the Roman husbandman had his beard shaven once every week; now the rural slave cannot have it fine enough.—­Formerly one saw on the estates a corn-granary, which held ten harvests, spacious cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses; now the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes his doors to be inlaid with African cypress-wood.—­Formerly the housewife turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed; now,” it is said in another satire, “the daughter begs her father for a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of pearls.—­Formerly a newly-married husband was silent and bashful; now the wife surrenders herself to the first coachman that comes.—­ Formerly the blessing of children was woman’s pride; now if her husband desires for himseli children, she replies:  Knowest thou not what Ennius says?

   “‘-Ter sub armis malim vitam cernere Quam semel modo parere—.—­’

“Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice in the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned waggon;” now, he could add (comp.  Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), “the wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her, and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable host of Greek menials and the choir.” —­In a treatise of a graver kind, “Catus or the Training of Children,” Varro not only instructs the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for the children’s welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping, against sweet bread and fine fare—­the whelps, the old man thinks, are now fed more judiciously than the children—­and likewise against the enchantresses’ charms and blessings, which in cases of sickness so often take the place of the physician’s counsel.  He advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work, and not to allow them to put off the child’s dress too early; he warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.—­In the “Man of Sixty Years” Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century.  He is astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy’s head an old bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog; but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome.  Lucrine oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which, accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary torch.  While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now the disposal is transferred to the latter:  he disposes, forsooth, of his father by poison.