1You too, great Pales, we will sing, and you, shepherd of Amphrysus, worthy to be remembered, and you, woods and streams of Lycaeus. 3Other themes, which would have held idle minds with song, are all now commonplace: who does not know of harsh Eurystheus, or the altars of unpraised Busiris? 6By whom has the boy Hylas not been told, and Latona's Delos, and Hippodame, and Pelops, marked out by his ivory shoulder, keen with horses? 8I must try a path by which I too may raise myself from the ground and fly victorious on the lips of men. 10I shall be the first, if only life remains, to lead the Muses with me to my homeland, returning from the Aonian peak; 12I shall be the first to bring back to you, Mantua, the palms of Idumaea, and on the green plain I shall set up a temple of marble beside the water, 14where the great Mincius wanders in slow windings and fringes his banks with tender reed.
16In the middle I shall have Caesar, and he shall possess the temple: in his honour I, victorious and conspicuous in Tyrian purple, will drive a hundred four-horse chariots beside the river. 19For me all Greece, leaving the Alpheus and the groves of Molorchus, will contend in the races and with the rawhide gauntlet. 21I myself, my head adorned with leaves of the trimmed olive, will bring gifts. 22Even now it is a joy to lead the solemn processions to the shrines and to see the bullocks slain, or how the scene withdraws as its fronts revolve, and how the Britons woven into them raise the purple curtains. 26On the doors I will fashion, in gold and solid ivory, the battle of the Gangarides and the arms of victorious Quirinus, and here the Nile surging with war and flowing mightily, and columns rising with the bronze of ships.
30I will add the conquered cities of Asia, and Niphates routed, and the Parthian trusting in flight and backward-turned arrows, and two trophies snatched by hand from foes far apart, and nations twice triumphed over from either shore. 34There will stand Parian marbles too, statues that breathe, the offspring of Assaracus and the names of the race descended from Jupiter, and father Tros, and the Cynthian founder of Troy. 37Wretched Envy will fear the Furies and the stern river of Cocytus, and Ixion's twisted snakes and monstrous wheel, and the stone that cannot be overcome. 40Meanwhile let us pursue the woods and untouched glades of the Dryads, your commands, Maecenas, and no easy ones.
42Without you my mind begins nothing lofty; 42come, break off sluggish delays; 43Cithaeron calls with a mighty shout, and the hounds of Taygetus, and Epidaurus, tamer of horses, and the cry, redoubled by the assent of the groves, bellows back. 46Yet soon I shall gird myself to tell of the fiery battles of Caesar, and to carry his name in fame through as many years as Caesar is distant from the first origin of Tithonus.