Naxos with its Bacchic revels on the heights, and green Donysa, Olearos, snow-white Paros, and the sea-strewn Cyclades, and thread the straits sown thick with islands. The sailors’ shouts rise in varied rivalry; the crews raise the cheer: ‘On to Crete and our forefathers!’ A wind rising astern attends us as we sail, and at last we glide up to the ancient shores of the Curetes. Eagerly, therefore, I work on the walls of my chosen city, call it Pergamum, and urge my people, who rejoice at the old name, to love their hearths and build a citadel with lofty roof.

And now the ships were just drawn up on the dry beach; our youth were busy with marriages and new tillage, and I was giving laws and homes, when on a sudden, from a tainted quarter of the sky, came a pestilence and season of death, to the wasting of