Since I managed to flee the girl, now it’s right that I cry to the lonely halcyons: Cassiope’s harbour’s not yet had its accustomed sight of my boat, and all my prayers fall on a heartless shore. Yes, even in your absence, Cynthia, the winds promote your cause: hear with what savage threats the sky resounds. Will good fortune ever come to calm the storms? Will that little beach hold my ashes?
Change your fierce complaints to something kinder and let night and hostile shoals be my punishment. Could you, dry-eyed, require my death, never to clasp my bones to your breast? O, perish the man, whoever he was, who first made ships and rigging, and ploughed the reluctant deep! Easier to change my mistress’s moods (however harsh, though, she’s still a rare girl) than to gaze at shores ringed with unknown forests, and search in the sky for the long-lost Twins.
If the Fates had buried my grief at home, and an upright stone stood there to my last love, she would have given dear strands of hair to the fire, and laid my bones gently on soft rose-petals: she would have cried my name, over the final embers, and asked for earth to lie lightly on me. But you, the sea-born daughters of lovely Doris, happy choir, loosen our white sails: if ever love glided down and touched your waves, spare a friend, for gentler shores.
—Sextus Propertius
Propertius 1.17, translated by A. S. Kline
