BOOK IV. I. 33-39
the five per cent tax?[1] No, it is because he fancies that up till now he is hampered and uncomfortable, because he has not obtained his freedom from slavery. "If I am set free," he says, "immediately it is all happiness, I shall pay no attention to anybody, I talk to everybody as an equal and as one in the same station in life, I go where I please, I come whence I please, and where I please." 35Then he is emancipated, and forthwith, having no place to which to go and eat, he looks for someone to flatter, for someone at whose house to dine. Next he either earns a living by prostitution,[2] and so endures the most dreadful things, and if he gets a manger at which to eat he has fallen into a slavery much more severe than the first; or even if he grows rich, being a vulgarian he has fallen in love with a chit of a girl, and is miserable, and laments, and yearns for his slavery again. "Why, what was wrong with me? Someone else kept me in clothes, and shoes, and supplied me with food, and nursed me when I was sick; I served him in only a few matters. But now, miserable man that I am, what suffering is mine, who am a slave to several instead of one! However, if I get rings on my fingers,"[3] he says, "then indeed I shall live most prosperously and happily." And so, first, in order to get them he submits to—what he deserves! Then when he has got them, you have the same thing over again. Next he says, "If I serve in a campaign, I am rid of all my troubles." He serves in a campaign, he submits to all that a jail-bird suffers, but none the less he demands a second campaign and a third.[4]
- ↑ See note on II. 1, 26.
- ↑ For the euphemistic phrase used in the Greek see Demosthenes, 59, 20.
- ↑ The members of the Equestrian order at Rome had the right to wear a gold ring.
- ↑ Required of those who held the higher offices. See note on II. 14, 17.
