JUVENAL, SATIRE I
retire from public life and sleep his fill[1]; it is a foolish clemency when you jostle against poets at every corner, to spare paper that will be wasted anyhow. But if you can give me time, and will listen quietly to reason, I will tell you why I prefer to run in the same course over which the great nursling of Aurunca[2] drove his steeds.
22When a soft eunuch takes to matrimony, and Maevia, with spear in hand and breasts exposed, to pig-sticking; when a fellow under whose razor my stiff youthful beard used to grate[3] challenges, with his single wealth, the whole nobility; when a gutter-snipe of the Nile like Crispinus[4]—a slave-born denizen of Canopus[5]—hitches a Tyrian cloak on to his shoulder, whilst on his sweating finger he airs a summer ring of gold, unable to endure the weight of a heavier gem—it is hard not to write satire. For who can be so tolerant of this monstrous city, who so iron of soul, as to contain himself when the brand-new litter of lawyer Matho comes along, filled with his huge self; after him one who has informed against his noble patron and will soon sweep away the remnant of our nobility already gnawed to the bone—one whom Massa[6] dreads, whom Carus[6] propitiates by a bribe, and to whom Thymele[7] was sent as envoy by the terrified Latinus;[7] when you are thrust on one side by men who earn legacies by nightly performances, and are raised to heaven by that now royal road to high preferment—the favours of an aged and wealthy woman? Each of the lovers will have
- ↑ Referring to the retirement of Sulla from public life in B.C. 79. Such themes would be prescribed to schoolboys as rhetorical exercises, of the kind called suasoriae. See Mayor's n. and Sat. vii. 150–170.
- ↑ Lucilius, the first Roman satirist, B.C.148–103.
- ↑ Some barber who had made a fortune. The line is repeated in x. 226.
- ↑ A favourite aversion of Juvenal's as a rich Egyptian parvenu who had risen to be princeps equitum. See iv 1, 31, 108.
- ↑ A city in the Nile Delta.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Notorious informers under Domitian.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Both actors; the allusion is not known.
