Carmina

You will feast well with me, my Fabullus, in a few days, if the gods favour you, provided you bring here with you a good and great feast, not forgetting a radiant girl and wine and wit and all kinds of laughter. Provided, I say, you bring them here, our charming friend, you will feast well: for your Catullus' purse is full with cobwebs. But in return you will receive a pure love, or what is sweeter or more elegant: for I will give you an unguent which the Venuses and Cupids gave to my girl, which, when you smell it, you will entreat the gods to make you, Fabullus, all Nose!

If I did not love you more than my eyes, most delightful Calvus, for your gift I should hate you with Vatinian hatred. For what have I done or what have I said that you should torment me so vilely with these poets? May the gods give that client of yours ills enough, who sent you so many scoundrels! Yet if, as I suspect, Sulla, the litterateur, gives you this new and care-picked gift, it is not ill to me, but well and beatific, that your labors [in his cause] are not made light of. Great gods, what a horrible and accursed book which—if you please!—you have sent to your Catullus, that he might die of boredom the livelong day in the Saturnalia, choicest of days! No, no, my joker, you will not get off so easily: for at dawn I will haste to the booksellers' cases; the Caesii, the Aquini, Suffenus, every poisonous rubbish will I collect that I may repay you with these tortures. Meantime farewell! be gone from here, where an ill foot brought you, pests of the period, most wretched of poets.