Saturae

Must I always be a hearer only? Shall I never retaliate, though plagued so often with the Theseid of Codrus, hoarse with reciting it? Shall one man, then, recite to me his Comedies, and another his Elegies, with impunity? Shall huge “Telephus” waste a whole day for me, or “Orestes,” with the margin of the manuscript full to the very edge, and written on the back too, and yet not finished, and I not retort?

No one knows his own house better than I do the grove of Mars, and Vulcan’s cave close to the Æolian rocks. The agency of the winds, what ghosts Æacus is torturing, whence another bears off the gold of the stolen fleece, what huge mountain-ashes Monychus hurls, all this the plane-groves of Fronto, and the statues shaken and the columns split by the eternal reciter, are for ever re-echoing. You may look for the same themes from the greatest poet and the least.

And yet I too have shirked my hand away from the rod. I too have given advice to Sylla, that he should enjoy a sound sleep by returning to a private station. When at every turn you meet so many poetasters, it were a foolish clemency to spare paper that is sure to be wasted. Yet why I rather choose to trace my course over that plain through which the great foster-son of Aurunca urged his steeds, I will, if you are at leisure, and with favorable ear listen to reason, tell you. When a soft eunuch marries a wife; when Mævia transfixes the Tuscan boar, and, with breasts exposed, grasps the hunting-spears; when one man singly vies in wealth with the whole body of patricians, under whose razor my beard, grown exuberant, sounded while I was in my prime; when Crispinus, one of the dregs of the mob of the Nile, a born-slave of Canopus, (while his shoulder hitches up his Tyrian cloak,) airs his summer ring from his sweating fingers, and can not support the weight of his heavier gem;—it is difficult not to write satire. For who can be so tolerant of this iniquitous city, who so case-hardened, as to contain himself! When there comes up the bran-new litter of Matho the lawyer, filled with himself; and after him, he that informed upon his powerful friend; and will soon plunder the nobility, already close-shorn, of the little that remains to them; one whom even Massa fears, whom Carus soothes with a bribe; or a Thymele suborned by some trembling Latinus. When fellows supplant you, who earn their legacies by night-work, lifted up to heaven by what is now the surest road to the highest advancement, the lust of some ancient harridan. Proculeius gets one poor twelfth; but Gillo has eleven twelfths. Each gets the share proportioned to his powers. Well! let him take the purchase-money of his blood, and be as pale as one that has trodden on a snake with naked heel, or a rhetorician about to declaim at the altar at Lyons.