No sentiment caused more surprise to the Roman world than the famous one preserved in the fragment of Maecenas,-- "Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxa, Tuber adstrue gibberum, Lubricos quate dentes; Vita dum superest bene est; Hanc mihi vel acuta Si sedeam cruce sustine;" which may be paraphrased,-- "Numb my hands with palsy, Rack my feet with gout, Hunch my back and shoulder, Let my teeth fall out; Still, if _Life_ be granted, I prefer the loss; Save my life, and give me Anguish on the cross." Seneca, in his 101st Letter, calls this "a most disgraceful and most contemptible wish;" but it may be paralleled out of Euripides, and still more closely out of Homer.

"Talk not," says the shade of Achilles to Ulysses in the Odyssey,-- "'Talk not of reigning in this dolorous gloom, Nor think vain lies,' he cried, 'can ease my doom.
_Better by far laboriously to bear A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air, Slave to the meanest hind that begs his bread, Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead_.'" But this falsehood of extremes was one of the sad outcomes of the popular Paganism.

Either, like the natural savage, they dreaded death with an intensity of terror; or, when their crimes and sorrows had made life unsupportable, they slank to it as a refuge, with a cowardice which vaunted itself as courage.
V.And it was an age of cruelty.

The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and imbruted the public sensibility.

The immense prevalence of slavery tended still more inevitably to the general corruption.