Sorrows

Little book — and I do not begrudge it — you will go to the city without me:
alas for me, that your master is not allowed to go!
Go, but unadorned, as befits the book of an exile;
in your misfortune, wear the dress this season of mine requires.
Let no whortleberry veil you with its purple dye —
that color does not suit times of grief —
let no vermilion mark your title, no cedar-oil your pages,
and wear no white bosses on your dark brow.
Let such trappings adorn the books of the fortunate:
it befits you to keep my fortune in mind.
Let no brittle pumice polish your two edges smooth,
so that you may show shaggy, your hair disordered.
And be not ashamed of blots; whoever sees them
will sense that they were made by my tears.
Go, book, and greet in my words the places I love:
let me at least touch them with what foot I may.
If anyone there, as happens in a crowd, has not forgotten me,
if anyone should chance to ask how I fare,
say that I live, but deny that I am safe and well;
and that even my living, I hold as a god’s gift.
And for the rest be silent — let one who wants more read on —
take care lest you chance to say what need not be said!
The reader, once reminded, will at once revive my charges,
and I shall be tried, the public defendant, on the people’s lips.
You — take care not to defend me, however you are bitten by words:
my case, being bad, will be too much for an advocate.
You will find someone who sighs that I am taken away,
and reads these songs through with cheeks not dry,
and silently wishes within — lest some ill-wisher hear —
that, Caesar appeased, my punishment be light.
I too pray that whoever he is may not be wretched,
who wishes the gods to be appeased toward the wretched;
that what he wishes come true, and that the prince’s anger, withdrawn,
grant me to die in the seat of my fathers.
Though you carry out my orders, book, you will perhaps be blamed,
and judged beneath the praise my talent once had.
The judge’s duty is to inquire into the occasion as well as the deed:
let the occasion be inquired into, and you are safe.
Songs come forth drawn from a serene mind:
my days are clouded over by sudden ills.
Songs ask for the seclusion and the leisure of a writer:
I am tossed by the sea, by the winds, by savage winter.
Every fear stands in the way of song: I, undone,
think the sword even now, even now, will lodge in my throat.
That I do even this much, a fair judge will marvel at,
and will read what I write, such as it is, with indulgence.
Give me Homer himself, and hedge him round with as many disasters:
under ills so great, all his genius would fail.
In short, book, remember to go heedless of fame,
and let it not shame you to have displeased your reader.
Fortune does not show herself so favorable to me
that you should take any account of your own praise.
While I was safe, I was touched by love of renown,
and the desire for a name burned in me;
now, if I do not hate the songs and the pursuit that harmed me,
let that be enough; my exile was won by my own talent.
You, though — go in my place, you who are allowed — look upon Rome;
would the gods grant that I could now be my own book!
And do not think that, because you come a foreigner into the great city,
you can come unknown to the people.
Though you lack a title, your very color will betray you;
however much you wish to dissemble, it is clear that you are mine.
Yet enter in secret, lest my songs do you harm;
they are not, as once they were, full of favor.
If there is anyone who thinks you, because you are mine,
not worth the reading, and casts you from his lap,
say: "Look at the title: I am no teacher of love;
that work has already paid the penalty it earned."
Perhaps you wait to learn whether, sent up to the high Palatine,
I bid you climb to Caesar’s house.
Let the august places and the gods of those places pardon me.
It was from that citadel that the lightning came upon this head.
I remember indeed that there are most gentle powers in those seats,
but I fear the gods who have done me harm.
The dove is terrified by the slightest whir of a wing,
once wounded, hawk, by your talons.
Nor does any lamb dare go far from the fold,
once it has been snatched from the teeth of a greedy wolf.
Phaethon would shun the sky, if he were alive,
and would refuse to touch the horses he foolishly desired.
I too — I confess it — fear the weapons of Jove, which I have felt:
I think myself the target of hostile fire whenever it thunders.
Whoever of the Argive fleet escaped Caphereus
forever turns his sails away from the Euboean waters;
and my little boat, once struck by a vast squall,
shudders to approach the place where it was hurt.
Therefore, book, be careful, and look about with a timid mind,
so that it be enough for you to be read by the middling crowd.
While Icarus sought too lofty heights on feeble wings,
he gave his name to the waters of the sea.
Yet it is hard to say from here whether you should use oars or breeze;
the occasion and the circumstance and the place will advise.
If you can be handed over when he is at leisure, if you see all things
gentle, if his anger has broken its force,
if there is anyone who, while you hesitate and fear to approach,
hands you over, and yet first speaks a few words — approach.
On a good day, and luckier than your master,
may you reach there and lighten my ills.
For either no one, or he who made my wounds,
he alone, in Achilles’ fashion, can take them away.
Only see that you do no harm while you wish to help —
for my hope is less than the fear in my mind —
and take care lest the anger that was at rest, once stirred, rage again,
and you become a second cause of my punishment.
Yet when you have been received into my inner sanctum,
and reached your home, the curved book-cases,
you will see there your brothers, set in order,
all whom the same toil kept awake.
The rest of the throng will display their titles openly,
and bear their names on an uncovered brow;
but three you will see lurking far off in a dark corner —
these, because, as no one fails to know, they teach men to love.
These you should either flee, or, if you have face enough,
call them Oedipuses and Telegonuses.
And of the three, I warn you, if you have any care for your parent,
love none of them, however much it will itself teach you to.
There are also the changed forms, thrice five rolls,
songs lately snatched from my own funeral.
To these I bid you say that the face of my fortune
can be reckoned among the changed bodies,
for it has suddenly been made unlike its former self,
and is now to be wept over, though once it was glad.
More commands, if you ask, I had to give you,
but I fear to be the cause of your slow road;
and if you were to carry with you, book, all that comes to mind,
you would prove a heavy burden to your bearer.
The way is long, make haste! For me the world’s
last edge will be my dwelling, a land far from my own land.

Gods of sea and sky — for what is left but prayers? —
spare the timbers of my shattered craft from breaking apart,
and do not, I beg, endorse great Caesar’s anger:
often, when one god presses, another god brings aid.
Mulciber stood against Troy, Apollo stood for Troy;
Venus was kind to the Teucrians, Pallas unkind.
Saturnia, nearer to Turnus, hated Aeneas;
yet he was kept safe by Venus’ power.
Often fierce Neptune attacked wary Ulysses;
often Minerva snatched him from her own uncle.
And though we stand far below those men, who forbids
that some divinity stand by us when a god is angry?
A wretch, I waste in vain words that do no good.
The heavy waters themselves spatter my face as I speak,
and dreadful Notus tosses my words away, and will not let
my prayers go to the gods to whom they are sent.
So the same winds, that I be not harmed in one way only,
carry off my sails and my vows I know not where.
Wretched me, what mountains of water roll!
Now, now you would think they will touch the highest stars.
What valleys sink down as the sea is parted!
Now, now you would think they will touch black Tartarus.
Wherever I look, there is nothing but sea and sky,
the one swollen with waves, the other threatening with clouds.
Between the two the winds roar with monstrous noise.
The sea’s wave does not know which master to obey.
For now Eurus takes strength from the crimson east,
now Zephyrus comes, sent from the late evening,
now cold Boreas rages from the dry north,
now Notus wages war with his front opposed.
The helmsman is in doubt and cannot find
what to flee or make for: his very skill is stunned by the baffling perils.
Surely we are lost, and there is no hope of safety,
and while I speak, a wave overwhelms my face.
The flood will crush this life of mine, and as I pray in vain
with open mouth I shall take in the killing waters.
But my faithful wife grieves for nothing but my exile:
this one ill of mine she knows and bemoans.
She does not know that I am tossed on the boundless sea,
does not know I am driven by winds, does not know death is near.
Ah, well that I did not let her embark with me,
lest I, poor wretch, should have to suffer death twice over!
But now, even if I perish, since she is free of the peril,
in half of myself at least I shall survive.
Ah me, with what swift flame the clouds have flashed!
What a great crash resounds from the heavenly vault!
And the planks of the sides are struck by the waves no more lightly
than the heavy ballista-shot batters a wall.
This wave that comes here overtops all the waves:
it comes after the ninth and before the eleventh.
I do not fear death; it is the kind of death that is pitiable;
take away shipwreck, and death will be a gift to me.
It is something, for a man falling by his own fate or by the sword,
to lay his dying body on the solid ground,
to leave some charge to his kin and to hope for a tomb,
and not to be food for the fishes of the sea.
Suppose me worthy of such a death — I am not the only one
borne here. Why does my punishment drag the guiltless along?
O you gods above, and you green gods who care for the waters,
let both your throngs now cease your threats;
and the life that Caesar’s most gentle anger granted,
let me, unhappy, carry to the appointed place.
If you wish me to pay the penalty I have earned,
my fault, even by my own judge, is less than death.
If Caesar had wished already to send me into the Stygian waves,
he would not have needed your help for this.
He has a power over my blood that need rouse no envy;
and what he gave, when he wills, he will himself take away.
Only you — whom, I think, I have wronged by no crime —
be content, I pray, now with my ills.
And yet, though all of you should wish to save a wretch,
what has perished can be no safe-and-living head.
Suppose the sea subside and I have favoring winds,
suppose you spare me — I shall be no less an exile.
I do not plow the broad sea, greedy to amass wealth
without end by trading my goods,
nor do I seek Athens, which once I eagerly sought,
nor the towns of Asia, nor places seen before;
not to be carried into Alexander’s famous city
to see your delights, playful Nile.
That I pray for favoring winds — who could believe it? —
the Sarmatian land is what my sails make for.
I am bound to touch the savage shores of the Pontus on the left;
and I complain that my flight from my homeland is so slow.
That I may see the Tomitans, set in some corner of the world,
I make my road short by my prayers.
Whether you love me, restrain these great waves,
and let your powers be favorable to my craft;
or whether you rather hate me, drive me to the land I am ordered to:
part of my punishment lies in the region itself.
Carry me off — what am I doing here? — swift winds, my sails!
Why do my sails wish for the Ausonian borders?
Caesar did not wish this: why do you hold one whom he drives away?
Let the Pontic land look upon my face.
He both orders it and I have deserved it; nor do I think it right or holy
to defend the charges he has condemned.
Yet if mortal deeds never deceive the gods,
you know that crime is far from my fault.
Indeed, if you know it so, if my own error carried me off,
and my mind was foolish, not criminal,
if — as is allowed even to the lowest — I favored that house,
if Augustus’ public commands were law enough for me,
if under this leader I called the age a happy one,
and dutifully gave incense for Caesar and the Caesars —
if such was my mind, then spare me, you gods!
If not, let a high wave fall and overwhelm my head!
Am I wrong, or do the swollen clouds begin to vanish,
and the changed sea’s anger, defeated, break?
Not by chance — but called under condition, you whom it is not possible
to deceive, you bring me this aid.

When the saddest image of that night comes over me,
the night that was my last time in the city,
when I recall the night on which I left so much that was dear,
even now a teardrop slips from my eyes.
Already the day was near at hand on which Caesar had ordered me
to depart from the borders of farthest Ausonia.
There had been neither time nor mind fit enough for preparing:
my heart had grown numb with the long delay.
I had no care for choosing slaves, or a companion,
no fitting clothes or supplies for an exile.
I was as stunned as one struck by Jove’s fires,
who lives and is himself unaware of his own life.
Yet when grief itself removed this cloud from my mind,
and at last my senses recovered their strength,
about to depart, I address my mournful friends for the last time,
who, of many, were now but one or two.
My loving wife, weeping, held me more bitterly as I wept,
the rain falling all the while down her undeserving cheeks.
My daughter was far off, apart, under the Libyan shores,
and could not be told of my fate.
Wherever you looked, mourning and groans resounded,
and within was the look of a funeral not silent.
Women and men, children too, grieve at my funeral,
and every corner in the house held tears.
If it is allowed to use great examples in small things,
this was the face of Troy when it was being taken.
And now the voices of men and dogs were quiet,
and the Moon on high was guiding her nocturnal horses.
Looking up at her, and seeing by her the Capitol,
which had been joined — in vain — to my own household,
I said: "Powers dwelling in the neighboring seats,
and temples now never again to be seen by my eyes,
and gods I must leave, whom the high city of Quirinus holds,
be saluted by me for all time.
And though I take up the shield late, after the wounds,
yet unburden this exile of your hatreds,
and tell the heavenly man what error deceived me,
that he not think a crime where there was a fault.
Let the author of my punishment feel what you know:
with the god appeased, I can be not wretched."
With this prayer I worshiped the gods above; my wife with more,
sobbing breaking off the sounds midway.
She too, before the Lares, with hair let loose, prostrate,
touched the dead hearth with trembling lips,
and poured out many words to the averted Penates,
words of no avail for the husband she lamented.
And now the night, plunging headlong, denied space for delay,
and the Parrhasian Bear had turned from its axis.
What was I to do? I was held back by sweet love of country,
but that was the last night before my ordered flight.
Ah, how often I said to someone who hurried me, "Why press me?
See whither you hasten to go, or whence."
Ah, how often I lied that I had a fixed hour
that would suit the journey set before me.
Three times I touched the threshold, three times I was called back, and my very foot,
indulging my mind, was slow for me.
Often, with "farewell" said, again I spoke much,
and, as though departing, gave the last kisses.
Often I gave the same charges and deceived myself,
looking back with my eyes at the dear pledges of my love.
At last I said, "Why do I hurry? It is Scythia I am sent to;
Rome must be left — each is a just cause of delay.
My wife, alive, is denied to me, living, forever,
and the house, and the sweet members of the faithful house,
and the comrades I have loved in a brother’s way,
o hearts joined to me with Thesean faith!
While it is allowed, let me embrace them: never, perhaps,
will it be allowed again; the hour granted me is so much gain."
And without delay I leave my words of talk unfinished,
embracing each one nearest to my heart.
While I speak and we weep, most brilliant in the high sky,
the Morning-star, a star grievous to us, had risen.
I am torn apart no otherwise than if I were leaving my own limbs behind,
and a part seemed wrenched from its own body.
So Mettus grieved, then, when he had the horses,
the avengers of his treachery, turned in opposite ways.
Then indeed the cry and the groans of my people arise,
and mournful hands strike bare breasts.
Then indeed my wife, clinging to the shoulders of the departing man,
mingled these sad words with her tears:
"You cannot be torn away: together — ah! — together we will go," she said,
"I will follow you, and be the exile wife of an exile.
For me too the road is made, me too the farthest land receives:
I will board your fleeing craft, a small piece of baggage.
Caesar’s anger bids you depart your homeland,
me my devotion: this devotion will be my Caesar."
Such she attempted, as she had attempted before,
and scarcely gave in, her hands overcome by what was useful.
I go out — or was that being carried off without a funeral? —
unkempt, my hair hanging shaggy over my face.
She, out of her mind with grief, with darkness coming over her,
half-dead, they tell, fell down in the middle of the house,
and when she rose again, her hair fouled with vile dust,
and lifted her limbs from the cold ground,
she lamented now herself, now the deserted Penates,
and often called the name of the husband snatched away,
and groaned no less than if she had seen
the body of her daughter or of me laid on the built pyre,
and wished to lay aside her sense of woe by dying,
yet, out of regard for me, could not.
Let her live; and, since the fates have so borne it, let her live
absent, and ever support me with her aid.

The guardian of the Erymanthian Bear is dipped in ocean,
and with his star troubles the waters of the sea.
Yet we cleave the Ionian deep not of our own
will, but, made bold by fear, are forced.
Wretched me! With what great winds the waters swell,
and the sand boils up, torn from the lowest depths!
No lower than a mountain, the wave leaps onto the prow
and the curved stern, and lashes the painted gods.
The pine-built planks resound with the blow, the rigging with shrieking,
and the keel itself groans at our misfortunes.
The sailor, confessing his cold fear by his pallor,
now follows his ship, beaten, no longer rules it by skill.
And as a too-weak rider lets fall the useless reins
on the stiff neck of his horse,
so I see the steersman has given his sails to the ship
not where he wished, but where the wave’s force snatches it.
Unless Aeolus sends out winds that change,
I shall be carried into places I must not now approach.
For, the Illyrian shores left far on the left,
forbidden Italy comes into my view.
Let the breeze cease, I pray, to strive toward the forbidden lands,
and with me obey the great god.
While I speak, and at once both fear and long to be driven back,
with what force the wave has crashed against my side!
Spare me, you powers of the blue sea, spare me,
and let it be enough that Jove is hostile to me.
Snatch my weary soul from cruel death,
if only one who has perished can keep from perishing.

O you who must be named after none of my comrades ever,
and to whom, above all, my lot has seemed his own;
who first, dearest one — I remember — dared to bear me up,
thunderstruck, with your words;
who gave me the gentle counsel to go on living,
when in my wretched breast was the love of death.
You know well whom I mean, by the signs set in place of a name,
and your service, friend, does not deceive you.
These things will be fixed for me forever in my inmost marrow,
and I shall be the perpetual debtor of this soul:
sooner shall this breath go, thinned into the empty air,
and desert my bones on the warm pyre,
than forgetfulness of your kindnesses come over my mind,
and that devotion of yours fall away with the long day.
May the gods be kind to you, and grant you a fortune
that needs no one’s help, unlike my own.
Yet if this ship were borne by a friendly wind,
that faith of yours would perhaps go unknown.
Pirithous would not have felt Theseus so much a friend,
had he not gone alive to the infernal waters.
That you, sad Orestes, were the example of true love,
your Furies brought about, Phocian.
Had Euryalus not fallen among the Rutulian foes,
no glory would belong to Nisus, son of Hyrtacus.
Just as tawny gold is tested in the fire,
so faith must be inspected in a hard time.
While Fortune helps and smiles with serene face,
all things follow upon undiminished wealth:
but as soon as she has thundered, they flee, and he is known by none
who was just now girt with throngs of companions.
And these things, once gathered from the examples of the ancients,
are now known to me as true by my own ills.
Scarcely two or three of you out of so many are left to me, my friends:
the rest were Fortune’s crowd, not mine.
So much the more, o you few, come to the aid of my battered estate,
and give safe shores to my shipwreck,
and do not, with false fear, tremble too much, in dread
that a god be offended by this devotion.
Often Caesar has praised faith even in opposing arms,
and loves it in his own, approves it in an enemy.
My case is the better, who fostered no opposing
arms, but earned this exile by my own simplicity.
So keep watch, I pray, over my misfortunes,
in case the divinity’s anger can in any way be lessened.
If anyone desires to know all my misfortunes,
he asks for more than the case allows to be told.
I have suffered as many ills as there are stars shining in the sky,
and as many tiny bodies as the dry dust holds;
and we have borne many things greater than belief, things that,
though they have happened, will win no credence.
A certain part, too, must die with me,
and I would wish it could be covered while I keep it dark.
Had I an unbreakable voice, a breast firmer than bronze,
and many mouths with many tongues,
not even so could I embrace it all in words,
the matter outrunning my strength.
For the Neritian leader, learned poets,
write my ills: I have borne more ills than the Neritian.
He wandered over a short space in many years,
between the Dulichian and the Ilian homes:
me, after I had measured seas distant by all the stars,
fate carried into the Getic and Sarmatian gulfs.
He had a faithful band and trusty comrades:
me, a fugitive, my comrades deserted.
He, glad and victorious, was making for his homeland:
I have fled my homeland, conquered and an exile.
Nor is my home Dulichium, or Ithaca, or Samos,
places where to be absent is no great penalty,
but the one that looks round the whole world from its seven
hills, Rome, the seat of empire and of the gods.
He had a hard body, patient of toils:
mine are feeble strengths, and gently bred.
He was ceaselessly driven about in savage arms:
I myself was accustomed to soft pursuits.
A god has crushed me, with no one to lighten my ills:
a warrior goddess brought him aid.
And though he who reigns in the swelling waves is less than Jove,
Neptune’s anger pressed him, Jove’s presses me.
Add that the greatest part of his toils is invented;
in my ills no story is set down.
At last, after all, he reached the Penates he sought,
and gained, after all, the fields he long had sought:
but I must be without my native land forever,
unless the wronged god’s anger grow softer.

Lyde was not so beloved by the Clarian poet,
nor was Bittis so loved by her own Coan,
as you, my wife, cling fast within my heart,
worthy of a less wretched, not a better, husband.
By you my ruin has been propped, as if by a beam set beneath it:
if I am still anything, it is all your gift.
You make it that I am not plunder, nor stripped bare by those
who sought the planks of my shipwreck.
And as a wolf, ravenous, goaded by hunger and greedy for blood,
snatches at an unguarded fold,
or as a gluttonous vulture looks round for some corpse
set down where it can spy it, under no soil,
so someone, ill-faithful in my bitter circumstances,
was about to come into my goods, had you allowed it.
Your courage drove him off through your brave friends,
to whom no worthy thanks can ever be returned.
So you are proved by a witness as wretched as he is true,
if only a witness has any weight at all.
Nor is Hector’s wife your superior in uprightness,
nor Laodamia, companion of her dead husband.
Had you been allotted the Maeonian bard,
Penelope’s fame would be second to yours:
whether you owe this to yourself, made dutiful by no teacher,
and your character was given you with your first daylight,
or whether the first lady, honored by you through all the years,
teaches you to be the example of a good wife,
and has made you like herself by long familiarity —
if it is allowed to liken great things to small.
Alas for me, that my songs have no great power,
and my mouth is too small for your deserts,
and that if there was in me before any living vigor,
all of it has perished, put out by my long ills!
Otherwise you would have first place among the holy heroines,
first you would be conspicuous for the goodness of your mind.
Yet, however much my heralding shall avail,
in my songs you will live for all time.

If you have anyone in the likeness of my features,
take the ivy, the Bacchic garlands, from my hair.
Those lucky emblems befit happy poets:
a garland is not suited to my times.
Conceal this from yourself, but feel it said — best of men —
you who bear me on your finger and bear me back,
and, clasping my image in tawny gold,
see the dear face — what you can of it — of a banished man.
As often as you look at it, it may come upon you, perhaps, to say,
"How far from us is our comrade Naso!"
Your devotion is welcome, but my greater image
are my songs, which I bid you read, such as they are —
songs telling of the changed forms of men,
a work that its master’s unhappy flight broke off.
These, on departing, like many things of mine,
I myself set, mournful, with my own hand in the fire.
And as the daughter of Thestius is said to have burned her own son
in the brand, and to have been a better sister than mother,
so I laid my own innocent books, doomed to perish with me,
my own vitals, on the devouring pyres:
whether because I hated the Muses, as the cause of my charges,
or because the song was still growing and unworked.
Since these were not utterly destroyed, but survive
(written, I think, in several copies),
now I pray that they may live, and delight the reader
with no idle leisure, and put him in mind of me.
Yet they cannot be read with patience by anyone
who does not know the final hand is missing from them.
That work was taken from the midst of the anvil,
and the last file was wanting to my undertaking.
And so I ask pardon, not praise; I am praised abundantly,
if I am not scorned by you, reader.
These six lines too, if you think they should be set
at the very front of the book, take them:
"Whoever you are who touch these rolls, orphaned of their parent,
let a place at least be given them in your city.
And favor them the more for this: these were not published by himself,
but were as it were snatched from their master’s funeral.
Whatever fault, therefore, this unworked song shall have,
I would have corrected it, had I been allowed."

Back from the sea the deep rivers will glide to their source,
and the Sun, his horses turned, will run backward;
the earth will bear stars, the sky will be split by the plow,
the wave will give out flames, and the fire give waters;
all things will go reversed against nature’s laws,
and no part of the world will keep its own road;
all things will now come to pass that I denied could be,
and there is nothing of which faith should not be held.
This I prophesy, because I have been deceived by him
whom I thought would bring aid to me in my misery.
Did so great a forgetfulness of me take hold of you, false one,
and was it so great a terror to approach the stricken,
that you neither looked back nor consoled me as I lay,
hard man, nor walked in my funeral train?
Does that holy and venerable name of friendship
lie for you at a cheap rate, and underfoot?
What was it to visit a comrade laid low by a vast weight,
and to lighten him by some small part with your address,
and, if not to let a tear fall at my disasters,
yet to suffer a few words of feigned grief,
and to do what even strangers do — at least to say
"farewell," and follow the people’s voice and the public mouth?
To look, at last, upon my mournful face, never to be seen again,
while it was allowed, on that final day,
and once — and never more in a whole lifetime — to receive
the word "farewell," and return it in a like voice?
But others did it, joined to me by no bond,
and gave their tears, the signs of their feeling.
What if I had not been bound to you by living together, by strong
grounds, and by a love of long standing?
What if you had not known my jests, so many, and my serious matters, so many,
and I myself had not known so many jests and serious matters of yours?
What if you had been known to me at Rome alone,
adopted so often into every kind of place?
Have all these things gone, voided, into the seaward winds?
Have all been sunk, and borne off in Lethe’s waters?
I do not think you were born in the peaceful city of Quirinus,
the city which my foot may now not approach,
but among the crags that this shore of the sinister Pontus holds,
and among the wild ridges of Scythia and Sarmatia;
and your heart has veins of flint around it,
and your hard breast holds the seeds of iron,
and the nurse who once gave you her full breasts
to draw with your tender palate was a tigress:
otherwise you would think my ills less foreign than now you do,
and would not be charged by me with hardness.
But since this too is added to my fated losses,
that the first days lack their proper measure,
bring it about that I be not mindful of this fault, and that I praise
your service with the same mouth with which I complain.

May it be given you to reach the goal of life unhurt,
you who read this work of mine not as my enemy.
And would that my prayers might avail for you,
which for myself have not touched the hard gods!
While you are safe, you will count many friends:
if your times grow cloudy, you will be alone.
You see how the doves come to white-roofed houses,
while the grimy tower receives no birds.
Ants never make for empty granaries:
no friend will go to wealth that is lost.
And as the shadow goes companion to those walking in the sun’s rays,
but, when he hides pressed by clouds, it flees,
so the fickle crowd follows the lights of Fortune:
as soon as these are covered, with night drawn over, it is gone.
I pray that these things may always seem false to you:
yet they must be owned true by my own case.
While I stood, my house — known, indeed, but not ambitious —
held throngs as great as was enough.
But as soon as it was struck, all feared its fall,
and warily turned their backs in common flight.
And I do not wonder that they fear the cruel thunderbolts,
by whose fires whatever is nearest is wont to be scorched.
Yet a friend who stays on through hard circumstances
Caesar approves, however hated the enemy,
nor is he wont to be angry — for none is more moderate —
when a man, in adversity, loves what once he loved.
After he learned of the Argive Orestes’ comrade,
Thoas himself, they say, approved of Pylades.
The faith that Actor’s son always kept with great Achilles
was wont to be praised by Hector’s mouth.
That dutiful Theseus went, a companion, to his friend among the Shades,
they say grieved the Tartarean god.
When the faith of Euryalus and Nisus was told you, Turnus,
it is credible your cheeks grew wet with tears.
There is devotion even among the wretched, and it is approved in an enemy.
Alas for me, how few my words here move!
Such is the state, such now the fortune of my affairs,
that there should be no measure set to my tears;
yet my heart, though saddest by its own mischance,
has been made serene by your advancement.
I saw this coming, dearest one, even then,
when a lesser breeze still bore that craft of yours.
If there is any worth in character, or in a life
free of stain, no one was to be bought at a higher price;
or if anyone has lifted his head through the liberal arts,
by your eloquence any cause becomes good.
Moved by these things, I said to you at once, to your own face,
"A great stage awaits your gifts, friend."
These things were told me not by the entrails of sheep, nor by thunder on the left,
nor by the tongue or the wing of a watched bird:
reasoning is my augury, and the conjecture of the future;
by this I divined, and gained my knowledge.
Since it is true, with my whole mind I congratulate you and myself
that your talent has not lain hidden.
But would that ours had lain hidden in the deepest dark!
It would have served me for the light to be far from my pursuit.
And as the grave arts profit you, eloquent one,
so mine, being unlike them, have done me harm.
Yet my life is known to you; you know that from those arts
their author’s conduct held itself apart;
you know this song was an old game of mine in my youth, and that those
jests, though not to be praised, are still but jests.
Therefore, as I think my offenses can be defended by no color,
so I think they can be excused.
Excuse them as you can, and do not desert a friend’s cause:
as you have begun well, so may you ever go well.

I have — and pray I may keep — the protection of golden Minerva:
my ship takes its name from the painted helmet.
Whether there is need of sails, she runs well to the slightest breeze;
or if there is need of the oar, she makes her way by the rower.
And not content to outstrip her companions in flying course,
she overtakes whatever ships have set out before,
and rides out at once both the waves and the far-stretched
still seas, nor, beaten, is she soaked by cruel waters.
She, first known to me at Corinthian Cenchreae,
remains the faithful guide and comrade of my anxious flight,
and through so many chances, and over seas stirred by hostile winds,
was kept safe by Pallas’ power.
Now too, I pray, may she safely cut the mouths of the vast Pontus,
and enter the waters of the Getic shore she makes for.
As soon as she had brought me down to the sea of Aeolian Helle,
and made the long journey by a narrow track,
we bent our course to the left, and from Hector’s city
came to your harbors, land of Imbros.
Thence, having gained the Zerynthian shores with a light wind,
the weary keel touched Thracian Samos.
From here it is a short crossing for one making for Tempyra:
this far she followed her master.
For it pleased me to traverse the Bistonian plains on foot:
she retraced the Hellespontine waters,
and made for Dardania, which bears its founder’s name,
and you, Lampsacus, kept safe by the rustic god,
and the strait that, by the ill-carried maiden’s narrow waves,
separates Sestos from the Abydene town,
and Cyzicus, clinging to the Propontic shores,
Cyzicus, the noble work of the Haemonian race,
and the Byzantine shores that hold the jaws of the Pontus:
this is the place, the vast gateway of the twin seas.
These, I pray, may she overcome, and, driven by strong south winds,
may she briskly pass the shifting Cyanean rocks,
and the Thynian gulfs, and from these, past Apollo’s city,
hold her way under Anchialus’ narrow walls.
Thence let her pass by the harbors of Mesembria and Odessos
and the citadel called by your name, Bacchus,
and those who, they tell, sprung from the walls of Alcathous,
set up their fugitive household-gods in these seats.
From these may she come safe to the Milesian city,
where the wronged god’s anger has carried me down.
If these things befall, a lamb shall fall to deserving Minerva:
a greater victim does not suit our means.
You too, sons of Tyndareus, brothers whom this island honors,
be present, I pray, gentle powers, to my twofold way!
For one ship prepares to go through the narrow Symplegades,
the other to cleave the Bistonian waters.
Bring it about that, when we make for different places,
the one have its own winds, and the other no less its own.

Whatever letter you have read in this whole book
was made by me in the anxious season of my journey.
Either the Adriatic saw me writing it, amid the waters,
shivering in the cold month of December;
or, after I had crossed by my course the two-sea’d Isthmus,
and a second keel was taken up for my flight,
I think the Aegean Cyclades stood amazed
that I made verses amid the wild roar of the sea.
I myself now wonder that, in such tumults of mind and of sea,
my talent did not give way.
Whether the name for this pursuit is stupor or madness,
by this concern all my care is lightened.
Often I was tossed in doubt by the stormy Kids,
often the sea was threatening with Sterope’s star,
and the guardian of the Atlantean Bear darkened the day,
or the South wind had drunk up the Hyades with late rains;
often part of the sea was inboard; yet I myself,
with trembling hand, drew out verses, such as they are.
Now too the rigging shrieks, stretched by the North wind,
and the hollowed water rises in the fashion of a heap.
The very helmsman, lifting his palms to the stars,
begs aid with prayers, forgetful of his art.
Wherever I have looked, there is nothing but the image of death,
which I fear with a wavering mind, and, fearing, pray for.
Should I reach harbor, by the harbor itself I shall be terrified:
the hostile land holds more of fear than the water;
for I am beset at once by the snares of men and of the sea,
and the sword and the wave make twin terrors.
The one, I fear, hopes for plunder from my blood,
the other wishes to have the title of my death.
The left shore is barbarous, and inured to greedy plunder,
which blood and slaughter and wars hold always;
and though the sea is stirred by wintry waves,
their breasts are more turbulent than the sea itself.
So much the more should you pardon these poems, fair reader,
if they are, as they are, below your hope.
I did not write them, as once, in my gardens,
nor, my familiar couch, do you hold my body now.
I am tossed in the wintry daylight on the untamed deep,
and the very paper is struck by the dark-blue waters.
The cruel storm fights and is indignant that I dare
to write, while it shakes its rigid threats at me.
Let the storm conquer the man! But at the same time, I beg,
let me set the limit of my song, and it of its own.

What have I to do with you, my books, unhappy care of mine,
I who, wretched, have perished by my own talent?
Why do I seek again the Muses I just now condemned, my crime?
Or is it too little to have earned my punishment once?
Songs made man and woman wish to know me,
by no lucky omen of mine;
songs made Caesar mark me and my morals
on account of my Art, now ordered taken away.
Take from me my pursuit, and you take the charges of my life too;
I credit my being guilty to my verses.
This is the reward I have got for my care and my sleepless toils:
a punishment has been found for my talent.
If I were wise, I would justly hate the learned sisters,
divinities ruinous to their own worshiper.
But now — so great is the madness that goes with my disease —
I bring my unlucky foot back to those rocks again:
just as the beaten gladiator seeks the arena again,
and the shipwrecked vessel returns to the swelling waters.
Perhaps, as once for him who held the Teuthrantian kingdom,
the same thing will bring me both wound and cure,
and the Muse will soothe the anger she has stirred, now stirred:
songs often win over the great gods.
Caesar himself bade the Ausonian mothers and brides
sing songs to turret-crowned Ops;
he had bidden them be sung to Phoebus too, at the time he held the games
which one age sees but once.
By these examples, I pray, most gentle Caesar, may your anger now
be made softer by my talent.
That anger is just, and I will not deny that I have deserved it:
shame has not so far fled from my face.
But unless I had sinned, what could you forgive?
My lot has given you the matter of pardon.
If, as often as men sin, Jupiter should hurl his thunderbolts,
in a short time he would be disarmed;
now, when he has thundered and terrified the world with the din,
he gives the air back pure, the rains shaken out.
Justly, then, is he called father and ruler of the gods,
justly the capacious world has nothing greater than Jove.
You too, since you are called ruler and father of your country,
follow the manner of the god who bears the same name.
And so you do, nor could anyone ever hold the reins
of his own power more moderately than you.
You have often given pardon to the conquered party,
which the conqueror, in your place, would not have given you.
I have seen many men increased with riches and honors too,
who had borne arms against your head;
and the day that ended the war ended your war’s anger for you,
and both sides at once brought gifts to the temples;
and as your soldier rejoices that he has conquered the enemy,
so the enemy has cause to rejoice that he is conquered.
My case is the better, who am not said to have followed
opposing arms or the enemy’s resources.
By the sea, by the lands, by the third divinities I swear,
by you, a present and visible god,
that this mind of mine favored you, greatest of men, and that I,
in the only way I could, was yours in heart.
I prayed that you might reach the heavenly stars late,
and was a small part of the crowd praying the same,
and gave dutiful incense for you, and, one among all,
I too aided the public vows with my own.
Why should I recall that my books — those too, my crime —
are full of your name in a thousand places?
Look at the greater work, still held without an end,
the bodies changed into forms past believing:
you will find there the heraldings of your name,
you will find many pledges of my mind.
Your glory is not made greater by songs, nor has it where
it might grow, to become greater.
Fame is more than enough for Jove: yet it pleases him that his deeds
be recounted, and that he be the matter of song,
and when the battles of the war of the Giants are told,
it is credible that he is glad of his own praises.
Others celebrate you with as fitting a voice as is due, and sing
your praises with a richer talent:
but yet, as a god is taken by the shed blood of a hundred bulls,
so he is taken by the smallest honor of incense.
Ah, fierce, and crueler to me than all my enemies,
whoever read you my Delights,
that the songs which venerate you in my books might not
be read with a fairer judgment.
But who could be a friend to me when you were angry?
Scarcely then was I not my own enemy.
When a shaken house has begun to sink, the whole weight
settles onto the leaning parts,
and all things gape, as fortune makes a crack,
and the house itself, drawn by its own weight, falls in ruin.
So by my song I won the hatred of men, and the crowd
followed your face, as it ought.
But — I remember — you approved my life and my morals
on that horse you had given me, as I passed in review:
and if this is of no profit, and no glory of honesty
is returned to me, yet I had got no charge against me.
Nor was the fortune of defendants ill entrusted to me,
the suit to be examined by the ten times ten men.
Private matters too I judged, a judge without reproach,
and even the losing side confessed my good faith.
Wretched me! I could, if the last things did not harm me,
have been more than once kept safe by your judgment.
The last things ruin me, and one squall sinks beneath the lowest sea
the ship that was so many times unharmed.
Nor did a small part of the flood harm me, but all the waves
and the ocean pressed upon this head.
Why did I see anything? Why did I make my eyes guilty?
Why was the fault made known to me, unaware?
Unwitting, Actaeon saw Diana without her dress:
none the less was he prey to his own dogs.
Clearly, among the gods, even chance must be atoned for,
nor does mischance find pardon when a divinity is wronged.
On that day on which my evil error carried me off,
my house — small indeed, but without stain — perished:
small, yet such that it may be called, in my father’s line,
distinguished, and inferior in nobility to none,
and not to be marked for either riches or poverty,
whence the knight who comes from it is conspicuous for neither.
And let my house be small, whether in property or in birth,
by my talent at least it is not hidden:
and though I may seem to have used that talent too youthfully,
yet I bear a great name from the whole world;
and the throng of the learned knows Naso, and dares
to count him among men not scorned.
This house, then, dear to the Muses, has fallen, brought down
under a single, but not slight, charge:
yet it has so fallen that it can rise again, if only
the wronged Caesar’s anger shall have ripened.
In the measuring of my penalty his clemency is so great
that it has come out gentler than my fear.
Life was given me, and your anger stopped short of death,
o prince sparing in the use of your strength!
On top of this — you not taking them — come my father’s
riches, as if life were too little a gift.
You did not condemn my deeds by a decree of the senate,
nor was my exile ordered by a chosen judge.
You inveighed with grim words (so worthy of a prince),
and yourself avenged your grievances, as is fitting.
Add that the edict, though harsh and threatening,
was yet mild in the naming of the penalty:
for in it I am called relegated, not exiled,
and there are words there special to my own fortune.
No punishment, indeed, is heavier to a sane and self-possessed mind
than to have displeased so great a man:
but a divinity is sometimes wont to grow placable:
the bright day is wont to come when the cloud is driven off.
I have seen an elm laden with grape-bearing vines,
which had been struck by the bolt of savage Jove.
Though you yourself forbid me to hope, I will hope all the same;
this one thing can be done though you forbid it.
A great hope comes upon me when I look at you, most gentle prince,
hope falls from me when I look at my own deeds.
And as, when winds stir the air, there is not
an even rage and continuous fury,
but they now sink down and, intermitting, fall silent,
and you would think they had laid aside their force:
so my fears go off and return and vary,
and give and deny me the hope of appeasing you.
By the gods above, then, who give and will give you long
spans of time, if only they love the Roman name;
by your country, which is safe and secure with you as parent,
of which, as one of the people, I lately was a part;
so may the love it owes you, of a grateful city, be returned to you,
which you ever earn by your deeds and your spirit;
so may Livia complete with you her wedded years,
who, but for you, was worthy of no husband,
who, if she did not exist, a single life would befit you,
and there was none to whom you could be a husband;
may your son too be safe while you are safe, and one day
rule this empire, an old man with you, older still;
and may your grandsons, the youthful star, as now they do,
go forward by their own deeds and their father’s;
so may Victory, ever accustomed to your camps,
now too be present and seek the standards she knows,
and circle the Ausonian leader on her wonted wings,
and set the laurel garlands on his gleaming hair —
he through whom you wage war, in whose body you now fight,
to whom you give great auspices and your gods,
and with half of yourself you are present and look upon the city,
with half you are far off and wage savage wars;
so may he return to you a victor over a conquered foe,
and shine on high on garlanded horses:
spare me, I pray, and put away your thunderbolt, your fierce weapons,
weapons too well known, alas, to wretched me!
Spare me, father of your country, and do not, forgetful of this name,
take from me the hope of one day appeasing you.
I do not pray that I may return — although it is credible
that the great gods have often given more than was asked:
if you give me a milder and nearer exile at my asking,
a great part of my punishment will be lightened.
I suffer the uttermost, cast out into the midst of enemies,
nor is any exile farther from his homeland.
Sent alone to the outlets of the sevenfold Hister,
I am pressed by the cold pole of the Parrhasian maiden.
The Iazyges, the Colchians, the throng of Tereus’ people, the Getae
are scarcely kept off by the waters in the middle of the Danube;
and though others have been banished by you for a graver cause,
to none was a land farther off than mine given.
Nothing is farther than this, except only cold and enemies,
and the wave that freezes into bound ice.
This far is the Roman part of the sinister Euxine:
the nearest beyond, the Bastarnae and the Sauromatae hold.
This is the newest land under Ausonian law, and scarcely
clings to the margin of your empire.
Whence I pray, a suppliant, that you relegate me to safety,
that peace too be not taken from me with my country,
that I not fear the nations the Hister does not well keep off,
nor be able, your citizen, to be captured by an enemy.
Divine law forbids that anyone born of Latin blood
should suffer barbarian chains while the Caesars are safe.
Though two charges, a poem and an error, have ruined me,
the guilt of the one deed must be kept silent by me:
for I am not of such worth that I should renew your wounds, Caesar,
whom it is more than too much to have grieved once.
The other part remains, on which I am accused of having become,
by a shameful poem, the teacher of obscene adultery.
It is possible, then, that heavenly minds are deceived in some things,
and many are too small for your notice;
and as Jupiter, watching at once the gods and the high heaven,
has no leisure to attend to trifling matters,
so, while you survey the world that hangs upon you,
the lesser things escape your cares.
Should you, the prince of empire, leave your post
and read poems made in unequal measures?
That weight of the Roman name does not so press you,
nor is so light a load borne upon your shoulders,
that you could turn your divinity to silly trifles
and run your eyes over my idle hours.
Now you have Pannonia, now the Illyrian coast to tame,
now Raetian and Thracian arms cause alarm,
now the Armenian seeks peace, now the Parthian horseman
holds out his bow and the captured standards with a timid hand,
now Germany feels you young again in your offspring,
and a Caesar wages wars for the great Caesar.
In short, as in so great a body — greater than ever was —
no part of the empire totters,
the city too wearies you, and the guardianship of your laws,
and of the morals you wish to be like your own.
The leisure you grant to the nations does not fall to you,
and you wage restless wars with many peoples.
Should I wonder, then, that under the weight of such great affairs
you have never unrolled my jests?
But if — what I would prefer — you had chanced to have leisure,
you would have read no crime in my Art.
That work, I confess, is not of a stern brow,
nor worthy to be read by so great a prince:
yet not for that reason is it contrary to the commands of the laws,
nor does it school Roman brides.
And lest you doubt for whom I write, one of the three books
holds these four verses:
"Be far off, you slender fillets, the emblem of modesty,
and you, long flounce that covers the middle of the feet!
We shall sing nothing but the lawful and permitted stealth,
and in my song there will be no crime."
Have I not sternly removed from this Art all
whom the worn stola and the assumed fillet forbid to be touched?
"But a matron can use arts meant for others,
and has where to be drawn, though she is not taught."
Then let a matron read nothing, since by every poem
she can be made more learned for transgressing.
Whatever a woman bent on the sinister has touched,
from it she will school her morals toward vice.
Let her take up the Annals (nothing is shaggier than they):
she will read, of course, how Ilia was made a mother.
Let her take up "the mother of the Aeneadae," where it first stands,
she will ask whence nourishing Venus is the Aeneadae’s mother.
I will pursue it further below, if only I may go in order,
that every kind of poem can do harm to the mind.
Yet not for that will every book be guilty:
nothing is of use that cannot likewise do harm.
What is more useful than fire? Yet whoever prepares
to burn houses arms his bold hands with fire.
Medicine now snatches away, now gives, health,
and shows which herb helps, which is harmful.
Both the robber and the wary traveler gird on the sword;
but the one carries it for ambush, the other for his own aid.
Eloquence is learned that it may plead harmless causes:
it protects the guilty, and crushes the innocent.
So then my poem too, if read with a right mind,
will be found able to harm no one.
"But it does, some women." Whoever conceives this errs,
and claims too much for my writings.
Yet, to grant this — the games too furnish the seeds
of wantonness: order all the theaters torn down;
how often have they given many a cause for sinning,
when the Martian sand strews the hard ground!
Let the Circus be torn down; the license of the Circus is not safe:
here a girl sits close beside a man unknown to her.
Since some women stroll there, so that a lover may meet them
in the same place, why does any portico stand open?
What place is more august than the temples? These too let her shun,
any woman who is ingenious for her own fault.
When she stands in Jove’s temple, it will come to her, in Jove’s temple,
how many mothers that god has made.
As she enters next, adoring, the temple of Juno,
that this goddess grieved over many rivals.
With Pallas seen, she will ask why the virgin
took up Erichthonius, born of a crime.
She will come into the temple of great Mars, your gift,
Venus stands joined to the Avenger, her husband before the doors.
Sitting in the temple of Isis, she will ask why Saturnia
drove her across the Ionian and the Bosphorian sea.
Anchises for Venus, the Latmian hero for the Moon,
Iasion for Ceres — these will be brought to her mind.
All things can corrupt perverted minds;
yet all those things stand safe in their own places.
And far from the Art written for harlots alone,
its first page removes the hands of the freeborn.
Whatever woman has broken out where the priestess does not let her go,
straightway she is herself guilty of the charge she has taken on.
Yet it is no crime to unroll soft verses:
the chaste may read much that is not to be done.
Often a matron of stern brow looks upon naked
women, exposed to every kind of lust.
The eyes of Vestals look upon the bodies of harlots,
nor was that a cause of punishment to their master.
But why is there too much wantonness in my Muse,
or why does my book persuade anyone to love?
Nothing but a sin and a manifest fault must be confessed:
I repent of my talent and my judgment.
Why did I not rather harry, with my song, Troy,
which fell beneath the Argive arms, once more?
Why was I silent about Thebes, and the brothers’ mutual wounds,
and the seven gates, each under its own captain?
Nor did warlike Rome deny me material,
and it is a dutiful labor to recount one’s country’s deeds.
In short, since you have filled all things with your merits, Caesar,
one part out of many was mine to sing,
and as the radiant lights of the sun draw the eyes,
so your deeds would have drawn my mind.
I am accused undeservedly. A thin field is plowed by me:
that was a work of great fertility.
Not because a little boat dares to play on a small lake
ought it therefore to trust itself to the open sea.
Perhaps — and even this I might doubt — I am fit enough
for lighter measures, and suffice for small modes:
but if you should bid me tell of the Giants tamed by Jove’s fire,
the burden would cripple me as I tried.
It is the work of a rich talent to set down the vast deeds
of Caesar, lest the work be overcome by its matter.
And yet I had dared. But I seemed to detract,
and — what is a sin — to be a damage to your might.
I came back to a light work, the songs of youth,
and stirred my heart with a feigned love.
I would not, indeed: but my fates were dragging me on,
and I was ingenious toward my own punishment.
Ah, that I learned anything! Why did my parents teach me,
and why did any letter detain my eyes?
This wantonness made me hateful to you, on account of the Art
by which you supposed forbidden beds were assailed.
But brides did not learn stealth with me for master,
and no one can teach what he scarcely knows himself.
I so made my Delights and my soft songs
that no scandal has grazed my name.
Nor is there any husband, even in the middle of the people,
who is doubtful of his fatherhood through my fault.
Believe me, my morals are far from my song
(my life is modest, my Muse is playful),
and the greatest part of my works is lying and feigned:
it has allowed itself more than its author.
Nor is a book the evidence of a mind, but an honest entertainment:
you will find very much fitted to soothe the ears.
Else Accius would be savage, Terence a reveler,
and those who sing of fierce wars would be pugnacious.
Finally, I did not compose tender loves alone:
for tender love composed, I alone have paid the penalty.
What did the Teian Muse of the old lyric poet teach,
but to confound Venus with much wine?
What did Lesbian Sappho teach the girls, but to love?
Yet Sappho was safe, and he too was safe.
Nor did it harm you, son of Battus, that you often
confessed your delights, to the reader, in verse.
No play of charming Menander is without love,
and yet he is wont to be read to boys and girls.
What is the Iliad itself but an adulteress, over whom
there was a fight between a lover and a husband?
What is first in it but the flame of Briseis, and how
the snatched girl made the leaders angry?
Or what is the Odyssey but a woman sought, for love,
by many suitors while her husband was away?
Who but the Maeonian tells of Venus and Mars bound,
their bodies caught in a shameful bed?
Whence, but by great Homer’s testimony, would we know
that two goddesses grew hot with their guest’s fire?
Tragedy surpasses every kind of writing in gravity:
this too always has the matter of love.
What is there in the Hippolytus but the blind stepmother’s flame?
Canace is famous for the love of her own brother.
What? Did not the ivory-shouldered son of Tantalus carry off,
with Cupid driving his car, the Pisaean girl behind Phrygian horses?
That a mother should dip the iron in her children’s blood,
grief, stirred by wronged love, did it.
Love turned a king and his rival suddenly into birds,
and made the mother who even now weeps for her Itys.
If the wicked brother had not loved Aerope,
we would not read of the horses of the Sun turned away.
Nor would impious Scylla have touched the tragic buskins,
had not love cut off her father’s lock.
You who read the Electra and Orestes out of his wits,
read the crime of Aegisthus and of Tyndareus’ daughter.
For why should I tell of the grim tamer of the Chimaera,
whom his treacherous hostess all but gave to death?
Why speak of Hermione, why of you, maid of Schoeneus,
and you, prophetess loved by the Mycenaean leader?
Why of Danaë, and Danaë’s daughter-in-law, and the mother of Lyaeus,
and Haemon, and her for whom two nights were joined in one?
Why of the son-in-law of Pelias, why of Theseus, or who first
of the Pelasgians touched the Ilian soil from his ship?
Here add Iole, and the mother of Pyrrhus, here Hercules’ wife,
here Hylas, and the Ilian boy.
Time would fail me, if I should pursue the tragic fires,
and my book would scarcely hold the bare names.
There is tragedy mixed with obscene laughter too,
and it has many words past modesty.
Nor does it harm the author who made Achilles soft,
to have broken his brave deeds with his measures.
Aristides joined the Milesian crimes to himself,
yet Aristides was not driven from his city.
Nor did Eubius, who described how the seeds of mothers
are spoiled, the founder of an impure history,
nor he who lately composed the Sybaritica, go into exile,
nor those who did not keep silent about their own embraces.
And these things are mixed with the monuments of learned men,
and, by the gifts of leaders, lie open to the public.
And lest I be defended only by foreign arms,
the Roman book too has much that is playful.
As grave Ennius sang of Mars with his own mouth,
Ennius greatest in talent, rude in art;
as Lucretius unfolds the causes of the swift fire,
and prophesies that the threefold fabric will fall:
so his mistress was often sung by wanton Catullus,
to whom Lesbia was a false name;
and not content with her, he published many loves,
in which he himself confessed his own adultery.
Equal and like was the license of slight Calvus,
who disclosed his own stealth in various measures.
Cinna too is companion to these, and Anser, more shameless than Cinna,
and the light work of Cornificius, and the like of Cato;
and the poems of Ticidas, and of Memmius — why recall them? —
in whom there is a name for things, and a shame for names;
and in whose books Perilla was lately disguised,
and is now read named by your name, Metellus.
He too, who led the Argo into the Phasian waves,
could not keep silent about his own thefts of Venus.
No less wanton are the songs of Hortensius, no less of Servius.
Who would hesitate to follow names so great?
Sisenna translated Aristides, nor did it harm him
to have inserted filthy jests into history.
It was no reproach to Gallus to have celebrated Lycoris,
but to have failed to hold his tongue under too much wine.
Tibullus thinks it hard to believe one who swears,
since she denies the same about him, too, to her husband:
he confesses that he himself taught how to deceive the guards,
and now says, wretched, that he is pressed by his own art.
Often, as if to test his mistress’s gem or seal,
on that pretext he recalls he has touched her hand,
and, as he tells, he often spoke with his fingers and a nod,
and drew a silent sign in the circle of the table,
and teaches by what juices the bruise leaves the body
that the pressing of the mouth is wont to make:
in the end he asks of the too-careless husband
that he too keep watch on her, so that she may sin less.
He knows who is barked at when he walks alone,
before whose so-often-closed doors a man clears his throat,
and he gives many such precepts of stealth, and teaches
by what art brides may deceive their husbands.
This was no fraud to him, and Tibullus is read
and pleases, and was already known when you were prince.
You will find the same precepts in charming Propertius:
yet he was not branded by the slightest mark.
These I succeeded, since candor bids me pass over
in silence the eminent names of the living.
I did not fear, I confess, lest, where so many keels had gone,
mine alone should be wrecked while all the rest were saved.
Arts are written by others by which dice are played
(no slight crime, this, in the eyes of our forefathers):
what the knucklebones avail, by what throw you may strike
the most points, or escape the ruinous dogs;
what numbers the die holds; when the rival is called at a distance,
how it is fitting to throw, and how to play what is thrown;
how the parti-colored soldier advances on a straight line,
when a piece set between two enemies is lost;
how the pursuer knows to wage war and to call back the one in front,
nor goes fleeing, unaccompanied, in safety;
how a small board is set with three pebbles a side,
on which to have won is to have kept one’s own in a row;
and the other games (for I will not now pursue them all)
that are wont to waste our time, a precious thing.
See, another sings of the shapes and the throws of balls,
this one teaches the art of swimming, that of the hoop;
others have written a care for tinting the complexion;
this one has given laws for banquets and for hospitality;
another shows the clay from which cups are fashioned,
and teaches what jar is fit for clear wine.
Such things are played in smoky December,
which it was a hurt to no one to have composed.
Deceived by these, I made songs that were not sad,
but a sad punishment has followed my jests.
In short, of so many writers I do not see one
whom his own Muse has ruined: I am the one found out.
What if I had written mimes that joke obscenely,
which always carry the crime of forbidden love,
in which a polished adulterer continually comes forward,
and a cunning wife gives the slip to her stupid husband?
The marriageable virgin watches these, the matron, the man, the boy,
and a great part of the senate is present.
Nor is it enough that the ears are profaned by lewd words;
the eyes grow used to suffering many shameful things:
and when the lover has cheated the husband by some new trick,
there is applause, and the palm is given with great favor;
and, the less it profits, the stage is more lucrative to the poet,
and the praetor buys such great crimes for no small price.
Look at the costs of your own games, Augustus:
you will read that you have bought many such things at great price.
You have watched these, and often given them to be watched
(so everywhere is your majesty obliging),
and with your eyes, which the whole world makes use of,
you have calmly looked upon stage adulteries.
If it is right to write mimes imitating base things,
a lesser punishment is owed to my matter.
Or do their own boards make this kind of writing safe,
and has the stage given the mimes leave for what is permitted?
My poems too have often been danced before the people,
often they too have held your eyes.
Just as in our houses the ancient bodies of heroes
shine, painted by an artist’s hand,
so somewhere, in some place, a small panel paints
the varied couplings and figures of Venus:
and as the son of Telamon sits, his face confessing his rage,
and the barbarian mother holds the crime in her eyes,
so dripping Venus dries her wet hair with her fingers,
and is seen still covered by her mother’s waters.
Others sound of wars furnished with bloody weapons,
some sing the deeds of your race, some yours.
Grudging nature has confined me to a narrow space,
and given my talent only slight strength;
and yet that fortunate author of your Aeneid
brought "arms and the man" to the Tyrian bed,
and no part of the whole body is read more
than that love joined by no lawful bond.
The same poet had earlier played, a young man, with the fires
of Phyllis and tender Amaryllis, in pastoral measures.
I too sinned long ago in that same kind of writing:
a fault that is not new suffers a new punishment;
and I had already published my songs when you, marking offenses,
passed me by, the knight, so many times unreproached.
So the writings I thought, as a young man, would do me no harm,
unwisely, have now harmed me, an old man.
A late vengeance has overflowed for the old book,
and the punishment is far from the time of its desert.
Yet, lest you think my every work is slack,
I have often given great sails to my craft.
I wrote six books of the Fasti, and as many again,
and each roll has its ending with its own month,
and that work, lately written under your name, Caesar,
and dedicated to you, my fortune broke off;
and I have given a royal piece written for the tragic buskins,
and it has the words the grave buskin ought to have;
and I have told — though the last hand was wanting to the begun work —
of bodies changed into new shapes.
Would only that you might call your mind back a little from anger,
and bid, at your leisure, a few lines from there be read to you,
a few, in which, rising from the world’s first origin,
I drew the work down to your own times, Caesar:
you will see how much spirit you yourself have given me,
and with what favor of heart I sing you and yours.
I have grazed no one with a biting song,
nor does my verse hold the crimes of anyone.
Candid, I have fled from wit suffused with gall:
no letter is mixed with poisoned jest.
Among so many thousands of our people, so many writings,
I shall be the one whom my Calliope has wounded.
I do not, therefore, divine that any citizen rejoices at my ills,
but that many have grieved at them;
nor is it credible to me that anyone has insulted me as I lie,
if any thanks have been returned to my candor.
By these things, I pray, and by others, may your divinity be bent,
o father, o care and safety of your country!
Not that I may return to Ausonia, unless perhaps one day,
when you shall be won over by the long time of my punishment —
I pray for a safer and a somewhat quieter exile,
that my punishment may be equal to its fault.

"Sent into this city, an exile’s book, I come timidly:
give a kindly hand, friendly reader, to the weary one;
and do not shrink back, in dread that I may chance to shame you:
not one verse on this page teaches love.
Such is my master’s fortune that the unhappy man
ought to dissemble it with no jests.
Even that work which once he ill-played in his green years,
alas, too late he now condemns and hates.
Look what I bring: you will see nothing here but sadness,
the song that fits its own season.
That my verse limps, sinking down in the alternate line,
either the foot’s measure makes it so, or the long road;
that I am not golden with cedar, nor smooth with pumice,
I blushed to be more groomed than my master;
that the lettering is spotted with smudged blots,
the poet himself harmed his own work with tears.
If any words shall seem, by chance, not spoken in Latin,
the land in which he wrote them was a barbarous land.
Tell me, readers, if it is no trouble, which way I must go,
and what dwelling I, a stranger, should seek in the city."
When I had said this furtively, with stumbling tongue,
there was scarcely one to show me my way.
"May the gods give you what they did not grant our poet —
to be able to live softly in your own country.
Lead on, then, for I will follow, though over land and sea
I bring my weary foot back from a far-off world."
He obeyed, and, leading, said: "These are Caesar’s forums,
this is the road that has its name from the sacred rites,
here is the place of Vesta, which guards Pallas and the fire,
this was the little palace of old Numa."
Then, making for the right, "That gate," he says, "is the Palatine’s,
here is Stator, in this spot Rome was first founded."
While I marvel at each thing, I see posts conspicuous
with gleaming arms, and a house worthy of a god.
"And is this," I said, "the house of Jove?" That I should think it so,
the oaken crown gave the augury to my mind.
When I learned its master, "We are not deceived," I said,
"and it is true that this is the house of great Jove.
But why is the door veiled with laurel set against it,
and a shady tree girds the august locks?
Is it because that house has earned perpetual triumphs,
or because it was always loved by the Leucadian god?
Is it because the house itself is festal, or because it makes all things festal?
Or is it a sign of the peace it has given to the lands?
And as the laurel is ever green, nor is plucked of its falling leaf,
so does it hold an eternal honor?
The cause of the crown set above is attested in writing:
it declares that citizens were saved by this man’s aid.
Add, best of fathers, one citizen to the saved,
who, banished, lies hidden far off at the world’s end,
in whom the cause of the penalties he confesses he has earned
is no crime, but his own error.
Wretched me! I fear the place, and I fear its powerful lord,
and my lettering trembles with shuddering dread.
Do you see how the page goes pale with a bloodless color?
Do you see how the alternate feet have trembled?
Whenever it may be, I pray, may you, the house, please my parent,
and be looked upon under the same masters!"
Thence, at an even pace, by lofty steps I am led up
to the white temple of the unshorn god,
where there are statues alternating with foreign columns,
the daughters of Belus and the barbarian father with drawn sword,
and whatever the old and new learned men conceived
in their wise breast lies open for those who will read.
I was seeking my brothers — except, of course, those
whom their own parent could wish he had not begotten.
As I sought in vain, the guard set over those seats
ordered me to depart from the holy place.
I make for another temple, joined to the neighboring theater:
this too was not to be approached by my feet.
Nor did Liberty allow me to touch her halls,
which first stood open to learned books.
The fortune of the wretched author overflows onto his offspring,
and we, his children, suffer the exile he himself bore.
Perhaps one day Caesar, won over by long time,
will be less harsh to us, and to him.
Gods, I pray — or rather (for I need not ask the crowd),
Caesar, greatest divinity, be present to my vow.
Meanwhile, since the public station is closed to me,
let me be allowed to lie hidden in a private place.
You too, if it is right, take up, confused with the shame
of a rebuff, my songs, you hands of the common folk."

So it was in my fates to look upon Scythia too,
and the land that lies beneath the Lycaonian pole:
neither you, Pierians, nor the Letoian stock, your throng,
brought any aid to your learned priest.
Nor does it profit me that I jested without true crime,
and that my Muse was more sportive than my life:
but, after I had borne very many perils by sea and land,
the Pontus, scorched by unceasing cold, holds me.
And I, born a runaway from affairs, for carefree leisure,
soft, and impatient of toil before,
now suffer the uttermost; neither the sea, robbed of harbors,
nor the various roads, could destroy me;
and my spirit holds out against my ills; for from it my body
took its strength, and bore what was scarcely to be borne.
Yet while I was tossed in doubt over lands and waves,
the toil beguiled my cares and my sick heart:
but when the road was ended, and the labor of going rested,
and the land of my punishment was touched by me,
nothing pleases but to weep, nor is the rain from my eye
less than the water that flows from spring snow.
Rome and my home come over me, and longing for the places,
and whatever of me remains in the lost city.
Alas for me, why has the door of my own tomb
been knocked at so often, yet at no time opened?
Why have I fled so many swords, and why has no squall,
though so often threatening, overwhelmed my luckless head?
Gods, whom I find too constantly unjust,
sharers in the anger that one god holds,
goad on, I pray, the lagging fates, and forbid
the doors of my destruction to stand closed!

If you wonder why by chance this letter of mine
is written by another’s fingers, I have been sick.
Sick in the farthest parts of an unknown world,
and almost uncertain of my own recovery.
What spirit do you think I have now, lying in this dread region
among the Sauromatae and the Getae?
I bear neither the climate, nor have I grown used to these waters,
and the very land displeases me in some way I cannot name.
No house here is fit enough, no food useful for the sick,
no one to relieve the malady by Apollo’s art,
no friend at hand to console, none to beguile by telling tales
the hours that slip so slowly by.
Weary, I lie among the farthest peoples and places,
and now whatever is absent comes over my stricken mind.
Though all things come over me, you yet conquer all, my wife,
and hold more than your part in my heart.
You, absent, I speak of; my voice names you alone;
no night comes to me without you, no day.
Indeed, they say that I so spoke in my wanderings
that your name was on my raving lips.
If now I should faint, my tongue pressed to my palate,
scarcely to be revived with wine dripped in,
let someone announce my mistress has come, and I shall rise,
and the hope of you will be the cause of my vigor.
So I am in doubt of life — and you, perhaps, there
pass a pleasant time, unaware of me?
You do not, I affirm it. It is clear to me, dearest,
that no time is passed by you, without me, but a sad one.
Yet if my lot has filled the years it owed,
and the end of living is so soon at hand for me,
how much was it, great gods, to spare a dying man,
that I might at least be buried in my native earth?
Either the punishment should have been put off to the time of death,
or hurried death should have forestalled my flight.
Whole and sound, I could lately have given up this light;
now life is given me only that I die an exile.
So far off, then, on unknown shores I shall die,
and the very place will make my fate a sad one;
nor will my body languish on its accustomed bed,
nor will there be anyone to weep for me, laid out;
nor will my mistress’s tears, falling onto my face,
add a little span to my departing soul;
nor shall I give my last charges, nor with a final cry
will a loving hand close my failing eyes;
but, without funeral rites, without the honor of a tomb,
this head, unmourned, the barbarian earth will cover.
Will you, when you hear, be utterly troubled in mind,
and strike your faithful breast with a frightened hand?
Will you, stretching your arms in vain toward these regions,
cry out the empty name of your wretched husband?
Yet spare your cheeks from tearing, nor rend your hair:
not now for the first time, my light, shall I be snatched from you.
When I lost my country, then count me to have perished:
that was the earlier and the heavier death for me.
Now, if by chance you can — but you cannot, best of wives —
rejoice that so many ills are ended for me by death.
What you can do, lessen your ills by bearing them with a brave heart,
for which you have a breast long since not untrained.
And would that my soul might perish with my body,
and that no part of me escape the greedy pyre.
For if, free of death, the spirit flies high in the empty air,
and the words of the Samian old man are true,
a Roman shade will wander among the Sarmatian shades,
and forever be a stranger among the wild Manes.
Yet see that my bones are brought back in a small urn:
so I shall not be an exile even when dead.
No one forbids this: a Theban sister buried her slain brother
beneath a mound, though the king forbade.
And mix them with leaves and the powder of amomum,
and lay them, buried, in suburban soil;
and the verses that the hurrying traveler may read with his eye,
cut in large letters in the marble of the tomb:
"I who lie here, the player of tender loves,
Naso the poet, perished by my own talent;
but you who pass, whoever you are who have loved, let it not be hard
to say ’May the bones of Naso lie softly.’"
This is enough for an inscription. For my books are greater
and more lasting monuments to me,
which I trust, though they have harmed me, will yet give
their author a name and long ages.
Yet do you always give the dead his funeral gifts,
and garlands wet with your tears.
Though the fire shall have changed my body into ashes,
the mournful embers will feel your dutiful service.
I would write more: but my voice, weary with speaking,
and my dry tongue deny me the strength to dictate.
Receive — spoken, perhaps, with my last breath —
the word "farewell," which he who sends it to you does not himself have.

O dear to me always, but known in a hard time,
after my affairs fell in ruin:
if you believe at all a friend taught by experience,
live for yourself, and flee far from great names.
Live for yourself, and shun, as far as you can, the over-brilliant:
the savage thunderbolt comes from the over-brilliant height.
For though the powerful alone can do good,
let one not do good, rather, who can do harm.
The lowered yard escapes the wintry squalls,
and the broad sail has more of danger than the small.
You see how the light cork floats on the surface of the wave,
while the heavy weight sinks the bound net.
Had I myself been warned of this before, advising you,
I would perhaps be in the city where I ought to be.
While I lived with you, while a light breeze bore me,
this boat of mine ran over peaceful waters.
He who falls on level ground (yet even this scarcely happens)
so falls that he can rise from the earth he has touched.
But wretched Elpenor, fallen from the high roof,
met his king, a feeble shade.
What was it that Daedalus plied safe wings,
while Icarus marks the vast waters with his name?
Surely that the one flew high, the other lower:
for both had wings that were not their own.
Believe me, he who has hidden well has lived well,
and each man ought to keep within his own fortune.
Eumedes would not be bereft, if his son
had not foolishly loved the horses of Achilles;
nor would Merops have seen his son in the flame, his daughters
in a tree, had the father held Phaethon back.
You too always dread the too-lofty,
and, I pray, draw in the sails of your purpose.
For you deserve to run the course of life with unstumbling foot,
and to enjoy a fairer fate.
That I should pray these things for you, you earn by your gentle devotion,
and the faith that will cling to me for all time.
I saw you bewailing my fate with such a face
as it is credible was on my own.
I saw your tears falling upon my face,
which at one time I drank, and your faithful words.
Now too you defend your banished friend with zeal,
and lighten ills scarcely to be lightened in any part.
Live without envy, and pass your soft years inglorious,
and join to yourself friends who are your equals,
and love the name of your Naso — the one thing of his
that is not yet in exile: the Scythian Pontus has the rest.

My acquaintance of friendship with you was small,
so that you could have disowned it without trouble,
nor had you bound me to you with closer bonds,
my ship, perhaps, going with its own wind.
When I fell, and all fled my ruin in fear,
and turned their backs upon my friendship,
you dared to touch a body struck by Jove’s fire,
and to approach the threshold of a lamented house:
and you, newly known, not by long acquaintance, render me
what scarcely two or three of the old friends, in my misery, did.
I saw your troubled face, and marked the look of it,
your face wet with weeping and paler than my own:
and seeing your tears falling at each word,
I drank your tears with my face, your words with my ears;
and I received your arms hanging from my pressed neck,
and kisses mixed with sobbing sounds.
I too, dear one, am defended, absent, by your strength
(you know that "dear" stands in place of your true name),
and many besides, clear signs of your favor,
I hold, never to depart from my heart.
May the gods grant you the power always to defend your own,
whom you may help in a more prosperous matter.
Yet if meanwhile you ask what I, undone on these shores,
do (as it is credible you ask):
I am drawn on by a slight hope — do not take it from me —
that the god’s grim power can be soothed.
Whether I wait in vain, or whether it is right that it befall,
prove to me, I pray, that what I desire is right,
and bring all the eloquence of your tongue to this,
to teach that my prayer can have force.
The greater each man is, the more placable to anger,
and a noble mind takes gentle stirrings.
It is enough for the great-souled lion to have laid the body low;
the fight has its end when the enemy is down:
but the wolf, and the foul bears, press upon the dying,
and whatever beast is of lesser nobility.
What braver have we at Troy than Achilles?
Yet he did not endure the tears of the Dardanian old man.
What the clemency of the Emathian leader was, Porus
and Darius’s funeral rites teach.
And, not to recall men’s angers bent to mildness,
he who is now Juno’s son-in-law was before her enemy.
In short, I cannot but hope for some deliverance,
since the cause of my punishment is not a bloody one.
I did not, in my seeking, aim to ruin all by sinking
Caesar’s head, which was the head of the world:
I said nothing, nor did my tongue speak out in speaking,
nor did profane words slip from me under too much wine:
because my unwitting eyes saw a crime, I am punished,
and my offense was to have had eyes.
I cannot indeed defend the whole guilt:
but a part of my crime is error.
Hope, then, remains that he himself will soften
the penalty by the condition of a changed place.
Would that white Lucifer, the herald of the bright Sun’s
rising, would bring this on his loosed horse!

You neither wish, dearest, to dissemble the bond of our friendship,
nor, if perchance you wished, could you.
For while it was allowed, no other was dearer to me than you,
nor was any in the whole city more joined to you than I;
and that love was so attested to the people
that it was almost more known than you, or than I;
and that candor of spirit which is yours toward dear friends —
those qualities are known to the very man you cherish.
You hid nothing in such a way that I was not party to it,
and you gave many things to be covered in my breast:
and to you alone I told whatever secret I had,
except the one thing that ruined me.
Had you known that too, you would enjoy your comrade safe,
and by your counsel, friend, I would be unharmed.
But my fates, no doubt, were dragging me to my punishment.
Do all things close the road of good advantage?
Whether I could yet have avoided this ill by caution,
or whether no reasoning avails to conquer fate,
you yet, o joined to me by the longest acquaintance,
almost the greatest part of all I long for,
be mindful, and if your favor has won you any strength,
test it, I ask, on my behalf,
that the wronged divinity’s anger grow gentler,
and my penalty be less by a changed place.
And this — if there is no crime in my breast,
and error is the beginning of my charge.
It is neither brief nor safe to tell by what chance
my eyes were made conscious of the deadly ill:
and my mind dreads that time, as it dreads its own wounds,
and at the reminder the shame is fresh again:
but whatever can bring such shame,
it is fitting that it be covered, buried in blind night.
I will recall nothing, then, but that I sinned, yet sought
no rewards by that sin,
and that my crime ought to be called folly,
if you wish to give the deed its true name.
If it is not so, seek another place where I may be set farther off:
this land here is but a suburb to me.

Go, hastily traced letter, to greet Perilla,
the faithful servant of my discourse.
You will find her either sitting with her sweet mother,
or among her books and her Pierides.
Whatever she is doing, when she knows you have come, she will leave it,
and without delay will ask why you come, and what I do.
You will say I live, but so that I would not wish to live,
and that my ills are not lightened by so long a time;
and yet that I have returned to the Muses, though they harmed me,
and force fitting words into alternating feet.
"You too," say, "do you still cling to our shared pursuits,
and sing learned songs in a manner not your father’s?
For nature, with the fates, gave you chaste morals,
and rare gifts, and talent.
This I first led down to the waters of Pegasus,
lest the vein of fruitful water perish in waste;
I first saw it in the tender years of the maiden,
and was, as a father to a daughter, your guide and companion.
So if the same fires remain in your breast,
the Lesbian poetess alone will surpass your work.
But I fear lest my fortune now hold you back,
and after my mischance your breast be idle.
While it was allowed, I often read your verses to me, mine to you;
often I was your judge, often your master:
either I lent my ears to verses just made,
or, when you flagged, was the cause of your blushing.
Perhaps, by my example, because my books have harmed me,
you too may follow the fate of my punishment.
Lay aside your fear, Perilla. Only let no woman,
no man, learn to love from your writings.
So put away, most learned one, the pretexts for sloth,
and return to the good arts and your sacred rites.
That comely face will be marred by long years,
and the wrinkle of age will be on your aged brow,
and ruinous old age will lay its hand on your beauty,
which comes with a step that makes no sound.
And when someone says, "She was beautiful," you will grieve,
and complain that your mirror is a liar.
You have modest means, though you are most worthy of great:
but suppose you matched the boundless rich,
fortune, you know, gives and snatches what it likes,
and he is suddenly Irus who just now was Croesus.
Not to recall each thing — we hold nothing that is not mortal
except the goods of heart and of talent.
See me, who, though I lack my country and you and my home,
and all that could be taken from me has been snatched away,
yet keep my talent for company and enjoy it:
over this Caesar could have no right.
Let anyone end this life of mine with the savage sword,
yet, when I am dead, my fame will survive,
and while Martial Rome, victorious, looks out from her hills
upon the whole conquered world, I shall be read.
You too — may a happier use of your study await you —
escape, as far as you can, the coming pyres!"

Now I would wish to stand on Triptolemus’s car,
who cast the raw seed into the unknown soil;
now I would wish to rein the dragons of Medea,
which she had as she fled from your citadel, Corinth;
now I would long to take up the wings to be flapped,
either yours, Perseus, or yours, Daedalus:
that, with the soft air yielding to my flights,
I might suddenly look on the sweet soil of my country,
and the faces of my deserted house, and the comrades who remember me,
and, above all, the dear face of my wife.
Fool, why do you wish these things in vain with childish prayers,
which no day brings or will bring to you?
If you must wish at all, adore the godhead of Augustus,
and duly pray to the god you have felt.
He can hand you the wings and the flying car.
Let him grant return, and at once you will be winged.
If I should pray for this (for I cannot ask anything greater),
I fear my prayers are too little modest.
Perhaps one day, when he has glutted his anger,
then too he must be entreated, with an anxious mind.
What is meanwhile less will be to me the likeness of an ample gift:
let him bid me go from these places to any other.
Neither the climate nor the waters, the land nor the air, agree with me;
alas, a lasting languor holds my body!
Whether the contagions of a sick mind spoil my limbs,
or whether the cause of my ill is in the region,
since I touched the Pontus, sleeplessness vexes me, and leanness
scarcely covers my bones, nor does food please my mouth;
and the color that is on the leaves struck by the first cold
through autumn, when the new winter has hurt them,
that color holds my limbs, nor am I relieved by any strength,
and the cause of querulous pain is never away.
Nor am I better in mind than in body, but both parts
are equally sick, and I bear a twofold loss.
And there clings before my eyes, like a visible body,
the shape of my fortune, set there to be read:
and when I behold the place, the manners of the men, their dress and speech,
and remember who I am and who I was,
so great is the love of death that I complain of Caesar’s anger,
that he does not avenge his grievances with the sword.
But, since he has used his hatred once in a civil way,
let my exile at least be lighter by a changed place.

Here too, then — who would believe it? — are Greek cities
among the names of inhuman barbarism?
Hither too came colonists sent from Miletus,
and set up Greek homes among the Getae.
But the place’s name, older than the founded city, is agreed
to have come from the slaughter of Absyrtus here.
For in the ship that, made by warlike Minerva’s care,
first ran through waters never tried,
impious Medea, fleeing her deserted father,
is said to have brought her oars to these shoals.
When a watcher saw it far off from a high mound,
"A stranger," he said, "I know the sails — a Colchian comes."
While the Minyae are alarmed, while the cable is loosed from the mound,
while the dragged anchor follows the swift hands,
the Colchian struck her breast, conscious of her own deserts,
having dared, and ready to dare, many an unspeakable thing with her hand;
and, though a vast boldness remained in her mind,
there was pallor on the thunderstruck maiden’s face.
So when she looked out on the coming sails, "We are caught,"
she said, "and my father must be delayed by some trick."
While she seeks what to do, while she turns her face every way,
by chance her eyes, turned aside, fell upon her brother.
When his presence was thrust upon her, "We have won," she said:
"this one, by his death, will be my cause of safety."
At once, the unwitting boy fearing nothing of the kind,
she pierces his harmless side with the rigid sword,
and so tears him apart, and scatters his torn limbs
through the fields, to be found in many places.
And lest her father not know, she sets on a high rock
the pale hands and the bloody head,
that the parent be delayed by his fresh grief, and, while
he gathers the dead limbs, halt his sad journey.
Hence this place was called Tomis, because in it,
they say, a sister cut up her own brother’s limbs.

If anyone there still remembers banished Naso,
and my name survives in the city without me,
let him know that, set beneath the stars that never touch the sea,
I live in the midst of barbary.
The Sauromatae gird me, a wild race, the Bessi and the Getae,
names how unworthy of my talent!
Yet while the air is warm, we are defended by the mid-Hister:
he repels wars with his flowing waters.
But when grim winter has thrust out its squalid face,
and the earth is made white with marble frost,
when Boreas and the snow forbid men to dwell beneath the Bear,
then it is plain these nations are pressed by the trembling pole.
The snow lies, and, lest the sun and rains dissolve what has fallen,
Boreas hardens it and makes it perpetual.
So, when the first has not yet melted, another comes,
and in many places it is wont to last two years;
and so great is the force of the roused North wind that it lays
high towers level with the ground, and carries off roofs it has torn away.
With skins and stitched breeches they keep off the cruel cold,
and of the whole body only the face lies open.
Often the hair, when shaken, rings with the hanging ice,
and the white beard shines with the frost laid over it;
and wines stand bare, keeping the shape of the jar,
nor do they drink draughts of wine, but pieces handed them.
Why should I tell how the streams, bound, freeze together,
and brittle waters are dug out of the pool?
The Hister itself, no narrower than the papyrus-bearing river,
which mingles with the vast deep through many mouths,
freezes its blue waters as the winds harden them,
and creeps into the sea with covered waters;
and where ships had gone, men now go on foot, and the hoof
of the horse strikes the waters set hard with cold;
and over the new bridges, with the waves gliding beneath,
the Sarmatian oxen draw the barbarian wagons.
Scarcely indeed shall I be believed; but, since there is no reward
for falsehood, the witness ought to be granted full faith.
I have seen the vast sea stand fixed with ice,
and a slippery crust pressing upon the motionless waters.
Nor is it enough to have seen it. I have trodden the hard deep,
and the surface of the wave was under a foot not wet.
If you had once had such a strait, Leander,
your death would not be the crime of the narrow water.
Then the curved dolphins cannot launch themselves into the air;
and though Boreas roars, beating his wings,
there will be no wave in the beleaguered deep;
and the ships will stand shut in ice, as in marble,
nor will the oar be able to cleave the rigid waters.
I have seen fish held fast, bound in the ice,
yet a part of them then too was alive.
So, whether the savage force of too-strong Boreas freezes the sea,
straightway, the Hister leveled by the dry North winds,
the barbarian enemy rides in on a swift horse;
an enemy strong in horse and in the far-flying arrow,
he lays waste the neighboring soil far and wide.
Some flee away; and, with none to guard the fields,
the unwatched wealth is plundered,
the small wealth of the countryside, the herd and the creaking wagons,
and what riches the poor dweller has.
Some are driven captive, their arms bound behind their back,
looking back in vain at their fields and their hearth:
some fall, wretchedly pierced by barbed arrows;
for there is a dyed venom on the flying iron.
What they cannot carry or lead off with them, they destroy,
and the enemy’s flame burns the innocent huts.
Even when there is peace, they tremble with the dread of war,
nor does anyone furrow the soil with the pressed plowshare.
This place either sees the enemy, or fears the enemy it does not see;
the deserted land lies idle in rigid neglect.
Here the sweet grape does not hide beneath the leafy shade,
nor do the seething musts heap the deep vats.
The region denies fruit, nor would Acontius have had anything
on which to write here the words his mistress was to read.
You would see the fields bare, without leaf, without tree:
alas, places no happy man should approach!
So, though the vast world lies open so wide,
this land has been found out for my punishment.

Whoever you are, base man, who insult my mischances,
and bloodily drive me, a defendant, without end,
you were born from the rocks and fed on the milk of beasts,
and I will say that your breast holds flint.
What further step remains, to which your anger may stretch?
Or what do you see lacking to my ills?
A barbarous land and the inhospitable shores of the Pontus,
and the Maenalian Bear with her own Boreas, look on me.
I have no exchange of speech with the wild race:
all places are full of anxious fear.
And as the fleeing stag, caught by greedy bears,
or as the lamb, ringed by mountain wolves, is afraid,
so I, hedged on every side by warlike nations,
am terrified, the enemy almost pressing my flank.
And though it be a small punishment that I lack my dear wife,
that I lack my country and my pledges,
though I bear no ills but Caesar’s bare anger,
is Caesar’s bare anger too little ill for me?
And yet there is someone who reopens the raw wounds,
and looses his eloquent mouth against my morals.
In an easy cause anyone may be eloquent,
and the slightest force avails to shatter what is cracked.
To overthrow citadels and standing walls is courage:
however cowardly, men press what is already cast down.
I am not what I had been. Why trample an empty shade?
Why attack my ashes and my tomb with stones?
Hector was Hector when he strove in war; but the same man,
bound to the Haemonian horses, was not Hector.
Remember that I too, whom once you knew, am no more:
these likenesses of that man survive.
Why, fierce one, do you assail likenesses with bitter words?
Spare me, I pray, and cease to trouble my Manes.
Suppose all my crimes are true, let there be in them nothing
you would think more error than crime,
behold, I, a fugitive (glut your breast), pay the penalties,
heavy both by exile and by the place of exile.
My fortune might seem worth weeping to an executioner:
and yet, in one judge’s eyes, it is too little.
You are crueler than grim Busiris, crueler than he
who roasted the false bull over a slow fire,
and who, they say, gave the bull to the Sicilian tyrant,
and commended his craft with these words:
"In this gift, king, there is a use greater than its image,
nor is the mere shape of my work the thing to approve.
Do you see, on the right, this openable side of the bull?
Here the man you would destroy must be thrust.
Burn him, shut in, over slow coals at once:
he will bellow, and that will be the voice of a real bull.
For these inventions, that you may repay gift with gift,
give, I pray, rewards worthy of my talent."
He had spoken. But Phalaris said, "Wonderful inventor of punishment,
yourself, in person, initiate your own work."
Without delay, cruelly roasted by the fires he had shown,
he gave forth twin sounds from his groaning mouth.
What have I to do with Sicilians, between Scythia and the Getae?
To you, whoever you are, my complaint returns.
And that you may slake your thirst with my blood,
and bear in your greedy heart as much joy as you wish,
so many ills have I suffered, fleeing over land and sea,
that I would think you too could grieve, when you hear them.
Believe me, if Ulysses were compared with me —
was Neptune’s anger less than Jove’s?
So, whoever you are, do not reopen my charges,
and take your hard hands off a grievous wound;
and, that forgetfulness may thin the report of my fault,
let my deeds draw a scar over;
and, mindful of the human lot, which lifts and presses
the same men, fear the uncertain turns yourself.
And since — what I thought could never come to pass —
you take the greatest care for my affairs,
there is no reason to fear: my fortune is most wretched;
Caesar’s anger drags every ill along with it.
And that this may be clearer, and I not be thought to feign it,
I would wish you yourself to try my punishments.

Now the West winds lessen the cold, and, the year completed,
the Maeotian winter has seemed longer than the old;
and he who ill bore Helle set upon him
makes the daytime hours equal to the nightly.
Now the boys and the merry girls gather the violet,
which the countryside brings forth with no one sowing;
and the meadows grow downy with flowers of varied colors,
and the chattering bird makes its spring with untaught throat;
and, to lay aside the charge of being a bad mother, the swallow
makes its cradle and little dwelling beneath the beams;
and the herb that lay hidden, buried in Ceres’ furrows,
comes out and spreads its soft tip from the soil;
and where there is a vine, a bud stirs from the shoot —
for the vine is far from the Getic shore;
and where there is a tree, a branch swells on the tree —
for the tree is far from the Getic borders.
Now there is leisure there, and, with games following in order,
the chattering wars of the wordy forum give way.
Now is the use of the horse, now they play with light arms,
now the ball, now the hoop is rolled in a swift circle;
now, when the youth is drenched with the gliding oil,
they dip their wearied limbs in the Maiden’s water.
The stage thrives, and favor burns for rival parties,
and three theaters resound for the three forums.
O how, and how often (it cannot be numbered), blessed
is he who may enjoy the city not forbidden him!
But by me the snow is felt, dissolved by the spring sun,
and waters no longer dug hard out of the pool;
nor does the sea freeze with ice, nor, as before, does the Sarmatian
herdsman drive his creaking wagons across the Hister.
Yet some keels will begin to swim hither,
and a guest ship will be on the shore of the Pontus.
Eager, I shall run to meet the sailor, and, my greeting said,
ask why he comes, who he is, and from what places.
He, indeed — it would be a wonder if he had not, from a near region,
safely plowed only the neighboring waters.
Rare is the sailor who crosses so great a sea from Italy,
rare who comes to these harborless shores.
Yet whether he knows how to speak in Greek or in Latin
(this one’s speech will surely be the more welcome;
and it is right that someone, from the mouth of the strait and the long
Propontis, has given his sails hither to a steady South wind):
whoever he is, he can report a rumor with a mindful voice,
and become a part and a stage of fame.
He, I pray, may be able to tell of Caesar’s triumphs, heard of,
and the vows paid to Latian Jove,
and that you, rebel Germany, have at last set your sad head
beneath the feet of the great leader.
He who tells me these things, which I shall grieve not to have seen,
will at once be a guest in my house.
Alas for me, is the house of Naso now in the Scythian world?
And does my punishment give me its place for a hearth?
Gods, grant that Caesar wish this not to be my inmost dwelling and home,
but the lodging-place of my punishment.

Behold, superfluous (for what was the use of being born?),
my birthday is here at its proper season.
Hard day, why did you come to the wretched years of an exile?
You ought rather to have set a limit to them.
If you had any care for me, or any shame in you,
you would not follow me beyond my country,
and where I, an infant, was first ill-known to you,
there you would have tried to be my last,
and at the leaving — what my comrades too did —
you also would have said, sad, in the city, "farewell."
What have you to do with the Pontus? Has Caesar’s anger sent you too
to the farthest soil of the icy world?
You expect, no doubt, the honor of your wonted custom:
that a white garment hang from my shoulders,
that the smoking altar be girt with flowering garlands,
that the grain of incense crackle in the solemn fire,
that I give the cakes that properly mark my natal time,
and frame good prayers with a favoring mouth.
I am not so placed, nor are these times such for me,
that I could be glad at your coming.
A funeral altar, girt with deathly cypress, befits me,
and the flame made ready on the built pyre.
Nor does it please me to give incense that entreats the gods for nothing,
nor do good words come over me amid such great ills.
Yet if there is anything I should ask on this day,
I pray that you come no more to these places,
while the Pontus, almost the last part of the earth,
called Euxine by a false name, holds me.

Cultivator and holy priest of learned men,
what are you doing, ever a friend to my talent?
Do you, as once you were wont to celebrate me unharmed,
now too take care that I not seem wholly gone?
Do you gather my songs, except the Art alone,
which harmed its own artificer?
Yes, do so, I beg, you devotee of the new poets,
and, as you can, keep my body in the city.
Exile was decreed for me, not decreed for my books,
which did not earn their master’s punishment.
Often a father, a fugitive, lives in exile on foreign shores,
yet the exile’s children are allowed to be in the city.
After Pallas’s example, my songs were made of me,
without a mother; this is my stock and my offspring.
Her I commend to you, who, the more she is bereft of a parent,
the greater a burden she will be to you, her guardian.
Three of my children have caught my contagion:
take open care of the rest of the throng.
There are also the changed forms, thrice five rolls,
songs snatched from their master’s funeral.
That work could, had I not myself perished first,
have had a surer name from the final hand:
now it has come, uncorrected, into the people’s mouths,
if anything of mine is in the people’s mouth at all.
This too, whatever it is, add to my books,
sent to you, as it comes, from a far-off world.
Whoever shall read it (if anyone reads it), let him first weigh
at what time, and in what place, it was composed.
He will be fair to writings of which he has learned
that exile was the time, and barbary the place:
and amid so many adversities he will marvel that I sustained
to draw any song at all with a sad hand.
My talent the ills have broken, whose spring even before
was unfruitful, and the vein but small.
But whatever it was, with no one to exercise it, it has shrunk,
and, dried up, has perished, made arid by long neglect.
There is here no store of books to invite and feed me:
in place of books, bows and arms resound.
There is no one in this land, if I should recite songs,
whose ears I might use as those who would understand.
There is no place for me to withdraw. The guard of the wall
keeps off the hostile Getae, and the closed gate.
Often I seek some word, a name, a place,
nor is there anyone from whom I could learn for certain.
Often, as I try to say something (shameful to confess),
words fail me, and I have unlearned how to speak.
I am hemmed in, almost, by Thracian and Scythian speech,
and seem able to write in Getic measures.
Believe me, I fear lest Pontic words be mixed with the Latin,
and you read them in my writings.
So deem the book, such as it is, worthy of pardon,
and excuse it by the condition of my lot.

If anything in my books shall be faulty, as it will,
excuse it, reader, by its season.
I was an exile, and I sought rest, not fame,
that my mind be not always bent upon its ills.
This is why even the ditcher, bound by the fetter, sings,
when he eases the heavy work with an untaught measure.
He sings too who, leaning forward over the muddy sand,
drags the slow boat against the stream;
and he who brings the pliant oars together to his breast
tosses his arms in time, the water struck.
The weary shepherd, when he has leaned on his staff or sat on a rock,
soothes his sheep with a song of reeds.
The maidservant, singing and at once drawing out her assigned task,
is beguiled, and her labor is cheated.
Sad Achilles, they say, when the Lyrnesian girl was taken,
thinned his cares with the Haemonian lyre.
When Orpheus drew the woods and the hard rocks by singing,
he was mourning his twice-lost wife.
Me too the Muse relieves as I make for the appointed places of the Pontus:
she alone has stood firm, the companion of my flight;
she alone fears neither ambushes, nor the Sintian soldier’s sword,
nor sea nor winds nor barbary.
She knows too, when I perished, what error deceived me,
and that there was fault, not crime, in my deed,
fair to me now, of course, for this very thing, that she harmed me before,
when she was tried with me, a defendant in the joined charge.
I would not indeed, since they were to do me harm,
have laid my hand on the rites of the Pierides.
But now what am I to do? The very force of those rites holds me,
and, mad, I love the song, though wounded by song.
So the new lotus, tasted by the Dulichian palate,
was pleasant in the very flavor by which it harmed.
The lover mostly feels his losses, yet clings to them,
and pursues the matter of his own fault.
Me too the books delight, though they have harmed me,
and the weapon that made my wounds, I love.
Perhaps this pursuit may be able to seem a madness,
but this madness has something of use:
it forbids the mind to be always in the gaze of its ills,
and makes it forget the present mischance.
And as the Bacchant, wounded, does not feel her own wound,
while she is stunned, shrieked over the Idaean ridges,
so when my breast, stirred, glows with the green thyrsus,
that spirit is higher than human ill.
It feels neither exile nor the shores of the Scythian sea,
it feels not that the gods are angry.
And as if I drank the cups of sleep-bringing Lethe,
so the sense of my adverse time is gone from me.
Justly, then, I worship the goddesses that lighten my ills,
companions from Helicon of my anxious flight,
who deigned to follow my steps, part by sea, part by land,
whether by ship or on foot.
May these at least, I pray, be kind to me! For the rest
of the throng of the gods makes common cause with great Caesar,
and heap me with as many adversities as the shore has sands,
as the sea has fishes, and the fish has eggs.
Sooner will you number the flowers in spring, the ears of grain in the heat,
the fruits through autumn, and the snows in the cold,
than the ills I suffer, tossed over the whole world,
while, wretched, I make for the left shores of the Euxine.
Nor yet, since I came, is the fortune of my ills lighter:
hither too the fates have followed my ways;
here too I know the threads of my nativity,
threads made for me of a black fleece.
And, not to tell of ambushes and perils to my life —
true indeed, but heavier than the credit of truth —
how wretched it is to live among the Bessi and the Getae
for him who was always on the people’s lips!
How wretched, to guard one’s life with gate and wall,
and to be scarcely safe by the strength of the place itself!
A young man, I fled the harsh contests of soldiery,
nor moved arms except with a hand that meant to play;
now, an old man, I put my side to the sword, my left arm to the shield,
and set my gray head beneath the helmet.
For when the watcher from his lookout has given the signal of a raid,
we straightway put on our arms with a trembling hand.
The enemy, with bows and weapons steeped in poisons,
savage, surveys the walls on his panting horse;
and as the ravening wolf carries and drags through the crops, through the woods,
the sheep that has not sheltered itself in the fold,
so, if the barbarian foe has found anyone in the fields
not yet received within the gates, he holds him:
either he follows, captured, and takes the chains thrown on his neck,
or perishes by the venom-bearing dart.
Here I lie, a new dweller in an anxious abode:
alas, too long the seasons of my fate!
And yet, amid such great ills, the Muse, a guest,
sustains me to return to the measures and the old rites.
But there is no one to whom I may recite my songs, no one
to take in Latin words with his ears.
For myself — what else am I to do? — I write and read,
and my writing is safe in my own judgment.
Yet often I have said, "For whom now does this care labor?
Will the Sauromatae and the Getae read my writings?"
Often, too, tears have poured from me as I wrote,
and the letter has been made wet with my weeping,
and my heart knows its old wounds as if new,
and a rain of mournful water slips into my bosom.
When, by the changed turn, I recall who I am and who I was,
and it comes over me whither chance has borne me, and whence,
often my hand, mad, angry at my pursuits and at itself,
has cast my songs into the fire to burn.
And so, since out of many not many survive,
read them, with pardon, whoever you are.
You too, Rome, forbidden to me — receive my song with favor,
no better than my times.

Now wild Germany, like the whole world,
may have sunk, conquered, on bended knee, before the Caesars,
and the high Palatine perhaps is veiled with garlands,
and the incense crackles in the fire and dims the day,
and the white victim, its neck struck by the drawn axe,
beats the ground with purple blood,
and both Caesars, victorious, prepare to render to the temples
the gifts of the gods that their friends have vowed;
and the young men who grow up under Caesar’s name,
that that house may rule the lands forever,
and Livia, with the good brides, gives gifts to the deserving gods
for her son’s safety — gifts she will often give;
and the matrons together, and they who, without blame, keep
the chaste hearths in perpetual virginity;
and let the dutiful commons, and the senate with the dutiful commons, rejoice,
and the knights, of whom I was lately a small part.
Me, driven far off, the common joys escape,
and only a slight report comes from so far.
So the whole people will be able to watch the triumphs,
and read the captured towns with the leaders’ titles,
and will see the kings, wearing chains on their captive necks,
go before the garlanded horses,
and behold some faces turned, as suits the time,
others terrible and forgetful of themselves.
Of these, some will ask the causes, the facts, the names,
some will tell them, though they know but little:
"This one, who shines aloft in Sidonian purple,
was the leader of the war; that next, nearest to the leader.
This one, who now fixes his pitiable eyes on the ground,
did not have that look when he bore arms.
That one, fierce and still burning with hostile eyes,
was the urger and the counsel of the battle.
This treacherous one shut our men in by the cunning of the ground,
who covers his squalid face with hanging hair.
By that one, as minister, they say captured bodies were often
sacrificed to the god who refused them.
This lake, these mountains, all these forts, all these rivers,
were full of wild slaughter, full of blood.
Drusus once earned his surnames in these lands,
which his good offspring, worthy of the parent, bore.
The Rhine here, his horns broken, ill-covered with green sedge,
was discolored with his own blood.
Behold, Germany too is borne with hair let loose,
and sits mournful beneath the unconquered leader’s foot,
and, offering her spirited neck to the Roman axe,
wears the chains with the hand with which she bore arms."
Over these, Caesar, you will ride in the victorious car,
clad in purple, duly through your people’s faces,
and where you go, you will be clapped about by your own men’s hands,
flowers thrown everywhere covering the streets.
Your temples will be girt with Phoebean laurel, and the soldier
will sing "io, io triumph" with a great voice.
You yourself will often see the four-horse team, hot at once
with the noise and the applause and the roar, stand still.
Thence you will make for the citadel, the shrines favorable to vows,
and the vowed laurel will be given to deserving Jove.
These things I, removed, shall see in the only way I can — in mind:
that mind has a right to the place snatched from me;
it ranges free through the boundless lands,
it comes into heaven by swift flight;
it leads my eyes into the midst of the City,
nor lets them be without so great a good;
and my spirit will find where it may watch the ivory cars:
so at least, for a short time, I shall be in my country.
Yet the happy people will get the true spectacle,
and the glad throng will be present with its leader.
But by me this fruit must be gained only by imagining,
and with ears far removed,
and there will scarcely be anyone, sent from afar into a world
unlike Latium, to tell these things to my longing.
He too will report a triumph already late and old:
yet at whatever time I hear it, I shall be glad.
That day will come on which I lay aside my mourning,
and the public cause will be greater than the private.

Great Bear and Less, of which the one guides the Greek,
the other the Sidonian ships, both of you dry,
since, set at the top of the pole, you see all things,
and do not go beneath the western waters of the sea,
and your circle, girding the heavenly height with its embraces,
stands clear above the untouched ground,
look, I pray, on those walls which Remus, son of Ilia,
is said once to have leaped over, to his cost,
and turn your bright faces to my mistress,
and tell me whether she is mindful of me or not.
Alas for me, why do I ask what is too plain?
Why does my hope lie mixed with wavering fear?
Believe what is, and what you wish, and cease to fear the safe,
and have a sure faith in her sure fidelity,
and what the flames fixed in the pole cannot tell you,
report to yourself in a voice that will not lie:
that she of whom you have the greatest care is mindful of you,
and keeps your name with her, which is what she can.
She clings to your face as if you were present,
and, though far removed, if only she lives, she loves you.
Yet when her sick mind has settled on its just grief,
does gentle sleep depart from her warned breast?
Then cares come over her, while the bed and the place touch you,
and do not let her be forgetful of me,
and the fevers come, and the night seems boundless,
and the wearied bones of her tossed body ache?
I do not indeed doubt that these things and the rest happen,
and that your love gives the signs of its sad grief,
nor are you tortured less than when the Theban woman
saw bloody Hector dragged from the Thessalian car.
Yet what I should pray myself I doubt, nor can I say
what state of mind I would wish you to have.
Are you sad? I am indignant that I am a cause of grief to you:
are you not? But you would be worthy of a lost husband.
Nay, grieve your own losses, gentlest wife,
and pass a sad time through my ills,
and weep my mischances: there is a certain pleasure in weeping;
grief is filled up and worked off by tears.
And would that you had to mourn not my life, but my death,
and had been left alone by my death!
This breath would have gone out, through you, into my native air,
loving tears would have sprinkled my breast,
and on the last day, gazing on the known sky,
your fingers would have closed my eyes,
and my ash, set in the ancestral tomb, would have lain there,
and the earth I was born to would hold my body;
in short, as I had lived, so I would have died without blame:
now my life is shameful by its own punishment.
Wretched me, if you, when you are called an exile’s wife,
turn away your face, and a blush comes over you!
Wretched me, if you think it base to seem married to me!
Wretched me, if now you are ashamed to be mine!
Where is that time when you used to boast of your husband,
and not conceal the name of your man?
Where is the time when — unless you do not wish it recalled —
it pleased you, I remember, both to be called, and to be, mine?
And, as befits a good woman, I pleased you with every dowry:
your favoring love added much to the truth.
Nor was there another man whom you would prefer — so great a thing I seemed to you —
or whom you would rather have for your own.
Now too let it not shame you that you are married to me, and your grief,
not your shame, ought to be away from here.
When rash Capaneus fell by a sudden stroke,
do you read that Evadne blushed for her husband?
Nor, because the king of the world checked fires with fires,
was Phaethon himself to be disowned by his own.
Nor was Semele made a stranger to Cadmus her parent,
because, over-ambitious, she perished by her own prayers.
Nor, because I am struck by Jove’s savage fires,
let a crimson blush come over your soft face.
But rather rise up to the care of guarding me,
and be to me the example of a good wife,
and fill the sad matter with your virtues:
glory goes by a steep path, through the headlong way.
Who would know Hector, if Troy had been happy?
A public road is made for virtue through ills.
Your art, Tiphys, lies idle, if there is no wave on the sea:
if men are well, your art, Phoebus, lies idle.
The virtue that lies hidden and rests, unknown, in good times,
appears and is proved by ills.
My fortune gives you room for a title, and your devotion
has where to lift its conspicuous head.
Use the times, by whose gift now is made
a great field, open, for your praises.

O you who, though noble in your forefathers’ names,
surpass your stock by the nobility of your morals,
in whose mind is the image of your father’s candor,
that that candor not lack its proper measures,
in whose talent is the eloquence of your father’s tongue,
than which there was none earlier in the Latin forum:
though I least wished it, you have been named by signs set in place of a name;
forgive your own praises.
I have done no wrong; your known virtues betray you;
if you appear what you are, my fault is dissolved.
Nor yet do I think the homage done you in my song
can harm you, with so just a prince.
The father of the country himself — for what is more civil than he? —
suffers himself often to be read in my song;
nor can he forbid it, for Caesar is a public thing,
and my part too is of the common good.
Jupiter offers his godhead to the talents of poets,
and lets himself be celebrated by any mouth.
Your cause is safe by the example of the gods above,
of whom the one is seen, the other believed, a god.
Though I ought not to have, yet I will bear this charge:
my letter was not in your power to control.
Nor is it a new offense of mine that I speak with you,
with whom, unharmed, I often spoke.
That you may fear the less lest a friend be a charge against you,
the blame, if there is any, the author can bear.
For your father was always cultivated by me from my first years —
do not, at least, dissemble this —
and he approved my talent (you can remember this)
even more than I, in my own judgment, deserved;
and he spoke of my verses with that mouth
in which there was a part of a great nobility.
So it is not now, because that house has received me,
but earlier, to its founder, that words were given.
Nor were they given, believe me — but in all my acts,
if you take away the last, my life is to be defended.
This fault too, by which I perished, you will deny to be a crime,
if the whole train of so great an ill be known to you.
Either fear or error harmed me; error first.
Ah, let me not remember my own fate;
nor, by handling them, let me break the wounds not yet closing:
scarcely will even rest profit them.
So, as I justly pay the penalty, so all
crime and design was absent from my offense;
and the god feels this; for which neither is my light taken,
nor does another possess the wealth taken from me.
Perhaps he himself will one day end this very exile,
if only I live, when his anger is gentler with time.
Now I pray he bid me depart hence to some other place,
if my prayers do not lack a modest shame.
I wish for a milder and a somewhat nearer exile,
and a place that is farther from the savage enemy.
And so great is the clemency in Augustus, that if anyone
should ask him this for me, perhaps he would give it.
The cold shores of the Euxine Pontus confine me:
by the ancients it was called Axenus, the Inhospitable.
For neither are its waters tossed by moderate winds,
nor does the guest ship come to peaceful harbors.
There are nations round about that seek plunder by blood;
nor is the land less feared than the faithless water.
Those whom you hear rejoice in human blood
lie almost beneath the axis of the same star,
and not far from me is the place where the Tauric altar
of the quivered goddess is sprinkled with dire slaughter.
These realms, as they tell, were once — not envied by the wicked,
nor to be desired by the good — the kingdom of Thoas.
Here the Pelopian maiden, in place of a substituted hind,
tended the rites, such as they were, of her goddess.
Whither afterward Orestes — doubtful whether dutiful or wicked —
had come, driven by his own Furies,
and his comrade, the Phocian, an example of true love,
who were two in body but one in mind,
straightway, bound, they are led to the sad altar,
which stood bloody before the twin doors.
Yet neither did his own death terrify this one, nor his own that one;
each was mournful for the other’s death.
And now the priestess had stood with drawn blade,
and a barbarian fillet had girt her Greek hair,
when, by the exchange of speech, she knew her brother,
and Iphigenia gave him embraces in place of death.
Glad, she carried the image of the goddess, who loathed the cruel rites,
from those places to better ones.
This region, then, almost the last of the great world,
which men and gods flee, is near me;
and near my land are the funereal rites,
if only a barbarian land is Naso’s own.
O would that the winds by which Orestes was carried off
might bring back my sails too, the god appeased!

O you, the first part among my beloved comrades,
the one altar found for my fortunes,
by whose addresses this dying soul revived,
as the watchful flame is wont, when Pallas’s oil is poured in;
who did not fear to open faithful harbors
and a refuge to a craft struck by the thunderbolt;
by whose wealth I would not feel myself in want,
if Caesar had snatched away my father’s means:
while the impulse of this time, forgetful, carries me off,
alas, how nearly your name slipped from me!
Yet you recognize it, and, touched by the desire of praise,
you would wish to be able to say openly, "That is I."
Surely I, if you allowed it, would wish to give you your title,
and to win for your fidelity its rare fame.
I fear to harm you, grateful, by my song, and lest
the untimely honor of your name stand in your way.
What is allowed and safe — rejoice within your breast
that I was mindful of you, and you dutiful,
and, as you do, strive with the oars to bring me aid,
until a gentler breeze come, with the god appeased;
and protect a head that can be saved by no one,
unless he who sank it lift it from the Stygian water;
and show yourself, what is rare, constantly equal to every
office of unswerving friendship.
So may your fortune have everlasting advancement,
so may you yourself want no help, and aid your own;
so may your wife match her husband in perpetual uprightness,
and may rare complaint fall upon your bed;
and may your blood-companion always love you with that
affection with which dutiful Castor loves his brother;
so may your son be a young man like you, and may anyone
recognize, by his morals, that he is yours;
so may your daughter, by the wedding torch, make you a father-in-law,
and give you, while still young, the name of grandfather.

In time the bull becomes patient of the rustic plow,
and offers his neck to be pressed by the curved yoke;
in time the spirited horse obeys the pliant reins,
and takes the hard bit with a quiet mouth;
in time the rage of the Punic lions is checked,
nor does the fierceness that was before remain in the mind;
and the Indian beast that obeys its master’s orders
submits, in time, conquered, to servitude.
Time makes the grape swell as the clusters stretch,
and the seeds scarcely hold the wine they have within;
time brings the seed forth into white ears of grain,
and takes care the fruits be not of a sad savor.
This thins the tooth of the plow that renews the earth,
this wears down hard flints, this wears down adamant;
this too, little by little, soothes savage angers,
this lessens griefs and lightens mournful hearts.
All things, then, can antiquity, slipping by on silent foot,
thin away — except my cares.
Since I lack my country, the floor has twice been trodden of its grain,
twice the grape, pressed by the bare foot, has burst.
Yet patience has not been gained by the long space,
and my mind has the feeling of an ill still fresh.
Of course, even old bullocks flee the savage yoke,
and the horse, broken to the bit, often fights back.
The present hardship is even sadder than the earlier:
for, though it be equal to itself, it has grown and increased with delay.
Nor were my ills as known to me as they are;
now this very thing, the more known they are, weighs the heavier.
And it is something, too, to bring fresh strength,
and not to be already used up beforehand by the ills of time.
A new wrestler in the tawny sand is stronger
than one whose arms are slow and weary with delay.
The whole gladiator, in his gleaming arms, is better
than one whose weapons are red, dyed with his own blood.
A ship newly made bears well the headlong squalls:
an old one is undone by however small a rain.
I too scarcely bear (I bore more patiently before)
the ills multiplied by a long day.
Believe me, I fail, and, as far as I divine from my body,
short seasons will be added to my ills.
For neither are there strengths, nor the color that used to be:
I scarcely have a thin skin to cover my bones.
But my mind is sicker than my sick body, and stands
without end in the contemplation of its own ill.
The face of the City is away; away, my care, my comrades,
and, than whom none is dearer to me, my wife is away.
The Scythian crowd is at hand, and the trousered throng of Getae:
so the things I see and do not see alike move me.
Yet one hope there is to console me amid these:
that these ills will not be long-lasting, by my death.

Twice the sun has come to me after the cold of icy winter,
and twice completed its course, the Fish touched.
In so long a time, why has your right hand not been dutiful
in verses, however few?
Why did your devotion cease while those were writing
with whom my acquaintance was slight?
Why, as often as I took the bindings off some paper,
did I hope that it bore your name?
May the gods grant that your letter was often written by your hand,
but, of many, none delivered to me.
What I pray is clearly so: I would sooner believe that the face of Medusa
the Gorgon was girt with snaky hair,
that there are dogs beneath a maiden’s womb, that the Chimaera exists,
which parts a lioness by flames from a fierce serpent,
and four-footed creatures joined to a man’s chest,
the three-bodied man and the three-headed dog,
the Sphinx and the Harpies and the serpent-footed Giants,
hundred-handed Gyas and the half-bull man.
All these I would sooner believe than that you, dearest,
changed, have laid aside your care for me.
Countless mountains lie between me and you, and roads
and rivers and plains, and not a few seas:
for a thousand reasons the letter that is often
sent by you may come but rarely into my hands;
yet conquer the thousand reasons by writing often,
that I not always have to excuse you, friend, to myself.

Now my temples imitate the swan’s plumes,
and white old age stains my black hair.
Now the frail years come on, and a more inert age,
and now it is hard for me to bear myself, not firm enough.
Now it was time that, an end set to my labors,
I should live with no fear troubling my heart,
and enjoy the leisure that always pleased my mind,
and be softly at my studies,
and frequent my small house and my old Penates,
and the ancestral fields that now lack their master,
and grow old, carefree, in my mistress’s embrace and among dear comrades,
and in my own native land.
So once my age had hoped these things would be carried through;
so I deserved to lay down these years.
The gods did not see it so, who, having driven me by land and sea,
set me down in the Sarmatian places.
Battered ships are led into the hollow docks,
lest by chance they fall apart in the midst of the waters.
Lest he fall and dishonor the many prizes he has won,
the languid horse crops the grass in the meadows.
When the soldier is no longer useful enough in his finished years,
he sets down at the ancient Lares the arms he bore.
So then, as slow old age lessens my strength,
it was time that I too were granted the wooden sword;
it was time that I should not draw a foreign air,
nor relieve a dry thirst from a Getic spring,
but withdraw now into the empty gardens I had,
and again enjoy the sight of men, and the City.
So once, my mind not divining the future,
I wished that I might be able to live in peace, an old man.
The fates resisted, which, after they gave me first
soft seasons, weigh down the later.
And now, ten lustres completed without any stain,
I am pressed in the worse part of my life;
and not far from the goal, which I seemed almost to hold,
a heavy ruin has fallen upon my course.
So, mad, have I forced him to rage against me,
than whom the boundless world has nothing gentler?
And was clemency itself conquered by my offenses?
And yet life was not denied to my error —
life to be passed far from my country, under the Boreal pole,
where the left land of the Euxine sea lies.
If Delphi and Dodona herself had told me this,
each place would have seemed empty of truth.
Nothing is so strong — though adamant bind it —
as to stay firmer than the swift fire of Jove;
nothing is so lofty, and stretches above perils,
as not to be lower, and set beneath a god.
For though a part of my ills was brought on by my fault,
yet the divinity’s anger gave more of my ruin.
But you too, be warned even by my mischances,
to deserve well of the man who equals the gods.

If it is allowed, and you suffer it, I will keep your name and deed silent,
and your acts will be given to the waters of Lethe,
and my sentence will be overcome by late tears —
only make it plain that you have repented of yourself;
only condemn yourself, and wish to erase from your life
its Tisiphonean times, if you could.
But if not, and your breast burns with hatred of me,
unhappy grief will put on forced arms.
Though I am sent, as I am, to the world’s edge,
my anger will stretch out its hands as far as there.
All my rights, if you do not know it, Caesar has left me,
and my only penalty is to lack my country.
And my country too, if only he be safe, I hope for from him:
often the oak scorched by Jove’s bolt grows green again.
In short, if I have no faculty of vengeance,
the Pierides will give me strength and their own weapons.
Though I dwell, removed far off, on Scythian shores,
and the nearest constellations are dry to my eyes,
my heraldings will go through boundless nations,
and what I complain of will be known wherever the world extends.
Whatever I say will go from the rising to the setting,
and the East will be a witness to a Western voice.
I shall be heard across the earth, across the deep waves,
and great will be the voice of my groaning;
nor will your own age only know you guilty —
you will be a charge to perpetual posterity.
Already I am borne into the fight, and have not yet taken up my horns,
nor would I wish that there be any cause for taking them up.
The Circus still rests; already the grim bull scatters the sand,
and already strikes the ground with hostile foot.
This too is more than I wished: sing, Muse, of retreat,
while it is yet allowed this man to dissemble his name.

I who was the player of tender loves, whom you read,
hear, posterity, that you may know who I was.
Sulmo is my homeland, most rich in cold streams,
which is ninety miles distant from the City.
Here I was born; and, that you may know the time too,
when both consuls fell by a like fate.
If it is anything, an heir of the order, old from my forefathers,
not made a knight only by fortune’s gift.
Nor was I the first child; I was born with a brother before me,
who had risen three times four months earlier.
The same Morning-star was present at the births of both:
one day was celebrated with two cakes —
this is among the five festal days of armed Minerva,
the first that is wont to be made bloody by combat.
At once we are schooled, tender, and by our father’s care
we go to the men of the City distinguished in their art.
My brother tended toward eloquence from his green age,
born to the strong arms of the wordy forum;
but to me, already a boy, the heavenly rites were pleasing,
and the Muse drew me secretly to her own work.
Often my father said, "Why try a useless pursuit?
Maeonides himself left no wealth."
I was moved by his words, and, all Helicon abandoned,
I tried to write words loosed from measures.
Of its own accord a song came into fitting numbers,
and what I tried to write was verse.
Meanwhile, with the years gliding by on silent foot,
the freer toga was taken for my brother and me,
and the purple with the broad stripe is put on our shoulders,
and the pursuit that was before remains for us.
And now my brother had doubled ten years of life,
when he died, and I began to lack a part of myself.
We took the first honors of tender age,
and once I was one of the board of three men.
The senate-house remained: the breadth of the stripe was narrowed;
that burden was greater than my strength.
Neither was my body patient, nor my mind fit for labor,
and I was a shunner of anxious ambition,
and the Aonian sisters urged me to seek the safe leisure
that my judgment always loved.
I cultivated and cherished the poets of that time,
and as many bards as were at hand I thought gods at hand.
Often Macer, older in age, read me his birds,
and which snake kills, which herb helps.
Often Propertius was wont to recite his fires,
by the right of the fellowship in which he was joined to me.
Ponticus, famous in heroic verse, Bassus too in iambics,
were dear members of my company.
And tuneful Horace held our ears,
while he struck cultivated songs on the Ausonian lyre.
Virgil I only saw; nor did the greedy fates
give Tibullus time for my friendship.
He was the successor to you, Gallus; Propertius to him;
fourth from these, in the order of time, was I myself.
And as I cultivated my elders, so my juniors cultivated me,
and my Thalia became known not slowly.
When first I read my youthful songs to the people,
my beard had been cut but once or twice.
My talent had been stirred by one sung through the whole City,
whom I called, by no true name, Corinna.
I wrote much indeed, but what I thought faulty
I myself gave to the correcting fires.
Then too, when I was going into exile, I burned some that would have pleased,
angry at my pursuit and at my songs.
Soft, and not impregnable to Cupid’s darts,
was my heart, which a light cause might move.
Yet though I was such, and was kindled by the smallest fire,
no scandal arose under my name.
Almost a boy, I was given a wife neither worthy nor useful,
who was my wife a very short time.
A wife succeeded her, blameless indeed,
yet not to be firm in my bed.
The last, who stayed with me into my late years,
endured to be the wife of an exiled man.
My daughter, twice fruitful in her early youth,
but not by one husband, made me a grandfather.
And now my father had completed his fate, and had added
to nine lustres nine other lustres.
I wept for him no otherwise than he would have wept for me,
had I been taken; I bore my mother her due rites next.
Happy both, and buried in good time,
because they perished before the day of my punishment!
Me too happy, that they are not living to see me wretched,
and that they grieved nothing over me!
Yet if anything but names remains of the dead,
and a slender shade escapes the built pyres,
if, parental shades, report of me has reached you,
and my charges stand in the Stygian forum,
know, I pray (for it is not right for you to be deceived by me),
that the cause of the flight I was ordered to was error, not crime.
This is enough for the Manes: to you I return,
studious hearts, who seek the acts of my life.
Now, my better years driven off, gray hair
had come to me, and mingled with my old locks,
and after my birth the victorious horse, bound with Pisaean olive,
had ten times carried off the prizes,
when the wronged prince’s anger bids me seek the Tomitae,
set on the left of the Euxine sea.
The cause of my ruin, too well known to all,
is not to be attested by my own evidence.
Why tell of the wickedness of comrades, and the harmful servants?
I bore many things no lighter than the exile itself.
Yet my mind was indignant to yield to its ills, and showed itself
unconquered, using its own strength;
and, forgetful of myself and of a life led in leisure,
I took up, with unaccustomed hand, the arms of the time;
and I bore by land and sea as many chances as there are stars
between the hidden and the visible pole.
At last, driven through long wanderings, I touched the shore
joined to the quivered Getae, the Sarmatian.
Here, though I am sounded round by neighboring arms,
I relieve my sad fate, as I can, by song.
And though there is no one to whose ears it may be brought,
yet so I use up and beguile the day.
So that I live, and stand against the hard labors,
and the weariness of anxious daylight does not hold me —
thanks to you, Muse: for you furnish solace,
you come as the rest of care, you the medicine.
You are my guide and companion, you lead me away from the Hister,
and give me a place in the midst of Helicon;
you have given me, what is rare, a lofty name while living,
which fame is wont to give only from the funeral rites.
Nor has Envy, which detracts from things present,
bitten any work of mine with unjust tooth.
For though our age has borne great poets,
fame was not grudging to my talent,
and though I set many above myself, I am called not less than they,
and am read most of all through the whole world.
If, then, the presages of bards have anything of truth,
even though I die at once, I shall not be yours, o earth.
Whether by favor or by my song I have won this fame,
rightly, fair reader, I give you thanks.

This book too, from the Getic shore, you devotee of mine,
add to the four I have sent before.
This one too will be such as the poet’s fortune:
you will find nothing sweet in the whole song.
As my state is tearful, so is my song tearful,
the writing fitting its own matter.
Whole and glad, I played glad and youthful things:
yet now it grieves me to have composed them.
Since I fell, I publish the heraldings of my sudden mischance,
and am myself the author of my own argument.
And as the Caystrian bird, lying on the bank,
is said to bewail its own death with failing voice,
so I, cast far off onto Sarmatian shores,
bring it about that my funeral go not silent for me.
If anyone seeks Delights and wanton songs,
I forewarn him: there is no reason to read these.
Gallus will be fitter for him, and Propertius of the charming mouth,
fitter Tibullus, of the kindly talent.
And would that I were not in that number!
Alas for me, why did my Muse ever jest?
But I have paid the penalty, and on the borders of the Scythian Hister
that player of quivered Love is far away.
For what is left, I have bent my mind to public songs,
and bidden them be mindful of my name.
Yet if any of you should ask whence I sing
things to be grieved over, I have borne much to be grieved over.
I compose these things not by talent, not by art:
the matter is made ingenious by my own ills.
And how small a part of my fortune is in my song?
Happy is he who suffers what he can number!
As many as the shrubs of the wood, the yellow sands of Tiber,
as many as the soft grasses the field of Mars has,
so many ills have I endured, whose medicine and rest
is nothing but in study and the lingering with the Pierides.
"What measure, Naso, to your tearful song?" you say:
the same measure that will be the measure of this fortune.
What I complain of, it furnishes me from a full spring,
and these are not my words, but those of my fate.
But if you gave me back my country, with my dear wife,
let my face be cheerful, and let me be what before I was.
If unconquered Caesar’s anger be gentler to me,
I will give you songs now full of gladness.
Yet my writing will not play again, as it has played:
let it once have run riot in my jest.
What he himself may approve, I will sing. Only let, my penalty’s part lightened,
I escape barbary and the rigid Getae.
Meanwhile what should my books do but be sad?
That pipe befits my funeral.
"But you could," you say, "have borne your ills better by silence,
and dissembled your mischances without a word."
You require that no groans follow torments,
and forbid weeping when a heavy wound is taken?
Phalaris himself allowed, in Perillus’s bronze,
the man to give bellows and to complain with a bull’s mouth.
Since Achilles was not offended by Priam’s tears,
do you check my weeping, harder than an enemy?
When the Latonian offspring made Niobe childless,
yet she did not bid her have dry cheeks.
It is something, to relieve a fated ill by words:
this makes Procne and Halcyone querulous.
This was why the son of Poeas, in his cold cave,
wearied the Lemnian rocks with his voice.
Grief shut in strangles, and seethes within,
and is forced to multiply its own strength.
Give pardon rather, or take away all my books,
if so what profits me, reader, harms you.
But it cannot harm — nor have my writings been
ruinous to any but their own author.
"But they are bad." I confess it. Who forces you to take up the bad?
Or who forbids you to lay down what you took, once deceived?
I myself do not amend them, but only that they be read drawn out as here;
they are no more barbarous than their place.
Nor ought Rome to compare me with her poets:
among the Sauromatae I was a man of talent.
In short, no glory is sought by me, nor the fame
that is wont to set the spur to talents.
I do not wish my mind to waste away with ceaseless cares,
which yet break in, and go even where they are forbidden.
Why I write, I have taught. Why I send it thither, you ask:
I desire to be with you, by any means whatever.

When a new letter comes from the Pontus, do you grow pale,
and is it loosed by you with an anxious hand?
Lay aside your fear, I am well; and the body which before
was impatient of toils, and weak for me,
holds out, and, vexed, has hardened by the very use.
Or is it that I have no leisure to be more infirm?
Yet my sick mind lies low, nor has it taken strength with time,
and the affliction of my mind that was before remains.
And the wounds I thought would close with delay and their own span
ache no otherwise than if just made.
Of course, the aged length of years profits the small;
to great ills, losses are added with time.
For ten whole years the son of Poeas nursed
the pestilent wound given by the swollen serpent.
Telephus would have perished, consumed by an eternal wasting,
had not the hand that harmed brought aid.
And I — if I have committed no crime — pray that he who made
my wounds be willing to relieve what he made,
and, content at last with a part of my grief,
take a little water from a full sea.
Though he take away much, much of bitterness will remain,
and a part of my penalty will be the likeness of the whole.
As many as the shells the shores have, as many as the flowers the pleasant rose-beds,
or the grains the sleep-bringing poppy has,
as many beasts as the wood feeds, as many fish as swim the wave,
as many as the birds that beat the soft air with their wings,
so many adversities press me: which if I tried to grasp,
I would be trying to tell the number of the Icarian water.
And, to say nothing of the chances of the road, the perils of the sea,
to say nothing of the hands drawn against my life,
a barbarous land, the last of the great world,
holds me, and a place girt about by a savage foe.
From here I would be transferred (for my fault is not bloody),
if you had the care for me that you ought.
That god, on whom Roman power well rests,
has often been gentle, a victor, toward his own enemy.
Why do you hesitate, and fear the safe? Approach and ask:
nothing in the vast world is gentler than Caesar.
Wretched me! What shall I do, if my nearest forsake me?
Do you too withdraw your neck from the broken yoke?
Whither shall I be borne? Whence shall I seek solace for my weary affairs?
No anchor now holds my craft.
Look to it. I myself, though hated, will flee to the holy altar:
the altar drives away no hands.
Behold, absent, I address the absent powers, a suppliant,
if it is right for a man to be able to speak with Jove.
Arbiter of the empire, by whose safety it is certain
that all the gods have care of the Ausonian race,
o glory, o image of a country flourishing through you,
o man not less than the very world you rule
(so may you dwell on earth, and the heaven long for you,
so may you go, slow, to the stars pledged you),
spare me, I pray, and take the smallest part from your thunderbolt:
what will remain will be punishment enough.
Your anger indeed is moderate, and you gave me life,
nor do I lack a citizen’s right, nor my name,
nor was my fortune granted to others, nor am I myself
named an exile in the words of your edict.
And all these things I feared, because I saw that I had deserved them;
but your anger is gentler than my fault.
You ordered me, relegated, to look on the fields of the Pontus,
and to cleave the Scythian strait in a fugitive ship.
Ordered, I came to the misshapen shores of the Euxine
sea (this land lies beneath the icy pole),
nor does it torture me so much that the sky is never without cold,
and the clod always scorched by the white frost,
and that the barbarian tongue knows no Latin voice,
and the Greek speech is conquered by the Getic sound,
as that, hemmed in on all sides, I am pressed by neighboring War,
and a short wall scarcely makes me safe from the enemy.
There is peace at times, yet never trust in peace.
So this place now suffers, now fears, arms.
Let me only be moved from here — either let Zanclean Charybdis
devour me, and send me to the Styx with her waters,
or let me be burned, patient, in the flames of swift Aetna,
or be cast into the deep waters of the Leucadian god.
What I seek is a penalty: for I do not refuse to be wretched,
but I pray that I may be wretched more safely.

This is that day on which the poets are wont to celebrate you,
Bacchus, if only the seasons do not deceive me,
and bind their festal temples with fragrant garlands,
and tell your praises over your wine.
Among whom, I remember, while my fates allowed me,
I was often a part not hateful to you,
whom now, set beneath the stars of the Cynosurian Bear,
the Sarmatian shore holds, joined to the raw Getae.
And I, who before led a soft life, empty of toils,
in studies and in the choir of the Pierides,
now, far from my country, am sounded round by Getic arms,
having suffered much before by sea, much by land.
Whether chance gave me this, or the anger of the gods,
or the Fate that was cloudy at my birth,
you, at least, ought to have sustained, by your power, one
of the holy worshipers of the ivy.
Or does whatever the mistress sisters of fate have sung
all cease to be under a god’s control?
You yourself too were carried, by your merits, into the heavenly heights,
to which the way was made by no slight labor.
Nor did you dwell in your homeland, but came as far as snowy
Strymon and the Mars-worshiping Getae,
and Persia, and the Ganges spreading in its broad stream,
and whatever waters the dark Indian drinks.
No doubt this was the law the Parcae, spinning the fatal
threads, twice sang to you, the twice-born.
Me too, if it is right to go by the examples of the gods,
an iron and difficult lot of life presses.
I fell no more lightly than he whom, when he had spoken great things,
Jupiter drove from Thebes with his own fire.
Yet when you heard that a bard was struck by the thunderbolt,
at your mother’s reminder you might have grieved with him,
and, looking round at the poets at your rites, you might say,
"Some worshiper of mine is missing."
Bring aid, good Liber: so may another vine weigh down the elm,
and the grape be full of enclosed wine,
so may the busy youth of the Satyrs attend you with the Bacchae,
and may you not be silent in the frenzied sound,
so may the bones of axe-bearing Lycurgus be ill-pressed,
nor the impious shade of Pentheus be free of punishment,
so may your wife’s bright crown gleam eternal in the sky,
and conquer the neighboring stars:
hither come, and lighten my mischances, most beautiful one,
mindful that I am one of your number.
There is commerce among the gods. Try to bend
Caesar’s godhead, Bacchus, by your own godhead.
You too, partners of my pursuit, dutiful throng, poets,
each of you ask these same things, your wine taken up.
And let some one of you, Naso’s name once spoken,
set down cups mixed with his tears,
and, reminded of me, when he has looked round at all,
say, "Where is Naso, lately a part of our choir?"
And this — if I have earned your favor by my candor,
and no writing of mine was wronged by my judgment,
if, while I worthily revere the writings of the men of old,
I think the nearer ones not less than they:
so, then, may you make your song with Apollo on your right;
and, as far as is allowed, hold my name among you.

From the Euxine shore I, Naso’s letter, have come,
made weary by the sea and weary by the road,
who, weeping, said to me: "You, who are allowed, look upon Rome.
Alas, how much better your lot is than my lot!"
Weeping too he wrote me: nor was the gem with which I was sealed
brought to his mouth before, but to his wet cheeks.
If anyone seeks to learn the cause of his sadness,
he demands that the sun be shown him,
he sees neither leaf in the woods, nor soft grasses
in the open meadow, nor water in a full river;
he will wonder why Priam grieves, with Hector snatched away,
or why Philoctetes groans, struck by the serpent.
Would the gods grant that such were the state in him,
that there were no grievous cause for sadness!
Yet he bears, as he ought, his bitter mischances patiently,
nor, in the manner of an untamed horse, refuses the reins.
Nor does he hope the divinity’s anger will be perpetual for him,
conscious that there is fault, not crime, in his guilt.
Often he recalls how great the god’s clemency is,
among whose examples he is wont to number himself too:
for that he keeps his father’s wealth, that he keeps a citizen’s name,
in short that he lives, he holds as a god’s gift.
Yet you (o, if you believe me at all, dearer to him
than all) he holds always in all his heart;
and he calls you his son of Menoetius, you who accompanied Orestes,
you his son of Aegeus and his Euryalus.
Nor does he long for his own country more, and the many things
he feels to be away together with his country,
than for your face and your eyes, o sweeter than the honey
the Attic bee lays up in the wax.
Often, too, grieving, he recalls that time
which he grieves was not forestalled by death;
and when others fled the contagions of the sudden disaster,
and would not approach the threshold of the stricken house,
he remembers that you, with a few, stayed faithful to him,
if anyone calls a few three or two.
Though thunderstruck, yet he felt all things, nor that you
grieved less at his adversities than he himself.
He is wont to recall your words and your face and your groans,
and that his bosom was wet while you wept:
how you stood by him, with what aid you consoled your friend,
when you yourself, at the same time, were to be consoled.
For which he affirms that he will be mindful and dutiful,
whether he see the day or be covered by the earth,
being wont to swear by his own head and yours,
which I know is not cheaper to him than his own.
Full thanks will be returned for so many and so great deeds,
nor will he let your oxen plow the shore.
Only see that you steadfastly protect the fugitive: that, which he,
who knows you well, does not ask, I myself ask.

The yearly birthday of my mistress demands its wonted honor:
go, my hands, to the dutiful rites.
So once the Laertian hero perhaps had kept his wife’s
festal day at the world’s edge.
Let my tongue, favoring, be present, forgetful of our ills,
which, I think, has now unlearned to speak good words;
and let the robe that I take but once in a whole year
be taken, white, unlike my fate;
and let a green altar be made of grassy turf,
and a woven garland veil the warm hearth.
Give me incense, boy, that makes the flames fat,
and wine to hiss, poured on the dutiful fire.
Best of birthdays! Though I am far away, I pray
you come hither bright and unlike my own,
and if any pitiable wound was lately threatening my mistress,
let her have done with my ills for all time;
and may the ship that lately was more than shaken by a heavy squall
go, for what remains, over a safe sea.
Let her enjoy her home, her daughter, and her country
(let it be enough that these are snatched from me alone),
and, since she is not happy in a dear husband,
let the rest of her life be free of the sad cloud.
Let her live, and love her man, since she is so compelled, absent,
and complete her years, but long-lasting.
I would add my own too, but I fear lest the contagions
of my fate corrupt the years that she herself drives on.
Nothing is certain for man. Who would have thought it could be done,
that I should make these rites in the midst of the Getae?
Yet see how the wind carries the smoke, risen from the incense,
into the Italian parts and the regions on the right.
There is sense, then, in the mists that the fire drives out:
by design they flee your air, Pontus.
By design, when a common rite is made on the altar
for the brothers who died by mutual hand,
the black ash, at odds with itself, as if it were ordered by them,
is split into two parts.
This, I remember, I once said could not be done,
and the son of Battus was, in my judgment, false:
now I believe all things, since you, no fool, have given your back
to the North wind, vapor, and make for Ausonia.
This, then, is the light which, if it had not risen,
would have been no festal day to be seen by wretched me.
It gave forth manners equal to those heroines
whose father was Eetion and Icarius.
Chastity was born, and virtue, and uprightness, and faith,
but those joys were not born on this day,
but toil and cares and a fortune unequal to her morals,
and a just complaint, almost, of a widowed bed.
Of course, uprightness exercised by adverse things
has the matter of praise in a sad time.
If hard Ulysses had seen nothing hostile,
Penelope would be happy, but without praise.
If her husband had entered, victorious, the Echionian citadels,
perhaps her own soil would scarcely know Evadne.
Though so many are born of Pelias, why is one noble?
Surely because one was married to a wretched man.
Bring it about that another touch the Iliac sands first,
and there will be no reason for Laodamia to be told of.
And your devotion too, which you would prefer, would stay unknown,
if my sails had been filled by their own winds.
Yet, gods, and Caesar, to be added to the gods, but one day,
when your fate shall have equaled the Pylian span —
spare not me, who confess I have earned punishment, but her,
who grieves, worthy of no grief.

You too, once the trust of my affairs,
who were my refuge, who were my harbor,
do you too dismiss the care of a friend you took up,
and lay down the dutiful burden of your office so soon?
I am a load, I confess, which, if you were not going to lay it down
in my hour of need, ought not to have been taken up.
Do you leave the ship in the midst of the waves, Palinurus?
Do not flee, nor let your faith be less than your skill.
Did the fickleness of faithful Automedon ever desert
Achilles’ horses amid the fierce battles?
Podalirius never, once he had taken on a sick man,
failed to bring the promised aid of his healing art.
A guest is more basely cast out than not admitted:
let the altar that lay open be firm to my right hand.
At first you protected nothing but me alone; but now
save me and your own judgment alike,
if only there is no new fault in me, and my charges
have not suddenly changed your faith.
May this breath, which I ill draw in the Scythian air,
go out from my limbs — which I desire — before
your breast be bound by my offense,
and I seem deservedly cheaper to you.
We are not so wholly pressed by unjust fates
that my mind too is unsettled by my long ills.
Yet suppose it unsettled: how often do you think the son of Agamemnon
spoke shameless words against Pylades?
And it is not far from the truth that he even struck his friend:
yet that one stayed no less in his offices.
This alone is common to the wretched and the blest,
that to both is wont to be given deference:
way is yielded even to the blind, and to those whom the bordered robe
and the imperious rod, with the words, make revered.
If you do not spare me, you ought to spare my fortune:
no one’s anger has any place in me.
Choose the least of my labors, the least:
that, which you reckon least, will be greater than that other.
As many as are hidden by the wet reeds of the ditch,
as many bees as flowery Hybla guards,
as many grains as the ants are wont to bear, when found,
along their narrow path, to the earthen granaries,
so great a throng of crowded ills stands round me.
Believe me, my complaint is less than the truth.
He who is not content with these — let him pour sands on the shore,
ears of grain on the cornfield, waters into the sea.
So check your untimely swellings,
and do not desert my sails in the midst of the sea.

The letter you read comes to you from that land
where the Hister is added, broad, to the waters of the sea.
If life with sweet health falls to you,
one bright part of my fortune remains.
Of course, as ever, you ask, dearest, what I do,
though you can know this even with me silent.
I am wretched: this is the brief sum of my ills,
and whoever lives with Caesar offended will be so.
Are you eager to learn what the throng of the Tomitan region is,
and among what manners I dwell?
Though this shore be mixed of Greeks and Getae,
it draws more from the ill-pacified Getae.
A greater multitude of the Sarmatic and Getic race
goes and comes, on horseback, through the midst of the ways.
Among them there is no one who does not bear a quiver and bow
and weapons livid with viper’s gall.
A wild voice, a grim face, the truest image of Mars,
no hair, no beard cut by any hand,
a right hand not slow to deal wounds with the fixed knife,
which every barbarian has, joined to his side.
Among these your bard now lives — alas, forgetful of the loves he played —
these he sees, these he hears, my friend:
and would that he may live, and not also die, among them,
and his shade, at least, be away from the hated places.
That my songs are danced in a full theater,
and that my verses are applauded, you write, my friend:
yet I have done nothing (you yourself know this) for the theaters,
nor is my Muse ambitious for applause.
Yet it is not unwelcome, whatever hinders forgetfulness of me,
and brings the fugitive’s name onto men’s lips.
Though at times I curse the songs that I remember harmed me,
and curse my Pierides,
when I have well cursed them, yet I cannot be without them,
and pursue the bloody weapons of my own wounds,
and the Greek ship that was just now torn by Euboean waves
dares to run the Caphereian water.
Yet I do not lie awake to be praised, nor take care
for a future name, which it had been more useful to hide.
I hold my mind to studies, and beguile my griefs,
and try to give the slip to my cares.
What better should I do, alone on deserted shores,
or what other aid should I try to seek for my ills?
Whether I look at the place, the place is unlovely, and than which
nothing in the whole world can be sadder,
or at the men, they are scarcely men worthy of the name,
and have more savage fierceness than wolves.
They do not fear laws, but right yields to force,
and justice, conquered, lies beneath the warring sword.
With skins and loose breeches they keep off the cruel cold,
and their faces are shaggy, covered with long hair.
In a few there remain traces of the Greek tongue,
this too now made barbarous by the Getic sound.
There is no one in this people who could by chance
render any words at all in Latin from the common speech.
I, that Roman bard (forgive me, Muses),
am forced to speak most things in the Sarmatian manner.
Behold, it shames me, and I confess it: now, by long disuse,
Latin words scarcely come even to me.
Nor do I doubt that there are in this little book too not a few
barbarisms: not the man’s fault, but the place’s.
Yet, lest I lose the commerce of the Ausonian tongue,
and my voice grow mute in my native sound,
I speak with myself, and handle the disused words,
and take up again the ill-omened tokens of my pursuit.
So I drag out my mind and my time, so I draw myself back
from the contemplation of my ill, and put it away.
By songs I seek forgetfulness of my wretched affairs:
if I gain that reward by my study, it is enough.

I have not so fallen, though cast down, as to be
beneath you too, than whom nothing can be lower.
What gives you spirit against me, base man? Or why
do you insult mischances which you yourself can suffer?
Do not my ills make you mild and calm toward me as I lie,
ills at which wild beasts could weep;
nor do you fear the godhead of Fortune standing on her doubtful wheel,
and the proud words of the goddess who hates pride?
Avenging Rhamnusia exacts penalties from the deserving:
why do you trample my fate with foot set upon it?
I have seen one who laughed at shipwreck sunk in the waters,
and said, "Never was a wave more just."
He who once had denied cheap food to the wretched
now feeds himself on begged-for fare.
Rolling Fortune wanders with uncertain steps,
and stays sure and tenacious in no place,
but now comes glad, now takes on a bitter face,
and is constant only in her own fickleness.
We too flourished, but that flower was fleeting,
and our flame was of straw, and brief.
Yet, lest you take wild joy with your whole mind,
I have no want of hope of appeasing the god,
either because I sinned short of crime, and, as my fault
does not lack shame, so it does not lack freedom from envy,
or because nothing in the vast world, from the sun’s setting to its rise,
is gentler than he whom it obeys.
Of course, as he is to be overcome by force by no one,
so he has a soft heart for timid prayers,
and, by the example of the gods, to whom he himself is to be added,
will give, with the pardon of my penalty, more to be asked.
If you count the suns and the clouds of a whole year,
you will find the bright day has gone more often.
So, lest you rejoice too much at my ruin,
think that I too can one day be restored:
think it can come about that, the prince softened, you may see
my sad face in the midst of the city,
and that I may see you banished for a graver cause:
these are, next to my first, my nearest prayers.

O, if you would suffer your name to be set in my songs,
how often you would have been set there by me!
You alone I would sing, mindful of your merit, and in my books
no page would have grown without you.
What I owe you would be known in the whole city,
if yet I, an exile, am read in the city I have lost.
The present age would know you mild, the later age too,
if only my writings bear antiquity,
nor would the learned reader cease to speak well of you:
this honor would await you for having saved the bard.
Caesar’s is the first gift, that I draw the air;
after the great gods, thanks are to be had to you.
He gave me life; you protect the life he gave,
and make it possible to enjoy the gift received.
And when the greatest part shuddered at my mischances,
and a part even wished to be believed to have feared them,
and watched my shipwreck from a high mound,
nor gave a hand to one swimming through the savage straits,
you alone called me, half-dead, back from the Stygian wave.
This too, that I can be mindful, is your doing.
May the gods grant themselves always friendly to you, with Caesar:
my vow could not be fuller.
This my labor, if you allowed it, would set in much light,
to be seen, in tuneful books;
now too, though it is bidden to be quiet, my Muse
scarcely holds itself from naming you against your will.
And as the hard leash holds, barking in vain, the dog
that has caught the trail of the timid hind,
and as the eager horse provokes the doors of the not-yet-unbarred
starting-gate, now with foot, now with its very brow,
so my Thalia, bound and shut in by the law given,
desires to go by the title of the forbidden name.
Yet, lest you be harmed by the office of a mindful friend,
I will obey your orders (cease to fear).
But I would not obey, unless you thought that I remembered.
In this, which your voice does not forbid, I will be grateful.
And while (o may it be brief!) I see the vital light,
this breath of mine shall be a servant to your service.

Since we are in the Pontus, three times the Hister has frozen with cold,
three times the wave of the Euxine sea has been made hard.
But already I seem to be as many years far from my country
as Dardan Troy was beneath the Greek enemy.
You would think time stood still, so slowly does it advance,
and the year completes its journey with sluggish steps.
Nor does the solstice take anything from my nights,
nor does midwinter make my days short for me.
Of course, the nature of things has been made new in me,
and makes all things long, together with my cares.
Or do the common seasons accomplish their wonted motions,
and are the seasons of my life harder, more at a standstill?
A place the shore holds, with the false surname of Euxine,
and the truly sinister land of the Scythian strait.
Countless nations round about threaten fierce wars,
who think it shameful to live except by plunder.
Nothing outside is safe: the very mound is defended
by scanty walls and by the nature of the place.
When you least expect it, like birds, the densest enemy
flies in, and, scarce well seen, drives off the prey.
Often, within the walls, with the gates shut, we gather
the harmful weapons that come through the midst of the ways.
So there is rarely one who dares to till the country, and he,
unhappy, plows with this hand, and holds arms with that.
The shepherd sings beneath a helmet, his pipes joined with pitch,
and the timid sheep fear wars instead of the wolf.
We are scarcely defended by the help of the fort; and even within,
the barbarian throng, mixed with the Greeks, causes fear.
For the barbarian dwells with us, with no distinction,
and holds even more than a part of the dwelling.
And though you may not fear them, you could hate them at sight,
their breasts covered with skins and long hair.
These too, who are believed sprung from a Greek city,
wear Persian trousers instead of their fathers’ dress.
They carry on the commerce of a shared tongue:
by gesture must the matter be signified by me.
Here I am the barbarian, who am understood by no one,
and the stupid Getae laugh at Latin words;
and they often openly speak ill of me to my face, in safety,
and perhaps cast my exile at me;
and, as happens, when I have nodded yes or no
to them as they say something false about me, they think it true.
Add that unjust right is pronounced by the rigid sword,
and wounds are often dealt in the midst of the forum.
O hard Lachesis, who gave threads of life no shorter
to one who has so heavy a star!
That I lack the face of my country and of you, my friends,
and complain that I am here among the Scythian nations:
each is a heavy penalty. Yet I deserved to lack my city,
I did not deserve, perhaps, to be in such a place.
What do I say, ah, madman? I deserved to lose even life itself,
with Caesar’s godhead offended.

That someone, in a quarrel, said you were
the wife of an exile, your letter complained.
I grieved, not so much that my fortune is ill spoken of,
who have now grown used to being bravely wretched,
as that I am a cause of shame to her whom I would least wish it,
and I think you blushed at my ills.
Bear up and harden: you have borne much heavier things,
when the prince’s anger snatched me from you.
Yet he is wrong, by whose judgment I am named an exile:
a gentler penalty has followed my fault.
The greatest penalty for me is to have offended him,
and I would rather the hour of my funeral had come first.
Yet my ship is shaken, not sunk nor overwhelmed,
and, though it lacks a harbor, yet it rides above the waters.
He took from me neither life nor wealth nor a citizen’s right,
who deserved to lose all by my own fault.
But because no crime attended that offense,
he ordered nothing but that I be away from my native hearths.
And, as to others, whose number it is not possible to grasp,
so Caesar’s godhead was mild to me.
He himself uses, of me, the name of relegated, not of exile:
my case is safe by my own judge.
Justly, then, Caesar, my songs, such as they are, sing
your praises, to the best of my strength;
justly I pray the gods that they yet close heaven’s thresholds to you,
and wish you to be a god, but without themselves.
The people wish the same; but, as rivers into the vast sea,
so a brook of scanty water is wont to run.
But you, Fortune, from whose mouth I am called an exile,
spare, hard one, to weigh down my name with a lying word.

You write that I should beguile my tearful time by study,
lest my heart perish in shameful neglect.
What you advise, friend, is hard, because songs are a glad
work, and want to have peace of mind.
My fortune is driven through adverse squalls,
nor can any lot be sadder than mine.
You require Priam to applaud at his sons’ funeral,
and childless Niobe to lead festal dances.
Do I seem bound to be held by grief, or by study,
ordered alone to go off among the farthest Getae?
Though you give me a breast propped on strong oak,
such as fame reports was the breast of Anytus’s defendant,
wisdom will fall, broken by the mass of so great a ruin:
the god’s anger avails more than human strengths.
That old man, called wise by Apollo, would not have sustained
to write any work in this case.
Though forgetfulness of my country come, come of you,
though all sense of what is lost can be away,
yet fear itself forbids me to perform the office in quiet:
a place girt by a numberless enemy holds me.
Add that my talent, harmed by long rust,
is sluggish, and much less than it was before.
A fertile field, if it is not renewed by the constant plow,
will have nothing but grass with thorns.
The horse that has stood a long time will run ill, and among
those sent from the starting-gates will go last.
The boat that has long been empty of its wonted waters
is turned to soft rot, and gapes with cracks.
Despair of me too, that I, though I was small even before,
can return equal to him whom I had been.
The long endurance of ills has crushed my talent,
and no part of my old vigor is present.
Yet, if at any time, as now too, a tablet is taken by me,
and I have wished to force words into their feet,
no songs are written by me, or such as you see,
worthy of their master’s time, worthy of the place.
In short, "glory gives no small strength to the mind,
and love of praise makes the breast fruitful."
Once I was drawn by the brightness of name and fame,
while a favoring breeze bore my yardarms.
It is not now so well with me that glory should be my care:
if I might, I would wish to be known to no one.
Or, because my songs succeeded well at first, do you urge me
to write, that I may follow up my own successes?
By your leave, nine sisters, let me say it:
you are the greatest cause of my flight.
And as the maker of the bronze bull gave just penalties,
so I myself pay penalties to my own arts.
I ought to have nothing more to do with verses;
but, I think, if, mad, I should try again the fatal pursuit,
this place will furnish me the weapons of song.
There is no book here, no one to lend me an ear
and know what my words mean.
All places are of barbary, and of a beastlike voice,
and all are full of the fear of a hostile sound.
I myself seem to have already unlearned Latin:
for I have learned to speak Getic and Sarmatian.
Nor yet, to confess the truth to you, can my Muse
be held from composing song.
I write, and burn the books I have written:
the issue of my study is a little ash.
I cannot — and yet I desire to draw out some verses:
therefore my labor is set in the fire,
and no part comes through to you, of my talent,
except what was snatched from the flames by chance or by trick.
So would that my Art, which ruined its master, who feared nothing
of the kind, had been turned to ashes!

This greeting your Naso sends you from the Getic land,
if anyone can send what he himself lacks.
For, sick, I have drawn the contagions of my mind into my body,
that no part of me may be free of torment.
And for many days I suffer the tortures of my side;
no doubt the winter harmed it with excessive cold.
Yet if you yourself are well, in some part we are well:
for my ruin is propped on your shoulders.
Why, when you have given me vast pledges, and when
you protect this head through every number,
do you sin in this, that your letter consoles me rarely,
and offer the dutiful deed, but deny me your words?
Mend this, I pray: for if you correct this one thing,
there will be no blemish on a peerless body.
I would accuse you of more, were it not that it can happen
that a letter not come to me, yet have been sent.
May the gods grant that my complaint is rash,
and that I think, falsely, that you do not remember me.
What I pray is clearly so: for it is not right for me to believe
that the strength of your heart is changeable.
Sooner would the white wormwood fail the icy Pontus,
and Trinacrian Hybla lack its sweet thyme,
than anyone convict you of being unmindful of your friend.
The black threads of my fate are not so spun.
Yet you, that you may drive off even the charges of a false fault,
take care not to seem what you are not.
And as we used to spend long times in talking,
the day failing our discourse,
so let the letter now bear and bring back our silent voices,
and let paper and hand perform the office of the tongue.
And, lest I seem to distrust too much that this will be,
and that it be enough to have warned of it in a few verses,
receive the word with which a letter is always ended
(and may your fate differ from mine!): "farewell."

How great a monument I have given you in my books,
o wife, dearer to me than myself, you yourself see.
Though Fortune take much from their author,
you yet will be borne, made famous by my talent;
and while I am read, your fame will be read together with me,
nor can you go wholly into the mournful pyres;
and though, by your husband’s mischance, you may seem pitiable,
you will find some who wish to be what you are,
who, since you are in the share of my ills,
call you happy, and envy you.
I would not have given you more by giving you riches:
the rich man’s shade will bear nothing to its Manes.
I have given you the fruit of a perpetual name, and that —
than which gift I could give nothing greater — you have.
Add that, since you are the sole protection of my affairs,
the burden of no small honor comes to you,
that my voice is never mute about you, and you ought
to be proud at the testimony of your husband.
That no one may be able to call these things rash, stand firm,
and keep both me and your dutiful faith alike.
For your honor, while I stood, remained without base reproach,
and your uprightness was only unreproved.
Now from my ruin a field is made for you;
here let your virtue set a conspicuous work.
It is easy to be good when what forbids it is removed,
and a wife has nothing to stand in the way of her duty.
When the god has thundered, not to withdraw oneself from the storm —
that, at last, is devotion, that is wedded love.
Rare indeed is the virtue that Fortune does not steer,
which stays with steady foot when she flees.
Yet if any virtue seeks a reward for itself,
and stands, lofty, in scanty circumstances,
when you count time, through no ages is it silent,
and the places wonder at it, wherever the world’s road extends.
Do you see how, through a long age, Penelope’s faith,
praiseworthy, keeps its name unextinguished?
Do you see how Admetus’s wife is sung, and Hector’s,
and the daughter of Iphis, who dared to go onto the kindled pyres?
how the Phylacian wife lives in fame, whose husband
pressed the Iliac soil with swift foot?
There is no need of death for me, but of love and faith:
not from a hard road must fame be sought by you.
Nor believe yourself warned of these things because you do not do them:
I give sails, though my ship goes by the oar.
He who warns you to do what you already do, by warning
praises, and by his exhortation approves your deeds.