Apuleius of Madaura · c. 158–161 CE (composed after the Oea trial; includes the Apologia and related Florida orations, with the Florida pieces composed across the 160s)
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↪ you wandered here via “white mantle augur” — the connecting lines are tinted below
There is a town named Wallet in the midst Of smoke that's dark as wine.
The lines which follow are so wonderful, that had you read them you would envy me my wallet even more than you envy me my marriage with
Pudentilla. You reproach philosophers for their staff and wallet. You might as well reproach cavalry for their trappings, infantry for their shields, standard-bearers for their banners, triumphant generals for their chariots drawn by four white horses and their cloaks embroidered with palm-leaves. The staff and wallet are not, it is true, carried by the Platonic philosophers, but are the badges of the Cynic school. To
Diogenes and Antisthenes they were what the crown is to the king, the cloak of purple to the general, the cowl to the priest, the trumpet to the augur. Indeed the Cynic Diogenes, when he disputed with Alexander the Great, as to which of the two was the true king, boasted of his staff as the true sceptre. The unconquered Hercules himself, since you despise my instances as drawn from mere mendicancy, Hercules that roamed the whole world, exterminated monsters, and conquered races, god though he was, had but a skin for raiment and a staff for company in the days when he wandered through the earth. And yet but a brief while afterwards he was admitted to heaven as a reward for his virtue.
- But if you despise these examples and challenge me, not to plead my case, but to enter into a discussion of the amount of my fortune, to put an end to your ignorance on this point, if it exists, I
acknowledge that my father left my brother and myself a little under
2,000,000 sesterces--a sum on which my lengthy travels, continual studies, and frequent generosity have made considerable inroads. For I
have often assisted my friends and have shown substantial gratitude to many of my instructors, on more than one occasion going so far as to provide dowries for their daughters. Nay, I should not have hesitated to expend every farthing of my patrimony, if so I might acquire, what is far better, a contempt for it. But as for you, Aemilianus, and ignorant boors of your kidney, in your case the fortune makes the man.
You are like barren and blasted trees that produce no fruit, but are valued only for the timber that their trunks contain. But I beg you,
Aemilianus, in future to abstain from reviling any one for their poverty, since you yourself used, after waiting for some seasonable shower to soften the ground, to expend three days in ploughing single-handed, with the aid of one wretched ass, that miserable farm at Zarath, which was all your father left you. It is only recently that fortune has smiled on you in the shape of wholly undeserved inheritances which have fallen to you by the frequent deaths of relatives, deaths to which, far more than to your hideous face, you owe your nickname of Charon.
HKB