Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/68

 but Orestes slew no wife, no sister; he never sang upon the stage, he never wrote an epic upon Troy! And of all his crimes, which deserved greater punishment than that?

Whose blood could be nobler than that of Catiline or Cethegus? Yet they conspired to destroy the city; and it was the plebeian Cicero that preserved it. The plebeian Marius saved her from the Cimbri and the Teutones; the plebeian Decii saved our legions from the hosts of Latium; and the best king of Rome was a slave-girl's son.

The 9th Satire deals with a disgusting offence, one of the main sources of corruption in the ancient world.

The 10th Satire has been often called Juvenal's masterpiece; it has had the honour of being paraphrased by Johnson in his "Vanity of Human Wishes," and it has all the merits of a full-blown rhetorical declamation. It has some magnificent descriptions, especially that of the fall of the favourite Sejanus. But it is a profoundly depressing and pessimistic poem. Except in the last few lines, there is not a word of hope or encouragement for the ordinary human being; no sense that any kind of life can be worth living; not one word of counterpoise to the long, dismal catalogue of human failures; no suggestion that in great lives which have ended in disaster there may have been moments of noble lxiv