PERSIUS, SATIRE V
gold? Have you marked off the things to be aimed at, and those again to be avoided—the former with a white stone, the latter with a black? Are you moderate in your desires, modest in your establishment, and kindly to your friends? Can you now close your granaries, and now again throw them open? Can you pass by a coin sticking in the mud, without gulping down your saliva in your greed for treasure?[1] When you can truly say, "Yes, all these things are mine," I will call you a free and a wise man, under the favour of praetors and of Jove; but if, after having been but a little ago of the same stuff as ourselves, you hold to your old skin, and though your brow be smooth, still keep a crafty fox[2] in that vapid heart of yours, I take back what I have just granted you and pull in my rope. Not one point has reason granted you; put out your finger (and what can be a slighter thing than that?) and you go wrong; not all the incense in the world will win leave from the Gods that one short half-ounce of wisdom may find lodgment in the head of a fool! To mingle[3] the two things is sacrilege; if you are a clown in all else, you cannot dance as much as three steps of the Satyr of Bathyllus.[4]
124"Yet for all that I am free," you say. And what is your ground of confidence, you that are a slave to so many masters? Do you know of no master but the one from whom the praetor's rod sets you
- ↑ Mercury being the god of gain.
- ↑ Here Persius, in his effort to combine two passages from Horace into a single phrase, perpetrates a gross confusion of metaphors. In the one passage (Sat. I. vi. 22) Horace alludes to the ass in the lion's skin, in the other (Sat. II. iii. 186) to that of the fox dressed up as a lion. The words farinae nostrae (" of the same flour as ourselves") introduce a new metaphor; and when he says pelliculam veterem, "the old skin," what he means is that the real nature of the fox remains unchanged beneath the skin.
- ↑ Miscere is exactly the right word here, being used of mingling things which have no proportion or affinity to each other, as distinguished from temperare, "to mix in due proportion."
- ↑ A comic dancer of the time.
