the warlike Rugian, with the Gelonian in company; the fierce Gepid follows; the Burgundian drives the Scirian on; the Hun, the Bellonotus, the Neurian, the Basterna, the Thuringian, the Bructeran, whom the reedy Nicer washes with its wave; the Frank breaks forth; swiftly, cut by the double axe, the Hercynian forest fell into skiffs, and the Rhine was woven with alder. And now Attila had spread out his terrifying squadrons over your plains, O Belgian; scarcely had Aetius left the Alps, leading a thin and scattered force without soldiery, its strength Getic among his auxiliaries — too credulous, presuming in vain that his own would be present at his camps. But after the messenger struck the leader, that the Huns, an enemy already close to being despised, awaited the Getae in their own seats, he turns all things over with himself, wandering, and drives his counsels and his mind with waves of cares.
At last, as he wavered, a resolve settled: to entreat the lofty man; and with all the leaders gathered together, suppliant before them, he thus begins with such words: 'Salvation of the world, Avitus, to whom it is no new glory now that Aetius makes his request; you willed it, and the foe does no harm. Do you wish it? It profits; you hold so many thousands enclosed by your nod, and to the Getic peoples your favor alone is the boundary. Ever hostile to us, they furnish peace to you. Bring forth the victorious eagles: make, O best of men, that the Huns — whose flight had once by chance shattered us before — should twice profit me, as victor.' Thus he spoke; and the other, having promised his prayer, made hope. Straightway thence he flies, and stirs up his servile wraths to battle. The skin-clad squadrons went behind the Roman trumpets, with the Getae running at the name.
The barbarian dreads to be summoned by the bronze, when overthrown, shuddering at reproach, not at loss. These to war then draws Avitus, now the world's hope — whether now a private man, or still. So the Phoebean bird of the Erythraean hill, bearing cinnamon to its pyre, rouses all the throng of birds: the attendant columns come running, and the air, crowded, cannot spread its wings. Now already the fates were filling out for you the twice-six wings of the vulture (for you know your labors, Rome, you know them): the half-man, mad Placidus slaughtered Aetius; and scarcely, Petronius, was the diadem set upon your head —
Straightway barbarism, and Rome too seeming captured to the Getae, and a land about to yield to its own fury — like ravening wolves perhaps, to whom the scent shows with keen nostril the rich air from the closed sheepfolds, they goad and sharpen their hunger, and bear in their look the semblance of plunder, cheating their fasting with gaping maw; and now, now the tender lamb is broken by their hope, and the absent prey already crackles in their greedy palate. Nay, the Armorican tract hoped for the Saxon pirate too, to whom it was sport to furrow the salt with a hide, and to cleave the grey sea with a stitched skiff. The Frank was laying low the German first and the Belgian second, and you, fierce Alaman, were drinking the Rhine from Roman banks, and on either shore, proud, you were either citizen or victor.
But seeing the tracts of the lands lost, the prince, now Maximus, chose you, Avitus, as his one master of foot and horse — the sole thing that remained in his affairs. The rumor of the honor conferred found the husbandman while by chance he plied the teeth of his bent mattock, or, stooping over the curved plough, turned the unbaked clod through the rich acres — as once, poor Cincinnatus, you come to the broken fortunes of your fatherland from the plough, when your wife clothed you, before your oxen, in the ancient robe of state, and the willow doors received the dictator, and the triumphal purple, laden with a base bundle, carried to his own dwelling the vile seed which he had not sown. As soon as he took up the weight of the honor thrust upon him, you might read those who beg pardon for their fury, O Alaman.
The Saxon's incursion ceases, and the Elbe with its marshy water binds the Chattian; and scarcely does the thrice-monthly moon behold all this. And now toward the peoples and fields held by the fierce Geta he stretched his march, where the Ocean, driven by the tide, scatters its ebbing flood over the tilled lands of the Garonne, the sea running into the river: the bitter brine climbs over the gentle streams, and the salt wave, dashed through the river's channel, sails for itself a deep foreign to it. Here now, as they loosed the reins for battle appointed, rumor suddenly checks the Visigothic nobles from their wrath, reporting in a hasty dispatch that Avitus was now entering the Getic homes, and, laying aside for a while the burden of his office, had taken up the duties of an envoy. The leaders were struck dumb alike, and the Scythian senate, and they feared lest perchance he should deny them their peace.
So, when the ruddy axle bore off light Phaethon, the day now paling, and the peace of the elements raged, roused with the world ablaze, or the neighboring vapor grew savage over the dried pools, and the mud thirsted at the dusty bottom of the sea — then one strange, unwonted flame of Phoebus quenched the heat. Here by chance then some Geta, while with his fire-tempered sickle he shapes with blows and sharpens on the whetstone his sword, now ready to grow hot at the trumpets, now, now about to bury the earth with frequent slaughter — not with a buried foe — as soon as the name of the coming Avitus first shone forth, cries out: 'The war has perished; give back the ploughs again. If I recall the leisure of the old repose, well known to me, more than once has this man borne off the sword from me: O shame! O gods! that faith should have such power!'
Why do you threaten these sluggish treaties, to my own hurt and against my good faith? You bid us both grant terms of peace and be beholden for them—who would ever believe it? They suppose that the Getae, though willing to submit as suppliants, have reigned but as inferiors; you do not even deign to say, 'Brave one, you love peace.' Already Avitus lays the enemy low with a few men; and Messianus, sent ahead, moreover restrains the wrath of the Getae. Even now you have given the command, and we lay down our arms. What remains that you could still wish for? That we are not your foes I count a small thing; but if you had known me of old in action, I should be your ally, or thus at least it will be permitted to fight.' While Vetus turns these things over in his stern heart, they had come within sight of one another. King and general stood side by side; the one held himself erect in countenance, but the other blushed for joy, and by that blush begged pardon.
Thereafter, with the king's brother held on this side and the king himself on that, with clasped hands they entered Palladian Toulouse. Not otherwise, with palms joined before the sacred couches, did Romulus and Tatius make their treaty, when—amid their kinsmen's swords, and while the raging husbands warred against their own kin—Hersilia set the Sabine women on the hill of Pallas. Meanwhile, O Africa, the Vandal seizes you unawares by his stealthy arms, and the Burgundian by his treacherous leading wrests from you the trembling wrath of a prince marked for slaughter. Alas, the crime! Once more to war, and to a fourth ordeal, the faithless trumpets of Elissa's Byrsa grow savage. What evil do the Fates nourish? The Massylian phalanx had scaled the citadels of Evander, and Marmaric feet had trodden the hills of Quirinus, and once again did captive Barce bring back the tribute she had once paid.
The exile of the fathers, the woes of the people, the slaying of the prince, the empire led into captivity—rumor bore all this to Getic ears. At the new dawn an assembly of the ancient Getae is gathered after their custom; there stands old age, hoary with years yet green in counsel; their garments are unkempt, and the coarse linen grows greasy upon their lean backs; nor can their hides reach the calf, but around the bare knee a poor knot suspends the horsehide boot. After honored poverty came into the council of the elders, and the king likewise called for words of peace, the leader spoke: 'I could have wished, I confess, secure in my native fields, ever to have cherished a hard-won repose, ever since, after three terms of military service, I have now in a fourth height governed the proud pinnacle of the prefecture.'
But while Maximus, prince of our world, calls me—unwitting, absent, after a thousand refusals from the nobles—to the war-trumpets after civic office, and wished to change the herald for the resounding clarions, I most readily seized upon this office, that I might come to you as envoy. I beg for the old treaties, which that prince of mine would now be keeping, old man, had I perchance so bidden him—he whose growth it ever was to follow Avitus. I was wont of old to handle Getic affairs; you know how often those things I urged came to nothing unless done. Yet fortune snatched away my former genius; whatever I earned perished, when, with your father, Narbonne, worn down by disaster, he had beset—you were but a little child—girding the trembling thousands, and had already all but driven them to loathsome fare;
Now, grimly, he believed his own prey would fail him, should the besieged perhaps perish; when he approved our counsels and slackened the walls, calling off the retreating war. And you yourself—there, behold, are old men—cherished at this breast: these hands held you weeping, if perchance your nurse should lift you to me for suckling, though you were unwilling. Behold, I come, and now I ask again the pledge of ancient love. If you have no faith, no reverence for a father—O hard one—then deny peace too.' From all the council a murmur bursts forth: and a seditious throng, condemning the uproar and strife, stirs up a concordant tumult. Then the king speaks: 'Long since, illustrious leader, I blame you for asking our peace, when you could compel servitude and drag the peoples as your followers into war. Do not, I pray, brand me with hatred by my ancestral name:'
What do I deserve, if you command nothing? What under him you could persuade, now merely to wish it is enough; and the only delay is that the Getae did not know what you desire. To me long since Rome's laws have been pleasing through you; and my father bade me while yet a boy to learn to your words, that with the ancient song of Maro the docile page might soften my Scythian manners. Now you teach me to wish for peace; but hear what shall be the condition of my compliance—perhaps you will approve the terms as ratified. I call to witness, Rome, your godhead venerable to us, and your race allied through Mars, and whatever from of old (the world holds nothing better than you, nothing than the Senate itself)—that I keep peace with you, or wish to abolish what our grandfather sinned, whom this one thing darkens: that he took you, Rome, captive.
But if the gods second my vows, the vengeance of the present shall avail to purge the guilt of that ancient overthrow, if you, illustrious leader, will take upon yourself alone the name of Augustus. Why do you turn away your eyes? It befits you, though unwilling, to be more than you are; we do not compel this, but we solemnly urge it. Under you as leader I am Rome's friend, under you as prince a soldier; you snatch a kingdom from no one, nor does any Augustus possess the Latin citadels: where the court is empty, it is yours. I swear, this does not suffice—that I do you no harm; and would that by this diadem of yours it might come to pass that I do good! To persuade is mine; for if another cause should compel you, as by right it can, let the world obey you, that it may not perish.' He spoke, and together with his brother upon the shield he gives holy pledge in words. You depart, Avitus, in sorrow, you who knew the Gauls could not lie hidden, and what the Getae could serve with you as prince;
for when it became plain to the trembling citizens that you were bringing treaties, they run to meet you eagerly, and before the tribunal they prostrate themselves before you, all unaware. And when it seemed that a numerous nobility had assembled by itself—that nobility upon which the snowy crags of Cottius look down, which the waters of the Tyrrhene and the Rhine surround on diverse sides, or which the long ridges of the Pyrenees hem in, sundered from Spanish jurisdiction—a throng, rejoicing, approaches the man grieved by the overwhelming weight of his cares; and then one, the greatest of the nobles, worthy to take upon himself the person of his country, begins: 'That country which for a long while now fortune, through varied toils, under a boy-prince, wears down, harsh in her tattered fortunes. Perhaps it is long to complain, great leader, since indeed you were the greatest part of the grieving, while you mourn your country's wounds and are driven by vehement anxieties.'
Amid these disasters and the deaths of the world, for us to have lived was to die; but while, according to the words of our fathers, we cherish spineless laws and think it holy to pursue the ancient order through our losses, we have borne but the shadow of empire, content to bear the vices of an ancient stock and to see a nation clothed in the wonted purple more by custom than by right. Lately a most ready opportunity shone forth, whereby Gaul might put forth her own strength, while Maximus seized the trembling city—nay, could have seized the world, had she reformed her whole realm with you as her master. Who has stirred up the Belgic countryside for us, the shore of Armorica, who the Getic wrath—that is no secret; in these so great wars we yielded to you, illustrious one. Now the highest matters call; in a doubtful season a coward does not govern the realm:
all ambition is set aside, when the last extremities seek out illustrious men. After the losses of Ticinus and Trebia the trembling republic came in haste to Fabius; after famous Cannae, with Varro put to flight, and the Carthaginian still swelling with the funeral of the Scipios, chosen Livius broke him. The captive world, they say, lies in the City; the prince perishes—this one thing now holds all sway of empire. We beg you: mount the tribunal, raise up the fallen! It is not thus that the times demand another should love Rome more; lest perchance you think yourself unequal to rule—when the standards of Brennus pressed the Tarpeian rock, you know, then our whole republic was Camillus, who, owed to his country as her avenger, sheltered the smoking embers from the enemy's slaughter.
No popular gold procured you the centuries, nor do venal tribes, bought with many a coin, run together to the voting-marks: no one has purchased the world's suffrages; you are chosen though poor—that one thing which suffices, you are rich in merits. Why do you delay your country's vows, which command that you should command? This is the sentence of all: 'If you become our lord, I shall be free.' A din fills the halls of Ugernum, where by chance the loyal throng, the senate, had brought its force, its vows, its prayers. The place, the hour, and the day are declared blessed for empire; and forthwith there rejoicing diligence assigns the watches of the nobles. The third dawn had brought back Hyperion to the fleeing stars: the nobles run together, and with the soldiery poured round about, upon a raised mound they set him up, and with the camp-torque they crown the sorrowful man, and bestow on him the insignia of royal power.
Already before this he had put on cares of the prince alone. With no other countenance did the Tirynthian hero once take up the burdens of heaven, at the very moment when the Giant was raising himself from the Libyan crag, and when the more secure machine of the world had settled upon Hercules' back. This man I have given to you, O Rome, while Gaul over her broad plains thunders 'Augustus' with applause, and the North wind, now stronger, bears the auspicious roar upon the bloodless South wind; he shall restore to you Libya by a fourth chain of bondage. And of him, whose very journey recalled the long-lost Pannonias after many ages, it is now easy to believe what he shall do in wars: O how often shall he yoke nations to you, the eagles once inflicted—he who, though a private man, fled the greatest omens of kingship, when by chance, as he went, a swift bird shook off his plebeian cloak.
But rejoicing now in so great a prince, O ancient Rome, parent of the gods, lift up your cheeks, and lay aside your shameful lethargy: behold, a prince as elder shall make you grow young again, more than the boys made you old. Scarcely had the father made an end with his lips, when the gods applauded, and a murmur ran through the council. The Sisters have spun a happy time for your rule, O Augustus, and in the year of your consulship have drawn out golden ages with their whirling weights. POEM VIII. PUBLICATION OF THE PANEGYRIC, TO PRISCUS VALERIANUS THE EX-PREFECT. Priscus, our glory ever, to whom—by Avitus as prince—the lofty purple joins a kindred stock, since to your examination our trifles now run, I say: 'Stand, ye vagrant ones! Whither do you hasten?' He loves them. The strict censor who loves proves ever exacting:
gentle friendship reads with stern brow. Nothing profits the bards, that thing added to their praises, that the Ulpian portico glows ruddy with my bronze, or that even now, with people and senate applauding together, hollow Rome re-echoes 'bravo' to my work. They answer thus: 'We shall hasten, we shall go, and you do not detain us: before so great a judge the fault finds favor. No knower is better than he; well he weighs the songs, slow in contempt, swift in judgment; and because I could not check the rash words, this I ask: do not hesitate to dedicate what has been read.' POEM IX. IN EXCUSE, TO THE DISTINGUISHED FELIX. This generous greeting Sollius Apollinaris—Sidonius, his own—sends to lord Felix and to a pious brother.
Tell me, tell me what I ask, Magnus, tell me, I pray, Felix in name, in mind, in honor, in fame, in children, in wife, in brothers, in parents, in the kinsmen of your father and of your mother, and in Camillus, highest of your cousins: why do you bid the rash trifles of a friend—which the jest of tender youth scattered abroad—be reduced into the form of a little book? That a huge bundle of ill-will be at once and suddenly heaped up, and the paper perish? I am your servant in your commands; but first I bear witness, reader, to the rough spots you will suffer here. We do not run the old highway, nor will you find anything where the Muse traces the ancient wheel-ruts of the ancients. Not here shall we sing of the antipodes and the Red Sea, not here of the Memnonian Indians, scorched by the civic torch of Dawn:
Not Artaxata, Susa, Bactra, Carrhae; not shall I resound of well-baked Babylon, which, opening wide to its foster-river, drinks the enclosed Tigris on this side and on that. Not here shall I speak of Ninus, older than the Assyrians, nor of Arbaces, chief of the Medes: nor of him who—rich as he was, when he fled his foe—burned to ashes, Sardanapalus. Not shall I tell of Cyrus, grandson of Astyages, whom they say was nursed at a dog's teat; whose greed not even the treasure of Lydian Croesus could sate; whose ferocity was then not yet subdued, when—two hundred thousand slain before—hemmed in the narrows of a Scythian valley, he came to the wineskin of bereaved Tomyris. Not here shall you read of the Cecropian triumphs, or wherever Marathon grows red with battle; or when a thousand thousands roused up Xerxes, puffed up with his numerousness;
and how this man, when the deep salt rivers were drained straightway, thirsted still; nor Thermopylae, and the waves of Helle, when—the barriers of land and sea despised—he rode with mad squadrons, and, the sea swelling admitted through Athos, past the summit of the leaf-bearing Alp, went through caverns carved out for his fleets. Not shall I speak of the offspring of the Garamantic Thunderer, ruling over realms and princes, how he flew across the lands of Asia, stretched out by his father's lightning; and first how he crushed the tumultuous prefects and satraps of Darius: then how the man himself, proud upon his fathers' throne and blustering that gods were his kindred, was—with wife, children, parent taken captive—bidden return to the lot of a mortal man.
Who, when he had stirred up the greatest wars, and had set the arms of all Persia—gathered from every side—upon a single field, is reported to have attained this alone: that the foe might more freely sleep. Nor shall I tell how the Minyae, borne along by a speaking wood, stood in the Phasian harbor, when—the leader of the Pelasgi being smitten by beauty—the heroine-maid softened the raging bulls; nor how she was not then terrified when her own settler, after the sown molar-teeth of the tamed serpent, trembling amid the armed grasses, stood aghast that the foe blossomed into a crop, and, with ears of grain warring here and there, that above the war-bearing clods the culm-clad brothers grew wet with green gore.
Not here shall I speak of the earth-born cohort, made the more lively by admixed venom, which—besides a shape now lacking—had snakes that, extending their scaly legs from voluminous bodies, ended in a maw where the feet should be. Thus the wanton youth of triple form, trampling the earth with devouring foot, ran with the wondrous gait of their heads; and when the trumpets of the divinities sounded, soon, hissing back against the thunder, they dared to summon the gods above with their sole. Nor shall you read of the enlarged fields of Phlegra, when mountains, hurled, flit through the stars—Pindus, Pelion, Ossa, Olympus, Othrys—with their woods, flocks, wild beasts, hoarfrosts, rocks, springs, and towns, lifted by the more spacious right hand of the quivering giants.
Not here shall I dwell upon the labors of Hercules, to whom the boar, the hind, the lion, the giant, the Amazon, the host, the bull, Eryx, the birds, Lycus, the thief, Nessus, the Libyan, the mountains, the apples, the maiden, the serpent, Ceto, the Thracian horses, the Iberian oxen, the wrestler-river, the three-formed dog, and the borne-up pole gave a pole. Not here shall I follow in verse Elis, noble for her four-horse teams, nor the river no less famous for love—how through the depths of the sea Alpheus flows, and beyond the waves falls into the conjugal wave. Not here shall I unravel the house of Tantalus, wherein—through the Pelopian parent—the sister was made mingled with the offspring, and by a new monstrosity the father begot an infamous grandson. Nothing mournful is sung here;
nor do we compose lamentations over the flesh-laden feast of Thyestes—that wretch who, by his brother's crime, became the living sepulcher of his own children, sprinkled with their gore: when, after these banquets, the Sun-god straightway turned his chariot and, setting, fled toward the sunrise, that he might flee the guest and put the day to flight. Nor is the Phrygian shepherd to be read of by you, for whom, they say, shorn Dindymon, its summit cut, wove a fleet; when—at the bidding of protecting Venus—he laid waste the Oechalian lands and the hospitable Amyclae, seeking his prey, a pursuing plunder, across the sea. But neither Pergama, nor the ten-years' war, nor the savage phalanxes of Agamemnon; nor shall I pursue the perjuries of Sinon, whereby the citadel, dedicated to the Palladian emblem, unlocked by the treacherous betrayer, received the horse that bore footmen within.
Not here, with the pen of the Maeonian Muse, do I tell the valor and wisdom of the citizen of Dulichium and of Thessaly. Of these, the one is thought to have been reared in the Pelian cave, in hunting, the lyre, wrestling, and herbs, under the old man born of Saturn. While now, a boy treading the lairs of wild beasts, he lay scattered here and there through snowy Pholoe, now, reclining at the beloved stalls, he slept more softly in his master's mane. Thence, given to the parent of the Scyrian maids, he bore the name of a false Pyrrha, and amid the choirs of stern Minerva whirled thyrsi hidden from Venus. At last, drawn by praise to the sound of Phrygian rapine, to the glories of Hector dragged and to be dragged. But him to whom it fell to return to his native Ithaca in the fourth lustrum, not even Smyrna sufficiently unfolds the volume.
For who could recount in succession those labors which land and sea brought upon him? The Palladium stolen, Achilles discovered, Dolon captured by swift feet, and Rhesus' snowy four-horse teams—dragged off before ever they drank the streams of Xanthus? The quiver too, which the patron god, Philoctetes, gave to you? Ajax son of Telamon raging, because—while pleading his cause before the fleet—the eloquent one bore off the crown of the warlike? Polyphemus shunned thence, and Circe, and the hunger of the Laestrygonian tyrant? Then the orchards of rich Calypso, the Sirens pleasing to those who perish, the darkness shunned, and the torch of Nauplius, and the swift loins of devouring Scylla, or what rocks the Sicilian Charybdis hollows out with her belched-forth deep?
I do not sing of the gods favoring particular fields, cities, and islands—Saturn to Latium, and Jupiter to Crete, and Juno to Samos, and the Sun to Rhodes, Persephone to Henna, Minerva to Hymettus, Vulcan to Lipara, Dione to Paphos, Perseus to Argos, Priapus to Lampsacus, Bacchus to Thebes, Vesta to Ilium, the Delian to Thymbra, the Arcadian to Lycaeus, Mars to the Thracians, and Diana to the Scythians: whom dedicated temples made gods—incense, salt, spelt, meal, or the consecration of superfluous ceremonies. Not with Triptolemus shall I sing of venerable Eleusis, who gave the first ears of grain to the peoples once fed through the Chaonian oak-grove; not shall I resound of Mareotic Apis, roused to the Memphitic sistra.
I shall not tell how the youth of Lacedaemon dedicated the oiled wrestling-bouts of the Tyndarids, whom—taught by the ancestral training-ground at Therapnae—the arena of the Bebrycian theater dreads. Not the Lycian oracles and those of Caere, nor the responses of Themis, prior to Delphi. Nor the divinities which the Tuscan, once the lightning was expiated, seeks at the fenced bidental. Nor those whom, drinking the Euganean Timavus, the augur upon Antenor's hill beheld—gods stirring up the Thessalian battle. Nor those whom Amphiaraus and Melampus snatched, gods from the very embers, while the flame ill-flickered through the temple—Metellus rejoicing though his sight was lost. Not here shall Cinyphian Ammon be sung, lifting his mitred head from the sands, scarcely wont to bring himself forth from the pit of the Syrtes after a hecatomb duly offered.
Not here shall I describe the Dindyma, nor the Curetes sounding Berecynthian rites on the crackling boxwood, nor Bacchus displaying his triennial festivals, nor the Bassarids going in tremulous frenzy amid the festal madness, nor the fillet-crowned mystics whirling at the incense-burning altar. Not here should you look for the rich songs of Hesiod of Ascra, nor the chords of Pindar. Not here the jests of buskin-wearing Menander, nor the fierce iambics of injured Archilochus, nor yet the graver Muses of Stesichorus, or what the girl of Lesbos composed. Not what Mantua—defiant of Homer—added to Latin speech, envious that Parthenope, by Maro's tomb, should ever be set equal to itself.
Not what Flaccus, in the satires of his epistles, in the wit of his conversations, in his new epode, in the books of song and the art of poetry, wished to resound in the praises of Phoebus and roving Diana in his writings. Not what your Papinius and mine sounds among the Labdacian furies, or when, by chance in the lesser rhythm of the foot, he paints the gem-strewn meadows of little woodlands. Not what Cordoba, mighty in her nurslings, sets forth—eloquent though it be—should you think must here be read. Of these, the one cultivates rough Plato, and in vain admonishes his own Nero. The other shakes the orchestra of Euripides, having followed Aeschylus painted with wine-lees, or Thespis wont to sound from wagons—who, after the trodden stage beneath the buskin, used to lead forth the male of the reeking she-goat.
The third told of the Gallic Caesar's battle, how son-in-law and father-in-law drove kindred Rome into arms. So greatly does he give tears to his own Philippi that he would count the ruin of Cremera slight, and judge Allia to be mourned as less grievous, and Jove redeemed in Brennus' scale; that he sets after it the Trebia and grievous Cannae, nor tells of the Thrasimene slaughter. He is ashamed to leave unspoken the Scipio brothers, whom the Tartessian world holds fast: let him keep silent about the Euphrates ill-sought, and Carrhae wet with the gore of the Crassi, or those swords which, O Spartacus, you were wont to put to flight with your victorious sickle. Nor does that war slay him more—which, after the Cimbric trophies turbulent, and Nasamonian Jugurtha bound, while he seeks the Mithridatic triumph, the Arpinate wished to stir up against Sulla.
Not Gaetulicus shall here be read by you, not Marsus, Pedo, Silius, Tibullus. Not what the jest of Sulpicia's Muse wrote, sweetly-speaking to her own Calenus. Not the sternness of Persius, or the charm of Propertius, nor yet the many-metered Terentianus. Not Lucilius here, nor Lucretius; not Turnus, Memor, Ennius, Catullus, Stella, and Septimius, and Petronius, or Martial biting without end. Not he who in the time of the second Caesar dwelt at Tomis under an eternal charge. Nor he who, by a like mischance thereafter, to the thin breath of the roaring crowd, was the exile of an angered actor. Not he, sprung from Pelusian Canopus, who sings of the couch of the swarthy husband, and by a heavenly Muse chants the shades below. Nor those who, in our fathers' first age, were the greatest companions.
Of these, the one, having followed Bonifacius and headlong Sebastianus, as a boy shuddered at his Cadurcan birth, loving Pandionian Athens more. If you read his varied poem, then you would deem that Phoebus, or the Hyantian maidens, drenched from a draught of Hippocrene, then Amphion and the son of Maia, then the Rhodopeian bard, sounded—their strains combined. You shall not here be read now, nor your thunderbolt, O most worthy second Quintianus, who—scorning the soil and household gods of the Ligurians, and loving the Gauls with home transferred—amid the war-trumpets, standards, javelins, and squadrons, praising Aetius and taking leisure with a book, in the camps thrice crowned with the golden ivy. But neither shall that third one now be read, who—leaving once his native Baetis—sought the watery thirst of Ravenna: