My destruction had begun. I had no reason to be proud of myself. I was unnerved by the wine and had let my quivering hands fall, when Ascyltos, who would contrive every possible outrage, ravished Giton from me in the dark and brought him to his own bed, making too free in wallowing with someone else’s boy. Giton either did not feel the outrage or pretended not to, and in a stolen embrace Ascyltos fell asleep, oblivious of human rights. When I awoke I ran a hand all over my bed and found it despoiled of my delight. Any lover will believe me when I say that I hesitated whether or not to run them through with my sword and crown their sleep with death. Taking the safer course, I shook Giton up with a few blows, looked fiercely at Ascyltos, and said, “Since you have wickedly broken our pact and our mutual friendship, take your things at once and find some other place to pollute.”

He offered no resistance, but when we had divided our spoils in all good faith, he said, “And now we must split the boy in two.” 

I thought it was a parting jest. But he drew his sword with murderous intent and added, “You shall not enjoy the booty you brood over on your own. I need my share, and I will cut it off with this sword, despised though I am.”

It was my turn to strike the same attitude; I wrapped my cloak round my arm and took my guard. In the middle of our lunatic folly the anguished boy touched our knees, and tearfully begged us not to make this low inn the scene of a Theban duel,^[1] nor to defile a hallowed and beautiful friendship by spilling one another’s blood.

“If you must commit a crime,” he cried, “here is my bare throat, turn your hands to it, plunge your blades in it. I am the one who should die for effacing your oath of friendship.”

We sheathed our swords after this plea, and Ascyltos was the first to speak: “I’m going to put a stop to our quarrel. The boy himself shall follow whoever he chooses, so at least he will be free to pick his own brother.”^[2]

Persuaded that our long-standing intimacy had passed into a bond of blood, I had no qualms, and jumped hastily at the proposal. I put the case to our judge. I had scarcely closed my mouth when, without any deliberation, without any show of hesitation, he got up and chose Ascyltos for his brother.^[3] I was thunderstruck by this decision, and collapsed just as I was on my bed, without my sword, and would have attempted suicide at the verdict if I had not grudged my enemy that extra triumph. Ascyltos went off gloating over his prize, and left me, so lately his dearest friend, his equal in every fortune, an outcast in a strange place.

[80 i] iocari putabam discedentem. at ille gladium parricidali manu strinxit et “non frueris” inquit “hac praeda, super quam solus incumbis. partem meam necesse est vel hoc gladio contemptus abscidam.” [ii] idem ego ex altera parte feci et intorto circa bracchium pallio composui ad proeliandum gradum. [iii] inter hanc miserorum dementiam infelicissimus puer tangebat utriusque genua cum fletu petebatque suppliciter ne Thebanum par humilis taberna spectaret neve sanguine mutuo pollueremus familiaritatis clarissimae sacra. [iv] “quod si utique” proclamabat “facinore opus est, nudo ecce iugulum, convertite huc manus, imprimite mucrones. ego mori debeo, qui amicitiae sacramentum delevi.” [v] inhibuimus ferrum post has preces, et prior Ascyltos “ego” inquit “finem discordiae imponam. puer ipse quem vult sequatur, ut sit illi saltem in eligendo fratre salva libertas.” [vi] ego qui vetustissimam consuetudinem putabam in sanguinis pignus transisse, nihil timui, immo condicionem praecipiti festinatione rapui commisique iudici litem. qui ne deliberavit quidem, ut videretur cunctatus, verum statim ab extrema parte verbi consurrexit [et] fratrem Ascylton elegit. [vii] fulminatus hac pronuntiatione sic ut eram sine gladio in lectulum decidi, et attulissem mihi damnatus manus, si non inimici victoriae inviderem. [viii] egreditur superbus cum praemio Ascyltos et paulo ante carissimum sibi commilitonem fortunaeque etiam similitudine parem in loco peregrino destituit abiectum.

Friendship’s a name that clings while it’s useful; The piece comes and goes on the checkered board. When fate is for us, friends, your smile is wide; When gone, you show your backs, you basely fly. A comedy plays: this is the Father, That the Son; another’s named The Rich Man. But the page turns down on the pleasant parts, True faces come back, the grease-paint melts away.

But I did not indulge in tears for long. I was afraid Menelaus, the assistant tutor, would add to my troubles by finding me alone at the inn, so I bundled my things and sadly took a room at an unfrequented place near the sea.

I shut myself in for three days. My mind was haunted with loneliness and humiliation; I beat my breast, already weary with sobbing, I groaned heavily, and broke out again and again with the same lament: “Why couldn’t the earth open and swallow me down? Or the sea, so terrible even to the innocent? I fled from justice, I cheated the arena, I killed my host, and with these titles to valour I am a beggar, an exile, and lie abandoned in a Greek town at an inn. And who reduced me to this solitude? An adolescent infected with every vice, and by his own admission deserving of exile, who got his freedom by debauch, his birthright by it, who gambled his young life away, who was treated as a girl even by those who knew he was a man. And the other one? He put on a skirt instead of a grown man’s wear; his own mother coaxed him out of his sex; he played a woman’s part in the slaves’ quarters;^[4] then he couldn’t meet his debts, he changed his style of debauch, forsook the very name of our old friendship, and—the shame of it—has sold all, like the last prostitute, for one clinging night. Now the two lovers lie whole nights together in one embrace, and perhaps they laugh at my solitude when they have exhausted their lust and themselves. But they won’t get away with it. I am no man, and no freeman, if I do not avenge the insult in their own guilty blood.”

Here, an eagle bore the shepherd-boy of Ida to the heights of heaven; there, unsullied Hylas refused the wanton Naiad. Apollo damned his guilty hands and crowned his slackened lyre with a new-born flower.^[5] Among these painted lovers’ faces I cried out as though no one were there, “So the gods too are touched by love! Jupiter in his heaven found nothing to please him, and went whoring on earth, and yet did no one any harm. The nymph who ravished Hylas would have stayed her passion had she believed Hercules might come to forbid it. Apollo transformed the shade of a boy into a flower, and every tale is of embraces secure from rivalry. But I have taken up with a companion more cruel than Lycurgus himself.”

All at once, as I argued with the winds, a white-headed old man came into the gallery. His face was emaciated, and seemed to hold promise of some greatness.