What matters it then in what large porticoes he wearies out his steeds--through what vast shady groves his rides extend[178]--how many acres close to the forum, or what palaces he has bought? No bad man is ever happy. Least of all he that has added incest to his adultery, and lately seduced the filleted priestess,[179] that with her life-blood still warm must descend into the earth. But now we have to deal with more venial acts. Yet if any other man had committed the same, he would have come under the sentence of our imperial censor.[180] For what would be infamous in men of worth, a Titius or Seius, was becoming to Crispinus. What can you do when no crime can be so foul and loathsome as the perpetrator himself? He gave six sestertia for a mullet.[181] A thousand sesterces, forsooth! for every pound of weight, as they allege, who exaggerate stories already beyond belief. I should commend the act as a master-stroke of policy, if by so noble a present he had got himself named chief heir[182] in the will of some childless old man. A better plea still would be that he had sent it to some mistress of rank, that rides in her close chair with its wide glasses. Nothing of the sort! He bought it for himself! We see many things which even Apicius[183] (mean and thrifty compared with him) never was guilty of. Did you do this in days of yore, Crispinus, when girt about with your native papyrus?[184] What! pay this price for fish-scales? Perchance you might have bought the fisherman cheaper than the fish! You might have bought a whole estate for the money in some of our provinces. In Apulia, a still larger one.[185] What kind of luxuries, then, may we suppose were gorged by the emperor himself, when so many sestertia, that furnished forth but a small portion, a mere side-dish of a very ordinary dinner, were devoured by this court buffoon, now clothed in purple. Chief of the equestrian order now is he who was wont to hawk about the streets shads from the same borough[186] with himself. Begin, Calliope! here may we take our seats! This is no poetic fiction; we are dealing with _facts_! Relate it, Pierian maids! and grant me grace for having called you _maids_. When the last of the Flavii was mangling the world, lying at its last gasp, and Rome was enslaved by a Nero,[187] ay, and a _bald_ one too, an Adriatic turbot of wonderful size fell into the net, and filled its ample folds, off the temple of Venus which Doric Ancona[188] sustains. No less in bulk was it than those which the ice of the Mæotis incloses, and when melted at length by the sun's rays, discharges at the outlets of the sluggish Euxine, unwieldly from their long sloth, and fattened by the long-protracted cold.