Satires of Juvenal and Persius

Or Stratocles, or Demetrius with the soft Haemo.
The whole nation is a troupe of actors. Do you laugh? With a greater guffaw
he is shaken; he weeps if he sees the tears of a friend,
and he does not feel pain. If you ask for a little fire in the winter time,
he puts on a heavy cloak; if you say "I am hot," he sweats.
We are not therefore equal; he who is better, and who can always,
at night and day, assume another's face,
throw his hands from his face, ready to praise,
if his friend has belched well, if he has urinated straight,
if the golden bowl has given a sound from its inverted bottom.
Furthermore, nothing is holy, and safe from his groin,
not the matron of the house, not the virgin daughter, nor the
bridegroom himself still beardless, nor the son hitherto chaste.
If none of these are there, he corrupts the household of his friend.
They want to know the secrets of the house, and therefore be feared.
And since the mention of the Greeks has begun, move past
the gymnasia, and hear the crime of the larger gown the philosopher's pallium.
The Stoic informer killed his friend Barea,
and the old man killed his disciple, he who was nourished on that bank
to which the feather of the Gorgon's horse Pegasus fell.
There is no place here for any Roman, where reigns
some Protogenes, or Diphilus, or Erimanthus,
who, by the vice of their race, never shares a friend.
He has him alone; for when he has distilled into the easy ear
a little of the poison of his nature and his country,
I am removed from the threshold; the times of long
service have perished. Nowhere is the loss of a client less.
What service, then, (lest I flatter myself,) or what
merit does a poor man have here? If he cares to run at night
in his toga, when the praetor urges on his lictor, and to go