[37] The cup in Virro’s hands is richly crusted with amber and rough with beryl: to you no gold is entrusted; or if it is, a watcher is posted over it to count the gems and keep an eye on your sharp finger-nails. Pardon his anxiety; that fine jasper of his is much admired! For Virro, like so many others, transfers from his fingers to his cups the jewels with which the youth preferred to the jealous Iarbas used to adorn his scabbard. To you will be given a cracked cup with four nozzles that takes its name from a Beneventine cobbler, and calls for sulphur wherewith to repair its broken glass.
[49] If my lord’s stomach is fevered with food and wine, a decoction colder than Thracian hoar-frosts will be brought to him. Did I complain just now that you were given a different wine? Why, the water which you clients drink is not the same. It will be handed to you by a Gaetulian groom, or by the bony hand of a blackamoor whom you would rather not meet at midnight when driving past the monuments on the hilly Latin Way. Before mine host stands the very pink of Asia, a youth bought for a sum bigger than the entire fortune of the warlike Tullus or Ancus, more valuable, in short, than all the chattels of all the kings of Rome. That being so, when you are thirsty look to your swarthy Ganymede. The page who has cost so many thousands cannot mix a drink for a poor man: but then his beauty, his youth, justify his disdain! When will he get as far as you? When does he listen to your request for water, hot or cold? It is beneath him to attend to an old dependent; he is indignant that you should ask for anything, and that you should be seated while he stands. All your great houses are full of saucy slaves. See with what a grumble another of them has handed you a bit of hard bread that you can scarce break in two, or lumps of dough that have turned mouldy — stuff that will exercise your grinders and into which no tooth can gain admittance. For Virro himself a delicate loaf is reserved, white as snow, and kneaded of the finest flour. Be sure to keep your hands off it: take no liberties with the bread-basket! If you are presumptuous enough to take a piece, there will be someone to bid you put it down: “What, Sir Impudence? Will you please fill yourself from your proper tray, and learn the colour of your own bread?” “What?” you ask, “was it for this that I would so often leave my wife’s side on a spring morning and hurry up the chilly Esquiline when the spring skies were rattling down the pitiless hail, and the rain was pouring in streams off my cloak?”
[80] See now that huge lobster being served to my lord, all garnished with asparagus; see how his lordly breast distinguishes the dish; with what a tail he looks down upon the company, borne aloft in the hands of that tall attendant! Before you is placed on a tiny plate a crab hemmed in by half an egg — a fit banquet for the dead. The host souses his fish in Venafran oil; the sickly greens offered to you, poor devil, will smell of the lamp; for the stuff contained in your cruets was brought up the Tiber in a sharp-prowed Numidian canoe — stuff which prevents anyone at Rome sharing a bath with Bocchar, and which will even protect you from a black serpent’s bite.
[92] My lord will have a mullet dispatched from Corsica or the Rocks of Tauromenium: for in the rage for gluttony our own seas have given out; the nets of the fish-market are for ever raking our home waters, and prevent Tyrrhenian fish from attaining their full size. And so the Provinces supply our kitchens; from the Provinces come the fish for the legacy-hunter Laenas to buy, and for Aurelia to send to market.
[99] Virro is served with a lamprey, the finest that the Straits of Sicily can purvey; for so long as the South wind stays at home, and sits in his prison-house drying his dank wings, Charybdis has no terrors for the daring fisherman. For you is reserved an eel, first cousin to a water-snake, or perchance a pike mottled with ice-spots; he too was bred on Tiber’s banks and was wont to find his way into the inmost recesses of the Subura, battening himself amid its flowing sewers.
[107] And now one word with the great man himself, if he will lend his ear. “No one asks of you such lordly gifts as Seneca, or the good Piso or Cotta, used to send to their humble friends: for in the days of old, the glory of giving was deemed grander than titles or fasces. All we ask of you is that you should dine with us as a fellow-citizen : do this and remain, like so many others nowadays, rich for yourself and poor to your friends.”
[114] Before Virro is put a huge goose’s liver; a capon as big as a goose, and a boar, piping hot, worthy of yellow-haired Meleager’s steel. Then will come truffles, if it be spring-time and the longed-for thunder have enlarged our dinners. “Keep your corn to yourself, O Libya!” says Alledius; “unyoke your oxen, if only you send us truffles!”
[120] During all this time, lest any occasion for disgust should be wanting, you may behold the carver capering and gesticulating with knife in air, and carrying out all the instructions of his preceptor: for it makes a mighty difference with what gestures a hare or a hen be carved! If you ever dare to utter one word as though you were possessed of three names, you will be dragged by the heels and thrust out of doors as Cacus was, after the drubbing he got from Hercules. When will Virro offer to drink wine with you? or take a cup that has been polluted by your lips? Which one of you would be so foolhardy, so lost to shame, as to say to your patron “A glass with you, Sir”? No, no: there’s many a thing which a man whose coat has holes in it cannot say! But if some God, or god-like manikin more kindly than the fates, should present you with four hundred thousand sesterces, O how great a personage would you become, from being a nobody; how dear a friend to Virro! “Pray help Trebius to this!” “Let Trebius have some of that!” “Would you like a cut just from the loin, good brother?” O money, money! It is to you that he pays this honour, it is you that are his brother! Nevertheless, if you wish to be yourself a great man, and a great man’s lord, let there be no little Aeneas playing about your halls, nor yet a little daughter, more sweet than he; nothing will so endear you to your friend as a barren wife. But as things now are, though your Mycale pour into your paternal bosom three boys at a birth, Virro will be charmed with the chattering brood, and will order cuirasses of green rushes to be given them, and little nuts, and pennies too if they be asked for, when the little parasites present themselves at his table.
[146] Before the guests will be placed toadstools of doubtful quality, before my lord a noble mushroom, such a one as Claudius ate before that mushroom of his wife’s — after which he ate nothing more. To himself and the rest of the Virros he will order apples to be served whose scent alone would be a feast — apples such as grew in the never-failing Autumn of the Phaeacians, and which you might believe to have been filched from the African sisters; you are treated to a rotten apple like those munched on the ramparts by a monkey equipped with spear and shield who learns, in terror of the whip, to hurl a javelin from the back of a shaggy goat.
[156] You may perhaps suppose that Virro grudges the expense; not a bit of it! His object is to give you pain. For what comedy, what mime, is so amusing as a disappointed belly? His one object, let me tell you, is to compel you to pour out your wrath in tears, and to keep gnashing your molars against each other. You think yourself a free man, and guest of a grandee; he thinks — and he is not far wrong — that you have been captured by the savoury odours of his kitchen. For who that had ever worn the Etruscan bulla in his boyhood, — or even the poor man’s leather badge — could tolerate such a patron for a second time, however destitute he might be? It is the hope of a good dinner that beguiles you: “Surely he will give us,” you say, “what is left of a hare, or some scraps of a boar’s haunch; the remains of a capon will come our way by and by.” And so you all sit in dumb silence, your bread clutched, untasted, and ready for action. In treating you thus, the great man shows his wisdom. If you can endure such things, you deserve them; some day you will be offering your head to be shaved and slapped: nor will you flinch from a stroke of the whip, well worthy of such a feast and such a friend.
Satire 6. The Ways of Women
[1] In the days of Saturn, I believe, Chastity still lingered on the earth, and was to be seen for a time — days when men were po
orly housed in chilly caves, when one common shelter enclosed hearth and household gods, herds and their owners; when the hill-bred wife spread her silvan bed with leaves and straw and the skins of her neighbours the wild beasts — a wife not like to thee, O Cynthia, nor to thee, Lesbia, whose bright eyes were clouded by a sparrow’s death, but one whose breasts gave suck to lusty babes, often more unkempt herself than her acorn-belching spouse. For in those days, when the world was young, and the skies were new, men born of the riven oak, or formed of dust, lived differently from now, and had no parents of their own. Under Jove, perchance, some few traces of ancient modesty may have survived; but that was before he had grown his beard, before the Greeks had learned to swear by someone else’s head, when men feared not thieves for their cabbages or apples, and lived with unwalled gardens. After that Astraea withdrew by degrees to heaven, with Chastity as her comrade, the two sisters taking flight together.
[21] To set your neighbour’s bed a-shaking, Postumus, and to flout the Genius of the sacred couch, is now an ancient and long-established practice. All other sins came later, the products of the age of Iron; but it was the silver age that saw the first adulterers. Nevertheless, in these days of ours, you are preparing for a covenant, a marriage-contract and a betrothal; you are by now getting your hair cut by a master barber; you have also perhaps given a pledge to her finger. What! Postumus, are you, you who once had your wits, taking to yourself a wife? Tell me what Tisiphone, what snakes are driving you mad? Can you submit to a she-tyrant when there is so much rope to be had, so many dizzy heights of windows standing open, and when the Aemilian bridge offers itself to hand? Or if none of all these modes of exit hit your fancy, how much better to take some boy-bedfellow, who would never wrangle with you o’ nights, never ask presents of you when in bed, and never complain that you took your ease and were indifferent to his solicitations!
[38] But Ursidius approves of the Julian Law. He purposes to bring up a dear little heir, though he will thereby have to do without the fine turtles, the bearded mullets, and all the legacy-hunting delicacies of the meat-market. What can you think impossible if Ursidius takes to himself a wife? if he, who has long been the most notorious of gallants, who has so often found safety in the corn-bin of the luckless Latinus, puts his head into the connubial noose? And what think you of his searching for a wife of the good old virtuous sort? O doctors, lance his over-blooded veins. A pretty fellow you! Why, if you have the good luck to find a modest spouse, you should prostrate yourself before the Tarpeian threshold, and sacrifice a heifer with gilded horns to Juno; so few are the wives worthy to handle the fillets of Ceres, or from whose kisses their own father would not shrink! Weave a garland for thy doorposts, and set up wreaths of ivy over thy lintel! But will Hiberina be satisfied with one man? Sooner compel her to be satisfied with one eye! You tell me of the high repute of some maiden, who lives on her paternal farm: well, let her live at Gabii, at Fidenae, as she lived in her own country, and I will believe in your paternal farm. But will anyone tell me that nothing ever took place on a mountain side or in a cave? Have Jupiter and Mars become so senile?
[60] Can our arcades show you one woman worthy of your vows? Do all the tiers in all our theatres hold one whom you may love without misgiving, and pick out thence? When the soft Bathyllus dances the part of the gesticulating Leda, Tuccia cannot contain herself; your Apulian maiden heaves a sudden and longing cry of ecstasy, as though she were in a man’s arms; the rustic Thymele is all attention, it is then that she learns her lesson.
[67] Others again, when all the stage draperies have been put away; when the theatres are closed, and all is silent save in the courts, and the Megalesian games are far off from the Plebeian, ease their dullness by taking to the mask, the thyrsus and the tights of Accius. Urbicus, in an Atellane interlude, raises a laugh by the gestures of Autonoe; the penniless Aelia is in love with him. Other women pay great prices for the favours of a comedian; some will not allow Chrysogonus to sing. Hispulla has a fancy for tragedians; but do you suppose that any one will be found to love Quintilian? If you marry a wife, it will be that the lyrist Echion or Glaphyrus, or the flute player Ambrosius, may become a father. Then up with a long dais in the narrow street! Adorn your doors and doorposts with wreaths of laurel, that your highborn son, O Lentulus, may exhibit, in his tortoiseshell cradle, the lineaments of Euryalus or of a murmillo!
[82] When Eppia, the senator’s wife, ran off with a gladiator to Pharos and the Nile and the ill-famed city of Lagos, Canopus itself cried shame upon the monstrous morals of our town. Forgetful of home, of husband and of sister, without thought of her country, she shamelessly abandoned her weeping children; and — more marvellous still — deserted Paris and the games. Though born in wealth, though as a babe she had slept in a bedizened cradle on the paternal down, she made light of the sea, just as she had long made light of her good name — a loss but little accounted of among our soft litter-riding dames. And so with stout heart she endured the tossing and the roaring of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, and all the many seas she had to cross. For when danger comes in a right and honourable way, a woman’s heart grows chill with fear; she cannot stand upon her trembling feet: but if she be doing a bold, bad thing, her courage fails not. For a husband to order his wife on board ship is cruelty: the bilge-water then sickens her, the heavens go round and round. But if she is running away with a lover, she feels no qualms: then she vomits over her husband; now she messes with the sailors, she roams about the deck, and delights in hauling at the hard ropes.
[103] And what were the youthful charms which captivated Eppia? What did she see in him to allow herself to be called “a she-Gladiator”? Her dear Sergius had already begun to shave; a wounded arm gave promise of a discharge, and there were sundry deformities in his face: a scar caused by the helmet, a huge wen upon his nose, a nasty humour always trickling from his eye. But then he was a gladiator! It is this that transforms these fellows into Hyacinths! it was this that she preferred to children and to country, to sister and to husband. What these women love is the sword: had this same Sergius received his discharge, he would have been no better than a Veiento.
[114] Do the concerns of a private household and the doings of Eppia affect you? Then look at those who rival the Gods, and hear what Claudius endured. As soon as his wife perceived that her husband was asleep, this august harlot was shameless enough to prefer a common mat to the imperial couch. Assuming a night-cowl, and attended by a single maid, she issued forth; then, having concealed her raven locks under a light-coloured peruque, she took her place in a brothel reeking with long-used coverlets. Entering an empty cell reserved for herself, she there took her stand, under the feigned name of Lycisca, her nipples bare and gilded, and exposed to view the womb that bore thee, O nobly-born Britannicus! Here she graciously received all comers, asking from each his fee; and when at length the keeper dismissed the rest, she remained to the very last before closing her cell, and with passion still raging hot within her went sorrowfully away. Then exhausted but unsatisfied, with soiled cheeks, and begrimed with the smoke of lamps, she took back to the imperial pillow all the odours of the stews.
[133] Why tell of love potions and incantations, of poisons brewed and administered to stepsons, or of the grosser crimes to which women are driven by the imperious power of sex? Their sins of lust are the least of all their sins.
[136] But tell me why is Censennia, on her husband’s testimony, the best of wives? “She brought him a million sesterces; that is the price at which he calls her chaste. He has not pined under the darts of Venus; he was never burnt by her torch. It was the dowry that lighted his fires, the dowry that shot those arrows! That dowry bought liberty for her: she may make what signals, and write what love letters she pleases, before her husband’s face; the rich woman who marries a money-loving husband is as good as unmarried.
[142] “Why does Sartorius burn with love for Bibula?” If you shake out the truth, it is the face that he loves, not the woman. Let three
wrinkles make their appearance; let her skin become dry and flabby; let her teeth turn black, and her eyes lose their lustre: then will his freedman give her the order, “Pack up your traps and be off! you’ve become a nuisance; you are for ever blowing your nose; be off, and quick about it! There’s another wife coming who will not sniffle.” But till that day comes, the lady rules the roast, asking her husband for shepherds and Canusian sheep, and elms for her Falernian vines. But that’s a mere nothing: she asks for all his slave-boys, in town and country; everything that her neighbour possesses, and that she does not possess, must be bought. Then in the winter time, when the merchant Jason is shut out from view, and his armed sailors are blocked out by the white booths, she will carry off huge crystal vases, vases bigger still of agate, and finally a diamond of great renown, made precious by the finger of Berenice. It was given as a present long ago by the barbarian Agrippa to his incestuous sister, in that country where kings celebrate festal sabbaths with bare feet, and where a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age.
[161] “Do you say no worthy wife is to be found among all these crowds?” Well, let her be handsome, charming, rich and fertile; let her have ancient ancestors ranged about her halls; let her be more chaste than the dishevelled Sabine maidens who stopped the war — a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan! yet who could endure a wife that possessed all perfections? I would rather have a Venusian wench for my wife than you, O Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, if, with all your virtues, you bring me a haughty brow, and reckon up Triumphs as part of your marriage portion. Away with your Hannibal, I beseech you! Away with Syphax overpowered in his camp! Take yourself off, Carthage and all!
Delphi Complete Works of Juvena Page 4