Collected Works

May the bow and weapons of your Diana be imitated by you:
If you never cease to stretch them, it will become soft.
Cephalus was famous in the woods: and many wild beasts
Had fallen with him striking them.
And yet he did not offer himself badly to be loved by Aurora.
The goddess came to him, wise from an old husband.
Often under the holm-oaks, any grass whatsoever
Supported the two of them, Venus and the son of Cinara, placed together.
And the son of Oeneus Meleager burned for the Maenalian Atalanta.
She holds the spoil of the beast as a pledge of love.
Let us also now be numbered in that crowd:
If you take away Venus, your forest is rustic.
I will come as a companion. Nor will the dark, rocky places move me:
Nor the boar, to be feared for its slanted tusk.
Two seas attack the isthmus with their waves:
And the thin land hears both seas.
Here I will inhabit Troezen with you, the Pittheian kingdoms.
Now it is dearer than my own fatherland.
The Neptunian hero Theseus is away for a time: and will be away for long:
The land of his Pirithous detains him.
Theseus preferred (unless we deny what is manifest)
Pirithous to Phaedra: and Pirithous to you.
Nor did this injury come to us alone from him:
We both have been harmed in great matters.
The bones of my brother, broken by the three-knotted club,
He scattered on the ground. My sister was left as prey for wild beasts:
My mother, worthy of the favor of her son, bore you,
First in virtue among the axe-bearing girls Amazons.
If you ask where she is? Theseus finished her side with his sword.
Nor was the mother protected by such a great pledge.
But not even as a bride: and received in the nuptial bed:
Why? Unless lest you, a bastard, should seize the ancestral kingdoms:
And he added brothers from me for you: yet he was the one,
Not I, who was the cause of their being taken away.
O, would that the innards, most beautiful of things,
Destined to harm you, had been ruptured in the midst of birth.
Go now, and revere the bed of a deserving parent:
Whom he flees: and whom he disowns by his deeds.
And do not let empty names wear out your spirit,
Because I might seem to be about to unite with my stepson.
That ancient piety, destined to die in the future age,
Was rustic while Saturn held the kingdoms.
Jupiter established that whatever pleased was pious.