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a large collection, you think you will soon get all you want from him. But do you suppose, you rotter, that he is so steeped in mandragora as to hear that and yet not know how you pass your time during the day, what your drinking bouts are like, how you spend your nights, and in whose company? Do not you know that a monarch has many eyes and ears? And your doings are so conspicuous that even the blind and the deaf may know of them; for if you but speak, if you but bathe in public—or, if you choose, don’t even do that—if your servants but bathe in public, do you not think that all your nocturnal arcana will be known at once? Answer me this question: if Bassus, that literary man who belonged to your following, or Battalus the flute-player, or the cinaedus Hemitheon of Sybaris, who wrote those wonderful regulations for you, which say that you must use cosmetics and depilatories and so forth—if one of those fellows should to-day walk about with a lion’s skin on his back and a club in his hand, what do you suppose those who saw him would think? That he was Heracles? Not unless they were gravel-blind; for there are a thousand things in their appearance that would give the lie to their costume; the gait, the glance, the voice, the thin neck, the white lead and mastich and rouge that you beautify yourselves with; in short, to quote the proverb, it would be easier to conceal five elephants under your arm than a single cinaedus. Then if the lion’s skin would not have hidden such as they, do you suppose that you will be undetected