Haste thee, nymph, whose well-aimed spear
Wounds the fleeting mountain-deer!
Dian, Jove's immortal child,
Huntress of the savage wild!
Goddess with the sun-bright hair!
Listen to a people's prayer.
Turn, to Lethe's river turn,
There thy vanquished people mourn![2]
Come to Lethe's wavy shore,
Tell them they shall mourn no more.
Thine their hearts, their altars thine;
Must they, Dian--must they pine?
[1] This hymn to Diana is extant in Hephaestion. There is an anecdote of
our poet, which has led some to doubt whether he ever wrote any odes of
this kind. It is related by the Scholiast upon Pindar (Isthmionic. od. ii.
v. 1. as cited by Barnes) that Anaecreon being asked why he addressed all
his hymns to women, and none to the deities? answered, "Because women are
my deities."
I have assumed, it will be seen, in reporting this anecdote, the same
liberty which I have thought it right to take in translating some of the
odes; and it were to be wished that these little infidelities were always
allowable in interpreting the writings of the ancients.
[2] Lethe, a river of Iona, according to Strabo, falling into the Meander.
In its neighborhood was the city called Magnesia, in favor of whose
inhabitants our poet is supposed to have addressed this supplication to
Diana. It was written (as Madame Dacier conjectures) on the occasion of
some battle, in which the Magnesians had been defeated.