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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 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.

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ODE IX.

To Maecenas.

When, O happy Maecenas, shall I, overjoyed at Caesar’s being victorious, drink with you under the stately dome (for so it pleases Jove) the Caecuban reserved for festal entertainments, while the lyre plays a tune, accompanied with flutes, that in the Doric, these in the Phrygian measure?  As lately, when the Neptunian admiral, driven from the sea, and his navy burned, fled, after having menaced those chains to Rome, which, like a friend, he had taken off from perfidious slaves.  The Roman soldiers (alas! ye, our posterity, will deny the fact), enslaved to a woman, carry palisadoes and arms, and can be subservient to haggard eunuchs; and among the military standards, oh shame! the sun beholds an [Egyptian] canopy.  Indignant at this the Gauls turned two thousand of their cavalry, proclaiming Caesar; and the ships of the hostile navy, going off to the left, lie by in port.  Hail, god of triumph!  Dost thou delay the golden chariots and untouched heifers?  Hail, god of triumph!  You neither brought back a general equal [to Caesar] from the Jugurthine war; nor from the African [war, him], whose valor raised him a monument over Carthage.  Our enemy, overthrown both by land and sea, has changed his purple vestments for mourning.  He either seeks Crete, famous for her hundred cities, ready to sail with unfavorable winds; or the Syrtes, harassed by the south; or else is driven by the uncertain sea.  Bring hither, boy, larger bowls, and the Chian or Lesbian wine; or, what may correct this rising qualm of mine, fill me out the Caecuban.  It is my pleasure to dissipate care and anxiety for Caesar’s danger with delicious wine.

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ODE X.

Against Maevius.