A REFERENCE IN JUVENAL. [To vas EDITOR or Talc "ErECTATOR...]
SIR,—III your issue of October 25th, 1913(p. 656), the writer of a review of Mr. Ferguson's GreekImperialism speaks of the passage in Juvenal's 10th Satire about Alexander the Great as being "much misunderstood." As a student and admirer of Juvenal I should be much interested in learning in what particular the ordinary view of the passage is faulty. Is not Mayor's version correct in the main, though the language might be perhaps a little improved P "For Pella's youth one single globe is all too small; he chafes, poor soul, in the narrow bounds of the Universe, as thongh pent in Gyara and tiny Seriphus."—I am,
[Our reviewer writes ae follows ;—"I gladly offer the explanation asked for by your correspondent. It is generally thought that Alexander, having conquered the whole of this world, wept because he could not extend his conquest to the stellar regions. Mr. Payne (History of the New World Called America, Vol. I., p. 27) points out that this view is incorrect. The story as it is told by Plutarch in his Moralia appears to confirm Mr. Payne's view. The philosopher Anaxarchus told Alexander that there existed an infinity of worlds, upon which Alexander wept, and on being asked by his companions the cause of his grief replied eta gone Satyr; eta e, adapter tirT‘er 1.xeliner, Ivbs °baize; inipios yerivanev ; From this it would appear that Alexander lamented, not his inability to conquer many worlds, but his failure to conquer one, and, moreover, that his lamentation was due to his having been told that the world which he knew did not constitute the whole of the globe ; there were, as Aristotle had pointed out to him, other oisaLnerai, and it was these he regretted he could not subdue.—C." —Ea. Spectator.
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