Satires/Book I/3

2. On Extremism

Satires ~ I, III. On Tolerance written by Horace

4. A Defence of Satire

Translation by A. S. Kline

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All singers have the same fault, nothing will make them
Offer to sing for their friends when they’re asked,
Yet unasked they never stop. Sardinian Tigellius
Was like that. Even if Caesar, with all his power,
Had begged him to sing out of friendship to him
And his father, he’d have got nowhere: yet if he chose
He’d cry: ‘Hail Bacchus!’ at meals, from the egg to the fruit,
Now in a bass, now tenor, from tip to toe of the lyre.
The man lacked balance: sometimes he’d run as if fleeing
An enemy: sometimes walk slow as a man who’s carrying
Juno’s sacred basket. Sometimes he’d two hundred slaves,
Sometimes just ten: One day it was tetrarchs and kings
And everything royal, the next: ‘All I ask is salt in a shell,
A three-legged table, a coat that however ill-made
Will keep out the cold.’ If you gave ten thousand or so
To this thrifty man content with so little, in a week
His pockets were empty. He’d stay awake all night
Till dawn, then snore all day. Never lived so inconsistent
A creature. ‘Well,’ someone might say, ‘and what about you?
Have you no faults?’ Yes, others, but different and lesser
Perhaps. When Maenius once savaged absent Novius
Someone said: ‘Look at yourself, or do you think to pretend
We can’t see you too?’ He answered: ‘Oh, myself I pardon.’
Such stupid and shameless self-love deserves to be censured.
When we consider our own faults, we accidentally blind
Our eyes with a smear of ointment, but viewing our friends’
We’re as keen-eyed as eagles or Epidaurian snakes.
The result is that they gaze just as keenly at ours.
That man’s a bit hot-tempered, not acceptable
To today’s sensitive folks: another makes you smile
With his rustic haircut, his sloppy toga, loose sandals
That barely stay on his feet: and yet he’s a good man,
None better, and your friend, and great gifts lie hidden
Beneath that form. In short, give yourself a good shaking
And consider whether it’s nature or perhaps a bad habit
That long ago sowed the seeds of wickedness in you:
For the bracken we burn springs up in neglected fields.
Think of the case of a lover in all his blindness
Who fails to see his darling’s ugly blemishes,
Or is even charmed, like Balbinus with Hagne’s mole.
I wished we erred in the same way with our friends,
And morality gave such errors a decent name.
We should behave to a friend as father to son
And not be disgusted by some fault. If a boy squints
His father names him Paetus: Pullus if he’s puny
Like that dwarf who used to exist called Sisyphus:
Varus if he has crooked legs: or if he can barely stand
On twisted ankles gives him the cognomen Scaurus.
Well then let’s call a friend who’s mean, ‘thrifty’. Another
Who’s tactless and boasts a bit: he just wants his friends
To think him ‘sociable’. or perhaps the man’s more fierce
And outspoken: let’s have it he’s ‘frank’ and fearless.
He’s a hothead? We’ll just count him one of the ‘eager’.
This it is that unites friends, and then keeps them united.
We turn virtues themselves upside down in our desire
To foul a spotless jar: the decent man who lives here
Among us, who’s an utterly humble soul, we call him
Slow-witted, thick-headed. Another who flees all deceit
And who never offers a single loophole to malice,
Though we live among the kind of people, where Envy
Is keen and accusations flourish: instead of noting his
Common sense and caution, we call him false and sly.
Of one who’s unsophisticated, as I’ve often shown
Myself to be with you, Maecenas, interrupting you
Perhaps, while reading or thinking, with tiresome chatter:
We say: ‘He quite lacks the social graces.’ Ah, how
Casually we enact these laws against ourselves!
No man alive is free of faults: the best of us is him
Who’s burdened with the least. If he desires my love,
My gentle friend must, in all fairness, weigh my virtues
With my faults, and incline to the more numerous,
Assuming that is my virtues are the more numerous.
And by that rule I’ll weigh him in the same scale.
If you really expect a friend not to be offended
By your boils, pardon him his warts: it’s only fair
That he forgives who asks forgiveness for his faults.
So, if the vice of anger, and all of the other faults
That cling to fools can’t be wholly excised, why then
Does Reason not employ her own weights and measures
And curb each offence with appropriate punishment?
If a man were to nail his slave to a cross for eating
Left-over fish and cold sauce from the dish he’d been told
To remove, sane men would call him madder than Labeo.
Well how much greater and more insane a fault is this:
When your friend has committed some slight offence,
That you’d be thought ungracious not to have pardoned,
You hate him savagely, and shun him as Ruso is shunned
By his debtor. When the unhappy Kalends come, if he can’t,
Poor wretch, rustle up principal or interest from somewhere,
He has to expose his throat, and listen to those sad Histories!
So what if a drunken friend drenches the couch, or even
Knocks a bowl that must have been touched by Evander’s
Own fingers from the table: should he be less of a friend
In my eyes, even though he may have reached for the bird
On my side of the dish? What would I do then if he should
Commit a theft, betray a trust, or even disown his word?
The Stoics who think all sins are much of a much-ness
Struggle in face of reality: all tradition and feeling rebel
And Expediency too, mother almost of fairness and justice.
When the first living creatures crawled on primeval Earth,
Mute, formless beasts, they fought for their food and shelter
With claws and fists, and then with sticks, and so on up
Fighting with the weapons that experience had forged,
Until they found words, to give meaning to feelings
And cries, and then names. They began to shun war,
They started to lay out towns and to lay down laws,
By which no man might be thief, brigand, or adulterer.
Even before Helen’s day cunts were a dire cause for battle,
But those who snatched promiscuous love like beasts
And were killed like a bull in the herd by a stronger bull,
Died an unsung death. If you want to study the record
Of those past ages of the world, you’ll be forced to accept
That justice was created out of the fear of injustice.
Nature doesn’t, can’t, distinguish between right and wrong,
As she does between sweet and sour, attractive and hostile:
And Reason can never show it’s the same offence
To cull fresh cabbages out of a neighbour’s garden
As to steal the god’s sacred emblems by night: let’s have
Rules, to lay down a fair punishment for every crime,
Lest we flay with the terrible whip what merits the strap.
There’s little fear of your punishing with the cane
One who deserves worse, given you’d say that theft
Is as bad as highway robbery, and use the same hook
To prune all crime great or small, if only men gave you
Royal powers. If as the Stoics say the wise man’s rich,
Uniquely handsome, a brilliant cobbler, a king for sure,
Why do you need to be given what you already have?
‘That’s not what Chrysippus meant’, they cry, ‘without making
Sandals or shoes the wise man is still a fine cobbler.’ What?
‘Just as a silent Hermogenes is still the best singer
And player: and clever Alfenus when he’d thrown away
All the tools of his trade and closed up his shop, was
A barber still, so the wise man alone’s the master
Of every role, and so a king.’ O mightiest king
Of mighty kings, mischievous lads pluck at your beard:
And unless you drive them away with your staff, the crowd
All round you jostle, while you poor wretch fume and snarl!
To be brief, while you, a king, go to your public bath
Without a single attendant to keep you company
But stupid Crispinus, my sweet friends will forgive me
If I, a fool, commit some crime, and I’ll tolerate
Gladly in turn all their shortcomings, and I’ll live,
More happily than your majesty, a private man.

Notes