Trimalchio's threatening face relaxed and he turned to us, "If the wine
don't please you," he said, "I'll change it; you ought to do justice to
it by drinking it. I don't have to buy it, thanks to the gods.
Everything here that makes your mouths water, was produced on one of my
country places which I've never yet seen, but they tell me it's down
Terracina and Tarentum way. I've got a notion to add Sicily to my other
little holdings, so in case I want to go to Africa, I'll be able to sail
along my own coasts. But tell me the subject of your speech today,
Agamemnon, for, though I don't plead cases myself, I studied literature
for home use, and for fear you should think I don't care about learning,
let me inform you that I have three libraries, one Greek and the others
Latin. Give me the outline of your speech if you like me."
"A poor man and a rich man were enemies," Agamemmon began, when: "What's
a poor man?" Trimalchio broke in. "Well put," Agamemnon conceded and
went into details upon some problem or other, what it was I do not know.
Trimalchio instantly rendered the following verdict, "If that's the case,
there's nothing to dispute about; if it's not the case, it don't amount
to anything anyhow." These flashes of wit, and others equally
scintillating, we loudly applauded, and he went on: "Tell me, my dearest
Agamemnon, do you remember the twelve labors of Hercules or the story of
Ulysses, how the Cyclops threw his thumb out of joint with a pig-headed
crowbar? When I was a boy, I used to read those stories in Homer. And
then, there's the Sibyl: with my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up
in a jar; and whenever the boys would say to her 'Sibyl, Sibyl, what
would you?' she would answer, 'I would die.'"