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Home  »  library  »  prose  »  Worship in Spring: Theætetus (Fourth Century B.C.)

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Worship in Spring: Theætetus (Fourth Century B.C.)

By The Greek Anthology

Translation of John William Mackail

NOW at her fruitful birth-tide the fair green field flowers out in blowing roses; now on the boughs of the colonnaded cypresses the cicala, mad with music, lulls the binder of sheaves; and the careful mother swallow, having finished houses under the eaves, gives harborage to her brood in the mud-plastered cells; and the sea slumbers, with zephyr-wooing calm spread clear over the broad ship-tracks, not breaking in squalls on the sternposts, not vomiting foam upon the beaches. O sailor, burn by the altars the glittering round of a mullet, or a cuttlefish, or a vocal scarus, to Priapus, ruler of ocean and giver of anchorage; and so go fearlessly on thy seafaring to the bounds of the Ionian Sea.