Georgics, book 3, lines 209-241

With cattle as with horses,
nothing so enhances sheer brute power
as frustration of desire, of the urgings of a hidden love.
That’s why men banish bulls to lonely pastures
on the far side of the mountain, and across wide rivers;
or they keep them penned up in their stall
with well-filled feeding troughs.
For when a bull has glimpsed a female,
then his body gradually becomes inflamed,
his strength is sapped.
She works her sweet enticements on him
so that he forgets all thought of woods and pastures.
Often she will goad proud lovers
to resolve their argument by clash of horns.

A lovely heifer grazes in the mighty forests of Calabria.
In turn, her suitor bulls join battle, using all their force,
inflicting on each other countless injuries,
their bodies lathered with black gore.
They lower horns and, bellowing out loud,
they charge against the enemy.
Their echoes sound throughout the earth and sky.

These rivals never stay together as a herd.
The beaten animal departs,
to live in exile in a distant, unknown land,
where he bewails his shame,
the wounds his scornful conqueror has dealt him
and — especially — the love he’s lost;
a loss yet unavenged.
Regretfully, in his mind’s eye
he sees the comfort of his stall,
the country of his ancestors, abandoned.
So he lays his careful plans. He concentrates his powers.
All night long he lies on unstrawed ground,
surrounded by hard rocks,
with prickly leaves and spiky reeds his only food.
After a while, he tests his strength;
he butts into a tree trunk,
working up the anger in his horns;
he savages the winds with blows, he paws the sand,
in preparation for the fight to come.
And soon, with forces mustered, might regained,
he hoists his standard,
charging headlong at his unsuspecting enemy.
He’s like a wave far out at sea which starts to whiten;
from the deep it swells up in an arch
and, rolling on towards the shore,
it roars like thunder all along the reefs
till, nothing less than mountainous, it crashes down,
while, from beneath, the water boils in eddies,
tossing up black sand into the air.