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That discourse was thronged, has been read far and wide, is in all men's hands, and has won the affections of the pious inhabitants of Oea not so much through any eloquence of mine as because it treats of Aesculapius. Will any one, who chances to remember it, repeat the beginning of that particular passage in my discourse? You hear, Maximus, how many voices supply the words.
I reconciled the mother with her sons, and began my career as a step-father by enriching my step-sons with a large sum of money. All Oea was aware of this. Every one execrated Rufinus and extolled my conduct. Pontianus together with his very inferior brother had come to visit us, before his mother had completed her donation.
For although it was specially written to rebut the charge of magic brought against me, a remarkable piece of ingenuity on the part of Rufinus has altered its meaning and brought me into discredit with certain citizens of Oea as being a proved sorcerer.
I have often heard it said with truth that a liar should have a good memory. Had you forgotten, Aemilianus, that before I came to Oea, you wrote to her son Pontianus, who had then attained to man's estate and was pursuing his studies at Rome, suggesting that she should marry? Give me the letter, or better give it to Aemilianus and let him refute himself in his own voice with his own words.
Things being in this delicate position owing to the matrimonial intentions of the mother and the fears of the son, chance or destiny brought me to Oea on my way to Alexandria. Did not my respect for my wife prevent me, I would say 'Would God it had never happened'. It was winter when this occurred.
This is no invention on the spur of the moment; nearly three years since, in a public discourse on the greatness of Aesculapius delivered by me during the first days of my residence at Oea, I made the same boast and recounted the number of the mysteries I knew.
I neither know nor care to know whether you have slaves to till your fields or whether you do so by interchange of service with your neighbours. But you know that at Oea I gave three slaves their freedom on the same day, and your advocate has cast it in my teeth together with other actions of mine of which you have given him information.
Let him deny that, after what I have just related to you, his mother married me in her country house, as had been agreed some time previously! The reason for our decision to be married by preference at her country house not far from Oea was to avoid a fresh concourse of citizens demanding largesse.
Finding himself come short of his competitor in wealth and money, by which advantages the other was enabled to take care of the poor, inviting every day some one or other of the citizens that was in want to supper, and bestowing clothes on the aged people, and breaking down the hedges and enclosures of his grounds, that all that would might freely gather what fruit they pleased, Pericles, thus outdone in popular arts, by the advice of one Damonides of Oea, as Aristotle states, turned to the distribution of the public moneys; and in a short time having bought the people over, what with moneys allowed for shows and for service on juries, and what with other forms of pay and largess, he made use of them against the council of Areopagus, of which he himself was no member, as having never been appointed by lot either chief archon, or lawgiver, or king, or captain.
If, on the other hand, it was his nose discerned the smoke, he surpasses hounds and vultures in the keenness of his sense of smell. For what hound, what vulture hovering in the Alexandrian sky, could sniff out anything so far distant as Oea?
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