JUVENAL, SATIRE VIII
runaway slaves, beside hangmen and coffin-makers, or of some eunuch priest lying drunk with idle timbrels. Here is Liberty Hall! One cup serves for everybody; no one has a bed to himself, nor a table apart from the rest. What would you do, friend Ponticus, if you chanced upon a slave like this? You would send him to your Lucanian or Tuscan bridewell.[1] But you gentlemen of Trojan blood find excuses for yourselves; what would disgrace a huckster sits gracefully on a Volesus or a Brutus!
183What if I can never cite any example so foul and shameful that there is not something worse behind? Your means exhausted, Damasippus, you hired out your voice to the stage,[2] taking the part of the Clamorous Ghost of Catullus.[3] The nimble Lentulus acted famously the part of Laureolus[4]; deserving, in my judgment, to be really and truly crucified. Nor can the spectators themselves be forgiven; the populace that with brazen front sits and beholds the triple buffooneries of our patricians, that can listen to a bare-footed[5] Fabius, and laugh to see the Mamerci cuffing each other. What matters it at what price they sell their deaths?[6] No Nero compels them to sell; yet they hesitate not to sell themselves at the games of the exalted Praetor. And yet suppose that on one side of you were placed a sword, on the other the stage; which were the better choice? Was ever any man so afraid of death that he would choose to be the jealous husband of a Thymele, or the colleague of the clown Corinthus? Yet when an Emperor[7]
- ↑ Private prisons in which gangs of slaves were kept in irons.
- ↑ Siparium was a curtain separating the front part of the stage, on which mimes were acted, from the back.
- ↑ A writer of mimi.
- ↑ A highwayman who was crucified.
- ↑ Actors in mimes wore no shoes.
- ↑ "To sell their deaths" is equivalent to "to sell their lives." The word funera may also suggest that these degenerate nobles are destroying the old glories of their families.
- ↑ Nero.
