All singers have the same fault, nothing will make them
Offer to sing for their friends when they're asked,
Yet unasked they never stop. Sardinian Tigellius
Was like that. Even if Caesar, with all his power,
Had begged him to sing out of friendship to him
And his father, he'd have got nowhere: yet if he chose
He'd cry: ‘Hail Bacchus!' at meals, from the egg to the fruit,
Now in a ba**, now tenor, from tip to toe of the lyre.
The man lacked balance: sometimes he'd run as if fleeing
An enemy: sometimes walk slow as a man who's carrying
Juno's sacred basket. Sometimes he'd two hundred slaves,
Sometimes just ten: One day it was tetrarchs and kings
And everything royal, the next: ‘All I ask is salt in a shell,
A three-legged table, a coat that however ill-made
Will keep out the cold.' If you gave ten thousand or so
To this thrifty man content with so little, in a week
His pockets were empty. He'd stay awake all night
Till dawn, then snore all day. Never lived so inconsistent
A creature. ‘Well,' someone might say, ‘and what about you?
Have you no faults?' Yes, others, but different and lesser
Perhaps. When Maenius once savaged absent Novius
Someone said: ‘Look at yourself, or do you think to pretend
We can't see you too?' He answered: ‘Oh, myself I pardon.'
Such stupid and shameless self-love deserves to be censured.