Petronius: Satires and the Book of Priapeia

A grand and, if I may say so, modest oratory is not stained or swollen, but rises with a natural beauty. Recently, that windy and enormous wordiness migrated from Asia to Athens, and it breathed upon the spirits of young men rising to great things as if with a pestilential star; once the standard was corrupted, eloquence stood still and fell silent. In short, who since then has advanced to the fame of Thucydides or Hyperides? Not even a poem of healthy color has shone forth, but all things, fed as if on the same food, could not grow gray-haired in old age a metaphor for reaching maturity or lasting through time. Painting, too, met no other end after the audacity of the Egyptians found a shortcut for such a great art.

3 Agamemnon did not allow me to declaim in the portico any longer than he himself had sweated in school, but he said: “Young man, since you have a conversation that is not of the public flavor, and, which is most rare, you love a good mind, I will not defraud you of my secret art. Truly, the teachers are not at fault in these exercises, for they are forced to rave with the raving. For unless they say what the youngsters approve, as Cicero says, ‘they will be left alone in the schools.’ Just as fictional flatterers, when they hunt for the dinners of the rich, meditate on nothing sooner than that which they think will be most pleasing to their listeners—for they will not otherwise obtain what they seek unless they have set certain snares for the ears—so the master of eloquence, unless he has placed bait on his hooks like a fisherman, which he knows the little fish will desire, will wait on the rock without hope of prey. What, then, is the cause? Parents are worthy of rebuke, who do not wish their children to advance by a strict law. For first, they sacrifice their hopes to ambition just like everything else. Then, when they rush toward their prayers, they push their still-raw studies into the forum and clothe boys who are still in the process of being born in eloquence, than which they confess there is nothing greater. But if they allowed the steps of labor to be taken, if studious youths were irrigated by strict reading, if they composed their spirits with the precepts of wisdom, if they dug out words with a harsh stylus, if they heard for a long time what they wanted to imitate, if they persuaded themselves that nothing is magnificent which pleases boys, then that grand oratory would have the weight of its own majesty. Now, boys play in school, young men are laughed at in the forum, and—what is more shameful than both—what each has learned wrongly, he is unwilling to confess in old age. But lest you think I have disparaged the improvisation of Lucilian humility, I myself will fashion what I feel in verse: