Jove thus replies: “It equally belongs To both to guard our common pledge from wrongs: But if to things we proper names apply, This hardly can be call’d an injury: The theft is love; nor need we blush to own The thief, if I can judge, to be our son; Had you of his desert no other proof, To be Jove’s brother is, methinks, enough: Nor was my throne by worth superior got; Heaven fell to me, as hell to him, by lot: If you are still resolved her loss to mourn, And nothing less will serve than her return, Upon these terms she may again be yours (The irrevocable terms of fate, not ours); Of Stygian food if she did never taste, Hell’s bounds may then, and only then, be pass’d.”