Book XIV, 3: Problem

Cypris thus addressed Love, who was looking downcast: “How, my child, hath sorrow fallen on thee?” And he answered: “The Muses stole and divided among themselves, in different proportions, the apples I was bringing from Helicon, snatching them from my bosom. Clio got the fifth part, and Euterpe the twelfth, but divine Thalia the eighth. Melpomene carried off the twentieth part, and Terpsichore the fourth, and Erato the seventh; Polyhymnia robbed me of thirty apples, and Urania of a hundred and twenty, and Calliope went off with a load of three hundred apples. So I come to thee with lighter hands, bringing these fifty apples that the goddesses left me.”