PERSIUS, SATIRE III
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
- ↑ This metaphor, taken from testing the soundness of a jar by the ring, is repeated in v. 24.
- ↑ Referring to the annual parade (transvectio) of the equites, clad in their purple robes of state (trabea), before the Censor.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ i.e. "closely." cf. ἐν χρῷ.
- ↑ In allusion to the brazen bull of Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigentum. See the parallel passage in Juv. viii. 81–82.
