Juvenal

“ No penalty can you devise for such a crime, no fit punishment for a people in whose minds rage and hunger are like and equal things. When Nature gave tears to man, she proclaimed that he was tender-hearted; and tenderness is the best quality in man. ”

“ But man finds it all too little to have forged the deadly blade on an impious anvil; for whereas the first artificers only wearied themselves with forging hoes and harrows, spades and ploughshares, not knowing how to beat out swords, we now behold a people whose wrath is not assuaged by slaying someone, but who deem that a man's breast, arms, and face afford a kind of food. ”

“ To them in the beginning of the world our common maker gave only life; to us he gave souls as well, that fellow-feeling might bid us ask or proffer aid, gather scattered dwellers into a people, desert the primeval groves and woods inhabited by our forefathers, build houses for ourselves, with others adjacent to our own, that a neighbour's threshold, from the confidence that comes of union, might give us peaceful slumbers ”

“ What avails a mob of so many thousand brawlers if no lives are lost? So fiercer and fiercer grows the fight; they now search the ground for stones—the natural weapons of civic strife—and hurl them with bended arms against the foe ”

“ Each people is filled with fury against the other because each hates its neighbours' Gods, deeming that none can be held as deities save its own. So when one of these peoples held a feast, the chiefs and leaders of their enemy thought good to seize the occasion, so that their foe might not enjoy a glad and merry day, with the delight of grand banquets, with tables set out at every temple and every crossway, and with night-long feasts, and with couches spread all day and all night, and sometimes discovered by the sun upon the seventh morn. ”

“ In one part cats are worshipped, in another a river fish, in another whole townships venerate a dog; none adore Diana, but it is an impious outrage to crunch leeks and onions with the teeth. What a holy race to have such divinities springing up in their gardens! No animal that grows wool may appear upon the dinner-table; it is forbidden there to slay the young of the goat; but it is lawful to feed on the flesh of man! When Ulysses told a tale like this over the dinner-table to the amazed Alcinous, [2] he stirred some to wrath, some perhaps to laughter, as a lying story-teller. ”

“ She therefore bids us weep for the misery of a friend upon his trial, or when a ward whose streaming cheeks and girlish locks raise a doubt as to his sex brings a defrauder into court. It is at Nature's behest that we weep when we meet the bier of a full-grown maiden, or when the earth closes over a babe too young for the funeral pyre. ”

“ First come loud words, as preludes to the fray; these serve as a trumpet-call to their hot passions; then shout answering shout, they charge. Bare hands do the fell work of war. Scarce a cheek is left without a gash; scarce one nose, if any, comes out of the battle unbroken. Through all the ranks might be seen battered faces, and features other than they were ”

“ 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 [10] gives better teaching, for he permits some things, though not indeed all things, to be done for the saving of life ”