Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/258

 238 THE DECLIISE AND FALL not silent on this propitious day : ^^ he sung, in various and lively strains, the happiness of the royal pair, and the glory of the hero, who confirmed their union and supported their throne. The ancient fables of Greece, which had almost ceased to be the object of religious faith, were saved from oblivion by the genius of poetry. The picture of the Cyprian grove, the seat of harmony and love ; the triumphant progress of Venus over her native seas, and the mild influence which her presence diffused in the palace of Milan ; express to every age the natural sentiments of the heart, in the just and pleasing language of allegorical fiction. But the amorous impatience which Claudian attributes to the young prince '^'^ must excite the smiles of the court ; and his beauteous spouse (if she deserved the praise of beauty) had not much to fear or to hope from the passions of her lover, Honorius was only in the fourteenth year of his age ; Serena, the mother of his bride, deferred, by art or persuasion, the consummation of the royal nuptials ; Maria died a virgin, after she had been ten years a wife ; and the chastity of the emperor was secured by the coldness, or perhaps the debility, of his constitution.*^! m^ subjects, who attentively studied the character of their young sovereign, discovered that Honorius was without passions, and consequently without talents ; and that his feeble and languid disposition was alike incapable of dis- charging the duties of his rank or of enjoying the pleasures of his age. In his early youth he made some progress in the exercises of riding and drawing the bow : but he soon relin- quished these fatiguing occupations, and the amusement of feeding poultry became the serious and daily care of the monarch of the West,62 ^y^o resigned the reins of empire to the firm and 59 Claudian, as the poet laureate, composed a serious and elaborate epithalamium of 340 lines : besides some gay Fescennines, which were sung in a more licentious tone on the wedding-night. 60 . . . Calet obvius ire Jam princeps, tardumque cupit discedere solem. Nobilis haud aliter sonipcs. {de. Nuptiis Honor, et Mariae, 587) and more freely in the Fescennines (112-126 [iv. 14-29, ed. Koch]). Dices " O " qjwtiem, " hoc mihi dulcius Quam flavos decies vincere Sarmatas ". Turn victor madido prosilias tore Nocturni referens vulnera prcelii. 8' See Zosimus, 1. v. p. 333 [c. 28] . fi^ Procopius de Bell. Gothico, 1. i. c. 2. I have borrowed the general practice of Honorius, without adopting the singular and, indeed, iraprohable tale vhich is related by the Greek historian.