Classic Poem

De Iunonis festo

When fruit-filled Tuscia should a wife give me,
We touched the walls, Camillus, won by thee.
The priests to Juno did prepare chaste feasts,
With famous pageants, and their home-bred beasts.
To know their rites well recompensed my stay,
Though thither leads a rough steep hilly way.
There stands an old wood with thick trees dark clouded:
Who sees it grants some deity there is shrouded.
An altar takes men's incense and oblation,
An altar made after the ancient fashion.
Here, when the pipe with solemn tunes doth sound,
The annual pomp goes on the covered ground.
White heifers by glad people forth are led,
Which with the grass of Tuscan fields are fed,
And calves from whose feared front no threat'ning flies,
And little pigs, base hogsties' sacrifice,
And rams with horns their hard heads wreathed back;
Only the goddess-hated goat did lack,
By whom disclosed, she in the high woods took,
Is said to have attempted flight forsook.
Now is the goat brought through the boys with darts,
And given to him that the first wound imparts.
Where Juno comes, each youth and pretty maid
Show large ways, with their garments there displayed.
Jewels and gold their virgin tresses crown,
And stately robes to their gilt feet hang down.
As is the use, the nuns in white veils clad,
Upon their heads the holy mysteries had.
When the chief pomp comes, loud the people hollow,
And she her vestal virgin priests doth follow.
Such was the Greek pomp, Agamemnon dead,
Which fact, and country wealth Halesus fled,
And having wandered now through sea and land,
Built walls high towered with a prosperous hand.
He to th' Hetrurians Juno's feast commended;
Let me, and them by it be aye befriended.