Juvenal and Persius/The Satires of Persius/Satire 3

by Persius

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SUMMARY OF SATIRE III

Prof. Housman has well explained the difficulties of this satire. Throughout its first sixty-two verses, it is aimed at those who live amiss though they know the right way; and the satirist takes himself as a specimen of the class (Class. Quart. Jan. 1913, pp. 26–28). Persius alternately acts the part of the youth satirised (which explains the use of the first person in stertimus, findor, querimur) and alternately assumes the role of a monitor, expostulating with the young man and trying to recall him to a sense of the follies and wasted opportunities of his life (1–43). Childish sports are suitable to the age of childhood; but when childhood is past, and knowledge has arrived, the serious purposes of life must be faced (44–62).

From that point onwards the theme is more general, being directed against those who have not been illuminated by philosophy (63–118).

"What? still sleeping? Won't you be up and doing?" "How can I? won't somebody come to help me? My pen won't write, and the ink won't mark" (1–14). Mere baby that you are! you are running to waste; satisfied with your competency, you're letting the precious moments slip, and will soon be no better than Natta who has lost all sense of right and wrong. What torture more horrible than to feel that virtue has for ever passed out of your grasp? (15–43). As a child I too rejoiced in childish games; but you are no child, you have studied philosophy, you know the difference between the straight and the crooked; yet here you are, yawning off yesterday's debauch without a thought for the ends which alone make life worth living! (44–62).

The time will come when it will be too late to mend; be wise in time. Learn what you are, and why you were brought here; what is the true end for man, and what are his duties; don't be envious of the rich stores of your wealthy lawyer-neighbour (63–76). At this no doubt some shaggy soldier will burst into a guffaw and tell us that he doesn't care a fig for all the philosophers in creation, with their dull looks, their bent figures, their dismal mutterings and old-wife dreamings that nothing can come out of nothing, and nothing go back to nothing (77–87).

A man feels ill and consults his doctor, who orders rest and abstinence. Feeling better after a few days, he returns to his old habits, rejects scornfully the warnings of friends, and bathes on a full stomach. While drinking his wine, he is seized by a sudden stroke, and is carried to the grave by citizens of yesterday's making (88–106). You tell me you have no illness, no fever in your pulse. But does not your heart beat. high when you catch sight of money, or when a pretty girl smiles sweetly on you? Can you put up with plain food? Not you! Cold at one moment with fear, at another hot with wrath, you say things and do things which Orestes himself would declare were signs of madness (107–118).

 

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.

⁷"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.

¹⁵Poor 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?

¹⁹"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,^[1] 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^[2] in a purple robe? To the mob with your trappings!^[3] I know you within and on the skin.^[4] 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?

³⁵ 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^[5] roar more frightfully; did ever sword hanging from gilded ceiling strike more terror into the purple necks below,^[6] 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?

⁴⁴I used often, I 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^[7] 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.

⁶²But you have learnt how to distinguish the crooked from the straight;^[8] you have studied the doctrines of the learned Porch, daubed over with trousered Medes;^[9] 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.^[10] 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?

⁶³It 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?^[11] 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;^[12] 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^[13] 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.

⁷⁷Here one of the unsavoury tribe of Centurions^[14] may say, "What I know is enough for me; I have no mind to be an Arcesilas,^[15] or one of your poor devils of Solons^[16] 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.^[17] 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.

⁸⁸"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^[18] over me; I buried mine long ago;^[19] 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,^[20] stretches out his heels cold and stark towards the door, and Quirites of yesterday's making, with caps of liberty^[21] on their heads, carry him out to burial.

¹⁰⁷"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!

Footnotes

1. This metaphor, taken from testing the soundness of a jar by the ring, is repeated in v. 24.
2. Referring to the annual parade (transvectio) of the equites, clad in their purple robes of state (trabea), before the Censor.
3. Persius warns the youth that he is in danger of falling into the lowest state of all, that of the incorrigible reprobate who is dead to all moral feeling, and has to suffer, when too late, all the horrors of a guilty conscience (30–43). This character corresponds to the ἀκόλαστος of Aristotle.
4. i.e. "closely." cf. ἐν χρῷ.
5. In allusion to the brazen bull of Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum. See the parallel passage in Juv. viii. 81–82.
6. An obvious reminiscence of Horace, Od. III. i. 17-18.
7. In playing with the tesserae, cubes like our dice, the highest throw (called "Venus," or jactus venereus) was the senio, when all the dice turned up sixes. The lowest throw was when all came out singles (uniones); that was called canis, or, as here, canicula.
8. "Straight" and "crooked" (or"curved") are naturally applied to denote "good" and "bad" respectively. Similarly our word "right" is derived from rectus, and "depraved" from pravus, "crooked." cf. "the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain" (Isaiah xl. 4).
9. Referring to the ποικίλη στοά, or Painted Portico, in which Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, taught. It was adorned with pictures, one of which represented the battle of Marathon, with Persians in their native dress.
10. Pythagoras of Samos is said to have depicted the "Choice of Life" under the form of the Greek letter ϒ, which was originally written with a straight stem, Ϥ. The straight stem represents the period of indeterminate childhood; the branching ways represent the moment when the choice of life has to be made. The steep path to the right is the path of virtue; the sloping path to the left that of vice and pleasure.
11. The name of a doctor, taken from Hor. Sat. II. iii. 161.
12. i.e. what is the real and proper use of money.
13. Country clients seem generally to have paid their lawyers' fees in kind. See the enumeration of such rural gifts in Juv. vii. 119-121.
14. Nothing so moves the ire and contempt of the gentle philosophic Persius as the ignorance and coarseness of the brawny soldiery. See v. 189-191; also Juv. xvi. throughout.
15. Arcesilas, or Arcesilaus, a Greek philosopher of the third century B.C., regarded as the founder of the Middle Academy.
16. The early sage and legislator of Athens of the seventh century; the most famous of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.
17. The fundamental principle of the Epicurean philosophy.
18. cf. Hor. Sat. II. iii. 88; ne sis patruus mihi.
19. From Horace again, Sat. i. ix. 28: "Omnes composui; Felices! nunc ego resto."
20. The tuba, candelae, amomis (or amomum), all part of the paraphernalia of a funeral. See Juv. iv. 108.
21. The body is carried to the grave by slaves manumitted by their late master's will. As soon as the slave was manumitted he put on a conical cap (pileus) as a sign of liberty.