Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 1.djvu/199

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PETRONIUS ARBITER
 
From the depth of the jewels: in garments of woven wind clad
Our brides might as well take their stand, their game naked to stalk,
As seek it in gossamer tissue transparent as air.


CHAPTER THE FIFTY-SIXTH. “What should we say was the hardest calling, after literature?” he asked. “That of the doctor or that of the money-changer, I would say: the doctor, because he has to know what poor devils have got in their insides, and when the fever’s due: but I hate them like the devil, for my part, because they’re always ordering me on a diet of duck soup: and the money-changer’s, because he’s got to be able to see the silver through the copper plating. When we come to the dumb beasts, the oxen and sheep are the hardest worked, the oxen, thanks to whose labor we have bread to chew on, the sheep, because their wool tricks us out so fine. It’s the greatest outrage under the sun for people to eat mutton and then wear a tunic. Then

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