TO A WOMAN WHOSE CHARMS WERE OVER.
What would you be at, you woman fitter for the swarthy monsters? Why do
you send tokens, why billet-doux to me, and not to some vigorous youth,
and of a taste not nice? For I am one who discerns a polypus, or fetid
ramminess, however concealed, more quickly than the keenest dog the
covert of the boar. What sweatiness, and how rank an odor every where
rises from her withered limbs! when she strives to lay her furious rage
with impossibilities; now she has no longer the advantage of moist
cosmetics, and her color appears as if stained with crocodile's ordure;
and now, in wild impetuosity, she tears her bed, bedding, and all she
has. She attacks even my loathings in the most angry terms:--"You are
always less dull with Inachia than me: in her company you are threefold
complaisance; but you are ever unprepared to oblige me in a single
instance. Lesbia, who first recommended you--so unfit a help in time of
need--may she come to an ill end! when Coan Amyntas paid me his
addresses; who is ever as constant in his fair one's service, as the
young tree to the hill it grows on. For whom were labored the fleeces of
the richest Tyrian dye? For you? Even so that there was not one in
company, among gentlemen of your own rank, whom his own wife admired
preferably to you: oh, unhappy me, whom you fly, as the lamb dreads the
fierce wolves, or the she-goats the lions!"
* * * * *