So here’s Damocles quickly leaving his home and going straight to work. He’s so eager to start the story that, not only does he jump right in with a Homeric "in medias res" routine, but he’s willing to settle for a breathless present-tense. Damocles works as a minor palace official in the court of Dionysius. Actually he’s a "flatterer," according to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. He’s not a bureaucrat, like a postmodern official. There’s no bureaucracy in Syracuse, it’s all done by a tiny group of elite families, who run everything. Syracuse is a pre-industrial city-state of maybe fifty thousand people. An independent city-state about the size of Oshkosh, Wisconsin.