Book 3

Shade of Callimachus and rites of Coan Philitas, let me, I beg, enter into your grove. I am the first priest who, from a pure spring, come to bear Italian mysteries through Greek dances. Tell me, in what cave did you together refine your song, or with what step did you enter? what water did you drink? Ah, away with him, whoever keeps Phoebus among arms! Let verse run polished with fine pumice, by which Fame lifts me high above the earth, and the Muse born of me triumphs with garlanded horses, and with me in the chariot little Loves are carried, and the throng of writers follows my wheels. Why do you vie with me in vain with loosened reins? It is not granted to run a broad road to the Muses. Many, Rome, will add your praises to their annals, who will sing that Bactra will be the empire's bound. But this work, which you may read in peace, my page has brought down from the Sisters' mountain by an untrodden way. Give soft garlands, daughters of Pegasus, to your poet: no hard crown will suit my head. But what the envious crowd takes from me living, Honour will repay after death with double interest; after death antiquity makes all things greater: a greater name comes upon men's lips from the funeral. For who would know of the citadels battered by the firwood horse, and of the rivers that fought at close quarters with the Haemonian man, the Idaean Simois and Scamander, child of Jove, and that Hector thrice stained the wheels across the plains? Deiphobus and Helenus and, in arms, Polydamas, and Paris, such as he was, his own land would scarcely know. Little would be the talk of you now, Ilion, and you, Troy, twice taken by the power of the Oetaean god. And Homer too, the recorder of your fall, felt his work grow with posterity; and Rome will praise me among late descendants: that day after my ashes I myself foretell. That no stone may mark my bones in a scorned tomb has been provided, the Lycian god approving my vows.

Meanwhile let us return to the circle of our song, that the girl, touched by the wonted sound, may rejoice. They say that Orpheus soothed the beasts and held back the rushing rivers with his Thracian lyre; that the rocks of Cithaeron, driven by Theban art, came together of their own accord into the body of a wall; nay even, Polyphemus, fierce Galatea beneath Aetna turned her dripping horses to your songs: should we wonder, with Bacchus and Apollo favouring us, if a crowd of girls reveres my words? Though my house is not propped on Taenarian columns, nor my ceiling of ivory among gilded beams, nor do my orchards match the Phaeacian woods, nor does the Marcian stream water my wrought grottoes; yet the Muses are my companions, and my songs are dear to the reader, and Calliope is not wearied by my dances. Fortunate, whoever you are, celebrated in my little book! My songs will be so many monuments of your beauty. For neither the cost of pyramids raised to the stars, nor the house of Elean Jove that imitates heaven, nor the rich fortune of the Mausoleum's tomb are free from the final condition of death. Either flame or rain will steal their glory away, or, conquered by the silent weight of years, they will fall. But the name won by genius will not fall from time: the glory of genius stands without death.

I had seemed, reclining in the soft shade of Helicon, where flows the water of Bellerophon's horse, able to utter your kings, Alba, and the deeds of your kings, so great a work, with my own powers; and I had now set my small mouth to the great springs (whence thirsting father Ennius drank before, and sang the Curian brothers and the Horatian spears, and the royal trophies borne on Aemilius' ship, and the conquering delays of Fabius and the unlucky battle of Cannae and the gods turned to pious vows, and the Lares that put Hannibal to flight from his Roman seat, and that Jove was kept safe by a goose's voice), when Phoebus, watching me from the Castalian tree, spoke thus, leaning on his golden lyre by the grotto: 'What have you to do with such a river, madman? Who bade you touch the work of heroic song? From this no fame is to be hoped for you, Propertius: soft meadows are to be trodden by little wheels; so that your book may often be tossed on a bench, which a girl reads while awaiting her man alone. Why has your page swerved from the prescribed circles? The skiff of your talent must not be overloaded. Let one oar graze the waters, the other the sands, and you will be safe: the greatest crowd is in mid-sea.' He had spoken, and with ivory quill points me a seat, where a new path is made on the mossy ground. Here was a green cavern with stones set in, and timbrels hung from the hollow pumice, the Muses' rites and the clay image of father Silenus and your reeds, Tegean Pan; and the birds of mistress Venus, my throng, the doves dip their red beaks in the Gorgonian pool; and the nine Maidens, having drawn their several rights, ply their tender hands at their own gifts: this one gathers ivy for the thyrsi, this fits songs to the strings, but that one weaves the rose with both hands. Of whose number one of the goddesses touched me (by her face, I think, it was Calliope): 'Content, you will always be borne by snowy swans, nor will the brave horse's sound lead you to arms. Let it not be yours to blow the trumpet's proclamations on the harsh horn, nor to stain the Aonian grove with Mars; nor on what fields the battles stand under the Marian standard and Rome breaks the Teutonic strength, or the barbarian Rhine, drenched with Suevian blood, bear wounded bodies on its mourning water. For you will sing of garlanded lovers at another's threshold and the drunken tokens of a night's delay, that through you he may learn to charm out the shut-up girls, whoever wishes to strike the stern men by art.' Such words Calliope spoke, and, drawing water from the spring, she wet my lips with the water of Philitas.

The god Caesar plans arms against the rich Indians, and to cleave with his fleet the straits of the gem-bearing sea. Great the reward, citizen: the world's end prepares triumphs; Tigris and Euphrates will flow beneath your laws; late, but the province will come under the Ausonian rods; Parthian trophies will grow used to the Latin Jove. Go, come, prows tried in war, give sail, and do, war-horses, your wonted duty! I sing favourable omens. Atone for the Crassi and the disaster! Go and care for Roman history! Mars father, and fateful lights of holy Vesta, before my death, I pray, may that day come on which I may see Caesar's axles laden with spoils, and beneath them the captured leaders sitting in arms, the darts of the fleeing horse and the bows of the trousered soldier, and the horses often halting at the people's applause, and, leaning on the bosom of my dear girl, I may begin to watch and read the captured towns by their placards! Guard your offspring yourself, Venus: let this head live forever, which you see surviving from Aeneas. Let this be spoil for those whose labours have earned it: for me it will be enough to applaud on the Sacred Way.

Love is a god of peace, we lovers worship peace: enough for me are the hard battles with my mistress. Nor is rich Campania ploughed for me with a thousand yokes, nor does my thirst drink from a precious gem, nor is my breast plucked by hated gold, nor do I prepare bronzes mixed by your slaughter, Corinth. O unlucky first earth shaped by Prometheus! He did his work of the breast too carelessly. Arranging the bodies, he did not see the mind enclosed: the straight way of the spirit should have been first. Now we are tossed so far on the sea by the wind, and seek a foe, and link new wars to wars. You will carry no wealth to the waters of Acheron: naked, fool, you are borne on the infernal boat. Victor with vanquished is mingled alike among the shades: you sit, captive Jugurtha, with consul Marius. Lydian Croesus is no different from Dulichian Irus: best is the death that comes before its day is plucked. It delights me to have honoured Helicon in my first youth and to have joined my hands to the dances of the Muses; it delights me too to bind the mind with much Lyaeus, and always to have my head in spring's rose. And when heavy age has cut off Venus, and white old age has sprinkled my black hair, then let it please me to learn thoroughly the ways of nature, what god rules this house of the world by his art, by what way the moon comes rising, by what she wanes, whence with horns contracted the monthly moon returns to fullness, whence winds prevail over the sea, what Eurus seizes with his blast, and whence the perennial water comes into clouds; whether a day will come that will overthrow the world's towers, why the purple rainbow drinks the rain-waters, or why the peaks of Perrhaebian Pindus trembled, and the sun's orb mourned with darkened horses, why Bootes is slow to turn his oxen and wagon, why the chorus of the Pleiades clusters with thick fire, or why the deep sea does not pass its bounds, and the full year goes in four parts; whether beneath the earth are the laws of the gods and torments of the accused, whether there is a wheel, whether rocks, whether thirst amid waters, or the furies of Alcmaeon or the fasts of Phineus, whether Tisiphone's head rages with a black snake, whether Cerberus guards the infernal cave with three throats, and nine poor acres for Tityus, or whether a feigned tale has come down to wretched peoples, and there can be no fear beyond the pyre. Let this be the end of life left to me: you, to whom arms are more welcome, bring home the standards of Crassus.

Tell me what truth you felt about my girl: so may the yokes of a mistress be lifted from you, Lygdamus. For every messenger should be without falsehood, and a slave hold faith greater than his fear. Now, if you hold anything, begin to tell from the first origin: with eager ears I will drink in these things. Do you deceive me, swollen with empty joy, by reporting these things which you think I wish to believe? Did you see her thus weep with unkempt hair? Did much water fall from her eyes? Did you see no mirror on the spread couch, Lygdamus, and the cases lying closed at the foot of the bed, and a mournful gown hang from her tender arms? Did no gem adorn her snowy hands? The house was sad, and the maids, sad, plucked their tasks, and she herself spun in the midst, and dried her wet eyes with the wool pressed to them, and recounted our quarrels in a querulous tone? 'Was this the reward promised to me with you as witness, Lygdamus? It is a punishment to break faith even with a slave as witness. Can he leave me wretched with no deed of mine, and keep at home one of a kind I will not name? Does he rejoice that I pine alone in an empty bed? If it please him, let him insult, Lygdamus, my death. Not by her manners, but by herbs the wicked woman conquered me; he is led by the whirling wheel of the magic disc. The portents of the swelling toad's venom drag him, and bones gathered from sucked snakes, and the feathers of an owl found among the lying tombs, and the woollen fillet bound to the funeral couch. If my dreams sing no idle things, Lygdamus, I swear, late but ample punishment will be before my feet; and the rotting spider will weave in the empty bed: Venus herself will sleep through their nights.' If the girl has complained to you with true heart, run back, Lygdamus, by this same road, and carry back my charges with many tears, that there is anger, not deceit, in my love, and that I too am set burning on a like fire: I will swear that I have been chaste twice six days. But if from so great a war a happy concord arises through me, you, Lygdamus, shall be free.

So you are the cause of an anxious life, money! Through you we go the road of untimely death; you furnish cruel food to the vices of men; the seeds of cares spring from your head. You overwhelm Paetus, stretching his sails to the Pharian ports, thrice and four times in the mad sea. For while he follows you, the wretch fell in his first age and swims, new food for distant fishes. But if, content with his father's ox, he had turned the fields, and thought my words had weight, he would live before his own household gods, a sweet companion, poor, but weeping nothing on land except his wealth. Paetus would not have this, to hear the roar of the storm and to chafe his tender hands with the hard rope, but to have his head propped on many-coloured down in a cedar chamber or with Orician terebinth. The wicked night saw him borne off on a little plank, and the wretch's open mouth drew in the hated water; the wave tore his nails out by the roots while he lived: so many ills came together that Paetus might die. Yet weeping he gave these charges in his last complaints as the black water closed his dying lips: 'Gods of the Aegean sea who hold the deeps, winds, and whatever wave weighs down my head, where do you carry the years of my first down? I brought long hair into your straits. Ah wretched me, I shall be dashed on the sharp halcyon rocks! Against me the sea-blue god has taken up his trident. But at least let the tide carry me to Italy's regions: this of me will be enough, if only it be for my mother.' The wave, twisting in its eddy, drags him as he speaks; this was Paetus' last word and last day. Paetus, why do you count your age? Why is your dear mother on your lips as you swim? The wave has no gods. And your mother could not give the just dues to the pious earth nor bury you among the kindred pyres, but now the sea-birds stand over your bones, now for a tomb the whole Carpathian sea is yours. Unlucky Aquilo, terror of snatched Orithyia, what great spoils from him were yours? Or why, Neptune, do you rejoice in a broken keel? That hull was carrying holy men. O hundred sea-girls of Nereus your sire, and you, Thetis, touched by a mother's grief; it was fitting for you to put your arms beneath his weary chin: he could not weigh down your hands. Give back the body, waters! His life is laid in the gulf; of your own will, cheap sand, cover Paetus; and whenever a sailor passes Paetus' tomb, let him say, 'You can be a terror even to the bold.' Go, curve your ships and weave the causes of death: that death comes driven by human hands. The land had been too little for the fates, we added the waves: by art we have increased the wretched roads of fortune. Does the anchor hold you, whom the household gods did not hold? What would you call deserving, to whom his own land is too little? Whatever you prepare is the winds': no keel has grown old, even the harbour itself cheats faith. For your cables, tied to the rocks by nocturnal storms, all fall with worn rope. There are shores witnessing the cares of Agamemnon, which the punishment of Argynnus, son of Athamas, marks. Nature, lying in wait, laid the sea low for the greedy: that it should turn out well for you can scarcely happen once. The rocks of Caphereus broke the triumphal ships, when shipwrecked Greece was dragged in the vast brine. Little by little Ulysses wept the loss of his comrades, for whom his wonted tricks availed not in the sea. But you, savage Aquilo, will never see my sails: I must lie buried, idle, before my mistress' doors.

Sweet to me was the quarrel by yesterday's lamps and all the curses of your raving voice. Nay, boldly attack my hair and mark my face with your fair nails, threaten to burn my eyes with the flame set under, bare my breast by tearing my robe! When, frenzied with wine, you push the table and at me hurl full goblets with a maddened hand, then truly the signs of true ardour are given me: for no woman grieves without grave love. The woman who hurls reproaches with raging tongue, she rolls before the feet of great Venus. Whether she packs a band of guards about her as she goes, or follows the middle roads like a stricken maenad, or frenzied dreams often terrify the timid one, or a girl painted on a tablet moves the wretch, of these torments of the mind I am a true diviner, these signs I have often learned in sure love. No faith is sure that you cannot turn to quarrels: may a slow girl fall to my enemies. Let my friends see my wounds on the bitten neck: let the bruise teach that I have had my girl with me. In love I wish either to grieve or to hear one grieving, to see either my tears or yours, when you send back words hidden under your brows, or note with your fingers things to be kept silent. I hate the sleeps that no sighs ever prick: I would always be pale before an angry woman. Sweeter was the fire to Paris when, amid Greek arms, he could bring joys to his Spartan girl: while the Greeks conquer, while barbarian Hector stands, he wages his greatest wars in Helen's lap. With you or for you against my rivals I shall always have arms: in you no peace pleases me. Rejoice that none is equally fair: you would grieve, if there were: now you may be justly proud. But you, who wove nets about our bed, may you have a father-in-law forever and a house not without a mother-in-law! If any chance of a stolen night is given you now, she gave it offended at me, not as your friend.

Maecenas, knight of the Etruscan blood of kings, you who wish to keep within your fortune, why do you send me into so vast a sea of writing? Great sails are not fit for my craft. It is shameful to entrust to one's head a weight one cannot bear and soon, pressed, to turn the back with bent knee. Not all things are alike fit for all, nor is any palm won from an equal yoke. The glory of Lysippus is to fashion spirited statues; Calamis boasts to me of his horses, exactly made; Apelles demands the highest place for himself in the picture of Venus; Parrhasius claims his place by small art; Mentor's subjects are more added to the form; but the acanthus of Mys turns its narrow path; the Phidian Jupiter adorns himself with an ivory statue; the marble of Praxiteles sells from its own city. There are those for whom the palm of the Elean four-horse chariot runs, there are those whose glory is born in swift feet; this man begotten for peace, this useful for camp arms: each follows the seeds of his own nature. But your precepts of life, Maecenas, I have taken up, and I am forced to surpass you by your own examples. Though you may set the mistress-axes in Roman honour and lay down laws in the middle of the forum; or go through the spears of the warlike Medes, and load your house with arms fixed upon it; and Caesar give you strength to your effect, and at every time such ready wealth steal in; yet you forbear, and shrink low into thin shadows: you yourself draw back the full folds of your sails. Believe me, those judgments will match the great Camilli, and you too will come into the mouths of men. I do not cleave the swollen sea with sail-bearing keel: all my delay is under a tiny stream. I will not weep that the citadel of Cadmus sat down in its ancestral ashes, nor of battles always with equal slaughter; nor will I tell of the Scaean gates and Pergama, the citadels of Apollo, and that the Greek ships returned in the tenth spring, when the wooden horse, victor of Pallas' art, pressed the Neptunian walls with the Greek plough. It will be enough to have pleased among the books of Callimachus and to have sung in your measures, Coan poet. Let these writings burn the boys, let them burn the girls, and let them cry me a god and bring me rites! With you as my leader I will sing even the arms of Jove and Coeus threatening heaven, and Eurymedon on the Phlegraean ridges; and the kings reared, twins, from the woodland udder, I will begin, and the walls made firm by Remus slain, and the lofty Palatine cropped by Roman bulls, and my talent will grow at your bidding; I will follow too the chariots exulting from either shore, the darts of the Parthians loosed in cunning flight, and the bars of Pelusium broken down by Roman iron, and the hand of Antony heavy against his own fate. Take up, as patron, the soft reins of the youth I have begun, and with your right hand give me signs as the wheels run free. This glory you grant me, Maecenas, and it is from you that I shall be said to have been myself of your party.

I was wondering what the Camenae had come to see at dawn, standing before my couch as the sun reddened. They sent a token of my girl's birthday and thrice clapped a lucky sound with their hands. Let this day pass without a cloud, let the winds stand in the air, and let the wave lay its threats softly on the dry shore. May I see none grieving in today's light, and let the very stone hold back the tears of Niobe; let the halcyons' mouths rest, their complaints laid aside; and let not the mother bewail her Itys taken. And you, O dear to me, born with lucky wings, rise and pray the just things to the gods who demand them. But first shake off sleep with pure water, and shape your shining hair with pressed thumb; then put on the dress in which you first caught the eyes of Propertius, nor leave your head empty of flower; and pray for what avails you, that your beauty be perennial, and that your kingdom always stand over my head. Then, when you have hallowed the garlanded altars with incense, and the favourable flame has shone through the whole house, let there be reckoning for the table, and let the night run amid cups, and let the myrrh-onyx anoint our nostrils with saffron. Let the hoarse flute sink beneath continuous dances, and let there be free words of your wantonness, and let the sweet banquets take away ungrateful sleeps; let the public breeze of the neighbouring street resound: let there be lots for us too by the interpreting cast of dice, whom that boy strikes more heavily with his wings. When the hour has been spent in many cups, and Venus, the night's minister, sets up her rites, let us pay the yearly solemnities in our chamber, and so complete the journey of your birthday.

Why do you wonder if a woman turns my life and drags a man bound under her laws, and frame against me the foul charges of a cowardly head, that I cannot break the chains with the yoke shattered? The sailor better foretells the way of the winds, the soldier has learned from wounds to have fear. These words I tossed about in my past youth: now learn by my example to fear. The Colchian drove the blazing bulls beneath the adamant yoke and sowed battles in the arm-bearing soil, and shut the fierce jaws of the guardian serpent, that the golden fleece might go to the house of Aeson. Fierce Maeotian Penthesilea once dared to attack with arrows from horseback the Greek ships; but after the golden helmet bared her brow, her white beauty conquered the conquering man. Omphale advanced to so great an honour of beauty, the Lydian girl bathed in the Gygaean lake, that he who had set up his columns in the pacified world spun soft wool with so hard a hand. Semiramis founded Babylon, city of the Persians, so as to raise a solid work with a baked rampart, and that two chariots, sent against each other along the walls, could not graze a side with their touching axle; and she led the Euphrates through the midst of the citadel she built, and bade Bactra bow its head to her rule. For why should I drag heroes, why gods, into charges? Jupiter defames both himself and his house. What of her who lately wove disgrace upon our arms, and, a woman worn among her own servants, demanded as the price of an obscene union the Roman walls and the Senators sold into her realm? Guilty Alexandria, land most apt for tricks, and Memphis so often bloody with our woe, where the sand stripped three triumphs from Pompey— no day will lift this mark from you, Rome. Your funeral would have gone better on the Phlegraean field, or if you were to give your neck to your father-in-law. Forsooth the harlot queen of incestuous Canopus, the one mark burnt into the blood of Philip, dared to set barking Anubis against our Jove, and to force the Tiber to bear the Nile's threats, and to drive out the Roman trumpet with the rattling sistrum, and to chase the Liburnian beaks with the punt-poles of her barge, and to stretch foul mosquito-nets on the Tarpeian rock, and to give laws among the statues and arms of Marius! What now is the use of Tarquin's broken axes, whom a proud life marks with a like name, if a woman had to be endured? Sing your triumph, Rome, and, safe, pray Augustus a long day! Yet you fled to the wandering streams of the timid Nile: your hands received the Roman chains. I saw the arms bitten by the sacred snakes, and the limbs draw in the hidden path of sleep. 'Not by so great a citizen, Rome, was I to be feared!' she said, her tongue buried in unceasing wine. The city high on seven hills, that presides over the whole world, is not to be cast down by human hand. The gods founded these walls, the gods too guard them: with Caesar safe, Rome would scarcely fear Jove. Now where are the fleets of Scipio, where the standards of Camillus, or lately, Bosporus, captured by Pompey's hand? The spoils of Hannibal and the monuments of conquered Syphax, and the glory of Pyrrhus broken at our feet? Curtius set up monuments by filling the chasms, Decius, with his horse let loose, broke the battle lines, the path of Cocles attests the cut-off bridges, there is one to whom the crow gave a surname: Leucadian Apollo will record the routed battle-lines: one day removed a war of so great a work. But you, whether you seek the port or, sailor, leave it, be mindful of Caesar over all the Ionian sea.

Postumus, could you leave weeping Galla, a soldier, and follow the brave standards of Augustus? Was any glory of a despoiled Parthian worth so much, that you should not do it, with your Galla begging so much? If it be right, may all you greedy ones perish alike, and whoever has preferred arms to a faithful bed! Yet you, madman, covered by your flung cloak, weary, will drink the water of Araxes from your helmet. Meanwhile she will waste away on empty fame, lest this valour of yours grow bitter to you, and lest the Median arrows rejoice in your slaughter, or the iron horseman on his armoured steed, or lest anything of you to be wept be brought back in an urn: thus return those who fell in those places. Thrice four times happy, O Postumus, in chaste Galla! With such manners you were worthy of another wife. What will a girl do, fortified by no fear, when Rome is the mistress of her own luxury? But go secure: gifts will not conquer Galla, nor will she be mindful of your hardness. For on whatever day the fates send you back safe, chaste Galla will hang upon your neck. Postumus will be a second Ulysses with a wondrous wife: those long delays did not harm him so much, the ten years' camp, and the death of the Cicones, Ismara taken, and your eye burnt out, Polyphemus, in the night, and Circe's deceits, the lotus and the clinging herbs, Scylla and Charybdis split by alternate waters, that the heifers of Lampetie lowed on Ithacan spits (these the daughter Lampetie had pastured for Phoebus), and that he fled the chamber of the weeping Aeaean girl, and swam so many nights of winter, so many days, and entered the blackening homes of the silent souls, approached the Sirens' lakes with deaf oarsman, and renewed his old bows for the death of the suitors, and so set a measure to his wandering. Nor in vain, since his chaste wife had stayed at home. Aelia Galla surpasses the faith of Penelope.

You ask why a night is costly for greedy girls, and wealth, drained by Venus, laments its losses. The cause is sure indeed and manifest for such ruins: the way of luxury has been made too free. The Indian ant sends gold from the hollow mines, and the Erycine shell comes from the Red Sea, and Cadmean Tyre furnishes purple dyes, cinnamon and the Arab, baker of much scent. These arms storm even the chaste shut up, and those who wear your disdain, daughter of Icarius. The matron walks dressed in the wealth of spendthrifts and drags the spoils of disgrace before our faces. There is no shame in asking, none in giving, or if there is, the very delay is removed by a price. Happy the one law of funeral for Eastern husbands, whom the red Dawn colours with her horses! For when the last torch is cast on the death-bed, the pious band of wives stands with hair let down, and they have a contest of death, which living shall follow her husband: it is a shame not to have been allowed to die. The victors burn and offer their breasts to the flames, and lay their scorched faces upon their men. This race of brides is faithful; here no girl is unfaithful, no Evadne, no pious Penelope. Happy the rustic youth of old, at peace, whose riches were the harvest and the tree! For them a gift was the quinces shaken from the branch, and to give full baskets of crimson berries, now to pluck violets by hand, now to bring mingled shining lilies through the wicker baskets, and to carry grapes clothed in their own leaves or a bird of varied, many-coloured plumage. With these blandishments then through hidden caves the girls gave kisses, bought, to the woodland men. The fawn's skin covered the lovers laid out, and the high grass had grown for a natural couch, and the leaning pine cast its glad shadows around; nor was it a crime to see the goddesses naked. The horned ram, leader, himself led back the sated sheep to the empty fold of the Arcadian shepherd; and all gods and goddesses, who have charge over the fields, offered kind words at your hearth: 'You shall hunt the hare, whoever you are who come, guest, and if by chance you seek a bird on my path: and call me Pan as your companion from the rock, whether you seek your prizes with the reed or with the dog.' But now the shrines lie idle in the deserted groves: all worship gold, now that piety is conquered. By gold faith is driven out, by gold rights are for sale, the law follows gold, soon shame without law. The scorched thresholds attest sacrilegious Brennus, while he sought the Pythian realms of the unshorn god: but soon Parnassus, shaken at its laurelled peak, scattered dread snows upon the Gallic arms. You, Polydorus, the crime of Thracian Polymestor, the gold received, feeds in a hospitality not pious. You too, Eriphyle, that you might wear golden arms, are nowhere, with the horses of Amphiaraus sunk down. I will speak out (and would I might be a true prophet of my country!): proud Rome is broken by her own goods. I speak sure things, but no faith; nor was the truthful maenad once to be held worthless to the Pergamene of ill: she alone said Paris was framing the doom of Phrygia, she alone that the deceitful horse was creeping into Troy. That madness was useful to her country, that to her father: her idle tongue proved the gods true.

We marvel at the many laws of your wrestling-school, Sparta, but more the many blessings of the maidens' gymnasium, that a naked girl plies inglorious sports with her body among the wrestling men, when the ball cheats the swift throws through the arms, and the hooked staff of the turned hoop clatters, and the woman, dusty, stands at the farthest goals, and suffers wounds in the hard pancratium: now she binds her glad arms to the boxing-glove with thongs, now she whirls the throwing weight of the discus in its circle, and now, her hair sprinkled with frost on Taygetus, she follows her father's hounds over the long ridges: she beats the ring with horses, binds her snowy side with a sword, and protects her maiden head with hollow bronze, as the warlike throng of Amazons, their breasts bared, bathe in the Thermodontian waters; as Pollux and Castor on the sands of Eurotas, the one a victor at boxing, the other to be at horses, among whom Helen is said to have taken up arms with bare breasts, nor to have blushed before her brother-gods. The Spartan law, then, forbids lovers to part, and it is allowed to be at one's girl's side in the crossroads, and there is no fear nor any guard over the shut-up girl, nor the grave punishment to be feared of a stern man. Without sending anyone ahead you may speak in safety of your own affairs: no rebuff of long delay. Nor do Tyrian garments cheat the wandering eyes, nor is there the troublesome care of scented hair. But ours goes ringed about with a huge crowd, nor is the narrow way to slip in even a finger; nor can you find what is her face nor what the words of asking: the lover plies a blind road. But if you imitated the laws and contests of the Spartans, the dearer would you be to me, Rome, for this blessing.

So may I now know no tumults in love nor may a night to be watched through come for me without you, let no tale stir your ears about us; you alone may I love, even burnt by the funeral logs. When the modesty of the bordered cloak was relieved for me and freedom given to know the way of love, Lycinna, taking part, first steeped my untaught spirit through the early nights, won, alas, by no gifts! Now that the third year (it is scarcely much less) is drawn out, I scarcely recall that ten words passed between us. Your love buried all, and no woman after you has given sweet chains to my neck. But you, spare to vex Lycinna, who has not deserved it: your anger, rushing on, knows not how to draw back its foot. The witness will be Dirce, savage at so vain a charge, that Antiope, daughter of Nycteus, had lain with Lycus. Ah, how often the queen tore the fair hair, and fixed her cruel hands on the soft face! Ah, how often she burdened the maid with unjust tasks, and bade her lay her head on the hard ground! Often she let her dwell in filthy darkness, often denied cheap water to the hungry one. Jupiter, do you nowhere help Antiope, who has so many ills? The hard chain wears her hands. If you are a god, it is shameful to you that your girl should serve: whom but Jove should Antiope, bound, invoke? Yet alone, with whatever strength was in her body, she broke the royal manacles with both hands. Then with timid foot she runs to the heights of Cithaeron. It was night, and the bed was sad with scattered frost. Often, alarmed by the wandering sound of flowing Asopus, she believed her mistress' feet came behind. And hard Zethus and Amphion, soft with tears, the mother found, driven from her own stalls. And as when the seas lay down their great motions, and Eurus ceases to go against the South, the sound of the sand grows rare on the troubled shore, so the girl falls, slipping on her bent knee. Late, yet piety: the error is known to her sons. Worthy old man, you who guard the sons of Jove, you give back the mother to the boys; and the boys bound Dirce, to be dragged beneath the face of a fierce bull. Antiope, know Jove: for you Dirce, in her glory, is dragged to her death in many places. The meadows of Zethus are bloodied, and victorious Amphion sang the paean on your rock, Aracynthus.

Midnight, and a letter came to me from my mistress: she bade me be present at Tibur, the delay sent away, where the white summits show their twin towers, and the Anio nymph falls into the broad pools. What shall I do? Shall I commit myself to the drawn-over darkness so as to fear bold hands upon my limbs? But if I put off these commands through my fear, her weeping will be a fiercer foe to me than the night. I sinned once, and was driven out for a whole year: she has no gentle hands toward me. Yet there is no one who would harm sacred lovers: they may go the middle roads of Sciron. Whoever shall be a lover, though he walk on Scythian shores, no one will be so barbarous as to wish to strike him. For what wicked man would be sprinkled with the so small blood of a lover, and whose companion Venus herself is? The moon serves the road, the stars point out the rough places, Love himself shakes the kindled torches before, the savage rage of dogs turns aside its gaping bites: for this race the way is safe at any time. But if a sure death should follow my course, even at such a price let death be bought by me. She will bring me unguents and adorn the tomb with garlands, sitting as a guard at my grave. May the gods grant that she not place my bones in a crowded land, where the throng makes its way by a constant path! Thus after death are the tombs of lovers defamed. Let a remote earth cover me with the leaves of a tree, or let me be buried, walled by mounds of unknown sand: it pleases me not to have my name in the middle of the road.

Now, O Bacchus, we humbly fall before your altars: give me, appeased, favourable sails, father. You can curb the disdain of mad Venus, and medicine for cares comes from your wine. Through you lovers are joined, through you they are loosed: wash this fault from my soul, Bacchus. For that you too are not ignorant of love, Ariadne attests, borne to heaven among the stars by your lynxes. This sickness, which keeps the old fires in my bones, either death or your wines will heal. For always a sober night torments empty lovers; hope and fear turn the spirit both ways. But if, Bacchus, through your gifts to my fevered temples sleep is summoned into my bones, I myself will sow vines and plant the hills in rows, which no beasts may crop while I watch. If only the casks foam for me with purple must, and the new grape stain my treading feet, what is left of life I will live through you and your horns, and be called, Bacchus, the poet of your power. I will tell of the maternal birth by the Aetnaean bolt, the Indian arms put to flight by the Nysaean dances, and mad Lycurgus, in vain at the new vine, and Pentheus snatched to death in three flocks, and the Tyrrhenian sailors, the curved bodies of dolphins, leaping into the shallows from the vine-clad ship, and for you the sweet-smelling streams through the midst of Dia, whence the Naxian throng drinks your wine. The Lydian turban will gird your white neck, laden with the loosened clusters of the Bassarids' hair, your smooth neck will flow with scented olive-oil, and you will strike your bare feet with flowing robe. The soft drums of Dircaean Thebes will beat, the goat-footed Pans will sing with gaping reed, nearby the great goddess Cybebe, with turreted head, will beat the hoarse cymbals to the Idaean dances. Before the temple doors, as priest, pouring from the bowl and gold the wine offered for your rites, these memorable things I will recount on no humble buskin, such as the breath that thunders from the Pindaric mouth: only set me free from proud servitude, and conquer this anxious head with sleep.

Where the sea, shut off, beats from shady Avernus the smoking pools of warm Baian water, where the trumpeter of Troy, Misenus, lies on the sand, and the road built by Hercules' labour resounds; here where, when the kindly god sought mortal cities, the cymbals clashed for the Theban god— but now hated Baiae, with great reproach, what god stood as a foe in your water?— Marcellus sank his face into the Stygian waves, and that spirit wanders in the infernal lake. What did birth or valour or his most excellent mother avail him, or to have embraced the hearths of Caesar? or lately the sails fluttering in the full theatre, and the festal omens through the wondering hands? He died, and the wretch had reached his twentieth year: so many goods one day shut in so small a circle. Go now, lift your spirits and imagine triumphs for yourself, and let whole theatres standing in applause delight you; surpass Attalic robes, and let your purples be jewelled with Indian emeralds: you will give these to the flames. But yet hither all, hither the first rank and the last: it is an evil, but that road must be trodden by all. The three barking necks of the dog must be entreated, the public boat of the grim old man must be boarded. Neither is beauty eternal nor anyone's fortune lasting: nearer or further, his own death awaits each. Though that man cautiously hide himself in iron and bronze, death nonetheless draws his head out from within. Not beauty exempted Nireus, not strength Achilles, nor Croesus the wealth the water of Pactolus bears. But for you the boatman, who ferries across the pious shades of men, may he carry hither the empty body of your soul: by the way that Claudius, victor of the Sicilian land, and by which Caesar, passed from the human road into the stars.

You so often cast my lust at me: believe me, it rules you women more. You, when you have broken the bridle of scorned shame, know not how to keep measure in your captured mind. Sooner is the flame quenched amid the kindled stalks of corn, and the rivers will return to their source-head, and the Syrtes offer a calm harbour and savage Malea good shores with hospitality to sailors, than anyone could check your courses and break the goads of your raging wantonness. Witness she who, having suffered the disdain of the Cretan bull, put on the false horns of a firwood cow; witness Salmoneus' daughter, burning for Thessalian Enipeus, who wished to give herself wholly to the liquid god. A crime too was she, Myrrha, inflamed for her aged father, hidden in the leaves of a new tree. For why should I tell of Medea, at what time love atoned the mother's wrath by the slaughter of her sons? or of Clytemnestra, on whose account the whole Pelopean house stands infamous for adultery at Mycenae? And you, O Scylla, sold for the form of Minos, shear your father's kingdom with the purple lock. This dowry, then, the virgin had pledged to the foe! Nisus, love unbarred your gates by treachery. But you, unwed, light your torches more happily: the girl hangs, dragged by the Cretan ship. Yet not undeservedly does Minos sit as judge of Orcus: though he was victor, he was just toward his foe.

Do you believe he can now remember your beauty, whom you saw give sail from your bed? Hard, who could change a girl for gain! Was all Africa worth so much, that you should weep? But are you so foolish? You frame empty words: perhaps he wears down his heart with another love. You have powerful beauty, you have the arts of chaste Pallas, and splendid fame shines from a learned grandsire, a fortunate house, if only you have a faithful friend. I will be faithful: run, girl, to our bed! You too, Phoebus, who draw out your summer fires more amply, draw in the road of the lingering light. My first night comes! Give time to the first night! Linger longer, Moon, on the first bed. How many hours shall yield to my talk before Venus rouses sweet arms for us! The pacts must first be made and the laws sealed and a code written for me in a new love. Love himself will bind these pledges with his own seal: witness the twisted crown of the starry goddess. For where the bed is not bound by a sure pact, the night to be watched through has no avenging gods, and lust soon looses the chains it has laid on those: let the first omens keep faith for us. Therefore, whoever breaks these pacts with altars touched, and pollutes the marriage rites with a new bed, let there be for him whatever griefs are wont to be in love, and let him offer his head to the shrill tale, nor let the windows open by night to his weeping mistress: let him always love, always lacking the fruit of love.

I am forced to set out on the great journey to learned Athens that the long road may free me from a grave love. For the care of the girl grows by constant gazing: love itself furnishes the greatest food to itself. All has been tried by me, by whatever way it could be put to flight: but the god himself, sleepless, presses me. Yet she scarcely admits me, even once, when she has often refused: or if she comes, she sleeps, wrapped, at the bed's edge. The one help will be: with the lands changed, Cynthia, as far from my eyes, so far will love go from my mind. Now come, O comrades, drive the ship into the seas, and draw by lot your equal turns of the oars, and join the lucky sails to the top of the mast: now the breeze makes the liquid road favourable for sailors. Farewell, Roman towers, and you, my friends, and you, girl, whatever you are to me, farewell! So I shall now be borne, an untried guest of the Adriatic sea, and be forced now with prayer to approach the wave-resounding gods. Then, borne through the Ionian, when the weary vessel has stilled its sails at Lechaeum in calm water, what is left, hasten, my feet, to bear the toil, where the Isthmus keeps both seas from the lands. Then when the shores of the Piraeus port receive me, I will climb the long arms of the Thesean way. There I will begin to mend my soul in the courses of Plato, or in your gardens, learned Epicurus; or I will pursue the study of language, the arms of Demosthenes, and taste your wit, polished Menander; or surely painted tablets will catch my eyes, or hands wrought in ivory, or rather in bronze. And the spaces of years and the long intervals of the deep will soothe my wounds in a silent breast: or I shall die by fate, not broken by shameful love; and that will be for me an honourable day of death.

Cold Cyzicus has pleased you so many years, Tullus, where the isthmus flows with Propontic water, and Dindymis and Cybebe fashioned in the sacred vine, and the road that bore the horses of the ravisher Dis? If by chance the cities of Helle, daughter of Athamas, delight you, yet not be moved, Tullus, by longing for me, though you must see the shore of the swan-bearing Cayster, and the wave that tempers the serpentine paths; though you behold Atlas bearing the whole sky, and the face of Phorcus' daughter cut by Perseus' hand, the stables of Geryon and the marks in the dust of Hercules and Antaeus wrestling, and the dances of the Hesperides; though you drive the Colchian Phasis with your oar, and yourself trace the whole journey of the Peliac timber, where the rough pine, driven into the shape of a new prow, swam among the rocks with the Argive dove: all marvels will yield to the Roman land. Nature here has set whatever has been anywhere. A land more fit for arms than apt for crime: Fame is not ashamed, Rome, of your history. For as much by iron as by piety we stand powerful: anger tempers the victorious hand. Here you flow, Anio of Tibur, the Clitumnus from the Umbrian path, and the Marcian water, an eternal work, the Alban lake and the Nemorensian, abundant with leaves, and the healthful nymph drunk by Pollux's horse. But no horned serpents glide on scaly belly, nor does the Italian wave rage with new portents; here the chains of Andromeda do not resound for her mother, nor do you tremble, Phoebus put to flight, at Ausonian feasts, nor have absent fires blazed against anyone's head, a mother stirring ruin for her own son; the savage Bacchae do not hunt Pentheus in a tree, nor does a substituted hind loose the Greek ships; nor could Juno bend horns upon a rival or disfigure her face with the foul cow; . . . the tree-crosses of Sinis, and the rocks not hospitable to Greeks, and the shortened timbers turned to savage doom. This is your parent, Tullus, this is the fairest seat, here honour is to be sought by you, worthy of your race, here fellow-citizens for your eloquence, here the ample hope of grandchildren and the fitting love of a coming wife.

So our learned tablets have perished, on which so many good writings perished alike! These long use had worn down with my hands, use which bade them be trusted, unsealed. They already, without me, knew how to appease girls, and to speak certain eloquent words without me. No fixed gold had made them dear: the dingy wax was on common boxwood. Such as they were, they always stayed faithful to me, and always earned good results. Perhaps these charges were entrusted to those tablets: 'I am angry, since, sluggard, you delayed yesterday. Or did some girl seem fairer to you? or do you fling false charges, not good, about us?' or she said: 'You will come today, we will idle together: Love has prepared a lodging for the whole night,' and whatever a willing, not foolish, girl finds to chatter, when an hour is spoken of with charming wiles. Wretched me, on these some greedy man writes his accounts and sets them among his harsh ledgers! If anyone brings them back to me, he will be given gold: who would want…? Go, boy, and quickly post these on some column, and write that your master dwells on the Esquiline.

False is that confidence of your beauty, woman, once made too proud by my eyes. Our love bestowed such praises on you, Cynthia: it shames me that you are made famous by my verses. Mingled with various forms I often praised you, so that love thought you were what you were not; and your colour was so often compared to the rosy Dawn, when the brightness on your face was sought. What my father's friends could not turn aside from me, nor a Thessalian witch wash out in the vast sea, this I—forced by no iron, no fire, but myself shipwrecked in the Aegean water (I will confess the truth). Seized, I was scorched in the savage cauldron of Venus; I was bound, my hands turned back upon my back. Behold, the garlanded keels have touched the port, the Syrtes are crossed, my anchor is cast. Now at last, weary, I come to my senses from the vast surge, and my wounds have now closed to healing. Good Sense, if you are any goddess, I give myself to your shrine! So many vows of mine fell on deaf Jove.

I was a laughing-stock among the banquets at the set tables, and anyone could be talkative about me. I was able to serve you faithfully five years: often, with bitten nail, you will lament my faith. I am not moved by tears: by that art I was caught; you always, Cynthia, are wont to weep from snares. I will weep as I depart, but the wrong outweighs the weeping: you do not let the well-fitting yoke go on. Farewell now to thresholds weeping at my words, yet to a door not broken by an angry hand. But may heavy age press you with concealed years, and the unkind wrinkle come to your beauty! Then may you long to pluck the white hairs by the root, with the mirror now reproaching your wrinkles, and, shut out, may you suffer in turn proud disdain, and, an old woman, lament the deeds you did! These fatal curses my page has sung to you: learn to fear the outcome of your beauty!