Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/261

 has taken to harp-playing, it is not so very strange that a noble should act in a mime. Beyond this, what will be left but the gladiatorial school? And that scandal too you have seen in our city; a Gracchus fighting, not indeed as a murmillo, nor with the round shield and scimitar ; such accoutrements he rejects, ay rejects and detests; nor does a helmet shroud his face. See how he wields his trident! and when with poised right hand he has cast the trailing net in vain, he lifts up his bare face to the benches and flies, for all to recognise, from one end of the arena to the other. We cannot mistake the golden tunic that flutters from his throat, and the twisted cord that dangles from the high-crowned cap ; and so the pursuer who was pitted against Gracchus endured a shame more grievous than any wound.

If free suffrage were granted to the people, who would be so abandoned as not to prefer Seneca to Nero—Nero, for whose chastisement no single ape or adder, no solitary sack, should have been provided? His crime was like that of Agamemnon's son ; but the case was not the same, seeing that Orestes, at the bidding of the Gods, was avenging a father slain in his cups. Orestes never stained himself with Electra's blood, or with that of his Spartan wife ; he never mixed poison-drafts for his own kin; he never sang upon the stage, he never 175