Extant Works

And tears, and watchful men complaining near the thresholds,
200 Of Asteris and the Poet, sung throughout the whole city:
Asteris before feasts. Asteris by night, Asteris at the rising.
How much Hylas was not cried for. And now she began
To bend her harsh heart willingly, and now to seem hard to herself,
Well done, in your marriage, most peaceful among Latin poets,
Because you have traversed the hard path, and of the begun labor
You have reached the harbors: just as a deserter of the swollen Pisa
River, far inflamed toward foreign loves,
Draws the undefiled streams in a sunken channel:
Until at length, brought forth, he drinks the Sicanian Sicilian fountains
210 With gasping mouth: the Naiad marvels at the sweet
Kisses, and does not believe a husband has come by the sea.
What a day was that for you then, with the clear gift of the celestials,
O Stella? How much did your breasts leap with a vow?
When she nodded the sweet marriage of her face, with her right hand,
To go from the sky, and to wander through the shining axes
She seemed. Less did the shepherd exult on the Amiclean sands
At the coming of Helen's Idaean ships:
Nor did the Thessalian Tempe see such a Peleus,
When Chiron saw Thetis approaching the Emonian Thessalian lands
220 On an erect horse. How long the stars delay.
How sluggish is Aurora to the prayers of the husband.
But as far as the stars perceived that the bridal chambers were being prepared,
The Letoan father of poets Apollo, and the Semeleian Euan Bacchus (of Nisa,
This one moves from Ortygia, this one moves rapid crowds:
Hence the Lycian mountains, and the cold shades of Thymbra
And the honor of Parnassus, to him the Pangaean mountains resound,
And Ismara, and the shores of once-genial Naxos.