Idyll 29

Translated by Thothica

2 min

and we too, being drunk, must be truthful.

And I will tell you what lies in the depth of my heart.

You do not wish to love me wholly, from your heart.

I know it; for I have half my life

through your beauty, but the rest is lost.

And when you are willing, I pass a day

like the blessed; but when you are unwilling, deep in darkness.

How is this fitting, to give the one who loves you pains?

But if you would take my word, the younger from the elder,

you would profit by it, and would praise me afterward:

make one nest in a single tree,

where no savage creeping thing will come.

But as it is, you hold one branch one day,

and another the next, and you seek one after another;

and if anyone, seeing your fair face, should praise it,

you become straightway more than a three years' friend to him,

while the one who first loved you, you reckon a friend of three days.

You seem to breathe the airs of overweening men.

But love, while still you may, one of your own kind always.

For if you do thus, you shall be well spoken of

among the townsmen, and Love will not be harsh to you,

Love who easily subdues the minds of men,

and made me soft out of iron.

But by your soft mouth I beseech you,

remember that last year you were younger,

and that we grow old before we can spit it away,

and wrinkled; and to have youth back again

is not possible, for it bears wings upon its shoulders,

and we are too slow to catch the things that fly.

Knowing this, you should be the kinder,

and love me, who love you, without guile,

so that, when you have a man's beard,

we may be to each other friends like Achilles and his comrade.

But if you give these words to the winds to carry off,

and say in your heart, Why, strange man, do you trouble me?

then now, even for golden apples, for your sake,

I would go, and to Cerberus, the warder of the dead;

but then, though you called me at the courtyard doors,

I would not come forth, having ceased from my cruel longing.