Book XII, Epigram 32 (Ker)

O you disgrace of July's kalends, I have seen your traps, Vacerra, I have seen them, the lot that was not distrained upon for two years' rent, and which your wife carried, red-headed with her seven curls, and your white-headed mother, together with your hulking sister. Furies were they, methought, emerged from the night of Dis! These two ladies in front, you, parched with cold and hunger, and paler than faded boxwood, the Irus of your day, followed: you would have thought Aricia's hill was shifting! There went along a three-legged truckle-bed and a two-legged table, and, alongside a lantern and bowl of cornel, a cracked chamberpot was making water through its broken side; the neck of a flagon was lying under a brazier green with verdigris; that there were salted gudgeons, too, or worthless sprats, the obscene stench of a jug confessed — such a stench as a whiff of a marine fish-pond would scarcely equal. Nor was there wanting a section of Tolosan cheese, nor a four-year-old chaplet of black pennyroyal, and ropes shorn of their garlic and onions, nor your mother's pot full of foul resin, the depilatory of dames under the walls. Why do you look for a house and scoff at rent-collectors when you can lodge tor nothing, O Vacerra? This procession of your traps befits Beggars' bridge.