I ask nothing more save that you would render these donations lasting to me. If I have neither made my estate larger by bad means, nor am in a way to make it less by vice or misconduct; if I do not foolishly make any petition of this sort—“Oh that that neighboring angle, which now spoils the; regularity[1] of my field, could be added! Oh that some accident would discover to me an urn [full] of money! as it did to him, who having found a treasure, bought that very ground he before tilled in the capacity of an hired servant, enriched by Hercules’ being his friend;” if what I have at present satisfies me grateful, I supplicate you with this prayer: make my cattle fat for the use of their master, and every thing else, except my genius:[2] and, as you are wont, be present as my chief guardian. Wherefore, when I have removed myself from the city to the mountains and my castle,[3] (what can I polish, preferably to my satires and prosaic muse?[4]) neither evil ambition destroys me, nor the heavy[5] south wind, nor the sickly autumn, the gain of baleful Libitina.
Father of the morning,[6] or Janus, if with more pleasure
- ↑ Denormat. We do not find this word in any other author.
- ↑ Et cætera præter ingenium. The Latins, in speaking of style, have expressions not unlike this, "pingue et adipatum dicendi genus; poetæ pinguæ quiddam sonantes." This playing on the double meaning of the word is much in our author's manner. Besides, Mercury was a good-humored god, who understood raillery, "de Dis non tristibus." Yet, for fear the deity should understand the word cætera in its full extent, and without any exception, the petitioner pleasantly guards against the fatness of his understanding. San.
- ↑ In arcem. He considers his country-house as a citadel inaccessible to the cares that besieged him at Rome. San.
- ↑ Musáque pedestri. The muse of satire, if such an expression may be allowed, is a muse on foot. She borrowed nothing from poetry but the measures of her verses, the only particular in which she differs from prose. San.
- ↑ Plumbeus. This epithet very well expresses the weight of air in autumn, when the south wind was usually attended at Rome with pestilential disorders. Our poet's country-house was covered by mountains, in such a manner, that he had nothing to fear from its bad effects. San.
- ↑ Matutine pater, The satire properly begins here, and all before this line is a kind of preface. Janus presided over time, and therefore Horace calls him god of the morning, as if time seemed to be renewed every morning. Dac.
whence, as Dacier observes, the poet recommends the preservation of his cattle to him, in the fourteenth verse. Ed. Dubl.
