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to my song, to describe heroic deeds and modes of war and the setting of the scene. Without thee my course wavers and runs uncertainly, and mist shrouds the sails of my lonely craft. Nor was it I alone thy bountiful love did cherish: such wert thou too toward thy spouse. Thou knewest the torches of but one wedlock: one passion alone inspired thee. Assuredly I cannot separate my mother from thy cold tomb: there doth she feel and know thy presence, she sees thee, and morn and eve salutes thy grave, as other women in feigned loyalty attend on Pharian or Mygdonian grief, and bewail an alien death.^[1]

Why should I tell of thy frank, yet earnest nature? thy loving heart, thy contempt of gain, thy care for honour, thy passion for the right? and yet again, when it pleased thee to relax, of the charm of thy converse? of thy mind that knew no age? For these deserts of thine the ruling providence of the gods has granted thee renown and kindly fame, and saved thee from the sadness of any blow. Thou art taken, father, not lacking years, nor overburdened; ten spaces of five years hast thou added to three lustres. But grief and affection suffer me not to count thy days, O thou who wert worthy to surpass the Pylian^[2] bounds of life and equal a Priam’s age, worthy to see me too as old! But the gate of death was not dark for thee: gentle was thy passing, nor did a tardy end fore-ordain thy frame in senile dissolution to the ever-threatening grave, but a tranquil unconsciousness and death that counterfeited slumber set free thy soul, and bore thee to Tartarus under the false semblance of repose. Ah! what groans I uttered then! my friends saw me with anxiety, my mother saw me and rejoiced to recognize her son. What