Then I, bolder in my words, said: “Hey, you, the one who started the story, don’t let it irk or bore you to weave the rest of it to the end.” And to the other: “You, though, with your thick ears and stubborn heart, spit out what may perhaps be truly told.

Pertexere, “to weave to the end,” closes the loom the prologue set up with exordior, “to lay the warp” (1.1b). Telling a story is weaving, and Lucius wants the whole cloth. Next to it, sermonem ieceras, “you had thrown out the talk,” is plain, everyday Latin: Tacitus uses jacere sermones for remarks dropped in passing, as Lewis & Short notes. Heus is the Latin “hey,” used, says Lewis & Short, “in calling attention,” and its examples come from the comic stage, Plautus and Terence. Lucius rebukes the skeptic for crassis auribus, “thick ears,” using crassus, whose first sense in Lewis & Short is “solid, thick, dense, fat.” His speech runs on past the end of this chapter.