Virgil · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1| Next I will go on to the heavenly gift of honey from the air: look on this part too, Maecenas. I will tell you of wondrous spectacles of a tiny world, of great-hearted leaders, and in due order of a whole nation's character and pursuits, its peoples and its battles. The labor is on a slight theme, but the glory is not slight, if unfriendly powers allow it and Apollo hears when called.
8| First, you must look for a site and a settled home for your bees, where the winds have no access — for winds prevent them from carrying their food home — and where no sheep or butting kids trample the flowers, nor a heifer wandering over the plain shakes off the dew and wears down the growing grass. Keep away from the rich hives the painted lizard with its scaly back, bee-eaters and other birds, and Procne, her breast marked by bloodstained hands; for they lay everything waste far and wide, and catch the bees themselves in flight and carry them in their beaks as sweet food for their pitiless nestlings. But let there be clear springs nearby, and pools green with moss, and a thin stream slipping through the grass; let a palm or a huge wild olive shade the entrance, so that when the new kings lead out the first swarms in their own springtime, and the young ones let out of the combs come out to play, a nearby bank may invite them to escape the heat, and a tree in their path may hold them in its leafy hospitality. In the middle of the water, whether it stands still or flows, throw willows crosswise and big stones, so that they can rest on many bridges and spread their wings to the summer sun, if the east wind has happened to scatter them as they linger or plunged them headlong into Neptune's waters.
30| Around these let green cassia flourish, and wild thyme with its far-reaching scent, and a wealth of strong-smelling savory, and let beds of violets drink from the running spring. As for the hives themselves, whether you have stitched them from hollow bark or woven them from pliant osier, let them have narrow entrances: for winter congeals the honey with cold, and heat melts it and makes it run. Both forces are equally to be feared for bees; it is not for nothing that in their homes they vie in smearing the thin crevices with wax, filling the edges with pollen and flowers, and keeping for this very task a glue they have gathered, stickier than birdlime or the pitch of Phrygian Ida. Often too, if the story is true, they have made their home in burrows dug underground, and have been found deep within hollow pumice and in the cavity of a rotten tree. Still, you should smear smooth mud around their cracked chambers to keep them warm, and throw a few leaves on top. Do not let a yew grow too near their home, do not roast reddening crabs on your hearth, and do not trust a deep marsh, or a place where there is a heavy smell of mud, or where hollow rocks ring when struck and the echo of a voice rebounds.
51| For the rest, when the golden sun has driven winter underground and opened the sky with summer light, at once they range over glades and woods, harvest the bright flowers, and sip lightly from the surface of the streams. From then on, glad with a sweetness I cannot name, they cherish their offspring and their nests; from then on they skillfully hammer out fresh wax and mold the clinging honey. Then, when you look up and see a column let out of the hives swimming toward the stars of the sky through the clear summer air, and marvel at the dark cloud drawn along by the wind, watch it closely: they always make for fresh water and leafy shelter. Sprinkle there the scents I prescribe, bruised balm and the humble honeywort, raise a tinkling, and shake the cymbals of the Mother around them. They will settle on the scented sites of their own accord; of their own accord, in their usual way, they will hide themselves in the innermost cradles.
67| But if they have gone out to battle — for often discord has come upon two kings with great commotion, and at once you can tell far in advance the mood of the crowd and their hearts quivering for war; for that martial music of harsh bronze rebukes the laggards, and a sound is heard like the broken blasts of trumpets — then they gather anxiously, their wings flashing, sharpen their stings on their beaks, flex their muscles, and swarm densely around the king and right up to his headquarters, and call the enemy with loud cries. So, when they find a clear spring day and open fields, they burst out of the gates; they clash; there is a noise high in the air; they are mixed up and massed in a great ball and fall headlong. Hail from the sky is not thicker, nor do so many acorns rain down from a shaken oak. The leaders themselves, in the midst of the ranks, with their distinguished wings, turn great spirits in their small breasts, determined never to give way, until the heavy hand of the victor forces one side or the other to turn its back in flight. These passions of spirit and these great contests will be checked and laid to rest by the throw of a little dust. But when you have called both leaders back from the battle, put to death the one who seems the worse, so that he does no harm by wasting; let the better one reign in the empty palace. The one will be ablaze with flecks of rough gold — for there are two kinds: this, the better, distinguished in appearance and bright with gleaming scales; the other, shaggy with sloth, inglorious, dragging a broad belly.
95| As there are two looks for kings, so too for the common bodies. For some are ugly and bristle, as a thirsty traveler does when he comes out of deep dust and spits the dirt from his dry mouth; others are bright and flash, glowing with gold, their bodies marked with even drops. This is the better stock; from it at the proper season of the year you will press sweet honey, and not only sweet but clear, and able to soften the harsh taste of wine.
103| But when the swarms fly aimlessly and play in the sky, scorn the combs and leave their cold dwellings, you must keep their unsteady minds from this empty play. It is no great task to stop them: pluck the wings from the kings; with them hesitating, no one will dare to go on a high journey or pull up the standards from camp. Let gardens breathing with yellow flowers draw them, and let the guardian of thieves and birds, Priapus of the Hellespont, with his willow sickle, keep watch. Let the man to whom such things matter bring thyme and pines from high mountains and plant them widely around the hives; let him wear out his hand with hard labor, let him set fruitful plants in the ground and water them with kindly showers.
116| And indeed, if I were not now drawing in my sails near the end of my labors and hurrying to turn my prow to land, perhaps I would also sing what care would adorn rich gardens, and the rose-beds of Paestum that flower twice a year, and how endives rejoice in the streams from which they drink, and green banks in celery, and how the cucumber twists through the grass and swells into a belly; nor would I have left unmentioned the late-flowering narcissus, the shoot of the curling acanthus, the pale ivies and the myrtles that love the shore. For I remember that under the towers of the Oebalian citadel, where dark Galaesus waters the yellow fields, I saw an old man from Corycus, who had a few acres of abandoned land, neither fertile for bullocks, nor suited to flocks, nor good for the vine. Yet he, planting here and there among the brambles a scattering of vegetables, with white lilies around them, and vervain and slender poppy, matched the wealth of kings in his spirit, and returning home late at night loaded his table with a feast he had not bought. He was the first to pick the rose in spring and the fruit in autumn, and when grim winter was still splitting the rocks with cold and holding back the courses of the waters with ice, he was already cutting the bloom of the soft hyacinth, scolding the late summer and the delaying west winds.
139| So he also was first to overflow with breeding bees and a great swarm, and to collect frothing honey from the pressed combs; he had linden trees and the richest pines, and as many fruits as the fertile tree had put on in its first blossom, so many it held ripe in autumn. He also transplanted late elms in rows, a hardened pear tree, thorns already bearing plums, and a plane tree already giving shade to drinkers. But these things I myself pass over, shut out by the unfavorable limits of space, and leave for others to tell after me.
149| Now come, I will set out the natures which Jupiter himself gave to the bees, as the reward for which, following the ringing sounds of the Curetes and their clashing bronze, they fed the king of heaven in the Dictaean cave. They alone hold their children in common, they have houses shared as one city, and they live their lives under great laws, and they alone know a homeland and fixed household gods, and, mindful of the winter to come, they test their labor in summer and place what they have gained in a common store. For some keep watch over food, and, by a pact agreed, are sent out into the fields; some within the enclosures of their homes lay the first foundations of the combs with the tears of narcissus and sticky gum from bark, then hang up the clinging wax; others lead out the grown young, the hope of the race; others pack the purest honey and swell the cells with clear nectar. There are some to whom the guarding of the gates fell by lot, and who in turn watch the rains and the clouds of the sky, or take the loads of those arriving, or, forming a column, drive the drones, a lazy herd, away from the hives.
169| The work is hot, and the fragrant honey smells of thyme. And just as the Cyclopes, when they hurry thunderbolts out of tough lumps of metal, some take in air and send it out again with bulls' hide bellows, others dip the hissing bronze in the water; Etna groans under the anvils set on it; they raise their arms among themselves with great force in rhythm and turn the iron in the gripping tongs: just so, if one may compare small things with great, an inborn love of gain drives the Attic bees, each at her own task. The old ones have the care of the towns, to fortify the combs and to build the cunningly made houses. But the younger ones come back tired late at night, their legs full of thyme; they feed everywhere on arbutus and gray willows, cassia, red saffron, rich linden and dark hyacinths. All have one rest from their work, all one toil: in the morning they rush out of the gates; there is no delay; and again, when the evening has warned them at last to leave the fields where they fed, then they head for home, then they look after their bodies; a hum rises, and they murmur around the edges and the threshold.
189| Afterward, when they have settled in their chambers, there is silence into the night, and their own sleep takes hold of their weary limbs. Nor, when rain threatens, do they go far from the hives or trust the sky when east winds are coming, but they draw water nearby, safe under the walls of their city, make short trial flights, and often lift little stones, as unstable boats do ballast in the tossing waves, and with these they steady themselves through the empty clouds. You will marvel that this custom pleased the bees, that they do not indulge in mating, nor slackly relax their bodies into love, nor give birth with labor pains: rather they themselves gather their young with their mouths from leaves and sweet herbs, they themselves provide a king and little Quirites, and rebuild their courts and waxen realms. Often too, wandering over hard rocks, they wear their wings away and of their own accord give up their lives under their load: such is their love of flowers and their pride in making honey. So although the limit of a short life awaits the bees themselves, for no more than the seventh summer is lived through, yet the race remains immortal and for many years the fortune of the house stands firm and grandfathers of grandfathers are counted.
210| Besides, neither Egypt nor vast Lydia nor the peoples of the Parthians or the Median Hydaspes look up to their king as the bees do. While the king is safe, all have one mind; when he is lost, they break faith and tear apart the honey they built and loosen the lattices of the combs. He is the guardian of their works; all admire him and stand round him with a dense murmur and crowd about him in numbers, and often lift him on their shoulders, throw their bodies in front of him in battle and seek a noble death through wounds.
219| Following these signs and these examples, some have said that the bees have a share of the divine mind and draughts of the upper air; for they say that god goes through all lands and tracts of sea and the deep sky. From him flocks, herds, men, and every kind of wild beast, each at its birth, draw their slender lives; and surely to him all things return afterwards and, once dissolved, are given back, and there is no place for death, but alive they fly into the ranks of the stars and rise to the high heaven.
228| If ever you are going to unseal their narrow home and the honey stored in its treasuries, first sprinkle your mouth with a draught of water and hold out in your hand the pursuing smoke. They gather their heavy yield twice, two seasons of harvest: when Taygete the Pleiad first shows her fair face to the earth and with her foot thrusts aside the despised streams of Ocean, or when the same star, fleeing the watery constellation of the Fish, descends from the sky more grimly into the winter waves. Their anger knows no limit, and when hurt they breathe poison into the bites and leave their unseen stings fixed in the veins, and lay down their lives in the wound. But if you fear a hard winter and will spare the future, and pity their crushed spirits and ruined fortunes, who would hesitate to fumigate with thyme and cut away the empty wax? For often an unseen lizard has eaten into the combs, and cells have been packed with cockroaches that shun the light, and the drone, sitting idle at another's food, has crept in, or the harsh hornet, with unequal weapons, or the dreadful tribe of moths, or Minerva's hated spider has hung her loose webs at the door. The more they have been drained, the harder all will strive to repair the ruin of their fallen race, and fill the passageways and weave their storehouses of flowers.
251| But if, since life has brought bees too our human misfortunes, their bodies grow weak with a sad sickness (which you can now recognize by clear signs): at once the sick have a different color, a rough thinness disfigures their appearance, then they carry out the bodies of those that lack light from the hive and conduct a sad funeral; or they hang by their feet linked together at the entrance, or loiter shut up inside their dwellings, all sluggish with hunger and slow with cold that has drawn them in. Then a deeper sound is heard, and they hum in a drawn-out way, as the cold south wind sometimes murmurs in the woods, as the troubled sea hisses with its ebbing waves, as raging fire seethes in closed furnaces: then I will advise burning scented galbanum and bringing in honey through reed tubes, encouraging them and calling the weary ones to their known food. It will help also to mix in the taste of crushed gall, and dried roses, or must boiled thick over a strong fire, or raisins from the Psithian vine, and Attic thyme and strongly smelling centaury. There is also a flower in the meadows which farmers have named amellus, an easy plant to find for those who look; for from a single clump it raises a great thicket, golden itself, but in the leaves, which spread out in great numbers around, the purple of the dark violet shines faintly through; [the altars of the gods have often been decked with woven garlands of it;] its taste is harsh in the mouth; shepherds gather it in mown valleys and near the winding streams of the Mella. Boil its roots in fragrant wine and set it out as food at the entrance in full baskets.
281| But if a swarm's whole offspring should suddenly fail, and you have no stock from which to restore a new line, it is time to reveal the memorable discovery of the Arcadian master, and the way in which the corrupted blood of slaughtered bullocks has often before now produced bees. I will set out the whole story at length, tracing it back to its first origin. For in the region where the fortunate people of Pellaean Canopus live beside the Nile as it floods and stands over the land, and travel about their own fields in painted boats, and where the neighborhood of quiver-bearing Persia presses close, [and where the river, rushing down from the dark-skinned Indians, enriches green Egypt with black silt and runs off in seven separate mouths], the whole country stakes its sure well-being on this craft. First a small place is chosen, narrow and prepared for this very purpose; they enclose it with a roof of tiles in a tight space and with walls pressed close, and add four windows facing the four winds, admitting a slanting light. Then a bullock is sought, one just curving its horns on a two-year-old brow. Though he struggles hard, both his nostrils and the breath of his mouth are stopped up, and when he has been beaten to death, his entrails are pounded to pulp through the unbroken hide.
303| They leave him lying like this in the closed room and put under his ribs broken sprigs, thyme and fresh cassia. This is done when the Zephyrs are first driving on the waves, before the meadows redden with new colors, before the chattering swallow hangs her nest from the rafters. Meanwhile the moisture, warmed in the tender bones, ferments, and creatures wonderful to see, at first without feet, soon buzzing with wings as well, swarm together and take more and more of the thin air, until they burst out like rain pouring from summer clouds, or like arrows from the string when the light Parthians first enter battle.
315| Which god, Muses, which god forged this art for us? Where did this new experience of men begin? The shepherd Aristaeus, fleeing Peneian Tempe after losing his bees, so the story goes, to disease and hunger, stood sorrowful at the sacred source of the river, at its far end, and in his many complaints addressed his mother with these words: 'Mother, mother Cyrene, you who hold the depths of this pool, why did you bear me, of a glorious line of gods, if indeed my father is Thymbraean Apollo, as you say, only to be hated by the Fates? Or where has your love for me been driven? Why did you bid me hope for heaven? See, even this very honor of mortal life, which my skillful care of crops and herds, trying everything, had barely forged for me, I am giving up, though you are my mother. Come now, with your own hand tear up my fruitful woods, bring hostile fire to my stalls and destroy my harvests, burn my crops and swing the strong double axe against my vines, if such disgust at my reputation has seized you.' But his mother heard the sound from her chamber deep under the river. Around her the Nymphs were carding Milesian fleeces dyed with the deep color of glass, Drymo and Xantho and Ligea and Phyllodoce, their glossy hair spread over their white necks, Nesaea and Spio and Thalia and Cymodoce, Cydippe and golden Lycorias, one a maiden, the other just then experiencing the first labors of Lucina, Clio and her sister Beroe, both daughters of Ocean, both belted with gold, both draped in painted skins, and Ephyre and Opis and Asian Deiopea and swift Arethusa, at last with her arrows laid aside.
345| Among them Clymene was telling of Vulcan's fruitless anxiety and the tricks and sweet thefts of Mars, and from Chaos she was counting off the crowded loves of the gods. While, spellbound by her song, they unwound the soft wool from their spindles, once more the grief of Aristaeus struck his mother's ears, and all of them sat stunned on their glassy seats. But before the other sisters, Arethusa looked out and raised her golden head above the water's surface, and called from far off: 'O Cyrene, sister, not without reason are you startled by so great a lament. It is Aristaeus himself, your greatest care, who stands sorrowing and in tears by the water of his father Peneus, and calls you cruel by name.' His mother, her mind struck with new dread, said: 'Bring him, bring him to us. He is permitted to touch the thresholds of the gods.' At the same time she ordered the deep waters to part widely, where the young man might set his steps. The wave curved itself into the shape of a mountain and stood around him, received him in its vast hollow, and sent him down beneath the river. And now, marveling at his mother's home and her watery realm, at the pools shut in caves and the resounding groves, he went on, stunned by the huge motion of the waters, and he gazed at all the rivers gliding beneath the great earth, flowing in different places: the Phasis and the Lycus, and the spring from which deep Enipeus first bursts out, where father Tiber comes from, and the streams of the Anio, and rocky, roaring Hypanis, and Mysian Caicus, and Eridanus, gilded, with two horns on a bull's face, than which no other river pours more violently through rich farmland into the purple sea.
374| When they had come to the chamber roofed with hanging pumice, and Cyrene recognized her son's empty tears, Cyrene's sisters in turn gave him clear spring water for his hands and brought towels of shorn-nap wool. Some load the tables with food and set out full cups again; the altars blaze with Panchaean incense. His mother said: 'Take up cups of Maeonian wine. Let us pour a libation to Ocean.' At the same time she herself prays to Ocean, father of all things, and to the sister Nymphs who guard a hundred woods and a hundred rivers. Three times she sprinkled blazing Vesta with bright nectar, three times the flame shot up to the top of the roof. Strengthening his spirit with this omen, she began to speak in these words:
387| 'In Neptune's Carpathian sea there is a seer, sea-blue Proteus, who traverses the vast ocean with fishes and a chariot drawn by a team of two-footed horses. He is now revisiting the harbors of Emathia and his homeland Pallene. We Nymphs revere him, and aged Nereus himself does too; for the seer knows everything, what is, what has been, and what is about to come in the future. Such was Neptune's will, whose monstrous herds and ugly seals he pastures beneath the sea. This is the one, my son, you must first take in chains, so that he may explain the whole cause of the disease and bring about a good outcome. For without force he will give no instructions at all, and you will not bend him by pleading. When you have caught him, apply harsh force and chains; against these his tricks will in the end break and come to nothing. I myself will lead you, when the sun has kindled its noonday heat, when the grass is thirsty and the shade is now more welcome to the herds, into the old man's secret place, where he retires tired from the waves, so that you may easily attack him as he lies asleep. But when you have him seized in your hands and held in chains, then various shapes and the faces of wild beasts will mock you. For he will suddenly become a bristling boar, a black tiger, a scaly serpent, and a lioness with tawny mane; or he will make the sharp crackle of flame and so slip out of the chains, or slide away into thin water and vanish. But the more he turns himself into every shape, the harder, my son, you must pull the tight chains, until, his body changed, he becomes such as you saw him when he began to close his eyes in sleep.'
415| So she spoke and poured out the liquid fragrance of ambrosia, with which she anointed her son's whole body; and a sweet breath breathed from his combed hair, and nimble strength came into his limbs. There is a huge cave in the hollowed flank of a mountain, where much water is driven by the wind and divides into curving inlets, once a very safe anchorage for sailors caught by storm; inside, Proteus hides himself behind a barrier of vast rock. Here the Nymph placed the young man in a hiding place, turned away from the light; she herself stood at a distance, hidden in mist. Now the raging dog star Sirius was scorching the thirsty Indians, and the fiery sun had drunk up half its course in the sky; the grass was withering, and the sun's rays were baking the hollow streams, warm down to the mud, in their dry channels. Then Proteus, making for his accustomed cave from the waves, came along; around him the wet tribe of the vast sea leapt and scattered the bitter spray far and wide. The seals lay down to sleep, scattered along the shore. He himself, like a herdsman in the mountains at times, when evening brings the calves back from pasture to the folds and the lambs' bleating sharpens the wolves, sat down on a rock in the middle and counted over his flock.
437| Since the chance was now offered to Aristaeus, he scarcely allowed the old man to settle his weary limbs, but rushed at him with a great shout and seized him with shackles as he lay. Proteus, for his part, not forgetting his art, changed himself into every kind of wonder: fire, a terrifying beast, flowing water. But when no deception found a way to escape, beaten, he returned to himself and finally spoke in a human voice: 'Who, most reckless of young men, told you to come to our home? And what do you seek here?' he said. The other answered: 'You know, Proteus, you yourself know; nothing can deceive you. But stop trying. Following the gods' instructions, we have come here to seek an oracle for our ruined fortunes.' That was all he said. At this the seer, with great force at last, rolled his blazing eyes with their gray-green gleam, gnashed his teeth hard, and so loosed his lips to speak the fates.
453| "It is the anger of some divine power that is hounding you; you are paying for a great crime. Pitiable Orpheus — who by no means deserves it — is calling down these punishments on you, unless the Fates stand in the way, and he rages bitterly for the wife who was taken from him. She, rushing headlong along the river to escape you, did not see, poor girl, doomed to die, the monstrous water snake guarding the banks in the deep grass before her feet. But the band of Dryads, her companions, filled the mountain heights with their cries; the peaks of Rhodope wept, and high Pangaea, and Rhesus' land of war, and the Getae, and the Hebrus, and Attic Orithyia. He himself, consoling his aching love with the hollow lyre, sang of you, sweet wife, of you alone with himself on the lonely shore, of you as the day came, of you as it departed. Even the jaws of Taenarus he entered, the deep gateway of Dis, and the grove dark with black terror, and approached the shades and their dreaded king, and the hearts that human prayers cannot make gentle. But stirred by his song, from the deepest seats of Erebus came the insubstantial shades and the phantoms of those deprived of light, as many as the thousands of birds that hide among the leaves when evening or a winter storm drives them from the mountains: mothers and men, and the bodies of great-hearted heroes done with life, boys and unmarried girls, and young men placed on the pyre before their parents' eyes; all held fast by the black mud and the ugly reeds of Cocytus, and the unlovely marsh with its sluggish water, and Styx, flowing nine times between, hems them in.
481| Even the halls of Death themselves were astonished, and the innermost depths of Tartarus, and the Furies with dark-blue snakes twined in their hair; Cerberus held his three mouths gaping, and the wheel of Ixion stopped turning in the wind. And now, retracing his steps, he had escaped every danger, and Eurydice, given back, was coming up to the air above, following behind — for Proserpina had made that condition — when a sudden madness seized the unwary lover, one to be forgiven, if the shades knew how to forgive. He stopped, and on the very edge of the light, forgetting, alas, and overcome in his heart, he looked back at his Eurydice. In that moment all his toil was poured away, the pact with the pitiless tyrant was broken, and three times a crash was heard over the pools of Avernus. She cried: 'What is this, Orpheus, that has destroyed both me in my misery and you? What great madness? Look, once again the cruel Fates call me back, and sleep shuts my swimming eyes. And now, farewell: I am carried off, wrapped in vast night, stretching out to you hands that have no strength — ah, no longer yours!' She spoke, and suddenly, like smoke mingling with thin air, she fled from his sight in the other direction, and did not see him again as he clutched in vain at the shadows and longed to say so much; and the ferryman of Orcus did not let him cross the barrier of the marsh again.
504| What was he to do? Where was he to go, his wife twice taken from him? With what weeping could he move the shades, with what voice the powers below? She, already cold, was floating in the Stygian boat. For seven whole months on end, they say, he wept beneath a towering cliff by the waters of the lonely Strymon, and unfolded his story in the cold caves, soothing tigers and moving oaks with his song: as a nightingale mourning in the poplar shade laments her lost young, whom a hard-hearted ploughman has spied and dragged unfledged from the nest; but she weeps all night, and sitting on a branch she renews her pitiful song and fills the places far and wide with her sorrowful complaints. No love, no marriage turned his heart. Alone he roamed the Hyperborean ice and the snowy Tanais and the fields never free of Riphaean frost, lamenting Eurydice taken from him and the empty gifts of Dis. Scorned by this devotion, the Ciconian women, amid the sacred rites of the gods and the orgies of Bacchus by night, tore the young man apart and scattered him over the wide fields. Even then, while the Hebrus, the river of Oeagrus, carried his head, torn from his marble neck, and rolled it in the middle of its current, the voice itself and the cold tongue, with his life fleeing, called 'Eurydice — ah, poor Eurydice!'; 'Eurydice,' the banks echoed all along the river."
528| So spoke Proteus, and with a leap he threw himself into the deep sea, and where he plunged, he twisted the foaming water into a whirl. But Cyrene did not leave; of her own accord she spoke to her frightened son:
531| 'My son, you may lay aside your sad cares. This is the whole cause of the disease; from this the Nymphs, with whom she used to dance in the high groves, sent the pitiful destruction on your bees. You must humbly offer gifts, asking for peace, and honor the gentle Napaean nymphs; for they will grant pardon to your prayers and let their anger go. But first I will tell you in order the manner of the entreaty. Choose four outstanding bulls of fine build, which now graze the green heights of Lycaeus for you, and the same number of heifers with necks untouched by the yoke. For these, set up four altars by the high shrines of the goddesses, and let the sacred blood flow from their throats, and leave the bodies of the cattle themselves in the leafy grove. Afterward, when the ninth Dawn has shown her rising, you will send Lethe poppies as funeral offerings to Orpheus and sacrifice a black ewe, and go back to the grove. You will honor the appeased Eurydice by slaughtering a calf.'
548| Without delay he carries out his mother's instructions at once: he comes to the shrines, raises the altars as he was shown, leads four choice bulls of outstanding build and as many heifers whose necks the yoke has never touched. Then, when the ninth Dawn had brought on her rising, he sends Orpheus his funeral offerings and returns to the grove. And here they see a sudden portent, wondrous to tell: through the decaying flesh of the cattle, all through their bellies, bees are buzzing and boiling out of the broken ribs, trailing in vast clouds, and now streaming together at the top of a tree and hanging in a cluster from the bending boughs.
559| This I was singing of the care of fields and flocks and of trees, while great Caesar was hurling the thunderbolt of war by the deep Euphrates, and, victorious, was giving laws to willing peoples and setting out on the road to Olympus. At that time sweet Parthenope was nurturing me, Virgil, as I flourished in the pursuits of inglorious ease — I who played at shepherds' songs, and, bold in my youth, sang of you, Tityrus, under the cover of a spreading beech.
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