Martial winds up his fourth book (4.89)

There's one by Martial I've been meaning to take a stab at, and the first line worked well enough in verse that I carried on, since I would get to reuse it at the end.

This is the last poem of Book 4, of interest for its terminology of the book's bits and pieces. Martial's reader has made it all the way to the centre of the book, the umbilicus, where the end of the roll is fixed to the central winding-stick with a strip of papyrus called a schida -- a word I had never met before.

Whoa, little book! That’s quite enough for now.

Whoa! We have made it to the finish-line;

But you are keen to venture ever on,

And will not let the binding hold you back.

You act as if your work was incomplete,

That you accomplished even on Page One.

By now your reader wearies and complains;

By now your copyist himself must say:

Whoa, little book! That’s quite enough for now.