He who sees you sins: so he who can’t see you can’t desire you: the eyes commit the crime. O Cynthia, why else do you search out dubious oracles at Praeneste, or the walls of Aeaean Telegonus? Why do chariots take you to Herculean Tibur? Why the Appian Way, so often, to Lanuvium? Cynthia, I wish you’d walk here when you’re free! But the crowd tell me to put no trust in you, when they see you rush faithfully, carrying a torch on fire, to the sacred grove, bearing light to the goddess Trivia.
No wonder Pompey’s Portico with its shady colonnade, famed for its canopy of cloth of gold, seems worthless, and its rising rows of evenly planted plane-trees, and the waters that fall from slumbering Maro, lightly bubbling liquid through the city, till Triton buries the stream again in his mouth.
You betray yourself: these trips show some furtive passion: mad girl, it’s our eyes you flee, and not the city. It won’t do, you plot mad schemes against me: you spread familiar nets for me with scant skill. But I’m the least of it: losing your good name will bring you the pain that you deserve. Lately a rumour spoke evil in my ear, and nothing good was said of you in the city.
But give no credence to hostile tongues: the tales have always punished beauties. Your name’s not been tarnished by being caught with drugs: Apollo bears witness that your hands are clean. If a night or two has been spent in lengthy play, well, such petty crimes don’t move me. Helen abandoned her country for a foreign lover, and was brought home again alive without being judged. They say that Venus herself was corrupted by libidinous Mars, but was always honoured, nevertheless, in heaven. Though Ida’s mount tells how a nymph loved shepherd Paris, sleeping with him among the flocks, the crowd of Hamadryad sisters saw it, and Silenus, head of the ancient troop of Satyrs, with whom, in the hollows of Ida, Naiad, you gathered falling apples, catching them below in your hands.
Contemplating such debaucheries, surely no one asks: ‘Why’s she so rich? Who gave her wealth? Where did the gifts come from?’ O great your happiness Rome, these days, if a single girl swims against the stream. Lesbia did all these things before, with impunity: anyone who follows her is surely less to blame. He’s only lately set foot in this city who asks for the ancient Tatii or the strict Sabine. You’ll sooner have power to dry the waves of the sea, or gather the stars in a human hand, than change things so our girls don’t want to sin: that was the custom no doubt in Saturn’s age, and when Deucalion’s waters flooded the globe: but after Deucalion’s ancient waters, who could ever keep a chaste bed, what goddess could live alone with a single god?
The snow-white shape of a savage bull corrupted great Minos’s wife once, they say, and Danae enclosed in a tower of bronze, was no less unable, in her chastity, to deny great Jove. So if you imitate Greek and Roman women, I sentence you to be free for life!
—Sextus Propertius
Propertius 2.32, translated by A. S. Kline
