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if he should be granted safe return. In no long time he added captive Asia to the Egyptian territory. For these reasons I, bestowed amidst the celestial host, by a new gift fulfil your ancient vow. Unwillingly, O queen, did I quit your brow,
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unwillingly: I swear to you and to your head; if anyone swears lightly, may he bear a suitable penalty: but who may claim himself equal to steel? Even that mountain was swept away, the greatest on earth, over which Thia’s illustrious progeny passed,
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when the Medes created a new sea, and the barbarian youth sailed its fleet through the middle of Athos. What can locks of hair do, when such things yield to iron? Jupiter! may the whole race of the Chalybes perish, and whoever first began to seek the veins beneath the earth
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and invent the hardness of iron! Just before severance my sister locks were mourning my fate, when Ethiop Memnon’s brother, the winged steed, beating the air with fluttering wings, appeared before Locrian Arsinoe,
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and he bearing me up, flies through aethereal shadows and lays me in the chaste bosom of Venus. Zephyritis herself had dispatched him as her servant, a Greek settler on the Canopian shores. For it was the wish of many gods
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that the golden crown from Ariadne’s temples stay fixed, not alone in heaven’s light, but that we also should gleam, the spoils dedicated from your golden-yellow head; when moist with weeping I entered the temples of the gods, the goddess placed me, a new star, among the ancient ones.
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For touching the Virgin’s and the cruel Lion’s gleams, hard by Lycaonian Callisto, I turn westwards, a guide before the slow-moving Bootes who barely sinks into the vast ocean. But although the footsteps of the gods press upon me in the night,
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