Collected Works

These secret notes are carried by land and sea:
The enemy inspects the notes received from an enemy.
Three times I attempted to speak with you. Three times my useless tongue
Clung fast. Three times the sound ceased at my very lips.
Where it is allowed: and it follows: modesty must be mixed with love.
Love ordered me to write what I was ashamed to say.
Whatever love has ordered: it is not safe to ignore.
He reigns: and he has power over the gods themselves.
He said to me when I was first hesitating to write:
Write: that iron-hearted man will surrender his hands.
May he be present: and just as he warms our marrow with greedy fire:
So may he fix your spirit upon my prayers.
I will not break the social bonds of loyalty:
My reputation, I would have you inquire, is free from crime.
Love comes more heavily the later we are burned. Inside
We are burned: and our hearts have a hidden wound.
Just as first yokes injure tender bullocks:
And a horse captured from the herd barely suffers the reins:
So does the unrefined heart barely endure, and only with difficulty, the first loves:
And this burden does not sit well with my spirit.
It becomes an art when crime is learned in tender years.
What comes at a late time: loves more badly.
You will pluck fresh offerings from a preserved reputation:
And we will both become equally guilty.
It is something to pluck orchards with full branches:
And to choose the first rose with a delicate fingernail.
Yet even so, that purity with which I conducted myself before
Was to be marked by an unaccustomed stain.
But it has turned out well: and we are burned with a worthy fire.
A shameful adulterer harms worse than adultery.
If Juno would grant me both my brother and my husband Phaedra refers to the incestuous relationships of her divine and royal lineage:
I seem to be about to prefer Hippolytus to Jupiter.
Now also, you will barely believe: I am being sent into unknown arts:
I have an impulse to go through wild beasts.
It pleases me to go into the grove: and with deer pressed into the nets,
To urge on the swift dogs through the highest ridges.
Now my primary goddess is Delia Diana, goddess of the hunt, distinguished by a curved bow.
I myself will follow your judgment.
Either to vibrate the trembling javelin with my arms:
Or to place my body upon the grassy ground.
Often it is a pleasure to turn light chariots in the dust,
Wrenching the jaws of a fleeing horse with the reins.
Now I am carried as the Maenads followers of Bacchus driven by the furies of Bacchus: