On the cheap subject-matter of some epigrams.
But it is not only faulty and unpolished to offer the reader a shameful and obscene picture but also in general to depict whatever is cheap, ugly, and unwelcome. Hence those epigrams cannot be regarded as beautiful and polished whose subject is a toothless hag, a poetaster with a threadbare cloak, a rank old goat, a filthy nose, or a glutton vomiting on the table—all of which are a fertile ground of jokes for actors—since ugliness of that sort can never be redeemed by the point.
For this reason we have admitted none of such kind in the epigrams of Martial which we have subjoined to this treatise, and a good many epigrams that we have run across we have put aside, such as Buchanan's in which he depicts the unattractive and unpleasant picture of a lank old man:
While Naevolus yells he can outbellow Stentor,
And roars and roars, "All men are animals,"
He has slipped by almost his ninetieth year
And bent senility shakes his weak step.
Now three hairs only cling to his smooth head,
And he sees what a night-owl sees at dawn.
The snot is dripping from his frosty nose,
And stringed saliva falls on his wet breast—
Not an odd tooth in his defenceless gums,
Not an old ape so engraved with wrinkles.
Naevolus, for shame leave this frivolity
And no more cry, "All men," since you are none.[19]
Again, the baseness of the subject and the hardly pleasant or civilized image of a hanging man is a fault in this epigram of Sannazaro's, although it has an element of humor:
In your desire to learn your fortune, sir,
You questioned every tripod, every rune;
"You'll stand out above gods and men," at last
Answered the god in truth-revealing voice.
What arrogance you drew from this! You were
Immediately lord of the universe.
Now you ascend the cross. God was no cheat:
The whole world lies spread out beneath your feet.[20]
This is fairly respectable and merely low. But the cynical license of Martial and Catullus, by which they speak of many things that are not simply morally foul but such as decent society demands be removed from sight and hearing, must be regarded as altogether shameless and vulgar. For this reason men of taste never mention favorably Catullus' Annales Volusi cacata charta, or Martial's
et desiderio coacta ventris
gutta pallia non fefellit una[21]
And there are many others a good deal more despicable which cannot be adduced even as examples of a fault. Assuredly Antiquity was too forbearing toward this sort of thing, and I have often wondered how Cicero could have been tolerated in the Roman Senate when he inveighed against Piso:
Do you not remember, blank, when I came to see you about the fifth hour with Gaius Piso, you were coming out of some dirty shack, slippers on your feet and your face and beard covered; and when you breathed on us that low tavern air from your fetid mouth, you apologized on grounds of ill health, saying that you were taking a kind of wine treatment? When we had accepted your explanation—what else could we do?—we stood a while in the smell and fume of the joints you patronize until you kicked us out by the impudence of your answers and the stench of your belches.[22]