“Now you slander yourself again! If all clients who needed money could write, the world would be full of poets.”
“Well, perhaps it was not so. But speak of yourself—of your Aeneid.”
Virgil looked gloomy: “Of that I will not speak.”
“Is it finished?”
“More than that! It is done with!”
“Done with?”
“Yes! When I read it, I found it a failure! It was not Homer; it was nothing. It was a punishment, because I wished to outshine my father.”
“Have you destroyed it?”
“Not yet; but it is sealed up, in order to be destroyed after my death.”
“Now you are slandering yourself, and you are depressed, Maro, not by years, not by work, but by something else.”