SATIRE XV

Juvenal

AN EGYPTIAN ATROCITY

    WHO knows not, Bithynian Volusius, what mon-
sters demented Egypt worships? One district adores
the crocodile, another venerates the ibis that is gorged
with snakes; sacred is the glittering golden image of
the long-tailed ape, in the place where magic chords
are sounded by broken Memnon,⁴ and ancient hundred-
gated Thebes lies in ruins. There cats, here a river fish,
over there whole towns venerate a dog - no one Diana.
It is an impious outrage to crunch a leek and even an
onion with the teeth. What a holy people to have such
divinities springing up in their gardens! Wooly animals
are withheld from every dinner-table; it is a sin there to
slay the young of the goat; but it is lawful to feed on the
flesh of man! When Ulysses told a tale like this over the

⁴ The famous statue of Memnon at Thebes, which emitted
musical sounds at daybreak.

dinner-table to the amazed Alcinous,^l he stirred some to
wrath, some perhaps to laughter, as a lying story-teller.
"What?" one would say, "will no one hurl this fellow
into the sea, who is deserving of a horrible and genuine
Charybdis with his inventions of monstrous Laestry-
gones and Cyclopes? For I could sooner believe in
Scylla, and the clashing Cyanean rocks,² and skins
full of storms, or in the story how Circe, by a light
tap, turned Elpenor ³ and the oarsmen into grunt-
ing swine. Did he deem the Phaeacian people to
be so devoid of brains?" So might someone have
justly spoken who was not yet tipsy, and had taken
but a small drink of wine from the Corcyraean bowl,
for the Ithacan's tale was all his own, with none to
bear him witness.
    We are amazed indeed, but I will relate how deeds
were done of late in the consulship of Juncus,⁴ beyond
the walls of broiling Coptus; a crime of the common
herd, worse than any crime on the tragic stage; for a
crime, though you roll out all of the long robe of Tragedy
from the days of Pyrrha onwards, you will find none
committed by an entire people. But hear what an
example of awful savageness has been displayed in
these days of ours.
    Between the neighbouring towns of Ombi and
Tentyra ⁵ there burns an ancient and long-cherished
feud and undying hatred, whose wounds are not to
be healed. Each people is filled with fury against
the other because each hates its neighbours' Gods,
deeming that none can be held as deities save its

¹ King of the Phaeacians, to whom Ulysses narrated his
adventures.
² The clashing rocks (Greek) at the mouth of the
Bosporus.
³ One of the crew of Ulysses turned into a pig by Circe.
⁴ Aemilius Juncus was consul in A.D. 127. This fixes the
earliest date for this Satire.
⁵ Ombi and Tentyra (now Dendyra ), towns in Upper
Egypt.

own. So when one of these peoples held a feast,
the chiefs and leaders of their enemy thought good
to seize the occasion, so that their foe might not
enjoy a glad and merry day, with the delight of
grand banquets, with tables set out at every temple
and every crossway, and with night-long feasts, and
with couches spread all day and all night, and some-
times discovered by the sun upon the seventh morn.
Egypt, doubtless, is a barbarous country; but in indul-
gence, so far as I myself have noted, its barbarous
rabble yields not to the ill-famed Canopus.¹ Victory
too would be easy, it was thought, over men steeped
in wine, stammering and staggering. On the one side
were men dancing to a black piper, with perfumes,
such as they were, and flowers and chaplets on their
heads; on the other side, a ravenous hate. First come
loud words, as quarrels begin: these serve as a trumpet-
call to a brawl when feelings are hot; then shout answer-
ing shout, they charge. In the raging bare hands are
used in place of weapons. Scarce a cheek is left without
a wound; scarce one nose, if any, comes out of the battle
in one piece. Through all the ranks might be seen battered
faces, and features other than they were; bones gaping
through torn cheeks, and fists dripping with blood
from eyes. Yet the combatants deem themselves
at play and waging a boyish warfare because there
are no corpses on which to trample. What good is
a mob of so many thousand brawlers if no lives are
lost? So fiercer and fiercer grows the fight; they
now search the ground for stones--the natural
weapons of civic strife--and hurl them with bended
arms against the foe: not such stones as Turnus or
Ajax flung, or of such weight as the son of Tydeus ²

¹ A city in the Delta, near the W. mouth of the Nile [known
for its immorality].
² Diomedes.

struck Aeneas on the hip with, but such as may
be cast by hands unlike theirs, and born in our
times. For even in Homer's day the race of man
was on the wane; earth now produces none but
weak and wicked men that provokes whatever
God that sees them to laughter and to loathing.
    To come back from our digression: the one side,
after enlarged by reinforcements, boldly draws the
sword and renews the fight with showers of
arrows; the dwellers in the shady palm-groves of
neighbouring Tentyra turn their backs in headlong
flight before the Ombite charge. Hereupon one
of them, in too great of terror and hurrying,
tripped and was caught; the conquering host cut
up his body into a great number of bits and pieces,
so that one dead man might suffice for everyone,
and devoured it bones and all. There was no
stewing of it in boiling pots, no roasting upon spits;
so slow and tedious they thought it to wait for a
fire, that they contented themselves with the corpse
uncooked !
    One may here rejoice that no outrage was done
to the flame that Prometheus stole from the highest
heavens, and presented to the earth. I congratulate
the element [of fire], and doubt not that you are
pleased; but for those who put up with chewing that
carcase, never was flesh so eaten with such relish.
For in that act of gross wickedness, do not doubt
or ask whether it was only the first stomach that
enjoyed its meal; for when the whole body had
been consumed, those who stood furthest away
actually dragged their fingers along the ground
and so got some taste of the blood.
    The Vascones,¹ fame tells us, once prolonged
their lives by such food as this; but their case was

¹ A Spanish tribe N. of the Ebro; their chief town, Cala-
gurris, was reduced by Africanus in B.C. 72, after the fall of
Sertorius.

different. The dislike of fortune had brought on them
the last dire extremity of war, the famine of a long
siege. In a plight like that of the people just named,
resorting to such food deserves our pity, inasmuch
as not till they had consumed every herb, every animal,
and whatever else that the madness of an empty belly
drove them to--not till their very enemies pitied their
paleness, leanness, and wasted limbs--did hunger
make them tear the limbs of other men, being ready
to feed even upon their own. What man then, or
God if you will, would refuse to give a pardon to
bellies which had suffered such cruel and extreme
suffering, and which would have been forgiven by
the Manes of those whose bodies they were devouring?
To us, indeed, Zeno ¹ gives better teaching, for he
permits some things, though not indeed all things, to
be done for the saving of life; but how could a
Cantabrian ² be a Stoic, and that too in the days of
old Metellus? ³ Today the whole world has its Graeco-
Roman Athens; eloquent Gaul has trained the pleaders
of Britain, and distant Thule ⁴ talks of hiring a rhetorician.
Yet the people I have named were a noble people; and
the people of Zacynthos,⁵ their equals in bravery and
honour, their more than equals in calamity, offer a like
excuse. But Egypt is more savage than the Maeotid ⁶
altar (if we may hold the poet's tales are true,) the
Tauric foundress of that accursed rite only sacrifices,

¹ The founder of the Stoic school.
² The Vascones were not Cantabrians, who were more to
the W.
³ Q. Caecilius Metellus conducted the war against Ser-
torius, B.C. 79-72.
⁴ The most distant land or island to the N.; probably N.W.
Norway rather than Shetland or Iceland.
⁵ A poetic name for the Spanish town of Saguntum, sup-
posed to have been founded from Zacynthus; taken by
Hannibal B.C. 218.
⁶ The palus Maeotis was the sea of Azov: strangers were
there sacrificed on the altar of the Tauric ( i.e. Crimean)
Artemis.

they have nothing further or more terrible to fear than
to be victim to the knife. But what calamity drove
these Egyptians to the deed? What extremity of hunger,
what besieging army, compelled them to dare so
monstrous and detestable a crime? Were the land of
Memphis to run dry, could they do anything more in
hatred of the Nile for refusing to rise? No terrible
Cimbrians or Brittones, no savage Sarmatians or
monstrous Agathyrsians,¹ ever raged so furiously as
this unwarlike and worthless rabble that hoists tiny sails
on crockery ships, and plies puny oars on boats of
painted earthenware! No penalty can you devise for
such a crime, no fit punishment for a people in whose
minds hatred and hunger are equal and alike. When
Nature gave tears to man, she proclaimed that he was
tender-hearted; and tenderness is the best feeling in man.
She therefore bids us weep for a friend who pleads his
case as a defendant in squalor, or when a ward whose
streaming face and girlish locks raise a doubt as to his
sex brings a defrauder into court. It is at Nature's
command that we moan when we come across the
funeral of a mature maiden, or when the earth closes
over a babe too young for the funeral pyre. For what
good man, what man worthy of the mystic torch,²
and such as the priest of Ceres would wish him to
be, believes that any human woes concern him not?
It is this that divides us from the speechless herd;
and it is for this that we alone have had allotted to
us a nature worthy of reverence, capable of divine
things, fit to create and practise the arts, and that we
have drawn from on high that gift of feeling which
separates us from the lowly [beasts], who are lacking
and who lean forward with eyes on the ground. To

¹ An uncertain tribe, placed by Herodotus in Transyl-
vania.
² i.e. worthy of being initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.

them in the beginning of the world our common maker
gave only life; to us he gave souls as well, that fellow-
feeling might bid us ask or proffer aid, gather scattered
dwellers into a people, desert the primeval groves and
woods inhabited by our forefathers, build houses for
ourselves, with others adjacent to our own, that a
neighbour's threshold, from the confidence that comes
of union, might give us peaceful slumbers; shield with
arms a fallen citizen, or one staggering from a grievous
wound, give battle signals by a common trumpet, and
to be protected by the same towers, and gates fastened
by a single key.
    But in these days there is more amity among
serpents than among men; wild beasts are merciful
to beasts spotted like themselves. When did the
stronger lion ever take the life of the weaker? In
what wood did a boar ever breathe his last under
the tusks of a boar bigger than himself? The wild
tigress of India spends time with another tiger in
lasting peace; fierce bears live in harmony. But
man finds it all too little to have forged a deadly
blade on a wicked anvil; for whereas the first arti-
ficers only accustomed to be weary of forging rakes
and hoes, spades and ploughshares, not knowing
how to beat out swords, we now behold a people
whose wrath is not assuaged by slaying someone,
but who deem that a man's breast, arms, and face
afford a kind of food. What would Pythagoras say,
or to what place would he not flee, if he beheld these
horrors of today,--he who refrained from every
living creature as if it were human, and would not
indulge his belly with every kind of podded plant?

Volusius : the name of an unknown man he is addressing: it is not even sure if he is from Bythnia.

Charybdis : a sea-monster like Scylla from the Odyssey. All these things mentioned here are from that book.

Laestrygones : man-eating giants.

skins : Aeolus gave Ulysses an ox-hide sack containing the Winds.

Corcyraean : Green puts it that the wine is "powerful".

Pyrrha : i.e. From the beginning of the human race (after the Flood).

Manes : Spirits.

Sarmatians : People living by the Sea of Azov mentioned above (and in Satire II ).

squalor : Not from being poor you figure but from having been kept in jail.

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