Petronius (Loeb)

He can afford to delegate the management of his business and grow a little negligent—even to care for the life of the spirit, despite his accounts being six months in arrears.

He believes, of course, in astrology; he sings excerpts out of tune from the latest musical plays, and adopts phrases from the lips of the comic star whom Nero delights to honor. He has two The manuscript says three, and it may be correct; he is drunk when he boasts of them. libraries, one of Greek and one of Latin books, and mythology courses through his brain in incorrigible confusion.

His fellow townsmen and guests, whom he insults, do not aspire to these heights. Dama, Seleucus, and Phileros are rich merely in the common coin of everyday talk, in the proverbial wisdom that seems to gather strength and brightness from being constantly exchanged. "A hot drink is as good as an overcoat"—"Flies have their virtues, we are nothing but bubbles"—"An old love pinches like a crab"—"It is easy when everything goes fair and square." In these phrases and others like them, Latin literature speaks to us for once in the tones we recognize in England through characters like Justice Shallow or Joseph Poorgrass Characters from Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy, respectively, representing rural, colloquial speech.. Nearly all of them warm themselves with this fatuous talk of riches, drink, and deaths. However, one man, Ganymede—a shrewd Asiatic immigrant like Trimalchio himself—blows cold on their sentimentality with his searching talk of bread prices in Cumae, which are rising pitilessly due to drought and the operation of a ring of bakers in league with officials. He tells us in brilliant phrases of the starving poor, of the decay of religion, and of the lost pride in using good flour. Then Echion, an old clothes dealer, overwhelms him with a flood of suburban chatter about games, children, chickens, and the material blessings of education.