Satires of Juvenal and Persius

No. 3/3

R script?
hp. 10. Janze

When the man who cuts my beard made a noise as a young man,
when Crispinus, a mere slice of the Nile mob, a slave from Canopus,
brings his shoulders forward to hitch up his Tyrian cloaks,
and fans the summer air with his sweating fingers,
unable to endure the weight of a larger gem,
it is difficult not to write satire. For who is so patient
with this unjust city, so iron-hearted, that he can hold himself back?
When the new litter of the lawyer Matho comes by,
full of the man himself, and after him, the informer of a great friend,
and he who will soon snatch the remainder from the consumed nobility,
whom Massa fears, whom Carus bribes with a gift,
and Thymele, sent by the trembling Latinus—
when they push you aside, those who earn their fortunes by nocturnal
services to old women, raised to heaven by the best path
of the highest advancement today, the bladder of a wealthy crone—
Proculeius has his half-ounce, but Gillo has his eleven-twelfths;
let each one receive his portion according to the measure of his groin;
let him take his reward for his blood, and let him grow pale
like one who has stepped with bare heels upon a snake,
or a rhetorician about to speak at the altar of Lugdunum.
Why should I recount how much my dry liver burns with anger?
When this plunderer presses the people with herds of retainers,
a ward who prostituted himself? Yet this man, condemned by a hollow
judgment—for what does infamy matter if the money is safe?
Marius drinks from the eighth hour and enjoys the angry gods,
while you, victorious province, you weep.
Should I not think these things worthy of the lamp of Venusia a reference to the satirist Horace, born in Venusia?
Should I not agitate against these things? But why rather write of the labors of Hercules,
or of Diomedes, or the bellowing of the labyrinth,
and the boy struck by the sea, and the flying craftsman Daedalus?