The Festivals

The seasons with their causes, set in order through the Latin year,
and the stars that sink beneath the earth and rise — these I shall sing.
Receive this work, Caesar Germanicus, with an untroubled face,
and steer the course of my timid ship,
and, not scorning the slight honor of the office,
look — attend me, favorable, your godhead pledged to my prayer.
You will recognize rites dug out of the ancient annals,
and by what merit each day stands marked.
There too you will find festivals that belong to your own house;
often your father is to be read of, often your grandfather,
and the rewards they carry, stamped on the painted calendar,
you also will win, beside your brother Drusus.
Let others sing Caesar’s arms: I sing Caesar’s altars
and whatever days he has added to the holy ones.
Nod assent as I try to move through the praises of your kin,
and shake the trembling fears out of my heart.
Grant yourself gentle to me, and you will have given my songs their strength:
my talent stands or falls by your face.
The page that must come under the judgment of a learned prince
quakes, as if sent to be read by the Clarian god.
For we have felt what eloquence your cultivated lips command,
when it took up a citizen’s arms for trembling defendants.
And we know, when your impulse turned toward our own arts,
how great the rivers of your genius run.
If it is allowed and right, poet, take a poet’s reins in hand,
that under your auspices the whole year may run blessed.

When the founder of the City was ordering the seasons,
he fixed that there be twice five months in his year.
No doubt you knew arms better than the stars, Romulus,
and your greater care was to conquer your neighbors.
Yet there is a reasoning too, Caesar, that may have moved him,
and he has grounds on which to defend his mistake.
What is enough for the infant to come forth from its mother’s womb,
this much of time he judged enough for a year;
for just as many months, after a husband’s funeral, the wife
keeps up the marks of mourning in her widowed house.
This, then, is what the care of robed Quirinus saw,
when he gave a raw people its yearly laws.
The first month was Mars’s, the second Venus’s;
she the head of his race, he the father of himself:
the third was named from old men, the fourth from the name of the young,
and the crowd that follows was marked off by number.
But Numa passed over neither Janus nor the ancestral shades,
and set two months in front of the ancient ones.
Yet, lest you not know the laws of the various days,
not every Morning-star carries the same office.
That day will be unlawful on which the three words are hushed;
it will be lawful on which a case may by statute be tried.
And do not suppose its laws hold firm the whole day through:
what is now lawful was, in the morning, unlawful;
for once the entrails have been given to the god, all may be spoken,
and the honored praetor has his words free.
There is a day, too, on which it is right to pen the people in the rails;
there is one, too, that always comes round from the ninth turn.
Juno’s care lays claim to the Ausonian Kalends;
on the Ides a white ewe-lamb, the larger, falls for Jove;
the Nones’ guardianship lacks a god. To all of these
(beware you are not tricked) the next day will be black.
The omen comes from the outcome: for on those days Rome
bore grim losses with Mars turned against her.
Let these things, said by me once, cling to the whole calendar,
so I be not forced to break the sequence of events.

Look — Germanicus, the day announces a year of good omen for you,
and in my song Janus is the first to come.
Two-headed Janus, origin of the silently gliding year,
you alone of the gods above who see your own back,
be favorable to the leaders by whose labor the fertile earth
has its quiet, the sea its quiet;
be favorable to your senators and to the people of Quirinus,
and with a nod unbar your shining temples.
A prosperous dawn is rising: keep watch over tongues and minds;
now, on a good day, good words must be said.
Let ears be free of lawsuits, let mad quarrels at once
be gone: postpone your work, you spiteful crowd.
Do you see how the air glows with fragrant fires,
and how the Cilician saffron crackles on kindled hearths?
The flame beats with its own brightness on the temples’ gold,
and scatters a trembling radiance high in the shrine.
In spotless garments they go up to the Tarpeian heights,
and the people themselves match the color of their festival,
and now the new rods of office go before, the new purple shines,
and the conspicuous ivory chair feels a new weight.
The bullocks, untried at the work, offer their necks to be struck,
the ones the Faliscan grass fed on its own plains.
When Jupiter looks out from his citadel over the whole world,
he has nothing but what is Roman to watch over.
Hail, glad day, and come back ever better,
worthy to be kept by a people that masters the world.

But what god shall I call you, two-formed Janus?
For Greece has no divinity to match you.
Tell, at the same time, the reason why, alone of the heaven-dwellers,
you see both what is behind your back and what is before.
While I was turning these things in my mind, my tablets taken up,
the house seemed brighter than it had been before.
Then holy Janus, marvelous in his two-faced image,
suddenly offered his twin faces to my eyes.
I was terrified, and felt my hair stiffen with fear,
and my breast went cold with a sudden chill.
He, holding a staff in his right hand, a key in his left,
gave out these sounds to me from his front mouth:
"Learn, with your fear laid aside, painstaking poet of the days,
what you seek, and take my words into your mind.
The ancients called me Chaos (for I am a primeval thing):
see of how long a span of time I sing the deeds.
This clear air and the three bodies that remain —
fire, water, earth — were one heap.
Once this mass split apart in the strife of its own elements
and, dissolved, went off into new homes,
flame sought the height, the nearer place took the air,
earth and sea settled in the middle ground.
Then I, who had been a sphere and a shapeless lump,
returned to a face and limbs worthy of a god.
Now too, a small token of my once-confused figure,
what is in front of me and what is behind looks the same.
Hear the other reason for the shape you ask about,
so you may know it, and my office, at once.
Whatever you see anywhere — sky, sea, clouds, lands —
all is shut and opened by our hand.
The guardianship of the vast world is mine alone,
and the whole right of turning its hinge is mine.
When it pleases me to send Peace out from her quiet halls,
she walks free along the unending roads:
the whole world would be drenched in death-bringing blood,
if rigid bars did not hold War shut in.
I preside at the doors of heaven with the gentle Hours
(Jupiter himself goes and comes back by my office):
from this I am called Janus; and when the priest sets on me
the cake of Ceres and the spelt mixed with salt,
you will laugh at my names: for in the same sacrificing mouth
I am called now Patulcius and now Clusius.
No doubt that rude antiquity wished, with alternating names,
to signify my different turns.
My power has been told; now learn the reason for my shape:
though already you see it, in some part, yourself.
Every door has twin fronts, this side and that,
of which the one faces the people, the other the household god;
and as your doorkeeper, seated near the threshold of the front of the house,
sees who goes out and who comes in,
so I, the doorkeeper of the heavenly court, look out
on the regions of dawn and of evening at once.
You see the faces of Hecate turning into three parts,
that she may guard the crossroads cut into three ways:
and I too, lest I lose time by the bending of my neck,
am allowed to see two ways with my body unmoved."
He had spoken: and by his look he had pledged, if I should wish
to ask for more, that he would not be hard with me.
I took heart, and not in terror gave the god my thanks,
and, looking at the ground, spoke a few more words:
"Tell, come, why the new year begins in the cold,
when it had better have begun with spring?
Then all things flower, then is the fresh age of the season,
and the new bud swells on the teeming vine-shoot,
and the tree is covered with leaves just formed,
and the blade of the seed comes up to the top of the soil,
and the birds soothe the warm air with their concerts,
and the herd plays and frolics in the meadows.
Then the sun is coaxing, and the unknown swallow comes out
and fixes her muddy work under the high beam;
then the field bears tilling and is renewed by the plow.
This rightly should have been called the year’s new birth."
I had asked at length; he, not delaying long,
gathered his words into two verses, like this:
"Midwinter is the first day of the new sun and the last of the old:
Phoebus and the year take their beginning from the same point."
After that I wondered why the first day was not
free of lawsuits. "Take in the reason," said Janus.
"I set the new-born seasons over the doing of business,
lest the whole year, by its first omen, be idle.
Each man tries his own craft, for the same reason, by working at it,
and witnesses no more than his usual labor."
Next I said, "Why, though I appease the other gods,
Janus, to you first do I bring incense and unmixed wine?"
"So that through me, who guard the thresholds," he said,
"you may have access to whatever gods you wish."
"But why are glad words spoken on your Kalends,
and why do we give and receive prayers in turn?"
Then the god, leaning on the staff he carried in his right hand,
said, "Omens are wont to lie in beginnings.
You turn your anxious ears to the first word,
and the augur reads the bird he has first seen.
The temples and the ears of the gods stand open, no tongue
shapes idle prayers, and the words spoken carry weight."
Janus had ceased. I made no long silence,
but touched his last words with words of my own:
"What does the palm-fruit mean, and the wrinkled fig," I said,
"and the white honey given in a snow-white jar?"
"It is for the omen," he said, "that the outcome follow the flavor,
and the year, sweet, complete the road it has begun."
"I see why sweet things are given: add the reason for the coin,
so that no part of your festival may slip past me."
He laughed, and said, "Oh, how your own age deceives you,
if you think honey sweeter than money taken!
I scarcely, in Saturn’s reign, saw anyone
to whose mind sweet gains were not dear.
With time the love of having grew, which now is at its peak:
it scarcely has anywhere further left to go.
Wealth is worth more now than in the years of the old time,
while the people were poor, while Rome was new,
while a small hut held Mars-born Quirinus,
and the river-sedge gave him his scanty bed.
Jupiter could scarcely stand at full height in his cramped shrine,
and in Jupiter’s right hand was a thunderbolt of clay.
They decked with leaves the Capitol they now deck with gems,
and the senator himself pastured his own sheep:
nor was there shame in taking peaceful rest on straw
and laying hay beneath the head.
The praetor gave laws to the people with his plow just set aside,
and a thin plate of silver was a crime.
But after the fortune of this place lifted its head
and Rome touched the gods with her topmost peak,
both wealth and the mad lust for wealth increased,
and, though they own the most, they seek for more.
They strive to seek so as to spend, and to seek again what they have spent,
and the very alternations are food for their vices:
so, with those whose belly is swollen, suffused with water,
the more they drink, the more they thirst for water.
Worth lies now in money: rank money gives,
money gives friendships; the poor man lies low everywhere.
Yet you ask whether the omen of the coin is useful,
and why old bronze pleases our hands:
of old they gave bronze; the better omen now is in gold,
and the old coinage, beaten, has yielded to the new.
We too like temples of gold, although we approve the ancient ones:
majesty itself befits a god.
We praise the old days, but use our own years:
yet each custom is equally worthy to be kept."
He had finished his counsel. Then again, gently, as before,
I myself address the key-bearing god with my words:
"Much indeed I have learned: but why is one face stamped on the bronze
a ship’s, the other two-headed?"
"You could have known me by the double image," he said,
"had not the day itself, being old, worn the work thin.
The reason of the ship remains: the sickle-bearing god
came by boat to the Tuscan river, his globe already wandered over.
On this land, I remember, Saturn was received
(driven from the realms of heaven by Jove).
From this the name Saturnia long clung to the race;
the land too was called Latium, from the god in hiding.
But good posterity formed a ship’s stern on the bronze,
to bear witness to the coming of the divine guest.
I myself tilled the soil whose left flank the gentlest
wave of sandy Tiber grazes.
Here, where Rome now is, an unfelled forest grew green,
and all this great thing was pasture for a few cattle.
My citadel was the hill which the present age, by my name,
commonly calls and names the Janiculum.
Then I reigned, when the earth could bear to have gods upon it,
and divinities mingled in human places.
Not yet had mortal crime put Justice to flight
(she last of the gods left the ground),
and in place of fear shame itself ruled the people without force;
there was no labor in giving the just their rights.
I had nothing to do with war: I guarded peace and the doorposts,
and" — showing the key — "these," he said, "are the arms I bear."
The god had closed his mouth. Then I opened mine,
my voice drawing out the god’s words:
"Since there are so many archways, why do you stand consecrated in one,
here where you have your temples joined to two forums?"
He, stroking with his hand the beard combed down upon his breast,
at once recalled the arms of Oebalian Tatius,
and how the fickle guard, won over by bracelets, led the Sabines
on a silent path to the top of the citadel.
"From there, as it is now, the slope down which you descend
ran steep into the valleys through the forums.
And already he had reached the gate, whose opposing bars
jealous Saturnia had taken away;
fearing to join battle with so great a divinity,
I, cunning, set in motion a work of my own art,
and the fountain-mouths, in which my power is strong, I unstopped,
and shot out sudden waters.
But first I put sulphur under the wet veins,
so the boiling moisture might close the road to Tatius.
When its usefulness, the Sabines driven off, had been seen,
the place was given back, safely, to the shape it had had;
an altar was set up for me, joined to a small chapel:
on it the spelt is burned in the flames along with the offering-cake."
"But why do you hide in peace, and open up when arms are stirred?"
Without delay the reason of my question was given:
"So that the way back may lie open for a people gone off to war,
my whole gate stands open, its bar removed.
In peace I bolt the doors, lest she be able to slip away anywhere;
and under Caesar’s godhead I shall be long shut."
He spoke, and lifting his eyes that look opposite ways
he surveyed whatever there was in the whole world:
there was peace, and the cause of your triumph, Germanicus —
the Rhine had already handed its waters over to you as a slave.
Janus, make peace and the ministers of peace everlasting,
and grant that its author not desert his work.

But — this much I was allowed to learn from the calendar itself —
the fathers consecrated two temples on this day.
The island that the river presses with its divided water
received the son of Phoebus and the nymph Coronis.
Jupiter has a share: one place took in both,
and the temples of the great grandson are joined to the grandfather.

What forbids me to tell of the stars too, as each one rises and sets?
Let that also be part of my promise.
Happy the souls whose first care it was to know these things
and to climb up into the homes on high!
It is believable that they lifted their heads higher
than human vices and human places alike.
Neither Venus nor wine broke their lofty hearts,
nor the duty of the forum, nor the toil of the camp;
no light ambition, no glory smeared with rouge,
no hunger for great wealth disturbed them.
They brought the distant stars near to the eyes of the mind
and set the upper air beneath their own genius.
So heaven is reached — not for Olympus to carry Ossa,
nor for Pelion’s peak to touch the topmost stars.
We too, under those guides, will measure out the sky,
and set to the wandering signs their proper days.
So, when the third night before the coming Nones is here,
and the ground lies wet, sprinkled with heavenly dew,
the claws of eight-footed Cancer will be looked for in vain:
headlong he will sink beneath the western waters.

When the Nones have come, the rains sent you from black clouds
will give their signs as the Lyre rises.

Add four days drawn in order from the Nones,
and Janus must be appeased on the Agonal day.
The name’s cause may be the girt-up attendant
by whose striking the victim falls for the gods above,
who, about to dip his drawn knives in the warm blood,
always asks "Shall I drive?" and does not act unless bidden.
Some believe the day takes the name Agonal from the driving (actus),
because the beasts do not come but are driven.
Some think this festival was called Agnalia by the ancients,
with one letter taken from its proper place.
Or, because the victim fears the knives foreseen in the water,
is the day itself marked from the beast’s dread?
It may even be the day took a Greek name from the games
that were customary in the age of our forebears.
And ancient speech called cattle "agonia";
and in my judgment the last reason is the true one.
And though it is not certain, the king of the rites must
appease the powers with the mate of a woolly ewe.
The victim (victima) that falls by a conquering (victrix) right hand is so named;
the offering (hostia) takes its name from conquered foes (hostes).
Before, what had the power to win the gods over to man
was spelt and the gleaming grain of pure salt.
Not yet had the foreign ship, driven across the waters of the sea,
brought myrrh wept from the bark,
nor had Euphrates sent frankincense, nor India costus,
nor had the threads of red saffron been known.
The altar, content with Sabine herbs, gave off its smoke,
and the laurel was scorched with no small crackling;
if anyone could add violets to garlands made from the meadow’s bloom,
he was a rich man.
This knife, which now lays open the entrails of the stricken bull,
had no work in the sacred rites.
Ceres first took joy in the blood of the greedy sow,
avenging her crops by the deserved slaughter of the guilty:
for she found that the seedlings, milky in the new spring with tender juice,
had been grubbed up by the snout of the bristly swine.
The pig had paid its penalty: warned by its example,
you should have kept off the vine-shoot, goat.
Someone, watching him press his teeth into the vine,
gave words like these, his grief not silent:
"Gnaw the vine, goat: yet from it, when you stand at the altar,
there will be something that can be sprinkled on your horns."
The outcome follows the words: the foe handed over to you for his offense
is sprinkled on the horns, Bacchus, with poured wine.
His own fault harmed the pig, the goat’s fault harmed it too:
but what did you deserve, ox, what, you peaceable sheep?
Aristaeus wept, because he had seen his bees, killed root and stock,
abandon the combs they had begun;
his sea-blue mother, scarcely consoling him in his grief,
added these last words to her speech:
"Stop your tears, boy: Proteus will lighten your losses
and will give the means to recover what has perished.
But lest he trick you by changing his shapes,
let firm bonds hamper both his hands."
The young man came to the seer, and binds the arms
of the sea-old man, caught and slack with sleep.
He, shifting form, falsifies his face by his art;
soon, tamed by the bonds, he returns to his own limbs,
and lifting his face dripping from its sea-blue beard
he said, "By what art do you ask to get back your bees?
Bury the carcass of a slaughtered bullock in the earth:
what you ask of me, the buried beast will give."
The herdsman does as bidden; swarms boil from the rotting ox:
one creature, killed, gave a thousand lives.
Fate demands the sheep: the wicked thing had cropped the sacred herbs
the dutiful old woman used to bring to the country gods.
What safety is left, when both the woolly flock
and the country oxen lay down their life upon the altars?
The Persian appeases with a horse Hyperion girt in rays,
that no sluggish victim be given to the swift god.
Because once a hind was slain in a virgin’s stead for twin-born Diana,
now too a hind falls, though for no virgin.
I have seen the Sapaeans offer the entrails of dogs to Trivia,
and whoever dwells beside your snows, Haemus.
A little ass too is slain for the stiff guardian of the country;
the reason is shameful, indeed, but yet fits the god.
You used to keep, Greece, the festival of ivy-berried Bacchus
that every third midwinter brings back at its set time.
The gods too, the worshippers of Lyaeus, came to the same place,
and whoever was no stranger to jests,
the Pans and the Satyrs’ young, bent toward Venus,
and the goddesses that haunt the rivers and the lonely fields.
Old Silenus too had come on his sway-backed ass,
and he who, red, frightens the timid birds with his groin.
They, having found a grove fit for sweet feasting,
reclined on couches clothed with grass:
Liber gave the wine, each had brought himself a garland,
a brook supplied, sparingly, the water for mixing.
Some Naiads were there with their hair let loose, no comb used,
some with their hair arranged by art and hand;
one serves with her tunic caught up above the calves,
another with her breast bared at the unstitched fold;
this one bares a shoulder, that one trails her dress through the grass,
no straps hamper their tender feet.
So some kindle gentle fires in the Satyrs,
some in you, who wear your brows bound with pine:
you too, Silenus of unquenched lust, they burn:
it is your wanton mischief that will not let you grow old.
But red Priapus, the glory and the guardian of gardens,
of all of them had been caught by Lotis:
her he desires, her he longs for, for her alone he sighs,
and gives signs with a nod and woos her with marks.
Disdain dwells in the beautiful, and pride attends good looks:
she looks down on him, mocking, with that face of hers.
It was night, and, the wine bringing on sleep, the bodies lay
overcome by slumber in scattered places;
Lotis, the last of them, on the grassy ground beneath the maple boughs,
just as she was, tired with play, lay still.
The lover rises and, holding his breath, stealthily
carries his steps, silent, on the tips of his toes.
When he reached the secret bed of the snow-white nymph,
he takes care that the very breath of his breathing make no sound;
and now, close by, he was poising his body on the grass:
she, for all that, was full of heavy sleep.
He rejoices, and, the covering drawn from her feet,
had begun to go toward his wishes by a lucky road.
Look — the ass that carries Silenus, braying hoarse,
let out untimely sounds from its mouth.
The nymph starts up in terror, and with her hands thrusts Priapus
away, and in her flight rouses the whole grove.
But the god, ready, and all too obscene in his part,
was a thing of laughter to them all in the moon’s light.
The author of the uproar paid with its death; and this
is the victim welcome to the Hellespontine god.
Untouched you once were, birds, the country’s comforts,
a kind at home in the woods and harmless,
who build your nests and warm your eggs with feathers
and pour out sweet measures from your easy throats;
but none of that helps, because you bear the charge of the tongue,
and the gods think you lay bare their minds.
(Nor is this false: for, being each one nearest to the gods,
now by wing, now by cry, you give true signs.)
Long safe, the brood of birds was then at last slain,
and the entrails of the informer pleased the gods.
So often the white dove, a wife carried off from her mate,
is burned on the Idalian hearths.
Nor does saving the Capitol save the goose
from yielding its liver onto your platters, lady of Inachus.
By night the crested bird is slain for the goddess Night,
because with its wakeful cry it summons the warm day.
Meanwhile the Dolphin, a bright constellation, rises
over the waters and lifts its face from its native shallows.

The next day marks winter at its midpoint,
and what is left will be equal to what is past.

The next day, the bride leaving Tithonus behind, will look upon
the pontifical rite of the Arcadian goddess.
You too, sister of Turnus, the same day received in a shrine,
here where the Campus is bounded by the Virgin water.
Where shall I seek the causes and the custom of these rites?
Who will steer my sails in the middle of the strait?
Instruct me yourself, who have your name drawn from song,
and favor my purpose, that your honor not go astray.
Born before the moon — if she is to be believed about herself —
the land has its name from great Arcas.
From here was Evander, who, though famous on both sides,
was nobler by the blood of his holy mother;
she, as soon as she had conceived the heavenly fires in her mind,
poured from her mouth songs full of the true god.
She had foretold that upheavals were at hand for her son and herself,
and much else besides that in time won belief.
For the young man, banished with his all-too-truthful mother,
leaves Arcadia and his Parrhasian home.
To him, weeping, his mother said, "This fortune of yours must be borne
like a man (check your tears, I beg).
So it stood in the fates; no fault of yours has driven you out,
but a god: by an offended god you are expelled from your city.
You suffer no penalty deserved, but a divinity’s anger:
it is something, in great troubles, to be clear of guilt.
As each one’s conscience is, so it conceives within the breast
its hope or its fear, according to its own deed.
Yet do not grieve as if you were the first to suffer such ills:
that storm has overwhelmed mighty men.
The same was suffered by Cadmus, once driven from the Tyrian shores,
who settled, an exile, on Aonian ground;
the same Tydeus suffered, and the same Pagasaean Jason,
and others whom it would be a long delay to recount.
Every soil is a homeland to the brave, as the sea is to fish,
as whatever lies open in the empty world is to the bird.
Nor does the wild storm rage the whole year long:
for you too, believe me, there will be a springtime."
His mind steadied by his parent’s words, Evander
cuts the waves with his ship and reaches Hesperia.
And now, by learned Carmentis’s counsel, he had driven his craft
into the river and was going to meet the Tuscan waters:
she looks at the riverbank, where the shallows of Tarentum lie,
and the huts scattered through the lonely places;
and, just as she was, with her hair flung loose she stood before the stern,
and grimly held back the hand of the man steering the course,
and stretching her arms far out toward the right bank
she struck the pine-built deck three times with frenzied foot,
and, in her haste to leap out and set foot on land,
she was scarcely, scarcely held back by Evander’s hand;
and "Hail," she said, "you gods of the places we have sought,
and you, land that will give new gods to heaven,
and rivers and springs that the welcoming land enjoys,
and woodland groves and the choirs of the Naiads,
be seen with good omens by my son and me,
and may this bank be touched by a lucky foot.
Am I wrong, or will these hills become mighty walls,
and from this land will the rest of the earth seek its laws?
To these hills the whole world is one day promised.
Who would believe the place holds so great a destiny?
And soon the Dardanian pines will touch these shores:
here too a woman will be the cause of a new war.
Dear grandson Pallas, why do you put on the arms of death?
Put them on: you will be slain by no lowly avenger.
Conquered, you will still conquer, and overthrown, Troy, you will rise again:
that ruin of yours overwhelms the houses of your foes.
Burn, you conquering flames, the Neptunian Pergama:
is its ash, for all that, any less high than the whole world?
Soon dutiful Aeneas will bring the sacred things and — another sacred thing —
his father: receive, Vesta, the gods of Ilium.
A time will come when the same man will guard both you and the world,
and the rites will be performed with a god himself the priest,
and the guardianship of the fatherland will rest with the Augusti:
it is right that this house hold the reins of empire.
Then the grandson and son of a god, though he himself refuse it,
will bear his father’s burdens with a heavenly mind,
and as I shall one day be hallowed on everlasting altars,
so Julia Augusta will be a new divinity."
When with such words she had come down to our own years,
her foreknowing tongue stopped in mid-utterance.
Disembarked, the exile stood on Latian grass:
happy the man for whom that place was exile!
Nor was the delay long: new houses stood, and no other
on the Ausonian hills was greater than the Arcadian.
Look — the club-bearing hero drives the Erythean cattle there,
having measured out the road of the long world,
and while the Tegeaean house is his lodging, the cattle wander
unguarded through the broad fields.
It was morning: shaken from sleep, the Tirynthian drover
feels that two bulls are missing from the count.
Searching, he sees no tracks of the silent theft:
fierce Cacus had dragged them backward into his cave,
Cacus, the terror and disgrace of the Aventine wood,
no light evil to neighbors and to guests.
Grim was the man’s face, his strength matched his bulk, his body
huge (Mulciber was this monster’s father),
and for a house a cavern vast with long recesses,
hidden, scarcely to be found even by wild beasts;
over the doorposts hang faces and nailed-up arms,
and the foul ground whitens with human bones.
With part of the cattle ill-kept, the son of Jove was leaving:
the stolen ones gave a lowing with hoarse sound.
"I take the recall," he said, and following the cry
the avenger came through the woods to the unholy cave.
Cacus had walled the entrance with a barrier of broken mountain;
twice five yoke of oxen could scarcely have moved that mass.
He heaves with his shoulders (the sky too had once rested on them),
and by the strain shakes the vast weight loose.
The moment it was overturned, the crash terrified heaven itself,
and the struck ground sank under the weight of the mass.
Cacus first starts the battle hand to hand,
and fierce wages it with rocks and stakes.
When nothing is gained by these, ill-bravely he flees
to his father’s arts, and vomits flames from his roaring mouth;
as often as he blasts them out, you would think Typhoeus breathed
and a swift bolt was hurled from the fire of Aetna.
Alcides forestalls him, and the three-knotted club, drawn back,
settled three and four times in the man’s face.
He falls, and vomits smoke mixed with blood,
and, dying, beats the ground with his broad breast.
The victor sacrifices to you, Jupiter, one bull of those,
and calls Evander and the country-folk,
and sets up for himself the altar that is called the Greatest,
here where a part of the City has its name from the ox.
Nor is Evander’s mother silent that the time is near
when the earth will have had enough of its Hercules.
But the blessed prophetess, having lived most dear to the gods,
now, a goddess, holds this day in Janus’s month.

On the Ides, in great Jove’s shrine, the chaste priest
offers to the flames the entrails of a half-male sheep;
and every province was given back to our people,
and your grandfather was called by the name of Augustus.
Read through the wax masks set in order through the noble halls:
such great titles have fallen to no man.
Africa names its conqueror after itself, another attests
the Isaurians or the conquered wealth of the Cretans;
the Numidians make this man proud, Messana that one;
that one drew his surname from the city of Numantia:
to Drusus, Germany gave both his death and his name —
ah, wretched me, how brief that valor was!
If he should take them from the conquered, Caesar would assume as many names
as the mightiest world has nations in its count.
Some are renowned from a single deed — the titles of a torque
stripped away, or of the helping crow.
Great one, your name is the measure of your achievements:
but the man who conquered you was greater in name.
Nor is there any higher grade of surname than the Fabii’s:
that house was called the Greatest for its own deserts.
Yet all of these are honored with merely human distinctions;
he alone has a name shared with highest Jove.
The fathers call holy things "august," and "august" are called
the temples duly dedicated by a priest’s hand:
from the source of this same word hangs "augury" too,
and whatever Jupiter increases by his power.
May he increase our leader’s empire, increase his years,
and may the oak-leaf crown protect your doors:
and under the gods’ auspices may the heir of so great a surname
take up the world’s burden with the omen his father had.

When the third Sun looks back upon the past Ides,
the rites of the Parrhasian goddess will be performed again.
For in earlier days carriages bore the Ausonian matrons
(these too, I think, were named from Evander’s parent);
soon the honor is taken away, and every matron resolves
not to renew her thankless husbands with any child,
and, so as not to bear, recklessly with a blind blow
she would dash out the growing burden from her womb.
They say the fathers rebuked the wives who dared such cruelty,
yet restored the right that had been taken away,
and now they bid that twin rites be done alike to the Tegeaean mother
for boys and for girls.
It is not right to bring things of leather into her chapel,
lest dead skins defile the pure hearths.
If any of you loves the old rites, stand by the one who prays;
you will take in names not known to you before.
Porrima is appeased, and Postverta — whether sisters,
or companions of your flight, goddess of Maenalus;
the one is thought to have sung what had been long before,
the other whatever was to come hereafter.

The next day set you, fair one, in a snow-white temple,
where lofty Moneta lifts her high steps,
now well overlooking the Latin throng, Concord —
now consecrated hands have set you up.
Furius, conqueror of the Etruscan people, had vowed
the old one, and he had paid the pledge of his vow.
The cause: that the commons had seceded from the fathers, arms taken up,
and Rome herself feared her own strength.
The recent cause is better: Germany holds out her flowing hair
to your auspices, revered leader.
From there you offered the gifts of the people you triumphed over
and built temples to the goddess whom you yourself worship.
Your mother established her both by her deeds and by an altar,
found the only one worthy of great Jove’s couch.

When these days have passed, Phoebus, leaving Capricorn behind,
you will run through the signs of the youth who governs the water.
When the seventh sunrise from here has plunged itself in the waves,
no Lyre will any longer shine in the whole sky.

From this constellation, on the coming night, the fire
that gleams in the middle of the Lion’s breast will be sunk.
Three and four times I unrolled the calendars that mark the seasons,
and no Sowing day was found in them;
when the Muse said to me (for she had seen my trouble),
"This day is appointed by proclamation; why do you seek a movable rite from the calendar?
And though the day of the rite is uncertain, its season is fixed —
when, the seeds cast, the field is with young."
Stand garlanded at the full manger, young bullocks:
with the warm spring your work will come back.
Let the countryman hang the discharged plow on its peg:
the ground dreads every wound in the cold.
Steward, give the earth rest, the sowing done;
give rest to the men who have tilled the earth.
Let the village keep its feast: purify the village, farmers,
and give the yearly cakes to the village hearths.
Let the mothers of the crops be appeased, Earth and Ceres,
made heavy with their own spelt and their own bodies:
Ceres and Earth keep a common office;
the one gives the crops their source, the other their place.
Partners in the work, through whom the old time was reformed
and the oak’s acorn beaten by more useful food,
fill the eager farmers with measureless harvests,
that they may take the rewards their tilling deserves.
Grant unbroken growth to the tender sowings,
and let no new blade be scorched amid the icy snows.
When we sow, open the sky with clear winds;
when the seed lies hidden, sprinkle it with heavenly water.
And guard the fields of Ceres, that no flock of birds
lay waste the tilled land in a ruinous host.
You too, ants, spare the buried grains:
after the harvest there will be a greater plenty to plunder.
Meanwhile let the crop grow free of rough mildew,
and let no grain go pale from the weather’s fault,
and let it neither fail through leanness nor, too rich,
grow rank and perish by its own abundance;
and let the fields be free of the darnel that harms the eyes,
and let no barren wild-oat rise on the tilled ground;
may the field yield crops of wheat, and spelt that will bear the fire twice,
and barley, at enormous interest.
These things I wish for you, these wish for yourselves, farmers,
and may both goddesses make the prayers come true.
War long held men: the sword was fitter
than the plowshare, the plow-ox yielded to the horse;
the hoes lay idle, the mattocks were turned into javelins,
and a helmet was made from the weight of the rake.
Thanks to the gods and to your house: bound with chains,
long now under your foot the Wars lie.
Let the ox come under the yoke, the seed under the plowed earth:
Peace nourishes Ceres, Ceres is the fosterling of Peace.

But the day that, sixth, comes before the approaching Kalends —
on it temples were dedicated to the gods born of Leda:
brothers of the race of the gods built those temples
to the brother-gods around the pool of Juturna.

The song itself has led us to the altar of Peace:
this will be the second day from the month’s end.
Your hair bound and dressed with the leaves of Actium,
Peace, be here, and stay gentle in the whole world.
While enemies are lacking, let the cause of triumph be lacking too:
you will be a greater glory to our leaders than war.
Let the soldier bear arms only to keep arms in check,
and let nothing but the procession sound on the fierce trumpet.
Let the world, both nearest and farthest, dread the sons of Aeneas:
if any land feared Rome too little, let it love her.
Priests, add incense to the flames of Peace,
and let a white victim fall, its brow drenched;
and that the house which guarantees her may last on with peace,
pray to the gods, who incline to dutiful vows.
But now the first part of my labor is finished,
and the little book has its end with its own month.

Janus has reached his end. The year too grows along with my song:
as this month is a second, so let a second book go forward.
Now for the first time, my elegiacs, you sail under larger canvas:
lately, I recall, you were a slight affair.
I myself found you willing servants in love,
when my early youth played in its own measures.
Now I, the same poet, sing of rites and the seasons marked in the calendar:
who would have believed there was a road from that to this?
This is my soldiering; I bear what arms I can,
and my right hand is not exempt from every duty.
If javelins are not whirled by a strong arm of mine,
nor the back of a war-horse pressed beneath me,
if no helmet covers me, no sharp sword girds me
(anyone at all can be handy with such weapons),
yet with an eager heart I attend your names, Caesar,
and march on through your titles of honor.
So be present, and turn a moment of calm regard
upon my offerings, if your work of pacifying the foe allows it.
The Roman fathers called the means of cleansing februa:
to this day many tokens make the word good.
The pontiffs ask wool from the King and the Flamen,
to which in the old tongue the name februa belonged;
and the cleansings the lictor takes from appointed houses,
roasted spelt with salt, are called the same;
the same name belongs to the bough which, cut from a pure tree,
covers the chaste brows of the priests with its leaf.
I myself saw the Flamen’s wife asking for februa;
to her asking, a pine twig was given for februa.
In short, whatever it is by which our bodies are purified,
this was the name it bore among our unshorn forefathers.
The month is named from these, because the Luperci with cut hide
purify the whole ground, and count that a cleansing;
or because the season is pure when the graves are appeased,
once the days of the dead have gone by.
Our elders believed that purifications could lift away
every sin and every cause of evil.
Greece gave the custom its start: she holds that the guilty,
once cleansed, lay down their impious deeds.
Peleus absolved the son of Actor; Peleus himself
Acastus absolved of Phocus’s murder, in Haemonian waters;
Aegeus, credulous, cherished with undeserved aid the Phasian woman,
borne through the empty air by bridled dragons;
the son of Amphiaraus said to Naupactian Achelous,
"Loose me from my sin," and the god loosed his sin.
Ah, too easily fooled, you who think the grim guilt of slaughter
can be washed away by river water!
But still, lest you stray in ignorance of the ancient order:
January’s month is first, as it is, and was before;
the month that follows January was the last of the old year:
you too, Terminus, were the end of the rites.
For January’s month is first, because a door comes first;
the month sacred to the lowest shades was lowest of all.
Afterward the Ten Men are believed to have joined together
two seasons that long stood far apart.

At the month’s beginning, Sospita, neighbor to the Phrygian Mother,
is said to have been enriched with new shrines.
Now where are the temples of the goddess that were hallowed
on those Kalends? They have toppled in the long course of time.
That the rest should not fall, shaken in like ruin,
the provident care of our consecrated leader saw to it,
under whom no old age is felt in the shrines;
and it is not enough for him to oblige men — he binds the gods.
Founder of temples, holy restorer of temples,
I pray the powers above may keep an equal care of you.
May the heavenly ones grant you the years that you grant them,
and stand on guard before your house.
Then too the grove of neighboring Alernus is thronged,
where the stranger Tiber makes for the waters of the sea.
At Numa’s sanctuary, and the Capitoline Thunderer,
and on Jove’s high citadel a two-year sheep is slain.
Often the sky, muffled in clouds, stirs up heavy rains,
or the land lies hidden under fallen snow.

When the next Sun, about to set in the western waves,
lifts the jeweled yoke from his crimson horses,
on that night someone, raising his face to the stars,
will say, "Where is the Lyre today that shone yesterday?"
And while he hunts for the Lyre, he will mark that the back
of the mid-Lion, too, has suddenly plunged into the clear waters.

The Dolphin, embossed in stars, that you saw just now,
will flee your gaze on the following night,
whether he was the lucky informer in secret loves,
or whether he bore the Lesbian lyre with its master.
What sea does not know, what land is ignorant of Arion?
By his song he would hold the running waters still.
Often the wolf chasing the lamb was checked by his voice,
often the lamb fleeing the greedy wolf stood still;
often hounds and hares lay down under one shade,
and the hind stood on the rock close beside the lioness,
and the chattering crow sat, no quarrel between them,
by Pallas’s bird, and the dove was paired with the hawk.
Cynthia, they say, was often spellbound by your strains,
tuneful Arion, as if by her brother’s music.
Arion’s name had filled the Sicilian cities,
and the Ausonian shore was captive to his lyric sounds;
heading home from there, Arion boarded a ship,
and so was carrying off the wealth his art had won.
Perhaps, poor man, you feared the winds and waves:
but the open sea was safer for you than your own vessel.
For the helmsman took his stand with sword drawn,
and the rest of the crew, his accomplices, with armed hand.
What have you to do with a blade? Steer the wavering ship, sailor:
these are not the weapons your fingers should be holding.
He, quaking with fear, said, "I do not plead against death,
but let me take up my lyre and play a little."
They grant it and laugh at the delay: he takes the garland
that could grace your own hair, Phoebus;
he had put on a robe twice steeped in Tyrian purple:
the string, struck by his thumb, gave back its notes,
in plaintive measures, as a swan sings when the cruel quill
has pierced clean through its whitening temples.
At once, still in his finery, he leaps into the midst of the waves;
the dark-blue stern is sprayed by the water he strikes.
Then — past belief — they tell that a dolphin set its curved back
beneath the strange new burden.
He, seated and holding his lyre, sings the fare for his crossing
and soothes the sea’s waters with his song.
The gods see acts of devotion: Jupiter took the dolphin
up among the stars and bade it have nine stars.

Now I could wish a thousand voices were mine, and the breast
that was yours, Homer, by which Achilles too was sung,
while I sing the sacred Nones in alternating verse.
Here the highest honor is heaped upon the calendar.
My talent fails, and matters too great for my strength press hard:
this day must be sung by me with all my power.
What did I want, fool, to load so great a weight
on elegiacs? That was a theme for the heroic foot.
Holy Father of the Fatherland — the commons gave you this name,
the senate gave it, and we knights gave it to you.
Yet the fact had given it first: late too you received your true
titles; long since you were father of the world.
You bear on earth the name that, in high heaven,
Jupiter bears: you are the father of men, he of the gods.
Romulus, you will yield: this man makes your walls great
by guarding them; you left them for Remus to leap.
Tatius felt you, and little Cures, and Caenina;
under this man’s lead, both sides of the sun are Roman.
You held some brief scrap of conquered earth;
whatever lies under high Jove, Caesar holds.
You snatch women off; he, as leader, bids wives be chaste;
you gave wrong sanctuary in a grove, he drove it out;
violence pleased you; under Caesar the laws flourish;
you bear the name of master, he of princeps;
Remus indicts you; he has granted pardon to his enemies;
your father made you a god, he made his father one.
Already the Idaean boy stands out as far as the waist,
and pours clear water mingled with nectar.
See — even if anyone used to shudder at the North Wind,
let him rejoice: a softer breeze comes from the Zephyrs.

When the Morning-star for the fifth time lifts its bright fire
from the sea’s waves, it will be the season of early spring.
Yet do not be deceived: the cold remains for you, it remains,
and departing winter has left great tokens behind.

Let the third night come, and at once you will see
the Bear’s Guardian thrust forth both his feet.
Among the hamadryads and arrow-shooting Diana,
Callisto was one member of the sacred band.
She, touching the goddess’s bow, said, "Bow that I touch,
be witness of my virginity."
Cynthia praised her, and said, "Keep the pledge you have promised,
and you shall be the first of my companions to me."
She would have kept the pledge, had she not been beautiful:
she guarded against mortals — her guilt comes from Jove.
Phoebe was returning from hunting a thousand beasts in the woods,
the sun holding the middle of the day, or past it;
when she reached a grove (a grove dark with thick holm-oak,
in its midst a deep spring of cold water),
"Here in the wood, Tegean maiden," she said, "let us bathe";
the girl blushed at the false title of maiden.
She had spoken to the nymphs too. The nymphs lay aside their veils;
this one is ashamed, and her slow lingering gives bad signs.
She had stripped off her tunics; betrayed by the swelling of her womb,
she is given away by the evidence of her own weight.
To her the goddess said, "Perjured child of Lycaon,
leave the company of maidens, and do not defile the chaste waters."
Ten times the moon had filled its new orb with its horns:
she who had been thought a maiden was a mother.
Wounded Juno rages, and changes the girl’s shape: what are you doing?
She suffered Jove with an unwilling heart.
And when she saw the brute’s foul features in her rival,
"Into her embraces, Jupiter," she said, "may you go."
A she-bear, filthy, wandered the untilled mountains,
she who lately had been loved by highest Jove.
Now the boy conceived in stealth was passing his fifteenth year,
when the mother met her own son.
She indeed, as though she knew him, stood still, distracted,
and groaned: the groan was a parent’s speech.
The boy, unknowing, would have pierced her with his sharp spear,
had not both been snatched away to the houses above.
They shine as neighboring stars: first is the one we call the Bear;
the Bear-Guard has the shape of one following at her back.
Still Saturn’s daughter rages, and begs hoary Tethys
not to let the Maenalian Bear bathe in her touching waters.

On the Ides the rustic altars of Faunus smoke,
here where the island breaks the waters it has parted.
This was that day on which, by Veientine arms,
the Fabii fell — three hundred, and three times two beyond.
One house had taken on the strength and the burden of the city:
the kinsmen’s hands take up the arms they pledged.
From the same camp the high-born soldiery marches out,
of whom any one was fit to be made general.
Beside the right arch of the Carmental gate runs a road:
do not go by it, whoever you are; it carries an omen.
Report says the three hundred Fabii went out that way:
the gate is clear of blame, yet it carries an omen.
When at quick step they reached the ravening Cremera
(it was running turbid with winter waters),
they pitch camp on the spot: with swords drawn they themselves
go through the Tyrrhenian ranks in mighty war;
no otherwise than when lions of the Libyan breed
fall on flocks scattered across the broad fields.
The enemy scatter and take dishonorable wounds in the back:
the earth grows red with Tuscan blood.
So again, so often they fall; when open victory
is not granted, they ready ambush and hidden arms.
There was a plain; hills shut off the plain’s far edges,
and a wood fit to hide the mountain beasts.
In the middle they leave a few men and scattered cattle;
the rest of the company lies hidden in the brush.
Look — as a torrent swollen with rains, or with snow
that melts, beaten by the warming West Wind,
is borne over the crops and roads, and no longer, as before,
keeps its waters penned within the banks’ edge,
so the Fabii fill the valley with their wide-ranging charge,
and lay low whatever they see, and no other fear is in them.
Where do you rush, noble house? You trust the foe too well:
guileless nobility, beware the treacherous darts.
Valor dies by fraud: into the open fields from every side
the enemy spring out and hold every flank.
What can a brave few do against so many thousands?
Or what help is left to them in their wretched hour?
As a boar driven far from the woods by the baying pack
scatters the swift hounds with his lightning jaw,
yet soon himself goes down, so they do not die unavenged,
and with answering hand they deal and take their wounds.
One day had sent all the Fabii out to war;
one day destroyed those it had sent to war.
Yet that some seed of the Herculean race might survive,
it is credible the gods themselves took thought:
for one boy, not yet grown and still no use for arms,
had been left of the Fabian line —
doubtless that you, Maximus, might one day be born,
by whom the state was to be restored by delaying.

Three constellations lie joined in place — the Raven
and the Snake, and the Bowl set midway between the two.
On the Ides they are hidden; they rise the following night;
why these three are so allied, I shall sing to you.
By chance Phoebus was preparing a solemn feast for Jove
(my tale will make no long delays):
"Go, my bird," he said, "lest anything hold up the holy rites,
and fetch clear water from living springs."
The raven lifts a gilded bowl in his curved talons
and flies high on his airy road.
A fig-tree stood, thick with fruit still hard:
he tries it with his beak; it was not ripe to pluck;
forgetful of his charge, they say he settled under the tree,
waiting for the fruit to sweeten with slow delay.
And now, well fed, he seizes a long water-snake in his black claws,
returns to his master, and reports invented words:
"This was the cause of my delay, this besieger of the living waters:
he held the springs back, and my duty with them."
"You add lies to your fault," says Phoebus, "and dare
to try deceiving a prophetic god with words?
But for you, as long as the milky fig clings to the tree,
no cold water shall be drunk from any spring."
He spoke, and, as everlasting memorials of the old deed,
the Snake, the bird, the Bowl shine as joined stars.

The third dawn after the Ides looks upon the naked Luperci,
and the rites of two-horned Faunus go forward.
Tell, Pierians, what is the origin of these rites,
and from where they were fetched when they reached Latian homes.
The ancient Arcadians, they say, worshipped Pan, the god
of the flock; he is most at home on the Arcadian ridges.
Pholoe shall bear witness, the Stymphalian waters witness,
and Ladon, who runs to the sea with rushing streams,
and the pine-girt ridges of the Nonacrine wood,
and high Tricrene, and the Parrhasian snows.
Pan was the god of the herd, Pan there the god of the mares;
for keeping the sheep unharmed he took his reward.
Evander carried the woodland gods along with him:
here, where the city now stands, was then the city’s site.
Hence we worship the god and the rites the Pelasgians brought down:
for these, in the old custom, there was the Flamen Dialis.
Why then do they run, and why (such is the manner of the running)
do they bear their bodies bare, their clothing laid aside, you ask?
The swift god himself delights to dash about on the high
mountains, and conceives sudden flights of his own;
the god himself, naked, bids his servants go naked;
and clothing would not be convenient enough for running.
Before Jove was born, they say, the Arcadians held the land,
and that people was older than the moon.
Their life was like the beasts’, driven by no arts:
the crowd was still without skill, and raw.
For houses they knew leaves, for grain grasses;
their nectar was water scooped in two cupped palms.
No bull panted under the curved plowshare,
no land lay under the command of a tiller;
there was as yet no use of the horse; each bore himself;
the sheep went clothed in its own wool.
They lived hardy under the open sky and went bare-bodied,
schooled to endure heavy rains and the South Winds.
Now too the bared men recall the memorials of that ancient
custom, and bear witness to the old, plain way.
But why Faunus above all shuns coverings,
a tale is handed down, full of old laughter.
By chance the Tirynthian youth was walking, his mistress’s companion:
Faunus saw the pair from a high ridge;
he saw, and grew hot, and said, "Mountain powers,
I have nothing to do with you: here will be my fire."
The Maeonian walked, her shoulders flowing with perfumed hair,
a sight to see in her gold-bordered gown;
a golden parasol kept off the warm sun —
yet the hands of Hercules held it up.
Now she had reached Bacchus’s grove and the vineyards of Tmolus,
and dewy Hesperus was riding his dusky horse.
She enters a cave coffered with tufa and living pumice;
a babbling brook ran at the very threshold.
And while the servants make ready the feast and the wine to drink,
she dresses Alcides out in her own attire:
she gives him fine tunics dyed with Gaetulian purple,
she gives the smooth girdle she had just worn.
The girdle is too small for his belly; he loosens the tunics’
fastenings, to free his great hands;
he had snapped the bracelets, not made for such arms,
and his big feet split the little ankle-straps.
She herself takes up the heavy club and the lion’s spoil
and the smaller weapons stowed in his quiver.
So, the banquet done, they give their bodies to sleep,
and lay down apart on couches set side by side:
the reason — they were preparing rites for the vine’s discoverer,
to perform them pure when day should rise.
It was the middle of the night. What does shameless love not dare?
Through the dark Faunus comes to the dewy cave;
and when he sees the attendants undone by sleep and wine,
he takes hope that the same sleep is on their masters too.
The reckless adulterer enters and gropes here and there,
stretching his wary hands before him and following them.
He had come to the spread bedding he had sought,
and was about to be lucky on the first throw;
but when he touched the tawny lion’s hide, bristling with hair,
he took fright and drew back his hand,
and, thunderstruck with fear, retreated — as a traveler
will often pull back his startled foot at sight of a snake.
Then he touches the soft coverings of the couch joined next,
and is fooled by the deceiving token.
He climbs up and lies down on the frame closer to hand,
and his swollen groin was harder than horn.
Meanwhile he draws the tunics up from the lowest hem:
the legs were rough, bristling with thick hair.
As he tried the rest, the Tirynthian hero suddenly
thrust him off: down he tumbled from the top of the couch.
A clatter follows; the Maeonian calls her attendants and demands
lights: with the lamps brought in, the whole affair lies open.
He groans, hurled down hard from the high bed,
and scarcely lifts his limbs from the hard ground.
Alcides laughs, and all who saw him sprawling,
and the Lydian girl laughs at her would-be lover.
Tricked by clothing, the god has no love for clothes
that cheat the eye, and calls his worshippers naked to his rites.

Add Latin causes, my Muse, to the foreign ones,
and let our own horse run in its own dust.
A she-goat slain in the customary way for horn-footed Faunus,
the summoned crowd came to the modest feast.
And while the priests dress the entrails skewered on willow spits,
the sun holding the middle of its road,
Romulus and his brother and the shepherd youth
were giving their naked bodies to the sun and the field.
With crowbars and javelins and the hurled weight of stone
they were trying their arms in sport:
a shepherd from a height called, "Romulus, Remus,
robbers are driving the bullocks through the trackless country."
To arm would take too long: each rushes out
by different ways; the booty is recovered by Remus’s onset.
When he came back, he pulls the sizzling entrails from the spits
and says, "These surely none but the victor shall eat."
He does as he said, the Fabii with him. Romulus comes
there empty-handed and sees the tables and the bare bones.
He laughed, and grieved that the Fabii and Remus could win,
while his own Quintilii could not.
The shape of the deed remains: with garments laid aside they run,
and what turned out well keeps its remembered fame.
Perhaps you ask, too, why that place is the Lupercal,
or what cause marks the day with such a name.
Silvia the Vestal had brought forth heavenly seed in childbirth,
while her uncle held the throne;
he orders the babes carried off and drowned in the river:
what are you doing? One of these will be Romulus.
The servants carry out the tearful orders against their will
(they weep all the same) and bear the twins to a lonely place.
The Albula — which Tiberinus, drowned in its waves,
remade as the Tiber — happened to be swollen with winter water:
here, where the fora now stand, you might have seen skiffs adrift,
and where your valleys lie, Great Circus.
When they came here (for they could go no farther),
one and then another of them says:
"But how alike they are! How handsome both!
Yet that one has the more vigor of the two.
If birth is read in the face, unless the likeness lies,
I suspect there is some god in you.
But if some god were the author of your begetting,
in so headlong an hour he would bring help —
bring help, surely, if your mother did not need help too,
who was made a mother and bereft in a single day.
Born together, to die together, go together beneath the waves,
you little bodies." He had ceased, and set them down from his lap.
Both wailed alike: you would think they understood;
the men go back to their homes with wet cheeks.
The hollow trough holds the laid-in pair on the water’s surface:
alas, how much destiny that little plank carried!
The trough, run aground against the shady woods,
settles little by little in the mud as the river falls.
There was a tree: traces of it remain, and what is now
called the Rumina fig was the Romula fig.
To the exposed twins came — a marvel — a she-wolf newly whelped:
who would believe the beast did the boys no harm?
Not harming is too little: she even helps. Those the wolf nurses,
kindred hands had the heart to destroy.
She halted and fawns with her tail on the tender nurslings,
and shapes their two bodies with her tongue.
You would know them sons of Mars: fear was absent. They draw
the udders, and are fed by milk not pledged for them.
She gave her name to the place, the place to the Luperci;
the nurse has great rewards for the milk she gave.
What forbids the Luperci to have been named from the Arcadian mount?
Faunus Lycaeus has temples in Arcadia.
Bride, what do you wait for? Not by potent herbs,
nor prayer, nor magic spell will you be a mother;
take patiently the blows of a fruitful right hand,
and soon your husband’s father will have his longed-for name of grandsire.
For there was a time when, by a hard lot, wives
seldom yielded the pledges of their womb.
"What good to me," cried Romulus (this was while he held
the scepter), "to have carried off the Sabine women,
if my wrong has brought me not strength but war?
It would have served me better not to have these brides."
Below the Esquiline mount, uncut for many years,
there was a grove that bore the name of great Juno.
When they came here, both wives and husbands alike
fell down in supplication on bended knee;
when suddenly the treetops of the stirred wood trembled,
and the goddess spoke marvelous words through her groves.
"Let a sacred he-goat go in to the Italian mothers," she said.
The crowd, terrified, was stunned at the riddling sound.
There was an augur — his name has dropped away in the long years:
lately he had come, an exile, from Etruscan soil;
he slaughters a he-goat: the girls, as bidden, gave
their backs to be struck with the cut-out hides.
The moon was renewing its horns at the tenth circuit,
and on a sudden the husband was a father, the bride a mother.
Thanks be to Lucina: this grove gave you these names,
or because you, goddess, hold the source of light.
Spare, I pray, the women with child, gentle Lucina,
and softly lift the ripe burden from the womb.
When this day has risen, give up trusting the winds;
the breeze of that season has lost its good faith.
The blasts are not steady, and for six days the wide door
of the Aeolian prison stands unbarred.
Now light Aquarius has sunk with his tilted urn:
next, Fish, receive the horses of the sky.
They tell that you and your brother (for you shine as joined
constellations) bore two gods upon your backs.
Once, fleeing dreadful Typhon, Dione —
at the time when Jupiter took up arms for heaven —
came to the Euphrates with little Cupid as companion,
and sat down at the edge of the Palestinian water.
Poplars and reeds held the tops of the banks,
and willows gave hope that these too might be hidden.
While she hides, the grove rang with wind: she pales
with fear, and believes hostile bands are at hand,
and as she held her son in her lap, "Help me, nymphs,"
she said, "and bring aid to two gods."
No delay: she leapt forth. Twin fish came beneath them:
for which, you see, the stars now bear their name.
Hence the Syrians count it impious to set this kind on the table,
and in their fear will not defile their mouths with fish.

The next day is empty; but the third is named for Quirinus,
who holds this name (he was Romulus before),
whether because the spear was called curis by the old Sabines
(the war-god came to the stars from his weapon),
or because the Quirites gave their own name to their king,
or because he had joined Cures to the Romans.
For after the war-mighty father saw the new walls,
and the many wars accomplished by Romulus’s hand,
"Jupiter," he said, "the Roman power has strength now:
it has no need of any service from my blood.
Give the son back to his father: though the other has perished,
the one who remains will stand for himself and for Remus.
’There will be one whom you shall raise to the blue of heaven’ —
so you told me: let Jove’s words be made good."
Jupiter had nodded: at the nod both poles trembled,
and Atlas felt the weight of heaven shift.
There is a place the ancients called the Goat’s Marsh:
by chance there, Romulus, you were giving laws to your people.
The sun flees, and rising clouds take the sky away,
and a heavy shower comes down in pouring waters.
Here it thunders, here the sky is split by darted fires:
flight breaks out; the king was making for the stars on his father’s horses.
There was mourning, and the senators falsely charged with murder,
and that belief might perhaps have lodged in men’s minds;
but Proculus Julius was coming in from Alba Longa,
and the moon was shining, and there was no need of a torch,
when with a sudden movement the hedges on the left trembled:
he drew back his steps, and his hair stood on end.
Beautiful, and taller than a man, and splendid in his robe of state,
Romulus seemed to stand there in the midst of the road,
and to say at once, "Forbid the Quirites to mourn,
and let them not profane my godhead with their tears;
let the pious crowd bring incense and appease the new Quirinus,
and tend their fathers’ arts and their soldiering."
He commanded, and vanished from his sight into thin air;
this man calls the people together and reports the bidden words.
Temples are raised to the god; the hill, too, is named from him,
and fixed days bring back the ancestral rites.
Hear too why the same day is called the Feast of Fools:
a small cause, indeed, but a fitting one, lies behind it.
The ancient land had no skilled husbandmen:
harsh wars wearied the active men.
There was more glory in the sword than in the curved plow:
the field, neglected by its lord, bore little.
Yet the old men sowed spelt, reaped spelt,
gave the cut spelt to Ceres as first-fruits;
taught by trial, they gave it to the flames to parch,
and bore much damage through their own mistake;
for now they swept up black ash in place of spelt,
now the fire snatched up the very huts.
The Oven was made a goddess: the farmers, glad in the Oven,
pray that she may temper their grain.
The Chief Curio now proclaims the Fornacalia in the lawful
words, but holds the rite on no fixed day;
and in the forum, with many a tablet hung around,
each curia is marked with its own sign,
and the foolish part of the people, who do not know
which is their curia, keep the rite on the last appointed day.

There is honor for the tombs as well: to appease the ancestral souls,
and to bring small gifts to the heaped pyres.
The shades ask little: devotion is welcome in place of a rich
offering; the deep Styx holds no greedy gods.
A tile veiled with the garlands laid across it is enough,
and scattered grain, and a sparing pinch of salt,
and bread soaked soft in wine, and violets strewn loose:
let an earthen dish, left in the middle of the road, hold these.
I do not forbid larger gifts, but the shade is appeased with these too:
add prayers and their own words at the hearths you have set.
This custom Aeneas, a fit founder of piety,
brought into your lands, righteous Latinus.
He used to bring solemn gifts to his father’s Genius:
from him the peoples learned their pious rites.
But once, while they waged long wars with battling arms,
they forsook the Parental days.
It went not unpunished; for from that omen, they say,
Rome grew hot with pyres in her suburbs.
I scarcely believe it, truly: yet they say the forefathers
came out from their tombs and made complaint in the silent night,
and that misshapen souls, an empty throng,
howled through the City’s streets and over the broad fields.
After that, the neglected honors are paid back to the tombs,
and a limit came to the portents and the funerals.
But while these things are done, hold off, you unwed girls:
let the pine torch wait for purer days,
and let the bent spear not part your maiden hair,
you who will seem ripe to your eager mother.
Put away your torches, Hymen, and carry them off
from the dark fires: the mournful graves have torches of their own.
Let the gods, too, be hidden, the temple doors shut fast;
let the altars go without incense, the hearths stand without fire.
Now the thin souls, the bodies done with their tombs,
wander; now the shade feeds on the food set out.
Yet this lasts no longer than the days left in the month
match the feet our verses carry.
This day they called Feralia, because they bear the dues;
it is the last day for appeasing the shades.
Look — an aged crone, seated among the girls,
performs the rites of the Silent One (yet she herself scarcely is silent),
and with three fingers sets three grains of incense under the sill,
where the little mouse has made itself a secret path;
then she binds enchanted threads with dark lead,
and rolls seven black beans in her mouth,
and the head of a sprat, which she has stopped with pitch
and pierced with a bronze needle, sewn shut, she roasts in the fire;
she drips wine in too: whatever wine is left over,
she or her companions drink — but she the more.
"We have bound up hostile tongues and unfriendly mouths,"
she says as she leaves, and the old woman goes out drunk.
At once you will ask of me who the Mute Goddess is:
learn what I have known through the old men.
Jupiter, overcome by a measureless love for Juturna,
bore many things a god so great should not bear:
now she would hide in the woods among the hazel thickets,
now she would leap down into her kindred waters.
He calls the nymphs together, all who held Latium,
and casts such words into the midst of the band:
"Your sister grudges her own self, and shuns what would profit her —
to join her body with the highest god.
Take thought for us both: for what is my great pleasure
will be your sister’s great advantage.
Stand in her way on the near bank as she flees,
lest she sink her body in the river’s water."
He had spoken; all the Tiberine nymphs had nodded assent,
and those who tend your chambers, divine Ilia.
There chanced to be a Naiad, Lara by name; but her old name
was its first syllable doubled,
given for her failing. Often Almo had told her,
"Daughter, hold your tongue" — yet she does not hold it.
As soon as she touched the pools of her sister Juturna,
"Flee the banks," she says, and reports Jove’s words.
She even went to Juno, and, pitying wives, said,
"Your husband loves the Naiad Juturna."
Jupiter swelled with anger, and tears out the tongue
she had used without restraint, and calls Mercury:
"Lead her down to the shades: that place is fit for the silent.
A nymph she shall be, but a nymph of the marsh below."
Jove’s commands are done. A grove received them on the way:
then, they say, she found favor with the god who led her.
He readies force; she pleads with her face in place of words,
and strains in vain to speak with her mute mouth,
and grows heavy, and bears twins who guard the crossroads
and keep watch forever in our city — the Lares.

The next day the kin called the Caristia, from "the dear,"
and a throng of relatives comes to the family gods.
No doubt it is good to turn the face from the tombs
and the kin who have died, straight back to the living,
and after so many lost, to look on whatever of one’s blood
remains, and count up the degrees of the line.
Let the guiltless come: far from here, far off be the impious
brother, and the mother harsh to her own children,
he whose father lives too long, who tallies his mother’s years,
the unjust mother-in-law who grinds the hated daughter-in-law.
Let Tantalus’s brothers be absent, and Jason’s wife,
and she who gave the farmers parched seed,
and the sister, and Procne, and Tereus cruel to both,
and whoever swells his wealth by crime.
Give incense to the family gods, you good ones: Concord
is said to be present, gentle above all, on that day;
and pour out the feast, so the dish sent forth,
a pledge of grateful honor, may feed the girded Lares.
And now, when the moist night counsels peaceful sleep,
take up wine with a generous hand as you make to pray,
and say, "Good health to you all, good health to you,
Father of the Fatherland, best Caesar"; let the words be kind, the wine outpoured.

When the night has passed, let the god be honored
in the wonted way who marks the fields off by his own sign.
Terminus, whether you are a stone or a stake sunk in the field,
you too have your godhead from the ancients.
Two owners crown you from opposite sides,
and bring you two garlands and two cakes.
An altar is made: to it the farmer’s wife herself brings fire
in a broken potsherd, taken from the warm hearth.
The old man splits the wood and stacks the cut pieces with skill,
and strains to fix the branches in the solid ground;
then he coaxes the first flames with dry bark;
a boy stands by and holds the wide baskets in his hands.
Then, when he has cast grain three times into the midst of the fire,
his little daughter holds out the cut honeycombs.
Others hold the wine; each cup is poured to the flames;
they watch, and the white-robed crowd keeps holy silence.
The shared Terminus is sprinkled too with a slain lamb,
and does not complain when a suckling pig is given him.
The simple neighbors gather and keep the feast,
and sing your praises, holy Terminus:
"You set bounds to peoples and cities and vast kingdoms:
without you every field would be a quarrel.
You play no favorites, you are bought by no gold,
you guard with lawful faith the lands put in your trust.
If you had marked the Thyrean land of old,
three hundred bodies would not have been sent to death,
nor would Othryades have been laid out on the heaped arms.
Oh, how much blood he gave for his country!
What, when the new Capitol was a-building? Surely the whole
crowd of gods gave way to Jove and yielded place;
but Terminus, as the ancients record, found in the shrine,
held his ground, and shares the temple with great Jove.
Now too, that he may see nothing above himself but the stars,
the temple roof keeps a small opening.
Terminus, after that you have no freedom to be fickle:
stay in the post where you were set;
and yield nothing to a neighbor for the asking,
lest you seem to have set man before Jove:
and whether you are struck by plowshares or by mattocks,
cry out, ’This field is yours, that one is yours.’"
There is a road that leads the people into the Laurentine fields,
the realm once sought by the Dardanian leader:
on that road the sixth milestone from the City sees
your rites made, Terminus, with a woolly flock’s entrails.
To other nations land is given within a fixed limit:
the span of the Roman City and of the world is one.

Now I must tell of the king’s flight. From it the sixth day
from the month’s end drew its name.
Tarquin held the last reign of the Roman race,
an unjust man, yet brave at arms.
He had captured some cities, overthrown others,
and made Gabii his own by a shameful trick.
For the youngest of three, the plain offspring of the Proud,
came into the midst of the enemy in the silent night.
They had bared their swords: "Kill me unarmed," he said,
"this my brothers would wish, and Tarquin my father,
who tore my back with cruel scourging"
(that he might say this, he had borne the lashes).
There was a moon: they look at the youth, sheathe their swords,
and, his garment drawn aside, see the marked back;
they even weep, and beg him to wage their wars with them.
The cunning man nods to the unsuspecting men.
And now, grown strong, he sends a friend to ask his father
what road he might point out for the ruin of Gabii.
Below there lay a garden, well kept with fragrant herbs,
its soil cut by a brook of softly murmuring water:
there Tarquin takes in the hidden message of his son,
and with his wand he lops off the tallest lilies.
When the messenger came back and told of the lilies struck down,
the son said, "I recognize my father’s command."
No delay: the chief men of the Gabine city slain,
the walls, stripped of their leaders, are handed over.
Behold — a horror to see — a snake comes out from the midst
of the altars and snatches the entrails from the dead fires.
Phoebus is consulted. The oracle came back thus:
"He who first gives his mother kisses shall be the victor."
Each in haste brought kisses to his own mother,
the trusting crowd not catching the god’s meaning.
Brutus was a shrewd counterfeiter of folly,
that he might be safe from your snares, dread Proud One.
He, lying face down, gave kisses to mother Earth,
thought to have stumbled and fallen by a tripping foot.
Meanwhile Ardea is ringed by Roman standards,
and endures long delays of siege.
While there is leisure and the foe fear to give battle,
there is play in the camp, the soldier idles his hours.
Young Tarquin receives his comrades with feasting and wine;
among them the king’s son says:
"While Ardea holds us anxious in a sluggish war,
and will not let us bring our arms back to our fathers’ gods,
is the marriage-bed faithful to its duty? And are we
as much a care to our wives as they to us?"
Each praises his own: the rivalry swells with their zeal,
and tongue and heart boil with much wine.
He rises to whom Collatia had given a famous name:
"No need of words; put your trust in the facts," he says.
"Night is left us: let us mount and make for the City";
the words please; the horses are bridled.
They had borne their masters. They make straight for the royal
house: there was no guard at the door.
Look — they find the king’s daughter-in-law keeping late vigil
over poured-out wine, garlands spilled about her neck.
Thence with quick step they seek Lucretia, before whose couch
were the wool-baskets and the soft wool.
By a scant lamp the maids were spinning their measured wool;
and among them she spoke thus, in a low voice:
"A cloak must be sent to our lord — now, now, make haste, girls —
finished by our own hand as soon as may be.
Yet what do you hear (for you can hear more than I)?
How much of the war is said to be left?
Soon, conquered, you will fall: you hold out, Ardea, against
your betters, you wicked thing, who keep our husbands away.
If only they come back. But that man of mine is rash,
and rushes anywhere with his sword drawn.
My mind fails and I die, each time the image of him in battle
steals over me, and a cold chill grips my breast."
She ends in tears and let the begun threads fall,
and laid her own face down in her lap.
This itself became her: the tears became the chaste wife,
and her face was worthy of her heart, and its equal.
"Set fear aside, I am here," her husband says; she came alive again,
and hung from her husband’s neck, a sweet weight.
Meanwhile the royal youth conceives his maddening fires,
and, seized by a blind love, runs wild.
Her beauty pleases him, her snowy color and golden hair,
and the grace that was there, fashioned by no art;
her words please him, and her voice, and that she cannot be bought;
and the less his hope, the more he craves.
Now the bird that heralds the light had given its song,
when the young men carry their steps back to camp.
His stunned senses are gnawed by the image of the absent woman;
recalling her, he finds more and more to please him.
"So she sat, so she was dressed, so she spun the threads,
so her hair lay flung across her neck,
such was her look, these were the words she spoke,
this her color, this her face, this the grace of her mouth."
As a wave will sink to calm after a great gust,
yet still the swell heaves on from the wind that was,
so, though the presence of the beauty that pleased him was gone,
the love her present beauty had given still remained.
He burns, and, spurred by the goads of a lawless love,
plots force and terror against an undeserving bed.
"The outcome is in doubt: I will dare the last extreme," he said,
"let her look to it! Both chance and god help the daring.
By daring we took Gabii too." So speaking,
he girt his side with a sword and pressed his horse’s back.
The bronze-bound gate of Collatia takes in the youth,
as the sun was already making ready to hide its face.
As a guest the enemy enters the inner rooms of Collatinus;
he is kindly received — he was joined to them by blood.
How much blindness is in the mind! Unwitting of it all,
the luckless woman makes a feast for her own enemy.
The meal was done: the hour calls for sleep;
it was night, and no lights in all the house.
He rises and frees his sword from the gilded sheath,
and comes into your chamber, chaste bride;
and as he pressed the bed, "The blade, Lucretia, is with me,"
says the king’s son, "and it is a Tarquin who speaks."
She says nothing — for she has no voice nor strength
to speak, nor any thought in all her breast;
but she trembles, as a little lamb, caught straying from the fold,
lies once beneath a menacing wolf.
What is she to do? Fight? A woman fighting will be beaten.
Cry out? But in his right hand was the sword to forbid it.
Flee? His palms press hard upon her breast,
then for the first time touched by a stranger’s hand.
The lover-foe presses on with prayers, with bribes, with threats;
but not by prayer, nor bribe, nor threat does he move her.
"You gain nothing: I will rob you of life by a crime," he said,
"the adulterer, I will turn false witness to adultery:
I will kill a slave, with whom you will be reported caught."
Beaten by fear for her name, the girl gave way.
Why, victor, do you exult? This victory will be your ruin.
Alas, how dear one night cost your throne!
And now day had risen: she sits with her hair undone,
as a mother does when she must go to her son’s pyre,
and summons her aged father and her faithful husband
from the camp: each comes with delay laid by.
And when they see her state, they ask the cause of her grief,
for whom she makes ready a funeral, by what blow she is struck.
She is long silent, and in shame hides her face
in her robe: her tears flow like an unfailing stream.
On this side father, on that husband soothe her tears
and beg her to tell, and they weep and quake with blind dread.
Three times she tried to speak, three times gave up,
and daring on the fourth still did not lift her eyes.
"Shall I owe this too to Tarquin? Shall I speak," she said,
"shall I, unhappy, speak my own disgrace with my own mouth?"
And what she can, she tells; the last part remained:
she wept, and her matron’s cheeks flushed red.
Her father and her husband grant pardon for the deed she was forced to:
"The pardon you give," she said, "I refuse myself."
No delay: she drove a hidden blade into her breast,
and falls, all bloodied, at her father’s feet.
Then too, even dying, she takes care she not fall
unseemly: this too was the falling woman’s thought.
Look — over the body, lamenting their shared loss,
husband and father lie, forgetful of dignity.
Brutus is there, and at last belies his name within,
and snatches the weapon fixed in the half-dead body,
and, holding the knife dripping with noble blood,
uttered dauntless words with threatening mouth:
"By this brave and chaste blood I swear to you,
and by your shade, which shall be a god to me,
that Tarquin and his banished line shall pay the price.
Long enough now has my valor played the fool."
She, lying there, moved her lightless eyes at the words,
and seemed, with a shake of her hair, to approve the speech.
She is borne to burial, a matron of manly soul,
and draws tears and indignation along in her train.
The gaping wound lies open: Brutus with a shout
rouses the Quirites and recounts the king’s unspeakable deeds.
Tarquin flees with his brood: a consul takes up the year’s
authority: that day was the monarchy’s last.
Are we deceived, or does the swallow come, herald of spring,
and fear no turn of winter back again?
Yet often, Procne, you will rue your too-great haste,
and your husband Tereus will be glad of your cold.

And now two nights remain of the second month,
and Mars drives his swift horses with their yoked cars;
from the truth the name Equirria has lasted, given because
the god himself looks on the races in his own field.
You come by right, Gradivus: your season demands its place,
and the month stamped with your name is at hand.
We have come into harbor, the book finished along with its month.
Let my skiff now sail from here on other waters.

Warlike one, lay down your shield and spear a little while:
Mars, be present, and loose your bright hair from the helmet.
Perhaps you would ask yourself what a poet has to do with Mars:
the month I sing of takes its name from you.
You see for yourself that fierce wars are waged by Minerva’s hands:
is she for that any less at leisure for the liberal arts?
By Pallas’s example take a time for laying the spear-point
aside: you will find something to do unarmed as well.
Unarmed you were then too, when the Roman priestess
took you captive, to give this city its great seed.
Silvia the Vestal (for what forbids my starting there?)
went at morning to fetch water for washing the holy things.
She had come where the bank slopes down by a gentle path;
the earthen jar is set off the crown of her head:
weary, she sat on the ground, and took the breezes on her bared
breast, and put her ruffled hair to rights.
As she sits, the shady willows and the songful birds
and the soft murmur of the water made her drowse;
a coaxing rest crept stealthily over her conquered eyes,
and the hand fell slack and languid from her chin.
Mars sees her, and seeing desires her, and takes the one desired,
and by his godhead’s power hid the theft.
Sleep goes; she lies there heavy; for already, you may be sure,
within her womb was the founder of the Roman city.
Faint she rises, nor knows why she rises faint,
and, leaning on a tree, speaks words like these:
"Useful and lucky, I pray, be what in a dream’s shape
I have seen — or was it clearer than a dream?
I stood at the Trojan fire, when, slipping from my hair,
a woolen fillet fell before the sacred hearth.
From it, marvelous to see, two palm-trees together
rose: of the pair the one was taller,
and with heavy boughs had roofed the whole round world,
and had touched the topmost stars with its crown.
Look — my uncle drives the steel against them:
I am terrified at the warning, and my heart throbs with dread.
The bird of Mars, the woodpecker, fights for the twin trunk,
and a she-wolf: through these both palms stood safe."
She had spoken, and with no firm strength lifted the brimming
jar: she had filled it while she told her vision.
Meanwhile, as Remus grew and Quirinus grew,
her belly swelled with the heavenly weight.
Before the year could run its allotted courses out,
two signs were left now for the shining god:
Silvia becomes a mother; the images of Vesta, they say,
set their virgin hands before their eyes.
The goddess’s altar surely shook as her servant gave birth,
and the frightened flame sank down into its own ash.
When Amulius, scorner of the right, learned this
(for as victor he held the wealth seized from his brother),
he bids the twins be drowned in the river. The water shrank from the crime:
the boys are left stranded on the dry ground.
Who does not know the infants grew on the milk of a beast,
and that the woodpecker often brought food to the exposed pair?
Nor would I pass you over, Larentia, nurse of so great a race,
nor your help, poor Faustulus:
your honor will come, when I tell of the Larentalia —
December, dear to the household spirits, holds that day.
The seed of Mars had ripened to thrice six years,
and a new beard now lay under their golden hair:
to all the farmers and the masters of the herds
the brothers, sons of Ilia, gave the law they asked.
Often they come home glad with the blood of robbers
and drive the rounded-up cattle back to their own fields.
When they heard their lineage, their disclosed father lifts their spirit,
and they are ashamed to bear a name in a few huts,
and Amulius falls, run through by Romulus’s sword,
and the kingdom is given back to their aged grandfather.
Walls are founded, which, small though they were,
it did Remus no good to leap across.
Now what had lately been woods and the haunts of cattle
was a city, when the father of the eternal city spoke:
"Arbiter of arms, of whose blood I am held
to be born — and, to be so held, I will give many pledges —
from you we name the start of the Roman year:
the first month shall bear my father’s name."
The word is ratified, and he calls the month by his father’s name:
this piety is said to have pleased the god.
And yet before all others the men of old worshipped Mars;
the warlike crowd had granted this to its own pursuits.
Cecrops’s people worship Pallas, Minoan Crete Diana,
the land of Hypsipyle worships Vulcan,
Sparta worships Juno, and Mycenae of the line of Pelops,
the Maenalian country the pine-crowned head of Faunus:
Mars was Latium’s to revere, because he presides over arms;
arms gave the fierce race both substance and glory.
But if perhaps you have leisure, look into foreign calendars:
in these too there will be a month with Mars’s name.
Third it stood for the Albans, fifth it was for the Faliscans,
sixth among your peoples, land of the Hernici;
among the Aricians it agrees with the Alban count
and the walls raised high by Telegonus’s hand;
fifth the Laurentes hold it, tenth the fierce Aequicolan,
and the folk of Cures reckon it first from the third;
and for you, Paelignian soldier, with your Sabine
forebears it agrees: for both that race the god stands fourth.
Romulus, to outdo all these at least in rank,
gave the first season to the author of his blood.
Nor did the ancients have as many Kalends as now:
their year was shorter by two months.
Greece had not yet handed her conquered arts to her conquerors,
an eloquent breed but poorly given to war:
he who fought well had mastered the Roman art;
the man who could hurl a javelin was the eloquent one.
Who then had marked the Hyades or the Atlantean Pleiades,
or that there are twin poles beneath the axis,
that there are two Bears, of which the Sidonians steer
by Cynosura, the Greek keel marks Helice,
and that the signs which the brother reviews in a long year
the sister’s horses pass through in a single month?
Free and unwatched the stars ran on through the year;
yet it was agreed that they were gods.
They did not keep the signs that glide across the sky,
but their own, which to lose was a great crime —
those, indeed, of hay; yet there was such reverence for the hay
as you see your eagles command now.
A long pole carried the hanging wisps aloft,
from which the maniple-soldier has his name.
So minds untaught and as yet without reckoning
ran out their lustres, the shorter by ten months.
The year was full when the moon had got back her disk a tenth time:
this number was then held in great honor,
whether because the fingers we count by are so many,
or because a woman bears in the twice-fifth month,
or because, the count rising up as far as ten,
from there a fresh beginning is taken for new spans.
So Romulus parted the hundred fathers into ten circles,
and instituted ten companies of spearmen,
and the front rank had as many bodies, the rear rank as many,
and so did each man who soldiered on a state-given horse.
Nay more, he gave as many divisions to the Titienses,
and to those they call the Ramnes, and to the Luceres.
So he kept the accustomed numbers in the year;
this is the span a mourning woman grieves her man.
And lest you doubt the Kalends of March once came first,
you may turn your mind to these signs.
The laurel that had stood with the flamens the whole year through
is taken down, and fresh leaves come into honor;
then the king’s door is green with Phoebus’s tree set up,
and the same is done before your gates, ancient Senate-house.
And that Vesta too may shine, veiled in fresh leaf,
the gray laurel gives way at the Trojan hearth.
Add that a new fire, they say, is made in the secret shrine,
and the flame, renewed, takes on strength.
Nor is it small proof to me that the years began here once,
that Anna Perenna began to be worshipped in this month.
From here too the old magistracies are recorded as entered upon,
down to the season of your war, treacherous Carthaginian.
Lastly Quintilis was the fifth from this, and from here
begins each month that takes its name from a number.
First, Pompilius, brought to Rome from the olive-bearing fields,
felt that two months were missing,
whether taught this by the Samian, who holds that we
can be born again, or at his Egeria’s warning.
But still, even now, the seasons strayed, until
this too became one of Caesar’s many cares.
That god, the author of so great a line, did not think
it less than his own duties,
and wished to know in advance the heaven promised him,
nor, a god, to enter unknown houses a stranger.
He is said, with the reckoning worked out to the last,
to have set in order the sun’s delays, by which it returns to its signs;
he linked three hundred and sixty-five days together,
and to the seasons added a fifth part of a full day.
This is the year’s measure: each lustre one day,
made complete out of the fractions, must be put in.

"If bards are permitted to hear the hidden counsels
of the gods, as fame at least believes them permitted —
since you, Gradivus, are fitted for manly duties,
tell me why the matrons keep your festival."
So I. So Mavors spoke to me, his helmet laid aside
(yet still in his right hand was a throwing-spear):
"Now for the first time I, a god of use in arms, am called
to the pursuits of peace, and bear my steps into a new camp.
Nor do I regret the venture: I am glad to linger on this side too,
lest Minerva think she alone is equal to it.
Learn, hard-working bard of the Latin days,
what you seek, and mark my words in a remembering heart.
Small was Rome, if you would trace her first elements,
yet in that small place lay the hope of all this greatness.
The walls already stood, too narrow for the peoples to come,
but thought then too ample for their own throng.
If you ask what was my son’s palace,
look at the house of reed and straw.
On stubble he took the gifts of peaceful sleep,
and yet from that couch he came to the stars.
Already the Roman had a name greater than his standing,
yet he had neither wife nor any father-in-law.
The rich neighborhood scorned his penniless sons,
and I was ill believed to be the author of his blood.
To have lived in stalls and pastured sheep told against them,
and to hold a few acres of untilled soil.
Birds and beasts each pair with their own kind,
and the snake has some mate by which to breed.
The right of marriage is granted to the farthest nations: yet there was
no woman who would consent to wed a Roman.
I grieved, and gave you, Romulus, a father’s resolve.
’Away with prayers,’ I said; ’what you seek, arms will give.’
He prepares a feast to Consus. Consus will tell you the rest,
when he sings the deeds done on his own day.
Cures swelled with rage, and those whom the same grief touched:
then first a father-in-law bore arms against his kin.
And now the ravished women had nearly a mother’s name too,
and the kindred war had dragged on in long delay:
the wives gather in the appointed temple of Juno,
and among them my daughter-in-law dared to speak thus:
’O fellow-ravished, since we hold this much in common,
we can be dutiful at our leisure no longer.
The lines are drawn: but choose for which side the gods
are to be asked; here a husband, there a father holds the arms.
The question is whether you would rather be widowed or fatherless.
I will give you counsel both bold and dutiful.’
She had given the counsel: they obey, and loose their hair,
and wrap their grieving bodies in funeral black.
Now the lines had stood ready for the sword and for death,
now the war-trumpet was about to sound the signal for the fight,
when the ravished women come between fathers and husbands,
and hold in their laps their children, the dear pledges.
When with torn hair they reached the middle of the field,
they sank to the earth on bended knee;
and, as if they understood, the grandchildren with coaxing cries
stretched their little arms out to their grandfathers.
The one who could cried ’grandfather!’ at the man seen at last,
and the one who scarcely could was forced to find the power.
The weapons and the spirit fall from the men, and, swords laid by,
fathers-in-law give their hands to sons-in-law and take theirs,
and hold their daughters, praised aloud, and on his shield the grandfather
carries his grandson: this was the shield’s sweeter use.
From this the Oebalian mothers count it no light office
to keep this first day, the Kalends that are mine —
either because, daring to fling themselves on the drawn points,
they had ended the wars of Mars with their tears;
or because Ilia was made by me a mother of happy issue:
so the matrons duly keep my rites and my day.
What of this — that winter, mantled in frost, then at last gives way,
and the fallen snows perish in the warming sun;
the leaves shorn off by the cold come back to the trees,
and the moist bud swells on the tender shoot;
and the fertile grass, long hidden, now finds
the secret paths to raise itself into the air?
Now the field is fruitful, now the hour for breeding the flock,
now the bird on the bough makes her roof and home.
Rightly do the Latin mothers keep the fruitful season,
whose own childbearing is a soldiering and a vow.
Add that, where the Roman king kept his watch —
the hill that now bears the name Esquiline —
there, by the Latin matrons, a temple to Juno
was on this day, if I recall, made public.
Why do I delay, and load your heart with reasons of every kind?
Look — what you seek stands plain before your eyes.
A mother loves the wedded: a mother’s throng attends me.
This cause, so dutiful, befits us beyond the rest."
Bring flowers to the goddess: in blooming herbs this goddess
takes delight; bind your heads with the tender flower:
say, "You gave us the light, Lucina";
say, "You attend the vow of the woman in labor."
But if any is with child, let her pray with loosened hair
that the goddess loose her childbirth gently.
Who now will tell me why the Salii bear the heavenly
arms of Mars and sing of Mamurius?
Nymph, instruct me, you who serve Diana’s grove and pool;
nymph, Numa’s wife, come to your own deeds.
There is, girt round by shady wood in the Arician vale,
a lake, sacred with ancient awe;
here Hippolytus lies hidden, torn apart by his horses’ reins,
and so no horses come into that grove.
Threads hang veiling the long hedges,
and many a tablet is set up to the goddess who has earned it.
Often a woman whose vow has prevailed, her brow wreathed in garlands,
carries lit torches from the City.
The strong of hand and swift of foot hold the reign there,
and each in turn perishes afterward by his own precedent.
A stony brook flows down with fitful murmur:
often, but in small draughts, I have drunk from it.
Egeria it is who supplies the waters, a goddess dear to the Camenae:
she was Numa’s wife and his counsel.
At first it seemed good to soften the Quirites, too quick for war,
by law and by the fear of the gods.
Hence laws were given, lest the stronger could do all things,
and the handed-down rites began to be kept in purity.
Wildness is put off, right grows mightier than arms,
and to have come to blows with a fellow-citizen brings shame,
and a man but lately fierce is turned at the mere sight of an altar,
and gives wine and salted spelt to the warm hearths.
Look — the father of the gods scatters red flames through the clouds,
and dries the upper air with the rains poured down.
At no other time did the hurled fires fall thicker:
the king quakes, and terror grips the hearts of the crowd.
To him the goddess: "Be not too afraid: the thunderbolt
can be atoned," she says, "and savage Jove’s wrath is bent.
But Picus and Faunus will be able to hand down the rite
of atonement, both of them powers of Roman soil.
Yet not without force will they give it: put chains, you, on the captives";
and so she told by what art they could be caught.
Below the Aventine lay a grove, dark with the holm-oak’s shade,
at sight of which you could say, "A god is here."
In its midst was turf, and from a rock mantled in green moss
a vein of ever-flowing water trickled;
from it almost alone Faunus and Picus used to drink:
hither king Numa came and slaughtered a sheep to the spring,
and sets out cups brimful of fragrant wine,
and hides himself, with his men, shut deep in a cave.
To their wonted springs the woodland powers come
and ease their dry breasts with much wine.
Sleep follows the wine: Numa comes out from the cold cave
and binds the sleepers’ hands in tight chains.
When sleep withdrew, by struggling they try to break
the bonds; the harder they struggle, the tighter those hold.
Then Numa: "Gods of the groves, forgive my deeds,
if you know that crime is far from my intent,
and show me by what means the thunderbolt may be atoned."
So Numa; so Faunus, shaking his horns, says:
"Great things you ask, and not such as you may rightly learn
by our telling: our godhead has its own bounds.
We are country gods, who hold sway upon the high
mountains; over his own roof the rule belongs to Jove.
Him you will not be able by yourself to draw down from heaven,
but you may, perhaps, by using our help."
So Faunus had spoken; Picus’s verdict is the same.
"Take off our chains, though," Picus says,
"Jupiter will come here, drawn down by potent art:
cloudy Styx shall be my witness to the promise."
What the two do, released from the snares, what spells they speak,
and by what art they draw Jove from his seats on high,
it is forbidden a man to know. What is allowed us shall be sung,
and what a pious bard’s mouth may utter.
They draw you down from the sky, Jupiter; whence later men
now too honor you and call you Elicius.
It is sure the Aventine wood’s tops trembled,
and the earth sank, pressed by the weight of Jove:
the king’s heart throbs, and from his whole body the blood
flees, and his bristling hair stood stiff.
When his spirit came back, "Give sure atonements," he said,
"for the bolt, O king and father of the gods on high,
if I have touched your offerings with clean hands,
and if a pious tongue is what now asks this too."
He nodded to the suppliant, but hid the truth behind
a drawn-out riddle, and frightened the man with ambiguous words.
"Cut off a head," he said; to whom the king: "We will obey;
an onion must be cut, pulled from my gardens."
The god added, "of a man"; "you will take," said he, "the hairs."
The god demands a life; to whom Numa: "of a fish."
He laughed, and "with these," he said, "see you procure my weapons’ grace,
O man not to be driven from conversing with the gods.
But to you, when tomorrow’s Cynthian has brought his whole disk forth,
I will give sure pledges of empire."
He spoke, and on a vast thunderclap above the shaken sky
is borne away, and left Numa at his worship.
He returns glad and recounts to the Quirites what was done:
belief in his words comes slow and hard.
"But surely we shall be believed," he says, "if the outcome
follows the words: come, hear of tomorrow, whoever is here.
When the Cynthian has brought his whole disk forth over the lands,
Jupiter will give sure pledges of empire."
They part in doubt, and the promise seems slow to come,
and faith hangs upon the coming day.
Soft was the earth, dewed with the morning frost:
before their king’s threshold the people stand.
He comes forth and takes his seat midmost on a maple throne;
countless men stand round about and keep silence.
Phoebus had risen only on the topmost rim:
their anxious minds quail with hope and fear at once.
He took his stand, and, his head veiled in a snow-white robe,
raised the hands already well known to the gods,
and thus: "The time of the promised gift is here," he said;
"Jupiter, add to your words the faith you pledged."
While he speaks, the sun had now heaved up its whole disk,
and a heavy crash came from the vault of heaven.
Thrice the god thundered from a cloudless sky, three lightnings he sent.
Believe the teller: marvels, but real, I tell —
from its mid region the sky began to gape:
the crowd, with their leader, lowered their eyes.
Look — a shield, turning gently in the light breeze,
came down: from the people a shout rose to the stars.
He lifts the gift from the ground (a heifer slain first
that had given her neck to no yoke to press),
and calls it ancile, because it is cut back on every side,
and no angle is there for your eye to mark.
Then, mindful that the empire’s fate stood lodged in it,
he enters on a plan of much cunning:
he bids more be made, embossed in a like figure,
so that error might pass before a plotter’s eyes.
Mamurius — whether more flawless in character or in the smith’s
art, it is hard to say — brought that work to a close.
To him generous Numa said, "Ask the rewards of your making:
if my good faith is known, you will ask nothing in vain."
He had already given the Salii their name, drawn from the leap,
and arms, and words to be sung to fixed measures;
then thus Mamurius: "Let glory be given me for wage,
and let my name sound at the close of the song."
So the priests pay the rewards promised for the ancient work,
and call upon Mamurius.
If any woman would wed, however you both will hasten,
put it off: small delay has great advantages.
Arms stir up battles, and battle ill befits the wedded;
when they are put away, the omen will be fitter.
On these days too the wife of the bonneted Flamen of Jove
must keep her hair uncombed.

When the third night of the month has stirred its risings,
one of the twin Fishes will be hidden away.
For there are two: this one is nearest the south winds, that one
the north; each holds its name from a wind.

When the wife of Tithonus has begun to drip dew
from her saffron cheeks and brings on the fifth day’s hour,
whether it is Arctophylax, or that sluggish Bootes,
the star will sink from sight and slip past your eyes.
But the Vintager will not slip past: whence this star too
draws its origin is a small delay to tell.
Ampelos, the unshorn son of a satyr and a nymph,
Bacchus is said to have loved on the Ismarian ridges.
He gave him a vine that hung from an elm’s leaves,
which now takes its name from the boy’s name.
While rashly he plucked the painted grapes on a branch,
he fell: Liber bore the lost one to the stars.

When for the sixth time Phoebus climbs steep Olympus from Ocean
and crops the upper air with his winged team,
whoever you are at hand and tend chaste Vesta’s inmost shrine,
give thanks, and lay incense on the Trojan hearths.
To Caesar’s countless titles — which he chose rather to earn —
the pontifical honor was added.
Over the eternal fires the godhead of eternal
Caesar presides: you see the pledges of empire joined.
Gods of ancient Troy, the worthiest spoil for him who bore you,
the burden by which Aeneas was kept safe from the foe,
a priest sprung from Aeneas touches his kindred
powers: O Vesta, guard your kindred head.
You fires that his holy hand cherishes, live on and well;
live unquenched, both flame and leader, I pray.

One mark belongs to Mars on the Nones: on that day, they hold,
a temple of Veiovis was hallowed before two groves.
When Romulus ringed a grove with high rock,
"Flee here, whoever you are," he said; "you will be safe."
O from how slight an origin the Roman grew,
how free from envy the crowd of old once was!
Yet, lest the strangeness of the name baffle you in your ignorance,
learn who that god is, and why he is so called.
He is the young Jupiter: look at his youthful face;
then look at his hand: it holds no thunderbolts.
The bolts were taken up by Jove after the Giants dared
to assail the sky: in the first age he was unarmed;
Ossa blazed with strange fires, and Pelion higher than Ossa,
and Olympus fixed fast on the solid ground.
A she-goat too stands by: Cretan nymphs, they say, pastured her,
and she gave milk to the infant Jove.
Now I am called to the name: stunted spelt that has grown ill
the farmers call vesca and "small";
if that is the word’s force, why should I not suppose Veiovis’s shrine
to be the shrine of a Jove not great?
And now, when the stars dapple the dark-blue sky,
look up: you will see the neck of the Gorgon’s horse.
He is believed to have leapt from slain Medusa’s
teeming neck, his mane spattered with blood.
For him, gliding above the clouds and beneath the stars,
the sky served for earth, a wing for a foot;
and now he had taken the new bit in his indignant mouth
when his light hoof struck out the Aonian springs.
Now he enjoys the heaven he once sought on wings,
and glitters bright with fifteen stars.

Straightway, when night comes on, you will see the Cnossian
Crown: by Theseus’s crime she was made a goddess.
Already she had well exchanged her perjured husband for Bacchus,
she who had given the thread to be wound by the thankless man;
rejoicing in her marriage-lot, "Why did I weep, country fool?" she said;
"to my own profit that faithless one turned out."
Meanwhile Liber had conquered the Indians with their combed-out hair,
and comes back rich from the eastern world.
Among the captive girls of surpassing beauty
a king’s daughter pleased Bacchus too well.
His loving wife wept, and pacing the curving shore
with disheveled hair brought out words like these:
"Lo, once again, you waves, hear the same complaints.
Lo, once again, you sand, receive my tears.
I used to say, I recall, ’Perjured, faithless Theseus!’
He went his way; Bacchus is charged with the same crimes.
Now too I will cry, ’Let no woman trust a man’;
with only the name changed, my case is told again.
Would that my lot had run the way it first set out,
and that I were nothing at this present hour.
Why, Liber, did you save me, doomed to die, upon the deserted
sands? I might have grieved my last but once.
Bacchus, fickle, and lighter than the leaves that ring
your brows, Bacchus made known to me by my tears,
have you dared, with a rival led before my eyes,
to trouble a bed so well composed?
Alas, where is the pledged faith? where the oaths you used to swear?
Wretch that I am, how often shall I speak these words?
You blamed Theseus, and called him deceiver yourself:
by your own verdict you sin the more shamefully.
Let no one know this, and let me burn with silent griefs,
lest I be thought to have deserved to be fooled so often.
Above all I would have it hidden from Theseus, that he take
no joy to find you a partner in his guilt.
But, I suppose, a fair rival is preferred to dark me!
May that complexion fall to the lot of my enemies.
Yet what does this matter? for that very flaw she pleases you more.
What are you doing? she defiles your embraces.
Bacchus, keep faith, and set no woman before the love
of your wife: I have grown used to loving one man always.
The horns of a beautiful bull caught my mother,
yours caught me; but this love is my glory, that one a shame.
Let it not harm me that I love: for it did not harm you, Bacchus,
that you yourself confessed your flames to me.
Nor is it a wonder that you burn me: born in fire,
they say, you were, and from the fire snatched by a father’s hand.
I am she to whom you used to promise heaven.
Ah me, what gifts I get in heaven’s stead!"
She had spoken; Liber had long been hearing the words of her lament,
for he chanced to be following at her back.
He clasps her in his arms and dries her tears with kisses,
and "together," he says, "let us seek the heights of heaven:
joined to me in the marriage-bed, you will take a name joined to mine,
for, transformed, your name shall be Libera,
and I will make, to stay with you, a memorial of your crown,
the crown Vulcan gave to Venus, and she to you."
He does as he says, and turns nine gems to fires:
golden now it glitters among nine stars.

When he who bears the crimson day on his rushing axle
has lifted six disks and sunk as many,
you will watch a second Equirria on the grassy Plain,
which the Tiber presses on the flank with its curving waters;
yet if by chance it lies flooded under the cast-up wave,
let the dusty Caelian hill receive the horses.

On the Ides falls the merry feast of Anna Perenna,
not far from your banks, immigrant Tiber.
The commons come and, scattered here and there over the green grass,
drink, and each man reclines with his own mate.
Some hold out under the open sky, a few pitch tents,
some have a leafy hut made out of branches;
others, having set up reeds for stiff columns,
have laid their togas stretched across the top.
Yet they grow warm with sun and wine, and pray for as many years
as the cups they take, and drink them out by the count.
There you will find a man who drinks down Nestor’s years,
a woman turned by her own cups into a Sibyl.
There too they sing whatever they learned in the theaters,
and fling ready hands in time to their own words,
and, the mixing-bowl set down, lead clumsy dances,
and the trim mistress dances with her hair let loose.
As they come back they stagger, a show for the crowd,
and the throng they meet calls them the lucky ones.
Lately I met (it struck me as worth the telling)
a procession: a drunk old woman dragging a drunk old man.
But since who this goddess is wanders among the rumors,
no tale of her shall be left covered by my design.
Pitiable Dido had burned with love of Aeneas,
had burned on the pyre built for her own doom,
and her ash was laid to rest, and on the tomb’s marble was
this brief verse, which dying she herself had left:
Aeneas gave both the cause of death and the sword:
Dido herself fell, by her own hand undone.
At once the Numidians invade the unguarded realm,
and the Moor Iarbas seizes the captured house,
and, mindful that he was scorned, "Of Elissa’s chamber yet," he says,
"see, I, whom she so often spurned, have the enjoyment now."
The Tyrians scatter, each where his wandering drives him, as once
the bees, their king lost, stray in confusion.
The threshing-floor had taken in the harvest to be stripped a third time,
and a third new wine had gone down into the hollow vats:
Anna is driven from the home, and weeping leaves her sister’s
walls; but first she renders her sister the due rites.
The soft ashes drink unguents mixed with tears,
and receive locks of hair offered from the crown,
and thrice she said "farewell," thrice the ashes raised to her lips
she pressed, and her sister seemed to lie beneath them.
Finding a boat and companions for her flight, she glides with even pace,
looking back at the walls, her sister’s sweet work.
Fertile is Melite, the island near barren Cosyra,
which the wave of the Libyan strait beats upon.
She makes for it, trusting in the king’s old guest-bond:
there the host, a king rich in wealth, was Battus.
When he had learned the fortunes of both sisters,
"This land," he said, "small as it is, is yours."
And he would have kept the office of hospitality to the last;
but he feared the great power of Pygmalion.
The sun had reviewed his signs twice, a third
year was running on, and a new land of exile must be found.
Her brother is at hand and demands her with war. The king, loathing arms,
"We are unwarlike; flee you to safety," he says.
At his bidding she flees and trusts her boat to wind and waves:
her brother was rougher than any sea.
Near the fishy streams of stony Crathis
is a small field, which the dwellers call Camere:
thither her course lay. And she was no farther off
than a sling can carry nine times over:
the sails first drop and sway in a wavering breeze:
"Cleave the waters with the oar," the sailor said;
and while they make ready to take in the canvas with twisted rope,
the curved stern is struck by a sudden south wind,
and out into the open sea, the helmsman struggling in vain,
she is borne, and the land just seen flees from her sight.
The waves leap up, and from its lowest gulf the deep
is churned, and the hull gulps the whitening waters.
Skill is beaten by the wind, the steersman no longer plies
the reins, but he too begs help by prayers.
The Phoenician exile is tossed through the swelling waves,
and covers her wet eyes with her garment held before them.
Then for the first time Dido was called happy by her sister,
and so was anyone who had pressed any ground with her body.
The ship is driven by a mighty gale to the Laurentine
shore, and, all put off, is swallowed up and lost.
Already pious Aeneas had been enriched with Latinus’s realm
and his daughter, and had merged the two peoples.
While on the dowry-shore, with Achates his only companion,
he picks a lonely path with bare foot,
he sees her wandering, and cannot bring himself to believe
it is Anna: why would she come to the Latian fields?
While Aeneas wonders, "It is Anna!" Achates cries:
at the name she lifted up her face.
Alas, what is she to do? flee? what chasm of earth shall she seek?
Before the wretched woman’s eyes was her sister’s doom.
The Cytherean hero perceived it, and addresses her dread
(yet he weeps, stirred by the memory of you, Elissa):
"Anna, I swear by this land, which once you used to hear
was being granted me by a kindlier fate,
and by the gods, my comrades, lately settled in this seat,
that they kept chiding me often for my delays —
yet I had no fear about her death: that dread was far off.
Ah me, she was braver than belief allows.
Do not tell of it: I saw the wounds unworthy of that body
when I dared go down to the halls of Tartarus.
But you, whether reason drove you to our shores
or a god, take the comforts of my realm.
Many things we owe you, mindful of all; all we owe Elissa:
you will be welcome for your own name, welcome for your sister’s."
To him so speaking (for no other hope was left)
she gave her trust, and set forth her wanderings;
and when she entered the house, dressed in Tyrian array,
Aeneas begins (the rest of the crowd falls silent):
"There is a dutiful reason, Lavinia my wife, why I commend her to you:
a castaway, I once used up her substance.
She is sprung from Tyre, she held a kingdom on the Libyan coast:
I beg you, love her as you would a dear sister."
Lavinia promises all, and keeps the unseen wound
in her silent mind, and dissembles her fears;
and though she sees many gifts borne past her eyes,
she thinks that many too are sent in secret.
She has not settled what to do: she hates with a fury’s hate,
and lays a snare, and longs to die avenged.
It was night: before the bed there seemed to stand her sister’s
shade, Dido, bloodied, with squalid hair,
and to say, "Flee, do not waver, flee this house of grief";
at the word a gust pushed the creaking doors.
She leaps up and, quick, daring the low window,
flings herself out (fear itself had made her bold),
and in her terror she is hurried on, veiled in an ungirt tunic,
and runs like a doe scared at the howl of wolves,
and horned Numicius is believed to have snatched her in his eager waves
and hidden her away in his own pools.
Meanwhile the Sidonian woman is sought with a great outcry
through the fields: tracks and the marks of feet appear;
they had come to the banks: footprints were on the banks;
the knowing river held its silent waters back.
She herself seemed to speak: "I am the nymph of calm Numicius:
hidden in an ever-flowing stream, I am called Anna Perenna."
At once, glad, they feast in the fields they had ranged,
and keep themselves and the day with lavish wine.
There are those for whom she is the Moon, because she fills the year with months;
some think her Themis, some the Inachian cow.
You will find those who call you the Azanian nymph,
and say that you, Anna, gave Jove his first food.
This rumor too, which I shall tell, has reached
my ears, and it stands not far from the trust due to truth.
The commons of old, not yet kept safe by any tribunes,
fled, and were on the height of the Sacred Mount;
already too the food they had brought with them had failed,
and the grain fit for the uses of men.
There was a certain Anna, born at suburban Bovillae,
a poor old woman, but of much diligence;
she, her gray hair bound in a light cap,
used to shape country cakes with trembling hand,
and so each morning would deal them, steaming, among the people:
this plenty was welcome to the people.
When peace was made at home, they set up a statue to Perenna,
because she had brought them help in their need.
Now it remains for me to tell why the girls sing
their obscenities; for they gather and chant set ribaldries.
She had lately been made a goddess: Gradivus came to Anna,
and, drawing her aside, makes a speech like this:
"You are worshipped in my month, I have joined my season to yours;
a great hope of mine hangs on your good offices.
An arms-bearer, seized with love for the arms-bearing Minerva,
I burn, and this long while I have nursed the wound.
Bring it about that we two gods, alike in our pursuit, may join as one:
these are the parts that suit you, kindly old woman."
He had spoken; she mocks the god with an empty promise,
and drags his foolish hope on with wavering delay.
To him pressing the more often, "I have done your bidding," she says;
"she is won; scarcely to your prayers did she give in."
The lover believes, and makes ready the bridal chamber. Thither
Anna is led, veiling her face like a new bride.
About to take a kiss, Mars all at once catches sight of Anna:
now shame, now anger steals over the deluded god.
The new goddess laughs at the would-be lover of her dear Minerva,
and to Venus no thing was ever more welcome than this.
Hence the old jokes and obscene words are sung,
and it delights them that she fooled so great a god.
I was about to pass over the swords driven into the prince,
when thus Vesta spoke from her chaste hearth:
"Do not hesitate to remember it: he was my own priest;
sacrilegious hands aimed their weapons at me.
I myself snatched the man away and left a naked likeness behind:
what fell by the steel was but Caesar’s shade."
He indeed, set in heaven, looked upon Jove’s halls,
and holds a temple dedicated in the great Forum;
but all who dared the outrage, against the gods’
will, and had defiled the pontifical head,
lie low in a deserved death: be witnesses, Philippi,
and you whose scattered bones whiten the ground.
This was the work, this the piety, these the first lessons
of Caesar: to avenge his father with righteous arms.

When the next dawn has freshened the tender grass,
the Scorpion will be visible from its first part.

The third day after the Ides is most thronged for Bacchus:
Bacchus, favor your bard while I sing your festival.
Nor will I tell of Semele — to whom, but that Jupiter
brought his bolts along, you were a feeble, helpless thing;
nor how, that you might be born a boy at the ripe season,
your mother’s work was completed in a father’s body.
It were long to tell the Sithonian and Scythian triumphs
and your conquered peoples, incense-bearing India.
You too shall be passed in silence, ill prey of your Theban mother,
and you, Lycurgus, driven by furies against your own offspring.
Lo, I would gladly tell of the sudden fish and the Tyrrhenian
monsters; but that is not this song’s task.
This song’s task is to set forth the reasons why
the planter of the vine summons the peoples to his cakes.
Before your birth the altars stood without honor,
Liber, and grass was found upon the cold hearths.
They tell that you, when the Ganges and all the East were subdued,
set apart the firstfruits for great Jove:
cinnamon you first gave, and captured frankincense,
and the roasted flesh of an ox led in triumph.
From their founder’s name the libations take their name,
and the cakes — liba — because a part of them is given to the holy hearths;
cakes are made for the god, because he delights
in sweet juices, and honey, they say, was found by Bacchus.
He was going, attended by satyrs, from the sandy Hebrus
(my tale carries no unwelcome jests);
and now he had come to Rhodope and flowering Pangaeus:
the bronze-bearing hands of his comrades clashed.
Lo, new winged things gather, driven by the jangling,
and the bees follow the sounds the bronze gives out;
Liber gathers the wanderers and shuts them in a hollow tree,
and has the reward of the honey he had found.
When the satyrs and the bald old man had tasted the savor,
they sought the golden combs through all the wood.
The old man hears the hum of a swarm in a hollowed elm,
sees the wax, and dissembles what he has seen;
and, as he sat lazily on the back of a sway-backed ass,
he brings it up to the elm and the hollow bark.
He himself stood up, propped on a branching trunk,
and greedily reaches for the honey stored in the wood:
thousands of hornets swarm, and into his naked crown
they drive their stings and brand his snub face.
He falls headlong, and is caught by the ass’s heel,
and shouts to his fellows and begs for help.
The satyrs run up and laugh at their father’s swollen
face: he limps on a battered knee.
The god himself laughs too, and shows him how to smear on mud;
he obeys the counsel and daubs his face with clay.
The father enjoys his honey, and onto the warm cake poured
we give, by right, the gleaming honey to its finder.
Why a woman presides is no hidden reason:
he stirs up the women’s dances with his thyrsus.
Why an old woman does it, you ask? The riper age is the more wine-loving,
and loves the gifts of the laden vine.
Why is she wreathed with ivy? ivy is most dear to Bacchus;
why this too is so, it is no delay to learn.
When his stepmother sought the boy, the Nysian nymphs, they say,
set this leaf before his cradle.
It remains for me to find why the free toga is given to boys
upon your day-star, radiant Bacchus:
whether because you yourself seem ever a boy and a youth,
and your age stands midway between the two;
or because you are a father, and fathers commend their pledges, their sons,
to your care and your divine power;
or because you are Liber, and through you the free garment too
is taken on, and the road of a freer life;
or because, when the men of old tilled the fields more keenly,
and a senator did the work on his ancestral land,
and a consul took the rods up from the bent plow,
and to have hard hands was no reproach,
the country folk used to come to the City for the games —
but that honor was paid to the gods, not to amusements:
the inventor of the grape held his games on his own day,
which now he holds together with the torch-bearing goddess —
and so, that a throng might honor the new recruit,
the day seemed not unfitted for the giving of the toga?
Turn hither, father, your gentle head and your appeased horns,
and grant favoring sails to my talent.
They go to the Argei (who they are, their own page will tell)
on this day, if I remember, and the day before.
The star of the Kite sinks slanting toward the Lycaonian
Bear: on that night it comes to be seen.
What gave the bird the sky, if you would learn:
Saturn had been driven from his realm by Jove;
in anger he rouses the mighty Titans to arms,
and tries the aid that the fates owed him.
Born of mother Earth, a marvelous monster, a bull
was, in its hinder part, a serpent:
him, behind a triple wall, in black groves,
violent Styx had penned, at the three Fates’ warning.
Whoever should give the bull’s entrails to the flames to burn,
it was fated, could conquer the eternal gods.
Briareus sacrifices it with an axe made of adamant,
and was on the very point of giving the inwards to the flames:
Jupiter bids the birds snatch them up: the kite brought them
to him, and for its service came among the stars.

One day is in the middle, and the rites of Minerva are held,
which take their name from five joined days.
The first is free of blood, nor is it right to clash with steel:
the reason — that on that day Minerva was born.
The next, and three more, are kept on the scraped sand:
in drawn swords the warlike goddess takes delight.
Pray now to Pallas, boys and tender girls:
he who has well appeased Pallas will be learned.
With Pallas appeased, let the girls learn to soften wool
and to unload the laden distaffs.
She teaches them too to run the shuttle along the upright warp
and to press the loose work close with the comb.
Worship her, you who take stains from damaged clothes:
worship her, whoever sets the cauldrons for the fleece.
Nor will anyone, with Pallas unwilling, make good fastenings for the foot,
though he be more skilled than Tychius:
and though, matched in handiwork against old Epeus,
he stand the higher, with Pallas angry he will bungle.
You too, who drive off diseases by Phoebus’s art,
bring back a few gifts from your earnings to the goddess.
Nor do you, schoolmasters — a tribe mostly cheated of your pay —
scorn her (she draws new pupils your way),
and you who ply the graver, and you who burn a panel with colors,
and you who make stone soft with a skilled hand.
She is the goddess of a thousand works: of song, surely, she is the goddess;
if I deserve it, let her befriend my pursuits.
Where the Caelian mount comes down from its height to the level,
here, where the road is not flat but nearly flat,
you may see the small shrine of Minerva Capta,
which the goddess began to hold on her birthday.
The cause of the name is in doubt. We call a clever
wit "capital": and the goddess is full of wit.
Or is it because she is said, motherless, to have leapt
from the crown of her father’s head with her own shield?
Or because she came to us a captive when the Faliscans
were subdued? an old inscription teaches it by that token.
Or because she has a law that bids thefts taken from that place
be paid for with a capital penalty?
By whatever reasoning you draw the name, Pallas,
hold ever your aegis before our leaders.

The last of the five days bids us purify the tuneful trumpets
and sacrifice to the brave goddess.
Now you can, your face lifted to the sun, say,
"Here, yesterday, he pressed the fleece of the Phrixean sheep."
The seed being parched by a wicked stepmother’s guile,
the corn had raised no blades, as it is wont:
one is sent to the tripods to bring back by sure lot
what aid the Delphic god would grant the barren land.
He too, corrupted along with the seed, reports that by the oracle
the deaths of Helle and young Phrixus are demanded.
The citizens, and the season, and Ino kept driving
the still-refusing king to bear the unspeakable orders;
and sister and Phrixus both, their brows veiled with fillets,
stand together before the altars and bewail their joined doom.
Their mother sees them, as she chanced to hang in the air,
and strikes her bared breast with a thunderstruck hand,
and into the dragon-born city, with clouds for escort,
she leaps down, and snatches her children from there;
and, that they may take flight, a ram most bright with gold
is given them: he carries the two across the long straits.
The girl, they say, held the horn with her weak left hand,
when she gave the water its name from herself.
The brother almost perished with her, while he tries to aid the falling one,
and keeps reaching out his outstretched hands.
He wept for the lost sharer of his twin peril,
not knowing she was wedded to a sea-blue god.
The shores once reached, the ram becomes a star; but his
golden fleece came to the Colchian halls.

When coming Dawn has sent three day-stars on before her,
you will find the daytime hours made equal to the night.

Then, when four times the shepherd has penned his sated kids,
and four times the grass has whitened with fresh dew,
Janus must be adored, and with him gentle Concord
and Roman Salus and the Altar of Peace.

The Moon governs the months: the span of this month too
the Moon brings to a close, to be worshipped on the Aventine ridge.

"Be gracious, foster me," I said, "mother of the twin Loves";
she turned her face back toward the poet.
"What do you want with me?" she said. "Surely you sang of greater things.
Do you carry an old wound in your soft heart?"
"You know, goddess," I answered, "about the wound." She laughed,
and at once the sky, on that side, was clear.
"Wounded or whole, have I ever deserted your standards?
You are my set theme, you are always my work.
In my first years I played, without offense, at what befitted them;
now a larger field is worn smooth by my horses.
I sing the seasons with their causes, dug out of the ancient annals,
and the constellations that sink beneath the earth and rise.
We have come to the fourth month, in which you are most thronged with honor:
you know, Venus, that both the poet and the month are yours."
Moved, she lightly touched my temples with the Cytherean myrtle
and said, "Finish the work you have begun."
I felt it, and the causes of the days lay suddenly open:
while it is allowed and the breezes blow, let the ship sail on.

If any part of the calendar ought to touch you,
Caesar, in April you have something to guard as your own:
this month descends to you by a great line of ancestry,
and becomes yours by adoptive nobility.
The son of Ilia, when he laid out the long year,
saw this and reckoned up your forebears himself:
and as he gave fierce Mars the first lot in the order,
because he was the nearest cause of his own begetting,
so he willed that Venus, taken into the line through many steps,
should hold the place of the second month;
and seeking the origin of his stock and the ages rolled back,
he came at last to his kindred gods.
Could he fail to know that Dardanus was born of Electra,
Atlas’s daughter, that Electra had lain with Jove?
His son was Erichthonius; from him Tros was begotten;
he fathered Assaracus, and Assaracus Capys;
next came Anchises, with whom Venus did not disdain
to share the name of parent:
from him sprang Aeneas; his piety, proved through the flames,
bore the holy things and his father on his shoulders — that father a holy thing too.
We come at last to the lucky name of Iulus,
through whom the Julian house touches its Teucrian forebears.
From him Postumus, who, because he was born in the deep woods,
was called Silvius among the Latin race.
He, Latinus, is your father; Alba succeeds Latinus;
nearest to your titles, Alba, stands Epytus.
He gave Capys the name brought back from Troy,
and was made, Calpetus, your grandfather too.
And when after him Tiberinus held his father’s kingdom,
he is said to have drowned in the eddy of the Tuscan water.
Yet he had already seen his son Agrippa born and his grandson
Remulus; they say lightning was hurled at Remulus.
Aventinus came after these — from whom the place takes its name,
the hill as well; after him the kingdom passed to Proca;
him Numitor follows, brother of hard Amulius;
Ilia and Lausus were born of Numitor:
Lausus falls by his uncle’s sword; Ilia pleases Mars,
and bears you, Quirinus, joined to your twin Remus.
He always called Venus and Mars his parents,
and earned belief for the claim:
and lest the descendants to come should fail to know it,
he gave the gods of his line successive months.
But I divine that the month of Venus is marked by a Greek word:
the goddess is named from the foam of the sea.
And do not wonder that the thing is called by a Greek name;
for the land of Italy was once Greater Greece.
Evander had come with a full fleet of his people,
Alcides had come, each Greek by race
(the club-bearer as a guest pastured his herd on the Aventine grass,
and the Albula was drunk by so great a god),
the Neritian captain too; the Laestrygones stand as witnesses,
and the shore that still keeps Circe’s name;
and already the walls of Telegonus, already of dripping Tibur
stood — walls that Argive hands had set.
Halaesus had come, driven by the doom of the son of Atreus,
from whom the Faliscan land believes itself named.
Add Antenor, the urger of peace for Troy,
and your son-in-law, Apulian Daunus, the son of Oeneus.
Late from the flames of Ilium, and after Antenor,
Aeneas brought his gods into our country.
One companion of his was Solimus, from Phrygian Ida,
from whom the walls of Sulmo take their name —
of cool Sulmo, my homeland, Germanicus.
Wretched me — how far that place lies from the Scythian soil!
So I, so far away — but check your complaints, my Muse:
the holy rites are not to be sung by you on a mournful lyre.
Where does envy not reach? There are those who would
snatch the month’s honor from you and begrudge it, Venus.
For, because spring then opens all things, and the thick
harshness of cold gives way and the teeming earth lies open,
they say April is named from the opened season —
which kindly Venus claims by laying her hand on it.
She, most worthy, tempers the whole round world,
she holds a realm no smaller than any god’s,
and gives laws to sky, to earth, to the waves that bore her,
and through her own approaches keeps every kind in being.
She created all the gods (it would be long to count them),
she gave the causes to the crops and the trees,
she drew the rude minds of men together into one,
and taught each to be joined with his own mate.
What creates the whole race of birds, but coaxing pleasure?
Nor would the herds couple, if light love were away.
The fierce ram battles it out, horn against horn, yet that same ram
spares to bruise the brow of the ewe he loves;
the bull, his wildness laid aside, follows the heifer,
the bull at whom every glade, all the woodland, trembles.
The same power preserves whatever lives beneath the broad sea,
and fills the waters with fish past counting.
She first stripped his savage habits from man: from her
came refinement and the neat care of oneself.
The first lover, they say, on a night refused him, sang
a song kept watch till dawn before the bolted doors,
and eloquence was to win over the hard-hearted girl,
and each man was articulate in his own cause.
A thousand arts were set going through her; and by the zeal to please,
they say, much that lay hidden before was found out.
Would anyone dare to rob her of the title of the second month?
Far from us be that madness.
And what of this — that, powerful everywhere and enriched
with crowded temples, the goddess yet holds greater right in our city?
For your Troy, Roman, Venus bore arms,
when she groaned, her soft hand hurt by a spear-point;
and she beat two of the heavenly ones by a Trojan’s verdict
(ah, I would not have the beaten goddesses recall it),
and was called the daughter-in-law of Assaracus, so that one day,
of course, great Caesar might have the Julian line for forebears.
No season was fitter for Venus than spring
(in spring the lands shine, in spring the field is unbound;
now the grasses lift their tips through the burst earth,
now the vine-shoot drives its buds through the swelling bark),
and lovely Venus is worthy of the lovely season,
and, as always, is set next to her own Mars.
In spring she bids the curved ships go over her mother-seas
and fear no longer the threats of winter.

Duly you worship the goddess, mothers and brides of Latium,
and you who lack the fillet and the long robe.
Take the golden chains from her marble neck,
take off her riches: the whole goddess must be washed.
Give back the golden chains to her dried neck:
now other flowers, now the fresh rose must be given.
She bids you too bathe beneath the green myrtle:
learn the sure cause why she bids it.
On the shore, naked, she was drying her dripping hair:
the satyrs, a wanton crowd, caught sight of the goddess.
She felt it, and screened her body with a myrtle held between:
safe by that deed, she bids you do the same.
Learn now why you give incense to Manly Fortune
in that place which is wet with cold water.
That place receives all the women with their veils laid off,
and sees every blemish of the naked body;
that Manly Fortune may cover this and hide it from the men,
she grants it, and, begged with a little incense, does it.
And do not be loath to take poppy ground with snowy milk
and honey strained from the pressed combs:
when Venus was first led to her eager bridegroom,
she drank this; from that hour she was a bride.
Appease her with suppliant words: in her keeping
remain beauty, and character, and good repute.
Rome had slipped from the chastity of its forefathers’ time:
you of old, men, consulted the Cumaean crone.
She bids temples be built for Venus: and when these were duly made,
Venus from that holds the name of the turned heart.
Ever upon the sons of Aeneas, most beautiful one, look with a calm face,
and guard your many brides, goddess.
While I speak, the Scorpion, to be feared for the point of his raised tail,
plunges headlong into the green waters.

When the night has passed, and the sky has begun to redden
at its first edge, and the dew-touched birds complain,
and the traveler, his night kept watch, sets down his half-burnt torch,
and the countryman goes off to his familiar work,
the Pleiades will begin to relieve their father’s shoulders —
they who are called seven, yet are wont to be six:
whether because six of them came into the embrace of gods
(for they say Sterope lay with Mars,
Alcyone with Neptune, and you, lovely Celaeno,
Maia and Electra and Taygete with Jove),
while the seventh, Merope, married you, a mortal, Sisyphus;
she repents, and alone hides for shame of the deed:
or because Electra could not bear to watch Troy’s ruin,
and set her hand before her eyes.

Let the sky turn three times on its unceasing axle,
let Titan three times yoke and three times unyoke his horses,
and at once the Berecyntian flute with its curving horn
will blow, and the Idaean Mother’s festival will be here.
The half-men will go and beat the hollow drums,
and bronze, struck back by bronze, will give its clashings;
she herself, borne on the soft necks of her attendants,
will be howled along through the midst of the City’s streets.
The stage resounds, the games call: watch, Quirites,
and let the wrangling courts be free of their lawsuits.
I would gladly ask many things, but the sound of the shrill bronze
frightens me, and the curved boxwood-pipe with its dreadful note.
"Grant me, goddess, someone to question." The Cybelean one saw
her learned granddaughters, and bade them attend to my concern.
"Disclose, mindful of your charge, nurslings of Helicon,
why the Great Goddess delights in unceasing din."
So I. So Erato (the Cytherean month fell to her,
because she bears the name of tender love):
"This was the oracle given to Saturn: ’Best of kings,
you will be shaken from your scepter by a son.’
He, dreading his own offspring, as each was born,
devours it, and keeps it sunk in his belly.
Often Rhea complained that, so often fruitful, she was never
a mother, and grieved at her own fertility.
Jupiter was born: (antiquity is trusted as a great witness;
forbear to disturb the belief once received)
a stone, hidden in swaddling, settled in the heavenly throat:
so the father had to be cheated of the fates.
Long has steep Ida echoed with clashings,
that the boy might wail safely with his infant mouth.
Some beat shields with stakes, some empty helmets:
this is the Curetes’ work, this the Corybantes’.
The thing stayed hidden, and the imitations of the old deed remain:
the goddess’s attendants ply the bronze and the hoarse hides.
They strike cymbals for helmets, drums for shields:
the flute gives Phrygian measures, as it gave of old."
She had ceased; I began: "Why does the fierce race of lions
yield its unwonted mane to her curving yoke?"
I had ceased; she began: "Their wildness is believed
softened by her; she has shown it by her own car."
"But why is her head loaded with a tower-bearing crown?
Did she give towers to the earliest cities?"
She nodded. "Whence came," I said, "the urge
to cut their own limbs?" When I fell silent, the Pierian began:
"A Phrygian boy in the woods, of striking face, Attis,
bound the tower-crowned goddess to him in chaste love;
she wished him kept for herself, to guard her temples,
and said, ’See that you will to stay a boy forever.’
He gave his pledge to her command, and said, ’If I lie,
let that love by which I deceive you be my last.’
He breaks faith, and in the nymph Sagaritis ceases
to be what he was: for this the goddess’s wrath exacts its price.
She felled the Naiad by wounds dealt to a tree —
the Naiad dies; the tree was the Naiad’s fate;
he goes mad, and thinking the chamber’s roof was caving in,
flees, and at a run makes for the heights of Dindymus;
and now ’Take away the torches!’ now ’Take off the lashes!’ he cries,
and often swears the avenging goddesses are at hand.
He even tore his body with a sharp stone,
and his long hair was dragged in the filthy dust,
and his cry was, "I have deserved it: I pay deserved penalties in blood.
Ah, let the parts perish that did me harm!"
"Ah, let them perish," he was still saying; he takes off the burden of his groin,
and suddenly no signs of his manhood were left.
This madness became a precedent, and the soft ministers,
tossing their hair, lop their worthless members."
In such words, by the Aonian Muse’s eloquent voice,
the cause of the frenzy I had asked about was given.
"This too, guide of my work, I pray you teach: whence
was she sought and fetched? Or was she always in our city?"
"Dindymus and Cybele and Ida lovely with springs
the Mother always loved, and the wealth of Ilium:
when Aeneas was carrying Troy into the Italian fields,
the goddess all but followed the holy-laden ships,
but she felt her power was not yet asked for Latium by the fates,
and had stayed behind in her accustomed places.
Afterward, when Rome, mighty in resources, had seen
five centuries and lifted its head over a conquered world,
the priest scanned the fateful words of the Euboean song;
they say what was scanned there ran thus:
’The Mother is absent: I bid you, Roman, seek the Mother.
When she comes, she must be received by a chaste hand.’
The fathers wander amid the riddles of the dark oracle —
what parent is absent, and in what place she is to be sought.
Paean is consulted, and says, ’Summon the Mother of the gods;
she is to be found on the Idaean ridge.’
Nobles are sent. Attalus then held the Phrygian scepter;
he refuses the thing to the men of Ausonia.
I shall sing a marvel: the earth shook with a long rumble,
and thus the goddess spoke from her shrine:
’I myself willed to be sought: let there be no delay; send me willing:
Rome is a place worthy that every god should go to it.’
He, trembling at the terror of the sound, said, ’Set out;
you will still be ours: Rome traces back to Phrygian forebears.’
At once countless axes felled the pine-woods,
those the fleeing pious Phrygian once had used.
A thousand hands come together, and a hollow ship, painted
with burnt-in colors, holds the Mother of the heavenly ones.
Most safely she is borne through her son’s own waters,
and reaches the long straits of Phrixus’s sister,
and passes roomy Rhoeteum and the Sigean shores,
and Tenedos, and the old wealth of Eetion.
The Cyclades receive her, Lesbos left astern,
and the wave that breaks on the shoals of Carystus;
she crosses the Icarian sea too, where Icarus, his wings slipped loose,
lost them and gave his name to the vast water.
Then leaving Crete on her left, the Pelopian waters on her right,
she makes for Cythera sacred to Venus.
Hence the Trinacrian sea, where Brontes and Steropes
and the son of Acmon are wont to dip the glowing iron,
and she skirts the African waters, and looks back at the Sardinian
realms from her left-hand oars, and gains Ausonia.
She had reached the mouth where Tiber divides himself
into the deep and swims in a freer plain:
every knight, and the grave senate mixed with the commons,
came to meet her at the mouth of the Tuscan river.
Mothers and daughters and brides advance together,
and those who tend the sacred hearths by their virginity.
The men weary their busy arms at the taut rope:
scarcely does the foreign ship move up against the stream.
The land had long been dry, thirst had scorched the grasses:
the keel, pressed down, settled on the muddy shoal.
Whoever is at the work toils more than his share,
and helps the strong hands with a ringing shout:
she sits like an island fixed in mid-sea;
thunderstruck at the portent the men stand and quail.
Claudia Quinta traced her line from high Clausus
(nor was her beauty unequal to her birth),
chaste indeed, but not believed so: unjust rumor
had wounded her, and she stood charged with a false offense.
Her elegance, her going out with hair dressed many ways,
her ready tongue, told against her before the stern old men.
Her mind, sure of its own rightness, laughed at rumor’s lies,
but we are a crowd quick to believe the worst.
When she had come forward from the line of chaste matrons
and drawn pure river water in her hands,
three times she sprinkles her head, three times lifts her palms to the sky
(whoever looks on thinks she has lost her wits),
and on bended knee fixes her face on the goddess’s image,
and with loosened hair sends forth these sounds:
’Kindly fruitful mother of the gods, receive
your suppliant’s prayers under a sure condition.
I am denied to be chaste: if you condemn me, I shall own I earned it;
beaten by the goddess as judge, I shall pay with my death;
but if guilt is absent, you shall give a pledge of my innocence by the deed,
and, chaste yourself, follow my chaste hands.’
She spoke, and drew the rope with a slight effort;
a marvel — but one the stage too has borne witness to:
the goddess is moved, and follows her leader and praises her by following;
a sound betokening joy is carried to the stars.
They come to the river’s bend (the men of old called it
the Halls of Tiber), where it turns off to the left.
Night came on: they bind the rope to an oaken stump,
and, having taken food, give their bodies to light sleep.
Day came on: they loose the rope from the oaken stump,
but first, setting a hearth, they offered incense,
first they garlanded the stern, and slew a heifer
without blemish, untried by toil and the yoke of mating.
There is a place where the gliding Almo flows into the Tiber
and, the lesser stream, loses its name in the great.
There a hoary priest in purple robe washed
the Mistress and her holy things in the Almo’s waters.
Her attendants howl, the frenzied flute is blown,
and soft hands strike the bull’s-hide drums.
Claudia walks before, most renowned, with joyful face,
believed chaste at last, the goddess her witness;
the goddess herself, seated on the wagon, was driven in through the Capene gate:
the yoked oxen are strewn with fresh flowers.
Nasica received her; the founder of the temple did not last:
Augustus is now its restorer, before him it was Metellus."
Here Erato stopped. There is a pause, while I ask the rest.
"Tell me," I say, "why she seeks her wealth with a small coin."
"The people contributed the bronze from which Metellus
built her shrine," she says; "from that the custom of the coin remains."
I ask why they go to banquets by turns,
and then more than ever crowd the proclaimed feasts.
"Because the Berecyntian changed her seat for the better," she said,
"they court the same omen by changing their seats."
I had pressed on — why the Megalesia should be the first games
in our city — when the goddess (for she perceived it)
said, "She bore the gods: they gave way to their parent,
and the Mother holds the first place of the honor bestowed."
"Why then do we call those who cut themselves Galli,
when the Gallic soil lies so far from Phrygia?"
"Between green Cybele and high Celaenae," she says,
"runs a river of maddening water, Gallus by name.
Whoever drinks of it goes mad: depart far hence, you who have
care for a sound mind: whoever drinks of it goes mad."
"Is there no shame," I said, "in setting a grassy moretum
on the Mistress’s table? Or does some cause lie behind it?"
"The ancients, they say, lived on pure milk and the herbs
the earth bore of its own accord," she says;
"white cheese is mixed with pounded herb,
that the ancient goddess may know the ancient foods."

When next the daughter of Pallas shall shine, the stars
shifted from the sky, and the Moon has unyoked her snowy horses,
whoever shall say, "Long ago, on the hill of Quirinus, Public Fortune
was hallowed on this day," will speak the truth.

It was the third day of the games (I remember), and as I watched,
an older man, next to me in his place, said,
"This is that day on which, on the Libyan shores, Caesar
crushed the treacherous arms of great-souled Juba.
Caesar was my commander, under whom I am proud
to have served as tribune: he presided over my service.
This seat I gained by soldiering, you by peace,
having held office among the Board of Ten."
As we would have said more, we are suddenly parted by a shower:
the hanging Balance was stirring the waters of heaven.
Yet before the last day brings the shows to an end,
sword-bearing Orion will lie sunk beneath the sea.

When next Dawn looks upon victorious Rome,
and the routed star gives place to Phoebus,
the Circus will be thronged with the procession and the throng of gods,
and the first palm will be sought by the wind-swift horses.

Hence the games of Ceres: there is no need of one to point out the cause;
the goddess’s gift and her deserving are plain of themselves.
The bread of the first mortals was the green herbs,
which the earth gave with none to coax it;
and now they plucked the living grass from the turf,
now the treetop with its tender leaf was their feast.
Later the acorn became known: it was well, the acorn once found,
and the hard oak held magnificent wealth.
Ceres first, calling man to better nourishment,
exchanged the acorn for a more useful food.
She forced the bulls to offer their necks to the yoke:
then first the upturned soil saw the sun.
Bronze was prized, the Chalybian ore lay hidden:
alas, it ought to have stayed hidden forever.
Ceres rejoices in peace; and you, farmers, pray
for unending peace and a peace-bringing leader.
You may give the goddess the spelt and the honor of the dancing salt-grain,
and grains of incense on the old hearths;
and, if incense is lacking, kindle oiled pine-torches:
small things please good Ceres, if only they be pure.
Girded attendants, take the knives away from the ox:
let the ox plow; sacrifice the slothful sow.
A neck fit for the yoke is not to be struck by the axe:
let it live and toil often on the hard ground.
The place itself demands that I tell the rape of the maiden:
much you will recognize, in a few things you will need teaching.
The Trinacrian land runs out into the vast sea on three crags,
having got its name from the lie of the place,
a home dear to Ceres: she owns many cities there,
among which is Henna, fertile in its tilled soil.
Cool Arethusa had summoned the mothers of the gods:
the golden goddess too had come to the sacred feast.
Her daughter, attended as usual by her girl-companions,
wandered with bare foot through her own meadows.
Beneath a shady valley is a place, wet with much spray
from water leaping down from on high.
There were as many colors there as nature holds,
and the ground shone, painted with varied bloom.
As soon as she saw it, "Companions, come near," she said,
"and bring back with me your laps full of flowers."
The worthless spoil lures their girlish minds,
and the toil is not felt for the eagerness.
This one fills baskets woven of pliant osier,
this her bosom, that one weighs down her loosened folds;
that one gathers marigolds, this cares for the violet-beds,
that one nips the poppy-heads off with her nail;
these you hold, hyacinth; those you delay, amaranth;
some love thyme, some the wild poppy and the melilot;
most plucked is the rose, and there are nameless flowers too:
she herself gathers the slender crocus and the white lilies.
In the zeal of picking they go little by little farther,
and by chance no companion followed her mistress.
Her uncle sees her, and seeing carries her swiftly off,
and bears her to his realm with his dark-blue horses.
She indeed kept crying, "Oh, dearest mother,
I am carried off!" and had torn her own dress;
meanwhile a road opens for Dis, for his horses, unaccustomed,
scarcely endure the daylight.
But her band of age-mates, the attendants heaped with flowers,
cry, "Persephone, come to your gifts!"
When, so called, she is silent, they fill the mountains with their howls,
and strike their bared breasts with mournful hand.
Ceres is stunned by the wailing (she had just reached Henna),
and at once, "Wretched me! Daughter," she said, "where are you?"
Out of her wits she is swept along, as we are used to hear
the Thracian maenads go with streaming hair.
As a mother lows for her calf snatched from the udder
and seeks her young through all the woodland,
so the goddess holds back no groans, and stirred to a run
is borne along, and begins from your fields, Henna.
Then she found the footprints of the girl’s tread
and saw the ground pressed by the familiar weight;
perhaps that day would have been the last of her wandering,
had not the swine confused the tracks she found.
And now in her course she passes the Leontini and the streams
of Amenanus and your banks, grassy Acis:
she passes Cyane too, and the springs of gentle Anapus,
and you, Gela, not to be approached for your eddies.
She had left Ortygia and Megara and Pantagias,
and where the sea takes in the Symaethian waters,
and the caves of the Cyclopes, scorched by the furnaces within,
and the place that bears the name of the curved sickle,
and Himera and Didyme and Acragas and Tauromenium,
and Mylae, glad pastures of the sacred cattle:
hence she comes to Camerina and Thapsus and the vale of Helorus,
and where Eryx lies ever open to the West Wind.
And now she had traversed Pelorias and Lilybaeum, and now
Pachynus, the chief horns of her own land:
wherever she goes, she fills all the places with wretched plaints,
as the bird mourns lost Itys.
And by turns now "Persephone!" now "Daughter!" she cries,
she cries and calls each name in turn;
but neither does Persephone hear Ceres nor the daughter the mother,
and by turns each name dies on the air;
and whether she saw a shepherd or one tilling the fields, her one
question was, "Did some girl pass this way?"
Now one color is in all things, and all are veiled in dark,
now the watchful dogs have fallen silent:
high Aetna lies over the mouth of vast Typhoeus,
whose breathed-out fires set the ground ablaze;
there she kindles twin pines for a torch:
hence even now a torch is carried at Ceres’ rites.
There is a cave, rough with the fabric of eaten-out pumice,
a region not for man, not to be approached by beast:
the moment she comes there, she yokes bridled serpents to her car
and dry-shod roams across the sea-waters.
She escapes the Syrtes and you, Zanclaean Charybdis,
and you, dogs of Nisus’s daughter, shipwrecking monsters,
and the Adriatic spreading wide, and two-sea’d Corinth:
so she came to your harbors, land of Attica.
Here first she sat, most grieving, on a cold rock:
that rock the sons of Cecrops even now call the Mournful Stone.
Under the open sky she held out, unmoving, for many days,
enduring both the moon and the rain.
Each place has its own destiny: what is now called Ceres’ Eleusis,
this was the fields of old Celeus.
He carries home acorns and blackberries shaken from the brambles
and dry wood for the hearths that will burn.
His little daughter was driving two she-goats down from the hill,
and a tender son lay sick in the cradle.
"Mother," said the girl (the goddess was moved by the name of mother),
"what do you do, unattended, in these lonely places?"
The old man too stopped, though his burden pressed him, and begs
that she come under the roof of his cottage, however small.
She refuses (she had feigned an old woman and bound her hair with a cap);
to him as he insists she gives back such words:
"May you go safe and ever a parent; my daughter has been snatched from me.
Alas, how much better is your lot than mine!"
She spoke, and like a tear (for it is not for gods to weep)
a shining drop fell upon her warm breast.
The soft-hearted girl and old man weep together;
of whom these were the words of the righteous old man:
"So may the daughter you seek, who was snatched, be safe for you;
rise, and do not scorn the roof of our scanty cottage."
To him the goddess said, "Lead on; you have found how to compel me,"
and lifts herself from the rock and follows the old man.
The guide tells his companion how sick his son is,
how he gets no sleep and lies awake in his sufferings.
She, before entering the humble household, gathers
the sleep-bringing soft poppy from the country ground.
While she gathers it, they say she tasted with forgetful palate,
and unwittingly broke her long fast;
and because she ended her fasting at the onset of night,
the initiates take their meal when the stars appear.
When she crossed the threshold, she sees all things full of mourning;
already there was no hope of the boy’s recovery.
Having greeted the mother (the mother is called Metanira),
she deigned to join the boy’s mouth to her own.
The pallor goes, and they see sudden strength in his body:
so great a vigor came from the heavenly mouth.
The whole house is glad — that is, mother and father
and daughter: those three were the whole house.
Soon they set out a meal, curds melted in milk
and fruit and golden honey in its combs.
Kindly Ceres abstains, and gives you the poppies, causes of sleep,
to drink with warm milk, boy.
It was the middle of night and the silence of peaceful sleep:
she took up Triptolemus into her lap,
and three times stroked him with her hand, said three charms,
charms not to be repeated by a mortal voice,
and on the hearth covered the boy’s body with living embers,
that the fire might purge away the human burden.
The foolishly loving mother is shaken from sleep, and frantic
cries, "What are you doing?" and snatches his limbs from the fire.
To her the goddess said, "Though you meant no crime, you have done one:
my gifts are made void by a mother’s fear.
This boy indeed will be mortal: but he will be the first to plow
and to sow and to take the rewards from the tilled ground."
She spoke, and going out trails a cloud, and crosses
to her serpents, and Ceres is borne up on her winged car.
She leaves exposed Sunium and the Piraeus, safe in its recess,
and the shore that lies on the right hand;
hence she enters the Aegean, where she sees all the Cyclades,
and skirts the grasping Ionian and the Icarian,
and through the cities of Asia makes for the long Hellespont,
and roams on high a path varied by its places.
For now she looks down on the incense-gathering Arabians, now the Indians;
here the Libyan, here Meroe and the parched land lie below;
now she comes to the western lands — the Rhine, the Rhone, the Po,
and you, Tiber, father-to-be of a mighty water.
Where am I carried? It is endless to tell the lands she wandered:
no place in the world was passed over by Ceres.
She wanders in the sky too, and addresses the constellations
nearest the cold pole, exempt from the clear sea:
"Parrhasian stars — for you can know all things,
since you never sink beneath the sea-waters —
show Persephone, my daughter, to her wretched parent."
She had spoken. To her Helice gives back such words:
"The night is clear of the crime; ask the Sun about the maiden
snatched away, who sees the deeds of day far and wide."
The Sun, approached, says, "She whom you seek, that you toil not in vain,
wedded to Jove’s brother, holds the third realm."
Having long complained to herself, she thus addressed the Thunderer
(and there were great signs of grief in her face):
"If you remember by whom Proserpina was born to me,
she ought to have half of your care.
The world wandered over, only the wrong of the deed is known:
the ravisher keeps the rewards of his crime.
But Persephone does not deserve a robber for a husband,
nor was a son-in-law to be won for us in this way.
What heavier thing should I have borne, a captive with Gyges victor,
than I have now borne with you holding the scepter of heaven?
But let him go unpunished — I shall bear this unavenged;
let him give her back and mend his former deeds with new."
Jupiter soothes her, and excuses the deed by love:
"nor is he a son-in-law for us to be ashamed of," he says;
"I am no nobler: my palace is set in heaven,
one brother holds the waters, the other the empty void.
But if perhaps your heart cannot be changed,
and it stands fixed to break the bonds of the once-joined bed,
let us try this too, if only she has stayed fasting;
if not, she will be the wife of an infernal husband."
Bidden, the Wand-bearer goes to Tartarus on wings put on,
and returns swifter than hope, and reports for certain what he saw:
"The stolen one," he said, "broke her fast with three seeds
that the Punic apple hides under its tough rind."
The grieving parent felt no less pain than if she had just been snatched,
and was scarcely restored after a long while.
And thus, "Heaven is not habitable for me either," she said;
"bid me too be received in the Taenarian valley."
And she would have done it, had not Jupiter agreed
that for twice three months she should be in heaven.
Then at last Ceres recovered her face and her spirit,
and set garlands of grain-ears on her hair:
and a generous harvest came up in the fields that had lain idle,
and the threshing-floor scarcely held the heaped wealth.
White suits Ceres: at the Cerialia take up
white garments; now the use of the dark fleece is away.

Jupiter the Victor by surname seizes the April Ides:
on this day his temple was given him.
On this day too, if I mistake not, Liberty began
to have her own halls, most worthy of our people.

On the following day, sailor, seek safe harbors:
the wind from the west will come mixed with hail.
Be that as it may, yet on this day, amid the hail, Caesar
struck down by his soldiery the arms of Mutina.

When the third day after Venus’s Ides has risen,
pontiffs, sacrifice with a pregnant cow.
A forda is a cow that carries young, called fruitful from her carrying;
hence too, they think, the fetus has its name.
Now the flock is pregnant, the earth too pregnant with seed:
to full Earth a full victim is given.
Part falls on the citadel of Jove; each curia receives
thirty cows and is drenched, sprinkled with abundant gore.
But when the attendants have snatched the calves from the wombs
and given the cut innards to the smoking hearths,
the eldest-born Virgin burns the calves in fire,
that on the day of Pales that ash may purge the people.
In King Numa’s reign, the yield not answering the labor,
the prayers of the cheated farmer came to nothing.
For now the year was dry with cold north winds,
now the field ran riot with ceaseless rain;
often Ceres failed her owner in the first blades,
and the light oat-straw stood on the besieged soil,
and the flock bore unripe young before their time,
and the lamb in being born often killed the ewe.
An old wood, long unviolated by any axe,
stood, left sacred to the Maenalian god:
he gave answers, to a quiet mind, in the silent
nights; here King Numa sacrifices two sheep.
The first falls to Faunus, the second falls to gentle Sleep;
both fleeces are spread on the hard ground.
Twice his unshorn head is sprinkled with spring-water,
twice he presses his temples with beech-leaves.
The use of love is away, nor is it lawful to set flesh
on the table, nor is there any ring on his fingers;
covered in rough garb, he lays his body on the new fleeces,
the god adored with his own words.
Meanwhile Night comes, her calm brow wreathed with poppy,
and draws black dreams along with her;
Faunus is there, and, pressing the sheep’s fleeces with his hard foot,
uttered such words from the right side of the bed:
"By the death of two cattle, king, must Earth be appeased:
let one heifer give two lives to the rites."
His rest is shaken off by terror: Numa turns the vision over,
and ponders within him the riddles and the dark commands.
His wife, most dear to the grove, frees him from his wandering
and said, "You are asked for the innards of a pregnant cow."
The innards of a pregnant cow are given; a more fruitful year
comes on, and earth and flock bear their increase.
This day Cytherea once bade go more swiftly,
and drove the loosed horses on headlong,
that, with the next day’s first light, prosperous wars
might give the young Augustus the title of command.

But now for you the fourth Morning-star looks back on the passed Ides;
on this night the Hyades hold the sea.

When the third day after the Hyades’ setting has risen,
the Circus will have its horses parted in their stalls.
Why then the foxes, let loose, should carry burning torches
bound to their backs, the reason I must teach.
Carseoli is a cold land, not fit for bearing olives,
but a soil clever at grain crops;
by this road I was making for the Paeligni, my native fields,
small, but ever watered by unfailing streams.
I entered the familiar house of an old host;
Phoebus had now taken the yokes from his spent horses.
He used to tell me many things, but this among them,
by which my present work might be furnished:
"In this field," he said (and pointed the field out), "a thrifty
farm-wife with her hard husband had a little plot.
He worked his own ground, whether the task was the plow,
or the curved sickle, or the two-pronged hoe;
she now swept the cottage propped on a post,
now set the eggs to be warmed under the mother’s feathers,
or gathers green mallows or white mushrooms,
or warms the low hearth with a welcome fire;
and yet she keeps her arms busy at the constant loom,
and makes ready arms against the threats of cold.
Her son was wanton in his first years,
and had added two years to twice five.
He catches a fox in the far hollow of a willow-thicket:
it had carried off many birds of the farmyard.
He wraps the captive in straw and hay and brings
fire near: it escapes his burning hands;
where it fled, it set ablaze the fields clothed with crops;
the breeze gave strength to the ruinous flames.
The deed is gone, the memorials remain: for even now
a Carseolan law forbids the fox to go free,
and, that it may pay the penalty, this race burns at the Cerialia,
and in the very way it ruined the crops, it perishes itself."

When next the saffron mother of Memnon comes
on her rosy horses to look upon the open lands,
the sun departs from the leader of the woolly flock, who betrayed Helle:
as he goes forth, a greater victim is at hand.
Whether it be a cow or a bull is not easy to tell:
the fore part appears, the hinder parts lie hidden.
But whether this sign is a bull or a female,
against Juno’s will it holds a gift of love.

Night has gone, and dawn rises: I am summoned to the Parilia;
not summoned in vain, if kindly Pales favor me.
Kindly Pales, favor me as I sing the shepherds’ rites,
if I attend your festival with my service.
Surely I have often carried in a full hand the calf’s ash
and the bean-stalks, the roasted means of cleansing;
surely I have leapt across the flames set three in a row,
and the wet laurel-branch has flung its sprinkled water.
The goddess is moved, and favors the work. The ship leaves the docks;
already my sails have their winds.
Go, people, seek the fumigant from the virgin altar;
Vesta will give it, and by Vesta’s gift you will be pure.
The blood of the horse will be the fumigant, and the calf’s ash,
the third thing the empty stalk of the hard bean.
Shepherd, purify your sated sheep at the first twilight:
let water sprinkle first, and the besom sweep the ground;
let the sheepfolds be decked with leaves and fastened boughs,
and a long garland cover the adorned doors.
Let blue smoke rise from pure sulphur,
and let the ewe, touched by the smoking sulphur, bleat.
Burn the male olive-wood and pine and Sabine herbs,
and let the scorched laurel crackle amid the hearths;
and let cakes of millet, and a little basket of millet, follow:
the country goddess is glad above all in this food.
Add the feast and its milk-pail, and, a portion of the feast cut off,
pray with warm milk to woodland Pales.
Say: "Take thought alike for the flock and the flock’s masters:
let harm be driven off and flee from my stalls.
If I have grazed on holy ground, or sat beneath a sacred tree,
or my sheep unknowing has cropped fodder from the graves;
if I have entered a forbidden grove, or by my eyes the nymphs
and the half-goat god were put to flight;
if my sickle has stripped the grove of a shady bough,
to give a basket of leaves to a sick ewe,
forgive the fault: nor let it count against me, while the hail comes down,
to have set my flock beneath a country shrine.
Nor let it harm me to have troubled the pools: forgive me, nymphs,
that a stirring hoof made the waters murky.
You, goddess, on our behalf appease the springs and the spring-powers,
you the gods scattered through every grove.
May we see neither the dryads nor the bathing of Diana,
nor Faunus, when he presses the fields at noon.
Drive diseases far off; let men and herds be sound,
and sound too the watchful dogs, the provident pack.
Let me drive home no fewer than there were at morning,
nor groan as I bring back fleeces snatched by the wolf.
Let cruel famine be away: let grass and leaves abound,
and waters to wash the limbs and waters to drink.
Let me press full udders, let the cheese bring me coin,
and let the loose wickerwork give passage to the liquid whey;
let the ram be lustful, and the ewe give back the seed she has conceived,
and let there be many a lamb in my fold;
let wool come forth that will chafe no girls’ hands,
soft and fit anywhere for tender fingers.
Let what I pray come to pass, and let us make, year by year,
great cakes for Pales, mistress of the shepherds."
With these words the goddess is to be appeased: these, turned to the east,
say four times, and wash your hands in living dew.
Then you may, with a wooden bowl set out as if a mixing-bowl,
drink snowy milk and the purple must;
and soon through the burning heaps of crackling straw
fling your nimble limbs with quick foot.
The custom is set forth; the origin of the custom remains for me:
the crowd of explanations makes me doubt and checks my undertaking.
Devouring fire purges all things and boils the dross from metals:
is it for this that it purges the sheep with their master?
Or, because the contrary seeds of all things
are two discordant gods, fire and water,
did the fathers join the elements, and think it fitting
to touch the body with fire and with sprinkled water?
Or, because in these is the cause of life — which the exile loses,
by which one becomes a new bride — do they count these two as great?
I scarcely believe it; there are those who think it harks back
to Phaethon and the excessive waters of Deucalion.
Some too relate that, when shepherds struck stone on stone,
a spark suddenly leapt forth;
the first indeed perished, the second was caught in straw:
is this the warrant the Parilian flame has?
Or did the piety of Aeneas rather make this custom,
to whom the fire gave a harmless path through the conquered city?
Yet is it nearer the truth that, when Rome was founded,
the Lares were bidden moved to new homes,
and that, changing house, they set fire under the rustic roofs
and under the cottage that was to be left,
that the flock leapt through the flames, the farmers leapt?
which is done even now, Rome, on your birthday.
Chance itself makes the occasion for the poet: the City’s founding
comes round; be present, great Quirinus, at your own deeds.
Now the brother of Numitor had paid the penalty, and all
the shepherd commons was under the twin leaders;
it pleased both to gather the countrymen and to set walls:
it is disputed which of the two should set the walls.
"There is no need," said Romulus, "of any contest;
great is the faith in birds: let us try the birds."
The plan pleases: one goes to the rocks of woody Palatine;
the other goes at dawn to the Aventine peak.
Remus sees six birds, this one twice six in order;
they keep the pact, and Romulus has the rule of the city.
A fit day is chosen on which to mark the walls with the plow:
the rites of Pales were at hand; from them the work is begun.
A trench is dug to the solid ground, fruits are thrown into the bottom
and earth fetched from the neighboring soil;
the trench is filled with earth, and on the full trench an altar set,
and a new hearth is busy with kindled fire.
Then, bearing down on the plow-handle, he marks the walls with a furrow;
a white cow with a snowy ox bore the yoke.
These were the king’s words: "Jupiter, and father Mavors,
and mother Vesta, be present as I found the city,
and all you gods whom it is right to call on, give heed:
under your auspices let this work rise for me.
Long be its age, and its power mistress of the earth,
and under it be both the rising and the setting day."
So he prayed; Jupiter gave omens with thunder on the left,
and lightnings hurled from the left of the sky.
Glad at the augury the citizens lay the foundations,
and in a short time there was a new wall.
Celer urges on the work, whom Romulus himself had summoned,
and had said, "Celer, let these things be your charge:
let no one cross either the walls or the trench cut by the share;
hand over to death whoever dares such a thing."
Not knowing this, Remus began to scorn the low walls,
and to say, "With these will the people be safe?"
Without delay he leapt across: Celer with his spade strikes the bold man down;
he, bloodied, presses the hard ground.
When the king learned this, he swallows the tears that rose within
and keeps the wound shut in his breast.
He will not weep openly, and keeps to a brave example,
and says, "So let the enemy cross my walls."
Yet he grants the funeral rites; nor can he any longer
hold back his weeping, and the hidden love is laid bare;
and he pressed last kisses on the bier set down,
and says, "Brother, taken from me against my will, farewell,"
and anointed the limbs about to burn: as he did, so did
Faustulus and grieving Acca, her hair unbound.
Then the Quirites, not yet so named, wept for the youth;
last, the flame was set beneath the lamented pyre.
The city rises (who then could have believed it of any?)
destined to set a victor’s foot upon the lands.
May you rule all things, and be ever under a great Caesar,
and often have many of this name;
and as often as you stand aloft over a subdued world,
let all things be lower than your shoulders.

I have told of Pales: I will tell likewise of the Vinalia;
yet one day lies midway between the two.
Worship the godhead of Venus, you common girls:
Venus is much suited to the earnings of those who ply the trade.
Ask, with incense given, for beauty and the people’s favor,
ask for charms and words fit for jest;
and give your mistress the pleasing mint with her own myrtle
and the rush-bindings wrapped with arranged roses.
Now it is fitting that the temple nearest the Colline gate be thronged;
it takes its name from the Sicilian hill,
and when Claudius took Syracuse of Arethusa by arms
and captured you too in war, Eryx,
Venus was brought over by the song of the long-lived Sibyl,
and chose to be worshipped in the city of her own stock.
Why then they call the Vinalia a feast of Venus,
you ask, and why this day is Jupiter’s.
Whether Turnus or Aeneas should be Latian Amata’s son-in-law
was the cause of war: Turnus entreats Etruscan strength.
Mezentius was famed, and fierce in the arms he had taken up,
and great on horse, or greater on foot;
him the Rutuli and Turnus try to win to their
side. Against this the Tuscan leader speaks thus:
"My valor stands me at no small price: I call to witness my wounds
and my arms, which I have often sprinkled with my own blood.
You who seek my aid, share with me no great
rewards — only the next must from your vats.
There is no delay in the service: yours to give, ours to win.
How would Aeneas wish these things denied to me!"
The Rutuli had assented. Mezentius puts on his arms,
Aeneas puts on his, and addresses Jove:
"The enemy’s vintage is vowed to the Tyrrhenian king:
Jupiter, you shall have the must from the Latin vine-shoot."
The better vows prevail: huge Mezentius falls
and with indignant breast beats the ground.
Autumn had come, grimy with the trodden grapes:
the wine that was due is duly rendered to Jove.
Hence the day is called Vinalia; Jupiter claims it,
and is glad to be present among his own feasts.

When April will have the six days that remain,
the season of spring will be at the middle of its course,
and in vain will you seek the ram of Athamas’s daughter Helle,
and rains give their signs, and the Dog-star rises.
On this day, as I was returning from Nomentum to Rome,
a white-robed crowd blocked my way in mid-road:
a flamen was going to the grove of ancient Robigo,
about to give the innards of a dog and of a sheep to the flames.
At once I drew near, that I might not be ignorant of the rite;
your flamen, Quirinus, uttered these words:
"Rough Robigo, spare the corn of Ceres,
and let the light blade-tip quiver on the surface of the ground.
Let the crops, nursed by the favorable stars of heaven,
grow, until they become fit for the sickles.
Your power is no light thing: the grain you have marked,
the farmer counts, grieving, among his losses;
neither winds nor rains have harmed Ceres so much,
nor does she so grow pale, scorched by marble-white frost,
as when Titan heats the damp stalks:
then is the moment for your wrath, dread goddess.
Spare, I pray, and take your scaly hands from the harvests,
and harm not the tilled crops; that you can harm is enough.
Embrace not the tender corn, but the hard iron,
and what can destroy others, destroy first.
More usefully you will gnaw swords and harmful weapons:
there is no need of them; the world keeps holiday.
Now let the hoes and the hard mattock and the curved share,
the wealth of the field, shine; let rust foul the weapons,
and let anyone trying to draw the blade from the sheath
feel it stuck fast by long disuse.
But do not you violate Ceres, and may the farmer ever
be able to pay his vows to you in your absence."
He had spoken; on his right was a napkin of loose nap
and a casket of incense with a bowl of pure wine.
He gave incense and wine to the hearths, and the fibers of a sheep,
and the foul innards of an ill-omened dog (I saw it).
Then to me, "You ask why a strange victim is given at the rites?"
(I had asked) "learn the reason," the flamen says.
"There is the Dog, the Icarian they call it, at whose rising
the parched earth thirsts and the crop is hurried on too fast:
for the starry Dog this dog is laid upon the altar,
and there is no ground for the deed but the name."

When the Tithonian goddess, leaving the brother of Phrygian Assaracus,
has thrice lifted her radiance over the boundless world,
the goddess comes wreathed with a thousand garlands of varied flowers;
the stage takes on the manner of freer jest.
The rite of Flora runs over into the Kalends of May as well:
then I shall take it up again; now a greater task presses me.
Take the day, Vesta: Vesta has been received on a kinsman’s
threshold; so the righteous fathers ordained.
Phoebus has a share: a second share fell to Vesta:
what is left over from these two, he himself, a third, holds.
Stand, Palatine laurels, and let the house stand
bordered with oak: one house holds three eternal gods.

You ask from where I think the month of May took its name?
The cause is not yet plainly known to me.
As a traveler stands uncertain, not knowing which way he must go,
when he sees a road opening on every side,
so, since it is granted that different causes can be given,
I do not know which way to turn, and the very abundance harms me.
Tell me, you who hold the springs of Aganippe’s Hippocrene,
the welcome tokens of the Medusan horse.
The goddesses disagreed; of them Polyhymnia began
first (the others fall silent, and mark her words in their minds):
"After chaos, as soon as the three bodies were given to the world
and the whole mass withdrew into new forms,
earth sank by its own weight and drew the seas down with it,
but lightness bore the sky to the highest places;
the sun too, with the stars, held back by no weight,
and you, Moon-horses, leaped forth.
But neither did earth long yield to sky, nor the rest of the stars
to Phoebus: every honor stood equal.
Often some god, up from the common crowd, dared
to sit on the throne which you, Saturn, held;
no newcomer god joined his side to Ocean’s,
and Themis was often shown to the last place,
until Honor and seemly Reverence with her calm face
laid their bodies on lawful couches.
From these Majesty was born; these she counted her parents,
and on the day she was brought to birth, she was great.
Without delay she took her seat, lofty in mid-Olympus,
golden, conspicuous in her purple robe;
Modesty and Fear sat down with her. You would see every
divine power compose its looks toward her.
At once respect for honors entered their minds:
the deserving win their worth, and no one is pleased with himself alone.
This state of things held in heaven for many years,
until the elder god fell from the citadel by fate.
Earth brought forth fierce offspring, monstrous prodigies, the Giants,
who would dare to march on Jupiter’s house.
She gave them a thousand hands and snakes for legs,
and said, ’Lift your weapons against the great gods.’
They made ready to pile mountains up to the highest stars
and to harry great Jupiter with war;
Jupiter, hurling thunderbolts from heaven’s citadel,
turned the vast masses back upon their makers.
By these arms the Majesty of the gods, well defended,
survives, and from that time remains honored.
She sits beside Jupiter thereafter, is Jupiter’s most faithful guard,
and makes Jupiter’s scepter feared without force.
She came to earth as well: Romulus worshipped her
and Numa, then others, each in his own time.
She guards fathers and mothers in dutiful honor,
she comes as companion to boys and to maidens;
she lends grace to the granted fasces and the curule ivory,
she rides high in triumph behind garlanded horses."
Polyhymnia had finished her speech: Clio approved the words,
and so did Thalia, skilled at the curved lyre.
Urania takes it up: all the rest made silence,
and no voice but hers could be heard.
"Great once was the reverence for a gray head,
and the old man’s wrinkle was held at its proper worth.
The young men did the work of Mars and waged spirited wars,
and stood on guard, each for his gods;
old age, lesser in strength and not fit for bearing arms,
often brought aid to the fatherland by counsel;
the Senate-house then opened only after late years,
and the Senate carries the gentle name of age.
An elder gave laws to the people, and the age
at which office may be sought was fixed by definite laws,
and he walked among young men in the middle, they not resenting it,
and on the inner side, if he had a single companion.
Who would dare to speak words deserving a blush before an old man?
Long old age conferred a censor’s office.
Romulus saw this and called the chosen hearts the fathers:
to these the highest affairs of the new city were referred.
From this I am moved to think the elders gave their name to May,
and looked after their own time of life.
And Numitor could have said, ’Romulus, give this month
to the old men,’ and the grandson did not gainsay his grandfather.
Nor does the month that follows hold a light pledge
of the design: June, named from the young men’s name."
Then thus, her neglected hair bound round with ivy,
Calliope, first of her choir, began:
"Ocean once married the Titaness Tethys,
he who girds the earth, far as it spreads, with flowing waters;
from these Pleione was born, and joined, as the tale runs,
with sky-bearing Atlas, and bore the Pleiades.
Of these Maia is said to have outdone her sisters in beauty
and to have lain with Jupiter most high.
She, on the ridge of cypress-bearing Cyllene, bore him
who travels the airy road on winged foot;
the Arcadians duly worship him, and rushing Ladon and huge
Maenalus, the land believed older than the moon.
Evander, an exile from Arcadia, had come
into the Latin fields, and had brought his gods aboard.
Here, where Rome now is, the head of the world, were trees and grass
and a few cattle and a hut here and there.
When they had come there, "Halt," said his prophetic mother,
"for that countryside will be the seat of empire."
The Nonacrian hero obeys both his mother and the seer,
and halted, a guest on foreign soil;
and many rites indeed, but first the rites of two-horned Faunus
and of the wing-footed god he taught these peoples.
Half-goat Faunus, you are worshipped by the girt Luperci,
when their cut thongs purify the crowded streets;
but you gave the month its name from your mother’s name,
inventor of the curved lyre, fit company for thieves.
Nor is this your first dutiful deed: you are thought to have given
seven strings, the Pleiades’ number, to the lyre."
She too had finished: she was praised by her sisters’ voices.
What am I to do? Every part of the throng has an equal claim.
May the Muses’ favor rest on me equally,
and let none be praised by me either more or less.

Let the work rise from Jupiter. On the first night I must watch
the star that did its service to Jupiter’s cradle:
the rainy sign of the Olenian She-goat is born;
she holds the heaven as reward for the milk she gave.
The Naiad Amalthea, famous on Cretan Ida,
is said to have hidden Jupiter in the woods.
She had a beautiful she-goat, mother of two kids,
a thing to mark among the Dictaean flocks,
with high horns curving back over her own spine,
and an udder such as Jupiter’s nurse might have.
She gave the god milk; but she broke a horn against a tree,
and was stripped of half her splendor.
The nymph took it up and wreathed it with fresh herbs
and brought it, filled with fruit, to Jupiter’s lips.
He, when he held the affairs of heaven and sat
on his father’s throne, and nothing was greater than unconquered Jove,
made the nurse into a constellation, and her fertile horn
into stars, which even now bears its mistress’s name.
The Kalends of May saw an altar set up
to the Lares Praestites and small images of the gods:
Curius had vowed them, true, but much does age
pull down, and long years injure even stone.
The reason for their surname had been
that they keep all things safe beneath their watch:
they stand for us as well and guard the City’s walls,
and are present and bring help.
But a dog, fashioned of the same stone, stood
before their feet: what cause had it for standing with the Lar?
Each guards the house, each is faithful to its master too:
the crossroads are dear to the god, the crossroads dear to the dog.
Both the Lar and Diana’s pack rout thieves:
the Lares keep watch all night, and the dogs keep watch.
I was looking for the twin gods’ twin images,
fallen to ruin by the force of aged delay:
a thousand Lares, and the Genius of the leader who gave them,
the City has, and the wards worship the threefold powers.
Where am I being carried? The month of August will grant me
the right to this song: meanwhile the Good Goddess must be sung.
There is a natural mass of rock; the thing has named the place:
they call it the Rock; it is a goodly part of the hill.
On this Remus had taken his stand in vain, at the time when
you birds gave the first signs to his brother on the Palatine;
there, on the gently sloping ridge, the fathers founded
a temple that abhors the eyes of men.
An heiress of the old name of the Crassi dedicates it,
who in her maiden body had endured no man:
Livia restored it, that she might not fail to imitate
her husband and follow him in every part.

When the next dawn, the stars of Hyperion driven off,
lifts its rosy lamp on the morning horses,
the cold north-wester will stroke the topmost ears of grain,
and white sails will be spread from the Calabrian waters.
But as soon as the dim dusk leads on the night,
no part of the Hyades is hidden from the whole flock.
The Bull’s face gleams, radiant with seven flames,
which the Greek sailor calls Hyades, from the rain;
some think they nursed Bacchus, some have believed
them granddaughters of Tethys and old Ocean.
Atlas did not yet stand with shoulders weighed by Olympus
when Hyas was born, a sight for his beauty:
Aethra, of Ocean’s stock, brought him forth in ripe labor
and the nymphs, but Hyas was born first.
While his down is new, he frightens the timorous deer
with terror, and the hare is kindly prey to him;
but after his manhood grew with the years, he dares
to close hand-to-hand with boars and shaggy lionesses;
and while he seeks the lair and cubs of a lioness with young,
he himself became the bloody prey of the Libyan beast.
His mother wept for Hyas, his mournful sisters for Hyas,
and Atlas, soon to set his neck beneath the pole.
Yet both parents were outdone by the sisters’ love:
their grief won them the sky, and Hyas gave the name.
"Mother of flowers, be here, to be honored with merry games:
I had put off your portion in the month before.
You begin in April, you cross over into May’s season:
one month holds you as it flees, the next as it comes.
Since the borders of the months are yours and yield to you,
the one or the other suits your praises.
The Circus games run out into this month, and the palm acclaimed
in the theaters; let this song too go with the Circus show.
Teach me yourself who you are: the opinion of men is treacherous;
you will be the best author of your own name."
So I; and so the goddess answered my questions
(as she speaks, she breathes spring roses from her lips):
"I was Chloris, who am called Flora: the Greek letter of my name
has been corrupted by the Latin sound.
I was Chloris, a nymph of the happy field, where you hear
the estate of fortunate men once lay.
What my beauty was, it shames a modest woman to tell;
but it found a god for a son-in-law to my mother.
It was spring, I was wandering; Zephyrus saw me, I was going away;
he pursues, I flee: he was the stronger.
And Boreas had given his brother every right to ravish,
having dared to bear off his prize from the house of Erechtheus.
Yet he makes amends for the force by giving me a wife’s name,
and in my marriage-bed there is no complaint.
I enjoy spring forever: the year is always at its brightest,
the tree keeps its leaves, the ground its pasture always.
In the fields of my dowry I have a fertile garden;
a breeze warms it, a spring of clear water waters it:
my husband filled it with flowers of noble stock,
and said, "Goddess, hold the rule of the flower."
Often I have wished to count the marshaled colors,
and could not: the abundance was greater than counting.
As soon as the dewy frost is shaken from the leaves
and the dappled foliage warms beneath the rays,
the Hours gather, girt in painted robes,
and pick our gifts into light baskets;
at once the Graces draw near, and weave garlands
and wreaths to entwine the hair of the gods.
I first scattered new seeds across the boundless nations:
before, the earth was of a single color;
I first made a flower from Therapnaean blood,
and the lament stays written on its petal.
You too have a name through the cultivated gardens, Narcissus,
unhappy that you were not one and another at once.
Why should I tell of Crocus, or Attis, or the son of Cinyras,
from whose wounds, through me, a beauty rises?
Mars too, if you do not know it, was brought forth by my arts:
may Jupiter, as still he does, never come to know it, I pray.
Holy Juno grieved that Jupiter had had no need
of her service, with Minerva born without a mother.
She was going to complain to Ocean of her husband’s doings;
weary with the effort, she stopped at my doors.
As soon as I saw her, ’What has brought you, daughter of Saturn?’
I said. She tells the place she is bound for;
and she added the cause. I tried to console her with friendly words.
’My trouble,’ she says, ’is not to be eased with words.
If Jupiter has become a father without the use of a wife,
and holds both titles in himself alone,
why should I despair of becoming a mother without a husband,
and bearing, untouched, provided I stay chaste?
I will try every drug in the wide lands,
and I will ransack the seas and the gulfs of Tartarus.’
Her voice was in mid-course: I wore the look of one who hesitates.
’You seem, nymph, to have some power,’ she says.
Three times I wished to promise help, three times my tongue held back:
great Jupiter’s anger was the cause of my fear.
’Bring help, I beg,’ she said, ’the giver will be kept hidden,’
and she calls to witness the power of the Stygian water.
’What you seek,’ I say, ’a flower sent to me from the Olenian fields
will give: it is the only one of its kind in my gardens.
He who gave it said, "Touch even a barren heifer with this,
she will be a mother": I touched, and at once she was a mother.’
At once I plucked the clinging flower with my thumb;
she is touched, and at the touch conceives within her.
And now, heavy with child, she enters Thrace and the left of the Propontis,
and gains her wish, and Mars had been created.
He, mindful of the birth he owed to me, said, ’Have you too
a place in the city of Romulus.’
Perhaps you think my realm is only in tender garlands.
My power touches the fields as well.
If the crops have flowered well, the threshing-floor will be rich;
if the vine has flowered well, there will be wine;
if the olives have flowered well, the year is at its brightest,
and the orchard takes its yield from this season.
Once the blossom is harmed, the vetches and the beans perish,
and your lentils perish, foreign Nile.
Wines too, laid down with labor in great cellars,
flower, and a mist covers the tops of the jars.
Honey is my gift: I call the winged makers of honey
to the violet and the clover and the hoary thyme."
We too do the same, then, when in our youthful years
our spirits run wild and the body itself is in its strength.
I marveled in silence as she spoke such things; but she
says, "You have the right to learn, if you would ask anything."
"Tell me, goddess," I answered, "what is the origin of the games."
Scarcely had I done, she answered me:
"The other instruments of luxury were not yet in their vigor;
the rich man had either cattle or broad land
(from this comes ’well-landed,’ from this ’money’ itself was named);
but already each was building wealth out of forbidden ground.
It had grown a custom to graze the public woodland bare,
and that was long allowed, and there was no penalty;
the common folk kept their public lands with none to defend them,
and now to graze on one’s own was a mark of sloth.
Such license was brought before the plebeian aediles,
the Publicii; before, the men had lacked the spirit.
The people takes up the case, the guilty paid a fine:
care for the public good won the defenders praise.
A large part of the fine was given to me, and with great favor
the victors founded new games;
with part they let out a slope, which then was a steep crag,
now a useful road, and they call it the Publician."
I had believed the shows were made a yearly thing: she said no,
and added other words to her speech:
"We too are touched by honor: we delight in festivals and altars,
and we of heaven are an ambitious crowd.
Often someone by sinning has turned the gods against him,
and a coaxing victim atoned for the offense;
often I have seen Jupiter, when already he meant to loose
his bolts, hold back his hand at an offering of incense.
But if we are neglected, the wrong is paid for
with great penalties, and anger oversteps its just bound.
Look at the son of Thestius: he burned though the flames were far off;
the cause is that Phoebe’s altar was left without fire.
Look at the son of Tantalus: the same goddess held the fleet becalmed;
a virgin she is, yet twice she avenged her slighted hearths.
Unhappy Hippolytus, you would have wished to have worshipped Dione,
when you were torn apart by your panicked horses.
It is a long delay to recount slights corrected by losses:
the Roman fathers passed me by as well.
What was I to do, by which my grief might be made plain?
what penalty exact to mark the affront to me?
In my sorrow my duty fell from me: I watched over no
fields, nor was the fertile garden held of worth;
the lilies had fallen, you would see the violets wither,
and the threads of the crimson saffron grow faint.
Often Zephyrus said to me, ’Do not yourself
ruin your own dowry’: my dowry was worthless to me.
The olives were in flower, the wanton winds harmed them;
the crops were in flower, the crop was struck by hail.
The vine was full of promise, the sky blackens with the South winds,
and the leaves are shaken down by sudden rain.
I did not wish it so, nor am I cruel in my anger;
but I took no care to ward it off.
The fathers met, and vowed, if the year should flower well,
yearly festivals to my power.
We assented to the vow: consul with consul,
Laenas with Postumius, paid me the games."
I was trying to ask why there was greater wantonness
in these games, and freer jesting;
but it came to me that this deity is not stern,
and that the goddess brings gifts suited to delights.
The brows are bound all over with stitched garlands,
and the shining table is hidden under the strewn rose;
the drunken guest, his hair girt with linden bark,
dances, and unknowing plies the art of wine;
drunk at the hard threshold of his lovely mistress
he sings, his oiled hair wearing soft wreaths.
No serious business is done with a garlanded brow,
nor is clear water drunk by men bound with flowers;
while you, Achelous, were mixed with no clusters of the grape,
there was no charm in taking up the rose.
Bacchus loves flowers: that a garland pleased Bacchus
you can learn from Ariadne’s star.
The light stage suits her: she is not, believe me, not
to be reckoned among the buskined goddesses.
Why the harlot crowd should keep these games
the reason sought is not hard to find.
She is not of the grim, not of those who profess great things:
she wants her rites to lie open to a plebeian throng,
and she warns us to use the bloom of our age while it flowers;
the thorn is scorned once the roses have fallen.
Why, though white robes are given at the Cerialia,
is she at her best in many-colored dress?
Is it because the harvest whitens with ripe ears,
and every color and form is found in flowers?
She nodded, and at the shaking of her hair flowers fell,
as a tossed rose is wont to fall upon the tables.
The lights remained, whose cause was hidden from me,
when she thus took my wanderings away:
"Either because the fields gleam bright with flowers,
lights were thought to befit our days;
or because neither flower nor flame is of a dull color,
and each brilliance draws the eyes to itself;
or because the license of the night suits our delights:
the third cause comes nearest the truth."
"There is a small thing besides which it remains for me to ask,
if I may," I said: and she said, "You may."
"Why are unwarlike roe-deer and the anxious hare
penned for you in the net, instead of Libyan lionesses?"
She answered that not the woods had fallen to her, but gardens
and fields no fighting beast should enter.
She had finished all: she withdrew into the thin air,
a fragrance lingered; you could tell a goddess had been there.
That Naso’s song may flower through all time,
sprinkle, I pray, my breast with your gifts.

Less than four nights off, Chiron will bring out his stars,
half a man and mingled in body with a tawny horse.
Pelion is a Haemonian mountain facing the south winds:
its summit is green with pine, oak holds the rest.
The son of Phillyra held it; there stand caves of ancient rock,
which they record the just old man dwelt in.
He is believed once to have busied in lyric measures
the hands that would one day send Hector to his death.
Alcides had come, a part of his labors spent,
and almost the last of those imposed remained for the hero.
You might see, by chance, two fates of Troy standing together:
here the boy of Aeacus’ line, here the son of Jove.
The Philyrean hero receives the young man in hospitality,
and the one asks the cause of his coming, the other tells it.
Meanwhile he looks at the club and the lion’s spoil,
and says, "A man worthy of these arms, and arms worthy of the man!"
Nor could Achilles’ hands hold back from daring
to touch the hide bristling with its hair.
And while the old man handles the weapons foul with poison,
an arrow slipped out and lodged in his left foot.
Chiron groaned, and drew the iron from his body:
Alcides groaned in answer, and the Haemonian boy.
Yet he himself blends herbs gathered on the Pagasaean hills
and eases the wounds with this and that remedy;
the devouring venom overcame the remedy, and the plague,
sunk deep into his bones and his whole body, was there:
the blood of the Lernaean serpent, mixed
with the Centaur’s blood, gave no time for help.
Achilles stood drenched with tears, as before a father:
so would Peleus be wept for, if he lay dying.
Often he caressed the failing hands with loving hands:
the teacher reaped the reward of the character he had shaped.
Often he kissed him, and often said to him as he lay,
"Live, I beg, and do not leave me, dear father."
The ninth day was at hand, when you, most just Chiron,
had your body girt with twice seven stars.

The curved Lyre would wish to follow him, but the way
is not yet fit: the third night will be the proper time.

The Scorpion in the sky, when we say the Nones
dawn tomorrow, must be marked from its middle part.

After this, when fair Hesperus has thrice shown his face,
and thrice the conquered stars have yielded place to Phoebus,
there will be the rite of an ancient ceremony, the nightly Lemuria:
on it they will give offerings to the silent dead.
The year was shorter, and they did not yet know the pious cleansings,
nor were you, two-formed Janus, leader of the months;
yet already they brought their gifts to the cold ashes,
and the grandson made atonement at the buried grandfather’s tomb.
It was the month of May, named from the elders,
which even now keeps a part of the old custom.
When the night is now at its middle and offers silence for sleep,
and you, dog and you varied birds, have fallen quiet,
he, mindful of the ancient rite and fearful of the gods,
rises (his two feet have no bindings on them),
and makes a sign with his fingers, the thumb joined to the middle,
lest in his silence a flimsy shade should meet him.
And when he has rinsed his hands clean in spring water,
he turns, and first takes up black beans,
and casts them with face turned away; but as he casts he says,
"These I send; with these beans I redeem myself and mine."
This he says nine times, and does not look back: the shade is thought
to gather them and follow behind, with no one seeing.
Again he touches water, and clashes Temesan bronze,
and asks the shade to go out from his house.
When nine times he has said "Go forth, ancestral spirits,"
he looks back, and thinks the rite cleanly done.
Whence the day got its name, what the origin of the name may be,
escapes me: it must be found out from some god.
Son of the Pleiad, instruct me, you to be revered for your mighty wand:
often you have looked on the palace of the Stygian Jove.
The Wand-bearer came at my prayer. Hear the cause
of the name: the cause was learned from the god himself.
When Romulus had laid his brother’s shade in the tomb,
and the due rites were paid to too-swift Remus,
unhappy Faustulus and Acca with streaming hair
were sprinkling the burned bones with their tears;
then they go home sorrowful at the first dusk,
and lay themselves down, just as they were, on the hard bed.
The bloody shade of Remus seemed to stand by the couch,
and to speak these words in a faint murmur:
"Behold me, the half of you, the other part of your prayer,
see what I am, who lately was what I was!
I who lately, had I had the birds awarding me a kingdom,
might have been the greatest among my people,
now am an empty phantom, slipped from the pyre’s flames:
this is the shape left over from that Remus.
Alas, where is Mars my father? if only you spoke truth,
and he it was who gave us the wild beast’s teats, exposed.
Him whom the she-wolf saved, a rash citizen’s hand
has destroyed. O how much gentler she was!
Cruel Celer, may you yield up your cruel life through wounds,
and go beneath the earth bloodstained, as I did.
My brother did not will this, his love is equal to mine:
what he could, he gave — his tears upon my fate.
Beg him, by your tears, by the nurture you gave me,
to mark out a day with honor in my name."
They long to embrace him as he charges them, and stretch their arms:
the slippery shade escapes their clutching hands.
When the fleeing phantom drew sleep away with it,
both carry the brother’s words to the king.
Romulus complies, and names that day Remuria
on which due rites are borne to buried forefathers.
The harsh letter, which stood first in the whole name,
was changed in the long course of time to a soft one;
soon too they called the souls of the silent dead lemures:
this was the sense of the word, that the force of the term.
Yet the ancients shut the shrines on those days,
as now you see them covered at the season of the dead;
nor are those times fit for the torches of widow or maiden:
she who married then did not live long.
For this reason too, if proverbs touch you at all,
the common folk say bad women wed in the month of May.
Yet these three festivals fall in the same season,
with no single day running on from one to the next.

If among the middle of these you look for Boeotian Orion,
you will be mistaken: I must sing the cause of the sign.
Jupiter, and the brother who reigns in the broad sea,
and Mercury were traveling the roads together;
it was the hour when the plows are turned and brought back from the yoke,
and the lamb, stooping, drinks the milk of the well-fed ewe.
By chance old Hyrieus, tiller of a narrow little field,
sees them, as he stood before his small hut,
and said, "The way is long, and not much daylight remains,
and our door stands open to guests."
He added a look to his words, and asked again:
they obey his offer, and hide that they are gods.
They enter the old man’s dwelling, ugly with black smoke;
a little fire was in yesterday’s log:
he himself, kneeling, rouses the flames with his breath,
and brings out broken torches and splits them small.
Cups stand ready; one held beans, the other greens,
and each foams, pressed beneath its own earthen lid.
And while there is waiting, with trembling right hand he serves red wine:
the god of the sea takes the first cups.
As soon as he drained them, "Now let Jupiter drink in his turn,"
he said. At the name of Jove the old man paled.
When his wits came back, he sacrifices the tiller of his poor field,
the ox, and roasts it on a great fire;
and the wine that as a boy he had once drawn off in his early years
he brings out, stored away in a smoky jar.
Without delay, on couches with linen hiding the river sedge,
low even so, they reclined.
Now with the feast, now with the Wine-god set forth, the tables shone;
the mixing-bowl was red clay, the cups were beech.
These were Jupiter’s words: "If your heart prompts anything, choose it:
you shall have it all." These were the calm old man’s words:
"I had a dear wife, known to me in the spring
of my early youth. Where is she now, you ask? An urn covers her.
To her I swore, calling you to witness my words,
’You alone shall have the enjoyment of my marriage.’
I said it, and I keep it; but yet I have a different wish:
I want to be a father, and not a husband."
All had assented. All had taken their stand
at the back of the bullock—shame forbids to tell the rest.
Then they covered the soaked hide with earth thrown over it:
and now ten months, and the boy had been born.
Him Hyrieus, because so begotten, calls Urion:
the first letter has lost its old sound.
He had grown beyond measure: the Delian took him as companion;
he was the goddess’s guard, he her attendant.
Words not well weighed rouse the anger of the gods:
"There is no beast," he said, "that I cannot master."
Earth let loose a scorpion against him: it had the urge
to carry its curved sting against the twin-bearing goddess;
Orion stood in its way. Latona set him among the shining stars
and said, "Take the reward of your service."

But why do Orion and the other stars make haste
to give way from the world, and night cuts short its course?
Why does the white day, the Morning Star going before,
lift its radiance sooner than its wont from the clear sea?
Am I deceived, or do arms clash? I am not deceived, arms were clashing:
Mars comes, and coming gave the signals of war.
The Avenger himself comes down from heaven to his own honors
and to the temple to be admired in the Forum of Augustus.
Both the god is huge and the work: not otherwise should Mars
make his dwelling in the city of his own son.
This shrine is worthy of the trophies over the Giants:
from here it befits Gradivus to set fierce wars in motion,
whether some impious foe provoke us from the Eastern world,
or one must be subdued from the setting sun.
The Lord of Arms surveys the gable-peaks of the lofty work,
and approves that unconquered goddesses hold the height;
he surveys on the doors the weapons of varied shape,
and the arms of the lands his own soldiery has conquered.
On one side he sees Aeneas laden with his dear burden
and all the ancestors of the Julian nobility;
on the other he sees Ilia’s son bearing on his shoulders the leader’s arms,
and famous deeds set beneath the figures ranged in order.
He looks too at the temple fronted with the name of Augustus,
and the work seems greater when Caesar is read there.
He had vowed it as a young man, when he took up the dutiful arms:
from such great things a princeps had to begin.
He, stretching out his hands, the loyal soldiery on one side,
the conspirators on the other, gave such words:
"If my father, and Vesta’s priest, is the author of my warring,
and I make ready to avenge both deities,
Mars, be present and glut the steel with guilty blood,
and let your favor stand for the better cause.
You shall have a temple and, when I conquer, be called the Avenger."
He had vowed it, and returns glad from the routed foe.
Nor is it enough for Mars to have earned the surname once:
he pursues the standards held back by the Parthian’s hand.
It was a people safe in its plains, its horses, its arrows,
and unapproachable behind its girdling rivers;
the deaths of the Crassi had put spirit into the people,
when soldier and standards and general perished together.
The Parthian held the Roman standards, the glory of war,
and an enemy was standard-bearer of the Roman eagle;
and that shame would have lasted still, had not the wealth
of Ausonia been guarded by the brave arms of Caesar.
He took away the old marks and the disgrace of a long age:
the recovered standards knew their own once more.
What now did the arrows you used to shoot behind your back avail you,
what your terrain, what the use of your swift horse?
Parthian, you give back the eagles, you hold out too your conquered bows:
now you keep no pledges of our shame.
Duly to the god, twice avenger, a temple and a name were given,
and the deserved honor pays the debt of the vow.
Celebrate the solemn games in the Circus, Quirites:
the stage was not thought to befit the valiant god.

You will see all the Pleiades and the whole company
of sisters, when before the Ides one night is left:
then, on no doubtful authorities, summer begins for me,
and the season of warm spring has its end.

The Ides foretell that the Bull lifts its starry face earlier:
a well-known story lies beneath this sign.
How Jupiter as a bull offered his back to the Tyrian girl
and bore false horns upon his brow,
she held the mane with her right hand, her robes with her left,
and the very fear was the cause of fresh beauty;
the breeze fills her garments, the breeze stirs her golden hair:
Sidonian girl, so were you to be gazed on by Jove.
Often she drew her girlish feet up from the sea,
and feared the touch of the leaping water;
often the cunning god let his back sink into the waves,
so that she might cling the tighter to his neck.
When the shore was reached, Jupiter stood with no horns at all
and was turned from a bull back into a god.
The bull goes up into heaven: you, Sidonian, Jupiter makes fruitful,
and a third part of the earth bears your name.
Others have said this sign is the Pharian heifer,
who is a cow made from a human, and from a cow made a goddess.
Then too the Virgin is wont to cast the rush effigies
of the men of old from the oaken bridge.
Whoever has believed that bodies past sixty years
were sent to their death, charges his forefathers with the crime.
There is an old report that, when the land was called Saturnia,
such were the words of prophetic Jove:
"Send two bodies of your people, offered to the scythe-bearing old man,
to be received by the Tuscan waters";
until the Tirynthian came into these fields, every year
the grim rites were performed in the Leucadian manner;
they say he had the Romans cast straw men into the water,
and that, by Hercules’s example, false bodies were thrown.
Some think that, so the young men alone might cast their votes,
they flung the helpless old men from the bridges.
Tiber, teach me the truth: your bank is older than the City;
you can well know the origin of the rite.
Tiber raised his reed-bearing head from the middle of his channel
and parted his hoarse lips with sounds like these:
"These places I saw as deserted grass without walls:
each bank pastured its scattered cattle,
and I, whom now the nations know and fear as the Tiber,
was then to be looked down on even by the herd.
The name of Arcadian Evander is often told to you:
he, a stranger, churned my waters with his oars.
Alcides came too, attended by an Achaean throng:
Albula, if I recall, was then my name.
The Pallantian hero received the young man in hospitality,
and at last the due punishment came to Cacus.
The victor goes off, and drags away with him the cattle,
the Erytheian spoil; but his comrades refuse to go farther.
And a great part of them had come from abandoned Argos:
on these hills they set their hope and their home.
Yet often they are touched by sweet love of their fatherland,
and one of them, dying, charges this brief task:
’Cast me into the Tiber, that, borne on Tiber’s waves,
I may go, empty dust, to the Inachian shore.’
The heir mislikes the charge of caring for the tomb:
the dead guest is buried in Ausonian soil;
a rush image is thrown into the Tiber in his stead,
to seek again the Greek homes across the long seas."
So far, and he sank into the caves that dripped with living rock;
you, light waters, stayed your course.

Bright grandson of Atlas, be here, whom once on the Arcadian
mountains one of the Pleiads bore to Jove:
arbiter of peace and of arms for the gods above and below,
you who travel the road on winged foot,
glad in the striking of the lyre, glad too in the gleaming wrestling-ground,
by whose teaching the cultivated tongue learned to speak,
the fathers set you a temple looking on the Circus
on the Ides; from that day this is your festive day.
You, all who profess to sell their wares,
having given incense, ask to grant them profit.
There is a water of Mercury near the Capene gate;
if it pleases to trust those who have tried it, it holds a power.
Here comes the merchant, girt in his tunic, and from an urn
purified with fumigation he draws the water he will carry.
A laurel is wetted from it, and with the wet laurel are sprinkled
all the goods that are to find new owners.
He sprinkles his own hair too with the dripping laurel,
and runs through his prayers in a voice well trained to deceive:
"Wash away the perjuries of time gone by," he says,
"wash away the treacherous words of yesterday.
Whether I made you my witness, or falsely called
on the empty godhead of Jove, who would not hear,
or whether knowingly I cheated some other god or goddess,
may the swift South winds have carried off the wicked words:
and let perjuries lie open to me on the coming day,
and let the gods above not mind whatever I may say.
Only give me profits, give me joy in the profit made,
and grant that it please me to have cheated the buyer."
At such a petitioner Mercury laughs from on high,
remembering that he himself stole the Ortygian cattle.

But disclose to me, I pray, who seek things so much better,
from what time Phoebus passes into the Twins.
"When you shall see as many days left in the month
as the labors of Hercules in number," he says.
"Tell me," I answered, "the cause of this constellation."
The god gave back the cause with eloquent lips:
"The brothers, the sons of Tyndareus, had carried off
Phoebe and Phoebe’s sister, the one a horseman, the other a boxer.
Both Idas and his brother make war and demand back their own,
each having bargained to be Leucippus’s son-in-law.
Love urges these to demand them back, those to refuse to give them up;
and from an equal cause each pair does battle.
The Oebalids could have escaped their pursuers by running,
but it seemed shameful to win by swift flight.
There is a place clear of trees, a ground fit for fighting:
in that place (its name is Aphidna) they had made their stand.
Castor, pierced through the breast by Lynceus’s sword,
sank to the ground with a wound he had not looked for;
Pollux comes as avenger, and runs Lynceus through with his spear,
where the neck, joined on, presses upon the shoulders.
Idas was moving against him, and was scarcely driven off by Jove’s fire;
yet they say the bolt did not tear the weapons from his hand.
And now the lofty heaven lay open for you, Pollux,
when you said, "Father, take in my words:
the heaven you give to me alone, divide between the two of us;
the half will be greater than the whole gift."
He spoke, and ransomed his brother by alternating station:
both stars are useful to the anxious ship."

Let him who asks what the Agonia are go back to Janus:
yet they too have this date in the calendar.

On the night that follows the day the Dog of Erigone comes out:
the cause of the sign has been given in another place.

The next day is Vulcan’s, they call it the Tubilustria:
the pure trumpets, which he makes, are then purified.

Then comes a place of four letters, in which, read in order,
is either the custom of the rites or the flight of the king.

Nor do I pass you by, Public Fortune
of the powerful people, given a temple on the day that follows.
When Amphitrite, rich in waters, has taken up this day,
you will see the beak of the tawny bird dear to Jove.
The coming dawn will take Bootes from your eyes,
and on the next day will be the star of Hyas.

This month too has doubtful causes in its name:
which one pleases you, you will choose yourself, when all are set out.
I shall sing facts; but there will be those who say I made them up,
and think no deities were ever seen by a mortal.
There is a god in us; when he stirs, we grow warm;
this impulse holds the seeds of a sacred mind.
It is given to me above all to have seen the faces of the gods,
whether because I am a bard, or because I sing of sacred things.
There is a grove thick with trees, a place withdrawn
from every sound, but for the murmuring of waters:
here I was inquiring what the origin might be
of the month I had begun, and was busy about its name.
Behold, I saw goddesses—not those whom the teacher of plowing
had seen, when he followed his Ascraean sheep;
nor those whom the son of Priam set side by side in the valleys
of watery Ida: yet one of them was from these,
one of them she was, sister of her own husband;
this was she, I knew her, who stands in the citadel of Jove.
I had shuddered, and confessed my mind with a silent pallor;
then the goddess herself took away the fears she had caused.
For she says, "O bard, founder of the Roman year,
who have dared to set forth great things in slender measures,
you have won for yourself the right of seeing a heavenly power,
when it pleased you to enshrine the festivals in your verse:
yet, lest you remain ignorant and be drawn by the crowd’s error,
June takes its name from our name.
It is something to have married Jove, to be the sister of Jove:
I doubt whether to glory more in brother or in husband.
If lineage is looked at, I made Saturn a father first,
I was the first lot that fell to Saturn.
From my father Rome was once called Saturnia:
this land was the nearest to him from heaven.
If the marriage-bed is valued, I am called the Thunderer’s matron,
and my temple is joined to Tarpeian Jove.
Could a concubine give her name to the month of May,
and shall this honor be grudged to me?
Why then am I called queen and chief of the goddesses,
why did they put a golden scepter in my right hand?
Shall the days make up the month, and shall I be called Lucina
from the days, and yet draw my own name from no month?
Then I should repent of having loyally laid aside my anger
against the race of Electra and the Dardanian house.
The cause of my anger was twofold: I grieved at Ganymede’s rape,
and my beauty too was beaten by the Idaean judge.
I should repent that I do not cherish the towers of Carthage,
since my chariot and my arms are in that place;
I should repent of having set Sparta and Argos and my Mycenae
and ancient Samos below Latium:
add old Tatius and the Juno-worshipping Faliscans,
whom I let yield to the Romans.
But let me not repent, nor is any nation dearer to me:
here let me be worshipped, here hold a temple with my Jove.
Mars himself said to me, ’I entrust these walls
to you: you shall be powerful in your grandson’s city.’
His words are followed by their proof: we are honored at a hundred altars,
and the month’s honor is to me no lighter than any.
Yet not only Rome bestows this honor upon us:
the towns around give me the same gift.
Look at the calendars that woodland Aricia keeps,
and the people of Laurentum, and my Lanuvium:
there is a month of Juno there. Look at Tibur
and the sacred walls of the Praenestine goddess,
you will read of a time of Juno: nor did Romulus found those towns,
but Rome was my grandson’s."
Juno had finished; we looked back: the wife of Hercules
stood there, and in her face were signs of vigor.
"I will not, if my mother should bid me yield the whole heaven,
linger against my mother’s will," she says.
"Now too I do not wrestle over the name of this season:
I coax, and play almost the part of one who entreats,
and I would rather have held my right by praying for it:
and perhaps you yourself may favor my cause.
My mother holds the golden Capitol in a shared temple,
and, as is right, keeps the heights along with Jove;
but all my glory comes to me from the month’s beginning:
it is the one honor for which I am anxious.
What harm, Roman, if you have given the month’s title
to the wife of Hercules, and posterity keeps it in mind?
This land too owes me something in the name of my great
husband: hither he drove the captured cattle,
here Cacus, ill-defended by his flames and his father’s dower,
stained the Aventine ground with his blood.
I am called to nearer matters: Romulus sorted the people by their years
and distributed them into two divisions;
the one is readier to give counsel, the other to fight,
this age advises war, but that wages it.
So he decided, and marked the months off by the same token:
June is the young men’s; the month before was the old men’s."
She spoke; and in their zeal for the contest they would have come to strife,
and duty would have been disguised as anger:
Concord came, her long hair bound with Apollo’s laurel,
the deity and the handiwork of our peaceful leader.
When she had told how Tatius and brave Quirinus
and the two kingdoms with their peoples had come together,
and how fathers- and sons-in-law were received in a common home,
"from these joined," she says, "June (Iunius) has its name."
A threefold cause is told. But forgive me, goddesses:
the matter is not to be settled by my judgment.
Go from me equal. Troy perished by a judge of beauty:
two goddesses do more harm than one of them does good.

The first day is given to you, Carna. She is the goddess of the hinge:
by her power she opens what is shut, shuts what is open.
Whence she has the powers given her, the report is darkened by age;
but from our song you will be made sure.
An ancient grove of Alernus lies beside the Tiber:
the pontiffs even now bring sacrifices there.
From it was born a nymph (the ancients called her Cranae),
often, and in vain, sought by many suitors.
She used to range the fields and chase wild beasts with javelins,
and to stretch knotted nets in the hollow valley;
she had no quiver, yet they believed her Phoebus’s sister,
and she was no disgrace to you, Phoebus.
If some young man had spoken loving words to her,
she at once gave back such words as these:
"These places have too much light, and with the light, too much shame:
if you lead the way to more secret caves, I follow."
As he, credulous, went on ahead, she, finding bushes, stops,
and hides, and is in no way to be found.
Janus had seen her, and, caught by desire at the sight,
had tried soft words upon the hard girl.
The nymph bids him, as her custom was, seek a more distant cave,
and, as if his companion, follows, then leaves her leader behind.
Foolish girl! Janus sees what goes on behind his back:
you do nothing, and he is looking back at your hiding place.
You do nothing, look! I said: for, as you hide beneath the rock,
he takes you in his embrace, and, having won his hope, says,
"Let the right of the hinge be yours for our lying together:
have this as the price of the maidenhead you laid aside."
So saying, he gave her a thorn-branch, by which she could drive
grim harms from the doors—it was a whitethorn.
There are greedy birds, not those that cheated the gullets
at Phineus’s table, but they draw their stock from there:
a great head, staring eyes, beaks fit for plunder;
grayness is in their feathers, a hook in their claws;
they fly by night and seek out children who lack a nurse,
and spoil the bodies snatched from their cradles;
they are said to tear the suckling vitals with their beaks,
and their throats are full of the blood they have drunk.
The name of these is screech-owls; but the cause of the name
is that they are wont to screech horribly in the night.
Whether, then, they are born birds, or are made so by a spell,
and a Marsian crone shapes old women into birds with her chant,
they came into Proca’s chamber: Proca, born five days before,
was the birds’ fresh prey within those walls,
and they suck the infant breast with greedy tongues;
but the unhappy boy wails and begs for help.
Frightened by her nursling’s cry, the nurse runs up,
and finds his cheeks gashed by the stiff claw.
What was she to do? His face had the color the leaves
are wont to wear late in the year, which early winter has hurt.
She comes to Cranae, and tells the matter. "Lay aside your fear,"
she said: "your nursling will be safe and sound."
She had come to the cradle; mother and father were weeping:
"Stop your tears, I myself will heal him," she says.
At once she touches the doorposts three times in order with arbutus
leaf, three times marks the threshold with arbutus leaf,
she sprinkles the entrance with water (and the water held a charm)
and holds the raw innards of a two-month sow,
and speaks thus: "Birds of the night, spare the child’s
inward parts: for a little one a little victim falls.
A heart for a heart, I pray, take fibers for fibers:
this life we give you in place of a better one."
When she has thus made offering, she sets the cut pieces under the open sky,
and forbids those present at the rite to look back:
and a wand of Janus, of the white thorn, is set
where a small window let light into the chamber.
After that the birds are said never to have harmed the cradle,
and the boy’s former color came back to him.
You ask why fat bacon is tasted on those Kalends,
and why the bean is mixed with warm spelt?
She is an old goddess, and is fed on the foods she used before,
nor in her luxury does she seek imported feasts.
In that people’s day the fish still swam unbetrayed,
and the oysters were safe in their shells;
nor did Latium know the bird that rich Ionia supplies,
nor the bird that delights in Pygmy blood;
and in the peacock nothing pleased but its plumes,
nor had the earth sent beasts caught by craft.
The pig was prized, they kept their feasts with a slaughtered pig;
the earth gave only beans and hard spelt.
Whoever eats these two together on the sixth month’s Kalends,
they say his bowels can take no harm.
On the top of the citadel too, the temple of Juno Moneta
they record was made by your vow, Camillus.
Before, it had been the house of Manlius, who once
drove the Gallic arms back from Capitoline Jove.
How well, great gods, would he have fallen in that battle,
the defender of your throne, lofty Jupiter!
He lived to die condemned on a charge of seeking kingship:
long old age conferred this title on him.
The same day is festal to Mars, on whom the Capene gate
looks out, set beside the Covered Way.
You too, Tempest, we own deserved a shrine,
when the fleet was all but overwhelmed in Corsican waters.
These memorials of men lie open: if you seek the stars,
then rises the hooked bird of great Jupiter.

The next dawn calls forth the Hyades, the horns of the Bull’s brow,
and the earth grows wet with abundant rain.

When morning has twice come and Phoebus repeated his rising,
and the crop has twice been wetted with fallen dew,
on this day Bellona is said to have been hallowed in the Tuscan war,
and she is always favorable to Latium.
Appius is her founder, who, when peace was refused to Pyrrhus,
saw much in his mind, though he was robbed of sight.
A small open space before the temple looks out on the top of the Circus:
there stands a small column of no small note;
from here a spear, herald of war, is wont to be hurled by hand,
when it is resolved to take up arms against a king and peoples.

The other part of the Circus is kept safe under Hercules the Guardian,
because the god holds the charge by Euboean oracle.
The time of the office is the Morning Star before the Nones;
if you ask the title, Sulla approved the work.

I was wondering whether to assign the Nones to Sancus or to Fidius
or to you, father Semo; then Sancus said to me:
"To whichever of these you give it, I shall have the gift:
I bear three names: so the people of Cures willed."
So the old Sabines bestowed a temple on him,
and set it on the Quirinal ridge.

I have a daughter—and may she, I pray, outlive my years—
by whose safety I shall always be happy.
When I wished to give her to a son-in-law, I sought what times
were fit for the marriage-torches, and what should be shunned:
then it was shown to me that June, after the sacred Ides,
is favorable both for brides and for husbands,
but the first part of it was found unfriendly to wedding-chambers;
for thus the holy wife of the Flamen Dialis said to me:
"Until the calm Tiber has carried the sweepings from Trojan Vesta
down to the sea in his yellow waters,
it is not allowed me to comb my hair with the trimmed boxwood,
nor to cut my nails with iron,
nor to have touched my husband, though he is Jupiter’s priest,
though he is given to me by perpetual law.
You too, do not hurry: your daughter will marry to better fortune
when the fiery Vesta shall shine on the cleansed ground."

On the third day after the Nones Phoebe is said to take away Lycaon,
and the Bear has nothing to fear behind her.
Then I remember I watched games on the grass of the Field,
and they were called yours, slippery Tiber.
It is a festal day for those who draw the dripping nets,
and who hide the curved bronze under little baits.

Mind too has its godhead: we see the shrine of Mind
vowed in fear of your war, treacherous Carthaginian.
Carthaginian, you had renewed the war, and at the consul’s death all,
thunderstruck, dreaded the Moorish bands.
Fear had driven out hope, when the Senate takes up vows to Mind,
and at once she came, the kinder for it.
The day on which the vows were paid to the goddess
looks ahead to the Ides, six days off in the midst.

Vesta, be gracious: to you now, in your service, we unseal our lips,
if it is allowed us to come to your rites.
I was wholly in prayer: I felt the heavenly powers,
and the glad ground shone with a purple light.
Not indeed that I saw you (away with the lies of bards),
goddess, nor were you to be looked on by a man;
but the things I had not known, and was held in error about,
became known to me with none to teach them.
They tell that Rome had kept forty Parilia,
when the goddess, guardian of the flame, was received in a temple,
the work of the peaceful king, than whom the Sabine land
bore no nature more in awe of the divine.
What you now see in bronze, you would then have seen roofed with straw,
and the wall was woven of pliant wicker.
This small place, which holds the Hall of Vesta,
was then the great palace of unshorn Numa;
yet the form of the temple, which now remains, is said to have stood
before, and a sound reason for the form lies beneath it.
Vesta is the same as Earth: a watchful fire underlies each:
both Earth and the hearth signify their own abode.
The earth is like a ball, propped on no support,
so heavy a weight, with air beneath it, hangs;
its own spinning holds the balanced globe,
and every corner that might press upon its parts is absent:
and since it is set in the middle region of things,
so as to touch no side more or less,
were it not convex, it would lie nearer to one part,
and the universe would not have the earth for its central weight.
By Syracusan art there stands, hung in enclosed air,
a globe, a small figure of the measureless heaven,
and as far from the top, so far from the bottom stands
the earth; which its round shape brings about.
Like is the temple’s shape; no corner juts in it,
a domed roof shields it from the rainy shower.
Why is the goddess served by virgin attendants, you ask?
For this part too I will find the proper reasons.
They tell that Juno and Ceres were born of Ops
by Saturn’s seed; Vesta was the third.
The other two married, both are said to have borne children;
of the three, one alone held out against a husband.
What wonder, if a virgin, glad in a virgin attendant,
admits only chaste hands to her rites?
And understand Vesta to be nothing but the living flame;
and you see no bodies born of flame.
Rightly, then, she is a virgin, who sends out no seeds
nor takes them, and loves companions in virginity.
Foolish, I long thought there were images of Vesta,
then I learned there are none beneath the curved dome.
An undying fire is hidden in that temple:
Vesta has no likeness, nor has the fire.
The earth stands by its own force; from standing by force Vesta is named;
and a like cause may belong to her Greek name.
But the hearth is named from the flames, and because it warms all things;
yet it stood formerly in the front of the house.
From this too, I think, the vestibule is named; and in prayer
from there we name Vesta first, who holds the foremost place.
It was once the custom to sit on long benches before the hearths,
and to believe the gods were present at the table;
even now, when the rites of ancient Vacuna are performed,
they stand and sit before Vacuna’s hearths.
Something has come down to our years from the old custom:
a clean dish carries the food sent to Vesta.
Behold, loaves hang from garlanded asses,
and flowery wreaths veil the rough millstones.
Of old the farmers parched their spelt in ovens only
(and the goddess Fornax has her own rites):
the hearth itself made the bread set under the ashes,
and a broken tile was laid on the warm floor.
Hence the baker honors the hearth and the mistress of hearths,
and the she-ass that turns the pumice millstones.
Shall I pass over or tell your disgrace, ruddy Priapus?
It is a little tale of much jest.
Cybele, her brow circled with a turreted crown,
summons the eternal gods to her festival;
she summons too the satyrs and, rustic powers, the nymphs;
Silenus is there, though no one had called him.
It is not allowed, and it is long, to tell the gods’ banquet:
the night was watched out in much wine.
Some wandered at random in the valleys of shady Ida,
part lie down and rest their limbs on the soft grass;
these play, sleep holds those; part link their arms
and beat the green ground three times with nimble foot.
Vesta lies down and, untroubled, takes her calm rest,
just as she was, her head propped on the turf.
But the red guardian of the gardens hunts the nymphs and goddesses,
and bears his wandering steps to and fro.
He sees Vesta too: whether he thought her a nymph
or knew her for Vesta is doubtful, but he denies he knew.
He conceives an obscene hope, and tries to approach by stealth,
and bears his steps poised, his heart pounding.
By chance old Silenus had left the ass he had ridden
by the banks of a softly sounding stream;
the god of the long Hellespont was about to begin,
when the ass brayed with an untimely sound.
Terrified at the deep cry the goddess starts up; the whole crowd
flies together, and he escapes through the hostile hands.
Lampsacus is wont to slaughter this beast to Priapus,
singing, "Fitly we give the tell-tale’s guts to the flames."
Him, goddess, mindful, you deck with necklaces of bread;
the work stops, the empty millstones have fallen silent.
More famed in name than in worth, on the Thunderer’s citadel,
I shall tell what the altar of Jupiter the Baker means.
The Capitol, surrounded, was hard pressed by the fierce Gauls:
the now long siege had brought on famine.
Jupiter, the gods summoned to his royal throne,
says to Mars, "Begin"; at once he replies:
"No doubt the plight of the wretched is unknown,
and this grief of the heart wants a voice to complain.
Yet if you require me to tell briefly the woes joined to shame,
Rome lies beneath an Alpine foe.
Is this she to whom the mastery of the world was promised,
Jupiter? Was this the one you meant to set over the lands?
Already she had crushed the suburban and the Etruscan arms:
hope was on its way: now she is driven from her own home.
We have seen, through the bronze-decked halls, the triumphal old men,
arrayed in embroidered robes, lie slain;
we have seen the pledges of Trojan Vesta moved
from their seat: clearly they think there are some gods.
But if they looked back at the citadel where you dwell,
and that so many of your houses are gripped by the siege,
they would know no help is left in the care of the gods,
and that the incense, given by an anxious hand, is wasted.
And would that a field for battle lay open; let them take up arms,
and, if they cannot prevail, let them fall.
Now, short of food and dreading an inglorious death,
shut on their own hill, a barbarian throng hems them in."
Then Venus, and Quirinus fair with augur’s staff and robe,
and Vesta spoke much on behalf of her own Latium.
"There is a public care for those walls," Jupiter answered,
"and conquered Gaul shall pay the penalty.
Only do you make the grain that is lacking seem to remain,
and do not desert your seat, Vesta.
Whatever there is of solid grain, let the hollow mill grind it,
and let the hearth harden in the fire what the hand has softened."
He had bidden, and the virgin daughter of Saturn
assented to her brother’s bidding, and it was midnight.
Now toil had given the leaders sleep. Jupiter chides them
and with sacred mouth tells what he would have them do:
"Rise, and from the topmost citadels into the midst of the foe
send the help you least wish to send."
Sleep departs, and, driven by the strange riddle, they ask
what help they are bidden to give, though loath.
It seemed to be Ceres’ grain; they throw the gifts of Ceres:
thrown, they ring upon the helmets and the long shields.
The hope of beating them by hunger fell away: the foe driven off,
a white altar is set up to Jupiter the Baker.
By chance I was coming back, on Vesta’s feast, by that road
which now, the New Way, is joined to the Roman Forum:
here I saw a matron coming down barefoot;
I was struck dumb in silence and checked my step.
An old woman, neighbor of the place, noticed, and bidding me sit
addresses me, shaking her head with trembling voice:
"This, where the fora now are, wet marshes held;
the ditch was sodden with the river’s overflowing waters.
That Curtian lake, which now upholds dry altars,
is solid ground today, but was a lake before;
where the Velabrum is wont to lead the processions to the Circus,
was nothing but willows and hollow reed.
Often a reveler returning sings over the suburban waters
and flings drunken words to the boatmen.
Not yet had that god, fitted to his many shapes,
taken his name from the turned-back river.
Here too was a grove thick with rushes and reed,
and a marsh not to be trodden with shod foot.
The pools have drawn back, and its own bank confines the waters,
and the ground is dry now: yet that custom remains."
She had given the reason. "Farewell, best of old women," I said;
"may all that is left of your life be soft."
The rest I learned long ago in my boyhood years,
yet not for that reason should I pass it by.
Ilus the Dardanid had lately made new walls
(Ilus still held the rich wealth of Asia);
the heavenly image of arm-bearing Minerva is believed
to have leapt down upon the heights of the Trojan city.
I had a wish to see it: I saw the temple and the place;
this is what is left to Troy—Rome holds the Pallas.
Sminthean Apollo is consulted, and, dim in the shady grove,
gave these sounds with no lying mouth:
"Guard the heavenly goddess, you will guard the city:
she will carry the empire of the place along with her."
Ilus guards her and keeps her shut on the top of the citadel,
and the charge passes down to his heir Laomedon;
under Priam she was ill guarded: so she herself wished,
ever since her beauty was beaten in the judgment.
Whether the son-in-law of Adrastus, or Ulysses apt at thefts,
or Aeneas, they say it was that carried her off;
the doer is uncertain, the thing is Roman: Vesta guards it,
because she sees all things with her unceasing flame.
Alas, how the fathers feared, at the time when Vesta
burned and was all but buried under her own roof!
The holy fires blazed with wicked fires,
and profane flame was mixed with pious flame;
the attendants wept, thunderstruck, with hair let down:
fear itself had robbed them of bodily strength.
Metellus rushes into the midst, and with a great voice, "Help!"—
"There is no help in weeping," he says.
"Lift up the fated pledges with virgin hands:
they are not to be won by prayer, but snatched by the hand.
Wretched me! do you hesitate?" he says. He saw them hesitate
and sink down, terrified, on bended knee.
He draws water, and lifting his hands, "Forgive me," he said,
"O sacred things: a man, I will enter where no man may go.
If it is a crime, let the penalty of the deed fall back on me:
let Rome be redeemed by the forfeit of my head."
He spoke, and burst in: the goddess, rescued, approved the deed,
and was kept safe by the service of her pontiff.
Now you shine well, sacred flames, under Caesar:
the fire will be, and is, on the Trojan hearths;
and under this leader no priestess will be said to have shamed the fillets,
nor be buried alive in the ground.
So the unchaste one perishes, because she is interred in the very one
she has violated: Earth and Vesta are one and the same power.
Then Brutus won himself a surname from the Callaecian foe
and stained the Spanish ground with blood.
To be sure, sad things are sometimes mixed with glad,
lest festivals please the people with the whole heart:
Crassus at the Euphrates lost the eagles, his son, and his men,
and was himself given last to death.
"Parthian, why do you exult?" the goddess said. "You will send the standards back,
and there will be an avenger to punish the death of Crassus."

But as soon as the violets are taken from the long-eared asses,
and the rough stones grind the grain of Ceres,
the sailor, sitting on the stern, says, "We shall see the Dolphin,
when the moist night has risen and the day is driven off."

Now, Phrygian Tithonus, you complain of being left by your bride,
and the watchful Morning Star comes out of the Eastern waters:
go, good mothers (the Matralia is your festival),
and offer yellow cakes to the Theban goddess.
Joined to the bridges and the great Circus is the much-frequented
square, which takes its name from the ox set up there.
On this day, they say, the scepter-bearing hands of Servius
gave a temple and rites to mother Matuta.
What goddess she is, why she keeps maidservants from the temple’s threshold
(for she does), and seeks roasted cakes,
Bacchus, your grape-clustered hair set off with ivy,
if that house is yours, guide the bard’s work.
Semele had burned by Jove’s compliance: Ino receives
you, boy, and zealously nurses you with all her care.
Juno swelled with anger that she should rear a child stolen from a rival;
but that blood was her own sister’s.
Hence Athamas is driven by furies and a false vision,
and you fall, little Learchus, by your father’s hand.
The mournful mother had buried Learchus’s shade
and given all the due rites to the wretched pyre.
She too, just as she had torn her death-struck hair,
leaps up and snatches you, Melicerta, from the cradle.
There is a land narrowed to a short span, that thrusts back two seas,
and one land is beaten by two waters.
Here she comes, clasping her son in her maddened arms,
and from a high ridge casts herself with him into the deep.
Panope and her hundred sisters receive them unharmed,
and bear them with a gentle gliding through their realms.
Not yet Leucothea, not yet that boy Palaemon,
they reach the mouth of the thick-eddying Tiber.
There was a grove, doubtful whether it is called Semele’s or Stimula’s;
they say Ausonian maenads dwelt there.
Ino asks them what people it was. She hears they are Arcadians,
and that Evander holds the scepter of the place.
The daughter of Saturn, hiding her godhead, treacherously
goads the Latin Bacchae with feigned words:
"O too easily fooled, O caught with all your heart,
this stranger does not come a friend to our dances.
She comes by guile, and means to learn the secret of the rite:
but she has a pledge by which she may pay the price."
Scarcely had she finished, the Thyiads fill the air with howls,
their hair streaming over their necks,
and lay hands on her and struggle to tear the boy away.
She calls on gods she does not yet know:
"Gods and men of the place, help a wretched mother."
The cry strikes the neighboring rocks of the Aventine.
The Oetaean had driven the Iberian cows to the bank;
he hears, and, roused by the cry, presses on his way:
at Hercules’s coming, those who were just making ready force
shamefully turned their backs in womanly flight.
"What do you seek here," (for he had known her) "aunt of Bacchus?
or does the power that harries me harry you as well?" he says.
She tells part, part the presence of her son
holds back, and she is ashamed to have gone to crime through madness.
Rumor, swift as she is, flies on beating wings,
and your name, Ino, is often on men’s lips.
You are said to have entered the faithful home of Carmentis as a guest
and to have laid aside your long hunger.
The Tegean priestess is said to have given cakes
made in haste by her own hand, baked on a sudden fire.
Now too cakes please the goddess at the Matralia;
rustic devotion was more pleasing than art.
"Now," she says, "O seer, unseal the coming fates,
so far as is allowed: add this, I pray, to your welcome."
There is a little delay, the seer takes on heaven and its powers,
and grows full, with all her breast, of her god;
you could scarcely know her all at once, so much
holier and so much greater was she than just before.
"Glad things I will sing: rejoice, Ino, your labors done,"
she said, "and be always favorable to this people.
You will be a power of the sea: the sea too will have your son.
Take another name in your own waters:
Leucothea to the Greeks, Matuta you will be called by ours;
your son will have all power over the harbors,
whom we shall call Portunus, his own tongue Palaemon.
Go, I pray, both of you gracious to our lands."
She had nodded, the promise was sure; they laid aside their toils,
they changed their names: he is a god, she a goddess.
You ask why she forbids handmaids to approach? She hates them,
and the origin of the hate, if she allow it, I shall sing.
One of your handmaids, daughter of Cadmus, used
often to go into your husband’s embraces.
Shameless Athamas loved her in secret; from her
he learned that the seed given to the farmers had been parched.
You yourself deny you did it, but rumor took it up.
This is why a band of servants is hateful to you.
Yet let no devoted mother pray to her for her own offspring:
she herself seemed to have been a luckless parent.
Better will you commit another’s child to her care:
she was more use to Bacchus than to her own.
They say she said to you, Rutilius, "Where do you hurry?
On my day, as consul, you will fall by the Marsian foe."
The outcome followed her words, and the river Tolenus
flowed crimson, its waters mixed with blood.
The next year it was: slain on the same day,
Didius doubled the strength of the enemy.

No mark is on the coming day that you could name;
on the Ides a temple was given to Jupiter the Unconquered.
And now I am bidden to tell of the lesser Quinquatrus.
Now be present, golden Minerva, to my undertaking.
"Why does the flute-player wander through the whole City?
what do the masks, what does the long robe mean?"
So I. So the Tritonian, her spear laid by, said
(would that I could report the learned goddess’s words):
"In the days of our ancient forefathers the flute-player’s craft
was great, and always held in great honor:
the flute played at the shrines, the flute played at the games,
the flute played at the mournful funerals;
the toil was sweet for its pay. Then a time followed
that suddenly broke the practice of the pleasing art.
Add that the aedile had ruled that only ten
players should go in the funeral procession.
They change the City for exile and withdraw to Tibur:
Tibur was once a place of exile.
The hollow flute is missed on the stage, missed at the altars;
no dirge leads the last biers.
A certain man had been a slave at Tibur, worthy of any rank,
but had long been free.
He prepares a feast on his estate, and summons the tuneful
crowd: they gather to the festive board.
It was night, and eyes and minds swam with wine,
when a messenger came with a face composed beforehand,
and said thus: "Why delay to break up the banquet?
for behold, the man who freed you is coming."
Without delay the guests move their limbs reeling with strong wine;
their unsteady feet stand and totter.
But the host says, "Be off," and onto a wagon the lingerers
he lifted; in the wagon was a broad mat of rushes.
The hour and the rocking and the wine lure on sleep,
and the drunken crowd thinks it is going home to Tibur.
And now through the Esquiline it had entered the Roman city,
and at dawn the wagon stood in the middle of the Forum.
Plautius, to deceive the Senate by their look and number,
orders their faces covered with masks,
and mixes in others, and, to swell the company with a flute-girl,
bids them go in long robes;
so the returned could be well hidden, lest by chance they be marked
as coming against the orders of their own magistrate.
The plan pleased, and on the Ides one may use the new dress
and sing jesting words to the old tunes."
When she had taught this fully, "It remains for me to learn," I said,
"why that day is called the Quinquatrus."
"March," she says, "keeps my festival under that name,
and this guild too is among my inventions.
First, with boxwood bored through with scattered holes,
I contrived that the long flute should give its sounds.
The sound pleased: but in the waters that gave back my image
I saw my maiden cheeks puff out.
’The art is not worth so much to me; farewell, my flute,’ I said:
the bank received it, cast away on its turf.
A satyr first marvels at it found, and knows not its use,
and feels that, blown, it has a voice;
and now he lets the air go with his fingers, now draws it in,
and now among the nymphs was proud of his art;
he even challenges Phoebus. Phoebus winning, he hung;
his limbs, flayed, parted from his skin.
Yet I am the inventor and author of this music:
this is why that art keeps my days."

The third night will come, on which you, Dodonian Thyone,
will stand, to be seen on the brow of the Agenorean bull.
This is that day on which you, Tiber, send the sweepings of Vesta
through the Etruscan waters down to the sea.

If there is any trust in the winds, give your sails to Zephyrus, sailors:
tomorrow he will come favorable to your waters.

But when the father of the Heliades has dipped his rays in the waves,
and the calm star girds the twin poles,
the offspring of Hyrieus will lift his strong arms from the ground;
on the next night the Dolphin will be there to see.
To be sure, this one once saw the Volscians and Aequians routed
on your plains, land of Algidus;
whence, famed for a suburban triumph, Tubertus,
you were borne in time, a victor, on snow-white horses.

Now six and six more days are left of the month,
yet you must add one day to this number.
The sun goes from the Twins, and the signs of the Crab redden:
Pallas begins to be worshipped on the Aventine citadel.

Now your daughter-in-law, Laomedon, rises, and risen drives off
the night, and the wet frost flees from the meadows.
A temple, they say, was given to Summanus, whoever he is,
at the time when you, Pyrrhus, were to be feared by the Romans.

When Galatea too has received this day in her father’s waters,
and the land is full of untroubled rest,
a youth rises from the ground, blasted by his grandfather’s weapons,
and stretches out his hands entwined with twin snakes.
Known is the love of Phaedra, known the wrong of Theseus:
credulous, he cursed his own son.
Not unpunished the dutiful youth was making for Troezen:
a bull cleaves the opposing waters with its breast.
The frightened horses take fright, and, held back in vain,
drag their master over crags and hard rocks.
He had fallen from the chariot, and, the reins snaring his limbs,
Hippolytus was dragged, his body torn,
and had given up his life, while Diana raged in grief.
"There is no cause for sorrow," says the son of Coronis:
"for to the dutiful youth I will give back life without a wound,
and the sad fates will yield to my art."
At once he takes herbs from ivory caskets:
they had helped the shade of Glaucus before,
at the time when, as augur, he went down to the herbs he had watched,
and used the help a snake had given to a snake.
Three times he touched the breast, three times said healing words:
the youth lifted from the ground his low-laid head.
Dictynna hides him in a grove and the recess of her own wood:
he is Virbius at the Arician lake.
But Clymenus and Clotho grieve, she that her threads are held back,
he that the rights of his realm are made the less.
Jupiter, fearing the precedent, aimed his bolts
at the very one who had wielded the aid of excessive art.
Phoebus, you complained: he is a god, be reconciled to your father:
for your sake he himself does what he forbids to be done.

I would not wish you, Caesar, however you hasten to conquer,
to move your standards, if the augury forbid.
Let Flaminius and the shores of Trasimene be your witnesses
that the gods give many warnings through the birds.
If you ask the rash date of that old disaster,
it is twice the fifth day counting from the month’s end.
The next day is better: Masinissa overcomes Syphax,
and Hasdrubal fell by his own weapons.

Time slips by, and we grow old with the silent years,
and the days flee, with no rein to hold them.
How quickly the honors of Fors Fortuna have come!
after seven days June will be done.
Go, Quirites, gladly keep the goddess Fors:
on the Tiber’s bank she has the king’s gift.
Some on foot, some too in a swift skiff, run down,
and let it not shame you to come home from there well drunk.
Carry, you garlanded boats, the banquets of the young men,
and let much wine be drunk amid the waters.
The plebs worships her, because he who founded her is said
to have been of the plebs, and to have won the scepter from a humble place.
She suits slaves too, because Tullius, born of a slave,
set up the neighboring temples to the doubtful goddess.

Behold, someone coming back ill-sober from a suburban temple
flings such words up to the stars:
"Your belt is hidden now, and tomorrow perhaps will be hidden:
after that, Orion, it will be there for me to see."
But, had he not been drunk, he would have said the same:
that the time of the solstice would come on that day.

As the Morning Star came on, the Lares received their shrines
here, where many a garland is made by a skilled hand.
The same time the temple of Jupiter the Stayer holds, which Romulus
once founded before the brow of the Palatine ridge.

As many days are left of the month as the Fates have names,
when the temple was given to your robe, Quirinus.

Tomorrow is the birthday of the Julian Kalends:
Muses, set the crowning touch to my undertaking.
Tell, Muses, who assigned you to him
to whom the conquered stepmother gave her unwilling hands.
So I. So Clio: "You behold the monuments of famous Philippus,
from whom chaste Marcia draws her descent—
Marcia, her name brought down from sacrificing Ancus,
in whom beauty matches her nobility.
Her form, too, answers to her spirit; in her
are lineage and beauty and talent all at once.
Nor, because we praise her beauty, should you think it base:
in this respect too we praise the great goddesses.
She was once wed, the aunt of Caesar, to him:
O glory, O woman worthy of the sacred house!"
So sang Clio, and the learned sisters assented;
Alcides nodded and struck the lyre.