the glass and sometimes leave your
plough to marvel at the numberless furrows with which wrinkles have
scored your face.

But I should not be surprised if you prefer me to speak of your ugly
deformity of a face and to be silent about your morals, which are
infinitely more repulsive than your features. I will say nothing of
them. In the first place I am not naturally of a quarrelsome
disposition, and secondly I am glad to say that until quite recently
you might have been white or black for all I knew. Even now my
knowledge of you is inadequate. The reason for this is that your
rustic occupations have kept you in obscurity, while _I_ have been
occupied by my studies, and so the shadow cast about you by your
insignificance has shielded your character from scrutiny, while I for
my part take no interest in others' ill deeds, but have always thought
it more important to conceal my own faults than to track out those of
others. As a result you have the advantage of one who, while he is
himself shrouded in darkness, surveys another who chances to have
taken his stand in the full light of day. You from your darkness can
with ease form an opinion as to what I am doing in my not
undistinguished position before all the world; but your position is so
abject, so obscure, and so withdrawn from the light of publicity that
you are by no means so conspicuous.

17. 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. And yet but a few minutes earlier he had declared that I
came to Oea accompanied by no more than one slave. I challenge you to
tell me how I could have made one slave into three free men. But
perhaps this is one of my feats of magic. Has lying made you blind, or
shall I rather say that from force of habit you are incapable of
speaking the truth? 'Apuleius,' you say, 'came to Oea with one slave,'
and then only a very few words later you blurt out, 'Apuleius on one
and the same day at Oea gave three slaves their freedom.' Not even the
assertion that I had come with three slaves and had given them all
their freedom would have been credible: but suppose I had done so,
what reason have you for regarding three slaves as a mark of my
poverty, rath