Catalepton

Catalepton

Delia comes often to you, Tucca; but to see her is not allowed: she is hidden, shut behind a husband's threshold. To you Delia comes often, but to me she has not yet come: for if she is hidden, it is far to touch what you cannot. She will have come: I have heard it. But what use to me now is that messenger? Tell it to him to whom she returned.

That lover of Corinthian words, that fellow, that rhetorician! For inasmuch as he is wholly Thucydides, a tyrant, an Attic fever, the Gallic "tau," the "min" and the "psin," and "ill befall him"— all those words he mixed up for his brother.

Behold him whom glory, upheld by a mighty realm, had lifted higher even than the seats of heaven: this man had shaken the great globe of the earth with war, this man had broken the kings of Asia, this man its peoples; this man was bringing grievous slavery to you, now to you, Rome, (for the rest had fallen by the hero's spear-point): when suddenly, in the midst of the contest of affairs, headlong he collapsed, driven from his fatherland into exile. Such is the power of the goddess; by such a nod the deceitful hour, in a moment of time, wears away mortal things.

Wherever the seasons of our varied life bid us go, whatever lands to touch, whatever men to see, may I perish, if any other shall be dearer to me than you. For what other can be sweeter than you, to whom, a youth before others, the gods and the gods' sisters, the Muse too, gave all good things, and not undeservedly, all things in which the chorus of Phoebus and Phoebus himself rejoice? O who could have been more learned than you, Muse? O who on earth speaks more pleasantly than you alone? For surely bright Clio herself does not so speak. Wherefore it is enough, if you permit yourself to be loved; for that the love be mutual in return—whence is that to come to me?

Away from here, you empty bombasts of the rhetoricians, away, words puffed up with no Achaean dew, and you, Selius and Tarquitius and Varro, the race of schoolmen, dripping with grease, away from here, you cymbal of empty youth. And you, O Sextus, the care of my cares, farewell, Sabinus; now farewell, fair ones. We are setting our sails for the blessed harbours, seeking the learned sayings of great Siro, and we will free our life from all care. Away from here, Camenae; you too, away—and yet farewell, sweet Camenae, for we will confess the truth, sweet you were, and yet revisit my pages, but modestly and seldom.

Father-in-law, blessed neither to yourself nor to another, and son-in-law Noctuinus, you rotten head, has such a girl, then, by your stupor and by yours, been crushed and gone off to the country? Ah me, how that verse fits, on every side: "Father-in-law and son-in-law, you have ruined everything."

This indeed without offence, sweetest Varius, I will say: may I perish, if that pretty boy has not undone me. But if the precepts forbid me to say it, then truly I will not say it, but that boy has undone me.

Little farm, that were Siro's, and you, poor little field, yet to that master you too were riches, I commend to you myself and these, along with me, whom I have ever loved, if I shall hear anything sadder of my fatherland, and first of all my father. You will now be to him what Mantua had been, and what Cremona was before.

A few things to me, but to snowy Phoebus not unknown, a few things to me say, you learned daughters of Pegasus. The victor is at hand—behold, the great glory of a great triumph, the victor, wherever the lands and wherever the seas lie open, bearing the bristling tokens of barbarian battle, like great Oeneus' son and like proud Eryx; nor any the less for that worthy to pour forth your songs, greatest, and to enter the holy choruses. And so by these unwonted cares I am the more tossed, best one, as to what I can write of you, or what to you. For (I will confess it) that which ought to have been the greatest cause of deterring became the greatest cause of urging me on. A few of your songs have come into our pages,

songs both for their tongue and for their Cecropian wit, songs that, welcome to ages to come, deserve to surpass the Phrygian, the Pylian elder. Softly here, beneath the green covering of a spreading oak, were the shepherds Moeris and Meliboeus, tossing sweet songs in alternate verse, such as the learned youth of Trinacria loves. In rivalry all the gods adorned the heroine, in rivalry the goddesses too, each with her own gift. O you, happy beyond others with such a writer for your maiden! No other shall be called prior in fame: not she who, had she not been caught by the gift of the Hesperides, had outrun winged Hippomenes in the race; not the bright daughter of Tyndareus, brought forth from the swan's egg, not Cassiopeia gleaming in the upper sky, not she long defended in the great contest of horses, which each suitor's pregnant hand desired for itself, for whom the impious father often drained a son-in-law's life-blood,

often, like ruddy ground, the earth flowed with blood; not royal Semele, not the Inachian daughter of Acrisius, who tested Jove with pitiless lightning and rain; not she by whose rape, driven out, the Tarquinii left their household gods, son and father alike, at that time when Rome first changed its proud masters for placid consuls. Many rewards too she gave to deserving nurslings, rewards greatest to the Messallae, the Publicolae. For why should I record those zeals of measureless labour? why the bristling seasons of hard soldiering? the camp set so often before the forum, the camp before the city, this so far from your son, this so far from your fatherland? to endure now the unmeasured stars, now the heats? to be able to stretch yourself even upon the hard flint? often to glide across the fierce sea under a hostile star? often by daring to conquer the sea, often the storm? often too to hurl your body among the dense foe, and not to remember the god common to war? now the swift Africans, the thousands of a perjured race,

now to approach the golden streams of swift Tagus? now by warfare to seek one nation after another, to conquer and pass beyond the bounds of Ocean? It is not ours, no, I say, to touch upon such great praises— nay, I will even dare to say this: it is scarcely within man's power. These very deeds, these will bear their own memorials of things through the world, they will of themselves win for themselves a glorious renown. We, those songs which the gods fashioned with you, the Cynthian and the Muses, Bacchus and Aglaia, if we, lowly, can aspire to praise and approach Cyrene, if in our father's song we can approach the Greek wit, we already advance beyond our very wishes. This is enough; I have nothing to do with the gross crowd.

That Sabinus whom you see, strangers, says he was the swiftest mule-driver, and that he could not fail to pass the onrush of any flying gig, whether to Mantua he must fly, or to Brixia. And he denies that the house of his rival Trypho denies this noble fact, or the island of Caerulus, where that man, Sabinus after, before Quintio, says he cropped with the two-pronged forceps their long-maned necks, lest, the Cytorian yoke pressing, the harsh mane should breed a wound. Cold Cremona and muddy Gaul, that to you these things were and are most well known Sabinus says: from his ultimate origin he says he stood in your morass, in your marsh laid down his packs, and thence through so many rutted miles bore the yoke, whether to left or right the mule had begun to balk, or both, and that no vows were made by him to the wayside gods, save this latest one: his father's reins and the nearest comb. But these things were of old: now of ivory he sits, and sits on his seat, and dedicates himself to you, twin Castor and twin of Castor.

What god, Octavius, has snatched you from us? or was it, as they say—ah!—the cups too harsh with unmixed wine? "With you, if it is a fault, I drank. Each man's own fates follow him: what guilt have the undeserving wine-cups?" Your writings indeed we shall greatly marvel at, and you, snatched away, and Roman history we shall weep, but you will be nothing. Speak, you perverse shades, what envy was it that this man should outlive his father?

Proud Noctuinus, you rotten head, the girl is given to you whom you seek, she is given; she is given, proud Noctuinus, whom you seek. But, O proud Noctuinus, do you not see that Atilius has two daughters, two, and that this one and the other are given to you? Be present now, be present: behold, as is fitting, proud Noctuinus leads home his wine-jug. Talasius, Talasius, Talasius!

You think me cast down, because I cannot, as before, be borne over the deep seas, nor endure the hard cold, nor suffer the heat, nor follow a victor's arms? They are strong, strong in me, my wrath and ancient frenzy and the tongue by which I am a man to you, and the foul fellowship of your prostituted sister. O why do you provoke me? Why, you shameless one, you who must be reproved to Caesar, if your thefts be told, and your late thrift over a squandered patrimony toward your brother, or the banquets held as a boy with grown men, and your buttocks wet through your sleep, and, you unaware, the sudden shout besides of "Talasius, Talasius"? Why did you turn pale, woman? Do the jokes hurt? Or do you recognize your own deeds? You shall not summon me through the fair Cotyttia to your festival phalli, nor afterward shall I see you wag your loins in your little gown, clutching the altars, nor, by the yellow Tiber, the reeking sailor

to call, where the beached rafts stand in the shallows, held by foul mud, and, struggling, in the meagre water; nor into the kitchen and the greasy crossroads-feasts shall you lead the squalid banquets, filled with which, as if with slobbering waters, you go back to your fat wife, and, seething, you loose your bowels at the price of her dowry, and lick mouth and shin with your kisses. Now wound me, now provoke, if you have any strength! And I write down your name. Lucius, you catamite, have your riches now left you, and do your back teeth chatter with hunger? I shall see you holding nothing besides your cowardly brothers and an angry Jove, and your split belly, and the feet of your ruptured uncle, swollen with starvation.

13a. Beneath this citadel of Pallas lies the wrong done to the Italian age, a guest not less than the men of ancient genius, and one in whom Rome might vie with learned Athens; but to no man is it given to conquer the iron fates.

If the task I have undertaken shall be allowed to run its course, O Paphos, O you who dwell in the Idalian seats, that Trojan Aeneas through the Roman towns at last may go, borne in a song worthy of you, with you: not only with incense, or with a painted tablet, shall I adorn your temples and bear garlands with pure hands; a horned ram, a bull—humble these, but greatest—a victim shall sprinkle with honour your consecrated hearths, and in marble, his head and his fire-coloured wings fashioned, after the manner of a painted quiver, Love shall stand. Be present, O Cytherea: your own Caesar from Olympus and the altar of the Surrentine shore calls you.

14a. Of him who was sweeter than the Syracusan bard, and than Hesiod greater, and not less than the lips of Homer, these too are the rudiments of that divine poet, and Calliope unpolished in his varied song.