the most permanent of all appeals that are ever made to humanity; and, even in times of revolution, its authority has been invoked by those most eager to sweep away existing institutions. _Pro magno teste vetustas creditur._[112] But if Augustus and his friends appealed to antiquity, it was not merely to recall the shadows of the ancient forms and customs, but to revivify them with the new life of virtue that was welling up in their time, and which, in its turn, received external grace and strength by its embodiment in the ancestral forms. The strong chord of moral earnestness struck by Horace and Virgil grows more resonant as the new era advances, until, in literature at least, it attains the persistence of a dominant. Juvenal is so passionately moral that he frequently renders himself liable to Horace’s censure of those who worship virtue too much; but, in his best moods, as in the famous lines which close the Tenth Satire, he depicts the virtuous man in a style which is not the less earnest and sincere because it is also dignified and calm. Persius, whose disposition was marked by maidenly modesty and gentleness, and who is also described as _frugi et pudicus_, shows, even when hampered by a disjointed style which only allows him to utter his thought in fragments, that devotion to the highest moral aims which we should expect from a writer brought up under the influences which he enjoyed;[113] and though he, too, exhibits some of the savage ferocity of Juvenal in his strictures of vice, he yet pays, in his Fifth Satire, that tribute to virtue in the person of Cornutus which “proves the goodness of the writer and the gracefulness with which he could write.”[114] Lucan, too, whose youth, like that of Persius, had the inestimable advantage of receiving a share of the wisdom which Cornutus had gained by nights devoted to philosophic studies, exhibits a spirit of the loftiest morality under the rhetorical phrasing of his great Republican Epic.[115] Looking back, with something of regret, to the days of a dominant oligarchy, he does not conceal the licentiousness which society harboured beneath the sway of the later Optimates, and he turns mostly to Cato as the type which he would fain accept as representative of the true Roman patrician:— “Nam cui crediderim Superos arcana daturos Dicturosque magis quam sancto vera Catoni?”[116] The noble lines in which Cato refuses to consult the Libyan oracle—_Non exploratum populis Ammona relinquens_—are well known, and express a highly ethical view of the divine administration of the world:— “Hæremus cuncti superis, temploque tacente Nil facimus non sponte Dei: nec vocibus ullis Numen agit: dixitque semel nascentibus auctor Quicquid scire licet: steriles nec legit arenas Ut caneret paucis, mersitque hoc pulvere verum. Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer Et cælum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra? Juppiter est quodcunque vides quocunque moveris.”[117]