Lesbia always speaks ill of me, never shuts up about me: damn me if she doesn’t love me. What’s the sign? Because it’s the same with me: I’m continually complaining, but damn me if I don’t love her. —Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) Catullus 92, translated by A. S. Kline . . .
How Many Kisses: to Lesbia
Lesbia, you ask how many kisses of yours would be enough and more to satisfy me. As many as the grains of Libyan sand that lie between hot Jupiter’s oracle, at Ammon, in resin-producing Cyrene, and old Battiades sacred tomb: or as many as the stars, when night is still, gazing down on secret . . .
Let’s Live and Love: To Lesbia
Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love, and all the words of the old, and so moral, may they be worth less than nothing to us! Suns may set, and suns may rise again: but when our brief light has set, night is one long everlasting sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more, another . . .
Treacherous Girl
What slender boy, Pyrrha, drowned in liquid perfume, urges you on, there, among showers of roses, deep down in some pleasant cave? For whom did you tie up your hair, with simple elegance? How often he’ll cry at the changes of faith and of gods, ah, he’ll wonder, surprised by roughening . . .
Her Apology
Let me not be such a feverish passion to you, my love, as I seem to have been a few days ago, if I’ve done anything in my foolish youth which I’ve owned to regretting more than leaving you, alone, last night wishing to hide the desire inside me. —Sulpicia Sulpicia 6, translated by A. S. . . .
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