Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/163



Mcntula is truly said to be rich in the possession of the grant of land at Firmum, which has so many fine things in it, fowling of all sorts, fish, meadowland, corn-land, and game. All to no purpose; he outruns the produce of it by his expenses. So I grant that he is rich, if you will allow that he lacks everything. Let us admire the advantages of his estate, so long as he himself is in want.

Mentula has something like thirty acres of grazing land, forty of plough land: the rest is salt water. How can he fail to surpass Croesus in wealth, who occupies so many good things in one estate, pasture, arable, vast woods and cattle-ranges and lakes as far as the Hyperboreans and the Great Sea?

I have often cast about with busy questing mind how I could send to you some poems of Callimachus with which I might make you placable to me, and that you might not strive to send a shower of missiles to reach my head; but now I see that this labour has been taken by me in vain, Gellius, and that my prayers have here availed nothing. Now in return I will parry those missiles of yours by wrapping my cloak round my arm; but you shall be pierced by mine and punished.

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