The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter/Chapter 105
CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTH. Lycas was greatly disturbed by this information, and flew into a rage. “So someone aboard my ship cut off his hair, did he?” he bawled, “and at dead of night, too! Bring the offenders aft on deck here, and step lively, so that I can tell whom to punish, from their heads, that the ship may be freed from the curse!” “I ordered it done,” Eumolpus broke in, “and I didn’t order it as an unlucky omen, either, seeing that I had to be aboard the same vessel: I did it because the scoundrels had long matted hair, I ordered the filth cleared off the wretches because I did not wish to even seem to make a prison out of your ship: besides, I did not want the seared scars of the letters to be hidden in the least, by the interference of the hair; as they ought to be in plain sight, for everyone to read, and at full length, too! In addition to their other misdemeanors, they blew in my money on a street-walker whom they kept in common; only last night I dragged them away from her, reeking with wine and perfumes, as they were, and they still stink of the remnants of my patrimony!” Thereupon, forty stripes were ordered for each of us, that the tutelary genius of the ship might be propitiated. And they were not long about it either. Eager to propitiate the tutelary genius with our wretched blood, the savage sailors rushed upon us with their rope’s ends. For my part, I endured three lashes with Spartan fortitude, but at the very frst blow, Giton set up such a howling that his all too familiar voice reached the ears of Tryphæna; nor was she the only one who was in a flutter, for, attracted by this familiar voice, all the maids rushed to where he was being flogged. Giton had already moderated the ardor of the sailors by his wonderful beauty, he appealed to his torturers without uttering a word. “It’s Giton! It’s Giton!” the maids all screamed in unison. “Hold your hands, you brutes; help, Madame, it’s Giton!” Tryphæna turned willing ears, she had recognized that voice herself, and flew to the boy. Lycas, who knew me as well as if he had heard my voice, now ran up; he glanced at neither face nor hands, but directed his eyes towards parts lower down; courteously he shook hands with them, “How do you do, Encolpius,” he said. Let no one be surprised at Ulysses’ nurse discovering, after twenty years, the scar that established his identity, since this man, so keenly observant, had, in spite of the most skillful disguise of every feature and the obliteration of every identifying mark upon my body, so surely hit upon the sole means of identifying his fugitive! Deceived by our appearance, Tryphæna wept bitterly, believing that the marks upon our foreheads were, in truth, the brands of prisoners: she asked us gently, into what slave’s prison we had fallen in our wanderings, and whose cruel hands had inflicted this punishment. Still, fugitives whose members had gotten them into trouble certainly deserved some punishment.