The works of John Dryden :: :: University of Virginia Library

Our author, living in the time of Nero, was contemporary and friend to the noble poet Lucan. Both of them were sufficiently sensible, with all good men, how unskilfully he managed the commonwealth; and perhaps might guess at his future tyranny by some passages during the latter part of his first five years; though he broke not out into his great excesses, while he was restrained by the counsels and authority of Seneca. Lucan has not spared him in the poem of his Pharsalia; for this very compliment looked asquint, as well as at Nero. Persius has been bolder, but with caution likewise. For here, in the person of young Alcibiades, he arraigns his ambition of meddling with state-affairs without judgment, or experience. It is probable that he makes Seneca, in this satire, sustain the part of Socrates, under a borrowed name; and, withal, discovers some secret vices of Nero, concerning his lust, his drunkenness, and his effeminacy, which had not yet arrived to public notice. He also reprehends the flattery of his courtiers, who endeavoured to make all his vices pass for virtues. Covetousness was undoubtedly none of his faults; but it is here described as a

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veil cast over the true meaning of the poet, which was to satirise his prodigality and voluptuousness; to which he makes a transition. I find no instance in history of that emperor's being a Pathic, though Persius seems to brand him with it. From the two dialogues of Plato, both called “Alcibiades,” the poet took the arguments of the second and third satires; but he inverted the order of them, for the third satire is taken from the first of those dialogues.

The commentators before Casaubon were ignorant of our author's secret meaning; and thought he had only written against young noblemen in general, who were too forward in aspiring to public magistracy: but this excellent scholiast has unravelled the whole mystery, and made it apparent, that the sting of the satire was particularly aimed at Nero.

Whoe'er thou art, whose forward years are bent
On State affairs, to guide the government;
Hear first what Socrates of old has said
To the loved youth, whom he at Athens bred.

“Tell me, thou pupil to great Pericles,
Our second hope, my Alcibiades,
What are the grounds from whence thou dost prepare
To undertake, so young, so vast a care?
Perhaps thy wit; (a chance not often heard,
That parts and prudence should prevent the beard;)

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'Tis seldom seen, that senators so young
Know when to speak, and when to hold their tongue.
Sure thou art born to some peculiar fate,
When the mad people rise against the State,
To look them into duty, and command
An awful silence with thy lifted hand;
Then to bespeak them thus:—‘Athenians, know
Against right reason all your counsels go;
This is not fair, nor profitable that,
Nor t'other question proper for debate.’
But thou, no doubt, canst set the business right,
And give each argument its proper weight;
Know'st, with an equal hand, to hold the scale;
Seest where the reasons pinch, and where they fail,
And where exceptions o'er the general rule prevail;
And, taught by inspiration, in a trice,
Canst punish crimes, and brand offending vice.

“Leave, leave to fathom such high points as these,
Nor be ambitious, e'er thy time, to please,
Unseasonably wise; till age and cares
Have formed thy soul to manage great affairs.
Thy face, thy shape, thy outside, are but vain;
Thou hast not strength such labours to sustain;
Drink hellebore, my boy; drink deep, and purge thy brain.

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“What aim'st thou at, and whither tends thy care,
In what thy utmost good? Delicious fare;
And then, to sun thyself in open air.

“Hold, hold; are all thy empty wishes such?
A good old woman would have said as much.
But thou art nobly born: 'tis true; go boast
Thy pedigree, the thing thou valuest most:
Besides, thou art a beau; what's that, my child?
A fop, well drest, extravagant, and wild:
She that cries herbs, has less impertinence,
And in her calling more of common sense.

“None, none descends into himself, to find
The secret imperfections of his mind;
But every one is eagle-eyed, to see
Another's faults, and his deformity.
Say, dost thou know Vectidius?” —“Who? the wretch
Whose lands beyond the Sabines largely stretch;
Cover the country, that a sailing kite
Can scarce o'erfly them in a day and night;
Him dost thou mean, who, spite of all his store,
Is ever craving, and will still be poor?
Who cheats for half-pence, and who doffs his coat,
To save a farthing in a ferry-boat?
Ever a glutton at another's cost,
But in whose kitchen dwells perpetual frost?
Who eats and drinks with his domestic slaves,
A verier hind than any of his knaves?
Born with the curse and anger of the gods,
And that indulgent genius he defrauds?

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At harvest-home, and on the shearing-day,
When he should thanks to Pan and Pales pay,
And better Ceres, trembling to approach
The little barrel, which he fears to broach;
He 'says the wimble, often draws it back,
And deals to thirsty servants but a smack.
To a short meal he makes a tedious grace,
Before the barley-pudding comes in place:
Then bids fall on; himself, for saving charges,
A peeled sliced onion eats, and tipples verjuice?”

“Thus fares the drudge: but thou, whose life's a dream
Of lazy pleasures, tak'st a worse extreme.
'Tis all thy business, business how to shun;
To bask thy naked body in the sun;
Suppling thy stiffened joints with fragrant oil:
Then, in thy spacious garden walk awhile,
To suck the moisture up, and soak it in;
And this, thou think'st, but vainly think'st, unseen.
But know, thou art observed; and there are those,
Who, if they durst, would all thy secret sins expose;
The depilation of thy modest part;
Thy catamite, the darling of thy heart,
His engine-hand, and every lewder art,
When, prone to bear, and patient to receive,
Thou tak'st the pleasure which thou canst not give.
With odorous oil thy head and hair are sleek,
And then thou kemb'st the tuzzes on thy cheek;

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Of these thy barbers take a costly care,
While thy salt tail is overgrown with hair
Not all thy pincers, nor unmanly arts,
Can smooth the roughness of thy shameful parts.
Not five, the strongest that the Circus breeds,
From the rank soil can root those wicked weeds,
Though suppled first with soap, to ease thy pain;
The stubborn fern springs up, and sprouts again.

“Thus others we with defamations wound,
While they stab us, and so the jest goes round.
Vain are thy hopes, to 'scape censorious eyes;
Truth will appear through all the thin disguise:
Thou hast an ulcer which no leach can heal,
Though thy broad shoulder-belt the wound conceal.
Say thou art sound and hale in every part,
We know, we know thee rotten at thy heart.
We know thee sullen, impotent, and proud:
Nor canst thou cheat thy nerve, who cheat'st the crowd.”

“But when they praise me in the neighbourhood,
When the pleased people take me for a god,

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Shall I refuse their incense? Not receive
The loud applauses which the vulgar give?”

“If thou dost wealth with longing eyes behold,
And greedily art gaping after gold;
If some alluring girl, in gliding by,
Shall tip the wink, with a lascivious eye,
And thou, with a consenting glance, reply;
If thou thy own solicitor become,
And bidst arise the lumpish pendulum;
If thy lewd lust provokes an empty storm,
And prompts to more than nature can perform;
If, with thy guards, thou scour'st the streets by night,
And dost in murders, rapes, and spoils delight;
Please not thyself, the flattering crowd to hear,
'Tis fulsome stuff to feed thy itching ear.
Reject the nauseous praises of the times;
Give thy base poets back their cobbled rhymes:
Survey thy soul, not what thou dost appear,
But what thou art, and find the beggar there.”

The compliment, at the opening of the Pharsalia, has been thought sarcastic. It certainly sounds so in modern ears: if Nero could only attain empire by civil war, as the gods by that of the giants, then says the poet,

— Scelera ipsa nefasque
Hac mercede placent —

Socrates, whom the oracle of Delphos praised as the wisest man of his age, lived in the time of the Peloponnesian war. He, finding the uncertainty of natural philosophy, applied himself wholly to the moral. He was master to Xenophon and Plato, and to many of the Athenian young noblemen; amongst the rest to Alcibiades, the most lovely youth then living; afterwards a famous captain, whose life is written by Plutarch.

Pericles was tutor, or rather overseer, of the will of Clinias, father to Alcibiades. While Pericles lived, who was a wise man, and an excellent orator, as well as a great general, the Athenians had the better of the war.

That is, by death. When the judges would condemn a malefactor, they cast their votes into an urn; as according to the modern custom, a balloting-box. If the suffrages were marked with Θ, they signified the sentence of death to the offender; as being the first letter of Θανατος, which, in English, is death.

The poet would say, that such an ignorant young man, as he here describes, is fitter to be governed himself than to govern others. He therefore advises him to drink hellebore, which purges the brain.

The name of Vectidius is here used appellatively, to signify any rich covetous man, though perhaps there might be a man of that name then living. I have translated this passage paraphrastically, and loosely; and leave it for those to look on, who are not unlike the picture.

Pan, the god of shepherds, and Pales, the goddess presiding over rural affairs; whom Virgil invocates in the beginning of his second Georgic. I give the epithet of better to Ceres, because she first taught the use of corn for bread, as the poets tell us; men, in the first rude ages, feeding only on acorns, or mast, instead of bread.

The learned Holyday (who has made us amends for his bad poetry in this and the rest of these satires, with his excellent illustrations), here tells us, from good authority, that the number five does not allude to the five fingers of one man, but to five strong men, such as were skilful in the five robust exercises then in practice at Rome, and were performed in the circus, or public place ordained for them. These five he reckons up in this manner: 1. The cæstus, or whirlbats, described by Virgil in his fifth Æneid; and this was the most dangerous of all the rest. The 2d was the foot-race. The 3d, the discus, like the throwing a weighty ball, a sport now used in Cornwall, and other parts of England; we may see it daily practised in Red-Lion Fields. The 4th was the saltus or leaping; and the 5th, wrestling naked and besmeared with oil. They who practised in these five manly exercises were called Πενταθλοι.

Persius durst not have been so bold with Nero as I dare now; and therefore there is only an intimation of that in him which I publicly speak; I mean, of Nero's walking the streets by night in disguise, and committing all sorts of outrages, for which he was sometimes well beaten.

Look into thyself, and examine thy own conscience; there thou shalt find that, how wealthy soever thou appearest to the world, yet thou art but a beggar; because thou art destitute of all virtues, which are the riches of the soul. This also was a paradox of the Stoic school.