ce_.

Since you alone support so many and such weighty concerns, defend Italy
with your arms, adorn it by your virtue, reform it by your laws; I
should offend, O Caesar, against the public interests, if I were to
trespass upon your time with a long discourse.

Romulus, and father Bacchus, and Castor and Pollux, after great
achievements, received into the temples of the gods, while they were
improving the world and human nature, composing fierce dissensions,
settling property, building cities, lamented that the esteem which they
expected was not paid in proportion to their merits. He who crushed the
dire Hydra, and subdued the renowned monsters by his forefated labor,
found envy was to be tamed by death [alone]. For he burns by his very
splendor, whose superiority is oppressive to the arts beneath him: after
his decease, he shall be had in honor. On you, while present among us,
we confer mature honors, and rear altars where your name is to be sworn
by; confessing that nothing equal to you has hitherto risen, or will
hereafter rise. But this your people, wise and just in one point (for
preferring you to our own, you to the Grecian heroes), by no means
estimate other things with like proportion and measure: and disdain and
detest every thing, but what they see removed from earth and already
gone by; such favorers are they of antiquity, as to assert that the
Muses [themselves] upon Mount Alba, dictated the twelve tables,
forbidding to trangress, which the decemviri ratified; the leagues of
our kings concluded with the Gabii, or the rigid Sabines; the records of
the pontifices, and the ancient volumes of the augurs.

If, because the most ancient writings of the Greeks are also the best,
Roman authors are to be weighed in the same scale, there is no need we
should say much: there is nothing hard in the inside of an olive,
nothing [hard] in the outside of a nut. We are arrived at the highest
pitch of success [in arts]: we paint, and sing, and wrestle more
skillfully than the annointed Greeks. If length of time makes poems
better, as it does wine, I would fain know how many years will stamp a
value upon writings. A writer who died a hundred years ago, is he to be
reckoned among the perfect and ancient, or among the mean and modern
authors? Let some fixed period exclude all dispute. He is an old and
good writer who completes a hundred years. What! one that died a month
or a year later, among whom is he to be ranked? Among th