Epistulae

only to spread abroad your shame, if your former brave deeds are stained by an infamous miscarriage. Are you not said to have wrung to death two horrid snakes, when, young and in your cradle, you shewed yourself worthy of your father Jupiter? You began with more honor than you are like to end: the last parts of your life fall short of the first. How preposterous to shew yourself a man in this, in that a child! He whom not a thousand monsters, not the son of Sthenelus, his obstinate enemy, not implacable Juno could vanquish, is yet vanquished by love. But I am thouht honorably wedded, because I am called the wife of Hercules, and boast of him for my father-in-law, who, riding on his fiery steeds, rends the poles with his thunder. As when unequal steers are yoked in the same plough, so does the wife of inferior degree suffer from her mighty husband. A rank that oppresses, is no honor, but a burthen. She who desires to wed well, will do wisely to wed with her equal. My lord is ever absent; and a stranger is better known to him than his wife: he is always in pursuit of monsters and ferocious beasts. Oft I ad-

dress Heaven with chaste vows, and tremble in my solitary home, lest my husband should fall by some savage enemy. My imagination hurries me amidst serpents, boars, furious lions, and three-headed devouring dogs. The entrails of the sacrifices, the vain phantoms of sleep, and secret omens of night, alarm me. I am terrified with every surmise of doubtful fame, and feel the full misery of a breast racked by alternate hope and fear. Your mother is absent, and complains that ever her charms engaged the notice of a powerful God. I have neither the society of your father Amphitryon, nor that of your son Hyllus. I feel only Eurystheus, the minister of Juno's unjust rage, and the unrelenting wrath of that goddess. But it is not difficult to bear this. You add also foreign loves; and any one may be a mother by you. I shall not speak either of

Auge deflowered in the vales of Arcadia, or of your offspring by Astydamia, the daughter of Ormenus. You shall not be reproached with the fifty sisters of the house of Theutrantes, all of whom you debauched in one night. Your late crime I resent, in preferring an adulteress to me; by whom I am made stepmother to Lydian Lamus.