Carmina

Preface to the Panegyric Spoken for Anthemius Augustus, Consul for the Second Time

When Nature set the youthful Jove above the stars and the new god took up the ancient realm, the divine powers vied to honour their own divinity, and in unequal measures sang an equal wisdom. Mars, with blaring trumpet, proclaimed his father's praise and lauded the thunderbolts with thunderous sound; the Arcadian and the Bowman thrummed on resonant strings, this one more skilled at the cithara's stroke, that at the lyre; the chorus of the Castalides applauded in varied measure, with songs, with reeds, with thumb, with voice, with foot. Yet after the heaven-dwellers, even the demigods' middling chants the god is said to have borne with patience. Then the Dryads, fit for the Fauns, and the Maenads for the Satyrs, a rustic throng, poured out a charming melody. The pipe-blowing Pans left the high Maenala, and after the lyre the harsh reed-pipe pleased Jove. Among these Chiron, dancing to the sounding plectra, gracefully bent the awkward limbs of his horse-half; the half-man earned a hearing and earned to please, though, even as he sang, he gave out a whinny. So rich tongue and poor alike offered their sacred rite, and the highest offering of their vow was then a song. Thus we, O Caesar, the greatest hope of our age, after the great nobles bring our little incense, boldly singing before the learned Victor, who is wont to speak with the mouth of Phoebus, or your own; for though he be your quaestor in the eternal court, to us he will be an eternal master. Therefore, prince, let the offering of a varied tongue revere you; for you make our breasts a new temple to yourself.

Panegyric

By favourable omen and number, Augustus, raise up the fasces for the second time, and, shining in the mass of consular gold, unfold the new year, an old consul, and without disdain let yourself be written twice in the annals; though crowned in the diadem your hair be lifted high, and a Tyrian cloak enclose your shoulders after the manner of those before you, yet may the painted purple of the toga take you more, since it is always, from the ages, a rare thing—a frequent consul; and you, O Janus, to whom the yearly laurel is due, loosen your torpor and bind your locks with any leaf, nor at the sudden light grow pale, nor believe the prince, or the elements of things, are stirred: Nature works no novelty—this sun too comes from the east.

This is he, O nobles, whom the valour of Romulus sought, and whom your love; to whom, as if conquered by storms and bereft of a steersman, the state, a shattered ship, gave herself, to be better guided by a worthy master, that she might fear neither the tempests nor you, O pirate. The farmer sought you with prayer, the ally with assenting covenant, the camp with trumpets, the senate-house with applause; the three tribes wrote your name with their votes, and your colleague sent you to us and the realm to you; the suffrages are as many as the world can muster. I confess, we all trembled lest your devout colleague should refuse to grant to your prayer the public prayers. Will posterity believe it?— that you, O prince, who can do all things against us, were not permitted all things over yourself. You surpass the deeds of those before, Augustus Leo; for he stands above kingdoms who bids men reign: better will your commonwealth now be the more one, which was thus made of two.

Hail, pillar of sceptres, queen of the East, Rome of your own world! Now, with the prince sent to me, to be revered no longer by the Eastern citizen alone, seat of empire—but more precious in that you stand, mother of empire. You who bear Rhodope and Haemus, the land of the Thracians is yours, a soil fruitful of heroes. Here the ice receives the newborn, and from the mother's womb the soft limbs of infants the native snow hardens. Scarcely any is nourished at the breast, but drawn from the teat he drinks rather, through a wound, his horse's blood; so, milk forsaken, the whole race drinks valour; they grow a little while: soon they play at war with javelins; their nurse, the wound, furnishes them these sports; the boys, apt for the hunt, empty the lairs of beasts, and the youth, enriched by plunder, keeps the law of the sword; and ripened old age they are not ashamed to end by steel: in such an order of life the men of Mars conduct themselves; but you, girt by the sea, draw from both Europe and Asia their commingled temperateness; for the nearby trumpet of the Chalcidic Eurus gradually tempers the Bistonian gapings of the North. Meanwhile Susa trembles at you, and in suppliant homage the Achaemenid Persian bows his crescent tiara. The Indian, his hair drenched with fragrant balsam, for your gain disarms the throat of his wild nurslings, that he may pay down the curved ivory; so the elephant, inglorious, carries back his maimed face as a Bosphoran tribute. You stretch out a vast city with spacious walls, which yet the people make too narrow; men go out into the sea on moles, and the new land draws in the old waves; for the dust of Dicaearchean sand, brought hither, within the waters one enters grows solid, and the hardened mass sustains fields carried out into a foreign deep. So set in order, gazing on every side at your harbours, ramparted by the sea, the goods of the earth gird you. Fortunate enough you are, having shared Rome's triumphs, and now we do not complain: let the division of the realm prevail. The parts of the balance agree; while you take up our weight, you have made it equal. From such a city you, a citizen, shine from Procopius your father, to whom an ancient line came down from Augustan forebears; whom to speak of with worthy eloquence is not granted, not even if there now rose from Avernus the one who with his song bent the cliffs, and with sounding fingers compelled the listening woods to run to his plectrum, when the streams of Hebrus stood still, and with the river's course bound, the astonished wave thirsted the more for his song.

To this man once, in his youth, was entrusted the restoring of peace with Assyria; the Parthian was astounded that in his first years he should not bear an old man's counsel; terror-struck, each satrap stood transfixed who sits beneath his king: so had the envoy's genius bound them all; the Median fields trembled, and Babylon, who had not closed her gates to the dragon-born foe, then at last thought herself laid too widely open. But after the new formula set a treaty for both sides, with Procopius dictating it the more, by them is sworn the fire and the water as god, and—lest the future pacts hold not— he calls his ancestral gods to witness here. The Chaldaean elder, after the manner of priests, performed over the entrails his secret murmurings; the king himself, holding a jewelled bowl, poured the goblets prone before the incense-burning altars. Returning thence, he takes up the height of a doubled honour: patrician, and master too of foot and horse, he is set over the camps, where, holding the bars of Taurus and driving the wandering Ethiopians far off by the terror of war, with the gulf pacified he might watch the Orontes serve. His father-in-law was Anthemius, prefect, consul, and the same, who ruled the peoples by his judgements and the year by his name. Fortune ever attends purple-clad men with the murex; this alone is changed in them, that he who was consul reigns. But we pass them all by: now come you to the plectrum, you whose hair, worn by the helmet, comes to the diadem, to whom the ruddy purple of Caesar is given when the breastplate is laid aside, and whose hand, emptied of the sword-point, must be filled with the sceptre. Your cradle shone with the marks of empire, and the foreknowing earth, with crops transformed, promised golden ages. At your birth, they say, the rivers, with honey welling forth, lingered in their sweetened channels, and streams of oil flowed through the astonished presses, the berry yet hanging. The field brought forth a waving harvest without seed, and the vine begrudged the grapes born without it. The roses of winter blushed, and, scorning the frost, the lilies leaped up amid the mingled rime. As often as Lucina brings such a birth to pass, the custom of the elements yields, and faith in a reign to come is made by the newness of things: that blessed gods have come Nature thus declares: the gentle flames licked the tender locks of steadfast Iulus; Astyages, fated to be driven out by his grandson Cyrus, took fright at the cluster of vine spread from his loins; the teeming she-wolf offered her teats to fearless Quirinus; Julius came into the light while the laurel blazed; great Alexander and Augustus too are held to have been conceived by a serpent-god, and Phoebus and Jove they divided between them: for one of these sought his father beneath the Cinyphian Syrtis; the other, by his mother's birthmarks, rejoiced to be held Phoebus-born, boasting the Epidaurian standards of the Paeonian serpent. Eagles have girt many men, and over the sudden sky the attendant pinion has played at crowns to come. But that this one, illustrious nobles, was called to the sceptre was given to be known even then, when by chance in his father's home the cut vine-shoot put forth shoots not its own. That was the spring of empire; beneath the image of foliage the omens flowered on the dry branch on his right hand. But after the infant had passed his first years, he crawled over his father's arms, and the breastplate that pressed his narrow neck he clasped with both arms and, the plates loosened, went between to dark kisses, the crests pushed back. It was the boy's play, with hurrying hand, to handle arrows snatched from the foe, and through captured bows to drive the reluctant sinews to the curved horns, now to hurl the trembling javelin with his tender arm, and on the back of a snorting horse, with the weight of a pole, to carry by a leap the chains of steel he wore; to drive the beasts he found, and seek those hidden in foliage, to shut them, once caught, in close-meshed nets, now to pierce them with the twisted spit: then often by the din of his comrades to be praised, when the gnashing beast bore the steel and the weapon went out through the entered shoulder-blades. Lay by, alert boy and huntsman, your Pelethronian titles, son of Aeacus—though pressing the back of your subjected master, and therefore ranging the lairs secure, you were the rather guided by your horse. Not better than our prince did Paean aim his shafts, standing over the Python, when, troubled with quiver nigh empty, he pierced the numerous coils with numberless darts.

No less did he hear, among these, the ancient sages: how you, Thales, born of Miletus, blame standing surety; how you, Cleobulus of Lindos, say, "moderation is best"; how from Ephyra you devise the whole, Periander; how you, Attic Solon, look well to the end of life; how to you, Bias of Priene, the crowd of evils is greater; how you counsel to know the time, Pittacus, born of Lesbos; how you would have all know themselves, Chilon of Sparta. Moreover he learned the various schools, new doctrines: whatever Anacharsis praised in the Scythian fields; whatever Sparta gained from the law-giving Lycurgus; whatever the Cynic throng turns over in the Erechthean gymnasia, imitating, Epicurus, your fellows; whatever the twofold Academy, deciding nothing true, proclaims; whatever Cleanthes tastes with gnawed nail; whatever Pythagoras, Democritus, Heraclitus wept, laughed at, kept silent; whatever Plato's genius—which dwelt on the height—teaches in due order on the throne, or whatever Aristotle, dividing the limbs of speech, gives as snares in his argumentative syllogisms; whatever Anaximenes, Euclid, Archytas, Zeno, Arcesilas, Chrysippus, and Anaxagoras gave; and the Socratic mind, alive after death in the Phaedo, looking down on the vast chains on his thin leg, when death itself trembled at the accused and the lictor's pale hand brought the poison to the untroubled master. Besides, whatever the ancient age took pains to set in the books of Latium, he was wont to run through whole: what battles Mantua, and what perils of the sea, played out, imitating the Smyrnaean trumpet; whatever aid of speech the Arpinate consul gives, having followed without end the smith's son, by whom—his father scorned—the tongue polished with eloquence counted more; or whatever into the ages the Paduan volumes send on Euganean pages; with what brevity Crispus pleases, with what weight Varro, with what genius Plautus, with what thunderbolt Quintilian, with what pomp Tacitus, never to be named without praise.

Formed by these studies, sprung from such a birth, steeped in such character—him the prince to whom the world from East to West then gave the sceptre, to whom his cloudy and only daughter owed grandsons of the purple, chose for son-in-law; yet not so as in sluggish luxury, content with his father-in-law's fortune and snatching at ease, to owe nothing to himself; but, the rank of count received, he circled the banks of the Danube and the line of the broad frontier, he exhorts, disposes, examines, arms; so under his father Pius, governing his parent's camps, so Marcus while Pius lived, men who would later give laws, held command over countless legions. Hence, returning, every honour is given him; and master of both services and consul he shines, the joined power of the patriciate his; and at swift pace his private heights ran up, and as a youth he mounted the curule chair of old men, and a young veteran sat in well-earned gold.

And now his father is among the gods: but in you there was no desire for empire; the diadem, having long endured rebuff, chose a man so distinguished that, when he in turn chose, you could not scorn his choosing: to you alone did Fortune grant this honour, though the order demanded you, that you should seem chosen prince rather than left behind. After your father-in-law Augustus you reign, but the purple came to you not through the marriage-chamber, and the royal consort was praise rather than cause of your reign; for with the reins of power the state chose not a son-in-law, but a man of noble worth. I err, unless the world proves it from its four-fold quarters: the West courts you as ruler, the East appoints you, to the North you wage war, and to the South you are feared.

Yet before your colleague made you his partner, it is fitting to touch on what triumphs the Illyrian coast beheld, which, ravaged by the arms of Valamer, mourned itself forsaken—through the fault, by chance, of our own general. Not otherwise, when Caepio, slain of old, gave up the strength of Ausonia, did the terrified state, the sudden ruin compelling it to choose a leader after Jugurtha's throat was broken, set the Arpinate camp-follower, avenger of the Calpurnian pacts, against the raging Cimbri. Here, as soon as the province saw your eagles, it ceased at once to shudder at the hostile dragons. Forthwith, tamed by war and bereft of plunder, soon they themselves lie as your plunder. But we pass these by as mere ravagers: rather I unfold the deeds of war: which war no small band—nor you, Spartacus, bound, having broken from the prison, did prepare for the gladiator's school— but a wandering swarm of the Scythian region, abounding in savagery, dread, rapacious, fierce, even among the very peoples there barbarous to barbarians, whose leader was Hormidac, and a citizen of theirs. What is that soil, and their manners and race: where the white Tanais, driven through Hyperborean valleys, falls from a Riphaean crag, beneath the Bear's axle there lies a race threatening in spirit and in limb: thus in their very faces their own horror dwells; the rounded mass of the head rises to a peak; beneath the brow, in twin caverns, sight is present, the eyes absent; the light, driven into the vault of the skull, scarcely reaches the retreating orbs, yet not the closed; for under the narrow arch they see great spaces, and the use of a larger light they make up with clear pupils in their deep wells. Then, lest the twin channel grow out beyond the cheeks, a band wound round blunts the tender nostrils, that they yield to helmets: so for the sake of battle a mother's love deforms her offspring, since the stretched expanse of the cheeks grows broader with no nose set between. The rest of the men is handsome: vast chests stand out, notable shoulders, and beneath the loins a girt-up belly. Their form, indeed, is middling for a footman, but tall it stands if you behold them as horsemen: so they are often thought tall when they sit; scarcely has the child, leaving its mother, stood before the steed offers its back; you would think the limbs kindred to the men: so the rider ever clings, as if fixed, to the horse; another race is borne on horn-hoofed backs, this one dwells there; smooth bows and arrows are their delight, their hands terrible and sure, and to bear death in the javelin is their fixed faith, and beneath the unerring stroke a fury taught to err. This race, bursting forth suddenly and carried on wheels across the solid Hister, had come, and their wheel-rut had cut the dried-up waters. Sent against them as they wandered through Dacian fields, you go, attack, overcome, surround them; and when Serdica beheld you with your camp-space measured out, you press it with a siege, which for a long time marvelled that you, set in the rampart, kept your soldier from going into the fields by sallies neither lawful nor by stealth. And though Ceres often failed him, and Bacchus always, yet discipline did not fail; therefore, with the foe near, they feared their leader the more; so at last it came to pass that he who was then by chance your ally, soon your betrayer, turned his back to them in vain at the time of the joined battle. When now he fled, baring his wings by his bent course, you stood the battle alone; you the scattered band sought, its leader in flight; you the horseman, sweating in the foot-fight, sought back; following your standards, the soldier did not feel himself forsaken in the contest.

Go now and bring forth the praises of old Tullus, white age of the fathers, since with fair urging the lying Mettius concealed the wavering covenant of his retreat! Nothing like this is yours, and to deceive your foe pleases you not; then the soldier conquered while he thought himself to be aided: here he conquered after he found himself abandoned. The leader flees: you pursue; he renews the contest: you besiege him; he is shut in: you storm; he slips away: you crush, and you set his own death as the price of the Sarmatian peace, and it is granted; the deserter has now undergone the ordered death, and your victim fell by a foreign blade. Lo, again, if perchance it please you, contend, Antiquity! That fierce Hannibal, by chance demanded for punishment, though he had no power over his life at his last hour, yet had power over his death: him, whom the blind prison and the hook and the lictor about to break his throat awaited, he drank, more steadfast than the Bebrycian host, the venom; but the one who fled from you, slain by the death you ordered, perished not so much by the victor's mouth as by the judge's.

Now be present, O Paean, you whose curved-beaked griffins the skilled bits bind whenever through the leafy reins you bend the feathered flanks with bicolour ivy; hither turn your lyre: it is no time now to tell of the Python destroyed, nor to sound the twice-seven wounds of Tantalus' brood, whose deaths your song preserves, and whose dyings live in eternal verse. You too, Castalides, declare in a few words by what divinity Anthemius came to us with the bond of a twin realm: the peace of the world has sent the one to govern its wars.

Augustus Severus had by Nature's law increased the number of the gods; which fall as soon as Oenotria beheld, from the cliffs of the airy Apennine, she goes to the glassy halls of the blue Tiber, not with her cheeks shut in a helmet (nor did a sewn-up ring weave her corselet with driven-in hooks), but bare-headed; instead of hair, the cluster-bearing vine comes forth, binding many a town across her brow, and over her smooth shoulders, over her ruddy arms, the hanging robes were bitten by jewel-bearing studs. She walks more slowly with age, and her venerable limbs, holding a vine-tressed staff, she binds, in place of a staff, to an elm. Yet Abundance follows: wherever she draws near, she makes the road fruitful by her gait; and the Vintage, glad, attending her step, drips down through the planted footprints. As soon as she enters the cave of the Tiber's flood, the river was running, then, settling, the woods, matching colour with the green hair of the tall reed, floated; the wave falling gives a sound at his chin, though his beard, bristling with bristles set beneath, much softened the crash; from his breast he belched the waters, and with rushing slip the now-torrent channel furrowed his sodden belly. He is terrified at the goddess' coming, and, his hands slackened, the oar and the urn fall; then, as he prepared words of pardon, she first: "I come, that Rome, widowed of our pontiff, may, through you, if it please you, be bent by tears: let her seek the regions of the Dawn, and, disdain set aside, grant this one thing—let her now deign to be loved the more; teach her what forces to seek, and to the prostrate world say from what world she may demand a head. Whomever she begot, born under my sky, at once Fortune broke upon him the wheels of empire; hence the Vandal foe presses, and against our destruction with a numerous fleet campaigns each year, and, the order of fate reversed, the scorched Byrsa brings against me Caucasian furies. Besides, the unconquered Ricimer, whom the public destinies regard, alone with his own sword scarcely repels the pirate roaming through the countryside, who, shunning battles, a fugitive, plays the victor. Who could bear a foe who refuses both peace and combat? For no treaty does Ricimer cast with him; why he should hate him too much, hear. That one prattles of an uncertain father, though his mother is surely a slave; now, that he may be a king's son, he flaunts his mother's adultery; then he is envious that two realms call Ricimer to a kingdom; for a Sueve by his father, by his mother a Goth. He recalls this too, that his grandfather, Wallia, on Tartessian lands laid low the Vandal squadrons and the Alans joined in war, and corpses covered the western Calpe. Why tell of ancient routs, why the losses of old? He recalls the disasters of the Agrigentine plain, and hence he rages, that this man has shown himself well enough the grandson of that hero at whose sight, Vandal, you always turned your back; for not more illustrious from Sicilian fields do you return, Marcellus, through whom by land and sea our arms pressed the Syracusan dwellings; nor you, to whom it fell, Metellus, to surpass the chariot of Curius, displaying to us the elephant in throngs, when the black herd hid the white yoke-beasts with their bulk and the pomp of triumph concealed its own author. Because Noricum holds back the Ostrogoth, this man is feared; because Gaul binds the war of the Rhine, this man is a dread; because the Vandal foe with his kinsman the Alan tearing at me plundered me, he, by his arms, took vengeance for his own. But he is one man, and cannot alone remove such great perils, but can defer them: now we have need of an armed prince, who in the manner of our forefathers of old will not delegate but wage wars himself, at whose moving standards land or sea may tremble, that at last, the right recovered, the Roman trumpets may govern fleets long disused."

Her the father heard, and at once assented. She goes to the city, straightway sees the goddess herself, bows low, and adores; the horns touched the breast and the bared bosom; thence she bears the entrusted prayers; which the goddess, having heeded, prepares to go her way. Grim, she binds her loosened hair, and the towers lay hidden, shut in her helmet; the laurel was her fillet. Rough with hostile bosses, a baldric on her left fastens the rising sword, her victorious hand is thrust into the shield; its orb the sons of Mars, the wolf, Tiber, Love, Mars, Ilia fill. A clasp with biting tooth catches at the breast the robes that flee back, the threatening spear gleams, and the oak, curved with trophies, trembles and wearies the goddess with its welcome load. Her foot stands ever on the ground, but the binding is stayed at the first toes; from the fastened cord her thumb sends two thongs into the buskins facing each, to draw the sandals tight, and, the loops meeting, weave the bent chains of the bonds along her legs. So then, just as she was, borne through the liquid air she sought the warm risings of new-born Hyperion.

There is a place of Ocean, nearest to the far-off Indies, beneath the Eastern axle, stretched toward the Nabataean Eurus: there spring is continual, and the earth, broken by no frosts, does not grow pale, but, painted with perennial flower, the fields know not foreign chills; the countryside breathes with roses, and through the unmarked fields fragrance is wafted; violet, cytisus, wild thyme, privet, lilies, narcissi, cassia, colocasia, marigolds, costum, malobathrum, myrrh, balsam-juice, frankincense the fields bring forth; and as old age knocks, the neighbouring Phoenix seeks from here his reviving cinnamon. Here is the house of Aurora, crusted with ruddy metal, roughened, displaying the smooth pebbles of pearls. Diverse things snatch the eyes, and by the mistress-art this conquers, whatever you see; but all the beauty is hidden in the present mistress, and with the gems' too great redness she loses their varied fires, since she possesses them. Her combed hair poured out saffron, and from her bent arm a comb, lowered, dressed her yellow temples. Her eyes poured out rays; a fiery colour was in them, yet not heat, though, the night shaken off, the dews she received are wont to feign sweat. Twice the girdles encircle her breasts, and to her small nipples the very fold makes envy; the outermost part of the robe carries crimson folds down to her reddening legs. Thus the queen sits on her throne; in place of a sceptre her right hand the spear of a torch fills; Night stands next the goddess, turned now to her retreating feet, and behind the tribunal Light shows her topmost summit, scarce understood. Thence, seeing Rome coming by a liquid path, she leaped up quickly and, with coaxing words, was first to begin: "What, O head of the world," she said, "do you revisit my realm? What do you command?" She, a little silent, mixing harshness with gentleness, thus began: "I come (cease to be moved nor tremble overmuch), not that the Araxes, pressed, should flow for me beneath an imposed bridge, nor that in ancient order the Indian Ganges be drunk from an Ausonian helmet, nor that through the tiger-bearing fields of quivered Niphates the consul, exulting, lay waste Caspian Artaxata. I do not now pray for the realms of Porus, nor that with these arms the ram, driven home, shatter the Hydaspian Erythrae. I am not borne against Bactra, nor do the Semiramian gates laugh at our trumpets joining battle. I do not seek the Arsacid houses, nor is the watchword given for a camp at Ctesiphon; this whole region I have yielded to you: and do I not so deserve that you should guard my old age? All that lies once between Euphrates and Tigris you alone hold: a thing bought for me with the blood of Crassus, at Carrhae I wrote the price; nor did I remain unavenged, nor did the field so bought perish; if I lie, you have proved it, Sapor, slain by Ventidius; nor is that enough: Armenia and Pontus I gave; with what war they were sought let Sulla tell you; perhaps it is not believed of one: consult Lucullus. I am silent now of all the Cyclades: acquired by my Metellus, Crete serves you; I made over the Cilicians: these Magnus once had routed. I added to Syria, governing them now, the Isaurians: these too Servilius subdued in my years. I granted the ancient Aetolians and the Acheloian fields; I made over—too trusting—the testament of Attalus; Epirus you hold: you know to whom Pyrrhus owes it. To Illyricum I look to see you send laws, and to the lands of the Macedonians: and you have grandsons, Paulus. The corn of Egypt I gave: Agrippa had once conquered for me on the straits of Leucas. Judaea is held beneath your sway, as though you had sent thither illustrious Titus with his father; to you the Cyprian gain is brought: I, a pauper, praise the warlike Catos. The Doric land and the Achaean fields tremble at you, and you stretch your happy realms to twin-sea'd Corinth: tell me, what Byzantine Mummius did the deed for you? But if perchance it please you to lull old complaints to sleep, grant me Anthemius. Let Augustus and long-lived Leo be for those parts; let him whom I have sought govern my laws; let the divine star of her parent rejoice that his daughter Euphemia is clothed in her father's murex. Add besides a private bond to the public: let Augustus be a happy father-in-law to his son-in-law Ricimer; they shine in nobility: you have a royal maiden, that man is royal to me. If, in concord, you assent to this, soon you will grant me to hope for Libya; look round at the marriages of old: no such match is ready to your hand. Let Greece bring forth here the marriages of old won through peril, if there is shame in it: let Pisa, the chariots restored, rouse Oenomaus, falling by his daughter's fraud when the waxen pin, the axles loosened, betrayed him; let the Colchian maid come forth, known to her husband first by crime rather than by sex; let Atalanta from the barrier of the circus behold her pale suitors, and gather the apples of fair Hippomenes no longer now for the gold alone; Deianira, let Achelous, fat from the wrestling-school, light up your marriage-torches, and, pressed by panting Hercules, let him refresh his wearied foe with rival streams: however far I call up the unions of the ancient age, these surpass the heroes here, those the heroines there. This marriage, Ricimer, Virtue demands for you as bridesmaid, and the martial laurel gives the Dionaean myrtle. Come then, hand over the man who cherishes no sluggish ease and is weighed with delights, but whom the sailor's heat now burns, and the gulf of Abydos and the Sestian shore shouted round by Hellespontian storms; which sea-straits I would not believe even that man held thus, for whom Athos was cut through, and whose swelling sails ran by Median oarsmen across the wooded Alp; nor was this strait so girt by Lucullan keels, when the sluggish foe sat before notable Cyzicus, who, compelled by hunger, chewing the corpses of his kin, lived by his own death. But why do I delay my wishes? Hand him over rather." Then in few words the Tithonian spouse replies: "Lead him, holy mother, though I have the greatest use of an unconquered and supreme leader, so that you may be the gentler and we may better govern the reins, not divided. For if perchance it please you to recall the ancient toils, and him who would fight for his country as your Iulus did— to say no more—I first sent Memnon from here." They had finished; Concord joined the twin parts, and Rome at last possesses a chosen prince. Now, Antiquity, boast that you chose some by like prayer or love—you, ever envious of the highest and most deserving men. Against Brennus' arms bring forth Camillus from exile, and to Cincinnatus restore the axes, Caeso driven out, and bid the weeping parent come from the harrows to the rostra; and in wretched tumult first drive out those whom, beaten, you seek; if the Carthaginian breaks the Alps, run back to the afflicted and condemned; that the shameless Metaurus may blush at the Barcine slaughter, let your consul, having been fined, conduct the war, who, routing the thousands of Hasdrubal—when he has forged for himself a ruddy sword— bears himself a clotted head: far other is our gratitude of judgement: it knows it is loved, unwronged.

But now too-mighty gusts drive on my sails; stay, Camena, your slender measures, and as I seek harbour let the anchor of my song now sit for me in a calm and placid floor. Yet, O prince, what fleet and arms are now handled by you, how great deeds you do and in how short a time, if the god prolong my prayers, in due order I shall tell, when twice your son-in-law or thrice you are consul. For now the festivals already call us, and to the Ulpian forum the Quirites demand you—those whom you will gift with liberty, whose glad cheeks await the blow. Go on, father of your country, fortunate and with happy omen, about to bind new captives, absolve the old.

To His Little Book

What makes glad harvests, what season is to be loved by crops and herds, by vines and bees, was once published under the name of Maecenas; hence, Maro, you afterward dare to speak of arms and the man. But for me Petrus will be the Maecenas of this time; for over the sea of fame I run beneath his own star. If he approve, he sends it forth; if he condemn the songs, he hides them, and brands us not with the snorting rhinoceros. Go, book: this man, believe me, guards our modesty; with this censor even to have displeased is to please.

Preface to the Panegyric Spoken for the Lord Emperor Caesar Julius Valerius Maiorianus Augustus

As once Tityrus, beneath the cover of a spreading beech, rolled forth his murmurs through swollen reeds, Caesar granted to the afflicted man the right of life and field, and his lofty wrath halted not at a slender defendant; but while he praised the granted countryside in the bounteous prince, the rustic Muse gave heaven in return for lands; nor was it less to repay the gifts of Phoebus: this man had made a lord, and that one made a god. And to you, Flaccus, who had followed the ranks of Brutus and Cassius, the author of your song was he who was also of your pardon. So to me, lately falling beneath an adverse war, you, the victor, bade me be unconquered in spirit. Let then the tongue of the saved poet serve you, and let your praise be the price of my life; I will not now dig at Maro with biting tooth, nor carp at your citizen, Sabine land. The matter is less than my talent, but greater than my Caesar; let them conquer in eloquence, so long as we conquer in our lord.

Panegyric

Conceive in mind, O state, your past triumphs: the consul now holds empire, whom the purple covers no more than the corselet, whose brow the diadem covers not by luxury but by law, and after the palm of his mind's labours comes the palm-broidered robe; the fasces heap up all the glories of the realm, and the prince grows with the consul. Therefore through your sky, your country, your cities, your waters Europe, exulting, sounds "well done"—because, having a ruler, you who had been victor, I confess, the trembling world trembled while you would not conquer for yourself, and with too great shame grieve that you deserve the realm, and by a sad rebuff take up, not to govern, what you thought must be defended.

Warlike Rome had been seated, her breast bared, her crested head turreted, behind whom from her capacious helmet the slipping hair pours over her back. Sternness awaits her gladness, and terror grows with modesty, and unwilling beauty overcomes her valour. Of purple hue is the woven robe, which a biting clasp pierces with twisted tooth; then whatever covering the breast flings back, this a gem encloses in its open recess. Hence a ruddy boss, with spacious circle, props her left side; here you may see, poured in thick metal, the cave of Rhea and the teeming she-wolf, whom, throat bared, even to fawn was a terror; though she fears to devour the painted sons of Mars; the nearest part shows the Tiber; here, poured beneath the rough pumice of porous tufa, he breathed forth a moist slumber through his grey-green throat; a mantle covers his breast, which his wife Ilia had woven, who, joined to the flowing bed, would still the murmurs of the waters and keep the sleep of her billowy husband. These gleam on the shield; the spear-point rises on an ivory shaft, drunk with the slaughter of men; beside it Bellona builds a trophy and bends the oak with a captive's weight. The throne rises from stones which, cut, fall from the ruddy mountain of the Ethiopians, where, the sun near, a native purple has breathed upon the scorched cliffs. Here Synnadic marble is joined, there the Numidian stone is added, counterfeiting ancient ivory; then, after the Laconian rock, a radiant order of grass-green marble shows green between.

So when she gave herself to the midst of the throne, all the earth flies up at once, and then each province set forth its own fruits: the Indian brings ivory, the Chaldaean balsam, the Assyrian gems, the Chinese fleeces, the Sabaean frankincense, Attica honey, the Phoenix dates, Lacedaemon olive-oil, Arcadia horses, Epirus mares, the Gaul cattle, the Chalybian arms, the Libyan corn, the Campanian wine, the Lydian gold, the Arab gum, Panchaia myrrh, Pontus castor, Tyre purple-dye, Corinth bronze; Sardinia silver, Spain brings ships and the thunderbolt-stone; the darting lightning stains the rocks and the fruitful wrath of the gods weds the kindled flint; as often as the heaven stirs itself there, the earth there has the more power. Suddenly Africa, weeping, fell prostrate, her black cheeks torn, and bowing broke on her head the now ill-fruitful ears of grain, and thus began to speak: "I come, the third part of the world, unhappy through one happy man. Once born a slave, this brigand here, the masters destroyed, long holds barbarous sceptres in my land, and with nobility utterly banished, the stranger, raging, loves not what is not his. O drowsy vigour of Latium, he laughs that your walls have yielded to his stratagems: do you not brandish the spear? Do you not grieve for me, even captive? Surely your fates are thought to rise by ills, and to be loftier by ruin; but better, that the terror departs: now it remains to conquer, if you fight as you are wont when conquered. Porsenna, hurling proud Tarquin on, once filled the Janiculum with Etruscan soldiery; but while he prepares by siege to burst the gates, he endured your whole might on the single shield of Cocles; many thousands of men pressed the ground, the path hanging in air; nor when the bridge was loosed did he fall when it fell; that king at last, warned by his scribe's death, learned that wars were stirred against him not only when there were wars; soon, peace sought, he returned to his kingdom, put to flight not so much by the wounding man as by the burning. For with frozen heart Scaevola had stood and condemned his right hand at the applied fire, the more fortunate by his erring hand, when by chance the guard grew pale at the steadfast accused, and the captive's tortures he fled who was the torturer. You trembled at Brennus, better afterward: whatever is yours, by whatever name you are called, the Tarpeian rock alone was then yours; but one man even then drove back the whole battle-line, while the chattering goose announces the Senones and keeps watch over your fate without a soldier. Me too (grant pardon that we once waged war) after Trebia and Cannae you tame, and my Hannibal saw the Roman houses before your Scipio saw mine. What did I deserve? By fate I am compelled to wage wars on you, when I will, when I will not. The trembling foe frightens you, but is safe with the strait shutting him in, as a bristling boar lies near the high wilds and, shut in, points his black mouth, white with darts, ready; round him barks a huge throng of hounds, in case he should wish to charge on the plain; he swells and is haughty behind the thorns set against him, slight in strength but strong in his ground, while close at hand "hey there!" the hunter sounds from the hill: the known voice of the master renews his wearied rage; then his blind fury scorns to feel the wounds. Why do you put off the battles? Why fear the sea, for whose triumphs even heaven is often wont to fight? What of this, that you have now an excellent prince, whom the foreknowing ages proclaim will come to the destruction of Libya, who, the third from me, will take his name? This the fates owe to your toil, Maiorianus. Why he should wish to mount the fleet and enter my harbours and approach the city, if you bid, I will tell briefly in order. It is told that where warlike Aquincum is mighty in Pannonia, his grandfather ruled the Illyrian soil with the tracts of the Hister; for Theodosius, at the time when at Sirmium he took the name Augustus, through both masterships of the army, when about to come to the Eastern parts of the realm, had Maiorianus with him. Set down in the Latin annals are the leader's deeds, as often as the trumpets, brought against the Scythian dwellers, pressed the Hypanis, and frozen Peuce the camp-follower mocked, hailing in mind the rimes. This man's father has him as father-in-law, a man renowned, and content ever with one peak of service, that he might follow one friend, joined to him in dubious chances. Not once did Aetius try, the fasces offered, to snatch that man to his court, but he stood firm, greater than the honoured: he began to be more precious; so faith was not bought with a price; he was what he once had been, quaestor to consuls: he handled the public moneys by his own law: and kept such measure that report told that he now spared his son's estate. But the leader's envious wife had by chance perceived this— that the boy's fame was growing—and, suffused with bile, had cooked an inward venom through her barbarous heart; forthwith she searches the sky, and runs through all astrology with rolling numbers, questions the shades, scans the lightnings, sees the scales, rejoicing on every side to have snatched a secret from a god. So the grim Colchian of the Pelasgians had stood on the stern, her husband trembling, about to scatter Absyrtus for his father, and to do, by the slaying of her brother, a wickedness greater than his death, while she fights by murder and makes her brother her weapons; or when she quenched the fire of the bulls, herself burning more, and wove a chill flame round the trembling man, who, the poison defending him, they say grew cold among the blazing bullocks. So, long impatient in spirit, after she heard empire and a long reign appointed for that man, her arms torn, she enters where her husband lay, and broke forth in a raging voice with these words: "You lie at ease, forgetful of your own, O sluggard: and to the world (so the ages demand) a prince Maiorianus shall be; the stars proclaim this by their signs, men by their prayers; why do I seek the stars for him, for whom love has made another fate? Nothing is braver than he, and a boy is never greedy, but sparing of having; poor as yet, he already scatters wealth, urges mighty counsels and follows them, all he plans is lofty, he presses what he hopes; if perchance I retrace his sport, one day of his consumes whatever you might think done with javelins: at his three arrows trembled snake, stag, boar. Not so did that man balance shafts against the foe who, his son girt by a serpent's body, feared more when he aided him, while by the same casts he gave death and life and held with trembling heart a steady hand, and went out wholly into his art, fear set off by nearer hope, giving, between the limbs of two, the death of one. Should it please to decide with the boxing-glove: Sicilian Eryx yields, nor did Sparta flourish by like art, when Amycus, laid low on the Bebrycian sands, looked up to the boxer, fat with the Therapnaean wrestling-school. What vigour in his feet! In vain did Opheltes' son award himself the Sicanian palm, nor did the Arcadian so swiftly bear his proud soles over dry Nemea— whose mother, flying in the Aetolian dust, Hippomenes shuddered at, who, sent ahead in scorn on the much-turfed circus, when from the den of the barrier the swift heroine flashed forth, the people trembling, to touch nothing with her whole stride, while he, pale, looked back to see the mid-field shrink behind him and the long ways to the goal, and, pressed by her near breath, now ran anxious in his foe's shadow, until, at the bend of the post now all but left behind, she broke her hurried steps thrice, the apple scattered. Whoever sees this horseman scorns the Ledaean nursling and your youth, Stheneboea, to whom Antiquity grants the back of the winged horse, and the Lycian Chimaera he is said to have conquered, when with one wound he took three lives. Had the fates given you life then, fierce Maiorianus, you would have forbidden Castor to know reins, Pollux the gloves, Alcon the darts, ready to leap upon the spoils of Bellerophon. If he take the shield, he conquers Telamon's son, who among the Greek ships, against Hector's fire, defended even the fleet of faithless Ulysses. If you ask with what weight he hurls the missile, more feebly, trembling for the burden of inserted Camilla, did Metabus loose his dart, nor with so great a whirl did the whizzing ash-spear of Achilles go out through Troilus; nor so did the Attic son of Aegeus, delaying the heroes' graves, shatter Creon with the Marathonian oak; nor so, avenger of the violated Phoebas, did she hurl the twisted bolt against the Greeks, when Greece had a night like Troy's and a like torch, and, fixed on the rocks of Caphereus, amid the waters Oileus belched flame. I speak of small things. What of this, that as often as wars are waged for you, a disciple, not a soldier, attends? And he molds a pupil: the rival, on the other hand, watches; what you conquer he hates, and those whom you besiege he loves. Wholly drowses against this man great Alexander, whom his father's glory tormented. What shall I, unhappy, do? What realms shall I prepare for my son, shut out from the Getic sceptre, if the state passes me by and little Gaudentius is, besides, trampled by this man's fate? Now Gaul praises him and whatever is throughout Europe. Him with their stiff waves the Rhine washes, the Arar, the Rhone, the Mosa, the Matrona, the Sequana, the Ledus, the Clitis, the Elaris, the Atax, the Vacalis; and the Loire, hewn into pieces by the axe, it drinks, when, the war-fearing Turoni defended, you were away; soon, a little while after, you fought together, where the Frank under Chlogio had overrun the open lands of the Atrebates. Here the meeting roads shut up the narrow ways, and the rampart, a vicus subdued by an arch called Helena and a river together, in a long course had passed over its joints on beams set beneath. There, the bridge set, beneath that very bridge fought Maiorianus the horseman; by chance on the bank's near hill a barbarian wedding-song resounded, and with Scythian dances the new bride, like her yellow-haired groom, was being wed. These, then, as they tell, he laid low; the helmet rattled at the blows, and the corselet warded off the spears' strokes with its scales, until the routed foe, turning, gave his back; you might see gleam on the wagons the wandering festivities of the barbarian couch, and scattered everywhere the dishes flung down and the captive feasts, and the garlanded cauldrons, dripping with curled hair, bearing fragrant wreaths. Forthwith Mars swells, and Bellona, more ablaze, shatters the marriage-torches; the victor seizes the chariots and the bride-to-be, the daughter-in-law. Not so did Semelean Euan mingle the Pholoetan monsters and the Pelethronian Lapiths, when the orgies inflame the Haemonian mothers and rouse Venus and Mars, and first they consume the bloody food for war, and, the wine-bowl whirled, they think the cups weapons, when, the tumult growing raw, Centaur blood befouled Emathian Othrys. Nor let the quarrels of the cloud-born brothers be more famed: here too he tames monsters, on the height of whose ruddy skull the hair, drawn to the forehead, lies, and the bared neck gleams by the loss of bristles; then with grey-green light the watery sight grows white, and on faces shorn on every side instead of a beard thin lines are furrowed by the comb. More tightly sewn garments confine the tall limbs of the men; beneath the raised covering their knee lies open, and a baldric hangs the broad sword and the narrow belly. To hurl swift double-axes through the vast void and to foreknow the place of the blow, to whirl the shields and outrun the twisted spears with leaps and to come at the foe first: in boyish years the love of war is ripe. If perchance they are hard pressed by number or by the lot of the ground, death, not fear, overwhelms them; unconquered they stand firm, and survive in spirit now almost after their life. Such men, with you for witness and praiser, he put to flight; who could bear it? With you he does all; without you he does much; all fight for the prince: how I fear lest now that man fight for himself! If he holds the realm, to him you besiege whatever you tame. The fates leave no middle here: for if you refuse to be a slayer, you will be a slave. Surely if the Chaldaean truly keeps the stars on a straight path, if the Colchian knows herbs, if the Tuscan the lightnings, if the Thessalian draws forth shades, if the Lycian lots have understanding, if our birds speak our fates by their flight, if Hammon with learned bleatings groans his holy oracle beneath the Syrtis, if at last the truth, Phoebus, Themis, Dodona, you dog-star—after our days this Julius will be Augustus. Joined besides in love is the youth, whom the great spirit of his royal grandfather arms. Whither will you turn? To the heights of the world this man bears fate, both bear spirit; rise up and at once attack them unawares; neither will you be able to slay, if you bid both die; but weave deceitful blandishments for the one, yet let that one be sought with steel. Why do I speak in vain? It is nothing that we guard so greatly: that he may reign, he shall be the one to live!" Stirred to wrath, Aetius thus replies in few words: "Curb the impious prayers of your raging mind. Shall I be able to order the death of an innocent man, and be silent of my own? Does anyone pray that to be well-born be made a crime without crimes? Who would summon the fates to punishment? Your flesh with steel, Maiorianus, will I seek, if Phoebus shines by night, the Moon by day, if the twofold Parrhasian Wain is renewed in the sea, if the Tanais beholds Atlas, the Bagrada Caucasus, if a boat woven from the timber of the Hercynian wood furrows the Nabataean Hydaspes for the Rhine, if the Spaniard drinks the Ganges, and from the warm Erythraeans the Indian water-carrier comes to the Tartessian Iberus, if Castor drenches himself with the blood of Pollux, if a frenzied hand laid low the Theseus of Pirithous, the Pylades of Orestes, when the pious matricide was carrying off the Tauric rites. But lest I seem to have scorned your grief, let him live and for a little be without service; alas! he might have owed his fortune to us, had you not thought it a sorrow." So he speaks, and bids that man on his father's farm exchange his wonted toils, the wheel of the fates running on, that he might learn what awaits a landholder, and what manners at last the civil law prepares, lest he bring the soldier's art alone to empire. Forthwith the discharged youth hung up his arms, fertilizing with the ploughshare the fasts of a barren land. So once, with a stooping consul, you turned the fields, if, peace being intervening, you had loosed the war-trumpets a little, whose strong left hand guided the plough-handle after the eagles, while the palm-broidered robe, joined to a humble hearth, drank the smoke of the victorious oxherd.

Meanwhile Aetius had closed the prince's tearful fate with his sword; and that he might the more safely join his great forces to the Palatine squadrons, he summoned this man by entreaties, but the penalty did not delay for the blood he had shed (for he had gathered the number, not the spirit, of the people): he loosed the evil crimes of the sword by the sword, and fell the more to your ruin; even then the golden fates were rolling the empire of the present prince on their distaff; but the public losses escaped the man's odium. Whoever have been chosen to the name Augustus have held the throne left to the Caesars: after you, captive, labour, this man did what he has. Nerva summoned Trajan, when the pledge was already victor: that he might be Germanicus in titles, as he had been in merits, the matter runs in order; whoever so begins courts this fame. Once, after Tiberius' Capreae, after the foul godhead of Gaius, the censorship of Claudius, the lyre and marriages of Nero, after the pomp of the monstrous mirror, in which he beheld himself foul on this side because, Otho, you were fair—after Vitellius' five thousand, condemned to the abyss for his notorious gut— by these titles a prince was chosen, and by like toil Vespasian was. But lest perchance you think me shut in by the valour of a brigand, in him his vice of life consumed the vigour of his race; Scythian ferocity not strength but wishes hold, and, master of immense spoils, he has lost in luxury all the strength by which he was strong while poor. My flesh for himself he now arms against me; I am torn, captured through so many years, burned by his own fire, by my own valour, and fruitful of penalties I bring forth those whom I suffer; with his own arms he accomplishes nothing: by the Gaetuli, Nomads, Garamantes, and Autololes, the Arzuges, Marmarid, Psylli, Nasamon he is feared, sluggish, and now knows not steel from huge gold. But his own colour is bloodless, which surfeit vexes and a pallid fatness holds, and, pressed by perennial gluttony, his stomach does not work off the souring breath, his life is like his swine's; not so did the Barcaean Hannibal perish at rich Capua, when in war the strong limbs were softened amid the delights of Baiae, and where Gaurus slopes into the Lucrine waves, the Massylian swimmer flung his black arms. And therefore give me back, I pray, at least after so many ages this lord as my avenger, lest any longer Carthage do battle against Italy." So having spoken, with grief she groaned and aided her prayers with rising tears. To these Rome answers thus: "Gird up your long complaints, O devoted to me: by the name of the gods your avenger will be Maiorianus. But in few words I will retrace a few. From the time when Theodosius restored the common laws to his author's brother, the foe being driven out—whose throat a hand, afterward to be turned against itself, broke— my Gaul is still unknown to the lords of affairs, and, knowing nothing, serves in ignorance. From that time much has perished, since, the prince shut in, whoever he was, of the wretched world it was the custom that the divers parts be laid waste. What life could please, when the ruler himself was in need of governing? For so many years scorned, the nobility lay low: the state gave as reward to the brave man odium; our prince corrects all this, and adding to your strength out of the nations comes to war through wars; for to have gone, not to have fought, is the greatest toil. Why do we waste the time in words? He arrives and conquers." With such discourse the council was ended, and, the metal serving the goddess' words, the concordant sisters drew out golden threads.

These toils of Rome and Libya that I have sung, the prayers of men taught me to speak; now it is time to bear my foot to those things which I must tell even if Apollo be mute: in place of the Muses, your Mars will serve. The fierce Alaman had mounted the Alps and, led through the long silences over the ridge of the Raeti, had gone out over Roman soil laid waste, and through the fields once called by the name of Canis had sent forth a hundred times nine of the foe for plunder, and now you were master: Burco you direct thither, a scanty band attending, but that suffices when you bid them fight; victory is sure for our men that you commissioned the battle-lines; Fortune accomplishes the triumph not by your people but by your love; I do not wish for columns on the field to which you send few, that fortunate outcome of war regards you; it was contended for by the right of the master, the destiny of Augustus. Lately the fierce foe was wandering slowly over the open sea, after in order every order had given you the realm—the commons, the senate, the soldier, and the colleague together. Entering the Campanian land with the South winds blowing, secure with his Moorish soldier he attacks the farmer; the fat Vandal sat across the thwarts, awaiting the plunder which he had ordered to be dragged thither, the captive doing the capturing, but your forces suddenly had given themselves between both foes on the plains which cut sea and hill and make a harbour by the withdrawn bend of the river. At first the terrified throng seeks the mountains, which, shut in by the abandoned timbers, became plunder of the plunder; then, roused with his whole band, the pirate joins for battle: part from the hollowed boat unloads the now-docile horses, part puts on iron-woven mail of like colour, part unfolds the smooth bows and the shafts that bear poison poured into the iron, to strike twice though sent once. Now the woven serpent runs along either line, whose throat swells with the driven-in zephyrs; with open gape the painting feigns an angry hunger, and the breeze makes a fury in the cloth as often as the turning back is thickened by the blasts and the belly no longer holds its too-great void. But the trumpet, hoarse, blared heavily with earth-resounding crash, the shout answers the clarions, and valour suddenly rages even small in cowards; on every side the steel falls, yet here into throats: this one the twisted falarica crushes with its cast, scarce to cease at a second death; this one the pole's blow whirls down; this man falls, pierced by the dart, from his horse, and another by the spit; here this one lies at once by the winged weapon, having suffered an absent right hand; part, the knee cut, lives to the spite of death, and part of the brain this one snatches with part of the helmet, and with strong arm scatters the wretched skull with the two-edged sword. As soon as the Vandal turns his arms and gives his back, slaughter succeeds the battle: with no distinction they are laid low everywhere on the plains, and every brave deed the helpless one did, in trembling flight the pale rider enters the sea and passes through the ships, and by a foul swim returned from the deep to the skiff. So was the third battle of Pyrrhus once: when, his thousands slain, Dentatus pressed him, he scarce dragged the fragments of his shattered fleet into Epirus—he who had scattered the Chaones and Molossians, the bands of Thracians and Macedonians, along your shores, and at whose strength pale Oenotria and Tarentum herself, anointed, whom he sought, had trembled. The foe driven out, there is now leisure to survey the field, which stands vast; here, beneath that carnage, you may see the spirit of both sides: none not slain in the breast, whoever was yours; none not pierced in the back, of theirs whoever. This the wounds proclaim of the foremost of the pirates, by chance their leader, to whom the greedy king's sister, they say, was wedded, who, shut in blind dust and crushed by javelins, still bears the shameful footprints of his disgraceful flight. So your bands, with the spoils, hold the field and enjoy the war.

Meanwhile, while you weave a fleet on a twofold shore, the lower sea and the upper, all the forest falls into the deep for you, and too long, Apennine, your flank is cut on both sides, rich in ship-timber, sending into the sea no fewer woods than waters. Though Gaul be weary with continual tributes, she wishes to have pleased by this levy, nor does she feel the burdens which she proves to be of profit. Not with such a fleet did greater Atrides cover the Carpathian sea when the Doric foe, about to snatch the Sigean wealth, shut in Rhoetean Pergama; nor was the fleet of Xerxes so great, about to join Sestos to Abydos, when he laid low the swelling waves and gave a sea beneath a bridge, when with proud step he burst profaning into the violated pools, and the thronging squadrons ranged over the Hellespontian deep; nor so did the Mareotic fleet hide the Actian waters in the Leucadian harbour, when into her husband's war came the dowried throng from Pharian Canopus, when fierce Cleopatra, girt by her ancestral sistrum, or laden her tawny keels with even pitch-black soldiery, pressed with Ptolemaic treasure the wide-spread Doris. You fight not with this array, but, in the manner of those before, richer in steel, to which deservedly gold lies subject, the gold of a rich coward; do not scorn such rebels: even if no battle-lines, yet these adorn triumphs. Nor will it irk me to have recalled the Lagean stock as an example of your foe; for I foretell for these same realms a like fortune, since the luxury in that part is equal, nor is the Caesar worse in this. Forthwith you attempt what no Augustus in our time could: the stern host of the seven-fold Hister you snatch to arms. For whatever the languid axle, on the Sithonian hinge beneath the Parrhasian Bear, brings forth, all this fears your standards; the Bastarna, the Sueve, the Pannonian, the Neurian, the Hun, the Goth, the Dacian, the Alan, the Bellonotus, the Rugian, the Burgundian, the Vesian, the Alites, the Bisaltan, the Ostrogoth, the Procrustes, the Sarmatian, the Moschian came after your eagles; for you serves all Caucasus and the Tanaitic drinker of the Scythian wave. What might not the man's fortune do? Whatever hands it threatens, these Rome has already trembled at; now beneath you as prince she thinks it almost slight not to fear, unless that serve her which she feared when another reigned. Now you were moving camp and thousands with their divers standards crowded you; one race refuses obedience, which lately from the Hister brought back its untamed band, fiercer than its wont, which through wars lacks lords, and against the proud people Tuldila supplies wraths to be punished in battle. Here you, your arms scarce laid down, take up arms again: as when the Bistonian women of the Cicones by chance fill the rimes with Ogygian thiasi, whether on Strymon's fields or through Rhodope or where cloudy Ismarus rolls Hebrus into the sea on Hyperborean crags, the wandering throng gives itself to sleep, and at once the wearied orgies grow quiet, and the pipe no longer re-echoes with twin breath; scarce rest, and now the inspired Bassarid whirls her thyrsus and, bristling with the spots of an Erythraean fawn-skin, rouses the Odrysian initiates to the languid drums. Yet you defer this punishment, but, while you spare, you were the author of greater bloodshed. No further did this hand, more cautious for you, bear it, and your sense of honour it scorned for your sake; the first sacrifice of the war falls, whoever was rebel. The plunder too you divide among those whose mind had been devoted: that which, terror-struck, serves by the example, rejoices at the price. Caesar, seeking the Pharsalian fields, curbed his sudden wraths with the sword; but cutting his own limbs, as if compelled by the weight of the cause, he wept those whom he slew; this sedition profits your arms: whatever you bid, unless the barbarian hears, he falls here, that the soldier may fear.

Now in the season of winter the marble Alps and the rocks that meet the joined sky, and cliffs of ice, and crags threatening dry rain, you first traverse on foot, and likewise make firm your slippery steps with a pole sent ahead. The greatest throng had begun, at the middle of the rock, to grow rough with inner cold, which, shut in by the narrowed ways on the sloping hill, could not creep on the stiff, rolled-back ground: by chance one from that band, whose wheel had worn the white-flowing Hister, cries out: "I prefer swords, and the wonted calm that the cold of death brings; a numbness binds my limbs with sluggish stiffness, my body, scorched by a certain fire of cold, perishes. We follow without end the youth pressing on his toil; whoever that bravest man is, whether king or people, shut now in camp, lies in the sunny warmth or beneath a hide; we have changed the use of the year. What this man commands will be the law for things; he is never bent from his beginnings, and thinks it a loss if he fears the wraths of the season, even through losses. From what race shall I say he is sprung, whom a Scythian I do not endure? Whose lips, an infant, drank a tigress' milk beneath a Hyrcanian crag? What land, heavier than my axle, bore him? Lo, on the topmost peak he drives the freezing squadrons and laughs at the cold, while he alone glows the more in mind, when, following the trumpets of an Arctic king, I had heard the Roman prince's arms and the Caesarian house grow torpid in unending luxury: it profits nothing that earlier lords have gone before, if this king too was brave." As he prepared to say greater things, you kindle him with bitter words from the cliff: "Whoever you are, who fear the slippery things of the opposing slope, break the skin of the hanging water, and, the stream carved, let the ice be a step for you, lay aside your base complaints; ease has cold. Surely Nature did not give me the limbs of two-formed Hylaeus? Did Pegasus aid me with wings, whatever I tread, and give feathers to me as I fly? Are Calais and Zetes mine—whom you see now treading the snowy backs of the ridge? Does cold break you, do the Alps? Now, now let me strive to weigh the rimes; I will give summer beneath the Syrtis." So with your voice you raise the bands and lift them by your example, and first you attempt the toils, whatever you bid; then the rest of the throng obeys gladly: the author serves under his own laws.

What companions besides were yours, and how great a master of the soldiery, who drove your band on after you— yet not unwilling! Worthy to whom alone Sulla in the line, Fabius in genius, Metellus in piety, Appius in eloquence, Fulvius in force, Camillus in art might yield; if you ask how great a man governs the honour of the prefecture where Gaul stretches her broad bounds, he scarce had manners like the man to whom, the senate witnessing, Ulpius entrusted even the sword drawn against himself, who now dictates laws to the Goths; beneath your judge the skin-clad foe looks up to the grey-haired herald. Why should I tell here of him who governs the sacred archives, who, while he dispenses the reins of the civil part, sustains the cares of the armed, the interpreter under whom the savage race is bent to your terms? Why, rash Clio, do you attempt to praise Petrus with small strength?—from whose mouth Caesar deigns to speak to the world, though he is mighty too in an eloquent quaestor; yet this man lately, most placid prince, the hostage received, from the walls of our city drove out the sword thrust into our wretched vitals. And because to our weary fortunes you came as the one hope, we beg, succour our ruins, and your Lugdunum, as you pass, behold, O victor: broken ease after too great toils demands you. To whom you give peace, give back spirit: the wearied neck of the bullock, the plough laid down, better furrows afterward the clod of solid earth—of ox, of crop, of farmer, of citizens she is drained. The fortune of the standing was hidden; while she is taken, ah, how great it was! After joys, prince, it delights to remember the ill. Though by ravages, by fire we have fallen, yet coming with all things you restore everything: because we were the cause of your triumph, the very ruin pleases, when as victor you will begin to mount the chariot, and the mural, the rampart, the civic laurel will bind for you the sacred hair after the manner of those before, and the tawny Capitols will behold the chains of kings, when you will clothe Rome with spoils, when with rich wax you will paint the captive huts of Cinyphian Bocchus, I myself, through the resisting peoples and hoarse crashes, will go before, and in a slender song, as now, will say that you tamed the twin Alps, the Syrtes you, you the great sea, you the straits, you alike the Libyan hordes, yet first conquered me. Because you turn your eyes and now with serene face regard the wretched, it is good to exult: I remember, when you wished to spare, this was your look; gentle beauty gives the signs, assent: so may Byrsa breathe again at your trophies, so may the Parthian flee for certain and the Moor go, white with fear; so may Susa tremble, and, the quivers laid down, disarmed Bactra stand about your tribunal."

Preface to the Panegyric Spoken for Avitus Augustus

While the Thracian Pallas, armour-sounding, has her festal birth sounded by the Ismarian bard with songs, and while through Mopsopian Marathon are thronged the rivers that had stood still and every land that ran together, while the sweet-sounding murmur is shaken by the plectrum on the strings, they say the goddess approved these praises with praise: "Goddess, whom in the time of the Giant war an armed birth poured from a cloven crest, whom Latona bore not beneath the Delian caverns, about to fix the wandering Cyclad by her pledges, nor she who, bearing Alcides on Cadmean shores, suspended the childbirth for a triple night, nor she whose tower was soaked with rainy metal, when the gold-begotten son filled his mother: but you, when Phlegra beheld the trembling Thunderer, the burst peak, struck from his crest, drove forth; and when sheer force alone drew the gods into battle, his strength, much confounded, was nothing without you: as soon as your father's crest brought you forth, Wisdom, then the more they conquered, when the gods had you. Through you the engine, built by dread hands, already stretched almost across the ruddy pole, gave way. Pindus, Othrys, Pholoe fell by the right hands of Giants, and Ossa, now heavy, fell by Rhoetus' hand. Aegaeon is laid low, Briareus, Ephialtes and Mimas, wont to lick with their heels the Arctic wheels. Enceladus lay for the father, Typhoeus for the brother; this one upholds the Euboean rock, this the Sicilian." Hence Orpheus turned himself to the whole mother and taught his chords to tell of Calliope. The Muses rose up at their sister's praise, and the goddess' piety pleased more than her song. But if to sing a mother's praises is to win favour, and I cannot equal the ancient lyres, this is a public father, to whom I have vowed my song, Avitus: the matter is greater, if my Muse is lesser.

Panegyric

Phoebus, about at last, the world traversed, to see one whom you can endure as your equal, give your light to heaven: this man suffices for the earth, nor let the standard-bearer now boast himself among the stars, whom Marmaric Atlas wears down with his crest: to this man these are mere stars. As they, sunk, grow bright, so amid adversities Rome gleams, for whom from her rise it was a fixed order to have grown by ills; now she rises with a prince for consul; surely, fathers, it delights you to see the fasces brought together, and the curule chair given as ally to the sceptre: believe me, you will give more: now bind the two-fronted chariots, ambiguous Janus, your hair, and gird yourself with twofold laurel; formerly a prince's, now a consul's, this year gleams, and the diadems grow with the well-earned robes. In vain now, Muse, you fear that the South wind has driven the sails of our ship; for since we have begun to run over the sea of fame, lo, the star to keep us through the deep.

By chance the father of the gods looked down on the lands from heaven: lo, whatever he sees flourishes; to have looked on the world was to have remade it; his nod alone cherishes all things. And now, that the gods might assemble, the Tegean bird flies now on feet, now on brow; scarce has he touched the fields and come down with his whole height: sea, land, or air sent their native gods. Brother of the Thunderer, you come first, who, wont to cleave Doris with your green car, scatter swift calm over the startled backs; the moist Nymphs Phorcus attends, and there sea-green you come, Glaucus, and surest of seers, Proteus, you were sure. In long order after come the gods: vine-clad Liber, fierce Mars, shaggy Tirynthian, naked Venus, fruitful Ceres, quivered Diana, weighty Juno, prudent Pallas, turreted Cybele, exiled Saturn, wandering Cynthia, youthful Phoebus, fearful Pan, stiff Fauns, wanton Satyrs. There assembled too those who hold heaven by valour, Castor by his horse, Pollux by the glove, Perseus by the sickle-sword, Vulcan by the thunderbolt, Tiphys by the ship, Quirinus by his race. Who could sing here the hall of heaven, whose very ruddy stars are the pavement? Now the father, tranquil, sets himself on his golden throne; thence the elder gods took their seats (the rivers too had it granted there— but the aged—to sit in that place; to you, greatest of floods, Eridanus, broken into cups by the yellow Sygambri, swelling Rhine, ridden by the wandering Scythian bands, Hister, and, better known by an unknown rising, Nile): when from afar, from the upraised part of heaven, Rome dragged her sluggish steps, her neck bent down, bearing her face bowed; her hair hangs from her head, covered with dust, not a helmet, and the shield strikes against her ailing steps, and a weight, not a terror, is borne in her spear. And when first she fell at the knees of the loving Thunderer, she said, "I call to witness, holy father, you, your divinity, and that— whatever Rome I was: by my supreme fate overwhelmed enough, I envy the lowly; the narrow house does not bear the weight of a great roof, nor does the thunderbolt threaten the valleys. What, I ask, did the Tuscan soothsayer portend to me with twice six vultures? Casting the walls for my first race, why was I already lofty in omens, while you, O poor Romulus, open for me the foundations on the ridges of the Etruscan hill? I was safer by the sword, when, in joined whirlwind, the Rutulian, the Veientine, and likewise the Auruncan and the Aequian, the Hernican and the Volscian pressed me; I seemed great enough even to you, while a woman bursts her body, defiled by steel, and you return to a chaste wound, O rooted-out shame. Now, when Tarquinius shut me in, ramparted with his Etruscan ally: O fires of Mucius! O waters of Cocles! O grief! Here, where now is he who brought beneath my laws the Samnite, Gurges, who cut down the back of the Volscian, Marcius, and the dictator and exile who routed the Senones? I would wish the life of Fabricius, the deaths of the Decii, either thus conquering or thus conquered: give me back my beginnings! Alas! where now are the pomps and rich triumphs and the poor consul? My spear-point terrified the Libyan axle, and I set a third yoke on the faithless Carthaginian. The Indians' Ganges, the Colchians' Phasis, the Araxes of Armenia, the Ger of the Ethiopians and the Tanais of the Getae trembled at my Tiber. With the Teuton joined, once, broken, you submit, O Cimber, and the hands burdened with swords I ordered to carry chains alone. Woe to me! What was I, when at my bidding they bade Sulla, Asiagenes, Curius, Paulus, Pompey give to Tigranes, Antiochus, Pyrrhus, Perses, Mithridates peace and realms, flight, tribute, chains, poison. I am silent of the Sauromatian and the Moschian and the Getae, wont to drink bloody milk and dye their cups with blood, or, when they flee, then the more to-be-fled-from Persians. Nor is it enough to have told of lands: in gleaming arms so many seas I entered with you for leader, and the nations set far beneath the setting sun. Victorious Caesar carried his standards even to the Caledonian Britons; and though he routed both the Scot and the Pict with the Saxon, he sought foes, whom now Nature forbade to seek more men. It beheld you break Leucas, fierce Augustus, and Pharos, while the fleet-borne soldier shook the Actian pools, and Antony, fugitive in arms and bibulous, emptied the unchaste Ptolemaïs of her ancestral realm. And though I once complained of the narrowed hinge of the world, now there is no limit even for me. More, supreme of gods, than is just I seemed to you mighty, since the Parthian Sapor of his own accord restored my standards, and, the tiara laid down, wept while he purged the deaths of the Crassi; and from this now (O grief!) the right of people and senate shaken off, I incurred what I feared; I am wholly in the prince, wholly the prince's, and from a Caesar I become a torn realm, who once was queen; and Tiberius' Capreae and Gaius' boots the censorship of Claudius followed, and a husband by death—Nero; with sad Piso you lay low the reverend Galba, Otho, who, while you sought to be held fair by the mirror, made me foul; the loathsome gullet of Vitellius brought me a belly, who, reigning a short time, perished too late; the wearied me illustrious-in-arms Vespasian holds, then Titus, and after him his brother too; after whom tranquil Nerva scarce began to give me back to myself, made greater than the adoptive Caesar; thence comes Ulpius, by whom Agrippina was dreaded by the Sygambri, brave, pious, upright, keen. Such a one, captive, I pray for. Trajan I know not if any could equal, unless perhaps you again, Gaul, send one to conquer." Tears closed the voice of the suppliant, and whatever sorrow remains she begs; on every side of heaven the nobles rise, Mars, Cypris, Romulus, and the gods who were your authors, Rome; now milder, the Saturnian herself is bent and pardons her ancient wraths. Jupiter answers thus: "The Fate by which all things are ruled, and by which I too, was not permitted to be broken; the lofty ever labour, and the strength raised by our gift Fortune begrudged to herself; but conceive great spirits, though broken, if Porsenna feared you the more, roaring from the loosed bridge; if your captured walls soon saw Brennus' flight; if at last we drove back dread Hannibal with joined tumult of earth and sky (when his camp now stood next your walls, the thunderbolt ran for the Colline tower, and there again Nature feared, after Phlegra, to see Jove fight, frightened): lift your drooping eyes, let the darkness leave your cleared mind. It is a marvel that you are conquered; when you begin to conquer, it will be no marvel. And that it may be plain to you by what you may at last rise, weary as you are, learn—in few words I will teach. I have a land that lifts up a nursling from Latin blood, famed for its men, to which once not even Nature, best artificer of things, gave a peer; fruitful from the city its field is mighty, which, scarcely broken by the first plough, thirsts for slow seed, or, with the bullock luxuriating, lays bare the pitchy clod with secret richness. There rose up against it what the scorching South cooked, the Nile-land and the Libyan soil, and ever the dry Mygdonian Gargara, compared, the sickles condemned; the Apulian and the Calaber yielded; the one hope of things, cherishing this, O Arvernian, you yield to none in arms, you besiege any with your horse. Let Caesar's Fortune, too greatly fearing, be my witness here, when, driven from the hill of Gergovia, the soldier scarce stood firm in his very camp. These so brave I willed; but while I prepare to yield Avitus to you, Rome, to whom long since the greatest pedigree gleams, his stock having embraced—the palm-robe ran through his great-grandfathers, and, you witnessing, Philagrius, the patrician peak of his race shines forth. But how small a part is this of his praises, to praise his fathers, whom indeed the curule chairs and prefectures owe to their descendant? Let others be those through whom a later origin boasts itself, and let another count an ancient line by titles: Avitus, you alone are the nobility of your forebears. It pleases to set forth the deeds of so great a man and to run through his early life in few words. A noble mother had loosed in childbirth the burden of her chaste womb; I gave at once plain signs of the future prince, and filled the whole hall of the trembling father with happy augury, though the same man blamed his son's great destinies and saw already the boy's reign; but, perceiving a deposit of the world entrusted to him under so great a pledge, lest anything be lost to you, Rome, he aided fortune with his zeal. First he gave his vaunting limbs to the snows, and bade him break the ice with his soles and, a little child, laugh at the trodden rimes. The rising powers of his mind are formed by the Muses, and with him by whom you thunder, Cicero; he learned too the deeds of your former leaders; he learned wars, and read again in books what he should wage in the field. Scarcely had he first begun to be a boy out of an infant, when by chance a she-wolf, rabid with bloody jaws and preparing food for her cubs with hungry maw (for there were fragments near), he laid low with a rock snatched from the crag, and her broken skull leaped apart with the millstone, and the stone settled in the wound. So my Alcides, while he wandered in Nemea's glades, met the monster empty-handed, not bearing his club, not his quivers; he stood, wrath roaring, and, the foe near, his deceived valour took counsel of his arms alone. Small things indeed, yet to be told: who readier than he to lower the stretched neck of the chained Molossian and to recline at the lairs of beasts, to learn by the interpreting nostril things unseen and to seek footprints in the air? Now if perchance the shameless Umbrian had terrified a boar with barkings, it was his sport to break the white crescents beneath the black throat, and with wrestling arm to drive vast hunting-spears through the opposing prey, how fair, when by chance returning home after the lairs he gleamed with the horror of the boar, and his struggling valour betrayed against his will, by brave deeds, his modesty! So in the fields of chaste Tritonis at Pandion's Hippolytus shone, cloudless, from his rosy face, but together, when the Cretan, blazing with twofold frenzy, passed in passion beyond mothers and in fraud beyond stepmothers. What of his zeal for birds, which Nature gives as ravening upon a kindred kind? Who more learned than he taught to join various contests through the clouds? By a bird he conquers birds, and with swift wing through the air no fighter wars better with the talon. No less, having followed civil law among these things, he is chosen first, a youth, alone, to bind the ills of his broken country and demand that the shapeless tribute be removed; then, by chance more powerful there among the nobles, and afterward even a prince, Constantius grants all, fixed in wonder at such great character, and marvelling in years so small a great good, and in the mouth of the praying youth an old man's words. Hence it pleases, Rome, to unfold the leader's battles and the treaties of kings: struck by the varied storms of wars, your Gaul was ordered to give to the Getic king pledges of peace, among which, a noble hostage, you, Theodorus, come; whom, for love of your kinsman, you seek out in the midst of the skin-clad prince's hall, safe, Avitus, in his good faith. This now Theodoric's high example of duty proves, a wondrous thing and worthy of report, that you, gentle, pleased a fierce king; hence little by little he tastes you in his inmost senses and wishes too greatly that you be his own; but you scorn to bear the part of a friend more than that of a Roman; he is amazed at the rebuff and from it pleases the more. So, Pyrrhus, you saw Fabricius stern, when the poor man fled the wealth heaped on his rich spirit, scorning the king, while with a suppliant fee the king begs a pledge of friendship from cheap gold. Aetius meanwhile—because by the Scythian war he is often instructed—you follow; who, though lofty in arms, did nothing without you, while you did very much without him. For after the Iuthungi and the Norican wars, the Vindelician subdued, you, victor joined to him, freed the Belgian whom the fierce Burgundian had oppressed. There is conquered in the race the Herulian, the Hun by javelins, the Frank by swimming, the Sauromatian by shield, the Salian by foot, the Gelonian by sickle, or anyone who weeps a wound, whom to be struck is to grieve, and to have furrowed his cheeks with steel, and with threatening face to have buried the red traces of his scars. Now then he is given the lofty illustrious honour, and, scaly and still bearing on his face livid marks from the ruddy crests, scarce had he brought home from camp his arms befouled, when the perjured foe stirs new wars again and battle beneath the very walls of his country. Litorius then by chance, lofty, the Aremorican subdued, was hurrying the Scythian horsemen into the Getic line through your lands, O Arvernian; who, all the nearest places by raiding, flames, steel, ferocity, plunder, were destroying, belying the empty name of peace. Then a certain one of these, more savage—soon to be struck— you strike his servant; he rushes on, and commends his sad fate to his absent lord, and dying bears to the Stygian stream, in hope, the part of vengeance to come. And now rumour brings to the man guarding the towers and gates, in the gaze of the trembling commons, the crime committed. He is shaken, he halts, grows pale, blushes, freezes, and burns, and varying his look through one face he makes for himself many faces of wrath, or—the way of one who grieves often— he loves the dead the more; at last he bursts forth and "Arms, arms," he roars, and even now is borne the corselet fat with blood, and the pole blunted through barbarous wounds and the sword toothed beneath unceasing slaughters. He shuts his calves in greaves and sets on his head a gleaming helmet, on which a tawny cone grows high and from its top hurls an angry light. And now he mounts his horse, and, the gates torn from their hinge, he flashes forth; Valour and Grief stand by their comrade, and Honour: with his pike he eagerly seeks the armed wings, seeking battle by fighting, and through the trembling line by the death of many makes up for the one who lies hidden. So, demanding the Phrygian victor with his Emathian spear, the son of Aeacus reined in his grief at his slain friend, through so many of your deaths, Troy (for the cheap throngs in themselves), content to rush on, and through broad peoples to thrust his drawn sword; the earth swims, overwhelmed with blood, and while the throng blunts his heavy hewing weapon, Hector, absent, is now falling at his side in every wound. When at last he was betrayed who was the cause of so great a tumult, Avitus said: "Come, you reared beneath the Scythian Bear, who rage and trust only in a slain unarmed man, meet me armed; my wrath has already done you much: I have granted you battle and bid you resist; it pleases to have slain one contending." So he speaks, and into the midst of the plain he leaps forth, and the fierce foe comes as well. As soon as they bore breast against breast or face to face, this one trembles with wrath, that one with fear. Now the rest of the throng flutters with divers prayers and through varied strokes hangs on the outcome, but after the first, the second, and the third wheel was driven, lo, the lofty spear comes and pierces the bloody man, and after the borders of the back the corselet, burst, yields, the breast twice pierced through, and while the blood sobs through the twofold gap, the divided wounds plucked away his doubtful life.

After these deeds of the man (you I call to witness, livid Styx) he ruled the prefecture's laws for me unstained; and Gaul, taking up for herself this head, worn out by her wonted ruins, was growing pale with Getic wrath. By no prayer, no price, no soldier broken, Aetius did nothing; with Litorius captive the losses of the lands lay open; to advance their bounds to the Rhone was the fixed purpose of the sons of Theodoric, nor was it needful to fight, but for the Goths to migrate; the fierce victor sharpens his rabid wrath; what he felt—the Scythian foe before the walls— he charges to another; and nothing is heavier, if perchance ever it fall to conquer, than to be afraid—after on every side no garrison and to your leaders nothing, Rome, was left— you, Avitus, make a treaty anew; your read page tames the savage king; it is enough that you have ordered what the world asks. Will the nations and peoples to come ever believe this? A Roman letter cancels what, barbarian, you besiege. He ruled the laws, then; for this too was fitting, that he should then become the asserter of laws who now will be their author, lest the prince to be given to the peoples—the head, the commander, the Caesar and Augustus—should know fierce battles alone.

Now having at last discharged the height of the prefecture, he had given himself to the country (yet never ease, never unwarlike sloth, but zeal and care for arms ever in his quiet): suddenly, with a tumult broken loose, barbarism had poured all the North upon you, Gaul; the warlike Rugian, the Gelonian attending, the fierce Gepid follows; the Burgundian musters the Sciri; the Hun, the Bellonotus, the Neurian, the Bastarna, the Toringian, the Bructeran, or he whom the Nicer washes with its sedgy wave, the Frank bursts forth; quickly the Hercynian forest, cut by the axe into boats, wove the Rhine with alder; and now with his terrifying squadrons Attila had spread himself into your fields, O Belgian. Scarcely had Aetius left the Alps, leading a thin and scattered force without soldiery in his auxiliaries, too credulous, falsely presuming the Getic band would be present in his own camp. But after the messenger struck the leader—that the Huns, the now-scorned foe almost in their own seats, the Getae awaited—he turns all his counsels over with himself, wandering, and presses his mind with waves of cares. At last, to him wavering, the resolve settled to entreat the lofty man, and, all the princes gathered, in their presence he begins thus, suppliant, in such words: "Salvation of the world, Avitus, to whom it is now no new glory that Aetius begs—you have willed it, and the foe does no harm; you wish: it profits, you hold so many thousands shut in by your nod, and to the Getic peoples your favour alone is the boundary; ever hostile to us, they grant you peace. Go, bring forth the victorious eagles; make, O best, the Huns, whose former flight had once shaken us, twice conquered, profit me." So he speaks, and that man, having promised, made the vow a hope. Forthwith from there he flies and rouses his servant wraths to battle. The skin-clad squadrons went after the Roman trumpets, the Goth running at the name; the demolished barbarian fears to be summoned by the bronze, dreading reproach, not loss. These to war Avitus, now the hope of the world, draws, whether now a private man or still in office; so, bearing cinnamon from the pyre on the Erythraean hill, the bird of Phoebus rouses all the throng of birds; the attendant bands run, and the narrow air does not unfold their wings.

Now near the fates of your vulture were filling the twice-six wings (for you know your toils, you know, Rome): Placidus, a mad half-man, slew Aetius; and scarce had the diadem been set on your head, Petronius, when at once came barbarism, and Rome seemed even captive to the Getae, and the land about to yield to their fury; as ravening wolves by chance, to whom by keen scent the smell shows a fat air from the closed sheepfolds, provoke and sharpen their hunger, and bear the look of plunder in their faces, with open jaws cheating their fasts; now, now in hope the tender lamb is broken, and the absent prey crackles already on the greedy palate. Moreover the Aremorican tract hoped for the Saxon pirate, whose sport it is to furrow the British brine with hide and to cleave the grey-green sea with a stitched skiff. The Frank laid low first the German, second the Belgian, and you, fierce Alaman, drank the Rhine on the Roman banks, and, proud in both fields, were either citizen or victor. But seeing the lost spaces of the lands, the prince now Maximus chose for himself the one thing that there was in affairs, the master of foot and horse, you, Avitus; the rumour of the conferred honour finds him a farmer, while by chance he works the teeth of his bent mattock, or, bowed over the curved plough, turns the unbaked clod through the fertile acres. So once to your country's broken fortunes, a poor ploughman, you come, Cincinnatus, when your wife clothed you, the old man, in the robe before the oxen, and the willow doors received the dictator, and to his own dwellings, bearing what he had not sown, weighted from his base bundle, the triumphal purple bore the cheap seed. As soon as he took up the weight of the imposed honour, "Choose those who may beg pardon, Alaman, for their fury"; the Saxon's onset ceases, and the Chattan with marshy water the Elbe binds; and scarce thrice the monthly moon sees all this, and now to the peoples and fields, stretched by the fierce Goth, he presses his way, where, driven by the tide, the Ocean scatters the refluent Garonne over the tilled lands; into the river, the sea running, the bitter water passes over the gentle streams, and, driven through the river's channel, the salt wave sails for itself a foreign deep. Here now, the battle arranged, the leaders of the Visigoths loosing the reins of war, rumour suddenly suspended from their wrath, reporting that Avitus, girt with a diploma, now entered the Getic homes, and, the burden of the mastership laid down for a while, had taken up the rights of a legate. The leaders were astounded alike, and the Scythian senate, and feared lest perchance he refuse them their peace; as when the ruddy axle, snatching up light Phaethon, the day now growing pale, and, the world kindled, the disturbed peace of the elements raging, or the near heat raging through the dry pools, and the mud thirsting in the dusty bottom of the sea, then the single mild flame of Phoebus extinguished the unwonted heat. Here by chance a certain Goth, while with reforged sickle he shapes by strokes and points his sword on a stone, now ready to have warmed to the trumpets, now, now about to bury the land with frequent slaughter, the foe not buried, as soon as the name of coming Avitus shone forth, cries: "The war has perished, give back the ploughs again. If I retrace the well-known ease of ancient quiet, not once has that man borne off my steel—O shame! O gods! That good faith should have such power! Why do you threaten me with sluggish treaties, to my loss, by good faith my own? The savings of peace you bid us both furnish and owe; who ever would believe it? Lo, the Getic kings, willing to obey, think they have reigned the lower! Nor can I even say under the pretext of sloth that you would not fight: brave, you love peace. Now Avitus lays the factions low; besides, sent ahead, Messianus restrains the Getic wraths; you have commanded still more, and we lay down our arms. What remains that you might wish to be able? That we are not foes I count a small thing; if you are known to me in your old deeds, I will be your auxiliary: even so it will be allowed to fight." While the Visigoth turns these things in his stern heart, they had come into view; the king and the master had halted near; this one upright in countenance, but that one blushed with joy and by his blush begged pardon, then thence, the king's brother held on one side, the king on the other, with clasped hands they entered Palladian Toulouse. Not otherwise, their palms inserted at the couches, Romulus and Tatius cast a treaty, when, with the steel of their parents and the rabid husbands joined in kindred war, Hersilia thrust the Sabine women on the Pallantian hill.

Meanwhile the Vandal with stealthy arms takes you unawares, and the Burgundian, with treacherous leading toward you, wrings out the trembling wraths of slaying the prince. Alas, the crime! Into wars again and the fourth labours the perfidious trumpets of Elissaean Byrsa grow cruel. What ill did you nourish, O fates? The Massylian phalanx had mounted the citadels of Evander, and the Marmaric feet pressed the mountains of Quirinus, and again brought back the captive tribute that Barce once gave. The exile of the fathers, the ills of the commons, the prince slain, rumour bore the captured empire to Getic ears; at new dawn, after the custom of the Getae of old, an assembly is gathered; there stands an old age, ancient in years yet green, of the consul; his garments are squalid, and the soiled linen grows greasy on his lean back, nor can the raised skins touch his calf, and with bare knee a poor knot suspends his horsehide boot. After honoured poverty came into the council of the elders and the king at once demanded the words of peace, the leader said: "I would have wished, I confess, secure in my native fields, ever to have cherished a well-earned quiet, from the time when, after the three offices of service, I held the proud peak of the prefecture, now a fourth height. But while the prince now of our world, Maximus, calls me—unknowing, absent—through a thousand refusals of the nobles to the trumpets after the laws, and wished to change his herald for the sounding clarions, most ready I seized that office, by which as legate I might come to you. The ancient treaties I beg, which he, my own, would now hold, had I perchance commanded, the old man for whom to follow Avitus was ever his growth. I was wont once to handle Getic affairs; you know you have often not known what I urged, unless it were done; yet Fortune snatched away the earlier genius; whatever I deserved perished with your father. He had beset Narbo, dissolved with corruption (you were a small child); girding the trembling thousands, he had now, now driven them to infamous foods; now, sad, he believed his own prey would fail him, if perchance the shut-in one perished, when he approved our counsels and slackened the walls, the war drawn back. And you yourself (lo, here are old men)—propped on this breast these hands held you weeping, if perchance your nurse lifted you to me to be suckled, when you would not—lo, I come and now seek again the pledge of ancient love. If you have no faith, no reverence for a father, go, hard man, and refuse peace." There bursts from all the council a murmur and a roar, and condemning battle the seditious throng raises a concordant tumult. Then the king declares: "Long since, illustrious leader, I blame you for begging our peace, when you could compel servitude, and drag the following peoples into wars. Do not, I pray, brand me with odium by a father's name: what do I deserve, if you command nothing? To persuade under him whom you could—now to will is enough; and the only delay to what you would wish is that the Getae did not know it. To me Roman laws have long pleased through you, and my father bade me, a small child, learn at your words by what docile page the ancient verse of Maro might soften my Scythian manners; now you teach me to wish for peace, but learn what is the condition of obedience: perhaps you will approve the ratified pacts. I call to witness, Rome, your name venerable to us and our kindred race from Mars (or whatever from the ages, the world has nothing better than you, nothing than your senate), that to keep peace with you, or to be willing to abolish what our grandfather did amiss—whom this one thing darkens, that he took you, Rome—but if the gods favour my prayers, the vengeance of the present will avail to purge the crime of the old destruction, if you, illustrious leader, will only take up the name of Augustus. Why do you turn your eyes? It is fitting to be the more unwilling; we do not compel this, but we attest: with you for leader I am Rome's friend, with you for prince a soldier; you snatch the realm from none, nor does any Augustus possess the Latin citadels; where it is vacant, the court is yours. I attest, this is not enough, that I do no harm; and would that by your diadem it might come to pass that I do good! To persuade is mine; for if Gaul compels you, as by right she can, let the world obey you, lest it perish." He spoke, and likewise to the asked-for words gives, with his brother, holy faith. You depart, Avitus, sad, who know the Gauls cannot hide that the Getae can serve with you for prince; for as soon as it was plain to the trembling citizens that you bring treaties, they run up eager and before the unknowing tribunal fling themselves down; and when the nobility, numerous enough, seemed to her to have assembled—she on whom the snowy rocks of Cottius look down, whom on divers sides the water of the Tyrrhene and the Rhine surrounds, or whom the long ridges of the Pyrenees, shut off from Spanish law, confine— the joyful throng approaches the man, sad with too great a weight of cares. Then the one greatest of the nobles, worthy to take up the person of his country, begins: "How long fortune, through varied toils, beneath a boy prince, has worn us, harsh to affairs and prostrate, perhaps it were long, great leader, to complain, since indeed you were the greatest part of the grieving, while, mourning your country's wounds, you are driven by vehement anxieties. For us, amid these disasters and the deaths of the world, death was to have lived. But while through our fathers' words we cherish slothful laws and think it holy to pursue the old order through losses, we have borne the shadow of empire, content to bear an ancient race and its vices, and to suffer a people wont to be clothed in the murex more by custom than by right. Lately a most ready chance shone forth, by which Gaul might put forth her own strength, while Maximus seizes the trembling city; he could have done enough for the world, had she with you for master reformed all her realms for herself. Who of us stirred the Belgic fields, the Aremorican shore, who the Getic wraths, is no secret: in these so great wars we have yielded to you, illustrious one, now at last the summit calls; in a doubtful time the realm no sluggard rules; all ambition is set aside when the last extremities seek out the renowned: after the losses of Ticinus and Trebia, the trembling state came in haste to Fabius; the famous Cannae, Varro routed, and the Carthaginian swelling even with the death of the Scipios, Livius, chosen, broke; captive, as they say, the world lies in the city; the prince perishes, here all the head of empire now is; we beg, mount the tribunal, raise the fallen; the times do not now demand this, that another love Rome more. Nor perchance think yourself not equal to the realm: when the Brennic standards pressed the Tarpeian rock, you know, then our state was wholly Camillus, who, owed his country's avenger, covered the smoking ashes with hostile slaughter. Gold did not procure for you the popular centuries, nor do the tribes now, venal and bought with a numerous as, run together to the vote; the suffrages of the world no one buys. Poor you will be chosen; what alone suffices, you are rich in merits. Why do you delay your country's prayers, which bid that you may bid? This is the verdict of all: if they have a lord, I shall be free." The din fills the halls of Viernum, where by chance the loyal throng of the senate had brought their force, prayers, entreaties; the place, the hour, the day are called fortunate for empire, and forthwith there the watchful skill gladly assigns the watches of the nobles. The third light had poured Hyperion from the retreating stars: the nobles run together, and, the soldiery poured round, a mound composed, they set him up and crown with the camp torque the sad man, and give the insignia of the realm; for before he had put on the cares alone of a prince. With no other look once did the Tirynthian hero take up the weight of heaven, at the same time as, from the Libyan rock, the Giant withdrew himself, and when, safer, the engine had sat on Hercules' back. This man, Rome, I have given to you, while through her broad fields Gaul thunders "Augustus" with applause, and Boreas, now stronger, bears the happy crash to the bloodless South. He will restore Libya to you through a fourth chain, and he whose journey alone called back, after many ages, the lost Pannonias, it is now easy to believe what he may do in wars—O what nations he will often yoke for you, the eagles inflicted, who fled the greatest omens of the realm as a private man, when by chance, as he journeyed, a swift bird shook off his plebeian cloak! But gladder now in so great a prince, ancient parent Rome of the gods, lift up your cheeks and your foul lethargy lay down: lo, a greater prince will make grow young her whom the boys made old." The father had scarce given an end with his mouth: the gods applauded, and a roar ran through the council; the sisters wove a fortunate time for your empire, Augustus, and in the year of your consulship spun out tawny ages with their turning threads.

To Priscus Valerianus, a Man of Prefectorian Rank

Priscus, ever our glory, to whom, with Avitus as prince, the lofty purple joins a kindred line, since to your sifting my trifles run, I say: "Stand still, you wanderers; whither so near a chasm? He loves. A censor strict is ever the one who cherishes; with stern brow tender friendship reads. Nothing wholly profits, this added to your praises— that the Ulpian portico gleams ruddy at my cost, or that still, the people and the senate applauding alike, hollow Rome re-echoes our 'well done.'" They answer: "We will hasten, we will go, and you do not hold us back: before so great a judge a fault is pleasing, no examiner is better than this; well he weighs songs, slow in scorn, swift in judgement." And because I could not stay these rash words, this I ask: do not hesitate to dedicate to the pyre what you have read.

To Felix

This bounteous gift Sollius Apollinaris, his own Sidonius, sends as greeting to his happy lord and pious brother Felix.

Tell, tell what I ask, Magnus, tell, I pray, Felix by name, by mind, by honour, by form, by children, by wife, by brothers, by parent, by your father's and your mother's kin, and by Camillus, highest of your cousins: why do you bid the rash trifles of a friend, which the jest of tender youth scattered, be reduced into the shape of a little book, and at once a huge and sudden bundle of odium be forged, and the paper perish? I serve your bidding, but first I attest, reader, what rough patches you will suffer here. We do not run the ancient road, nor will you find anything where the Muse wears the old ruts of those before; not here the antipodes and the Red Sea, not here will we sing the Memnonian Indians, scorched by the kindred torch of Aurora; not Artaxata, Susa, Bactra, Carrhae, nor will I sound out baked Babylon, which, lying open to its nursing river, drinks the Tigris enclosed on this side and that. Not here will I tell of Ninus, first of the Assyrians, nor of Arbaces, head of the Medes, nor her in whose rich ash, when he fled the foe, Sardanapallus blazed. I will not speak of Cyrus, grandson of Astyages, whom they say a dog's teat nourished, whose rapacity not even the treasure of Lydian Croesus could satisfy; whose ferocity was not then subdued, when, two hundred thousand slain before, driven into the narrow vale of Scythia, he came to the wineskin of bereaved Tomyris. Not here will you read the Cecropian triumphs, nor in what battle Marathon grows red, nor, when he roused a thousand thousand, Xerxes, puffed with multitude, and this man, the deep waters of the gods swallowed at once, still thirsting; nor too Thermopylae and the waves of Helle, the barriers of land and sea scorned, ridden over with frenzied bands, and, the swelling sea let into Athos, beside the peak of the leaf-bearing Alp to have gone through caverns carved out for fleets. Not the offspring of the Garamantic Thunderer, ruling over realms and princes, will I tell to have flown over the lands of Asia stretched out, driven by his father's bolt, and first to have struck down the tumultuous prefects and satraps of Darius, soon to have bidden the man himself, proud on his fathers' throne and prating of gods akin to him, his wife, his children, his parent taken, return to the chances of a man; who, when he had stirred the greatest wars and set on one field the gathered arms of all Persia from every side, is reported to have gained this only, that the foe might more freely sleep. I will not tell that the Minyans, borne by the speaking wood, stood in the Phasian port, when, struck by the form of the Pelasgian leader, the heroine softened the rabid bulls, nor terrified then, when her own husbandman, after the sown molars of the tamed serpent, trembling among the armed grasses, wondered to see the foe flower into a harvest, and, with the ears of grain fighting here and there, above the war-bearing clods grew wet the brothers, stalked, with green gore. I will not tell here of the earth-born cohort, the more lively for the venom mingled in, to whom, save for a shape now lacking, serpents, with their voluminous bodies, stretching high their scaly legs, ended in their tracks in a mouth. So the wanton youth of triple form, treading the earth with devouring foot, ran, astonishing in the gait of their heads, and when the trumpets of the gods sounded, soon against the thunder, hissing back, dared with their soles to provoke the heaven-dwellers. Nor do you read of the widened fields of Phlegra, while the sent mountains fly through the stars— Pindus, Pelion, Ossa, Olympus, Othrys— with their woods, herds, beasts, rimes, rocks, springs, towns, lifted up by the more spacious right hand of those that brandished them. I will not cultivate here the labours of Hercules, to whom boar, hind, lion, Giant, Amazon, host, bull, Eryx, birds, Lycus, thief, Nessus, the Libyan, the yokes, the apples, the maid, the serpent, Oete, the Thracian horses, the Iberian oxen, the wrestling river, the three-formed dog, and the borne-up pole gave the pole. Not here will I pursue in verse Elis, noble for its chariots, nor the all-too-known river out of love, how through the deeps of the sea Alpheus flows and over the brine falls into the waves of his bride. Not here will I unweave the house of Tantalus, where, through her father Pelops, a daughter became sister to her own offspring, and by a new monstrosity the father begot an infamous grandson; nothing sad is sung here; nor do we paint the tears at the eaten feast of Thyestes, who by his brother's crime, his children devoured, was a living tomb, when after these banquets, suddenly, his car bent back, the setting Titan fled toward the rising the guest, and put the day to flight. Nor will the Phrygian shepherd be read by you, for whom Dindymon, lessened, its peak cut off, is said to have woven a fleet, when, at the bidding of patroness Venus, the ravisher laid waste the Oebalian lands and hospitable Amyclae, seeking his following prey across the sea. But neither Pergama nor the ten-year war nor the savage phalanxes of Agamemnon nor the perjuries of Sinon will I pursue, where the citadel, dedicated to the Palladian sign, unbarred by the deceitful traitor, received the horse that bore the foot-soldiers. Not here with the pen of the Maeonian Muse do I tell the valour and wisdom of the Dulichian and the Thessalian citizen, of whom this one is thought, in the Pelian cave, to have been schooled in hunting, the lyre, the wrestling-ground, and herbs beneath the old man born of Saturn, while now, a boy treading the lairs of beasts, he lies here and there over snowy Pholoe, now, reclining at the beloved mangers, sleeps more softly in his master's mane; thence, given to a parent of the Scyrian maids, to have borne the name of false Pyrrha and among the dances of austere Minerva to have whirled the thyrsus hidden for Venus; at last, drawn by the sound of the Phrygian rape, led on by the praises of Hector to be dragged. But that other, to whom it fell, in the fourth lustrum, to return to his fatherland after Ithaca, not even the volume of Smyrna unfolds enough, for who could continue those toils that land and sea brought him: the Palladium stolen, Achilles found, Dolon caught by his swift feet, and Rhesus' snowy chariots, dragged off before the streams of Xanthus could drink them, and the quiver too which, snatched from you, Philoctetes, the patron god gave; Telamonian Ajax raging because before the ships, pleading his cause, the eloquent one bore off the prize of the warrior; hence Polyphemus avoided and Circe and the hunger of the Laestrygonian tyrant, then the orchards of rich Calypso, and the Sirens pleasing to those that perish, the avoided darkness and the torch of Nauplius and the rabid loins of devouring Scylla, or what cliffs the Tauromenitan Charybdis hollows out, belching from the deep? Not the gods favouring particular fields, cities, and islands do I sing— Saturn for Latium and Jove for Crete and Juno for Samos and the Sun for Rhodes, Persephone for Henna, Minerva for Hymettus, Vulcan for Lipara, Dione for Paphos, Perseus for Argos, Priapus for Lampsacus, Euhius for Thebes and Vesta for Ilium, the Delian for Thymbra, the Arcadian for Lycaeus, Mars for the Thracians and Diana for the Scythians, whom dedicated temples made gods, incense, salt, spelt, meal, or the consecration of superfluous rites. Not with Triptolemus the reverend Eleusis, who gave the first ears of grain to peoples fed through the Chaonian holm-oak grove, nor the Mareotic Apis will I sound roused at the Memphitic sistra. I will not tell that the youth of Lacedaemon dedicated the anointed wrestlings to the daughter of Tyndarus, whom, taught in their native Therapnae, the gymnastic crowd of the Bebrycian theatre fears; not the Lycian lots and those of Caere, nor the answers of Themis, prior to Delphi, nor the powers the Tuscan seeks at the fenced bidental, the lightning expiated; nor those whom, drinking the Euganean Timavus, on Antenor's hill the augur saw, gods moving the Thessalian battle; nor those whom Amphiaraus and Melampus . . . the gods Metellus snatched from the very ashes, through the temple, the flame ill-wavering, rejoicing, with his sight lost. Not here will Cinyphian Hammon be sung, lifting his mitred head from the sands, scarce, after the hecatomb offered, wont to bring himself forth from the chasm of the Syrtes. Not here Dindyma, nor, on rattling boxwood, the Curetes sounding the Berecynthian rite, not Bacchus showing forth his triennial feast will I describe, and the trembling, in festal frenzy, go among the Bassarids, or the fillet-bound initiates whirling at the incense-burning altar. Not here will you behold the rich songs of Hesiod of Ascra and the chords of Pindar; not here the jests of sock-bearing Menander, not the fierce iambics of injured Archilochus, or the more weighty Muses of Stesichorus, or what the Lesbian girl composed; what Mantua, stubborn against Homer, added to the Latin speech, ever envious that to herself was matched Parthenope by Maro's tomb; not what, after the satires of his epistles and the wit of his sermons and his new epode, his books of song and his art of poetry, in praise of Phoebus and wandering Diana written, Flaccus wished to sound; not what your Papinius and mine sounds among the Labdacian frenzies, or when by chance with the lesser rhythm of his foot he paints the gemmed meadows of his little woodlands. Not what Corduba, mighty in her sons, calls eloquent, do you think to be read here, of whom one cultivates rough Plato and warns his Nero in vain, the other shakes the orchestra of Euripides, following Aeschylus, painted with lees, or Thespis, wont to sound from wagons, who, after the trodden platforms, beneath the buskin were leading the male of a stinking she-goat; the third sang the Gallic battle of Caesar, how son-in-law and father-in-law drove kindred Rome into arms, giving so many tears to his own Philippi that he counts the fall of Cremera light, and reckons the Allia less to be grieved, and Jove redeemed on Brennus' balance, that he set after it Trebia and grievous Cannae, nor tells of the Trasimene slaughter, thinks the brother Scipios must be passed in silence, whom the Tartessian world holds, is silent of the Euphrates ill-sought, and the Carrhae wet with the blood of the Crassi, or the swords, Spartacus, which you were wont to put to flight from the consuls with your victorious dagger, nor weeps that war the more, which, after the Cimbric trophies, turbid, and the chained Nasamonian Jugurtha, while he sought the Mithridatic triumph, the Arpinate wished to stir against Sulla. Not Gaetulicus will be read by you here, not Marsus, Pedo, Silius, Tibullus, not what the jest of Sulpicia's Muse wrote, sweet-speaking, to her Calenus, not Persius' rigour or Propertius' charm, nor yet the hundred-metred Terentianus. Not Lucilius is here and Lucretius, not Turnus, Memor, Ennius, Catullus, Stella and Septimius and Petronius or biting, without end, Martial; not he who in the time of the second Caesar dwelt at eternal Tomi under accusation, nor he who afterward, by a like chance, to the thin breath of the brawling mob, was the exile of an angry actor, not he sprung of Pelusian Canopus, who sings the couches of the dusky husband and, with the upper Muse, the powers below, nor those who were to our fathers, in the first time, the greatest companions, of whom one, having followed Bonifatius and headlong Sebastian, as a boy shuddered at his Cadurcan birth, loving more Pandionian Athens; whose varied poem if you read, then Phoebus and the Hyantian maidens drunk from the Hippocrene, then Amphion and the son of Maia, then the Rhodopeian bard you would think to sound in a blended harmony. Not you now will be read here, and your bolt, O most worthy, a second Quintianus, who, scorning the soil and hearths of the Ligurians, your home changed, loved the Gauls, amid trumpets, standards, javelins, squadrons praising Aetius and finding time for the book, ivy-crowned in the laurelled camps. But neither will that third one now be read, who, leaving once his native Baetis, sought the thirst of watery Ravenna, to whom the applauding Quirites a gleaming statue, and the prince, dear in his popularity, set up in the forum of Trajan. But do not try to compare to me those whom, far lesser myself, I yet revere the more— Paulinus and Ampelius and Symmachus, Messala of talent deep enough and second now to no Martius, and Petrus, in a new art of speaking equal to the ancients, and, when he speaks, too astounding, or him whom the senate rightly sets before the municipal poets, a good steward, or those our soil alone keeps eloquent— sweet Anthedius and the Muses of my master Hoenus, venerable enough, keen Lampridius, shrewd Leo, and Severianus, excelling at the trumpet, and no less able to write as Marcus Quintilianus used to do. We trust these measures of a very barren Muse to a rare and brief paper, which may rightly carry mackerel and pepper. For what god will grant to it, rejected, that even, taking up good odours— nard and the rich alabasters tinged with Niceros' juices that breathe fragrance, cinnamon sought from the Indian pyre, by which the Phoenix grows young in dying, costum, malobathrum, roses, balsam, myrrh, frankincense, and balm—it should preserve them? Wherefore guard my misdeed, and the rash modesty of your fellow-pupil who obeys you, I pray, defend, yet remember first to summon Probus, your brother, the pillar of learning, who is able, good man, to apply the strict theta to this scribble. But I know well, I do not refute the fault, nor does a shameless poet please the learned; but neither shall I too much fear the swollen face of an abusive reader, if, as if too weighty and severe, refusing the jest of our Terpsichore, a third Cato, with wrinkled lip, threaten me with rhinoceros nostril. Let not this over-skilled one too greatly frighten you; in truth, if you would prove it, so much no one knows, believe me, as he is ignorant of.

Preface to the Epithalamium Spoken for Ruricius and Hiberia

When the wave-dwelling festal bride of Pagasae unfolded Pelion through her caverns beneath the Emathian rock, the abundant furniture of the gods straitened the ground; the pole here, the sea there, vied in treasures; and the father-in-law himself led the dances, nearly clad in green, of like colour with his sea-blue mantle; the nymph too, coming naked to the chamber from the flood, began to fear the limbs of the clothed man. Then whoever of the gods was present, terror set aside, played in the office wherein each was mighty. Jupiter sent a warm, weightless thunderbolt and said: "Better now does Cytherea glow." Pollux then was praised for the glove, Castor for the reins, Pallas then for the crests, the Delian then for the quiver; Alcides for the club, Mars then played at the spear, the Arcadian then with the wand, Bromius then with the fawn-skin. Here too best Orpheus had brought in the Pierians with chords, voice, hand, songs, reeds; ambitious Hymen there gathered all the arts; who, if not by talent, perchance pleased by his native spirit. Yet the Fescennine songs were not admitted before our Apollo thundered on his wonted lyre.

Epithalamium

[Among the Cyanean crags, the Ephyraean peaks, where above Idalium the salt-eaten peak of the mountain lifts Orithyion into the air, where by chance, as he fled, trembling Tiphys fixed the wandering Symplegades, and the place belched back, returning, toward harsh Malea,] there goes out into the Isthmian sea, the wings of the rocks closing it, a bay from the cliff, in which recess often, as if the whole light of heaven gathered there, the collected day is straitened, and through the trembling waves follows the secrets of the shoal; the water, transmitted, is steeped in the splendour of the deep, and—wondrous to tell— the wave drinks the sun, and, inserted into the thin stream, the dry light pierces the liquid with an arid ray. Space served the design; for there the Lemnian played, as it were a temple, for Venus, and, leaving the thunderbolt, here the iron-dusky Pyragmon often smoked. Here is stone from five places, giving five colours— Ethiopian, Phrygian, Parian, Punic, Laconian— purple, green, mottled, ivory, and white. The tawny blaze of chrysolith flashes from the doorposts; murrhine, sardonyx, Iberian amethyst, Indian jasper, Chalcidic, Scythian, beryl, agate lift up the twofold leaves of silver on their hinge, through which the shadow of the shut emerald vomits light; thick onyx crusts the threshold, and near it the blue of jacinth casts a concordant colour into the pools. The outer rock is unadorned, but the pumice, rough from the unceasing lash of the waters, juts up high. In the inner place Mulciber feigned in gold the rocks standing forth widely, and by his mistress-art he deceived the uncultivated nature with vast culture, intent on this work, which she did not yet know who afterward condemned the stolen love with Lemnian chains. Hither the scaly Triton, where the borders of his twofold back meet above the windings of his coiled belly, bore Dione through the waters with warm heart. But Galatea presses, with the added weight of a shining shell, the side of the half-beast, which, her thumb fixed, she plucks, and by a secret touch promises marriage; then, rejoicing at the twisting jest, the lover smiles, already with a wound, and lashes his own gentle whale. Behind comes a band of Loves in blazing troops; this one curbs a dolphin with roses, and, borne on a green bullock, this one hangs by the horns, the reins scorned; these, standing, totter in their motion, and with wet foot slip, and steady the prints of their feet with their wings. She had let her soft face droop on her bent arm; the violets were withering, and her neck, heavier with sleep, had begun, worn by the flowers, to sink down. Alone of the number of brothers, he who is the fairer, Love, was wanting, while he prepares the celebrated feasts for the Gauls, which the father-in-law Ommatius, greater than his great forebears and grandson of a patrician house, with happy auspices arranges for his daughter and son-in-law. But when that day by chance shone forth, he himself seeks his mother in swift flight, on whom hung torch, bow, and quiver; but he, head down and hanging on the edge of her left palm, beats with his wings his feet balanced through the void, so plucking his mother's kisses, and, as she lay loosed in sleep, with light feather he tickled her half-slumbering eyes. Then, eager, he was first with these words: "I bring new joys of a happy spoil, mother: that proud Ruricius glows, touched by our torches and by the sweet venom, and sighs in his heart a longed-for grief. Were the present age what it was, the Lemnian woman would spend on him her kingdom, the Cretan the thread of the labyrinth, Alcestis her life, Circe her herbs, Calypso her apples, Scylla her hair, Atalanta her feet, Medea her frenzies, Hippodamia the wax, the maid born of Jove the swan a crown; for him Dido would have gone to the sword, Phyllis to the noose, Evadne into the flames, and the Sestian maid into the waves." To these she answers thus: "I rejoice, son, that you praise and besiege a rebel man; but the maiden's beauty is such that, had the hero, Stheneboea's lover, once beheld it, he would not, out of scorn, have tamed the monsters of Chimaera; or he who, proud of his Thermodontian mother, scorned the rash vows of the Cnossian stepmother, seeing her would have died—I confess—but by a true charge; and if perchance I had been a fourth in the judgement, me too the shepherd on Rhoetean Ida would have condemned; or, if you wish, give me to conquer that maiden, I would rather," she said: "I had given this beauty for the reward of beauty. So great is the honour and grace on her cheeks; matched with her blush the pale purple lies hid, and, pressed down by the light of her face, the flashings of pearls grow dark on her bound neck. You too with manifold sports would she have courted, Hiberia— Pelops with the axle, Hippomenes with the race, Achelous with the wrestling, Aeneas approved in wars, Perseus with the Gorgon; nor less this form, for which Jupiter would so often have been the Delian, the bull, the swan, the Satyr, the dragon, the bolt, and the gold. Wherefore come, let them be joined; for fortune, beauty, and race agree: nothing unequal here has your arrow fixed. But why do I delay the vows?" She spoke and called for her car, to which crystals had given the yoke, which, in the first frost, where the ice of the still-tender world swells Caucasus, the Tanaitic crust congealed with Hyperborean rimes, taking the nature of a gem because it lost that of the wave. A pole shaped of tawny metal pierces this; the river had sent it from whose flood the Nymphs cherished Mygdonian Midas, who, poor amid gold, enriched the streams of Pactolus with his vows reversed. The wheel gleams, girding with a translucent rim its spokes from the jaws of the Marmaric beast, while the brute groans, its curved teeth shaken out, to be disarmed of its mouth; this gift too he sent who, naked, harasses the warm Erythrae, of colour like the Ethiopian, his hair fat with balsam, the flowing Indian, with fragrant huntings. She yet binds the swans wont to feed throughout Cyprus with garlanded myrtle, whose milk-white necks, stretched, are curved with the rest by crimson coral. So, the journey begun: the hanging wheel furrows the empty air, and the track is not loosed in the liquid course. Here the threefold Grace attends in one bond, here Plenty is fragrant with Fortune's open horn, here Flora scatters from her baskets, but flowers perennial, here Pharian Osiris attends Sicilian Ceres, here Pomona bears her pregnant lap according to the season, here Pallas comes among the moist presses with the oil-vats, here, her side picked out with a spotted fawn-skin, the Thyiad whirls the Indian rites of Bromius with the Echionian thyrsus, here too the Corybas who in the Sigean caves mocks Dindyma, now cut, grows warm again; through whose hoarse throat the hollow boxwood pipes groan back fire through their twin caverns. So they came to the marriage-chamber: frankincense, nard, balsam, myrrh are here, here the Phoenix gives the cinnamon of its living pyre. The very neighbouring winter, breathed on by the heat of the feast, is now less cold, and, holding the look of spring, the vows give in this place what the seasons do not give to the world. Then the Paphian, clasping the youth's right hand and the maid's, sang the solemn rites in few words, lest even words should make delay: "Lead your life in concord and happily; may there be children and grandchildren; and may the great-grandson behold in his forebear what for himself he would choose."

To the Clarissimus Catullinus

Why, even if I were well, do you bid me make a song for the Fescennine-worshipping Dione, set among the long-haired bands and enduring the Germanic words, praising again and again, with grim face, what the gorged Burgundian sings, pouring sour butter on his hair? Do you wish me to tell you what breaks a poem? Driven off by these barbaric plectra, Thalia scorns the six-foot pen, since she sees the seven-foot patrons. Happy your eyes and happy your ears, and happy I may call your nose, for whom not garlic and foul onion belch forth ten messes at the new morning, whom not, as a grandfather's old age and a nurse's husband, before day even breaks, so many and so great Giants assail at once as scarce Alcinoüs' kitchen could bear. But now the Muse is silent and holds the reins, having jested in a few hendecasyllables, lest anyone call even these a satire.

To the Emperor Maiorianus

Reverend antiquity reports that the son of Amphitryon, while he relieved the earth, deserved the heavens. But though, grim, in his bare arm he crushed the grey throat of the Cleonaean beast, and though with blazing sword he scarce laid low the hydra, when death by a wound bore twin lives, and, bearing the captive monster from the Erymanthian wood, laughed at the disarmed mouth of the wild boar, and, bursting the smoking jaws of the flame-born thief, at last bade the oxen go straight forward— bull, hind, Giant, host, wrestler, Amazon, the Cretan, the dog, the Hesperides be the man's memorials— yet no battle is greater than Geryon laid low, to whom alone he bore that three-fold head. These things Alcides once did; but you, a second Tirynthian, yet a prince, the greatest care of the great god, whom snake, stag, boar felt by equal arrows, when tooth, when venom, when flight availed nothing, think me to be Eurystheus and the monster a tribute; from these take three heads for me, that I may live.

These prayers your suppliant servant dedicated, awaiting a pious and healthful answer, that you may give back his country and at once his life, unburdening Lugdunum of its ruins; this your Sidonius begs of you: so may the purple, re-dyed with Sidonian tincture, clothe you through many years; so, the lustrum of your unending empire passed, may the quinquennial games be vowed to your fasces; so, the swelling of the twofold bank broken, may the shorn Sygambrian drink the Waal. But if you grant this to your poet, I will commit to be read in the perpetual annals whatever you do in your noble triumphs, for now the loquacious Muse is silent for tribute, who, in place of Virgil and Terence, collects the sixths and twelfths of the treasury, and fears the hand and rope of Marsyas, who, out of an old hatred of Phoebus, now threatens the bards with hanging.

Sidonius to His Polemius, Greeting.

1. While after your departure, my Polemius, most loving brother, I greatly considered with myself in what manner I might sing Fescennine verses at the wishes of you, a philosopher, a theme crept upon me which, once run through, can easily be discerned to show that I had more regard for your learning than for your occasion. And so, the tenderness of the epithalamium set aside, I drew my pen through the most rugged and most pebbly rules of philosophy; of which the order is such that, without very many new words—which, with the leave of the rest of the eloquent be it said, are known especially to you and your fellow-Platonists—these very trifles could not be expounded. 2. See whether the ears of certain men, through inexperience, may rashly not think mention of the centre, the proportion, the intervals, the climates, or the myras suitable for an epithalamium; that, certainly, with the consular man, truly named Magnus, the quaestorian man Domnulus, the spectabilis man Leo, as my warrant, I boldly affirm—that music and astrology, which are the consequent members of philosophy beneath arithmetic, can in no way be set forth without these names; which if anyone shall despise as Greek, as they are, and foreign words, let him know that either he must always abstain from the mention of an art of this kind, or that he can discuss it in the Latin tongue either not at all or certainly not to the full. 3. But if any judge that the matter stands otherwise than I assert, I, being absent, do indeed yield to the disparagers; yet let those who think differently know that my opinion cannot be condemned without Marcus Varro, without Serenus—not Septimius but Sammonicus—without Censorinus, who composed an illustrious volume on the natal day. 4. You will read here too a new word, that is, "essence" (essentia); but know that Cicero himself said this very thing; for he named both essentia and indoloria, adding: "for it is permitted to impose new names on new things"; and rightly he said it. For just as, from that which is, for example, "to be wise" and "to understand," we name "wisdom" and "understanding," so regularly, from that which is "to be," we do not keep silent of "essence." Therefore, since, led by zeal for your love, I, a Gaul, have brought in matter from the sophists' school, I seek you above all as the intercessor for my deed. Let Venus and the fictitious pigments of the Loves be assigned to him who has lacked the means to be so praised. Farewell.

Preface to the Epithalamium Spoken for Polemius and Araneola

Prosperous for marriage the day flashes, which kindly Clotho with snowy threads, which the white pebble of the pitchy Indian, which the tree of peace and of youth together, the ever-green olive, may mark. Come, Calliope, with gleaming palm give the eloquence of the sacred water, which Pegasus dug with flying foot, his mane wet with kindred venom. No impiety is here, nor does the ambition of suitors grant this maiden to deaths; here Pelops hears no pacts bloody in the circus of Oenomaus, nor does pale Hippomenes, at the foot of the goal, with the thrice-falling apple, delay the daughter of Schoeneus; not here does Aetolian Calydon, astonished from her citadel, behold the Herculean wrestling-grounds, when Alcides pressed the horn of the proud river, ever and again refreshing his wearied breast from the watery foe; but a learned youth and a comely maiden, holding by birth the heights of Gaul, are joined: quickly, goddess, bind your chords, nor, because a greater Muse has thundered, compel our poverty to be silent. At the marriage-torches of Thetis, Phoebus approving, even Chiron sang with lesser plectrum, nor did the pious throng laugh at the rustic, though often the two-formed old man there broke his song with a whinnying note.

Epithalamium

By chance, returning from the citadel of stormy Caphereus, Pallas, having well avenged the violated honour of the Iliac Phoebas, was changing Xanthus for Erechthean Hymettus. Her head gleams with golden bronze, and she takes a greater calm from her terror; for, the thunderbolt laid down, she had not yet gladdened her grim limbs with the Cinyphian Triton. The Gorgon holds the midst of her breast, about to make, for the beholder, even when severed, delays; the treacherous image gleams proud, and its loveliness lives though its soul perishes; a high heap roughens the black head with the coils of horned serpents, the biting hair twists its spotted windings, and the angry locks give out foul hissings. The scaly corselet does not reach the middle of her belly, the mantle hanging behind the steel; the robe with the circle of its border covers the edges of her feet, which, when they move beneath the robe, the stiff folds rattle in the crinkled train. Her left a shield covers, full of the Phlegraean tumult: here Enceladus, brandishing, whirls Pindus, struck up to the stars, Ossa becomes a missile for raging Typhoeus; Porphyrion snatches Pangaea, and Damastor lifts Rhodope with the Strymonian spring, and, coming from above, quenches the hot bolt with a twisted flood; here Pallas seeks Pallas, for whom, the Gorgon seen, the lance, now slow, finds a solid corpse already; here Mimas hurls Lemnos against the aegis for his brother, and the missile island shakes the heaven it strikes; here many-bodied Briareus fights in a populous frame, bearing a kindred battle-line, on whom from one head you may see palms sprout from his branching arms. Nor did Mulciber give shapes alone to the monsters; by his art he gave fury, and feared the very wraths he had fashioned. Her right holds the spear which lately in the vale of Aracynthus Pallas herself drew forth from the olive she had set up, which had stood by this genius, that over the goddess' footsteps the Marathonian berry might hold the slipping oil-presses. Here two temples gleam; of which one stands forth above, both in merit and in seat, the place which holds men searching out on high by reason what the engine of heaven, what the earth, what the trench of the sea, what the turbid air, what the changes of night and day, what the monthly increments of the moon prepare, why as many losses follow. Forthwith here sit the seven highest sages, the beginnings of innumerable philosophers: Thales, born of Miletus, condemns standing surety; you, Cleobulus of Lindos, bid that moderation be best; you, meditating, adorn all Corinth, Periander; thence Attic Solon approves the one rule, "nothing too much"; Bias of Priene, you say the malignant are the more; you, born of Mytilene, Pittacus, were teaching to know the time, to know oneself, Chilon of Sparta; this one, the Samian, after the learned silence of his lustrum, Pythagoras, the first chief, asserts that music tempers the solid world and renders harmony from fixed stars, and that the signs which the zodiac circle holds— thrice four—on the highest axle do not run by their own motion, yet are set with equal spaces between themselves and likewise borne, head-down, fixed with the sign-bearer, and that the seven wandering stars too give a chief song from this, since each number is held perfect, affirming by this number, in this order, that all things revolve: that the zone of the sickle-bearing old man goes through the tops of the poles, that the star of Mars next to it advances with Jove in the middle, after these the Sun bends itself by a fourth track, so the gentle Paphian keeps a fifth interval, the Arcadian a sixth, the Moon thus in the highest orbit runs nearly through thrice-ten myras in its tropic climate. If then any measures the lyre, or the harp, or the pipe have given forth with the voice, on this model, the weights being set down, as much as proportion advises, he tells that the intervals follow the seven of the star; saying too that harmony is this—that the four elements so sit in these modes that there is a place lower by weight for the great—in the middle earth (and that which is perfectly in the middle, plainly is the bottom of the sphere); that hence it comes that the lighter wave gleams over the earth, that higher than these too is the air, which, purer, stands forth, that the heaven, with its supreme lightness, encloses all, and that this whole at once hangs from the origin of the centre. Thales here too, by numbers and stars, searches out how to announce beforehand the eclipse of Phoebus and the labour of the Moon; but he sets down a beginning useless for things, while he believes the world subsists by waters. The opinion of his disciple is reversed, saying that single things are ever created by their own beginnings, who decrees that each has certain springs ever-watering and full of the seed of things. Him too follows one who thought this air begot all things and likewise affirms the gods thus arose. Fourth, Anaxagoras keeps the Thaletic doctrines, but feels a divine mind that made the world. Joined to him sits a younger colleague, but the same, believing air the matter for all creatures, judges thence that a god, by whom he might make all things, was present. After these, Arcesilas conjectures that this mass was prepared by a divine mind, made up of those parts which he himself calls light atoms. The Socratic school gleams after him, which, migrating from the weight of nature, transferred its use to the polishing of men's manners. This school, they say, the supreme Plato cultivated, but formed it in a threefold way, since first and one he joins physics to logic, logic to ethics; he, the chief, found out how far the first essence stands from the highest and sixth good: since, finally, stones are only this, and are proved to be nothing within save to be; let the next succeed, to whom to be and to live is ready, to which you can add nothing more, the tree and the plant; let the third be of cattle, whose being and living lacks not motion and sense; then let the fourth creation regard her own, mortals, to whom is given to be, to move, to live with sense, and there stands out that they have wisdom and avail to discern the false from the true; let the fifth substance bring forth the higher creatures, whom some have called gods, since they take on bodies to be contemplated by man, and a little after leave them and return into their own, if any, most subtle, form— so that it is made plain that the highest substance is the creator, the sixth, and above it nothing, but all things beneath itself. In this gymnasium the wisdom of Polemius cultivates his life and cherishes him, joined to her own Plato; and though the Academy with all its schools opposes and denies the truth, with true praises it adorns this man. The Stoic after these—but they being in accord— Chrysippus and Zeno teach to hold their precepts, the Cynics now nearly excluded, but they remain on the threshold; but Virtue thrusts the Epicureans out on every side. But on the other side, in the weaving-room of Minerva, the first robe of Jove gleams ruddy, whose threads, twice steeped in the cauldron, the Sidonian murex dyed silken. Nor only does the drunken sandyx breathe purple; for it holds an inserted lightning, and on the stiff thread the purple, heavy with a fragment of the bolt, blazed, here green Glaucus hung in his spreading cloak; here the folds waved by art, and with feigned swell a woven tempest plunged the curved keels. For the son of Amphitryon a third robe rose: here the little one, girt by the twin serpent of his stepmother, all unknowing smiles at the monsters, and, thinking the snare a game, loves it, while he knows not, and with grieving face weeps that the snakes he himself slays are extinguished; besides, beneath are these things in scattered figures: boar, lion, hind, Giant, bull, yokes, Cerberus, hydra, host, Nessus, Eryx, birds, Thracian, Cacus, Amazon, Cretan, river, Libyan, apples, Lycus, maid, pole, Oete. This work, and whatever else remains that clothes the gods, virgin hands have set down; but in the whole band, among the Cecropian and Ephyraean maidens, Araneola gleams; she strives to match her own hands with Minerva's, and the goddess, vanquished at the baskets, withdrawing, while this one holds the webs, would the more hold weapons. Here then, imitating her great-grandfather's stiff robes, she herself prepares the palm-robe for her father, by which, consul and the same, he might touch his grandfather Agricola and teach his descendants to join the fasces not of a great-great-grandfather only but of a grandfather too. Yet she had woven also the cloaks in which that master, conspicuous, shone through the Tartessian cities, and those in which, at the time of the prefecture thrust upon him, conspicuous as governor, he renders the sacred laws. Yet on the robe, in a high panel, she had played what was illustrious to ancient couches. First the Ithacan tale and the Dulichian household are formed, and Penelope herself, unweaving her slow webs, she wove. Here the Thracian beats Taenarus in vain, his wife twice snatched away, with his lyre, after he profaned the law of Avernus, and, thinking to profit, looks not again at the shade; here Alcestis vows to break her life, her husband preferred, whom you may see, in the very fleece of the Parcae, not yet wholly spun, her safety remaining by fate; here the night of the daughters of Danaus shone in gold, to whom the impious father fits fifty swords and the discordant command gives a concordant frenzy; Lynceus alone, saved by the gift of Hypermestra, escapes; you may behold her fearing little for herself and growing pale only for the husband she let go, and now she changes Jove into the forms in which he was wont to hold Mnemosyne, Europa, Semele, Leda, Cynosura— serpent, bull, bolt, swan, Dictynna; and now the work went on to the tower of Danaë and the rain of metal, and here Jupiter dripped in another gold, when the maiden, looking, saw the Tritonian, her gaze turned, behold more gladly the learned-sounding arts; moved, she shifts her hands, and with skilled thumb began to paint Laïs, victress over the philosopher, who through the fierce Cynic's chin and wrinkled neck tore the fragrant beard with her perfumed pincers. Pallas smiled and added these words from her chaste mouth: "No longer, maiden, will you laugh at our doctrines, about to be wed to my philosopher; rather, taking the flame-coloured veil, let your mother weave this work without you. Rise up, distinguished glory of the sages, Polemius, and now lay aside at last your Stoic eyebrows and, imitating the Cynic lovers, you will begin again to bring me a little Plato." The master addresses the hesitating man with such a voice: "Go gladly, nor condemn perchance to be yoked, since that old man of ours bids it, who not sluggishly drank, contemplating the gods, the poison, Anytus growing pale." He had spoken; that one at once rises and with modest face commends his austere mantle to his knotty club. Then the goddess binds the hair of both with the peace of the green olive, joins their right hands, and bids the covenant, which the grandfather Nymphidius may behold. Atropos approves the omen, and the concordant sisters joined the tawny threads.

Thanksgiving to Bishop Faustus

Phoebus, and the thrice-three Muses with the tenth, Pallas, and Orpheus, and the feigned water of the horse's fountain, and the Ogygian lyre, by which you bend the following stones, which raised the listening walls by its song— spurn them, my lyre; come rather now, that Spirit, I pray, about to tell of your bishop, you who entered the breast of ancient Mary, when, snatching the timbrels, dry Israel went through the hollow of the suspended flood, ramparted by the banks of water, and through the midst of the waves the dusty throng cried out your triumph; and you who aided the hand of Judith striking the neck of Holofernes, when, the throat cut, the trunk lay, and the frail sex hid itself well in the strong blow; you who, the basin filled from the pressed fleece, and then staining the earth, the fleece untouched, made firm Gideon—you, Spirit, set in the sounding trumpets, and victory came by song alone; you who breathed too on the king, taken from the flock of fleecy Jesse, when the foe, setting the ark of the covenant on a wagon with no oxherd guiding, betrayed the obscene disease of his swelling parts; you who once sounded in the throat of the three boys, who, set in the furnace of the Chaldaean tyrant, the dewy flame moistened, the kiln burned; you who filled Jonah, wandering through the rolling tracts of the belly, while the monster's entrails resound within, the food singing, or the burden of the fasting yet full belly—but with the prophet unstained— the raw hunger belches up, whom, with its sobbing innards, the hungry brute vomited up, its bite withheld; you who once came twofold into the breast of Elisha, when the fiery axle was lifting up the old Thesbite, and, leaving as a gift his torn skin, the shaggy charioteer entered the burning reins; you too, about to send a second Elijah to the earth, appeased, bound the tongue of just Zacharias, while the wrinkled mother made him a late father, signifying, the prophet bidden to be silent, that, when grace shone forth, the Law should know itself about to be silent; you too, born of a virgin, with no seed, before all time God, and in time Christ, as far as concerns the body, created yourself; you who, wont to give sight to the blind, gait too to the lame, hearing to the deaf, to the dumb to loose speech, came for this also, that dead limbs might rise from bed, from bier, from tomb; you who too bore punishments in the flesh you took on, sustaining blows, mockeries, scourges, thorns, the lot, the chains, the cross, the nails, the gall, the dart, the vinegar, and last of all death—but about to rise—you went, snatching back whatever of ours had passed into the right of the old foe through our crime, when the first woman, breaking the precept, bound us by perpetual fault; who, when he sought you for destruction nor found in you anything that he could prove his own, lost all that Eve gave by her fall; that bond, by which man was overrun, this compensation broke, free of sin, for sinners you become an ample price, and, new Adam, by the turn of a loan the old, while you die, you snatch from death. So death is dead, so it deceived itself by the snares it had made; for while undiscerning it sought the guiltless and the guilty, it brought it about that even those bound by crime could be absolved; you who too bade the just ashes rise at the time with you, when into the dwellings, long-time hidden, hasty salvation burst, and life, suddenly poured in, shook the hardened embers from the tombs: grant me to praise your Faustus, grant me to render thanks, which it pleases to owe even afterward—you, great priest, this lyre of ours sings, though with unequal plectrum.

This, then, is the first cause or ground of his praises, that, while the slippery age rolls on, my brother is proved kept with you, by the Lord's gifts, and his honour, with no faltering of fame; this regards you, this good, however great; the reward will be owed to him, he to you. Let the praise, if he would not fall, be his; for what he could not do redounds wholly by right to you. Moreover, because long ago, as I came to Reii, when the Dog-star raged, when the scorching fire of the sun with winding cracks wrote upon the thirsting fields, with you as host, peace, home, shade, water, blessing, table, couch at once received our heats. Yet of all these you grant enough in that you willed that I should approach the holy threshold too of the holy mother. I stiffened, I confess, conscious of myself, and suddenly reverence dyed my adoring face with pallor; nor otherwise did I tremble than if by chance Israel led me to Rebecca, or long-haired Samuel to Anna. Wherefore, even venerating you with endless vows, I confess a great affection through small songs.

Whether the flaming Syrtes and the inhospitable wastes, or a marsh green with mire, or black rocks in a recess more wild hold you, where, the sun removed, the hollow caves keep their long-lived darkness; whether the Alps, stretched out on their sheer cliffs, tremble at you, anchorite, taking your girt-up slumbers on the cold turf (which, though it bear frosts, never tames the heat conceived of Christ), where now Elijah, now John bids you go, now the two Macarii, now the hero Paphnutius, now Or, now Ammon, now the Sarmatian, now Hilarion, now naked Antony calls you in that tunic which his master's kindly hand made of palm leaves; or whether Lerins has embraced you, its ancient parent, where you, now broken, often for the sake of great quiet come to serve the disciples, and scarce, abstemious, take the leisure of sleep, scarce cooked food, and lead your age fat with fasts joined to inserted psalms, suggesting to the brothers what mountains that level island has sent up to heaven, what was the holy life of old Caprasius and young Lupus, what grace remained to father Honoratus, who was that Maximus, of whose city and monks you, bishop and abbot, act as twice his successor, celebrating too with those praises the journey of Eucherius coming, of Hilary returning; or whether the people entrusted to you holds you, and the lesser dares with you in the midst to scorn the swollen manners of the greater; or whether, anxious, you care by what food the sick, or by what the stranger may live, what should feed even him whose slippery legs the prison's fetter thins beneath; or whether, your mind rather distracted with funerals to be buried, if the livid bones of a dead pauper grow green, you yourself, unfastidious, bear the corpse to the grave; or whether the diligent commons, about to hear you preach, stand round you on the conspicuous steps of the venerable altar, that they may drink with their ears the medicine of the expounded law: whatever you do, wherever you are, be ever to me Faustus, ever Honoratus, ever Maximus too.

To the Clarissimus Ommatius

Four days before the first light of scorching Sextilis brings forth its ear-bearing head over the world, our sixteenth birthday will be kept, which seeks to be happy at your coming. No banquets will be set out for you on doubled tables, nor will the Assyrian murex give you a couch; nor through the many cells of the gleaming sideboard will I unearth weights of dark silver; nor will a cup be given here whose crusted side by chance a twisted handle of ruddy metal binds. Our dishes are middling, not so made that grand workmanship of size makes up the price; the bread wont to grow yellow on the Libyan Syrtis the rustic table of your Gaul will not receive. My wines are not Gazetic, Chian, Falernian, nor such as, sent from the Sareptan vine, you might drink; the cups here are not illustrious by the name of the village which the triumvir himself set in our fields, yet we beg that you come; Christ will give all, who here made me a fatherland for love of you.

On the Baths of His Villa

If anyone deigns to visit our Avitacum, let it not displease you: so may what you have please you. A rooftop, rival to that of Baiae, is raised on a cone, and a like peak gleams with a buskined summit. A more babbling wave murmurs than the Gauran streams, slipped down from the brow of the neighbouring hill. Rich Campania would not wish the Lucrine pool, if it beheld the waters of our lake. That shore is adorned with crimson sea-urchins; in our fish, guest, you see them both. If it please you and you would rejoice with calm heart, whoever you are, here in spirit you make Baiae.

On His Fish-pond

Enter the chill waves after the burning baths, that the cold water may harden your warm skin; and though you plunge your limbs in this water alone, your eyes swim through our pool.

To Ecdicius His Brother-in-law

Our birthday warns that the Nones of November draw near: that you come I do not ask, but command. Let your wife be with you, you two now hasten; but this we wish: after a year that you come a third.

On the Fish Caught by Night

These four fish night first strung on the hooks; of them I kept two; take you also two. Those I sent are the greater; the order is most just; for of our soul you were the greater portion.

Sidonius to His Pontius Leontius, Greeting.

While at Narbo, once called Martian but lately made so in fact, I weave my delays, it came into my mind to put together some hexameters in keeping with your love, by reading which you might know full well that, although the household hearth of each of us is dwelt in places set somewhat farther apart than is fair, our minds are not on that account so much sundered as our country.

You have here, then, Dionysus drooping amid the delights of his Indian triumph; you have also Phoebus, who, by poetic right, is clearly made your tenant out of a deity—that Phoebus, I mean, very intimate with my Anthedius, by whose fellowship that prefectorian man surpasses in the art of disputation not only every musician but even the geometers, arithmeticians, and astrologers; since I should judge that no one has investigated more exactly what the oblique signs of the zodiac, what the wandering planets, what the scattered foreign stars prevail in.

For he gives so to these, so to speak, members of philosophy, that it seems to me he learned Julius Firmicus, Julianus Vertacus, Fullonius Saturninus, most skilled founders in the books of mathesis, without an interpreter, by his genius alone giving its support; and we, adoring the footprints of his very doctrine, before that tuneful swan confess ourselves a hoarse goose. Why do I detain you longer? Your Burgus, by the right that befitted a friend, I have made mine, knowing well that the material at least will please you, even if as a finished poem it displease.

THE CASTLE OF PONTIUS LEONTIUS

The Bistonian king's stable, the altars of Busiris, the tables of Antiphates and the Tauric realms of Thoas, and the Cyclops, by the Ithacan's wit defrauded of his light, bearing on the field of his brow, through the hollows of the mountain, a darksome cavern almost like that of his pierced eye— guest, approach, if any of you has come to Burgus to keep silence. And though Phoebus does not everywhere loose his reins for song, and here does not unfurl all the sails of speech, yet whoever you are, not praising aloud so great a house as you inspect, you are inspected: the will resounds without a voice; for your very silences cry that you, silent, are envious. Come then, Erato, strike for me the Pierian chords; let the Satyrs answer, and, moving finger and foot, sport, nor break their songs with the tremulous leap. Whatever festal applause the Dryad or the Hamadryad ever gave, the Napaeae joined to themselves, let them now pay off to you, Burgus; or the Naiads there, kindly chorus of the Nereids, teach, when by chance, the Garonne returning, you come, and furrow the sea in the river. Unfold then the causes, Erato, and tell what genius belongs to this house; so great a roof is not without its presiding lord. By chance Euan, having laid waste the arrow-bearing Erythrae, was driving to the chariots the tigers haltered with the vine, where the cluster-bearing pole entered the twofold bow; languid himself, he sits in the car; his high neck is wet with the dew of sweated wine; golden horns break from his head and hurl the native fire of the bolt (this he had taken at his first birth, when once he passed from his mother into his father's thigh); his temple bears both seasons, the wealth of spring, and the vintage binds his ruddy flowers; goblet and thyrsus are borne in right hand and left, nor does the mantle cover, but touches, his bared arms; sweetly his eyes swim, which, if chance turn them on a foe, while he beholds them only astounded, he makes the Indians drunk; then, as often as on rough places the leaping axle shakes itself, the wheel-track is everywhere drenched with the falling new wine. The Bassarids, the Satyrs, the Pans, and the Fauns Silenus was teaching to sport, now full of his nursling's godhead, yet adorned as to his head; for, his crown bare, with garlands he strives to excuse his lost hair. Then horned Ganges becomes the pomp of the new triumph; head bowed, he stood, his unkempt face with dripping mouth, and aided the dry waves with glassy tears; his hands, cast into bonds, the vine bound behind his back; here, little by little, the captive moisture flowing again, of its own accord the shoot puts forth leaves along his dewy arms. Likewise there the bound wife of the snatched husband goes, her saffron cheeks lowered, and, the lamp forbidden to be hidden, Aurora blushed with the rays of the Sun. Here too was present, after his lost cinnamon, the Phoenix, fearing that a second death does not remain for him; the captive cohort follows, bearing dishes laden with their own treasures; here ivory, ebony, or gold, and snowy pearls snatched from the pitchy breast, are carried; whoever sustains nothing is sent into fragrant bonds; here you may see the very punishments please, and the green chains breathe with violets. Last in the spoil march the black elephants; shapeless to the herd is their shape: bristling on their back stiffens a hide that scarce bears iron; for the shameless dart does not pierce their native wickerwork, and, in turn drawn in and stretched, the backs of the beasts crackle, and, by their practice of caution, they drive off the impacted missile with their shaken folds. And now the victor was making his way to Thebes through the great air, and had raised his rites to the topmost clouds, when he sees the Delian coming from the Aonian height. He too holds griffins: laurel binds their curved muzzles with leafy bit; with ivy wreathed about the hanging reins grow green; gently the wild bird flies up, the aerial and earthly ways, lest perchance with the swift clatter of its wings it break the woody reins. He himself shines eternal in his cheeks; his temples grew with clusters, and his hair, of like colour, sweeps the gilded axle; on his left side he holds, of vast sweetness, the lyre, hoarse with the carved Python; his right part holds the arrows and the strings resounding with another murmur. The Pierians went along together, and, standing round the midst, shaded the car with their nine-fold train; the Epidaurian serpent hangs through the smooth tripods, spreading the holy venom through his healthful neck. Here too Pegasus joined his hair-set wings, bearing eloquent Croton on his learned-speaking leg. When the choruses joined, each rises into his brother's embrace, but Euan a little slower, while it shames him, if he rise, to betray his unsteady feet. Then Phoebus says: "Whither do you go? Do you perhaps, Bacchus, seek the guilty Thebes? The son of Echion denies, you know, that you are a god. Leave these walls, I beg, leave them, and rather turn your wheels with me. Agave scorned to worship you, and Niobe scorned us; she stiffens thence, proud, suffering as many wounds as she beholds wounds of her womb, and, though she wishes to die, mercy more grievously fixed her; to spare is often an evil, and to bring sense to grief. And the Pentheian mother herself, her son slain, that she may rage the more—is she not, in time, to be unsound? Can we then dwell on the Aonian hills, when the adulterer will possess the chambers of the slain father, to be held the brother of his children, the husband of his mother, his own stepfather? If it is your wish to join our step, I will tell on what land alike we may set our seat. There is a place where, watering the rock, Garonne, you roll, and you who, swift by a like slip into the sea, go out, mossy Durani, with your bent gravel, now mingle little by little your now-sluggish streams. Here the sea runs against them, and with much recoil spurns and seeks the waves that the rivers roll. But when, drawn back by the lunar increments, Garonne himself gathers his tides upon his ridges, with headlong flood he swiftly returns, and seems to go now not refluent but downflowing toward his source. Then the lesser one receives the lesser water, his own, from his stagnant brother; and he too swells to Ocean's size, and makes for himself banks his own shores. Between these rivers, nearer to one wave, is a mountain breaking the air, conspicuous on its high citadel, to have lords more lofty and a spring-like senate, which the chief of his race, Pontius Paulinus, once, when Latium shall rule his country, will encircle with high walls, and lofty towers will send across the air; on whose summits may there sit, gleaming in common, either pomp or aid; not the engine those walls, not the ram, not the high pile or the near mound, not the catapult that whirls the whizzing millstones, nor yet the tortoise, nor the shed, nor the running wheel, the ladders now set, will ever be able to shake. Now I seem to see what shall be yours, Burgus (so you will be called); for the houses rise from the river and shining baths sit along the battlements. Here, when the heat is vexed by pitch-black north winds, the rough pumice begins to bark from its roughened brink; and the torrent, leaping from the broken cliffs, is shaken up on high, and with its spray rains on the very roofs, and lifts the sailors, and often with a playful shipwreck sports; for, the tempest done, it leaves stranded, ebbing, the fleets sent into the baths. But with what columns, and how great ones, they are propped! Let the precious darkness of the crimson cave yield, the Synnadic, and the hill that bears the ivory stones of the Numidians, and the marbles that grow green with grassy veins; I want now no white Paros, now no Carystus; cheaper is the purple that hangs on the red rock. And lest posterity doubt who the founder is, a stone is fixed at the entrance; here it marks the names of the authors; but near it is water, and the pressed footprints, which it snatches and wipes off the mud with its poured flood. The wall, crusted with cut slabs, comes up to a golden roof, too much to be hidden by tawny metal; for the rich fortune of the house, not suffering its riches to lie hid, betrays them, while it so conceals its own roofs. After this rises a portico, itself double, overpassing the double court, unknown to the double wagon; which again, drawn back at its soft summit, the curved wings look back upon a little with their facing horns. It beholds the new-born day with its right curve, seeing the noon in front, about to see the setting on the left. It loses nothing of the threefold hinge of heaven and keeps the whole sun through its crescent halls. Here the sire of Pharnaces plunges in the deep the sacred herds of trident-bearing Jove; you would think the bodies of the horn-hoofed, struck by the axe, and the sure blows to redden with bloody dew; the true horror of the wound stands, and, the four-horse teams slain, the painting lives. Hence the Pontic ruler with numerous arms shuts in Cyzicus; but on this side the consul Lucullus brings aid to his allies, and, compelled to undergo the utmost crisis of famine, the Mithridatic soldier envies the besieged foe. Here the ardour of the Roman soldier swims the sea and carries dry paper across on his wet body. Above, with roofs stretched out lengthwise, the granaries grow and straiten the building with their ample fruits. Hither will come whatever Africa reaps in her warm lands, whatever the Calaber, whatever the keen Apulian cultivates, how great a harvest swells in the Leontine heap, whatever Gargara entrusts to the Mygdonian furrow, how much Attic Eleusis, having worshipped Ceres with silent dances, was storing up for her citizen Triptolemus, when, the peoples of men long melting away upon the acorn, the tawny age was perishing, the tawny grain given. The summer portico lies open hence to the chill North; hence a harmless heat goes out from the winter baths and softens the place against the season; for that part is fitter for the cold; for what flees the face of the Lion, thence it ill bears the rage of the Lycaonian Bear. But to the baths of the citadel comes a far higher stream, and falls upon the mountain, and, driven through wide channels, carries round the shut-in river through hollow partings. Toward the setting sun, after the granaries, rises the shaded house that is the lords' winter dwelling: here a good flame crackles, feeding on the timbers set beside it; the wave of the burning globe, curved in the furnace, perishes, and, the whip broken, scatters its softened vapour over all the roofs. Continuous hence you may see what the founder dared— to raise weaving-rooms rivalling the Palladian temples, where once the reverend wife of lofty Leontius— than whom no Pontic bride ever rejoices more, illustrious for the lot of her husband—will be celebrated in song, either for having emptied the Syrian distaffs, or for having twisted the silken threads through the light reeds, or, with tawny thread, for having spun the softened metal of the pregnant spindle. On the joined walls hereafter gleams the device that bears the beginnings of the circumcised Jews. The painting shines perpetual; nor in long time, cheapened, do the pigments deface their figures. You are turned to the left: a broad portico receives you, curved with straight ways, where at the topmost edge hangs, and a stony forest stands of straitened columns; here a high dining-hall lies open with revolving doors; near it a molten channel; the wave falls from above before the doors, the basin hanging; and, following the vein, swimming fish find the watery dining-rooms. Close by rises a tower, both first and last; the custom shall be here for the lords to set the winter couch. Sitting often on its conspicuous summit I shall behold the mountain dear at once to my Muses and my goats; I shall walk among these laurel boughs; here I shall believe that trembling Daphne trusts herself to me. Now if perchance you turn your steps toward the twin Bear, to come into the temple of the god who is greatest, the storeroom and the larder breathe with joined delights; here, brother, you will be much present. Now divide the dwelling, yielding to me my spring, which, flowing from the mountain, a many-hollowed arch shades with its spacious circle. It needs no adornment; Nature has given it grace; nothing feigned pleases to please; no pomp through art is there; the hammer with its resounding blow will not smooth the rocks, nor will marble fill the eaten tufa. This spring of Castalia suffices us in place of its wave; have the rest, you rich man; let the hills tremble at your laws; loose your captives here, and through the ridges of Burgus let the glad vineyards become the relaxed chains." This voice Silenus, now nearly sober, confirms, and likewise the choruses sang, applauding: "Nysa, farewell to Bromius; Parnassus, twin-peaked, to Phoebus. Let not Naxos seek this one, not Cirrha seek this one, but rather let Burgus be sought, about to please for ever."

Lo, as often as it shall please you to gladden your banquet with more capacious bowls, I have sent what among your cups and great draughts you may read. You will succour my modesty if these things do not come to sober ears; nor without cause, and otherwise than is fair, do I make this demand, since for my Bacchus, about to undergo a decemviral judgement, a tribunal is raised earlier than is fitting. But if anyone shall judge a poem to be blameworthy in this, that it has exceeded the brevity of an epigram, it is plainly evident that he has never read the baths of Etruscus, nor the Surrentine Hercules, nor the locks of Flavius Earinus, nor the Tibur of Vopiscus, nor anything at all of the woodlands of our Papinius; all which descriptions that most highly esteemed man does not bind within the narrow limits of distichs or quatrains, but rather, as the lyric Flaccus prescribes in his volume on the art of poetry, with many and those purple patches of commonplaces becomingly extends the themes once begun. Let it suffice that I have set these things down for an example of my defence, lest this very plea against length should itself seem long. Farewell.

To Consentius

When already, for your merits, I was preparing, Consentius, pillar and glory of manners, to spend the song of a poor reed-pipe on the praises of your hospitality, of your own accord, unbarring the trumpet for songs, you, the order reversed, summoned in verse your companion, wont thus rather to play. The Muse obeys you, but the shameless pen she will move hence much more cautiously; for while you demand songs eloquently, you urge me to write, but make me silent. Lately, when on your hurrying steed you went to Phocis and the Sestian Baiae, cities illustrious by titles and battles, through two trophies of consuls (for the one bore the war of Julianus and, with Brutus for leader, a naval frenzy, but this one the bloody Teutonic battles and Marius raised up at the falling Cimbri), you sent me a manifold poem, learned, noble, strong, delicate. The hexameters went proudly, and bore, with joined but lesser steps, elegiacs through five feet; you sent too, with the metre of the triple trochee attended by spondee and dactyl, sweet hendecasyllables, and your Sollius you bound with a kindly interest. The usury is asked of us and we repay; for what I pay back in verse for yours, this is the hundredth part of your praises. What shall I first revere and worship for you? Unless I err, your country and your father near. Who, though he might claim for himself the highest place by right, yet it is needful that she conquer who bears the parents. Hail, Narbo, mighty in health, good to be seen in town and country alike, in walls, citizens, circuit, taverns, gates, porticoes, forum, theatre, shrines, capitols, mints, baths, arches, granaries, markets, meadows, springs, islands, salt-pans, pools, godhead, merchandise, bridge, sea; you who alone by right may worship the gods Lenaeus, Ceres, Pales, Minerva with ears of grain, the vine, the pastures, the oil-presses. Trusting in men alone, and the aid of nature sought not, far left behind, putting forth a higher peak from the mountains, no open trench, no rampart with the barrier of bristling stakes, crowns you; you do not fix marbles, gold-leaf, and glass, not the sheen of the Indian tortoise, not, if any beams of ivory the broken tusks of the Marmaric elephant gave, upon your walls, nor adorn your golden gates with mosaic pebbles; but, proud through your half-ruined citadels, showing the glory of an old war, you bear millstones shaken with blows, more precious for your praiseworthy ruins. Let other cities be threatening by their site, which humble strength founds on heights, and walls set on sheer crests that, never cut down, may glory: you please by being battered, and the storm endured has made public your strong fidelity. Hence that Martian ruler, and greater than his great father, glory of the Goths, pillar and safety of the Roman race, Theodoric loves you, and proves you faithful to himself in adverse tumults before. But do not on this account seem foul, because the engine has often pierced you; for in the body of brave men the praise is greater, the greater the scar. In the Marathonian camp, to have deserved to lack a great wound is a disgrace; among the Publicolae, fierce of hand, Mucius stands out with maimed arm; when Magnus pressed Caesar's rampart, among so many faces safe from the foe one-eyed Scaeva was the more comely. It is a steep praise to endure hard things; for the cowardly, the timid, and the disproved much idle valour is feigned. What of this, that, fruitful in creating Caesars, happy in the offspring of men, you gave at once sons reigning with their begetter? For who will pass over the Persian expedition or the victorious camp of prince Carus and Niphates, trodden over by Roman legions, then, when the emperor, taken by the lightning, finished a life like the lightning? Mighty in these citizens, city, and country, Consentius, you beget for me a kindly father, him to whom bright wit and Roman rigour were joined with Attic charm. Him Miletus and Thales could have marvelled to hear, and at the same time he who at Lindos is known, Cleobulus, among the citadels; and you, Periander, who are from Corinth, and you whom Priene gave, Bias, and you, Pittacus, the Lesbian sophist, and you who, mighty at austere Athens, besiege the Socratic wrestling-grounds, Solon, and you, born in Tyndarean Therapnae, Chilon, prior to law-giving Lycurgus. Not here, if he wished, his care at leisure, to mark what course belongs to the stars, did he run the divers ways of Aratus; him not, when to geometric arts he composed his mind, could Euclid follow, knowing the space of Olympus; him not, if he wished to whirl rhythms, could Chrysippus delay one whit from his purpose with his heap. Here, when he studied the Amphionian art with plectrum, thumb, voice, and pipe, the Thracian bard, the Arcadian god, and Phoebus were after in every song, and the very Muses you would not think so musical. Here, if dressed in train and buskin he had once entered the Attic theatre, Sophocles and Euripides would have yielded; or if he had wished to sound the platforms with the sock, to him, his finger raised, you would give the palm, Menander. Here, when he polished the six-foot pen, learned in the manner of the Smyrnaean workshop, or when he gave himself to grave history, scarcely could they keep their first places, torrential Herodotus, thundering Homer. Not better than he had been he who once stirred by art the Pandionian cavea, the tumultuous orator, whether he were swept against one-eyed Philip, or pleaded the cause of Ctesiphon, a man ever growing by popularity and justly seated on the citadel of speech, who, begotten of a smith for father, chose rather to polish the file of his mouth. What shall I sing of you, the masters of Latin eloquence, the Arpinate, the Paduan, the Mantuan, and you who teach comedy, Terence, and you who, sprung in a severe age, surpass, Plautus, the Greek wit in charm, and you, venerable enough for the manifold multitude of your writings, Varro, and you who are mighty in brevity, Crispus, and you who, for your flowing genius, must be silenced by no mouth, Cornelius Tacitus, and you, through the gardens of the Massilians, the colonist of the sacred trunk, Arbiter, equal to the Hellespontian Priapus, and you, known through your wanton songs, tender Naso, and sent to Tomi, once to a Caesarean girl under a feigned name subjected, as Corinna? What of the lofty Senecas shall I tell, or of him whom lofty Bilbilis gives, Martial, natives of the Iberian lands? What of the poets whom, yoked in a twofold marriage, Argentaria Polla gives? What shall I unweave of the many of varied style? The witty, the tender, the grave, the keen, if Consentius was present, lay hidden. To this man of supreme genius, and likewise of supreme nobility and beauty, is joined a wife who, transferring to her husband's house the insignia of ancient Jovinus, filled the sophist's home with consular robes. So within your own household, Consentius, proud glory of your country, in the annals your grandfather lives, in the books your father. You, mighty enough through these pedigrees, but mightier in the height of your manners, I could not sound with the praise you merit, not if, singing to me in an Odrysian cave, where, with the streams far trembling, Hebrus re-echoes through the cliffs of the Cicones, that prince of bards had taught me— when his sweet chords, the stones made living, bore them through Rhodope by his drawing song, and, the order reversed, the springs being bound, compelled the panting lands to run, and Ismarus too lay open to the suns, the eared wood seeking the lyre, and, dissolved by no heat, the curved snows rushed down from Ossa, and the Bistones saw the Strymon standing, when the swift water thirsted for the song; nor if, given to the two-formed Pelian one, I had stood at the Centaur's plectra, fearing the whinny of my twofold master; nor if that god had taught me to speak, the oxherd bidden to feed the herd of his client at the Amphrysus' stream, who struck down the iron-dark Cyclopes with his bow beneath the Liparaean furnaces, brandishing a bolt heavier in his arrow. Now, while you were warm from your first tender rising, the nine sisters received you in their bosom, and you, wailing from your mother, they dipped in the ford of glassy Hippocrene: then, plunged in this water, instead of the wave of the loquacious stream, you the rather drank letters. Hence, now a boy fitter than your master, whatever of rhetoric's training, whatever of grammar or the wrestling-ground there is, as, still tender, you had drained, you devoured. And now the court bore you, and the pious prince at once set you among the conspicuous whom the consistories hold, the tribunes; and now too the purple one in the citadel of the realm was wont to preside over your offices, because your manners deserved it by nobility: so great a peak and a wondrous glory the honours written in the annals show. Hence, having followed an ample service, though you ought to have enlarged the camp-revenue by just suffrages, yet, abstaining from the customary little gain, richer in fame you returned home, counting yours only what you had given. Then, if perchance it was that the emperor wished something to come to his father-in-law's Eastern ears by a faithful and skilled interpreter, he chose you, learned to resolve the commerce of the twofold speech, forthwith. O, prithee, how often, as you spoke, the Byzantine realms gave you their "well done," and you, whether sounding in Latin as if born of the Romulean Subura, or, with the roundness of the Argive tongue welling up as if begotten at Marathon, the Bosphorans, applauding, marvelled at, admiring the Attic nurslings less! Hence, if the treaties of the world were loosed, fierce Hun, Sauromatian, Goth, Gelonian would give peace with you for mediator; you would enter the Tuncrus and the Waal, the Visurgis, the Elbe, and the innermost marshes of the Franks, the Sygambri revering you, safe by your manners alone amid arms; you would approach Maeotis and the Caspian gates, you the Bactra ridden by the fluid Parthians, steadfast and undaunted, so that, the haughtiness of the swollen court laid aside, the tyrant who sits above the satraps, belching forth his kinships with the demigods, would bend to you his crescent tiara. You, if the public destinies did not forbid that you should seek Byrsa or the Tanaitic rebel of the African land, forthwith, the rage of Mars laid down, after the pirate's losses, would dispatch keels full of merchandise—the trader's ships— and through you, peace well restored, no more would wars sail against me. Now if perchance, ending grave matters, the spectacles of the theatre had taken you, the whole chorus of actors grew pale, as if the Bowman and the nine Muses sat near the platforms as judges. Before you Caramallus or Phabaton, with closed throat and speaking gesture, by nod, leg, knee, hand, rotation, in his whole figure would even once lie hidden, whether the daughter of Aeetes and her Jason are brought in there, and the fierce Phasis, who, the teeth cast over the Colchian fields, took fright, while, the war sprouting up, the spear-points mingled with the ears of grain wavered; or whether someone tells the feast of Thyestes or your laments, fierce Philomela, or the boy torn apart and made food for his now more innocent wife; or the Tyrian rape, and Jove the bull, more to be feared, the thunderbolt scorned, in his brow; or whether the tower of Danaë is told there, when it was much watered with a rainy fee, giving more by golden theft than by metals; or whether someone acts Leda, and the Phrygian boy, fitting him to the cups, makes for the Thunderer a sweet-smelling waiter with nectar's juice; or feigns Mars now sent into Lemnian chains, or, repulsed, puts on the form of a boar and roughens his head with bristles and his back, and with shaggy jaws curves the smooth ivory, or shapes a shaggy beast on his back, pointing the bent tusks by unceasing rubbing; or whether the Persean maiden, avenged, is acted there by the husband's sickle-sword, or what of song and fable the closed Pergama gives in their ten-year war. What shall I say of the cithara-girls, the flute-players, the mimes, the rope-dancers, the buffoons, reeds, plectra, jests, the wrestling-ground, the rope, to unfold tremblingly before you? For how great things you yourself in the circus games, victor, did, while Rome thundered, it were fitting to grave with a glad Muse. By chance two-fronted Janus brought back his Kalends, Phoebus rounding off the seasons of the year, to the curule chairs to be assumed. This is Caesar's custom, on one and the same day twice (they call them "private") to prepare games. Then a band of youths, but of the court, exercises the grim images of the Elean field with ranging four-horse teams. And now the urn seeks you, and the hoarse acclamation, hissing, of the crowd rouses you; then where the door and the seat of the consuls is, which a wall, arched on either side with twelve crypts and barriers, encircles, one of four axles being chosen by lot, you enter, pressing the curved reins. Your colleague does this and likewise the part opposed to you both; the colours gleam, white or sea-blue, green and red, your insignia; the attendants hold the mouths, and the hands the reins, and the twisted manes they compel to hide in flexible knots, and exhort by the way and help with coaxing applause, and further dictate to the four-footed a delightful frenzy. Those at the barriers roar and lean upon the bolts at once, and through the shut boards they breathe smoke, and before the course the absent field is seized by their blasts. They push, they tremble, they drag, they fight back, they grow hot, they leap, they fear, they are feared, nor do they check their step, but with restless foot lash the hardened post. At last, with the murmur of the blaring horn, the trumpeter, calling the suspended teams, pours the swift cars into the field. Not so the rush of the three-forked lightning, not the arrow shot from the Scythian string, not the furrow of a swiftly-falling star, not the leaden hail of bullets whirled from Balearic slings ever so broke the liquid paths of the pole. The earth yields to the wheels, and the air is soiled with the dust stirred by the tracks; the drivers press on at once with the whips, and now, their breasts bent forward from the chariot, they are dragged, stretched out, and strike the yoke-beasts across the shoulders, the back left empty, nor could you quickly tell whether the head-long masters the poles bear up the rather, or the axles. Now, as you flew out of sight, the space consumed being wider, the field, made narrow by art, had closed your bodies, through which the channel, long, low, and double-walled, stretched out for itself its engine. When the farther goal released them all, your colleague becomes first of the two who had passed you; so you yourself were fourth then by the condition of the turn. The care of the middle ones is, as that first one, pressed by the more rightward urging, if he should lay open his left side, bearing all the reins toward the barrier, to be passed by a chariot driven within. You, redoubled by the very effort, hold in the four-yoked team, and with supreme art keep them well in reserve for the seventh round; the others pressed on with hand and voice, and everywhere onto the field, in falling drops, went the sweat of the drivers and the wing-footed. A hoarse crash of the cheering strikes the hearts, and to the men and horses alike heat comes from the course and chill from fear. So it goes once, and a second time; so is the third orbit and the fourth; in the fifth round, unable to bear the weight of those that follow, the first wrenches back his axle, because, commanding the swift four-horse team, he had felt the yoke-beasts exhausted for himself. Now, the sixth return all explained, and the crowd now demanding the prizes, the adverse part, fearing nothing of your force, was wearing the unguarded tracks first, when suddenly, the curbs tightened at once, the breasts tightened, the foot set forward, as much as that charioteer was wont, dragging Oenomaus, Pisa trembling, so much you wear down the swift yoke-beasts. Here, while one alone presses the winding shortcuts of the goal, urged on by you, the chariots once raised by the rush he could not bend in a joined turn; whom you, because he passed without rule, overtook by staying behind, halting by art. Another, while he rejoices in popularity, ran too far to the right beneath the seats. This one, while he turns his way aside, and long, slow, too late rouses his horn-hoofed with the whip, you yourself pass, twisted on a straight track. Here the foe, following you too incautiously, hoping he had already anticipated the leader, came shameless crosswise upon your axle; his horses are bent, the wanton throng of legs enters the wheels, and the twelve spokes are straitened, until, the intervals crackling, filled, and the whirling rim breaks the feet; then he, the fifth, flung headlong from the toppling car, makes a mountain by his manifold ruin, fouling with blood his fallen forehead. A crash, revived, mingles all things, so great as the cypress-bearing Lycaeus does not raise, so great as wooded Ossa does not, restless through frequent storms, so great as not the Trinacrian Doris, rolled by the South, re-echoes, nor the Propontis, which ramparts the Bosphorus with its whirling brine. Here at once the just emperor bids silken palms be joined with torque-crowns, and merit be rewarded, ordering the conquered, shameful enough, to go off with rugs of many-coloured wool. Now, the games of youth performed, what you showed yourself to be in the following age, sought within the court of my father-in-law when you governed the care of the Palace, we will tell in later pages, if there is more leisure for times to come; now let obedient Thalia, in few words, sound out that hospitality of which we have spoken. O sweet house, O pious household gods, which (a thing difficult and at odds with itself) liberty and modesty cultivate together! O banquets, talks, little books, laughter, seriousness, sallies of wit, the meeting, the company, one and the same, whether the shrines of God were to be worshipped by us, the illustrious roofs, or the houses of Livius to be seen, or steps to be borne to the pontiff, or to the heights of Martius Myro, or to the dwellings of learned-speaking Leo (who, teaching the twice-six tables of law, would make Claudius Appius lie hid of his own accord, the more obscure for his renown in the decemvirate; but if he tell epic, and bend the metre into clipped rhythms, his plectrum thundering, he would make biting Flaccus fall silent, though after his satires and his lyre that one strives to fly to the Pindaric swan); or whether, Magnus, your favour held us, endowed with many gifts of men, beauty, nobility, mind, fortune (whose varied deeds if I should go through, they would weary a hundred iron mouths with praise— steadfast, ingenious, and effective, a prudent arbiter, the best of kinsmen, defrauding his genius of nothing for himself or any, regarding persons, places, and time); or whether your halls held us, my Marcellinus, skilled in the laws (who, too truthful and too severe, believed to be harsh by him who knows you not; but if anyone has well proved you, he learns what you yourself wish to judge; for never do you fear to speak what is just, though Sulla press you and fierce Carbo, though the grim Marii and the savage Cinnae, and though by chance the triumviral swords stand round your head and side); or whether the household gods of Limpidius held us, a magnificent citizen and a supreme man, following well the rule of his brother; or whether the linking dutifulness of distinguished Marinus held us together, whose diligence and fellowship are to be cherished by me with eternal praise; or whatever other brothers it was dear to both of us to see, with whom to have had leisure I count a praiseworthy occupation; when affection wishes to set their names in verse, the metre refuses. Hence you would call us to your own house, when the new morning had gone out, and the warming sun gave the second hour after the first. Here, bringing forth smooth balls and hoops, here the dice in the rattling boxes, arranging us for the strokes of the throws, like the son of Nauplius, inventor of the art, you rejoiced to stir up a merry quarrel. Hence to the baths—not Neronian nor those that Agrippa gave, nor that man's whose tomb Dalmatian Salonae behold— to the baths it pleased, however, to go, well furnished for a private man's modesty. After which your cups and the midmost couch of your Muses held us, such statues and images as neither in bronze nor marble nor colours Mentor, Praxiteles, Scopas gave, such as not Polyclitus himself fashioned, nor a figure made by the Phidian chisel. But now five hundred hendecasyllables beg your pardon for their loquacity. Only, even if it please, the poem is long. Now it suffices; you yourself are hindered, reading much in the verse your friend, more at leisure than those that rule.

Send-off to His Little Book

Going out of my doors, little book, remember, I pray, to keep this way, which leads well to our companions, whose names I have carefully marked; nor let the ancient highway be worn by you, along whose space the Caesarean name, old enough, grows green on the columns; but step gently: and by taking your delays you stir a swift affection in your friends. And first you will enter the home of severe Domitius, your Muses trembling: not so censorious was even he whom they say laughed but once in his age; but you can rejoice in his learned rigour: here, if he approves you, you will please all. Hence kindly Brivas will receive you, which cherishes the bones of holy Julianus, which, while they are thought dead among the dead, a living power flashes from the tomb. Hence now you seize the rightward fields, and, the ridge measured in a single day, tomorrow you behold the yellow Triobris; then the land of the Gabali, snowy enough, and—so far as the natives wish it thought— you will see a lofty city in a well. Hence to my own time's Laconians you will hasten, Justinus and his brother, whose famous love, through the lips of the world, tramples Pirithous and Theseus and the faithful comrade of raging Orestes. When you have been received in their bosom, you will go to Trevidon and the ridge too near, alas, to the slanderous Ruteni. Here you will find the father of learned Tonantius, the ruler and pillar of the Gauls, Ferreolus, equal to ancient Syagrius, whom his wife Papianilla, sharing his cares with chaste labour, aids— such as neither Tanaquil was, nor she whom you, Tricipitinus, begot, nor such as the maid dedicated to Phrygian Vesta, who against the swelling Albula drew the boat by her virgin hair. Hence Laesora, surpassing the Scythians' Caucasus, will behold you, and swift Tarnis, bearing in its clear wave the muddy fish pressed with a solid savour. Here add to yourself the wings of Zetes and Calais, and, fleeing, beware the cloudy ridge; for it is fruitful of unceasing storm; but though you be borne in swift course, Vorocingus will detain you, weary. Here you will find our Apollinaris, whether against the heats of the raging Lion he clothes his house in the cold of marbles, or walks in his sequestered gardens, such as grow green in honey-bearing Hybla, such as, gladdening the old man of Corycus, the dark stream of pitchy Galaesus shaded; or whether, among violets, thyme, privet, wild thyme, cassia, saffron, and marigold, narcissi and hyacinthine flowers, he scorns the clod which, the seeker of great price, the incense-bearing Sabaean brings; or whether he rather rests in a feigned grotto on the hill's edge, where the bent wood, striving to give a native portico, makes with its trees not a grove but a cave. Who could now compare the ancient orchards of the Indian king here, and the golden vines with leaves of green amber, when Porus set up, with rattling treasure, a vineyard of metal from a tawny shoot, its clusters flowing with gems? Hence you will go to Cottion and to our Avitus say "hail," then "farewell." You owe a perpetual obedience to the man; for—let my kinsmen grant pardon for this— a parent is not prior to me before a friend. Hence Fidulus, glory of the good, and second to Tetradius, by no hidden gifts of manners or by the tenor of right, receives you with holy hospitality. Thence direct your step to the Tres Villae and seek Thaumastus, either of the two: of whom the younger is my companion and at once colleague and brother in degree; but if by chance the elder is found by you, salute him, prostrate, almost as an uncle. Hence to the ample roofs of consul Magnus and to your Felix come, little book; and, where the paternal library is— such as not even austere Philagrius had— Probus will make you, approved, be admitted; here you will often be read to my Eulalia, whose manners, equal to Cecropian Minerva, and the stern old men, and her father himself, once purple-clad, used to fear. But now it suffices: lo, leave the harbour; lest I press you with more weight of ballast, in these verses lift your anchor.