The Argonautica

every last drug together, out of the coffer.

She kissed her own bed, and the folding doors at both sides,

touched the doorposts and walls; with her hands she tore out a long

lock of her hair, left there in the room as a keepsake

for her mother, maidenhood's memorial; then she cried aloud:

This long lock I leave you in place of myself as I go,

my mother; farewell, though I journey far away from you.

Farewell, Chalciope, and all my house! If only the sea

had shattered you, stranger, before you reached Colchis!

So she spoke, and a flood of tears ran down from her eyelids.

As a captive woman slips from the house of a rich man,

whom fate has only now torn far from her own homeland,

who never yet has known sorrow's bitter labor,

but still new to misery, new to the work of a slave,

goes in terror beneath the pitiless hands of a mistress,

so the lovely maiden rushed forth out of the palace.

Even the bars of the doors gave way of their own accord,

springing straight back at the bidding of her swift spells.

Barefoot she ran up along the cramped and narrow pathways,

with her left hand drawing her veil above her eyebrows and over

her brow and lovely cheeks; with her right hand meanwhile

she raised the outermost hem of her tunic high from the ground.

Swiftly she traced the unseen path outside the towers

of the broad-streeted city, she came in fear; no watchman