SATIRE V

Juvenal

HOW CLIENTS ARE ENTERTAINED

   If you are still unashamed of your plan of life, and
still deem it to be the highest good to live off another
man's table--if you can permit indignities which
neither Sarmentus nor the despicable Gabba ⁵ would
have endured at Caesar's ill-assorted table--I would
refuse to believe your testimony, even upon oath. I
know of nothing so easily satisfied as the belly; but
even granted that you have nothing with which to

⁵ Sarmentus and Gabba are representatives of the lowest
parasite class.

fill its emptiness, is there no sidewalk vacant, no bridge?
Can you find no share in a beggar's mat to stand
upon? Is a dinner worth all the insults with which
you have to pay for it? Is your hunger so im-
portunate, when it might, with greater dignity, be
shivering along with you, and munching dirty scraps
of dog's bread?
    First of all be sure of this; that when invited to
dinner, you are receiving payment in full for all your
past services. A meal is the return which your grand
friendship yields you; the great man counts it against
you, and though it comes but seldom, he counts it
against you all the same. So if after a couple of
months it is his pleasure to invite his forgotten
client, lest the third place on the lowest couch¹
should be unoccupied, and he says to you, "Come
and dine with me," you are in seventh heaven!
what more can you desire? Now at last Trebius ²
has gotten the reward for which he cuts short
his sleep, and hurries with shoe-strings untied, fearing
that the whole crowd of callers may already have
gone their rounds, at an hour when the stars are
fading or when the chilly wain of Bootes is wheeling
slowly round.
    And what a dinner after all ! You are given wine
that fresh-clipped wool would refuse to suck up,³ and
which soon converts your revellers into maniacs.
Foul words are the prelude to the fray; but before
long tankards will be flying about; a battle royal
with Saguntine crockery will soon be raging between
you and the company of freedmen, and you will be
staunching your wounds with a blood-stained napkin.

¹ i.e. the least honorable place on the least honorable of
the three couches of the triclinium .
² The name of the client whom he is addressing.
³ i.e. the wine was not good enough to be used even for
fomentations [for the treatment of wounds].

The great man himself drinks wine bottled in the
days when Consuls wore long hair; the juice which
he holds in his hand was squeezed during the Social
Wars,^l but never a glass of it will he send to a friend
suffering from heartburn! Tomorrow he will drink
a vintage from the hills of Alba or Setia whose home-
land and date have been effaced by the plentiful soot
which time has gathered upon the aged jar--such
wine as Thrasea ² and Helvidius ² used to drink with
garlands upon their heads on the birthdays of Cassius
and the Bruti.
    The cup in Virro's ³ hands is richly encrusted with
amber and rough with beryl: to you no gold is en-
trusted; or if it is, a watcher is posted over it to
count the gems and keep an eye on your sharp
finger-nails. Pardon his anxiety; that fine jasper of
his is much admired ! For Virro, like so many others,
transfers from his fingers to his cups the jewels which
the youth,⁴ preferred to the jealous Iarbas, used to
adorn the front of his scabbard with. You will drain
a cup with four nozzles that takes its name from a
Beneventine cobbler,⁵ and now battered and broken
demands sulphur to repair its glass.
    If my lord's stomach is fevered with food and
wine, a decoction colder than Thracian hoar-frosts
will be brought to him. Did I complain just now that
you were given a different wine? Why, the water
which you clients drink is not the same. Cups will be
handed to you by a Gaetulian groom, or by the bony
hand of a blackamoor whom you would rather not
meet at midnight when driving past the monuments
on the hilly Latin Way. Before my host stands the

¹ The Social Wars, after which the Italians gained the
Roman franchise, were fought between B.C. 91 and 88.
² Two famous stoics whose outspoken freedom cost them
their lives under Nero and Vespasian respectively.
³ The patron who gives the dinner.
⁴ Aeneas. Aen. iv. 36.
⁵ Vatinius, a man with a long nose.

very flower of Asia, a youth bought for a sum bigger
than the entire fortune of the warlike Tullus or Ancus,
more valuable, in short, than all the pitiful goods of
all the kings of [early] Rome. That being so, when
you are thirsty look to your swarthy Ganymede. The
page who has cost so many thousands cannot mix a
drink for a poor man: but then his beauty, his
youth, justify his disdain! When will he get as far
as you?   When does he listen to your request for
water, hot or cold? It is beneath him to attend to
an old dependent; he is indignant that you should
ask for anything, and that you should be seated
while he stands. All your great houses are full of
impudent slaves. See with what a grumble another of
them has handed you a bit of hard bread that you
can barely break in two, or bits of solid dough that
have turned moldy--stuff that will exercise your
molars and into which no tooth can gain admit-
tance. For Virro himself a delicate loaf is reserved,
white as snow, and kneaded of the finest flour. Be
sure to keep your hands off it: take no liberties with
the bread-basket! If you are presumptuous enough,
poor wretch, to take a piece, there will be someone
to bid you put it down: "What, Sir Impudence? Will
you please fill yourself from your proper tray, and
learn the color of your own bread?" "What?" you
ask, "was it for this that I have so often left my wife's
side in the morning and hurried up the high, freezing
slope of the Esquiline, while Jupiter sent down a
pitiless spring hail, and the rain that was pouring in
streams off my cloak?"
    Behold that huge lobster being carried to my
lord, all garnished with asparagus; see how his long
breast stands out from the dish; and with what a tail
he looks down upon the company, borne aloft in the
hands of that tall attendant! Before you is placed
on a tiny plate a shrimp hemmed in by half an egg--a
banquet fit for the dead.   The host souses his fish in
Venafran oil; the sickly greens offered to you, poor
devil, will smell like they had oil on them meant for
a lamp; for the stuff presented to your platters was
brought up the Tiber in a sharp-prowed Numidian
canoe--stuff which prevents anyone at Rome sharing
a bath with the [African] Bocchar, and which will
even protect you from a black serpent's bite.
    My lord will have a mullet dispatched from
Corsica or the rocks of Tauromenium:^l for in the
rage for gluttony our own seas have given out; the
nets of the fish-market are forever raking our home
waters, and prevent Tyrrhenian fish from attaining
their full size. And so the Provinces supply our
kitchens; from the Provinces come the fish for the
legacy-hunter Laenas to buy, and for Aurelia to
send to market.²
    Virro is served with a lamprey, the finest that
the Straits of Sicily can provide; for so long as the
South wind stays at home, and sits in his prison- house
drying his drenched wings, the middle of Charybdis
has no terrors for the daring fish-nets. For you is
reserved an eel, first cousin to a water-snake, or per-
chance a pike mottled with ice-spots; he too was bred ^T
on Tiber's banks and was wont to find his way into the
inmost recesses of the Subura, fattening himself amid
its flowing sewers.
    And now one word with the great man himself,
if he will lend his ear. "No one asks of you such

¹ Today Taormina, on the E. coast of Sicily.
² Juvenal and other writers are full of allusions to
captatores, legacy-hunters, who showered presents of all
kinds upon rich and childless old men or women.   Aurelia
sells the fish she has received as a present from Laenas.

lordly gifts as Seneca, or the good Piso or Cotta,
used to send to their humble friends: for in the days
of old, the glory of giving was deemed grander than
titles or fasces. All we ask of you is that you dine
dine with us as a fellow-citizen: ¹ do this and then
remain, like so many others nowadays, rich for your-
self and poor to your friends."
    Before Virro is put a huge goose's liver; a
fattened fowl as big as a goose, and a boar, piping hot,
worthy of yellow-haired Meleager's ² steel. Then
will come truffles, if it is spring-time and the longed-
for thunder has sufficiently grown the would-be dish.³ ^T
"Keep your corn to yourself, O Libya!" says Aliedius;
"unyoke your oxen, if only you send us truffles!"
    During all this time, lest any occasion for disgust
should be wanting, you may behold the carver caper-
ing and gesticulating with knife in air, and carrying
out all the instructions of his teacher: for it makes
a mighty difference with what gestures a hare or a
hen be carved! If you ever dare to utter one word as
though you were possessed of three names,⁴ you will
be dragged by the heels and thrust out of doors as
Cacus was, after the drubbing he got from Hercules.
When will Virro offer up a drink to you? or
take a cup that has been polluted by your lips!
Which one of you would be so foolhardy, so lost to
shame, as to say to your patron "A glass with you,
Sir"? No, no: there's many a thing which a man
whose coat has holes in it cannot say! But if some
God, or god-like being more kindly than the fates,
should present you with four hundred thousand

¹ The word civiliter , from which our word "civil" comes,
meant "as a citizen and an equal."
² The Aetolian hero who slew the Calydonian boar.
³ Thunder was supposed to be favorable to the growth of
truffles.
⁴ i.e. as if you were a free-born Roman with the three
necessary names--the praenomen , the nomen , and the cog-
nomen.

sesterces,¹ then what a somebody from a nobody
you would become; how dear a friend to Virro!
"Help Trebius to this! " "Let Trebius have some
of that!" "Would you like a cut right from the
loin, good brother! "O money, money! It is to
you that he pays this honor, it is you that are his
brother! Nevertheless, if you wish to be an impor-
tant man, and even an important man's lord, let there
be no little Aeneas playing about your halls, nor yet
a little daughter, more sweet than he; nothing will so
endear you to your friend as a barren wife.² But as
things now are, and though your [wife] Mycale present
you with triplet boys, still Virro will be charmed with
the chattering brood, and will order little green jackets
to be given them, and little nuts, and pennies too if they
be asked for, when the little parasites present themselves
at his table.
    Before his insignificant friends will be placed toad-
stools of doubtful quality, before my lord a noble
mushroom, like the ones Claudius ate before that
mushroom of his wife's,³ after which he ate nothing
more. To himself and the rest of the Virros he will
order fruits to be served whose scent alone would be
a feast--fruits such as grew in the perpetual Autumn
of the Phaeacians, and which you might believe to
have been swiped from the African sisters;⁴ you are
treated to a rotten apple like those gnawed on the
ramparts by a monkey equipped with shield and
helmet who learns, in terror of the whip, to hurl a
javelin from the back of a shaggy goat.
    You may perhaps suppose that Virro grudges
the expense; not a bit of it ! His object is to give
you pain. For what comedy, what mime, is so
amusing as a disappointed belly? His one object,

¹ i.e. the fortune of the eques . The fortune [property qualification]
required of a knight (the census equestris ) was 400,000 sesterces.
² It was the childless that were courted for their money.
³ Agrippina the younger. She poisoned her husband, the
emperor, with a mushroom.
⁴ The Hesperides [golden apples guarded by them were stolen
    by Hercules as one of his labors].

let me tell you, is to compel you to pour out your
anger in tears, and to keep you clenching and grinding
your teeth all day. You see yourself as a free man,
and guest of a grandee; he thinks--and he is not far
wrong--that you have been captured by the savoury
odors of his kitchen. For who that had ever worn the
Etruscan bulla^l in his boyhood,--or even the poor
man's leather badge--could tolerate such a patron
for a second time, however destitute he might
be? It is the hope of a good dinner that beguiles
you: "Surely he will give us," you say, "what is left
of a hare, or some scraps of a boar's haunch; the
remains of a fattened fowl will come our way by and
by." And so you all sit in dumb silence, your bread
clutched, untasted, and ready for action. In treating
you thus, the great man shows his wisdom. If you
can endure such things, you deserve them; some
day you will be offering your head to be shaved and
slapped: nor will you flinch from a stroke of the
whip, well worthy of such a feast and such a friend.

¹ The golden bulla, enclosing a charm, was the sign of free
birth (ingenuitas ) [from freeborn parents; the leather "badge"
a sign of being freeborn from a freedman (Rudd)].

^T bred : the Latin reads "vernula riparum," a "slave" or "domestic slave of the bank." Some kind of comparison between the fish and the client is obviously going on; perhaps both are home bred products, enslaved by social/environmental circumstances, and forced to feed off garbage in order to work themselves further ahead. There is perhaps more implication from exactly what they feed on, but such speculation gets into obscenity so I will pass on it.

^T dish : I cannot justify the translation given by the Latin but made the alteration anyway for purposes of giving meaning; Ramsay has it: "the longed-for thunder has enlarged our dinners."

wain of Bootes : The "farm-wagon" of the "Herdsman" or "Ox-Driver" - a constellation. It circles slowly due to its location above the North Pole.

maniacs : actually "Corybants" who were priests of Cybele and behaved in wild fashion.

Saguntine : Saguntum, Spain: known for its pottery.

Setia :

"Now Sezza or Sesse; an ancient town of Latium in the east of the Pomtine Marshes. It was celebrated for the excellent wine grown in its neighbourhood, which was reckoned in the time of Augustus the finest wine in Italy ( Mart.x. 36; Juv.x. 27), and was called vinum Setinum. See Vinum ." Peck.

Gaetulia :

"(Gaitoulia). The interior of Northern Africa , south of Mauretania , Numidia , and the region bordering on the Syrtes , reaching to the Atlantic Ocean on the west, and of very indefinite extent towards the east and south. The pure Gaetuli were not an Aethiopic (i. e. Negro ), but a Libyan race, and were most probably the ancestors of the Berbers ( Ritter , Erdkunde, i. pp. 1034 foll.). Cossus Lentulus brought the Gaetulians under Roman rule, receiving for this a triumph and the surname Gaetulicus." Peck

Ganymede : "The son of Tros, king of Dardania, brother of Ilus and Assaracus. According to Homer he was carried away by the gods for his beauty, to be the cup-bearer of Zeus, and one of the immortals. In the later legend he is carried away by Zeus himself in the shape of an eagle, or by the eagle of Zeus. To make amends to his father, Zeus presented him with four immortal horses for his chariot. Ganymedes was afterwards regarded as the genius of the sources of the Nile, and the astronomers made him into the constellation Aquarius." Peck

sulphur : "It remains to explain the use of ramenta sulpurata, i.e. chips of wood smeared with sulphur (Mart. x. 3). ... The effect of sulphur to make a fire spread quickly is noticed by Juv. xiii. 145. ... These sulpurata ramenta were provided by vendors of sulphur, who drove a double trade, joining broken glass with sulphur, hence called gregale sulpur (Stat. Silv. i. 6, 73; cf. Plin. xxxvi. § 199), and also selling the sulphur matches, or exchanging them for broken glass, which would be sold again when they had mended it with their sulphur. Martial's sulpurata merx (xii. 57) may include mended glass as well as matches, but the pallentia sulpurata (i. 41) are certainly the vellow sulpurata ramenta of x. 3, and not, as Mr. Simcox (on Juv. v. 48) supposes, the glassware mended with and discoloured by sulphur."
Smith, Wayte

Vatinius :"VATINIUS, of Beneventum, was one of the vilest and most hateful creatures of Nero's court, equally deformed in body and in mind. He was originally a shoemaker's apprentice, next earned his living as one of the lowest kinds of scurrae or buffoons, and finally obtained great power and wealth by accusing the most distinguished men in the state. Dion Cassius relates a saying of his which pleased Nero exceedingly. Well knowing the emperor's detestation of the senate, he said to him on one occasion, " I hate you, Caesar, because you are a senator." (Tac. Ann. xv. 34, Dial. de Orat. 11, Hist. i. 37; Dion Cass. lxiii. 15.) A certain kind of drinking-cups, having nasi or nozzles, bore the name of Vatinius, probably because he brought them into fashion. Juvenal alludes to a cup of this kind in the lines (v. 46, foil.) : --

" Tu Beneventani sutoris nomen habentem
Siccabis calicem nasorum quatuor," &c.,

and Martial also in the Epigram (xiv. 96) : --

" Vilia sutoris calicem monumenta Vatini
Accipe; sed nasus longior ille fuit." " Smith

Esquiline : one of the seven hills of Rome and the high rent district.

Tyrrhenian : from the Etruscan or Tuscan Sea "between Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily" Braund

Charybdis : "Charybdis was once a nymph-daughter of Poseidon and Gaia who flooded lands for her father's underwater kingdom until Zeus turned her into a monster and have her suck in and out water three times an day. She lived in a cave at one side of the Strait of Messina, opposite the monster Scylla , the two of them forming a dangerous threat to passing ships." http://www.pantheon.org/articles/c/charybdis.html

Subura : District in Rome known for prostitution and other immoral behavior.

fasces : "The Latin name for a bundle of rods, tied together by a red strap, and enclosing an axe, with its head outside. The fasces were originally the emblem of the king's absolute authority over life and limb, and as such passed over to the high magistrates of the Republic.... Peck

Cacus [Aenead, bk viii, ln. 193-270]

"In Italian mythology, a fire-spitting giant, the son of Vulcan, who lived near the place where Rome was afterwards built. When Hercules came into the neighbourhood with the cattle of Geryon, Cacus stole some of them while the hero was sleeping and dragged them backwards into his cave under a spur of the Aventine, so that their footprints gave no clue to the direction in which they had gone. He then closed the entrance to the cave with a rock, which ten pairs of oxen were unable to move. But the lowing of the cattle guided the hero, in his search, to the right track. He tore open the cave, and, after a fearful struggle, slew Cacus with his club (Ovid , Fast.i. 543 foll). Upon this he built an altar on the spot to Iupiter, under the title of Pater Inventor, “the discoverer,” and sacrificed one of the cattle upon it. The inhabitants paid him every honour for freeing them of the monster; and Evander , who had been instructed by his mother, Carmentis, in the lore of prophecy, saluted him as a god. Hercules is then said to have established his own religious service, and to have instructed two noble families, the Potitii and the Pinarii, in the usages to be observed at the sacrifice ( Livy, i. 7 ). This sacrifice was to be offered on the Ara Maxima, which he himself had built on the cattle-market ( Forum Boarium ) where the cattle had been pastured." Peck

perpetual Autumn of the Phaeacians : see Odyssey , Bk VII, 114-121. Fruit grew all year round.

Hesperides :

"( Hesperides ). “The Western Maidens,” three celebrated nymphs, whose genealogy is differently given by various writers. According to Hesiod (Theog. 215), they were the daughters of Night, without a father. Diodorus, on the other hand, makes them to have had for their parents Atlas and Hesperis , daughter of Hesperus (Diod. Sic.iv. 27 ), an account which is followed by Milton in his Comus (981). Others, however, to assimilate them to their neighbours the Graiae and Gorgons, call the Hesperides the offspring of Phorcys and Ceto. Apollonius gives their names as Aeglé , Hespera, and Erytheïs (iv. 1427); while Apollodorus, who increases the number to four, calls them Aeglé, Erythea, Hestia, and Arethusa (ii. 5, 11). Hesiod makes them to have dwelt “beyond the bright ocean,” opposite to where Atlas stood supporting the heavens (Theog. 518); and when Atlas had been fixed as a mountain in the extremity of Libya, the dwelling of the Hesperides was usually placed in his vicinity, though some set it in the country of the Hyperboreans ( Apollod.1. c.).

According to the legend, when the bridal of Zeus and Heré took place, the different deities came with nuptial presents for the latter, and among them the goddess of Earth, with branches having golden apples growing on them ( Poet. Astron. ii. 3). Heré, greatly admiring these, begged of Earth to plant them in her gardens, which extended as far as Mount Atlas. The Hesperides, or daughters of Atlas, were directed to watch these trees; but, as they were somewhat remiss in discharging this duty, and frequently plucked off the apples themselves, Heré sent thither a large serpent to guard the precious fruit. This monster was the offspring of Typhon and Echidna, and had a hundred heads, so that it never slept. According to Pisander, the name of the reptile was Ladon. One of the tasks imposed upon Heracles by Eurystheus was to bring him some of this golden fruit...." Peck

monkey : a monkey trained to imitate a warrior for entertainment purposes and who is rewarded with (rotten) food.

slapped : in the manner of a "professional buffoon". Green

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