Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/157

 fill its emptiness, is there no quay vacant, no bridge? Can you find no fraction of a beggar's mat to stand upon? Is a dinner worth all the insults with which you have to pay for it? Is your hunger so importunate, when it might, with greater dignity, be shivering where you are, and munching dirty scraps of dog's bread?

First of all be sure of this—that when bidden to dinner, you receive payment in full for all your past services. A meal is the return which your grand friendship yields you; the great man scores it against you, and though it come but seldom, he scores it against you all the same. So if after a couple of months it is his pleasure to invite his forgotten client, lest the third place on the lowest couch should be unoccupied, and he says to you, "Come and dine with me," you are in the seventh Heaven! what more can you desire? Now at last has Trebius got the reward for which he must needs cut short his sleep, and hurry with shoe-strings untied, fearing that the whole crowd of callers may already have gone their rounds, at an hour when the stars are fading or when the chilly wain of Bootes is wheeling slowly round.

And what a dinner after all! You are given wine that fresh-clipped wool would refuse to suck up, and which soon converts your revellers into Corybants. Foul words are the prelude to the fray; but before long tankards will be flying about; a battle royal with Saguntine crockery will soon be raging between you and the company of freedmen, and you will be staunching your wounds with a blood-stained napkin. 71