fish were, fish so necessary for my
possession and so hard to find, that they were well worth the price I
paid for their acquisition. They have mentioned no more than three. To
one they gave a false name; as regards the other two they lied. The
name was false, for they asserted that the fish was a sea-hare,
whereas it was quite another fish, which Themison, my servant, who
knows something of medicine, as you heard from his own lips, bought of
his own suggestion for me to inspect. For, as a matter of fact, he has
not as yet ever come across a sea-hare. But I admit that I search for
other kinds of fish as well, and have commissioned not only fishermen
but private friends to search for all the rarest kinds of fish,
begging them either to describe the appearance of the fish or to send
it me, if possible, alive, or, failing that, dead. Why I do so I will
soon make clear. My accusers _lied_--and very cunning they thought
themselves--when they closed their false accusation by pretending that
I had sought for two sea-beasts known by gross names. That fellow
Tannonius wished to indicate the nature of the obscenity, but failed,
matchless pleader that he is, owing to his inability to speak. After
long hesitation he indicated the name of one of them by means of some
clumsy and disgusting circumlocution. The other he found impossible to
describe with decency, and evaded the difficulty by turning to my
works and quoting a certain passage from them in which I described the
attitude of a statue of Venus.

34. He also with that lofty puritanism which characterizes him,
reproached me for not being ashamed to describe foul things in noble
language. I might justly retort on him that, though he openly
professes the study of eloquence, that stammering voice of his often
gives utterance to noble things so basely as to defile them, and that
frequently, when what he has to say presents not the slightest
difficulty, he begins to stutter or even becomes utterly tongue-tied.
Come now! Suppose I had said nothing about the statue of Venus, nor
used the phrase which was of such service to you, what words would you
have found to frame a charge, which is as suited to your stupidity as
to your powers of speech? I ask you, is there anything more idiotic
than the inference that, because the names of two things resemble each
other, the things themselves are identical? Or did you think it a
particularly clever invention on your part to pretend that I had