SATIRE V
It is the fashion of poets to call for a hundred voices, a hundred mouths and a hundred tongues for their lays,[1] whether their theme be a play to be gaped out by a lugubrious tragedian, or a wounded Parthian plucking an arrow from his groin.[2]
5"What are you driving at? What are these big lumps of solid poetry that you would cram down the throat so as to need a hundred throat-power to grapple with them?[3] Let those who meditate lofty themes gather vapours on Mount Helicon,[4] if there be any who propose to set a-boiling the pot of Procne or of Thyestes,[5] whereby that dullard Glyco[6] may be provided with his nightly supper. But you are not one that squeezes the wind like the bellows[7] of a forge when ore is a-smelting, nor are you one who croaks to himself some solemn nonsense with hoarse mutterings like a crow; nor do you swell out your cheeks till they burst with an
- ↑ The reference is to Iliad ii. 489, where Homer says that ten tongues and ten voices would be all too few to recount the leaders of the Achaean host; also to Virgil, who declares that a hundred tongues and a hundred voices would not be enough to tell all the forms of punishment in the lower world (Aen. vi. 625 foil.). See, too, Geor. ii. 43-4.
- ↑ This line is closely imitated from Hor. Sat. II. i. 15.
- ↑ A grotesque expression, after the manner of Persius. For whereas the demand made was for a hundred mouths for utterance, the speaker perverts the sense, and assumes that the hundred mouths are wanted for swallowing; as though the poet were a glutton stuffing himself with Thyestean meals.
- ↑ Helicon, near Delphi, was the mountain of the Muses.
- ↑ Referring to the grim tragic story of the supper off his own children that was served up to Tereus by his wife Procne.
- ↑ An actor of the time, who seems to have played the part of Tereus.
- ↑ The metaphor of the bellows is closely imitated from Hor. Sat. i. iv. 19 foll.
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