Extant Works

"Not for this did I give such beauty to you, and proud countenances,
170 And gave myself, that you should pass through widowed years,
As if you were not dear to me: it is enough, O all too much, to have
Despised your former suitors. But truly, he is given to you here,
With all his heart he admires and loves you above all others,
Lacking neither beauty nor lineage. For who, among the youths
Throughout the world, have not learned his songs, and which girls have not?
You shall see him raise the fasces symbols of magisterial power twelve times
(Thus may the indulgence of the Ausonian governor the Emperor proceed)
Before the day; certainly, even now he knows the Cybeleian of the Mother Goddess
180 Thresholds, and he reads the song of the Euboic Sibyl.
And now the parent the Emperor (for it is permitted to me even to foreknow his mind)
Will indulge him with purple robes and the curule ivory of youth.
He will give him to celebrate the spoils of leaders (what greater glory is there?),
And with the laurel of the new.
Therefore come, join the marriage beds, and take away the leisure of youth.
Which peoples have I not joined, and which hearts have I not bound with my torch?
The flocks of birds and cattle and of hard wild beasts have not
Refused me. I release the very ether into the marriages of the earth
(When the clouds become thin with the calm).
190 Thus the series of things and the age of the world returns.
Whence was the new glory of Troy and the ravisher of the burning gods Ganymede,
If I had not been joined to a Phrygian husband?
Whence would the Lydian Tiber have repeated my Iulians the Julian line?
Who could have held the walls of seven-fold Rome,
The Latin head of the empire, if the Trojan priestess
Had not taken Mars by theft, and I not forbidding?"
With these words she soothes her, and inspires a silent love
Of marriage; the gifts and prayers now return to her mind.