THE LITTLE BEES OF JULIUS CAESAR SCALIGER

TO

VIDUS BRASSACUS

PRESIDENT OF BORDEAUX

If those dew-gathering girls—whom the ancient Greeks once sang of as the servants who brought liquid streams to law-bearing Ceres—should bring you honey, Vidus, sweetening your pleasant words with a nectarean whisper, so that they might lift from you the grim weariness of the harsh forum: will it be pleasing? And perhaps they have feared to deserve pardon: suffused with a noble blush upon their faces, while they wish to come forward, they desire to remain in the light, hesitant as to how the opinion of men might turn, being so varied and injected with so much poison of envy, that one can scarcely wait for punishment; for they have dared to wear away with an audacious little delay so much of the leisure which you cut from judgments and severe studies, and lead away stealthily into pleasant retreats. For just as when a sailor has endured the angry countenances of the sea, and the flattering hope of longed-for rest returns; then, if the straits have laid down their arms, forgetting their former threats, he repairs his shattered wealth, sated in spirit, and thus indulges in play and song, as if he had always enjoyed favorable fortune, fixing fragrant garlands upon the prow: thus also, when a wise man has, as a victor, shaken off the murmurings of a rabid beast, he [does so] with a similar tenor thereafter.