Satyra.

You are conscious of falsehood, fraud, and deceit.
You have carried out great plunder, and living and teaching
Against the word and examples of the heavenly master,
And you cannot defend your empire by any law.
Therefore, full of fear, lest the stolen power perish,
And lest it not be permitted for you to sell rotten trifles,
And to live according to the example of corrupt Sardanapalus an ancient king noted for luxury and decadence,
You not only never grant free councils,
But you even condemn writings that are free and sounding of Christ,
And take them from your own, and forbid them to be sold and read.
And you proscribe pious writers with bitter hatred,
And the marks of heresy. Thus to you and yours,
The light is hateful. Thus you bear it poorly, that the bright Sun emerges,
So that you proceed to make all your things more and more suspected,
And openly testify to your conceived fear.
What? Because you even pursue typographers, who secretly
Published our writings, with bitter hatred,
So that all their books, in any idiom whatsoever,
Be they written in any doctrine or art,
You condemn, and give signs of manifest fear?
But what will you accomplish? You fear the frost, furious one,
But soon (believe me) the thickest snow will oppress you.
O rabies, and huge fury, and the ruin of pious
Things, if the fates grant you this, Cerberus.
Do you dare, insane one, because of our books,
To condemn all the writers, and the writings published by them
Of the masters, doing nothing to the kingdom