Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/289

 for the fame of a Cicero or a Demosthenes. Yet it was eloquence that brought both orators to their death; each perished by the copious and over-flowing torrent of his own genius. It was his genius that cut off the hand, and severed the neck, of Cicero; never yet did futile pleader stain the rostra with his blood!

Had Cicero always spoken thus, he might have laughed at the swords of Antony. Better verses meet only for contempt than thou, O famous and divine Philippic, that comest out second on the roll! Terrible, too, was the death of him whom Athens loved to hear sweeping along and holding in check the crowded theatre. Unfriendly were the Gods, and evil the star, under whom was born the man whom his father, blear-eyed with the soot of glowing ore, sent away from the coal, the pincers and the sword-fashioning anvil of grimy Vulcan, to study the art of the rhetorician!

The spoils of war and trophies fastened upon stumps—a breast-plate, a cheek-strap hanging from a broken helmet, a yoke shorn of its pole, the flagstaff of a captured galley, or a captive sorrowing on a triumphal arch—such things are deemed glories too great for man; these are the prizes for which every General strives, be he Greek, Roman, or barbarian; it is for these that he endures toil and peril; so much greater is the thirst for glory than for virtue! For who would embrace virtue herself if you stripped 203