Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/143

 great-grandfathers, happy the days of old which under Kings and Tribunes beheld Rome satisfied with a single gaol!

"To these I might add more and different reasons; but my cattle call, the sun is sloping and I must away: my muleteer has long been signalling to me with his whip. And so farewell; forget me not. And if ever you run over from Rome to your own Aquinum to recruit, summon me too from Cumae to your Helvine Ceres and Diana; I will come over to your cold country in my thick boots to hear your Satires, if they think me worthy of that honour."

once again! a man whom I shall often have to call on to the scene, a prodigy of wickedness without one redeeming virtue; a sickly libertine, strong only in his lusts, which scorn none save the unwedded.—What matters it then how spacious are the colonnades which tire out his horses, how large the shady groves in which he drives, how many acres near the Forum, how many palaces, he has bought? No bad man can be happy; least of all the incestuous seducer wilh whom lately lay a filleted priestess, doomed to pass beneath the earth with the blood still warm within her veins. 57