Two Volumes of Pasquils

PREFACE.

turned aside, and recited the fable of the donkey's shadow original: "fabulam de asini umbra." This is a famous Greek anecdote where Demosthenes tells a story about a man who hired a donkey and then argued with the owner over who had the right to sit in the animal's shadow. When the audience leaned in to hear the ending, he scolded them for caring more about a donkey's shadow than the life of a man on trial. to them while they were sitting and listening. By this means, he not only woke them as if from a deep sleep, but also, having soon rebuked them because they were more attentive to little stories than to the matter at hand, he found them somewhat more fair and diligent in understanding the legal case.

Especially if you offer any warning regarding morals or duties, most people turn away their ears and minds; they would allow you to do anything rather than—as a certain poet says—"scrape those tender ears with the biting truth." original: "radere uero." This is a reference to the Roman satirist Persius, who used the metaphor of a doctor or a sharp instrument scraping away falsehoods to describe the painful but necessary effect of satire. Therefore, it is just as doctors sometimes do, who:

when healers attempt to give bitter wormwood wormwood: a proverbially bitter herb (absinthium) used in ancient medicine to treat intestinal worms and fever.,
they first touch the rims around the cups
with the sweet, golden liquid of honey. These lines are a famous passage from the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. He used this metaphor to explain why he wrote his difficult philosophy in beautiful verse.

In the same way here, it is necessary to enter the minds of men through certain charms and allurements of words, as it were, and to occupy their turned and alienated minds as if by doing something else. Seeing this very thing long ago, those most ancient and wisest of the Greeks permitted this license and power to the youth, so that, carried around in wagons and [having smeared] their faces with dregs The author is describing the legendary origins of Greek comedy and satire, where performers in the "Dionysia" would ride in wagons and mock citizens, often using wine dregs to disguise their faces....