“You are the only man in Sicca who needs to ask the question. What! not know the great Polemo of Rhodes, the friend of Plotinus, the pupil of Theagenes, the disciple of Thrasyllus, the hearer of Nicomachus, who was of the school of Secundus, the doctor of the new Pythagoreans? Not feel the presence in Sicca of Polemo, the most celebrated, the most intolerable of men? That, however, is not his title, but the ‘godlike,’ or the ‘oracular,’ or the ‘portentous,’ or something else as impressive. Every one goes to him. He is the rage. I should not have a chance of success if I could not say that I had attended his lectures; though I’d be bound our little Firmian here would deliver as good. He’s the very cariophyllus of human nature. He comes to the schools in a litter of cedar, ornamented with silver and covered with a lion’s skin, slaves carrying him, and a crowd of friends attending, with the state of a proconsul. He is dressed in the most exact style; his pallium is of the finest wool, white, picked out with purple; his tresses flow with unguent, his fingers glitter with rings, and he smells like Idalium. As soon as he puts foot on earth, a great hubbub of congratulation and homage breaks forth. He takes no notice; his favourite pupils form a circle round him, and conduct him into one of the exedræ, till the dial shows the time for lecture. Here he sits in silence, looking at nothing, or at the wall opposite him, talking to himself, a hum of admiration filling the room. Presently one of his pupils, as if he were præco to the duumvir, cries out, ‘Hush, gentlemen, hush! the godlike’—no, it is not that. I’ve not got it. What is his title? ‘the Bottomless,’ that’s it—‘the Bottomless speaks.’ A dead silence ensues; a clear voice and a measured elocution are the sure token that it is the outpouring of the oracle. ‘Pray,’ says the little man, ‘pray, which existed first, the egg or the chick? Did the chick lay the egg, or the egg hatch the chick?’ Then there ensues a whispering, a disputing, and after a while a dead silence. At the end of a quarter of an hour or so, our præco speaks again, and this time to the oracle. ‘Bottomless man,’ he says, ‘I have to represent to you that no one of the present company finds himself equal to answer the question, which your condescension has proposed to our consideration!’ On this there is a fresh silence, and at length a fresh effatum from the hierophant: ‘Which comes first, the egg or the chick? The egg comes first in relation to the causativity of the chick, and the chick comes first in relation to the causativity of the egg,’ on which there is a burst of applause; the ring of adorers is broken through, and the shrinking professor is carried in the arms or on the shoulders of the literary crowd to his chair in the lecture-room.”