Satire III

“What? Is this to go on for ever? Here is the morning sun pouring in at your windows and widening every chink with its beams. The shadow is just touching the fifth line of the sundial and we are snoring enough to work off' that indomitable Falernian! What are you going to do? The mad Dog-star has long been drying and baking the crops; the cattle are all lying under the branching elms!” So speaks one of my young lord’s friends.

“What now, really, is that so? Won’t somebody come quick? What? Nobody there?” The glassy bile swells big within him. “I’m just splitting,” he shouts; till you would think that all the herds of Arcadia were setting up a bray. We now take up our book, and the two-coloured parchment, well cleansed of hair; some paper too, and the knotty reed-pen. Next we complain that the ink is thick and clots upon the pen; that when water is poured in, the blackness disappears, and that the pen sprinkles the diluted stuff in blots upon the paper.

Poor fool, and more of a fool every day! Is this the pass to which we have come? Why not rather go on like a pet dove, or like a child in some great man’s house that asks to have its food cut up small, or refuses in a rage to listen to its mammy’s lullaby?

“But how can I work with a pen like this?” Whom will you deceive? Why these whining evasions? The gamble is your own; your brains are oozing away, and you are becoming contemptible; formed of green and ill-baked earth, the jar rings false when struck, and betrays the flaw. You are moist and ductile clay; what you need is to be taken in hand from this instant, and moulded ceaselessly on the swift-revolving wheel. But you have an ancestral property, with a moderate crop of corn; you have a bright and spotless salt-cellar (nothing to fear, you think), with an ample salver for the worship of the hearth. What? Will that satisfy you? Or are you to puff out your lungs with pride because you come of a Tuscan stock, yourself the thousandth in the line; or because on review days you salute your Censor in a purple robe? To the mob with your trappings! I know you within and on the skin. Are you not ashamed to live after the fashion of the abandoned Natta? a man deadened by vice, whose heart is overlaid with brawn, who has no sense of sin, no knowledge of what he is losing, and is sunk so deep that he sends up no bubble to the surface?

O mighty Father of the gods! Be it thy will to punish cruel tyrants whose souls have been stirred by the deadly poison of evil lust in no other way but this — that they may look on Virtue, and pine away because they have lost her! Did ever brazen bull of Sicily roar more frightfully; did ever sword hanging from gilded ceiling strike more terror into the purple necks below, than for a man to say to himself, “I am falling, falling to ruin,” and to turn pale, poor wretch, for a misdeed which the wife of his bosom may not know?

I used often, remember, as a boy to smear my eyes with oil if I did not want to recite the noble speech of the 'dying Cato — a speech which would be much applauded by my idiot of a master, and that to which my father, sweating with delight, would have to listen with his invited friends. And very right too: for in those days it was my highest ambition to know how much the lucky sice would bring me, how much the ruinous ace would carry off; not to be baffled by the narrow neck of the jar, and not to be outdone by anyone in whipping the boxwood top.

But you have learnt how to distinguish the crooked from the straight; you have studied the doctrines of the learned Porch, daubed over with trousered Medes: those doctrines over which a sleepless and close-cropped youth, fed on beans and grand messes of porridge, nightly pores; and the letter which spreads out into Pythagorean branches has pointed out to you the steep path which rises on the right. And are you snoring still? yawning off the debauch of yesterday, with a head unhinged and nodding, and jaws gaping from ear to ear? Have you any goal in life? Is there any target at which you aim? Or are you just taking random shots at crows with clods and potsherds, not caring whither your feet are taking you, and living from one moment to another?

It is too late to call for hellebore when the skin is already swollen and diseased; meet the malady on its way, and then what need to promise big fees to Craterus? Come and learn, O miserable souls, and be instructed in the causes of things: learn what we are, and for what sort of lives we were born; what place was assigned to us at the start; how to round the turning-post gently, and from what point to begin the turn; what limit should be placed on wealth; what prayers may rightfully be offered; what good there is in fresh-minted coin; how much should be spent on country and on kin; what part God has ordered you to play, and at what point of the human commonwealth you have been stationed. Learn these things, and do not envy your neighbour because he has many a jar going bad in a larder well stored with gifts from the fat Umbrians whom he has defended, or with the pepper and hams that tell of grateful Marsian clients, or because the pilchards in his first barrel have not yet come to an end.

Here one of the unsavoury tribe of Centurions may say, “What I know is enough for me; I have no mind to be an Arcesilas, or one of your poor devils of Solons who go about with their heads bent down, pinning their eyes to the ground, champing and muttering to themselves like mad dogs, balancing their words on protruded lip, and pondering over the dreams of some sickly grey-beard that nothing can come out of nothing, and that nothing can into nothing return. Is it over stuff like this that you grow pale? is it worth while for this to go without your dinner?” Such jests move the mob to mirth: peal after peal of laughter comes rippling forth from the curled nostrils of our brawny youth. “Examine me,” says a patient to his doctor; “I have a strange fluttering at the heart; my throat is sore, and the breath coming from it is bad.” The doctor orders rest; but when the third night finds the man’s veins flowing quietly along, he sends a good-sized flagon to a wealthy friend, and asks for some old Surrentine wine to take before his bath. “You’re a bit pale,” says the friend. “O that’s nothing,” says the other. “But you had better look to it, whatever it is; your skin is yellow and is beginning to swell.” “You’re paler yourself: don’t come the guardian over me; I buried mine long ago: only you are left.” “As you please, I say no more.” So, gorged with a good dinner, and pale in the belly, he takes his bath, slowly pouring forth sulphurous vapours from his throat. But as he drinks his wine a shivering fit comes on and knocks the hot tumbler out of his hand; his teeth are laid bare and chatter; the savoury morsels drop out of his relaxed lips. Then follow the trumpet and the torch, and at last the poor departed, laid out on a high bed and smeared with greasy unguents, stretches out his heels cold and stark towards the door, and Quirites of yesterday’s making, with caps of liberty on their heads, carry him out to burial.

“Feel my pulse, poor fool, and put your hand upon my heart; no fever there! Touch my hands and my feet; they are not cold!” No, but if you catch a glimpse of coin, or if the pretty girl next door smiles sweetly on you: will your heart beat steadily then? Or suppose you have a dish of tough cabbage served up to you on a cold plate with bread made of the coarsest flour, would we not discover a sore place in your throat, if we looked into it, which must not be scraped by plebeian beet? You shiver when pale fear sets your bristles up; anon, if a torch is applied to you, your blood boils, your eyes flash with rage, and you say things, and do things, which the mad Orestes himself would swear were the signs of madness!