Petronius, Satyricon
Michael Heseltine, Ed.

[103] “God and man forbid,” cried Eumolpus, “that you should make such a vile conclusion of your lives. No, better take my advice. My slave, as you learned by his razor, is a barber. Let him shave the head of[p. 211] each of you this minute, and your eyebrows as well. Then I will come and mark your foreheads with some neat inscription, so that you look like slaves punished by branding. These letters will divert inquisitive people's suspicions, and at the same time conceal your faces with the shadow of punishment.” We tried the trick at once, and walked cautiously to the side of the ship, and yielded up our heads and eyebrows to the barber to be shorn. Eumolpus covered both our foreheads with enormous letters, and scrawled the usual mark of runaway slaves all over our faces with a generous hand. But one of the passengers, who was extremely seasick, happened to be leaning over the side of the ship to relieve his stomach, and observed the barber in the moonlight busy with his ill-timed work. The man cursed this for an omen, because it looked like the last offering of a doomed crew, and then threw himself back into his bunk. We pretended not to hear his puking curses, and went on with the gloomy business, and then lay down in silence and passed the remaining hours of the night in uneasy sleep. . .