PERSIUS, SATIRE I
'No nuisance here,' you say; paint up a couple of snakes, my lads, and clear out; the ground is holy, and I'll be off."[1]
"And yet Lucilius[2] flayed our city: he flayed you, Lupus, and you, Mucius, and broke his jaw over you. Horace, sly dog, worming his way playfully into the vitals of his laughing friend, touches up his every fault; a rare hand he at flinging out his nose and hanging the people on it![3] And may I not mutter one word? Not anywhere, to myself, nor even to a ditch? Yes—here will I dig it in. I have seen the truth; I have seen it with my own eyes, O my book: Who is there who has not the ears of an ass? this dead secret of mine, this poor little joke, I will not sell for all your Iliads!
"O all ye that have caught the bold breath of Cratinus—ye who haye grown pale over the blasts of Eupolis or of the Grand Old Man[4]—look here too, if you have an ear for anything of the finer sort. Let my reader be one whose ear has been cleansed and kindled by such strains, not one of the baser sort who loves to poke fun at the slippers of the Greeks, and who could cry out 'Old one-eye!' to a one-eyed man; nor yet one puffed up with his dignity as a provincial aedile who deems himself somebody because he has broken up short pint measures
- ↑ On spots to be protected from defilement snakes were painted up, as a warning, representing the genius loci.
- ↑ C. Lucilius, the father of Roman Satire, and forerunner of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, was born in B.C. 148. He wrote thirty books of Satires, and, living in days of freedom, was unsparing in his attacks upon the follies of his contemporaries. See Introd. pp. xliii sqq.
- ↑ This is Mr. Conington's excellent translation.
- ↑ i.e. Aristophanes. These three poets, as recorded in the famous lines of Horace, Sat. I. iv. 1:
Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae
Atque alii quorum Comoedia prisca virorum est,
constituted the great Triumvirate of the Old Comedy of Greece. Cratinus was born in B.C. 519, Eupolis in 446, and Aristophanes in 444.
