These are by my favourite carol-collecting translator of Greek epigram, Reverend George Ratcliffe Woodward, sometime Vicar of Walsingham. His little collection from the skoptic poets of Book 11, Tart and Homely Gibes of Greek Epigrammatists, is in the typical format of his small-press volumes and produced with his and his housekeeper's characteristic care. This pair happily met my eye when I opened it up just now.
In my usual way, I reproduce Woodward's archaising flourishes, but update his typographic fondness for that old-fashioned 's' that looks just an 'f'.
THE FEAST
(Lucillius: xi, 137)
Raw beef-steak you set before us,
Heliodorus;
Ast, three stoups of cruder wine;
Then come epigrams to souse us,
Drench and douse us.
Now, if I had robbed a shrine,
Or had err’d by eating any
Of the many
Sacro-sanct Trinacrian kine,
Guilty then I’de drink and drain, sir,
Nor complain, sir,
At one gulp, the deep-sea brine;
But, as hence the sea is distant,
Unresistant
Drown me in yon well of thine.
THE NIGGARD
(Lucllius: xi, 397)
Artemidoros, counting o’er,
But spending not his myriad store,
Lives life of mules and asses,
Which oftly carry weighty tacks
Of costly gold upon their backs,
But feed themselves on grasses.
(Lucillius: xi, 137)
Raw beef-steak you set before us,
Heliodorus;
Ast, three stoups of cruder wine;
Then come epigrams to souse us,
Drench and douse us.
Now, if I had robbed a shrine,
Or had err’d by eating any
Of the many
Sacro-sanct Trinacrian kine,
Guilty then I’de drink and drain, sir,
Nor complain, sir,
At one gulp, the deep-sea brine;
But, as hence the sea is distant,
Unresistant
Drown me in yon well of thine.
THE NIGGARD
(Lucllius: xi, 397)
Artemidoros, counting o’er,
But spending not his myriad store,
Lives life of mules and asses,
Which oftly carry weighty tacks
Of costly gold upon their backs,
But feed themselves on grasses.
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