thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich (-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax, such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim, smooth, tender, charming.  The life-breath of this poetry is polemics—­ not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly, or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24) of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which the Forum, to use Varro’s language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise regulations.  In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings—­ “why,” he complains on one occasion, “do ye call me from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?” He belonged to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic, but the heart was sound.  His polemic against the hereditary foes of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers and put them accordingly into proportional alarm—­it was not without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time transmitted to the “severe man” their newly-issued treatises.  Philosophizing is truly no art.  With the tenth part of the trouble with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker, he trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage.  Singular people, these philosophers!  One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey—­ it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with, otherwise where would any honey-wine be left?  Another thinks that men grow out of the earth like cresses.  A third has invented a world-borer (—­Kosmotorounei—­) by which the earth will some day be destroyed.

   -Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat
   Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.

It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard—­by which is meant an etymologizing Stoic—­cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith’s scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine philosophers’ quarrel—­a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter of athletes.  In the satire -Marcopolis-, —­peri archeis—­, when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart, matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant, but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- —­ -di’-enos- -leimmatos-logos—­, son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent—­ evidently the philosophic -Dilemma—–­with the mattock.