ured
Pudentilla's 4,000,000 in vain anticipation. With this in view he
decided that I must be got out of the way, in order that he might find
fewer obstacles in his attempt to hoodwink the weak Pontianus and the
lonely Pudentilla. He began, therefore, to upbraid his son-in-law for
having betrothed his mother to me. He urged him to draw back without
delay from so perilous a path, while there was yet time; to keep his
mother's fortune himself rather than deliberately transfer it to the
keeping of a stranger. He threatened that, if he refused, he would
take away his daughter, the device of an old hand to influence a young
man in love. To be brief, he so wrought upon the simple-minded young
man, who was, moreover, a slave to the charms of his new bride, as to
mould him to his will and move him from his purpose. Pontianus went to
his mother and told her what Rufinus had said to him. But he made no
impression on her steadfast character. On the contrary, she rebuked
him for his fickleness and inconstancy, and it was no pleasant news he
took back to his father-in-law. His mother had shown a firmness of
purpose not to be expected of one of her placid disposition, and to
make matters worse his expostulations had made her angry, which was
likely seriously to increase her obstinacy: in fact, she had finally
replied, that it was no secret to her that his expostulations were
instigated by Rufinus, a fact which made the support and assistance of
a husband against his desperate greed all the more necessary to her.

78. When he heard this, the ruffian was stung to fury and burst into
such wild and ungovernable rage that in the presence of her own son he
heaped insults, such as he might have used to his own wife, on the
purest and most modest of women. In the presence of many witnesses,
whom, if you desire it, I will name, he loudly denounced her as a
wanton and myself as a sorcerer and poisoner, threatening to murder me
with his own hands. I can hardly restrain my anger, such fierce
indignation fills my soul. That you, the most effeminate of men,
should threaten any man with death at your hand! Your hand! What hand!
The hand of Philomela or Medea or Clytemnestra? Why, when you dance in
those characters you show such contemptible timidity, you are so
frightened at the sight of steel, that you will not even carry a
property sword? But I am digressing. Pudentilla, seeing to her
astonishment that her son had fallen lower than she could have