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Book I.8:1-26

CYNTHIA'S JOURNEY

Propertius

Are you mad, then, that my anxiety does not stop you? Am I less to you than chilly Illyria? Does he seem so great to you, whoever he is, that you’ll go anywhere the wind takes your sails, without me? Can you hear the roar of the furious seas unmoved, and lie down on hard planks; tread the hoarfrost under your tender feet? Cynthia, can you bear unaccustomed snow? Oh, I wish that the days till the winter solstice were doubled, and the Pleiades delayed, the sailors sitting idle, the ropes be never loosed from the Tyrrhenian shore, and the hostile breezes not blow my prayers away! Yet may I never see such winds drop when your boat puts off, and the waves carry it onwards, leaving me rooted to the desolate strand, repeatedly crying out your cruelty with clenched fist.

Yet whatever you deserve from me, you who renounce me, may Sicilian Galatea not frown on your journey: pass with happy oars Epirus’s Acroceraunian cliffs, and be received by Illyrian Oricos’s calm waters. No other girl will seduce me, mea vita, from bitterly uttering complaints about you at your threshold, nor will I fail to question the impatient sailors: ‘Tell in what harbour my girl is confined?’ and say ‘Though she lives on Thessaly’s shore, or beyond the Scythian, she’ll be mine.’