Littera is the antecedent of quae and the subject of monstravit.
Diduxit < diduco, –ducere, –duxi, –ductum: “to draw apart.”
Callem < callis, –is: “a narrow track.” Callis and limes are oddly tautological.
58–62. The comes sees his sermon has not had the desired effect. Conpage < conpages, –is: “joint, seam, connection.”
Oscitat hesternum = “yawns off yesterday.”
Dissutis undique malis = “with cheeks having come unsewn in all directions,” a striking image of slack-jawed stupor.
60. “Do you have an aim?”
61–2. “Or are you on a wild goose chase?” Testaque lutoque = “with pottery shards and mud,” difficult weapons with which to try to bring down crows (corvos).
Ex tempore = “for the moment.”
63–5. Some assume a change of addressee at this point. Certainly, at line 64 the comes, if that is whom we are still to imagine speaking these lines, changes from using the second person singular (videas) to the plural (occurite) in mid sentence, but it is less than assured that the student has left the scene or whence this mysterious audience has arrived. All attempts to imagine a consistent, unambiguous dramatic context for this surreal dialogue are doomed to fail. Elleborum = “black hellebore,” used in the treatment of dropsy.
Poscentis = accusative plural.
Videas = “you should consider.”
Cratero: an eminent physician mentioned by Cicero and Horace (Satires 2.3.161).
Magnos … montis: understand auri. The phrase is proverbial for vast expense.
66–72. Through learning the Stoic definitions of the nature of things (causas rerum) we in turn come to understand our own natures and hence our duties and responsibilities. In this way, our suffering (miseri) will cease if we take philosophy as our physic.
Victuri = “future participle of purpose” (Gildersleeve 1903).
Metae qua mollis flexus et unde: a metaphor taken from chariot racing. The skilled driver must know how to make the turns. Hence, the winners in life’s race must know where the posts (metae) are and from where (unde) they should begin their turns, if they are not to overturn their cars and be trampled.
69–72. Compare Lucilius 1342–54.
73–6. “If you learn this lesson, then you won’t envy the lot of those advocates who focus on material possessions.” The shift back to the singular returns the focus to the student. Note the emphasis on containers of rotting foodstuffs. The person innocent of philosophy may be wealthy on the outside, but putrefying within. Putet < puteo, –ere: “to stink.”
Fidelia: compare line 22.
Penu < penus, –us: “provisions.”
Defensis pinguibus Umbris = ablative absolute, “when fat Umbrians have been defended.” Patrons were expected to defend their clients for free, but in return for their services they would generally receive gifts in kind on their birthdays or the Saturnalia. Umbrians were proverbially prosperous.
Piper = “pepper.”
Pernae = “hams.”
Marsi monumenta clientis: it is unclear whether this phrase is in apposition to et piper et pernae or it refers to an additional set of gifts. Juvenal 3.169 shows that the Marsians were proverbial for their simplicity. Likewise, hams and pepper were not rare and expensive gifts. In that case, however, what precisely did the fat Umbrians provide? Multa fidelia is oddly vague compared with the specificity of et piper et pernae. Nonetheless, the lack of a coordinating conjunction before Marsi monumenta clientis tips the balance toward apposition.
Maena: Pliny (Historia Naturalis 9.16) tells us, and the scholia confirm, a kind of chopped fish preserved in jars of brine.
Prima … orca: the wealthy advocate has not yet finished his first jar.
77–87. The comes introduces an objection from a hypothetical centurion (dicat is potential subjunctive). This device is used both to inject humor into the portrait of the philosopher and, ultimately, to discredit the typical objections of the crowd to the life of philosophical study. Hircosa = “goat-like,” hence smelly (see Catullus 69), but also crude and animalistic.
Quod sapio satis est mihi: “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.”
Quod Arcesilas aerumnosique Solones: understand sunt. Arcesilas was founder of the second Academy (third century BCE), which taught the impossibility of absolute knowledge. Solon was the great seventh-century BCE Athenian lawgiver and one of the seven sages. The plural is generalizing and contemptuous, “those Solons.” Aerumnosi = “toiling.”
Obstipo < obstipus, –a, –um: “bowed down.”
Trutinantur < trutinor, –ari: “to weigh.”
Labello = contemptuous diminutive of labrum.
Aegroti veteris … somnia: philosophical ideas were often portrayed as the fantasies of the old and sick (Kissel 1990).
Gigni / de nihilo nihilum, in nihilum nil posse reverti = a parody of Epicurean dogma offered as an indictment of Stoicism by the ignorant centurion.
Quis = aliquis.
86. The switch from the potential subjunctive (dicat) to the indicative (ridet) makes the scene more vivid and prepares for the dialogue that follows. Torosa = “muscular.”
87. Crispante < crispo, –are: “to curl,” as in “to turn up one’s nose.”
88–106. The comes introduces a dialogue within the dialogue in the form of a parable about a man who believes himself to have recovered from illness and is no longer willing to follow doctor’s orders. The result is death. The metaphor of physical for moral health was common in ancient philosophy. The multiplicity of perspectives introduced here is typical of the satire as a whole and anticipates the return of the student in 107.
88–93. Our little scene begins with the patient asking for help and being ordered to rest. This interchange parallels the student’s initial exposure to the principles of Stoic moral hygiene as an antidote to the suffering that comes from the common life in this world. But like the student, the patient, once he begins to feel better, ignores his physician’s advice. Faucibus < faux, faucis: “gullet.”
Sodes is a colloquial compound (si + audes) used to soften the imperative.
Tertia … nox: certain mosquito-borne illnesses have recurring fevers. The patient thinks he has the sort that returns after only two days, but in fact he has a quartan fever, which recurs after three.
Conpositas … venas = “a normal pulse.”
De maiore domo = de patroni domo.
Modice sitiente lagoena = “from a moderately thirsty jar.” Compare Horace 2.8.41.
Lenia … Surrentina: the wine of Sorrento was light and recommended, Pliny the Elder assures us, for convalescents (Historia Naturalis 23.35).
Loturo < lavo, –are, –vi, –lotum: “to bathe.” He will take the wine to drink in the bath.
94–7. A brief exchange takes place on the way to the baths. Lutea pellis = a “sallow hide.”
Ne sis mihi tutor = hortatory subjunctive. A tutor is a legal guardian.
Hunc = his actual tutor.
Perge, tacebo = “never mind, I’ll shut up.”
98–106. On death in the baths, compare Juvenal 1.140–6.
98–9. A vivid picture of ill-health and self-indulgence. Albo ventre: compare lutea pellis.
Mefites < mefitis, –is: the vapor arising from a sulphur spring.
100–2. A shockingly realistic description of seizure and death. Inter vina = “in the midst of drinking his wine.”
Calidumque trientem: a triens is a cup holding one third of a sextarius (roughly a pint). It was warm owing to the Roman habit of mixing hot water with their wine, often for medicinal purposes.
Pulmentaria: see Lucilius 30.3.1051.
103–5. The funeral follows. Tuba: see Horace 1.6.44. Candelae: a normal part of the funeral, a wax or tallow candle.
Beatulus = “the man himself, bless his heart.”
Crassis lutatus amomis: “Every word is contemptuous: ‘bedaubed with lots of coarse ointments’” (Gildersleeve
1903).
In portam rigidas calces extendit: prior to the funeral and subsequent cremation the corpse was laid on a couch in the atrium with its heels pointed toward the door.
105–6. It was a common practice for Romans to free many of their slaves upon death. These new freedmen would then follow the bier wearing their caps of freedom. Observe the way the final sentence unfolds, “but that man, a group who only yesterday placed [the cap of freedom] on their heads followed close upon, now Roman citizens.”
107–18. “The adversary [student] convicts himself most eloquently, however, when he comments on the imaginary scene between a patient and his doctor: unable to perceive the close relationship between spiritual and physical illness, he assumes that he is healthy because he has no chills or fever, and he turns a deaf ear to his friend’s warnings” (Dessen 1968: 52).
109–11. “But at the first sight of money or a pretty girl your heart skips a beat.” Molle = adverbial.
Rite = “regularly.”
111–14. “And your throat is too tender for common food.” Catino < catinus, –i: “a deep dish or bowl.”
Algente < algeo, –ere, alsi: “to be cold.”
Holus: see Horace 2.1.74.
Populi cribro: “with the common sieve,” i.e., coarsely ground.
Ulcus … putre = “a rotting ulcer.”
Beta = “beet.” The irony is that while the beet may be plebeia, it is proverbially soft. On the importance of radere, see introduction [70].
115–18. “Besides, you chill when struck by fear, and are often fevered with anger.” Aristas = “goose bumps.”
117–18. See introductory note. Orestes went mad when pursued by the Furies after slaying Clytemnestra.
4
This poem, ostensibly on Alcibiades, investigates the complex relations that governed the conjunction of sexual practices, self-cultivation, and political power in Neronian society [70]. It is universally agreed that the first twenty-two lines of the poem are based on the (pseudo-?) Platonic Alcibiades I. In this dialogue, and in a series of lost dialogues that follow the same essential scenario (Dessen 1968: 97–105), Socrates challenges Alcibiades’s presumption that he is equipped to lead the Athenian people. He demonstrates to the young man that, in as much as he knows neither the good, nor the just, nor himself, he—in spite of his noble ancestry, aristocratic upbringing, and good looks—is not truly qualified to advise the dêmos. The dialogue concludes with Alcibiades begging Socrates to instruct him on how to acquire the self-knowledge demanded by the Delphic inscription, gnôthi seauton (know yourself), and on how to care for himself (epimeleia heautou) so that he might know virtue and thus be of use to the polis.
Alcibiades’s conversion, however, rests on shaky ground. Socrates ends the dialogue with the warning, “I would wish that you accomplish this. Yet I shudder, not because I mistrust anything in your nature, but when I see the power of the city, I fear it will overcome you and me.” The reference to the power of the city is at once an allusion to Socrates’s later condemnation by the Athenian court for corrupting the youth, a proceeding in which the debauched Alcibiades served as exhibit A, and to Alcibiades’s seduction by the adoration of the crowd. For Socrates, it is clear that the blandishments of the people are more to be feared than their condemnation.
Seduction is one of the major themes of the Alcibiades I. Socrates, in fact, introduces himself as Alcibiades’s suitor. He has been waiting in the wings until Alcibiades’s youth had begun to fade and the crowd of potential lovers the handsome lad attracted had left. Socrates, however, loves not Alcibiades’s passing beauty but the inner nobility he could possess if he were to care for himself properly (103–106B).
The conclusion of Satire 4 echoes Socrates’s final words, but the satire ends on a more acerbic note than the Alcibiades I. The young man’s interlocutor admonishes him: respue quod non es; tollat sua munera cerdo. / tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex [“Spit out what you are not; let the common man take back his gifts. / Live with yourself: you will know how paltry is your furnishing”]. Like Socrates in the Alcibiades I, the interlocutor fears that Alcibiades will fail to know and care for himself and that he will be seduced by the blandishments of the crowd. The expression of Persius’s Socrates may be less ironic and more caustic than that of the Greek original—as befits the satiric genre—but the parallels are nonetheless striking.
They are, moreover, crucial to an understanding of the structure and significance of the poem: for, while the relation between the Alcibiades I and the first twenty-two lines is universally conceded, there is considerable controversy about the relation of this opening passage, and its Greek source, to the rest of the poem. The problem is that the middle section of the poem (lines 24–50) consists of two vignettes that many contend have no precise parallel in the Platonic text (Hooley 1997: 124–5). Dessen, however, sees these vignettes as simply a set of examples designed to emphasize the dominant philosophical message of the importance of self-knowledge and of care of the self (1968: 61–2). Once we realize, however, that the final lines of Satire 4 recall the final lines of the dialogue, just as the opening lines recall the themes of the dialogue as whole, it becomes difficult not to see the entirety of the poem as taking place under the sign of its Platonic predecessor.
In fact, however, the examples chosen by Persius not only recall the dominant themes of the dialogue but they have precise analogues in the Alcibiades I. The miser Vettidius (lines 25–32), who pathologically cares only for the accumulation of his own possessions, represents an acid caricature of the Platonic khrêmatistês (“business man,” but literally “one who is occupied with his khrêma or things/possessions”). The khrêmatistês does not care for himself or for the things that truly are his own (i.e., his body), but only for the accumulation of the things of his things (i.e., doubly external possessions). He, like Vettidius, is completely without self-knowledge (131A–C).
In Satire 4, the example of Vettidius leads directly to the image of Alcibiades sunning himself in an obscene pose, with a shaven crotch, like a male prostitute. In the Platonic text, the next example after the khrêmatistês is that of Alcibiades himself as eromenos or “pederastic beloved.” Again, the emphasis in the dialogue is on a failure to love what is essential and a tendency to concentrate on externals to the detriment of an authentic care of the self that would lead to the love of wisdom (philosophia). Yet, these sentiments are hardly foreign to the more grotesquely eroticized Alcibiades presented by Persius. Thus, Socrates in the Greek text says, “Likewise, if someone had become the lover of the body of Alcibiades, he would not be the lover of Alcibiades, but of one of the things of Alcibiades” (131C6–8). Similarly at 132A Alcibiades is described as the dêmerastês, the “darling” of the people. His relation to the Athenian public is portrayed as an essentially pederastic one. Alcibiades proposes to prostitute himself. Socrates, however, hopes to lure him to his own corner.
The two vignettes in Persius certainly elaborate these examples of the man concerned with wealth alone and of the seduced and seducing Alcibiades at greater length and in more detail than is found in the Alcibiades I. In particular, the detailed and grotesque erotic imagery of lines 33–41 is without parallel. Moreover, the extensive elaboration of these images stands in for a set piece in the dialogue where Socrates gives a long speech demonstrating that, though Alcibiades may be proud of his aristocratic heritage and vast wealth, they were laughable compared to those of the kings of Sparta and Persia. These monarchs were the traditional foes of Athens, and thus the two adversaries about whom Alcibiades would presume to advise the Athenian body politic (121A–124B5). As such, they also represent the world of democratic Athens, the ultimate background to the dialogue’s epistemological and ethical investigations.
Thus the essential frame of the Alcibiades I is the young man’s political ambitions and his role in the city, while that of Persius 4 is personal vice. It is only natural then that those aspects dealing with sexuality’s relation t
o personal probity are highlighted in this satire. The foregrounding of the sexual represents less a deviation from the framework supplied by the Alcibiades I than its reinterpretation for the conditions found in the mid-first century CE.
The structural problem of the relation between the two halves of the satire as well as the intertextual question of the relation of the Alcibiades I to the poem as a whole are thus really one and the same. What we see in fact is not a shift in focus away from the Alcibiades in the last half of the satire, but a shift from the political concerns that are central to the dialogue in its Athenian setting to a focus on the private morality that characterize Stoic meditations on the meaning of libertas in the age of Neronian autocracy [31]. The central problem of the satire is in fact the necessity of the descent into the self. It is precisely the withdrawal from the all too public world rather than the question of who is fit to lead it that is at the core of this poem. Ut nemo in sese temptat descendere, nemo, / sed praecedenti spectatur mantica tergo! [“how no one tries to make the journey deep inside himself, no one, but each sees the sack [of vice] on the next person’s back!”] (lines 23–4). Likewise, the oft-cited shift from a predominantly Greek scene in lines 1–22 to a predominantly Roman scene in lines 23–52 merely underlines the process of reinterpretation that the Greek text undergoes as it is naturalized in its Roman imperial setting (pace Kissel 1990: 496). Although even this is oversimplified, as demonstrated by line 8’s invocation of the Quirites (Roman citizens) in the supposedly Greek portion of the poem. The presence of both Greek and Roman elements is a common device in Horace (see, inter alia, Odes 1.9).
1–3. Socrates approaches Alcibiades and asks on what basis he would presume to handle the affairs of the people. Crede = an imperative from the narrator directed at the reader.
Sorbitio = “draught.”
Cicutae = “of hemlock.”
Fretus = “relying on.”
Pupille Pericli: Alcibiades and his brother were the wards of the Athenian statesman, Pericles.
4–5. “You show amazing wisdom for a barely pubescent (ante pilos) youth.” Socratic irony is well in evidence. Calles = “know by experience.”
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