Book 12
Imperial Marcus Valerius Martialis Latinpr. Valerius Martialis to his friend Priscus, greetings.
I know I owe a defence for three years of most obstinate idleness; for which idleness there would be no excuse even amid those urban occupations by which we more easily achieve the look of being a nuisance rather than dutiful—much less in this provincial solitude, where, unless we even study to excess, I have withdrawn both without solace and without excuse. So receive my account. In which this is the chief and first point, that I miss the ears of the city, to which I had grown accustomed, and seem to myself to be pleading in a foreign court; for if there is anything that pleases in my little books, it was the audience that dictated it: that subtlety of judgment, that genius for subject-matter, the libraries, the theatres, the gatherings, in which pleasure does not feel itself to be study—in short, all those things which, grown soft, I left behind, I now miss as though abandoned. To this is added the rust of small-town teeth, and ill-will in the seat of judgment, and one or two malicious men—in a tiny place, a great many; against which it is hard to keep a good temper day by day: so do not wonder that what used to be done by an eager spirit is now cast off by an indignant one. Yet, lest I deny anything to you, both arriving from the city and demanding it—to whom I am ungrateful if I render only what I can—I have commanded myself to do what I used to indulge in, and have studied for very few days, so that I might receive your most intimate ears with their welcoming-gift. I should like you not to grudge the trouble of carefully weighing and sifting these things, which are at risk only with you; and—what is most difficult for you—of judging my trifles with elegance set aside, lest, if you so decide, we send to Rome not a Spanish-style book, but a Spaniard.
I While the nets are idle and the baying Molossian hounds, and the wood is quiet, no boar found, you can give your leisure, Priscus, to a brief little book. The hour is not a summer one, nor is the whole of it lost on you.
II You who lately used to be sent from the City to the nations, now, hurrah, you'll go a foreigner to Rome, my book, from the race of gold-bearing Tagus and grim Salo, the native rivers which my mighty land gives me. Yet you'll be no stranger, nor can you now be called a newcomer, you, whose brothers the high house of Remus holds in such number. By your own right, seek the venerable threshold of the new temple, where the halls are given back to the Pierian choir. Or, if you prefer, you'll walk to the head of the Subura; there are the high halls of my consul: eloquent Stella dwells in his laurel-crowned home, bright Stella, thirster after the Hyantean water; there a Castalian spring is proud with its glassy torrent, whence the nine mistresses are said often to have drunk: he will give you to people and senators and knights to read, and will read you through himself with not too dry cheeks. Why ask for a title? Let two or three verses be read, and all, my book, will cry that you are mine.
III What Maecenas, a knight sprung from royal forefathers, was to Flaccus and Varius and supreme Maro, that, Priscus Terentius, garrulous fame and the aged page will say you were to me among the nations and the peoples. You make my genius, you, if I seem to have any power; you give me the right to a freeborn idleness. Bravo for your spirit, which few have, and for your character, such as Numa, such as a cheerful Cato might have. To be generous, to bestow, to enlarge a slender estate, and to give what the easy gods scarcely granted, is now allowed and lawful. But you under a harsh prince and in evil times dared to be good.
IV The longer labour of my eleventh and tenth little book has been compressed and pared into a short work. Let the idle read more, those to whom you gave safe leisure: read these, Caesar; perhaps you'll read those too.
V You poems, who lately were going to shore-set Pyrgi, go now by the sacred way—no longer dusty. The mildest of the nobles of the Ausonian court has come, Nerva: now one may enjoy all of Helicon: upright honour, cheerful clemency, cautious power return now; the long fears have turned their backs. This, pious Rome, your peoples and nations pray: may such a leader always be yours, and this one for long.
VII As many hairs as she bears on the whole of her head, if Ligeia has so many years, she's three years old.
VIII Rome, goddess of lands and nations, to whom nothing is equal and nothing second, when, lately glad, she was counting up the years to come of Trajan over so many ages, and saw in so great a leader a soldier brave and young and warlike, she said, glorious in such a guardian: "Nobles of the Parthians and leaders of the Seres, Thracians, Sauromatae, Getae, Britons, I can show you a Caesar; come."
IX Palma governs our Iberians, mildest Caesar, and a foreign peace enjoys the gentle yoke. So we render glad thanks for so great a gift: you have sent your own ways into our regions.
X Africanus has a hundred million, yet he hunts legacies. Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none.
XI Give greetings, Muse, to your Parthenius and mine: for who drinks more freely from the Aonian stream? Whose lyre comes brighter from the Pimpleian cave? Whom does Phoebus love more of the Pierian flock? And if perhaps—but this is scarcely to be hoped—he has leisure, ask him to hand our poems to the leader himself, and only to commend the timid and brief little book with four words: "Your Rome reads this man."
XII You promise everything when you've drunk all night; in the morning you provide nothing. Pollio, drink in the morning.
XIII The rich have a kind of profit, Auctus, in their anger: to hate costs less than to give.
XIV Use the runaway horse more sparingly, I warn you, Priscus, and don't go so violently after hares. Often the hunter has paid the price to his quarry, and fallen shaken from his fierce horse, never to return. The plain too has its traps: though there be neither ditch nor mound nor rocks, level ground is wont to deceive. There'll be no lack of one to give you such spectacles, but let him fall by a less envied fate. If spirited dangers delight you, let's lie in wait for Tuscan boars—that valour is safer. What good to you are reckless reins? More often, Priscus, it's been given to them to break a rider than a hare.
XV Whatever was gleaming in the Parrhasian hall has been given to our eyes and our gods. Jupiter marvels at the Scythian flames of green gold, and is amazed at the proud king's luxuries and weighty playthings: these are the cups that befit the Thunderer, these are they that befit the Phrygian servant. We are all now blessed, together with Jove; but lately—it shames me, ah, it shames me to confess— we were all poor, together with Jove.
XVI You sold, Labienus, three little fields; you bought, Labienus, three catamites: you bugger, Labienus, three little fields.
XVII Why your fever won't leave you, Laetinus, for so many days, you ask, and keep groaning. It's carried about with you and bathes with you alike; it dines on mushrooms, oysters, sow's udder, boar; it often gets drunk on Setine and often on Falernian, and drinks no Caecuban except through snow-cooled water; it reclines wreathed in roses and dark with balsam, it sleeps on down and a purple couch. Since it reclines so handsomely, since it lives so well at your house, do you want your fever to go to Dama instead?
XVIII While you, Juvenal, perhaps wander restless in the clamorous Subura, or tread the hill of mistress Diana; while across the thresholds of the more powerful your sweat-soaked toga fans you, and the greater and lesser Caelian wear you out as you roam: me, after many Decembers come round again, my Bilbilis, proud of its gold and iron, has received and made a countryman. Here lazily I cultivate, by sweet labour, Boterdum and Platea—these are the rougher names of Celtiberian lands—: I enjoy a vast and shameless sleep, which often not even the third hour breaks, and now I pay myself back in full for whatever I had stayed awake through three times ten years. The toga is unknown, but at my request the nearest garment from a broken chair is given. When I rise, the hearth receives me, proud with a heap from the neighbouring oak-wood, which the bailiff's wife crowns with many a pot. The hunter follows, but the kind you'd wish to have with you in a secret wood; the smooth bailiff doles out tasks to the boys and asks to lay aside his long hair. So I love to live, so I love to die.
XIX In the baths Aemilius takes lettuce, eggs, mackerel, and denies that he dines at home.
XX Why Themison hasn't a wife, Fabullus, you ask? He has a sister.
XXI Who would think you, Marcella, a townswoman of grim Salo and born in our regions? So rare, so sweet is your wit. The Palatine will say, if it has heard you even once, that you're its own; no girl born in the heart of the Subura will rival you, nor a nursling of the Capitoline hill; nor will the glory of a foreign-born child soon arise more fit to be a Roman bride. You bid my longing for the mistress city be gentler: you alone make Rome for me.
XXII How unbecomingly one-eyed Philaenis is, do you want me to tell you briefly, Fabullus? Philaenis would be more becoming blind.
XXIII Teeth and hair—and you're not ashamed—you use, all bought. What will you do for an eye, Laelia? That's not for sale.
XXIV O pleasant solitude of my carriage, a gift more welcome to me than coach or chariot, gift of eloquent Aelianus! Here you may, here, Iuvatus, speak whatever comes to your mouth: no black driver of a Libyan horse, no girt-up runner goes ahead; nowhere is there a muleteer: the ponies will keep silent. O if Avitus were here to share it, I'd not fear a third ear. How well the whole day would pass like this!
XXV When I ask you for money without a pledge, "I have none," you say; yet, if my little field stands surety for me, you have it: what you won't trust me with, Telesinus, your old comrade, you trust to my cabbages and trees. Look, Carus has charged you as defendant: let my little field attend. You seek a companion for exile: let my little field go.
XXVI You say you've been fucked by robbers, Saenia: but the robbers deny it.
XXVII I drink two ounces, you drink eleven, Cinna: and you complain that we don't drink the same, Cinna?
XXVIII Hermogenes is as great a thief of napkins as Massa, I think, scarcely was of money; though you watch his right hand and hold his left, he'll find a way to make off with your napkin: so the stag's breath sucks up the cold snake, so Iris draws up the waters that will fall from on high. Lately when discharge was sought for wounded Myrinus, Hermogenes filched four napkins; when the praetor wished to drop the chalk-white napkin, Hermogenes stole the praetor's napkin. No one had brought a napkin, while thefts were feared: Hermogenes stole the cloth from the table. And if even this is lacking, Hermogenes is not afraid to strip the middle of the couches and the feet of the tables. Though the spectacles glow with no small sun, the awnings are drawn back when Hermogenes comes. The anxious sailors hasten to furl their canvas, whenever Hermogenes appears at the harbour. The bald linen-clad priests flee, and the rattle-bearing throng, when Hermogenes has stood among the worshippers. Hermogenes never brought a napkin to dinner, from dinner Hermogenes always carried one home.
XXIX Since you, a senator, tread sixty thresholds in the morning, I seem to you an idle knight, because I don't run about the city from first light and carry home, weary, a thousand kisses. But you do it to give new names to the purple calendar or to seek the lands of the Nomads or the Cappadocians: but for me, whom you force to break off my sleep in the middle and to bear and endure the morning mud, what's to be gained? When my straying foot comes out of broken leather and a sudden shower of thick water falls, and the home-born slave, called for, doesn't come with my stolen cloak, a servant comes up to my chilled ear and says, "Laetorius asks you to dine with him." For twenty coins? Not I: I'd rather go hungry, than that dinner be my wages while a province is yours, and we do the same and not earn the same.
XXX Aper is dry, sober; what's that to me? That's how I praise a slave, not a friend.
XXXI This grove, these springs, this woven shade of trailing vine-shoots, this channelled stream of running water, and the meadows and the rose-beds not to yield to twice-bearing Paestum, and the herb that's green in January's month and doesn't freeze, and the tame eel that swims in enclosed waters, and the white tower that holds birds of the same hue, are the gifts of my mistress: when I returned after seven lustres, Marcella gave me this home and these little realms. If Nausicaa would grant me her father's gardens, I could say to Alcinous, "I prefer my own."
XXXII O disgrace of the Julian Kalends, I saw, Vacerra, your baggage, I saw it; which, not held back for two years' rent, your red-haired wife carried, with her seven locks, and your white-haired mother with your huge sister. I thought they were Furies risen from the night of Dis. You followed these ahead, dry with cold and hunger, and paler than aged boxwood, the Irus of your times. You'd think the Arician slope was on the move. A three-legged cot went along and a two-legged table, and with a lantern and an earthenware bowl a chamber-pot was pissing through its broken side; the neck of an amphora lay under a greening brazier; that there'd been sprats or worthless mackerel the shameless smell of the jar confessed, such as scarce comes from a sea-water tank. Nor was a square of Toulouse cheese lacking, nor a four-year-old wreath of black pennyroyal and bald ropes with garlic and onions, nor your mother's pot full of vile resin, with which the Summemmian wives are stripped of hair. Why do you seek a house and mock the bailiffs, when you could, Vacerra, live free of charge? This parade of baggage belongs on the bridge.
XXXIII To buy boys Labienus sold his gardens. Now Labienus has nothing but a fig-grove.
XXXIV Thirty-four harvests I have spent with you, Julius, if I remember rightly. Of these the sweets are mixed with the bitter, but still the pleasant were the more; and if every pebble, this way and that, distinct and two-coloured, were sorted out, the white throng would beat the blacker. If you'd avoid certain bitter things and guard against sad bites of the heart, make yourself too close a comrade to no one: you'll rejoice less and you'll grieve less.
XXXV As though you lived openly with me, Callistratus, you're often used to tell me you've been buggered. You're not so candid, Callistratus, as you want to be believed. For whoever tells such things keeps more untold.
XXXVI Four pounds of silver, or two, to a friend, and a toga for the cold and a short cloak, and now and then gold pieces clinking in the hand, enough to last two Kalends— because no one but you, Labullus, gives these, you're not, believe me, a good man. What then? To speak the truth, you're the best of the bad. Give me back the Pisos and Senecas and Memmiuses and Crispuses, but the earlier ones: you'll become at once the last of the good. Do you want to glory in running, in your feet? Beat Tigris and swift Passerinus: there's no glory in outrunning little donkeys.
XXXVII You long too much to seem a man of sharp nose. I want a man of nose, not one all polyps.
XXXVIII This man, who paces day and night among the women's chairs, too well known in the whole city, gleaming of hair, dark with ointment, glistening with purple, soft of face, broad of chest, smooth of leg, who, a shameless companion, often clings to your wife— there's no reason to fear him, Candidus: he doesn't fuck.
XXXIX I hate you, Sabellus, because you're pretty. A pretty fellow is a rancid thing—and a Sabellus. In short, I'd rather have a war than a Sabellus. May you waste away, pretty Sabellus!
XL You lie, I believe it: you recite bad poems, I praise them: you sing, I sing: you drink, Pontilianus, I drink: you fart, I pretend not to notice: you want to play at dice, I'm beaten: there's one thing you do without me, and I keep silent. Yet you provide me nothing at all. "When I'm dead," you say, "I'll treat you well." I want nothing: but die.
XLI It's not enough, Tucca, that you're a glutton: you want both to be called one and to seem one.
XLII Bearded Callistratus was married to rugged Afer, on the same terms a virgin is wont to wed a man. Torches blazed before them, bridal veils covered their faces, nor were your words, Talassus, lacking to you. A dowry too was named. Does this not yet seem to you, Rome, enough? Are you waiting for him to give birth as well?
XLIII You read me eloquent verses on lewd matters, Sabellus, all too many, such as neither the girls of Didymus know nor the wanton little books of Elephantis. There are in them new figures of love, such as a desperate fornicator might dare, what the catamites perform and keep silent, in what entanglement five are coupled, by what chain more are held together, what is allowed when the lamp is put out. It wasn't worth so much, your being eloquent.
XLIV Unicus, you who bear a name joined to me by kindred blood, and whose heart is near to mine in pursuits; since you make poems yielding only to your brother, you're no less in talent, but first in family love. Lesbia could love you, with witty Catullus, coaxing Corinna could follow you, after Naso. Nor would the west winds fail, if it pleased you to set sail; but you love the shore. This too you have of your brother's.
XLV You who cover with a goatskin the temples and crown of your bare, bald head, he spoke wittily to you, Phoebus, who said your skull was shod.
XLVI Difficult and easy, pleasant and bitter, you're the same: I can't live with you, nor without you.
XLVII Gallus and Lupercus sell their poems. Now deny, Classicus, that poets are sane.
XLVIII If you set out mushrooms and boar as though they were cheap things and you think these aren't what I pray for, I'm willing: but if you believe I'm made fortunate by them and want me written down as heir for five Lucrine oysters, farewell. The dinner's elegant, I admit, most elegant, but tomorrow it'll be nothing—nay, today, nay, at once—nothing, which the wretched sponge of a condemned mop may know, or any dog and the broken pot beside the road: this is the end of mullets and hares and sow's udder, the sulphurous colour and the executioner feet. Not the Alban revel would be worth so much to me, nor the Capitoline banquets and those of the pontiffs; let a god himself charge me with nectar, it'll turn to vinegar and the treacherous flat wine of a Vatican cask. Seek other guests, master of banquets, whom the proud realms of your table may take: let my own friend invite me to hasty cutlets: this dinner, which I can return, pleases me.
XLIX Linus, tutor of the long-haired throng, whom rich Postumilla calls the master of her affairs and to whom she entrusts her gems, her gold, her wines, her concubines: so may your patroness, proved by your unending loyalty, prefer you to all others: come, I pray, to the aid of my wretched madness and guard now and then carelessly those who badly scorch my heart, whom both by night and by day I long, in my desire, to see in my embrace, the lovely, snow-white, matched, twin, big ones—not boys, but pearls.
L You have laurel-groves and plane-groves and airy pine-groves and baths for more than one, all to yourself, and a high portico stands for you on a hundred columns, and the onyx gleams, trodden under your foot, and the fleeing hoof claps the dusty hippodrome, and the splash of falling water sounds everywhere; long halls stand open. But there's nowhere a place for diners or for sleep. How well you don't live!
LI That our Fabullinus is so often deceived, do you wonder, Aulus? A good man is always a novice.
LII Wont to wreathe his brows with the Pierian garland, no less a voice celebrated by trembling defendants, here he lies, here that Rufus of yours, Sempronia, whose very ash burns with love of you. You're told as a sweet tale in the Elysian field, and Tyndareus' daughter herself is amazed at your abduction: you're the better, who came back when your ravisher was deserted, while she refused to follow her husband even when sought back. Menelaus laughs and hears of the Trojan loves: your abduction absolves Phrygian Paris. When one day the glad places of the pious receive you, no shade in the Stygian home will be better known: Proserpina does not see the abducted as strangers, but loves them: that love will win you the favour of the mistress.
LIII Though you have so much money and wealth, Paternus, as a rare citizen has, you give away nothing and brood over your hoard, like the great serpent the poets sing was the guardian of the Scythian grove. But the cause, as you yourself recall and boast, is that you're the son of dire rapacity. Do you really seek out fools and simpletons, to mock and to rob of their wits? To this vice you have always been a father.
LIV Red of hair, black of face, short of foot, weak of eye, you do a great thing, Zoilus, if you're good.
LV Whoever bids you give yourselves for free, girls, is the most tasteless and most shameless of men. Don't give for free, but kiss for free. This Aegle refuses, this, greedy, she sells. But let her sell: to kiss well, how great a thing it is! Yet she sells this too, and at no light plunder: either she demands a pound of Cosmian perfume, or eight new pieces from the fresh mint, so the kisses won't be mute, won't be stingy, won't deny entry with closed lips. Yet she does one thing kindly, just one: she who refuses to give a kiss for free doesn't refuse to lick for free, Aegle.
LVI You fall ill ten times a year or oftener, and this harms not you but us, Polycharmus: for every time you get up, you ask your friends for recovery-gifts. Have some shame: now, Polycharmus, fall ill just once.
LVII Why I often make for the little fields of dry Nomentum and the squalid home of my villa, you ask? There's no place, Sparsus, for a poor man to think or to rest in the city. The schoolmasters deny him life in the morning, the bakers at night, the coppersmiths' hammers all day long; here the idle money-changer rattles his dirty table with a heap of Nero's coin, there the beater of Spanish gold-dust beats the worn stone with his gleaming club; nor does the god-frenzied throng of Bellona cease, nor the babbling shipwrecked man with his bandaged stump, nor the Jew taught by his mother to beg, nor the bleary-eyed hawker of sulphur-wares. Who can count up the losses of lazy sleep? He'll tell how many bronze pans the hands of the city beat, when the cut Moon is flogged by the Colchian wheel. You, Sparsus, know nothing of this, nor can you know, luxurious in your Petilian realms, where your level house looks down on the mountain-tops, and there's countryside in the city, and a Roman vine-dresser, and no greater vintage on the Falernian hill, and within your boundary a wide drive for the chariot, and sleep in the depths, and quiet broken by no tongues, and no daylight unless let in. Us the laughter of the passing crowd wakes, and Rome is at our bedside. When, worn out with weariness, it pleases us to sleep, we go to the villa.
LVIII Your wife calls you a chaser of maids, and she herself is a chaser of litter-bearers: you're a matched pair, Alauda.
LIX Rome gives you so many kisses, returned just now after fifteen years, as Lesbia did not give Catullus. The whole neighbourhood presses you, the hairy farmer with his goatish kiss; here the weaver besets you, there the fuller, here the cobbler who's just kissed his leather, here the master of a dangerous chin, here the lame man on his right side, there the bleary-eyed, and the cocksucker and the fresh cunt-licker. Now it wasn't worth so much for you to return.
LX Day, child of Mars, on which we first saw the rosy lamp and the great face of the starry god, if you'll be ashamed to be honoured in the country and at green altars, you who used to be honoured by me in the Latian city: forgive me that I don't want to be a slave on my own Kalends, and that I want to live on the day I was born. To grow pale on one's own birthday, lest the hot water fail for Sabellus; and that Alauda may drink clear unmixed wine, to strain the muddy Caecuban through an anxious bag; and to go to and fro among one's own tables; to receive these and those, and rise the whole dinner long, treading marble colder than ice: what sense is it to endure and suffer of one's own accord what you'd refuse if a king and master bade you do it?
LXI That I'd make verses and a brief, lively poem against you, you fear, Ligurra, and you long to seem worthy of this fear. But you fear in vain and long in vain. Libyan lions rush upon bulls, they're no trouble to butterflies. I'd advise you to seek, if you toil to be read, some drunken poet of a dark archway, who writes with rough charcoal and crumbling chalk poems that men read while shitting. This brow of yours is not to be branded with my mark.
LXII Great king of the ancient pole and of the former world, under whom there was sluggish rest and no toil at all, no lightning too regal nor men worthy of the lightning, no earth split open to the Shades, but rich for itself: glad and gracious, come to these solemn joys of Priscus: it befits you to be present at your own rites. You, best father, give back to his homeland, in the sixth winter, peace-making Numa, returned from the Latian city. Do you see how, like an Ausonian market, the procession hangs for you, and how great an honour runs riot? How no stinting hand and the coins of a lavish table, what wealth, Saturn, is counted out for you? And that there may be a reward for these deserts and greater thanks, both a father and a frugal man thus honours your rites. But you, holy one—so may you ever be loved in your December— bid these days often return for him.
LXIII Corduba, richer than oil-rich Venafrum, no less perfect than the Istrian jar, you who surpass the sheep of white Galaesus, false by no purple dye nor blood, but with your flocks tinted in living colour: tell your poet, I beg, to have some shame, and not recite my little books for free. I'd bear it, if a good poet did it, to whom I could give pains in return. A celibate corrupts without retaliation, a blind man can't lose what he carries off: nothing is worse than a naked robber: nothing is safer than a bad poet.
LXIV A cook who outdid his servants in face and hair, Cinna made him. Cinna, you're a gluttonous man.
LXV When beautiful Phyllis had given herself to me all night, lavish in every way, and in the morning I was thinking what gift to give, whether a pound of Cosmus or of Niceros, or a sharp weight of Baetic wool, or ten yellow pieces from Caesar's mint: embracing my neck and coaxing me with a kiss as long as the marriages of doves, Phyllis began to ask for a jar of wine.
LXVI You bought your house for a hundred thousand, which you want to sell for that sum or even less. But with sly art you corrupt the buyer, Amoenus, and the hovel lies hidden, ambitious with riches. Jewelled couches gleam with prime tortoise-shell, and rare slabs of Moorish citron-wood; silver and gold a more-than-simple Delphic table bears; boys stand there, whom I'd pray were my own masters. Then you sound out two hundred thousand, and say it's not for less. You sell a furnished house cheap, Amoenus.
LXVII You, the May Ides, gave birth to Mercury, on the August Ides Diana returns, the October Ides Maro consecrated. May you often keep the Ides, both these and those, you who celebrate the Ides of great Maro.
LXVIII Morning client, the reason I left the city, if you're wise, you'd court ambitious halls. I'm no advocate, nor fit for bitter lawsuits, but lazy and older and a companion of the Muses; leisure and sleep delight me, which great Rome denied me: I'll go back, if there's no rest here either.
LXIX Just as with your tablets and goblets, Paulus, you hold all your friends to be original masterpieces.
LXX When the bandy-legged home-bred slave was lately carrying towels for Aper, and the one-eyed old woman sat over his little toga, and the ruptured rubber gave him a drop of oil, he was a grim and harsh censor of the soused: he kept shouting that the cups should be smashed and the Falernian poured out, that a knight had just drunk after bathing. But after three hundred thousand came from his old uncle, he doesn't know how to go home sober from the baths. O how much carved cups and five long-haired boys can do! Then, when he was poor, Aper wasn't thirsty.
LXXI You deny me nothing, Lygdus, when I ask: yet once, Lygdus, you denied me nothing.
LXXII Having bought acres of a little field hidden near the tombs and the propped-up roof of a badly-built hovel, you abandon, Pannychus, your urban lawsuits, your estate, and the small but sure rewards of a worn toga. Grain, millet, barley-gruel and beans you used to sell as a man of business; now you buy them as a farmer.
LXXIII You say I'm your heir, Catullus. I won't believe it, Catullus, until I've read it.
LXXIV While a Nile-borne convoy brings you crystal, take cups from the Flaminian Circus. Are these more daring, or those who send such gifts? But there's a use in cheap glassware: these embossed pieces, Flaccus, tempt no thief, and aren't spoiled by too hot water. What of it, that the guest drinks while his servant's at ease, and the trembling hands haven't feared a mishap? This too is something, that you'll toast in these, if a cup, Flaccus, must be broken by you.
LXXV Polytimus hastens to the girls; unwilling, Hypnus confesses himself a boy; Secundus has buttocks fed on acorns; Dindymus is soft, but doesn't want to be; Amphion could have been born a girl. The charms and the pride of these and their querulous airs, Avitus, I'd rather have than five times two hundred thousand as a dowry.
LXXVI A jar is given for twenty coins, a peck for four pieces of bronze. Drunk and bloated, the farmer has nothing.
LXXVII While he greeted Jove with many prayers, standing bent back right up onto his tiptoes, Aethon farted in the Capitol. Men laughed, but the father of the gods himself, offended, punished his client with a three-night dine-at-home sentence. After this disgrace, poor little Aethon, when he wants to come to the Capitol, first seeks out the Paterclian privies and farts ten and twenty times. But although he's taken care by his cracking, with clenched buttocks he greets Jove.
LXXVIII I've written nothing against you, Bithynicus. You won't believe it and bid me swear an oath? I'd rather give satisfaction.
LXXIX I gave you many things you asked for; I gave you more things than you asked for: yet you don't stop asking me always. Whoever denies nothing, Atticilla, sucks.
LXXX So as not to praise the deserving, Callistratus praises everyone. He for whom no one is bad, how can anyone be good?
LXXXI On winter days and the holidays of Saturn, poor Umber used to send me a little cloak; now he sends me spelt-gruel: for he's become rich.
LXXXII There's no escaping Menogenes in the baths and around the bathhouse, however you may wish to, by every art. He'll catch the warm ball with right hand and left, so as to charge you often with the catches he made. He'll gather and bring back the slack bladder from the dust, and, even if he's already bathed, even if already in slippers. If you take up your towels, he'll say they're whiter than snow, though they be filthier than a baby's bib. As you comb your scanty hairs with the cut comb, he'll say you've arranged the locks of Achilles. He'll himself bring you a swig from the dregs of a smoky flagon, and keep gathering the sweat of your brow. He'll praise everything, marvel at everything, until, having endured a thousand vexations, you say, "Come!"
LXXXIII Fabianus, the mocker of ruptures, whom all balls lately feared as he spoke against swollen hydroceles, more than two Catos could say, suddenly in the Neronian baths saw himself, poor wretch, and began to keep silent.
LXXXIV I'd not wanted, Polytimus, to violate your hair, but I'm glad to have granted this to your prayers. Such were you, lately shorn Pelops, and you gleamed with your locks laid aside, that the bride could see all the ivory.
LXXXV You say buggerers' mouths smell. If this is true, Fabullus, as you say: what do you think cunt-lickers' mouths smell of?
LXXXVI You have thirty boys and as many girls: you have one prick, and it won't stand. What will you do?
LXXXVII Cotta, having complained twice that he'd lost his slippers, while he brings a careless home-born slave to his feet, the only one to attend the poor man and make a crowd, devised—a shrewd and cunning man— a way not to suffer such a loss more often: he began to go to dinner unshod.
LXXXVIII Tongilianus has a nose: I know it, I don't deny it. But now Tongilianus has nothing but a nose.
LXXXIX That you bind your head with wool, Charinus, it's not your ears that ache, but your hair.
XC Maro made a vow for a sick friend—but loudly— who had a heavy and burning semi-tertian fever, that, if the sick man were not sent to the Stygian shades, a welcome victim should fall to great Jove. The doctors began to promise certain recovery. Now Maro makes vows, so as not to pay his vow.
XCI Since you share a bed with your husband, Magulla, and share a catamite too, why, tell me, do you not share a servant as well? You sigh; the reason is, you fear the wine-jar.
XCII You often ask, Priscus, what sort I'll be, if I become wealthy and suddenly grow powerful. Do you think anyone can describe his future character? Tell me, if you became a lion, what sort would you be?
XCIII By what method she could kiss her lover in her husband's presence, Fabulla found out. She keeps kissing a little fool: him, drenched with many kisses, the lover snatches at once, and, filled up with his own, sends back straightway to the laughing lady. How much greater a fool is the husband!
XCIV I was writing epic; you began to write: I gave way, lest my poems should stand as rivals to yours. My Thalia transferred herself to the tragic buskins: you too fitted the long train to yourself. I moved the strings of the lyre, refined by Calabrian Muses: ambitious one, you snatch the new quills from me. I venture satires: you labour to be a Lucilius. I play at light elegies: you play at the same too. What could be less? I began to fashion epigrams: hence too my palm is now sought by you. Choose what you don't want—for what shame is it to want everything?— and if there's anything you don't want, Tucca, leave it to me.
XCV The most pathic little books of Mussetius, which rival the Sybaritic little books, and the pages dipped in itching salt, read, Instantius Rufus; but let your girl be with you, lest you sing the wedding-song with lustful hands and become a husband without a woman.
XCVI Since your husband's life and fidelity are known to you, and no woman oppresses or troubles your bed, why, foolish one, are you tormented, as if by rivals, over the servants, in whom love is both brief and fleeting? I'll prove the boys serve you more than their master: they make it so that you're your husband's only woman; they give what you, his wife, don't want to give. "Yet I do give it," you say, "lest my husband's wandering love should stray from our bed." It's not the same thing: I want a Chian fig, I don't want a marisca: in case you doubt which is the Chian, yours is the marisca. A matron and a wife ought to know her own limits: yield their own part to the boys, use your own part.
XCVII Though you have a wife such as a shameless husband could scarcely ask for in his prayers, rich, noble, learned, chaste, you burst your flank, Bassus, but on long-haired boys, whom you got with your wife's dowry. And so the prick, bought back for many thousands, returns to its mistress and goes limp; nor, roused by coaxing words, nor begged with a soft thumb, does it rise. Have some shame at last, or let's go to court. This isn't yours, Bassus: you sold it.
XCVIII Baetis, your hair wreathed with an olive-bearing garland, you who dye golden fleeces in your gleaming waters; whom Bromius loves, whom Pallas loves; for whom Albula, ruler of the waters, spreads a ship-bearing path through the straits: with glad omens may Instantius enter your shores, and may this year, as the last, go well for the peoples here. He's not unaware what a burden it is to follow Macer: he who measures his own weight can bear it.