1First my Thalia deigned to play in Syracusan verse, and did not blush to dwell in the woods. 3When I was singing of kings and battles, the Cynthian god plucked my ear and warned me: 'A shepherd, Tityrus, should feed fat sheep, but sing a finely spun song.' 6Now I—for you will have more than enough who long to tell your praises, Varus, and to set down grim wars—will practise the rustic Muse on a slender reed. 9I do not sing unbidden: yet if anyone reads these too, if anyone, captivated by love, reads them, our tamarisks will sing of you, Varus, every grove will sing of you; 11nor is any page more pleasing to Phoebus than one which has set at its head the name of Varus.
13Proceed, Pierian Muses! 13The boys Chromis and Mnasyllos saw Silenus lying asleep in a cave, his veins swollen, as always, with yesterday's wine: the garlands lay just apart, slipped from his head, and his heavy tankard hung by its worn handle. 18Falling upon him—for the old man had often cheated them both with the hope of a song—they cast fetters made from the garlands themselves upon him: Aegle joins them as an ally and comes up to the timid boys—Aegle, loveliest of the Naiads—and, as he now opens his eyes, she paints his forehead and temples with blood-red mulberries. 23He, laughing at the trick, 'Why are you tying these fetters?' 23he says; 24'Release me, boys; 24it is enough to have seemed to have the power: learn the songs you want; 25songs for you; for her there will be another kind of reward.' 26At once he himself begins.
27Then indeed you would have seen Fauns and wild beasts sporting in rhythm, then stiff oaks nodding their tops; 29neither does the Parnassian rock rejoice so much in Phoebus, nor do Rhodope and Ismarus marvel so much at Orpheus. 31For he sang how, through the great void, the seeds of earth and air and sea had been gathered together, and of liquid fire as well; 33how from these first beginnings all things, and the young sphere of the world itself, grew solid; 35how then the ground began to harden and shut Nereus off in the sea, and little by little to take on the forms of things; 37and how the lands are amazed as the new sun shines out, and rains fall from higher as the clouds are lifted away; 39when woods first begin to rise, and when animals wander here and there over the unknowing mountains.
41Then he tells of the stones Pyrrha threw, of Saturn's reign, of the Caucasian birds and Prometheus' theft: to these he adds at what spring the sailors had left Hylas and called for him, so that the shore 'Hylas, Hylas!' 44rang out all over. 45and he consoles Pasiphae, happy had herds never existed, with love for a snow-white bullock. 47ah, unhappy girl, what madness has seized you! 48The daughters of Proetus filled the fields with feigned lowing: yet none of them pursued such shameful union with cattle, though each had feared the plough on her neck, and often felt for horns on her smooth brow. 52ah, unhappy girl, you now wander on the mountains: he, resting his snowy flank on soft hyacinth, chews pale grasses beneath a dark holm-oak, or follows some heifer in the great herd.
55'Close, nymphs, Dictaean nymphs, close now the glades of the woods, in case by chance the bull's wandering tracks should meet my eyes; 58perhaps some cows may lead him, captivated by the green grass or following the herd, to the stalls of Gortyn.' 61Then he sings of the girl who marvelled at the apples of the Hesperides; 62then he wraps the sisters of Phaethon in the moss of bitter bark, and raises them from the ground as tall alders. 64Then he sings how one of the sisters led Gallus, wandering by the streams of Permessus, to the Aonian mountains, and how the whole choir of Phoebus rose to greet the man; 67how Linus, a shepherd of divine song, his hair adorned with flowers and bitter parsley, said to him: 'These reeds the Muses give you—here, take them—which once they gave to the old man of Ascra, with which he used to draw the stiff ash-trees down from the mountains by his singing: with these let the origin of the Grynean grove be told by you, so that there may be no grove in which Apollo takes more pride.' 74Why should I tell either of Scylla, daughter of Nisus, of whom the story goes that, her white loins girt with barking monsters, she harried the Dulichian ships, and in the deep whirlpool, ah, tore the frightened sailors with her sea-dogs; or how he told of the transformed limbs of Tereus; 79what feast, what gifts Philomela prepared for him, in what flight she sought the wilderness, and on what wings, unhappy one, she first fluttered over her own home?
82All the songs which once, as Phoebus rehearsed them, blessed Eurotas heard and bade his laurels learn by heart, he sings: the echoing valleys carry them back to the stars; 85until the Evening Star bade them pen the sheep in the folds and count their number, and came forth over an unwilling Olympus.