 Section 7 of satires. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Giesen. Satires by Juvenile. Translated by G. G. Ramsey. Satire 6. The Ways of Women. Part 2. Gullnia hires clothes to see the games. She hires attendance, a litter, cushions, female friends, a nurse, and a fair-haired girl to run her messages. Yet she will give all that remains of the family plate down to the last flagon to some smooth-faced athlete. Many of these women are poor, but none of them pay any regard to their poverty or measure themselves by the standard which that prescribes and lays down for them. Men, on the other hand, do sometimes have an eye to utility. The aunt has at last taught some of them to dread cold and hunger. But your extravagant woman is never sensible of her dwindling means, and just as though money were forever sprouting up afresh from her exhausted coffers, and she had always a full heap to draw from, she never gives a thought to what her pleasures cost her. Whenever Akinaidos is kept, he taints the household. Folks let these fellows eat and drink with them, and merely have the vessels washed, not shivered to atoms, as they should be when such lips have touched them. So even the Lannister's establishment is better ordered than yours, for he separates the vile from the decent, and sequesters even from their fellow Retiari, the wearers of the ill-famed tunic. In the training school and even in jail such creatures herd apart, but your wife condemns you to drink out of the same cup as these gentry, with whom the poorest trull would refuse to sip the choicest wine. Them do women consult about marriage and divorce. With their society do they relieve boredom or business. From them do they learn lascivious motions, and whatever else the teacher knows. But beware, that teacher is not always what he seems. True, he darkens his eyes and dresses like a woman, but adultery is his design. Mistrust him the more for his show of effeminacy. He is a valiant mattress knight. There Trifullus drops the mask of Thais. Whom are you fooling? Not me. Play this fast, those who cannot pierce the masquerade. I wager you are every inch a man. Do you own it, or must we ring the truth out of the maid-servants? I know well the advice and warnings of my old friends. Put on a lock and keep your wife indoors. Yes. And who will ward the warders? They get paid in kind for holding their tongues as to their young ladies' escapades. Participation seals their lips. The wily wife arranges accordingly and begins with them. If your wife is musical, none of those who sell their voices to the praetor will hold out against her charms. She is forever handling musical instruments. Her sardonyx rings sparkle thick all over the tortoise-shell. The quivering quill, with which she runs over the cords, will be that with which the gentle Heddy Millies performed. She hugs it, consoles herself with it, and lavishes kisses on the dear implement. A certain lady of the lineage of the Lamiae and the Apiae inquired of Janus and Vesta, with offerings of cake and wine, whether Polio could hope for the capitaline Oak Chaplet and promise victory to his liar. What more could she have done had her husband been ill, or if the doctors had been shaking their heads over her dear little son? There she stood before the altar, thinking it no shame to veil her head on behalf of a harper. She repeated in due form all the words prescribed to her. A cheek blanched when the lamb was opened. Tell me now, I pray, O Father Janus, thou most ancient of the gods, dust thou answer, such as she. You have much time on your hands in heaven, so far as I can see there is nothing for you gods to do. One lady consults you about a comedian, another wishes to commend to you a tragic actor. The soothsayer will soon be troubled with Valico's veins. Better, however, that your wife should be musical than that she should be rushing boldly about the entire city attending men's meetings, talking with unflinching face and hard breasts to generals in their military cloaks with her husband looking on. This same woman knows what is going on all over the world. What the Thracians and Chinese are after, what has passed between the stepmother and the stepson. She knows who loves whom, what gallant is the rage. She will tell you who got the widow with child, and in what month. How every woman behaves to her lovers, and what she says to them. She is the first to notice the comet threatening the kings of Armenia and Parthia. She picks up the latest rumours at the city gate, and invents on herself how the Nifates has burst out upon the nations and is inundating entire districts, how cities are torturing and lands subsiding. She tells us to everyone she meets at every street crossing. No less insufferable is the woman who loves to catch hold of her poor neighbours, and deaf to their cries for mercy lays into them with a whip. If her sound slumbers are disturbed by a barking dog, quick with the rods, she cries, thrash the owner first and then the dog. She is a formidable woman to encounter. She is terrible to look at. She frequents the baths by night. Not till night does she order her oil jars and her quarters to be shifted thither. She loves all the bustle of the hot bath. When her arms drop exhausted by the heavy weights, the anointer passes his hand skilfully over her body, bringing it down at last with a resounding smack upon her thigh. Meanwhile, her unfortunate guests are overcome with sleep and hunger, till at last she comes in with a flushed face and with thirst enough to drink off the vessel containing false three gallons which is laid at her feet and from which she tosses off a couple of pints before her dinner to create a raging appetite. Then she brings it all up again and souses the floor with the washings of her inside. The stream runs over the marble pavement, the guilt base in the reeks of Flurnian, for she drinks and vomits like a big snake that has tumbled into a vat. The sickened husband closes his eyes and so keeps down his bile. But most intolerable of all is the woman who as soon as she has sat down to dinner commends Virgil, pardons the dying dido, and pits the poets against each other, putting Virgil in the one scale and Homer in the other. The grammarians make way before her. The rhetoricians give in. The whole crowd is silenced. No lawyer, no auctioneer will get a word in, no, nor any other woman. So torrential is her speech that you would think that all the pots and bells were being clashed together. Let no one more blow a trumpet or clash a symbol. One woman will be able to bring a sucker to the laboring moon. She lays down definitions and discourses on models like a philosopher. Thasting to be deemed both wise and eloquent, she ought to tuck up her skirt's knee high, sacrifice a pig to Sylvainus, and take a penny bath. Let not the wife of your bosom possess a special style of her own. Let her not hurl at you in whirling speech the crooked enthime. Let her not know all history. Let there be some things in her reading which she does not understand. I hate a woman who is forever consulting and pouring over the grammar of Palaimon, who observes all the rules and laws of language, who quotes from ancient poets that I never heard of, and corrects her unlettered female friends for slips of speech that no man need trouble about. Let husbands at least be permitted to make slips in grammar. There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge piles to her elongated ears. There is nothing more intolerable than a wealthy woman. Meanwhile, she ridiculously puffs out and disfigures her face with lumps of toe. She reeks of rich Poppeian ungüents which stick to the lips of her unfortunate husband. Her lover, she will meet with a clean washed skin, but when does she ever care to look nice at home? It is for her lovers that she provides the spikenard. For them she buys all the scents which the slender Indians bring to us. In good time she discloses her face. She removes the first layer of plaster and begins to be recognisable. She then laves herself with that milk for which she takes a hud of she-asses in her train, if sent away to the hyperborean pole. But when she has been coated over and treated with all those layers of medicaments, and had those lumps of moist dough applied to it, shall we call it a face or a sore? It is well worth while to ascertain how these ladies busy themselves all day. If the husband has turned his back upon his wife at night, though wall-made is done for, the tire-women will be stripped of their tunics. The Libornean chairman will be accused of coming late, and will have to pay for another man's drowsiness. One will have a rod broken over his back, another will be bleeding from a strap, a third from the cat. Some women engage their executioners by the year. While the flogging goes on, the lady will be dobbing her face, or listening to her lady-friends, or inspecting the widths of a gold embroidered robe. While thus flogging and flogging, she reads the lengthy gazette written right across the page, till at last the floggers being exhausted, and the inquisition ended, she thunders out a gruff. Be off with you! Her household is governed as cruelly as a Sicilian court. If she has an appointment, and wishes to be turned out more nicely than usual, and is in a hurry to meet someone waiting for her in the gardens, or more likely near the chapel of the wanton Isis, the unhappy maid that does her hair will have her own hair torn, and the clothes stripped off her shoulders and her breasts. Why is this curl standing up? she asks, and then down comes a song of bull's hide to inflict chastisement for the offending ringlet. Pray, how was Psecas in fault? How would the girl be to blame, if you happened not to like the shape of your own nose? Another maid on the left side combs out the hair, and rolls it into a coil. A maid of her mother's, who has served her time at sewing, and has been promoted to the wool department, assists at the council. She is the first to give her opinion. After her, her inferiors in age or skill will give theirs, as though some question of life or honour were at stake. So important is the business of beautification. So numerous are the tears and stories piled one upon another on her head. In front you would take her from Andromache. She is not so tall behind. You would not think it was the same person. What if nature had made her so short of stature, that if unaided by high heels she looks no bigger than a pygmy, and has to rise nimbly on tiptoe for a kiss? Meantime she pays no attention to her husband. She never speaks of what she costs him. She lives with him as if she were only his neighbour. In this alone more near to him, that she hates his friends and his slaves, and plays the mischief with his money. And now, behold, in comes the chorus of the frantic Bologna and the mother of the gods, attended by a giant eunuch, to whom his obscene inferiors must do reverence. Before him the howling heard with the timbrels give way. His plebeian cheeks are covered with a frigiant tiara. With solemn utterance he bids the lady beware of the September Sirocco's, if she do not purify herself with a hundred eggs, and present him with some old mulberry coloured garments in order that any great and unforeseen calamity may pass into the clothes, and make expiation for the entire year. In winter she will go down to the river of the morning, break the ice, and plunge three times into the tiber, dipping her trembling head in its whirling waters, and crawling out thence naked and shivering. She will creep with bleeding knees right across the field of Tarquin the Proud. If the white Io shall so order, she will journey to the confines of Egypt, and fetch water from hot Meroe, with which to sprinkle the Temple of Isis, which stands hard by the ancient sheepfold. For she believes that the command was given by the voice of the goddess herself, a pretty kind of mind and spirit for the gods to have converse with by night. Hence the chief and highest place of honour is awarded to Anubis, who with his linen clad and shaven crew mocks at the weeping of the people as he runs along. He it is that obtains pardon for wives who break the law of purity on days that should be kept holy, and exacts huge penalties when the covalet has been profaned, or when the silver serpent has been seen to nod his head. His tears and carefully studied mutterings make sure that Osiris will not refuse a pardon for the fault, bribed, no doubt, by a fat goose and a slice of sacrificial cake. No sooner has that fellow departed than a palsy de Jues, leaving her basket and her truss of hay, comes begging to her secret ear. She is an interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem, a high priestess of the tree, a trusty go-between of highest heaven. She too fells her palm, but more sparingly, for a Jew will tell you dreams of any kind you please for the minutest of coins. An Armenian or Comergenian soothsayer, after examining the lungs of a dove that is still warm, will promise a youthful lover or a big bequest from some rich and childless man. He will probe the breast of a chicken or the entrails of a dog, sometimes even of a boy, some things he will do with the intention of informing against them himself. Still more trusted are the coldeans, every word uttered by the astrologer they will believe has come from Hamon's fountain. For now that the Delphian oracles are dumb, man is condemned to darkness as to his future. Chief among these was one who was oft in exile, whose friendship and venal prophecies the great citizen died, whom Otho feared. For nowadays no astrologer has credit unless he have been imprisoned in some distant camp, with chains clanking on either arm. None believe in his powers unless he has been condemned and all but put to death, having just contrived to get deported to a cyclad, or to escape at last from the diminutive serifos. Your excellent Tanakwil consults us to the long delayed death of her jaundiced mother. Having previously inquired about your own, she will ask when she may expect to bury her sister or her uncles, and whether her lover will outlive herself. What greater boon could the gods bestow upon her? And yet your Tanakwil does not herself understand the gloomy threats of Saturn, or under what constellation Venus will show herself propitious. Which months will be months of losses, which of gains? But beware of ever encountering one whom you see clutching a well-worn calendar in her hands, as if it were a ball of clammy amber. One who inquires of none, but is now herself inquired of. One who, if her husband is going forth to camp, or returning home from abroad, will not bear him company if the numbers of Thrasillus call her back. If she wants to drive as far as the first milestone, she finds the right hour from her book, if there is a sore place in the corner of her eye. She will not call for a salve until she has consulted her horoscope. And if she be ill in bed, deems no hour so suitable for taking food as that prescribed to her by Petosiris. If the woman be of humble rank, she will promenade between the turning posts of the circus. She will have her fortune told, and will present her brow and her hand to the seer who asks for many an approving smack. Wealthy women will pay for answers from a Phrygian or Indian auger, well-skilled in the stars and the heavens, or one of the elders employed to expiate thunderboats. Phrygian destinies are determined in the circus or on the ramparts. The woman who displays a long gold chain on her bare neck inquires before the pillars and the clusters of dolphins, whether she shall throw over the tavern keeper and marry the old clothesman. These poor women, however, endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing to which their lot condemns them. But how often does a gilded bed contain a woman that is lying in? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs of the abortionist paid to murder mankind within the womb. Rejoice, poor wretch! Give her the stuff to drink, whatever it be, with your own hand, for where she willing to get big and trouble her womb with bouncing babes, you might perhaps find yourself the father of an Ethiopian, and some day a coloured heir, whom you would rather not meet by daylight, would fill all the places in your will. I say nothing of supposititious children, of the hopes and prayers so often cheated at those filthy pools from which are supplied priests and sally with bodies that will falsely bear the name of Skari. There, fortune shamelessly takes her stand by night, smiling on the naked babes. She fondles them all, and folds them in her bosom, and then, to provide herself with a secret comedy, she sends them forth to the houses of the great. These are the children that she loves, on these she lavishes herself, and with a laugh brings them always forward as her own. One man supplies magical spells, another sells the salient charms by which a wife may upset her husband's mind, and lather his buttocks with a slipper, thence come loss of reason and darkness of soul, and blank forgetfulness of all that you did but yesterday. Yet even that can be endured if only you become not raving mad like that uncle of Nero's into whose drink Caesonia poured the whole brow of a weakly foal, and what woman will not follow when an empress leads the way. The whole world was ablaze then, and falling down in ruin, just as if Juno had made her husband mad. Less guilty, therefore, will Agrippina's mushroom be deemed, seeing that it only stopped the breath of one old man, and sent down his palsied head and slobbering lips to heaven. Whereas the other potion demanded fire and sod and torture, mingling knights and fathers in one mangled bleeding heap. Such was the cost of one mare's offspring and of one she-poisoner. A wife hates the children of a concubine, let none demur or forbid, seeing that it has long been deemed right and proper to slay a step-son. But I warn you, wards, you that have a good estate, keep watch over your lives, trust not a single dish. Those heart-cakes are black with poison of a mother's baking. Whatever is offered to you by the mother, let someone taste it first. Let your trembling tutor take the first taste of every cup. Now, think you that all this is a fancy tale, and that our satire is taking to herself the high heels of tragedy. Think you that I have outstepped the limits and the laws of those before me, and a mouthing in soft folkly undones, a grand theme, unknown to the Rutulian hills and the skies of Latium. Oh, would indeed that my words were idle. But here is Pontia proclaiming, I did the deed. I gave aconite, I confess it, to my own children. The crime was detected and is known to all. Yes, with my own hands I did it. What, you most savage of vipers, you killed two, did you? Two at a single meal? I and seven, too, had their chance to be seven to kill. Let us believe all that tragedy tells us of the savage Colhion and of Procne. I seek not to gain say her. Those women were monsters of wickedness in their day, but it was not for money that they sinned. We marvel less at great crimes when it is wrath that incites the sex to the guilty deed, when burning passion carries them headlong like a rock torn from a mountain site, when the ground beneath gives way and the overhanging slopes fall in. I cannot endure the woman who calculates and commits a great crime in her sober senses. Our wives look on at Alsestis undergoing her husband's fate. If they were granted alike liberty of exchange, they would feign that the husband die to save a lap dog's life. You will meet a daughter of Belos or an Eryphilly every morning. No street but has its Clytemnestra. The only difference is this. The daughter of Tindareus wielded in her two hands a clumsy two-headed axe, whereas nowadays a slice of Toad's lung will do the business. Yet it may be done by steel as well if the wary husband have before hand tasted the medicaments of the thrice-conquered King of Pontus. On Caesar alone hang all the hopes and prospects of the learned. He alone, in these days of ours, has cast a favouring glance upon the sorrowing muses. At a time when poets of name and fame thought of hiring baths at Gabii or bake houses in Rome, while others felt no shame in becoming public criers and starving Cleo herself, bidding adieu to the veils of Aghanipi, was flitting to the auction rooms. For, if you see no prospect of earning a grove within the muses' grove, you had better put up with Machira's name and profits and join in the battle of the sail room, selling to the crowd wine jars, tripods, bouquets and cupboards. The Alcithoe of Paseus, the Thebes or the Tyrias of Faustus. How much better that than to say before a judge, I saw what you did not see? Leave that to the Knights of Asia, Orbithinia and Cappadocia, gentry that were imported barefooted from Nugol. But from this day forth, no man who weaves the tuneful web of song and has bitten Nepala's laurel will be compelled to endure toil unworthy of his craft. To your task, young men, your prince is looking around and goading you on, seeking objects for his favor. If you expect patronage from any other quarter, and in that hole are filling up the parchment of your saffron tablet, you had better order faggots at once, Delicinus, and present your productions to the spouse of the king. Or else, put away your tomes and let bookworms bore holes in them where they lie. Break your pen per etch, destroy the battles that have robbed you of your sleep, you that are inditing lofty strains in a tiny garret, that you may come forth worthy of a scraggie bust wreathed with ivy. No hope have you beyond that. Your rich miser, has now learned only to admire, only to command the eloquent, just as boys admire the bird of Juno. Meantime, the years flow by that could have endured the sea, the helmet, or the spade. The soul becomes wearied, and an eloquent, but penniless old age curses itself in its own terpsichory. And now, learn the devices by which the patron for whose favor you desert the temples of the Muses and Apollo seeks to avoid spending anything on you. He writes verses of his own, yielding the palm to none but Homer. And that, only because of his thousand years. If the suites of fame fire you to give a recitation, he puts at your disposal a tumbledown house in some distant quarter, the door of which, it's closely barred like the gate of a beleaguered city. He knows how to supply you, avid freedmen, to sit at the end of the rows, and how to distribute about the room the stalwart voices of his retainers. But none of your great men will give you as much as will pay for the benches or for the tears of seats resting on hired beams, or for the chairs in the front rows, which will have you, the front rows, which will have to be returned when done with. Yet, for all that, we poets stick to our task. We go on drawing furrows in the thin soil and turning up the shore with unprofitable plough. For if you would give it up, the itch for writing and making a name holds you fast as with a noose and becomes invetured in your distempered brain. But your real poet, who has a vein of genius all his own, ones who spins no hachnite lace and whose pieces are struck from no common mint, such a one as I cannot point to and only feel is the product of a soul free from care that knows no bitterness, that loves the woodlands and is fitted to drink at the muses' string. For how can unhappy poverty sing songs in the Pyrean cave as to the thirsts when it is short of cash, which the body has need of both by night and day? Horace's stomach was well filled when he shouted his cry of evil, where congenious find a place except in a heart stirred by song alone that shuts out every thought but one and is swept along by the lords of Sira and of Nysa. It needs a lofty soul, not one that is dismayed at the cost of a coverlet to have visions of chariots and horses and gods' faces or to tell with what a mean the fury confounded the Rutulian. Had Virgil possessed no slave and no decent roof over his head, all the snakes would have fallen from the furious hair. No dreadnought would have boomed from her voiceless trumpet. Do we expect Rubrenna's Lapa to be as great in the buskin as the ancients when his Atreus has to be pawn for his cloak and crockery? Numitor, poor man, has nothing to give to a needy friend, though he is rich enough to send presents to his mistress and he had enough too to buy a tamed lion that needed masses of meat for his scheme. It costs less, no doubt, to keep a lion than a poet. The poet's belly is more capacious. Lucan, indeed, reclining amid the statues of his gardens, may be content with fame. But what will ever so much glory bring into Seranas or to the starving Salius if it be glory only? When Stacia's has gladdened the city by promising a day, people flock to hear his pleasing voice and his loved Thebes. So charmed are their souls by his sweetness. With such rapture does the multitude listen to him. But when his verses have brought down the house, poor Stacia's will starve if he does not sell his virgin Agave to Paris. For it is Paris who appoints men to military commands. It is Paris who puts the golden ring around the poet's finger after six months of service. You can get from a stage player what no great man will give you. Why frequent the spacious antechambers of the Barrier or the Camerina? It is Pelopea that appoints our prefix, and Philomela are tribunes. Yet you need not begrudge the bard who gains his living from the playhouse. Who nowadays will be amicinas to you, a Proculeus or a Fabius? Who another Cata or a second Lentilus? Genius in those days met with its due reward. Many then found their profit in pale cheeks and in abjuring potations all through December. And is your labor more remunerative, you writers of history? More time, more oil is wasted here. Regardless of all limit, the pages run up to thousands. The pile of paper is ever-mounting to your ruin. So ordains the vast array of facts and the rules of the craft. But what harvest will you gather? What fruit from the tilling of your land? Who will give to a historian as much as he gives to the man who reads out the news? Oh, but historians are a lazy crew that delight in lounging and the shade. Tell me then, what do pleaders get from their services in the courts and for those huge bundles of papers which they bring with them? They talk big enough, especially if a creditor of their own happens to be listening or if, more urgent still, they get poked in the ribs by one who has brought a huge ledger to claim a doubtful debt. Then indeed do their capaceous bellows pan forth prodigious lies. Then are their breasts be slobbered and yet if you want to discover their real gains you may put on one side the fortunes of a hundred lawyers and the other that of a single jockey of the red. The great men are seated. You rise, a pale-faced Ajax to decline before a bumping judge in a case of contested liberty. Strain your lungs, poor fool, until they burst that when exhausted by your labors some green palm branches may be put up to adorn your garret. What fee will your voice bring in? A dried-up ham, a jar of Sprats, some veteran onions which would serve as rations for a moor or five flagons of wine that has sailed down the Tiber. If you have pled on four occasions and been lucky enough to get a gold piece, a bit of it as part of the compact will go to the attorney. Emilius will get the maximum legal fee though he did not plead so well as we did. But then he has a bronze chariot in his forkward with four stately steeds and an effigy of himself seated on a gallon charger brandishing from a far-abending spear and practicing for battle with one eye closed. That's how peddle becomes bankrupt and how mothel fails and such will be the end of Tangilius who frequents the baths with a huge oil flask of rhinoceros horn and disturbs the bathers with a mob of dirty retainers. His median bearers are weighed down by the long poles of his litter as he passes through the forum on his way to buy slaves or plate, agate vases or country houses. For that foreign robe of his with its teary and purple gains him credit. These gentlemen get profit out of this display. The purple or the violet robe brings practice to a lawyer. It pays him to live with a racket and an appearance beyond his means and wasteful Rome sets no limits to extravagance. Trust in eloquence, indeed, why, no one would give Cicero himself two hundred pins nowadays unless a huge ring were blazing on his finger. The first thing that a litigant looks to is have you eight slaves and a dozen retainers? Have you a litter to wait on you and gown citizens to walk before you? That's why Paulus used to hire Sardonic's ring. That is why he earned a higher fee than Gala's or Basilis. When is eloquence ever found beneath a shabby coat? When does Basilis get the chance of producing in court a weeping mother? Who would listen to him however well he spoke? Better go to Goal or to Africa that nursing mother of lawyers if you would make a living by your tongue. Or do you teach rhetoric? Oh, Vettius, what iron bowels must you have when your troop of scholars slays the cruel tyrant? When each in turn stands up and repeats what he has just been coning in his seat, reciting the self-same things in the self-same verses. Served up again and again, the cabbage is the death of the unhappy master. What complexion should we put on the case? Within what category it falls? What is the crucial point? What hits will be made on the other side? These are things which everyone wants to know, but for which no one is willing to pay. Paying deed? Why, what have I learned? asks the scholar. It is the teacher's fault, of course, that the Arcadian youth feels no flutter in his left breast when he dines his dire Hannibal into my unfortunate head on every sixth day of the week, whatever be the question which he's pondering. Whether he should make straight for the city from the field of Cannae, or whether, after the rain and thunder, he should lead around his cohorts, all dripping after the storm. Name any sum you please, and you shall have it. What would I give that the lad's father might listen to him as often as I do? So cry half a dozen or more of our soul-fists in one breath, entering upon real lawsuits of their own, abandoning the ravisher and forgetting all about the poisoner, or the wicked and thankless husband, or the drugs that restore sight to the chronic blind. And if so, if my counsel goes for anything, I would advise the man who comes down from his rhetorical shade to fight for a sum that would buy a trumpery corn ticket. For that's the most handsome fee he will ever get to present himself with a discharge and enter upon some other walk of life. If you ask what feasts, chrysogonas and polio get for teaching music to the sons of our great men, you will tear up the rhetoric of Theodorus. Your great man will spend 600,000 cestuses upon his baths and something more on the colonnade than he is to drive on rainy days. What, is he to wait for a clear sky and bespatter his horses with fresh mud? How much better to drive where their hooves will remain bright and spotless? Elsewhere, let a banqueting hull arise supported on lofty pillars of African marble to catch the winter sun. And cost the house what it may, arrange the courses skillfully, and the man who makes up the tasty dishes. Amidst expenditure such as this, 2,000 cestuses will be enough and more than enough for Quintilian. There is nothing on which a father will not spend more money than on his son. How then, you ask, does Quintilian possess those vast domains? Passed by cases of rare good fortune, beautiful and brave, he is wise and noble and high-born. He soars on to his black shoe the crescent of the senator. He is a great orator, too, a good javelin man, and if he chance to have caught a cold, he sings divinely. For it makes all the difference by what stars you were welcomed when you utter your first cry and are still read from your mother's womb. And so choose, you will become a consul from being a redder. If again she so wills, you will become a redder from being a consul. What a ventidious and toolious! What made their fortunes but the stars and the wondrous potency of secret fate? The fates will give kingdoms to a slave and triumphs to a captive. Nevertheless, that fortunate man is rare, rarer than a white crow. I have repented them of the professor's vain and unprofitable cheer, witnessed the ends of Trasimachus and Secundus Carinas, hymn to this thou-seen poverty on whom thou, O Athens, hath nothing better to bestow than a cup of cold hemlock. Grant, O gods, that the earth may lie soft and light upon the shades of our forefathers. May the sweet-scented crocus and a perpetual springtime bloom over their ashes, who deemed that the teacher should hold the place of a revered parent. A killis trembled for fear of the rod when already a full age singing songs in his native hills. Nor would he then have dared to laugh at the tale of his musical instructor. But Rufus and the rest are cudgled each by his own pupils. That Rufus, whom they have so often styled the aloe brogian Cicero, who pours into the lap of Salatus or of the learned Pulemen as much as their grammatical labors deserve. And yet, small as the fee is, and it is smaller than the redder's wage, the pupil's unfeeling attendant nibbles off a bit of it for himself. So too does the steward. But never mind, Pulemen, suffer some diminution of your wage, a hawker who sells rags and white-gallant blankets for winter wear. If only it do not go for nothing that you have sat from early dawn in a hole which no blacksmith would put up with, no workman who teaches how to card wool with slanting tool, that it do not go for nothing to have snuffed up the odor of as many lamps as you had scholars in your class thumbing a discolored horus for a begrimed virtual. But it is seldom that the fee can be recovered without a judgment of the court. And yet, be sure, your parents, to impose the strictest laws upon the teacher. He must never be at fault in his grammar. He must know all history and have all the authorities at his fingertips. If asked a chance question on his way to the baths or to the establishment of Phoebus, he must at once tell you who was the nurse of Ankaesis, what was the name and birthplace of an Kimolese stepmother, to what age assessed his lived, how many flagons of Sicilian wine he presented to the Trojans, require of him that he shall mold the young minds as a man molds a face out of wax with his thumb. Insist that he shall be a father to the whole brood, so that they shall play no nasty game and do no nasty trick, no easy matter to watch the hands and sparkling eyes of so many youngsters. See to all this, you say, and then, when the year comes round, receive the golden peace which the mob demands for a winning jockey. End of Set Hires 7 Section 9 of Set Hires This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer here, please visit LibriVox.org. Set Hires by Juvenel. Translated by Gigi Ramsey. Set Hire 8 What avail your pedigrees? What boots it, Podicus, to be valued for one's ancient blood and to display the painted visages of one's forefathers? An Emilienus standing in his car, a half-crumbled Curius, a Carvinus who has lost a shoulder, or a Galba that has neither ear nor nose. Of what profit is it to boast a Fabius on your ample family chart, and thereafter to trace kinship through many a branch with grimy dictators and masters of the horse, if in presence of the Lapidae, you live an evil life? What signify all these effigies of warriors if you gamble all night long before your numentine ancestors and begin your sleep with the rise of Lucifer at an hour when our generals of old will be moving their standards and their camps? Why should a Fabius, born in the home of Hercules, take pride in the title Alobrogicus and in the great altar if he be covetous and empty-headed and more effeminate than a Eugenian lambkin? If his loins rubbed smooth by Cotainian pumice, throw shame on his shaggy-haired grandfathers, or if, as a trafficker in poison, he dishonors his unhappy race by a statue that will have to be broken in pieces. Though you deck your hull from end to end with ancient waxen images, virtue is the one and only true nobility. Be a polis or a cussus or a drusas in character. Ring them before the statues of your ancestors. Let them precede the fasses themselves when you are consul. You owe me, first of all things, the virtues of the soul. Prove yourselves stainless in life, one who holds fast to the right, both in word and deed, and I acknowledge you as a lord. All hail to you, Gaitelicus, or you, Salinas, for from whatever stock you come if you have proved yourself to a rejoicing country, a rare and illustrious citizen, we would faint cry what Egypt shouts when Osiris has been found, for who can be called noble who is unworthy of his race and distinguished in nothing but his name? We call someone's dwarf and atlas, his black amour a swan, an ill-favored, miss-shapen girl we call Europa, lazy hounds that are bald with chronic mange and who lick the edges of a dry lamp who bear the names of pard, tiger, lion, or of any other animal in the world that roars more fiercely. Take you care that it be not on that principle that you are a criticus or a camarinas. Who is it whom I admonish thus? It is to you rebellious blunders that I speak. You are puffed up with the lofty pedigree of the druzhai, as though you had done something to make you noble and to be conceived by one glorien in the blood of Eulus, rather than by one who weaves for hire under the windy rampard. You others are dirt, you say, the very scum of our populace. Not one of you can point to his father's birthplace, but I am one of the sick croppy-day. Long life to you, may you long enjoy the glories of your birth, yet, among the lowest rebel, you will find a Roman who has eloquence, one who will plead the cause of the unlettered noble. You must go to the toga-clad herd for a man to untie the knots and riddles of the law. From them will come the brave young soldier who marches to the Euphrates or to the eagles that guard the conquered Batavians, while you are nothing but a sick croppet, the image of a limbless hernese, no respect but one have viewed advantage over him. His head is of marble, while yours is a living effigy. Tell me, thou scion of the Trojans, who deems a dumb animal well-born, unless it be strong? It is for this that we commend the swift horse whose speed sets every hand aglow and fills the circus with the horse's shout of victory. That horse is noblest on whatever pasture reared, whose rush outstrips the rest and whose dust is foremost upon the plain. But the offspring of Corephaeus or Hypinus comes to the hammer if victory lights with seldom on his car. No respect is there paid to ancestors, no favor is shown to shades. The slow of foot that are fit only to turn a miller's wheel pass for a mere nothing from one owner to another and gall their necks against the collar. So, if I am to respect yourself and not your belongings, give me something of your own to engrave among your titles in addition to those honors which we pay and have paid to those to whom you owe your all. Enough this for the youth whom report has headed down to us as proud and puffed up with his kinship to Nero, for in those high places regard for others is rarely to be found. But for you, Ponticus, I cannot wish that you should be valued for the glorious of your race while doing nothing that shall bring your praise in the days to come. It is a poor thing to lean upon the fame of others, lest the pillars give way and the house fall down in ruin. The vineshoot trailing upon the ground longs for the widowed elm, be a stout soldier, a faithful guardian and an incorruptible judge. If summoned to bear witness in some dubious and uncertain cause, though hilarious himself should bring up his bull and dictate to you a perjury, count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honor and to lose for the sake of living all that makes life worth having. The man who merits death is already dead, though he dine off a hundred luprine oysters and bathe in a whole cauldron of cosmos essences. When you enter your long-expected province as its governor, set a curb and a limit to your passion, as also to your greed. Have compassion on the impoverished provincials whose very bones have been sucked dry of marrow. Have regard to what the law ordains, what the senate enjoins. Consider what honors await the good ruler, with what a just thunderstrobe the senate hurled down capital annumator, those plunderers of the Silicians. Yet what profit was there from their condemnation? Look out for an auctioneer, Kirippus, to sell your chattels, seeing that Pansa has tripped you of all that Neda left. And hold your tongue about it. When all else is gone, it is madness to throw away your passage-money. Very different in days of old were the wailings of our allies and the harm inflicted on them by losses when they had been newly conquered and were wealthy still. Their houses, then, were all well-stored. They had piles of money with Spartan mantles and Coen purples. Beside the paintings of Farazias and the statues of Myron stood the living ivories of Phidias. Everywhere the works of Polyclitus were to be seen. Few tables were without a mentor. But after that came now Adalabella, now an Antonius, and now a sacrilegious Varys, loading big ships with secret spoils, peace trophies more numerous than those of war. Nowadays, on capturing a farm, you may rob our allies of a few yoke of oxen or a few mares with the sire of the herd or of the household gods themselves if there be a good statue left or a single deity in his little shrine. The best and choicest things to be got now. You despise, perchance, and deservedly the unmoor like Rhodian and the scented Corinthian. What harm will their resin youths do you for the smooth legs of the entire breed? But keep clear of rugged spain. Avoid the land of gold in the Dalmatian shore. Spare to those harvesters who will fill the belly of a city that has no leisure, safer the circus and the play. May profit can you reap from outrages upon Libyans, seeing that Marius has so lately stripped Africa to the skin. Beware above all things to do no wrong to men who are at once brave and miserable. You may take from them all the golden silver that they have, but plunder, though they may be, they will still have their arms, they will still have their shields and their swords, their javelins and helmets. What I have just propounded is no mere theme, it is the truth. You may take it that I am reading out to you one of the civil's leaves. If your whole staff be incorruptible, if no long-haired ganameed sells your judgments, if your wife be blameless, if, in your circuit, through the towns and districts, there so harpy, ready to pounce with crook talons upon gold, then you may trace back your race to Picus. If you delight in lofty names, you may count the whole array of titans and Prometheus himself among your ancestors, and select for yourself a great-grandfather from whatever myth you please. But if you are carried away headlong by ambition and by lust, if you break your rods upon the bleeding backs of our allies, if you love to see your axes blunted and your headsmen weary, then the nobility of your own parents begins to rise up in judgment against you and to hold a glaring torch over your misdeeds. The greater the sinner's name, the more signal the guiltiness of the sin. If you are want to put your signature to forge deeds, what matters it to me that you sign them in temples built by your grandfather or in front of the triumphal statue of your father? What does that matter? If you steal out at night for adultery, your brow concealed under a cowl of gallic wool. The bloated Letyrannus whirls past the bones and ashes of his ancestors in a rapid car. With his own hands, this multi-year council locks the wheel with the drag. It is by night indeed, but the moon looks on. The stars train their eyes to see. When his time of office is over, Letyrannus will take up his whip in broad daylight. Not shrinking to meet a now-aged friend, he will be the first to salute him with his whip. He will unbind the trusses of hay and deal out the fodder to his weary cattle. Meanwhile, though his lace woolly victims and tawny steers after numerous fashion, he swears by no other deity before Jovi's high altar than the goddess of horse flesh and the images painted on the reeking stables. And when it pleases him to go back to the all-night tavern, a syrophoenician runs forth to meet him, a denizen of the Idumean gate perpetually drenched in perfumes and salutes him as lord and prince with all the heirs of a host. And with him comes Siany, her dress tucked up, carrying a flagon of wine for sale. An apologist will say to me, We too did the same as boys. Perhaps. Then you cease from your follies and let them draw. Let your evil days be short. Let some of your misdoings be cut off with your first beard. Boys may be pardoned, but when Latoranus frequented those hot liquor shops with their inscribed linen awnings, he was of right age, fit to guard in arms the Armenian and Syrian rivers, the Danube and the Rhine, fit to protect the person of his emperor. Send your legate to Ostia, O Caesar, but search for him in some big cook shop. There you will find him lying cheek by jaw beside a cutthroat in the company of bargees, thieves and runaway slaves beside hangman coffin makers or of some eunuch priest lying drunk with idle timbrels. Here is liberty hall. One cup serves for everybody. No one has a bed to himself nor a table apart from the rest. What would you do, friend Ponticus, if you chanced upon a slave like this? You would send him to your Lucanian or Tuscan Bridewell. But you, gentlemen of Trojan blood, find excuses for yourselves. What would disgrace a huckster sit gracefully on a valesis or a brutus? What if I can never cite any example so foul and shameful that there is not something worse behind? Your means exhausted, Damasipus, you hired out your voice to the stage, taking the part of the clamorous ghost of Catullus. The nimble lentilus, the nimble lentilus, acted famously the part of Laurelis, deserving in my judgment to be really and truly crucified. Nor can the spectators themselves be forgiven, the populace that with brazen front sits and beholds the tribal buffooneries of our patricians that can listen to a bare-footed fabius and laugh to see them Americai cuffing each other. What matters it at what price they sell their deaths. No Nero compels themselves to sell, yet they hesitate not to sell themselves at the games of the exalted breeder. And yet, suppose that on one side of you were placed a sword, on the other the stage, which were the better choice? Was ever any man so afraid of death that he would choose to be the jealous husband of a thymili or the colleague of the clown Carinthus? Yet, when an emperor has taken to heart-playing, it is not so very strange that a noble should act in a mine. Beyond this, what will be left but the gladiatorial school? And that scandal, too, you have seen in our city, a grecus fighting, not indeed as a murmillo, nor with the round shield and scimitar. Such accoutrements he rejects, a, rejects and detests, nor does a helmet shroud his face. See how he wields his trident, and when with poised right hand he has cast a trailing net in vain, he lifts up his bare face to the benches and flies for all to recognize, from one end of the arena to the other. We cannot mistake the golden tunic that flutters from his throat and the twisted cord that dangles from the high crown cap and so the pursuer who was pitted against the gracas endured a shame more grievous than any wound. If free suffrage were granted to the people, who would be so abandoned as not to prefer Seneca to Nero? Nero, for whose chastisement no single ape or adder, no solitary sack should have been provided. His crime was like that of a remnant son, but the case was not the same. Seeing that Orestes, at the bidding of the gods, was avenging a father's lane in his cups, but Orestes never stained himself with electrous blood or with that of his Spartan wife. He never mixed poison drafts for his own kin. He never sang upon the stage. He never wrote an epic upon Troy. For of all the deeds of Nero's cruel and bloody tyranny, which was there that more deserved to be avenged by the arms of a Virginias, of a Vindex, or a Galba. These were the deeds. These the graces of our high-born prince, who was to prostitute himself by unseemly singing upon a foreign stage, and to earn a chaplet of Greek parsley. Let thy ancestral images be decked with the trophies of thy voice. Place thou at the feet of the mishis, the trailing robe of Aestes or Antigone, or the mesc of Melanippa, and hang up thy harp on a colossus of marble. Where can be found, O Catiline, nobler ancestors than thine, or than thine, Sathigus? Yet you plot a night attack. You prepare to give our houses and temples to the flames, as though you were the sons of trousered golds, or sprung from the cenons, there in deeds that deserve the shirt of torture. But our consul is awake and beats back your hosts. Born at Arpinum, of ignoble blood, a municipal knight new to Rome, he posts helmeted men at every point to guard the affrighted citizens, and is alert on every hill. Thus, within the walls, his toga won for him as much name and honor as Octavius gained by battling Lucas, as much as Octavius won by his blood-dripping sword on the plains of Thessaly. But then, Rome was yet free when she styled him the parent and father of his country. Another son of Arpinum used to work for hire upon the hills, toiling behind a plow, not his own. After that, a centurion's naughty staff would be broken over his head if his pick were slow and sluggish in the trench. Yet, it is he who faces the Simbrae in the mightiest perils. Alone, he saves the trembling city. And so, when the ravens, who had never before seen such huge carcasses, flew down upon the slaughtered Simbrae, his high-born colleague is decorated with the second bay. Plebeian were the souls of the Dessiae. Plebeian were their names. Yet, they were accepted by the gods beneath and by Mother Earth in the aid of all the legions and the allies, and all the youth of Latham, for the Dessiae were more precious than the hosts whom they saved. It was one born of a slave who won the robe and died them in façades of Corainus, one of our good kings. Whereas the consuls own sons who should have dared some great thing for endangered liberty, some deed to be marveled at by Musias or Coakleys, or by the maiden who swam across the river boundary of our realm, were for traitorsly losing the bolts of the city gates to the exile tyrants. It was a slave, well worthy he to be bewailed by mations who revealed the secret plot to their sons met their just punishment from scourging and from the axe then first used in the cause of law. I would rather that their cities were your fodder, if only you were like the grandson of Iacus and could wield the arms of Vulcan than that you should have been begotten by Achilles and be like their cities. Yet, after all, however far you may trace back your name, however long the roll, you derive the phrase from an ill-famed asylum, the first of your ancestors whoever he was was either a shepherd or something that I would rather not name. End of SATIRE 8 Excellated by Gigi Ramsey Satire 9 The Sorrows of a Reprobate I should like to know, Nivalus, why you so often look gloomy when I meet you, knitting your brow like a vanquished Marseys. What have you to do with the look that Ravila wore when caught playing that dirty trick with Radopey? If a slave takes a lick at the pastry he gets a thrashing for his pains. You look as woe-begone as Creperius Polio when he goes round offering a triple rate of interest and can find no fool to trust him. Why have you suddenly developed those wrinkles? You used to be an easily contented person who passed as a home-bred knight that could make biting jests at the dinner-table and tell witty town-bred stories. But now you are a different man. You have a hang-dog look. Your head is a forest of unkempt, unanointed hair. Your skin has lost all the gloss that it got from swaths of hot Brutian pitch. And your legs are dirty and rough with sprouting hair. Why are you as thin as a chronic invalid in whom a quarton fever has long made its home? One can detect in the sickly body the secret torments of the soul has also its joys. The face takes on the stamp of either. You seem, therefore, to have changed your mode of life and to be going in a way opposite to your past. Not long ago, as I remember, you were a gallant more notorious than oundious. You used to frequent the temple of Isis and bat of peace with its Ganymede and the secret courts of the foreign mother. For in what temple are there not frail fair ones to be found? Many men have found profit in my mode of life, but I have made nothing substantial out of my labours. I sometimes have a greasy cloak given me that will save my toga. A coarse and crudely dyed garment that has been ill-combed by the Gallic Weaver or some trifle in silver of an inferior quality. Man is ruled by destiny. Even those parts of him that lie beneath his clothes. What greater monster is there in the world than a miserly debauchee? I gave you this, says he, and then that, and later again ever so much more. Thus he makes a reckoning with his lusts. Well, set out the counters, call in the lads with the reckoning board, count out five thousand cestercies all told, and then enumerate my services. I am less accounted of than the poor hind who plows his master's field. You used to deem yourself a delicate and good-looking youth fit to be joe's own cup-bearer, but will men like you who are unwilling to pay for your own morbid pleasures ever show a kindness to a poor follower or a slave? A pretty fellow to have present sent him a mean sunshades or big amber balls on a birthday or on the first day of showery spring when he lolls at full length in a huge easy chair counting over the secret gifts he has received upon the matron's day. Tell me, you sparrow, for whose benefit are you keeping all those hills and farms in Apulia, all those pasturelands that tire out the kites? Your stores are filled with rich grapes from your trifeline vineyards or from the slopes that look down upon Qumai, or the unpeopled Gauros, whose vats seal up more vintages destined for long life than yours? Would it be a great matter to present a few acres to the loins of an exhausted client? Is it better think you that this countrywoman with her cottage and her babe dog should be bequeathed to a friend who plays the timbrels? You're an impudent beggar, you say. Yes, but my rent cries on me to beg. And so does my single slave lad, as single as that big eye of polyphemus which helped the wily Ulysses to make his escape. And one slave is not enough. I shall have to buy a second and feed them both. What shall I do pray when the winter howls? What shall I say to their shivering feet and shoulders when December's north wind blows? Shall I say, hold on and wait till the grasshoppers arrive? And though you ignore and pass by my other services, what price do you put on this? That were I not your true and devoted client, your wife would still be a maid. You know how often and in ways you have asked that service of me, and what promises you made to me. There's many a household in which a union that was unstable, ready to break up, and all but dissolved, has been saved by the intervention of a lover. Which way can you turn? Which service do you put first, which last? Is it to be no merit, you thankless and perfidious man, none at all, that I have presented you with a little son or daughter? For you rear the children and love to spread abroad in the gazette the proofs of your virility. Hang up garlands over your door. You are now a father. I have given you something to set up against ill-fame. You have now parental rights. Through me you can be entered as an heir, and receive a legacy entire, with this little extra into the bargain. To all which perquisites many more will be added if I make up your family to the full number of three. Indeed, Nivalous, you have just cause of complaint, but what has he got to say on the other side? He takes no notice and looks out for another two-legged donkey like myself. But remember, my secrets are for your fears alone. Keep my complaints fast locked up in your own bosom. It is a fatal thing to have for your enemy a man who keeps himself smooth by pumice stone. The man who has lately entrusted me with a secret has a consuming hatred of me, believing I have revealed everything that I know. He will not hesitate to take up a sword or to lay open my club, or to put a lighted candle against my door. Nor can you disregard or make nothing of the fact that for a man of his means the price of poison is never high. So keep my secrets close, as close as did the Council of Areobagus. Oh, my poor Corridan, do you suppose that a rich man has any secrets, though his slaves hold their tongues, his beasts of burden and his dog will talk. His doorposts and his marble columns will tell tales. Let him shut the windows and close every chink with curtains. Let him fasten the doors, remove the light, turn everyone out of the house and permit no one to sleep in it. Yet the tavernkeeper close by will know before dawn what he was doing at the second cop crow. He will hear also all the pastryman by the head-cook and the carver, for what calamity will they hesitate to concoct against their masters when a slander will avenge them for their strappings. Nor will some tippling friend be wanting to look for you at the crossways and do what you will pour his drunken story into your ear. So just ask those people to hold their tongues about the things you questioned me about just now why they would rather blab out a secret than drink as much stolen wine as Salfea used to swill when conducting a public sacrifice. There are many reasons for right living, but the chiefest of them all is this, that you need pay no attention to the talk of your slaves, for the tongue is the worst part of a bad slave. And yet worse still is the plight of a man who cannot escape from the talk of those whom he read and money. Your advice is excellent, but it is vague. What do you advise me to do now, after all my lost time and disappointed hopes, for the short span of our poor unhappy life is hurrying swiftly on like a flower to its close while we drink and call for chaplets, for unguents and for maidens, old ages creeping on us and perceived. Be not afraid, so long as these seven hills of ours stand fast, Pathic friends will never fail you. From every quarter, in carriages and in ships, those gentry who scratch their heads with one finger will flock in, and you have always a further and better ground of hope if you fit your diet to your trade. Such maxims are for the blackesses are well pleased if I can fill my belly with my labours. Oh, my own little larries, whom I am want to supplicate with a pinch of frankincense or corn or with a tiny garland, when can I assure myself of what will keep my old days from the beggars' staff and mat? Twenty thousand cestresses well secured, some vessels of plain silver, yet such as censor Fabricius would have condemned and a couple of stout Moesian porters on whose hired necks I may be taken comfortably to my place in the balling circus. Let me have besides a stooping engraver and a painter who will quickly dash off any number of likenesses. Enough this for a poor man like me. It is a pitiful prayer and I have little hope even of that. For whenever fortune is supplicated on my behalf she plugs her ears with wax, fetched from that self-sameship which escaped from the Sicilian song-stresses through the deafness of her crew. End of SATIRE IX Section XI of SATIRES This is a leaper-box recording. All leaper-box recordings are in the description. For more information or to volunteer please visit leaperbox.org SATIRES by Juvenile translated by Gigi Ramsey SATIRE X The Vanity of Human Wishes In all the lands that stretch from Gades to the Ganges and the Morn there are but few who can distinguish true blessings from their opposites putting aside the mists of error. For when does reason or our fears? What project do we form so auspiciously that we do not repent us of our effort and of the granted wish? Whole households have been destroyed by the compliant gods in answer to the master's prayers. In camp and city alike we ask for things that will be our ruin. Many a man has met death from the rushing flood of his own eloquence. Others from the strength and views in which they have trusted. More still have been ruined by money too carefully amassed and by fortunes that surpass all patrimonies by as much as the British whale exceeds the dolphin. It was for this that in the dire days Nero ordered Longinus and the great gardens of the over-wealthy Seneca to be put under siege. For this was it that the noble palace of the Laterani was beset by an entire cohort. It is but seldom that soldiers find their way into a garret. Though you carry but few silver vessels with you in a night journey you will be afraid of the sword and cudgel of a freebooter. You will tremble at the shadow of a reed shaking in the moonlight but the empty-handed traveller will whistle in the robber's face. The foremost of all petitions, the one best known to every temple, is for riches and their increase that our money-chest may be the biggest in the forum. But you will drink no aconite out of an earthenware cup. You may dread it when a jewelled cup is offered you or when setting wine sparkles in a golden bowl. Then will you not commend the two wise men one of whom would laugh while the opposite sage would weep at the time he set a foot outside the door? To condemn by a cutting laugh comes readily to us all. The wonder is how the other sage's eyes were supplied with all that water. The sides of Democritus shook with unceasing laughter although in the cities of his day there were no purple border door, purple striped robes, no fascies, no palanquins, no tribunals. He had seen the praetor uplifted in his lofty car amid the dust of the circus attired in the tunic of Jove, hitching an embroidered Tyrian toga on to his shoulders and carrying a crown so big that no neck could bear the weight of it. For a public slave is sweating under the burden and that the consul may not fancy himself over much the slave rides in the same chariot with his master. Add to all this the bird that is perched on his ivory staff. On this side the hornblowers, on that the deutious clients preceding him in long array with white-robed Roman citizens whose friendship has been gained by the dinner-doll snugly lying in their purses marching at his bridal reign. Even then the philosopher found food for laughter at every meeting with his kind. His wisdom shows us that men of high distinction and destined to set great examples may be born in a dullered air and in the land of mutton-heads. He laughed at the troubles I and at the pleasures of the crowd, sometimes too at their tears while for himself he would bid frowning fortune go hang and point at her the finger of derision. Thus it is that the things for which we pray and for which it is right and proper to load the knees of the gods with wax are either profitless or pernicious. Some men are hurled headlong by over great power and the envy to which it exposes them. They are wrecked by the long and delustrious role of their honors. Down come their statues obedient to the rope. The axe hues in pieces their chariot wheels and the legs of the unoffending horses. And now the flames are hissing. And amid the roar of furnace and of bellows the head of the mighty Sojanus the darling of the mob is burning and crackling and from that face which was but lately second in the entire world are being fashioned pipkins, pitchers, frying pans and slop-pails up with the laurel wreaths through your doors lead forth a grand chocked bowl to the capital. Sojanus is being dragged along by a hook as a show and joy to all. What a lip the fellow had! What a face! Believe me, I never liked the man. But on what charge was he condemned? Who informed against him? What was the evidence? Who the witnesses? Who made good the case? Nothing of the sort. A great and wordy letter came from Capri. Good, I ask no more. And what does the mob of Remus say? It follows fortune, as it always does, and rails against the condemned. That same rabble, if Nortia had smiled upon the Etruscan, if the aged emperor had been struck down on wares, would in that very hour have conferred upon Sojanus the title of Augustus. Now that no one buys our votes the public has long since cast off its cares. The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things, bread and games. I hear that many are to perish. No doubt of it big furnace ready. My friend Brutidius looked a trifle pale when I met him at the altar of Mars. I tremble lest the defeated Ajax should take vengeance for having been so ill defended. Let us rush headlong and trample on Caesar's enemy while he lies upon the bank. I and let our slaves see us that none bear witness against us and drag their trembling master into court with a halt around his neck. Such was the talk at the moment about Sojanus. Such were the mutterings of the crowd and would you like to be courted like Sojanus, to be as rich as he was, to bestow on one man the ivory chairs of office, appoint another to the command of armies and be counted guardian of a prince seated on the narrow ledge of Capri with his herd of Caldean astrologers. You would like no doubt to have Centurions, cohorts and illustrious knights at your call and to possess a camp of your own. Why should you not? Even those who don't want to kill anybody would like to have the power to do it. But what grandeur, what high fortune are worth the having if the joy is overbalanced by the calamities they bring with them? Would you rather choose to wear the bordered robe of the man now being dragged along the streets or to be a magnet at Fitani or Gabi adjudicating upon weights or smashing vessels of short measure as a threadbare idol at deserted Ula Bray? You admit then that Sojanus did not know what things were to be desired for in coveting excessive honors and seeking excessive wealth. He was but building up the many stories of a lofty tower whence the fall would be the greater and the crash of headlong ruin more terrific. What was it that overthrew the Crassie and the Pompeii and him who brought the conquered Quarities under his lash? What but lust for the highest place pursued by every kind of man? What but ambitious prayers granted by unkindly gods? Few indeed are the kings who go down to Ceres son-in-law, saved by sword and slaughter. Few the tyrants that perish by a bloodless death. Every schoolboy who worships Minerva with a modest penny-fee, attended by a slave to guard his little satchel, prays all through the days for eloquence for the fame of a Cicero or a Demosthenes, yet it was eloquence that brought both orators to their death, each perished by the copious and overflowing torrent of his own genius. It was his genius that cut off the hand and severed the neck of Cicero. Never yet did futile pleader stain the rostra with his blood. Oh, happy fate in state was the date of my great consulate. Had Cicero always spoken thus he might have laughed at the swords of Antony. Better verses meet only for contempt than thou, oh famous and divine Philippic, that comest out second on the roll. Terrible too was the death of him whom Athens loved to hear sweeping along and holding in check the crowded theatre. Unfriendly were the gods and evil the star under whom was born the man whom his father, blear-eyed with the soot of glowing ore, sent away from the coal, the pincers, and the sword-fashioning anvil of grimy Vulcan to study the art of the Redarition. The spoils of war and trophies fastened upon stumps, a breastplate, a cheek-strap hanging from a broken helmet, a yoke shorn of its pole, the flagstaff of a captured galley, or a captive sorrowing on a triumphal arch. Such things are deemed glories too great for man. These are the prizes for which every general strives, be he Greek, Roman, or Barbarian. It is for these that he endures toil and toil. So much greater is the thirst for glory than for virtue. For who would embrace virtue herself if you stripped her of her rewards? Yet full oft has a land been destroyed by the vain glory of a few, by the lust for honour, and for a title that shall cling to the stones that guard their ashes, stones which may be rent asunder by the rude of the barren fig leaf, seeing that even sepulchres have their doom assigned to them. Put Hannibal into the scales. How many pounds weight will you find in that greatest of commanders? This is the man for whom Africa was all too small, a land beaten by the Moorish sea and stretching to the steaming Nile, and then again to the tribes of Italy, and a new race of elephants. Spain is added to his dominions. He overleaps the Pyrenees. Nature throws in his way alps and snow. He splits the rocks asunder and breaks up the mountainside with vinegar. And now Italy is in his grasp, but still on he presses. Not as accomplished he cries until my punic host comes down the city gates and I plant my standard in the midst of the subura. Oh, what a sight was that! What a picture it would make the one-eyed general riding on the Gatulian monster! What then was his end? Alas, for glory, a conquered man, he flees headlong into exile, and there he sits, a mighty and marvellous subliant in the anti-chamber, until it please his Bithinian majesty to awake. No sword, no stone, no javelin shall end the life which once wrought havoc throughout the world. That little ring shall avenge Cani and all those seas of blood. On, on, thou madman, and race over the wintry alps, that thou mayest be the delight of school boys and supply declaimers with a theme. One globe is all too little for the youth of Pella. He chafes uneasily within the narrow limits of the world, as though he were cooped up within the rocks of Guyara, or the diminutive Seraphos. But yet, when once he shall have entered the city fortified by the potter's art, a sarcophagus will suffice him. Death alone proclaims our poor human bodies. We have heard how ships once sailed through Mount Athos and all the lying tales of Grecian history, how the sea was paved by those self-same ships and gave solid support to chariot-wheels, how deep rivers failed, and whole streams were drunk dry when the Persian breakfasted, with all the fables of which Sostratos sings singing pinions. But in what plight did that king flee from Solemus? He that had been want to inflict barbarous stripes upon the winds, chorus, and urus, never treated thus in their Aeolian prison-house. He who had bound the earth-shaker himself with chains, deeming it clemency for sooth, not to think him worthy of a branding also. What God indeed would be of such a master. In what plight did he return? Why, in a single ship, on blood-stained waves, the prow slowly forcing her way through waters thick with corpses, such was the penalty exacted for that long desired glory. Give me length of days, give me many years, O Jupiter, such is your one and only prayer in days of strength or of sickness, yet how great, how unceasing are the miseries of old age. Look first at the misshapen and ungainly face, so unlike its former self. See the unsightly hide that serves for skin. See the pendulous cheeks and the wrinkles, like those which a matron baboon carves upon her aged jaws in the shaded glades of Fabrica. Young men differ in various ways. This man is handsomer than that, and he, than another. One is stronger than another, but old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair, their noses dribbling as in childhood. Their bread, poor wretches, has to be munched by toothless gums. So offensive do they become their children and themselves that even the legacy hunter Causes turns from them in disgust. Their sluggish pallet takes joy in wine or food no longer, and all pleasures of the flesh have been long ago forgotten. And now consider the loss of another sense. What joy has the old man in song, however famous be the singer. What joy in the harping of this himself, or of those who shine resplendent in gold embroidered robes. What matters it in what part of the great theatre he sits when he can scarce hear the horns and trumpets when they all blow together. The slave who announces a visitor or tells the time of day must need shout in his ear if he is to be heard. Besides all this, the little blood in his now chilly thiever, diseases of every kind dance around him in a body. If you ask of me their names I could more readily tell you the number of opias paramours, how many patients themosan killed in one season, how many partners were defrauded by basilis, how many wards corrupted by heros, how many lovers tall mora wears out in a single season. I could sooner run over the number of women now belonging to the barber under whose razor my stiff youthful beard used to grate. One suffers in the shoulder, another in the loins, a third in the hip, another has lost both eyes and envies those who have won. Another takes food into his pallid lips from someone else's fingers while he whose jaws used to fly open at the sight of his dinner. Now only gates like the young of a swallow whose fasting mother flies to him with well-laden beak. But worse than any loss of limb is the failing mind, which forgets the names of slaves and cannot recognize the face of the old friend who dined with him last night, nor those of the children whom he has begotten and brought up. For by a cruel will he cuts off his own flesh and blood and leaves all his estate too fily. So potent was the breath of that alluring mouth which had plied its trade for so many years in her narrow archway. And both the powers of his mind be strong as ever, yet must he carry forth his sons to burial. He must behold the funeral pyres of his beloved wife and his brothers and urns filled with the ashes of his sisters. Such are the long liver. He sees calamity after calamity before his house. He lives in a world of sorrow. He grows old amid continual lamentation and in the garb of woe. If we can believe mighty Homer, the king of Pylos was an example of long life, second only to the crow. Happy forsooth in this that he had put off death for so many generations, and had so often quaffed the new-made wine, counting now his years upon his right hand. But mark for a moment I beg how he bewails the decrees of fate and his too long thread of life when he beholds the beard of his brave Antillicus in the flames, and asks of every friend around him why he has lived so long. What crime he has committed to deserve such length of life is thus did Pilius also mourn when he lost Achilles, and so that other father who had to bewail the sea-roving Ithacan had Priam perished at some other time before Paris began to build his audacious ships. He would have gone down to the shade of Asaricus when Troy was still standing, and with regal pomp his body would have been born on the land of Hector and his brothers amid the tears of Illion's daughters, and the rending of Polluxena's garments. Cassandra would have let the cries of woe. What boon did length of days bring to him? He saw everything in ruins, and Asia perishing by fire and the sword. Laying aside his tiara, and arming himself, he fell a trembling soldier of all mighty jove, like an aged ox discarded by the thankless plow who offers his poor lean neck to his master's knife. Priam's death was at least that of a human being, but his wife lived on to open her mouth with the savage barking of a dog. I hastened to our own countrymen, passing by the king of Pontus and Cresus, who was bitten by the poison, to look to the last lap of a long life. It was this that brought Marius to exile and to prison. It took him to the swamps of Mindurny, and made him beg his bread in the Carthage that he had conquered. What could nature ever in all the world have produced more glorious than him? If after parading his troops of captives with all the pomp of a war as he was about to step down from his teutonic car, kindly Campania gave to Pompey a fever, which he might have prayed for as a boon, but the public prayers of all those cities gained the day, so his own fortune and that of Rome preserved him to be vanquished and to lose his head. No such cruel thing befell Lentulus. Cephicus escaped such punishment and fell whole, and Catalan's corpse lay unviolated. When the loving mother passes the temple of Venus, she prays in whispered breath for her boys more loudly and entering into the most trifling particulars for her daughters that they may have beauty. And why should I not, she asks, did not Latona rejoice in Diana's beauty? Yes, but Lucretia forbids us to pray for a face like her own, and Virginia would gladly take Rutila's hump and give her own fair form to Rutila. A handsome son keeps his parents in constant fear and misery, so rarely do modesty and good looks go together. For though his home be strict and have taught him ways as pure as those of the ancient Sabines, and though nature besides with kindly hand have lavishly gifted him with a pure mind and a cheek mantling with modest blood, and what better thing can nature, more careful, more potent than any guardian, bestow upon a youth. He will not be allowed to become a man. The lavish wickedness of some seducer will tempt the boy's own parents. Such trust can be placed in money. No misshapen youth was ever unsexed by cruel tyrant in his castle. Never did Nero have a bandy legged or scrofulous favourite, or one that was hump-backed or pot-bellied. Go to now, you that rebel in your son's beauty. Think of the deadly perils that lie before him. He will become a promiscuous gallant and have to fear all the vengeance due to outraged husbands. No luckier than Mars, he will not fall into the net, and sometimes the husband's wrath exacts greater penalties than any law allows. One lover is slain by the sword, another bleeds under the lash, some undergo the punishment of the mullet. Your dear endymion will become the gallant of some matron whom he loves. But before long, when Servilia has taken him into her pay, he will serve him also whom he loves not, and will strip her of all her ornaments. For what can any woman be she an opi or a katala denied to the man who serves her passion? It is on her passion that a bad woman's whole nature centres. But how does beauty hurt the chaste you ask? Well, what availed Hippolytus, or Pilarophon, their firm resolve. The cretin lady flared up as though repelled with scorn. No less furious was the navy. Both dames lashed themselves into fury. For never is woman so savage as when her hatred is goaded on by shame. And now tell me what council you think should be given to him, whom Caesar's wife is minded to wed. Best and fairest of a patrician house, the unhappy youth is dragged to destruction by Messalina's eyes. She has long been seated. Her bridal avail is ready. The Tyrion-nuptial couches being spread openly in the gardens. A dowry of one million cestorses will be given after the ancient fashion. The Suf Sair and the witnesses will be there. And you thought these things were secret, did you? Known only to a few. But the will not wed save with all the due forms. Say what is your resolve? If you say nay to her, you will have to perish before the lighting of the lamps. If you perpetrate the crime, you will have a brief respite until the affair, known already to the city and to the people, shall come to the prince's ears. He will be the last to know of the dishonor of his house. For a few days of life so highly, obey your orders. Whatever you may deem the easier and the better way, that fair white neck of yours will have to be offered to the sword. Is there nothing then for which men shall pray? If you ask my counsel, you will leave it to the gods themselves to provide what is good for us, and what will be serviceable for our in place of what is pleasing. They will give us what is best. Man is dearer to them than he is to himself, impelled by strong and blind desire. We ask for wife and offspring, but the gods know of what sort the sons, of what sort the wife will be. Nevertheless that you may have something to pray for, and be able to offer to the shrines, and presaging sausages from a white porker, you should pray for a sound mind in a sound body, for a stout heart that has no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of nature's gifts, that can endure any kind of toil, that knows neither wrath nor desire, and thinks that the woes and hard labours of Hercules are better than the loves and the gifts, and the down cushions of Sardinopolis. What I commend to you you can give to yourself, for it is assuredly through virtue, that lies the one and only road to a life of peace. Thou wouldst have no divinity, O Fortune, if we had but wisdom. It is we that make a goddess of thee, and place thee in the skies. End of Satire 10.