Book 2

6. Satire VI I believe that Chastity lingered on the earth in the reign of Saturn,

and was seen there long, when a cold cave furnished its cramped

dwellings, and shut up fire and household god,

and flock and masters, in one shared shade,

when a mountain wife spread her woodland bed

with leaves and straw and the skins of neighboring

beasts—not at all like you, Cynthia, nor like you whose

bright little eyes were troubled by a dead sparrow,

but one carrying breasts for great babies to drink from,

and often more unkempt than her acorn-belching husband.

For then, in a new-made world and a young sky,

men lived otherwise, who, born from a split oak

or molded out of clay, had no parents at all.

Perhaps many traces of the old Chastity survived,

or some, even under Jove—but Jove not yet

bearded, and the Greeks not yet ready to swear

by another's head—when no one feared a thief

for his cabbages and fruit, and lived with an open garden.

Then little by little Astraea withdrew to the gods above

with this companion, and the two sisters fled together.

It is an ancient and long-standing thing, Postumus, to shake

another man's bed and scorn the spirit of the sacred marriage-couch.

Every other crime the iron age soon brought forth:

the silver age saw the first adulterers.

Yet in our own day you are arranging a meeting and a pact

and a betrothal, and already by a master barber's hand

you are being combed, and perhaps have given a pledge for her finger;

surely you were once sane. Postumus, are you taking a wife?

Tell me, by what Tisiphone, by what serpents are you driven?

Can you endure any mistress, while so many ropes are at hand,

while the high dizzying windows stand open,

while the Aemilian bridge offers itself close by?

Or if none of these many exits pleases you, do you not think

it better that a boy should sleep with you?

A boy who does not wrangle at night, demands of you

no little gifts as he lies there, and never complains

that you spare your flanks and do not pant as hard as he bade.

But the Julian Law pleases Ursidius: he means to raise a sweet

heir, though he must lose his fine turtle-doves,

his bearded mullets, and the legacy-hunters' market.

What could you think impossible, if any woman weds

Ursidius? If the most notorious adulterer of old

now thrusts his stupid head into the marriage-halter,

a man whom doomed Latinus' chest so often hid?

What of this too—that he seeks a wife of old-fashioned

morals? Doctors, lance the overfull vein!

What a dainty fellow! Bow to the Tarpeian threshold,

face down, and slaughter a gilt heifer to Juno,

if it falls to your lot to win a matron of chaste head.

So few are worthy to touch the fillets of Ceres,

whose kisses a father need not fear: weave a garland

for your doorposts, and stretch thick ivy across the lintels.

Does one husband suffice Hiberina? Sooner will you

wring this from her—that she be content with one eye.

But there is great fame of a certain woman living

on her father's farm? Let her live at Gabii as she lived in the country,

let her live at Fidenae, and I grant your father's little plot.

Yet who maintains that nothing was done in the hills or in

the caves? Have Jupiter and Mars grown so old?

Is any woman shown to you in the colonnades worthy

of your vow? Do the seats and the whole tiers of the theater hold

one you might love untroubled and pick out from there?

When soft Bathyllus dances Leda in mime,

Tuccia cannot command her bladder, Apula whimpers

as if suddenly clasped—a wretched, long-drawn sound;

Thymele attends: Thymele the country-girl learns her lessons then.

But others, whenever the rolled-up stage-curtains rest

and the law-courts alone sound, the theater empty and shut,

and the Megalesian games are far from the Plebeian,

mournfully clutch a mask and a thyrsus and the loincloth of Accius.

Urbicus, in the Atellan farce, raises a laugh

with the gestures of Autonoe; poor Aelia loves him.

For these women the comic actor's clasp is unfastened at great cost; there are some

who keep Chrysogonus from singing; Hispulla dotes on a tragedian:

do you expect a Quintilian to be loved?

You take a wife, by whom a lyre-player—Echion

or Glaphyrus—shall become a father, or Ambrosius the flute-boy.

Let us set up long platforms through the narrow streets,

let the doorposts be adorned, and the entrance with great laurel,

so that in your tortoiseshell canopy, Lentulus, your noble

infant may show the features of Euryalus or a Murmillo.

Eppia, wedded to a senator, followed a gladiator-troupe

to Pharos and the Nile and the infamous walls of Lagus,

while even Canopus condemned the monstrous morals of the city.

Forgetful of home, of husband, and of sister,

she gave nothing to her country, and wickedly left her weeping children,

and—that you may marvel more—she left the games and Paris.

Though as a tiny girl she had slept amid great wealth,

on her father's down and in jeweled cradles,

she scorned the sea; she had scorned her good name long since—

a loss that counts for little among soft sedan-chairs.

So she endured the Tyrrhenian waves and the far-resounding

Ionian with steadfast heart, though so often

she had to change her sea. Where the cause of danger

is just and honorable, women are afraid, their breasts

freeze in terror, and they cannot stand on trembling soles:

a brave spirit they show in deeds they basely dare.

If a husband bids it, it is hard to board a ship;

then the bilge stinks, then the very sky reels round.

But she who follows a lover has a strong stomach; that wife

vomits over her husband, this one feasts among the sailors,

and roams the deck and delights to handle the rough ropes.

Yet with what beauty was Eppia inflamed, by what youth

captivated? What did she see, that she could bear

to be called a gladiator's woman? For her little Sergius had already

begun to scrape his throat and to hope for discharge from his cut arm;

besides, there was much deformity in his face: a scar

galled by the helmet, a huge wen in the middle

of his nostrils, and the sharp ailment of a forever-running eye.

But he was a gladiator. This makes them into Hyacinthuses;

this she preferred to her children and her country, this to her sister

and her husband: it is the steel they love. This same Sergius,

once discharged, would have begun to look like a Veiento.

Why do you care what a private house, what Eppia did?

Look at the rivals of the gods; hear what Claudius

endured. When his wife felt that her husband slept,

she dared to prefer a common mat to the Palatine couch.

That imperial whore took up her nighttime hoods

and left, with no more than a single maid for company.

But hiding her black hair under a yellow wig,

she entered a warm brothel with its old patchwork curtain,

and an empty cell, her own; then, naked, with gilded

nipples, she stood for hire, taking the false name of Lycisca,

and displayed the belly that bore you, noble Britannicus.

She welcomed her customers fawningly and demanded their money;

then, when the pimp now dismissed his girls,

she went away sadly, and yet, the last, did what she could—

she closed her cell, still burning with the rage of her stiffened lust,

and worn out by men, but not yet sated, she withdrew,

and foul, her cheeks grimed with the lamp's soot,

she carried the stench of the brothel to the emperor's pillow.

Shall I speak of love-charms and incantations, of the boiled poison

given to a stepson? Driven by the imperious power

of their sex, they do worse, and their lust is their least offense.

"But why is Censennia called the best, on her husband's word?"

She brought him a million: at that price he calls her chaste.

He is not lean from Venus' quiver, nor does he burn with her torch:

her dowry kindles the fires, the arrows come from the dowry,

her freedom is bought; she may signal openly, and write back

to a lover: the rich wife who marries a miser is a widow.

"Why does Sertorius burn with desire for Bibula?"

If you sift the truth, it is the face that is loved, not the wife.

Let three wrinkles appear and the dry skin go slack,

let the teeth grow dark and the eyes smaller:

"Pack up your little bundles," her freedman will say, "and get out.

You are a nuisance to us now, you blow your nose too often—get out,

and quick"; for another wife is coming, with a dry nose.

Meanwhile she is in her glory and reigns and demands of her husband

shepherds and a Canusian sheep and Falernian elms;

a small matter, this. She demands all his slave-boys, whole prison-gangs;

and whatever is not in the house but the neighbor has, must be bought.

Then in the month of winter, when the merchant Jason

is shut in and the white booth blocks the armed sailors,

great crystal vessels are carried off, then huge

murrhine bowls, then a most famous diamond,

made more precious by being on Berenice's finger: this gift the barbarian

Agrippa once gave to his incestuous sister,

where kings keep the festal sabbaths barefoot,

and an ancient mercy spares old pigs to grow old.

"Out of so many flocks does none seem worthy to you?"

Suppose her beautiful, graceful, rich, fertile, with ancient

ancestors ranged along her colonnades, more chaste than any

Sabine who broke off the war with streaming hair,

a rare bird on the earth, most like a black swan:

who could bear a wife in whom everything is perfect? I would rather,

far rather, have a Venusine girl than you, Cornelia, mother

of the Gracchi, if with your great virtues you bring

a grand disdain and reckon up triumphs in your dowry.

Take away, I beg, your Hannibal and conquered Syphax

in his camp, and migrate with the whole of Carthage.

"Spare us, I beg, Healer, and you, goddess, lay down your arrows;

the children have done nothing—aim at the mother herself,"

cries Amphion; but the Healer draws his bow,

and so carried off the flock of her children and their father too,

while Niobe thought herself nobler than Latona's race,

and more fertile than the white sow.

What gravity, what beauty is worth so much, that she should forever

charge it to your account? For the pleasure of this rare

and supreme good is none, whenever a soul corrupted by pride

holds more of aloes than of honey. And who is so devoted

that he would not shudder at the very woman he extols with praise,

and hate her seven hours out of the day?

Some faults are small, indeed, yet not to be endured by husbands.

For what is more nauseating than that no woman thinks herself

beautiful unless she has turned from a Tuscan into a little Greek,

from a girl of Sulmo into a pure Athenian? Everything is in Greek—

though it is more shameful for our women not to know Latin;

in this tongue they voice their fear, their anger, joys, and cares,

in this they pour out all the secrets of the soul. What more?

They make love in Greek. Yet you might grant these things to girls.

But will you too, whom your eighty-sixth year

batters, still speak Greek? That tongue is not chaste

in an old woman: as often as that wanton phrase comes out,

"my life and soul," you are using in public the words

just left under the bedclothes. For what would not stir the loins,

a coaxing, naughty voice? It has fingers in it. Yet, that all

your feathers may sink, though you say these things more softly than Haemus

or Carpophorus, your face is reckoning up the years.

If you are not going to love the woman pledged and joined to you

by a lawful contract, there seems no reason

for marrying, no reason to waste the wedding-feast and the must-cakes

handed out when the company breaks up, gifts for the well-fed guests, nor that

which is given for the first night's right, when on a rich plate

the Dacian and the inscribed Germanicus gleam in gold.

If you have a husband's simplicity, a heart devoted to one,

then bow your head and bend your neck, ready

to bear the yoke: you will find no woman who spares a lover.

Though she burns herself, she delights in the torments of her lover

and in his spoils; and so the better and more desirable a husband

a man will be, the less useful a wife is to him.

You will never give anything against your wife's will, you will sell

nothing if she opposes, nothing will be bought if she refuses.

She will decide your affections: let that old friend be shut out

whose beard your door once saw when it was young.

Though pimps and gladiator-trainers have the freedom

to make a will, and the men of the arena enjoy the same right,

more than one of your rivals will be dictated to you as heir.

"Crucify that slave." "By what crime has the slave earned

his punishment? What witness is there? Who informed? Hear him out;

no delay is ever too long when a man's death is at stake."

"You fool—so a slave is a man? Suppose he has done nothing—be it so:

this is my will, so I command; let my pleasure stand for reason."

So she lords it over her husband. But soon she gives up these realms

and changes households and wears out her bridal veils, then

flutters off and seeks again the traces of the bed she scorned;

she leaves the doors she lately adorned, the hangings

still in the house, and the boughs still green upon the threshold.

So the number grows, so there come to be eight husbands

in five autumns—a fact worth recording on a tombstone.

You may despair of harmony while the mother-in-law lives.

She teaches her daughter to delight in the spoils of a stripped husband;

she teaches her, when notes come from a seducer,

to write back nothing crude or simple; she beguiles

the guards, or breaks them with bribes; then, though her daughter's body is sound,

she summons Archigenes and tosses off the heavy blankets.

Meanwhile the adulterer lies hidden and concealed,

and, impatient of delay, stays silent and works his foreskin.

Do you really expect a mother to hand down honest

morals, or any other than the ones she has? It pays, besides,

for a foul old woman to bring up her daughter foul.

There is scarcely a lawsuit in which a woman has not

stirred up the quarrel. If she is not the defendant, Manilia accuses.

They compose and frame their pleas themselves, all on their own,

ready to dictate to Celsus the opening and the headings.

Who does not know the Tyrian wrestling-cloaks, the women's wrestling-grease?

Who has not seen the wounds of the post,

which she gouges with constant practice-swords and pounds with her shield,

and goes through all the drills—a matron most fit indeed

for the Floralia's trumpet?—unless in that breast

she is plotting something more, and training for the real arena.

What modesty can a helmeted woman show,

who flees her sex? She loves strength: yet she herself

would not wish to become a man, for how slight is our pleasure!

What a fine sight, if your wife's goods were put up for auction,

the baldric and the gauntlets and the crests and the half

cover of the left leg! Or, if she fights another

kind of battle, you are a lucky man when your girl sells off her greaves.

These are the women who sweat in a thin gown, whose

delicate skin a silken scrap chafes.

See with what a snarl she delivers the strokes she has been taught,

with what a weight of helmet she is bent down, how thick

the bandage that sits upon her hams, how dense its bark—

and laugh when, her arms laid by, she takes up the chamber-pot.

Tell me, you granddaughters of Lepidus or blind Metellus

or Fabius Gurges, what gladiator's woman ever put on

such gear, when she was panting at the post, the wife of Asylus.

The bed in which a wife lies always has its quarrels

and mutual wranglings; there is very little sleep there.

Then she is a burden to her husband, then worse than a tigress robbed of cubs,

when, conscious of her own secret deed, she feigns groans;

she either hates the slave-boys, or weeps over an invented mistress,

with floods of tears forever at the ready, forever

posted at their station, awaiting her command,

in what manner she bids them flow. You think it love;

you flatter yourself, you grub, and suck up the weeping

with your lips—what notes, what letters you would read,

if the desk of your jealous adulteress were laid open!

But suppose she is caught in the embrace of a slave or a knight. "Tell me,

tell me some plea here, please, Quintilian, some color."

We are stuck. "Speak for yourself."

"Long ago it was agreed," she says,

"that you might do as you pleased, and that I too might

indulge myself. Shout though you may and confound sea with sky—

I am a human being." Nothing is bolder than these women

once caught: they take their anger and their spirit from the very crime.

Whence these monsters, you ask, or from what source?

In old days lowly fortune kept the Latin women chaste;

it was their toil, their short sleep, their hands

galled and hardened with Tuscan wool, Hannibal close to the city,

and their husbands standing on the Colline tower,

that kept the little dwellings untouched by vices.

Now we suffer the evils of a long peace: luxury, more savage

than war, has settled on us and avenges a conquered world.

No crime, no deed of lust is absent, since

Roman poverty perished. From that source there flowed in upon these

hills both Sybaris and Rhodes and Miletus

and garlanded, wanton, sodden Tarentum.

Filthy money first brought in the foreign morals,

and broke our ages with shameful luxury,

these soft riches. For what does drunken Venus care?

She does not know what difference there is between groin and head,

she who at midnight bites into great oysters,

when the unguents foam, drenched in unmixed Falernian,

when she drinks from a great shell, when the ceiling

walks round in her dizziness and the table rises with its twin lamps.

Go now and wonder with what a sneer Tullia

snuffs up the air, what Maura, foster-sister of the notorious Maura,

says, as she passes the ancient altar of Chastity.

Here at night they set down their litters, here they make water

and drench the goddess' image with long jets,

and ride each other in turn, and stir, with the Moon for witness;

then off they go home—and you, when daylight returns, tread on

your wife's urine on your way to greet your great friends.

Known are the secret rites of the Good Goddess, when the flute

excites the loins and, swept along alike by horn and wine,

the maenads of Priapus whirl their hair and howl, frenzied.

O what a blaze then in their minds for coupling,

what a cry as their lust leaps, what a torrent

of old wine pouring down their drenched thighs!

Saufeia, with the prize set up, challenges the pimps'

maids and carries off the trophy for her swaying haunch;

but she herself adores the rolling of Medullina's hips:

the palm is among ladies; their prowess matches their birth.

Nothing there will be feigned in play; everything will be done

in earnest—enough to fire the now ice-cold

son of Laomedon, or Nestor with his rupture.

Then their itch can brook no delay, then the woman is pure female,

and from every part of the cavern the cry comes back at once:

"Now it is lawful—let the men in!" If the adulterer sleeps,

she bids a youth take a hood and hurry;

if none can be had, the slaves are rushed; if you take away the hope

of the slaves, a hired water-carrier will come; and if

he is sought and the men are lacking, she herself makes no delay,

but slips under a saddled donkey.

And would that the old rites and the public sacraments at least

were performed untainted by these evils! But all the Moors

and Indians know what flute-girl brought in a penis

bigger than the two Anti-Catos of Caesar,

into that place from which a mouse flees, conscious of its testicles,

where a painting is ordered to be veiled,

any that has copied the figures of the other sex.

And what man then despised the divine power? Or who

dared to laugh at Numa's ladle and his black dish

and the brittle plates from the Vatican hill?

But now—to what altars does Clodius not come?

. . .

And now the same lust runs through the highest and the lowest alike,

and she is no better who wears down the black flint with her feet

than she who is carried on the necks of tall Syrians.

To watch the games, Ogulnia hires a dress,

hires attendants, a litter, a cushion, women friends,

a nurse, and a fair-haired girl to whom she gives her orders;

yet whatever is left of her father's silver,

she gives away—even the last vessels—to smooth-skinned athletes.

Many have a narrow estate at home, but none has the modesty

of poverty, nor measures herself to the limit

that poverty set and laid down. Yet men do sometimes

look ahead to what is useful: some have at last learned to dread

frost and famine, schooled by the ant;

but the spendthrift woman does not feel her wealth perishing.

And, as if the coin would sprout again, reborn,

from the emptied chest, and could always be taken from a full heap,

they never reckon what their pleasures cost them.

In whatever house there lives and plays a man who professes

the obscene art, who promises everything with a quivering right hand,

you will find them all foul and like the deviants.

These men they permit to defile their food and stand at the holy

table, and bid that vessels be washed which must be smashed,

once a Colocyntha or a bearded Chelidon has drunk from them.

A gladiator-trainer, then, is purer and better than your house,

among whose number the heavy man is bidden to dwell far off

from the slender; nor are the nets joined with the foul

tunic, nor does the same cell hold

the shoulder-guards and the arms and the battered trident

of the man who fights naked. The last division of the school

receives such souls, and others its stocks within the prison;

but your wife makes you and them share one cup—

men with whom the fair whore of a ruinous tomb

would refuse to taste the Alban or the Surrentine wine.

By their counsel women marry and as suddenly withdraw;

with these they relieve a drooping spirit and the serious business of life;

from these as masters they learn to wag their haunch and flank,

and whatever else he knows who teaches it. Yet not in him

must trust always be placed: he feeds his eyes with soot,

streaked with saffron, the netted adulterer;

let him be the more suspect to you the softer his voice, and the more

often his right hand lingers on his tender loins:

this one will be most valiant in bed; there he sheds

his mask, the docile Thais, played by a Triphallus.

"Whom are you mocking? Take this farce to others! Let a wager be laid:

I maintain you are a true man, I maintain it. Do you confess?

Or does the torturer's cell summon the maids?" I know

the advice and the old warnings you all give, friends:

"Set a bolt, keep her shut up." But who is to guard

the guards themselves, who now keep silent the thefts of the wanton girl

for this very wage? A shared crime is hushed up:

a prudent wife foresees this and begins with them. . . .

There are women whom feeble eunuchs delight, and the ever-soft

kisses, and the despair of a beard,

and the fact that there is no need of an abortion. Yet their greatest

pleasure is this—that the loins are handed to the surgeons

when youth is already at its hot ripeness and the hair grows black;

and so, after the testicles, awaited and bidden to grow first,

have begun to weigh two pounds,

Heliodorus snatches them off, to the barber's loss alone.

The slave-dealers' boys are seared by a real and pitiable

mutilation, and are ashamed of the empty pouch and the lost chick-pea.

Conspicuous from afar and marked by all, he enters

the baths, and challenges, no doubt, the guardian of the vine and garden—

made a eunuch by his mistress. Let him sleep

with his mistress; but you, Postumus, do not entrust

Bromius, now grown hard and ripe for the eunuch's blade.

If she delights in song, no clasp holds out against her

who sells her voice to the praetors; the instruments are always

in her hands, the sardonyxes glitter thick over the whole shell;

with a rippling quill the strings are run through,

the quill that tender Hedymeles plied: this she holds, with this

she consoles herself, and gives kisses to the dear plectrum.

A certain woman of the line of the Lamiae and the name of Appius

prayed to Janus and Vesta with meal and wine,

whether Pollio might hope for the Capitoline oak-crown

and promise it to his lyre. What more could she have done

if her husband were ill, or if the doctors despaired

of her little son? She stood before the altar, and thought it no shame

to veil her head on a lyre-player's behalf, and bore the dictated

words, as is the custom, and turned pale at the opened lamb.

Tell me now, I beg, tell me, most ancient of the gods,

do you answer these prayers, father Janus? Great is the idleness of heaven;

there is nothing, I see, nothing for you gods to do.

One consults you about comedians, another wishes to recommend

a tragedian; the soothsayer will get varicose veins.

But let her sing rather than go flitting through the whole city,

bold, able to bear the gatherings of men,

and with cloaked generals, in her husband's presence,

to talk herself, with a straight face and dry breasts.

This same woman knows what is happening in all the world, what the Chinese,

what the Thracians are at, the secrets of stepmother

and stepson, who is in love, what adulterer is fought over;

she will tell you who got the widow with child, and in what

month, with what words and in how many ways each woman couples.

She is the first to see the comet that threatens the Armenian

and the Parthian king; she catches the latest news and rumors

at the gates—some she invents: that the Niphates

has burst upon the nations, that there everything is held by a great

flood, that cities are tottering, that lands are sinking;

she tells it at any crossroads to anyone she meets.

Yet that vice is not more intolerable than hers who is wont

to seize her humble neighbors and flog them with thongs,

when begged to do so. For if her deep sleep is broken

by barking, "Bring the cudgels here, quick," she says,

"bring them," and orders the master to be beaten first,

then the dog—grim of approach, most hideous of face.

She goes to the baths by night, has her flasks and her kit moved by

night, loves to sweat in a great uproar;

when her arms have dropped, wearied by the heavy weights,

and the cunning masseur has pressed his fingers on her flesh

and made her thigh's top cry out,

meanwhile her wretched guests are overcome by sleep

and hunger. At last she comes, all flushed, thirsting

for the whole wine-jar, which is set, brimful as an urn,

at her feet, from which a second pint

is drawn before the food, to whet a ravening appetite,

while it comes back up and strikes the ground from her washed-out gut.

The wine runs over the marble; the gilded basin

reeks of Falernian; for she drinks and vomits like a long

snake that has tumbled into a deep vat; and so her husband,

sickened, shuts his eyes and holds back his bile.

But more burdensome still is she who, when she has begun to recline,

praises Virgil, pardons Dido about to die,

pits poets against each other and compares them, hangs Maro

in one scale and Homer in the other.

The grammarians yield, the rhetoricians are beaten, the whole

company falls silent; neither pleader nor crier will speak,

nor any other woman; such a force of words falls down,

you would say so many basins and bells

were being struck at once. Let no one weary the trumpets now, no one the bronze:

she alone will be able to come to the aid of the laboring Moon.

The wise man sets a limit even to honorable things;

for she who longs to seem too learned and eloquent

should hitch her tunic up to mid-thigh,

sacrifice a pig to Silvanus, and bathe for a farthing.

Let not the matron who reclines at your side have

a style of speaking, or whirl a crooked enthymeme in rolling

discourse, or know all the histories,

but let there be some things in books she does not understand. I hate

the woman who is forever poring over and unrolling Palaemon's grammar,

keeping always the law and rule of speech,

and who, an antiquarian, quotes verses unknown to me,

and corrects in a country friend words

no man should care about: let a husband be allowed his solecism.

There is nothing a woman will not permit herself, she thinks nothing shameful,

once she has hung green gems about her neck and fastened

great pearls to her stretched ears;

there is nothing more unbearable than a rich woman.

Meanwhile her face, foul to look at and laughable, swells

with much bread-paste, or breathes out greasy Poppaean ointments,

and on these the lips of her wretched husband stick fast:

to her adulterer she comes with washed skin. When does she care to look

beautiful at home? It is for adulterers that the perfumes are got ready,

for them is bought whatever you slender Indians send us here.

At last she opens her face and lays aside the first coating;

she begins to be recognized, and is soothed with that milk

for which she would lead a herd of she-asses with her

into exile, if she were sent off to the Hyperborean pole.

But she who is plastered over and soothed

with so many medicaments, and takes lumps of boiled

and moistened bread-dough—shall it be called a face, or a sore?

It is worth one's pains to learn thoroughly what they do

and how they spend the whole day. If at night her husband

has lain turned away, the wool-keeper is done for, the dressers

put off their tunics, the litter-bearer is said to have come

late, and is forced to pay the penalty for another's sleep;

this one's rods are broken, that one reddens under the whip,

this one under the lash; some keep torturers on a yearly wage.

She flogs, and meanwhile paints her face, listens to her women friends,

or studies the broad gold of an embroidered robe,

and flogs; she reads across the long day-book

and flogs, until, the floggers worn out, she thunders "Out!"—

dreadful, the inquiry now done.

The governance of her house is no gentler than a Sicilian court;

for if she has fixed it and longs to be adorned more handsomely

than usual, and is in haste, with someone waiting now in the gardens,

or rather at the shrine of the Isiac procuress,

unhappy Psecas, her own hair torn, arranges

her mistress's coiffure, with shoulders and breasts bared.

"Why is this curl too high?" The bull's-hide whip at once

punishes the crime and offense of a misplaced hair.

What has Psecas done? What fault of the girl is it here,

if your own nose has displeased you? Another, on the left,

draws out and combs the locks and rolls them into a circle.

In the council is an old woman, her mother's maid, now retired

from the wool and set over the hairpin; her opinion

will be first; after her, those lesser in age and skill

will vote, as if reputation or life

were at stake: so great is the care of seeking beauty;

with so many tiers she presses, with so many courses she builds up

her lofty head; you will see an Andromache in front;

behind she is smaller—you would think her another woman. Suppose she has been allotted

a short span of little stature, and looks shorter

than a Pygmy maiden, helped by no high heels,

and rises lightly on tiptoe to a kiss.

Meanwhile no care is taken for the husband, no mention is made

of his losses. She lives as if she were her husband's neighbor,

closer only in this—that she hates his friends

and his slaves, and is a burden on his accounts. Look, the chorus

of frenzied Bellona and the Mother of the gods enters, and a huge

half-man, a face the lesser obscene crew must revere,

who long ago cut off his soft genitals with a broken sherd,

before whom the hoarse troop, before whom the timbrels give way;

his common cheeks are wrapped in a Phrygian tiara.

He bawls aloud and bids her dread the coming of September

and the South Wind, unless she purifies herself with a hundred eggs

and presents him with her old dark-red gowns,

so that whatever sudden and great peril threatens

may pass into the garments and atone for the whole year at once.

In winter she will go down into the river through broken ice,

plunge three times in the morning Tiber,

and wash her timid head in the very eddies; then over the whole field

of the proud king she will creep, naked and trembling, on bleeding

knees; if white Io commands, she will go

to the end of Egypt and fetch waters sought

from warm Meroe, to sprinkle them in the temple

of Isis, which rises next to the ancient sheepfold.

For she believes she is warned by the very voice of the mistress goddess:

behold a soul and mind with which the gods may talk at night!

So the chief and highest honor is earned by him

who, ringed with a linen-clad troop and a bald-headed troop,

runs as Anubis, mocking the wailing people.

He begs forgiveness whenever a wife does not abstain

from intercourse on the holy and to-be-observed days,

and a great penalty is owed for the violated coverlet,

and the silver serpent was seen to move its head;

his tears and his studied mutterings procure

that Osiris will not refuse pardon for the fault—

bribed, of course, by a fat goose and a thin cake.

When he has given place, a quaking Jewess, leaving her basket

and her hay behind, begs at her secret ear,

interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem and high priestess

of the tree and trusty go-between of highest heaven.

She too fills her hand, but more sparingly; for a small coin

the Jews will sell you dreams of any sort you please.

A tender lover, or the huge legacy of a rich

childless man, an Armenian or Commagenian soothsayer

promises, after handling the lung of a warm dove;

he will probe the breasts of chickens, the entrails of a puppy,

sometimes even of a boy; he will do what he can then inform upon.

But in the Chaldeans there will be greater trust: whatever

the astrologer says, they will believe brought back from the spring

of Ammon, since the oracles at Delphi have ceased

and the darkness of the future condemns the human race.

Yet the chief of these is one who has often been an exile,

through whose friendship—if his right hand has clanked with iron

and his left, if he has long dwelt in a camp-prison—

the trust in his art comes. No astrologer will have genius

if he is uncondemned, but one who has barely escaped, who has just managed

to be sent to a Cyclad, and at last to be quit of little Seriphos.

She consults him about the lingering death of her jaundiced mother,

but first, your Tanaquil, about you—when she will bury

her sister and her uncles, whether her adulterer will outlive

her own self: for what greater thing can the gods grant?

Yet this woman does not know what the grim star

of Saturn threatens, under what constellation Venus shows herself glad,

which months are for losses, what seasons are given for gain:

remember to avoid even the meeting of her

in whose hands you see, like fat amber, well-thumbed

almanacs; she who consults no one and is now

consulted herself, who, when her husband seeks the camp or his country,

will not go with him, called back by the calculations of Thrasyllus.

When she chooses to be carried to the first milestone, the hour

is taken from a book; if the rubbed corner of her eye

itches, she asks for salve only after her horoscope is inspected;

though she lies sick, no hour seems fitter

for taking food than the one Petosiris has appointed.

If she is of middling rank, she will pace the space on each side

of the race-course turning-posts and draw lots, and offer her forehead

and her hand to the seer who asks for repeated lip-smackings.

To the rich a Phrygian augur will give responses, or a hired

Indian; one skilled in the stars and the sky will give them,

and some old man who buries the public lightning-bolts:

the plebeian's fate is set in the circus and on the embankment.

She who displays a long gold chain on her bare neck

consults, before the scaffolds and the dolphin-columns,

whether to leave the tavern-keeper and marry the cloak-seller.

Yet these women undergo the perils of childbirth and endure

all the labors of nursing, as their lot constrains them;

but scarcely any lies in childbed in a gilded couch,

so great is the power of that woman's arts, her drugs,

who makes women barren and hires herself out to kill

men in the womb. Rejoice, you wretch, and hold out yourself

whatever it is to be drunk; for if she chose to swell

and trouble her belly with leaping babies, you might perhaps

become the father of an Ethiopian—soon a dark heir

would fill your will, one you would never wish to see at dawn.

I pass over the foundlings, the joys and prayers so often

deceived at the foul cisterns, and the pontiffs

fetched from there, and the Salii destined to bear the names

of the Scauri in a false body. Wicked Fortune stands by night,

smiling on the naked infants; these she cherishes and folds

in her whole bosom, then hands them up to lofty houses,

preparing for herself a private farce; these she loves, on these

she presses herself, and forever brings them forward as her foster-children.

This man brings magic spells, this one sells Thessalian

philters, by which she may have power to trouble her husband's mind

and to thrash his buttocks with her slipper: it is from these

that your wits are gone, from these the darkness of your mind and the great

forgetting of the things you did but now. Yet this is bearable, if

you do not also begin to rave, like that uncle of Nero,

into whose whole forehead Caesonia poured

the fluid of a trembling foal's brow. What will the wife of an emperor not do?

Everything was ablaze and falling in with its frame shattered,

just as if Juno had made her husband mad;

less harmful, then, will Agrippina's mushroom be,

since it pressed the heart of one old man alone

and bade his palsied head go down

into heaven, his lips streaming with long slaver;

but this potion demands sword and fire, this one racks,

this tears apart the senators mixed with the blood of knights.

So much does a single poisoner cost; so much the foal of a mare.

They hate the children of a mistress: let no one resist,

let no one forbid; now, now it is lawful to kill a stepson.

You wards, I warn you, whose estate is the greater,

guard your lives and trust no dish:

those rich pastries reek, livid with a mother's poison.

Let someone bite first whatever she hands you

who bore you; let your timid tutor taste the cups before you.

Now all this, of course, is our invention; satire is putting on

the lofty buskin, and, overstepping the bounds and law of our forebears,

we rave a grand song in the Sophoclean gape,

a thing unknown to the Rutulian hills and the Latin sky?

Would that we were idle dreamers! But Pontia cries, "I did it,

I confess, and I prepared the aconite for my own children,

which, discovered, lies open; yet I myself carried out the deed."

"You—two, at one supper, you most savage viper?"

"You—two?" "Seven, had there happened to be seven!"

Let us believe whatever the tragedians say of the grim

Colchian and of Procne; I make no objection. They too

dared great monstrous deeds in their day, but

not for the sake of money; less wonder is owed

to the greatest monstrosities, whenever anger drives this sex

into guilt, and, with frenzy firing the liver, they are carried

headlong, like rocks torn from a ridge, from which the mountain

is drawn away and the hanging slope falls back.

That woman I could not endure who reckons it up and, cool-headed,

commits a monstrous crime. They watch Alcestis going

under her husband's fate, and, were a like exchange offered,

would gladly save a lapdog's life by their husband's death.

You will meet many a daughter of Belus and Eriphyle

in the morning; not a street but will have its Clytemnestra.

This much only is the difference—that the famed daughter of Tyndareus

held a clumsy, witless axe in right hand and left,

but now the deed is done with the thin lung of a toad;

yet with steel too, if her Atrides has cautiously

forearmed himself with the Pontic remedies of the thrice-conquered king."