Lævia protendens brachia, pollicita est.”
Here the three words τον Βερενικης βοστρυχον have been extended into “E Bereniceo vertice cæsariem fulgentem,” and the single word ἐθηκε has formed a whole Latin line,
“Lævia protendens brachia, pollicita est[509].”
The Latin poem, like its Greek original, is in elegiac verse, and is supposed to be spoken by the constellation called Coma Berenices. It relates how Berenice, the queen and sister of Ptolemy, (Euergetes,) vowed the consecration of her [pg 313]locks to the immortals, provided her husband was restored to her, safe and successful, from a military expedition on which he had proceeded against the Assyrians. The king having returned according to her wish, and her shorn locks having disappeared, it is supposed by one of those fictions which poetry alone can admit, that Zephyrus, the son of Aurora, and brother of Memnon, had carried them up to heaven, and thrown them into the lap of Venus, by whom they were set in the sky, and were soon afterwards discovered among the constellations by Conon, a court astronomer. In order to relish this poem, or to enter into its spirit, we must read it imbued as it were with the belief and manners of the ancient Egyptians. The locks of Berenice might be allowed to speak and desire, because they had been converted into stars, which, by an ancient philosophic system, were supposed to be possessed of animation and intelligence. Similar honours had been conferred on the crown of Ariadne and the ship of Isis, and the belief in such transformations was at least of that popular or traditionary nature which fitted them for the purposes of poetry. The race, too, of the Egyptian Ptolemies, traced their lineage to Jupiter, which would doubtless facilitate the reception of the locks of Berenice among the heavenly orbs. Adulation, however, it must be confessed, could not be carried higher; the beautiful locks of Berenice, though metamorphosed into stars, are represented as regretting their former happy situation, and prefer adorning the brow of Berenice, to blazing by night in the front of heaven, under the steps of immortals, or reposing by day in the bosom of Tethys:—
“Non his tam lætor rebus, quam me abfore semper,
Abfore me a dominæ vertice discrucior.”
But though the poem of Callimachus may have been seriously written, and gravely read by the court of Ptolemy, the lines of Catullus often approach to something like pleasantry or persiflage:
“Invita, O Regina, tuo de vertice cessi ...
Sed qui se ferro postulet esse parem?
Ille quoque eversus mons est, quem maximum in oris