The works of Horace : with English notes, critical and ... - Cristo Raul

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EXPLANATORY NOTES. BOOK II., SATIRE V. 519
Aoman citizens, the prienomen, or first part of the name, was generaUy
used, as being peculiar to freemen ; for slaves had no yrienomen.—33. Vir-
tus tua. " Thy great merit."—34. Jus anceps. " AH the knotty points
of the law," i. e., susceptible of a double interpretation, and which a crafty
advocate, after starting, may easily convert to his client's advantage.
S5. Quam te cont&mtum cassa nuce pauperet. "Than treat thee with
contempt, and defraud thee to the value of a nut-shell." Pauperare liter-
ally means " to impoverish ;" here, however, it is taken in a stronger
sense.—37. Ire domum a£que pelliculam curare jube. The connection is
as follows : When, by dint of langnage such as this, thou hast succeeded
in conciliating his good will, " bid him go home, and make much of himself."
The phrase pelliculam curare is analogous to " genio indulgere."—
38. Fi cognitor ipse. " Do thou become his advocate," i. e., do thou take
care of his cause for him. Cognitor is a term of the Boman law, and the
cognitores were those to whom the management of a suit was intruBted
by either of the parties, in the presence of the court, after which the lat
ter might retire if they felt inclined.
39-44. 39. Persia atque oidura, &.c. The idea intended to be convey
" Persevere and hold out," through either extreme of
ed is simply this :
heat or cold. In expressing it, however, Horace, as usual, seizes the op
portunity of indulging more freely his satirical humor, and throws wellmerited
ridicule on two silly specimens of contemporary versification. In
the first of these, statues recently made were termed infantes ("infant,"
" young") ; a ludicrous image, which the poet here parodies in a very
amusing manner, by applying the same epithet to wooden stataes just
finished, and made of quite fresh materials, so as to split, in consequence,
under the intense heat of the dog-days. Who the author of this curious
metaphor was, which is thus so deservedly laughed at, we have no certain
means of ascertaining. He is generally supposed, however, to have
been none other than Furius Bibaculus, to whom, as the text informs us,
the second of these strange poetic thoughts unquestionably belongs. In
this last-mentioned one, Jupiter was described as spitting forth snow upon
the Alps, an idea low, harsh, and extravagant. To render his parody of
this the more severe, Horace substitutes Furius himself for the monarch
of the skies, and, to prevent all mistake, applies to the former a laughable
species of designation, drawn directly &om his personal appearance {pijir
gui tenlus omaso, " distended with his fat paunch"). According to the
scholiast, the line of Bibaculus, which we have just been considering, occurred
in the beginning of a poem which he had composed on the Gallic
war, and ran as follows " : Jupiter hibernas cana nine eonspuit Alpes."—
40. Omaso. The term omasum properly denotes a bullock's paunch s it
is here humorously applied to the abdominal rotundity of Furius himself.
—43. Ut potions I lit amicis aptus ! ut acer ! " How indefatigable he
is ! how serviceable to his friends ! how warm in their cause !"—44. Plures
annabunt thunni et cetaria crescent. " More tunnies wU. swim in, and
thy fish-ponds will increase." The thunnus o£ the ancients is the scomber
tjmnnus of modem ichthyologists. These fish always swim in great numbers,
and from this circumstance the present image is drawn, rich old men
being here compared to so many tunnies swimming in shoals into the net
of the legacy-hunter. Cetaria. The cetaria were fish-ponds of salt-water,
near the sea-side, intended fbr the larger kind offish.
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