"Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras amet."

(To-morrow he shall love who ne'er has loved

And who has loved, to-morrow he shall love.)

An interesting study might be made of the favorite types of feminine beauty in the Roman poets. Horace sings of the "golden-haired" Pyrrhas, and Phyllises, and Chloes, and seems to have had an admiration for blondes, but a poet of the common people, who has recorded his opinion on this subject in the atrium of a Pompeian house, shows a more catholic taste, although his freedom of judgment is held in some constraint:

"My fair girl has taught me to hate

Brunettes with their tresses of black.

I will hate if I can, but if not,

'Gainst my will I must love them also."[70]

On the other hand, one Pompeian had such an inborn dread of brunettes that, whenever he met one, he found it necessary to take an appropriate antidote, or prophylactic:

"Whoever loves a maiden dark

By charcoal dark is he consumed.

When maiden dark I light upon

I eat the saving blackberry."[71]

These amateur poets do not rely entirely upon their own Muse, but borrow from Ovid, Propertius, or Virgil, when they recall sentiments in those writers which express their feelings. Sometimes it is a tag, or a line, or a couplet which is taken, but the borrowings are woven into the context with some skill. The poet above who is under compulsion from his blonde sweetheart, has taken the second half of his production verbatim from Ovid, and for the first half of it has modified a line of Propertius. Other writers have set down their sentiments in verse on more prosaic subjects. A traveller on his way to the capital has scribbled these lines on the wall, perhaps of a wine-shop where he stopped for refreshment:[72]

"Hither have we come in safety.

Now I hasten on my way,

That once more it may be mine

To behold our Lares, Rome."

At one point in a Pompeian street, the eye of a straggler would catch this notice in doggerel verse:[73]

"Here's no place for loafers.

Lounger, move along!"

On the wall of a wine-shop a barmaid has thus advertised her wares:[74]