He begs us to state that for reasons of weight
     He has lingered so long and determined so late. 
     For he deemed the achievements of comedy hard,
     The boldest attempt of a desperate bard! 
     The Muse he perceived was capricious and coy;
     Though many were courting her, few could enjoy. 
     And he saw without reason, from season to season,
       Your humor would shift, and turn poets adrift,
     Requiting old friends with unkindness and treason,
       Discarded in scorn as exhausted and worn.

     Seeing Magnes’s fate, who was reckoned of late
       For the conduct of comedy captain and head;
     That so oft on the stage, in the flower of his age,
       Had defeated the Chorus his rivals had led;
     With his sounds of all sort, that were uttered in sport,
       With whims and vagaries unheard of before,
     With feathers and wings, and a thousand gay things,
       That in frolicsome fancies his Choruses wore—­
     When his humor was spent, did your temper relent,
       To requite the delight that he gave you before? 
     We beheld him displaced, and expelled and disgraced,
       When his hair and his wit were grown aged and hoar.

     Then he saw, for a sample, the dismal example
     Of noble Cratinus so splendid and ample,
     Full of spirit and blood, and enlarged like a flood;
     Whose copious current tore down with its torrent,
     Oaks, ashes, and yew, with the ground where they grew,
     And his rivals to boot, wrenched up by the root;
     And his personal foes, who presumed to oppose,
     All drowned and abolished, dispersed and demolished,
     And drifted headlong, with a deluge of song.

     And his airs and his tunes, and his songs and lampoons,
     Were recited and sung by the old and the young: 
     At our feasts and carousals, what poet but he? 
     And “The fair Amphibribe” and “The Sycophant Tree,”
     “Masters and masons and builders of verse!”
     Those were the tunes that all tongues could rehearse;
     But since in decay you have cast him away,
       Stript of his stops and his musical strings,
     Battered and shattered, a broken old instrument,
       Shoved out of sight among rubbishy things. 
     His garlands are faded, and what he deems worst,
     His tongue and his palate are parching with thirst.

And now you may meet him alone in the street,
Wearied and worn, tattered and torn,
All decayed and forlorn, in his person and dress,
Whom his former success should exempt from distress,
With subsistence at large at the general charge,
And a seat with the great at the table of State,
There to feast every day and preside at the play
In splendid apparel, triumphant and gay.

Seeing Crates, the next, always teased and perplexed,
With your tyrannous temper tormented and vexed;
That with taste and good sense, without waste or expense,
From his snug little hoard, provided your board
With a delicate treat, economic and neat. 
Thus hitting or missing, with crowns or with hissing,
Year after year he pursued his career,
For better or worse, till he finished his course.