Page:The poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus - Francis Warre Cornish.djvu/55



quarrel? Is it that you wish to be talked about? What do you want? would you be known no matter how? So you shall, since you have chosen to love my lady, — and long shall you rue it.

Ameana asked me for a round ten thousand; that girl with the ugly nose, the mistress of the bankrupt of Formiae. You relations, who have the charge of the girl, call together friends and doctors: the girl is not right in her mind, and never asks the looking-glass what she is like.

Hither from all sides, hendecasyllables, as many as there are of you, all of you as many as there are. An ugly drab thinks she may jest with me, and says she will not give me back your tablets, if you can submit to that. Let us follow her, and demand them back again. You ask who she is. That one whom you see strutting with an ugly gait, grinning like a vulgar mountebank with the gape of a Cisalpine hound. Stand round her and call for them back again. ' Dirty drab, give back the tablets, give back the tablets, dirty drab! ' Don't you care a penny for that? O, filth, O beastliness! or anything else that I can call you filthier still! But we must not think this enough. Well, if nothing else can do it, let us force a blush from the brazen face of the beast: call