341"Ceres first broke up the clod with the hooked plough, first gave corn and gentle foods to the lands, first gave laws: all things are the gift of Ceres. 344She must be my song. 344If only I could tell songs worthy of the goddess: surely the goddess is worthy of song. 346The vast island of Trinacria was heaped upon the giant's limbs, and with its great masses it presses down Typhoeus, laid beneath it, who dared to hope for the dwellings of heaven. 349He strains indeed, and often struggles to rise again, but his right hand lies beneath Ausonian Pelorus, his left beneath you, Pachynus; his legs are pressed down by Lilybaeum, Etna weighs down his head: beneath it, on his back, fierce Typhoeus hurls up sand and vomits flame from his mouth.
354Often he struggles to heave off the weight of earth and to roll the towns and great mountains from his body. 356Then the earth trembles, and the king of the silent ones himself is afraid that the ground may gape open and be laid bare by a wide chasm, and daylight let in may terrify the trembling shades. 359Fearing this disaster, the tyrant had come out from his gloomy abode and, carried in a chariot of black horses, was cautiously going round the foundations of the Sicilian land. 362After he had made sure enough that no places were giving way, and his fear was laid aside, the goddess of Eryx, sitting on her mountain, sees him wandering, and, embracing her winged son, she said, 'My arms and hands, my son, my power, take those weapons with which you conquer all, Cupid, and drive your swift arrows into the breast of the god to whom the last lot of the threefold kingdom fell.
369You subdue the gods above and Jupiter himself, you subdue and conquer the powers of the sea, and the very one who rules the powers of the sea. 371Why does Tartarus hold back? 371why do you not extend your mother's empire and your own? 372A third part of the world is at stake. 373And yet in heaven (such is my forbearance now) we are scorned, and the strength of Love dwindles along with mine. 375Do you not see that Pallas and Diana the huntress have deserted me? 376Ceres' daughter too will be a virgin, if we allow it: for she aspires to the same hopes. 378But you, for the sake of our shared kingdom, if that alliance means anything to you, join the goddess to her uncle.' 379So Venus spoke.
379He loosed his quiver and, at his mother's bidding, from a thousand arrows set aside one, but one than which none is sharper, none less uncertain, none more obedient to the bow, and, setting his knee against it, he bent the pliant horn and struck Dis in the heart with the barbed shaft. 385Not far from the walls of Henna there is a lake of deep water, Pergus by name. 386Not even the Cayster hears more songs of swans on its gliding waves. 388A wood crowns the waters, encircling every side, and with its foliage, as with an awning, keeps off the blows of Phoebus. 390The branches give coolness, the moist ground gives Tyrian-hued flowers: it is perpetual spring.
391While Proserpina plays in this grove, and picks violets or white lilies, and while with girlish eagerness she fills her baskets and her lap and vies to outdo her companions in gathering, almost in one moment she was seen and loved and carried off by Dis: so headlong is love. 396The goddess, terrified, calls with mournful voice on her mother and her companions, but more often on her mother; 398and, as she had torn her garment from its top edge, the flowers she had gathered fell from her loosened tunic. 400And such was the innocence of her childish years, this loss too stirred her maidenly grief. 402The ravisher drives his chariot and urges on his horses, calling each by name, shaking over their necks and manes the reins dyed with dark rust, and is carried through deep lakes and the pools of the Palici, reeking of sulphur and boiling up from the broken earth, and where the Bacchiadae, a race sprung from Corinth of the two seas, set up walls between unequal harbours.