C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
From a Professional Diner-out—Capnosphrantes to Aristomachus
By Alciphron (Second Century)
From the ‘Epistolæ,’ iii. 49.
I
SHOULD like to ask my evil genius, who drew me by lot as his own particular charge, why he is so malignant and so cruel as to keep me in everlasting poverty; for if no one happens to invite me to dinner I have to live on greens, and to eat acorns and to fill my stomach with water from the hydrant. Now, as long as my body was able to put up with this sort of thing, and my time of life was such as made it proper for me to bear it, I could get along with them fairly well; but now that my hair is growing gray, and the only outlook I have is in the direction of old age, what on earth am I going to do? I shall really have to get a rope and hang myself unless my luck changes. However, even if fortune remains as it is, I shan’t string myself up before I have at least one square meal; for before very long, the wedding of Charitus and Leocritis, which is going to be a famous affair, will come off, to which there isn’t a doubt that I shall be invited,—either to the wedding itself or to the banquet afterward. It’s lucky that weddings need the jokes of brisk fellows like myself, and that without us they would be as dull as gatherings of pigs rather than of human beings!
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