JUVENAL, SATIRE I
sea, lying alone upon an empty couch; for at a single one of their fine large and antique tables they devour whole fortunes. Ere long no parasites, will be left! Who can bear to see luxury so mean? What a huge gullet to have a whole boar—an animal created for conviviality—served up to it! But you will soon pay for it, my friend, when you take off your clothes, and with distended stomach carry your peacock into the bath undigested! Hence a sudden death, and an intestate old age; the new and merry tale runs the round of every dinner-table, and the corpse is carried forth to burial amid the cheers of enraged friends!
147To these ways of ours Posterity will have nothing to add; our grandchildren will do the same things, and desire the same things, that we do. All vice is at its acme;[1] up with your sails and shake out every stitch of canvas! Here perhaps you will say, "Where find the talent to match the theme? Where find that freedom of our forefathers to write whatever the burning soul desired? 'What man is there that I dare not name? What matters it whether Mucius forgives my words or no?[2]'" But just describe Tigellinus[3] and you will blaze amid those faggots in which men, with their throats tightly gripped, stand and burn and smoke, and you[4] trace a broad furrow through the middle of the arena.
- ↑ The phrase is difficult. Duff translates "Vice always stands above a sheer descent," and therefore soon reaches its extreme point.
- ↑ Apparently a quotation from Lucilius, being an attack on P. Mucius Scaevola.
- ↑ An infamous favourite of Nero's.
- ↑ i.e. "your body." The passage refers to the burning of the early Christians, and the dragging of their remains across the arena.
