Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/257

 own hands this muleteer Consul locks the wheel with the drag. It is by night, indeed; but the moon looks on; the stars strain their eyes to see. When his time of office is over, Lateranus will take up his whip in broad daylight; not shrinking to meet a now-aged friend, he will be the first to salute him with his whip; he will unbind the trusses of hay, and deal out the fodder to his weary cattle. Meanwhile, though he slays woolly victims and tawny steers after Numa's fashion, he swears by no other deity before Jove's high altar than the Goddess of horse-flesh, and the images painted on the reeking stables. And when it pleases him to go back to the all-night tavern, a Syro-Phoenician runs forth to meet him—a denizen of the Idumaean gate perpetually drenched in perfumes—and salutes him as lord and prince with all the airs of a host; and with him comes Cyane, her dress tucked up, carrying a flagon of wine for sale.

An apologist will say to me, "We too did the same as boys." Perhaps; but then you ceased from your follies and let them drop. Let your evil days be short; let some of your misdoings be cut off with your first beard. Boys may be pardoned; but when Lateranus frequented those hot liquor shops with their inscribed linen awnings, he was of ripe age, fit to guard in arms the Armenian and Syrian rivers, the Danube and the Rhine; fit to protect the person of his Emperor. Send your Legate to Ostia, O Caesar, but search for him in some big cookshop! There you will find him, lying cheek-by-jowl beside a cut-throat, in the company of bargees, thieves, and 171