The Loves

We who were lately Naso’s five little books
are three: the author preferred his work this way.
Though now it be no pleasure to you to have read us,
yet with two taken off your punishment is lighter.

Arms in a weighty measure, and violent wars,
I was making ready to publish, the matter matched to the meter.
The lower verse was equal — but Cupid laughed,
they say, and stole away one foot.
’Who gave you, cruel boy, this right over song?
We poets are the Muses’ band, not yours.
What if Venus snatched away blonde Minerva’s arms,
and blonde Minerva fanned the kindled torches?
Who would approve of Ceres reigning over the ridged woods,
of the fields kept by the law of the quivered maid?
Who would arm Phoebus, splendid in his hair, with a sharp spear,
while Mars strums the Aonian lyre?
Yours are great realms, boy, and too powerful by far;
why grasp at new work, you ambitious thing?
Or is whatever exists everywhere yours? Are Helicon’s vales yours?
Is even his own lyre now scarcely safe for Phoebus?
When the new page has risen well in its first verse,
that next one slackens my sinews;
nor have I matter fit for lighter measures —
no boy, no girl with long, well-ordered hair.’
I had made my complaint, when at once, his quiver loosed,
he chose out shafts made for my undoing,
and bent the curving bow strongly against his knee,
and ’Take, poet,’ he said, ’the work you’ll sing!’
Wretched me! That boy kept arrows that do not miss.
I burn, and in my empty breast Love reigns.
Let my work rise in six feet, settle back in five:
farewell, iron wars, with your measures, too!
Bind your golden temples with myrtle of the shore,
my Muse, to be measured out through eleven feet!

What shall I call this — that my bedding seems to me
so hard, and my covers will not stay on the couch,
and empty of sleep I have passed the night, long as it was,
and the weary bones of my tossing body ache?
For I think I would feel it, if some love were testing me.
Or does he steal in and, cunning, harm me by hidden craft?
So it will be: slender arrows have stuck fast in my heart,
and savage Love churns the breast he has seized.
Do we yield, or fan the sudden fire by struggling?
Let us yield: a burden borne well grows light.
I have seen flames grow when the torch is shaken,
and die again when nobody shakes it.
Oxen take more lashings — more than those who like the plow —
while, freshly caught, they balk at the first yoke.
The rough horse has his mouth bruised by the hard jagged bit;
he feels the reins less, whoever takes to the fight.
Far more sharply, far more fiercely, Love drives
the unwilling than those who own they bear his slavery.
Look, I confess! I am your new prey, Cupid;
I stretch out conquered hands to your law.
There is no need for war — I beg for pardon and peace;
nor, unarmed and beaten, will I be glory to your arms.
Wreathe your hair with myrtle, yoke your mother’s doves;
your stepfather himself will give a fitting chariot,
and in the given car, while the people shout the triumph,
you will stand and skillfully drive the harnessed birds.
Captive youths and captive girls will be led along;
this parade will be your magnificent triumph.
I myself, fresh booty, will bear my newly-made wound
and carry my new chains with a captive mind.
Good Sense will be led with hands wrenched back behind,
and Modesty, and whatever opposes Love’s camp.
All things will fear you; stretching their arms toward you
the crowd will chant ’Hail, triumph!’ in a great voice.
Caresses will go with you, and Error and Frenzy,
a throng that follows your side without rest.
With these soldiers you overcome both men and gods;
strip these advantages away, and you will be bare.
Glad for your triumph, your mother from high Olympus
will applaud and scatter roses set ready on your face.
With gems on your wings, gems flecking your hair,
you will go, golden yourself, on golden wheels.
Then too, if I know you well, you will burn not a few;
then too, passing by, you will deal many wounds.
Your arrows cannot rest, even should you wish it;
the scorching flame harms with its neighboring heat.
Such was Bacchus when the Ganges-land was tamed;
you bear heavy on birds, he bore heavy on tigers.
So, since I can be part of your sacred triumph,
spare wasting your resources on me, conqueror!
Look at the lucky arms of your kinsman Caesar —
with the hand he conquered by, he shields the conquered.

I ask what is just: let the girl who lately took me as plunder
either love, or give me cause to love forever!
Ah, I have wanted too much — let her just allow being loved;
may Cytherea have heard my many prayers!
Take one who will serve you through long years;
take one who knows how to love with pure faith!
If the great names of ancient forebears do not commend me,
if the founder of my blood is but a knight,
and my field is not renewed by countless plows,
and each thrifty parent rations my spending —
still Phoebus and the nine companions and the vine’s discoverer
stand on my side, and Love, who gives me to you,
and faith that will yield to none, conduct without reproach,
naked candor and the crimson of shame.
A thousand girls do not please me, I am no vaulter of love:
you, if there is any trust, will be my lasting care.
With you, however many years the sisters’ threads grant me,
may it fall to me to live, and die with you grieving!
Give yourself to me as lucky matter for my songs —
songs worthy of their cause will come forth.
By song they hold their name — Io, terrified by her horns,
and she whom the adulterer tricked as a river-bird,
and she who, carried over the sea on a counterfeit bullock,
gripped the spreading horns with a maiden’s hand.
We too shall be sung alike through the whole world,
and my name shall always be joined to yours.

Your man is going to come to the same feast as us —
I pray that dinner be your man’s last!
So shall I, a mere guest, only gaze at the girl I love?
Another will be the one it pleases to touch,
and you, snugly tucked beneath, will warm another’s chest?
Will he lay his hand on your neck whenever he likes?
I cease to wonder that, when the wine was set out, fair
Hippodamia drew the two-natured men to arms.
No forest is my home, nor are my limbs fused to a horse —
yet I seem scarcely able to keep my hands from you!
Still, learn what you must do, and give not my words
to the East winds or the warm South winds to carry off!
Come before your man — not that I see what can be done
if you come before; but still, come before.
When he presses the couch, you, his companion with modest face,
will go to recline — secretly touch my foot!
Watch me, and my nods, and my talking face;
catch my stealthy signs and send them back yourself.
I will speak words that talk with the eyebrows, without voice;
you will read words in my fingers, words traced in wine.
When the wantonness of our love-making comes to mind,
touch your blushing cheeks with a tender thumb.
If there is anything you would silently fault me for,
let your soft hand hang from the bottom of your ear.
When the things I do or say please you, my light,
let the ring keep turning on your fingers.
Touch the table with your hand, the way suppliants do,
when you rightly wish your man a heap of ills.
What he mixes for you — be wise — bid him drink himself;
quietly ask the boy for what you want.
The cups you hand back, I will be the first to take,
and where you drank, on that side I will drink.
If by chance he gives you what he has tasted first,
reject the foods his mouth has sipped.
Let him not press your neck with arms laid over it,
nor lay your soft head on his stiff breast;
let not your bosom or your handy breasts admit his fingers;
and above all, be willing to have given no kisses!
If you give kisses, I will turn open lover
and say, ’They are mine!’ and lay my hand on.
These, though, I will see; but what the covers hide well,
those will be the cause of my blind dread.
Do not put thigh to thigh, do not cling with your leg,
do not join your soft foot with his hard one.
I, wretch, fear much, because I have done much shamelessly,
and I am tortured, look, by dread of my own example.
Often for me and my mistress a hurried pleasure
has done its sweet work under a thrown-on robe.
This you will not do; but, lest you be thought to have,
take the knowing cloak from off your back.
Keep begging your man to drink — but let kisses be missing from your begging! —
and while he drinks, if you can, slip in unwatered wine.
If he lies well settled in sleep and wine,
the moment and the place will give us our counsel.
When you rise to leave for home, we will all rise too;
remember to go into the middle of the crowd’s column.
In that column you will find me, or be found:
whatever of me you can touch there, touch.
Wretched me! I have given advice good for a few hours;
I am parted from my mistress at night’s command.
At night her man will shut her in; I, sad, with welling tears,
will follow, as far as allowed, right up to the cruel doors.
Now he will take kisses, now not only kisses:
what you give me by stealth, you will give him by right, compelled.
But give it unwilling — you can do this — like one forced;
let endearments fall silent, and let your love be grudging.
If my prayers have power, I wish it please him not at all;
if not, at least let nothing of it please you.
But whatever fortune follows upon the night,
tomorrow deny to me, with steady voice, that you gave!

It was hot, and the day had run out its midmost hour;
I laid my limbs to be eased on the middle of the couch.
One leaf of the shutter was open, the other closed;
the kind of light the woods are wont to have,
like the twilight that gleams faint as Phoebus flees,
or when night has gone, yet day has not risen.
That is the light to offer modest girls,
in which shy shame may hope to find its hiding-place.
Look — Corinna comes, veiled in an ungirt tunic,
her parted hair covering her white neck —
just as fair Semiramis is said to have gone
into her chamber, and Lais, loved by many men.
I tore off the tunic — thin, it did little to hinder;
yet still she fought to be covered by the tunic.
And since she fought like one who did not want to win,
she was beaten, not unwilling, by her own betrayal.
When she stood before my eyes, her covering laid aside,
nowhere on her whole body was there a flaw.
What shoulders, what arms I saw and touched!
How the shape of her breasts was made to be pressed!
How smooth the belly beneath the trim chest!
What a flank, how fine! how youthful the thigh!
Why recount each thing? I saw nothing not worth praise,
and pressed her naked body right against mine.
The rest, who does not know? Tired, we both lay still.
May my noons turn out, often, like this for me!

Doorkeeper — it is a disgrace! — bound by a hard chain,
move the stubborn hinge and open the door!
What I beg is small — with a narrow gap make the door,
half-ajar, take in my body sidewise.
Long love has thinned my body for such uses
and made my limbs apt, their weight drawn down.
It shows the way to go softly through the watchmen’s rounds:
it guides the feet so they do not stumble.
But once I used to fear the night and its empty phantoms;
I marveled at anyone going out into the dark.
Cupid laughed, so I could hear, with his tender mother,
and lightly said, ’You too will turn out brave.’
No delay — love came: I do not fear shadows flying by night,
nor hands drawn out against my doom.
You, too slow, I fear; you alone I coax;
you hold the thunderbolt by which you can destroy me.
Look — to see it, loosen the pitiless bars —
how the door has been made wet with my tears!
Surely I, when you stood stripped for the lash,
spoke to my mistress on your behalf as you trembled.
So the favor that once availed even for you —
alas, the outrage! — now avails too little for me?
Repay my service in kind! you may be grateful, as you wish.
The hours of night are passing; shake the bar from the post!
Shake it! so, I say, may you be freed of your long chain,
and may a slave’s water not be drunk by you forever!
Iron-hearted, you hear me plead in vain, doorkeeper;
propped on hard oak, the door stands rigid.
For besieged cities the shut gate’s defenses
are useful; in the midst of peace, why fear weapons?
What will you do to a foe, who so shut out a lover?
The hours of night are passing; shake the bar from the post!
I do not come escorted by soldiers and arms;
I would be alone, if savage Love were not here.
Him, even should I wish, I can send away nowhere;
sooner would I myself be torn from my own limbs.
So Love, and a little wine about my temples,
are with me, and a garland slipped from my soaked hair.
Who would fear these weapons? who would not go to meet them?
The hours of night are passing; shake the bar from the post!
You are sluggish: or does sleep — may it ruin you — give
the lover’s words to the winds, rebuffed by your ear?
But I remember, at first, when I wished to slip past you,
you were wakeful to the stars of midnight.
Perhaps your own girlfriend rests beside you now —
alas, how much better your lot than mine!
If only on those terms — pass over onto me, hard chains!
The hours of night are passing; shake the bar from the post!
Am I deceived, or did the doorposts sound with the turning hinge,
and the shaken doors give their hoarse signal?
I am deceived — the door was pushed by a spirited wind.
Ah me, how far that breeze carried off my hope!
If you remember the rape of Orithyia well enough, Boreas,
come here and batter the deaf doors with your blast!
All through the city is silent, and wet with glassy dew —
the hours of night are passing; shake the bar from the post!
Or now I myself, readier with iron and fire,
will go for the proud house with the torch I hold.
Night and Love and wine urge nothing moderate;
the night lacks shame, Bacchus and Love lack fear.
I have spent it all, and moved you with neither prayer nor threat,
O you, harder yourself than your own doors.
It did not suit you to guard a beautiful girl’s
threshold; you deserved an anxious prison.
And now frosty Lucifer is wheeling his axle round,
and the cock rouses wretches to their work.
But you, garland torn from my unhappy hair,
lie on the hard threshold all night long!
You, when my mistress sees you cast down at dawn,
will be the witness of a time so badly spent.
Whatever you are, farewell, and feel the honor of one leaving;
sluggard, shamed by an unadmitted lover, farewell!
You too, cruel doorposts with your rigid threshold,
and you hard timbers, fellow-slaves — farewell, doors!

Put my hands in bonds — they have earned chains —
while all the madness goes off, if any friend is here!
For madness moved my rash arms against my mistress;
my girl weeps, hurt by my frenzied hand.
Then I could have done violence even to dear parents,
or borne savage blows even against the holy gods!
What? Did not even Ajax, lord of the sevenfold shield,
lay low across the wide fields the flocks he caught,
and Orestes, his father’s avenger on his mother, an evil avenger,
dare to call for weapons against the hidden goddesses?
So could I tear apart her well-arranged hair?
And yet the disordered locks did not disgrace my mistress.
So lovely was she. Just so, I would say, did Schoeneus’ daughter
harry the Maenalian beasts with her bow;
just so the Cretan girl wept that the headlong South winds
had carried off perjured Theseus’ promises and sails;
just so Cassandra — save that she wore the fillets in her hair —
fell prostrate, chaste Minerva, in your temple.
Who did not say ’madman!’ to me, who not ’barbarian!’?
She herself said nothing; fear held her trembling tongue.
But her silent looks made reproaches all the same;
with her tears, her mouth silent, she made me the accused.
I wish my arms had fallen from my shoulders first;
I could have done usefully without a part of myself.
I had frenzied strength to my own loss,
and was strong, brave, only for my own punishment.
What have I to do with you, agents of slaughter and crime?
Submit, sacrilegious hands, to the chains you owe!
If I had struck the lowest citizen of the commons,
I would be punished — shall I have greater right over my mistress?
Diomedes left the worst memorials of crime.
He was the first to strike a goddess — I am the second!
And he was less guilty. The one I professed to love
was hurt by me; Diomedes was savage against a foe.
Go now, conqueror, contrive your magnificent triumphs,
wreathe your hair with laurel and pay your vows to Jove,
and let the escorting crowd that follows your chariot
shout, ’Hurrah! a girl is conquered by a brave man!’
Let the sad captive go before with streaming hair,
all white — if her injured cheeks would allow.
It would have been fitter for her to bruise with pressed lips
and for her neck to bear a coaxing tooth’s mark.
Finally, if I was driven on like a swelling torrent,
and blind anger had made me its own prey,
would it not have been enough to shout at the timid girl,
and not thunder out threats too harsh,
or shamefully drag her tunic down from its top edge
to the waist? — at the waist her belt would have brought relief.
But as it was, I had the heart — her hair torn from her brow —
iron man, to mark her freeborn cheeks with my nail.
She stood there dazed, with a face white and bloodless,
like the marble cut from the Parian ridges.
I saw her fainting limbs and her trembling body —
as when a breeze stirs the poplar’s leaves,
as the slender reed quivers in the gentle West wind,
or when the wave’s surface is grazed by the warm South;
and her long-suspended tears flowed down her face,
as water trickles from cast-off snow.
Then for the first time I began to feel myself guilty —
the tears she shed were my own blood.
Yet three times I wished to fall suppliant before her feet;
three times she pushed away my dreaded hands.
But you — do not hesitate — revenge will ease the pain —
go straight at my face with your nails.
Spare neither my eyes nor my hair:
anger lends help to hands however weak;
and so the sad signs of my crime may not survive,
put your hair back, rearranged, in its place!

There is a certain — whoever would learn what a bawd is,
let him listen! — there is a certain old woman named Dipsas.
She has her name from the thing — never sober has she seen
the mother of black Memnon on her rosy steeds.
She knows witch’s arts and Aeaean spells,
and by craft curls back the flowing waters to their source;
she knows well what the herb can do, what the threads
spun on the whirled wheel, what the slime of a mare in heat.
When she has willed it, clouds gather over the whole sky;
when she has willed it, the day shines in a clear vault.
I have seen the stars drip blood — if you will believe it;
the Moon’s face was crimson with blood.
I suspect that she, transformed, flits through the night shadows
and that her old body is feathered over with plumage.
I suspect it, and rumor agrees. In her eyes too a double pupil
flashes, and light comes from a twin orb.
She summons great-grandsires and forefathers from ancient tombs
and splits the solid ground with a long incantation.
She has set herself to violate chaste bedrooms;
nor does her tongue lack a harmful eloquence.
Chance made me witness to her talk; she was advising
thus — the double doors hid me away:
’Do you know, my light, you pleased a rich young man yesterday?
He stuck fast, and his eyes stayed fixed on your face.
And why should you not please? Your beauty is second to none;
poor me — the finery worthy of your body is missing!
I would wish you as lucky as you are most lovely —
once you are made rich, I will not be poor.
The opposing star of Mars set against you did you harm.
Mars has gone; now Venus is well placed in her own sign.
See how her coming helps — look! a rich lover
has desired you; he takes thought for what you lack.
He even has the looks to match himself to you;
if he did not wish you bought, he would be worth buying.’
She blushed. ’A blush, true, suits white cheeks, but that —
if you fake it, helps; the real one tends to hurt.
When, eyes well lowered, you gaze upon your lap,
each man is to be regarded for how much he brings.
Perhaps the unwashed Sabine women, when Tatius reigned,
were unwilling to be at the service of several men;
now Mars exercises men’s spirits in foreign wars,
but Venus reigns in the city of her own Aeneas.
The lovely ones play; chaste is she whom no one has asked —
or, if rusticity does not forbid, she asks herself.
Even these who carry their brow’s wrinkles up on high,
shake them out: from the wrinkles many sins will fall.
Penelope tried the young men’s strength upon the bow;
the bow that proved their vigor was made of horn.
Time slips by unseen, rolling on, and beguiles us,
as a swift river slides by with its waters let loose.
Bronze gleams with use, a good dress asks to be worn,
abandoned houses grow gray with ugly mold —
beauty, unless you admit men, with none to use it, ages.
Nor do one lover and a second bring enough effect;
plunder from many is surer and less begrudged.
Full booty comes to gray wolves from the flock.
Look — what does that poet of yours give, except new songs?
You will read a lover’s many thousands — of verses.
The very god of poets, splendid in a golden robe,
plies the tuneful strings of his gilded lyre.
The man who will give — let him be greater to you than great Homer;
believe me, to give is a stroke of genius.
And do not, if any man has been ransomed at the price of his head,
look down on him; the chalked foot is a hollow reproach.
Nor let the old wax masks about the halls deceive you.
Take your ancestors away with you, poor lover!
The man who, because he is handsome, will ask a night without a gift —
let him first dun his own lover for what to give!
Ask the price more sparingly while you spread the nets,
lest they flee; once caught, scorch them under your own laws!
Feigned love has done no harm; let him believe he is loved,
and take care this love does not come to you for nothing!
Often refuse nights. Now feign a headache,
and now there will be Isis to furnish your excuses.
Soon take him back, lest he gather any habit of enduring,
and lest love, often rebuffed, go slack.
Let your door be deaf to the pleader, open to the giver;
let the admitted lover hear the shut-out one’s words;
and, as if hurt first, be angry now and then at the one you hurt —
your fault vanishes, counter-weighed by his.
But never grant a long stretch of time to anger:
lingering anger often breeds feuds.
Indeed, let your eyes learn to weep on command,
and let this one or that one make your cheeks wet;
nor, if you are deceiving someone, be afraid to swear false —
Venus lends deaf deities for our games.
Let a slave and a clever maid be readied for their parts,
to teach what may fitly be bought for you;
and let them ask a little for themselves — if they ask a little of many,
soon there will be a great heap from the gleaned stubble.
And let sister and mother, the nurse too, fleece the lover;
booty sought by many hands is quickly made.
When reasons for demanding gifts run short on you,
make a cake your witness and proclaim your birthday!
Beware lest he love carefree, with no rival;
love does not last well if you take away the battles.
Let him see a man’s traces all over the bed
and your neck bruised with wanton marks.
Above all let him see the gifts another has sent.
If no one has given any, the Sacred Way must be canvassed.
When you have carried off much, so that he still may not give all,
ask him yourself to lend what you will never repay!
Let your tongue help and hide your mind — caress and harm;
wicked poisons lurk beneath sweet honey.
If you do these things, known to me by long practice,
and the wind and the breeze have not borne my words away,
often you will bless me while I live, often you will pray
that, when I am dead, my bones lie softly.’
Her voice was in mid-course, when my shadow betrayed me,
and my hands scarcely held themselves back
from tearing her white, thin hair, and her eyes
weepy with wine, and her wrinkled cheeks.
May the gods grant you no household gods and a needy old age,
and long winters, and an unending thirst!

Every lover is a soldier, and Cupid has his own camp;
Atticus, believe me, every lover is a soldier.
The age that is fit for war suits love as well.
An old soldier is a shame, a shame an old man’s love.
The spirit that captains seek in a brave soldier,
a pretty girl seeks in the man who shares her bed.
Both keep watch all night; each rests upon the ground —
one guards his mistress’s door, the other his general’s.
A soldier’s duty is the long march; send off the girl,
and the keen lover will follow with no set bound.
He will go up facing mountains, and rivers doubled
by storm, he will tread through the heaped-up snows,
nor, about to put to sea, will he plead the swollen East winds
or look for stars fit for sweeping the waters.
Who but a soldier or a lover would bear both the night’s cold
and snow mixed in with the thick rain?
One is sent as a scout against the hostile foe;
the other keeps his eyes on a rival, as on an enemy.
One besieges grave cities, the other the threshold
of a hard girlfriend; one breaks gates, the other doors.
Often it has paid to fall on sleeping enemies
and slaughter an unarmed throng with an armed hand.
So fell the fierce ranks of Thracian Rhesus,
and you, captured horses, deserted your master.
Lovers, surely, make use of husbands’ sleep,
and ply their own weapons while the foe lies drowsing.
To pass the bands of guards and the squads of watchmen
is always the work of the soldier and the wretched lover.
Mars is doubtful and Venus uncertain; the beaten rise again,
and those you would deny could ever fall, fall.
So whoever used to call love idleness,
let him stop. Love is a thing of enterprising wit.
Great Achilles burns for the stolen Briseis —
while you may, Trojans, break the Argive strength!
Hector went from Andromache’s embraces to arms,
and it was his wife who set the helmet on his head.
The chief of captains, Atreus’ son, at the sight of Priam’s daughter,
is said to have stood stunned by the Maenad’s streaming hair.
Mars too was caught and felt the smith’s chains;
no tale was better known in heaven.
I myself was sluggish, born for ungirt leisure;
couch and shade had softened my spirit.
Care for a lovely girl spurred on the lazy man
and bade him earn his pay in her camp.
Hence you see me nimble, waging the wars of night.
Whoever would not turn idle, let him love!

Such as she who, carried from Eurotas on Phrygian ships,
was for two husbands the cause of war,
such as Leda was, whom the crafty adulterer, hidden
in white feathers, beguiled in the shape of a false bird,
such as Amymone wandered in the parched fields,
when the urn pressed down upon her crown of hair —
such you were; and I feared for you the eagle and the bull,
and whatever else love made of great Jove.
Now all fear is gone, my mind’s delusion is cured,
and that face no longer captures my eyes.
Why am I changed, you ask? because you demand gifts.
This is the cause that will not let you please me.
While you were unspoiled, I loved your soul with your body;
now your figure is marred by your mind’s flaw.
Love is a boy, and naked; he has years without grime
and no clothes, so as to be open to view.
Why do you bid Venus’s boy hawk himself for a price?
He has no fold of robe to stow the money in!
Neither Venus nor Venus’s son is fit for savage arms —
it ill suits unwarlike gods to earn a soldier’s pay.
The whore stands, purchasable by anyone for a fixed sum,
and with her body on command seeks wretched gains;
yet even she curses the greedy pimp’s rule,
and does under compulsion what you do of your own will.
Take as your example the cattle that lack reason;
it will be a shame for brutes to have the gentler nature.
The mare does not demand a gift of the stallion, the cow of the bull;
the ram does not court with a gift the ewe he likes.
Woman alone exults in spoils stripped from a man,
alone she hires out her nights, alone she comes up for bid,
and sells what pleases both, what both were after,
and sets the price at her own pleasure’s worth.
The love that is to come equally welcome to two,
why does the one sell it and the other buy?
Why should the pleasure be my loss and your profit,
which woman and man share in a common motion?
It is not well that hired witnesses sell their perjuries,
not well that a chosen juror’s strongbox lies open.
Shameful to defend wretched defendants with a bought tongue;
shameful a court that makes itself great wealth;
shameful to swell ancestral means by the bed’s returns,
and to have prostituted one’s own beauty for gain.
Thanks are rightly owed for things given unbought;
for a basely-hired bed there are no thanks.
The hirer pays for all; once the fee is paid,
he stays no debtor to your service.
Spare yourselves, lovely ones, bargaining a price per night;
sordid plunder has no good outcomes.
It was not worth so much for the Sabine maid to strike her bargain for bracelets,
that arms should crush the sacred maiden’s head;
the son she had come from pierced her vitals with the sword,
and a necklace was the cause of her doom.
And yet it is not unworthy to ask rewards of a rich man;
he has the means to give what one who asks gifts wants.
Pluck the grapes that hang from the laden vines;
let Alcinous’s bountiful soil yield its fruit!
Let the poor man tally up service, and zeal, and faith;
what each man has, let him bring it all to his mistress.
It is my dowry too, to celebrate deserving girls in song;
the one I have wished becomes famous by my art.
Clothes will be torn, gems and gold will shatter;
the fame that songs confer will be everlasting.
Not the giving, but being asked a price, I scorn and hate;
stop wanting what I refuse the asker — and I will give it!

Skilled to gather the straying hair and set it in order,
Nape — not to be counted among the maids,
known in the services of the stealthy night,
useful, and clever at delivering signals,
who often urged the wavering Corinna to come to me,
often found faithful to me in my distress —
take these tablets, written out this morning, to your mistress,
deliver them, and diligently drive off the delays that block!
No veins of flint, no hard iron is in your breast,
nor do you have simplicity beyond your station.
It is likely you too have felt Cupid’s bow —
defend in me the standards of your own service!
If she asks how I do, say I live on hope of a night;
the rest the wax bears, traced by a coaxing hand.
While I speak, the hour flees. Give her the tablets at a good moment,
but make her, even so, read them straightaway.
I charge you, watch her eyes and brow as she reads;
from a silent face one may know what is to come.
Without delay, once she has read it through, bid her write back much;
I hate it when the bright wax lies widely blank.
Let her crowd the lines close together, and let the letters
scratched at the very margin keep my eyes lingering.
But why need she tire her fingers, gripping the stylus?
Let the whole tablet hold this one word written: ’Come!’
Then I would not delay to wreathe the victorious tablets with laurel
nor to set them in the midst of Venus’s temple.
I will inscribe below: ’To Venus, Naso dedicates these faithful
servants of his — though lately you were worthless maple.’

Weep for my misfortunes — the tablets have come back gloomy;
today an unlucky letter says it cannot be.
Omens are something; just now, as she wished to leave,
Nape stopped at the threshold, her toe struck.
Sent out again, remember to cross the threshold
more carefully, and, sober, to lift your foot up high!
Away with you, troublesome tablets, funeral wood,
and you, wax stuffed full of refusing marks! —
which, I think, the Corsican bee gathered from the flower
of the tall hemlock and sent under its ill-famed honey.
Yet you blushed as if steeped deep in vermilion —
that color was truly the color of blood.
Cast out at the crossroads may you lie, useless wood,
and may a passing wheel’s weight crush you!
Even the man who turned you from tree to use,
I will prove had unclean hands.
That tree furnished a noose for some wretch’s neck,
it furnished the executioner his dreadful crosses;
it gave foul shade to the hoarse screech-owls,
and bore the vulture’s and the night-owl’s eggs in its boughs.
To these, out of my mind, did I entrust my loves
and give soft words to be carried to my mistress?
These tablets would more fitly hold some babbling court-bond,
which an attorney reads out with a hard voice;
better they should lie among the daybooks and the ledgers
in which a miser weeps his squandered wealth.
So I have found you double in fact as well as in name.
The very number was no omen of good.
What should I, in anger, pray, except that rotting age
gnaw you, and the wax go white with filthy mold?

Now over the ocean she comes, from her aged husband,
the golden one who carries the day on her frosty axle.
’Where do you hurry, Aurora? Stay! — so may the bird
each year make solemn offering with ritual slaughter to Memnon’s shade!
Now it is sweet to have lain in my mistress’s tender arms;
if ever, now she is well joined close to my side.
Now too the sleep is deep, and the air is cold,
and the bird sings clear from its slender throat.
Where do you hurry, unwelcome to men, unwelcome to girls?
Check your dewy reins with your rosy hand!
Before your rising the sailor better keeps his stars
and does not stray, lost, in mid-sea;
at your coming the traveler rises, however weary,
and the soldier fits his cruel hands to arms.
First you see the men, laden with the mattock, working the fields;
first you call the slow oxen under the curved yoke.
You cheat boys of sleep and hand them to schoolmasters,
that their tender hands may undergo savage beatings;
and you send fools to stand surety before the courts,
so that from a single word they bear great losses.
You are welcome neither to the lawyer nor to the pleader;
each is forced to rise to fresh lawsuits.
You, when women’s labors might be at rest,
call the wool-working hand back to its allotted task.
All this I would endure — but that girls rise early,
who could bear it, except one who has no girl?
How often I have wished that night would not yield to you,
that the stars, once stirred, would not flee your face!
How often I have wished that either a wind would break your axle,
or your horse fall, caught fast in a thick cloud!
Envious one, where do you hurry? Because your son was black,
that was the color of his mother’s heart.
I could wish that Tithonus were free to tell tales of you;
no story in heaven would be uglier.
While you flee from him, because he has grown old with long years,
you rise early from the old man to your hated wheels.
But if you held in your embrace the Cephalus you prefer,
you would cry, ’Run slowly, horses of the night!’
Why should I, a lover, be punished, if your husband withers with age?
Did you marry the old man at my matchmaking?
Look how many sleeps the Moon granted her beloved youth! —
and her beauty is not second to yours.
The very father of the gods, so as not to see you so often,
joined two nights into one to suit his wish.’
I had made an end of scolding. You would know she heard: she blushed —
and yet the day rose no later than its wont!

I kept saying, ’Stop doctoring your hair!’
Now you have no hair left that you could dye.
But had you let it be, what was more ample than it?
It had reached down to the lowest flank, as far as that extends.
What of this — that it was fine, the kind you would fear to dress?
like the silks the dyed Seres have,
or the thread the spider draws out with slender foot,
when she weaves her light work under a deserted beam.
Yet it was neither black, nor was it golden,
but, though neither, a blend of both colors —
such as the tall cedar has, its bark stripped off,
in the moist valleys of steep Ida.
Add that it was docile, fit for a hundred twists,
and never the cause of any pain to you.
No pin broke it, no comb’s row of teeth.
The hairdresser was always safe in her person;
often she was groomed before my eyes, and never
made her arms bleed by a snatched-up pin.
Often, too, in the morning, her hair not yet arranged,
she lay half-reclined on the crimson couch.
Then too, unkempt, she was lovely, like a Thracian Bacchante
when, weary, she lies at random on the green grass.
Though it was fine, and like soft down,
alas, what trials the poor harried locks endured!
How patiently they offered themselves to iron and fire,
that a curl might be made, plaited in a twisted ring!
I kept crying, ’It is a crime, a crime to scorch that hair!
It is lovely of itself; spare your own head, you iron girl!
Take force far away from here! there is nothing here that ought to be burned;
the hair itself instructs the pins put to it.’
The beautiful locks are lost — which Apollo would wish,
which Bacchus would wish, to be upon his own head!
I would liken them to those which naked Dione
is painted once to have held up with a dripping hand.
Why complain that your ill-kept hair is lost?
Why, foolish girl, set down the mirror with a sad hand?
You are not well looked at by yourself with accustomed eyes;
to please, you must be forgetful of your old self.
No rival’s enchanted herbs have harmed you,
no treacherous hag has washed you with Haemonian water;
no force of disease has hurt you — far off be the omen! —
nor did an envious tongue thin your thick locks.
The loss you feel was done by your own hand and fault;
you yourself applied the mingled poisons to your head.
Now Germany will send you captive hair;
you will be safe by the gift of a conquered nation.
O how often, when someone admires your hair, you will blush,
and say, ’Now I am approved for bought goods;
that man now praises some Sygambrian woman in my stead.
And yet I remember when that fame was mine.’
Wretched me! she scarcely holds back the tears, and with her right hand
shields her face, her freeborn cheeks painted with the blush.
She holds her old hair in her lap and gazes on it —
ah me, a gift not worthy of that place!
Compose your mind together with your face! the loss can be repaired.
Soon you will be seen with your own native hair.

Why, gnawing Envy, do you reproach me with idle years,
and call song the work of a sluggish wit;
why, that I do not, in my fathers’ way, while vigorous age sustains me,
pursue the dusty rewards of soldiering,
nor learn by heart the wordy laws, nor
prostitute my voice in the thankless forum?
The work you seek is mortal. I seek a lasting fame,
to be sung forever, the whole world over.
The Maeonian will live while Tenedos and Ida stand,
while Simois rolls its rushing waters to the sea;
the Ascraean too will live, while the grape swells with new wine,
while the grain falls, cut by the curved sickle.
The son of Battus will be sung forever the world over;
though he is not strong in genius, he is strong in art.
No loss will come to the Sophoclean buskin;
with sun and moon Aratus will endure forever;
while the cheating slave, the harsh father, the shameless bawd
and the coaxing whore live on, Menander will live;
Ennius, lacking art, and Accius of the spirited speech
have a name that will fall at no time.
What age will not know Varro, and the first ship,
and the golden fleece sought by Aeson’s leader?
The songs of lofty Lucretius will perish only then,
when a single day shall give the earth to destruction;
Tityrus and the harvests and the arms of Aeneas will be read,
while Rome is head of the conquered world;
while fire and the bow are Cupid’s arms,
your measures, polished Tibullus, will be learned;
Gallus will be known both to the West and to the East,
and his Lycoris will be known along with Gallus.
So, while flints, while the tooth of the enduring plow
waste away with age, songs are free of death.
Let kings yield to songs, and kings’ triumphs,
and let the generous bank of gold-bearing Tagus yield!
Let the crowd admire cheap things; for me let golden Apollo
serve cups brimming with Castalian water,
and let me wear on my hair the frost-fearing myrtle,
and be read much by the anxious lover!
Envy feeds upon the living; after death it rests,
when each man’s own honor, by his merit, guards him.
So even when the final fire has consumed me,
I shall live, and a great part of me will survive.

This too I composed, I, born in the watery Paelignian land,
I, that Naso, the poet of my own naughtiness.
This too Love commanded — far hence, keep far off, you prudes!
You are no fit audience for tender measures.
Let the maiden, not cold at her betrothed’s face, read me,
and the raw boy touched by a love he has not known;
and let some one of the young men, wounded by the same bow
that now has wounded me, know the tell-tale signs of his own flame,
and, marveling long, say, ’From what informer did
that poet learn, to set down this case of mine?’
I had dared, I recall, to tell of the wars of heaven
and hundred-handed Gyas — and my mouth was big enough —
when Earth took her ill vengeance, and steep Pelion, heaped
on Olympus by Ossa, bore the sky sloping down.
In my hands I held the storm-clouds and, with Jove, the thunderbolt,
which he might well hurl in defense of his own heaven —
my girlfriend shut her door! I dropped the bolt, and Jove along with it;
Jupiter himself slipped clean out of my mind.
Jupiter, forgive me! your weapons did me no good;
the shut door holds a bolt greater than yours.
I took up again my caresses and light elegies, my own arms;
soft words softened the hard door.
Songs draw down the horns of the blood-red moon,
and call back the snowy horses of the departing sun;
by song serpents burst apart, their jaws torn open,
and water, turned back, runs home to its springs.
To songs the doors gave way, and the bar set in the post,
oak though it was, was conquered by song.
What good would swift Achilles do me, sung in verse?
What will either son of Atreus do for me,
and he who lost as many years in wandering as in war,
and Hector, mourned, dragged by the Haemonian horses?
But the tender girl, her beauty often praised,
comes in person to the poet, the wage of his song.
A great fee is paid! Famous names of heroes,
farewell; your favor is not the thing for me!
Lend your lovely faces, girls, to my
songs, which radiant Love dictates to me!

You in whose charge lies the keeping of your mistress, Bagoas —
while I run through a few things with you, but to the point, be free.
Yesterday I saw the girl walking
in that colonnade which holds the band of Danaus’s daughters.
At once, since she pleased me, I sent and asked in writing.
She wrote back with trembling hand, ’It is not allowed!’
and to my asking why it is not allowed, this cause was given:
that your watch over your mistress is too troublesome.
If you are wise, guard, stop earning hatred, believe me;
each man wants the one he fears out of the way.
Her husband, too, is no wise man; for why labor to guard
a thing from which nothing is lost, even if you do not watch it?
But let him, frantic, indulge his own passion
and think chaste what pleases many;
let stealthy freedom be given her by your gift,
which, once you give it her, she may give back to you.
You are willing to be in on it — the mistress is beholden to the slave;
you are afraid to be in on it — then you may look away.
She reads a letter to herself — suppose her mother sent it!
A stranger has come — soon he will be a friend.
She will go to a sick friend who is not really ailing:
let her visit! let the friend be ill in your judgment.
If she is slow about it, lest the long delay weary you,
you can snore with your brow laid on your chest.
And do not ask what may go on at linen-robed Isis’s rites,
nor have any fear of the curving theaters!
An accomplice to the deed will reap constant rewards —
and what task is lighter than to have kept silent?
He is in favor, and runs the house, and feels no lash;
he holds the power — the others, a sordid crowd, lie low.
For him, to hide the real reasons, empty ones are invented;
and both masters approve what the one mistress approves.
When the husband has drawn his face down and gathered his frowns,
the coaxing girl does what she wished to be done.
But still, now and then, let her pick a quarrel even with you,
and feign tears and call you her torturer.
You, retorting with charges she can safely refute,
take the credit from the true ones by a false charge.
So your standing will always grow, so your savings deepen;
do this, and in a short time you will be free.
Do you see the chains bound round informers’ necks?
The squalid prison holds the hearts that broke faith.
Tantalus seeks water amid the waters and grasps at the fleeing fruit —
this his babbling tongue earned him.
While Juno’s watchman guarded Io too closely,
he died before his time; she is a goddess now!
I have seen a man wearing legs bruised by the fetters,
through whom a husband had been forced to learn of the adultery.
The penalty was less than deserved. The evil tongue harmed two;
the husband grieved, the girl bore the loss of her name.
Believe me, accusations are welcome to no husband,
nor do they please anyone, however he listens.
If he is lukewarm, you bring your tale to indifferent ears;
if he loves, your good service makes him wretched.
A fault, however plain, is not easily proved;
she comes off safe under the favor of her own judge.
Though he sees it himself, still he will believe her denial
and will condemn his own eyes and play himself false.
Let him see his mistress’s tears, and he will weep himself,
and say, ’That blabbermouth will pay for this!’
Why enter so unequal a contest? for you, beaten, the lash
is ready; she sits in the judge’s lap.
We attempt no crime, we do not meet to mix
poisons, no hand flashes with a drawn sword.
We ask only to be able to love safely, through you.
What could be gentler than our request?

Alas for me, that you guard my mistress, neither man nor woman,
and cannot know the mutual joys of love!
The man who first cut the breeding parts from boys
ought himself to have suffered the wounds he made.
You would be soft to comply and yielding to petitioners,
had your own love once warmed for any woman.
You were not born for the horse, not of use for brave arms;
the warlike spear does not suit your right hand.
Let men handle those things; lay aside manly hopes.
Yours are the standards to be borne with your mistress.
Fill her with favors, let her gratitude profit you;
if you lacked her, what use would you be?
She has beauty too, and years fit for play;
it is unworthy that such beauty perish in slothful neglect.
She could deceive you, troublesome as you are held;
what two have willed does not lack its outcome.
Yet, granting it were fitter to have tried by entreaty — we ask,
while you still have a good time for placing your favors.

I would not dare to defend my faulty morals
and wield false arms in behalf of my vices.
I confess — if there is any use in owning one’s offenses;
now, having confessed, I go madly on into my crimes.
I hate it, and, though I wish, I cannot not be what I hate;
ah, how heavy it is to bear what you long to lay down!
For I lack the strength and the right to govern myself;
I am swept off like a ship driven by the rushing water.
There is no one fixed kind of beauty that lures my love —
there are a hundred reasons why I am always in love.
If some girl casts her modest eyes to the ground,
I burn, and that modesty is a snare for me;
if another is forward, I am caught, because she is no rustic,
and gives hope she will be lively on the soft couch.
If one has seemed harsh, aping the stiff Sabine women,
I think she is willing, but hiding it deep.
If you are learned, you please, dowered with rare accomplishments;
if untaught, you have pleased by your very simplicity.
There is one who calls Callimachus’s songs rustic
next to mine — she who likes me at once pleases me herself.
There is even one who faults me, the poet, and my songs —
yet I would long to hold up the thigh of my faulter.
One walks softly — she captures by her motion; another is stiff —
but she could turn softer at a man’s touch.
This one, because she sings sweetly and bends her voice so easily,
I would want to give snatched kisses as she sings;
this one runs over the plaintive strings with a deft thumb —
who could not love such skilled hands?
That one pleases by her dancing and leads her arms in measure
and twists her supple flank with soft art —
to say nothing of myself, who am moved by every cause,
set Hippolytus there, and he will be Priapus!
You, because you are so tall, match the heroines of old
and can lie, all of you, along the whole couch.
This one is handy by her shortness. I am corrupted by both;
tall and short alike suit my desire.
She is not groomed — it occurs to me what grooming could add;
she is adorned — she shows off her own endowments.
A fair girl will catch me, a blonde girl will catch me,
there is a Venus to be had in a dark complexion too.
If dark locks hang on a snow-white neck,
Leda was striking with her black hair;
if they are golden, Aurora pleased with her saffron hair.
My love fits itself to every story.
A young one stirs me, an older age touches me too;
this one is the better, that one pleases by her body’s looks.
In short, whatever girls in the whole city anyone could approve,
my ambitious love is out after all of them.

No love is worth so much — be off, quivered Cupid! —
that I should so often have death for my greatest prayer.
Death is my prayer, when I recall that you have sinned,
O girl born to be my unending bane!
No badly-erased tablets lay your deeds bare,
no gifts given by stealth carry the charge.
Oh that I accused you in a way I could not win!
Wretched me! why is my case so good?
Lucky the man who dares stoutly to defend what he loves,
to whom his girl can say, ’I did nothing!’
Iron-hearted is he, and too indulgent of his own pain,
who seeks a bloody victory-palm by his mistress’s conviction.
I, wretch, saw it myself, while you thought I slept,
sober, over the wine set out — your crimes.
I saw you both saying much with quivering brows;
in your nods was a good part of your speech.
Your eyes were not silent, nor the table written over
with wine, nor was there no letter on your fingers.
I knew the talk that ran beneath what was meant to be unseen,
and words bidden to stand for agreed-on signs.
And now the table was thinning, the guests gone;
one or two young men were settled down.
Then truly I saw you joining shameless kisses —
it is clear to me they were laced with tongue —
such as no sister would give a strict brother,
but a yielding mistress would give an eager man;
such as one may believe Diana gave not to Phoebus,
but Venus gave often to her own Mars.
’What are you doing?’ I cry, ’where now do you carry off my joys?
I will lay my masterful hands on what is mine by right!
These joys are yours with me, mine with you in common —
why does any third party come into these goods of ours?’
This I said, and whatever grief dictated to my tongue; but for her
a guilty blush rose into her face,
like the sky tinged red by Tithonus’s wife,
or a girl seen by a new bridegroom;
like roses glowing mingled among their lilies,
or when the Moon labors under enchanted horses,
or the ivory a Maeonian woman has dyed with Assyrian purple,
so that it cannot yellow with long years.
Her color was that, or most like one of these,
and never was she lovelier to look upon.
She gazed at the ground — gazing at the ground became her;
her face was sad — sad, she was becomingly so.
I had an impulse to tear her hair, just as it was — and it was well-dressed —
and to go at her tender cheeks —
but when I saw her face, my strong arms fell;
my girl was defended by her own weapons.
I, who just now was savage, became a suppliant and begged, unasked,
that she give me no kisses inferior to those.
She laughed and gave, from the heart, her best — such as could
strike the three-forked bolts from angry Jove’s hand;
I am tortured, unhappy, lest the other felt kisses so good,
and I wish those had not been of this same stamp.
These too were far better than the ones I taught her,
and she seemed to have learned something new.
That they pleased too much is the trouble — that your whole tongue
was against my lips, and mine received by yours.
And yet it is not this alone I grieve at — I do not only complain
that the kisses were joined, though this too I complain of;
those could have been taught nowhere but in bed.
Some master or other has earned a great fee.

The parrot, the mimic bird from the eastern Indies,
is dead — go in crowds to the funeral, you birds!
Go, faithful fliers, and beat your breasts with your wings
and mark your tender cheeks with a stiff claw;
let bristling feathers be torn in place of mourning hair,
let your songs sound out in place of the long trumpet!
The crime of the Ismarian tyrant you mourn, Philomela —
that lament has run out its allotted years;
turn aside to the sad funeral of a rare bird —
Itys is a great, but an old, cause of grief.
All you who poise your courses in the clear air,
yet you before the rest, friendly turtledove, mourn!
Between you was full concord all your life,
and your long, tenacious faith stood firm to the end.
What the Phocian youth was to Argive Orestes,
that the turtledove, while it could, was to you, parrot.
Yet what use that faith, what the beauty of your rare color,
what your voice, ingenious at changing its sounds,
what use that, the moment you were given, you pleased my girl? —
unlucky glory of birds, you lie dead all the same!
You could dull frail emeralds with your wings,
wearing a Punic beak dyed with red saffron.
No bird on earth was a better mimic of voices —
you gave back words so well in your lisping tone!
You were snatched off by envy — you stirred up no fierce wars;
you were a chatterer and a lover of quiet peace.
Look — the quails live on amid their battles;
perhaps that is even why they often grow old.
You were full on the least, nor, for love of talk,
could you spare your mouth for much food.
A nut was your fare, poppy-seeds the cause of your sleep,
and a draught of plain water drove off your thirst.
The gluttonous vulture lives on, and the kite wheeling
its circles through the air, and the jackdaw, herald of rain;
the crow lives too, hateful to weapon-bearing Minerva —
she indeed scarce to die in nine generations;
but that talking echo of the human voice has perished,
the parrot, a gift given from the world’s far edge!
The best things first, as a rule, are snatched by greedy hands;
the worse fill out their appointed count.
Thersites looked on the sad funeral of Phylacus’s grandson,
and Hector was already ash while his brothers lived.
Why recount the timid girl’s loyal prayers for you —
prayers carried off over the sea by the stormy South wind?
The seventh day came, not to show an eighth,
and now the Fate stood by you with empty distaff.
Yet the words did not stick dumb in your faltering throat;
dying, your tongue cried out, ’Corinna, farewell!’
Beneath an Elysian hill a grove leafs with dark holm-oak,
and the moist earth is green with perpetual grass.
If there is any trust in things unsure, that is said to be the place
of faithful birds, from which the unclean ones are barred.
There the harmless swans graze far and wide,
and the long-lived phoenix, ever the only one of its kind;
there Juno’s own bird spreads its feathers,
and the coaxing dove gives kisses to its eager mate.
The parrot, welcomed among these in their woodland seat,
turns the faithful birds to his own words.
A mound covers his bones — a mound large for the body —
on which a small stone holds a verse to match:
’From my very tomb it can be gathered that I pleased my mistress.
My mouth was taught to speak beyond a bird’s.’

So am I to keep serving forever as defendant on fresh charges?
Even to win, it galls me to have fought so often.
If I glance up at the top of the marble theater,
you pick from the crowd someone to be hurt by;
if a fair woman looks at me with a silent face,
you charge that on the face are silent signals.
If I have praised a girl, you go for my wretched hair with your nails;
if I find fault, you think I am hiding guilt.
If my color is good, I am called cold toward you too;
if bad, I am said to be dying of love for another.
And I — I wish I were aware of some sin in myself!
Those who have deserved it bear their punishment with an even mind;
now you accuse at random, and by believing everything in vain
you yourself keep your anger from carrying weight.
Look how the long-eared donkey, of pitiable lot,
broken by the constant lash, plods sluggishly on!
Look, a fresh charge! Cypassis, skilled at hairdressing,
is alleged to have defiled her mistress’s bed.
The gods forbid that, if I had a whim to sin,
a sordid girlfriend of contemptible rank should please me!
What free man would want to bed a serving-girl
and embrace a back cut up by the lash?
Add that she is busy dressing your hair
and is a welcome servant to you, well-trained of hand —
as if I would proposition a maid so faithful to you!
What for, but that a rebuff be coupled with a betrayal?
I swear by Venus and the winged boy’s bow,
that I am not guilty of a crime I never committed!

Cypassis, perfect at arranging hair in a thousand styles,
yet fit to dress goddesses alone,
and known to me, no country girl, in our delightful intrigue,
fit for your mistress, true, but fitter for me —
who was the informer between us of our joined bodies?
from where did Corinna sense your sleeping with me?
Did I blush, though? did I, slipping in any word,
give the tell-tale signs of our stolen love?
What of this — that I argued the man who could sin with a maid
must be out of his right mind?
The Thessalian burned for the slave-girl’s beauty, Briseis;
the priestess of Phoebus, a slave, was loved by the Mycenaean captain.
I am no greater than Tantalus’s descendant, no greater than Achilles;
why should I think shameful what befitted kings?
But when she fixed her angry eyes on you,
I saw you blush over your whole cheeks;
yet how much more steady was I myself, if you recall,
who pledged my faith by the great godhead of Venus!
You, goddess — you bid the perjuries of a guiltless heart
be carried by the warm South winds over the Carpathian sea!
In return for these services, pay me a sweet reward —
your embraces today, dusky Cypassis!
Why refuse, and feign new fears, ungrateful girl?
It is enough to have earned the favor of one of your masters.
But if, foolish, you refuse, I will turn informer and confess what is past,
and I will come, the betrayer of my own fault,
and tell your mistress where I was with you, and how often, Cypassis,
and how many ways, and which!

O Cupid, never enough reviled for what you do,
O boy who lie idle in my heart —
why do you wound me, who as a soldier never left your standards,
and why am I hurt in my own camp?
Why does your torch burn, your bow pierce, your friends?
It was greater glory to conquer those who fight.
What? did not the Haemonian hero, the man he struck with his spear,
afterward heal the pierced one with the physician’s aid?
The hunter chases what flees; what is caught he always leaves
behind, and seeks ever beyond what he has found.
We, a people surrendered to you, feel your arms;
your hand goes slack against an enemy who fights back.
What pleasure to blunt your barbed weapons on bare
bones? love leaves me only bare bones.
So many men are without love, so many girls without love! —
from these let your triumph march with great glory.
Rome, had she not pushed her strength into the boundless world,
would even now be roofed with huts of straw.
The worn-out soldier is settled on the fields he has been granted;
the horse, free of its stall, is turned out into the glades;
the long docks hide the beached ship,
and, the sword laid down, the safe wooden foil is asked for.
For me too, who have so often served under a girl’s love,
it was time, my discharge done, to live in peace.

’Live,’ should some god say to me, ’with love laid aside!’
I would beg off — so sweet an evil is a girl.
When I am thoroughly sick of it, and the ardor has slackened in my heart,
I am driven by some whirlwind or other of my wretched mind.
As the hard-mouthed horse sweeps its master headlong
while he vainly pulls back the foaming reins;
as a sudden wind, the land all but grasped, snatches the ship
just touching the harbor back out to the deep —
so the uncertain breeze of Cupid often carries me back,
and radiant Love takes up again his well-known weapons.
Pierce me, boy! I offer myself bare, my arms laid down;
here is where your strength lies, here your right hand does its work;
here, as if commanded, your arrows now come of their own accord —
their own quiver scarce knows them as well as I do!
Unhappy is he, whoever can bear to rest the whole night through
and calls sleep a great reward!
Fool, what is sleep but the image of chill death?
The fates will give us long times for resting.
Let the words of a deceiving mistress beguile me now and then;
by hoping, at least, I will carry off great joys.
Let her now speak caresses, now pick quarrels;
often I will enjoy my mistress, often go off rebuffed.
That Mars is fickle is your doing, stepson Cupid;
your stepfather takes up arms after your example.
You are flighty, and far more windy than your own wings,
and you give and deny your joys with wavering faith.
Yet if you hear me, with your lovely mother, Cupid,
rule an undeserted kingdom in my heart!
Let girls be added to the realm — a too-roaming crowd!
So you will be worshipped by both peoples.

You to me, you for certain, I remember, Graecinus, used to deny
that anyone could love two women at one time.
Through you I am deceived, through you caught defenseless —
look, to my shame, I love two at one time!
Both are beautiful, both painstaking in their grooming;
in accomplishments it is doubtful whether this or that is ahead.
That one is prettier than this, this one too is prettier than that;
and this pleases me more, and that one more!
I drift, like a skiff driven by conflicting winds,
and the two loves hold me, split between them.
Why double my pains without end, Erycina?
was not one girl enough for my cares?
Why add leaves to the trees, why stars to the full sky,
why add gathered waters to the deep seas?
But still this is better than if I lay loveless —
may an austere life befall my enemies!
May it befall my enemies to sleep in a widowed bed
and stretch their limbs loose in the middle of the couch!
But for me let savage love break off my idle sleep,
and let me not be the only weight upon my bed!
Let my girl wear me utterly out, with none to stop her —
if one can do it, one; if not enough, then two!
I will hold up — my limbs are slim, but not without strength;
my body lacks weight, not sinew;
and pleasure will give my flank nourishment for strength.
No girl was ever let down by my performance;
often I have spent the hours of night wantonly,
and was good for use, with a sturdy body, in the morning.
Happy the man whom love’s mutual contests destroy!
May the gods make that the cause of my death!
Let the soldier set his breast against the enemy’s weapons
and buy with his blood an everlasting name.
Let the greedy man seek wealth, and, shipwrecked, drink with perjured mouth
the seas he wearied with sailing.
But may it fall to me to grow faint in love’s motion,
and, when I die, to be dissolved in the midst of the work;
and may someone, weeping at my funeral, say,
’That death was fitting to your life!’

The pine, felled on Pelion’s summit, first taught
evil ways to the wondering waters of the sea,
which, rash, between the clashing rocks,
carried the ram conspicuous for its tawny fleece.
Oh that the Argo, so no one might stir the long straits with an oar,
had gone under and drunk the deadly waters!
Look — Corinna flees her familiar bed and her household gods
and makes ready to travel the treacherous roads.
How I will fear for you, wretched me, the West winds and the East
and chill Boreas and the not-so-chill South!
There you will marvel at no cities, no woods;
there is one blue face of the unjust sea.
The mid-sea has no delicate shells or painted pebbles;
that is the pastime of the thirsty shore.
Print the shores with your marble feet, girls;
this far it is safe — the rest is a blind road.
Let others tell you of the battles of the winds;
what waters Scylla infests, what Charybdis;
and with what rocks the violent Ceraunia jut;
in what gulf the greater and the lesser Syrtes lurk.
Let others report these to you; whatever each one says,
believe it! no storm harms the believer.
Too late is the land looked back on, when, the cable loosed,
the curved keel runs out into the boundless brine;
when the anxious sailor dreads the cruel winds
and sees death as near as he sees the water.
But if Triton should roughen the shaken waves,
how all the color will drain from your face!
Then you will call on the noble stars of fertile Leda
and say, ’Lucky the man his own land holds!’
It is safer to have kept to your couch, to have read your little books,
to have struck the Thracian lyre with your fingers.
But if the flying gales carry off my words as empty,
still may Galatea be kind to your ship!
The loss of such a girl will be your fault,
you Nereid goddesses and father of the Nereids.
Go, mindful of me, to return with a following wind;
may a stronger breeze fill those sails of yours!
Then may great Nereus tilt the sea toward these shores;
hither let the winds blow, hither drive the tide its waters!
Ask, yourself, that the West winds come full into the canvas,
move, yourself, the swelling sails with your hand!
I will be the first to spy the familiar ship from the shore,
and say, ’She brings home my gods!’
I will catch you on my shoulders and snatch many kisses,
with no order to them. A vowed victim will fall for your return;
the soft sands will be spread in the shape of a couch,
and any mound at all can serve for a table.
There, the wine set out, you will tell me much —
how the ship was almost swamped in mid-water;
and how, hurrying to me, you feared neither the hours of the cruel night
nor the headlong South winds.
I will believe it all as true, though it be made up —
why should I not myself indulge my own wishes?
May Lucifer, brightest in the high sky, bring me these hours
as soon as may be, his horse let loose at the gallop!

Go, triumphal laurels, round about my temples!
We have won: look, Corinna is in my arms,
whom a husband, a guard, a strong door — so many enemies —
kept watch on, lest she be taken by any art!
This is a victory worthy of a special triumph,
in which the booty, whatever it is, is free of blood.
Not low walls, not towns girt with little ditches,
but a girl was captured under my command!
When Pergamum fell, beaten in a ten-year war,
out of so much, how small a share of the glory was the Atridae’s?
But my glory is set apart and shared with no soldier,
and no one else holds the title for the deed.
With me as general, me as soldier, I reached this goal of my prayer;
I myself was the cavalry, myself the infantry, myself the standard-bearer.
Nor did fortune mix any chance into my deeds —
come here, O Triumph, won by my own effort!
Nor is my war’s cause a new one. Had Tyndareus’s daughter not been carried off,
there would have been peace between Europe and Asia.
A woman drove the woodland Lapiths and the two-formed folk
shamefully to arms, when the wine was set out;
a woman drove the Trojans to stir up new wars again
in your kingdom, just Latinus;
a woman, when the city was still new, set fathers-in-law
against the Romans and gave them savage arms.
I have seen bulls fighting for a snow-white mate;
the heifer herself, looking on, gave them spirit.
Me too, among many, but me without bloodshed, Cupid
bade carry the standards of his warfare.

While, rash, she dislodges the burden of her swollen womb,
Corinna lies exhausted, her life in doubt.
She, having undertaken so great a peril behind my back,
deserves my anger; but my anger falls before my fear.
And yet either she had conceived by me — or so I believe;
what may be is often, for me, as good as done.
Isis, you who haunt Paraetonium and the genial fields of Canopus
and Memphis and palm-bearing Pharos,
and where the swift Nile, slid down in its broad channel,
goes out through seven mouths into the sea’s waters,
by your sistrums I pray, by the face of revered Anubis —
so may faithful Osiris ever love your rites,
and the slow serpent glide about your offerings,
and horned Apis go as escort in your procession!
Turn your face this way, and in one woman spare two!
For you will give my mistress her life, and she will give me mine.
Often she has sat in service to you on the appointed days,
where the Gallic troop wreathes your laurels.
And you who pity girls laboring with the womb,
whose bodies the hidden burden slowly stretches,
come gently and favor my prayers, Ilithyia!
She is worthy that you bid her be of your bounty.
I myself, robed in white, will give incense on the smoking altars,
I myself will bring vowed gifts before your feet.
I will add the inscription: ’Naso, for Corinna saved!’
Only do you make room for the inscription and the gifts.
But if, in such great fear, it is right to give a warning,
let it be enough for you to have fought this one battle!

What good is it that girls keep clear of war, exempt,
and do not care to follow the fierce shielded columns,
if without warfare they suffer wounds from their own weapons
and arm blind hands against their own lives?
She who first taught how to tear out the tender unborn
deserved to die in her own campaign.
So that your belly may be free of the reproach of wrinkles,
shall the grim sand of your battle be strewn?
If the same custom had pleased the mothers of old,
the human race would have perished by the vice,
and someone would have to be found to throw again,
in the empty world, the stones that are our race’s first beginnings.
Who would have broken Priam’s power, if Thetis, the water-deity,
had refused to bear her rightful burden?
If Ilia had killed the twins in her swollen womb,
the founder of the mistress-City would have fallen;
if Venus had violated Aeneas in her pregnant belly,
the earth would have been bereft of the Caesars.
You too, though you might have been born beautiful, would have perished,
had your mother tried the deed you try;
and I myself, who would better perish by loving,
would have seen no days at all, had my mother refused.
Why cheat the full vine of its swelling grapes,
and pluck the unripe fruit with a cruel hand?
Let the ripe fall of their own accord — let what is born grow;
life is no light price for a little waiting.
Why dig out your own vitals with thrust-in instruments,
and give dread poisons to the not-yet-born?
They blame the Colchian woman spattered with her children’s blood
and mourn Itys, slain by his own mother;
each a cruel parent, but each for grievous reasons
avenged herself on her man by the loss of shared blood.
Tell me, what Tereus, what Jason provokes you
to stab your own bodies with an anxious hand?
This not even the tigers have done in their Armenian lairs,
nor has the lioness dared to destroy her young.
But tender girls do it — yet not unpunished;
often she who kills her own in the womb dies herself.
She dies herself, and is carried to the pyre with hair unbound,
and all who chance to see cry out, ’She deserved it!’
But let these words of mine vanish into the airy breezes,
and let there be no weight in my omens!
Kindly gods, grant her to have sinned once with impunity,
and that is enough; let a second fault bear its punishment!

Ring, soon to bind a beautiful girl’s finger,
in which nothing is to be valued but the giver’s love,
go, a welcome gift! May she, receiving you with glad heart,
at once slip you onto her knuckles;
may you fit her as well as she fits me,
and, easy on the finger, rub it with your true circle!
Lucky ring, you will be handled by my mistress;
already, wretch, I am envious of my own gift.
Oh that I could suddenly become my own present
by the arts of Aeaean Circe or the Carpathian old man!
Then, whenever I longed to touch my mistress’s breasts
and slip my left hand inside her tunic,
I would slide off her finger, however tight and clinging,
and, loosened by wondrous art, fall into her bosom.
I too, that I might seal her secret tablets,
and the dry, sticky stone not drag the wax,
would first touch the moist lips of the lovely girl —
only let me not seal writings I would grieve to read.
Should it be a chore to stow me in your jewel-box, I will refuse to come off,
cinching your fingers with my circle grown smaller.
I will never be a disgrace to you, my life,
nor a burden your tender finger would refuse to bear.
Wear me when you drench your limbs in warm showers,
and bear the loss of the water seeping under the stone —
but, I think, at your nakedness my limbs will rise with lust,
and, that ring, I will play the man’s part.
Why do I wish for the impossible? Be off, little gift;
let her feel that faith was given along with you!

Sulmo holds me, a third part of Paelignian country —
a small district, but wholesome with its watering streams.
Though the sun split the earth, its star brought near,
and the wanton star of Icarius’s dog blaze,
the Paelignian fields are crossed by gliding waters,
and the fertile grass grows green in the soft soil.
The land is rich in grain and far richer in grapes;
here and there a field yields the berry-bearing olive of Pallas too;
and over the grass springing up again where the brooks glide,
the grassy turf shades the wet ground.
But my fire is away. I have erred in a single word! —
she who stirs my passion is far off; the passion is here.
I, were I set between Pollux and Castor,
would not wish to be in any quarter of heaven without you.
Let them lie uneasy and be weighed down by hostile earth,
who cut the world into long roads! —
or they should have ordered girls to go as the young men’s companions,
if the earth had to be cut into long roads!
Then for me, even if I trudged, frozen, over the windy Alps,
so long as it were with my mistress, the road would have been soft.
With my mistress I would dare to break through the Libyan Syrtes
and give my sails to be borne by the unfair South winds.
I would not fear the monsters that bark beneath a maiden’s loins,
nor your gulfs, curving Malea;
nor Charybdis, who, gorged on sunken ships,
pours out the waters and takes them, poured-out, back in her mouth.
But if the windy power of Neptune should win,
and the wave sweep off the gods who would come to help,
do you lay your snowy arms upon my shoulders;
with a willing body I will bear the sweet burden.
Often the youth, making for Hero, had swum across the waves;
then too he would have swum across, but the way was blind.
But without you, though fields laborious with vines
hold me, though the meadows swim with streams,
and the farmer call the running water into the channels,
and a cool breeze soothe the trees’ leafy hair,
I do not seem to be keeping the wholesome Paelignian country,
nor my birthplace, my father’s fields —
but Scythia and the fierce Cilicians and the painted Britons,
and the crags that redden with Prometheus’s gore.
The elm loves the vine, the vine deserts not the elm;
why am I so often parted from my mistress?
But you had sworn you would always be my companion —
by me and by your eyes, our stars!
The words of girls, lighter than the falling leaves,
wind and water carry off as void, wherever they please.
Yet if any loyal care for me, left behind, is in you,
begin to add deeds to your promises,
and as soon as may be, with your little gig and the racing ponies,
shake the reins yourself over their loosed manes!
But you, swollen mountains, sink down where she will come,
and be easy, you roads, in the winding valleys!

If there is anyone who thinks it shameful to be a girl’s slave,
by his verdict I shall be convicted shameful!
Let me be disgraced, so long as she burns me more gently,
who holds Paphos and Cythera beaten by the wave.
And would I had been the prey of a gentle mistress too,
since I was bound to be a beautiful one’s prey!
Beauty gives airs. By her beauty Corinna is overbearing —
wretched me! why is she so well known to herself?
No doubt her disdain is taken from the mirror’s image,
and she never sees herself except first made up!
No — though your beauty gives you airs and omens of a kingdom —
O beauty born to hold my eyes! —
you should not on that account scorn me, matched with you;
lesser things may be paired with great.
Even Calypso the nymph, the story goes, caught by love of a mortal,
held back the man against his will.
It is believed the sea-Nereid lay with the Phthian king,
Egeria with righteous Numa,
Venus with Vulcan, though, his anvil left behind,
he limps unsightly on his crooked foot.
This very kind of verse is unequal; yet aptly
the heroic line is joined with the shorter measure.
You too, my light, take me on whatever terms you like;
let it become you to lay down the law in the middle of the forum.
I will be no reproach to you, nor one you would be glad to be rid of;
this love of ours will be no love to disown.
I have lucky songs in place of a great fortune,
and many women wish to have a name through me;
I know one who puts it about that she is Corinna.
To become her, what would she not give?
But neither do the cold Eurotas and the poplar-fringed Po,
far apart, glide between the same bank,
nor will any but you be sung in my little books;
you alone will give my genius its themes.

While you bring your poem on to the wrath of Achilles
and clothe the sworn-in men in their first arms,
I, Macer, idle in love’s lazy shade, lie at ease,
and tender Love breaks me when I would attempt great things.
Often I have told my girl, ’Be off at last’ —
straightway she sat down in my lap.
Often I have said, ’I am ashamed!’ — she, scarce holding back her tears,
said, ’Poor me! are you ashamed to love me now?’
And she wound her arms about my neck
and gave a thousand kisses, the kind that undo me.
I am overcome, and my genius is called back from the arms it took up,
and I sing exploits done at home and my own wars.
Yet I took up the scepter, and tragedy grew under my care,
and for that work I was as fit as could be.
Love laughed at my robe and my painted buskins
and the scepter taken up so fast by a private hand.
From this too the power of an unfair mistress drew me away,
and over the buskined poet Love triumphs.
What I may, I do: either I profess the arts of tender Love —
ah me, I am hard-pressed by my own precepts! —
or I write what may be sent to Ulysses in Penelope’s words,
and your tears, abandoned Phyllis,
what Paris and Macareus and thankless Jason
and Hippolytus’s father and Hippolytus may read,
and what pitiable Dido, holding the drawn sword, may say,
and the Lesbian woman beloved of the Aonian lyre.
How quickly my Sabinus returned from all the world over
and brought back letters from far-flung places!
Fair Penelope knew Ulysses’s seal;
the stepmother read the writing from her Hippolytus.
Now dutiful Aeneas has written back to wretched Elissa,
and what Phyllis may read, if only she is alive, is at hand.
A sad letter has come from Jason to Hypsipyle;
let the Lesbian, beloved, give to Phoebus the lyre she vowed.
Nor, Macer, so far as is safe for a bard singing of arms,
is golden Love passed over by you in the midst of war.
Both Paris is there and the adulteress, that famous scandal,
and Laodamia, companion to her dead husband.
If I know you well, you sing wars no more gladly than these,
and from your own camp you come over into mine.

If you have no need of a guarded girl, fool,
at least guard her for my sake, so I will want her more!
What is allowed gives no pleasure; what is not allowed burns the sharper.
He is made of iron, the man who loves what another permits.
Let us lovers hope alike, alike fear,
and let an occasional rebuff make room for desire.
What is a fortune to me that never cares to cheat?
I love nothing that at no time would hurt!
Sly Corinna had spotted this fault in me,
and, shrewd, knew the means by which I could be caught.
Ah, how often, faking a headache in a sound head,
she bade me, dawdling, go off with lagging foot!
Ah, how often she feigned a fault, and, as far as an innocent woman might,
put on the look of being guilty!
So, when she had vexed me and rekindled the cooling fires,
again she was kind and ready for my wishes.
What caresses she would ready for me, what sweet words,
what kisses — great gods — and how many she gave!
You too, who lately stole my eyes,
often fear me, pretending; often, when asked, refuse;
and let me, flung down before your doorposts on the threshold,
endure the long frosts through a frosty night.
So my love lasts and grows up into long years;
this delights me; these are the nourishment of my spirit.
A love too rich and too freely open turns to loathing for me
and, like sweet food to the stomach, does harm.
If the bronze tower had never held Danae,
Danae would not have been made a mother by Jove;
while Juno guarded Io, changed with horns,
she became dearer to Jove than she had been.
Whoever wants what is allowed and easy, let him pluck leaves
from a tree and drink water from a great river.
If any girl would reign long, let her cheat her lover.
Ah me — that I am tormented by my own advice!
Whatever happens, indulgence harms me —
what follows me, I flee; what flees, I myself pursue.
But you, too careless of a beautiful girl,
begin now to shut your door at nightfall.
Begin to ask who so often knocks furtively at your threshold,
why the dogs bark in the silent night,
what tablets the clever maid carries to and fro,
why so often she sleeps apart in an empty bed.
Let this care gnaw your marrow now and then,
and give place and matter to my wiles.
He could steal sands from an empty shore,
the man who could love a fool’s wife.
And now I give you fair warning: unless you begin
to guard the girl, she will begin to stop being mine!
I have borne much and long; I have often hoped it would come about
that, once you had guarded her well, I would nicely deceive you.
You are slack, and put up with what no husband should;
but for me this leave of yours will be the end of my love!
Am I, poor wretch, never to be barred from coming?
Is my night to be forever under no avenger?
Am I to fear nothing? to draw my sleep through no sighs?
Will you do nothing to make me justly wish you dead?
What have I to do with an easy husband, a pander of a husband?
He spoils my joys with his own vice.
Why not look for another whom such patience suits?
If you would have me be your rival — forbid me!

An old wood stands, uncut through many years;
one could believe a god dwells in that place.
A sacred spring at its heart, a grotto of hanging tufa,
and on every side the birds make their sweet complaint.
Here, while I stroll, screened by the woodland shade —
asking what work my Muse should set in motion —
Elegy came, her perfumed hair bound up,
and one of her feet, I think, was longer than the other.
A graceful figure, the finest dress, a lover’s face,
and the fault in her feet was the cause of her charm.
Violent Tragedy came too, with a giant stride:
her hair grim on her brow, her robe trailing the ground;
her left hand swept the royal sceptre wide,
the Lydian buskin was the high lacing of her feet.
And she spoke first: ’Will there ever be an end to your loving,
poet so slow over your one theme?
Wine-soaked parties tell of your wantonness,
the crossroads forked into many ways tell of it.
Often someone points a finger at the poet as he passes
and says, "There — there he is, the one savage Love sets ablaze!"
You are the talk of the whole city, flung about, though you don’t feel it,
while you recount your deeds with all shame laid aside.
It was time to be stirred by a heavier thyrsus;
you have idled enough — begin the greater work!
Your matter cramps your gift. Sing the deeds of men.
"This is the field," you will say, "made for my spirit!"
What tender girls might sing, your Muse has trifled at,
and your first youth has run its course through its own measures.
Now, through me, let me be Roman Tragedy and have a name!
That breath of yours will fill out my laws.’
So far she spoke, and, propped on her painted buskins,
shook her head, thick with hair, three and four times over.
The other, if I remember, smiled with a sidelong glance —
am I wrong, or was there a myrtle wand in her right hand?
’Why with weighty words, spirited Tragedy,’ she said,
’do you press me? Can you never not be weighty?
Yet you deigned to move in unequal measures;
you fought against me using my own verses.
I would not match your lofty songs with mine;
your palace overwhelms my little doors.
I am light, and light with me is Cupid, my care;
I am myself no stronger than my matter.
Without me the mother of wanton Love would be a peasant;
I came forth as that goddess’s go-between and companion.
The door you could never unbar with your hard buskin
stands loose to my coaxing;
and yet I have earned more power than you, by bearing
much that your haughty brow would never endure.
Through me Corinna, having tricked her guard, learned
to tempt the loyalty of the tight-shut threshold,
to slip from her bed wrapped in a loosened tunic
and move her feet unheard through the night.
Ah, how often I hung fixed to her hard door,
not afraid to be read by the passing crowd!
Why, I remember, while the cruel guard went off,
I hid, poor thing, in the bosom of her maid.
What of the time you sent me as a birthday gift, and she,
the barbarous girl, tore me up and drowned me in water set beside her?
I first set stirring the lucky seeds of your talent;
the gift she now courts you for — that gift is mine.’
She had finished. I began: ’By you both I beg —
let the words of a man in fear reach unoccupied ears.
You, the one, would grace me with sceptre and high buskin;
already, at the touch, a great sound is in my mouth.
You, the other, give my love a name that will live —
so stay, and to the long verses add the short!
Grant the poet a little time, Tragedy!
You are eternal labor; what she asks is brief.’
She was moved and gave leave — let the tender Loves be hurried on
while there is leisure; behind my back a grander work bears down.

’I do not sit here keen on the high-bred horses;
yet I pray the one you favor may win.
I came to talk with you and to sit beside you,
so the love you cause should not be unknown to you.
You watch the races, I watch you; let each of us gaze
on what delights, and each feed his own eyes.
O lucky driver of horses, whoever it is you favor!
So it fell to him to be your concern?
Let this fall to me: launched from the sacred gate,
I would stand to the car with a bold mind, to be carried by the horses,
now give them the reins, now mark their backs with the lash,
now graze the turning-post with my inner wheel.
But if you came in sight as I ran, I would slow,
and the reins would slip slack from my hands.
Ah, how nearly Pelops fell to the Pisan spear,
while he gazed, Hippodamia, on your face!
Yet, sure enough, he won by his own girl’s favor.
Let each of us win by the favor of his mistress!
Why shrink back for nothing? The line forces us together.
These conveniences the Circus grants by the law of the place —
but you on the right, whoever you are, spare the girl;
she is hurt by the touch of your side.
You too, watching behind us, draw in your legs,
if you have any decency, and don’t press her back with your stiff knee!
But your cloak hangs trailing too far on the ground.
Gather it up — or look, I lift it with my fingers!
A grudging garment you were, to cover such fine legs;
and the more one looks — a grudging garment you were!
Such were the legs of fleeing Atalanta that Milanion
longed to have held up in his hands.
Such are the legs they paint on girt-up Diana
when she hunts brave beasts, herself the braver.
Not seeing these I burned; what will come of them seen?
You pour flames onto flame, water into the sea.
From these I suspect the rest can please as well —
all that lies well hidden under the thin dress.
Meanwhile, would you like to summon an easy breeze?
My hand will make one with this moving fan.
Or is this heat more of my mind than of the air,
and does a woman’s love scorch my captured heart?
While I talk, your white dress is dusted with fine dust.
Off with you, filthy dust, from her snow-white body!
But now the procession comes — keep tongues and minds in awe!
The time for applause is here — the golden procession comes.
First in place Victory is borne with wings spread wide —
come here, goddess, and make my love win!
Applaud Neptune, you who trust the waves too far!
I have nothing to do with the sea; my own land holds me.
Applaud your own Mars, soldier! We hate arms;
peace delights us, and love, found in the midst of peace.
Let Phoebus stand by the augurs, Phoebe by the hunters!
Turn the craftsmen’s hands to you, Minerva!
Country-folk, rise for Ceres and tender Bacchus!
The boxer favors Pollux, the horseman Castor!
We applaud you, coaxing Venus, and the boys mighty with the bow;
nod assent, goddess, to my undertakings,
and give a mind to my new mistress! Let her allow herself to be loved!
She nodded, and gave favoring signs with the motion.
What the goddess promised, promise it yourself, I ask;
with Venus’s leave I’ll say it, you will be the greater goddess.
By so many witnesses and the procession of gods I swear to you,
you are the mistress I court for all time!
But your legs hang down. You can, if it happens to help,
slip the tips of your feet into the rail.
And now the praetor, the Circus cleared, has launched
the great spectacle — the four-horse teams from a level gate.
I see whom you back. He will win, whomever you favor.
What you desire, the very horses seem to know.
Wretched me — he rounds the post in a wide circle!
What are you doing? The next man comes up, his axle close.
What are you doing, luckless man? You ruin the girl’s good prayers.
Pull, I beg, on the reins hard with your left hand!
We’ve backed a sluggard — but call them back, Quirites,
and give the signal everywhere with your tossed togas!
Look, they call them back! — and so the tossed toga won’t muss your hair,
you may hide yourself right here in my bosom.
And now the gate is unbarred, the posts stand open again;
the field of varied colors flies out with the horses loosed.
Now at least pull ahead and rise into the open stretch!
Make my prayers, make my mistress’s prayers come true!
My mistress’s prayers are answered; mine are still outstanding.
He holds the palm; my palm is still to be sought.
She laughed, and with her bright eyes promised something.
’That’s enough here — grant the rest in another place!’

That there are gods — go on, believe it! She broke the faith she swore,
and the beauty she had before still stays with her!
The hair she had, long, before she forswore herself,
just as long she has now, after wronging the powers above.
Fair, her whiteness flushed with rosy red
she was before — the red still shines on her snowy face.
Her foot was small — her foot’s shape is most trim.
Tall and graceful she was — tall and graceful she stays.
Bright eyes she had — they shine like a star,
the eyes through which, faithless, she lied to me so often.
No doubt the eternal gods grant girls the right
to swear falsely, and beauty has a power of its own.
I remember she swore lately by her own eyes
and by mine: and look — it was mine that ached!
Tell me, gods, if she cheated you and went scot-free,
why did I bear the loss for another’s fault?
Or is the daughter of Cepheus no grievance to you,
ordered to die for a mother too proud of her beauty?
Is it not enough that I had you for worthless witnesses,
and unpunished she laughs at the gods mocked along with me?
So that she may buy off her own perjuries by my punishment,
am I, the cheated, to be the cheat’s sacrifice?
Either a god is a name without substance, feared for nothing,
who moves the people with foolish credulity;
or, if there is a god, he loves tender girls
and bids them alone be able to do anything.
Against us Mars girds on his death-dealing sword;
against us Pallas’s spear comes from an unconquered hand.
Against us Apollo’s pliant bows are bent;
against us the high right hand of Jove holds the thunderbolt.
The wronged gods are afraid to offend the beautiful
and, unprompted, fear the very women who did not fear them.
And does anyone trouble to lay pious incense on the hearths?
Surely men ought to have more spirit than this!
Jupiter hurls his fire at the groves and the citadels
and forbids his flung shafts to strike the perjured.
So many have earned his aim — yet pitiable Semele burned!
The punishment she found came from her own compliance;
but had she slipped away from her lover as he came,
the father would not be doing the mother’s work over Bacchus.
Why do I complain and rail at the whole heaven?
The gods too have eyes, the gods too have a heart!
If I were a god myself, I would let a woman cheat
my godhead with a lying mouth and go free;
I myself would swear that girls swear true,
and I’d not be called one of the sour gods.
Still, use their gift more moderately —
or at least, girl, spare my eyes!

Hard husband, by setting a guard over your tender girl
you do nothing; each must be kept safe by her own nature.
If any woman is chaste with fear removed, she is chaste at last;
the one who doesn’t, only because she may not — she does it!
Though you guard the body well, the mind’s an adulteress;
and no woman can be guarded against wanting.
Nor can you guard the body, though you lock everything;
with all shut out, the adulterer will be within.
She who is allowed to sin sins less; the very freedom
makes the seeds of wantonness fainter.
Stop, believe me, provoking vices by forbidding;
you’ll master them better by giving way.
I saw lately a horse, balking against his bonds,
go like a thunderbolt with mouth fighting the rein;
he stopped the moment he felt the reins given,
the loose bridle lying on his streaming mane.
We always strain after the forbidden and crave what’s denied;
so the sick man hankers after the water he’s banned from.
A hundred eyes on his brow, a hundred on his neck
Argus bore — and Love alone tricked them often;
into a chamber of iron and stone, built to last,
Danae was handed as a virgin, and became a mother;
Penelope stayed, though she had no guard,
untouched among so many young suitors.
Whatever is guarded we want the more, and the very
watching summons the thief; few love what another allows.
She pleases not by her own face, but by her husband’s love;
they suppose there’s some something that has caught you.
The wife a husband guards is not made honest, but a prized adulteress;
the fear itself has a worth greater than her body.
Be indignant if you like, forbidden pleasure delights;
she alone pleases who can say, ’I’m afraid!’
Yet it’s no right to guard a freeborn girl —
let this fear drive the bodies of a foreign race!
So that the guard can say, ’I did it,’
is she to be chaste to the credit of your slave?
He is far too much a boor whom an adulterous wife wounds,
and he doesn’t know enough of the city’s familiar ways,
the city where the sons of Mars were not born without scandal,
Romulus, Ilia’s child, and Remus, Ilia’s child.
Why take a beautiful wife, if only a chaste one pleased you?
Those two things can come together by no means.
If you are wise, indulge your mistress and put off
your stern looks; don’t enforce the rights of a rigid husband,
and cultivate the friends your wife gives you — she’ll give many.
So great favor comes with the least labor;
so you’ll always be able to join the parties of the young
and see at home much that you never paid for.

’It was night, and sleep let my weary eyes sink down;
such visions terrified my mind:
Under a sunny hill a grove thick with holm-oak
stood, and in its branches many a bird lay hidden.
Below was a clearing, greenest with grassy meadow,
moist with the drops of softly sounding water.
I myself was avoiding the heat under the leaves of the trees —
yet under the trees’ leaves there was heat all the same —
when look! seeking the grass mingled with various flowers
a white cow stopped before my eyes,
whiter than snow when it has just fallen,
not yet turned by time into flowing water;
whiter than the milk that still gleams with hissing froth
and has just left the ewe newly drained.
A bull was her companion, her happy mate,
and with his consort he pressed the soft ground.
While he lies and slowly chews the recalled grass
and feeds again on the food fed on before,
he seemed, as sleep took away his strength to hold it up,
to have laid his horned head on the ground.
Hither a crow, gliding down on light wings through the air,
came and chattering settled on the green ground,
and three times with her pecking beak dug at the snowy cow’s breast
and tore away the whitening hair with her bill.
The cow, long hesitating, leaves the place and the bull —
but there was a black bruise on the cow’s breast;
and when she saw far off the bulls cropping the fodder —
far off the bulls were cropping the rich fodder —
she rushed there and mingled with those herds
and made for ground of more fertile grass.
Come, tell me, whoever you are, reader of the night’s image,
if these have any truth, what those visions bring.’
So I; and so the reader of the night’s image spoke,
weighing each word in his mind:
’The heat you wanted to avoid under the shifting leaves,
but avoided badly, was the heat of love.
The cow is your girl — that color suits a girl;
you are the man, and in the cow’s mate you were the bull.
That the crow dug at the breast with its sharp beak —
an old bawd was working on your mistress’s mind.
That the cow, long hesitating, left her bull —
you are left cold and forsaken in a widowed bed.
The bruise and the black marks under the breast turned away
deny that her heart is free of adultery’s stain.’
The interpreter had spoken. The blood fled from my chilled face,
and deep night stood before my eyes.

River, your muddy banks fringed with reeds,
I’m hurrying to my mistress — hold back your waters a moment!
You have no bridges, nor a hollow skiff to ferry one across
on a hauled rope, without the stroke of an oarsman.
You were small, I remember, and I didn’t shrink from crossing you,
and your topmost water scarcely touched my ankles.
Now you tear down from the neighboring mountain, the snows melted,
and roll your thick waters in a foul flood.
What good was it to have hurried, to have grudged time to rest,
to have stitched the day onto the night,
if I must stand here all the same, if by no arts I’m granted
to set my foot on the far bank?
Now I wish for the wings the hero, Danae’s son, had
when he carried the head thick with the dreadful snakes,
now I wish for the chariot from which the seeds of Ceres
first came, cast onto the untilled soil.
I speak the monstrous lies of the old poets;
no day ever brought these to pass, nor ever will.
Rather you, river spilling over your wide banks —
so may you flow forever — slip back within your bounds!
You’ll bear no enviable name, torrent, believe me,
if I be said to be a lover held back by you.
Rivers ought to help young men in love;
rivers themselves have felt what love is.
Inachus is said to have gone pale for Bithynian Melie
and to have grown hot in his chilly shallows.
Troy had not yet been besieged ten years
when Neaera ravished your gaze, Xanthus.
What of Alpheus — did not a sure love for the Arcadian maid
drive him to run through far-apart lands?
You too, Peneus — they say you hid Creusa, promised to Xuthus,
in the lands of Phthia.
Why tell of Asopus, whom warlike Thebe captivated,
Thebe who would be mother of five daughters?
If I now ask where your horns are, Achelous,
you’ll complain they were broken by Hercules’s angry hand;
Calydon was not worth so much, nor all Aetolia worth it,
yet Deianira alone was worth so much.
That Nile, flowing rich through its seven mouths,
that hides so well the source of all its water,
is said to have been unable to quench in all his floods
the flame he caught for Euanthe, daughter of Asopus.
So that he might embrace the daughter of Salmoneus dry,
Enipeus bade his water withdraw; bidden, the water drew back.
Nor do I pass you by, who, rolling through hollow rocks,
water the orchard-fields of Argive Tibur,
you whom Ilia pleased, though she was wild in her looks,
her hair scored by her nails, her cheeks scored by her nails.
Groaning over her uncle’s crime and the offences of Mars,
she wandered through lonely places on bare foot.
Bold Anio saw her from his rushing waves
and raised his hoarse face from the midst of his shallows
and spoke thus: ’Why, anxious, do you wear my banks,
Ilia, descended from Idaean Laomedon?
Where has your finery gone? Why do you wander alone,
no white fillet binding up your hair?
Why weep and spoil your eyes wet with tears,
and beat your bared breast with a frantic hand?
He has flint and living iron in his breast,
the man who unmoved sees tears on a tender face.
Ilia, lay aside your fears! My palace will lie open to you,
and the rivers will court you. Ilia, lay aside your fears!
You will rule over a hundred nymphs or more;
for my waters hold a hundred nymphs or more.
Only do not scorn me so, I beg, scion of Troy;
you will get gifts richer than my promises.’
He had spoken. She, her modest eyes cast to the ground,
weeping, sprinkled her soft breast with a shower of tears.
Three times she tried to flee, three times she stopped at the deep water,
fear snatching away her strength to run.
At last, tearing her hair with a hostile thumb,
she uttered these unworthy sounds from a trembling mouth:
’O would that my bones had been gathered and laid
in my father’s tomb, while they could still be gathered as a virgin’s!
Why am I, just now a Vestal, invited to any marriage-torch,
disgraced and to be disowned by the hearths of Troy?
Why do I linger and get pointed at by the crowd as an adulteress?
Let the face be gone that infamous shame would brand!’
So far she spoke, and held her dress before her swollen eyes
and so, lost, threw herself into the rushing waters.
The slippery river is said to have slipped his hands beneath her breast
and to have granted her the rights of a partner’s bed.
You too, it’s likely, grew hot for some girl;
but woods and forests cover your sins.
While I speak, you have swelled, broader with your wide waters,
and the deep channel cannot hold the waters let in.
What have you against me, madman? Why put off our shared
joys? Why, boor, break the journey I began?
What if you flowed a lawful, a noble river,
if you had the greatest fame through the lands —
You have no name, gathered out of falling streams,
you have no springs, no fixed home!
For a spring you have only rain and melted snows,
the riches that sluggish winter supplies you;
either muddy you run your course in the winter season,
or, dusty, you press the parched ground.
What thirsty traveler could then have drunk you?
Who said with a grateful voice, ’May you flow forever’?
Ruinous to the herds you run, more ruinous to the fields.
Perhaps these losses move others; mine move me.
To this thing — oh madness! — I was telling the loves of rivers!
I’m ashamed to have flung such great names away on it unworthily.
Looking at this nobody, I could speak of Achelous and Inachus the river
and even, Nile, recall your name!
But as your deserts earn, I wish you, you muddy torrent,
scorching suns and a winter forever dry!

But she’s not beautiful, not well groomed, this girl,
nor, I suppose, often sought by my prayers!
Yet I held her to no use, slack to my shame,
but lay, a reproach and a dead weight on a sluggish bed;
and though I wanted her, and the girl wanted me as much,
I could take no joy from the helping part of my worn-out groin.
She indeed slipped around my neck her ivory
arms, whiter than Sithonian snow,
pressed in kisses that fought with her eager tongue,
and laid her wanton thigh beneath my thigh,
and spoke caresses to me and called me her lord,
and the other common words that give delight.
Yet my members, as if touched with cold hemlock,
went sluggish and failed my intent;
I lay an inert stump, a show and a useless weight,
and it was not settled whether I was a body or a ghost.
What old age is coming to me — if it is coming at all —
when youth itself fails its own functions?
Ah, I’m ashamed of my years: what use to me being young and a man?
My mistress felt me neither young nor a man!
So an eternal priestess rises to approach the holy flames,
and a sister, revered, leaves her dear brother.
Yet lately fair Chlide twice, white Pitho three times,
Libas three times, I kept in unbroken service;
and in one short night, I remember, Corinna demanded,
and I held up, nine rounds.
Is my body cursed and slack with Thessalian poison?
Do a spell and herbs harm me, wretch that I am,
or has a witch fixed my name in red wax
and driven a thin needle into the middle of my liver?
Wronged by a spell, Ceres withers into barren grass,
the waters of the spring, wronged by a spell, fail,
acorns fall from the holm-oak, the charmed grape from the vine,
and the fruit drops though nothing shakes it.
What stops the sinews too from going numb by magic arts?
Perhaps that’s why my loins turn powerless.
To this was added shame: the very shame of the act did harm;
that was the second cause of my failure.
Yet what a girl I only saw and touched!
Just so is she touched even by her own tunic.
At her touch the old man of Pylos could grow young again
and Tithonus be stronger than his years.
She had fallen to me; but no man fell to her.
What prayers shall I now frame in fresh vows?
I believe even the great gods regretted the gift
they offered, which I used so shamefully.
I wished, surely, to be received — well, I was received;
to bring kisses — I brought them; to be next to her — I was.
What good is such luck to me? what good a kingdom unused?
What am I but a rich miser who has hoarded his wealth?
So the blabber of secrets thirsts in the midst of the waters
and has fruit he may at no time touch.
Does any man rise so in the morning from a tender girl
that he can go straight to approach the holy gods?
But, I suppose, she wasted no coaxing, no choicest
kisses on me; she stirred me with no resource at all!
She could have moved heavy oaks and hard adamant
and deaf rocks with her caresses.
She was worthy, surely, to move living things and men;
but I then was neither alive nor a man, as before.
What use if Phemius sings to deaf ears?
What good is a painted panel to poor Thamyras?
But what joys I shaped in my silent mind!
What postures I imagined and arranged!
Yet my members lay as though dead before their time,
shamefully limper than yesterday’s rose —
which now, look, are lively and strong out of season,
now they demand their work and their warfare.
Why not lie there ashamed, you worst part of me?
Just so I was caught before by your promises.
You cheat your master; through you, caught unarmed,
I bore grievous losses with great shame.
This part my girl did not even disdain to rouse,
gently bringing her hand to it;
but when she saw it could rise by no arts
and lay slumped, forgetful of itself,
’Why mock me?’ she said, ’who, you sick fool, bade you
lay your unwilling limbs on my bed?
Either the witch of Aeaea curses you with threads passed through,
or you come worn out from another love.’
No delay — she leapt up, wrapped in a loosened tunic —
and it became her to dash off on bare feet! —
and so her maids couldn’t know she’d been left untouched,
she covered up the disgrace by calling for water.

And does anyone still look up to the liberal arts,
or think tender song has any dowry?
Talent was once more precious than gold;
but now it’s gross barbarism to own nothing.
Though my little books pleased my lovely mistress,
where my books were allowed to go, I am not allowed;
though she praised them well, the door is shut on the praised man.
Shamefully I, the gifted one, go this way and that.
Look — newly rich, his fortune won through wounds,
a knight fattened on blood is preferred to me!
Can you embrace him, my life, with your lovely arms?
Can you lie, my life, in his embrace?
If you don’t know, this head used to carry a helmet;
the flank that serves you was girt with a sword;
his left hand, ill-suited now to its late gold,
bore a shield; touch his right — it was bloody!
Can you touch that right hand by which someone died?
Alas, where is that softness of your heart?
Look at the scars, the marks of old fighting —
whatever he has was earned by his body.
Perhaps he’ll even tell how many men he’s cut down!
Do you touch those confessing hands, you greedy thing?
Am I, the pure priest of the Muses and Phoebus,
to sing an idle song at unbending doors?
Learn, you who are wise, not the things we idlers know,
but to follow the nervous battle-lines and the savage camps,
and instead of a good verse, lead out the first javelin!
A night with her could be granted you, Homer, if you went to war.
Jupiter, warned that nothing is mightier than gold,
was himself the price of the seduced virgin.
While the pay was lacking, hard was the father, stern the girl herself,
the doorposts bronze, the tower iron;
but after the shrewd adulterer came in a gift,
she herself offered her breast and, told to give, gave.
But when old Saturn held the realms of heaven,
the deep earth pressed all gain into the dark.
Bronze and silver and, with gold, the weights of iron
it had moved down to the shades, and there was no ingot.
But it gave better things — grain without the curved plowshare,
fruits, and honey found in the hollow oak.
No one split the earth with a strong plow,
no surveyor marked the ground with any boundary,
men didn’t sweep the churned seas with the dipped oar;
the shore was then the farthest road for a mortal.
Against yourself you were clever, human nature,
and far too ingenious to your own harm.
Why gird your cities with towered walls?
Why set quarreling hands to arms?
What have you to do with the sea — you should have been content with land!
Why not seek heaven too, the third realm?
So far as you may, you aim at heaven too — temples
Quirinus has, and Liber and Alcides, and lately Caesar.
We dig solid gold from the earth instead of grain.
The soldier owns the wealth he found by blood.
The Senate-house is shut to the poor — the property-rating gives offices;
hence the grave juror, hence the stern knight!
Let them own everything; let the Campus and the forum
serve them, let these men manage peace and cruel wars —
only let them not, greedy, bid for my loves at auction,
and — it’s enough — let something belong to a poor man!
But now, though she might match the grim Sabine women,
the man who can give much commands her like a captive;
the guard keeps me off; on my account she fears her husband.
If I gave, both would clear out of the whole house!
O if some god, avenger of the slighted lover,
would turn such ill-gotten riches to dust!

If a mother wept for Memnon, a mother for Achilles,
and sad fates touch the great goddesses,
mournful Elegy, loosen your unworthy hair!
Ah, too truly now your name will fit you! —
Tibullus, the poet of your work, your fame,
burns, an empty body, on the heaped pyre.
Look, Venus’s boy carries his quiver overturned
and his bow broken and his torch without light;
see how piteously he goes with drooping wings
and beats his bared breast with a hostile hand!
His hair, scattered over his neck, catches the tears,
and his mouth sounds with shaking sobs.
So, they say, at the funeral of his brother Aeneas
he came forth from your house, fair Iulus;
and Venus is no less shaken at the dying of Tibullus
than when the savage boar tore the young man’s groin.
Yet we are called sacred poets and the care of the gods;
there are even those who think we hold a godhead.
No doubt importunate death profanes all that is holy,
and lays its unseen hands on all!
What good to Orpheus of Ismarus were father and mother?
What good that the beasts stood stunned, conquered by his song?
And the same father is said to have sung ’ah, Linus!’ for Linus
in the high woods on an unwilling lyre.
Add the man of Maeonia, from whom, as from an unfailing spring,
the mouths of poets are watered with Pierian streams —
him too the last day plunged into black Avernus.
Songs alone escape the greedy pyres;
they endure, a poet’s work — the fame of the Trojan war
and the slow web unwoven by night’s cunning.
So Nemesis, so Delia will have a lasting name,
the one his recent care, the other his first love.
What good to you are your rites? What good now the Egyptian
sistra? What good to have slept apart in an empty bed?
When evil fates snatch off the good — forgive my confession! —
I am tempted to think there are no gods.
Live devout — you’ll die; devout, tend the rites — even as you tend them
grim death will drag you from the temples to the hollow tomb;
trust in fine songs — look, Tibullus lies low:
of the whole man scarce enough remains to fill a small urn!
You, sacred poet — did the pyre’s flames carry you off,
and not fear to feed upon your breast?
They could have burned the golden temples of the holy gods,
those flames that dared so great a sacrilege!
She who holds the heights of Eryx turned away her face;
there are some too who say she could not hold back her tears.
Yet this is better than if the Phaeacian land
had laid him unknown beneath cheap soil.
Here at least his mother closed his moist eyes as he fled
and brought the last gifts to his ashes;
here his sister came, sharing the grief with the wretched mother,
her unkempt hair torn,
and Nemesis and the earlier love joined their kisses
to yours, and did not leave the pyre forsaken.
Delia, departing, said: ’More happily was I
loved by you; you lived while I was your flame.’
To her Nemesis: ’Why,’ she said, ’is my loss a grief to you?
It was me he held, dying, with his failing hand.’
Yet if anything of us but name and shade
remains, Tibullus will be in the Elysian vale.
Come to meet him, your youthful brow bound with ivy,
learned Catullus, with your Calvus;
you too, Gallus, if the charge of betraying a friend is false,
you spendthrift of your blood and your life.
Your shade is their companion; if there’s any shade of the body at all,
you have swelled the devout numbers, refined Tibullus.
Quiet bones, I pray, rest safe in the urn,
and may the earth lie not heavy on your ashes!

The yearly season of Ceres’s rite has come;
my girl sleeps alone, apart in an empty bed.
Golden Ceres, your fine hair wreathed with ears of grain,
why do you bar my pleasures with your rites?
You, goddess, the nations everywhere call bountiful,
and none begrudges human goods less than you.
Before, no shaggy farmers parched the spelt,
nor was the threshing-floor a name known to the lands,
but the oaks, the first oracles, bore acorns;
these and the grass of the soft turf were food.
Ceres first taught the seed to swell in the fields
and cut the colored tresses with the sickle;
she first forced bulls to put their necks under the yoke,
and tore up the old ground with the curved tooth.
Does anyone believe she delights in lovers’ tears
and is well honored by torments and sleeping apart?
Yet she is not — though she loves fertile fields —
a peasant, nor is her heart widowed of love.
The Cretans will be my witnesses — and Cretans don’t make up everything.
Crete is the land proud of having reared Jove.
There the boy who governs the starry citadel of the world
drank milk, tiny, with a tender mouth.
Great is the trust in the witness: the witness is praised for its nursling.
I think Ceres would confess the charge I bring.
The goddess had seen Iasius beneath Cretan Ida
piercing the backs of wild beasts with a sure hand.
She saw, and when her tender marrow caught the flame,
on this side shame, on that side love kept dragging her.
Love beat shame; you’d have seen the furrows go dry
and the crops come back with the smallest part of their seed.
When the well-swung mattocks had beaten the fields,
and the hooked plowshare had broken the hard ground,
and the seed had gone evenly into the broad fields,
the prayers of the cheated farmer were in vain.
The goddess mighty over crops idled in the high woods;
the garlands of grain had fallen from her long hair.
Crete alone was fruitful in a teeming year;
wherever the goddess had taken herself, all was harvest;
Ide herself, a place of groves, grew white with grain,
and the wild boar reaped the spelt in the woods.
Law-giving Minos wished for years like these for himself;
he would have wished Ceres’s love to be a long one.
Because sleeping apart was a sorrow to you, golden goddess,
am I now compelled to bear the same at your rites?
Why should I be sad, when your daughter has been found again
and rules a realm only less than Juno’s by lot?
A festal day calls for love and song and wine;
these are the gifts it’s fitting to bring to the ruling gods.

Much and long I’ve borne; my patience is beaten by your faults;
withdraw from my weary breast, base love!
Now indeed I’ve claimed my freedom and fled the chains,
and what I was not ashamed to bear, I’m ashamed to have borne.
I’ve won, and trample love, tamed, beneath my feet;
late have the horns come to my head.
Endure and hold firm! This pain will profit you one day;
often a bitter draught has brought aid to the weary.
So I put up with it — so often turned from the door —
laying my freeborn body on the hard ground?
So, for who-knows-whom that you held in your arms,
I kept watch like a slave before the shut house?
I saw, when a worn-out lover came out of the door,
carrying off his weak and discharged flank;
yet this is lighter than that I was seen by him —
may that shame fall on my enemies!
When did I not cling patiently fixed to your side,
myself your guard, myself your man, myself your escort?
No doubt, escorted by me, you pleased the crowd as well;
my love was the cause of love in many men.
Why recount the foul lies of your false tongue
and the gods perjured to my hurt?
Why the young men’s silent nods amid the feasts
and the words hidden under arranged signs?
I was told she was sick — headlong, out of my mind, I ran;
I came, and she was not sick for my rival!
By bearing these and what I keep silent I often hardened myself;
look for another in my place who can endure such things.
Now my ship, wreathed with the votive garland,
calmly hears the swelling waters of the sea.
Stop wasting your caresses and your words, once so potent —
I am not now the fool I was before!

They wrestle, and pull my fickle heart in opposite ways,
love this way, hatred that — but love, I think, wins.
I’ll hate, if I can; if not, I’ll love against my will.
The bull does not love the yoke; yet what he hates, he wears.
I flee your faithlessness — your beauty draws back the fleeing man;
I turn from the sins of your character — I love your body.
So I can live neither without you nor with you,
and I seem not to know my own wish.
I’d want you either less beautiful, or less wicked;
such fine beauty doesn’t suit such bad behavior.
Your deeds earn hatred, your face wins love by entreaty —
wretched me, she prevails over her own faults!
Spare me, by the shared rights of the bed, by all
the gods who so often give themselves to you to be deceived,
and by your face, to me the likeness of a great godhead,
and by your eyes, which ravished mine!
Whatever you’ll be, you’ll always be mine; only you choose
whether you’d have me want it too, or love under compulsion!
Rather let me give my sails and use the bearing winds,
so that the love I’d be forced to, against my will, I may will.

What day was that, on which, you birds not white,
you sang together omens always sad for a lover?
What star shall I think crosses my fate,
what gods shall I complain are stirring wars against me?
She who was lately called mine, whom I began to love alone,
I fear I must now share with many.
Am I wrong, or has she grown famous through my little books?
So it is — she’s been hawked about by my own talent.
And deservedly! For why did I cry up her beauty?
By my fault my girl has been made up for sale.
With me her pander she pleases, with me the guide the lover is led in,
the door has been opened wide by my own hands.
Whether poems do good is doubtful; they’ve always done harm;
they were the envy that fell on my own goods.
Though there was Thebes, though Troy, though Caesar’s deeds,
Corinna alone stirred my talent.
Would that I had touched my songs with the Muses turned away,
and Phoebus had abandoned the work I began!
And yet it’s not the custom to hear poets as witnesses;
I’d rather my words had no weight.
Through us Scylla, having stolen her father’s dear hair,
presses raging dogs at her loins and groin;
we gave wings to feet, we gave snakes for hair;
the victorious son of Abas is borne on a winged horse.
We too stretched out huge Tityos over his space of ground,
and made three mouths for the snake-haired dog;
we made Enceladus hurl with a thousand arms,
and men captured by the voice of the ambiguous maiden.
We shut Aeolus’s east winds in the Ithacan’s bags;
the betrayer Tantalus thirsts in the midst of the stream.
We made a stone of Niobe, a she-bear of the maiden.
The Cecropian bird sings of Odrysian Itys;
Jupiter transforms himself either into birds, or into gold,
or, a bull, cuts the waters with the maiden set on his back.
Why mention Proteus and the Theban seed, the teeth;
the bulls that there were, breathing flames from the mouth;
your sisters, Charioteer, weeping amber from their cheeks;
and those that were ships, now goddesses of the sea;
and the day turned away from the fiendish feast of Atreus,
and the hard rocks that followed the struck lyre?
The fertile license of poets runs out into the boundless,
and binds its words to no historical truth.
And my woman, falsely praised, should have seemed so too;
now your credulity does me harm.

Since my wife was born in apple-bearing Falerii,
we reached the walls conquered by you, Camillus.
The priestesses were preparing chaste rites for Juno
and thronging games and a native heifer;
a great reward for the delay, to learn the ritual, though
the road offers a hard way here over the slopes.
There stands an old grove, shadowed dark with thick trees;
look — you’d grant a god dwells in the place.
An altar receives the prayers and votive incense of the devout —
an altar made without art by ancient hands.
From here, when the pipe has sounded out its solemn tune,
the yearly procession goes through the draped streets;
snow-white heifers are led with the people applauding,
heifers the Faliscan grass reared on its own plains,
and calves, not yet menacing with brow to fear,
and a humbler victim, the pig from its lowly sty,
and the leader of the flock with horn curved back over his hard temples.
The she-goat alone is hateful to the ruling goddess;
by her informing, the goddess, found beneath the high woods,
is said to have given up the flight she’d begun.
Now too the betrayer is attacked by the boys with javelins
and is herself given as prize to the one who deals the wound.
Where the goddess will come, young men and timid girls
sweep the broad streets before her with their trailing robes.
Maidens’ hair is weighted with gold and gem,
and a proud mantle covers their gilded feet;
after the Greek manner of their fathers, veiled in white robes,
they carry on their heads the sacred things handed down.
The mouths of the people keep awed silence when the golden procession comes,
and the goddess herself follows close behind her priestesses.
The look of the procession is Argive; when Agamemnon was slain
Halaesus fled both the crime and his father’s wealth
and now, an exile having wandered over land and sea,
founded these high walls with a lucky hand.
He it was who taught his Faliscans the rites of Juno.
May they be ever kind to me, ever kind to their own people!

I don’t ask you not to sin, since you’re beautiful,
but that I not, poor wretch, be forced to know;
nor does my judgment bid you become chaste,
but it does ask that you try to dissemble.
She does not sin who can deny she’s sinned,
and only the fault confessed makes a woman notorious.
What madness, to confess in daylight what hides by night,
and to report openly the deeds you do in secret?
The whore, about to join her body to an unknown citizen,
keeps the crowd off first with the bar set across;
will you prostitute your sins to ill fame,
and carry through the informing on your own crime?
Have a better mind, or at least imitate the chaste,
and let me think you honest, though you won’t be.
What you do, go on doing; only deny you’ve done it,
and don’t be ashamed to speak modest words in public!
There’s a place that calls for wantonness; fill that one
with all delights, let shame stand far away from there!
The moment you’ve left it, let all lewdness at once
be gone, and lay your sins down on your bed.
There let it be no shame to have taken off your tunic,
nor to have borne a thigh laid over your thigh;
there let the tongue be buried in crimson lips,
and let love shape Venus into a thousand modes;
there let neither cries nor helping words fall still,
and let the bed-frame tremble with wanton motion!
Put on, with your tunic, a face that fears scandal,
and let modesty disown the obscene work;
fool the people, fool me; let me stray in ignorance,
and grant me the joy of a foolish credulity!
Why do I so often see tablets sent and received?
Why is the far side of the bed pressed down too?
Why do I see your hair more tangled than by sleep,
and your neck wearing the mark of a tooth?
You bring the offence almost up to my very eyes;
if you hesitate to spare your name, spare me!
My mind goes and I die each time you confess you’ve sinned,
and a cold drop runs through my limbs.
Then I love, then I hate in vain what I must love;
then I’d wish to be dead — but with you!
I’ll make no inquiry for my part, nor chase down
what you’ll prepare to hide, and to be deceived will be like a gift.
Yet if you’re caught and held in the very midst of the fault,
and the shame must be seen by my eyes,
deny that what I saw plainly I saw plainly —
my eyes will yield to your words.
Easy is the palm for you, to beat one who wishes to be beaten,
if only your tongue remembers to say ’I didn’t do it!’
Since you can win with just two words,
even if not by your case, win by your judge!

Seek a new poet, mother of the tender Loves!
Here the last turning-post is grazed by my elegies;
these I composed, a nursling of the Paelignian country —
nor did my pleasures dishonor me —
heir, for what it’s worth, to an old rank from forefathers far back,
not a knight made just now by the whirlwind of war.
Mantua rejoices in Virgil, Verona in Catullus;
I shall be called the glory of the Paelignian people,
whom their love of freedom had driven to honorable arms,
when anxious Rome feared the allied bands.
And some stranger, gazing on the walls of watery Sulmo,
which hold a few acres of plain,
will say: ’You who could bear so great a poet,
however small you are, I call you great.’
Refined boy, and you of Amathus, mother of the refined boy —
pull up the golden standards from my field!
Horned Lyaeus has clashed with a heavier thyrsus:
a greater field must be beaten by great horses.
Unwarlike elegies, genial Muse, farewell,
a work to outlast me, surviving after my death!