Your knowledge--your poesy--your laws--your arts--your barbarous mastery of war (all how tame and mutilated, when compared with the vast original!)--ye have filched, as a slave filches the fragments of the feast, from us! And now, ye mimics of a mimic!--Romans, forsooth! the mushroom herd of robbers! ye are our masters! the pyramids look down no more on the race of Rameses--the eagle cowers over the serpent of the Nile.

Our masters--no, not mine.

My soul, by the power of its wisdom, controls and chains you, though the fetters are unseen.

So long as craft can master force, so long as religion has a cave from which oracles can dupe mankind, the wise hold an empire over earth.

Even from your vices Arbaces distills his pleasures--pleasures unprofaned by vulgar eyes--pleasures vast, wealthy, inexhaustible, of which your enervate minds, in their unimaginative sensuality, cannot conceive or dream! Plod on, plod on, fools of ambition and of avarice! your petty thirst for fasces and quaestorships, and all the mummery of servile power, provokes my laughter and my scorn.