gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for
the children's welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode
of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly
spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping,
against sweet bread and fine fare--the whelps, the old man thinks,
are now fed more judiciously than the children--and likewise
against the enchantresses' charms and blessings, which in cases of
sickness so often take the place of the physician's counsel. He
advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards
understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work,
and not to allow them to put off the child's dress too early; he
warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which
the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.--In the "Man of Sixty
Years" Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep
when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is
astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old
bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog;
but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome. Lucrine
oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which,
accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary
torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now
the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of
his father by poison. The Comitium had become an exchange,
the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen. No law is any
longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for
nothing. All virtues have vanished; in their stead the awakened
man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens.
"Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening!"--
The sketch resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which
(about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth
in the bitter turn at the close; where Marcus, properly reproved
for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is--
with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom--dragged as
a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber. There was
certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.

28. "The innocent," so ran a speech, "thou draggest forth,
trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank
in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered].
Se