Carmina

Because you, oppressed by fortune and bitter calamity, sent me this letter written with tears, that I might bear up shipwrecked you tossed by the foaming waves of the sea, and restore you from the threshold of death; you whom neither sacred Venus suffers to repose in soft slumber, desolate on a lonely couch, nor do the Muses divert with the sweet song of ancient poets, while your anxious mind keeps watch:—I am grateful that you call me your friend, and seek here the gifts of the Muses and of Venus. But so that my troubles may not be unknown to you, Manlius, and so that you not think that I hate the duty of host, hear how I myself am engulfed in the waves of fortune, and do not further seek joyful gifts from a wretched one. In that time when the white toga was first handed to me, and my flowering age was passing its delightful spring, much and enough did I sport: nor was the goddess unknown to us who mixes bitter-sweet with our cares. But my brother's death plunged all this pursuit into mourning. O brother, taken from my unhappy self; you by your dying have broken my ease, O brother; all our house is buried with you; with you have perished the whole of our joys, which your sweet love nourished in your lifetime. With your loss, I have dismissed wholly from mind these studies and every delight of mind. So then, because you write, “it is shameful for Catullus to be at Verona, because here someone of the better sort warms up his frigid limbs on a desolate couch;“ that, Manlius, is not shameful; rather it is a sorrow. Therefore, forgive me if I do not bestow on you these gifts which grief has snatched from me, because I am unable. For the fact that there is no great store of writings with me arises from this, that we live at Rome: there is my home, there is my hall, there my time is passed; here but one of my book-cases follows me. As it is thus, I would not want you to think that we do this from ill-will or with a mind not open enough, because ample store is not forthcoming to either of your desires: of my own accord would I grant both, had I the wherewithal.