Learn, ladies, what care can enhance your appearance, and how your beauty may be preserved. Cultivation bade the sterile earth to pay out a bounty of grain, bade the biting thorns to die. Cultivation also improves the bitterness of fruit, and the split tree gains adopted richness. That which is cultivated gives pleasure. Lofty halls are plated with gold, black earth lays hidden under set marble: the same fleeces are many times dyed in cauldron of Tyrian purple: India offers its ivory to be cut into delightful figures. Perhaps the ancient Sabines under king Tatius preferred to cultivate their fathers' farms rather than themselves: when the matron, sitting red in her high seat, was spinning continuously with her hardened thumb, and she herself penned up the lambs which her daughter had pastured, she herself set the twigs and chopped wood on the hearth. But your mothers gave birth to tender girls. You want your body to be covered with rich clothing, you want to change the style of your perfumed hair, you want to have hands shining with gems: you adorn your neck with stones sought from the east, and so large that your ear finds two a burden to bear. Yet it is not a fault, if you are anxious to please, since this age of ours has men who love elegance. Your husbands are refined in feminine principles, and scarcely does a wife have to add to their refinement. It makes a difference for whom each prepares herself, and what lover she may be hunting; elegance of appearance does not cause reproach. They lie hidden in the country and are trimming their hair; though lofty Athos may hide them, lofty Athos will find them smart. There is pleasure, too, in self-satisfaction; and dear to the heart of girls is their own beauty. Juno displays the praised feathers of her bird to men, and many a bird shows off its beauty. Thus love will inflame us rather than by strong herbs, which the hand of a sorceress gathers for her terrible craft. Trust not grasses nor mixed juices, and do not attempt the harmful venom of an infatuated mare; snakes are not split in half by Marsian spells, nor does a wave return to its source; and though one has provoked the bronze of the Temese, the Moon will never be cast off her horses.