Achte auf das Ende bei einem langen Leben.
Bürge, doch den Schaden rechne dir selbst zu!
Denke nach über alles!
Anderen magst du viel verzeihen, dir nichts!
Maßhalten ist das Beste.
So many lovely things, so rare, so young,
A day begat them, and a day will end.
His monuments decay, and death comes even to his marbles and his names.
If many dread you, then beware of many.
It is outrageous that a strictly abstemious reader should sit in judgement on a poet a little drunk.
Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive.
It is the things which Ausonius reveals unconsciously that win him liking, not those which he sets out to celebrate with a kind of innocent pomp: not the chair of rhetoric at twenty-five, nor the imperial tutorship in his fifties, nor the consulship at sixty-nine, but that he loved and taught rhetoric all his life, and kept his simplicity.
In the history of versification did anyone ever juggle so wildly well with iambics, sapphics, dactylics, anapestics, and all the rest? He fabricated verses most ingeniously, most enthusiastically. His virtuosity is amazing. Almost every line he wrote was a tour de force. And in spite of all this highly self-conscious technical facility he managed occasionally to write poetry.
O maid, while youth is with the rose and thee,
Pluck thou the rose: life is as swift for thee.
What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.
They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailèd names of kings.
Every stage of life has its troubles, and no man is content with his own age.
The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age.
In the history of versification did anyone ever juggle so wildly well with iambics, sapphics, dactylics, anapestics, and all the rest? He fabricated verses most ingeniously, most enthusiastically. His virtuosity is amazing. Almost every line he wrote was a tour de force.
I've never written for a fasting man;
A taste of wine is good before my verse.
But sleep is better than a little wine,
For when sleeping one thinks my songs are dreams.
Bürgen muß man würgen.
