We shall now examine a few of the more important of the fragments which have been preserved to us. The following has been thought to be a vivid picture of the unworthy struggle of life as he saw it in the Rome of his own time. Lactantius, however, whose quotation of the fragment has saved it, thinks that the poet is portraying in a more general way the unhappy, unrestful life of mankind, unrelieved, as Lucretius would say, by the comforting reflections of philosophy. But now, from morning to night, on holidays and work days, in the same place, the whole day long, high and low, all busy themselves in the forum and never depart. To one and the same pursuit and practice have they all devoted themselves: to cheat as guardedly as possible, to strive craftily, to vie in flattery, to make a pretense of being good men, to lay snares just as if they were all the foes of all. There was a certain Titus Albucius, who, it seems, was so enamored with everything Greek that he was continually affecting the manners and language of that country. Such running after foreign customs and speech has not yet wholly disappeared. This weakness is the object of the poet's wit in the following passage, in which he tells how Scævola, the proprætor of Asia, once "took down" the silly Albucius in Athens: A Greek, Albucius, you would be called, and not a Roman and a Sabine, a fellow-townsman of Pontius and Tritanius, though they are both illustrious men, and first-rate standard-bearers. And so, as prætor at Athens, when I meet you, I salute you in the foreign style which you are so fond of: "+chaire+!"[A] I say; and my lictors and all my retinue inquire: "+chaire+?" Fie, Albucius! for this thou art my country's foe, and my own enemy! [A] Hail. The fourth satire, says an ancient scholiast, was an attack upon luxury and the vices of the rich. The following passage might well have been the opening lines of this satire, representing Lælius as exclaiming in praise of a vegetable diet and against gluttony: "O sorrel, how praiseworthy art thou, And yet how little art thou really known!" over his mess of sorrel Lælius the wise used to cry out, chiding one by one the gluttons of our day. And that he did not hesitate to call the glutton and spendthrift by name is shown by this fragment, which is evidently a continuation of the same diatribe: "O Publius Gallonius, thou spendthrift," said he, "thou art a wretched fellow. Never in all thy life hast thou dined well, though all thy wealth on that lobster and that sturgeon thou consumest." The last selection which we shall present from Lucilius is the longest extant fragment. The passage is a somewhat elaborate definition of _virtue_ as the old Roman understood it. We use the translation of Sellar.