It is our eyes you flee, not the city,
You do nothing, you plot inane schemes against me,
Languidly you stretch out the snare
with which I am already familiar,
And yet again, and newly rumour strikes on my ears,
Rumours of you throughout the city,
and no good rumour among them.
“You should not believe hostile tongues,
“Beauty is slander’s cock-shy,
“All lovely women have known this,”
“Your glory is not outblotted by venom,”
“Phoebus our witness, your hands are unspotted,”
A foreign lover brought down Helen’s kingdom,
and she was led back, living, home;
The Cytharean brought low by Mars’ lechery
reigns in respectable heavens, ...
Oh, oh, and enough of this,
by dew-spread caverns,
The Muses clinging to the mossy ridges;
to the ledge of the rocks;
Zeus’ clever rapes, in the old days,
combusted Semele’s, of Io strayed.
Of how the bird flew from Trojan rafters,
Ida has lain with a shepherd, she has slept between sheep.
Even there, no escape
Not the Hyrcanian seabord, not in seeking the shore of Eos.
All things are forgiven for one night of your games....
Though you walk in the Via Sacra, with a peacock’s tail for a fan.
XII
WHO, who will be the next man to entrust his girl to a friend?
Love interferes with fidelities;
The gods have brought shame on their relatives;
Each man wants the pomegranate for himself;
Amiable and harmonious people are pushed incontinent into duels,
A Trojan and adulterous person came to Menelaus under the rites of hospitium,
And there was a case in Colchis, Jason and that woman in Colchis;
And besides, Lynceus,
you were drunk.