Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/335

 are scarce; hardly so numerous as the gates of Thebes, or the mouths of the enriching Nile. We are living in a ninth age; an age more evil than that of iron—one for whose wickedness Nature herself can find no name, no metal from which to call it. We summon Gods and men to our aid with cries as loud as that with which the vocal dole applauds Faesidius when he pleads. Tell me, you old gentleman, that should be wearing the bulla of childhood, do you know nothing of the charm of other people's money? Are you ignorant of how the world laughs at your simplicity when you demand of any man that he shall not perjure himself, and believe that some divinity is to be found in temples or in altars red with blood? Primitive men lived thus in the olden days, before Saturn laid down his diadem and fled, betaking himself to the rustic sickle; in the days when Juno was a little maid, and Jupiter still a private gentleman in the caves of Ida. In those days there were no banquets of the heavenly host above the clouds, there was no Trojan youth, no fair wife of Hercules for cup-bearer, no Vulcan wiping arms begrimed by the Liparaean forge after tossing off his nectar. Each God then dined by himself; there was no such mob of deities as there is to-day; the stars were satisfied with a few divinities, and pressed with a lighter load upon the hapless Atlas. No monarch had as yet had the gloomy realms below allotted to him; there was no grim Pluto with a 249