ith poverty. It was
not so once in Rome. Were Cincinnatus or Regulus at the tribunal of
Varus, they would fare like the soldier Macer. And who, Romans, is this
Varus? and why is he here in the seat of authority? At the tribunal,
Varus did not know me. But what if I were to tell you there was but a
thin wall between the rooms where we were born, and that when we were
boys we were ever at the same school!--not such schools as you are
thinking of, where the young go for letters and for Greek, but the
school where many of you have been and are now at, I dare say, the
school of Roman vice, which you may find always open all along the
streets, but especially where I and Varus were, in one of the sinks near
the Flavian. Pollex, the gladiator, was father of Varus!--not worse, but
just as bad, as savage, as beastly in his vices, as are all of that
butcher tribe. My father--Macer too--I will not say more of him than
that he was keeper of the Vivaria of the amphitheatre, and passed his
days in caging and uncaging the wild beasts of Asia and Africa; in
feeding them when there were no games on foot, and starving them when
there were. Varus, the prefect, Romans, and I, were at this school till
I joined the legions under Valerian, and he, by a luckier fortune, as it
would be deemed, found favor in the eyes of Gallienus, to whom, with his
fair sister Fannia, he was sold by those demons Pollex and Caeicina. I
say nothing of how it fared with him in that keeping. Fannia has long
since found the grave. Is Varus one who should sit at the head of Rome?
He is a man of blood, of crime, of vice, such as you would not bear to
be told of! I say not this as if he were answerable for his birth and
early vice, but that, being such, this is not his place. He could not
help it, nor I, that we were born and nurtured where we were; that the
sight of blood and the smell of it, either of men or beasts, was never
out of our eyes and nostrils, during all our boyhood and youth; that to
him, and me, the sweetest pleasure of our young life was, when the games
came on, and the beasts were let loose upon one another, and,--O the
hardening of that life!--when, specially, there were prisoners or
captives, on which to glut their raging hunger! Those were the days and
hours marked whitest in our calendar. And, whitest of all, were the days
of the Decian persecution, when the blood of thrice cursed Christians,
as I was taught to name them, flowed like water. Every day