Metamorphoses

While Galatea was giving her hair be to combed, heaving sighs, she addressed her in such words as these: “ And yet, O maiden, no ungentle race of men does woo thee; and as thou dost, thou art able to deny them with impunity. But I, whose sire is Nereus, whom the azure Doris bore, who am guarded, too, by a crowd of sisters, was not able, but through the waves, to escape the passion of the Cyclop;” and as she spoke, the tears choked her utterance. When, with her fingers like marble, the maiden had wiped these away, and had comforted the Goddess, “Tell me, dearest,” said she, “and conceal not from me ( for I am true to thee) the cause of thy grief.” In these words did the Nereid reply to the daughter of Cratæis: “Acis was the son of Faunus and of the Nymph Symæthis, a great delight, indeed, to his father and his mother, yet a still greater to me. For the charming youth had attached me to himself alone, and eight birth-days having a second time been passed, he had now marked his tender cheeks with the dubious down. Him I pursued ; incessantly did the Cyclop me pursue. Nor can I, shouldst thou enquire, declare whether the hatred of the Cyclop , or the love of Acis, was the stronger in me. They were equal. O genial Venus! how great is the power of thy sway. For that savage, and one to be dreaded by the very woods, and beheld with impunity by no stranger, the contemner of great Olympus with the Gods themselves , now feels what love is; and, captivated with passion for me, he burns, forgetting his cattle and his caves.

MetamorphosesOvidHenry T. RileyEnglishVerse permalinkRead in Book 13

Book 13, Line 41ProseID metamorphoses-riley-en-prose-13-41