She’s being torn away from me, the girl I’ve loved so long, and, friend, do you stop me shedding tears? No enmities are bitter but those of love: cut my throat indeed and I’ll be a milder enemy. Can I watch her leaning on another’s arm, she, no longer called mine, called mine a moment ago?
All things may be overturned: surely, love’s affairs may be so: you win or lose: this is the wheel of love. Often, great leaders, great tyrants have fallen: and Thebes stood once, and there was noble Troy. Many as the gifts I gave, many as the songs I made: yet she, the cruel one, never said: ‘I love.’
—Sextus Propertius
Propertius 2.8, translated by A. S. Kline
