Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/43

none of them took longer than two days to write, while some were turned out in a single day. How I fear lest the poems themselves make that only too plain!

The first piece can appeal to a witness of inviolable sanctity: for “from Jove must I needs begin.”^[1] These hundred lines on the Great Horse I was bidden deliver to our most indulgent Prince the day after he had dedicated it. “Possibly,” some one will say, “you had seen the statue already.” You will answer him, my dearest Stella, you who know that the Epithalamium you demanded of me was written in two days. A bold piece of work, by Hercules! but all the same it contains three hundred hexameters—and perhaps you will tell a fib for a colleague. Certainly Manilius Vopiscus, a man of great erudition, who is foremost in rescuing from decay our almost vanishing literature, often boasts on my account, and quite spontaneously, that my sketch of his country-house at Tibur was done in one day. Then comes a poem dedicated to Rutilius Gallicus on his recovery from sickness, upon which I say nothing, lest I seem to be taking advantage of the death of my witness to exaggerate. For I can prove my case by the evidence of Claudius Etruscus, who received his ‘‘Bath” from me within the interval of a dinner. Last comes “The Kalends of December,” which at all events will find credence: for a night so happily spent and so unprecedented for public amusements . . .