The feasts of Nero and his midnight crew,

Where oft, when potent draughts had fired the brain,

The jaded taste was spurred to gorge again.

And in my time none understood so well

The science of good eating: he could tell

At the first relish if his oysters fed

On the Rutupian or the Lucrine bed;

At first sight of a sea-urchin he’d name.

The country, nay the district, whence it came.

Here closed the solemn farce. The Fathers rise,

And each, submissive, from the presence hies—

Pale, trembling wretches, whom the Prince in sport

Had dragged, astonished, to the Alban court,

As if the stem Sycambri were in arms

Or the fierce Chatti threatened new alarms;

As if ill news by flying posts had come

And gathering nations sought the fall of Rome.

Oh, that such scenes (disgraceful at the most)

Had all those years of cruelty engrossed,

Through which his rage pursued the great and good

Unchecked, while vengeance slumbered o’er their blood.

And yet he fell; for when he changed his game

And first grew dreadful to the vulgar name,

They seized the murderer, drenched in Lamian gore,

And hurled him headlong to the infernal shore.

1 An informer.

2 Cornelius Fuscus, Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, killed in Domitian’s Dacian Wars, AD 86–8.

3 Fabricius Veiento and Catullus Messalinus, both informers under Domitian.

CANNIBALS IN EGYPT

Satires, XV

Juvenal

Translated by Niall Rudd, 1991

Juvenal was not wholly complimentary about the customs of Egypt, where he found himself exiled during the reign of Emperor Domitian (see Story 79). In his satirical story of cannibalism, he nods to Odysseus’ tales of his travels in Homer’s Odyssey (see Story 6). While the cannibals of Homer were mythical, the cannibals of Egypt were, for Juvenal, only too real. Perhaps he really did witness an act of cannibalism, but there is little evidence for it in the historical sources. Juvenal addresses the story to a friend from the Roman province of Bithynia, on the north coast of what is now Turkey.

Volusius, my Bithynian friend, everyone knows

what monsters the mad Egyptians worship. Some of them honour

the crocodile, others bow down to the ibis bulging with snakes;

the long-tailed ape is sacred, with its gleaming golden image,

where lyre-strings magically echo from Memnon’s mangled statue,

and ancient Thebes, with its hundred gates, is a heap of ruins.

In one place cats, in another fresh-water fish, in another

dogs are worshipped by entire towns; Diana by no one.

It’s sin and sacrilege to sink your teeth in a leek or an onion

(a holy country indeed where such divinities grow

in gardens!); wool-bearing quadrupeds are strictly avoided

by guests at table; it’s a sin to slit the throat of a kid.

The consumption of human flesh is in order. Ulysses, describing

a crime like that to the astonished Alcinous as they sat over dinner,

elicited anger, or in certain quarters possibly laughter,