Wit & Attitude Quote by Aulus Persius Flaccus

Persius skewers “tomorrow” as Rome’s favorite moral anesthetic: the calendar as an alibi. The line is built like a mock calendar of miracles - idlers suddenly industrious, fools abruptly wise, ordinary men clawing their way into heaven - and that escalating impossibility is the point. He’s not praising human potential; he’s exposing how grand our self-promises become precisely because we don’t plan to keep them. “Tomorrow” is where every resolution goes to die, dressed up in lofty language so it can feel like virtue even while it remains pure delay.

The subtext is aggressively Stoic. Persius, writing satire under Nero, targets the self-deceptions that let a corrupt society feel respectable: the rich who postpone restraint, the sensualists who postpone discipline, the careerists who postpone integrity. In a world where public ethics are often performance and private appetites run the show, “reform” becomes another piece of theater scheduled for a day that never arrives. By pairing petty failures (idling) with spiritual ambition (“lay hold on heaven”), he punctures Roman religiosity too: the fantasy that you can procrastinate your character and still cash out in salvation.

What makes it work is its compressed cynicism. The sentence sounds like prophecy, but it’s an anti-prophecy - a deadpan oracle announcing events that will never occur. Persius turns hope’s language into a scalpel, making procrastination look not harmless but absurd, even sinful: a refusal to live in the only tense where action is possible.