Book V, Epigram 20 (Ker)

If I and you, dear Martial, were permitted to enjoy careless days, if permitted to dispose an idle time, and both alike to have leisure for genuine life, we should not know the halls or mansions of men of power, nor worrying lawsuits and the anxious forum, nor lordly ancestral busts; but the promenade, the lounges, the bookshops, the plain, the colonnade, the garden's shade, the Virgin water, the warm baths — these should be our haunts always, these our tasks. To-day neither lives for himself, and lie feels the good days are flitting and passing away, our days that perish and are scored to our account. Does any man, when he knows how to live, delay?