Book VIII, Epigram 33 (Ker)

From your praetor's crown, Paulus, you send me a leaf and require this to be called a bowl. With this film your platform was lately coated, and the pale stream of red saffron washed it away. Or rather was it a flake — I think, belonging to the leg of your couch — scraped off by the nail of a cunning slave? It can from a distance feel the fluttering of a gnat, and be wafted by the wing of the very smallest butterfly; it floats in air, kept up by the heat of a tiny lamp, and, splashed with wine even lightly sprinkled, it dissolves. With such a layer is coated on the Kalends of January the nut which a shabby client brings as a gift together with small coin. Pliant Egyptian beans grow with a less slender filament, of thicker mould are lily leaves that fall beneath the overpowering sun; nor does the spider dart about a web so slender, nor the pendulous silkworm ply a work so light. Denser stands the chalk on old Fabulla's face, denser swells the bubble in tumbled water, and stronger is the bladder-net that confines knotted locks, and the Batavian pomade that transforms Latin tresses. With skin like this is clothed the chick in a swan's egg, such are the patches that rest on a crescent-plastered brow. What use have you for a bowl when you can send me a tablespoon, when you can send me even a snail-pick — I am suggesting too great things — when you can send me a snail-shell: in a word, when you, Paul us, can send me nothing?