JUVENAL, SATIRE XV
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[1] 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[2] be a Stoic, and that too in the days of old Metellus?[3] To-day the whole world has its Greek and its Roman Athens; eloquent Gaul has trained the pleaders of Britain, and distant Thule[4] talks of hiring a rhetorician. Yet the people I have named were a noble people; and the people of Zacynthos,[5] their equals in bravery and honour, their more than equals in calamity, offer a like excuse. But Egypt is more savage than the Maeotid[6] altar; for if we may hold the poet's tales as time, the foundress of that accursed Tauric rite does but
- ↑ The founder of the Stoic school.
- ↑ The Vasconea were not Cantabrians, who were more to the W.
- ↑ Q. Caecilius Metellus conducted the war against Sertorius, B.C. 79-72.
- ↑ The most distant land or island to the N.; possibly Shetland or Iceland.
- ↑ A poetic name for the Spanish town of Saguntum, supposed to have been founded from Zacynthus; taken by Hannibal B.C. 218.
- ↑ The palus Maeotis was the sea of Azov; strangers were there sacrificed on the altar of the Tauric (i.e. Crimean) Artemis.
