"For when he rattled with the box, and thought he now had got 'em.
The little cubes would vanish thro' the perforated bottom.
Then he would pick 'em up again, and once more set a-trying:
The dice but served him the same trick: away they went a-flying.
So still he tries, and still he fails; still searching long he lingers;
And every time the tricksy things go slipping thro' his fingers.
Just so when Sisyphus at last once gets there with his boulder,
He finds the labour all in vain--it rolls down off his shoulder."
All on a sudden who should turn up but Caligula, and claims the man for a slave: brings witnesses, who said they had seen him being flogged, caned, fisticuffed by him. He is handed over to Caligula, and Caligula makes him a present to Aeacus. Aeacus delivers him to his freedman Menander, to be his law-clerk.
FOOTNOTES
Footnote 1: A proverb for a nobody, as Petron, 58: qui te natum non putat.
Footnote 2: "Augurinus" unknown. Baba: see Sep. Ep. 159, a fool.
Footnote 3: Reference unknown.
Footnote 4: A Gallic slave, appointed by Augustus Procurator of Gallia Lugudunensis, when he made himself notorious by his extortions. See Dion Cass. liv, 21.
Footnote 5: A proverb, found also in Herondas iii, 76: apparently fairy-land, the land of Nowhere.
Footnote 6: Perhaps alluding to a mock marriage of Silius and Messalina.
Footnote 7: Again μωροῦ for θεοῦ as in ch. 6.