Martial, : the twelve books of Epigrams,.

MARTIAL'S EPIGRAMS

LXIII
TO CELER
YoU'D have me read my verse. Nay that ensures
The consequence that you would make them yours.
LXIV
THE BOASTER
YOU'RE rich and young, as all confess,
And none denies your loveliness;
But when we hear your boastful tongue
You're neither pretty, rich, nor young.
LXV
THE DOUBLE-ENTENDRE
Ficus,' I said, but when you heard
You mocked it as a barbarous word
And called my blunder gross.
Your sort and mine, as now I see
Do differ-fundamentally:
So yours shall be, ' Ficos.'
LXVI
THE PLAGIARIST
INSATIABLE thief, you're wrong to think
That poets can be made at such a price;
Though paper's cheap and copying and ink,
Believe me eighteen-pence will not suffice.
Seek an unpublished work, verse yet unknown,
Whose virgin page its owner guards within
Close locked and sealed and scanned by him alone,
Unsmeared as yet by any studious chin.
For books once known can hardly be suborned
To change their lord; find an unpolished scroll
With boss and parchment cover unadornedSome such I have and would not tell a soulRemember, if for stolen fame you look,
To buy the author's silence, not his book.
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