Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 1.djvu/237

 Trimalchio spoke up. “Everything you see here, my friends,” said he, “was made from the same stuff.” With my usual keen insight, I jumped to the conclusion that I knew what that stuff was and, turning to Agamemnon, I said, “I shall be greatly surprised, if all those things are not made out of excrement, or out of mud, at the very least: I saw a like artifice practiced at Rome during the Saturnalia.”

  I had not done speaking, when Trimalchio chimed in, “As I hope to grow fatter in fortune but not in figure, my cook has made all this out of a hog! It would be simply impossible to meet up with a more valuable fellow: he’d make you a fish out of a sow’s coynte, if that’s what you wanted, a pigeon out of her lard, a turtle-dove out of her ham, and a hen out of a knuckle of pork: that’s why I named him Dedalus, in a happy moment. I brought him a present of knives, from Rome, because Rh