Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/379

 own. So when one of these peoples held a feast, the chiefs and leaders of their enemy thought good to seize the occasion, so that their foe might not enjoy a glad and merry day, with the delight of grand banquets, with tables set out at every temple and every crossway, and with night-long feasts, and with couches spread all day and all night, and sometimes discovered by the sun upon the seventh morn. Egypt, doubtless, is a rude country; but in indulgence, so far as I myself have noted, its barbarous rabble yields not to the ill-famed Canopus. Victory too would be easy, it was thought, over men steeped in wine, stuttering and stumbling in their cups. On the one side were men dancing to a swarthy piper, with unguents, such as they were, and flowers and chaplets on their heads; on the other side, a ravenous hate. First come loud words, as preludes to the fray; these serve as a trumpet-call to their hot passions; then shout answering shout, they charge. Bare hands do the fell work of war. Scarce a cheek is left without a gash; scarce one nose, if any, comes out of the battle unbroken. Through all the ranks might be seen battered faces, and features other than they were; bones gaping through torn cheeks, and fists dripping with blood from eyes. Yet the combatants deem themselves at play and waging a boyish warfare because there are no corpses on which to trample. What avails a mob of so many thousand brawlers if no lives are lost? So fiercer and fiercer grows the fight; they now search the ground for stones—the natural weapons of civic strife—and hurl them with bended arms against the foe; not such stones as Turnus or Ajax flung, or like that with which the son of Tydeus 293