Parentalia XI. — Pastor, my Son's Child

You also, lad of unripe years, have broken this sequence of laments for riper age, Pastor, my loved grandson, filling with bitter grief your grandfather, whose sure hope you would have been, third child of Hesperius your father. Your name, which chance had given you (because just when you were born a pipe sounded some pastoral air), too late was understood to be a symbol of your short life: because the breath soon passes from the pipes on which a shepherd blows. You perished stricken down by the weight of a cast tile, thrown from the roof by a workman's hand. No workman's hand was that: that hand of bloody Fate should surely have borne the blame. Ah me, how many of my hopes, how many of my joys you broke short, my Pastor! That tile, carelessly flung, reached my head. O, how much fitter were you to mourn the end of my old age, and raise a sad lament at my burial!