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.

* * * * *



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