Horace Ode 1.38

I hate Persian trapping, boy, crowns woven with linden displease (me); cease to pursue where of places the late rose delays. I attentively care (that) you trouble not at all over the simple myrtle: the myrtle disgraces neither you as attendant nor me drinking under the compact vine.

Horace Ode 1.37

Now it is time to drink, now it is time the earth be struck with a free foot, now it was time to burden the couch of the gods with Salian feasts, comrades. Before this it was wrong to draw off Caecuban from the ancestral cellars, while the queen was preparing mad ruins for the Capitoline and destruction for (our) power with her polluted flock of men foul with shame, mad to hope for anything and drunk with sweet fortune. But hardly one ship safe from the fires lessened her madness, and Caesar reduced her mind frenzied with Mareotic (wine) into true fears, with his oars pressing on her flying from Italy swiftly as a soft dove or the swift hunter a hare in the snowy plains of Haemonia, to give the destructive monster over to chains; who, seeking to die more nobly, neither became frightened of the sword like a woman nor sought the shores with her swift fleet; having dared both to see the fallen palace with a calm face and to draw up the harsh serpents bravely, to drink in the dark poison with her body, fiercer by her determined death, begrudging to be lead as a private (citizen) by savage Liburnians for a proud triumph, not as a humble woman.

Horace Ode 1.25

Wild young men more sparingly shake (your) closed windows with thick blows, nor do they deny you sleep, Lydia, and the door loves the threshold which easily before used to move a lot; you hear less and less now “Lydia, with me, yours, dying, do you sleep the long nights?” In turn as a thin old woman you will weep for your arrogant adulterers in the lonely ally, with the Thracian wind raging more under the new moon, when burning love and lust will savage around your ulcerous liver, which is accustomed to madden the mothers of horses, not without complaint that the happy youth rejoices more in green ivy and blackish myrtle; she will commit dry leaves to the East Wind, companion of winter.

Horace Ode 1.24

What shame or measure is there to desire for so dear a head? Teach mourning songs, Melpomene, to whom the father gave a pure voice with the lyre. Now a perpetual sleep presses Quintilius! When will Decency, and the sister of Justice, incorruptible Faith, and naked Truth ever see an equal to him (lit. whom)? That man fell wept by many good men, more wept for by no one than by you, Vergil. You, pious in vain—alas—ask the gods for Quintilius not thus entrusted. What if you, more pleasantly than Thracian Orpheus, should tune a song heard by the trees, would blood then return to the empty ghost, which once and for all with his frightful staff Mercury drove to his black herd? It is not to open fates with soft prayers. It is hard: but whatever is wrong to set right, let it become easier by the suffering.

Horace Ode 1.23

You avoid me like a fawn, Chloe, seeking her frightened mother in trackless mountains not without empty fear of the breezes and woods. For whether the arrival of spring bristled with shifting leaves or the green lizards parted the bramble, she trembles both in heart and knees. But no harsh tiger of Gaetulian lion do I follow to break you: cease finally following (your) mother, (you are) ready for a man.

Horace Ode 1.22

One whole of life and pure of evil does not need Maurian spears nor a bow nor quiver heavy with poisoned arrows, Fuscus, whether he is about to make a journey through sweltering Syrtes or inhospitable Caucasus or which places the fabled Hydaspes laps. For a wolf fled me though unharmed in the Sabine forest while I sang (lit. sing) my Lalage and wandered (lit. wanders) beyond the boundary with cares disengaged, such a monster as neither warlike Daunia feeds in wide oak woods nor the land of Iuba begets, dry nurse of lions. Put me in dull fields where no tree is refreshed by summer breeze, which side of the world the clouds and evil Jupiter presses; put (me) under a chariot of too close a sun in a land refusing homes: I will love Lelage sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking.

Catullus 49

Marcus Tullius, most elegant of the descendants of Romulus, as many are and as many were and as many will be in other years, Catullus gives you greatest thanks, the worst poet of all, as much the worst poet of all as you are the best patron of all.