See, lady Moon, where my love came from. "But as it is, I say I owe thanks first to the Cyprian, and after the Cyprian you, lady, were the second to snatch me from the fire, when you called me into this house of yours half burnt; for Eros often kindles a fiercer blaze than Hephaestus on Lipara.

Now the compliments. He owes thanks first to Aphrodite, "the Cyprian," and second to Simaetha, who snatched him half-burnt from the fire; for Eros burns hotter than Hephaestus on Lipara, the volcanic island where the smith god was said to keep his forge. Cholmeley quotes the French scholar Legrand: Theocritus gives these flowers of gallant rhetoric to the man without love, to show how far the jargon of sentiment is from the language of real passion. Set them beside Simaetha's own plain words a few stanzas back.