_He tells Venus that he now ceases to write Elegies._
|Seek a new Poet, mother of the tender Loves; here the extreme
turning-place is grazed [674] by my Elegies, which I, a foster-child of
the Pelignian fields, have composed; nor have my sportive lays disgraced
me. _Me, I say, who_, if that is aught, am the heir to my rank, [675]
even through a long line of ancestors, and not lately made a Knight
in the hurly-burly of warfare. Mantua delights in Virgil, Verona in
Catullus; I shall be called the glory of the Pelignian race; which its
own liberties summon to glorious arms, [676] when trembling Rome dreaded
[677] the allied bands. And some stranger will say, as he looks on the
walls of the watery Sulmo, which occupy but a few acres of land, "Small
as you are, I will call you great, who were able to produce a Poet
so great." Beauteous boy, and thou, Amathusian parent [678] of the
beauteous boy, raise your golden standard from my fields. The horned
[679] Lyæus [680] has struck me with a thyrsus more potent; with mighty
steeds must a more extended plain be paced. Unwarlike Elegies, my
sportive [681] Muse, farewell; a work destined to survive long after I
am dead and gone.----