This message showed he was not to be treated as a slave.
“I will come,” Lycon hastily replied, and when the lad had gone he fairly leaped into the air in his delight.
Before he had left the guest-room he remembered that during his restless sleep he had had a dream. In his childhood he had often seen a little boy, the son of poor parents, known by the name of unlucky Knemon, because he looked so doleful that everybody slapped and pushed him because he really seemed to invite cuffs. This boy had appeared to him in the dream. Lycon tried to push him aside—but at the same moment the lad was transformed and Eros himself stood smiling before him, a garland of roses on his hair. Gazing intently at Lycon he shook his finger at him. Lycon thought of Myrtale and murmured: “I accept the omen.”
This dream now returned to his mind.
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “yesterday I was a doleful, unlucky Lycon; I invited a beating—so Simonides kicked me.... Would a dog get so many blows if it did not crouch before its master? Well, I will be braver to-day.”
With these words he took up the two bundles he had brought with him from Athens.
“What have you there?” asked Simonides, as he saw Lycon enter with a package under each arm.
“Not my property, but yours,” replied Lycon.
Simonides understood that the parcels contained the ready money and articles of value Lycon had brought with him from Athens.
“Put them there,” he said, pointing to a small cabinet.