"What's the use of all this talk?" lisped a languid-looking epicurean fop, who, sated with dissipation, at twenty-five found life as empty as a sucked orange. "We cannot alter fate. Life is short; let us make the most of it. I'd like to press its nectar into a single draught and have done with it for ever. As the easy-going Horace says, 'The same thing happens to us all. When our name, sooner or later, has issued from the fatal urn, we leave our woods, our villa, our pleasant homes, and enter the bark which is to bear us into eternal exile!'"[15]
Here the Emperor made an impatient gesture, to indicate that he was weary of this philosophic discourse. At the signal the ladies rose and retired. Adauctus also made his official duties an excuse for leaving the table, where Diocletian and his other guests lingered for hours in a drunken symposium.
Thus we find that the very questions which engage the agnostics and skeptics and pessimists of the present age—the Mallocks, and Cliffords, and Harrisons and their tribe—have agitated the world from the very dawn of philosophy. Did space permit, we might cite the theories of Lucretius as a strange anticipation of the development hypothesis. Indeed the writings of Pyrrho, Porphyry and Celsus show us that the universal tendency of human philosophy, unaided by divine inspiration, is to utter skepticism.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] On a single supper for his friends, Lucullus, who is said to have fed his lampreys with the bodies of his slaves, is recorded to have expended 50,000 denarii—about $8,500.
[11] His name and office are recorded even by so skeptical a critic as Gibbon, and his epitaph has been found in the Catacombs. See Withrow's Catacombs, p. 46.
[12] Strauss and Renan and their rationalizing school rival this pagan sophist in eliminating the miraculous from the sacred record.
[13] Yet these stories, too incredible for this old pagan, were gravely related to the present writer, on the scene of the alleged miracles, by the credulous Romans of to-day.
[14] Sat. ii. 49. "That the manes are anything, or the nether world anything, not even boys believe, unless those still in the nursery."
[15] See that saddest but most beautiful of the ode of Horace, To Delius, II. 3: