with a
perfectly curable illness. The philosophy which alone professed itself
able to heal men's sorrows applauded the supposed courage of a voluntary
death, and it was of too abstract, too fantastic, and too purely
theoretical a character to furnish them with any real or lasting
consolations. No sentiment caused more surprise to the Roman world than
the famous one preserved in the fragment of Maecenas,--

"Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa,
Tuber adstrue gibberum,
Lubricos quate dentes;
Vita dum superest bene est;
Hanc mihi vel acuta
Si sedeam cruce sustine;"

which may be paraphrased,--

"Numb my hands with palsy,
Rack my feet with gout,
Hunch my back and shoulder,
Let my teeth fall out;
Still, if _Life_ be granted,
I prefer the loss;
Save my life, and give me
Anguish on the cross."

Seneca, in his 101st Letter, calls this "a most disgraceful and most
contemptible wish;" but it may be paralleled out of Euripides, and still
more closely out of Homer. "Talk not," says the shade of Achilles to
Ulysses in the Odyssey,--

"'Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom,
Nor think vain lies,' he cried, 'can ease my doom.
_Better by far laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead_.'"

But this falsehood of extremes was one of the sad outcomes of the
popular Paganism. Either, like the natural savage, they dreaded death
with an intensity of terror; or, when their crimes and sorrows had made
life unsupportable, they slank to it as a refuge, with a cowardice which
vaunted itself as courage.

V. And it was an age of cruelty. The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary
combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures
and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs
burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and
imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery
tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as
usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with perfect amazement of the
number of slaves in the wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no
extravagant number, and the vast majority of them were idle, uneducated
and corrupt. Treated as little better than animals, they lost m