a most ingenious fraud
transferred the greater part of his property to his wife, and so,
although he himself was needy, ill-clad and protected by the very
depth of his fall, managed to leave this same Rufinus--I am telling
you the truth and nothing but the truth--no less than 3,000,000
sesterces to be squandered on riotous living. This was the sum that
came to him unencumbered from his mother's property, over and above
the daily dowry brought him by his wife. Yet all this money has been
ravenously devoured by this glutton in a few short years, all this
fortune has been destroyed by the infinite variety of his
gormandizing; so that you might really think him to be afraid of
seeming in any way to be the gainer by his father's dishonesty. This
honourable fellow actually took care that what had been ill-gained
should be ill-spent, nor was anything left him from his too ample
fortune, save his depraved ambition and his boundless appetite.

76. His wife, however, was getting old and worn out and refused to
continue to support the whole household by her own dishonour. But
there was a daughter who, at her mother's instigation, was exhibited
to all the wealthy young men, but in vain. Had she not come across so
easy a victim as Pontianus she would perhaps still have been sitting
at home a widow who had never been a bride. Pontianus, in spite of
urgent attempts on our part to dissuade him, gave her the right--false
and illusory though it was--to be called a bride. He did this knowing
that, but a short time before he married her, she had been seduced and
deserted by a young man of good family to whom she had been previously
betrothed. And so his new bride came to him, not as other brides come,
but unabashed and undismayed, her virtue lost, her modesty gone, her
bridal-veil a mockery. Cast off by her previous lover, she brought to
her wedding the name without the purity of a maid. She rode in a
litter carried by eight slaves. You who were present saw how
impudently she made eyes at all the young and how immodestly she
flaunted her charms. Who did not recognize her mother's pupil, when
they saw her dyed lips, her rouged cheeks, and her lascivious eyes?
Her dowry was borrowed, every farthing of it, on the eve of her
wedding, and was indeed greater than could be expected of so large and
impoverished a family.

77. But though Rufinus' fortune is small, his hopes are boundless.
With avarice rivalled only by his need he had already devo