THIRTEEN SATIRES OF JUVENAL

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AM I to be for ever nothing but a listener?

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Never

to pay back in kind, after being so often bored by that Theseid that has made Cordus hoarse? Is there then to be no redress, when one person has read me his comedy and another his elegy? No redress, when a whole day has been wasted by the bulky Telephus, or by Orestes, who, when the border to the very end of the roll was filled, was written all over on the back as well, and even yet is not finished? There is not a man more familiar with his own house than I am with the 'Grove of Mars' and 'Vulcan's cave hard by Aeolian cliffs.'2 What the winds are about, what ghosts Aeacus is torturing, from what place such a one is carrying off the gold of the pilfered fleecelet, what the size of the mountain ashes that Monychus is hurling all this is being for ever shouted by Fronto's planes and shivered marbles, and his pillars which are split with the everlasting reading. Be the poet the

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greatest or the least, you have the same to expect from him. Well, but I too have flinched from the rod. I too have tendered my advice to Sulla to retire into private life and get a sound sleep. It is a foolish leniency, when at every turn you run against so many inspired bards, to spare the paper which is sure to be spoilt. But why I have a fancy for going through my paces on this very course over which Aurunca's great foster-son guided his racers, if you have time and will quietly listen to my reasons, I

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will make known.

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Since effeminate eunuchs take wives, and a Mevia spears the Tuscan boar, and bares her breasts, and wields the hunter's lance and the whole patrician order is challenged to compete with the wealth of a single person, a fellow against whose razor my beard used to grate in my younger days: and a scrap of the proletariat of Egypt, Crispinus, a slave born and bred at Canopus, hitches up a Tyrian mantle with his shoulder, and fans the summer ring on his perspiring finger, unable to bear the weight of his heavier signet— why, to keep from writing satire is the difficulty. For who so tolerant of this wrong-headed city, who so callous, that he can contain himself, when Lawyer Matho's brand-new litter comes along, filled with his Greatness, and, after him, the betrayer of his distinguished friend, who will soon finish off the remnants of our nobility already preyed upon-the man whom Massa dreads,

whom Carus coaxes with gifts, as does Latinus too, in his panic privately despatching his Thymele; when you must 'move on' for those who earn a place in a will by foul night-work, men who are transported to the summit of their hopes by what is nowadays the surest path to the highest preferment-a rich old dame's lust? Proculeius gets one poor twelfth, but Gillo eleven-twelfths-each inheriting in proportion to his powers. By all means let him pocket the price of his life-blood, and be as pale as one who has trodden with his bare heel upon a snake, or as a speaker just on the point of declaiming at the Altar of Lyons. Need I tell with what passion my fevered bosom burns when this wretch who plundered his ward and drove him to infamy is jostling the Roman people with his throngs of retainers; or when this manMarius after being condemned by a bootless verdict (for what matters disgrace, so the cash be safe?) is beginning his carousals in the land of his exile at two o'clock in the day, enjoying the wrath of heaven, while you, poor province, are left with your verdict and your tears? Am I not to deem such things worthy of the midnight oil of the Venusian, am I not to pursue such themes? Well, but what should have the preference? The Geste of Hercules, say you, or of Diomede, or the bellowing in the Labyrinth, the Boy's splash in the sea, and the Smith on the wing? What! seeing that a pander-husband inherits the

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goods of the adulterer, when the wife cannot lawfully take them-a husband who has been schooled to gaze at the ceiling, schooled to snore over his cups with a wide-awake nose: seeing that a man thinks it no sin to aspire to the command of a cohort, who has lavished his substance on the stables, and has stripped himself of all his family wealth by furious driving on the Flaminian Road—a true young Automedon, for he handled the reins himself to show off to his mistress in the soldier's cloak? Is not one moved to fill a bulky note-book right in the middle of the cross-roads, when a man is carried past, already indulging in six bearers, showing himself to view on both sides his sedan almost without a curtainreminding one not a little of the way Maecenas used to lounge-a forger who has made 10 himself aristocrat and millionaire with a little tablet and a damp seal? Now you are confronted by a lady of position, who, when her husband is thirsty, just before she hands him the mild Calenian, puts in a dash of poison, and, like a superior Lucusta, teaches her unsophisticated kinswomen to carry their livid husbands to burial right through the Town and all its gossip. If you would be a somebody, then dare a something, to entitle you to the narrow bounds of Gyara and to a gaol. Virtue's lot is praise and-shivering in the cold. It is to crimes that men owe their pleasure grounds, their 'castles,' banquets, old silver, and goblets with goat's

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figure in relief. Who can rest for the seducer who plays on his daughter-in-law's greed, for the thought of betrothed girls ruined, and adulterers in their teens? When Nature refuses, sheer scorn produces verse-the best it can: the kind of verses I write— or Cluvienus.

Beginning from the time when the rain-clouds lifted up the sea, and Deucalion climbed the mountain in a ship and asked for an oracle, and the breath of life gradually warmed the stones into soft flesh, and Pyrrha displayed to the men her naked maids-all men's doings from that time on, their wishes and fears, their resentments, their pleasures, their various pursuits, all these make up my literary hotchpotch. And when had vice a more luxuriant crop? When did avarice open her pocket wider? When had gambling such spirit? Why, nowadays, men do not try the hazard of the table with a mere cash-box to help them, but they stake their coffers on the game. What battles you will see going on there, with the cashier for armour-bearer! Is it lunacy or something worse to squander thus a hundred thousand sesterces, while you deny your shivering slave his shirt ?12 Which of our forefathers ever raised so many country-houses or had seven courses when he dined alone? Nowadays the dole is set out in all its paltriness 18 at the outer edge of the vestibule for the crowd to scramble for in their