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Juvenal

The Satires

Satire II – Effeminate Rome

Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2001 All Rights Reserved

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Contents

Satire II: Effeminate Rome

SatII:1-35 Put no Trust in Appearances

I’d like to flee this place, go far beyond the Sarmatians and icy

Ocean, while those who pretend to the Curii’s virtue, but live

Like Bacchanals, have the gall to preach to us of morality.

Lesson one: they’re ignorant, though their houses you’ll find

Filled with plaster busts of Chrysippus; for the most perfect

Is he who’s bought the most lifelike Aristotle, or Pittacus,

And ordered an antique Cleanthes to watch over his bookcase.

Put no trust in appearances; after all isn’t every street packed

With sad-looking perverts? How can you castigate sin, when you

Yourself are the most notorious of all the Socratic sodomite holes?

Though hairy members, and those stiff bristles all over your arms,

Promise a rough approach, your arse turns out to be smooth enough

When the smiling doctor lances away at your swollen piles.

Few words and a marked urge for silence is what they possess,

Hair cut shorter than their eyebrows. Peribomius the pathic’s

More open and honest than they; who admits his affliction

In his looks and his walk, all of which I attribute to fate.

The vulnerability of such is pitiful, and their passion itself

Deserves our forgiveness; far worse, are those who attack them

With Herculean rectitude, and waggle their bottoms while

Talking of virtue. ‘How can I respect you, Sextus, when I see

You wiggling your arse:’ cries notorious Varillus, ‘who’s better?’

The upright should scorn to limp, and white counter the black.

Where’s the sense in the Gracchi carping about revolution?

How could sky not be confounded with land, sea with sky,

Should Verrus the thief object to stealing, or Milo to murder,

Should Clodius condem adultery, Catiline his ally Cethegus,

Should Sulla’s Triumvirate, his disciples, jib at his death-list.

That’s how Domitian, that recent adulterer, behaved, defiled

By a fatal union, he who revived such bitter laws in his day,

To terrify everyone, even the deities, even Venus and Mars,

While Julia, his niece, ditched the contents of her ripe womb

With abortifacients, and shed lumps resembling her uncle.

Is it not just then and right, when the extremes of depravity

Sneer at every false Scaurus, and bite back when castigated?

SatII:36-63 Hypocritical Adulterers

Laronia, the adulteress, couldn’t abide that grim individual

Forever shouting: ‘Whose bed now, you breaker of Julian law?’

Grimacing she said: ‘O happy age, that set you on to carp at

Our morals. Let Rome be ashamed now, a third Cato falls

From  the sky! But just as a matter of interest where did you buy

The essence of balsam that wafts from your hairy neck?

Don’t hesitate to tell us who owns the shop it came from.

If it’s a matter of quoting neglected laws and statutes, cite

The Scantinian laws before all the rest, men and not women

Scrutinise first: they behave worse, but then they have safety

In numbers, united behind their phalanx of close-linked shields.

Great is the union of effeminates, nor will you find

So detestable an example set by any one of our sex.

Tedia never licks Cluvia, Flora is never all over Catulla,

But Hispo yields to young men and gets sick both ways.

We never plead cases, do we? Is it we who learn civil law?

When do we disturb your courts by making an uproar?

There aren’t many women wrestlers, girls on an athlete’s diet.

But you men tease the wool, and draw back the finished fleece

In its basket, you tweak the spindle pregnant with finest thread

More deftly than ever Penelope did, more cleverly than Arachne,

More than any dishevelled mistress does, as she sits on the chest.

Why Hister had made provision for his freedman alone in his will,

Is well-known, why he gifted his wife so much while he lived.

She who sleeps third in a bed will end up wealthy.

Marry, and be quiet: secrets garner cylinder-seals.

And after all that, do you dare sentence us as guilty?

Acquit the ravens, and bring censure on the doves?’

SatII:64-81 Hypocritical Aristocrats

As she uttered a manifest truth the quivering Stoics

Fled; was there any one thing Laronia said that was false?

But what should women do when you dress in muslin,

Creticus, while people stare at your clothes, as you rail

At Procula and Pellita? Let Fabulla be an adulteress,

Find even Carfinia guilty if you like: guilty as she is,

She won’t dress in a toga! ‘But it’s hot this July, I’m

Boiling.’ Then go naked: even madness is far less vile.

Behold what you wear, when citing laws and statutes,

To a victorious people, one with its wounds still raw,

Or mountain folk who are just come from the plough!

How you would protest if you caught a judge wearing

Such clothes! I doubt muslin’s decent even for witnesses.

You fierce indomitable champion of liberty, Creticus,

You’re so transparent. This stain is contagious and so

Will spread further, just as the whole herd of swine dies

In the field, because of the mange and scab on a single pig.

Just as a grape becomes tainted by touching another grape.

SatII:82-116 Those In the Closet

Some day you’ll dare something worse than that clothing;

No one’s wholly corrupted overnight. Little by little,

You’ll be received by those who, at home, in private, wear

Wide bands on their brow, necks all decked out in jewellery,

And placate the Good Goddess, like women, with a bowl of wine

And a young sow’s udder. But, in a change to the usual rule,

Women are challenged afar, and turned from the threshold,

The goddess’s altar open to men alone. ‘Hence, you profane ones,’

They cry, ‘no flute-playing girl with her mellow pipe here.’

Such secret rites were performed to torchlight, the Baptae

Accustomed to tiring the goddess, Cecropian Cotyto.

One man has blackened his eyebrows, moistened with soot,

Extends them with slanting pencil, and flutters his eyelids,

While applying the make-up; another drinks from a phallus-

Shaped glass, his bouffant hair filling a gilded hair-net,

Dressed in a chequered blue or a yellow-green satin,

While the master’s servant swears by the feminine Juno.

One holds a mirror, the pathic Otho’s constant companion,

‘The spoils of Auruncian Actor’ (Virgil), in which he used

To admire himself armed, as he issued the order for battle.

It’s worth noting in modern annals, and current histories:

A mirror was essential equipment to raise civil war.

It’s the mark of a supreme general, of course, to kill Galba

While powdering your nose, the maximum self-possession

Shown on Bebriacum’s field, to aspire to the Palatine throne

While your fingers plaster your face with a mask of dough,

What not even Semiramis, the archer, in her Assyrian city,

Tried, nor Cleopatra, in grief, in her flagship, at Actium.

Here there’s no shame in their language, or reverence at table,

Here is Cybele’s foulness, the freedom to speak in a woman’s

Voice, and an old fanatical white-haired man who’s the priest

Of the rites, a rare and memorable example, an enormous

Throat, a gluttonous specimen, an expert well worth his hire.

Why are they waiting? Isn’t it time already to use their knives,

To carve their superfluous flesh in the Phrygian manner?

SatII:117-148 And Those Out of It

Gracchus has given a dowry of four thousand gold pieces

For a horn-player, or one perhaps who plays the straight pipe;

The contract’s witnessed, ‘felicitations!’, a whole crowd

Asked to the feast, the ‘bride’ reclines in the husband’s lap.

O, you princes, is it a censor we need, or a prophet of doom?

Would you find it more terrible, think it more monstrous

Truly, if a woman gave birth to a calf, or a cow to a lamb?

He’s wearing brocade, the long full dress, and the veil,

He who bore the sacred objects tied to the mystic thong,

Sweating under the weight of shields. O, Romulus, Father

Of Rome, why has this evil touched the shepherds of Latium?

Where is it from, this sting that hurts your descendants, Mars?

Can you see a man noted for birth, wealth, wed to another man,

And your spear not beat the ground, your helmet stay firm,

And no complaint to the Father? Away then, forsake the stern

Campus’s acres, you neglect now. ‘I’ve a ceremony to attend

At dawn, tomorrow, down in the vale of Quirinus.’ ‘Why’s that?’

‘Why? Oh, a friend of mine’s marrying a male lover of his:

He’s asked a few guests.’ Live a while, and we’ll see it happen,

They’ll do it openly, want it reported as news in the daily gazette.

Meanwhile there’s one huge fact that torments these brides,

That they can’t give birth, and by that hang on to their husbands.

But it’s better that Nature grants their minds little power over

Their bodies: barren, they die; with her secret medicine chest,

Swollen Lyde’s no use, nor a blow from the agile Luperci.

Yet Gracchus beats even this outrage, in tunic, with trident,

A gladiator, circling the sand, as he flits about the arena:

He’s nobler in birth than the Marcelli, or the Capitolini,

Than the scions of Catulus and Paulus, or the Fabii,

Than all the front-row spectators, including Himself,

The one who staged that show with the nets and tridents.

SatII:149-170 Rome’s a Disgrace!

That ghosts exist at all, or the realms of the Underworld,

Cocytus, and the whirl of black frogs in the Styx,

Or all those thousands crossing the flood in one boat,

Not even children believe, unless wet behind the ears.

But suppose it were true: what would the shade of Curius feel,

What of the shades of the Scipios, of Fabricius or Camillus?

What of the legion at Cremera, the young men ruined at Cannae,

The dead of all those wars, what would they feel when a ghost

Descended from here? They’d desire purification, if they had

There, the sulphur, the flaming torches, and the moist laurel.

Down there, alas, we’d be paraded in shame. We may have

Sent troops beyond Ireland’s shores, and recently captured

The Orkneys, beaten the Britons familiar with midnight suns,

But the nations we’ve defeated don’t get up to what people

Get up to now, in victorious Rome. ‘Yet nevertheless one

Zalaces, they say, an Armenian lad, more effeminate than all

The rest of the boys, gave himself to a passionate tribune.’

Look what foreign trade yields: he came here as a hostage,

We make them men of the world, if such boys stay longer

Adopting Roman ways, they’ll never lack lovers, doffing

Their breeches, and little knives, their bridles and whips.

Those are the teenage ways they’ll take home to Armenia.

End of Satire II