What is your chief good? to have lived always on rich dishes; and a skin made delicate by constant basking in the sun?[1396] Stay: this old woman would scarce give a different answer—"Go now! I am son of Dinomache!"[1397] Puff yourself up!—"I am beautiful." Granted! Still Baucis, though in tatters, has no worse philosophy, when she has cried her herbs[1398] to good purpose to some slovenly slave.
How is it that not a man tries to descend into himself? Not a man! But our gaze is fixed on the wallet[1399] on the back in front of us! You may ask, "Do you know Vectidius' farms!" Whose? The rich fellow that cultivates more land at Cures than a kite[1400] can fly over! Him do you mean? Him, born under the wrath of Heaven, and an inauspicious Genius, who whenever he fixes his yoke at the beaten cross ways,[1401] fearing to scrape off the clay incrusted on the diminutive vessel, groans out, "May this be well!" and munching an onion in its hull, with some salt, and a dish of frumety (his slaves applauding the while), sups up the mothery dregs of vapid vinegar.
But if, well essenced, you lounge away your time and bask in the sun, there stands by you one, unkenned, to touch you with his elbow, and spit out his bitter detestation on your morals—on you, who by vile arts make your body delicate! While you comb the perfumed hair[1402] on your cheeks, why are you closely shorn elsewhere? when, though five wrestlers pluck out the weeds, the rank fern will yield to no amount of toil.
"We strike;[1403] and in our turn expose our limbs to the arrows. It is thus we live. Thus we know it to be. You have a secret wound, though the baldric hides it with its broad gold. As you please! Impose upon your own powers; deceive them if you can!"
"While the whole neighborhood pronounces me to be super-excellent, shall I not credit[1404] them?"
If you grow pale, vile wretch, at the sight of money; if you execute all that suggests itself to your lust; if you cautiously lash the forum with many a stroke,[1405] in vain you present to the rabble your thirsty[1406] ears. Cast off from you that which you are not. Let the cobbler[1407] bear off his presents. Dwell with yourself,[1408] and you will know how short your household stuff is.
FOOTNOTES:
[1386] Rem populi tractas? from the Greek περὶ τῶν τοῦ δήμου πραγμάτων βουλεύεσθαι. The imitations of the First Alcibiades are very close throughout the Satire. Even in our own day, in looking back upon ancient history, it would be difficult to find two persons so nearly counterparts of each other as Nero and Alcibiades; not only in their personal character but in the adventitious circumstances of their life. Both came into public life at a very early age. Nero was emperor before he was seventeen years old, and Alcibiades was barely twenty at the siege of Potidæa. Seneca was to Nero what Socrates was to Alcibiades. Both derived their claims to pre-eminence from the mother's side: Nero through Agrippina, from the Julian gens; Alcibiades through Dinomache, from the Alemæonidæ. The public influence of both extended through nearly the same period, thirteen years. Both were notorious for the same vices: love of self-indulgence, ambition of pre-eminence, personal vanity, lawless insolence toward others, lavish expenditure, and utter disregard of all principle. It would be very easy to carry out the parallel into greater detail. Comp. Suet., Nero, c. 26, with Grote's Greece, vol. vii., ch. 55.
[1387] Barbatum. Cf. Juv., xiv., 12, "Barbatos licet admoveas mille inde magistros." Cic., Fin., iv., "Barba sylvosa et pulcrè alita inter hominis eruditi insignia recensetur." Hor., ii., Sat. iii., 34, "Tempore quo me solatus jussit sapientem pascere barbam."
[1388] Cicutæ. Cf. ad Juv., vii, 206.