The rain doesn’t fall from the clouds forever
on the sodden fields, and capricious storm-winds
don’t always trouble the Caspian
waters, nor does the solid ice linger,

Valgius, dear friend of mine, through all twelve months,
and the oak woods of Garganus aren’t always
trembling, because of the northern gales,
or the ash trees stripped of their foliage:

But you’re always pursuing in tearful ways
the loss of your Mystes, and your endearments
don’t ebb with the evening star’s rising
or when it sinks before the swift sunrise.

Yet Nestor, who lived for three generations,
didn’t mourn his beloved Antilochus,
every moment, nor were the youthful
Troilus’s Trojan parents and sisters,

always weeping. Stop your unmanly grieving
now, and let’s sing about Augustus Caesar’s
new trophies instead, the ice-bound Mount
Niphates, and the Persian waters,

with its flow reduced, now the Medes are added
to the subject nations, and then the Thracians,
riding over their meagre landscape,
within the bounds that we’ve now set for them.