The Complete Odes and Epodes
Page 5
Beatus ille
‘Happy he who far from business dealing
(like uncorrupted folk of yore)
and free from interest owing,
works with his oxen his family land:
no soldier he aroused by fierce alarums;
nor does he dread the sea enchaf’d;
he avoids the haughty portals of
great men, and likewise the Forum;
he weds his lofty poplar trees
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to nubile shoots of vine;
in some secluded dale reviews
his lowing, wandering herds;
he prunes back barren shoots
with his hook and grafts on fruitful;
he stores pressed honey in clean jars;
he shears the harmless sheep;
when Autumn lifts in the fields his head
fittingly decked with ripened fruit,
he delights to pluck the grafted pears
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and grapes that vie with the purple,
with which to render thanks to you,
Priapus, and you, father Silvanus,
the guardian of bound’ries.
Pleasant now to recline beneath a tree,
and now on some luxuriant sward
as the waters glide by lofty banks,
birds quire in the woods
and purling brooklets babble,
lulling to gentle slumber.
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But when the winter of thundering Jove
brings in rain and snow,
one either harries with hounds
hither and thither fierce boars
into the intercipient toils,
or stretches loose nets on smooth poles
to deceive the eager thrushes,
and takes with a noose the pleasant prize
of coward hare and migrant crane.
Who will recall to remembrance
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amid such things the woeful pangs of love?
But if a modest helpmeet plays her part
with home and sweet children
(a Sabine dame or sun-tanned wife
of some Apulian stalwart),
and piles the blessèd hearth with seasoned faggots
against the coming of her weary spouse,
and pens the frisking flock with wattle,
and drains their swelling udders,
and pours the sweet new vintage from its jar,
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and prepares a repast of home-produce;
then Lucrine oysters could not rejoice
me more, nor turbot, nor scar,
when Winter booming on waves of Dawn
diverts them to our fishing-grounds;
neither African fowl nor Ionian pheasant
descends more pleasantly into my belly
than olives picked out from the richest boughs,
or sorrel that thrives in the fields,
or mallows good for bodily ailments,
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or a lamb slaughtered at the feast of Terminus,
or a kidling saved from the wolf.
Amid such feasts it is a joy to see
the sheep hasting home from pasture,
the wearied oxen dragging along
with languid necks the upturned ploughshares,
the home-bred slaves (the swarm of a thriving house)
about the glittering Lares…’
– Thus Alfius, a moneylender,
on the point of turning farmer:
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he called in all his capital
on the Ides, and on the Kalends
he’s busily loaning it out again.
3
Parentis olim
He whose impious hand has strangled
his agèd father deserves to eat it. It is
more harmful than hemlock. Garlic.
Peasants must have iron guts.
What venom rages in my gizzard?
Have these roots been stewed
in vipers’ blood without my knowledge?
Has Canidia handled this evil dish?
Medea infatuate with the Argonauts’ captain
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(more fair than all his crew)
when he tried to yoke the unbroken bulls
anointed her Jason with this;
and before she fled on the great winged worm
she took revenge on his mistress
by making her gifts besmeared with this.
Never did such a fiery, stifling heat
settle on drought-parched Apulia.
Nessus’ shirt did not sear
more swelteringly into
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resourceful Hercules’ shoulders.
If ever you are tempted this way again,
my humorous Maecenas, I devoutly hope
that your girl will push away your face
and retreat to the very edge of the bed.
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Lupis et agnis
As falls by fate between wolves and lambs,
so is the strife ’twixt me and you,
whose flanks are callous’d from Spanish bonds
and shanks from hard shackles.
Although you stroll puffed up with wealth,
Fortune does not change your kind.
Don’t you see, as you perambulate
the Sacred Way in your toga of twice three yards,
the faces of passers-by, this side and that,
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express the most patent indignation?
– ‘This creature, once flogged with the magistrates’ lash
till the crier himself was sickened,
now ploughs a thousand acres of good Falernian land.
His ponies wear out the Appian Way.
Defying Otho’s law, he takes his place
like an eminent knight in the foremost seats.
What can be gained by sending so many
beaked warships of massive tonnage
against the pirates and bands of slaves
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when this, this thing, is an army tribune?’
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At, o deorum
‘But o whatever Gods in heaven rule
the earth and humankind,
what does this hubbub mean, and what
the fearsome staring of all at me?
By your children (if summoned
Lucina attended honest births),
by this vain favour of purple,
by Jupiter bound to disapprove
these things, I beseech you, why
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do you glare like a stepmother,
or feral animal goaded with steel?’
– Having made this plaint with
trembling lips, stripped of his emblems
the boy stood firm, a childlike form
to soften savage Thracian hearts.
Her unkempt hirsute poll
all tangled with little vipers,
Canidia orders funereal cypress,
wild fig-trees dug out from tombs,
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a nocturnal screech-owl’s feathers and eggs
smeared with the blood of a nasty toad,
herbs supplied by poisonous-
fertile Iolcos and Spain,
bones snatched from a starving bitch –
to be scorched in the Colchian flames.
Sagana, like a sea-urchin
bristling in her shift,
or like some charging boar
sprinkles water from Lake Avernus
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through all the house. Veia,
phlegmatic because amoral,
groaning over her labour,
digs up the earth with a spade.
And buried there, with only his face
protruding, and only so much
as a person’s in water floating
suspended from his chin,
the boy can starve to death
in full view of a dinner
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; changed twice or thrice in each long day:
once his eyes, on the unattainable food,
have withered away, his marrow and liver,
excised and dried, will serve
for an aphrodisiac potion.
And the gossips of Naples and all
the neighbouring towns believe
that the mannish-lustful hag
Arimensian Folia was there,
who by Thessalian incantations
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tears moon and stars from the sky.
Then fearsome Canidia, gnawing
her uncut nails with her bile-black teeth,
what did she say, what leave unsaid?
‘O faithful witnesses of these my deeds,
Night, and Diana who rules in the silence
when holy myst’ries are performed,
now come, now come, now turn your wrath
and godhead-power on hostile homes.
While weary predators sweetly slumb’ring
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lie hid in the dreadful forest, let
the Subura’s curs all yap at the ancient rake
smeared with a lotion as perfect
as any my hands have contrived.
What’s wrong? Why don’t the terrible drugs
of outlandish Medea prevail
with which before she fled she took revenge
on the haughty concubine,
the daughter of mighty Creon,
when the given mantle steeped in pus
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took off with burning the newlywed bride?
No roots or herbs in hiding
in overgrown nooks escaped me:
he slumbered on perfumed bedding,
oblivious to all female charms.
But oh! Oh! He walks, set free
by the spell of some more learnèd witch.
By no familiar draught, my Varus,
o creature bound for bitter grieving,
shall you come running back to me,
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and by no Marsian incantation shall
your understanding be restored.
I shall brew a stronger, pour a yet stronger
draught to physic your revulsion,
and sooner shall the sky sink down
beneath the sea, the earth spread out above,
than you not blaze with love for me
like smoking pitch in fire.’
– At this the boy no longer, as before,
would calm the unnatural hags
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with soothing words,
but doubtful how to break his silence
flung out Thyestean curses.
‘Your poison-magic has no power
to alter right and wrong
or turn aside human retribution.
My curses shall dog you:
no sacrifice may avert
my solemn execrations.
And when, my death enjoined,
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I have breathed my last, I shall
waylay you by night as a Fury; my shade
shall slash at your faces with crookèd nails,
as Manes are empowered to do;
and squatting upon your unquiet breasts,
I shall keep off sleep with terror.
The rabble, this side and that,
shall pulp you, you senile
obscenities, by pelting you with rocks.
Then the Esquiline wolves and carrion birds
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shall scatter your unburied limbs:
this spectacle shall not escape
my parents, outliving me, alas.’
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Quid immerentis hospites
A cowardly cur when facing wolves,
why do you harass innocuous strangers?
You do not dare to turn your empty threats
this way? Bait me, who will bite you back?
Molossian hound or tawny Laconian,
the shepherd’s strong right arm,
ears pricked, I’ll follow amid deep snow
whatever predator leads on.
Having filled the woods with threat’ning yelps,
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you sniff at the meat that’s flung you.
Take care, take care: I ferociously lift
my ready horns against rank malice,
like the slighted son-in-law of Lycambes
the false, or Bupalus’ eager opponent.
Worried with poisonous teeth,
should I blub like a child, unavenged?
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Quo, quo, scelesti ruitis?
Into what, what, do you wickedly plunge?
Why do your hands draw swords from scabbards?
Perhaps too little Latin blood has been spilled
on battlefields or Neptune’s realm?
And not that Romans might burn
the haughty towers of emulous Carthage;
not that the scatheless Briton might trudge
in chains down the Sacred Way;
but that in fulfilment of Parthian prayers
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this City might die by her own right hand.
Such ’haviour never ’longed to lions or wolves,
ferocious only to alien kinds.
Does blinded frenzy possess us?
Some sharper goad, such as guilt? Reply!
– Silence. A blenching pallor dyes their cheeks,
their capsized intellects are numb.
So it goes: a bitter fate pursues
the Romans, and the crime of fratricide,
since the blood of Remus ran on the earth,
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the bane of his successors.
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Rogare longo
That you, rotten, should ask what it is
that emasculates me, when you’ve
just one black tooth and decrepit age
ploughs up your forehead with wrinkles,
when a diarrhoeic cow’s hole gapes
between your dehydrated buttocks!
What rouses me is your putrid bosom,
your breasts like the teats of a mare
the flaccid belly and skinny thighs
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that top your grossly swollen shanks.
Be bless’d, and may triumphant lovers’
likenesses attend your corpse.
May no wife perlustrate laden
with fatter, rounder pearls than yours.
What though Stoic pamphlets like
to lie between silken pillows?
Illiterate sinews stiffen,
and hamptons droop, no less for that.
(Though if you hope to rouse up mine,
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your mouth is faced with no mean task.)