Satires

pr. Prologue I never wet my lips at the nag's spring,

nor do I remember dreaming on two-peaked Parnassus,

that I should step forth all at once a poet so.

The Heliconian Muses and pale Pirene

I leave to those whose portraits the clinging

ivy licks: I myself, half a rustic outsider,

bring my own song to the holy rites of the bards.

Who taught the parrot his "good morning,"

and schooled the magpie to attempt our speech?

That master of skill, that lavisher of talent,

the belly, an artist at chasing voices once denied;

for let the hope of treacherous coin glitter,

and you would believe that raven-poets and magpie-poetesses

were singing the very nectar of Pegasus.

1. O the cares of men! O how much emptiness there is in things!

"Who will read this?" Is it me you ask? Nobody, by Hercules. Nobody?

Two perhaps, or nobody. A shameful, pitiable thing! Why so?

Is it that Polydamas and the Trojan women may prefer

Labeo to me? Trifles. No—if muddled Rome

disparages anything, do not step in to correct

the faulty needle on her scales, and do not look for yourself outside yourself.

For at Rome who is not—if only it were permitted to say it—but it is permitted

then, when I look upon the grey hairs and that grim way of living of ours,

and on everything we do once the nuts of boyhood are set aside,

when we play the stern uncle: then, then forgive me—I will not—

what am I to do? But I have a saucy spleen—I burst out laughing.

We write shut indoors, one in measured verse, another in prose,

something grand, that the lung lavish with breath may pant out.

This, of course, you will read to the public, combed and in a fresh toga,

white-robed at last with your birthday sardonyx,

from a lofty seat, when you have rinsed your supple throat

with a liquid gargle, languid with a melting, lustful eye.

Then you may see great Tituses quivering, in no decent manner

nor with steady voice, when the verses enter their loins

and the inmost parts are tickled with the trembling line.

Do you, old man, gather morsels for other men's ears—

ears at which even you, ruined to the skin, would cry "Enough!"?

To what end have you learned, if this ferment, this wild fig

once sprung up within, should not break through and burst the liver?

Look at the pallor and the wasting! O for our morals—is knowing your own thing

worth so utterly nothing, unless another knows that you know it?

"But it is a fine thing to be pointed out and to have men say, 'That's the man';

do you reckon it nothing to have been the dictation-piece of a hundred curly-haired boys?"

Behold: over their cups the well-fed sons of Romulus

ask what the divine poems have to tell;

here some fellow, with a hyacinth-coloured cloak about his shoulders,

mouthing something rancid through a lisping nose,

filters out his Phyllises, his Hypsipyles, and whatever the bards make tearful,

and trips the words along his delicate palate.

The gentlemen approve: is not the poet's ash now

happy? Does not the tombstone now press more lightly on his bones?

The guests applaud: will not now from those shades,

now from the tomb and the blessed ashes,

violets spring up? "You mock," he says, "and you indulge too much

in a curled-up nose. Will there be a man who would refuse to wish

to have earned the public's praise, and—having spoken words worthy of cedar oil—

to leave behind poems that need fear neither mackerel nor incense?"

Whoever you are, you whom just now I made speak on the other side,

when I write, if by chance something rather apt comes out—

since this is a rare bird—still, if something rather apt does come out,

I would not be afraid of praise; for my fibre is not made of horn.

But I refuse that your "bravo" and your "charming" should be

the end and uttermost goal. For shake out this whole "charming":

what does it not contain within? Is not Attius' Iliad here,

drunk on hellebore? And whatever little elegies the crude

grandees have dictated? And whatever, in short, is written

on couches of citron-wood? You know how to set down a steaming sow's-belly,

you know how to bestow a worn-out cloak on a shivering client,

and "I love the truth," you say, "tell me the truth about myself."

How can that be? Shall I tell you? You trifle, baldhead, when

your fat paunch sticks out a foot and a half before you.

O Janus, whom no stork ever pecked from behind,

nor any nimble hand mimicked as white ass's ears,

nor any tongue, thrust out as far as a thirsty Apulian dog's!

You, O patrician blood, who must live

with a blind back of the head—turn round to face the grimace behind you.

What is the talk of the public? Why, what else but that verses

now at last flow with a soft measure, so that the join lets the stern

nails run smoothly over the surface? "He knows how to draw out a line

just as if he were guiding a red chalk-mark with one eye shut.

Whether the task is to speak against morals, against luxury, against the dinners of kings,

the Muse grants grand themes to our poet."

Behold, now we see men bring heroic sentiments forward

who used to trifle in Greek, with no skill to portray a sacred grove

or to praise a fruitful countryside—where there are baskets

and the hearth and pigs and the Palilia smoky with hay,

whence came Remus, and you, Quintius, wearing down your plough-share in the furrow,

when your trembling wife dressed you dictator before the oxen

and the lictor carried your ploughs home: "bravo, poet!"

There is the man now whom the swollen-veined book of Brisaean Accius detains,

there are those whom Pacuvius and his warty

Antiopa hold spellbound, "her grief-stricken heart propped on sorrows."

When you see bleary-eyed fathers pouring such lessons

into their boys, do you ask whence this hash of talk

has come upon their tongues, whence that disgrace by which

the smooth young dandy struts and preens before you across the benches?

Is it no shame that you cannot ward off perils from your grey head

without longing to hear this lukewarm "well said"?

"You are a thief," they say to Pedius. What does Pedius do? He weighs

his charges in balanced antitheses, and is praised

for having set out his learned figures. "How fine this is." This, fine? Are you wagging your tail, Romulus?

Should it move me? Should I, if a shipwrecked man sang, hold out

a copper? Do you sing, when you carry yourself painted on a broken plank,

slung from your shoulder? He who would have me bend with his lament

will weep with what is true, and not got up overnight.

"But grace and a smooth join have been added to the rough measures."

So Berecyntian Attis learned to close his line,

and "the dolphin that was parting blue Nereus";

so "we drew away a rib from the long Apennine."

"Arms and the man!"—is this not all froth and fat bark,

like an old branch dried out under its overgrown cork?

What, then, is tender, and to be read with relaxed neck?

"They filled their savage horns with Mimallonian boomings,

and the Bassarid, ready to bear off the head torn from a proud calf,

and the Maenad, about to guide her lynx with ivy-clusters,

redoubles her 'Euhion!'—and reparative Echo answers back."

Could such things be done, if any vein of our fathers' manhood

were alive in us? This nerveless stuff swims on the surface

of the lips, in spittle—Maenad and Attis are afloat in the wet,

and the man never beats his desk, nor smacks of bitten-down nails.

But what need to scrape tender ears with biting truth?

See to it, please, lest by chance the thresholds of the great

grow cold to you: here sounds the snarling letter of the dog's nose.

For all I care, henceforth let everything be white;

I make no objection. Bravo! Everyone, everyone—well done, you will all be marvellous things!

Does this please you? "Here," you say, "I forbid anyone to make a mess."

Paint two snakes: "boys, the place is sacred—relieve yourselves outside";

I withdraw. Yet Lucilius slashed the city—you, Lupus,

you, Mucius—and broke his back tooth on them;

sly Flaccus touches every fault of his laughing friend,

and, once let in, plays about the heart-strings,

clever at hanging the public from his well-blown nose:

and may I not so much as mutter? Not in secret? Not even into a ditch? Nowhere?

Yet here I will bury it. I have seen it, I myself have seen it, little book:

who does not have ass's ears? This buried secret of mine,

this laughter of mine, slight as it is—I would not sell it to you for any

Iliad. Whoever you are, breathed upon by daring Cratinus,

who grow pale over angry Eupolis and the grand old man,

look on these things too, if by chance you can hear something more refined.

From them let my reader come to a boil with a steamed ear—

not the man who itches to make sport of the Greeks' sandals,

a sordid fellow who can call a one-eyed man "One-Eye"

and, thinking himself somebody because, puffed up with Italian office,

he smashed the short measures as aedile of Arretium;

nor the man who is clever at laughing at the figures on the abacus

and the cones marked in the spread sand, ready to enjoy himself hugely

if some saucy streetwalker plucks the beard of a Cynic.

To such men I give the praetor's edict in the morning, Callirhoe after lunch.

2. This day, Macrinus, count with the better pebble,

the bright day that adds to your gliding years;

pour the unmixed wine to your Genius. You are no man to ask in greedy prayer

for things you could entrust to the gods only by drawing them aside.

But a good share of our great men will pour their offering with a silent censer;

it is not easy for everyone to lift away the muttering and humble whispers

from the temples, and to live by an open prayer.

"A sound mind, good name, good faith"—this aloud, so even a stranger may hear;

but the rest he mutters within himself, beneath the tongue: "O if only

my uncle would bubble out his last—a splendid funeral!" And "O if only,

with Hercules's good favour, a jar of silver would ring out for me

under my hoe! Or that I could blot out the ward whose nearest heir

I am, treading on his heels—for he is scabby and swollen

with sharp bile! Already Nerius is burying his third wife!"

That you may pray for these things in holiness, you dip your head

in Tiber's eddy each morning, twice and thrice, and purge the night in the river?

Come now, answer me—it is the smallest thing I am trying to learn:

what do you think of Jupiter? Are you ready to set him above—

above whom? Above whom? Above Staius, say? Or do you hesitate?

What better judge, what fitter guardian for the fatherless?

Well then, that very thing by which you try to assail Jupiter's ear,

say it to Staius. "By Jupiter! O good god," he would cry,

"Jupiter!" And would not Jupiter himself cry out by his own name?

Do you suppose he has forgiven you, because when he thunders the holm-oak

is shattered with the sacred fire sooner than you and your house?

Or is it that, because you do not lie a grim corpse in a grove, a thing to be shunned,

at the bidding of sheep's entrails and Ergenna's word,

Jupiter therefore offers you his foolish beard to pluck?

Or what is the price by which you have bought the ears

of the gods? With lungs and fat tripe?

See—a grandmother, or an aunt fearing the gods, has taken the boy

from his cradle, and with the disgraceful finger and lustral spittle first

purifies forehead and moist lips, skilled at warding off the burning eyes;

then she dandles him in her hands, and with a suppliant prayer sends

her starveling hope now into Licinus's fields, now into the halls of Crassus:

"may a king and queen wish for him as son-in-law; may the girls

snatch at him; whatever he shall tread on, let it turn to roses."

But I do not entrust my prayers to a nurse. Refuse,

O Jupiter, these things to her, though she ask you robed in white!

You pray for strength to your sinews and a body trusty for old age:

so be it—agreed; but your great platters and rich sausages

have kept the gods from nodding assent, and hold Jupiter back.

You long to build your fortune by slaughtering an ox, and you summon

Mercury with the entrails: "grant prosperity to my household,

grant cattle, and increase to my flocks!" How, you wretch, can that be,

when the caul of so many heifers melts for you in the flames?

And yet he is bent on winning with offerings and rich cakes:

"now the field grows, now the sheepfold grows,

now it will be granted, now, now"—until, deceived and out of hope,

the coin at the bottom of his chest sighs in vain.

If I were to bring you bowls of silver and gifts chased

with thick gold, you would sweat, and from your left breast

your heart, trembling with joy, would shake out drops.

From this comes that practice: you overlay sacred faces

with triumphal gold; for among the bronze brothers, those

who send the cleanest dreams, free of rheum,

let them be foremost, and let theirs be the golden beard.

Gold has driven out the vessels of Numa and the Saturnian bronze,

and replaces the Vestal urns and the Tuscan earthenware.

O souls bowed to the earth and empty of heavenly things!

What good is it to bring our own morals into the temples

and to judge what is good for the gods from this sinful flesh?

This flesh has dissolved cassia for itself, ruining the oil,

and boiled the Calabrian fleece in tainted purple;

this it is that has bidden men scrape the pearl from the shell

and strain veins of glowing ore from the raw rock.

It sins, this flesh, it sins, yet it gets some use from its vice; but you,

tell me, you pontiffs: what is gold doing in a holy place?

Surely just what dolls dedicated to Venus by a girl are doing.

Why not give the gods what the bleary offspring of great Messala

could not give from his great dish:

right and law duly composed in the soul, and the holy recesses

of the mind, and a heart steeped through with noble honour.

Let me bring these to the temples, and I will win the gods' favour with meal.

3. Is it always like this? Already the bright morning enters the windows

and widens the narrow chinks with its light;

we snore enough to sleep off the unmastered Falernian,

until the shadow touches the fifth line. "Now then, what are you about?

The mad Dog-star is baking the dry harvests this long while,

and every beast is under the spreading elm,"

says one of his companions. "Is it true? Is it so? Quick, let someone

come here—nobody?" The glassy bile swells in him:

he splits with shouting, so you would think the herds of Arcadia were braying.

Now the book is taken up, and the two-coloured parchment with its hair scraped off,

and the paper comes into his hands, and the knotty reed-pen;

then we complain that the ink hangs thick on the pen,

that the black cuttle-juice grows pale when water is poured in;

we complain that the pen-tip doubles its watered drops.

O wretch, and day by day more wretched! To this pass of things

have we come? Why not rather, like a tender pigeon

or like the sons of kings, demand your pap chopped fine,

and in a temper refuse to let mother sing you to sleep?

"Can I study with such a pen?" Whom are you fooling? Why do you

drone out these evasions? The game is at your own cost. You leak away, fool;

you will be despised. The half-baked jar, when struck, gives off a flawed sound,

and answers ill, made of unseasoned green clay.

You are wet and soft mud—now, now you must be hurried and shaped

without end on the sharp wheel. "But on my father's land

I have a modest store of grain, a clean and spotless salt-cellar—

what should you fear?—and a dish that guards the hearth in safety."

Is that enough? Or is it fitting to burst your lung with windy pride

because you draw your branch as the thousandth on a Tuscan stock,

or because you greet your own censor in your festal robe?

Off to the rabble with your trappings! I know you inside and to the skin.

Are you not ashamed to live by the loose ways of unbelted Natta?

But he is numb in his vice, and the fat has grown thick over his vitals;

he feels no fault, knows not what he is losing, and sunk deep below

no longer rises to bubble at the surface.

Great father of the gods, may it please you to punish cruel tyrants

in no other way than this, when dread lust,

steeped in burning venom, has stirred their nature:

let them see virtue, and pine for having forsaken it.

Did the bronze of the Sicilian bull groan more,

or did the sword hung from the gilded panelling more

terrify the purple necks beneath it, than when a man says to himself,

"down, down headlong we go," and pales within, unhappy,

at a thing his nearest wife must never know?

Often as a boy, I remember, I would touch my eyes with oil

when I did not wish to recite the grand dying words of Cato—

words much to be praised by a teacher who had no sense—

words my father, sweating, would hear, with his friends brought in;

for in truth this was my highest wish: to know what a lucky six

would bring, and how much the ruinous low throw

would scrape away; not to be cheated by the neck of the narrow jar,

nor have anyone more cunning at whipping the boxwood top.

To you it is no untried thing to catch out crooked characters,

and all that the wise Porch teaches—the Porch painted

with the trousered Medes—where the sleepless and close-cropped youth

keep vigil, fed on pulse and thick barley-porridge;

and the letter that parted the Samian branches in two

has shown you the rising path on the right-hand track.

Do you still snore? And does your slack head, its joints undone,

gape with yesterday's yawn, your jaws unhinged on every side?

Is there anything you aim at, anything you point your bow toward?

Or do you chase ravens everywhere, with potsherd and clay,

careless where your foot may carry you, and live from moment to moment?

In vain you will see men begging hellebore when the sick skin

is already swollen: meet the disease as it comes,

and what need to promise great mountains to Craterus?

Learn, O wretched men, and come to know the causes of things:

what we are, and for what kind of life we are born; what order

is given us, or where and whence the soft turn round the post;

what limit there is to wealth, what it is right to pray for, what use

the rough coin has; how much should be lavished on one's country and dear kin;

what God has bidden you to be, and in what part of human affairs you are placed.

Learn, and do not envy the man whose many a jar grows rank with fat

in the rich larder of the well-defended Umbrians,

with pepper and hams, the tokens of a Marsian client,

and a sprat that has not yet given out in the first jar.

Here some fellow of the goatish breed of centurions

may say: "What I understand is enough for me. I do not care

to be what the Arcesilauses and the careworn Solons were,

with head bowed sideways and eyes fixed on the ground,

while they gnaw their mutterings and rabid silences within,

and balance their words on a thrust-out lip,

brooding over the dreams of a sick old man: that nothing comes

from nothing, that nothing can return to nothing.

Is this what you grow pale over? Is this a reason for a man to go without lunch?"

At this the people laugh, and the brawny youth

redouble their quivering guffaws with wrinkling noses.

"Examine me—something flutters here in my chest, and a heavy breath

comes up from my ailing throat; examine me, please,"

says the man to his doctor. Ordered to rest, after

the third night had seen his blood run calm,

he asks for a mild Surrentine from a great house's cellar,

a flask thirsting only a little, to drink before his bath.

"Good fellow, you are pale." "It is nothing." "Look to that, though,

whatever it is: your yellow skin is quietly rising on you."

"But you are worse pale than I." "Don't play guardian to me.

Him I buried long ago: you remain." "Go on, I will say no more."

Swollen with feasting, and with a white belly, he goes to bathe,

his throat slowly breathing out sulphurous fumes.

But a tremor comes upon him amid the wine, and shakes the warm cup

from his hands; his bared teeth chatter,

and then the greasy morsels fall from his slack lips.

From this come the trumpet, the candles; and at last our little blessed one,

laid out on a high bier and plastered with thick perfumes,

stretches his stiff heels toward the door, and the new-made citizens,

freedmen of yesterday, with caps on their heads, take him up.

Touch your veins, wretch, and lay your right hand on your breast:

no heat here. Touch the tips of your feet and your hands:

they are not cold. But if the sight of money, or if

your neighbour's fair girl has smiled softly at you,

does your heart beat steadily? Coarse greens are set before you

in a cold dish, and meal sifted through the people's sieve:

let us try your throat. A rotten ulcer lurks in your tender mouth,

which it would not do to scrape with common beet.

You shiver when white fear has shaken the bristles up on your limbs;

now, when the torch is held beneath, your blood boils, and your eyes

flash with anger; you say and do such things as Orestes himself,

mad as he was, would swear under oath were not the acts of a sane man.

4. "Do you handle the affairs of the people?"—imagine this is said

by the bearded master whom the dread draught of hemlock carried off.

On what do you rely? Tell me this, ward of great Pericles.

No doubt genius and a quick wisdom in affairs

came to you before your beard, and you are skilled in what to say and what to keep silent.

So, when the little mob seethes, stirred to bile,

your spirit prompts you to impose silence on the heated crowd

with a majestic gesture of the hand. What then will you say? "Citizens,

this, suppose, is not just; that is wrong; this other is more right."

For you know how to suspend justice on the twin scales

of the doubtful balance; you discern the straight where it comes

between crooked things, or when the rule deceives with its bent foot;

and you can set the black theta against a fault.

Why then, vain in your fine outward skin, do you not

stop wagging your tail before the fawning rabble before your time,

you who would do better to drink down neat doses of hellebore?

What is your highest good? To have lived forever on a greasy plate,

and to keep your little skin tended in the unfailing sun?

Wait—this old woman would answer no differently. Go now,

puff yourself up: "I am the son of Dinomache, I am fair." So be it,

provided ragged Baucis has no worse taste

when she has cried her basil to a slovenly slave.

How no one tries to descend into himself—no one—

but each man stares at the wallet on the back ahead of him!

Ask, "Do you know Vettidius's estates?" "Whose?" "His who,

rich, ploughs at Cures more land than a kite can range over."

You mean this man—this fellow, hateful to the gods and with a left-handed Genius,

who, whenever he fixes the yoke at the doused crossroad-shrine,

dreading to scrape the old crust from his little jar,

groans, "may all be well," as he bites the salted

onion in its skin, and—while the boys clap over the porridge-pot—

swallows the ragged dregs of vinegar going dead?

But if you idle anointed and pin the sun upon your skin,

there is a stranger at your elbow to nudge you and spit

his scorn: "such manners!—to weed the privates and the secrets of the loins,

and spread your flabby parts before the public!

When you comb the balsamed fleece on your jaws,

why does a shorn shame stick out below?

Though five wrestling-trainers pluck these saplings

and shake your boiled buttocks loose with the curved tongs,

still that bracken is tamed by no plough."

We strike, and in turn offer our own legs to the arrows;

this is how we live, this is the way we know. Below the groin

you have a hidden wound, but a sword-belt broad with gold

hides it over. As you please—give fair words and cheat your sinews,

if you can. When the neighbourhood calls me excellent,

shall I not believe it? If you grow pale at the sight of money, you scoundrel,

if you do whatever your lust suggests, if at the Puteal

you flog the bitter usury, cautious, with many a stripe,

it is in vain that you have given your thirsty ears to the public.

Spit out what you are not; let the huckster take back his gifts.

Dwell with yourself: you will learn how scanty your furniture is.

5. It is the bards' way to ask for a hundred voices for themselves,

to wish for a hundred mouths and a hundred tongues for their songs,

whether a tale is set out to be gaped over by a mournful tragedian,

or the wounds of a Parthian drawing the steel from his groin.

To what end is this? Or what great gobbets of sturdy song

are you stuffing in, that it should take a hundred throats to strain at?

Let those about to speak grand things gather mists on Helicon,

if there are any for whom the pot of Procne or of Thyestes

will seethe, often to be served up as supper to the tasteless Glycon.

You do not press the winds from a panting bellows

while the ore is cooked in the furnace, nor, hoarse with stifled muttering,

croak some weighty nonsense to yourself, ineptly,

nor strain to burst your swollen cheeks with a pop.

You follow the words of everyday life, clever in your sharp joining,

with a rounded, modest utterance; you are skilled to scrape pale morals

and to nail down fault with a gentleman's wit.

From here draw what you say, and leave the tables to Mycenae,

with their head and feet, and learn to know the meals of common folk.

For my part I do not aim to have my page swell

with mournful trifles, fit only to give weight to smoke.

We speak in private. Now, at the Muse's urging, I give you

my heart to shake out; and how great a part of my soul

is yours, Cornutus, I delight to show you, dear friend.

Strike it; be careful to tell apart

what rings sound from the plastered surface of a painted tongue.

For this I would dare to ask for a hundred throats,

that I might draw out in a clear voice how deeply I have fixed you

in the folds of my heart, and that my words might unseal the whole

of what lies hidden, unutterable, in the secret fibre.

When first the purple, my guardian, left me, still timorous,

and the locket, dedicated, hung up before the girt-up household gods—

when my companions were charming, and the now-white border of my toga

allowed me to cast my eyes with impunity over all the Subura—

when the road was uncertain, and the wandering ignorance of life

was leading my anxious steps astray at the branching crossroads,

I put myself under you. You take up my tender years

in your Socratic bosom, Cornutus. Then the rule, skilled at correction,

set against them, straightens out my twisted morals,

and my mind is pressed by reason and labours to be overcome,

and takes on a fashioned look beneath your thumb.

For I remember spending long days with you,

and plucking with you the first hours of night for our feasting,

one in our work, and together we appoint our rest alike,

and we unbend our serious labours at a modest table.

Do not doubt this: that by a fixed compact of us both

our days agree, and are drawn from a single star.

Whether the Fate that holds fast to the truth has hung our times

on the balanced Scales, or whether the hour born to the faithful

divides into the Twins the harmonious destiny of the two of us,

and together we break grim Saturn by our own Jupiter—

there is, I am sure, some star that tempers me to you.

There are a thousand kinds of men, and the varied use of things;

each has his own desire, and men do not live by one prayer.

This man, under the newly risen sun, barters Italian wares

for wrinkled pepper and grains of pale cumin;

this one prefers to swell with watered sleep when full;

this one gives himself to the field; gambling melts that one away; another

rots in lust. But when stony gout

has made knots of his joints like the branches of an old beech,

then they groan that their thick days are past, and the swampy light,

and that, too late now, the life they have left behind is gone.

But you delight to grow pale over the leaves by night;

for, a tiller of the young, you graft their cleansed ears

with the fruit of Cleanthes. Seek from here, boys and old men,

a fixed goal for the mind, and provisions for wretched grey hairs.

"Tomorrow this shall be done." The same tomorrow it will be done. "What?

Is it a great thing, then, that you grant me a day?" But when the next light comes,

we have already used up yesterday's tomorrow; behold, another tomorrow

carries off the years, and is always a little beyond,

for though it be close beside you, though it be under the same pole,

in vain will you chase the rim that turns upon itself,

since you run as the hinder wheel, and on the second axle.

We need liberty—not the kind by which each Publius,

once enrolled in the Veline tribe, comes to own a scabby ration-ticket

for his grain. Alas, you barren of truth, for whom a single

twirl makes a Roman citizen! Here is Dama, a groom not worth three farthings,

bleary with sour wine, and a cheat over a paltry feed of fodder;

let his master turn him round, and in a moment's whirl out comes

Marcus Dama. Wonderful! With Marcus standing surety, do you refuse

to lend your coin? Do you turn pale with Marcus as your judge?

"Marcus has said it; it is so." Sign the tablets, Marcus.

This is pure liberty, this is what the freedman's cap bestows on us.

"But is any other man free, except him to whom it is allowed

to lead his life as he pleases? I am allowed to live as I wish: am I not

freer than Brutus?" "You reckon falsely," says

the Stoic here, his ear washed with biting vinegar.

"This part I accept—'I am allowed'; but take away the 'as I wish.'"

"After I came back from the praetor with the rod of freedom my own master,

why is it not allowed me to do whatever my will commands,

except what Masurius's rubric has forbidden?"

Learn this—but let the anger fall from your nose, and the wrinkling sneer,

while I tear the old grandmothers from your lungs.

It was not the praetor's business to give to fools the fine

duties of life, or to grant them the use of life's swift course;

sooner could you fit a harp to a tall pack-mule.

Reason stands against you, and whispers in your secret ear

that one may not do the thing one will spoil by doing.

The common law of mankind and Nature contains this right:

that feeble ignorance be kept from forbidden acts.

You mix hellebore and, not knowing how to check the scales

at a fixed mark—the very art of healing forbids this.

If a peasant in his rawhide boots, ignorant of the morning star,

should demand a ship for himself, Melicerta would cry out that all

shame had perished from the world. Has skill given you the power

to live by an upright stance, and are you clever to tell apart

the look of truth, lest the coin ring false with copper beneath the gilding?

The things to be pursued and the things in turn to be avoided—

have you marked the first with chalk, and then these with charcoal?

Are you moderate in your wishes, thrifty in your household, kind to your friends?

Do you know how now to lock your granaries fast, now to throw them open,

and to step over a coin fixed in the mud,

and not gulp down the spittle that Mercury draws?

When you can truly say, "These things are mine—I hold to them,"

then be free and wise, with the praetors and Jupiter favouring you.

But if, having lately been of our own meal,

you keep your old skin, and, polished on the brow,

guard a crafty fox in your stale breast,

then I draw back what I granted above, and reel in the rope:

reason has conceded you nothing. Stick out a finger—you go wrong,

and what is so small as that? Yet with no incense will you win the gods' favour

to let so much as half an ounce of right lodge in fools;

it is forbidden to mix these things; nor, while in all else you are a ditch-digger,

may you move like the satyr of Bathyllus through even three figures of the dance.

"I am free." From where do you get that, you who are subject to so many things?

Or do you know no master but the one whom the rod releases?

"Boy, go and carry the scrapers to Crispinus's baths!"

If he barks at it, "Are you dawdling, you good-for-nothing?"—harsh slavery

drives you in no way, nothing enters from without

to set your sinews in motion; but if masters are born

within, in your sick liver, how do you come off more scot-free

than this boy, whom the lash and his master's fear drove to the scrapers?

In the morning you snore, sluggard. "Get up," says Avarice; "ho there,

get up!" You refuse; she presses on: "Get up," she says. "I cannot." "Get up."

"And what am I to do?" "You ask? Bring in salt-fish from Pontus,

beaver-musk, tow, ebony, incense, slippery Coan silks;

be first to take the fresh pepper off the thirsting camel's back;

trade something; swear an oath." "But Jupiter will hear." "Alas,

you simpleton—be content to go on boring a finger into the licked salt-cellar,

if you mean to live on terms with Jupiter."

Now, girt up, you fit the hide and the wine-skin on your boys;

quick, to the ship! Nothing keeps you from sweeping over the Aegean

in a huge hull—unless clever Luxury, first drawing you aside,

warns you: "Where, then, madman, are you rushing, where?

What do you want? Has manly bile so swelled in your hot breast

that no urn of hemlock could quench it?

You—leap over the sea? You—have your supper

on a thwart, propped on twisted hemp, while the squat jug

breathes out a Veientine red, spoiled by the rancid pitch?

What do you seek? That the coins you here nursed

at a modest five per cent should work out their greedy twelfths in sweat?

Indulge your Genius; let us pluck the sweets; this life of yours

is ours; you will become ash and ghost and a tale.

Live mindful of death; the hour flies; this very word I speak is already gone."

Now then, what are you doing? You are torn in two directions by a double hook.

Will you follow this one or that? You must obey your masters by turns,

in alternating servitude, and stray off by turns.

Nor, when you have once resisted and refused to obey the pressing

command, may you say, "Now I have broken my chains";

for even the dog that has struggled snaps the knot, and yet,

as it flees, a long part of the chain is dragged from its neck.

"Davus, quick—I mean it, believe me—I am minded to make an end

of my past griefs," says Chaerestratus, gnawing

his ragged nail. "Should I be a disgrace to my sober kinsmen?

Should I, with ill repute, smash my father's fortune

against an obscene threshold, while drunk before the wet doors

of Chrysis, with the torch put out, I sing?"

"Bravo, boy—be wise; offer a lamb to the gods who turn away

evil." "But do you think she will weep, Davus, when I leave her?"

"You trifle, boy: you will be beaten with the red slipper,

lest you take fright and gnaw the tight nets!

Now you are fierce and violent; but if she calls, you will say at once,

without delay, 'What then am I to do? Not even now,

when she summons me and of her own accord entreats, shall I go to her?'

If you had come away from there whole and untouched, not even now.

Here, here is what we seek—here it is,

not in the rod that the silly lictor flourishes."

Has that man mastery over himself, whom gaping ambition,

whitewashed, leads on by flattery? "Keep watch, and scatter chickpeas

freely to the brawling crowd, that the old men sunning themselves

may remember our Floralia." What is finer? But when

the days of Herod have come, and the lamps set out

along the greasy windows have vomited their fat smoke,

bearing violets, and the tail of the tunny floats

in its embrace round the red dish, and the white jar swells with wine—

you move your lips in silence and turn pale at the circumcised Sabbath.

Then come the black ghosts and the perils of the cracked egg,

then the great priests of Cybele, and the one-eyed priestess with her rattle,

who drive in the gods that swell the body—unless

you have thrice in the morning, as prescribed, tasted a head of garlic.

If you say these things among the varicose centurions,

at once huge Pulfenius gives his coarse laugh

and bids a clipped hundred-as for a hundred Greeks.

6. Has the winter already brought you, Bassus, to your Sabine hearth?

Do the lyre and its strings live for you now under the stern quill?

Marvellous craftsman, in setting to measure the first beginnings of the ancient tongue,

and in stretching the manly sound of the Latin lyre,

and then in stirring the merry sports of youth, and with honourable thumb,

a noble old man, in sporting still. For me, now, the Ligurian shore

grows mild, and my sea keeps its winter, where the cliffs

give a huge flank, and the coast draws back into a long valley.

"It is worth your while, citizens, to know the harbour of Luna":

so Ennius's heart commands, after he stopped snoring that he was

Homer, the fifth from the Pythagorean peacock.

Here I, careless of the crowd, and of what the south wind is preparing,

luckless for the flock, and careless of that corner

of my neighbour's land, because it is richer than mine—and even if all

born of worse stock should grow wealthy, I would still refuse,

just for that, to be bowed and shrunk with age, or to dine without sauce,

or to test with my nose the seal on a flat, flavourless flask.

Let another differ from these. The Horoscope brings forth twins

with discordant Genius: one man, only on his birthdays,

slyly dips his dried greens in brine bought by the cupful,

himself sprinkling the sacred pepper on the dish; another, a great-souled boy,

runs through his vast goods with his tooth. I will use my own, I will use it,

yet not so lavishly as to set turbots before my freedmen,

nor so fine-tongued as to know the subtle savours of thrushes.

Live to the limit of your own harvest, and grind out your granaries—

it is right. What should you fear? Harrow, and another crop is already in the blade.

"But duty calls: a friend, shipwrecked, his beam broken,

clutches the Bruttian rocks, a pauper, and has buried his whole fortune

and his unheard prayers in the Ionian sea; he himself lies on the shore,

and with him the great gods from the stern, and now the ribs of the broken ship

lie open to the gulls." Now, then, break off something from the living turf,

bestow it on the poor man, lest he wander painted

on a sea-blue tablet. "But the heir will neglect the funeral feast,

angry that you have cut his fortune short; he will give

your unscented bones to the urn, ready not to care

whether the cinnamon breathes faint, or the cassia is adulterated with cherry-bark:

are you to lessen your goods while still unharmed?" And Bestius presses

the Greek teachers: "so it goes; ever since this wisdom of ours,

without backbone, came to the city along with pepper and dates,

the haymakers have spoiled their porridge with thick grease."

Are you to fear such things beyond the ash? But you, my heir,

whoever you shall be, come a little apart from the crowd and hear.

Good fellow, do you not know? A laurel has been sent by Caesar

for a notable slaughter of the German youth, and from the altars

the cold ash is shaken out, and already Caesonia is hiring arms for the doorposts,

already royal cloaks, already tawny wigs for the captives,

and chariots and huge Rhines. So to the gods

and to the leader's Genius, for deeds nobly done, I bring on

a hundred pairs of gladiators. Who forbids it? Dare to object!

Woe to you if you do not connive! I lavish oil and pies

on the public—do you forbid it? Speak out plainly! "Not so far," you say;

"the field nearby has been stripped of stones." Well, if I have

no aunt left now, no female cousin, no great-granddaughter

of an uncle, my uncle's wife has died barren,

and nothing remains of my grandmother, I go to Bovillae

and the hill of Virbius, and Manius is ready to be my heir,

a son of the soil. "Ask me who is my fourth

ancestor"—not readily, yet I will tell you; add one more,

and one more still: he is already a son of the soil, and by this reckoning

this Manius comes out as almost my great-uncle in the line.

You who are ahead in the race—why do you ask me for the torch as I run my course?

I am your Mercury; I come as a god to you, just as he

is painted. Do you refuse? Will you not be glad of what is left?

"Something is missing from the total." It has shrunk for me, but for you

it is the whole, whatever it is. Where the thing is that Tadius

once left me, forbear to ask, nor recite paternal sayings:

"Let the interest be added to the capital; from this take your expenses."

"What is left?" Left? Now, now, baste the cabbages more lavishly,

baste them, boy! For me, on the festal day, let a nettle be cooked

and a smoke-blackened pig's-cheek with a split ear,

so that that grandson of yours, glutted one day on a goose's giblets,

when his fastidious vein throbs in his roving loins,

may discharge himself into a patrician womb? Shall the warp of my frame

be all that is left, while his priestly belly quivers with fat?

Sell your soul for gain, trade, and shrewdly ransack

every quarter of the world, that none may be your better

at slapping fat Cappadocians on the stiff slave-platform;

double your fortune. "I have; now it is triple, now fourfold,

now tenfold it returns into my fold. Mark where I am to stop:

found at last, Chrysippus, is he who can set the limit to your heap."