Sextus Propertius – Earth is too small a tomb
Go build curved keels,
weave the sails of death;
men’s hands have wrought such ruin at sea.
Earth being too small a tomb
we add the ocean,
by artifice we lengthen
the evil path of fortune.
Can an anchor hold a man
whose household gods cannot?
What shall a man merit
whose homeland is too small?
What he builds is at the wind’s mercy,
for rarely does a hull get old and rot,
and you can’t count on a safe harbor.
Cruel Nature put the sea
at the disposal of avarice and ambition
usually unrealized.
A wild coast testifies to Agamemnon’s grief,
where the pain of Argynnus
brands the waters below the mountain.
For a drowned youth
the Greek ships did not weigh anchor;
Iphigenia killed for the delay.
And rocks broke the triumphant fleet,
Greece thus shipwrecked and sea-ravaged.
A few at a time Ulysses mourned them, his friends,
his wit worthless against the ocean waves.
(from The Poems of Sextus Propertius, Book III [23 BCE], #7, translated by J. P. McCulloch)
