Epodes

You will go among the high bulwarks of the ships, in Liburnian galleys, my friend, ready to undergo every danger of Caesar's as your own, Maecenas: what of us, to whom life is sweet if you survive, but, if otherwise, a burden? Shall we, as bidden, pursue a leisure not sweet unless together with you, or shall we bear this toil with the spirit that becomes men who are not soft? We will bear it, and follow you, whether over the ridges of the Alps and the inhospitable Caucasus, or all the way to the farthest gulf of the West, with a brave heart. You may ask how I, unwarlike and far from strong, should help your toil by my own. As your companion I shall be in less fear, the fear that grips the absent more: just as the bird sitting over her unfledged young dreads the gliding of serpents more, once she has left them — though, were she present, she could bring no more help to them than now. Gladly this campaign, and every war, will be served in hope of your favour — not that more bullocks may strain at ploughs yoked to my own teams, nor that my flocks may shift, before the burning Dog-star, from Calabrian to Lucanian pastures, nor that a gleaming villa of lofty Tusculum may touch the Circaean walls. Your generosity has enriched me enough and more than enough; I shall not gather what either, like miserly Chremes, I might bury in the ground, or, an ungirt spendthrift, squander.

"Happy the man who, far from business cares, like the primal race of mortals, works his ancestral fields with his own oxen, free from all moneylending; who is not roused, a soldier, by the harsh trumpet, nor dreads the angry sea, and shuns the forum and the proud thresholds of more powerful citizens. And so he either weds the grown shoots of his vines to the tall poplars, or in a secluded valley looks out upon his wandering, lowing herds, and, lopping off the useless branches with his knife, grafts in more fruitful ones, or stores pressed honey in clean jars, or shears his feeble sheep. Or when Autumn lifts over the fields his head adorned with mellow fruits, how he rejoices, plucking the grafted pears and the grape that rivals purple, with which to reward you, Priapus, and you, father Silvanus, guardian of boundaries. He loves to lie now beneath an ancient oak, now on the matted grass: meanwhile the waters glide between their high banks, the birds complain in the woods, and the leaves murmur against the flowing streams, which invites a light sleep. But when the wintry season of thundering Jove brings on its rains and snows, he either drives, with many a hound, this way and that, the fierce boars into the waiting nets, or stretches his wide-meshed snares on a smooth pole, a trap for the greedy thrushes, and catches the timid hare and the migrant crane in the noose, his pleasant prizes. Amid such things, who does not forget the wretched cares that love brings? But if a chaste wife does her part with the house and the sweet children — such as a Sabine, or the sun-scorched wife of a nimble Apulian — and heaps the sacred hearth with seasoned logs against the coming of her weary man, and, penning the glad flock in their wattled folds, drains their swollen udders, and, drawing this year's wine from the sweet cask, prepares an unbought feast: then no Lucrine oysters could please me more, nor turbot, nor parrot-wrasse, if any, when winter has thundered upon the eastern waves, turns them toward this sea of ours; no African fowl would go down into my belly, no Ionian grouse, sweeter than the olive gathered from the richest branches of the trees, or the sorrel that loves the meadows, and the mallow wholesome to an ailing body, or a lamb slain at the feast of Terminus, or a kid snatched from the wolf. Amid such banquets, how it pleases him to see the well-fed sheep hurrying homeward, to see the wearied oxen dragging the upturned ploughshare with their drooping necks, and the home-born slaves, the swarm of a wealthy house, ranged about the gleaming Lares." When the moneylender Alfius had said this, about to be a countryman at last, he called in all his money on the Ides — and on the Kalends seeks to lend it out again.

If ever a man with impious hand has broken his father's aged throat, let him eat garlic, more harmful than hemlock. O the hardy bowels of harvesters! What poison is this that rages in my vitals? Has viper's blood, perhaps, been boiled into these herbs and tricked me? Or has Canidia meddled with the baleful dish? When, beyond all the Argonauts, Medea admired their fair leader, she smeared Jason with this, as he was about to bind the unfamiliar yokes upon the bulls; with this she took her vengeance on her rival, drenching the gifts, and fled on a winged serpent. Never did so great a steam of the stars settle on thirsty Apulia, nor did the gift burn more fiercely on the shoulders of mighty Hercules. But if you ever long for such a dish again, playful Maecenas, I pray that your girl may set her hand against your kiss, and lie at the very edge of the bed.

As great as the discord allotted between wolves and lambs, so great is the discord between you and me, you whose flank is scarred with Spanish ropes and your legs with the hard fetter. However proudly you strut in your money, fortune does not change your breed. Do you not see, as you pace the Sacred Way in a toga six yards wide, how the freest indignation of the passers-by turns their faces this way and that? "This fellow, cut by the triumvirs' lashes till the crier was sick of it, ploughs a thousand acres of Falernian land and wears down the Appian Way with his ponies, and, a great knight, sits in the front seats, scorning the law of Otho. What use is it to lead so many beaked ships, heavy with their bronze, against pirates and a gang of slaves — this man, this man, a tribune of soldiers?"

"But, O whatever of the gods rules in heaven the lands and the human race, what means this uproar, and why are all those fierce faces turned upon me alone? By your children — if Lucina, summoned at true births, was ever present to you — by this empty honour of my purple, I pray, by Jove, who will not approve these things: why do you glare at me like a stepmother, or like a beast attacked with steel?" When the boy had uttered this complaint with trembling mouth and stood there, his ornaments torn away, a body still unmanned, such as could soften the impious hearts of the Thracians: Canidia, her hair bound with little vipers and her head unkempt, orders wild fig-trees torn from the tombs, orders funereal cypresses, and eggs smeared with the blood of a loathsome toad, and the feather of a night-owl, and herbs which Iolcos and Iberia, fruitful in poisons, send forth, and bones snatched from the mouth of a starving bitch, to be burned in Colchian flames. But Sagana, with her skirts tucked up, sprinkling Avernal waters through the whole house, bristled, her hair rough as a sea-urchin's or a charging Laurentian boar's. Veia, restrained by no scruple of conscience, was digging out the ground with hard mattocks, groaning at her labour, that the boy, buried there, might die in slow torment, in sight of food twice and thrice changed through the long day, his face just showing, as much as bodies hung by the chin stand out above the water; so that his dried-out marrow and his withered liver might be a love-potion, once his eyeballs, fixed on the food forbidden him, had wasted away. That Folia of Ariminum, of masculine lust, was there too — so idle Naples believed, and every neighbouring town — she who charms down from the sky the stars and the moon with her Thessalian voice. Then Canidia, gnawing her unpared thumb with her livid, savage tooth, what did she say, or what leave unsaid? "O you witnesses not unfaithful to my doings, Night and Diana, who rule the silence when the secret rites are performed, now, now be present, now against my enemies' houses turn your wrath and your power. While the wild beasts lie hidden in the fearful woods, languid in sweet sleep, let the dogs of the Subura bark — that all may laugh — at the old adulterer, anointed with such nard as my own hands never wrought more perfectly. What has happened? Why do the dread poisons of barbarous Medea avail me less, those by which she fled, avenged upon her haughty rival, the daughter of great Creon, when the robe, that gift steeped in gore, carried off the new bride in flame? And yet no herb, no root lurking in rough places has escaped me. He sleeps on a couch anointed with forgetfulness of all his mistresses. Ah, ah — he walks about, set free by the spell of some more knowing sorceress. Not with the usual draughts, Varus, O head that will weep much, will you run back to me, nor will your mind, once called, return at Marsian charms. I will prepare a greater, I will pour you a greater draught, for all your loathing; and sooner shall the sky sink below the sea, with the earth stretched out above, than you should not so blaze with love of me as bitumen blazes in black fires." At this the boy, no longer, as before, trying to soothe the impious women with gentle words, but in doubt how to break his silence, hurled forth the curses of a Thyestes: "Your poisons cannot reverse right and wrong, cannot change the lot of human kind. I will hound you with curses: no victim expiates a dread imprecation. Nay, when, doomed to die, I have breathed my last, I will meet you as a nocturnal Fury, and, a shade, will tear at your faces with hooked talons — for such is the power of the spirits of the dead — and, sitting upon your restless hearts, I will take away your sleep with terror. Crowd upon crowd, pelting you with stones from street to street, will crush you, foul old women; then the wolves and the Esquiline birds will scatter your unburied limbs, nor shall my parents — alas, surviving me — escape this spectacle."

Why do you harass innocent strangers, you cur cowardly against the wolves? Why not, if you can, turn your empty threats this way and attack me, who will bite back? For, like a Molossian or a tawny Spartan hound, a friend's force to the shepherds, I will drive through the deep snows, my ear pricked up, whatever beast goes before me; but you, when you have filled the grove with your fearsome voice, sniff at the food thrown to you. Beware, beware: for, most savage against the wicked, I raise ready horns, like the slighted son-in-law of faithless Lycambes, or the fierce foe of Bupalus. Or if anyone attacks me with black tooth, shall I, unavenged, weep like a boy?

Where, where are you rushing, you wicked men? Or why are the swords, once sheathed, being fitted to your hands? Has too little Latin blood been spilled over the plains and the sea — not that the Roman might burn the proud citadels of envious Carthage, nor that the Briton, yet untouched, might come down the Sacred Way in chains, but that, in accordance with the Parthians' own prayers, this City might perish by its own right hand? This was never the way of wolves or of lions, fierce only against creatures unlike themselves. Is it blind frenzy, or some sharper force, that drives you, or guilt? Give me an answer. They are silent, and a pale whiteness stains their faces, and their stricken minds are stunned. So it is: a bitter fate drives the Romans on, and the crime of a brother's murder, ever since the blood of innocent Remus flowed onto the earth, a curse upon his descendants.

That you, foul with a long age, should ask what unnerves my manhood — when your teeth are black, and old age, ancient, furrows your brow with wrinkles, and your loathsome rump gapes between your withered haunches like that of a sickly cow. But it is your breast that stirs me, and your rotting paps like the udders of a mare, your flabby belly and your thigh, thin, set above swollen calves. Be blessed, then; let triumphal images attend your funeral, and let no wife walk about loaded with rounder pearls than yours. What of it, that little Stoic books love to lie among your silken cushions? Do my unlettered sinews stand any the less stiff, or my member any the less droop? But to call it forth from its proud loins, your mouth must do the laboring.

When, glad in the victory of Caesar, shall I drink with you the long-stored Caecuban beneath your lofty house — so it is pleasing to Jove — blessed Maecenas, while the lyre sounds a song mingled with the flutes, this in the Dorian, those in the Phrygian strain? As lately, when the Neptunian captain, driven from the strait, fled with his ships burned, having threatened the City with the chains he had struck off from treacherous slaves, their friend. A Roman — alas, posterity, you will deny it — bound in servitude to a woman, bears the stake and the soldier's arms, and can serve wrinkled eunuchs, and amid the military standards, a shameful thing, the sun looks down upon a mosquito-net. Against this, two thousand snorting horses, the Gauls, turned, chanting "Caesar," and the sterns of the enemy ships, swiftly steered to the left, lie hidden in port. O Triumph, do you delay the golden chariots and the unyoked oxen? O Triumph, neither from the Jugurthine war did you bring back a leader his equal, nor the African, over whom, above Carthage, his valour raised a monument. The enemy, conquered by land and sea, has changed his cloak for mourning grey. Either he makes, with winds not his own, for Crete, famed for its hundred cities, or seeks the Syrtes, vexed by the south wind, or is carried over an uncertain sea. Bring here more capacious cups, boy, and Chian wines, or Lesbian, or measure us out the Caecuban, to check our heaving nausea. It is good to dissolve our care and fear for Caesar's fortunes in the sweet god of release.

The ship goes out, loosed under an evil omen, bearing the rank Maevius. Remember, South Wind, to lash both his flanks with your bristling waves; let the black East Wind, the sea overturned, scatter the cables and the broken oars; let the North Wind rise, as great as when on the high mountains it shatters the trembling oaks; and let no friendly star appear in the black night, where grim Orion sets; nor let him be carried on a calmer sea than the Greek host of victors was, when Pallas turned her wrath from the burning of Ilium upon the impious ship of Ajax. O how much sweat awaits your sailors, and what a yellow pallor you, and that unmanly wailing, those prayers to an averted Jove, when the Ionian gulf, bellowing back, has broken your keel beneath the dripping South Wind! But if a rich prize, stretched out upon the curved shore, should gladden the gulls, a lustful goat shall be sacrificed, and a lamb, to the Tempests.

Pettius, it gives me no pleasure, as it did before, to write little verses, struck as I am by a heavy love — a love that beyond all others seeks me out, to burn for soft boys or for girls. This is the third December, since I ceased to rave for Inachia, that shakes the glory from the woods. Alas for me, through the City — for I am ashamed of so great an evil — how great a byword I was, and I repent of the dinners, at which my languor and my silence betrayed me as a lover, and the sigh drawn up from my inmost breast. "Does the candid genius of a poor man avail nothing against gain?" — so I complained, weeping to you, once the immodest god of the heated, with the wine grown hotter, had drawn the secrets from their hidden place. "But if the free bile should boil up in my breast, so as to scatter to the winds these thankless poultices that do nothing to ease the cruel wound, then shame, removed, will cease to contend with unequal odds." When I, severe, had openly praised this resolve to you, bidden go home, I was carried on unsteady foot to the doors — alas for me — that were not my friends, and the cruel thresholds, against which I bruised my loins and my flank. Now the love of Lyciscus holds me, who boasts he can outdo any woman in softness; from which neither the free counsels of friends nor harsh reproaches can extricate me, but only another flame, either for a fair girl or for a slender boy who reties his long hair.

What do you want, woman most worthy of black elephants? Why do you send me gifts, why love-letters, me, who am no sturdy youth nor dull of nose? For I, more keenly than any, scent out whether a polypus or a rank goat lurks in your hairy armpits, better than a sharp hound where the boar lies hidden. What a sweat, and what a foul smell, rises everywhere from her shrivelled limbs, when, my member spent, she hastens to quench her untamed frenzy! And no longer does the moist chalk stay on her, nor the colour dyed with crocodile dung; and now, in heat, she breaks the strained couch and its canopy. Or she stirs my loathing with savage words: "With Inachia you flag less than with me; Inachia you can manage three times a night, but to me you are always soft for a single bout. A curse on that Lesbia, who, when I asked for a bull, pointed me to a sluggard, when I had Coan Amyntas at hand, in whose untamed loins the sinew stands more steadfast than a young tree clings to the hills. For whom were the fleeces of wool, twice steeped in Tyrian purple, being hurried? For you, surely, that there might be no guest among your equals whom his own woman loved more than you. O unhappy me, whom you flee, as the lamb dreads the fierce wolves, and the roe the lions!"

A grim storm has drawn the sky together, and rains and snows bring Jove down; now the sea, now the woods roar with the Thracian North Wind. Let us seize, friends, the chance of the day, and while our knees are green and it is fitting, let old age, with its clouded brow, be smoothed away. Bring out the wines pressed in the consulship of my Torquatus. Leave off speaking of other things: a god, perhaps, will restore these to their place by a kindly turn. Now it is good to be drenched in Achaemenian nard, and with the Cyllenian lyre to lighten our hearts of their dread anxieties, as the noble Centaur sang to his mighty nursling: "Unconquered one, mortal son of the goddess Thetis, the land of Assaracus awaits you, which the cold streams of the little Scamander cleave, and slippery Simois, whence the Fates, with a sure thread, have broken off your return, nor will your sea-blue mother carry you home. There lighten every ill with wine and song, with the sweet solace against unsightly grief."

Why a soft idleness has poured so deep a forgetfulness through my inmost senses, as if with parched throat I had drained the cups that draw on Lethean sleeps, candid Maecenas, you slay me by asking so often: a god, a god forbids me to bring to the final mark the iambics I began, the song long since promised. In just such a way, they say, Anacreon of Teos burned for Samian Bathyllus, who very often wept his love on the hollow shell, in a measure not laboured. You yourself burn, poor wretch: but if no fairer fire kindled beleaguered Ilium, rejoice in your lot; me a freedwoman, and one not content with one man, Phryne, wears away.

It was night, and the moon was shining in a clear sky among the lesser stars, when you, about to wrong the divine power of the great gods, swore an oath in my words, clinging with your supple arms more closely than the ivy binds the tall oak: that while the wolf was the foe of the flock, and Orion of sailors, troubling the wintry sea, and the breeze stirred the unshorn locks of Apollo, this love would be mutual — O Neaera, who will grieve much over my manhood: for if there is anything of a man in Flaccus, he will not endure that you give your unbroken nights to a rival, and, in anger, will seek an equal mate, nor will my constancy yield to your form, once it has offended, if a settled grief has entered in. And you, whoever you are, more fortunate than I, who now strut proud over my misfortune, though you be rich in flocks and in much land, and though Pactolus flow for you, nor let the mysteries of Pythagoras reborn escape you, and though you surpass Nireus in beauty — alas, alas, you will mourn your love transferred elsewhere, and I, in my turn, shall laugh.

Already a second age is being worn away by civil wars, and Rome herself falls to ruin by her own strength — Rome whom neither the neighbouring Marsi had power to destroy, nor the Etruscan band of menacing Porsena, nor the rival valour of Capua, nor fierce Spartacus, nor the Allobroges, faithless in revolution, nor savage Germany with its blue-eyed youth subdue, nor Hannibal, abhorred by our parents: we, an impious age of doomed blood, shall ruin her, and the soil will again be possessed by wild beasts. A barbarian victor, alas, will stand upon her ashes, and the City a horseman will trample with sounding hoof, and the bones of Quirinus, which are spared the winds and the suns, he will scatter insolently — a thing accursed to see. Perhaps you all together, or the better part, ask what may serve to be rid of your wretched toils; let no resolve be preferable to this: as the state of the Phocaeans, having cursed their land, fled their fields and ancestral hearths and the shrines fit to dwell in, and left them to the boars and ravening wolves, so let us go wherever our feet shall bear us, wherever over the waves the South Wind shall call, or the wild Africus. Is this agreed? Or has anyone a better counsel to urge? Why, with the omen favourable, do we delay to take ship? But let us swear to this: "When stones, lifted from the deepest shallows, swim again, then let it not be wrong to return; nor let it shame us to turn our sails homeward, when the Po shall wash the peaks of Matinus, or the lofty Apennine shall run out into the sea, and a strange love shall join new monsters in unheard-of lust, so that the tiger gladly couches with the deer, and the dove is mated with the kite, and the trusting herds fear no longer the tawny lions, and the smooth he-goat loves the salt waves." These oaths, and what else can cut off our sweet return, let us all swear, the whole accursed state, or the better part above the unteachable herd; let the soft and hopeless lie on in their ill-omened beds. You, who have manhood, put away womanish lament, and fly past the Etruscan shores. For us the encircling Ocean waits: let us seek the blessed fields, the fields and the wealthy isles, where the unploughed earth yields its grain year by year, and the unpruned vine forever blooms, and the shoot of the never-failing olive buds, and the dark fig adorns its own tree, honey flows from the hollow oak, and from the high mountains the light water leaps down with rippling foot. There the she-goats come unbidden to the milking-pails, and the friendly flock brings back its swollen udders, nor does the evening bear growl round the sheepfold, nor does the deep ground swell up with vipers; and we, the blessed, shall marvel at more: how neither the watery East Wind scours the fields with heavy rains, nor are the rich seeds burned in the dry clods, the king of the gods tempering both. Hither no pine strove with the Argo's oarsmen, nor did the shameless woman of Colchis set her foot; hither the Sidonian sailors turned not their yard-arms, nor the toiling crew of Ulysses. No plagues harm the flock, no star's scorching violence parches the herd. Jupiter set apart those shores for a righteous people, when he tainted the golden age with bronze, and with bronze, then with iron, hardened the ages, from which a happy flight is granted to the righteous, with me their prophet.

"Now, now I yield my hands to your effective skill, and a suppliant I beg you, by the realm of Proserpina, and by the not-to-be-moved divinity of Diana, and by the books of charms that have power to call down the fixed stars from heaven, Canidia: spare at last your sacred words, and loose, loose the whirling top sent spinning back. Telephus moved the Nereid's grandson, against whom in his pride he had drawn up the ranks of the Mysians and hurled his sharp weapons. The Trojan mothers anointed Hector, the slayer of men, though he had been given to the savage birds and dogs, after the king, leaving the walls, fell prostrate — alas — at the feet of unyielding Achilles. The toiling oarsmen of Ulysses put off their bristly limbs, their hard hides, when Circe willed it; then their reason and their voice came back, and the wonted dignity to their faces. I have paid you enough and more than enough of penalties, you well loved by sailors and by pedlars. My youth has fled, and the modest colour has left my bones, wrapped in sallow skin, my hair is white with your unguents, no rest reclines me from my toil; night presses on the day, and day on the night, nor is there relief for my breast, strained with each breath. And so, wretched, I am forced to believe what I denied, that Sabellian charms make the heart throb, and the Marsian dirge makes the head burst asunder. What more do you want? O sea and earth, I burn as neither Hercules burned, steeped in the black gore of Nessus, nor the seething Sicanian flame green within Etna; you, until I be borne off, dry ash, upon the injurious winds, are hot, a workshop of Colchian poisons. What end, or what penalty, awaits me? Speak; with good faith I will pay the penalties you command, ready to make atonement, whether you demand a hundred bullocks, or wish to sound on a lying lyre: "You, chaste, you, virtuous, shall walk among the stars, a golden constellation." Castor, offended at the lot of infamous Helen, and the brother of great Castor, overcome by prayer, gave back to the bard the eyes they had taken away: and you too — for you can — release me from my madness, O you neither soiled with your father's squalor, nor a wise-woman skilled to scatter, in the tombs of the poor, the ashes of the ninth day. Yours is a hospitable heart and pure hands, and your belly is Pactumeius, and with your blood the midwife washed the cloths red, however bravely you leap up, a delivered mother." "Why do you pour out prayers to ears barred against you? The rocks are not deafer to the naked sailors than the wintry Neptune that pounds them in the deep sea. That you, unpunished, should have laughed at Cotytia made public, the rite of free Cupid, and that, as pontiff of the Esquiline witchcraft, you should fill the City with my name unpunished? What did it profit me to have enriched the Paelignian hags, or to have mixed a swifter poison? But a slower fate than your prayers awaits you: an unwelcome life must be dragged on, wretched, for this — that you may forever be at hand for new torments. Tantalus, the father of faithless Pelops, longs for rest, ever lacking the bounteous feast; Prometheus, bound to the bird, longs for it; Sisyphus longs to set upon the topmost mountain the stone; but the laws of Jove forbid. Now you will wish to leap down from high towers, now in vain to fasten a noose to your throat, now, sick with loathing in your gloomy grief, to lay open your breast with a Noric sword. Then I, a horseman, shall ride upon your hostile shoulders, and the earth shall yield to my insolence. Shall I, who can move the waxen images — as you yourself, in your prying, know — and tear down the moon from the pole with my words, who can raise up the cremated dead, and mix the cups of longing, weep at the issue of my art, that has no effect on you?"