Varus drew me off from the Forum where I was passing the time to see his lover: a
professional, as it seemed to me at first sight, neither inelegant nor lacking
good looks. When we came in, we fell to discussing various subjects, among
which, how was Bithynia now, how things
had gone there, and whether I had made any money there. I replied what was true,
that neither ourselves nor the praetors nor their company had brought away
anything whereby to flaunt a better-scented hair-do, especially as our praetor,
who boned us all, didn't care a hair for his company. "But surely," she said,
"you got some men to bear your litter, for they are said to grow there?" I, to
make myself appear to the girl as one of the fortunate, "No," I say, "it did not
go that badly with me, ill as the province turned out, that I could not procure
eight strapping men to bear me. (But not a single one was mine either here or
there who could hoist on his neck the fractured foot of my old bedstead). And
she, like the saucy tramp she was, "Please, Catullus," says she, "lend me those
bearers for a short time, for I want to ride to the shrine of Serapis." "Hold
it!" say I to the girl, "when I said I had this, my mind slipped; my friend,
Cinna Gaius, he provided himself with these. In truth, whether his or
mine—what is it to me? I use them as though I had paid for them. But
you are awfully crude and a bother, not through you am I to be careless."
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.