You shoelace, go and be hanged!Critical apparatus from the edition of Goetz and Loewe:
Do you dare to be a lover here, you dregs of a man,
or to touch what men love?
You skinned sprat, Persian tunic, mantle,
sheepskin coat, salt market, crushed olive, and more stuffed with
common and Phoenician garlic than Roman rowers!
ligula, i in malam crucem!
tune hic amator audes esse, hallex viri, 1310
aut contrectare quod mares homines amant?
deglupta maena, sarrapis, sementium,
manstruca, halagora, sampsa, tum autem plenior
ali ulpicique quam Romani remiges.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, January 14, 2024
Some Insults
Plautus, Poenulus 1309-1314 (tr. Wolfgang de Melo):
