Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/299

 right hand. But mark for a moment, I beg, how he bewails the decrees of fate and his too-long thread of life, when he beholds the beard of his brave Antilochus in the flames, and asks of every friend around him why he has lived so long, what crime he has commit ted to deserve such length of days. Thus did Peleus also mourn when he lost Achilles; and so that other father who had to bewail the sea-roving Ithacan. Had Priam perished at some other time, before Paris began to build his audacious ships, he would have gone down to the shade of Assaracus when Troy was still standing, and with regal pomp; his body would have been borne on the shoulders of Hector and his brothers amid the tears of Ilion's daughters, and the rending of Polyxena's garments; Cassandra would have led the cries of woe. What boon did length of days bring to him? He saw everything in ruins, and Asia perishing by fire and the sword. Laying aside his tiara, and arming himself, he fell, a trembling soldier, before the altar of Almighty Jove, like an aged ox discarded by the thankless plough who offers his poor lean neck to his master's knife. Priam's death was at least that of a human being; but his wife lived on to open her mouth with the savage barking of a dog.

I hasten to our own countrymen, passing by the king of Pontus and Croesus, who was bidden by the wise and eloquent Solon to look to the last lap of a long life. It was this that brought Marius to exile and to prison, it took him to the swamps of Minturnae and made him beg his bread in the 213