209But no diligence strengthens their powers more than keeping off love and the goads of blind passion, whether one prefers to use oxen or horses. 212And so they banish bulls far off to lonely pastures, behind a barrier of mountain and across broad rivers, or keep them shut up indoors at full mangers. 215For the female gradually wastes their strength and inflames them at the sight of her, and does not let them remember groves or pasture — she with her sweet allurements — and often drives proud lovers to fight it out among themselves with their horns. 219A beautiful heifer grazes in great Sila: they in turn join battle with great force, with many wounds; black blood bathes their bodies, and the horns, driven against each other, are thrust home with a vast groan; the woods and the long sky re-echo. Nor is it the custom for the fighters to stall together, but the beaten one goes away and lives in exile on far unknown shores, groaning much at his disgrace and the blows of the proud victor, then at the loves he has lost unavenged; 228and gazing back at the stalls, he has left his ancestral realm.
229So with all care he trains his strength, and lies stubbornly among hard rocks on a bed unstrewn, fed on prickly leaves and sharp sedge, and he tests himself and learns to put his anger into his horns, butting at a tree-trunk, and he challenges the winds with his blows, and paws the sand as prelude to the fight. 235Afterwards, when his strength is gathered and his powers restored, he moves his standards and rushes headlong at the foe who has forgotten him: as a wave, when it has begun to whiten far out in mid-sea, draws its curve from the deep, and rolling to land roars monstrously among the rocks, and falls no smaller than a mountain itself, while the water below boils up in eddies and tosses black sand on high.