Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/133

 Carm. LXVII, LXVIII

House-door.

First then, that she came to us a virgin is untrue.

And yet this not only does Brixia say she well knows, Brixia that lies close under the citadel of Chinea, the town through which runs the soft stream of yellow Mella, Brixia dear mother of my own Verona; but she tells also of Postumius, and the amours of Cornelius, with whom she enjoyed un- lawful love.

Catullus.

Here someone will say: 'What, house-door, do you know all this, you who never may be away from your master's threshold, nor hear the people talk, but fixed under this lintel do nothing, but shut or open the house? '

House-door.

I have often heard her telling these sins of hers with hushed voice alone with her maids, speaking of those by name of whom I spoke, hoping no doubt that I had neither tongue nor ear. She added besides one whom I do not choose to mention by name, lest he should arch his red brows. He is a tall man, and was once troubled with a great lawsuit, from a falsely imputed child-birth.

To Manlius.

That you, weighed down as you are by fortune and bitter chance, should send me this letter written with tears, to bid me succour a shipwrecked man cast up by the foaming waters of the sea, and restore him from the threshold of death, whom neither does holy Venus suffer to rest, deserted in his widowed