JUVENAL, SATIRE VI
skirts knee-high,[1] sacrifice a pig to Silvanus,[2] and take a penny bath.[3] Let not the wife of your bosom possess a special style of her own; let her not hurl at you in whirling speech the crooked enthymeme! Let her not know all history; let there be some things in her reading which she does not understand. I hate a woman who is for ever consulting and poring over the "Grammar" of Palaemon,[4] who observes all the rules and laws of language, who quotes from ancient poets that I never heard of, and corrects her unlettered[5] female friends for slips of speech that no man need trouble about; let husbands at least be permitted to make slips in grammar!
457There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds, and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears; there is nothing more intolerable than a wealthy woman. Meanwhile she ridiculously puffs out and disfigures her face with lumps of dough; she reeks of rich Poppaean[6] unguents which stick to the lips of her unfortunate husband. Her lover she will meet with a clean-washed skin; but when does she ever care to look nice at home? It is for her lovers that she provides the spikenard, for them she buys all the scents which the slender Indians bring to us. In good time she discloses her face; she removes the first layer of plaster, and begins to be recognisable. She then laves herself with that milk for which she takes a herd of she-asses in her train if sent away to the Hyper-
- ↑ i.e. wear the short tunic of a man.
- ↑ Only men sacrificed to Silvanus.
- ↑ i.e. bathe in the public baths.
- ↑ A treatise on grammar by Q. Remmius Palaemon, the most famous grammarian of the early empire.
- ↑ The word Opican is equivalent to Oscan, denoting the early inhabitants of Campania. It is used here as equivalent to barbarian.
- ↑ Cosmetics, called after Nero's wife Poppaea.
