Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/383

 different. Unkindly fortune had brought on them the last dire extremity of war, the famine of a long siege. In a plight like that of the people just named, resorting to such food deserves our pity, inasmuch as not till they had consumed every herb, every living thing, and everything else to which the pangs of an empty belly drove them—not till their very enemies pitied their pale, lean and wasted limbs—did hunger make them tear the limbs of other men, being ready to feed even upon their own. What man, what God, would withhold a pardon from bellies which had suffered such dire straits, and which might look to be forgiven by the Manes of those whose bodies they were devouring? To us, indeed, Zeno gives better teaching, for he permits some things, though not indeed all things, to be done for the saving of life; but how could a Cantabrian be a Stoic, and that too in the days of old Metellus? To-day the whole world has its Greek and its Roman Athens; eloquent Gaul has trained the pleaders of Britain, and distant Thule talks of hiring a rhetorician. Yet the people I have named were a noble people; and the people of Zacynthos, their equals in bravery and honour, their more than equals in calamity, offer a like excuse. But Egypt is more savage than the Maeotid altar; for if we may hold the poet's tales as time, the foundress of that accursed Tauric rite does but 297