Here let Arturius live,* and such as he;
Such manners will with such a town agree.
Knaves, who in full assemblies have the knack
Of turning truth to lies, and white to black,
Can hire large houses, and oppress the poor
By farmed excise; can cleanse the common-shore,
And rent the fishery; can bear the dead,
And teach their eyes dissembled tears to shed;
All this for gain; for gain they sell their very
These fellows (see what fortune's power can do!)
Were once the minstrels of a country show;
Followed the prizes through each paltry town,
By trumpet-cheeks and bloated faces known.
But now, grown rich, on drunken holidays,
At their own costs exhibit public plays;
Where, influenced by the rabble's bloody will,
With thumbs bent back, they popularly kill. †
From thence returned, their sordid avarice rakes
In excrements again, and hires the jakes.
Why hire they not the town, not every thing,
Since such as they have fortune in a string,
Who, for her pleasure, can her fools advance,
And toss them topmost on the wheel of chance?
What's Rome to me, what business have I there?
I who can neither lie, nor falsely swear?
Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes,
Nor yet comply with him, nor with his times?
Unskilled in schemes by planets to foreshow,
Like canting rascals, how the wars will go:
* Arturius means any debauched wicked fellow, who gains by the times.
In a prize of sword-players, when one of the fencers had the other at his mercy, the vanquished party implored the clemency of the spectators. If they thought he deserved it not, they held up their thumbs, and bent them backwards in sign of death.
I neither will, nor can, prognosticate
To the young gaping heir, his father's fate;
Nor in the entrails of a toad have pried,
Nor carried bawdy presents to a bride:
For want of these town-virtues, thus alone
I go, conducted on my way by none;
Like a dead member from the body rent,
Maimed, and unuseful to the government.
Who now is loved, but he who loves the times,
Conscious of close intrigues, and dipt in crimes,
Labouring with secrets which his bosom burn,
Yet never must to public light return?
They get reward alone, who can betray;
For keeping honest counsels none will pay.
He who can Verres when he will accuse,
The purse of Verres may at pleasure use :
But let not all the gold which Tagus hides,
And pays the sea in tributary tides, †
Be bribe sufficient to corrupt thy breast,
Or violate with dreams thy peaceful rest.
Great men with jealous eyes the friend behold,
Whose secrecy they purchase with their gold.
I haste to tell thee,-nor shall shame oppose,
What confidents our wealthy Romans chose
And whom I must abhor: to speak my mind,
I hate, in Rome, a Grecian town to find;
To see the scum of Greece transplanted here,
Received like gods, is what I cannot bear.
* Verres, prætor in Sicily, contemporary with Cicero, by whom accused of oppressing the province, he was condemned : his name is used here for any rich vicious man.
+ Tagus, a famous river in Spain, which discharges itself into the ocean near Lisbon, in Portugal. It was held of old to be full of golden sands.
Nor Greeks alone, but Syrians here abound;
Obscene Orontes,* diving under ground,
Conveys his wealth to Tyber's hungry shores,
And fattens Italy with foreign whores:
Hither their crooked harps and customs come;
All find receipt in hospitable Rome.
The barbarous harlots crowd the public place:
Go, fools, and purchase an unclean embrace;
The painted mitre court, and the more painted
face.
Old Romulus, † and father Mars, look down!
Your herdsman primitive, your homely clown,
Is turned a beau in a loose tawdry gown.
His once unkem'd and horrid locks, behold
'Stilling sweet oil; his neck enchained with gold ;
Aping the foreigners in every dress,
Which, bought at greater cost, becomes him less.
Meantime they wisely leave their native land;
From Sycion, Samos, and from Alaband,
And Amydon, to Rome they swarm in shoals:
So sweet and easy is the gain from fools.
Poor refugees at first, they purchase here;
And, soon as denizened, they domineer;
Grow to the great, a flattering, servile rout,
Work themselves inward, and their patrons out.
Quick-witted, brazen-faced, with fluent tongues,
Patient of labours, and dissembling wrongs.
Riddle me this, and
guess him if you can,
Who bears a nation in a single man?
A cook, a conjurer, a rhetorician,
A painter, pedant, a geometrician,
A dancer on the ropes, and a physician;
Orontes,
river for the
+ Romu
he greatest river of Syria. The poet here puts the abitants of Syria.
was the first king of Rome, and son of Mars, as the poets feign. The first Romans were herdsmen.
All things the hungry Greek exactly knows,
And bid him go to heaven, to heaven he goes.
In short, no Scythian, Moor, or Thracian born,
But in that town which arms and arts adorn. *
Shall he be placed above me at the board,
In purple clothed, and lolling like a lord?
Shall he before me sign, whom t'other day
A small-craft vessel hither did convey,
Where, stowed with prunes, and rotten figs, he lay
How little is the privilege become
Of being born a citizen of Rome!
The Greeks get all by fulsome flatteries;
A most peculiar stroke they have at lies.
They make a wit of their insipid friend,
His blubber-lips and beetle-brows commend,
His long crane-neck and narrow shoulders praise,—
You'd think they were describing Hercules.
A creaking voice for a clear treble goes;
Though harsher than a cock, that treads and crows.
We can as grossly praise; but, to our grief,
No flattery but from Grecians gains belief.
Besides these qualities, we must agree,
They mimic better on the stage than we :
The wife, the whore, the shepherdess, they play,
In such a free, and such a graceful way,
That we believe a very woman shown,
And fancy something underneath the gown.
But not Antiochus, nor Stratocles, †
Our ears and ravished eyes can only please;
The nation is composed of such as these.
All Greece is one comedian; laugh, and they
Return it louder than an ass can bray;
* Athens, of which Pallas, the Goddess of Arms and Arts, was patroness.
+ Antiochus and Stratocles, two famous Grecian mimics, or actors, in the poet's time,
Grieve, and they grieve; if you weep silently,
There seems a silent echo in their eye;
They cannot mourn like you, but they can cry.
Call for a fire, their winter clothes they take;
Begin but you to shiver, and they shake;
In frost and snow, if you complain of heat,
They rub the unsweating brow, and swear they
We live not on the square with such as these;
Such are our betters who can better please;
Who day and night are like a looking-glass,
Still ready to reflect their patron's face;
The panegyric hand, and lifted eye,
Prepared for some new piece of flattery.
Even nastiness occasions will afford;
They praise a belching, or well-pissing lord.
Besides, there's nothing sacred, nothing free
From bold attempts of their rank lechery.
Through the whole family their labours run;
The daughter is debauched, the wife is won;
Nor 'scapes the bridegroom, or the blooming son.
If none they find for their lewd purpose fit,
They with the walls and very floors commit.
They search the secrets of the house, and so
Are worshipped there, and feared for what they
And, now we talk of Grecians, cast a view
On what, in schools, their men of morals do.
A rigid stoick his own pupil slew;
A friend, against a friend of his own cloth,
Turned evidence, and murdered on his oath. *
What room is left for Romans in a town
Where Grecians rule, and cloaks controul the gown?
* Publius Egnatius, a stoick, falsely accused Bareas Soranus, as Tacitus tells us.
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