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Elegia XIII. De Junonis festo. - Christopher Marlowe, The Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 3 (Poems) [1598]

Edition used:

The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. A.H. Bullen (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885). Vol. 3.

Part of: The Works of Christopher Marlowe, 3 vols.

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Elegia XIII.1
De Junonis festo.

  • When fruit-filled Tuscia should a wife give me,
  • We touched the walls, Camillus, won by thee.
  • The priests to Juno did prepare chaste feasts,
  • With famous pageants, and their home-bred beasts.
  • To know their rites well recompensed my stay,
  • Though thither leads a rough steep hilly way.
  • There stands an old wood with thick trees dark-clouded
  • Who sees it grants some deity there is shrouded.
  • An altar takes men's incense and oblation,
  • An altar made after the ancient fashion.

    10

  • Here, when the pipe with solemn tunes doth sound,
  • The annual pomp goes on the covered2 ground.
  • White heifers by glad people forth are led,
  • Which with the grass of Tuscan fields are fed,
  • And calves from whose feared front no threatening flies,
  • And little pigs. base hogsties' sacrifice,
  • And rams with horns their hard heads wreathèd back
  • Only the goddess-hated goat did lack,
  • By whom disclosed, she in the high woods took,
  • Is said to have attempted flight forsook.

    20

  • Now3 is the goat brought through the boys with darts,
  • And give[n] to him that the first wound imparts.
  • Where Juno comes, each youth and pretty maid,
  • Show1 large ways, with their garments there displayed.
  • Jewels and gold their virgin tresses crown,
  • And stately robes to their gilt feet hang down.
  • As is the use, the nuns in white veils clad,
  • Upon their heads the holy mysteries had.
  • When the chief pomp comes, loud2 the people hollow,
  • And she her vestal virgin priests doth follow.

    30

  • Such was the Greek pomp, Agamemnon dead;
  • Which fact3 and country wealth Halesus fled;
  • And having wandered now through sea and land,
  • Built walls high towered with a prosperous hand.
  • He to th' Hetrurians Juno's feast commended:
  • Let me and them by it be aye befriended.

[1]Not in Isham copy or ed. A.

[2]“It per velatas annua pompa vias”

[3]“Nunc quoque per pueros jaculis incessitur index, Et pretium auctori vulneris ipsa datur.”

[1]“Praeverrunt latas veste jacente vias,”—Dyce remarks that Marlowe read “Praebuerant.”

[2]“Ore favent populi.” (In Henry's monumental edition of Virgil's Æneid, vol. iii. pp. 25--27, there is a very interesting note on the meaning of the formula “ore favete.” He denies the correctness of the ordinary interpretation “be silent.”)

[3]“Et scelus et patrias fugit Halæsus opes.”