Basilus and Hirrus defrauded." He condemns the increased desire for
luxury. "Do not," he warns, "long for a mullet, when you have only a
gudgeon in your purse." The rule of the day was to purchase sensual
indulgence at any cost, "Greediness is so great that they will not even
invite a parasite." Excessive selfishness leads to every kind of
dishonesty. "A man of probity is as rare as a mule's foal, or as a
shower of stones from a cloud." "What day is so sacred that it fails to
produce thieving, perfidy, fraud, gain sought through every crime, and
money acquired by bowl and dagger. The good are so scarce that their
number is barely as great as that of the gates of Thebes, or the mouths
of the fertilizing Nile."

He attacks every kind of social abuse, and does not even spare the
ladies--some are too fast, some are learned and pedantic, some cruel to
their slaves--even scourging them with cowhides. "What fault," he
asks, "has the girl committed, if your own nose has displeased you?" As
to religion, that has disappeared altogether. "What a laugh your
simplicity would raise in public, if you were to require of anyone that
he should not perjure himself, but believe that there was some deity in
the temple, or at the ensanguined altar! That the souls of the departed
are anything, and the realms below, and the punt-pole and frogs of the
Stygian pool, and that so many thousands pass over in one boat, not even
the boys believe, except those who are too young to pay for their bath."

The language used in the last passage is no doubt an example of the
profane manner in which some men spoke at that day, but in general, we
must remember that these pictures are humorous and overdrawn. Still,
some of the offences spoken of with horror by Juvenal were treated
almost as lightly by contemporary poets as they had been by
Aristophanes.