JUVENAL, SATIRE VII
stands up, and repeats what he has just been conning in his seat, reciting the self-same things in the self-same verses! Served up again and again, the cabbage is the death of the unhappy master! What complexion[1] should be put on the case; within what category it falls; what is the crucial point; what hits will be made on the other side—these are things which everyone wants to know, but for which no one is willing to pay. "Pay indeed? Why, what have I learnt?" asks the scholar. It is the teacher's fault, of course, that the Arcadian youth feels no flutter in his left breast when he dins his "dire Hannibal" into my unfortunate head on every sixth day of the week, whatever be the question which he is pondering: whether he should make straight for the city from the field of Cannae, or whether, after the rain and thunder, he should lead around his cohorts, all dripping after the storm. Name any sum you please and you shall have it; what would I give[2] that the lad's father might listen to him as often as I do! So cry half-a-dozen or more of our sophists[3] in one breath, entering upon real lawsuits[4] of their own, abandoning "The Ravisher" and forgetting all about "The Poisoner" or "The wicked and thankless Husband," or the drugs that restore sight to the chronic blind.
171And so, if my counsel goes for anything, I would advise the man who comes down from his rhetorical shade to fight for a sum that would buy a trumpery corn-ticket[5]—for that's the most handsome fee he will ever get—to present himself with a discharge,[6]
- ↑ For the meaning of color, see note on vi. 280.
- ↑ The English idiom would be "What would I not give."
- ↑ i.e. teachers, especially of rhetoric.
- ↑ The rhetor goes to law to recover his fees.
- ↑ A ticket for the gratuitous distributions of corn.
- ↑ A retiring gladiator received a wooden sword (rudis) as a token of discharge.
