Quintus Horatius Flaccus

Had you given a million sesterces to this frugal man, content with little, in five days there would have been nothing in his purse. He stayed awake all night till morning and snored all day. Never was anything so inconsistent with itself.

“You delight in wounding,” says someone, “and you do it out of malice.” Where did you find this charge to hurl at me? Is any of those I have lived with its source? The man who backbites the absent, who does not defend a friend when another finds fault, who courts men’s loose laughter and a name for wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret—that man is black; beware of him, Roman.

Let us turn first to this: a lover, in his blindness, fails to see his mistress’s ugly defects, or is even charmed by them, as Balbinus is by Agna’s polyp. I wish we made the same mistake in friendship, and that virtue had given that error an honourable name.

You would not rightly call happy the man who possesses much; he more rightly claims the name of happy who knows how to use the gods’ gifts wisely and to endure harsh poverty, and who fears disgrace worse than death—he is not afraid to die for dear friends or for his country.

If a guiltless hand has touched the altar, though no more persuasive with a costly victim, it has softened the estranged Penates with holy meal and crackling salt.

Where are you sweeping me, Bacchus, full of you? Into what groves, what caves am I driven, swift with new inspiration? In what grottoes shall I be heard practising to set the everlasting glory of illustrious Caesar among the stars and in the council of Jove? I will sing of something remarkable, new, as yet unsung by any other voice.

But do not, wanton Muse, abandon your jests and take up again the task of the Cean dirge; with me in Dione’s grotto seek measures for a lighter quill.

That corner of the earth smiles for me beyond all others, where the honey yields nothing to Hymettus and the olive vies with green Venafrum, where Jupiter grants a long spring and mild winters, and Aulon, friend to fertile Bacchus, has little cause to envy the grapes of Falernum.

He has carried every vote who has mingled the useful with the sweet, delighting the reader while instructing him.

Though, Maecenas, of all the Lydians who have settled in Etruscan lands no one is of nobler birth than you, and though your grandfathers on your mother’s and your father’s side once commanded great legions, you do not, as most men do, turn up your nose at men of no name, such as me, a freedman’s son.