Sometimes, by no divine interposition Nor through the shafts of Venus, a plain woman, Though of inferior beauty, may be loved. For sometimes she herself by her behaviour, Her gentle ways and personal daintiness Will easily accustom you to spend Your whole life with her. And indeed ’tis custom That harmonises love. For what is struck However lightly by repeated blows, Yet after a long lapse of time is conquered And must dissolve. Do you not likewise see That drops of water falling upon stones After long lapse of time will pierce them through? BOOK V Who is there that by energy of mind Could build a poem worthy of our theme’s Majesty and of these discoveries? Or who has such a mastery of words As to devise praises proportionate To his deserts, who to us has bequeathed Such prizes, earned by his own intellect? No man, I think, formed of a mortal body. For if we are to speak as the acknowledged Majesty of our theme demands, a god Was he, most noble Memmius, a god, Who first found out that discipline of life Which now is called philosophy, and whose skill From such great billows and a gloom so dark Delivered life, and steered it into a calm So peaceful and beneath so bright a light. For compare the divine discoveries Of others in old times. ’Tis told that Ceres First revealed corn to men, Liber the juice Of grape-born wine; though life without these things Might well have been sustained; and even now ’Tis said there are some people that live so. But to live happily was not possible Without a serene mind. Therefore more justly Is this man deemed by us a god, from whom Came those sweet solaces of life, which now Already through great nations spread abroad Have power to soothe men’s minds. Should you suppose Moreover that the deeds of Hercules Surpass his, then yet further will you drift Out of true reason’s course. For what harm now Would those great gaping jaws of Nemea’s lion Do to us, and the bristly Arcadian boar? What could the bull of Crete, or Lerna’s pest The Hydra fenced around with venomous snakes, And threefold Gerion’s triple-breasted might, Or those brazen-plumed birds inhabiting Stymphalian swamps, what injury so great Could they inflict upon us, or the steeds Of Thracian Diomede, with fire-breathing nostrils Ranging Bistonia’s wilds and Ismarus? Also the serpent, guardian of the bright Gold-gleaming apples of the Hesperides, Fierce and grim-glancing, with huge body coiled Round the tree’s stem, how were it possible He could molest us by the Atlantic shore And those lone seas, where none of us sets foot, And no barbarian ventures to draw near? And all those other monsters which likewise Have been destroyed, if they had not been vanquished,