"Paro Dies" Means, "I Furnish the Days," Right?

A passable idea occurred to me the other day for another parody of that Caesar-Marks-Lerner oldie, Is It True What They Say About Dixie? (A frightful midi [at least, it sounds frightful on my machine; all the midi's I found of this one did] can be found here.)

Like lots of passable ideas, this one passed, all right: it passed right into turgidity. What should have sounded like Irving Berlin on an average day came out sounding like W.S. Gilbert on a bad day. Still, for the record:

Is it true, if it says ipse dixit?
Is it false, if it's not Q.E.D.'d?
Could Rome have hoped to flatten
Illiterates in Gaul,
If it had swapped its Latin
For proto-Provençal?
Does it help, using sound bites from Virgil
As a crutch
For a much
Thinner screed?
Well, the hic
Takes a haec
When the hoc-um starts to flow,
So I guess that it must be so.

Alternate-but-not-any-better substitute for lines 3-6:

Would we kowtow to Caesar,
And do it with such grace,
Had he not said, "divisa
All Gaul in partes tres"?

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov