Letter 7002: Nectar, wine, food, clothing, learning, resources —
II
To the same man, when he was inviting me to dinner
Nectar, wine, food, clothing, learning, abundance -
with your lavish gifts, Gogo, you are enough for me;
you stand forth as a Cicero overflowing, you as our own Apicius [a famous gourmet and writer on cookery]:
on this side you satisfy with words, and on that you feed with food.
But for now grant me pardon: I am resting while the beef swells within me,
for a quarrel of the belly arises if mixed meat sets up an uproar.
Here, where the ox lies down, I think the chicken and the goose will flee:
between horns and feathers the frenzy will not be evenly matched.
And now already I close my eyes, drooping with sleep:
for my slow songs attest that I am sleeping.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
II
Ad eundem cum me rogaret ad cenam
Nectar vina cibus vestis doctrina facultas –
muneribus largis tu mihi, Gogo, sat es;
tu refluus Cicero, tu noster Apicius extas:
hinc satias verbis, pascis et inde cibis.
sed modo da veniam: bubla turgente quiesco,
nam fit lis uteri, si caro mixta fremat.
hic, ubi bos recubat, fugiet puto pullus et anser:
cornibus et pinnis non furor aequus erit.
et modo iam somno languentia lumina claudo:
nam dormire meum carmina lenta probant.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern venantius fortunatus retranslated v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://data.mgh.de/openmgh/bsb00000790.zip
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