To Calliope
Descend from heaven, queen Calliope, and come sing with your pipe a
lengthened strain; or, if you had now rather, with your clear voice, or
on the harp or lute of Phoebus. Do ye hear? or does a pleasing frenzy
delude me? I seem to hear [her], and to wander [with her] along the
hallowed groves, through which pleasant rivulets and gales make their
way. Me, when a child, and fatigued with play, in sleep the woodland
doves, famous in story, covered with green leaves in the Apulian Vultur,
just without the limits of my native Apulia; so that it was matter of
wonder to all that inhabit the nest of lofty Acherontia, the Bantine
Forests, and the rich soil of low Ferentum, how I could sleep with my
body safe from deadly vipers and ravenous bears; how I could be covered
with sacred laurel and myrtle heaped together, though a child, not
animated without the [inspiration of the] gods. Yours, O ye muses, I am
yours, whether I am elevated to the Sabine heights; or whether the cool
Praeneste, or the sloping Tibur, or the watery Baiae have delighted me.
Me, who am attached to your fountains and dances, not the army put to
flight at Philippi, not the execrable tree, nor a Palinurus in the
Sicilian Sea has destroyed. While you shall be with me with pleasure
will I, a sailor, dare the raging Bosphorus; or, a traveler, the burning
sands of the Assyrian shore: I will visit the Britons inhuman to
strangers, and the Concanian delighted [with drinking] the blood of
horses; I will visit the quivered Geloni, and the Scythian river without
hurt. You entertained lofty Caesar, seeking to put an end to his toils,
in the Pierian grotto, as soon as he had distributed in towns his
troops, wearied by campaigning: you administer [to him] moderate
counsel, and graciously rejoice at it when administered. We are aware
how he, who rules the inactive earth and the stormy main, the cities
also, and the dreary realms [of hell], and alone governs with a
righteous sway both gods and the human multitude, how he took off the
impious Titans and the gigantic troop by his falling thunderbolts. That
horrid youth, trusting to the strength of their arms, and the brethren
proceeding to place Pelion upon shady Olympus, had brought great dread
[even] upon Jove. But what could Typhoeus, and the strong Mimas, or what
Porphyrion with his menacing statue; what Rhoetus, and Enceladus, a
fierce darter with trees uptorn, avail, though rushing violently against
the sounding shield of Pallas? At one part stood the eager Vulcan, at
another the matron Juno, and he, who is never desirous to lay aside his
bow from his shoulders, Apollo, the god of Delos and Patara, who bathes
his flowing hair in the pure dew of Castalia, and possesses the groves
of Lycia and his native wood. Force, void of conduct, falls by its own
weight; moreover, the gods promote discreet force to further advantage;
but the same beings detest forces, that meditate every kind of impiety.
The hundred-handed Gyges is an evidence of the sentiments I allege: and
Orion, the tempter of the spotless Diana, destroyed by a virgin dart.
The earth, heaped over her own monsters, grieves and laments her
offspring, sent to murky Hades by a thunderbolt; nor does the active
fire consume Aetna that is placed over it, nor does the vulture desert
the liver of incontinent Tityus, being stationed there as an avenger of
his baseness; and three hundred chains confine the amorous Pirithous.
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