Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/167

 sesterces, O how great a personage would you become, from being a nobody; how dear a friend to Virro! "Pray help Trebius to this!" "Let Trebius have some of that!" "Would you like a cut just from the loin, good brother?" O money, money! It is to you that he pays this honour, it is you that are his brother! Nevertheless, if you wish to be yourself a great man, and a great man's lord, let there be no little Aeneas playing about your halls, nor yet a little daughter, more sweet than he; nothing will so endear you to your friend as a barren wife. But as things now are, though your Mycale pour into your paternal bosom three boys at a birth, Virro will be charmed with the chattering brood, and will order little green jackets to be given them, and little nuts, and pennies too if they be asked for, when the little parasites present themselves at his table.

Before the guests will be placed toadstools of doubtful quality, before my lord a noble mushroom, such a one as Claudius ate before that mushroom of his wife's —after which he ate nothing more. To himself and the rest of the Virros he will order apples to be served whose scent alone would be a feast apples such as grew in the never-failing Autumn of the Phaeacians, and which you might believe to have been niched from the African sisters; you are treated to a rotten apple like those munched on the ramparts by a monkey equipped with spear and shield who learns, in terror of the whip, to hurl a javelin from the back of a shaggy goat.

You may perhaps suppose that Virro grudges the expense; not a bit of it! His object is to give you pain. For what comedy, what mime, is so amusing as a disappointed belly? His one object, 81