If for great evils lofty rewards were now to be given, evils would not be more eagerly nor goods more slowly sought after. While I speak I shudder. I do not know, I cannot, I do not wish to speak. Things to be spoken and things unspeakable—who could even weep over both? What rivers, I ask, or what volumes of tears would be enough to wipe away so many foul deeds of so many furies? If I should tell such frenzied things, it would not be fair, if the crime is less; alas! far off lies the action of the laws. Ploughing my song, I weep; with my song I cannot, nor in prose can I tell so many evils, recount so many disgraces, bear such disgraceful things. They are very many; my voice fails for recounting them; it is no shame to all that these things must be uncovered with words. The paper will fail, I know, the speech, the time and the hour, if I wish to touch on, if I wish to reprove, even graver matters.
Indeed my Muse is now too weary to record these things; yet that offspring is not too weary to commit them, and not guiltless. Therefore for a little while this stylus and this dactyl shall be restrained. The Muse shall afterward speak of the lost age and of what comes after, once subdued. We run over the deep seas; let the anchor now be cast; where fuller force and a more favorable breeze shall go, there let us go.