Ode XII

To A Woman Whose Charms Were Over

What would you be at, you woman fitter for the swarthy monsters? Why do you send tokens, why billet-doux to me, and not to some vigorous youth, and of a taste not nice? For I am one who discerns a polypus, or fetid ramminess, however concealed, more quickly than the keenest dog the covert of the boar. What sweatiness, and how rank an odor every where rises from her withered limbs! when she strives to lay her furious rage with impossibilities; now she has no longer the advantage of moist cosmetics, and her color appears as if stained with crocodile's ordure; and now, in wild impetuosity, she tears her bed, bedding, and all she has. She attacks even my loathings in the most angry terms:—"You are always less dull with Inachia than me: in her company you are threefold complaisance; but you are ever unprepared to oblige me in a single instance. Lesbia, who first recommended you—so unfit a help in time of need—may she come to an ill end! when Coan Amyntas paid me his addresses; who is ever as constant in his fair one's service, as the young tree to the hill it grows on. For whom were labored the fleeces of the richest Tyrian dye? For you? Even so that there was not one in company, among gentlemen of your own rank, whom his own wife admired preferably to you: oh, unhappy me, whom you fly, as the lamb dreads the fierce wolves, or the she-goats the lions!"