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greatest gift of my life. We embraced, and I went off to train with the other young men at spear-fighting and throwing javelins. By then I was nearly eighteen.
    On the training-ground I found two or three faces no handsomer than my own, and a good many arms less strong. I had kept my lean shepherd’s muscle, and my eye was straight. My comrades thought well of me for not having run home. Making new friends, I almost forgot I might die before I’d made one song fit to be handed down from bard to bard.
    After some days, the barbarian army was descried coming down the Silenos river-plain. On this the priests of Artemis took counsel with the lords, and decreed that a pharmakos be chosen, to purge the city.
    The young men I trained with said it was twenty years since a scapegoat had been needed, in time of plague; so none of them remembered it. But they knew all about it; and those who were old enough went to the great square before the city, to take part in the choosing. The younger ones, and foreigners like me, watched from the rooftops.
    Artemis of Ephesos is not like Artemis of Athens. She is no virgin; farmers and women pray to her for increase, and she is hung all over with breasts. All her priests are eunuchs, by their own choice; some do it themselves in the frenzy of the rites. Soon they appeared on the terrace before the temple porch, winding out through the many columns that surround the mighty sanctuary, as if they threaded a marble forest. They carried their wands tipped with the sacred crescent; their young boys clashed ringing cymbals, to order silence. They had brought their victim with them.
    He was a mean shambling fellow, led by a rope-his hands were tied behind him-and scared out of his life. The people shouted and catcalled, as if they thought him well chosen. In a voice cra?cked with fear, he shouted out that if he had defrauded any citizen, anyone at all, he vowed by the goddess he would make it good to him. Being fairly near, I could see he was crossed-eyed and patched with scrofula. There was jeering; then someone shouted out, “Not him! Choose Hipponax!” And there was applause.
    I peered down from my roof, to see if I could find Kleobis in the crowd, but it was too thick. I saw Hipponax, however. Everyone knew him, especially the servants of Apollo. He was a poet; and he was so well known because he never left the city. When first I knew of him, I pitied him and felt moved to take his part, for he was much uglier than I was. There is not much wrong with my body, except that I have no height; but he limped in one leg, which he had broken as a child, so that it was shorter than the other. The foot turned in, and his rocking gait had twisted his whole body, making his shoulders tilted. I thought it no wonder he should be bitter, for princes would not want to see him about their courts, where even I had been made welcome. Knowing he was poor, I asked Kleobis if we might not offer him supper. He looked startled for a moment; then thought, and said, “Ask him, my son. He is a man you ought to meet.”
    I did my errand respectfully. (I was then only fifteen.) Hipponax replied that Kleobis was suddenly very civil, and he hoped our house would not need to be purified, after a Poet of the Agora had passed the threshold.
    That his clothes were dirty, I put down to his having no wife; but I thought that in a city not short of water, he could have washed himself. He ate noisily, and was helped twice; leaving off only to say that men were fortunate who had the art of pleasing princes, “but Truth has Want for a steward.” Poor old Metriche, who had been cooking half the day to honor a guest-we lived plainly enough ourselves-was not out of hearing before he mocked at her fat buttocks. This started him on women, his favorite theme. He treated us, unasked, to one of his songs against a hetaira who had said him nay, and whose trade he was trying to ruin in revenge. Not that one had to offend him, for him to cut one