After a long cessation, O Venus, again are you stirring up tumults?  Spare me, I beseech you, I beseech you.  I am not the man I was under the dominion of good-natured Cynara.  Forbear, O cruel mother of soft desires, to bend one bordering upon fifty, now too hardened for soft commands:  go, whither the soothing prayers of youths, invoke you.  More seasonably may you revel in the house of Paulus Maximus, flying thither with your splendid swans, if you seek to inflame a suitable breast.  For he is both noble and comely, and by no means silent in the cause of distressed defendants, and a youth of a hundred accomplishments; he shall bear the ensigns of your warfare far and wide; and whenever, more prevailing than the ample presents of a rival, he shall laugh [at his expense], he shall erect thee in marble under a citron dome near the Alban lake.  There you shall smell abundant frankincense, and shall be charmed with the mixed music of the lyre and Berecynthian pipe, not without the flageolet.  There the youths, together with the tender maidens, twice a day celebrating your divinity, shall, Salian-like, with white foot thrice shake the ground.  As for me, neither woman, nor youth, nor the fond hopes of mutual inclination, nor to contend in wine, nor to bind my temples with fresh flowers, delight me [any longer].  But why; ah! why, Ligurinus, does the tear every now and then trickle down my cheeks?  Why does my fluent tongue falter between my words with an unseemly silence?  Thee in my dreams by night I clasp, caught [in my arms]; thee flying across the turf of the Campus Martius; thee I pursue, O cruel one, through the rolling waters.

* * * * *

ODE II.

To antonius iulus.

Whoever endeavors, O Iulus, to rival Pindar, makes an effort on wings fastened with wax by art Daedalean, about to communicate his name to the glassy sea.  Like a river pouring down from a mountain, which sudden rains have increased beyond its accustomed banks, such the deep-mouthed Pindar rages and rushes on immeasurable, sure to merit Apollo’s laurel, whether he rolls down new-formed phrases through the daring dithyrambic, and is borne on in numbers exempt from rule:  whether he sings the gods, and kings, the offspring of the gods, by whom the Centaurs perished with a just destruction, [by whom] was quenched the flame of the dreadful Chimaera; or celebrates those whom the palm, [in the Olympic games] at Elis, brings home exalted to the skies, wrestler or steed, and presents them with a gift preferable to a hundred statues:  or deplores some youth, snatched [by death] from his mournful bride—­he elevates both his strength, and courage, and golden morals to the stars, and rescues him from the murky grave.  A copious gale elevates the Dircean swan, O Antonius, as often as he soars into the lofty regions of the clouds:  but I, after the custom and manner