No More Learning

If nature can't, then wrath our verse ensures!
Count from the time since old Deucalion's boat,
Raised by the flood, did on Parnassus float:
Whatever since that golden age was done,
What human kind desires, and what they shun,
Joy, sorrow, fear, love, hatred, transport, rage,
Shall form the motley subject of my page.
And when could Satire boast so fair a field?
Say, when did vice a richer harvest yield?
When did fell avarice so engross the mind?
Or when the lust of play so curse mankind?
O Gold, though Rome beholds no altar's flame,
No temples rise to thy pernicious name,
Such as to Victory, Virtue, Faith are reared,
Or Concord, where the clamorous stork is heard,
Yet is thy full divinity confessed,
Thy shrine established here, in every breast.

After a vigorous outburst against the degrading scramble among
impoverished clients for doles from their patrons, and a mordant
onslaught upon the gluttony of the niggardly rich, Juvenal sees in his
age the high-water mark of iniquity.

Nothing is left, nothing for future times,
To add to the full catalogue of crimes:
Vice has attained its zenith; then set sail,
Spread all thy canvas, Satire, to the gale.


_II. --A Satire on Rome_

This sharp indictment is put in the mouth of one Umbricius, who is
represented as leaving his native city in disgust. Rome is no place
for an honourable character, he exclaims.

Here, then, I bid my much-loved home farewell.
Ah, mine no more! There let Arturius dwell,
And Catulus; knaves, who, in truth's despite,
Can white to black transform, and black to white.
Build temples, furnish funerals, auctions hold,
Farm rivers, ports, and scour the drains for gold!
But why, my friend, should _I_ at Rome remain?
_I_ cannot teach my stubborn lips to feign;
Nor when I hear a great man's verses, smile,
And beg a copy, if I think them vile.

The worst feature is the predominance of crafty and cozening Greeks,
who, by their versatility and diplomacy, can oust the Roman.

I cannot rule my spleen and calmly see
A Grecian capital--in Italy!
A flattering, cringing, treacherous artful race,
Of torrent tongue, and never-blushing face;
A Protean tribe, one knows not what to call,
Which shifts to every form, and shines in all:
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician,
All trades his own your hungry Greekling counts;
And bid him mount the sky--the sky he mounts!

The insinuating flatteries of these aliens are so masterfully
contrived that the blunt Roman has no chance against such a nation of
actors.

Greece is a theatre where all are players.
For, lo! their patron smiles--they burst with mirth;
He weeps--they droop, the saddest souls on earth;
He calls for fire--they court the mantle's heat;
"'Tis warm," he cries--the Greeks dissolve in sweat!

Besides, they are dangerously immoral. Their philosophers are
perfidious. These sycophant foreigners can poison a patron against a
poor Roman client. This leads to an outburst against poverty and its
disadvantages.

The question is not put, how far extends
One's piety, but what he yearly spends.
The account is soon cast up: the judges rate
Our credit in the court by our estate.