Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/67

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SILVAE, I. ii. 160–184

home or her shrine at Eryx. Then she addressed the maiden, as she reclined alone upon her couch: “How long this slothfulness, this modest, unshared bed, O well-beloved of me among Laurentian[1] girls? What limit wilt thou set to chastity and thy sworn vow? Wilt thou never submit to a husband’s yoke? Soon sadder years will come. Employ thy beauty and use the gifts that are quick to fly. Not for that end did I give thee such charm and pride of countenance and my own spirit, to see thee pass year after year of loneliness, as though thou wert not dear to me. Enough, ay and too much to have despised thy former suitors. For truly this one with his whole manhood’s reverent devotion loves thee alone among all others, nor lacks he beauty or noble birth; and, for his poetry, what youths, what maidens all the city through have not his songs by heart? Him also shalt thou see—so far may the Ausonian prince[2] prove gracious!—raise high the twelvefold rods before the due age; of a truth already has he opened Cybele’s gates and read the Euboean Sibyl’s song.[3] Soon will the Latian Father, whose purpose I may foreknow, bestow upon the youth the purple raiment and the curule ivory,[4] and will permit him to celebrate (a greater glory this) the spoils of Dacia and the laurels newly won. Come, marry then and have done with youth’s tarrying. What races, what hearts has my torch failed to subdue? Birds, cattle, savage herds

  1. ↑ From Laurentum on the coast of Latium; here = Italian.
  2. ↑ i.e., the Emperor; so “the Latian Father,” l. 178.
  3. ↑ i.e., he has been made one of the XVviri, under whose charge were all foreign worships as well as the Sibylline books.
  4. ↑ It is not certain to what curule office this refers, or in what capacity Stella “celebrated the Dacian victory,” i.e., the games that accompanied Domitian’s triumph at the end of 89.

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