414Learn also to burn fragrant cedar in the stalls and to drive off noxious water-snakes with the smell of galbanum. 416Often under undisturbed mangers either a viper, harmful to touch, has lain hidden and fled the daylight in terror, or a snake, used to creeping under roof and shade, a cruel plague to oxen, and to spraying venom on the flock, has hugged the ground. 420Take stones in your hand, shepherd, take clubs, and as he rears up threatening and swells his hissing neck, strike him down. 422And now in flight he has hidden his timid head deep, while his middle coils and the windings at the end of his tail are loosened, and the last fold drags its slow curves.
425There is also that evil serpent in the Calabrian glades, rolling his scaly back with breast upraised, his long belly spotted with large markings, who, while any streams burst from their springs and while the lands are wet with moist spring and rainy south winds, haunts the pools, and dwelling on the banks, insatiably crams his black maw with fish and croaking frogs; 432once the marsh is burned up and the lands gape with heat, he darts out onto dry ground and, rolling his flaming eyes, rages through the fields, fierce with thirst and maddened by the heat. 435Let me not then wish to snatch soft sleep under the open sky, or to lie on the grass on a wooded ridge, when, his slough cast off, new and gleaming with youth, he rolls along, leaving his young or his eggs in his lair, towering towards the sun, and flickers in his mouth with three-forked tongue.