Epistles 1.20 (Fairclough)

You seem, my book, to be looking wistfully toward Vertumnus and Janus, in order, forsooth, that you may go on sale, neatly polished with the pumice of the Sosii. You hate the keys and seals, so dear to the modest; you grieve at being shown to few, and praise a life in public, though I did not rear you thus. Off with you, down to where you itch to go. When you are once let out, there will be no coming back. “What, alas! have I done? What did I want?” you will say, when someone hurts you, and you find yourself packed into a corner, whenever your sated lover grows languid.

But unless hatred of your error makes the prophet lose his cunning, you will be loved in Rome till your youth leave you; when you’ve been well thumbed by vulgar hands and begin to grow soiled, you will either in silence be food for vandal moths, or will run away to Utica, or be sent in bonds to Ilerda. Your monitor, from whom you turned away your ear, will then have his laugh, like the man who in anger pushed his stubborn ass over the cliff: for who would care to save an ass against his will? This fate, too, awaits you, that stammering age will come upon you as you teach boys their A B C in the city’s outskirts.

When the milder sun brings you a larger audience, you will tell them about me: that I was a freedman’s son, and amid slender means spread wings too wide for my nest, thus adding to my merits what you take from my birth; that I found favour, both in war and peace, with the foremost in the State; of small stature, grey before my time, fond of the sun, quick in temper, yet so as to be easily appeased. If one chance to inquire my age, let him know that I completed my forty-fourth December in the year when Lollius drew Lepidus for colleague.