PERSIUS, SATIRE V
jars are swollen out with wine, you silently twitch your lips, turning pale at the sabbath of the circumcised. Then, again, there are the black spectres and the perils of the broken egg; there are the huge priests of Ceres, and the one-eyed[1] priestess with her rattle, who drive demons into you[2] that make your bodies swell if you do not swallow the prescribed morning dose of three heads of garlic.[3]
189If you talk in this fashion among your varicose Centurions, the hulking Pulfennius straightway bursts into a huge guffaw, and bids a clipped hundred-penny piece for a lot of a hundred Greeks.[4]
- ↑ Isis was supposed to punish offenders with blindness (Juv. xiii. 93).
- ↑ The idea seems to be that of causing bodies to be possessed by evil spirits as were the Gadarene swine.
- ↑ Persius piles up a list of the best known superstitions. Line 186 refers especially to the rites of Cybele, with her eunuch priests (Galli), and of Isis. See Juv. ii. 111; vi 512–13, and Hor. Epp. II. ii. 208–9.
- ↑ Persius once more has his fling at the muscular soldier clans.
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