Juvenal and Persius/The Satires of Persius/Satire 1

by Persius

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SUMMARY OF SATIRE I

This whole satire is an attack on the corruption of literature and literary taste in Rome, as a sign and accompaniment of a similar corruption in morals. The poem takes the form of a dialogue between Persius and a Friend. Persius recites a line (possibly from Lucilius) which looks like the beginning of a poem. "Who will read stuff like that?" asks the Friend. "Well," says Persius, "what does that matter! The opinion of thick-headed Rome isn't worth a d——n! If only I could say what I think! But when I look at our gloomy way of living, and our affectation of morality, I feel that I must have my laugh out (1–12). Just look at the foppery and ostentation of our public recitations, and the licentious character of the things recited" (13–23).

F. "But surely you must allow our young poets to show their learning and give their genius a vent?" (24–25).

P. "Learning, indeed ! as if knowledge were of no use unless other people know that you possess it!" (26–27).

F. "But you cannot deny the charm of being praised and of hearing people say 'That's the man!'" (28–30).

P. "And what kind of praise do they win? Listen to the mawkish stuff poured forth at dinner tables, and the applause given to it by the well-filled guests. How grand and soul-sufficing!" (30–40).

F. "You are very nasty with your gibes. Do you suppose that any one is so indifferent to fame that he would not care to be ranked among the immortals?" (40–43).

P. "Certainly not. I value praise justly bestowed as much as any man; but I decline to accept the verdict of guests whose favour has been secured by gifts of old clothing and good viands. You say you want the truth? then let me tell it you: you are a mere twaddler, happy only in this that, unlike Janus, you cannot see the gibes made at you behind your back" (44–62).

F. "Anyhow the public are enchanted. Never, they say, did poets write more smoothly and correctly, or handle great themes more nobly" (63–68).

P. "Yes, indeed! To-day we find heroic themes attempted by men who cannot describe the simplest scenes of country life without committing absurdities. Others have a mania for archaisms; and what can be more artificial than our rhetoric? An advocate cannot defend a man on his trial for some crime without using all the embellishments of the schools! He is like the shipwrecked mariner who appeals to you by a song" (69–91).

F. "But you will at least grant that our modern Muse has grace and polish?" (92).

P. "Grace and polish indeed! Let me quote some instances of your modern polish . . . What would Virgil have said of turgid and frothy stuff like that? Now please give me some instances of the tender languishing style " (93–98). (Then follow four lines of furious magniloquent bombast, quoted admiringly by P.'s interlocutor (99–102).)

P. "Whew! what nerveless sputtering trash! Not one sign there of real honest work!" (103–106).

F. "But why vex delicate ears with biting truths like these? See that the doors of your great friends are not closed to you after his. Beware of the dog!" (107–110).

P. "Well! Well! Have your way. Put up a notice—'No nuisance here,' and I'll be off. But Lucilius had his say out, sparing no man; Horace spoke out his mind with well-spiced pleasantry; and am I to keep my mouth shut? am I not to divulge my secret to any one, not even to a ditch? Nay, here is a ditch, and I will dig it in: 'All the world are fools.' This little secret joke of mine I will not sell you for all your Iliads!" (110–123).

"No: let me have for hearers all you that have drawn an inspiring breath from Cratinus, and Eupolis, and the Grand Old Man; I care not for the fry that love to vent their wit upon the slippers of the Greeks, nor for the puffed-up local magnate who jeers at a one-eyed man, nor for the man who flouts philosophers and thinks it a fine joke to see a saucy wench pluck a cynic by the beard. Let these enjoy the pleasures they deserve!" (123–134).

The first satire of Persius seems to have furnished a pattern for the first satire of Juvenal. In each case the poet begins by an attack on the character of his own age, Persius laying stress upon the corruption of literature, Juvenal upon that of morals as a whole. In each case a friend warns the poet of the dangers of such an attack. Both poets justify themselves by the example of Lucilius, and his free-spoken attacks upon his contemporaries. Persius rejects all appeal to the depraved opinion of his own time, and asks for readers who have caught the spirit of the masters of the old Greek comedy; Juvenal promises to spare the living and to confine his attacks to the dead.

 

SATIRE I

P. "O the vanity of mankind! How vast the void in human affairs!"

F. "Who will read stuff like that?"

P. "Is it to me you are speaking? Not a soul, by Hercules."

F. "What? nobody?"

P. "One or two perhaps or nobody."

F. "What a poor and lamentable result!"

P. "Why that? Are you afraid that Polydamas and his Trojan ladies^[1] will put Labeo above me? Stuff and nonsense! And if thick-headed Rome does disparage anything, don't you go and put right the tongue in that false balance of theirs; look to no one outside yourself. For who is there in Rome who is not^[2]—oh, if only I might say my secret!—and yet say it I must, when I look at these gray heads of ours, and our gloomy ways of living, and indeed everything that we have been doing since the days when we gave up our marbles, and put on the wise airs of uncles. So please forgive me! I would rather not say it—but what else can I do?—I have a wayward wit and must have my laugh out.

¹³"We shut ourselves up and write something grand—one in verse, one in prose—something that will take a vast amount of breath to pant out. This stuff you will some day read aloud to the public, having first lubricated your throat with an emollient wash; you will take your seat on a high chair, well combed, in a new white robe, and with a rakish leer in your eye, not forgetting a birthday sardonyx gem on your finger. Thereupon, as the thrilling strains make their way into the loins, and tickle the inward parts, you may see the burly sons of Rome,^[3] quivering in no seemly fashion, and uttering no seemly words. What, you old reprobate? Do you cater for other people's wanton ears?—ears to which, however hardened your hide, you might fain cry 'hold, enough!'"

F. "But what avail study and learning if the yeast, and the wild fig-tree^[4] which has sprung up within, are never to break through the bosom and come forth? See our pallid cheeks and aged looks!"^[5]

P. "Good heavens! Is all your knowledge to go so utterly for nothing unless other people know that you possess it?"

F. "O but it is a fine thing to have a finger pointed at one, and to hear people say, 'That's the man'! Would you yourself deem it of no account to have been conned as a task by a hundred curly-headed urchins?"

P. "See, now, the sons of Romulus, having well dined, are asking over their cups, 'What has divine poesy to say'? Whereupon some fellow with a purple mantle round his shoulders lisps out with a snuffle some insipid trash about a Phyllis or a Hypsipyle^[6] or some other dolorous poetic theme, mincing his words, and letting them trip daintily over his palate. The great men signify their approval; will notyour poet's ashes be happy now? will not the grave-stone press more lightly upon his bones?^[7] The lesser guests chime in with their assent: will not violets now spring up from those remains, from the tomb and its thrice-blessed ashes?"

F. "You are scoffing, and use your turned-up nose too freely. Do you mean to tell me that any man who has uttered words worthy of cedar oil will disown the wish to have earned a place in the mouths of men, and to leave behind him poems that will have nothing to fear from mackerel or from spice?"^[8]

⁴⁴P. Well, my friend, whoever you are whom I have set up to speak on the opposing side, I am the last man, if by chance when writing I let fall something good (rare bird as that would be), I am the last man, I say, to be afraid of praise. My heart is not made of horn! But I decline to admit that the final and supreme test of excellence is to be found in your 'Bravo!' and your 'Beautiful!' Just sift out all those 'Bravos': what do they not contain? Will you not find there the bedrugged Iliad of Attius,^[9] and all the love-ditties spouted by your grandees while digesting their dinners—all the stuff in short that is scribbled on couches of citron-wood? You know how to serve up a sow's paunch piping hot: you know how to present a shivering client with a threadbare cloak,^[10] and then you say, 'I love the Truth; tell me the truth about myself!' How can the man do that? Would you like me to tell you the truth? You are just a fool, you old baldpate, with that pot-belly of yours sticking out a foot and a half in front of you! O happy Janus, who cannot be pecked at from behind by a stork, nor mocked by a hand nimble at mimicking white donkey-ears; at whom no tongue can be thrust out as far as that of a thirsty Apulian hound! O ye blue-blooded patricians, you who have to live without eyes in the back of your head, turn round and face the gibing in your rear!^[11] And what does the town say? "

F. "Why what else but this—that now at last we have verses flowing smoothly along, so that the critical nail^[12] glides unjarred over the joinings. Our poet knows how to draw his lines as straight as if he were directing a ruddle cord with one eye shut. Whatever be his theme: whether it be the morals and luxury of the times, or the banquets of the great, the Muse furnishes him with the lofty style."

P. "Yes; and so we now see heroics produced by men who have been used to trifle over Greek verses—men who have not art enough to describe a grove, or commend the abundance of country life, with its baskets and its hearths, with its pigs and the smoking hay-heaps of the Palilia;^[13] out of which emerges Remus, and thou, Cincinnatus,^[14] polishing thy share-beam against the furrow, and then thy wife in a flurry arraying thee as Dictator before the oxen, while the lictor drives home the plough! Bravo, bravo! Mr. Poet! One man pores over the dried-up tome of the Bacchanalian^[15] Accius;^[16] others dwell lovingly on the warty Antiope of Pacuvius,^[16] 'her dolorific heart buttressed up with woes.' When you see blear-eyed sires pouring lessons like these into their children's eai*s, can you ask whence has come this farrago of language into their tongues? or whence came those shameless ditties which put your smooth-faced sprigs of nobility into a tremble of ecstasy on the benches?

⁸³"Are you not ashamed to be unable to ward off danger from some hoary head without wishing to hear some trifling word of commendation? 'You are a thief!' says the accused to Pedius: how does Pedius^[17] reply? He balances the charges against each other in smooth antitheses, and Is praised for his artistic tropes: 'How fine!' they say. What, Romulus? Do you call that fine? Or are you just losing your virility? Shall I be touched, think you, and pull a penny out of my pocket because a ship-wrecked mariner sings a song? You sing, do you, when you carry on your shoulder a picture of yourself, squatting on a broken plank? No, no . the man who wishes to bend me with his tale of woe must shed true tears—not tears that have been got ready overnight."

⁹²F. "But you will admit, anyhow, that grace and polish have been added to the uncouth measures of our sires. See how we have learnt to round off our verses with 'Berecynthian Attis'; or 'the dolphin which was cleaving the sky-blue Nereus'; or how 'we filched a rib off from the lengthy Apennines'!"^[18]

P. "O shade of Virgil! What is this but frothy inflated stuff, like an old bough smothered under its bloated bark! Now give me something of the languishing kind; something that should be recited with a gentle bending of the neck."

F. "'They filled their savage horns with Mimallonean boomings'; 'the Bassarid ready to tear off the head of the prancing calf'; or, 'the Maenad, about to rein the lynx with ivy-trails, redoubles the Evian shout: responsive Echo gives back the cry!'"^[19]

P. "What? Would such things be written if one drop of our fathers' manhood were still alive in our veins? Your Maenad and your Attis are just marrowless drivel, floating and spluttering on the lips, on the top of the spittle: no banging of the desk here, no biting of nails to the quick!"^[20]

¹⁰⁷F. "But why rasp people's tender ears with biting truths? Take heed, I beseech you, that the doorsteps of your great friends do not grow cool towards you: don't you hear the snarl of a dog?"

P. "Well, well, have your way; I will paint everything white henceforth! Bravo! Bravo! you shall all be paragons of creation! Will that please you? 'No nuisance here,' you say; paint up a couple of snakes, my lads, and clear out; the ground is holy, and I'll be off."^[21]

"And yet Lucilius^[22] flayed our city: he flayed you, Lupus, and you, Mucius, and broke his jaw over you. Horace, sly dog, worming his way playfully into the vitals of his laughing friend, touches up his every fault; a rare hand he at flinging out his nose and hanging the people on it!^[23] And may I not mutter one word? Not anywhere, to myself, nor even to a ditch? Yes—here will I dig it in. I have seen the truth; I have seen it with my own eyes, O my book: Who is there who has not the ears of an ass? this dead secret of mine, this poor little joke, I will not sell for all your Iliads!

"O all ye that have caught the bold breath of Cratinus—ye who haye grown pale over the blasts of Eupolis or of the Grand Old Man^[24]—look here too, if you have an ear for anything of the finer sort. Let my reader be one whose ear has been cleansed and kindled by such strains, not one of the baser sort who loves to poke fun at the slippers of the Greeks, and who could cry out 'Old one-eye!' to a one-eyed man; nor yet one puffed up with his dignity as a provincial aedile who deems himself somebody because he has broken up short pint measures at Arretium. Nor do I want a man who thinks it funny to laugh at figures on a blackboard, or cones traced in the sand, and is ready to scream with joy if some saucy wench plucks a Cynic by the beard. To such gentlemen I would commend the play-bill in the morning, for the afternoon Calliroe."^[25]

Footnotes

1. Polydamas is from Homer (Il. xxii. 104-5). Polydamas and the high-born Roman ladies are supposed to represent the opinions of the respectable Mrs. Grundys of the day. Attius Labeo was a poor poet of the time, said to have translated Homer.
2. The secret is that every one is an ass, see 1. 121. For the passage 8-12 I follow the punctuation and explanation given by Professor Housman (C.Q. Jan. 1913). Cachinno is a verb, "I laugh"; it has been commonly taken as a substantive ("a laugher") but there is no authority.
3. Titos for Titienses, one of the three original Roman tribes, ironically applied to those who prided themselves on their ancient Roman descent. Similarly used are Troiades in 1. 4, Romulidae, 1. 31, and Rhamnes in Hor. A. P. 342.
4. The ferment of poetic inspiration longing for a vent is compared to the sturdy shoot of the wild fig-tree, which finds its way through masonry and dislodges even solid stones (Juv. x. 143).
5. These words refer to the canities, etc., ridiculed in 1. 9 which the Friend accounts for by the hard work of the poet! Some give these words to Persius, with an ironical meaning.
6. i.e. some sentimental ditty taken from heroic times; there may be an allusion to the Heroides of Ovid.
7. Referring to the simple prayer often inscribed over the ashes of the dead, sit tibi terra levis (S.T.T.L.).
8. A clear imitation of Cat. xcv. 7, and Hor. Epp. II. i. 269, alluding to the uses of waste paper.
9. No doubt the Attius Labeo of 1. 4.
10. These lines, again, are closely imitated from Hor. Epp. I. xix. 37.
11. Janus, having two faces (bifrons), could not be ridiculed from behind.
12. A metaphor from the art of the sculptor, who passes his nail along the surface to make sure that there is no inequality.
13. The Palilia or Parilia were celebrated on the 21st of April, the supposed birthday of Rome. Part of the ceremony or sport of the day was to jump over burning heaps of hay.
14. L. Quintus Cincinnatus. Alluding to the well-known story of his being saluted as Dictator on coming home from the plough.
15. Brisaeus is an epithet of Bacchus, used here (like venosus and verrucosus) to indicate the poet's style. Line 78 is apparently a parody of a line in the Antiope of Pacuvius, in which he is said to have imitated Euripides.
16. These were the greatest of the early poets of home, after Ennius. Both wrote tragedies. Pacuvius was born about B.C. 220, Accius (or Attius) in B.C. 170. Horace speaks of them with more respect than Persius: aufert=Pacuvius docti famam senis, Accius alti (Epp. n. i. 56).
17. The name "Pedius," as that of an advocate, seems taken from Hor. Sat. I. x. 28, but there seems to be no reference to the cause in which Pedius is there concerned.
18. These lines (93-5), admiringly quoted by the Friend, seem to be invented or quoted to show the absurdities of modern poetic diction.
19. These four lines of furious bombast are said by the Scholiast, apparently without any authority, to have formed part of a poem by Nero. They are ridiculed both for their grandiloquence in rhythm and for their crudities in expression. Line 99 is imitated from Catull. lxii. 264. Line 100 is from Eur. Bacch. 743.
20. This line is obviously imitated from Hor. Sat. i. x. 70.
21. On spots to be protected from defilement snakes were painted up, as a warning, representing the genius loci.
22. C. Lucilius, the father of Roman Satire, and forerunner of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, was born in B.C. 148. He wrote thirty books of Satires, and, living in days of freedom, was unsparing in his attacks upon the follies of his contemporaries. See Introd. pp. xliii sqq.
23. This is Mr. Conington's excellent translation.
24. i.e. Aristophanes. These three poets, as recorded in the famous lines of Horace, Sat. I. iv. 1:
    Eupolis atque Cratinus Aristophanesque poetae
    Atque alii quorum Comoedia prisca virorum est,
    constituted the great Triumvirate of the Old Comedy of Greece. Cratinus was born in B.C. 519, Eupolis in 446, and Aristophanes in 444.
25. Some mawkish sentimental poem, of the kind satirised above.