And yet I too have shirked my hand away from the rod.[40] I too have given advice to Sylla, that he should enjoy a sound sleep by returning to a private station.[41] When at every turn you meet so many poetasters, it were a foolish clemency to spare paper that is sure to be wasted. Yet why I rather choose to trace my course over that plain through which the great foster-son of Aurunca[42] urged his steeds, I will, if you are at leisure, and with favorable ear listen to reason, tell you. When a soft eunuch[43] marries a wife; when Mævia[44] transfixes the Tuscan boar, and, with breasts exposed, grasps the hunting-spears; when one man singly vies in wealth with the whole body of patricians, under whose razor my beard, grown exuberant, sounded while I was in my prime;[45] when Crispinus, one of the dregs of the mob of the Nile, a born-slave of Canopus, (while his shoulder hitches up his Tyrian cloak,)[46] airs his summer ring from his sweating fingers, and can not support the weight of his heavier gem;--it is difficult not to write satire. For who can be so tolerant of this iniquitous city, who so case-hardened,[47] as to contain himself! When there comes up the bran-new litter of Matho[48] the lawyer, filled with himself; and after him, he that informed upon his powerful friend; and will soon plunder the nobility, already close-shorn, of the little that remains to them; one whom even Massa fears, whom Carus soothes with a bribe; or a Thymele suborned by some trembling Latinus.[49] When fellows supplant you, who earn their legacies by night-work, lifted up to heaven[50] by what is now the surest road to the highest advancement, the lust of some ancient harridan. Proculeius gets one poor twelfth; but Gillo has eleven twelfths. Each gets the share proportioned to his powers. Well! let him take the purchase-money of his blood, and be as pale as one that has trodden on a snake with naked heel, or a rhetorician about to declaim at the altar at Lyons.[51]