Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/269

 when he goes round offering a triple rate of interest, and can find no fool to trust him? Why have you suddenly developed those wrinkles? You used to be an easily contented person, who passed as a home-bred knight that could make biting jests at the dinner-table and tell witty town-bred stories. But now you are a different man. You have a hang-dog look; your head is a forest of unkempt, unanointed hair; your skin has lost all the gloss that it got from swathes of hot Bruttian pitch, and your legs are dirty and rough with sprouting hair. Why are you as thin as a chronic invalid in whom a quartan fever has long made its home? One can detect in a sickly body the secret torments of the soul, as also its joys; the face takes on the stamp of either. You seem, therefore, to have changed your mode of life, and to be going in a way opposite to your past. Not long ago, as I remember, you were a gallant more notorious than Aufidius; you used to frequent the Temple of Isis and that of Peace with its Ganymede, and the secret courts of the Foreign Mother—for in what temple are there not frail fair ones to be found?

"Many men have found profit in my mode of life; but I have made nothing substantial out of my labours. I sometimes have a greasy cloak given me that will save my toga—a coarse and crudely dyed garment that has been ill-combed by the Gallic weaver—or some trifle in silver of an inferior quality. Man is ruled by destiny; even those parts of him that lie beneath his clothes. What 183