JUVENAL, SATIRE V
The great man himself drinks wine bottled in the days when Consuls wore long hair; the juice which he holds in his hand was squeezed during the Social Wars,[1] but never a glass of it will he send to a friend suffering from dyspepsia! To-morrow he will drink a vintage from the hills of Alba or Setia whose date and name have been effaced by the soot which time has gathered upon the aged jar—such wine as Thrasea[2] and Helvidius[2] used to drink with chaplets on their heads upon the birthdays of Cassius and the Bruti.
37The cup in Virro's[3] hands is richly crusted with amber and rough with beryl; to you no gold is entrusted; or if it is, a watcher is posted over it to count the gems and keep an eye on your sharp finger-nails. Pardon his anxiety; that fine jasper of his is much admired! For Virro, like so many others, transfers from his fingers to his cups the jewels with which the youth[4] preferred to the jealous Iarbas used to adorn his scabbard. To you will be given a cracked cup with four nozzles that takes its name from a Beneventine cobbler,[5] and calls for sulphur wherewith to repair its broken glass.
49If my lord's stomach is fevered with food and wine, a decoction colder than Thracian hoar-frosts will be brought to him. Did I complain just now that you were given a different wine? Why, the water which you clients drink is not the same. It will be handed to you by a Gaetulian groom, or by the bony hand of a blackamoor whom you would rather not meet at midnight when driving past the monuments on the hilly Latin Way. Before mine host stands the
- ↑ The Social Wars, after which the Italians gained the Roman franchise, were fought between B.C. 91 and 88.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Two famous Stoics whose outspoken freedom cost them their lives under Nero and Vespasian respectively.
- ↑ The patron who gives the dinner.
- ↑ Aeneas. Aen. iv. 36.
- ↑ Vatinius, a man with a long nose.
