Extant Works

Which would not suffer savage axes under a master,
And now, perhaps, the slippery Nais water nymph who knows not,
Or the Hamadryad tree nymph will not take away your unsevered years.
Why should I recount the tables alternating upon the twin mound?
And the Alban lakes? And the fountains in another pool?
And you, who glide deeply through the winding river,
Martia the Marcian aqueduct, and run through the floods with bold lead?
Or does the sweet path lead the river, elided under Ionian waves,
To the Aetnean ports?
Does the Anio himself, in those caves, having left his source,
Stripped of his sea-green cloak under the secret night,
Here and there lay down his breast upon the fragile moss:
Or does he fall huge into the pools, and beat the glassy
see: Tiberinus

waters with his swimming; Tiberinus lies in that shade:
There Albula a sulfurous spring desires to drench her sulfurous hair.
This house could cause Phoebe Diana to forsake the grove,
And strip the cold Taygeta a mountain range in Greece of the choirs of Dryads,
And summon Pan from the Lycaean woods.
And if the Tirynthian Hercules temples did not give other lots,
The Praenestine sisters the Fates or Oracles of Praeneste could also have migrated here.
Why should I praise the two-bearing orchards of Alcinous, and you,
Branches that never went forth into the air empty?
Let the fields of Telegonus yield, let the Laurentian acres
Of Turnus yield: let the Lucrine house, and the shore of bloody
Antiphates yield; let the treacherous glassy ridges of Circe
Howled at by Dulichian wolves Odysseus' men yield, and the proud citadels
Of Anxur, and the seats which the mild one owes to the Phrygian
Foster-child, let the old women yield: those that will call you back
to the narrow suns, because the cloudy shores will recall you in winter.