The Epodes

You will go among the tall bulwarks of the fleet, on Liburnian galleys, my friend, ready to take on every danger of Caesar’s as your own, Maecenas — but what of me, for whom life is sweet while you survive, and otherwise a weight? Are we, as bidden, to pursue a leisure that gives no pleasure unless shared with you, or to bear this toil with the spirit in which men who are not soft should bear it? Bear it we will, and follow you with a brave heart over the ridges of the Alps, over the inhospitable Caucasus, or to the farthest gulf of the setting sun. You may ask how I would help your labor with my own, unwarlike and none too strong. At your side I shall live in less fear — the fear that grips the absent harder; as the bird brooding over her unfledged chicks dreads the snakes’ gliding approach more once she has left them, though present she could bring them no more aid. Gladly will this war and every war be soldiered through in hope of your good favor — not that more bullocks may strain at plows yoked for my fields, nor that my flock may trade Calabrian for Lucanian pasture before the scorching Dog-Star, nor that a gleaming villa of high Tusculum may reach as far as its Circean walls. Your kindness has enriched me enough, and more than enough; I will not heap up what I might bury in the earth like grasping Chremes, or squander like a loose-belt prodigal.

"Happy the man who, far from the world of business, like the early breed of mortals, works his father’s fields with his own oxen, free of all usury; who is not startled, a soldier, by the savage trumpet, nor dreads the angry sea, and shuns the Forum and the proud thresholds of more powerful citizens. And so he weds the grown shoots of the vine to the tall poplars, or in a secluded valley looks out over his wandering, lowing herds, and, pruning the useless branches with his hook, grafts on more fruitful ones, or stores pressed honey in clean jars, or shears the helpless sheep. Or when Autumn has lifted over the fields his head crowned with mellow fruit, how he delights to pluck the grafted pears and the grape that rivals purple, to reward you, Priapus, and you, father Silvanus, guardian of boundaries. He loves to lie now under an old holm-oak, now on the matted grass, while the waters glide between their high banks, the birds lament in the woods, and the leaves murmur with the flowing springs — which beckons an easy sleep. But when the wintry season of thundering Jupiter makes ready its rains and snows, he either drives the fierce boars, with many a hound, this way and that into the waiting nets, or stretches the wide-meshed nets on a smooth pole, a snare for the gluttonous thrushes, and bags the timid hare and the migrant crane in his noose — welcome prizes. Among such joys, who does not forget the wretched cares that love brings? But if a chaste wife does her part to keep the home and the sweet children — a Sabine, say, or the sun-scorched wife of a nimble Apulian — and piles the sacred hearth with seasoned logs against her tired husband’s coming, and, penning the glad flock in woven hurdles, drains their swollen udders, and, drawing this year’s wine from the sweet cask, lays out an unbought feast: then no Lucrine oysters would please me more, no turbot or parrot-wrasse, should any storm, thundering over eastern waves, turn them to this sea of ours; no African hen would go down into my belly, no Ionian pheasant, sweeter than the olive gathered from the richest branches of the trees, or the sorrel-leaf that loves the meadows, and mallows wholesome for a heavy body, or a lamb slain at the feast of Terminus, or a kid snatched from the wolf. Amid such feasting, what joy to watch the well-fed sheep hurrying home, to watch the weary oxen drag the upturned share on their drooping necks, and the home-born slaves, the swarm of a thriving house, ranged round the gleaming Lares." When the moneylender Alfius had said all this — on the very point of turning farmer — he called in all his money on the Ides, and looks to lend it out again by the Kalends.

If ever a man with impious hand has throttled his old father’s throat, let him eat garlic, more harmful than hemlock. O the iron guts of harvesters! What is this venom raging in my vitals? Has viper’s blood, boiled into these herbs, played me false? Or did Canidia handle the baleful dish? When Medea, past all the other Argonauts, marveled at their handsome captain, it was with this she smeared Jason as he went to set the yoke, strange to the bulls; with this, avenged on her rival through anointed gifts, she fled on a winged serpent. Never did so fierce a blaze of the stars settle on thirsty Apulia, nor did the gift burn hotter on the shoulders of efficient Hercules. But should you ever crave such a thing again, my joking Maecenas, I pray your girl may set her hand against your kiss and lie at the bed’s far edge.

Such enmity as fell by lot between wolves and lambs is mine with you, your flank seared by Spanish ropes, your shins by the hard fetter. Strut as you may, swollen with money, fortune does not change your breed. Do you not see, as you pace the Sacred Way in a toga three yards wide, how the passers-by turn their faces this way and that in utter, open indignation? "This man, cut by the triumvirs’ whips till the crier sickened of it, plows a thousand acres of Falernian soil and wears the Appian Way thin with his ponies, and, a great knight, takes a front-row seat in scorn of Otho’s law. What is the point of leading out so many ships, beaked and of heavy tonnage, against pirates and a slave rabble, when this — this — is a tribune of the soldiers?"

"But oh, whatever of the gods in heaven rules the earth and the human race, what means this uproar, and why the savage looks of all of you turned on me alone? By your children I beseech you — if ever Lucina, called on, stood by at a true birth — by this empty honor of my purple I pray, by Jupiter, who must condemn these things: why do you stare at me as a stepmother would, or like a beast struck with the steel?" When the boy had finished this lament with trembling lips and stood there, his badges stripped away — a body still unripe, such as could soften the impious hearts of Thracians — Canidia, her hair and uncombed head entwined with little vipers, orders wild fig-trees torn up from the graves, orders funereal cypresses, and eggs smeared with the blood of a foul toad, and the feather of a night screech-owl, and herbs that Iolcos and Hiberia, fertile in poisons, send, and bones snatched from the mouth of a starving bitch, to be charred in Colchian flames. Meanwhile brisk Sagana, sprinkling Avernus’ waters through the whole house, bristles in her hair like a sea-urchin or a charging boar. Veia, with no conscience to restrain her, was hollowing the ground with hard mattocks, groaning at the labor, so the buried boy might die at the slow, twice- and thrice-changed spectacle of food, his face protruding only so far as bodies stand above the water, hung by the chin; so his dried marrow and parched liver might serve as a love-philter, once his eyeballs, fixed on the forbidden food, had wasted away. Idle Naples believed — and every neighboring town — that Folia of Ariminum, a woman of masculine lust, was there as well, who charms the bewitched stars and the moon down from the sky with her Thessalian voice. Here fierce Canidia, gnawing her untrimmed thumb with livid tooth — what did she say, or what did she leave unsaid? "O faithful witnesses to my doings, Night, and Diana, who rule the silence when the secret rites are wrought, now, now be present, now against my enemies’ houses turn your wrath and power. While in the fearsome woods the wild beasts lie slack with sweet sleep, let the dogs of the Subura bark — that all may laugh — at the old adulterer, anointed with nard such as my hands never worked more perfect. What has happened? Why do barbarous Medea’s dire poisons work less, with which, avenged, she fled her proud rival, great Creon’s daughter, when the robe, a gift steeped in gore, bore off the new bride in flame? And yet no herb, no root that hides in rough ground, has escaped me. He sleeps on a couch anointed for the forgetting of every mistress. Aha! He walks free by the spell of some witch who knows more than I. Not by the usual potions, Varus — O head that will weep much — will you come running back to me, nor will your mind, recalled by Marsian voices, return. I will brew something stronger, pour you a stronger cup as you turn from me in scorn; and sooner shall the sky sink below the sea, the earth stretched out above it, than you shall fail to blaze with love for me as pitch blazes with black fire." At this the boy no longer tried, as before, to soften the impious women with gentle words, but, unsure from where to break his silence, flung out Thyestean curses: "Magic poisons cannot overturn right and wrong, cannot reverse the lot of men. With curses I will hunt you: a dread execration is atoned by no victim. Nay, when, condemned to die, I have breathed out my life, by night I will fall upon you, a Fury, and tear at your faces, a shade with curved talons — for such is the power of the gods of the dead — and, settling on your restless hearts, I will steal your sleep with terror. The mob, here and there pelting you street by street with stones, will batter you to pieces, you filthy hags; then the wolves and the Esquiline birds will scatter your unburied limbs, and this my parents — alas, outliving me — shall not fail to witness."

Why do you harry innocent strangers, dog, you coward against wolves? Why not, if you can, turn your idle threats this way and come at me, who will bite back? For like a Molossian or a tawny Spartan hound, that strong friend of shepherds, I will drive through deep snow, with ear pricked up, whatever beast runs before me; while you, when you have filled the grove with your fearsome voice, sniff at the food thrown down. Beware, beware: for against the wicked I am fiercest, and I lift my horns at the ready — like the slighted son-in-law of faithless Lycambes, or the fierce foe of Bupalus. If anyone goes at me with a black tooth, shall I weep, unavenged, like a boy?

Where, where are you rushing, criminals? Or why are sheathed swords being fitted to your hands? Has too little Latin blood been spilled on the plains and on Neptune’s waters — not that the Roman might burn the proud citadels of envious Carthage, nor that the Briton, untouched till now, might come down the Sacred Way in chains, but that, in keeping with the Parthians’ prayers, this City might perish by its own right hand? Never was this the way with wolves or lions, savage only against a different kind. Is it blind frenzy, or some sharper force, or guilt, that drives you? Give answer. They are silent, and a pallid white stains their faces, their stricken minds are stunned. So it is: a bitter fate drives the Romans on, and the crime of a brother’s murder, ever since the blood of guiltless Remus flowed to the ground, a curse upon his heirs.

That you, rotten with a long lifetime, should ask what unstrings my manhood, when your teeth are black, and ancient age plows your forehead into wrinkles, and a foul anus gapes between your shriveled buttocks like a cow’s with the runs! But it inflames me — your breast and putrid dugs like the udders of a mare, your flabby belly, and the scrawny thigh set on swollen calves. Be blessed, and may triumphal images lead out your funeral train, and may no wife walk about more heavily laden with rounder pearls. And what of it that little Stoic tracts like to lie among silk cushions? Do unlettered sinews stiffen any the less, or the member droop the less? To call it up from a haughty groin, you must put your mouth to the work.

When shall I, glad at Caesar’s victory, drink with you the Caecuban laid by for festal feasts beneath your high roof — so it please Jupiter — blessed Maecenas, while the lyre sounds out a measure mingled with flutes, this strain Dorian, those a barbarian air? As lately, when the Neptunian captain, driven from the strait, fled with his ships ablaze, after threatening the City with the chains he had struck from treacherous slaves, his friends. A Roman — alas, you of later days will deny it — made over, bound to a woman, bears stake and arms, a soldier, and can bring himself to serve wrinkled eunuchs; and amid the military standards the sun looks down on a shameful mosquito-net. At this, two thousand Gauls, chafing, wheeled their horses round, hailing Caesar, and the sterns of the hostile ships, steered hard to the left in haste, lie hidden in harbor. Hail, Triumph! Do you hold back the golden chariots and the heifers never yoked? Hail, Triumph! No leader like the one from the Jugurthine war did you bring home, nor the African, over whom his valor raised a tomb above Carthage. Beaten by land and sea, the foe has changed his purple for the mourning cloak. Either he makes for Crete, famed for its hundred cities, ready to sail with winds not his own, or he heads for the Syrtes harried by the south wind, or he is borne over an uncertain sea. Bring larger cups here, boy, and Chian wine or Lesbian, or measure us out the Caecuban to curb our welling nausea. Sweet it is to dissolve the care and the fear for Caesar’s fortunes in mellow Lyaeus.

Under an evil bird the ship casts off and sails, bearing stinking Mevius. Mind, Auster, that you lash both her flanks with horrid waves; let the black Eurus, the sea upturned, strew her cables and broken oars; let Aquilo rise, as great as that which on high mountains splinters the shuddering oaks; and let no friendly star appear in the black night, there where grim Orion sets; and let her ride no calmer a sea than the Greek band of victors rode when Pallas turned her wrath from burnt Ilium against the impious ship of Ajax. O what a sweat awaits your sailors, and what a sallow paleness awaits you, and that unmanly howling, the prayers, and Jupiter turned away, when the Ionian gulf, bellowing back with the wet south wind, has cracked your keel! But if, stretched out along the curving shore, a fat prize, you gladden the gulls, a lustful goat shall be slaughtered, and a ewe, to the Tempests.

Pettius, it gives me no pleasure, as it did before, to write my little verses, struck through with a heavy love — a love that, beyond all others, seeks me out to burn for soft boys or for girls. This is the third December, since I gave up raging for Inachia, that shakes the glory from the woods. Alas — through the City (for I am ashamed of so great an ill) what a tale I was; and I repent of the parties where languor and silence gave the lover away, and the breath fetched up from deep within. "Against gain, does the candid genius of a poor man count for nothing?" I would complain, weeping to you, once the shameless god, with hotter wine, had drawn my secrets out into the open. "But if free bile should ever seethe up in my breast, to scatter to the winds these useless salves that do nothing to ease the cruel wound, then shame, put off, will cease to vie with unequal rivals." When I had gravely praised such resolves before you, sent home, I would be carried off on a wavering foot to doorposts — alas for me — that were no friends, and hard thresholds, on which I bruised my loins and flank. Now the love of Lyciscus holds me, who boasts of outdoing in softness any little woman; from this no free counsel of friends can pry me loose, nor any heavy reproach, but only another flame — for a fair girl, or for a slim boy knotting back his long hair.

What do you want, woman most fit for black elephants? Why send me gifts, why little notes, when I am no firm young man, nor dull of nose? For I, one man, can scent more keenly whether a polyp or a rank goat couches in hairy armpits than a sharp hound where the boar lies hidden. What sweat, and what a foul reek, rises everywhere from her shriveled limbs, when, my member gone limp, she hurries to slake her ungoverned frenzy, and no longer does the wet chalk stay on her, nor the color daubed with crocodile dung, and now, in heat, she bursts the strained bedding and the canopy. Or when she goads my disgust with savage words: "With Inachia you flag far less than with me; Inachia you can do three times a night, but with me you go soft after a single bout. A foul end to Lesbia, who, when I sought a bull, pointed me to you, a do-nothing — when I had Coan Amyntas at hand, in whose untamed groin the sinew stands more constant than a young tree clings to the hillside. For whom were the fleeces, twice steeped in Tyrian purple, being readied in such haste? For you, of course, so there should be no fellow-guest among his equals whom his own woman loved better than you. O unhappy me, whom you flee as the lamb dreads the fierce wolves, the she-goats the lions!"

A grim storm has drawn the sky together, and rain and snow bring Jupiter down; now the sea, now the woods roar with the Thracian north wind. Let us snatch, friends, the moment from the day, and while our knees are green and it is fitting, let old age be cleared from the clouded brow. You, bring out the wine pressed in my Torquatus’ consulship. Of the rest forbear to speak: a god, perhaps, will set these things to rights by a kindly turn. Now it is sweet to be drenched with Persian nard and to ease the breast of dire anxieties with the Cyllenian lyre, as the noble Centaur sang to his great ward: "Unconquered one, mortal boy, son of the goddess Thetis, the land of Assaracus awaits you, which the cold streams of little Scamander cleave, and gliding Simois; from there the Fates with their sure thread have cut off your return, nor will your sea-blue mother bring you home. There ease every ill with wine and song, with the sweet consolations of deforming grief."

Why a soft sloth has poured so deep a forgetting into my inmost senses — as though with parched throat I had drained the cups that draw on Lethe’s sleep — candid Maecenas, you kill me by asking, and asking again: for a god, a god forbids me to bring to the roller’s end the iambics begun, the song promised long ago. In no other way, they say, did Anacreon of Teos burn for Samian Bathyllus, who often wept his love on the hollow shell in a measure not labored over. You yourself are scorched, poor wretch: and if no fairer fire set beleaguered Ilium ablaze, rejoice in your lot; as for me, a freedwoman, Phryne, content with no single man, wears me away.

It was night, and the moon was shining in a clear sky among the lesser stars, when you, about to outrage the power of the great gods, swore the oath in my words, clinging with your supple arms more close than the ivy binds the tall holm-oak, that — while the wolf was foe to the flock, and Orion, foe to sailors, churned the wintry sea, and the breeze stirred the unshorn hair of Apollo — this love would be returned. O Neaera, you who will grieve much at my manhood: for if there is anything of a man in Flaccus, he will not bear that you give your nights, unbroken, to a rival preferred, and, angered, he will seek a match; nor will his constancy give way to your beauty, once it has taken offense, if a settled hurt has entered. And you, whoever you are, more fortunate, who now strut proud at my misfortune — though you be rich in flocks and broad acres, and Pactolus flow for you, and the secrets of reborn Pythagoras not elude you, and you outdo Nireus in beauty — alas, alas, you too will mourn your love carried off elsewhere; and I, in my turn, shall laugh.

Now a second generation is ground away by civil wars, and Rome herself falls by her own strength — she whom the neighboring Marsi had no power to ruin, nor the Etruscan host of menacing Porsena, nor the rival valor of Capua, nor fierce Spartacus, nor the Allobrox, faithless in revolution; she whom neither savage Germany with its blue-eyed youth nor Hannibal, the dread of our parents, could subdue — we shall destroy, an impious generation of accursed blood, and the soil will be held again by wild beasts. The barbarian victor, alas, will tread the ashes, and the horseman will trample the City with ringing hoof, and the bones of Quirinus, that now lie sheltered from wind and sun — a thing unspeakable to see — he will insolently scatter. Perhaps you ask, all of you, or the better part, what may avail to be quit of these wretched toils. Let no resolve be set above this: just as the citizens of Phocaea fled, with a curse, their fields, the homes of their fathers, and the shrines, leaving them to boars and to ravening wolves — to go wherever our feet shall carry us, wherever over the waves the South or the wild African calls. Is that agreed? Or has anyone a better course to urge? Why, under a favoring bird, do we delay to board? But let us swear to this: "When the rocks, lifted from the lowest depths, shall swim back to the top, then let return be no sin; nor let it shame us to set our sails for home, when Padus shall wash the peaks of Matinus, or lofty Apennine run out into the sea, or a strange love yoke new monsters in unheard-of lust, so that tigers gladly couch with deer, and the dove be mated to the kite, and the trusting herds fear no tawny lions, and the smooth he-goat take to the salt sea." These oaths, and whatever else can sever sweet return — let us go, the whole city under a curse, or the part better than the unteachable herd; the soft and the hopeless, let them press their ill-omened couches. You who have manhood, put away womanish grief and fly on past the Etruscan shores. For us the encircling Ocean waits: let us make for the fields, the blessed fields, and the wealthy isles, where the unplowed earth yields its grain each year, and the unpruned vine forever flowers, and the shoot of the never-failing olive buds, and the dark fig adorns its own tree; honey wells from the hollow holm-oak, and from the high hills the light stream leaps down with sounding foot. There the she-goats come unbidden to the milking-pails, and the friendly flock brings back its swollen udders, nor at evening does the bear growl round the fold, nor does the deep ground heave with vipers; and we, the blessed, shall marvel at more: how the rainy Eurus does not scour the fields with great showers, nor the rich seeds burn in the dry clods, the king of the gods tempering both. Hither no pine pressed on with Argo’s oarsman, nor did shameless Colchis set her foot; hither the Sidonian sailors turned no yards, nor did the toiling crew of Ulysses. No plagues harm the cattle; no star’s blazing fury scorches the flock. Jupiter set those shores apart for a pious people, when he debased the golden age with bronze; with bronze, and then with iron, he hardened the ages, from which a happy escape is granted to the pious — with me for their prophet.

"Now, now I yield my hands to your effective skill, and I beg, a suppliant, by the realms of Proserpina, and by the unmovable powers of Diana, and by the books of spells potent enough to unfix the stars and call them down from heaven — Canidia, spare your sacred chants at last, and loose, loose the swift wheel backward. Telephus moved the grandson of Nereus, against whom he had proudly arrayed his ranks of Mysians, and at whom he had hurled sharp spears. The Trojan mothers anointed man-slaying Hector, given over to the wild birds and the dogs, after the king, leaving the walls behind, fell — alas — at stubborn Achilles’ feet. The toiling oarsmen of Ulysses shed their bristly, hard hides at Circe’s will; then reason and voice came back to them, and the wonted dignity to their faces. I have paid you penalty enough and more, you so beloved of sailors and of peddlers. My youth has fled, and the modest bloom has left my bones, wrapped in sallow skin; my hair is white with your perfumes; no rest relieves me from my labor; night presses on day and day on night, nor can I ease my strained breast by drawing breath. And so, wretched, I am beaten into believing what I denied — that Sabellian charms harrow the breast, and a Marsian chant splits the head apart. What more do you want? O sea and earth, I burn, as much as Hercules never burned, smeared with the black gore of Nessus, nor the Sicilian flame that blazes green in Etna; while you, until I am borne off, dry ash, on injurious winds, are a workshop hot with Colchian poisons. What end, or what tribute, awaits me? Speak; I will pay in good faith the penalties you set, ready to atone, whether you should demand a hundred bullocks, or wish to be hymned on a lying lyre: ‘You, the chaste, you, the upright, shall walk the stars, a golden constellation.’ Castor, offended at the slur on infamous Helen, and the brother of mighty Castor, won over by prayer, gave back to the poet the eyes they had taken away: and you — for you can — release me from my madness, O you neither soiled with a father’s filth, nor a knowing hag who scatters among the graves the nine-day ashes of the poor. Yours is a hospitable heart and pure hands, and Pactumeius is your son, and the midwife washed the cloths red with your blood, however stoutly you spring up, a strong young mother." "Why do you pour out prayers to barred ears? No rocks deafer to the naked sailors does wintry Neptune pound on the deep brine. Shall you, unpunished, have mocked the Cotytian rites laid bare, the worship of free Cupido, and, as pontiff of the Esquiline sorcery, have filled the City with my name, and gone scot-free? What did it profit me to have enriched the Paelignian hags, or to have mixed a swifter venom? But a fate slower than your prayers awaits you: a wretched life must be drawn out, in misery, for this — that you may forever be at hand for new torments. Tantalus, father of faithless Pelops, ever wanting the bounteous feast, longs for rest; Prometheus, bound to the bird, longs for it; Sisyphus longs to set the rock upon the peak; but the laws of Jupiter forbid. You will wish, now to leap down from high towers, now to lay open your breast with a Norican blade, and in vain will you knot the noose about your throat, sick with your dismal grief. Then I, a horseman, will ride on your hateful shoulders, and the earth will give way to my insolence. Shall I — who can stir waxen images, as you yourself, in your prying, have learned, and pluck the moon from the sky with my spells, who can rouse the cremated dead and mix the cup of longing — shall I weep at the outcome of an art that works nothing against you?"