e freedom for inventing lies in the absence
of the subject of your slanders? If so, the opportunity afforded you
for mendacity has been lost you, thanks to a certain habit of mine
which comes in most opportunely. It is my wont wherever I go to carry
with me the image of some god hidden among my books and to pray to him
on feast days with offerings of incense and wine and sometimes even of
victims. When, therefore, I heard persistent though outrageously
mendacious assertions that the figure I carried was that of a
skeleton, I ordered some one to go and bring from my house my little
image of Mercury, the same that Saturninus had made for me at Oea. You
there, give it them! Let them see it, hold it, examine it. There you
see the image which that scoundrel called a skeleton. Do you hear
these cries of protest that arise from all present? Do you hear the
condemnation of your lie? Are you not at last ashamed of all your
slanders? Is this a skeleton, this a goblin, is this the familiar
spirit you asserted it to be? Is this a magic symbol or one that is
common and ordinary? Take it, I beg you, Maximus, and examine it. It
is good that a holy thing should be entrusted to hands as pure and
pious as yours. See there, how fair it is to view, how full of all a
wrestler's grace and vigour! How cheerful is the god's face, how
comely the down that creeps on either side his cheeks, how the curled
hair shows upon his head beneath the shadow of his hat's brim, how
neatly the tiny pair of pinions project about his brows, how daintily
the cloak is drawn about his shoulders! He who dares call this a
skeleton, either never sees an image of a god or if he does ignores
it. Indeed, he who thinks this to represent a goblin must have goblins
on the brain.

64. But in return for that lie, Aemilianus, may that same god who goes
between the lords of heaven and the lords of hell grant you the hatred
of the gods of either world and ever send to meet you the shadows of
the dead with all the ghosts, with all the fiends, with all the
spectres, with all the goblins of all the world, and thrust upon your
eyes all the terror that walketh by night, all the dread dwellers in
the tomb, all the horrors of the sepulchre, although your age and
character have brought you near enough to them already. But we of the
family of Plato know naught save what is bright and joyous, majestic
and heavenly and of the world above us. Nay, in its zeal to reach the
heights of wisd