You'll have no scandal when you dine. But honest talk and wholesome wine. And instead of lewd dance and song, a slave shall read aloud Homer and Homer's one rival, Vergil. The twelfth satire opens with a thanksgiving for the escape of a friend, Catullus, from a great storm at sea, and ends with a denunciation of legacy hunters, the connecting link between these somewhat remote themes being that Juvenal, at any rate, is disinterested in his joy at his friend's escape. The thirteenth and fourteenth satires deal with more abstract themes, the pangs of the guilty conscience and the importance of parental example. In the first, Juvenal consoles his friend, Calvinus, who has been defrauded of a sum of money. The loss, he says, is small, and, after all, honesty is rare nowadays. Men have so little care for the gods that they shrink from no perjury. Besides, what is such loss compared with the many worse crimes that darken life. Why thirst for revenge? It is the doctrine of the common herd. Philosophy teaches otherwise. The torment of conscience will be a worse penalty than any you can inflict, and at last justice will claim its own. In the next satire, to emphasize the value of parental example, the poet illustrates his point from the vice of avarice, and finally, forgetting his original theme, lashes the avaricious man in words such as would never suggest that the question of parental example had been raised at all. It is noteworthy that throughout these two satires the poet draws his illustrations from the themes of the schools rather than from the scenes of contemporary life. In the fifteenth satire, however, he returns to depict and discuss actual occurrences, but in how altered and strange a manner. His theme is a case of cannibalism in Egypt,[720] the result of a collision between religious fanatics of neighbouring townships. The aged poet spurs himself into one last fury against the hated Oriental, regardless of the fact that the denunciation of cannibalism to a civilized audience must necessarily be insipid. Last comes a fragment expatiating bitterly on the shameful advantages of a military career. The unhappy civilian assaulted by a soldier cannot get redress, for the case must be heard in camp before a bench of soldiers. The soldier, on the other hand, can get summary settlement of all his disputes, and alone of Romans is exempt from the _patria potestas_, can control his earnings and bequeath them to whom he will. At this point the satire breaks off abruptly, and we have no means of judging the extent of the loss. It is a striking reversion to his earlier manner. Once more the satire takes the form of a series of sketches from actual life.