OVID
METAMORPHOSES
TRANSLATED  AND   WITH   NOTES   BY
CHARLES MARTIN
INTRODUCTION   BY
BERNARD KNOX

Copyright © 2004
ISBN: 0393058107

TO   JOHANNA

CONTENTS
Introduction by Bernard Knox    ix
Acknowledgments    xxv
A Note on This Translation    3
BOOK I
THE SHAPING OF CHANGES    13
BOOK II
OF MORTAL CHIEDREN AND IMMORTAL LUSTS   49
BOOK III
THE WRATH OF JUNO    89
BOOK IV
SPINNING YARNS AND WEAVING TAEES    121
BOOK V
CONTESTS OF ARMS AND SONG    157
BOOK VI
OF PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT    187

BOOK VII
OF THE TIES THAT BIND   221
BOOK VIII IMPIOUS ACTS AND EXEMPLARY LIVES   261
BOOK IX
DESIRE, DECEIT, AND DIFFICULT DELIVERIES    301
BOOK X
THE SONGS OF ORPHEUS   339
BOOK IX
ROME BEGINS AT TROY   367
BOOK XII
AROUND AND ABOUT THE ILIAD    405
BOOK XIII SPOILS OF WAR AND PANGS OF LOVE   435
BOOK XIV
AROUND AND ABOUT WITH AENEAS   479
BOOK XV
PROPHETIC ACTS AND VISIONARY DREAMS    519
Notes     555 Persons, Places, and Personifications in the Metamorphoses    577

INTRODUCTION Bernard Knox
Publius Ovidius Naso1 (the last name, "Nose," was a family inheritance from an ancestor who presumably had a big one), though admired by Shakespeare,2 was distrusted in the nineteenth century as an immoralist and dismissed for most of the twentieth as a lightweight, but is now back in favor. He was all the fashion in his own time, too, and that time has some intriguing resemblances to our own. It was an age of peace that succeeded generations of war and also one that saw the obsolescence of the stern moral code that had made the early Roman republic a nation of dedicated farmer-soldiers and faithful, fertile wives.
In Ovid's day divorce had become commonplace in upper-class Roman circles, abortion not infrequent, families small, and adultery generally condoned. Ovid, who proclaimed himself "the well-known recorder of his own amorous follies," justified that title by devoting well over two thousand lines of elegiac couplets (the standard meter of Latin
1 Ovid uses this name when he refers to himself in his poems; Ovidius, with its first three syllables short, could not be fitted into either hexameter or the second line of the elegiac couplet.
2In Love's Labour's Lost (IV.ii), Holofernes dismisses a poetic love letter addressed by Biron to Rosaline as lacking in "the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy. . . . Ovidius Naso was the man. And why indeed 'Naso' but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?"

love poetry) to a witty chronicle of the ups and downs of his long affair with a married woman, including her abortion and his seduction of her maid. Not content with this he went on to write The Art of Love, an instruction book for young men on where in Rome to find women and how to seduce them, in which at one point he announced his satisfaction with the age in which he lived. "Let others delight in the good old days; I am delighted to be alive right now. This age is suited to my way of life."3
The word here roughly translated as "way of life"—moribus—is, as so often in Ovid, a significant allusion. It is an unmistakable and mocking echo of a famous line of Ennius, the epic poet who, two centuries earlier, had celebrated the great days of the early republic, the wars against Carthage, and the conquest of the eastern Mediterranean: Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque—"By its ancient way of life and its men the Roman state stands firm." Ovid goes on to make perfectly clear why he is so happy to be living now. It is not because of "the stubborn gold we mine, or the rare shells gathered/For our delight from foreign shores,/. . . but for/Refinement and culture, which have banished the tasteless/Crudities of our ancestors."4 One important aspect of "refinement and culture," Ovid took it for granted, was sexual license. "In the old days," he had remarked in his earlier poem, the Amores,"it was different. Those Sabine women stuck to/One husband apiece. But then they didn't wash."5
Unfortunately for Ovid, Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who in 30 B.C., after the defeat and death of Antony and Cleopatra, had become the master of the Roman world, was intent on turning the clock back. Using powers granted him by a subservient Senate, he established a whole legislative program designed to restore the old Roman family values. Octavian himself, before he assumed
3 ArsAmatoria III, 121-22.
4 Ars Amatoria III, 122ff. Translated by Peter Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems (Penguin, 1982), p. 217.
5 Atnores I, 8. 39-40; Green, Ovid:The Erotic Poems, p. 98.

the titles of Augustus and pater patriae, had been no plaster saint. He had divorced his wife, Scribonia, to marry Livia while she was still pregnant by her divorced husband, and, according to Suetonius, he had even before that had a remarkable career as a libertine. He was also the author of a six-line epigram abusing Antony and his wife Fulvia so explicitly obscene that Martial (who quotes it in full)6 cites Augustus as his precedent for his own "witty little books" stuffed with epigrams that Byron labeled "nauseous." But there is no moral reformer more fanatical than a reformed rake, and these severe laws, though not always strictly enforced, were there on the books to be used if needed. One of them made adultery a crime punishable by expulsion from Rome; another restricted advancement on the administrative-military ladder to high office, the cursus honorum, to married men with three children.
Augustus must have been infuriated by the popularity of poems that, as Peter Green puts it, "presented adultery as a high-class social game,"7 but it was not until 8 A.D. that he took action, not just expelling Ovid from Rome but sending him all the way to Tomi on the Black Sea, a Fort Apache of the Roman frontier, where, according to Ovid, showers of poisoned arrows could come over the walls at any moment. One of the two reasons for this harsh sentence, Ovid informs us in one of the many poems written in exile, was a poem—presumably The Art of Love—which, however, he defends in a long letter addressed to Augustus as no worse than the love elegies written by Tibullus and Propertius or for that matter than Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas, the ancestor of Rome's founder, joins in illicit union with Dido. The other reason he gives for his punishment is an error, a word with a semantic range stretching from "mistake" to "madness"; whatever he did (or failed to do)  probably had some  connection with  the  many  court intrigues
6Book XI.20. In the Loeb Classical Library's original edition of the Epigrams (1925) this one (like many another) was translated into Italian. In the new edition edited by D. R. Shackleton Bailey it is turned into plain English.
7Green, Ovid: The Erotic Poems, p. 44.

sparked by the vexed problem of the succession to Augustus or with the sexual scandal that resulted in the exile of Augustus' daughter Julia.
The Art of Love had been in circulation for some eight years when Ovid was forced to leave Rome. In those years he worked on two long poems. One of them was the Fasti, a celebration of the recurring religious fesitvals of the Roman calendar and the myths connected with them.
But this was not the only poem Ovid worked at in the years before the imperial edict consigned this playboy of the Roman World to the outer darkness of the frontier. He also produced a major work which, he announced in its closing lines, was his warrant for eternal fame: "Wherever Roman power rules over conquered lands I shall be read, and through all centuries, if poets' prophecies speak truth, I shall live." The poem was known by the title Metamorphoses,8 a Greek word meaning "changes of shape"; its opening lines proclaim its theme—"My mind is intent on singing of shapes changed into new bodies." In the Metamorphoses, by far the most ambitious of his poems (and also the longest—over 12,000 lines divided into fifteen books), he abandoned the elegiac couplet, the metrical form used in all his other extant work. For the Metamorphoses he chose the hexameter, the line in which Homer sang of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus, which Ennius adapted for the Latin language in his celebration of the great wars of the early republic, andVirgil shaped to majestic music for his tale of Aeneas and the origins of Rome.
It was a meter Ovid had once publicly rejected.The opening couplet of his first collection, the Amores, presents a comic apology for not celebrating the wars of Augustus in hexameter verse. He was about to do so—"Arms and the violence of war were to be my theme, in solemn meter, the subject suited to the verse. My second line was as long as the first." But he was thwarted—"Cupid, they tell me, burst out laughing, and slyly docked it of one foot." The first word of the poem—arma—a
8 Ovid never uses the word, but later writers (Seneca, for example) refer to the poem under this tide.

deliberate echo of Virgil's Arma virumque, makes even more pointed Ovid's expression of his disinclination to celebrate the glories of the Augustan age in epic verse. And now that he has abandoned the verse form of which he had made himself the supreme master, the theme he chooses for his new medium has little to do with heroic action or the Roman national tradition.
Initially, it seems much broader; he begins with the original great metamorphosis, the emergence of our universe from primeval chaos, a magnificent account of the Creation based on the writings of the Stoic philosophers, which suggests perhaps that his model is neither Ennius nor Virgil but Lucretius, whose great poem De Rerum Natura expounds in epic verse the doctrines of Epicurus. The next metamorphoses, however—the passage of the human race through the changes from Golden through Silver and Bronze Ages to the Age of Iron, suggest Hesiod as the model. But at this point Ovid charts his own path with the story of Lycaon, the tyrant whose savagery and contempt for the gods so enrages Jupiter that he changes him into a howling wolf.
This is the first of a long and dazzling succession of transformations, over 250 of them. People are changed into animals, birds, fish, insects, flowers, plants, trees, rivers, fountains, rocks, mountains, islands, and stones; stones are turned into people as are ants; men are changed into women and vice versa; and, in one famous case, a statue is changed into a woman. The stories are told with such graceful charm and wit, and sometimes with a terribilità worthy of Dante at his most infernal, that they have been appropriated by poets and artists ever since. Shakespeare plundered Medea's appeal to Night and Hecate for the great speech in which Prospero abjures his "rough magic" and burlesqued one of Ovid's most famous tales as "the most lamentable comedy and cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe." Bernini, in a miraculous metamorphosis of his own, transformed into marble the limbs of Ovid's Daphne as they become trunk, twig, and leaf of the laurel.
In the first six books the transformations are for the most part the result of divine action. Daphne becomes a laurel tree to escape Apollo's

pursuit and Syrinx a reed to escape Pan. Io is changed into a cow in an attempt on Jupiter's part to conceal his coupling with her from Juno. Callisto is changed into a bear by Diana because she has been made pregnant by Jupiter. Coronis becomes a crow to escape rape by Neptune. Arachne is changed into a spider for challenging Minerva to a spinning contest—and so on. In the next six books, though the actual transformation has to be the work of a god, it is the result of human passion and crime.
So far, the myths Ovid has been using, and often radically recasting, are Greek, but toward the end of Book XIV Roman myth takes over as Aeneas starts on his long journey to Italy, though his progress is often interrupted by more Greek stories—Galatea, Polyphemus, Glaucus— before he reaches his destination and, his mission accomplished, is changed into a god. But before the final metamorphosis—the spirit of Julius Caesar changed into a star—Numa, the Roman lawgiver king who succeeded Romulus (also changed into a star), goes to visit the Greek mystic and philosopher Pythagoras, who, in a 400-line speech, explains to him the nature of the universe and our lives. It is a majestic sermon on the instability not only of the universe but also of our own identities, for, according to Pythagoras, the individual spirit does not perish, but after the death of the body enters some other shape. This transition from metamorphosis to metempsychosis, together with Pythagoras' eloquent diatribe against eating animal flesh, casts an intriguing backward light on the transformations of human beings into animals in the poem, suggesting perhaps that when we see a cow, instead of thinking of meat we should see the animal as an Io transformed, just as we should see a stag as Actaeon, a bear as Callisto, and that when we instinctively move to crush a spider we should remember Arachne.
There is a further resonance to Pythagoras' great speech. Though toward the end of his long litany of impermanence he foresees Rome's dominance of the world and the deification of Augustus, he does not promise permanence. There is no exception to the rule Nihil est quod perstet in orbe—There is nothing in the world that does not change. There are other passages, too, that remind us of Ovid's incurable habit of

writing poems "with double or even triple meanings." When Jupiter, after changing Lycaon into a wolf, decides to annihilate the whole human race, he calls a council of the gods to announce his decision. Though they were all worried about the consequences ("Who would bring incense to their altars?"), they approved, "some with speeches that sharpened Jupiter's anger, some in silence."
Ovid's epic model is of course the divine councils in the Iliad and Odyssey, where, however, disagreement is often expressed and the will of Zeus sometimes (though never openly) opposed. Here, as William S. Anderson points out in his illuminating commentary, "it becomes clear that Jupiter plays the role of Augustus and that the gods are the obsequious senators for whom, a century later, Tacitus expressed such contempt. This poetic Council and its mythical subject suddenly have contemporary repercussions, which generates a mixture of tone that is provocatively elusive."9 Ovid makes sure that his readers will not miss the point by his description of the council's location: "This is the place which, if such audacity be permitted, I would not hesitate to call the Palatine Hill of the wide heaven"—the area where the Roman aristocracy, including Augustus, maintained their stately homes. Just to make everything perfectly clear Ovid adds that the lower-class gods (he actually calls them the plebs) live somewhere else.
But in the main body of the poem, framed by the account of Creation and Flood at the beginning and the discourse of Pythagoras toward the end, Ovid avoids such "contemporary repercussions"; he is the master storyteller who enchants the reader by the variety and strangeness of his tales of passion, violence, and young love as he makes his swift and often surprising transitions from one to another. Many of them speak directly to the concerns of the modern reader; they have, to quote the editors' introduction to After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, "direct, obvious  and powerful affinities with  contemporary  reality.
9 Ovid's Metamorphoses, Books I—V, edited with a commentary by William S.Anderson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), p. 168.

They offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behavior and suffering, especially ones we think of as especially modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of the themes." Noting that "Ovid is again enjoying a boom," they invited a number of poets to translate an episode, ending up with forty-two contributions from Britain, Ireland, America, Australia, and New Zealand.                                   
The result is a surprising and fascinating anthology of modern variations on Ovidian themes, some faithful (after their fashion), some ranging from eccentric to outrageous, all of them impressive. Seamus Heaney offers a moving version, in subtly rhymed couplets, of Orpheus' quest for Eurydice and his death at the hands of the Maenads. C. K.Williams, in his trademark long Whitmanesque lines, gives us a version of the death of Hercules which owes more to Sophocles' Trachiniae (which he translated) than to Ovid. The late (and much lamented) Amy Clampitt contributed a graceful adaptation of the tale of Medea's transformation from love-struck girl to betrayed and vengeful wife. Michael Longley tackles no less than seven of Ovid's episodes, among them the rustic idyll of Philemon and Baucis, in which he stays close to the original, and a wild but charming Irish adaptation of the story of Phoenix, which begins: "I'll hand to you six duck eggs Orla Murphy gave me... ."
Alice Fulton's contribution is a thirty-one-page extravaganza based on the 113 lines Ovid devoted to the story of Apollo and Daphne, featuring an Apollo who "favored snapbrim hats, alligator shoes/and sharkskin/suits from Sy Devine's Hollywood mens' store. . . ." Kenneth Koch serves up a rollicking ballad of Jove and Io—"Her youthful beauty caused in Jove such ache that 'Me, oh! my, oh!'/He cried,'she must be mine!' . . ." Simon Armitage's short version of Jove's affair with Europa will send American readers to their dictionaries looking (sometimes in vain) for the meaning of such Northern English dialect words as stirk and stot, bezzle and plodge. There is a short poem by our own former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, which is not so much a translation of Ovid

as an intriguing poem about Ovid and poetic creation. And there are four excerpts by England's poet laureate, Ted Hughes: a fine version of the first 300 lines—Creation, Four Ages, Flood, Lycaon—together with the long episodes of the deaths of Pentheus and Adonis and a shorter tale, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.
Hughes has now combined these four selections with twenty more to form a volume: Tales from Ovid.10 It contains about one third of the text, including most of the well-known tales, though those of Orpheus, Jason and Medea, Cephalus and Procris, Baucis and Philemon, as well as the contents of Books XIII to XV, are missing. Hughes is of course an accomplished and powerful poet and the deep sympathy with and imaginative recreation of animal life and feeling that is such a marked feature of his work serves him well here. As, for example, in his version of the fate of Actaeon, who, returning from the hunt with his hounds, accidentally stumbles on the virgin goddess Diana as she bathes naked in a pool. Infuriated at being exposed to male gaze, she reaches behind her for an arrow, but she has left her weapons on the shore.
No weapon was to hand—only water.
So she scooped up a handful and dashed it
Into his astonished eyes, as she shouted:
"Now, if you can, tell how you saw me naked. "
That was all she said, but as she said it Out of his forehead burst a rack of antlers. His neck lengthened, narrowed, and his ears
Folded to whiskery points, his hands were hooves, His arms long slender legs. His hunter's tunic Slid from his dappled hide. With all this
10Tales from Ovid, trans. Ted Hughes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

The goddess
Poured a shocking stream of panic terror
Through his heart like blood. Actaeon
Bounded out across the cave's pool
In plunging leaps, amazed at his own lightness.
And there
Clear in the bulging mirror of his bow-wave
He glimpsed his antlered head,
And cried: "What has happened to me?"
No answer came. No sound came but a groan.
This loose stanza form served Hughes, with varying line lengths throughout the book, for a collection of episodes that combine, as one English critic has put it, "his feeling for drama with a tough, brawny language." Unfortunately the language is apt at times to become much too brawny, to the point in fact where it is utterly alien to the style and spirit of the original. Ovid's description of the wickedness of mankind in the Iron Age concludes with the phrase Vida iacet pietas—Piety (which includes respect for duty to one's fellows as well as to the state and the gods) lies conquered. In Hughes's version these three words turn up as: "The inward ear, attuned to the Creator/Is underfoot like a dog's turd." Even if one manages to accept the inward ear being underfoot, that dog's turd is too much. Ovid is absolutely incapable of introducing such an object into his verse. He can be terrifying as well as beguiling, sexually suggestive as well as discreetly allusive, comic as well as tragic, but he is always elegant.
Sometimes Hughes does more than add a discordant detail of his own. When Pentheus mocks the prophet Tiresias, "he jeered," Hughes writes, "at this dreamer./'Dreams,'he explained,/'Which this methane-mouth/Tells us are the dark manifesto/Of the corrector/In fact are corpse-lights, the ignes fatui,/Miasma from the long-drop/and fermenting pit/Of what we don't want, don't need,/And have dumped./They

rise from the lower bowel. And lower.' " If you look for the source of this brawny language in Ovid you will find no trace of it whatsoever. In fact in Ovid Pentheus is not even given direct speech; Ovid reports simply that "he laughed at the prophetic words of the old man and taunted him with his darkness, the loss of his sight." Hughes's versions, for all their merits, are to be read with caution; some of their most striking passages have no warrant in the text.
Tales from Ovid also suffers from the disadvantage that it is a selection of stories from a work in which the means employed to ensure continuity are often as intriguing as the stories themselves. Continuity is what Ovid prays for in his poem; he asks the gods to look kindly on his enterprise and "bring the poem uninterrupted down from the first beginnings of the world to the present day." Since what he is about to launch into is a collection of hundreds of stories, some short, some long, selected from Greek and Roman mythology because they end in a metamorphosis, this sounds like a tall order, even for gods. But they comply. Though the poem is divided into fifteen books, these books, unlike those ofVirgil's Aeneid, are not artistic unities, each with its dramatic opening and significant closure. On the contrary, time after time, a story runs over from one book to the next. The poem is a seamless whole, an uninterrupted progress from start to finish, from the creation of the world to the final metamorphosis of the spirit of the murdered Julius Caesar into a star. And one of the many pleasures offered to the reader stems from the subtlety, variety, and often surprising wit of the transitions from one tale to another.
Sometimes one tale is embedded in another, in the style of The Arabian Nights. Mercury, for example, sent by Jupiter to get rid of Argus, the hundred-eyed guardian Juno had set to watch Io, puts him to sleep with the story of Syrinx, the nymph changed into a reed, and then cuts off his head. When, after the Flood and the creation of the new human race, other forms of life emerged, one was an enormous serpent called Python, which Apollo killed. To commemorate his victory he established the Pythian Games, at which the prize for the winners was a

crown of oak leaves. Every one of Ovid's readers knew that it was a crown of laurel leaves, and he hastens to explain that the laurel tree had not yet come into existence. That was the result of Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, who was the daughter of a river god. All the other river gods came to console her father for his loss, except Inachus, who had himself lost a daughter—Io, transformed into a cow.
She eventually regained human shape and bore Jupiter a son, Epaphus, who became a great friend of Phaethon, the son of Helios, the sun god. Phaethon persuaded his father to let him drive the chariot but lost control of the horses and came too near the earth. Jupiter put a stop to his ride with a thunderbolt and then came down to survey the damage. He ran into Callisto, a nymph companion of the goddess Diana, seduced her, and made her pregnant; when Diana saw her condition she changed the girl into a bear. The skill with which these transitions are managed, providing surprise time after time in the long series, is one of the most delightful features of the poem; anything short of a full version gives the reader short weight.
This point is emphasized in the preface to David Slavitt's translation of the whole text.11 "As a translator," he writes, "I take all kinds of liberties, but I am strict in my observance of length and scale, which I take to be significant artistic decisions that any new poem ought to respect and re-create. The sweep of this work, the change in its moods and rhythms, the way in which the heart of the poem turns out to be in the transitions, some of them quite arbitrary and fortuitous, are what have impressed me and what I have tried to convey."
Convey the sweep of the work he does, as the poem rolls on in the polished "English hexameters" modeled on but lighter than those developed by Richmond Lattimore for his translation of the Illiad. They are impressive, as the following excerpt will demonstrate. It is a passage in which the youth goddess Hebe has just rejuvenated her husband Iolaus.
11 "The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

As she starts to swear that she will never do the same thing for anybody else, Themis prevents her, with a prophecy packed with mythical examples of future rejuvenations that may puzzle modern readers by its cryptic allusiveness.The excerpt also makes clear what Slavitt meant by the phrase "all kinds of liberties."
. . . Themis, the Hours' mother and Mistress of Seasons and Years, prevented this ill-considered gesture. And now we get Themis' list of myths in which time stands still, moves around, plays tricks . . . not stories but only allusions, some of them clear, and others oblique or coy. Our attention wanes, as the voice—of Themis? Ovid?—falters and drones. Tired perhaps? We strain to follow its murmur and feel frustration, even annoyance. Why has he thus betrayed us? Is this a place he'd have fixed had the gods not sent him away (or, to keep to the pattern, turned him from darling to exile, the victim of Caesar Augustus' whim)? But there is a way to read this passage and turn time back. We are children again, hide in the hall at the top of the stairs and strain to hear the phrases that float up from our parents' conversations. Greedy for what we can catch, we hold our breath to listen and to comprehend their words and the world's unpleasant secrets from which they have tried to protect us as long and as well as they could. The question is one of trust, which Ovid invites or tests. Have we learned in these pages to yield to his moods and moves, to read with that mixture of love and awe we felt many years ago in the upstairs hall? The subject, at any rate, is the business of youth and age, how the gods can turn back the clocks—not often, but every now and again. We get Amphiarius' story. . . .
At this point Slavitt gives us a highly selective version of what Themis said (omitting Amphiarius, to whom Ovid devotes ten lines) and proceeds with the words "We are back on track now. . . ." But we are not. He regales us with seven more lines of editorial comment—"This story,

a somewhat mannered performance,/is one of those nice rhetorical set pieces Ovid loved . . ."—before settling down to the lurid story of Byblis' passion for her brother Caunus. Slavitt speaks eloquently in his introduction of the reader's (and the translator's) reaction to the poem as a "leap of sympathy, intuition, understanding, and, finally, collaboration." But this seems to go beyond collaboration; it is in fact editorial intervention, or perhaps intrusion would be a more accurate description.
Fortunately such passages are rare. No one can deny the merits of Slavitt's version. His English hexameter is a great success—a supple, fluid, and versatile medium that does Ovid's loosening of the Virgilian line full justice. And at his best he is very good indeed. Here, for example (and for comparison with Hughes), is his version of the metamorphosis of Actaeon.
Without her quiver of arrows, she makes do with splashing his head with water she kicks in his direction in playful anger— or is it real? He has no idea! His wits have left him. Utterly dumb, he can barely comprehend her words as she speaks to him: "Now, that you've seen a naked goddess, go and tell whomever you will, or whomever you can. ..." On his head, where the water drops landed, his horns are already sprouting out in a rack of impressive antlers that spread out from the crowns of mature stags. His ears are sharpening into pointed excrescences, while his hands are pointing, becoming hoofs, and his arms are turning to forelegs. His skin is a hide, and his heart is cold with terror. He looks down into the water's surface sees what he has become, then turns in panic and runs faster than he has ever been able to run. He attempts to vent his rage at what's happened, give voice to his woe, but words fail, have fled. . . .
Ovid, as the editors of After Ovid remarked, is once again enjoying a boom. There is at least one more translation of the Metamorphoses under way; excerpts from it have appeared in literary magazines12 and the fin-
12The Tennessee Quarterly (Fall 1995); Eclectic Literary Forum, vol. 7, no. 1 (1997).

ished version is to be published by Norton. It is by Charles Martin, a well-known poet13 and also the author of a brilliant translation of Catullus, which was reviewed in these columns some years ago.14 Like Slavitt, he avoids breaks in the narrative and stanza form, using one line throughout, an elegantly varied version of the standard English pentameter. Here is the fate of Actaeon:
. . . [Diana] managed to turn sideways and look back as if she wished she had her arrows handy— but making do with what she had, scooped up water and flung it in Actaeon's face, sprinkling his hair with the avenging droplets, and adding words that prophesied his doom: "Now you may tell of how you saw me naked, tell it if you can, you may. "
No further warning: the brow which she has sprinkled jets the horns of a lively stag; she elongates his neck, narrows the tips of his ears to tiny points, converts his hands to hooves, his arms to legs, and clothes his body in a spotted pelt. Lastly the goddess endows him with trembling fear: that heroic son of Autonoe flees, astonished to find himself so swift a runner.
But when he stopped and looked into a pool at the reflection of his horns and muzzle— "Poor me!" he tried to say, but no words came. . . .
This is not only more faithful to Ovid than either of the other two versions (Slavitt's "in playful anger—or is it real?" and Hughes's "hunters tunic slid from his dappled hide" are both additions) but also captures an
l3He is the author of Steal the Bacon (1987) and What the Darkness Proposes (1996), both published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
I4"A Dangerously Modern Poet," The NewYork Review, December 3,1992, pp. 19-23.

important feature of the original which the others have missed. They attribute the original action, the sprinkling of the water, to Diana, but after that the transformation is described as a process, a sort of organic growth. Martin uses active verbs; each detail of the transformation is a separate action on the part of the goddess. And this is true to Ovid's text, where a remarkable repetition, the -at ending of the verbs—dat, dat, cacuminal, mutat, velat—she gives him the horns, gives length to his neck, points his ears, changes his forearms to legs, and covers his body with a pelt—presents the stages of Actaeon's transformation as the whiplash blows inflicted by divine fury. Martin's complete text is clearly something to look forward to with high expectations.
I WROTE THOSE words in 1998, and now at last we have the whole of Ovid's masterpiece in Charles Martin's translation, which surpasses in its brilliance and accuracy even my high expectations. From the very first lines the general reader recognizes the expertise of a translator who is also a widely admired poet, and the scholar admires the skill of a poet who is also a scholar and literary critic. But the translation's prime virtue is its irresistible readability; its flowing, melodious lines sweep you on from the end of one story into the beginning of the next, from the creation of the world to Ovid's final claim: that after his death he will be "immortal as the name I leave behind/. . . my words will be upon the people's lips ... then I will live forever in my fame." It is a claim that over the centuries proved true, and Martin's splendid version of Ovid's masterpiece will give it a fresh lease of life for a long time to come.
                                                   —Bernard Knox
May 2003

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the editors of the following publications, in which portions of this work have previously appeared:
Arion: "The Wrath of Juno," "Deucalion and Pyrrha," "Medea," "The
Plague at Aegina," and "Cephalus and Procris" Barrow Street: "The House of Rumor" Cumberland Poetry Review. "Tereus, Procne, and Philomela" Eclectic Literary Forum: "The Sun and Leucothoë" The Formalist: "The Mortal Child of an Immortal's Lust" Parnassus: "Polyphemus, Galatea, and Acis" Pivot: "The Daughters of Pierus" The Tennessee Quarterly: "Echo and Narcissus" TriQuarterly: "Of Praise and Punishment: Arachne"
I am grateful for the frequent PSC-CUNY Research Awards that have given me time to work on this project.
I have benefited greatly from the very close attention that two advisory editors gave to earlier versions of this translation. Bernard Knox's enthusiastic encouragement for this undertaking has been a source of inspiration to me from the beginning, and his comments on that earlier text were invaluable to me. I am similarly indebted to John Hollander, whose superb ear helped me find my way into Ovid's verse; his conversations on Ovid and on translation are warmly recalled.

William S. Anderson's two-volume commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses has been my constant companion in this venture, a treasure for any reader of the poem.
Over the years, friends have offered advice, suggestions, solutions, partial solutions, and venues wherein I have had the chance to talk (formally or informally) about my work and read from it: my thanks to John Gery, Dana Gioia and Michael Peich, Rachel Hadas, Emily Martin, David Mason, Wyatt Prunty, Mark Rudman, Nigel Thompson, Rosanna Warren, and the late Katharine Washburn.
John Mardirosian first welcomed me to Norton; my manuscript and I both have learned much from Ann R. Tappert's thoughtful copyediting, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge Brian Baker's continuing helpfulness. I am most grateful to Carol Bemis, whose enthusiasm, dedication, and patience have done much to make these remarks both possible and necessary.

METAMORPHOSES

A   NOTE   ON   THIS   TRANSLATION
Ovid ends the Metamorphoses with the word vivam, which I have unremarkably translated as "I will live." A poet survives only if his poem does, and if his poem survives, it does so either in its own language or in translation; there are no other possibilities. In our time, the Metamorphoses has many more readers in English and in other living languages than it has in the Latin in which Ovid composed it: this does not mean that it is less alive in Latin than in translation, only that it is less frequently alive in Latin. The loss of Latin as a living language makes translation essential if most of us are to enjoy Ovid's work at all, but it also means that an entire world of connotation and association has been lost with it.
In his time, Ovid's Metamorphoses was centered in a web of cultural and political relations to which it was bound by allusions of various kinds. For Ovid's first readers, his brief introduction—the first four lines of his poem—not only set out his own intentions for it, but referred to two of his own earlier works in a very different genre and illustrated in verse his turn from the elegiac couplets he had previously written to the hexameter lines proper to the Latin epic. Not only personal history but cultural: the reader of his time would have also noticed allusions not just to Ovid's earlier work but also to the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Argonautica of Apollonius, and to the issue of whether the poet should write a traditional, chronologically arranged epic or the more refined

variety preached and practiced by the Alexandrian Callimachus and his later Roman followers.
What Ovid's Pythagoras would call "the gnawing tooth of time" has left us the poem intact but has fragmented the web surrounding it: Ovid's personal history and the larger cultural issues of his day have little resonance in our age; if a translator could bring across those allusions into modern English, a contemporary reader would still have little or no idea what was at issue; in that sense, they are lost to translation. Throughout the Metamorphoses, for example, Ovid is engaged in a complex and competitive relationship with the poet Virgil and with the other epic of the Augustan era, Virgil's Aeneid. Many contemporary readers will have their first hint of this in Book XIII, when Aeneas himself makes his appearance; unlike Virgil's Aeneas, however, Ovid's hero bumbles along like a celebrity tourist on a guided tour, opening his mouth only to get in trouble for saying the wrong thing and otherwise avoiding memorable speech and action. Very odd indeed for an epic hero, and in the past, his behavior in the poem has often been seen as ineptitude on Ovid's part rather than as a clever element of a deliberately parodie strategy.
Other, more subtle allusions to Virgil's poem may be misunderstood or lost entirely. In Book III of the Metamorphoses, the goddess Juno bitterly complains about her husband Jove's affair with Semele and is about to launch into a great tirade when she stops to remind herself of her own importance and to threaten vengeance on her enemy:
"profeci quid enim totiens per iurgia?" dixit, "ipsa petenda mihi est; ipsam, si maxima Iuno rite vocor, perdam, si me gemmantia dextra sceptra tenere decet, si sum regina lovisque et soror et coniunx—"
"But when have I won anything by shouting?" she asked. "No: I must attack and ruin her, if I am rightly styled as almighty Juno,

if it is right for me to bear the scepter, if I am certainly the queen of Jove, his sister, his wife—"
Part of the fun in this passage is that Ovid has taken a speech of Juno from Book I of the Aeneid, in which she laments her inability to prevent Aeneas from reaching Italy, an issue of cosmic importance, and applied it to the rather more comical situation of the latest infidelity of her perpetually straying husband, Jove, the omnipotent ruler of heaven; Ovid's last phrase in this passage, "regina Iovisque et soror et coniunx," "the queen of Jove, his sister and wife," is taken directly from Virgil; to it Ovid adds one more phrase, deflating Juno's epic dignity just as surely as Groucho Marx did Margaret Dumont's: "certe soror" "well, certainly his sister."
This is not to say that Ovid is completely without respect for Virgil; his borrowing and echoing of Virgilian phrases throughout the Metamorphoses indicate that he clearly realized the older poet's genius; but to Virgil's gravitas he opposed that "thoughtful lightness" that Italo Calvino finds in his work; to Virgil's single story of how one man, Aeneas, refused to be sidetracked from coming to Italy and establishing a dynasty that led to the rule of Augustus, Ovid opposes so many stories told by so many voices that it is hard to be sure we have counted them accurately.
Ovid's relationship with Virgil, important as it may have been for him in staking out his poetic turf, is impossible to convey in translation, since the existence of Virgil himself largely depends on translations. Unless there were a translation of the Aeneid so distinctive in its diction or rhythm that the translator of the Metamorphoses could count on his readers recognizing an allusion to it—but even to suggest this is to recognize its unlikeliness.
And what of Ovid's relationship to Augustus himself, the "first citizen" of the Roman state and the official sponsor of Virgil and his literary vision? In Book I, Ovid describes a boisterous convocation of the Olympian gods in which an obstreperous Jove lords it over the other gods and decides to wipe out the human race altogether, for ... its cru-

elty! Ovid explicitly compares Jove to Augustus in this scene, and then goes on to show Jove, in the remainder of Book I and subsequent books, as a successful rapist and clumsy seducer of essentially defenseless women. In Book XV, Ovid again compares Augustus to Jove and praises him so extravagantly, in a tone so different from anything else in the Metamorphoses, that it is hard to believe Ovid is being serious. "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise," said Alexander Pope, and this seems almost a formula for what Ovid is doing here. Between these episodes are others in which Ovid appears to raise serious questions about the character of Augustus and the legitimacy of his reign. If the Olympian gods often seem in Ovid's treatment of them to be the spoiled members of a dysfunctional family, then Ovid's comparison of Augustus to Jove becomes an act of political subversion, and the Metamorphoses may be read as a social and political commentary, an allegorical reflection of its times, and not—it never was intended to be—a timeless and canonical collection of myths.
The translator may suggest such things, but they must be left for the critic to develop: they belong to what has already been lost, that world of context in which Ovid's poem once moved. What the translator can hope for is to bring over as best he may those elements of Ovid's style that can be translated. Chief among these would be that "thoughtful lightness" that Italo Calvino has spoken of in his Six Memos for the New Millennium. One can see it in the irony that so often undercuts the noble and the heroic, either by an inappropriate admission (as in Juno's monologue cited above) or by a simile that brings us from tragedy to comedy with no stops in between, as when Pyramus (in Book IV) nobly decides to take his own life in emulation of his beloved Thisbe:
" 'Drink my blood now,' he says, drawing his sword,
and thrusting it at once in his own guts:
a fatal blow; dying, he draws the blade
out of his burning wound, and his lifeblood
follows it, jetting high into the air,

as he lies on his back upon the ground.
"It was as when a water pipe is ruptured where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak ...
The reader is torn from the world of undying love and thrown into one in which we are trying to find a twenty-four-hour plumbing service.
So then, there is the speed of the narration, the casualness of tone, the rapid changes in point of view, the alternation between apparent sympathy for his characters and apparent indifference to their fates; there is the wordplay, the elaborate rhetorical and prosodic figures, the whimsical erudition, and the coining of new words: more than enough to keep a translator busy. If the translator cannot reproduce one of Ovid's jokes, he may perhaps substitute one of his own in a different place to give a sense of Ovid's playfulness.
Other effects are impossible to reproduce. Latin allows the poet the liberty to create lines, such as the so-called Golden Line, which Virgil and Ovid both employed, in which a pair of adjectives and their respective nouns at either end enclose a verb in the middle. English will rarely stand still for this sort of thing, but occasionally something like it may occur to the translator, as in the passage in Book I where Io's poor father laments her having been discovered in her current condition as a heifer:
"Lost, you were less a grief than you are, found!"
Though this is not a reflection of the metrical arrangement of the original lines, I used it anyway, since the artificiality of the arrangement tells us something about the way in which we are to understand Io's (temporary) metamorphosis.
When I began my own process of translation, I set out in medias res, with the opening of Book III, to see what doing Ovid would be like:
Iamque deus posita fallacies imagine tauri se confessus erat dictaeque rura tenebat,

cum pater ignarus Cadmo perquirere raptam imperat et poenam, si non invenerit, addit exilium, facto plus et sceleratus eodem.
My first question was, what kind of meter will work for this? My earliest version used a line whose length and irregularly placed stresses would seem, I hoped, analogous to Ovid's dactylic hexameter:
And now, no longer misrepresenting himself as a bull, Jove in his own form arrived at Crete, while the captive girl's baffled father orders her brother Cadmus to search for her, and—perverse but paternal—threatens to banish the son if he doesn't come up with the daughter.
This lumbered along genially enough, with some lines sagging toward the middle, but I kept thinking of it as a blunt club, battering Ovid into submission. With those few lines, I realized that Ovid does not stop or slow down to take prisoners: he moves swiftly, from one detail to another, one story to another. A second version tried for a shorter line and greater speed:
And now, no longer impersonating a bull,
Jove was on Crete, exposed as himself, while the captive
girl's baffled father (in an action both
paternal and perverse) orders her brother Cadmus
to go out and find her or face banishment.
In subsequent versions, my line moved closer and closer to blank verse—the iambic pentameter line—until I realized that blank verse was what I was looking for:
And now, his taurine imitation ended, the god exposed himself for what he was to cowed Europa on the isle of Crete.

In an action both paternal and perverse, the captured maiden's baffled father bids her brother Cadmus to locate the girl or face an endless term of banishment.
In blank verse I found both an analogue to Ovid's dactylic hexameter and a willing and patient warhorse, infinitely adaptable and responsible to the demands placed upon it. Since contemporary poetry has for the most part yielded storytelling to prose, I have organized my verse into paragraphs, as both an acceptance of that fact and a challenge to it.
And so, blank verse it has been, for the most part. There are a few passages where I have departed from its rule; in Book IV, for instance, I have the demonic Tisiphone speak in rhymed couplets because I did not know how else to convey the sheer strangeness of that scene; couplets occasionally managed to slip in elsewhere, either alone or in small groups, where I had not expected them: a number of them found their way into Book X at a place where I was perhaps thinking of Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard."The hymn to Bacchus at the beginning of Book IV is rendered in a meter associated with hymns in English; and the awkward, boxy quatrains of the Athenians' song of praise to Theseus in Book VII are meant to resemble an old-fashioned kind of amateur verse.
In Book V, Ovid tells how the goddess Minerva visits the immortal Muses, the nine daughters of Memory, and learns that they had recently been challenged in song by the nine human daughters of Pierus, who were defeated in the ensuing contest and changed into birds. I do not know what Ovid really thought of the daughters of Pierus, but he does give them a much more interesting song than he gives the Muses. It occurred to me that the contest might be represented as one between the voices of Poesy and those of the Downtown Scene. Thus, the Pierides became the P-Airides, and their song is presented in the diction and meter of contemporary rap. Because Ovid was imitating song here and not speech, I now needed a meter different from the blank verse I had been using and one that would reflect the formality of the Muses' opposing song. Since it seemed fitting that the Muse Calliope would speak in

poetry, I settled on a loose five-beat line, relatively irregular as to placement of stresses, but to my ear a lot like Latin dactylic hexameter.
At this point I noticed that in addition to the fifth book, Ovid also turns from the imitation of conversation to the imitation of poetry in the tenth and fifteenth books of his poem. In Book V, it is the song of the Muse Calliope; in Book X, it is the songs of her son, Orpheus; and in Book XV, it is the long, inspired (so he says) monologue of the philosopher Pythagoras, whose teachings—written out in Greek hexameter lines—were known in a collection called The Golden Sayings. All three figures are related: Calliope and Orpheus are mother and son, and Pythagoras is bound to both of them by his habit of writing in verse and by the emphasis that Pythagorean thought placed on the mystical importance of music. Whether Ovid is using these figures to signal that his epic of fifteen books can be structurally divided into three equal parts, I cannot say: Ovid is very skillful at playing with our structural expectations. However, because of the relationship between these speakers, and because they are all speaking poetry, as it were, I have used the same meter for all three of them.
Though I have generally resisted the urge to add anything to an already abundant original, there are three areas in which I have supplied some information that Ovid left out.
By allowing his stories to jump from one book to the next, and by abrupt, often fortuitous-seeming transitions between stories, Ovid deliberately gives most of the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses the appearance of mutability; though they are permeable, they also have a certain underlying coherence, and so I have supplied titles that indicate what I take to be the major theme of each book. I have also supplied running titles for each of the stories, at about the place—and opinions will differ on this—where one story changes to another.
Finally, there are some places, usually near the end of a story, where Ovid withholds information necessary to complete the reader's understanding of what he has just read; often Ovid will leave out entirely the names of some of his more significant characters: Aesculapius, for instance,

or Europa, or Callisto, all unnamed in the tales told of them. These omissions may simply be Ovid's way of assuring his readers that he knows they are already familiar with the story, a mild form of flattery, and a means of inviting their participation in the poem: if they aren't familiar with it, how long will it take them to discover the identity of the protagonist?
Since Ovid's contemporary readers are not as familiar with the figures of myth and legend as his first readers were, I have taken the liberty of slipping the names into the tales, either in the running titles or occasionally in a bracketed line or two in the text itself. I apologize in advance to those who find this obtrusive; the alternative, sending the reader back to the notes at a crucial moment in the story, seemed to me even more so.
Translators hope to be stalking-horses for those readers who will discover the work in their own language for the first time and make something new out of it. Shakespeare found in Golding's version of Ovid a source for the cruelties of Titus Andronicus and the refined magic of The Tempest. After a long period in which Ovid seemed to have little to say to Western readers, his text is once again coming to be seen as a source.
It is perhaps too early to say what it will be a source of, but in his Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino describes what he calls "the manifold text, which replaces the oneness of the thinking 'I' with a multiplicity of subjects, voices and views of the world." Calvino goes on to describe the possibilities it opens: "Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic." One ancient source of the manifold text in Western literature is of course Ovid's Metamorphoses, as Calvino clearly recognizes when he asks, "Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote about the continuity of forms?"*
* Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 117 and 124.

BOOK I
THE SHAPING OF CHANGES
Proem         The creation         The four ages
War with the Giants         Lycaon's feast         The great flood
Deucalion and Pyrrha         The second creation
Apollo and the Python         Apollo and Daphne
Jove and Io (1)         Pan and Syrinx
Jove and Io (2)         Phaëthon

Proem
My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed
into new bodies: O gods above, inspire
this undertaking (which you've changed as well)
and guide my poem in its epic sweep
from the world's beginning to the present day.
The creation Before the seas and lands had been created, before the sky that covers everything, Nature displayed a single aspect only throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,
shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk                                              10
and nothing more, with the discordant seeds of disconnected elements all heaped together in anarchic disarray.
The sun as yet did not light up the earth, nor did the crescent moon renew her horns, nor was the earth suspended in midair, balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean extend her arms to the margins of the land.
Although the land and sea and air were present, land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,                                       20
and air lacked light; shapes shifted constantly, and all things were at odds with one another, for in a single mass cold strove with warm, wet was opposed to dry and soft to hard, and weightlessness to matter having weight.
Some god (or kinder nature) settled this dispute by separating earth from heaven, and then by separating sea from earth and fluid aether from the denser air;
and after these were separated out                                                           30
and liberated from the primal heap, he bound the disentangled elements

each in its place and all in harmony.
The fiery and weightless aether leapt to heaven's vault and claimed its citadel; the next in lightness to be placed was air; the denser earth drew down gross elements and was compressed by its own gravity; encircling water lastly found its place, encompassing the solid earth entire.                                                        40
Now when that god (whichever one it was) had given Chaos form, dividing it in parts which he arranged, he molded earth into the shape of an enormous globe, so that it should be uniform throughout.
And afterward he sent the waters streaming in all directions, ordered waves to swell under the sweeping winds, and sent the flood to form new shores on the surrounded earth;
he added springs, great standing swamps and lakes,                                50
as well as sloping rivers fixed between their narrow banks, whose plunging waters (all in varied places, each in its own channel) are partly taken back into the earth and in part flow until they reach the sea, when they—received into the larger field of a freer flood—beat against shores, not banks. He ordered open plains to spread themselves, valleys to sink, the stony peaks to rise, and forests to put on their coats of green.                                               60
And as the vault of heaven is divided by two zones on the right and two on the left, with a central zone, much hotter, in between, so, by the care of this creator god, the mass that was enclosed now by the sky was zoned in the same way, with the same lines

inscribed upon the surface of the earth.
Heat makes the middle zone unlivable,
and the two outer zones are deep in snow;
between these two extremes, he placed two others                                    70
of temperate climate, blending cold and warmth.
Air was suspended over all of this, proportionately heavier than aether, as earth is heavier than water is. He ordered mists and clouds into position, and thunder, to make test of our resolve, and winds creating thunderbolts and lightning.
Nor did that world-creating god permit the winds to roam ungoverned through the air;
for even now, with each of them in charge                                                  80
of his own kingdom, and their blasts controlled, they scarcely can be kept from shattering the world, such is the discord between brothers.
Eurus went eastward, to the lands of Dawn, the kingdoms of Arabia and Persia, and to the mountain peaks that lie below the morning's rays; and Zephyr took his place on the western shores warmed by the setting sun. The frozen north and Scythia were seized
by bristling Boreas; the lands opposite,                                                         90
continually drenched by fog and rain, are where the south wind, known as Auster, dwells. Above these winds, he set the weightless aether, a liquid free of every earthly toxin.
No sooner had he separated all within defining limits, when the stars, which formerly had been concealed in darkness, began to blaze up all throughout the heavens; and so that every region of the world should have its own distinctive forms of life,                                         100

the constellations and the shapes of gods occupied the lower part of heaven; the seas gave shelter to the shining fishes, earth received beasts, and flighty air, the birds.
An animal more like the gods than these, more intellectually capable and able to control the other beasts, had not as yet appeared: now man was born, either because the framer of all things,
the fabricator of this better world,                                                               110
created man out of his own divine substance—or else because Prometheus took up a clod (so lately broken off from lofty aether that it still contained some elements in common with its kin), and mixing it with water, molded it into the shape of gods, who govern all.
And even though all other animals lean forward and look down toward the ground,
he gave to man a face that is uplifted,                                                          120
and ordered him to stand erect and look directly up into the vaulted heavens and turn his countenance to meet the stars; the earth, that was so lately rude and formless, was changed by taking on the shapes of men.
The four ages Golden, that first age, which, though ignorant of laws, yet of its own will, uncoerced, fostered responsibility and virtue; men had no fear of any punishment,
nor did they read of threatened penalties                                                   130
engraved on bronze; no throng of suppliants trembled before the visage of a judge or sought protection from the laws themselves.

As yet no pine tree on its mountaintop had been chopped down and fitted out to ship for foreign lands; men kept to their own shores; steep moats did not yet girdle besieged towns; there were no straight bronze trumpets, no curved horns, no swords or helmets; without warfare, all the nations lived, securely indolent.                                                            140
No rake had been familiar with the earth, no plowshare had yet wronged her; untaxed, she gave of herself freely, providing all essentials. Content with food acquired without effort, men gathered fruit from the arbutus tree, wild strawberries on mountainsides, small cherries, and acorns fallen from Jove's spreading oak.
Spring was the only season that there was, and the warm breath of gentle Zephyr stroked
flowers that sprang up from the ground, unsown.                                      150
Later—though still untilled—the earth bore grain, and fields, unfallowed, whitened with their wheat; now streams of milk, now streams of nectar flowed, and from the green oak, golden honey dripped.
When Saturn was dispatched to Tartarus, Jove ruled the world; the silver race appeared, less dear than gold, but costlier than bronze. Jupiter made the ancient springtime shorter by adding onto it three seasons more:
now winter, summer, an erratic fall,                                                             160
and a brief spring filled out the fourfold year.
Then the scorched air first burned and glowed with heat, and icicles dangled in the freezing wind; then houses first appeared, in the form of caves, or crude shelters hidden in dense thickets, or huts of branches bound with strips of bark. At that time, grain was first sown in long furrows,

and bullocks groaned, whose shoulders bore the yoke.
The third age followed with the race of bronze, crueler by nature and much more disposed                                           170
to savage warfare, but not yet corrupt.
Last was the age of iron: suddenly, all forms of evil burst upon this time of baser mettle; modesty, fidelity, and truth departed; in their absence, came fraud, guile, deceit, the use of violence, and shameful lusting after acquisitions.
Now ships spread sail, though sailors until now knew nothing of them; pines that formerly
had stood upon the summits of their mountains,                                   180
turned into keels, now prance among the waves; and land—which formerly was held in common, as sunlight is and as the breezes are— is given boundaries by the surveyor.
Now men demand that the rich earth provide more than the crops and sustenance it owes, and piercing to the bowels of the earth, the wealth long hidden in Stygian gloom is excavated and induces evil;
for iron, which is harmful, and the more                                                190
pernicious gold (now first produced) create grim warfare, which has need of both; now arms are grasped in bloodstained hands; men live off plunder, and guest has no protection from his host, nor father-in-law from his daughter's husband, and kindness between brothers is infrequent; husband and wife both wish each other dead, and wicked stepmothers concoct the bilious poisons that turn their youthful victims pale;
a son goes to a soothsayer to learn                                                         200
the date when he will change from heir to owner,

and piety lies vanquished here below.
Virgin Astraea, the last immortal left on the bloodstained earth, withdraws from it in horror.
War with the Giants So that the skies above might be no more secure than earth, the race of Giants plotted (we hear) to rule in heaven by themselves: they brought together mountains in a heap and piled them up to reach the lofty stars;
then the omnipotent father launched a bolt                                          210
that shattered Mount Olympus at the base, so Pelion came crashing down from Ossa.
When their enormous corpses all lay crushed beneath the great weight of each other's bodies, their Mother Earth (or so the story goes) drenched with their steaming gore, gave life to it; and lest no memory at all remain of her offspring, she gave them human shape; her stock was marked by hatred of the gods,
by cruelty and eagerness for slaughter:                                                   220
you would have recognized their bloody nature.
Lycaon's feast Now when great Jove, the son of Saturn, saw all this from his high citadel, he groaned, recalling an event then still too recent to be widely known: Lycaon's filthy banquet! And stirred by anger worthy of himself, he called a council of the gods to session: none of those summoned was the least bit late.
When the nighttime sky is clear, there can be seen a highway visible in heaven, named                                                        230
the Milky Way, distinguished for its whiteness. Gods take this path to the royal apartments of Jove the Thunderer; on either side

are palaces with folding doors flung wide,
and filled with guests of their distinguished owners;
plebeian gods reside in other sections,
but here in this exclusive neighborhood,
the most renowned of heaven's occupants
have their own household deities enshrined;
and if I were permitted to speak freely,                                                      240
I would not hesitate to call this enclave
the Palatine of heaven's ruling class.
So when, within their marble council chamber, all of the gods assembled took their seats, and Jove, above the others, leaned upon his staff of ivory and shook three times and four his awe-inspiring thick head of hair, which makes the very cosmos tremble, these words escaped from his indignant lips:
"I've never been more anxious for my realm,                                    250
not even when the serpent-footed Giants were each preparing to take heaven captive in the fierce embrace of his one hundred arms! —That enemy was savage, to be sure, but all the trouble came from just one source; yet now, wherever Nereus is heard resounding as he flows around the world, the human race must perish; this I swear by the rivers flowing underneath the earth
through Stygian groves; we have tried everything                                 260
to find a cure, but now the surgeon's blade must cut away what is untreatable, lest the infection spread to healthy parts.
"I have my demigods to think about, rustic divinities, the nymphs, the fauns, the Satyrs, and the spirits of the forest that dwell on mountainsides; although, as yet,

we haven't honored them with residence in heaven, we must guarantee their safety upon the earth which we have given them.                                           270
"But can we? O my gods, can you believe they will be safe, when I, who lord it over lesser immortals and the thunderbolt, have had snares set against me by a mortal noted for beastliness? I mean—Lycaon!"
All hell broke loose in heaven—what an uproar, with everyone excitedly demanding a punishment to fit such infamy! It was as when that band of traitors raged
to annihilate the name of Rome by shedding                                       280
the blood of Caesar's heir; stunned by the frightful prospect of utter ruin, the human race throughout the world, as one, began to shudder; nor was the piety of your own subjects, Augustus, any less agreeable to you than that of Jove's had been to him. By voice and gesture, he suppressed the riot. All held their peace.
When the clamor had subsided, curbed by the weight of his authority,
great Jove once more broke silence with these words:                          290
"He has been dealt with—have no fears of that! But I will now inform you of his crimes and of their punishment.
"The age's infamy had reached our ears; hoping to disprove it, I glided down from the summit of Olympus, concealing my godhood in a human form, and walked upon the earth. Long would it take to enumerate the evils that I found in such abundance, everywhere I went:

the truth was even worse than I had heard.                                               300
"I crossed Maenala, where the wild beasts roam, Cyllene, and the pine groves of Lycaeus; then on to the inhospitable abode and seat of the tyrant of Arcadia, approaching it as evening turned night.
"By signs I let them know a god had come, and common folk began to offer prayers; at first Lycaon mocked their piety, and then he said,'I will make trial of him,
and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt                                                   310
whether this fellow is a god or man.'
"He planned to take me, overcome with sleep, and murder me as I lay unawares; that was his way of getting at the truth. Nor was he satisfied with this: he took a hostage sent by the Molossians, and after severing his windpipe, cut his body into pieces and then put the throbbing parts up to be boiled or broiled.
"As soon as he had set this on the table,                                            320
I loosed my vengeful bolts until that house collapsed on its deserving household gods!
"Frightened, he runs off to the silent fields and howls aloud, attempting speech in vain; foam gathers at the corners of his mouth; he turns his lust for slaughter on the flocks, and mangles them, rejoicing still in blood.
"His garments now become a shaggy pelt; his arms turn into legs, and he, to wolf
while still retaining traces of the man:                                                    330
greyness the same, the same cruel visage, the same cold eyes and bestial appearance.
"One house has fallen: many more deserve to;

over the broad earth, bestiality prevails and stirs the Furies up to vengeance."
The great flood Some of the gods give voice to their approval
of Jove's words and aggravate his grumbling,
while others play their roles with mute assent. Nevertheless, all of them were saddened by the proposed destruction of the human race                                     340
and wondered what the future form of earth could possibly be like, without men on it:
why, who would bring the incense to their altars? Was it his purpose to surrender earth
for wild beasts to plunder? As they debated, the king of gods bade them not to worry, for he would tend to everything himself, and promised to provide them with a race which, quite unlike the one he would destroy, would be miraculous in its origin.                                                          350
Now he was just about to sprinkle earth with thunderbolts, yet held back out of fear that such a conflagration could ignite the sacred heavens and set the skies ablaze; and he recalled a time the Fates predicted, when land and seas and heaven's palaces, the universe so artfully devised, should come to total ruin in a fire.
He puts away those bolts the Cyclops forged; another punishment now pleases him:                                                    360
to sink the mortal race beneath the waves and send down sheets of rain from up above.
At once he seals the north wind in the cave of Aeolus, along with all those winds that scatter clouds; the south wind is set loose and flies off swiftly on his dripping wings,

his awful face concealed in pitchy blackness;
his beard is utterly suffused with rain
that runs in channels down his streaming locks;
upon his forehead gather clouds of gloom,                                            370
and his flowing robes are—literally—flowing.
And when his broad hands squeeze low cloud formations, a crash is heard, and they give up their rain. Iris, the messenger of Juno, clad in many-colored robes, draws water up to heaven, where she nourishes the clouds.
Ripening grain that was the farmer's hope, to his despair, now lies completely ruined; the long year's labor has been all for naught.
Jove's own sky cannot yield sufficient water                                      380
to ease his wrath: Neptune, his sky-blue brother, aids him with waves of fresh auxiliaries. The tyrant calls his rivers to assemble beneath his roof and tells them only this:
"No point in lengthy battlefield harangues. Pour yourselves into this with all your strength, that's what is needed! Open all your doors, release the floodgates of your dams and dikes, let all your rivers run without restraint!"
Those are his orders: back the rivers go                                             390
and loose the reins about their fountainheads; unbridled streams go racing to the sea.
Now with his trident, Neptune strikes the earth, who shudders at the blow and opens wide new waterways. Delivered from their courses, the rivers rush across the open fields, and bear away not only figs and flocks, but folks who tend them, with their dwelling places; they also sink the shrines of household gods!
If any roof has managed to resist,                                                       400

untoppled, this unnatural disaster, the waves embrace above it nonetheless; its highest turrets lie beneath the flood. There are no longer boundaries between earth and the sea, for everything is sea, and the sea is everywhere without a shore.
One takes to the hills, another to his skiff, rowing where once he plowed the earth in rows, while yet another sails above his grainfields,
or glimpses, far below, his sunken villa;                                                        410
and here in the topmost branches of an elm is someone casting out a fishing line; an anchor grazes in a meadow's grasses, or a curved keel sweeps above a vineyard, and the seal's misshapen figure lies at rest where the slender goats were lately fond of browsing.
The Nereids marvel at the sight of groves, cities, and dwelling places all submerged, while dolphins take possession of the woods
and shake the lofty branches of the oak                                                      420
as they brush by. The wolf swims among sheep, the tawny lion and the tiger both are carried helplessly upon the waves; the boar's great power, like a lightning bolt, does not avail, nor do the stag's swift limbs. After his long search for a landing place, the bird with weary wings collapses seaward.
Now unrestrained, the sea conceals the hills, and strange new waves beat at the mountaintops;
the greater part are drowned beneath the waves,                                       430
while those spared drowning perish of starvation.
Deucalion and Pyrrha The land of Phocis separates Boeotia from the Oetaean fields—a fertile land,

when it was land—but now part of the sea, a broad field, rather quickly inundated.
There Mount Parnassus raises its twin peaks, piercing the clouds and seeking out the stars; in this place (which alone was unsubmerged) Deucalion, and she who shared his bed,
borne on a little raft, had come to land.                                                 440
Immediately they set out to worship the local nymphs, the mountain deities, and Themis, who, in those days, was in charge of giving answers through the oracles; there lived no better nor more upright man, no wife more reverential than his own.
When Jupiter realized the world was now thoroughly inundated, and observed only a single man and woman left
out of the many thousands there had been,                                           450
and that they both were blameless and devout, he tore the clouds apart and drove them off with the blustery north wind; then he revealed the heavens and the earth to one another.
The sea's great rage subsides now, as its lord deactivates his triple-pointed spear and soothes the waters; then he summons Triton, a sea god, blue as is the sea itself, who rises from the vasty deeps, displaying
a colony of shellfish on his shoulders,                                                    460
and bids him blow on his resounding conch shell to signal the retreat of floods and streams.
He lifts the hollow shell of his great horn, which twists, expanding in diameter as it revolves around its spiral base; and when he blows upon it in midocean, its voice reverberates from shore to shore

along the daily route that Phoebus travels.
So after he had pressed it to his lips, wet from that streaming beard of his, and blew                                         470
retreat as he had been commanded to, the waters everywhere, on land and sea, all heard that sound, and were at once restrained.
Now seas have shores, and streams their swollen beds, and hills appear again as floods subside; land rises and earth waxes as waves wane; after so long a period of time, the treetops are uncovered in the woods, showing the muck still clinging to their leaves.
The world was certainly restored, but when                                        480
Deucalion perceived the emptiness and silent desolation of its lands, tears rose within him as he turned to Pyrrha: "O sister, wife, and only woman left, you, whom the bonds of race and family and our marriage bed have joined to me, we are now joined by our common perils— for we two are the crowd that fills the lands seen by the rising and the setting sun—
we two are all: the sea now has the others.                                                 490
And our claim upon our lives is still doubtful, for those storm clouds frighten me!
"And how would you be feeling, my poor wretch, if fate had snatched you from the flood without me? How would you bear this terror all alone? Who would console you in your unshared grief? For trust me, if the sea had taken you, I would have followed then, my wife; the sea would not have taken one of us, but two.
"Oh, would that I were able to repair                                                     500
these losses by the skills my father had

of breathing spirit into molded clay, for then I could restore the human race!
"But now humanity depends on us; so heaven wills, and wills that we alone remain the only models of mankind." He finished speaking. For a while they wept and then decided to entreat the heavens and seek aid through the sacred oracles.
So side by side, the couple went at once                                            510
to the Cephisus, which, though not yet clear, was now confined to its accustomed bed. They sprinkled drops of water in libation upon their heads and garments, then went off to worship at the sacred shrine ofThemis, its gables all discolored with foul moss, and altars with no sacrificial fires.
As soon as they approached the temple steps both fell upon the ground in reverence,
kissing the cold stone with trembling lips:                                             520
"If heaven may be softened by the prayers of the just, and godly anger be deflected, then tell us, Themis, by what methods may this ruined race of ours be restored, and aid, most merciful, this world immersed!"
Moved by their words, the goddess offered them an oracle: "Go from my temple now, with your heads covered and your robes unbound; behind you, toss the bones of your great mother!"
Bewildered, were they, for the longest time:                                      530
Pyrrha broke the silence first, refusing to carry out the orders of the goddess; begging her pardon, though, with quivering lip, but mother's shade would surely be offended by such a casual treatment of her bones.

And meanwhile they repeat the oracle's obscurities, those words whose sense is hidden, turning them over in their puzzled minds, until at last the son of Prometheus spoke soothing words to Epimetheus' daughter:                                    540
''The righteous oracles can't counsel evil, so if I am not very much mistaken, our 'great mother' is the earth itself; I reckon that the 'bones' the goddess meant are merely stones in the body of the earth: it's stones we're meant to throw behind our backs!"
Though Pyrrha was excited by her husband's interpretation of the oracle, it seemed a rather doubtful hope at best,
for neither of them had much confidence                                            550
in heaven's admonitions—still, what harm could come from trying it?
As they descend, they veil their heads and loosen up their robes, and cast the stones behind them as the goddess bade them to do—and as they did, these stones you needn't take this part of it on faith, for it's supported by an old tradition)— these stones at once begin to lose their hardness and their rigidity; slowly they soften; once softened, they begin to take on shapes.                                         560
Then presently, when they'd increased in size and grown more merciful in character, they bore a certain incomplete resemblance to the human form, much like those images created by a sculptor when he begins roughly modeling his marble figures.
That part in them which was both moist and earthy was used for the creation of their flesh,

while what was solid and incapable
of bending turned to bone; what had been veins                                      570
continued on, still having the same name.
By heaven's will, in very little time, stones that the man threw took the forms of men, while those thrown from the woman's hand repaired the loss of women: the hardness of our race and great capacity for heavy labor give evidence of our origins.
The second creation The earth spontaneously generated the varied forms of other animals
after the standing water had been warmed                                                 580
by the sun's rays; for then the sodden marshes swelled up with heat, and fecund seeds of life grew in that soil as in a mother's womb, and from its richness took distinctive forms; so when the Nile that flows with seven mouths, retreating from the fields it irrigates, has settled back into its ancient bed and the still-damp slime was heated by the sun, then farmers, as they tilled the soil, discovered
numerous kinds of animated life;                                                                  590
some, just begun, were not yet quite alive, while others showed some sort of imperfection, and often in the same form one could see that this part lived, while that part was raw earth.
It is when heat and moisture join as one that life is generated; all living forms originate from these opposing sources; for even though they are at odds by nature, the two of them create all living things,
and their discordant harmony is suited                                                        600
to foster varied offspring in abundance.

So when the earth, still completely covered with fresh muck from that just receded flood, was heated by the sun's rays, she produced countless species; some were the old ones, restored, and others were monsters, novel in their shapes.
Apollo and the Python Unwillingly, the earth bore you, as well, enormous Python, serpent quite unknown to all prior ages—you, who would become
a terror to the newly fashioned folk,                                                      610
so very like a mountainside you were; the archer god (with lethal bow unused before, except for hunting does and she-goats) destroyed this beast by ventilating him with almost every arrow in his quiver, and the snake's venom poured through his black wounds.
And, lest the centuries should wear away the glory of his deed, he instituted the sacred games whose contests all would throng to, and named them Pythian, to celebrate                                                   620
his victory against the vanquished serpent; at these events, the youths who won in trial of hand or foot or fleet-wheeled chariot were given, as their prize, an oaken garland, for laurel wasn't in existence yet; in those days, Phoebus bound his flowing locks in garlands made from any tree whatever.
Apollo and Daphne Daphne, the daughter of the river god Peneus, was the first love of Apollo;
this happened not by chance, but by the cruel                                       630
outrage of Cupid; Phoebus, in the triumph of his great victory against the Python, observed him bending back his bow and said,

"What are you doing with such manly arms, lascivious boy? That bow befits our brawn, wherewith we deal out wounds to savage beasts and other mortal foes, unerringly: just now with our innumerable arrows we managed to lay low the mighty Python,
whose pestilential belly covered acres!                                                    640
Content yourself "with kindling love affairs with your wee torch—and don't claim our glory!"
The son of Venus answered him with this: "Your arrow, Phoebus, may strike everything; mine will strike you: as animals to gods, your glory is so much the less than mine!"
He spoke, and soaring upward through the air on wings that thundered, in no time at all had landed on Parnassus' shaded height;
and from his quiver drew two arrows out                                              650
which operated at cross-purposes, for one engendered flight, the other, love; the latter has a polished tip of gold, the former has a tip of dull, blunt lead; with this one, Cupid struck Peneus' daughter, while the other pierced Apollo to his marrow.
One is in love now, and the other one won't hear of it, for Daphne calls it joy to roam within the forest's deep seclusion,
where she, in emulation of the chaste                                                    660
goddess Phoebe, devotes herself to hunting; one ribbon only bound her straying tresses.
Many men sought her, but she spurned her suitors, loath to have anything to do with men, and rambled through the wild and trackless groves untroubled by a thought for love or marriage.
Often her father said, "You owe it to me,

child, to provide me with a son-in-law and grandchildren!"
"Let me remain a virgin, father most dear," she said, "as once before                                                 670
Diana's father, Jove, gave her that gift."
Although Peneus yielded to you, Daphne, your beauty kept your wish from coming true, your comeliness conflicting with your vow: at first sight, Phoebus loves her and desires to sleep with her; desire turns to hope, and his own prophecy deceives the god.
Now just as in a field the harvest stubble is all burned off, or as hedges are set ablaze
when, if by chance, some careless traveler                                                   680
should brush one with his torch or toss away the still-smoldering brand at break of day— just so the smitten god went up in flames until his heart was utterly afire, and hope sustained his unrequited passion.
He gazes on her hair without adornment: "What if it were done up a bit?" he asks, and gazes on her eyes, as bright as stars, and on that darling little mouth of hers,
though sight is not enough to satisfy;                                                          690
he praises everything that he can see— her fingers, hands, and arms, bare to her shoulders— and what is hidden prizes even more.
She flees more swiftly than the lightest breeze, nor will she halt when he calls out to her: "Daughter of Peneus, I pray, hold still, hold still! I'm not a foe in grim pursuit! Thus lamb flees wolf, thus dove from eagle flies on trembling wings, thus deer from lioness, thus any creature flees its enemy,                                                                  700

but I am stalking you because of love!
"Wretch that I am: I'm fearful that you'll fall, brambles will tear your flesh because of me! The ground you're racing over's very rocky, slow down, I beg you, restrain yourself in flight, and I will follow at a lesser speed.
"Just ask yourself who finds you so attractive! I'm not a caveman, not some shepherd boy, no shaggy guardian of flocks and herds—
you've no idea, rash girl, you've no idea                                                 710
whom you are fleeing, that is why you flee!
"Delphi, Claros,Tenedos are all mine, I'm worshiped in the city of Patara! Jove is my father, I alone reveal what was, what is, and what will come to be! The plucked strings answer my demand with song!
"Although my aim is sure, another's arrow proved even more so, and my careless heart was badly wounded—the art of medicine
is my invention, by the way, the source                                                   720
of my worldwide fame as a practitioner of healing through the natural strength of herbs.
"Alas, there is no herbal remedy for the love that I must suffer, and the arts that heal all others cannot heal their lord—"
He had much more to say to her, but Daphne pursued her fearful course and left him speechless, though no less lovely fleeing him; indeed, disheveled by the wind that bared her limbs
and pressed the blown robes to her straining body                                730
even as it whipped up her hair behind her, the maiden was more beautiful in flight!
But the young god had no further interest in wasting his fine words on her; admonished

by his own passion, he accelerates,
and runs as swiftly as a Gallic hound
chasing a rabbit through an open field;
the one seeks shelter and the other, prey—
he clings to her, is just about to spring,
with his long muzzle straining at her heels,                                           740
while she, not knowing whether she's been caught,
in one swift burst, eludes those snapping jaws,
no longer the anticipated feast;
so he in hope and she in terror race.
But her pursuer, driven by his passion, outspeeds the girl, giving her no pause, one step behind her, breathing down her neck; her strength is gone; she blanches at the thought of the effort of her swift flight overcome,
but at the sight of Peneus, she cries,                                                       750
"'Help me, dear father! If your waters hold divinity, transform me and destroy that beauty by which I have too well pleased!"
Her prayer was scarcely finished when she feels a torpor take possession of her limbs— her supple trunk is girdled with a thin layer of fine bark over her smooth skin; her hair turns into foliage, her arms grow into branches, sluggish roots adhere
to feet that were so recently so swift,                                                     760
her head becomes the summit of a tree; all that remains of her is a warm glow.
Loving her still, the god puts his right hand against the trunk, and even now can feel her heart as it beats under the new bark; he hugs her limbs as if they were still human, and then he puts his lips against the wood, which, even now, is adverse to his kiss.

"Although you cannot be my bride," he says, "you will assuredly be my own tree,                                                       770
O Laurel, and will always find yourself girding my locks, my lyre, and my quiver too— you will adorn great Roman generals when every voice cries out in joyful triumph along the route up to the Capitol; you will protect the portals of Augustus, guarding, on either side, his crown of oak; and as I am—perpetually youthful, my flowing locks unknown to the barber's shears— so you will be an evergreen forever                                                        780
bearing your brilliant foliage with glory!"
Phoebus concluded. Laurel shook her branches and seemed to nod her summit in assent.
Jove and Io (1) There is a grove in Thessaly, enclosed on every side by high and wooded hills: they call it Tempe. The river Peneus, which rises deep within the Pindus range, pours its turbulent waters through this gorge and over a cataract that deafens all
its neighbors far and near, creating clouds                                              790
that drive a fine, cool mist along, until it drips down through the summits of the trees.
Here is the house, the seat, the inner chambers of the great river; here Peneus holds court in his rocky cavern and lays down the law to water nymphs and tributary streams.
First to assemble were the native rivers, uncertain whether to congratulate, or to commiserate with Daphne's father:
the Sperchios, whose banks are lined with poplars,                               800
the ancient Apidanus and the mild

Aeas and Amprysus; others came later— rivers who, by whatever course they take, eventually bring their flowing streams, weary of their meandering, to sea.
Inachus was the only river absent, concealed in the recesses of his cave: he added to his volume with the tears he grimly wept for his lost daughter Io,
not knowing whether she still lived or not;                                           810
but since he couldn't find her anywhere, assumed that she was nowhere to be found— and in his heart, he feared a fate far worse.
For Jupiter had seen the girl returning from her father's banks and had accosted her: "O maiden worthy of almighty Jove and destined to delight some lucky fellow I know not whom) upon your wedding night, come find some shade," he said, "in these deep woods—" showing her where the woods were very shady)                                   820
"while the sun blazes high above the earth!
"But if you're worried about entering the haunts of savage beasts all by yourself, why, under the protection of a god you will be safe within the deepest woods— and no plebeian god, for I am he who bears the celestial scepter in his hand, I am he who hurls the roaming thunderbolt— don't run from me!"
But run she did, through Lerna and Lyrcea, until the god concealed                                                       830
the land entirely beneath a dense dark mist and seized her and dishonored her.
Juno, however, happened to look down on Argos, where she noticed something odd:

swift-flying clouds had turned day into night
long before nighttime. She realized
that neither falling mist nor rising fog
could be the cause of this phenomenon,
and looked about at once to find her husband,
as one too well aware of the connivings                                                 840
of a mate so often taken in the act.
When he could not be found above, she said, "Either I'm mad—or I am being had." She glided down to earth from heaven's summit immediately and dispersed the clouds.
Having intuited his wife's approach, Jove had already metamorphosed Io into a gleaming heifer—a beauty still, even as a cow. Despite herself,
Juno gave this illusion her approval,                                                        850
and feigning ignorance, asked him whose herd this heifer had come out of, and where from; Jove, lying to forestall all inquiries as to her origin and pedigree, replied that she was born out of the earth. Then Juno asked him for her as a gift.
What could he do? Here is his beloved: to hand her over is unnatural, but not to do so would arouse suspicion;
shame urged him onward while love held him back.                            860
Love surely would have triumphed over shame, except that to deny so slight a gift to one who was his wife and sister both would make it seem that this was no mere cow!
Her rival given up to her at last, Juno feared Jove had more such tricks in mind, and couldn't feel entirely secure until she'd placed this heifer in the care

of Argus, the watchman with a hundred eyes:
in strict rotation, his eyes slept in pairs,                                                  870
while those that were not sleeping stayed on guard.
No matter where he stood, he looked at Io,
even when he had turned his back on her.
He let her graze in daylight; when the sun set far beneath the earth, he penned her in and placed a collar on her indignant neck. She fed on leaves from trees and bitter grasses, and had no bed to sleep on, the poor thing, but lay upon the ground, not always grassy, and drank the muddy waters from the streams.                                     880
Having no arms, she could not stretch them out in supplication to her warden, Argus; and when she tried to utter a complaint she only mooed—a sound which terrified her, fearful as she now was of her own voice.
Io at last came to the riverbank where she had often played; when she beheld her own slack jaws and newly sprouted horns in the clear water, she fled, terrified!
Neither her naiad sisters nor her father                                             890
knew who this heifer was who followed them and let herself be petted and admired. Inachus fed her grasses from his hand; she licked it and pressed kisses on his palm, unable to restrain her flowing tears.
If words would just have come, she would have spoken, telling them who she was, how this had happened, and begging their assistance in her case; but with her hoof, she drew lines in the dust,
and letters of the words she could not speak                                         900
told the sad story of her transformation.
"Oh, wretched me," cried Io's father, clinging

to the lowing calf's horns and snowy neck. "Oh, wretched me!" he groaned. "Are you the child for whom I searched the earth in every part? Lost, you were less a grief than you are, found!
"You make no answer, unable to respond to our speech in language of your own, but from your breast come resonant deep sighs and—all that you can manage now—you moo!                                          910
"But I—all unaware of this—was busy arranging marriage for you, in the hopes of having a son-in-law and grandchildren. Now I must pick your husband from my herd, and now must find your offspring there as well!
"Nor can I end this suffering by death; it is a hurtful thing to be a god, for the gates of death are firmly closed against me, and our sorrows must go on forever."
And while the father mourned his daughter's loss,                               920
Argus of the hundred eyes removed her to pastures farther off and placed himself high on a mountain peak, a vantage point from which he could keep watch in all directions.
The ruler of the heavens cannot bear the sufferings of Io any longer, and calls his son, born of the Pleiades, and orders him to do away with Argus.
Without delay, he takes his winged sandals, his magic, sleep-inducing wand, and cap;                                                    930
and so equipped, the son of father Jove glides down from heaven's summit to the earth, where he removes and leaves behind his cap and winged sandals, but retains the wand; and sets out as a shepherd, wandering far from the beaten path, driving before him

a flock of goats he rounds up as he goes, while playing tunes upon his pipe of reeds.
The guardian of Juno is quite taken by this new sound: "Whoever you might be,                                         940
why not come sit with me upon this rock," said Argus, "for that flock of yours will find the grass is nowhere greener, and you see that there is shade here suitable for shepherds."
The grandson of great Atlas takes his seat and whiles away the hours, chattering of this and that—and playing on his pipes, he tries to overcome the watchfulness of Argus, struggling to stay awake;
even though Slumber closes down some eyes,                                       950
others stay vigilant. Argus inquired how the reed pipes, so recently invented, had come to be, and Mercury responded:
Pan and Syrinx "On the idyllic mountains of Arcadia, among the hamadryads of Nonacris, one was renowned, and Syrinx was her name. Often she fled—successfully—from Satyrs, and deities of every kind as well, those of the shady wood and fruited plain.
"In her pursuits and in virginity                                                        960
Diana was her model, and she wore her robe hitched up and girt above the knees just as her goddess did; and if her bow had been made out of gold, instead of horn, anyone seeing her might well have thought she was the goddess—as, indeed, some did.
"Wearing his crown of sharp pine needles, Pan saw her returning once from Mount Lycaeus, and began to say...."

There remained to tell of how the maiden, having spurned his pleas,                                        970
fled through the trackless wilds until she came to where the gently flowing Ladon stopped her in her flight; how she begged the water nymphs to change her shape, and how the god, assuming that he had captured Syrinx, grasped instead a handful of marsh reeds! And while he sighed, the reeds in his hands, stirred by his own breath, gave forth a similar, low-pitched complaint!
The god, much taken by the sweet new voice of an unprecedented instrument,                                                            980
said this to her: "At least we may converse with one another—I can have that much."
That pipe of reeds, unequal in their lengths, and joined together one-on-one with wax, took the girl's name, and bears it to this day.
Now Mercury was ready to continue until he saw that Argus had succumbed, for all his eyes had been closed down by sleep. He silences himself and waves his wand above those languid orbs to fix the spell.                                               990
Without delay he grasps the nodding head and where it joins the neck, he severs it with his curved blade and flings it bleeding down the steep rock face, staining it with gore. O Argus, you are fallen, and the light in all your lamps is utterly put out: one hundred eyes, one darkness all the same!
Jove and Io (2) But Saturn's daughter rescued them and set those eyes upon the feathers of her bird, filling his tail with constellated gems.                                                    1000
Her rage demanded satisfaction, now:

the goddess set a horrifying Fury
before the eyes and the imagination
of her Grecian rival; and in her heart
she fixed a prod that goaded Io on,
driving her in terror through the world
until at last, O Nile, you let her rest
from endless labor; having reached your banks,
she went down awkwardly upon her knees,
and with her neck bent backward, raised her face                                1010
as only she could do it, to the stars;
and with her groans and tears and mournful mooing,
entreated Jove, it seemed, to put an end
to her great suffering.
Jove threw his arms around the neck of Juno in embrace, imploring her to end this punishment: "In future," he said, "put your fears aside: never again will you have cause to worry— about this one." And swore upon the Styx.
The goddess was now pacified, and Io                                              1020
at once began regaining her lost looks, till she became what she had been before; her body lost all of its bristling hair, her horns shrank down, her eyes grew narrower, her jaws contracted, arms and hands returned, and hooves divided themselves into nails; nothing remained of her bovine nature, unless it was the whiteness of her body. She had some trouble getting her legs back,
and for a time feared speaking, lest she moo,                                         1030
and so quite timidly regained her speech.
She is a celebrated goddess now, and worshiped by the linen-clad Egyptians. Her son, Epaphus, is believed to be

sprung from the potent seed of mighty Jove, and temples may be found in every city wherein the boy is honored with his parent.
Phaëthon He had a friend, like him in age and spirit, named Phaëthon, the sun god's child. One day
this boy was boasting, and in vanity                                                       1040
would not take second place to Epaphus, so proud he was that Phoebus was his father.
The grandson of Inachus could not bear it: "You are a fool—to trust your mother's lies! You're swollen with false notions of your father!"
Phaëthon blushed, and in embarrassment, repressed the awful anger that he felt; he went back to his mother, Clymene, and told her what the other boy had said.
"And so that you may feel this pain the more,                                      1050
dear mother," he said, "I who am so bold, so very spirited, could not reply! It shames me that I listened to such insults unable to respond or to refute them!
"If I am truly of immortal seed, give me sure proof of my exalted birth, and a status equal to my origin!"
He spoke and threw his arms around her neck, imploring her upon his very life,
and on that of his stepfather, Merops,                                                    1060
and by the wedding torches of his sisters, to give him proof of who his father was.
Clymene, moved by Phaëthon's petition (or by the insult to her own good name), lifted her arms and stretched them out to heaven and gazing right into the sun, replied, "By this great radiance, my child, I swear,

by this bright orb which sees and hears us now,
that from this being which you now behold,
and which rules the world, you have your origin,                                1070
child of the Sun! And if I speak a lie,
never may I look on his face again;
may this light be the last light that I see!
"It will not be a great task to discover the place where your father keeps his household gods. The house from whence he rises is on land contiguous to ours: if you dare, set out and ask your question of the Sun."
Already full of heaven in his mind, his mother's words inspire him with joy,                                               1080
and after crossing Ethiopia, his native land, and passing through the realm of India that lies beneath the sun, he comes at last to where his father rises.

BOOK II
OF MORTAL CHILDREN AND IMMORTAL LUSTS
Phaëthon         The Heliades         Cycnus
The Sun's complaint       Jove, Callisto, and Areas
The raven and the crow         The prophecies of Ocyrhoë
Mercury and the tattletale         Mercury and Aglauros (1)
The house of Envy         Mercury and Aglauros (2)
Jove and Europa

Phaëthon
There stood the regal palace of the Sun,
soaring upon its many lofty columns,
with roof of gold and fire-flashing bronze,
and ceilings intricate with ivory,
and double-folding doors that shone with silver.
Its art surpassed the stuff that it was made of, for Vulcan had engraved upon those doors the seas that gird the middle of the earth, the circling lands and the overhanging sky.
The waves displayed their gods of cerulean hue:                                10
harmonious Triton, inconstant Proteus, huge Aegaeon, who lifts enormous whales, and Doris with her daughters, the sea nymphs; some are depicted swimming, others sit upon a rock to dry their sea-green hair, and others are shown riding upon fishes, their features neither utterly alike nor wholly different, but rather mixed, as those of sisters ought to be.
On land were scenes of men in cities, beasts in forests,                                         20
rivers and nymphs and rural deities; and over this he set the zodiac, six figures each upon the left and right.
Soon as the son of Clymene had climbed the steep path leading to the dwelling place of his reputed parent, he went in and turned at once to meet his father's gaze— though at some distance, for he could not bear such brightness any closer.
Phoebus sat in robes of purple high upon a throne                                                    30
that glittered brilliantly with emeralds;

and in attendance on his left and right
stood Day and Month and Year and Century,
and all the Hours, evenly divided;
fresh Spring was there, adorned with floral crown,
and Summer, naked, bearing ripened grain,
and Autumn, stained from treading out her grapes,
and Winter with his grey and frosty locks.
And sitting in the middle of these figures, the all-seeing Sun looked upon that youth,                                            40
who quaked with terror at such novel sights. "What brings you here?" he asked. "What do you seek in this high tower, Phaëthon—you, an heir no parent would deny?"
The youth responded: "O Phoebus, our universal light, and father—if you let me use that name! —If Clymene is not concealing guilt under false pretenses, then give me proof by which I might have credibility
as your true son, and free my mind of doubt!"                                       50
So the boy spoke.
The father put aside his shining crown and told him to draw nearer and took him in his arms: "It would not be appropriate for me to disavow our relationship," he said, "for Clymene has spoken truly of your parentage.
"But so that you may have no doubts at all, whatever gift you ask me will be given you; and this I promise by the marshy Styx,
which all of the immortals swear upon—                                               60
a sight which I, of course, have never seen."
He'd scarcely finished speaking when the boy asked for his father's chariot—and permission

to guide his winged horses for a day.
The father's oath now filled him with regret;
three times and four he struck his lustrous brow:
"Your deed reveals the rashness of my speech!
Would that I were permitted to rescind
the promise I have given! I confess
that this alone I would deny you, son!                                                   70
"At least I am permitted to dissuade you: what you desire is most dangerous! You seek a gift that is too great for you, beyond your strength, beyond your boyish years; your fate is mortal: what you ask for isn't.
"Out of your ignorance, you seek much more than even gods are able to control, for though each god may do just as he pleases, none but myself may set his heel upon
the fire-bearing axle. No—not even he                                                  80
who governs vast Olympus and who flings the thunderbolt may drive this chariot: and what force is more powerful than Jove?
"The journey starts off steeply, and my team, emerging from their stables in the morning, must struggle to ascend—and barely do: the midpoint of the heavens is so high that when I look down on the earth and seas, fear often makes me tremble, and the heart within my breast is seized with palpitations!                                           90
"The last part of the journey is a steep descent that needs a skilled hand on the reins; then, even Tethys, waiting to receive me beneath the waves, must fear that I will crash!
"Besides, there is the whirling vault of heaven that draws the stars along and sets them spinning; I press against this force which overcomes

all others, and I overcome it by opposing the revolving universe.
"Suppose the chariot were in your hands:                                          100
what would you do? Would you have the power to go against the whirling of the poles, lest their rotation sweep you off completely?
"Perhaps you think that there are sacred groves and cities of the gods along the way, temples displaying all the gifts of wealth? Not so: your path is full of lurking perils as well as images of savage beasts.
"And if you hold this course unswervingly, you'll find the horns of Taurus in your way,                                          110
the Archer and the gaping jaws of Leo, and Scorpio, whose long and curving arms sweep one way, while the curving arms of Cancer sweep broadly in the opposite direction.
"Nor will you find it easy to control my fire-breathing steeds, who challenge me to hold them back when they get heated up, and their wild necks rebel against the reins.
"I would not be the giver of a gift that would prove fatal to you, son—beware,                                          120
and change your asking while it may be changed! You seek assurance that you are my son? I give you such assurance by my fears, and by my dread, I show myself your father. Look, look, upon my countenance—I wish that you could look into my heart as well, and there discover my paternal cares!
"Whatever wealth this ample world affords is yours to have: just cast your eyes about
the plentitude of sky and earth and ocean                                              130
and ask for any of the goods you see:

I will deny you nothing that you wish.
"Only one thing I beg you not to ask for, a punishment, if truly understood, and not a gift, although you think it so— a punishment indeed, my Phaëthon.
"Why do you throw your arms around my neck, you foolish child? Why do you beseech me? It will be given to you! Have no doubt!
I've sworn it by the waters of the Styx,                                                 140
whatever you wish for—only wish more wisely!" But his rebellious son refused to listen and adamantly kept to his design, so great his passion for the chariot.
And so, after delaying for as long as possible, the father led his son to Vulcan's gift, the noble chariot. Golden its axle, golden too, its shaft, and golden the outer surface of its wheels,
adorned with radiating silver spokes;                                                      150
its yoke, inlaid with golden chrysolites, returned the light of Phoebus in reflection.
And while the overreaching Phaëthon gazed upon it in admiration, look— Aurora, wakeful in the gleaming east, has once more opened wide her purple gates, and now her rosy courtyard is displayed; the stars all scatter, and bright Lucifer brings up the rear, the last to leave his post.
When the father noticed that the morning star                                 160
was setting, and the world was growing red, and the Moon's pale horns were vanishing, he ordered the passing Hours to prepare his steeds. Swiftly they brought his fire-breathing horses from the lofty stalls where they had been well fed

on heavenly ambrosia, and harnessed them: they shook their jangling reins impatiently.
Then Phoebus smeared his son's face with an ointment to keep him safe from the consuming flames,
and placed the radiant crown upon his head.                                         170
Foreseeing grief, his breast heaved as he spoke: "You have so far ignored your father's warnings, but listen now, and—if you can—heed these: spare the whip, boy, and rein your horses in, for on their own, they will go fast enough— your task is to restrain them in their flight.
"Do not attempt to go directly through the five zones of heaven, but rather take the curving route that leads through only three, and thus avoids extremes of north and south.                                        180
"That is the right way—you will clearly see the ruts worn in the pathway by my wheels. To heat the earth and sky both evenly, don't hug the earth, don't rise to the upper air or you will either set the sky ablaze or the earth below: the middle way is safest.
"Avoid the coiled-up Serpent on your right and the low-lying Altar on your left— keep in between! I leave the rest to Fortune,
and trust that she will be a better guide                                                 190
than you yourself have been.
"But while I speak, the humid night has reached the western shore— we may delay no longer. We are called: Dawn is conspicuously present now, and shadows all are fled. Take up the reins, or, if that heart of yours can be persuaded, take my advice—and not my chariot!
"Change your mind now, while change is still permitted,

while both your feet are firmly on the ground—
before you mount and set out on this course                                       200
which, in your ignorance, you foolishly desire—
look on in safety while I light the world!"
But the boy is in the chariot already
and stands there proudly as he takes the reins
and offers thanks to his unwilling father.
Meanwhile, the flying horses of the Sun, Pyrois, Eous, Aethon, and Phlegon, filled all the air with fiery whinnying, and kicked the bars that held them back.
When Tethys not knowing what her grandson's fate would be)                                 210
released them, and all heaven opened up, they took off with their hooves shredding the mists of morning in their way as they flew past the east winds in the quadrants where they rise.
But the burden that the horses of the Sun were used to bearing was much heavier, and their yoke lacked its customary weight; just as a ship that is unballasted rolls all about, unsteadied by its lightness,
and goes off course, so too the chariot,                                                  220
without the weight it usually carries, leaps in the air, bucking, tossed all about as though it had no passenger at all; and once they're all aware of this, the horses bolt from the rutted track in four directions.
Now terrified, it is impossible for him to use the reins that he was given, or find his way; nor, if he were to find it, could he control his steeds. For the first time, then,
the Great and Little Bears knew the sun's heat                                      230
and tried—in vain, for it was not permitted—

to plunge into the sea. And the Serpent, who
lies nearest to the frigid northern Pole,
and who has been, in sluggish hibernation,
a threat to no one, suddenly became
a raging terror, stirred up by the heat.
Folks say that even you, Bootes, fled,
slow as you are, and hampered by your oxcart.
But when, from heaven's summit, he looked down at the lands that lay so distantly beneath him,                                        240
unlucky Phaëthon at once turned pale, and suddenly his knees began to shake with terror, and his eyes were darkened by excessive light; and now the god's true son regrets he ever touched his father's horses, is sorry to have found his origins, and sorry that his prayer was ever answered; he wishes to be called the son of Merops, this boy now like a ship caught in a gale
and driven by the furious north wind,                                                   250
whose helmsman lets the useless tiller go and puts his trust in heaven and in prayer.
Much of the sky already lies behind him, much more remains ahead: what can he do? He turns this matter over in his mind, now looking to the west (which he is fated never to reach), now looking eastward: no solution to his problem may be found, and stunned by ignorance, cannot decide
if he should hold the reins or let them go—                                         260
he doesn't even know his horses' names!
And scattered everywhere throughout the sky, he sees the terrifying images of enormous beasts, which aggravate his fears. There is a place where two gigantic arms

bend into bows, and arms and tail extended,
Scorpio wholly occupies two zones:
when the boy sees this venom-sweating monster
bend its tail back to strike at him, his mind
goes blank with icy fear. He drops the reins,                                               270
which slackly lie upon the horses' backs;
and now his steeds, completely unrestrained,
go galloping off course through the unknown
regions of the upper air, wherever
impulse proposes, purposeless, and knock
against the fixed stars set within the sky,
dragging their chariot through trackless space.
Now they seek heaven's summit, now they drop and carry themselves closer to the earth;
Luna now marvels at her brother's horses                                                     280
below her own, at scorched clouds trailing smoke! Earth at its highest point bursts into flame, deep fissures open up, and its juices dry; the ripe grain whitens, trees and leaves all burn, and the dry crop provides itself as fuel.
What I lament is nothing to what comes: great cities perish and their walls collapse, entire nations are reduced to ash; the woods burn with their mountains: Athos burns, Cilician Taurus and Timolus burn,                                                         290
and Oeta, too; Mount Ida, which had once been full of fountains, now runs dry and burns; Muse-haunted Helicon and Haemus (not yet associated with Oeagrus); Etna (already blazing) blazes twice; twin-peaked Parnassus, Eryx, Cynthus, Othrys, and Rhodope (about to lose its snows), Mymas and Dindyma, Mycale and Cithaeron (famed for Apollo's rites) are now ablaze;

Scythia's frigid climate does not spare it;                                                    300
Caucasus burns, and Ossa burns with Pindus, and greater than the pair of them, Olympus; whole ranges burn: the Alps, the Apennines.
Then Phaëthon in truth beholds the world in every part aflame, and cannot bear the overwhelming heat; each breath he draws seems like an exhalation from an oven; his chariot is white-hot underfoot.
Unable to endure the sparks and ashes whirling about him, shrouded in black smoke,                                       310
he has no way of knowing where he is, or where he is going through the darkness, borne wherever the flying horses wish to take him.
And it was then, according to some folks, that the inhabitants of Ethiopia
turned black, when blood was drawn up to their skins; and then that Libya became a desert, and nymphs lamented their lost springs and pools: Boeotia mourned Dirce; Argus, Amymone; and Corinth mourned the spring at Pirene.                                           320
Broad-channeled rivers were no better off: unquietly the distant Don flows, steaming; Old Man Peneus, Mysian Caicus, swift-running Ismenus, Arcadian Erymanthus, and Xanthus (destined to blaze up again); the yellow Lycormas and the Maeander, that playfully meanders in its course, the Thracian Melas and Spartan Eurotas; in Babylon, the wide Euphrates burns,
and the Orontes burns in Syria,                                                              330
as do the rapid Thermodon, the Ganges, the river Phasis and the blue Danube; Alpheus blazes through Olympia,

and the banks of Sperchios in Thessaly;
the Tagus is so hot that its gold melts!
In Lydia the celebrated swans
that sing upon the Cayster have been scorched;
the Nile in terror seeks a place of refuge
and hides its head—where it is hidden still:
its seven mouths lie empty, choked with dust,                                        340
its seven channels all without a stream.
Likewise the Hebrus and the Strymon shrivel,
as in the west, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Po,
and—fated for later greatness—our Tiber.
The soil cracks everywhere, and now the light seeps to the underworld and terrifies its ruler and his wife; the sea contracts, and what had been until quite recently a sheet of water is a field of sand,
and peaks that once were covered by the waves                                     350
are new additions to the Cyclades!
Fish seek the bottom, and no dolphins dare to trust their curving bodies to the air; the dying sea calves bob upon their backs, and it is said that even Nereus, with Doris and the Nereids, attempted to hide themselves in underwater caves from the blazing heat.
Three times great Neptune strove to lift his head and torso from the waves
and three times failed, unable to endure                                                 360
the fiery air.
Kind Mother Earth, surrounded by the sea and by the waters of the deep and by her streams, contracting everywhere as they took shelter in her shady womb, though heat-oppressed, still lifted up her head

and placed a hand upon her fevered brow; and after a tremor that shook everything had subsided somewhat, she spoke out to Jove in a dry, cracked voice:
"If it should please you that I merit this, greatest of all gods,                                                       370
why keep your lightnings back? If I must die of fire, why not let me die of yours: knowing that you are author of my doom will make it more endurable to me. I'm scarcely able to pronounce these words—" (through choking smoke)
"—-Just look at my singed hair, the glowing ashes in my eyes and face!
"Do I deserve this? Is this the reward for my unflagging fruitfulness? For bearing,
year after year, the wounds of plow and mattock?                                  380
And for providing flocks with pasturage, the human race with ripened grain to eat, the gods with incense smoking on their altars?
"But even assuming I deserve destruction, why is your brother equally deserving? Why are those waters, which were his by lot, so much diminished, so far now from the sky?
"If neither Earth nor Sea deserve your favor, have pity on the heavens! Look around you!
Both poles are smoking now! If flames destroy them,                           390
the palaces of heaven will collapse!
"Atlas is scarcely able to support the white-hot heavens on his bare shoulder! Now if the sea, the lands, the heavens perish, all will be plunged in chaos once again!
"Save from the flames whatever is still left, take measures to preserve the universe!"

So spoke the Earth, and with no more to say, unable any longer to endure
the heat, retreated deep within herself                                                   400
and took up chambers nearer the underworld.
Before he would commit himself, however, the father almighty made the other gods (especially the god who gave his son the chariot) swear that the gravest fate hung over all, unless he should take action.
And then he sought the pinnacle of heaven, whence he was wont to parcel out the rain clouds widely over the earth, and whence he moved
the thunder and sent forth his lightning bolts;                                       410
but now he had no rain clouds to distribute, nor any rain to send down from the heavens; and so he thundered and released a bolt of lightning from beside his ear that drove the hapless driver from his spinning wheels and from his life: fires put cruel fires out.
In consternation then, his horses reared and slipped their yoke and fled from their restraints; the chariot breaks up now: here the reins
come falling from the sky, and here the pole                                         420
now breaks off from its axle, and the spokes of the shattered wheels fall to another spot, and wreckage litters a wide area.
But Phaëthon, his bright red hair ablaze, is whirled headlong, and tracing out an arc, seems like a comet with a tail of fire, or like a star about to fall that doesn't. In Italy, far distant from his homeland, the river Eridanus [now the Po] receives his corpse and bathes his seething face.                                    430
Italian naiads lay his broken body,

still smoking from that three-forked thunderbolt, within a tomb prepared for it and carve this epitaph in verse upon the stone:
Young Phaëthon lies here, poor lad, who dreamt Of mastering his father's sky-borne carriage; Although he sadly died in the attempt, Great was his daring, which none may disparage.
His miserable father, sick with grief, drew his cloak up around his head in mourning;                                  440
for one whole day then, if the tale is true, the sun was quite put out. The conflagration (for the world was still ablaze) provided light; that was a time some good came out of evil.
After Clymene said what might be said of such an awful situation, she
wandered the world, her mind quite gone with grief, beating her breast, and seeking first to gather his lifeless limbs, then to collect his bones,
which she at last found in a foreign tomb;                                             450
collapsing, she threw herself upon the stone that bore his name, and bathing it in tears, she pressed her naked breast on the inscription.
The Heliades Nor did her daughters, the Heliades, hold back their empty gift of lamentation; their cruel hands raised bruises on their breasts, while night and day they cried to Phaëthon (who would not hear their wretched wails of grief) and cast themselves upon his sepulcher.
Four months went by; according to their custom                             460
(which their persistence had established), they continued grieving; one day, Phaëthusa, the eldest of the sisters, while attempting

to fling herself upon the tomb, complained of a rigidity down in her feet; and when a second sister, luminous Lampetia, attempted to approach her, she suddenly felt rooted to the earth.
Now the third sister, tearing at her hair, grasps foliage; now this one grieves to find                                            470
her ankles sealed in wood, that one to feel her slender arms becoming lengthy branches; and as they marvel at these happenings, their private parts are wrapped in sheathes of bark, which, from their loins, move upward to surround their bellies, breasts and shoulders, arms and hands— fixed to the ground, they call out to their mother.
What can she do? Where impulse carries her, she dashes off, now this way and now that,
encouraging their kisses, while she can.                                                 480
To no avail! Now frantic, she attempts to strip their bodies of this new veneer and breaks the little twigs off with her hands, releasing drops of blood, as from a wound.
"Pray spare me, mother!" comes from each of them, the selfsame cry repeated: "Spare me, pray! It is my body wounded in this tree! Farewell now, mother!" The conclusive bark immediately weaves itself upon those last words of the daughters of the Sun.                                         490
Their tears continue flowing, and, sun-hardened, fall from the trees; borne onward by the Po, they will one day adorn the brides of Rome. [And so, in myth, mourning becomes electrum; the sisters' tears are, now and forever, amber.]
Cycnus Cycnus, the son of Sthenelus, observed this marvelous event, O Phaëthon!

Although related to you through his mother,
he was more closely joined to you by passion,
and so your death was devastating to him.                                             500
Abandoning his kingdom (for he ruled the people and cities of Liguria) he wept and wailed along the Po's green banks and in those woods so recently augmented by the Heliades.
His voice becomes attenuated, and white feathers grow over the hair upon his face and body; a lengthy neck extends far from his chest, a membrane starts between his reddish toes, wings hide his sides, and a blunt bill, his mouth.                                    510
So Cycnus was turned into something new: a bird that had no faith in Jove or heaven, recalling all too well the thunderbolt unjustly hurled. His habitat is now the surface of a standing pond or lake; detesting fire, he calls water home, preferring flumes to flames—their opposite.
The Sun's complaint Phoebus, meanwhile, mourning his lost son, ignores appearances, as is his wont
whenever he goes into an eclipse:                                                           520
hating the light of day and his own being, he gives himself entirely to grief, and in his anger threatens to resign:
"Enough!" he cries. "Why, ever since creation my lot has been incessant restlessness, work unrewarded, going on forever! Let someone else—whoever wishes to, be driver of the chariot of light!
"If no one else of all the gods will do it,

if none admits that he is able to,                                                              530
why not just let the Governor take charge: at least while he is struggling with the reins he'll have to put aside the thunderbolt fated to rob fathers of their children!
"'Then he will know—once he has gauged the mettle of those fire-footed horses—that my son, who was unable to control the team, did not deserve to die!"
The other gods all stand around the Sun beseeching him,
as humble suppliants, to keep the darkness                                             540
from covering the world; Jove goes so far as to defend himself for hurling fire, but adds (as royals will) threats to entreaties.
Then Phoebus gathers up his team and yokes them, still trembling and wild-eyed with their fear, and in his grief torments them with his whip (torments them truly!) and reproaches them, holding them liable for his son's death.
Jove, Callisto, and Areas Now Jupiter omnipotent sets out
on an inspection tour of heaven's walls                                                  550
after the fire, in order to make certain that nothing is in danger of collapsing. And once he sees that all is up to strength, he turns toward earth, where the affairs of men, their varied labors, come into his ken.
Arcadia, his birthplace, above all is dearest to him; he at once restores her springs and streams (which had not dared to flow), gives grass back to the earth, gives leaves to trees, and bids the blackened woods grow green again.                                  560
And as he comes and goes about his business,

he gets stuck on an Arcadian nymph, Callisto [although Ovid doesn't name her], and passion burns into his deepest marrow.
She did not spend her days before the loom nor in the artful styling of her hair; a modest brooch was her one ornament, and a white headband bound her otherwise neglected tresses; so artlessly adorned,
with sometimes her swift javelin in hand,                                              570
sometimes a bow, she was Diana's soldier, and no nymph pleased the goddess more than she did, there on Mount Maenalus: but influence cannot be counted on to last for long.
Just as the Sun had passed his highest point, she set foot in that grove which had not known the felling of a tree since time began; putting aside her arrows and unstringing her resistant bow, she fell upon the grass and used her painted quiver for a pillow.                                               580
When Jupiter beheld the girl, exhausted and off her guard, he said, "That wife of mine will never learn about this escapade! But if she happens to discover it, a little scolding is small price to pay!"
At once he was Diana in appearance, and greeted her: "Dear maiden of my band, where, on what mountain, did you hunt today?" The virgin sprang up from her grassy couch:
"Hail, goddess far superior to Jove—                                                     590
a judgment I would stand by in his presence!"
He laughed to be preferred above himself, and joined their lips together with a kiss much less than modest, more than maidenly; as she began recounting the day's hunt,

he interrupted her with an embrace that clearly showed his criminal intent.
She did as much as any woman could if only you had been a witness, Juno,          
your judgment would have been much less severe);                              600
she fought against him but was just a girl; and can a mere girl fight off a grown man? Can anyone fight off great Jupiter?
Victorious, Jove now withdraws to heaven leaving the Arcadian behind him to trace her way back from that knowing grove, now hateful to her—and almost forgetting her quiver full of arrows and her bow.
But look—the goddess with her company approaches on the slopes of Maenalus,                                                  610
well pleased with that day's feral body count, and calls out when she sees her. Terrified that it is Jove disguised again, she flees; but when she sees the nymphs around the goddess, she is relieved and joins their company.
How difficult it is not to reveal a guilty conscience in one's countenance! She does not lift her gaze up from the ground, nor walk beside the goddess as she used to,
nor take the lead; and she is silent now—                                                     620
that and her blushing show her loss of honor.
The countless indications of her guilt went by Diana, much too innocent to recognize loss of virginity— they say her nymphs were well aware of it.
Nine months elapsed. Now wearied of the heat, the goddess broke off her pursuits and came to a gelid grove in which a babbling brook poured over polished sands. She approved the place

and stirred the shallow water with her foot;                                          630
it, too, won her approval: "No one is near
to spy on us," she said. "Come—let us undress
and take a dip in this pellucid stream."
And while the rest of them undressed at once, one blushed and sought excuses for delay, until the others snatched away her shift, baring her body—and her crime as well.
The dumbstruck girl attempted to conceal her swollen belly "Get away from here!"
Diana said."Do not defile this spring!"                                                  640
And with that drove her from their company.
The consort of almighty Jupiter had long since learned about this situation, but put off vengeance till the time was ripe; no reason to postpone it any longer, for now a boy named Areas had been born to Lady Juno's husband's concubine, a further source of grief. And now she turned her baleful eyes and mind in their direction:
"Oh, very nice indeed," she said. "Home wrecker!                            650
Nothing would do but that you must conceive, and publish the disservice that you've done me, bearing your witness to my lord's disgrace! Ah! But you will not get away with it; I'll take away the beauty that delights you and my husband both, you thoughtless thing!"
And with those words, she seized her by the hair and threw her down, face-forward on the ground. The girl stretched out her arms in supplication;
her arms began to bristle with black hairs,                                            660
her hands now served as feet, tipped with sharp claws, and the mouth that Jove had praised so recently was now a pair of widely gaping jaws!

To keep her from successfully appealing to Jupiter, her speech was snatched away: only a growl from deep within her chest, a rumble, hoarse and menacing, remained.
Within the bear, there was a human mind, however; constant groans expressed her grief
as she reared up and raised her hands to heaven,                                   670
her gestures showing what she could not say: the pain of Jovian ingratitude.
How often she would be too terrified to lie down by herself in the deep woods, and wandered to the fields near her old home! How often had a baying pack of hounds driven her upward through the steep ravines; how many times the huntress was the hunted. Often she hid herself at the sight of beasts,
forgetting that she was a beast herself.                                                    680
And the bear was frightened by the sight of bears up in the mountains—and afraid of wolves, although her father had been changed to one.
And now here is Lycaon's grandson, Areas; at age fifteen, the special circumstances of his conception are unknown to him; while he pursues his quarry through ravines and on the mountain pastures they prefer, while he wraps up the woods of Arcady in woven nets, he comes upon his mother.                                            690
And when she sees him, she stands motionless and seems to recognize him as her son; fearing he knows not what, he flees from her unmoving eyes that fix on him forever; and as she tries to close the gap between them, he turns to thrust his spear into her breast!
Jove stayed his hand and then expunged together

their abominations and identities,
bearing them upward through the empty air
and imposing them on heaven in the form                                            700
of two adjacent constellations.
When her husband's mistress gleamed among the stars, rage-swollen Juno descended to the level of white-haired Tethys and venerable Oceanus, gods whom the others often reverence.
And when they asked what brought her there, she said: "You wish to know why I, the queen of heaven, have come here from my airy habitation? Another has usurped my lofty place!
Call me a liar if you do not see,                                                               710
when darkness has obscured the nighttime sky, there, in the place of highest honor, where the smallest circle revolves around the pole, two constellations put out to insult me!
"And truly, why should any hesitate to take on Juno or to fear her wrath, who only helps the ones that she would harm? How vast my power and how great my deeds! I would not let her keep her human form,
and the result is—she is a goddess now!                                                720
Thus do I punish those who do me wrong! Thus do I wield my great authority!
"Let him restore her former face and figure, eliminating all the beastliness, as once before he did—in Io's case: since Juno is deposed, why shouldn't he remarry—and become Lycaon's son-in-law?
"But if the disdain he shows your foster child arouses you to anger, then deny this constellation your cerulean depths,                                                  73o

drive off these interlopers who have been
turned into stars—the wages paid to sin!
—and keep this slut from dipping in your waters."
Tethys and Oceanus gave assent, and Juno in her handy chariot was carried upward through the melting air by peacocks fitted out with Argus' eyes quite recently—in fact, at the same time that your white plumage suddenly turned black, loquacious raven.
The raven and the crow For once upon a time                                               740
those wings of his were silvery snow-white, immaculate as are the wings of doves, or as those geese whose vocal vigilance would one day keep the Capitol from harm, and no less white than the water-loving swan. It was that tongue of his that did him in; through his loquacity, he came to ruin and turned from white into its opposite.
There was no one in all of Thessaly more beautiful than Coronis of Larissa,                                                  750
and surely a delight to you, Apollo, while she was either true—or undetected. Apollo's raven caught her in the act and that inexorable tattletale went flying off to see his lord and master in order to disclose her guilty secret.
Eager for news, that chatterbox, the crow, caught up to him and flapped along beside, but when he learned the journey's purpose, said,
"This course will get you nowhere, friend, believe me!                         760
Do not dismiss my warning: pay attention to what I once was and to what I am now,

then ask why I deserved this transformation. You will discover that my loyalty was what destroyed me!
"Once upon a time, a boy named Erichthonius was born without a mother. Apollo hid the child in a woven basket of the Attic kind, and ordered the three virgin daughters of
the monster Cecrops to watch over him,                                               770
and not to take a peek inside the basket.
"Concealed within an elm tree's greenery, I spied on them to see what they would do; two of the sisters, Pandrosos and Herse, were careful, honest watchers—but the third, Aglauros, called the other sisters cowards, and opened up the basket to peek in: she saw the infant stretched beside a serpent.
"I carried my report back to the goddess, expecting a reward, but for my troubles                                                 780
I was deposed as Minerva's favorite, and—even worse—demoted to a rank below that of the noxious bird of nighttime!
"All birds should be reminded by my loss not to seek trouble by loquacity, and not to bring bad tidings to the boss.
"Perhaps you'll say she did not seek me out as her companion, of her own accord, when I had no such notion in my mind.
Why don't you go and ask the goddess? She                                         790
may still be angry, but she won't deny it.
"For I was not always as you see me now; the land of Phocis was my place of birth, my father was the famous Coroneus, as everyone knows; and, as a princess, I

was wooed by many wealthy noblemen.
"My beauty "was my ruin, for, one day, while I was promenading on the beach as usual, Neptune, god of the sea,
saw me and right away grew passionate;                                                     800
when prayers and blandishments proved wasted time, he chased me, threatening to force the issue.
"I called upon the gods and men for aid, but no one was around to hear my cries; a virgin's plight aroused the virgin goddess and she delivered me: I stretched my arms out and they began to darken with pinfeathers; I tried to tear the clothing from my shoulders but it was feathered, rooted in my skin;
I strove to beat my bare breast with my hands,                                          810
but found that I had neither hands nor breasts. I tried to run but now I glided over the unrestraining surface of the sand, and soon I soared aloft, high in the air, and then was given to Minerva as her chaste companion.
"What good does that do me, if someone who was turned into a bird to punish her for her appalling crimes— I mean Nyctimene—now takes my place?
"Or have you somehow managed not to hear                                      820
the story that is famous everywhere, throughout all Lesbos—how Nyctimene outraged the honor of her father's bed?
"Although a bird now, she still feels her guilt and flees the sight of men and light of day, concealing shame in darkness, driven out of the clear sky by all the other birds."
"We spurn your foolish omens," said the raven.

"May all your efforts to arrest my flight
redound upon you!" Onward raven flew                                                830
and told his master he had seen Coronis
lie with a young Thessalian.
When Apollo heard the accusation brought against his lover, the laurel resting on his brow slipped down; in not as much time as it takes to tell, his face, his lyre, his high color fell! Swelling with rage, he seized his customary weapon and bent it toward him from the tips; then his inexorable arrow flew into that breast so often pressed to his.                                                   840
Coronis groaned, and when the arrowhead was drawn out, her white limbs were drenched in gore: "O Phoebus, I deserved your punishment," she said. "But not before I'd given birth— for now another perishes with me." And with her blood, the life poured out of her; soon, with its spirit gone, her body lay frigid in death.
Now he is sorry for his cruel punishment, belatedly,
and hates himself for what he listened to,                                               850
and for his furious response to it: he hates the bird who forced him into this, the cause both of his crime and of his grief; he hates the hand and bow, and with the hand, he hates his thoughtless arrows for good measure; he strokes the fallen girl, too late, and tries to overcome her fate: too late again, for his attempt to bring her back to life through the arts of medicine are all for naught.
Now when he saw that these had no effect,                                      860

and that her funeral pyre was prepared
for the flames that would soon shrivel up her limbs,
the groans (for the immortal gods, you see,
are not permitted tears upon their cheeks)
from deep within him came, not unlike those
a young cow utters when she sees the hammer
come crashing down into the rounded skull
of her own suckling calf. The deity
pours fragrance on her unresponsive breast,
embraces her one last time and performs,                                              870
improperly, rites proper to the dead.
But Phoebus could not bear for his own seed to perish in those flames—and so he ripped the unborn child out of its mother's womb and brought it to the centaur Chiron's cave; and raven, who had hoped to be rewarded for his truth-telling was prohibited from taking his old place among white birds.
The prophecies of Ocyrhoë Meanwhile, the centaur was rejoicing in
his foster child's immortal lineage,                                                          880
delighted by the thought of raising him, an onorous, yet honorable task,
when look—here comes the centaur's human daughter, distinguished by her shoulder-length red hair, and named Ocyrhoë, for the swift stream upon whose banks the naiad Chariclo gave birth to her: besides her father's arts, she learned how to foretell fate's mysteries.
And so, when the prophetic fit came on her, and a god's fire burned within her breast,                                              890
she looked upon that infant and she said, "Grow up, Boychild, bringer of good health to the whole world! The sick will often be

indebted to you, and you will be permitted to bring back spirits who were snatched away, once and once only: for when you attempt to bring the dead to life a second time in spite of heaven, you will be halted by a lightning bolt from your grandfather Jove.
"No longer godlike in your power then,                                           900
but a lifeless corpse until changed yet again— into a real god now, and so your fate will be renewed for yet a second time.
"You, father dear, who are immortal too, destined from birth to live on earth forever, will beg the gods to be allowed to die, when the foul Hydra's blood has poisoned you; heaven will finally permit your death, and the three goddesses will snap the thread."
Still other fortunes waited to be told,                                                910
but with a deep sigh and flowing tears, she said, "The fate that changes me prohibits speech, and makes my own voice inaccessible. Those arts by which I have earned heaven's wrath are scarcely worth the price I pay for them! —I'd rather not know what the future holds! It seems my human form is being taken: the thought of grass for dinner pleases me, and open fields, where I can freely ride
as I become my relative—a mare!                                                           920
Whole horse? But why? My father is but a centaur!"
Her whining, waning, becomes whinnying, as mind and speech both grow confused together, and for a moment seemed a sound between the noise a horse makes and a human word, more like someone who imitates a horse, before the sound turned clearly into neighing,

as she went on all fours through the tall grass.
Her fingers fused together and a single band of light horn surrounded them, a hoof.                                             930
Her neck and mouth "were both increased in size and her long robe was turned into a tail while the hair that used to stray across her neck became a mane that fell on her right side; made over now in voice and form completely, this transformation gave her a new name.
Mercury and the tattletale Heroic Chiron, son of Philyra, wept, and sought your help, O Phoebus, but in vain, for you could not revoke the orders of
almighty Jove—and even if you could,                                                        940
you had gone off to Elis and Messenia.
That was the time when you were clothed in homespun and carried, in your left hand or the other, a shepherd's crook, and played the pipes of Pan: love was the care you eased with country music, and your unguarded herd went wandering into the fields of Pylos.
Mercury, that crafty rustler, sees your cattle there and drives them off and hides them in the woods.
And no one knows about this theft except                                       950
for one old man well known to everyone within that area. They called him Battus, the hired hand of wealthy Neleus, who watched his herd of mares, all thoroughbreds, in nearby glades and grassy pasturelands.
Young Mercury gladhands the aged rustic and taking him aside, inveigles him: "If anyone should ask about a herd, deny that you saw cattle passing through.

So that your kindness may not lack reward,                                               960
select one of these heifers for yourself."
He gave one to the old man, who replied: "Your secret's safe with me! Why, that stone there—" (and as he spoke, he pointed to a rock) "—will tell about your theft before I will!"
The son of Jove appeared to go away but soon returned with a new identity: "Say there, Hayseed," he said, "if you've just seen a herd of cattle being moved through here,
don't keep silent—help me—they've been stolen!                                     970
Your prize will be a heifer—and a bull."
The doubled bribe appealed to the old man: "Foot of yon mountain there is where you'll find 'em," the rustic said, and that was where they were.
Mercury laughed at him: "Will you betray me, you rogue? Betray me even to myself?" And he turned that hardened criminal to stone, a peak still known there as "the Tattletale"; unmerited, the ancient libel clings.
Mercury and Aglauros (1) On wings that steadied him, young Mercury                                        980
flew off until from high above he looked on the land which is Minerva's special love, the fields of Athens and its learned grove.
He happened to have shown up on the day on which Minerva's festival was kept, when maidens carried sacred gifts in baskets, poised on their heads, up to the Parthenon.
The winged god gave them the once-over as they returned, and, altering his flight plan,
made after them in a wide, sweeping arc,                                               990
as when that swiftest of all birds, the kite, has glimpsed the entrails of the sacrifice—

but while the priests are crowded round, it fears
to fly too near, yet fears to fly away,
so hovers high above its longed-for prey;
just so the nimble Mercury in flight
made circles over the Acropolis.
Just as the morning star outshines all others, and as the moon is to the morning star,
so Herse was to her companions there,                                                      1000
her beauty singular in their procession.
The son of Jupiter was stupified and in suspension burned with passion's flame: as when a Balearic sling lets fly and its leaden load goes whizzing on its way, heated by its own speed until it finds a warmth unknown before within the clouds.
He left the sky and came down to the earth without disguise, so great his confidence
in his own beauty, which, though not misplaced,                                     1010
was aided by the care he took of it, smoothing his hair, which had been mussed in flight, arranging his cloak so that it hung just so, letting its pricey golden border show, and making sure that the wand in his right hand (with which he brings sleep on or drives it off) was freshly shined, and seeing that the wings were gleaming brightly on his shapely feet.
Expensive ivory and tortoiseshell adorned the women's quarters, which held three                                      1020
bedchambers; yours, Pandrosos, on the right, Aglauros' on the left, Herse's in between. She on the left first noticed the approach of Mercury, and dared to ask his name and reason for his visit.
The grandson

of Atlas and Pleione answered her:
"Let me get to the point directly: I
am the airborne messenger of my father Jove,
and you should wish to be loyal to your sister
and famous as the aunt of our offspring,                                                1030
for Herse is the reason I am here;
I pray you favor me in my request."
Aglauros looked at him in the same way that she had only recently looked on the mysteries of golden-haired Minerva; and for his services, demanded gold in quantity; and Mercury, meanwhile, was ordered to vacate the premises.
The house of Envy Now bellicose Minerva turned the fierce
fire of her gaze upon Aglauros,                                                            1040
sighing so deeply that her breast was shaken beneath the aegis that defended it; for she realized that this was the same one who had gone against her orders and profaned her mysteries by peeking at Apollo's motherless child; and now this one would be a god's delight and pleasing to her sister, and rich with what her avarice demanded!
She headed straight to Envy's squalid quarters, black with corruption, hidden deep within                                           1050
a sunless valley where no breezes blow, a sad and sluggish place, richly frigid, where cheerful fires die upon the hearth and fog that never lifts embraces all.
Arriving here, the warlike maiden stood before the house (for heaven's law denied her entrance) and with her spear tip rapped upon the doors, which instantly flew open,

revealing Envy at her feast of snakes,
a fitting meal for her corrupted nature:                                                     1060
from such a sight, the goddess turned away.
The object of her visit sluggishly arises from the ground where she'd been sitting, leaving behind her interrupted dinner of half-eaten reptiles. Stiffly she advances, and when she sees the beauty of the goddess and of her armor, she cannot help but groan, and makes a face, and sighs a wretched sigh.
Then she grows pale, and her body shrivels up. Her glance is sidewise and her teeth are black;                                     1070
her nipples drip with poisonous green bile, and venom from her dinner coats her tongue; she only smiles at sight of another's grief, nor does she know, disturbed by wakeful cares, the benefits of slumber; when she beholds another's joy, she falls into decay, and rips down only to be ripped apart, herself the punishment for being her.
Although the goddess hated Envy, she addressed her nonetheless with these few words:                                  1080
"Infect one of the daughters of the Cecrops. That is the task. Aglauros is the one." With not another word, the goddess fled, placing the tip of her spear against the ground and using it to vault back up to heaven.
Muttering sourly beneath her breath, she eyes the fleeing goddess with distrust, already saddened by Minerva's joy. She takes her staff, bristling with thorns,
and sets off in a mantle of black clouds,                                                 1090
flicking the heads off flowers as she passes, blighting the grasses and destroying trees,

her breath polluting houses, cities, states.
At last she sees the city of the goddess; its wealth, its work, its joyous flourishing and peaceful temper all affect her so, she's scarcely able to prevent herself from weeping—for there's nothing here to weep for.
Once in the chambers of Aglauros, Envy obeys her orders, touching the girl's breast                                          1100
with her rust-stained hand and filling it with thorns; now Envy breathes her poison in the girl, and spreads her venom right into her bones, and so that she would have a cause for grief, draws her a picture of her sister's fortune, her blessed marriage to the handsome god, enlarging on it in imagination.
Aglauros, maddened, feasts on her own heart in secret wretchedness as anxious day
succeeds each anxious night; groaning, she slowly                                1110
wastes away, dissolving, just as ice does in the uncertain light of early spring.
Mercury and Aglauros (2) Her envy of her sister's happiness consumed her, and she burned as does a fire that smolders in a pile of thorny scrub. Often she wished to die in order not to see such happiness and often wished to bring the news of it to her stern parents; and finally she sat down on the threshold to keep the god from entering.
His prayers                                           1120
and his most honeyed words proved unavailing: "Stop it," she said. "I will not move from here until you have been thwarted in your purpose!"
"You have," said Mercury the swift,"a deal!"

And with his wand, he opened up the door;
but she, attempting to get to her feet,
discovered that the parts one bends when sitting
could not be moved, so heavy they had grown;
she tried to stand up, but her knees had stiffened,
and a chill crept down to her extremities                                              1130
and pallor drained her body of its color;
as cancer, that incurable disease,
spreads its roots widely while it makes its way,
infecting healthy tissue from unhealthy,
so lethal winter gradually came
into her breast and closed the passages
of life and slowly suffocated her;
she no more tried to speak, and if she had,
would not have found a passage for her voice.
Her neck was turned to rock. Her features hardened                       1140
until she sat, a bloodless effigy; nor was that stone white, but stained as by her soul.
Jove and Europa When Mercury had punished her for these impieties of thought and word, he left Athena's city, and on beating wings returned to heaven where his father Jove took him aside and (without telling him that his new passion was the reason) said:
"Dear son, who does my bidding faithfully, do not delay, but with your usual                                                            1150
swiftness fly down to earth and find the land that looks up to your mother on the left, called Sidon by the natives; there you will see a herd of royal cattle some way off upon a mountain; drive them down to shore."
He spoke and it was done as he had ordered: the cattle were immediately driven

down to a certain place along the shore
where the daughter of a great king used to play,
accompanied by maidens all of Tyre.                                                   1160
Majestic power and erotic love do not get on together very well, nor do they linger long in the same place: the father and the ruler of all gods, who holds the lightning bolt in his right hand and shakes the world when he but nods his head, now relinquishes authority and power, assuming the appearance of a bull to mingle with the other cattle, lowing as gorgeously he strolls in the new grass.                                              1170
He is as white as the untrampled snow before the south wind turns it into slush. The muscles stand out bulging on his neck, and the dewlap dangles on his ample chest; his horns are crooked, but appear handmade, and flawless as a pair of matching gems. His brow is quite unthreatening, his eye excites no terror, and his countenance is calm.
The daughter of King Agenor admires him, astonished by the presence                                              1180
of peacefulness and beauty in the beast; yet even though he seems a gentle creature, at first she fears to get too close to him, but soon approaching, reaches out her hand and pushes flowers into his white mouth.
The lover, quite beside himself, rejoices, and as a preview of delights to come, kisses her fingers, getting so excited that he can scarcely keep from doing it!
Now he disports himself upon the grass,                                         1190

and lays his whiteness on the yellow sands;
and as she slowly overcomes her fear
he offers up his breast for her caresses
and lets her decorate his horns with flowers;
the princess dares to sit upon his back
not knowing who it is that she has mounted,
and he begins to set out from dry land,
a few steps on false feet into the shallows,
then further out and further to the middle
of the great sea he carries off his booty;                                                1200
she trembles as she sees the shore receding
and holds the creature's horn in her right hand
and with the other clings to his broad back,
her garments streaming in the wind behind her.

BOOK III
THE WRATH OF JUNO
Jove and Europa         Cadmus founds Thebes         Actaeon and Diana
  Juno, Jove, and Semele         The judgment of Tiresias
Narcissus and Echo         Narcissus         Bacchus and Pentheus

Jove and Europa
And now, his taurine imitation ended, the god exposed himself for what he was to cowed Europa on the isle of Crete.
In an action both paternal and perverse, the captured maiden's baffled father bids her brother Cadmus to locate the girl or face an endless term of banishment. His search was fruitless, for who can discover Jove's secret snatches? The son of Agenor,
shunning alike his parent's realm and wrath,                                          10
supplicates the oracle of Phoebus and asks him for a land to colonize.
Cadmus founds Thebes "You will meet a heifer in a trackless place," says Phoebus, "one who has not borne the yoke, nor broken up the earth with a curved plow. Follow her lead; wherever she reposes, there build your city. Name the land Boeotia."
Cadmus had just come down from the Castalian grotto, when he discovered an unguarded
heifer who ambled on ahead of him,                                                      20
her neck unscarred by any signs of service. He fell in after, following her tracks, and as he walked, gave silent thanks to Phoebus, who instigated this.
The heifer crossed the shallows of the river called Cephisus, then passed beyond the meadows of Panope, and then abruptly halted; lifting up her lovely rack of horns to heaven, she bellowed repeatedly: then, with a glance
over her shoulder at the men behind her,                                               30
knelt and resigned her flank to the soft grasses.

Gratefully, Cadmus kissed the foreign soil
and reverenced the unknown fields and mountains.
A sacrifice to Jove is now in order: Cadmus sends his attendants off to find the necessary spring of running water. Nearby there was a stand of virgin timber, and deep within, a cave whose mouth was screened by undergrowth and stones all mixed together; fresh water poured across the arch it made.                                             40
Deep in this cave, there lurked a golden-crested serpent that Mars had chosen as his own: his eyes flashed fire and his coiling bulk was swollen up with venom, while his tongue (divided at its tip into three parts) flickered past teeth arranged in triple rows.
When the doomed Tyrians had reached this grove and started to draw water from the spring, their careless clattering and splashing woke
the serpent, who, from deep within the cave                                          50
thrust his head out, hissing at them fiercely: the pitchers tumble from their frightened hands as in their veins the warm blood ices over, and their agitated limbs convulse with tremors.
Twisting his scaly coils in rolling knots, with a great leap he flexes like a bow, and then, by more than half his height, he thrusts himself up through the unresisting air; so huge he was that if you could have seen
the whole of him, he would have seemed the Snake                              60
that keeps the Greater from the Lesser Bear.
At once he falls upon the Tyrians, whether they now prepare to fight or flee or simply stand there, paralyzed by fear; those who escape his fangs live but to die

crushed in his coils or poisoned by his breath.
At midpoint now, the sun draws shadows in, and Cadmus, wondering what keeps his mates, sets out to find them: his shield, a lion pelt;
his arms, a javelin and thrusting spear;                                                         70
no weapon, though, was greater than his courage.
Soon at the grove, he sees their broken bodies, and towering above them sways their huge enemy, triumphant, his bloody tongue licking at their sad wounds.The hero cries, "Most faithful souls! I will avenge your deaths or else I'll join you," and with his right hand lifts up a huge rock, straining, and then hurls it.
Such a great blow would easily have toppled steep walls and lofty towers; but the serpent,                                               80
protected by the armor of his scales and by his adamantine hide beneath, repels the stroke unscathed, though not the spear that slips through writhing coils to pin his spine, its tip of iron buried in his innards.
Frenzied, he twists his head round to examine his wounded back, then bites down on the shaft, and with great effort barely manages to tear it loose, although the tip stays in,
adding new fuel to the well-banked ire                                                       90
of customary rage: the veins throb in his throat, his gaping horrid jaws are flecked with foam; buffed by his scales, the bare earth resonates, and his infernal breath infects the air.
He coils his roundness up into enormous spirals, then winds out upright, tall as a tree; and now comes pouring like a stream in flood, his huge breast sweeping forests on before it.
Cadmus falls back: his shield of lion skin

receives the blows, while he wards off the jaws                                     100
with sharp spear jabs; enraged, the serpent bites
into the palate-piercing iron tip;
now blood begins to trickle from his throat,
and spatters the fresh grass with its new color.
The wound is light though, since he keeps retreating, moving his injured neck back from the spear, yielding more ground, while he prevents the hero from working on that wound. Relentlessly Cadmus engages him, maneuvering
until he gets him right before an oak,                                                   110
then thrusts and pins the monster to the tree, which now bends in the middle from his weight, and groans in bass, lashed by the serpent's tail.
And while he stared at his enormous trophy, the winner heard an unexpected voice, distinctly clear, but unlocatable: "Why do you gape at the slain serpent, Cadmus, when you yourself are fated to become a spectacle, a serpent well worth seeing?"
And for a long time, faint and colorless,                                             120
he stood there, trembling with icy fear, his hair erect. But look: his patroness glides down from heaven and stands by his side: Pallas Athena, who now bids him sow the agitated earth with the viper's teeth, seed of a race to come. Obeying her, he opens furrows with a plow, then sprinkles that mortal seed of teeth into the ground.
And then, incredibly, the dull clods stir: at first only the little tips of spears                                                           130
are visible, emerging from the furrows, but these, almost at once are followed by the brightly painted waving crests of helmets,

then shoulders, breasts, and arms heavy with weapons,
and finally a dense-packed mass of shields:
no different from what you will have seen
on feast days, in the theater, when the curtain
lifts from the pit, and the images of men
painted upon it seem to rise: heads first,
and then the rest of them, little by little,                                                    140
drawn up in one unbroken wave until
the tiny figures stand erect onstage,
complete in all respects, from head to feet.
Cadmus, alarmed by this new enemy, prepared to arm himself: "Don't take up arms," cried one of those created in the earth. "It's our civil war—stay out of it!"
And closing in on one of his earthborn brothers, he hacked him with his rigid sword,
and then was felled by someone else's spear;                                              150
and just a moment later, that one too yielded the breath he'd only just received.
Now all of them were equally enraged! These brothers of a moment slew each other, until young men, whose lives had just begun, lay beating the breast of their ensanguined mother.
And now just five remained: one was Echion, who, warned by Pallas, threw his weapons down, seeking and giving securities for peace
among his brothers; these were the companions                                    160
Sidonian Cadmus had when he built the city granted him by the oracle of Phoebus.
Actaeon and Diana Thebes has been founded now, and even though an exile still, you might seem fortunate in having Mars and Venus as your in-laws, Cadmus; nor is this all, for in addition

are offspring worthy of your noble wife,
your sons and daughters, the pledges of your love,
and grandsons too, already grown to manhood.
But "fortunate"? A judgment best reserved                                            170
for a man's last day: call no one blest, until
he dies and the last rites are said for him.
Not all your riches could console you, Cadmus, grieving for the grandson that you lost when those unlikely horns sprang from his brow, and his own dogs were sated with his blood. You'll find—if you look closely—that the fault here was with Fortune, not with the young man, for can it really be a crime to err?
When the sun stood equidistant from its goals                                  180
at shadowless midday, upon a mountain polluted with the blood of divers beasts, Actaeon languidly addressed his mates, who had been hunting in the trackless wood: "Fortune has been sufficient to the day: our nets and spears are steeped in beastly gore. Let us renew our labors when Aurora next brings the day back in her saffron car, for now at midpoint, Phoebus sweats the fields;
stop what you're doing and take in the nets."                                         190
They did as he commanded them to do, and abruptly brought their labors to an end.
There is a grove of pine and cypresses known as Gargraphie, a hidden place most sacred to the celibate Diana; and deep in its recesses is a grotto artlessly fabricated by the genius of Nature, which, in imitating Art, had shaped a natural organic arch out of the living pumice and light tufa.                                                 200

Before this little grotto, on the right, a fountain burbles; its pellucid stream widens to form a pool edged round with turf; here the great goddess of the woods would come to bathe her virgin limbs in its cool waters, when hunting wearied her.
She is here today; arriving, she hands the Armoress of Nymphs her spear, her quiver, and her unstrung bow; and while one nymph folds her discarded robe
over an arm, two more remove her sandals,                                           210
and that accomplished Theban nymph, Crocale, gathers the stray hairs on Diana's neck into a knot (we cannot help but notice that her own hair is left in careless freedom!); five other nymphs, whose names are Nephele, Hyale, Rhanis, Psecas, and Phiale, fetch and pour water from enormous urns.
And while Diana bathes as usual, see where Actaeon on a holiday,
wandering clueless through the unfamiliar                                            220
forest, now finds his way into her grove, for so Fate had arranged.
At sight of him within the misty precincts of their grotto, the naked nymphs began to beat their breasts and filled the grove with shrill and startled cries; in their concern, they poured around Diana, attempting to conceal her with a screen of their own bodies, but to no avail, for the goddess towered over all of them.
The color taken from the setting sun                                                 230
by western clouds, so similar to that which rosy-tinted Dawn so often shows,

was the same color on Diana's face
when she was seen undressed. And even though
her virgin comrades squeezed themselves around her,
she managed to turn sideways and look back
as if she wished she had her arrows handy—
but making do with what she had, scooped up
water and flung it in Actaeon's face,
sprinkling his hair with the avenging droplets,                                          240
and adding words that prophesied his doom:
"Now you may tell of how you saw me naked,
tell it if you can, you may!"
No further warning: the brow which she has sprinkled jets the horns of a lively stag; she elongates his neck, narrows his eartips down to tiny points, converts his hands to hooves, his arms to legs, and clothes his body in a spotted pelt. Lastly, the goddess endows him with trembling fear: that heroic son of Autonoe flees,                                                                   250
surprised to find himself so swift a runner.
But when he stopped and looked into a pool at the reflection of his horns and muzzle— "Poor me!" he tried to say, but no words came, only a groaning sound, by which he learned that groaning was now speech; tears streamed down cheeks that were no longer his: only his mind was left unaltered by Diana's wrath. What should he do? Return home to the palace,
or find a hiding place deep in the woods?                                                  260
Shame kept him from one course, and fear, the other.
And while he stands bewildered, he observes his pack of hunting dogs approaching him with Tracker and keen Blackfoot in the lead (Tracker's a Cretan, Blackfoot's out of Sparta)

haying the good news to the dogs behind,
the whole pack rushing at him like a storm:
Gazelle and Greedy and Ridge Rover, all
Arcadians, with Killdeer and Tornado,
and sturdy Hunter, fearsome Birdie, Gwen,                                                270
and savage Sylvia (who'd lately been
gored by a boar) and Snap (a wolf, her dam)
and faithful Shepherdess along with Snare
and two of the pups from her last litter;
ravenous Raptor the Siconian,
then Runner, Grinder, Spot, Tigress, Terror,
snow-colored Whitey, Soot as black as ashes,
powerful Sparta, devastating Whirlwind,
Speedy, and Wolf, the Cyprian, her brother,
and Trap (with that distinctive little white patch                                       280
right in the middle of his black brow);
and after them came Blackie, Shag, and two
dogs of mixed Cretan-Spartan ancestry,
Fury and Fang, a little one named Yipper,
and many more too numerous to mention,
all out to taste his blood, all unrelenting;
through steep, and sheer, and inaccessible,
through difficult and through impossible
places, they track him, and he flees the hunt
he has so often led, longing to cry out                                                        290
to the pack behind him, "It's me! Actaeon!
Recognize your master!" But the words
betray him and the air resounds with baying.
Now Brownie and Buster leap onto his back while Mountain Climber dangles from one shoulder; they'd started late but figured out a shortcut across the hilltop; now he's held at bay until the pack can gather and begin to savage him: torn by their teeth, he makes

a sound no man would make and no stag either,                                   300
a cry that echoes through those well-known heights;
and kneeling like a suppliant at prayer,
he turns toward them, pleading with his eyes,
as a man would with his hands.
But his companions loudly encourage the ferocious pack, all unaware: they look around for him, call out to him as though he weren't there; "Actaeon!" "Pity he's not here with us!"
And hearing his own name, he turns his head: he might wish to be elsewhere, but he's present,                                    310
and might wish merely to be watching this, rather than feeling the frenzy of his dogs who press around him, thrusting pointed snouts into the savaged body of their master, convinced that he's a stag.
And it is said he did not die until his countless wounds had satisfied Diana's awful wrath.
Juno, Jove, and Setnele Folks were divided: there were those who found the goddess's actions cruel and unjust,
while others considered them appropriate                                             320
to the defense of her austere virginity.
As usual, both parties had their reasons. Jove's wife alone refrained from passing judgment, rejoicing as she did when some misfortune fell upon one of Agenor's descendents, for her undying hatred of her husband's Tyrian mistress had been redirected more generally against Europa's kin.
But look: her husband's at it once again: Semele's womb is swollen with the seed                                                 330

of almighty Jove, and Juno is dismayed; this so reminds her of earlier episodes that a great tirade rises to her lips:
"But when have I won anything by shouting?" she asked. "No: I must attack and ruin her, it I am rightly styled as almighty Juno, if it is right for me to bear the scepter, if I am certainly the queen of Jove, his sister, his wife—well, certainly his sister.
"Why bother, though? She's just a one-night stand,                          340
a momentary insult to my conjugal rights. But this one carries shame that can't be hidden in her tumescent womb—and that is new; her fondest wish is to become the mother of a child by Jove—an honor I'm denied.
"She's proud of her good looks: I'll have that pride betray her; say that I'm not Saturn's daughter it that one doesn't end up in the Styx, and plunged there by almighty Jove himself!
She left her throne and journeyed to the house                                350
of Semele, wrapped in a golden cloud, until she'd made herself into a crone with whitened hair and wrinkle-furrowed skin who walked bent over double, tottering on trembling limbs, and spoke up in a voice that quavered with old age; as such she seemed Beroë, Semele's Epidaurian nurse.
A long, inveigling chat of this and that, until Jove's name came up. Nurse sighed and said,
"I hope he's Jupiter—although I doubt it:                                               360
the divinity plea? An all-too-common ploy among seducers. Suppose he is, though: make him provide assurance of his love; if he's the real thing, ask him to put on

all of the trappings of his high office
and embrace you, showing such almighty splendor
as when he is received by Lady Juno."
Thus the goddess schooled the clueless daughter of Cadmus, who went quickly off to Jove and asked him for a gift, nature unspecified.                                          370
"Ask it," he said. "I will deny you nothing! So that you may believe me all the more, I'll swear it by the sacred, roiling Styx, the god that terrifies the rest of us."
Tickled to death by her appalling fate and demanding from her too-indulgent lover a gift soon to undo her, Semele said, "Just as you are when Lady Juno receives you in her embraces and you initiate
the pact of Venus, hidden from all others—                                           380
come likewise unto me." Even as she spoke the god would have prevented her from speaking, but all too swiftly had her words been uttered, which, like his oath, could not be taken back.
He groans, distraught, and then ascends to heaven, and with a glance, the mists are summoned round; dark clouds are laced with lightning and high winds, and thunder too, and inescapable fire; as best he can, he moderates his force,
leaving upon its shelf the thunderbolt                                                    390
with which he hurled the hundred-handed Typhoeus into the fire: that would have been too much.
Instead, he picks a bolt the Cyclops forged, one with reduced anger and a lower flame (they call such weapons his Light Artillery) ; and so appareled, came to Semele; but she, whose mortal body could not bear such heavenly excitement, burst into flames

and was incinerated by Jove's gift.
Her child was torn out of her womb unfinished,                              400
and—this part is scarcely credible—was sewn into his father's thigh, where he was brought to term. His mother's sister, Ino, secretly cared for the babe and then surrendered him to nymphs on Nysa, who hid him in their cave and nourished him with milk.
And so, on earth, the cradle of the twice-born baby Bacchus was kept from harm by Fate's decree.
The judgment of Tiresias Meanwhile, they say that in heaven Jove had put aside
his weighty cares, and, drink in hand, was busy                                      410
killing time in repartee with Juno: "Women get far more pleasure out of sex than men do," he said. And when she denied this, they both agreed to seek the arbitration of the transsexual sage, Tiresias, who, in a leafy forest, had once profaned the coupling of two enormous serpents, by giving them a blow with his walking stick.
A wonder, for at once he was transformed into a woman and remained as such                                                       420
for seven years. But when the eighth year came, he saw the same two serpents once again and said, "Since striking you has the effect of turning one into one's opposite, I'll strike you once again."
And having done so, became the image of his former self.
The sage agreed to settle their dispute, a trifling one, or so he must have thought,

when he agreed with Jove. But Saturn's daughter
reacted badly when he gave his judgment,                                             430
and many thought her anger was excessive,
when, for an issue of no great importance,
she damned Tiresias to eternal blindness.
But one god can't undo another's doing, and so Jove gave Tiresias the gift of foresight to replace the vision lost, tempering punishment with the high esteem he was soon held in, throughout all Boeotia, for the unerring answers that he gave to those who came to him and sought his counsel.                               440
First to consult him was Liriope, the sky-blue nymph who had been ravished by the river god Cephisus when he snared her between his winding banks; she bore a child, who even as an infant was adorable, and whom she called Narcissus.
When she asked whether her son would live to ripe old age, Tiresias responded with these words: "If he knows himself—not. For a long time
that prophecy appeared completely groundless,                                     450
until the boy's unusual obsession, which took his life, proved the foretelling true.
Narcissus and Echo Narcissus at sixteen seemed to be both boy and man, and many boys and women desired him; but in his yielding beauty was such inflexibility and pride that no young man or woman ever moved him.
Once, as he drove the trembling deer to his nets, resounding Echo sighted him, a nymph unable to keep still when someone spoke,                                             460

or speak at all before another did.
Until this time, Echo had a body; though voluble, she wasn't just a voice, as she is now—although she used her voice no oftener than she does now, repeating just the last words of any speech she heard.
Juno had done this to her, for whenever Saturn's daughter was poised to apprehend Jove in his dalliance with a mountain nymph,
Echo, who knew full well what she was doing,                                     470
detained the goddess with a long recital of idle chatter while the nymphs escaped.
But Juno figured out what she was up to: "Once too often has your tongue beguiled me; from now on you'll have little use for it!" And that is why Echo skips now to the end of any speech she hears and then repeats it.
One day Narcissus happened to be roaming the countryside when Echo happened by,
and at the very sight of him grew hot;                                                   480
she secretly pursued him through the woods, her heat increasing as she overtook him, as torches smeared with highly flammable sulfur ignite themselves, brought near a flame.
Often she wanted to come on to him, accost him with endearments, tender prayers— but her nature won't permit such forwardness: advances are denied her, though she may repeat, in her own voice, a sound she hears.
That day he was cut off from his companions,                                  490
and called out, "Anyone here?"
"Here!" answered Echo. Narcissus searches all around, astounded: cries out more loudly,

"Come!" His cry returns; he turns around, but there's no one approaching: "Why do you run away from me?" he asks, and the very same words are given back to him.
He halts, astounded by that other voice: "Here let us come together," he cries out, and Echo gave her heart with her reply,
"Come! Together!" And leapt out of the woods,                                       500
eager to give her words a little help by swiftly embracing the desired neck; he flees, and fleeing, cries, "Hands off! No hugs! I'll die before you'll have your way with me!" "You'll have your way with me" Echo replied.
Spurned, shamefaced, she slipped into the woods and hid herself, living alone in caves from that time on. And yet her love endured, increased even, by feeding on her sorrow:
unsleeping grief wasted her sad body,                                                     510
reducing her to dried out skin and bones, then voice and bones only; her skeleton turned, they say, into stone. Now, only voice is left of her, on wooded mountainsides, unseen by any, although heard by all; for only the sound that lived in her lives on.
Narcissus He'd trifled with her and so many others, water nymphs, nymphs of the wooded mountains, as well as a host of male admirers.
One of those spurned raised his hands to heaven:                                  520
"May he himself love as I have loved him," he said, "without obtaining his beloved," and Nemesis assented to his prayer.
There was a clear pool of reflecting water unfrequented by shepherds with their flocks

or grazing mountain goats; no bird or beast, not even a fallen twig stirred its surface; its presence nourished greenery around it, and the surrounding trees would keep it cool.
Worn out and overheated from the chase,                                              530
here comes the boy, attracted to this pool as to its setting, and reclines beside it. And as he strives to satisfy one thirst, another is born; drinking, he's overcome by the beauty of the image that he sees; he falls in love with an immaterial hope, a shadow that he wrongly takes for substance.
Transfixed, suspended like a figure carved from marble, he looks down at his own face;
stretched out on the ground, stares into his own eyes                               540
and sees a pair of stars worthy of Bacchus, a head of hair that might adorn Apollo; those beardless cheeks, that neck of ivory, the decorative beauty of his face, and the blushing snow of his complexion; he admires all that he's admired for, for it is he that he himself desires, all unaware; he praises and is praised, seeks and is the one that he is seeking; kindles the flame and is consumed by it.                                                     550
How many times, in vain, he leans to kiss the pool's deceptive surface or to plunge his arms into the water, keen to clasp the neck he glimpses but cannot embrace; and ignorant of what it is he looks at, he burns for what he sees there all the same, aroused by the illusion that deceives him.
Why even try to stay this passing fancy? Child, what you seek is nowhere to be found,

your beloved is lost when you avert your eyes:                                      560
that image of an image, without substance, arrives with you and with you it remains, and it will leave when you leave—if you can!
For neither his hunger nor his need for rest can draw him off; prone on the shaded grass, his insatiate stare fixed on that false shape, he perishes by his own eyes.
Lifting himself, he spreads his arms out toward the nearby woods: "O woods," he cries, "tell me if any other
has ever suffered any more than I have,                                                 570
for surely you would know, you who have been a likely lurking place for so many lovers— was there ever one, in all the ages past that you recall, who was consumed like me? I like what I look at, but what I look at and like I can't locate—"
(So great is the confusion in which this lover wanders, lost!)
"My pain is even greater, for no ocean lies between us, nor some highway without end,
nor mountain range to cross, nor gates to scale:                                    580
only this shallow pool! He would be held, for every time I lean down to the surface and offer him my willing mouth to kiss, he, on his back, lifts up his lips toward mine— you'd think he could be touched!
"So very small a thing it is that keeps us from our loving! Come out and show yourself! Why do you mock me, singular boy? Where do you take yourself? Surely I'm young and sufficiently attractive

to stay your flight! Why, even nymphs have loved me!                             590
"I've no idea what hopes you mean to raise with that come-hither look of yours, but when I've reached down toward you, you've reached up again, and when I laughed, why, you laughed too, and often I have seen tears on your cheeks when I wept; you second all my motions, and the movement of your bow-shaped lips suggests that you respond with words to mine—although I never hear them!
"But now I get it! I am that other one! I've finally seen through my own image!                                                    600
I burn with love for—me! The spark I kindle is the torch I carry: whatever can I do? Am I the favor-seeker, or the favor sought?
"Why seek at all, when all that I desire is mine already? Riches in such abundance that I've been left completely without means!
"Oh, would that I were able to secede from my own body, depart from what I love! (Now that's an odd request from any lover.)
My grief is draining me, my end is near;                                                     610
soon I will be extinguished in my prime. This death is no grave matter, for it brings an end to sorrow. Of course, I would have been delighted if my beloved could have lived on, but now in death we two will merge as one."
Maddened by grief, he spoke and then turned back to his image in the water, which his tears had troubled; when he saw it darkly wavering, he cried out, "Stay! Where are you going? O cruel, to desert your lover! Touch may be forbidden,                                          620
but looking isn't: then let me look at you and feed my wretched frenzy on your image."
And while he mourned, he lifted up his tunic

and with hard palms, he beat on his bare breast
until his skin took on a rosy color,
as parti-colored apples blanch and blush,
or clustered grapes, that sometimes will assume
a tinge of purple in their unripened state;
the water clears; he sees what he has done
and can bear no more; just as the golden wax                                        630
melts when it's warmed, or as the morning's frost
retreats before the early sun's scant heat,
so he dissolves, wasted by his passion,
slowly consumed by fires deep within.
Now is no more the blushing white complexion, the manly strength and all that pleased the eye, the figure that was once quite dear to Echo.
And seeing this, she mourned, although still mindful of her angry pain; as often as the wretched
boy cried, "Alas!" she answered with "Alas!"                                         640
And when he struck his torso with his fists, Echo responded with the same tattoo.
His last words were directed to the pool: "Alas, dear boy, whom I have vainly cherished!" Those words returned to him again, and when he cried "Farewell!""Farewell!" cried Echo back.
His weary head sank to the grass; death closed those eyes transfixed once by their master's beauty, but on the ferry ride across the Styx, his gaze into its current did not waver.                                                   650
The water nymphs, his sisters, cut their locks in mourning for him, and the wood nymphs, too, and Echo echoed all their lamentations; but after they'd arranged his funeral, gotten the logs, the bier, the brandished torches, the boy's remains were nowhere to be found;

instead, a flower, whose white petals fit closely around a saffron-colored center.
Bacchus and Pentheus
Once news of this affair had circulated
throughout the Grecian cities, the seer's fame                                       660
increased deservedly; of all men, only
King Pentheus (who mocked the gods) despised him,
deriding his prophetic speech, and cruelly
throwing in his face the sudden blindness
which he had been afflicted with by Juno.
But the old man shook his white head in warning: "Better, far better, had it been for you if you too were blind: you would then be spared the sight of Bacchus' rites," replied the seer.
"The day of his arrival is not distant,                                                670
this new god who is sprung from Semele, and if you fail to show him fitting honors, the god will tear your mangled corpse to pieces and scatter them, your blood will stain the trees— will stain your mother and her sisters too! —It will be so! You will ignore the god, and you will say that in my blindness, I saw far too much!"
The son of Echion drove the seer off before he finished speaking, but what he said would happen came to pass.                                       680
Liber has come!'The fields reverberate with the ululations of the revelers; people come pouring from the city's gates, ignoring all distinctions of rank and gender: men with matrons, matrons with young marrieds, nobles and nobodies all hastening together to these novel rites of Bacchus.

"Children of Mars! Offspring of the Serpent!" cried Pentheus. "What madness clouds your judgment? Will clashing cymbals, blaring hornpipes, tawdry                                  690
illusions conquer those who have endured a line of flashing spears, who've drawn their swords, advancing as one man when the charge was sounded? Will these be overcome by women's voices, by wine-soaked madness, drums and debauchery?
"And you, elders—should I not find it strange that you who crossed the sea to found New Tyre, and made a home here for your exiled gods, will yield it up without a fight?
"And you, my comrades, warlike men of my own age—                                        700
have you decided to exchange your arms and helmets for the thyrsus and green garlands?
"I pray you keep in mind the stock you spring from, take as your own the spirit of the Serpent, one who slew many; he died in the defense of his own lair, but you for glory's sake; he slew heroes; you must drive off sissies to keep your nation's honor bright.
"If fate denies long life to Thebes, I'd rather see
her walls fall to men and the engines of war,                                         710
in tumult of iron and fire! Our wretchedness would be no crime then, we could mourn our lot openly, unshamed by our tears.
"But Thebes has been captured by a sissyboy, untutored in the arts of war, unaided by spears or cavalry: the city taken by slicked and scented hair, by tender garlands, by robes embroidered with rich gold and purple!
"Out of my way! I'll force him to admit the truth about his lofty parentage                                                          720

and concocted rites! Didn't Acrisius
show what he was made of when he banned
this empty deity and closed the gates
of Argos to him and his crowd? Will Pentheus
and all of Thebes take fright at his approach?
Go quickly, slaves, bring me their leader back
in chains: do as I bid without delay!"
His grandfather and Athamas rebuke him, and all the counselors that press around,
vainly attempting to contain his anger;                                                  730
their warnings, ineffectual, enrage him, and his wrath increases as they urge restraint.
So I have sometime seen a stream in torrent make no more than a murmur as it flowed on, unobstructed; but where it met resistance from logs and rocks, it boiled and foamed, turning its waters white with an opposing rage.
But look: his slaves are back, all smeared with blood, and when he asks for Bacchus, they reply
that even though no Bacchus could be found,                                       740
they nonetheless have captured his companion, a Bacchic priest, hauled up before the king with his arms tightly bound behind his back.
Almost unable to restrain himself, Pentheus casts a dreadful eye on him: "You who are about to die, and by your death serve as a warning to all others, speak: tell us your name, your ancestry, your nation, and why you devote yourself to these new rites."
He spoke up fearlessly: "My name's Acoetes,                                     750
my land's Maeonia; my people, humble; my father didn't leave me a young bull to help the cultivation of the fields he didn't leave me any of besides; no herds of sheep, nor any other beasts.

"He was, in fact, a pauper, baiting hooks and casting out to where the fish were leaping; that skill was all his wealth and property, and when he passed it on to me, he said,
'Accept the only riches that I have,                                                        760
my sole successor, heir of my enterprise.'
"And so it was that my inheritance consisted totally of liquid assets: dying, he left me nothing but the water.
"Then, so as not to have to spend my life forever stuck on one rock and the same, I added to my repertoire the arts of navigation: I learned how to steer and set a course for ships by the positions
of the Goat, the Pleiades, the Hyades, the Bear;                                    770
I studied the directions of the winds and learned which ports make the safest harbors.
"Happened one day that as we made for Delos, we were becalmed and lay to, off the coast of Chios, until with our practiced oars, we brought the ship to shore, leapt to wet sand, and beached her there. And there we spent the night.
"At dawn, I rose and sent the men for water from a nearby spring I showed them where to find, while I went up a hill to read the winds,                                                780
and when I finished, summoned them aboard. 'All present and accounted for,' answered Opheltes, the first of my crew members to return with booty (as he thought) found in a field: a little boy formed like a little girl.
"The child seemed to totter, stumbling along as though dulled by sleep. I noted carefully the refinement of his bearing, the look of him— nothing I saw there made me think him mortal.

Sensed it at once, and told my crew,
" 'What god                               790
impersonates that child I do not know, but there's a god in him, I'm sure of that! Whoever you are, oh, show us grace and favor, aid our undertakings, and forgive these men for their offense.'
" 'Don't pray for us,' said Dictys, who would scramble like a monkey into the rigging and right back down again. Libys concurred with him, as did the lookout, blond Melanthus; Alcimedon joined in
and Epopeus, who timed the rowers' strokes,                                        800
and all the others went along with them, blinded alike by greediness for plunder.
" 'I won't allow this ship to be defiled by profaning acts,' I said. 'My own authority must have the greater weight and precedence.' I held them back from boarding, but Lycabas, the most abandoned, most headstrong of that crew, exiled from Tuscany for manslaughter, flew at my throat, enraged, in mortal combat;
choked me until I very nearly fainted,                                                          810
and would have sent me flying into the water had I not grabbed a rope and clung to it.
"The filthy rabble all approved. At last, Bacchus (for it was he), as though awakened by our racket, asked, half-drunkenly, "What's going on here, sailors? Why this fuss? How did I get here? What will you do with me?'
" 'Don't you fret none,' said Proreus. 'Just say which port you want and we'll deliver you straight to whatever land your heart is set on.'                                       820
" 'Naxos!' cried Liber:'Change your heading to starboard!

That is my home, and there you will be welcomed!'
"Those liars swore by the sea, by all the gods, it would be so, and ordered me to sail. Naxos lay to starboard; starboard was my heading, but men kept coming up to me and muttering, 'What are you doing, madman? "What's gotten into you, Acoetes?"Tack to port and hold steady!' Some made their meaning clear with a nod or wink, while others whispered openly. I balked:                                                830
'Have someone else take over then,' I said, letting them know I'd have no part in this.
"They all began to murmur and rebuke me, and from their midst Aethelion emerged: 'Sure,' he said,'Sure—as if our safety depends on one man—you!' He took the helm and set sail to port, away from Naxos.
"The god began to toy with them, pretending he'd only just now seen through their deceit,
and gazing out at the sea from the curved prow                                    840
in feigned tears, he cried, 'This is not the shore you promised, sailors, nor the land I sought: What have I done to you? What glory is gained, if a boy is tricked by men? Or one by many?'
"I had long been weeping. My indecent crew laughed at my tears and rowed at double speed. Now, by the presence of the god himself (a god more truly present than all others) I swear that what I tell you next is truth,
though past belief: the ship stood still in the sea—                                850
as though it had been lifted up in dry dock!
"The men, although astounded, persevere, redoubling their strokes and letting sail out, hoping to break loose one way or another. But now the oars are tangled up in ivy,

and twining strands of it coil round their bodies, ascend the mast and decorate the sails with ivy berries in enormous clusters.
"And now the god reveals himself at last, his brow festooned with leaves and grapes in bunches,                         860
shaking a spear with vine leaves wrapped around it! About him tigers and the bodiless forms of lynxes and fierce leopards lie!
"Insanity or terror drives my crew, and they leap overboard: Medon's whole body begins to darken and his spine is molded in a dramatic curve:
" 'What sort of specimen is it you're turning into?' asks Lycabas, but even as he speaks his jaws gape wide,
his nose protrudes, his skin gets rough and scaly.                                   870
And while he leans against unmoving oars, Libys becomes aware his hands are shrinking until they aren't even hands—but fins.
"Another only learns he's lost his arms when he attempts to wrap them round a rope: limbless, he does a back-flip into the sea, to demonstrate the tail that he now sports, curved like the crescent horns of a new moon!
"Now they leap up and splash back, frolicking in the water all around us, everywhere!                                                  880
They carry on like dancers, leaping wildly, sucking in water and spraying it into the air!
"Out of the twenty men that vessel carried, I alone was left: trembling, cold with terror, scarcely myself, until the god encouraged me: 'Dismiss your fears,' he said. 'Set sail for Naxos!' And since the time of my arrival there, I've been devoted to the god and to his rites."

"We've listened patiently, too patiently, to this long-winded drivel, meant to dissipate                                       890
our anger by delaying punishment," said Pentheus. "Off with him quickly, boys, go break his bones and rack him with dread torments and plunge him lifeless into Stygian gloom!"
At once Acoetes was dragged out and chained in a thick-walled cell. While they prepared the instruments of torture and hot irons, the doors flew open, folks said, on their own, and just like that, the chains fell from his shoulders!
But Pentheus kept up his opposition.                                                     900
No longer sending others, he himself went to Cithaeron, the appointed site for the performance of the mysteries, and heard the songs and loud cries of Bacchantes; and as a warhorse, eager for some action, snorts and whinnies when the brazen trumpet sounds the charge, and his old love of battle surges, so Pentheus was roused by their wild cries, his wrath rekindled by the savage clamor.
Halfway up the mountain was a clearing                                                 910
surrounded by woods, but wholly visible. And here, as he observed the mysteries with his profaning eyes, the very first to sight him and pursue him in a frenzy, the first to wound him, with the wand she hurled, was his own mother: "Sisters," she cried, "come here: a great boar has blundered into our field, a boar that I must slay!"
In a seething mass they rush out after him from every side,
driving him on; and he, now terrified,                                                   920
the autocratic no longer, speaking mildly,

admits to them the error of his ways. Wounded, he cries out, "Help, Aunt Autonoe, yield to the spirit of your son, Actaeon!"
But who is this Actaeon he has mentioned? How would she know? She tears off his right arm, while Ino in rapture savages the left. He has no arms to stretch out to his mother, unlucky man, but cries out,"Mother, look!" and shows her his torso with its missing limbs.                                      930
Tossing her hair in frenzy and exulting at the grim sight, Agave tears her son's head from his trunk and fiercely gripping it in a bloody fist maniacally cries, "Comrades! The deed, the victory are ours!"
Swift as the wind that tears the last few leaves clinging to trees touched by autumnal frost, those impious hands tore him all asunder; by that example warned, Thebans observe the new rite, bringing incense to its altars.                                            940

BOOK IV
SPINNING YARNS AND WEAVING TALES
The daughters of Minyas         Pyramus and Thisbe         Mars and Venus
The Sun and Leucothoë         The fountain of Salmacis
The daughters of Minyas transformed
Juno in Hades; Ino and Athamas
Cadmus and Harmonia         Perseus and Atlas
Perseus and Andromeda         Perseus and Medusa

The daughters of Minyas
But not Alcithoë: Minyas' daughter considers
the rites of Bacchus unacceptable,
and goes so far as to deny that Jove                    
fathered the new god, an impiety
her sisters also hold.
A priest commands the people celebrate a festival: all servant girls to be excused from work; they and their mistresses to dress in hides, unbind their hair, wreathe their heads in garlands,
and lift the leafy thyrsus in procession;                                                   10
failure to comply with these instructions, he prophecies, will move the slighted god to cruel anger.
Old wives and young comply: the piles of weaving, baskets full of wool, all the unfinished business of the day is thrust aside; incense is burned, and Bacchus summoned by his many names and titles: "Great Thunderer! Sweet Bringer of Release!" "Child whose father was his second mother!"
"Child torn from woman, and reborn of Jove!"                                     20
"Unshorn Son of Semele Translated!" "Lenaeus, Planter of the Genial Grape!" "Nocturnal Orgiast!"
"Father of Cries!" "Eleleus!"
"Iacchus!
"Euhan!" ''And by whatever other names unmentioned here in our litany belong to you, Liber, among the multitudes of Greece:

"O Youth undimmed, Eternal Boy,
Fairest in the heavens; Without your horns, your countenance                                             30
Is lovely as a maiden's;
"Now all the Orient admits
The godhead that is yours, Even as far as India,
Where the dark Ganges pours;
"Worshipful god, King Pentheus
Died of your great wrath, And Lycurgus, who swung his axe;
Blasphemers were they both.
"You threw the changed Tyrrhenian                                                   40
Sailors in the ocean, But you reward your devotees
Who offer their devotion;
"Lynxes in harness draw your car,
Bacchantes and Satyrs follow; The boxwood flutes begin to wail,
Their music fills the hollow;
"Your revelers collapse in laughter,
As swaying on his mule, Or staggering drunkenly after,                                                            50
Silenus plays the fool!
"Intoxicating clamor trails
You upon your rambles: The ululations of your horde,
Their tambourines and cymbals!"

"Be reconciled, be gentle," cry the Theban women as they perform the rites demanded; only the daughters of Minyas keep within, spoiling the new god's feast with their untimely
spinning and weaving, the diurnal tasks                                                       60
they and their servants are kept busy with.
One sister, lightly drawing thread, observes, "Though other women cease their work and hasten to his concocted rites, a superior divinity has kept us in our places: Pallas Athena! No reason why we shouldn't lighten the useful labor of these hands by taking our turns at telling stories: such give and take will pass the time more quickly, and be a kindness to those listening."                                                           70
Her joyful sisters bid her to begin, but which of the many stories that she knows should she relate? Long she pondered, doubtful: your story, Babylonian Dercetis? A woman who, as Syria supposes, was changed into a scaly thing that swims now in a little pool? Or how her daughter, transformed into a dove of purest white, spent her last years perched on lofty towers?
Or how, by potent herbs and incantations,                                                  80
a nymph changed little boys to fish, until she underwent the very same conversion? Or how the mulberry, which once bore white, bears dark fruit now, since it's been stained with blood? That one will please them with its novelty! And as she weaves, begins to spin her yarn:
Pyramus and Thisbe "Pyramus, who was handsomest of men, and Thisbe, of a loveliness unrivaled

in all the East, lived next to one another
in Babylon, the city that Semiramis                                                               90
surrounded with a wall made out of brick.
"Proximity saw to it that this couple would get acquainted; soon, they fell in love, and wedding torches would have flared for them had both their parents not forbidden it, although they weren't able to prevent two captive hearts from burning equally.
"These lovers had no go-between, yet managed a silent conversation with the signs
and gestures they alone could understand:                                                   100
their fire burned more hotly, being hidden.
"In the common wall that ran between their houses, there was a narrow cleft made by the builders during construction and unnoticed since. Love misses nothing! You two first descried it, and made that little crack the medium that passed your barely audible endearments.
"Often, when they had taken up positions, Pyramus on one side,Thisbe on the other,
and each had listened to each other's panting,                                       110
'O grudging wall,' they cried, 'why must you block us? Is it too much to ask you to let lovers embrace without impediment of stone? Or if it is, won't you please let us kiss? It's not that we're ungrateful—we admit all that we both owe you, for allowing our words to pass into attentive ears!'
"So they (in pointless separation) spoke. When night came on, each said goodbye and pressed a kiss—which went no further—on the stone.                                      120
"When next Aurora had put out the stars and the Sun had burned the hoarfrost from the meadow,

they found themselves at their familiar spot, and after much whispered lamentation, agreed that just as soon as it was night, they'd slip their guardians and leave their houses, and once outdoors, flee from the city too.
"And so as not to end up wandering
those open spaces by themselves, they chose the tomb of Ninus as their meeting place:                                              130
nearby, there was a fountain and a tall mulberry tree, abounding with white berries; in its dense shadows they would find concealment. They were delighted by this plan of theirs; daylight seemed loath to leave, but at long last, the sun extinguished itself in the sea, and from its waters came—at last—the night.
"Discretely veiled, Thisbe unlocks her door, lets herself out and slips into the darkness;
emboldened by love, she finds the tomb and sits                                   140
beneath the tree. But look! A lioness, whose jaws are dripping from a recent kill, approaches the fountain to assuage her thirst.
"From far off, Thisbe sees her in the moonlight, and with trembling steps, runs into a dark cave.
But in her flight, she drops her cloak and leaves it behind her on the ground. Now, when the savage lioness has had her fill of water and heads back to the woods, by chance she finds
that cloak (without the girl) and pauses there                                        150
to mangle it in her ferocious jaws.
"Arriving later, Pyramus discovers tracks in the dust, as plain as day: he blanches, and when he finds her bloodstained garment, cries, 'On this one night, two lovers come to grief! For she, far more than I, deserved long life!

Mine is the guilt, poor miserable dear, since it was I most surely who destroyed you, bidding you come by night to this drear place, and me not here before you!
" 'Come now, you lions                           160
inhabiting the caves beneath this rock, tear me to pieces and consume me quite! But only cowards merely beg for death.'
"He carries Thisbe's cloak to the tree of their pact, and presses tears and kisses on the fabric. 'Drink my blood now,' he says, drawing his sword, and thrusting it at once in his own guts: a fatal blow; dying, he draws the blade out of his burning wound, and his lifeblood
follows it, jetting high into the air,                                                          170
as he lies on his back upon the ground.
"It was as when a water pipe is ruptured where the lead has rotted, and it springs a leak: a column of water goes hissing through the hole and parts the air with its pulsating thrusts; splashed with his gore, the tree's pale fruit grow dark; blood soaks its roots and surges up to dye the hanging berries purple with its color.
"But look! Where frightened still, but frightened more that by her absence she might fail her lover,                                           180
Thisbe comes seeking him with eyes and soul, all eagerness to tell him of the perils she has escaped. But can this be the place? That tree has a familiar shape, although the color of its fruit leaves her uncertain.
"And as she hesitates she notices a knot of writhing limbs on the bloodstained earth; in horror, she leaps back, as white as boxwood; a tremor runs right through her, and she shivers

as the sea does when a breeze stirs on its surface.                                   190
"In the next moment, Thisbe recognizes her lover's body and begins to beat her unoffending arms with small, hard fists, tearing her hair out; she embraces him, and the tears she sheds there mingle with his blood. Kissing his cold lips, she cries, 'Pyramus, what grave mischance has taken you from me? Answer me, Pyramus, your darling Thisbe is calling: hear me, raise your fallen head!'
"And he, responding to his darling's name,                                        200
opens his eyes, so heavy with his death, to close them on the image of her face.
''And now she recognizes her own cloak and sees his sword and its sheath of ebony: 'O poor unfortunate! You've lost your life by your own hand and by your love for me! In my hand too, there's strength to do the same, and love that will give power to my stroke!
'' 'I'll follow you until the very end; it will be said of me I was the cause                                                       210
as well as the companion of your ruin. Death once had strength to keep us separate; it cannot keep me now from joining you!
" 'And may our wretched parents, mine and yours, be moved by this petition to allow us, joined in the same last hour by unwavering love, to lie together in a single tomb.
" 'And you, O mulberry, whose limbs now shade
the wretched corpse and soon will shelter two, display the markings of our deaths forever                                             220
in the crimson of your fruit, the likeliest memorial for two who perished here.'
''She holds the sword tip underneath her breast

and then falls forward on the still-warm blade. Her parents and the gods yield to her prayers; for now the mulberry's ripe fruit is dark and their blent ashes share a single urn."
Mars and Venus And so it ended. A brief pause ensued, and then Leuconoë began to weave another story for her silent sisters:                                                          230
"Even the Sun, who with his own light governs all other stars, has felt love's agitation: I will relate the passions of the Sun.
"Since this god sees whatever happens first, the Sun is reckoned to have first uncovered the extramarital affair of Mars andVenus. Scandalized, the Sun informed the husband of the goddess, shedding light on the very couch where two had sinned together!
"Vulcan at once dropped what he was doing:                                   240
immediately he devised a brilliant trap for the guilty pair, a net of bronze links so finely woven that it fooled the eye. No thread of mortal weaving was as slender as this one was: finer than the spider's, and more responsive to the slightest touch.
"He spread it craftily across the bed, and when his wife and her gallant had come together on the couch, by her husband's art
and by the chains he'd cleverly devised,                                                 250
the two of them were caught in the very act, clinging together in mutual embrace.
"Vulcan at once threw wide the folding doors of ivory, and sent the other gods inside to see the lovers where they lay trapped in each other's arms most shamefully!

"And one of the immortals who was present was heard by all the others there to wish— not at all sadly—that he too might be
embarrassed so. The others howled with laughter,                                 260
and for a long time that was the one story any of them told in all of heaven.
The Sun and Leucothoë "But Venus knew who her betrayer was, and soon devised appropriate revenge: the spoiler of her naughty little secret would find himself no less destroyed by love. —O son of Hyperion, what use to you your beauty, your brightness, your radiant beams? You who scorch earth "with fire of your own
are burned now by an unaccustomed flame!                                          270
You who should gaze on all, impartially, have eyes but for the virgin Leucothoë!
"And now you rise too early in the morning and drop into the sea too late at night; your lingering glance prolongs brief winter days, and now and then you even fail completely, as the unshakable obsession in your mind passes through your eyes, and its obscureness is terrifying to all mortal hearts!
"It's not as though the moon had interposed                                    280
its own pallor between the earth and you: love is the force that leaves you colorless! You've chosen this one, and no longer care for Clymene, for Rhodos, or for Circe's most attractive mother; you neglect poor Clyde, who, although you scorn her, is very eager to make love to you, and even now is languishing, heartbroken.
"For Leucothoë has chased them from your mind,

the daughter of Eurynome, the fairest                                                    290
in the land of spices; just as her mother's beauty
surpassed that of all other women, she,
when she grew up, surpassed her mother's beauty.
Her father Orchamus was king of Persia,
the seventh in descent from ancient Belus,
the kingdom's founder.
"Under western skies are meadows where the horses of the Sun are pastured, feeding on divine ambrosia instead of ordinary grass; and here,
exhausted by their efforts of the day,                                                      300
this nourishment sustains them and renews their vigor for the labors of the morrow.
"And while his horses browse on their immortal pasturage, and Night goes to work, the Sun takes on the form of Leucothoë's mother, Eurynome, and slips into her bedroom; lamplight reveals his darling with her servants, winding fine strands of wool upon her spindle. Then kissing her as her fond mother would,
he says, 'A secret matter, servants: leave!                                                  310
Respect a mother's right to privacy!'
"Once witnesses are gone, the god emerges: 'I am that one who measures the long year, who sees all things, and by whom all may see; I am the world's eye and believe me, you are something really special, quite a sight!'
"She trembles uncontrollably with fear; distaff and spindle slip from her slack grip. Her fear arouses him: at once he resumes his former shape and his accustomed splendor.                                      320
"This unexpected apparition frightens the virgin, but its radiance overwhelms her,

and she gives in to him without complaint.
"Now Clyde, whose own love for the Sun was boundless, raged with envy of her rival: she spread around the story of her fall, and brought her ruined state to the attention of the girl's father.
"Like a savage beast he mercilessly scorns his daughter's pleas,
her hands uplifted to the Sun in prayer,                                                  330
and her own explanation of events: "He plundered me! I did not pleasure him!'
"He buries her alive, and then heaps up an enormous mound of sand upon her grave. The Sun's rays melt it down, so that you might lift your head proudly in the world once more; but worn out by the weight of earth you bear, you cannot raise yourself, poor nymph, and lie with all the life crushed out of you.
"They said that not since the fiery death of Phaëthon                                             340
had the governor of swiftly flying horses seen anything as sad as he attempted to revive those icy limbs with his warm rays and call the living warmth back to her body.
"And although Fate prevents him from succeeding, he sprinkles her body and the site around it with fragrant nectar; and after he had mourned her, he cries out loudly in his lamentation, 'In spite of Fate, you will reach up to heaven!'
"Her body, steeped in those divine aromas,                                       350
dissolved at once in earth-delighting odors. A slip (not of a girl now, but of fragrant incense) broke through the apex of that hillock, while its roots drove down and deeply gripped the soil.

"Though Clytie might well have made the case that love brought her to grief, and grief to tattle, because the Lord of Light no longer wanted to sleep with her as he had used to do, her passion turned into consuming madness.
"Unable to endure the other nymphs,                                               360
naked she sat on the uncovered earth by day and night, beneath the open sky, her hair a straggly mess, and for nine days subsisting on no more than dew and teardrops, in motion only when she turned her face to keep it always fixed upon her god.
"Her limbs (they say) attached themselves to earth, her pallor turned in part to bloodless plant, and where her face had been, a trace of color
yielded a little violet-like flower.                                                             370
Rooted in earth, she turns now toward the Sun, and, although changed, preserves her changeless love."
The fountain of Salmacis She ended, and the marvels she related held every ear: some sisters would deny that anything like that could ever happen, while some declare that any real gods may do anything at all that they've a mind to, though Bacchus surely isn't one of these.
Now when the sisters have composed themselves once more, Alcithoë is called upon,                                                        380
and as she swiftly and expertly draws the shuttle through the warp, she thinks aloud:
"I will not mention here the too-familiar loves of the Idaean shepherd Daphnis, turned into stone for a nymph's rage at a rival: how thwarted lovers burn! Nor will I speak of how a law of nature was repealed

when Sithon changed at will from man to woman;
nor of you, Celmis, now adamant, but once
the most faithful guardian of baby Jove;                                                 390
nor how the Curetés emerged from a downpour;
nor will I speak of Crocus and his Smilax,
turned into tiny flowers—these I pass by,
choosing to keep your attentions with a tale
commended by the charm of novelty:
"I will explain the way in which the fountain of Salmacis, whose enervating waters effeminate the limbs of any man who bathes in it, came by its reputation,
for though the fountain's ill effects are famous,                                     400
their cause has never been revealed before.
"Venus of Cythera and Mercury together made a boy raised by the naiads in caves upon Mount Ida. His face and name made evident their offspring's origins.
"At fifteen he took off for parts unknown, leaving maternal Ida and the mountains of his fatherland, and wandered, pleased to see strange lands and rivers likewise new to him, his keenness making molehills out of mountains.                                  410
"He traveled to the cities of Lycia and to the Carians, who dwell nearby. And there he saw a pool of crystal-clear water, not choked with reeds and spiky rushes, but fluidly transparent, with a border of well-kept lawn, landscaped with evergreens.
"A nymph dwelled here, who was not keen on hunting, not up for archery, unfit for footraces; the only nymph not in Diana's posse.
Often, the story goes, her sisters said,                                                     420
'Choose one, Salmacis, javelin or bow,

and interrupt your leisure for the chase!'
"But she would not choose javelin or bow, or interrupt her leisure for the chase; for she would rather bathe her shapely limbs and then spend hours working on her hair, using the waters as a mirror to reflect the look that made her look most lovely.
"And after that, in a transparent gown, she chose between the softness of the leaves                                          430
or the lawn's softness to lie down upon. Often she gathered flowers. As it happened, one day while so engaged, she saw the boy, and realized that she just had to have him.
"But eager as she was, she still hung back: composed herself and then arranged her hair and struck a fetching pose; and having done her utmost to be seen as beautiful, she only then came up to him and spoke:
" 'O boy, most worthy to be taken for                                               440
a god, if you're a god, why you'd be Cupid, but if you're not a god, if you're just mortal, why, blessed are the parents who produced you, happy your brother and fortunate indeed your sister, if you have one, and the nurse who gave her breasts to you, but far more blest than any one of these is your betrothed, if you're already promised to another, if that's the case I'll bed you secretly—
but if there is no other I would be                                                          450
the one to share a wedding couch with you.'
"The nymph fell silent, and the boy's cheeks reddened, for though he'd no experience of love, he blushed attractively.

"The color seemed like that of apples in a sunny orchard, or painted ivory, or like the moon eclipsed, when red is glimpsed around her rim, and brazen vessels are beaten in the vain effort of the pious to restore her.
"The nymph kept pestering him for a kiss,                                       460
a friendly kiss, the kind a sister gets— while readying herself to fling her arms around his ivory neck in an embrace. 'Stop that,' he said,' or I'll leave you here alone!' This terrifies Salmacis, who replies, 'Stranger, this place is yours; I freely yield it.'
"She walked away, pretending to depart, but only went into a nearby thicket and hid herself, crouching on bended knee;
he seemed to think that he was all alone                                                470
and unobserved, and so went wandering along the grassy margins of the pool, testing the playful waters with his toes and then his feet, and then—no more delay, the tepid water summoned him, and he removed the garments from his slender body.
"Salmacis is delighted by the sight and burns with passion for his nakedness; her eyes light up as though he were the Sun
and they were mirrors filled with his reflection.                                    480
Delay seems unendurable and joy will suffer no postponement; scarcely able to still her passion, she must have him now!
"And after splashing water on his body with his cupped palms, he dives into the pond, and breaks the surface with an easy crawl,

glowing within that liquid as though lilies or an ivory figurine has been sealed up in clearest glass.
" 'I've won, the boy is mine!' the nymph cries out, and tearing off her clothing,                                490
she dives into the middle of the pool, and though he fights her, holds him in her clutches, seizing the kisses he is loath to yield; her hands surprise him, coming from below, caressing that reluctant breast of his— although he strives to tear himself away, the nymph—now here, now there—surrounds her prey, just as the serpent wraps herself around the eagle when he grasps her in his talons
and takes her up: dangling from his claws,                                              500
she twines herself between his head and feet and with her tail, immobilizes him; or just as ivy winds around a tree, and as the octopus beneath the sea securely binds the prey that it has captured with tentacles sent out in all directions; yet still the boy denies the nymph her bliss.
"She presses her whole body against his as though stuck on him, crying, 'Willful boy,
you can resist me, but you can't escape!                                                  510
O gods, so order it that from this day he will not part from me—nor I from him!'
"Her wish was granted: their two bodies blent, both face and figure, to a single form; so when a twig is grafted to a tree, they join together in maturity.
"Now these two figures in their close embrace were two no longer, but were something else, no longer to be called a man and woman,

and although neither, nonetheless seemed both.                                    520
"And when he understood about the water, how he had dived into it as a man, but left it otherwise, with softened limbs, Hermaphroditus raised both hands to heaven and cried out in a voice no longer virile:
" 'O father and mother, after whom I'm named, grant me, as consolation, this one boon: may any man who sets foot in this pool depart from it without virility, instantly softened by the water's touch.'                                                  530
"Hermes and Aphrodite heard the prayer of their one child, in whom both sexes were, and gave the fountain that defiling power."
The daughters of Minyas transformed Alcithoë concluded, while the daughters of Minyas continued with their work, spurning the god, dishonoring his feast; when suddenly a dissonant outburst from unseen tambours, flutes, and cymbals broke upon them with a loud, disturbing clamor—
the air now smelled of saffron and of myrrh,                                         540
and, unbelievably, their weaving greened.
Some of their hanging tapestries burst forth with ivy, while the others turned to grape vines, and what had lately been unliving threads are vine sprouts now, while soft vine tendrils trail from the distaff, and brightly clustered grapes now seek to match the woven purple dye!
The day was ended and that time had come which you could say was neither light nor dark,
uncertain night, when yet some day remains.                                         550
It seemed as though the house suddenly shuddered, and unaccountably the oil lamps flared

and blazing torches lit up every room, and howling all around them everywhere were the false images of savage beasts.
Meanwhile, the sisters have been seeking refuge in various places from the glaring flames, and as they try to slip into the shadows, a slender membrane glides over their limbs
and meager wings enclose their withered arms;                                     560
darkness conceals from them the true extent of the great changes now come over them; not downy feathers, but translucent wings sustain their flight, and when they try to speak, their much diminished bodies now emit only the very tiniest of voices, telling their woes in little, high-pitched squeaks.
Shunning the woods, they congregate in houses, nocturnal fliers fearful of the day,
creatures named for the time they first appear:                                      570
vespertilians. [Or, as we say, bats.]
Juno in Hades; Ino and Athamas After this incident, the divinity
of Bacchus was much remarked on throughout Thebes, and the god's aunt, Ino, boasted of his powers everywhere, for only she had been spared the great grief that her three sisters knew, save for her tears of sympathy with them.
Juno could not but notice Ino's pride in her son and in her husband, Athamas,
and—yes!—in her immortal foster child!                                               580
Quite unendurable, she told herself: "My rival's son is able to transform men into fishes and plunge them in the sea, to make a mother dismember her own child, and slip weird new wings over on the three

daughters of Minyas: what can Juno do, but weep for slights and insults unavenged?
"Should that content me? That be my one power? My enemy instructs me (as is fitting)
in my course of action: the death of Pentheus                                       590
reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt what madness may achieve: why shouldn't Ino be goaded into frenzy like her sisters?"
There is a road on both sides darkened by funereal yew trees as it descends through speechless silence to the nether world, where sluggish Styx exhales its rotten breath; shades of the recent dead tread down that path when their last rites have been attended to;
and in that cold and featureless wasteland,                                             600
souls newly come are at a loss to find the Stygian city and palace of black Dis.
There are a thousand ways into this city, and open gates on all sides; as the ocean receives the rivers from around the world, so this place gathers in all mortal souls, and never fills, however many come.
Here bloodless, boneless, bodiless shades stray: some make their way to the forum; others seek
the palace of the ruler of the dead,                                                         610
or take up once again the crafts they lived by.
Motivated by her ferocious hatred, Saturnian Juno found the fortitude to come here after leaving heaven's realm. Pressed by her sacred body on arrival, the threshold groaned, and Cerberus raised up his three heads baying all in unison.
Juno summons those sisters born of Night, implacable grave powers, where they sit

before the adamantine prison's gates,                                                     620
combing the snakes from their hair; as soon as they saw who it was approaching through the gloom, the sisters rose at once and greeted her.
This is the place where infamy is punished; here Tityos endures evisceration, pegged down over nine acres; here you, Tantalus, lower your lips to the receding flood and raise them to the ever-rising fruit; here, Sisyphus, you push or you pursue
the rock that always rolls back to its place;                                             630
here Ixion, bound on his turning wheel both flees himself and follows after; here the Belides, who slew their cousin-husbands, must carry water in their leaky vessels.
Juno looked daggers at these felons all, at Ixion especially, then turned her glance to Sisyphus again, and said, "Why is it that of all the brothers, he should be eternally tormented, when
Athamas and his wife, who scorned my godhead,                                 640
live grandly in a palace up above?"
Juno sets out before them all the reasons why hatred had compelled her to this journey, and tells them what she wishes, which was this: the ruination of the house of Cadmus, and that the vengeful Furies should employ Athamas as an instrument of evil; she bids them, begs, beseeches their support in a flood of words.
When Juno stopped at last, Tisiphone shook out her matted locks,                                                  650
and brushed the snakes away so she could speak: "It's no big thing," she said, "no reason for

a song and dance about it. Say no more: consider it done exactly as you bid; and now from this unlovable abode, return at once to heaven's sweeter airs." Thither celestial Juno repairs, and on arrival, Iris,Thaumas' daughter, besprinkles her with purifying water.
At once the ominous Tisiphone                                                       660
selected a torch that had been steeped in blood, put on a robe reddened with dripping gore, and a belt of live snakes. And so appareled, set out from home accompanied by Grief, with Fear and Terror and convulsive Madness.
They say the doorposts shuddered when she stood on the threshold of the house of Aeolus; the polished oaken doors lost all their luster, and the Sun went in. Ino and Athamas
were blocked, when, terrified, they tried to flee                                    670
the ill-omened Fury there before them, who spreads her arms, alive with tangled snakes, and shakes her locks out: stunned, more serpents fall, some to her shoulders, others to her breast, hissing and vomiting their deadly slaver.
And then she seizes two from her coiffure and hurls them at her victims, but the snakes glide easily across their torsos, breathing their poison out, though not to harm their bodies: it is their minds that take the fatal blows.                                               680
Besides the serpents, she had brought along assorted other poisons and distempers: slaver from Cerberus, venom from the Hydra, Hallucination, Blindness, Mindlessness, with Sin and Tears and Rage and Blood-Lust too, all ground together into a fine powder,

mixed with fresh blood and then brought to a boil in a great kettle made of bronze, and stirred with a fresh green wand cut from a hemlock tree.
And while they stood there trembling, she poured                           690
her potion on their breasts; at once it sank into the very center of their feelings. Then snatching up her torch, she whirled it round so swiftly that its flames burst into flame!
And having done what she set out to do, victorious Tisiphone returned to the insubstantial kingdom of black Dis and slipped out of the serpents she was wearing.
Athamas, raging in his palace, cries, "Ah, comrades! Spread your nets here in these woods,                         700
for I have just now seen a lioness with her twin cubs!"
Dementedly he stalked his wife as though she were a savage beast; laughing at this, his infant son, Learchus, was reaching toward him with his little arms, when the madman snatched him from his mother's breast and whirled him in the air just like a sling, two or three times, before he smashed the child's head on a rock.
Then, maddened by her grief or by the poison she'd been sprinkled with,                                           710
Ino flees, shrieking, with her hair disheveled, and you, Melicertes, clutched in her bare arms. "Euhoe, Bacchus!" she cried, and at the sound of Bacchus' name, Juno laughed and said, "May he always bless you so, your foster son!"
There is a cliff that juts into the ocean; the waves had worn away its lower face, leaving a shelf to keep away the rain;

its high peak thrust far out above the tide.
She reached this point, for Madness gave her strength,                        720
and unrestrained by any normal fears, leapt with her burden out into the sea, whose pounding waves churned the dark waters white.
But Venus, out of pity for her grandchild's unmerited distress, addressed her uncle caressingly: "O Neptune, god of waters, and second in command in all of heaven, I realize that I am asking much, but these are mine: I beg you pity them,
who, as you know, are plunged in the immense                                          730
reaches of the vast Ionian Sea, and let them join you now as water gods.
"For after all, the sea owes me a favor, if it is true indeed that I arose from sea foam in the depths, on that occasion commemorated by my name in Greek."
Neptune nodded, assenting to her prayer, and raised them up no longer mortal, but in their majesties most worshipful;
new names and shapes were also given them:                                              740
Palaemon was the name of the new god; his goddess mother was named Leucothoë.
Ino's attendants caught up to her in time to see her leaping from the summit's edge; her death assured, they mourned the house of Cadmus, beating their breasts, tearing their hair and garments, and reproving the goddess for the cruel injustice shown the wife of Athamas.
Juno would not hear it: "My cruelty? Yourselves will be its greatest monuments!"                                          750
No sooner had she spoken when it happened, as Ino's most devoted servant cried,

"I will attend upon her in the waves,"
and poised in the very moment of her leap,
she froze, as though connected to the rock;
another, who'd been beating her own breasts,
felt her arms stiffen as she lifted them;
a third, who, as it happened, stretched her hands
over the waters, turned into a figure
of stone, her hands outstretched to that same ocean;                             760
and yet another of the women froze
just as she started tearing out her hair.
Each one inhabited her final gesture, and those of the attendants who escaped this cruel fate, were turned into seabirds, who skim the surface of those troubled waters.
Cadmus and Harmonia Now Cadmus had no notion that his daughter and little grandson had become sea gods; but overwhelmed by evil upon evil,
by all of the misfortunes he'd endured                                                   770
and by the many portents that he'd seen, went out of Thebes, the city he had founded, as though not his, but its fortune oppressed him; and driven to wandering for many years, he and his wife came to the Illyrian coast, where all the ills they had so long endured weighed down on them, and they stopped to consider the fates of their offspring and their own distress.
"Was it a sacred serpent that I speared," asked Cadmus, "when, newly come from Sidon,                                   780
I sprinkled the viper's teeth upon the ground, and seeded a new crop of human beings? If that is what the gods have been avenging by their unwavering wrath for all these years, why then, I pray that I might be extended

into a serpent with a gut-like shape—"
And as he said it he became a serpent with a gut-like shape. At once he felt the scales begin to grow out on his thickened skin,
and his dark body lighten up with patches                                                790
of irridescent blue; he fell upon his breast, and his two legs were blended into one, which, gradually lengthening, became and elegant and sharply pointed tail.
His arms remained unchanged; he held them out, and as the tears coursed down his cheeks (which were still—for the moment—human), he exclaimed,
"Come closer to me, O most wretched wife, and while there is still something left of me,
before I am entirely transformed                                                                  800
to serpent, touch me, take these hands in yours!"
He would have said much more, but suddenly the tip of his tongue divided into two, and words no longer would obey his wishes, so that whenever he tried to complain or grieve, he hissed, and could not manage more, for he had been left with no other voice.
Now striking her bare breast, his -wife cries out, "Cadmus! Stay as you are! Put off these strange
shapes now possessing you, unfortunate man!                                            810
Cadmus, what's happening? Where are your feet? Your face? Complexion? Even as I speak, where is the rest of you! Heavenly beings, will you not also turn me to a snake?"
The creature's tongue flicked lightly over her lips, and he slipped in between her cherished breasts as though he were familiar with the place, embraced her, and slid right around her neck.
Those of his companions who were present

were horrified, but she just calmly stroked                                             820
the smooth, sleek neck of the crested dragon, and at once there were two serpents intertwined, who presently went crawling off and found a hiding place within a nearby grove.
But these days, they no longer flee from men, nor do they harm them; mindful of their former identities, they're very gentle dragons.
Perseus and Atlas Nevertheless, their mighty nephew Bacchus was comfort to them both in their changed shapes, worshiped as he was throughout defeated                                              830
India, and in crowded Grecian temples; only Acrisius, his relative, will not admit him to his city, Argos; Acrisius makes war against the god, whom he denies was the true son of Jove, and says the very same thing about Perseus, conceived by Danaë in a rain of gold.
So mighty is the force of truth revealed that not long after this, Acrisius
repented of his outrage to the god                                                          840
and of the way he slighted his own grandson.
One is installed in heaven now, the other, returning with his memorable trophy after the snake-coiffed monster had been slain, goes gliding through thin air on humming wings, and while he overflies harsh Libya, the blood drops trickle from the Gorgon's head; reaching the ground, these come to life as snakes of various kinds; and that is why today serpents infest that whole unpleasant land.                                             850
Driven this way and that by sparring winds through heaven's great immensity, as though

of no more substance than the dewy mist, he looked down from a great height onto earth as he flew over it; thrice to the frigid north, thrice to the far south; to the west often, and just as often to the east he flew.
The setting sun made further flight too risky; he landed on the borders of the west
in the realm of Atlas, where he sought his ease                                         860
until the morning star should summon Dawn, and Dawn bring forth the carriage of the Day.
Atlas, the son of Iapetas, was huge, greater in bulk than all men put together. He ruled earth's western border and the sea which welcomed the panting horses of the Sun and his worn-out chariot at end of day.
A thousand herds of cattle and as many flocks of fat sheep were grazing on his meadows;
there were no neighbors nearby to confine him.                                       870
A tree he had, whose leaves of shining gold concealed gold fruit and branches underneath.
"Mine host," said Perseus, "if the renown of noble birth is what impresses you, why, I'm the son of Jove! If mighty deeds are what you marvel at, marvel at mine! I seek both hospitality and rest."
But Atlas called to mind the prophecy given him by Themis of Parnassus:
"A time will come when your bright golden tree                                 880
will be despoiled, Atlas; and the spoils will go to one who styles himself the son of Jove."
In order to forestall this, Atlas built a mighty wall to fence his orchard in, and set an enormous dragon to patrol his boundaries and keep all strangers out.

"Go far from here," said Atlas. "All these lies about your deeds of glory won't avail you, and as for Jupiter—he's nowhere near!"
Now Atlas tries to drive the stranger off                                          890
with force as well as threats, but Perseus stands up to him, yet tries to calm him down with pacifying speech. At length, perceiving himself-—who wouldn't be?—the weaker, says, "Well, since the little favor that I ask seems too important to you to be granted, take this instead!"The hero turned his back to Atlas and raised up in his left hand the unkempt horror of Medusa's head.
Atlas became a mountain just as large                                                900
as the man had been. His hair and beard became a forest, and his arms and shoulders turned into adjacent ridges; his head was now the mountain's summit and his bones were rock. Each part grew to extraordinary size (as you immortals had ordained), until the weight of heaven rested on his shoulders.
Perseus and Andromeda Aeolus had just finished locking up the winds in prison underneath Mount Etna,
and the morning star that summons men to work                                9io
had risen brightly in the eastern sky. Perseus strapped his wings onto his feet and armed himself again with his hooked sword, and with his swift-winged sandals split the air.
The world fell back away from him in flight till he saw Ethiopia beneath him and near it, the kingdom ruled by Cepheus, where Ammon had condemned Andromeda (the one unjust, the other innocent)

to pay the price for her own mother's speech.                                          920
At sight of her, bound high upon a cliff, he would have thought that she'd been carved from stone were it not for the breeze that stirred her hair and for the warm tears flowing from her eyes; the woman's beauty quite astounded him, and left him witless, to the point that he almost forgot to keep his wings in motion.
"Oh!" he said. "These chains don't do you justice; the only chains that you should wear are those
that ardent lovers put on in their passion.                                                  930
But what's your name and land of origin, and why are you chained up?"
At first the maiden would not address the man, for modesty, and would have used her hands to hide her face were they not tightly bound; her eyes, however, as they welled up with tears, said everything.
At his insistence, she (lest she appear to be concealing some fault of her own)
told him her name, and land of origin,                                                  940
and how it happened that her mother's trust in her own beauty brought her to this pass; and in the middle of her tale, the sea erupted with the roar of a great beast who rose up as he breasted the wide water.
The virgin screams, her parents mourn with her, all miserable—though she has greatest cause. They have no help to offer her, except for weeping, wailing, thumping on their breasts,
and clinging to the chains around her body,                                           950
as is appropriate to the occasion.
The stranger said, "There will be time enough for weeping, by and by—but brief indeed

the time in which bold actions may succeed!
If I, as Perseus, the son of Jove
and she to whom he came in a rain of gold,
had sought your daughter—Perseus, the hero
who slew the snake-haired Gorgon and was bold
to take to the air, borne on soaring wings—
I would no doubt have been preferred to all                                         960
suitors as son-in-law material.
But, with the gods' permission, I will try
to add to these endowments by my service;
the deal is that she's mine if I can save her."
They take his offer (who would hesitate?)
and promise him a kingdom as his dowry.
But look! Just as the beak of a swift ship ploughs through the waves when all its oarsmen strain, that beast divides the water with his breast,
no farther from the rocks than one could send                                     970
a shot launched from a Balearic sling; when suddenly the young man leapt from earth into the clouds; his shadow on the sea provoked the beast to strike at it in fury.
And just as when Jove's bird, the eagle, sees a snake sunning itself idly in a field, he strikes from behind, avoiding the fierce maw, and sinks his talons in the scaly back; so Perseus, through the resistless air
swoops and dives at the monster from behind,                                      980
and plunges his sword right up to the hilt into the shoulder of the raging beast.
Tormented by that wound, it rises up into the air, it crashes to the water and turns in terror and confusion, like a boar surrounded by the baying pack.
The hero flees its jaws on speedy wings,

and where the beast is vulnerable, strikes
with his hooked blade: now slashes at the back,
inlaid with barnacles, now jabs the sides,                                                    990
and now strikes where the beast is slenderest,
at that place where its tail spreads like a fish's.
The serpent vomits up a purple froth of blood and salty water in a spray that dampens our hero's drooping pinions, which he no longer can rely upon; he spies a rock whose summit breaks the water when the sea is calm, but otherwise is hidden; bracing himself against its surface, he
clutches the jagged rock with his left hand,                                              1000
and with his right, he time and time again plunges his sword into the serpent's guts.
Applause reverberates along the shore and from the mansions of the gods above; Cepheus and Cassiope, the parents, rejoice in their new son-in-law, and hail him as prop and savior of their family; the unbound virgin steps forth from her chains, well worth the trouble that her troubles caused him.
Water is drawn: before the hero washes                                                  1010
his serpent-slaying hands, he carefully constructs a little nest there on the beach, of some soft leaves with seaweed strewn upon them, and there he rests Medusa's snake-fringed head, lest she be damaged by the beach's gravel.
Thirsty fresh twigs, still living, still absorbent, soak up the monster's force, and at its touch rigidify through every branch and leaf. Astounded sea nymphs try experiments
on other twigs and get the same results;                                                1020
delighted, they toss them back into the sea

as seeds to propagate this new species! Coral today shows the same properties; its branches harden when exposed to air, and what was—in the water—a spry twig becomes a rock when lifted out of it.
The hero builds three altars out of turf: one on the left for Mercury, and one for the warlike virgin goddess on the right,
and in between, an altar for great Jove;                                                  1030
a cow is slain for Minerva, and a calf for the swift god with wings upon his feet, but a bull to thee, highest of all gods. At once the hero takes Andromeda without a dowry, given that she herself is a reward sufficient to his labors.
Now Love and Marriage shake the wedding torches, and burning aromatics scent the air; houses are garlanded, and everywhere
are lyres, flutes, and singers singing songs                                               1040
that make their argument for happiness.
The folding doors are opened to reveal a golden hall where a great banquet is about to start, attended by the princes of the realm.
Perseus and Medusa When they had finished dinner and were all gladdened by the liberal gifts of Bacchus, Perseus asked his hosts about the region, the manner and mores of the folk that lived there. After responding, his informant said,
"Now tell us, gallant Perseus, how strength                                           1050
and cleverness let you lay hands upon that head whose hair is woven through with snakes."
So Perseus told them of that place beneath frigid Mount Atlas, guarded by its bulk,

within whose entryway two sisters live, daughters of Phorcys, who shared a single eye: while one was passing it off to the other, her pass was intercepted by our hero, who palmed it cleverly and slipped away.
And then by trekking through remote and distant                              1060
byways, through fearful forests and rough rocks, he came at last to where the Gorgon lived. And everywhere, in fields, along the roads, he witnessed the sad forms of men and beasts no more themselves, but changed now into stone, misfortunates, who'd glimpsed Medusa once.
He too had once looked upon her image, but it had been reflected in the shield of bronze our hero bore in his left hand;
and while sleep held Medusa and her snakes,                                            1070
he struck her head off; from their mother's blood sprang swift Pegasus and his brother both.
And then he told more stories, just as true, of lands and seas he'd seen from high above, and of the stars his wings had whisked him past; and ended there, before it was expected. But one of that company of nobles asked why none of her sisters but Medusa wore those serpents interwoven in her hair.
The guest responded: "Since what you would know                          1080
happens to be a story worth relating, listen to me and I will tell you why.
"She was at one time very beautiful, the hope of many suitors all contending, and her outstanding feature was her hair (this I have learned from one who saw her then). But it is said that Neptune ravished her, and in the temple of Minerva, where

Jove's daughter turned away from the outrage
and chastely hid her eyes behind her aegis.                                           1090
"So that this action should not go unpunished, she turned the Gorgon's hair into foul snakes; and she, to overwhelm her foes with terror, bears on her breast the serpents she created."

BOOK V
CONTESTS OF ARMS AND SONG
Perseus and the suitors         Minerva visits the Muses
The daughters of Pierus         Calliope's hymn to Ceres: Proem
The rape of Proserpina         Stellio
Ascalaphus         The daughters of Achelous
Proserpina transformed         Arethusa's tale
Triptolemus and Lyncus         The P-Airides

Perseus and the suitors
While Danaë's heroic son regaled
the Ethiopians surrounding him
with his adventures, raucous tumult filled
the hall of the palace: this was not the clamor
which signifies a wedding feast in progress,
but that which tells of warfare breaking out,
as, unexpectedly, the marriage banquet
became a riot, which you might compare
to when the sea's calm waters, angered by
the rabid winds, make agitated waves.                                                    10
Phineus was the first to take up arms, the instigator of this thoughtless action, who shook his bronze-tipped ash-wood spear, and said, "Look over here at me, come to avenge my stolen bride: your wings will not avail you, nor Jupiter, transformed into fool's gold, defend you from the havoc I will wreak!"
As Phineus prepared to cast his spear, his brother Cepheus cried out to him,
"What are you doing? What insanity                                                      20
is urging you to perpetrate this outrage? Do his great services deserve such thanks? Will you repay the saving of a life with such a dowry? For to tell the truth, it was not Perseus who took her from you, but the grim deity of the Nereids, and Ammon of the horns, and the sea monster who came to sate his hunger on my child; you lost her at the moment she was taken
to be destroyed—unless your cruelty                                                      30
would have her dead to cover up your shame, and ease your grief at the expense of mine!
"That you, her uncle and her fiance,

could see her bound and not attempt a rescue,
that should have ended any claim you had.
But now, because another saved the girl,
will you cry foul and try to take his prize?
If his reward now seems excessive to you,
you should have tried to win it on the rocks,
when she was chained to them. Now let that man,                                40
who has delivered me from an old age
that would have lacked the comfort of a daughter,
keep what his actions—and my pledge—have won him,
and realize that he has been preferred
not to you, merely, but to certain death."
He made no answer, but looked back and forth to Perseus and to the other man, unable to decide which one should get it, but after a few moments' hesitation, he hurled his mighty spear at Perseus.                                                     50
It stuck out from the couch beside the hero, who, when he noticed it at last, leapt up ferociously, and sent it whizzing back; it would have torn the breast of Phineus were he not hiding out behind the altar, where, shamefully, that criminal found refuge.
Nevertheless, his throw could not be said to be entirely without effect: the spear caught Rhoetus full in the face,
and after it was plucked out of his skull,                                                 60
he lay there writhing in his agony, and spattered the table settings with his gore.
The crowd went totally ballistic, then; spears filled the air, and there were those who said that Cepheus should die with Perseus, but the old man had already slipped away, swearing by Faith and Justice and the gods

of hospitality that this was done
against his will. Warlike Athena appeared
and covered up her brother with her shield                                           70
and gave him courage.
From India had come a youth named Athis, whom the nymph Limnaee (herself a daughter of the river Ganges) gave birth to, underneath its glassy surface, or so they say. The exceptional good looks of this still adolescent innocent were well enhanced by his distinguished wardrobe, especially his gold-fringed purple mantle; a golden necklace ornamented his neck,
and a headband held his perfumed locks in place;                                  80
he was a master of the javelin, quite capable of hitting a bull's-eye from far away, and even more accomplished with the bow, which, at that moment, he was bending, when Perseus snatched up a smoking brand from the sacrificial fires of the altar and struck him with it, shattering his face.
Now when Assyrian Lycabas saw that much-admired beauty wallowing
in his own blood, expiring beneath                                                        90
that bitter wound, he wept for his true love and closest mate, then took up his friend's bow and said, "I will provide you with a contest; you will not long rejoice in this boy's fate, which brings you far more odium than glory."
He had not finished saying all of this when the penetrating dart leapt from its string to miss the mark and dangle helplessly from the robe of Perseus, who turned on him and thrust into his breast that scimitar                                                    100

first tested in the slaughter of Medusa.
His vision blurry with advancing night,
he sought a glimpse of Athis as he died,
and fell upon him, bearing to his grave
the solace that they were now joined in death.
But look, where Phorbas, son of Metion, and Amphimedon, a Libyan, appear, both eager to commit themselves to battle, both skidding helplessly, then crashing down
into the blood that made the floor all slippery;                                         110
and as they struggled to regain their footing, one caught it in the ribs, and one, the throat.
But Perseus did not employ his sword when he found Eurytus, the son of Actor, whose weapon was the double-headed axe; he hoisted in both hands a huge and weighty wine-mixing bowl, artistically engraved, and sent it crashing down onto the man, who fell upon his back, expiring
in the bright red blood that he had vomited,                                             120
and his head thumped in spasms on the floor.
Then Perseus struck down Polydegmon (who was descended from Queen Semiramis), Caucasian Abaris, Lycetus of Thessaly unbarbered Helices, Phlegyas, and Clitus, and trod upon that heap of dying men.
Phineus did not dare engage in close combat, but hurled a javelin instead, which accidentally struck Idas, who
had vainly sought to maintain neutrality.                                                130
Idas, dying, glared at the man and said, "Since I have been forced to take sides in this, accept the enemy you've made of me, and pay the price for that wound now, with this one—"

He had withdrawn that weapon from his body
and was about to hurl it back at him,
when he collapsed, completely drained of blood.
Then Hodites, the second in command to Cepheus, was slain by Clymenus,
and Hypseus struck down Prothoenor,                                                      140
and was himself transfixed by Lyncides.
There was an old man named Emathion, a friend of justice and of piety; since he was kept from combat by his age, he warred with words, and boldly now stepped up to execrate their irreligious arms; as he clung tremulously to the altar, a blow from Chromis' sword cut off his head which dropped at once onto the altar stone,
and his half-conscious tongue continued to                                               150
upbraid them till his failing breath no longer stirred sacrificial flames.
The next to fall were Broteas and Amnion, who were twins; unbeaten in the ring, they would have won, if boxing gloves were any match for swords: in close combat, Phineus slew them both.
Ampycus, priest of Ceres, with his brows adorned in sacramental fillets, fell; you also fell, Lampetides, not meant
to shine in situations such as these;                                                         160
yours were the deeds of peace, reciting poems which you accompanied upon the lute; you had been summoned here to solemnize the wedding feast with song.
Pedasus, grinning, saw how he kept himself and his instrument out of harm's way, and shouted to him, "Sing

the remainder of your song to the shades below,"
lodging his shaft above the bard's left eye;
and as he fell, his dying fingers struck
the lyre's strings, and on that plaintive note                                            170
the poet and his song came to an end.
Infuriated by that sight, Lycormas did not allow him to go unavenged, but seized a beam from the right side of the door and brought it crashing down upon the spine of grinning Pedasus, and broke his neck, and he collapsed like a sacrificial bull.
Pelates, a North African, attempted to tear out a pillar on the left-hand side,
and as he struggled, his right hand was pinned                                      180
against the wooden beam with a spear cast by Corythus, come from Marmarica. And as he hung there, Abas cut him open and bled him dry; he did not fall to the ground, but dangled helplessly until he died.
And Melaneus too was overcome, one of the followers of Perseus; and Dorylas as well, the wealthiest in Libya, where no one else possessed
estates or heaps of spice as vast as his;                                                     190
a spear cast from the side tore through his groin, a fatal place.
When Halcyoneus of Bactria, who'd given him that wound, observed his victim gasping up his soul and rolling his eyes in agony, he said, "Of all the many properties you own, you may keep only what you lie upon," and left his lifeless corpse.
But Perseus,

avenging him, snatched from the still-warm wound
the bloody spear and flung it back at him;                                             200
it broke his nose and drove right through his neck,
projecting from the front and from behind.
While Fortune favored him, the hero slew Clytis and Clanis, who, though both were born of the same mother, died of different wounds, for Clytis had been shafted through both thighs while Clanis ate the spear that did him in.
Then Celadon of Mendes also fell, and Astreus (his mother Syrian,
his father dubious) and Aethion,                                                             210
once shrewd enough at seeing what would come, now victimized by a deceptive omen; and Thoactes, the royal armorer, and Agyrtes, the ill-famed patricide.
Although worn-out by all that he had done, there was still more to do: it was one man against a mob united to destroy him; from all sides he was set on by opponents, a moving front, the servants of a cause assailing his merit and the promise made him.                                       220
On his side, he could count on the support of his father-in-law and his new bride and the bride's mother—all filling up the hall with pointless lamentation, now drowned out by the groans of the dying warriors, as fierce Bellona shames the household gods with fresh-spilled blood and stirs the conflict up.
Phineus and his thousand followers surround one man: past him the missiles whiz
on either side, beyond his eyes and ears,                                                 230
thicker than hailstones in a winter storm. He leans his shoulders flat against a column,

and with his back safe, faces his opponents massed on both sides and ready to attack: Chaonian Molpeus leads the left and Nabataean Ethemon, the right.
Just as a tigress, goaded by her hunger, who has heard the lowing of two separate herds in different valleys, cannot quite decide
which to take on, but burns to take on both,                                         240
so our Perseus is hesitant as to which side he ought to strike at first: Molpeus takes a spear shaft in the shin and is permitted to remove himself, but Ethemon cuts Perseus no slack, and charges, with his sword held shoulder high, aiming to wound our hero in the neck, a powerful, though ill-considered thrust: he strikes the column and his shattered blade rebounds and lodges in its master's throat.                                              250
That wound was not sufficient to dispatch the helpless man, who raised up trembling hands in unsuccessful prayer as Perseus now ran him through with Mercury's curved sword.
Then seeing that the mob would overwhelm him, Perseus said, "You've forced me into this; I will seek aid from my own enemies! If there are any friends here, hide your eyes," and speaking, lifted up the Gorgon's head.
"Find someone else to worry with your wonders,"                          260
said Thescalus, who raised his deadly spear to cast it, but was frozen in that gesture, as motionless as any marble statue.
And then came Ampyx, rich in self-esteem, who, with his sword tip, sought the hero's heart, and as he sought it, his right hand grew stiff

and powerless to move the sword it held.
But Nileus, who falsely claimed descent from the Nile, whose seven mouths were all engraved in gold or silver on his shield, cried out,                                                270
"Look, Perseus, upon my origin: it will much comfort you when you are dead and wandering among the silent shades, that you were slain by such a one as I—" but the last part of what he said was stifled; it would have seemed to you as though his mouth opened to speak, but words could not pass through.
Then Eryx scornfully rebuked them, saying "Defective courage, not effect of Gorgon,
brings on this inertia—attack with me,                                                  280
and cast him and his magic weapons down!" He started in; the earth clung to his feet, and he remained there, having turned to flint, the immobilized shape of an armed man.
Now all of these deserved their punishment, but one of them, a soldier on the side of Perseus named Aconteus, didn't: while he was fighting for our hero, he beheld the Gorgon's face and hardened into rock;
supposing that the man was still alive,                                                    290
Astyages struck him with his long sword which leapt back, clanging shrilly from the blow. While Astyages stood there all astounded, the very same force turned him into marble and left him an astonishment of stone.
It really would take far too long to name the ordinary soldiers; when it ended, two hundred men returned to their own side, two hundred others were left petrified from looking at Medusa's horrid visage.                                                 300

Now Phineus has finally repented of his unjust war, but what is he to do? He sees these likenesses in diverse poses, and realizes that they are his men, and calling each by name, asks for his help, and reaches out to touch the nearest man in disbelief—all are made of marble!
He turns his face away but holds his hands out in supplication, confessing his defeat:
"O Perseus," he cries, "you win! Just take away                                     310
that fright of yours, that petrifying head of this Medusa, whatever she may be— get rid of it, get rid of it, I beg you! I never hated you! I never wanted to rule in your place! What got me into this, what moved me to take up arms against you, was my promised bride—I had the prior claim, but on the merits, you deserved to win. I'm not at all ashamed at having lost;
grant me my life and nothing in addition—                                          320
yours be the spoils, greathearted Perseus!"
And as he spoke, he did not even dare to look upon that other, who replied, "Fear not, fainthearted Phineus: the gift that lies within my power to bestow (and what a tribute to your cowardice it is!) I now confer: no sword will injure you. You will remain a monument forever, displayed in the house of my father-in-law;
my wife will find great solace," said the hero,                                         330
"in gazing at her fiance's still form," and carried the Medusa's head around to the agitated gaze of Phineus.
Then, even as he strove to turn away,

his neck grew rigid, and, upon his cheeks, the tears that he was shedding turned to stone, and fixed forever in the marble were the frightened face and suppliant expression, the pleading hands and abject attitude.
And now, accompanied by his new bride,                                          340
triumphant Perseus returns to Argos, the high-walled city of his birth; and there, in order to avenge his undeserving grandfather, Acrisius, he wages war on his granduncle, Proetus, who drove Acrisius away by force of arms and seized his citadel. But neither arms nor the citadel that he had wrongly seized allowed Proetus to prevail against the fierce gaze of the serpent-bearing monster.                                     350
But you, O Polydectes, governor of tiny Seriphos, unmollified by the young man's excellence, so often shown in the trials and tribulations he went through— you were inflexible in hating him and unrelenting in your unjust anger; you went so far as to deny him praise, and claimed Medusa's death to be a lie.
"We'll give you evidence right now," said Perseus. "Protect your eyes!" He raised Medusa's face                                         360
up to the king's and turned him into stone.
Minerva visits the Muses Up until now, Minerva had companioned her gold-begotten brother in his travels;
but then, surrounded by a hollow cloud, she slipped out of Seriphos; on her right, the isles of Cythnus and Gyarus fell away, as, by the most direct route she could take

across the sea, she headed right for Thebes and Helicon, where the virgin Muses dwell.
She landed on their mountain and addressed                                   370
those erudite and skillful sisters nine: "We have heard much of this new spring of yours, which Pegasus, Medusa's flying horse, created when his hoof broke through the earth. That is what brings me here: I wish to see this miracle—I have already seen the horse himself, born from his mother's blood."
Urania replied: "Whatever cause brings you to visit our home, O goddess,
you are a welcome presence in our hearts;                                             380
the tale that you have heard is true indeed, for it was Pegasus produced this spring." She led Minerva to the sacred waters.
The goddess long stood rapt in admiration of the spring made by a blow from the horse's hoof, and gazed about her at the ancient woods, the grottoes, and the varied kinds of grasses displaying their innumerable flowers, and called the daughters of Mnemosyne
doubly blest—both by their eagerness to learn                                      390
and by their home.
One of them answered her: "O goddess, more than welcome in our choir— had not your worthiness selected you for greater tasks—you speak the truth in praising the arts we practice and the home we share.
"We would be happy were we safe in it, but these days wickedness is unrestrained, and maiden sensibilities like ours are easily affrighted: before our eyes we still can see him—fierce king Pyreneus;                                           400

that scare we have not yet recovered from.
"For with his Thracian forces, he had seized rich Daulis and the fields of Phocea, whose folk he tyrannized; we were en route to our temple high on Mount Parnassus,
when he noticed us as we were passing through, and recognizing us, put on a face that showed false reverence for our godhead. "Daughters of Memory,'he said,'stop here!
Take refuge without hesitation, please,                                                   410
from gloomy skies and rain (for it was raining) beneath my roof—for often deities have taken shelter in much humbler homes.'
"Persuaded by his words and by the weather, we yielded and set foot in his front room. The rain soon ceased: the north wind having won its struggle with the south wind, the dull clouds were promptly purged and exiled from the sky. We wished to leave; he shut us up within,
thinking to have his way with us by force,                                             420
and so we put our wings on to escape.
"He perched on the summit of his citadel, as though intending to come after us: 'Whither thou goest, I shall go the same,' he said, and threw himself from the high tower and landed on his head, which shattered it, and dyed the earth with his indecent blood."
The daughters of Pierus As the Muse spoke, Minerva could hear wings beating on air, and cries of greeting came
from high in the trees. She peered into the foliage,                               430
attempting to discover where those sounds, the speech of human beings to be sure, were emanating from: why, from some birds!

Bewailing their sad fate, a flock of nine magpies (which mimic anyone they wish to) had settled in the branches overhead.
Minerva having shown astonishment, the Muse gave her a little goddess-chat: "This lot has only recently been added
to the throngs of birds. Why? They lost a contest!                                  440
Their father was Pierus, lord of Pella, their mother was Evippe of Paeonia; nine times she called upon Lucina's aid and nine times she delivered. Swollen up with foolish pride because they were so many, that crowd of simpleminded sisters went through all Haemonia and through Achaea too, arriving here to challenge us in song:
" 'We'll show you girls just what real class is Give up tryin' to deceive the masses                                                       450
Your rhymes are fake: accept our wager Learn which of us is minor and which is major There's nine of us here and there's nine of you And you'll be nowhere long before we're through Nothin's gonna save you 'cuz your songs are lame And the way you sing 'em is really a shame So stop with, "Well I never!" and "This can't be real!" We're the newest New Thing and here is our deal If we beat you, obsolete you, then you just get gone From these classy haunts on Mount Helicon                                         460
We give you Macedonia—if we lose An' that's an offer you just can't refuse So take the wings off, sisters, get down and jam And let the nymphs be the judges of our poetry slam!'
"Shameful it was to strive against such creatures; more shameful not to. Nymphs were picked as judges, sworn into service on their river banks,

and took their seats on benches made of tufa.
"And then—not even drawing lots!—the one who claimed to be their champion commenced;                                  470
she sang of war between the gods and Giants, giving the latter credit more than due and deprecating all that the great gods did; how Typhoeus, from earth's lowest depths, struck fear in every celestial heart, so that they all turned tail and fled, until, exhausted, they found refuge down in Egypt, where the Nile flows from seven distinct mouths; she sang of how earthborn Typhoeus
pursued them even here and forced the gods                                        480
to hide themselves by taking fictive shapes:
" 'In Libya the Giants told the gods to scram The boss god they worship there has horns like a ram Cuz Jupiter laid low as the leader of a flock And Delius his homey really got a shock When the Giants left him with no place to go: ''Fuggedabout Apollo—make me a crow!" And if you believe that Phoebus was a wuss His sister Phoebe turned into a puss
Bacchus takes refuge in the skin of a goat                                              490
And Juno as a cow with a snow-white coat
Venus the queen of the downtown scene, yuh know what her wish is? "Gimme a body just like a fish's" Mercury takes on an ibis's shape And that's how the mighty (cheep cheep) gods escape'
"And then her song, accompanied on the lute, came to an end, and it was our turn— but possibly you haven't got the time to listen to our song?"
"Oh, don't think that," Minerva said. "I want it word for word:               .                                 500

sing it for me just as you sang it then."
The Muse replied: "We turned the contest over to one of us, Calliope, who rose, and after binding up her hair in ivy and lightly strumming a few plaintive chords, she vigorously launched into her song:
Calliope's hymn to Ceres: Proem " 'Ceres was first to break up the soil with a curved plowshare, the first to give us the earth's fruits and to nourish us gently, and the first to give laws: every gift comes from Ceres. The goddess must now be my subject. Would that I could sing              510
a hymn that is worthy of her, for she surely deserves it.
The rape of Proserpina " 'Vigorous Sicily sprawled across the gigantic body of one who had dared aspire to rule in the heavens; the island's weight held Typhoeus firmly beneath it. Often exerting himself, he strives yet again to rise up, but there in the north, his right hand is held down by Pelorus, his left hand by you, Pachynus; off in the west, Lilybaeum weighs on his legs, while Mount Etna presses his head, as under it, raging Typhoeus coughs ashes and vomits up fire. Often he struggles, attempting to shake off the earth's weight              520
and roll its cities and mountains away from his body.
" 'This causes tremors and panics the Lord of the Silent, who fears that the earth's crust will crack and break open, and daylight, let in, will frighten the trembling phantoms; dreading disaster, the tyrant left his tenebrous kingdom; borne in his chariot drawn by its team of black horses, he crisscrossed Sicily, checking the island's foundation.
" 'After his explorations had left him persuaded that none of its parts were in imminent danger of falling, his fears were forgotten, andVenus, there on Mount Eryx,                    530
observed him relaxing, and said, as she drew Cupid near her, "My son, my sword, my strong right arm and source of my power,

take up that weapon by which all your victims are vanquished and send your swift arrows into the breast of the deity to whom the last part of the threefold realm was allotted.
"'"You govern the gods and their ruler; you rule the defeated gods of the ocean and govern the one who rules them, too; why give up on the dead, when we can extend our empire into their realm? A third part of the world is involved here! And yet the celestial gods spurn our forbearance,                                  540
and the prestige of Love is diminished, even as mine is. Do you not see how Athena and huntress Diana have both taken leave of me? The virgin daughter of Ceres desires to do likewise—and will, if we let her! But if you take pride in our alliance, advance it by joining her to her uncle!"
" 'Venus ceased speaking and Cupid loosened his quiver, and, just as his mother had ordered, selected, from thousands of missiles, the one that was sharpest and surest and paid his bow the closest attention,
and using one knee to bend its horn back almost double,                     550
he pierces the heart of Dis with his barb-tipped arrow.
" 'Near Henna's walls stands a deep pool of water, called Pergus: not even the river Cayster, flowing serenely,
hears more songs from its swans; this pool is completely surrounded by a ring of tall trees, whose foliage, just like an awning, keeps out the sun and preserves the water's refreshing coolness; the moist ground is covered with flowers of Tyrian purple; here it is springtime forever. And here Proserpina was playfully picking its white lilies and violets,
and, while competing to gather up more than her playmates,               560
filling her basket and stuffing the rest in her bosom, Dis saw her, was smitten, seized her and carried her off; his love was that hasty. The terrified goddess cried out for her mother, her playmates—but for her mother most often, since she had torn the uppermost seam of her garment,

and the gathered flowers rained down from her negligent tunic; because of her tender years and her childish simplicity, even this loss could move her to maidenly sorrow.
" 'Her abductor rushed off in his chariot, urging his horses, calling each one by its name and flicking the somber,                           570
rust-colored reins over their backs as they galloped through the deep lakes and the sulphurous pools of Palike that boil up through the ruptured earth, and where the Bacchiadae, a race sprung from Corinth, that city between the two seas, had raised their own walls between two unequal harbors.
" 'There is a bay that is landlocked almost completely between the two pools of Cyane and Pisaean Arethusa, the residence of the most famous nymph in all Sicily, Cyane, who gave her very own name to the fountain. She showed herself now, emerged from her pool at waist level, and recognizing the goddess, told Dis, "Go no further! You cannot become the son-in-law of great Ceres against her will: you should have asked and not taken! If it is right for me to compare lesser with greater, I accepted Anapis when he desired to have me, yielding to pleas and not—as in this case—to terror." She spoke, and stretching her arms out in either direction, kept him from passing. That son of Saturn could scarcely hold back his anger; he urged on his frightening horses, and then, with his strong right arm, he hurled his scepter directly into the very base of the fountain; the stricken earth opened a path to the underworld and took in the chariot rushing down into its crater.
" 'Cyane, lamenting not just the goddess abducted, but also the disrespect shown for her rights as a fountain, tacitly nursed in her heart an inconsolable sorrow; and she who had once been its presiding spirit, reduced to tears, dissolved right into its substance. You would have seen her members beginning to soften,

her bones and her fingertips starting to lose their old firmness;            600
her slenderest parts were the first to be turned into fluid: her feet, her legs, her sea-dark tresses, her fingers for the parts with least flesh turn into liquid most quickly); and after these, her shoulders and back and her bosom and flanks completely vanished in trickling liquid; and lastly the living blood in her veins is replaced by springwater, and nothing remains that you could have seized on.
" 'Meanwhile, the terrified mother was pointlessly seeking her daughter all over the earth and deep in the ocean. Neither Aurora, appearing with dew-dampened tresses,                        610
nor Hesperus knew her to quit; igniting two torches of pine from the fires of Etna, the care-ridden goddess used them to illumine the wintery shadows of nighttime; and when the dear day had once more dimmed out the bright stars, she searched again for her daughter from sunrise to sunset.
Stellio " 'Worn out by her labors and suffering thirst, with no fountain to wet her lips at, she happened upon a thatched hovel and knocked at its humble door, from which there came forth a crone who looked at the goddess, and, when asked for water, gave her a sweet drink, sprinkled with toasted barley.                            620
And, as she drank it, a boy with a sharp face and bold manner stood right before her and mocked her and said she was greedy. Angered by what he was saying, the goddess drenched him with all she had not yet drunk of the barley mixture. The boy's face thirstily drank up the spots as his arms were turned into legs, and a tail was joined to his changed limbs; so that he should now be harmless, the boy was diminished, and he was transformed into a very small lizard. Astonished, the old woman wept and reached out to touch him, but the marvelous creature fled her, seeking a hideout.                         630
He now has a name appropriate to his complexion, Stellio, from the constellations spotting his body.

" 'To speak of the lands and seas the goddess mistakenly searched would take far too long; the earth exhausted her seeking; she came back to Sicily; and, as she once more traversed it, arrived at Cyane, who would have told her the story had she not herself been changed; but, though willing in spirit, her mouth, tongue, and vocal apparatus were absent; nevertheless, she gave proof that was clear to the mother: Persephone's girdle (which happened by chance to have fallen             640
into the fountain) now lay exposed on its surface.
" 'Once recognizing it, the goddess knew that her daughter had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder, and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands. With her daughter's location a mystery still, she reproaches the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops, and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields                        650
default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping. Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous, was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted, now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall; stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.
" 'Then Arethusa lifted her head from the Elean waters and swept her dripping hair back away from her forehead, saying, "O Mother of Grain—and mother, too, of that virgin               660
sought through the whole world—here end your incessant labors, lest your great anger should injure the earth you once trusted, and which, unwillingly pillaged, has done nothing ignoble; nor do I plead for my nation, since I am a guest here: my nation is Pisa, I am descended from Elis, and live as a stranger in Sicily—this land that delights me

more than all others on earth; here Arethusa
dwells with her household gods. Spare it, merciful goddess,
and when your cares and countenance both have been lightened,
there will come an opportune time to tell you the reason                      670
why I was taken from home and borne off to Ortygia
over a waste of waters. The earth gave me access,
showed me a path, and, swept on through underground caverns,
I raised my head here to an unfamiliar night sky.
But while gliding under the earth on a Stygian river,
I saw with my very own eyes your dear Proserpina;
grief and terror were still to be seen in her features,
yet she was nonetheless queen of that shadowy kingdom,
the all-powerful consort of the underworld's ruler."
" 'The mother was petrified by the speech of the fountain,               680
and stood for a very long time as though she were senseless, until her madness had been driven off by her outrage, and then she set out in her chariot for the ethereal regions; once there, with her face clouded over and hair all disheveled, she planted herself before Jove and fiercely addressed him: "Jupiter, I have come here as a suppliant, speaking for my child—and yours: if you have no regard for her mother, relent as her father—don't hold her unworthy, I beg you, simply because I am the child's other parent!
The daughter I sought for so long is at last recovered,                             690
if to recover means only to lose much more surely, or if to recover means just to learn her location! Her theft could be borne—if only he would return her! Then let him do it, for surely Jove's daughter is worthy of a mate who's no brigand, even if my daughter isn't."
" Jupiter answered her, "She is indeed our daughter, the pledge of our love and our common concern, but if you will kindly agree to give things their right names, this is not an injury requiring my retribution, but an act of love by a son-in-law who won't shame you,                    700

goddess, if you give approval; though much were lacking, how much it is to be Jove's brother! But he lacks nothing, and only yields to me that which the Fates have allotted. Still, if you're so keen on parting them, your Proserpina may come back to heaven—but only on one condition: that she has not touched food, for so the Fates have required."
Ascalaphus " 'He spoke and Ceres was sure she would get back her daughter, though the Fates were not, for the girl had already placated her hunger while guilelessly roaming death's formal gardens, where, from a low-hanging branch, she had plucked without
thinking                                                                                       710
a pomegranate, and peeling its pale bark off, devoured seven of its seeds. No one saw her but Ascalaphus (whom it is said that Orphne, a not undistinguished nymph among those of Avernus, pregnant by Acheron, gave birth to there in the underworld's dark-shadowed forest); he saw, and by his disclosure, kept her from returning.
" 'Raging, the Queen of the Underworld turned that informer into a bird of ill omen: sprinkling the waters of Phlegethon into the face of Ascalaphus,
she gave him a beak and plumage and eyes quite enormous.                720
Lost to himself, he is clad now in yellow-brown pinions, his head increases in size and his nails turn to talons, but the feathers that spring from his motionless arms scarcely flutter; a filthy bird he's become, the grim announcer of mourning, a slothful portent of evil to mortals—the owl.
The daughters of Achelous " 'That one, because of his tattling tongue, seems quite worthy of punishment,—but you, daughters of Achelous, why do you have the plumage of birds and the faces of virgins? Is it because while Proserpina gathered her flowers, you, artful Sirens, were numbered among her companions?                  730
No sooner had you scoured the whole earth in vain for her

than you desired the vast seas to feel your devotion,
and prayed to the gods, whom you found willing to help you,
that you might skim over the flood upon oars that were pinions,
then saw your limbs turn suddenly golden with plumage.
And so that your tunefulness, which the ear finds so pleasing,
should not be lost, nor your gifts of vocal expression,
your maidenly faces remain, along with your voices.
Proserpina transformed " 'But poised between his sorrowing sister and brother, great Jove divided the year into two equal portions,                              740
so now in two realms the shared goddess holds sway, and as many months spent with her mother are spent with her husband. She changed her mind then, and changed her expression to match it, and now her fair face, which even Dis found depressing, beams as the sun does, when, after having been hidden before in dark clouds, at last it emerges in triumph.
Arethusa's tale " 'Her daughter safely restored to her, kindhearted Ceres wishes to hear your story now, Arethusa—
what did you flee from and what changed you into a fountain? The splashing waters are stilled: the goddess raises                                 750
her head from their depths and wrings dry her virid tresses, then tells the old tale of the river Alpheus' passion.
" ' "Once I was one of the nymphs who dwell in Achaea," she said, "and none had more zeal than I for traversing the mountain pastures or setting out snares for small game. But even though I did not seek to find fame as a beauty, men called me that, my courage and strength notwithstanding; nor was I pleased that my beauty was lauded so often, and for my corporeal nature (which most other maidens are wont to take pleasure in) I blushed like a rustic,                              760
thinking it wrong to please men.
"Exhausted from hunting, I was on my way back from the Stymphalian forest,

and the fierce heat of the day was doubled by my exertions. By chance I came on a stream, gently and silently flowing, clear to the bottom, where you could count every pebble, water so still you would scarcely believe it was moving. Silvery willows and poplars, which the stream nourished, artlessly shaded its banks as they sloped to the water.
" ' "At once I approach and wiggle my toes in its wetness, then wade in up to my knees—not satisfied wholly,                              770
I strip off my garments and hang them up on a willow, and, naked, merge with the waters. I strike and stroke them, gliding below and thrashing about on the surface, then hear a strange murmur that seems to come from the bottom, which sends me scampering onto the near bank in terror: 'Why the great rush?' Alpheus cries from his waters, then hoarsely repeating, 'Why the great rush,Arethusa?' Just as I am, I flee without clothing (my garments were on the bank opposite); aroused, Alpheus pursues me, my nakedness making me seem more ripe for the taking.                     780
" ' "Thus did I run, and thus did that fierce one press after, as doves on trembling pinions flee from the kestrel, as kestrels pursue the trembling doves and assault them. To Orchomenus and past, to Psophis, Cyllene, the folds of Maenalia, Erymanthus, and Elis, I continued to run, nor was he faster than I was; but since Alpheus was so much stronger, I couldn't outrun him for long, given his greater endurance.
" ' "Nonetheless, I still managed to keep on running across the wide fields, up wooded mountains,                                       790
on bare rocks, steep cliffs, in wastes wild and trackless; with the sun at my back, I could see his shadow before me, stretched out on the ground, unless my panic deceived me; but surely I did hear those frightening footsteps behind me, and felt his hot breath lifting the hair from my shoulders.
" ' "Worn with exertion, I cried out,'Help! Or I'm taken!

Aid your armoress, Diana—to whom you have often
entrusted your bow, along with your quiver of arrows!'
The goddess was moved by my plea and at once I was hidden
in a dense cloud of fine mist: the river god, clueless,                                800
circled around me, hidden in darkness, searching;
twice he unknowingly passed by the place where the goddess
had hidden me, and twice he called,'Yo! Arethusa!'
How wretched was I? Why, even as the lamb is,
at hearing the howling of wolves around the sheepfold,
or as the rabbit in the briar patch who glimpses
the dog's fierce muzzle and feels too frightened to tremble.
" ' "Alpheus remained there, for as he noticed no footprints heading away from the cloud, he continued to watch it. An icy sweat thoroughly drenched the limbs that he looked for,           810
and the dark drops poured from every part of my body; wherever my foot had been, there was a puddle, and my hair shed moisture. More swiftly than I can tell it, I turned into liquid—even so, he recognized me, his darling there in the water, and promptly discarded the human form he had assumed for the occasion, reverting to river, so that our fluids might mingle. Diana shattered the earth's crust; I sank down, and was swept on through sightless caverns, off to Ortygia, so pleasing to me because it's the goddess's birthplace;                          820
and here I first rose up into the air as a fountain."
Triptolemus and Lyncus " 'Here Arethusa concluded. The fruitful goddess summoned her team of dragons and yoked them onto her chariot; and guiding their heads with the reins, she was transported up through the middle air that lies between earth and heaven until she arrived in Athens, and, giving her carriage to Triptolemus, ordered him to go off and scatter grain on the earth—some on land that had never been broken, and some on land that had been a long time fallow.

" 'The young man was carried high up over Europe and Asia          830
until at last he came to the kingdom of Scythia. Lyncus was king here; he brought him into his palace, and asked him his name, his homeland, the cause of his journey, and how he had come there.
"My well-known homeland," he answered, "is Athens; I am Triptolemus; neither by ship upon water nor foot upon land have I come here; the air itself parted to make me a path on which I coursed through the heavens. I bear you the gifts of Ceres, which, sown in your broad fields, will yield a bountiful harvest of nourishing produce."
" 'This the barbarian heard with great envy, and wishing                 840
that he himself might be perceived as the donor, took him in as a guest, and while the young man was sleeping, approached with a sword, and as he attempted to stab him, Ceres changed Lyncus to lynx, and ordered Triptolemus to drive her sacred team through the air back to Athens.'
The P-Airides "When our eldest sister had concluded her superb performance, with one voice the nymphs awarded victory to ... the Muses!
"And when the others, in defeat, reviled us, I answered them: 'Since you display such nerve                                     850
in challenging the Muses, you deserve chastisement—even more so since you've added insult to outrage: our wise forbearance is not without its limits, as you'll learn when we get to the penalties, and vent our righteous anger on your worthless selves.'
"Then the Pierides mock our threats, and as they try to answer us by shouting vulgarities and giving us the finger,
their fingers take on feathers and their arms                                          860
turn into pinions! Each one sees a beak

replace a sister's face, as a new bird
is added to the species of the forest;
and as they try to beat upon their breasts,
bewailing their new situation, they
all hang suspended, flapping in the air,
the forest's scandal—the P-Airides!
"And even though they are all feathered now, their speech remains as fluent as it was,
and they are famous for their noisiness                                                   870
as well as for their love of argument."

BOOK VI
OF PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT
Arachne         Niobe         Latona         Marsyas
Pelops         Tereus, Procne, and Philomela
Boreas and Orythyia

Arachne
Atter she'd listened to their tale, Minerva
gave her approval to the Muses' song
and to the anger that it justified.
""To praise is insufficient," she reflected;
"we will be praised—and we will not permit
those who belittle our divinity
to go unpunished!"
Her attention turned to the undoing of Maeonian Arachne, who (it was said) accepted praise that set her
above the goddess in the art of weaving,                                                10
a girl renowned not for her place of birth nor for her family, but for her art: her father, Idmon, came from Colophon, and (like the mother that Arachne lost) was of plebeian origin, a tradesman who steeped the thirsty wool in purple dye.
Nevertheless, her art had made her famous throughout the many cities of Lydia, although her home was every bit as humble as Hypaepa, the hamlet where she lived.                                                 20
To see her wonderwork, the nymphs would leave their vineyards on the slope of Mount Timolus or their haunts along the winding Pactolus. They came not just to see the finished product, but to watch her working, for such comeliness and grace were present when she plied her art, whether she shaped the crude wool in a ball, or with her fingers softened it and drew the fleecy mass into a single thread
spun out between the distaff and the spindle,                                         30
or worked a pattern into what she wove with her embroidery.

You would have known that only Pallas could have been her teacher. Nevertheless, as though offended by the very thought, the girl denied it, saying, "Let her compete with me, and if she wins I'll pay whatever penalty she sets!"
Pallas disguises herself as a crone: puts on a wig of counterfeit grey hair
and, with a staff to prop her tottering limbs,                                          40
begins to speak: "Old age is not to be wholly despised, for with it wisdom comes. Heed my advice: seek all the fame you wish as best of mortal weavers, but admit the goddess as your superior in skill; beg her to pardon you for your presumption in an appropriately humble manner— forgiveness will be given, if you ask it."
Arachne drops the work she had begun, and scarcely able to restrain her hand,                                                     50
expresses outrage through her glaring eyes, cutting the goddess short with these sharp words: "You've lived too long, you senile nincompoop, that's what your trouble is! Try telling that to your own daughter or your daughter-in-law, if you have any children; as for me, I'll take my own advice, thanks very much!
"And so you shouldn't think you've made your case, my own opinion hasn't changed at all:
why does the goddess shun a match with me?                                        60
Why won't she come to challenge me herself?"
The goddess answered her with, "She has come," and casting off the image of old age, revealed herself as Pallas; the Phrygian matrons and the nymphs bowed down before her.

All were quite terrified except Arachne, although she reddened when a sudden flush stained her unwilling cheeks, then disappeared, as when the sky turns crimson just at dawn, but then grows pale again as the sun rises.                                              70
Yet she persists in what she has begun; in her desire for the foolish palm of victory, she rushes to her fate; Jove's daughter does not turn Arachne down, or warn her further, or postpone the match.
At once the two of them select their sites and set the uprights of their frames in place, then draw the slender threads of the warp between the horizontal crossbeams of the yoke;
the warp is separated with a reed,                                                           80
and dexterous fingers, busy at the shuttle, draw woof through warp, then tap it into place with the comb's notched teeth.
Then they go to it, hitching their robes up underneath their breasts, their well-instructed fingers swiftly flying, and zeal for the contest making light of labor.
Into their fabrics they weave purple threads of Tyrian dye, and place beside them shades that lighten imperceptibly from these;
as when a storm ends and the sun comes out,                                        90
a rainbow's arc illuminates the sky; although a thousand colors shine in it, the eye cannot say where one color ends and another starts, so gradual the verging; there in the middle, the colors look the same, while, at the edges, they seem different. Into the fabrics they weave threads of gold, as on each loom appears an oft-told tale:

Minerva shows the Areopagus, site of that contest held once to determine                                           100
a city's name. Twelve deities are seated in august assurance, weighty on their thrones, Jove in the middle; ranged on either side, the gods all look like their own images; how regal Jove seems!
Next, she depicts how Neptune with his trident strikes the rugged rock from which a spring of water gushes, the pledge by which he hopes to claim the city.
Then she displays herself, armed with a shield and a sharp spear; a helmet guards her head,                                         110
her breast is well protected by the aegis; she represents that moment when the earth, struck by her spear tip, instantly produces a full-grown olive tree, laden with ripe fruit. The gods all marvel, and she takes the prize.
And then, to give Arachne an idea of the reward this upstart can expect for her audacious bid for praise and glory, the goddess then expertly represents,
in each of the four corners of her work,                                                120
a different contest, each in miniature, and each with its distinctive color scheme.
In the first scene, two Thracians, Rhodope and Haemus, who were mortals once, are turned into a pair of mountains, for assuming the names of Jove and Juno as their own; and in the second corner she depicted the terrifying fate of the Pygmy queen: when Juno had defeated her, she ordered
her to transform herself into a crane                                                       130
and then make war upon her former subjects;

in the third corner is Antigone,
who once dared struggle with Jove's mighty consort
and whom Queen Juno turned into a stork;
not Ilion, nor Laomedon, her father,
could save the girl: she put white feathers on,
and now applauds herself with clacking beak;
the final corner shows a grieving man:
Cinyras, clinging to the temple steps
that used to be the limbs of his own daughters,                                    140
and weeping what appear to be real tears.
Around her work, the goddess wove a border of peaceful olive leaves; that finished it, and with her tree, her labors, too, were done.
Arachne shows Europa tricked by Jove in semblance of a bull upon the sea, and done so naturally you would have thought the bull and the waves he breasted were both real; the girl seems to look back at her lost land,
cries out to her companions and withdraws                                                150
her feet in terror from the surging flood.
Asterie is shown in an eagle's grip, and Leda, lying under a swan's wing; Arachne shows how, in a Satyr's guise, Jupiter filled Antiope with twins; how, as Amphitryon, he hoodwinked you, Alcmena; and how Danaë was deceived by a golden shower; Aegina by a flame; how Mnemosyne was cozened by a shepherd
and Proserpina, child of Demeter,                                                          160
was ruined by a many-colored serpent.
And she depicted you as well, Neptune, transformed into the fiercest-looking bull, with the Aeolian maiden, Canace; as Enipeus, you were shown begetting

Otos and Ephialtes, the Aloidae,
and as a ram, deceiving Theophane;
immortal Demeter, the golden-haired
and infinitely mild mother of grain,
knew you as a horse; while to Medusa,                                                  170
mother of Pegasus, you seemed a bird,
and seemed just like a dolphin to Melantho;
she rendered all of them just as they were,
and each with an appropriate background.
And there's Apollo, tricked out as a rustic, now dressed in feathers, now a lion skin, or as a shepherd to take Isse in; and Bacchus, out to trick Erigone with grapes that aren't really grapes at all;
there's Saturn, breeding Chiron on a mare,                                            180
and all around the edge, a deftly woven border of flowers plaited into ivy.
Not even Envy could have faulted this; Pallas did not, yet, bitterly resenting her rival's success, the goddess warrior ripped it, with its convincing evidence of celestial misconduct, all asunder; and with her shuttle of Cytorian boxwood, struck at Arachne's face repeatedly!
She could not bear this, the ill-omened girl,                                     190
and bravely fixed a noose around her throat; while she was hanging, Pallas, stirred to mercy, lifted her up and said:
"Though you will hang, you must indeed live on, you wicked child: so that your future will be no less fearful than your present is, may the same punishment remain in place for you and yours forever!"
Then, as the goddess turned to go, she sprinkled

Arachne with the juice of Hecate's herb,
and at the touch of that grim preparation,                                            200
she lost her hair, then lost her nose and ears;
her head got smaller and her body, too;
her slender fingers were now legs that dangled
close to her sides; now she was very small,
but what remained of her turned into belly,
from which she now continually spins
a thread, and as a spider, carries on
the art of weaving as she used to do.
Niobe Now all of Lydia is in an uproar
and farther to the east, the story spreads                                                 210
from town to town through Phrygia, until the great world speaks of nothing other than Arachne's fate.
Before her wedding day, when she was living in Maeonia, Niobe knew this girl; nevertheless, the punishment her countrywoman suffered did not convince Niobe to defer to the immortals, and to treat with them as with superiors.
Her pride had many sources, as it happened, but in fact,                                                         220
neither her husband's great artistic skills, nor their distinguished lists of ancestors, nor the power of their realm—no, none of these gave her such pleasure (even though, of course, all of the items mentioned gave her pleasure) as did her progeny. All would have hailed Niobe as most fortunate of mothers had she not gotten there ahead of them. Then Manto, daughter ofTiresias,

and like her father skilled at divination,                                                 230
went all throughout the city, prophesying,
"Women ofThebes! Go to Latona's temple,
and offer her and the twin gods she bore
the gifts of incense and your dutiful worship,
binding your brows with laurel as the goddess,
speaking through me, commands."
The Theban women obediently bind their brows with laurel, and offer prayers and incense at her altar.
But look, where in the midst of her attendants, Niobe comes, a sight well worth the seeing,                                          240
in gold-embroidered robes from Phrygia, and lovely, insofar as her great anger would let her be.
Tossing her fine head so that her hair spills over both shoulders, she halts and draws herself up to full height, and fixes the women with a haughty look:
"What madness is this," she said, "to prefer gods that you've only heard of to the ones you've actually seen? Why cultivate Latona's altars and deny me mine?                                                          250
"My lineage is highly worshipful: only one man has ever been permitted to lie among the gods at their high table: my father, Tantalus. And Dione, my mother, is a sister of the famous Pleiades; my grandfather on her side is mighty Atlas, who bears heaven's weight upon his shoulders; on my father's side, why, my grandfather is Jupiter himself,
who raped my husband's mother and became                                       260
the father-in-law that I am proud to claim.

"Feared by the Phrygians, I am a queen in the line that traces its descent from Cadmus, and with my husband Amphion, I rule the folk within these walls, which rose as though by magic when he played upon the lyre.
"I gaze around my palace, and I see the spectacle of riches everywhere; my beauty is quite worthy of a goddess,
and in addition, I have seven daughters                                                  270
and seven sons, all soon to multiply my holdings by their spouses when they marry— and you still ask what cause have I for pride?
"Then dare prefer Latona's cult to mine, that daughter of the Titan Coeus, whoever he's supposed to be! Latona, denied the barest spot for giving birth! There was no place in heaven nor on earth nor on the sea that would receive your goddess,
an exile driven over the wide world                                                       280
until the Isle of Delos pitied her: 'You wander homeless on the earth,' he said, 'as I upon the waters do the same.' He gave her a place, unstable though it was, where she became the parent of—just two! One seventh of the yield of our womb!
"Blessed am I (who ever would deny it?), and (who can doubt it?) blessed will I be forever, safely kept by my abundance.
Fortune would find me far too great to harm:                                      290
though she took many, I'd have many more.
"Such wealth drives fear away! But just suppose some part of that vast nation of my offspring was taken from me: not even so reduced would I be left with two—Latona's horde,

wherewith she staves off utter childlessness!
"So stop these ceremonies now, and go— and take that laurel from your hair!" They did, abandoning their uncompleted rites,
yet offering Latona what they could,                                                      300
their reverence expressed in silent prayers.
Seething with indignation at this treatment, Latona, on the summit of Mount Cynthus, addressed her children, the immortal twins: "Just look at this, now! I, a goddess who gives way to no one else, except for Juno, and proud of having borne the pair of you, now find my divinity called into doubt!
"My altars will forever be neglected, unless you two come to my aid at once!                                                 310
There's more, besides: this child of Tantalus adds insult to these injuries, preferring her own offspring to you! And calling me— Oh, may that word come back to her—bereft! She shows her father's gift for blasphemy!"
She would have added prayers to her complaint, But Phoebus broke in: "Enough! This lengthy screed serves only to delay her punishment." Phoebe concurred, and in a trice the two had touched down on the citadel of Thebes.                                         320
Below the walls there lay a level field, pounded incessantly by horses' hooves and by the thronging wheels of chariots: here some of the seven sons of Amphion were putting their spirited chargers through their paces, gaily caparisoned with saddlecloths dyed in Tyrian purple, and with golden reins.
Here as he wheeled his steed round in a circle, forcing the bit against its jaws, Ismenus,

the earliest burden of his mother's womb,                                              330
cried out,"Ah, me!" as the arrow pierced his breast and the reins slid between his lifeless fingers and he dismounted slowly from the right, toppling over the shoulder of his steed.
The next was Sipylus, who, having heard the clattering of arrows in a quiver, at once gave full rein to his horse, fleeing as when a helmsman sees a distant cloud, the harbinger of an approaching storm,
and crowds on sail to take advantage of                                                 340
the slightest breeze; though he gave full rein, the inevitable arrow overtook him; while its steel tip projected from his throat, its feathered shaft stood trembling in his nape; as he was leaning forward, so he pitched over his horse's mane and fell beneath its galloping legs, defiling Mother Earth with his warm blood.
Ill-fated Phaedimus and Tantalus (the grandson of the hero)
had finished with their horses and moved on                                        350
to boyish pleasures in the wrestling ring; their well-oiled bodies glistening, they gripped each other, breast to breast, in a tight clinch; a bowstring is drawn back and then released: a single arrow pierces both of them. They groan together and together fall, together writhing in death's agony; they roll their eyes and breathe their last together.
Alphenor saw this and flew toward the pair, beating his grief-stricken breast, and as he                                             360
lifted their limbs, already cold, in his embrace, he, in that act of piety, was felled

when Delian Apollo drove a shaft
right through his diaphragm: when they withdrew it,
a part of his torn lung stuck on the barb;
his lifeblood followed, gushing in the air.
Longhaired Damascithon came to a more complicated end, struck by an arrow between the ligaments behind his knee;
and as he struggled with that fatal shaft,                                                 370
a second arrow punched right through his throat, up to the feathers. His hot blood expelled it, drilling the air through in a slender column.
Ilioneus was the last to die; raising his arms to heaven in a prayer that would prove ineffectual, he cried in desperation,"Spare me, all you gods!" (not knowing that not all gods needed asking!). Although the god who bent the bow was moved,
his arrow (not to be recalled) sped on:                                                   380
nevertheless, a slight wound did for him, for the arrow didn't pierce his heart—too deeply.
Rumor of evil spreads across the city, touching with sorrow every group it meets, until her own attendants, now in tears, assure the mother of her certain ruin; she can't believe that this could happen to her, and that it had happened was outrageous; that the gods could dare so, were within their rights; that father Amphion had killed himself,                                                 390
putting one end to sorrow and to life.
How sadly different is this Niobe from that Niobe who so recently dispersed the people at Latona's shrine, who sailed so proudly down the city's streets with head held high, the envy of her friends—

who now is pitied even by her foes!
She flings herself onto the lifeless corpses in her derangement, kisses them farewell,
then lifts her bruised arms to the sky and says,                                      400
"Now feast your cruel heart upon our grief, feast yourself, Latona, till you're sated! Glut your bloodthirsty heart! These seven deaths have ruined me: exult then, in the triumph of the victor over her defeated foe!
"But who is victor? In my wretchedness I still have far more children left to me than you in all your bliss! Thus, even after so many deaths, I am the victor still!"
No sooner had she spoken when the taut                                          410
bowstring twanged with its release, a sound that terrified them all except Niobe: ruin had made her reckless.
The seven sisters stood, in black for mourning, with their hair unbound, before the corpses laid out in a row; the first sister, attempting to remove an arrow threaded through a brother's guts, collapsed and died, her lifeless cheek on his; the second sister, trying to console
her grieving mother, suddenly bent over                                               420
in agony, struck by an unseen wound.
This one dies fleeing; that one falls upon a sister's corpse; this one hides, and that one stands up where you can see her shivering; now six, diversely wounded, have been slain; the last of them still lives; her mother stretches her body and her garment over her, and cries, "Leave me my youngest one at least, spare me but one, the youngest of my many!"

And as she prayed, the one for whom she prayed                                 430
fell dead, the last of them; and now bereft, she sits, surrounded by the lifeless bodies of her sons, her daughters, and her husband, she sits there stilly, rigid in her grief: not a hair upon her head stirs in the breeze, her face is colorless, and her eyes fixed, and in this image of her nothing lives; her tongue is stone, frozen to her palate, her veins no longer move; she cannot turn
her head nor raise her hand nor move a foot;                                            440
her viscera are stone; and yet Niobe wept.
A whirlwind carried her back to her homeland; there, set upon the summit of a mountain, Niobe weeps, and even to this day, she bathes the marble with her flowing tears.
And now, for certain, men and women fear the revelation of Latona's wrath, and tend her altars with a greater ardor, showing their awe before the power of the goddess-mother of the sacred twins.                                                     450
Latona And as so often happens in such cases, recent events remind folks of old stories, until one says, "Something like this took place in fruitful Lycia, once, long ago, when peasants spurned the goddess to their grief; only the humble birth of those involved has kept this tale from being better known, yet it's amazing—with my own eyes I saw the pond, the place touched by that miracle. It happened like this.
"My father, being then                                           460
too far advanced in years to brave the rigors

of cattle driving, ordered me to move some fancy stock of his out of that region, and gave me a local fellow for a guide.
"And as we made our way through the grasslands, I saw, right in the middle of a lake, surrounded by reeds that trembled in the breeze, an ancient altar coated with a crust of black ash from sacrificial fires.
"He stopped right there and whispered fearfully,                              470
"Show me your favor!' And I did likewise. "So now,' I ask him, 'would that be an altar to Faunus? The naiads? Some local god perhaps?'
''The fellow answers, 'Young sir, that there altar hasn't to do with any mountain god: she calls it hers whom once the queen of heaven put earth off-limits to, until (but just) the floating island Delos took her in.
" 'She braced herself against a pair of trees, the olive and the palm, Latona did,                                                        480
and brought forth twins upon that very spot, in spite of all their stepmother could do.
'' 'She fled, they say: the goddess-mother left with the baby deities upon her breast, until she reached the borders of Lycia, where the Chimaeras live. A blazing sun scorched the fields bare; assailed by heat and thirst, her breasts drained dry by her greedy nurslings, it happened that she saw, down in a dell,
a lake of modest size; there, at its edges,                                                 490
peasants were gathering bushy osiers and other useful grasses from the marsh.
" 'The Titan's daughter came to them, and knelt at the lake's margin for a cooling drink; the rustic mob forbade her. She appealed:

"And why do you prohibit me from drinking?
Surely the water is for everyone.
Nature has given no one ownership
of sunlight, air, and water! I have come
to exercise what is a public right;                                                            500
nevertheless, it's as a suppliant
that I am here to beg this gift from you.
" ' "I have not come to bathe my weary limbs, but to relieve my thirst: for I'm so dry that I can hardly speak, my throat is parched, and I have almost no voice left at all! A draft of water will be nectar to me, and I will say I've been restored to life, yes, it is life you give me with this water!
" ' "And let my little children move you too,                                     510
my pretty babes, who even now beseech you, stretching their tiny arms out from my breast!" (And as it happened, they stretched out their arms!)
" 'And who would not have been won over by such winning words? But they, despite her pleas, continued to restrain her, threatening to do her harm unless she goes away, and adding insults to such injuries.
" 'Nor did that end it, for they roiled the pond with hands and feet, and from its bottom stirred                                   520
the oozy muck by jumping up and down, out of no other motive than pure meanness.
" 'Anger put thirst off, for the Titan's daughter now would no longer beg unworthily, nor could she bear not speaking as a goddess. Turning her palms up to the stars, she cried, "Dwell in this pond of yours forevermore!"
" 'And as the goddess ordered, so it was. It pleases them, the underwater life,

sometime to hide, submerged in muck completely,                               530
sometime to poke a head out or to swim across the surface of the pond, or sit, as they quite often do, along its banks, only to leap on back into its cool water; but now, as in the past, they exercise their foul tongues in shameless quarreling, and even underwater, utter curses. '' 'They've raucous voices now and swollen throats, and constant quarreling has given them distended jaws; their heads now seem to sit                                           540
on shoulders without benefit of necks; green are their backs and white their bellies (now their largest parts); no longer laboring, they all cavort in ponds and mucky bogs, after their transformation into—frogs.' "
Marsyas No sooner had that nameless fellow finished his tale of how the Lycians came to ruin, than someone called to mind the old story of how Latona's son trounced the Satyr
in a match played upon Minerva's pipes,                                                550
then punished him:
"Why do you deconstruct me?" cried the Satyr. "Oh! I am mortified! What a great price I'm paying for this flute!"
And as he cries, the skin is stripped from his body until he's all entirely one wound: blood runs out everywhere, and his uncovered sinews lie utterly exposed to view; his pulsing veins were flickering, and you could number all his writhing viscera
and the gleaming organs underneath his sternum.                                 560
Then came the country folk to weep for him,

gods of the forest, nymphs and fauns, his fellow Satyrs, and his favorite boy, Olympus, along with shepherds who, in mountain pastures, tended their woolly flocks and horny herds.
All wept for him, drenching the fertile earth; she then absorbed their transitory tears into her veins and turned them into droplets of vapor. Sent back out into the air,
they gathered together in a single stream                                                   570
descending swiftly between narrow banks until it reached the ocean; that stream is known as the clearest river in all Phrygia, and takes its name from his: the Marsyas.
Pelops Immediately after this, the crowd turned to the present day, mourning the death of Amphion, destroyed with all his offspring.
All blame the mother; nonetheless, folks say one man, her brother Pelops, mourned for her,
and when he ripped his garment from his breast,                                      580
revealed the ivory patch on his left shoulder.
At birth, both shoulders were the same in color and both were made of flesh; when Tantalus, his father, chopped him up in little pieces, they say the gods put him back together, and all the other parts of him were found except for one between his arm and neck.
An ivory chip replaced the missing piece, and Pelops was made once again complete.
Tereus, Procne, and Philomela Neighboring nobles assembled, and nearby cities                                      590
encouraged their kings to pay condolence calls: Argos, Sparta, Pelopeidean Mycenae, and Calydon (which had not yet acquired

the emnity of fierce Diana); fertile
Orchomenus and Corinth (famed for bronze);
fearsome Messene and Patrae and low-lying Cleonae;
and Nelean Pylos and Troezen (not yet ruled
by Pittheus); and all the other cities
to the north and south of Corinth
sent delegates to pay their last respects.                                                 600
Who would believe that only you, Athens, did nothing? Warfare kept you from your duty, for a barbaric horde from overseas had marched its terror right up to your walls.
Tereus of Thrace had raised that siege with his auxiliaries, had driven off the foe, and now was famous for his victory. And since he was a man of wealth and power, and a descendant of the god of war,
King Pandion had bonded with Tereus                                                  610
by joining him in marriage to his daughter, Procne.
But neither Juno, who presides at weddings, nor the wedding god himself, Hymenaeus, nor the required Graces attended theirs. Instead, the Furies shook the torches they had snatched from funerals, and turned down the coverlet upon their bed; and all night long, an evil owl perched and brooded on the roof of their bedchamber.
Under these omens, Tereus and Procne                                             620
are wed; and under them, their child is born; and naturally all of Thrace is one in its felicitations to the parents, who offer up their own thanks to the gods.
That day is now proclaimed a festival on which the king of Athens gave his daughter

to the distinguished ruler, and the day as well on which Itys, their son, was born. What does us good is to a great extent concealed from us.
Five autumns passed,                                               630
then Procne coaxed her husband with these words: "If I am at all pleasing in your sight, then either let me visit with my sister or let her visit me; you must assure my father we won't keep her for too long! The sight of her would be the finest gift that you could give me!"
So he orders ships brought down to waterside, then sail and oar swiftly convey Tereus overseas
to Athens and the harbor at Piraeus.                                                       640
Admitted to the presence of the king upon arrival, it so happens that the two men clasp each other's hands and start their conversation on that lucky omen.
He had just mentioned his young wife's request to see her sister, and assured the king that she, if sent, would be sent promptly back, when look! where Philomela now appears richly adorned, but richer still in beauty,
one to be spoken of in the same terms                                                   650
as often we hear used of nymphs and dryads glimpsed in the woods—if only they were dressed as well as she and were quite as refined.
When he first saw her, Tereus caught fire as instantly as ripe grain or dry leaves, or as hay stored in a barn goes up in blazes. Her beauty surely justified such passion, but he was driven by an innate lust,

a bent that Thracians have for lechery:
he burned with his and with his nation's heat.                                     660
What tack to take here? Bribe her attendants? Make his way to her through her faithful nurse? Seduce the girl with rare and precious gifts, even at the cost of his whole kingdom? Or seize her and defend his theft with warfare? Nothing at all he would not dare to do in his unbridled passion, so fierce the flames that would not be contained within his breast.
And now delay was unendurable: he eagerly repeated Procne's speech,                                                      670
and raised his own desires under hers. Love lent him eloquence, and when he seemed to go beyond the mandate he'd been given, he said that this was merely Procne's wish, and added tears, as though they too were part of his commission. By the gods above, what utter blindness dwells in human hearts! Here Tereus achieves a reputation for piety while plotting wickedness, and criminal behavior wins him praise!                                                  680
What made it even easier for him was Philomela's acquiesence: she wishes the very same thing for herself, and puts her arms around her father's neck, and in a captivating manner begs that she might go and visit with her sister, for all the good—none!—that will come of this.
Pricked on by lust, by sights that feed his madness, Tereus looks at her and sees himself
with her already, doing it to her!                                                             690
He watches as she flings her arms around her father's neck and chastely kisses him,

and as he watches them in their embrace, he yearns to take the father's part, although his motives would be no less impious.
The father is won over by the prayers of both his daughters. The nearer one rejoices, and thanks him, for she thinks, unhappy child, that what must turn out ill will turn out well
for both the daughters. Little labor now                                                 700
remained for Phoebus, whose straining horses fly on pounding hooves across the western sky.
A regal banquet is provided next, and Bacchus too, in golden chalices. Then sated bodies seek untroubled sleep. But even though the Thracian has retired, he burns for her, recalling now her face, her gestures, and the way her body moved, imagining what he has not yet seen,
and feeding the fires burning in his heart,                                              710
sleep driven off by his anxiety.
Light came, and with tears welling in his eyes, King Pandion embraces Tereus, committing his daughter to the Thracian's care: "Compelled, dear son-in-law, by your desires, as well as by the urgings of my daughters, I give her to you; by faith and by the ties between us, by the gods above, I beg that you protect her with a father's love,
and send back home, as soon as possible                                                 720
(for any delay will be unbearable), the sweet alleviation of my years.
"You also, Philomela, must return as soon as possible, if you would be dutiful in your relationship with me: one daughter's absence is enough to bear."

With these commands, he kisses her good-bye, the ripe tears falling even as he speaks, and makes the two of them join hands together
in pledge of faith, and begs them to remember                                         730
him to his absent daughter and her son, and with abundant sobs bids them farewell, a grim foreboding troubling his mind.
Once Philomela had been brought aboard the painted ship, they rowed out of the harbor into the channel and lost sight of land. "My victory!" he cried. "At last the prize that I have wished for is aboard this boat!"
And scarcely able to defer his lust, the barbarian exults, and keeps his eyes                                                        740
fixed firmly on his now defenseless prize, exactly as when Jove's great bird of prey, the eagle, drops into his lofty nest the hare gripped in his talons, and the prey and captor both know there is no escape.
Their journey done, the ship is brought to shore: Tereus drags the daughter of the king to an upland hut, deep in those ancient woods, where pallid, trembling, utterly in terror,
she tearfully asks where her sister is;                                                       750
he locks her in and openly admits his shameful passion and his wicked plan, then overwhelms the virgin all alone. In vain she cries repeatedly for help from father, sister, from the gods above.
And after he was done with her, she shuddered like a young lamb, broken by an old grey wolf and flung aside, who cannot yet believe that she is safe; or like a wounded dove, her plumage brightly stained with her own blood,                               760

who trembles with her dread that the sharp claws which have embraced and raked her will return.
When she recovered from her shock, she tore her unbound hair and scratched and beat her arms like one bereft. With hands turned out, she cried, "Oh, what a dreadful thing you've done to me, barbarian! You bloody-minded rogue! Neither the charge my father laid on you, nor his loving tears, nor my sister's care,
nor my virginity, nor your wedding vows—                                          770
none of these things meant anything to you!
"And now the very order of our lives, our relationships, are all confused! I have been made the rival of my sister, and you a bigamist! Procne my enemy! O treacherous man! Why don't you kill me now, and leave no heinous crime still uncommitted! Would you had done so before bedding me so shamefully, for then I would have gone, an innocent shade, down to the world below.                                        780
"Nevertheless, if the gods are watching this, if heavenly power means anything at all, if, with my honor, all has not been lost, somehow or other I will punish you; I'll cast aside my modesty and speak of what you've done; if I escape this place, I'll go among the people with my tale; imprisoned here, my voice will fill the trees and wring great sobs of grief from senseless rocks!
Heaven will hear me, and what gods there are,                                     790
if there are any gods in all of heaven!"
Such words provoke the savage tyrant's wrath and fear in equal measure; spurred by both, he draws the sword he carried from its sheath

and, seizing her by her hair, forces her arms behind her back and binds her.
Philomela, for whom the sword had given hope of death, eagerly offers him her throat, but he, with a pair of pincers, takes her tongue instead,
which calls (as though protesting this offense)                                           800
her father's name out in a garbled voice, before the tyrant's sword has severed it.
Its stump throbs in her mouth, while the tongue itself falls to the black earth trembling and murmuring, and twitching as it flings itself about, just as a serpent's severed tail will do; and with what little life is left it, seeks its mistress's feet. And even after this— one scarcely can believe it, but they say
that even after this, the man continued                                                        810
to violate her mutilated body.
And after these outrages, he returned to Procne, who at sight of him inquired about her sister. Tereus replied with practiced sobs and a convincing tale of how she died—a story that his tears made altogether credible. His wife rips from her back the golden-bordered robe and puts on black for mourning, and constructs
a needless sepulcher; and with the hands                                                820
that his lies have deceived, she offers gifts in expiation of her sister's death, and prematurely mourns her sister's fate.
And now the Sun has journeyed through one year; what can poor Philomela do? A guard is set upon her to prevent escape, a wall of solid stone surrounds her hut;

her speechless lips cannot address the wrongs that have been done her.
And yet from suffering comes native wit, and often cleverness                                                   830
is born of misery. Upon her loom, she hangs a Thracian web and starts to weave threads of deep purple on a white background, depicting the crime.
And when her work is done, she rolls it up and hands it to the slave attending her; and by mute gestures asks the slave to bring this package to her mistress; and so she does, not knowing what it holds.
The wife of the cruel tyrant opens it and in it reads her sister's wretched fate,                                                 840
and (it is quite amazing that she can) keeps silent, for her grief restrains her speech; her questing tongue cannot produce the words sufficient to her outrage: no tears now, for good and evil are all heaped together, and her imagination wholly bent on one and only one course: punishment.
Every third year the Thracian women join in a great throng to celebrate the rites
of Bacchus: now that time has come again.                                            850
Night is aware of what is happening; by night Mount Rhodope is resonant with the disturbing sound of clashing cymbals; by night the queen emerges from her palace, outfits and arms herself as for the frenzy: she wraps her head in vines and drapes a deerskin over her left shoulder—in her left hand a staff the Bacchantes carry, called the thyrsus.
Now through the woods she hastens with a crowd

of her attendants; roused to madness by                                                      860
her grief, O Bacchus, she pretends your frenzy:
comes to that hut far from the beaten path
and crying out,"Ulula!" and "Euhoy!"
breaks the door down, snatches up her sister
and outfits her as one of the Bacchantes,
conceals her ravaged face with ivy leaves,
and brings the stunned girl back into her palace.
As soon as Philomela understood she was inside his unspeakable abode,
the poor girl shuddered and turned pale with dread;                                870
but Procne brought her to a hiding place, where she removed her ritual adornments, showing the face a monstrous crime had shamed, and held her closely in a warm embrace; but Philomela could not bear to meet her sister's pleading eyes, for in her own, the wrong done her had wronged her sister too.
She kept her glance fixed firmly on the ground, yearning to swear by all the gods in heaven
that her disgrace was brought about by force,                                             880
if only hands could speak.
But Procne blazed, unable to control her anger, and, sweeping aside her sister's tears, she said, "No weeping now—it is the time for swords, or for whatever else surpasses swords: my sister, there is no abomination that I am unprepared to undertake, whether I torch the palace roof and fling Tereus, the mastermind of all our woes,
into the blazing ruins of this house,                                                        890
or pluck his tongue out or remove his eyes, or sever the member which has brought you shame,

or by a thousand wounds minutely given, expel the guilty spirit from his body! I am prepared for some important work, but what it will be, I am still uncertain."
While Procne was still speaking to her sister, Itys came to his mother, who at once realized what she could do, and said,
taking him in with her unfeeling eyes,                                                   900
"How very like his father the boy is!" And that was all she said. Outwardly silent yet inwardly ablaze, she planned the crime.
And yet, when he came up and greeted her, throwing his little arms around her neck, and kissed her with all the innocence of youth, she was quite moved by this; her anger broke, and her unwilling eyes were suddenly full of hot tears that she could not control;
but as she felt her sense of purpose falter                                               910
out of an excess of maternal love, she turned to look upon her sister's face, and then turned back and forth between them, wildly:
"And why does this one babble pleasantries, while that one's silent? What has got her tongue? How can it be that this one calls me mother, while that one cannot call me sister? Look! Your husband is the answer to this riddle, unworthy daughter of royal Pandion!
The only crime against a man like this                                                   920
is to behave with natural affection!"
Now resolute, she carries Itys off, just as a tiger on the Ganges' banks will drag a nursing fawn through the dense woods, until they reach an unfrequented room deep within the palace.

He pleads with his hands, aware of what is just about to happen, and cries out, "Mother!" reaching for her neck, as Procne drives the blade into his side
and does not turn away. That single blow                                              930
sufficed to kill the boy, but Philomela severed his windpipe also with the sword.
He was still alive as they dismembered him. Gobbets of flesh in the cauldron wildly danced as she made a fine broth of the boy, while other parts were hissing on the grill.
Now Tereus, all unaware, receives an invitation to attend a feast which his wife falsely claims to be a rite
of the Athenians: husbands only may                                                     940
partake of it; all slaves are sent away and all attendants:Tereus dines alone.
And he, on his ancestral banquet throne begins to feed and shortly stuffs his gut with flesh and blood that he himself begot, and in the blindness of his heart, commands, "Bring Itys here!"
Procne is unable to hide her savage joy; and eager now to be the bearer of misfortune cries, "The one that you are seeking is within!"                                             950
He looks about and asks, where can he be? He calls and asks once more; until, disheveled, her long hair matted with the stain of slaughter, Philomela leaps up and flings the bloody head of young Itys in his father's face, and never more than then did she desire the faculty of speech, so that she might most fittingly express the joy she felt!

With a great cry he overturns the table and calls upon the Furies to assist him;                                                  960
and now, if only he were able to, he'd open up his own breast and remove the half-digested remnants of that feast; he weeps and calls himself his own son's tomb; and with his naked blade pursues the two daughters of Pandion; you would have thought that the Athenians were poised on wings: and so they were! One flies off to the woods, the other finds her refuge under roofs.
And even now, the signs of what they did                                         970
are visible in marks upon their breasts and in the bloody stains upon their plumage.
Fast to fly after them, he's given wings by grief and by desire for revenge— he turns into a stiffly crested bird with a huge beak in place of his long sword: the hoopoe, which seems armed as though for war.
Boreas and Orythyia Pandion's life was shortened by this grief, which sent his shade to Tartarus before
old age could claim him. The royal scepter                                                 980
and management of Athens and its affairs passed on to Erectheus, who was famed equally for justice and for skill in war.
Four sons he sired and four daughters too, and of the latter, two were famous beauties: Aeolus' grandson, Cephalus, was made a happy man, with Procris as his wife; but Boreas, a northerner like Tereus, of Thrace, was blamed for what his kinsman did,
and for a great long while, the god was kept                                               990
from Orithyia, the prize he sought,

while he proceeded by pleas and prayers to court her, rather than by using force.
And when his fancy speeches got him nowhere, reverted to his usual harsh anger: ""Why did I ever give my weapons up?" he asked. "For without Cruelty and Might, my Rage and Menace, I deserved to lose!
"Most unbecoming of me to rely on prayers to move them! Force is my strong suit:                                1000
by force I drive the heavy-laden clouds, by force I agitate the ocean's waves and uproot the knotty oak; I heap the earth with snow, I pelt the ground with icy hail; likewise, when I get going in the sky with my brother winds, why, I contend so fiercely that middle heaven rings with our concourse and fires burst forth from the hollow clouds; likewise, when I descend to the vaulted caves
below the surface of the earth, and brace                                             1010
my back against the lower vaults and heave, why, even shades in the underworld are shaken!
"Now that's the sort of tack I should have taken to get myself a wife; I should have made Erectheus my kinsman—not just prayed!"
And with these words (or words no less impressive) Boreas smartly clapped his wings together, which shook the earth and terrified the ocean; he trailed his dusty mantle over mountains
and swept the plains below; concealed in darkness,                               1020
he gathered up the trembling Orithyia in his tawny wings; and as he flew, their action more fiercely fanned the fires of his love, nor did her captor check his flight until he reached the city of the Cicones;

here the Athenian became the bride
of the frigid tyrant, and in time became
a mother too, when she delivered twins
who had her features but their father's wings,
though not at birth: both boys were wingless then,                              1030
and beardless underneath their golden locks;
but when their beards came in, the wings did too,
sprouting on either side as bird's wings do,
and cheeks grew tawny with new facial hair.
And so, when childhood passed and they were men, they sailed (together with the Minyans) over an unknown ocean in the first ship ever, to seek the brightly shining Golden Fleece.

BOOK VII
OF THE TIES THAT BIND
Medea and Jason         Medea and Aeson         Medea and Pelias
The flight of Medea         Medea, Aegeus, and Theseus
King Minos threatens war         Cephelus arrives at Aegina
The plague at Aegina         Cephalus, Proeris, and Aurora
The plague at Thebes         Cephalus, Aura, and Procris

Medea and Jason
Now they were plowing through the ocean's waves,
the Argonauts, in their Thessalian craft,
and Phineus they had already seen, dragging his weary way through scant old age
in never-ending night; and the young sons of the north wind had driven off the Harpies that snatched the food out of the poor man's mouth; and after undergoing many trials at the command of their famous leader, Jason,
they reached at last the swift and turbulent                                            10
brown waters of the river Phasis.
There,
while they present themselves and their demands for the fleece that had been given to the king, and he describes the great and terrible labors they must accomplish to attain it, the daughter of the king is overcome by a passion which she struggles to resist for a long time.
But when her raging madness will not submit to reason, she cries out,
"All your resistance is in vain, Medea;                                                     20
what god opposes you, I do not know— I wonder if this isn't love, so called, or something rather like it—for why else would these ordeals imposed upon the strangers by my own father seem too harsh to me? Because they are!
"Why do I fear that one whom I have only just now seen will die? What is the power that can cause such fear? There is a fire in your untried heart, poor wretched girl! Dislodge it if you can!                                             30

I'd act more sanely, if I only could, but this new power overwhelms my will; reason advises this, and passion, that; I see the better way, and I approve it, while I pursue the worse.
"O royal virgin, why is it that you blaze now for this stranger? Why dream of marriage in another world? You love this land: surely it can furnish a husband worthy of you?
"This man's fate— whether he lives or dies—is up to heaven.                                              40
May he live, then! It's quite appropriate for me to offer such a prayer as that, even without my loving him at all.
"But look at the heroic deeds of Jason! What heartless wretch could be indifferent to youth and breeding joined with manliness? Absent these qualities, who would not be moved by the beauty of his countenance? My heart was moved by it, most certainly.
"And now, unless I come to Jason's aid,                                              50
he will be scorched by fire-breathing bulls and clash with enemies sprung from the soil that he himself has seeded, or be given as sacrifice to sate the greedy dragon!
"If I permit this, I'll confess myself a tiger's daughter with a heart of stone! But why can I not look upon his dying and not defile my eyes? Why can't I urge his enemies against him, cheer on the bull,
the earthborn warriors, the sleepless dragon?                                         60
Because the gods wish him a better fate! And yet not prayers are needed here, but deeds!

"Will I betray the kingdom of my father, only to have the stranger whom I save set sail without me for another's bed, leaving Medea to her punishment? It he could do that, leave me for another, let the ingrate die!
"But no: that isn't in him, not in his face, not in his noble spirit,
not in a man as beautiful as he,                                                                70
that I should fear duplicity from him, or his neglecting what I am deserved.
"Besides, he'll give his word to me beforehand, and I will call the gods as witnesses of our compact. Why fear, when all is safe? Prepare for action now, without delay; you will have Jason's gratitude forever, he'll join himself to you with solemn vows, and you'll be praised as his deliverer by throngs of women throughout all of Greece!                                     80
"So shall I then sail off, abandoning my sister, brother, father, gods, and homeland? My father is cruel and my homeland crude; my brother is no more than a mere child, and my sister sides with me in this affair. Within my breast the greatest of all gods has found his residence! I do not leave greatness, but elope with him to seek it!
"I will be called 'Savior of Grecian Youth,' and come to know a better land, and cities                                            90
famous, even here, for art and culture; and that young man, whom I would not exchange for all the wealth of this world, at my side; and with him as my husband, in felicity, I'll be considered heaven's favorite,

and with my forehead I will touch the stars.
"But what of. . . oh, what are their names, those clashing mountains in midocean people speak of? And what of ship-devouring Charybdis,
that sucks the sea in and then spits it out?                                                   100
What of rapacious Scylla, surrounded by her savage dogs, baying off Sicily?
"Nothing to me: holding the one I love, lying contentedly in Jason's lap, I'll make the long sea voyage in his arms, and nothing fear unless I fear for him.
"Marriage you call it then, Medea, do you? Aren't you merely covering your guilt with a deceptive name? Just look ahead:
how great a sin it is you're thinking of!                                                             110
Turn from this crime and flee while you are able. " She spoke: before her stood stern Rectitude, earnest Devotion, blushing Modesty; and Love, defeated, now prepared to fly.
Then she went off to Hecate's ancient altar, hidden deep in the forest's deepest shades. Here she was resolute, and her impulsive ardor would appear to be extinguished— but broke out once again at sight of Jason:
her cheeks reddened, and a suffusing glow                                                120
spread across her countenance completely, as when a spark that has been hidden under a crust of ash is nourished by a breeze and comes to life again as it's stirred up, regaining all the vigor it once had; just so her smoldering love, which you'd have thought was almost out, came blazing up anew, to see the young man standing in her presence, and—as it happened—looking even better

than usual. You would have understood                                                       130
and pardoned her for her infatuation.
And when he took her hand and spoke to her in a modest tone, and pleaded for her help,
and gave his word that he would marry her,                                             
she wept profusely as she answered him: "I clearly see what I'm about to do: not ignorance beguiles me now, but love. Through my good offices, you will be saved; fulfill the promise you have made me then!"
He swore by Hecate and by whatever other                                          140
deities might dwell within that grove, and by the father of his own prospective father-in-law, the all-beholding Sun, and by the peril of his coming trials; so she believed him and at once passed on the magic herbs; from her, he learned their uses, then joyfully withdrew to his own tent.
The flickering stars were scattered by the Dawn: the folk assembled on the field of Mars,
then placed themselves on the surrounding heights;                                 150
and in their midst, the king himself was seated, conspicuously clad in purple robes and holding a scepter carved from ivory.
But look! Two fire-breathing, bronze-shod bulls, exhaling, scorch the grasses underfoot! And just as fiery furnaces resound, or limestone hisses in an earthen kiln and then ignites when sprinkled 'with fresh water, so those two rumbled with their pent-up blaze,
and bellowed from scorched throats; nevertheless,                                     160
the son of Aeson dares to stand against them. At his approach, they turn their dreadful faces to glare at him and drop their mighty horns,

tipped with iron; now their cloven hooves pound the powdery earth, and now they fill the smoky air with bellowing that blazes!
The Agonauts are paralyzed with fear; Jason ignores those flaming exhalations and presses on (what potent medications
Medea has given him!), ever closer,                                                        170
until his right hand daringly caresses their dangling dewlaps.
Now he yokes his team, and makes them draw the plow across that field unused to prior cultivation: the Colchians marvel, and the Argonauts raise a great cry that lifts up every spirit.
Then, from a bronze helmet, Jason removes the serpent's teeth and sows them in the field. Earth softens seed that had been steeped beforehand in virulent poison; and now, as growth begins,                                       180
those scattered teeth commence to take new forms, as when an infant in its mother's womb takes on a human shape, and not until its separate parts have been composed together does it emerge into the common air; so when their human forms had been accomplished in the quickened womb of pregnant Mother Earth, they rose up from that newly fertile field, and—an even greater miracle—the arms they bore to warfare had been born with them!                                    190
But when the Greeks observed the men preparing to fling their sharpened spears at Jason's head, their faces and their spirits fell together; and even she who'd made him safe was frightened at seeing one man set on by so many, and turning pale, she sat there cold and bloodless.

And fearful that her magic herbs should prove ineffectual, she murmured incantations and summoned secret powers to his aid.
He lifts a heavy rock and sends it flying                                            200
into their midst, which redirects their rage against each other: those earthborn brothers die of mutual wounds in bitter civil war.
The Greeks congratulate the winner then, eager to hold him warmly in embrace; you also wanted to embrace the winner, barbarian maiden, but restrained yourself out of your fear of what the folk would say. You did what was permitted you to do:
gave joyful thanks in silence for the charms                                           210
and for the gods who had accomplished this.
All that remained was to deploy your herbs against the vigilant custodian whose elevated crest and thrice-forked tongue and curving fangs proclaim him as the dragon who guards the tree that holds the Golden Fleece.
But after Jason doused the wakeful snake with juice of the plant that brings oblivion, and thrice recited words to summon sleep,
the spell that pacifies the raging seas                                                       220
and stills the roaring brook, a slumber sealed those eyes that had not known its sway before.
And now that haughty hero, Aeson's son, obtained the golden trophy and—the one who'd made it possible—his trophy bride, and carried both off to Iolchos harbor.
Medea and Aeson Delighted that their sons have all returned, Thessalian parents gratefully bring gifts and burn great heaps of incense on the pyre,

as a dedicated bull with gilded horns                                                     230
falls to the blade.
But Aeson absents himself from the solemnities of this thanksgiving, worn-out by the great weight of all his years and near to death.
His son, the hero, says, "Dearest, to whom I must confess I owe my very life, although you've given all, and even though all that you've given me has far exceeded all my expectations, if by your spells you could accomplish this
(and nothing is impossible for them!),                                                    240
I'd have you take some years from my own life and add the subtracted portion to my father's!" He wept without restraint.
Medea was moved by the great devotion shown in his request; the image of the father she'd abandoned came to her mind, so unlike her husband's.
Without revealing how she felt, she said, "Dearest, what blasphemy falls from your lips! Do you believe me able to take years
from you and give them to another man?                                              250
Why, Hecate will never grant me this— you ask for what has never been permitted.
"But Jason, I will nonetheless attempt to offer you an even greater gift: with my own feats of magic, I will try to lengthen your father's life by many years, and not by revoking any years of yours, if Hecate will only aid me now, and nod assent to this great enterprise."
Three nights must pass before the moon's horns close                      260

into a circle; now when it is complete,
and in its fullness gazes down on earth,
she sets out walking barefoot from her house,
with garments loosened and with unbound hair
cascading down her back, and makes her way
without companion, straying through the deep
silence of midnight, when men and birds and beasts
are all released into profound repose,
with not a peep or murmur from the hedgerow,
and in the trees the leaves are stilly silent,                                              270
and even the dewy air is motionless;
she lifts her arms up to the brilliant stars,
and spins around: once, twice, thrice;
and thrice she pours branch water on her hair,
and thrice she cries out wailing in the night,
and then kneels down upon the earth to pray:
"O Night," she cries, "most faithful guardian of secrecies, and you, O golden Stars, who with the moon relieve the blazing sun;
and you as well, three-headed Hecate,                                                   280
who are aware of our undertakings, and who assist the mage's spells and arts; and you too, Earth, provider of potent herbs, you, Breezes, Winds, Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, you gods of every grove, and every god of night, be present now! For with your aid, when I have willed it, I have caused the streams to flow back in between their startled banks up to their sources; I've calmed the raging flood
and I've enraged the calm seas with my spells;                                       290
I drive the clouds off, and I bring them back; I chase the winds away, and I recall them; I break the jaws of serpents with my spells, and I uproot the living rocks and oaks;

I make whole forests move; by my command
the mountains tremble, and the deep earth groans,
and spirits of the dead come from their tombs.
"You also, Moon, I draw you from the sky, though clattering bronze attempt to aid your labors; the chariot of my grandfather Sun                                                          300
grows pale at the power of my incantations, and Dawn grows pale from thinking of my poisons.
"For me you dulled the sharp flames of the bulls, bending their fretful necks to bear the plow; you brought the serpent-born to slay themselves in cruel warfare, and you lulled the rude protector of the Golden Fleece to sleep, and with its guardian beguiled, you sent his treasure sailing off to Grecian cities.
"Now I must have a potion to renew                                                 310
old age, restoring it to youthful bloom. And you will give me one, for not in vain do the stars above me flicker their assent, and not in vain does my chariot appear, drawn by its matched pair of flying dragons."
And there it was: her chariot, sent down from the aethereal regions. Once aboard, she stroked her dragons' necks and flicked their reins lightly, and they ascended; below her lay
Thessalian Tempe; she set her dragons for                                              320
those regions that were sources of her herbs: and she descried below plants found on Ossa and lofty Pelion, on Othrys, on Pindus, and (larger than that last one) on Olympus; the herbs that pleased her she took, root and all, or snipped off leaves with her bronze pruning hook.
Many appealing herbs were found along the banks of the Apidanus, and many more

along the Amphrysus, nor were you exempt,
Enipeus, from her provisioning,                                                              330
and Peneus and Sperchios and Boebe;
and from Euboean Anthedon she seized
a life-prolonging herb not yet made famous
by the effects that it produced on Glaucus.
After nine days and nights had seen Medea in her dragon-driven chariot, traversing the skies above those regions, she returned to her own home; her reptiles had been touched only by the odors of those herbs, and yet they shed the skins of their old age!                                           340
Nearing her house she halted on its threshold: and there, beneath the blue sky's canopy, without allowing Jason to embrace her, she built two altars out of turf; on the right was Hecate's—and Youth she gave the other.
She decorated them with sacred boughs fetched out of the forest; near the altars, she dug a pair of trenches in the earth, and there performed her rites. She slit the throat
of a black sheep and let his blood drain out                                           350
into the trenches; over it she poured a goblet full of honey, liquified, and then a goblet full of tepid milk, while praying to the gods who dwell below, begging the king of shadows and his bride, stolen from earth, that they should be less eager to cheat an old man of the breath of life.
And then, when by her prayers and incantations the underworld was calmed, she had them bring
Aeson's exhausted body to the altars;                                                      360
and once her spells had put him in a sleep resembling death, she stretched the old man out

on a bed of strewn grasses, then sent her mate and his attendants off, commanding them to keep far hence, lest their profaning eyes should violate the mysteries.
They left as she had ordered them, and then, her hair unbound like one of the Bacchantes, Medea walked all around the blazing altars, steeping
her torches in the trenches black with blood,                                        370
until, igniting them upon the altar stones, she purified the old man three times each, with water and with fire and with sulpher.
Meanwhile the potent brew in her bronze cauldron is on the boil, leaping with thick white foam; in it are roots dug up in Thessaly cooking with seeds and flowers and black juice; she adds some pebbles from the Orient, some sand grains washed by Ocean's ebbing tide,
some hoarfrost gathered in the full moon's light,                                   380
the nasty wings and flesh of a screech owl, the innards of a werewolf, which can change his feral mask into a human face, the scaly skin of a Libyan water snake, an old stag's liver, and the head and eggs of an ancient crow that had lived longer than nine human generations.
When, with these, and with a thousand other such ingredients (whose names we needn't bother mentioning),
the miracle to come had been arranged,                                                390
the foreign woman took a long-dead branch from a fruitful olive tree and stirred her pot, mixing it thoroughly from top to bottom.
But look! Almost at once, that stick turned green,

and just a short time later put out leaves, and suddenly was loaded down with fruit! Wherever her bronze cauldron overflowed and the hot potion splashed upon the ground, flowers and tender grass turned the earth green.
Medea, seeing this, unsheathed her sword                                         400
and slit the old man's throat to drain his blood, which she at once replaced with her elixir; as soon as Aeson had consumed the stuff (poured either in his mouth or in his wound), his beard and hair immediately changed from white to black, his gauntness and his pallor and aura of decay took their departure, as all his wrinkles filled out with new flesh and withered limbs regained their muscle tone:
Aeson was now astonished to recall                                                        410
himself as he had been four decades past!
(Bacchus observed this wonder from on high, and realizing how his aged nurses could be rejuvenated by her gift at once obtained it from the sorceress.)
Medea and Pelias Now, so that guile might not go out of fashion, Medea feigned a breakup with her husband and ran off as a suppliant to Pelias; since he himself was burdened with the weight
of old age too, his daughters welcomed her;                                          420
pretending friendship, the cunning Colchian took the girls in and shortly won them over.
And while she entertained them all with stories of her remarkable accomplishments, she told at length of how she had restored Aeson to his prime. Her story raised the hope among her listeners that by such arts

their father too could be rejuvenated:
they begged her aid, imploring her to name
her own reward, however great it was.                                                   430
A moment's silence while she seemed in doubt, as by her fictive indecisiveness she kept the pleading girls in high suspense— but when she'd given them her word, she added, "We'll have a demonstration, so that you may be more confident about this gift I offer you: your oldest sheep, the aged bellwether of your flock, will soon become, through my concoctions, a young lamb again."
Worn-out by his innumerable years,                                                  440
the woolly one, with great horns curving round his bulging temples, was brought forth at once; slitting his throat with her Thessalian blade (which his exhausted blood could barely stain) the sorcer woman quickly plunged his carcass into the cauldron, where the heat reduced it, and where his horns (and years) were burned away.
A feeble "Baa, baa" comes from deep within: to their astonishment, a little lamb
skips out and eagerly essays a bleat,                                                         450
then scampers off—to find a milky teat!
The daughters of Pelias were dumbstruck then, for she had done exactly as she promised! Even more eagerly, they urged her on. Three times now Phoebus had unyoked his team after their plunge into the western stream; on the fourth night, the stars were glittering when the deceitful daughter of Aeetes brought up to boil a cauldron of clear water,
and added to it herbs of no real power.                                                  460
A death-like sleep (produced by magic spells)

had quite unstrung the king and his defenders.
As ordered by the Colchian, his daughters, slipping across the threshold of his room, surround his bed: "Slackers! Why hesitate? Unsheathe your swords and spill his ancient gore, and I'll refill his veins with youthful blood. Your aged father's life is in your hands; if you have any love for him at all,
if you're not merely stirred by empty hopes,                                         470
then give your father what you owe him, now: drive his old age off with your sharp weapons, let his blood out by plunging in your swords!"
Urged on by her and by their piety, each child commits the worst crime that a child can possibly commit against a parent, and only to avoid a much worse crime! Unable nonetheless to watch themselves, they turn away and blindly strike at him.
Bleeding profusely, leaning on one elbow,                                         480
he struggles to get up, though slashed to ribbons, and as he raises arms in supplication amid a thicket of swords, cries out to them, ''What are you doing, daughters? Why arm yourselves to slay your father?"Their hands—and spirits—fall; he would have gone on speaking, but Medea slit his throat and plunged his mangled body into the cauldron full of boiling water.
The flight of Medea And she, had she not taken to the air,
escaping in her dragon-driven carriage,                                                 490
would not have gone unpunished for that deed.
Aloft, she fled above Mount Pelion, where Chiron makes his home, and over Othrys, famed site of the adventures of Cerambus,

who managed to escape Deucalion's flood on wings provided him by mountain nymphs when the heavy earth was being overwhelmed by the engulfing waters of the sea.
On her left she passed Aeolian Pitane with its gigantic serpent made of stone,                                                 500
and Ida's grove, where once the son of Bacchus rustled a calf; in order to protect him, his father changed the boy into a stag; she passed the site where Helen's lover lies beneath a meager monument of sand, and passed those fields which Maera terrified with her strange barking; flew above the city of Eurypylus, where the Coan women were changed to cows when Hercules set off
on his great expedition against Troy;                                                       510
and over Rhodes, that island dear to Phoebus, and Ialysos, home of the Telechines, whose eyes so blighted everything they saw that Jupiter condemned them to be plunged under the waters governed by his brother; she passed the ancient city of Carthaea on the Isle of Cea, where Alcidamas once would find himself astonished by the strange metamorphosis of daughter into dove.
And after that she saw the Hyrian lake                                              520
and Tempe, home of Cycnus, celebrated for his sudden transformation into swan: for at this boy's imperious command, Phylius tamed wild birds and a fierce lion and brought them to him as love-offerings; ordered to overcome a bull as well, he did so, but when he saw his passion so utterly ignored and unrewarded, refused to give the latest of these presents

to the one who sought it; enraged, the boy                                          530
cried out,"You'll wish you had!" and straightway leapt
from a high rock: all thought he had been slain,
but changed into a swan, he hung in midair,
supported by strong pinions, white as snow;
his mother, Hyrie, quite unaware
of his deliverance, dissolved in tears,
and turned into the lake that bears her name.
Nearby is Pleuron, where, on fluttering wings, Combe, the daughter of Ophius, escaped
the death her sons had planned.                                                             540
Medea saw the fields of Latona's Calaurea, fields well aware of how a king and queen were also changed to birds. Now on her right, Cyllene passes by, where Menephron, just like a beast, would bed down with his mother; and in the distance she beholds Cephisus, weeping for the end his grandson came to, changed to a tumid sea calf by Apollo; and near him was Eumelus, who had tears because his son had changed into a bird.                                                550
To Corinth then she came on dragon wing, Corinth, the city of the sacred spring; for here, according to an old tradition, mankind sprang from wet funguses by fission.
But after the new bride that Jason took was poisoned by the old wife he forsook, and fisherfolk off Corinth glimpsed through haze the ruined palace of the king ablaze, the blade that dripped with her own children's gore enraged their father, whom she fled before,                                           560
her fatal vengeance leaving all undone!
Now, once again, the dragons of the Sun bore her aloft, off to the citadel of Athens, where the citizens all tell

the tale of Phene, their most righteous queen,
who, with her mate, Periphas, was last seen
flying side by side in tight formation;
and they recount another transformation,
that of Polypemon's Alcyone,
leaning on her new wings—a halcyon!                                                   570
Aegeus welcomed the new refugee, and by that act of hospitality condemned himself; the king, not satisfied to have her as his guest, made her his bride.
Medea, Aegeus, and Theseus Then Theseus appeared, a son unknown to his own father; the valorous young man has pacified the land between two seas. Medea, wishing to destroy him, mixed a cup with poison brought from Scythia
a long time past; they say this poison came                                            580
from the jaws of Cerberus.
There is a cave as black as blindness, with a gloomy mouth, and a path that leads down to the underworld. Upward along that path, great Hercules dragged Cerberus on adamantine chains, while the great beast struggled hard against him, and turned his eyes away from the harsh daylight.
Now goaded to a frenzy by his rage, he filled the air with barking from three throats,
and spattered the green fields with his white foam.                               590
They say those foam flecks grew, and taking root were nourished by the richness of that soil, and found in it the power to do ill; the rustics call them, since they grow on rocks, the aconites, or "flowers lacking soil."
This poison, through Medea's treachery,

father Aegeus offered his own son
as to an enemy, and Theseus,
all unaware of any ill intent,
had taken it and raised the cup to drink,                                                    600
when his father recognized the family crest
on the ivory hilt of the hero's sword,
and swept the poisoned goblet from his lips.
Medea fled the death that would have followed
in a cloud cover summoned by her spells.
The father, though delighted by his son's deliverance, was nonetheless astounded by just how closely they had come to ruin and so had fires kindled on the altars
and offered gifts up to the gods; now hefty                                                  610
axe blows descended on the brawny necks of bulls whose horns were gaily draped with ribbons.
No day more festive ever dawned on Athens, say the Athenians, than this one was, as elders and those of undistinguished rank commingled happily, with wine inspiring the song of praise they made up for the hero:
"Now Marathon lies at your feet,
The slayer of the Bull of Crete;
To you the men of Cromyon bow                                                       620
For sticking the Enormous Sow;
"You sent the hero, Periphetes, With giant club, right to his knees In Epidauria, and you slew Fierce, club-wielding Procrustes, too!
"In Eleusis, the dear town Of Ceres, you killed Ceryon;

Sinis you killed, and with due cause, Who violated our laws:
"He'd bend two pine trees of great height                                        630
Until their tips were touching, quite; The victim in between them tied, Released, was scattered far and wide;
"The coastal road is now secure Since vicious Sciron is no more: Even his bones were long denied A resting place by the restless tide
"Until they hardened, as folks claim,
Into those cliffs which bear his name;
Count your good deeds and then your days,                                     640
Deeds are more numerous to praise;
"To honor the heroic labors Of our prince, his subject-neighbors In gratitude now offer up Libations poured from every cup."
Prayers and applause inspired by the hero filled the palace; and nowhere in that city was there a place where sorrow could be found. King Minos threatens war And yet, no joy is ever unalloyed,
and worry worms its way into delight;                                                   650
so Aegeus, rejoicing in his son's return, was not completely without care, for Minos was preparing to make war; though powerful in fleet and infantry, his greatest strength was his paternal wrath

over the death of his son, Androgeos, whom he intended, justly, to avenge.
Before declaring war, he sought out allies, ranging the Aegean in that swift fleet
by which his awesome power was maintained.                                         660
He brought Anaphe over to his cause by promises, and Astypalaea by threats of war; low-lying Mykonos came over next, then chalk-famed Cimolus and Syros, known for its abundant thyme; then level Seriphos, the marble cliffs of Paros, and then Siphnos, once betrayed by wicked Arne, who, acquiring the gold her avarice implored, became
a thieving jackdaw with black feet and wings,                                           670
who even now takes pleasure in bright gold.
However, Oliaros and Didyme, as well as Tenos, Andros and Gyaros, and Peparethos, rich in glistening olives, declined to aid the fleet.
Then Minos sailed west to Oenopia, the realm of Aeacus, for that was the name given to this island in the old days, until the present king renamed it for his mother, Aegina.
A crowd surged forward, eager to become                                        680
acquainted with a man of such great fame. Telamon greeted him, then Peleus, and Phocus, youngest of the king's three sons, and then the king himself appeared, Aeacus, slow with the burden of his many years, and asked King Minos what had brought him there.
At this reminder of his paternal grief, the ruler of a hundred cities sighed

and answered him: "I must have your assistance
in a war which I am undertaking now                                                        690
for my dead son's sake; serve under my command
in a just cause: I act for his repose."
The aged king replied, "You ask in vain for something which my city cannot offer: no region is more closely linked to Athens, and there are treaties binding us to them."
Grimly King Minos turned away and said, "Those treaties will be kept at a great cost." He thought it much more useful just to threaten,
instead of waging, war—and thus avoided                                                   700
using up his warriors beforehand.
Cephalus arrives at Aegina The Cretan fleet could still be sighted from the city's walls when there appeared a ship flying from Athens under crowded sail, which put in to the friendly harbor, bearing Cephalus and the greetings of his country.
Although it had been long since they'd last seen him, the three young princes of Aeacus' line immediately recognized Cephalus,
embracing him and leading him within                                                 710
their father's house; the hero, well worth seeing, still with some traces of his former beauty, entered the palace carrying a branch of the olive tree, native to his country.
He stood between a pair of younger men, Clytus and Butes, who were sons of Pallas. And after an exchange of formal greetings, the emissary laid out his commission, appealed for aid, referring to the treaty
and the ancestral league between the cities,                                           720
adding that Minos sought dominion over

not only Athens, but the mainland, too.
His eloquence did justice to his cause; Aeacus, his left hand resting on his scepter, spoke: "Do not come seeking aid, Athenian: assume it! Count as yours whatever men this isle may boast of and whatever else the present state of my affairs can offer; my forces are at strength, and quite sufficient
to defend Aegina and to mount offenses;                                              730
thanks to the gods, the times are fortunate, and offer us no reason for inaction!"
"May it be so, indeed," Cephalus said, "and may your city grow in citizens; on my way in, joy took me when I saw so many young men coming out to meet me, so similar in beauty and in age. And yet I miss many of the men I saw when I came to this city, years ago."
Aeacus groaned and sadly answered him:                                           740
"Though better fortune followed, what came first was cause for sorrow: would that I were able to call to mind the one without the other!
"But I will tell you all, as it occurred, nor beat about the bushes any further: those whom you ask for are now bones and ashes, and with them perished much of my own kingdom.
The plague at Aegina "A fearful plague came down among the people, brought on when cruel Juno's anger turned
against the land that bore her rival's name.                                             750
While we were ignorant of what had caused it, and while it still appeared to us to be a natural disaster, it was fought with all the arts of medicine, and still

it vanquished all of our stratagems!
"At first the sky pressed down against the earth in a dense darkness; clouds helped to contain the enervating heat, and while the moon filled out its horns four times, and four times waned, the south wind warmed us with its fatal breath.                                    760
"Our pools and springs became infected next, when multitudes of serpents slithered through the empty fields and left our streams and rivers stained with their venom.
"At first the animals alone succumbed: the plague confined itself to dogs, birds, sheep, cattle, and wild beasts: the luckless plowman is quite stunned to see his healthy bulls collapsing at their work, falling in midfurrow; woolly flocks
give a few feeble bleats, then, without help,                                           770
shed their thick coats, grow wasted and soon die; the stall-bound horse, once famous for his speed, but now unworthy of his victories, ignores his former honors, whinnying as death prepares to scratch him from the race.
"The boar does not remember now to rage, nor the deer to trust in swiftness, nor the bear to cull the great herds with his fierce attacks; a languor seizes all; in woods, in fields,
along the roads, the fetid corpses lie                                                       780
until the air is blighted with the stench.
"I'll tell you something quite astonishing: the greedy dogs and vultures—even wolves!— left them untouched; those bodies fell apart, sickening us with their appalling odor and spreading foul contagion everywhere.
"The plague, grown stronger, now advances on

the wretched country folk, then rules within
the walls of the great city. Its first symptom
is a fierce burning in the viscera,                                                                 790
the hidden fire indicated by
a flushed complexion, pain in drawing breath;
the patient's roughened tongue swells up with fever,
and lips that have been parched by the hot winds
gape widely, snatching at the torpid air—
no bed nor covering is bearable;
they fling themselves facedown upon the ground
to cool their bodies off; but no: the heat
of their poor bodies warms the earth instead!
"Ungovernable plague! The doctors die,                                               800
their arts a harm to their practitioners, and those who are the closest to the sick, who serve most faithfully, are first to fall!
"Now as the hope of health abandons them, they realize that their disease will end only in death and give in to their desires, having no care at all for what might cure them, since nothing can. They sprawl about all over, without a thought for decency—they lie
in springs, in streams, and in capacious wells;                                              810
bloated by water, many cannot rise and so they die—where others come to drink!
"They find their beds too painful to endure and leap from them; but if they cannot stand, they roll their bodies right along the ground, fleeing the homes that now seem charnel houses; the cause unknown, the place itself is blamed; you would have seen some wandering the roadways, half-dead, perhaps, but capable of standing,
and others lying on the ground in tears,                                                820
at the point of death: they roll their eyes and die.

Others lift arms up to oppressive heaven; here, there—wherever death overtakes them— they breathe their last and silently expire.
"Can you imagine what my feelings were? Like those of anyone in such a case: I hated life and longed to share the fate of my own kind, for everywhere I looked the dead were strewn in heaps, without distinction, like rotten apples shaken from the bough                                               830
or acorns that the wind strips from an oak.
"Do you see that temple there, the lofty one with the long approach? It is Jupiter's. And who among us did not offer up the unavailing incense on its altars? How often, for his wife, the husband came, and for his dying son, the father, who gave up the ghost while he was still at prayer upon the unmoved altar—in his hand
a portion of the incense, unconsumed!                                                   840
How often, in that temple, while the priest at prayer was pouring wine between the horns of sacrificial bulls, the beasts collapsed even before the anticipated blow!
While I myself was sacrificing there for my own good and for my sons and nation, the beast began to bellow horribly, and instantly collapsed without a stroke: it barely stained the knife with its thin blood;
the entrails, too, were sickly, and had lost                                                850
those signs by which the truth and heaven's will are made apparent, for this grim disease had penetrated to the viscera! I saw cadavers flung by temple doors, and even thrown—as though to shame the gods

for their indifference—before the altars!
"Some freed themselves from the fear they had of death by taking their own lives—summoning Fate even as Fate prepared to summon them.
No longer were the bodies of the dead                                                       860
carried in processions from the city for burial with the customary rites: no gates were wide enough for such a throng.
"Either they lay unburied on the ground or, without services, were stacked and burned; and now there are no honors for the dead; dying, men struggle over scraps of wood, and are cremated with a stranger's flame.
"With none to mourn them, unlamented souls of parents and their children, the young, the old,                                      870
wander about, their journey uncompleted: no wood is left to burn their bodies now, no bit of land where they may be interred.
"And stunned by such a whirlwind of disasters, I cried, 'O Jupiter, if what folks say is not untrue, that you have lain in love with Aegina, the daughter of Asopus, and that you're not ashamed to be our father, either restore to me those who are mine, or else give me a sepulcher as well!'                                                             880
"Jove answered favorably with a flash of lightning followed by a thunderbolt. 'I take this omen, and I pray that these signs of your purpose augur well for us,' I said, 'for I accept them as your promise.'
"It happened that there was an oak nearby, one with unusually widespread branches; this tree, whose seed had come from Dodona, was therefore sacred to almighty Jove;

here we observed a swarm, in single file,                                                890
each bearing a great load in tiny jaws: a busy company of grain-gathering ants, making its way across the wrinkled bark!
"Astonished by that multitude, I cried, 'O best of fathers, give me just as many new subjects and fill up my lifeless city!' That lofty oak tree trembled, and its limbs groaned as they moved in the unmoving air; I shook with terror and my hair stood up;
and even though I kissed the earth and oak,                                          900
could not admit—not even to myself— the hopes I had. And yet, I hoped, indeed, and in my heart I cherished my desires.
"Night fell, and sleep claimed our bodies, worn by ceaseless cares. Before my eyes I seemed to see the oak that I had seen before, with just as many branches and the same number of creatures swarming over them, and the limbs swaying as they had before:
the grain-bearing ants were shaken to the ground,                                910
where they at once seemed to grow much larger, lifting themselves from where they'd fallen off, to stand with upright torsos; they put aside their former leanness, monotonous black hue, and many of their feet, while they assumed a human form and human attributes.
"Sleep fled: waking, I had no confidence in what my vision had disclosed to me; no help, I thought, from heaven.
"But within, a great hubbub arose; it seemed to me                                                   920
I heard what I'd been long unused to hearing: the sound of human voices!

"While I still thought myself asleep and dreaming, Telamon came bursting in on me and cried out, 'Father, come forth, and you will see a miracle greater than you had hoped for or believed in!'
"I went on out, and there they were: the very men that I had just seen in my dream— now wide awake, I recognized the fellows!
Approaching, they saluted me as king.                                                         930
I offered thanks to Jove and portioned out my city and my fields, now tenantless, to these new citizens. I called this folk the Myrmidons [from the Greek word for ant], a name that doesn't hide their origins.
"You've seen their bodies; well, their character and dispositions have remained the same: they are a thrifty race, industrious, acquisitive, and keep their acquisitions.
"All similar in age and bravery,                                                                 940
these are the ones who'll follow you to war when the east wind, which so propitiously brought you here, shall veer round to the south."
Such conversation filled the lengthy day; the evening was set aside for feasting, and the night for sleep. Now when the Sun had brought his radiance to light, the east wind still prevented the Athenians' return.
The sons of Pallas came to Cephalus (who was their elder), and together they                                                     950
went to Aeacus, whom they found still sleeping. The king's son Phocus met them on the threshold, for Telamon and Peleus were busy mustering the Myrmidons for warfare.
So Phocus conducted the Athenians

into a handsome chamber deep within
the palace, where they all sat down together.
And here he saw the gold-tipped javelin
that Cephalus was carrying, its shaft
made from a kind of wood unknown to him.                                       960
After a brief exchange, the young man said, "Woodlore and hunting are my specialties, but for a while now I've been wondering what kind of wood your javelin is made from: if it were ash, it would be tawnier; if it were dogwood, there would be more burls. —I can't say what it is, and yet I'm certain these eyes of mine have never seen a spear more beautiful in its design than this one!"
One of the two Athenian brothers said,                                             970
"You will discover more to marvel at than just its beauty," he said, "for it strikes the target that it seeks, unruled by chance, and then—quite on its own—comes flying back, with bloodstained tip, into its owner's hand."
And then, of course, young Phocus had to know everything about it: How could this be? Where was it from? Who gave him such a gift? Cephalus tells him all he wants to know,
or all, at least, that decency allows:                                                          980
shame keeps him from revealing the concession by which he gained it.
Silence.
Then, touched by grief for his lost wife, he wept, and said to them, "It is this weapon which incites my tears, son of the goddess—who would think it so? But so it does and for a long time will, however long the life my fate decrees,

for this has ruined me and my poor wife: would that I never had this gift at all!
Cephalus, Procris, and Aurora
"Her name was Procris: it's likelier you've heard                                  990
about her ravished sister, Orithyia,
but were you to compare the two of them
in looks and manner, Procris was more worthy
of being ravished! Her father Erectheus
joined me to her as Love joined her to me.
I was called 'fortunate,' and so I was;
and had the gods not otherwise ordained,
I would perhaps still know felicity.
"But in the second month of our marriage, while I was setting nets out to take deer,                                               1000
high on the peak of flowering Hymettus, pale Aurora, fresh from driving off nocturnal gloom, first saw, then ravished me, against my will! Now may it please the goddess, I am permitted to report the truth: and by her rosy mouth (a sight worth seeing), and by her power over night and day, and by that nectar she was nurtured on, I still loved Procris! She was in my heart,
her name was always trembling on my lips.                                            1010
I spoke of nothing but the ties that bound us, of fresh delights and recent pleasures proven, of the first doings on our deserted bed.
"Such talk upset Aurora:'Stop your whining, you thankless dolt! You may have your Procris, but if I've any gift at all of foresight, you'll wish you hadn't!' Angrily she sent me back to my wife, and, while I was returning, I turned her warnings over in my mind, and—as I thought on them—began to fear                                           1020

that my young wife had not observed my rights.
"Her youth and beauty led me to believe her an adulteress; her character forbade me to believe it. Nonetheless, the one from whom I was just now returning set quite a good example of misconduct— besides, we lovers are a fearful lot.
"I settled upon making myself wretched by trying to disturb her constant nature
through bribery. Aurora churned my fear,                                             1030
and helped me out by altering my looks. (It seemed to me that I could feel the change.)
"Unrecognized, I slipped into Athena's beloved city, and entered my own home: there were no signs of anything amiss; all were concerned about their vanished master, and only by a thousand stratagems                      
did I contrive an audience with Procris.
"Dumbstruck at sight of her, I nearly dropped my scheme for testing her fidelity;                                                         1040
I barely kept from blurting out the truth and giving her the kisses she deserved.
"Though she was sad, none could be lovelier than she was in her sorrow, longing for the husband taken from her. Imagine, Phocus, how beautiful this woman must have been when even grief served as her ornament! Why tell how often her modesty withstood my challenges, how often she would meet
my offers with,'I keep myself for one,                                                   1050
wherever he may be; him I love, only.'
"What man in his right mind would not have been contented by such proof of loyalty?

I was not satisfied. Out to draw blood
(my own!) I battled on, and offered her
a fortune just to spend one night with me,
then added even more to what I'd offered,
and finally got her to hesitate—
at which, unlucky winner, I cried out,
'O wretch! Here was a false adulterer;                                                   1060
I was your own true husband! Faithless one,
by my own witness, you are apprehended!'
"But she made no response to me at all, and silenced by her overwhelming shame, fled her deceitful husband and his house; detesting the entire race of men because of the wrong that I had done to her, she roamed the mountains, giving herself over to the preoccupations of Diana.
"Abandoned, I was desolate: a fire                                                     1070
scorched me right to the marrow of my bones. I begged her pardon and confessed my sins, admitting that I too might have succumbed, tempted by such gifts—if they'd been offered.
"And when I had confessed such things to her, after avenging her injured honor, she returned to me; years passed in sweet agreement.
"And, as if she herself were not gift enough, she gave me another one: a hunting dog,
a present from her very own Diana,                                                       1080
and said,'He will be fastest of them all.' At the same time she gave me this javelin, which, as you see, I'm holding in my hands. You're curious about the other gift? Then listen to this marvelous account; you'll find excitement in its novel plot:

The plague at Thebes
"The son of Laius, Oedipus, had solved
the riddle of the Sphinx, which none before him
had ever done; straightway, the dark prophet
leapt headfirst from the summit of a cliff,                                              1090
heedless of her own ambiguities.
"At once, another plague was loosed on Thebes, and this fierce beast left many of the farm folk frightened for themselves and for their flocks. We local lads came out and drew a cordon around the fields; lightly the swift beast leapt over the highest point of our nets!
"The dogs were loosed, but she escaped them all, and mocked the hunting party with her speed,
by flying no more slowly than a bird!                                                  1100
The others begged me to release my "Storm" (which was the name my present had been given); he'd long been struggling against the leash and straining at his collar; on release, he disappeared, was nowhere to be found.
"Instead, we saw his tracks left in the dust, but he himself had vanished from our sight. No spear, no ball of lead shot from a sling, no reedy arrow from a Cretan bow was ever swifter in its flight than he.                                                    1110
"There was a nearby hill whose summit gave a view of the surrounding fields below. I climbed it and observed this novel race, wherein the beast seemed almost to be caught yet slipped—it seemed—out of his very mouth! Nor did the sly one run in a straight line, but to deceive the jaws that followed her, she circled round to keep her foe from springing.
"I thought it time to use my javelin,

and as I balanced it in my right hand                                                   1120
and fit my fingers to the throwing loop,
I took my eyes from them for just a moment,
and when I looked again at where they were,
I saw (oh, marvelous!) the two of them,
now marble figures standing in midfield!
You would have thought that she appeared to flee,
and he to capture her. Most certainly
some god had wished that neither know defeat—
if any god had been attending them."
Cephalus, Aura, and Procris At this point he fell silent. Phocus asked,                                               1130
"What charge do you bring against the javelin?" The other man then set out his indictment:
"From our joys, dear Phocus, sprang our sorrows. I will speak first of our happiness, for it is pleasing to recall those first years of our marriage, when, as husband and wife, we were both equally blest in our loves, and closely bound to one another by mutual care and loving comradeship.
"No one could come between us: if great Jove                                 1140
had offered marriage, she would have declined; and I was interested in no other, not even Venus, if she herself appeared, for in our hearts the flames burned equally.
"In early morning, when the sun's first rays touched on the hilltops, youthful eagerness to go off hunting drew me to the woods; no horse, no servants, and no keen-nosed hounds would come along with me on these excursions,
nor did I bring my knotted nets: for safety,                                            1150
all that I needed was my javelin.
"When I was sated with the slaughter of game,

I would go seek some cool refreshing shade and gentle breeze that emanated from the chilly hollows. I named that cool breeze 'Aura,' and sought her gentle breath in midday heat, waiting for her to refresh me from my labors.
"I had a song that I would sing to her that went, as I recall, like this: 'Sweet Aura, come,
please me and ease me now with your embrace,                                      1160
most welcome one—and as you do so well, relieve me of the fever which consumes me!'
Perhaps I added (as Fate led me to) additional endearments to the breeze: 'You give me such great pleasure,' I would say, 'you are my dear refreshment and delight, you make me love these woods and lonely places; what joy to catch your breath upon my lips!'
"Now someone overheard these words of mine and misinterpreted their ambiguities;                                                          1170
and hearing me so often summon 'Aura,' assumed that I was speaking to a nymph of the same name, whom he thought my lover!
"At once this rash informer went to Procris and whispered in her ear the false story of my alleged infidelity! How credulous love is! My wife collapsed from grief (I later learned) in a dead swoon.
"Recovering at last, she called herself the wretched victim of a cruel fate,                                                            1180
complained of my betrayal, and, aroused by an insubstantial charge, by nothing, really, grew frightened of this phantom with a name, and wept—my luckless darling—-just as though her rival had been real.
"Often, however,

she doubted and she hoped, in her wretchedness,
that she might be mistaken, and rejected
what she had heard as unreliable;
she would not hold her husband to be sinful,
unless she witnessed his misdeeds herself.                                              1190
"On the next day, when Aurora's early light had driven night off, I made for the woods, and after a successful hunt, reclined on the soft grass and called out, 'Aura, come, alleviate the stresses of my labors!'
"And suddenly, while I was calling her, I thought I heard a groaning sound, and yet I cried out once more, 'Come, my dearest, come!' Hearing a rustling in the fallen leaves,
I took it for some beast and hurled my javelin:                                     1200
Procris emerged, clutching her wounded breast, and cried out,'Woe is me!'
"As soon as I had recognized my faithful darling's voice, I rushed to where I heard it coming from, beside myself with fear of what I'd find: and found her dying, with her garments soaked and soiled in her own blood, and, oh, how awful!
"Attempting to withdraw from her torn breast the very present she had given me,
I raised her body, dearer than my own,                                                  1210
and tore the bloody garment from her wound and wrapped and bandaged it as best I could, in an attempt to stanch the flow of blood; I prayed she would not die and leave me guilty of her murder.
"Though she was failing and very close to death, she forced herself to speak these few words: 'By our faithful vows,

and by the gods above—and by those gods
soon mine below—by what is owed my love,
unchanging even as I die—the love                                                       1220
that is the very cause of my own death—
do not let Aura take my place in bed!'
"She spoke, and I immediately knew how she had been mistaken about the name, and I explained the truth of it to her, but to what end was any explanation?
"She fell back in my arms, and her last strength fled with her blood. As long as she could fix her eyes on anything, she looked at me,
and on my lips I caught her luckless spirit;                                            1230
but she died easily and seemed content."
With copiously flowing tears, the hero brought this to mind again. But look—Aeacus enters, accompanied by his two sons and by his newly recruited citizens, impressive in their weaponry and armor, all gratefully received by Cephalus.

BOOK VIII
IMPIOUS ACTS AND EXEMPLARY LIVES
Nisus and Scylla         Minos and Ariadne         Daedalus and Icarus
Daedalus and Perdix         Meleager and Althaea
Achetons and Theseus         The Echinades and Perimele
Baucis and Philemon         Erysichthon and his daughter

Nisus and Scylla
And now when Lucifer had driven off
the night, revealing the next brand-new day,
the east wind fell and wet, dark clouds arose;
the south wind mildly offered safe return
to Cephalus and his assembled troops,
bringing them home much sooner than expected.
Meanwhile, along Megara's coast, King Minos was pillaging, and trying out his forces against its capital, now held by Nisus,
who had, among the venerable locks                                                     10
of grey upon his head, a tuft of purple, which guaranteed the safety of his realm.
The war was entering its sixth month, still undecided, as winged Victory flew back and forth uncertainly between the two combatants. A royal tower rose upon those singing walls, where, it is said, Apollo had set his golden lyre down: its music lingered still within the stones.
In peacetime, Scylla, daughter of King Nisus,                                    20
would often come and toss a pebble here to make the rocks sing; now, in time of war, she came as often to observe the duels, and as the war dragged on, not only learned the names of the chief contenders on both sides, but recognized them by the arms they bore, their horses, styles of dress, and Cretan quivers; she knew Europa's son the best of all, the countenance of Minos being more familiar to her than it should have been.                                                 30
What if his face is hidden in a helmet? Why, helmets frame his beauty! And that shield he carries, hammered out of gleaming bronze—

how well the gleaming shield becomes the man! And does he cast his javelin with vigor? Then she commends his skillful manliness. And does he draw the bowstring to his ear? Why, no—that must be Phoebus with the bow!
But when he raised his visor to reveal his countenance, and purple-cloaked, he clenched                                 40
his horse's back and sat that milk-white steed, using the reins upon its foaming jaws, why then, the virgin daughter of King Nisus lost herself almost, almost lost her mind: happy the spear that his hand grasped, she thought, and happy the reins that lay within his grip.
She would go off to him, were it permitted, a virgin treading through the enemy lines, or from her tower fly into his camp,
or turn the city over to the foe—                                                           50
or do whatever else Minos might wish.
As she sat gazing at his tents, she said, "What should I feel about this dreadful war? Should I rejoice or grieve? I cannot say: I grieve for my beloved enemy, but without war, I never would have known him! Were I his hostage, he could end it now, I'd be with him and be his pledge of peace!
"If she who bore you were as beautiful as you are, O my loveliest of kings,                                                         60
no wonder, then, that Jove was mad for her! Thrice happy would I be if I had wings to fly into his camp, and there confess my passion for him and demand to know what dowry the great king would have me for!
"As long as it were not my city's life! Far better that my dreams of marriage die

than that they should be realized by treason!
—Though many, on the other hand, have found it
most useful to be vanquished by a foe                                                    70
who, when appeased, grants them his clemency.
"And certainly, he wages a just war of retribution for his murdered son; his motive will prevail, as will the arms advancing it. I think that we are lost.
"Then, if it is the end for our city, why should his martial skills, and not my love, unbolt the gates? Much better would it be for him to conquer us without delay,
without exterminating our folk                                                              80
or being hurt himself. That being so, Minos, I'll have no cause to fear, unless someone should unintentionally wound you, for who could be so cruel as to dare deliberately cast a spear at you?
"These undertakings please me. I resolve to surrender to him, and give my country as my dowry—and by acting, end the war.
"But mere desire will not be enough! A sentry guards my father in his sleep:                                                    90
my father holds the keys that keep the city; he is the source of all my fear and sorrow, and he alone delays my love's fulfillment: would that the gods could make me fatherless!
"But each of us is his own divinity, and Fortune spurns the coward's useless prayers. Another woman in my situation would long ago have happily destroyed whatever stood between her and her love!
"Why should another be more brave than I?                                    100
I would endure the fire and the sword,

but in this situation, there's no need for sword or fire: all that I have need of is but a single lock of my father's hair! That would be far more valuable than gold! One lock of purple hair will make me blest, and give me everything that I've desired."
Now Night, the greatest nurse of mortal cares, broke in on these reflections; in the darkness,
her boldness grew. In time of first repose,                                             110
when Slumber finds its way into the heart exhausted by its daily round, the daughter slips silently into her father's chambers and robs him of his fated lock of hair.
Oh, what an awful crime! And with this prize she flees the city, passing through its foes, and confident of her reception comes and makes her presentation to the king, who quails at the sight of her:
"Love has led me into this betrayal; I am Scylla,                                                                  120
the daughter of King Nisus; I surrender myself, my nation, and my gods as well, and seek no other recompense but you; receive this pledge that guarantees my love, this purple lock—which is no lock at all, but my father's head!"
She stretched out her foul hand with the proffered gift as Minos shrank away, shocked by the sight of this unholy act: "Shame of the age," he said, "may the gods forbid you their kingdom, and may land and sea deny you!                                     130
Be sure that I will never let so vile a monster into Crete, which is my realm and the sacred cradle of the infant Jove!"

That upright leader spoke, and, just as soon as terms had been imposed upon the vanquished, ordered his captains to release their moorings, and the bronze-keeled fleet was rowed away from shore.
Once Scylla saw the ships already launched and realized that their commander had
no notion of rewarding her wrongdoing,                                                    140
and that her prayers were pointless, she became enraged with him, and with her arms outstretched and hair disheveled, cried out in a frenzy: "Where do you run to now, abandoning the only reason for your victory? Where do you flee, you savage man, who took my nation and my father's place? To whom our victory was both my crime and glory! Are you unmoved by all I've done for you? Unmoved by my great passion and my trust?                                              150
"Where can I go, abandoned? To my homeland? It has been conquered. Suppose it hadn't been: my treachery has closed it off to me. Should I return now to my father's presence? But I've already given him to you!
"My countrymen detest me, and my neighbors fear my example: I have made myself an exile everywhere, throughout the world, that only Crete might offer me its shelter;
if you refuse me Crete as well, you ingrate,                                            160
and leave me here, then legend has it wrong: Europa did not give birth to you, King Minos, it was that tigress from Armenia, inhospitable Syrtis! Raging Charybdis!
"Your father was not Jove, your mother, not misled by the counterfeit appearance of a bull! The story of your origin is false!

In truth, it was a bull that sired you!
"O father, punish me! Walls I have betrayed so recently, take pleasure in my pain!                                                      170
For I confess that I deserve to perish, but by the hand of someone I have harmed; you who have profited from our crime— why should you be the one to punish it? You should regard this crime against my father and country as a service to your cause!
"That wife of yours is worthy, to be sure, who tricked the fierce bull into lechery and bore its unnatural offspring in her womb!
"Can you hear my voice? Or do the selfsame winds                         180
that fill your sails out, you ungrateful man, break up my words and scatter them?
"Now, now, I see it is no wonder Pasiphaë preferred the bull to you: you are much more a savage beast than it could ever be!
"Alas for me! He orders double-speed! The waves resound as his oars beat on them; my land and I both disappear from view!
"It will avail you nothing to forget what I have merited! Against your will,                                                  190
I'll overtake you, cling to your curved plow, and be dragged through the long furrows of the sea!"
She'd scarcely finished speaking when she leapt into the water and struck out for the ship, her passion giving her the strength required. A hateful guest now clung to the Cretan keel.
Her father, hovering on yellow wings (for he had just been changed into an osprey), caught sight of her and dove to the attack, prepared to savage her with his curved beak.                                         200

She lost her grip in terror; as she fell, the light air bore her up—or so it seemed, so that she lightly skimmed above the surface.
Feathers appear upon her hands; transformed into a bird, she is now known as Ciris, and has this name from the clipped lock of hair [because the Greek verb kerein means "to cut"].
Minos and Ariadne As soon as he had disembarked on Crete, Minos discharged his debt to Jove by slaying
a hundred bulls, then hung the spoils of war                                          210
as decorations on his palace walls.
The scandal of his family had grown past all concealment; now the mother's foul adultery was proven by the strange form of the Minotaur, half man, half bull. Minos determined to remove the cause of this opprobrium from his abode, enclosing it within a labyrinth devised and built by Daedalus, the most
distinguished of all living architects,                                                       220
who framed confusion and seduced the eye into a maze of wandering passages.
Not otherwise than when Maeander plays his liquid games in the Phrygian fields and flowing back and forth uncertainly, observes its own waves bearing down on it, and sends its doubtful waters on their ways back to their source or down to the open sea: so Daedalus provided numberless
confusing corridors and was himself                                                      230
just barely able to find his way out, so utterly deceitful was that place.
Minos confined that monstrous form within

the labyrinth, and twice it had been fed
on the blood of sacrificed Athenians;
after another nine-year interval,
the third demand for tribute doomed the creature,
when, by the aid of Princess Ariadne,
the path back to the hidden entranceway,
which none before had ever reached again,                                          240
was rediscovered when the thread was wound;
then Theseus abducted Minos' daughter
and sailed to Dia, where he cruelly
abandoned his companion to her wailing.
Bacchus brought love and comfort to the girl, and so that she would shine among the stars, he sent her diadem up into heaven; it flew through the thin air, and where it flew its precious stones were turned to brilliant fires;
now in appearance still a crown, it's found                                             250
between Ophiucus and Hercules.
Daedalus and Icarus Meanwhile, detesting Crete and his long exile, and longing to return to his own nation, Daedalus found that an escape by sea was closed to him:
"Though he may bar the earth and seas," he said, "without a doubt, the sky above is open; that is how we'll go: Minos rules everything except the air."
He spoke and turned his mind to arts unknown, and changed the face of nature, for he placed                                        260
a row of feathers in ascending order, smallest to largest, so you would have thought that they had all grown that way on a slope; thus antic panpipes with unequal reeds will rise above each other; these were bound

together in the middle with flaxen thread and then joined at the quills with molded wax; and finally, he bent them just a bit, so they resembled bird's wings.
Icarus, his boy, was standing close by, unaware                                                   270
of any danger in the things he handled; he smiled as he snatched at wisps of feathers blown from his father's workbench by a passing breeze, or left a thumbprint in the golden wax and playfully got in his father's way.
The wondrous work continued nonetheless, and when he'd put the final touches to it, the artisan himself hung poised between the wings upon his shoulders in midair, and offered these instructions to his son:                                               280
"Listen to me: keep to the middle course, dear Icarus, for if you fly too low,
the waves will weight your wings down with their moisture; and if you fly too high, flames will consume them; stay in the middle and don't set your course by gazing at the stars: ignore Bootes, the Dipper, and Orion's unsheathed sword; keep to my path and follow where I lead you." And while he was instructing him in flight, he fit the untried wings to the boy's shoulders.                                     290
And as he works and as he warns the boy, the old man's cheeks are dampened by his tears; the father's hands are trembling as he gives his son a not-to-be-repeated kiss, and lifts off on his wings into the air; he flies ahead, afraid for his companion, just like a bird who leads her young in flight from their high nest, and as he flies along,

exhorts the boy to follow in his path,
instructing him in their transgressive art,                                                    300
as he employs his wings in flight and watches
his fledgling Icarus attempt his own.
Some fisherman whose line jerks with his catch, some idle shepherd leaning on his crook, some plowman at his plow, looks up and sees something astonishing, and thinks them gods, who have the power to pass through the air.
Now on their left, they had already passed the Isle of Samos, Juno's favorite,
Delos and Paros too; and on their right,                                                        310
Lebinthos and Calymne, honey-rich, when the boy audaciously began to play and driven by desire for the sky, deserts his leader and seeks altitude.
The sun's consuming rays, much nearer now, soften the fragrant wax that bound his wings until it melts.
He agitates his arms, but without wings, they cannot grip the air, and with his father's name on them, his lips
are taken under by the deep blue sea                                                    320
that bears his name, even to the present.
And his unlucky father, now no more a father, cries out, "Icarus, where are you, where, in what region, shall I look for you?"
And then he saw the feathers on the waves and cursed his arts; he built his son a tomb in the land that takes its name from Icarus.
Daedalus and Perdix As he entombs his child's pathetic corpse, he is observed, from where a rank ditch drips,
by a chatty partridge, who chirps cheerfully                                          330
and makes his wing tips flutter in applause:

a novel and unprecedented bird,
and one who'd only lately been transformed,
O Daedalus, because of a misdeed
that, for a long time, will be held against you.
For, as it happened, the inventor's sister, quite unaware of what the Fates intended, entrusted her own son to his instruction, a likely lad of twelve, who had a mind
with the capacity for principles and precepts;                                        340
and from his observation of the spines of fishes, which he'd taken as his model, incised a row of teeth in an iron strip and thereby managed to invent the saw. Likewise, he was the first to bind two arms of iron at a joint, so one is fixed and the other, as it moves, inscribes a circle.
Daedalus envied him, and headlong hurled this lad of precepts from a precipice,
the steep acropolis Minerva loves,                                                           350
and lying, said the lad had slipped and fallen.
But Athena, who takes care of clever people, snatched him from harm, changed him to a bird, and covered him with feathers in midair. His former brilliance, like his former name, he kept, although the former was transformed into the swiftness of his wings and feet.
Although a bird, she does not soar aloft, and does not build her nest high up in trees
or on lofty peaks; she flies close to the ground                                      360
and lays her eggs in hedges; remembering that fall of long ago, she fears the heights. [Perdix is the word Greeks had for "partridge."]
Meleager and Althaea And then, exhausted Daedalus found rest in Sicily, where Cocalus the king

waged war on his behalf against the Cretans.
Now, thanks to Theseus, the Athenians no longer had to pay their mournful tribute; the temple is all wrapped around with flowers,
and the people praise the bellicose Minerva,                                         370
along with Jove and all the other gods, whose altars they now sacrifice before, leaving them gifts and burning pungent incense; Rumor had gone racing through the towns of Greece, bearing the name of Theseus, and everywhere Achaean folk implored the hero to deliver them from dangers.
Calydon sought his help, although she had a hero of her own, named Meleager;
a pig it was that prompted her petition,                                                 380
hostile Diana's attendant and avenger.
For they say that Oeneus of Calydon, in gratitude for an abundant harvest, offered the firstfruits of the grain to Ceres and the first squeezings of his grapes to Bacchus and poured out a libation of her oil, as golden as her hair is, to Minerva.
Commencing with the rural deities, the gods all got the honors they desired;
only Diana's altar was ignored,                                                                390
and left, they say, without a gift of incense. Even the gods may be provoked to anger! "We will not let them get away with this," Diana said. "Dishonored we may be; but none will say that we were unavenged!"
And the spurned goddess sent her vengeful boar straightway onto the fields of Calydon: a beast as great as the bulls of Epirus, and mightier than those of Sicily,

with blood and fire shining from his eyes                                                  400
and a neck stiff with bristles just like spear shafts;
and as his chest heaved with his grating breath,
his heavy shoulders dripped with seething spume;
in length his tusks were like an elephant's,
and bolts of lightning issued from his mouth,
and when he exhaled, trees turned black and died.
Now he destroys the grain while it is growing, and now it is a field of ripened wheat some farmer has occasion to lament;
the mills and granaries await in vain                                                             410
their promised harvests. He destroys the grapes in weighty clusters with their trailing vines and the leafy olive's berry-laden branches. He raged against the herds of cattle too, and neither herdsmen nor their dogs were able to guard them, nor the bulls defend their own.
Folks fled the countryside and thought themselves safe only when inside a city's walls, till Meleager with his chosen band
of youths assembled, desirous of glory:                                                        420
Leda's twin boys, one famous for his boxing, the other skilled as an equestrian; Jason, the world's first sailor; Theseus and Pirithous, a single-minded pair; Meleager's uncles; the sons of Thestius; Lyncaeus and swift Idas, who were sons of Aphareius; and Caeneus, who was no more a woman; fierce Leucippus; Acastus, famous for his javelin,
and Hyppothous, with Dryas, and the son                                                  430
of Amyntour, and Phoenix, with the two sons of Actor; Phylius of Elis; the brothers Telamon and Peleus

(the father of magnificent Achilles)
were neither of them absent, nor the son
of Pheres nor Boeotian Iolaus;
and likewise present were Eurytion
the diligent, and rapid Echion,
and Lelex the Locrian; Panopeus
and Hyleus and fierce Hippasus too,                                                      440
and Nestor in his prime, and those sent by
Hippocoon from ancient Amyclae;
the father of Penelope's beloved;
Arcadian Ancaeus and the son
of Ampyx, famous for his prophecies;
the son of Oecleus, who was as yet
unruined by his wife; and finally,
the pride of Arcadia's Mount Lycaeus,
Tegean Atalanta: at her neck,
a polished buckle kept her garments fastened;                                       450
her hair was gathered in a single knot,
a style that was simplicity itself.
The maiden held a bow in her left hand, and from her shoulder swung an ivory quiver, whose arrows clattered as she walked. So much for her attire: as for looks, it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that she was somewhat girlish for a boy and really rather boyish for a girl.
As soon as our hero saw her face,                                                       460
he ached for "what the gods would not allow, and wasted by love's hidden fires, said: "Oh, fortunate, the fellow that she chooses— if she should choose one."
But the occasion and his own sense of decency forbade all further speech: a far, far greater task—

this mighty contest—summons him to action.
The scene: an old-growth forest, never cut, which, rising from a plain, looks down upon
fields sloping off in mild declivity.                                                         470
The men arrive: while some spread out the nets, others unleash the dogs, and others still, pursuing danger, start to track the beast.
Within that forest was a hollow, soaked by constant rain: the pliant willow grew upon its swampy floor, accompanied by sedge and osier, tall rushes and short reeds: out of this dell, the boar came hurtling against his foes in furious assault
as lightning issues from colliding clouds,                                               480
overwhelming the whole grove with his attack, for the trees came down as he crashed into them.
The young men raise a cry and hold their spears with the broad, glinting tips aimed at the beast who rushes them and strews the hounds about as they attempt to block his frenzied charge, obliquely sweeping at them with his tusks.
Echion hurled the first spear, but in vain: it struck and left a maple slightly wounded;
the next seemed sure to stick in the boar's back,                                   490
and would have done so—had not Jason thrown with so much force it overshot its mark:
Mopsus, the son of Ampyx, cried, "O Phoebus, if I once worshiped and still worship you, allow me what I ask for: let my spear attain its goal unerringly!"
The god complied, so far as he was able to; the blow was struck, but left the boar unwounded: Diana snatched the spear tip in midflight,

and the now pointless shaft flew on its way.                                           500
The beast was stirred to anger by the blow and burned more fiercely than the lightning does: his eyes glittered and his exhalations blazed, and as a stone slung from a catapult seeks out a wall or tower full of soldiers, just so that bloody-minded pig deployed his overwhelming force against the men.
Now Pelagon and Hippalmus, who held the right flank, were bowled over by his charge;
companions snatched them both out of harm's way,                             510
but Enaesimus, son of Hippocoon could not escape the boar's death-dealing blows; while timidly preparing to turn tail, he was hamstrung, and his legs collapsed beneath him.
And Nestor of Pylos, too, might well have died before the Trojan War, had he not had the strength to use his spear to vault himself into a nearby oak, from whose convenient branches he looked down in safety at the enemy below.                                                                   520
Now having sharpened up its blunted tusks against the oak that Nestor nestled in, and confident of its refurbished weapons, the beast was out for blood: raking its snout, it savages the thigh of Hippasus.
And now the Gemini (not yet promoted to constellations, being brothers still), conspicuous both, both mounted upon steeds whiter than snow, both fiercely brandishing
great javelins that quivered in the air—                                                  530
for sure they would have dealt it a great wound, had not the beast retreated to a thicket

impervious to horses and to spears.
Telamon followed, eager and incautious, and tripping over a projecting root fell flat upon his face.
While Peleus was helping him get up, swift Atalanta drew back her bowstring smartly and released an arrow which, though high, creased the boar's back and pricked it slightly, right beneath the ear;                                         540
a little blood now trickled down its bristles.
She took no greater pleasure in her hit than Meleager did, who was the first to see the blood and show it to the others: "How manly of you!" he said. "You deserve the honor and acclaim you will receive!"
The men all reddened with embarrassment and yelled encouragement to one another; becoming braver from the noise they made,
they launched their spears together in a jumble                                     550
that missed the mark they were intended for.
But look where Arcas, raging, rushes off to meet his fate, armed with a two-edged axe: "Now you will learn how the weapons of a man surpass those of a woman," Arcas said. "Stand back now, fellows, leave the job to me: why, even if Diana could protect the beast with her own weapons, nonetheless, I would destroy him with my strong right hand!"
Swollen by such magniloquence, he rose                                           560
and hoisting high his double-headed axe above his head, he gripped it with both hands and stood on tiptoes, poised to bring it down; but the boar anticipated his next move and looking for the fastest way to kill him,

drove both its tusks into his private parts.
Ancaeus fell, and his intestines spilled
like a great ball of thread unraveling
all bloody, and the earth was stained with his gore.
The son of Ixion, Pirithous,                                                                570
was next of them to face the enemy, shaking the hunting spear in his right hand. "Don't get too close to it!" warned Theseus. "You who are dearer to me than my soul, my other half! For heroes are permitted to do their acts of valor from afar; learn from Ancaeus how rash courage fares!" He spoke and cast his heavy, bronze-tipped spear; though hurled with force and with good augury, it ran into an oak tree's leafy branch.                                                      580
And then the son of Aeson threw his spear which, by an accident, turned from its mark to fall among the pack of hunting dogs and pin one by its privates to the ground.
But Meleager, son of Oeneus, achieved a very different result: the first of his two spears fell short to ground, the second struck the boar right in its back, and as it raged and spun itself around,
it jetted hissing spume mixed with fresh blood;                                     590
the giver of the wound goaded his foe, then drove his splendid spear into its heart.
His comrades testify to their great joy by making a commotion with their mouths, crowding around to press the victor's hand, and gazing in wonder at the savage beast which takes up so much room upon the earth that even now they are afraid to touch it, although they dip their spears into its blood.

Then Meleager set his foot upon                                                     600
that ruinous head and said to Atalanta, "Take, by my right, these spoils, Arcadian, and let my glory come in part to you." He offered her the bristling pelt and head distinguished for the size of its curved tusks. The giver of the gift was just as pleasing to her as the gift was.
An envious murmur arises from the ranks of the companions: shaking their fists, the sons of Thestius
[who happen to be Meleager's uncles,                                                    610
the brothers of his mother, Althaea] raise a great ruckus: "Let it go now, woman, do not usurp the prizes rightly ours, and do not think too highly of your beauty: your lover may not always be so near."
They seize his gifts, denying him the right to offer them to anyone he chooses. That son of Mars cannot endure such treatment, and grinding his teeth in anger, he cries out,
"You scavengers of someone else's honors!                                            620
Now you will learn how great a difference there is between an action and a threat!" And without warning, thrusts his wicked blade into the fearful heart of Plexippus. While Toxeus considers what to do, wanting to avenge his brother's murder, but scared of sharing in his brother's fate, he has but little time to think it over: the blade still warm from slaughtering the one is soon reheated in the other's blood.                                                     630
Althaea was already in the temple thanking the gods for her son's victory

when she saw her brothers' corpses carried in.
Now Meleager's mother beat her breasts
and raised a lamentation audible
throughout the city; she at once replaced
the golden robes she wore with mourning weeds.
But when she learned who was the murderer,
her grief left her completely, and she turned
from weeping to a desire for revenge.                                                          640
When Althaea was in the throes of labor, the Threefold Sisters dropped a block of wood into the fire; and as they wove the threads of life beneath their fingertips, they sang, "We give an equal span of time to you and to this piece of wood, O newborn babe."
As soon as their prophetic recitation was over and the Fates had disappeared, the mother snatched the branch out of the fire
and sprinkled it with water. Many years                                                      650
it lay within its secret hiding place, and guarded there, it guarded you, young man.
She brought the piece of wood out now and ordered her servants to supply the gummy pine and kindling bits, then lit the cruel flames.
And then she tried—four times—to thrust the branch into the fire, and drew back each time; mother and sister strove with one another and those two names "were tugging at one heart.
Often she turned pale, thinking of the crime                                            660
she wanted to commit—and just as often her eyes took on the color of her rage.
Now she resembled some unfeeling menace, and now you would have thought her pitiful; and when her angry heart had stopped her tears, her tears would flow again; as when a ship,

driven in one direction by the wind
and in the other by an opposing tide,
feels those two equal forces struggling,
and yields herself uncertainly to both;                                                        670
that was Althaea, wandering between
wavering passions; now her burning rage
is stifled, now it's started up again.
The sister, nonetheless, began to win, and so that blood might pacify the shades of her own blood, her brothers, she resolves to do a pious deed, impiously. For when that fire had blazed up, she said, "Let this be the cremation of my womb!"
And as she stood before her brothers' biers,                                          680
with the deadly piece of wood in her grim hand, the miserable woman raised a cry: "Now turn your faces to our dreadful rites, O Threefold Goddesses, O Gracious Ones! Avenging one abomination, I commit another: death must expiate death, crime be added onto crime, burial to burial, until the weight of woe accumulated overwhelms at last
this impious household! Shall fortunate                                                      690
Oeneus rejoice in his son's victory? Shall Thestius mourn? Better you both grieve.
"And you now, brothers, dead so recently, appreciate the office I perform; accept the sacrifice prepared for you by your own sister at such dreadful cost, the wicked tribute of a mother's womb.
"Oh, god! What am I rushing into here? Brothers, forgive a mother's wavering, my hands rebel from what they have begun!                                              700

Yes, I admit that he deserves to die, but it displeases me to do the deed.
"Shall he then walk away from this, unpunished, alive, a victor, swollen with his triumph, inheriting the realm of Calydon while your thin ashes lie in icy darkness? But I could not endure that. Let him die, the criminal, and with him take the hopes his father had for him and for his kingdom.
"But where are my maternal feelings? Where                                    710
is that devotion any parent has? The pains I bore until my son was born?
"O would that you had died in infancy, when that first fire blazed up in my sight! Mine were the gifts that you have conquered by; of your own merit you deserve to die! Now pay the penalty for what you've done; twice I have given you the gift of life, once at birth, once when I snatched the branch
out of the fire; now return the gift                                                         720
or put me with my brothers in the grave!
"But I cannot accomplish what I wish for. What is my problem? Here before my eyes is the image of my brothers' bloody wounds, and now the mother in me melts my heart.
"Oh, wretched me! It is a wickedness that you shall win, my brothers, but you shall! Provided that you offer me the solace I give you now, and let me follow you!"
She turned away and with a trembling hand                                     730
flung the funereal torch into the fire; and then it gave—or seemed to give—a groan, as it burned in flames that bent away from it.
All unaware of that far-distant fire,

Meleager felt his viscera consumed by hidden flames and bore great suffering with courage, although he was grieved to die far from a battlefield; Ancaeus seemed most fortunate in dying as he did.
He cries out to his superannuated                                                     740
father, his brothers, his devoted sisters; and, groaning, to his wife and bedmate; then, summoning up his last breath, calls upon his mother, as it happened.
Flames rose and fell as did his pain, and both died down together; his spirit gradually slipped away and mixed in the air as gradually as ashes settle over glowing coals.
High Calydon is now brought low by grief: princes and proles, old men and young men mourn,                             750
the matrons on the banks of the Euenus tear out their hair in grief and beat their breasts; his father, lying on the ground, befouls his white hair and his ancient head with dust, and angrily rebukes his length of years. For now his mother, cognizant at last of the wickedness her hand has caused, has seen fit to exact her punishment, and thrusts a sword into her viscera!
Not even if some god had given me                                                  760
a hundred mouths, each fitted with a tongue, and genius suitable to the occasion, and all of Helicon for inspiration, not even then would I be able to describe the sad fate of his wretched sisters, who, careless of decorum, beat their breasts, and while his corpse was still displayed among them,

caressed him constantly and gave him kisses,
and even kissed the bier he was laid out on;
they gathered up his ashes in an urn                                                            770
and pressed it to their breasts, and threw themselves
onto his grave mound and embraced the stone
and bathed the name carved on it with their tears.
At last Diana, being satisfied with the destruction of Oeneus' house, caused feathers to appear upon their bodies, excepting Gorge and [Deianira] the daughter-in-law of highborn Alcmena, and having fitted out their arms with wings
and given each of them a horny beak,                                                   780
she sent them, thus transformed, into the air [as meleagrides, or guinea hens].
Achelous and Theseus Theseus, meanwhile, having done his part in the joint effort, headed back to Athens. Swollen from recent rains, the Achelous prevented him from going on his way: "Abide with me," he said, "beneath my roof, O celebrated son of Aegeus, do not entrust yourself to the greedy flood;
why, I have seen it seize and carry off                                                          790
enormous tree trunks, even mighty boulders, and send them spinning, now this way, now that, with a huge roar! I have seen great stables, constructed on the bank here, carried off with all their herds; neither the oxen's strength nor the horses' speed availed against the flood.
"When springtime torrents are created by snow melting in the mountains, strong young men are swept away and drowned in its seething eddies. Much safer would it be for you to stay                                                         800

until the waters once more learn their limits, and the thin stream gets back into its bed."
The son of Aegeus, assenting, said, "You offer me your counsel and your home; I will take both." And take them both he did. He passed into the river's entrance hall made of poriferous pumice and rough tufa; its earthen floor was squishy with wet moss, its ceiling done in alternating rows of inlaid seashells, conch, and purple murex.                                          810
The Sun had finished two-thirds of his journey when the hero and his companions of the hunt arranged themselves in couches round the table. Here sat the son of Ixion, and there sat Lelex, the great hero of Troezen, a smattering of grey hair at his temples, and others too, deemed worthy of this honor by the river god, delighted to be hosting the mightiest of heroes, Theseus.
At once came barefoot nymphs to set the table,                                820
bring out the feast, and clear away the courses, before they filled the jeweled cups with wine.
The Echinades and Perimele While gazing at the waters of the gulf, Theseus, pointing with one finger, asked, "What is that place? What is that island's name? Though it doesn't seem to be one island, just."
"It isn't," said the river in response; "what you perceive is not one isle, but five: perception is misled at such a distance.
And so that you may find Diana's actions,                                              830
when she was slighted, less astonishing, those islands that you see were naiads once, who, when they had slaughtered ten young bullocks,

extended invitations to their feast
to all the local gods, except yours truly,
forgotten as they led their choral dancing.
"Infuriated, I became as full as ever I get when my water rises, and as my mind made waves, I overwhelmed,
and tore away the forests from their forests,                                           840
fields from their fields: I carried off the nymphs, mindful of me at last, with their habitat, down to the sea; there, where I join the gulf, together we divided up the land into those diverse portions you behold off in the water, called the Echinades.
"But further off, you'll see another island more dear to me, which mariners have named Perimele, a maiden whom I prized;
but when I took her maidenhead from her,                                           850
her father, Hippodamas, was enraged, and sent her hurtling headlong from a cliff into the sea below. I caught her as she fell, and keeping her afloat, I cried to heaven, 'O trident-bearing Neptune, drawn by lot to rule over the nearby world of waves, answer my prayer and give to one drowned by her father's cruelty, a place— or, if she cannot have, then let her be one.'
"And even as I spoke, new earth began                                             860
to gather her in its embrace, and from her transformed shape the solid land emerged."
Baucis and Philemon The river then fell silent. All were moved save Pirithous, son of Ixion, a freethinker, dismissive of the gods, who ridiculed their host's credulity:

''The fables that you tell, Achelous,
attribute too much power to the gods,
if they can change the shapes of things like that."
The others were all shocked by what he said,                                   870
and disapproved, Lelex especially, whose judgment had been ripened by his years: "Omnipotent and limitless is heaven, and what the gods desire is accomplished; and so that you may come to doubt it less, know that on a hillside in Phrygia, there stand an oak and linden, side by side, surrounded by an undistinguished wall; once, on a mission for King Pittheus, I saw the very site of which I speak.                                                       880
"There is a marsh nearby; no longer fit for men to dwell in, it is now the haunt of coots and seagulls only; Jupiter came to this area, disguised as a mortal, with Mercury, who'd taken off his wings.
"A thousand homes they came to, seeking rest; a thousand doors were bolted fast against them; one home received them, humble, just a hut, and thatched with reeds and stubble from the swamp, but most devout; Baucis and Philemon,                                                 890
a couple equally advanced in years, were wed there in their youth, and there grew old together, making light of poverty by cheerfully admitting it and bearing its deprivations with composure; seek no servants in that house, nor masters neither, for there were only two there, and the one commanding was the same one who obeyed.
"So, when the gods came to their humble home and stooped to pass through its ramshackle door,                                  900

the old man bade them rest upon a bench
which Baucis, busy bustling about,
had covered with a roughly woven blanket;
and after sweeping ashes from the hearth,
she had resuscitated yesterday's
still-glowing coals, restoring them to life
with a diet of leaf mold and dry bark;
and then she added twigs and bits of kindling
which she fetched down from overhead and chopped
still smaller, before placing them beneath                                               910
her little cooking pot: she huffed and puffed
until she managed to produce a flame,
then trimmed the cabbage which her mate had picked
from their well-watered garden.
"He, meanwhile, had fetched a hunk of what had once been bacon down from its hook upon a sooty rafter, an inexpensive, sinewy old chine and not at all improved by long-term storage; she carefully snipped off a frugal piece and put it in the pot to learn some manners.                                         920
"While they beguiled the hours before dinner with talk that kept delay from being felt, he filled a beechwood basin with warm water, then bathed the travelers' exhausted limbs as they sat on a mattress stuffed with grass, perched on a couch with frame and feet of willow.
"Over this piece, a coverlet was thrown, brought out on feast days only, yet a match in age and value for the willow couch.
"The gods reclined. And with her skirts hitched up,                         930
the trembling old lady set the table, correcting its imbalance with a potsherd slipped underneath the shortest of its legs;

and when the table had been stabilized,
she scrubbed its surface clean with fragrant mint.
"She set out berries from Minerva's tree, and autumn-ripened cornel cherry pickles, with endives, radishes, fresh cheese, and eggs that had been lightly roasted in the coals.
"She put out everything on earthenware;                                         940
a bowl for mixing wine and water in (ordered, no doubt, from the same catalogue) appeared upon the table, joined by cups of beechwood, all patched up with yellow wax.
"A moment, and the hearth sent out its steaming feast, and once again the wine—a recent vintage— returned to table, briefly, set aside to make some room now for the second course of nuts and varied fruits: figs, dates, and plums,
sweet-smelling apples rolling from their baskets,                                      950
and purple grapes just taken from the vine; and right there, in the middle of the table, an oozing honeycomb. But more than these were beaming looks, expressions of goodwill, the very opposite of poverty.
"Meanwhile, they saw that when the mixing bowl was emptied out, it filled right up again of its own accord, as though from underneath; astonished and frightened by this miracle,
old Baucis and fainthearted Philemon                                                   960
pressed their palms upward and recited prayers, and begged the gods' indulgence for their meal and the meager preparations they had made.
"They had a single goose, the guardian of their small villa, whom they now prepared to sacrifice to their immortal guests; his swiftness, though, left the old pair exhausted.

"Time after time, he slipped out of their grasp, and then, it seemed, sought refuge with the gods,
who would not let the couple do him in:                                            970
'We are gods,' they said. 'This irreligious region will now be punished as it should be; you two will be exempted from the evil, so leave your house together now and climb that difficult steep mountain there with us.'
"Leaning on walking sticks, the pair obeyed, and struggled to find their footing on its slope. When they were just a bowshot from its summit, they looked back and saw everything submerged
in the waters of the swamp—save for their house!                                980
They marveled at this, and they shed some tears for their neighbors' fate.
"And that house of theirs, which had been crowded with just two of them, was turned into a temple: columns replaced the wooden beams supporting its front gable, the yellow thatch became a roof of gold, and doors appeared, inlaid with artful bronze, and—where bare dirt had been—a marble courtyard!
"The son of Saturn quietly addressed them: 'Decent old man, wife worthy of her mate,                                           990
what can we do for you now? Tell us, please.' Philemon turned and spoke to Baucis briefly, and then revealed their mutual decision: 'We ask to be allowed to guard your temple as its priests, and, since we have lived together so many years in harmony, we ask that the same hour take us both together, and that I should not live to see her tomb nor she survive to bury me in mine.'
"Their prayers were granted. Their remaining years                         1000

were spent in taking care of the new temple,
till finally, exhausted by old age,
the two of them were standing by its columns,
speaking of what had happened to them there,
when Baucis saw Philemon come into leaf,
and Philemon saw Baucis put forth leaves.
Then, as their faces both were covered over
by the growing treetop, while it was allowed them,
they spoke and answered one another's speech:
'Farewell, dear spouse!' they both cried out together,                           1010
just as their lips were sealed in leafiness.
"And even now, the peasants in that region will show you two trees standing side by side, sprung from a single trunk; sensible seniors, who had no earthly reason to deceive me, told me this tale, and my own eyes have seen the votive garlands hanging from the branches, and as I hung fresh garlands there, I said, 'Let those who are beloved of the gods
be gods themselves; let those who reverence                                               1020
the gods be reverenced as gods as well.' "
Erysichthon and his daughter He ceased, and his whole audience was moved by the substance of the tale and by its teller, especially Theseus, who wished to hear more of the gods and their astounding deeds.
Propped on his elbow, Achelous responded: "O bravest of all heroes, there are those whose forms, once changed, forevermore remain in their new state; others there are for whom
continual transformation is the rule,                                                      1030
as is your case, O Proteus, who live in the sea that wraps itself around the earth; at one time men have seen you as a youth,

at others as a lion, a wild boar,
a snake that everyone must fear to touch;
now horns have made you into a wild bull;
often you could appear to be a stone,
often a tree; and every now and then,
taking the shape that flowing water makes,
you were a river; occasionally you                                                          1040
became the opposite of water, flame.
"The daughter of Erysichthon, who wed Autolycus, had powers great as those; her father was a man who spurned the gods and would not offer fragrant sacrifice; why, it is even said he violated the sacred grove of Ceres with his axe, defiling ancient woods with man-made iron.
"There stood a giant oak of many years, a veritable grove all by itself,                                                                1050
girdled with ribbons, garlands, votive tablets— all witnesses to efficacious prayer.
"Often beneath its branches, dryads danced, and linking hands, encircled the great oak, no less than fifteen ells circumference; it stood as high above the other trees as they stood to the grasses underneath them.
"Its character provided Erysichthon no reason to restrain from ordering
his slaves—the criminal—to cut it down.                                              1060
And when he saw them hesitate, he snatched the axe away from one of them, and said, 'Why, even if this were not just the tree that Ceres loves, but were itself the goddess, its leafy tip would touch the ground!'
"He spoke, and held the axe suspended for the blow:

the sacred oak gave out a groan and shuddered, and its leaves, its acorns, and its branches paled.
"But when he struck with his defiling hand, blood issued from its severed bark, as when                                          1070
a bull is sacrificed before the altar and the warm blood pours from its severed throat.
"All were astounded by this miracle, and one more daring than the others tried to hold his cruel axe back from a crime, deterring it from an impiety: 'Take this reward for your religious bent,' Erysichthon muttered when he saw him, and turning from the tree toward the man, truncated him by severing his head.                                                       1080
"But as he struck the oak repeatedly a voice was heard from deep within the wood: 'Beneath the surface of this tree I dwell, a nymph of Ceres; dying, I foresee your punishment at hand, and pleased, foretell the consolation that your death will be.'
"The criminal at last succeeded: shaken by many blows and hauled on by thick ropes, it fell and brought down the surrounding woods.
Grief-stricken by their loss and by the grove's,                                     1090
the dryad sisters went to Ceres, weeping and wearing black, and begged her with their prayers to punish Erysichthon for his crimes.
"The loveliest of goddesses assented, nodding her head—and by that motion shook fields freighted with a harvest yet to come. Ceres contrived a punishment for him that would have stirred to pity, were it not for the unpitiable nature of his deeds: he should be lashed by pestilential Famine.                                          1100

"Because the goddess could not go herself upon this mission (for the Fates forbid Ceres and Famine ever to connect), she called upon a mountain nymph of hers to go instead of her, with this command: 'There is a place in icy Scythia's northernmost reaches where the barren soil will not support a tree or field of grain; sluggish Frigidity inhabits it,
with Pallor, Shivering, and Famine too;                                               1110
command this last one to conceal herself in the stomach of this sacrilegious rogue, and order her to overcome Abundance and Fruitfulness—the powers that I wield. And, lest the distance should dishearten you, accept these dragons with my chariot.' And she placed the reins that guide them in her hands.
"Borne through the air in Ceres' vehicle, she came to Scythia; on a forbidding peak
(called the Caucasus) she unyoked her steeds,                                       1120
and there she found the Famine that she sought, picking stray grasses in a field of stones:
"Her unkempt hair was matted and her eyes seemed hollowed out; grey was her complexion, and grey her lips, from want of frequent use; her throat was rusted from inactivity, and her skin was stretched so tightly you could see the viscera beneath; hip bones protruded from underneath her withered, sunken loins,
her belly, nothing more than an indication                                          1130
of where a belly might be found; her breasts, dependents of her spine; her joints were all exaggerated by emaciation; her knees and ankles were great shapeless lumps.

"Now when the mountain nymph caught sight of Famine from far away (not daring to come near) she wasted no time giving her her orders; although she kept her distance from the other and really hadn't been there very long,
she felt herself beginning to feel famished,                                            1140
and so she leapt into her chariot and headed the dragons back to Thessaly.
"Famine obeyed the orders Ceres gave her (although their functions are in opposition) and swift upon the wind passed through the air until she came to Erysichthon's house and introduced herself at once into the bedroom of the sacrilegious one, sunk in deep slumber, for it was the night;
she wrapped both arms around him in embrace,                                   1150
and breathed herself, her essence, into him, exhaling on his throat, his breast, his lips, till hunger circulated through his veins; her mission done, she fled the fruitful world, returning to the homes of emptiness and her accustomed caverns.
"Gentle Sleep fans Erysichthon with emollient wings; in dreams he seeks imaginary feasts, and opens wide to gobble nothingness;
he wears his teeth down, grinding one another,                                    1160
deludes his throat with insubstantial food, and for his banquet feasts on empty air.
"Awakened, the desire to devour raged within him; reason was overruled by greed of gorge and appetite of maw.
"At once he sought whatever edibles that the earth or air or ocean could supply

and moaned with hunger at the groaning board,
looking for feasts even as he feasted;
what would have been enough for a whole city,                                      1170
or for a nation, did not suffice for one,
and as he fed it, his desire grew.
"Just as the sea receives from round the world its rivers, and is never satisfied, no matter from what distant source they flow, and as a raging fire spurns no fuel, devouring innumerable logs and wanting more with every one it gets, growing more voracious from abundance,
just so the greedy lips of Erysichthon,                                                       1180
even as they took in, were seeking out; the cause of one feast was the one before, and all his eating only left him empty.
"When Famine and his belly's bottomless abyss had eaten up all his estates, he nonetheless remained insatiable; the fire in his gullet raged full blast, devouring his wealth and property until a daughter (who deserved a better
father) was all that still remained to him:                                                    1190
a man now without means, he sold her too.
"The noble girl refused to have a master and went down to the seaside there to pray: 'Oh, take me from my master, you who took the gift of my virginity,' she said, for Neptune had already taken it, and now the god did not ignore her prayer, although the master in pursuit had seen her; Neptune gave her a new form and countenance, and made her look just like a fisherman.                                                    1200
"And catching up to her, the master said,

'O regulator of the reedy rod,
who hides the dangling hook in balls of bait,
so may the sea lie nice and flat for you,
and may the fish be wholly credulous,
and never sense your presence till they're hooked;
but just now on this shore, there stood a girl—
I know this, for I saw her standing there—
a girl dressed like a slave with unkempt hair:
please tell me where she is, for her tracks lead                                      1210
right up to you, and do not go beyond.'
"From what her master said, she realized that Neptune's gift was working; with these words she interrupted his interrogation: 'I beg your pardon, sir, whoever you are, but I have not looked up from here at all, so taken have I been with my pursuit; but so that you should doubt me less, I swear by Neptune's aid upon my enterprise
that for a great long while, there has not been                                      1220
a soul upon this shore except for me, and no one here that you might call a girl.'
"The master trusted her and turned around and left the beach, deluded utterly; the girl changed back then to her other form.
"But once the father realized that she was able to transform her body's shape, he sold her off to master after master, and she, as mare, or bird, or cow, or deer,
would slip away, dishonestly providing                                                   1230
her greedy father with the food he craved.
"But when at last his illness had consumed all that she brought him, and he still craved more, the wretched man began to tear his limbs asunder, mangling them in his maw,

and fed his body as he shrank away.
"But why do I linger over others' tales of metamorphoses? Often, young friends, I have myself turned into something else,
although my choices have been limited:                                                1240
at times I seem to be as I am now, at other times I coil into a snake, and sometimes as the leader of the herd, a bull with potent horns—did I say horns?
"Once I had two—but now, as you can see, one of the weapons on my brow is gone!" And after speaking, he let out a groan.

BOOK IX
DESIRE, DECEIT, AND DIFFICULT DELIVERIES
Achelous and Hercules         Hercules, Deianira, and Nessus
The passion of Hercules         Lichas         The death of Hercules
Jove and the apotheosis of Hercules         Alcmena's tale
Iole's tale of Dryope         Iolaus and Hebe's prophecy
Byblis and Caunus         Iphis and Isis

Achelous and Hercules
Theseus asked the river why he groaned, and how he happened to have lost his horn; and after binding up his hair in reeds, Achelous began to answer him:
"The task you set before me is a sad one, for who indeed takes pleasure in recalling the battles he has lost? Nevertheless, I will recount this story as it happened, because there is less shame in being beaten
than honor in my being a contender,                                                     10
and solace to have lost to such a hero.
"You may have heard the name of Deianira, at one time the most beautiful of maidens, and a great cause of jealousy among her many suitors. When all of us had entered the palace of her father, I spoke up: 'Accept me as your son-in-law, Oeneus,' and Hercules beside me said the same. The others yielded to the two of us.
"He spoke first, repeating the old story                                              20
of how he was the son of Jupiter, and boasting of the fame of his great labors, all undertaken by command of Juno.
"Then it was my turn. I responded, saying, 'It is indecent for a god to yield before a mortal (for at that time Hercules had not yet been transformed into a god); in me you have the master of the streams that through your realm meander; I will be
one of your own, no distant son-in-law,                                                 30
a countryman and part of your own kingdom.
" Juno doesn't hate me, that is true, and I was never forced into her service—

I only hope this won't be held against me!
" 'And as for that paternity you boast of, great Hercules, why, you must take your choice: either it's false that Jupiter's your father, or else it's true that you're a bastard born; you seek a father in your mother's sin!
Which will you have then, son of Alcmena,                                           40
a fictive parent or a shameful birth?'
"Long after I had finished speaking, he still glowered at me, smoldering with rage, and displaying little self-control, replied, 'Your tongue is far more dexterous than mine, but just as long as I can win with punches, I'll let you have the victory with words.'
"Then he advanced upon me, savagely, and after such big talk, I would have been
dishonored to fall back: I shed my green robe                                        50
and raised my hands, and crouching, took my stance in opposition, with my arms widespread, and so prepared myself to wrestle him.
"He tosses a handful of dust in my direction, and he himself takes on its tawny color. He lunges then and feints as though to seize me by the neck or legs or private parts, attacking everywhere. He seeks in vain: I am defended by my weightiness,
not otherwise than when a seaside bluff,                                                60
assaulted by the waves that pound against it, endures, protected by its mighty bulk.
"We separate for just a little while, and then we come together once again, each holding firm and neither backing down, and stand there, toe to toe, fingers knotted, breast against breast, and forehead pressed to forehead:

I've seen two mighty bulls rush at each other
in competition for the herd's prize heifer:
the rest of the herd all look on in terror,                                                      70
not knowing which contender will achieve
the victory—and with it, gain a realm.
"Three times, without success, Hercules strives to push my breast away from his; the fourth, he knocks away my arms and breaks my hold, and as I tumble forward, off balance, —I have to tell this just the way it happened— gives me a slap that turns me all around and then comes down on me with all his weight.
"If you can credit this—I do not seek                                                      80
to garner glory by exaggeration— I felt I had a mountain on my back! I barely had the strength to work my arms— the sweat was pouring off them—under his, and barely freed myself from his fierce grip.
"He pressed against me as I gasped for breath and kept me from recovering my strength, then got me in a stranglehold—my knees connected with the earth and I ate dust.
"Clearly deficient in the manly virtues,                                                   90
I opted to try trickery instead, and changing to a snake, I glided out from under his strong grip. But after I had wound my body up into tight coils and showed him my forked tongue, and hissed a bit, Hercules laughed and ridiculed my arts: 'While I was in my cradle, I whipped snakes; supposing you surpass the lot of them, what portion of the many-headed Hydra
will you—a single serpent—prove to be,                                                     100
Achelous? The blows I dealt that beast

just strengthened it: no sooner did I sever one of its heads than two more took its place!
" 'This creature, branching out with serpents sprung from death, delighted in destruction—yes! I overwhelmed the monster and I diced it! What do you think will happen in your case? —Why, even as a snake you're an imposter, fighting with borrowed weapons, in a form that is not yours—and subject to recall!'                                               110
"He spoke and wrapped his fingers like thick chains around my throat and dug in with his thumbs: gripped by those pinchers, I was passing out, and fought to get his digits off my throat.
"So, since I had been vanquished as a snake, the only refuge left was my third form, that of a raging bull. And thus transformed in all my parts, I now renewed the struggle. He got his arms around my neck again,
and dragged his heels beside me as I galloped,                                       120
until he pushed my horns down to the ground and plowed my poor head deep into the dirt.
"Nor was this all: grasping my rigid horn in his right hand and cruelly breaking it, he tore it from my mutilated forehead. The naiads immortalized this incident, filling my horn with fruit and fragrant flowers; known as the cornucopia, it now enriches the sweet goddess of Abundance."
He finished speaking and a nymph stepped up,                                 130
dressed like Diana, with her hair unbound: one of his attendants, who produced their second course out of that horn of plenty, the ripe fruit which are bountiful in autumn.
The sun appeared, and as the mountaintops

were touched by its first rays, the young men left,
even before the river had found peace
and the flood-driven waters had subsided;
Achelous concealed his rustic looks
and mutilated brow beneath the waves.                                                      140
Hercules, Deianira, and Nessus His only grief, though, was to be deprived of his lovely horn—he was fine, otherwise, and that one loss was easily repaired by willow leaves and reeds wrapped round his head; you, on the other hand, impulsive Nessus, passionate centaur who loved Deianira— an arrow through the back cost you your life.
While Hercules was heading back to Thebes, the city he called home, with his new bride,
he came to the swift waters of Evenus,                                                        150
higher than normal, swollen with winter rains, and full of whirlpools—impassable, in short. Though Hercules was fearless for himself, concern for Deianira made him anxious.
Along came Nessus, powerfully built, and knowing where the river could be forded: "With my assistance, Hercules, your bride will be set down on the opposing bank," he said, "and you can swim across yourself."
Although she was as frightened by the centaur                                     160
as by the raging river, Hercules entrusted her to Nessus, and at once, still weighed down with his lion skin and quiver (for he had thrown his club and curving bow across to the far bank), the hero said, "One river I've already overcome; I'll conquer this one just as handily."
And without hesitating, or attempting

to find a calmer place to cross it at,
he spurned the help of more compliant waters;                                     170
and after he had reached the other bank,
as he was picking up the articles
sent over in advance, he recognized
his wife's voice, and he shouted to the centaur,
who was preparing to violate his trust:
"To what unhappy end will that misplaced self-confidence of yours betray you, rapist? —Yes, I mean you, double-dealing Nessus! Listen, don't interfere with what is mine—
if not for the respect you ought to show me,                                         180
then for the memory of Ixion, your father, who lies bound upon a wheel for all eternity—the price he paid for his attempting a forbidden rape. It won't be possible for you to flee, however much you count on equine speed: my weapon, not my feet, will run you down!"
It happened as he said: with those last words, he drilled an arrow through the centaur's back,
whose barbed tip exited beneath his breast.                                           190
When he removed it, blood that had been mixed with the Hydra's poison spurted from those wounds.
The centaur let it soak into his tunic, "Lest I should die," he said, "without revenge," and gave the garment steeped in his warm blood to Deianira as a magic charm that would induce a lost love to return.
Many years passed, and the heroic deeds of Hercules endeared him to the world and made his father's wife despise him less.                                           200
After one famous foreign victory over Eurytus, king of Oechalia,

he was preparing to give thanks to Jove
by sacrificing to him at Cenaeum,
when Rumor, madly chattering, appears
and whispers, Deianira, in your ears;
Rumor, whose wide range and jurisdiction,
increasing with each mix of fact and fiction,
announces that your mate has got a thing
for Iole, the daughter of the king!                                                           210
The story of this new love was widespread, and loving him, his wife of course believed it; surrendering to tears at first, she grieved and poured her heart out.
But soon enough she asked, "What am I weeping for? These tears of mine can only be a comfort to my rival! Since she approaches, I should use the time to plan some unexpected stratagem, before this woman takes my place in bed.
Loudly complain—or suffer it in silence?                                              220
Decamp to Calydon—or linger here? Yield her the house—or stay and be obstructive, if I can do no more? But what if I— recall that I'm your sister, Meleager— if I should happen to devise a crime, and by destruction of my rival, show how great a deed the grief and injury of a woman scorned is capable of causing!"
And after mulling over all these options, Deianira finally decided                                                                           230
to send him the garment soaked in Nessus' gore, which had the power to restore lost love.
With honeyed words the wretched woman bids her husband's servant, Lichas (unaware of what it is that he is carrying),

to bring this gift to mighty Hercules— and all unwittingly, seals her own doom.
The passion of Hercules Suspecting nothing, he receives her gift, and drapes the poisoned tunic on his shoulders.
He prayed and offered incense to the fire,                                             240
and poured out wine upon the altar stone; freed by the flames, the pestilential venom warmed to its task and spread throughout his body. While he was able to, he suppressed his groans with manly strength; when his impassivity at last was overcome by violence, he overturned the altar, and his screams reverberated through the woods of Oeta.
He first tried to remove the fatal tunic, but when he tore it off, his skin came too,                                             250
for (sickening to speak of) it would cling fiercely to his limbs; removed by force, it bared his muscles and enormous bones.
His blood (as when a heated iron bar is plunged into the blacksmith's icy trough) boiled up and hissed with fiery hot venom; with nothing to restrain them, the greedy flames fed upon his heart; dark sweat drenched his body, and his scorched nerves unnervingly sang out,
while deep within his bones the marrow melted;                                  260
he raised both hands to heaven and cried out, "Look down from your high seat upon this plague, O cruel Juno—feast your bestial heart on my destruction till your greed is sated! Or if I may be pitied even by an enemy, that is to say, by you— then take from me my much-despised existence, my life of labor, sickened by these torments.

My death would be a gift! And what gift more
appropriate from my stepmother's hands?                                             270
"Did I subdue Busiris, who defiled Egyptian temples with the blood of pilgrims, to come to this? Was it for this that I tore Antaeus from his mother's nourishment? —That I withstood three-headed Geryon the Spanish shepherd, and that dog from hell, fierce Cerberus, who had three heads as well?
"And you, my hands—was this the reason why you wrenched the horns off Neptune's mighty bull? —Was this the reason why you toiled at Elis?                                        280
At Stymphalus? In the Parthenian groves? —Was this the reason why you carried off Hippolyte's gold belt from Thermidon and the apples guarded by the sleepless dragon? —Was it for this that the centaurs fell before me, and the boar that devastated Arcadia? —That the Hydra who grew stronger from his losses regenerated heads to no avail? —That when I saw those horses fat with blood,
and saw their mangers full of chopped-up men,                                   290
I slew the Thracian king and his steeds too?
"These biceps flattened the Nemean lion, this neck upheld the world! Jove's cruel mate is worn out now with issuing commands; I have outlasted Juno's savage hate; unwearied still of doing are my hands.
"But now my strength cannot resist this plague, nor force of arms. This all-consuming fire has penetrated deep into my lungs
and feeds itself on each and every limb.                                                 300
But is Eurysthaeus still vigorous? And are there those who still believe in gods?"

The gravely wounded hero finished speaking and then climbed Oeta to its highest range, and nothing more resembled than a bull still carrying the hunting spear's barbed tip, long after his assassin has escaped.
You would have seen him there upon the mountain, and heard his groaning and his roars of pain
as once again he struggled to tear off                                                     310
the poisoned tunic, and in agony plucked trees up by the roots and scattered them, and raised his arms to heaven in despair.
Lichas He catches sight of Lichas cowering in fear, attempting to conceal himself within a hollow rock, and all his rage is gathered up and focused on one man: "Are you the giver of the fatal gift, Lichas? Would you achieve undying fame by causing my demise?"
Lichas trembled                                               320
in terror, trying to excuse himself, but even as he spoke, while he attempted to clasp the hero's knees in supplication, Hercules seized him, spun him round and round, then catapulted him into the sea. He hardened as he hung there in midair, as rain (they say) congeals in a frigid wind, until it changes into snow, whose flakes turn first to slush and then to frozen hail;
so he, hurled through the void by Hercules,                                           330
bloodless with fear, all humors vaporized, turned into rigid flint, tradition says.
And even now, in the Euboean Sea, a small rock rises just above the waves,

maintaining still its former, human shape; sailors believe that it is sentient, and will not walk upon it in their shoes. They call it Lichas.
The death of Hercules But you, famed son of Jove, having denuded Mount Oeta of its trees,
constructed your enormous funeral pyre                                               340
and ordered Philoctetes, son of Poeas (who torched it from the base), to take your bow and arrows and your quiver in exchange, armaments destined to return to Troy.
And as the eager flames began to spread, you draped the pelt of the Nemean lion over the top, and pillowing your head upon your club, you lay there at your ease, not otherwise than as you would have been
reclining at a banquet, flower-wreathed,                                                        350
with wine to drink from cups always refilled. Now spreading out in every direction, the crackling flames came after Hercules, whose carefree limbs received them with contempt. Jove and the apotheosis of Hercules The gods were frightened for the earth's protector, and when he realized this, Jove was pleased by their concern and happily addressed them: "It gives me pleasure to observe your fear, O deities; I congratulate myself
quite unreservedly, that I am called                                                         360
the father and the rector of such a race of mindful subjects—and that my progeny is given the protection of your favor, for even though you organize this tribute to honor him for his impressive deeds,

I nonetheless am much obliged to you.
"But let your hearts not quake with empty fear; ignore those flames rising from Mount Oeta— he who has vanquished all will vanquish them!
Only his mother's part will feel the fires:                                               370
immortal is the part he has from me; it cannot die or be subdued by flames.
"And when he has been discharged from the earth, I will receive him on the shores of heaven; and I am utterly convinced that all of you will find my action a great source of joy.
"But if there should be anyone among you, anyone at all, I say, who might be pained by Hercules' becoming an immortal,
that one may wish him not to have this gift,                                          380
but will acknowledge that it is deserved, and—even though unwillingly—approve it."
The gods assented—and even Juno seemed to find his speech not difficult to bear, until its ending, when she lost composure, embarrassed to be singled out in public.
Meanwhile, whatever parts of Hercules were flammable, the fire burned away, till naught that could be recognized remained,
and none of what his mother's gifts had been;                                       390
now all that he retained derived from Jove.
And as a serpent who has shed his skin sheds old age too, rejoicing in new life, and glitters with new scales; so Hercules, when he had cast off his mortality, became more vigorous in his better part, and he began to seem much more impressive, more worshipful in his augmented size.
Almighty Jupiter bore him aloft

and (in his chariot) through hollow clouds                                           400
up to his place among the radiant stars.
Atlas could feel an increase in the weight upon his shoulders; yet not even now did Erystheus let go of his anger: the hatred that he had for Hercules was redirected against his descendents.
Alcmena's tale But the hero's mother, Alcmena, consumed by lifelong cares, had now, in Iole, someone to whom she could relate the tales
of the legendary labors of her son                                                           410
and of her own labors and misfortunes. For Hyllus, as commanded by his father, had taken Iole to heart and bed and magnanimously filled her womb with seed.
Alcmena began telling her this story: "I pray the gods will favor you at least by shortening your time of delivery when you are due, and call on Ilithyia, the patron-goddess of all frightened mothers, whom Juno's anger influenced against me.                                            420
"For when the time came for me to deliver the child who took on labors of his own, and the Sun's weight pressed upon the tenth house, the burden of my womb was so enormous, my size so great, that you could tell the cause could be no other than almighty Jove. I could not bear the pains a moment longer!
"Grief seizes me as I recall it now, and horror grips me even as I speak
and a cold shiver runs throughout my limbs.                                         430
For seven nights and days, I was in torment; wrung out by suffering, I called upon

Lucina and the Nixi, goddesses
who offer aid to women in their pangs.
"Lucina came—but having taken bribes from cruel Juno, who desired my death, she sat outside the house upon an altar, with her right knee pressed tightly on her left, and fingers interlaced across them both;
and as she listened to my screams, the goddess                                      440
recited spells and charms in a low voice that kept delivery from taking place.
"I strain, and mad with agony, reproach ungrateful Jove; I want to die, my words would stir unfeeling stones! The women of Thebes offer up prayers and try to comfort me.
"Galanthis, a plebeian servant girl with bright red hair, appears, quick to take orders, and pleasing to me for her diligence.
She realizes Juno is against me                                                                450
and up to mischief. As she comes and goes, she sees the goddess sitting on the altar, her knees pressed close, her fingers laced around them: 'Whoever you are,' she said, 'congratulate our mistress, for Alcmena is delivered of a boychild, and our prayers are answered!'
"That influential goddess of the womb leaps up, unclenching both her hands and knees, and I give birth as soon as the chains drop!
"They say Galanthis mocked the cheated goddess,                           460
who seized the girl, still laughing, by her hair, and wiped the ground with her; and as she struggled, the goddess changed her arms into forelegs; she kept her former quickness, and her body now has the color that her hair once had, although her form is rather different.

"Because of the deception of her lips, she must now bear her offspring through her mouth; she dwells (as formerly) within our homes." [Galanthis has been turned into a weasel.]                                             470
Iole's tale of Dryope Alcmena finished speaking, and she groaned, upset to think of what had happened to her former servant.
While she grieved, Iole addressed her in these words: "Nevertheless, dear mother, it's the transformation of a stranger that you find upsetting—what if I should tell you the astounding tale of my own sister's fate? And yet my tears impede me and prohibit me from speaking!
"Dryope was her mother's only daughter                                          480
(for I was born to my father's second wife), by far the fairest in Oechalia. The god who rules at Delphos and Delos desired her virginity and forced her, and then she was accepted by Andraemon, who was considered lucky in his marriage.
"There is a lake whose banks are crowned with myrtle, whose shores slope gently down to meet the water; here Dryope came, ignorant of fate,
and—so your indignation may be greater—                                          490
to gather myrtle garlands for the nymphs! She carried the sweet burden of her boy, an infant, really, not yet one year old, and nourished him with milk warm from her breast.
"Close to the water's edge, a lotus bloomed, whose purple blossoms, bright as Tyrian dye, foretold of berries. Dryope reached in and picked some flowers to delight her son,

and I was just about to follow suit,
for I was present, too—but just in time,                                                 500
I saw the drops of blood those flowers shed
and saw the branches quivering with dread!
"For as you know, the local boors still tell how the nymph Lotis, fleeing from obscene Priapus, found a refuge as this flower, and kept her name, though changing her appearance. My sister had known nothing of all this: when she in fright attempted to turn back and leave, while begging pardon of the nymphs, her feet, as though turned roots, clung to the ground.                           510
"She fought to tear herself away from it, yet nothing but her torso could now move; a shell of bark wound upward from below, little by little, till it sheathed her loins. She tried to tear the hair out of her head, but found her hands were full of leaves instead. Her child, Amphissus (given that name by his grandfather, Oechalian Eurytus), could feel his mother's titty growing rigid and was no longer able to take suck.                                                      520
"I was a witness to your cruel fate, my sister, powerless to bring you aid, yet did as much as I was able to; with my embraces, I delayed the change by clinging to your burgeoning new growth at trunk and branches. O sister, I confess, I wished to hide myself beneath that bark!
"But look, to where her husband Andraemon and her most wretched father now appear,
seeking Dryope.The Dryope they seek,                                                 530
as I point out, is now a lotus tree. And having thrown themselves upon the ground,

they cling to its roots and kiss the still-warm wood.
"Now only my beloved sister's face had not yet been transformed into the wood: your tears were trickling down upon the leaves made from your body; while it could, your mouth responded to the promptings of your voice and filled the air with rending lamentation:
" 'If those in wretchedness may truly swear,                                      540
why then I swear by all the gods in heaven, I have done nothing to deserve this evil! I bear a punishment that has no crime! I've lived a blameless life—and if I lie, then let my foliage shrivel up and die and may the axe and flame consume me quite!
" 'But take my baby from his mother's limbs and give him to a wet nurse who will bring him here and nurse him underneath this tree,
and let him play here too; when my poor babe                                     550
has learned to speak, let him come to this place and greet his mother here and sadly say, "My mother is hidden underneath this bark." Let him be frightened of the lake, and mindful never to pluck the flowers from the trees, and think that in each bush a goddess hides!
" 'Farewell, dear husband—sister—father! If you can show compassionate respect, then keep the sharpened pruning hook far hence, and guard my foliage from browsing flocks.                                           560
" 'And since I am forbidden to bow down, raise yourselves up to where my limbs branch out and let us kiss while I am able to; lift up my little boy! I can say no more; the bloodless bark crawls over my soft neck and what I am is hidden in its tip.

But do not offer me the services
given to the dead—for without your hands
the upward crawling bark will close my eyes.'
"She ceased her speaking—and ceased at once to be,                       570
but for a long while her new branches held her body's warmth, now changed entirely."
Iolaus and Hebe's prophecy While Iole told this amazing story, and while Alcmena (who was weeping too) with sympathetic thumbs erased the tears cascading down the storyteller's cheeks, a new occurrence drove away their sorrow: right there above them on the threshold stood a boy with his first beard upon his cheeks, Iolaus, restored to prime of life.                                                              580
For Hebe, Hercules' immortal bride and Juno's daughter, worn down by her mate's entreaties, had just given him this gift. And nevermore, she was about to swear, would she confer such gifts on anyone, when Themis broke in with a prophecy:
"Why, even now, Thebes suffers the commotion of civil war," she said, "and Capaneus will be invincible to all but Jove;
the two brothers will inflict mortal wounds                                           590
on one another; the still-living seer will disappear into the gaping earth and find the spirits which he once controlled; in a crime of piety his son will slay his mother to avenge his father's death; stunned by the horror of this crime, expelled from home and driven mad, he will be chased by the raging Furies and his mother's ghost until his wife demands from him the fatal

golden necklace, and the sword of Phegeius                                          600
will find its way into his kinsman's side.
"And then, at last, Callirhoë, his wife, the daughter of Achelous, will be given by Jove the gift that will allow her sons to change from infancy to manhood, so that their father's murder may not go unpunished; and then Jupiter, won over by her petitioning shall claim the gifts of Hebe in advance for them, and change the prepubescent boys into young men."                                               610
When Themis, who was prescient, had told them what was to come, the other gods began to grumble openly; a groundswell rose; Why was this same gift not allowed to others?
Aurora railed about her ancient spouse Tithonus, and mild-mannered Ceres moaned for Iasion's white locks;Vulcan demanded renewed life for his son Erichthonius, and Venus also, looking to the future, insisted that Anchises be restored.                                                           620
Each of the gods there had a favorite, and argued from a partisan position against the others, until Jove spoke up: "O gods! If you have any reverence for us at all, why leap to such confusions? Does anyone here imagine himself able to overcome the limits set by Fate? Iolaus was given back the years he was in need of by the will of Fate;
not by ambition, not by skill in combat                                                 630
will Callirhoë's sons turn into men from infancy, but by the will of Fate, which governs even us; I tell you this

that you might put a better face on it— yes, you are ruled by Fate, and I am too.
"If I were able to oppose its force, the years would not have bent Aeacus down, and Rhadamanthus would be always young, and Minos too, now held in disregard
by reason of the bitter weight of age,                                                     640
no longer ruling as he used to do."
The words of Jove calmed everybody down: none of the gods was able to complain when he saw Rhadamanthus worn with years, and Aeacus, and Minos, who, when young, could frighten mighty nations with one word: Minos. He was decrepit now and feared Miletus, son of Deione and Phoebus, a young man proud of his strength and lineage.
Minos believed Miletus would rise up                                                   650
against his realm, but still he did not dare to banish him from his ancestral lands.
You fled, Miletus, of your own accord, traversing the Aegean in your swift ship, and in the land of Asia you established that city which still bears its founder's name. Here you had knowledge of the nymph Cyanee (the daughter of that winding stream, Maeander) while she was straying on her father's banks;
and from that union came a pair of twins,                                             660
Byblis and Caunus, famous for their beauty.
Byblis and Caunus Now Byblis, who was driven by desire for her own brother, the grandson of Apollo— this Byblis serves to illustrate a moral: that girls should not desire what's forbidden;

she did not love her brother as a brother, or as a sister should.
Indeed, at first, she didn't even recognize her passion, nor did she think it wrong to kiss him often,
or throw her arms around her brother's neck;                                       670
and she herself was for some time deceived by the appearance of affectionate devotion.
Her feelings for him gradually changed, and not for the better; when she visited her brother, she was elegantly dressed, and anxious that he find her beautiful, and envious of those who seemed more lovely.
She was, as yet, unconscious of her feelings, and offered up no prayers for satisfaction,
but burned with inner fire, nonetheless.                                                680
She calls him "Master" now, and now detests the thought that they are siblings, and prefers that he should call her "Byblis" and not "Sister."
Nevertheless, she did not dare admit such impure hopes into her wakeful thoughts; often, however, when relaxed in sleep, an image of her passion came to her, an image of her lying with her brother, that made her, even sleeping, blush with shame.
Sleep fled, and for a long time she lay still,                                        690
revisiting the dream of her desire, until, at last, she spoke out, doubtfully: "I am so wretched! Whatever can they mean, these visions that appear in the wordless night? I would not have it so! Why do I see such things while I am sleeping? He is indeed most pleasing, even to a hostile eye,

and I could love him, not unworthily,
if he were not my brother! I am wronged,
and all the harm is—that I am his sister!                                                      700
"But even if I keep them out of mind, there is no wrong in dreaming of such things as often as I want to, in my sleep! There are no witnesses to our dreams, and they provide a pleasure almost real!
"O Cupid and sweet Venus, what great joys were given to me! And how real they seemed! My marrow melted as I lay asleep! How pleasing to remember! But how brief
those pleasures were—the night, with breakneck speed,                          710
snatched them away, when they had just begun!
"If I could be allowed to change my name and marry you, dear Caunus, what a fine daughter-in-law I would make your father! What a fine son-in-law you would make mine! We would have everything in common then, except grandparents—yours should be the nobler! Yes, I would have it so! But all too soon, you will take someone else to be your wife,
most beautiful of men—and you will be,                                                    720
by virtue of parental lottery, my brother only. There is the harm of it, that we will have no more than that in common.
"What are they telling me, these dreams of mine? What weight do dreams have? Have they any weight? Oh, may the gods send better dreams than these!
"The gods took their own sisters, to be sure! So Saturn had Ops, Oceanus had his Tethys, the ruler of Olympus had his Juno:
the gods, though, are a law unto themselves!                                              730
—Why should I try to use them as my models

when their behavior is so unlike ours?
"Passion suppressed will either leave my heart, or, if I am unable to suppress it, I pray that I might die and not surrender; and when I have been laid upon my bier, may my dear brother kiss me on the lips! Such a decision should be jointly made: what pleases me might seem a crime to him!
"The sons of Aeolus were not afraid                                                  740
to sleep with their sisters! How do I know this, and why have I come up with this example? Where is this leading me? Depart, indecent thoughts, and let me love my brother not at all, unless my love is sisterly and lawful!
"Nevertheless, if he had been seized first by love for me, I might indulge his passion. And so, since I would never turn him down, I will go after him! Can you admit this?
Will you be able to confess it?                                                                                           750
Compelled by love, I will be able to! If Shame should press her finger to my lips, a silent letter will confess my hidden feelings."
This purpose pleases her and overcomes her mind's uncertainties. Still in her bed, she lifts herself up and leans on her left elbow: "Now let him see," she says, "my decadence! What slope am I beginning to descend? What fire is conceived within my heart?"
Her shaking hands set down the practiced words:                            760
she grips the iron stylus in her right, and holds the blank wax tablet in her left. She starts and stops. Sets down—and then condemns. Adds and deletes. Doubts; finds fault with; approves. She throws the tablet down, then picks it up!

She cannot say what she is striving for, and every tack she takes displeases her, who sometimes seems ashamed, and sometimes bold.
She first wrote "Sister" down—and then decided to take the "Sister" out—and then inscribed                                          770
these words on the corrected wax:
"My dearest— One who so holds you, one who will not have a dearest, if not you, now sends you this, who cannot, out of shame, reveal herself, but if you wish to know what I desire, it is that, nameless, I might plead my case unrecognized as Byblis, undiscovered until my wish were certain to be granted.
"You might have sensed I was in love with you from my drained complexion and stressed countenance,                      780
my eyes so often filling up with tears, the sighs brought on by no apparent cause, my constant need to throw my arms about you— and, if by any chance you noticed them, the kisses that were more than sisterly.
"And yet, despite the burden of my wound, despite the fury of that inner fire, I did my best—the gods will witness this!— to bring myself again to sanity;
unfortunate, I've struggled for so long                                                   790
to get way from Cupid's fierce encounters, enduring more—I think you would agree— than any girl could bear.
"Now overwhelmed by my great passion and compelled to speak, I seek your help with this fainthearted prayer, for you will be my rescue—or my ruin: the choice is yours and you must make it now.

"I pray to you not as an enemy, but as the one most closely joined to you,
who yet desires to be nearer still,                                                            800
more closely linked by even stricter chains.
"Let old men know what is and is not proper, distinguish 'decent' from 'indecencies,' and keep the fine distinctions of the law. Heedless passion accords with our youth. We have not learned yet what may be allowed, so we believe that everything may be, and follow the example of the gods!
"In our case, we haven't a strict father or a concern for what the people say,                                                     810
or fear to serve as an impediment; and should there be occasion for our fear, our pleasurable thefts will be concealed by our relationship—for as your sister, I am allowed to speak with you in private, and openly embrace and give you kisses.
"The little that is lacking—is it too much? Have pity, then, on one who speaks her love but would not speak unless compelled by passion;
and let it not be written on my stone                                                     820
that by refusing me, you caused my death."
When she had finished setting down these words on tablets which were filled right to their edges (though pointlessly, as it will soon appear), she sealed the wicked missive with her signet, dampened—her mouth was dry—by flowing tears.
Shamefaced, she called a servant to her side and gave him orders in a shaky voice: "Take these, most faithful one, to our—" and after a long pause, she got out,
"—brother."                                  830

She dropped the tablets she was giving him, but sent them anyway—despite that omen. And when he thought it was appropriate, the servant gave the message to her brother, who read it halfway through, then threw it down, astonished and enraged by what he'd read, and scarcely able to restrain himself from tearing out the frightened servant's throat: "Flee while you can," Maeander's grandson said,
"you agent of my sister's filthy lust—                                                     840
if your death were not linked to our dishonor, then surely you would die, you vicious rogue!"
He fled in terror, bringing to his mistress her brother's fierce response. When she heard the news of his rejection, Byblis lost all color and shivered uncontrollably from chills.
As soon as she became herself again, her passion for her brother came back too, and barely audible, she gave it voice:
"Deserved, indeed! Why have I been so foolish                                     850
as to reveal my very soul to him! So swiftly to set down upon the page what should have been concealed! I should have tried to understand his feelings for me first, with speech that hinted but did not commit.
"I should have checked which way the wind was blowing before I set my sails out, to be safe; I set them out too soon; a wind came up and now I have been driven on the rocks;
the whole force of the ocean overwhelms me,                                      860
and I have no way to regain my course.
"By unambiguous omens I was warned not to give in to my desires, when, while ordering my servant to deliver

the letter, it—and all my hopes—both fell.
Should I have changed the day—or my whole purpose?
"Better to change the day! Almighty Jove admonished me in no uncertain terms, which I would not have missed, had I been sane.
I should have spoken to him, and confessed                                            870
the feelings that I have for him in person, and not put them in writing in the wax. He would have seen his tearful lover's face; I could have said much more than any letter.
"With no encouragement, I could have thrown my arms around his neck, and if he spurned me, I would have made it seem like I was dying, and clinging to his knees, begged for my life.
"I should have left nothing unattempted: though any of my stratagems could fail,                                                 880
the lot of them together might prevail against the hardness of my brother's heart. The fault—it may be—of my messenger, ineptly showing up at the wrong time, seeking him out when he was not at leisure, I'm sure of it.
"All this has injured me. But after all, he is no tiger's son with heart of iron or of adamant, nor was he suckled by a lioness.
He will be overcome! I will pursue him                                                890
once more, and not give up while I have breath!
"If I could just undo what I have done, that would have been best: not to have begun; the second best is now for me to do all that it takes to see this journey through.
"For if I now should alter my intent he could not think of me as innocent,

and if I give him up now, I must seem
a light thing, undeserving of esteem,
or else a temptress trying every way                                                       900
she knows to lead the virtuous astray.
He will not think I have within my breast
that god whose urgent flames give me no rest,
but rather that I am provoked by lust.
"Nothing I do now will regain his trust, since he has read the letters that I traced; desire revealed may never be erased. Though I do nothing more, I must appear guilty to him; with hope, and without fear,
I may still win my bliss and end my pain,                                               910
and nothing to lose means only much to gain."
She spoke, and her confusion was so great that while she wept for what she had attempted, she wanted to attempt it yet again; at every approach, rejection came. Her brother fled his homeland, and his sister's abominations; when her grim pursuit seemed endless to him, he went off and founded a city of his own on foreign soil.
And then, they say, she truly lost her mind,                                       920
and ripped apart the garments on her breast and beat her arms and shoulders in her fury; her madness unconcealed now, she confesses the hope of her forbidden love, and flees her homeland and its now-detested hearth, and sets out after her self-exiled brother.
It is as when your devotees, O Bacchus, the frenzied women of Ismaria, all come together at your triennial rites;
not otherwise the women of Bibassus                                                    930
saw Byblis raving all across the fields.

And afterward, she roamed through Caria, and among the Leleges and Lycians. Now she has passed Cragus and Limyre, and the river Xanthus, and that mountain range the fire-breathing Chimaera inhabits, who boasts a lion's head and serpent's tail.
The woods grew sparse. Worn out by your pursuit, you tumble to the ground, and lie there, Byblis,
your unbound hair on the unyielding earth,                                          940
and your mouth pressed against the fallen leaves.
Often the Lelegeian nymphs attempted to lift her up in their sympathetic arms, and urged upon the unresponsive girl the remedies they had for lovesickness; Byblis just lies there silently and clutches the grasses in her fingers, as she waters the vegetation with her flowing tears. The naiads, it is said, replaced that font
with one incapable of running dry:                                                        950
what greater gift could naiads have to give?
As pitch drops drip from gashes in pine bark, as gummy asphalt oozes from dense soil, as frozen water, touched by the soft breath of the west wind, now melts beneath the sun, so Byblis, quite consumed by her own tears, is changed at once into a flowing spring which, in these parts, still bears its mistress' name, and has its source beneath a shrub-oak tree.
Iphis and Isis Rumor might very well have spread the news                                      960
of this unprecedented transformation throughout the hundred towns of Crete, if they had not just had a wonder of their own to talk about—the change that came to Iphis.

For, once upon a time, there lived in Phaestus, not far from the royal capital at Cnossus, a freeborn plebeian named Ligdus, who was otherwise unknown and undistinguished, with no more property than fame or status, and yet devout, and blameless in his life.                                                970
His wife was pregnant. When her time had come, he gave her his instructions with these words: "There are two things I pray to heaven for on your account: an easy birth and a son. The other fate is much too burdensome, for daughters need what Fortune has denied us: a dowry.
"Therefore—and may God prevent this happening, but if, by chance, it does and you should be delivered of a girl,
unwillingly I order this, and beg                                                             980
pardon for my impiety—But let it die!"
He spoke, and tears profusely bathed the cheeks of the instructor and instructed both. Telethusa continued to implore her husband, praying him not to confine their hopes so narrowly—to no avail, for he would not be moved from his decision.
Now scarcely able to endure the weight of her womb's burden, as she lay in bed
at midnight, a dream-vision came to her:                                              990
the goddess Io stood (or seemed to stand) before her troubled bed, accompanied with solemn pomp by all her mysteries.
She wore her crescent horns upon her brow and a garland made of gleaming sheaves of wheat, and a queenly diadem; behind her stood the dog-faced god Anubis, and divine

Bubastis (who defends the lives of cats),
and Apis as a bull clothed in a hide
of varied colors, with Harpocrates,                                                        1000
the god whose fingers, pressed against his lips,
command our silence; and one often sought
by his devoted worshipers—Osiris;
and the asp, so rich in sleep-inducing drops.
She seemed to wake, and saw them all quite clearly.
These were the words the goddess spoke to her: "O Telethusa, faithful devotee, put off your heavy cares! Disobey your spouse, and do not hesitate, when Lucina
has lightened the burden of your labor,                                                1010
to raise this child, whatever it will be. I am that goddess who, when asked, delivers, and you will have no reason to complain that honors you have paid me were in vain." After instructing her, the goddess left.
The Cretan woman rose up joyfully, lifted her hands up to the stars, and prayed that her dream-vision would be ratified.
Then going into labor, she brought forth a daughter—though her husband did not know it.                               1020
The mother (with intention to deceive) told them to feed the boy. Deception prospered, since no one knew the truth except the nurse.
The father thanked the gods and named the child for its grandfather, Iphis; since this name was given men and women both, his mother was pleased, for she could use it honestly. So from her pious lie, deception grew. She dressed it as a boy—its face was such that whether boy or girl, it was a beauty.                                               1030
Meanwhile, the years went by, thirteen of them:

your father, Iphis, has arranged for you
a marriage to the golden-haired Ianthe,
the daughter of a Cretan named Telestes,
the maid most praised in Phaestus for her beauty.
The two were similar in age and looks,
and had been taught together from the first.
First love came unexpected to both hearts and wounded them both equally—and yet
their expectations were quite different:                                                 1040
Ianthe can look forward to a time of wedding torches and of wedding vows, and trusts that one whom she believes a man will be her man. Iphis, however, loves with hopeless desperation, which increases in strict proportion to its hopelessness, and burns—a maiden—for another maid!
And scarcely holding back her tears, she cries, "Oh, what will be the end reserved for Iphis,
gripped by a strange and monstrous passion known                             1050
to no one else? If the gods had wished to spare me, they should have; if they wanted to destroy me, they should have given me a natural affliction.
"Cows do not burn for cows, nor mares for mares; the ram will have his sheep, the stag his does, and birds will do the same when they assemble; there are no animals whose females lust for other females! I wish that I were dead!
"That Crete might bring forth monsters of all kinds, Queen Pasiphaë was taken by a bull,                                                      1060
yet even that was male-and-female passion! My love is much less rational than hers, to tell the truth. At least she had the hope of satisfaction, taking in the bull through guile, and in the image of a cow,

thereby deceiving the adulterer!
"If every form of ingenuity were gathered here from all around the world, if Daedalus flew back on waxen wings,
what could he do? Could all his learned arts                                        1070
transform me from a girl into a boy? Or could you change into a boy, Ianthe?
"But really, Iphis, pull yourself together, be firm, cast off this stultifying passion: accept your birth—unless you would deceive yourself as well as others—look for love where it is proper to, as a woman should! Hope both creates and nourishes such love; reality deprives you of all hope.
"No watchman keeps you from her dear embrace,                          1080
no husband's ever-vigilant concern, no father's fierceness; nor does she herself deny the gifts that you would have from her. And yet you are denied all happiness, nor could it have been otherwise if all the gods and men had labored in your cause.
"But the gods have not denied me anything; agreeably, they've given what they could; my father wishes for me what I wish,
she and her father both would have it be;                                             1090
but Nature, much more powerful than they are, wishes it not—sole source of all my woe!
"But look—the sun has risen and the day of our longed-for nuptials dawns at last! Ianthe will be mine—and yet not mine: we die of thirst here at the fountainside.
"Why do you, Juno, guardian of brides, and you, O Hymen, god of marriage, come to these rites, which cannot be rites at all,

for no one takes the bride, and both are veiled?"                                 1100
She said no more. Nor did her chosen burn less fiercely as she prayed you swiftly come, O god of marriage.
Fearing what you sought, Telethusa postponed the marriage day with one concocted pretext and another, a fictive illness or an evil omen. But now she had no more excuses left, and the wedding day was only one day off.
She tears the hair bands from her daughter's head and from her own, and thus unbound, she prayed                                1110
while desperately clinging to the altar: "O holy Isis, who art pleased to dwell and be worshiped at Paraetonium, at Pharos, in the Mareotic fields, and where the Nile splits into seven branches; deliver us, I pray you, from our fear!
"For I once saw thee and thy sacred emblems, O goddess, and I recognized them all and listened to the sound of brazen rattles and kept your orders in my memory.                                                   1120
"And that my daughter still looks on the light, and that I have not suffered punishment, why, this is all your counsel and your gift; now spare us both and offer us your aid."
Warm tears were in attendance on her words. The altar of the goddess seemed to move— it did move, and the temple doors were shaken, and the horns (her lunar emblem) glowed with light, and the bronze rattles sounded.
Not yet secure, but nonetheless delighted by this omen,                                               1130
the mother left with Iphis following,

as was her wont, but now with longer strides, darker complexion, and with greater force, a keener countenance, and with her hair shorter than usual and unadorned, and with more vigor than a woman has. And you who were so recently a girl are now a boy! Bring gifts to the goddess! Now boldly celebrate your faith in her!
They bring the goddess gifts and add to them                                          1140
a votive tablet with these lines inscribed:
GIFTS IPHIS PROMISED WHEN SHE WAS A MAID TRANSFORMED INTO A BOY HE GLADLY PAID
The next day's sun revealed the great wide world with Venus, Juno, and Hymen all together gathered beneath the smoking nuptial torches, and Iphis in possession of Ianthe.

BOOK X
THE SONGS OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus and Eurydice         The catalogue of trees         Cyparissus
The songs of Orpheus         Proem         Ganymede
Hyacinthus         The Propoetides and the Cerastae         Pygmalion
Myrrha         Venus and Adonis (1)
Atalanta and Hippomenes         Venus and Adonis (2)

Orpheus and Eurydice
From there, dressed in his saffron mantle, Hymen
went on his way, traversed the boundless heavens
until he came to Thrace, where he'd been summoned
by the voice of Orpheus—to no avail,
for though the god appeared, he did not bring
the words that customary use has sanctioned,
nor countenances radiating joy,
nor omens of good fortune for the couple;
even the torch he carried merely sputtered,
emitting only tear-producing smoke,                                                     10
not catching fire when he whirled it round.
And the aftermath was even more unpleasant, for as the bride was strolling through the grass, attended by the naiads, she dropped dead, bitten on her ankle by a snake.
When Orpheus had mourned sufficiently in the upper air, he bravely went below lest he should leave the underworld untried; he made his way there by the Spartan Gates,
and passing through the superficial forms                                               20
of those who had been buried up above, he came to Proserpina and her spouse, the ruler of this unattractive kingdom, and master of the shades.
The Thracian bard plucked at his lyre and began to sing: "Great god and goddess, appointed to govern in Hades, into which every living creature relapses, if it is rightful for me, if I am permitted to shun all evasions, speaking the truth to you plainly, know that I have not come down here to your kingdom                      30
just for the view, or to chain up the three-headed Cerberus, that monstrous child of Medusa, bristling with serpents;

my wife is the cause of my journey: she stepped on an adder
whose venom cut her life short as it spread through her body.
I won't deny that I wished to—and tried to—endure it,
but Love overcame me. Above, this god is quite famous;
whether he has the same status down here, I'm not certain,
but even so, I would think him to be as well known,
for unless that tale of long-ago rape was invented,
the selfsame deity joined the pair of you, also!                                             40
If that's the case, then I, by all of these frightening places,
by mighty Chaos and by this realm of the silent, I beg you
to weave once again Eurydice's fate, done too swiftly.
"We are all owed to you wholly, and though we may linger, later or sooner all hasten to this single dwelling. Everyone heads for this place, the home that is final. Your rule is the longest that any human encounters; she will be yours by right and dwell down here also, when her years are accomplished: I ask for her life as a favor, but if the Fates should deny me the gift I am seeking                                50
on behalf of my wife, be sure that I will remain here, and you may take pleasure then in a double destruction."
These words, accompanied on the plucked strings, so moved the bloodless spirits that they wept; Tantalus did not seek the receding water, and on his wheel lay Ixion, astounded; the birds let go the liver, and the daughters of Danaus were resting by their urns, while you, O Sisyphus, sat on your stone.
Then, for the first time ever, overcome                                              60
by the effects of song, the Furies wept, nor could Persephone reject his prayer, nor he who rules the underworld deny him; Eurydice was called up from her place among the newly dead, and awkwardly came forward, limping from her recent wound.

The Thracian bard accepted her, together with the condition set for her release: that he may not look back at all, until
he'd exited the valley of Avernus,                                                                 70
on pain of revocation of this gift.
He started out upon the soundless path that rises steeply through dense fog and darkness until they had come almost to the border of the upper earth; here Orpheus, afraid that she would fail him, and desiring a glimpse of his beloved, turned to look: at once she slipped back to the underworld, and he, because he wanted to embrace her,
or be embraced by her, stretched out his arms—                                       80
but seized on nothing, that unlucky man, unless it was the abnegating air.
And she now, who must die a second death, did not find fault with him, for what indeed could he be faulted for, but his constancy? "Farewell," she cried out to him one last time, and he had scarcely heard her cry before she took her place again among the dead.
The second time his wife died, Orpheus collapsed into no different a stupor                                                              90
than that which came upon that timid fellow who looked upon the triple-headed dog, his middle throat encircled with thick chains; that fellow's trembling did not cease until his former nature did, as stoniness arose and spread throughout his human frame; or as Olenos, who, though innocent, took on a fault wishing to seem guilty; and you, luckless Lethaea, once so proud of your great beauty, and once joined to him:                                       100

two hearts that beat as one are now transformed into a pair of stones on humid Ida.
Orpheus prayed, desiring in vain to cross the river Styx a second time, but was prevented by the border guard; for seven days he sat by the river's banks, unkempt, unshaven, and unfed, with naught but care and sorrow for his nourishment; complaining that the gods below were cruel, he sought out lofty Rhodope and Haemus.                                          110
Three times the Sun had finished out the year in Pisces of the waters. Orpheus had fled completely from the love of women, either because it hadn't worked for him or else because the pledge that he had given to his Eurydice was permanent; no matter: women burned to have the bard, and many suffered greatly from rejection. Among the Thracians, he originated
the practice of transferring the affections                                               120
to youthful males, plucking the first flower in the brief springtime of their early manhood.
The catalogue of trees There was a hill and on this hill there was an open space, a level area made green by all the grasses growing there.
The place lacked shade, until that poet born of heaven came to be in residence, and plucking his resounding lyre strings, he summoned many shade trees to his presence:
the oak tree sacred to great Jupiter,                                                         130
a grove of poplars (once Heliades) and the Italian oak, with deep green leaves; soft linden, beech and laurel (still unwed)

with the tender hazel and the useful ash
(providing us with spears and javelins);
pine without knots, the acorn-laden ilex,
the genial plane tree and the maple too,
(unrivaled in the brilliance of its hue);
and river-dwelling willows, lotus trees,
thin tamarisk and boxwood evergreen,                                                 140
and myrtle with its berries green and black,
viburnum with its berries gray and blue,
and you as well, O twining ivy, came,
along with tendriled vines and the vine-clad elm,
the mountain ash, the spruce, the arbutus
(encumbered with its fruit of brilliant red)
and victory's reward, the supple palm,
and the pine tree, bare to near its shaggy top,
so pleasing to Cybele, Mother of the Gods,
since her beloved Attis put aside                                                             150
his manhood for that trunk in which he stiffened.
Cyparissus And present in the midst of this commotion was the cone-shaped cypress, who, though now a tree, was once a boy, beloved of that god by whom the bow and lyre are both strung.
Dear to the nymphs of the Carthaean fields was an enormous stag whose branching antlers most generously shaded his own head. They glowed with gilding, and around his neck
and on his shoulders lay a jeweled collar.                                               160
A silver amulet tied to his brow jiggled when he moved, and matching pearls hung from each ear. Fearless by nature, he would go into the homes of perfect strangers and offer up his neck to their caresses.
But he was pleased by you above all others,

Cyparissus, most beautiful of Ceans:
for it was you who led him to new pastures
and brought him to the fountain that he drank from
and wove the varied flowers through his antlers.                                      170
You, like a horseman, sat upon his back,
and joyfully you led him where you wished to,
guiding his tender mouth with purple reins.
It was the middle of a summer's day, and high up in the sky, the swollen claws of the seashore-dwelling Crab baked in the heat; the weary stag lay on the grassy ground, absorbing the coolness of the woodland shade.
Unwittingly, the boy Cyparissus transfixed him with his deadly javelin,                                                         180
and as he watched him die of his cruel wound resolved that he himself should perish too.
Phoebus tried everything to comfort him, enjoining him to moderate his grief and suit it to the nature of his loss; the boy kept groaning nonetheless and begged the finest (and the final) gift from heaven: that he should be allowed to mourn forever.
Enormity of grief had left him drained, and now his limbs began to turn bright green,                                      190
and now the locks upon his snowy brow became a crown of bristles as he turned into a tree that sways but does not bend, whose slender tips look up to starry heaven.
The god, grief-stricken, told him, "You will be mourned by myself, and others you will mourn, and by your presence, you will signal grief."
The songs of Orpheus Such was the grove the bard had gathered round him, and now, amidst the concourse of the birds

and the assembled beasts, he took his seat;                                                 200
and after he had plucked the lyre strings
and felt the varied modes in harmony
(though each string had its own distinctive sound),
Orpheus began to raise his voice in song:
Proem "O Muse, my mother, let Jove inspire my poem, for all things yield to Jove's power; on prior occasions, I have sung the dominion of Jove, lifting my lyre to deal with so weighty a subject: the fall of the Giants, the bolts hurled victorious down on the fields of Phlegraea! But now the task of my lyre requires a lighter                                       210
touch as I sing of young boys whom the gods have desired, and of girls seized by forbidden and blameworthy passions.
Ganymede "The king of heaven once burned with desire for Trojan Ganymede; Jupiter found an identity pleasing him more than even his own did: no bird but the eagle, bearer of Jove's thunderbolt, could deserve this distinction. Without delay, as his counterfeit wings beat the air, he captured the boy, who, in spite of Juno's objections, mixes his nectar and serves him above now in heaven.
Hyacinthus "Phoebus loved you, Hyacinthus, and would have installed you            220
in heaven also, if cruel fate had permitted. Nevertheless, you are made—in a fashion—immortal, for just as often as springtime repulses the winter and Aries assumes the place of watery Pisces, you rise and break out in flowers upon the green earth.
"My father, Phoebus, preferred you above all the others, abandoning Delphi, his city at the earth's navel, while he frequented the banks of the river Eurotas and haunted unfortified Sparta, paying no mind to music and archery, skills that brought him great honor;                        230

careless of his own pursuits, he happily carried
the nets, and held back the dogs, and played the good sport
by scrambling up the jagged ridges of mountains,
while his beloved's continual presence kept him afire.
"The Sun stood halfway between the night driven off and the night that was newly approaching; bodies shed garments and glistened richly with olive oil, as the contestants prepared themselves to engage in a match with the discus. Phoebus threw first, sending the well-balanced object aloft to shatter the clouds arrayed in the distance;                                 240
after a long time, it fell back again to the hard earth, displaying not only Apollo's great skill but his power.
"But the imprudent youth, driven by love of the contest, had raced off ahead to capture the speeding discus, which, when it landed, bounced up again and spun back into your face, Hyacinthus.The selfsame pallor now blankets the boy and the god who kneels to embrace him, who gathers the fallen lad and attempts to revive him, who stanches his wound, and who now, by the application of healing herbs, tries to keep his soul from departing,                         250
without success, for the wound defies the god's treatment.
"As when a poppy or violet grown in a garden among the lilies (whose tongues are thick yellow and bristly) breaks, and the flower's head shrivels, droops, and collapses, unable to hold itself up, with downcast demeanor, just so the dying boy's head, now lacking all vigor, unable to bear its own weight, lies flat on his shoulder.
" 'O Spartan lad, cheated out of your youth, you are fallen, and the fault that I see in your wound is my own,' cried Phoebus. 'Your death is the cause of my self-reproach and my sorrow,                260
for my right hand must be charged with the crime of your murder, and I alone am responsible for your destruction! But where did I err, unless our pleasures were errors? Where was I wrong, unless it was wrong to have loved you?

If only I were permitted to die or exchange my
life for your own! But even though Fate's law prevents this,
you will be with me always, my lips will never forget you!
You will be present both in my songs and my music,
and a flower will come into being, inscribed with my mourning;
later, a legend involving the boldest of heroes                                       270
will be conjoined to this flower and read in its markings.'
"The truth of Apollo's words appeared as he spoke them, for look, where the boy's spilled blood, now staining the grasses, stops being blood and at once a new flower springs up, shining even more brightly than Tyrian purple, and takes on the form, if not the color, of lilies.
"Phoebus (who was indeed the source of this honor), still unsatisfied, now inscribed his own mourning inside the flower, in the form of the letters AI, AI,
and left its petals marked with the cry of lamenting.                             280
Nor is his Sparta ashamed of Hyacinthus, for even today, the city still honors him in the old manner, by holding the Hyacinthian festival every midsummer.
The Propoetides and the Cerastae "But if you should ask Amathus, that Cyprian city so rich in metals, if it were proud of its daughters the Propoetides, it would deny them completely,
along with those folks who were once given horns on their foreheads, and who, from then on, assumed the name of Cerastae.
"Before the gates of their city, there once stood an altar to Jove the Welcome of Strangers; if any passed by it                             290
who had not heard of the crime that had taken place there, and happened to glance at the bloodstains, he would have reckoned that priests had sacrificed tender young lambs or veal calves— but a guest had been slain there! Enraged by this blasphemy, Venus prepared to abandon her cities and farmlands on Cyprus: 'But how have these places so dear, how have these cities sinned against me?' she asks.'How have they offended?

Better that I should exile this impious people
or kill them—or choose something between these two fates:
what punishment serves my purpose better than changing                   300
all of them into a different kind of a being?'
"While she was wondering what she would turn them all into, she happened to glance at their horns and at once was reminded not to change everything; leaving those parts as she found them, the goddess transformed all that remained of these sinners, their limbs and enormous torsos, into fierce bullocks.
"Nevertheless, the indecent Propoetides dared to deny her divinity; in anger, Venus made them the first, it is said, to sell their own bodies, and as their shame ceased, and they lost the power of blushing,            310
they turned into stones—a very small difference, really.
Pygmalion "Pygmalion observed how these women lived lives of sordid indecency, and, dismayed by the numerous defects of character Nature had given the feminine spirit, stayed as a bachelor, having no female companion.
"During that time he created an ivory statue, a work of most marvelous art, and gave it a figure better than any living woman could boast of, and promptly conceived a passion for his own creation. You would have thought it alive, so like a real maiden                          320
that only its natural modesty kept it from moving: art concealed artfulness. Pygmalion gazed in amazement, burning with love for what was in likeness a body.
"Often he stretched forth a hand to touch his creation, attempting to settle the issue: was it a body, or was it—this he would not yet concede—a mere statue? He gives it kisses, and they are returned, he imagines; now he addresses and now he caresses it, feeling his fingers sink into its warm, pliant flesh, and fears he will leave blue bruises all over its body;                                    330

he seeks to win its affections with words and with presents
pleasing to girls, such as seashells and pebbles, tame birds,
armloads of flowers in thousands of different colors,
lilies, bright painted balls, curious insects in amber;
he dresses it up and puts diamond rings on its fingers,
gives it a necklace, a lacy brassiere and pearl earrings,
and even though all such adornments truly become her,
she does not seem to be any less beautiful naked.
He lays her down on a bed with a bright purple cover
and calls her his bedmate and slips a few soft, downy pillows                340
under her head as though she were able to feel them.
"The holiday honoring Venus has come, and all Cyprus turns out to celebrate; heifers with gilded horns buckle under the deathblow and incense soars up in thick clouds; having already brought his own gift to the altar, Pygmalion stood by and offered this fainthearted prayer: 'If you in heaven are able to give us whatever we ask for, then I would like as my wife—' and not daring to say, '—my ivory maiden,' said, '—one like my statue!' Since golden Venus was present there at her altar,                                  350
she knew what he wanted to ask for, and as a good omen, three times the flames soared and leapt right up to the heavens.
"Once home, he went straight to the replica of his sweetheart, threw himself down on the couch and repeatedly kissed her; she seemed to grow warm and so he repeated the action, kissing her lips and exciting her breasts with both hands. Aroused, the ivory softened and, losing its stiffness, yielded, submitting to his caress as wax softens when it is warmed by the sun, and handled by fingers, takes on many forms, and by being used, becomes useful.                     360
Amazed, he rejoices, then doubts, then fears he's mistaken, while again and again he touches on what he has prayed for. She is alive! And her veins leap under his fingers!
"You can believe that Pygmalion offered the goddess

his thanks in a torrent of speech, once again kissing those lips that were not untrue; that she felt his kisses, and timidly blushing, she opened her eyes to the sunlight, and at the same time, first looked on her lover and heaven! The goddess attended the wedding since she had arranged it, and before the ninth moon had come to its crescent, a daughter          370
was born to them—Paphos, who gave her own name to the island.
Myrrha "She had a son named Cinyras, who would be regarded as one of the blessed, if he had only been childless. I sing of dire events: depart from me, daughters, depart from me, fathers; or, if you find my poems charming, believe that I lie, believe these events never happened; or, if you believe that they did, then believe they were punished.
"If Nature allows us to witness such impious misdeeds, then I give my solemn thanks that the Thracian people and the land itself are far away from those regions                                 380
where evil like that was begotten: let fabled Panchaea be rich in balsam and cinnamon, costum and frankincense, the sweat that drips down from the trees; let it bear incense and flowers of every description: it also bears myrrh, and too great a price was paid for that new creation.
"Cupid himself denies that his darts ever harmed you, Myrrha, and swears that his torches likewise are guiltless; one of the three sisters, bearing a venomous hydra and waving a Stygian firebrand, must have inspired your passion. Hating a parent is wicked, but even more wicked                                 390
than hatred is this kind of love. Princes elected from far and wide desire you, Myrrha; all Asia sends its young men to compete for your hand in marriage: choose from so many just one of these men for your husband, so long as a certain one is not the one chosen.
"She understood and struggled against her perversion, asking herself, 'What have I begun? Where will it take me?

May heaven and piety and the sacred rights of fathers
restrain these unspeakable thoughts and repel my misfortune,
if this indeed is misfortune; yet piety chooses                                       400
not to condemn this love outright: without distinctions
animals copulate; it is no crime for the heifer
to bear the weight of her father upon her own back;
daughters are suitable wives in the kingdom of horses;
the billy goats enter the flocks that they themselves sire,
and birds are inseminated by those who conceive them:
blessed, the ones for whom such love is permitted!
" 'Human morality gives us such stifling precepts, and makes indecent what Nature freely allows us!
But people say there are nations where sons and their mothers,           410
where fathers and daughters, may marry each other, increasing the bonds of piety by their redoubled affections. Wretched am I, who hadn't the luck to be born there, injured by nothing more than mischance of location!
" 'Why do I obsess? Begone, forbidden desires; of course he is worthy of love—but love for a father! So, then, if I were not the daughter of great Cinyras, I would be able to have intercourse with Cinyras: though he is mine, he is not mine, and our nearness ruins me: I would be better off as a stranger.                                         420
" 'It would be good for me to go far away from my country, as long as I could escape from my wicked desires, for what holds me here is the passion that I have to see him, to touch and speak to Cinyras and give him my kisses— if nothing more is permitted. You impious maiden, what more can you imagine will ever be granted? Are you aware how you confuse all rights and relations? Would you be your mother's rival? The whore of your father? Would you be called your son's sister? Your brother's own mother? Do you not shudder to think of the serpent-coiffed sisters                   430
thrusting their bloodthirsty torches into the faces

of the guilty wretches that those three appear to and torture?
'" 'But you, while your body is undefiled, keep your mind chaste, and do not break Nature's law with incestuous pairing. Think what you ask for: the very act is forbidden, and he is devout and mindful of moral behavior— ah, how I wish that he had a similar madness!'
"She spoke and Cinyras, whom an abundance of worthy suitors had left undecided, consulted his daughter,
ran their names by her and asked whom she wished for a husband;     440 silent at first, she kept her eyes locked on her father, seething until the hot tears spilled over her eyelids; Cinyras, attributing this to the fears of a virgin, bade her cease weeping, wiped off her cheeks, and kissed her; Myrrha rejoiced overmuch at his gesture and answered that she would marry a man just like you.' Misunderstanding the words of his daughter, Cinyras approved them, replying, 'May you be this pious always.' Hearing that last word, the virgin lowers her head, self-convicted of evil.
"Midnight: now sleep dissolves all the cares of the body;                 450
Cinyras' daughter, however, lies tossing, consumed by the fires of passion, repeating her prayers in a frenzy; now she despairs, now she'll attempt it; now she is shamefaced, now eager: uncertain: What should she do now? She wavers, just like a tree that the axe blade has girdled completely, when only the last blow remains to be struck, and the woodsman cannot predict the direction it's going to fall in, she, after so many blows to her spirit, now totters, now leaning in one, and now in the other, direction, nor is she able to find any rest from her passion                                    460
save but in death. Death pleases her, and she gets up, determined to hang herself from a beam with her girdle: 'Farewell, dear Cinyras: may you understand why I do this!' she said, as she fitted the noose around her pale neck.
"They say that, hearing her murmuring, her faithful old nurse

in the next chamber arose and entered her bedroom:
at sight of the grim preparations, she screams out, and striking       
her breasts and tearing her garments, removes the noose from
around the girl's neck, and then, only then, she collapses,
and weeping, embraces her, asking her why she would do it.               470
"Myrrha remained silent, expressionless, with her eyes downcast, sorrowing only because her attempt was detected. But the woman persists, baring her flat breasts and white hair, and by the milk given when she was a babe in the cradle beseeches her to entrust her old nurse with the cause of her sorrow. The girl turns away with a groan; the nurse is determined to learn her secret, and promises not just to keep it:
" 'Speak and allow me to aid you,' she says, 'for in my old age, I am not utterly useless: if you are dying of passion,
my charms and herbs will restore you; if someone wishes you evil,      480 my rites will break whatever spell you are under; is some god wrathful? A sacrifice placates his anger. What else could it be? I can't think of anything—Fortune favors your family, everything's going quite smoothly both of your parents are living, your mother, your father—' Myrrha sighed deeply, hearing her father referred to, but not even then did the nurse grasp the terrible evil in the girl's heart, although she felt that her darling suffered a passion of some kind for some kind of lover.
"Nurse was unyielding and begged her to make known
her secret,                                                                                           490
whatever it was, pressing the tearful girl to her bosom; and clasping her in an embrace that old age had enfeebled, she said,'You're in love—I am certain! I will be zealous in aiding your cause, never you fear—and your father will be none the wiser!'
"Myrrha in frenzy leapt up and threw herself onto the bed, pressing her face in the pillows: 'Leave me, I beg you,' she said. 'Avoid my wretched dishonor;           

leave me or cease to ask me the cause of my sorrow: what you attempt to uncover is sinful and wicked!'
"The old woman shuddered: extending the hands that now
trembled                                                                                                500
with fear and old age, she fell at the feet of her darling, a suppliant, coaxing her now, and now attempting to scare her; threatening now to disclose her attempted self-murder, but pledging to aid her if she confesses her passion.
"She lifted her head with her eyes full of tears spilling over onto the breast of her nurse and repeatedly tried to speak out, but repeatedly stopped herself short of confession, hiding her shame-colored face in the folds of her garments, until she finally yielded, blurting her secret:
'O mother,' she cried, 'so fortunate you with your husband!'                510
and said no more but groaned.
"The nurse, who now understood it, felt a chill run through her veins, and her bones shook with tremor, and her white hair stood up in stiff bristles. She said whatever she could to dissuade the girl from her horrible passion, and even though Myrrha knew the truth of her warning, she had decided to die if she could not possess him. 'Live, then,' the other replied, 'and possess your—' Not daring to use the word 'father,' she left her sentence unfinished, but called upon heaven to stand by her earlier promise.
"Now it was time for the annual feast days of Ceres;                        520
the pious, and married women clad in white vestments thronged to the celebration, offering garlands of wheat as firstfruits of the season; now for nine nights the intimate touch of their men is considered forbidden. Among these matrons was Cenchre'is, wife of Cinyras, for her attendance during these rites was required. And so, while the queen's place in his bed was left vacant, the overly diligent nurse came to Cinyras, finding him drunk, and spoke to him of a maiden

whose passion for him was real (although her name wasn't)                  530
and praising her beauty; when asked the age of this virgin,
she said, 'the same age as Myrrha.' Commanded to fetch her,
nurse hastened home, and entering, cried to her darling,
'Rejoice, my dear, we have won!' The unlucky maiden
could not feel joy in her heart, but only grim sorrow,
yet still she rejoiced, so distorted were her emotions.
"Now it is midnight, when all of creation is silent; high in the heavens, between the two Bears, Bootes had turned his wagon so that its shaft pointed downward; Myrrha approaches her crime, which is fled by chaste Luna,                540
while under black clouds the stars hide their scandalized faces; Night lacks its usual fires; you, Icarus, covered your face and were followed at once by Erigone, whose pious love of her father merited heaven.
"Thrice Myrrha stumbles and stops each time at the omen, and thrice the funereal owl sings her his poem of endings; nevertheless she continues, her shame lessened by shadows. She holds the left hand of her nurse, and gropes with the other blindly in darkness: now at the bedchamber's threshold, and now she opens the door: and now she is led within,                      550
where her knees fail her; she falters, nearly collapsing, her color, her blood, her spirit all flee together.
"As she approaches the crime, her horror increases; regretting her boldness, she wishes to turn back, unnoticed, but even as she holds back, the old woman leads her by the hand to the high bed, where she delivers her, saying, 'Take her, Cinyras—she's yours,' and unites the doomed couple. The father accepts his own offspring in his indecent bed and attempts to dispel the girl's apprehensions,
encouraging her not to be frightened of him, and                                560
addressing her, as it happened, with a name befitting her years: he called her 'daughter' while she called him 'father,' so the right names were attached to their impious actions.

"Filled with the seed of her father, she left his bedchamber, having already conceived, in a crime against nature which she repeated the following night and thereafter, until Cinyras, impatient to see his new lover after so many encounters, brought a light in, and in the same moment discovered his crime and his daughter; grief left him speechless; he tore out his sword from the scabbard;        570 Myrrha sped off, and, thanks to night's shadowy darkness, escaped from her death. She wandered the wide-open spaces, leaving Arabia, so rich in palms, and Panchaea, and after nine months, she came at last to Sabaea, where she found rest from the weariness that she suffered, for she could scarcely carry her womb's heavy burden.
"Uncertain of what she should wish for, tired of living but frightened of dying, she summed up her state in this prayer: 'O gods, if there should be any who hear my confession, I do not turn away from the terrible sentence                                       580
that my misbehavior deserves; but lest I should outrage the living by my survival, or the dead by my dying, drive me from both of these kingdoms, transform me wholly, so that both life and death are denied me.'
"Some god did hear her confession, and heaven answered her final prayer, for, even as she was still speaking, the earth rose up over her legs, and from her toes burst roots that spread widely to hold the tall trunk in position; her bones put forth wood, and even though they were still hollow, they now ran with sap and not blood; her arms became branches,      590 and those were now twigs that used to be called her fingers, while her skin turned to hard bark. The tree kept on growing, over her swollen belly, wrapping it tightly, and growing over her breast and up to her neck; she could bear no further delay, and, as the wood rose, plunged her face down into the bark and was swallowed.
"Loss of her body has meant the loss of all feeling;

and yet she weeps, and the warm drops spill from her tree trunk;
those tears bring her honor: the distillate myrrh preserves and
will keep the name of its mistress down through the ages.                    600
"But under the bark, the infant conceived in such baseness continued to grow and now sought a way out of Myrrha; the pregnant trunk bulged in the middle and its weighty burden pressed on the mother, who could not cry out in her sorrow nor summon Lucina with charms to aid those in childbirth. So, like a woman exerting herself to deliver, the tree groaned and bent over double, wet from its weeping. Gentle Lucina stood by the sorrowing branches, laid her hands onto the bark and recited the charms that aid in delivery; the bark split open; a fissure                                           610
ran down the trunk of the tree and its burden spilled out, a bawling boychild, whom naiads placed in soft grasses and bathed in the tears of its mother. Not even Envy could have found fault with his beauty, for he resembled one of the naked cherubs depicted by artists, and would have been taken as one, if you had provided him with a quiver or else removed one from those others.
Venus and Adonis (1) "Time swiftly glides by in secret, escaping our notice, and nothing goes faster than years do: the son of his sister by his grandfather, the one so recently hidden                                      620
within a tree, so recently born, a most beautiful infant, now is an adolescent and now a young man even more beautiful than he was as a baby, pleasing now even to Venus and soon the avenger of passionate fires that brought his mother to ruin.
"For while her fond Cupid was giving a kiss to his mother, he pricked her unwittingly, right in the breast, with an arrow projecting out of his quiver; annoyed, the great goddess swatted him off, but the wound had gone in more deeply than it appeared to, and at the beginning deceived her.                         630

"Under the spell of this fellow's beauty, the goddess no longer takes any interest now in Cythera, nor does she return to her haunts on the island of Paphon, or to fish-wealthy Cnidus or to ore-bearing Amethus; she avoids heaven as well, now—preferring Adonis, and clings to him, his constant companion, ignoring her former mode of unstrenuous self-indulgence, when she shunned natural light for the parlors of beauty; now she goes roaming with him through woods and up mountains and over the scrubby rocks with her garments hitched up                    640
and girded around her waist like a nymph of Diana, urging the hounds to pursue unendangering species, hoppety hares or stags with wide-branching antlers, or terrified does; but she avoids the fierce wild boars and rapacious wolves and bears armed with sharp claws, and shuns the lions, sated with slaughter of cattle.
"And she warns you also to fear the wild beasts, Adonis, if only her warning were heeded.'Be bold with the timid,' she said, 'but against the daring, daring is reckless.
Spare me, dear boy, the risk involved in your courage;                          650
don't rile the beasts that Nature has armed with sharp weapons, lest I should find the glory you gain much too costly! For lions and bristling boars and other fierce creatures look with indifferent eyes and minds upon beauty and youth and other qualities Venus is moved by; pitiless boars deal out thunderbolts with their curved tusks, and none may withstand the frenzied assault of the lions, whom I despise altogether.'
"And when he asked why, she said,'I will tell you this story which will amaze you, with its retribution delivered for ancient wrongdoing.                          660
" 'But this unaccustomed labor has left me exhausted— look, though—a poplar entices with opportune shade, and offers a soft bed of turf we may rest on together,

as I would like to.' And so she lay down on the grasses and on her Adonis, and using his breast as a pillow, she told this story, mixing her words with sweet kisses:
Atalanta and Hippomenes " 'Perhaps you'll have heard of a maiden able to vanquish the swiftest of men in a footrace; this wasn't a fiction, for she overcame all contestants; nor could you say whether she deserved praise more for her speed or her beauty.                           670
She asked some god about husbands. "A husband," he answered, "is not for you, Atalanta: flee from a husband! But you will not flee—and losing yourself, will live on!"
" 'Frightened by his grim prediction, she went to the forest and lived there unmarried, escaping the large and persistent throng of her suitors by setting out cruel conditions; "You cannot have me," she said, "unless you outrun me; come race against me! A bride and a bed for the winner, death to the losers. Those are the rules of the contest."
" 'Cruel? Indeed—but such was this young maiden's beauty           680
that a foolhardy throng of admirers took up the wager. As a spectator, Hippomenes sat in the grandstand, asking why anyone ever would risk such a danger, just for a bride, and disparaging their headstrong passion. However, as soon as he caught a glimpse of her beauty, like mine or like yours would be if you were a woman,' said Venus, 'her face and her body, both bared for the contest, he threw up both hands and cried out, "I beg your pardons, who only a moment ago disparaged your efforts, but truly I had no idea of the trophy you strive for!"                            690
" 'Praises ignited the fires of passion and made him hope that no young man proved to be faster than she was and fear that one would be. Jealous, he asked himself why he was leaving the outcome of this competition unventured: "God helps those who improve their condition by daring," he said, addressing himself as the maiden flew by him.

Though she seemed no less swift than a Scythian arrow,
nevertheless, he more greatly admired her beauty,
and the grace of her running made her seem even more lovely;
the breezes blew back the wings attached to her ankles                        700
while her loose hair streamed over her ivory shoulders
and her brightly edged knee straps fluttered lightly; a russet
glow fanned out evenly over her pale, girlish body,
as when a purple awning covers a white marble surface,
staining its artless candor with counterfeit shadow.
" 'She crossed the finish line while he was taking it in, and Atalanta, victorious, was given a crown and the glory; the groaning losers were taken off: end of their story. But the youth, undeterred by what had become of the vanquished, stood on the track and fixed his gaze on the maiden:                           710
"Why seek such an easy victory over these sluggards? Contend with me," he said, "and if Fortune makes me the winner, you will at least have been beaten by one not unworthy: I am the son of Megareus, grandson of Neptune, my great-grandfather; my valor is no less impressive than is my descent; if you should happen to triumph, you would be famous for having beaten Hippomenes."
" 'And as he spoke, Atalanta's countenance softened: she wondered whether she wished to win or to be won, and asked herself which god, jealous of her suitor's beauty,                   720
sought to destroy him by forcing him into this marriage: "If I were judging, I wouldn't think I was worth it! Nor am I moved by his beauty," she said, "though I could be, but I am moved by his youth: his boyishness stirs me— but what of his valor? His mind so utterly fearless? What of his watery origins? His relation to Neptune? What of the fact that he loves me and wishes to wed me, and is willing to die if bitter Fortune denies him?
"Oh, flee from a bed that still reeks with the gore of past victims, while you are able to, stranger; marrying me is                                      730

certain destruction! No one would wish to reject you, and you may be chosen by a much wiser young lady!
"But why should I care for you—after so many have perished? Now he will learn! Let him die then, since the great slaughter of suitors has taught him nothing! He must be weary of living! So—must he die then, because he wishes to wed me, and is willing to pay the ultimate price for his passion? He shouldn't have to! And even though it won't be my fault, my victory surely will turn the people against me!
"If only you would just give it up, or if only,                                740
since you're obsessed with it, you were a little bit faster! How very girlish is the boy's facial expression! O poor Hippomenes! I wish you never had seen me! You're worthy of life, and if only my life had been better, or if the harsh Fates had not prevented my marriage, you would have been the one I'd have chosen to marry!"
" 'She spoke, and, moved by desire that struck without warning, loved without knowing what she was doing or feeling. Her father and people were clamoring down at the racecourse, when Neptune's descendent Hippomenes anxiously begged me:         750
"Cytherian Venus, I pray you preside at my venture, aiding the fires that you yourself have ignited." A well-meaning breeze brought me this prayer, so appealing that, I confess, it aroused me and stirred me to action, though I had scant time enough to bring off his rescue.
" 'There is a field upon Cyprus, known as Tamasus, famed for its wealth; in olden days it was given to me and provides an endowment now for my temples; and there in this field is a tree; its leaves and its branches glisten and shimmer, reflecting the gold they are made of;                    760
now, as it happened, I'd just gotten back from a visit, carrying three golden apples that I had selected: and showing myself there to Hippomenes only, approached him and showed him how to use them to advantage.

" 'Both of them crouched for the start; when horns gave the signal, they took off together, their feet barely brushing the surface; you would have thought they were able to keep their toes dry while skimming over the waves, and could touch on the ripened heads of wheat in the field without bending them under.
" 'Cries of support and encouragement cheered on the young
man;                                                                                                                                    770
"Now is the time," they screamed, "go for it, go for it, hurry, Hippomenes, give it everything that you've got now! Don't hold back! Victory!"And I am uncertain whether these words were more pleasing to him or to his Atalanta, for often, when she could have very easily passed him, she lingered beside, her gaze full of desperate longing, until she reluctantly sped ahead of his features.
" 'And now Hippomenes, dry-mouthed, was breathlessly gasping, the finish line far in the distance; he threw out an apple, and the sight of that radiant fruit astounded the maiden,                      780
who turned from her course and retrieved the glittering missile; Hippomenes passed her: the crowd roared its approval.
" 'A burst of speed now and Atalanta makes up for lost time: once more overtaking the lad, she puts him behind her! A second apple: again she falls back, but recovers, now she's beside him, now passing him, only the finish remains: "Now, O goddess," he cries, "my inspiration, be with me!"
" 'With all the strength of his youth he flings the last apple to the far side of the field: this will really delay her!
The maiden looked doubtful about its retrieval: I forced her                790
to get it and add on its weight to the burden she carried: time lost and weight gained were equal obstructions: the maiden (lest my account should prove longer than even the race was) took second place: the trophy bride left with the victor.
" 'But really, Adonis, wasn't I worthy of being thanked for my troubles? Offered a gift of sweet incense? Heedless of all I had done, he offered me neither!

Immediate outrage was followed by keen indignation;
and firmly resolving not to be spurned in the future,
I guarded against it by making this pair an example.                                800
" 'Now they were passing a temple deep in the forest, built long ago by Echion to honor Cybele, Mother of Gods, and now the length of their journey urged them to rest here, where unbridled desire possessed Hippomenes, moved by the strength of my godhead. There was a dim and cave-like recess near the temple, hewn out of pumice, a shrine to the ancient religion, wherein a priest of these old rites had set a great many carved wooden idols. Hippomenes entered that place, and by his forbidden behavior defiled it; in horror,                                          810
the sacred images turned away from the act, and Cybele prepared to plunge the guilty pair in Stygian waters, but that seemed too easy; so now their elegant pale necks are cloaked in tawny manes; curved claws are their fingers; arms are now forelegs, and all the weight of their bodies shifts to their torsos; and now their tails sweep the arena; fierce now, their faces; growls supplant verbal expression; the forest now is their bedroom; a terror to others, meekly these lions champ at the bit of the harness on either side of the yoke of Cybele's chariot.                                           820
" 'My darling, you must avoid these and all other wild beasts, who will not turn tail, but show off their boldness in battle; flee them or else your courage will prove our ruin!'
Venus and Adonis (2) "And after warning him, she went off on her journey, carried aloft by her swans; but his courage resisted her admonitions. It happened that as his dogs followed a boar they were tracking, they roused it from where it was hidden, and when it attempted to rush from the forest, Adonis pierced it, but lightly, casting his spear from an angle; with its long snout, it turned and knocked loose the weapon                830

stained with its own blood, then bore down upon our hero,
and, as he attempted to flee for his life in sheer terror,
it sank its tusks deep into the young fellow's privates,
and stretched him out on the yellow sands, where he lay dying.
"Aloft in her light, swan-driven chariot, Venus had not yet gotten to Cyprus; from a great distance she recognized the dying groans of Adonis and turned her birds back to him; when she saw from midair his body lying there, lifeless, stained with its own blood, she beat her breasts and tore at her hair and her garments,                   840
and leapt from her chariot, raging, to argue with grim Fate:
" 'It will not be altogether as you would have it,' she said.'My grief for Adonis will be remembered forever, and every year will see, reenacted in ritual form, his death and my lamentation; and the blood of the hero will be transformed to a flower. Or were you not once allowed to change a young woman to fragrant mint, Persephone? Do you begrudge me the transformation of my beloved Adonis?'
"And as she spoke, she sprinkled his blood with sweet nectar,          850
which made it swell up, like a transparent bubble that rises from muck; and in no more than an hour a flower sprang out of that soil, blood red in its color, just like the flesh that lies underneath the tough rind of the seed-hiding pomegranate. Brief is its season, for the winds from which it takes its name, the anemone, shake off those petals so lightly clinging and fated to perish."

BOOK XI
ROME BEGINS AT TROY
The death of Orpheus         The transformation of the Maenads
Midas         The perfidy of Laomedon
Peleus and Thetis         Daedalion         The wolf of Psamathe
Ceyx and Alcyone (1)         The house of Sleep
Ceyx and Alcyone (2)         Aesacus

The death of Orpheus
Meanwhile, as Orpheus compelled the trees
and beasts to follow him with suchlike songs,
and made the very stones skip in his wake,
behold: a raving mob of Thracian women
with the pelts of wild beasts draped across their breasts
observed him from the summit of a hill
setting the words to music on his lyre.
One of them tossed her hair in the light breeze: "Look over there!" she cried. "The one who scorns us!" And with no more ado, she cast her lance                                              10
at the vocalizing mouth of Apollo's seer; it struck without wounding, being wreathed in leaves.
Another's weapon was the stone she cast, that even in midnight was overwhelmed by words and music joined in harmony, and, as though begging pardon for its mad daring, fell at the poet's feet.
Nevertheless, the level of their mindless rage increased and measure fled: mad fury was in charge,
but even so, their weapons would have been                                          20
made mild by the enchantment of his song, had not the shrill clamor of Phrygian flutes, the breaking tones of horns, the frenzied drums, and the Bacchantes' applause and ululations together overwhelmed his lyre's music; when Orpheus no longer could be heard, the stones were reddened with a poet's blood.
Up until now, his voice had held in thrall the countless birds, the snakes, the surging beasts
that were the indication of his triumph:                                                  30
all these the Maenads savagely drove off,                                               
then turned their bloody hands against the poet                           

and swarmed upon him as the birds will do,
when in the daylight they discern an owl
among them, dazed; or as when, in the arena,
on the morning of the games, the fated stag
is torn by dogs, and bleeds into the sand;
just so the Maenads search the poet out
and throw at him their wands wrapped in green leaves,
not meant for such a use.
Then some hurl clods,                                   40
and others, branches broken from the trees, while others are still busy throwing rocks; and, lest their madness lack for proper weapons there happened to be oxen yoked nearby, tilling the soil—and not too far from them, some brawny peasants, breaking the hard ground, sweating at their labors.
But when these men saw the Maenads surging toward them, they took off, abandoning their work and implements;
scattered throughout the vacant fields now lay                                       50
their hoes and rakes and mattocks, which the Maenads captured, and having torn apart the oxen whose horns had threatened them, they hastened back to finish off the seer, who, with raised hands, spoke words unheeded for the first time ever, his voice not moving them the slightest bit; the sacrilegious women struck him down, and past those lips—ah, Jupiter!—to which the stones would listen and the beasts respond, his exhaled ghost receded on the winds.                                                  60
For you now, Orpheus, the grieving birds, the thronging beasts, the sharp, unyielding rocks, the trees that often gathered for your songs, and which, like men who tear their hair in grief,

have shed their leaves for you—all these now wept,
and it is said that rivers were increased
by their own tears, and water nymphs galore
distressed their tresses and dressed all in grey.                                  
His limbs lay scattered all about; his head and lyre, as they glide on down your stream,                                          70
O Hebrus, now (miraculously!) mourn; the plaintive lyre makes some kind of moan, the lifeless tongue moans on along with it, the moaning riverbanks respond in turn.
Now head and lyre are borne down to the sea beyond their native stream, until they reach the coast of Lesbos, near Methymna's walls: here, as it lay at risk on foreign sands, that head (its locks still dripping with salt spray)
was set upon by a ferocious snake;                                                          80
just as the serpent spread its jaws to strike, Phoebus at last appeared and drove it off, then turned the serpent's open jaws to stone, just as they were—and will forever be.
The shade of Orpheus now fled below, and recognized all he had seen before; and as he searched through the Elysian Fields, he came upon his lost Eurydice, and passionately threw his arms about her;
here now they walk together, side by side,                                              90
or now he follows as she goes before, or he precedes, and she goes after him; and now there is no longer any danger when Orpheus looks on Eurydice.
The transformation of the Maenads Nevertheless, Bacchus did not permit the murder of his seer to go unpunished, and as he grieved for Orpheus, he bound

those Thracian women who had looked upon
that outrage: for now roots spring from the path
that each one walks upon, gripping her toes,                                        100
drawing them out and down into the earth,
as when a bird steps right into the snare
the skillful fowler cunningly conceals,
and sensing itself caught, it beats its wings
in agitated fear that only serves
to draw the noose more tightly round its leg;
just so, as each of them, fixed to the soil
in terror, vainly tries to get away,
is kept in place by the resistant roots,
and as she struggles upward, is drawn back,                                           110
and when she seeks her hands, her feet, her nails,
beholds the bark surmounting her trim calves;
and when her grieving hand would strike her thighs,
she strikes an oak; of oak is her breast made,
and oaken are the Maenad's shoulders, too;
you would have thought her knotty arms were branches—
and you would not have been at all mistaken.
Midas Nor does this placate Bacchus, still so mad that he removes himself from these same fields,
and, with a better crowd, sets out to find                                               120
the vineyards of Mount Timolus and the banks of the river Pactolus, which, in those days, was water, not a stream of flowing gold, nor envied for the value of its sands.
The usual throng of Satyrs and Bacchantes accompanied the god—save for Silenus: staggering from age and inebriation, he had been taken captive in Phrygia, and led in chains of chaplets to King Midas, who, with the Athenian king Eumolpus,                                               130

had once been taught the Bacchic mysteries
by Orpheus himself.                                                                       
On recognizing his comrade and companion in the rites,                                       
King Midas joyfully proclaimed a feast,                                                
which lasted for ten days and nights together, to celebrate his guest's arrival.                 
Now, when Lucifer, on the eleventh day, had driven off the ranks of stars above, King Midas joyfully came to the fields
of Lydia, returning old Silenus                                                              140
to Bacchus, who had been his foster child.
The god, rejoicing in his safe return, offered the king whatever he might choose, a gratifying, although useless gift; and destined to make evil use of it, King Midas answered with, "Grant that whatever my body touches will turn into gold!" Bacchus assented to this harmful gift, and granted him his wish—although he grieved that Midas had not asked for something better.                                     150
The Phrygian king took leave of him, rejoicing in his misfortune—and as he went, essayed the efficacy of his gift by touching one thing and another: even he could scarcely credit it, but when he snapped a green twig from the low branch of an oak, the twig immediately turned to gold; he picked a stone up, and it did the same; he touched a clod, and at his potent touch,
the piece of earth became a lump of ore;                                               160
ripe wheat-heads plucked produced a golden harvest, and when he took an apple from a tree,

you would have thought that the Hesperides
had given it to him. His fingertips
brushed lofty columns, and they seemed to glow;
and when he washed his hands in water, why
the water would have gotten past Danaë:
All turns to gold! He scarcely could imagine!
As he rejoiced, his servants set a table with heaps of roasted meats and fresh-baked breads,                             170
the gifts of Ceres; when he touched a loaf, it hardened, and when Midas greedily prepared to sink his teeth into his meat, the teeth encountered golden dinnerware; he mixed his Bacchic beverage with water, and you could see him swallow liquid gold!
Astounded by this strange catastrophe of wretchedness in wealth, he longs to flee its trappings—now despising what he'd prayed for.
Abundance was unable to relieve                                                            180
his empty stomach or his burning throat; so justly tortured by the hateful gold, he raised his hands and gleaming arms to heaven: "O Father Bacchus," he cried, "show your favor! Though I have sinned, I beg you, grant me mercy, save me from this ruinous extravagance!"
The gods are gentle: when the king confessed to having sinned, Bacchus repaired his case, released him from the gift that he had given
to keep his pledge, and said, "Lest you remain                                       190
surrounded by the gold you wrongly wished for, go to the stream that flows past mighty Sardis as swiftly as you can, and climb upstream until you come upon the river's source, then plunge your head and body both at once beneath the fountain that it burbles from,

and in that moment you will purge your crime."
The king went where the god had ordered him; the stream was colored by the force of gold
as it exchanged his body for the river;                                                        200
and even now, the seed of that old vein is taken up by the surrounding fields whose soil, in hardness and in golden color, still shows the influence of Midas' touch.
Detesting wealth, he dwelled in woods and fields, and worshiped Pan, who haunts the mountain caves; but he remained not altogether bright, and as it happened once, now once again his foolishness would do him injury.
For Mount Timolus, looking out to sea                                                 210
from his high peak, stands loftily between the town of Sardis and little Hypaepa; and there, while Pan was boasting to the gentle nymphs of his skill at fingering the pipes and playing melodies on waxen reeds, he dared speak poorly of Apollo's gift compared to his own—a boast which brought about the uneven contest which Timolus judged.
The aged judge was seated on his mountain, and shook his ears free of the greenery;                                                 220
a wreath of oak leaves bound up his dark hair, and acorns dangled from his bulging temples. At sight of Pan, the shepherd-god, he said, "Court is in session: on with the proceedings."
Pan made a noise on his outlandish reeds, and that barbaric song charmed Midas (who just happened to be present for the singing); when Pan had finished, Mount Timolus turned his face to Phoebus—and his forest followed.
Apollo's golden locks were crowned with laurel                               230

from Mount Parnassus, and his mantle, trimmed
with Tyrian purple, swept along the ground;
in his left hand, the god held up his lyre,
inlaid with precious gems and ivory,
and in his other hand he held the plectrum:
an artist, in his bearing and his manner.
And when his skillful thumb aroused the strings,
the judge, so taken by that sweetness, ruled
that Pan's reeds must be humbled by the lyre.
The judgment that the sacred mountain gave                                   240
on the contestants was approved by all but one man, Midas, who alone opposed it, calling it unjust. Apollo could not bear that ears so dull should keep their human shape, and so he drew them out to greater length, and stuffed them full of gray and shaggy hair, and made them wobbly where they joined his head and capable of moving back and forth; the rest stayed human: just in that one part
was Midas punished, whom the god compelled                                    250
to wear the ears of a lackadaisical ass.
Now Midas, eager to alleviate the shame upon his temples, tried to hide it beneath a purple turban, but the slave who barbered him took note of his disgrace, and he, because he did not dare expose the shameful sight, yet wished to speak of it, and was unable not to bring it up, went off a ways and dug himself a hole,
and in that hole he whispered quietly                                                    260
what he had noticed about his master's ears, and then concealed the vocal evidence by shoveling the dirt back in the hole, and, having filled it, silently slipped off.

And on that spot, there started to spring up a thickly planted grove of whispering reeds, which, at year's end, when they had reached their growth, betrayed their secret—stirred by the south wind, they breathed the hidden words, and so revealed the secret story of the master's ears.                                                        270
The perfidy of Laomedon Avenged, Apollo left Timolus, borne through fluid air until he came to earth in the land that Laomedon was ruler of, on this side of the narrow Hellespont.
Sigeum on the right, Rhodes on the left: between them on a promontory stands an ancient altar, consecrated to the Thunderer, Jove of the Oracles; and there Apollo watched as Laomedon
began the walls of his new city, Troy,                                                     280
an undertaking of great magnitude, which was not going well, the god perceived, and which required very great resources; so he and Neptune, father of the seas, assumed the shapes of mortals and erected walls there for the tyrant of Phrygia, after arranging to be paid in gold.
The work was soon accomplished, but the king denied the debt, and in addition, swore
(the finishing touch put on his treachery!)                                             290
that he had never promised compensation. "You will not get away with this unpunished," Neptune said, releasing all his waters against the shores of avaricious Troy, and drenched the land until it seemed a sea, and overwhelmed the fields and ruined the crops.
Nor did he think this punishment sufficient:

the daughter of the king must be surrendered
to a sea monster! It was Hercules
who freed her from the rocks that she was bound to,                            300
and when he sought the horses he'd been promised,
the reward for his great service was denied;
so, for his prize, the hero took instead
the twice-perjured walls of vanquished Troy.
And Hercules' companion, Telamon, was given Hesione as his reward for the role that he had taken in this action; a goddess bride brought fame to Peleus, who had no reason to be prouder of
his grandfather than of his father-in-law,                                                310
for Jove had many mortal grandchildren, but only one had an immortal wife.
Peleus and Thetis Old Proteus had prophesied to Thetis: "Conceive, O water goddess: you will be the mother of a youth who, in his prime, will outperform the deeds of his own father, and will be called the greater."
For that reason, lest the earth produce one greater than himself, although the fire that he felt for her
was anything but tepid, Jupiter                                                                320
shunned intercourse with Thetis, ordering his grandson, Peleus, to take his place in making love to her in word and deed.
In Thessaly, there is a sickle-shaped bay with two arms extending out to sea; if it were deeper, it would be a port, but the surface there lies just above the sand; the shore is solid: footprints leave no trace, and the sand is free of seaweed, firm to walk on.

There is a myrtle grove nearby, whose trees                                          330
are thickly hung with their berries red and green, and in the middle is a grotto, made by nature or by art—it isn't easy to say which of them has the greater claim, but art would seem to.
Here you would often come, Thetis, riding on your bridled dolphin, and usually naked; here as you lay                        
disarmed by sleep, Peleus embraced you, and after you rejected his desires,
resorted to force, wrapping both his arms                                                   340
around your neck; and had you not employed your customary arts, his audacity would have won him what he was trying for:       but now you are a bird, which he holds fast, and now a heavy tree that he must cling to; you next appeared to be a spotted tigress, which frightened him, so that he let you go.
At which point, baffled Peleus entreats the sea gods for their aid, offering wine
mixed with their element, and burning up                                                 350
great clouds of incense and the guts of sheep, till Proteus emerges from the deep: "Peleus," he said, "you may obtain what you desire in the way of bed, if you do this: when she is fast asleep in the unyielding cave, and unawares, bind her in snares and chains to hold her close, and do not let her work her wiles on you, though she take on a hundred lying shapes:
press her, whatever she will be, until                                                             360
she reassumes the form that she first had." So Proteus spoke and quickly sank from sight

beneath the waves that covered his last words.
Now in his tilted chariot, the Sun was hastening down toward the western sea, when lovely Thetis, leaving the deep water, returned once more to her accustomed bed; Peleus had just barely got a grip on her virgin limbs, when she assumed new shapes,
continuing until she realized                                                                   370
her movements were constrained: she had been bound, and both her arms were now securely pinned.
She groaned and told him, "You would not have won without the intervention of the gods," and then appeared to him in her own form, and he achieved what he desired to, and filled her womb with fabulous Achilles.
Daedalion His son and wife proved Peleus to be one of the fortunate, a man to whom,
if you ignore his butchery of Phocus,                                                     380
good only happens: stained with his brother's blood, and driven from the palace of his father, he found a refuge in the land of Trachin.
Here ruled, with great benevolence, the seed of Lucifer, whose name was Ceyx, a son whose father's splendor shone in him, though at that time he was unlike himself, in mourning for a brother snatched away.
Exhausted by his cares and by his travels, Peleus, with a few companions, entered                                               390
the city, after leaving flocks and herds in a shaded valley just outside the walls, and when permitted to approach the king, extended, in the sign of supplication, the olive branches wound around with wool,

and told him his and his own father's name,
concealing nothing other than his crime,                                            
and lying about the reason for his flight;                                  
he sought, in city or in countryside,
a competence.
The ruler of Trachin                                                             400
gently replied, "Even the common folk find opportunities within our realm, nor is our kingdom inhospitable; your reputation and descent from Jove        provide another motive that unites with our natural benevolence; waste no more time with your petition, then: you will have everything you ask us for, just take your share of anything you see—
if only there were better to be seen!"                                                           410
Then he broke down and wept.
Moved by his grief, Peleus and his companions asked its cause; the king replied, "Perhaps you thought this bird of prey, the terror of all other birds, has been one always—but that isn't so: he used to be a man, and so unchanging are our characters that even then his edgy bellicosity was noted, as was his readiness to pick a fight—
his name? Daedalion. Like me, the son                                                        420
of the god who calls Aurora to her duties and exits from the heavens last of all; my interests were in preserving peace and being with my wife; my brother, though, found pleasure only in ferocious war, in subjugating by his strength of arms rulers and their nations; now transformed,

he agitates the dovecotes of Boeotia!
"Daedalion had a daughter named Chione, endowed with beauty to a rare deg ree,                                                 430
who had a thousand suitors by the time she was old enough for marriage at fourteen.
"It happened that Apollo was returning from Delphi as it chanced that Mercury was on his way back from Cyllene's heights: both saw her at the same time, both caught fire. Apollo deferred his longed-for satisfaction until the nightfall, but the other one would not delay: with sleep-inducing wand,
he touched the virgin's lips; its influence                                               440
made her lie down at once beneath the god and bear his thrusts; Night spread the sky with stars; came Phoebus in the guise of an old woman, and he attained his long-delayed delight.
"Now, when her time had come, a son was born of the wing-footed god:Autolycus, a thief with all his father's cleverness, and able to persuade you white was black and black was white; of Phoebus there was born
(for Chione had given birth to twins)                                                    450
Philammon, later famous for his skills as singer and musician.
"Having delivered a pair of twins and having pleased two gods; having a father who is powerful, and a grandfather noted for his brilliance— is this a guarantee of satisfaction, or is such glory often just a trial?
"Well, certainly, in this case, it was so, for Chione, in her own estimation,

surpassed Diana in attractiveness,                                                            460
and found fault with the goddess's appearance;
enraged, Diana answered,'Deeds be my words!'
And without pausing, fitted to the string
of her curved bow an arrow and released it,
piercing, deservedly, Chione's tongue,
which lapsed into silence; neither voice nor word
ensued, as she attempted to speak out,
and blood and life both drained away from her.
"Wretched, I took her in my arms and held her, bearing my brother's sorrow in my heart,                                              470
attempting to console him with my words, which had no more of an effect on him than the murmuring of waves upon the rocks, as he mourned for his daughter snatched away; and when her father saw her body burning, he tried four times to leap into the flames, and after being thrown back the fourth time, he fled in agitation, like a bullock with a cloud of stinging wasps around his neck, who plunges off the pathway.
"Even then                                               480
he seemed to run much faster than a man; you would have thought his feet had put on wings, as, in his eagerness to kill himself, he outstripped all of us and gained the peak of Mount Parnassus.
"Apollo pitied him when he had thrown himself down from the heights, and changed him to the kind of bird that hovers on unexpected wings; gave him a beak and curving claws, but left his former courage and strength out of proportion to his size;                                             490

he lives now as a hawk, at odds with all the other birds he preys on savagely, grieving himself, and a source of grief to them."
The wolf of Psamathe While Ceyx, the son of Lucifer, recounted the marvel of his brother's transformation to his rapt guest, the herdsman, Onetor, came rushing in all breathlessly and cried, "Peleus, Peleus, I bring you news of a catastrophe!"
And while King Ceyx sat trembling in anxious expectation,                                                     500
Peleus ordered Onetor to speak: "I'd driven the weary cattle down to shore," he started and then started once again, beginning with, "At that time when the sun was highest, in the middle of his course, with as much seen as there was left to see, some of the cattle knelt on the yellow sands, and rolling on their flanks, gazed out upon the watery pastures; meanwhile, others roamed
unhurriedly here and there, and some                                                    510
swam out and stood up to their necks in water.
"There was a temple very near the sea, not famous for its marble or its gold, but built of thick-hewn timbers, in a grove of ancient trees that shaded it, and sacred to Nereus and the Nereids, his daughters (a sailor who was drying out his nets along the shore informed me that these are sea deities); close to the temple grounds,
in a thick grove of willows, is a marsh                                                  520
created by the back flooding of the sea; now from this marsh, with an appalling noise,

a racket that upsets the neighborhood,
this very, very huge-sized animal,
a wolf, emerges from the marshy growth,
his jaws all dripping foam and clotted blood,
and his eyes blazing with their own red flames!
"Driven by rage and hunger equally (though rage seemed sharper), he attacked the herd, not simply out of hunger, but to wreak                                                  530
havoc upon the cattle that he slaughtered, assaulting them as though they were his foes!
"And some of us as well were badly wounded, torn by his fangs as we attempted to repel the beast, and given up for dead; the shore, the shallow waters, and the swamp reverberating with the groans of cattle turned red with blood!
"Delay is ruinous, nor does this matter let us hesitate!
While something yet remains for us to save,                                          540
let us unite and eagerly take arms, and together bring the battle to the foe!"
So spoke the rustic. Peleus kept calm, despite his losses: mindful of his crime, he realized that the grieving Nereid intended them to be a sacrifice to her son Phocus in the underworld.
The king ordered his men to arm themselves and to prepare for battle; when it seemed
that he too was preparing to go join them,                                            550
his wife, Alcyone, drawn by the tumult, sped from her chambers with her hair undone, undoing it still further in her flight, and threw herself upon her husband's neck and with her words and tears together begged

that he should send relief, not go himself, and thereby save two lives by saving one.
And Peleus to her: "Put off, O Queen, your dutiful and most becoming fear:
the aid that you have promised me is welcome,                                     560
but I do not intend to take up arms against this hideous new apparition; the powers of the sea must be appeased!"
A lighthouse stood atop the citadel, a welcome sight to vessels in a storm, which they ascended, and looking out, beheld (and groaned to see), upon the bloody shore, the slaughtered herd and devastating beast with gore-stained jaws and bloody matted pelt.
Lifting his arms in invocation, Peleus                                                 570
prayed to the sea-blue goddess, Psamathe, and begged that she would end her enmity and give him aid; the pleas of Peleus left Psamathe unmoved until his wife joined his prayers with her own, and then the goddess relented and forgave him.
But even when commanded to desist his slaughtering, the wolf continued, maddened by his blood lust, until, as he was clinging to the neck
of a wounded heifer, he was turned to stone;                                       580
his color changed, but all else stayed the same: the change in color shows he is a wolf no longer, and no longer to be feared.
The Fates, however, still did not permit the exiled Peleus to stay in Trachin; and so he wandered to Magnesia, and here, from King Acastus, he obtained an absolution for the murder he'd committed.

Ceyx and Alcyone (1)
His brother's transformation and some weird
portents that followed it left Ceyx perturbed                                        590
and eager to consult the oracles
that comfort men in their perplexity,
but on account of Phorbas and his brigands,
the road to Delphi was too dangerous,
so he prepared to undertake a journey
to Phoebus' shrine at Clarium instead.
Of course, before he did so, he consulted you, most loyal Alcyone; at once the marrow of your bones took a great chill,
your face turned white as boxwood, and your cheeks                           600
were soaked with tears. Three times you tried to speak, but could not manage it for weeping so, as sobbing interrupted your complaints:
"Dearest," she said, "what have I done amiss to change your heart? Where is the consideration that you have always showed me? Are you now able to take your leave without a thought for me? Does a long journey have such great appeal? Does absence make me dearer to you now?
"But I suppose you're traveling by land,                                            610
and though I will be sorry, I won't fear, and my concern will be unmixed with dread. The sea is terrifying, and that sad image of the deep: a little while ago I saw parts of a broken ship on shore, and often, upon gravestones yet uncarved, I've read the names of those about to die!
"Don't put your confidence in the wrong place, relying on your father-in-law, Aeolus,
who keeps the storm winds locked up in his prison,                             620
and, when he wishes to, can calm the waves,

for once they break loose and reach open seas,
the winds are wholly uncontrollable,
and earth and sea alike are unprotected;
indeed, they even vex the clouds in heaven,
and shake the lightnings from them by collision!
The more I know the winds—I came to know them
from frequent observations as a girl
in my father's house—the more they frighten me!
"But if your purpose, dear, will not be changed                                630
by a thousand prayers, if you are fixed on going, then take me with you, and most certainly we will experience the storms together, nor will I fear what I must undergo; whatever will be, we will bear the same, in the same ship, borne on the open sea!"
Her starry husband could not but be moved by this lament of the daughter of Aeolus, for an equal fire burned in his heart too;
however, he did not wish to abandon                                                     640
the sea journey that he proposed to make, nor let Alcyone share in its dangers; his words poured forth, intended to console her, but did not win consent until he added, in order to alleviate her pain, one last concession; it was this alone that let his loving spouse give her permission:
"Delay of any sort seems long to us," he said, "but by my father's light I swear
that if the Fates permit, I will return,                                                     650
before the moon has filled his circle twice."
When her hopes for his return had been renewed by what he promised, he did not waste time, immediately ordering his ship

brought out of drydock down to water's edge and suitably provisioned.
But at the sight, as though the future had been told to her, Alcyone was horrified once more, and once again her tears began to flow,
and she embraced him most unhappily,                                                 660
and managed only one word of farewell, before she fainted. Even as the king was searching for some pretext to delay, the young men seated two by two in rows drew the oars back to their powerful breasts, cleaving the waters with long, even strokes.
She raised her head, and leaning forward, fixed her blurry gaze upon him where he stood on the curved poop deck, waving back to her,
and she returned his signal till the ship                                                  670
had gone so far she couldn't make him out; but as long as she was able to, she followed its path, until, when it was almost gone, she watched the fluttering of its topmost sail; when even this had disappeared from view, she anxiously retreated to her chamber and cast herself down upon her bed; but empty bed and bedroom both renewed her tears, by summoning to mind at once that part of her now taken from her life.                                                680
As soon as they had gotten out of harbor, a breeze came up and made the rigging creak: the oars were shipped, the yard run up the mast, and the sails were spread to catch the rising wind.
The ship sped through the sea, and now was far from either shore—a little less, perhaps,

but certainly no more than halfway there—
when, as night fell, the swelling waves began
to whiten, and the east wind blew more fiercely:
"Lower the yard, now, now," cried the captain,                                     690
"tight reef the sail!" Those were his orders, but
the gale winds blew the words back in his face,
and no one's voice could possibly be heard
over the breaking waters.
Nonetheless, some hurry on their own to stow the oars, some seal the rowlocks, others reef the sails; here one is busy bailing out the ship, sending the water back to where it came from, and here one hastily secures the spars;
while this is happening in great confusion,                                           700
from every side, the winds are waging war and agitating the indignant waves.
The captain now admits to his own fear, has no idea of what is happening, what orders he should issue or enjoin: his skill is nothing, in comparison to the greater power of the fury's force.
Men cry in panic, and the rigging creaks, the surging waves resound, the thunder crashes:
the waves are high as mountains and appear                                         710
to reach up to the heavens, where they drench the overhanging clouds with their wild froth; and now the water gets its color from the yellow sand stirred from the bottom, now the water turns far blacker than the Styx, or white with rolling sheets of hissing spume.
The ship from Trachin was likewise beset by these vicissitudes: now lifted up as to a mountain's summit, she appears

to gaze down at the pit of Acheron;                                                       720
now plunged beneath a curving wall of water, she looks up from the underworld to heaven.
The ship's sides, often battered by the blows of surging waves, give out enormous crashes, nor are those blows less resonant than when the iron-headed ram or the catapult makes tortured towers shake from its assault; and as ferocious lions who gain strength by going on attack will hurl themselves
onto the hunter's arms and leveled spears,                                              730
so, when the insurgent winds had roused the waves, these were much higher than the highest part of the tall ship they dashed themselves against.
And now the hull, its covering of wax all worn away, begins to spring its wedges, providing entrance to the lethal waves: see where the sheets of water pour in floods from bursting clouds; it would have seemed to you that all of heaven was sinking to the sea, and the swollen sea was mounting to the heavens!                                740
Sails were rain-sodden, waters from above were mixed in thoroughly with those below; the stars were all put out, and blackest night bore down with its own darkness and the storm's. That darkness, nonetheless, was shattered by the flickering thunderbolts that lit the sky and made the raindrops glitter as they fell.
Boldly the flood now sprang onto the ship, and like a soldier, who, surpassing all
his many comrades, in the last assault                                                     750
upon the walls of a beleaguered city, after so many tries, achieves his aim, and, fired by the love of praise, leaps over,

and one man holds the wall against a thousand; just so, when nine successive waves have battered the hull of that tall ship without success, the tenth wave rushes in with greater force, and does not end its struggle with the weary vessel before it penetrates the wall of the captured ship.
Part of the sea was now                                        760
still trying to invade the craft, while part had done so, and already was inside; fear and confusion now were everywhere, as in a city under siege, whose walls, sapped from outside, are held fast from within.
Skill fails, and courage sinks, and every wave seems to bring with it one more way to die, as it comes rushing on and breaking in; this one is unable to stop crying,
that one's in a stupor; over here                                                              770
is one who calls a funeral a blessing, while here one lifts his unavailing arms in vain to sightless heaven for its help; one calls upon his brothers and his father, and one upon his home and family, and each upon what he has left behind.
But Ceyx is fixed upon his Alcyone, and it is her name now upon his lips, and yet, though she is all that he desires,
he nonetheless rejoices in her absence;                                                  780
he wishes to behold his land once more, and see, before his eyes are closed in death, his palace, but in truth, he does not know in which direction land and palace lie: the waters boil in whirlpools, and the sky is so completely hidden by dark clouds

that blackest night is doubled in its darkness.
A whirlwind breaking in destroys the mast and wrecks the rudder too; now the last wave,
like a conqueror rejoicing in his spoils,                                                  790
rears up and looks down on the lesser waves, and no more lightly than if one could tear Mount Athos and Mount Pindus from their seats and haul them both into the open sea, that wave came crashing down upon the ship, and by its weight and overwhelming force, plunged it right to the bottom; with it went most of its men, sucked down into that vortex, and fated not to breathe the air again.
But some still hang on pieces of the ship                                           800
that floated to the surface; here the hand that used to hold the scepter clings to flotsam. Ceyx calls upon his father and upon the father of his wife—in vain, alas, but now the name most often on his lips is that of Alcyone, repeatedly recalled to mind and called to, as he swam: he prayed that he might float where she would find him, and that his lifeless corpse could be entombed
by her devoted hands. And while he swam,                                            810
as often as the waves allowed him breath, he murmured Alcyone's name to them and to himself.
But look now: towering over the lesser swells, a giant bow of blackest water breaks upon him now and buries him beneath the shattered surface.
That morning you would not have recognized great Lucifer in his obscurity, for even though he could not leave the sky,

he hid his face within the densest clouds.                                              820
But Alcyone, meanwhile, unaware of this disaster, counting down the nights, makes haste now as she finishes the robes that he will wear when he returns to her, and those that she will wear herself as well, at the homecoming that will never be.
Devoutly, she sends clouds of incense up to all the gods, but most of all to Juno, before whose altar she prays on behalf
of her poor spouse, no longer in existence,                                            830
that he would be kept safe and would return and would not find another woman—this alone of all her prayers would find an answer.
The house of Sleep But Juno could no longer bear to be petitioned for someone already dead, and wished to keep her altar from the touch of hands that were unwittingly profaned; "Iris," she said, "most faithful messenger, go to the soporific halls of Sleep
as swiftly as you can, and order him                                                       840
to send a likeness of extinguished Ceyx to Alcyone, sleeping, so that she might learn the truth about her situation."
The goddess spoke. Her messenger put on a cloak dyed in a thousand varied colors, and crossed the sky upon a rainbow's arc, and sought, as ordered, the abode of Sleep, concealed beneath a panoply of clouds.
There is a hollow mountain near the land of the Cimmerians, and deep within there is a cave where idle Sleep resides, his special place, forbidden to the Sun

at any hour from the dawn to dusk;
the earth around it breathes out clouds of fog
through dim, crepuscular light.
No wakeful cock summons Aurora with his crowing song, no restless watchdog interrupts the stillness, nor goose, more keenly vigilant than dogs: no wild and no domesticated beasts,
not even branches, rustling in the wind,                                                860
and certainly no agitated clamor of men in conversation.
Here mute repose abides, and from the bottom of the cave, the waters of the sleep-inducing Lethe flow murmuring across their bed of pebbles.
Outside, in front, the fruitful poppies bloom, and countless herbs as well, that dewy night collects and processes, extracting Sleep, which it distributes to the darkened earth.
Doors are forbidden here, lest hinges creak,                                           870
no guardian is found upon the threshold; but on a dais in the middle of the cave a downy bed of blackest ebony is set with a coverlet of muted hue; upon it lies the god himself, at peace, his knotted limbs in languorous release; around him on all sides are empty shapes of dreams that imitate so many forms, as many as the fields have ears of wheat, or trees have leaves, or seashore grains of sand.                                      880
The maiden brushed aside these obstacles before her as she entered; the god's home was lit up by the splendor of her garments.
But Sleep could scarcely lift his eyelids, weighed

down by his idleness: time after time
they slid back down again, and his chin bumped
against his breastbone as he nodded, till
he finally awakened from himself,
and hoisted himself up upon one elbow,
and recognizing Iris, asked her what                                                      890
she had come there for.
The messenger replied, "O Sleep, that gives your peace to everything, most tranquil, Sleep, of all the deities, the foe of care, the spirit's gentle balm that soothes us after difficult employment, restoring our powers for the morrow; O Sleep, whose forms are equal to the real, order an image in the shape of Ceyx to go to Alcyone in her chamber
and represent the shipwreck that destroyed him.                                   900
Juno commands this."
Having carried out her orders, Iris took her leave at once, unable any longer to resist the slumber she felt stealing through her limbs; and so she fled, and swiftly journeyed back upon that rainbow she had lately crossed.
But from the nation of his thousand sons, old Father Sleep arouses Morpheus, skillful at simulating human form:
there wasn't any other of his children                                                         910
as capable of copying the ways
men walked, or looked, or sounded when they spoke; he did their clothing, too, and knew what words they would most often use. He specialized in human beings only: someone else impersonated beasts and birds and serpents;

the gods refer to him as Icelon,
but human beings call him Phobetor.
A third, Phantasas, has another skill:
he imitates the soil and rocks and waves                                                   920
and tree trunks, anything without a mind;
these show themselves at night to kings and leaders,
while others wander among common folk.
The father passed these by and chose from all his offspring Morpheus to do the task Iris had ordered; having done so, he repaired immediately to his couch and closed his eyes; his chin fell to his breast: time for old Sleep to get a little rest.           
Ceyx and Alcyone (2) Morpheus, meanwhile, flies on silently                                                  930
through darkness, coming in no time at all to the city of Haemonia, where he removes his wings, assumes the face and form of Ceyx, and turns up, pale as death and naked, in the bedchamber of his wretched wife, with his beard soaked, and matted, streaming hair.
And then, profusely weeping, he leans over their bed and says, "Do you not recognize your Ceyx, my wholly pitiable spouse,
or have my features been so changed with death?                                 940
Another look—you'll recognize me then, and find no husband but your husband's shade! Your prayers, my Alcyone, went unanswered! I am now dead! Don't hope for my return! The cloud-gathering south wind seized my ship on the Aegean, tossed it in high winds until it broke apart; yours was the name upon my lips, in vain, until I drowned.
"No doubtful messenger announces this,

you hear no unreliable account:                                                              950
but I myself am uttering these words,
the shipwrecked man who stands before you now!
"Arise then, stir yourself, go shed your tears and put on garments suitable for mourning: do not let me go off to Tartarus, that place of emptiness, without lament."
Morpheus told her these things in a voice that she could easily believe was his, and seemed to be sincerely weeping too,
and gestured with his hands as Ceyx would do.                                    960
Weeping, Alcyone groans and moves her arms in sleep: attempting to embrace his form, she grasps the air instead, and cries out,
"Stay! We'll go as one where you are hastening!"
Awakened by the sound of her own voice and by her husband's image, she attempts to verify if it was really him whom she has just observed; roused by her cries, the servants had brought in a lamp, and she,
unable now to find him anywhere,                                                         970
began to strike herself about the face, and tearing at the robes upon her breast, struck it as well, and without bothering to let her hair down, started tearing it.
And answered, when they asked what caused her grief, "Alcyone is no one any more: she died with Ceyx! No consolation, please! He perished in a shipwreck: this I know, for I have seen and recognized my man, and stretched my hands to hold him as he fled!                                     980
"He was a ghost—but even as a ghost, he clearly was my husband. Nonetheless,

if you should ask, he did not quite appear as normally he did, nor did his face glow as it usually used to do.
"I saw the doomed man standing pale as death and naked with his hair still dripping wet: look where he just now stood, right over here!"
She searched to see if footprints still remained. "And it was this which my divining mind                                             990
led me to fear when I implored him not to leave, entrusting himself to the winds.
"But even though we both would now be dead, I'd rather you had taken me along, for going would have been more to the purpose: I would not have to spend my life alone, and we would not have separately died.
"A part of me is dead; apart from it I perish, tossed upon those very waves
that parted us! The sea does not have me?                                             1000
In having him, the sea has me as well!
"My mind would be more cruel than the sea if I should struggle to prolong my life, attempt to overcome such wretchedness! I will not fight against it, nor surrender you, my beloved, whom I must lament!
"But rather I will come as your companion, and if the same urn may not hold us both, the letters carved in stone will let us mingle: if not our bones, at least our names will touch!"                                   1010
Grief forbade speaking further; weeping spoke in place of words, beyond what words could say, and groans that rose up from her broken heart.
It was now dawn: she left her palace and once again sought that sad place on the shore where she had stood and witnessed his departure,

and as she lingered there and told herself,
"He was right there when he released the cable,
and over here was where we kissed good-bye—"
while thinking of what had happened in that place                              1020
and looking out to sea, she noticed, at a distance,
something that bobbed and floated on the water,
something resembling a human corpse;
at first she didn't know what it could be,
but after a while the waves drove it toward shore,
and even though it was some distance off,
it was apparently a body—whose?
She could not tell yet; nonetheless, because it clearly was the victim of a shipwreck,
an omen stirred within her, and she cried,                                            1030
weeping as though for one unknown to her, "Alas, poor man, whoever you might be, and—if you have one—for your wife!"
The waves prodded the body nearer, and the more she looked at it, the less composed she was, and now it had come close enough to shore for her to recognize it, and she knew it was her husband!
"It is he," she cries, and tears her hair, and tears her face and garments,
and reaches out with trembling hands to ask,                                        1040
"O dearest husband, now so pitiful, is this the homecoming you promised me?"
There was a breakwater along the shore on which the anger of the sea was spent and which it would exhaust itself attacking. She leapt from it—a miracle she could!
And suddenly, Alcyone was flying; beating the air with unexpected wings,

the saddened bird lightly skimmed the whitecaps,
and as she flew, her long and narrow beak                                             1050
gave out hoarse cries, as though of one grief-laden,
and when she reached his silent, bloodless corpse
with her new wings, embraced his cherished limbs
and gave him a cold kiss with her hard beak.
Now, whether Ceyx could really feel that kiss or simply had his head raised by the current was a matter of some popular debate; no: he did feel it; and at length the gods showed mercy and transformed them both; as birds, their love and conjugal vows remain in force:                                       1060
they mate and rear their young; for seven days, halcyon days, in winter, Alcyone broods on a nest that floats upon the waves, which at that time are still: Aeolus guards the winds and keeps them in his custody, when, for his grandsons' sakes, he calms the sea.
Aesacus Some old man watches them as side by side they fly above the ocean's vast expanse and praises their continuing devotion;
another man—or possibly the same—                                                   1070
points to a long-necked diver and goes on:
"This bird, which you see skimming on the waves, trailing his slender legs, is royal too, a child of kings, whose lineage goes back uninterrupted—you could look it up— as far as Ilus and Assaricus, and Ganymede, abducted by great Jove, and Laomedon and aged Priam, who achieved his destined end in Troy's last days;
this one was Hector's brother, and if he                                                 1080
had not met his strange fate in early manhood,

his name might well be equal to that other's.
"Hector, of course, was born to Hecuba, but Aesacus was born in secrecy, as folks say, in Mount Ida's undergrowth by the daughter of the two-horned Granicus Alexiroë. He shunned city life and lived apart from the glamour of the palace, dwelling, by his own choice, in mountain caves and in the unambitious countryside, and rarely sought the company of Trojans.
"He was no bumpkin, though, and had a heart susceptible to the delights of love, and often through the forest he pursued Hesperia, whom he had caught a glimpse of as she lay, after bathing, on the banks of the river Cedren (who had fathered her), drying her flowing tresses in the sunlight.
"The nymph fled at the sight of Aesacus, as frightened as the hind is of the wolf, or as the wild duck, taken by surprise far from the shelter of his accustomed pond, flies from the hawk; the Trojan hero followed, sped by his love as she was by her fear.
"But look: as she was fleeing him, a serpent that lurked there in the grass sank its curved fangs deep in her foot and poisoned her at once; her flight was ended even as her life; the lover, maddened by his grief, embraces her corpse and cries out, 'Shame on me! How I regret that I pursued you so! I never feared any such thing as this, or that my victory would cost so much!
" 'The snake and I are both responsible: he for the bite that he has given you,

and I for having given him the cause: I'll be the greater criminal than he, if, by my death, I cannot solace you!'
"And from a cliff that had been hollowed out by the hoarse waves until it overhung                                                    1120
the sea, he leapt—but Tethys pitied him as he descended, and she broke his fall so that he landed gently on the surface, where she put feathers on him as he floated, denying him the longed-for gift of death.
"The lover was indignant, being forced to live against his wishes, and his spirit, coerced into remaining in the seat it longed to leave, could not endure to stay;
so as new wings appeared upon his shoulders,                                      1130
he flew aloft and once again attempted to fling himself headlong into the sea.
"His feathers broke his fall, and he, enraged, dove straightway down, and plunging to the depths, attempted to find out the way to death, continually and without success.
"He's very thin now: Love has made him so. His legs are lengthy, and his neck as well, which keeps his head quite distant from his body.
He loves the water and approves his name                                             1140
[mergus] because [as we once used to say] he immerges himself underneath its surface."

BOOK XII
AROUND AND ABOUT THE ILIAD
Iphegenia on Aulis         The house of Rumor         Cycnus
Caeneus         The Lapiths and the centaurs
Periclymenus         The death of Achilles

Iphigenia on Aulis
His father, Priam, mourned, quite unaware
that Aesacus still lived on borrowed wings:
and Hector and his brothers pointlessly
conducted funeral rites before a tomb
with the name AESACUS carved into the stone;
Paris had failed to show up for the service,
but afterward brought an abducted bride
and a long war back to his own country:
a thousand ships and the whole Greek nation,
bound by their oath, came after in pursuit,                                            10
and would have promptly taken their revenge,
if fierce winds had not made the sea impassable,
and if Boeotia had not held the fleet
at the fishing port of Aulis; there, as they
prepared to offer sacrifice to Jove
in the manner of their country, and the ancient
altar was glowing with fresh-kindled flame,
the Greeks observed a dark-blue serpent winding
itself around a nearby pine tree's trunk.
Eight fledglings nested high up in that tree,                                       20
and they, together with their mother, who flew round her little lost ones, disappeared into the serpent's gullet as he grabbed them!
All were astounded save the prescient augur, Thestorides, who spoke the truth: "Rejoice, O Greeks, for victory is ours! Troy will be taken, though it will take time!"
In his interpretation of events, each of the nine birds was a year of war.
Their living predator, who coiled around                                               30
the leafy branches, was turned into stone that had the serpent's form engraved on it.
The north wind still blew fierce on the Aegean,

and military convoys kept to port:
some held that Neptune, having built its walls,
intended to protect the Trojan city,
but not Thestorides: not ignorant,
and not one to keep silent when he knew
that a virgin goddess's fierce wrath must be
placated by a mortal virgin's blood.
And after piety had given way to patriotics and the common good, and kingship triumphed over fatherhood, Iphigenia waited at the altar, prepared to sacrifice her spotless blood, surrounded by her grief-stricken attendants; the goddess suddenly was overcome, yielded, and cast a cloud before their eyes; and there, in the officiating throng of bloody ritual and beseeching voices, Diana substituted—so they say— a deer for Iphigenia.
Therefore, when the goddess's cruelty had been appeased by bloodshed and her anger (and the Ocean's) had both subsided, the thousand ships discovered a favoring wind, and after many trials, at last they came to the Phrygian sands.
The house of Rumor At the world's center is a place between the land and seas and the celestial regions where the tripartite universe is joined; from this point everything that's anywhere (no matter how far off) can be observed, and every voice goes right into its ears.
Rumor lives here; she chose this house herself, well situated on a mountaintop,

and added on some features of her own; it has innumerable entrances and a thousand apertures—but not one door: by day and night it lies completely open.
It is constructed of resounding brass                                                       70
that murmurs constantly and carries back all that it hears, which it reiterates; there is no quiet anywhere within, and not a part of it is free from noise; no clamor here, just whispered murmurings, as of the ocean heard from far away, or like the rumbling of thunder when great Jupiter has made the dark clouds speak.
Crowds fill the entryway, a fickle mob that comes and goes; and rumors everywhere,                                            80
thousands of fabrications mixed with fact, wander the premises, while false reports flit all about. Some fill their idle ears with others' words, and some go bearing tales elsewhere, while everywhere the fictions grow, as everyone adds on to what he's heard.
Here are Credulity and Heedless Error, with Empty Joy and Fearful Consternation; and here, with Unexpected Treachery,
are Whispers of Uncertain Origin;                                                         90
nothing that happens, whether here on earth or in the heavens or the seas below, is missed by Rumor as she sweeps the world.
Cycnus Rumor let it be known that a Greek fleet replete with gallant soldiers was approaching; its arrival—not unexpected—was observed by the opposing Trojans, who defended their shores and kept the enemy from landing;

and you were first to fall, Protesilaus, dispatched by Hector's spear; those early fights cost the Greeks greatly as they came to know what skill brave Hector had at slaughtering.
Nor were the Phrygians exempted from discovering how capably Achaeans butchered their enemies, and soon the shores grew red with blood; now Cycnus out of Troy, the son of Neptune, cut his thousand down, and now Achilles in his chariot pressed on relentlessly against his foe, flattening ranks of Trojans with each thrust of his great spear, fashioned out of wood from a tree harvested on Pelion; and as he searched for Hector or for Cycnus, met with the latter on the battlefield (for Hector's fate had been postponed ten years); then urging on his horses, whose white necks strained at the yoke, Achilles drove his chariot straight for the enemy, and shook his spear to threaten him, and cried,
"Young man, whoever you might be,                                                   120
take consolation, dead, from knowing that your slayer is Thessalian Achilles."
So spoke the hero, and his weighty spear followed directly on his utterance, but though his cast was nothing less than certain, the sharp point struck—and merely dinged the breast of his opponent without harming him.
"O goddess-born," the other one replied, "for your celebrity has preceded you,
why do you marvel that we stand unscathed?"                                     130
(It was indeed a marvel to Achilles.) "Neither the golden, horsehair-crested helmet

that you observe me wearing, nor the curved shield, the burden that I bear on my left side, serves any purpose other than adornment. Mars also, for this reason, puts on armor! Deprive me then, of my protective gear, and I'll still walk away from here unhurt.
"Breeding matters: it is good to be the son— not of a Nereid—but of the one                                                                  140
who rules Nereus, his daughters—and the sea!"
He spoke and cast his spear at the Achaean, but it was fated just to strike his shield, tearing through bronze and nine layers of hide, and lodging in the tenth.
He shook it off and hurled another back with his strong hand, but once again did not inflict a wound on the undamaged body of his foe, nor did a third spear even land on Cycnus,
although he offered himself openly;                                                             150
you will have seen a bull in the arena, who, with his terrifying horns, pursues the provocation of a scarlet cape, only to discover that he's missed it: Achilles, raging, was not otherwise.
He checks his spear: is the tip still on? It is. "My arm," he said, "that once was so very strong, has lost its power—but only in this case? —For surely, it was strong enough when I
was first to breech the walls at Lyrnesus,                                                     160
or when this arm dyed Tenedos and Thebes, Eetion's city, with their defenders' blood, or left the Caicus' swift current purple from slaughter of the tribes along its shores, or when Telephus—twice—felt my spear's heft!

"And here as well, among so many dead, these heaps of corpses piled up on the shore which I have seen and made, this arm of mine has done—and still can do—its mighty work!"
He spoke as one who lacks all confidence in the heroic deeds of yesterday, and cast his spear directly at Menoetes, one of the rank and file from Lycia, and tore right through his armor and his breast.
And as the dying foot soldier crashed down headlong upon the heavy earth, Achilles withdrew the spear from its hot wound, and said, "This is the hand, and this, the very spear with which I have just now gained victory, and which I'll use on him in the same way, and hope to get the same results again!"
So speaking, he found Cycnus in the fray: unerring ash struck unevading shoulder, the left one, with a thud—then bounded off as from a wall or from a solid cliff: Achilles saw that Cycnus had been bloodied where he had struck him and rejoiced—in vain: there was no wound—it was Menoetes' blood!
Then truly outraged, roaring like a madman, Achilles leapt from his high chariot,                                                     180
and seeking his invulnerable foe, he drew his shining sword and closed with him; he noticed that although the other's shield and armor had been punctured by his blade, it lost its edge on his unyielding body.
Achilles could endure no more of this: with shield and sword hilt as his weapons, he assaulted him about the face and head, blow after blow, until, as one gives way

the other one pursues, perturbs, keeps pressing him,                                200
gives him no time to pull himself together.
Fear seizes Cycnus, and his vision blurs; the path he flees on is obstructed by a boulder in the middle of the plain; as he lies with his back pressed hard against it, Achilles seizes him and whirls him round and flings him heavily against the earth.
Then kneeling on his shield on Cycnus' breast, he strips the thongs that tied his helmet on
beneath the chin, and wraps them round his throat                                  210
and strangles him.
Preparing to despoil his conquered enemy, he notices the armor that he seeks has been abandoned, for Neptune took the body of his foe and transformed Cycnus into that white bird whose name, until quite recently, he bore.
Caeneus This effort, this contention, earned a rest of several days, when arms were put away, and on both sides, the combatants stood down;
as wakeful sentries paced the Trojan walls                                              220
and Argive trenches, the warriors relaxed.
Achilles, who had triumphed over Cycnus, was pacifying Pallas with the blood of a slain heifer; when its entrails were ablaze upon the altars, and the reek of burning flesh, so cherished by the gods, had made its way to heaven, the immortals received their portion, and the rest of it was set out on the tables to be eaten.
The officers all took their ease, reclining                                           230
on couches where they stuffed themselves with meat

and drove away their cares and thirst with wine.
No lyres for this lot, no poetry,
no flutes of boxwood, pierced with many holes:
what pleases them is to extend the night
by telling stories of heroic deeds;
they reenact old wars, their own and others,
and are delighted to remember all
the dangers they've endured and gotten through:
what else has great Achilles to discuss?                                                  
What else is there to speak of in his presence?
The subject of their stories was, in fact, his latest victory: the fall of Cycnus seemed quite a marvel to this gathering: that any youth should have a body which no spear could penetrate to wound, and which, in fact, turned blunted steel away, astounded all the Greeks—even Achilles.
But Nestor told them, "Cycnus was unique, the only one in all your generation who spurned the sword, impervious to wounds. But I have seen Thessalian Caeneus— oh, this was long ago—who could endure a thousand blows without a single wound!
"Thessalian Caeneus, yes, indeed, the one who used to dwell on Mount Othrys, and once was famous for heroic deeds— but what was most amazing about him, was that he had been born ... a her"
Astonished by such a marvel, his whole audience                                                    260
implored him to continue with the story. Achilles, among others, interjected: "Do tell! For this entire company, O fluent elder, source of sagacity,

is equal in its eagerness to learn who Caeneus 'was, how he changed his sex, in what campaign or battle did you know him, and how was he defeated—if he was."
Nestor replied: "Though my extreme old age is something of an obstacle to me,                                                        270
and much of what I witnessed in my youth I have forgotten, still I remember much, and nothing stands out more in memory, among so many acts of war and peace, than this does. But if great expanse of years makes one a living witness of so much that happened, I have lived two centuries already, and am living in my third!
"The daughter of Elatus was a maiden named Caenis, celebrated for her beauty,                                               280
the most attractive of Thessalian women in all the nearby cities, and in yours, Achilles, for she grew up in your town.
"A host of suitors hoped in vain to wed her— your father Peleus might have been one had he not taken Thetis as his bride already, or had they not been betrothed.
"But Caenis had no wish for any marriage, and one day, as the story went, while she
was traveling alone along the shore,                                                       290
the sea god, Neptune, forced himself on her.
"And after he had taken his delight by ravishing the maiden, he announced, 'Whatever you desire will be granted! Fear no refusal; ask and it is given.' (The story that I mentioned said this too.)
"Caenis replied: 'The injury you've done me requires a great wish to be set right;

that I might never suffer this again, allow that I may be no more a woman, and you will have fulfilled me utterly.'
"The words she ended her prayer with were deeper than those that she began it with, and seemed as though they could be coming from a man. And so it was: for Neptune had already assented, and now gave much greater gifts: that she should be impervious to wounds, and never fall a victim to the sword.
"Caeneus went off happily with these, and spent his days in masculine pursuits, wandering in the fields of Peneus, delighting in his new phallicity.
The Lapiths and the centaurs "Pirithous, the son of Ixion the bold, wed Hippodame and invited those cloud-born beasts, the centaurs, to recline at tables carefully arranged and set in a grotto sheltered by high foliage; the highest-born Thessalians were present, and we ourselves; the palace hall rang out with mingled sounds of festive merriment.
"They had begun to sing the wedding hymn, the torches were smoking up the atrium, and the young maiden, outstanding in her beauty, had just come in, surrounded by a crowd of matrons and of newly married women.
"We all congratulated Pirithous on his new bride, which very nearly spoiled the services by ruining the omen; for you, Eurytus, fiercest of the fierce centaurs, with a heart inflamed by wine, took fire at the entrance of the virgin,

and lust was doubled by inebriation.
"The tables were all overthrown at once, and the marriage feast was turned into a rout as the new bride was picked up by the hair and carried off! Eurytus seized Hippodame, and the others seized the women that they fancied or those that they were able to abduct, and in no time at all the scene resembled what happens when a city is despoiled.                                                  340
"Female shrieking filled the palace hall; we rose up instantly, and Theseus responded first: 'What senselessness impels you, mad Eurytus, to harm Pirithous, while I still live? Do you not understand that in harming one, you harm the two of us?'
"The hero fit his actions to his words, driving the centaurs off and rescuing the maiden from their hands. Aware that such
actions were indefensible with words,                                                    350
the centaur rushed at Theseus and struck                             
his face and selfless breast with shameless hands.
"It happened that an antique mixing bowl, engraved elaborately, stood nearby; though it was large, Theseus was larger, and so the greathearted hero hoisted it and smashed it into his opponent's face; bits of his brain, gobbets of gore and wine came vomiting from mouth and wound alike, as he crashed backward on the blood-soaked sands.                              360
"His death enraged the bimanous quadrupeds, who all together cried at once,'To arms!' Wine gave them courage and they fought at first with flying cups and jars, and with curved basins; the implements once found at dinner parties

were now appropriate to war and slaughter.
"Amycus, son of Ophion, first dared to rob the sanctuary of its gifts, and snatching up a chandelier replete with votive lamps all lit up for the wedding, he lifted it up high above his head as though he were about to sacrifice a spotless bull, and brought it crashing down on Celadon the Lapith, rendering the wedding guest unrecognizable in a welter of crushed bone. The eyes leapt forth from the disfigured pudding of his face, and his nose was driven back into his palate.
"Amycus had his turn when Pellaeus, dismantling a maple table leg, used it to lay him flat upon the ground: one blow fixed chin to breast, and then a second dispatched him to the shades of Tartarus in a fine mist of black blood and flying teeth.
"Next up was Gryneus, who, as he stood fiercely glaring at a smoking altar, asked, 'Why not use this?' And promptly hoisting it, he hurled the huge high altar with its flames into the middle of the Lapith throng and flattened Broteas and Orios; the mother of Orios was Mycale, a witch, as people say, whose spells could bring the moon, despite its struggling, to earth.
"'You will not get away with that, if I can find a weapon,' cried Exadius, and found one in the antlers of a stag, a votive offering fixed to a pine. He plunged the horns into Gryneus' eyes and gouged them out; one to an antler clung,

the other dribbled down his beard and hung                                        400
suspended in a mass of clotting gore.
"But look: right from the middle of the altar, Rhoetus snatches up a blazing brand of plum-tree wood, and whirling it around on his right side, he smashes in the head of Charaxus, all covered in blond hair, which catches fire instantly and burns as swiftly as a grainfield in a drought, and the boiling blood that issues from that wound
gives out a terrifying hissing noise,                                                         410
just as a heated bar of iron does when the blacksmith removes it from the furnace with his pincers and then thrusts it in a vat of water where it hisses and it sizzles.
"Distressed, he brushed the leaping flames away from his unkempt hair, and tore a threshold stone out of the earth, and hoisted that great weight, more suitable for oxen, on his shoulders; too heavy to be launched against a foe,
it fell—he dropped it—on a friend, Cometus,                                       420
who happened to be standing near, and crushed him.
"Rhoetus could not keep from chortling: 'Oh, bravely done,' he said, 'and may the rest of your side do as well as you, I pray!' He charged again, still wielding his charred brand, and struck at him repeatedly, until his skull was broken into many pieces, which sank into the jelly of his brain.
"The winner then went up against Euagrus, Dryas, and young Corythus; when the latter,                                         430
a lad who'd only just begun to shave, lay flattened out, Euagrus asked, 'What glory will you receive for murdering a child?'

"Rhoetus didn't give the man a chance to say another word: fiercely he thrust his glowing torch into the other's mouth, while he still had it open from his speech, and drove it deeply down into his breast!
"And you, cruel Dryas, he pursued as well, whirling his flaming torch about his head,                                            
but not, in your case, with the same results: for as that serial slaughterer came on, rejoicing in his rampage, you transfixed him with a blackened stake where neck and shoulder join.
"Rhoetus groaned and then, with all his might, he wrenched the stake from his unyielding bone, and dripping with his own blood, ran away; and with him fled Orneus, Lycabas, and Medon, whose right shoulder had been wounded; and Thaumas fled along with Pisenor and Mermeros, till recently the winner in footraces against any contender, but now disabled by a wound himself; and Phobus, Melaneius, and Abas, hunter of boars, and Asbolus the augur, who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to argue against their going into battle; to Nessus, worried about being wounded, he spoke these reassuring words: 'Don't worry:
stay where you are—your fate reserves you for                                    
the bow of Hercules!'
"But Eurynomus, Lycidas, Areos, and Imbreus did not escape: Dryas destroyed them all in combat, face to face; your fatal wound was frontal too, Crineus, even though you took it fleeing him: for you looked back

and his spear nailed you right between the eyes.
"Aphidas lay asleep, inertly clutching his cup of wine and water mixed together,
stretched at his ease upon a bearskin throw,                                           470
and would not stir, no matter all the tumult; and from a distance, Phorbas spotted him, not answering (in vain!) the call to arms, and fitting javelin to sling, he said, 'One Beaujolais-and-River-Styx to go!'
"At once he hurled his spear at the young man, and as he lay there with his head flung back the iron-tipped ash drove right through his throat; death took him unawares, and from his wound
the black blood flowed onto the couch he lay on                                 480
and filled the cup he clung to till the end.
"I saw Petraeus struggling to wrench an acorn-laden oak out of the ground; with both his arms he'd managed to surround it, and shook it back and forth until it tottered, and just as he had almost got it loose the spear of Pirithous tore through his ribs and pinned his straining breast to the firm oak.
"Men praise the valor of Pirithous for slaying Lycus and for Chromis too,                                                  490
but neither of those deaths gave him the glory that slaying Dictys and Helops did: Helops was pinned by a javelin that went right through his temple, from the right ear to the left, and Dictys, as he fled Pirithous in fearful haste, toppled over the edge of a mountain with two peaks, plunging headlong until a giant ash tree broke his fall, and left its fractured branches decorated with loops of his intestines.

"Aphareus was fixing to avenge him, struggling to hurl the rock he'd broken off a mountain, and as he struggled with it, Theseus got in the first shot with his club of oak and broke the huge bones of his elbow joint; and then, with neither time nor inclination to wound the helpless creature any further, he leapt upon the back of tall Bienor, accustomed to no rider but himself, and locking knees against the centaur's ribs, with his left hand, he clutched him by the hair, and with his knotty cudgel smashed his face and trashy mouth and shattered his thick skull.
"And with that club, he flattened Nedymnus and Lycopes, skilled with the javelin, and Hippasos, whose breast was covered by his uncut beard, and Ripheus, who loomed above the tallest trees, and Thereus, who caught bears on the peaks of Thessaly and fetched them back still living and indignant.
"No longer could Demoleon endure the stunning victories of Theseus; he had been struggling with all his might to tear an ancient pine tree from the ground, but when he could not, he just broke it off and sent it flying at his enemy; and when he saw it coming, Theseus moved out of range, upon advice of Pallas— or so he would prefer us to believe.
"That tree still did some damage as it fell, for it sheared off the breast and left shoulder from Crantor's neck—remember him, Achilles? That fellow was your father's armor-bearer,

given to him as a guarantee of peace by Amyntour, king of the Dolopians, when Peleus defeated him in battle.
"At sight of him so horribly disfigured, Peleus cried out from far away, 'Crantor, most pleasing of all youths, accept
this sacrifice sent to the underworld!'                                                     540
With all the strength of his right arm, he hurled his ash-wood spear against Demoleon: it tore right through the basket of his ribs until it shuddered, biting into bone.
"With difficulty, he plucked out the shaft, but the spear tip still adhered within his lung; grief gave him courage; wounded though he was, he reared up on his hind legs and struck out with deadly forehooves at his enemy.
"Peleus stood beneath that hammering                                             550
and took it on his helmet and his shield, protecting his torso, readying his thrust, then lunging forward, as with one swift blow he pierced a human and an equine breast.
"That man, before he slew Demoleon, had already slain Hyles and Phlegraeos, both at a distance; and at hand to hand, Iphinous and Clanis; Dorylas was next, who wore a wolf-skin cap upon his head,
and armed himself, not with a deadly spear,                                           560
but with a pair of bull's horns, dripping blood.
"Said I to him (for courage gave me strength!), 'See how my iron yields before your horns,' and hurled my javelin. Since he could not duck it, he raised his right arm to ward off the wound: his forehead and his hand were nailed together.
"On being struck, he made a great commotion,

but he was quite disabled by his wound,
and Peleus was standing close to him
and used his sword to open up his belly;                                                570
that fierce, unbridled beast bounded forward
and spilled his entrails out upon the ground,
and what spilled out of him, he trod upon,
and what was trodden on was burst asunder
and tangled in his legs until he fell,
his belly emptied of its viscera.
"Nor did your beauty save you in that battle, Cyllarus, if we grant that your kind may be beautiful; his beard, just growing in, was golden in its color, like the hair that fell straight from his shoulders to his flanks. He had a gratifying vigor of expression, and you would praise all of his human parts —his graceful neck, his shoulders, hands, and torso— as equal to an artist's masterpiece.
"Nor could his equine attributes be faulted as inferior to the man's beauty: provide him with a proper head and neck and he would be a worthy mount for Castor! His back so well adapted for the saddle, his breast so muscular! In color, black, and blacker even than the blackest pitch, save for his legs and tail, which were both white.
"Many there were, among the centaur folk, who sought him for a lover; only one, Hylonome, succeeded, captured him, the comeliest of females in that tribe of savages who dwelled in the deep woods; and by alluring him and loving him
and whispering sweet nothings in his ear,                                            
maintained her own exclusive hold on him;

and by her refinement—insofar as one
can speak of such a thing among her kind—
for she would run a comb through her long tresses,
and twine them with rosemary, violets,
or roses—even lilies, now and then;
and twice a day she washed her face beneath
the waters of a font near Pegasa,
that leapt and tumbled from a sylvan height,
and twice a day she bathed in that same stream;                                    610
and never would you find Hylonome
dressed unbecomingly, in anything
but well-matched pelts, all carefully selected
and draped across her left side from the shoulder.
"Their love was mutual; together, they roamed through the mountains and explored the caves; now they were at the Lapith feast together, and stood by one another, fiercely fighting; from the left side, there came a javelin
(I don't know whose) that entered you, Cyllarus,                                  620
just at the sternum: a slight wound to the heart, but heart and body all the same grew cold, after the weapon was removed.
"At once Hylonome knelt by her dying lover, and pressed her hand against the bleeding wound and placed her lips on his, and so attempted to keep his soul from exiting his body; but when she realized that he was dead, she took the spear with which he had been slain,
and saying something that I couldn't hear                                             630
because of the great clamor there, she fell upon it and in death embraced her lover.
"And even now there stands before my eyes Phaeocomes, who killed half a dozen lions

and tied their skins together to protect
his human and his horsey parts at once;
he hurled a tree trunk which two teams of oxen
could scarcely budge; it cracked Tectaphos' pate,
shattered the broad dome of his skull, and pressed
his fluid brains till they exuded through
his mouth, his sinuses, his eyes and ears,
as when the whey pours through the oaken basket
leaving the curds behind, or as when grapes
beneath the press drip through the slender sieve,
and juice is squeezed out through the narrow openings.
"But as he knelt to strip the dead man's arms (your father knows this story well, Achilles) I thrust my sword up through his testicles from underneath! Chthonius as well, and Teleboas fell before my sword: the one had as his weapon a forked stick, the other had a spear, and with that spear the creature wounded me—you see the mark? Why, even to this day, I bear the scar!
"Those were the days when I should have been sent to take Troy by myself! Those were the days when I could have—not overwhelmed great Hector, but fought him to a draw by force of arms. But Hector, in those days, was not yet born or was a boy, and now it is too late: old age has taken much away from me.
"Why should I tell you of the victory of Periphas over the half-and-half Pyraethus? Why should I renew once more the deed of Ampyx, who ran his spear haft through the forehead of that quadruped Echeclus? Or tell how Macareus hurled a crowbar at Pelethronian Erigdupus,

and laid him flat? And well do I recall
how the hunting spear that left the hand of Nessus                               670
was buried in the balls of Cymelus!
"Nor would it have seemed credible to you that Mopsus, the son of Ampycus, was nothing other than a soothsayer, for by his spear the centaur Hodites was stretched out as he tried, in vain, to speak, with his tongue fixed to his chin and chin to throat!
"Caeneus had already slaughtered five: Styphelus first, then Bromus, Antimachus,
Elymus, and axe-wielding Pyracmos;                                                     680
I don't recall the manner of their deaths, for I took note just of the names and numbers.
"Then Latreus charged out upon the scene, gigantic in his limbs and body both, and wearing armor taken from Halesus, whom he had slain; even though middle-aged, with greying hair, he still had youthful vigor.
"Conspicuously bearing shield and helmet and a Macedonian lance, he rode
between the front lines, showing off to both,                                        690
and circled tightly, beating on his shield, while arrogantly adding to the wind: 'Are you supposed to be my match, Caenis? In my eyes, you will always be a woman, you'll always be Caenis to me,' and such: 'Consider well what you are by your birth and by what you have gone through: go, take up the colander and milk pail, twist the threads across your thumb—leave war to men!'
"While Latreus was boasting in this manner,                                    700
Caeneus hurled a spear into his side, extended for his gallop, where the man

and horse were joined; raging with his pain,
he struck the young man's unprotected face
and saw his lance rebounding in the way
a hailstone does when it strikes against a roof,
or a pebble when it bounces from a drumhead:
then Latreus closed in on him and tried
to slip his sword into the other's side,
too hard to penetrate. 'Still you won't escape,                                        710
for even though my weapon's point is dull,
it has an edge, with which you will be slain!'
"So he told him, and holding his weapon flat in his long right arm, lunged at the other's balls. It was as though his blade had struck on marble, for with that blow, it shattered into pieces!
"Caeneus, unscathed, paused for effect before his astonished enemy a while, then said, 'Now let me try your body with my blade!' and thrust his sword into the other's side up to the hilt, then blindly twisted it around to make a wound within the wound.
"Outraged, the quadrupedal bimanites rushed up screaming, hurling all their spears against a single target, Caeneus: their blunted weapons fell, but he remained unbloodied and unbowed by all their blows.
"They were astounded by this miracle. Monychus cried out, 'What a great disgrace that our nation is overwhelmed by one not quite a man—and yet he is a man, while we seem more like what he used to be, the fault of our indecisiveness.
" 'What purpose in these monstrous limbs of ours? And why is it that we have double strength? Wherefore in our natures do we join

the strongest beings in a single force?            
I can't believe a goddess was our mother,
or that we are the sons of Ixion,
who had the greatness to attempt the rape                                             740
of lofty Juno—while we are conquered by
an enemy who used to be a mare!
"'Then let a whole mountain worth of boulders and a forest full of tree trunks be the missiles we use to crush the life right out of him! Let the sheer mass of it cut off his breath and let its weight do for a fatal wound!'
"He spoke, and as it happened, came upon a tree trunk that had been uprooted by
the fearsome power of the mad south wind,                                          750
and hurled it at his formidable foe; so many others followed his example that in no time, Mount Othrys was denuded, and Pelion was left without its shade.
"Buried beneath that monstrous heap of trees, Caeneus seethed with rage and lifted up, on his broad shoulders, the whole timber pile; but even so, once the enormous burden had covered up his lips and then his head,
he found it was impossible to breathe,                                                    760
and gasping, he attempted (though in vain) to raise his buried head up, and so scatter the forest heaped upon him; and as he moved, he seemed like Mount Ida (visible from here) when its green slopes are shaken by an earthquake.
"His end is still a matter of dispute: some claim his body sank beneath the weight of all those trees into the underworld; Mopsus denies this, for he saw a bird on golden wings rising from the center                                                 770

of that great pile into the yielding air,
and I beheld the very same myself,
for the first time then, and never afterward.
"As Mopsus watched him in his graceful flight around the camp and heard his beating wings, attending with his eyes and with his spirit, he cried out to him,'Glory of the Lapiths, once greatest of all men, but now a bird unparalleled, Caeneus, fare thee well!'
"The story rests on his authority. Grief added to our rage: it sickened us to think that one man should be vanquished by so many enemies; we did not cease expressing grief with our steel until the night had fallen; half of our enemies were dead, and those still left alive had taken flight."
Periclymenus And hearing Nestor's story of the battle between the Lapiths and the half-wild centaurs, Tlepolemus, indignant that his father was being silently passed over, said: "One moment, Senior, for a senior moment astonishes: how could you possibly forget to praise the deeds of Hercules, when I have often heard my father speak of the cloud-born quadrupeds he overcame?"
Nestor rebuked him sharply: "Why must you compel me to remember wrongs again, unearthing sorrow that the years have buried, those injuries that make me hate your father?
God knows that he has done deeds past belief,                                    
and all the earth speaks only of his merits, which I, if I were able to, would gainsay: Deiphobus does not find praise from us,

nor Polydamas, no—not even Hector; for who will sing the praises of a foe?
"That father you're so proud of sacked Messene, and devastated without cause the towns of Elis and Pylos; yes, Hercules destroyed my home by fire and by sword.
I shall not speak of others whom he slew,                                              810
but we were the dozen sons of Neleus, distinguished youths; all twelve of us were slain by the strength of Hercules, except for me.
"The deaths of all those others could be borne, but that of Periclymenus was weird; his grandfather Neptune had given him the power to transform himself at will to any shape and then resume his own.
"Now when his repertoire had been exhausted to no avail, he changed into that bird                                                     820
who in his talons bears the thunderbolt, and is most pleasing to the king of heaven; that bird, with all the strength of his strong wings, curved beak, and talons, tore the hero's face.
"Then Hercules took all too certain aim with his great bow, as risen to the clouds the bird hung, hovering and motionless, and the hero's arrow struck him in the side, where his wing began. The wound was minor,
but sinews which were severed by the arrow                                         830
were paralyzed and could not aid his flight. He lost his purchase on the yielding air, and plunged headlong to earth, and when he struck, the arrow in his wing was driven through it into his breast and then right through his throat.
"Now then, most admirable admiral of the fleet from Rhodes, what reason do I have

to sing your father's praises? Nonetheless, I seek no further vengeance for my brothers than to ignore the deeds of Hercules; but our friendship—yours and mine—is solid."
When Nestor had brought his story to an end so courteously, the wine was sent around once more, and then they rose up from their couches; the remainder of the night belonged to sleep.
The death of Achilles But the god who rules the waters with his trident still felt paternal sorrow for his son Cycnus, who had been changed into a swan, as he lamented the death of Phaëthon, and exercised his unremitting wrath on manslaying Achilles, whom he hated.
War had been waged for almost ten years now, and Neptune urged Apollo's intervention: "O most obliging of my brother's sons, with whom I built Troy's ineffectual walls, do you not groan at sight of that citadel so soon to fall? And do you not lament for the many thousands slain defending it? And of those many, whom I will not speak of, does not the shade of Hector rise from below, his corpse appearing just as when Achilles shamefully dragged him round the Trojan walls?
"But he who has a greater thirst for blood than even Mars himself, the pillager of our handiwork—Achilles—he still lives! Give him to me, and I will make him feel what I can do with my three-pronged spear!
"But since I am not permitted to engage my enemy in combat hand to hand,

the task is yours: slay him with an arrow,                                                    870
unseen and unexpected."
So Apollo, agreeing with his uncle, gave assent, and in a cloud, came to the Trojan front, where, in the midst of slaughter, he discerned Paris, lackadaisically shooting his arrows at anonymous Achaeans.
Revealing his divinity to him, Apollo said, "Why do you waste your barbs on nobodies? If you have any care
for your own people, take aim at Achilles,                                                  880
and so avenge his slaughter of your brothers!"
And with these words, he showed him where Achilles was devastating Trojans with his spear, and made him turn his bow in that direction, and with his own death-dealing hand, he guided that certain arrow to its fated target.
Not since the death of Hector had old Priam a cause for celebration; now he had: that you, Achilles, conqueror of many,
are overcome by an unheroic                                                                  890
adulterer who snatched a Grecian's wife! Better that you were slain in battle by an Amazon, wielding her double axe.
Now he who was the terror of the Trojans, the glory and protector of the Greeks, invincible Achilles, has been burned upon the pyre; one god and the same armed this great hero and consumed him quite; now he is ashes: and the little left
of great Achilles scarcely fills an urn,                                                     900
although his living glory fills the world.

That glory is the measure of the man, and it is this that is Achilles' essence, nor does he feel the emptiness of death.
His very shield—that you should be aware whose it once was—now instigates a battle, and for his arms, arms are now taken up. None of the lesser leaders, such as Ajax, the son of Oileos, or Diomedes,
or Menelaus dares to lay a claim,                                                             910
nor any of the other leaders, more distinguished for their age and experience; only Ajax, the son of Telamon, and Ulysses are bold enough to do so.
Now Agamemnon, to spare himself the thankless burden of deciding on this issue, ordered the Argive leaders to assemble in the middle of the camp, and hear the case, and come to a decision by themselves.

BOOK XIII
SPOILS OF WAR AND PANGS OF LOVE
Ajax versus Ulysses         The sorrows of Hecuba         Memnon
The daughters of Anius         The daughters of Orion
Polyphemus, Galatea, and Acis         Scylla and Glaucus

Ajax versus Ulysses
The leaders were seated while the common grunts stood round them in a circle. Ajax rose, the master of the seven-layered shield, now barely able to contain his anger.
He looked back at the fleet along the shore, then pointed to it, fiercely glowering: "By Jupiter, it is appropriate to plead my case before these ships," he said, and fitting that I clash here with Ulysses,
who did not hesitate to yield them up                                                   10
to Hector's torches—which I held at bay, then put to flight!
"There's more security in flinging lies than fighting hand to hand. But I'm as slow to speak as he to act; I am his master on the battlefield, as he is mine—when it comes to talking.
"Nor is it necessary, fellow Greeks, that I remind you once again of my great deeds, for you have seen them: let Ulysses tell
his stories of events that went unwitnessed,                                            20
which none but night, it seems, was privy to.
"I realize I seek a great reward, but having such a rival is demeaning and cheats me of the honor I am due: Ajax cannot be proud to win a prize, no matter how substantial, that Ulysses can have the expectation of receiving; he has already gotten his reward, for when his claim has been rejected, he can boast that he and I were fairly matched!                                           30
"But even if my courage were in doubt, my lineage would prove superior

to his, for I am the son of Telamon, who, under Hercules, once captured Troy, then sailed to Colchis for the Golden Fleece; Telamon's father was Aeacus, the stern judge of the silent underworld, where Sisyphus is forced to push a huge rock up a hill. Since Jupiter, the highest god in heaven, acknowledges Aeacus as his son, I am the great-great-grandson of great Jove!
"But this connection should not advance my cause unless I am related to Achilles: and he's my cousin! I seek a cousin's arms! And why do you, O son of Sisyphus, and most like him in lies and thievery, seek to associate Aeacus' line with the name of an unrelated family?
"Is it because I freely took up arms that arms are now denied me? Is the better man the one who was the last to go to war, who sought to shirk the action by feigned madness, till someone who was cleverer than he, but not as self-serving, Palamades, exposed this coward's trickery and forced him to take up the very weapons that he shunned? Shall he now have the best of arms, who wished no arms at all? Shall I go without honor, deprived of my own cousin's worthy gifts, because I was the first to go to battle?
"Would that Ulysses had been truly mad, or that we had believed him: either way the fellow never would have come to Troy and driven us to crimes! You, Philoctetes, would not have been—to our shame—abandoned on Lemnos, where, they say, you hide yourself

in woods and caves, and move the rocks to groans
with curses you call down upon Ulysses,
well merited, and not—if there are gods—
called down in vain! And he who took the oath                                    70
to fight in our cause, a leader who
inherited the bow of Hercules,
now perishes of hunger and disease,
is clothed and nurtured by the birds brought down
with arrows fate intended for the Trojans!
"No matter: he still lives, at least—because he chose not to accompany Ulysses, unlike unfortunate Palamades, who would prefer to have been left behind,
and would be living now—or would have died                                     80
without dishonor; for Ulysses here, reacting to the exposure of his madness, accused him of betraying our cause, and as his proof of this fictitious crime, produced the gold which he himself had hidden! And so, by means of exile or by murder, he has reduced the strength of our forces; that's how he fights, and why he must be feared.
"Although his eloquence surpasses Nestor's, the man will never manage to persuade me                                           90
that abandoning old Nestor was no crime: for when, exhausted by extreme old age and held back by his wounded mount, he begged Ulysses' aid, his friend deserted him; not only I, but Diomedes too, is well aware of this: he called to him repeatedly and seized him as he fled, reproaching him for his timidity!
"The gods, however, even out the scales: behold, Ulysses is in need of aid,                         .                                   100

who did not offer it; he who once left another must himself be left behind; a precedent that he himself has set. He cries to his companions for relief; arriving, I observe him trembling, pale, all discomposed by his impending doom; I plant my massive shield in front of him and save—no praise is due—his worthless life.
"Will you keep on contesting me? If so, let us return, then, to the battlefield, to the enemy, your wound, your constant fear: crouch down again behind my shield and argue! But once I had relieved him of the danger, he took off on those legs he couldn't stand on— his 'wound,' remember? No laggard here!
"Hector shows up and leads the gods to battle, and where he charges, not just you, Ulysses, are terrified, but even brave men too, so great a fear that warrior inspires.                
And while he was rejoicing in a string of bloody victories, I laid him low with a great rock I hurled from quite a distance; when he sought someone out for single combat, I was the only one to undertake it; you prayed the lot would fall to me, Achaeans, and your prayers were answered. If you would learn the fortunes of that battle, know that I survived it undefeated by great Hector!
"Look where the Trojans rush out of their city, carrying iron, fire, and the force of Jove against our helpless fleet! Where's glib Ulysses? A thousand ships, the hope of your return, and who protected them but me, alone! Give me the armor in exchange for them!

"In truth, if I may say so, it's the prize that seeks association with my glory, and would be honored much more than would I— for it's the armor would be given Ajax,              
not Ajax the armor.                                            
"To my heroic deeds Ulysses should compare the way he dealt                                                   140
with Rhesus, Dolon, and Helenus, his capture of the statue of Athena: none of these deeds was done in the light of day, and none without his Diomedes' help; but if, on such weak merits, you decide to give the armor, then divide it up and give the larger share to Diomedes!
"What use does someone like Ulysses—who conducts maneuvers secretly, unarmed,
relying on his cunning to deceive                                                                  150
a careless foe—what use has he for armor? The rays reflecting from the golden helmet would spoil his ambush and reveal him hiding; nor could his head support the weight of it, not any more than his unwarlike arm could heft the spear shaft grown on Pelion; nor is the shield, engraved to represent the world in all its vastness, suitable for his left hand—the timid, thieving one!
"Indecent man, why do you ask for gifts                                           160
that cannot but enfeeble you? Gifts which, if ever by some error on the part of the Achaeans, were presented to you, would not inspire terror in our foe, but greed to strip such prizes from your corpse!
"And flight, most timid one, your only gift, and the one in which you do surpass us all,

will be impeded for you by that burden.
"To all these reasons let us add one more: your shield, so rarely used, is still brand new,                                          170
while mine, which bears a multitude of scars, is urgently in need of a replacement.
"And finally, what need is there for words? Let us be seen in action: send the armor back to our foe, then order its recapture, and give it to the one who rescues it." Ajax concluded: an approving murmur broke out among the soldiers standing there.
Ulysses rose, paused briefly, and looked up to gaze upon the leaders, then began                                                    180
to speak the words they had been waiting for, ingratiating in his eloquence.
"If our prayers had triumphed—yours and mine, my fellow Greeks—there'd be no doubt at all as to the winner of this important match, and you would have your armor, now, Achilles, and we would now have you; but since his fate unfairly must deny him to you, to me—" and here he made as though to wipe his eyes,
"the one who should relieve him of his armor                                      190
is the one who brought him to relieve the Greeks.
"I don't want my opponent here to profit simply because he seems to be (and is) just a bit slow—or that I should be harmed for being clever, or for having used my cleverness to your advantage always; my eloquence now takes its master's side, but it has often spoken up for you; I would not have it garner any envy, for each should do his best with his own gifts.                                      200
"My race and family, the famous deeds

of famous ancestors are not my own;
since Ajax raised this issue, though, by claiming
that Jove was his great-grandfather, I
have to reply that he was also mine,
the founding father of my father's line:
my father was Laertes; Arcesius,
the son of Jupiter, was his; and nowhere
in my father's line was anyone convicted
of criminal offenses, or condemned                                                        210
to exile; moreover, on my mother's side,
Mercury adds his luster to our name;
my lineage, on both sides, is divine!
"But the reason why I ask you for these arms is not because of my more noble birth (owing to my mother) nor because my father was innocent of fratricide: this case must be decided on its merits; that Telamon and Peleus were brothers
should not advantage Ajax: not origin,                                                   220
but honor ought to be considered here in seeing which of us deserves the plunder!
"For if inheritance is linear, Achilles had a father, Peleus, and a son, Pyrrhus: so where is there a place for Ajax in Achilles' family? Let the arms be sent to Phthia or Scyros! Teucer was a cousin of Achilles, no less than Ajax: does he seek the armor, and if he did, would he be like to win?                                                 230
"Plain speech is what is called for in this contest; I have done more than words can manifest, yet I will try to tell my deeds in order.
"Achilles' mother, an immortal nymph, foreseeing the destruction of her son,

attempted to disguise him as a woman:
though her deception took in everyone,
including Ajax, it was I who introduced
some arms that would arouse a manly spirit
among the items in the women's quarters;                                             240
although he was still dressed up as a maiden,
at once Achilles grasped the spear and shield:
'O goddess-born,' I said, 'Troy waits for you,
a city destined for destruction—why
do you prevent yourself from sacking it?'
I seized his hand, inspired and possessed him,
then sent that brave man off to do brave things.
"So everything that he did was my doing; my spear defeated Telephus in battle,
whom I restored, when he entreated me;                                                   250
ifThebes has fallen, I deserve the thanks, and you can credit me with Lesbos and the cities of Apollo :Tenedos, Chryse, and Cilia; give me Scyros too, and grant that it was my right arm alone reduced the walls of Lyrnesus to rubble, and—not to speak of other actions—I, and no one else, gave you the only man able to destroy the warlike Hector; yes,
through me that famous hero met his end!                                                260
I seek these arms then, in exchange for those by which the hidden hero was discovered; I gave him arms while he was living; now, after his death, I ask them back again.
"When one man's troubles spread to all of Greece, and a thousand ships were idling at Aulis, all waiting for a wind that wouldn't come, or when it came, came from an adverse quarter, our leader, Agamemnon, was commanded

by an unyielding oracle to offer                                                                  270
his blameless daughter as a sacrifice
to fierce Diana; this he would not do,              
since, in that king, there was a father, who
in his great anger cried out against heaven;
I was the one that, with ingenious speech,
turned the kind parent into the public man
(and I confess it here and beg your pardon,
Agamemnon), although I found it hard
to plead my case before a biased judge.
"He was persuaded, for the common good,                                      280
and by his high command, and by his brother, to temper his affection for his daughter with a concern for doing the right thing.
"They sent me also to the mother, who would not hear reason, but must be deceived by cunning—and if Ajax had been sent, those ships would still be waiting for a breeze!
"As your ambassador to Ilium, I went into the Trojans' Senate House,
which was still full of heroes in those days,                                            290
but I, as ordered, pled the cause of Greece; I charged Paris with abduction, and demanded that they give Helen and the plunder back; Priam and Antenor were moved by my speech, but Paris, his brothers, and accomplices were scarcely kept from laying their indecent hands on me—Menelaus—you know this! That was the first day when I shared your dangers.
"It would take far too long for me to tell of all the services that I performed                                                         300
as an advisor and as engineer during the course of that long, drawn-out war.
"After the first engagements, the enemy

for a long time stayed within their city, and so no opportunity for combat presented itself; at last, and not before the tenth year, did we do battle with our foe: and what had you been doing all this time, who have no expertise except in battles? What use were you?
"Would you know what I did? I set up ambushes and dug a trench around our fortifications; furthermore I gave encouragement to our allies, so that they could endure the tedium of such a long engagement; I advised on how to keep us armed and well provisioned, and served on other missions as required.
"But look: deluded by a phantasm appearing in his sleep at Jove's command, the king gives orders to give up the war, orders which he defends as being Jove's: so now let Ajax put an end to this, let Ajax now insist on Troy's destruction, and fight, since he is such a warrior!
"Why doesn't he restrain them, and provide a bulwark where the wavering could rally? That wouldn't be too much for such a braggart! But he was busy fleeing: ashamed, I saw you turn your back and raise disgraceful sails!
"At once I cried out, 'Men, what are you doing? What madness now incites you to run off just when the city is within our grasp? What will we have to show for these ten years, what can we carry home except disgrace?'
"And I said other things like that as well, for disappointment gave me eloquence,

which turned them from the ships and brought them back.
"Then Agamemnon called for an assembly of the Greek alliance, still panic-stricken;
not even then was Ajax bold enough                                                      340
to make a peep, although Thersites dared to mock the kings with insubordination— but thanks to me, he didn't get off lightly! I got up and exhorted them once more to take the battle to our enemy, replacing their lost courage with my speech. From then on, whatever acts of bravery Ajax may claim in truth belong to me, who dragged him back from his intended flight.
"And lastly, Ajax, who among the Greeks                                          350
has praise for you and seeks your company? But Diomedes has joined his cause with mine in all his actions; I have his approval, and he can always count on his Ulysses— and that is something, to be singled out, chosen from all the Greeks by Diomedes!
"Nor was I picked by lottery to go: but careless of the dangers posed by night and by our enemy, I took out Dolon,
who was scouting us, as we were scouting him;                                     360
but not before I'd gotten him to tell me the battle plans of the dishonest Trojans.
"I understood their strategy completely and had no need for more discoveries: I could return to certain commendation, but not content with that, I made my way to the tents of Rhesus; there, in his own camp, I slaughtered him and his whole retinue.
"A victor now, with all I'd prayed for won, I proceeded in a captured chariot                          .                                370

in imitation of a joyful triumph; the enemy insisted on those horses as that night's price; deny the arms to me and let Ajax be the more generous!
"Why should I tell again of how my sword brought devastation to the rank and file of Sarpedon, the Lycian commander? Or how I slew a bloody multitude: Coeranos, the son of Iphitus, and Alastor and Chromius I killed, and Alcander, and Halius and Noëmon, and Chersidamas and Thoon as well, and Charopes and Ennomos, pursued by Fates implacable, and others who were not as famous, but who nonetheless my strong right arm left broken on the ground beneath the walls of Troy.
"O citizens, I have my scars, and they are glorious for where I've gotten them—but do not trust in empty words: look on them for yourselves," he said, uncovering himself to them.
"My breast," he said, "has always been engaged in this great cause of yours. But Ajax here has paid out nothing for so many years in blood shed for his comrades that he's earned a body free of scars!
"So what if he brings up how he defended the whole Grecian fleet against the might of Troy and Jove combined? I grant it: let him have the credit owed his great accomplishment; but he should not take all the glory; some belongs to you, for Patroclus, as great Achilles, drove

the Trojans back and saved the fleet from burning.
"He even thinks himself the only one who dared trade spears with Hector on the field, ignoring the king, the rulers, and myself; he was but ninth in our chain of command, and only won the task by lottery. What was the outcome of this fight of yours,
bravest of warriors? Hector withdrew,                                                         410
unblemished even by the slightest scratch!
"It grieves me to think back to our sorrow when Achilles, bulwark of the Greeks, was slain. The tears that I shed then did not prevent me from lifting him and carrying him off upon these shoulders—yes, indeed—I bore the body of Achilles on these shoulders, and at the same time bore his armor off— a deed I am now striving to repeat.
"I've shown the strength to bear so great a weight,                             420
and have the spirit to appreciate the honor you confer upon the bearer: am I to think that this was the ambition of his immortal mother for her son, that these exquisite gifts, the consummate masterworks of the gods' own armorer, were meant to grace a rude and brainless soldier?
"He has no understanding of the world depicted on the shield, its sea and lands
and stars arranged in patterns high in heaven,                                            430
the Pleiades, the Hyades, the Bear who is exempt from setting in the ocean, and opposite, Orion's gleaming sword: he grasps at armor that his mind can't grasp.
"Does he not realize that in blaming me for hiding from the rigors of the war,

and for arriving after it began,
he deprecates great-spirited Achilles?
If pretense is a crime, then we're both guilty,
and if delay is culpable, then my                                                           440
offense is lessened: I arrived here first!
My devoted wife and his devoted mother
kept us from leaving, but after those first days
were given them, the rest were given you;
and though I were unable to refute
the crimes I'm charged with—well, I could care less,
since those are faults I share with such a man,
and by Ulysses' ingenuity
was Achilles found; but Ajax looked around
and nowhere a Ulysses could he see.
"Nor should it shock us that his stupid mouth should so abuse me, for you also are the targets of his indecent reproaches. Can it be baseness for me to accuse Palamades unjustly, but correct for you to find him guilty of the charges? Palamades could not defend himself against so great a crime; his guilt was proven, and you not only heard that guilt proclaimed, but saw it in the evidence produced!                                                    460
"Nor is it my fault that Philoctetes languishes on Lemnos: you consented; defend your action. Yes, I persuaded him to go on leave and to absent himself from the rigors of the journey to the war, and try to ease his awful state with rest. He listened to me—and he's still alive! So my advice was not just well intended, but in its outcome was successful too, though only my intentions really mattered.                                          470

"And now that our augurs have decided                                 
that Philoctetes has to be brought here before the city can be overcome,       don't give this task to me: it would be better if Ajax went—for by his eloquence, he'll calm the raging fury of the man, and by some cleverness or skillful trick will bring our Philoctetes back to us!
"The Simoïs will start to flow upstream, Mount Ida will stand bare of foliage,                                                      480
and Greece send war relief to Troy, before— if my mind ever gives up on your cause— the wit of Ajax does the Greeks some good!
"O bitter Philoctetes, it is right that you should hate me so ferociously,                                          
and heap your endless curses on my head, and long, in misery, to drink my blood, if ever chance should give me up to you, doing to me in spades as I did you.
"Despite your enmity, I would set out                                               490
and try to bring you back with me to Troy; if Fortune favors, I would have your bow, just as I had that Trojan seer I captured, just as I found the oracles, revealing the fate of Troy, just as I carried off the image of Minerva from its shrine within the city of our enemy— does Ajax now compare himself to me?
"The Fates forbade the city to be captured without that image: where was bold Ajax then?                                    500
Whatever happened to his boastful speech? Why was he frightened? How does Ulysses dare to venture out beyond the sentry line, entrusting his own safety to the night,

and facing opposition, enters Troy,
and penetrates its citadel and steals
the goddess from her altar, and then brings
the captured image past our enemies?
"And had I not accomplished all of this, the bull-hide shield of seven thicknesses                                                    510
that our Ajax carries on his left arm would have been worn in vain, for on that night I guaranteed our victory at Troy: I overcame Pergama when I made it possible to overcome the city!
"Allow me, Ajax, to express the thought your scrunched up face and muttering convey: 'Part of his glory goes to Diomedes!' Of course it does: nor were you all alone
when you braced your shield before the Grecian fleet;                         520
you had a host beside you: I but one.
"Unless he knew that fighting has less value in warfare than strategic capability, and that the prize by right should not be given merely to an indomitable arm, Diomedes would also rise to claim it, and lesser Ajax, and Eurypylus, Andraemon's son, and Idomeneus, and his own countryman, Meriones,
and Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus,                                                    530
would also seek it; all of them, however, though strong of hand, my equals on the field, have yielded to my insight and my counsel.
"Your arm is purposeful in war, but lacks the wisdom that my counsel can provide; you have meer strength, but not my intellect; lacking my foresight, you know only how, not when to fight; that is my special skill,

and the task which our leaders picked me for;     
you represent the body, I the mind,                                                       540
and as an oarsman to an admiral,
or as a GI to a general,                 
so much are you inferior to me,
because, in our bodies, our hands
are of far lesser value than our brains:            
in them resides the vigor of our lives.
"Now you, O leaders, should award the prize to your faithful guardian, considering the many years which I have loyally spent        
in anxious care for these concerns of ours,                                           550
as compensation for my services.                           
"My labor now is ended: I've removed the obstacle of the resistant Fates, and I have taken lofty Troy for you by making possible the city's capture.
"Now, by the hopes that we all have in common, and by the walls of Troy, fated to topple, and by those gods I've recently removed from our foe, and by whatever else
is left to do with wisdom and with daring                                             560
before Troy falls, remember all I've done!
"And if you still won't give the arms to me (he pointed to the image of Minerva)— give them to her!"
The leadership was moved, and the outcome showed what eloquence could do: the skillful man bore off the hero's armor, while the other one, who had so often stood alone against great Hector and endured iron and fire and the wrath of Jove,
discovered a passion he could not withstand:                                         570
the undefeated man was overcome

by the anger that he turned against himself.
He seized his sword and turned to face them all: "But surely this, at least, is mine," he said. "Or will Ulysses take this from me too? I must employ it now against myself, and the blade so often stained with Trojan gore must now be steeped in its own master's blood, lest anyone but Ajax conquer Ajax!"
He, when he finished speaking, drove that sword into his previously unscarred breast, up to the hilt—and none was strong enough to draw the weapon out, until the force of his own blood expelled it, and the earth was stained with its color; from patches of green turf there sprang a purple flower, which before had sprung from the mortal wound of Hyacinthus; and on its petals, letters were inscribed, appropriate both to the man and boy, spelling a hero's name, a cry of woe.
The sorrows of Hecuba Ulysses then set sail for the isle of Lemnos (the realm of Thoas and Hypsipyle, where once a famous massacre took place) to carry back the arrows of Hercules; and after he had brought them and their master, Philoctetes, back to the Greek forces, the final blow of that long war was struck. ...
Troy was ablaze, the flames not yet subsided; Jove's altar was still drinking the thin blood of aged Priam, and Apollo's priestess, drawn by her hair, raised unavailing hands in silent supplication; Trojan women, while they still could, embraced the images of native gods—until triumphant Greeks

dragged their appealing plunder from the temples.
Astyanax was flung off of that tower                        
from which his mother would point out to him      his father on the battlefield, defending        his reputation and ancestral realm.
And now the north wind urged them to depart;                               610
the sails flapped noisily against the masts and the mariner had whistled up a breeze. "Farewell, O Troy, for we are carried off," they cry, kissing the earth as they relinquish their still-smoldering homes. Last to embark— a pitiable sight—was Hecuba, discovered at the princes' sepulchers, clutching the tombs and kissing their dry bones; Ulysses broke her grip and dragged her off,
but she hid Hector's ashes in her bosom,                                               620
and left locks of her white hair on his tomb, her hair and tears a pointless offering.
There is, across the way from where Troy was, a country that the men of Thrace inhabit; here was the wealthy court of Polymestor, to whom, O Polydorus, your father Priam, entrusted you in secret to be raised far from the fighting: a wise decision, had he not sent you off with a great treasure, provoking avarice and ensuring evil.                                                      630
When Troy collapsed, the impious Thracian king savagely cut the throat of his young charge, and then, as though to show that crimes could be eliminated just as easily as victims are, the corpse of Polydorus was tossed down from a cliff into the sea.
Awaiting quiet seas and a steady wind, Agamemnon gave orders that the fleet

was to be moored along the Thracian coast;
quite unexpectedly, the ground split open,                                            640
and there emerged the ghost of great Achilles,
as large, and in his form as threatening
as in that time when, like a wild man, he
went after Agamemnon with his sword
and challenged him for his unjust behavior:
"O Greeks," he said, "do you depart for home heedless of me? My body lies decayed, as are the thanks you owe me for my service! This cannot be: so that my sepulcher
may not go without honor, let my shade                                               650
be pleasured by the death of Polyxena."
He finished speaking, and the Greeks obeyed his unforgiving ghost: torn from the arms of her mother Hecuba, for whom the maiden was almost the only comfort she had left, that fierce, unfortunate, unfeminine virgin was brought directly to the grave and sacrificed upon that ominous tomb.
And after she had been brought to the altar, and realized that she would be the victim                                             660
of this cruel sacrifice, not even then did she forget herself; but when she saw Neoptolemus waiting, blade in hand and eyes fixed on her countenance, she said,
"The time has come to spill my noble blood; let there be no delay: plunge your blade now into my throat or breast," and she bared both, "for you may rest assured: Polyxena does not desire to live as a slave!
"My only wish is that my death somehow                                        670
could be unnoticed by my mother, for her awareness of it spoils the joy

that I would take in it—although her life,                                          
and not my death, should really make her tremble!
"Do not press close around me now, if what I ask of you is just: let no man's hand defile a maiden's honor by its touch, lest I go to the Styx unwillingly! My death will be more acceptable to him,
whoever he is, whom you propitiate,                                                         680
if I endure it willingly. But if any are moved by these last words of mine— no captive maid but Priam's daughter asks!— then let my mother have my body back without a ransom; let her tears, not gold, redeem my corpse for its sad funeral: when she was able to, she gave you gold."
The tears that she was able to restrain flowed in abundance from the eyes of those
who heard her speak; and even as he plunged                                           690
his blade into the breast she offered him, the priest himself, though with reluctance, wept.
Her knees gave out, and she slid to the ground, a resolute expression on her face right to the end—and as she fell took care to cover up those parts that should be hidden and served the honor of her chastity.
The Trojan women took her body up, once more lamenting another child of Priam,
the many victims given by one house;                                                   700
and they mourned you, who, until yesterday, had been the king's consort and queen-mother, the image of an Asia in its prime— now, even for a captive, you appear especially unfortunate. Ulysses, in his triumph, would surely not have wished

you to be his, except that you gave birth to Hector, who would not have chosen him to be his mother's master and her lord!
She bathed her daughter's corpse now with the tears that she had shed so often for her country, her children, and her husband; she poured those tears into her daughter's wound, and kissed her face and beat her own breast, accustomed to the gesture, and as she plucked her hair in bloody clumps, these words, and even more than these, she cried:
"O daughter, the last grief of your poor mother, what else is there still left for me to lose? The wound that you were given is my own, lest I should ever lose a child of mine without it being murdered—and yet you, because you were a woman, I imagined, would be safe from the sword—but even so, as a woman, you too have perished by it, killed as so many of your brothers were, the victims of Achilles, who has bereft the Trojan people and their helpless queen.
"But after he had fallen to the arrows of Paris and Apollo, I said,'Surely Achilles is no longer to be feared!' Now more than ever I had cause to fear him! The very ashes in his sepulcher despise our race, and even from the grave we feel the enmity that he still bears us! I have been fruitful for Achilles' sake!
"Great Troy has fallen, and the public woe has ended in calamity—yet it has ended: for me alone the story still continues, my ship of sorrow holds its steady course.
"So very fortunate till recently,

in children, in their marriages, my husband—
now destitute, an exile, sundered from
my family's remains! Penelope                    
will soon display me to her women friends
on Ithaca, and tell them, as I weave
my daily quota, 'This is Priam's queen,        
and noble Hector's celebrated mother.'            
"Now after all the others have been lost, you who were left to alleviate my grief
have now been sacrificed upon his tomb!                                              750
The child that I gave birth to has become an offering made to Achilles' ghost! Why do I linger here, unyielding? To what end is my old age, rich only in its years?
"O cruel gods, why draw my lifetime out, unless to show me even further grief? For who could think that Priam could be called fortunate after Troy had been demolished? Only your father's death was fortunate,
my daughter, for he did not see you die,                                                760
leaving his life and kingdom both at once.
"But surely you, a princess of the blood, would have your funeral rites as dowry and lie in state among your ancestors? No, this is not the fortune of our house: your only offerings will be my tears, your burial, upon a foreign beach!
"We have lost everything—yet there remains what may allow me to continue living
a little while: her mother's favorite,                                                        770
my youngest once, and now my only son, my Polydorus, sent to the Thracian king on these same shores. But why do I delay to wash this cruel wound with water

and bathe your face, still splattered with your blood?"
She finished speaking and went down to shore, tottering with age, and in her grief tearing her white hair: "O women of Troy, fetch me an urn," the luckless one commanded,
intending to draw water from the sea,                                                    780
she found instead the body of her son washed onto shore, disfigured by the open wounds carved in it by Thracian implements.
The Trojan women screamed, but Hecuba was silent in her grief, which had devoured the tears and the cry that sprang up deep inside her; she stood stone still and fixed her angry gaze now on the ground and now upon the heavens, and sometimes staring at her dead son's face
and sometimes, and more often, at his wounds,                                     790
as surging rage armed and instructed her.
Yet even in her fury, she behaved as though she were still queen, and fixed her mind and her imagination on revenge; and as a mother lioness, whose cub is taken from her, follows its spoor back to find the enemy it cannot see, so Hecuba, when anger mixed with grief, forgot her years, but not her bravery,
and went directly to the Thracian king,                                                 800
for this cruel murder had been his idea, and asked him for an audience, pretending that she would give him gold that she had long kept hidden for her son. Deceived by this, and by his customary avarice, the king came in secret and implored her thus:
"Give your son the treasure, now, Hecuba, for everything you give will go to him,

as everything you've so far given has, I swear by all the gods."
She stared at him                   810
ferociously as he foreswore himself, and swelling with the flames of indignation, she seized him, calling to the captive women, and sank her fingers in his faithless eyes, and plucked them out—for anger gave her strength— then plunged her hands, stained with his foul blood, into the places where his eyes had been (for they were there no more) and plucked them out.
The Thracians were enraged by this disaster which befell their king, and started to throw stones                              820
and spears at Hecuba; growling, she snapped at the stones they threw at her, and even though her jaws were meant for words, she started barking when she attempted speech. Because of this, the place has taken (and still takes) its name [in Greek, Cynossema: Sign of the Dog] from the place where Hecuba, remembering the evils of that distant time, would howl across the Thracian grasslands mournfully.
The Trojans and her enemies, the Greeks,                                         830
were likewise moved by what became of her, as were the gods in heaven, all of them, even the one who is the bride and sister of Jupiter, for Juno, too, denied that Hecuba deserved to end like this.
Memnon Although she had supported them with arms, Aurora had no time to sympathize when Troy and Hecuba both came to ruin.
The goddess had a care closer to home; a private grief tormented her, the loss                                                    840

of her son Memnon, whom she had just seen Achilles murder with his deadly spear on the Phrygian fields; and, as she watched, the reddish color of the dawn grew pale and clouds spread over the entire sky.
Aurora was unable to look on as her son's body fed the final flames, but didn't think it inappropriate, just as she was, and with her hair unbound,
to fling her arms around the knees of Jove                                             850
and supplement her speech with flowing tears: "Although I am inferior to all the other gods that dwell in shining heaven (my temples being few and far between), I nonetheless approach you as a goddess, but not to ask you for more festal days on earth below, for temples or for altars ablaze with the bright flames of sacrifice: nevertheless, if you would just consider
all that I do (though I am just a woman),                                               860
the services I undertake for you, when, with new light, I sever night from day, you'd say that I deserved to be rewarded.
"But my present situation and concern is not to ask for honors I deserve: I come because I am bereft of Memnon, who bravely (but in vain) bore arms for Priam, and, still a youth, was slain by bold Achilles, for so you wished it. Now I pray that you,
ruler supreme of all the gods in heaven,                                               870
grant him some honor, a solace for his death and consolation for his mother's wound."
Jupiter nodded, as the towering pyre collapsed into its leaping flames,

and thick, black smoke clouds blotted out the day,            
as when a water nymph exhales a fog
that can't be penetrated by the sun;
black embers flying up accumulate                                              
into one body, which, thickening, takes shape,
drawing warmth and animation from the fire;                                      880
lightness provides it with a pair of wings,
and birdlike at first, but very soon a bird
in fact, it flies off noisily among
innumerable sisters like itself,
all of them having the same origin.
Three times they flew around the blazing pyre, and their mournful cries in harmony arose and filled the air; on their fourth circuit, they divided into two opposing camps
which waged ferocious war against each other,                                     890
employing their sharp beaks and curved talons until they had worn out their wings and breasts; and then, as sacrifices to the dead, these ashy creatures fell back to the earth, remembering the hero that they sprang from.
The unexpected offspring took their name from their creator: they are the Memnonides, or children of Memnon; when the sun has crossed the zodiac, their combat is renewed: they fight and die in mourning for their parent.                                   900
So others wept while Hecuba was barking, but Aurora was intent on her own grief, and even to this day she sheds her tears, the morning dew that falls upon the world.
The daughters of Anius Nevertheless, the Fates did not allow the hopes of Troy to perish with the city: Aeneas, the heroic son of Venus,

brought out the sacred objects in his arms,
and likewise sacred, the venerable burden
of his father, Anchises. These were the spoils of war                             910
that pious man selected from his wealth,
and with his son Ascanius, he bore
in his fleet of refugees from Antandros
and from pernicious Thrace, so lately stained
with the blood of Polydorus; winds and tides
favored his voyage, and he soon arrived
at Delos, the city of Apollo, which
he entered with his cohorts.
There Anius the king, who served Apollo as high priest,
received him in his temple and his palace                                              920
and showed him the city, with its famous shrine containing the two trees Latona gripped while she was giving birth to the twin gods.
Here they gave incense to the altar's flame, then doused it with an offering of wine, and after sacrificing cattle, burned the entrails, as was customary, then went back into the palace and reclined on piles of carpets and refreshed themselves with gifts of Ceres and with flowing wine.                                            930
Devout Anchises asked, "Priest of Apollo, am I mistaken in my recollection, or did you not have four daughters and a son when I first came to visit in your city?"
Anius shook his head, bound with white ribbons, and sadly answered him: "You are not wrong,
O  greatest of heroes, for you saw me then as the father of five children, of whom now (such the inconstancy of human life!)
I  am almost entirely bereft;                                                                      940

what aid can I expect from my absent son, who holds the land of Andros (named for him) in his father's place, and rules there as its king?
"Apollo gave him the gift of prophecy, but Bacchus gave a gift to my four daughters greater than they could have prayed or hoped for: whatever any of these maidens touched, turned into grain, or wine, or olive oil: a profitable metamorphosis!
"When Agamemnon, the great scourge of Troy,                                950
learned of this gift (lest you should think that we had not experienced your trials), he at once resorted to the use of force, dragged the reluctant girls from my embrace and ordered them to use their heavenly gift to supply provisions for the Argive fleet.
"Each of them fled where she was able to: two of the girls sought refuge in Euboea, the other two, in Andros with their brother.
The Greeks arrived and threatened him with war                                960
unless he gave them up: the ties that bind in piety were overcome by fear, and he surrendered them for punishment: a brother's pardonable cowardice, for he had no Aeneas to defend his Andros, and no hero like great Hector, who helped you to endure for ten long years.
"Now as the Greeks were forging manacles to bind my daughters, they all raised their arms
to heaven, and together they cried out,                                                  970
'O father Bacchus, deliver us from this!'
"The author of their gift delivered them— if you can call it a delivery to lose your human form in some strange way—

I couldn't understand then how they lost it,
nor am I able to explain it now.
But I do know how this evil came to end:
they put on plumage and became the birds
attending Venus, your immortal consort:
my daughters were all changed to snow-white doves."                         980
The daughters of Orion And there were more such stories until dinner concluded and they sought their beds.
At daybreak, the oracle of Phoebus bade them seek their ancient mother and related shores; the king presented gifts on their departure: a scepter to Anchises, and a robe and quiver to Ascanius his grandson; a goblet to Aeneas which a guest had brought back from Aionia for the king.
The precious goblet was the handiwork                                            990
of Alcon of Hyleus, who had engraved a lengthy narrative along its side. The scene: a city having seven gates, by which the viewer knows that it is Thebes; funeral services were taking place before the city walls: at sepulchers, flames leapt into the air from blazing pyres and mothers with bared breasts and unbound hair proclaimed their grief; and even water nymphs
wept at the ruin of their dried-out springs;                                         1000
the trees were all bare and goats gnawed dry rocks.
But look, where in the middle of the city, the daughters of Orion, both of them, are exhibiting unwomanly behavior: this one exposes her throat to the blade, while that one bares her breast to the cast spear;

they sacrifice themselves to save their people;
then with great ceremony, they are borne
through the city's crowds, to where they are cremated.
And to prevent their family's extinction,                                    1010
twin boys (whom fame has named the Coronae) spring from the still-warm ashes of the virgins; these lads at once join in the services commemorating their maternal cinders.
These figures had been brilliantly depicted around the outside of that ancient bronze; its lip was decorated with a rough border of gold-engraved acanthus leaves. Nor did the Trojans offer gifts less worthy:
they gave Apollo's priest an incense box,                                               1020
a saucer, and a crown of gold and gems.
From there, recalling that Teucrians sprang from Teucer, they sailed off to Crete, but couldn't bear for long the wrath of Jove and left that island of a hundred cities, eager to reach the shores of Italy. Fierce storms of winter tossed their ships about, and when at last they came to the deceitful harbor of the Strophades, Aëllo, a Harpy, terrified them with her threats.                                                1030
And then to Samos, where Neritos dwells, and Ithaca, the kingdom of Ulysses the deceitful; they sailed past both of these, and saw Ambracia, contested by the gods, with its image of a judge turned into rock, but better known now for Apollo's deeds; they saw Dodona, of the talking oaks, and Chaonia's bay, where once the threatened sons of King Molossos managed to escape the impious flames on wings that they both sprouted.                      1040

They next sought out the Phaiakhian's land, felicitous for its abundant orchards, and landed in Epirus at Buthrotos, a town that was a replica of Troy, and ruled by Helenus, a son of Priam; thanks to the prophecies of the Phrygian seer, they were aware of what the future held for them, and after that, they came to Sicily.
That island has three capes that run to sea in three directions: Pachynus is turned                                                  1050
to the rainy south, while Lilybaeum faces the gentle western breezes; Pelorus looks north and sees the Great and Lesser Bears, two groups that never set beneath the sea.
By strength of oar and by the favoring tides, the Teucrians arrived and beached their fleet at nightfall on the sands of Messana: Scylla assails the whole coast on the right, and, on the left, unsleeping Charybdis;
the latter devours and regurgitates                                                         1060
the ships that she has captured, while the former is girdled with wild dogs from the waist down.
She has a virgin's face, and, if our poets are not to be completely disbelieved, was once a maiden ardently pursued by many lovers, all of whom she scorned, finding among the sea nymphs (who adored her) a shelter from unwanted male attentions, where she could boast of outmaneuvered swains.
And there once, while she offered Galatea                                        1070
her hair to groom, that lovelorn Nereid, sighing repeatedly, told her this tale:
Polyphemus, Galatea, and Acis "Without a doubt, O virgin, you attract men of refinement, those of a better class,

whom you can brush off without any fear
of consequence; but I, although the daughter
of two immortals, Nereus and Doris,
and although guarded by a throng of sisters,
could not escape from the undesired
attentions of the Cyclops without grief."                                           1080
A flood of tears kept her from saying more.
The other smoothly scrubbed away the tears from Galatea's eyes and soothed her, saying, "Tell me the reason for your sorrow, dear, do not conceal it—I'm a faithful friend!"
And Galatea answered Scylla so: "Acis, the son of Faunus and a nymph, gave pleasure to his parents, but gave me, a pleasure even greater, to be sure:
we were inseparable. At sixteen,                                                             1090
he was a gorgeous boy, whose tender cheeks displayed the faintest down: I felt for him exactly what the Cyclops felt for me: incessant longing. Nor, if you had asked, would I have been capable of telling you whether my detestation of the Cyclops meant more to me than did my love of Acis: for they were equal!
"O Venus most benign, how powerful a governance is thine!
"For see where that wild creature which the woods                       1100
are terrified to look upon, the host no stranger ever safely sees, the one who disregards Olympus and its gods, now realizes what love's all about, and as he burns with powerful desire, entirely ignores his rocks and flocks; you give attention now to your appearance, Polyphemus, and now you take a rake

against your matted locks, and are well pleased
to trim your shaggy beard with a great scythe,                                     1110
observing your hirsuteness in a pool
and practicing an ardent swain's expressions.
"Your love of slaughter and bloodthirstiness now disappears, and ships can come and go in perfect safety.
"Meanwhile, Telemus, son of Eurymus, an unerring seer, had landed here on Sicily, near Etna.
"He said to terrible Polyphemus, 'That eye of yours, the only one you've got,
and which you wear in the middle of your head,                                 1120
is going to be taken—by Ulysses!'
"The Cyclops laughed and said, 'O foolish seer, you are entirely mistaken here: another has already taken it!'
"So he dismissed the one who tried in vain to warn him, and set out with heavy heart, walking with leaden steps along the shore or turning back, exhausted, to his cave.
"A sloping, wedge-shaped cliff juts out to sea, washed evenly on both sides by the waves:                                          1130
the brutal Cyclops scrambled to its top and sat down in the middle of the rock, soon followed by his sheep, now leaderless.
"And after placing by his feet the pine he used as walking stick—though others might employ it as the yardarm of a ship— he took his pipes made from a hundred reeds, and piped away: the mountains felt it keenly, and the waters, too; a rock concealing me,
I lay in the lap of my darling Acis,                                                        1140
whence I could hear, so very far away,

words of the song the Cyclops sang to me, and kept them afterward within my mind:
" 'O Galatea, whiter than the snowy white flowers that decorate the privet hedge, richer in blossoms than the meadow is, taller, more slender than an alder tree, brighter than crystal, more skittish than a kid, smoother than a seashell on the shore
worn by the ceaseless motion of the waves,                                           1150
more pleasing than the shade in summertime or sun in winter, swifter than the deer, and even more remarkable to see, far more conspicuous than the tall plane tree; clearer than ice, sweeter than ripe grapes, softer than swans' down or the curdled milk, and, if you would not always flee from me, more beautiful than an irrigated garden.
" 'Yet you, the very selfsame Galatea, are fiercer than an untamed heifer is,                                                     1160
harder than oak, more feigning than the sea, tougher than willow wands or bryony, less movable than the rock I'm sitting on, rougher than rapids, prouder than a peacock, fiercer than fire, bitterer than thistles, grumpier than a nursing mother-bear, more unresponsive even than the ocean, less apt to pity than a stepped-on snake, and, finally, the worst of all your faults,
the one that I most wish to rid you of:                                                  1170
not only swifter than the deer pursued by the baying pack, but even swifter than the winds and the swiftest breezes in the air!
" 'If only you would get to know me well, you would regret your giving me the rush,

condemn yourself for holding out against me,
and do your best to keep a catch like me:
a large part of this mountain is my own;
I have my caves, cut from the living rock,
protected from excessive summer heat                                                 1180
and winter's chill; my apples strain their branches,
and yellow grapes are hung upon their vines
like lumps of gold, and purple ones as well:
to serve you, maiden, there will be both kinds;
and in the summer, you yourself will gather
delicious strawberries in wooded shade,
in autumn, cherries, and the sweet black plums,
and not just those, but the big yellow ones,
which have the color of fresh new wax.
" 'Nor will you lack, with me as your mate,                                    1190
chestnuts and fruit of the arbutus tree, and orchards will be placed at your disposal.
" 'This flock is mine entirely, and many others are out there grazing in the valley, many I have in the woods, and many more are penned in stables deep within my caves; and if you were to ask, I could not say how many sheep are mine, for only paupers can tally up the number of their flocks;
but don't trust me when I sing my own praises:                                    1200
just look around you here and trust your eyes, see how these sheep can scarcely get around, with their teats hanging down between their shanks.
" 'The little lambs are kept warm in their folds, as are an equal number of small goats. The milk I get from them is snowy white, and part of it is kept for drinking fresh, and the rest of it is made into my cheeses.
" 'You'll get no ordinary gifts from me,

and nothing that is easily obtained,                                                    1210
like deer, and hares, and goats, and pairs of doves,
or a bird's nest lifted off a treetop:
on a mountainside, I found a pair of twins,
too like for you to tell one from the other—
playmates for you! Cubs of the shaggy bear!
I cried out, when I found them,"For my mistress!"
" 'Come on now, Galatea, now's the time to lift your pretty head above the waves! Come on now, don't despise my offerings!
I have a good opinion of myself:                                                            1220
lately I saw my image in the water, and my appearance pleased enormously.
" 'Just look how big I am! Not even Jove— this Jupiter that you go on about, who you say governs heaven—is as big! Abundant hair hangs over my fierce face and shoulders, shading me, just like a grove; but don't think me unsightly just because I am completely covered in dense bristles:
unsightly is the tree that has no leaves,                                                  1230
the horse without a mane; birds have their plumage and sheep are most attractive in their wool, so facial hair and a full body beard are really most becoming in a man.
"'In the middle of my forehead is one eye, as large in its appearance as a shield: what of it, then? Does not the mighty Sun see everything that happens here on earth? And as for eyes, he too has only one!
" 'And furthermore, my father Neptune rules                                   1240
your waters; I present him as a gift to be your father-in-law—if you will only have pity on my prayers and supplications!

" 'For only you do I bow down before, despising Jupiter and heaven too, and his all-penetrating thunderbolt! I fear you, Galatea, and your wrath, far more ferocious than Jove's armaments!
" 'But I could bear your scorn more patiently if you fled everyone—though you do not:                                            1250
how can you spurn the Cyclops, but love Acis, preferring his embraces to my own? Well, he may please himself for all of that, but what I don't like is, he pleases you, Galatea—-just let me at the guy, he'll learn that I'm as strong as I am big! I'll tear his living gut out and I'll scatter his body parts in fields and in your waters, so you can mingle with his mangled limbs!
" 'I burn indeed, and your offense against me                                   1260
blazes within more fiercely than a fire: I feel as though Mount Etna in eruption has been transported into my own breast, and none of this makes any difference to how you feel about me, Galatea!'
"And after uttering these vain complaints, he stood erect (for I saw everything), and as a bull whose cow is snatched away, unable to stand still, goes wandering
through forests and familiar fields, until                                                 1270
that wild one catches sight of me with Acis, and we both unaware and fearless too:
" 'I see!' he cried out, 'and I will see to it that this fond coupling will be your last!' And these words spoken in a frightening voice, such as an angry Cyclops ought to have, that left Mount Etna shaken to its core.

"In fear, I dove into the nearby waters, while my Sicilian hero turned and fled,
crying out,'Galatea! Help me! Please!'                                                        1280
and 'Help me, parents! Admit into your kingdom the son who otherwise will be soon dead!'
"The Cyclops followed, pausing just to fling a portion that he'd broken off the mountain, and even though the barest corner struck him, it nonetheless crushed Acis altogether. I (who could do but as the Fates permitted) caused Acis to assume ancestral powers.
"Bright purple blood streamed from beneath the rock, and in a little while the redness faded                                                         1290
until it turned the color of a stream           
swollen from the first rainstorms of spring, then shortly afterward completely cleared.
"The boulder that the Cyclops threw cracked open, and from within, there sprang a living reed of noble size; and from the hollow rock there came the sound of waters leaping up, and marvelous! there suddenly emerged, from the middle of that womb, a tender youth
whose fresh new horns were wreathed in streaming rushes,                  1300
and who, though larger than he used to be, and with a face now of immortal blue, was Acis, changed into a river god, whose waters kept the name he had before."
Scylla and Glaucus When Galatea finished with her story, the company of Nereids dissolved and went off swimming in the placid waters. Not Scylla, though: the maiden did not dare entrust her body to the liquid depths, but wandered naked on the thirsty beach                                                   1310

or swam, when she was weary, in a pool secluded and remote, to cool her limbs.
But look, where other limbs, so lately changed (near Anthedon, a town set in Boeotia), belonging to a strange new resident of the deep sea, skim now across its waves: Glaucus is here—and brought to a standstill by his desire at first sight of her, he says whatever comes into his mind
that he thinks might be able to prevent her                                           1320
from fleeing him; but she flees anyway, fear speeding her, until she comes to rest atop a mountain very near the shore, a massive mountain, facing out to sea, which rose up till it gathered in a peak of shaded woods that hung out over it: here, in a place of safety, Scylla stopped, not knowing whether he was god or monster, admiring his color and the hair
descending past his shoulders to his back,                                            1330
where at his groin began a fish's tail.
He senses her discomfiture, and says, while leaning on a rock that stood nearby, "Maiden, I am no monster, no wild thing; I am, in fact, a god of these same deeps, and of no less authority to govern than Proteus or Triton or Palaemon.
"Before that, I was, nonetheless, a mortal, but so bound to the ocean, to be sure,
that even then I schooled myself in it:                                                    1340
now I would draw in nets laden with fish, and now, while sitting on a rock, employ my rod and line.
"There is a strip of beach

adjacent to green meadows: on one side,
the waves, and on the other, fields,
undamaged by the grazing of horned cattle,
or depredations made by sheep or goats;
no busy bee has gathered flowers here,           
no festive wreathes were ever taken hence,
and grasses never felt the sickle's sweep.                                                 1350
"I was the first to stop there on that turf, while my wet fishing lines were drying out and I examined my catch of the day, all laid out in a line along the shore, the fish that chance had swept into my nets or whom credulity brought to my hooks.
"Now comes what sounds like fiction, I admit, but what advantage would I gain by feigning? Lying on the grass, my plunder from the surf
began to stir, and flipped from side to side,                                            1360
as all at once, they strove to leave the earth and get back to the water. While I watched, dumbfounded and incapable of moving, they fled, the lot of them, abandoning the shore and their new master for the sea.
"I stood stock-still in wonder a long time, asking myself how such a thing could be; was it some god—or something in the grass? 'How could mere grass,' I asked,'be strong as that?'
"I plucked some and I ground it in my teeth,                                   1370
and scarcely had I gulped that unknown liquid, when suddenly my heart began to pound, and my whole sensibility was taken with the desire for another element, which I could not resist for long: 'Farewell,
O earth, which I will nevermore return to,'
I said, and plunged beneath the ocean's waves.

"The sea gods welcomed me, pronounced me fit to join their honorable company,
and asked the Ocean and his consort, Tethys,                                        1380
to take away whatever still remained of my mortality; and this they did first, by the recital of a hymn, nine times, to purge me of my evil; then they bade me to immerse myself a hundred times in just as many rivers; when I did, the rivers that flow on from every part poured all their cleansing waters on my head.
"I can recall what happened up to this point, and repeat it to you; this I recollect,                                                       1390
but I don't understand the rest of it. When I awoke, my body and my mind were both much changed from what they once had been: I saw then for the first time my green beard, and my long hair, which spreads across the waves, and my broad shoulders, and my sea-blue arms and legs which vanish in a fish's tail.
"But where's the benefit of my new form, and that the sea gods are all pleased with me—
what point is there to my divinity,                                                             1400
if you have not been touched by all of this?"
And so he spoke, and had much more to say, and would have said it, had not Scylla fled; then he, enraged by her rejection, went to the wondrous halls of Titan's daughter, Circe.

BOOK XIV
AROUND AND ABOUT WITH AENEAS
Glaucus         Aeneas wanders         The Sybil
Cyclops revisited         Circe revisited
Circe and Picus         Acmon transformed         The wild olive tree
The transformation of Aeneas' ships         The Heron
The deification of Aeneas         Pomona and Vertumnus (1)
Iphis and Anaxaretes         Pomona and Vertumnus (2)
A Roman spring         The deification of Romulus

Glaucus
Now he who dwells among the swelling waves
left Etna, perched upon the Giant's Neck,                      
and left the Cyclops' fields, that were unused                  
to rake and plow and unbeholden to
the oxen yoked together in matched pairs;
Messana, too, he left behind, and left
the walls of Rhegium, on the far side
of that shipwrecking strait which separates
the shores of Sicily and Italy.
From there, with mighty strokes propelling him                                10
across the Tyrrhene Sea, Glaucus arrived at the grass-covered hills and fabled halls inhabited by many varied beasts, where Circe, daughter of the Sun, held sway.
No sooner had he seen her and exchanged greetings, when he urgently implored her: "Have pity on a god, I beg you, goddess, for you alone can cure my passion—if you find me worthy! The strength of magic herbs
is better known to no one than to me,                                                   20
for they have utterly transformed my life!
"What caused my madness? This: one glimpse of Scylla on the Italian coast, off Sicily! It would be much too shameful to repeat the promises that she dismissed with scorn, the vows and the endearments she rejected!
"But if there is some power found in charms, then by all means, recite a charm for me; or, if herbs should be of greater potency,
rely on those you know as efficacious;                                                    30
I am not asking to be healed and whole, to have this burden lifted from my heart, but that these flames should burn her in some part."

Such flames burned no one more than they burned Circe, (either because of her own inclinations or by the agency of Venus, acting in retribution for the Sun's exposure of her own indiscretion once, with Mars) and who responded to his plea with this:
"You would do better to pursue someone                                        40
as ready and as willing as yourself, someone who reciprocates your passion.
"For you were worthy once (most certainly!) of being asked, and, take my word for it, if only you will give a girl some hope, you will assuredly be asked again.
"Don't think that you are lacking in appeal, for I, a goddess, the daughter of the Sun, the mistress of strong drugs and incantations,
I pray that you will have me! Only spurn                                              50
the one who spurns your passion, and return the love of one who loves you: let one deed serve two women as they each of them deserve."
Glaucus responded to her proposition: "The leaves of trees will spring out of the ocean, and seaweed will be found on mountain ranges, before my love for Scylla ever changes."
The goddess was offended; even though she could not injure him, another god
(nor did she wish to, being so in love),                                                   60
yet stung by his rejection, she concocted at once a mess of horrifying herbs and poison potions; as she blended these, she murmured certain charms of Hecate's, then dressed herself in a cloak of azure hue, and passing on through throngs of cringing beasts, she left her palace, seeking Rhegium,

across the straits directly from Messana,
and made her way over the roiling waters                             
as if she walked upon the solid earth,                                                          70
her bare feet dry as she skimmed the tops of waves.
There was a little pool, curved like a bow, that Scylla found appealing for its quiet; here she restored herself from midday heat, when the sun was high and shadows disappeared.
Circe got here before the maiden did, and fouled that place with poisons that produced prodigious monsters; juice of noisome roots she sprinkled there, and three times nine times spoke the dark and winding words of incantation,                                                80
her lips well practiced in the magic arts.
Arriving, Scylla sinks into the pool up to her waist, and when she first beholds her private parts deformed into the shapes of barking dogs, cannot believe them her, and in her fear, attempts to drive them off, and then flees from their gaping wantonness; but what she flees is drawn along with her, and reaching down to touch herself below,
discovers not her thighs and legs and feet,                                                   90
but that those parts of her have been replaced by gaping mouths, like those of Cerberus; she stands on rabid dogs and on the backs of beasts beneath her, and her private parts are girded with a ring of monstrous shapes.
Her lover Glaucus wept at this and fled from having any more to do with Circe, whose use of potent herbs was too aggressive.
Scylla remained where she was standing, though, and when the opportunity arose                                                                 100
for her to show the hatred she bore Circe,

she carried off Ulysses' men as plunder,
and would have done the same to the Trojan ships
had she not been transformed into a rock
before their coming—a rock that stands there still,
deep in the water, shunned by navigation.
Aeneas wanders When the Trojans had passed Scylla and Charybdis, and were quite near the shores of Italy, a head wind drove them to the Libyan coast,
where Dido took Aeneas to her heart                                                   110
and home, but was unable to endure a separation from her Phrygian mate; and on a pyre built to counterfeit the sacred rites, she fell upon his sword: and she, who had been tricked, tricked everyone.
And fleeing that new city in the sands, Aeneas once again returned to Eryx, the royal residence of his true friend Acestes; here, at Anchises tomb, he honored his father with gift offerings                                                120
And setting out again in ships that Iris, the messenger of Juno, almost burned, he soon sailed past the Aeolian isles, and the lands that reek of burning sulfur, and the rocky islets haunted by the Sirens, the daughters of Achelous; and then, once he had lost the helmsman of his ship, he coasted past Inareme and Prochyte, and Pithecusae on its barren hill, an island named for its inhabitants.                                                         130
For to be sure, the father of the gods, enraged by all the fraud and perjury and criminality of the Cercopians, transformed their men into misshapen creatures,

so that they should seem unlike human beings
and yet appear quite similar as well,                                   
with shortened limbs and flattened, pushed-back noses
and faces deeply lined with old-age furrows;
and with their bodies cloaked in yellow hair,
he sent them off to dwell in these abodes,                                             140
but not before he took from them the use
of their congenitally lying tongues,
yet left them with the power to complain,
in raucous, strident noises, of their lot.
The Sybil When he had sailed past these and left behind the walls of Parthenope on his right, there, on his left side he beheld the tomb of Misenus, Aeolus' tuneful son, and the fertile lowlands' sedgy marsh
on the coast of Cumae, where he stopped and entered                         150
the cave of the superannuated Sibyl to pray that he might journey through Avernus for consultation with his father's shade.
For a long time, the Sybil kept her gaze fixed on the ground, but when the god within had stirred her to frenzy, she raised her eyes to his: "It is a great thing that you ask of me," the Sybil said, "O man of mighty deeds, whose strength and piety have been essayed by sword and fire and are well esteemed.                                               160
"So put aside your apprehension here, Aeneas: what you ask for will be granted; and with me leading, you will come to know the Elysian abodes and that extraordinary kingdom within whose borders you will find the shade of your dear father: nothing prevents such access to the man of excellence."

She spoke and showed him, deep within the wood of Proserpina, a shining golden branch
and ordered him to break it from its tree.                                               170
Aeneas did as he was told and saw the underworld's formidable resources, and his ancestral spirits, and the shade of that great-spirited and venerable man, father Anchises. He carefully observed the laws and customs of the places there, and learned what dangers he himself would face in the wars to come. And afterward, as he retraced his steps in weariness,
struck up a conversation with his guide,                                                180
to alleviate the journey's tedium.
And while they were returning through dim twilight on that dreadful road, Aeneas said to her, "Whether you are yourself a goddess, or are one who is most pleasing to the gods, you will seem always most divine to me. I will avow that my opportunity to tour the underworld and leave it alive has been your gift to me; and in exchange,
when I return to where the air is fresh,                                                  190
I will erect a temple and establish a cult that will burn incense in your honor."
The Sybil took a deep breath and responded, "I am no goddess—and no mere mortal is worthy of the gift of sacred incense! But lest you err by ignorance, know that eternal life was offered to me once, if I would yield my maidenhead to Phoebus, who, while he thought I would submit to him, attempted to seduce me with fine gifts:                                                200
" 'Select, Cumaean virgin, what you wish, and you will have whatever it may be.'

"I pointed to a piled-up heap of sand and asked a gift that would prove meaningless: that I should have as many years of life as sand grains in the pile. My words escaped before I'd thought to say, 'unaging years.' He gave the years and promised endless youth if I would let him love me—but I spurned the gifts of Phoebus and remained a maid.                                             210
"My better days have turned their back on me, and scant old age with palsied step draws near, which I must suffer for a long, long time, for seven centuries have been accomplished, and three more yet remain to me before my years are equal to those grains of sand: three hundred harvestings of grape and grain.
"A time will come when many days reduce my body to near nothing, and old age
whittles my limbs to where they scarce can bear                                   220
their meager burden; nor will I then seem to have inspired love in a god's breast; Phoebus himself perhaps will not remember, or may deny that he desired me: these are the changes I will come to bear, but when I am no longer visible, I will be recognized by my voice still, according to the promise of the Fates."
So while they journeyed up that sloping road, the Sybil told her story to Aeneas;                                                          230
they exited the underworld at Cumae, and there Aeneas offered customary sacrifices, then landed on the shore that, as yet, did not bear his nurse's name.
Cyclops revisited Macareus, companion of Ulysses, had lingered here, weary of wandering.

He recognizes Achaemenides,
who had so long ago been left behind
on rocky Etna, and who, now discovered
so unexpectedly among the living,                                                         240
causes astonishment: "What luck, what god
has saved you, Achaemenides?" he asked.
"What is a Greek doing on a Trojan ship,
and what land are you seeking in this vessel?"
Now like himself, no longer clad in rags that thorns had torn and then had pinned together, Achaemenides answered him with this:
"May I behold Polyphemus again, his gaping jaws awash in human blood,
if I prefer my home and Ithaca                                                                250
to this ship, or if I should venerate Aeneas less than I do my own father; nor would I ever, though I gave my all, be able to discharge my debt to him!
"I speak, I breathe, I look up at the stars in heaven, always mindful, always grateful! His gift was that I did not end my life in the Cyclops' mouth—that if I should die now, I'd have another grave besides his gut!
"What feelings came to me—or would have come,                           260
had dread not left me numb to all sensation— when I beheld you make for the open seas! I wanted to cry out to you, but feared to give myself up to the enemy: Ulysses' outcry nearly sank you all! I saw a boulder broken from the mountain and hurled into the middle of the water! I saw him flinging out enormous rocks with his great arms, as from a catapult, and feared that wind and waves would sink your ship—                      370

having forgotten I was not on board.
"But after you had fled from certain death, the groaning Cyclops prowled all over Etna and shook the trees to search them with his hands, and blindly hurled himself against the rocks, and stretching his misshapen arms out seaward, he damned all Greeks entirely and said,
" 'If only by some chance that knave Ulysses were brought back here—or any of his men
on whom I might now ventilate my rage,                                              280
whose guts I might devour, and whose lives might be extinguished in my strong right hand, whose blood might run in rivers down my throat, whose shattered limbs might quiver in my jaws— little or nothing would my blindness seem!'
"This and much more he said, just as ferocious, while pale-faced horror gripped me at the sight of those grim features, stained with recent slaughter! Those hands! The empty socket of that eye! That beard, now stiff with human gore! Those limbs!                           290
"My death was right before my very eyes, although it was the least of all my troubles, for now I reckoned that I would be caught, that my own viscera would merge with his: I couldn't get that image from my mind, how I had seen two of my companions snatched up, their bodies dashed against the ground three or four times, before he crouched above them, and like a shaggy lion at his prey,
had crammed his belly with their guts, their flesh,                                300
the marrow of their bones, their twitching limbs!
"A tremor seized me: there I stood, stock-still, my face a funeral as I watched him chew and spit out remnants of his bloody feast

and vomit gobbets mixed with sour wine,
and I pictured the same fate in store for me
and hid myself away for many days,
trembling at every sound I heard,
fearing my death and wishing but to die,
and living off of acorns, grass, and leaves,                                               310
helpless, alone, abandoned to my death,
until, after a long time had gone by,
at a great distance, I beheld a ship,
and begging with dumb gestures for relief,
I raced down to the shore: I touched their hearts
and a Trojan ship allowed a Greek on board!
Circe revisited "But you, most welcome comrade, tell your adventures— what leader, what companions went with you when you entrusted yourself to the sea?"
Macareus told them of how Aeoleus,                                                 320
son of Hippotes, ruled the Tyrrhene Sea, imprisoning the winds: he gave Ulysses a gift worth mentioning: a bag of winds, and aided by the breezes it contained, he sailed nine days until he came in sight of the desired land. But at first light of the tenth day, his crew was overcome by greed and envy: after reckoning the bag was full of gold, they loosed the string
that bound it up and were blown all the way back                               330
across the waves until their ship regained the harbor of Aeoleus the king.
"And after that," Macareus went on,   "we came to Formiae, in ancient times founded by Lamus the Laestrygonian; Antiphates was ruler in this kingdom. I was dispatched to him with two companions,

and barely managed, after taking flight,
to save myself and one of my two men:                           
the other's blood was smeared across the faces                                      340
of the inhospitable Laestrygonians.
"Antiphates pursued us as we fled,                                 
urging his forces on: they came together and hurled great rocks and timbers after us and sank our men and sank our ships as well. Ulysses and I, however, got away on one of them.
"We mourned our lost companions and with much lamentation found that land which, at a distance, you can see from here—
believe me when I say that from a distance                                            350
is the best way to see it!                               
"O goddess-born, most righteous man of all the Trojan race (whom I may not describe as 'enemy,' now that the war is over), heed my warning: avoid the shores of Circe!
"We landed there, but with Antiphates still fresh in mind and the barbaric Cyclops, we refused to leave our ships; so men were picked by lot whose task was to approach her secret palace.
"The lot sent me and loyal Polites                                                      360
as my companion with Eurylochus and Elpenor (who was too fond of wine) and eighteen others to the walls of Circe; as soon as we'd arrived there and were standing upon the threshold of her palace, a thousand wolves, she-bears, and lionesses came rushing at us, frightening us all; our fears were groundless, for they meant no harm

and even joined us, followed in our tracks,
wagging their tails and fawning just like dogs,                                       370
until we were received by her attendants
and brought through marble courtyards to their mistress,
who sat upon her throne within an alcove
in a robe of purple and a golden veil.
"Nymphs joined with Nereids in serving her, their nimble fingers plucking at no wool nor deftly spinning it to useful thread: instead, they went through piles of herbs and flowers and sorted plants out into separate baskets;
she supervised the work that they were doing,                                      380
who knew the purpose of every leaf, and how to blend ingredients together, and weighed and measured them out carefully.
"When she had noticed us and made us welcome, she gazed upon us warmly and gave signs that our prayers were going to be answered. She ordered her attendants to prepare refreshments at once: they produced a drink of roasted barley, honey, and strong wine
with curds of milk, whose sweetness would conceal                             390
the drops of juice she furtively slipped in.
"We took the cups the goddess offered us, and when we'd thirstily consumed it all, the goddess touched each of us with her wand atop our heads. It shames me, yet I'll say it: bristles began to sprout all over me, and I lost my ability to speak:        instead of words I only managed grunts, my face was turned completely to the ground,
and I could feel my mouth becoming hard                                          400
and turning into an extended snout— my neck grew thick with wrinkles, and that part

which only recently had held the cup
was now creating hoof prints in the dirt!
I was enclosed in a pigsty with all those                                    
likewise transformed—so potent was that drink!
"We saw that just one man, Eurylochus,    persisted in his shape: he alone had shunned the proffered cup; had he not done so,
I would still be among that herd of porkers,                                          410
nor would he have been able to inform Ulysses of our tragic situation, nor he have come to Circe, seeking vengeance.
"Peace-bearing Mercury had given him a white flower, which the gods call moly: it springs up from the soil out of black roots. With this, and with the deity's instructions to keep him safe, he entered Circe's palace: he too was offered the deceitful cup,
but struck away the wand with which she tried                                    420
to stroke his hair, and terrified the witch with his drawn sword.
"And afterward, when they had pledged their faith and shaken hands on it, and she had taken him to be her spouse, he made her, for his dowry, restore us; then we were sprinkled with the healing juices of an unknown herb, and tapped upon the head with the other end of her enchanted wand, and words were spoken to undo the words that had been spoken to make us the herd's.                                          430
The more she sang, the more upright we stood; bristles dropped off, and our cloven hooves were turned back into feet, and our shoulders and upper arms resumed their normal shapes; weeping, we clung to our weeping leader,

embraced him and threw our arms about his neck, but nothing said until we all had thanked him.
"We lingered there with Circe for a year, and in that time I witnessed many things
and took in much by listening: for instance,                                          440
this story told me privately, by one of her four slaves, assigned to sacred rites.
Circe and Picus "One day, while Circe dallied with Ulysses, this woman that I mentioned pointed out a statue of white marble which depicted a youth with a woodpecker on his head; it had been placed in a temple of its own and was distinguished by its many wreathes; but who the marble figure represented
and why it had its cult here in this temple,                                            450
and why the bird, were things I wished to know!
" 'Listen to this, Macareus,' she said, 'and learn how powerful my mistress is; apply yourself to what I have to say:
" 'Picus, the son of Saturn, was the king of Ausonia, and one who understood the purpose of the cavalry in combat. His manly form was as you see it here, but if you could have seen the living man,
you would have found the truth superior                                              460
to its depiction by an artist's hand. He hadn't yet gone four times to the games they celebrate at Elis twice each decade.
" 'He turned the heads of all the dryads born in the mountains of Latium, and was pursued by water nymphs and by the naiads who haunt Tiber's stream, as well as those beside the waters of Numicius and Anio,

brief-running Alma, swiftly flowing Nar,                     
and Farfarus, hidden under its shade trees,                      470
and those as well within the woody pool                     
of Scythian Diana and its nearby lake.
" 'All these he spurned, attracted just to one, a nymph, delivered on the Palatine (or so the story went) to Venilia, and fathered by the double-facing Janus; when she had reached the marriageable age, she was betrothed to Picus, much preferred to all other suitors.
" 'She was exquisite not just for beauty, but the art of singing,                                              480
and for which she was given the name Canens: she moved the trees and rocks, and tamed the beasts and stilled great rivers with her lovely voice; she charmed the birds right back into their tree.
" 'And while his wife was singing prettily, Picus of Latium set out from home to hunt the wild boar native to that region; dressed in a purple tunic trimmed with gold, he pressed his legs against his horse's back, holding a pair of spears in his left hand.                                                 490
" 'The daughter of the Sun had quit those fields that bore her name—Circeaen—and had come to these same woods, out to collect fresh herbs on the abundant hillsides. From within a thicket, she caught sight of him: at once astounded, she let fall her gathered herbs; she blushed, and that bright color penetrated right to the very marrow of her bones.
" 'As soon as she had pulled herself together and had recovered from the shock of passion,                                       500
she was about to tell him what she wanted

but wasn't able to get near enough,
so swift his steed, so great his entourage.
" ' "Not even on the wind could you escape me, not if I know my powers and myself," said Circe, "not if I still know my herbs, not if my charms have not abandoned me!"
" 'She spoke and formed an incorporeal image of a wild boar and ordered it
to start across the trail before the king,                                                       510
then to appear to plunge into a thicket full of fallen trees, where the woods were densest, impenetrable to a man on horseback.
" 'Swiftly dismounting from his frothing steed, Picus, all unaware, sought out his prey, pursuing an illusion through deep woods, without companions.
" 'Circe now began to utter certain prayers and incantations, addressing unknown gods with unknown charms,
which would allow her to conceal the moon                                       520
and hide her father's face behind rain clouds.
" 'Then, by the recitation of her prayers, the sky grew dark, fog rose up from the earth, and the king's companions wandered all amazed, unable to protect him in his danger.
" 'The hour and the setting are arranged: "Oh, by your eyes," she cried, "which have taken mine, and by your figure, O most beautiful, which has converted me, a goddess, even,
into a suppliant, I implore you                                                                 530
to assuage my passion's fires and accept the all-seeing Sun as your father-in-law, nor harshly spurn the Titan's daughter, Circe!"
" 'She spoke; he savagely rejected her:

"Whatever you are," he said, "I am not yours;
I have been captured by another,
who holds, and will hold me, I pray, forever,
nor will I violate my marriage vows                                     
to Canens, daughter of immortal Janus,
as long as fate allows her to be mine."                                                    540
" 'And when the Titan's daughter realized that her oft-repeated pleas had come to naught, she said, "You will not stroll away from here, returning to your Canens: no, you will learn just what a woman scorned in love can do, for Circe is a loving woman, scorned!"
" 'Then, after turning three times to the west and three times to the east, she cast three spells and struck the young man three times with her wand; he fled, but was amazed to find himself                                                 550
running more swiftly now than usual; he saw the feathers on his body, and, enraged to find himself so suddenly transformed into this new, unprecedented kind of bird in his own woods of Latium, he pecked at the rough oaks with his hard beak, and angrily left wounds on their long limbs; his wings took on the scarlet of his tunic, the golden clasp he wore upon it changed
into bright feathers; a band of yellow gold                                             560
encircled his neck; and now, but for his name, nothing remained of Picus from before.
" 'Meanwhile, his comrades, who, with hue and cry had searched the fields and not discovered him, came upon Circe (for she'd cleared the air and let the sun and winds disperse the clouds) and rightly they accused her of her crime against the king, demanding his return,

and making preparations to attack her with their fierce weapons.
" 'Instead, she sprinkled them                   570
with noxious drugs and poisonous concoctions, and summoning up Night and all his gods, that dwell below in Erebus and Chaos, she called upon the goddess Hecate with long-drawn ululations.
" 'Astonishing to say it, but the woods leapt from their place, the earth shuddered, the nearby trees turned white, and clumps of grass were stained with drops of blood; stones seemed to bellow and wild dogs to bay,
the earth appeared to writhe with poison serpents,                               580
and ghostly forms to flutter all around.
" 'Astounded by these monstrous apparitions, his comrades turned into a fearful mob; she touched their faces—trembling, terrified— with the magic wand by which these youths were changed into a great variety of beasts; and not a one of them kept his old shape.
" 'Phoebus, descending, had already bathed the Spanish coast beyond the Western Gates,
and the spouse that Canens sought with eyes and heart                        590
was nowhere to be found: slaves and subjects hastened through the forest, bearing torches; nor did it seem sufficient to the nymph to weep and tear her hair and beat her breast (though she did all of these), but she herself rushed off and wandered madly through the woods.
" 'Six days and nights observed her wandering through hills and valleys just as Chance proposed, without food or sleep; the Tiber was the last to see her, worn by grief and wandering,                                               600

laying her body down on its long bank;
and there she poured her heart out in her grief,
words mixed with tears in ever-fainter tones,
as when it happens that the swan will sing                                  
his elegy himself before he dies.
" 'At last, attenuated so by grief that in her bones the marrow turned to water, she melted down and vanished on the breezes;           
the place has kept alive her legend's fame,
however, bearing even now the name                                                     610
of the nymph Canens, given by the Muses.'
"Many such things I saw and heard about during that long year's time, in which we grew accustomed to our inactivity:                                      
once more we were commanded to set sail; Circe warned us of all that lay ahead: a long journey on an uncertain path and danger everywhere on that cruel sea. I must confess that I was terrified, and when we reached this shore, I stayed behind."                                   620
Acmon transformed So Macareus ended his account, and the ashes of the wet nurse of Aeneas, sealed in a marble urn, were then interred in a grave with these brief verses on the stone:
WITHIN, THE ASHES OF CAIËTA LIE:
MY FOSTER CHILD, KNOWN FOR HIS PIETY,
SNATCHED ME FROM GREEK FLAMES, THEN CREMATED ME
WITH FITTING RITES AND GREAT PROPRIETY
The lines that bound them to the grassy shore were loosed, and treachery left far behind                                                  630
in the abode of that disreputable goddess:

they sought the wooded grove where gloomy Tiber
sends his sand-laden waters to the sea;
he won the throne and daughter of the king
of Latium, though not without a struggle,
for Turnus, raging, battled for the bride
he had been previously promised, and
war with a fierce race was undertaken,
as Etruria united against Latium,
and for a long time a hard victory                                                          640
was sought in the anxiety of arms.
Both sides increased the size of their own forces with help from foreigners, and many men guarded the Rutulian and Trojan camps. Aeneas sued successfully for aid from King Evander, although Venulus was disappointed on his mission to the city of the exiled Diomedes: he had founded a great-walled city in Apulia,
the realm of Daunus, and he held the lands                                           650
his bride had brought him as her dowry.
But after Venulus, at the behest of Turnus, had gone to him and asked him for his help, Diomedes answered that he lacked the troops, and was unwilling to commit himself or the forces of his father-in-law, either; nor did he have a nation of his own that he could mobilize: "Lest you should think that my excuses to you are fictitious,
I will recount my bitter woes again,                                                     660
though each recital must renew my grief.
"When Ilium's high towers had been burned, and Troy had toppled into the Greek flames, and after Ajax (who alone deserved the punishment that all of us received

because he took a virgin from a virgin)
had sinned against Minerva, we poor Greeks
were taken by the winds and strewn all over
the hostile sea, whose wrath (and heaven's too)
we bore in the forms of rainstorm, darkness, lightnings,                          670
till finally, the blow to end all blows:
the promontory at Caphereus!
"I will not long delay you, setting out our woes in the order they occurred: just say that even Priam would have wept to see how Greece was faring at that time!
"Warlike Minerva kept me safe, however, and delivered me from the tumultuous waves into another sorrow, even worse:
I was expelled from my ancestral fields                                                 680
as kindly Venus settled an old score with fresh new pain; and so oppressive were the toils at sea and wars on land I bore that often I would call men fortunate who had been drowned in the storm we all endured or had been shipwrecked on Caphereus, and wished myself to have been one of them.
"My comrades had endured the very worst that wars and storms could offer, and they begged
that our wandering should have an end;                                                690
but Acmon, an excitable young man, made even more so by these trials, said,
" 'Is there still something you have not endured,' he asked,'some grief you might decline to bear? What is there that is left for her to do, if she should wish to do more than she has? As long as we fear something worse may come, prayer has its place—but when the short straw's drawn, we put our fears behind us and below,

and hopelessness releases us from care.                                                  700
" 'So let her hear me saying this—so what? So what if she despises, as she does, all of the men who serve with Diomedes, since all of us despise her attitude: her high-and-mightiness seems scarcely high, as far as we're concerned!'
"Provocative, those words of Acmon, and they angered Venus, and brought her old anger back to life again.
"His bitter words pleased very few of us, and the majority rebuked Acmon,                                                          710
who learned, when he attempted to reply, that his throat and voice were both attenuated, his hair had changed to feathers, and new plumage concealed his recently remodeled neck; his arms accepted even larger feathers, and his sharp elbows turned gracefully to wings; his feet were given over to webbed digits, and his face hardened to inexpressive horn that ended in a sharply pointed beak.
"Lycus, Idas, Rhexenor, Nycteus,                                                       720
and Abas, too, all stared at him in wonder, and while they wondered, took on the same shape; the greater part of them were changed to birds and flew up all together as one flock, encircling the oarsmen on flapping wings: and if you wish to know what kind of bird they had so swiftly been transformed into, I'd have to say that though they weren't swans, they much resembled them, though these were white.
"And now that I am the son-in-law of Daunus,                                730
I hold—-just barely—this new-founded town

and these dry fields with what few men are left."
Here Diomedes finished his account.                      
The wild olive tree Venulus left the realm of Calydon,                                                
the realm of Peucetia and the fields of Messapia, where he saw a cave hidden in the forest dense and misty, a screen of waving reeds that grew before it.
Goat-footed Pan now holds it as his own, but at one time it was the lair of nymphs                                               740
who had been driven off in terror by the unexpected apparition of an Apulian shepherd. But soon after, the nymphs regained their lost composure, and, with nothing but contempt for their pursuer, they went back once again to nimble-footed choral dancing.
Still the shepherd mocked them with boorish imitations of their dancing, and barnyard insults, and obscene expressions;
nor would he close his mouth until a tree                                             750
sprang from his throat and covered up his face; indeed, he is a tree now: by his fruits you may know what kind, for the sour berries of the wild olive show his language plain, whose bitterness has entered into them.
The transformation of Aeneas' ships When the ambassadors returned with word that the Aetolians refused to fight, the Rutulians waged war without their help, as they had planned, and both sides shed much blood.
But look! Where Turnus flings his greedy torches                             760
at hulls of pine, and ships spared by the waves

are terrified by fire! Vulcan now burns pitch and wax and other foods for flames, which leap from mast to mast, and the wooden thwarts in the curved hulls are wreathed in acrid smoke!
Then the Holy Mother of the Gods recalled that these pines had been felled upon the summit of Mount Ida, and at once she filled the air with the tintinnabulation of her cymbals
and the shrill ululation of her boxwood flutes;                                      770
and lightly carried through the parting air in a chariot drawn by her familiar lions, the goddess cried, "Your sacrilegious hand flings torches at these ships to no avail, Turnus, for I will rescue them from danger: I will not let your hungry flames devour limbs that were mine, that grew in my own groves!"
The goddess was still speaking when it thundered, and the thunder was immediately followed
by dancing hailstones mixed with falling rain;                                       780
and the winds, like brothers in a civil war, brought tumult and confusion to the air and to the waves, so suddenly increased.
Cybele then selected one of these to break the ropes that held the Trojan fleet, then plunged their burning hulls deep underwater: the wood lost firmness and turned into flesh; the curved prows changed to heads; oars turned to toes and swimming legs; what had been sides still were,
and keels remained, though they were changed to spines;                    790
lines softened into locks, sail yards to arms, and the ships' cerulean color stayed the same; vessels that once were frightened by the waves are naiads now and gambol in the water; despite their hard beginnings on a mountain,

they now frequent the waves, untroubled by old memories of their peak experience.
They do remember, though, their lives as ships, and the dangers they so often faced at sea;
on which account, they often lend a hand                                                800
to guide the keels of storm-tossed ships—unless those ships should happen to belong to Greeks; still mindful of the fall of Troy, they hate that race entire, and rejoiced to see the floating wreckage of Ulysses' ship, as they rejoiced to see the wooden vessel of Alcinous transformed into stone.
The Heron There was a hope that when the fleet had been endowed with life as water nymphs, this wonder
would have inspired fear in the Rutulians,                                             810
and make them end the war; but war continued, since both sides each had gods supporting them, and courage, which is just as good as gods; they went on fighting not for a dowered kingdom, not for the scepter in your father's hand, nor for you, even, fair Lavinia: they fought to win and to avoid the shame of having to surrender; finally, Venus saw that the arms which she'd provided
brought her son victory; now Turnus fell,                                              820
and with him fell the city of Ardea, called powerful while he lived to protect it, but when the fire of barbarians reduced it to a heap of tepid ashes, there flew out from the middle of that mass a swift-winged bird not previously known, flapping its wings above the cinder heap; its cry, its scrawniness, its sickly pallor

were fitting for a city that is captured,
and it has even kept the city's name:                                                       830
[ardea is the Latin name for heron]
Ardea mourns itself with beating wings.
The deification of Aeneas The manly excellence Aeneas showed compelled the gods, including even Juno, to put an end to their old enmity; and now with Julus well set up and rising, it was the proper time for our hero to enter heaven; Venus had approached the deities, soliciting approval, and threw her arms about her father's neck:                                          840
"Father," she said, "you've always been most kind; now I beseech you to be even more so, and for the sake of my own flesh and blood, your grandson too, grant him divinity; however small a portion does not matter, as long as you give something! It is enough that he has once seen the Unlovely Realm, that he has once traversed the river Styx!"
The gods gave their assent, and even she, Jove's consort, now appeased, beamed her approval.                              850
The father of the gods said, "Both of you, the seeker and the one for whom it is sought, deserve the gift of immortality, and so, my daughter, take what you would have."
Venus thanked him and then was carried off on the light breezes in a chariot drawn by her team of yoked and harnessed doves to the Laurentian coast, where the Numicius weaves its way through a curtain of tall reeds, then spills its waters in the nearby sea.                                                   860
She bade the river god to take Aeneas

under the surface of his silent stream               
and cleanse him of all mortal deficits;              
he did as she commanded, bathing him,             
and having purged him of his mortal dross, restored his best, immortal part to him.          
His mother purified Aeneas' body,      anointing it with heavenly perfumes, and touched his lips with sweet ambrosia
and nectar both, so he became a god,                                                          870
known to the Roman folk as Indiges [a name that means both "native born" and "needy"], who honor him with altars and with shrines.
Ascanius (also known as Julus) ruled Latium and Alba after him, and then there followed Silvius, whose son, Latinus, took an ancient name and scepter; distinguished Alba followed Latinus, and Epytus came next, and after him
came Capetus and Capys (who came first,                                                  880
but these my Latin meter has reversed); then Tiberinus followed them, who drowned in the Tuscan stream to which he gave his name; his sons were Remulus and fierce Acrota; the elder, Remulus, was struck by lightning as he was imitating its effect; Acrota, somewhat less brave than his brother, yielded the scepter to Aventinus, who was buried on the hill where he held sway,
and to which he has given his own name;                                                  890
then Proca ruled the race that dwells in Rome.
Pomona and Vertumnus (1) Under his rule, Pomona flourished there, unrivaled in her skill at gardening among the Latin wood nymphs of her time;

nor was there any other who was more
devoted to the nurturing of fruit trees,
from which she had her name: not one for woods
or rivers, she loved open country best,
and branches laden with abundant fruit;
she was not one to grip a javelin,                                                           900
but used instead a pruning hook to suppress
the exuberance of nature and restrain
the trees from branching out in all directions;
or she would graft a slip onto a tree,
whose sap would rise into the foreign nursling;
she would not let them thirst; her flowing streams
would irrigate the threads of their parched roots.
This was her love, to which she was devoted, and the other kind, that Venus knows about,
held no attractions for her; indeed, fearing                                           910
the possibility of rustic rape, she closed herself within her orchard's walls, from which she barred all forms of manliness.
What did her many suitors—the young Satyrs, fit for a dance or two; the pack of Pans, with pinecones decorating their wee horns; Sylvanus, who acts younger than he is; and that divinity whose look or hook (I mean Priapus) frightens off all thieves—
what did her many suitors leave undone                                                920
in unsuccessful efforts to attain her?
Vertumnus loved her more than all of them, but he had no more luck with her than they did. How often did he show up in the likeness of an unpolished hired hand at harvest, carrying a basket full of wheat— indeed, the very image of a reaper!
At other times, Vertumnus would appear

wearing a still-green wreath of new mown hay
around his temples, and would seem to be                                                  930
one of the mowers turning grass to dry;
or show up with an ox goad in his hand,
and so much like a drover you would swear
that he had just unyoked his weary oxen;
given a pruning hook, he seemed to be
off on his way to shaping trees or vines;
up on a ladder, you would think that he
was picking apples with the other men;
in the same way, a sword made him a soldier,
a fishing rod made him a fisherman:                                                             940
in short, his many changes of appearance
allowed him frequent access to her presence,
and great delight in gazing at her beauty.
He went so far as to put on a wig of grey hair and to wrap around his head a gaudy turban like those that women wear, and leaning on a walking stick, he entered her garden, where he marveled at the fruit. "But you," he said,"are so much more impressive!"
and showered her with kisses of a kind                                                  950
that ancient ladies are not wont to give.
He sat down on the ground beneath the trees and looked up at those branches bent with fruit, the weight of autumn. There was a splendid elm across from these, adorned with shining grapes; he glanced at it approvingly, and said,
"Now if that tree trunk were to stand unwed, untrained to any vine, it would not be of any worth to us, but for its leaves;
likewise the vine, which has been joined to it,                                      960
rests on the elm tree; if it had not been, it would be lying flat upon the ground:

however, the example of this tree
makes no impression on you, for you flee
the joys of sex, nor do you care to wed.
"But how I wish you would, for you would have suitors more numerous than Helen had, or she for whom the Lapiths went to battle, or the wife of too long tarrying Ulysses!
"And even though you run away from them,                                   970
resisting those who come here seeking you, a thousand men desire to possess you, and gods and even demigods as well, every god up in the Alban hills!
"But if you would be wise and marry well, then lend an ear to what this old crone says, who loves you more than all the others do, and more than you could easily believe: spurn all those many others, but accept
Vertumnus as the sharer of your bed:                                                     980
I guarantee that he's the one for you, and no one knows him better than I do, as well—I daresay—as he knows himself!
"He isn't one to wander round the world, but lives alone here in your neighborhood; nor is he like so many other suitors, who fall in love with everyone they see: you are his first love and will be his last, and he will give his years to you alone.
"And add to these the fact that he is young                                      990
and unaffectedly attractive too, and that he has a gift for changing shape, for taking on whatever form he wishes, and that he will do anything you want, even if you should ask for everything!
"Your interests are likewise similar,

for he is always the first there to enjoy    
the fruit it is your pleasure to provide!            
But it is not the fruit found in your trees            
that he desires, nor the pleasing herbs                                        1000
that grow within the confines of your garden,
nor is it anything, in fact, but you!
Take pity on his passion and believe
that his own prayers are coming through my lips.
"Reflect a moment on the vengeful gods, how Venus, who frequents Mount Ida, hates the unyielding heart, and have a proper fear of Nemesis, whose wrath is unforgiving!
"And so that you may fear these all the more, I will tell you a story that is quite well known                                     1010
on Cyprus, for my years make me a source of useful wisdom; from it you should learn to modulate your wishes and be mild.
Iphis and Anaxaretes "Iphis, a young man drawn from lowly stock, caught sight of Anaxaretes, a woman descended from the ancient race of Trojans: the flames of passion seared him to the bone.
"For a long time, he struggled with his feelings, but after reason failed to overcome
his madness, he appeared upon her threshold,                                       1020
and as a suppliant, he now confessed his mad infatuation to her nurse, praying that she would not be hard on him, by the hopes that she had for her tender charge; then he went on to servant after servant, and fawning on them anxiously, he sought their help in getting close to his desire; often he had them carry his love letters, and sometimes he would hang upon her door

garlands of flowers wet with the dew of his tears,                                    1030
and lay his tender flanks on her hard threshold, despondently reproving the barred door.
"But she, who was more cruel than the storms arising at the setting of the Kids, harder than steel that has been tempered by Norican fires, or like a great stone still clinging to its roots, she spurned and mocked him, and adding insults to that injury, the fierce contempt of her response deprived her suitor of his last remaining hope.                                                           1040
"Iphis, unable to endure for long the torment of his grief, spoke his last words in a message he delivered at her door: 'You win, Anaxaretes, and no longer must you endure my tiresome pursuit: now grant yourself a triumph, and rejoice: sing hymns and gird your brow with shining laurel! You win indeed; now I will freely die, and you, unyielding one—go celebrate!
" 'But certainly, you will be forced to praise                                         1050
some aspect of my love that pleases you, compelling you to speak of my good points— remember that I loved you while I lived, and that in dying and in losing you the light of my life has been twice put out.
" 'Nor will you learn of my death secondhand: for I myself—undoubtedly—will be there, a presence visible, so you may glut your cruel eyes upon my lifeless corpse!
" 'If it is true that you, O gods, observe                                                 1060
the acts of mortals, then remember me— for I desire nothing more from you— and see that I am spoken of for ages,

and that the time subtracted from my life    is added to my fame!'
"So Iphis spoke with streaming eyes, and raising his pale arms to those doorposts he'd often crowned with wreaths, affixed his noose onto the highest beam:
" 'O cruel and unkind,' he said, 'are you well pleased by this bouquet?'
"He thrust his head                              1070
into the noose and turned in her direction, and then, misfortunate, the burden of his lifeless corpse hung by his broken neck.
"Dying, the convulsive motions of his feet against the door made sounds that sounded like someone outside demanding to be let in, and when the door was opened in response, the shocking deed revealed itself: her servants cried out, and took the young man down—too late.
"They brought him to his mother's house (his father                      1080
was dead already); she embraced her son and tried to warm his lifeless limbs with hers, and after she had given voice to grief and did the things that grieving parents do, she led a throng of mourners through the city escorting his pale corpse to its cremation.
"By chance that sad procession passed before the very home of Anaxaretes, and stirred by an avenging deity,
the sounds of bitter mourning struck her ears;                                     1090
in spite of herself, she was moved, and said, 'Let us go see this mournful funeral.' Going inside, she went upstairs and stood at an open window: scarcely had she glimpsed the corpse of Iphis laid out on his bier,

when her eyes hardened and her cold blood ran
in terror from her body: she attempted
to step back from the sight, but her feet froze;
when she attempted to avert her face,
she was unable to; and very soon                                                         1100
the stoniness that for so long a time
had been within her heart spread through her body.
"And lest you should consider this a fiction, there is a statue, even to this day, at Salamis, the image of this lady: and a temple of foresightful Venus too.
"So, my dear nymph, you should be ever mindful of these events, and put aside, I pray, your proud resistance to a lover's plea,
lest the late spring frost nip your budding fruit,                                   1110
or swift winds tear the flowers from the bough."
Pomona and Vertumnus (2) After the god, disguised as an old woman, had argued well, although to no effect, he changed himself back into a young man, appearing to the maiden just as brightly as does the Sun, when its resplendent face prevails against the dim opposing clouds and shines undimmed in all its radiance; he was prepared to take her then by force,
which proved unnecessary, for the nymph                                             1120
was taken by the figure of the god, and felt within a corresponding wound.
A Roman spring Amulius (known as the Oppressive) next governs Italy, by force of arms; and after him comes ancient Numitor, whose grandson aided him in getting back the kingdom he had lost; the city's walls

are founded on the feast day of the shepherds;
King Tatius and the Sabine senators
wage war on Romulus; having betrayed                                                1130
the path that leads up to the citadel,
Tarpeia justly perishes beneath         
the weapons piled upon her by the Sabines,
who are now busy shushing one another,
and silently as wolves are sneaking up
upon the Romans, overcome by slumber;
the Sabines try the gates, which Romulus
had closed and bolted firmly; nonetheless,
Saturnia unfastens one of them,
and draws the gate back on its silent hinges;                                         1140
Venus alone knew that the bolt had fallen
and would have put it back and locked the gates,
but one god is unable to rescind
the actions of another.
Near the shrine of Janus is an icy spring of water, possessed by the Italian water nymphs; Venus asked them if they would help her out, and they did not refuse her just request, opening the fountain to its fullest.
The pass of Janus was still open then,                                                1150
and never had the waters closed it off; the nymphs put yellow sulfur underneath their fountain and then heated it until the boiling veins were full of smoky pitch; by these and other means, steam penetrated throughout the fountain: water which had dared quite recently to challenge alpine chill was ready now to stand up against fire! The twin gate posts smoked with boiling mist and the gates which had been opened up in vain                                 1160

before the unyielding Sabines were now blocked
by this new spring, which gave the Romans time
to arm themselves; then Romulus set forth,
and Roman earth was strewn with mingled corpses,
Romans and Sabines, for the impious sword,
indifferent to kinship, mixed the blood
of husbands with the fathers of their wives.
But finally, they chose to end the war instead of fighting to the bitter end, and Tatius agreed to share the throne.                                                  1170
The deification of Romulus Tatius died, and you set out the laws equitably to Romans and to Albans, O Romulus. Doffing his helmet, Mars addressed the author of all gods and men:
"The time has come, O father, since the state of Rome has been established on a sound foundation, and does not depend upon a single man to serve as its protector— the time has come for you to grant the gift
promised to me and to your worthy grandson:                                    1180
that he should be released from earthly bonds and taken up to heaven and installed as one of the immortals; this you promised in a council where the other gods were present, and I took note of your inspiring words, which memory allows me to repeat:
" 'There will be one that you will carry up to the blue vault of heaven.' This you said; now ratify the promise that you gave."
Jove the omnipotent gave his consent,                                              1190
first darkening the air with thunderclouds, then frightening the world with lightning bolts.
Mars realized that the apotheosis

he had been promised was now ratified                
by this event, and leaning on his spear,
he vaulted up into his chariot,                                  
whose steeds both strained against the bloody yoke,     
and flogging them to action with his whip
descended headlong through the air until
he set down on the wooded Palatine,                                                    1200
where he abstracted Romulus from the earth
as he was giving out his royal decrees
to the Roman people; his mortal parts                 
dissolved as he was borne up through the air,
as a leaden bullet fired from a sling
is worn away as it traverses the sky;
and now a beauty that is heavenly,
more worthy of the couches of the gods,
transforms him as he turns into Quirinus,
adorned in a white robe with purple seam.                                         1210
His wife, Hersilia, was mourning him when Juno ordered Iris to descend upon a rainbow and console her thus, and carry these instructions to the widow:
"O glory of the Latins and the Sabines, most worthy to have been the wife and queen of such a man as Romulus has been, and now most fit to be Quirinus' spouse, leave off your lamentations: would you see
your husband once again? Then come with me                                    1220
into that grove, bright green upon the hill named after Quirinus; within it lies the shaded temple of the Roman king."
Iris obeyed, descending to the earth upon her rainbow and made Hersilia hearken to the message she was given; and she, with downcast eyes and modest look,

responded to the messenger of Juno:
"O goddess, for I know that you are one, although I cannot say which one you are—                                          1230
lead on, lead on: show me my husband's face, for if the Fates should let me see it once, then I would say that I have gone to heaven."
Without delay she went with Iris to the hill of Romulus, and there a star slipped from the vault of heaven down to earth; Hersilia, whose hair burst into flames, ascended with that star into the air; Rome's founder there receives her, takes her hand
within his own, and gives her a new name                                            1240
along with her new body; she is called Hora, and as a goddess now is joined to her immortal Quirinus forever.

BOOK XV
PROPHETIC ACTS AND VISIONARY DREAMS
Numa (1)         Myscelus and the founding of Crotona
The teachings of Pythagoras         Numa (2)
Egeria and Hippolytus         Tages; The spear of Romulus; Cipus
Aesculapius         The apotheosis of Julius Caesar
The poet of the future

Numa (1)
In the meantime, a ruler capable
of bearing such responsibilities
and of succeeding Romulus is sought;              
Fame accurately prophesies the fitness 
of the distinguished Numa for the throne;     
and he, not satisfied by his command
of Sabine thought and practices, conceived
a larger project in his receptive mind,
striving to master universal knowledge.
The love he had for this activity                                                        10
drove him to leave his capital of Cures, and travel to a distant city, famed for its hospitality to Hercules.
Myscelus and the founding of Crotona Numa asked who had founded this Greek city on the Italian coast, and an old man who knew the ancient legends well responded: "They say that Hercules, the son of Jove, returning from his journey to the ocean, enriched by herds of Spanish cattle, landed
felicitously at Lacinium;                                                                           20
and while his cattle grazed the tender grass, he enjoyed the home and hospitality of Croton, a great man, beneath whose roof he found refreshment from his lengthy labor.
"As he was leaving, he said,'In the future, this place will be a city of your offspring.' That promise, as it happened, was fulfilled: there was a certain man named Myscelus, the son of Alemon of Argus, who in his day was most pleasing to the gods.                                                30
"One night, as he lay sleeping heavily, Hercules stood above him with his club

and said,'Go now and leave your native land:
seek the remote and rocky straits of Aesar,'
and threatened Myscelus quite vividly
if he did not obey; and after that,
the vision and the god both disappeared.
"The son of Alemon leapt out of bed and silently reviewed his recent dream,
and struggled for a long time with its meaning:                                     40
the god commanded his departure, but the law prohibited his setting forth; death was the penalty for anyone who wished to change his homeland for another.
"The bright Sun had concealed his shining face far underneath the surface of the Ocean, and darkest Night had wreathed her head with stars, when once again that selfsame god returned delivering the selfsame admonition,
and threatening, unless the man obeyed,                                                 50
worse punishments, and even more of them. This terrified him: he at once prepared to move his household to another region.
"Word got around about it in the city, and he was brought to trial for his malfeasance. The prosecution rested: no defense: no need to call on any witnesses; the poor wretch raised his face and hands to heaven: 'O you who by twelve labors merited heaven,
help me, I pray,' he cried, 'for it is you                                                     60
who are the instigator of my crime!'
"Back in those ancient times, white or black pebbles were used to show one's innocence or guilt; and that was how the court proceeded then in handing down the sentence: every pebble placed in the unforgiving urn—was black!

But when they turned it over to count up                 
the pebbles, every single one of them, without exception, had been changed to white!
"The judgment against Myscelus had been                                      70
reversed by Hercules, and he was saved;                                      
he thanked Amphitryon's heroic son and then sailed across the Ionian Sea, bypassing Neretum, Sybaris, and Tarentum; nor did he linger by the bay of Siris, Crimese, or the coast of Apulia; and scarcely had he gotten past those lands which look upon those waters, when he found the end that had been destined for his journey, the mouth of the river Aesar.
"Not far away                                          80
there was a mound of earth: beneath it lay the sacred bones of Croton; on this site, as he had been commanded to, Myscelus established his new city, which he named for the one who had been buried in the tomb."
Such were the origins of that region and of the Greek city built in Italy, according to dependable tradition.
The teachings of Pythagoras There was a man who had been born on Samos,
but fled his native island and its rulers,                                                   90
freely choosing to become an exile out of his hatred for despotism; and this man was allowed to understand the thought of gods, off in remotest heavens; his inner sight exposed what Nature kept from human view; and when he had at last exhaustively examined all there was, would lecture to improve the people's minds;

a silent multitude stood marveling
at the erudition of his discourse                                                            100
upon the origin of the universe,
on the laws of Nature and causality,
what God is, and where the snow comes from,
and whether lightning is produced by Jove
or by the winds that tear apart the clouds;
what causes earthquakes and what keeps the stars
from flying off, and other hidden things;
he was the first to censure man for eating
the flesh of animals and was the first
to preach this learned, but not widely held                                           110
doctrine, in these words from his own lips:
"Mortals, refrain from defiling your bodies with sinful feasting, for you have the fruits of the earth and of arbors, whose branches bow with their burden; for you the grapes ripen, for you the delicious greens are made tender by cooking; milk is permitted you too, and thyme-scented honey: Earth is abundantly wealthy and freely provides you her gentle sustenance, offered without any bloodshed. Some of the beasts do eat flesh to allay their own hunger, although not all of them, for horses, sheep, and cattle                            120
feed upon grasses; but those of untamable nature— Armenian tigers, furious lions, wolves and bears, too— these creatures take pleasure in feasting on what they have slaughtered.
"What an indecency, mingling entrails with entrails, fattening one on the flesh from another one's body, saving the life of one by another's destruction! Surrounded by all of this wealth, so freely provided by Earth, the best of all mothers, you wholly ignore it, choosing to mangle sad flesh with your cruel teeth, and delighted again to act out the rites of the Cyclops,                                130
unable ever to placate your stomach's voracious desires until, at last, you have murdered another!

"That time long since past, which we now refer to as 'golden,' was blessed in the fruit of its trees, and in its wild herbs, and in the absence of blood smeared on men's faces. In that time, the birds flew through the air without danger, the fearless rabbit went wandering over the meadows, and the fish was not brought to the hook by its credulous nature. All lived without ambushes; none had a fear of deception, and peace was everywhere. But after that bringer of trouble,                  140
whoever he was, who envied the lion his dinner, had crammed his greedy gut with the flesh from a body, he led us down the wrong path; for it may be that iron was first stained with the warm blood of the beast that he butchered; this would not have been a crime had the creatures attacked us, for I say that any such beasts may be rightfully murdered, but those that we must destroy should never be eaten!
"Crimes even greater emerged from that one: the sow is thought to have merited death as a ritual victim
because she uprooted new crops with her snout, thus depriving            150
farmers of hope for the year; the goat was led to the altar to pay with his life for the sin of devouring Bacchus; these two, then, died for offenses that they had committed. But what did you ever do, sheep, to merit your murder? —You who were born to serve man with milk from your udders and with the soft wool wherewith we make our garments— your life is surely more useful to us than your death is! And what have you done, poor ox, so soulful and guileless, innocent simpleton, born but to bear our labors?
Wholly unmindful, unworthy the gift of the earth's fruits                       160
is one who, after releasing him from the weight of the harness, strikes down the worker with whom he had broken the hard field as many times as it had given him harvests, and chops with his axe at that neck worn out by exertion.
"Nor is it enough that man had committed such misdeeds: the gods were charged with them too, were believed to take pleasure

in dealing death out to the labor-bearing young bullock!
Since that which makes him so pleasing is what will most harm him,
a victim distinguished in figure and quite without blemish,
his horns gilded, trailing bright ribbons, is led to the altar,                    170
where he, without comprehending them, listens to prayers,
and observes the barley he helped to cultivate sprinkled
between his horns: perhaps even sees in the basin,
held under his head by the priest, the knife blade reflected
a moment before his blood is spilled into the water.
"At once they tear out the guts from the still-living creature, and scrutinize them in search of some heavenly purpose! So great is the human hunger to eat what's forbidden, you mortals will dare even to feed upon this! Don't you do it, I beg you! Pay close attention to my admonition,                                 180
and when you devour the flesh of your fresh-butchered cattle, taste it and know you are eating your labor's companion!
"A god is directing my speech: I will speak as inspired, revealing, as though I were Delphi, the secrets of heaven, disclosing mysteries known but to the illumined; I will sing of great issues, never before now uncovered by earlier thinkers and hidden until the present, for it delights me to travel up into the heavens, delights me to leave the earth's insipid abode, and
riding on clouds, mount to the capable shoulders                                 190
of Atlas, where I can look down on those wandering mortals, lacking in reason, anxious and fearful of dying, and from there, exhort and encourage them by unrolling the scroll upon which Fate is inscribed in succession.
"O people stunned with the icy terror of dying, why do you fear the Styx? Why are you frightened of phantoms and names that mean nothing, the empty blather of poets, foolish hobgoblins of a world that never existed? Here is what happens after you die: your body, whether consumed on the pyre or slowly decaying,                             200

suffers no evil; souls cannot perish, and always,
on leaving their prior abodes, they come to new ones,
living on, dwelling again in receptive bodies;
in the time of the Trojan war, I remember quite well
that I was Panthous, son of Euphorbus, and wounded
once in the breast by a spear cast by Lord Menelaus;
recently, while in the temple of Juno on Argos,
I recognized the shield that I bore on my left arm!
"Everything changes and nothing can die, for the spirit wanders wherever it wishes to, now here and now there,                      210
living with whatever body it chooses, and passing from feral to human and then back from human to feral, and at no time does it ever cease its existence; and just as soft wax easily takes on a new shape, unable to stay as it was or keep the same form, and yet is still wax, I preach that the spirit is always the same even though it migrates to various bodies.
"And so, at the risk of repeating myself, I exhort you, lest your devotion be vanquished by the greed of your bellies, stop this expulsion by slaughter of spirits so like you,                           220
this practice of feeding one creature on blood from another.
"And since I am already embarked upon this great sea, have given full sails to the wind, hear me out: nothing endures in this world! The whole of it flows, and all is formed with a changing appearance; even time passes, constant in motion, no different from a great river, for neither a river nor a transitory hour is able to stand still; but just as each wave is driven ahead by another, urged on from behind, and urging the next wave before it in an unbroken sequence,                                 230
so the times flee and at the same time they follow, and always are new; for what has just been is no longer, and what has not been will presently come into being, and every moment's occasion is a renewal.

"Do you not see how the nighttime turns toward the daylight, and how a radiant shining comes after night's darkness? Nor is the sky at midnight unchanged in appearance when dazzling Lucifer rides in upon his white horse, and that too is changed, when Aurora, the herald of sunlight, brightens the world as she hands it on over to Phoebus,                       240
whose heavenly shield is brilliantly red when he lifts it from under the earth in the morning, and also at sunset, when it is replaced, but turns a pale white at its zenith, where the air is clearer and free of the earth's infection. Nor does nocturnal Diana appear the same always: for if she is waxing, she will be less today than tomorrow, and less tomorrow than she is today, if she is waning.
"But really, do you not see how the year has four seasons in imitation of how we pass through our lifetime?
For tender and milky and most like a child is the early                         250
Spring, when the world is freshly green and lacking in vigor, swelling with moisture, a hopeful sign for the farmer. Everything flowers then, and the fields are a riot of color, although as yet there is no real strength in the foliage. Spring is replaced by the Summer, a more robust season, which in its vigor resembles a hardy young man; no other time is richer or warmer than this one. Autumn steps in and the ardor of youth is replaced by a milder maturing, a time between younger and older, when the thinning hair begins to go grey at the temples;                     260
then Winter's old age approaches us, lame and trembling, and whatever hair it still happens to have has been whitened!
"Our bodies, too, are always incessantly changing, and what we were, or are, is not what we will be, tomorrow: once we were seeds, the hope of our fathers, and lay concealed in the womb of our first mother; creative Nature willed otherwise: took us in hand, and out of the narrow confines of mother's expanded

viscera, sent us forth into the open air, homeless!
The infant lay powerless, blinking his eyes at the light, and                    270
shortly began to walk like a beast on all fours,
and then learned to stand, although still weak-kneed and trembling,
and needing to grasp at whatever could aid its endeavor;
this changes into the swift and powerful stage of first youth,
and then middle age, which, when its service is ended,
glides down the path of decline that leads us to old age,
which undermines and demolishes all of the strength of
those earlier stages: contemplating the shoulders
and arms that once, with their masses of muscle, resembled
those of great Hercules, Milon, the heavyweight champion,                  280
now weeps to see them hanging so useless and flabby;
Helen too weeps at the wrinkles seen in her mirror
and asks herself why she was—twice!—seized by a lover.
"Devouring Time! Envious Age! Working together, you bring all to ruin: in your unhurried consumption, the world is ground down, and everything perishes slowly. Even what we call the elements do not endure, and if you pay heed, I will show you the changes they go through.
"Four genitive substances make up the eternal cosmos; two of them, which we call earth and water, are heavy,                           290
and of their own weight will sink right down to the bottom; but the other two, air and fire (purer than air is), are weightless and will rise up if nothing suppresses them. Though they are spatially distant, each element rises out of another, and into that other, collapses; when earth is unbound, for example, it changes to water, then, as it loses its moisture, it once again changes, this time to wind and air, and, as it grows thinner, bursts into flame and rises through heaven as fire;
from there the way is reversed, and in the same order;                             300
fire, condensing, turns into air, which turns into water, and fluid water, changing to earth, becomes solid.

"Nothing persists without changing its outward appearance, for Nature is always engaged in acts of renewal, creating new forms everywhere out of the old ones; nothing in all of the cosmos can perish, believe me, but takes on a different shape; and what we call birth is when something first changes out of its former condition, and what we call death is when its identity ceases;
things may perhaps be translated hither and thither;                              310
nevertheless, they stay constant in their sum total.
"I truly believe that nothing may keep the same image for a long time; the age of gold yields to iron, and often places will know a reversal of fortune. For with my own eyes, I have seen land that once was quite solid change into water, and I have seen land made from ocean; seashells have been discovered far from the seashore, and rusty anchors right on the summits of mountains; a former plain was converted into a valley
by rushing waters, whose force has leveled great mountains;                320
and a onetime marshland has been turned into a desert, while thirsty sands have been transformed into marshland.
"Here Nature allows a new spring of water to surface, there closes one off; and shaken by underground tremors, rivers leap out of the earth, or shrink and are swallowed. So then, when Lycus sinks in the ground through a fissure, he comes up from under again, far away, totally altered; now the Erasinus, swallowed, glides underground, hidden till it emerges and flows through the fields of Argolis; they say that Mysus regrets his former existence,                                   330
and, having chosen a different course, is the Ca'icus; and the Amenanus flows through the Sicilian desert, sometimes disappearing, whenever its sources dry up. Once the Anygras was potable; now no one will touch it, not since the centaurs, riddled by Hercules' arrows, bathed there to clean out their wounds—or else the poets

who tell us this story are truly not to be trusted.
Haven't the formerly sweet waters of the Hypanis,
sourced in the Scythian mountains, turned bitter and brackish?
"Antissa, Pharos, and Tyre once were surrounded                              340
by water, but none of those cities now is an island;                       
folks around Leucas say it was once part of the mainland, but now it's encircled as well; and they say that Messana was joined to Italy, until the ocean's waves shattered their borders, and left them completely divided by water. If you seek Buris and Helice, those Achaean cities, you will discover them both underwater, and even today the sailors still point out their wavering towers and overwhelmed walls; near Troezen, ruled by Pittheus, there is a steep and treeless hillock, which once was level                     350
but now is rounded; for—it's a terrible story— the bestial force of the winds, sealed up in their cavern, seeking to exhale and vainly striving for freedom— and since there was not the slightest crack in their prison through which their breath could break out, they made the earth bulge, as when one exhales one's own breath into a bladder or blows up a goatskin; that was a permanent groundswell, now like a hillock, which, over the years, has grown harder.
"I will refer to a few of the many such instances that I have heard of or witnessed—why, isn't water                               360
itself subjected to taking and giving new shapes? At midday, your waters, O spring of Ammon, are frigid, but warm in the morning and evening. They say the Boeotians can set wood on fire by dumping it into the water when the moon is in its last phase, and the Thracian Cicones have a river which, if you drink from it, turns your intestines to stone and changes whatever it touches to marble; closer to home, those neighboring rivers, the Crathis and the Subaris, turn hair into gold or silver; even more strange are those streams that not only alter                         370

the body, but have an effect upon the mind too;
who hasn't heard of the indecent pool of Salmacis,
or of the Ethiopian lakes? Any who swallow
their waters either go mad or go into a coma;
whoever quenches his thirst at the spring of Clitorius
will give up wine in favor of its purer fluid,
whether there is some intrinsic strength in the water
which counters the heat of the wine, or, as legend would have it,
the son of Amythaon, after relieving the frenzied
daughters of Proetus with potent herbs and enchantments,                    380
cast the means of purgation into the river,
making the hatred of wine a part of its nature.
The Lyncestrian river acts in the opposite manner,
for whoever drinks even a tiny amount of it
staggers as though he had swallowed his wine undiluted.
There is a place in Arcadia formerly known as
Pheneus, whose inconsistent stream is mistrusted:
don't drink it at night, for that is when it is harmful,
while it is harmless if it is drunk in the daytime;
so streams or lakes will have, at one time or another,                               390
these or some other effects.
"There was a time when Ortygia moved about on the ocean, but now she stays still; when the Argonauts sailed, they found the Symplegades fearful, twin rocks exploding with spray when they crashed together, but now, fixed in place, they form a motionless windbreak.
"Nor will Mount Etna, her sulphurous ovens now blazing, always be fiery, nor was she fiery always. For if the earth is animal-like in its nature, then it lives and it has many places that fire exhales from, and the earth changes those places with every eruption,                         400
sealing some caverns off as she opens up others.
"Or if the winds that are penned up deep inside caverns fling rocks against other rocks or at matter containing

the seeds of fire, a blaze will be started from friction,
but the caves will cool down when the winds are no longer blowing;
and if the fire is caused by the nature of asphalt
and yellow sulphur that burns with a very thin flame,
when the earth no longer furnishes food for that fire
and cannot sustain it, and it has been worn out for ages,
then Nature herself must suffer a want of nutrition                               410
and will not be able to endure such a great famine;
abandoned herself, she will abandon her fires.
"In Macedonia, there are supposed to be men whose bodies get covered completely with delicate feathers when they have plunged nine times in the pool of Minerva. I find that hard to believe, but among the Scythians, women are said to achieve results much the same by sprinkling a magical potion all over their bodies.
"Nevertheless, if trust in such strange situations may be adduced from examples already proven,                                    420
do you not see that when corpses decay from the heat or from length of time, they turn into wee tiny beasties? Here is a common experiment: bury some bullocks slain by the priests, and from their decaying intestines, the flower-culling bees will be born: rural in nature, as are their parents, inclined to hard labor and prudent. Buried in earth, the bellicose horse breeds out hornets; if you remove a crab's curved claws from its body and bury them in the earth, from the interred portion a scorpion emerges to menace you with its bent tail;                            430
we know that worms which quite commonly (ask any farmer) cover green leaves with their white threads will change to butterflies, emblems of spirit departing from body.
"Mud contains seeds which generate frogs, at first legless, though soon they develop limbs that equip them for swimming, and so that these same limbs can be used for long-distance leaping, their hind legs are always much greater in length than their forelegs.

Nor is the bear cub, when newly brought forth by the she-bear,
other than bear-pulp: by her own purposeful licking,
the mother bear shapes it and forms it in her own image.                    440
Do you not see how the larva of bees, makers of honey,
so well protected within their hexagonal chambers
of wax, are born without any limbs on their bodies,
and only later develop legs and the wings used for flying?
The peacock of Juno, with stars in its feathery tail, or
the arms-bearing eagle of Jove, the doves dear to Venus,
or any others within the entire bird kingdom:
who could believe that such wonders emerged out of eggshells,
unless he already knew how they came into being?
And there are those who believe that when men have been buried     450
and their spines decay, the marrow turns into a serpent.
"Each of these lives is brought forth out of another, but there is one bird which can renew its own being; Assyrians call it the Phoenix; it lives not on grasses and grains but on incense and on the essence of balsam. As soon as five hundred years of his life are completed, employing his talons and unsullied beak, the old Phoenix builds his own nest in the top of a tremulous palm tree. Once it is covered completely with sweet-smelling branches of nard and mezereon, myrrh and pieces of cinnamon,                         460
he lies down upon it, expiring over the odors. Out of the corpse of his father, there springs a young Phoenix (or so people say) destined to live the same life span. When age gives him strength to carry such weighty burdens, he lightens that of the palm tree by taking his nest down and bearing his cradle, along with the tomb of his father, through the light air until he comes to the city of Hyperion and piously places his burden before the sacred doors of Hyperion's temple.
"Should you think this is at all surprising or novel,                          470
you'll find the hyena a marvel for changing her gender:

females, when they are mounted, turn into males, and             
there's also a creature, nourished on air and light breezes,   that takes on the color of whatever substance it touches.
"Defeated India offered wine-bringing Bacchus            
a tribute of lynxes, and it is said that their urine turns into stones which the air instantly hardens. So too with coral, which waves like a grass underwater, but being exposed to the air turns instantly rigid.
"Day will be ended with Phoebus bathing his weary                       480
horses at sunset in the deep ocean, before I manage to put into words how everything changes into new forms: we can even see the times changing, as one nation gains in strength while another collapses: once Troy was great, rich in its wealth and its heroes, and able to go on bleeding both for ten years; now brought to earth, she has nothing to show but her ruins, no wealth besides that which lies in her burial chambers.
"Sparta was famous, mighty Mycenae once flourished, even as Athens, even as Thebes of the Towers;                                        490
Sparta is worthless now, lofty Mycenae has toppled, what but the name remains of the Thebes of Oedipus? What but the name remains of Pandion's Athens?
"Fame now informs us that Dardanian Rome is rising, even now building a deep and enormous foundation close to the Tiber that flows from the Apennine mountains: therefore, she changes her form by increasing, and shortly will be the boundless world's capital! So say the prophets, so say the oracles also. Indeed, I remember
Helenus, the son of Priam, telling Aeneas,                                             500
bitterly weeping and doubtful about his survival, back when the matter of Troy was beginning to crumble, 'O goddess-born, if you will pay careful attention                                 
to my foretelling, while you live, Troy will not perish! Fire and iron will give way as you carry your city

forth from the ruins, until, together, you come to
a more hospitable, even though foreign, site than your homeland.
" 'I now see the city destined for Priam's descendants: never has there ever been one as great, or one greater than this one is, never will there be one in the future!                           510
Princes besides him will maintain her power for ages, but he, the offspring of Julius, will make her the mistress of all creation! And when he is no longer useful on earth, the powers above will rejoice in his presence, for heaven will be his reward and his destination.'
"Helenus foretold all of this to Aeneas, encumbered by his household gods, and I recall it quite clearly, and I rejoice in the walls of my relatives rising, a welcome result of the conquest of Troy by the Argives!
"However, lest I should wander far off in digression,                        520
and my forgetful steeds stray from their course on the racetrack, heaven and everything under it will take on new forms, as will the earth too, and everything here upon it, as even we will, for we are a part of it also, not merely bodies, but winged spirits, and able to shelter in beasts, to lodge in the breasts of cattle; bodies which once may have given refuge to parents or brothers, or any joined to us by obligation, or men like ourselves, to be sure, should be safe and respected, not crammed into our guts like a Thyestean banquet!                           530
"What a slippery slope he descends, who slits a calf's throat able to listen unmoved to its piteous mooing, for he prepares himself to murder a human! Or who can butcher a kid, whose terrified bleating so resembles the cries of our children! Or eat a chicken, whom we have fed from our hand? Is this less than a murder? How does it differ? What is the end that it leads to?
"Let the bull plow and in time let him die of old age, and let the sheep arm you against the freezing north wind,

and let the goat give herself to the hands at her udders!                        540
Hang up your nets, nooses, snares, and artful deceptions, completely! Do not betray the poor bird with a limed twig, nor drive the deer into nets with forms made of feathers, nor hide a treacherous dinner upon a barbed hook! Kill any that harm you, but make sure only to kill them; don't stain your mouths with their blood; be nourished more gently."
Numa (2) They say that Numa, having taken these and other such instructions to his heart, returned to his own nation and submitted
to the desire of the Roman people                                                         550
that he should be the ruler of their state; successful in his marriage to a nymph, and wisely guided by the Muses, he instructed the Romans in the sacred rites, and led that previously warlike folk into the practice of the arts of peace.
Egeria and Hippolytus In old age, when his life and governance were ended, people of all classes mourned; his wife, Egeria, was so distracted
by grief that she left Rome altogether,                                                   560
withdrawing to Aricia's wooded dale, where her loud groans and lamentations hindered the celebration of Diana's rites.
How often all the nymphs of grove and pool admonished her and offered consolation! How often did Hippolytus address her: "Enough!" he cried. "For yours is not the only misfortune that deserves to be lamented! Reflect on situations like your own,
and you will find your own more bearable.                                            570
I wish that I had nothing of that kind

to offer for your comfort, but I do:
"If you have heard about Hippolytus at all, you know that the credulity his father gave to the perversity of his stepmother brought him to his death. It will astonish you to learn that I— though I can hardly prove it—I am he.
"In vain the daughter of Queen Pasiphaë once tempted me to shame my father's bed                                           580
and then imputed her foul lusts to me (either from fear that she would be discovered or else from her displeasure with rejection); and though I had done nothing to deserve it, my father ordered me to leave the city, placing a fatal curse upon my head.
"Banished, I headed in my chariot for Troezen, and had made it to the shore of the Bay of Corinth, when the sea rose up
and a huge mass of water, like a mountain,                                            590
seemed to arch up and hover over me till, at its highest point, it split in two, and when those waters burst, a roaring bull was driven forth, and rearing on hind legs, it spewed salt water from its nose and mouth!
"But I was still too occupied with thoughts of my mistreatment to be terrified, as my attendants were, when suddenly my warlike horses turned toward the waves,
their ears pricked up, they shook at what they saw,                                  600
then dragged my chariot in headlong flight along the rocky coast; in vain I strive to guide them, dragging on the foam-flecked reins; bent over backward in my hurtling car, I test my own against their frenzied strength,

and would have won, had not my turning wheel,
striking a tree stump, shattered into pieces;
had you been there, you would have seen my limbs
entangled in the reins, my viscera
drawn from my living body and bestrewn                                   610
about the tree to the accompaniment
of breaking bones, as trunk and limbs were severed,
and my poor body was strung out between
the tree trunk and my team, still galloping;
when I exhaled my last, nothing at all
was left of me for you to recognize,
for everything was just one single wound.
"And have you got the nerve, nymph, to compare my sufferings with those that you've endured?
I had to journey to the underworld                                                        620
and warm my limbs in river Phlegethon, and would not have been brought to life again had not Apollo's son, Aesculapius, revived me with his artful remedies; when his strong herbs and simples had restored me (against the will of Pluto), Cynthia, lest envy be encouraged by this gift, cast a thick cloud and wrapped it all around me; so that I would be safe, and could be seen
without endangerment, she added years                                                 630
to those I had already, and she altered the features of my face past recognition; long she debated whether Crete or Delos would have me, but deciding finally that neither of them suited, placed me here and ordered me to put my old name by, which might remind me too much of my horses. 'And you,' she said, 'who were Hippolytus,' will now be Virbius, the very same.'

"And in this grove I have dwelt ever since,                                       640
one of the lesser deities, protected from misfortune by the godhead of my mistress, and recognized as Cynthia's attendant."
But another's woes could not alleviate the lamentation of Egeria, who, situated at a mountain's base, dissolved in tears, until the goddess Phoebe, impressed by the devotion of her sorrow, transformed her body into a chill fountain, and of her limbs made streams that will not die.                                    650
Tages; The spear of Romulus; Cipus This strange event astonished all the nymphs and Hippolytus was similarly stunned, as was the plowman of Etruria when in his field he saw the fateful clod— on its own, moving without being touched, and then exchanging its form for a man's, before it opened its unaccustomed mouth to speak of what would happen in the future! The locals called him Tages; he first taught
the skill of prophecy to the Etruscans;                                                   660
no less astounding than when, once upon a time, Romulus saw the spear shaft he had cut upon the Palatine put forth green leaves and stand, not with its head fixed in the ground, but newly rooted: no weapon now: a tree providing unanticipated shade to those who flocked beneath it, marveling; or as when Cipus, looking in the water, saw horns upon his head, which he believed,
erroneously, to be an illusion,                                                                  670
for they were real, as he discovered when he touched what he could see upon his forehead;

and then, accepting what he saw was there,
as a victor returning from a vanquished foe,                     
he raised his eyes and hands in prayer to heaven:                 
"O gods, whatever this should prove to be,                              
this wonder, if it prove to be propitious, may it be so for the Roman folk and nation; but if misfortune, may it fall on me."
Then Cipus built an altar out of turf,                                                680
where he burned incense to placate the gods, and poured out wine from a libation dish, and in the entrails of a slaughtered sheep (still quivering) he sought to comprehend the meaning of the horns upon his head.
As soon as Tages, the Etruscan seer, had looked into this matter, he could see great deeds astir, but somewhat murkily; yet when he raised his sharp eyes to the horns on the head of Cipus, he saluted him:                                                    690
"Hail, King Cipus! To you and to your horns the land and towers of Latium will bow! Hasten to enter those wide-open gates!               
The Fates would have it so, and you will be received as king and rule securely there, forever!"
Cipus walked back to the city, averting his grim visage from its walls: "O may the gods keep all that far from me! Better, much better, that I spend my days
in endless exile from my home," he said,                                               700
"than that the Capitol see me as king!"
He spoke and called together an assembly of the people and its leaders in the senate,                                           
but not before he covered up his horns with peaceful laurel; standing on a mound

constructed by the soldier-citizens,
he offered prayers up to the ancient gods
according to the rites, and then he said,
"There is one here who will become your king unless you drive him from your city now;                                              710
I will not tell you what the person's name is, but by this sign you may discover him: he bears a pair of horns upon his forehead! The augur indicates that if you let this man enter Rome, you will be reduced to slaves. He might have broken through your open gates, had I not stood against him, even though no one is closer to him than am I: oh, keep him from your city, citizens,
or if he merits it, put him in chains,                                                       720
or end your fear of destined tyranny by slaying him!"
A murmuring arose among the folk assembled there, as when a sharp wind whistles through the girded pine or like the ocean's waves, heard from afar— but out of all their troubled murmuring a single cry emerged, "Who can it be?" And they examined one another's foreheads in search of the horns that he had spoken of.
Then Cipus spoke again and this time said,                                       730
"The one that you are seeking has been found," and as the crowd attempted to restrain him, removed the crown of laurel from his head, exhibiting the horns that marked his brows.
All looked down in dismay and groaned as one, and then—who could believe this?—with reluctance, they looked upon that fame-deserving head, and so that it should not lack further honor,

they placed the laurel crown back on his head.
But since you could not come inside the walls,                                740
the leaders, Cipus, gave you as a gift
of honor as much land as could be worked                            
by a team of oxen yoked up to a plow                                       
from sunrise to sunset; those horns of yours,                            
transformed into a work of art, have been inscribed in bronze upon the temple's gates, and there they will remain throughout the ages.
Aesculapius O Muses, who attend upon the bards, reveal (for you have knowledge of these things,
nor do the ages, stretching out forever,                                                  750
betray your memories) that place from whence the island bathed in the deep Tiber's stream once brought Apollo's son by Coronis, and worshiped him among the gods of Rome.
A dire plague once blighted Latium and men lay wasted from the grim disease. Exhausted by too-frequent funerals, and seeing that their labors and the skills of their own healers had all come to naught,
it was the aid of heaven that they sought,                                              760
in Delphi, at the center of the earth, the shrine and oracle of Phoebus, where they prayed that he would show by prophecy his own intention to deliver them from wretchedness and end the city's woes.
The laurel tree, the shrine, and the quiver held by the god at once began to tremble, and from the tripod deep within the shrine there came a voice that filled their hearts with fear: O Romans what you seek here what you seek                                                           770
you should have looked for in a closer place

and should now look for in a closer place the task of lessening your wretchedness is not that of Apollo but his son go with good auspices and seek my child
Obedient to the orders of the gods, the prudent senators soon ascertained the city that the son of Phoebus lived in, and sent an emissary under sail to search for the coast of Epidaurus.                                                      780
Soon as the curved keel scraped against the beach, they went to the assembly of the Greeks, begging as a gift the god whose power, according to the prophecy of Phoebus, would put an end to Roman funerals; the Greeks were much divided on this issue, with some opposed to holding back the aid, while many favored keeping the god there, not sending help or letting go of the godhead.
While they debated, evening came on,                                              790
extinguishing the latest lights of day, and darkness cast its shadow on the world; the health-restoring god now seemed to stand before your couch, O Roman, as you slept, just as he used to look in his own temple, holding a rustic staff in his left hand, and with his right hand stroking his long beard, as from his gentle heart arose these words:
"Be unafraid, for I will leave my image and come with you: now carefully observe                                            800
the snake that winds itself around my staff, so you will recognize its shape on sight, for this is what I will change myself into, although I will appear to be much larger, as heavenly bodies will, in transformation.

And with his voice, the god (and sleep) departed,
and with the flight of sleep came kindly night,
for Dawn had chased away the burning stars.         
Unsure of what to do, the senators assembled at the temple of the god                                                         810
whose aid they sought and urged him with their prayers to indicate, by supernatural signs, where he himself desired to reside.
They had just finished when the golden god, transformed into a snake with a high crest, forewarned them of his presence there by hissing; at his arrival, the entire temple, its statues and its altars and its doors, its marble pavement and its gilded roof,
began to tremble; and right in the center                                               820
he slowly rose until he stood breast high; his eyes, like fire flicking, swept the room and left them shaking; but a priest (whose hair was bound with a white ribbon) recognized the presence of divinity and cried:
"The god is here, the god is here among us! Silence your tongues and keep your spirits still, you who are present! O god most beautiful, grant that this vision be a blessing on these people here who worship at your rites!"                                       830
Those who were present reverenced the god as they were ordered to, and everyone repeated what the priest said; and the sons of Aeneas also carried out the rites, performing them with fervor and devotion.
The god then nodded his assent to them, and shook his heavy crest and hissed three times, and then, as he descended those smooth steps, he turned back, looking at the ancient altars                  

he was about to leave, and then saluted                                                      840
the home that he was so accustomed to and the temple he had dwelt in for so long.
The great god slithered out and down the streets strewn with scattered blossoms, through the town, until he had snaked his way right to the harbor, which was protected by a curved embankment.
He halted there, and looking most benign, seemed to dismiss his crowd of devotees before he went aboard the Roman vessel,
which felt the heavy presence of the god                                                    850
and was pressed down by his immortal form; the offspring of Aeneas were delighted, and after sacrificing on the shore their flower-decorated ship left harbor.
A light wind drove the ship along: the god conspicuously lay athwart the stern and gazed down at the sea's reflective blue as he was borne through the Ionian Sea, and on the sixth day came to Italy,
passing Lacinia (where Juno's temple is)                                                      860
and Skylaceum; Iapygia next, and then their oars sped them between the rocks of Amphrysia on the left, and the steep cliffs of Cocinthia hard on the right; Rometheum, Caulona, and Narycia were next, and then the Sea of Sicily and the constricted straits of Pelorus; then the Aeolian isles and copper-rich Temesa; Leucosa, and the warm
rose gardens of Paestum; past Capreae                                                         870
(the promontory of the wise Minerva), Surrentum, whose soft hills are rich in vines, and Herculaneum, conceived (along

with Stabia and Parthenope, too)
as charming playgrounds for the idle rich,
and after to the Sybil's shrine at Cumae,
and then to Baeae (where the hot springs flow)
and then Liternum, rich in mastic trees,
and the mouth of the Volturnus, clogged with sand,         
and Sinuessa, famed for snowy doves;                                                         880
Minturna, famous for its illnesses,
and the land named for someone's foster nurse;
the palace of Antiphates, the town
of Trachin, situated in a marsh,
and Circe's territory, and the shore          
of Antium, a sweep of polished sand.
They put in here, because the seas were rough; the god unfolded himself from the ship, great rolls of serpent gliding down the beach
to slip into the temple of his father                                                        890
there on the sands.
When the sea was calm again, the god from Epidaurus left the shrine where he had been hospitably received                   
by a kindred deity, and went back aboard, dragging his scaly body through the sands; and after winding himself round the rudder, he placed his head upon the ship's high stern, where he reposed until the ship reached Castrum and the sacred city of Lavinium and the mouth of the Tiber.
Here everyone                                          900
came pouring out to greet the deity, the fathers and the mothers of the city and the virgins who attend the shrine of Vesta, saluting the new god with a joyful clamor.                       
And as the ship sailed swiftly up the Tiber,

from altars set in rows along both banks
came clouds of fragrant incense, and the blood
of victims warmed the sacrificial knives;
he enters Rome now, the world's capital,
and gliding to the topmost of the mast,                                                 910
inclines his head now this way and now that,
in search of an appropriate abode.
And where the Tiber separates to flow in two parts equally around that place known as the Island, the serpent-shaped son of Phoebus left the ship, and, once again assuming the form that he displays in heaven, brought an end to the bereavement of the city by restoring it to health.
The apotheosis of Julius Caesar That one approached our altars as a stranger,                                         920
but Caesar is a god in his own city, raised up to heaven, changed into a star blazing so brilliantly, not by his own remarkable success in war and peace, not by the battles that were crowned in triumph, nor by his service to the commonwealth, nor yet by glory that hastened to his side; but rather by his offspring, for no deed has Caesar done that stands out more than this: he is the father of our own Augustus!                                                     930
For truly, it was less significant to subjugate the Britons on their isle, or lead his vessels up the reedy Nile to victory; and less to have subdued Iuba, the king of the Numidians, and Pontus, boasting yet of Mithridates; and less indeed to have been granted some of the many triumphs that he merited;

all these are far, far less significant
than to have begotten such a man!                                                               940
And you, O gods, by placing him in charge,
have showered blessings on the human race!
That such a man might not be born a mortal, his father must be made into a god; the golden mother of Aeneas saw this                  
as clearly as she saw the sordid plotting                      
of armed conspirators, bent on the destruction of her own high priest.Venus grew quite pale, and told the gods, as she encountered each,
"Just look at all the plots arrayed against me,                                             950
the many treacheries that seek to slay the last descendent of my Trojan Julus!
"Am I the only god to be forever vexed by such justified anxieties? For even now the Calydonian spear of Diomedes wounds me, and the walls of ill-defended Troy come crashing down,             
and I can see my son's long wandering
in exile and his struggle with the sea,                                                           
his journey to the silent underworld                                                     960
and war with Turnus, or, to speak the truth, with Juno, rather. But why do I recall these ancient injuries against my people? This new fear drives all former fears from mind!
"Behold where sinful blades are being sharpened! Prohibit this, I pray, prevent this crime, or else the blood of Vesta's sacred priest will soon put out the fires on her hearth!"
Care-ridden Venus cried out all these woes through heaven, and although the gods were moved,                           970
they could not break the stern decree of Fate, though they were able to provide at least

unambiguous signs of approaching grief:
they say that wars broke out high in the heavens
where storm clouds clashed, and horns and trumpets sounded
alarms that brought terror to the hearts of men
and warned them of the evils soon to come;
a dismal sun now shed its lurid light
upon the agitated lands below,
and torches seemed to blaze among the stars;                                        980
often great drops of blood fell from the clouds,
the morning star turned dark, and its complexion
was stained as though by flakes of iron rust;
now Luna's chariot seemed smeared with blood;
and the Stygian owl hooted mournful omens
in a thousand places; in a thousand places,
ivory statues wept; in sacred groves
they say that threats and cries of woe were heard.
There were no victims found acceptable,
and livers warned of tumult soon to come;                                           990
and in the forum and around men's homes,
and in the temples, dogs would howl at night;
the silent dead would wander, it is said,
and earthquakes shook the city with their tremors.
Nor could those premonitions from the gods
overcome fate or human treachery,
and unsheathed swords were brought into the senate,
for there was nowhere else in all the city
for such a dreadful murder to take place.
Then Venus struck her breast with both her hands,                          1000
and made to gather Caesar in a cloud, as Paris once was borne from Menelaus, and as Aeneas from Diomedes.
Her father said, "My dear, are you preparing to alter his inevitable fate all by yourself? It is permitted you

to enter the Hall of Records kept by the Fates;
there you will find the labor of the ages,
the universal script, in bronze and iron,                               
which does not fear that clashes in the sky                                               1010
or lightning's rage will bring it down to ruin,
for it will be eternally secure.
"Here you will find, inscribed on adamant that will not perish ever, your son's fate: and I myself have read and noted it, and I will now expound on it to you, so you may understand what is to come. The one that you are mourning has accomplished the time he was allotted here on earth; the debt that he has owed to life is paid.                                                    1020
"So that he may set out on his career as a god in heaven, worshiped here on earth, you will assist him, working with his son, who as the heir to Caesar's name and title will bear alone the burden this imposes, and as the chief avenger of his murder will have our full support in all his wars: under his leadership, the vanquished walls of Mutina, besieged, will sue for peace;
Pharsalia will suffer from his blows,                                                             1030
and Philippi once more be drenched in gore; the one called 'great' will drown off Sicily; a Roman general's Egyptian wife will rue that poor connection, and will fall, her threat that our Capitol would kneel to her Canopus having proven false.
"But why should I enumerate to you the foreign lands and people situated                                              
on either ocean—when whatever land                    
is habitable will belong to him?                                                                    1040

The sea as well will be his very own.
"And having given universal peace to humankind, his fresh attentions turn to Roman laws, where justly legislating, himself a model for all citizens, he guides their actions; and looking to a time ahead and future generations, he will bid the son born of his blameless wife to carry his own name and burdens too;
but not until his years and services                                                         1050
are equal in number, not until old age, will he at last reach his divine abode and join the stars he is related to.
"Meanwhile, do as I tell you; go, take up the spirit from his father's murdered body, so that forevermore the deified Julius will look down upon the forum and Capitol from his own lofty temple."
No sooner had he spoken when the goddess slipped back into the senate house unseen                                            1060
and took the still-fresh soul from Caesar's body, which she would not let vanish in the air, and carried it up to the stars in heaven; and as she did so, she could see it glowing and feel it start to kindle in her bosom: she let it go; and as it flew through space trailing fire, it flickered like a star.
Observing now the good deeds of his son, Caesar admits that he has been surpassed,
and is delighted to have lost to him.                                                      1070
And though the son will not allow his deeds to be regarded as above his father's, Fame (which obeys no will except its own) raises him up, despite his own desire;

in this, and this alone, defying him:
so Atreus gave way to Agamemnon,               
Aegeus to Theseus, Peleus to Achilles,
and finally, as no inapt example,                               
so Saturn, in the later light of Jove:               
for Jupiter rules kingdoms up above                                                      1080
as well as air and sea and earth below;
on earth Augustus rules, and like great Jove
he is our father and our governor.
O gods, I pray you, comrades of Aeneas, before whom sword and fire both yielded sway, and O you local gods of Italy, Indigetes, and noble Quirinus, Father of Rome, and Gravidus, the father of invincible Quirinus,
and Vesta (to whom Caesar was devoted),                                              1090
and you Apollo, worshiped beside Vesta, and Jove whose temple rises high upon Tarpeia's rock, and all the other gods a poet ought to call on in his prayer, late be that day and not in our time when he, Augustus, ruler of the world, departs from it, and rises to the stars, and absent, is attentive to our prayers.
The poet of the future My work is finished now: no wrath of Jove
nor sword nor fire nor futurity                                                            1100
is capable of laying waste to it. Let that day come then, when it wishes to, which only has my body in its power, and put an end to my uncertain years; no matter, for in spirit I will be borne up to soar beyond the distant stars, immortal in the name I leave behind;

wherever Roman governance extends
over the subject nations of the world,
my words will be upon the people's lips,                                              1110
and if there is truth in poets' prophesies,
then in my fame forever I will live.