Page:Eclogues and Georgics (Mackail 1910).djvu/127

ll. 515–566.] and leave the bodies of the oxen alone in the leafy copse. Thereafter, when the ninth dawn brightens to her birth, thou shalt send Lethean poppies for funeral gifts to Orpheus, and adore appeased Eurydice with a slain heifer-calf, and sacrifice a black ewe and again seek the grove.

Delaying not, forthwith he fulfils his mother's counsels. He comes to the shrines; he bids the ordained altars rise; four noble bulls of stately girth he leads up, and as many heifers whose neck knows not the yoke; thereafter, when the ninth dawn had risen to her birth, he sends funeral gifts to Orpheus and again seeks the grove. Here indeed they descry a portent sudden and strange to tell; bees humming among the dissolving flesh of the carcases and swarming forth from the rent sides of the oxen, and trailing in endless clouds, till now they stream together on the tree-top and hang clustering from the pliant boughs.

Thus I sang of the tending of fields and flocks and trees, while great Caesar hurled war's lightnings by high Euphrates and gave statutes among the nations in welcome supremacy, and scaled the path to heaven. Even in that season I Virgil, nurtured in sweet Parthenope, went in the flowery ways of lowly Quiet: I who once played with shepherds' songs, and in youth's hardihood sang thee, O Tityrus, under the covert of spreading beech.