Book III, Elegy 5

Love is a god of peace: we lovers worship peace: enough for me the hard warfare I wage with my mistress. My soul is not so racked with lust for hateful gold, nor drinks my thirst from cups of precious stone, nor is fat Campania ploughed for me by a thousand yokes, nor do I get me bronzes from thy ruin, hapless Corinth.

Ah! primeval earth so unkind to Prometheus' fashioning hand! With too little care he moulded the human heart. He ordered men's bodies, but forgot the mind as he plied his art; straight before all else should have been the path of the soul. Now o'er such wide seas are we tempest-tossed; we seek out a foe, and pile fresh war on war. Yet no wealth shalt thou carry to the waves of Acheron: naked, thou fool, thou shalt be borne to the ship of Hell. There victor and vanquished shades are mingled in equality of death: captive Jugurtha, thou sittest beside the consul Marius; Lydian Croesus is as Dulichian Irus! That death is best that comes apace when we have had our joy of life.

My delight is it to have worshipped Helicon in my earliest youth and to have entwined my hands in the Muses' dance. Be it my delight also to bind my soul with deep Lyaean draughts and ever to have wreaths of spring roses about my brow. And when the burdening years have set a stay to love, and whitening age hath flecked my black locks, then be it my pleasure to learn the ways of nature, to learn what god rules by his wisdom this quarter of the world, how comes the rising moon, how wanes, and how each month its horns are orbed to the full; whence sweep the winds in triumph over the sea, what seeks the East Wind with his blast, and whence the clouds draw their unfailing water; whether a day shall come to o'erthrow the citadels of the world; why the bright bow drinks up the rain-water, why the peaks of Perrhaebian Pindus have trembled, why mourned the sun's disk with dark-robed steeds, why Bootes is late to turn his oxen and wain, why the band of Pleiads shine with close-set fires, why the deep outsteps not its bounds, and why the full year hath four seasons in its round; whether there be gods that rule underground and giants that suffer torment, and Tisiphone's brow be wild with black snakes; whether Alcmaeon be plagued with Furies and Phineus with fasting, whether there be the wheel, the rolling rock, the thirst in the water's midst; whether Cerberus guards with triple throat the cave of Hell, and nine acres are all too few for Tityos; or if the tale that hath come down to wretched mortals be an empty dream and there is naught to dread beyond the pyre. Such is the close of life that waits for me: do ye to whom arms are dearest bring home the standards of Crassus.