Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/169

 let me tell you, is to compel you to pour out your wrath in tears, and to keep gnashing your molars against each other. You think yourself a free man, and guest of a grandee; he thinks—and he is not far wrong—that you have been captured by the savoury odours of his kitchen. For who that had ever worn the Etruscan bulla in his boyhood,—or even the poor man's leather badge— could tolerate such a patron for a second time, however destitute he might be? It is the hope of a good dinner that beguiles you; "Surely he will give us," you say, "what is left of a hare, or some scraps of a boar's haunch; the remains of a capon will come our way by and by." And so you all sit in dumb silence, your bread clutched, untasted, and ready for action. In treating you thus, the great man shows his wisdom. If you can endure such things, you deserve them; some day you will be offering your head to be shaved and slapped; nor will you flinch from a stroke of the whip, well worthy of such a feast and such a friend.

the days of Saturn, I believe, Chastity still lingered on the earth, and was to be seen for a time—days when men were poorly housed in chilly caves, when one common shelter enclosed hearth and house-hold gods, herds and their owners; when the hill-bred wife spread her silvan bed with leaves and straw and the skins of her neighbours the wild beasts—a wife not 83