What varying forms in madness may we trace
Safe in his loved Electra's fond embrace,
Orestes sees the avenging Furies rise,
And wave their bloody torches in his eyes:
While Ajax strikes an ox, and, at the blow,
Hears Agamemnon or Ulysses low:
And surely he, though, haply, he forbear,
Like these, his keeper and his clothes to tear,
Is just as mad, who, to the water's brim,
Loads his frail bark, a plank 'twixt death and him!
When all this risk is but to swell his store
With a few coins, a few gold pieces more.
Heaven lowers, and frequent, through the muttering air,
The nimble lightning glares, or seems to glare:
"Weigh! weigh!" the impatient man of traffic cries,
"These gathering clouds, this rack that dims the skies,
Are but the pageants of a sultry day;
A thunder shower, that frowns and melts away."
Deluded wretch! dash'd on some dangerous coast,
This night, this hour perhaps, his bark is lost;
While he still strives, though whelm'd beneath the wave,
His darling purse, with teeth, or hand, to save.
Thus he, who sighed of late for all the gold
Down the bright Tagus and Pactolus roll'd,
Now bounds his wishes to one poor request,
A scanty morsel, and a tatter'd vest;
And shows, where tears, where supplications fail,
A daubing of his melancholy tale! (302).
Wealth, by such hardships earn'd, requires more pain,
More care to keep it, than at first to gain:
Whate'er my miseries, make me not, kind Fate,
The sleepless Argus of a vast estate!
The slaves of Licinus, a numerous band,
Watch through the night with buckets in their hand,
302. They carried about a coarse painting of their shipwreck, to move pity, perhaps, in countries where their language was not understood.
While their rich master trembling lies, afraid
Lest fire his ivory, amber, gold, invade.
The naked Cynic mocks such anxious cares,
His earthen tub no conflagration fears;
If crack'd, or broken, he procures a new,
Or, coarsely soldering, makes the old one do.
Even Philip's son, when, in the little cell,
Content he saw the mighty master dwell,
Own'd, with a sigh, that he who nought desired,
Was happier far than he who worlds required,
And whose ambition certain dangers brought,
Vast and unbounded as the object sought.-
Fortune, advanced to heaven by fools alone,
Would lose, were wisdom ours, her shadowy throne.
"What call I, then, ENOUGH?" What will afford
A decent habit and a frugal board;
What Epicurus' little garden bore, (319)
And Socrates sufficient thought, before;
These squared by Nature's rules their blameless life-
Nature and Wisdom never are at strife.
You think, perhaps, these rigid means too scant,
And that I ground philosophy on want;
Take then (for I will be indulgent now,
And something for the change of times allow,)
As much as Otho for a knight requires :-
If this, unequal to your wild desires,
Contract your brow; enlarge the sum, and take
As much as two,-as much as three, will make :
If yet, in spite of this prodigious store,
Your craving bosom yawn, unfill'd, for more,
319. No one could hold the theological tenets of Epicurus in greater contempt and abhorrence than Juvenal, and yet he never omits an opportunity of doing justice to the simplicity of his life. Diocles says that he was a perfect example of continence and simplicity; and Juvenal loves to dwell on his frugality-parvis suffecit in hortis. In a word, the garden of Epicurus was a school of temperance: and would have afforded little gratification, and still less sanction, to those sensualists of our day, who, in turning hogs, flatter themselves that they are becoming Epicu
TO VOLUSIUS BITHYNICUS, ON THE SUPERSTITION OF THE EGYPTIANS.
WHO knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend,
The mad inhabitants of Egypt bend?
The snake-devouring Ibis these inshrine,
Those think the crocodile alone divine;
Others, where Thebes' vast ruins strew the ground,
And shatter'd Memnon yields a magic sound, (5)
Set up a glittering brute of uncouth shape,
And bow before the image of an ape!
Thousands regard the hound with holy fear,
Not one, Diana: and 'tis dangerous here,
To violate an onion, or to stain
The sanctity of leeks, with tooth profane.
O holy nations! Sacro-sanct abodes!
Where every garden propagates its gods!
They spare the fleecy kind, and think it ill,
The blood of lambkins or of kids to spill;
But human flesh-Oh! that is lawful fare,
And you may eat it without scandal there.
When, at the amazed Alcinous' board, of old,
Ulysses of so strange an action told,
He moved of some the mirth, of more the gall,
And for a lying vagrant pass'd with all:
"Will no one dash this babbler, for his pains,
Against some true Charybdis ;-while he feigns
Monsters unheard of since the world began,
Cyclops and Læstrigons, who feed on man!
VER. 5. Herodotus, when he went into Egypt, was shown the fragments of a colossus, thrown down some years before by Cambyses. This he calls Memnon, but says not a syllable respecting its emitting a vocal sound: which appears to have been an afterthought of the priests of
For me I less should doubt of Scylla's train,
Of rocks that float and jostle in the main,
Of bladders filled with storms, of men, in fine,
By magic changed, and driven to grunt with swine,
Than of his cannibals :-the fellow lies,
As if he thought Phæacians not o'er wise."
Thus one, perhaps, more sober than the rest,
Observed, and justly, of their travell'd guest,
Who spoke of prodigies till then unknown;
Yet brought no attestation but his own.
-I have my wonders also: I can tell,
When Junius late was consul, what befel
Near Coptus' walls; tell of a people stain'd
With deeper guilt than tragedy e'er feign'd;
For, sure, no buskin'd bard, from Pyrrha's time,
E'er tax'd a whole community with crime;
Take then a scene, yet to the stage unknown,
And, by a nation, acted-IN OUR OWN!
Between two neighbouring towns a deadly hate,
Sprung from a sacred grudge of ancient date,
Yet burns; a hate no lenients can assuage,
No time subdue, a rooted, rancorous rage!
Blind bigotry, at first, the evil wrought:
For each despised the other's gods, and thought
Its own the true, the genuine, in a word,
The only deities to be adored! (38)
And now the Ombite festival drew near;
When the prime Tent'rites, envious of their cheer,
Resolved to seize the occasion, to annoy
Their feast, and spoil the sacred week of joy.
Thebes. The upper part of this statue has been covered by the sand for ages it is that which yet remains on its pedestal, which performs the wonders mentioned by so many travellers, who have perpetuated their credulity on the spot, by inscribing their names on the stone. The whole, however, appears to have been a trick not ill adapted to such a place as Egypt, where men went, and still go, with a face of gaping wonderment, predisposed to swallow the grossest absurdities.
38. The Ombites worshipped the crocodile, the Tentyrites the ibis, whose respective claims to superiority are not yet settled.
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