Book X, Epigram 68 (Ker)

Although your home is not Ephesus, nor Rhodes, nor Mitylene, but a house, Laelia, in Patrician street, and though your motlier was one of the sunburnt Etruscans, and never rouged, your sturdy father one from the district of Aricia, you are continually heaping on me in Greek "my lord," "my honey," "my soul" — shameful! although you are a fellow-citizen of Hersilia and Egeria.' Let a couch hear such phrases, nor even every couch, but only that which his mistress has laid out for an amorous paramour. You want to know how you are to speak as a chaste matron? Can you be more alluring when your gestures are lewd? You may learn by heart and reproduce all the ways of Corinth, yet nohow, Laelia, will you be a Lais.