“Wherefrom father Ennius, sitting before I came, hath drunk.”
I had rehearsed the Curian brothers, and made remarks on the Horatian javelin
(Near Q. H. Flaccus’ book-stall).
“Of” royal Aemilia, drawn on the memorial raft,
“Of” the victorious delay of Fabius, and the left-handed
battle at Cannae,
Of lares fleeing the “Roman seat” …
I had sung of all these
And of Hannibal,
and of Jove protected by geese.
And Phoebus looking upon me from the Castalian tree,
Said then “You idiot! What are you doing with that water;
“Who has ordered a book about heroes?
You need, Propertius, not think
“About acquiring that sort of a reputation.
“Soft fields must be worn by small wheels,
“Your pamphlets will be thrown, thrown often into a chair
“Where a girl waits alone for her lover;
“Why wrench your page out of its course?
“No keel will sink with your genius
“Let another oar churn the water,
“Another wheel, the arena; mid-crowd is as bad as mid-sea.”
He had spoken, and pointed me a place with his plectrum:
Orgies of vintages, an earthern image of Silenus
Strengthened with rushes, Tegaean Pan,
The small birds of the Cytharean mother,
their Punic faces dyed in the Gorgon’s lake;
Nine girls, from as many countrysides
bearing her offerings in their unhardened hands,
Such my cohort and setting. And she bound ivy to his thyrsos;
Fitted song to the strings;
Roses twined in her hands.
And one among them looked at me with face offended,
Calliope:
“Content ever to move with white swans!
“Nor will the noise of high horses lead you ever to battle;
“Nor will the public criers ever have your name
in their classic horns,
“Nor Mars shout you in the wood at Aeonium,
Nor where Rome ruins German riches,
“Nor where the Rhine flows with barbarous blood,
and flood carries wounded Suevi.
“Obviously crowned lovers at unknown doors,
“Night dogs, the marks of a drunken scurry,
“These are your images, and from you the sorcerizing
of shut-in young ladies,
“The wounding of austere men by chicane.”
Thus Mistress Calliope,
Dabbling her hands in the fount, thus she
Stiffened our face with the backwash of Philetas the Coan.
III
Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress:
Telling me to come to Tibur, At once!!: “Bright tips reach up from twin towers, Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.”
What is to be done about it? Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows, Where bold hands may do violence to my person?
Yet if I postpone my obedience
because of this respectable terror
I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal assailant.
And I shall be in the wrong, and it will last a twelve month, For her hands have no kindness me-ward,
Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight
And in the Via Sciro.
If any man would be a lover
he may walk on the Scythian coast,
No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,
The moon will carry his candle,
the stars will point out the stumbles,
Cupid will carry lighted torches before him
and keep mad dogs off his ankles.
Thus all roads are perfectly safe
and at any hour;
Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor? I
Cypris is his cicerone.
What if undertakers follow my track,
such a death is worth dying.
She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,
She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.
Gods’ aid, let not my bones lie in a public location
with crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it;
For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated.
May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage
Or may I inter beneath the hummock
of some as yet uncatalogued sand;
At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.
IV
