Epistulae

O DEMOPHOÖN, Phyllis, your Thracian hostess, complains of your absence beyond the promised time. You engaged to drop anchor on our coast, when the moon should have completed her orb. Already she hath four times waned, four times renewed her full orb; and your Athenian ships do not yet stem the Thracian tide. If you reckon time in the minute manner we lovers do, this complaint will not appear to have come before its day. Hope forsook me slowly too: we are unwilling to believe what may be injurious; but now I feel it, and, in spite even of love and myself, must believe. Often have I lied to myself for your sake; often flattered myself that the raging south winds would drive hither your swelling sails. In my resentment I have cursed Theseus, imagining that he would not suffer you to depart; yet he perhaps was no cause of your stay. Sometimes I dreaded that, in making towards the shallows of Hebrus, your ship might have been swallowed up by the foaming deep. Oft before the altars with offerings of incense have I, in a suppliant manner, implored the gods for your safety, O perfidious man! Oft seeing the winds favorable, the heaven serene, and the sea calm;

Surely,

said I to myself,

if alive, he will come.

In fine, my indulgent love represented to me all the obstacles that might prevent a speedy return; and I became ingenious at finding out excuses for you. But still you linger: the gods whom you invoked have not restored you to me; nor, moved by a sense of my love, do you return. O Demophoön, you have given both your words and sails to the winds. Your sails, alas! have failed to bring you back, and your words were insincere. What have I done, unless perhaps I have loved you to excess? But surely this crime might have rather endeared me to you. My only fault is, to have loved and entertained you, faithless man: yet this fault with you ought to be a merit. Where is now your honor? where are your oaths, and plighted troth? where are the many gods who dwelt on your perjured tongue? Where is now your matrimonial vow of constancy, which was to me the pledge and security of my phasing conjugal hopes? You swore by the tempest-beaten main, which before you had often crossed, and on which you were again to hazard yourself; you swore too by your grandsire (if he also is not falsely called so) who soothes the boisterous waves; by Venus doubly armed with her torch and bow, too successful, alas! with both against me; by Juno, who presides over the marriage-bed, and the sacred mysteries of the torch-bearing goddess. If each of these wronged powers should be disposed to take vengeance for the dishonor of invoking them falsely, you alone would be insufficient for the deserved punishment.