Book 10

I If I seem too much a book, too long, my final flourish late, read just a little: I'll be a slim small thing for you. Three and four times over my page is finished off with a tiny poem: make me as short as you yourself desire.

II Rushed out before its time, the work of my tenth little book, that slipped from my hands, I've now called back again. Some pieces you'll know, but planed smooth by a recent file; the larger part is new: reader, be kind to both, reader, my wealth: when Rome had given you to me, "I've nothing greater to give you," she said. "Through this you'll flee the sluggish streams of thankless Lethe, and survive in the better part of yourself. The wild fig splits Messalla's marble, and the bold muleteer laughs at Crispus' half-broken horses: but theft does pages no harm, and the ages serve them, and these monuments alone know nothing of dying."

III The quips of home-bred slaves, the foul tooth, and the vile abuse of a hawker's gutter tongue, stuff a peddler of cracked Vatinian cups wouldn't take if bought with a brimstone match, some sneaking poet scatters about and wants them taken for mine. Do you believe it, Priscus? That a parrot should speak in a quail's voice, and Canus long to be a bagpiper? Far from my little books be black repute; a gem-bright rumour bears them on a snow-white wing: why should I labour to be known so vilely, when silence can be had for free?

IV You who read of Oedipus and murky Thyestes, of Colchian witches and Scyllas—what but monsters do you read? What good to you is the rape of Hylas, what Parthenopaeus and Attis, what good the sleeper Endymion? Or the boy stripped of his slipping wings? Or he who hates the waters that love him, Hermaphroditus? What pleasure in the empty mockeries of a wretched page? Read this, of which life can say, "It's mine." Here you'll find no Centaurs, no Gorgons or Harpies: my page tastes of a human being. But you don't wish, Mamurra, to know your own habits, nor to know yourself: read the Origins of Callimachus.

V Whoever, scorning the matron's robe and the purple, has wronged with impious verse those he ought to honour, let him wander the city, an exile from bridge and slope, and last among the hoarse-voiced beggars beg for the dog's mouthfuls of vile bread; let a long December and a dripping winter and the closed archway prolong his bitter cold: let him call blessed and shout out the good fortune of those borne by on the bier of death. And when the threads of his last hour have come, and the slow day, let him feel the snarling of dogs, and beat off the harmful birds with a flapping rag. Nor let his punishment end with death, but now flayed by the lash of stern Aeacus, now crushed beneath restless Sisyphus' mountain, now parched amid the waters of the babbling old man, let him wear out all the fables of the poets: and when the Fury bids him confess the truth, let his conscience, betraying him, cry out, "I wrote it."

VI Happy are they whose lot it was to see the leader flashing among Arctic suns and stars. When will that day come, when field and tree and every trim window will be bright with a Latian bride? When the sweet delays, the long dust raised by Caesar, and all Rome to be seen along the Flaminian Way? When will you ride forth, knights and Moors in painted Nilotic tunics, and the people's voice be one: "He comes"?

VII Father of nymphs and streams, Rhine, and all who drink the Odrysian frosts, so may you ever enjoy your flowing waters, nor may the barbarian wheel of an insolent oxherd grind you trodden underfoot; so may you go with your golden horns restored and Roman now on either bank: the Tiber, your master, begs you give back Trajan to his own peoples and to the City.

VIII Paula wants to marry me; I'm unwilling to marry Paula: she's an old woman. I'd be willing, were she older still.

IX By elevens of feet and syllables and with much salt yet nothing crude, that Martial known to the nations and known to the peoples—why do you envy?— I'm no better known than Andraemon the racehorse.

X While you, who enter the year with laurel-wreathed rods, wear down a thousand thresholds at the morning round, what am I to do here? What do you leave for us, Paulus, who are of Numa's common crowd and the packed throng? Shall I, who sees me, call him lord and king? This you yourself do—but how much more smoothly! Shall I follow litter or chair? You don't refuse to carry it, you fight to go ahead through the middle of the mud. Shall I rise more often to one reciting verse? You stand and stretch both hands together toward his face. What shall the poor man do, who isn't allowed to be a client? Your purple has dismissed our togas.

XI You talk of nothing but Theseus and Pirithous, and you think yourself, Calliodorus, a match for Pylades. May I die, if you deserve to hand Pylades his chamber-pot or to feed the swine of Pirithous. "And yet," you say, "I gave my friend five thousand and a toga washed, at most, three or four times." What of it, since Orestes never gave Pylades anything? He who gives, however much, refuses more.

XII You who make for the Aemilian peoples and Apollo's Vercellae and the fields of the Phaethontean Po, may I not live, Domitius, if I don't let you go gladly, though without you no day is pleasing to me: but the longing is worth this, that even by one summer's reaping you ease your neck, scorched by the City's yoke. Go, I pray, and drink in whole suns with greedy skin— oh, how handsome you'll be, while you're abroad! And you'll come back unrecognized by your pale-faced friends, and the wan crowd will be jealous of your cheeks. But the colour the road gives you, Rome will swiftly snatch away, though you come back black as a Nile-bred face.

XIII That the Celtiberian Salo leads me to gold-bearing shores, that I long to visit my homeland's hanging roofs, you bring this about, Manius, dear to me from my simple years and cherished in friendship since boyhood's days; in the Iberian lands there is no other man sweeter, more worthy of true love than you. With you I could have loved, as a guest, the Gaetulian huts of the parched African and the Scythian cabins. If your mind is the same, if our care is mutual, in whatever place, Rome will belong to us two.

XIV Though the cushioned carriage carry your smooth-skinned servants for you, and the Libyan rider sweat in the long dust, though spread couches ring more than one Baiae for you and Thetis grow pale, smeared with your perfume, though Setine wine break the bright crystal cups, nor Venus sleep on softer down than yours: you lie at the night-time threshold of a haughty whore, and the deaf door, alas, is wet with your tears, nor do sighs cease to scorch your wretched breast. Shall I tell you why things go badly with you, Cotta? They go well.

XV You say you yield to none of our friends. But, granting this is true, what, I ask, Crispus, do you do? When I begged five thousand sesterces as a loan, you refused, though your heavy strongbox couldn't hold your cash. When did you give me a peck of beans or grain, though a Nile-bred tenant farms your acres? When was a short toga sent in the cold of winter's time? When did half a pound of silver come to me? I see nothing else by which we might believe you a friend, than that you tend to fart in my presence, Crispus.

XVI He pierced his dowried wife's heart with a sharp reed, but while Aper was at play: Aper knows how to play.

XVII If you call promising and not giving a gift, Gaius, I'll outdo you in my gifts and presents. Take whatever the Asturian digs in Galician fields, whatever the golden flood of rich Tagus holds, whatever the black Indian finds in Red Sea weed, whatever the lone bird guards in its nest, whatever shameless Tyre boils up in Agenor's cauldron: take whatever everyone has—the way you give.

XVIII To cheat Macer of his Saturnalian tribute you long in vain, my Muse: it's not allowed: he asks for it himself, and demands the customary jokes, not gloomy verse, and complains that my trifles have gone silent. But now he has time only for the surveyors' long account-books. Appian Way, what will you do, if Macer reads these?

XIX Marius neither invites to dinner nor sends gifts, nor stands surety, nor will lend, nor even has anything to lend. Yet a crowd's not lacking that courts the barren friend. Alas! how foolish are your togas, Rome!

XX Take a little book not learned enough and too little grave, yet not quite rustic either, to eloquent Pliny for me, my Thalia— go, carry it: the labour's brief, once done, to climb the steep path of the Subura. There you'll see at once the Orpheus slick on the summit of his dripping theatre, and the wondering beasts, and the king's own bird that bore off the ravished Phrygian to the Thunderer; there is the small house of your Pedo, engraved with an eagle's lesser wing. But take care not to knock, drunk and at the wrong hour, on his eloquent door: he gives whole days to austere Minerva, while he toils for the ears of the hundred men at what the ages and posterity might be able to set even beside the pages of Arpinum. You'll go more safely to the late lamps: this is your hour, when Lyaeus rages, when the rose reigns, when the hair is drenched: then let even rigid Catos read me.

XXI To write what Modestus himself can scarcely understand and Claranus scarcely—what good is it, I ask, Sextus? Your books need no reader, but Apollo: in your judgment, Cinna was greater than Maro. So let yours be praised, by all means: but my poems, Sextus, may they please the grammarians, so long as they please without them.

XXII Why do I often come out with a plastered chin, or my sound lips painted with white lead, Philaenis, you ask? I don't want to kiss you.

XXIII Happy Antonius Primus now counts off in tranquil age his fifteen Olympiads gone by, and looks back on days that are past and on years made safe, nor does he now fear the waters of Lethe drawing near. No day, as he recalls them, is unwelcome or hard; there was none he wouldn't wish to remember. A good man enlarges for himself the span of his life: this is to live twice—to be able to enjoy a former life.

XXIV The Kalends of March, my birthday, a day lovelier than all the Kalends, on which the girls send me a gift, to your hearths I add this fiftieth and seventh cake and this casket of incense. If it suits you to grant a petitioner, on these years add, I pray, twice nine more, so that, not yet sluggish with excessive age, but with the three stages of life completed, I may seek the groves of the Elysian girl. After such a Nestor's span I'll ask for not one more day.

XXV That Mucius lately seen in the morning arena, who laid his own limb upon the fire— if he seems to you patient and hard and brave, you've the wits of the people of Abdera. For when, with the torturing shirt set before him, he's told "Burn your hand," it's more to say "I won't do it."

XXVI Varus, lately noble through the Latian vine in the Paraetonian towns, leader to be remembered by a hundred men, but now, promised in vain to Ausonian Quirinus, you lie, a stranger's shade, on the shore of the Nile. It wasn't granted to sprinkle your cold face with tears, nor add rich incense to the mournful pyres. But it's given you—a name to live by eternal song: can you deny even this, deceitful Nile?

XXVII On your birthday, Diodorus, the senate as your guests reclines, and a rare knight is not left out, and your dole hands out thirty coins apiece. Yet no one, Diodorus, thinks you were ever born.

XXVIII Loveliest sire of the years and of the shining world, whom the public vows and prayers first invoke, once you dwelt in cramped quarters as a thoroughfare, where teeming Rome wore down the middle of the road: now your thresholds are ringed with Caesar's gifts, and you count as many forums, Janus, as you bear faces. But you, holy father, grateful for so great a gift, keep watch over the iron bars with their bolt forever fastened.

XXIX The dish you used to send me at Saturn's season, you've sent, Sextilianus, to your mistress; and the gown you'd give on the Kalends named for Mars, out of my green toga is the dinner-suit bought. Now the girls have begun to cost you nothing: you screw, Sextilianus, with my gifts.

XXX O sweet shore of temperate Formiae, you, when he flees the town of stern Mars and wearied sheds his restless cares, Apollinaris prefers above all places. Not the sweet Tibur of his pious wife, nor his Tusculan or Algidan retreats, does he so admire, nor Praeneste and Antium; no charming Circe nor Dardanian Caieta is missed, nor Marica nor the Liris, nor Salmacis bathed in the Lucrine spring. Here the surface of Thetis is brushed by a gentle wind; the sea doesn't languish, but a living stillness of the deep bears the painted skiff with a helping breeze, just as, from a girl who has no love of summer's heat, a healthful coolness comes from the waved purple fan. Nor does the line seek its prey in the long sea, but the fish, hooked from couch and little bed, is watched as it draws the line from high above. If ever Nereus feels the reign of Aeolus, the table laughs at the storms, safe in its own supply: the fishpond feeds the turbot and home-bred bass, the dainty lamprey swims to its keeper, the namer of names calls the well-known mullet, and the old red mullets, bidden, come forth at the summons. But when does Rome allow the enjoyment of these things? How many days at Formiae does the year reckon to one held fast by the City's pressing affairs? O happy doorkeepers and bailiffs! These things are prepared for the masters; they serve you.

XXXI You sold a slave yesterday for twelve hundred coins, Calliodorus, so you might dine well—once. And you didn't dine well: a mullet bought at four pounds was the show and headpiece of the meal. One wants to cry out: "This is no fish, you scoundrel, no fish: it's a man; a man, Calliodorus, you're eating."

XXXII This picture, tended with violets and roses, whose features it recalls, Caedicianus, you ask? Such was Marcus Antonius Primus in his middle years: in this face the old man sees his younger self. Would that art could shape the character and the soul! No tablet on earth would be more beautiful.

XXXIII Simpler than the old Sabines, Munatius Gallus, who surpass the Cecropian sage in goodness, so may chaste Venus grant you to keep your daughter's husband's bright house with her wedding-torch unbroken: that you, if perchance ill-will calls verses dipped in green verdigris to be mine, do as you do—drive them from me, and don't insist that anyone who is read writes such poems. My little books have learned to keep this rule: to spare persons, to speak of vices.

XXXIV May the gods grant you, Caesar Trajan, whatever you deserve, and ratify forever what they've been willing to bestow: you who restore his rights to the patron stripped of them —he'll be no exile to his own freedmen—, you deserve the power to keep the whole client safe: which—if only one may prove the truth—you can.

XXXV Let all girls read Sulpicia, who wish to please one man alone; let all husbands read Sulpicia, who wish to please one bride alone. She doesn't recount the frenzy of the Colchian nor tell of dire Thyestes' banquet; nor does she believe there was a Scylla or a Byblis: but she teaches chaste and honest loves, games, delights, and pleasantries. Whoever judges her poems rightly would say none is more mischievous, would say none is more pure. Such, I'd believe, were Egeria's jests in dewy Numa's grotto. With her as fellow-pupil or as teacher, you'd have been more learned and chaste, Sappho: but had hard Phaon seen Sulpicia beside you and at once, he'd have loved her. In vain: for neither as the Thunderer's wife nor as the girl of Bacchus or Apollo would she live, with her Calenus torn away.

XXXVI Whatever the wicked smokehouses of Massilia ripen, each cask that takes its age from the fire, comes from you, Munna: to your wretched friends you send across the straits, down the long roads, your savage poisons; and at no easy price, but one that would content a jar of Falernian or Setine dear to its own cellars. Why you don't come to Rome in so long a time, this, I think, is the reason: that you'd not drink your own wines.

XXXVII Most holy worshipper of justice and even-handed laws, who rule the Latian forum with truth-telling lips, to your townsman, Maternus, your old comrade, if you're sending anything to the Galician Ocean—. Or do you think it better to drag ugly frogs and slender needle-fish on the Laurentian shore than to send the captive mullet back to its own rocks, since it would seem to weigh less than three pounds? And to dine on an insipid clam at the head of the table, and on what a small thin-shelled mussel covers, rather than oysters not envious of Baian shells, which the slave-boys gulp, their master not forbidding? Here you'll noisily drive the reeking fox into the nets, and the filthy prey will bite your dogs: there the wet lines, lately scarce drawn up from the fishy deep, will entangle my hares. While I speak, look—the fisherman returns with empty basket, the hunter stands by, proud of a captured badger: every dinner comes from the city market to the sea. If you're sending anything to the Galician Ocean—.

XXXVIII O the soft fifteen years, Calenus, which the god granted and brought to completion in wedlock with your Sulpicia! O every night and hour that was marked with the precious pebbles of the Indian shore! O what battles, what struggles on both sides the happy little bed and the lamp beheld, drunk with Nicerotian perfumes! You've lived three lustres, Calenus: this whole age is reckoned to you, and you count only the days of a husband. If, long besought, Atropos would give you back from those one single day—but one— you'd rather have it than four times Nestor's age.

XXXIX That you swear you were born when Brutus was consul, Lesbia, you lie. Were you born when Numa was king, Lesbia? There too you lie. For, as your centuries report, you're said to be moulded from Prometheus' clay.

XL Since I was always being told that my Polla was secretly with a lover, I burst in, Lupus. It was no lover.

XLI In the new month of Janus, Proculeia, you abandon your old husband and bid him keep his goods to himself. What, I ask, what's happened? What's the cause of this sudden grief? You give me no answer? I'll tell you: he was made praetor. The purple for the Megalensian games would have cost a hundred thousand, even if you gave the shows too sparingly, and the people's festival would have carried off twice ten thousand. This is no divorce, Proculeia: it's profit.

XLII Your down is so faint, so soft, that breath and the suns and a light breeze wear it away. A coming quince hides itself in similar fuzz, which gleams when stripped by a maiden's thumb. Whenever I've pressed five firmer kisses on you, I become bearded, Dindymus, from your lips.

XLIII Now, Phileros, your seventh wife is buried in your field. No man's field, Phileros, yields more than yours.

XLIV Quintus Ovidius, soon to see the Caledonian Britons and green Tethys and Father Ocean, so you leave Numa's hills and the Nomentan leisure, and neither country nor hearth holds the old man back? You put off your joys, but Atropos doesn't put off her threads, and every hour is charged to you. You'll have proved to a dear friend—who wouldn't praise it?— that sacred loyalty is worth more to you than life; but be at last returned, to remain among your Sabines, and count yourself among your own friendships.

XLV If my little books say anything gentle and sweet, if a flattering page sounds anything that honours you, you think this fat and would rather gnaw the rib, when I serve you the flank of a Laurentian boar. Drink Vatican wine, if you delight in vinegar: my flagon doesn't suit your stomach.

XLVI You want, Matho, to say everything finely. Sometimes say it well too; say it neither way; sometimes say it badly.

XLVII The things that make life happier, most delightful Martial, are these: wealth not earned by toil, but inherited; land not ungrateful, a hearth ever burning; no lawsuit, the toga seldom worn, a quiet mind; a freeman's strength, a healthy body; prudent frankness, well-matched friends; easy company, a table without art; a night not drunken, but freed of cares; a bed not joyless, and yet chaste; sleep that makes the darkness brief; to wish to be what you are, to prefer nothing else; neither to fear your last day nor to long for it.

XLVIII The crowd of the Pharian heifer announces the eighth hour, and the spear-armed cohort returns and now takes its turn. This hour tempers the baths, the earlier breathes out excessive vapours, and the sixth glows with immoderate Nero's heat. Stella, Nepos, Canius, Cerialis, Flaccus—are you coming? The couch holds seven; we are six; add Lupus. The bailiff's wife has brought me mallows to relieve the belly, and the varied riches the garden holds, among which is squat lettuce and trimmed leek, nor is belching mint lacking, nor the lustful herb; sliced eggs will crown rue-flavoured mackerel, and there'll be a sow's udder dripping from the tunny-brine. These for the relish; one little dinner will be set on a single table: a kid snatched from the jaws of a savage wolf, and tidbits that need no carver's knife, and workmen's beans and tender young greens; a chicken too, and a ham already surviving three dinners, will be added. To the well-fed I'll give ripe apples, wine without dregs from a Nomentan flagon, which was three years old in Frontinus' second consulship. Add jokes without gall, and a freedom not to be feared the next morning, and nothing you'd wish you'd left unsaid: let my guest talk of the Green and the Blue, nor will our cups make anyone a defendant.

XLIX Though you drink your amethyst-coloured measures and are soaked in dark Opimian, you toast me with a Sabine just now broached and say to me, Cotta, "Will you have it in gold?" Does anyone want leaden wine in a golden cup?

L Let mournful Victory break her Idumaean palms, beat, Favour, your bare breast with a savage hand; let Honour change his garb, and you, sad Glory, fling your garlanded hair to the cruel flames as an offering. Alas, the crime! cheated of your first youth, Scorpus, you fall and so soon yoke the black horses. That goal, always too swiftly hastened and brief for your chariots—why was it so near to your life too?

LI Now Tyrian Taurus looks back on the stars of Phrixus' ram, and winter flees the alternating Castor; the field laughs, the ground is clothed, the tree is clothed, the Attic mistress weeps for Ismarian Itys. What days, Faustinus, what a Ravenna has Rome stolen from you! O suns, O tunic-clad repose! O grove, O springs, and the firm shore of the moist sand, and Anxur splendid with its sea-waters, and the couch that watches more than one stretch of water, which sees from here the river's boats, from there the sea's! But there is no Theatre of Marcellus or Pompey, nor there the triple baths, nor the fora joined four times, nor the topmost shrine of Capitoline Thunderer, nor the temples that shine next to their own heaven. How often, weary, I think you say to Quirinus: "What's yours, keep for yourself: what's mine, give back to me."

LII Numa had seen the eunuch Thelys in a toga, and said he was a convicted adulteress.

LIII I am that Scorpus, glory of the clamorous Circus, your applause, Rome, and your brief delight, whom envious Lachesis snatched in his ninth third-year, and, counting my palms, believed to be an old man.

LIV You set out good dishes, Olus, but you set them covered. It's ridiculous: I can have good ones that way too.

LV Whenever Marulla has weighed in her fingers an erect member and long taken its measure, she names the pounds, the scruples, the half-ounces; the same one, after the work and its exercises, when it lies slack like a loosened thong, Marulla says by how much it's lighter. So that's no hand of hers, but a balance-scale.

LVI You bid me, Gallus, serve you all day long and run three, four times through your Aventine. Cascellius pulls out or repairs the aching tooth, you, Hyginus, burn off the lashes hostile to the eyes; Fannius cuts not, but removes the dripping uvula, Eros erases the grim brands of stone; Hermes is called the Podalirius of ruptures: who heals the broken, tell me, Gallus, who is it?

LVII You used to send a pound of silver; it's become a half-pound, but of pepper. I don't buy pepper that dear, Sextus.

LVIII While I tended the calm retreats of sea-girt Anxur, Frontinus, and Baiae nearer still and the shore-house, and the grove that the inhuman cicadas, when the Crab seethes, never knew, and the river-fed lakes, I had leisure to honour with you the learned Pierians: now the greatest Rome wears me down. When is a day my own here? I'm tossed on the deep of the City, and life perishes in barren toil, while I feed the harsh acres of a suburban farm and the household gods near you, holy Quirinus. But not only he loves who, night and day, frequents your thresholds, nor do such losses befit a poet. By the venerable rites of the Muses, by all the gods I swear: even unattentive, I love you.

LIX If a page is used up on a single subject, you skip it, and the shorter, not the better, pleases you. A rich dinner is set out, furnished from every market for you, but only the tidbit delights you. I've no need of too dainty a reader; I want one who isn't satisfied without bread.

LX Munna asked Caesar for the privilege of three pupils, though he's always been used to teaching two.

LXI Here rests Erotion, a too-hasty shade, whom her sixth winter slew by the crime of fate. Whoever you'll be, after me the ruler of my little field, to her slight shade pay each year its due: so may your hearth endure, your household be unharmed, and this stone be the only thing to mourn on your land.

LXII Schoolmaster, spare the simple throng: so may the long-haired boys flock to hear you and the chorus love your dainty desk, nor any reckoner or swift clerk be ringed by a larger circle. The white days glow with the flaming Lion and seething July cooks the parched harvest. Let the Scythian hide, fringed with rough thongs, with which Marsyas of Celaenae was flogged, and the grim canes, the sceptres of pedagogues, rest and sleep until the Ides of October: in summer, if boys keep well, they learn enough.

LXIII Marble small indeed, but not to yield, traveller, to the stones of Mausolus and the pyramids, you read. Twice was my life seen at the Roman Tarentine games, and it lost nothing before the final pyres: Juno gave me five boys, as many girls, and the hands of all closed my eyes. A rare glory of the marriage-bed fell to me too: one member alone was known to my chastity.

LXIV If you should touch my little books, queen Polla, receive my jests with no stern brow. That bard of yours, the glory of our Helicon, when he sang of fierce wars on the Pierian trumpet, did not yet blush to say in wanton verse: "If I'm not even buggered, Cotta, what am I doing here?"

LXV Though you boast yourself a citizen of the Corinthians, Charmenion, with no one denying it, why am I called your brother, I, born of Iberians and Celts, a citizen of the Tagus? Or do we seem alike in face? You wander sleek with curled hair, I unruly with Spanish locks; you smooth with daily depilatory, I with shaggy legs and cheeks; your speech lisps and your tongue is feeble, my little daughter would speak more forcefully: the dove is not so unlike the eagle, nor the timid gazelle the stiff-maned lion. So stop calling me brother, lest I, Charmenion, call you sister.

LXVI Who, I ask, was so hard, who so haughty, as to order you, Theopompus, made a cook? Does anyone bear to defile this face with the black kitchen, to pollute these locks with greasy fire? Who'll rather hold the wine-cups or the crystal? By what hand will Falernian be better mixed? If such an end awaits star-bright servants, let Jupiter now use Ganymede as a cook.

LXVII Daughter of Pyrrha, stepmother of Nestor, whom Niobe saw white-haired as a girl, whom old Laertes called grandmother, Priam nurse, Thyestes mother-in-law, now outliving all the crows, at last laid in this tomb still itches, bald Plutia, with Melanthion.

LXVIII Though you have neither Ephesus nor Rhodes nor Mytilene, but a house, Laelia, in a patrician quarter, and a mother never tanned, born of swarthy Etruscans, a stern father from the Arician region; "My lord, my honey, my soul"—you keep heaping it up, —for shame!—you, a citizen of Hersilia and Egeria. Let the little bed hear these words, not every bed, but the one a mistress has spread for her wanton man. Do you want to know how you, a chaste matron, talk? Can you, even when you writhe, be more seductive? Though you learn by heart and recite the whole of Corinth, you still won't, Laelia, be wholly a Lais.

LXIX You give your husband watchmen, Polla, but take none yourself. This, Polla, is to wed a man as a wife yourself.

LXX That scarcely one book a year comes out from me, I stand charged of sloth before you, learned Potitus. But how much more justly might you marvel that one comes out, when whole days often slip away from me. At night I visit friends who don't return the greeting, I congratulate many, no one congratulates me, Potitus. Now my gem seals letters to light-bringing Diana, now the first hour snatches me, now the fifth. Now a consul or praetor holds me, and the returning dances, often a poet is heard the whole day through. But you can't safely refuse the pleading lawyer, nor if a rhetor or a grammarian should ask you. After the tenth hour the baths are sought, weary, and a hundred quadrantes. When, Potitus, will the book be done?

LXXI Whoever you are who wish glad and late fates for your parents, love the brief inscription of this marble. Here Rabirius has buried dear shades in the earth; no old folk lie under a brighter lot: a gentle and last night closed twice six lustres of their wedlock, two funerals burned on a single pyre. Yet he mourns them as snatched in their earliest years. Nothing can be more outrageous than these tears.

LXXII In vain you come to me, Flatteries, pitiful with your worn-down little lips: I'm not going to call anyone lord and god. There's no longer a place for you in this city; go far off, to the felt-capped Parthians, and, foul and grovelling and suppliant, kiss the soles of painted kings. There's no lord here, but an emperor, but the most just senator of all, through whom from the Stygian home there's brought back rustic Truth, with dry hair. Under this prince, if you're wise, beware, Rome, of speaking in your former words.

LXXIII A letter brought me the welcome pledge of an eloquent friend, the austere gift of an Ausonian toga, which not Fabricius, but Apicius would wish to wear, which Maecenas, Caesar's knight, would wish. This would have been cheaper to me, sent by another; not by whatever hand the victim is slain does it appease: sent by you it comes: could I not love your gift, Marcus, I could love my own name. But more than the gift and more welcome than the name itself is the kind service and judgment of a learned man.

LXXIV Now spare your weary congratulator, Rome, your weary client. How long, as a morning caller among forerunners and little toga'd men, shall I earn a hundred leaden coins the whole day, when Scorpus in a single hour carries off, victorious, fifteen heavy sacks of glowing gold? I'd not want, as the prize for my little books —for what do they earn?—the Apulian fields: neither Hybla nor the corn-bearing Nile takes me, nor the dainty grape that from the citadel of the Setine slope looks out on the Pomptine marshes. You ask, then, what I long for? To sleep.

LXXV Once Galla demanded twenty thousand from me, and, I confess, she wasn't too dear at the price. A year went by: "You'll give twice five thousand," she said. She seemed to me to ask more than before. Now, six months later, when she asked two thousand, I offered a thousand coins. She wouldn't take them. Two or perhaps three Kalends had passed: of her own accord she asked four gold pieces. I didn't give them. She bade me send a hundred coins: but even this sum seemed to me too heavy. A meagre dole of a hundred quadrantes joined us; this she wanted: I said it had been given to my boy. Could she go any lower? She did. Galla gives for free, gives of her own accord: I say no.

LXXVI Does this, Fortune, seem fair to you? A citizen not of Syria or Parthia, nor a knight from a Cappadocian platform, but a home-bred slave of the people of Remus and Numa, pleasant, honest, harmless—a friend, learned in both tongues, whose one fault, but a great one, is that he's a poet, Mevius shivers in a drab cowl, while the muleteer Incitatus shines in scarlet.

LXXVII Nothing was ever more wickedly done by Carus, Maximus, than that he died of a fever: it too committed a crime. The savage, harmful fever should at least have been a quartan! He ought to have been kept for his own doctor.

LXXVIII You'll go, Macer, to shore-set Salonae, and there will go rare loyalty and love of right and that office which, when it drags modesty along as companion, always returns the poorer: happy farmer of the gold-bearing land, you'll send your governor back with an empty purse and wish for delays, and as he departs the Dalmatian will follow him with wet-eyed joy. We'll make for the Celts, Macer, and the fierce Iberians with longing for you. But whatever page is brought from there, marked by the reed of the fishy Tagus, my page will name Macer: so let me be read among the old poets, and don't prefer to me many earlier ones, but let me be lesser to you than Catullus alone.

LXXIX Torquatus has a mansion at the fourth milestone; at the fourth milestone Otacilius bought a little farm. Torquatus built baths gleaming with varied marble; Otacilius made a cooking-pot. Torquatus laid out a laurel-grove on his land; Otacilius planted a hundred chestnut-trees. When Torquatus was consul, that one was a ward-master, and thought himself no less in so great an honour. As once a great ox burst a tiny frog, so, I think, will Torquatus burst Otacilius.

LXXX Eros weeps, whenever he eyes the cups of spotted murra or the slave-boys or the nobler citron-wood, and draws his groans from deep in his breast, because he can't, poor wretch, buy up the whole Saepta and carry it home. How many do what Eros does, but with dry eye! The greater part laughs at his tears and holds the same within.

LXXXI When two had come one morning to fuck Phyllis and each desired to take her naked first, Phyllis promised to give herself to both at once, and did: one lifted her foot, the other her tunic.

LXXXII If my distress adds anything to your affairs, in the morning or at midnight I'll wear the toga and bear the shrieking blasts of the unkind north wind and endure the storms and take the snow. But if you grow no richer by a single quadrans through my groans and freeborn torments, spare me, I pray, worn out, and let go these vain labours that profit you nothing and harm me, Gallus.

LXXXIII You gather your sparse hairs from here and there and cover the broad field of your gleaming bald head, Marinus, with the hair from your temples; but at the wind's bidding the disturbed locks return and restore themselves, and ring your bare head with great curls on this side and that: between Spendophorus and Telesphorus you'd think Cyda's Hermeros was standing. Won't you confess yourself an old man more simply, so you may at last seem to be a single person! Nothing is uglier than a bald man with hair.

LXXXIV You wonder why Afer doesn't go off to bed? You see, Caedicianus, the one he reclines with.

LXXXV Old Ladon now, a boatman of a Tiber barge, bought a farm near the waters he loved. And since wandering Tiber often pressed it with rushing waves and broke up the fields with its wintry flood, he filled with stones his discharged boat, which stood on the high bank, and set it against the shallows. So he turned aside the excessive waters. Who could believe it? The sunken boat brought aid to its master.

LXXXVI No one ever burned so inflamed with a new mistress as Laurus blazed with love of the ball. But he who was the prime player while his prime years flowered, now that he's ceased to play, is the prime ball.

LXXXVII Come, let pious Rome feel the October Kalends of eloquent Restitutus: with all your tongues favour him, and with your prayers; we keep his birthday—be silent, lawsuits. Away with the wax candle of the dried-up client, and let the empty triple tablets and brief napkins wait for the jests of icy December. Let the richer compete in gifts: Agrippa's swollen trader should bring cloaks made by Cadmus' townsmen; the man charged with brawls and a drunken night should send dinner-clothes to his advocate; the girl who has bested her slandered man should present true sardonyx, but herself hand it over; the old man who admires our forefathers should give an embossed work of Phidian chasing; the hunter a hare, the farmer a kid, the fisherman should bring the sea's spoils. If each sends what is his own, what do you think the poet will send you, Restitutus?

LXXXVIII You chase after all the praetors' little books, Cotta; you receive their wax tablets too. You're a dutiful man.

LXXXIX This Juno, Polyclitus, your labour and happy glory, which Phidian hands would long to have earned, shines with so great a face that on Ida she'd have surpassed the goddesses convicted with the judge in no doubt. Did not her brother love his own Juno, Polyclitus, the brother could love your Juno.

XC Why do you pluck your old cunt, Ligeia? Why stir up the ashes of your own tomb? Such elegance befits girls —for you can no longer even seem an old woman—; that, believe me, Ligeia, is a charming thing not for Hector's mother, but his wife. You're wrong, if you think this a cunt to which a cock has ceased to belong. So if you've any shame, Ligeia, don't pluck the beard of a dead lion.

XCI Almo has all eunuchs and can't get it up himself: and he complains that his Polla bears him nothing.

XCII Marrius, cultivator and companion of a quiet life, by whom old Atina boasts as her citizen, to you I commend these twin pines, the glory of the wild grove, and the holm-oaks of the Fauns, and the altars of the Thunderer and rough Silvanus raised by the half-skilled hand of the bailiff, which the blood of lamb or kid has often stained, and the maiden goddess, mistress of the holy shrine, and him you see as guest of his chaste sister, Mars, the patron of my Kalends, and the laurel grove of dainty Flora, into which she fled when Priapus pursued her. All this gentle divinity of my little farm, whether you appease it with blood or incense: "Wherever your Martial is," you'll say, "behold, with this right hand he sacrifices to you with me, an absent priest; count him present, and grant to both whatever either shall ask."

XCIII If you should first see, Clemens, the Euganean shores of Helicaon and the fields painted with vine-clad ridges, carry to Sabina of Ateste my poems, not yet made public, but lately dressed in the purple toga. As a rose delights, plucked by the first thumb, so a fresh page, not soiled by the chin, pleases.

XCIV No Massylian serpent guards my orchards, nor does the royal land of Alcinous serve me, but my Nomentan garden buds in safety with its tree, nor do the leaden apples fear a thief. So these apples, just now born in the middle Subura, I send—the waxen fruits of my autumn.

XCV Your husband sent back an infant to you, Galla, your lover too. These two, I think, plainly deny they've fucked you.

XCVI That I often speak too much of remote nations, Avitus, you wonder, made old in the Latian city, and that I thirst for gold-bearing Tagus and my native Salo and seek again the humble fields of a well-stocked cottage. That land pleases me, in which a small estate makes me blessed and slender means run to luxury: here the field is fed, there it feeds; here the hearth warms with a grudging fire, there it gleams with a mighty blaze; here hunger is costly and the market a bankrupter, there the table is laid with the riches of its own country; here four togas or more are worn through in a summer, there one covers me for four autumns. Go now, court patrons, when a place can provide you whatever a friend does not, Avitus.

XCVII While the light pyre is built of papyrus soon to burn, while my weeping wife buys myrrh and cassia, the grave now ready, now the bier, now the embalmer, Numa wrote me his heir: he got well.

XCVIII Though a servant adds my Caecuban, looser than an Idaean catamite, than whom no daughter reclines more elegant, no wife, no mother of yours, no sister, do you want me rather to gaze at your lamps or your old citron-wood and Indian tusks? But so you won't suspect me as I recline, provide from the herd and the squalid farmstead shaven, shaggy, raw, puny sons of a stinking swineherd for me. This jealousy will destroy you: you can't, Publius, have these manners and these servants both.

XCIX If these were the Roman features of Socrates, they'd have been such as Julius Rufus has in his Satires.

C Why, fool, do you mix your verses with mine? What have you to do, wretch, with a book that's at war with you? Why do you seek to herd foxes with lions and make owls like to eagles? Though you had one of Ladas' feet, you'd run in vain, idiot, with a wooden leg.

CI If perchance old Gabba, released and sent back from the Elysian field, happy in his own Caesar, who'd have heard Capitolinus and Gabba jesting together, will return and say: "Hold your tongue, country Gabba."

CII By what method, you ask, was Philinus made a father, who never fucked? Let Gaditanus tell you that, Avitus, who writes nothing and yet is a poet.

CIII Townsmen, whom Augustan Bilbilis on its steep mountain bore me, girt by Salo's rushing waters, does the glad glory of your bard please you at all? For I am your honour and name and fame, nor does Verona owe more to its slender Catullus, and she'd be willing for me to be called no less her own. A thirtieth summer has been added to four harvests, since without me you give country cakes to Ceres, while I dwell in the loveliest walls of mistress Rome: the Italian realms have changed my hair. If you welcome my return with a calm mind, I come; if you bear harsh hearts, I'm free to go back.

CIV Go, my little book, go as companion to our Flavus on the long sea—but of a favouring wave—, and with easy course and your own winds make for the citadels of Spanish Tarraco: from there a wheel will lift you, and swiftly carried you'll see, perhaps in the fifth carriage, high Bilbilis and your own Salo. What do I charge you with, you ask? That you greet my few comrades, but old ones, and seen by me before thirty and four winters, at once, straight from the road, and remind our Flavus now and then to procure me a pleasant, not laborious retreat at a wholesome price, to make your parent lazy. That's all. Now the swollen master calls and chides the delays, and a better breeze has opened the harbour: farewell, little book: a ship, you know, I think, waits for no single passenger.