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If I did not love you more than my eyes, most delightful Calvus, for your gift I
should hate you with Vatinian hatred. For what have I done or what have I said
that you should torment me so vilely with these poets? May the gods give that
client of yours ills enough, who sent you so many scoundrels! Yet if, as I
suspect, Sulla, the litterateur, gives you this new and care-picked gift, it is
not ill to me, but well and beatific, that your labors [in his cause] are not
made light of. Great gods, what a horrible and accursed book which—if
you please!—you have sent to your Catullus, that he might die of
boredom the livelong day in the Saturnalia, choicest of days! No, no, my joker,
you will not get off so easily: for at dawn I will haste to the booksellers'
cases; the Caesii, the Aquini, Suffenus, every poisonous rubbish will I collect
that I may repay you with these tortures. Meantime farewell! be gone from here,
where an ill foot brought you, pests of the period, most wretched of poets.
Catullus. The Carmina of Gaius Valerius Catullus. Leonard C. Smithers. London. Smithers. 1894.
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