Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/239

 and enter upon some other walk of life. If you ask what fees Chrysogonus and Pollio get for teaching music to the sons of our great men, you will tear up the Rhetoric of Theodorus.

Your great man will spend six hundred thousand sesterces upon his baths, and something more on the colonnade in which he is to drive on rainy days. What? Is he to wait for a clear sky, and bespatter his horses with fresh mud? How much better to drive where their hoofs will remain bright and spotless! Elsewhere let a banqueting hall arise, supported on lofty pillars of African marble, to catch the winter sun. And cost the house what it may, there will come a man to arrange the courses skilfully, and the man who makes up the tasty dishes. Amidst expenditure such as this two thousand sesterces will be enough, and more than enough, for Quintilian; there is nothing on which a father will not spend more money than on his son. "How then," you ask, "does Quintilian possess those vast domains?" Pass by cases of rare good fortune; the lucky man is both beautiful and brave, he is wise and noble and high-born; he sews on to his black shoe the crescent of the Senator. He is a great orator too, a good javelin-man, and if he chance to have caught a cold, he sings divinely. For it makes all the difference by what stars you are welcomed when you utter your first cry, and are still red from your mother's womb. If Fortune so choose, you will become a Consul from being a rhetor; if again she so wills, you will become a rhetor from being a Consul. 153