Ausonius
Translated by Deborah Warren, 2017
Ausonius (c. AD 310–c. 395) was a Latin poet and teacher from Bordeaux, known in Gallo-Roman times as Burdigala. He was also a Christian, which may come as a surprise, for his poetry often feels thoroughly pagan. Among his many careers, Ausonius served as tutor to the future emperor Gratian (ruled 367–383 AD). Like the Greek novelists before him, Ausonius took a picture as the inspiration for this intriguing tale of the distress that Cupid – love – has caused women in literature. Here, love finally gets his comeuppance.
From Ausonius to my dear “son”:
Have you ever seen a picture painted on a wall? You’ve certainly seen one and remember it. Naturally this painted picture in Zoilus’s dining room in Treves: lovesick women fix Cupid to a cross—not women of our time, who sin of their own free will, but those heroines who excuse themselves and blame God—some of whom our Virgil lists in the Fields of Mourning. I admired this painting for its beauty and subject. Afterwards I translated my dazzled admiration into the ineptitude of my poetry: except for the title, nothing pleases me; still, I send you my meanderings. We love our own warts and scars and, not content to fail alone in our defects, we seek that they be loved by others. But why do I defend this little poem so zealously? I’m sure you’ll like whatever you know is mine: this I hope more than that you praise it. Farewell, and remember your “father” affectionately.
In heaven’s fields, which Virgil’s muse describes,
where a myrtle grove conceals distracted lovers,
heroines held their rituals—and each one
bore her mark of her long ago death—
wandering through vast woods in grudging light,
through reedy goat’s-beard, heavy flowering poppy,
and silent, still lakes and unmurmuring streams
whose flowers sigh through banks in misty light,
mourning the names of youths and kings of old:
gazing Narcissus; Oebalus’ Hyacinth;
gold-haired Crocus; Adonis, purple-dyed;
Ajax of Salamis, limned with tragic pain.
All the griefs that spur sad memories
after death, with tears, sorrowing loves
call heroines back again to their lost lives:
pregnant Semele, deceived, moans in birth and destroys
a burning cradle, and brandishes the fire
of a thunderbolt. Mourning her worthless gift,
Caenis grieves—changed back to her former shape,
having been pleased with her gender as a man.
Procris, stabbed, is tending to her wounds
and even now loves Caephalus’s deadly hand.
The girl at Sestus goes headlong from the tower
bearing her smoking clay lamp; and mannish Sappho,
who’d die from the barbs of love for a man of Lesbos,
threatens to leap to death from cloud-wrapped Leucas.
Sad Eriphyle shuns Harmonia’s necklace,
doomed by her son, unlucky in her marriage;
the whole tale also of Minos’s lofty Crete
flickers, a faint image of a depicted scene:
Pasiphae follows the tracks of the snow-white bull;
deserted Ariadne holds the ball of threads,
in her hand; regretful Phaedra recalls her tablet
left behind. One bears a noose, one the sham
of a vain crown; it shames the third to enter
and hide in Daedalus’s heifer. Laodamia
laments two stolen nights of doomed delights
with dead and living lovers; in another place
others, fierce with drawn swords, Thisbe, Canace
and Tyrian Dido loom: one bears her husband’s sword,
the second her father’s, the third her guest’s.
And horned Luna, with torch and starry crown,
strays as once over Latmos’ rocks,
having pursued the sleeping Endymion.
A hundred others dwelling on love’s old wounds
re-live the torments with sweet and gloomy plaints.
Between them reckless Cupid on rattling wings
has scattered the shadows of black fog. All of them
knew the boy and, memory returning,
saw their common offender, though the damp clouds
obscured his belt gleaming with golden studs
and his quiver and the flame of his bright red torch.
They recognize him, though, and try to vent
their vain force on their one foe—met in a place
not his own where he’d wield wings ineffective
in thick gloom—and they press him as a swarm:
they pull him trembling and vainly seeking refuge
into their mass, mid-throng.
A myrtle is chosen,
familiar in that sad grove, loathed as the gods’ revenge—
with this, once, spurned Proserpine tortured Adonis
who thought of Venus. Hanged on its high branch,
chained, hands behind his back, feet bound,
they grant the weeping Cupid no lesser sentence.
Love, accused, is condemned with no trial or judge.
Each, eager to absolve herself of blame,
shifts her own guilt into another’s crime.
All, blaming him, argue the indications
for his justifiable killing. They consider
their attack a sweet vengeance that seeks to redress their grief
each in the way she was ruined. One holds a noose;
one shows the false spectre of a sword; another
a rough cliff, ghost-river, threat of the ocean, a sea
though calm in its depths, raging: some brandish flames
and wield torches hissing flameless. Myrrha opens
her full womb—hurls at the trembling boy her tears
shining as amber drops of a weeping tree. A few intend
mere mockeries but in the guise of pardons,
so a sharp shaft under his pierced skin can draw out
tender blood from which the anemone springs
or their lamps move wanton lights toward the boy.
Even Venus herself, his mother, guilty
of similar sin, enters this fray unafraid.
Not rushing to plead for her surrounded son,
she redoubles his terror and kindles their wavering rage
with bitter goads, and blames her own disgrace
on her son’s crimes, since she suffered the hidden chains—
caught with Mars; since for her shame at her child,
the stigma of Priapus from the Hellespont
was mocked; and Eryx, cruel, and Hermaphroditus
only half-man. Words weren’t enough:
with her red wreath Venus beat the boy, suffering
and fearing worse; she pressed red dew from his body struck
with repeated blows, roses fastened together,
already red, drew blood more fiery red.
The fierce threats died away, the punishment having seemed
now greater than his own offenses, and Venus
about to become the offender. The heroines
themselves intervene and each prefers to blame
her own death on cruel Fate. Then the fond mother
gives thanks at their having withdrawn their grievances
and forgiven her boy and pardoned his crimes.
And then such visions in nocturnal shapes
upset his sleep, disturbed by empty terror,
which Cupid, having suffered most of the night—
the fog of sleep at last dispelled—flees, leaves
the ivory gate and flies up to the gods.