and unknown, are overwhelmed with endless obscurity, because they were destitute of a sacred bard.  Valor, uncelebrated, differs but little from cowardice when in the grave.  I will not [therefore], O Lollius, pass you over in silence, uncelebrated in my writings, or suffer envious forgetfulness with impunity to seize so many toils of thine.  You have a mind ever prudent in the conduct of affairs, and steady alike amid success and trouble:  you are an avenger of avaricious fraud, and proof against money, that attracts every thing; and a consul not of one year only, but as often as the good and upright magistrate has preferred the honorable to the profitable, and has rejected with a disdainful brow the bribes of wicked men, and triumphant through opposing bands has displayed his arms.  You can not with propriety call him happy, that possesses much; he more justly claims the title of happy, who understands how to make a wise use of the gifts of the gods, and how to bear severe poverty; and dreads a reproachful deed worse than death; such a man as this is not afraid to perish in the defense of his dear friends, or of his country.

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ODE X.

To Ligurinus.

O cruel still, and potent in the endowments of beauty, when an unexpected plume shall come upon your vanity, and those locks, which now wanton on your shoulders, shall fall off, and that color, which is now preferable to the blossom of the damask rose, changed, O Ligurinus, shall turn into a wrinkled face; [then] will you say (as often as you see yourself, [quite] another person in the looking glass), Alas! why was not my present inclination the same, when I was young?  Or why do not my cheeks return, unimpaired, to these my present sentiments?

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ODE XI.

To Phyllis.

Phyllis, I have a cask full of Abanian wine, upward of nine years old; I have parsley in my garden, for the weaving of chaplets, I have a store of ivy, with which, when you have bound your hair, you look so gay:  the house shines cheerfully With plate:  the altar, bound with chaste vervain, longs to be sprinkled [with the blood] of a sacrificed lamb:  all hands are busy:  girls mingled with boys fly about from place to place:  the flames quiver, rolling on their summit the sooty smoke.  But yet, that you may know to what joys you are invited, the Ides are to be celebrated by you, the day which divides April, the month of sea-born Venus; [a day,] with reason to be solemnized by me, and almost more sacred to me than that of my own birth; since from this day my dear Maecenas reckons his flowing years.  A rich and buxom girl hath possessed herself of Telephus, a youth above your rank; and she holds him fast by an agreeable fetter.  Consumed Phaeton strikes terror into ambitious hopes, and the winged Pegasus,