Amores I.7

O friend, if any friend be here, put the shackle upon my hands — they have deserved the chain — till my madness all is past! For madness it was that moved me to raise reckless hands against my lady-love; my sweetheart is in tears from the hurt of my raging blows. 'Twas in me then to lay hands on even the parents I love, or to deal out cruel strokes even to the holy gods!

Well? did not Ajax, too, lord of the seven-fold shield, seize and lay low the flocks over the broad fields? and did not Orestes, ill avenger exacting from his mother ill vengeance for his sire, dare ask for weapons against the mystic goddesses? What! Had I on that account the right to rend the well-wrought hair of my lady-love? And yet her disordered locks did not become her ill. She was beautiful so. Such, I should say, was Schoeneus' daughter a when she harried the Maenalian wild; such the Cretan maid as she wept that the headlong winds of the south had borne away both sails and promises of perjured Theseus; thus was Cassandra — except that fillets bound her hair — when down she sank at thy shrine, O chaste Minerva.

Who did not say to me : " Madman! " who did not say: "Barbarian!" Herself said naught; her tongue was kept from it by trembling fear. But her face, for all her silence, uttered reproaches none the less; tears charged me with my crime, though her lips were dumb. I would that my arms had sooner dropped from their shoulders; I could better have done without a part of myself. I have used my maddened strength to my own cost, and myself have been strong to my own hurt. What have I with you, ye ministers of blood and crime! Unholy hands, submit to the shackles you deserve! What! if I had struck the least of the Quirites among the crowd, should I be punished — and shall my right o'er ray lady-love be greater? The son of Tydeus left most vile example of offence. He was the first to smite a goddess — I am the second! And he was less guilty than I. I injured her I professed to love; Tydeus' son was cruel with a foe.

Go now. victor, make ready mighty triumphs, circle your hair with laurel and pay your vows to Jove, and let the thronging retinue that follow your car cry out : " Ho! our valiant hero has been victorious over a girl! " Let her walk before, a downcast captive with hair let loose — from head to foot pure white, did her wounded cheeks allow! More fit had it been for her to be marked with the pressure of my lips, and to bear on her neck the print of caressing tooth. Finally, if I must needs be swept along like a swollen torrent, and blind anger must needs make me its prey, were it not enough to have cried out at tile frightened girl, without the too hard threats I thundered? or to have shamed her by tearing apart her gown from top to middle? — her girdle would have come to the rescue there.

But, as it was, I could endure to rend cruelly the hair from her brow and mark with my nail her free-born cheeks. She stood there bereft of sense, with face bloodless and white as blocks of marble hewn from Parian cliffs. I saw her limbs all nerveless and her frame a-tremble — like the leaves of the poplar shaken by the breeze, like the slender reed set quivering by gentle Zephyr, or the surface of the wave when ruffled by the warm South-wind : and the tears, long hanging in her eyes, came flowing o'er her cheeks even as water distils from snow that is cast aside. 'Twas then that first I began to feel my guilt — my blood it was that flowed when she shed those tears. Thrice, none the less, I would have cast myself before her feet a suppliant; though thrice thrust she back my dreadful hands.

But you, stay not — for your vengeance will lessen my grief — from straight assailing my features with your nails. Spare neither my eyes nor yet my hair : however weak the hand, ire gives it strength; or at least, that the sad signs of my misdeed may not survive, once more range in due rank your ordered locks.