Um pentâmetro

In his poetic autobiography Tristia ("Sad Poems") 4.10, Ovid records that his father (a conservative country gentleman who lived to be ninety) tried to force him to give up writing poetry because there was no money in it, but that whatever he said turned out to be poetry. This passage may have inspired a wonderful, but apocryphal, anedocte: once, when his father was beating him for persisting with his poetry, Ovid cried out, parce mihi; numquam versificabo, pater! ("Spare me, father, and I will never write verses again"), which scans as pentameter.

J. C. McKeown, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World's Greatest Empire, Oxford University Press, 2010