PERSIUS, SATIRE VI
ask where is the sum that Tadius left me long ago, and don't serve up to me your paternal saws:—"Let interest accrue on your capital, and take your expenses out of that."—"Yes, and what will be left?" "Left," do you ask? Here, boy, drench the cabbage with oil, and dn the expense! Am I to have my holiday dinner off nettles and a smoked pig's cheek with his ear split through, in order that some day or other your young ne'er-do-weel may regale himself on a goose's liver? . . . Am I to be reduced to a thread-paper while his belly is to wag with fat like that of a priest?
75Go, sell your soul for gain; buy and sell; ransack cunningly every corner of the earth, let no one outstrip you in patting fat Cappadocian[1] slaves in their pen; turn every coin into two. "Done already," you say; "with a threefold, fourfold, ay, and a tenfold increase."[2] Mark the point at which I am to stop, and the finisher of your heap,[3] Chrysippus, will have been found!
- ↑ Cappadocian slaves, being tall, were much prized as litter-bearers.
- ↑ Ruga is a "crease," or "fold," so that redire decies in rugam expresses exactly "a ten-fold increase." Many editors have wrongly explained the word as the fold or sinus in the toga, and so = "a purse."
- ↑ Referring to the well-known Sorites, the fallacy of the heap; Dum cadat elusus ratione mentis acervi (Hor. Epp. II. i. 47). The analogous fallacy demonstrating the impossibility of motion was met by the famous "solvitur ambulando."
D D
