Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/202

 life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to profit by sycophantic subservience alone.”

And Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. XVIII, chap. 4, remarks: “Some there are that grovel before rich men, old men or young, childless or unmarried, or even wives and children, for the purpose of so influencing their wishes and them by deft and dextrous finesse.”

That this profession of legacy hunting is not one of the lost arts is apparent even in our day, for the term “undue influence” is as common in our courts as Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “husband,” or refined cruelty, or “injunctions” restraining husbands from disposing of property, or separate maintenance, or even “heart balm” and the consequent breach of promise.

  The rite of the Persians:

Castration has been practiced from remote antiquity, and is a feature of the harem life of the Levant to the present day. Semiramis is accused of having been the first to order the emasculation of a troupe of her boy slaves:

“Whether the first false likeness of men came to the Assyrians through the ingenuity of Semiramis; for Rh