JUVENAL, SATIRE VI
celebrate festal sabbaths with bare feet,[1] and where a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age.[2]
161"Do you say no worthy wife is to be found among all these crowds?" Well, let her be handsome, charming, rich and fertile; let her have ancient ancestors ranged about her halls; let her be more chaste than the dishevelled Sabine maidens who stopped the war—a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan! yet who could endure a wife that possessed all perfections? I would rather have a Venusian wench for my wife than you, O Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, if, with all your virtues, you bring me a haughty brow, and reckon up Triumphs as part of your marriage portion. Away with your Hannibal, I beseech you! Away with Syphax overpowered in his camp! Take yourself off, Carthage and all![3]
172"Be merciful, I pray, O Apollo! and thou, O goddess, lay down thine arrows. These babes have done naught; shoot down their mother!" Thus prayed Amphion;[4] but Apollo bends his bow, and Niobe[5] led forth to the grave her troop of sons, and their father to boot, because she deemed herself of nobler race than Latona, and more prolific than the white sow of Alba. For is any dignity in a wife, any beauty, worth the cost, if she is for ever reckoning up her merits against you? These high and transcendent qualities lose all their charm when spoilt by a pride that savours more of aloes than of honey.
- ↑ Josephus relates that Berenice sacrificed at Jerusalem with dishevelled hair and bare feet.
- ↑ For Jewish abstinence from pork see Tac. Hist. v. 4.
- ↑ Alluding to the exploits of the elder Scipio.
- ↑ Husband of Niobe.
- ↑ Wife of Amphion, king of Thebes. Proud of her six sons and six daughters, she boasted herself against Lelo, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Indignant at her presumption, they slew all her children with arrows.
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