“My Lesbia, let’s live and let’s love,
Let all the rumors of harsh old men
count for only a penny.
Suns can set and rise again:
but when our brief light sets
we must sleep a lonely endless night.
Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred,
then another thousand and a second hundred,
And even then another thousand, a hundred more.
When we’ve had so many thousands,
we will mix them together so we don’t know,
so that no wicked man can feel envy
when he knows what a number of kisses there’ve been.”

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

As with earlier poems of Catullus I have mentioned, this one came to me when I was a teenager studying AP Latin. I don’t know if anything more ruinous or momentous could happen to a teenager in his rutting years than encountering Catullus (ok, that sentence needs a limiting phrase–“in a Latin class”). It has been twenty years since I first read this poem, but I could almost translate every line without looking at the Latin.

Perhaps there is an unpleasant serendipity in the Latin AP on Catullus no longer being offered? For better or worse, I never would have pursued classics if not for the verve and danger of Gaius Valerius Catullus. Discipuli, thank your Latin teachers!