How does it come about, Maecenas, that no one lives content with the lot his reason has dealt him or chance has thrown his way, but praises instead the men who follow other roads? ’Lucky merchants!’ says the soldier, heavy with his years, his limbs by now broken with long campaigning. The merchant, when the south winds toss his ship, says the reverse: ’Soldiering is better. Why? You close, and in the space of an hour comes quick death or the joy of victory.’ The man schooled in law and statute praises the farmer when, at cockcrow, a client hammers on his door; the other, hauled to town from the country on posted bail, shouts that only those who live in the city are happy. The rest of this kind — there are so many — could tire out the chatterbox Fabius. Not to delay you, hear where I am driving. Suppose some god should say, ’Here I am: I will grant now what you want. You, just now a soldier, shall be a merchant; you, the lawyer of a moment ago, a farmer. This way, you — that way, you — change parts and be off. Well? Why are you standing still?’ They would refuse. And yet they are free to be happy. What reason is there why Jupiter should not, and rightly, puff out both cheeks at them in anger, and declare he will not be so soft hereafter as to lend an ear to their prayers? And further — not to skim through this laughing, like a man dealing in jokes (though what forbids the telling of truth with a laugh? as coaxing teachers sometimes give children sweet cakes to make them willing to learn their first letters) — still, jesting aside, let us look at the matter in earnest: the man who turns the heavy earth with the hard plow, this cheating innkeeper, the soldier, the sailors who race boldly across every sea — they say they endure their toil with this in mind: that as old men they may withdraw into safe ease once they have heaped up their provisions; just as the ant, that tiny creature of enormous labor — for she is their model — drags in her mouth whatever she can and adds it to the pile she builds, by no means ignorant or heedless of the future. Yet she, the moment Aquarius saddens the turning year, creeps out nowhere, and wisely lives on what she gathered before; while you — no burning heat can shift you from your gain, no winter, fire, sea, sword; nothing stands in your way, so long as no other man is richer than yourself. What pleasure is there in furtively burying, in fear, a vast weight of silver and gold in the dug-up earth? ’Because, if you broke into it, it would dwindle to a worthless coin.’ But if you do not, what is fine about the heap you have stacked? Say your threshing-floor has milled a hundred thousand bushels: your belly will hold no more on that account than mine — just as, if among a slave-gang up for sale you happened to carry the bread-net on your loaded shoulder, you would get no more than the man who carried nothing. Or tell me, what does it matter to one who lives within nature’s bounds whether he plows a hundred acres or a thousand? ’But it is sweet to draw from a great heap.’ So long as you let us take just as much from a small one, why should you praise your granaries above our grain-bins? As if, needing no more liquid than a jug or a single cupful, you should say, ’I would rather draw the same from a great river than from this little spring.’ And so it falls out that those who delight in more abundance than is right are swept away, banks and all, by the fierce Aufidus; but the man who wants just as much as he needs neither draws water fouled with mud nor loses his life in the waves. Yet a good part of mankind, misled by false desire, says, ’Nothing is enough, since you are worth what you own’: what can you do with such a one? Bid him be wretched, since he does it gladly — like that man at Athens, remembered as mean and rich, who used to scorn the people’s talk like this: ’The people hiss at me, but at home I applaud myself the moment I gaze on the coins in my strongbox.’ Tantalus, parched, snatches at the streams that flee his lips — why do you laugh? Change the name and the tale is told of you: you sleep open-mouthed on money-bags heaped from everywhere, and are forced to spare them as if they were consecrated, or to take your pleasure in them as if they were painted panels. Do you not know what money is worth, what use it offers? Buy bread with it, greens, a pint of wine — add the things which human nature, denied them, grieves to be without. Or is it a joy to lie awake half-dead with fear, by night and day to dread wicked thieves, fires, slaves who will strip you bare and run? Of goods like these I would always pray to be the very poorest man. But if your body, taken with a chill, has fallen sick, or some other mischance has pinned you to your bed, do you have someone to sit by you, ready the poultices, summon the doctor to rouse you and restore you to your children and dear kin? Your wife does not want you well, nor does your son; everyone — neighbors, acquaintances, boys and girls — detests you. Do you wonder, when you set money above all else, that no one offers you the love you have not earned? But if you wished to keep the kinsmen nature gives you at no cost, and to hold on to your friends, you would waste your effort, poor wretch — as if a man should teach a donkey on the field to obey the rein and gallop. In short, let there be an end to getting; and as you have more, fear poverty less, and begin to bring your labor to a close now that you have won what you craved — lest you do what one Ummidius did. The story is not long: so rich that he measured out his coins, and so mean that he never dressed himself better than a slave; right to his very last hour he went on dreading that a want of food would crush him. But a freedwoman split him down the middle with an axe — bravest of the daughters of Tyndareus. ’What, then, do you advise me? To live like Naevius, or like Nomentanus?’ You insist on yoking things that fight each other, head to head. When I forbid you to be a miser, I am not commanding you to turn wastrel and good-for-nothing. There is something between the eunuch Tanais and Visellius’ father-in-law. There is measure in things; there are, in the end, fixed bounds, on either side of which the right cannot keep its footing. I come back to where I set out: how no man, like the miser, is pleased with himself, but rather praises those on other roads, and because a neighbor’s she-goat carries a fuller udder wastes away with envy — never matching himself against the greater crowd of poorer men, but straining to outdo this one and that. So, to a man in such a hurry, a richer one always blocks the way, as when the hoof sweeps the chariots loosed from the gates, the driver bears down on the horses outrunning his own, contemptuous of the one he has lapped, left among the stragglers. And so it happens that we can rarely find a man who says he has lived happily, and, content with his span when it is spent, quits life like a guest who has dined his fill. Now that is enough. So you will not think I have ransacked the writing-cases of bleary Crispinus, I will add not a word more.

The guilds of Syrian flute-girls, the quack-druggists, the beggars, the actresses, the buffoons — all this tribe is in grief and dismay at the death of Tigellius the singer. For he was open-handed. This other man, in contrast, afraid of being called a spendthrift, would refuse a needy friend the means to fend off cold and biting hunger. If you ask this one why, in thankless gluttony, the scoundrel strips the splendid estate of grandfather and father bare, buying up every delicacy with borrowed cash, he answers it is so he won’t be thought stingy and small-souled. He is praised by these, found fault with by those. Fufidius, rich in fields, rich in money out at interest, dreads the name of wastrel and good-for-nothing: he carves five percent a month from the principal, and the more desperate a man is, the harder he bears down on him; he hunts out the bonds of striplings just come into the man’s toga under harsh fathers. ’Greatest Jupiter!’ — who does not cry it out the moment he hears? ’But surely the man spends on himself in proportion to his gain?’ You could scarcely believe how little a friend he is to himself: that father in Terence’s play, who lived in misery after driving his son into exile, tormented himself no worse than this man does. If anyone should now ask, ’Where is this heading?’ — here: while fools shun one vice, they run into its opposite. Maltinus walks with his tunic trailing low; there is another who hitches it right up to his obscene groin; dapper Rufillus reeks of perfume-cakes, Gorgonius of goat: there is no middle ground. Some would touch none but the women whose flounce, stitched to the hem, comes down over the ankles; another, none but one standing in a stinking brothel-stall. When a certain well-known man came out of a brothel, ’Bless you for your virtue,’ said the godlike pronouncement of Cato; ’for once foul lust has swollen the veins, it is right that young men come down to a place like this, and not grind away at other men’s wives.’ ’I would not care to be praised on those terms,’ says Cupiennius, the connoisseur of the white-gowned cunt. It is worth your while to hear — you who wish the adulterers no success — how on every side they come to grief, how their pleasure is spoiled by a great deal of pain and, rare as it is, comes amid frequent and brutal dangers. This one threw himself headlong from a roof; that one was flogged to death; another, in flight, fell into a fierce pack of robbers; another paid cash to ransom his skin; the stable-grooms pissed all over a third; it even happened once that someone had his balls and lecherous tail mown off with a blade. ’By rights,’ said all; Galba alone said no. But how much safer is the merchandise of the second class — the freedwomen, I mean — over whom Sallustius runs as mad as any man who plays adulterer. Yet if this man, where circumstance and reason advised, and as far as one may be generous in moderation, were willing to be decent and open-handed, he would give as much as was enough and bring himself no loss or disgrace. But he hugs himself on this one point, this he loves and lauds: ’I touch no married woman’ — just as Marsaeus once, that famous lover of Origo, who hands his father’s farm and household gods to an actress, says, ’I shall never have had a thing to do with other men’s wives.’ But he has it with actresses, has it with whores, from which his good name takes a heavier wound than his fortune does. Or is it amply enough for you to dodge the part itself, and not whatever, on any side, does the harm? To throw away a good name, to silt up a father’s estate, is bad wherever it happens. What is the difference whether you sin with a matron or a toga-clad maid? Villius, in his pursuit of Fausta — and so Sulla’s son-in-law — wretchedly fooled by that one name alone, paid penalties over and above what was enough: battered with fists, set upon with a blade, shut out of doors while Longarenus was within. To him, as he faced such great troubles, if his heart had spoken in his prick’s own words, ’What is it you want? Do I ever demand of you a cunt descended from a great consul and veiled in a stola, when my anger boils?’ What would he answer? ’The girl is born of a great father.’ But how much better — and how at odds with all that — is the counsel of nature, rich in resources of her own, if only you would dispense them rightly and not confound what must be shunned with what is to be sought. Do you think it makes no difference whether your trouble springs from your own fault or from things outside it? So, that you may not come to regret it, give up the chase of matrons, from whom there is more pain to drink than profit to be plucked from the act. Nor — for all her snow-white and green gemstones — is this lady’s thigh, Cerinthus, softer than yours, or her leg straighter; indeed the toga-clad woman’s are very often better. Add to this that she carries her wares without false paint, shows openly what she has for sale, and, if there is some fine point, does not parade it on display while she hunts for ways to hide her flaws. Kings have this habit when they buy horses: they inspect them covered, lest a handsome shape — as so often — propped on a tender hoof should tempt the gaping buyer with fine haunches, a small head, a high-arched neck. In this they are right: do not gaze on the body’s best points with the eyes of Lynceus, and then, blinder than Hypsaea, overlook the bad. ’O what a leg! O what arms!’ — but she is flat-rumped, big-nosed, short in the waist, and long in the foot. Of a matron you can make out nothing but the face; the rest, unless she is a Catia, she keeps under a trailing gown. If you go after the forbidden goods, ringed round with a rampart — for that is what drives you mad — many things will block you then: the guards, the litter, the hairdressers, the hangers-on, the stola let down to the ankles, the mantle wrapped about, a host of things that grudge you any clear view of the goods. The other — nothing in the way: through Coan silk you can all but see her naked, whether she has no bad leg, no ugly foot; you can take the measure of her flank with your eye. Or would you rather a trap were laid for you, and the price wrenched out before the merchandise is shown? ’As the hunter chases the hare through the deep snow but will not touch it once it lies ready’ — so he sings, and adds: ’My love is just like that; for it flits past what is set before it and goes hunting after what flees.’ With little verses like these do you hope to drive the aches and fevers and heavy cares out of your breast? Is it not more to your profit to ask what limit nature sets to the desires, what she can bear to lose, what she will grieve to be denied — and to cut the hollow away from the solid? When thirst is scorching your throat, do you call for golden cups? When hungry, do you scorn everything but peacock and turbot? When your groin is swollen, if a maid or a houseboy is at hand for you to charge on at once, would you rather burst with your hardness? Not I; for the Venus I love is the cheap and ready kind. The woman of ’presently,’ ’but for more,’ ’if my husband goes out’ — Philodemus leaves her to the eunuch-priests; for himself he wants the one who costs no great price and does not dawdle when she is bidden to come. Let her be fair and straight, groomed just so far that she has no wish to seem taller or whiter than nature has made her. When such a one has tucked her left side under my right, she is an Ilia, an Egeria; I give her whatever name I like. And I have no fear that, while I am fucking, the husband may dash back from the country, the door be smashed, the dog bark, the whole house ring with the great din of his pounding, the woman leap from the bed white as a sheet, her guilty maid shriek that she is done for, the wife in terror for her legs, the one caught for her dowry, and I for myself. I would have to bolt with my tunic ungirt and my feet bare, or lose my cash, or my backside, or at the very last my name. To be caught is a wretched thing: I would win that case even with Fabius on the bench.

All singers have this fault: among friends they can never bring themselves to sing when asked, and unasked never leave off. That Sardinian Tigellius had it. Caesar, who could have compelled him, were he to beg it by his father’s friendship and his own, would get nowhere; but if the whim took him, from the egg clear to the apples he would run his ’Io Bacchae,’ now in the top register, now in the one the four strings sound at their lowest. Nothing about the man was even: often he would run like one fleeing an enemy, very often like one bearing the sacred things of Juno; often he kept two hundred slaves, often ten; now talking of kings and tetrarchs, all on a grand scale, now: ’Let me have a three-legged table, a shell of clean salt, and a toga that can keep off the cold, coarse though it be.’ Had you given a million to this thrifty man, content with little, in five days there would be nothing in his coffers; he would lie awake all night to the very dawn, and snore the whole day long; nothing was ever so at odds with itself. Now someone may say to me, ’And you? Have you no faults?’ Why yes — others, and perhaps smaller ones. When Maenius was carping at the absent Novius, ’Hey, you,’ said a bystander, ’do you not know yourself, or do you think you can foist yourself on us as a stranger?’ ’I let myself off,’ said Maenius. That self-love is foolish and shameless, and earns the mark. When you survey your own faults bleary and smeared with salve, why are you, in your friends’ failings, as keen-eyed as an eagle, or the serpent of Epidaurus? But the thing turns the other way for you: they in turn go probing your faults. He is a touch too quick to anger, ill-matched to the sharp noses of men like these; he might be laughed at because his toga hangs country-barbered, and his loose shoe clings ill on the foot: but he is good — no man better — and a friend to you, and a vast mind lies hidden beneath that uncouth body. In short, give yourself a shaking: see whether nature once sowed any faults in you, or even bad habit; for the bracken that must be burned springs up in fields left untended. Let us turn first to this: that a lover, blind, is taken in by the ugly faults of his mistress, or is even charmed by these very things — as Balbinus is by Hagna’s polyp. I could wish we erred this way in friendship, and that virtue had set an honorable name upon that error. And as a father treats his son’s defect, so we, with a friend, ought not — if he has some fault — to recoil from it. A father calls his squint-eyed boy ’cast-a-glance,’ and ’chick’ if someone’s son is wretchedly undersized, as the dwarf Sisyphus once was; this one, with bandy legs, he coos at as ’Varus,’ that one, propped on crooked ankles, he lisps to as ’Scaurus.’ This man lives rather close: let him be called frugal. This one is a little gauche and given to swagger: he asks only to seem good company to his friends. Another is too rough and freer than is fair: count him plain-dealing and bold. He runs hot: number him among the keen. This, I think, is what both joins friends and keeps them joined. But we invert the very virtues, and itch to grime a clean vessel. An honest man lives among us, very unassuming: we tag him ’slow,’ we tag him ’dull.’ This other dodges every trap and bares his flank to no malice — though we live in the sort of world where keen envy and slander flourish: instead of ’sound and wary’ we call him ’sham’ and ’sly.’ Another is rather plain — the very sort I would gladly have shown myself to you, Maecenas, often, when he breaks in with some chatter or other on a man reading by chance, or silent: ’A nuisance,’ we say, ’with plainly no feel for the company.’ Alas, how rashly we pass against ourselves an unfair law. For no one is born without faults; the best is the man the fewest press upon. A kind friend, as is only fair, when he weighs my good against my faults, should lean to the heavier side — these good points, if indeed I have more — if he wishes to be loved: by that rule he will be set on the same scale. The man who asks that his own swellings not offend his friend will forgive that friend’s warts: it is fair that one who begs indulgence for his own sins should grant it back in turn. In short, since the fault of anger cannot be cut clean out, nor the rest that cling to fools, why does reason not use its own weights and measures, and curb offenses with penalties fitted to each as it is? If a man should nail to the cross a slave who, told to clear the dish, had licked up the half-eaten fish and the lukewarm sauce, he would be called, among the sane, madder than Labeo. How much more frantic and greater a fault is this: a friend has slipped a little — which, unless you let it pass, you are reckoned a boor; sour, you hate and shun him as a debtor shuns Druso, who, unless — when the grim Kalends have fallen on the poor wretch — he scrapes interest or principal from somewhere, must, neck stretched out like a captive, hear out the bitter histories. Drunk, my friend wets the couch, or knocks from the table a bowl worn smooth by the hands of Evander: for this — or because, hungry, he snatched up a chicken set before me on my side of the platter — is he to be a less agreeable friend to me? What shall I do if he turns thief, or betrays a trust confided to him, or disowns a pledge? Those who are pleased to hold all sins roughly equal flounder when it comes to the truth: sense and custom fight them, and so does expediency itself, all but the mother of right and fair. When living creatures first crept out upon the early earth, a dumb and shapeless herd, they fought for acorns and lairs with nails and fists, then with clubs, and so by stages with the weapons that use had forged in time, until they hit on words to mark their cries and feelings, and on names; thereafter they began to give over war, to fortify towns and to lay down laws, that none should be thief, or brigand, or adulterer. For before Helen, the cunt was a most loathsome cause of war; but those men died unchronicled deaths whom one stronger in force cut down, like a bull in the herd, as they snatched at chance coupling in the manner of beasts. You must grant that laws were devised from fear of the unjust, if you care to unroll the ages and the annals of the world. Nor can Nature sort the unjust from the just, as she divides goods from evils, the things to be shunned from those to be sought; nor will reason ever prove that he offends as much and the same who has snapped the tender cabbages of another’s garden, and he who by night has stolen the sacred vessels of the gods. Let there be a rule to deal out penalties matched to the sins, so that you do not flay with the dreadful scourge a man who deserves the strap. That you would beat with a cane one who deserves to suffer heavier blows, I have no fear — not when you say that pilferings are on a par with robberies, and threaten that you would prune great crimes and small with one and the same hook, if only men would grant you a throne. If the wise man is rich, and a good cobbler, and alone handsome, and a king — why crave what you have? ’You do not know,’ he says, ’what father Chrysippus holds: the wise man never made himself slippers or sandals; yet the wise man is a cobbler.’ How so? ’Just as Hermogenes, though he keeps silent, is for all that a singer and a finished musician; as the sly Alfenus, though he had flung away every tool of his trade and shut up his shop, was still a cobbler: so the wise man is the best workman at every craft, and so he alone is king.’ Wanton boys tug at your beard, and unless you fend them off with a stick, you are mobbed by the crowd that hems you in, and you burst, poor wretch, and bark — O greatest of mighty kings. Not to be long: while you, a king, go to your bath for a farthing, and no escort attends you, foolish as you are, but Crispinus, my sweet friends will pardon me if, like a fool, I slip, and I in my turn will gladly bear their faults, and live, a private man, happier than you, the king.

Eupolis and Cratinus and Aristophanes, those poets, and the others to whom the Old Comedy belongs, if anyone deserved to be drawn — for being a rogue, a thief, an adulterer or a cutthroat, or in any other way notorious — branded him with great freedom. On these Lucilius wholly hangs; he followed them, changing only the feet and the measures: witty, of a well-cleared nose, but hard at the making of verse. For here was his flaw: often, as some great feat, he would dictate two hundred lines in an hour, standing on one foot; as he flowed along all muddy, there was much you would wish away; wordy, and too lazy to bear the labor of writing — of writing well, that is; for mere quantity I do not care. Look — Crispinus challenges me at the longest odds: ’Take, if you will, take your tablets at once; let a place be set us, a time, and umpires; let us see which can write the more.’ The gods did well to fashion me poor and of a slight spirit, one who speaks seldom and very little; but you, imitate, if you would rather, the air shut in goatskin bellows, straining and straining until the fire softens the iron. Lucky Fannius, with his book-boxes and his bust delivered unasked, while no one reads my writings, and I am afraid to recite them in public — for this reason: that there are men whom this sort of thing pleases not at all, since most of them deserve the blame. Pick anyone from the thick of the crowd: he labors either under greed or under some wretched ambition. This one rages with love of married women, that one of boys; this one the glint of silver takes; Albius is stunned by bronzes; this one trades his wares from the rising sun to the lands the evening warms — nay, is swept headlong through dangers like dust caught up in a whirlwind, in dread of losing a fraction of his total, or set on swelling his estate. All these fear verses, they hate poets. ’He has hay on his horn — give him a wide berth; so long as he can knock a laugh out of himself, this fellow will spare no friend, and whatever he has once smeared on his pages, every soul coming home from the oven and the pond will be made to know it — the boys, the old women.’ Come now, hear a few words in answer. First, I will strike myself from the number of those I would grant to be poets: for you would not say that to round off a verse is enough; nor, if a man writes, as I do, things nearer to talk, would you reckon him a poet. To one who has genius, a mind more nearly divine, a mouth made to sound great things — to him give the honor of that name. On that score some have asked whether comedy is or is not a poem, since neither in its words nor its matter is there keen breath and force; except that it differs from talk by a fixed foot, it is talk and nothing more. ’But a father blazes in fury because his good-for-nothing son, mad over a mistress, refuses a wife with a great dowry, and, drunk — what a scandal — parades abroad with torches before nightfall.’ Would Pomponius hear a milder lecture than that, were his father living? So it is not enough to write out a verse in plain words which, were you to break it up, any father would storm in just the way the masked one does. From these lines — what I write now, what Lucilius once wrote — if you stripped the fixed times and measures, and put the word that stands first in the order later, setting last before first, you would not — as you would if you unmade ’after foul Discord had shattered the iron posts and gates of war’ — still find, even in the wreckage, the limbs of a poet. So much for this; another time, whether it is a true poem. Now I will ask only this: whether you are right to hold this kind of writing suspect. Keen Sulcius prowls about and Caprius, both villainously hoarse and armed with their notebooks, a great terror to footpads; but if a man lives well and with clean hands, he can despise the pair of them. Even were you the very twin of the robbers Caelius and Birrius, I am no Caprius, no Sulcius: why should you fear me? Let no shop, no pillar hold my little books for the hands of the crowd and of Hermogenes Tigellius to sweat upon; nor do I recite to anyone but friends, and that under duress — not anywhere at all, nor before just anybody. There are many who recite their writings in the middle of the forum, and others while bathing: the closed room gives the voice a sweet ring. That delights the empty-headed, who never ask whether they do it without taste, or at the wrong moment. ’You take joy in wounding,’ he says, ’and you do it from a spiteful streak.’ Where did you fetch that to fling at me? Is there a single voucher for it among the men I have lived with? He who gnaws an absent friend, who will not defend him when another finds fault; who fishes for loose laughs from people and a name for being sharp; who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a thing confided: that man is black — of him, Roman, beware. Often you may see four to a couch, three couches full, among whom one loves to spatter all the rest with whatever comes — all but the host who pours the water; and him too, later, once he is drunk and truthful Bacchus opens the heart’s locked chambers. Yet this man strikes you as genial and urbane and frank, you who are the foe of the ’black’; but if I have laughed because foolish Rufillus reeks of scent-cakes and Gorgonius of goat, do I seem to you spiteful and snapping? If some mention of the thefts of Petillius Capitolinus were let drop in your presence, you would defend him, in your way: ’Capitolinus has had me for a messmate and a friend since boyhood, and at my asking has done a great many things, and I am glad he lives safe in the City; but all the same I wonder how he slipped that verdict.’ This is the black cuttlefish’s ink, this is pure verdigris of spite; and that this vice shall be far from my pages, and first from my heart, I promise — if I can truly promise anything about myself, I promise it. If I have spoken somewhat too freely, or perhaps too much in jest, you will grant me this licence, with indulgence: my excellent father broke me to it, to flee the vices by marking each with its living example. When he urged me to live thriftily, frugally, and content with what he had himself laid by: ’Do you not see how badly Albius’s son lives, how penniless Barrus is? A great lesson not to want to fritter a father’s estate.’ When he would steer me off the foul love of a harlot: ’Be no Sectanus.’ That I might not run after wives when a permitted love was open to me: ’The name of Trebonius, caught in the act, is not a pretty one,’ he would say. ’A philosopher will give you the reasons why each thing is better shunned or sought; for me it is enough if I can keep the custom handed down from the old, and, while you still need a keeper, guard your life and name unharmed; once age has toughened your limbs and your mind, you will swim without the cork.’ So with such words he molded me as a boy; and whether he was bidding me do a thing — ’you have an authority for doing this’ — he would point to one of the chosen jurymen; or forbidding it: ’Can you doubt whether this is shameful and ruinous to do, when this man and that are ablaze with evil repute?’ As a neighbor’s funeral unnerves the sick glutton and, through fear of death, compels him to go easy on himself, so the disgraces of others often scare tender minds away from the vices. From this I am sound, free of the ruinous kind; I am held only by the middling faults you would pardon. Perhaps even from these a long life, a candid friend, my own reflection will pare much away; for when my little couch or a colonnade has taken me in, I do not fail myself: ’This is more right; doing it I shall live better; so I shall meet my friends with pleasure; that thing so-and-so did was not handsome — might I one day, off my guard, do the like?’ This I turn over with myself, lips shut; and when a scrap of leisure is given, I trifle with my pages. This is one of those middling faults; and if you will not let it pass, then a great band of poets will come to my aid — for we are far the more numerous — and, just like the Jews, we will force you to come over to our crowd.

Leaving mighty Rome behind, I was taken in at Aricia with modest lodging; my companion was Heliodorus the rhetorician, by far the most learned of the Greeks. Then on to Forum Appi, packed with bargemen and grasping innkeepers. This stretch, being lazy, we split in two, though to the higher-girt it is a single leg: the Appian is kinder to the slow. Here, on account of the water — it was the vilest — I declare war on my belly, waiting in no easy mood while my companions dine. Now night was preparing to draw its shadows over the lands and scatter the constellations across the sky: and then the boys hurled abuse at the boatmen, the boatmen at the boys: ’Put in here!’ ’You’re packing in three hundred!’ ’Whoa, that’s enough now!’ While the fare is collected, while the mule is hitched, a whole hour goes by. The cursed gnats and the marsh frogs drive sleep away; the boatman, sluiced with sour wine, sings of his absent girl, and a traveler takes him up in contest; at last the weary traveler drops off to sleep, and the lazy boatman turns his mule out to graze, ties the tow-rope to a stone, and snores flat on his back. And now day was at hand when we feel the barge is not moving at all, until one hothead springs out and lays a willow cudgel across the mule’s head and the boatman’s loins: it is barely the fourth hour when we are at last set ashore. We washed our faces and hands in your water, Feronia. Then, having lunched, we crawl three miles and climb to Anxur, perched on its far-gleaming white rocks. Here the excellent Maecenas was to come, and Cocceius, both sent as envoys on great affairs, men used to reconciling estranged friends. Here, with sore eyes, I smear on black salve. Meanwhile Maecenas arrives, and Cocceius, and with them Fonteius Capito, a man finished to the fingernail, no closer friend to Antony than he. Fundi, under ’praetor’ Aufidius Luscus, we leave gladly, laughing at the trappings of the crackpot clerk — his bordered toga, his broad stripe, his brazier of coals. Then, worn out, we halt in the city of the Mamurrae, Murena lending the house, Capito the kitchen. The next day dawns the most welcome by far; for at Sinuessa Plotius and Varius meet us, and Vergil — souls than whom the earth has borne none more candid, and to whom no man is more bound than I. O what embraces there were, and what rejoicing! Nothing, while I am sane, would I set against a delightful friend. The little farmhouse hard by the Campanian bridge gave us a roof, and the purveyors their due — firewood and salt. From here the mules lay down their pack-saddles at Capua in good time. Maecenas goes off to play, Vergil and I to sleep; for ball is no friend to the sore-eyed and the queasy. From here the brim-full villa of Cocceius takes us in, the one that stands above the inns of Caudium. Now, Muse, in a few words recall for me the brawl of Sarmentus the buffoon and Messius Cicirrus, and from what father each was sprung who came to that quarrel. Messius’s stock is the famous Oscan; Sarmentus’s mistress is still alive: from forebears like these they came to the fight. Sarmentus first: ’I declare you the very image of a wild horse.’ We laugh, and Messius himself: ’Granted,’ and tosses his head. ’Oh,’ he says, ’if your brow had not had its horn cut out, what would you do, when even mutilated you make such threats?’ For an ugly scar had marred the bristly forehead on the left side of his face. Cracking joke after joke at the Campanian disease and at his looks, he kept begging him to dance the shepherd Cyclops: he would need no mask, he said, no tragic buskins. Cicirrus had plenty in reply: had he yet made over his chain, as vowed, to the household gods? Clerk though he now was, his mistress’s claim on him was none the weaker; and lastly he asked why he had ever run off, when a single pound of meal would be plenty for one so spare and so puny. All in all, most pleasantly we spun that dinner out. From here we make straight for Beneventum, where our busy host all but burned up while turning lean thrushes over the fire; for the flame, slipped loose through the old kitchen, went roving and was racing to lick the top of the roof. Then you would have seen the hungry guests and the terrified slaves snatching up the dinner and all of them wanting to put out the blaze. From that point Apulia begins to show me her familiar mountains, scorched by the Atabulus, which we would never have crawled across had not a farmhouse near Trivicum taken us in — not without tear-drawing smoke, the hearth burning green boughs, leaves and all. Here, like the greatest of fools, I wait right up to midnight for a lying girl; sleep, though, carries me off still strained toward love; and then dreams, with their filthy vision, stain my nightclothes and my belly as I lie on my back. From here we are whirled four-and-twenty miles by carriage, to lodge at a little town not to be named in verse, though easy to give by signs: here water, cheapest of things, is sold, but the bread is far the finest, so the knowing traveler will load it on his shoulders for the road beyond; for at Canusium it is gritty, the place no richer by a single jug of water — a town founded long ago by brave Diomedes. Here Varius, in sorrow, parts from his weeping friends. Then, worn out, we reach Rubi, having ground out a long stage made the worse by rain. Next day the weather is better, the road worse, right up to the walls of fish-rich Barium; then Gnatia, raised under the water-nymphs’ displeasure, gave us laughter and jokes as it tried to convince us that on its sacred threshold incense melts without a flame. Let Apella the Jew believe it, not I; for I have learned that the gods lead a carefree existence, and that if nature works some marvel, it is not the gods who send it down, dour, from the high roof of heaven. Brundisium is the end of the long road and the longer page.

Not because, Maecenas, of all the Lydians who ever settled the Etruscan marches none is nobler than you, nor because you had a grandfather, on the mother’s and the father’s side, who once commanded great legions — not for these, as most men do, do you turn up your hooked nose at the obscure, at men like me, born of a freedman father. When you deny that it matters of what parent a man is born, so long as he is freeborn, you rightly persuade yourself that before the reign of Tullius, that low-born kingship, many men sprung of no ancestors both lived as honest men and were raised to ample honors; while on the other side Laevinus, of the line of Valerius — from whom Tarquin the Proud, flung off his throne, took flight — was never reckoned worth a single penny more, with that judge you know for assessor, the people, who foolishly heap honors on the unworthy and, witless, serve mere reputation, gaping at inscriptions and ancestral masks. What ought we to do, set far, far apart from the crowd? For grant it: the people would sooner entrust office to Laevinus than to Decius, a new man, and the censor Appius would strike me from the roll were I not born of a freeborn father — and rightly, since I would not have rested quiet in my own skin. But Glory drags the bound behind her gleaming car, the unknown no less than the nobly born. What did it profit you, Tullius, to take up again the stripe you had laid down and become a tribune? Envy has grown against you that would have been the less had you stayed a private man. For the moment some madman has wound the middle of his shin in black leather and let the broad stripe fall down his chest, he hears at once: ’Who is this fellow? Born of what father?’ Just as a man sick with Barrus’s disease, who longs to be thought handsome, sets, wherever he goes, the girls to the trouble of inquiring into each particular — what his face is like, his calf, his foot, his teeth, his hair — so the man who pledges that the citizens, the city, the empire, and Italy, and the shrines of the gods shall be his charge, forces every mortal to take notice and to ask of what father he was born, whether an obscure mother shames him. ’You — son of a Syrus, a Dama, a Dionysius — do you dare to fling citizens from the rock, or hand them to Cadmus?’ ’But my colleague Novius sits one bench behind me; for he is only what my father was.’ ’And does that make you a Paulus or a Messalla in your own eyes? Why, that Novius — if two hundred wagons and three funerals should collide in the forum — would boom loud enough to drown the horns and trumpets: at least that holds our attention.’ Now I come back to myself, born of a freedman father, whom all gnaw at as born of a freedman father — now because I am your companion, Maecenas, but once because a Roman legion obeyed me as its tribune. This case is unlike that: for though anyone might with some reason grudge me the office, he cannot likewise grudge me your friendship — the more so as you take care to take on only the deserving, and stand far from crooked self-seeking. I could not call it luck that I won you for a friend by some chance; no accident threw you in my way: long ago the excellent Vergil, and after him Varius, told you what I was. When I came before you, choking out a few words — for tongue-tied shyness barred me from saying more — I did not claim a famous father, nor to ride about my lands on a Saturine nag, but told you what I was. You answer, in your way, in few words; I go off, and nine months later you call me back and bid me be one of your friends. I count it a great thing to have pleased you, who sift the honorable from the base not by a brilliant father but by a clean life and heart. And yet if my nature is marred with middling faults, and few — sound otherwise, as if you found fault with moles scattered on a handsome body — if no one can truly charge me with greed, or meanness, or filthy haunts; if I am clean and guiltless (to praise myself a little) and live dear to my friends — the cause of all this was my father. Poor, on a lean little plot, he would not send me to the school of Flavius, where the great boys, sprung from great centurions, their satchels and tablets slung from the left arm, would troop in, bringing their eight coppers on the Ides; but he dared to carry me, a boy, to Rome, to be taught the arts that any knight or senator would have his own sons taught. My dress, the slaves who followed me — anyone who saw them in that great throng would have thought those costs were met for me out of ancestral wealth. He himself, the most incorruptible of guardians, was there among all my teachers. In short: he kept me chaste — which is virtue’s first honor — safe not only from every deed but from foul reproach as well, and was not afraid that someone might charge it against him if one day I followed small fees as a crier, or, as he was himself, a debt-collector; nor would I have complained. As it is, the more praise is his due for this, and the greater thanks from me. Never, in my right mind, could I be ashamed of such a father, and so I will not defend myself as a great many do, who plead it was no fault of theirs that they lack freeborn and famous parents. Far different from theirs are both my words and my reasoning. For if nature should command us, from a fixed age, to retrace the span already run and choose other parents, each the ones his pride preferred, I, content with mine, would not take for myself parents graced with the rods and the curule chairs — mad in the judgment of the crowd, sane perhaps in yours, because I would not want a burdensome load I was never used to carrying. For then I should at once have to chase a larger fortune, pay court to more men, and take one companion along and then another, so as not to go out alone into the country or abroad; more grooms and nags to feed, more carriages to drive. As it is, I may ride a bobtailed mule, all the way to Tarentum if I please, his loins galled by the pack, his shoulders by the rider. No one will charge me with the meanness they charge you, Tullius, when on the Tibur road five slaves follow you, a praetor, lugging a chamber-pot and a wine-jar. In this, my fine senator, I live more comfortably than you, and in a thousand ways besides. Wherever the whim takes me, I walk alone, ask the price of greens and meal, drift through the cheating Circus, and often the forum at evening; I stop to hear the fortune-tellers, then carry myself home to a dish of leeks, chickpeas, and pancakes. My supper is served by three boys, and a slab of white stone holds two cups and a ladle; beside them stands a cheap salt-cellar, with a jug and a saucer — Campanian ware. Then I go off to sleep, untroubled that tomorrow I must rise at dawn and pass before Marsyas, who says he cannot stand the face of the younger Novius. I lie abed till the fourth hour; after that I stroll, or, having read or written something to please me in my quiet, I am rubbed with oil — not the sort that filthy Natta uses, robbed from the lamps. But when the fiercer sun has warned me, tired, to go and bathe, I flee the Field and the game of three-cornered ball. Having lunched without greed — just enough to keep me from facing the day on an empty stomach — I idle at home. This is the life of men set free from grinding, weighing ambition; with this I comfort myself that I shall live more sweetly than if my grandfather and father and uncle had all been quaestors.

How the half-breed Persius avenged the pus and venom of the proscribed Rupilius Rex — that, I fancy, is known to every bleary-eyed loafer and every barber. This Persius, a wealthy man, had very large concerns at Clazomenae, and by now a galling lawsuit with Rex too, a hard man, and one who in sheer odiousness could beat Rex — brazen, swollen, and so bitter of tongue that he would outrun the Sisennas and the Barruses with white triumphal horses. I come back to Rex. After nothing could be agreed between the two — for all tiresome men have the same right to be stubborn as the brave on whom war has fallen for an enemy: between Hector son of Priam and the spirited Achilles the wrath was mortal, so that only death could part them, for no other cause than that in each the valor stood at its height; but if discord plagues two weaklings, or if war falls on ill-matched foes, as Diomedes met the Lycian Glaucus, the slacker withdraws, sending gifts of his own accord — while Brutus held rich Asia as praetor, the pair of Rupilius and Persius fight a bout no better matched than Bacchius against Bithus. Hot-blooded, they dash into court, each one a grand show. Persius lays out his case; the whole assembly laughs; he praises Brutus, praises his staff, calls Brutus the sun of Asia, calls his companions wholesome stars — all but Rex; Rex, he says, had risen like the Dog-star, the constellation farmers loathe; he came rushing like a winter torrent, where the axe rarely passes. Then the man of Praeneste flings the insults back, in a salty, streaming flood wrung from the vineyard — a tough grape-picker, unbeaten, to whom many a passer-by had given way after hailing him ’cuckoo’ at the top of his voice. But the Greek Persius, after he has been doused in Italian vinegar, cries out: ’By the great gods, Brutus, I beg you — you who are practiced at making away with kings — why not cut this Rex’s throat? This, believe me, is a job that belongs to your line of work.’

Once I was a fig-wood log, a useless piece of timber, when the carpenter, unsure whether to make a bench or a Priapus, chose that I be a god. A god, then, I am — the greatest dread of thieves and birds; for my right hand keeps thieves in check, and so does the red stake jutting from my obscene groin, while a reed fixed on my head scares the pestering birds and forbids them to settle in the new-made gardens. Here once a fellow-slave used to hire the carrying of corpses, flung from their cramped cells, in a cheap box; this stood as the common grave of the wretched poor — for Pantolabus the buffoon and Nomentanus the wastrel. A boundary-stone gave the plot a thousand feet of frontage, three hundred deep, so the tomb should not pass to the heirs. Now one may live on the wholesome Esquiline and stroll on the sunny rampart, where lately the glum looked out on ground made hideous with white bones — though for me it is not the thieves and the wild beasts that haunt and harass this place that are so much my care and labor as the women who turn human minds with their spells and poisons: these I can in no way destroy or stop, the instant the wandering moon has lifted her lovely face, from gathering bones and baleful herbs. I saw with my own eyes Canidia stride, girt in a black mantle, barefoot, her hair let loose, howling beside the elder Sagana; pallor had made the pair of them horrible to look on. They began to claw the earth with their nails and to rip a black lamb apart with their teeth; the blood was poured into a trench, that out of it they might call up the ghosts, spirits to give them answers. There were two figures, one of wool, one of wax: the woolen the larger, to master the lesser with punishments; the waxen stood in a suppliant pose, like one already doomed to die in a slave’s manner. One calls on Hecate, the other on cruel Tisiphone: you might have seen snakes and hell-hounds prowling, and the moon flushing red and hiding behind the great tombs, not to witness it. But if I lie in any of this, may my head be fouled with the white droppings of crows, and may Julius come to piss and shit on me, and dainty Pediatia, and Voranus the thief. Why tell each thing — how the shades, speaking by turns with Sagana, gave back a sad, shrill echo; how they slyly buried in the ground a wolf’s beard with the tooth of a spotted snake; how the fire blazed up higher from the waxen image; and how I, no witness to go unavenged, shuddered at the voices and the deeds of the two Furies? For, with a noise as loud as a bursting bladder, I let off a fart, my fig-wood rump splitting; and off they bolted into the city. Canidia’s teeth, Sagana’s towering wig fell out, and the herbs and the enchanted bands slipped from their arms — a sight you would have watched with no end of laughter and sport.

I happened to be walking down the Sacred Way, as is my habit, turning over some trifle or other, wholly lost in it, when up runs a fellow known to me by name alone, and, snatching my hand: ’How goes it, dearest of men?’ ’Well enough, as things stand,’ I say, ’and I wish you all you wish.’ When he kept tagging after me, ’You want something?’ I get in first. But he: ’You’ll come to know me — I’m a man of learning.’ At this I say, ’You’ll be worth the more to me for that.’ Desperate to get free, I would now step faster, now halt, now murmur who-knows-what in my boy’s ear, while the sweat ran clear down to my ankles. ’Oh, Bolanus, lucky man, with that hot head of yours!’ I told myself, as he prattled about anything at all, praising the streets, the city. When I gave him no answer, ’You’re dying to be off,’ he says; ’I’ve seen it this good while; but it’s no use: I’ll hold on the whole way; I’ll dog you from here to wherever you’re bound.’ ’No need to be hauled out of your road: I want to visit someone you don’t know; he lies sick far over the Tiber, near Caesar’s gardens.’ ’I’ve nothing to do, and I’m no idler: I’ll follow you all the way.’ Down droop my ears, like a sulky little donkey when a load too heavy has settled on his back. He begins: ’If I know myself, you’ll prize neither Viscus nor Varius higher as a friend; for who could write more verses than I, or faster? Who move his limbs more softly in the dance? My singing — even Hermogenes might envy it.’ Here was the place to cut in: ’Have you a mother, kinsfolk who need you alive?’ ’Not a soul. I’ve laid them all to rest.’ ’Lucky them. Now I am left. Finish me off; for a grim doom hangs over me that a Sabine crone, shaking her prophetic urn, chanted to me as a boy: ”No dread poison shall carry this one off, no enemy’s sword, no pleurisy or cough, no creeping gout: a chatterbox will end him one day; let him shun the talkative, if he is wise, the moment he comes of age.”’ We had reached the temple of Vesta, a quarter of the day already gone, and as it happened he was due just then to answer to his bail; had he failed, he would lose his suit. ’If you love me,’ he says, ’stand by me here a moment.’ ’Strike me dead if I’m fit to stand about, or know one word of the civil law; and I’m hurrying — you know where.’ ’I’m in doubt what to do,’ he says, ’give up you, or my case.’ ’Me, I beg you.’ ’I won’t,’ says he, and started on ahead; I, since it is hard to fight a winner, follow. ’How does Maecenas stand with you?’ he picks up from here. ’A man of few intimates, and very sound sense.’ ’No one has worked his luck more shrewdly. You’d have a powerful backer, one to play second, if you cared to bring this man forward: hang me if you wouldn’t have shouldered the whole field aside.’ ’We don’t live there as you imagine; no house is purer than that one, or more a stranger to such evils; it does me no hurt, I tell you, that this man is richer or that one more learned: each has his own place.’ ’A great tale you tell, scarcely to be believed.’ ’And yet it is so.’ ’You only fire me the more to long to be near him.’ ’You need only wish it: such is your prowess, you’ll carry the works; and he is one who can be won — which is just why the first approaches are made hard.’ ’I’ll not fail myself: I’ll bribe the slaves with presents; if I’m shut out today, I won’t give up; I’ll watch my chances, meet him at the crossroads, walk him home. Life has handed mortals nothing without hard toil.’ While he runs on like this, look — Aristius Fuscus comes up, a dear friend of mine, who knew the fellow only too well. We stop. ’Where do you come from? Where bound?’ he asks, and answers. I began to pluck at him and press his limp arms with my hand, nodding, rolling my eyes, to have him rescue me. The cruel joker, laughing, played the innocent; the bile scorched my liver. ’Surely you said there was something you wanted to talk over with me in private.’ ’I remember well, but I’ll tell you at a better time; today is the thirtieth sabbath: would you affront the circumcised Jews?’ ’I’ve no scruple of that kind,’ I say. ’But I have: I’m a bit weaker that way — one of the many. You’ll pardon me; another time.’ To think this sun rose so black for me! The rascal bolts and leaves me under the knife. By luck his opponent meets him head-on: ’Where are you off to, you scoundrel?’ he bawls at the top of his voice, and ’May I take you to witness?’ I, for my part, hold out my ear. He drags him to court; there is shouting on both sides, a crowd running up from everywhere. So Apollo saved me.

Yes, I did say that the verses of Lucilius run on a clumsy foot. Who is so witless a partisan of Lucilius as not to admit it? But on the same page the same man is praised for scrubbing down the city with plenty of salt. Yet, granting him this, I would not grant the rest as well; for on that footing I should have to admire Laberius’s mimes as fine poems. So it is not enough to stretch the hearer’s grin with a laugh — though even in that there is a certain merit. There is need of brevity, that the thought may run and not snarl itself in words that load down the weary ears; and need of a style now grave, often jesting, sustaining by turns the part of orator and of poet, sometimes of the man of wit who husbands his strength and deliberately keeps it in check. Ridicule commonly settles great matters more forcibly and better than severity. Those men by whom the Old Comedy was written stood by this, and in this are to be imitated — men whom pretty Hermogenes has never read, nor that ape who knows how to sing nothing but Calvus and Catullus. ’But he did a great thing, mixing Greek words with Latin.’ O laggard students — do you really think it hard and marvelous, a feat that came easily to Pitholeon of Rhodes? ’But a style neatly turned in both tongues is the sweeter, as when a vintage of Chios is blended with Falernian.’ When you make verses — I put it to you — or even when you have some hard case of Petillius’s to argue through? Forgetting your country, I suppose, and your Latin father, while a Pedius Publicola and a Corvinus sweat out their pleadings, you would rather thread into your native words some fetched from abroad, in the manner of the double-tongued man of Canusium. And when I myself, born this side of the sea, was turning out Greek verselets, Quirinus forbade me, appearing after midnight, the hour when dreams are true, with words like these: ’You would be no madder carrying logs into a forest than if you chose to swell the great throngs of the Greeks.’ While bombastic Alpinus butchers Memnon, and while he botches the muddy head of the Rhine, I trifle with these pieces, which are not to ring out, competing, in the temple with Tarpa for judge, nor to come back again and again to be watched in the theaters. You alone of the living, Fundanius, can rattle off charming little books with a sharp-tongued courtesan and a Davus duping old Chremes; Pollio sings the deeds of kings in the thrice-beaten foot; spirited Varius leads the strong epic as no one else can; to Vergil the Muses who delight in the country granted the soft and the witty. This — satire — was the thing I could write better, after Varro of the Atax and certain others had tried it in vain, though I am less than its inventor; nor would I dare pull from his head the crown that clings there with so much glory. But I did say he flows muddy, often carrying more that ought to be cleared away than left. Come, tell me, please: do you, learned man, find nothing to fault in great Homer? Does genial Lucilius change nothing in the tragedies of Accius? Does he not laugh at lines of Ennius that fall short of their weighty theme, while calling himself no greater than the men he faults? What forbids us too, as we read the writings of Lucilius, to ask whether it was his own nature, or the harshness of his subjects, that denied him verses more finely wrought and running more smoothly than the work of a man content merely to lock something into six feet, who loves to have written two hundred lines before dinner and as many after — such was the genius of Etruscan Cassius, hotter than a rushing river, who, the story goes, was burned on a pyre built of his own book-cases and books? Granted, I say, that Lucilius was genial and urbane; granted he was more polished than the author of a rough verse untouched by the Greeks, and than the throng of the older poets; yet he, had fate let him drop down into this age of ours, would file much away from himself, would lop off everything dragged on past the finished point, and, in making a verse, would often scratch his head and gnaw his nails to the quick. Often turn the stylus, if you mean to write what is worth a second reading, and do not toil to have the crowd admire you — content with a few readers. Or would you, fool, rather have your poems dictated in cheap schools? Not I; for it is enough that the knights applaud me — as bold Arbuscula said, scorning the rest, when she was hissed off the stage. Should the bedbug Pantilius rattle me? Should it gall me that Demetrius nibbles at me behind my back, or that silly Fannius, the table-companion of Hermogenes Tigellius, runs me down? May Plotius and Varius, Maecenas and Vergil, Valgius, and the excellent Octavius approve these pieces, and Fuscus too, and would that both the Visci might praise them — with all flattery set aside. I can name you, Pollio, and you, Messalla, with your brother, and you as well, Bibulus and Servius, and with them you, candid Furnius, and a good many others, learned men and friends, whom I knowingly pass over; I would wish these pieces, such as they are, to please them, and I shall be sorry if they please less than I hope. Demetrius, and you, Tigellius, I bid you go and whimper among the armchairs of your lady pupils. Go, boy, and be quick to add these lines at the foot of my little book.

’There are those to whom I seem, in satire, too sharp, and to strain the work past its law; the other party thinks whatever I have set down is nerveless, and that a thousand lines like mine could be reeled off in a day. Trebatius, what should I do? Prescribe.’ ’Rest.’ ’You mean I should write no verse at all?’ ’Just so.’ ’Curse me if that would not be best; but I cannot sleep.’ ’Let those who need deep sleep oil themselves and swim the Tiber three times over, and steep the body in neat wine toward nightfall. Or, if so great a love of writing carries you off, be bold: tell of unconquered Caesar’s deeds — you will bear away rich rewards for your pains.’ ’Eager though I am, best of fathers, my powers fail; for not just any man can render the ranks bristling with javelins, or the Gauls perishing on a shattered spear, or the wounds of a Parthian slipping from his horse.’ ’Yet you could write of him as just and as brave, as wise Lucilius did of Scipio.’ ’I will not fail myself, when the matter itself invites; but except at the right moment, Flaccus’s words will not pass through Caesar’s attentive ear, and if you stroke him clumsily, he kicks back, guarded at every point.’ ’How much better this than to gash with sour verse Pantolabus the buffoon and Nomentanus the wastrel, when each man, though untouched, fears for himself and hates you.’ ’What can I do? Milonius takes to dancing the moment the fever has reached his fuddled head and the lamps have doubled in number; Castor delights in horses, and his brother, hatched from the same egg, in boxing; as many thousands of men as live, so many thousands of tastes. My delight is to lock words into meter, in Lucilius’s way, a better man than either of us. He confided his secrets long ago to his books as to trusty companions, never running off elsewhere whether things had fallen out ill or well; and so it is that the old man’s whole life lies open, as though painted on a votive tablet. Him I follow — Lucanian or Apulian, I cannot say which; for the colonist of Venusia plows the border under both, planted there, the old tale runs, when the Sabellians were expelled, so that no enemy might charge through empty ground against Rome, whether the Apulian race or violent Lucania might let loose the war. But this stylus of mine will not attack any living soul unprovoked; it will guard me like a sword sheathed in its scabbard — and why should I try to draw it, safe as I am from hostile footpads? O father and king Jupiter, may the weapon laid aside rot away with rust, and may no one harm me, who crave peace! But the man who stirs me up — better not touch me, I cry aloud — shall weep, and be sung, a marked man, through the whole City. Angry Cervius threatens with the laws and the jury-urn; Canidia, with the poison of Albucius, those she hates; Turius, with a crushing sentence if you go to law with him on the bench. That each frightens those he suspects with whatever he is strong in, and that mighty nature ordains it so — reckon it out with me: the wolf strikes with the tooth, the bull with the horn — taught from where, if not from within? Trust a long-lived mother to Scaeva the spendthrift heir: his dutiful hand will do no crime — no wonder, just as the wolf attacks no one with his heel, nor the ox with his tooth — but hemlock, fouling the honey, will carry the old woman off. Not to be long: whether a calm old age awaits me, or death wheels round me on black wings — rich, poor, at Rome, or, if chance so bids, in exile — whatever the color of my life, I shall write.’ ’My boy, I fear you may not be long for the world, and that some great friend may strike you with a chill.’ ’What? When Lucilius first dared to compose poems in this present manner, and to peel off the skin in which each man, sleek to the eye, paraded, though foul within — did Laelius, or the man who drew his earned name from crushed Carthage, take offense at his wit, or grieve when Metellus was hurt, and Lupus buried under libelous verses? And yet he laid hold of the leaders of the people, and the people tribe by tribe, fair, of course, to nothing but Virtue and her friends. Indeed, when the valor of Scipio and the gentle wisdom of Laelius had withdrawn from the crowd and the public stage into privacy, they would fool about with him and frolic, ungirt, until the greens were boiled soft. Whatever I am — though below Lucilius in rank and in talent — still that I have lived among the great, envy will own, against its will, again and again; and, looking to sink its tooth in something brittle, it will strike on the solid — unless in something you, learned Trebatius, dissent.’ ’For my part, I can split nothing off from this. But all the same, take warning and beware, lest ignorance of the sacred laws bring trouble on you: if a man composes evil verses against another, there is law and a trial.’ ’Granted, if a man makes evil ones; but what if a man makes good ones, and is praised with Caesar for judge? If he barks at one who deserves reproach, being himself blameless?’ ’The case will dissolve in laughter, and you will walk free.’

What virtue there is, my good friends, and how great, in living on little — this is no discourse of mine, but what Ofellus taught, a countryman, an irregular sage of homespun wit. Learn it, not amid the gleaming dishes and tables, when the eye is dazed by mad glitterings and the mind, leaning toward the false, refuses the better; here, before lunch, search out the truth with me. Why so? I will tell you, if I can. Every corrupted judge weighs the truth badly. When you have chased a hare, or are spent from an unbroken horse — or, if Roman drilling tires a man bred to Greek ease — whether the swift ball draws you, the keenness softly cheating the hard work, or the discus drives you, strike the yielding air with the throw: when toil has hammered out your squeamishness, then, dry and empty, scorn cheap food if you can; drink nothing but Hymettian honey thinned with Falernian. The steward is out, and the dark sea, storming, keeps back its fish: bread with salt will nicely quiet your barking belly. Where do you think that comes from, or how got? The highest pleasure lies not in the costly aroma, but in yourself. Earn your relish by sweating: the man bloated and pale with excess — no oyster, no parrot-fish, no imported grouse can do him any good. Yet I shall scarcely wrest it from you: set down a peacock, and you will want to scour your palate with that rather than a hen, seduced by the show of things, because the rare bird sells for gold and spreads a spectacle with its painted tail — as if any of that were to the point. Do you eat those feathers you praise? Does the same splendor survive the cooking? Yet though there is no difference in the meat, suppose you do, fooled by their unequal looks, prefer the one to the other: how do you tell whether this gaping bass was caught in the Tiber or out in the deep? whether it was tossed between the bridges, or at the mouth of the Tuscan river? You praise, you madman, a three-pound mullet you must carve into separate helpings. Looks lead you, I see: what then is the point of loathing the long bass? Because, of course, nature gave the one a larger size, the other slight weight: a hungry stomach seldom scorns common fare. ’I should like to see something big stretched on a big platter,’ says a gullet fit for the grasping Harpies. But you, south winds, come and rot their delicacies for them. Though boar and fresh turbot stink when foul plenty frets the sick stomach, which, glutted, would rather have radishes and sour elecampane. Not yet is all poverty banished from the tables of kings: for cheap eggs and black olives still have their place today. Not so long ago the board of Gallonius the auctioneer was infamous for a sturgeon. What? Did the sea breed fewer turbots then? The turbot was safe, and the stork safe in its nest, until a man of praetorian rank schooled your taste. So if someone should now decree that roast cormorants are dainty, the youth of Rome, quick to learn what is base, will obey. Squalor will differ from a frugal table, with Ofellus for judge: for in vain will you have shunned that vice, if you have wrenched yourself crooked into another. Avidienus, to whom the nickname ’Dog,’ truly earned, clings, eats five-year-old olives and wild cornels, is sparing to pour his wine unless it has turned, and the smell of whose oil you could not endure — though he may, dressed in white, keep a wedding-feast, a birthday, or other holy days — drips it himself, from a two-pound horn, onto his greens, not stinting his old vinegar. What diet, then, will the wise man keep, and which of these will he copy? On one side the wolf presses, on the other the dog, they say. He will be neat enough not to offend by squalor, and wretched in his manner on neither side. He will not, like old Albucius, be savage to his slaves while he parcels out their tasks, nor, like slovenly Naevius, set greasy water before his guests: that too is a great fault. Hear now what blessings, and how great, a frugal diet brings with it. First, your health will be sound; for that mixed dishes harm a man you may believe, recalling that food which once sat lightly on you when it was plain. But the moment you have mingled roast with boiled, shellfish with thrushes, the sweet will turn to bile, and sluggish phlegm bring uproar to the stomach. You see how everyone rises pale from a dubious dinner? Indeed the body, loaded with yesterday’s excess, drags the mind down with it, and pins to the earth a particle of the divine breath. The other man, who has given his tended limbs to sleep quicker than a word, rises brisk to his appointed tasks. He too may cross to better fare now and then — when the returning year brings round a feast-day, or he wishes to restore a wasted body; and when the years mount up, and weak old age asks gentler handling. But you — what will you have left to add to that softness which, young and strong, you draw on in advance, should hard sickness fall, or slow old age? The ancients praised high boar — not because they had no noses, but, I think, with this in mind: that a guest arriving late might more handily finish it tainted than the greedy host the whole of it fresh. Would that the early earth had borne me among such heroes! Do you give any weight to good name, which, sweeter than song, takes hold of the human ear? Great turbots and great dishes bring great disgrace along with the ruin. Add an angry uncle, the neighbors, yourself at odds with yourself, and vainly craving death, when, destitute, you will lack a penny — the price of a noose. ’With justice,’ says he, ’is Trausius rated in such terms; but I have great revenues and wealth ample for three kings.’ Then is there nothing better on which to spend what is left over? Why does any worthy man go in want while you are rich? Why do the ancient temples of the gods fall to ruin? Why, you scoundrel, do you not measure out something for your dear country from so vast a heap? To you alone, no doubt, things will always go right — O great laughingstock, in time to come, for your enemies. Which of the two, in the chances of doubt, will trust himself more surely: he who has trained a proud mind and body to abundance, or he who, content with little and afraid of the future, has, like a wise man, made ready in peace what war demands? That you may credit this the more: I knew this Ofellus as a small boy, and with his means intact he lived no wider than now, when they are cut down. You may see him on his measured-out little plot, with his stock and his sons, a sturdy tenant working for hire, telling how: ’I never on a workday rashly ate a thing but greens and a knuckle of smoked ham. And if after a long while a guest came, or, in a rainy spell free of work, a neighbor — a welcome messmate — we did well, not with fish fetched from the city, but with a chicken and a kid; then the hung-up grape and nuts with a double fig graced the second course. After this our sport was to drink with forfeits for a master; and Ceres, worshipped that she might rise on a high stalk, smoothed with wine the cares of a furrowed brow. Let Fortune rage and stir up new upheavals: how much will she pare from this? How much the more sparingly, my boys, have I or you flourished since the new tenant came? For nature has made neither him nor me nor anyone the owner of land as his own: he drove us out; him will drive out either his own wickedness, or his ignorance of the tricky law, or, at the last, surely a longer-lived heir. Now the field, under the name of Umbrenus — lately called Ofellus’s — will belong to no one outright, but pass into use, now to me, now to another. So live bravely, and set brave breasts against adversity.’

’You write so seldom that not four times in a whole year do you call for parchment, unweaving all you have written, vexed at yourself because, generous with wine and sleep, you sing nothing worth discussion. What will come of it? Why, at the very Saturnalia you fled here, sober. So then, say something worthy of your promises. Begin. — Nothing comes. The pens are blamed for nothing, and the innocent wall, born under the wrath of gods and poets, suffers undeserving. And yet you wore the look of a man threatening many fine things, once your little farm had taken you in under its warm roof. What was the point of cramming Plato in with Menander, of bringing out such companions — Eupolis, Archilochus? Do you mean to appease envy by deserting excellence? You will be scorned, poor wretch. You must shun that wicked Siren, sloth — or else lay down, with an even mind, whatever you won in a better life.’ ’For your true counsel, Damasippus, may the gods and goddesses reward you — with a barber. But how do you know me so well?’ ’Since all my fortune was smashed at the middle Janus, I mind other men’s business, knocked loose from my own. For once I loved to hunt out in what bronze basin that crafty Sisyphus had washed his feet, what was clumsily carved, what cast too stiffly. Expertly I would price this statue at a hundred thousand; I, and I alone, knew how to buy gardens and fine houses at a profit; so the crowded crossroads pinned on me the surname ”Mercury’s favorite.”’ ’I know it, and I marvel you are purged of that disease. But, as usual, a new one has strangely driven out the old — as a pain in the wretched side or head shifts to the heart, or as a lethargic patient turns boxer and lays into his doctor. So long as you do nothing of that sort, be as you please.’ ’My good man, do not fool yourself: you too are mad, and nearly all fools are, if there is any truth in what Stertinius rattles off — from whom I, an apt pupil, copied down these wondrous precepts, at the time when he consoled me and bade me grow a philosopher’s beard and come back, not downcast, from the Fabrician bridge. For when, my affairs in ruin, I meant to throw myself, head muffled, into the river, he stood at my right and said: ”Take care you do nothing unworthy of yourself. A false shame wrings you — afraid, among the mad, of being thought mad. First let me ask what it is to be insane: if it is in you alone, I will not add a word against your dying bravely. Whomever evil folly and ignorance of the truth drive on, blind, the Porch and flock of Chrysippus calls mad. This formula holds whole peoples, holds great kings — all but the wise man. Now hear why all are as senseless as you, who pinned the name of madman on you. As in the woods, where straying error drives men off the sure path this way and that — one goes left, one right, the error one for both, but it deludes them in different quarters: in this way believe yourself mad — yet no wiser is the man who jeers at you and trails a tail behind him. There is one kind of folly that fears what need not be feared — that complains of fire, of cliffs and rivers barring its way on open ground; another, its opposite and no whit wiser, that rushes straight through the midst of fires and rivers: though his loving mother cry out, his honest sister, his kin, his father, his wife — ’Here is a vast ditch, here a great crag: watch out!’ — he would hear no more than drunken Fusius once did, sleeping off his Iliona, while twelve hundred Catienuses bawled ’Mother, I call on you!’ Like this error I will prove the whole crowd to be mad. Damasippus is insane for buying old statues: is Damasippus’s creditor sound of mind? Granted. If I were to say to you, ’Take this, which you will never repay me’ — would you be mad to take it, or madder still to refuse the prize that ready Mercury holds out? Enter ten bonds with Nerius for surety: not enough; add the knotty Cicuta’s tablets, a hundred; add a thousand chains: still that scoundrel Proteus will slip these fetters. When you drag him to court, laughing with a jaw not his own, he will turn boar, now bird, now stone, and, when he likes, a tree. If to manage badly is the madman’s mark, and to manage well the sane man’s, then Perillius’s brain — believe me — is far the rottener, dictating a bond you could never repay. I bid him hear me and gather up his toga, whoever pales with evil ambition or the love of silver, whoever burns with luxury or grim superstition or any other sickness of mind: come up to me here, in order, while I prove you all mad. By far the largest dose of hellebore must go to the grasping: I rather think reason would assign them the whole of Anticyra. The heirs of Staberius were to grave the sum on his tomb, or, failing that, were bound to give the people a hundred pairs of gladiators, a banquet at Arrius’s discretion, and as much grain as Africa reaps. ’Whether I willed this wrongly or rightly, do not play the uncle with me’: so, I suppose, Staberius’s shrewd mind foresaw. What, then, did he mean, wanting his heirs to cut the sum of his estate on stone? As long as he lived, he held poverty a monstrous vice, and against nothing guarded more keenly; so that, had he chanced to die one farthing poorer, he would have seemed to himself the baser. For everything — virtue, fame, honor, things divine and human — obeys fair riches; and whoever heaps them up will be famous, brave, just. ’And wise?’ ’Yes, and a king, and whatever he likes.’ This, as though won by virtue, he hoped would be his great renown. What did the Greek Aristippus do like him? He bade his slaves throw away his gold in mid-Libya, because they went too slowly, sluggish under the load. Which of the two is the madder? An example settles nothing that resolves one dispute with another. If a man should buy lyres and pile his purchases in one heap, though given neither to the lyre nor to any Muse; if, no cobbler, he buys knives and lasts; if, set against trade, he buys ship’s sails: he would rightly be called crazed and witless on every side. How does he differ from these — the man who hoards his coins and gold, not knowing how to use his store, afraid to touch it as if it were holy? If a man should keep watch, stretched out forever beside a vast pile of grain with a long cudgel, and the hungry owner dare not touch a single grain of it, but, stinting, feed rather on bitter leaves; if, with a thousand jars of Chian and old Falernian stored within — that is nothing: with three hundred thousand — he drinks sharp vinegar; and if, seventy-nine years old, he sleeps on straw while his bed-clothes, a feast for moths and worms, rot in the chest: no doubt he would seem mad to few — because the greatest part of mankind is tossed by the same disease. God-hated old man, are you guarding all this so that a son, or even a freedman heir, may drink it down? For fear you run short? Why, how little of the sum would each day dock, if you began to dress your greens and your head with better oil, foul as you are with unkempt scurf? Why, if anything at all is enough, do you perjure, pilfer, plunder on every side? Are you sane? If you began to pelt the people with stones, or your own slaves whom you bought with cash, all the boys and girls would cry you mad; when you make away with your wife by the noose and your mother by poison, is your head sound? Why so? Because you do not do it at Argos, nor kill your mother with the sword, a madman like Orestes. Or do you think he went mad after his mother was killed, and was not driven witless by the evil Furies before he warmed the keen blade in his mother’s throat? Indeed, from the time Orestes was reckoned of unsound mind, he did nothing you could fault: he never dared strike Pylades with the sword, or his sister Electra; he only rails at the pair, calling her a Fury, him whatever else his bright bile bade. Opimius, poor amid silver and gold laid up within, who used to drink Veientan from a Campanian ladle on feast-days and sour stuff on workdays, was once crushed by a deep lethargy, so that his heir already ran round his strong-boxes and keys, glad and crowing. A doctor, quick and faithful, rouses him thus: he orders a table set, the money-bags poured out, and several men to come and count; so he raises the man, and adds this too: ’Unless you guard your own, your greedy heir will carry it off this instant.’ ’While I am alive?’ ’Then, to stay alive, wake up. Attend.’ ’What do you want?’ ’Your veins will fail you, drained, unless food and a great prop come to your collapsing stomach. You hold back? Come, take this rice-broth.’ ’Bought for how much?’ ’A trifle.’ ’How much, then?’ ’Eight pennies.’ ’Alas — what does it matter whether I perish by disease, or by theft and plunder?’ Who, then, is sane? He who is not a fool. What of the miser? A fool, and mad. What — if a man is not greedy, is he at once sane? By no means. Why, Stoic? I will tell you. Suppose Craterus has said, ’This patient is not heart-sick.’ Is he then well, and will he rise? He will deny it: because the side or kidneys are gripped by an acute disease, the man is not therefore perjured or sordid. Let such a one sacrifice a pig to his gracious Lares; but if he is ambitious and reckless, let him sail to Anticyra. For what is the difference — whether you fling all you have into a pit, or never use what you have gathered? Servius Oppidius, rich by the old reckoning, is said to have shared out his two estates at Canusium between his two sons, and, dying, to have told the boys, summoned to his bed: ’Since I saw you, Aulus, carry your dice and nuts in a loose fold, give them away and gamble, and you, Tiberius, count them, hide them gloomily in holes, I grew afraid that a discordant madness might drive you — you to follow Nomentanus, you Cicuta. So, each of you entreated by the household gods, you take care not to lessen, you not to make greater, what your father thinks enough and nature keeps in bounds. And further, lest glory tickle you, I will bind you both by oath: whichever of you becomes aedile or praetor, let him be accursed and barred from bearing witness.’ Would you waste your goods on chickpeas, beans, and lupines, so you may stride broad in the Circus and stand cast in bronze — stripped of your father’s lands, stripped of his money, you madman — just to win the applause that Agrippa wins, a sly fox aping a noble lion? Son of Atreus, why do you forbid anyone to bury Ajax? ’I am king.’ I, a commoner, ask no more. ’And I command a just thing; but if I seem unjust to any, I let him say what he thinks, unpunished.’ Greatest of kings, may the gods grant you to bring your fleet home with Troy taken. Then I may question, and in turn be answered? ’Question.’ Why does Ajax, a hero second only to Achilles, rot — glorious for so often saving the Greeks — that Priam’s people and Priam may rejoice at him unburied, the man through whom so many youths lost their native graves? ’Mad, he put a thousand sheep to death, crying that he slew famous Ulysses and Menelaus, and me along with them.’ When you, at Aulis, set your sweet daughter in a heifer’s place before the altars, and sprinkle her head with salted meal, you wretch — do you keep your mind straight? ’To what end this?’ Why, what did mad Ajax do? When he cut down the flock with the sword, he kept his hand from wife and son; though he called down many curses on the sons of Atreus, he did no harm to Teucer, nor to Ulysses himself. ’But I, to free the ships stuck on a hostile shore, deliberately appeased the gods with blood.’ With your own, no doubt, madman? ’My own — but I was not mad.’ Whoever takes in images at odds with the truth, confused by the turmoil of guilt, will be held disturbed; and whether he errs through folly or through anger will make no difference. Ajax is senseless when he kills the harmless lambs: when you knowingly commit a crime for empty titles, do you stand sound in mind, and is your heart clean of fault when it is swollen? If a man should love to carry a sleek lamb about in a litter, and furnish it clothes, maids, and gold as for a daughter, call it ’Pussy’ or ’Little One,’ and betroth it as a bride to some sturdy husband: the praetor would strip him of all rights by injunction, and his guardianship would pass to his sane kinsmen. What — if a man devotes his daughter in place of a dumb lamb, is he sound of mind? Do not say it. So where there is twisted folly, there is the height of madness; the criminal will also be a maniac; the man glassy glory has seized, around him Bellona, glad in blood, has thundered. Now come, lay hold with me of luxury and Nomentanus. For reason will prove that spendthrift fools are mad. The moment he came into a thousand talents of inheritance, he proclaims that the fisherman, the fruiterer, the fowler, the perfumer, and all the unholy crowd of the Tuscan quarter, the poulterer with his clowns, the whole meat-market with the Velabrum, should come to his house at dawn. What then? They came in throngs; a pander speaks for them: ’Whatever is mine, whatever any of these has at home, count it yours, and send for it now or tomorrow.’ Hear what the fair-minded youth answered to this. ’You sleep booted in the Lucanian snow, so that I may dine on boar; you sweep the fish from the wintry sea. I am idle, unworthy to own so much; take it away, take a million for yourself; you the same; you three times over, you from whose house your wife comes running, called at midnight.’ The son of Aesopus, to gulp down a million at a swallow, dissolved in vinegar a splendid pearl plucked from Metella’s ear: how was he saner than if he had thrown the same thing into a rushing river or a sewer? The offspring of Quintus Arrius, that noble pair of brothers, twins in worthlessness and trifling and the love of perverse things, who used to lunch on nightingales bought at ruinous cost — where do they belong? Among the sane, marked with chalk, or with charcoal? If it pleased a grown, bearded man to build toy houses, harness mice to a little cart, play odds-and-evens, ride a long reed, madness would be at work in him. If reason proves that to be in love is more childish than these, and that there is no difference whether you play in the dust at a game as you did at three, or whine, sick with love of a whore: I ask, will you do what reformed Polemon once did? Will you lay aside the badges of your disease — the leg-bands, the elbow-cushion, the mufflers — as he, in his cups, is said to have secretly stripped the garlands from his neck, after the fasting master’s voice had pulled him up short? When you hold out apples to a sulking boy, he refuses; ’Take them, puppy’: he says no; if you do not give, he would want them. How does the shut-out lover differ, when he debates with himself whether to go or not to where he would have returned unasked, and clings to the doors he hates? ’Even now, when she calls me of her own accord, shall I not go? Or rather plan to end my pains? She shut me out; she calls me back: shall I return? Not if she begs.’ Look — a slave, not a little wiser: ’O master, a thing that has neither measure nor counsel will not be handled by reason and rule. In love these evils lie: war, then peace again; and if a man should toil to fix and make sure for himself these things — shifting almost like weather, drifting on blind chance — he would unravel them no better than if he set about going mad by fixed reason and rule.’ What — when you pick the seeds from Picene apples and rejoice if you happen to strike the ceiling, are you your own master? What — when you mouth lisping baby-words with an aged palate, how are you saner than the child building his toy houses? Add bloodshed to folly, and stir the fire with a sword. With measure, I say. When Marius, having stabbed Hellas, hurls himself down, was he crazed? Or will you acquit the man of a deranged mind and yet condemn the same for crime — applying, as men do, kindred names to things? There was a freedman who, fasting, his hands washed, used to run round the crossroads-shrines each morning, an old man, and pray: ’One thing — and what so great? — one man, snatch me from death! For the gods it is easy’ — sound in both ears and both eyes; yet his mind, were a seller selling him, he would except from warranty — unless the buyer were litigious. This crowd too Chrysippus places in the teeming tribe of Menenius. ’Jupiter, who give and take away great sufferings,’ says the mother of a boy now sick abed five months, ’if the cold quartan leaves the child, on the morning of the day you appoint a fast, he shall stand naked in the Tiber.’ Should chance or the doctor lift the sick boy from his crisis, the crazed mother will kill him, fixing him on the cold bank, and bring the fever back — shaken in mind by what affliction? Fear of the gods. These weapons Stertinius, an eighth among the wise, gave me, his friend, that I might not in future be reviled unavenged. Whoever calls me mad shall hear as much in return, and learn to look back at what hangs from his own unseen back.’ ’Stoic, so may you sell everything dearer after your loss — by what folly, since there is not just one kind, do you think me mad? For to myself I seem sane.’ ’What — when Agave carries the severed head of her luckless son in her hands, does she think herself mad then?’ ’A fool I confess myself — let me grant the truth — and even mad; only spell this out: with what disease of mind do you reckon me sick?’ ’Hear it: first, you build — that is, you ape the tall, you who from sole to crown are a whole two feet of stature; and yet you laugh at the swagger and the strut of Turbo in his armor, too big for his body: how are you less ridiculous than he? Or is it right that whatever Maecenas does, you do as well, so unlike him and so far his lesser in the contest? When a calf’s hoof had crushed the young of an absent frog, and one escaped, he tells his mother how a huge beast had squashed his brothers; she asks, how big? Was it as big as this, puffing herself up? ’Half as big again.’ ’As big as this?’ And as she blew herself out more and more, ’No,’ he said, ’not if you burst yourself will you match it.’ This image is not far from you. Now add your poems — that is, add oil to the fire; if anyone ever made such things in his right mind, then you too make them sane. I say nothing of your fearful raving —’ ’Stop now.’ ’— your style of life beyond your means —’ ’Keep to your own affairs, Damasippus.’ ’— your thousand passions for girls, your thousand for boys —’ ’O greater madman, spare at last the lesser!’

’Where from, and where to, Catius?’ ’I have no time — I am keen to set down new precepts, the sort that will outdo Pythagoras, and the man Anytus prosecuted, and learned Plato.’ ’I confess my fault, in breaking in on you at so unlucky a moment; but grant me pardon, good sir, I beg. And if anything has now slipped you, you will recover it soon — whether it is a gift of nature or of art, you are wonderful at both.’ ’Indeed, that was my very care: how to keep it all, fine matters as they are, worked out in fine language.’ ’Tell me the man’s name — and whether he is a Roman or a stranger.’ ’The precepts themselves I will sing from memory; the author shall stay hidden. Remember to serve eggs of a long shape, since they are of better flavor and whiter than the round; for, firm-shelled, they hold a male yolk. Cabbage grown in dry suburban fields is the sweeter: nothing is more washed-out than from a watered garden. If an evening guest takes you by surprise, so that no tough hen may answer your palate ill, you will know to plunge it alive in Falernian must: this will make it tender. Meadow mushrooms are the best in nature; others are ill to trust. He will pass his summers in health who ends his lunches with black mulberries, picked from the tree before the sun grows heavy. Aufidius used to mix honey with strong Falernian — a blunder, since to the empty veins one should commit nothing but the mild: you will rinse your insides better with gentle mead. If a costive bowel holds you up, the mussel and cheap cockles will clear the obstruction, and the short sorrel-herb — but not without white Coan wine. The waxing moons fill the slippery shellfish; but not every sea is fertile in noble shell: the Lucrine clam beats the Baian murex, oysters come from Circeii, sea-urchins from Misenum, soft Tarentum vaunts its broad-shelled scallops. Let no man rashly lay claim to the art of dinners before he has worked out the subtle theory of flavors. Nor is it enough to sweep fish off the costly stall, not knowing which suit a sauce better and which, once roasted, will make the jaded guest prop himself up again on his elbow. The Umbrian boar, fed on holm-oak acorns, bends the round platters for the man who shuns flabby meat; for the Laurentian is poor, fattened on sedge and reed. The vineyard does not always yield edible roe-deer. The connoisseur will hunt for the forelegs of a breeding hare. What the nature and age of fish and birds should be, no one’s research laid open before my palate. There are men whose genius runs only to new pastries. It is by no means enough to spend care on one thing alone — as if a man should labor only at this, that his wine be not bad, careless what oil he drenches his fish in. If you set Massic wine out under a clear sky, any thickness in it will be thinned by the night air, and the smell that is hostile to the nerves will pass off; but those wines, spoiled by straining through linen, lose their whole flavor. The cunning man who blends Surrentine wines with Falernian lees gathers up the dregs neatly with a pigeon’s egg, since the yolk, rolling down, draws the foreign matter to the bottom. You will revive the drooping drinker with roasted prawns and an African snail; for lettuce floats on a stomach soured after wine; the appetite, once whetted, demands to be restored rather with ham and sausages — nay, would rather have anything brought steaming from the filthy cook-shops. It is worth the trouble to learn through and through the nature of the two-fold sauce. The simple is made of sweet oil, which it is right to mix with rich wine and with brine — none other than that in which the Byzantine jar has reeked. When this, stirred together, has simmered with chopped herbs and stood sprinkled with Corycian saffron, you will add on top what the pressed berry of the Venafran olive has given. Tiburtine apples yield to Picene ones in juice — though they excel in looks; the Venuculan grape suits the jar; the Alban grape you had better cure with smoke. I am found the first to have set this out with apples, the first the wine-lees and fish-pickle, the first to set white pepper and black salt, sifted, round in clean little dishes. It is a monstrous fault to lay out three thousand at the fish-market and then crowd the roving fish into a narrow dish. It stirs great disgust in the stomach if a slave-boy has handled the cup with greasy hands while he licks up his pilferings, or if a heavy scum has clung to the old mixing-bowl. On cheap brooms, napkins, sawdust — how much expense is there? Yet, neglected, the disgrace is huge. Are you to scour your figured mosaic floor with a muddy broom, and throw unwashed couch-covers over Tyrian cloth, forgetting that the less care and cost these things take, the more justly you are blamed for them than for those that can only fall to rich men’s tables?’ ’Learned Catius, by our friendship and the gods I beg: wherever you go, remember to take me along to hear him. For though you report it all to me from a faithful memory, still, as an interpreter you will not help me quite so much. Add the look and bearing of the man, whom you, blessed in having seen him, rate at little, because it fell to you; but in me there is no slight longing to reach those distant springs and drink the precepts of the blessed life.’

’This too, Tiresias, beyond what you have told, answer my asking: by what arts and means I may repair my lost estate. Why do you laugh?’ ’Is it not enough for you, you schemer, to be carried back to Ithaca and look upon your ancestral household gods?’ ’O you who never lied to anyone, you see how naked and penniless I come home, as you foretold — and there neither the wine-cellar nor the flock is untouched by the suitors; and yet both birth and worth, without means, are cheaper than seaweed.’ ’Since, riddles aside, you shudder at poverty, hear by what method you may grow rich. If a thrush, or anything else of your own, is given you, let it fly off to where a great fortune gleams under an aged master; let the rich man, more to be revered than your Lar, taste before your Lar the sweet apples and whatever honors your tilled farm yields you. Though he be forsworn, of no family, stained with a brother’s blood, a runaway — still, if he asks it, do not refuse to walk at his side, on the outer edge.’ ’What, shield the flank of a filthy Dama? Not so did I bear myself at Troy, contending always with my betters.’ ’Then you will be poor.’ ’I will bid my brave heart endure it; I have borne greater things before. Tell me at once, augur, whence I may rake up riches and heaps of cash.’ ’I have said it, and I say it: shrewdly hunt the wills of old men everywhere; and if one or two sly ones, having nibbled off the bait, slip the trapper, do not put down hope, or, fooled, abandon the art. If some case, great or small, is fought in the forum, whichever party lives rich and childless, a scoundrel who boldly hales a better man unprovoked to court — be his defender; scorn the citizen of fairer name and the stronger case, if he has a son at home or a fertile wife. ’Quintus,’ say, or ’Publius’ — soft little ears delight in the first name — ’your worth has made me your friend. I know the law’s two-edged turns, I can plead causes; sooner would anyone tear out my eyes than rob you, scorned, of an empty nut; this is my care, that you lose nothing, nor become a laughingstock.’ Bid him go home and nurse his precious skin; turn advocate yourself, stand firm and hold out: whether the red Dog-star splits the speechless statues, or Furius, stuffed with fat tripe, spits hoary snow over the wintry Alps. ’Don’t you see,’ someone, nudging with his elbow the man beside him, will say, ’how patient he is, how good to his friends, how keen?’ More tunny will swim up, and your fish-ponds will fill. Besides, if a man is rearing a sickly son acknowledged in a splendid estate, lest your court of the childless show too plainly, creep gently into hope, all dutiful, so that you may be named second heir, and, should some chance drive the boy to Orcus, you may step into the vacancy: very rarely does this throw of the dice fail. Whoever hands you a will to read, remember to refuse and push the tablets from you — yet so as to snatch sidelong what the first page means in its second line; whether you are sole heir or joint with many, skim it with a quick eye. Often a clerk re-boiled from a petty commissioner will cheat the gaping crow, and the legacy-hunter Nasica will be a laughingstock to Coranus.’ ’Are you raving? Or do you knowingly mock me, chanting in riddles?’ ’O son of Laertes, whatever I say will be, or will not be: for great Apollo grants me the gift of prophecy.’ ’Still, tell me, if I may, what that tale means.’ ’At the time when a young man dreadful to the Parthians, sprung from the line of high Aeneas, shall be great on land and sea, the tall daughter of Nasica — who dreads to repay his debt in full — shall wed brave Coranus. Then the son-in-law will do this: he will hand the tablets to his father-in-law and beg him to read; Nasica, after much refusing, will take them at last, and read in silence, and find nothing left to him and his but to weep. This I bid besides: if a crafty woman or a freedman should manage a doting old man, join them as partner; praise them, that you be praised behind your back. This too helps; but it far outdoes the rest to storm the head himself first. Will the witless fellow write bad verses? Praise them. Will he be a whoremonger? Do not wait to be asked; obligingly hand Penelope over to the better man.’ ’Do you think she can be led astray — one so thrifty and so chaste, whom the suitors could not turn from her straight course?’ ’Because there came a young set stingy with great gifts, and keen less on Venus than on the kitchen. That is why Penelope is virtuous to you; but once she has tasted profit from a single old man, sharing the little gain with you, she will never be scared off — like a dog from a greasy hide. What I shall tell happened in my old age. A wicked old woman at Thebes was, by her will, carried out for burial thus: her heir bore the corpse, drenched in oil, on his bare shoulders — that she might slip away, dead, if she could; because, I suppose, he had pressed her too hard while she lived. Approach with caution: neither fail in your service, nor overdo it past measure. A chatterer offends the difficult and peevish man: beyond ’no’ and ’yes’ keep silent; be a Davus of comedy, and stand with head bowed, much like a man afraid. Press on with compliance; warn him, if the breeze freshens, to cover his dear head with care; draw him out of the crowd with your shoulders set against it; lend your ear to the talker. The bore loves to be praised: until, hands raised to heaven, he has cried ’Enough now!’, keep at it — blow up the swelling bladder with puffed-up talk. When he has freed you from long servitude and care, and, wide awake, you hear for certain, ’Let Ulysses be heir to a fourth part’: ’So now is my comrade Dama nowhere? Where shall I find one so brave and so faithful?’ Let fall such words from time to time; and if you can weep a little, you may hide the face that betrays your joy. The tomb, left to your discretion, build without stinting: let the neighborhood praise a funeral splendidly done. If by chance some older coheir coughs badly, tell him that, should he want a buyer for a farm or a house out of your share, you will gladly knock it down to him for a token coin. But imperious Proserpina drags me off: live, and farewell.’

This was in my prayers: a measure of land not so very large, where there might be a garden, and near the house a spring of unfailing water, and above these a little woodland. More amply and better the gods have done it. It is well. I ask no more, son of Maia, except that you make these gifts my own. If I have neither swelled my estate by foul dealing, nor am about to shrink it by vice or fault; if I never foolishly pray such prayers as ’O if only that next corner might be added, which now mars the shape of my little field!’ or ’O if some chance would show me a pot of silver, as it did the man who, having found a treasure, bought and plowed the very field he had worked for hire, made rich by Hercules’ favor!’ — if what is at hand contents and pleases me, with this prayer I beg you: make the flock fat for its master, and everything else but his wit; and, as you are wont, stand my greatest guardian. So, now that I have drawn off from the City into the hills and my citadel, what should I sooner brighten with satire and the Muse that goes afoot? Here no evil ambition undoes me, nor the leaden south wind, nor heavy Autumn, the harvest of cruel Libitina. Father of mornings — or Janus, if you would rather be so called — from whom men set in motion the first works and toils of life (such is the gods’ pleasure) — be you the beginning of my song. At Rome you hurry me off to stand surety: ’Come, push on, lest anyone answer the call of duty before you.’ Whether the north wind scrapes the earth, or winter drags the snowy day round on a narrower circuit, go I must. Afterward, having spoken out clear and plain to my own hurt, I must wrestle in the throng and do harm to the slow. ’What do you want, madman?’ and ’What are you about?’ some lout assails me with angry curses: ’so you would shoulder aside whatever blocks you, would you, when you scurry back, mind set, to Maecenas.’ This delights me, this is honey, I will not lie. But the moment I have reached the dark Esquiline, a hundred other men’s affairs go leaping about my head and flanks. ’Roscius begged you to meet him at the Puteal tomorrow before the second hour.’ ’The clerks begged you to remember, Quintus, to come back today on a great new matter of common concern.’ ’Get Maecenas to set his seal to these tablets.’ Say ’I will try,’ and: ’If you wish, you can,’ he adds, and presses. Now the seventh year — nearer the eighth — will have fled since Maecenas began to number me among his own — only so far, though, as one he would take up in his carriage on a journey, and trust with trifles of this kind: ’What is the hour?’ ’Is the Thracian Gallina a match for Syrus?’ ’The morning frosts are nipping the careless now,’ and the sort of thing safely dropped into a leaky ear. Through all this time, by day and hour, our friend grew more open to envy. He had watched the games, played ball beside him on the Field: ’Fortune’s son!’ said all. A chilling rumor oozes from the Rostra through the crossroads: whoever meets me asks me: ’Good sir — for you must know, since you touch the gods more nearly — have you heard anything about the Dacians?’ ’Nothing at all.’ ’How you will always be a tease!’ ’May all the gods harry me if I know a thing.’ ’What — is Caesar going to give the soldiers the promised lands in Sicily, or on Italian soil?’ When I swear I know nothing, they marvel at me as a man, no doubt, of rare and lofty reticence. Amid all this the day is squandered, poor me, not without prayers: O countryside, when shall I look on you, and when shall it be granted me, now with the books of the ancients, now with sleep and idle hours, to drink the sweet forgetfulness of a careworn life? O when shall the bean, kinsman of Pythagoras, and greens with it, well-dressed in rich bacon-fat, be set before me? O nights and suppers of the gods, at which I myself and my friends dine before my own hearth-god, and feed my pert home-born slaves from the dishes we have tasted! As each one’s fancy is, the guest, freed from senseless rules, drains cups unequal — whether one boldly takes the strong wine, or grows the merrier, mellowed by milder draughts. So talk springs up — not about other men’s villas and houses, nor whether Lepos dances well or ill; but we thresh out what touches us more nearly, and is harmful not to know: whether men are made happy by riches or by virtue; what draws us into friendships — self-interest or the right; and what the nature of the good is, and what its highest form. Amid this our neighbor Cervius prattles his apt old-wives’ tales. For if anyone, in ignorance, praises the fretful wealth of Arellius, he begins like this: ’Once, they say, a country mouse welcomed a town mouse into his poor hole — an old host, an old friend — rough and careful of his gettings, yet able to open his pinched soul for a guest. In short: he grudged neither his hoarded chickpea nor his long oats, but, carrying in his mouth a dried grape and half-gnawed scraps of bacon, served them, longing to conquer with a varied meal the disdain of a guest who barely touched each thing with a haughty tooth, while the master of the house himself, stretched on this year’s straw, ate spelt and darnel, leaving the better of the feast to his friend. At last the town mouse says to him: ”What pleasure do you find, friend, in living it out on the ridge of a steep wood? Will you not set men and the city above the wild forests? Take to the road, trust me, as my companion, since earthly creatures live with mortal souls allotted them, and there is no flight from death for great or small: so, good fellow, while you may, live happy amid pleasant things, live mindful of how brief your span is.” When these words had moved the rustic, lightly he springs from his home; then both carry out their planned journey, eager to slip beneath the city walls by night. And now night held the mid-space of heaven, when each set his feet in a wealthy house, where cloth dyed with scarlet glowed over the ivory couches, and many courses were left over from a great dinner, standing, yesterday’s, in baskets heaped nearby. So, when he had laid the rustic out on the purple covering, the host bustles to and fro like a girt-up slave, keeps the dishes coming, and even does the very offices of a houseboy, tasting first all he brings. The other, reclining, delights in his changed lot, and amid the good things plays the happy guest — when of a sudden a huge crash of the doors flung them both from the couches. Terrified, they scamper the whole length of the room, and more, half-dead, they quake, as the lofty house rang with Molossian hounds. Then the country mouse: ”I have no need of a life like this,” he says, ”so farewell: my wood and my hole, safe from ambush, will console me with slender vetch.”’

’I have been listening a good while, and, a slave who wants to say a few words to you, I hold back in fear.’ ’Davus, is it?’ ’Yes, Davus — a chattel loyal to his master and honest enough — that is, enough for you to think him likely to live.’ ’Come, use December’s licence, since our forefathers willed it so: speak out.’ ’Part of mankind delights steadily in its vices and holds to its course; a good part wavers, now reaching for the right, now in thrall to the wrong. Priscus, often remarked with three rings, sometimes with his left hand bare, lived so unevenly that he would change his stripe by the hour: out of a great mansion he would suddenly bury himself somewhere a freedman could scarcely emerge from decently; now an adulterer at Rome, now he would rather live a scholar at Athens — born under all the Vertumni there are, and every one against him. Volanerius the buffoon, after a well-earned gout had crippled his finger-joints, kept a man hired by the day to pick up the dice for him and drop them in the box: the steadier he was in the same vices, the less wretched, and better off than the man who struggles now with a taut rope, now with a slack.’ ’Will you not say today where all this rancid stuff is heading, you gallows-bird?’ ’At you, I tell you.’ ’How so, you wretch?’ ’You praise the fortune and ways of the old commons, and yet, if some god should suddenly drive you back to them, you would refuse every time — either because you do not really feel that what you proclaim is better, or because you defend the right without firmness, and stick fast, vainly longing to drag your foot out of the mire. At Rome you long for the country; in the country, fickle, you cry the absent City to the stars. If you happen to be asked to no one’s dinner, you praise your untroubled greens, and, as though you went anywhere in chains, so you call yourself lucky and hug yourself that you have nowhere to go drinking. Let Maecenas bid you come to him late, a guest, at lamp-lighting: ”Won’t somebody bring oil, and quick? Does nobody hear?” You bellow with a great shout, and bolt. Mulvius and the spongers go off with curses on you that I had better not repeat. ”For I confess,” one of them would say, ”that I am led by my belly, light-headed; I tilt my nose up at a savory smell; I am weak, idle — and, if you like, add, a tavern-lounger. But you, being what I am and perhaps worse, would you for no cause set on me as your better, and wrap your own vice in handsome words?” What if you are caught more of a fool than I, who was bought for five hundred drachmas? Stop trying to scare me with your look; hold back your hand and your temper, while I deliver what Crispinus’s doorkeeper taught me. Another man’s wife takes you; a little tart takes Davus: which of us sins the worthier of the cross? When keen nature pricks me, whatever woman, naked under a clear lamp, has taken the strokes of my swollen tail or, lustful, ridden me lying on my back, sends me off neither disgraced nor anxious that a richer or handsomer man may use the same. But you, when you have flung off your badges — the knight’s ring, the Roman dress — and step out a ’Dama’ in place of a juror, foul, a hooded cloak shrouding your perfumed head, are you not the thing you counterfeit? In fear you are smuggled in, and, as your lusts wrangle with your dread, you tremble to the bone. What is the difference whether, hired out, you march to be flogged with rods and killed by the sword, or, shut in a shameful chest where the maid, her mistress’s accomplice, has stowed you, you press your head to your huddled knees? Has the husband of the sinning matron no just power over both — and over the seducer even juster? Yet she does not change her dress or her place, nor sin from above, since the woman is afraid of you and does not trust her lover. You will go knowingly under the yoke, and stake on a raging husband your whole fortune, your life, and, with your body, your good name. You have escaped: you will be afraid, I suppose, and, schooled, will beware — no, you will hunt for when you can be terrified again, and again be ruined, O slave so many times over. What beast, once it has burst its chains and got free, perversely gives itself back to them? ”I am no adulterer,” you say. Nor am I, by Hercules, a thief, when I wisely pass the silver plate. Take away the danger, and roving nature will leap out at once, the curbs removed. Are you my master — you, lesser than the rule of so many and so great things and men, whom the rod of manumission, laid on three times and four, would never free of wretched fear? And add, besides, what weighs no lighter than the rest: for whether he who obeys a slave is an under-slave, as your own usage says, or a fellow-slave — what am I to you? Why, you who lord it over me are the abject slave of others, and are jerked like a wooden puppet on strings not your own. Who, then, is free? The wise man, who is lord of himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor chains can frighten, strong to defy his desires and to scorn honors, whole within himself, polished and round, so that nothing from outside can find a hold on his smooth surface, against whom Fortune charges always crippled. Can you recognize any of these traits as your own? A woman demands five talents of you, plagues you, and, when you are shut out at the door, douses you with cold water, then calls you back: pull your neck from the base yoke; ’I am free,’ come, say it. You cannot. For a master, and no gentle one, drives your mind, claps sharp spurs to your jaded flanks, and wheels you about when you balk. Or when you stand spellbound, you madman, before a panel by Pausias — how do you sin less than I, when I gape at the battles of Fulvius and Rutuba and Pacideianus, daubed in red chalk or charcoal, their knees braced, as if the men really fought, striking and dodging, plying their arms? Davus is a worthless idler; but you — you are styled a subtle and knowing judge of the old masters. I am nothing, if a steaming cake draws me on: does your great virtue and spirit hold firm against lavish dinners? Why is humoring my belly more ruinous for me? Because my back pays for it. How do you go any less punished, who chase after dainties that cannot be had for little? Surely feasts pursued without end turn to gall, and the cheated feet refuse to carry the diseased body. Does the slave-boy sin who, toward dusk, trades a filched scraper for a bunch of grapes — while the man who sells his lands to please his gullet has nothing of the slave in him? Add that you cannot keep your own company an hour, cannot dispose your leisure aright, and flee yourself, a runaway and a vagabond, trying now with wine, now with sleep, to cheat your care — in vain: for that black companion bears down and dogs you as you flee.’ ’Where can I lay hold of a stone?’ ’What is the need?’ ’Where, of arrows?’ ’The man is either raving or making verses.’ ’If you do not whisk yourself off quicker than that, you will go as a ninth hand to the Sabine farm.’

’How did the dinner of rich Nasidienus please you? For when I sought you yesterday as a guest, I was told you were drinking there from midday on.’ ’So well that never in my life have I fared better.’ ’Tell me, if it is no trouble, what dish first appeased your angry belly.’ ’First of all, a Lucanian boar: it was taken under a mild south wind, as the father of the feast kept saying; around it, sharp turnips, lettuces, radishes — the things that rouse a jaded stomach — skirret, fish-pickle, Coan lees. When these were cleared, a high-girt slave wiped the maple table with a purple cloth, and another swept up whatever lay useless and might offend the diners; then — solemn as an Attic maiden advancing with the sacred things of Ceres — dusky Hydaspes came bearing Caecuban, and Alcon Chian unmixed with sea-water. Here the host: ”Maecenas, if Alban or Falernian pleases you more than what is set out, we have both.” ’Wretched riches! But who dined with you, and made it fine for you, Fundanius? I am keen to know.’ ’I was at the top, and next to me Viscus of Thurii, and below, if I recall, Varius; with Servilius Balatro, Vibidius — the ”shadows” Maecenas had brought. Nomentanus was above the host himself, Porcius below — a clown for bolting whole cakes at a gulp; Nomentanus was there for this: to point out with his finger anything that might escape us; for the rest of the company — we, I mean — were dining on birds, shellfish, fish, whose flavor hid something far unlike the familiar, as came clear at once, when he handed me the innards of a plaice and a turbot, things I had never tasted. After this he taught me that honey-apples blush red if picked under a waning moon. What that means you would hear better from himself. Then Vibidius to Balatro: ”Unless we drink ruinously, we shall die unavenged,” and calls for bigger cups. Then pallor turned the host’s face — he who dreaded nothing so much as hard drinkers, either because they rail more freely, or because hot wines deaden the fine-tuned palate. Vibidius and Balatro tip whole wine-jars into Allifan tankards, and all the rest follow suit; only the guests on the lowest couch did the flagons no harm. A lamprey is brought in, stretched on a platter amid swimming prawns. At this the host: ”This was caught with spawn,” he says, ”its flesh the worse after spawning. The sauce for them is mixed of: oil that the first vat of Venafrum pressed; fish-brine from the juices of the Iberian fish; five-year-old wine, but born this side of the sea, poured in while it cooks — once cooked, Chian suits it so well that nothing else does more; white pepper, and not without the vinegar that has soured from the spoiling of the Methymnaean grape. Green rocket and bitter elecampane — I was the first to show how to stew them in; unwashed sea-urchins Curtillus taught us, since what the sea-shell yields is better than any brine.” Meanwhile the hanging canopy came down in heavy ruin onto the platter, dragging more black dust than the north wind raises in the fields of Campania. We, dreading worse, once we felt there was no danger, sit up again; Rufus, his head bowed, fell to weeping as if his son had died before his time. What end there would have been, had not the wise Nomentanus lifted up his friend thus: ”Alas, Fortune, what god is crueller to us than you? How you always love to make sport of human things!” Varius could barely smother his laughter in his napkin. Balatro, turning up his nose at it all, said: ”This is the condition of living, and so its fame will never answer in full measure to your toil. To think that you, so that I may be entertained in style, should be racked, torn by every anxiety — that no bread be burnt, no ill-seasoned sauce be served, that all the slaves wait properly girt and groomed! Add besides these mischances — if the canopy falls, as just now; if a stable-hand, slipping, breaks a dish underfoot. But a host’s genius, like a general’s, adversity tends to lay bare, and good fortune to hide.” To this Nasidienus: ”May the gods grant you whatever blessings you pray for: so good a man you are, and so genial a guest” — and calls for his slippers. Then on each couch you might have seen whispers hissing, traded from ear to ear apart.’ ’No shows would I rather have watched than these; but come, tell me what next you laughed at.’ ’While Vibidius asks the slaves whether the flagon too is broken, since the cups he calls for are not brought, and while we laugh at trumped-up pretexts, with Balatro seconding him, back you come, Nasidienus, with altered brow, as if to mend your luck by art; then slaves followed, bearing on a great charger the carved limbs of a crane, well strewn with salt and meal, and the liver of a white goose fattened on rich figs, and the wrenched-off forelegs of hares — much sweeter so than if one eats them with the loins. Then we saw blackbirds served with scorched breasts, and ringdoves without their rumps — dainty things, had not the master recounted their causes and their natures; from whom we fled, so avenged that we tasted nothing at all, as though Canidia, worse than African serpents, had breathed upon them.’