our fortune, sir,
You questioned every tripod, every rune;
"You'll stand out above gods and men," at last
Answered the god in truth-revealing voice.
What arrogance you drew from this! You were
Immediately lord of the universe.
Now you ascend the cross. God was no cheat:
The whole world lies spread out beneath your feet.[20]

This is fairly respectable and merely low. But the cynical license of
Martial and Catullus, by which they speak of many things that are not
simply morally foul but such as decent society demands be removed from
sight and hearing, must be regarded as altogether shameless and
vulgar. For this reason men of taste never mention favorably Catullus'
_Annales Volusi cacata charta_, or Martial's

et desiderio coacta ventris
gutta pallia non fefellit una[21]

And there are many others a good deal more despicable which cannot be
adduced even as examples of a fault. Assuredly Antiquity was too
forbearing toward this sort of thing, and I have often wondered how
Cicero could have been tolerated in the Roman Senate when he inveighed
against Piso:

Do you not remember, blank, when I came to see you about the
fifth hour with Gaius Piso, you were coming out of some dirty
shack, slippers on your feet and your face and beard covered; and
when you breathed on us that low tavern air from your fetid
mouth, you apologized on grounds of ill health, saying that you
were taking a kind of wine treatment? When we had accepted your
explanation--what else could we do?--we stood a while in the
smell and fume of the joints you patronize until you kicked us
out by the impudence of your answers and the stench of your
belches.[22]

_On spiteful epigrams._

Men with some gentleness of nature have an inborn hatred of spite,
especially of such as mocks bodily flaws or reversals of fortune, or,
finally, anything that happens beyond the individual's responsibility.
For, since no man feels himself free of such strokes of chance, he
will not take it easily when they are torn down and laughed at. The
Vergilian Dido spoke with human feeling when she said: _Not unaware of
ill I learned to aid misfortune._[23] and the good will of the reader
rises quietly in her favor. Likewise, Seneca says nicely: _It is not
witty to be spiteful._[24] On the other hand they act inhumanely who
triumph over misfortune and upbraid what was not guiltily effected, to