TITI PETRONI ARBITRI

SATYRICON

1 LO "Are the rhetoricians declamatores (speakers of practice-orations) tormented by a new kind of Fury, as they shout: 'These wounds I received for the public liberty; I sacrificed this eye for you: give me a guide to lead me to my children, for my hamstrung knees cannot support my limbs'? Even these things would be tolerable if they paved the way to true eloquence. As it is, between the bombast of the subject matter and the very empty noise of the sentiments, they accomplish only this: that when they arrive in the forum, they think they have been transported to another world. And therefore I believe that young men become the greatest fools in the schools, because they hear and see nothing of what we use in everyday life, but rather pirates standing in chains on the shore, tyrants writing edicts commanding sons to cut off their fathers' heads, oracles given during a plague that three or more virgins be sacrificed, and honey-sweet clusters of words, with every saying and deed sprinkled as if with poppy and sesame seeds. Those who are nurtured among these things can no more be wise than those who live in a kitchen can smell sweet. By your leave, let it be said: you were the first to destroy eloquence. For by stirring up certain mockeries with light and empty sounds, you have ensured that the body of oratory is enervated and falls. Young men were not yet being kept confined to these declamations when Sophocles or Euripides discovered the words they ought to speak. No cloistered scholar had yet corrupted the talents of the day when Pindar and the nine lyric poets sang in Homeric verses."