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310 After all, it is a long while. Ages and ages lie as dust between us. Yet even they would scarce have seemed to you time enough to slake the scorching thirst of your dark blood, Caius Catullus.

You held your life like a ripe fruit full of a subtle tang, acrid and sweet, crushed to your lips till you had sucked from the bright bitter rind the last morsel of pulp.

And when your purse had in it nothing but cobwebs you invited the guests to bring their own wines to the banquet, and from the cushions of your ivory bed while Lesbia and Juventius muffled in the voluminous scarlet of your cloak whispered love at your ear, you surveyed with glittering eyes black as agates each arriving guest: he of the sallow face yellower than a gilded statue's, Gellius thin as a rose leaf, the beloved Fabullus and Verannius in their bracelets just back from an unfruitful campaign, then the sunlight filling with amber the irised wine cups, the brown feet of the dancing girl from Cadiz in the whining of flutes, clatter of crotales, crushing to fragrance the strown marjoram on the veined pavement, and beyond all these under the wind-shaken awning of the portico, the gold-footed peacocks strutting and bowing to their green reflections in the polished floor, storm buffeted galleys veering and tacking on a porphyry sea.