The first verse of this little poem,

    “Quisquis amat valeat, pereat qui nescit amare,”

represented by the first couplet of the English rendering, calls to mind the swinging refrain which we find a century or two later in the Pervigilium Veneris, that last lyrical outburst of the pagan world, written for the eve of the spring festival of Venus: 

    “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras amet.”

    (To-morrow he shall love who ne’er has loved
    And who has loved, to-morrow he shall love.)

An interesting study might be made of the favorite types of feminine beauty in the Roman poets.  Horace sings of the “golden-haired” Pyrrhas, and Phyllises, and Chloes, and seems to have had an admiration for blondes, but a poet of the common people, who has recorded his opinion on this subject in the atrium of a Pompeian house, shows a more catholic taste, although his freedom of judgment is held in some constraint: 

    “My fair girl has taught me to hate
    Brunettes with their tresses of black. 
    I will hate if I can, but if not,
    ’Gainst my will I must love them also."[70]

On the other hand, one Pompeian had such an inborn dread of brunettes that, whenever he met one, he found it necessary to take an appropriate antidote, or prophylactic: 

    “Whoever loves a maiden dark
    By charcoal dark is he consumed. 
    When maiden dark I light upon
    I eat the saving blackberry."[71]

These amateur poets do not rely entirely upon their own Muse, but borrow from Ovid, Propertius, or Virgil, when they recall sentiments in those writers which express their feelings.  Sometimes it is a tag, or a line, or a couplet which is taken, but the borrowings are woven into the context with some skill.  The poet above who is under compulsion from his blonde sweetheart, has taken the second half of his production verbatim from Ovid, and for the first half of it has modified a line of Propertius.  Other writers have set down their sentiments in verse on more prosaic subjects.  A traveller on his way to the capital has scribbled these lines on the wall, perhaps of a wine-shop where he stopped for refreshment:[72]

    “Hither have we come in safety. 
    Now I hasten on my way,
    That once more it may be mine
    To behold our Lares, Rome.”

At one point in a Pompeian street, the eye of a straggler would catch this notice in doggerel verse:[73]

    “Here’s no place for loafers. 
    Lounger, move along!”

On the wall of a wine-shop a barmaid has thus advertised her wares:[74]

    “Here for a cent is a drink,
    Two cents brings something still better. 
    Four cents in all, if you pay,
    Wine of Falernum is yours.”

It must have been a lineal descendant of one of the parasites of Plautus who wrote:[75]

    “A barbarian he is to me
    At whose house I’m not asked to dine.”