Horace: IV, I

Is the cease-fire over, Venus?
Spare me! Spare me! I beg you to remember
I am not what I once was
When under the gentle thumb of Cynara. Forbear,

Cruel mother of the Cupids,
To put the screws to one now pushing fifty,
Now cold to your hot breath.
Go whither the young are praying up a storm;

On purple swansdown go,
Revel in the house of Paulus Maximus,
And seek what you must seek,
That someone who would burn most hard, most gem-like.

Noble and handsome both,
The champion of the divorcée and the widow,
A youth of a hundred skills,
He shall bear your standards into the hinterlands;

And when some giver of gifts,
Some lavish rival, fails, Paulus, laughing,
Will set you up in marble
Under a citrus roof near the Alban Lake.

There you will breathe only
The best of incense, and there be charmed by a concert
Featuring the lyre,
The Berecynthian flute and the reedpipe, too.

There a boy and a girl will dance
In your honor twice a day, day in, day out,
The dance of the Salian,
And shake the earth three times with a bare foot.

Nothing—nor girl, nor boy,
The credulous hope of being loved by either,
Nor grape, the trials thereof,
Nor flowers fresh upon my brow—delights me.

Nothing. Then why, Lygurinus,
Does a tear now and then trickle down my gray cheek?
Why does my eloquent tongue
Fall with an unbecoming silence among these words?

Now, in the dream of night,
I hold you captive; now I pursue you in flight
Over the grasses of the Campus
Martius, O hard-hearted, through the whirling waters.