Catullus’ Latin translation of a lost poem by Callimachus, rendered into English by Justin Brumby.
The king asked angrily: “Who dares to rob
the gods and mock the monarch?” Terror held
the court in awed if awkward quietude.
“Who snitched the lock of hair my royal wife
Berenice deposited in Venus’ shrine
— a thankful offering for my return
from devastating all Assyria?”
Then Conon spoke, the court astrologer:
Conon, who’d considered every light throughout the whole tremendous heavens,
what hour each is reborn in the blue, what time it dies from sight,
when the sun’s white blasts of heat will muffle under eclipse,
why the stars move in obedience to Time, how gentle love called the moon down from her skyish ride
to set upon Endymion, the sleepy shepherd boy,
— that heavenly scholar, Conon, spoke, and thus appeased the king,
“That lock of hair, once Berenice’s, now hangs among the stars,
placed there by the gods!”
Meanwhile the sad if stellar bangs lamented in the heavens:
“I am those curls Berenice vowed the gods as she outstretched her smooth arms in prayer;
when the king, enhanced by marrying her, went off to devastate Assyria,
still spattered with the traces of that bloody bedtime scuffle
in which he carried off the queen’s virginity.
Do brides really dread the wedding night, do they really want to cheat their parents out of grandsons?
So they irrigate the bed-sheets with their phony tears,
so help me all the gods, their groans are faked.
I learned that from the queen’s unending complaints
— how she grudged entrusting her man to battle!
Does she claim it wasn’t the empty bed she feared —
she only wept because he was her cousin?
I suppose, Berenice, it was only family feeling that made you so grief-weak you couldn’t walk or speak?
From the vantage-point of your own head I’ve seen your courage,
from earliest girlhood. I remember (if you don’t) how you slew
the man you were engaged to, so you could marry this king.
The tragic speeches you made the day he left! By Jupiter, how often you wiped your eyes!
What god was it transformed your supposed coldness? What other god than Love?
The king left. To ensure his return, you sacrificed a bull
and vowed my fuzzy self to the gods. When he came back, having added Asia Minor, as far as the Euphrates, to Egypt,
she kept her word and I became a tuft twice removed
— first to the temple, then wafted to the skies —
Against my will, O queen! I swear it by your head! A curse upon me
if I lie. But who withstands metal?
The greatest mountain the sun rises over, Athos itself, yielded to steel
when Xerxes cut a ship canal through the isthmus and sent his barbarian fleet swimming through the slopes.
When such give way to forged tools, what hope for me who am mere filament?
Jupiter! May the whole race of Chalybes perish, that Black Sea tribe, to whom it first occurred
to disembowel their mother earth and scrape the ore from her ribs of rock,
to make the cruel metals!
My sisters wept for me, cut off from them forever, then Emathion,
son of the Dawn, appeared, in the form of an ostrich, raising a wind at each nod of his stubby wings
— the servant of Venus — he flew me up the night sky, and placed me in Aphrodite’s holy lap.
(By luck the Love goddess was vacationing in Egypt at the time.)
She, lest the crown of Ariadne shine in the sky without competition —
she made me gleam there too, soggy with tears, kidnapped from the head of blonde Berenice!
A new constellation among the old, I float over by the great bear, Callisto, between the lights of Virgo and bad- tempered Leo.
I sink nightly down the skies, leading stupid Boötes — better known as the little bear — who can hardly find his way
to the ocean to set. He always gets there late.
Though at night I get to hear the footsteps of gods above me, day sinks me in the gray sea again.
Nemesis, let me speak this out unpunished — I don’t lack reverence for the starry company
I’m forced to keep — but all the same
no coward fear will make me hide the truth, though all the stars should sing together, O, come off it, girl!
Nothing will prevent me from opening my honest heart
like a book, that all may read —
all this superlunary stuff doesn’t divert me. It’s torture to be exiled, forever, I presume,
from the dearest head of all, where I fed deliciously on pleasantly fragrant moisturizing shampoos, mild cleansers and rich conditioners imparting body, bounce and luster!
You girls, whom the long-awaited wedding day has joined,
by torchlight, to your true soulmates,
don’t unbutton, setting forth your sweet little titties, before you offer up in my honor an alabaster box full of choicest hair-care products,
you chaste obedient maidens! But girls who sleep around — let dirt drink in their spilt gifts — I reject them!
I don’t need any favors from unworthy hearts.
But pure new brides, you have my blessing:
may harmony always modulate the measure of your wedded lives!
You, my queen, when you stare at the stars and light lamps in honor of Venus —
don’t let me dry out up here in the breezy ether,
pour out offerings of pure pomade for my frazzled sake.
Oh! I wish the stars would fall! I want to be hair again! Let Aquarius glare by Orion in my place.”
This excerpt is from Brumby’s book Devil Girls of Ancient Rome, available from our bookstore here.