138In turn the care of the sires begins to wane and that of the mothers to take its place. 139When, their months completed, they wander heavy with young, let no one allow them to draw the yokes of heavy wagons, nor to leap across the road, nor to race over the meadows in swift flight and swim greedy rivers. 143Let them graze in empty glades and beside full rivers, where there is moss and the bank is greenest with grass, and let caves shelter them and a rocky shade stretch over them. 146There is, around the groves of Silarus and green with holm-oaks, 146Alburnus, a fly flitting in swarms, whose Roman name is asilus, which the Greeks have called oestrus in their tongue, fierce, buzzing harshly, before which whole herds scatter in terror through the woods; 150the sky, shaken, rages with their bellowing, and the woods, and the bank of the dry Tanager.
152With this monster Juno once vented her terrible wrath, devising a plague for the heifer daughter of Inachus. 154This too — for it presses harder in the midday heat — you will keep away from the pregnant cattle, and you will pasture the herds when the sun has just risen or when the stars bring on the night.