When I was from Cupid’s passions free, my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy.
The rest night knows, and we, and the tower that sees, and the light that showed me a path through the sea.
Keep your run along a course between those constellations. I leave the rest to Fortune: may she help and guide you better than you do yourself.
I see and approve of the better, but I follow the worse.
May the world near and far dread the sons of Aeneas, and if there be land that feared not Rome, may it love Rome instead.
From that time on she lived in lonely caves.
What did Sappho of Lesbos teach but how to love women?
Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
To feed her love on melancholy sorrow.
Siqua metu dempto casta est, ea denique casta est; quae, quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit.
Time gliding by without our knowledge cheats us, and nothing can be swifter than the years.
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.
And now, as she died for the second time, she never complained that her husband had failed her – what could she complain of, except that he’d loved her?
And last her voice remained. Vanished in forest.
Male beauty’s better for neglect.
All things do change; but nothing sure doth perish.
Ah, wretched me! that love is not to be cured by any herbs; and that those arts which afford relief to all, are of no avail for their master.
Wait for the final day. Call no man happy until he is dead and his body is laid to rest in the grave.
How I wish your eyes were able to pierce deep down to my heart and catch a glimpse of your father’s anxiety.
In all creation nothing endures, all is in endless flux, each wandering shape a pilgrim passing by.
As Ceres drank what she gave her, an insolent, coarse-looking boy strolled up in front of the goddess, burst into laughter and jeered, ‘What a greedy female you are!’ Deeply insulted, she rapidly threw what was left of her drink in the prattling idiot’s face and drenched him in barley mixture.