The Marriage of Philology and Mercury

...whether anyone has ever written so copiously with such elegance, or with such elegance and success in such abundance. Augustus composed a Sicily A lost poem by Augustus about the island, Epigrams, an Achilles, Geographical Works, and many other things with equal grace. If only his Ajax A tragedy Augustus began but later destroyed had not FALLEN UPON THE SPONGE A play on words: Augustus famously said his Ajax "fell upon the sponge" (was erased) rather than his sword, we would certainly have something to set against those tasteless men
Tasteless, according to Gellius book 19.?

who, to the great detriment of the State, turn the most gifted minds of Princes away from the study of the more humane arts humaniorum artium: the liberal arts or humanities as if such things were beneath them. Nor indeed was Tiberius inferior to his most famous predecessors in this regard; he both toyed with a collection of Greek epigrams with admirable sweetness and wrote a most eloquent lamentation concerning the murder of Gaius Julius Caesar. Neither was Germanicus The nephew of Tiberius and a celebrated general lacking, who [translated] the Phænomena of Aratus A famous Greek astronomical poem...