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that city^[1] I hate where thou goest undisguised, where thou soundest the thunders that proclaim our high union, and wieldest the lightnings that are mine. Let Thebes atone her crimes; why dost thou choose Argos as her foe? Nay, if such discord hath seized our holy marriage-chamber, go, raze Sparta to the ground, bring war’s destruction upon Samos and old Mycenae. Why anywhere^[2] is the altar of thy spouse made warm by sacrificial blood or fragrant with heaps of eastern incense? Sweeter is the smoke that rises from the votive shrines of Mareotic Coptos or from the wailing crowds and brazen gongs of river Nile. But if ’tis the evil deeds of former men that mankind now doth expiate, and this resolve hath come so tardily to minister to thy wrath, to cast back thy gaze through days of old, at what far stage of time doth it suffice to drive away earth’s madness and purge the backward-reaching ages? Choose straightway that spot for thy beginning where Alpheus following afar the track of his Sicanian love glides by with sea-wandering wave. Here on accursed ground the Arcadians set thee a shrine—yet it shames thee not—here is Oenomaus’ chariot of war and the steeds more fitly stalled beneath Getic Haemus,^[3] nay even yet the severed heads and mangled corpses of the suitors lie stark and unburied. Yet hast thou here the welcome honours of a temple, yea, and guilty Ida^[4] pleases thee, and Crete that tells falsely of thy death. Why dost thou