Part of my punishment’s the place I’m at.

Drive my ship, you swift winds—here I’ve no business—

Why do my sails hanker for Italy?

Caesar forbids. Whom he expels, don’t hamper;

My face the Black Sea now must surely see.

Those orders—I deserve them. Crimes that Caesar

Condemned I don’t deem proper to deny.

But if gods aren’t deceived by human actions,

You know my fault is free from villainy.

And, if you know, if a mistake has wrecked me,

If I was foolish, never criminal,

If I accepted Caesar’s public edicts

And backed his house as is allowed to all,

If, in his rule, I sang good times and offered

Incense to Caesar and his family,

If that was my true mind; ye Gods, have mercy!

If not, may I be sunk in the deep sea!

Am I deceived or is the cloudbank thinning,

The ocean changing and its anger laid?

This is no chance. You, called to hear my pledges,

Who can’t be duped, are coming to my aid.

[…]

When in my thoughts that tragic night is pictured

Which in the City formed my final hour,

That night on which I left so much I treasured,

Now once again from my sad eyes tears shower.

The dawn was near on which by Caesar’s order

From Italy’s last bounds I must depart.

No more delay! My mind was numb: for proper

Arrangements I had neither time nor heart.

No thought of choosing slaves or a companion,

No kit or clothes an exile ought to wear.

I was as stunned as someone struck by lightning,

Who lives, yet of his life is unaware.

But when my pain itself cleared my mind’s stormcloud,

And senses in the end some strength regained,

I spoke to my sad friends last words of parting:

So many once—now one or two remained.

I was in tears. My wife, in tears more bitter,

Held me, her blameless sheets wet endlessly.

My daughter, far away on shores of Libya,

Could not be told the fate befallen me.

Look where you might, it seemed a noisy funeral;

You heard the sounds of grief and sorrow swell

Inside the house, with tears in every corner,

As men and women grieved, and slaves as well

If great events may be compared with little,

Troy had the same appearance when she fell.

The voices now of men and dogs were quiet,

And through the night the moon was riding high.

Gazing at her and by her light discerning

The Capitol (my home in vain hard by),

‘Ye Powers’, I said, ‘whose dwellings are my neighbours,

Ye shrines that now my eyes must never see,

And gods, whom I must leave, of Rome’s tall city,

Take for all time this last farewell from me;

‘And though I take my shield too late and wounded,

Yet free from hatred this my banishment,