Title: contactum nullis ante cupidinibus
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Latin-geekery. Slash.
Setting: Approximately (!) 25 BCE. Also, before Jack appeared on Dr Who (during his Time Agency years)
Pairings: Horace/Virgil, Horace/Virgil/Propertius(Jack)

Summary: Sextus Propertius swans into Maecenas's little set, young and beautiful and full of elegies. Virgil loves him, and Horace hates him.

Notes: Quintus is Quintus Horatius Flaccus (best known as Horace), Publius is Publius Vergilius Maro (best known as Virgil), Gaius is Gaius Cilnius Maecenas (best known as Maecenas, one of Augstus's mates and patron of a bunch of poets) and Sextus is Jack Sextus Propertius (best known as Propertius, an elegaic poet (I love his stuff, even if he's not as famous as the others)). This is mainly inspired by the distinctly RPS-esque intro to a book of Porpertius' elegies I read last year.


Quintus keeps a straight face while Publius talks about Sextus. Publius talks about Sextus a lot. And it's not that Quintus can't see why; Sextus is tall and broad and really, does not so much wear his toga as drape it enticingly about himself. It's just that Quintus doesn't want Publius to talk about Sextus.

Publius is tall and thin, balding and harried looking. He's terrified of women. He's not much better with men, but Quintus has always been able to warm him up a little. Publius never really expresses attraction towards anyone; he barely manages to express liking. When he does fall for someone he writes poems that allude to it, that have someone a little like Publius addressing someone a little like the object of his affection. Quintus had demanded to at least be shown the boy, after reading the Eclogues, and Publius had reluctantly agreed. Quintus now knows that Publius has a type, but Sextus isn't it.

Sextus isn't Quintus' type, either. Like any good Roman man, Quintus demands superiority in sexual relations, and he suspects he wouldn't get it with Sextus. And that he'd like not having it.

Quintus is short and round, with flabby tits and a jowly neck and a great many laughter lines. He doesn't really mind - it would be against his philosophy to, after all - since its his poetry that gets him laid. Pretty girls and boys, so easily swayed. Other poets, though, not so much.

And this is why Publius' little crush on Sextus is wearing so very hard. Publius is tall and thin and Quintus is short and fat and they have been best friends for most of their lives now (or the important parts thereof), and Quintus can't remember a time when he wasn't in love with Publius. Skinny, neurotic Publius, who writes like Apollo himself is dictating. Quintus is more of a Bacchus man, all things considered.

Sextus writes like Callimachus, who Quintus despises. He informs Publius of this.

"Youth," Publius responds. "He'll grow out of it. We all went through a phase like that."

"And she's a prostitute," Quintus adds. "That's worse than Catullus and Lesbia, my friend."

Publius frowns. "You consider it an excess?" he asks.

"I consider it a good way to catch something nasty, and pretty vulgar to boot," Quintus says.

"It's not like you to get so worked up," Publius chides him. Quintus curses himsef for making a philosophy out of such things, and craves a few extremes, every now and then.

Gaius wanders over to see how his guests are doing, and is pleased to learn how keen Publius is to 'take young Sextus under his wing'. Gaius's words, of course, not Publius's. Publius blushes and stammers. Sextus, talking to Gaius's wife in a way that Quintus thinks the man ought to pay more attention to, looks over and winks at them. Publius fixes his eyes on the floor, and Gaius notices his wife's blush more than Sextus's smile. Quintus glares at Sextus until Gaius gets between them.

Publius offers Quintus a sad, apologetic smile, and takes a grape from the table between the U of couches. The third is unoccupied, and it is perhaps this that prompts Publius to be a little more honest.

"I am not even going to attempt to woo him," he tells Quintus. "Look at him. He looks like Aeneas, or one of those men of old. He could be a gladiator, with that physique."

"And you would be at the stadium with all the wives, dirtying your toga for him," Quintus observes cruelly.

Publius nods. "Worse than those whores," he says bitterly. "My breasts are drooping pockets of skin, my pubes are grey and falling out; I am too tall and too thin and balding and I stoop. My eyesight has been wrecked since I started the Aeneid. He wants some lithe slave boy, some star of one of your odes. I wouldn't even have the nerve to assert my authority over someone so virile."

"If your eyesight is so bad, how can you tell?" Quintus can't resist a joke at his friend's expense, but it makes Publius smile a little. "Give him five years, my dear. He will hunch like the rest of us, have no voice from dictating, have eyesight like a blind beggar. He will have my belly and your breasts from Maecenas' exquisite catering. Not to mention everything his pretty Cynthia will gift him with."

Publius laughs a little. "Yes, there is definitely something worth saying about that."

Quintus reaches over and takes Publius's hand. "We must go to my little farm," he says. "Get you away from our plague-ridden Eros and back where you belong." He pauses, and adds, "I recently purchased some bee hives."

Publius grins. "For me?" he asks.

"Of course, my dear," Quintus says. "I was hoping that you would observe them at work with me, and explain their behaviours."

"You know me too well," Publius says.

"The Georgics, am I right?" An unwanted voice interupts.

Quintus hates Sextus's accent. He cannot place it at all, but it's definitely not Umbrian. It's vowels are all wrong, and it sounds for all the world like Latin is not his first language. No wonder his poetry is so... How did Publius put it? Bold. Everything the man does is 'bold'. He barely knows how to wear a toga, but those tantalising glimpses of flesh seem all the more deliberate for it. He has strange taste in food, and tends to sit, rather than recline.

Sextus takes the couch opposite Quintus, and Publius, to his friend's fury, switches so that his head is next to Sextus, and Quintus is talking to his feet. They are apologetic feet, though, and Quintus finds it hard to stay angry with them.

"I love this century, don't you?" Sextus says, swirling his wine around in Gaius's imported cup. He is reclining, but Quintus sees something in his posture that suggests it's an enjoyed luxury, rather than the appropriate posture to eat dinner. Sextus swallows a garum-covered egg whole, obscenely.

"Yes, I particularly enjoyed the civil war," Quintus says nastily.

"Well, if you will choose the wrong side," Publius says.

"It's all over now," Sextus says. "There'll be peace for, well, some time."

"Really?" Quintus snarls.

Sextus laughs at him, not improving Quintus's mood at all. "You are nothing like I imagined you," he says. "I was expecting some old stoic. It's good to know you're a little human."

This does little to mollify Quintus.

"You've not read much of his poetry, have you?" Publius says, tossing a smile at his friend. "Or you have not read it well."

Sextus laughs again, this time at himself. "You've caught me," he says. "It's not to say I haven't tried. It's just too evocative. You write about some beautiful girl or boy, and, well, I have to go out and find one. You write about your farm, and I just have to have a holiday."

"You write about Cynthia, and I have to visit a doctor," Quintus says.

Publius looks embarrassed, but, again, Sextus is laughing. "If you knew her," he says. "Oh, Cleopatra and Lesbia and all the mortal women in the world could not compare."

"At least you are not invoking Venus," Publius says.

"You should never tell a lover that another is more beautiful than they," Sextus says, "and that goes doubly so for a god. Greater men than me have suffered all kinds of fates." He smiles, and says very softly, "Though I wish I wasn't going to have to depart before Ovid steals my stage. Now there's a poet who knew women."

Quintus doesn't care about Sextus's ramblings; a sure sign the pox he must have caught from his courtesan has reached his mind.

Sextus looks up, and meets his eyes. There is a jolt of electricity all the way down to his groin. Sextus grins, and Quintus sees the straightest, whitest teeth he ever saw. There is a cleft in that square jaw and dimples in his cheeks and a shit-eating grin that would seduce a Vestal Virgin, and probably has. Sextus knows exactly what he's doing.

"Priapus preserve us," Quintus murmurs.

"I want you both," Sextus says in a low, rough voice. "I want you both at once, and one after the other, and to watch you together."

Publius moans and bites his lip. Quintus pulls his gaze from Sextus's and looks at his dear friend. He wants that moan for himself. He wants that skinny body with its drooping breasts and folds of skin and greying hair; its wrinkled, tired phallus and its bony, sagging buttocks. He wants that man's poetry to be about him, surround him, inside of him. He wants to compose couplets in bed together. He wants to show him how to seduce the boys and girls he's bought for just that purpose, how to spend a whole day having nothing but sex with one beautiful person after another, because he has a beautiful mind. He doesn't want the bronzed Adonis before him, with its square shoulders and flat stomach and tight buttocks. Well, he does, but he does not think he could stand to write couplets with the elegaic little slut. He can't admire the man, or respect him like he does Publius. He just feels... threatened.

"I'll leave," Sextus promises. "I'll leave you together. I just want to hear you."

"Hear us?" Publius asks, voice trembling.

"Poets," Sextus says, "aeon-defying, epoch-defining poets. I want to hear you throw poetry at each other in the throes of passion. I want-"

"You want a better teacher," Quintus says. "And I suppose we will have to do. Honestly, what drivel you speak, my dear boy." The drivel is comforting; Quintus is his superior by far in that area, and he knows that that is what Publius will love him for, in the end. Sextus's looks are fleeting, but Quintus's poetry will last past his death (he hopes).

"My room is upstairs," Publius says, and Quintus adores him for the first romantic bravery he has ever shown. He loves him all the more, because Publius is looking at Quintus, and not Sextus.

---

Jack had hell to pay back at the agency. Impersonating a famous personage. Seducing critical figures. Producing paradoxical poetry; writing it only because he'd memorised it before he came.

Jack tuned out the dressing down, and began planning next year's vacation. He wondered whether Horace would notice that Propertius bore an uncanny resemblance to Messalla, who he'd schooled with. Messalla who'd known a young Ovid.

Priapus preserve him, he loved the Romans.