Epistle VI. — An Invitation to Paulus

If any trust is ever to be placed in the feigned words of poets, and if they scrawl not ever fiction, Paulus — once the most famous child of the Castalian Camenae, now their father or grandfather or yet more ancient than a great-grandfather, as was of old the kinglet of Tartessus —remember to keep your promises inviolate. Phoebus bids us speak truth: although he suffers the Pierian sisters to swerve from the line, he himself never twists a furrow. You also must not regret your plighted bond; come quickly now by river or by road, either where Garonne, swelled with the flood-tide of the billowy deep, challenges the main, or where the beaten gravel of the relaid road leads to the garrison of Blaye. For in the first days after holy Easter I long to visit my estate.

For I am weary at the sight of throngs of people, the vulgar brawls at the cross-roads, the narrow lanes a-swarm, and the broadways belying their name for the rabble herded there. Confused Echo resounds with a babel of cries: "Hold!" — "Strike!" — -"Lead!" — "Give!" — "Look out!" Here is a mucky sow in flight, there a mad dog in fell career, there oxen too weak for the waggon. No use to steal into the inner chamber and the recesses of your home: the cries penetrate through the house. These, and what else can shock the orderly, force me to leave the walled city and seek again the sweet peace of the retired country and the delights of trifling seriously; and there you may arrange your own hours and have the right to do nothing or else what you will. If you haste after these joys, come quickly with all the wares of your Camenae: dactyls, elegiacs, choriambics, lyrics, comedy and tragedy — pack them all in your carriage, for the devout poet's baggage is all paper. With me you will find a quid pro quo if you please to trade on Greek,' not Punic, terms.