ELEGY XV

SEEK a new Poet, mother of tender Loves. I'm now rounding the last mark with my elegies. Those songs which I, a child of the Pelignian countryside, have written, have been a delight to me and they have not put me to shame. If it's anything to boast about, my title of Knight is an old ancestral

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one. I'm not a parvenu of the latest war. Mantua delights in Virgil, Verona in Catullus; I shall be called the glory of the Pelignians, of the people who so loved freedom that they did not hesitate to fight and die for it when Rome was menaced by confederate hosts. Some day when he sees Sulmo of many streams, close girdled by her narrow ramparts, the traveller will exclaim, "Little town, for all thy littleness, I'll call thee great, because thou wast able to produce so great a poet."

Lovely boy, and thou, Venus, his mother, pluck from my fields your golden standards, The god of the hornèd brow, Lyæeus, hath struck me with a mightier thyrsus, and bids me urge my steeds over a wider plain. Farewell, ye dainty elegies, and thou, my kindly Muse, farewell; when I am gone, my work will still live on.

Quaere novum vatem, tenerorum mater Amorum!
    raditur hic elegis ultima meta meis;
quos ego conposui, Paeligni ruris alumnus--
    nec me deliciae dedecuere meae--
siquid id est, usque a proavis vetus ordinis heres,
    non modo militiae turbine factus eques.
Mantua Vergilio, gaudet Verona Catullo;
    Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego,
quam sua libertas ad honesta coegerat arma,
    cum timuit socias anxia Roma manus.
atque aliquis spectans hospes Sulmonis aquosi
    moenia, quae campi iugera pauca tenent,
'Quae tantum' dicat 'potuistis ferre poetam,
    quantulacumque estis, vos ego magna voco.'
Culte puer puerique parens Amathusia culti.
    aurea de campo vellite signa meo!
corniger increpuit thyrso graviore Lyaeus:
    pulsanda est magnis area maior equis.
inbelles elegi, genialis Musa, valete,
    post mea mansurum fata superstes opus.