Juvenal, Satire 15 Translated by John Delaware Lewis (1882) Formatted by C. Chinn (2008) WHO does not know, Volusius of Bithynia, what kinds of monsters demented Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile, another quakes before the ibis gorged with serpents. The golden image of a sacred long-tailed ape glitters 5 where the magic chords resound from mutilated Memnon, and ancient Thebes lies in ruin with her hundred gates. There whole towns venerate cats, here a river-fish, there a dog, but no one Diana. It is impiety to violate and break with the teeth the leek and the onion. 10 O holy races, to whom such deities as these are born in their gardens! Every table abstains from woolly animals; it is impiety there to cut the throat of a young kid; it is lawful to feed on human flesh. When narrating such a misdeed as this to the amazed Alcinous over their supper, 15 Ulysses had not improbably excited the anger or the laughter of some of the guests as a lying babbler. "Will no one pitch into the sea this fellow, who deserves a cruel Charybdis and a real one, with his fictions of huge Laestrygones and Cyclopes? For I would sooner believe in Scylla or the Cyanean rocks 20 clashing together, or the bladders full of stormy winds, or that Elpenor was struck with a light blow of Circe, and grunted in company with the crew turned into hogs. Did he suppose the Phaecian people to be so void of brains?" So some one may have spoken with reason who was not yet drunk, 25 who had quaffed but very little wine from the Corcyraean bowl. For the Ithacan was singing this alone, with no witness to corroborate him. We shall recount things, marvelous it is true, but which were only lately enacted in the consulship of Junius, above the walls of sultry Coptos; we shall recount the crime of a whole populace, and things surpassing in gravity 30 all tragedies. For though you turn over all tragic themes from the time of Pyrrha, nowhere in the poets does a whole people commit a crime. Hear what a sample dread barbarism has produced in our own age. A long-standing and ancient grudge, an undying hatred, and a wound that can never be healed, still rages between 35 two neighbors, Omhi and Tentyra. On both sides there is the utmost fury on the part of the vulgar, from this cause, that each locality hates its neighbor's deities, since it thinks those alone should be accounted gods whom it worships itself. At any rate, at a festival of one nation, the occasion seemed to all the enemy's 40 chiefs and leaders one to be seized, in order to prevent their enjoying a happy and merry day, when the tables are placed before the temples and in the crossways, as also the couch that knows no sleep, which lying there night and day, the seventh sun sometimes finds. Egypt is 45 savage, to be sure; yet, in luxuriousness, as far as I myself have remarked, the barbarous crowd does not yield to the notorious Canopus. Add that victory is easy even, over those who are drunk and stuttering and reeling with wine. On one side there were men dancing to a black piper; perfumes, such as they were, 50 and flowers and chaplets in plenty on their brows; on the other, hatred with an empty stomach. However, the first altercations begin to resound with souls all on fire; this is the trumpet of the fray. Then, with a like clamor, they charge each other, and in place of a weapon rages the naked hand. There are few cheeks without a wound ; 55 scarce any, or none, in the whole fight has a nose intact. You might see already, through all the ranks, mutilated countenances, faces that were no longer the same, bones gaping through the divided cheeks, fists covered with blood from the eyes. Yet they themselves think they are at play and engaged in 60 a child's fight, because they are trampling on no dead bodies; and, to be sure, to what purpose a fighting crowd of so many thousands, if every one is to remain alive? So the onslaught grows sharper, and now they begin to hurl stones, which they have picked up with arms bent along the ground, the familiar weapons of sedition; 65 no such stone, indeed, as those which Turnus and Ajax hurled, or of the weight of that with which Tydides struck Aeneas on the hip, but such as right hands, unlike theirs, and produced in our time, have strength to project; for that race was already degenerating in the days of Homer. 70 The earth nowadays nurtures wicked and puny men, so whatever god has seen them, laughs at and despises them. From this digression let us go back to our story. After being strengthened by reinforcements, one side ventures to draw the sword, and renew the fight with deadly arrows; 75 those who inhabit Tentyra, neighboring on the shady palm-trees, press on their opponents, all showing their backs in rapid flight. On this side one who through excessive fear was precipitating his pace, falls, and is captured; whereupon the victorious crowd, after he had been cut into a great number of morsels and small portions, that one 80 dead man might suffice for many, eats up the whole of him and gnaws his very bones; they did not even cook him in the seething caldron or on a spit, so very long and tedious did they deem it to wait for a fire, contented as they were with the raw carcass. At this point we may rejoice that they did not desecrate the fire, 85 which Prometheus stole from highest heaven and gave to earth. I congratulate the element, and I imagine you are rejoiced. However, he who can bring himself to taste a corpse never eats anything with more pleasure than this kind of flesh; for in the matter of a crime so great, do not ask or doubt whether 90 the first palate only experienced pleasure. Why, the very last of them who came up after the entire body had been consumed, drew his fingers along the ground, and tasted some of the blood. The Vascones—so the story is—in days of yore protracted their lives by such nutriment as this; but the case was different; but there 95 you have the malice of Fortune, and the extremities of war, the climax of adversity, the dreadful destitution of a long siege. For the instance we are now mentioning of such food ought to excite pity, inasmuch as the people I have just named, after every kind of herbage, after all their animals, and whatever 100 the fury of their empty bellies drove them to, had been eaten, when their very enemies were pitying their pallor and emaciation and wasted frames, tore in pieces, through famine, the limbs of others, prepared to eat even their own. What man or what god could refuse his pardon to strong men who had endured such dreadful and monstrous things, 105 and whom the very manes of those on whose bodies they were feeding might have forgiven? The precepts of Zeno teach us better; he thinks, not, indeed, that all things, but some only, may be done for the sake of life. Yet how should the Cantabrian be a Stoic, especially in the age of old Metellus? 110 Now the whole world has the Greek Athens and our own. Eloquent Gaul has instructed the British lawyer; already Thule speaks of engaging a teacher of rhetoric. Yet that noble people we have named, and Saguntum their equal in courage and fidelity, their more than equal in calamity, have an excuse 115 to offer for a deed of this kind. Egypt is more cruel than the altar of Maeotis; since that Tauric inventress of the abominable rite (if, at least, you believe what the poems tell us to be worthy of faith) only immolates, the victim has nothing further or worse to fear than the knife. What mischance even 120 impelled these men? What hunger so great, or arms threatening their ramparts, compelled them to dare so detestable a monstrosity ? Could they, if the land of Memphis had been dry, have offered a greater insult to the Nile for refusing to rise? Never have even the terrible Cimbri, nor the Britons, 125 nor the savage Sarmatians, nor the monstrous Agathyrsi raged with such fury as this effeminate and useless rabble, accustomed to set their little bits of sails in their boats of clay, and to bend over the short oars of their painted shells. You can neither find a penalty for such guilt, 130 nor provide a punishment worthy of these tribes in whose minds anger and hunger are on a par, and alike in their results. Nature confesses that she gives the tenderest of hearts to the human race, by giving them tears: this is the best part of our sensations. She bids us then weep over the misfortune of our sorrowing friend, 135 the squalid appearance of one accused, the ward summoning his despoiler to justice, whose girlish locks render uncertain the sex of the face bedewed with tears. At nature's bidding we sigh when the funeral of an adult virgin meets us, or an infant, too young for the fire of the pile, 140 is buried in the earth. For what good man worthy of the mystic torch, such an one as the priest of Ceres would have him to be, can deem any misfortunes to be foreign to himself? This it is that separates us from the herd of dumb creatures, and on that account we alone have had allotted to us a reverential spirit, are capable of containing divine things, 145 and, fitted for practicing and apprehending the arts, have received, transmitted to us from the heights of heaven, a moral sense, which animals bending downwards, and looking to the earth, are wanting in. In the beginning of the world the common Creator allowed them life only, to us a soul as well, that our mutual regard might 150 bid us seek aid and afford it, draw the scattered ones into a community, migrate from the ancient grove, leave the woods inhabited by our forefathers, build houses, join on to our Lares another habitation, that united confidence might give us slumbers 155 secured by a neighbor's threshold, protect with arms a citizen who has fallen or is staggering under a severe wound, sound our war-signals on a common trumpet, be defended by the same towers, be enclosed by one key for our gates. But now there is greater concord among serpents; a wild beast 160 of like kind spares his kindred spots. When did a stronger lion deprive of his life another lion? In what forest did a boar ever expire by the teeth of a larger boar? The Indian tigress lives with each rabid tigress in perpetual peace; savage bears agree among themselves. 165 But to man it is not enough to have beaten out the deadly weapon on the accursed anvil, though the first smiths, accustomed to forge harrows and hoes only, and wearied with making mattocks and ploughshares, knew not how to hammer out swords; we behold nations to whose fury it does not suffice to have 170 killed some one, but they think his breast, arms, face to be a kind of meat What, then, would Pythagoras say, or, rather, whither would he not flee, if, nowadays, he witnessed such horrors— he who abstained from all animals as though from a human being, and would not allow his stomach even all kinds of vegetables?