Virgil and Lucretius: Passages Translated by William Stebbing

This is the tale old Proteus by the sea

Erst told of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Virgil at Parthenope overheard,

And has resung it, if not word by word.


Orpheus had been espoused but one short hour,

And went to gather roses for the bower,

When a rejected wooer, mad with love,

Sprang upon the light-footed nymph, and strove

For an embrace; she, heeding nought, alas!

Trod on a serpent sleeping in the grass;

And when on the instant, answering her cries,

Her Bridegroom knelt there, kissing her closed eyes,

Half fainting with the sense of all her charms,

Sudden he woke, a dead Bride in his arms!

Not his alone the woe and misery;

Nor he sole mourner for Eurydice;

From Rhodope to Pangæa’s peaks, above

The cave where Boreas hid his Attic love,

Through the fierce realm of Rhesus, echo bore

The wail to the wild Getes, to the shore

Of Hebrus, while in forest, hill, and dale

The tuneful Dryads told the tearful tale.

But how conjure by the best ordered show

Of grief an irremediable woe!

Orpheus fled Pity, and neighbourly Care;

All human fellowship but his despair.

With but that and his lyre communion still

He held, from dawn to sunset, then until

The planets rose and sank, banishing sleep,

Keeping sad vigils by the moaning deep,

Thinking each shadow on the desert shore

Was his lost Bride restored to life once more.