Virgil · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
1| My Thalia was the first to deign to play in Syracusan verse, and she did not blush to live in the woods. When I was singing of kings and battles, the Cynthian god tweaked my ear and warned me: "A shepherd, Tityrus, should feed fat sheep and sing a finely spun song." Now I — for you will have plenty of others, Varus, eager to sing your praises and to set down grim wars — will practice the country Muse on a slender reed. I do not sing unbidden. Yet if anyone, anyone captivated by love, reads these verses too, it is you, Varus, that my tamarisks will sing of, you that every grove will sing; and no page is dearer to Phoebus than the one that bears the name of Varus at its head. Go on, Pierian Muses. The boys Chromis and Mnasyllos saw Silenus lying asleep in a cave, his veins swollen, as always, with yesterday's wine; the garland lay some way off, merely slipped from his head, and his heavy tankard hung by its well-worn handle. Attacking him — for the old man had often cheated them both of the hope of a song — they cast on him fetters made from the garlands themselves. Aegle joins them as an ally and comes up to the timid boys;
21| Aegle, loveliest of the Naiads, and, as he opens his eyes, she paints his forehead and temples with blood-red mulberries. Laughing at the trick, he says: "Why are you tying these fetters? Untie me, boys: it is enough to have shown you could. Hear the songs you want: songs for you, and for her there will be another kind of reward." And at once he begins. Then indeed you could see Fauns and wild beasts dancing in rhythm, and stiff oaks nodding their tops. Not so much does the rock of Parnassus rejoice in Phoebus, not so much do Rhodope and Ismarus marvel at Orpheus. For he sang how through the vast void the seeds of earth and air and sea, and of liquid fire too, had been brought together; how from these first beginnings all things, and the young globe of the world itself, grew solid; how then the ground began to harden, to shut off Nereus in the sea, and little by little to take on the forms of things; how the earth is amazed at the new sun shining, and the rain falls from higher up as the clouds are lifted; when the woods first begin to rise, and when a few animals wander over the mountains that do not know them.
41| Next he tells of the stones Pyrrha threw, the reign of Saturn, the birds of the Caucasus, and the theft of Prometheus. To these he adds the spring at which the sailors had left Hylas and called for him, so that the whole shore rang "Hylas, Hylas!"; and he consoles Pasiphae with her love for a snow-white bullock — happy she would have been, if herds had never existed. Ah, unhappy girl, what madness has seized you! The daughters of Proetus filled the fields with false lowing; yet not one of them pursued so shameful a union with cattle, though each had feared the plough on her neck and often felt for horns on her smooth forehead. Ah, unhappy girl, now you wander in the mountains: he, resting his snow-white flank on soft hyacinth, chews pale grass under a dark holm oak, or follows some cow in the great herd. "Close, Nymphs, Dictaean Nymphs, close now the glades of the woods, in case by chance the straying tracks of the bull should come before my eyes: perhaps some cows will lead him to the stalls of Gortyn, caught by green grass or following the herd."
61| Then he sings of the girl who marveled at the apples of the Hesperides; then he wraps the sisters of Phaethon in the moss of bitter bark and raises them from the ground as tall alders. Then he sings how one of the sisters led Gallus, as he wandered by the streams of Permessus, to the Aonian mountains, and how the whole choir of Phoebus rose for the man; how Linus the shepherd, his hair crowned with flowers and bitter parsley, said to him in divine song: "The Muses give you these reeds — here, take them — which they once gave the old man of Ascra, with which he used to draw the stiff ash trees down from the mountains by his singing. With these let the origin of the Grynean grove be told by you, so that there may be no grove in which Apollo takes more pride." Why should I tell how he sang of Scylla, daughter of Nisus, of whom the story goes that, her white loins girded with barking monsters, she harried the ships of Ulysses and in the deep whirlpool, ah, tore the terrified sailors with her sea dogs; or how he told of the transformed limbs of Tereus, what feast, what gifts Philomela prepared for him, with what flight she sought the wilderness, and with what wings the unhappy one first fluttered over her own roof? All the songs that happy Eurotas once heard as Phoebus practiced them, and bade its laurels learn by heart, he sings — the valleys, struck by the sound, echo them to the stars — until the Evening Star bade them pen the sheep in their folds and count their number, and moved on across an unwilling sky.
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