2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Translation copyright © 1993 by James Michie

Introduction copyright © 2002 by David Malouf

Biographical note copyright © 2002 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This translation was originally published in 1993 by the Folio Society, London.

This edition published by arrangement with the translator.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-80183-8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-76117-1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.

[Ars amatoria. English & Latin]

The art of love / Publius Ovidius Naso; translated by James Michie; introduction by David Malouf.— 2002 Modern Library pbk. ed., Bilingual ed.

p.      cm.

Translation of Ars amatoria.

ISBN 978-0-375-76117-1

1. Didactic poetry, Latin—Translations into English.    2. Erotic poetry, Latin—Translations into English.    3. Seduction—Poetry.    I. Michie, James.    II. Title.

PA6522.A8 M6 2002

871′.01—dc21

2002070264

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

OVID

The great classical poet Ovid was born Publius Ovidius Naso in Sulmo (modern Sulmona), Italy, on March 20, 43 B.C. Although biographical information is scant—and based largely on Ovid’s autobiographical poetry—it is known that Ovid’s father had the wealth and position to anticipate a political career for his son. Ovid was educated in Rome, where he studied rhetoric, and traveled in Athens, Asia Minor, and Sicily. Reluctantly, he held minor official posts upon his return, but poetry became increasingly important to him. The contemporary works of Virgil and Horace had spurred Ovid’s imagination, and he decided to give up public life and begin writing.

Ovid is believed to have written his first surviving work, the Amores (The Loves), between 25 and 20 B.C. The Amores consisted of short poems of 86 to 106 lines in proper elegiac couplets. With its simple and obvious theme, the Amores was a successful stepping-stone for the young poet, and it was republished in a shorter second edition years later.

At roughly the same time, Ovid composed the Heroides (Heroines), a collection of fifteen imagined letters from famous women of Greek mythology to absent or abandoned lovers. Though it is uncertain when the Heroides was written, some scholars date it after the Amores because Ovid again utilizes the form of the love elegy, but augments it with dramatic monologue and mythical themes. The influence of Greek tragedy on Ovid’s writing was significant, and he wrote his own version of the Medea, perhaps around the time he worked on the Heroides.

Building on some of the themes of the Amores, Ovid turned next to the composition of three poems on the art of seduction. The first of these didactic poems was likely the Medicamina Faciei (On Cosmetics), a short poem, of which only a fragment remains, that professes very technical knowledge on how to cultivate physical beauty. The second and more substantial work, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), was probably finished between 2 B.C. and A.D. 2 and published in three volumes—two addressed to men, one to women. This ambitious and very popular handbook taught readers how to find, catch, and hold on to lovers, and it highlighted Ovid’s lack of reverence for Emperor Augustus’ strict moral codes. While finishing the third book of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid wrote a follow-up poem titled Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love). In this recantation of sorts, Ovid offers cures for falling out of love in the spirited and burlesque style of the Ars Amatoria.

Soon, Ovid began exploring different literary themes and forms. Around A.D. 1–4, he worked on the Fasti (Calendar), a long poem consisting of twelve books of elegiac couplets that describe the origins of Roman religious festivals and holidays. The six surviving books of the Fasti chronicle the first six months of the year and are filled with bits of astronomical detail as well as patriotic enthusiasm. During this period, Ovid also began work on what is perhaps his most famous work, the Metamorphoses (Transformations). Totaling fifteen books and nearly twelve thousand lines, this long poem was inspired largely by Virgil’s Aeneid. Ovid’s epic, written in hexameter verse, sweeps from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar in a variety of historical and mythological tales. By A.D. 8, Ovid had completed the poem; final revisions, however, were left unfinished when Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from Rome that year (some claim that the hedonistic themes of Ars Amatoria were to blame). Exiled to the harsh Black Sea port of Tomis (now Constanta, Romania), Ovid continued writing and hoped for reprieve.

Ovid produced three major poems from exile: Tristia (Poems of Sadness), Ibis, and the Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from Pontus). It is believed that the Tristia, a set of fifty autobiographical poems in five books, was written first, between A.D. 8 and A.D. 12. In the Tristia, he returns to the first person and to the use of elegiac couplets as he woefully describes his journey into exile. The undated Ibis is a lengthy imputation directed at an anonymous enemy in which Ovid again shows the breadth of his mythological learning. The Epistulae ex Ponto consists of forty-six poems in four books written between A.D. 12 and A.D. 16. Like the Tristia, the Epistulae recounts the miseries of life in Tomis, but in this work Ovid addresses his melancholy “letters” to specific people in Rome—his wife, his friends, and the emperor—and appeals for aid and sympathy. These compositions failed to move Augustus, and although Ovid was popular among Romans, he remained in exile until his death in late A.D. 17 or early A.D. 18.

Ovid’s adoption of Greek themes and meter into the Latin language, his mastery of classical mythology, and his technical precision are but a few of the reasons many consider him one of history’s most brilliant poets. His influence on Western literature is immeasurable.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION by David Malouf

Dedication

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

THE ART OF LOVE: [ENGLISH]

BOOK ONE

BOOK TWO

BOOK THREE

THE ART OF LOVE: [LATIN]

LIBER PRIMUS

LIBER SECUNDUS

LIBER TERTIUS

INTRODUCTION

David Malouf

The Ars Amatoria presents itself as a didactic poem in the manner of Virgil’s Georgics. But if we expect it to be solemn and improving, we will from the start be confounded. Its subject is neither farming nor military tactics, hunting, horsemanship, seafaring, rhetoric, or any other practical and socially useful activity. In the topsy-turvy “modern” world that Ovid introduces us to, the flaneur’s world of cruising the streets of a vast cosmopolitan city, of shopping and partygoing, of theaters, taverns, temples, synagogues, colonnades, racetracks, piazzas, Ovid’s subject is the entirely unsolemn and to this point unconsidered art (or so the poet would have us believe) of getting and keeping a lover.

Highly colored, allusive, audaciously tongue-in-cheek, the Ars Amatoria is from first line to last a series of surprising and provocative reversals, not only of established literary conventions but of anything that even the most alert and knowing reader might expect.

Comic disproportion is its method. Petty concerns are illustrated with large examples, great matters with ones that are trivial. Moral tags are misapplied, old tales are introduced on the most tenuous pretext and given new twists, arguments are playfully exaggerated until they collapse under their own weight—it is the playfulness, not the argument, that we are meant to approve and be impressed by, psychological analysis, as in the recounting of Pasiphae’s passion for the bull, pursued to the point where it becomes comically absurd. Seriousness is at every turn averted, but with so disarming a mixture of slyness and candor, and so much infectious joy in the doing of it, that to charge the poet with crime—lèse-majesté or libertinism or the corruption of youth—would be, to steal an image from a later Augustan, like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Is this why it took Augustus so long to accuse and punish Ovid?

In A.D. 8, a good seven years after the poem first made its spectacular appearance, Ovid was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea, a place from which, despite many appeals for clemency, he was never to return. The Ars Amatoria is cited as one part of his offense, and it is not difficult to see in the poem what the emperor might have found offensive.

At its center is a character that was to have a long history in poems of this kind, and not only in Latin: the modern lover—the carefree, pleasure-loving man-about-town who has dropped out of the world of serious civic duty and become a hero not of the battlefield or the law courts but of the bedchamber, where the only “virtue” he recognizes is play. The poem really is subversive—not in the challenge it offers to the new morality, or because it has the effrontery to claim for the lover the same “professional” status as the farmer, the soldier, the holder of high public office, but because it makes the role it creates so invitingly attractive; most of all, because it establishes the lover/poet as the emperor of an alternative and privately constituted state. As one of Ovid’s later incarnations puts it: “She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is.”[1] The poem’s ostensible subject, the art of love, is a decoy. The real subject is the poet himself. To be a poet—to be the poet Ovid—is to be a world unto yourself. The emperor’s world, the great world of Rome, is simply the scene of operations, at the most, “material.” That is the immodest claim. No wonder Augustus felt he had to act.

Around this lively and youthfully impulsive dramatis persona (the poet himself, we should remember, was in his middle forties), Ovid organizes a spectacular ado, a series of brilliant sideshows in which what is on display is the poet’s delight in his own talent: the range of his erudition, his verbal dexterity and wit, his inventiveness in painting scenes of sweeping grandeur but also, since he has what we would now call a cinematic eye, illuminating close-ups. The poet can take literally anything into his poem in the assurance that what will hold it together is his own mercurial presence, as guide, joker, confidant, provocateur, storyteller, picture maker, mock scholar, mock sage, magician, stage manager.

At one moment he is leading us on a conducted tour of the city’s sights and monuments—with time out to comment on the usefulness of each as a pickup place. In the next he is playing knucklebones or spillikins, or recommending hairstyles or footwear or health resorts, or diverting us with old tales retold, of Pasiphae and her bull, of the birdman Daedalus, of Mars and Venus, Cephalus and Procris, and throwing out hints along the way to a whole company of poets and playwrights and novelists to come: to the school of English poets we call Metaphysical, who will find in his unexpected juxtapositions, his yoking together of disparate worlds and objects, the way to a new kind of imagery; to Molière for Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes; to the long line of eighteenth-century epistolary novelists; even perhaps, in his proposal that the safest way of transmitting a message is to write it on the back of the messenger, to a twentieth-century filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, for The Pillow Book.

It is the protean inclusiveness of the Ars Amatoria, its joy in the variousness and contrariety of things, their lovely capacity for surprise and paradox, that has made it such a treasure-house of literary tropes and genres, such a gallery of pictures that need only the stroke of a brush to make them actual paintings. Titian, Rubens, Poussin, and others had only to turn to the verbal pictures here—Bacchus in a chariot drawn by tigers, a drunken Silenus falling sideways off his ass, Cephalus stretched out in a grassy clearing—to discover the program, down to the smallest detail, for some of the greatest Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

One of Ovid’s most sympathetic qualities for those who came later was his own sense of lateness—of being, as he must have seen it, postclassical. But what he also demonstrated, and by brilliant example, was that all we need to make old material new is freshness of invention and a previously unconsidered point of view.

Walking along the shore with Calypso, Ulysses maps the Trojan plain for her by drawing with a stick in the sand. So Ovid embarks, once again, on the well-known story. But Ulysses has barely got started on his “epic” when a wave sweeps up the beach and, in a wonderfully dramatic and affecting image, Troy and all the old world of gods and heroes is once more obliterated.

In the retelling of the Daedalus story, one of the most extended and fully imagined in the poem, an aerial view of the Greek islands Naxos, Paros, and Delos, in itself a remarkable piece of imagining, is momentarily suspended while Ovid shows us his two birdmen from another angle, through the eyes now of a supernumerary angler on the beach below. More than fifteen centuries later, Brueghel would appropriate this extraordinary image for a famous painting, and four centuries later again, W. H. Auden for an equally famous poem.

For the ancient reader, any suggestion of solemn intent would have been subverted by the poet’s choice of meter—not hexameters, as the didactic poem traditionally demanded, but elegiac couplets (hexameter followed by pentameter) of the sort used in the refined, playfully erotic poems Ovid had previously produced in his Amores. James Michie’s irregular couplets, with their unpredictable rhymes and quick-footed shifts of register and perspective, splendidly re-create the lightness of the original and its careless charm. We know this voice. It is the authentic voice of Ovid as it has been transmitted to us by a long line of English poets who, in localizing it, discovered their own:

Since ther’s no helpe, Come let us kisse and part,

Nay, I have done: You get no more of Me.…[2]

or

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?[3]

or

Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.[4]

Michie is able to evoke an Ovid who seems so immediately present, so racily up to date, because the persona he created has turned out, by a kind of miracle, to be timeless.

To the wandering scholars and minnesingers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to the authors of The Romance of the Rose, and to Chaucer in the fourteenth, Ovid seemed like a man of modern sensibility, a contemporary out of his time, and he appeared that way also to the poets of the English Renaissance. His dedication to what Chapman called “Ovid’s banquet of sense” made him a natural alternative to Petrarch and the Petrarchans. It was his joy in the senses, in color and action, most of all in the self, that he offered Marlowe, who translated the Amores while he was still a student at Oxford. For Francis Meres, writing in 1598, Shakespeare was the “sweet witty soul” of Ovid mellifluously reborn. Thomas Heywood and Thomas Lodge both made translations of the Ars Amatoria. In France it is what a rejuvenated Ronsard turned to in the second and third books of his Amours. And when Goethe, in the fifth of his Roman Elegies, taps out his hexameters on the back of a sleeping girl, it is surely Ovid who is there in the shadows behind him, as it must have been Ovid, as much as any of the Italian painters, or Winckelmann with his promise of “classical ground,” who drew the great Northerner into that area of his nature that he called Italy.

Ovid represents the playful, irreverent element in our culture that, once a place has been made for it, we cannot do without. We have only to hear his voice in our own everyday language, as we do here in James Michie’s translation, to recognize a lost but living contemporary whose boldness is a challenge to our own, and the charm of whose companionship is, as it always was, irresistible.

DAVID MALOUF is the author of fourteen books, including An Imaginary Life and the international bestseller The Great World. His work has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize, among other accolades. He lives in Tuscany and Australia.

[1] John Donne, “The Sunne Rising.”

[2] Michael Drayton, Sonnet 61, “Idea.”

[3] John Donne, “The Good-morrow.”

[4] John Donne, “Elegie. To His Mistris Going to Bed.”

TO JAKE AND DROGO

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Publius Ovidius Naso (the “Nose” no doubt reflects some distinguished ancestor) was born in 43 B.C. of a long-standing equestrian family. Though his birthplace was ninety miles east of the city, he belonged therefore to the second highest social class in Rome. As a teenager he was sent to Rome for a suitable education, which at the time heavily stressed the art of rhetoric, or the sophisticated gift of the gab which could lead a clever lad to the lucrative profession of an advocate in law; that is what his father hoped for, and that was the example set by his talented elder brother. It soon became clear to Ovid that, though he enjoyed the literary and emotional side of rhetoric, sheer argumentation bored him. He was writing poetry, and wanted to be a poet. His father, as fathers usually are, was aghast, but Ovid had his way. At about twenty, he did the equivalent of the Grand Tour, studying in Athens and visiting Sicily and the cities of Asia Minor. Like Catullus, in the same year he both gazed at the ruins of Troy and lost a beloved brother.

After his return to Rome he held some minor public posts, but his passion remained poetry: he made friends with Horace and Propertius, he mourned the early death of Tibullus, he saw Virgil but never spoke to him. Before long his verses were circulating and being publicly recited. First came the Amores, a series of clever love poems, most of them addressed to a probably fictional mistress, Corinna; next the Heroides, imaginary letters written by heroines of legend to their lovers or husbands; and then the Ars Amatoria, which brought him to the peak of popularity.

Meanwhile (possibly it was arranged by his anxious father) he had married a girl whom he not long after divorced: she was, in Ovid’s single, scathing reference to her, “neither worthy nor useful.” A second marriage was also short-lived; when or why it ended, and whether there was a child, we do not know; Ovid only vouchsafes that his wife “had nothing against” her predecessor. His last marriage, to a well-connected widow with a daughter, was happy, and it was to her and about her that he wrote some of his most touching poetry in exile.

In A.D. 8, almost a decade after the appearance of the Ars Amatoria, Ovid was abruptly banished by edict of the Emperor Augustus. (An irony of history is that he learnt of his fate while he was visiting an island famous in the annals of banishment: Elba.) It was not the harshest form of that particular punishment, which was exsilium, but relegatio, whereby he retained his civic rights and property; all the same he had to leave Rome for a place of Augustus’ choice (this was Tomis, on the Black Sea) and his books were removed from the public libraries. Ovid says the grounds for his sentence were “a poem” and “a blunder” and to the end of his life presented himself as an astonished innocent; but if we look at the background to the Emperor’s decision we may feel less surprise than Ovid professed to have felt.

As Octavian, Augustus had come to power after a period of civil war and disorder. Part of his programme of reform was to revive the stricter moral standards of the previous generation, to which end he passed a number of laws, notably one against adultery. In 2 B.C., on discovering that his daughter Julia was a multiple adulteress, he banished her and her known lovers. Ten years later he also banished his grand-daughter, another Julia, for the same offence. He was clearly in earnest. Between these two banishments Ovid had published his Ars Amatoria to the applause of educated Rome. This was the guilty “poem.” Ovid, riding high, must have been so blinded by success that he failed to see that it was bound to displease the Emperor deeply. Although he always protested that the available girls in his poem were exclusively freedwomen—unattached demi-mondaines—his text doesn’t bear him out; adultery is more than hinted at. And how could he have hoped that Augustus would tolerate his recommending as the two best hunting-grounds for casual sex the patriotic mock naval battle which the Emperor himself staged and the porticos which Augustus and his sister had dedicated in honour of his consort?

The “blunder” has puzzled historians. “Repertus ego,” says Ovid, suggesting that he was “discovered” as an unwilling or unwitting witness or minor accessory to some scene or plot offensive to the Emperor. He may have known too much about Julia’s love-life, or he may have been too friendly with members of the political opposition. He insists that the “blunder” was in no sense a “crime,” but it was certainly a fatal indiscretion. Augustus, having long stayed his hand, struck.

What were conditions like for an exile in Tomis? When Franco banished the philosopher Unamuno to a remote island in the Canaries, he had his books, local wine and an agreeable climate—what more, a cynic might ask, could a true philosopher desire? Ovid had none of these amenities: imported wine, it’s true, was available, but, as he complains, it was often iced over and could be drunk “not by the draught but only by the chunk.” Delacroix’s painting in the National Gallery, Ovid Among the Scythians, is charming but misleading: it shows the poet lounging, lightly clad, on a bank in front of a pleasant-looking stretch of water, enjoying the sight of a picturesque tribesman milking a mare. In fact, Tomis (now Constanta in Romania) was a god-forsaken, run-down, self-governing Roman frontier outpost, continually harassed by barbarian horsemen from the steppes. The inhabitants spoke not a word of Latin, only a garbled form of Greek. The climate was vile (a prevailing north-east wind), he was without his wife (she had begged him to let her accompany him, but they had decided it was wisest for her to stay behind, look after their property and work for his recall), he was without his library and without skilled doctors, the posts to and from Rome took several months, privacy was hard to come by, and he had no one with whom he could share his love of poetry: as he poignantly put it, “To write a poem you can’t read to anyone else is like dancing in the dark.” Yet he didn’t collapse, as Oscar Wilde did, with less excuse, in Dieppe. He buckled down to learn the local language, Getic, and, as a middle-aged man in a community living in fear of raids (“we pick up poisoned arrows in the street”), he joined the citizen militia. And during his eight or nine years of exile he continued to write poetry, nearly six thousand lines of it, sometimes grovelling in hopeful flattery of Augustus, sometimes whingeing, sometimes aggressive (his Ibis is a savage attack on some, to us, unknown enemy in Rome, whom he blames for his misfortunes), sometimes deeply moving (the autobiographical parts of the Tristia), but always glitteringly accomplished. He ended up honoured in Tomis, crowned with a municipal wreath and exempted from taxation. A statue of him stands in Constanza today. By the time he died, at the age of fifty-nine, another emperor, Tiberius, was the ruler of the Roman world, and the question of the poet’s exile was not high on his agenda.

What sort of man was Ovid? The Romans were not given to self-portraiture—Horace has left us a few sentences, Virgil nothing—so we must be grateful that Ovid occasionally spoke of himself in his poetry, especially in exile, though he was at all times speaking through the poet’s mask, or persona. I get the impression of an affectionate nature: his expressed love for his parents, his brother and his last wife, his unjealous friendships with fellow poets, even his sexual teasing in the Ars strike me as the mark of a warm, not a cold person. He was entirely heterosexual in a society that was tolerantly not, but he thought some “gays” fair target for mockery. If he had a tendency to self-pity, he also had humour as well as wit, as is demonstrated (as I read it) by a story of Seneca’s. Knowing and disapproving of Ovid’s weakness for verbal extravagance, three of his friends proposed to him that they should, in committee, select three of his lines that ought to be excised from his work. He agreed, but only on condition that he could select three lines that on no account should be sacrificed. The lines on each list were identical.

Francis Meres, a contemporary of Shakespeare, hit on a happy phrase—“the sweet witty soul of Ovid.” In the language of the nineteenth-century clubman, Macaulay tries to sum him up: “He seems to have been a very good fellow; rather too fond of women; a flatterer and a coward; but kind and generous, and free from envy, though a man of letters sufficiently vain of his literary performance.” I see no evidence for “coward,” I do not know where being fond of women should properly stop, and as for flattery (that old Whig obsession), what other weapon could Ovid have laid hands on in trying to get his sentence repealed? For me, he is a more complicated character—imaginative, self-indulgent, histrionic, but also tough, responsible and adaptable, as the facts prove. Above all, he was persistently, dedicatedly, a poet, with a superb ear, a genius for both compression and digression, and an exceptionally rich memory, enabling him to retell innumerable myths and legends that were part of his cultural heritage, if not of his, or any other sophisticated Roman’s, religious belief.

The Ars Amatoria is a mock-didactic poem. The traditional didactic poem—Virgil’s Georgics are its supreme culmination—was a practical versified guide to such prosaic subjects as bee-keeping or antidotes to poison. Ovid himself wrote a short one, at about this time, on facial cosmetics. What he now did was entirely original: he built a joke around the genre. From his self-appointed professorial podium he delivered a tongue-in-cheek verse lecture on the science of seduction, not in the expected hexameters, but in a metre associated with erotic poetry, elegiac couplets. New, too, was the tone of voice—here was no conventional, passive, melancholy love poet, but an unorthodox, positive ringmaster, exhibiting his tricks, totally in charge of the show. The first two books give advice to men on how to find a mistress, how to seduce her, and how to keep her. The third book, added later and perhaps at the request of female friends (of which, one feels, Ovid was never short), purports to be an equivalent guide for women; but in it, although he pretends to be betraying male secrets and weaknesses to the other sex, he is really compounding the macho joke by giving away very little that matters. The poem is riddled with metaphors of war and the chase. It is also embroidered with illustrations from legend, set-pieces which teasingly delay the business in hand but without which we would be the poorer—the rape of the Sabine women, the princess Pasiphaë turned into a cow and mad with love for a white bull, Bacchus in his tiger-drawn chariot rescuing Ariadne from her desert island, and, best of all, the tragedy of the first aeronauts, Daedalus and Icarus. These bravura passages contrast amusingly with the sexual tips they interrupt. Contrast, ironic or parodic, between a lofty manner and down-to-earth concerns is at the heart of Ovid’s method. Nowhere is it more outrageously employed than when he borrows Virgil’s solemn phrase referring to the difficulty Aeneas will have in retracing his steps back from the Underworld, “hoc opus, hic labor est” (“herein lies the task, the great labour”) and finishes the line in his own way—“primo sine munere iungi” (“to part with nothing before she’s given herself”).

Ovid was a survivor, and so it’s fitting that his work too should have survived, not only in the manuscripts which the celibate monks, to whom we are smilingly grateful, preserved in monastery libraries, but in the judgment of posterity. He was Martial’s favourite poet after Catullus. Touchstone in As You Like It calls him, with intent to praise, “the most capricious poet,” and Marlowe, who translated the Amores while he was at university, brilliantly transferred his lover’s prayer into the mouth of Dr. Faustus desperately close to the stroke of midnight: “O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!” Milton admired his erotic poems. Macaulay read his entire works in Calcutta and pronounced the Ars Amatoria “decidedly his best.” For the next hundred years a Victorian reaction prevailed, at least publicly, and the Ars was described as “a shameless compendium in profligacy” and as “l’art d’aimer sans amour.” How odd! It may be “naughty” but by no stretch of imagination is it pornographic and, as for “true love,” Ovid makes it clear that he is not dealing with that. In 1993 readers will find it easy, despite what is lost in translation, to enjoy it as they would Pope’s Rape of the Lock—as a sparklingly clever, gorgeously decorated, serio-comic masterpiece.

A word about this translation. Having just compared Ovid with Pope, I agree with Peter Green’s opinion that “Ovid has suffered more than most Roman poets from over-close association with the eighteenth century.” Put him into rhyming couplets and not only do you lose a great deal through forced compression, but you also turn, willy-nilly, a young Roman into a middle-aged gentleman, complete with wig, in Twickenham. Mr. Green’s excellent translation of the Ars Amatoria, published in the Penguin Classics, while still keeping to the couplet concept, uses lines of irregular length, with as many as seven or as few as two stresses. I have followed in his path, but feeling that the two primary elements in Ovid’s poetry, wit and technical virtuosity, had to be reflected somehow, I have added rhyme. If there is gain, it is in chic, a very Ovidian quality; if there is loss, it is that I am sometimes cheating the reader of the awareness that after every couplet there is in the original a definite pause. But the test of all translations is simple: is this what the author wrote, and do I enjoy what I’m reading? I can only guarantee you the first.

JAMES MICHIE, 1993

THE ART OF LOVE

[ENGLISH].

BOOK ONE

[LATIN: Siquis in hoc…]

If any Roman knows nothing about love-making, please

Read this poem and graduate in expertise.

Ships and chariots with sails, oars, wheels, reins,

Speed through technique and control, and the same obtains

For love. As Automedon was Achilles’ charioteer

And Tiphys earned the right to steer

The Argo on Jason’s expedition,

So I am appointed by Venus as the technician

Of her art—my name will live on

As Love’s Tiphys, Love’s Automedon.

Love often fights against me, for he’s wild,

Yet he’s also controllable, for he’s still a child.

Chiron made Achilles expert with the lyre,

His cool tuition quenched youth’s primitive fire,

So that the boy who later became

A terror to friends and foes alike stood tame

In front of his aged teacher, so they say,

And the hand that Hector would feel one day

Was held out meekly to be rapped

At his schoolmaster’s bidding. Achilles was the apt

Pupil of Chiron, Love is mine—

Wild boys both, and both born of divine

Mothers; yet the heavy plough will make

Even the bull’s neck docile, and the friskiest colt will take

The bit in his teeth. Love shall be tamed under my hand,

Though his arrows riddle me, though his flaming brand

Is waved in my face. The worse the wounds, the fiercer the burn,

The prompter I’ll be to punish him in return.

I won’t pretend that I’m inspired by you, Apollo:

The hoot of an owl, the flight of a swallow,

Have taught me nothing; awake or asleep,

I never had a vision of the Muses tending sheep

In pastoral valleys. This poem springs

From experience. Listen, your poet sings

Of what he knows, he tells no lies.

Venus, mother of Love, assist my enterprise!

But you with headbands and ankle-length robes, staid matrons,

Stay well clear—you are not my patrons.

My theme is safe and licit love, stolen joys which women’ll

Condone; I’ll mention nothing criminal.

[LATIN: Principio, quod amare…]

Your first job, then, love’s volunteer recruit,

Is to find the object of your pursuit;

Next comes the work of wooing and winning; and, last, ensuring

That the love you’ve won is enduring.

These are the limits of the ground my wheeled

Chariot will rapidly cover, my chosen field.

[LATIN: Dum licet, et…]

While you’re still unharnessed and can wander fancy-free,

Pick a girl and tell her, “You’re the only girl for me.”

A mistress, though, doesn’t float down from the sky:

You have to seek out the one who’s caught your eye.

A hunter has to work,

Know where to spread his stag-nets, in which glens boars lurk,

A fowler’s familiar with copses, fishermen learn

Which streams are the most rewarding, and you, if you yearn

For a long-term affair, won’t have one till you’ve found

The places where girls are thick on the ground.

Though Perseus brought back Andromeda from the Syrian coast

And Paris stole Helen from his foreign host,

You can achieve your ambition

More easily. I’m not recommending an expedition

Overseas or a gruelling march; look nearer home

And you’ll say, “The prettiest girls in the world are in Rome”—

They’re thicker than wheatsheaves on Gargara, grapes in Lesbos, birds in the trees,

Stars in the sky, fish in the seas,

For Venus is a strong presence

In the city her son founded. If you fancy adolescents,

One stunner out of plenty

Will emerge and dazzle you; if you like them over twenty,

The range of available talent is so rich

That your only problem will be which;

And if you prefer mature, experienced women,

Believe me, they’re as common

As blackberries.

[LATIN: Tu modo Pompeia…]

When the sun’s on the back of Hercules’

Lion, in high summer, just stroll at your ease

Down Pompey’s shady colonnade,

Or Octavia’s (which she made

More beautiful, when her son died,

With rich marblework on the outside),

Or the one that’s named

After its founder, Livia, famed

For its antique paintings. Don’t forget to go

To the Danaids’ portico

Where the fifty sculptured virgins meditate

Their luckless cousins’ fate—

The multiple murder planned

By their fierce father Belus (here shown sword in hand).

And don’t miss the shrine where Venus weeps

For Adonis, the synagogue where Syrian Jewry keeps

The sabbath sacred, or the Memphian temple

Of the linen-clad heifer Io, whose example

Has taught many a courtesan

To offer her body to a man

As she did hers to Jove.

The law-courts, too, are fertile grounds for love,

Believe it or not—yes, desire

From dry forensic tinder can catch fire.

There where the Appian nymph tosses her water-jets

High from beneath the marble shrine, Venus’s nets

Trap even lawyers. The man who knows how to lend

His eloquence to defend others can’t defend

Himself, words fail him, he has to look after

A new case now—his own. Meanwhile the goddess’s laughter

Tinkles from her nearby temple at the sight

Of the advocate turned client overnight.

[LATIN: Sed tu praecipue…]

Above all, comb the curved theatre—that’s the place

Richest in spoils of the sexual chase.

There you’ll find someone to love, or a playmate, there

You can opt for one night or a solid affair.

As ants in column bustle up and down their lanes,

Jaws clutching their wheat-grains,

As bees in their fragrant glades and pastures hover

Above flowers and thyme and clover,

Our smart women swarm to the games in such numbers my vision

And judgment blur—often I lose my powers of decision.

They come to see and be seen;

Modesty, chastity mean

Nothing there. Romulus, it was all your fault,

It was your games that first featured rape and assault—

Those Sabine women and sex-hungry men.

The theatre had no marble seats or awnings then,

Nor was the stage red-dyed

With sweet-smelling saffron; the Palatine woods supplied

A backdrop of greenery,

And nature without artifice the scenery;

Shaggy-headed, the spectators sat

On tiered turf seats, any old leaves as a hat

To shade the sun. Alert, each man

Brooded silently and formed his plan,

Having marked with a glance his selected girl.

Then, to the skirl

Of Etruscan flutes, the dancers’ feet

Stamped the smooth floor in the triple beat

Until amid loud hoorays

(Applause was pretty crude in the old days)

The king gave the sign they were waiting for

And the Rape began. Up they sprang with a lustful roar

And grabbed the virgins. As eagles scatter a flock

Of timid doves or wolves scare lambs, so the shock

Of this wild male charge spread panic. Colour drained

From every girl’s face; a common terror reigned,

Though its features varied. Some sat there numb

With fear, some tore their hair; one girl, struck dumb,

Simply wept, another

Called ineffectually for her mother;

They shrieked or stared, they froze or fled.

And so, as plunder of the marriage-bed,

They were carried away, and I dare say their alarm

Gave some of them a piquant extra charm.

A girl who struggled and wouldn’t co-operate

Was hoisted up and hauled off by her new mate

With “Why spoil those tender eyes with tears? Never mind,

I’ll be as kind to you as your father was kind

To your mother.” Romulus, you found the right reward

For soldiers—for that I’ll enlist myself, with a sword!

Since then time-honoured custom has made our Roman

Theatres danger spots for pretty women.

And don’t miss the chariot races: the big Circus

Offers lots of chances for smart workers.

No need of finger-language here, no need to guess

That a nod of the head means yes:

You can sit as close to a girl as you please,

So make the most of touching thighs and knees

(The seating arrangements almost force

Physical intimacy as a matter of course).

At this point casually volunteer

An opening remark for anyone to hear.

Ask with keen interest, “Whose team’s that going by?”

And “Who are you backing?” Given a reply,

Add instantly, “So am I!”

When the gods’ ivory statues pass in the grand

Procession, give Venus a big hand,

And if a speck of dust, as it well may,

Falls in her lap, brush it away—

Brush it away even if there’s no dust:

Any gallant excuse in the service of lust.

If her cloak trails on the ground, make a great scene

Of lifting it up to keep it clean,

And if you’ve played it right

You’re rewarded at once—with her permission, the sight

Of her ankles. (Watch out for the man behind—

His knee may be giving the small of her back a grind.)

A frivolous mind

Is won by small attentions. Many a man

Has scored by arranging a cushion or plying a fan

Or slipping a little stool

Under the dainty feet of a sweet fool.

[LATIN: Hos aditus Circusque…]

Such openings the Circus offers for the study

Of the art of the pick-up; so does the grim Forum with its bloody

Arena of sand. Here Cupid has his killing-ground,

And the man who came to see blood himself gets a wound—

In the heart. While he’s touching her hand, bending her ear,

Borrowing her programme, asking if the charioteer

He’s backed will win, he feels

The shock of the arrow, the steel’s

Struck home, he groans—and the spectator

Joins in the show, a dying gladiator.

[LATIN: Quid, modo cum…]

When Caesar staged that naval mock-battle between

Athenians and Persians, what a scene!

From east and west young women and men

Converged, the whole known world was in Rome then.

In such a crowd, in such a push-and-shove,

Who could fail to find someone to love?

That day hundreds of men learnt

How hot a foreign flame is, and got burnt.

[LATIN: Ecce, parat Caesar…]

Now Caesar’s planning to extend his powers

To the rest of the untamed world. You shall be ours,

O farthest East. Parthians, you shall be paid

In full. Exult, standards that they laid

Shaming barbarian hands on! Rejoice, the shade

Of buried Crassus! Now your avenger appears,

A boy who despite his years

Proclaims his generalship

And has strong hands to grip

The reins of a war that no one of that age

But he would dare or be allowed to wage.

Why timidly rely on arithmetic

When it comes to the age of a god? Valour is quick

To show in Caesars. Divine genius tolerates

No hanging back, accelerates

Achievement, and makes nonsense of mere dates.

The infant Hercules strangled two snakes, even

In the cradle earning the applause of heaven.

And you, Bacchus, still a young god,

How old were you when India kissed your rod?

With your father’s authority, under his lucky star,

Boy, you shall fight and win this war.

Your great name calls for a youthful victory:

Today prince of the young, one day you shall be

Prince of the old. You’re a brother, a son—then requite

The wrongs of brothers, uphold a father’s right.

Your country’s father, indeed your own,

Has armed you against a foe who seized his throne

By force from a father. Javelin versus bow,

Good against evil, justice and right shall go

Ahead of your standards. Parthia’s doom is sealed

By her own guilt; may every battlefield

Reflect that truth, and may my prince come home

Bringing the riches of the East to Rome!

O Mars, O Caesar, both fathers, one divine,

One god-to-be, let your numinous powers shine

On his setting forth. Lo, I predict a

Great triumph, and vow to you, the victor,

A celebratory poem to trumpet your name

Resoundingly. Using the same

Words I wrote, you’ll stand and exhort

Your battle-line—and I pray they’ll not fall short

Of your valour’s reach. I’ll describe head-on attacks

By Romans, cowardly Parthian backs,

And arrows in the sky

Shot by their swivelling horsemen as they fly.

(You Parthians, if, pursuing victory, you retreat,

What meaning’s left for the word “defeat”?

Your war-will’s sapped, it’s an ill omen.)

And so the day will come when you, our Roman

Hero, an adored, resplendent sight,

Will ride in gold, drawn by four snow-white

Horses, behind their chiefs—neck-fettered now for fear

They save their skins by a second flight. A cheer

Will rise from every watching girl and boy

On that day of heart-felt joy.

When some girl asks the names of the kings and foreign parts—

Towns, mountains, rivers etcetera—on the pageant carts,

Answer all her questions. No, don’t wait

To be asked, volunteer (though you’re guessing) with a straight

Face, “Here’s Euphrates, his forehead fringed with reeds,

And that’s Tigris with the long blue hair. There are the Medes,

And, look, the Armenians, I’m positive. There goes

Some Achaemenid valley town. And those

Must be two generals …” Give them each a name—

Right, if you can; if you can’t, give them one just the same.

[LATIN: Dant etiam positis…]

Banquets give openings, too: when the tables are spread,

There’s more than wine to turn your head.

There Love, with soft arms and flushed face,

Has often given the horns of Bacchus an embrace,

And when wine has soaked his thirsty plumage, Love

Stands rooted, torpid, can’t perform or move.

He takes no time to shake his wings dry again,

But for us a few drops of love are intense pain.

Wine rouses the heart, wine makes all men

Lovers, wine undiluted dilutes worry. Then

Laughter arrives, even the poor

Feel as brave as bulls, wrinkles relax, out of the door

Go care and sorrow, into all hearts

Flies truth (rare bird these days), for the god expels the arts

Of the hypocrite. Then girls bewitch men with desire,

And Venus in the wine is a fire within a fire.

On these occasions don’t trust the lamps—they can lie:

Darkness and drink blur the judging eye.

It was in broad daylight, not after dinner,

That Paris made his choice: “You, Venus, are the winner.”

Blemishes are lost in the half-light,

Faults overlooked. Night

Turns any woman into a goddess.

When it comes to judging faces, bodies,

Jewels or clothes, I always say,

Consult the light of day.

[LATIN: Quid tibi femineos…]

But why count grains of sand? How can I list all the places

Where girls go and you can hunt pretty faces?

Take Baiae, its shores fringed with pleasure craft,

Its springs smoking with sulphur—Cupid’s shaft

Does heart damage there. One man came back with the report:

“That’s no health resort!”

The same goes for Diana’s shrine by the lake

In the woods near Rome, where the slave-priests take

Office in turn by murder—she,

Being a virgin, spitefully,

Out of hatred of Love’s darts

Wounds, and will go on wounding, human hearts.

[LATIN: Hactenus, unde legas…]

Having carried you this far

In my Muse’s bumpy, elegiac car

And taught you hunters in which coverts to find

And how to spread nets for the bird you have in mind,

Now for the trickiest, subtlest part: how to get

Your darling well entangled in the net.

Men everywhere, you have something to learn, so attend!

And you, the common people, kindly lend

My enterprise your favour till the end.

[LATIN: Prima tuae menti…]

First and foremost, feel confidence that all

Girls can be caught; just spread your nets, they’ll fall.

Hounds will run from a hare, birds in spring sit dumb,

Cicadas in summer keep mum,

Sooner than a girl, wooed charmingly, will resist:

Even one you think doesn’t want it wants to be kissed.

Women, like men, adore secret affairs,

But our skill in dissembling is less than theirs.

If we males unanimously agreed

Not to move first, females, crushed, would take the lead.

In lush fields the heifer moos to the bull, the mare

Whinnies at stallions in the open air;

Men’s sex-urge is less primitive, less raw,

Our lust is bound by the limits of the law.

But as for women … Byblis was mad for her brother

And bravely atoned for her sin with a suicide’s noose. Another

Was Myrrha, whose love was most undaughterly

And who is now imprisoned in the tree

Whose bark still weeps the tears named after her

Which we use for perfume and call myrrh.

Once in the shady valleys of wooded Ida

There was a white bull, the herd’s pride, a

Single splash of black above the eyes

Marring perfection, milk-white otherwise.

The handsome Cretan heifers longed to bear his weight,

But Pasiphaë eyed them all with envious hate,

For to play the role of adulterous mate

Of the bull inflamed her fancy. (I only repeat

A well-known fact which hundred-citied Crete,

Proverbial home of liars, can’t rebut.)

With her own high-born hands, they say, she cut

Fresh, tender leaves and grass for him and, undeterred

By the thought of her husband, joined the herd.

So King Minos was humbled by a bull!

Queen, why bother with silks and expensive wool?

They won’t impress your lover in the least.

If you want to live like a mountain beast,

Why the mirror, the pointless fussing with your hair?

You can trust the glass, though, for one thing—there

You’re no heifer. But goodness, how

You wish you could be a plump, horned cow!

If you like Minos, then stay at home,

Don’t look elsewhere; if you prefer to roam

And betray your husband, why then, woman,

At least betray him with a fellow human.

But, leaving her palace and bower behind,

Off she goes to the woods and glens, like a maenad out of her mind,

God-intoxicated. Every time she spies

A cow, she looks daggers and cries,

“What can my darling see in her? There, she’s gambolling

In front of him on the grass—does the stupid thing

Think she’s attractive?” And she’d give the word

For the innocent to be culled from the great herd

To be yoked to the plough, or, faking piety, have her killed

At the altar “to appease the gods,” even take the spilled

Guts gleefully in her hands and jeer

At her rival’s corpse, “Now try to please him, dear!”

In her fantasies she’s now Europa, now

Io—riding a bull or changed to a cow.

Yet the herd-leader, fooled by a cow made of wood,

Mounted, and his fatherhood

Showed in the Minotaur. Had Aerope learnt to restrain

Her love for Thyestes (how hard it is to abstain

From the one man you fancy!), the sun’s charioteer,

Appalled in mid-career,

Would never have reined, turned round and driven

His horses dawnwards across heaven.

Scylla stole from her father his red lock of hair—

Now her loins writhe, a mad dogs’ lair.

Agamemnon escaped with his life

From land battles and sea storms, then fell to his wife.

Who hasn’t been horrified

By the tale of Jason’s wife, who died

In a flaming, poisoned robe, and Medea, red

With her own children’s blood? Of Phoenix, who shed

Tears from eyeless sockets? And Hippolytus—as for him,

Fear-crazed horses tore him limb from limb.

Phineus, why blind

Your innocent sons when you’ll soon find

Yourself sightless? All these crimes were brought about

By woman’s lust, keener and wilder than ours. Why doubt

That you can succeed with any

Woman in the world? Scarcely one out of many

Will say no. Willing or unwilling,

They all find it equally thrilling

To be propositioned. Just chance your arm:

If you make a mistake and get snubbed, where’s the harm?

But why should you be when new pleasures lure and the unknown

Holds more charm than what’s our own?

Our neighbour’s crop hints at a richer yield,

And cows’ udders look fuller in the next field.

[LATIN: Sed prius ancillam…]

But first get to know your quarry’s maid—she’s the key

To smooth, early intimacy.

Make sure she’s her mistress’s confidante, the sort

You can trust with the secret of your private sport.

Corrupt her with promises and prayers, make her your friend:

With her good will you’ll easily gain your end.

She’ll pick a time, just as a doctor would,

When her mistress is in the right mood—

Relaxed, seducible, full of the joy of living,

Exuberant like wheat in a rich soil giving

Promise of harvest; for when hearts are gay

And unshuttered by grief, Venus will find a way

To subtly insinuate herself. It was when the mood of Troy,

After the long, grim siege, lapsed into joy

That she welcomed that enemy-freighted horse.

Pique over a rival is another source

Of vulnerability. In that case supply aid

For her vengeance. Prime the maid

To assist the sails by putting her oar in,

By sighing half to herself, “Would it really be a sin

If you gave him a taste of his own medicine

And had an affair?”

(This in the morning, while she combs her hair),

Then talk about you, and in convincing fashion

Swear that you’re dying of a frantic passion.

Work fast, though—sails may slacken, winds die away:

Pique, like thin ice, melts with delay.

Will it help your cause, you may ask, to seduce the maid?

Playing such games is a dangerous trade;

They act as brakes as frequently as spurs:

Will she view you as her mistress’s prize, or hers?

It can go either way, and, though you may gain

By taking a bold risk, my advice is, Abstain.

Rock-climbing and peak-scaling aren’t part of my plan

Of attack. No young man

Will be taken prisoner while I’m in command.

On the other hand,

If, as she ferries notes to and fro, her beauty

As well as her zeal in doing her duty

Happens to please you, then take

The mistress first and make

The maid your afters. It would be a sin

Against taste to begin

By fucking the maid. One warning (if you trust

My skilled advice, if some greedy gust

Doesn’t blow my words out to sea): Take heed,

Either don’t try at all or make damned sure you succeed.

Once she’s a guilty partner in your crime,

She won’t turn informer. Once its wings feel the lime,

Does the bird escape? Does the boar break out,

Once the loose net has him? Play your hooked trout,

Press her hard, harass her, haul her to land,

Don’t budge till you’ve got the upper hand.

Where there’s shared guilt, there’ll be no betraying,

And you’ll be told all your mistress is doing or saying.

But guard your spy’s secret—you’ll get the low-down on your lover

Just as long as you don’t blow her cover.

[LATIN: Tempora qui solis…]

There’s a mistaken notion

That only those who work the fields or sail the ocean

Observe the seasons. You can’t entrust grain

To the treacherous earth, or hulls to the green main,

Any day of the year, and the same is the case

With catching girls: the right time and place

Improve the chances. Thus, on certain dates

(Her birthday; April the First, when Rome celebrates

Venus conjoined with Mars; and the Saturnalia,

When the Circus displays rich gifts and regalia,

Not the pottery images of a former age),

Postpone your attempt—then the worst storms rage,

The Pleiads glower, and the huge swell

Half drowns the little Kid. You’ll do well

To pause now. Blithely launch a boat,

And with luck and a spar you may just survive afloat.

Start work on a grim day, like the one when Allia’s water

Was crimsoned with the slaughter

Of Roman dead, or the sabbath feast

The Syrian Jews observe, the day least

Fit for business, when most trade is dead.

But view with superstitious dread

Your mistress’s birthday, surely the most unpleasant

Day in the calendar—you’re forced to give a present.

Dodge as you may, she’ll collect: every woman discovers

Ways of extracting loot from ravenous lovers.

When she’s in a spending mood,

Some half-naked, rude

Huckster comes up and spreads his wares for her,

Poor you sitting by. To make you feel like a connoisseur,

She begs you to look them over, then starts to ply

You with kisses and, finally, asks you to buy—

She wants it right now, it’ll please her for years to come,

Now’s the time to get it … Protest that you don’t have the sum

In cash in the house, she’ll demand

(You’ll wish you’d never learnt to write!) a note-of-hand.

Good God, she can have a birthday at will, can make

Any date an excuse for claiming a birthday-cake.

She can burst into tragic tears

And pretend that a jewel’s dropped from one of her ears.

They’re always borrowing things that don’t get returned:

It’s your loss, and not a thank-you earned.

I’d need ten mouths and ten tongues to list the damnable arts

Of these money-grubbing tarts.

[LATIN: Cera vadum temptet…]

Let the wax of the writing tablet smooth your way,

Let the wax, like a boat, cross over and convey

Your mind, and a cargo of flatteries in the style

Lovers use; however grand you are, pile

The entreaties on. By speaking fair

Priam made Achilles give back Hector’s body. Prayer

Moves even an angry god. By all means throw

Promises in. Do they do any harm? No.

We’re all rich men as far as promises go.

Hope, once trust starts her off, will run and run,

A deceptive goddess, but a useful one.

Once you’ve given her something, you may be dropped—reasonably so:

It’s hers, she’s lost nothing, she can let you go.

What you don’t give she’ll keep thinking she’s going to receive:

That’s how, so often, barren fields deceive

Their owners, how the gambler, for fear of loss,

Goes on losing with every toss

Of the dice which his greedy fingers ask

To have again and again. “Herein lies the task,

The great labour”[*]—to part with nothing before

She’s given herself, so she’ll give more and more

Lest she lose what she’s given already. So,

Let a persuasive letter go

In a careful hand, in order to find

A way forward and to test her mind.

By a message scratched on an apple Cydippe was betrayed:

The words, once read aloud, were hers, and trapped the maid.

[LATIN: Disce bonas artes…]

Young Romans, study the noble art

Of eloquence—not merely to take the part

Of some trembling client: just as the common herd,

Grave judges, elected senators, find the power of the word

Irresistible, so do women. But take care

To hide your powers, avoid long words, too clever an air.

Who but a fool would be declamatory?

The effect of a letter can be most unamatory.

Write in a natural, credible style,

In words that are simple but can still beguile,

As though you were there, with her. If she rejects your letter

And sends it back unread, just hope for better

Luck tomorrow and hold fast

To your purpose. Time at last

Breaks stubborn oxen to the plough, in time the horse

Learns to put up with the bridle, in the course

Of time the rub of long use wears

An iron ring thin, and even ploughshares

Crack with the furrows’ friction.

It’s no contradiction

That water’s soft, stone hard, and yet

A drip can hollow rock. Don’t forget,

Troy took a long time to fall, but it fell:

Persist and you’ll take even Penelope’s citadel.

So she’s read it and won’t reply? You feel like assault and battery?

Just see that she goes on receiving regular flattery.

Once she’s consented to read, she’ll consent to answer. These

Matters proceed by gradual degrees.

First you may get an unfriendly note requesting

You to stop “this pestering and molesting.”

What she demands she dreads, she wants the unasked, in a word

Your pursuit. Press on, and you’ll catch your bird.

[LATIN: Interea, sive illa…]

Meanwhile, if she’s being carried in the street,

Cushioned, in her litter, approach. Act cool, be discreet,

And to foil eavesdroppers mask your talk,

As well as you can, with double meanings. If she should walk

Down the colonnade, share her outing, adjust your speed,

Dawdling or brisk, to hers—you can trail her or take the lead.

Or slip round the columns between you—don’t be shy—

And in passing brush her thigh.

If she goes to the theatre, go too, your admiring glance

Following her (she’s sure to wear something to enhance

Those shoulders!). Turn round, gaze to your heart’s content,

And make your hands and eyebrows eloquent.

When a dancer plays a girl’s role, lead the cheers,

And clap whenever the lover appears.

When she rises, rise; as long as she stays, sit on. Kill

Time entirely at your mistress’s will.

[LATIN: Sed tibi nec…]

Don’t torture your hair with curling-tongs

Or depilate your legs with pumice—that belongs

To Mother Cybele’s eunuch priests who shriek

Their Phrygian choruses. Casual chic

Suits men best. Theseus managed to win

Ariadne without benefit of a hair-pin.

Phaedra loved Hippolytus and he wasn’t smart;

Adonis, a man of the woods, captured a goddess’s heart.

If you want to please, be neat and clean; when it’s hot,

Tan in the Campus; wear a toga that fits, without spot;

As for shoes, don’t lace them too tightly, take care

That the buckles are rust-free, and never wear

A too large size that your feet swim in; your hair

Should be well cut so that it doesn’t stand

At all angles—hair and beard need an expert’s hand;

Nails should be pared and kept clean;

Make sure there isn’t an obscene

Tuft in your nostrils; and guard against halitosis,

Don’t be a prime goat who offends all noses.

Further refinements leave to the courtesan

And the half-man cruising for another man.

[LATIN: Ecce, suum vatem…]

Lo, Bacchus summons his bard, the god who carries a torch

For lovers, who feels, himself, the flames that scorch—

As, fresh from sleep, the Cretan princess found,

Grief-crazed, barefoot, robe ungirt, blonde hair unbound,

Pacing the unknown shores of Naxos (little isle

In the great weltering ocean), all the while

Crying “Cruel Theseus!” The sea hears

Nothing, the innocent tears

Run down her tender cheeks, she weeps, she screams,

Yet still, somehow, she seems

Beautiful, her allure unrobbed

By the tears. Hands beating her soft breasts, she sobbed,

“He’s betrayed me, he’s gone! What will become of me?

What …” Suddenly,

The whole shore resounded

With the noise of cymbals and drums frenziedly pounded.

She broke off, the blood drained from her cold,

Limp body, she fainted with fear. Behold

The wild-tressed bacchanals, the wanton, gay

Satyrs, the rout that leads the wine-god’s way,

Old reeling-drunk Silenus in the train,

Half off his sway-backed donkey, clutching its mane,

While the maenads tease him with hide-and-seek,

Fleeing, then pouncing, until the weak

Rider, whipping the beast on, falls

Off his long-eared mount on his head, to the satyrs’ calls

Of “Get up again, Daddy!” Then the god arrives.

In his chariot roofed with grape-clusters, he drives

A team of tigers with golden harness on.

Her voice, her colour, her Theseus, all gone,

Three times the girl attempted flight,

Three times stayed rooted to the spot with fright,

Shivering like a slender cornstalk in a harsh

Wind, or a frail reed in a marsh.

“I am here,” said the god, “a truer lover than he was. Your life

Is in no danger. You shall be Bacchus’ wife.

The sky is your dowry; henceforward you are

The Cretan Crown; a looked-for star,

You will act as a guide to ships lost at night.”

And lest she should take fright

At the tigers, he leapt down (the sand held the print of his foot)

And went to her and put

His arms round her and carried her off. No struggle—with ease

The gods accomplish anything they please.

Some sang a wedding chorus, others cried

“Long live Bacchus!” And so to bed go god and bride.

[LATIN: Ergo ubi contigerint…]

So, when the gifts of Bacchus bless the board

And a girl’s sharing your couch, pray to the Lord

Of Night and Licence not to allow

His wine to fuddle your head, for now

Is the time for ambiguities and hidden sense,

Which she’ll feel are solely for her. Trace compliments

In spilt wine on the table so she’ll surmise

That she’s your sweetheart, gaze into her eyes

With obvious ardour—a long, silent look

Can say as much as a speech or a book.

If she puts her wine down, be the first to snatch it up

And drink from the side of the cup

Her lips have touched; if she’s fingered some food, demand

That bit, and in reaching for it brush her hand.

If she’s come escorted, your best plan

Is (he could be useful) to cultivate the man:

When you dice for the drinking order, let him instead

Of you have the honour; give him the garland from your head;

Whether he’s placed below or with you, let him be

The first to be served; defer to him, agree.

A safe and well-worn ploy is to pretend

To be the husband’s friend—

Safe and practised all the time,

But nevertheless a crime,

As if some greedy steward were to enlarge

His master’s remit and take total charge.

Next, advice on the bounds you should set to drinking.

Feet and mind should do their duty, walking and thinking.

Beware, above all, of brawls brought on

By liquor, of short-fused fist-fights. Eurytion

The centaur died through mindless boozing. The table

And wine are meant for good fun. If you’re able

To sing, sing; if you’re supple, dance a measure:

Please with whatever talent can give pleasure.

Real drunkenness can harm you, but when it’s feigned

It can be of use. With a clever tongue, trained

To slip and slur, the risqué things you say or do

Will be blamed on the wine, not you.

Toast the lady, toast “the man who shares her bed”

(Secretly wishing him dead);

But when the tables are moved and the guests go, if the crowd

Parts and you’re allowed

The chance, mingle, drift close, and as you both leave

Touch her foot with yours, tug at her sleeve.

Now comes the chat-up stage. Away with naive

Ploughboy shyness! Behave

Boldly—Fortune and Venus favour the brave.

Speak, but don’t follow some poet’s rule of thumb:

Just show you desire her, and the eloquence will come.

Play the lover to the hilt, you’re “desperate,” “heart-sick”;

To get her to believe it employ any trick:

It’s not hard—all women think they’re worth loving, the plain

And the pretty being, in that way, equally vain.

(Besides, sometimes an actor will begin

To feel real love, his role become genuine.

So be nice, you girls, to those who pretend:

A bogus passion may turn out true in the end.)

Like a stream eroding the bank hanging above it,

Undermine her subtly with flattery—she’ll love it.

Neat feet, slim fingers, good features, charming curls—

Never tire of praising them. Even good girls

Adore extravagant compliments, even virgins take

Loving care over the impression they make.

Why else should Juno and Pallas still begrudge

The prize lost in the Trojan glade when Paris was judge?

Juno’s peacock displays

The jewels of her plumage at a word of praise,

But shuts up shop before a silent gaze.

And racehorses, between sprints on the track,

Love their necks patted and their manes combed back.

[LATIN: Nec timide promitte…]

Don’t be shy of making promises; women are fair game

For promise-makers; invoke any god you care to name

To witness your oath. Jupiter from above

Smiles on the perjuries of men in love

And bids the Aeolian winds shred them in air.

He himself would often swear

To Juno with a hollow

“By the Styx!,” and now he favours all who follow

His bad example. That gods should exist

Is expedient; let us therefore not resist

Belief in them; let incense and wine be given

On their ancient hearths, for the ones in heaven

Don’t loll about in a sort of half-sleep,

They’re everywhere; so live virtuously, keep

Safe and return loans; honour your bond, eschew

Fraud, and have nothing to do

With bloodshed. A wise man will cheat

No one but women—it’s not a risky feat,

And only here there’s a kind of duty in deceit.

Deceive the deceivers! Since for the most part

They fib, let them fall, snared by their own art!

Egypt, they say, once had a drought, her ears

Of corn unrained-on for nine years,

When Thrasius approached the king and demonstrated

That the gods could be propitiated

By a stranger’s blood. “Then you’re the first

Victim,” Busiris said. “Cure Egypt’s thirst!”

And I could mention

Perillus roasted in his own invention,

The cruel bronze bull, by Phalaris—the biter bit.

Both kings were right, for it’s good law, and fit,

For a death-contriver to die by his own art.

So let liars fool liars, and Woman smart

From wounds in a war she was the one to start!

Tears, too, can be helpful—they can move adamant.

If you can, show her cheeks wet with tears; if you can’t

(They don’t always come on cue),

Dab your eyes with water, stage-manage the “dew.”

Mix—who doesn’t who’s wise?—

Kisses with your sweet talk, and if she tries

To deny them, simply take what she denies.

She may struggle at first and call you a sinner,

But she doesn’t really want to be the winner.

Only take care not to cause her soft lips pain

With your raids—she mustn’t be able to complain

That you’re so rough you bruise.

Men deserve to lose

The points they’ve won already if they snatch

The foreplay kisses and fail to clinch the match.

After all the kissing, how far away

Were you from …? Ah, you were clumsy rather than shy, I’d say.

Some force is permissible—women are often pleased

By force, and like what they’re giving to be seized.

The girl whose citadel is stormed

By sheer audacity feels warmed,

Complimented; the one who could have been attacked

And taken by force but escapes intact,

Although she affects to look glad,

Feels let down, a little sad.

Phoebe was raped by her lover, Hilaira by hers,

Yet both ravished sisters loved their ravishers.

And there’s the old tale—but it’s worth while

Retelling it—of Achilles and the girl from the isle

Of Scyros. It was years after Aphrodite,

In return for Paris’s award for beauty

When she triumphed on Ida over her two peers,

Gave him his fatal prize; it was years

After Priam welcomed his foreign relative,

And a Greek wife came to live

Inside Troy’s walls, and every chief

Swore allegiance to the wronged husband, and the grief

Of one man became

A people’s cause. It was while (deep shame,

Had his mother’s prayers not put him under stress)

Achilles hid his manhood in a woman’s dress.

What are you doing? Spinning’s not your concern,

Grandson of Aeacus: you must earn

Fame through another art of Pallas. Why do you stand

With a basket on your shield arm, quite unmanned?

Why do you hold in your right hand—

The one by which great Hector will be slain—

A soft wool-skein?

Throw away that spindle with its troublesome thread,

Pick up your spear instead!

Deidamia, who shared his bedroom, found

He was indeed a man, indeed she was “raped” (one’s bound

To accept tradition, of course),

But, still, she wanted to be taken by force.

“Stay,” she begged him again and again, “please stay,”

When Achilles was already on his way,

His distaff dumped, a warrior under arms.

But now I ask, “What harm’s

Been done by force, Princess?

Why do you wheedle and press

The author of your rape to linger?”

Agreed, shame points a finger

At girls who make the first move, but agreed

Also, it’s nice to follow a strong lead.

It’s a vain, over-confident man who expects

The woman to make the running. Our sex

Should take the initiative, propose,

Plead, coax with words—she’ll listen kindly to those.

She’ll be yours if you ask; to be asked is all she requires;

Just give her a start, and a good excuse to grant your desires.

When Jupiter wooed a heroine, he went to her

As a suppliant—no girl seduced great Jupiter.

But if you find your pleas only produce disdain,

Stop, take a step back, think again.

Many women desire what eludes them and hate to be pressed;

Play it coolly, hold their interest.

Don’t ask as if you were sure of getting it in the end:

Let the lover slip through, masked, in the name of friend.

I’ve seen the hardest case fooled by this ploy—

“Best friend” in no time became “darling boy.”

[LATIN: Candidus in nauta…]

A pale skin doesn’t suit a sailor—a man

Exposed to sun and brine should have a tan;

So should a farmer who with heavy harrow and share

Turns the soil all day in the open air,

And for you athletes going for the olive-wreath a white

Body would be inapposite.

All lovers should be pallid, it’s chic to be pale;

Only fools deny it, pale skins rarely fail.

Pale was Orion when he roamed the woods and pined

For Side, pale was Daphnis when his naiad proved unkind.

Look lean—it suggests passion; don’t blush to wear

A neat cap on top of your well-washed hair.

Night after sleepless night,

Loss of appetite,

Worry, love-sickness, they all make

The young lover as thin as a rake.

For your purpose, look so pitiful that you move

The world to exclaim, “He’s in love!”

Now shall I complain, or just tell you,

That nowadays right and wrong are blurred? The value

Of friendship’s nil, “good faith” is a mere phrase.

I’m sorry to say that it’s not safe to praise

Your girl in front of a friend—if he trusts what you’ve said,

He’ll usurp your place in bed.

“But,” you may protest,

“Patroclus never fouled Achilles’ nest,

Phaedra was safe with Pirithous, Hermione

Was loved by Pylades honourably,

As was Pallas by Phoebus and Helen by Castor, their brothers,

And I could cite others.”

Believe what you please.

Swallow that and you’ll look for apples on tamarisk trees

And honeycombs in rivers. Now only the base

Appeals. Each man’s on his own pleasure chase,

And the pleasure’s double

If his enjoyment means another’s trouble.

It’s a crime that it’s not their enemies

Lovers have most to fear. The safest motto is:

Shun those you trust. Cousins, brothers, peers—

They are the ones who’ll justify your fears.

[LATIN: Finiturus eram, sed…]

I was about to end, but so various are women’s hearts

That to catch a thousand takes a thousand arts.

You don’t raise corn and fruit

In the same field; one soil will suit

Olives, another vines, and in other places

Wheat thrives. Hearts have as many traits as faces.

The wise man adapts himself to every style;

He’s as versatile

As Proteus, he can turn into a wave of the sea,

A bristling boar, a lion, or a tree.

Depending on the fish, angle, cast nets or trawl,

And don’t employ the same technique for all

Age-groups—a veteran hind

A good way off smells something in the wind.

If a dunce finds you far too clever or a prude

Thinks you’re gross and crude,

Next day she’ll be sorry, tortured by self-doubt.

That’s how it comes about

That girls who shy away from decent lads

Fall cheap into the arms of cads.

[LATIN: Pars superat coepti…]

This part of my task is finished, more remains.

Let my boat rest here, I’ll drop the anchor-chains.

[*] A quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, vi, 129—“Hoc opus, hic labor est.”

BOOK TWO

[LATIN: Dicite “io Paean!”…]

Shout “Hurrah!,” a triumphant hurrah, for my traps have caught

The quarry I sought.

Each happy lover awards my poem the palm, first prize;

I outshine Homer and Hesiod in his eyes.

He’s as pleased as Pelops, the unknown face

Who won both the chariot-race

And Hippodameia, as pleased as Paris, the stranger

Who snatched his bride from the heart of Sparta’s danger

And spread his white sails for Troy.

But why the hurry, boy?

Your ship’s still out at sea,

And the port I’m aiming for distant. Thanks to me

You’ve a mistress, but that’s just a start. I’m teaching a beginner

How to keep as well as how to win her.

Hunting’s hard work, but so is guarding the kill;

There’s some luck in the chase, but this takes real skill.

I appeal to you, Venus and Cupid, and to you,

Erato, the Muse whose name connotes love too—

Be my friends now, if ever,

And help me in this, my epic endeavour,

To describe ways and means of keeping Love at home,

The world-ranging gypsy who must roam,

Being fickle and equipped

With wings for flight not easily tied or clipped.

[LATIN: Hospitis effugio praestruxerat…]

Minos confined Daedalus, all exits blocked,

Yet his guest found a bold way out. Having locked

The Minotaur up, spawn of his mother’s guilt,

Half-man, half-bull, having built

The labyrinth, “Just king,” he pleaded, “send

Me home now, let my exile end

And Attica have my ashes. Since I was banned

By unkind fate from my own land,

Allow me to die there. If you hold the services I’ve done

Cheap, then at least grant a return to my son.

Or, if you won’t spare him, spare me.” He pleaded,

And might have said much more, none of it heeded:

Minos refused. Seeing the king’s will

Was fixed, Daedalus thought, “I’ll use my skill,

Here’s my chance. Land and sea are controlled

And barred by him; one route’s left—the air. Be bold,

Try it. Jupiter, pardon my enterprise!

I don’t aspire to your starry house in the skies,

But the tyrant has me in a fix,

And this is the one way out. We’d swim the Styx

If it offered a passage! Now I must invent

New laws for human nature, test an element.”

A crisis stirs invention. Who would believe

That a man could ever cleave

A path through air? But he ranged feathered wings,

Like birds’, on a light frame with linen fastenings,

And glued the base with melted wax. It was complete—

A novel machine, a craftsman’s feat!

Smiling, the boy fingered wings and wax,

Not knowing the harness was for their own backs

Till his father spoke: “These are the craft I’ve made

To sail home by, with their aid

We must fly from Minos. He may have shut

All other escape routes, but

The air’s not his—break through it

With my invention—you can do it!

But take great care:

Don’t gaze at the stars, don’t go by the Bear

Or the swordsman Orion; track me with the wings provided;

I’ll lead, you follow; you’re safe, only be guided,

For the wax won’t stand the heat if we go

Too high, close to the sun, and if we drop too low

Our beating wings will get sodden with spray.

Steer in between. And, my son, stay

Alert to the winds—when the breeze is behind,

Sail with it.” While he’s telling him what to mind,

He fits the gear on the boy, explains the technique—

Like any mother bird instructing her weak

Fledglings—and straps on the wings he’s made

For his own shoulders, anxiously poised for this raid

On the unknown. On the verge of flight, while the tears run

Unchecked down his cheeks, he kisses his small son.

Not from a mountain, but a modest height

Above the plain, the pair launched on their tragic flight.

Daedalus worked his wings, glanced back at his son’s, held the steady

Course he’d planned. Already

The wonder of it thrilled them. Fear gone, Icarus flew

With growing skill and daring. (The airborne two

Froze a lone angler in mid-action,

Who dropped his quivering rod in stupefaction.)

Naxos, Paros, Delos—Apollo’s favourite isle—

Slid by. To the north, meanwhile,

Lay Samos, southward Lebynthos, the thick, shady trees

Of Calymne, and the rich fisheries

Of Astypalaea. Now it was that the boy,

Childishly reckless in the careless joy

Of flying, left his sire

And soared higher and higher,

Dangerously close to the sun-god’s fire.

The wax was melting, the fastenings gave, his arms flailed

To get a grip on the thin air, and failed.

Terrified, he looked down from the skies

At the waves, and panic blackness filled his eyes.

The wax all melted, his arms, now bare,

Thrashed in the unsupporting air,

With a shudder he plunged, and as he went called out,

“Father, Father, I’m falling!” till his shout

Was choked by the grey-green sea. Aghast,

His father, now a father in the past,

Was crying, “Icarus, where are you?,” crying,

“Icarus, whereabouts in the sky are you flying?”

Then he saw the floating plumes.

Earth has his bones; his name the sea assumes.

[LATIN: Non potuit Minos…]

Minos failed to clip man’s wings, and here am I

Hoping to pin down a god who can fly!

You’re a dupe if you mix with Thessaly’s black arts:

The growth on a foal’s forehead, animals’ secret parts,

The herbs of Medea, the mumbo-jumbo songs

Of up-country witches—none of them prolongs

Love. If they worked, Medea would have detained

Jason by spells, and Circe kept Ulysses chained.

Don’t give love-potions, they’re dangerous and bad:

They can affect the brain and drive girls mad.

In fact, don’t play foul. If you want to be loved, be nice:

A fine face and physique never suffice.

You may be Nireus, the handsomest man in Homer’s book,

Or Hylas, whom the naughty, doting naiads took,

But to keep your girl and not be thrown off balance

By being deserted, you must have mental talents

As well as physical charms. Beauty’s a frail flower,

It grows less with the years, it weakens by the hour.

The violet dies, the bell-mouthed lily goes,

The hard thorn’s left behind after the rose.

It’s the same with you, my debonair

Young fellow: soon grey hair

And furrowing wrinkles will arrive.

Now is the time to contrive

A good mind to add to your looks: that alone will endure

To the end, to the pyre. Make sure

You cultivate the liberal arts, and learn to speak

Not only perfect Latin but good Greek.

Ulysses wasn’t handsome, but he had

Such eloquence that two sea-goddesses were mad

For his love. Calypso wept at his haste to be going

And swore the water was too rough for rowing!

Again and again she asked about Troy, and he told the tale

In so many different ways it was never stale.

There on the shore, the lovely goddess begged, “Friend,

Tell me about King Rhesus’ bloody end.”

And he with a stick he happened to have in his hand

Drew diagrams on the firm sand.

“Here’s Troy,” he’d say—and with the damp

Sand built a wall. “Here’s Simois. Our camp

Imagine over there. There’s the plain”—and he smoothed a plain—

“Where we butchered the spy Dolon on the look-out to gain

Achilles’ steeds. Rhesus camped there; that night I rode

Back on the captured horses.” He would have showed

Calypso more,

But a wave raced up the shore

And washed Troy, Rhesus, and his camp away.

At which the goddess exclaimed, “What did I say?

How can you trust this sea when one wave effaces

All those famous names and places?”

And so, since looks may let you down unkindly,

Don’t rely on them blindly.

Reader, whoever you are, you must

Have something safer than physique to trust.

Tactful kindness is the key to the door

Of a girl’s heart; roughness breeds anger, hatred, war.

We loathe the hawk for his bellicose nature

And the wolf because he’s a sheep-murdering creature,

But the gentle swallow men never snare,

And doves get turreted houses in the air.

Steer clear of arguments, sarcasm, heat—

Baby love needs a diet that’s soft and sweet.

Let married couples go in for trouble and strife

Like eternally quarrelling litigants (for the wife

It’s natural—rows are the dowry she brings),

Your girl should hear only the things

She wants to hear. With you two it’s love instead

Of law obliging you to share a bed.

Use tender sweet-talk, make her ears hum

With the language of love, so she’s glad you’ve come.

I’m not addressing the rich; the wooer with gifts

At his fingertips doesn’t need my shifts.

Whoever can say, whenever he likes, with a gallant

Gesture, “Please accept this” has his own talent.

To him I resign

Pride of place: his ploys will work better than mine.

I’m the poor man’s poet, I loved when poor, and gave

Words since I couldn’t give presents. Poor lovers must behave

Carefully, watch their tongues and bear

A lot that a millionaire

Wouldn’t put up with. I pulled a girl’s hair

In anger once, I remember, and my temper cost

Me, oh, how many days of her company lost!

I don’t think—at least I never noticed—I tore her dress,

But she swore yes,

And the damage was paid for at my expense.

If you have any sense,

You’ll avoid your teacher’s blunders and never commit

A mistake like mine, one where you pay for it.

Fight Parthians, not civilised girls. Play, laugh,

Do anything for peace on love’s behalf.

[LATIN: Si nec blanda…]

If she’s cool and unwilling to be wooed,

Just take it, don’t weaken; in time she’ll soften her mood.

Bending a bough the right way, gently, makes

It easy; use brute force, and it breaks.

With swimming rivers it’s the same—

Go with, not against, the current. Patient methods tame

Lions and tigers, and that, too, is how

Bulls gradually come to tolerate the plough.

Who could have been more intractable than

Atalanta? Yet that fierce girl lost to a man

In the running race—to Milanion.

They say that, earlier on,

Ranging the woods with her, he often rued

Her cruelty and his servitude,

Her nets on his back all day, he spearing wild boars

Obediently. Hylaeus the centaur’s

Bow hurt him badly, but we know

His worst wound came from a more famous bow—

Cupid’s. I’m not advising you to go

Scrambling through Greek thickets, hunters and mountaineers,

Lugging nets and carrying spears,

Or to bare your chests to whizzing arrows—none of that stuff:

A cautious lover will find my programme easy enough.

If she resists, yield; surrender, and you’ll win.

Play any role she wants to cast you in.

Criticise when she’s critical, enthuse when she enthuses,

Echo her view, whatever line she chooses;

If she laughs, laugh; if she cries, remember to do the same:

Your face must obey her rules. If you’re playing a game,

Throw the dice clumsily, make a careless move;

If it’s knucklebones, let her off a forfeit if you prove

The winner, and see to it that you roll low scores;

If it’s “robbers,” let her glass man capture yours.

Don’t be too proud

To hold her sunshade and make room for her through the crowd.

Don’t feel a fool

Placing a footstool

For her pretty feet by the couch and easing

Her slippers on or off. If she’s cold, though you’re freezing

Warm her hand on your heart. And don’t think it a disgrace

To hold, with your freeborn hand, her mirror to her face—

You may look like a slave, but you’re sure to please.

When Juno tired of testing Hercules

With monsters, the hero who’d shouldered the sky and won

A place there did a stint, they say, as one

Of Omphale’s Lydian maids, held baskets, spun

Wool among them. If Jupiter’s son

Obeyed his mistress’s orders, so can you.

Go and endure what he went through!

Told to meet her in the Forum, arrive for the date

Good and early, wait,

And don’t leave unless she’s badly late.

If she summons you somewhere, drop everything, run along,

Barging and shoving your way through the throng.

At night, if she sends you a message at a party’s end,

Like her slave your job’s to attend

Her person all the way home.

The same applies if she’s away from Rome.

Love hates a lazy man. If wheels can’t be had,

Travel on foot, and no matter if the weather’s bad,

If there’s a heatwave or it’s snowed,

Don’t get held up on the road.

[LATIN: Militiae species amor…]

Love is a kind of war. Faint hearts, you’re debarred—

These standards aren’t for timid men to guard!

Love may be soft, but serving him is hard:

You’re in for suffering, hard work, long marches, all-night

Duty in winter, you’ll have to fight

Downpours and then, half-drowned,

Bed down on the bare ground.

When he herded cattle for King Admetus, it’s said

That the sun-god had to huddle in a shed;

So why shouldn’t a man follow

The example of divine Apollo?

Do you want love to last? Then dump your pride.

If safe and easy access is denied

And the door’s bolted, find a way in

Head-first through the skylight, or shin

Like a thief through a window of the upper storey.

She’ll be thrilled, you’ll have the glory

Of risking your neck for her, and it’ll prove

The authenticity of your love.

(Leander, though you could have borne the loss

Of Hero’s company, yet you swam across

To show how much you loved her.)

[LATIN: Nec pudor ancillas…]

Win over the maids,

Taking into account their different grades,

And the house-slaves too. Greet each (it costs nothing) by name,

Clasp their humble hands, it’s all part of the game:

A man with a plan need feel no shame.

On Fortune’s Day, if even a slave asks, offer

A present—it won’t drain your coffer;

And do the same for the maids on their day,

For the Gauls, fooled by girls disguised as matrons, had to pay

The penalty. Make friends, I say,

With the menials—and with none more

Than the janitor and the slave outside her bedroom door.

When it comes to her presents, I wouldn’t be wasteful:

Make them small, well-chosen and tasteful.

At harvest-time, when fruit weighs the branches down,

Send a boy round with an “out-of-town”

Basketful—say it’s the crop

From your country estate, though it came from a Rome shop.

Send grapes, or the chestnuts “my Amaryllis adored”[*]

(Though nowadays Amaryllises are bored

By chestnuts); send a thrush, a pigeon, a pheasant,

To show her she’s always present

In your thoughts. (Gifts sent to buy

The hope that when childless old people die

The donors will feature in the will

Are vile. Death to all those whose gifts are given so ill!)

[LATIN: Quid tibi praecipiam…]

What about sending a love poem? Would that be nice?

Verses, I fear, don’t cut much ice.

Poems are praised, but gifts are valued more;

Provided he’s rich, even a slob can score

With presents. This is the new Age of Gold

When love is bought, high office sold.

Homer, if you returned again

With all the Muses in your train,

But empty-handed, there’d soon be a shout

Of “Throw Homer out!”

There is, I grant you—though it’s small—a set

Of cultured women, and one mustn’t forget

The ones who are not

But would like to be. With either lot,

Write poems in praise of them, and then recite them,

Rubbish or not, con amore. You’ll delight them.

Lines dedicated to her, by a lover,

That he’s sweated all night over,

Blue-stocking or peasant

She’ll treat them as a little token “present.”

Whatever you’ve planned already and suits you best,

Make that appear your mistress’s request.

If you’ve promised one of your slaves manumission,

See that he begs her for her permission;

If you let one off a punishment or chains,

Put her in your debt for your “mercy”—the gain’s

All yours, the credit hers; never let slip

A chance for her to play Her Ladyship.

If you’re anxious to keep her, it’s your duty

To make her think you’re staggered by her beauty.

Notice her clothes.

Tyrian purple? Praise that. Coan silks? Praise those.

A gold-embroidered dress? Make it clear

That the gold is far less dear

Than the wearer. An outfit in wool?

Exclaim, “Wonderful!”

If she stands beside you in her slip, shout, “Fire!”

But at the same time, in a shy voice, enquire,

“Don’t you feel the cold?” If the girl’s

Changed her hair-style, applaud the new curls

Or the switched parting. Admire her charms—

Her voice when she sings, when she dances her arms—

And when she stops clamour for more.

When making love, you should “madly adore”

Her sensuousness and expertise,

And tell her in words the delicious things that please

You specially. She may be as rough and wild

As Medusa in bed, but for you she’s “sweet and mild.”

While serving up these compliments

Don’t for a moment ruin the pretence

By your expression. Hiding art is the name of the game:

Detection brings embarrassment and shame

And—serve you right—an eternity of blame.

[LATIN: Saepe sub autumnum…]

In early autumn, of all seasons the most sweet,

When grapes grow purple and juice-replete,

When one day we’re gripped by cold and the next limp with heat,

And the weather’s changeable mood

Brings on lassitude,

May your girl keep well. But if she does fall ill

And takes to bed with a fever or a chill

Caught from the morbid air,

Now is the time to show your loving care.

Be a shrewd cultivator—

Sow now, and you’ll reap a bumper harvest later.

If the invalid’s peevish, don’t let it upset you;

Do for her with your own hands whatever she’ll let you.

Weep in front of her, kiss her again and again,

Let the rain

Of your tearful grief

Bring her parched lips and mouth relief.

Make vows for her recovery—aloud so she can hear,

Tell her your dreams when she feels like listening—ones of good cheer,

Hire an old witch with tottery legs

And trembling hands to bring round sulphur and eggs

To purify the room and the bed.

All this will prove your willing love (it’s a route that’s led

To many legacies!). Zeal, though, should keep its bounds:

Don’t fuss, or your ministrations may become the grounds

Of her displeasure. Never ban food, and never concoct her

Bitter medicines. Leave rivals to play doctor.

[LATIN: Sed non cui…]

The wind that spread your sails just offshore

Won’t serve you any more

In the open sea. Young, toddling love gains strength

Through exercise. Nourish it well, and at length

It’ll prove sturdy. The bull you fear, you used to stroke

As a calf; you stretch out under an oak

That was a sapling once; a river begins

From frail, small origins,

But it gathers power as it flows,

Acquiring tributaries. See that your girl grows

Used to you: habit’s the master key,

Daily familiarity.

If boredom’s the price, then pay. Hang around, in her sight,

Chat to her, show your face day and night;

And when you’re strong and confident, when you know

She’ll feel your absence, really miss you, go—

Give her a rest.

A field pays best

If trusted to lie fallow, dry terrain

More eagerly drinks up the rain.

Phyllis was lukewarm while Demophoön was there—

It was his sailing caused her love to flare;

When clever Ulysses left, his wife was on the rack;

And you, Laodamia, longed for your husband back.

But brief partings are safest: affection grows slack

With lapse of time, and it’s not long before

The old love fades and the new comes through the door.

When Menelaus was abroad,

Helen, being bored

And lonely at night, found warmth on the breast

Of her husband’s foreign guest.

O Menelaus, I can’t help wondering whether

You were sane to go off, leaving them together

In the same house. Madman, do you trust doves to a kite?

Or a full sheepfold to a wolf at night?

Neither Helen nor the adulterer carries blame:

You or any man would have done the same.

By offering time and place you almost force

Adultery; if you map out the course,

Isn’t she going to take it? What could she do,

Menelaus, far from you,

With a stylish stranger around, frightened and lonely

In an empty bed? Think hard. You were the only

Culprit. In my view Helen doesn’t bear

The blame for the affair—

Her husband was complaisant, Paris there.

[LATIN: Sed neque fulvus…]

As fierce as the tawny boar in a rage, when he rounds

With flashing tusks on the maddened hounds

And tosses them sideways, no less

Ferocious than a lioness

Suckling unweaned cubs, even madder

Than a carelessly stepped-on adder,

Is the woman who finds a rival in the bed she shares.

Her face declares

Everything, the flames of jealousy scorch.

She reaches wildly for a dagger, a torch,

She throws dignity to the wind,

She’s a maenad, she goes clean out of her mind.

When Jason broke his marriage vow, barbarous Medea slew

Her own children. Think, too,

Of Procne, now our swallow, another

Savage, unnatural mother,

Whose crime is still to this day expressed

By the blood-red mark on her breast.

These are the sort of outrages that shake

The closest, firmest friendships; for his own sake,

A prudent man steers clear of them.

My moral rule, though, doesn’t condemn

You (heaven forbid!) to one woman all your life—

That’s beyond the hope even of a young wife.

Play around, but discreetly, decently hiding,

Not smugly advertising, your back-sliding.

Never give one a present the other might recognise.

An element of surprise

In the times of your secret rendezvous

Is essential; also don’t choose

The same well-known retreat

For all your girl-friends—you may, the three of you, meet.

And whenever you write one a letter,

You had better

Check the tablets for traces of a previous note:

Many a woman reads what her lover never wrote

To her. Venus, when she’s sore,

Hurls back the weapon in all-out, righteous war

And hits you where it hurts, as she was hit before.

So long as Agamemnon hadn’t disgraced

His marriage, Clytemnestra remained chaste:

It was his beastly conduct that made her a beast.

She’d heard all—reports of Chryses the priest,

Fillet on head, laurel in hand, begging in vain

For his daughter back again,

Of Briseis and her grief,

Stolen from Achilles, Agamemnon the thief,

And of action shamefully deferred,

The war prolonged. All this she’d heard,

But Cassandra she saw, and once she’d been

Eye-witness of the scene—

The conqueror enslaved, enraptured

By the princess he’d captured—

She took Aegisthus to her heart and bed

And brought down vengeance on her husband’s head.

[LATIN: Quae bene celaris…]

If you’re caught out, if your carefully concealed sin

Comes to light, still lie through thick and thin.

Don’t be extra nice to her, and don’t feebly wilt:

Both are sure signs of guilt.

Take her to bed—all peace is made on the pillow—

And with all you’ve got disprove your peccadillo.

Some recommend the use

Of aphrodisiacs such as savory juice

(Believe me, it harms you and it’s vile),

Or pepper mixed with nettle-seed, or camomile

Blended with vintage wine;

But the goddess worshipped at the shrine

On Eryx’s high and leafy hill

Isn’t drummed to her pleasures by man’s will.

Eat white onions from Megara, the hot,

Sexy rocket from your garden plot,

Hymettus honey, eggs, the nuts that fall

From the needled pine…

[LATIN: Docta, quid ad…]

But, learned Muse, why all

This pseudo-medical lore? I must use the rein

To keep my chariot in the inside lane.

If you followed my advice about lapses, “Conceal them,”

You must change tack now, because “Reveal them”

Is my new motto. Don’t blame

Me for inconsistency: the same

Wind doesn’t always drive the ship, we sail

With canvas hauled and set to catch the gale

From north, south, east or west—we veer.

Observe the skill of a charioteer:

How for full speed he lets the reins float slack,

But pulls them taut to hold his horses back.

Some women ill reward

A tame, indulgent lover; they get bored

With lack of competition and grow less

Passionate. Success

Breeds over-confidence; it’s hard to stay

Calm and fair when everything’s going your way.

A fire gradually weakens and dies down

And lies hidden under a crown

Of grey ash, yet sprinkle sulphur and it learns

To revive, and the blaze returns.

So love, grown lazy and self-satisfied,

To be rekindled needs some shock applied.

Heat up her lukewarm heart, alarm her with tales

Of your bad behaviour, so that she pales.

Trebly, incalculably happy is the lover

Whom an injured mistress agonises over.

As soon as she hears what she’d rather not know,

The poor girl faints—her voice, her colour go.

How I’d like to be the man whose hair she tears,

Whose soft cheeks she scratches, at whom she glares

With lovely, tear-filled eyes, the man she would

Cut out of her life, if she only could!

How long should you let her sulk? Not long. The longer

You put off making it up, the stronger

Her anger will grow. To prevent this,

Throw your arms round her neck, give her a kiss,

Pull her sobbing to your breast, hold her there tight,

Keep kissing her, treat her to the delight

Of Venus while she’s weeping. That’ll bring peace:

It’s the one sure way to make the tantrum cease.

When she’s raged her fill but still seems unreconciled,

Then sue for terms in bed, and you’ll find her mild.

Bed is the place, arms laid down, war forsworn,

Where Harmony dwells, where Tenderness was born.

After a fight doves snuggle, beak to beak,

And coo and murmur in bird-speak.

[LATIN: Prima fuit rerum…]

In the beginning the world was inchoate,

There was nothing but a great

Featureless mass, no earth, sea, stars or moon;

But soon

Sky was set above earth, land ringed with sea,

Chaos retired to its own vacancy,

Forest and air gave beasts and birds their living quarters,

And fish lurked deep in the new waters.

Through this lonely, empty place

Wandered the nomadic human race,

Powerful, uncouth brutes

Whose home was the forest, who ate grass and fruits

And bedded on leaves, long shunning one another

Suspiciously, brother ignoring brother.

What softened those fierce natures? Pleasure, they say.

A man and a woman met in a wood one day

And wondered what to do. No need for tuition:

Venus arranged the rough, sweet coition.

Birds have their mates, fish in the cold mid-ocean,

Thrilled by sexual emotion,

Find partners, hinds follow stags, snakes clasp snakes,

Dogs couple, glued together, the ewe takes

Pleasure in her tupping ram, the heifer’s full

Of desire for her covering bull,

The snub-nosed she-goat happily bears

Her stinking billy, and heat-crazed mares,

Though separated

By miles from stallions, swim streams to get mated.

Act, then. Only a strong dose of love will cure

A woman with an angry temperature.

Better than old Machaon’s drugs, my medicine

Will restore you to her favour when you sin.

[LATIN: Haec ego cum…]

While I was writing this, I saw Apollo coming

Towards me with his golden lyre, thumb strumming

The strings, bays in his hand, bays on his head,

Prophet and poet made manifest. “You,” he said,

“Professor of Love’s Affairs,

Lead your pupils to my temple—there’s

A world-famous inscription on it which goes,

Know yourself. Only the man who knows

Himself can be intelligent in love

And use his gifts to best effect to further every move.

If you’re good-looking, then dazzle all beholders;

If your skin’s fine, then lounge back with bare shoulders.

Let the man with a good voice sing, the clever talker break

Awkward silences, the connoisseur take

Pleasure in wine. But one caveat’s vital:

No ‘inspired’ poet should give a recital,

No ‘brilliant’ speaker deliver an oration

In the middle of dinner-table conversation.”

That was Apollo’s advice. I’d heed it if I were you:

What comes from a god’s mouth must be true.

[LATIN: Ad propiora vocor…]

Back to my theme:

The wise lover who follows my scheme

Will win through, achieve his goal. The sown

Furrow doesn’t invariably repay the loan

Of seed with interest,

Or the wind always spring to the help of the distressed

Vessel. Love offers less pleasure than pain;

Lovers must make up their minds to suffer again and again.

Like hares on Athos, shells on the seashore, bees

On Hybla, olives on the grey-green trees

Of Pallas, their pains are innumerable—and all

The shafts that wound us are steeped in gall.

She’s “not at home,” though you’ve glimpsed her indoors? Don’t doubt

The maid’s word but your own eyes: she’s out.

The night’s promised, but the door locked when you come round?

Take it like a man, doss on the filthy ground.

And if one of the cocky, barefaced liars

Among the maidservants enquires,

“What’s this fellow doing besieging the door?”

Use your charm, implore

The hard door to open, the hard heart to unlatch,

Take your wreath off and attach

The roses to the post. If she wants you to, enter; if not, just go.

Why force a mistress to say,

“I can’t escape the pest”? Moods change by the day.

And don’t think it a disgrace to take curses and blows,

Or even to kiss, grovellingly, her toes.

[LATIN: Quid moror in…]

But why waste time on trifles? I must ascend

Higher, treat greater themes. Attend

Closely, reader. Although the task may strain

My powers, nobody can attain

Excellence without difficulty: my art

Demands exacting work on the poet’s part.

Put up with a rival, be patient, and in time

You’ll end up, like the generals who climb

The Capitol, triumphant. This is no secular

Proverb, it’s Jupiter’s oracular

Truth. In all my hanging_eng this

Advice merits the greatest emphasis.

If she flirts, bear it; if she writes on the sly,

Don’t touch her letters; and never try

To check on where she comes from, where she goes.

Husbands grant wives this freedom—they even doze

While sleep assists the comedy. It must be confessed

That as student in this role I’m not the best;

But what can you do when you fail your own test?

Should I tamely watch while some would-be lover

Makes passes at my girl? No, rage takes over.

I remember, her husband kissed her once and I complained—

My love is savage and untrained

(A failing that has done me in the past a

Great deal of harm). The true Master

Is affable with rivals. Ignorance is better

Than knowledge; tolerate lies, for if you get her

To confess too often, her face may tire

Of blushing and she’ll become an inveterate liar.

And so, young lovers, don’t play the detective;

Let them cheat and think their cover-up’s effective.

Passion, unmasked, grows; a guilty pair

Always persist in a ruinous affair.

The whole world knows the myth:

Venus and Mars caught by Vulcan, the crafty smith,

When Father Mars, in the grip

Of mad passion, resigned his awesome generalship

To join the ranks of lovers. For her part

(For no goddess has a softer heart),

Venus was not averse to being wooed,

She certainly didn’t play the country prude.

Oh, the times the naughty jade

Mocked her husband’s bandy legs and made

Fun of his hands coarsened by fire and trade!

In front of Mars she had but to imitate

Vulcan’s peculiar gait,

And charm lent piquancy to beauty acting lame.

At first, through modesty and shame,

They kept their affair dark, but the game

Was up when the Sun (who can fool that all-viewing

God?) told Vulcan what his wife was doing.

(You’re a bad example, Sun. Just ask her, and she’ll treat

You to it too, if only you’re discreet.)

And so Vulcan set,

All round and over the bed, an invisible net,

And shammed a trip to Lemnos. The lovers met

As arranged, were caught stark naked in the snare,

Vulcan invited the gods round, and the pair

Made a ridiculous spectacle. Venus, they say,

Could hardly restrain her tears. Anyway,

They couldn’t conceal their faces or even move

Their hands away from the private parts of love.

One god laughed: “Brave Mars, I see

Your chains are a nuisance—hand them over to me!”

It took all Neptune’s pleading before Vulcan agreed

Reluctantly to release them. Freed

From their embrace,

Venus rushed off to Paphos, Mars to Thrace.

So what, Vulcan, did you achieve?

The formerly furtive couple leave

And carry on with even less

Shame than before. Word has it that you now confess

You acted like a lunatic

And bitterly regret your clever trick.

Be warned by the fate of Venus, beware

Of setting the sort of snare

She had to suffer. Don’t forge fetters

For rivals, don’t intercept secret letters;

Leave all that for accredited husbands to handle—

If they think the detective game is worth the candle.

I repeat, there’s no sport here the law doesn’t permit:

Married ladies don’t feature in my wit.

[LATIN: Quis Cereris ritus…]

Who’d dare to incur the disgrace

Of publishing the mysteries of Samothrace

Or the rites of Ceres to the common crowd?

One needn’t feel all that proud

Of keeping silence, but to profane

The sacred, the arcane,

Is a grave crime. Tantalus, for breaching

The gods’ secrets, is still reaching

For ungraspable apples on the tree,

Standing thirst-parched in water, and deservedly.

Venus is a stickler in this matter:

I warn you, any man prone to chatter

About her holy mysteries is forbidden

To mix with them. They may not involve things hidden

In caskets, they may forgo

The wild clashing of cymbals, but even so

They’re so much part of our daily life and feeling

That they demand concealing.

Venus herself, when she poses nude,

Stoops, left hand hiding her sex in an attitude

Of modesty. Animals couple all over the place,

In public—indeed, a girl has to avert her face—

But the secret acts of human lovers

Call for bedrooms, locked doors, blankets, covers

For our private parts, and, if not the darkness of night,

We want something less bright

Than the sun’s glare, preferably half-light.

Long ago, when mankind was still not proof

Against sun and rain, before they invented the roof,

Shelter and food were supplied by the oak,

And the sense of shame was so strong in primitive folk

That they made love

Not in the open air, but in a cave or grove.

But with our night sports it’s all “making” and “score”;

We pay too high a price for nothing more

Than the power to boast. Do you really want to comb

The whole female population of Rome

Just to be able to tell friends you meet,

“I’ve had her too,” so that no street

Lacks examples to point at? And will you repeat

Some leering story about each? I complain

About trifles: there are some men so vain

That if their lies were all true they’d have to back down—

They claim they’ve slept with every girl in town!

If they can’t touch a body, they finger a name;

Though flesh escapes, reputation’s smeared with shame.

Get busy, then, doorman, whom we love to hate,

Lock her chamber door, put a hundred bolts on the gate,

For where is security when her name is heard

Bandied by lechers who give their word

To make us believe that what never took place occurred?

For myself, even with facts I’m confessionally mean:

A thick veil protects my private scene.

Don’t blame a woman for her weak points; most men find

It pays here to pretend to be blind.

Wing-footed Perseus found no objection

To Andromeda’s Ethiopian complexion,

And though Andromache was too big in the eyes

Of the world, to Hector she was medium-size.

Habit makes all things bearable: new love’s

Sharp-eyed, and disapproves

Of many faults which a love that’s grown

Mature will readily condone.

While a new graft is growing in the tree’s

Green cortex, any breeze

Can shake it down, but, time-toughened, that shoot

Withstands the wind, bears its adopted fruit.

Time cures all physical blemishes—the blot

That used to bother you dwindles to a spot

You scarcely see. Young nostrils can’t abide

A bull’s hide

In a tannery when it’s being cured,

But the stink fades, the apprentice gets inured.

Euphemisms are great soothers in this matter:

Is she tar-black? Then “dusky” will flatter.

Has she a cast in one eye? Then observe a

Likeness to Venus. If she’s grey-haired, she’s Minerva.

If she’s half-starved, all bones, tell her she’s “slim.”

If she’s undersized, the word is “trim,”

And “generously built” translates “too fat.”

Bad points are good near-misses—play on that.

[LATIN: Nec quotus annus…]

Don’t ask her age, under which consul her birth

Was registered: leave the stern Censor to unearth

Statistical truth,

Especially if she’s past the prime of youth

And lost her bloom, and begun

To pluck the white hairs one by one.

Young lovers, women at this middle stage

Of life, or even of maturer age,

Are well worth cultivating, there’s a rich yield:

It’s up to you to sow the field.

So, while your years and powers permit,

Endure love’s labour, put up with it;

Soon bent old age, sly-footed, will arrive.

Churn the sea with oars, drive

Ploughshares into the earth, pour

Your manhood and ferocity into war—

Or expend heart, guts, balls, the lot,

On serving women. It’s not

Unlike military service—it takes all you’ve got!

Besides, they’ve been around, they’ve learnt to please—

Only experience brings expertise—

And they work hard to disguise

Age with art, so that anno domini’s

Made up for by finesse. You’ll be embraced

In a thousand ways, according to your taste:

No erotic picture could show

The number of variations that they know.

Their pleasure doesn’t depend on stimulus—

Women should share the pleasure equally with us.

I hate it when both partners don’t enjoy

A climax—that’s why a boy

Doesn’t appeal to me much. But my abomination

Is a girl who does it from a sense of obligation,

Who lies there dry, her thoughts flitting

Back to her wool and her knitting.

For me, that’s service, not pleasure: I’ll have no truck

With a dutiful fuck.

I like to hear her rapturous gasps imploring

Me to take my time, keep boring,

To watch her come with surrendering eyes, then, flaked out,

Insist on a long pause before the next bout.

Nature doesn’t grant youth these joys; they arrive

Quite suddenly, after the age of thirty-five.

Impatient lovers can gulp “nouveau”;

An ancient consul’s vintage, laid down years ago,

Suits me. Only an older plane can shield

Heads from the sun, bare feet are pricked by a new-sown field.

Could you seriously prefer

Helen’s daughter, Hermione, to her?

Or Medusa to her mother? If you seek an

Older woman’s love, press on, don’t weaken,

And then, my friend,

You’ll reap a handsome dividend.

Look! Two lovers on a bed which has the air

Of a witness. The door’s shut. Muse, stay outside. The pair

Won’t need your prompting, passion will blurt

The right words, hands won’t lie inert,

Fingers will learn what to do in the secret parts

In which, mysteriously, Love dips his darts.

So Hector made love with Andromache long ago

(War wasn’t his only talent), and so

Did great Achilles with his slave when, battle-spent,

He lay on her soft bed in the tent,

While you, Briseis, let hands still warm

With Trojan blood fondle your naked form—

Or was it rather that your body thrilled

At the touch of a conqueror who’d killed?

I tell you, you should approach the peak of pleasure

Teasingly, lingeringly, at leisure.

Once you’ve discovered the right

Places to touch, the ones which delight

Women most, don’t hold back through shame,

Carry on with the game,

And you’ll see her eyes light up, flash and quiver

Like sunlight on the surface of a river.

Soon she’ll be murmuring, moaning, gasping, saying

Words in tune with the instrument you’re playing.

But take care not to crowd on sail and race

Ahead of her, don’t fall behind her either; matching pace,

Arrive together at the winning-post

In a dead heat. Of all pleasures this is the most

Exquisite, when a man and a woman, satisfied,

Lie in mutual surrender, side by side.

That’s the rhythm to aim at—no hurry,

No furtiveness, no worry.

If dallying means danger, of course

It’s best to raise the stroke of your oars,

Or in other words to spur the galloping horse.

[LATIN: Finis adest operi…]

Here this part of my task ends.

You grateful young friends,

Give me the palm, perfume my hair, bring a myrtle crown.

Among the Greeks Podalirius won renown

For medical skill, Nestor for knowing men’s hearts,

Achilles for strength, Ajax for martial arts,

Calchas as priest and seer,

Automedon as charioteer;

So I, too, have no peer

In my field: love. Praise me, you youngsters, proclaim

Me poet and prophet, broadcast my name

World-wide.

I’ve equipped you for war, just as Vulcan supplied

Achilles with the arms he made.

Go and conquer as he did, and if with the aid

Of my weapons you lay an Amazon low,

Let this inscription on the trophy go:

“Ovid, our master, taught us all we know.”

[LATIN: Ecce, rogant tenerae…]

But now the girls are begging for lessons. Your turn,

Ladies. You’re my next concern.

[*] A reference to Virgil’s Eclogues, ii, 52.

BOOK THREE

[LATIN: Arma dedi Danais…]

Having armed Greeks against Amazons, I must now prescribe

Weapons, Penthesilea, for you and your tribe.

You must fight on equal terms. Victory’s won

Through the favour of kind Venus and her son

Who ranges the world on wings. It wouldn’t be fair

If women had to oppose armed troops with bare

Breasts, for victory, then,

Could only shame us men.

“But why give venom to snakes? Why betray

Our sheepfold to wild she-wolves?” you may say.

Don’t smear the whole sex with the disgrace

Of the few who are bad, judge each as a separate case.

It’s true, Helen and Clytemnestra had to face

Charges from both their husbands, and Eriphyle’s crime

Sent Amphiaraus before his time,

Together with his horses, hurled

Still living to the underworld;

But think of Penelope, chaste for ten years of war,

And then for ten years more

While her lord wandered; of Laodamia, who took her life

To be with her husband; of Alcestis, a wife

Who saved Admetus from the dead

By offering to join them in his stead;

Of Evadne’s cry, “Take me, we’ll embrace in the fire,

Capaneus!” as she leapt on to the pyre.

Virtue’s dressed as a woman, she’s feminine in gender—

No wonder her sex’s view of her is tender—

But faced with such paragons, my poetry fails:

Mine’s a light pleasure craft, with small sails.

What you’ll learn through me is only naughtiness;

I’m going to teach you nothing less

Than how you should be loved. Flaming arrows and bows

Aren’t usually used by women, I don’t suppose

I’ve seen many men hurt by those.

Men frequently, girls rarely, cheat:

Ask around—very few are accused of deceit.

Although Medea was by then a mother,

Treacherous Jason dumped his bride and took another.

As for you, Theseus, Ariadne in her solitude

Could have ended up as gulls’ food

For all the shame

You felt. Ask how Nine Ways got its name,

And listen to the falling leaves

Which the wood there sheds when it grieves

For Phyllis who hanged herself beside the sea.

Aeneas was noted for his piety,

And yet, Dido, your guest supplied

Both sword and motive for your suicide.

What ruined you all? I’ll tell you. You all lacked

Know-how, tact,

The art of love that keeps the spark

Of passion alive. And you’d still be in the dark

If Venus hadn’t come to me in a dream

And told me to give you a lecture on this theme.

“What have women done to deserve it?” she said. “Poor,

Defenceless mob, should they be pitted in war

Against armed males? Now that two parts

Of your poem have taught men the erotic arts,

It’s time the opposition

Enjoyed the benefit of your tuition.

The poet who was Helen’s denigrator

Retuned his lyre and sang her praises later

In a happier key. Never say

Bad words about us women! If I know you, you’ll stay

Eager to win their favour till your dying day.”

Then from her myrtle wreath she gave me a few

Berries and a leaf. As I took them, I knew

Her divine power: the air brightened

And my heart lifted, strangely lightened.

While her inspiration’s with me still, now

(If modesty, your morals and the laws allow

You to do so) take some tips, girls, from my page.

Never forget that old age

Will arrive, never let time

Slip from you, wasted. While you’re in your prime,

While you still can, have fun, play,

For the years like water run away,

The river glides, the hour moves on,

And are irrevocably gone.

Youth should be used, it vanishes so fast,

And pleasures to come will be less than pleasures past.

Those grey ghosts I remember as a violet-bed,

Those thorns were once a gift, a rose-wreath for my head.

You who now lock your lovers out—grow old,

And you’ll lie alone at night, feeling the cold,

Your door no longer battered

By midnight drunks, your threshold never scattered

With dawn roses. Oh yes, it’s sad

That flab and wrinkles come so soon, too bad

When the radiant complexion you once had

Fades, and the streaks you swear

You always had as a girl are suddenly everywhere—

A whole head of grey hair!

Snakes slough off age with their winter rags,

And shed horns put no extra years on stags,

But our looks go without upkeep. Pluck the flower; unpicked,

It withers, ugly, derelict.

Moreover, having children shortens the stage

Of youth: overcropped fields soon age.

Moon, when over Mount Latmos you had a crush

On Endymion, you felt no need to blush,

Nor was there, Aurora, in your eyes

Any shame in making Cephalus your prize.

Though Venus still mourns Adonis, all the same

She bore two children with a different name.

Follow the role models in the sky,

Earthbound women, and don’t deny

Your pleasures to hungry men. They may abuse

Your trust. So what? What have you got to lose?

Your balance is still safe, there’s been no cost.

Let them take and take and take, nothing is lost.

Though flint and iron get worn down by attrition,

That part remains unscratched, in mint condition.

What’s wrong with taking a light from fire? Who’d be

A miser with the vast, undrainable sea?

If a woman says no, all she’s done is refused

Available water that she might have used.

I’m not saying, Go and get laid

By all comers, but, Don’t be afraid

Of shadows on the wall.

When you give yourselves, you lose nothing at all.

Ahead there are stronger winds, trickier seas;

But I’m still in harbour—give me a light breeze!

[LATIN: Ordior a cultu…]

I’ll start with body care. The best wines

Come from well-tended vines,

And the tallest crops with the best yield

Are grown in a well-dug field.

Beauty’s a gift of the gods. How many of you can boast

That you have it? Frankly, most

Don’t. Attention helps: though you were graced

With the looks of Venus, neglected they’ll go to waste.

In the past girls may not have groomed themselves, but men

Were equally uncultivated then.

Do you wonder that Andromache wore

A rough smock?—she’d married a man of war.

And if you were Ajax’s wife, would you put on your best

For a fellow whose arrow-proof vest

Was a seven-layered ox-hide? In the days of old

Styles were crude and simple. Now Rome has gold,

The huge wealth of the conquered world. Compare

The new with the old Capitol and you’d swear

They belonged to different Jupiters. Who remembers

That our Senate House, now worthy of its members,

Was wattle-built under Tatius, and the Palatine,

Site of Apollo’s shrine

And the imperial palace now,

Once pastured oxen for the plough?

Let others venerate the past, I say

Thank goodness I’m alive today;

This age suits me—not because we mine

Stubborn gold from the earth, or gather fine

Shells from exotic shores, or dig

Marble from shrinking mountains, or thrust big

Villas into the bay’s blue water, but because

We have culture, and the coarse life that was

Natural to our grandfathers didn’t last

To our day, is a thing of the past.

[LATIN: Vos quoque nec…]

Don’t load your ears with expensive pearls that have been

Fished up by dark-skinned Indians from green

Tropical waters, don’t parade

In heavy, gold-embossed brocade—

Money displayed

For applause can have the opposite effect.

What we admire is elegance: don’t neglect

Your hair or let it stray too much;

Chic can be made or marred by a single touch.

There’s more than one way hair can be dressed:

Consult your mirror and choose the best

For you. An oval face prefers

Hair parted plainly (Laodamia did hers

Like that); a round face calls for a different style—

The hair in a neat pile

On top of the head, so the ears show.

One girl should let her tresses flow

Over her shoulders in a cascade,

Like Apollo when he plays the lyre; another should braid

Hers like Diana when, skirt tucked above the knee,

She hunts, and the wild things flee.

Some look good with it loose and tousled by the wind,

Others prefer it tied or pinned;

Some fancy tortoise-shell combs, others elect

To cultivate a wave-effect.

If the number of all acorns on all oak-trees,

If all the fauna of the Alps, if all the bees

On Hybla are beyond computation,

So are hair-styles—every day there’s a new creation.

Take the “careless look,” which suits a lot of girls:

To judge by their wild curls

You’d think they’d been slept on all night, but they’ve just

This moment been carefully mussed!

Art simulates chance effects. Think of the case

Of Hercules, who saw and loved the face

Of his unkempt captive, Iole; or forlorn,

Dishevelled Ariadne, borne

Away by Bacchus in his car

To the satyrs’ loud shouts of “hurrah!”

Nature’s treatment of your beauty’s more

Than kind—you’ve a thousand tricks to restore

The damage. We’re miserably stripped bare—

With age we lose our hair,

Which falls like gale-blown leaves. A woman can dye

Her grey streaks with German lotions, try

To enhance its natural colour, sport a big,

Thick, built-up wig,

New hair for old, which money buys—

There’s no embarrassment or disguise—

From the shop right under Hercules’ and the Muses’ eyes.

Now, what about clothes? I can’t abide

Flounces or Tyrian-purple-dyed

Wool. It’s mad,

When so many cheaper colours can be had,

To load your back with the worth of a whole estate.

There’s the blue you see when the spring winds abate

And stop bringing rain, and the air’s

Cloudless; there’s

Tawny gold, like the ram

On whose back Phrixus and Helle swam

To escape from Ino’s malice; there’s grey-green,

The colour of the waves, which we call “marine”—

I imagine that’s what the sea-nymphs must have worn;

There’s saffron—the dewy goddess of the morn

Wears it when she drives the team that brings us light;

There’s myrtle-green, amethyst-purple, rose-white,

The grey of the Thracian crane,

Almond-pink, chestnut (here come your chestnuts again,

Amaryllis!), the “beeswax” tan of a fleece … Past numbering,

Like the flowers of the new earth when warm spring

Urges the vines to bud and winter’s gone,

Are the dyes wool takes on.

Choose them with care,

For not every colour suits every woman. A fair

Skin looks attractive with dark grey—

It suited Briseis; even on the day

She was captured and dragged away

She wore it. Dark skins look best

In white—Andromeda, you were ravishing dressed

In white, on your island which the jealous gods oppressed.

[LATIN: Quam paene admonui…]

I was about to devote

A few words to guarding against underarm “goat”

And bristling, hairy legs, but I’m talking to girls finer

Than the peasants in north-west Asia Minor

Or the rocky Caucasus. Why give you needless warnings,

Such as, Don’t forget to wash your hands in the mornings,

Or, Don’t neglect your teeth or they may go black?

You know how to add the bloom you lack

With powder, how to replace

The blood in an anaemic face

With rouge, how to fill in an eyebrow-line that’s weak,

How to stick a patch on one unblemished cheek,

And you’re not shy of using a touch of ash

Or a dash

Of Cilician saffron to enhance your eyelids. Look

At Facial Treatment, my little book—

It may be short, but it was a long slog

Writing it—in which I catalogue

The best cosmetic recipes. Among other lore,

You’ll find tips there on how to restore

Fading looks. Yes, my art

Is no slouch when it comes to taking your part.

But don’t let your lover see the boxes and jars

On your dressing-table—remember, ars

Est celare artem.[*] The average man feels sick

At the sight of make-up put on so thick

That it melts and runs down a sweaty neck.

As for that facial grease

Extracted from an unwashed fleece,

Even though it’s “from Athens” it will offend

All noses. Nor can I recommend

Dabbing hind’s marrow cream on your face

Or cleaning your teeth in a public place.

It may improve your looks, but it doesn’t make good viewing:

What gives pleasure when done may be ugly in the doing.

A sculpture by Myron, signed, from his own

Workshop, was once a meaningless lump of stone;

To make that beautiful

Gold ring, crude ore was worked; that robe was filthy wool

Originally; the jewel you wear

Was a rough, uncut stone—now a cameo’s there:

Nude Venus wringing out her spray-wet hair.

We’d like to think that you’re asleep

While you’re at your toilet; women should keep,

Till the work’s perfected, out of sight.

Do I have to know why your complexion’s white?

Shut the boudoir door—why show

A half-finished painting? Men don’t need to know

Too much; most of what you do

Would shock us if it weren’t concealed from view.

The splendid statues in our theatres—you would sneer

If you looked at them closely: wood with gilt veneer.

That’s why the public aren’t allowed near

Until the work’s completed,

And why, too, we men shouldn’t be treated

To the sight of you making up. I don’t ban

Combing your hair out in front of a man

So that it ripples down your back, but take care

Not to lose your temper trying to repair

Knots and tangles. And please spare

Your lady’s-maid: I hate a girl who scratches

Her servant’s face, or snatches

A needle up and jabs her arm. The poor thing curses

The head she’s dressing and meanwhile nurses

A bloody wound, weeping, hating

The very hair she’s titivating.

If your hair’s a problem, either post a guard

At your boudoir door, or have it done where men are barred,

At the Good Goddess’s temple. I once bounced

Into a girl’s room unannounced,

And, flustered, she put her wig on the wrong way round.

I wouldn’t want my enemy to be found

In such a predicament—a disgrace

Fit for a female of the Parthian race.

A hornless bull, a bald field, a leafless bush

And a hairless head all make us wince and blush.

Who are my pupils? Semele, or Leda, or the maid

From Sidon the false bull betrayed

And carried over the sea,

Or Helen, whom Menelaus, sensibly,

Wanted back and Paris, sensibly too,

Kept as his prize? No, it’s not stars like you

Who’ve come to consult me in my guru role,

But women as a whole,

Pretty and plain alike (alas,

Most of them in the latter class).

Real beauty has no need of our

Advice: its dowry is its own unaided power.

When the sea’s face is smooth, the captain lolls on deck,

But it’s “All hands!” when it’s ugly, threatening wreck.

A flawless face is rare:

Mask your blemishes as best you can, take care

To hide your body’s faults. If you’re dumpy, sit in a chair

(You could be taken for seated if on your feet!),

Or stretch yourself, however petite,

On a couch, legs under a wrap, out of sight,

So inquisitive eyes can’t estimate your height;

If you’re scrawny, go in for thick-woven, profuse

Garments, a robe hanging loose

Over the shoulders; if your skin’s pallid, puce

Stripes are the answer; if it’s swarthy, make use

Of white, contrasting linen from the Nile;

If you’ve ugly feet, conceal them in buskin-style

Bootees; if your calves are too lean,

Keep them confined, don’t let them be seen;

Pads help jutting shoulder-blades, and a bra is a must

For a flat bust;

If your nails are rough and your fingers fat,

Don’t gesticulate; if your breath’s bad, never chat

On an empty stomach, and leave a good space

Between your mouth and your lover’s face;

If you’ve a tooth that’s black, protruding, or askew,

To laugh’s a fatal thing to do.

Would you believe it, women study even the act

Of laughing! That, too, calls for tact.

The mouth should be opened only so wide,

The dimples kept small on either side,

And the top teeth at the tip

Just covered by the lower lip—

No interminable, side-splitting

Merriment, but a sort of light trill, as is befitting

To their sex. Whereas one girl will twist her

Face into a grotesque guffaw, her sister

Will stagger about bent double

So you’d think she was weeping in real trouble,

While a third emits a raucous, unpleasing sound

Like the bray of a donkey pushing the millstone round.

Where doesn’t art come in? They learn to cry so that men

Find it attractive, turn the tap where, and when,

And at any pressure they choose.

Damn it, don’t we hear them abuse

The laws of the alphabet, forcing their tongues to misp-

ronounce letters with an artificial lisp?

So a fault acquires chic, and they mangle words and teach

Themselves the power to spoil their power of speech.

Pay attention to all these points, they can do you good.

Learn how to use your body as a woman should:

The walk is a part of sex-appeal at which you can’t scoff—

It turns a stranger on or puts him off.

A. sways her hips skilfully, lets her robe flow and flare

With the welcomed air,

An arrogant, mincing charmer;

While B., like the sun-reddened wife of an Umbrian farmer,

Has a huge, gawky stride.

But here, as in most things, moderation should preside—

One woman moves like a bucolic spouse,

The other more decadently than taste allows.

In spite of which, by all means flaunt the charm

Of a naked upper right arm—

It especially suits you girls whose flesh is white;

Just the sight of a shoulder like that makes me long to kiss and bite!

The Sirens, those bird-women of the main,

With their sweet voices could detain

The swiftest ship. Ulysses, though bound fast,

Almost wrenched himself free of the ropes round the mast

When he heard their song (the rest,

Ears plugged with wax, stayed self-possessed).

Song is a seductive thing:

All women should learn how to sing—

In many cases

The voice is as good a procuress as the face is.

Know the latest hits from the stage,

And the new tune from Egypt that’s all the rage.

An educated (my way) girl won’t lack the skill

To handle both the strings and quill.

When Orpheus touched his lyre, the sound

Moved rocks and beasts, and held spellbound

The rivers of Hell and the three-headed hound;

And when Amphion played

(That noble avenger of his mother’s shade),

Stones leapt gladly to form new walls for his city.

Even a dumb dolphin was moved to pity

By Arion’s lyre—you know the famous fable.

You should also be able

To cope with the Phoenician harp—a very

Suitable instrument when a party’s merry.

Know your poets: Callimachus, Philetas, and the bard

From Teos, that old man who drank so hard,

And Sappho (have you ever read such sexy verse?),

And Menander whose duped fathers always curse

Rascally slaves. Read tender Propertius; read Gallus;

And quote, of course, from you, Tibullus;

Read Varro’s epic tale of ancient Greece,

The Argonauts, about the golden fleece

Which brought poor Helle little joy;

Read the Aeneid, whose hero fled from Troy

And from whose settlement towering Rome has sprung—

The noblest poem in our Latin tongue.

Who knows, one day my name may rank among

Theirs, and my works succeed

In escaping Lethe; someone will say, “Read

That stylish poem in which our Master provides

Brilliant advice for both sides

In the sex war; take from his Love Poems some choice

Passage and read it aloud in a feeling voice,

Or recite one of his Heroines’ Letters—here

Was a new art-form, he was the pioneer.”

O Apollo, Bacchus, the nine Muses, O you

Spirits of long-dead poets, make it come true!

[LATIN: Quis dubitet, quin…]

Yes, you’ve guessed right, I’d have every girl enhance

Her image by knowing how to dance,

So that when wine’s poured and guests call for an act,

She can oblige. Why not? Stage stars attract

Applause, such are the ballet’s charms,

By the sinuous movements of their hips and arms.

I feel ashamed to offer advice

About trivia, but girls should play knucklebones and dice

And board-games. You have to think ahead. Sacrifice

Or protect a piece? Retreat or attack?

For instance, in tric-trac,

Or the war-game, you mustn’t be rash, but plan

Coolly when under a pincer attack you lose a man,

And your lone king’s driven back to where he began.

Then there’s spillikins—the problem’s lifting

Them one by one without the whole heap shifting;

Backgammon—a twelve-point board with the same

Number of zones as the tricky year; and the game

With a small board and three counters each side—you fill

Three squares in a row for the kill.

There are any number, all sorts

Of games and sports:

It’s a shame when girls won’t learn them, for where they’re played

Friendships are easily made.

Yet cleverly exploiting the dice’s roll

Matters far less than self-control.

In games we’re rash, in our eagerness we reveal

The naked passions we feel:

Rage shows its ugly face, and lust for gain,

There are arguments, brawls, raw nerves, pain,

The air’s thick with accusations and the sound

Of raised voices, angry gods are invoked all round,

Someone’s suspicious—“The slate must be wiped clean!”—

Indeed, I’ve often seen

Tears running down faces.

If you want to stay in men’s good graces,

May Jupiter be your saviour

And keep you from such barbarous behaviour!

[LATIN: Hos ignava iocos…]

These are the pastimes which a

Lazy Nature has given women; men’s scope is richer—

They have ball-games, hoops, javelins, armed combat, horses

To train and manage round the courses.

You women custom bars

From the grounds and the icy baths in the Field of Mars,

And you don’t swim in the Tiber even when it’s flowing

Gently. Still, you have the pleasure of going

For a saunter in the shade,

When August scorches heads, down Pompey’s colonnade,

Or up the Palatine, to the temple where we thank

Laurelled Apollo who sank

Cleopatra’s fleet, to the monuments our revered

Leader’s sister and wife have reared,

And the statue of Agrippa, his great “son,”

With the crown of the naval victory he won.

Savour the incense in the Egyptian shrine

Of the cow-goddess; visit all three theatres and shine

In the best seats; go to the Circus—warm blood on the ground

And chariot-wheels red-hot as they round

The turning-post! Men can’t desire

What isn’t there to admire:

What’s unseen must stay unknown.

A pretty woman’s useless all alone.

Though you may deserve to be ranked among

The greatest divas who’ve ever sung,

You’ll give no pleasure voiceless, lyre unstrung.

If Apelles had never posed her just so

For that painting, Venus would be still below

The foam, invisibly lurking.

What are we dedicated poets working

So hard for but fame? It’s our goal, our prayer.

Both gods and monarchs used to care

For poets in the good old days:

Choirs were richly rewarded, poets reaped praise,

Prestige and titles, not to mention

Regular cash gifts, even a pension.

Though born in Calabria’s mountains, Ennius rose

By merit, and shares a tomb with the Scipios.

But the ivy-wreath’s ignored now, and the bard

Who sits up late labouring hard

For the Muses is called a layabout. All the same,

There is a reward for the sleepless quest for fame.

Who would have heard of Homer unless we had

The published proof, his evergreen Iliad?

Or of Danaë if she’d stayed in the king’s power

And ended up an old maid in her brazen tower?

You pretty girls, a crowd pays—join the group,

Cross your threshold, get around. The she-wolf stalks the troop

To seize one sheep, the eagle aims its swoop

At a flock of birds. A beautiful woman should show

Herself in public: you never know,

Out of the ruck

One man may spot you and be struck.

To be admired, be seen all over the place,

Devote great care to your figure and your face.

Luck plays a big part. Keep your fish-hook dangling—

They’re where you least expect them, when you’re angling.

Hounds can scour mountain woods and draw a blank—

And then a stag, with only himself to thank,

Walks into the nets. Could chained Andromeda have dreamt

She would attract a lover, blubbering, unkempt?

Yet we know that when a man

Dies and the widow’s plan

Is to find a new one, a parade of funeral feeling—

Dishevelled hair, abandoned sobs—is quite appealing.

[LATIN: Sed vitate viros…]

But steer clear of the young professor

Of elegance, the too good-looking, snappy dresser

Who’s always arranging his hair—he’ll tell you a stale,

Thousand-times-told tale;

His heart’s a gypsy, it camps, it moves.

What can a woman do when the man she loves

Is smoother than she is and, for all she can tell, Has more men than she does as well?

It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, Troy would have stayed

Unsacked had Cassandra’s warnings been obeyed.

Some men conduct their siege under a disguise

Of passion in order to lay hands on the prize—

A shameful ploy. Don’t be fooled by his sleek,

Scented hair, tight-laced shoe-tongues, chic,

Fine-textured togas, or the ring

(Single or plural) glittering

On his hand. The best-dressed one of the lot

May well be a thief who’s after what

You’re wearing, not your body. When one pounces,

The mugged girl cries, “That’s mine!” and the echo bounces

Round the piazza: “Give it back, that’s mine!”

While you, Venus, from your dazzling, golden shrine,

And your fountain nymphs observe the brawl

With no concern at all.

A few men are notorious bad hats,

But there are scores of false, philandering rats.

The sad stories other girls retail

Should teach you to quail

For your own safety: lock your door to a treacherous male.

Girls of Athens, don’t trust Theseus—the vow

He makes by the gods he’s broken before now;

Or you, Demophoön—

Like father, like son,

Once you left Phyllis you resigned all credit.

If a man’s made a fair offer, said it

In so many words, then promise in the same measure

And, if he pays, meet your side of the bargain of pleasure.

The girl who takes a gift and doesn’t honour

The pact could loot the shrine of Isis, give belladonna

And hemlock to a lover, cause the undying fire

Of the Vestal Virgins to expire!

I have the feeling

I’m getting out of hand. The reins, Muse! No free-wheeling!

Love should test the ground with the written word. (You’d better

Be sure the maid who takes his letter

Is trustworthy.) Read it closely, guess

Whether he’s faking or in real distress,

Then after a day or two write back—

Delay, as long as it’s short, keeps men on the rack.

On the one hand, don’t collapse without resistance,

On the other, don’t too harshly snub persistence.

Give him cause to hope and worry, then in each reply

Diminish worry, raise hope high.

You should write elegantly, yet choose

Plain words—the ones we ordinarily use

Are the best. Often a hesitant lover’s set ablaze

By a good letter; equally, a phrase

That’s barbarous or misquoted

Can spoil the image of the pretty girl who wrote it.

Even though you may not have achieved

Married status, you have men you want deceived,

So have your letters penned

By a maid or a slave, don’t trust each new boy-friend

With notes in your own hand. To hoard them, I admit,

He’d have to be a complete shit,

But they’re evidence all the same,

As danger-packed as Etna is with flame.

I’ve seen cases of wretched girls, scared pale,

Made life-slaves through such blackmail.

To me, repelling fraud by fraud makes sense—

Arms against arms are legal in self-defence.

Teach yourself the trick

Of writing in different hands (the men are sick

Who force me to give these tips!); to be safe, smooth over

The wax before use, or someone may discover

Two letters on one tablet; and address your lover

By a woman’s name—refer

Throughout to him as “her.”

[LATIN: Si licet a…]

Now, if I may, I’ll leave minor details

For bigger matters, spread my wind-filled sails.

It’s beauty’s job to soften savage moods:

White peace suits man, dark rage the beast in the woods.

Anger bloats faces—veins bulge purple, eyes

Glitter bestially, Gorgon-wise.

When Pallas saw her puffed-out cheeks in the river,

She said, “Flute, you’re not worth it. Goodbye for ever.”

How many of you pretty creatures

In a tantrum would recognise your own features

In the mirror? Pride does as much harm

To your looks as anger—love should charm

With friendly eyes. I can’t bear

A haughty, stuck-up air—

Trust one who ought to know:

In a silent stare the seeds of hatred grow.

Always return a pleasant smile or glance,

And if a man takes a chance

And makes a sign, acknowledge it with a nod.

It’s after such foreplay that the god,

Abandoning the foils, starts

To pull from his quiver the transfixing darts.

Though Ajax loved Tecmessa, I hate sad girls: a Roman

Is a laughter-lover, he likes cheerful women.

Tragic Tecmessa, tearful Andromache,

Neither of you would have been the girl for me.

If it weren’t that your children prove the fact,

I could scarcely imagine you in the sexual act.

You, lugubrious Tecmessa, never, I bet,

Called Ajax “darling boy” or “my pet.”

Who’s to forbid me to illustrate

Petty concerns with great

Examples? Why should I shun

The title of general? As an able one

Will organise his force,

Choosing officers for the colours, the foot, the horse,

So you, too, should see that you get the most

Service from us—the right man in the right post.

Let the rich man give presents, the lawyer offer support

With advice and eloquence in court:

Poets can only do their best

And send you poems—it must be confessed,

We lot are more in tune with love than all the rest.

We are your publishers, we proclaim

The adored, the beautiful. Take any well-known name—

Lycoris, Cynthia, Nemesis—we spread its fame

From east to west; why, everybody asks

Who’s the real girl that my “Corinna” masks.

A poet by nature never double-deals:

His art, his calling, shape the way he feels.

We’re innocent of ambition, don’t care what we’re paid,

Despise the Forum, turn our backs on trade;

We prefer the couch, we cultivate the shade.

But we’re easily drawn, we’re stickers, and we burn

With a staunch love—too staunch (we never learn!).

Indeed, a poet’s temperament and heart

Reflect the gentle nature of his art.

So be kind, you girls, to poets—the darlings of the nine

Muses, there’s a divine

Spark in them all. We all conceal

A god within us, we all deal

With heaven direct, from whose high places we derive

The inspiration by which we live.

It’s a crime, it’s a shame,

To look for presents from such fine spirits; all the same,

I’m sorry to say, it’s a crime all girls commit.

But do please dissemble a bit,

Don’t be transparently avaricious:

New lovers may become suspicious,

Spot the net, and bolt.

You wouldn’t put the same bridle on a colt

As you would on a trained hack;

A callow youth and a seasoned older man

Require a different hunting plan.

Suppose Love’s fresh recruit, a tenderfoot in war,

Your latest prize, has passed your bedroom door—

Let him cling to you exclusively, know you alone:

High hedges must be grown

Round tender crops. Fend off rivals; as long

As you keep him to yourself you’re in a strong

Position; power-sharing brings

Uncertain reigns to lovers and to kings.

The old soldier’s approach is gradual, prudent;

He’ll tolerate a great deal that a student

Couldn’t endure; he won’t besiege your porch,

Assault doors with a crowbar or a torch,

Attack your tender cheeks with his nails, tear

Your, or his own, clothes, or pull your hair

By the roots till you’re weeping.

That sort of behaviour’s more in keeping

With youth’s hot blood and passion.

No, he’ll bear his wounds in stoic fashion.

And yet, poor man, he’ll smoulder in his way,

Like new-felled mountain timber, or damp hay;

He’ll give a slow, sure heat, the younger lover

A prodigal blaze that’s soon over.

Either way, reach out and pick

The fruit; it won’t hang long—be quick!

[LATIN: Omnia tradantur: portas…]

I’ve unbolted the gates, our defences are down,

The enemy’s in, the secrets of the town

Are about to be betrayed! Isn’t it reasonable

To be truly false, faithfully treasonable?

Too easy giving’s a bad regimen

To nourish lasting passion. Now and again,

Vary the fun and laughter with a rebuff.

Lock him out, let him camp rough

Outside your door (“oh, cruel door!”) and plead

And threaten till he’s blue in the face. Men need

Variety, we all enjoy

The jolt of bitter flavours; sweet things cloy;

Sometimes a skiff’s upset by favouring winds:

That’s why a woman often finds

Her husband’s ardour falling below scratch—

He has too easy access, the key of the latch.

But change the picture, throw in a door barred

And a doorman with a hard

Expression repeating “No,”

And you, too, will feel desire glow.

Put down your blunt foils now and have it out

With real swords (and I’ve no doubt

My own shafts will be aimed at my own head).

When your latest catch has fallen into your bed,

Let him think that he alone has a right to be there;

Then, later, make him aware

That he has a rival, that he has to share

His privilege. His ardour will soon wane

If you leave such tactics out of your campaign.

A game horse performs best in a race

When the field’s ahead of him, and he has to chase

And overtake. Resentment fans a failing fire—

I myself, I confess, can only feel desire

Under the stimulus of some hurt.

But it mustn’t be too gross or overt:

Let your lover worry away and always suppose

Much more than he knows.

Pretend your husband’s a jealous bore, that a spy,

Some scowling slave, is keeping an eye

On all you do—and he’ll be thrilled. Unalloyed,

Unmixed with danger, pleasure’s less enjoyed.

Though you’re as free as any courtesan,

Appear scared. Though the door’s safe, have the young man

Climb in through the window, while you act afraid.

Then arrange for a well-rehearsed maid

To burst in later, crying, “All is discovered!”

And hustle the quaking boy into a cupboard.

All the same,

In case he decides the nocturnal game

Isn’t worth the candle, dilute fear with a measure

Of pure, worry-free pleasure.

[LATIN: Qua vafer eludi…]

I had half a mind to omit

An account of the various ways you can outwit

A crafty husband or get round

His vigilant bloodhound.

Husbands should be respected

By wives, and wives be properly protected—

Nobody quarrels

With the claims of modesty, law and the new morals.

But for you, a newly emancipated slave,

To have guards checking on how you behave

Is intolerable. Attend to me:

I preach the doctrine of duplicity.

Though you’re surrounded by as many spies

As Argus had eyes,

Where there’s a will there’s a way. Can a guard prevent

You writing in your bath? Or a message being sent

Via a friend, either strapped to her calf,

Or snugly tucked inside her broad breast-scarf,

Or even, with a special billet-doux,

Wedged between the sole of her foot and her shoe?

If the guard sees through these tricks, she can go one better:

Offer her back to write on, be your letter.

Safe and undetectable by the eye

Is writing in milk—later, just apply

A sprinkling of coal-dust and presto! you can read.

Or write in oil of linseed

Oozing from a stalk of flax—

And your words are invisible on what seems blank wax.

Think how hard

Acrisius tried with Danaë—all access barred

But she made him a shocked grandfather. What can a guard

Do when Rome’s full of theatres, girls haunt the races,

Or shake the rattle of Isis and worship in places

Where men can’t follow (for example,

The Good Goddess’s temple

Which bans all male eyes from the rites

Except for her own chosen acolytes)?

When so many public baths provide

Clandestine fun for girls, while the guards outside

Look after their clothes? When a sly friend

Will always on request pretend

She’s unwell, yet be well enough to lend

The bed you need? How can a guard win

When there are more ways than a door to get in,

And the very words “duplicate key”

Instruct us in duplicity?

You can deal with a guard—fuddle him with wine

(Cheap Spanish will do fine);

There are drugs, too, which bring on

Deep sleep, total oblivion;

Or your friend can seduce the pest and make the fun

Last long enough for your business to get done.

But why tediously describe

These little dodges when the smallest bribe

Will do the trick? Believe me, bribes will buy

Favours not just on earth, but in the sky;

Even Jupiter lifts

His thundercloud when wooed with gifts.

When fools love bribes, what’s the wise man to do?

Take them, of course, and keep his mouth shut too.

But buy your guard outright, once and for all:

What he granted then will always be on call.

I remember grumbling once that a man can’t trust

His close friends, but it’s just

As true of a woman. If you believe

Too easily, if you’re naive,

Other women will snatch

The fruit in your orchard, others hunt and catch

Your coveted hare.

That helpful girl with a room and bed to spare

Has more than once, let me tell you, been in there

With me, alone. And beware

Of maids who are beauties—

I’ve often known them take on their employer’s duties.

[LATIN: Quo feror insanus…]

I’m rambling wildly. What’s the sense

Of charging the foe chest bare, with no defence?

Why betray myself with my own evidence?

A bird doesn’t show the fowlers his hiding-place,

Or a hind teach deer-hounds how to chase.

But to hell with male advantage! I shall keep my side

Of the bargain, I’ll provide

Swords for those women of Lemnos cursed with stinking breath,

Even at the risk of my own death.

Make us believe that we’re desired:

It’s easy—men are suckers when their fancy’s fired.

If your lover’s late, throw him a sweet glance, sigh

Dramatically, deeply, ask him why,

Then begin to cry

As though in a jealous passion—and then

Claw his face with your nails. By now most men

Will be convinced, feel sorry for you, conclude,

“She must be mad about me—hence this mood.”

(If he happens to be some overdressed ass

Who likes what he sees in the looking-glass,

He won’t find anything odd

In a goddess falling in love with a god.)

But however badly he treats you, keep your cool;

If he hints at a mistress, don’t be a fool

And leap to conclusions, reflect

On the dreadful case of Procris, too quick to suspect.

[LATIN: Est prope purpureos…]

There’s a sacred fountain

On the slopes of that flowery, sunset-violet mountain

Hymettus. There the grass grows green and lush,

Trees form a low copse, the arbutus bush

Covers the turf, the air is redolent

Of rosemary, bay and myrtle scent,

Thick-leaved box-trees abound, fragile tamarisks, fine

Lucerne, and the domestic pine.

All these varieties of leaves

Sway and dance and the tall grass heaves

In the good, warm winds blowing from the west.

Here Cephalus used to enjoy a rest—

Huntsmen dismissed, tired of the chase,

He often favoured this siesta place.

“Come to me, fickle Aura,” he’d entreat

The breeze. “Come to my breast, relieve my heat!”

Some stupid busybody overheard

What he sighed and reported it, word for word,

To his nervous wife. Procris, in the belief

That Aura was a rival, speechless with grief,

Fainted, and lay as pale as the last leaf

When early winter’s breath makes the vines wince,

Pale as the ripe, bough-bending quince,

Pale as the berry,

Not yet ripe for our palates, of the cornel cherry.

When she returned to consciousness,

She ripped her delicate dress,

Tore her innocent cheeks with her nails and, hair streaming,

Ran through the streets like a god-crazed maenad, screaming,

Till she reached Hymettus. She left her maids below,

And climbed and bravely entered the wood alone, tiptoe.

What went on in your half-mad mind while you lurked

In that wood, Procris? What fiery passions worked

On your heart? “Aura, whoever she may be,

Is coming at any moment, I shall see

Their shame with my own eyes,” you thought.

One minute you were glad you’d come—they’d be caught;

The next you were sorry—

You didn’t really want to find your quarry.

Love vacillated, your heart veered.

Place, name, witness, they all appeared

Conclusive; besides, the mind

Always believes what it’s afraid to find.

When you saw the grass impressed

By a body’s weight, you guessed

The worst, your heart beat faster, lurched in your breast.

Look, it is noon, the shadows are short-drawn,

The half-way point dividing dusk and dawn,

And Cephalus, Hermes’ son, fresh from the chase,

Bathes in spring water his flushed face

(Procris crouched tensely in her hiding-place),

Stretches himself on the usual grassy spot

And sighs, “Come, Aura. I’m so hot!

Sweet breeze, blow!” When the poor girl learned

The happy truth, her wits, her colour returned,

And she sprang up, burst through the bushes and ran

To be embraced by her man.

But he, supposing he’d heard a deer,

With the zest of youth sprang to his feet and grabbed his spear.

Fool, what are you doing? Throw away

Your weapon—that’s no hunter’s prey!—

Too late! The gods above

Weep—with your spear you’ve struck the woman you love!

“Ah, Cephalus,” she cried, “you’ve pierced the part

You’ve pierced so many times—my loving heart.

Untimely to my grave I go,

But since at last I know

That I’m uninjured by a rival’s hate,

You, earth, will lie on me with far less weight.

My spirit’s leaving now for the air

Whose name once caused me such despair.

I’m faint, I’m failing, my life’s sands

Are running out … Close my eyes with your dear hands …”

He clasps her in the throes of death,

Raining tears on the cruel wound. The rash girl’s breath

Falters, and as her spirit slowly slips

From her breast it’s caught on her ill-starred lover’s lips.

[LATIN: Sed repetamus opus…]

But back to business. If I’m to limp to port

In my tired ship, I must deal with facts and make them short.

So you’re eager for me to escort

You to parties now, and in that department, too,

Advise you what to do?

Well, arrive late, when the lamps are lit,

And make a graceful entrance: it

Adds to your charm if you’ve been “delayed”

(Unpunctuality has often played

The role of bawd); even if you’re plain

Tipsy men will think you’re great, and then again,

The shadows will hide your faults. Handle your food

Tidily, good

Table manners matter—it’s a disgrace

To smear sauce all over your face.

Don’t snack at home first; equally, don’t indulge in greed:

Eat just a little less than you need.

If Paris had ever seen

His Helen guzzling, he’d have thought, “I’ve been

A fool—my prize looks quite obscene.”

It’s far more suitable, I think,

And more attractive, for a girl to drink,

For Cupid and Bacchus, love and wine,

Tend to combine

Successfully. Last, if you have a strong head, you’ll have no trouble

With your brain and your legs—but on no account see double.

A drunk, sprawling woman’s a revolting sight;

Whoever has her, serve her right.

And when the table’s cleared, don’t nod off, keep

Alert—gross things can happen to a girl asleep.

[LATIN: Ulteriora pudet docuisse…]

The rest I blush to write, but kind Venus can claim,

“I’ve a special concern for what you’re shy to name.”

Each woman should know herself, and in the act of sex

Adapt her body for the best effects.

No one method is best

For everybody. If you’re blessed

With a pretty face, lie supine in the sack;

If you’re proud of your back,

Then perform the act

Like a beast, two-backed,

And offer a lovely rear view to beholders.

Milanion had Atalanta’s legs on his shoulders—

That’s a good way

For elegant legs to come into play.

A small woman should sit astride

(Andromache, Hector’s Theban bride,

Was too tall for this cockhorse jockey’s ride).

If you’ve fine, long flanks, kneel on the bed,

Neck arched, head

Back-tilted. If you’ve perfect breasts and youthful thighs,

Have your lover stand, and you lie down slantwise.

Never blush to loosen your hair and let it float

Wild, like a maenad’s, round your arching throat.

If your belly shows stretch-marks, then turn over

And offer your lover

A rear engagement, as the Parthian cavalry might.

Love has a thousand postures to delight:

A simple one, and the least physically trying,

Is on the right side, half-sitting, half-lying.

But neither the oracle of Ammon or Apollo

Can give you better advice to follow

Than my Muse can. Trust me;

My long experience of the art deserves to be

Trusted—these verses are truth’s guarantee.

A fucked woman should melt to her core, and the pleasure

Be felt by both in equal measure.

As background music to your games,

Whisper endearments, use pet names,

Dirty words, even.

If nature hasn’t given

You the knack of orgasm, just make it

Sound as if you were coming, fake it.

(Unlucky the one who’s numb there, not to enjoy

What should be the birthright of both girl and boy.)

But take care that your bluff

Isn’t seen through. Lay on convincing stuff—

Writhing body, rolling eyes,

Gasps and ecstatic cries,

All the signs of pleasure—though, I’ll risk saying it,

That secret part has its way of betraying it.

Girls who demand an after-sex gift can’t expect

Their “pretty pleases” to have any effect.

Oh, and don’t bare all the windows to the light:

Much of your body’s best kept out of sight.

[LATIN: Lusus habet finem…]

Our sport is ended. It’s high time

To unyoke the swans and climb

Down from my poet’s car. As the young men did before,

Now let my girl-disciples score

An inscription on their trophies, and once more

Let the inscription go:

“Ovid, our master, taught us all we know.”

[*] “The essence of art is to conceal art.”

THE ART OF LOVE

[LATIN].

LIBER PRIMUS

[ENGLISH: If any Roman…]

Siquis in hoc artem populo non novit amandi,

Hoc legat et lecto carmine doctus amet.

Arte citae veloque rates remoque moventur,

Arte leves currus: arte regendus amor.

5

Curribus Automedon lentisque erat aptus habenis,

Tiphys in Haemonia puppe magister erat:

Me Venus artificem tenero praefecit Amori;

Tiphys et Automedon dicar Amoris ego.

Ille quidem ferus est et qui mihi saepe repugnet:

10

Sed puer est, aetas mollis et apta regi.

Phillyrides puerum cithara perfecit Achillem,

Atque animos placida contudit arte feros.

Qui totiens socios, totiens exterruit hostes,

Creditur annosum pertimuisse senem.

15

Quas Hector sensurus erat, poscente magistro

Verberibus iussas praebuit ille manus.

Aeacidae Chiron, ego sum praeceptor Amoris:

Saevus uterque puer, natus uterque dea.

Sed tamen et tauri cervix oneratur aratro,

20

Frenaque magnanimi dente teruntur equi;

Et mihi cedet Amor, quamvis mea vulneret arcu

Pectora, iactatas excutiatque faces.

Quo me fixit Amor, quo me violentius ussit,

Hoc melior facti vulneris ultor ero:

25

Non ego, Phoebe, datas a te mihi mentiar artes,

Nec nos aëriae voce monemur avis,

Nec mihi sunt visae Clio Cliusque sorores

Servanti pecudes vallibus, Ascra, tuis:

Usus opus movet hoc: vati parete perito;

30

Vera canam: coeptis, mater Amoris, ades!

Este procul, vittae tenues, insigne pudoris,

Quaeque tegis medios, instita longa, pedes.

Nos venerem tutam concessaque furta canemus,

Inque meo nullum carmine crimen erit.

[ENGLISH: Your first job…]

35

Principio, quod amare velis, reperire labora,

Qui nova nunc primum miles in arma venis.

Proximus huic labor est placitam exorare puellam:

Tertius, ut longo tempore duret amor.

Hic modus, haec nostro signabitur area curru:

40

Haec erit admissa meta terenda rota.

[ENGLISH: While you’re still…]

Dum licet, et loris passim potes ire solutis,

Elige cui dicas “tu mihi sola places.”

Haec tibi non tenues veniet delapsa per auras:

Quaerenda est oculis apta puella tuis.

45

Scit bene venator, cervis ubi retia tendat,

Scit bene, qua frendens valle moretur aper;

Aucupibus noti frutices; qui sustinet hamos,

Novit quae multo pisce natentur aquae:

Tu quoque, materiam longo qui quaeris amori,

50

Ante frequens quo sit disce puella loco.

Non ego quaerentem vento dare vela iubebo,

Nec tibi, ut invenias, longa terenda via est.

Andromedan Perseus nigris portarit ab Indis,

Raptaque sit Phrygio Graia puella viro,

55

Tot tibi tamque dabit formosas Roma puellas,

“Haec habet” ut dicas “quicquid in orbe fuit.”

Gargara quot segetes, quot habet Methymna racemos,

Aequore quot pisces, fronde teguntur aves,

Quot caelum stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas:

60

Mater in Aeneae constitit urbe sui.

Seu caperis primis et adhuc crescentibus annis,

Ante oculos veniet vera puella tuos:

Sive cupis iuvenem, iuvenes tibi mille placebunt.

Cogeris voti nescius esse tui:

65

Seu te forte iuvat sera et sapientior aetas,

Hoc quoque, crede mihi, plenius agmen erit.

[ENGLISH: When the sun’s…]

Tu modo Pompeia lentus spatiare sub umbra,

Cum sol Herculei terga leonis adit:

Aut ubi muneribus nati sua munera mater

70

Addidit, externo marmore dives opus.

Nec tibi vitetur quae, priscis sparsa tabellis,

Porticus auctoris Livia nomen habet:

Quaque parare necem miseris patruelibus ausae

Belides et stricto stat ferus ense pater.

75

Nec te praetereat Veneri ploratus Adonis,

Cultaque Iudaeo septima sacra Syro.

Nec fuge linigerae Memphitica templa iuvencae:

Multas illa facit, quod fuit ipsa Iovi.

Et fora conveniunt (quis credere possit?) amori:

80

Flammaque in arguto saepe reperta foro:

Subdita qua Veneris facto de marmore templo

Appias expressis aëra pulsat aquis,

Illo saepe loco capitur consultus Amori,

Quique aliis cavit, non cavet ipse sibi:

85

Illo saepe loco desunt sua verba diserto,

Resque novae veniunt, causaque agenda sua est.

Hunc Venus e templis, quae sunt confinia, ridet:

Qui modo patronus, nunc cupit esse cliens.

[ENGLISH: Above all, comb…]

Sed tu praecipue curvis venare theatris:

90

Haec loca sunt voto fertiliora tuo.

Illic invenies quod ames, quod ludere possis,

Quodque semel tangas, quodque tenere velis.

Ut redit itque frequens longum formica per agmen,

Granifero solitum cum vehit ore cibum,

95

Aut ut apes saltusque suos et olentia nactae

Pascua per flores et thyma summa volant,

Sic ruit ad celebres cultissima femina ludos:

Copia iudicium saepe morata meum est.

Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae:

100

Ille locus casti damna pudoris habet.

Primus sollicitos fecisti, Romule, ludos,

Cum iuvit viduos rapta Sabina viros.

Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela theatro,

Nec fuerant liquido pulpita rubra croco;

105

Illic quas tulerant nemorosa Palatia, frondes

Simpliciter positae, scena sine arte fuit;

In gradibus sedit populus de caespite factis,

Qualibet hirsutas fronde tegente comas.

Respiciunt, oculisque notant sibi quisque puellam

110

Quam velit, et tacito pectore multa movent.

Dumque, rudem praebente modum tibicine Tusco,

Ludius aequatam ter pede pulsat humum,

In medio plausu (plausus tunc arte carebant)

Rex populo praedae signa petita dedit.

115

Protinus exiliunt, animum clamore fatentes,

Virginibus cupidas iniciuntque manus.

Ut fugiunt aquilas, timidissima turba, columbae,

Ut fugit invisos agna novella lupos:

Sic illae timuere viros sine more ruentes;

120

Constitit in nulla qui fuit ante color.

Nam timor unus erat, facies non una timoris:

Pars laniat crines, pars sine mente sedet;

Altera maesta silet, frustra vocat altera matrem:

Haec queritur, stupet haec; haec manet, illa fugit;

125

Ducuntur raptae, genialis praeda, puellae,

Et potuit multas ipse decere timor.

Siqua repugnarat nimium comitemque negabat,

Sublatam cupido vir tulit ipse sinu,

Atque ita “quid teneros lacrimis corrumpis ocellos?

130

Quod matri pater est, hoc tibi” dixit “ero.”

Romule, militibus scisti dare commoda solus.

Haec mihi si dederis commoda, miles ero.

Scilicet ex illo sollemnia more theatra

Nunc quoque formosis insidiosa manent.

135

Nec te nobilium fugiat certamen equorum;

Multa capax populi commoda Circus habet.

Nil opus est digitis, per quos arcana loquaris,

Nec tibi per nutus accipienda nota est:

Proximus a domina, nullo prohibente, sedeto,

140

Iunge tuum lateri qua potes usque latus;

Et bene, quod cogit, si nolis, linea iungi,

Quod tibi tangenda est lege puella loci.

Hic tibi quaeratur socii sermonis origo,

Et moveant primos publica verba sonos.

145

Cuius equi veniant, facito, studiose, requiras:

Nec mora, quisquis erit, cui favet illa, fave.

At cum pompa frequens caelestibus ibit eburnis,

Tu Veneri dominae plaude favente manu;

Utque fit, in gremium pulvis si forte puellae

150

Deciderit, digitis excutiendus erit:

Etsi nullus erit pulvis, tamen excute nullum:

Quaelibet officio causa sit apta tuo.

Pallia si terra nimium demissa iacebunt,

Collige, et inmunda sedulus effer humo;

155

Protinus, officii pretium, patiente puella

Contingent oculis crura videnda tuis.

Respice praeterea, post vos quicumque sedebit,

Ne premat opposito mollia terga genu.

Parva leves capiunt animos: fuit utile multis

160

Pulvinum facili composuisse manu.

Profuit et tenui ventos movisse tabella,

Et cava sub tenerum scamna dedisse pedem.

[ENGLISH: Such openings the…]

Hos aditus Circusque novo praebebit amori,

Sparsaque sollicito tristis harena foro.

165

Illa saepe puer Veneris pugnavit harena,

Et qui spectavit vulnera, vulnus habet.

Dum loquitur tangitque manum poscitque libellum

Et quaerit posito pignore, vincat uter,

Saucius ingemuit telumque volatile sensit,

170

Et pars spectati muneris ipse fuit.

[ENGLISH: When Caesar staged…]

Quid, modo cum belli navalis imagine Caesar

Persidas induxit Cecropiasque rates?

Nempe ab utroque mari iuvenes, ab utroque puellae

Venere, atque ingens orbis in Urbe fuit.

175

Quis non invenit turba, quod amaret, in illa?

Eheu, quam multos advena torsit amor!

[ENGLISH: Now Caesar’s planning…]

Ecce, parat Caesar domito quod defuit orbi

Addere: nunc, oriens ultime, noster eris.

Parthe, dabis poenas: Crassi gaudete sepulti,

180

Signaque barbaricas non bene passa manus.

Ultor adest, primisque ducem profitetur in annis,

Bellaque non puero tractat agenda puer.

Parcite natales timidi numerare deorum:

Caesaribus virtus contigit ante diem.

185

Ingenium caeleste suis velocius annis

Surgit, et ignavae fert male damna morae.

Parvus erat, manibusque duos Tirynthius angues

Pressit, et in cunis iam Iove dignus erat.

Nunc quoque qui puer es, quantus tum, Bacche, fuisti,

190

Cum timuit thyrsos India victa tuos?

Auspiciis annisque patris, puer, arma movebis,

Et vinces annis auspiciisque patris:

Tale rudimentum tanto sub nomine debes,

Nunc iuvenum princeps, deinde future senum;

195

Cum tibi sint fratres, fratres ulciscere laesos:

Cumque pater tibi sit, iura tuere patris.

Induit arma tibi genitor patriaeque tuusque:

Hostis ab invito regna parente rapit;

Tu pia tela feres, sceleratas ille sagittas:

200

Stabit pro signis iusque piumque tuis.

Vincuntur causa Parthi: vincantur et armis;

Eoas Latio dux meus addat opes.

Marsque pater Caesarque pater, date numen eunti:

Nam deus e vobis alter es, alter eris.

205

Auguror, en, vinces; votivaque carmina reddam,

Et magno nobis ore sonandus eris.

Consistes, aciemque meis hortabere verbis;

O desint animis ne mea verba tuis!

Tergaque Parthorum Romanaque pectora dicam,

210

Telaque, ab averso quae iacit hostis equo.

Qui fugis ut vincas, quid victo, Parthe, relinquis?

Parthe, malum iam nunc Mars tuus omen habet.

Ergo erit illa dies, qua tu, pulcherrime rerum,

Quattuor in niveis aureus ibis equis.

215

Ibunt ante duces onerati colla catenis,

Ne possint tuti, qua prius, esse fuga.

Spectabunt laeti iuvenes mixtaeque puellae,

Diffundetque animos omnibus ista dies.

Atque aliqua ex illis cum regum nomina quaeret,

220

Quae loca, qui montes, quaeve ferantur aquae,

Omnia responde, nec tantum siqua rogabit;

Et quae nescieris, ut bene nota refer.

Hic est Euphrates, praecinctus harundine frontem:

Cui coma dependet caerula, Tigris erit.

225

Hos facito Armenios; haec est Danaëia Persis:

Urbs in Achaemeniis vallibus ista fuit.

Ille vel ille, duces; et erunt quae nomina dicas,

Si poteris, vere, si minus, apta tamen.

[ENGLISH: Banquets give openings…]

Dant etiam positis aditum convivia mensis:

230

Est aliquid praeter vina, quod inde petas.

Saepe illic positi teneris adducta lacertis

Purpureus Bacchi cornua pressit Amor:

Vinaque cum bibulas sparsere Cupidinis alas,

Permanet et capto stat gravis ille loco.

235

Ille quidem pennas velociter excutit udas:

Sed tamen et spargi pectus amore nocet.

Vina parant animos faciuntque caloribus aptos:

Cura fugit multo diluiturque mero.

Tunc veniunt risus, tum pauper cornua sumit,

240

Tum dolor et curae rugaque frontis abit.

Tunc aperit mentes aevo rarissima nostro

Simplicitas, artes excutiente deo.

Illic saepe animos iuvenum rapuere puellae,

Et Venus in vinis ignis in igne fuit.

245

Hic tu fallaci nimium ne crede lucernae:

Iudicio formae noxque merumque nocent.

Luce deas caeloque Paris spectavit aperto,

Cum dixit Veneri “vincis utramque, Venus.”

Nocte latent mendae, vitioque ignoscitur omni,

250

Horaque formosam quamlibet illa facit.

Consule de gemmis, de tincta murice lana,

Consule de facie corporibusque diem.

[ENGLISH: But why count…]

Quid tibi femineos coetus venatibus aptos

Enumerem? numero cedet harena meo.

255

Quid referam Baias, praetextaque litora velis,

Et quae de calido sulpure fumat aqua?

Hinc aliquis vulnus referens in pectore dixit

“Non haec, ut fama est, unda salubris erat.”

Ecce suburbanae templum nemorale Dianae

260

Partaque per gladios regna nocente manu:

Illa, quod est virgo, quod tela Cupidinis odit,

Multa dedit populo vulnera, multa dabit.

[ENGLISH: Having carried you…]

Hactenus, unde legas quod ames, ubi retia ponas,

Praecipit imparibus vecta Thalea rotis.

265

Nunc tibi, quae placuit, quas sit capienda per artes,

Dicere praecipuae molior artis opus.

Quisquis ubique, viri, dociles advertite mentes,

Pollicitisque favens, vulgus, adeste meis.

[ENGLISH: First and foremost…]

Prima tuae menti veniat fiducia, cunctas

270

Posse capi; capies, tu modo tende plagas.

Vere prius volucres taceant, aestate cicadae,

Maenalius lepori det sua terga canis,

Femina quam iuveni blande temptata repugnet:

Haec quoque, quam poteris credere nolle, volet.

275

Utque viro furtiva venus, sic grata puellae:

Vir male dissimulat: tectius illa cupit.

Conveniat maribus, ne quam nos ante rogemus,

Femina iam partes victa rogantis agat.

Mollibus in pratis admugit femina tauro:

280

Femina cornipedi semper adhinnit equo.

Parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido:

Legitimum finem flamma virilis habet.

Byblida quid referam, vetito quae fratris amore

Arsit et est laqueo fortiter ulta nefas?

285

Myrrha patrem, sed non qua filia debet, amavit,

Et nunc obducto cortice pressa latet:

Illius lacrimis, quas arbore fundit odora,

Unguimur, et dominae nomina gutta tenet.

Forte sub umbrosis nemorosae vallibus Idae

290

Candidus, armenti gloria, taurus erat,

Signatus tenui media inter cornua nigro:

Una fuit labes, cetera lactis erant.

Illum Cnosiadesque Cydoneaeque iuvencae

Optarunt tergo sustinuisse suo.

295

Pasiphaë fieri gaudebat adultera tauri;

Invida formosas oderat illa boves.

Nota cano: non hoc, centum quae sustinet urbes,

Quamvis sit mendax, Creta negare potest.

Ipsa novas frondes et prata tenerrima tauro

300

Fertur inadsueta subsecuisse manu.

It comes armentis, nec ituram cura moratur

Coniugis, et Minos a bove victus erat.

Quo tibi, Pasiphaë, pretiosas sumere vestes?

Ille tuus nullas sentit adulter opes.

305

Quid tibi cum speculo, montana armenta petenti?

Quid totiens positas fingis, inepta, comas?

Crede tamen speculo, quod te negat esse iuvencam.

Quam cuperes fronti cornua nata tuae!

Sive placet Minos, nullus quaeratur adulter:

310

Sive virum mavis fallere, falle viro!

In nemus et saltus thalamo regina relicto

Fertur, ut Aonio concita Baccha deo.

A, quotiens vaccam vultu spectavit iniquo,

Et dixit “domino cur placet ista meo?

315

Aspice, ut ante ipsum teneris exultet in herbis:

Nec dubito, quin se stulta decere putet.”

Dixit, et ingenti iamdudum de grege duci

Iussit et inmeritam sub iuga curva trahi,

Aut cadere ante aras commentaque sacra coegit,

320

Et tenuit laeta paelicis exta manu.

Paelicibus quotiens placavit numina caesis,

Atque ait, exta tenens “ite, placete meo!”

Et modo se Europen fieri, modo postulat Io,

Altera quod bos est, altera vecta bove.

325

Hanc tamen implevit, vacca deceptus acerna,

Dux gregis, et partu proditus auctor erat.

Cressa Thyesteo si se abstinuisset amore

(Et quantum est uno posse carere viro?),

Non medium rupisset iter, curruque retorto

330

Auroram versis Phoebus adisset equis.

Filia purpureos Niso furata capillos

Pube premit rabidos inguinibusque canes.

Qui Martem terra, Neptunum effugit in undis,

Coniugis Atrides victima dira fuit.

335

Cui non defleta est Ephyraeae flamma Creüsae,

Et nece natorum sanguinolenta parens?

Flevit Amyntorides per inania lumina Phoenix:

Hippolytum pavidi diripuistis equi.

Quid fodis inmeritis, Phineu, sua lumina natis?

340

Poena reversura est in caput ista tuum.

Omnia feminea sunt ista libidine mota;

Acrior est nostra, plusque furoris habet.

Ergo age, ne dubita cunctas sperare puellas;

Vix erit e multis, quae neget, una, tibi.

345

Quae dant quaeque negant, gaudent tamen esse rogatae:

Ut iam fallaris, tuta repulsa tua est.

Sed cur fallaris, cum sit nova grata voluptas

Et capiant animos plus aliena suis?

Fertilior seges est alienis semper in agris,

350

Vicinumque pecus grandius uber habet.

[ENGLISH: But first get…]

Sed prius ancillam captandae nosse puellae

Cura sit: accessus molliet illa tuos.

Proxima consiliis dominae sit ut illa, videto,

Neve parum tacitis conscia fida iocis.

355

Hanc tu pollicitis, hanc tu corrumpe rogando:

Quod petis, ex facili, si volet illa, feres.

Illa leget tempus (medici quoque tempora servant)

Quo facilis dominae mens sit et apta capi.

Mens erit apta capi tum, cum laetissima rerum

360

Ut seges in pingui luxuriabit humo.

Pectora dum gaudent nec sunt adstricta dolore,

Ipsa patent, blanda tum subit arte Venus.

Tum, cum tristis erat, defensa est Ilios armis:

Militibus gravidum laeta recepit equum.

365

Tum quoque temptanda est, cum paelice laesa dolebit:

Tum facies opera, ne sit inulta, tua.

Hanc matutinos pectens ancilla capillos

Incitet, et velo remigis addat opem,

Et secum tenui suspirans murmure dicat

370

“At, puto, non poteras ipsa referre vicem.”

Tum de te narret, tum persuadentia verba

Addat, et insano iuret amore mori.

Sed propera, ne vela cadant auraeque residant:

Ut fragilis glacies, interit ira mora.

375

Quaeris, an hanc ipsam prosit violare ministram?

Talibus admissis alea grandis inest.

Haec a concubitu fit sedula, tardior illa,

Haec dominae munus te parat, illa sibi.

Casus in eventu est: licet hic indulgeat ausis,

380

Consilium tamen est abstinuisse meum.

Non ego per praeceps et acuta cacumina vadam,

Nec iuvenum quisquam me duce captus erit.

Si tamen illa tibi, dum dat recipitque tabellas,

Corpore, non tantum sedulitate placet,

385

Fac domina potiare prius, comes illa sequatur:

Non tibi ab ancilla est incipienda venus.

Hoc unum moneo, siquid modo creditur arti,

Nec mea dicta rapax per mare ventus agit:

Aut non rem temptes aut perfice; tollitur index,

390

Cum semel in partem criminis ipsa venit.

Non avis utiliter viscatis effugit alis;

Non bene de laxis cassibus exit aper.

Saucius arrepto piscis teneatur ab hamo:

Perprime temptatam, nec nisi victor abi.

395

Tunc neque te prodet communi noxia culpa,

Factaque erunt dominae dictaque nota tibi.

Sed bene celetur: bene si celabitur index,

Notitiae suberit semper amica tuae.

[ENGLISH: There’s a mistaken…]

Tempora qui solis operosa colentibus arva,

400

Fallitur, et nautis aspicienda putat;

Nec semper credenda ceres fallacibus arvis,

Nec semper viridi concava puppis aquae,

Nec teneras semper tutum captare puellas:

Saepe dato melius tempore fiet idem.

405

Sive dies suberit natalis, sive Kalendae,

Quas Venerem Marti continuasse iuvat,

Sive erit ornatus non ut fuit ante sigillis,

Sed regum positas Circus habebit opes,

Differ opus: tunc tristis hiems, tunc Pliades instant,

410

Tunc tener aequorea mergitur Haedus aqua;

Tunc bene desinitur: tunc siquis creditur alto,

Vix tenuit lacerae naufraga membra ratis.

Tu licet incipias qua flebilis Allia luce

Vulneribus Latiis sanguinolenta fluit,

415

Quaque die redeunt, rebus minus apta gerendis,

Culta Palaestino septima festa Syro.

Magna superstitio tibi sit natalis amicae:

Quaque aliquid dandum est, illa sit atra dies.

Cum bene vitaris, tamen auferet; invenit artem

420

Femina, qua cupidi carpat amantis opes.

Institor ad dominam veniet discinctus emacem,

Expediet merces teque sedente suas:

Quas illa, inspicias, sapere ut videare, rogabit:

Oscula deinde dabit; deinde rogabit, emas.

425

Hoc fore contentam multos iurabit in annos,

Nunc opus esse sibi, nunc bene dicet emi.

Si non esse domi, quos des, causabere nummos,

Littera poscetur—ne didicisse iuvet.

Quid, quasi natali cum poscit munera libo,

430

Et, quotiens opus est, nascitur illa, sibi?

Quid, cum mendaci damno maestissima plorat,

Elapsusque cava fingitur aure lapis?

Multa rogant utenda dari, data reddere nolunt:

Perdis, et in damno gratia nulla tuo.

435

Non mihi, sacrilegas meretricum ut persequar artes,

Cum totidem linguis sint satis ora decem.

[ENGLISH: Let the wax…]

Cera vadum temptet, rasis infusa tabellis:

Cera tuae primum conscia mentis eat.

Blanditias ferat illa tuas imitataque amantem

440

Verba; nec exiguas, quisquis es, adde preces.

Hectora donavit Priamo prece motus Achilles;

Flectitur iratus voce rogante deus.

Promittas facito: quid enim promittere laedit?

Pollicitis dives quilibet esse potest.

445

Spes tenet in tempus, semel est si credita, longum:

Illa quidem fallax, sed tamen apta dea est.

Si dederis aliquid, poteris ratione relinqui:

Praeteritum tulerit, perdideritque nihil.

At quod non dederis, semper videare daturus:

450

Sic dominum sterilis saepe fefellit ager:

Sic, ne perdiderit, non cessat perdere lusor,

Et revocat cupidas alea saepe manus.

Hoc opus, hic labor est, primo sine munere iungi;

Ne dederit gratis quae dedit, usque dabit.

455

Ergo eat et blandis peraretur littera verbis,

Exploretque animos, primaque temptet iter.

Littera Cydippen pomo perlata fefellit,

Insciaque est verbis capta puella suis.

[ENGLISH: Young Romans, study…]

Disce bonas artes, moneo, Romana iuventus,

460

Non tantum trepidos ut tueare reos;

Quam populus iudexque gravis lectusque senatus,

Tam dabit eloquio victa puella manus.

Sed lateant vires, nec sis in fronte disertus;

Effugiant voces verba molesta tuae.

465

Quis, nisi mentis inops, tenerae declamat amicae?

Saepe valens odii littera causa fuit.

Sit tibi credibilis sermo consuetaque verba,

Blanda tamen, praesens ut videare loqui.

Si non accipiet scriptum, inlectumque remittet,

470

Lecturam spera, propositumque tene.

Tempore difficiles veniunt ad aratra iuvenci,

Tempore lenta pati frena docentur equi:

Ferreus adsiduo consumitur anulus usu,

Interit adsidua vomer aduncus humo.

475

Quid magis est saxo durum, quid mollius unda?

Dura tamen molli saxa cavantur aqua.

Penelopen ipsam, persta modo, tempore vinces:

Capta vides sero Pergama, capta tamen.

Legerit, et nolit rescribere? cogere noli:

480

Tu modo blanditias fac legat usque tuas.

Quae voluit legisse, volet rescribere lectis:

Per numeros venient ista gradusque suos.

Forsitan et primo veniet tibi littera tristis,

Quaeque roget, ne se sollicitare velis.

485

Quod rogat illa, timet; quod non rogat, optat, ut instes;

Insequere, et voti postmodo compos eris.

[ENGLISH: Meanwhile, if she’s…]

Interea, sive illa toro resupina feretur,

Lecticam dominae dissimulanter adi,

Neve aliquis verbis odiosas offerat auris,

490

Qua potes ambiguis callidus abde notis.

Seu pedibus vacuis illi spatiosa teretur

Porticus, hic socias tu quoque iunge moras:

Et modo praecedas facito, modo terga sequaris,

Et modo festines, et modo lentus eas:

495

Nec tibi de mediis aliquot transire columnas

Sit pudor, aut lateri continuasse latus;

Nec sine te curvo sedeat speciosa theatro:

Quod spectes, umeris adferet illa suis.

Illam respicias, illam mirere licebit:

500

Multa supercilio, multa loquare notis.

Et plaudas, aliquam mimo saltante puellam:

Et faveas illi, quisquis agatur amans.

Cum surgit, surges; donec sedet illa, sedebis;

Arbitrio dominae tempora perde tuae.

[ENGLISH: Don’t torture your…]

505

Sed tibi nec ferro placeat torquere capillos,

Nec tua mordaci pumice crura teras.

Ista iube faciant, quorum Cybeleïa mater

Concinitur Phrygiis exululata modis.

Forma viros neglecta decet; Minoida Theseus

510

Abstulit, a nulla tempora comptus acu.

Hippolytum Phaedra, nec erat bene cultus, amavit;

Cura deae silvis aptus Adonis erat.

Munditie placeant, fuscentur corpora Campo:

Sit bene conveniens et sine labe toga:

515

Lingula ne rigeat, careant rubigine dentes,

Nec vagus in laxa pes tibi pelle natet:

Nec male deformet rigidos tonsura capillos:

Sit coma, sit trita barba resecta manu.

Et nihil emineant, et sint sine sordibus ungues:

520

Inque cava nullus stet tibi nare pilus.

Nec male odorati sit tristis anhelitus oris:

Nec laedat naris virque paterque gregis.

Cetera lascivae faciant, concede, puellae,

Et siquis male vir quaerit habere virum.

[ENGLISH: Lo, Bacchus summons…]

525

Ecce, suum vatem Liber vocat; hic quoque amantes

Adiuvat, et flammae, qua calet ipse, favet.

Cnosis in ignotis amens errabat harenis,

Qua brevis aequoreis Dia feritur aquis.

Utque erat e somno tunica velata recincta,

530

Nuda pedem, croceas inreligata comas,

Thesea crudelem surdas clamabat ad undas,

Indigno teneras imbre rigante genas.

Clamabat, flebatque simul, sed utrumque decebat;

Non facta est lacrimis turpior illa suis.

535

Iamque iterum tundens mollissima pectora palmis

“Perfidus ille abiit; quid mihi fiet?” ait.

“Quid mihi fiet?” ait: sonuerunt cymbala toto

Litore, et adtonita tympana pulsa manu.

Excidit illa metu, rupitque novissima verba;

540

Nullus in exanimi corpore sanguis erat.

Ecce Mimallonides sparsis in terga capillis:

Ecce leves satyri, praevia turba dei:

Ebrius, ecce, senex pando Silenus asello

Vix sedet, et pressas continet ante iubas.

545

Dum sequitur Bacchas, Bacchae fugiuntque petuntque

Quadrupedem ferula dum malus urget eques,

In caput aurito cecidit delapsus asello:

Clamarunt satyri “surge age, surge, pater.”

Iam deus in curru, quem summum texerat uvis,

550

Tigribus adiunctis aurea lora dabat:

Et color et Theseus et vox abiere puellae:

Terque fugam petiit, terque retenta metu est.

Horruit, ut graciles, agitat quas ventus, aristae,

Ut levis in madida canna palude tremit.

555

Cui deus “en, adsum tibi cura fidelior” inquit:

“Pone metum: Bacchi, Cnosias, uxor eris.

Munus habe caelum; caelo spectabere sidus;

Saepe reges dubiam Cressa Corona ratem.”

Dixit, et e curru, ne tigres illa timeret,

560

Desilit; inposito cessit harena pede:

Implicitamque sinu (neque enim pugnare valebat)

Abstulit; in facili est omnia posse deo.

Pars “Hymenaee” canunt, pars clamant “Euhion, euhoe!”

Sic coeunt sacro nupta deusque toro.

[ENGLISH: So, when the…]

565

Ergo ubi contigerint positi tibi munera Bacchi,

Atque erit in socii femina parte tori,

Nycteliumque patrem nocturnaque sacra precare,

Ne iubeant capiti vina nocere tuo.

Hic tibi multa licet sermone latentia tecto

570

Dicere, quae dici sentiat illa sibi:

Blanditiasque leves tenui perscribere vino,

Ut dominam in mensa se legat illa tuam:

Atque oculos oculis spectare fatentibus ignem:

Saepe tacens vocem verbaque vultus habet.

575

Fac primus rapias illius tacta labellis

Pocula, quaque bibet parte puella, bibas:

Et quemcumque cibum digitis libaverit illa,

Tu pete, dumque petis, sit tibi tacta manus.

Sint etiam tua vota, viro placuisse puellae:

580

Utilior vobis factus amicus erit.

Huic, si sorte bibes, sortem concede priorem:

Huic detur capiti missa corona tuo.

Sive erit inferior, seu par, prior omnia sumat:

Nec dubites illi verba secunda loqui.

585

Tuta frequensque via est, per amici fallere nomen:

Tuta frequensque licet sit via, crimen habet.

Inde procurator nimium quoque multa procurat,

Et sibi mandatis plura videnda putat.

Certa tibi a nobis dabitur mensura bibendi:

590

Officium praestent mensque pedesque suum.

Iurgia praecipue vino stimulata caveto,

Et nimium faciles ad fera bella manus.

Occidit Eurytion stulte data vina bibendo;

Aptior est dulci mensa merumque ioco.

595

Si vox est, canta: si mollia brachia, salta:

Et quacumque potes dote placere, place.

Ebrietas ut vera nocet, sic ficta iuvabit:

Fac titubet blaeso subdola lingua sono,

Ut, quicquid facias dicasve protervius aequo,

600

Credatur nimium causa fuisse merum.

Et bene dic dominae, bene, cum quo dormiat illa;

Sed, male sit, tacita mente precare, viro.

At cum discedet mensa conviva remota,

Ipsa tibi accessus turba locumque dabit.

605

Insere te turbae, leviterque admotus eunti

Velle latus digitis, et pede tange pedem.

Conloquii iam tempus adest; fuge rustice longe

Hinc pudor; audentem Forsque Venusque iuvat.

Non tua sub nostras veniat facundia leges:

610

Fac tantum cupias, sponte disertus eris.

Est tibi agendus amans, imitandaque vulnera verbis;

Haec tibi quaeratur qualibet arte fides.

Nec credi labor est: sibi quaeque videtur amanda;

Pessima sit, nulli non sua forma placet.

615

Saepe tamen vere coepit simulator amare,

Saepe, quod incipiens finxerat esse, fuit.

Quo magis, o, faciles imitantibus este, puellae:

Fiet amor verus, qui modo falsus erat.

Blanditiis animum furtim deprendere nunc sit,

620

Ut pendens liquida ripa subestur aqua.

Nec faciem, nec te pigeat laudare capillos

Et teretes digitos exiguumque pedem:

Delectant etiam castas praeconia formae;

Virginibus curae grataque forma sua est.

625

Nam cur in Phrygiis Iunonem et Pallada silvis

Nunc quoque iudicium non tenuisse pudet?

Laudatas ostendit avis Iunonia pinnas:

Si tacitus spectes, illa recondit opes.

Quadrupedes inter rapidi certamina cursus

630

Depexaeque iubae plausaque colla iuvant.

[ENGLISH: Don’t be shy…]

Nec timide promitte: trahunt promissa puellas;

Pollicito testes quoslibet adde deos.

Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum,

Et iubet Aeolios inrita ferre notos.

635

Per Styga Iunoni falsum iurare solebat

Iuppiter; exemplo nunc favet ipse suo.

Expedit esse deos, et, ut expedit, esse putemus;

Dentur in antiquos tura merumque focos;

Nec secura quies illos similisque sopori

640

Detinet; innocue vivite: numen adest;

Reddite depositum; pietas sua foedera servet:

Fraus absit; vacuas caedis habete manus.

Ludite, si sapitis, solas impune puellas:

Hac minus est una fraude tuenda fides.

645

Fallite fallentes: ex magna parte profanum

Sunt genus: in laqueos quos posuere, cadant.

Dicitur Aegyptos caruisse iuvantibus arva

Imbribus, atque annos sicca fuisse novem,

Cum Thrasius Busirin adit, monstratque piari

650

Hospitis adfuso sanguine posse Iovem.

Illi Busiris “fies Iovis hostia primus,”

Inquit “et Aegypto tu dabis hospes aquam.”

Et Phalaris tauro violenti membra Perilli

Torruit: infelix inbuit auctor opus.

655

Iustus uterque fuit: neque enim lex aequior ulla est,

Quam necis artifices arte perire sua.

Ergo ut periuras merito periuria fallant,

Exemplo doleat femina laesa suo.

Et lacrimae prosunt: lacrimis adamanta movebis:

660

Fac madidas videat, si potes, illa genas.

Si lacrimae (neque enim veniunt in tempore semper)

Deficient, uda lumina tange manu.

Quis sapiens blandis non misceat oscula verbis?

Illa licet non det, non data sume tamen.

665

Pugnabit primo fortassis, et “improbe” dicet:

Pugnando vinci se tamen illa volet.

Tantum ne noceant teneris male rapta labellis,

Neve queri possit dura fuisse, cave.

Oscula qui sumpsit, si non et cetera sumet,

670

Haec quoque, quae data sunt, perdere dignus erit.

Quantum defuerat pleno post oscula voto?

Ei mihi, rusticitas, non pudor ille fuit.

Vim licet appelles: grata est vis ista puellis:

Quod iuvat, invitae saepe dedisse volunt.

675

Quaecumque est veneris subita violata rapina,

Gaudet, et inprobitas muneris instar habet.

At quae cum posset cogi, non tacta recessit,

Ut simulet vultu gaudia, tristis erit.

Vim passa est Phoebe: vis est allata sorori;

680

Et gratus raptae raptor uterque fuit.

Fabula nota quidem, sed non indigna referri,

Scyrias Haemonio iuncta puella viro.

Iam dea laudatae dederat mala praemia formae

Colle sub Idaeo vincere digna duas:

685

Iam nurus ad Priamum diverso venerat orbe,

Graiaque in Iliacis moenibus uxor erat:

Iurabant omnes in laesi verba mariti:

Nam dolor unius publica causa fuit.

Turpe, nisi hoc matris precibus tribuisset, Achilles

690

Veste virum longa dissimulatus erat.

Quid facis, Aeacide? non sunt tua munera lanae;

Tu titulos alia Palladis arte petas.

Quid tibi cum calathis? clipeo manus apta ferendo est:

Pensa quid in dextra, qua cadet Hector, habes?

695

Reïce succinctos operoso stamine fusos!

Quassanda est ista Pelias hasta manu.

Forte erat in thalamo virgo regalis eodem;

Haec illum stupro comperit esse virum.

Viribus illa quidem victa est, ita credere oportet:

700

Sed voluit vinci viribus illa tamen.

Saepe “mane!” dixit, cum iam properaret Achilles;

Fortia nam posita sumpserat arma colo.

Vis ubi nunc illa est? Quid blanda voce moraris

Auctorem stupri, Deïdamia, tui?

705

Scilicet ut pudor est quaedam coepisse priorem,

Sic alio gratum est incipiente pati.

A! nimia est iuveni propriae fiducia formae,

Expectat siquis, dum prior illa roget.

Vir prior accedat, vir verba precantia dicat:

710

Excipiet blandas comiter illa preces.

Ut potiare, roga: tantum cupit illa rogari;

Da causam voti principiumque tui.

Iuppiter ad veteres supplex heroïdas ibat:

Corrupit magnum nulla puella Iovem.

715

Si tamen a precibus tumidos accedere fastus

Senseris, incepto parce referque pedem.

Quod refugit, multae cupiunt: odere quod instat;

Lenius instando taedia tolle tui.

Nec semper veneris spes est profitenda roganti:

720

Intret amicitiae nomine tectus amor.

Hoc aditu vidi tetricae data verba puellae:

Qui fuerat cultor, factus amator erat.

[ENGLISH: A pale skin…]

Candidus in nauta turpis color, aequoris unda

Debet et a radiis sideris esse niger:

725

Turpis et agricolae, qui vomere semper adunco

Et gravibus rastris sub Iove versat humum.

Et tibi, Palladiae petitur cui fama coronae,

Candida si fuerint corpora, turpis eris.

Palleat omnis amans: hic est color aptus amanti;

730

Hoc decet, hoc stulti non valuisse putant.

Pallidus in Side silvis errabat Orion,

Pallidus in lenta naïde Daphnis erat.

Arguat et macies animum: nec turpe putaris

Palliolum nitidis inposuisse comis.

735

Attenuant iuvenum vigilatae corpora noctes

Curaque et in magno qui fit amore dolor.

Ut voto potiare tuo, miserabilis esto,

Ut qui te videat, dicere possit “amas.”

Conquerar, an moneam mixtum fas omne nefasque?

740

Nomen amicitia est, nomen inane fides.

Ei mihi, non tutum est, quod ames, laudare sodali;

Cum tibi laudanti credidit, ipse subit.

At non Actorides lectum temeravit Achillis:

Quantum ad Pirithoum, Phaedra pudica fuit.

745

Hermionam Pylades quo Pallada Phoebus, amabat,

Quodque tibi geminus, Tyndari, Castor, erat.

Siquis idem sperat, laturas poma myricas

Speret, et e medio flumine mella petat.

Nil nisi turpe iuvat: curae sua cuique voluptas:

750

Haec quoque ab alterius grata dolore venit.

Heu facinus! non est hostis metuendus amanti;

Quos credis fidos, effuge, tutus eris.

Cognatum fratremque cave carumque sodalem:

Praebebit veros haec tibi turba metus.

[ENGLISH: I was about…]

755

Finiturus eram, sed sunt diversa puellis

Pectora: mille animos excipe mille modis.

Nec tellus eadem parit omnia; vitibus illa

Convenit, haec oleis; hac bene farra virent.

Pectoribus mores tot sunt, quot in ore figurae;

760

Qui sapit, innumeris moribus aptus erit,

Utque leves Proteus modo se tenuabit in undas,

Nunc leo, nunc arbor, nunc erit hirtus aper.

Hi iaculo pisces, illi capiuntur ab hamis:

Hos cava contento retia fune trahunt.

765

Nec tibi conveniet cunctos modus unus ad annos:

Longius insidias cerva videbit anus.

Si doctus videare rudi, petulansve pudenti,

Diffidet miserae protinus illa sibi.

Inde fit, ut quae se timuit committere honesto,

770

Vilis ad amplexus inferioris eat.

[ENGLISH: This part of…]

Pars superat coepti, pars est exhausta laboris.

Hic teneat nostras ancora iacta rates.

LIBER SECUNDUS

[ENGLISH: Shout “Hurrah!,”…]

Dicite “io Paean!” et “io” bis dicite “Paean!”

Decidit in casses praeda petita meos;

Laetus amans donat viridi mea carmina palma,

Praelata Ascraeo Maeonioque seni.

5

Talis ab armiferis Priameïus hospes Amyclis

Candida cum rapta coniuge vela dedit;

Talis erat qui te curru victore ferebat,

Vecta peregrinis Hippodamia rotis.

Quid properas, iuvenis? mediis tua pinus in undis

10

Navigat, et longe quem peto portus abest.

Non satis est venisse tibi me vate puellam:

Arte mea capta est, arte tenenda mea est.

Nec minor est virtus, quam quaerere, parta tueri:

Casus inest illic; hoc erit artis opus.

15

Nunc mihi, siquando, puer et Cytherea, favete,

Nunc Erato, nam tu nomen amoris habes.

Magna paro, quas possit Amor remanere per artes,

Dicere, tam vasto pervagus orbe puer.

Et levis est, et habet geminas, quibus avolet, alas:

20

Difficile est illis inposuisse modum.

[ENGLISH: Minos confined Daedalus…]

Hospitis effugio praestruxerat omnia Minos:

Audacem pinnis repperit ille viam.

Daedalus ut clausit conceptum crimine matris

Semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem,

25

“Sit modus exilio,” dixit “iustissime Minos:

Accipiat cineres terra paterna meos.

Et quoniam in patria, fatis agitatus iniquis,

Vivere non potui, da mihi posse mori.

Da reditum puero, senis est si gratia vilis:

30

Si non vis puero parcere, parce seni.”

Dixerat haec; sed et haec et multo plura licebat

Dicere: regressus non dabat ille viro.

Quod simul ut sensit, “nunc, nunc, o Daedale,” dixit:

“Materiam, qua sis ingeniosus, habes.

35

Possidet et terras et possidet aequora Minos:

Nec tellus nostrae nec patet unda fugae.

Restat iter caeli: caelo temptabimus ire.

Da veniam coepto, Iuppiter alte, meo:

Non ego sidereas adfecto tangere sedes:

40

Qua fugiam dominum, nulla, nisi ista, via est.

Per Styga detur iter, Stygias transnabimus undas;

Sunt mihi naturae iura novanda meae.”

Ingenium mala saepe movent: quis crederet umquam

Aërias hominem carpere posse vias?

45

Remigium volucrum disponit in ordine pinnas,

Et leve per lini vincula nectit opus,

Imaque pars ceris adstringitur igne solutis,

Finitusque novae iam labor artis erat.

Tractabat ceramque puer pinnasque renidens,

50

Nescius haec umeris arma parata suis.

Cui pater “his” inquit “patria est adeunda carinis,

Hac nobis Minos effugiendus ope.

Aëra non potuit Minos, alia omnia clausit;

Quem licet, inventis aëra rumpe meis.

55

Sed tibi non virgo Tegeaea comesque Bootae

Ensiger Orion aspiciendus erit:

Me pinnis sectare datis; ego praevius ibo:

Sit tua cura sequi; me duce tutus eris.

Nam sive aetherias vicino sole per auras

60

Ibimus, impatiens cera caloris erit:

Sive humiles propiore freto iactabimus alas,

Mobilis aequoreis pinna madescet aquis.

Inter utrumque vola; ventos quoque, nate, timeto,

Quaque ferent aurae, vela secunda dato.”

65

Dum monet, aptat opus puero, monstratque moveri,

Erudit infirmas ut sua mater aves.

Inde sibi factas umeris accommodat alas,

Perque novum timide corpora librat iter.

Iamque volaturus parvo dedit oscula nato,

70

Nec patriae lacrimas continuere genae.

Monte minor collis, campis erat altior aequis:

Hinc data sunt miserae corpora bina fugae.

Et movet ipse suas, et nati respicit alas

Daedalus, et cursus sustinet usque suos.

75

Iamque novum delectat iter, positoque timore

Icarus audaci fortius arte volat.

Hos aliquis, tremula dum captat arundine pisces,

Vidit, et inceptum dextra reliquit opus.

Iam Samos a laeva (fuerant Naxosque relictae

80

Et Paros et Clario Delos amata deo)

Dextra Lebinthos erat silvisque umbrosa Calymne

Cinctaque piscosis Astypalaea vadis,

Cum puer, incautis nimium temerarius annis,

Altius egit iter, deseruitque patrem.

85

Vincla labant, et cera deo propiore liquescit,

Nec tenues ventos brachia mota tenent.

Territus a summo despexit in aequora caelo:

Nox oculis pavido venit oborta metu.

Tabuerant cerae: nudos quatit ille lacertos,

90

Et trepidat nec, quo sustineatur, habet.

Decidit, atque cadens “pater, o pater, auferor!” inquit,

Clauserunt virides ora loquentis aquae.

At pater infelix, nec iam pater, “Icare!” clamat,

“Icare,” clamat “ubi es, quoque sub axe volas?”

95

“Icare” clamabat, pinnas aspexit in undis.

Ossa tegit tellus: aequora nomen habent.

[ENGLISH: Minos failed to…]

Non potuit Minos hominis conpescere pinnas;

Ipse deum volucrem detinuisse paro.

Fallitur, Haemonias siquis decurrit ad artes,

100

Datque quod a teneri fronte revellit equi.

Non facient, ut vivat amor, Medeïdes herbae

Mixtaque cum magicis nenia Marsa sonis.

Phasias Aesoniden, Circe tenuisset Ulixem,

Si modo servari carmine posset amor.

105

Nec data profuerint pallentia philtra puellis:

Philtra nocent animis, vimque furoris habent.

Sit procul omne nefas; ut ameris, amabilis esto:

Quod tibi non facies solave forma dabit:

Sis licet antiquo Nireus adamatus Homero,

110

Naïadumque tener crimine raptus Hylas,

Ut dominam teneas, nec te mirere relictum,

Ingenii dotes corporis adde bonis.

Forma bonum fragile est, quantumque accedit ad annos

Fit minor, et spatio carpitur ipsa suo.

115

Nec violae semper nec hiantia lilia florent,

Et riget amissa spina relicta rosa.

Et tibi iam venient cani, formose, capilli,

Iam venient rugae, quae tibi corpus arent.

Iam molire animum, qui duret, et adstrue formae:

120

Solus ad extremos permanet ille rogos.

Nec levis ingenuas pectus coluisse per artes

Cura sit et linguas edidicisse duas.

Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulixes,

Et tamen aequoreas torsit amore deas.

125

A quotiens illum doluit properare Calypso,

Remigioque aptas esse negavit aquas!

Haec Troiae casus iterumque iterumque rogabat:

Ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem.

Litore constiterant: illic quoque pulchra Calypso

130

Exigit Odrysii fata cruenta ducis.

Ille levi virga (virgam nam forte tenebat)

Quod rogat, in spisso litore pingit opus.

“Haec” inquit “Troia est” (muros in litore fecit):

“Hic tibi sit Simois; haec mea castra puta.

135

Campus erat” (campumque facit), “quem caede Dolonis

Sparsimus, Haemonios dum vigil optat equos.

Illic Sithonii fuerant tentoria Rhesi:

Hac ego sum captis nocte revectus equis.”

Pluraque pingebat, subitus cum Pergama fluctus

140

Abstulit et Rhesi cum duce castra suo.

Tum dea “quas” inquit “fidas tibi credis ituro,

Perdiderint undae nomina quanta, vides?”

Ergo age, fallaci timide confide figurae,

Quisquis es, aut aliquid corpore pluris habe.

145

Dextera praecipue capit indulgentia mentes;

Asperitas odium saevaque bella movet.

Odimus accipitrem, quia vivit semper in armis,

Et pavidum solitos in pecus ire lupos.

At caret insidiis hominum, quia mitis, hirundo,

150

Quasque colat turres, Chaonis ales habet.

Este procul, lites et amarae proelia linguae:

Dulcibus est verbis mollis alendus amor.

Lite fugent nuptaeque viros nuptasque mariti,

Inque vicem credant res sibi semper agi;

155

Hoc decet uxores; dos est uxoria lites:

Audiat optatos semper amica sonos.

Non legis iussu lectum venistis in unum:

Fungitur in vobis munere legis amor.

Blanditias molles auremque iuvantia verba

160

Adfer, ut adventu laeta sit illa tuo.

Non ego divitibus venio praeceptor amandi:

Nil opus est illi, qui dabit, arte mea;

Secum habet ingenium, qui, cum libet, “accipe” dicit;

Cedimus: inventis plus placet ille meis.

165

Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi;

Cum dare non possem munera, verba dabam.

Pauper amet caute: timeat maledicere pauper,

Multaque divitibus non patienda ferat.

Me memini iratum dominae turbasse capillos:

170

Haec mihi quam multos abstulit ira dies!

Nec puto, nec sensi tunicam laniasse; sed ipsa

Dixerat, et pretio est illa redempta meo.

At vos, si sapitis, vestri peccata magistri

Effugite, et culpae damna timete meae.

175

Proelia cum Parthis, cum culta pax sit amica,

Et iocus, et causas quicquid amoris habet.

[ENGLISH: If she’s cool…]

Si nec blanda satis, nec erit tibi comis amanti,

Perfer et obdura: postmodo mitis erit.

Flectitur obsequio curvatus ab arbore ramus:

180

Frangis, si vires experiere tuas.

Obsequio tranantur aquae: nec vincere possis

Flumina, si contra, quam rapit unda, nates.

Obsequium tigresque domat Numidasque leones;

Rustica paulatim taurus aratra subit.

185

Quid fuit asperius Nonacrina Atalanta?

Succubuit meritis trux tamen illa viri.

Saepe suos casus nec mitia facta puellae

Flesse sub arboribus Milaniona ferunt;

Saepe tulit iusso fallacia retia collo,

190

Saepe fera torvos cuspide fixit apros:

Sensit et Hylaei contentum saucius arcum:

Sed tamen hoc arcu notior alter erat.

Non te Maenalias armatum scandere silvas,

Nec iubeo collo retia ferre tuo:

195

Pectora nec missis iubeo praebere sagittis;

Artis erunt cauto mollia iussa meae.

Cede repugnanti: cedendo victor abibis:

Fac modo, quas partes illa iubebit, agas.

Arguet, arguito; quicquid probat illa, probato;

200

Quod dicet, dicas; quod negat illa, neges.

Riserit, adride; si flebit, flere memento;

Imponat leges vultibus illa tuis.

Seu ludet, numerosque manu iactabit eburnos,

Tu male iactato, tu male iacta dato:

205

Seu iacies talos, victam ne poena sequatur,

Damnosi facito stent tibi saepe canes:

Sive latrocinii sub imagine calculus ibit,

Fac pereat vitreo miles ab hoste tuus.

Ipse tene distenta suis umbracula virgis,

210

Ipse fac in turba, qua venit illa, locum.

Nec dubita tereti scamnum producere lecto,

Et tenero soleam deme vel adde pedi.

Saepe etiam dominae, quamvis horrebis et ipse,

Algenti manus est calfacienda sinu.

215

Nec tibi turpe puta (quamvis sit turpe, placebit),

Ingenua speculum sustinuisse manu.

Ille, fatigata praebendo monstra noverca

Qui meruit caelum, quod prior ipse tulit,

Inter Ioniacas calathum tenuisse puellas

220

Creditur, et lanas excoluisse rudes.

Paruit imperio dominae Tirynthius heros:

I nunc et dubita ferre, quod ille tulit.

Iussus adesse foro, iussa maturius hora

Fac semper venias, nec nisi serus abi.

225

Occurras aliquo, tibi dixerit: omnia differ,

Curre, nec inceptum turba moretur iter.

Nocte domum repetens epulis perfuncta redibit:

Tum quoque pro servo, si vocat illa, veni.

Rure erit, et dicet “venias”: Amor odit inertes:

230

Si rota defuerit, tu pede carpe viam.

Nec grave te tempus sitiensque Canicula tardet,

Nec via per iactas candida facta nives.

[ENGLISH: Love is a…]

Militiae species amor est; discedite, segnes:

Non sunt haec timidis signa tuenda viris.

235

Nox et hiems longaeque viae saevique dolores

Mollibus his castris et labor omnis inest.

Saepe feres imbrem caelesti nube solutum,

Frigidus et nuda saepe iacebis humo.

Cynthius Admeti vaccas pavisse Pheraei

240

Fertur, et in parva delituisse casa.

Quod Phoebum decuit, quem non decet? exue fastus,

Curam mansuri quisquis amoris habes.

Si tibi per tutum planumque negabitur ire,

Atque erit opposita ianua fulta sera,

245

At tu per praeceps tecto delabere aperto:

Det quoque furtivas alta fenestra vias.

Laeta erit, et causam tibi se sciet esse pericli;

Hoc dominae certi pignus amoris erit.

Saepe tua poteras, Leandre, carere puella:

250

Transnabas, animum nosset ut illa tuum.

[ENGLISH: Win over the…]

Nec pudor ancillas, ut quaeque erit ordine prima,

Nec tibi sit servos demeruisse pudor.

Nomine quemque suo (nulla est iactura) saluta,

Iunge tuis humiles, ambitiose, manus.

255

Sed tamen et servo (levis est inpensa) roganti

Porrige Fortunae munera parva die:

Porrige et ancillae, qua poenas luce pependit

Lusa maritali Gallica veste manus.

Fac plebem, mihi crede, tuam; sit semper in illa

260

Ianitor et thalami qui iacet ante fores.

Nec dominam iubeo pretioso munere dones:

Parva, sed e parvis callidus apta dato.

Dum bene dives ager, cum rami pondere nutant,

Adferat in calatho rustica dona puer.

265

Rure suburbano poteris tibi dicere missa,

Illa vel in Sacra sint licet empta via.

Adferat aut uvas, aut quas Amaryllis amabat—

At nunc castaneas non amat illa nuces.

Quin etiam turdoque licet missaque columba

270

Te memorem dominae testificere tuae.

Turpiter his emitur spes mortis et orba senectus.

A, pereant, per quos munera crimen habent!

[ENGLISH: What about sending…]

Quid tibi praecipiam teneros quoque mittere versus?

Ei mihi, non multum carmen honoris habet.

275

Carmina laudantur, sed munera magna petuntur:

Dummodo sit dives, barbarus ipse placet.

Aurea sunt vere nunc saecula: plurimus auro

Venit honos: auro conciliatur amor.

Ipse licet venias Musis comitatus, Homere,

280

Si nihil attuleris, ibis, Homere, foras.

Sunt tamen et doctae, rarissima turba, puellae;

Altera non doctae turba, sed esse volunt.

Utraque laudetur per carmina: carmina lector

Commendet dulci qualiacumque sono;

285

His ergo aut illis vigilatum carmen in ipsas

Forsitan exigui muneris instar erit.

At quod eris per te facturus, et utile credis,

Id tua te facito semper amica roget.

Libertas alicui fuerit promissa tuorum:

290

Hanc tamen a domina fac petat ille tua:

Si poenam servo, si vincula saeva remittis,

Quod facturus eras, debeat illa tibi:

Utilitas tua sit, titulus donetur amicae:

Perde nihil, partes illa potentis agat.

295

Sed te, cuicumque est retinendae cura puellae,

Attonitum forma fac putet esse sua.

Sive erit in Tyriis, Tyrios laudabis amictus:

Sive erit in Cois, Coa decere puta.

Aurata est? ipso tibi sit pretiosior auro;

300

Gausapa si sumpsit, gausapa sumpta proba.

Astiterit tunicata, “moves incendia” clama,

Sed timida, caveat frigora, voce roga.

Conpositum discrimen erit, discrimina lauda:

Torserit igne comam, torte capille, place.

305

Brachia saltantis, vocem mirare canentis,

Et, quod desierit, verba querentis habe.

Ipsos concubitus, ipsum venerere licebit

Quod iuvat, et quae dat gaudia voce notes.

Ut fuerit torva violentior illa Medusa,

310

Fiet amatori lenis et aequa suo.

Tantum, ne pateas verbis simulator in illis,

Effice, nec vultu destrue dicta tuo.

Si latet, ars prodest: adfert deprensa pudorem,

Atque adimit merito tempus in omne fidem.

[ENGLISH: In early autumn,…]

315

Saepe sub autumnum, cum formosissimus annus,

Plenaque purpureo subrubet uva mero,

Cum modo frigoribus premimur, modo solvimur aestu,

Aëre non certo, corpora languor habet.

Illa quidem valeat; sed si male firma cubarit,

320

Et vitium caeli senserit aegra sui,

Tunc amor et pietas tua sit manifesta puellae,

Tum sere, quod plena postmodo falce metas.

Nec tibi morosi veniant fastidia morbi,

Perque tuas fiant, quae sinet ipsa, manus.

325

Et videat flentem, nec taedeat oscula ferre,

Et sicco lacrimas conbibat ore tuas.

Multa vove, sed cuncta palam; quotiesque libebit,

Quae referas illi, somnia laeta vide.

Et veniat, quae lustret anus lectumque locumque,

330

Praeferat et tremula sulpur et ova manu.

Omnibus his inerunt gratae vestigia curae:

In tabulas multis haec via fecit iter.

Nec tamen officiis odium quaeratur ab aegra:

Sit suus in blanda sedulitate modus:

335

Neve cibo prohibe, nec amari pocula suci

Porrige: rivalis misceat illa tuus.

[ENGLISH: The wind that…]

Sed non cui dederas a litore carbasa vento,

Utendum, medio cum potiere freto.

Dum novus errat amor, vires sibi colligat usu:

340

Si bene nutrieris, tempore firmus erit.

Quem taurum metuis, vitulum mulcere solebas:

Sub qua nunc recubas arbore, virga fuit:

Nascitur exiguus, sed opes adquirit eundo,

Quaque venit, multas accipit amnis aquas.

345

Fac tibi consuescat: nil adsuetudine maius:

Quam tu dum capias, taedia nulla fuge.

Te semper videat, tibi semper praebeat aures;

Exhibeat vultus noxque diesque tuos.

Cum tibi maior erit fiducia, posse requiri,

350

Cum procul absenti cura futurus eris,

Da requiem: requietus ager bene credita reddit,

Terraque caelestes arida sorbet aquas.

Phyllida Demophoon praesens moderatius ussit:

Exarsit velis acrius illa datis.

355

Penelopen absens sollers torquebat Ulixes;

Phylacides aberat, Laodamia, tuus.

Sed mora tuta brevis: lentescunt tempore curae,

Vanescitque absens et novus intrat amor.

Dum Menelaus abest, Helene, ne sola iaceret,

360

Hospitis est tepido nocte recepta sinu.

Quis stupor hic, Menelaë, fuit? tu solus abibas,

Isdem sub tectis hospes et uxor erant.

Accipitri timidas credis, furiose, columbas?

Plenum montano credis ovile lupo?

365

Nil Helene peccat, nihil hic committit adulter:

Quod tu, quod faceret quilibet, ille facit.

Cogis adulterium dando tempusque locumque;

Quid nisi consilio est usa puella tuo?

Quid faciat? vir abest, et adest non rusticus hospes,

370

Et timet in vacuo sola cubare toro.

Viderit Atrides: Helenen ego crimine solvo:

Usa est humani commoditate viri.

[ENGLISH: As fierce as…]

Sed neque fulvus aper media tam saevus in ira est,

Fulmineo rabidos cum rotat ore canes,

375

Nec lea, cum catulis lactentibus ubera praebet,

Nec brevis ignaro vipera laesa pede,

Femina quam socii deprensa paelice lecti:

Ardet et in vultu pignora mentis habet.

In ferrum flammasque ruit, positoque decore

380

Fertur, ut Aonii cornibus icta dei.

Coniugis admissum violataque iura marita est

Barbara per natos Phasias ulta suos.

Altera dira parens haec est, quam cernis, hirundo:

Aspice, signatum sanguine pectus habet.

385

Hoc bene compositos, hoc firmos solvit amores;

Crimina sunt cautis ista timenda viris.

Nec mea vos uni damnat censura puellae:

Di melius! vix hoc nupta tenere potest.

Ludite, sed furto celetur culpa modesto:

390

Gloria peccati nulla petenda sui est.

Nec dederis munus, cognosse quod altera possit,

Nec sint nequitiae tempora certa tuae.

Et, ne te capiat latebris sibi femina notis,

Non uno est omnis convenienda loco;

395

Et quotiens scribes, totas prius ipse tabellas

Inspice: plus multae, quam sibi missa, legunt.

Laesa Venus iusta arma movet, telumque remittit,

Et, modo quod questa est, ipse querare, facit.

Dum fuit Atrides una contentus, et illa

400

Casta fuit: vitio est improba facta viri.

Audierat laurumque manu vittasque ferentem

Pro nata Chrysen non valuisse sua:

Audierat, Lyrnesi, tuos, abducta, dolores,

Bellaque per turpis longius isse moras.

405

Haec tamen audierat: Priameïda viderat ipsa:

Victor erat praedae praeda pudenda suae.

Inde Thyestiaden animo thalamoque recepit,

Et male peccantem Tyndaris ulta virum.

[ENGLISH: If you’re caught…]

Quae bene celaris, siqua tamen acta patebunt,

410

Illa, licet pateant, tu tamen usque nega.

Tum neque subiectus, solito nec blandior esto:

Haec animi multum signa nocentis habent:

Sed lateri ne parce tuo: pax omnis in uno est;

Concubitu prior est infitianda venus.

415

Sunt, qui praecipiant herbas, satureia, nocentes

Sumere; iudiciis ista venena meis;

Aut piper urticae mordacis semine miscent,

Tritaque in annoso flava pyrethra mero;

Sed dea non patitur sic ad sua gaudia cogi,

420

Colle sub umbroso quam tenet altus Eryx.

Candidus, Alcathoi qui mittitur urbe Pelasga,

Bulbus et, ex horto quae venit, herba salax

Ovaque sumantur, sumantur Hymettia mella,

Quasque tulit folio pinus acuta nuces.

[ENGLISH: But, learned Muse…]

425

Docta, quid ad magicas, Erato, deverteris artes?

Interior curru meta terenda meo est.

Qui modo celabas monitu tua crimina nostro,

Flecte iter, et monitu detege furta meo.

Nec levitas culpanda mea est: non semper eodem

430

Impositos vento panda carina vehit.

Nam modo Threïcio Borea, modo currimus Euro,

Saepe tument Zephyro lintea, saepe Noto.

Aspice, ut in curru modo det fluitantia rector

Lora, modo admissos arte retentet equos.

435

Sunt quibus ingrate timida indulgentia servit,

Et, si nulla subest aemula, languet amor.

Luxuriant animi rebus plerumque secundis,

Nec facile est aequa commoda mente pati.

Ut levis absumptis paulatim viribus ignis

440

Ipse latet, summo canet in igne cinis,

Sed tamen extinctas admoto sulpure flammas

Invenit, et lumen, quod fuit ante, redit:

Sic, ubi pigra situ securaque pectora torpent,

Acribus est stimulis eliciendus amor.

445

Fac timeat de te, tepidamque recalface mentem:

Palleat indicio criminis illa tui;

O quater et quotiens numero conprendere non est

Felicem, de quo laesa puella dolet:

Quae, simul invitas crimen pervenit ad aures,

450

Excidit, et miserae voxque colorque fugit.

Ille ego sim, cuius laniet furiosa capillos:

Ille ego sim, teneras cui petat ungue genas,

Quem videat lacrimans, quem torvis spectet ocellis,

Quo sine non possit vivere, posse velit.

455

Si spatium quaeras, breve sit, quo laesa queratur,

Ne lenta vires colligat ira mora;

Candida iamdudum cingantur colla lacertis,

Inque tuos flens est accipienda sinus.

Oscula da flenti, Veneris da gaudia flenti,

460

Pax erit: hoc uno solvitur ira modo.

Cum bene saevierit, cum certa videbitur hostis,

Tum pete concubitus foedera, mitis erit.

Illic depositis habitat Concordia telis:

Illo, crede mihi, Gratia nata loco est.

465

Quae modo pugnarunt, iungunt sua rostra columbae,

Quarum blanditias verbaque murmur habet.

[ENGLISH: In the beginning…]

Prima fuit rerum confusa sine ordine moles,

Unaque erat facies sidera, terra, fretum;

Mox caelum impositum terris, humus aequore cincta est

470

Inque suas partes cessit inane chaos;

Silva feras, volucres aer accepit habendas,

In liquida, pisces, delituistis aqua.

Tum genus humanum solis errabat in agris,

Idque merae vires et rude corpus erat;

475

Silva domus fuerat, cibus herba, cubilia frondes:

Iamque diu nulli cognitus alter erat.

Blanda truces animos fertur mollisse voluptas:

Constiterant uno femina virque loco;

Quid facerent, ipsi nullo didicere magistro:

480

Arte Venus nulla dulce peregit opus.

Ales habet, quod amet; cum quo sua gaudia iungat,

Invenit in media femina piscis aqua;

Cerva parem sequitur, serpens serpente tenetur,

Haeret adulterio cum cane nexa canis;

485

Laeta salitur ovis: tauro quoque laeta iuvenca est:

Sustinet inmundum sima capella marem;

In furias agitantur equae, spatioque remota

Per loca dividuos amne sequuntur equos.

Ergo age et iratae medicamina fortia praebe:

490

Illa feri requiem sola doloris habent:

Illa Machaonios superant medicamina sucos:

His, ubi peccaris, restituendus eris.

[ENGLISH: While I was…]

Haec ego cum canerem, subito manifestus Apollo

Movit inauratae pollice fila lyrae.

495

In manibus laurus, sacris inducta capillis

Laurus erat; vates ille videndus adit.

Is mihi “Lascivi” dixit “praeceptor Amoris,

Duc, age, discipulos ad mea templa tuos,

Est ubi diversum fama celebrata per orbem

500

Littera, cognosci quae sibi quemque iubet.

Qui sibi notus erit, solus sapienter amabit,

Atque opus ad vires exiget omne suas.

Cui faciem natura dedit, spectetur ab illa:

Cui color est, umero saepe patente cubet:

505

Qui sermone placet, taciturna silentia vitet:

Qui canit arte, canat; qui bibit arte, bibat.

Sed neque declament medio sermone diserti,

Nec sua non sanus scripta poeta legat!”

Sic monuit Phoebus: Phoebo parete monenti;

510

Certa dei sacro est huius in ore fides.

[ENGLISH: Back to my…]

Ad propiora vocor. Quisquis sapienter amabit

Vincet, et e nostra, quod petet, arte feret.

Credita non semper sulci cum faenore reddunt,

Nec semper dubias adiuvat aura rates;

515

Quod iuvat, exiguum, plus est, quod laedat amantes;

Proponant animo multa ferenda suo.

Quot lepores in Atho, quot apes pascuntur in Hybla,

Caerula quot bacas Palladis arbor habet,

Litore quot conchae, tot sunt in amore dolores;

520

Quae patimur, multo spicula felle madent.

Dicta erit isse foras: intus fortasse videre est:

Isse foras, et te falsa videre puta.

Clausa tibi fuerit promissa ianua nocte:

Perfer et inmunda ponere corpus humo.

525

Forsitan et vultu mendax ancilla superbo

Dicet “quid nostras obsidet iste fores?”

Postibus et durae supplex blandire puellae,

Et capiti demptas in fore pone rosas.

Cum volet, accedes: cum te vitabit, abibis;

530

Dedecet ingenuos taedia ferre sui.

“Effugere hunc non est” quare tibi possit amica

Dicere? non omni tempore sensus obest.

Nec maledicta puta, nec verbera ferre puellae

Turpe, nec ad teneros oscula ferre pedes.

[ENGLISH: But why waste…]

535

Quid moror in parvis? Animus maioribus instat;

Magna canam: toto pectore, vulgus, ades.

Ardua molimur, sed nulla, nisi ardua, virtus:

Difficilis nostra poscitur arte labor.

Rivalem patienter habe, victoria tecum

540

Stabit: eris magni victor in arce Iovis.

Haec tibi non hominem, sed quercus crede Pelasgas

Dicere: nil istis ars mea maius habet.

Innuet illa, feras; scribet, ne tange tabellas:

Unde volet, veniat; quoque libebit, eat.

545

Hoc in legitima praestant uxore mariti,

Cum, tener, ad partes tu quoque, somne, venis.

Hac ego, confiteor, non sum perfectus in arte;

Quid faciam? monitis sum minor ipse meis.

Mene palam nostrae det quisquam signa puellae,

550

Et patiar, nec me quo libet ira ferat?

Oscula vir dederat, memini, suus: oscula questus

Sum data; barbaria noster abundat amor.

Non semel hoc vitium nocuit mihi: doctior ille,

Quo veniunt alii conciliante viri.

555

Sed melius nescisse fuit: sine furta tegantur,

Ne fugiat ficto fassus ab ore pudor.

Quo magis, o iuvenes, deprendere parcite vestras:

Peccent, peccantes verba dedisse putent.

Crescit amor prensis; ubi par fortuna duorum est,

560

In causa damni perstat uterque sui.

Fabula narratur toto notissima caelo,

Mulciberis capti Marsque Venusque dolis.

Mars pater, insano Veneris turbatus amore,

De duce terribili factus amator erat.

565

Nec Venus oranti (neque enim dea mollior ulla est)

Rustica Gradivo difficilisque fuit.

A, quotiens lasciva pedes risisse mariti

Dicitur, et duras igne vel arte manus.

Marte palam simul est Vulcanum imitata, decebat,

570

Multaque cum forma gratia mixta fuit.

Sed bene concubitus primos celare solebant.

Plena verecundi culpa pudoris erat.

Indicio Solis (quis Solem fallere possit?)

Cognita Vulcano coniugis acta suae.

575

Quam mala, Sol, exempla moves! Pete munus ab ipsa

Et tibi, si taceas, quod dare possit, habet.

Mulciber obscuros lectum circaque superque

Disponit laqueos: lumina fallit opus.

Fingit iter Lemnon; veniunt ad foedus amantes:

580

Impliciti laqueis nudus uterque iacent.

Convocat ille deos; praebent spectacula capti:

Vix lacrimas Venerem continuisse putant.

Non vultus texisse suos, non denique possunt

Partibus obscenis opposuisse manus.

585

Hic aliquis ridens “in me, fortissime Mavors,

Si tibi sunt oneri, vincula transfer!” ait.

Vix precibus, Neptune, tuis captiva resolvit

Corpora: Mars Thracen occupat, illa Paphon.

Hoc tibi pro facto, Vulcane: quod ante tegebant,

590

Liberius faciunt, ut pudor omnis abest:

Saepe tamen demens stulte fecisse fateris,

Teque ferunt artis paenituisse tuae.

Hoc vetiti vos este; vetat deprensa Dione

Insidias illas, quas tulit ipsa, dare.

595

Nec vos rivali laqueos disponite, nec vos

Excipite arcana verba notata manu.

Ista viri captent, si iam captanda putabunt,

Quos faciet iustos ignis et unda viros.

En, iterum testor: nihil hic, nisi lege remissum

600

Luditur: in nostris instita nulla iocis.

[ENGLISH: Who’d dare to…]

Quis Cereris ritus ausit vulgare profanis,

Magnaque Threïcia sacra reperta Samo?

Exigua est virtus praestare silentia rebus:

At contra gravis est culpa tacenda loqui.

605

O bene, quod frustra captatis arbore pomis

Garrulus in media Tantalus aret aqua!

Praecipue Cytherea iubet sua sacra taceri:

Admoneo, veniat nequis ad illa loquax.

Condita si non sunt Veneris mysteria cistis,

610

Nec cava vesanis ictibus aera sonant,

At sic inter nos medio versantur in usu,

Se tamen inter nos ut latuisse velint.

Ipsa Venus pubem, quotiens velamina ponit,

Protegitur laeva semireducta manu.

615

In medio passimque coit pecus: hoc quoque viso

Avertit vultus nempe puella suos.

Conveniunt thalami furtis et ianua nostris,

Parsque sub iniecta veste pudenda latet:

Et si non tenebras, ad quiddam nubis opacae

620

Quaerimus, atque aliquid luce patente minus.

Tum quoque, cum solem nondum prohibebat et imbrem

Tegula, sed quercus tecta cibumque dabat,

In nemore atque antris, non sub Iove, iuncta voluptas;

Tanta rudi populo cura pudoris erat.

625

At nunc nocturnis titulos inponimus actis,

Atque emitur magno nil, nisi posse loqui!

Scilicet excuties omnes, ubi quaeque, puellas,

Cuilibet ut dicas “haec quoque nostra fuit,”

Nec desint, quas tu digitis ostendere possis?

630

Ut quamque adtigeris, fabula turpis erit?

Parva queror: fingunt quidam, quae vera negarent,

Et nulli non se concubuisse ferunt.

Corpora si nequeunt, quae possunt, nomina tangunt,

Famaque non tacto corpore crimen habet.

635

I nunc, claude fores, custos odiose puellae,

Et centum duris postibus obde seras!

Quid tuti superest, cum nominis extat adulter,

Et credi quod non contigit esse, cupit?

Nos etiam veros parce profitemur amores,

640

Tectaque sunt solida mystica furta fide.

Parcite praecipue vitia exprobrare puellis,

Utile quae multis dissimulasse fuit.

Nec suus Andromedae color est obiectus ab illo,

Mobilis in gemino cui pede pinna fuit.

645

Omnibus Andromache visa est spatiosior aequo:

Unus, qui modicam diceret, Hector erat.

Quod male fers, adsuesce, feres bene; multa vetustus

Leniet, incipiens omnia sentit amor.

Dum novus in viridi coalescit cortice ramus,

650

Concutiat tenerum quaelibet aura, cadet:

Mox eadem ventis, spatio durata, resistet,

Firmaque adoptivas arbor habebit opes.

Eximit ipsa dies omnes e corpore mendas,

Quodque fuit vitium, desinit esse mora.

655

Ferre novae nares taurorum terga recusant:

Adsiduo domitas tempore fallit odor.

Nominibus mollire licet mala: fusca vocetur,

Nigrior Illyrica cui pice sanguis erit:

Si straba, sit Veneri similis: si rava, Minervae:

660

Sit gracilis, macie quae male viva sua est;

Dic habilem, quaecumque brevis, quae turgida, plenam,

Et lateat vitium proximitate boni.

[ENGLISH: Don’t ask her…]

Nec quotus annus eat, nec quo sit nata, require,

Consule, quae rigidus munera Censor habet:

665

Praecipue si flore caret, meliusque peractum

Tempus, et albentes iam legit illa comas.

Utilis, o iuvenes, aut haec, aut serior aetas:

Iste feret segetes, iste serendus ager.

Dum vires annique sinunt, tolerate labores:

670

Iam veniet tacito curva senecta pede.

Aut mare remigiis, aut vomere findite terras,

Aut fera belligeras addite in arma manus,

Aut latus et vires operamque adferte puellis:

Hoc quoque militia est, hoc quoque quaerit opes.

675

Adde, quod est illis operum prudentia maior,

Solus et artifices qui facit, usus adest:

Illae munditiis annorum damna rependunt,

Et faciunt cura, ne videantur anus.

Utque velis, venerem iungunt per mille figuras:

680

Invenit plures nulla tabella modos.

Illis sentitur non inritata voluptas:

Quod iuvet, ex aequo femina virque ferant.

Odi concubitus, qui non utrumque resolvunt;

Hoc est, cur pueri tangar amore minus.

685

Odi quae praebet, quia sit praebere necesse,

Siccaque de lana cogitat ipsa sua.

Quae datur officio, non est mihi grata voluptas:

Officium faciat nulla puella mihi.

Me voces audire iuvat sua gaudia fassas,

690

Quaeque morer meme sustineamque rogent.

Aspiciam dominae victos amentis ocellos:

Langueat, et tangi se vetet illa diu.

Haec bona non primae tribuit natura iuventae,

Quae cito post septem lustra venire solent.

695

Qui properant, nova musta bibant: mihi fundat avitum

Consulibus priscis condita testa merum.

Nec platanus, nisi sera, potest obsistere Phoebo,

Et laedunt nudos prata novella pedes.

Scilicet Hermionen Helenae praeponere posses,

700

Et melior Gorge, quam sua mater, erat?

At venerem quicumque voles adtingere seram,

Si modo duraris, praemia digna feres.

Conscius, ecce, duos accepit lectus amantes:

Ad thalami clausas, Musa, resiste fores.

705

Sponte sua sine te celeberrima verba loquentur,

Nec manus in lecto laeva iacebit iners.

Invenient digiti, quod agant in partibus illis,

In quibus occulte spicula tingit Amor.

Fecit in Andromache prius hoc fortissimus Hector,

710

Nec solum bellis utilis ille fuit.

Fecit et in capta Lyrneside magnus Achilles,

Cum premeret mollem lassus ab hoste torum.

Illis te manibus tangi, Briseï, sinebas,

Imbutae Phrygia quae nece semper erant.

715

An fuit hoc ipsum, quod te, lasciva, iuvaret,

Ad tua victrices membra venire manus?

Crede mihi, non est veneris properanda voluptas,

Sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora.

Cum loca reppereris, quae tangi femina gaudet,

720

Non obstet, tangas quo minus illa, pudor.

Aspicies oculos tremulo fulgore micantes,

Ut sol a liquida saepe refulget aqua.

Accedent questus, accedet amabile murmur,

Et dulces gemitus aptaque verba ioco.

725

Sed neque tu dominam velis maioribus usus

Desere, nec cursus anteat illa tuos;

Ad metam properate simul: tum plena voluptas,

Cum pariter victi femina virque iacent.

Hic tibi versandus tenor est, cum libera dantur

730

Otia, furtivum nec timor urget opus.

Cum mora non tuta est, totis incumbere remis

Utile, et admisso subdere calcar equo.

[ENGLISH: Here this part…]

Finis adest operi: palmam date, grata iuventus,

Sertaque odoratae myrtea ferte comae.

735

Quantus apud Danaos Podalirius arte medendi,

Aeacides dextra, pectore Nestor erat,

Quantus erat Calchas extis, Telamonius armis,

Automedon curru, tantus amator ego.

Me vatem celebrate, viri, mihi dicite laudes,

740

Cantetur toto nomen in orbe meum.

Arma dedi vobis: dederat Vulcanus Achilli;

Vincite muneribus, vicit ut ille, datis.

Sed quicumque meo superarit Amazona ferro,

Inscribat spoliis “NASO MAGISTER ERAT.”

[ENGLISH: But now the…]

745

Ecce, rogant tenerae, sibi dem praecepta, puellae:

Vos eritis chartae proxima cura meae!

LIBER TERTIUS

[ENGLISH: Having armed Greeks…]

Arma dedi Danais in Amazonas; arma supersunt,

Quae tibi dem et turmae, Penthesilea, tuae.

Ite in bella pares; vincant, quibus alma Dione

Faverit et toto qui volat orbe puer.

5

Non erat armatis aequum concurrere nudas;

Sic etiam vobis vincere turpe, viri.

Dixerit e multis aliquis “quid virus in angues

Adicis, et rabidae tradis ovile lupae?”

Parcite paucarum diffundere crimen in omnes;

10

Spectetur meritis quaeque puella suis.

Si minor Atrides Helenen, Helenesque sororem

Quo premat Atrides crimine maior habet,

Si scelere Oeclides Talaioniae Eriphylae

Vivus et in vivis ad Styga venit equis,

15

Est pia Penelope lustris errante duobus

Et totidem lustris bella gerente viro.

Respice Phylaciden et quae comes isse marito

Fertur et ante annos occubuisse suos.

Fata Pheretiadae coniunx Pagasaea redemit:

20

Proque viro est uxor funere lata viri.

“Accipe me, Capaneu! cineres miscebimus” inquit

Iphias, in medios desiluitque rogos.

Ipsa quoque et cultu est et nomine femina Virtus:

Non mirum, populo si placet illa suo.

25

Nec tamen hae mentes nostra poscuntur ab arte:

Conveniunt cumbae vela minora meae.

Nil nisi lascivi per me discuntur amores;

Femina praecipiam quo sit amanda modo.

Femina nec flammas nec saevos excutit arcus;

30

Parcius haec video tela nocere viris.

Saepe viri fallunt: tenerae non saepe puellae,

Paucaque, si quaeras, crimina fraudis habent.

Phasida iam matrem fallax dimisit Iason:

Venit in Aesonios altera nupta sinus.

35

Quantum in te, Theseu, volucres Ariadna marinas

Pavit, in ignoto sola relicta loco!

Quaere, novem cur una viae dicantur, et audi

Depositis silvas Phyllida flesse comis.

Et famam pietatis habet, tamen hospes et ensem

40

Praebuit et causam mortis, Elissa, tuae.

Quid vos perdiderit, dicam? nescistis amare:

Defuit ars vobis; arte perennat amor.

Nunc quoque nescirent: sed me Cytherea docere

Iussit, et ante oculos constitit ipsa meos.

45

Tum mihi “Quid miserae” dixit “meruere puellae?

Traditur armatis vulgus inerme viris.

Illos artifices gemini fecere libelli:

Haec quoque pars monitis erudienda tuis.

Probra Therapnaeae qui dixerat ante maritae,

50

Mox cecinit laudes prosperiore lyra.

Si bene te novi (cultas ne laede puellas!)

Gratia, dum vives, ista petenda tibi est.”

Dixit, et e myrto (myrto nam vincta capillos

Constiterat) folium granaque pauca dedit;

55

Sensimus acceptis numen quoque: purior aether

Fulsit, et e toto pectore cessit onus.

Dum facit ingenium, petite hinc praecepta, puellae,

Quas pudor et leges et sua iura sinunt.

Venturae memores iam nunc estote senectae:

60

Sic nullum vobis tempus abibit iners.

Dum licet, et vernos etiamnum educitis annos,

Ludite: eunt anni more fluentis aquae;

Nec quae praeteriit, iterum revocabitur unda,

Nec quae praeteriit, hora redire potest.

65

Utendum est aetate: cito pede labitur aetas,

Nec bona tam sequitur, quam bona prima fuit.

Hos ego, qui canent, frutices violaria vidi:

Hac mihi de spina grata corona data est.

Tempus erit, quo tu, quae nunc excludis amantes,

70

Frigida deserta nocte iacebis anus,

Nec tua frangetur nocturna ianua rixa,

Sparsa nec invenies limina mane rosa.

Quam cito (me miserum!) laxantur corpora rugis,

Et perit in nitido qui fuit ore color.

75

Quasque fuisse tibi canas a virgine iuras,

Spargentur subito per caput omne comae.

Anguibus exuitur tenui cum pelle vetustas,

Nec faciunt cervos cornua iacta senes:

Nostra sine auxilio fugiunt bona; carpite florem,

80

Qui, nisi carptus erit, turpiter ipse cadet.

Adde, quod et partus faciunt breviora iuventae

Tempora: continua messe senescit ager.

Latmius Endymion non est tibi, Luna, rubori,

Nec Cephalus roseae praeda pudenda deae.

85

Ut Veneri, quem luget adhuc, donetur Adonis:

Unde habet Aenean Harmoniamque suos?

Ite per exemplum, genus o mortale, dearum,

Gaudia nec cupidis vestra negate viris.

Ut iam decipiant, quid perditis? omnia constant;

90

Mille licet sumant, deperit inde nihil.

Conteritur ferrum, silices tenuantur ab usu:

Sufficit et damni pars caret illa metu.

Quis vetet adposito lumen de lumine sumi?

Quisve cavo vastas in mare servet aquas?

95

Et tamen ulla viro mulier “non expedit” inquit?

Quid, nisi quam sumes, dic mihi, perdis aquam?

Nec vos prostituit mea vox, sed vana timere

Damna vetat: damnis munera vestra carent.

Sed me flaminibus venti maioris iturum,

100

Dum sumus in portu, provehat aura levis.

[ENGLISH: I’ll start…]

Ordior a cultu; cultis bene Liber ab uvis

Provenit, et culto stat seges alta solo.

Forma dei munus: forma quota quaeque superbit?

Pars vestrum tali munere magna caret.

105

Cura dabit faciem; facies neglecta peribit,

Idaliae similis sit licet illa deae.

Corpora si veteres non sic coluere puellae,

Nec veteres cultos sic habuere viros;

Si fuit Andromache tunicas induta valentes,

110

Quid mirum? duri militis uxor erat.

Scilicet Aiaci coniunx ornata venires,

Cui tegumen septem terga fuere boum?

Simplicitas rudis ante fuit: nunc aurea Roma est,

Et domiti magnas possidet orbis opes.

115

Aspice quae nunc sunt Capitolia, quaeque fuerunt:

Alterius dices illa fuisse Iovis.

Curia, concilio quae nunc dignissima tanto,

De stipula Tatio regna tenente fuit.

Quae nunc sub Phoebo ducibusque Palatia fulgent,

120

Quid nisi araturis pascua bubus erant?

Prisca iuvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum

Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis.

Non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum,

Lectaque diverso litore concha venit:

125

Nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes,

Nec quia caeruleae mole fugantur aquae:

Sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos

Rusticitas, priscis illa superstes avis.

[ENGLISH: Don’t load your…]

Vos quoque nec caris aures onerate lapillis,

130

Quos legit in viridi decolor Indus aqua,

Nec prodite graves insuto vestibus auro,

Per quas nos petitis, saepe fugatis, opes.

Munditiis capimur: non sint sine lege capilli:

Admotae formam dantque negantque manus.

135

Nec genus ornatus unum est: quod quamque decebit

Eligat, et speculum consulat ante suum.

Longa probat facies capitis discrimina puri:

Sic erat ornatis Laodamia comis.

Exiguum summa nodum sibi fronte relinqui,

140

Ut pateant aures, ora rotunda volunt.

Alterius crines umero iactentur utroque:

Talis es adsumpta, Phoebe canore, lyra.

Altera succinctae religetur more Dianae,

Ut solet, attonitas cum petit illa feras.

145

Huic decet inflatos laxe iacuisse capillos:

Illa sit adstrictis impedienda comis;

Hanc placet ornari testudine Cyllenea:

Sustineat similes fluctibus illa sinus.

Sed neque ramosa numerabis in ilice glandes,

150

Nec quot apes Hyblae, nec quot in Alpe ferae,

Nec mihi tot positus numero conprendere fas est:

Adicit ornatus proxima quaeque dies.

Et neglecta decet multas coma; saepe iacere

Hesternam credas; illa repexa modo est.

155

Ars casum simulat; sic capta vidit ut urbe

Alcides Iolen, “hanc ego” dixit “amo.”

Talem te Bacchus Satyris clamantibus euhoe

Sustulit in currus, Cnosi relicta, suos.

O quantum indulget vestro natura decori,

160

Quarum sunt multis damna pianda modis!

Nos male detegimur, raptique aetate capilli,

Ut Borea frondes excutiente, cadunt.

Femina canitiem Germanis inficit herbis,

Et melior vero quaeritur arte color:

165

Femina procedit densissima crinibus emptis,

Proque suis alios efficit aere suos.

Nec rubor est emisse; palam venire videmus

Herculis ante oculos virgineumque chorum.

Quid de veste loquar? Nec vos, segmenta, requiro

170

Nec te, quae Tyrio murice, lana, rubes.

Cum tot prodierint pretio leviore colores,

Quis furor est census corpore ferre suos!

Aëris, ecce, color, tum cum sine nubibus aër,

Nec tepidus pluvias concitat auster aquas:

175

Ecce, tibi similis, quae quondam Phrixon et Hellen

Diceris Inois eripuisse dolis;

Hic undas imitatur, habet quoque nomen ab undis:

Crediderim nymphas hac ego veste tegi.

Ille crocum simulat: croceo velatur amictu,

180

Roscida luciferos cum dea iungit equos:

Hic Paphias myrtos, hic purpureas amethystos,

Albentesve rosas, Threïciamve gruem;

Nec glandes, Amarylli, tuae, nec amygdala desunt;

Et sua velleribus nomina cera dedit.

185

Quot nova terra parit flores, cum vere tepenti

Vitis agit gemmas pigraque fugit hiemps,

Lana tot aut plures sucos bibit; elige certos:

Nam non conveniens omnibus omnis erit.

Pulla decent niveas: Briseïda pulla decebant:

190

Cum rapta est, pulla tum quoque veste fuit.

Alba decent fuscas: albis, Cepheï, placebas:

Sic tibi vestitae pressa Seriphos erat.

[ENGLISH: I was about…]

Quam paene admonui, ne trux caper iret in alas,

Neve forent duris aspera crura pilis!

195

Sed non Caucasea doceo de rupe puellas,

Quaeque bibant undas, Myse Caice, tuas.

Quid si praecipiam ne fuscet inertia dentes,

Oraque suscepta mane laventur aqua?

Scitis et inducta candorem quaerere creta:

200

Sanguine quae vero non rubet, arte rubet.

Arte supercilii confinia nuda repletis,

Parvaque sinceras velat aluta genas.

Nec pudor est oculos tenui signare favilla,

Vel prope te nato, lucide Cydne, croco.

205

Est mihi, quo dixi vestrae medicamina formae,

Parvus, sed cura grande, libellus, opus;

Hinc quoque praesidium laesae petitote figurae;

Non est pro vestris ars mea rebus iners.

Non tamen expositas mensa deprendat amator

210

Pyxidas: ars faciem dissimulata iuvat.

Quem non offendat toto faex inlita vultu,

Cum fluit in tepidos pondere lapsa sinus?

Oesypa quid redolent? quamvis mittatur Athenis

Demptus ab inmundo vellere sucus ovis.

215

Nec coram mixtas cervae sumpsisse medullas,

Nec coram dentes defricuisse probem;

Ista dabunt formam, sed erunt deformia visu:

Multaque, dum fiunt, turpia, facta placent;

Quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Myronis

220

Pondus iners quondam duraque massa fuit;

Anulus ut fiat, primo conliditur aurum;

Quas geritis vestis, sordida lana fuit;

Cum fieret, lapis asper erat: nunc, nobile signum,

Nuda Venus madidas exprimit imbre comas.

225

Tu quoque dum coleris, nos te dormire putemus;

Aptius a summa conspiciere manu.

Cur mihi nota tuo causa est candoris in ore?

Claude forem thalami! quid rude prodis opus?

Multa viros nescire decet; pars maxima rerum

230

Offendat, si non interiora tegas.

Aurea quae splendent ornato signa theatro,

Inspice, contemnes: brattea ligna tegit;

Sed neque ad illa licet populo, nisi facta, venire,

Nec nisi summotis forma paranda viris.

235

At non pectendos coram praebere capillos,

Ut iaceant fusi per tua terga, veto.

Illo praecipue ne sis morosa caveto

Tempore, nec lapsas saepe resolve comas.

Tuta sit ornatrix; odi, quae sauciat ora

240

Unguibus et rapta brachia figit acu.

Devovet, ut tangit, dominae caput illa, simulque

Plorat in invisas sanguinolenta comas.

Quae male crinita est, custodem in limine ponat,

Orneturve Bonae semper in aede deae.

245

Dictus eram subito cuidam venisse puellae:

Turbida perversas induit illa comas.

Hostibus eveniat tam foedi causa pudoris,

Inque nurus Parthas dedecus illud eat.

Turpe pecus mutilum, turpis sine gramine campus,

250

Et sine fronde frutex, et sine crine caput.

Non mihi venistis, Semele Ledeve, docendae,

Perque fretum falso, Sidoni, vecta bove,

Aut Helene, quam non stulte, Menelaë, reposcis,

Tu quoque non stulte, Troice raptor, habes.

255

Turba docenda venit, pulchrae turpesque puellae:

Pluraque sunt semper deteriora bonis.

Formosae non artis opem praeceptaque quaerunt:

Est illis sua dos, forma sine arte potens;

Cum mare compositum est, securus navita cessat:

260

Cum tumet, auxiliis adsidet ille suis.

Rara tamen mendo facies caret: occule mendas,

Quaque potes vitium corporis abde tui.

Si brevis es, sedeas, ne stans videare sedere:

Inque tuo iaceas quantulacumque toro;

265

Hic quoque, ne possit fieri mensura cubantis,

Iniecta lateant fac tibi veste pedes.

Quae nimium gracilis, pleno velamina filo

Sumat, et ex umeris laxus amictus eat.

Pallida purpureis spargat sua corpora virgis,

270

Nigrior ad Pharii confuge piscis opem.

Pes malus in nivea semper celetur aluta:

Arida nec vinclis crura resolve suis.

Conveniunt tenues scapulis analemptrides altis:

Angustum circa fascia pectus eat.

275

Exiguo signet gestu, quodcumque loquetur,

Cui digiti pingues et scaber unguis erit.

Cui gravis oris odor numquam ieiuna loquatur,

Et semper spatio distet ab ore viri.

Si niger aut ingens aut non erit ordine natus

280

Dens tibi, ridendo maxima damna feres.

Quis credat? discunt etiam ridere puellae,

Quaeritur aque illis hac quoque parte decor.

Sint modici rictus, parvaeque utrimque lacunae,

Et summos dentes ima labella tegant.

285

Nec sua perpetuo contendant ilia risu,

Sed leve nescio quid femineumque sonent.

Est, quae perverso distorqueat ora cachinno:

Risu concussa est altera, flere putes.

Illa sonat raucum quiddam atque inamabile ridet,

290

Ut rudit a scabra turpis asella mola.

Quo non ars penetrat? discunt lacrimare decenter,

Quoque volunt plorant tempore, quoque modo.

Quid, cum legitima fraudatur littera voce,

Blaesaque fit iusso lingua coacta sono?

295

In vitio decor est: quaerunt male reddere verba;

Discunt posse minus, quam potuere, loqui.

Omnibus his, quoniam prosunt, inpendite curam:

Discite femineo corpora ferre gradu.

Est et in incessu pars non temnenda decoris:

300

Allicit ignotos ille fugatque viros.

Haec movet arte latus, tunicisque fluentibus auras

Accipit, expensos fertque superba pedes:

Illa velut coniunx Umbri rubicunda mariti

Ambulat, ingentes varica fertque gradus.

305

Sed sit, ut in multis, modus hic quoque: rusticus alter

Motus, concesso mollior alter erit.

Pars umeri tamen ima tui, pars summa lacerti

Nuda sit, a laeva conspicienda manu.

Hoc vos praecipue, niveae, decet: hoc ubi vidi,

310

Oscula ferre umero, qua patet usque, libet.

Monstra maris Sirenes erant, quae voce canora

Quamlibet admissas detinuere rates.

His sua Sisyphides auditis paene resolvit

Corpora, nam sociis inlita cera fuit.

315

Res est blanda canor: discant cantare puellae:

Pro facie multis vox sua lena fuit.

Et modo marmoreis referant audita theatris,

Et modo Niliacis carmina lusa modis.

Nec plectrum dextra, citharam tenuisse sinistra

320

Nesciat arbitrio femina docta meo.

Saxa ferasque lyra movit Rhodopeïus Orpheus,

Tartareosque lacus tergeminumque canem.

Saxa tuo cantu, vindex iustissime matris,

Fecerunt muros officiosa novos.

325

Quamvis mutus erat, voci favisse putatur

Piscis, Arioniae fabula nota lyrae.

Disce etiam duplici genialia nablia palma

Verrere: conveniunt dulcibus illa iocis.

Sit tibi Callimachi, sit Coi nota poetae,

330

Sit quoque vinosi Teïa Musa senis;

Nota sit et Sappho (quid enim lascivius illa?),

Cuive pater vafri luditur arte Getae.

Et teneri possis carmen legisse Properti,

Sive aliquid Galli, sive, Tibulle, tuum:

335

Dictaque Varroni fulvis insignia villis

Vellera, germanae, Phrixe, querenda tuae:

Et profugum Aenean, altae primordia Romae,

Quo nullum Latio clarius extat opus.

Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis,

340

Nec mea Lethaeis scripta dabuntur aquis:

Atque aliquis dicet “nostri lege culta magistri

Carmina, quis partes instruit ille duas:

Deve tribus libris, titulus quos signat Amorum,

Elige, quod docili molliter ore legas:

345

Vel tibi composita cantetur Epistola voce:

Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus.”

O ita, Phoebe, velis! ita vos, pia numina vatum,

Insignis cornu Bacche, novemque deae!

[ENGLISH: Yes, you’ve guessed…]

Quis dubitet, quin scire velim saltare puellam,

350

Ut moveat posito brachia iussa mero?

Artifices lateris, scenae spectacula, amantur:

Tantum mobilitas illa decoris habet.

Parva monere pudet, talorum dicere iactus

Ut sciat, et vires, tessera missa, tuas:

355

Et modo tres iactet numeros, modo cogitet, apte

Quam subeat partem callida, quamque vocet.

Cautaque non stulte latronum proelia ludat,

Unus cum gemino calculus hoste perit,

Bellatorque sua prensus sine compare bellat,

360

Aemulus et coeptum saepe recurrit iter.

Reticuloque pilae leves fundantur aperto,

Nec, nisi quam tolles, ulla movenda pila est.

Est genus, in totidem tenui ratione redactum

Scriptula, quot menses lubricus annus habet:

365

Parva tabella capit ternos utrimque lapillos,

In qua vicisse est continuasse suos.

Mille facesse iocos; turpe est nescire puellam

Ludere: ludendo saepe paratur amor.

Sed minimus labor est sapienter iactibus uti:

370

Maius opus mores composuisse suos.

Tum sumus incauti, studioque aperimur in ipso,

Nudaque per lusus pectora nostra patent:

Ira subit, deforme malum, lucrique cupido,

Iurgiaque et rixae sollicitusque dolor:

375

Crimina dicuntur, resonat clamoribus aether,

Invocat iratos et sibi quisque deos:

Nulla fides, tabulaeque novae per vota petuntur;

Et lacrimis vidi saepe madere genas.

Iuppiter a vobis tam turpia crimina pellat,

380

In quibus est ulli cura placere viro.

[ENGLISH: These are the…]

Hos ignava iocos tribuit natura puellis;

Materia ludunt uberiore viri.

Sunt illis celeresque pilae iaculumque trochique

Armaque et in gyros ire coactus equus.

385

Nec vos Campus habet, nec vos gelidissima Virgo,

Nec Tuscus placida devehit amnis aqua.

At licet et prodest Pompeias ire per umbras,

Virginis aetheriis cum caput ardet equis;

Visite laurigero sacrata Palatia Phoebo:

390

Ille Paraetonicas mersit in alta rates;

Quaeque soror coniunxque ducis monimenta pararunt,

Navalique gener cinctus honore caput;

Visite turicremas vaccae Memphitidos aras,

Visite conspicuis terna theatra locis;

395

Spectentur tepido maculosae sanguine harenae,

Metaque ferventi circueunda rota.

Quod latet, ignotum est: ignoti nulla cupido:

Fructus abest, facies cum bona teste caret.

Tu licet et Thamyram superes et Amoebea cantu,

400

Non erit ignotae gratia magna lyrae.

Si Venerem Cous nusquam posuisset Apelles,

Mersa sub aequoreis illa lateret aquis.

Quid petitur sacris, nisi tantum fama, poetis?

Hoc votum nostri summa laboris habet.

405

Cura deum fuerant olim regumque poetae:

Praemiaque antiqui magna tulere chori.

Sanctaque maiestas et erat venerabile nomen

Vatibus, et largae saepe dabantur opes.

Ennius emeruit, Calabris in montibus ortus,

410

Contiguus poni, Scipio magne, tibi.

Nunc ederae sine honore iacent, operataque doctis

Cura vigil Musis nomen inertis habet.

Sed famae vigilare iuvat: quis nosset Homerum,

Ilias aeternum si latuisset opus?

415

Quis Danaën nosset, si semper clusa fuisset,

Inque sua turri perlatuisset anus?

Utilis est vobis, formosae, turba, puellae.

Saepe vagos ultra limina ferte pedes.

Ad multas lupa tendit oves, praedetur ut unam,

420

Et Iovis in multas devolat ales aves.

Se quoque det populo mulier speciosa videndam:

Quem trahat, e multis forsitan unus erit.

Omnibus illa locis maneat studiosa placendi,

Et curam tota mente decoris agat.

425

Casus ubique valet; semper tibi pendeat hamus:

Quo minime credas gurgite, piscis erit.

Saepe canes frustra nemorosis montibus errant,

Inque plagam nullo cervus agente venit.

Quid minus Andromedae fuerat sperare revinctae,

430

Quam lacrimas ulli posse placere suas?

Funere saepe viri vir quaeritur; ire solutis

Crinibus et fletus non tenuisse decet.

[ENGLISH: But steer clear…]

Sed vitate viros cultum formamque professos,

Quique suas ponunt in statione comas.

435

Quae vobis dicunt, dixerunt mille puellis:

Errat et in nulla sede moratur amor.

Femina quid faciat, cum sit vir levior ipsa,

Forsitan et plures possit habere viros?

Vix mihi credetis, sed credite: Troia maneret,

440

Praeceptis Priamo si foret usa satae.

Sunt qui mendaci specie grassentur amoris,

Perque aditus talis lucra pudenda petant.

Nec coma vos fallat liquido nitidissima nardo,

Nec brevis in rugas lingula pressa suas:

445

Nec toga decipiat filo tenuissima, nec si

Anulus in digitis alter et alter erit.

Forsitan ex horum numero cultissimus ille

Fur sit, et uratur vestis amore tuae.

“Redde meum!” clamant spoliatae saepe puellae,

450

“Redde meum!” toto voce boante foro.

Has, Venus, e templis multo radiantibus auro

Lenta vides lites Appiadesque tuae.

Sunt quoque non dubia quaedam mala nomina fama:

Deceptae multi crimen amantis habent.

455

Discite ab alterius vestras timuisse querellis;

Ianua fallaci ne sit aperta viro.

Parcite, Cecropides, iuranti credere Theseo:

Quos faciet testes, fecit et ante, deos.

Et tibi, Demophoon, Theseï criminis heres,

460

Phyllide decepta nulla relicta fides.

Si bene promittent, totidem promittite verbis:

Si dederint, et vos gaudia pacta date.

Illa potest vigiles flammas extinguere Vestae,

Et rapere e templis, Inachi, sacra tuis,

465

Et dare mixta viro tritis aconita cicutis,

Accepto venerem munere siqua negat.

Fert animus propius consistere: supprime habenas,

Musa, nec admissis excutiare rotis.

Verba vadum temptent abiegnis scripta tabellis:

470

Accipiat missas apta ministra notas.

Inspice: quodque leges, ex ipsis collige verbis,

Fingat, an ex animo sollicitusque roget.

Postque brevem rescribe moram: mora semper amantes

Incitat, exiguum si modo tempus habet.

475

Sed neque te facilem iuveni promitte roganti,

Nec tamen e duro quod petit ille nega.

Fac timeat speretque simul, quotiensque remittes,

Spesque magis veniat certa minorque metus.

Munda, sed e medio consuetaque verba, puellae,

480

Scribite: sermonis publica forma placet;

A! quotiens dubius scriptis exarsit amator,

Et nocuit formae barbara lingua bonae!

Sed quoniam, quamvis vittae careatis honore,

Est vobis vestros fallere cura viros,

485

Ancillae puerique manu perarate tabellas,

486

Pignora nec iuveni credite vestra novo.

489

Perfidus ille quidem, qui talia pignora servat,

490

Sed tamen Aetnaei fulminis instar habent.

487

Vidi ego pallentes isto terrore puellas

488

Servitium miseras tempus in omne pati.

491

Iudice me fraus est concessa repellere fraudem,

Armaque in armatos sumere iura sinunt.

Ducere consuescat multas manus una figuras,

(A! pereant, per quos ista monenda mihi)

495

Nec nisi deletis tutum rescribere ceris,

Ne teneat geminas una tabella manus.

Femina dicatur scribenti semper amator:

Illa sit in vestris, qui fuit ille, notis.

[ENGLISH: Now if I…]

Si licet a parvis animum ad maiora referre,

500

Plenaque curvato pandere vela sinu,

Pertinet ad faciem rabidos compescere mores:

Candida pax homines, trux decet ira feras.

Ora tument ira: nigrescunt sanguine venae:

Lumina Gorgoneo saevius igne micant.

505

“I procul hinc,” dixit “non es mihi, tibia, tanti,”

Ut vidit vultus Pallas in amne suos.

Vos quoque si media speculum spectetis in ira,

Cognoscat faciem vix satis ulla suam.

Nec minus in vultu damnosa superbia vestro:

510

Comibus est oculis alliciendus amor.

Odimus inmodicos (experto credite) fastus:

Saepe tacens odii semina vultus habet.

Spectantem specta, ridenti mollia ride:

Innuet, acceptas tu quoque redde notas.

515

Sic ubi prolusit, rudibus puer ille relictis

Spicula de pharetra promit acuta sua.

Odimus et maestas: Tecmessam diligat Aiax;

Nos hilarem populum femina laeta capit.

Numquam ego te, Andromache, nec te, Tecmessa, rogarem,

520

Ut mea de vobis altera amica foret.

Credere vix videor, cum cogar credere partu,

Vos ego cum vestris concubuisse viris.

Scilicet Aiaci mulier maestissima dixit

“Lux mea” quaeque solent verba iuvare viros?

525

Quis vetat a magnis ad res exempla minores

Sumere, nec nomen pertimuisse ducis?

Dux bonus huic centum commisit vite regendos,

Huic equites, illi signa tuenda dedit:

Vos quoque, de nobis quem quisque erit aptus ad usum,

530

Inspicite, et certo ponite quemque loco.

Munera det dives: ius qui profitebitur, adsit:

Facundus causam saepe clientis agat:

Carmina qui facimus, mittamus carmina tantum:

Hic chorus ante alios aptus amare sumus.

535

Nos facimus placitae late praeconia formae:

Nomen habet Nemesis, Cynthia nomen habet:

Vesper et Eoae novere Lycorida terrae:

Et multi, quae sit nostra Corinna, rogant.

Adde, quod insidiae sacris a vatibus absunt,

540

Et facit ad mores ars quoque nostra suos.

Nec nos ambitio, nec amor nos tangit habendi:

Contempto colitur lectus et umbra foro.

Sed facile haeremus, validoque perurimur aestu,

Et nimium certa scimus amare fide.

545

Scilicet ingenium placida mollitur ab arte,

Et studio mores convenienter eunt.

Vatibus Aoniis faciles estote, puellae:

Numen inest illis, Pieridesque favent.

Est deus in nobis, et sunt commercia caeli:

550

Sedibus aetheriis spiritus ille venit.

A doctis pretium scelus est sperare poetis;

Me miserum! scelus hoc nulla puella timet.

Dissimulate tamen, nec prima fronte rapaces

Este: novus viso casse resistet amans.

555

Sed neque vector equum, qui nuper sensit habenas,

Comparibus frenis artificemque reget,

Nec stabiles animos annis viridemque iuventam

Ut capias, idem limes agendus erit.

Hic rudis et castris nunc primum notus Amoris,

560

Qui tetigit thalamos praeda novella tuos,

Te solam norit, tibi semper inhaereat uni:

Cingenda est altis saepibus ista seges.

Effuge rivalem: vinces, dum sola tenebis;

Non bene cum sociis regna Venusque manent.

565

Ille vetus miles sensim et sapienter amabit,

Multaque tironi non patienda feret:

Nec franget postes, nec saevis ignibus uret,

Nec dominae teneras adpetet ungue genas,

Nec scindet tunicasve suas tunicasve puellae,

570

Nec raptus flendi causa capillus erit.

Ista decent pueros aetate et amore calentes;

Hic fera composita vulnera mente feret.

Ignibus heu lentis uretur, ut umida faena,

Ut modo montanis silva recisa iugis.

575

Certior hic amor est: brevis et fecundior ille;

Quae fugiunt, celeri carpite poma manu.

[ENGLISH: I’ve unbolted the…]

Omnia tradantur: portas reseravimus hosti;

Et sit in infida proditione fides.

Quod datur ex facili, longum male nutrit amorem:

580

Miscenda est laetis rara repulsa iocis.

Ante fores iaceat, “crudelis ianua!” dicat,

Multaque summisse, multa minanter agat.

Dulcia non ferimus: suco renovemur amaro;

Saepe perit ventis obruta cumba suis;

585

Hoc est, uxores quod non patiatur amari:

Conveniunt illas, cum voluere, viri;

Adde forem, et duro dicat tibi ianitor ore

“Non potes,” exclusum te quoque tanget amor.

Ponite iam gladios hebetes: pugnetur acutis;

590

Nec dubito, telis quin petar ipse meis.

Dum cadit in laqueos captus quoque nuper amator,

Solum se thalamos speret habere tuos.

Postmodo rivalem partitaque foedera lecti

Sentiat: has artes tolle, senescet amor.

595

Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit,

Cum quos praetereat quosque sequatur habet.

Quamlibet extinctos iniuria suscitat ignes:

En, ego (confiteor!) non nisi laesus amo.

Causa tamen nimium non sit manifesta doloris,

600

Pluraque sollicitus, quam sciet, esse putet.

Incitat et ficti tristis custodia servi,

Et nimium duri cura molesta viri.

Quae venit ex tuto, minus est accepta voluptas:

Ut sis liberior Thaide, finge metus.

605

Cum melius foribus possis, admitte fenestra,

Inque tuo vultu signa timentis habe.

Callida prosiliat dicatque ancilla “perimus!”

Tu iuvenem trepidum quolibet abde loco.

Admiscenda tamen venus est secura timori,

610

Ne tanti noctes non putet esse tuas.

[ENGLISH: I had half…]

Qua vafer eludi possit ratione maritus,

Quaque vigil custos, praeteriturus eram.

Nupta virum timeat: rata sit custodia nuptae;

Hoc decet, hoc leges iusque pudorque iubent.

615

Te quoque servari, modo quam vindicta redemit,

Quis ferat? Ut fallas, ad mea sacra veni!

Tot licet observent (adsit modo certa voluntas),

Quot fuerant Argo lumina, verba dabis.

Scilicet obstabit custos, ne scribere possis,

620

Sumendae detur cum tibi tempus aquae?

Conscia cum possit scriptas portare tabellas,

Quas tegat in tepido fascia lata sinu?

Cum possit sura chartas celare ligatas,

Et vincto blandas sub pede ferre notas?

625

Caverit haec custos, pro charta conscia tergum

Praebeat, inque suo corpore verba ferat.

Tuta quoque est fallitque oculos e lacte recenti

Littera: carbonis pulvere tange, leges.

Fallet et umiduli quae fiet acumine lini,

630

Ut ferat occultas pura tabella notas.

Adfuit Acrisio servandae cura puellae:

Hunc tamen illa suo crimine fecit avum.

Quid faciat custos, cum sint tot in urbe theatra,

Cum spectet iunctos illa libenter equos,

635

Cum sedeat Phariae sistris operata iuvencae,

Quoque sui comites ire vetantur, eat,

Cum fuget a templis oculos Bona Diva virorum,

Praeterquam siquos illa venire iubet?

Cum, custode foris tunicas servante puellae,

640

Celent furtivos balnea multa iocos,

Cum, quotiens opus est, fallax aegrotet amica,

Et cedat lecto quamlibet aegra suo,

Nomine cum doceat, quid agamus, adultera clavis,

Quasque petas non det ianua sola vias?

645

Fallitur et multo custodis cura Lyaeo,

Illa vel Hispano lecta sit uva iugo;

Sunt quoque, quae faciant altos medicamina somnos,

Victaque Lethaea lumina nocte premant;

Nec male deliciis odiosum conscia tardis

650

Detinet, et longa iungitur ipsa mora.

Quid iuvat ambages praeceptaque parva movere,

Cum minimo custos munere possit emi?

Munera, crede mihi, capiunt hominesque deosque:

Placatur donis Iuppiter ipse datis.

655

Quid sapiens faciet, stultus cum munere gaudet?

Ipse quoque accepto munere mutus erit.

Sed semel est custos longum redimendus in aevum:

Saepe dabit, dederit quas semel ille manus.

Questus eram, memini, metuendos esse sodales:

660

Non tangit solos ista querella viros.

Credula si fueris, aliae tua gaudia carpent,

Et lepus hic aliis exagitatus erit.

Haec quoque, quae praebet lectum studiosa locumque

Crede mihi, mecum non semel illa fuit.

665

Nec nimium vobis formosa ancilla ministret:

Saepe vicem dominae praebuit illa mihi.

[ENGLISH: Im rambling wildly…]

Quo feror insanus? quid aperto pectore in hostem

Mittor, et indicio prodor ab ipse meo?

Non avis aucupibus monstrat, qua parte petatur:

670

Non docet infestos currere cerva canes.

Viderit utilitas: ego coepta fideliter edam:

Lemniasin gladios in mea fata dabo.

Efficite (et facile est), ut nos credamus amari:

Prona venit cupidis in sua vota fides.

675

Spectet amabilius iuvenem, suspiret ab imo

Femina, tam sero cur veniatque roget:

Accedant lacrimae, dolor et de paelice fictus,

Et laniet digitis illius ora suis:

Iamdudum persuasus erit; miserebitur ultro,

680

Et dicet “cura carpitur ista mei.”

Praecipue si cultus erit speculoque placebit,

Posse suo tangi credet amore deas.

Sed te, quaecumque est, moderate iniuria turbet,

Nec sis audita paelice mentis inops.

685

Nec cito credideris: quantum cito credere laedat,

Exemplum vobis non leve Procris erit.

[ENGLISH: There’s a sacred…]

Est prope purpureos colles florentis Hymetti

Fons sacer et viridi caespite mollis humus:

Silva nemus non alta facit; tegit arbutus herbam,

690

Ros maris et lauri nigraque myrtus olent:

Nec densum foliis buxum fragilesque myricae,

Nec tenues cytisi cultaque pinus abest.

Lenibus inpulsae zephyris auraque salubri

Tot generum frondes herbaque summa tremit.

695

Grata quies Cephalo: famulis canibusque relictis

Lassus in hac iuvenis saepe resedit humo,

“Quae” que “meos releves aestus,” cantare solebat

“Accipienda sinu, mobilis aura, veni.”

Coniugis ad timidas aliquis male sedulus aures

700

Auditos memori detulit ore sonos;

Procris ut accepit nomen, quasi paelicis, Aurae,

Excidit, et subito muta dolore fuit;

Palluit, ut serae lectis de vite racemis

Pallescunt frondes, quas nova laesit hiemps,

705

Quaeque suos curvant matura cydonia ramos,

Cornaque adhuc nostris non satis apta cibis.

Ut rediit animus, tenues a pectore vestes

Rumpit, et indignas sauciat ungue genas;

Nec mora, per medias passis furibunda capillis

710

Evolat, ut thyrso concita Baccha, vias.

Ut prope perventum, comites in valle relinquit,

Ipsa nemus tacito clam pede fortis init.

Quid tibi mentis erat, cum sic male sana lateres,

Procri? quis adtoniti pectoris ardor erat?

715

Iam iam venturam, quaecumque erat Aura, putabas

Scilicet, atque oculis probra videnda tuis.

Nunc venisse piget (neque enim deprendere velles),

Nunc iuvat: incertus pectora versat amor.

Credere quae iubeant, locus est et nomen et index,

720

Et quia mens semper quod timet, esse putat.

Vidit ut oppressa vestigia corporis herba,

Pulsantur trepidi corde micante sinus.

Iamque dies medius tenues contraxerat umbras,

Inque pari spatio vesper et ortus erant:

725

Ecce, redit Cephalus silvis, Cyllenia proles,

Oraque fontana fervida pulsat aqua.

Anxia, Procri, lates: solitas iacet ille per herbas,

Et “zephyri molles auraque” dixit “ades!”

Ut patuit miserae iucundus nominis error,

730

Et mens et rediit verus in ora color.

Surgit, et oppositas agitato corpore frondes

Movit, in amplexus uxor itura viri:

Ille feram movisse ratus, iuvenaliter artus

Corripit, in dextra tela fuere manu.

735

Quid facis, infelix? non est fera, supprime tela!

Me miserum! iaculo fixa puella tuo est.

“Ei mihi!” conclamat “fixisti pectus amicum.

Hic locus a Cephalo vulnera semper habet.

Ante diem morior, sed nulla paelice laesa:

740

Hoc faciet positae te mihi, terra, levem.

Nomine suspectas iam spiritus exit in auras:

Labor, eo, cara lumina conde manu!”

Ille sinu dominae morientia corpora maesto

Sustinet, et lacrimis vulnera saeva lavat:

745

Exit, et incauto paulatim pectore lapsus

Excipitur miseri spiritus ore viri.

[ENGLISH: But back to…]

Sed repetamus opus: mihi nudis rebus eundum est,

Ut tangat portus fessa carina suos.

Sollicite expectas, dum te in convivia ducam,

750

Et quaeris monitus hac quoque parte meos.

Sera veni, positaque decens incede lucerna:

Grata mora venies; maxima lena mora est.

Etsi turpis eris, formosa videbere potis,

Et latebras vitiis nox dabit ipsa tuis.

755

Carpe cibos digitis: est quiddam gestus edendi:

Ora nec immunda tota perungue manu.

Neve domi praesume dapes, sed desine citra

Quam capis; es paulo quam potes esse minus;

Priamides Helenen avide si spectet edentem,

760

Oderit, et dicat “stulta rapina mea est.”

Aptius est, deceatque magis potare puellas:

Cum Veneris puero non male, Bacche, facis.

Hoc quoque, qua patiens caput est, animusque pedesque

Constant: nec, quae sunt singula, bina vide.

765

Turpe iacens mulier multo madefacta Lyaeo:

Digna est concubitus quoslibet illa pati.

Nec somnis posita tutum succumbere mensa:

Per somnos fieri multa pudenda solent.

[ENGLISH: The rest I…]

Ulteriora pudet docuisse: sed alma Dione

770

“Praecipue nostrum est, quod pudet” inquit “opus.”

Nota sibi sit quaeque: modos a corpore certos

Sumite: non omnes una figura decet.

Quae facie praesignis erit, resupina iaceto:

Spectentur tergo, quis sua terga placent.

775

Milanion umeris Atalantes crura ferebat:

Si bona sunt, hoc sunt accipienda modo.

Parva vehatur equo: quod erat longissima, numquam

Thebaïs Hectoreo nupta resedit equo.

Strata premat genibus, paulum cervice reflexa,

780

Femina per longum conspicienda latus.

Cui femur est iuvenale, carent quoque pectora menda,

Stet vir, in obliquo fusa sit ipsa toro.

Nec tibi turpe puta crinem, ut Phylleïa mater,

Solvere, et effusis colla reflecte comis.

785

Tu quoque, cui rugis uterum Lucina notavit,

Ut celer aversis utere Parthus equis.

Mille modi veneris; simplex minimique laboris,

Cum iacet in dextrum semisupina latus.

Sed neque Phoebei tripodes nec corniger Ammon

790

Vera magis vobis, quam mea Musa, canet:

Siqua fides arti, quam longo fecimus usu,

Credite: praestabunt carmina nostra fidem.

Sentiat ex imis venerem resoluta medullis

Femina, et ex aequo res iuvet illa duos.

795

Nec blandae voces iucundaque murmura cessent,

Nec taceant mediis improba verba iocis.

Tu quoque, cui veneris sensum natura negavit,

Dulcia mendaci gaudia finge sono.

Infelix, cui torpet hebes locus ille, puella,

800

Quo pariter debent femina virque frui.

Tantum, cum finges, ne sis manifesta, caveto:

Effice per motum luminaque ipsa fidem.

Quam iuvet, et voces et anhelitus arguat oris;

A! pudet, arcanas pars habet ista notas.

805

Gaudia post Veneris quae poscet munus amantem,

Illa suas nolet pondus habere preces.

Nec lucem in thalamos totis admitte fenestris;

Aptius in vestro corpore multa latent.

[ENGLISH: Our sport is…]

Lusus habet finem: cygnis descendere tempus,

810

Duxerunt collo qui iuga nostra suo.

Ut quondam iuvenes, ita nunc, mea turba, puellae

Inscribant spoliis “NASO MAGISTER ERAT.”

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

Maya Angelou

•

Daniel J. Boorstin

•

A. S. Byatt

•

Caleb Carr

•

Christopher Cerf

•

Ron Chernow

•

Shelby Foote

•

Charles Frazier

•

Vartan Gregorian

•

Richard Howard

•

Charles Johnson

•

Jon Krakauer

•

Edmund Morris

•

Joyce Carol Oates

•

Elaine Pagels

•

John Richardson

•

Salman Rushdie

•

Oliver Sacks

•

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

•

Carolyn See

•

William Styron

•

Gore Vidal

MODERN LIBRARY IS ONLINE AT WWW.MODERNLIBRARY.COM

MODERN LIBRARY ONLINE IS YOUR GUIDE

TO CLASSIC LITERATURE ON THE WEB

THE MODERN LIBRARY E-NEWSLETTER

Our free e-mail newsletter is sent to subscribers, and features sample chapters, interviews with and essays by our authors, upcoming books, special promotions, announcements, and news.

To subscribe to the Modern Library e-newsletter, send a blank e-mail to: sub_modernlibrary@info.randomhouse.com or visit www.modernlibrary.com

THE MODERN LIBRARY WEBSITE

Check out the Modern Library website at

www.modernlibrary.com for:

• The Modern Library e-newsletter

• A list of our current and upcoming titles and series

• Reading Group Guides and exclusive author spotlights

• Special features with information on the classics and other paperback series

• Excerpts from new releases and other titles

• A list of our e-books and information on where to buy them

• The Modern Library Editorial Board’s 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century written in the English language

• News and announcements

Questions? E-mail us at modernlibrary@randomhouse.com. For questions about examination or desk copies, please visit the Random House Academic Resources site at www.randomhouse.com/academic