Cleomedis Meteora Graece et Latine (Balfour 1605)

Here we soothe the desire for the study of ignoble leisure
With the honest arts of the fatherland,
Where the generous mass of the sea-born Garonne
Challenges the sea rising softly with a reflowing tide.

AN IDYLL

ON CLEOMEDES, EDITED IN GREEK AND LATIN

BY ROBERT BALFOUR, A SCOT,

AN EMINENT PHILOSOPHER AND MATHEMATICIAN,

AND ILLUSTRATED WITH MOST LEARNED COMMENTARIES.

Just as on the steep summit of airy Latmus
Endymion spent whole nights with a sleepless breast,
While he noted the miracles of the dew-flowing Phoebe the Moon,
And her various faces, and changing countenances:
Why now she stretches out her brow curved into horns,
Now she is half-full, elsewhere she is swerved into a circle,
Elsewhere immense in a full globe, soon she falls silent, nothing,
Now spotted, and now silvered in shining chariots:
Things which the happy lover first catches,
Who drew the Moon from the high orbit to his kisses:
Such a learned Greece saw her own Cleomedes
Investigating with his eyes the ceilings of the high world,
And opening temples flourishing with painted stars.
For captured by the bland love of the celestial Muse
He visited things impervious to human sights, and he measured
The ample spaces, and the movements of the shining Olympus.
Few things, however, escaped the man, who did not know there to be
Three spheres placed above the eight spheres,
And the star-bearing heaven to be bent in one dizziness:
He wrote, nor did he sense it to run from the setting to the rising.
Whence he imagined the stars to consist fixed in their places, just as
Passengers on a ship, nor thus
Is the daughter of Latona the Moon carried near the earth, nor thus
Do the horses of the sun turn one volume of the circle,
And the other stars wandering with oblique steps:
But just as moving backward from the prow to the stern,
So that laws and fates may serve human things.
Furthermore, the late age now, the outstanding labors,

And the unuse of the Greek language known to few
Had covered with ungrateful squalor: and it was weaving a rotten web
On the name of Cleomedes,
As the spider Arachne moved a quarrel for the Goddess.
Urania did not bear it, and indignant that the merit of the hidden
Alumnus be suppressed, and the monuments lie,
She stimulates Balfour with words: Go on, grant us
This work. Return the ancient one to its native brightness,
Astronomy. Make the Greek speak with a Latin mouth.
Irradiate with Ingenuity, and pour light into the darkness.
For you can: nor were you once carried in vain in the chariots of the Muses
Through the liquid air, you visited
The green fields of Ausonia, and the Roman wastes,
And the gardens of the Cecropidae Athenians, and Hellas of the rich soil,
You traversed with your mind, and the secrets of the learned Lyceum,
And whatever lies in the shade-bearing forest of the Academy,
And whatever the Stoa has, raised upon rigid columns.
Whence, having plundered the old Latium, and the rich Athens,
You brought back sacred offerings to the temples as a victor,
Which the Nicene Synod hung in the dome, and on the altars.
But you owe me more, who presented myself whole for you to see,
As a nurse, and I led you through the divine shores of the Aether,
While you were hanging in gaze, and with a wondrous sweetness,
And a new consonance, while the Siren tempers her own orb,
Soothing the happy ones with Ambrosial song.