After a long cessation, O Venus, again are you stirring up tumults?
Spare me, I beseech you, I beseech you. I am not the man I was under the
dominion of good-natured Cynara. Forbear, O cruel mother of soft
desires, to bend one bordering upon fifty, now too hardened for soft
commands: go, whither the soothing prayers of youths, invoke you. More
seasonably may you revel in the house of Paulus Maximus, flying thither
with your splendid swans, if you seek to inflame a suitable breast. For
he is both noble and comely, and by no means silent in the cause of
distressed defendants, and a youth of a hundred accomplishments; he
shall bear the ensigns of your warfare far and wide; and whenever, more
prevailing than the ample presents of a rival, he shall laugh [at his
expense], he shall erect thee in marble under a citron dome near the
Alban lake. There you shall smell abundant frankincense, and shall be
charmed with the mixed music of the lyre and Berecynthian pipe, not
without the flageolet. There the youths, together with the tender
maidens, twice a day celebrating your divinity, shall, Salian-like, with
white foot thrice shake the ground. As for me, neither woman, nor youth,
nor the fond hopes of mutual inclination, nor to contend in wine, nor to
bind my temples with fresh flowers, delight me [any longer]. But why;
ah! why, Ligurinus, does the tear every now and then trickle down my
cheeks? Why does my fluent tongue falter between my words with an
unseemly silence? Thee in my dreams by night I clasp, caught [in my
arms]; thee flying across the turf of the Campus Martius; thee I pursue,
O cruel one, through the rolling waters.

* * * * *



ODE II.