PERSIUS, SATIRE III
the debauch of yesterday, with a head unhinged and nodding, and jaws gaping from ear to ear? Have you any goal in life? Is there any target at which you aim? Or are you just taking random shots at crows with clods and potsherds, not caring whither your feet are taking you, and living from one moment to another?
63It is too late to call for hellebore when the skin is already swollen and diseased; meet the malady on its way, and then what need to promise big fees to Craterus?[1] Come and learn, O miserable souls, and be instructed in the causes of things; learn what we are, and for what sort of lives we were born; what place was assigned to us at the start; how to round the turning-post gently, and from what point to begin the turn; what limit should be placed on wealth; what prayers may rightfully be offered; what good there is in fresh-minted coin;[2] how much should be spent on country and on kin; what part God has ordered you to play, and at what point of the human commonwealth you have been stationed. Learn these things, and do not envy your neighbour because he has many a jar going bad in a larder well stored with gifts from the fat Umbrians[3] whom he has defended, or with the pepper and hams that tell of grateful Marsian clients, or because the pilchards in his first barrel have not yet come to an end.
77Here one of the unsavoury tribe of Centurions[4] may say, "What I know is enough for me; I have no mind to be an Arcesilas,[5] or one of your poor
- ↑ The name of a doctor, taken from Hor. Sat. II. iii. 161.
- ↑ i.e. what is the real and proper use of money.
- ↑ Country clients seem generally to have paid their lawyers' fees in kind. See the enumeration of such rural gifts in Juv. vii. 119-121.
- ↑ Nothing so moves the ire and contempt of the gentle philosophic Persius as the ignorance and coarseness of the brawny soldiery. See v. 189-191; also Juv. xvi. throughout.
- ↑ Arcesilas, or Arcesilaus, a Greek philosopher of the third century B.C., regarded as the founder of the Middle Academy.
