eagles with money or with glory?’ he asked, with what I thought was an insolent sneer.  I shook him off, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.  However,” smiling again as he saw a familiar impassiveness settle upon his host’s face, “for you to-night there shall be neither Parthians nor budgets.  I offer myself as the victim of your thoughts.  You may even ask me why I have not published my odes since you last saw me.”

Maecenas’s eyes brightened with affectionate amusement.

“Well, my friend,” he said, “both money and glory would wing your flight.  You have the public ear already, and can fix your own royalties with the Sosii.  And everybody, from Augustus to the capricious fair, would welcome the published volume.  You should think too of my reputation as showman.  Messala told me last week that he had persuaded Tibullus to bring out a book of verse immediately, while you and Virgil are dallying between past and future triumphs.  I am tempted to drop you both and take up with ambitious youth.  Here is Propertius setting the town agog, and yesterday the Sosii told me of another clever boy, the young Ovid, who is already writing verse at seventeen:  a veritable rascal, they say, for wit and wickedness, but a born poet.”

“If he is that,” Horace said, in a tone of irritation very unusual with him, “you had better substitute him for your Propertius.  I think his success is little short of scandalous.”

“You sound like Tullus,” Maecenas said banteringly, “or like the friend of Virgil’s father who arrived from Mantua last week and began to look for the good old Tatii and Sabines in Pompey’s Portico and the Temple of Isis!  Since when have you turned Cato?”

Horace laughed good-humouredly again.  “At any rate,” he said, “you might have done worse by me than likening me to Tullus.  I sometimes wish we were all like him, unplagued by imagination, innocent of Greek, quite sure of the admirableness of admirably administering the government, and of the rightness of everything Roman.  What does he think of Propertius’s peccadilloes, by the way?  He is a friend of the family, is he not?”

“Yes,” said Maecenas, “and he is doing his friendly duty with the dogged persistence you would expect.  He has haunted me in the Forum lately, and yesterday we had a long talk.  His point of view is obvious.  A Roman ought to be a soldier, and he ought to marry and beget more soldiers.  Propertius boasts of being deaf to the trumpet if a woman weeps, and the woman is one he cannot marry. Ergo, Propertius is a disgrace to his country.  It is as clear as Euclid.  All the friends of the family, it seems, have taken a hand in the matter.  Tullus himself has tried to make the boy ambitious to go to Athens, Bassus has tried to discount the lady’s charms, Lynceus has urged the pleasures of philosophy, and Ponticus of writing epics.  And various grey-beards have done their best to make a love-sick poet pay court to wisdom.  I could