have disquieted the Romans, from that time when the blood of the innocent Remus, to be expiated by his descendants, was spilled upon the earth.
ODE VIII.
UPON A WANTON OLD WOMAN.
Can you, grown rank with lengthened age, ask what unnerves my vigor? When your teeth are black, and old age withers your brow with wrinkles: and your back sinks between your staring hip-bones, like that of an unhealthy cow. But, forsooth! your breast and your fallen chest, full well resembling a broken-backed horse, provoke me; and a body flabby, and feeble knees supported by swollen legs. May you be happy: and may triumphal statues adorn your funeral procession; and may no matron appear in public abounding with richer pearls. What follows, because the Stoic treatises[1] sometimes love to be on silken pillows? Are unlearned constitutions the less robust? Or are their limbs less stout? But for you to raise an appetite, in a stomach that is nice, it is necessary that you exert every art of language.
ODE IX.
TO MÆCENAS.[2]
When, O happy Mæcenas, shall I, overjoyed at Cæsar’s being victorious, drink with you under the stately dome (for so it pleases Jove) the Cæcuban reserved for festal entertainments, while the lyre plays a tune, accompanied with flutes, that in the Doric, these in the Phrygian measure? As lately,
- ↑ "It was a common custom to place such books on the pillows, that, when the favored one came, the lady might pretend that philosophy, not pleasure, was the object of her attention." Schol.
- ↑ The date of this piece can not be disputed, since the battle of Actium, which is the subject of it, was fought on the 12th of September, 723. San.
