Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/337

 Sicilian spouse; there was no wheel, no rock, no Furies, no black torturing Vulture; the shades led a merry life, with no kings over their nether world. Dishonesty was a prodigy in those days; men deemed it a heinous sin, worthy of death, if a youth did not rise before his elders, or a boy before any bearded man, though he himself might see more strawberries, and bigger heaps of acorns, in his own home. So worshipful was it to be older by four years, so equal to reverend age was the first down of manhood!

But nowadays, if a friend does not disavow a sum entrusted to him, if he restore the old purse with all its rust, his good faith is deemed a portent calling for the sacred books of Etruria, and to be expiated by a lamb decked with garlands. If I discover an upright and blameless man, I liken him to a boy born with double limbs, or to fishes found by a marvelling rustic under the plough, or to a pregnant mule; I am as concerned as though it had rained stones, or a swarm of bees had settled in a long cluster on a temple-roof, or as though some river had poured down wondrous floods of milk into the sea.

You complain, do you, that by an impious fraud you have been robbed of ten thousand sesterces? What if someone else has by a like fraud lost a secret deposit of two hundred thousand sesterces? A third a still greater sum, which could scarce find room in the corners of his ample treasure-chest? So simple and easy a thing is it to disregard heavenly witnesses, if no mortal man is privy to the secret! Hear how loudly the fellow denies the charge! See the assurance of his perfidious face! He swears by the rays of the sun and the Tarpeian 251