Q. Horatius Flaccus
Satires 2.2 — Ofellus on living on a little
Sermones II.2 · About 30 BCE, published with the second book of Satires.
Horace hands the stage to Ofellus, a farmer, who explains how to eat: hunger is the best sauce, the peacock is bought for its tail and not its taste, and a man who has never been hungry cannot enjoy bread. A miser is mocked as hard as a glutton. Then Ofellus himself appears, his farm confiscated and given to a soldier, still working the same land as a tenant, and the dinner-table advice turns out to have been about how to lose everything and stay yourself.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Christopher Smart's prose Horace, first published in 1756 and served by Perseus in Theodore Buckley's revision of 1862. A crib meant for students, and it reads like one: close to the Latin, with the word order often only lightly rearranged, a liking for 'thee' and 'thy' in address, and occasional bracketed words supplied to make the sense. It is reliable for what Horace says and gives no idea of how he sounds. The Perseus scan has a few typographical errors, declared and corrected in this work's record.