If any of you that are
here present had any part with me in these same solemn ceremonies,
give a sign and you shall hear what it is I keep thus. For no thought
of personal safety shall induce me to reveal to the uninitiated the
secrets that I have received and sworn to conceal.

57. I have, I think, Maximus, said enough to satisfy the most
prejudiced of men and, as far as the handkerchief is concerned, have
cleared myself of every speck of guilt. I shall run no risk in passing
from the suspicions of Aemilianus to the evidence of Crassus, which my
accusers read out next as if it were of the utmost importance. You
heard them read from a written deposition, the evidence of a gorging
brute, a hopeless glutton, named Junius Crassus, that I performed
certain nocturnal rites at his house in company with my friend Appius
Quintianus, who had taken lodgings there. This, mark you, Crassus says
that he discovered (in spite of the fact that he was as far away as
Alexandria at the time!) from finding the feathers of birds and traces
of the smoke of a torch. I suppose that while he was enjoying a round
of festivities at Alexandria--for Crassus is one who is ready even to
encroach upon the daylight with his gluttonies--I suppose, I say, that
there from his reeking tavern he espied, with eye keen as any
fowler's, feathers of birds wafted towards him from his house, and saw
the smoke of his home rising far off from his ancestral roof-tree. If
he saw this with his eyes, he saw even further than Ulysses prayed and
yearned to see. For Ulysses spent years in gazing vainly from the
shore to see the smoke rising from his home, while Crassus during a
few months' absence from home succeeded, without the least difficulty,
in seeing this same smoke as he sat in a wine-shop! 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? Crassus is, I admit, a _gourmand_ of the first
order, and an expert in all the varied flavours of kitchen-smoke, but
in view of his love of drinking, his only real title to fame, it would
have been easier for the fumes of his wine, rather than the fumes of
his chimney, to reach him at Alexandria.

58. Even he saw that this would pass belief. For he is said to have
sold this evidence before eight in the morning while he was still
fasting f