Book 5

Satire XIII Whatever wrong is done by a bad example displeases its own author: this is the first revenge, that no guilty man is acquitted at his own bar, though by corrupt favour he has won the praetor's deceitful urn. What do you suppose all men think, Calvinus, of this fresh crime, of this charge of broken faith? Yet your means are not so slender that the weight of a modest loss should sink you; nor is what you suffer a rare thing. This is a mischance familiar to many, by now worn smooth, drawn from the common heap of fortune's lots. Let us put aside excessive groans: a man's grief ought not to blaze hotter than is fair, nor be greater than his wound. You can scarcely bear the least and tiniest particle of trifling ills, burning, your inwards seething, because a friend does not give back the trust deposited with him; does this astonish a man who has now left behind him sixty years, born in the consulship of Fonteius? Or do you gain nothing, with all your experience of the world? Mighty indeed is wisdom, conqueror of fortune, that gives her precepts in her sacred books; yet we count those happy too who, with life for their teacher, have learned to bear the troubles of existence and not to fling off the yoke. What day is so festive that it fails to bring to light a thief, treachery, frauds, and gain sought out by every kind of crime, and money got by the sword or the poison-box? For the good are few: count them, and they are scarcely as many as the gates of Thebes, or the mouths of the rich Nile. We are living the ninth age, an era worse than the times of iron, for whose wickedness Nature herself has found no name, and has named it from no metal. We call on the good faith of men and gods with a shout as loud as the cheering dole-crowd raises to praise Faesidius pleading. Tell me, old man, fit for a child's amulet, are you unaware what charms another's money holds? Are you unaware what laughter your simplicity stirs in the crowd, when you demand of any man that he not perjure himself, and that he believe there is some divine power in temples and at the reddening altar? Once the natives lived by this rule, before Saturn, in flight, laid down his crown and took up the rustic sickle, when Juno was still a little girl and Jupiter still a private person in the caves of Ida; no banquets of the heaven-dwellers above the clouds, no Trojan boy, nor the fair wife of Hercules, at the wine-cups; and Vulcan, wiping his arms that he had blackened in the Liparaean smithy, his nectar now drained. Each god dined by himself, nor was the throng of gods such as it is today, and the heavens, content with few divinities, pressed wretched Atlas with a lighter weight; no one had yet drawn by lot the gloomy dominion of the deep, nor grim Pluto with his Sicilian bride, no wheel, no Furies, no rock, nor the black vulture's torment, but the shades were merry, without kings of the underworld. Wickedness was a thing of wonder in that age, which counted it a great sin, to be atoned by death, if a young man had not risen for an old one, or a boy for any bearded man, even though he saw at home more strawberries and bigger heaps of acorns than they; so venerable a thing it was to be four years the elder, and the first down so equal to revered old age. Now, if a friend does not deny your deposit, if he gives back the old purse with all its rust, it is portentous honesty, worthy of the Etruscan records, and one that should be hallowed with a garlanded lamb. If I behold an upright and holy man, I compare this prodigy to a two-bodied child, to fish found in wonder beneath the plough, to a mule in foal— anxious, as though it had rained stones, or a swarm of bees settled in a long cluster on a temple's roof, as though a river had flowed into the sea with wondrous eddies, a torrent whirling with milk. You complain that ten thousand sesterces were filched by sacrilegious fraud. What if another lost two hundred that way in secret? A third a larger sum than the corner of his roomy strongbox could scarcely hold? So easy and natural is it to scorn the gods as witnesses, if no mortal share the knowledge! Look how loud a voice he uses to deny it, what constancy in his feigned face: he swears by the Sun's rays and the Tarpeian thunderbolts, by Mars' spear and the darts of the Cirrhaean seer, by the arrows of the huntress maiden and her quiver, and by your trident, father Neptune of the Aegean; he adds too the bow of Hercules and Minerva's spear, whatever weapons the armouries of heaven possess. And if he is a father besides, "May I eat," he says, "the boiled head of my son, soaked in Egyptian vinegar." There are some who set all things down to the chances of fortune, and believe the world is moved by no ruler, Nature rolling round the changes of light and year, and so they touch any altars fearlessly; another fears that punishment may follow his crime; this man thinks there are gods, and perjures himself, reasoning thus: "Let Isis decree whatever she will against my body and strike my eyes with her angry rattle, provided that, even blind, I keep the cash I deny; both consumption and rotting sores and half a leg are worth it. Ladas, if he is not in need of Anticyra nor of Archigenes, would not hesitate, poor as he is, to wish for the rich man's gout; for what does the glory of swift feet bestow, and the starving branch of Pisaean olive? Great though the gods' anger be, it is at least slow; if then they take care to punish all the guilty, when will they come to me? But perhaps I shall find the god placable: it is his way to pardon such things; many commit the same crimes with different fates: one bears the cross as the price of his crime, another a diadem." Thus he steadies his mind, trembling with dread of his dire guilt; then, when you call him to the sacred shrines, he goes before you—nay, is ready of his own accord to drag and harass you; for when there is great audacity to back a bad cause, it passes with many for assurance. He plays his part, like the runaway buffoon of witty Catullus; you, poor wretch, cry out, so as to outdo Stentor, or rather as loud as Homer's War-god: "Do you hear these things, Jupiter, and not move your lips, when you should have uttered a voice, be you of marble or of bronze? Or why do we lay on your coals the holy incense unwrapped from its paper, and the sliced liver of a calf and the white caul of a pig? As I see it, no distinction is to be drawn between your images and the statue of Vagellius." Hear what comfort he can offer in return, he who has read neither the Cynics nor the Stoic dogmas, that differ from the Cynics only by a tunic, and does not look up to Epicurus, content with the plants of his little garden. Let doubtful patients be tended by greater physicians: you, entrust your vein even to a pupil of Philippus. If you can show me no deed on earth so detestable, I am silent, nor do I forbid you to beat your breast with your fists, or to bruise your face with the flat palm, since, once the loss is suffered, the door must be shut, and with greater groaning, with greater uproar, money is bewailed in a house than a death; no one feigns his grief in this case, content to tear the top of his garment, to torment his eyes with forced moisture: lost money is mourned with real tears. But if you see all the law-courts full of like complaint, if, after the tablets are read ten times by the other side, men declare void the writing on the worthless wax, convicted though they are by their own hand and by the chief of sardonyx gems, kept in their ivory caskets, do you, my precious, think yourself a case set apart from the common lot, because you are the son of a white hen, and we cheap chicks, hatched from unlucky eggs? You suffer a modest wrong, to be borne with moderate bile, if you turn your eyes to greater crimes. Compare the hired assassin, fires begun with brimstone and craft, when the door first catches the flames; compare too those who carry off the great cups of an ancient temple, of venerable rust, and the gifts of peoples, or the crowns set up by some king of old; and where these are lacking, there is a lesser sacrilege, who scrapes the thigh of a gilded Hercules and the very face of Neptune, who pares the gold-leaf off Castor; why would he hesitate, who is wont to melt down the whole Thunderer? Compare too the makers and the merchant of poison, and the man to be sewn in an ox-hide and cast into the sea, along with which an innocent ape is shut up by adverse fates. How small a part of the crimes is this, which Gallicus, the city's guardian, hears from morning's star until the light goes down? If you wish to know the ways of the human race, one house suffices: spend a few days there, and then dare to call yourself wretched, once you have come away. Who marvels at a swollen throat in the Alps, or who at a breast in Meroe larger than a fat infant? Who is amazed at the blue eyes of a German, his yellow hair, and the horns he twists with a moistened lock? At the sudden birds of Thrace, the loud cloud, the Pygmy warrior runs out in his little arms, soon no match for his foe, snatched through the air by the curved talons of a savage crane. If you saw this among our peoples, you would shake with laughter; but there, though the same battles be watched continually, no one laughs, where the whole company is no taller than a foot. "Shall there be no penalty for the perjured head and the abominable fraud?" Suppose the man is seized at once with a heavier chain and put to death by our will—what more could anger want?— still that loss remains; never will your deposit be safe and yours again, but from the mutilated body the meagre blood will give you a hateful comfort. "But revenge is a good thing, sweeter than life itself." So say the ignorant indeed, whose hearts you may see at times blazing for no cause, or for a trifling one; however small the occasion, it suffices for their wrath. Chrysippus will not say the same, nor the gentle nature of Thales, nor the old man neighbour to sweet Hymettus, who, amid cruel chains, would give his accuser no part of the hemlock he had taken. Wisdom, that happy thing, strips off our vices and all our errors little by little; it is she that first teaches what is right; for revenge is always the pleasure of a petty and weak and trivial mind: draw your conclusion at once from this, that no one rejoices in revenge more than a woman. Yet why suppose that those men have escaped, whom the mind, conscious of a dread deed, holds stunned and lashes with a soundless whip, the soul plying its hidden scourge as tormentor? A heavy penalty, and far more savage than any that stern Caedicius or Rhadamanthus devised, to carry day and night one's own witness in one's breast. The Pythian priestess once answered a certain Spartan that it would not go unpunished that he hesitated to keep back a deposit and shield his fraud by an oath sworn falsely; for he was asking what the god's mind was, and whether Apollo would advise him to this deed. He gave it back, then, from fear, not from principle; and yet he proved every word of the shrine worthy of the temple, and true, being destroyed together with his whole offspring and house, and his kinsmen, however distant in a long line. Such penalties does the mere will to sin endure. For whoever silently meditates within himself any crime bears the guilt of the deed. What if he carries out his designs? Unending anxiety, that does not cease even at meal-times, his jaws dry as with a fever, his food growing hard between his molars; the wretch spits out the wine, the costly age of old Alban displeases him; show him a better, and a thick wrinkle gathers on his brow, as if drawn by sharp Falernian. At night, if perchance care has granted brief sleep, and his limbs, tossed about all over the bed, at last rest, straightway he sees the temple and the altars of the violated god, and—what most weighs upon his mind with sweat— he sees you in his dreams; your sacred and more than human image troubles him in his terror and forces him to confess. These are they who tremble and turn pale at every lightning-flash, who when it thunders are half-dead at the very first murmur of the sky, as though the fire fell not by chance nor by the rage of the winds, but in anger came down upon the earth to judge. That bolt did no harm; with heavier dread is feared the next storm, as if only deferred by this clear weather. Besides, if they begin to feel a pain in the side with a sleepless fever, they believe the disease was sent to their bodies by a hostile god; they think these stones and weapons of the gods. They dare not vow to the shrine a bleating sheep, nor promise a cock's comb to the Lares; for what hope is granted to the guilty when they are sick? Or what victim is not worthier of life than they? The nature of the wicked is for the most part fickle and shifting: while they commit a crime, resolve abounds; what is right and what is wrong they begin to feel at last, the crimes once done; yet nature returns to its condemned ways, fixed and unable to change. For who has set a limit to his sinning? When has anyone recovered the blush once banished from his hardened brow? What man have you ever seen content with a single disgrace? Our perfidious friend will set his foot in the snare and suffer the hook of the black dungeon, or the rock of the Aegean sea and the crags thronged with great exiles. You will rejoice in the bitter punishment of the hated name, and at last confess, glad, that none of the gods is deaf or like Teiresias.

Satire XIV Many are the things, Fuscinus, both worthy of evil fame and fixing a stain that clings to the brightness of one's fortunes, which parents themselves point out and hand on to their children. If ruinous dice delight the old man, the heir too plays, a boy in his amulet, and shakes the same weapons in his little box. Nor will any young man let a kinsman hope better of him, who has learned to scrape truffles of the earth, to season a mushroom and to plunge fig-peckers swimming in the same sauce, with a wastrel for a father and grey-haired gluttony for his teacher. When the seventh year has passed over the boy, before all his teeth are grown again, though you set a thousand bearded masters on this side, as many on that, he will always long to dine in splendid style, and not to fall short of a great kitchen. Does Rutilus prescribe a mild spirit and ways forgiving of small faults, and think that the souls of slaves and our bodies are made of the same stuff and the like elements— or does he teach savagery, who delights in the bitter crash of the lash, and counts no Siren equal to the whip, the Antiphates and Polyphemus of his trembling household, happy only when, some torturer summoned, a man is branded with hot iron for the theft of two towels? What does he counsel the young man, that lover of the chain's clank, who is wondrously thrilled by the brands, the work-houses, the prison? Do you expect, you simpleton, that the daughter of Larga will not be an adulteress, who could never name her mother's lovers so swiftly, nor reel them off at so great a pace, without drawing breath thirteen times? As a girl she shared her mother's secrets; now at her dictation she fills the little tablets and gives them to the same minions to carry to her lover. So nature bids: the household examples of vice corrupt us more quickly and sooner, since they steal into our minds backed by great authority. One youth or another perhaps will scorn these things, in whom Titan, with kindly skill and better clay, has fashioned a heart; but the rest are led on by the steps of their fathers, to be shunned, and the long-trodden rut of old guilt drags them down. Abstain, then, from what deserves blame. For this there is at least one strong reason: that our own crimes may not be copied by those born of us, since we are all apt pupils in imitating what is base and crooked; you may see a Catiline in any people, under any sky, but nowhere a Brutus or a Brutus' uncle. Let nothing foul to speak of or to see touch the threshold within which a father dwells; far, far from there the girls of the pimp and the song of the parasite carousing all night. The greatest reverence is owed to a child, if you are planning anything base; do not despise your boy's tender years, but let your infant son stand in the way when you would sin. For if at some time he does anything to deserve the censor's anger, and shows himself like you not only in body and face but in character too—a son who outdoes you in every sin along your own tracks— you will rebuke him, of course, and chastise him with a bitter outcry, and after that set about altering your will. But where do you find the brow and the freedom of a parent, when you, an old man, do worse things, and this head of yours, long empty of brains, has need of the windy cupping-glass? When a guest is coming, none of your household will rest. "Sweep the floor, show off the bright columns, let the dry cobweb come down with all its web; let this one polish the plain silver, that the embossed plate": the master's voice rages, pressing on, rod in hand. So you tremble, poor wretch, lest the halls, foul with dog's dung, displease the eyes of the coming friend, lest the portico be splashed with mud; yet a single half-peck of sawdust, one slave-boy, sets all that right: this you do not bother with—that your son should look upon a holy house free of all blemish and fault. It is a welcome thing that you have given your country and people a citizen, if you make him fit for his country, useful to its fields, useful in the business of war and of peace alike; for it will matter most by what arts and what ways you train him. The stork feeds her young on serpents and lizards found in pathless country places: those same creatures, when their wings are grown, they seek themselves. The vulture, leaving cattle and dogs and crosses, hastens to her brood and brings a part of the carcass: this, then, is the food of the great vulture too, when it feeds itself and now makes its nests on its own tree. But the noble birds, the servants of Jove, hunt the hare or the kid in the glade; from there the prey is laid in the eyrie: and then, when the grown offspring has taken wing, spurred by hunger it hastens to that prey which it first tasted when the egg was broken. Cretonius was a builder, and now on the curving shore of Caieta, now on the highest peak of Tibur, now in the Praenestine mountains, he would raise the lofty roofs of villas, outdoing with Greek marbles fetched from afar the temple of Fortune and of Hercules, as the eunuch Posides outdid our Capitol. While Cretonius thus dwells, he diminished his fortune, broke his wealth; yet the measure of the remaining part was not small: all this his crazy son threw into confusion, while he raised new villas of finer marble. Some, allotted a father who reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds and the divinity of the sky, and think there is no difference between human flesh and swine's, from which the father abstained; soon too they lay aside their foreskins; and, accustomed to despise the laws of Rome, they learn and keep and fear the Jewish code, whatever Moses handed down in his secret volume: not to show the way except to one who shares the same rites, to guide only the circumcised to the spring they seek. But the father is to blame, for whom every seventh day was idle and untouched by any business of life. Yet of their own accord the young imitate all the rest of vice; greed alone they are bidden, reluctant, to practise. For that vice deceives by the look and shadow of virtue, since it is grave in bearing, austere in face and dress, and beyond doubt the miser is praised as a thrifty man, as a frugal person and a sure guardian of his own goods, surer than if the serpent of the Hesperides or of Pontus kept the same fortunes. Add that the man of whom I speak the people thinks a notable artist at acquiring; for it is by such craftsmen that estates grow, but they grow by every means, and swell the larger under the unceasing anvil and the ever-blazing forge. And so the father too believes the greedy blessed in mind, he who admires wealth, who thinks there is no example of a happy man among the poor, and urges his sons to go that road and to lean upon that same sect. There are certain rudiments of the vices; with these he first imbues them and makes them learn by heart the meanest sordidness; soon he teaches the insatiable longing to acquire. He stints his slaves' bellies with a short measure, himself hungry too; for he can never bear to consume all the mouldy scraps of blue-green bread, being wont in mid-September to save yesterday's mince, and likewise to put off to the next day's dinner a summer bean-dish with a piece of fish, sealed up, or half a stinking shad, and to lock away the counted threads of a sliced leek. Some beggar from the bridge, invited to such fare, would refuse it. But to what end is wealth amassed through these torments, when it is plain madness, when it is manifest frenzy, to live the life of a pauper, that you may die rich? Meanwhile, while the money-bag swells with its full mouth, the love of money grows as much as the money itself has grown, and he who has it not desires it less. So another villa is got for you, when one estate is not enough, and you long to extend your bounds, and your neighbour's crop seems larger and better; you buy this too, and the plantations, and the hill that grows grey with thick olive; and if the owner is won over by no price, by night lean oxen and famished cattle with weary necks will be turned loose upon his green corn, nor sent home from there until the whole new growth has passed into their savage bellies—you would think the sickle had done it. You could scarcely tell how many bewail such wrongs, and how many estates injustice has put up for sale. But what talk, what a trumpet of foul report! "What harm in that?" he says. "I would rather have the lupin's husk than that the whole neighbourhood should praise me through the village for reaping the scantiest crops of a tiny field." No doubt you will be free of diseases and of weakness, and will escape grief and care, and a long span of life will be granted you hereafter by a kinder fate, if you alone possess as much tilled ground as the whole Roman people ploughed under Tatius. Later, even to men broken with age and worn by Punic battles, or by monstrous Pyrrhus and the Molossian swords, scarcely two acres were given at last in return for many wounds; that wage of blood and toil never seemed to anyone less than his deserts, nor a country's stinted faith ungrateful; such a little clod fed the father himself and the crowd of the cottage, where his teeming wife lay, and four children played, one a home-born slave, three the master's; but for their elder brothers, when they came back from the trench or the furrow, a second dinner, more ample, would steam, and the great pots with their porridge: now this measure of land is not enough for our garden. From this for the most part come the causes of crime; no vice of the human mind has mixed more poisons or more often set out with the sword than the savage lust for boundless wealth. For he who wants to grow rich wants too to grow rich quickly; but what respect for laws, what fear or shame is there ever in the hurrying miser? "Live content with these cottages and hills, O my boys," the Marsian and the Hernican once said, and the old Vestinian; "let us seek by the plough the bread that suffices for our tables; this the country gods approve, by whose aid and help, after the gift of the welcome corn-ear, men come to scorn the acorn of old. He will care to do nothing forbidden who is not ashamed to be shod with a high boot against the ice, who keeps off the East winds with skins turned inside out: it is the foreign and to us unknown purple, whatever it be, that leads to crime and sin." Such were the precepts those old men gave the young; but now, after autumn's end, at midnight a noisy father rouses his son from his back: "Take the wax tablets, write, boy, keep awake, plead causes, read through the red laws of our forefathers, or ask for the vine-staff by petition; but let Laelius mark your head untouched by the comb and your hairy nostrils, and admire your sturdy armpits; tear down the Moors' huts, the forts of the Brigantes, that your sixtieth year may bring you the wealthy eagle; or, if it irks you to bear the long toils of the camp, and the horns and clarions heard loosen your terrified bowels, buy what you can sell for more than half again, nor let any disdain of merchandise come over you of the sort that must be banished beyond the Tiber, nor think any difference is to be made between perfumes and hides: the smell of gain is good from any thing whatever. Let that saying be ever on your lips, worthy of the gods and of Jupiter himself as poet: no one asks how you got it, but you must have it. This the old crones teach the boys crawling on the ground, this all the girls learn before their alpha and beta." To any parent pressing on with such admonitions I could say this: "Tell me, you vainest of men, who bids you hurry? I warrant the pupil will outdo the master: go off untroubled. As Ajax surpassed Telamon, and Achilles outdid Peleus, the tender must be spared: ripe wickedness has not yet filled their marrow. When he begins to comb his beard and to admit the edge of the long razor, he will be a false witness, will sell his perjuries for a tiny sum, touching the altar and the foot of Ceres. Count your daughter-in-law already carried out to burial, if she crosses your threshold with a deadly dowry; with what fingers will she be throttled in her sleep! For what you think must be won by land and sea, a shorter road will bring to him; no great crime costs any labour. 'These things I never bade you do,' you will say one day, 'nor counselled such.' Yet the cause and origin of his evil mind rests with you. For whoever has taught the love of great wealth and by ill counsel rears his boys to greed, gives them free rein and lets out all the reins of the chariot, which, if you call it back, cannot stop, and, scorning you, is carried on, leaving the turning-posts behind. No one thinks it enough to offend just so far as you permit: so much more largely do men indulge themselves. When you tell a young man that he is a fool to give to a friend, to relieve a kinsman's poverty and raise him up, you teach him both to plunder and to cheat and to acquire wealth by every crime—wealth whose love in you was as great as the Decii's for their country, as the love with which Menoeceus loved Thebes, if Greece tells true, in whose furrows legions are born from the serpent's teeth with their shields, and at once take up grim wars, as though a trumpeter too had risen with them. So you will see the fire whose sparks you yourself supplied blazing far and wide and snatching up everything. Nor will you, poor wretch, be spared: your nursling, a lion, will lift his trembling trainer with a great roar in the cage. Your horoscope is known to the astrologers, but it is a weary thing to wait for the slow distaffs; you will die with the thread not yet broken. Even now you stand in his way and delay his hopes; even now your long and stag-like old age torments the young man. Quickly send for Archigenes and buy what Mithridates compounded; if you wish to pluck another fig and to handle other roses, you must have a drug to swallow before food—a father and a king." I show you a noble pleasure, to which no theatre, no platform of a lavish praetor, could you compare, if you watch at how great a risk to life are bought the increases of an estate, the heap of coin in the bronze-bound chest, the money to be laid up with the watchful Castor—since Mars the Avenger lost even his helmet and could not keep his own goods. So you may leave behind all the curtains of Flora and of Ceres and of Cybele: so much grander a game are human affairs. Or do bodies tossed on the springboard delight the mind more, and the man who is wont to go straight down the rope, than you, who ever linger on your Corycian ship, and dwell there, ever to be lifted up by the North-West and the South, a desperate and cheap trader in a stinking sack, who rejoice to have brought home the rich raisin-wine from the shore of ancient Crete and the flagons that are fellow-townsmen of Jove? Yet he, planting his steps on a swaying foot, earns his living by that wage, and against winter and hunger that rope is his guard: you, for a thousand talents and a hundred villas, are reckless. Look at the harbours and the sea full of great timbers: more of mankind is now upon the deep. A fleet will come wherever the hope of gain has called it, nor will it leap only over the Carpathian and Gaetulian waters, but, leaving Calpe far behind, will hear the sun hissing in the Herculean gulf. A great reward for your labour—that you may come back home with bulging purse, proud of your swollen wallet, to have seen the sea-monsters of Ocean and the young men of the sea. Not one frenzy alone drives men's minds: this one would be carried, in his sister's arms, before the face and fire of the Furies; this one, a bullock struck down, believes he hears Agamemnon or the Ithacan bellowing—let him but spare his tunics and cloaks— the man needs a guardian who fills his ship with merchandise up to the very gunwale, with only a plank between him and the wave, when the cause of all this evil and this peril is silver cut into stamps and tiny faces. Clouds and lightnings meet him: "Cast off the cable!" cries the owner of the wheat or the bought pepper, "this colour of the sky, this black band, threatens nothing; it is summer thunder." Unlucky man, this very night perhaps he will go down, the timbers broken, overwhelmed and sunk by the flood, gripping his money-belt in his left hand and his teeth. But he whose longings of late not all the gold that Tagus and Pactolus roll in red sand could satisfy, shall make do with rags to cover his cold loins and a scanty meal, a shipwrecked beggar, while his vessel sinks, asking for a copper and keeping himself alive with a painted storm. Got with such great pains, our wealth is kept with greater care and dread: the guarding of a great fortune is wretched. Licinus, hugely rich, bids a cohort of his slaves keep watch by night with their buckets at the ready, in terror for his amber and his statues and his Phrygian column and his ivory and broad tortoise-shell. The tub of the naked Cynic does not burn; if you break it, another will be made tomorrow, or the same will stay, mended with lead. Alexander felt, when he saw in that jar its great inhabitant, how much happier was the man who craved nothing than he who claimed the whole world for himself, doomed to suffer perils to match his deeds. There is no divine power, Fortune, if there be wisdom: it is we, we who make you a goddess. Yet what measure of fortune suffices, if anyone consults me, I will tell: as much as thirst and hunger and cold demand, as much, Epicurus, as sufficed you in your small gardens, as much as the household of Socrates possessed before. Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. Do I seem to hem you in with too harsh examples? Mix in, then, something from our own ways; make up the sum that the law of Otho deems worthy of the fourteen rows. If this too draws a wrinkle and curls the lip, take two knights' fortunes, make a third four hundred thousand. If I have not yet filled your lap, if it is opened wider, then neither the wealth of Croesus nor the Persian realms will satisfy your mind, nor the riches of Narcissus, to whom Claudius Caesar granted everything, and at whose commands he obeyed even the order to kill his wife.

Satire XV Who does not know, Volusius Bithynicus, what monsters mad Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile, another quakes before the ibis gorged on serpents; the golden image of the sacred long-tailed ape gleams, where the magic chords of half-ruined Memnon resound and ancient Thebes lies buried with her hundred gates; here whole towns venerate the cat, there the river-fish, there the dog—but no one Diana. It is a sin to violate the leek and the onion or to bruise them with a bite; O holy peoples, in whose gardens such deities are born! Every table abstains from woolly creatures; there it is a sin to slaughter the young of the she-goat: to feed on human flesh is allowed. When Ulysses told such a deed over the dinner to astonished Alcinous, he had perhaps moved some to bile or to laughter as a lying spinner of marvels. "Does no one fling this fellow into the sea, deserving a fierce and true Charybdis, inventor of monstrous Laestrygonians and Cyclopes? For I would sooner believe in Scylla, or the clashing rocks of the Cyaneans, or skin-bags full of tempests, or that Elpenor, struck by Circe's light blow, grunted along with the rowers turned to swine. Did he think the Phaeacian folk so empty-headed?" So might someone justly say, not yet drunk, who had drawn the least of liquor from a Corcyrean jar. For the Ithacan sang these things alone, with no witness; We shall tell of marvels indeed, but lately done, in the consulship of Juncus, above the walls of sweltering Coptos— we shall tell of a crime of the mob, worse than all the tragic buskins; for no people, though you unroll all the tragic robes from Pyrrha onward, commits such a crime among the tragedians. Hear what example of monstrous savagery our own age has brought forth. Between neighbours there is an old and ancient feud, an undying hatred, a wound never to be healed; it still blazes between Ombos and Tentyra. On each side the height of frenzy in the crowd, because each place hates the gods of its neighbours, believing that none should be held gods save those it worships itself. But at a festal time the chance of attacking the other people seemed worth seizing to all the chiefs and leaders of their foes, that they might not enjoy a glad and merry day, nor the pleasures of a great feast, with tables set out at the temples and the crossroads, and the all-night couch, which the seventh sun sometimes finds still lying there by night and day. Coarse indeed is Egypt, but in luxury, as I myself have noted, the barbarous crowd yields nothing to infamous Canopus. Add that victory is easy over men sodden with drink and lisping and reeling with wine. On one side a dance of men to a black piper, with unguents of whatever sort and flowers and many a garland on the brow; on the other a fasting hatred. But first the wrangling begins to sound, this the trumpet of the brawl to their burning souls; then with equal shouting they clash, and for weapon the bare hand rages; few cheeks are without a wound; scarcely anyone, or no one, in all that fight has his nose unbroken; you might now see throughout the ranks faces half gone, other shapes than men's, and bones gaping through torn cheeks, fists full of the blood of eyes. Yet they think themselves at play and exercising boyish ranks, because they trample no corpses. And to be sure, why so many thousands of a brawling throng, if all live on? So the assault grows fiercer, and now stones, sought along the ground with bowed arms, they begin to hurl, the household weapons of sedition; not such a stone as Turnus or Ajax, or that with whose weight the son of Tydeus struck the hip of Aeneas, but one that hands could throw, unlike to theirs and born in our own age. For even in Homer's lifetime this breed was already shrinking; the earth now rears men wicked and puny; so any god who looks down laughs and hates. To return from our digression: after one side, strengthened by reinforcements, dares to draw the sword and to renew the fight with deadly arrows, those who dwell at Tentyra, neighbour to the shady palm, turn their backs in swift flight before the pressing men of Ombos. Here a certain man, headlong in his too great terror, stumbles in his course and is caught. But him, cut into very many fragments and morsels, that one dead man might suffice for many, the victorious mob devoured whole, the bones gnawed clean, nor stewed him in a seething cauldron or on spits: so long and slow a thing they thought it to wait for fires, content with the raw corpse. Here one may rejoice that they did not violate the fire, which Prometheus, snatched from the highest part of heaven, gave to earth; I congratulate the element, and think that you exult too. But he who could bear to bite a corpse never ate anything more gladly than that flesh. For in a crime so great do not ask or doubt whether the first gullet alone felt the pleasure; for the last man who stood there, the whole body now consumed, drawing his fingers along the ground, tasted somewhat of the blood. The Vascones, the story goes, once prolonged their lives by such food; but the case was different, but there it was the spite of fortune and the last extremity of war, the utmost mischance, the dire want of a long siege: for of this hunger now in question the example of food must be a pitiable one, like the people I just named. After all herbs, after all animals, whatever the frenzy of an empty belly drove them to, when their very foes pitied their pallor and leanness and wasted limbs, they tore the flesh of others in their hunger, ready to eat their own too. What man or what god would refuse pardon to bellies that endured such dire and monstrous things, and whose shades themselves could forgive them, on whose bodies they fed? The precepts of Zeno warn us better; for not all things, but certain things, they hold, may be done for life's sake; but whence a Cantabrian Stoic, especially in the age of old Metellus? Now the whole world possesses Greek and our own Athens; eloquent Gaul has taught the Britons to be advocates, and Thule already talks of hiring a rhetorician. Yet that noble people of whom I spoke, and equal in valour and faith but greater in disaster, Saguntum, pleads such an excuse; Egypt is crueller than the Maeotic altar; for that Tauric inventress of unspeakable rites (granted you now believe whatever the poems hand down worthy of belief) only sacrifices men; further than this the victim fears nothing graver than the knife. But what mischance drove these men on? What hunger so great, what arms threatening their rampart, forced them to dare so detestable a monstrosity? Would they do this other reproach to the Memphite earth, when dry, if the Nile refused to rise, unwilling? With what frenzy never the terrible Cimbri nor the Britons ever, nor the fierce Sauromatae or the monstrous Agathyrsi, with this raged a worthless and useless rabble, wont to give little sails to its earthen skiffs and to lean on the short oars of a painted shell. You will find no penalty for the crime, nor prepare fit punishments for these peoples, in whose minds anger and hunger are equal and alike. Nature confesses that she gives the softest hearts to humankind by giving tears; this is the best part of our nature. She bids us therefore weep at the plight of a friend pleading his cause and his squalor, of a ward who summons to judgment his defrauder, whose flowing tears and girlish hair make his face uncertain. At Nature's command we groan, when the funeral of a grown maiden meets us, or an infant is shut in the earth, too small for the funeral fire. For what good man, worthy of the secret torch, such as the priest of Ceres would have him be, believes any troubles are alien to himself? This sets us apart from the herd of dumb beasts, and so we alone, allotted a venerable mind and capable of things divine, fit to practise and produce the arts, have drawn a sense sent down from the citadel of heaven, which the prone creatures that gaze upon the earth lack. At the world's beginning our common maker granted them only life, but to us a mind as well, that mutual affection might bid us seek and lend each other help, to draw the scattered into a people, to migrate from the ancient grove and to leave the forests our forefathers dwelt in, to build houses, to join to our own hearth another roof, that the trust of a neighbouring threshold might give safe sleep, to protect with arms a fallen citizen or one reeling from a grievous wound, to give signals by a common trumpet, to be defended by the same towers and held secure by one key of the gates. But now there is greater concord among serpents: a like beast spares its kindred spots. When has a stronger lion torn life from a lion? In what wood did a boar ever breathe his last under the tusks of a bigger boar? The Indian tigress keeps perpetual peace with the raging tigress; among themselves the savage bears agree. But for man it is not enough to have drawn out the deadly steel on the wicked anvil, when the first smiths, accustomed only to forge hoes and mattocks and weary at the harrow and the ploughshare, knew not how to beat out swords; we behold peoples whose anger is not content to have killed a man, but who count his breast, his arms, his face a kind of food. What then would he say, or whither would he not flee, if he saw these monstrous things now, Pythagoras, who abstained from all living creatures as from a man, and did not indulge his belly with every kind of bean?

Satire XVI Who could count the rewards, Gallius, of fortunate soldiering? For if a prosperous camp be entered, may the gate receive me, a frightened recruit, under a favouring star; for one hour of kindly fate avails more than if a letter of Venus commended us to Mars and his Samian mother, who delights in the sand. Let us treat first of the common advantages, of which not the least will be this: that no man in a toga shall dare to strike you, and, if he is struck himself, shall hide it, nor dare to show the praetor his teeth knocked out and the black lump of swollen bruises on his face, and the eye left him with no promise from the doctor. A Bardaean judge is granted to one who wishes to punish these wrongs, a hobnailed boot and great calves at the mighty benches, the old camp-laws and the way of Camillus being kept, that no soldier should go to law outside the rampart and far from the standards. "The centurions' inquiry into a soldier is most just, then, and I shall not lack redress, if a just cause of complaint be lodged." Yet the whole cohort is your enemy, and all the maniples with one great accord see to it that the redress is worse than the wrong, and a cure to make it sore. So it will be worth the declaimer Vagellius' mulish heart, when you have but two legs, to offend so many boots, so many thousands of hobnails. Besides, who would be so far from the city, who so much a Pylades, as to come beyond the mound's mass? Let our tears be dried at once, and let us not press our friends, who will make their excuses. When the judge says "Produce your witness," let that someone—whoever saw the blows— dare to say "I saw," and I will hold him worthy of the beard and worthy of the hair of our forefathers. Sooner could you produce a false witness, than one who speaks the truth against a civilian—against an armed man's fortune, and against his sense of shame. Let us now note other rewards and gains of the soldier's oath. If a wicked neighbour has taken from me a valley of my ancestral farm or a field, and has dug up the sacred boundary-stone from the middle of the bound, which my yearly porridge and broad cake have honoured, or if a debtor goes on refusing to repay the money he took, calling the writing on the worthless wax mere vanity, I must wait for the year that begins the lawsuits of the whole people; but then too a thousand vexations must be borne, a thousand delays; so often only the benches are spread, when, the eloquent Caedicius now laying aside his cloak and Fuscus now making water, we depart still ready, and we fight on the slow sand of the forum. But for those whom arms shield and the belt encircles, whatever time they please for pleading is granted them, nor is their substance worn away by the long drag of a suit. To soldiers alone, besides, is given the right to make a will while the father lives; for what is earned by the toil of soldiering, it has been ruled, is no part of the property whose whole control the father holds. And so Coranus, companion of the standards and earning the camp's pay, his father, though now palsied, courts; just favour advances him and renders his due to noble toil. Indeed it seems to be the general's own interest that whoever is brave should be the most fortunate too, that all should be glad with trappings and with chains, that all—