Romulus, and father Bacchus, and Castor and Pollux, after great achievements, received into the temples of the gods, while they were improving the world and human nature, composing fierce dissensions, settling property, building cities, lamented that the esteem which they expected was not paid in proportion to their merits.  He who crushed the dire Hydra, and subdued the renowned monsters by his forefated labor, found envy was to be tamed by death [alone].  For he burns by his very splendor, whose superiority is oppressive to the arts beneath him:  after his decease, he shall be had in honor.  On you, while present among us, we confer mature honors, and rear altars where your name is to be sworn by; confessing that nothing equal to you has hitherto risen, or will hereafter rise.  But this your people, wise and just in one point (for preferring you to our own, you to the Grecian heroes), by no means estimate other things with like proportion and measure:  and disdain and detest every thing, but what they see removed from earth and already gone by; such favorers are they of antiquity, as to assert that the Muses [themselves] upon Mount Alba, dictated the twelve tables, forbidding to trangress, which the decemviri ratified; the leagues of our kings concluded with the Gabii, or the rigid Sabines; the records of the pontifices, and the ancient volumes of the augurs.

If, because the most ancient writings of the Greeks are also the best, Roman authors are to be weighed in the same scale, there is no need we should say much:  there is nothing hard in the inside of an olive, nothing [hard] in the outside of a nut.  We are arrived at the highest pitch of success [in arts]:  we paint, and sing, and wrestle more skillfully than the annointed Greeks.  If length of time makes poems better, as it does wine, I would fain know how many years will stamp a value upon writings.  A writer who died a hundred years ago, is he to be reckoned among the perfect and ancient, or among the mean and modern authors?  Let some fixed period exclude all dispute.  He is an old and good writer who completes a hundred years.  What! one that died a month or a year later, among whom is he to be ranked?  Among the old poets, or among those whom both the present age and posterity will disdainfully reject?  He may fairly be placed among the ancients, who is younger either by a short month only, or even by a whole year.  I take the advantage of this concession, and pull away by little and little, as [if they were] the hairs of a horse’s tail:  and I take away a single one and then again another single one; till, like a tumbling heap, [my adversary], who has recourse to annals and estimates excellence by the year, and admires nothing but what Libitina has made sacred, falls to the ground.