Page:The Satire of Seneca on the Apotheosis of Claudius.djvu/145

 up to heaven and in return for such good news nobody believed him, he has declared in so many words that he’ll not testify about anything, not even if he should see a man murdered in the middle of the Forum. What I have heard from him, then, I state positively and plainly, so help him!

Now was come the season when Phoebus had narrowed the daylight, Shortening his journey, while sleep’s dim hours were left to grow longer; Now victorious Cynthia was widening the bounds of her kingdom; Ugly-faced Winter was snatching away the rich glories of Autumn, So that the tardy vintager, seeing that Bacchus was aging, Hastily, here and there, was plucking the clusters forgotten.

I presume I shall be better understood if I say that the month was October and the day October thirteenth; the exact hour I cannot tell you—it’s easier to get philosophers to agree than timepieces—but it was between noon and one o’clock.

“Too clumsily put!” you will say. “All the poets are unsatisfied to describe sunrises and sunsets, so that they are even tackling the middle of the day: are you going to neglect so good an hour?”