Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/363

 Yes; and no doubt you will escape disease and weakness, you will have no sorrow, no trouble, you will have long and ever happier days, if only you are sole possessor of as many acres of good land as the Roman people tilled in the days of Tatius. In later times, Romans broken with old age, who had fought in the Punic battles or against the dread Pyrrhus or the swords of the Molossians, received at last, in return for all their wounds, a scanty two acres of land. None ever deemed such recompense too small for their service of toil and blood; none spoke of a shabby, thankless country. A little plot like that would feed the father himself and the crowd at the cottage where lay the wife in child-bed, with four little ones playing around—one slave-born, three the master's own; for their big brothers, on their return from ditch or furrow, a second and ampler supper of porridge would be smoking in a lordly dish. To-day we don't think such a plot of ground big enough for our garden!

It is here mostly that lies the cause of crime. No human passion has mingled more poison-bowls, none has more often wielded the murderous dagger, than the fierce craving for unbounded wealth. For the man who wants wealth must have it at once; what respect for laws, what fear, what sense of shame is to be found in a miser hurrying to be rich? "Live content, my boys, with these cottages and hills of yours," said the Marsian or Hernican or Vestinian father in the days of yore; "let the plough win for us what bread shall suffice our table; such fare the rustic Gods approve, whose aid and bounty gave us the glad ear of corn, and taught man to disdain the acorn of ancient times. The man who is not ashamed to 277