The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis / translated into English verse by William Gifford.

  • Juvenal
Date:
1802
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis / translated into English verse by William Gifford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    130/574 (page 50)
    No female, strange perversion ! dares appear, For males, and only males, officiate here; “ Far hence,” they cry, “ unhallow’d sex, be found, “ Hence, with your yelling minstrel’s barbarous sound!” (At Athens thus, while all the city slept, Cotytto’s priests her secret orgies kept, And in such wanton rites their vigils past. That e’en Cotytto thought them too unchaste.) These with a tiring-pin their eye-brows dye, Till the full arch give lustre to the eye, rites more sacred, and mysteries more divine were polluted—quin velut occul- tumpertat scelus! To make the ridicule more complete, the ancient society adopted as much of the established ceremony as possible; the object of worship, and the sacri- fices, were the same ; and as the women, for the sake of greater secrecy and security, met in the house of the Consul or Praefect, these assembled in a private house, and not in a temple;—but here the resemblance ceased, and all besides was debauchery and profanation. The commentators, however, maintain that Juvenal alludes, in the above passage, to a college or brotherhood founded by Domitian at Alba, in honour of Minerva, to whom (on account of his superior wisdom and virtue, I suppose) he fancied himself related. But this appears to be altogether improbable, from Suetonius’s account of the institution : Celebrabat et in Albano quotannis Quin- quatria Minerva, cui collegium imtituerat; ex quo sorte ducti magisterio fuu- gerentur, ederentque eximias venationes et scenicos ludos, mperque oratorum ac poetarum certamina. There are no features of similarity. Add too, that Statius (in a poem to his wife) boasts of having obtained three prizes in these contests; and he was a man little likely to be connected with a band of cata- mites and atheists. Ver. 137. These with a tiring-pin their eye-brows dye, S^c.~] We are now admitted into the interior of this society, and behold the members at their