242Indeed every race on earth, of men and wild beasts, and the race of the sea, cattle and painted birds, into frenzy 244and fire they rush. 244Love is the same for all. 245At no other time does the lioness, forgetful of her cubs, roam the plains more savagely, nor do shapeless bears deal death and slaughter so widely through the woods; 248then the boar is savage, then the tigress at her worst; 249alas, it is ill wandering then in the lonely fields of Libya. 250Do you not see how a trembling runs through the whole body of horses, if the scent merely brings them the familiar breezes? 252And then neither the reins of men nor cruel lashes, nor cliffs and hollow rocks, nor rivers in the way that whirl along mountains torn away by their flood, can hold them back.
255The Sabellian boar himself rushes on and whets his tusks, paws up the earth with his foot, rubs his sides against a tree, and on this side and that hardens his shoulders against wounds. 258What of the youth in whose bones harsh love stirs a mighty fire? 259Late in the blind night he swims the straits troubled by bursting storms; 260above him the vast gate of heaven thunders, and the seas dashed on the rocks cry out against him; 262neither can his wretched parents call him back, nor the maiden who will die upon his cruel death. 264What of the spotted lynxes of Bacchus, and the fierce race of wolves and of dogs?
265What of the battles that unwarlike stags wage? 266Above all others, surely, the madness of mares is remarkable; 267and Venus herself gave them that spirit, at the time when the Potnian team of four devoured the limbs of Glaucus with their jaws. 269Love leads them over Gargarus and over the roaring Ascanius; 270they climb mountains and swim across rivers. 271And as soon as the flame has crept into their eager marrow — more in spring, because in spring heat returns to their bones — they all stand on high rocks with their faces turned to the west wind, and catch the light breezes, and often without any mating, made pregnant by the wind, wonderful to tell, they scatter over rocks and crags and low valleys, not towards your rising, East wind, nor the sun's, but to Boreas and the north-west wind, or where the blackest south wind is born and saddens the sky with rainy cold.
280Here at last the sticky slime which shepherds call by its true name, hippomanes, drips from their groin, hippomanes, which cruel stepmothers have often gathered, and mixed with herbs and not harmless spells.