Georgics

What makes the cornfield smile; beneath what star / Maecenas, it is meet to turn the sod / Or marry elm with vine; how tend the steer; / What pains for cattle-keeping, or what proof / Of patient trial serves for thrifty bees;- / Such are my themes. / O universal lights / Most glorious! ye that lead the gliding year / Along the sky, Liber and Ceres mild, / If by your bounty holpen earth once changed / Chaonian acorn for the plump wheat-ear, / And mingled with the grape, your new-found gift, / The draughts of Achelous; and ye Fauns / To rustics ever kind, come foot it, Fauns / And Dryad-maids together; your gifts I sing. / And thou, for whose delight the war-horse first / Sprang from earth's womb at thy great trident's stroke, / Neptune; and haunter of the groves, for whom / Three hundred snow-white heifers browse the brakes, / The fertile brakes of Ceos; and clothed in power, / Thy native forest and Lycean lawns, / Pan, shepherd-god, forsaking, as the love / Of thine own Maenalus constrains thee, hear / And help, O lord of Tegea! And thou, too, / Minerva, from whose hand the olive sprung; / And boy-discoverer of the curved plough; / And, bearing a young cypress root-uptorn, / Silvanus, and Gods all and Goddesses, / Who make the fields your care, both ye who nurse / The tender unsown increase, and from heaven

Shed on man's sowing the riches of your rain: / And thou, even thou, of whom we know not yet / What mansion of the skies shall hold thee soon, / Whether to watch o'er cities be thy will, / Great Caesar, and to take the earth in charge, / That so the mighty world may welcome thee / Lord of her increase, master of her times, / Binding thy mother's myrtle round thy brow, / Or as the boundless ocean's God thou come, / Sole dread of seamen, till far Thule bow / Before thee, and Tethys win thee to her son / With all her waves for dower; or as a star / Lend thy fresh beams our lagging months to cheer, / Where 'twixt the Maid and those pursuing Claws / A space is opening; see! red Scorpio's self / His arms draws in, yea, and hath left thee more / Than thy full meed of heaven: be what thou wilt- / For neither Tartarus hopes to call thee king, / Nor may so dire a lust of sovereignty / E'er light upon thee, howso Greece admire / Elysium's fields, and Proserpine not heed / Her mother's voice entreating to return- / Vouchsafe a prosperous voyage, and smile on this / My bold endeavour, and pitying, even as I, / These poor way-wildered swains, at once begin, / Grow timely used unto the voice of prayer.

In early spring-tide, when the icy drip / Melts from the mountains hoar, and Zephyr's breath / Unbinds the crumbling clod, even then 'tis time; / Press deep your plough behind the groaning ox, / And teach the furrow-burnished share to shine. / That land the craving farmer's prayer fulfils, / Which twice the sunshine, twice the frost has felt; / Ay, that's the land whose boundless harvest-crops / Burst, see! the barns.

But ere our metal cleave / An unknown surface, heed we to forelearn / The winds and varying temper of the sky, / The lineal tilth and habits of the spot, / What every region yields, and what denies. / Here blithelier springs the corn, and here the grape, / There earth is green with tender growth of trees / And grass unbidden. See how from Tmolus comes / The saffron's fragrance, ivory from Ind, / From Saba's weakling sons their frankincense, / Iron from the naked Chalybs, castor rank / From Pontus, from Epirus the prize-palms / O' the mares of Elis.

Such the eternal bond / And such the laws by Nature's hand imposed / On clime and clime, e'er since the primal dawn / When old Deucalion on the unpeopled earth / Cast stones, whence men, a flinty race, were reared. / Up then! if fat the soil, let sturdy bulls / Upturn it from the year's first opening months, / And let the clods lie bare till baked to dust / By the ripe suns of summer; but if the earth / Less fruitful just ere Arcturus rise / With shallower trench uptilt it- 'twill suffice; / There, lest weeds choke the crop's luxuriance, here, / Lest the scant moisture fail the barren sand.

Then thou shalt suffer in alternate years / The new-reaped fields to rest, and on the plain / A crust of sloth to harden; or, when stars / Are changed in heaven, there sow the golden grain / Where erst, luxuriant with its quivering pod, / Pulse, or the slender vetch-crop, thou hast cleared, / And lupin sour, whose brittle stalks arise, / A hurtling forest. For the plain is parched / By flax-crop, parched by oats, by poppies parched / In Lethe-slumber drenched. Nathless by change / The travailing earth is lightened, but stint not / With refuse rich to soak the thirsty soil, / And shower foul ashes o'er the exhausted fields. / Thus by rotation like repose is gained, / Nor earth meanwhile uneared and thankless left. / Oft, too, 'twill boot to fire the naked fields, / And the light stubble burn with crackling flames; / Whether that earth therefrom some hidden strength / And fattening food derives, or that the fire / Bakes every blemish out, and sweats away / Each useless humour, or that the heat unlocks / New passages and secret pores, whereby / Their life-juice to the tender blades may win; / Or that it hardens more and helps to bind / The gaping veins, lest penetrating showers, / Or fierce sun's ravening might, or searching blast / Of the keen north should sear them. Well, I wot, / He serves the fields who with his harrow breaks / The sluggish clods, and hurdles osier-twined / Hales o'er them; from the far Olympian height

Him golden Ceres not in vain regards; / And he, who having ploughed the fallow plain / And heaved its furrowy ridges, turns once more / Cross-wise his shattering share, with stroke on stroke / The earth assails, and makes the field his thrall. / Pray for wet summers and for winters fine, / Ye husbandmen; in winter's dust the crops / Exceedingly rejoice, the field hath joy; / No tilth makes Mysia lift her head so high, / Nor Gargarus his own harvests so admire. / Why tell of him, who, having launched his seed, / Sets on for close encounter, and rakes smooth / The dry dust hillocks, then on the tender corn / Lets in the flood, whose waters follow fain; / And when the parched field quivers, and all the blades / Are dying, from the brow of its hill-bed, / See! see! he lures the runnel; down it falls, / Waking hoarse murmurs o'er the polished stones, / And with its bubblings slakes the thirsty fields? / Or why of him, who lest the heavy ears / O'erweigh the stalk, while yet in tender blade / Feeds down the crop's luxuriance, when its growth / First tops the furrows? Why of him who drains / The marsh-land's gathered ooze through soaking sand, / Chiefly what time in treacherous moons a stream / Goes out in spate, and with its coat of slime / Holds all the country, whence the hollow dykes / Sweat steaming vapour?

But no whit the more / For all expedients tried and travail borne / By man and beast in turning oft the soil, / Do greedy goose and Strymon-haunting cranes / And succory's bitter fibres cease to harm, / Or shade not injure. The great Sire himself / No easy road to husbandry assigned, / And first was he by human skill to rouse / The slumbering glebe, whetting the minds of men / With care on care, nor suffering realm of his / In drowsy sloth to stagnate. Before Jove / Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen; / To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line- / Even this was impious; for the common stock / They gathered, and the earth of her own will / All things more freely, no man bidding, bore. / He to black serpents gave their venom-bane, / And bade the wolf go prowl, and ocean toss; / Shook from the leaves their honey, put fire away, / And curbed the random rivers running wine, / That use by gradual dint of thought on thought / Might forge the various arts, with furrow's help / The corn-blade win, and strike out hidden fire / From the flint's heart. Then first the streams were ware / Of hollowed alder-hulls: the sailor then / Their names and numbers gave to star and star, / Pleiads and Hyads, and Lycaon's child / Bright Arctos; how with nooses then was found / To catch wild beasts, and cozen them with lime, / And hem with hounds the mighty forest-glades.

Soon one with hand-net scourges the broad stream, / Probing its depths, one drags his dripping toils / Along the main; then iron's unbending might, / And shrieking saw-blade,- for the men of old / With wedges wont to cleave the splintering log;- / Then divers arts arose; toil conquered all, / Remorseless toil, and poverty's shrewd push / In times of hardship. Ceres was the first / Set mortals on with tools to turn the sod, / When now the awful groves 'gan fail to bear / Acorns and arbutes, and her wonted food / Dodona gave no more. Soon, too, the corn / Gat sorrow's increase, that an evil blight / Ate up the stalks, and thistle reared his spines / An idler in the fields; the crops die down; / Upsprings instead a shaggy growth of burrs / And caltrops; and amid the corn-fields trim / Unfruitful darnel and wild oats have sway. / Wherefore, unless thou shalt with ceaseless rake / The weeds pursue, with shouting scare the birds, / Prune with thy hook the dark field's matted shade, / Pray down the showers, all vainly thou shalt eye, / Alack! thy neighbour's heaped-up harvest-mow, / And in the greenwood from a shaken oak / Seek solace for thine hunger.

Now to tell / The sturdy rustics' weapons, what they are, / Without which, neither can be sown nor reared / The fruits of harvest; first the bent plough's share / And heavy timber, and slow-lumbering wains / Of the Eleusinian mother, threshing-sleighs / And drags, and harrows with their crushing weight; / Then the cheap wicker-ware of Celeus old, / Hurdles of arbute, and thy mystic fan, / Iacchus; which, full tale, long ere the time / Thou must with heed lay by, if thee await / Not all unearned the country's crown divine. / While yet within the woods, the elm is tamed / And bowed with mighty force to form the stock, / And take the plough's curved shape, then nigh the root / A pole eight feet projecting, earth-boards twain, / And share-beam with its double back they fix. / For yoke is early hewn a linden light, / And a tall beech for handle, from behind / To turn the car at lowest: then o'er the hearth / The wood they hang till the smoke knows it well.

Many the precepts of the men of old / I can recount thee, so thou start not back, / And such slight cares to learn not weary thee. / And this among the first: thy threshing-floor / With ponderous roller must be levelled smooth, / And wrought by hand, and fixed with binding chalk, / Lest weeds arise, or dust a passage win / Splitting the surface, then a thousand plagues / Make sport of it: oft builds the tiny mouse / Her home, and plants her granary, underground, / Or burrow for their bed the purblind moles, / Or toad is found in hollows, and all the swarm / Of earth's unsightly creatures; or a huge / Corn-heap the weevil plunders, and the ant, / Fearful of coming age and penury.

Mark too, what time the walnut in the woods / With ample bloom shall clothe her, and bow down / Her odorous branches, if the fruit prevail, / Like store of grain will follow, and there shall come / A mighty winnowing-time with mighty heat; / But if the shade with wealth of leaves abound, / Vainly your threshing-floor will bruise the stalks / Rich but in chaff. Many myself have seen / Steep, as they sow, their pulse-seeds, drenching them / With nitre and black oil-lees, that the fruit / Might swell within the treacherous pods, and they / Make speed to boil at howso small a fire. / Yet, culled with caution, proved with patient toil, / These have I seen degenerate, did not man / Put forth his hand with power, and year by year / Choose out the largest. So, by fate impelled, / Speed all things to the worse, and backward borne / Glide from us; even as who with struggling oars / Up stream scarce pulls a shallop, if he chance / His arms to slacken, lo! with headlong force / The current sweeps him down the hurrying tide.

Us too behoves Arcturus' sign observe, / And the Kids' seasons and the shining Snake, / No less than those who o'er the windy main / Borne homeward tempt the Pontic, and the jaws / Of oyster-rife Abydos. When the Scales / Now poising fair the hours of sleep and day / Give half the world to sunshine, half to shade, / Then urge your bulls, my masters; sow the plain / Even to the verge of tameless winter's showers / With barley: then, too, time it is to hide / Your flax in earth, and poppy, Ceres' joy, / Aye, more than time to bend above the plough, / While earth, yet dry, forbids not, and the clouds / Are buoyant. With the spring comes bean-sowing; / Thee, too, Lucerne, the crumbling furrows then / Receive, and millet's annual care returns, / What time the white bull with his gilded horns / Opens the year, before whose threatening front, / Routed the dog-star sinks. But if it be / For wheaten harvest and the hardy spelt, / Thou tax the soil, to corn-ears wholly given, / Let Atlas' daughters hide them in the dawn, / The Cretan star, a crown of fire, depart, / Or e'er the furrow's claim of seed thou quit, / Or haste thee to entrust the whole year's hope / To earth that would not. Many have begun / Ere Maia's star be setting; these, I trow, / Their looked-for harvest fools with empty ears. / But if the vetch and common kidney-bean / Thou'rt fain to sow, nor scorn to make thy care

Pelusiac lentil, no uncertain sign / Bootes' fall will send thee; then begin, / Pursue thy sowing till half the frosts be done. / Therefore it is the golden sun, his course / Into fixed parts dividing, rules his way / Through the twelve constellations of the world. / Five zones the heavens contain; whereof is one / Aye red with flashing sunlight, fervent aye / From fire; on either side to left and right / Are traced the utmost twain, stiff with blue ice, / And black with scowling storm-clouds, and betwixt / These and the midmost, other twain there lie, / By the Gods' grace to heart-sick mortals given, / And a path cleft between them, where might wheel / On sloping plane the system of the Signs. / And as toward Scythia and Rhipaean heights / The world mounts upward, likewise sinks it down / Toward Libya and the south, this pole of ours / Still towering high, that other, 'neath their feet, / By dark Styx frowned on, and the abysmal shades. / Here glides the huge Snake forth with sinuous coils / 'Twixt the two Bears and round them river-wise- / The Bears that fear 'neath Ocean's brim to dip. / There either, say they, reigns the eternal hush / Of night that knows no seasons, her black pall / Thick-mantling fold on fold; or thitherward / From us returning Dawn brings back the day; / And when the first breath of his panting steeds / On us the Orient flings, that hour with them / Red Vesper 'gins to trim his his 'lated fires.

Hence under doubtful skies forebode we can / The coming tempests, hence both harvest-day / And seed-time, when to smite the treacherous main / With driving oars, when launch the fair-rigged fleet, / Or in ripe hour to fell the forest-pine. / Hence, too, not idly do we watch the stars- / Their rising and their setting-and the year, / Four varying seasons to one law conformed.

If chilly showers e'er shut the farmer's door, / Much that had soon with sunshine cried for haste, / He may forestall; the ploughman batters keen / His blunted share's hard tooth, scoops from a tree / His troughs, or on the cattle stamps a brand, / Or numbers on the corn-heaps; some make sharp / The stakes and two-pronged forks, and willow-bands / Amerian for the bending vine prepare. / Now let the pliant basket plaited be / Of bramble-twigs; now set your corn to parch / Before the fire; now bruise it with the stone. / Nay even on holy days some tasks to ply / Is right and lawful: this no ban forbids, / To turn the runnel's course, fence corn-fields in, / Make springes for the birds, burn up the briars, / And plunge in wholesome stream the bleating flock. / Oft too with oil or apples plenty-cheap / The creeping ass's ribs his driver packs, / And home from town returning brings instead / A dented mill-stone or black lump of pitch.

The moon herself in various rank assigns / The days for labour lucky: fly the fifth; / Then sprang pale Orcus and the Eumenides; / Earth then in awful labour brought to light / Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus fell, / And those sworn brethren banded to break down / The gates of heaven; thrice, sooth to say, they strove / Ossa on Pelion's top to heave and heap, / Aye, and on Ossa to up-roll amain / Leafy Olympus; thrice with thunderbolt / Their mountain-stair the Sire asunder smote. / Seventh after tenth is lucky both to set / The vine in earth, and take and tame the steer, / And fix the leashes to the warp; the ninth / To runagates is kinder, cross to thieves.

Many the tasks that lightlier lend themselves / In chilly night, or when the sun is young, / And Dawn bedews the world. By night 'tis best / To reap light stubble, and parched fields by night; / For nights the suppling moisture never fails. / And one will sit the long late watches out / By winter fire-light, shaping with keen blade / The torches to a point; his wife the while, / Her tedious labour soothing with a song, / Speeds the shrill comb along the warp, or else / With Vulcan's aid boils the sweet must-juice down, / And skims with leaves the quivering cauldron's wave.

But ruddy Ceres in mid heat is mown, / And in mid heat the parched ears are bruised / Upon the floor; to plough strip, strip to sow; / Winter's the lazy time for husbandmen. / In the cold season farmers wont to taste / The increase of their toil, and yield themselves / To mutual interchange of festal cheer. / Boon winter bids them, and unbinds their cares, / As laden keels, when now the port they touch, / And happy sailors crown the sterns with flowers. / Nathless then also time it is to strip / Acorns from oaks, and berries from the bay, / Olives, and bleeding myrtles, then to set / Snares for the crane, and meshes for the stag, / And hunt the long-eared hares, then pierce the doe / With whirl of hempen-thonged Balearic sling, / While snow lies deep, and streams are drifting ice.

What need to tell of autumn's storms and stars, / And wherefore men must watch, when now the day / Grows shorter, and more soft the summer's heat? / When Spring the rain-bringer comes rushing down, / Or when the beards of harvest on the plain / Bristle already, and the milky corn / On its green stalk is swelling? Many a time, / When now the farmer to his yellow fields / The reaping-hind came bringing, even in act / To lop the brittle barley stems, have I / Seen all the windy legions clash in war / Together, as to rend up far and wide / The heavy corn-crop from its lowest roots, / And toss it skyward: so might winter's flaw, / Dark-eddying, whirl light stalks and flying straws.

Oft too comes looming vast along the sky / A march of waters; mustering from above, / The clouds roll up the tempest, heaped and grim / With angry showers: down falls the height of heaven, / And with a great rain floods the smiling crops, / The oxen's labour: now the dikes fill fast, / And the void river-beds swell thunderously, / And all the panting firths of Ocean boil. / The Sire himself in midnight of the clouds / Wields with red hand the levin; through all her bulk / Earth at the hurly quakes; the beasts are fled, / And mortal hearts of every kindred sunk / In cowering terror; he with flaming brand / Athos, or Rhodope, or Ceraunian crags / Precipitates: then doubly raves the South / With shower on blinding shower, and woods and coasts / Wail fitfully beneath the mighty blast. / This fearing, mark the months and Signs of heaven, / Whither retires him Saturn's icy star, / And through what heavenly cycles wandereth / The glowing orb Cyllenian. Before all / Worship the Gods, and to great Ceres pay / Her yearly dues upon the happy sward / With sacrifice, anigh the utmost end / Of winter, and when Spring begins to smile. / Then lambs are fat, and wines are mellowest then; / Then sleep is sweet, and dark the shadows fall / Upon the mountains. Let your rustic youth / To Ceres do obeisance, one and all; / And for her pleasure thou mix honeycombs

With milk and the ripe wine-god; thrice for luck / Around the young corn let the victim go, / And all the choir, a joyful company, / Attend it, and with shouts bid Ceres come / To be their house-mate; and let no man dare / Put sickle to the ripened ears until, / With woven oak his temples chapleted, / He foot the rugged dance and chant the lay.

Aye, and that these things we might win to know / By certain tokens, heats, and showers, and winds / That bring the frost, the Sire of all himself / Ordained what warnings in her monthly round / The moon should give, what bodes the south wind's fall, / What oft-repeated sights the herdsman seeing / Should keep his cattle closer to their stalls. / No sooner are the winds at point to rise, / Than either Ocean's firths begin to toss / And swell, and a dry crackling sound is heard / Upon the heights, or one loud ferment booms / The beach afar, and through the forest goes / A murmur multitudinous. By this / Scarce can the billow spare the curved keels, / When swift the sea-gulls from the middle main / Come winging, and their shrieks are shoreward borne, / When ocean-loving cormorants on dry land / Besport them, and the hern, her marshy haunts / Forsaking, mounts above the soaring cloud. / Oft, too, when wind is toward, the stars thou'lt see / From heaven shoot headlong, and through murky night / Long trails of fire white-glistening in their wake, / Or light chaff flit in air with fallen leaves, / Or feathers on the wave-top float and play. / But when from regions of the furious North / It lightens, and when thunder fills the halls / Of Eurus and of Zephyr, all the fields / With brimming dikes are flooded, and at sea / No mariner but furls his dripping sails. / Never at unawares did shower annoy:

Or, as it rises, the high-soaring cranes / Flee to the vales before it, with face / Upturned to heaven, the heifer snuffs the gale / Through gaping nostrils, or about the meres / Shrill-twittering flits the swallow, and the frogs / Crouch in the mud and chant their dirge of old. / Oft, too, the ant from out her inmost cells, / Fretting the narrow path, her eggs conveys; / Or the huge bow sucks moisture; or a host / Of rooks from food returning in long line / Clamour with jostling wings. Now mayst thou see / The various ocean-fowl and those that pry / Round Asian meads within thy fresher-pools, / Cayster, as in eager rivalry, / About their shoulders dash the plenteous spray, / Now duck their head beneath the wave, now run / Into the billows, for sheer idle joy / Of their mad bathing-revel. Then the crow / With full voice, good-for-naught, inviting rain, / Stalks on the dry sand mateless and alone. / Nor e'en the maids, that card their nightly task, / Know not the storm-sign, when in blazing crock / They see the lamp-oil sputtering with a growth / Of mouldy snuff-clots.

So too, after rain, / Sunshine and open skies thou mayst forecast, / And learn by tokens sure, for then nor dimmed / Appear the stars' keen edges, nor the moon / As borrowing of her brother's beams to rise, / Nor fleecy films to float along the sky. / Not to the sun's warmth then upon the shore / Do halcyons dear to Thetis ope their wings, / Nor filthy swine take thought to toss on high / With scattering snout the straw-wisps. But the clouds / Seek more the vales, and rest upon the plain, / And from the roof-top the night-owl for naught / Watching the sunset plies her 'lated song. / Distinct in clearest air is Nisus seen / Towering, and Scylla for the purple lock / Pays dear; for whereso, as she flies, her wings / The light air winnow, lo! fierce, implacable, / Nisus with mighty whirr through heaven pursues; / Where Nisus heavenward soareth, there her wings / Clutch as she flies, the light air winnowing still. / Soft then the voice of rooks from indrawn throat / Thrice, four times, o'er repeated, and full oft / On their high cradles, by some hidden joy / Gladdened beyond their wont, in bustling throngs / Among the leaves they riot; so sweet it is, / When showers are spent, their own loved nests again / And tender brood to visit. Not, I deem, / That heaven some native wit to these assigned, / Or fate a larger prescience, but that when / The storm and shifting moisture of the air

Have changed their courses, and the sky-god now, / Wet with the south-wind, thickens what was rare, / And what was gross releases, then, too, change / Their spirits' fleeting phases, and their breasts / Feel other motions now, than when the wind / Was driving up the cloud-rack. Hence proceeds / That blending of the feathered choirs afield, / The cattle's exultation, and the rooks' / Deep-throated triumph.

But if the headlong sun / And moons in order following thou regard, / Ne'er will to-morrow's hour deceive thee, ne'er / Wilt thou be caught by guile of cloudless night. / When first the moon recalls her rallying fires, / If dark the air clipped by her crescent dim, / For folks afield and on the open sea / A mighty rain is brewing; but if her face / With maiden blush she mantle, 'twill be wind, / For wind turns Phoebe still to ruddier gold. / But if at her fourth rising, for 'tis that / Gives surest counsel, clear she ride thro' heaven / With horns unblunted, then shall that whole day, / And to the month's end those that spring from it, / Rainless and windless be, while safe ashore / Shall sailors pay their vows to Panope, / Glaucus, and Melicertes, Ino's child.

The sun too, both at rising, and when soon / He dives beneath the waves, shall yield thee signs; / For signs, none trustier, travel with the sun, / Both those which in their course with dawn he brings, / And those at star-rise. When his springing orb / With spots he pranketh, muffled in a cloud, / And shrinks mid-circle, then of showers beware; / For then the South comes driving from the deep, / To trees and crops and cattle bringing bane. / Or when at day-break through dark clouds his rays / Burst and are scattered, or when rising pale / Aurora quits Tithonus' saffron bed, / But sorry shelter then, alack I will yield / Vine-leaf to ripening grapes; so thick a hail / In spiky showers spins rattling on the roof. / And this yet more 'twill boot thee bear in mind, / When now, his course upon Olympus run, / He draws to his decline: for oft we see / Upon the sun's own face strange colours stray; / Dark tells of rain, of east winds fiery-red; / If spots with ruddy fire begin to mix, / Then all the heavens convulsed in wrath thou'lt see- / Storm-clouds and wind together. Me that night / Let no man bid fare forth upon the deep, / Nor rend the rope from shore. But if, when both / He brings again and hides the day's return, / Clear-orbed he shineth, idly wilt thou dread / The storm-clouds, and beneath the lustral North / See the woods waving. What late eve in fine / Bears in her bosom, whence the wind that brings

Fair-weather-clouds, or what the rain South / Is meditating, tokens of all these / The sun will give thee. Who dare charge the sun / With leasing? He it is who warneth oft / Of hidden broils at hand and treachery, / And secret swelling of the waves of war. / He too it was, when Caesar's light was quenched, / For Rome had pity, when his bright head he veiled / In iron-hued darkness, till a godless age / Trembled for night eternal; at that time / Howbeit earth also, and the ocean-plains, / And dogs obscene, and birds of evil bode / Gave tokens. Yea, how often have we seen / Etna, her furnace-walls asunder riven, / In billowy floods boil o'er the Cyclops' fields, / And roll down globes of fire and molten rocks! / A clash of arms through all the heaven was heard / By Germany; strange heavings shook the Alps. / Yea, and by many through the breathless groves / A voice was heard with power, and wondrous-pale / Phantoms were seen upon the dusk of night, / And cattle spake, portentous! streams stand still, / And the earth yawns asunder, ivory weeps / For sorrow in the shrines, and bronzes sweat. / Up-twirling forests with his eddying tide, / Madly he bears them down, that lord of floods, / Eridanus, till through all the plain are swept / Beasts and their stalls together. At that time / In gloomy entrails ceased not to appear / Dark-threatening fibres, springs to trickle blood,

And high-built cities night-long to resound / With the wolves' howling. Never more than then / From skies all cloudless fell the thunderbolts, / Nor blazed so oft the comet's fire of bale. / Therefore a second time Philippi saw / The Roman hosts with kindred weapons rush / To battle, nor did the high gods deem it hard / That twice Emathia and the wide champaign / Of Haemus should be fattening with our blood. / Ay, and the time will come when there anigh, / Heaving the earth up with his curved plough, / Some swain will light on javelins by foul rust / Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike / On empty helmets, while he gapes to see / Bones as of giants from the trench untombed. / Gods of my country, heroes of the soil, / And Romulus, and Mother Vesta, thou / Who Tuscan Tiber and Rome's Palatine / Preservest, this new champion at the least / Our fallen generation to repair / Forbid not. To the full and long ago / Our blood thy Trojan perjuries hath paid, / Laomedon. Long since the courts of heaven / Begrudge us thee, our Caesar, and complain / That thou regard'st the triumphs of mankind, / Here where the wrong is right, the right is wrong, / Where wars abound so many, and myriad-faced / Is crime; where no meet honour hath the plough; / The fields, their husbandmen led far away, / Rot in neglect, and curved pruning-hooks

Into the sword's stiff blade are fused and forged. / Euphrates here, here Germany new strife / Is stirring; neighbouring cities are in arms, / The laws that bound them snapped; and godless war / Rages through all the universe; as when / The four-horse chariots from the barriers poured / Still quicken o'er the course, and, idly now / Grasping the reins, the driver by his team / Is onward borne, nor heeds the car his curb.

Thus far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven; / Now will I sing thee, Bacchus, and, with thee, / The forest's young plantations and the fruit / Of slow-maturing olive. Hither haste, / O Father of the wine-press; all things here / Teem with the bounties of thy hand; for thee / With viny autumn laden blooms the field, / And foams the vintage high with brimming vats; / Hither, O Father of the wine-press, come, / And stripped of buskin stain thy bared limbs / In the new must with me.

First, nature's law / For generating trees is manifold; / For some of their own force spontaneous spring, / No hand of man compelling, and possess / The plains and river-windings far and wide, / As pliant osier and the bending broom, / Poplar, and willows in wan companies / With green leaf glimmering gray; and some there be / From chance-dropped seed that rear them, as the tall / Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood, / Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular / Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth / A forest of dense suckers from the root, / As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant, / Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots / The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes / Nature imparted first; hence all the race / Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves / Springs into verdure.

Other means there are, / Which use by method for itself acquired. / One, sliving suckers from the tender frame / Of the tree-mother, plants them in the trench; / One buries the bare stumps within his field, / Truncheons cleft four-wise, or sharp-pointed stakes; / Some forest-trees the layer's bent arch await, / And slips yet quick within the parent-soil; / No root need others, nor doth the pruner's hand / Shrink to restore the topmost shoot to earth / That gave it being. Nay, marvellous to tell, / Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock, / Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood, / And oft the branches of one kind we see / Change to another's with no loss to rue, / Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield, / And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush.

Come then, and learn what tilth to each belongs / According to their kinds, ye husbandmen, / And tame with culture the wild fruits, lest earth / Lie idle. O blithe to make all Ismarus / One forest of the wine-god, and to clothe / With olives huge Tabernus! And be thou / At hand, and with me ply the voyage of toil / I am bound on, O my glory, O thou that art / Justly the chiefest portion of my fame, / Maecenas, and on this wide ocean launched / Spread sail like wings to waft thee. Not that I / With my poor verse would comprehend the whole, / Nay, though a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths / Were mine, a voice of iron; be thou at hand, / Skirt but the nearer coast-line; see the shore / Is in our grasp; not now with feigned song / Through winding bouts and tedious preludings / Shall I detain thee.

Those that lift their head / Into the realms of light spontaneously, / Fruitless indeed, but blithe and strenuous spring, / Since Nature lurks within the soil. And yet / Even these, should one engraft them, or transplant / To well-drilled trenches, will anon put of / Their woodland temper, and, by frequent tilth, / To whatso craft thou summon them, make speed / To follow. So likewise will the barren shaft / That from the stock-root issueth, if it be / Set out with clear space amid open fields: / Now the tree-mother's towering leaves and boughs / Darken, despoil of increase as it grows, / And blast it in the bearing. Lastly, that / Which from shed seed ariseth, upward wins / But slowly, yielding promise of its shade / To late-born generations; apples wane / Forgetful of their former juice, the grape / Bears sorry clusters, for the birds a prey.

Soothly on all must toil be spent, and all / Trained to the trench and at great cost subdued. / But reared from truncheons olives answer best, / As vines from layers, and from the solid wood / The Paphian myrtles; while from suckers spring / Both hardy hazels and huge ash, the tree / That rims with shade the brows of Hercules, / And acorns dear to the Chaonian sire: / So springs the towering palm too, and the fir / Destined to spy the dangers of the deep. / But the rough arbutus with walnut-fruit / Is grafted; so have barren planes ere now / Stout apples borne, with chestnut-flower the beech, / The mountain-ash with pear-bloom whitened o'er, / And swine crunched acorns 'neath the boughs of elms.

Nor is the method of inserting eyes / And grafting one: for where the buds push forth / Amidst the bark, and burst the membranes thin, / Even on the knot a narrow rift is made, / Wherein from some strange tree a germ they pen, / And to the moist rind bid it cleave and grow. / Or, otherwise, in knotless trunks is hewn / A breach, and deep into the solid grain / A path with wedges cloven; then fruitful slips / Are set herein, and- no long time- behold! / To heaven upshot with teeming boughs, the tree / Strange leaves admires and fruitage not its own.

Nor of one kind alone are sturdy elms, / Willow and lotus, nor the cypress-trees / Of Ida; nor of self-same fashion spring / Fat olives, orchades, and radii / And bitter-berried pausians, no, nor yet / Apples and the forests of Alcinous; / Nor from like cuttings are Crustumian pears / And Syrian, and the heavy hand-fillers. / Not the same vintage from our trees hangs down, / Which Lesbos from Methymna's tendril plucks. / Vines Thasian are there, Mareotids white, / These apt for richer soils, for lighter those: / Psithian for raisin-wine more useful, thin / Lageos, that one day will try the feet / And tie the tongue: purples and early-ripes, / And how, O Rhaetian, shall I hymn thy praise? / Yet cope not therefore with Falernian bins. / Vines Aminaean too, best-bodied wine, / To which the Tmolian bows him, ay, and king / Phanaeus too, and, lesser of that name, / Argitis, wherewith not a grape can vie / For gush of wine-juice or for length of years. / Nor thee must I pass over, vine of Rhodes, / Welcomed by gods and at the second board, / Nor thee, Bumastus, with plump clusters swollen. / But lo! how many kinds, and what their names, / There is no telling, nor doth it boot to tell; / Who lists to know it, he too would list to learn / How many sand-grains are by Zephyr tossed / On Libya's plain, or wot, when Eurus falls

With fury on the ships, how many waves / Come rolling shoreward from the Ionian sea. / Not that all soils can all things bear alike. / Willows by water-courses have their birth, / Alders in miry fens; on rocky heights / The barren mountain-ashes; on the shore / Myrtles throng gayest; Bacchus, lastly, loves / The bare hillside, and yews the north wind's chill. / Mark too the earth by outland tillers tamed, / And Eastern homes of Arabs, and tattooed / Geloni; to all trees their native lands / Allotted are; no clime but India bears / Black ebony; the branch of frankincense / Is Saba's sons' alone; why tell to thee / Of balsams oozing from the perfumed wood, / Or berries of acanthus ever green? / Of Aethiop forests hoar with downy wool, / Or how the Seres comb from off the leaves / Their silky fleece? Of groves which India bears, / Ocean's near neighbour, earth's remotest nook, / Where not an arrow-shot can cleave the air / Above their tree-tops? yet no laggards they, / When girded with the quiver! Media yields / The bitter juices and slow-lingering taste / Of the blest citron-fruit, than which no aid / Comes timelier, when fierce step-dames drug the cup / With simples mixed and spells of baneful power, / To drive the deadly poison from the limbs. / Large the tree's self in semblance like a bay, / And, showered it not a different scent abroad,

A bay it had been; for no wind of heaven / Its foliage falls; the flower, none faster, clings; / With it the Medes for sweetness lave the lips, / And ease the panting breathlessness of age. / But no, not Mede-land with its wealth of woods, / Nor Ganges fair, and Hermus thick with gold, / Can match the praise of Italy; nor Ind, / Nor Bactria, nor Panchaia, one wide tract / Of incense-teeming sand. Here never bulls / With nostrils snorting fire upturned the sod / Sown with the monstrous dragon's teeth, nor crop / Of warriors bristled thick with lance and helm; / But heavy harvests and the Massic juice / Of Bacchus fill its borders, overspread / With fruitful flocks and olives. Hence arose / The war-horse stepping proudly o'er the plain; / Hence thy white flocks, Clitumnus, and the bull, / Of victims mightiest, which full oft have led, / Bathed in thy sacred stream, the triumph-pomp / Of Romans to the temples of the gods. / Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here / In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks; / Twice doth the tree yield service of her fruit. / But ravening tigers come not nigh, nor breed / Of savage lion, nor aconite betrays / Its hapless gatherers, nor with sweep so vast / Doth the scaled serpent trail his endless coils / Along the ground, or wreathe him into spires. / Mark too her cities, so many and so proud, / Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town

Up rugged precipices heaved and reared, / And rivers undergliding ancient walls. / Or should I celebrate the sea that laves / Her upper shores and lower? or those broad lakes? / Thee, Larius, greatest and, Benacus, thee / With billowy uproar surging like the main? / Or sing her harbours, and the barrier cast / Athwart the Lucrine, and how ocean chafes / With mighty bellowings, where the Julian wave / Echoes the thunder of his rout, and through / Avernian inlets pours the Tuscan tide? / A land no less that in her veins displays / Rivers of silver, mines of copper ore, / Ay, and with gold hath flowed abundantly. / A land that reared a valiant breed of men, / The Marsi and Sabellian youth, and, schooled / To hardship, the Ligurian, and with these / The Volscian javelin-armed, the Decii too, / The Marii and Camilli, names of might, / The Scipios, stubborn warriors, ay, and thee, / Great Caesar, who in Asia's utmost bounds / With conquering arm e'en now art fending far / The unwarlike Indian from the heights of Rome. / Hail! land of Saturn, mighty mother thou / Of fruits and heroes; 'tis for thee I dare / Unseal the sacred fountains, and essay / Themes of old art and glory, as I sing / The song of Ascra through the towns of Rome.

Now for the native gifts of various soils, / What powers hath each, what hue, what natural bent / For yielding increase. First your stubborn lands / And churlish hill-sides, where are thorny fields / Of meagre marl and gravel, these delight / In long-lived olive-groves to Pallas dear. / Take for a sign the plenteous growth hard by / Of oleaster, and the fields strewn wide / With woodland berries. But a soil that's rich, / In moisture sweet exulting, and the plain / That teems with grasses on its fruitful breast, / Such as full oft in hollow mountain-dell / We view beneath us- from the craggy heights / Streams thither flow with fertilizing mud- / A plain which southward rising feeds the fern / By curved ploughs detested, this one day / Shall yield thee store of vines full strong to gush / In torrents of the wine-god; this shall be / Fruitful of grapes and flowing juice like that / We pour to heaven from bowls of gold, what time / The sleek Etruscan at the altar blows / His ivory pipe, and on the curved dish / We lay the reeking entrails. If to rear / Cattle delight thee rather, steers, or lambs, / Or goats that kill the tender plants, then seek / Full-fed Tarentum's glades and distant fields, / Or such a plain as luckless Mantua lost / Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan: / There nor clear springs nor grass the flocks will fail, / And all the day-long browsing of thy herds

Shall the cool dews of one brief night repair. / Land which the burrowing share shows dark and rich, / With crumbling soil- for this we counterfeit / In ploughing- for corn is goodliest; from no field / More wains thou'lt see wend home with plodding steers; / Or that from which the husbandman in spleen / Has cleared the timber, and o'erthrown the copse / That year on year lay idle, and from the roots / Uptorn the immemorial haunt of birds; / They banished from their nests have sought the skies; / But the rude plain beneath the ploughshare's stroke / Starts into sudden brightness. For indeed / The starved hill-country gravel scarce serves the bees / With lowly cassias and with rosemary; / Rough tufa and chalk too, by black water-worms / Gnawed through and through, proclaim no soils beside / So rife with serpent-dainties, or that yield / Such winding lairs to lurk in. That again, / Which vapoury mist and flitting smoke exhales, / Drinks moisture up and casts it forth at will, / Which, ever in its own green grass arrayed, / Mars not the metal with salt scurf of rust- / That shall thine elms with merry vines enwreathe; / That teems with olive; that shall thy tilth prove kind / To cattle, and patient of the curved share. / Such ploughs rich Capua, such the coast that skirts / Thy ridge, Vesuvius, and the Clanian flood, / Acerrae's desolation and her bane. / How each to recognize now hear me tell. / Dost ask if loose or passing firm it be-

Since one for corn hath liking, one for wine, / The firmer sort for Ceres, none too loose / For thee, Lyaeus?- with scrutinizing eye / First choose thy ground, and bid a pit be sunk / Deep in the solid earth, then cast the mould / All back again, and stamp the surface smooth. / If it suffice not, loose will be the land, / More meet for cattle and for kindly vines; / But if, rebellious, to its proper bounds / The soil returns not, but fills all the trench / And overtops it, then the glebe is gross; / Look for stiff ridges and reluctant clods, / And with strong bullocks cleave the fallow crust. / Salt ground again, and bitter, as 'tis called- / Barren for fruits, by tilth untamable, / Nor grape her kind, nor apples their good name / Maintaining- will in this wise yield thee proof: / Stout osier-baskets from the rafter-smoke, / And strainers of the winepress pluck thee down; / Hereinto let that evil land, with fresh / Spring-water mixed, be trampled to the full; / The moisture, mark you, will ooze all away, / In big drops issuing through the osier-withes, / But plainly will its taste the secret tell, / And with a harsh twang ruefully distort / The mouths of them that try it. Rich soil again / We learn on this wise: tossed from hand to hand / Yet cracks it never, but pitch-like, as we hold, / Clings to the fingers. A land with moisture rife / Breeds lustier herbage, and is more than meet

Prolific. Ah I may never such for me / O'er-fertile prove, or make too stout a show / At the first earing! Heavy land or light / The mute self-witness of its weight betrays. / A glance will serve to warn thee which is black, / Or what the hue of any. But hard it is / To track the signs of that pernicious cold: / Pines only, noxious yews, and ivies dark / At times reveal its traces.

All these rules / Regarding, let your land, ay, long before, / Scorch to the quick, and into trenches carve / The mighty mountains, and their upturned clods / Bare to the north wind, ere thou plant therein / The vine's prolific kindred. Fields whose soil / Is crumbling are the best: winds look to that, / And bitter hoar-frosts, and the delver's toil / Untiring, as he stirs the loosened glebe. / But those, whose vigilance no care escapes, / Search for a kindred site, where first to rear / A nursery for the trees, and eke whereto / Soon to translate them, lest the sudden shock / From their new mother the young plants estrange. / Nay, even the quarter of the sky they brand / Upon the bark, that each may be restored, / As erst it stood, here bore the southern heats, / Here turned its shoulder to the northern pole; / So strong is custom formed in early years. / Whether on hill or plain 'tis best to plant / Your vineyard first inquire. If on some plain / You measure out rich acres, then plant thick; / Thick planting makes no niggard of the vine; / But if on rising mound or sloping bill, / Then let the rows have room, so none the less / Each line you draw, when all the trees are set, / May tally to perfection. Even as oft / In mighty war, whenas the legion's length / Deploys its cohorts, and the column stands / In open plain, the ranks of battle set,

And far and near with rippling sheen of arms / The wide earth flickers, nor yet in grisly strife / Foe grapples foe, but dubious 'twixt the hosts / The war-god wavers; so let all be ranged / In equal rows symmetric, not alone / To feed an idle fancy with the view, / But since not otherwise will earth afford / Vigour to all alike, nor yet the boughs / Have power to stretch them into open space.

Shouldst haply of the furrow's depth inquire, / Even to a shallow trench I dare commit / The vine; but deeper in the ground is fixed / The tree that props it, aesculus in chief, / Which howso far its summit soars toward heaven, / So deep strikes root into the vaults of hell. / It therefore neither storms, nor blasts, nor showers / Wrench from its bed; unshaken it abides, / Sees many a generation, many an age / Of men roll onward, and survives them all, / Stretching its titan arms and branches far, / Sole central pillar of a world of shade.

Nor toward the sunset let thy vineyards slope, / Nor midst the vines plant hazel; neither take / The topmost shoots for cuttings, nor from the top / Of the supporting tree your suckers tear; / So deep their love of earth; nor wound the plants / With blunted blade; nor truncheons intersperse / Of the wild olive: for oft from careless swains / A spark hath fallen, that, 'neath the unctuous rind / Hid thief-like first, now grips the tough tree-bole, / And mounting to the leaves on high, sends forth / A roar to heaven, then coursing through the boughs / And airy summits reigns victoriously, / Wraps all the grove in robes of fire, and gross / With pitch-black vapour heaves the murky reek / Skyward, but chiefly if a storm has swooped / Down on the forest, and a driving wind / Rolls up the conflagration. When 'tis so, / Their root-force fails them, nor, when lopped away, / Can they recover, and from the earth beneath / Spring to like verdure; thus alone survives / The bare wild olive with its bitter leaves.

Let none persuade thee, howso weighty-wise, / To stir the soil when stiff with Boreas' breath. / Then ice-bound winter locks the fields, nor lets / The young plant fix its frozen root to earth. / Best sow your vineyards when in blushing Spring / Comes the white bird long-bodied snakes abhor, / Or on the eve of autumn's earliest frost, / Ere the swift sun-steeds touch the wintry Signs, / While summer is departing. Spring it is / Blesses the fruit-plantation, Spring the groves; / In Spring earth swells and claims the fruitful seed. / Then Aether, sire omnipotent, leaps down / With quickening showers to his glad wife's embrace, / And, might with might commingling, rears to life / All germs that teem within her; then resound / With songs of birds the greenwood-wildernesses, / And in due time the herds their loves renew; / Then the boon earth yields increase, and the fields / Unlock their bosoms to the warm west winds; / Soft moisture spreads o'er all things, and the blades / Face the new suns, and safely trust them now; / The vine-shoot, fearless of the rising south, / Or mighty north winds driving rain from heaven, / Bursts into bud, and every leaf unfolds. / Even so, methinks, when Earth to being sprang, / Dawned the first days, and such the course they held; / 'Twas Spring-tide then, ay, Spring, the mighty world / Was keeping: Eurus spared his wintry blasts, / When first the flocks drank sunlight, and a race / Of men like iron from the hard glebe arose,

And wild beasts thronged the woods, and stars the heaven. / Nor could frail creatures bear this heavy strain, / Did not so large a respite interpose / 'Twixt frost and heat, and heaven's relenting arms / Yield earth a welcome. / For the rest, whate'er / The sets thou plantest in thy fields, thereon / Strew refuse rich, and with abundant earth / Take heed to hide them, and dig in withal / Rough shells or porous stone, for therebetween / Will water trickle and fine vapour creep, / And so the plants their drooping spirits raise. / Aye, and there have been, who with weight of stone / Or heavy potsherd press them from above; / This serves for shield in pelting showers, and this / When the hot dog-star chaps the fields with drought.

The slips once planted, yet remains to cleave / The earth about their roots persistently, / And toss the cumbrous hoes, or task the soil / With burrowing plough-share, and ply up and down / Your labouring bullocks through the vineyard's midst, / Then too smooth reeds and shafts of whittled wand, / And ashen poles and sturdy forks to shape, / Whereby supported they may learn to mount, / Laugh at the gales, and through the elm-tops win / From story up to story.

Now while yet / The leaves are in their first fresh infant growth, / Forbear their frailty, and while yet the bough / Shoots joyfully toward heaven, with loosened rein / Launched on the void, assail it not as yet / With keen-edged sickle, but let the leaves alone / Be culled with clip of fingers here and there. / But when they clasp the elms with sturdy trunks / Erect, then strip the leaves off, prune the boughs; / Sooner they shrink from steel, but then put forth / The arm of power, and stem the branchy tide.

Hedges too must be woven and all beasts / Barred entrance, chiefly while the leaf is young / And witless of disaster; for therewith, / Beside harsh winters and o'erpowering sun, / Wild buffaloes and pestering goats for ay / Besport them, sheep and heifers glut their greed. / Nor cold by hoar-frost curdled, nor the prone / Dead weight of summer upon the parched crags, / So scathe it, as the flocks with venom-bite / Of their hard tooth, whose gnawing scars the stem. / For no offence but this to Bacchus bleeds / The goat at every altar, and old plays / Upon the stage find entrance; therefore too / The sons of Theseus through the country-side- / Hamlet and crossway- set the prize of wit, / And on the smooth sward over oiled skins / Dance in their tipsy frolic. Furthermore / The Ausonian swains, a race from Troy derived, / Make merry with rough rhymes and boisterous mirth, / Grim masks of hollowed bark assume, invoke / Thee with glad hymns, O Bacchus, and to thee / Hang puppet-faces on tall pines to swing. / Hence every vineyard teems with mellowing fruit, / Till hollow vale o'erflows, and gorge profound, / Where'er the god hath turned his comely head. / Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing / Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cates / And dishes bear him; and the doomed goat / Led by the horn shall at the altar stand, / Whose entrails rich on hazel-spits we'll roast.

This further task again, to dress the vine, / Hath needs beyond exhausting; the whole soil / Thrice, four times, yearly must be cleft, the sod / With hoes reversed be crushed continually, / The whole plantation lightened of its leaves. / Round on the labourer spins the wheel of toil, / As on its own track rolls the circling year. / Soon as the vine her lingering leaves hath shed, / And the chill north wind from the forests shook / Their coronal, even then the careful swain / Looks keenly forward to the coming year, / With Saturn's curved fang pursues and prunes / The vine forlorn, and lops it into shape. / Be first to dig the ground up, first to clear / And burn the refuse-branches, first to house / Again your vine-poles, last to gather fruit. / Twice doth the thickening shade beset the vine, / Twice weeds with stifling briers o'ergrow the crop; / And each a toilsome labour. Do thou praise / Broad acres, farm but few. Rough twigs beside / Of butcher's broom among the woods are cut, / And reeds upon the river-banks, and still / The undressed willow claims thy fostering care. / So now the vines are fettered, now the trees / Let go the sickle, and the last dresser now / Sings of his finished rows; but still the ground / Must vexed be, the dust be stirred, and heaven / Still set thee trembling for the ripened grapes.

Not so with olives; small husbandry need they, / Nor look for sickle bowed or biting rake, / When once they have gripped the soil, and borne the breeze. / Earth of herself, with hooked fang laid bare, / Yields moisture for the plants, and heavy fruit, / The ploughshare aiding; therewithal thou'lt rear / The olive's fatness well-beloved of Peace. / Apples, moreover, soon as first they feel / Their stems wax lusty, and have found their strength, / To heaven climb swiftly, self-impelled, nor crave / Our succour. All the grove meanwhile no less / With fruit is swelling, and the wild haunts of birds / Blush with their blood-red berries. Cytisus / Is good to browse on, the tall forest yields / Pine-torches, and the nightly fires are fed / And shoot forth radiance. And shall men be loath / To plant, nor lavish of their pains? Why trace / Things mightier? Willows even and lowly brooms / To cattle their green leaves, to shepherds shade, / Fences for crops, and food for honey yield. / And blithe it is Cytorus to behold / Waving with box, Narycian groves of pitch; / Oh! blithe the sight of fields beholden not / To rake or man's endeavour! the barren woods / That crown the scalp of Caucasus, even these, / Which furious blasts for ever rive and rend, / Yield various wealth, pine-logs that serve for ships, / Cedar and cypress for the homes of men; / Hence, too, the farmers shave their wheel-spokes, hence / Drums for their wains, and curved boat-keels fit;

Willows bear twigs enow, the elm-tree leaves, / Myrtle stout spear-shafts, war-tried cornel too; / Yews into Ituraean bows are bent: / Nor do smooth lindens or lathe-polished box / Shrink from man's shaping and keen-furrowing steel; / Light alder floats upon the boiling flood / Sped down the Padus, and bees house their swarms / In rotten holm-oak's hollow bark and bole. / What of like praise can Bacchus' gifts afford? / Nay, Bacchus even to crime hath prompted, he / The wine-infuriate Centaurs quelled with death, / Rhoetus and Pholus, and with mighty bowl / Hylaeus threatening high the Lapithae.

Oh! all too happy tillers of the soil, / Could they but know their blessedness, for whom / Far from the clash of arms all-equal earth / Pours from the ground herself their easy fare! / What though no lofty palace portal-proud / From all its chambers vomits forth a tide / Of morning courtiers, nor agape they gaze / On pillars with fair tortoise-shell inwrought, / Gold-purfled robes, and bronze from Ephyre; / Nor is the whiteness of their wool distained / With drugs Assyrian, nor clear olive's use / With cassia tainted; yet untroubled calm, / A life that knows no falsehood, rich enow / With various treasures, yet broad-acred ease, / Grottoes and living lakes, yet Tempes cool, / Lowing of kine, and sylvan slumbers soft, / They lack not; lawns and wild beasts' haunts are there, / A youth of labour patient, need-inured, / Worship, and reverend sires: with them from earth / Departing justice her last footprints left.

Me before all things may the Muses sweet, / Whose rites I bear with mighty passion pierced, / Receive, and show the paths and stars of heaven, / The sun's eclipses and the labouring moons, / From whence the earthquake, by what power the seas / Swell from their depths, and, every barrier burst, / Sink back upon themselves, why winter-suns / So haste to dip 'neath ocean, or what check / The lingering night retards. But if to these / High realms of nature the cold curdling blood / About my heart bar access, then be fields / And stream-washed vales my solace, let me love / Rivers and woods, inglorious. Oh for you / Plains, and Spercheius, and Taygete, / By Spartan maids o'er-revelled! Oh, for one, / Would set me in deep dells of Haemus cool, / And shield me with his boughs' o'ershadowing might! / Happy, who had the skill to understand / Nature's hid causes, and beneath his feet / All terrors cast, and death's relentless doom, / And the loud roar of greedy Acheron. / Blest too is he who knows the rural gods, / Pan, old Silvanus, and the sister-nymphs! / Him nor the rods of public power can bend, / Nor kingly purple, nor fierce feud that drives / Brother to turn on brother, nor descent / Of Dacian from the Danube's leagued flood, / Nor Rome's great State, nor kingdoms like to die; / Nor hath he grieved through pitying of the poor, / Nor envied him that hath. What fruit the boughs,

And what the fields, of their own bounteous will / Have borne, he gathers; nor iron rule of laws, / Nor maddened Forum have his eyes beheld, / Nor archives of the people. Others vex / The darksome gulfs of Ocean with their oars, / Or rush on steel: they press within the courts / And doors of princes; one with havoc falls / Upon a city and its hapless hearths, / From gems to drink, on Tyrian rugs to lie; / This hoards his wealth and broods o'er buried gold; / One at the rostra stares in blank amaze; / One gaping sits transported by the cheers, / The answering cheers of plebs and senate rolled / Along the benches: bathed in brothers' blood / Men revel, and, all delights of hearth and home / For exile changing, a new country seek / Beneath an alien sun. The husbandman / With hooked ploughshare turns the soil; from hence / Springs his year's labour; hence, too, he sustains / Country and cottage homestead, and from hence / His herds of cattle and deserving steers. / No respite! still the year o'erflows with fruit, / Or young of kine, or Ceres' wheaten sheaf, / With crops the furrow loads, and bursts the barns. / Winter is come: in olive-mills they bruise / The Sicyonian berry; acorn-cheered / The swine troop homeward; woods their arbutes yield; / So, various fruit sheds Autumn, and high up / On sunny rocks the mellowing vintage bakes. / Meanwhile about his lips sweet children cling;

His chaste house keeps its purity; his kine / Drop milky udders, and on the lush green grass / Fat kids are striving, horn to butting horn. / Himself keeps holy days; stretched o'er the sward, / Where round the fire his comrades crown the bowl, / He pours libation, and thy name invokes, / Lenaeus, and for the herdsmen on an elm / Sets up a mark for the swift javelin; they / Strip their tough bodies for the rustic sport. / Such life of yore the ancient Sabines led, / Such Remus and his brother: Etruria thus, / Doubt not, to greatness grew, and Rome became / The fair world's fairest, and with circling wall / Clasped to her single breast the sevenfold hills. / Ay, ere the reign of Dicte's king, ere men, / Waxed godless, banqueted on slaughtered bulls, / Such life on earth did golden Saturn lead. / Nor ear of man had heard the war-trump's blast, / Nor clang of sword on stubborn anvil set.

But lo! a boundless space we have travelled o'er; / 'Tis time our steaming horses to unyoke.

Thee too, great Pales, will I hymn, and thee, / Amphrysian shepherd, worthy to be sung, / You, woods and waves Lycaean. All themes beside, / Which else had charmed the vacant mind with song, / Are now waxed common. Of harsh Eurystheus who / The story knows not, or that praiseless king / Busiris, and his altars? or by whom / Hath not the tale been told of Hylas young, / Latonian Delos and Hippodame, / And Pelops for his ivory shoulder famed, / Keen charioteer? Needs must a path be tried, / By which I too may lift me from the dust, / And float triumphant through the mouths of men. / Yea, I shall be the first, so life endure, / To lead the Muses with me, as I pass / To mine own country from the Aonian height; / I, Mantua, first will bring thee back the palms / Of Idumaea, and raise a marble shrine / On thy green plain fast by the water-side, / Where Mincius winds more vast in lazy coils, / And rims his margent with the tender reed. / Amid my shrine shall Caesar's godhead dwell. / To him will I, as victor, bravely dight / In Tyrian purple, drive along the bank / A hundred four-horse cars. All Greece for me, / Leaving Alpheus and Molorchus' grove, / On foot shall strive, or with the raw-hide glove; / Whilst I, my head with stripped green olive crowned, / Will offer gifts. Even 'tis present joy / To lead the high processions to the fane,

And view the victims felled; or how the scene / Sunders with shifted face, and Britain's sons / Inwoven thereon with those proud curtains rise. / Of gold and massive ivory on the doors / I'll trace the battle of the Gangarides, / And our Quirinus' conquering arms, and there / Surging with war, and hugely flowing, the Nile, / And columns heaped on high with naval brass. / And Asia's vanquished cities I will add, / And quelled Niphates, and the Parthian foe, / Who trusts in flight and backward-volleying darts, / And trophies torn with twice triumphant hand / From empires twain on ocean's either shore. / And breathing forms of Parian marble there / Shall stand, the offspring of Assaracus, / And great names of the Jove-descended folk, / And father Tros, and Troy's first founder, lord / Of Cynthus. And accursed Envy there / Shall dread the Furies, and thy ruthless flood, / Cocytus, and Ixion's twisted snakes, / And that vast wheel and ever-baffling stone. / Meanwhile the Dryad-haunted woods and lawns / Unsullied seek we; 'tis thy hard behest, / Maecenas. Without thee no lofty task / My mind essays. Up! break the sluggish bonds / Of tarriance; with loud din Cithaeron calls, / Steed-taming Epidaurus, and thy hounds, / Taygete; and hark! the assenting groves / With peal on peal reverberate the roar. / Yet must I gird me to rehearse ere long

The fiery fights of Caesar, speed his name / Through ages, countless as to Caesar's self / From the first birth-dawn of Tithonus old. / If eager for the prized Olympian palm / One breed the horse, or bullock strong to plough, / Be his prime care a shapely dam to choose. / Of kine grim-faced is goodliest, with coarse head / And burly neck, whose hanging dewlaps reach / From chin to knee; of boundless length her flank; / Large every way she is, large-footed even, / With incurved horns and shaggy ears beneath. / Nor let mislike me one with spots of white / Conspicuous, or that spurns the yoke, whose horn / At times hath vice in't: liker bull-faced she, / And tall-limbed wholly, and with tip of tail / Brushing her footsteps as she walks along. / The age for Hymen's rites, Lucina's pangs, / Ere ten years ended, after four begins; / Their residue of days nor apt to teem, / Nor strong for ploughing. Meantime, while youth's delight / Survives within them, loose the males: be first / To speed thy herds of cattle to their loves, / Breed stock with stock, and keep the race supplied. / Ah! life's best hours are ever first to fly / From hapless mortals; in their place succeed / Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore / And death unpitying sweep them from the scene. / Still will be some, whose form thou fain wouldst change; / Renew them still; with yearly choice of young / Preventing losses, lest too late thou rue.

Nor steeds crave less selection; but on those / Thou think'st to rear, the promise of their line, / From earliest youth thy chiefest pains bestow. / See from the first yon high-bred colt afield, / His lofty step, his limbs' elastic tread: / Dauntless he leads the herd, still first to try / The threatening flood, or brave the unknown bridge, / By no vain noise affrighted; lofty-necked, / With clean-cut head, short belly, and stout back; / His sprightly breast exuberant with brawn. / Chestnut and grey are good; the worst-hued white / And sorrel. Then lo! if arms are clashed afar, / Bide still he cannot: ears stiffen and limbs quake; / His nostrils snort and roll out wreaths of fire. / Dense is his mane, that when uplifted falls / On his right shoulder; betwixt either loin / The spine runs double; his earth-dinting hoof / Rings with the ponderous beat of solid horn. / Even such a horse was Cyllarus, reined and tamed / By Pollux of Amyclae; such the pair / In Grecian song renowned, those steeds of Mars, / And famed Achilles' team: in such-like form / Great Saturn's self with mane flung loose on neck / Sped at his wife's approach, and flying filled / The heights of Pelion with his piercing neigh.

Even him, when sore disease or sluggish eld / Now saps his strength, pen fast at home, and spare / His not inglorious age. A horse grown old / Slow kindling unto love in vain prolongs / The fruitless task, and, to the encounter come, / As fire in stubble blusters without strength, / He rages idly. Therefore mark thou first / Their age and mettle, other points anon, / As breed and lineage, or what pain was theirs / To lose the race, what pride the palm to win. / Seest how the chariots in mad rivalry / Poured from the barrier grip the course and go, / When youthful hope is highest, and every heart / Drained with each wild pulsation? How they ply / The circling lash, and reaching forward let / The reins hang free! Swift spins the glowing wheel; / And now they stoop, and now erect in air / Seem borne through space and towering to the sky: / No stop, no stay; the dun sand whirls aloft; / They reek with foam-flakes and pursuing breath; / So sweet is fame, so prized the victor's palm. / 'Twas Ericthonius first took heart to yoke / Four horses to his car, and rode above / The whirling wheels to victory: but the ring / And bridle-reins, mounted on horses' backs, / The Pelethronian Lapithae bequeathed, / And taught the knight in arms to spurn the ground, / And arch the upgathered footsteps of his pride. / Each task alike is arduous, and for each / A horse young, fiery, swift of foot, they seek;

How oft so-e'er yon rival may have chased / The flying foe, or boast his native plain / Epirus, or Mycenae's stubborn hold, / And trace his lineage back to Neptune's birth. / These points regarded, as the time draws nigh, / With instant zeal they lavish all their care / To plump with solid fat the chosen chief / And designated husband of the herd: / And flowery herbs they cut, and serve him well / With corn and running water, that his strength / Not fail him for that labour of delight, / Nor puny colts betray the feeble sire. / The herd itself of purpose they reduce / To leanness, and when love's sweet longing first / Provokes them, they forbid the leafy food, / And pen them from the springs, and oft beside / With running shake, and tire them in the sun, / What time the threshing-floor groans heavily / With pounding of the corn-ears, and light chaff / Is whirled on high to catch the rising west. / This do they that the soil's prolific powers / May not be dulled by surfeiting, nor choke / The sluggish furrows, but eagerly absorb / Their fill of love, and deeply entertain.

To care of sire the mother's care succeeds. / When great with young they wander nigh their time, / Let no man suffer them to drag the yoke / In heavy wains, nor leap across the way, / Nor scour the meads, nor swim the rushing flood. / In lonely lawns they feed them, by the course / Of brimming streams, where moss is, and the banks / With grass are greenest, where are sheltering caves, / And far outstretched the rock-flung shadow lies. / Round wooded Silarus and the ilex-bowers / Of green Alburnus swarms a winged pest- / Its Roman name Asilus, by the Greeks / Termed Oestros- fierce it is, and harshly hums, / Driving whole herds in terror through the groves, / Till heaven is madded by their bellowing din, / And Tanager's dry bed and forest-banks. / With this same scourge did Juno wreak of old / The terrors of her wrath, a plague devised / Against the heifer sprung from Inachus. / From this too thou, since in the noontide heats / 'Tis most persistent, fend thy teeming herds, / And feed them when the sun is newly risen, / Or the first stars are ushering in the night.

But, yeaning ended, all their tender care / Is to the calves transferred; at once with marks / They brand them, both to designate their race, / And which to rear for breeding, or devote / As altar-victims, or to cleave the ground / And into ridges tear and turn the sod. / The rest along the greensward graze at will. / Those that to rustic uses thou wouldst mould, / As calves encourage and take steps to tame, / While pliant wills and plastic youth allow. / And first of slender withies round the throat / Loose collars hang, then when their free-born necks / Are used to service, with the self-same bands / Yoke them in pairs, and steer by steer compel / Keep pace together. And time it is that oft / Unfreighted wheels be drawn along the ground / Behind them, as to dint the surface-dust; / Then let the beechen axle strain and creak / 'Neath some stout burden, whilst a brazen pole / Drags on the wheels made fast thereto. Meanwhile / For their unbroken youth not grass alone, / Nor meagre willow-leaves and marish-sedge, / But corn-ears with thy hand pluck from the crops. / Nor shall the brood-kine, as of yore, for thee / Brim high the snowy milking-pail, but spend / Their udders' fullness on their own sweet young.

But if fierce squadrons and the ranks of war / Delight thee rather, or on wheels to glide / At Pisa, with Alpheus fleeting by, / And in the grove of Jupiter urge on / The flying chariot, be your steed's first task / To face the warrior's armed rage, and brook / The trumpet, and long roar of rumbling wheels, / And clink of chiming bridles in the stall; / Then more and more to love his master's voice / Caressing, or loud hand that claps his neck. / Ay, thus far let him learn to dare, when first / Weaned from his mother, and his mouth at times / Yield to the supple halter, even while yet / Weak, tottering-limbed, and ignorant of life. / But, three years ended, when the fourth arrives, / Now let him tarry not to run the ring / With rhythmic hoof-beat echoing, and now learn / Alternately to curve each bending leg, / And be like one that struggleth; then at last / Challenge the winds to race him, and at speed / Launched through the open, like a reinless thing, / Scarce print his footsteps on the surface-sand. / As when with power from Hyperborean climes / The north wind stoops, and scatters from his path / Dry clouds and storms of Scythia; the tall corn / And rippling plains 'gin shiver with light gusts; / A sound is heard among the forest-tops; / Long waves come racing shoreward: fast he flies, / With instant pinion sweeping earth and main.

A steed like this or on the mighty course / Of Elis at the goal will sweat, and shower / Red foam-flakes from his mouth, or, kindlier task, / With patient neck support the Belgian car. / Then, broken at last, let swell their burly frame / With fattening corn-mash, for, unbroke, they will / With pride wax wanton, and, when caught, refuse / Tough lash to brook or jagged curb obey.

But no device so fortifies their power / As love's blind stings of passion to forefend, / Whether on steed or steer thy choice be set. / Ay, therefore 'tis they banish bulls afar / To solitary pastures, or behind / Some mountain-barrier, or broad streams beyond, / Or else in plenteous stalls pen fast at home. / For, even through sight of her, the female wastes / His strength with smouldering fire, till he forget / Both grass and woodland. She indeed full oft / With her sweet charms can lovers proud compel / To battle for the conquest horn to horn. / In Sila's forest feeds the heifer fair, / While each on each the furious rivals run; / Wound follows wound; the black blood laves their limbs; / Horns push and strive against opposing horns, / With mighty groaning; all the forest-side / And far Olympus bellow back the roar. / Nor wont the champions in one stall to couch; / But he that's worsted hies him to strange climes / Far off, an exile, moaning much the shame, / The blows of that proud conqueror, then love's loss / Avenged not; with one glance toward the byre, / His ancient royalties behind him lie. / So with all heed his strength he practiseth, / And nightlong makes the hard bare stones his bed, / And feeds on prickly leaf and pointed rush, / And proves himself, and butting at a tree / Learns to fling wrath into his horns, with blows / Provokes the air, and scattering clouds of sand

Makes prelude of the battle; afterward, / With strength repaired and gathered might breaks camp, / And hurls him headlong on the unthinking foe: / As in mid ocean when a wave far of / Begins to whiten, mustering from the main / Its rounded breast, and, onward rolled to land / Falls with prodigious roar among the rocks, / Huge as a very mountain: but the depths / Upseethe in swirling eddies, and disgorge / The murky sand-lees from their sunken bed.

Nay, every race on earth of men, and beasts, / And ocean-folk, and flocks, and painted birds, / Rush to the raging fire: love sways them all. / Never than then more fiercely o'er the plain / Prowls heedless of her whelps the lioness: / Nor monstrous bears such wide-spread havoc-doom / Deal through the forests; then the boar is fierce, / Most deadly then the tigress: then, alack! / Ill roaming is it on Libya's lonely plains. / Mark you what shivering thrills the horse's frame, / If but a waft the well-known gust conveys? / Nor curb can check them then, nor lash severe, / Nor rocks and caverned crags, nor barrier-floods, / That rend and whirl and wash the hills away. / Then speeds amain the great Sabellian boar, / His tushes whets, with forefoot tears the ground, / Rubs 'gainst a tree his flanks, and to and fro / Hardens each wallowing shoulder to the wound. / What of the youth, when love's relentless might / Stirs the fierce fire within his veins? Behold! / In blindest midnight how he swims the gulf / Convulsed with bursting storm-clouds! Over him / Heaven's huge gate thunders; the rock-shattered main / Utters a warning cry; nor parents' tears / Can backward call him, nor the maid he loves, / Too soon to die on his untimely pyre. / What of the spotted ounce to Bacchus dear, / Or warlike wolf-kin or the breed of dogs? / Why tell how timorous stags the battle join? / O'er all conspicuous is the rage of mares,

By Venus' self inspired of old, what time / The Potnian four with rending jaws devoured / The limbs of Glaucus. Love-constrained they roam / Past Gargarus, past the loud Ascanian flood; / They climb the mountains, and the torrents swim; / And when their eager marrow first conceives / The fire, in Spring-tide chiefly, for with Spring / Warmth doth their frames revisit, then they stand / All facing westward on the rocky heights, / And of the gentle breezes take their fill; / And oft unmated, marvellous to tell, / But of the wind impregnate, far and wide / O'er craggy height and lowly vale they scud, / Not toward thy rising, Eurus, or the sun's, / But westward and north-west, or whence up-springs / Black Auster, that glooms heaven with rainy cold. / Hence from their groin slow drips a poisonous juice, / By shepherds truly named hippomanes, / Hippomanes, fell stepdames oft have culled, / And mixed with herbs and spells of baneful bode.

Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable hour, / As point to point our charmed round we trace. / Enough of herds. This second task remains, / The wool-clad flocks and shaggy goats to treat. / Here lies a labour; hence for glory look, / Brave husbandmen. Nor doubtfully know / How hard it is for words to triumph here, / And shed their lustre on a theme so slight: / But I am caught by ravishing desire / Above the lone Parnassian steep; I love / To walk the heights, from whence no earlier track / Slopes gently downward to Castalia's spring.

Now, awful Pales, strike a louder tone. / First, for the sheep soft pencotes I decree / To browse in, till green summer's swift return; / And that the hard earth under them with straw / And handfuls of the fern be littered deep, / Lest chill of ice such tender cattle harm / With scab and loathly foot-rot. Passing thence / I bid the goats with arbute-leaves be stored, / And served with fresh spring-water, and their pens / Turned southward from the blast, to face the suns / Of winter, when Aquarius' icy beam / Now sinks in showers upon the parting year. / These too no lightlier our protection claim, / Nor prove of poorer service, howsoe'er / Milesian fleeces dipped in Tyrian reds / Repay the barterer; these with offspring teem / More numerous; these yield plenteous store of milk: / The more each dry-wrung udder froths the pail, / More copious soon the teat-pressed torrents flow. / Ay, and on Cinyps' bank the he-goats too / Their beards and grizzled chins and bristling hair / Let clip for camp-use, or as rugs to wrap / Seafaring wretches. But they browse the woods / And summits of Lycaeus, and rough briers, / And brakes that love the highland: of themselves / Right heedfully the she-goats homeward troop / Before their kids, and with plump udders clogged / Scarce cross the threshold. Wherefore rather ye, / The less they crave man's vigilance, be fain / From ice to fend them and from snowy winds;

Bring food and feast them with their branchy fare, / Nor lock your hay-loft all the winter long. / But when glad summer at the west wind's call / Sends either flock to pasture in the glades, / Soon as the day-star shineth, hie we then / To the cool meadows, while the dawn is young, / The grass yet hoary, and to browsing herds / The dew tastes sweetest on the tender sward. / When heaven's fourth hour draws on the thickening drought, / And shrill cicalas pierce the brake with song, / Then at the well-springs bid them, or deep pools, / From troughs of holm-oak quaff the running wave: / But at day's hottest seek a shadowy vale, / Where some vast ancient-timbered oak of Jove / Spreads his huge branches, or where huddling black / Ilex on ilex cowers in awful shade. / Then once more give them water sparingly, / And feed once more, till sunset, when cool eve / Allays the air, and dewy moonbeams slake / The forest glades, with halcyon's song the shore, / And every thicket with the goldfinch rings.

Of Libya's shepherds why the tale pursue? / Why sing their pastures and the scattered huts / They house in? Oft their cattle day and night / Graze the whole month together, and go forth / Into far deserts where no shelter is, / So flat the plain and boundless. All his goods / The Afric swain bears with him, house and home, / Arms, Cretan quiver, and Amyclaean dog; / As some keen Roman in his country's arms / Plies the swift march beneath a cruel load; / Soon with tents pitched and at his post he stands, / Ere looked for by the foe. Not thus the tribes / Of Scythia by the far Maeotic wave, / Where turbid Ister whirls his yellow sands, / And Rhodope stretched out beneath the pole / Comes trending backward. There the herds they keep / Close-pent in byres, nor any grass is seen / Upon the plain, nor leaves upon the tree: / But with snow-ridges and deep frost afar / Heaped seven ells high the earth lies featureless: / Still winter? still the north wind's icy breath! / Nay, never sun disparts the shadows pale, / Or as he rides the steep of heaven, or dips / In ocean's fiery bath his plunging car. / Quick ice-crusts curdle on the running stream, / And iron-hooped wheels the water's back now bears, / To broad wains opened, as erewhile to ships; / Brass vessels oft asunder burst, and clothes / Stiffen upon the wearers; juicy wines / They cleave with axes; to one frozen mass

Whole pools are turned; and on their untrimmed beards / Stiff clings the jagged icicle. Meanwhile / All heaven no less is filled with falling snow; / The cattle perish: oxen's mighty frames / Stand island-like amid the frost, and stags / In huddling herds, by that strange weight benumbed, / Scarce top the surface with their antler-points. / These with no hounds they hunt, nor net with toils, / Nor scare with terror of the crimson plume; / But, as in vain they breast the opposing block, / Butcher them, knife in hand, and so dispatch / Loud-bellowing, and with glad shouts hale them home. / Themselves in deep-dug caverns underground / Dwell free and careless; to their hearths they heave / Oak-logs and elm-trees whole, and fire them there, / There play the night out, and in festive glee / With barm and service sour the wine-cup mock. / So 'neath the seven-starred Hyperborean wain / The folk live tameless, buffeted with blasts / Of Eurus from Rhipaean hills, and wrap / Their bodies in the tawny fells of beasts.

If wool delight thee, first, be far removed / All prickly boskage, burrs and caltrops; shun / Luxuriant pastures; at the outset choose / White flocks with downy fleeces. For the ram, / How white soe'er himself, be but the tongue / 'Neath his moist palate black, reject him, lest / He sully with dark spots his offspring's fleece, / And seek some other o'er the teeming plain. / Even with such snowy bribe of wool, if ear / May trust the tale, Pan, God of Arcady, / Snared and beguiled thee, Luna, calling thee / To the deep woods; nor thou didst spurn his call.

But who for milk hath longing, must himself / Carry lucerne and lotus-leaves enow / With salt herbs to the cote, whence more they love / The streams, more stretch their udders, and give back / A subtle taste of saltness in the milk. / Many there be who from their mothers keep / The new-born kids, and straightway bind their mouths / With iron-tipped muzzles. What they milk at dawn, / Or in the daylight hours, at night they press; / What darkling or at sunset, this ere morn / They bear away in baskets- for to town / The shepherd hies him- or with dash of salt / Just sprinkle, and lay by for winter use.

Nor be thy dogs last cared for; but alike / Swift Spartan hounds and fierce Molossian feed / On fattening whey. Never, with these to watch, / Dread nightly thief afold and ravening wolves, / Or Spanish desperadoes in the rear. / And oft the shy wild asses thou wilt chase, / With hounds, too, hunt the hare, with hounds the doe; / Oft from his woodland wallowing-den uprouse / The boar, and scare him with their baying, and drive, / And o'er the mountains urge into the toils / Some antlered monster to their chiming cry.

Learn also scented cedar-wood to burn / Within the stalls, and snakes of noxious smell / With fumes of galbanum to drive away. / Oft under long-neglected cribs, or lurks / A viper ill to handle, that hath fled / The light in terror, or some snake, that wont / 'Neath shade and sheltering roof to creep, and shower / Its bane among the cattle, hugs the ground, / Fell scourge of kine. Shepherd, seize stakes, seize stones! / And as he rears defiance, and puffs out / A hissing throat, down with him! see how low / That cowering crest is vailed in flight, the while, / His midmost coils and final sweep of tail / Relaxing, the last fold drags lingering spires. / Then that vile worm that in Calabrian glades / Uprears his breast, and wreathes a scaly back, / His length of belly pied with mighty spots- / While from their founts gush any streams, while yet / With showers of Spring and rainy south-winds earth / Is moistened, lo! he haunts the pools, and here / Housed in the banks, with fish and chattering frogs / Crams the black void of his insatiate maw. / Soon as the fens are parched, and earth with heat / Is gaping, forth he darts into the dry, / Rolls eyes of fire and rages through the fields, / Furious from thirst and by the drought dismayed. / Me list not then beneath the open heaven / To snatch soft slumber, nor on forest-ridge / Lie stretched along the grass, when, slipped his slough, / To glittering youth transformed he winds his spires,

And eggs or younglings leaving in his lair, / Towers sunward, lightening with three-forked tongue. / Of sickness, too, the causes and the signs / I'll teach thee. Loathly scab assails the sheep, / When chilly showers have probed them to the quick, / And winter stark with hoar-frost, or when sweat / Unpurged cleaves to them after shearing done, / And rough thorns rend their bodies. Hence it is / Shepherds their whole flock steep in running streams, / While, plunged beneath the flood, with drenched fell, / The ram, launched free, goes drifting down the tide. / Else, having shorn, they smear their bodies o'er / With acrid oil-lees, and mix silver-scum / And native sulphur and Idaean pitch, / Wax mollified with ointment, and therewith / Sea-leek, strong hellebores, bitumen black. / Yet ne'er doth kindlier fortune crown his toil, / Than if with blade of iron a man dare lance / The ulcer's mouth ope: for the taint is fed / And quickened by confinement; while the swain / His hand of healing from the wound withholds, / Or sits for happier signs imploring heaven. / Aye, and when inward to the bleater's bones / The pain hath sunk and rages, and their limbs / By thirsty fever are consumed, 'tis good / To draw the enkindled heat therefrom, and pierce / Within the hoof-clefts a blood-bounding vein. / Of tribes Bisaltic such the wonted use, / And keen Gelonian, when to Rhodope / He flies, or Getic desert, and quaffs milk

With horse-blood curdled. / Seest one far afield / Oft to the shade's mild covert win, or pull / The grass tops listlessly, or hindmost lag, / Or, browsing, cast her down amid the plain, / At night retire belated and alone; / With quick knife check the mischief, ere it creep / With dire contagion through the unwary herd. / Less thick and fast the whirlwind scours the main / With tempest in its wake, than swarm the plagues / Of cattle; nor seize they single lives alone, / But sudden clear whole feeding grounds, the flock / With all its promise, and extirpate the breed. / Well would he trow it who, so long after, still / High Alps and Noric hill-forts should behold, / And Iapydian Timavus' fields, / Ay, still behold the shepherds' realms a waste, / And far and wide the lawns untenanted.

Here from distempered heavens erewhile arose / A piteous season, with the full fierce heat / Of autumn glowed, and cattle-kindreds all / And all wild creatures to destruction gave, / Tainted the pools, the fodder charged with bane. / Nor simple was the way of death, but when / Hot thirst through every vein impelled had drawn / Their wretched limbs together, anon o'erflowed / A watery flux, and all their bones piecemeal / Sapped by corruption to itself absorbed. / Oft in mid sacrifice to heaven- the white / Wool-woven fillet half wreathed about his brow- / Some victim, standing by the altar, there / Betwixt the loitering carles a-dying fell: / Or, if betimes the slaughtering priest had struck, / Nor with its heaped entrails blazed the pile, / Nor seer to seeker thence could answer yield; / Nay, scarce the up-stabbing knife with blood was stained, / Scarce sullied with thin gore the surface-sand. / Hence die the calves in many a pasture fair, / Or at full cribs their lives' sweet breath resign; / Hence on the fawning dog comes madness, hence / Racks the sick swine a gasping cough that chokes / With swelling at the jaws: the conquering steed, / Uncrowned of effort and heedless of the sward, / Faints, turns him from the springs, and paws the earth / With ceaseless hoof: low droop his ears, wherefrom / Bursts fitful sweat, a sweat that waxes cold / Upon the dying beast; the skin is dry, / And rigidly repels the handler's touch.

These earlier signs they give that presage doom. / But, if the advancing plague 'gin fiercer grow, / Then are their eyes all fire, deep-drawn their breath, / At times groan-laboured: with long sobbing heave / Their lowest flanks; from either nostril streams / Black blood; a rough tongue clogs the obstructed jaws. / 'Twas helpful through inverted horn to pour / Draughts of the wine-god down; sole way it seemed / To save the dying: soon this too proved their bane, / And, reinvigorate but with frenzy's fire, / Even at death's pinch- the gods some happier fate / Deal to the just, such madness to their foes- / Each with bared teeth his own limbs mangling tore. / See! as he smokes beneath the stubborn share, / The bull drops, vomiting foam-dabbled gore, / And heaves his latest groans. Sad goes the swain, / Unhooks the steer that mourns his fellow's fate, / And in mid labour leaves the plough-gear fast. / Nor tall wood's shadow, nor soft sward may stir / That heart's emotion, nor rock-channelled flood, / More pure than amber speeding to the plain: / But see! his flanks fail under him, his eyes / Are dulled with deadly torpor, and his neck / Sinks to the earth with drooping weight. What now / Besteads him toil or service? to have turned / The heavy sod with ploughshare? And yet these / Ne'er knew the Massic wine-god's baneful boon, / Nor twice replenished banquets: but on leaves / They fare, and virgin grasses, and their cups / Are crystal springs and streams with running tired,

Their healthful slumbers never broke by care. / Then only, say they, through that country side / For Juno's rites were cattle far to seek, / And ill-matched buffaloes the chariots drew / To their high fanes. So, painfully with rakes / They grub the soil, aye, with their very nails / Dig in the corn-seeds, and with strained neck / O'er the high uplands drag the creaking wains. / No wolf for ambush pries about the pen, / Nor round the flock prowls nightly; pain more sharp / Subdues him: the shy deer and fleet-foot stags / With hounds now wander by the haunts of men / Vast ocean's offspring, and all tribes that swim, / On the shore's confine the wave washes up, / Like shipwrecked bodies: seals, unwonted there, / Flee to the rivers. Now the viper dies, / For all his den's close winding, and with scales / Erect the astonied water-worms. The air / Brooks not the very birds, that headlong fall, / And leave their life beneath the soaring cloud. / Moreover now nor change of fodder serves, / And subtlest cures but injure; then were foiled / The masters, Chiron sprung from Phillyron, / And Amythaon's son Melampus. See! / From Stygian darkness launched into the light / Comes raging pale Tisiphone; she drives / Disease and fear before her, day by day / Still rearing higher that all-devouring head. / With bleat of flocks and lowings thick resound / Rivers and parched banks and sloping heights.

At last in crowds she slaughters them, she chokes / The very stalls with carrion-heaps that rot / In hideous corruption, till men learn / With earth to cover them, in pits to hide. / For e'en the fells are useless; nor the flesh / With water may they purge, or tame with fire, / Nor shear the fleeces even, gnawed through and through / With foul disease, nor touch the putrid webs; / But, had one dared the loathly weeds to try, / Red blisters and an unclean sweat o'erran / His noisome limbs, till, no long tarriance made, / The fiery curse his tainted frame devoured.

Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now / Take up the tale. Upon this theme no less / Look thou, Maecenas, with indulgent eye. / A marvellous display of puny powers, / High-hearted chiefs, a nation's history, / Its traits, its bent, its battles and its clans, / All, each, shall pass before you, while I sing. / Slight though the poet's theme, not slight the praise, / So frown not heaven, and Phoebus hear his call.

First find your bees a settled sure abode, / Where neither winds can enter (winds blow back / The foragers with food returning home) / Nor sheep and butting kids tread down the flowers, / Nor heifer wandering wide upon the plain / Dash off the dew, and bruise the springing blades. / Let the gay lizard too keep far aloof / His scale-clad body from their honied stalls, / And the bee-eater, and what birds beside, / And Procne smirched with blood upon the breast / From her own murderous hands. For these roam wide / Wasting all substance, or the bees themselves / Strike flying, and in their beaks bear home, to glut / Those savage nestlings with the dainty prey. / But let clear springs and moss-green pools be near, / And through the grass a streamlet hurrying run, / Some palm-tree o'er the porch extend its shade, / Or huge-grown oleaster, that in Spring, / Their own sweet Spring-tide, when the new-made chiefs / Lead forth the young swarms, and, escaped their comb, / The colony comes forth to sport and play, / The neighbouring bank may lure them from the heat, / Or bough befriend with hospitable shade. / O'er the mid-waters, whether swift or still, / Cast willow-branches and big stones enow, / Bridge after bridge, where they may footing find / And spread their wide wings to the summer sun, / If haply Eurus, swooping as they pause, / Have dashed with spray or plunged them in the deep. / And let green cassias and far-scented thymes,

And savory with its heavy-laden breath / Bloom round about, and violet-beds hard by / Sip sweetness from the fertilizing springs. / For the hive's self, or stitched of hollow bark, / Or from tough osier woven, let the doors / Be strait of entrance; for stiff winter's cold / Congeals the honey, and heat resolves and thaws, / To bees alike disastrous; not for naught / So haste they to cement the tiny pores / That pierce their walls, and fill the crevices / With pollen from the flowers, and glean and keep / To this same end the glue, that binds more fast / Than bird-lime or the pitch from Ida's pines. / Oft too in burrowed holes, if fame be true, / They make their cosy subterranean home, / And deeply lodged in hollow rocks are found, / Or in the cavern of an age-hewn tree. / Thou not the less smear round their crannied cribs / With warm smooth mud-coat, and strew leaves above; / But near their home let neither yew-tree grow, / Nor reddening crabs be roasted, and mistrust / Deep marish-ground and mire with noisome smell, / Or where the hollow rocks sonorous ring, / And the word spoken buffets and rebounds.

What more? When now the golden sun has put / Winter to headlong flight beneath the world, / And oped the doors of heaven with summer ray, / Forthwith they roam the glades and forests o'er, / Rifle the painted flowers, or sip the streams, / Light-hovering on the surface. Hence it is / With some sweet rapture, that we know not of, / Their little ones they foster, hence with skill / Work out new wax or clinging honey mould. / So when the cage-escaped hosts you see / Float heavenward through the hot clear air, until / You marvel at yon dusky cloud that spreads / And lengthens on the wind, then mark them well; / For then 'tis ever the fresh springs they seek / And bowery shelter: hither must you bring / The savoury sweets I bid, and sprinkle them, / Bruised balsam and the wax-flower's lowly weed, / And wake and shake the tinkling cymbals heard / By the great Mother: on the anointed spots / Themselves will settle, and in wonted wise / Seek of themselves the cradle's inmost depth.

But if to battle they have hied them forth- / For oft 'twixt king and king with uproar dire / Fierce feud arises, and at once from far / You may discern what passion sways the mob, / And how their hearts are throbbing for the strife; / Hark! the hoarse brazen note that warriors know / Chides on the loiterers, and the ear may catch / A sound that mocks the war-trump's broken blasts; / Then in hot haste they muster, then flash wings, / Sharpen their pointed beaks and knit their thews, / And round the king, even to his royal tent, / Throng rallying, and with shouts defy the foe. / So, when a dry Spring and clear space is given, / Forth from the gates they burst, they clash on high; / A din arises; they are heaped and rolled / Into one mighty mass, and headlong fall, / Not denselier hail through heaven, nor pelting so / Rains from the shaken oak its acorn-shower. / Conspicuous by their wings the chiefs themselves / Press through the heart of battle, and display / A giant's spirit in each pigmy frame, / Steadfast no inch to yield till these or those / The victor's ponderous arm has turned to flight. / Such fiery passions and such fierce assaults / A little sprinkled dust controls and quells. / And now, both leaders from the field recalled, / Who hath the worser seeming, do to death, / Lest royal waste wax burdensome, but let / His better lord it on the empty throne. / One with gold-burnished flakes will shine like fire,

For twofold are their kinds, the nobler he, / Of peerless front and lit with flashing scales; / That other, from neglect and squalor foul, / Drags slow a cumbrous belly. As with kings, / So too with people, diverse is their mould, / Some rough and loathly, as when the wayfarer / Scapes from a whirl of dust, and scorched with heat / Spits forth the dry grit from his parched mouth: / The others shine forth and flash with lightning-gleam, / Their backs all blazoned with bright drops of gold / Symmetric: this the likelier breed; from these, / When heaven brings round the season, thou shalt strain / Sweet honey, nor yet so sweet as passing clear, / And mellowing on the tongue the wine-god's fire.

But when the swarms fly aimlessly abroad, / Disport themselves in heaven and spurn their cells, / Leaving the hive unwarmed, from such vain play / Must you refrain their volatile desires, / Nor hard the task: tear off the monarchs' wings; / While these prove loiterers, none beside will dare / Mount heaven, or pluck the standards from the camp. / Let gardens with the breath of saffron flowers / Allure them, and the lord of Hellespont, / Priapus, wielder of the willow-scythe, / Safe in his keeping hold from birds and thieves. / And let the man to whom such cares are dear / Himself bring thyme and pine-trees from the heights, / And strew them in broad belts about their home; / No hand but his the blistering task should ply, / Plant the young slips, or shed the genial showers.

And I myself, were I not even now / Furling my sails, and, nigh the journey's end, / Eager to turn my vessel's prow to shore, / Perchance would sing what careful husbandry / Makes the trim garden smile; of Paestum too, / Whose roses bloom and fade and bloom again; / How endives glory in the streams they drink, / And green banks in their parsley, and how the gourd / Twists through the grass and rounds him to paunch; / Nor of Narcissus had my lips been dumb, / That loiterer of the flowers, nor supple-stemmed / Acanthus, with the praise of ivies pale, / And myrtles clinging to the shores they love. / For 'neath the shade of tall Oebalia's towers, / Where dark Galaesus laves the yellowing fields, / An old man once I mind me to have seen- / From Corycus he came- to whom had fallen / Some few poor acres of neglected land, / And they nor fruitful' neath the plodding steer, / Meet for the grazing herd, nor good for vines. / Yet he, the while his meagre garden-herbs / Among the thorns he planted, and all round / White lilies, vervains, and lean poppy set, / In pride of spirit matched the wealth of kings, / And home returning not till night was late, / With unbought plenty heaped his board on high. / He was the first to cull the rose in spring, / He the ripe fruits in autumn; and ere yet / Winter had ceased in sullen ire to rive / The rocks with frost, and with her icy bit