Ephemeris

1. (Waking.) Now the bright morning unbars the windows, now the watchful swallow chirps at her nests: you, Parmeno, sleep as though it were the first and middle of the night. Dormice sleep the winter through, but they go without food: the cause of your sleep is that you drink much and stretch your paunch with too great a mass of food. Hence no sound enters your bent ears, and a deep slumber presses upon the seat of the mind, nor do the flashes of the glittering light vex your eyes. The fables once feigned for a young man a year-long rest, abiding through the turns of night and day, whose slumbers the Moon had made continuous. Rise, trifler, deserving of the rods: rise, lest a long sleep be given you from a quarter you do not fear: snatch your limbs, Parmeno, from the soft bed. Perhaps even this song, modulated in Sapphic verse, persuades you to sleep? Drive off the measure of Lesbian rest, sharp iambus.

2. PARECBASIS (Digression). Boy, up, rise, and give me my shoes and the linen wrap. Give, whatever it is for a covering that you have prepared, that I may go forth. Give me water of the fountain-dew, that I may wash my hands and face and eyes. And see that the shrine lie open, with no outward array: pious words, harmless vows — that is the abundance of the divine service. I do not demand incense to be burned, nor cakes of honeyed crust, and I leave the little hearth of living turf to vain altars. God must be prayed to by me, and the Son of the most high God, the majesty of a single mode, allied with the Holy Spirit. And lo, now I begin my vows: and the thought of the divine power feels, in awe, His presence. Does hope, does faith, fear anything?

3. THE PRAYER. Almighty, known to me by the worship of the mind alone, unknown to the wicked and to none of the pious unknown: lacking beginning and end, older than the age, than what has been or will come: whose form and measure neither mind can grasp nor tongue utter: whom alone it is lawful to behold, and face to face to hear as He commands, and to sit beside, near His Father's right hand — Himself the maker of things, Himself the cause of the things to be created, Himself the Word of God, the Word that is God, the foreshadower of the world which He was to make: begotten in that time when as yet there was no time: brought forth before the radiance and the ruddy morning-star (Eous) lit up the sky: without whom nothing was done, through whom all things were made: whose throne is in heaven, to whom, as He sits, the earth is subject, and the sea, and the insuperable chaos of dark night: restless, Himself moving all things, the quickener of the inert: God, with His begetter not begotten, who, offended at the deceit of a proud people, called the nations into His kingdom, to be worshipped by the better offshoot of an adopted stock: whom it was granted our forefathers to behold, and, that divine power being seen, it was given to have seen the Father too: who bore our contagions and, suffering the mockeries of a dire death, taught that the way of eternal life can be retraced; and that not the soul alone returns, but that with the whole body we enter the heavenly regions, and leave the empty mystery of the sepulchre covered over in the vacant earth.

Son of the most high Father, and a bringer of salvation to our age, to whom your begetter handed down all the Father's powers, keeping nothing back out of envy, and full of His gifts: open the way to my prayers, and bear these to the Father's ears. Grant, Father, a mind unconquered against all crimes, and turn away the viperous wickedness of the poison that would harm. Let it be enough that the serpent of old betrayed Eve and joined to her the deceived Adam: may we, the late seed of their descendants, once foretold by the truthful prophets, shun the snares which the death-bearing serpent winds about us. Open the way which, after the chains of my sickly body, may bear me on high, where the Milky path of the pure heaven runs! It surpasses the wandering clouds of the windy moon, where the pious chiefs have gone, and where once, untouched, Elias, snatched up, pierces above the air in his four-horse chariot, and Enoch, his forerunner, with his body entire. Grant, Father, the hoped-for breath of eternal light, if I swear not by stones for gods, and, looking up to the one altar of the venerable rite, I bear the undefiled libations of life: if I acknowledge You, Father of the Lord and the only-begotten God, and the Spirit, mingled with the two, who flitted over the waters of the deep.

Grant, begetter, pardon, and purge my tormented breast: if I seek You not by the entrails of cattle, nor by poured-out blood, nor divine the divine power from the secret inward parts: if I abstain from crime, though liable to error, and if I wish, rather than trust, to be approved good and pure. Deign to receive a confessing soul, if I curse my falling limbs, and if I silently repent, and a deep dread tortures my senses, and my wounded mind anticipates the late torments of Gehenna and suffers its own shades. Grant, Father, that these vows be made ratified by our prayer. May I fear nothing and desire nothing: I shall reckon this to be enough, which is enough; may I will nothing base, nor be to myself a cause of shame; may I do to no one what at the same time I would not have done to me. May I be wounded by no true charge, nor stained by a doubtful one: little, it seems, does the suspected differ from the truly guilty. May there be no power to do ill, and may a tranquil power to do well be at hand. May I be of slender fare and habit, may I be dear to my friends and ever a father without wound to that name; may I grieve neither in mind nor in body: may all my limbs perform their accustomed offices; nor, wounded in any part, may my use miss anything lost. May I enjoy peace, pass my days secure, count the marvels of the earth as nothing; and, when the last hour of the day shall come, may my life, of good conscience, neither fear death nor desire it. When, pure from hidden things, I shall by Your indulgence behold You, I shall despise all things, since the only delight will have been to hope for Your judgement; which, while it defers its own times and the day delays, drive far off the savage serpent, the snarer with his alluring errors. These pious vows, but trembling with sad guilt, do You, Son, who can be appeased, plead before the eternal Father — Saviour, God and Lord, mind, glory, the Word, the Son, true of the true, light of light, abiding with the eternal Father, reigning unto the ages, whom the harmonious songs of David, modulated, celebrate: and the air rings with voices that shall answer, Amen.

4. THE GOING FORTH. Enough of prayer has been given to God — although enough is never given to the guilty by prayer to the divine power. Give me my forensic dress, boy. To my friends must be said "hail" and "farewell," which is mutual; since, when through four hours the sun, his horses urged on in their course, inclines toward the south, Sosias must now be reminded.

5. THE PASSAGE OF INVITATION. For the time draws near for summoning my friends; lest we either delay their luncheon, run quickly, boy, through the neighbouring houses. You yourself know who they are: and now, while I speak, return. I have invited five; for a banquet of six with the host (the king) is just: if more, it is a riot (convicium). He has gone; we are left with Sosias.

6. THE PASSAGE OF GIVING ORDERS TO THE COOK. Sosias, we must lunch. The sun is now wholly warm into the fourth hour: at the fifth the shadow is bent toward its mark. Whether the seasoned dishes are steeped with a lively savour (for they are wont to deceive), prove by trying. Shake the seething pots with rolling palms; dip swiftly your fingers in the hot broth, that your moist tongue may lick them with a quivering, darting return.

7. ON A SHORTHAND-WRITER, MOST SWIFT IN WRITING. Boy, skilful minister of the swift-flying marks, fly hither, make ready the two-leaved writing-tablet, in which there is a great abundance of speaking, accomplished by single points, as a single word is finished off. I unroll my teeming books, and, like a dense hail, with a torrent of a tongue I sound on: your ears neither hesitate, nor is your page taken up too soon, and your right hand, sparingly moved, flies over the waxen plain. When most of all I now speak out with the compass of circumlocution, you already hold on the wax the thoughts of my breast, scarcely spoken. I would my mind had given me to perceive as swiftly as, by the flight of your swift right hand, you forestall me as I speak. Who, I ask, who has betrayed me? Who has already told you those things which I was meaning to say? What thefts does your winged right hand work in my inmost heart? What order of things is so new, that what the tongue has not yet finished off comes to your ears? Doctrine did not furnish this, nor any hand so swift at the swift-footed abridgement: nature gave you this gift, and God this present, that you should know before what I would say, and will the same thing that I will.

8. (Dreams.) Portents shatter for us our peaceful slumbers, such as we marvel at when, more often in the high ether, the wandering clouds in their gathering join various shapes of four-footed beasts and of birds, or when earthly monsters are mingled with sea-creatures; until, with the east winds clearing them, the dispersed clouds are thinned into a liquid expanse. Now the forums, now lawsuits, now the pageant of the broad theatre is seen: and I endure squadrons of horsemen and the slaughters of robbers; a wild beast tears our faces, or in the bloody arena we attack with the sword. On foot I tread the ship-wrecking sea, and leap the straits at a run, and on sudden wings I flit over the air; we even suffer, through our dreams, unspeakable lusts and the unchaste disgraces of the night and tragic unions. Yet there is a refuge, as often as repose, broken by shame, dissolves the portents of sleep, and the mind, free of the foul image, wakes: well aware, the secure hand passes over the whole bed: the shameful guilt of the couch recedes, and the crimes of the fleeing dream melt away. I behold myself applaud among the triumphant: again I am dragged, disarmed, among the captive Alans. I gaze upon the temples of the gods and the holy doors and the golden palaces, and I seem to recline on Sarranian (Tyrian) purple — and soon, a guest, I lie in the smoky cook-shops. They tell that the divine bard (Vergil) placed beneath the leaves of an elm the vain semblances of the slothful slumbers, and twin gates in number: the one, which with its ivory arch ever heaps up false shapes upon the air; the other, of horn, which sends out true visions. But if a choice is granted us out of these doubtful things, that it is better to lack faith in glad things than to fear vain ones, lo, I would now rather be deceived; for, provided only that sad things ever vanish, it is well enough — to have done without things to be enjoyed, rather than to tremble at ills — if only fear be absent. There are those too who would conjecture weeping and joys to be a matter of dispute, and who draw out the events with a varying report. Go through the slanting worlds of the sky, evil dreams, where the wandering storm-clouds, never at rest, disperse their clouds; inhabit the lunar poles: why do you steal upon our thresholds and the dark beds of a narrow dwelling? Let me pass the idle nights in peace, until the golden Lucifer return to me with his rosy rising. But if, vexed by no shapes in the night, soft sleep shall have soothed me in tranquil air, this grove, which grows green and leafy with elms in our field, I dedicate to be inhabited by your watches.