If I had not lifted up the stone, you would not have found the jewel.
CHAP. XLI. [P. 257.]
A modern Gracchus.
See Gifford’s Juvenal, p. 38, note.
The Gracchi were brothers, nobly descended, and virtuously educated, but unfortunately too ambitious. Cæsars in short born near a century before their time. They proposed an Agrarian law (Spencean) and to get it passed, struck at the root of that liberty of which they professed themselves the champions, conceiving, perhaps, with other hasty reformers, that the end justified the means. They were murdered with every circumstance of barbarity; Tiberius G. in the midst of his followers, by Scipio Nasica, and Caius G. some time after, by a mob more powerful and more profligate than his own. The hero of this chapter died miserably in banishment at Botany Bay, a just victim to the offended laws of his country.
CHAP. XLII. [P. 266.]
The subject of this chapter is well explained by an old Greek ceremony. It was the custom at Athens to introduce at the marriage ceremony a boy who was covered with prickly branches, and the common acorn, and carrying in his hand baskets full of bread; he was taught to exclaim, εφυγον κακον, ευρον αμεινον, as much as to say, I have exchanged the bad, that is, thorns and acorns, for good, or in other words, for bread. Nor is it less to the purpose to add, that these also were the terms used by those who were initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries—εφυγον κακον, ευρον αμεινον.