Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/355

 cross the threshold within which there is a father. Away with you, ye hireling damsels! Away with the songs of the night-revelling parasite! If you have any evil deed in mind, you owe the greatest reverence to the young; disregard not your boy's tender years, and let your infant son stand in the way of the sin that you propose. For if some day or other he shall do a deed deserving the censor's wrath, and shall show himself like to you, not in form and face only, but also your child in vice, and following in all your footsteps with sin deeper than your own, you will doubtless rebuke him and chide him angrily and thereafter prepare to change your will. But how can you assume the grave brow and the free tone of a father if you in your old age are doing things worse than he did, and your own empty pate has long been needing the windy cupping-glass?

When you expect a guest, not one of your household will be idle. "Sweep the pavement! Polish up the pillars! Down with that dusty spider, web and all! One of you clean the plain silver, another the embossed vessels!" So shouts the master, standing over them whip in hand. And so you are afraid, poor fool, that the eyes of your expected guest may be offended by the sight of dog's filth in the hall or of a portico splashed with mud—things which one slave-boy can put right with half a peck of sawdust; and yet will you take no pains that your son may behold a stainless home, free from any stain and blemish? It is good that you have presented your country and your people with a citizen, if you make him serviceable to his country, useful for the land, useful for the things both of peace and war. For it will make all the difference in what practices, 269