PERSIUS, SATIRE II
who send us dreams most free from gouty vapours, and let their beards be all of gold! Gold has now ousted Numa's crockery, and the bronze vessels of Saturn;[1] it has supplanted the urns and Tuscan pottery[2] of the Vestals.
61O Souls bowed down to earth, and void of all heavenly thoughts! What avails it to bring our ideas into the temples, and to infer from this sinful flesh of ours what is pleasing to the gods? It is the flesh that has spoilt our oil by mingling it with casia, and misused Tyrian purple for the soaking of Calabrian fleeces; it is this that has bidden us pluck the pearl from the shell, and tear out the veins of shining ore from the native clay. The flesh indeed sins, it sins, and yet it gets profit from its sinning But tell me this, ye priests, what avails gold inside the sanctuary? Just as much as the dolls[3] which maidens dedicate to Venus! Nay rather let us offer to the gods what the blear-eyed progeny of the great Messala[4] cannot give out of his lordly salver;—a heart rightly attuned towards God and man; a mind pure in its inner depths, and a soul steeped in nobleness and honour. Give me these to offer in the temples, and a handful of corn shall win my prayer for me!
- ↑ The bronze vessels of the Saturnian age, with a possible reference to the bronze coinage of early Rome.
- ↑ cp. Juv. xi. 115. Fictilis et nullo violatus Iuppiter auro.
- ↑ Just as boys dedicated the bulla on assuming the toga virilis, so did maidens hang up their dolls to Venus on attaining womanhood.
- ↑ A degenerate descendant of the distinguished Messalae, a family of the Valerian gens, with a possible reference to L. Aurelius Cotta Messalinus, mentioned with contumely by Tacitus {Ann. v. 3 and vi. 5).
