The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter/Chapter 76
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SIXTH. “At last it came about by the will of the gods that I was master in the house, and I had the real master under my thumb then. What is there left to tell? I was made co-heir with Cæsar and came into a Senator’s fortune. But nobody’s ever satisfied with what he’s got, so I embarked in business. I won’t keep you long in suspense; I built five ships and loaded them with wine—worth its weight in gold, it was then—and sent them to Rome. You’d think I’d ordered it so, for every last one of them foundered; it’s a fact, no fairy tale about it, and Neptune swallowed thirty million sesterces in one day! You don’t think I lost my pep, do you? By Hercules, no! That was only an appetizer for me, just as if nothing at all had happened. I built other and bigger ships, better found, too, so no one could say I wasn’t game. A big ship’s a big venture, you know. I loaded them up with wine again, bacon, beans, Capuan perfumes, and slaves: Fortunata did the right thing in this affair, too, for she sold every piece of jewelry and all her clothes into the bargain, and put a hundred gold pieces in my hand. They were the nest-egg of my fortune. A thing’s soon done when the gods will it; I cleared ten million sesterces by that voyage, all velvet, and bought in all the estates that had belonged to my patron, right away. I built myself a house and bought cattle to resell, and whatever I touched grew just like a honeycomb. I chucked the game when I got to have an income greater than all the revenues of my own country, retired from business, and commenced to back freedmen. I never liked business anyhow, as far as that goes, and was just about ready to quit when an astrologer, a Greek fellow he was, and his name was Serapa, happened to light in our colony, and he slipped me some information and advised me to quit. He was hep to all the secrets of the gods: told me things about myself that I’d forgotten, and explained everything to me from needle and thread up; knew me inside out, he did, and only stopped short of telling me what I’d had for dinner the day before. You’d have thought he’d lived with me always!