Your Penelope sends you this, slow Ulysses; but write nothing back to me — come yourself! Troy lies fallen, surely, hateful to the daughters of the Greeks; Priam and the whole of Troy were scarcely worth so much. O that then, when he was making for Lacedaemon under sail, the adulterer had been drowned in the raging seas! I would not have lain cold in a deserted bed, nor, left behind, complain that the days go slow; nor, as I sought to cheat the spacious night, would the hanging web tire my widowed hands. When did I not fear dangers graver than the true? Love is a thing brimful of anxious fear. I kept imagining the violent Trojans bearing down on you; at the name of Hector I was always pale. Whether someone told that Antilochus had been beaten by the foe, Antilochus was the cause of my fear; or that the son of Menoetius had fallen in borrowed arms, I wept that stratagems too can fail of their reward. Tlepolemus had warmed his Lycian spear with blood; by Tlepolemus’ death my dread was made new. In short, whoever was cut down in the Achaean camp, the heart of this lover turned colder than ice. But a fair god looked kindly on my chaste love: Troy is turned to ashes, my husband safe. The Argive leaders are home, the altars smoke; barbarian spoil is laid before our fathers’ gods. The young wives bring glad gifts for their husbands saved; those men sing of Troy’s doom conquered by their own. Righteous old men and trembling girls look on in wonder; a wife hangs on the lips of her storytelling husband. And someone, the table set, points out the savage battles, and paints all Pergamum in a little wine: ’This way ran Simois; here is the Sigean land; here stood the lofty palace of old Priam. There the son of Aeacus, there Ulysses pitched his tent; here mangled Hector terrified the galloping horses.’ For old Nestor had told the whole of it to your son, sent to seek you, and he to me. He told too of Rhesus and Dolon cut down by the sword, how the one was betrayed by sleep, the other by a trick. You dared — o too, too forgetful of your own! — to enter the Thracian camp by a nighttime trick and to butcher so many men at one stroke, helped by one alone! But you used to be so careful — and mindful, first, of me! My breast kept fluttering with fear, until you, victorious, were said to have ridden the Ismarian horses through the allied ranks. But what does it profit me that Ilium is scattered by your arms, and that what was wall is now level ground, if I stay on just as I stayed while Troy still stood, and my husband is gone, to be missed with no end in sight? For others Pergamum is razed; for me alone it stands, which the settler plows as victor with a captive ox. Now there is grain where Troy was, and the soil, fat with Phrygian blood, runs riot, ripe for the sickle; the half-buried bones of men are struck by the curved plows, and grass hides over the toppled houses. Victor, you are away, and I may not learn what holds you back, or in what corner of the world you hide, hard as iron! Whoever turns a foreign prow toward these shores goes off only after being asked many things of you, and into his hand is given a paper marked by my fingers, to deliver to you, if only he should see you anywhere. I sent to Pylos, ancient Nestor’s Neleian fields; the rumor sent back from Pylos is unsure. I sent to Sparta too; Sparta also knows nothing true. What lands do you live in, or where do you linger away? Better that the walls of Phoebus were standing even now — alas, how fickle, I rage against my own vows! I would know where you fought, would fear the war alone, and my complaint would be one joined with many. What I should fear I cannot tell — yet, frantic, I fear it all, and a broad field lies open to my cares. Whatever perils the sea holds, whatever the land, I suspect to be the causes of so long a delay. While I foolishly fear these things, you — such is your men’s lust — may be held captive by a foreign love. Perhaps you even tell how rustic a wife you have, fit for nothing but keeping the wool from going coarse. May I be wrong, and may this charge melt into thin air, and may you not, free to return, choose to stay away! My father Icarius presses me to leave the widowed bed and keeps reproaching my measureless delays. Let him reproach forever — yours I am, yours I must be called; Penelope will always be the wife of Ulysses. Yet he is bent by my devotion and chaste prayers, and tempers his own force of his own accord. The men of Dulichium and Same and those high Zacynthos bore, a wanton throng, the suitors, swarm upon me, and they lord it in your hall with none to forbid them; my vitals — your wealth — are being torn apart. Why should I name for you Pisander, Polybus, and dreadful Medon, and the greedy hands of Eurymachus and Antinous, and the rest, all of whom — you, shamefully gone — feed yourself with goods won by your own blood? Beggar Irus and Melanthius, who drives in the flock to be eaten, come last, the crowning shame upon your losses. We are three in number, and unwarlike: a wife without strength, old Laertes, and the boy Telemachus. He was lately all but taken from me by an ambush, as he made ready, against all our wills, to sail for Pylos. The gods, I pray, ordain it: that, the fates running in order, he close my eyes, and he yours! On our side stand the keeper of the cattle and the aged nurse, and, third, the faithful warden of the filthy sty; but Laertes, useless as he is in arms, cannot hold the kingdom in the midst of foes — to Telemachus a stronger age will come, if only he lives; now that age should have been guarded by a father’s help — nor have I the strength to drive the enemy from the house. Come the quicker, you, the harbor and altar of your own! You have a son — and may you keep him, I pray — who in his tender years should have been schooled in his father’s arts. Look to Laertes; that you may close his eyes for him, he holds off the final day of his fate. And surely I, who was a girl when you set out, though you come at once, will seem grown an old woman.

Your hostess Phyllis of Rhodope complains, Demophoon, that you stay away beyond the time you promised. When once the moon’s horns had closed into a full orb, your anchor was pledged to our shores — four times the moon has hidden, four times grown whole again; and no Sithonian wave brings the Attic ships. If you count the time — and we lovers count it well — my complaint does not arrive before its day. Hope, too, was slow; the things that, once believed, will hurt us we are slow to believe. Now you wrong me, though your lover would not have it. Often I lied to myself on your behalf, often I thought the stormy South winds were bringing back your white sails. I cursed Theseus, supposing he would not let you go; yet perhaps he never held back your course. At times I feared that, as you steered for the shallows of Hebrus, your ship had foundered, wrecked in the whitening water. Often, a suppliant, that you, villain, might be well, I worshipped the gods with prayer at incense-burning rites; often, seeing the winds favor in sky and sea, I said to myself: ’if he is well, he comes.’ In short, faithful love invented whatever obstructs a man in haste, and I was ingenious at finding excuses. But you stay away, slow; the gods you swore by do not bring you back, nor, moved by my love, do you return. Demophoon, you gave both your words and your sails to the winds; I complain the sails want a return, the words want faith. Tell me, what did I do, except love unwisely? By my offense I could only have deserved you the more. There is one crime in me: that I took you in, villain; but this crime has the weight and look of a merit. Where now are the oaths and the faith, the right hand joined to right hand, and the god so often on your lying lips? Where now is the Hymen promised for the years we’d share, who was my surety and pledge of marriage? By the sea, all of it churned by winds and waves, over which you had come, over which you meant to go, and by your grandfather — unless he too is a fiction — who soothes the seas the winds have roused, you swore to me; by Venus and the weapons that do too much against me — the one weapon the bow, the other the torch — and by Juno, who kindly presides over the marriage-bed, and by the mystic rites of the torch-bearing goddess. If of so many wronged each god should avenge his own godhead, you alone will not suffice for the penalties. Ah, in my madness I even mended your battered ships, that the keel I’d be deserted by might be sound, and gave the oars by which you’d take your flight from me. Alas! I suffer wounds dealt by my own weapons! I trusted your coaxing words, of which you had a store; I trusted your lineage and your great names; I trusted your tears — or are these too schooled to feign? Have they also their arts, and go where they are bid? I trusted the gods as well. What use now are so many pledges? By any one of them I could well have been won. Nor does it grieve me that I helped you with harbor and place — this should have been the sum of all my service! That I shamefully crowned my hospitality with the marriage-bed, and laid side against side, I repent. The night before that one — I would rather it had been my last, while I could die Phyllis still honorable. I hoped for better, because I thought I had earned it; whatever hope comes from desert comes justly. To deceive a trusting girl is no laborious glory. My openness deserved goodwill. Both loving and a woman, I was deceived by your words. May the gods grant this be the height of your renown! Among the sons of Aegeus may you be set up in the city’s heart, your father standing before, magnificent with his titles. When Sciron has been read out, and grim Procrustes, and Sinis, and the form mixed of bull and man, and Thebes subdued in war, and the two-formed creatures routed, and the dark god’s blind palace battered down — after those let your image be marked with this title: ’This is he whose loving hostess was taken by guile.’ Of your father’s whole great throng of deeds, only the deserted Cretan girl lodged in your mind. The one thing that excuses him, that alone you admire in him; you play the heir, traitor, of your father’s fraud. She — and I do not envy her — enjoys a better husband and rides aloft on haltered tigers; but the scorned Thracians shun marriage with me, because I am said to have set a stranger above my own. And someone says, ’Let her be off now to learned Athens; there will be another to rule warlike Thrace. The outcome proves the deed.’ May he go without success, I pray, whoever thinks deeds are to be judged by their event! But if my waters should foam beneath your oar, then, then I’d be said to have looked to my people’s good — but I did not, nor shall my palace receive you, nor shall you bathe your weary limbs in Bistonian water! That image of you departing clings before my eyes, as your fleet, about to go, crowded my harbor. You dared to embrace me, and, fallen upon your lover’s neck, to join long, lingering, pressing kisses, and to mingle your tears with mine, and to grieve that the breeze was fair for your sails, and, departing, to say to me in a last voice: ’Phyllis, be sure you wait for your Demophoon!’ Wait — for you who left, never to see me again? Wait for the sails denied to my sea? And yet I wait — only come back, though late to your lover, so that your faith has failed in its timing alone! What do I pray, poor wretch? Another wife holds you now, perhaps, and a love that has favored me ill; and now I have slipped your mind: you know no Phyllis, I think. Ah me! if you ask who Phyllis is, and from where — I, Demophoon, who, when long wanderings had driven you, gave you Thracian harbors and a host’s welcome, whose wealth my riches swelled, to whom in your need, rich, I gave many gifts, and was going to give many more; who laid beneath you the vast realm of Lycurgus, scarcely fit to be ruled in a woman’s name, where icy Rhodope reaches to shadowy Haemus, and sacred Hebrus drives out his gathered waters, to whom my virginity was offered under sinister birds, my chaste girdle unbound by a treacherous hand! Tisiphone as bridesmaid howled in that chamber, and the off-course bird sang a mournful song; Allecto was there, collared with little snakes, and the lights that stirred were of a funeral torch! Yet in grief I tread the crags and the brushwood shores, and all the broad coast that lies open to my eyes. Whether the ground loosens by day, or the cold stars shine, I look out to see what wind drives the straits; and whatever sails I have spied coming from afar, at once I take them for my gods. I run forward into the surf, the waves scarce holding me back, where the restless sea spreads its first waters. The nearer they come, the less and less I keep my feet; I swoon, and fall, to be caught up by my maids. There is a bay, curved gently into a drawn bow; its outermost horns stand stiff with sheer rock. From here it was my mind to fling my body into the waves below; and, since you keep deceiving me, so it shall be. Let the waves carry me, flung down, to your shores, and let me meet your eyes unburied! Though in hardness you outdo iron and adamant and yourself, you will say: ’Not thus, Phyllis, should you have followed me!’ Often I thirst for poisons; often it pleases me to die run through by the sword, in a bloody death. My neck, too, because it offered itself to be clasped by faithless arms, I am glad to wind in a noose. It is settled: to redeem my tender honor by a timely death. In the choosing of that death there will be little delay. You will be inscribed upon my tomb as the hateful cause. By this verse, or one like it, you will be known: ’Demophoon her guest gave loving Phyllis to death; he furnished the cause of her dying, she the hand.’

The letter you are reading comes from stolen Briseis, its Greek scarcely well-formed by a barbarian hand. Whatever blots you see, my tears made them; yet tears too carry the weight of a voice. If it is allowed me to complain a little of you, my master and my man, of master and man I will complain a little. That I was handed over quickly to the king who demanded me is no fault of yours — though this too is your fault; for the moment Eurybates and Talthybius summoned me, I was given over as a companion to Eurybates and Talthybius. Each casting his eyes on the other’s face, they asked in silence where our love had gone. I could have been put off; a delay of the penalty would have been welcome. Ah me! departing I gave no kisses; but tears I gave without end, and I tore my hair — unlucky, I seemed to myself to be taken captive twice! Often I longed to slip my guard and return, but there was an enemy to seize me, timid as I was. If I went out, I feared to be caught in the night, though I’d be going as a gift to one of Priam’s daughters. But grant I was given, since I had to be given — so many nights I am gone and not recalled; you hold off, and your anger is slow. The son of Menoetius himself, when I was being handed over, said in my ear, ’Why weep? You will be here in a little while.’ And not only do you not recall me — you fight against my being given back, Achilles! Go now, and bear the name of an eager lover! There came to you the sons of Telamon and Amyntor — the one nearer in degree of blood, the other a companion — and the son of Laertes, in whose company I was to come back (great gifts swelled their coaxing prayers): twenty tawny cauldrons of wrought bronze, and seven tripods, equal in weight and in craft; to these were added twice five talents of gold, twice six horses always used to win, and — what is needless — girls of surpassing beauty, women of Lesbos, bodies taken from an overthrown house, and, with all these — but you have no need of a wife — a wife, one girl out of Agamemnon’s three daughters. If I had to be ransomed from the son of Atreus at a price, what you ought to have given, you refuse to receive! By what fault did I deserve to be made cheap to you, Achilles? Where has your fickle love so quickly fled from me? Or does grim fortune press the wretched stubbornly, and no gentler hour come to evils once begun? I saw the walls of Lyrnesus razed by your warfare — and I had been a great part of my own country; I saw three fall, sharers alike of birth and of death, whose mother was the same who was mine; I saw, great as he was, my husband stretched on the bloody ground, tossing his gore-stained breast. Yet for all those lost I had you alone in their stead; you were my master, you my husband, you my brother. You yourself, swearing by the godhead of your watery mother, told me it had been to my good to be taken — yes, so that, though I come dowered, you may push me off, and flee, with me, the wealth that is offered you! Indeed there is even a rumor that, when tomorrow’s Dawn has shone, you mean to give your sails to the cloud-bearing south winds. When that wickedness reached my fearful ears, poor wretch, my breast was emptied of blood and of spirit. You will go — o wretched me! — to whom do you leave me, violent man? Who will be a gentle solace to me, deserted? May I first, I pray, be swallowed by a sudden gaping of the earth, or be burned by the red fire of a hurled bolt, before the seas grow white with Phthian oars without me, and I, left behind, see your ships go! If now your homecoming and your father’s household gods please you, I am no great baggage for your fleet. A captive, I will follow my victor, not a bride her husband; I have a hand fit to soften wool. Far the loveliest among Achaean matrons, a wife will go — and let her go — into your chamber, a daughter-in-law worthy of her father-in-law, grandson of Jove and Aegina, one whom old Nereus would wish for as a wife’s grandsire. I, lowly, and your handmaid, will spin the wool I’m dealt, and my threads will lessen the full distaffs. Only let your wife not harry me, I beg — who in some way or other will not be fair to me — and do not let my hair be torn before your face, and say lightly: ’this one too was mine.’ Or you may let it be, so long as I am not left in contempt — ah, here, wretched me, this fear shakes my bones. Yet what do you wait for? Agamemnon repents his anger, and mournful Greece lies before your feet. Conquer your own temper and your anger, you who conquer all else! Why does tireless Hector mangle the Danaan strength? Take up your arms, son of Aeacus — but with me first taken back — and, with Mars favoring, press the routed men! For my sake your anger was stirred; for my sake let it cease, and let me be the cause and the measure of your grief. And do not think it shameful to give way to my prayers; the son of Oeneus was turned to arms by his wife’s prayer. The tale I have heard, you know it. Bereft of her brothers, the mother cursed the hope and the life of her son. There was a war; he, fierce, withdrew from the arms he had laid down, and with stubborn mind refused his country aid. His wife alone bent the man. Luckier she! But my words fall, of no weight at all. Yet I am not indignant, nor have I carried myself as a wife, though, a slave, I was often summoned to my master’s bed. A certain captive woman, I remember, called me mistress. ’To my servitude,’ I said, ’you add the burden of a name.’ Yet by the bones of my husband, ill-covered in a hasty tomb, bones ever to be revered in my judgment; and by the brave souls of my three brothers, my divinities, who lie nobly for their country, and with their country; and by your head and mine, which we have joined as one, and by your swords, weapons my people came to know — I swear the Mycenaean shared no bed with me; if I lie, may you abandon me! If I should say to you now, bravest one: ’swear you too that you have taken no joys apart from me!’ you would refuse. But the Danaans think you grieve — while your plectrum is plied, and a soft mistress holds you in her warm embrace! And does anyone ask why you refuse to fight? Fighting hurts; the lyre and the song and Venus give delight. It is safer to have lain on a couch, to have held a girl, to have struck the Thracian lyre with the fingers, than to bear in the hands the shield and the sharp-pointed spear, and to prop a helmet on flattened hair. But once illustrious deeds pleased you above safety, and glory won in war was sweet. Or did you approve of fierce wars only while you were capturing me, and does your glory lie conquered together with my country? The gods forbid! and may the Pelian spear, I pray, brandished by a strong arm, pass through Hector’s flank! Send me, you Danaans! As your envoy I will entreat my master, and bring many kisses mixed with your messages. More than Phoenix, more than eloquent Ulysses, more, believe me, than the brother of Teucer will I achieve. It is something to have touched your neck with the wonted arms, and to have reminded your eyes by my presence. Though you be merciless, and fiercer than your mother’s waves, even if I keep silent, you will be broken by my tears. Now too — so may your father Peleus fill out all his years, so may Pyrrhus go to arms under your auspices! — look back on anxious Briseis, brave Achilles, and do not, iron-hearted, burn the wretch with a slow delay! Or, if your love has turned to loathing of me, her whom you force to live without you, force to die! And as you are doing, you will force it. My body and my color are gone; yet one hope of you alone holds up this breath. If I am robbed of it, I will rejoin my brothers and my husband — nor is it glorious for you to bid a woman die. But why bid it? Strike at my body with drawn steel; I have blood to pour from a pierced breast. Let that sword of yours seek me out, which, had the goddess allowed, was about to go into the son of Atreus’ breast! Ah, rather keep my life, your own gift! What you, as victor, had given to an enemy, I, your love, ask for. Those you could better destroy, Neptune’s Pergama supply; seek your matter for slaughter from the foe. Only me — whether you make ready to drive your fleet with the oar, or stay — by a master’s right, bid come!

The Cretan girl sends to the Amazon’s son the greeting which, unless you give it, she herself will go without. Read it through, whatever it is — what harm will a read letter do? There may even be something in it to please you; by these characters secrets travel over land and sea. Even an enemy reads the writing he gets from an enemy. Three times I tried to speak with you, three times my useless tongue stuck fast; three times the sound halted at my lips. Where it is allowed and follows, shame must be mixed with love; what I was ashamed to say, love bade me write. Whatever Love has commanded, it is not safe to scorn; he reigns, and holds his right even over the lordly gods. He said to me, as I first hesitated to write: ’Write! that iron man will give his hands up, beaten.’ Let him be near, and as he warms my marrow with greedy fire, so let him fix your heart upon my prayers! It is not through wantonness that I would break the marriage-bond; my repute — inquire, I’d have you — is clear of any crime. Love comes the heavier for coming late — I burn within; I burn, and my breast holds a hidden wound. Just as first yokes hurt the tender bullocks, and a horse caught from the herd scarcely bears the bit, so an untaught heart bears its first loves ill and hardly, and this burden does not sit fitly on my mind. It becomes an art, when the offense is learned from tender years; she to whom it comes when her time is spent loves the worse. You will take the first-fruits of my well-guarded fame, and the two of us will become guilty alike. It is something to pluck the orchard from full boughs, and to pick the first rose with a delicate nail. Yet if that earlier whiteness, in which I bore myself blameless, had to be marked by an unwonted stain, still it has fallen out well that I am scorched by a worthy fire; worse than the adultery is a base adulterer. If Juno should yield me her brother and her husband, I think I would set Hippolytus before Jove! Now too — you will hardly believe it — I am driven to unknown pursuits; I have an urge to go among the savage beasts. Now my chief goddess is she marked out by the curved bow, the Delian; I myself follow your judgment. I long to go into the woodland and, when the deer are penned in the nets, to urge the swift hounds along the high ridges, or to brandish the quivering javelin with arm thrown back, or to lay my body on the grassy ground. Often it pleases me to wheel the light chariot in the dust, twisting with the reins the mouth of a bolting horse; now I am swept along like the Eleleides driven by Bacchus’ frenzies, and the women who beat the drums beneath the Idaean hill, or like those whom the half-divine Dryads and the two-horned Fauns have stunned, touched by their power. For they tell me everything, when that frenzy has slackened; love, my accomplice, burns me, and I keep silent. Perhaps I pay this love as a debt of my line’s destiny, and Venus exacts her tribute from the whole race. Jupiter loved Europa — she is the first source of the line — a bull disguising the god. My mother Pasiphae, mounting beneath a deluded bull, brought forth in her womb her crime and her burden. The faithless son of Aegeus, following the guiding thread, escaped the winding house by my sister’s help. See, now I too, lest I be thought too little a child of Minos, go last into the common law of my race! This too is fated: one house has pleased two women; your beauty captures me, my sister was captured by your father. Theseus’ son and Theseus carried off two sisters — set up a double trophy from our house! At the time when I entered Ceres’ Eleusis, I wish the soil of Cnossos had kept me back! Then above all (though even before you pleased me) a keen love lodged in my inmost bones. Your robe was white, your hair bound round with flowers, a modest blush had tinged your golden face, and the face that other women call stern and grim, by Phaedra’s judgment, instead of stern, was brave. Keep far from me young men trimmed like a woman! — a man’s beauty loves to be groomed within a modest bound. That sternness of yours becomes you, and your hair set without art, and the light dust on your splendid face. Whether you bend back the struggling neck of a fierce horse, I marvel at your feet wheeling in a tight ring; or whether you hurl the tough spear-shaft with a strong arm, your bold arm draws my eyes upon itself, or whether you grip the cornel hunting-spears with their broad blade. In short, whatever you do delights my eyes. Only lay your hardness aside in the ridged woods; I do not deserve to perish in your warfare. What use to practice the pursuits of girt-up Diana, and to have stolen from Venus the measures that are hers? What lacks alternating rest cannot last; rest repairs the strength and renews the weary limbs. The bow — and you should copy the arms of your Diana — if you never cease to bend it, will go slack. Cephalus was famed in the woods, and many beasts had fallen through the grass at his striking; yet he gave himself not ill to be loved by Aurora. The wise goddess went to him, away from her old husband. Often beneath the holm-oaks some chance turf bore up Venus and the son of Cinyras, laid down together. The son of Oeneus too burned for Maenalian Atalanta; she holds the beast’s spoil as a pledge of love. Let us too be counted in that company as soon as may be! If you take away Venus, your woodland is a boor’s. I myself will come as your companion, and neither the hidden rocks will daunt me, nor the boar to be feared for his slanting tusk. Two seas assail an isthmus with their waves, and the narrow land hears both seas. Here with you I will dwell in Troezen, the realm of Pittheus; already now it is dearer to me than my own native land. For a time the Neptunian hero is away, and will be long away; the shore of his Pirithous detains him. Theseus has preferred — unless we deny the plain truth — Pirithous to Phaedra, and Pirithous to you. Nor is this the only injury that comes to us from him; in great matters we have both been wronged. The bones of my brother, shattered by his three-knotted club, he scattered on the ground; my sister was left as prey to the beasts. The first in valor among the axe-bearing maidens bore you, a mother worthy of her son’s vigor; if you ask where she is — Theseus ran her side through with the sword, nor was the mother safe even with so great a pledge. But she was not even wedded, nor received with the marriage-torch — why, except that you, a bastard, should not take your father’s realm? He has added brothers to you from me — yet of rearing them all I was not the cause, but he. O that, since they would harm you, fairest of all things, my womb had burst in the midst of its labor! Go now, revere the bed of so deserving a father — which he himself shuns and disowns by his own deeds! And do not let empty names frighten your mind, because I, a stepmother, may seem about to lie with a stepson. That old scruple, doomed to die in an age to come, was a rustic thing while Saturn held the realm. Jupiter decreed that whatever pleased should be righteous, and a sister married to a brother makes all things lawful. That bond of kinship holds fast in a firm chain, on which Venus herself has laid her own knots. Nor is it hard, though we sin, to hide the love. Under the name of kinship the fault can be cloaked. If someone sees us embracing, we will both be praised; I shall be called a faithful stepmother to my stepson. You will not have to unbar in the dark a harsh husband’s door, nor will a guard need to be tricked; as one house held the two of us, one house will hold us still; you used to give kisses openly, openly you will give them; you will be safe with me, and earn praise by the fault, even though you be seen in my bed. Only do away with delay and join the hastened bond — so may Love, who now rages at me, spare you! I do not disdain to plead, a suppliant and lowly. Alas! where now do my pride and high words lie? And I was resolved to fight long and not to yield to the fault — if love had any resolve in it; beaten, I beg, and to your knees I stretch out my royal arms! What is fitting, no lover sees. I have lost all shame, and shame, in flight, has left its standards. Pardon my confession, and tame your hard heart! That my father is Minos, who holds the seas, that thunderbolts come hurled from my great-grandfather’s hand, that my grandfather is he whose brow is ringed with sharp rays, who drives the warm day on his crimson axle — my nobility lies vanquished under love! Pity my forebears, and, if you will not spare me, spare my own! I have for dowry-land the island of Jove, Crete — let my whole palace serve my Hippolytus! Bend your fierce heart! my mother could seduce a bull; will you yourself be crueler than a savage bull? By Venus, who is most present with me, spare me, I pray! So may you never love one who could scorn you; so may the nimble goddess attend you in the secret glades, and the deep wood furnish beasts for the killing; so may the Satyrs favor you, and the mountain powers, the Pans, and may the boar fall pierced by your front-on point; so may the Nymphs grant you — though you are said to hate girls — a stream of water to ease your parching thirst! To these prayers I add my tears as well; you who read a pleader’s words, imagine you see my tears too!

The nymph sends to her Paris — though he refuses to be hers — words to be read, from the ridges of Ida. Do you read it through? or does a new wife forbid? Read it through — this letter was not penned by a Mycenaean hand! Oenone of the spring, most renowned in the Phrygian woods, wronged, I complain of you — my own, if you yourself allow it. What god has set his power against my prayers? What crime stands against me, that I may not remain yours? Whatever you suffer deservedly must be borne lightly; a penalty that comes undeserved comes to be grieved. You were not yet so great, when, content with you as husband, I was a nymph, born of a great river. You who are now Priam’s son — let no awe stand in truth’s way! — were a slave; I, a nymph, endured to wed a slave! Often among the flocks we rested, sheltered by a tree, and the grass mixed with leaves furnished a couch; often, as we lay on straw and on deep hay, a lowly hut kept the hoar frost off. Who showed you the glades fit for the hunting, and on what crag the wild beast hid her cubs? Often as your comrade I stretched the nets, marked with their meshes; often I drove the swift hounds over the long ridges. The beeches, cut by you, keep my name, and I am read, ’Oenone,’ carved by your pruning-knife, and there is a poplar, I remember, planted by the river’s stream, on which is written a line that remembers us: and as the trunk grows, so my name grows with it. Grow, and rise up straight into my titles! Poplar, live, I pray, you who, planted at the bank’s edge, bear this verse on your wrinkled bark: ’When Paris can draw breath with Oenone forsaken, the water of Xanthus will turn and run back to its source.’ Xanthus, hasten backward, and you waters, turn and flow back! Paris has the heart to have deserted Oenone. That day spoke my doom to wretched me; from it began the worst winter of a changed love, the day when Venus and Juno, and Minerva, comelier with her arms taken up, came naked to your judgment. My stunned breast throbbed, and a cold tremor ran, as you told me of it, through my hard bones. I consulted — for I was no little frightened — old women and aged men. It was agreed to be accursed. The fir was felled, the beams cut, and, the fleet made ready, the blue wave received the waxed ships. You wept as you left — at least do not deny this! We mingled our tears, each of us in grief; the elm is not so bound by the vines set against it as your arms were twined about my neck. Ah! how often, when you complained that the wind held you, your comrades laughed — that wind was fair! How often, sent off, you came back for kisses again! How hardly your tongue bore to say ’farewell’! A light breeze lifts the sails hanging from the stiff mast, and the water, churned by the oars, grows white. Unhappy, I follow the departing sails with my eyes, as far as I may, and the sand is wet with my tears, and I pray the sea-green Nereids that you may come swiftly — yes, that you may come swiftly to my ruin! So by my prayers you returned, only to return to another? Ah me, for a cursed rival I was the one who coaxed! A natural mass looks out upon the immense deep — it was a mountain; it withstands the waters of the sea. From here I first knew the sails of your keel, and I had an urge to go to you through the waves. While I delayed, purple gleamed for me on the prow’s top — I grew afraid; that finery was not your wont. The ship comes nearer and, with quickening breeze, touched the land; with trembling heart I saw a woman’s cheeks. That had not been enough — why, frantic, did I linger? — a shameless mistress was clinging to your bosom! Then indeed I tore my dress and beat my breast, and gashed my wet cheeks with stiffened nail, and I filled holy Ida with plaintive wailings, and carried these tears there, to my own rocks. So may Helen grieve, and weep, forsaken by her husband, and bear herself what she first brought upon me! Now those suit you who would follow you over the open seas and forsake their lawful husbands; but when you were poor and drove the herds as a shepherd, no one but Oenone was the poor man’s wife. I do not wonder at riches, nor does your palace move me, nor that I should be called one of Priam’s many daughters-in-law — yet not that Priam would refuse to be a nymph’s father-in-law, or that I should be a daughter-in-law for Hecuba to hide; and I am worthy to become the matron of a powerful realm; I have hands that a scepter might well become. And do not scorn me because I once lay with you on beech-leaves; I am better fitted for a purple couch. In short, my love is safe; there no wars are prepared, nor does the wave bring avenging ships. The runaway daughter of Tyndareus is demanded back with hostile arms; with this dowry she comes, haughty, to your chamber. Whether she must be given back to the Danaans, ask your brother Hector, or Polydamas along with Deiphobus; what grave Antenor advises, what Priam himself advises, consult them, to whom long age has been a teacher! A shameful first lesson, to set a stolen woman above your country. Your cause is one to blush for; her husband takes up just arms. Nor, if you are wise, promise yourself a faithful Spartan, one who turned so quickly into your embraces. As the younger son of Atreus cries out at the broken pact of his bed, and grieves, wounded by a foreigner’s love, so you too will cry out. Chastity, once wounded, is reparable by no art; it perishes once for all. Does she burn with love of you? So she loved Menelaus too. Now that trusting man lies in a widowed bed. Happy Andromache, well wedded to a steadfast husband! I should have been kept as a wife on your brother’s model; you are lighter than leaves, when, drained of the weight of sap, dried out, they fly on the shifting winds; and there is less weight in you than in the top of an ear of corn, which, light, stiffens, scorched by ceaseless suns. This your sister once sang — for I recall it — prophesying to me thus, with her hair flung loose: ’What do you do, Oenone? why entrust your seed to the sand? You plow the shores with oxen that will avail nothing. A Greek heifer is coming, who will destroy you and your country and your home! ho, forbid it! A Greek heifer is coming! While you may, sink the foul ship in the sea! Alas! how much Phrygian blood she carries!’ The voice was in mid-course: the handmaids seized the raving girl; but for me my golden hair stood stiff. Ah, all too true a prophet you were to wretched me — behold, that heifer holds my glades! However notable her face, an adulteress she surely is; captured by a guest, she deserted her household gods. Some Theseus — unless I mistake the name — some Theseus or other carried her off from her own land before. By a young and lustful man, is she to be believed returned a virgin? Where I learned this so well, you ask? I love. You may call it force, and veil the fault with a name; she who has been ravished so often offered herself to the ravishing. But Oenone stays chaste to a deceiving husband — and you yourself might have been deceived by your own laws! Me the swift Satyrs — I lay hidden, sheltered in the woods — sought, a wanton crew, with racing foot, and Faunus, his horned head girt with sharp pine, on the vast ridges where Ida swells. Me the builder of Troy, famed for his lyre, loved, and gave my hands access to his gifts. Whatever herb is potent for aid, and whatever root useful for healing grows in all the world, is mine. Wretched me, that love cannot be cured by herbs! Skilled, I am failed by my own art’s art. The help that neither the earth, fertile in breeding grasses, nor a god can give me, you can bring me. And you can, and I have deserved it — pity a girl who is worthy! I do not bear bloody arms with the Danaans — but I am yours, and was yours in your boyhood years, and yours, for what time remains, I pray to be!

Hypsipyle of Lemnos, of Bacchus’ stock, speaks to the son of Aeson — and how small a part of her mind was in the words! You are said to have touched the shores of Thessaly with returning keel, rich with the fleece of the golden ram. I rejoice in your safety, as far as you let me; yet this very thing I ought to have been made surer of by your own writing. For that you did not return past my realm, as agreed, though you wished it, you cannot lay to a lack of winds; a letter is sealed under any wind, however contrary. I, Hypsipyle, deserved a greeting sent. Why did rumor come to me of you sooner than a letter: that the oxen sacred to Mars went beneath the curving yokes, that, the seed once cast, crops of men grew up, and had no need of your right hand for their slaughter, that an ever-wakeful dragon guarded the spoil of the beast, yet the tawny fleece was snatched away by your brave hand? O, if I could say to those who doubtingly believe these things, ’He wrote it to me himself,’ how great I would be! Why do I complain that a slow husband’s duty has lapsed? If I remain yours, I have received a great favor! A barbarian sorceress is said to have come with you, taken into the share of the marriage-bed promised to me. Love is a credulous thing; would that I might be called rash for charging my husband with false accusations! Lately a Thessalian guest came to me from the Haemonian shores, and, scarcely had he well crossed my threshold, ’My son of Aeson,’ I said, ’how does he fare?’ He, in shame, stuck fast, his eyes fixed on the ground before him. At once I leapt up, and, my tunic torn from my breast, ’Does he live? or,’ I cry, ’do the fates call me too?’ ’He lives,’ he says. Because love is timid, I made him swear. Scarcely, with a god as witness, was your life believed by me. And when my spirit came back, I began to ask after your deeds. He tells how the bronze-footed oxen of Mars were plowed with, how serpent’s teeth were cast into the ground for seed, and how men suddenly born bore arms — how the earth-born peoples, destroyed in a civil war, filled out the day-long span of their lives. The serpent was vanquished. Again I ask whether Jason lives; hope and fear take turns by turns. While he tells each thing, by his zeal and the rush of his speaking he lays bare, by his own cleverness, my wounds. Alas! where is the pledged faith? where the rights of marriage, and the torch fitter to go beneath a funeral pyre? I was not known to you in stealth; Juno the bride’s-matron was there, and Hymen, his temples bound with garlands. But for me neither Juno nor Hymen, but the grim Fury, bloodstained, carried the ill-omened torches before me. What had I to do with the Minyae, what with the Dodonian pine? What had you, steersman Tiphys, to do with my country? Here there was no ram notable for its golden wool, nor was Lemnos the palace of old Aeetes. At first I was resolved (but evil fates were dragging me) to drive off the guest-host with a woman’s hand; and the women of Lemnos know how to conquer men — too well. By soldiery so brave my land should have been defended! I helped the man with my city, took him into roof and heart! Here for you twice summer and twice winter ran their course. It was the third harvest, when you, forced to set sail, filled out such words as these with your own tears: ’I am torn away, Hypsipyle; but let the fates only grant return — I go from here your husband, your husband I will always be. Yet what of us is hidden in your pregnant womb, may it live, and may we both be parents of the same!’ So far, and with tears falling on your false face I remember that you could not say the rest. Last of your companions you board the sacred Argo. She flies; the wind holds the hollow sails; the blue wave is drawn from beneath the driven keel; land is what you look on, the waters are what I see. A tower, open on every side, looks round upon the waves; there I am carried, and my face and breast are wet with tears. Through my tears I gaze, and my eyes, favoring my longing mind, see farther than they are wont. Add chaste prayers, and vows mixed with fear — now too, with you safe, to be paid by me. Shall I pay the vows? Medea will enjoy my vows! My heart aches, and love, mixed with anger, overflows. Shall I bring gifts to the temples, because I lose Jason living? Shall a victim fall, struck down, for my losses? I was indeed never free of care, and always feared that your father would take a daughter-in-law from an Argive city. I feared the Argive women — a barbarian rival harmed me! I took my wound from an enemy I had not looked for. Nor does she please by face and merits, but she knows spells, and reaps dread herbs with an enchanted sickle. She strives to draw the struggling moon down from her course, and to hide the horses of the sun in darkness; she curbs the waters and halts the slanting rivers; she moves woods and living rocks from their place. Through the tombs she wanders, ungirt, with hair flung loose, and gathers chosen bones from the still-warm pyres. She curses the absent and pierces waxen images, and drives the slender needle into the wretched liver — and things I would better not know. Ill is love sought by herbs, which should be won by character and beauty. Can you embrace this woman and, left alone in one chamber, unafraid enjoy your sleep in the silent night? No doubt, as she forced the bulls, so she forced you to bear the yoke, and with the power by which she charms the fierce serpents she charms you too. Add that she longs to have herself credited with the deeds of the chiefs and yours, and the wife stands in the way of your glory’s title. And some one of Pelias’ party charges the deeds to her poisons, and finds people to believe him: ’Not the son of Aeson, but the Phasian, daughter of Aeetes, tore away the golden hide of Phrixus’ ram.’ Your mother Alcimede does not approve — ask your mother — nor your father, to whom a daughter-in-law comes from the icy pole. Let her seek herself a husband from the Tanais and the wet marshes of Scythia, and all the way from the bank of the Phasis! Fickle son of Aeson, more uncertain than a spring breeze, why do your words want the weight of a promise? My husband, you had gone from here: why did you not return mine from there? Let me be the wife of the one come back, as I was of the one who departed! If nobility and high-born names touch you — lo, I am said to be born of Minoan Thoas! Bacchus is my grandsire; the wife of Bacchus, wreathed with a crown, outshines the lesser constellations with her own stars. Lemnos will be your dowry, a land kindly to the tiller; me too you can have among your dowry-goods. Now too I have given birth; congratulate us both, Jason! Their author had made my burden sweet to me when I was with child. I am lucky in number as well, and a twin offspring, two pledges, I bore with Lucina’s favor. If you ask whom they resemble, you will be recognized in them. They do not know how to deceive; the rest they have from their father. I almost gave them to be carried as envoys for their mother; but a cruel stepmother held back the journey begun. I feared Medea: Medea is more than a stepmother; Medea’s hands are apt for every crime. She who could scatter her brother’s mangled body through the fields — would she spare my pledges? Yet this woman, o madman, carried off by Colchian poisons, you are said to have preferred to Hypsipyle’s bed. Shamefully she, an adulterous virgin, knew a man; a chaste torch gave me to you and you to me. She betrayed her father; I snatched Thoas from the slaughter. She forsook Colchis; my Lemnos holds me. What does it matter, if the wicked woman beats the dutiful, and by the very crime is dowered, and has earned a husband? I blame the Lemnian women’s deed, I do not wonder at it, Jason; such grief gives arms even to the cowardly. Come, tell me: if, driven by hostile winds, as you ought to have been, you and your comrade had entered my harbor, and I had come out to meet you, my twin offspring beside me — surely you would have had to pray the earth to gape for you! — with what face would you look on your sons, with what on me, villain? By what death were you worthy, as the price of your treachery? You yourself indeed would have been safe and unharmed through me — not because you deserve it, but because I am gentle. I myself would have filled my face with the rival’s blood, and yours, which she stole away by her poisonings! To Medea I would have been a Medea! and if just Jupiter on high attends at all to my prayers, may she who has crept into my bed grieve at what Hypsipyle groans, and herself feel her own laws; and as I am abandoned, wife and mother of two, so may she be robbed of husband and of as many children! Nor may she long keep what was ill-got, and may she leave it worse — may she be an exile and seek flight over the whole world! As she was a sister to her brother and a daughter to her wretched father, so bitter may she be to her children, so bitter to her husband! When she has used up sea and lands, let her try the air; let her wander, helpless, hopeless, bloodied with her own slaughter! This I, the daughter of Thoas, cheated of my marriage, pray. Live on, bride and husband, in your accursed bed!

Receive, son of Dardanus, the song of dying Elissa; what you read, you read as my last words from me. So, when the fates call, cast down in the wet grass by the shallows of Maeander, the white swan sings. Not because I hope you can be moved by my prayer do I address you — I began this with a god against me; but since I have wretchedly lost my deserts, my fame, my body and my chaste mind, to lose words is a light thing. Are you resolved nonetheless to go, and leave poor Dido, and will the same winds carry off your sails and your faith? Are you resolved, Aeneas, to loose your ships along with your pledge, and to chase Italian realms you do not know where they lie? Does neither the new Carthage nor the rising walls touch you, nor the supreme power handed to your scepter? What is done you flee, what is to be done you seek; one land must be sought through the world, one land has been sought by you. Suppose you find the land — who will hand it over for you to hold? Who will give his own fields to strangers to keep? No doubt another love awaits you, and another Dido, and another pledge to give, that you may break it again. When will it be that you found a city the like of Carthage, and from a high citadel look down upon your own people? Though all turn out well, and your prayers do not delay you, where will you find a wife to love you so? I burn, like waxen torches smeared with sulphur, like pious incense set on smoking hearths. Aeneas clings always to my waking eyes; Aeneas night and rest bring back to my mind. He, indeed, is thankless and deaf to my gifts, and one I would wish to do without, if I were not a fool; yet I do not hate Aeneas, however ill he plots, but I complain of him as faithless, and complaining I love him the worse. Spare your daughter-in-law, Venus, and embrace your hard brother — brother Love, let him serve as a soldier in your camp! Or let me love, as I have begun (for I do not disdain it) — let him furnish the matter of my longing! I am deceived, and that image is flaunted falsely before me; he is at odds with his own mother’s nature. Stone and mountains and the oaks grown on high crags begot you, the savage beasts begot you, or the sea, such as you see tossed even now by winds, over which yet you make ready to go through hostile waves. Where do you flee? Winter stands in the way. May winter’s grace serve me! See how the East wind churns up the upheaved waters! What I would rather owe to you, let me owe to the storms; the wind and the wave are juster than your heart. I am not worth so much — why are you not reckoned unjust? — that you should perish while you flee me over the long seas. You drive a costly hatred, dear-bought and stubborn, if, so long as you escape me, dying comes cheap to you. Soon the winds will settle, and over the wave laid evenly smooth Triton will course through the sea on his blue horses. Would that you too were changeable with the winds! And, unless you outdo oak in hardness, you will be. Why, as if you did not know what mad seas can do, do you so ill trust the water you have so often tried? Even if, when the sea invites the way, you loose the mooring-ropes, still the deep holds many sorrows in its broad expanse. Nor does it profit those who try the seas to have broken faith; that place exacts the penalties of perfidy, above all when love has been wronged, because the mother of the Loves is said to have been born, naked, from Cytherean waters. Ruined, I fear to ruin you, or to harm the one who harms me, or that my enemy, shipwrecked, should drink the waters of the sea. Live, I pray! so I shall lose you better than by death. You shall rather be called the cause of my dying. Imagine, come, that by a swift whirlwind — let there be no weight in the omen! — you are caught; what will your mind be? At once the perjuries of your false tongue will rush upon you, and Dido forced to die by Phrygian deceit; before your eyes will stand the image of your deceived wife, sorrowful and bloodstained, with hair flowing loose. What is worth so much, that you should then say ’I have deserved it! forgive!’ and think that whatever bolts fall are hurled at you? Give a short space to the savagery of the sea and of yourself; a great reward for delay is a way that will be safe. And though you care less for this, let the boy Iulus be spared! It is enough for you to bear the title of my death. What has the boy Ascanius deserved, what the Penates gods? Shall the wave overwhelm the gods snatched from the flames? But you do not carry them with you, nor did the holy things and the father you boast of, faithless one, press your shoulders. You lie in everything, for your tongue does not begin its deceiving with me, nor am I the first to be punished. If you should ask where the mother of lovely Iulus is — she died, left alone by a hard husband! This you had told me — it warned me enough! Burn me, I deserve it; my punishment will be less than my fault. Nor have I any doubt that your own gods condemn you. Over sea, over land, a seventh winter tosses you. Cast up by the waves, I received you in a safe anchorage, and, scarcely having well heard your name, gave you a kingdom. Yet would that I had been content with these services, and that the rumor of our union were buried for me! That day did the harm, on which a dark rain with sudden waters drove us beneath a sloping cave. I had heard a voice; I thought the nymphs had wailed — it was the Eumenides who gave the signs of my doom! Exact your penalties, wronged honor! and you, faith of Sychaeus violated, to whom, wretched me, full of shame I go. I have Sychaeus consecrated in a marble shrine (set boughs and white wool cover it). From there I felt myself called four times by a known voice; he himself said in a thin sound, ’Elissa, come!’ There is no delay, I come, I come, your wife by right; yet I am slow through shame at my offense. Pardon my fault! a worthy author deceived me; he takes the odium from my guilt. A goddess for mother, and an aged father, the pious burden of his son, rightly gave me hope of a husband who would stay. If I had to err, my error has honorable causes; add faith to it, and there would be nothing in it to regret. The course of fate that ran before lasts to the end, and pursues the very last moments of my life. My husband fell, slaughtered at the household altars, and my brother holds the rewards of so great a crime; I am driven into exile and leave my husband’s ashes and my country, and am borne on uncertain ways with an enemy in pursuit. I land on these shores, and, escaped from my brother and the sea, I buy the shore which I gave to you, faithless one. I founded a city and fixed walls spreading wide, a thing of envy to the neighboring lands. Wars swell; a foreigner and a woman, I am assailed with wars, and scarcely make ready the gates and arms of a raw city. I pleased a thousand suitors, who banded together complaining that I had preferred some unknown man to their chambers. Why do you hesitate to hand me bound to Gaetulian Iarbas? I would have offered my arms to your crime. There is also a brother, whose impious hand demands to be spattered with my blood, as it was spattered with my husband’s. Lay down the gods, and the holy things you profane by your touch! An impious right hand does not well worship the heavenly ones. If you were to be the worshipper of gods escaped from the fire, the gods regret having escaped the flames. Perhaps too you leave Dido pregnant, villain, and a part of you lies hidden, shut within my body. The pitiable infant will be added to its mother’s fate, and you will be the author of the funeral of one not yet born, and the brother of Iulus will die together with his mother, and one penalty will carry off the two, joined as one. ’But a god bids me go.’ Would he had forbidden you to come, and that Punic soil had not been trodden by Trojans! Under this god as guide, surely, you are driven by hostile winds, and wear out long seasons on the raging sea? Hardly would Pergamum have been worth seeking again with such toil, had it been as great, with Hector living, as it once was. It is not your native Simois you make for, but the waters of Tiber — and, even should you arrive where you wish, you will be a stranger; and since the land you seek lies hidden and shuns your keels, scarcely will it fall to you, an old man, to reach it. Take rather these peoples for your dowry, with all the wandering done, and the wealth of Pygmalion that I brought. Move Ilium more happily into a Tyrian city, and hold the state and the sacred scepter in a king’s place! If your mind is greedy for war, if Iulus seeks whence a triumph won by his own warfare may go forth, we will provide an enemy for him to conquer, that nothing be lacking; this place admits the laws of peace, this place admits arms. Only do you, by your mother and your brother’s weapons, the arrows, and by the gods, companions of your flight, the Dardan holy things — so may all whom fierce Mars brings home from your race prevail, and may that be the limit of your loss, and may Ascanius happily fill out his years, and may the bones of old Anchises lie softly! — spare, I pray, the house that gives itself to you to hold! What crime do you charge me with except to have loved? I am no Phthian woman, nor sprung from great Mycenae, nor did my husband and my father stand against you. If you are ashamed of a wife, let me be called not wife but hostess; so long as she is yours, Dido will bear to be anything. Known to me are the straits that beat the African shore; at fixed seasons they grant and deny a passage. When the breeze grants a way, you will spread your sails to the winds; now light seaweed holds the stranded ship. Charge me to watch the time; you will go more surely, nor, if you wish it, will I myself let you stay. Your comrades too demand rest, and the battered fleet, half-repaired, asks for a little delay; for my services, and for whatever else I shall owe you besides, for the hope of marriage I ask a little time — until the seas grow gentle, and my love, until by time and habit I learn well to be able to bear my sorrows bravely. If not, I have the mind to pour out my life; you cannot long be cruel to me. Would that you might see what the image of the writer is! I write, and a Trojan sword lies in my lap, and over my cheeks the tears slide down onto the drawn sword, which soon, instead of tears, will be stained with blood. How well your gifts suit my fate! At small cost you furnish out my tomb. Nor is my breast now struck by a weapon for the first time; that place holds the wound of cruel love. Anna, sister, sister Anna, too aware of my fault, soon you will give the last gifts to my ashes. Nor, consumed on the pyre, shall I be inscribed ’Elissa, wife of Sychaeus’; this verse alone will stand on the marble of my tomb: ’Aeneas furnished both the cause of death and the sword; Dido herself fell, using her own hand.’

I, Hermione, address one lately both my cousin and my husband. Now my cousin; another holds the name of husband: Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, spirited in his father’s image, holds me shut up, against right and against duty. What I could, I refused, that I might not be held unresisting; for the rest, a woman’s hands had no strength. ’What do you do, son of Aeacus? I am not without an avenger,’ I said: ’This girl, Pyrrhus, is under a master of her own!’ He, deafer than the sea, as I cried out the name of Orestes, dragged me by my unbound hair into his house. What worse should I have borne, a slave with Lacedaemon taken, if a barbarian horde were carrying off Greek women? More sparingly did conquering Achaea harry Andromache, when Danaan fire was burning the wealth of Phrygia. But you, if a loyal care of me touches you, Orestes, lay no timid hands on what is your right! If someone should drive off the cattle from the opened stalls, you would take up arms — yet, your wife snatched away, be slow? Let your father-in-law be your example, reclaimer of a stolen wife, for whom a woman was a righteous cause of war! If that father-in-law had idly snored in his widowed hall, my mother would be married to Paris, as she was before. Do not make ready a thousand ships nor billowing sails, nor the masses of the Danaan soldiery — come yourself! Even so I should have been reclaimed; nor is it shameful for a husband to have borne hard wars for a dear marriage-bed. What of this, that the same Pelopian Atreus is grandfather to us both, and, were you not my husband, you were my kinsman. As husband, I pray, help your wife; as kinsman, your kinswoman! Two names press upon your duty. Tyndareus, weighty in life and in years as my warrant, gave me to you; my grandfather held the decision over his granddaughter. But my father had promised me to the son of Aeacus, unaware of the deed; my grandfather, prior in order, prevails over my father. When I married you, my marriage-torch harmed no one; if I am joined to Pyrrhus, you will be the one wronged in me. And my father Menelaus will pardon our love — he himself yielded to the darts of the swift god. The love he allowed himself, he will grant his son-in-law; my mother, beloved, will profit me by her example. You are to me what my father is to my mother; the part the Dardanian stranger once played, Pyrrhus plays. Though he boast without end of his father’s deeds, you too have a father’s deeds to tell. The son of Tantalus ruled all, and Achilles himself. This man was a part of the army; that one was the leader of leaders. You too, through your forefather Pelops and Pelops’ father, if you count the ones between, will be fifth from Jove. Nor do you lack valor. You bore hateful arms, but — what could you do? — your father put them on you. I wish you had been brave in a better matter; the cause was not chosen for your work, but given. Yet you fulfilled it; and Aegisthus, his throat opened, bloodied the house, which your father had bloodied before. The son of Aeacus rails at it and turns your praise to crimes — and yet he endures the sight of me. I burst, and my face swells along with my mind, and my breast, scorched with shut-in fires, aches. Has anyone, to Hermione’s face, flung Orestes in reproach, and I have no strength, nor is a fierce sword at hand? At least I may weep; by weeping I pour out my anger, and over my breast the tears go like a river. These alone I always have, and always pour out; my uncared-for cheeks are wet with a perennial spring. Is it by the destiny of our race, which strays into our own years, that we, the mothers of Tantalus’ line, are fit plunder? I will not recount the lie of the river-swan, nor complain that Jove hid himself in feathers. Where the outstretched Isthmus keeps two seas far apart, Hippodamia was carried off on a stranger’s wheels; the Taenarian woman, snatched across the sea by an Idaean guest, turned the Argive hands to arms on her behalf. I scarcely remember, yet I remember. All was grief, all was full of anxious fear; my grandfather wept, and my aunt Phoebe, and the twin brothers, Leda prayed to the gods above and to her own Jove. I myself, tearing my hair, not yet long, kept crying: ’without me — without me, mother — do you go?’ For my husband was away! Lest I be thought not of Pelops’ line, behold, I was made ready as booty for Neoptolemus! Would that the son of Peleus had escaped Apollo’s bow! The father would condemn his son’s insolent deeds; neither once did it please, nor now would it have pleased Achilles, that a husband should weep, widowed, for a wife carried off. What wrong of mine made the powers of heaven unjust, that I — alas, wretched me! — should complain that a star stands against me? As a small child I was without my mother, my father bore arms, and, though both lived, I was bereft of both. I brought you no childish endearments, my mother, in my early years, spoken as a girl with uncertain tongue; I did not catch at your neck with little arms, nor sit, a welcome burden, in your lap. You had no care of my upbringing, nor, betrothed to a husband, did I enter a new chamber with my mother making it ready. I had gone out to meet you on your return — I will confess the truth — nor was my parent’s face known to me! Yet I knew that you were Helen, because you were the most beautiful; you yourself had to ask which was your daughter! This one part has gone well for me, that Orestes was my husband; he too, unless he fights for himself, will be taken away. Pyrrhus holds me captive, his father safely home and victor — this gift fallen Troy has given me! Yet when high Titan presses on with his radiant horses, unhappy, I enjoy a freer kind of misery; but when night has hidden me, wailing in the chamber and groaning bitterly, and I have lain down on the mournful bed, instead of sleep my eyes ply welling tears, and, as I may, I flee the man as from an enemy. Often I am numb with my woes and, forgetful of circumstance and place, unknowing I have touched the Scyrian limbs with my hand, and when I have felt the wrong, I leave the body ill-touched, and believe I have polluted hands. Often, instead of the name of Neoptolemus, the name of Orestes comes out, and I love the slip of the voice as an omen. By my unhappy race I swear, and by the father of the race, who shakes the seas, the lands, and his own realms; by the bones of your father, my uncle, which owe it to you that they lie bravely avenged beneath the mound — either I will die before my time and be quenched in my early years, or I, a daughter of Tantalus, will be the wife of a son of Tantalus!

I, a letter, am sent to the son of Alceus by your wife, sharer of your mind — if Deianira is still your wife: I congratulate you that Oechalia is added to our titles; I lament that the victor has yielded to the conquered. A rumor has suddenly reached the Pelasgian cities, discolored, and not to be owned by your deeds: that he whom Juno and the boundless chain of labors never broke has had Iole’s yoke laid on him. This Eurystheus would wish, this the Thunderer’s sister would wish, and your stepmother would be glad at the stain upon your life; but not he to whom one short night — if it is believed — was given, as he labored, that you might be conceived so great. Venus has harmed you more than Juno: she, by pressing you down, exalted you; this one holds your neck beneath a lowly foot. Look at the world made peaceful by your avenging strength, wherever blue Nereus girdles the broad earth. To you the peace of the land, to you the safe seas owe themselves; you have filled both houses of the sun with your services. The heaven that is to bear you, you yourself once bore; with Hercules set beneath it, Atlas held up the stars. What have you won but notoriety for your wretched shame, if you heap a base mark upon your earlier deeds? Do they tell that you gripped fast the twin serpents, when, tender in the cradle, you were already worthy of Jove? You began better than you end; the last yield to the first; unlike are this man and that boy. Him whom a thousand beasts, whom the Sthenelean foe, whom Juno could not conquer, love conquers. But I am called well-married, because I am named the wife of Hercules, and have for father-in-law him who thunders on high with swift horses. As ill-matched bullocks come badly to the plow, so a lesser wife is oppressed by a great husband. It is no honor but a burden, a show that will hurt the one who bears it; if you would marry fitly, marry an equal. My husband is always away, better known to me as a guest than a spouse, and pursues monsters and dreadful beasts. I myself, busy with chaste vows in a widowed house, am tormented lest my husband fall by a hostile foe; among serpents and boars and greedy lions I am tossed, and dogs that will fasten with their triple jaws. The entrails of cattle, and the empty phantoms of sleep, and omens sought in the secret night, disturb me. Unhappy, I go fowling for the murmurs of uncertain rumor, and fear falls by doubtful hope, and hope by fear. My mother is away and complains that she pleased a powerful god, and neither father Amphitryon nor the boy Hyllus is here; Eurystheus the taskmaster, by the cunning of unjust Juno, is felt by us, and the goddess’s long anger. Is it too little for me to bear these things? You add foreign loves, and any woman can become a mother by you. I will not recount Auge, ravished in the vales of Parthenius, nor your offspring, nymph of Ormenus; nor shall the sisters be your reproach, throng of Teuthras, of whose company not one was left untouched by you. One adultery, a recent crime, will be charged to you by me, whence I am made a stepmother to Lydian Lamus. Maeander, so often a wanderer in the same lands, who often twists his weary waters back upon themselves, saw necklaces hung on the neck of Hercules, that neck to which the sky was a small burden. Were you not ashamed to bind your strong arms with gold, and to set jewels against those solid muscles? Yes, beneath those arms the Nemean pest gave up its life, from which your left shoulder has its covering! You dared to bind your shaggy hair with a turban! The white poplar is fitter for Hercules’ hair. And do you not think it disgraced you to be girt with a Maeonian sash, in the manner of a wanton girl? Does the image of cruel Diomedes not come to your mind, the savage who fed his mares on a banquet of men? If Busiris had seen you in that dress, surely you, the victor, would have shamed him, the vanquished. Let Antaeus strip the ribbons from that hard neck, lest he be ashamed to have fallen beneath a soft man. Among the Ionian girls you are said to have held a wool-basket, and to have quailed at your mistress’s threats. Do you not shrink, son of Alceus, from setting the hand victorious in a thousand labors on the smooth wool-baskets, and drawing out coarse threads with your sturdy thumb, and weighing back equal portions to your notorious mistress? Ah, how often, while you twist the threads with hard fingers, your too-mighty hands have crushed the spindles! Before your mistress’s feet you would sit, and tell the deeds you ought to have hidden — how, namely, the throats crushed, the monstrous water-snakes wrapped your infant hand with their coils, how the Tegean boar on cypress-bearing Erymanthus lies, and bruises the ground with its huge weight. Not the faces fixed on the Thracian doors are passed over by you, nor the mares fat with the slaughter of men; and the triple prodigy, Geryon rich in Iberian cattle, though in three bodies he was one; and Cerberus, parted from one trunk into as many dogs, his hair menacing with entwined snake; and the serpent that teemed again from a fertile wound, fruitful, and grown rich from its own losses; and the one that hung, a heavy burden, between your left side and left arm, its throat squeezed shut; and the mounted host, ill-trusting in its feet and its double form, driven from the Thessalian ridges. Can you tell these things, decked out in a Sidonian cloak? Does your tongue, checked by such finery, not fall silent? The nymph, daughter of Iardanus, decked herself too in your arms, and bore off famous trophies from her captive man. Go now, lift up your spirit and recount your brave deeds; by right she was the man that you were not. By so much are you less than she, as it was a greater thing, greatest of beings, to conquer you than those whom you conquered. To her passes the measure of your achievements — yield up your goods; your mistress is the heir of your glory. O shame! the rough pelt stripped from the shaggy lion’s ribs has covered her soft side! You are deceived and do not know — that is no spoil of the lion, but yours, and you are the conqueror of the beast, she of you. A woman has carried the darts black with Lernaean poisons, scarcely fit to carry the distaff heavy with wool, and armed her hand with the club that tames wild beasts, and looked in the mirror at the arms of my husband! Yet these things I had only heard; I could refuse to believe the rumor, and a soft grief came to my senses from the ear — before my eyes a foreign rival is led in, nor am I allowed to hide what I suffer! You do not let me turn away; through the city’s midst the captive comes, to be looked on by unwilling eyes. Nor does she come with unkempt hair in the captives’ manner, confessing her fortune by a fitting face; she walks abroad conspicuous in broad gold, just as you too were arrayed in Phrygia. She gives her face to the people, lofty as if Hercules were conquered; you would think Oechalia stood, with her father alive. Perhaps too, the Aetolian Deianira driven out, the rival, her name laid by, will be the wife, and a notorious Hymen will join the shameful bodies of Eurytus’ daughter Iole and the Aonian son of Alceus. My mind flees at the thought, and a chill walks through my limbs, and my hand lies in my lap, grown faint. Me too, among many, but me you loved without reproach. Do not regret it — twice I was your cause of battle. Weeping, Achelous gathered his horn on the wet banks, and plunged his maimed brow in the muddy water; the half-man Nessus fell in lotus-bearing Euenus, and the horse’s blood stained the waters. But why do I recount these things? As I write, rumor comes as messenger that my husband is perishing by the corruption of my tunic. Ah me! what have I done? whither has frenzy driven me, who love? Wicked Deianira, why do you hesitate to die? Shall your husband be torn apart in the midst of Oeta, and you, the cause of so great a crime, survive? If I still have anything done by which I may be believed the wife of Hercules, my death shall be the pledge of our marriage! You too, Meleager, will recognize a sister in me! Wicked Deianira, why do you hesitate to die? Alas, accursed house! Agrios sits on the high throne; a bare old age weighs down forsaken Oeneus. My brother Tydeus is an exile on unknown shores; the other was set, alive, in the fatal fire; my mother drove the steel through her own breast. Wicked Deianira, why do you hesitate to die? This one thing I beg, by the most sacred laws of our bed, that I may not seem to have plotted against your life. Nessus, when his greedy breast was struck by the arrow, said, ’This blood has the power of love.’ I sent you a robe smeared with the poison of Nessus. Wicked Deianira, why do you hesitate to die? And now farewell, aged father, and my sister Gorge, and my country, and my brother taken from his country, and you, the daylight last today to my eyes, and husband — but oh, may you live! — and farewell, boy Hyllus!

She whom you left to the beasts, wicked Theseus, even now lives — and would you have her bear even this with a calm mind? Every kind of wild beast I have found gentler than you; entrusted to none could I have fared worse than to you. What you read, Theseus, I send you from that shore from which the sails bore off your ship without me, on which my sleep wickedly betrayed me, and you, who through a crime laid an ambush against my slumber. It was the time when the earth is first sprinkled with glassy frost, and the birds, hidden in the leaves, complain. Half-waking, and languid with sleep, I moved, half on my back, my hands to grasp at Theseus — there was no one! I draw back my hands and try again, and move my arms over the bed — there was no one! Fear shook off sleep; terrified, I rise, and my limbs are flung from the widowed bed. At once my breast sounded under my striking palms, and my hair, disordered as it was from sleep, was torn. There was a moon; I look to see if I can make out anything but shores. What my eyes might see, they have nothing but the shore. Now this way, now that, and to both sides without order, I run; the deep sand slows my girlish feet. Meanwhile along the whole shore I cried ’Theseus!’: the hollow rocks gave back your name, and as often as I called you, so often the place itself called. The place itself wished to bring help to the wretched. There was a hill — sparse bushes show on its top; from it a crag, gnawed by the hoarse waters, hangs. I climb — my spirit gave me strength — and so far and wide I measure the deep waters with my gaze. From there I — for I found even the winds cruel — saw the sails stretched taut by the headlong South wind. When I saw it — though I would think I did not deserve to have seen it — I grew colder than ice and half-dead. Nor does grief let me languish long; by it I am roused, I am roused and call Theseus at the top of my voice. ’Where do you flee?’ I cry; ’come back, wicked Theseus! Turn your ship! it does not have its full number!’ So I; what my voice lacked I filled out with beating; blows were mingled with my words. If you could not hear, at least that you might see, my hands, waved far and wide, gave signs; and I set white veils on a long rod — to remind you, no doubt, who had forgotten me! And now you were snatched from my eyes. Then at last I wept; my soft cheeks had before been numb with grief. What better could my eyes do than weep for me, after I had ceased to see your sails? Either I wandered alone with hair flung loose, like a Bacchante stirred by the Ogygian god, or, gazing out on the sea, I sat cold upon a rock, and as much stone as my seat was, so much stone was I myself. Often I go back to the bed that had received us both, but was not to show us both again, and I touch your traces — what I can, in your stead — and the covers that grew warm with your limbs. I lie down, and with my tears streaming over the soaked bed, ’Two of us,’ I cry, ’pressed you — give back the two! We came here both; why do we not depart both? Faithless little bed, where is the greater part of us?’ What shall I do? where shall I take myself, alone? the island lies untilled. I see no works of men, none of oxen. Sea girds every side of the land; nowhere a sailor, no ship to go upon the uncertain ways. Suppose companions and winds and a ship were given me — what should I make for? my father’s land denies me approach. Though I glide on a lucky ship over the calmed seas, though Aeolus rein the winds — I shall be an exile! I shall not look on you, Crete, parted among a hundred cities, land known to the boy Jove, since my father, and the land ruled by a just parent — names dear to me — were betrayed by my deed. When, lest you, victorious, should die in the winding house, I gave you threads to guide your steps in a guide’s stead, then you said to me: ’I swear by these very perils, that you shall be mine while both of us live.’ We live, and I am not yours, Theseus — if she lives at all, a woman buried by the fraud of a perjured man. Me too you should have struck, wicked one, with the club with which you killed my brother; then the faith you gave would have been discharged by my death. Now I recall not only what I am to suffer, but whatever any abandoned woman can suffer: a thousand shapes of perishing come to my mind, and death holds less of pain than the delay of death. Now, now I suspect that, from this side or that, will come wolves to tear my flesh with greedy tooth. Who knows whether this land breeds tawny lions too? Perhaps the island holds savage tigers as well. And the straits are said to cast up great seals! Who forbids swords too to go through my side? Only let me not be bound, a captive, by a hard chain, nor draw great portions of wool with a slave’s hand — I, whose father is Minos, whose mother is the daughter of Phoebus, and, what I remember more, who was betrothed to you! If I have looked on sea, on lands, and on the outstretched shores, many things on land, many on the waters, threaten me. The sky remained — I fear the images of the gods! I am left, prey and food for ravening beasts; or if men dwell and live here, I distrust them — wronged, I have learned to fear foreign men. Would that Androgeos lived! and that you had not paid for your impious deeds, land of Cecrops, with your own dead; nor would your uplifted right hand, Theseus, have slain with a knotted club the creature part man, part bull; nor would I have given you the threads to show your way back, threads drawn back again through your gathering hands. I do not wonder, indeed, that victory stands with you, and that the monster, laid low, beat the Cretan ground. Your iron heart could not be pierced by the horn; even had you no shield, you were safe in your breast. There you carried flint, there you carried adamant, there you have a Theseus to outdo the flint. Cruel sleep, why did you hold me helpless? Or I should have been pressed once for all by eternal night. You too are cruel, winds, and too ready, and breezes too dutiful toward my tears. Cruel the right hand that killed my brother and me, and the faith given when I asked it — an empty word! Against me sleep and wind and faith have conspired; I, one girl, was betrayed by three causes! So then, dying, I shall not see my mother’s tears, nor will there be one to close my eyes with his fingers? Will my unhappy breath go out into foreign airs, and no friendly hand anoint my laid-out limbs? Will the sea-birds stand over my unburied bones? Is this the tomb my services deserve? You will go to the harbors of Cecrops and, received in your country, when you have stood high before the face of your throng and told well the death of the bull-and-man, and the stone house cut through by uncertain ways, tell too of me, left on a lonely land! I am not to be stolen away from your titles. Aegeus is not your father, nor are you the son of Aethra, daughter of Pittheus; the rocks and the sea begot you! Would the gods had made you see me from the top of your stern; my sad form would have moved your face! Now too, not with your eyes, but, as you can, see with your mind one clinging to a crag that the wandering water beats. See the hair let down in the mourner’s manner, and the tunic heavy with tears as if with rain. My body shivers, like crops driven by the north winds, and the letter, pressed by a trembling finger, falters. I do not entreat you by my service, since it turned out ill; let no gratitude be owed for my deed. But neither let there be punishment! if I am not the cause of your safety, yet there is no reason that you should be the cause of my death. These hands, worn out with beating my mournful breast, unhappy, I stretch out to you across the wide seas; these locks — what remain of them — in grief I show you! By the tears your deeds set flowing I pray — turn your ship, Theseus, and glide back with sail reversed! If I die first, you will yet carry home my bones!

The daughter of Aeolus sends to the son of Aeolus the greeting she herself does not have, and words marked by an armed hand; if any of the writing wanders in dark blots, the little book will have been stained by its mistress’s blood. My right hand holds the pen, the other holds drawn steel, and the unrolled paper lies in my lap. This is the image of Aeolus’ daughter writing to her brother; thus, it seems, I can please my hard father. I could wish he himself were here, spectator of my death, and that the deed were carried out before its author’s eyes! Savage as he is, and far fiercer than his own East winds, he would have watched my wounds with dry cheeks. Surely it is something, to live among the savage winds; he suits the temper of his own people. He commands Notus and Zephyr and the Sithonian Aquilo, and your wings, headlong Eurus. He commands, alas! the winds, but does not command his swelling anger, and holds realms smaller than his own vices. What use is it that, raised to heaven through ancestral names, I can count Jove among my kin? Do I any the less hold the deadly steel, a funeral gift, in a woman’s hand — weapons not my own? O Macareus, would that the hour which joined us into one had come later than my death! Why did you ever love me, brother, more than a brother should, and why was I to you what a sister ought not to be? I too caught fire, and such a god as I used to hear of, some god I felt in my warming heart. The color had fled my face; leanness had shrunk my limbs; my mouth, forced, took the smallest food; sleep came not easily, and the night was a year long to me, and I gave groans though hurt by no pain. Nor could I give myself a reason why I did these things, nor did I know what a lover was; yet that I was. My nurse first felt the trouble with her old woman’s mind; my nurse first said to me, ’Daughter of Aeolus, you are in love!’ I blushed, and shame cast my eyes down to my lap; these in my silence were signs enough of confession. And now the weight of my ruined womb was swelling, and the stolen burden weighed on my sick limbs. What herbs, what drugs did my nurse not bring me and apply with a bold hand, that the growing burden might be shaken out from deep within me — this one thing we hid from you? Ah, too tenacious of life, the infant withstood the arts brought against it, and was safe from a hidden enemy! Now nine times had Phoebus’ most beautiful sister risen, and a new Moon was driving her light-bringing horses. Not knowing what cause gave me sudden pains, I was raw for childbirth, and a new recruit. Nor did I keep in my cry. ’Why,’ she says, ’do you betray your crimes?’ and the knowing old woman pressed shut the mouth that screamed. What shall I do, unhappy? pain forces me to utter groans, but fear and the nurse and shame itself forbid. I hold in my groans and catch back the words that slip out, and am forced to drink down my own tears. Death was before my eyes, and Lucina denied her aid — and, were I to die, my death too would be a heavy crime — when, bending over me, your tunic and hair torn, you warmed my crushed breast again with your own, and said to me, ’Live, sister, o dearest sister, live, and do not in one body destroy two! Let good hope give you strength; for you will be wed to your brother. You will be the wife of him by whom you are a mother.’ Dead though I was, believe me, yet at your words I revived: and the crime and burden of my womb was laid down. Why do you congratulate yourself? Aeolus sits in the middle of his hall; the crime must be stolen from a father’s eyes. With grain and branches of the pale olive and light fillets the busy old woman hides the infant, and performs feigned rites and says words of prayer; the people give way to the rites, my father himself gives way. Now she was near the threshold — a wailing came to the father’s ears, and the child is betrayed by his own evidence! Aeolus snatches the infant and unmasks the false rites; the palace rings with his mad voice. As the sea grows tremulous when grazed by a slight breeze, as the ash-twig is shaken by the warm South wind, so you might see my pale limbs quiver; the bed was shaken by the body laid on it. He rushes in and publishes my shame with his shouting, and scarcely keeps his hands from my wretched face. I myself, in shame, poured forth nothing but tears; my tongue, held back, had grown numb with cold fear. And now he had ordered the little grandson given to dogs and birds, and left out in lonely places. The poor thing gave a wail — you would think it had understood — and with what voice it could, it begged its grandfather. What do you think my mind was then, brother — for you can gather it from your own heart — when the enemy, before my eyes, carried off my own flesh into the high woods, to be eaten by mountain wolves? He had gone out from the chamber; then at last I could beat my breast and run my nails over my cheeks. Meanwhile a guard of my father, with mournful face, came and uttered shameful words from his mouth: ’Aeolus sends you this sword’ — he handed over the sword — ’and bids you know, from your desert, what it means.’ I know, and I will use the violent sword bravely; I will bury my father’s gift in my breast. With these gifts, father, do you endow my marriage? With this dowry, father, will your daughter be rich? Carry far off, deceived Hymenaeus, your marriage-torches, and flee these accursed halls with hurried foot! Bring against me the torches you bear, black Furies, and let my pyre blaze from that fire! Marry, happy sisters, under a better fate, yet still be mindful of me who am lost! What did the boy do, born so few hours ago? By what deed did he, scarcely well born, wrong his grandfather? If he could have deserved death, let him be thought to have deserved it — ah, the poor thing is punished for my offense! Son, your mother’s grief, prey of the raging beasts, ah me! torn to pieces on your birthday; son, pitiable pledge of a too-ill-starred love — this was your first day, this was your last. It was not granted me to drench you with my due tears, nor to bring shorn locks to your tomb; I did not lie over you, I did not gather cold kisses. Greedy beasts tear my own flesh apart. I too will follow the infant’s shade with a wound of my own, nor will I long be called a mother, nor bereaved. But you, o hoped for in vain by your wretched sister, gather, I pray, the scattered limbs of your son, and bring them back to their mother, and lay them in a shared tomb, and let one urn, however narrow, hold us two! Live, mindful of me, and pour your tears upon my wounds, and do not, a lover, shrink from your lover’s body. Do you, I beg, carry out the charge of the sister you loved too well; I myself will obey my father’s charge!

Medea — an exile, destitute, scorned — speaks to her new-wed husband: or have you no time to spare from your kingdom? Yet for you, I remember, I, queen of the Colchians, had time to spare, when you begged that my art should bring you aid. Then the sisters who dispense the threads of mortals ought to have unwound my spindles. Then I, Medea, could have died well! whatever life I have drawn out from that time has been a punishment. Ah me! why did the Pelian timber, driven by youthful arms, ever seek the ram of Phrixus? Why did we Colchians ever see the Magnesian Argo, and you, the Greek throng, drink the water of Phasis? Why did your golden hair please me more than was right, and your beauty and the feigned charm of your tongue? Or, since once the strange ship had come to our sands and brought its bold men, the unmindful son of Aeson should have gone, undrugged, into the panting fires and the scorching mouths of the bulls; he should have cast the seed — as many foes as seed — that the sower might fall by his own sowing! How much treachery would have perished with you, villain, how many evils would have been taken from my head! There is some pleasure in reproaching an ingrate with his debt. This I will enjoy; this is the only joy I shall have of you. Bidden to turn the untried ship to Colchis, you entered the blessed realm of my country. There I, Medea, was what your new bride is here; as rich as her father is to her, so rich was mine to me. He holds two-sea’d Ephyre; mine held all as far as snowy Scythia, where the left shore of the Pontus lies. You receive the Pelasgian youths in hospitality, Aeetes, and you, Greek bodies, press the embroidered couches. Then I saw you, then I began to know what you were; that was the first ruin of my mind. I both saw and was lost; nor did I burn with familiar fires, as a pine torch burns before the great gods. You were handsome, and my own fates were dragging me; your eyes had stolen away my sight. Faithless one, you saw it — for who hides love well? The flame stands out, betrayed by its own evidence. Meanwhile the hard law is told to you, that you should press the necks of the wild bulls beneath the unaccustomed plowshare. They were the bulls of Mars, savage beyond their horns, whose terrible breath was fire; their feet were solid bronze, and bronze stretched over their nostrils, blackened, this too, by their own breathing. Besides, you are bidden to scatter with a doomed hand, over the broad fields, seed that would breed peoples, who would seek your body with the weapons born with them; that is a harvest unkind to its own farmer. To make the eyes of the guardian, that know not how to yield to sleep, give way — that is the last labor, to cheat him by some art. Aeetes had spoken; you all rise up in gloom, and the high table leaves the purple couches. How far from you then was the dowry-kingdom of Creusa, and your father-in-law, and the daughter of great Creon! You go off sad; with wet eyes I follow you departing, and my tongue said in a thin murmur: ’farewell!’ When, sorely wounded, I touched the bed set in my chamber, the night, long as it was, passed for me in tears; before my eyes were the bulls and the accursed crops, before my eyes was the ever-wakeful serpent. On this side love, on that fear; fear itself increases love. It was morning, and my dear sister, received into my chamber, found me with hair disheveled and lying face down, and everything full of my tears. She begs aid for the Minyae. One asks, the other obtains: what she begs, we give to the youth, the son of Aeson. There is a grove dark with pitch-pines and the foliage of holm-oak; scarcely may the sun’s rays reach there. In it are — at least there were — the shrines of Diana; the goddess stands, made of gold by a barbarian hand. Do you know it? or have the places, with me, slipped your mind? We came there. You began first to speak thus with faithless mouth: ’Fortune has handed you the right and the decision of my safety, and my life and death are in your hand. To be able to destroy is enough, if the mere power pleases anyone; but, saved, I will be a greater glory to you. By our troubles, I pray, of which you can be the relief, by your race, and the godhead of your all-seeing grandsire, by the three faces and the secret rites of Diana, and, if perchance this nation has any gods — O maiden, pity me, pity mine; make me, by your kindness, yours for all time! But if perchance you do not scorn a Pelasgian for husband — but whence should I have gods so kind, and mine? — my breath will vanish into thin air before any but you be a bride in my chamber! Let Juno be witness, who presides over the rites of marriage, and the goddess in whose marble shrine we are!’ These things — and how small a part are they! — moved the heart of a simple girl, and your right hand was joined to mine. I saw your tears too — there was a part of fraud in them as well. So quickly was I, a girl, captured by your words. You yoke the bronze-footed bulls with body unburned, and split the solid ground with the bidden plowshare. You fill the fields with poisoned teeth for seed, and a soldier is born, holding swords and shields. I myself, who had given the drugs, sat pale, when I saw the sudden men holding arms, until the earth-born brothers, a marvelous deed, joined their drawn hands against one another. Lo, the sleepless watcher, bristling with rattling scales, hisses and sweeps the ground with his coiling breast! Where then was your dowry’s wealth? where was your royal wife, and the Isthmus that parts the waters of the twin seas? I, who am now at last become a barbarian to you, now poor to you, now seen by you as harmful, lulled the flaming eyes with drugged sleep, and gave you the fleece, safe, to seize. My father was betrayed, I left my kingdom and country; the gift of being allowed to be in exile, I took! My virginity became the booty of a foreign robber; my best sister, with my dear mother, was left behind. But fleeing, I did not leave you, brother, without me! In this one place my letter fails. What my right hand dared to do, it does not dare to write. So I — but along with you — ought to have been torn apart. Yet I did not fear — for what should I fear after those deeds? — to trust myself to the sea, a woman and now a criminal. Where is the divine power? where the gods? Let us undergo on the deep our deserved penalties, you for fraud, I for credulity! Would that the Symplegades had crushed us, pressed together, and my bones clung to your bones; or that ravening Scylla had sunk us to be eaten by her dogs — Scylla ought to have harmed ungrateful men; and she who spews up as many waves and sucks back as many, should have plunged us too beneath the Trinacrian water! Safe and victorious you return to the Haemonian cities; the golden fleece is set before your fathers’ gods. Why should I tell of the daughters of Pelias, guilty through piety, and the father’s limbs cut up by a maiden’s hand? Though others blame me, you must praise me, for whom I was so often forced to be guilty. You dared — o, fitting words fail a just grief! — you dared to say, ’Leave the house of Aeson!’ Bidden, I left the house, accompanied by my two children, and by the love of you, which always follows me. When suddenly the chanted Hymen came to my ears, and the torches flashed with kindled fire, and the pipe poured out wedding songs for you, but for me more mournful than a funeral trumpet, I was terrified, nor did I yet think there could be such a crime; yet there was a chill in all my breast. The crowd rushes and shouts ’Hymen, Hymenaeus!’ again and again — the nearer that voice, the worse it was for me. Here and there the servants wept and hid their tears — who would wish to be the messenger of so great an evil? For me too, whatever it was, it was better not to know; yet, as if I knew, my mind was sad, when the younger of my boys (by chance, or in eagerness to see, he stood at the outer threshold of the double door) says, ’Come here just now, mother! Father Jason leads the procession, and, golden, drives his harnessed horses!’ At once, my garment torn, I beat my breast, nor was my face safe from my nails. My spirit urged me to go into the midst of the throng and snatch the garlands from their well-set hair; I scarcely held myself from crying, my hair torn, ’He is mine!’ and laying hands on him. Wronged father, rejoice! rejoice, forsaken Colchians! Take, shade of my brother, these offerings to the dead; I am deserted, having lost kingdom and country and home and a husband, who alone was everything to me! The serpent, then, I could overcome, and the raging bulls; one man alone I could not master, and I, who drove back the fierce fires with learned drugs, am unable to escape my own flames. My spells and herbs and arts themselves desert me; the goddess does nothing, nothing the rites of mighty Hecate. The day is not pleasing to me; the bitter nights are passed awake, and gentle sleep is far from my wretched breast. I, who cannot lull myself, could lull the dragon; my care is more useful to anyone than to me. The limbs I saved, a rival now embraces, and she has the fruits of my labor. Perhaps too, while you seek to boast yourself to your foolish wife and to say things fit for unjust ears, you invent new charges against my face and my character. Let her laugh and be glad at my faults! Let her laugh and lie aloft in Tyrian purple — she will weep, and, burned, will outdo my fires! While steel and flames and the juice of poison are at hand, no enemy of Medea will go unavenged! But if perchance prayers touch your iron heart, now hear words humbler than my spirit! I am as much a suppliant to you as you were often to me, nor do I delay to fall down before your feet. If I am cheap to you, look to our common children; a cruel stepmother will rage against my offspring. They are too like you, and I am moved by the likeness, and as often as I see them, my eyes grow wet. By the gods above I pray, by the light of my ancestral flame, by my service and by our children, our two pledges — give back the bed, for which, mad, I left so many things; add faith to your words and bring back your aid! I do not implore you against bulls and men, nor that the serpent, conquered, may lie quiet by your aid; I seek you, whom I earned, whom you yourself gave to me, with whom, the father, I became a parent alike. Where is my dowry, you ask? I counted it out in that field which you had to plow if you would carry off the fleece. That golden ram, notable for his deep wool, is my dowry, which, were I to say ’give it back!’, you would refuse. My dowry is yourself, safe; my dowry is the Greek youth! Go now, villain, set your Sisyphean wealth against that! That you live, that you have a bride and a powerful father-in-law, this very thing — that you can be ungrateful — is my doing. Whom indeed at once — but what use is it to foretell the punishment? my anger is in labor with huge threats. Where anger leads, I will follow! perhaps I shall repent the deed — and I repent having looked to the good of a faithless husband. Let that god see to it, who now turns my heart about! Something greater, surely, my mind is plotting!

Laodamia, a loving wife of Haemonia, sends to her Haemonian husband the greeting she wishes to go where it is sent. Rumor says you are detained at Aulis by a holding wind. But when you were fleeing from me, where was this wind then? Then the seas should have withstood your oars; that was the fitting time for cruel waters. I would have given my husband more kisses and more charges; and there are many things I wished to say to you. You were snatched headlong from here, and the wind that called your sails, which the sailors wanted, not I, was blowing; the wind was fit for sailors, not fit for a lover. I am loosed from your embrace, Protesilaus, and my tongue left the charges unfinished as I gave them; scarcely could I say that sad ’farewell!’ Boreas bore down and stretched the snatched-away sails, and now my Protesilaus was far off. While I could watch my husband, to watch was a joy, and I followed your eyes always with mine; when I could not see you, I could see your sails, and the sails long held my gaze. But after I saw neither you nor the fleeing sails, and there was nothing for me to look at but the sea, the light too went with you, and, with darkness rising over me, bloodless, I am said to have sunk down on a failing knee. Scarcely could my father-in-law Iphiclus, scarcely aged Acastus, scarcely my sorrowing mother revive me with cold water; they did a kindly service, but useless to me. I am angry that I, wretched, was not allowed to die! When my spirit returned, my griefs returned with it. A lawful love gnawed my chaste breast. I have no care to give my hair to be combed, nor do I wish to cover my body with a gilded robe. Like those whom the Two-horned One is believed to have touched with his vine-wreathed wand, I go this way and that, where frenzy drives me. The matrons of Phylace gather and cry to me: ’Put on your royal robes, Laodamia!’ Shall I, forsooth, wear wools steeped in purple, while he wages war beneath the walls of Ilium? Shall I comb my hair, while his head is pressed by a helmet? Shall I wear new clothes, while my husband bears hard arms? So far as I can, by my unkempt state let me be said to imitate your toils, and let me pass this time of war in sorrow. Evil Paris, son of Priam, beautiful to the ruin of your own, may you be as feeble a foe as you were a wicked guest! Either I would you had found fault with the beauty of the Taenarian wife, or that yours had displeased her! You, Menelaus, who toil too much for your stolen wife, ah me, to how many will you be a lamentable avenger! Gods, I pray, turn the sinister omen from us, and may my husband dedicate his arms to Jove the Restorer! But I am afraid, as often as the pitiable war comes to mind; my tears flow like snow melting in the sun. Ilium and Tenedos and Simois and Xanthus and Ida — they are names almost to be feared by their very sound. Nor would the guest have dared to carry her off, unless he could defend himself; he knew his own strength. He had come, as the report goes, conspicuous with much gold, and one to carry the wealth of Phrygia on his person, powerful in fleet and men, by which fierce wars are waged — and how great a part of his kingdom follows him? By these things I suspect you were conquered, Ledaean sister of the twins; these, I think, can do harm to the Danaans. Beware of Hector, whoever he is, if I am your care; keep the name stamped on a remembering heart! When you have avoided him, remember to avoid the rest, and think there are many Hectors there; and be sure you say, as often as you make ready to fight: ’Laodamia bade me spare myself for her.’ If it is fated that Troy fall beneath the Argive soldier, it will fall without your taking any wound. Let Menelaus fight and press against the opposing foe; a wife must be sought by the husband from the midst of enemies. Your cause is different; do you only fight to live, and to be able to return to your lady’s loyal embrace. Spare, sons of Dardanus, I pray, out of so many foes, this one, lest my blood flow from that body! He is not one whom it befits to clash with naked steel, and to bear a savage heart against the men opposed; he can love far more strongly than he can fight. Let others wage wars; let Protesilaus love! Now I confess — I wished to call you back, and my heart urged it; but my tongue stopped, in fear of an ill omen. When you wished to go out from your father’s doors toward Troy, your foot, stumbling on the threshold, gave a sign. When I saw it, I groaned, and said in my silent breast: ’May these be signs, I pray, of a husband who will return!’ This I now tell you, that you be not bold in arms; see that all this fear of mine goes into the winds! A lot too marks out some man by an unjust fate, who first of the Danaans shall touch the Trojan ground. Unhappy she who first will mourn a husband taken! May the gods grant that you not wish to be foremost! Among a thousand ships let yours be the thousandth, and last of all churn the wearied waters! This too I warn beforehand: be the last to leave the ship; the land you hasten to is not your fatherland. When you come back, drive the keel with oar and sail, and on your own shore stay your swift step! Whether Phoebus is hidden or rides high over the lands, come swift to me by day, come to me by night, yet by night more than by day — night is dear to girls whose neck has an arm laid beneath it. In my widowed bed I go hunting for lying dreams; while I lack the true, false joys delight me. But why does your pale image come before me? Why does much complaint come from your lips? I am shaken from sleep and worship the phantoms of the night; no Thessalian altar lacks my smoke; I offer incense and a tear besides, by which, sprinkled, it glows, as a flame is wont to rise when wine is poured on it. When shall I, embracing you returned with eager arms, be undone, languid, by my very joy? When will it be that, closely joined with me in one bed, you tell the splendid deeds of your campaign? While you tell me these things, however much it will please me to hear, yet you will take many kisses, and give many. Always in these things the well-telling words come fittingly to a halt; the tongue is readier to tell after a sweet delay. But when Troy comes to mind, the winds and the sea come too; good hope, beaten by anxious fear, falls. This too, that the winds forbid the keels to put out, moves me — you make ready to go on unwilling waters. Who would wish to return to his country when the wind forbids? Yet from your country you set sail though the sea forbids! Neptune himself grants no passage to his own city. Where do you rush? each of you, return to your homes! Where do you rush, Danaans? hear the forbidding winds! This delay is no sudden chance, but a god’s. What is sought by so great a war but a base adulteress? While you may, turn back your sails, you ships of Inachus! But what am I doing? do I call them back? Away with the omen of a recall, and may a kindly breeze favor the calmed waters! I envy the Trojan women, who, though they will see the tearful funerals of their own, and the enemy will not be far, will themselves with their own hands, a new bride, set the helmet on a brave husband and give him the Dardan arms. She will give the arms, and while she gives the arms, will at the same time take kisses — this kind of service will be sweet to both — and she will lead her husband forth, and give him charges to return, and will say: ’see that you bring back these arms to Jove!’ He, carrying his lady’s fresh charges with him, will fight warily and look back toward home. She will take off his shield when he returns and unbind his helmet, and receive his weary body on her breast. We are in uncertainty; anxious fear forces us to think all that can happen has already happened. Yet while you bear arms, a soldier in a far-off world, I have a wax that gives back your features; to it I speak the caresses, to it the words owed to you, and it receives my embraces. Believe me, the image is more than it seems; add a voice to the wax, and it will be Protesilaus. I gaze at it and hold it to my breast in place of my true husband, and complain to it, as if it could answer words. By your return and your body, my divinities, I swear, and by the matched torches of our love and our marriage, that I will come to you as your companion, wherever you are called, whether — what, alas, I fear — or whether you survive. My letter will be closed with a small charge at the end: if you have any care of me, have care of yourself!

Hypermestra sends this to the one out of so many cousins lately hers — the rest of the company lies low through the brides’ crime. I am kept shut in the house and confined with heavy chains; the cause of my punishment is that I was loyal. Because my hand shrank from driving the steel into your throat, I am accused; I would be praised, had I dared the crime. Better to be accused than to have so pleased my father; I do not regret having hands free of slaughter. Though my father burn me with the fire we did not profane, and thrust into my face the torches that attended the rites; or though he cut my throat with the sword he gave for an evil use, so that by the death my husband did not die, his wife may die — yet he will not bring it about that my dying lips say ’I repent!’ She is not loyal who regrets being loyal. Let Danaus repent the crime, and my savage sisters; this outcome is wont to follow wicked deeds. My heart shudders at the memory of the night defiled with blood, and a sudden trembling hampers the bones of my right hand. She whom you might think could have done a husband’s murder is afraid to write of a murder not done by her! Yet I will try. The dusk had just come over the earth; it was the last part of the day and the first of the night. We daughters of Inachus are led beneath the roof of great Pelasgus, and the father-in-law himself receives his armed daughters-in-law. On all sides the lamps, bound with gold, shine; impious incense is given to the unwilling hearths; the crowd cries ’Hymen, Hymenaeus!’ He fled from those who called; the wife of Jove herself withdrew from her own city! Lo, unsteady with wine, thronged by the shouting of their companions, fresh flowers binding their wine-soaked hair, glad, they are carried into the chambers — chambers, their own tombs! — and press the couches worthy of a funeral with their bodies. And now, heavy with food and wine and sleep, they lay, and deep, untroubled quiet was over Argos — around me I seemed to hear the groans of the dying; and indeed I was hearing it, and what I feared was real. My blood goes away, and warmth leaves my mind and body, and I lay grown cold on the new bed. As the slender ears of corn quiver in a gentle Zephyr, as a cold breeze shakes the poplar’s leaves, so, or even more, I trembled. You yourself lay there, and you were the sleep the wine had given you. The orders of my violent father shook off my fear; I rise up and take the weapon with a trembling hand. I will not speak falsely: three times my hand raised the sharp sword, three times, the sword ill-lifted, the hand fell back. I brought to your throat — let me confess the truth to you! — I brought to your throat my father’s weapon; but fear and loyalty stood in the way of the cruel attempt, and my chaste right hand shrank from the appointed work. Tearing my purple robe, tearing my hair, in a faint voice I said such words as these: ’Your father, Hypermestra, is cruel; carry out your parent’s orders; let this man go as companion to his brothers! I am a woman and a maiden, gentle by nature and in years; soft hands are not made for fierce weapons. Come now, while he lies there, imitate your brave sisters — it is likely the husbands have all been slain! If this hand could commit any murder, it would be bloodstained with its own mistress’s death. They have earned this death by keeping their cousins’ realm; with a destitute old man, we, a destitute crowd, go wandering. Suppose the men deserved to die — what have we ourselves done? By what offense of mine am I not allowed to be loyal? What have I to do with the sword? what use are warlike weapons to a girl? Wool and the distaff are fitter for my fingers.’ So I; and while I lament, my tears follow their own words and fall from my eyes onto your limbs. While you reach for embraces and toss your sleeping arms, your hand was almost wounded by the weapon. And now I feared my father and my father’s servants and the daylight — these words of mine drove off your sleep: ’Rise up, son of Belus, one out of so many brothers lately! This night, unless you hasten, will be everlasting for you!’ Terrified, you spring up; all the sluggishness of sleep flees; you see the brave weapon in my timid hand. To you, asking the cause, I said, ’while night permits, escape!’ While the dark night permits, you flee, I myself stay. It was morning, and Danaus counts up his sons-in-law lying from the slaughter. Of the full tally of the crime you alone are missing. He bears ill the loss of one kinsman’s death, and complains that there is too little blood shed. I am dragged from my father’s feet, and, seized by the hair — such rewards my loyalty earned! — the prison holds me. No doubt from that time Juno’s anger persists, since one was made an ox from a human, and a goddess from an ox. Yet it was punishment enough that the tender girl lowed, and could not, lately so beautiful, please Jove. The new heifer stood on the bank of her liquid father, and saw horns not her own in her father’s waters, and trying to complain she gave forth a lowing from her mouth, and was frightened at her shape, frightened at her own voice. Why do you rage, unhappy one? why do you wonder at yourself in your shadow? why do you count the feet made for your new body? You, the rival of great Jove, to be feared by his sister, relieve your great hunger with leaves and turf, you drink at a spring and gaze, stunned, at your own form, and fear lest the arms you bear should wound you, and you who lately were rich, that you might seem worthy even of Jove, now lie down naked on the naked ground. Over sea, over lands, and over kindred rivers you run; the sea grants, the rivers grant, the land grants you a way. What is the cause of your flight? why do you wander the long seas? You cannot escape your own face. Daughter of Inachus, where do you hasten? you both pursue and flee the same thing; you are guide to your companion, and companion yourself to your guide. The Nile, let out by seven mouths into the sea, stripped the maddened rival of her cow-face. Why do I tell of distant things, for which hoary age is my authority? See, my own years give me what to lament. My father and my uncle wage wars; from kingdom and home we are driven; the farthest world holds the outcasts. Of the throng of brothers the tiniest part remains. I weep for those given to death, and for those who dealt it; for as many brothers as I had, so many sisters perished to me. Let both companies receive my tears! Lo, I, because you live, am kept to be tortured for punishment; what will happen to the guilty, when I am tried for a praiseworthy deed, and, once the hundredth of a kindred company, unhappy, with one brother surviving, must fall? But you, Lynceus, if you have any care for a loyal sister, and are worthy of the gifts I gave you, either bring help, or give me to death, and my body, its life done, lay besides on a secret pyre, and bury my bones, drenched with faithful tears, and let my tomb be carved with a short inscription: ’Exiled Hypermestra, the unjust reward of loyalty: the death she warded from her cousin, she herself has borne.’ I would like to write more, but my hand has sunk under the chain’s weight, and fear itself takes away my strength.

Tell me, when the writing of my zealous hand was looked upon, was it at once known by your eyes as mine — or, unless you had read the name of the author, Sappho, would you not know whence this brief work is set going? Perhaps too you may ask why my songs are in alternating measures, when I am more suited to lyric strains. My love must be wept — elegy is the song of weeping; no lyre suits my tears. I burn, as a fertile field burns, its harvests kindled, when the unbridled East winds drive the fire. You haunt, Phaon, the distant fields of Typhoeus’ Etna; a heat no less than Etna’s fire holds me. Nor do songs come to me, that I might join to the strings I have set; songs are the work of an unburdened mind! Neither the girls of Pyrrha nor of Methymna, nor the rest of the Lesbian throng, please me. Cheap is Anactorie to me, cheap fair Cydro; Atthis is not pleasing to my eyes, as before, and a hundred others, whom here I loved without reproach; wicked one, what belonged to many, you alone now hold. You have beauty, you have years fit for play — O beauty, treacherous to my eyes! Take the lyre and the quiver — you will become Apollo plain to see; let horns come to your head — you will be Bacchus! Phoebus loved Daphne, and Bacchus the Cnosian girl, and neither one knew lyric measures; but for me the Pegasian Muses dictate the sweetest songs; already my name is sung in all the world. Nor has Alcaeus more praise, my fellow in homeland and lyre, though he sound more grandly. If grudging nature has denied me beauty, weigh the loss of beauty against my genius. Though I be short, yet I have a name to fill all lands; I myself bear the measure of my name. If I am not fair, Cepheian Andromeda pleased Perseus, dark with the color of her own country. And white doves are often joined to dappled ones, and the black turtledove is loved by the green bird. If none is to be yours but she who can seem worthy of you in beauty, then none will be yours. Yet when I read my verses, I seemed beautiful enough; you kept swearing that I alone was fit to speak. I was singing, I remember — lovers remember everything — and as I sang you gave me stolen kisses. These too you praised, and I pleased in every part — but then above all, when the work of love is done. Then my wantonness pleased you more than usual, and the quick stirring and the words fit for play, and that, when the pleasure of us both had mingled, the greatest languor was in our spent bodies. Now the Sicilian girls come to you as fresh prey. What have I to do with Lesbos? I wish to be a Sicilian. O send the wanderer back from your land, mothers of Nisus’s city and brides of Nisus’s city, and let not the lies of his coaxing tongue deceive you! What he says to you, he had said before to me. You too, Erycina, who haunt the Sican mountains — for I am yours — look to your poet, goddess! Or does grievous fortune carry on the course it began, and stay always bitter in its own running? Six birthdays had gone for me, when the gathered bones of my parent, before his day, drank my tears. My idle brother burned, caught by the love of a harlot, and bore losses mixed with base disgrace; made poor, he crosses the blue seas with a nimble oar, and the wealth he badly lost, he now badly seeks. Me too he hates, because I gave him much good and faithful counsel; this my frankness, this my dutiful tongue earned me. And as if there lacked things to wear me out without end, a little daughter heaps up my cares. Last of all you are added as a cause of my laments. My ship is not driven by its own wind. See, my hair lies scattered on my neck without order, nor does a bright gem press my fingers; I am clad in a cheap robe, there is no gold in my hair, my locks have no gifts of the Arabs. For whom, unhappy, should I be adorned, or to please whom should I labor? You, the one cause of my grooming, are away. My heart is soft and woundable by light darts, and there is always a cause why I always love — whether the Sisters laid down this law at my birth and no stern threads were given to my life, or whether pursuits pass into character, and Thalia, mistress of my art, makes my nature soft. What wonder, if the age of first down has carried me away, and the years a man may love? I feared you would snatch him in Cephalus’s stead, Aurora — and you would, but your first plunder holds you! If she who beholds all things, Phoebe, should behold him, Phaon will be bidden to prolong his sleep; Venus would have carried him to heaven in her ivory car, but she sees that he could please her own Mars too. O neither yet a young man, nor now a boy, a useful age, O ornament and great glory of your time, come here, and glide back, handsome one, into my arms! I do not pray that you love, but that you allow yourself to be loved. I write, and my eyes are bedewed with welling tears; see how many a blot there is in this place! If you were so resolved to go from here, you might have gone more gently, and at least have said, ’Girl of Lesbos, farewell!’ You did not take with you my tears, nor my kisses; in short, I did not fear what I was to grieve over. I have nothing of you with me but only the injury; nor do you have any pledge of your lover to remind you of her. I gave no charges, nor indeed would I have given any charge, except that you should not wish to be forgetful of me. By your love — may it never depart far from you! — and by the nine goddesses, my divinities, I swear, when someone said to me, ’your joys are fleeing,’ I could neither weep for long, nor speak! Both tears failed my eyes and words my palate, and my breast was bound tight with icy cold. After my grief found itself, I was not ashamed to beat my breast nor to shriek aloud with torn hair, no otherwise than if a loving mother carried the lifeless body of her lost son to the built-up pyre. My brother Charaxus rejoices and grows fat on my grief, and goes and comes before my eyes, and, that the cause of my grief may seem shameful, says, ’Why does she grieve? surely her daughter lives!’ Shame and love do not come to the same point. The whole crowd saw; I was laid bare in the breast with torn robe. You are my care, Phaon; my dreams bring you back — dreams brighter than a beautiful day. There I find you, though you are away in distant regions; but sleep does not hold joys long enough. Often I seem to load your arms upon my neck, often to have laid mine beneath yours; I recognize the kisses, which you used to join with the tongue, used to take aptly and aptly give. Sometimes I coax, and speak words most like the true, and my lips keep watch for my senses. I am ashamed to tell what follows, but all of it happens, and it pleases, and I cannot stay dry. But when Titan shows himself, and all things with him, I complain that sleep so quickly forsook me; I seek the caves and the grove, as though grove and caves could help — they were privy to my delights. There, out of my mind, like one whom raging Enyo has touched, I am borne, my hair lying loose on my neck. My eyes see the caves hanging with rough tufa, which to me were like Mygdonian marble; I find the wood, which often furnished us a bed and, shady, covered us with its thick foliage — but I do not find the lord of the wood and of me. The place is cheap ground; he was the dowry of the place. I knew the grass of the turf, familiar to me, that I had pressed; the herbage was bowed down by our weight. I lay down and touched the place, on the side where you had been; the grass, once dear, drank up my tears. Indeed the branches too seem to mourn, their leaves laid down, and no birds make their sweet plaint; only the most sorrowful Daulian bird, the mother who avenged her husband impiously, sings together of Ismarian Itys. The bird sings Itys, Sappho sings her deserted loves — so far; all the rest is silent as in midnight. There is a bright spring, clearer than any glass, a sacred spring — many think it holds a divine power — over which the watery lotus spreads its branches, a wood in itself; the ground is green with tender turf. Here, when, weeping, I had laid my weary limbs, a single Naiad stood before my eyes. She stood and said: ’since you burn with unequal fires, the land of Ambracia must be sought by you. Phoebus from on high looks out over the open sea, as far as it spreads — the people call it the Actian and the Leucadian. From here Deucalion, fired with love of Pyrrha, threw himself, and pressed the waters with body unhurt. Without delay, love turned and fled the sluggish breast of the sunken man, and Deucalion was relieved of his fire. That place holds this law. Seek at once high Leucas, and do not fear to leap from the rock!’ When she had warned me, she went, with her voice; I rise terrified, nor did my eyes hold back their tears. I will go, o nymph, and seek the rocks you showed; let fear, conquered by mad love, be far off! Whatever will be, will be better than now! Breeze, come beneath me, and let my body have no great weight! You too, gentle Love, set your wings beneath me as I fall, lest I be, dead, a reproach to the Leucadian water! Then I will lay down my lyre to Phoebus, a shared gift, and beneath it there will be a verse or two: ’In gratitude I have laid down the lyre to you, Phoebus, I, the poetess Sappho: it suits me, it suits you.’ Yet why do you send me, wretched, to the Actian shores, when you yourself could bring back your fugitive foot? You can be more healing to me than the Leucadian wave; both in beauty and in worth you will be a Phoebus to me. Or can you, o fiercer than any rock and wave, if I die, bear the title of my death? Ah, how much better my breast could be joined with you than be given to the rocks, to be cast headlong down! This is that breast, Phaon, which you used to praise, and which so often seemed full of genius to you. Now I would I were eloquent! grief stands in the way of my arts, and all my genius has halted at my woes. My old powers do not answer me for songs; the plectrum lies mute with grief, with grief the lyre. Women of sea-girt Lesbos, daughters about to wed and wed, women of Lesbos, names sung to the Aeolian lyre, women of Lesbos, you whom I loved and who made me infamous, cease to come, a throng, to my lyre! Phaon has carried off all that pleased you before in me, wretched me — I just now almost said ’mine!’ Bring it about that he return; your poet too will return. He gives strength to my genius, he takes it away. Do I accomplish anything with prayers, or is his boorish heart moved? Or is it unmoved, and do the Zephyrs carry off my falling words? The winds that carry off my words, I wish they brought back your sails; this task, sluggard, would befit you, if you were wise. Whether you return, and votive gifts are made ready for your ship, why do you tear my breast with delay? Loose the ship! Venus, born of the sea, makes the sea kind to a lover. The breeze will give you a course; only loose the ship! Cupid himself, sitting at the stern, will steer; he himself will set and furl the sails with a tender hand. But if it pleases you to have fled far from Pelasgian Sappho — yet you will not find why I deserved to be fled from — let at least a cruel letter say this to the wretch, that I may seek my fate in the Leucadian water!

This greeting I, son of Priam, send to you, daughter of Leda, which can be given to me only if you give it. Shall I speak out, or is there no need of a token to point out the flame, and does my love already show more than I would wish? I would rather it lay hidden, until times be given for a joy that will hold no fears mixed in, but I dissemble badly; for who could hide a fire, which is always betrayed by its own light? Yet if you wait for me to add a word too to the matter — I burn! you have the words that announce my heart. Spare me, I pray, for confessing, and do not read the rest with a hard face, but with one befitting your beauty. It is welcome already, that my letter, received, gives hope that I too may in this way be received. I pray she may make it good, and not have promised you to me in vain, who urged on me this journey — the mother of Love; for I — that you may not sin in ignorance — come by divine prompting, and no slight godhead attends my undertaking. I ask rewards indeed great, but not undeserved; Cytherea has promised you to my chamber. With her as guide, from the Sigean shore I made my doubtful ways over the long seas in a ship of Phereclus. She gave easy breezes and favoring winds — no wonder she has power over the sea, born of the sea. May she persist, and as she helped the sea’s swell, so help my breast’s; and bring my prayers into their own harbors. I brought these flames; I did not find them here. These were the cause for me of so long a journey, for neither grim winter nor wandering drove me here; the Taenarian land was the goal my fleet sought. Nor believe that I cleave the sea in a ship laden with merchandise — may the gods keep the wealth I have! Nor do I come as a sightseer to the Greek cities — the towns of my kingdom are richer. I seek you, whom golden Venus pledged to my bed; I desired you before you were known to me. I saw your face in my mind before with my eye; rumor, your first messenger, brought me the wound. Nor is it strange, if, since the bow is so strong, I love, struck from afar by its flying darts. So it pleased the fates; lest you try to overturn them, receive my words, reported with true faith. I was still held in my mother’s womb, the birth delaying; already her belly was heavy with its due weight. She seemed to herself, in the image of a dream, to bring forth a huge fire-bearing torch from her full womb. Terrified she rises, and the dread visions of the dark night she told to old Priam; he reports them to the seers. A seer sings that Ilium will burn with Paris’s fire — that torch was the torch of my heart, as it now is! My beauty and the vigor of my mind, though I seemed of the commons, were a sign of hidden nobility. There is a place in the midst of the wooded valleys of Ida, remote and thick with pitch-pines and holm-oaks, which is grazed neither by the peaceful sheep nor the crag-loving she-goat nor the slow ox with its broad mouth. From here, looking out on the walls of Dardania and its lofty roofs and the seas, I was leaning against a tree — Lo! the earth seemed to me to move under the beat of feet — I will speak truth that will scarcely find belief as truth — there stood before my eyes, driven on swift wings, the grandson of great Atlas and of Pleione — it was lawful to have seen it, may it be lawful to report what I saw! — and in the god’s fingers was a golden wand; and three goddesses at once, Venus and, with Pallas, Juno, set their tender feet on the grass. I was stunned, and a cold shudder had raised my hair, when the winged messenger said to me, ’lay aside your fear! You are the judge of beauty; settle the goddesses’ contest; which one is worthy by beauty to conquer the other two!’ And, lest I refuse, he commands it in the words of Jove, and at once lifts himself by the ethereal road to the stars. My mind grew strong, and sudden boldness came, and I did not fear to scan each one with my gaze. All were worthy to win, and I, the judge, complained that not all could keep their case. Yet even then one of them pleased me more, that you may know it was she from whom love is stirred. And so great is their care to win; with huge gifts they burn to tempt my judgment. The wife of Jove flaunts kingdoms, his daughter valor; I myself waver whether I wish to be powerful or brave. Sweetly Venus smiled; ’let neither gift touch you, Paris, both of them full of anxious fear!’ she said; ’We will give what you may love, and the daughter of fair Leda, fairer still, will go into your embraces!’ She spoke, and, her gifts and her beauty alike approved, she, victorious, carried her foot back to heaven. Meanwhile — the fates turned to fortune, I believe — I am recognized as a royal boy by sure signs. The house is glad at a son recovered after long times, and Troy adds this too to its festal days. And as I desire you, so girls have desired me; you alone can hold the prayer of many! Nor have only the daughters of kings and chiefs sought me, but I was the care and love even of nymphs. What face should I admire above Oenone’s? in the world there is no daughter-in-law worthier of Priam than you. But disgust of them all comes over me, since the hope of marriage with you, daughter of Tyndareus, has arisen. Waking I saw you with my eyes, by night in my mind, when the eyes lie conquered by gentle sleep. What will you do present, who pleased before being seen? I burned, though that fire was far off, nor could I owe that hope to myself any longer, without seeking my prayers by the blue road. The Trojan pine-woods are felled by the Phrygian axe, and every tree useful for the waters of the sea; lofty Gargara is stripped of its tall forests, and long Ida gives me countless beams. Oaks to found swift ships are bent, and the curved hull is woven with its ribs. We add the yards and the sails that follow the mast; and the curved stern receives its painted gods; on the one in which I myself sail, attended by little Cupid, stands painted the goddess, the surety of my marriage with you. After the last hand was laid on the finished fleet, at once it pleased me to go upon the Aegean waters — but my father and mother check my wishes by entreaty, and with loving voice delay the journey I had planned; and my sister Cassandra, with her hair loose as it was, when our ships were now ready to give their sails, cries out, ’Where do you rush? you will bring back fires with you! You do not know how great a flame is sought across these waters!’ The prophetess was true; I have found the fires she spoke of, and savage love blazes in my soft breast! I come out from the harbors, and, using bearing winds, I land on your shores, nymph of Oebalus. Your husband receives me in hospitality — this too was done not without the counsel and the divine powers of the gods! He indeed showed me whatever in all Lacedaemon was worth showing and notable; but for me, longing to see your praised beauty, there was nothing else by which my eyes could be caught. When I saw you, I was stunned, and felt my inmost heart, thunderstruck, swell with new cares. Such a face, as far as I recall, she had, Cytherea, when she came to my judgment. Had you come likewise into that contest, the palm of Venus would have been in doubt! Rumor indeed has made great proclamations of you, and no land is ignorant of your face; nor anywhere in Phrygia, nor from the sun’s rising, has any other among the beautiful so great a name! But believe this from me! — your glory is less than the truth, and rumor is almost grudging about your beauty; I find here more than she had promised, and your glory is outdone by its own subject. So Theseus, who knew all things, burned with reason, and you seemed worthy plunder for so great a man, when, in the manner of your people, you played naked in the gleaming wrestling-ground, a woman mixed with naked men. That he carried you off, I praise; I wonder that he ever gave you back. So good a prize should have been held firmly. This head would have parted from a bloody neck before you were dragged from my chamber. Would my hands ever wish to let you go? Would I, living, let you leave my embrace? If you had to be given back, yet I would have taken something first, nor would my love have been wholly idle. Either your virginity would have been tasted by me, or that which could be snatched with virginity unharmed. Only give yourself, and you will know what Paris’s constancy is; only the flame of the pyre will end my flames. I set you above the kingdoms which once the wife and sister of Jove promised me as the greatest gift; and so long as I could throw my arms about your neck, valor was scorned, though Pallas offered it. Nor do I regret it, nor will I ever seem to have chosen foolishly; my mind stays firm in its wish. Only do not let my hope fall to the ground, I beg, O you, worthy to be sought with so great a toil! I, no base man, do not seek marriage with a noble unworthily, nor, believe me, will you be my wife to your shame. A Pleiad, if you seek, you will find in my line, and Jove, to say nothing of the ancestors between; my father holds the realms of Asia, than which no shore is happier, scarcely to be traversed in its immense bounds. Countless cities you will see and golden roofs, and temples you would say befit their gods. You will behold Ilium and its walls strengthened with high towers, built by the music of Phoebus’s lyre. Why should I tell you of the multitude and number of men? That land scarcely supports its own people. The Trojan matrons will meet you in a dense throng, and our halls will not hold the Phrygian brides. O how often you will say: ’how poor is our Achaia!’ any one house will hold the wealth of a city. Nor would it be right for me to scorn your Sparta; the land in which you were born is blessed to me. But Sparta is thrifty, and you are worthy of rich adornment; that place does not suit such beauty. It befits this beauty to enjoy endless lavish furnishings and to revel in new delights. When you see the adornment of the men of our race, what kind do you think the Dardanian brides have? Only show yourself kind, and do not disdain a Phrygian husband, girl born in the Therapnaean countryside. A Phrygian, and born of our blood, was he who now, drinking with the gods, mixes water with nectar. A Phrygian was Aurora’s husband, yet the goddess who ends the last journey of night carried him off. A Phrygian too was Anchises, with whom the mother of the winged Loves is glad to have lain on Ida’s ridges. Nor, I think, with beauty and years compared, will Menelaus be preferred to me, with you as judge. At least I will not give you a father-in-law who puts to flight the bright lights of day, who turns his frightened horses from the feast; nor is Priam’s father stained with the murder of a father-in-law, and one who marks the Myrtoan waters with his crime; nor in our great-grandsire’s case are apples grasped at in the Stygian water, nor is moisture sought in the midst of the waters. Yet what does this matter, if he who holds you is sprung from those, and Jupiter is forced to be a father-in-law to that house? Alas, the outrage! that unworthy man holds you through whole nights, and fully enjoys your embrace; but you are seen by me scarcely at last when the table is set, and this time too has many things to wound me. May such banquets befall my enemies as I often endure when the wine is set out! I regret the hospitality, when, while I watch, that boor lays his arms on your neck. I burst with envy — for why should I not tell it all? — when he warms your limbs with his garment thrown over them. But when you gave kisses, not chary, before me, I set the cup I had taken before my eyes; I cast down my eyes when he holds you more closely, and the food grows sluggish in my unwilling mouth. Often I gave groans; and I noted that you — wanton! — did not hold back a laugh at my groaning. Often I wished to quench the flame with wine, but it grew, and drunkenness was fire upon fire, and, that I might not see much, I lie back with my neck turned away; but you yourself at once call back my eyes. What I should do, I am unsure; it is my grief to see those things, but a greater grief to be away from your face. As far as is allowed and I can, I struggle to hide my frenzy; but yet my dissembled love shows. Nor do I deceive you; you feel my wounds, you feel them! and would that they were known to you alone! Ah, how often I turned my face away as tears came, lest he should ask the cause of my weeping! Ah, how often, drunk, I told of some love affair, referring every word to my own wound, and gave a hint of myself under a feigned name! That lover, if you do not know, was I in truth. Indeed, that I might use words more freely, more than once drunkenness was feigned by me. Your breast, I remember, was betrayed by your loose tunic and, bare, gave my eyes an entrance — a breast whiter than pure snow, or than milk, or than Jove when he embraced your mother. While I was stunned at the sight — for I happened to hold the cup — the twisted handle slipped from my fingers. If you had given kisses to your daughter, I at once gladly took them from the tender lips of Hermione. And now, lying back, I sang of old loves, and now by a nod I gave signs that should be hidden. And the foremost of your companions, Clymene and Aethra, I lately dared to approach with coaxing words, who, having spoken nothing to me but that they were afraid, left my entreaties in the middle of my praying. Would the gods had made you the prize of a great contest, and that the victor could have you in his bed! — as Hippomenes took the daughter of Schoeneus as the prize of the race, as Hippodamia came into Phrygian arms, as fierce Alcides broke the horns of Achelous, while he sought your embraces, Deianira. My boldness would have gone bravely under these terms, and you would know you were the work of my toil. Now nothing is left me but to entreat you, beautiful one, and to embrace your feet, if you allow it. O ornament, O present glory of your twin brothers, O worthy of Jove for a husband, were you not born of Jove, either I will seek again the Sigean harbors with you as wife, or here I will be covered, an exile, by Taenarian earth! My breast is not lightly grazed at the surface by an arrow; my wound has gone down to the bone! That this would happen to me — for I recall it — that I should be pierced by a heavenly arrow, my truthful sister had foretold. Spare, Helen, to scorn a love granted by the fates — so may you have the gods kind to your wishes! Many things indeed come to mind; but that we may say more face to face, receive me in your bed in the silent night. Or are you ashamed, and do you fear to violate wedded love and to cheat the chaste rights of a lawful bed? Ah, too naive Helen — not to say boorish — do you think this beauty can be free of fault? Either you must change your face, or not be hard; chastity has a great quarrel with beauty. Jupiter delights in these stolen joys, golden Venus delights in them; these thefts, surely, gave you Jove for a father. Scarcely, if there is force of character in the seed, can the daughter of both Jove and Leda be chaste. Yet be chaste then, when my Troy holds you, and let me alone, I beg, be your only fault. Now let us commit the sin that the marriage-hour will correct, if only Venus has not promised me in vain! Your husband himself advises you to this by his acts, not his voice, and, lest he hinder his guest’s stolen joys, he is away. He had no fitter time in which to see the Cretan realms — O man of marvelous shrewdness! ’My affairs, and the guest of Ida, I charge to you,’ he said as he left, ’take care, wife, of our guest in my stead.’ You neglect, I swear, the charges of your absent husband! You have no care at all of your guest. Do you hope that this man, a fellow without heart, can rightly know the dowry of your beauty, daughter of Tyndareus? You are deceived — he knows it not; nor, if he thought the goods he holds were great, would he entrust them to a foreigner. Though neither my voice nor my passion stir you, we are compelled to make use of his very convenience — or we shall be fools, so as to outdo even him, if so secure a time passes by unused. Almost with his own hands he leads your lover to you; use the simplicity of the man who charged you! You lie alone in a widowed bed through so long a night; in a widowed bed I too lie alone. Let shared joys join you to me and me to you; that night will be brighter than midday. Then I will swear to you by any gods you please, and bind myself by my words to your own rites; then, if my confidence in myself is not deceptive, I will bring it about, in person, that you seek my realms. If you are ashamed, and fear to seem to have followed me, I myself will be the defendant of this charge, without you; for I will follow the deed of the son of Aegeus and of your brothers. You can be touched by no nearer example. Theseus carried you off, they the twin daughters of Leucippus; I shall be counted the fourth among the examples. The Trojan fleet is at hand, equipped with arms and men; soon the oar and the breeze will make swift ways. You will go, a mighty queen, through the Dardanian cities, and the crowd will believe a new goddess is present, and wherever you set your steps, flames will burn cinnamon, and the slain victim will beat the bloody ground. My father and brothers, and my sisters with my mother, and all the women of Ilium, and all Troy, will give you gifts. Ah me! scarcely any part of the future is told by me. You will receive more than my letter recounts. Nor, when carried off, fear that fierce wars will follow us, and that great Greece will rouse its strength. Of so many carried off before, was any sought back by arms? Believe me, that matter holds empty fears. The Thracians took the daughter of Erechtheus in the name of Aquilo, and the Bistonian shore was safe from war; the Pagasaean Jason carried off the Phasian woman in his new ship, nor was the Thessalian land harmed by a Colchian hand. He who carried you off, Theseus, carried off the daughter of Minos too; yet Minos called no Cretans to arms. In these matters the terror is wont to be greater than the danger itself, and what one may fear, one is ashamed to have feared. Yet suppose, if you will, that a huge war arises — I too have strength, and my weapons do harm. Asia’s resource is no less than your land’s; it is rich in men, rich, it abounds in horses. Nor will the son of Atreus, Menelaus, have more spirit than Paris, nor be preferred in arms. Almost a boy, I recovered the herds carried off, the enemies slain, and from that took the cause of my name; almost a boy, I beat young men in various contests, among whom were Ilioneus and Deiphobus; and lest you think I am to be feared only at close quarters, my arrow is fixed in the place I bid it. Can you grant him these deeds of his early youth? Can you furnish the son of Atreus with my skill? If you grant everything, will you give him Hector for a brother? He alone will be the equal of countless soldiery! You do not know what I am worth, and my strength escapes you; you are ignorant to what man you are to be wedded. Either, then, they will seek you back with no tumult of war, or the Doric camps will yield to my warfare. Nor would I disdain to take up the sword for so great a wife. Great prizes set the contest going. You too, if the whole world should contend over you, will bear a name from eternal posterity. Only, with hope not timid, depart from here with the gods favorable; and exact the gifts promised, with full faith.

Now that your letter has violated my eyes, the glory of not writing back seemed no light thing. You have dared, a stranger, profaning the sacred bonds of hospitality, to assail the lawful faith of a wedded wife! So it was for this, then, that the Taenarian shore received you in its harbor, borne over the windy seas, and that our palace did not bar its doors against you, though you came from a foreign people, that the reward of so great a kindness should be an injury! Coming in thus, were you a guest or an enemy? And I do not doubt that this complaint of mine, just as it is, will be called boorish in your judgment. Boorish let me be, indeed, so long as I am not forgetful of modesty, and the course of my life is without stain. If I have no grim look on a feigned face, nor sit scowling with hard-set brows, yet my repute is bright, and so far I have lived without reproach, and no adulterer has any boast of me. The more I wonder what is the confidence of your venture, and what reason gave you hope of my bed. Is it because the Neptunian hero did me violence, that, once carried off, I seem worthy to be carried off a second time too? The crime would have been mine, had I been won over; since I was carried off, what was mine but unwillingness? Yet he did not get from the deed the fruit he sought; I came back, having suffered nothing but fear. As I struggled, the wanton one took only a few kisses; nothing further of me has he. Your wickedness would not have been content with these — the gods be thanked! he was not like you. He gave me back untouched, and his restraint lessened the crime, and it is plain the young man repented of the deed; did Theseus repent, that Paris should succeed him, so that my name might never not be on someone’s lips? Yet I am not angry — for who is angry at a lover? — if only the love you profess is not feigned. For of this too I am unsure — not that confidence is lacking, or that my own beauty is not well known to me; but because credulity is wont to be a loss to girls, and your words are said to lack faith. But others sin, and a chaste matron is rare. Who forbids my name to be among the rare? For as to your thinking my mother a fit example, by whose case you suppose I too can be swayed, there is an error in my mother’s offense, deceived under a false shape; the adulterer was hidden in feathers. I, if I sin, can have been ignorant of nothing, nor will there be any error to shadow the guilt of the deed. She erred to good purpose, and redeemed her fault by its author. By what Jove shall I be called fortunate in my fault? But you flaunt your race and forefathers and royal names. This house is bright enough in its own nobility. To say nothing of Jupiter, great-grandsire of my father-in-law, and all the glory of Tantalid Pelops and of Tyndareus, Leda, deceived by the swan, gives me Jove for a parent, she who credulously cherished the false bird in her lap. Go now and recount the far-spread origins of the Phrygian race and Priam with his Laomedon! Whom I do indeed respect; but he who is your great glory as fifth, will be first from my name. Though I think the scepters of your land are powerful, yet I do not think these of mine are less than those. If indeed this place is surpassed in riches and in the number of men, still your land is, for certain, a barbarian one. Your rich letter indeed promises gifts so great that they could move the goddesses themselves; but if I now wished to cross the bounds of modesty, you yourself would be a better cause of the fault. Either I will keep my fame forever without stain, or I will follow you rather than your gifts; and though I do not despise them, yet gifts are always most welcome which their giver makes precious. It is far more that you love me, that I am to you a cause of toil, that your hope has come across such long waters. Those things too which you now do, shameless one, when the table is set, I notice, though I try to pretend not — when now you gaze at me with wanton, bold eyes, which, pressing on me, my eyes can scarcely bear, and now you sigh, now you take the cup next to me, and you drink from the part where I drank. Ah, how often I noticed signs given with the fingers, how often hidden ones given with an almost-speaking brow! And often I feared lest my husband see them, and I blushed at the not-well-hidden signs! Often, in a faint murmur or none at all, I said: ’This man has no shame.’ nor was that word of mine false. On the round of the table too I read, under my name, ’I love,’ which a letter traced in wine had made. Yet I denied with a refusing eye that I believed it — ah me, now I have learned that I too can speak so! By these caresses, if I were to sin, I would be swayed; by these my heart could be captured. You have too, I confess, a rare beauty, and a girl could wish to go into your embraces; but let another rather be made happy without crime, than that my modesty fall to a foreign love. Learn only, by my example, to be able to do without the beautiful; it is a virtue to have abstained from goods that please. How many young men, do you think, who are wise, desire what you desire? Or are you, Paris, the only one with eyes? You do not see more, but you dare more rashly: you have no more heart, but too much brazenness. Then I could wish you had come in your swift ship, when my virginity was sought by a thousand suitors; had I seen you, you would have been first of the thousand. My husband himself will grant pardon to my judgment. You come, too late, to joys possessed and taken before you; your hope was slow; what you seek, another has. Yet though I might have wished to become your Trojan wife, Menelaus does not hold me against my will either. Cease, I pray, to shake my soft heart with words, and do not harm me, whom you say you love; but let me keep the lot that fortune has assigned, and do not crave the shameful spoil of my modesty! But Venus bargained this, and in the valleys of lofty Ida three goddesses showed themselves naked to you, and while one would give a kingdom, another the glory of war, the third said, ’You will be the husband of Tyndareus’s daughter!’ I can scarcely believe that heavenly bodies submitted their beauty to your judgment, and even if this is true, surely the other part is invented, by which I am said to have been given as the price of the judgment. I have not such confidence in my body, that I should think I was the greatest gift, with a goddess as witness. My beauty is content to be approved by the eyes of men; Venus as my praiser brings me envy. But I deny nothing; I even favor those praises — for why should my mind, or my voice, deny what it wishes to be? And do not be angry that I have believed you too grudgingly; belief in great matters is wont to be slow. My first pleasure, then, is to have pleased Venus; the next, that I seemed to you the greatest prize, and that you preferred neither Pallas’s honors nor Juno’s, when you had heard of them, to the goods of Helen. So then I am valor, I am to you a noble kingdom! I would be iron, if I did not love this heart. Iron, believe me, I am not; but I resist loving one whom I scarcely think can become mine. Why should I try to cleave the thirsty shore with a curved plow, and follow a hope that the very place denies? I am untrained in the theft of love, and by no art — the gods are my witnesses — have I deceived my faithful husband. Now too, in that I commit my words to a silent page, my letter performs a new office. Happy they who have practice! I, ignorant of such things, suspect the path of guilt is hard. Fear itself is an evil; even now I am confounded, and think that all eyes are upon my face. Nor do I think this falsely; I have felt the crowd’s ill murmurs, and Aethra has reported certain words to me. But do you dissemble, unless you would rather desist! But why desist? you can dissemble. Play, but secretly! a greater, not the greatest, freedom is given us, because Menelaus is away. He indeed has gone far off, the matter so compelling; great and just was the cause of his sudden journey — or so it seemed to me. I, when he wavered whether to go, said, ’Go, but see that you return as soon as may be!’ Glad at the omen, he gave me kisses, and said, ’let my affairs and house and the Trojan guest be your care.’ I scarcely held back a laugh, and while I struggle to check it, I could say nothing to him but ’they shall be.’ He has indeed set sail for Crete with favoring winds; but do not for that think all things are allowed! My husband is away from here in such a way that, absent, he yet guards me — or do you not know that kings have long hands? My beauty too is a burden; for the more steadily I am praised by your mouths, the more justly he fears. The very glory that pleases, as things are, is a loss to me, and it would have been better to have cheated rumor. And do not wonder that he has left me here alone with you; he trusted my character and my life. For my face he fears, in my life he trusts, and my probity makes him secure, my beauty makes him afraid. You urge that the time freely given be not wasted, and that we use the convenience of a guileless husband. And I both wish and fear, nor is my will yet fully resolved; my heart wavers in doubt. My husband is away from us, and you sleep without a wife, and in turn your beauty captures me, mine captures you; and the nights are long, and now we come together in talk, and you — wretched me! — are charming, and one house holds us. And may I die, if everything does not invite the fault; yet I am held back by some fear or other! What you ill persuade, would that you could well compel! My boorishness should have been shaken off by force. Sometimes an injury is useful to the very ones who suffer it. So, surely, I would have been made happy by compulsion. While it is new, let us rather fight the love begun! A fresh flame, sprinkled with a little water, dies down. In guests love is not constant; it wanders, as they do, and when you would hope nothing firmer, it flees. Hypsipyle is witness, witness is the Minoan maiden, both deceived in beds never made good. You too, faithless one, are said to have forsaken your beloved Oenone through many years. Nor do you yourself deny it; and to inquire everything about you has been, if you do not know, my greatest care. Add that, even should you wish to remain constant in love, you cannot. Already the Phrygians make ready your sails; while you talk with me, while the hoped-for night is being prepared, a wind will already be there to carry you to your homeland. In mid-course you will leave the joys still full of newness; with the winds our love will depart. Or shall I follow, as you urge, and see the praised Pergamum, and be the granddaughter-in-law of great Laomedon? I do not so despise the proclamations of winged rumor, that it should fill the lands with reproaches of me. What will Sparta be able to say of me, what all Achaia, what the peoples of Asia, what your Troy? What will Priam think of me, what Priam’s wife, and your many brothers, and the Dardanian brides? And you yourself, how will you be able to hope I will be faithful, and not be anxious from your own example? Whoever, a stranger, enters the Ilian harbors, will be to you a cause of anxious fear. How often, angry, will you say to me ’adulteress!’ forgetting that your own crime is in my fault! You will become at once the censor and the author of the offense. Earth, I pray, bury my face before that! But I shall enjoy the wealth of Ilium and a blessed luxury, and receive gifts richer than you promised; purple, no doubt, and precious weavings will be given me, and I shall be rich with a heaped-up weight of gold! Pardon my confession — your gifts are not worth so much; somehow or other that land of yours holds me back. Who will help me, if I am wronged, on the Phrygian shores? Whence shall I seek my brothers, whence a parent’s aid? Faithless Jason promised Medea everything — was she any the less driven from the house of Aeson? There was no Aeetes for the scorned woman to return to, no mother Idyia, no sister Chalciope. Nothing of the kind do I fear — but neither did Medea fear it! Good hope is often deceived by its own foreboding. You will find that, for all the ships now tossed on the deep, the sea was gentle as they left the harbor. The torch too frightens me, which your mother seemed to have brought forth, bloody, before the day of birth; and I fear the warnings of the seers, who are said to have foretold that Ilium would burn with Pelasgian fire. And as Cytherea favors you, because she conquered and holds the double trophy won through your judgment, so I fear those two who, if your boast is true, lost their case with you as judge; and I do not doubt that, if I follow you, arms will be made ready. Our love, ah me! will go through swords. Did the Atracian Hippodamia force the Haemonian men to declare fierce wars on the Centaurs — and do you think Menelaus will be slow in so just an anger, and my twin brothers, and Tyndareus? As for your boasting well and telling of brave deeds, that face of yours is at odds with your words. Your body is more fit for Venus than for Mars. Let the brave wage wars; you, Paris, love always! Bid Hector, whom you praise, fight for you; a different warfare is worthy of your works. These arts I, if I were wise and a little bolder, would use; any girl will use them, if she is wise — or perhaps I, my modesty laid aside, will grow wise, and, conquered in time, will give my long-delayed hands. As for your asking that we speak of these things in secret, face to face, I know what you are after, and what you call a ’conversation’; but you are in too much haste, and your harvest is still in the blade. Delay may perhaps be a friend to your wish. So far; let my letter, the confidant of a secret and stealthy mind, now with weary thumb halt its work. The rest let us speak through my companions Clymene and Aethra, who are my two attendants and my counsel.

The man of Abydos sends you, girl of Sestos, the greeting he would rather bring, if the sea’s swell would fall. If the gods are kind to me, if they are favorable in love, you will read these words of mine with unwilling eyes. But they are not kind; for why do they delay my prayers, and not allow me to run through the familiar water? You yourself see the sky blacker than pitch, and the straits turbid with winds, scarcely to be crossed even by hollow ships. One sailor, and he a bold one, by whom my letter is delivered to you, set out from harbor; I would have boarded, except that, when he was loosing the prow’s cables, all Abydos was on the lookout. I could not have hidden it from my parents, as before, and the love we wish to keep covered would not have lain hidden. At once, writing this, I said, ’Go, lucky letter! Soon she will stretch out her lovely hand to you. Perhaps she will even touch you with her lips brought close, when she wishes to break your seals with her snowy tooth.’ Having said such words to myself in a faint murmur, my right hand spoke the rest with the paper. But how much rather would I have it swim than write, and carry me busily through the accustomed waters! It is indeed fitter to deal strokes to a calm sea; yet it is also a fit servant of my feeling. The seventh night passes, a span longer to me than a year, while the troubled sea seethes with roaring waters. If on these nights I have seen sleep soothing my breast, let the delay of the raging strait be long! Sitting on some rock, I gaze sadly at your shores, and where I cannot go in body, I am borne in mind. My sight even sees, or thinks it sees, the wakeful light on the top of your tower. Three times my clothing was laid down on the dry sand; three times, naked, I tried to take the hard journey — the swollen sea stood against my youthful attempts, and plunged my swimming face under its opposing waters. But you, most untamable of the rushing winds, why do you wage fixed battles with me? Against me, Boreas, if you do not know it, not the waters, you rage! What would you do, if love were not known to you? Cold as you are, do you, shameless one, deny that you once grew warm with Attic fires? If someone wished to close against you, as you were about to snatch your joys, the airy approaches, how would you bear it? Spare me, I pray, and stir a gentle breeze more moderately — so may Hippotades lay no harsh command on you! I ask in vain; he himself murmurs against my prayers, and nowhere restrains the waters he shakes. Now would that Daedalus would give me his bold wings — though the Icarian shore is near from here! Whatever will be, I will bear it, only let me lift my body into the air, which has often hung in the doubtful water. Meanwhile, while the winds and the strait deny me everything, I turn over in my mind the first times of my stolen love. Night was beginning — for it is a pleasure to remember — when, a lover, I went out from my father’s doors. Without delay, my fear laid aside together with my clothes, I threw my supple arms into the liquid sea. The moon was giving an almost trembling light to me as I went, like a dutiful companion on my way. Looking up at her, I said, ’be favorable, bright goddess, and let the Latmian rocks come to your mind! Endymion does not let you be of a stern heart. Turn, I pray, your face toward my stolen love! You, a goddess, slipping down from heaven, sought a mortal; let me speak truth! — she whom I pursue is herself a goddess. Not to mention manners worthy of a heavenly breast, her beauty falls to none but true goddesses. No face is before Venus’s and your own; and do not trust my words — see for yourself! As much as, when you shine silver with pure rays, all the stars yield to your flames, by so much is she more beautiful than all the beautiful. If you doubt it, Cynthia, your light is blind.’ Having said this, or at least nothing different from this, I was borne through the waters that yielded of their own accord to me. The wave shone with the reflected image of the moon, and there was a daylight brightness in the silent night; and no voice anywhere, no sound came to my ears but the murmur of the water parted by my body. The halcyons alone, mindful of their loved Ceyx, seemed to me to make some sweet plaint. And now, my arms weary beneath both shoulders, I raise myself up bravely high to the surface of the water. When I spied the light afar, ’my fire is in it: those shores,’ I said, ’hold my light!’ And suddenly strength returned to my weary arms, and the wave seemed softer to me than it had been. That I may not feel the cold of the icy deep, the love that burns in my eager heart provides. The more I approach and the nearer the shores become, and the less is left, the more I delight to go. But when I too can be seen, at once, a spectator, you add courage, and make me strong. Now I even labor to please my lady by swimming, and throw my arms before your eyes. Your nurse scarcely keeps you from going down into the deep — for this too I saw, nor did I deceive myself. Yet she did not bring it about, though she held you back as you went, that your foot was not wetted by the first water. You receive me with an embrace and join happy kisses — kisses, great gods, worth seeking across the sea! — and you give me the cloaks taken from your own shoulders, and dry my hair drenched with the sea’s rain. The rest the night, and we, and the tower that knows our secret, and the light that shows me my way through the shallows, know. The joys of that night can no more be counted than the seaweed of the Hellespontine sea; the shorter the time given us for our stolen love, the more care was taken that it should not be idle. And now, the wife of Tithonus about to put the night to flight, Lucifer, the forerunner of Aurora, had risen; we heap up hasty kisses snatched without order, and complain that the nights’ delays are short. And so, having lingered, at the nurse’s bitter warning I make for the cold shores, leaving your tower. We part weeping, and I seek again the maiden’s sea, looking back at my lady as long as I may. If the truth be believed, coming from here I seem a swimmer, but when I return I seem to myself a shipwrecked man. This too, if you will believe it: the way to you seems downhill; when I come back from you, it is a slope of sluggish water. Unwilling I seek my homeland — who could believe it? — unwilling, certainly, I now linger in my own city. Ah me! why, joined in heart, are we separated by the waters, and one mind, yet one land does not hold us two? Let either your Sestos take me, or my Abydos take you; your land pleases me as much as mine pleases you. Why am I thrown into confusion whenever the sea is troubled? Why can the wind, a trifling cause, stand in my way? Now the curving dolphins know our loves, and I think I am not unknown to the fishes. Now the worn track of my accustomed waters lies open, no otherwise than a road pressed by many a wheel. Before, I complained that I had no road but this; but now I complain that, because of the winds, even this is lacking. The waters of the daughter of Athamas grow white with monstrous waves, and a ship scarcely stays safe in its own harbor; this sea, when it first got the name it bears from the drowned maiden, was such, I think, as this. This place is infamous enough for the loss of Helle, and, though it spare me, its very name holds a crime. I envy Phrixus, whom safe across the grim straits the golden, wool-bearing ram carried; yet I ask no service of beast or ship, provided only the waters be given me that I may cleave with my body. I need nothing in any part; only let there be a chance of swimming, and I will be at once ship, sailor, and passenger! Nor do I follow Helice, or the Bear that Tyre uses; our love does not heed the common stars. Let another look at Andromeda and the bright Crown, and the Parrhasian Bear that gleams at the cold pole; but I do not wish what Perseus and Liber-with-Jove loved to be the guide of my uncertain way. There is another light, far surer to me than these, with which as guide my love does not stray in the dark; while I look at it, I would go to Colchis and the furthest parts of Pontus, and where the Thessalian pine made its way, and I could outdo in swimming the youth Palaemon, and him whom the suddenly-bitten herb made a god. Often my arms grow faint with ceaseless strokes, and, weary, are scarcely dragged through the immense waters. When I have said to them: ’a reward not cheap for your toil, soon I will give you my lady’s neck to hold,’ at once they grow strong, and strain toward their reward, like a swift horse loosed from the Elean barrier. So I keep my own love, by which I burn, and pursue you, a girl more worthy of heaven. Worthy of heaven you are indeed — but stay yet on earth, or tell me by what road I too may go to the gods above! You are here, and you touch your wretched lover but little, and the straits grow troubled with my mind. What good is it to me that I am not parted by a broad sea? Does this so brief water stand against us any the less? I am unsure whether I would rather, removed far off in all the world, have my hope too far away, along with my lady. The nearer you now are, the nearer the flame I burn with, and the thing itself is not always present, but the hope is always present. Almost I touch what I love with my hand, so great is the nearness; but often, alas, this ’almost’ moves me to tears! What else is it but to wish to grasp the fleeing apples, and to follow the hope of a stream that recedes from your very mouth? So then I shall never hold you, except when the wave wills, and no stormy season will see me happy, and, though nothing is less firm than wind and wave, will my hope always be in winds and water? Yet it is still summer. What, when the Pleiad has hurt the sea for me, and Arctophylax and the Olenian goat? Either I do not know how rash I am, or love, not cautious, will then too send me into the straits; and lest you think I promise this because the time is far off, I will give you pledges of my promise, not slow. Let the sea be swollen for a few nights yet, and I will try to go through the unwilling waters; either a lucky boldness will fall to me, safe, or death will be the end of my anxious love! Yet I will pray that I be cast up on those shores of yours, and that your harbors hold my shipwrecked limbs; for you will weep, and deign to touch my body, and will say, ’I was the cause of this man’s death!’ No doubt you are offended at the omen of my death, and my letter is hateful to you in this part. I stop — cease complaining! but that the sea may end its anger, add, I beg, your prayers to mine. We need a brief peace, while I am carried across; when I have reached your shores, let the storm hold on! There is the fit dock for my keel, and my vessel stands in no water better. There let Boreas shut me in, where it is sweet to linger! Then I will be slow to swim, then I will be cautious, and I will make no reproaches to the deaf waves, nor complain that the strait is grim for me as I swim. Let the winds and your tender arms hold me alike, and there let me be hindered by two causes! When the storm allows, I will use the oars of my body; only keep the light always in view! Meanwhile let my letter spend the night with you in my stead, which I pray I myself may follow with the least delay!

The greeting you sent me in words, Leander — that I may have it sent in deeds — come! Every delay that puts off joys is long to me. Pardon my confession; I do not love patiently! We burn with an equal fire, but I am unequal to you in strength: I suspect men’s nature is the stronger. As the body, so the mind is weak in tender girls — I shall fail, if you add a delay of but a little time! You men spend your long hours, now in hunting, now in tending the pleasant countryside, with varied delay. Either the forum holds you, or the gifts of the oiled wrestling-ground, or you bend with the bridle the neck of an obedient horse; now you take a bird with a snare, now a fish with a hook; the later hours are washed away with wine set out. Shut off from these, even if I burned less keenly, there is nothing left for me to do but love. What is left I do, and you, o my only delight, I love even more than can be repaid to me! Either I whisper of you with my white-haired nurse, and wonder what cause delays your coming; or, gazing at the sea, I scold with words almost your own the waters roused by the hateful wind; or, when the heavy wave has relaxed its rage a little, I complain that you can indeed come, but will not; and while I complain, tears flow down my loving eyes, which the knowing old woman dries with trembling thumb. Often I look to see if your footprints are on the shore, as though the sand kept the marks set on it; and that I may ask about you and write to you, I look for anyone who has come from Abydos, or anyone going to Abydos. Why should I tell how often I give kisses to the clothes which you lay aside as you set out into the Hellespontine water? So when the daylight is done and the friendlier hour of night has shown the bright stars, the day driven off, at once on the top of the house we set the wakeful lamp, the sign and token of your accustomed way, and, drawing out the twisted threads with the turned spindle, we cheat the slow delays with a woman’s art. What do I talk of, you ask, meanwhile, in so long a time? Nothing but Leander’s name is on my lips. ’Do you think now, nurse, that my joy has left his house, or are all awake, and does he fear his own people? Do you think he is now laying his clothes from his shoulders, now anointing his limbs with rich oil of Pallas?’ She nods, more or less; not that she cares for our kisses, but creeping sleep moves her old woman’s head. And after the least delay, ’now surely he is at sea,’ I say, ’and tosses his supple arms in the parted waters.’ And when I have finished a few threads touched to the ground, I ask whether you can be in mid-strait. And now we look out, now with timid voice we pray that a helpful breeze give you an easy way; with our ears we catch at uncertain sounds, and every noise we believe to be the noise of your coming. So when the greatest part of the beguiled night is passed for me, sleep steals secretly upon my weary eyes. Perhaps, unwilling, you nevertheless sleep with me, shameless one, and, though you yourself will not come, you come. For now I seem to watch you swimming near already, now to bear your wet arms upon my shoulders, now to give, as I am wont, garments to your dripping limbs, now to warm your breast joined to my bosom, and many things besides that a modest tongue must keep silent, which it pleases to have done, but shames to tell when done. Wretched me! this pleasure is brief and not real; for you are always wont to depart along with sleep. O, let us eager lovers at last unite more firmly, and let our joys not lack a true faith! Why have I, cold, passed so many widowed nights? Why are you so often away from me, slow lingerer? The sea, I admit, is not now manageable for a swimmer; but last night the breeze was gentler. Why was it let pass? why did you not fear what was to come? why did so good a passage perish, and was not seized by you? Even if at once a like chance of crossing be given you, that earlier one was surely better, in that it was earlier. But the calm sea’s face is quickly changed. When you hurry, you often come in less time. Caught here, I think, you would have nothing to complain of, and no storm would harm you while you embraced me. Surely then I would gladly hear the winds sounding, and would never pray the waters to be calm. Yet what has happened, that you are more fearful of the wave and now dread the strait you once despised? For I remember, when, as you came, the sea was no less savage and threatening, or not much less; when I cried to you: ’be rash in such a way that your valor be not to be wept by me, poor wretch!’ Whence this new fear, and whither has that boldness fled? Where is that great swimmer who scorned the waters? Yet be this rather than what you used to be before, and make your way safe over a calm sea — provided you are the same, provided we are loved as you write, and that flame become not cold ash. I fear not so much the winds that delay my prayers, as that your love, like the wind, may stray, that I may not be worth so much, and the perils outweigh their cause, and that I may seem a reward less than the toil. Sometimes I fear lest I be hurt by my country, and a Thracian girl be called unequal to an Abydene bed. Yet I can bear all things more patiently than if you spend your leisure caught by some rival or other, if alien arms come about your neck, and a new love becomes the end of our love. Ah, rather may I die than be wounded by that crime, and may my fate come before your fault! Nor do I say these things because you have given me signs of coming grief, or because I am troubled by some new rumor. But I fear everything — for who has ever loved free of care? And distance forces the absent to fear the more. Happy those whom their own presence bids know true wrongs, and forbids to fear false ones! Me an injury moves as much when empty as when real deceives, and each error stings me alike. O that you would come, or that the wind, or your father, and surely no woman, be the cause of delay! But if I learn of any woman, believe me, I shall die of grief; sin at once, then, if you seek my death! But you will not sin, and I am frightened by these things in vain, and an envious storm fights to keep you from coming. Wretched me! with how great a wave the shores are beaten, and the day lies hidden, buried in a dark cloud! Perhaps the loving mother of Helle has come to the sea, and weeps for her drowned daughter with dewy waters — or does a stepmother, turned into a sea-goddess, harass the sea named from the hated name of her stepdaughter? As things now are, that place does not favor tender girls; in this water Helle perished, in this I am wronged. But you, Neptune, mindful of your own flames, ought to have let no love be hindered by the winds — if neither Amymone, nor Tyro, most praised in beauty, is an empty tale of your transgression, and bright Alcyone, and Calyce daughter of Hecataeon, and Medusa, her hair not yet entwined with snakes, and golden Laodice, and Celaeno received into heaven, and those whose names I remember to have read. These at least, and more, the poets sing, Neptune, to have laid their soft side against your side. Why then, having so often known the powers of love, do you close with a whirlwind the way accustomed to us? Spare us, fierce one, and mingle your battles in the broad sea! This brief water keeps two lands apart. It befits you, great as you are, either to toss great ships, or to be savage even against whole fleets; it is base for the god of the sea to frighten a swimming youth, and that glory is less than any standing pool’s. Noble indeed he is, and bright in origin, but he does not draw his line from Ulysses, whom you suspect. Grant pardon and save us two! he swims, but on the same waters hang Leander’s body and my hope. Lo, the lamp has sputtered! — for we write with it set by us — it has sputtered, and given us favorable signs. See, the nurse drips wine on the lucky flames, and says, ’tomorrow we shall be more,’ and herself drinks. Make us more, gliding across the conquered waters, O you, received deep into my whole heart! Return to your camp, deserter of an allied love; why are my limbs laid down in the middle of the bed? There is nothing for you to fear! Venus herself will favor your daring, and, born of the sea, will smooth the watery ways. I myself often long to go through the midst of the waves, but this strait is wont to be safer for men. For why, when Phrixus and Phrixus’s sister crossed it, did the woman alone give her name to the vast waters? Perhaps you fear lest, for the return, time be lacking, or that you cannot bear the burden of a double toil. But let us, from opposite sides, meet in the middle of the sea, and give kisses, meeting, on the surface of the water, and so each return again to our own cities; that would be little, but more than nothing! O that either this modesty, which forces us to love in secret, or our love, timid of rumor, would give way! Now, things ill-matched, passion and reverence fight. Which to follow, is in doubt; the one is fitting, the other pleases. As soon as the Pagasaean Jason entered Colchis, he carried off the Phasian woman, placed on his swift ship; as soon as the Idaean adulterer came to Lacedaemon, he returned at once with his plunder. You, as often as you seek what you love, so often you leave it, and as often as it is hard for ships to go, you swim. Yet so, o youth, conqueror of the swollen waters, so scorn the strait that you also dread it! Ships built with art are sunk by the sea; do you think your arms can do more than oars? What you desire — to swim — this, Leander, the sailors fear; this is wont to be the end when ships are wrecked. Wretched me! I wish not to persuade you to what I urge, and I pray you yourself may be braver than my warnings — provided only you arrive, and, often tossed through the waves, throw your weary arms about my shoulders! But whenever I turn toward the blue waves, my frightened heart grows numb with some chill or other. And no less am I troubled by the vision of last night, though it has been atoned for by my offerings. For near dawn, when the lamp was now drowsing, the time when true dreams are wont to be seen, the threads fell from my fingers, loosed in sleep, and I gave my neck to the pillow to be borne. Here I seemed to myself, with no uncertain conviction, to see a dolphin swimming through the windy waves, and after the surge had dashed him on the thirsty sands, the wave and life together forsook the wretched creature. Whatever it means, I am afraid; do not laugh at my dreams, nor trust your arms to the sea unless it is calm! If you do not spare yourself, spare the girl you love, who will never be safe unless you are safe! Yet there is hope of a near peace in the breaking waves; do you cleave the calm ways with all your breast! Meanwhile, since the straits are not passable for a swimmer, let a letter sent soothe the hateful delays.

Receive, Cydippe, the name of scorned Acontius, of him who gave you words on the apple. Lay aside your fear! you will swear nothing here again to your lover; it is enough that you were promised to me once. Read it through! so may the weakness depart from that body of yours, for it is my grief that any part of you should ache! Why does shame come over you first? for, just as in Diana’s temple, I suspect your noble cheeks have blushed. I ask for marriage and the pledged faith, not for crime; I love as a husband owed to you, not as an adulterer. You may go over again the words which the fruit, plucked from the tree, carried to your chaste hands when I threw it; you will find there that you pledge what I desire — and which I would rather you, maiden, than the goddess, remembered. Now too I crave the same thing, but that same thing more keenly; the flame has taken on strength and grown by delay, and the love which was never small has now, by long time and by the hope you had given me, increased. You had given me hope, my passion here believed you. You cannot deny this deed, with the goddess as witness. She was present, and, as she was there, marked your words, and seemed, with a nod of her hair, to have taken in what was said. You may say you were deceived by my trick, so long as love is named the cause of my trick. What did my trick seek but the one thing, to be joined to you? That very thing you complain of can win you over to me. I am not by nature, nor by practice, so cunning; you, girl, believe me, make me clever. To me, by words composed — if I have achieved anything — ingenious Love bound you. By words dictated by him I made the betrothal, and with Love as my counsel in law I was crafty. Let ’fraud’ be the name for this deed, and let me be called guileful, if it is guile to wish to hold what you love! Lo, again I write and send entreating words! This is a second fraud, and you have something to complain of. If I harm you because I love, I confess, I will harm you without end, and will pursue you forever, however you guard against being pursued. Others have carried off the girls they liked by the sword; shall a letter carefully written be a crime in me? May the gods grant that I can lay on more knots, that your faith be free in no part! A thousand tricks remain — I sweat at the foot of the hill; my passion will leave nothing untried. Let it be doubtful whether you can be caught; you will surely be hunted. The outcome is in the gods’ hands, but you will be caught nonetheless. Though you escape part, you will not elude all the nets, which Love has spread for you, more than you think. If arts do not avail, I will come to arms, and you, snatched, will be borne into my longing bosom. I am not one to blame the deed of Paris, nor anyone who was a man, that he might be one. I too — but I am silent! though death be the penalty of this rape, it will be less than not to have had you. Either you should be less beautiful, and you would be sought more modestly; by your beauty we are forced to be bold. You do this, and your eyes, to which the fiery stars yield, which were the cause of my flame; this your golden hair does, and your ivory neck, and your hands, which, I pray, may come about my neck, and your grace, and a face modest without rusticity, and feet such as I would scarcely think even Thetis’s to be. If I could praise the rest, I would be happier, nor do I doubt that the whole work is equal to itself. Driven by this beauty, it is no wonder if I wished to have a pledge of your word. In short, until you are forced to confess yourself caught, be a girl caught by my snares. I will bear the odium; let its reward be given to one who bears it. Why should its own fruit be absent from so great a crime? Telamon took Hesione, Achilles took Briseis; each, surely, followed the man who conquered her. You may accuse me as much as you like and be angry; let me only be able to enjoy you, though you are angry. I myself, who cause it, will lessen the anger I have caused, if only a little chance of appeasing you be given. Let me, weeping, stand before your face, and let me add words to my tears, and, as slaves are wont, when they fear cruel blows, stretch out submissive hands toward your knees! You do not know your rights; summon me! why am I accused in absence? Bid me come, long since, after the manner of a mistress. You may yourself, imperious, tear my hair, and let my face be bruised by your fingers. I will endure all; only perhaps I will fear lest that hand of yours be hurt against my body. But bind me neither with fetters nor with chains — I will be kept bound by a firm love of you! When your anger has glutted itself well and as much as you wish, you will say to yourself: ’how patiently he loves!’ You will say to yourself, when you see all things borne: ’one who serves so well, let him serve me!’ Now, an unlucky defendant, I am tried in absence, and my cause, though it is the best, perishes with no one to plead it. This too — however much my writing is an injury — you have something to complain of, but surely of me alone. The Delian goddess did not deserve to be cheated along with me; if you will not give back what was promised to me, give it back to the goddess. She was present and saw, when you, deceived, blushed, and stored your voice in a remembering ear. May the omens be void of fulfillment! nothing is more violent than she, when she sees her own godhead wronged, which I would not wish. The Calydonian boar will be witness, so savage, that the mother was found more savage than he against her son. Witness too Actaeon, once thought a wild beast by those with whom he himself had before given beasts to death; and the proud mother who, with stone rising over her body, even now stands weeping on the Mygdonian ground. Ah me! Cydippe, I am afraid to tell you the truth, lest I seem to warn you with a false motive of my own; yet it must be said. This is the reason, believe me, that, sick, you often lie abed at the very time of marrying. She herself looks to your good, she labors that you be not forsworn, and wishes you safe, with your faith safe. Hence it comes that, as often as you try to prove faithless, so often she corrects your sin. Forbear to stir the fierce bow of the spirited maiden-goddess; she can still be made gentle, if you allow it. Forbear, I pray, to ruin your tender limbs with fevers; let that face be kept for me to enjoy. Let your features, born for my burning, be kept, and the soft blush that lies beneath your snowy face. And if any enemy fights to keep you from becoming mine, let it fare with him as you are wont to fare with me when sick! I am tortured alike whether you marry or are sick, and I cannot say which of the two I would less wish; sometimes I am wasted with grief, that I am the cause of your pain, and think you are hurt by my cunning. I pray that the perjuries against my mistress fall upon my own head; let her punishment be safely mine! Yet, that I may not be ignorant of how you fare, often to your threshold I go anxiously this way and that, dissembling; I secretly follow your maid and your manservant, asking what sleep or food has done you good. Wretched me, that I do not carry out the doctors’ orders, and chafe your hands, and sit by your bed! And again wretched, that while I am removed far from there, perhaps another, whom I would least wish, is present! He chafes those hands of yours, and sits by you, sick, hateful to the gods above, and to me with the gods; and while he feels your leaping pulse with his thumb, under that pretext he often holds your white arms, and handles your breast, and perhaps joins kisses. That is a reward fuller than his service deserves! Who allowed you to reap my harvests before me? who made you a path to another’s hedge? That breast is mine! shamefully you take my kisses! take your hands from the body promised to me! Shameless one, take your hands away! she whom you touch will be mine; if you do that hereafter, you will be an adulterer. Choose from the unclaimed one whom no other claims for himself; if you do not know it, that property has its own owner. And do not believe me — let the form of the contract be read out; and lest you say it is false, make her herself read it! From another’s chamber — to you, to you I say it — get out! What are you doing here? get out! that bed is not free! For though you too have the other words of a double pact, your case will not for that be equal to mine. She pledged herself to me, her father pledged her to you, but she comes first; yet surely she is nearer to herself than her father is. Her father promised her, she swore herself to her lover; he called men to witness, she called a goddess. He fears to be called a liar, she fears to be called perjured too; do you doubt whether this fear or that is greater? In short, that you may compare the perils of both, look to the outcomes — she lies sick, he is well. We two as well enter the contest with unlike feelings; neither is our hope equal, nor our fear alike. You seek from safety; to me a rejection is heavier than death, and I already love what you, perhaps, will come to love. If you had any care for justice or for right, you yourself ought to have yielded to my flames. Now, since this fierce man fights for an unjust cause, to what does my letter return, Cydippe? He makes you lie sick and be suspected by Diana; bid him, if you are wise, not to come near your threshold. By his doing you undergo such savage perils of your life — and would that he who stirs them might fall in your stead! If you reject him, and do not love one whom the goddess condemns, then you at once, and I surely, will be safe. Stop your fear, maiden! you will gain a steadfast health, only see that you worship the temple that knows your promise; the heavenly powers do not rejoice in a slaughtered ox, but in the faith that must be kept even without a witness. That they may be well, other women endure the knife and fire, and to others a bitter juice brings grim aid. There is no need of these; only avoid perjury, and save at once yourself and me and the faith you gave! Ignorance will grant pardon for your past fault — the covenant you read had slipped from your mind. You have just now been warned by my voice, along with those mishaps which you are wont to suffer, as often as you try to deceive. Even if you escape these too, surely in childbirth you will pray that she bring you her light-bringing hands? She will hear, and, recalling what she heard, will ask by what husband that childbed of yours comes about. You will promise an offering — she knows you promise falsely; you will swear — she knows you can deceive the gods! It is not about me that I am concerned; I labor with a greater care. My breast is anxious for your sake. Why did your frightened parents lately weep over you in doubt, whom you keep ignorant of your fault? And why should they be ignorant? you may tell your mother everything. Your deeds, Cydippe, hold nothing to blush at. See that you tell in order how you first became known to me while you yourself were making the rites of the quivered goddess; how, when you were suddenly seen — if perhaps you noticed — I stood still, my eyes fixed on your body; and how, while I marvel at you too much — a sure sign of madness — my cloak slipped and fell from my shoulder; how afterward, from I know not where, a rolling apple came, bearing insidious words in cunning letters, and because it was read with holy Diana present, that your faith was bound, with the goddess as witness. Yet, lest she be ignorant of what the meaning of the writing is, tell her again now the words once read by you. ’Marry, I pray,’ she will say, ’him to whom the good gods join you; let him whom you swore to become be my son-in-law. Whoever he is, let him please us, since he pleases Diana first!’ Such will your mother be, if only she is a mother. But still, see that she ask who and what I am. She will find that the goddess has looked to your good. An island, once most famous for its Corycian nymphs, is girdled by the Aegean sea, Cea by name. That is my homeland; nor, if you approve high-born names, am I shown to be sprung from despised ancestors. I have wealth too, and a character without reproach; and, if nothing more, Love joins me to you. You would seek such a husband even unsworn; and sworn, even were I not such, I should be kept. The archer Phoebe bade me write this to you in dreams; Love bade me write this to you waking; of these two, the arrows of the one have already harmed me; beware lest the shafts of the other harm you! Our safety is joined — pity both me and yourself; why do you hesitate to bring one aid to two? And if it comes to pass, when the given signals shall sound, and Delos shall be stained with votive blood, a golden image of the lucky apple will be set up, and the cause will be written in two little verses: ’By the image of this apple Acontius bears witness that what was written on it has been fulfilled.’ Lest a longer letter weary your sick body, let it be closed with the wonted ending: farewell!

Your letter, Acontius, has reached where it is wont, and almost laid an ambush against my eyes. I was afraid, and read your writing without a murmur, lest my unwitting tongue swear by some gods. And you would have tried to catch me again, I think, except that, as you yourself confess, you knew it was enough that I was promised once. Nor was I going to read it, but, had I been hard to you, the anger of the cruel goddess would perhaps have grown. Though I do everything, though I offer pious incense to Diana, yet she favors you more than is just, and, as you wish to be believed, avenges you with mindful anger; scarcely was she such toward her own Hippolytus. But the maiden-goddess would better have favored a maiden’s years, which I fear she means to make few for me. For a weakness clings to me from causes that do not show; and, worn out, I am helped by no physician’s aid. How thin do you think I now am, scarcely able to write this back, and how pale, scarcely able to raise my limbs on my elbow? Now fear is added too, lest anyone but my confidant the nurse perceive that there are exchanges of talk between us. She sits before the doors, and to those within who ask what I am doing, that I may write in safety, says, ’she sleeps.’ Soon, when sleep, the best excuse for a long privacy, by its tardy delay ceases to be believable, and now she sees those coming whom it is hard not to admit, she clears her throat and gives me the signs we agreed on. In haste I leave my words unfinished, just as they were, and the begun letter is hidden in my trembling bosom. Then, taken up again, it wearies my fingers; you yourself see how great a labor you are to me. May I perish if you deserved it, to speak the truth; but I am better to you than is just, than you deserve. So then, for your sake, so often uncertain of my life, do I and have I paid the penalty of your contrivances? Is this the reward that falls to me for a beauty proud in you as its praiser? and does it harm me to have pleased? Had I seemed ugly to you — which I would prefer — my faulted body would lack no remedy; now, praised, I groan, now by your rivalry you destroy me, and I am wounded by my own good. While neither you yield, nor he thinks himself second, you stand in the way of his wishes, he of yours. I myself am tossed like a ship which steady Boreas drives out to the deep, while the tide and wave carry it back, and when the day longed for by my dear parents draws near, an excessive fever of the body comes at the same time — ah me, at the very time of marriage cruel Persephone, harsh, knocks at our doors! Now I am ashamed, and fear, though I am conscious of no guilt, lest I seem to have deserved the gods’ offense. One man maintains these things happen by chance, but another denies that this man is acceptable to the gods; and lest you think rumor says nothing against you too, a part think these things are done by your sorceries. The cause lies hidden, my ills are plain; you, with peace set aside, wage bitter battles, and I am punished! Come, tell me now, and do not deceive in your wonted way: what will you do in hatred, when you harm me thus by love? If you hurt what you love, you will wisely love an enemy — I pray, that you may save me, dreadful one, be willing to destroy me! Either you now have no care for the girl you hoped for, whom, cruel, you let perish by an unworthy wasting, or, if the cruel goddess is begged for me by you in vain, you have no favor with her to boast of to me. Choose what you will pretend: you do not wish to appease Diana — then you are forgetful of me; you cannot — then she is yours! Would that either never, or not at that time, Delos in the Aegean waters had been known to me! Then my ship was launched on a difficult sea, and the hour was sinister for the journey begun. With what foot did I set out! with what foot did I move from the threshold! with what foot did I touch the painted decking of the swift ship! Yet twice the sails came back with a contrary wind — I lie, ah madwoman! that wind was favorable! It was favorable, the wind that carried me back as I went, and that, too little kindly, hindered my journey. And would that it had been steady against my sails — but it is foolish to complain of the wind’s fickleness. Stirred by the fame of the place, I hastened to see Delos, and seemed to make the journey in too sluggish a ship. How often I reproached the slow oars, and complained that the sails were given too little wind! And now I had passed Myconos, now Tenos and Andros, and white Delos was before my eyes; when I saw it afar, ’why do you flee me, island?’ I said, ’do you drift, as before, in the great sea?’ I had set foot on the land, when, the daylight now nearly done, the sun wished to take the yoke from his crimson horses. After the same sun called them back to their accustomed risings, my hair is dressed at my mother’s bidding. She herself gave gems to my fingers and gold to my hair, and herself put garments on my shoulders. At once, going out, to the gods to whom the island is sacred we give golden incense and wine in salutation; and while my mother stains the altars with votive blood, and heaps the cut entrails on the smoking hearths, my attentive nurse leads me too into the lofty temples, and we wander with straying foot through the sacred places. And now I walk in the porticoes, now I admire the gifts of kings and the statues standing in every place; I admire too the altar built of countless horns, and the tree against which the goddess leaned in giving birth, and whatever else besides Delos holds — for I neither remember nor care to tell all I saw there. Perhaps, while I looked at these things, I was looked at by you, Acontius, and my simplicity seemed able to be caught. I return to the temple of Diana, lofty with its steps — what place ought to have been safer than this? An apple is thrown before my feet with such a verse — ah me, even now I have almost sworn to you again! The nurse picked it up and, wondering, said, ’read it through!’ I read your snares, great poet! At the word ’marriage’ spoken, confounded with shame, I felt myself blush over all my cheeks, and I kept my eyes as if fixed on my lap — eyes made the servants of your design. Shameless one, why do you rejoice? or what glory is won for you? or what praise have you, a man, from a girl outwitted? I had not stood, shield-bearing, with the axe taken up, like Penthesilea on the Trojan soil; no belt chased with Amazonian gold was brought back to you as plunder, as from Hippolyte. Why do you exult, if your words tricked me, and I, a girl too little prudent, was caught by guile? An apple caught Cydippe, an apple caught the daughter of Schoeneus; you now, forsooth, will be a second Hippomenes! But it would have been better, if that boy held you, who, you say, has I know not what torches, not to corrupt hope by fraud, in the way of good men; I should have been won by entreaty, not caught! Why, when you sought me, did you not think those things should be declared on account of which you yourself were to be sought by me? Why did you wish to compel rather than to persuade, if I could be won when the terms were heard? What good to you now is the form of the oath, and a tongue that called the present goddess to witness? It is the mind that swears. But with that I swore nothing; that alone can add faith to words. Purpose and the prudent judgment of the mind swear, and no bonds avail but those of the judgment. If I willed to promise you our marriage, exact the due rights of the promised bed; but if I gave nothing but a voice without the heart, you hold in vain words bereft of their force. I did not swear — I read swearing words; you were not to be chosen as my husband in that way. Deceive others so — let a letter succeed the apple! If this avails, take great wealth from the rich; make kings swear they will give you their kingdoms, and let whatever pleases you in all the world be yours! You are much greater than Diana herself in this, believe me, if your letter has so present a divine power. Yet when I have said this, when, firm, I have denied myself to you, when the case of my promise has been well pleaded, I confess, I fear the anger of the cruel daughter of Latona, and suspect that my body is hurt from that cause. For why, as often as the marriage-rites are prepared, do the limbs of the bride-to-be so often sink in weakness? Three times now, coming to the set altars, Hymenaeus has fled, and turned his back at the chamber’s threshold, and scarcely with sluggish hand do the lamps, so often poured full, revive; scarcely does he catch the torches with the kindled fire. Often the ointments drip from his garlanded hair, and the shining mantle trails with much saffron. When he has touched the threshold, he sees tears and the fear of death and many things far removed from his own adornment, and he is ashamed to rise glad in a sorrowing crowd, and the redness that was in the mantle passes into his face. He himself throws down the garlands drawn from his brow, and wipes the thick perfumes from his shining hair; but for me, alas, wretched! my limbs are scorched with fevers, and my coverlets have a weight heavier than is right, and I see my weeping parents over my face, and instead of the marriage-torch the torch of death is present for me. Spare one who suffers, goddess glad in your painted quiver, and give me now the health-bringing aid of your brother. It is base for you, that he should drive off the causes of death, while you, on the other side, hold the title of my death. Did I ever, when you wished to bathe in a shady spring, unawares bring my face to your waters, or pass by your altars among so many gods, or was my mother scorned over your mother? I have done no wrong, except that I read words of perjury and was schooled in a too-unlucky verse. You too, on my behalf, if you do not feign your love, bring incense; let the hands that harmed me do good! Why, you who are angry that the girl pledged to you is not yet yours, do you act so that she cannot become yours? All things are to be hoped from me living; why does the cruel goddess take my life from me, and from you the hope of me? And do not believe that the man to whom I am destined as wife warms my sick limbs with hand laid over them. He sits by me indeed, as far as is allowed, but he remembers that my bed is a maiden’s. Now too he seems to have perceived something about me; for tears often fall, the cause hidden, and he caresses less boldly, and gives rare kisses, and calls me his with a timid mouth. Nor do I wonder he has perceived it, since I betray myself by open signs; I turn onto my right side when he comes, and do not speak, and feign sleep with covered eye, and push back his hand as it seeks my touch. He groans and sighs with a silent breast, and holds me as offended with him, though he does not deserve it. Ah me, that you rejoice, and that disposition of mine pleases you! Ah me, that I have confessed my feelings to you! But if I had any anger, you would more justly have deserved it, you who spread the nets for me. You write, that it may be allowed you to visit my feeble body. You are far from me, and yet from there you do harm. I wondered why your name was Acontius; you have a point that deals a wound from afar. Certainly I have not yet recovered from such a wound, struck from afar by your writing as by a javelin. Yet why should you come here? indeed you would see a pitiable body, the great trophies of your own cleverness! I am fallen away with leanness; my color is bloodless, such as I recall in my mind was on your apple, nor do my white cheeks glow with mingled red. The look of new marble is wont to be such; such is the color of silver at banquets, which, touched by the chill of cold water, grows pale. If you saw me now, you would deny I had been seen before, and would say, ’she was not sought by my art,’ and you will release the faith of the promise, that I be not joined to you, and will wish the goddess not to remember it. Perhaps you will even make me swear the contrary again, and will send me other words to read. Yet would that you might sit by me, as you yourself asked, and see the languid limbs of your betrothed! Though your heart be now harder than iron, Acontius, you yourself would beg pardon with my own words. Yet, lest you not know by what aid I may recover, it is inquired of the god at Delphi, who chants the fates. He too, as wandering rumor now whispers, complains of a faith neglected, with his sister as witness. This the god, this the seer, this the published oracles say — ah! no divine powers are lacking to your wish! Whence this favor for you? unless perhaps some new writing has been found which, when read, captures the great gods. And, you holding the gods, I myself follow the will of the gods, and gladly give my conquered hands to your wishes; and I have confessed to my mother the covenant of my deceived tongue, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground full of shame. The rest is your care; this too is more than a maiden should do, that my paper did not fear to speak with you. Now I have wearied my feeble limbs enough with the pen, and my sick hand refuses its office any longer. What remains, except that — since I desire now to be joined with you — my letter add: Farewell?