Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/180

170 lynxes, panthers, and bears—Xenophon speaks briefly as a foreign sport. He mentions that in some places the beasts are poisoned with aconite mixed in lumps of food, and placed in their way. In other places they are intercepted in the plains when they have come down from the mountains at night, and are speared by men on horseback. Elsewhere they are taken by means of pitfalls, with live goats for bait.

Thus far the treatise is of a purely technical character; but Xenophon, in concluding it, gives way to his love of moralising, and preaches a somewhat incongruous and irrelevant sermon. He returns to his old theme, the excellence of the practice of hunting as preparing a man to serve his country. Then he goes on to the worth of toilsome pursuits in general, and, though virtue is toilsome, says that mankind would not shun the pursuit of her if they could only see in bodily form how beautiful she is. This train of thought reminds him of the "Sophists," or professional teachers of morals and rhetoric. These he denounces as impostors, and in reference to the subject which he has been treating, he calls them "hunters for rich young men." There is, he adds, another spurious kind of hunters; namely, the political place-hunters. Their example young men should avoid, and should rather devote themselves to field-sports, with a happy faith that the gods delight in and approve of these, and that by practising them they may become a benefit to their parents, their friends, and their country.

The whole of this peroration is so little in keeping with the former part of a very excellent treatise, that