Let us, then, lay aside all excessive complaints. A _man's_ grief ought not to blaze forth beyond the proper bounds, nor exceed the loss sustained. Whereas _you_ can scarcely bear even the very least diminutive particle of misfortune, however trifling, boiling with rage in your very bowels because your friend does not restore to you the deposit he swore to return. Can _he_ be amazed at this, that has left threescore years behind him, born when Fonteius was consul?[822] Have you gained[823] nothing by such long experience of the world? Noble indeed are the precepts which philosophy, that triumphs over fortune, lays down in her books of sacred wisdom. Yet we deem those happy too who, with daily life[824] for their instructress, have learned to endure with patience the inconveniences of life, and not shake off the yoke.[825] What day is there so holy that is not profaned by bringing to light theft, treachery, fraud--filthy lucre got by crime of every dye, and money won by stabbing or by poison?[826] Since rare indeed are the good! their number is scarce so many as the gates of Thebes,[827] or the mouths of fertilizing Nile. We are now passing through the ninth age of the world: an era far worse than the days of Iron; for whose villainy not even Nature herself can find a name, and has no metal[828] base enough to call it by. Yet we call heaven and earth to witness, with a shout as loud as that with which the Sportula,[829] that gives them tongues, makes his clients applaud Fæsidius as he pleads. Tell me, thou man of many years, and yet more fit to bear the boss[830] of childhood, dost thou not know the charms that belong to another's money? Knowest thou not what a laugh thy simplicity would raise in the common herd, for expecting that no man should forswear himself, but should believe some deity is[831] really present in the temples and at the altars red with blood? In days of old the aborigines perhaps used to live after this fashion: before Saturn in his flight laid down his diadem, and adopted the rustic sickle: in the days when Juno was a little maid; and Jupiter as yet in a private[832] station in the caves of Ida: no banquetings of the celestials above the clouds, no Trojan boy or beauteous wife of Hercules as cup-bearer; or Vulcan (but not till he had drained the nectar) wiping[833] his arms begrimed with his forge in Lipara. Then each godship dined alone; nor was the crowd of deities so great[834] as it is now-a-days: and the heavens, content with a few divinities, pressed on the wretched Atlas with less grievous weight. No one had as yet received as his share the gloomy empire of the deep: nor was there the grim[835] Pluto with his Sicilian bride, nor Ixion's wheel, nor the Furies, nor Sisyphus' stone, nor the punishment of the black vulture,[836] but the shades passed jocund days with no infernal king.