Petronius: Satires and the Book of Priapeia

LO 1 Is there another kind of fury that vexes the declaimers, who shout: “These wounds I received for the public liberty; this eye I spent for you: give me a guide who may lead me to my children, for my severed hamstrings do not support my limbs”? These very things 5 would be tolerable if they cleared a path for those intending to reach eloquence. Now, however, through both the inflation of subject matter and the most vain clamor of sententious phrasing, they only achieve this: that when they come into the forum, they think they have been transported to another world. And for this reason, I believe that young men become most foolish in the schools, because they neither hear nor see anything of those things which we have in use. Instead, they see pirates standing on the shore with chains, 10 tyrants writing edicts by which they order sons to cut off the heads of their fathers, oracles given in response to a plague that three or more virgins must be sacrificed, and honeyed ornamental globules of words, with every saying and action sprinkled as if with poppy and sesame seeds. 15 2 Those who are nourished among these things can no more be wise than those who live in a kitchen can smell sweet. By your leave, it must be said: you are the first of all who have destroyed eloquence. For by stirring up certain mockeries with light and empty sounds, you have caused the body of oratory to be weakened and to collapse. Young men were not yet restricted to these declamations when Sophocles or Euripides 20 found the words by which they ought to speak. The cloistered teacher had not yet ruined innate talents when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to sing in Homeric verses. And not to cite poets as witnesses, I certainly see that neither Plato nor Demosthenes approached this type of exercise.

I have noted the discrepancy between the codices, which is most worthy of memory. To those readings which are to be thought to have been in the archetype, or those for which we do not know older ones, I have attached no other mark. In those particles which L Leiden manuscript and O Bern manuscript/common excerpts share, since Scaliger and others have used both kinds of books, one can often scarcely define what was handed down in L from antiquity. Words that are read in italics are missing from the codices. Asterisks indicate lacunae attested by some authority of the books.