8 CE 2026
This is an AI modernization of Metamorphoses into contemporary English. The original is available from The Latin Library. Also available as an epub.
Ovid was born in 43 BC, a year after Julius Caesar was killed, and was the most successful poet in Rome by his thirties. He was finishing the Metamorphoses around AD 8 when Augustus banished him to Tomis, a garrison town on the Black Sea at the edge of the empire. He never came back and died there. He said afterwards that the causes were a poem and a mistake, and he never said what the mistake was. He also said that he burned his own copy of this poem before he left; other copies were already in circulation, which is why it exists.
It is fifteen books and some two hundred and fifty stories, running from the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar, and every one of them turns on somebody changing shape. Girls become trees, birds, springs and stones; men become wolves, stags and statues; gods become bulls and showers of gold in order to get at women. Ovid called it one continuous song and wrote it as one: the tales hand off to each other, characters tell stories inside stories, and it is meant to be read forwards rather than looked up.
This is where most of what English readers know as Greek myth actually comes from, at second and third hand. Arthur Golding's English version of 1567 is the one Shakespeare used. A copy of Ovid is carried onto the stage in Titus Andronicus and the plot turns on the story of Philomela; Pyramus and Thisbe is the play the workmen perform in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Narcissus at the pool, Midas and the golden touch, Icarus flying too near the sun, Pygmalion falling in love with his own statue, Daphne turning into a laurel as Apollo's hands close on her — the versions that got passed down are his, and so is most of what is hanging in the painting galleries. The picture on the cover of this edition is Apollo and Daphne.
One thing is worth knowing before you start. A great many of the transformations begin with a god pursuing a woman who does not want him, and the poem contains a great deal of rape. Ovid tells some of it with real horror and terror, and some of it briskly and in passing, and the difference between those two is part of what the poem is. It is translated here with gravity, at full length, neither sensationalised nor cut.
The translation is from the Latin, complete, and it is prose: Latin hexameter has no English equivalent that does not end in padding.
My mind moves me to tell of forms changed into new bodies. Gods — for you are the ones who changed them — breathe your favor on what I begin, and from the world's first origin draw down one unbroken song, all the way to my own days.
Before there was any sea, or land, or sky that arches over everything, the whole face of nature wore one and the same look across the entire world. Men have named it Chaos: a raw and unsorted mass, nothing but a dead weight, a heap into which the warring seeds of things, badly matched, had all been crammed together. No Sun yet gave the world its light. No Moon renewed her horns by slow growing. No Earth hung balanced in the surrounding air, poised on its own weight, and no Amphitrite had reached out her arms along the far margins of the coasts. Land was there, and sea, and air — but the land could not be stood on, the water could not be swum, the air had no light of its own. Nothing kept its own shape. Everything got in the way of everything else, because within that single body cold fought hot, wet fought dry, soft fought hard, and things with weight fought things with none.
This quarrel a god, and a kinder nature, settled. He cut the earth away from the sky, and the waters away from the earth, and separated the clear heavens from the thick lower air. And once he had untangled these elements and freed them from that blind heap, he bound them, each in its own place, in a harmony that held peace between them. The fiery, weightless force of the domed sky leapt upward and made a place for itself at the very summit. Nearest to it, in lightness and in position, came the air. Denser than these, the earth drew down the heavier elements and was pressed together by its own gravity. The water, flowing around it all, took the lowest place and hemmed in the solid globe.
When the god — whichever of them it was — had thus divided the mass and, so divided, marshaled it into its parts, he first rolled the earth into the shape of a great ball, so that it should not be uneven on any side. Then he ordered the seas to spread out, to swell under the driving winds, and to wrap themselves around the shores of the encircled land. He added springs, and vast ponds, and lakes, and hemmed in the downhill rivers with sloping banks. These, different in different places, are partly swallowed by the earth itself; partly they reach the sea and, taken up into that wider field of freer water, beat against coastlines instead of banks. He commanded the plains to stretch wide, the valleys to sink low, the woods to clothe themselves in leaves, the stony mountains to rise. And just as the heavens are cut by two zones on the right and as many on the left, with a fifth between them hotter than the rest, so the god's care marked out the mass enclosed below with the same number, and the same number of climate-belts are pressed upon the earth. Of these, the middle one is not fit to live in, for its heat; deep snow buries two of them; and between each pair he set two more and gave them a mild climate, blending warmth with cold.
Over these hangs the air, which is heavier than fire by exactly as much as the weight of water is lighter than the weight of earth. There he ordered the mists to settle, and the clouds, and the thunder that would shake the minds of men, and, together with the lightnings, the winds that make the flashes. But even to these the world's maker did not grant the sky to hold at random. Even now, though each of them governs his own gusts in his own quarter, they can barely be kept from tearing the world apart — so fierce is the discord of these brothers. Eurus, the East Wind, drew off toward the dawn and the kingdoms of Nabath and Persia and the mountain ridges laid bare to the morning rays. The West — the evening lands, the shores that grow warm as the sun goes down — these border on Zephyr. Into Scythia and the far North burst the shuddering Boreas; the opposite quarter of the earth grows sodden with endless cloud and the rainy South. Above all these the god set the clear upper sky, the pure aether, weightless and holding not one trace of earthly dregs.
Scarcely had he fenced off everything within its own fixed bounds when the stars, long buried and hidden beneath that blind mass, began to blaze out across the whole of heaven. And so that no region should be left without its own living creatures, the stars and the shapes of the gods took the floor of heaven; the waters fell to the gleaming fish to live in; earth received the wild beasts, and the restless air the birds.
Still missing was a creature holier than these, able to hold a higher mind, one that could rule over the rest. And so Man was born. Either the maker of all things, the seedbed of a better world, fashioned him from divine stuff — or else the young earth, so lately parted from the high aether, still held the seeds of its kindred sky, and the son of Iapetus, Prometheus, mixed that earth with rainwater and molded it into the image of the gods who govern all things. And where the other animals bend their gaze down toward the ground, to Man he gave a face lifted high; he told him to look at the sky and to raise his eyes upright toward the stars. So the earth, which just now had been raw and shapeless, was changed and put on the never-before-seen forms of human beings.
The Golden Age was the first sown. With no one to enforce it, of its own free will, without laws, it kept faith and did right. Punishment and the fear of it were nowhere; no threatening words were read on tablets of fixed bronze, no crowd of the accused trembled before the face of its judge. All were safe with no one to guard them. No pine had yet been felled from its native mountains and gone down into the flowing waves to visit a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. No sheer moats yet ringed the towns; there was no straight war-trumpet, no coiled horn of bronze, no helmet and no sword. Without any use for soldiers, the untroubled peoples passed their days in soft ease. The earth herself, too, unforced, untouched by the hoe and wounded by no plowshare, gave everything of her own accord; and men, content with food that grew under no compulsion, gathered the fruit of the arbutus and mountain strawberries, cornel-cherries and blackberries clinging to the tough brambles, and the acorns that had fallen from Jupiter's spreading tree. It was an everlasting spring, and the mild west winds caressed with warm breath the flowers that had sprung up from no seed. Before long the unplowed earth was bearing grain as well, and fields that had never lain fallow whitened with heavy ears of wheat. Now rivers of milk, now rivers of nectar ran, and golden honey dripped from the green oak.
Afterward, once Saturn had been sent down into shadowy Tartarus and the world lay under the rule of Jupiter, the Silver Age came on — lower than gold, but more precious than tawny bronze. Jupiter shortened the span of that old-time spring and split the year into four seasons — winters, summers, unsteady autumns, and a brief spring. Then, for the first time, the air burned white with dry heat, and ice hung frozen hard in the winds. Then, for the first time, men went indoors; their houses were caves, dense thickets, and branches lashed together with bark. Then, for the first time, the seeds of Ceres, the grain, were buried in long furrows, and the young oxen groaned under the yoke.
After that age, third in order, followed the Bronze, fiercer in temper and quicker to reach for cruel weapons — yet not wicked outright. The last age was of hard iron. At once every kind of evil broke loose into that age of baser vein: modesty fled, and truth, and good faith, and in their place came fraud and trickery and treachery, and violence, and the criminal hunger to have more. The sailor now spread his sails to winds he still barely knew, and hulls of timber that had long stood high on the mountains now leapt over unknown waters. The land, once shared like sunlight and open air, the wary surveyor now marked off with a long boundary line. Nor was the rich soil asked only for its harvests and the food it owed; men went down into the very guts of the earth, and the wealth she had hidden away and moved close to the ghosts of the underworld was dug up — kindling for evil. And now hurtful iron had come forth, and gold more hurtful than iron; and War came forth, who fights with both, and rattles clashing weapons in his bloody hand. Men lived by plunder. Guest was not safe from host, nor father-in-law from son-in-law; even between brothers goodwill was rare. The husband schemed his wife's death, and she her husband's; ghastly stepmothers brewed pale poisons; and the son inquired into his father's years before their time. Duty and love lay conquered, and the maiden Astraea — Justice herself — last of the immortals, left the earth now soaked in slaughter.
And so that the high aether should be no safer than the earth, the Giants — so the story goes — made a grab for the kingdom of heaven and built the piled-up mountains high, toward the stars. Then the almighty Father hurled his lightning, split Olympus, and blasted Pelion off Ossa beneath it. When the monstrous bodies lay crushed under the ruin they themselves had raised, they say the Earth was drenched, soaked with the streaming blood of her sons; that she gave life to the warm gore; and, so that no trace of her offspring should remain, she turned it into the shape of men. But that breed, too, was a scorner of the gods above, greedy for savage killing, and full of violence: you could tell they were born of blood.
When the Father, Saturn's son, saw all this from his highest citadel, he groaned; and, calling to mind the foul banquet on Lycaon's table — an outrage still fresh and not yet widely known — he conceived a vast anger in his heart, an anger worthy of Jupiter, and summoned a council. No delay held back those he called.
There is a road on high, easy to see when the sky is clear; the Milky Way it is called, marked out by its very whiteness. Along this the gods go up to the halls of the great Thunderer, to his royal house. To the right and the left stand the open-doored courts of the noble gods, thronged with visitors. The lesser gods live scattered in their own quarters; here, along the front, the powerful and famous immortals have set their household shrines. This is the place — if boldness may be given to my words — that I would not be afraid to call the Palatine hill of high heaven. So when the gods had taken their seats in the marble hall, Jupiter himself, raised above them on his throne, leaning on his ivory scepter, shook the awful hair of his head three times and four; and with it he set the earth, the sea, and the stars trembling. Then, in words like these, he opened his indignant lips:
"I was no more anxious for the rule of the world even in that hour when each of the snake-footed monsters was reaching a hundred arms to seize the captured sky. For though that enemy was savage, still the whole war hung from one stock and sprang from a single source. Now, wherever Nereus roars around the whole globe, the race of mortals must be destroyed by me. I swear it by the rivers of the underworld that glide beneath the earth through the Stygian grove: everything else has already been tried, but a wound past healing must be cut away with the blade, so the sound part is not dragged down with it. I have demigods to think of; I have the country spirits, the nymphs, the fauns and satyrs and the woodland gods of the hills. Since we have not yet thought them worthy of the honor of heaven, we should at least let them live safely on the earth we have given them. But can you truly believe, gods, that they will be safe, when Lycaon — a man known for his savagery — has laid a plot against me, against the very one who holds and wields the thunderbolt and rules over you?"
Every god roared, and with burning zeal they demanded punishment for the man who had dared such a thing. It was just so when an unholy gang raged to blot out the Roman name in Caesar's blood: the human race stood stunned with sudden terror at so great a ruin, and the whole world shuddered. And the loyal love of your people, Augustus, was no less dear to you than that of the gods was to Jupiter. When he had checked their outcry with voice and hand, all of them fell silent. Once the clamor had died, held down by the weight of their ruler's authority, Jupiter broke the stillness again with these words:
"He has paid his penalty already — set that worry aside. But what he did, and what the punishment was, I will tell you. Word of the age's infamy had reached my ears. Hoping to find it false, I came down from the peak of Olympus and, a god in human shape, walked the earth. It would take too long to count up how much guilt was found everywhere: the rumor itself fell short of the truth.
"I had crossed Maenalus, dreaded for its dens of beasts, and Cyllene, and the pine woods of cold Lycaeus. From there, as the late dusk was drawing on the night, I entered the realm and the unwelcoming house of the Arcadian tyrant. I gave a sign that a god had come, and the common people began to pray. Lycaon first mocked their pious prayers; then he said, 'I'll find out by a clear test whether this fellow is a god or a mortal — and the truth will not be in doubt.' He made ready to kill me by surprise in the night, sunk in sleep: that was his idea of testing the truth. Not content with that, he took a hostage sent to him from the Molossian people, cut his throat with a blade, and softened part of the still-twitching limbs in boiling water while he roasted the rest over a fire. The moment he set this on the table, I, with avenging flame, brought his house down on its household gods — gods that deserved such a master. Terrified, he himself fled. He reached the silence of the fields and howled, and tried in vain to speak. His mouth drew rabid fury from himself, and, in his old lust for slaughter, he turned it against the flocks and even now delights in blood. His clothes became shaggy hair; his arms became legs. He is a wolf, and he keeps the traces of his former shape: the same gray, the same violence in his face, the same eyes glinting, the same look of savagery. One house has fallen — but one house alone did not deserve to die. As far as the earth reaches, the savage Fury reigns. You would think men had sworn an oath to do evil! Let all of them, and quickly, suffer the punishment they have earned — for that is my judgment."
Some of the gods approved Jupiter's words aloud and spurred him on in his anger; others played their part with silent assent. Still, the destruction of the whole human race grieved every one of them, and they asked what the earth would look like once emptied of mortals — who would lay incense on the altars? Did he mean to hand the world over to the wild beasts to ravage? To their questions the king of the gods answered that they should not be alarmed — the rest would be his care — and he promised to raise, from a marvelous source, a people unlike the one before.
And now he was about to scatter his lightning bolts over all the lands; but he feared that the sacred aether might catch fire from so many flames and the whole long vault of the sky burst into blaze. He remembered, too, that it stood in the decrees of Fate that a time would come when sea and land and the seized palace of heaven would all burn, and the hard-built mass of the world would strain in its agony. So the weapons forged by the Cyclopes' hands were laid aside. A different punishment pleased him: to destroy the mortal race beneath the waves and to loose the rains from every quarter of the sky.
At once he shut the North Wind up in the caves of Aeolus, along with every gust that drives the gathered clouds away, and sent out the South Wind. Out flew the South Wind on soaking wings, his terrible face wrapped in pitch-black gloom. His beard was heavy with storm; water streamed from his gray hair; mists sat on his brow; his wings and the folds of his robe dripped. And as he squeezed the hanging clouds in his broad hand, there came a crash, and dense rains poured down from the sky. Iris, the messenger of Juno, robed in her many colors, drew up water and carried it back as food for the clouds. The standing crops were beaten flat; the farmer's prayers lay ruined and mourned; and the work of a long year was lost, gone for nothing.
Jupiter's anger was not content with his own sky; his blue-gray brother Neptune helped him with reinforcing waves. He called the rivers together, and once they had come into their king's house he said, "There's no time now for a long speech. Pour out all your strength — the crisis demands it. Open your homes, and with every barrier thrown aside, give your streams full rein." So he ordered; and they went back, opened wide the mouths of their springs, and rolled toward the sea in an unbridled race. Neptune himself struck the earth with his trident, and it shuddered, and with the shock laid open the channels of the waters. The rivers burst their bounds and rushed across the open fields, sweeping away orchards along with the crops, flocks and men, houses, and temples too, with their sacred things. If any house stood firm and, unthrown, could resist so great a ruin, still the water rose higher than its roof and covered it, and the towers lay hidden, drowned beneath the flood. And now sea and land had no boundary between them: everything was ocean, and even the ocean had no shores.
One man seized a hilltop; another sat in his curved boat and pulled the oars where he had just been plowing; another sailed over his grainfields or the roof of his drowned farmhouse; another caught a fish in the top of an elm. An anchor, if chance so dropped it, bit into a green meadow, or curved keels grazed the vineyards below them. Where slender goats had lately cropped the grass, ungainly seals now laid down their bodies. The sea-nymphs, the Nereids, marveled at woods and cities and houses under the water; dolphins slipped into the forests and rammed the high branches and struck the shaken oaks. The wolf swam among the sheep; the wave carried tawny lions along, the wave carried tigers along. The lightning-force of his tusks did the boar no good now, nor his swift legs the stag, both swept away. And the wandering bird, long looking for land to light on, at last fell into the sea on failing wings. The boundless riot of the ocean had buried the hills, and unfamiliar waves beat against the mountaintops. The greatest part were carried off by the water; and those the water spared, long fasting broke, worn down by the want of food.
Phocis separates the fields of Aonia from those of Oeta — a fertile land, while it was land, but in that hour a part of the sea and a broad plain of waters that had risen all at once. There a steep mountain reaches toward the stars with two peaks, Parnassus by name, and its summit rises above the clouds. When Deucalion, in a small boat with the partner of his bed, ran aground here — for the sea had covered everywhere else — the two of them prayed to the Corycian nymphs and the gods of the mountain and to prophetic Themis, who at that time kept the oracle. No man was ever better than Deucalion, none more devoted to what was right, and no woman more reverent of the gods than Pyrrha.
When Jupiter saw the world one standing marsh of water, and saw that out of so many thousands only one man remained, out of so many thousands only one woman — both harmless, both worshippers of the gods — he scattered the clouds, and, the storms swept off by the North Wind, he showed the earth to the sky again and the sky to the earth. The sea's anger did not last either. Laying aside his three-pronged spear, the ruler of the deep calmed the waters and called on sea-green Triton, who stood up out of the deep with his shoulders crusted in native shellfish. He told him to blow his echoing horn and, at that signal, to call the waves and the rivers back. Triton took up his hollow, spiraling trumpet, the one that widens in coils from its narrow base — the trumpet that, once it has drawn in the sea's own air, fills the shores lying under either sunrise and sunset with its voice. Now, too, as soon as it touched the god's lips, wet with his dripping beard, and, filled with breath, sounded the ordered retreat, it was heard by all the waters of land and sea, and every water that heard it, it held in check. Now the sea had a shore again; the channels held their brimming rivers; the streams sank; the hills seemed to rise into view. The ground came up, the dry places spread as the waters shrank, and after a long day the woods showed their bare tops, holding the mud still left on their branches.
The world was restored. When Deucalion saw it emptied, and saw the desolate lands keeping a deep silence, tears welled up and he spoke to Pyrrha: "O sister, O wife, O only woman left alive, whom a shared descent and a common ancestor and then the marriage bed joined to me, and whom now our very dangers join — of all the lands the East and the West look upon, we two are the whole population. The sea has taken all the rest. And even now our hold on life is not sure enough; the clouds still frighten my mind. What would your heart be now, poor woman, if you had been snatched from destruction without me? How could you bear this terror alone? Who would comfort you in your grief? For I — believe me — if the sea had taken you too, I would have followed you, wife, and the sea would have taken me as well. If only I could remake the peoples by my father's arts and breathe souls into the molded earth! As it is, the mortal race survives in us two alone. So it has seemed good to the gods, and we remain as the last examples of mankind."
He finished, and they wept. They resolved to pray to the powers of heaven and to seek help through the sacred oracle. Without delay they went together to the waters of the Cephisus, not yet clear but already cutting their familiar channel. When they had sprinkled the drawn water on their clothes and their heads, they turned their steps to the temple of the holy goddess, whose gables were pale with ugly moss and whose altars stood without fire. As they reached the temple steps, each fell face-down on the ground and, trembling, kissed the cold stone. And they said: "If the gods can be softened, won over by just prayers — if the anger of heaven can be bent — tell us, Themis, by what art the ruin of our race can be repaired, and bring help, most gentle one, to a drowned world."
The goddess was moved, and gave this answer: "Leave the temple, veil your heads, loosen your girded robes, and throw the bones of your great mother behind your backs." For a long time they stood stunned. Pyrrha was the first to break the silence, refusing to obey the goddess's command; with trembling lips she begged pardon, afraid to wrong her mother's ghost by casting her bones. Meanwhile they turned over and over between them the dark, riddling words of the oracle they had been given. At last the son of Prometheus soothed the daughter of Epimetheus with gentle words: "Either my wit is deceiving me, or — since oracles are holy and never urge a crime — our great mother is the earth. The stones in the earth's body, I think, are what she calls her bones; those are what we are told to throw behind our backs." The daughter of Titan was moved by her husband's reading, yet her hope hung in doubt — so little did they both trust the warnings of heaven. But what harm in trying?
They went down; they veiled their heads, ungirded their tunics, and threw the stones, as ordered, behind their steps. And the stones — who would believe it, if the old tradition were not a witness? — began to lay aside their hardness and their stiffness, and little by little to soften, and, once softened, to take on a shape. Soon, when they had grown larger and a gentler nature had come over them, a kind of human form could be seen in them — not clear, but like a figure begun in marble, not yet finished off, very like rough-cut statues. The part of them that was damp with any moisture, and earthy, was turned into the stuff of a body; what was solid and could not bend changed into bone; what had just been a vein kept the same name still. And in a short while, by the will of the gods above, the stones thrown by the man's hands took on the look of men, and from the woman's throwing woman was made anew. That is why we are a hard race, well used to toil, and give proof of the source we sprang from.
The rest of the animals, in their different forms, the earth brought forth of her own accord, once the old moisture had been warmed through by the fire of the sun, and the mud and the wet marshes swelled with the heat, and the fertile seeds of things, nursed in the life-giving soil as in a mother's womb, grew and, given time, took on some shape. So it is when the seven-mouthed Nile draws back from the sodden fields and returns its waters to their old bed, and the fresh silt burns under the heavenly star: the farmers, turning the clods, come upon countless living things — some just begun, at the very moment of birth, some still unfinished and short of their limbs; and often, in the same body, one part is alive while the other is raw earth. For where moisture and heat have been mixed in just measure, they conceive, and from these two all things are born. And though fire fights with water, a moist warmth creates all things, and that discordant harmony is right for bringing life. So when the earth, still muddy from the recent flood, glowed hot again beneath the heavenly sun and a deep, soaking warmth, she gave birth to countless kinds — partly bringing back the old shapes, partly creating new monsters.
Against her will she bore you, too, then, enormous Python: a serpent never seen before, a terror to the newborn peoples, so much of the mountainside you covered. The bow-bearing god, Apollo, who had never before used such weapons on anything but fleeing deer and does, all but emptied his quiver upon him, laying him low with a thousand arrows as the venom oozed out through the black wounds. And so that the passing of years should not blot out the fame of the deed, he founded sacred games with famous contests, the Pythian games, named for the serpent he had conquered. There, whoever of the young men won with hand or foot or chariot-wheel took as his prize a wreath of oak leaves. There was no laurel yet, and Phoebus would bind his temples, lovely under their long hair, with garlands from any tree at all.
Daphne, the daughter of the river-god Peneus, was Apollo's first love — and it was no blind accident that gave her to him, but the savage anger of Cupid. Apollo, still flushed with pride from killing the serpent, had lately seen the boy bending his bow, drawing the string taut, and had jeered at him. "What are you doing with a grown man's weapons, you spoiled child?" he said. "Gear like that suits my shoulders — mine, who can deal a wild beast an unerring wound, deal a wound to an enemy, who just now laid low the bloated Python with a thousand arrows, that plague sprawled over so many acres with its poisonous belly. Be content to stir up who-knows-what little love affairs with your torch, and don't go claiming glory that belongs to me."
The son of Venus answered him: "Your bow may hit everything else, Apollo, but mine will hit you. And as much as every animal is beneath a god, that much less is your glory than mine." So he spoke, and beating the air with his wings he lit, quick and eager, on the shaded height of Parnassus, and drew two arrows out of his quiver — two arrows of opposite work. One kindles love; the other drives it off. The one that kindles it is gold, and its point glints sharp; the one that drives it off is blunt, with lead set under the reed. This second arrow the god fixed in the nymph, the daughter of Peneus; with the first he wounded Apollo, driving it clean through his bones into the marrow. At once the one is in love; the other flees the very word "lover," happy in the deep hiding-places of the woods and in the pelts of the beasts she has caught, a rival of the virgin Diana. A single band held back her hair, tied up without any care for arrangement. Many men courted her; she turned every suitor away, and, wanting no part of a man, unacquainted with men altogether, she roamed the trackless forests and cared nothing for what marriage, or love, or a wedding might be. Time and again her father said to her, "Daughter, you owe me a son-in-law." Time and again her father said, "Daughter, you owe me grandchildren." But she, hating the wedding torch as though it were something shameful, would flush that lovely face with a modest blush and, hanging on her father's neck with coaxing arms, would say, "Dearest father, let me enjoy my virginity forever. Diana's father granted her exactly this." He gave in, of course. But that very beauty forbids you to be what you wish, Daphne, and your loveliness fights against your prayer.
Apollo is in love. He has seen Daphne, and he wants to marry her, and what he wants, he expects to have — his own oracles fail him. And as light stubble burns once the ears of grain are stripped away, as a hedge catches fire from a torch that some traveler has held too close, or left behind at daybreak, so the god went up in flames — so his whole heart caught fire, and he fed a hopeless love on hope. He looks at her hair falling unadorned along her neck and thinks, "And what if it were done up?" He sees her eyes, glittering like stars with their own fire. He sees her lips, and it is not enough merely to see them. He praises her fingers, her hands, her wrists, her arms bare well past the elbow — and whatever is hidden he imagines to be lovelier still. But she flees, quicker than the light wind, and does not stop when he calls after her:
"Nymph, daughter of Peneus, wait — please! I am no enemy chasing you down. Nymph, wait! This is how the lamb runs from the wolf, the deer from the lion, the dove on trembling wing from the eagle — each one fleeing its enemy. But love is why I follow you. I am wretched! Don't fall on your face, don't let the brambles scratch those legs that never deserved a hurt — don't let me be the cause of your pain. The ground you race across is rough. Slow down, I beg you, hold back your flight, and I will follow more slowly too. Only ask yourself who it is you please. I am no mountain rough, no herdsman; I am not some shaggy creature guarding cattle and flocks out here. You don't know, rash girl — you don't know who it is you're running from, and that is the only reason you run. The land of Delphi serves me, and Claros, and Tenedos, and the royal house of Patara. Jupiter is my father. Through me is revealed whatever will be, whatever has been, whatever is; through me song comes into tune with the strings. My arrow flies true — yet there is one arrow truer than mine, the one that has struck this wound in my untouched heart. Medicine is my invention; all over the world I am called the bringer of help, and the power of every healing herb is mine to command. But look — there is no herb that can cure love, and the arts that heal everyone else are no use to their own master."
He would have said more, but the daughter of Peneus fled in fear and left him there, his words unfinished, and left the god behind along with them. Even then she looked lovely. The wind bared her body; the gusts came against her and set her clothes rippling, and a light breeze blew her hair out behind her — her beauty was only heightened by the flight. But the young god will not waste his sweet talk any longer. As love itself urged him on, he ran after her at full stride. Like a Gallic hound that has spotted a hare in an open field — the one straining after its prey, the other after its life; the dog, seeming just about to close, hopes at every stride to have her now, this instant, and grazes her heels with his outstretched muzzle, while the hare, unsure whether she is already caught, is torn from the very bite and slips clear of the mouth just touching her — so ran the god and the girl, he swift with hope, she with fear. Yet the pursuer, borne up on the wings of love, is faster; he gives her no rest, looms right over her fleeing back, and breathes on the hair scattered across her neck. Her strength was spent; she went pale, and, worn out by the effort of that headlong run, she looked toward the waters of Peneus and cried, "Help me, father! If you rivers hold any divine power, destroy this shape by which I have pleased too well — change it, take it away!"
The prayer was barely finished when a heavy numbness seizes her limbs. A thin bark closes over her soft breast; her hair lengthens into leaves, her arms into branches; her feet, so swift a moment ago, stick fast in sluggish roots; a treetop takes the place of her face. Only her shining beauty is left. Even so Apollo loves her. He lays his hand against the trunk and feels her heart still fluttering under the new bark, and folding the branches in his arms as if they were limbs, he kisses the wood — and even the wood shrinks back from his kisses. "Since you cannot be my wife," the god said to her, "you will at least be my tree. My hair will always wear you, laurel, and my lyre, and my quiver. You will stand with the Roman generals when the glad voice sings out the triumph and the long processions climb to the Capitol. You will guard the gateposts of Augustus, standing most faithful before his doors, keeping watch over the oak wreath set between them. And just as my head is young, my hair uncut, so you too shall wear the everlasting honor of your leaves." Apollo had finished. The laurel nodded with its new-made branches and seemed to shake its crown just like a head.
There is a grove in Thessaly, closed off on every side by a forest set on steep rock. They call it Tempe. Through it the river Peneus, pouring down from the foot of Mount Pindus, rolls along in foaming waters, and in its heavy fall it gathers clouds that scatter a fine mist like smoke, sprinkling the tops of the woods with spray and wearying places far off with its roar. This is the home, this the seat, these the innermost chambers of the great river. Here, in a cave hewn from the cliffs, he sat and gave law to the waters and to the nymphs who dwell in them. Here first the local rivers gather, not knowing whether to congratulate the father or to console him: the poplar-lined Spercheus, the restless Enipeus, old Apidanus, gentle Amphrysus, and Aeas — and soon after, the other streams that, wherever their current has taken them, lead their wave-weary waters down to the sea. Only Inachus is absent. Hidden deep in his cavern, he swells his own waters with weeping and mourns his daughter Io as lost — most wretched of all. He does not know whether she is still alive or already among the shades; but since he cannot find her anywhere, he believes she is nowhere, and in his heart he dreads worse.
Jupiter had seen her as she came back from her father's stream, and had said, "You girl, worthy of Jove, who will make some lucky man happy in your bed — come to the shade of these deep woods" (and he pointed out the shade of the woods) "while the day is hot and the sun stands at the very peak of its course. And if you are afraid to go alone into the haunts of wild beasts, you will enter the secret places of the grove under the protection of a god — and no common god, but the one who holds heaven's great scepter in his hand, who hurls the wandering lightnings. Don't run from me!" For she was already running. She had left behind the pastures of Lerna and the tree-planted fields of Lyrcea when the god cloaked the wide land in a rolling darkness, halted her flight, and took her modesty by force.
Meanwhile Juno looked down into the middle of Argos, and, puzzled that fast-moving clouds had made the look of night in the bright of day, she saw that these were not river-mists and were not rising from any wet ground; and she looked around for her husband, knowing all too well by now the schemes of a mate she had caught so often. When she did not find him in heaven, she said, "Either I am mistaken, or I am being wronged," and gliding down from the top of the sky she came to rest on the earth and ordered the clouds to draw back. He had foreseen his wife's arrival and had already changed the daughter of Inachus into a sleek heifer. Even as a cow she is beautiful. Juno, daughter of Saturn, admires the look of the animal, however grudgingly, and asks — as if she did not know the truth — whose it is, and where it came from, and what herd it belongs to. Jupiter lies, says it was born from the earth, so she will stop asking after its owner. Then Juno asks for the cow as a gift. What can he do? To hand over his own beloved is cruel; not to give her up looks suspicious. Shame urges him one way, love argues him the other. Shame would have lost to love — but if so trifling a gift as a cow were refused to his own sister and wife, it might well seem to be no cow at all.
Even with her rival handed over, the goddess did not put aside all her fear at once. She was still wary of Jupiter, still afraid of a theft, until she gave Io into the keeping of Argus, the son of Aristor. Argus had a head ringed with a hundred eyes. Two of them took their rest in turn while the rest kept watch and stayed on duty. However he stood, he was looking toward Io; even with his back turned he had Io before his eyes. By day he lets her graze; when the sun has sunk below the deep earth, he shuts her in and ties a rope around her undeserving neck. She feeds on the leaves of trees and on bitter grass, and for a bed the poor thing lies on ground that is not always even grassy, and drinks from muddy streams. When she wanted to stretch her arms out to Argus in appeal, she had no arms to stretch; and when she tried to voice her grief, only a lowing came out of her mouth — and she was terrified at the sound, frightened by her own voice. She came, too, to the banks where she used to play, the banks of her father Inachus, and when she saw her new horns in the water she recoiled from herself in terror and ran. The Naiads do not know her; Inachus himself does not know who she is. But she follows her father, and follows her sisters, and lets herself be touched, and offers herself to their admiring hands. Old Inachus plucked some grass and held it out; she licks his hand, kisses her father's palms, and cannot hold back her tears — and if only words would come, she would beg for help, would tell her name and her disaster. Instead of words, letters that her hoof drew in the dust told the sad story of her changed body. "Oh, wretched me!" cries her father Inachus, and clinging to the horns and the snow-white neck of the moaning heifer, he says it again: "Wretched me! Are you my daughter, that I searched for across every land? Undiscovered, you were a lighter grief to me than now, found. You say nothing; you give no words back to mine; you only heave sighs from deep in your chest, and — the only thing you can do — you answer my words with a low. And I, knowing nothing, was preparing a bridal chamber and wedding torches for you. My first hope was a son-in-law, my second grandchildren. Now you must take a mate from the herd, now your children come from the herd. And I cannot even end so great a grief by dying — it is a curse to be a god, for the gate of death is shut against me, and my mourning stretches on into ages without end." As he grieved, the star-eyed Argus dragged her away, tore the daughter from her father and led her off to distant pastures. He himself took up a high mountain peak far off and sat there, keeping watch on every side.
The ruler of the gods can bear the granddaughter of Phoroneus's suffering no longer. He calls his son Mercury, whom the shining Pleiad Maia bore, and orders him to put Argus to death. There is little delay in strapping the wings to his feet, taking the sleep-bringing wand in his strong hand, and setting the cap on his hair. Once these were in order, the son of Jupiter leapt down from his father's high citadel to the earth. There he took off the cap and laid aside the wings, keeping only the wand. With this, dressed like a shepherd, he drives a flock of she-goats he has rounded up along the byways through the wild country, and plays as he goes on a set of reed pipes. The keeper Juno had set on guard was charmed by this strange new sound. "Whoever you are," Argus said, "you're welcome to sit here with me on this rock. Nowhere is the grass richer for your flock, and you can see how good the shade is for a shepherd." So the grandson of Atlas, Mercury, sat down, and passed the daylight in a long, easy stream of talk, and by playing on his joined reeds tried to overcome the watching eyes. But Argus fought to master soft sleep, and though slumber had taken part of his eyes, with the rest he still kept watch. He asked, too — since the pipe had only lately been invented — how it had come to be discovered.
Then the god said: "In the cold mountains of Arcadia, among the wood-nymphs of Nonacris, there was one water-nymph famous above the rest. The nymphs called her Syrinx. More than once she had slipped away from the satyrs who chased her, and from every god the shadowy forest and the fertile fields hold. In her devotions and in her virginity she followed the goddess of Ortygia — Diana; dressed after Diana's fashion, she could fool anyone and be taken for Latona's daughter, if only her bow were not of horn and Diana's of gold. Even so she deceived them. As she came back from the hill of Lycaeus, Pan caught sight of her, his head wreathed in sharp pine, and he spoke these words to her —" It remained to tell the words, and how the nymph, scorning his pleas, fled through pathless country until she came to the calm stream of sandy Ladon; how there, the waters blocking her run, she begged her watery sisters to change her; and how Pan, when he thought he had caught Syrinx at last, found himself holding not the nymph's body but marsh reeds; and how, while he sighed in disappointment, the breeze stirring in the reeds made a thin sound, like someone in mourning; and how the god, captivated by this new art and the sweetness of the sound, said, "This is a way I can keep talking with you, at least" — and so, with reeds of different lengths joined by wax, he kept the girl's name. But as the Cyllenian god was about to tell all this, he saw that every one of Argus's eyes had given way, his sight buried in sleep. At once he stops his voice and deepens the slumber, stroking those drowsy eyes with his enchanted wand. Without a pause he strikes the nodding head where it joins the neck with his hooked sword, and hurls the bloodied thing down from the rock, staining the sheer cliff with gore. Argus, you lie low; the light you carried in so many eyes is put out, and one night has taken your whole hundred at once.
Juno takes them up and sets them on the feathers of her own bird, filling its tail with star-bright jewels. At once she blazed with rage, and did not put off the hour of her fury. She loosed a horrifying Fury before the eyes and mind of her Argive rival, drove invisible goads deep into her breast, and hounded her, a fugitive, across the whole world. You, O Nile, were the last thing left at the end of her endless labor. The moment she reached you, she dropped to her knees at the water's edge, threw back her neck, and — lifting to the stars the only thing she could still lift, her face — with her groans and her tears and her grieving lows she seemed to plead with Jupiter and to beg an end to her miseries. He threw his arms around his wife's neck and asked her, at last, to end the punishment. "Set aside your fears for the days to come," he said. "She will never again be a cause of grief to you." And he called the Stygian marshes to hear the oath.
Once the goddess was soothed, Io takes back her earlier form and becomes what she was before. The bristles fall away from her body; her horns shrink; the round of her eye grows smaller; her gaping jaw draws in; her shoulders and her hands come back; the hoof, dissolving, is lost and becomes five nails again. Nothing of the cow is left in her but the whiteness of her skin. Content now with the use of two feet, the nymph stands upright — yet she is afraid to speak, in case she should low like a heifer, and shyly tries out the words she has gone so long without. Now, as a goddess, she is worshipped by the linen-robed crowds of Egypt.
To her at last, it is believed, Epaphus was born from the seed of great Jupiter, and throughout the cities he holds temples set beside his mother's. He had a friend, Phaethon, child of the Sun, his equal in spirit and in years. Once, when Phaethon was boasting grandly and would not yield an inch, all puffed up about his father Apollo, the grandson of Inachus could not stand it. "You believe your mother about everything, you fool," he said, "and you're swollen with pride over a father who isn't real." Phaethon blushed and swallowed his anger in shame, and carried Epaphus's taunts to his mother Clymene. "To hurt you all the more, mother," he said, "I — the bold, the free-spoken one — held my tongue. I'm ashamed that such an insult could be flung at us and that we couldn't throw it back. But you — if I really am born of heavenly stock — give me some proof of that high descent, and claim me for the sky." So he spoke, and threw his arms around his mother's neck, and begged her by his own life, and by the life of Merops her husband, and by the wedding torches of his sisters, to give him some sign of his true father. Clymene — moved, perhaps, by Phaethon's pleading, or perhaps more by anger at the slander against her — stretched both arms toward the sky and, gazing up at the light of the sun, said, "By that radiance bright with darting rays, my son, which both hears and sees us, I swear to you: you were fathered by this Sun that you are looking at, this Sun that governs the world. If I am lying, let him refuse ever to be seen by me again, and let this daylight be the last my eyes ever know. And it is no long journey for you to find your father's home. The house where he rises borders on our own land. If you have the heart for it, go, and ask him yourself." At once Phaethon springs up, overjoyed at his mother's words, and heaven is already his in his mind. He passes by his own Ethiopians and the Indians who live beneath the sun's fires, and eagerly makes his way toward his father's rising.
The palace of the Sun rose high on soaring columns, ablaze with glittering gold and with bronze-red pyrope that mimics living flame. Polished ivory sheathed its topmost gables, and its double doors threw back the light from panels of silver. But the craftsmanship outshone even the costly stuff it was made of. For there Vulcan, the fire-god and smith of the sky, had chased into the metal the seas that ring the enclosing lands, and the round world, and the heavens that arch over the world. The waves hold their sea-blue gods: Triton blowing his echoing shell; shifting Proteus, who is never twice the same; Aegaeon, his arms flung across the vast backs of whales; and Doris and her daughters, the sea-nymphs — some of them shown swimming, some sitting on a rock to dry their green hair, some riding on the backs of fish. Their faces are not all one face, and yet not wholly unlike — just as sisters' faces should be. The land bears men and cities and forests, wild beasts and rivers, nymphs and all the other spirits of the countryside. And over them all is set the image of the shining sky, with six signs of the zodiac on the right-hand door and six on the left.
By a steep, climbing path the son of Clymene came at last to that place and stepped inside the house of the father he had only been promised. At once he turned his steps toward his father's face — and stopped a long way off, for he could not bear that light any nearer. Wrapped in a purple robe, Phoebus the Sun sat on a throne bright with clear-cut emeralds. To his right and his left stood the Day, the Month, the Year, the Ages, and the Hours, ranged at even spaces; young Spring stood there, wreathed in a crown of flowers; Summer stood naked, wearing garlands of grain; Autumn stood stained with the trodden juice of grapes; and icy Winter, his white hair stiff and shaggy.
From his place at the center, the Sun — with those eyes that see all things — saw the young man flinching at the strangeness of it all, and said, "What has brought you all this way? What do you come seeking in this high house, Phaethon — a son no father would deny?"
He answered, "Light shared by the whole measureless world, Phoebus, my father — if you let me use that name, if Clymene is not hiding some fault behind a lie — give me a token, father, some proof that lets the world believe I am truly your child; take this doubt out of my heart." So he spoke; and his father laid aside the blaze of rays that ringed his head and told the boy to come closer. He folded him in his arms and said, "You do not deserve to be denied as mine, and Clymene has told you your true birth. And so that you may doubt no longer — ask any gift you like, and you shall have it from my hand. Let the marsh the gods swear by be witness to my promise, the pool my own eyes have never seen."
Scarcely had he finished when the boy asked for his father's chariot, and for the right to drive the wing-footed horses for a single day.
His father repented the oath. Three times, four times he shook his shining head, and said, "Your words have made mine reckless. If only I were free not to grant what I promised! I confess it, son — this one thing, and only this, I would refuse you. But I am still allowed to argue you out of it. What you want is not safe. You ask for something too great, Phaethon, a gift that suits neither your strength nor your boyish years. Your lot is a mortal's; what you long for is not for mortals. In your ignorance you reach even beyond what the gods above are allowed. Let each of them please himself as he likes — still, not one of them but me can stand on the fire-bearing axle. Even the ruler of vast Olympus, who hurls the savage thunderbolts with his terrible right hand, could not drive this chariot; and what have we greater than Jupiter?
"The first stretch of road is steep, so steep that the horses, fresh in the morning, can barely struggle up it. At the very top of the sky it runs highest of all, and even I am often afraid to look down from there on the sea and the land, and my heart pounds with trembling dread. The last stretch drops sheer, and needs a sure hand on the reins; then even Tethys, the sea that takes me in below, is afraid I will come plunging headlong down. And the whole sky is forever wheeling round, dragging the high stars with it and spinning them in a rushing whirl. I drive against it — that force which overpowers all else does not overpower me — and I ride the opposite way to the racing world. Suppose the chariot were yours: what would you do? Could you go against the spinning poles and keep the swift axle from sweeping you away? Perhaps you picture groves up there, and cities of the gods, and temples rich with offerings? The way runs through ambushes, and the shapes of savage beasts! Even if you hold your course and are led astray by no wandering, still you must pass through the horns of the Bull that fronts you, past the Thessalian archer's bow and the jaws of the raging Lion, past the Scorpion curving his cruel arms in one long sweep and the Crab that curves his arms the other way. And the horses, hot with the fire they carry in their chests and breathe out from mouth and nostrils — those you will not easily rule. Even I can barely hold them when their fierce spirit heats up and their necks fight the reins.
"But you, my son — take care I am not the giver of a deadly gift; while there is still time, mend what you are asking for. You want a sure proof that you are sprung from my blood? I give you a sure proof by my fear for you: by a father's dread I am shown to be your father. Look — look at my face! I wish you could sink your eyes into my breast and catch the father's cares inside it. And, last of all — look round you at everything the rich world holds, and out of all the blessings of heaven and earth and sea, so many and so great, ask for anything; you shall meet no refusal. This one thing only I beg to be let off, which by its true name is a punishment, not an honor. You are asking, Phaethon, for a punishment dressed up as a gift. Why do you throw your coaxing arms around my neck, you foolish boy? Have no doubt — whatever you choose will be given; I have sworn it by the waters of the Styx. But choose more wisely!"
He had finished his warnings; but the boy fought them off all the same, held to his purpose, and burned with longing for the chariot. So the father, having stalled as long as he could, led the young man out to the tall chariot, Vulcan's handiwork. The axle was gold, the pole was gold, gold ran round the rims of the wheels, and the spokes were ranged in silver. Along the yoke, chrysolites and gems set in rows threw the bright light back to Phoebus above. And while the high-hearted Phaethon marveled at the work and studied it, look — wakeful Dawn threw open her purple doors in the reddening east and her halls full of roses. The stars fled; the Morning Star herded the last of their ranks and was himself the last to quit his post in the sky.
When the Sun saw him make for the earth, and the world turning red, and the horns of the waning Moon seem to melt away, he ordered the swift Hours to yoke the horses. The goddesses did his bidding quickly, leading the beasts from their lofty stalls — snorting flame, gorged on the juice of ambrosia — and buckling on the ringing bits. Then the father touched his son's face with a holy salve and made it able to bear the scorching flame; he set the rays on the boy's hair, and, drawing sigh after sigh from a heart that already foreknew grief, he said:
"If you can obey at least this much of your father's advice — go easy on the whip, boy, and pull hard on the reins. They race of their own accord; the work is to hold them back when they want to run. And do not let the road tempt you straight across the five circles of the sky. There is a track cut slantwise in a broad curve, kept within the bounds of three zones, that shuns the far southern pole and the Bear that keeps to the north wind — go that way; you will see the clear ruts of my wheels. And so that heaven and earth may share the heat alike, do not press too low, and do not force the chariot up through the highest air. Go too high, and you will scorch the roofs of heaven; too low, and you will burn the earth. The middle way is safest. Do not let the wheel veer right toward the coiled Serpent, or the left carry you down to the low Altar. Hold between the two. The rest I leave to Fortune, and I pray she helps you and looks after you better than you look after yourself. While I have been speaking, damp Night has touched her turning-post on the western shore. We are not free to wait; I am called for. Dawn is blazing out, the darkness put to flight. Take the reins in your hand — or, if your heart can still be changed, use my advice and not my chariot, while you still can, while you still stand on solid ground, before you have climbed, in your ignorance, into the axle you so wrongly wanted. Let me give the light to the earth — a light you can watch from a safe place!"
But the boy had already sprung into the light chariot with his young body, and stood tall, and rejoiced to take the light reins in his hands, and thanked his unwilling father for them.
Meanwhile the Sun's winged horses — Pyroeis and Eous and Aethon, and Phlegon the fourth — filled the air with fiery neighing and beat their hooves against the barriers. When Tethys, knowing nothing of her grandson's fate, pushed the barriers back and gave them the whole open sky, they leapt to the road, and, working their feet through the air, tore through the clouds that blocked them, and, lifted on their wings, outran the east winds that had risen from the same quarter. But the load was light — too light for the Sun's horses to feel — and the yoke lacked its usual weight. As curved ships without their proper ballast reel and are carried unsteady over the sea for their very lightness, so the chariot, empty of its accustomed burden, bounded up into the air, tossed high and pitching like a thing with nothing in it.
The moment the team felt it, they bolted, left the beaten track, and no longer ran in their old order. The boy himself was in a panic. He did not know which way to turn the reins put into his hands, did not know where the road lay, and, if he had known, could not have made them obey. Then, for the first time, the cold Wain-stars — the northern Bears — grew warm under the sunbeams, and tried in vain to dip themselves in a sea forbidden to them. The Serpent that lies coiled nearest the frozen pole, sluggish before with cold and a threat to no one, grew hot and took a new fury from the heat. And you too, Boötes, they say, fled in confusion, slow as you were and held back by your wagon.
But when the luckless Phaethon looked down from the roof of the sky at the lands lying far, so far below, he went white, and his knees shook with sudden fear, and in all that light darkness swam across his eyes. Now he wished he had never touched his father's horses; now he was sorry he had learned his birth and had won his own request; now, longing to be called the son of Merops, he was swept along like a ship driven by a screaming north wind, whose pilot has thrown down the helm he can no longer master and left her to the gods and his prayers. What could he do? Much of the sky lay behind him now, but more of it stretched ahead. He measured both in his mind. Now he looked forward to the west, which fate would never let him reach; now he looked back to the east. Numb, not knowing what to do, he neither let the reins go nor had the strength to hold them, and he did not even know the horses' names. And scattered here and there across the strange sky he saw, shaking with terror, monstrous shapes of enormous beasts. There is a place where the Scorpion bends his arms into two great bows, and, with his tail and his claws crooked on either side, stretches his limbs across the space of two signs. When the boy saw him, wet with the sweat of black poison and threatening a wound with the curved barb of his sting, his wits left him and, in a chill of horror, he let the reins fall.
When the reins dropped and settled on the horses' backs, the team broke loose. With no one to hold them they went careening through the air of an unknown country, and wherever their frenzy drove them, there they rushed, lawless: they crashed against the stars fixed high in the heavens and dragged the chariot through trackless wastes. Now they made for the very top of the sky, now they plunged down headlong ways to a strip of earth closer below. The Moon watched in amazement as her brother's horses ran lower than her own, and the singed clouds smoked.
The earth caught fire, each place as it stood highest first; it split and cracked open in gaping chasms and, its sap drawn off, went dry. The pastures whitened; the trees blazed with their leaves; and the ripe standing grain gave fuel to its own ruin. But these are small griefs to mourn. Great cities perished with their walls, and the flames turned whole nations, peoples and all, to ash; woods burned together with the mountains. Athos burned, and Cilician Taurus, and Tmolus, and Oeta, and Ida — dry now, once thick with springs — and Helicon, home of the virgin Muses, and Haemus, not yet called Oeagrian. Etna burned past all measure with doubled fire, and two-peaked Parnassus, and Eryx, and Cynthus, and Othrys, and Rhodope — this time to lose its snows at last — and Mimas, and Dindyma, and Mycale, and Cithaeron, born for holy rites. Its own cold could not save Scythia: Caucasus burned, and Ossa with Pindus, and Olympus taller than both, and the airy Alps, and the cloud-carrying Apennines.
Then indeed Phaethon saw the whole world ablaze on every side, and could not endure such heat; he breathed in scalding air as if from the bottom of a furnace, and felt his own chariot going white-hot beneath him. He could not bear the ashes and flung-up cinders any longer; on every side he was wrapped in scorching smoke, and, buried in a pitch-black murk, he no longer knew where he was going or where he was, and was carried off at the whim of the winged horses.
It was then, men believe, that the peoples of Ethiopia took on their dark color, as the blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies. It was then that Libya was made a desert, its moisture seared away; then that the nymphs, hair loose, wept for their springs and lakes. Boeotia looked for Dirce, Argos for Amymone, Ephyre for the waters of Pirene. Not even rivers with wide-set banks stayed safe: Tanais steamed in the middle of its waters, and old Peneus, and Teuthrantian Caicus, and quick Ismenus, and Phocian Erymanthus, and Xanthus — doomed to burn a second time — and yellow Lycormas, and Maeander playing in its winding streams, and Mygdonian Melas, and Taenarian Eurotas. Babylonian Euphrates burned; Orontes burned, and swift Thermodon, and Ganges, and Phasis, and Ister. Alpheus boiled; the banks of Spercheus blazed; the gold that Tagus carries in its current ran molten in the flames. And the river birds, the swans that had made the Maeonian banks famous with their song, scorched in the middle of the Cayster. The Nile fled in terror to the ends of the earth and hid its head, which is hidden still; its seven mouths lay empty and dusty, seven valleys with no river in them. The same fate dried the Ismarian streams, Hebrus with Strymon, and the western rivers — the Rhine, the Rhone, the Po, and the Tiber, to whom the mastery of the world was promised.
All the ground burst apart; light drove down through the cracks into Tartarus and terrified the king of the underworld and his queen. The sea shrank in, and where lately there had been open water was now a plain of dry sand; mountains the deep had covered rose up and swelled the number of the scattered Cyclades. The fish sank to the bottom; the arched dolphins no longer dared to lift themselves into the air above the water as they used to; the bodies of seals floated lifeless on their backs on the surface of the deep. The story goes that even Nereus himself, and Doris and their daughters, hid in their warm caves. Three times Neptune, with a grim face, dared to thrust his arms up out of the water; three times he could not endure the fiery air.
Yet kindly Earth, the mother, ringed round as she was by sea, among the waters of the deep and the shrunken springs that had buried themselves in her dark body — Earth, parched, lifted her smothered face as far as her neck, put a hand to her brow, and, shaking everything with a great tremor, sank a little lower than she is wont to be, and spoke in a broken voice:
"If this is your will and I have earned it, why do your lightnings hold back, highest of the gods? If I must perish by the power of fire, let me perish by your fire, and lighten my ruin by knowing whose hand it was. I can barely open my throat for these very words" — the heat had choked her mouth — "Look at my scorched hair! Look, so many cinders over my eyes, so many over my face! Is this the return you give me, this the reward of my fruitfulness and my service — that I bear the wounds of the curved plough and the harrows and am worked hard all the year long; that I furnish leaves for the cattle, and gentle food, the grain, for the human race, and incense for you gods? But even suppose I have earned destruction — what have the waters done, what has your brother done? Why do the seas handed to him by lot shrink away and pull back farther from the sky? And if regard for your brother and for me does not move you, then take pity at least on your own heavens! Look around: both poles are smoking. If the fire ruins them, your own halls will come crashing down. See — Atlas himself is struggling, and can barely hold the white-hot sky on his shoulders! If the seas, if the lands, if the palace of heaven are lost, we are hurled back into the chaos of old. Snatch from the flames whatever is still left, and take thought for the sum of things!"
So spoke Earth; for she could bear the vapor no longer, and could say no more, and drew her face back into herself, into the caverns nearest the ghosts of the dead.
But the almighty father, having called the gods above to witness — and the one, too, who had given the chariot — that unless he acted all things would be lost to a grim fate, climbed to the topmost height from which he is used to spreading clouds across the broad lands, from which he rouses his thunder and hurls his brandished bolts. But this time he had no clouds to draw over the earth, no rain to send down from the sky. He thundered, and, poising a bolt level with his right ear, flung it at the charioteer and struck him out of his life and his seat at once, and with his own ruthless fire he curbed the fire below. The horses panicked, leapt apart, wrenched their necks from the yoke, and left the broken harness behind. Here lie the reins; there the axle, torn from the pole; there the spokes of the shattered wheels; and the wreck of the smashed chariot was scattered far and wide.
But Phaethon, the flames devouring his red-gold hair, was flung headlong and fell in a long trail through the air, as sometimes a star from a clear sky seems to fall, though it has not really fallen. Far from his homeland, in another quarter of the world, the great river Eridanus, the Po, took him in and washed his smoking face.
The nymphs of the west laid his body, still smoking from the three-forked flame, in a tomb, and carved these lines on the stone:
Here lies Phaethon, who drove his father's chariot. If he could not hold it, still he fell in a great daring.
His wretched father, sick with bitter grief, had covered his face and hidden it; and — if only we can believe it — they say one whole day went by without a sun. The burning world gave light; so even that disaster was good for something.
But Clymene, when she had said whatever there was to say in so great a sorrow, wild and out of her mind and tearing at her breast, went over the whole earth, hunting first for his lifeless limbs, and then for his bones. She found the bones at last, buried on a foreign bank. She threw herself down on the spot, bathed with her tears the name she read on the marble, and warmed it against her open breast.
The daughters of the Sun mourned no less, and gave their tears, a gift useless to the dead, and beat their breasts with their hands, and called on Phaethon night and day — Phaethon, who would never hear their sad laments — and lay stretched about the tomb. Four times the Moon had filled her disk, joining her horns; and the sisters, in their custom (for grief had made a custom of it), kept up their wailing. Then Phaethusa, the eldest of them, when she tried to throw herself on the ground, cried out that her feet had gone stiff. Fair Lampetie, trying to come to her, was held fast by a root that sprang up out of nowhere. A third, when she went to tear her hair with her hands, tore off leaves instead. One wailed that her legs were held in a trunk of wood; another that her arms had become long branches. And while they stared at this, bark closed over their loins, and by degrees wrapped their bellies, their breasts, their shoulders, their hands, until only their mouths were left, crying out for their mother. What could their mother do but run this way and that, wherever her frenzy took her, and press her lips to theirs while she still could? It was not enough. She tried to pull their bodies out of the trunks and to snap the tender branches off with her hands — and out of them dripped blood as from a wound. "Spare me, mother, I beg you," each one cried as she was hurt, "spare me! It is my own body being torn in the tree. And now — goodbye." The bark came over their last words. From the branches the tears still flow, and the amber that drips from the new-formed boughs hardens in the sun; the clear river catches it and sends it on to be worn by the brides of Latium.
Cycnus, the son of Sthenelus, was there for this strange event — Cycnus, who, though he was kin to you, Phaethon, on his mother's side, was closer still to you in his heart. He had left his kingdom (for he had ruled the peoples and the great cities of Liguria) and was filling the green banks and the river Eridanus, and the wood the sisters had thickened, with his laments, when the man's voice thinned to a shrill note, gray feathers hid his hair, a long neck reached out from his breast, a web bound his reddening toes, plumage clothed his sides, and a blunt bill closed over his mouth. Cycnus became a new bird, the swan; but he would not trust himself to the sky or to Jupiter, remembering the fire hurled so unjustly from up there. He kept to the ponds and the wide lakes, and, hating fire, chose the streams, the very opposite of flame.
Meanwhile Phaethon's father, unkempt and stripped of his own splendor — just as he is when he goes into eclipse — hated the light, hated himself and the day, gave his mind over to grief, and to his grief added anger, and refused his service to the world. "From the very beginning of time," he said, "my lot has been restless enough, and I am sick of labors without end and without honor. Let anyone else drive the chariot that carries the light! And if there is no one, and all the gods admit they cannot do it, let Jupiter himself drive it — so that, while he is trying my reins, he may at least, for a while, lay down the bolts that leave fathers childless. Then, when he has felt for himself the strength of the fire-footed horses, he will know that the one who could not steer them well did not deserve to die."
As the Sun said such things, all the gods stood around him and begged him with pleading voices not to plunge the world into darkness. Jupiter, for his part, made excuses for hurling his lightning, and, like a king, added threats to his pleas. So Phoebus gathered his horses, still crazed and trembling with terror, and in his pain lashed out at them with goad and whip — lashed at them savagely, for savage he was — and threw his son in their faces and blamed his death on them.
But the almighty father went the round of the great walls of heaven, checking that no part, weakened by the violence of the fire, was about to fall. When he saw them firm and sound in their own strength, he looked over the earth and the works of men. Yet his own Arcadia was the deeper care to him. He restored its springs and the rivers that had not yet dared to run again; he gave grass back to the ground and leaves to the trees, and bade the wounded forests grow green once more. And as he went to and fro, again and again, he stopped short at a girl of Nonacris in Arcadia, and the fire caught and burned in his bones.
She was no girl for softening wool by teasing it out, or for varying the style of her hair. A clasp held her dress, a plain white band held her carelessly falling hair; and now she carried a light javelin in her hand, now a bow. She was one of Diana's soldiers, and no nymph who ranged Maenalus was dearer to the goddess than she. But no favor lasts long.
The high sun had passed the middle of its course when she came into a grove that no age had ever cut. Here she slipped the quiver from her shoulder, unstrung her supple bow, and lay down on the ground the grass had covered, her painted quiver a pillow under her neck. When Jupiter saw her there, tired and unguarded, he said, "Here at least is one stolen love my wife will know nothing of — or if she does find out, oh, her scolding is well worth it!" At once he put on the face and dress of Diana, and said, "O girl, one of my own company — on what ridges have you been hunting?" The girl raised herself from the turf and said, "Hail, goddess — greater in my eyes than Jupiter himself, though he hear me say it." He smiled to hear it, glad to be set above himself, and kissed her — kisses too long, and not such as a virgin goddess would give. As she began to tell him in what wood she had been hunting, he cut her off with an embrace, and gave himself away by the outrage he did her. She fought back, as hard as a woman could — if only you had seen it, Juno, you would have been kinder to her — she fought, but what girl could ever have overcome him, and who could overcome Jupiter? He won, and made for the upper sky; and now the grove and the wood that had witnessed it were hateful to her. Turning back from that place, she almost forgot to take up her quiver and its arrows and the bow she had hung on a branch.
Look now — Diana the huntress, coming along the heights of Maenalus with her band around her, proud of the beasts she had killed, caught sight of the girl and called to her. At the call she shrank back, afraid at first that this too might be Jupiter in disguise; but when she saw the nymphs walking with the goddess, she knew there was no trick, and joined their number. Alas, how hard it is not to betray a fault in the face! She could barely lift her eyes from the ground; she no longer walked, as she used to, at the goddess's side or at the head of the whole company, but was silent, and by her blushes gave the sign of her wounded honor. And Diana — but that she is a virgin, and could not guess it — might have read the girl's fault by a thousand signs. The nymphs, they say, did read it.
The horns of the Moon were rising for the ninth time when the goddess, faint from her brother the Sun's flames, came upon a cool grove out of which ran a stream, murmuring as it went and turning the fine-worn sand. She praised the place, and touched the surface of the water with her foot; and, praising the water too, she said, "No one is watching, far or near — let us bathe our bodies with the stream poured over them." The Parrhasian girl blushed. They all took off their clothes; she alone looked for reasons to delay. As she hesitated, her dress was taken from her, and with it off, her fault stood plain along with her naked body. She stood stunned, and tried to hide her belly with her hands. "Away from here, far away," said Diana, "and do not defile these sacred springs" — and the goddess ordered her out of her company.
The wife of the great Thunderer had long since noticed all this, and had put off her heavy punishment to a fitting time. Now there was no reason to wait: the boy Arcas — the very thing that galled Juno — had already been born to her rival. The moment she turned her cruel thoughts and her cruel eyes that way, she said, "So this was all that was still left, you adulteress — that you should be fruitful, and your childbearing make the wrong known, and stand as proof of my Jupiter's disgrace! You will not go unpunished. I will strip you of that shape you please yourself with, you troublemaker — the shape that pleases my husband." She spoke, and, seizing the girl by the hair over her forehead, threw her face-down on the ground. Callisto stretched out her arms to beg — and the arms began to bristle with coarse black hair, and her hands to curve and grow into hooked claws and serve her for feet, and the face that Jupiter had once praised was ruined into a wide, gaping jaw. And so that no prayers, no pleading words might sway anyone, the power of speech was torn away from her: only an angry, threatening growl, thick with terror, came from her hoarse throat. Yet her old mind stayed with her, even made a bear as she was, and with unbroken groaning she bore witness to her grief, and lifted such hands as she had to the sky and the stars, and, though she could not say it, felt that Jupiter was cruel. Ah, how many times, not daring to sleep alone in the wild wood,
How often she wandered before her own old house, through the fields that had once been hers! How often the baying of hounds drove her over the crags, and she — a huntress in her day — fled in terror from the hunters! Often she cowered at the sight of wild beasts, forgetting what she now was, and, a bear herself, shuddered at the bears she saw on the mountains, and went in dread of the wolves, though her own father ran among them as one of them.
Then look — Arcas comes, the child of Lycaon's daughter, knowing nothing of the mother who bore him. Some fifteen birthdays had passed over him. He was hunting the wild game, picking out the likeliest glades, ringing the Erymanthian woods with his woven nets, when he stumbled on his mother. She stopped dead at the sight of Arcas, and looked for all the world like something that knew him. He drew back, unnerved, not understanding why this bear kept her eyes fixed on him and would not look away; and when she pressed closer, eager to come to him, he was on the point of driving his hunting-spear straight through her breast. But the Almighty stayed his hand. In one stroke he swept away both of them and the horror about to be done, carried them off together through the empty air on a rushing wind, and set them in the sky, and made them neighboring constellations — the Great Bear and the Little.
Juno swelled with fury when her rival blazed among the stars. Down she went to the sea, to gray old Tethys and ancient Ocean, whom even the gods so often hold in awe; and when they asked the reason for her coming, she began: "You want to know why I, the queen of the gods, have left my home in heaven and come down to you? Because another woman holds the sky in my place! Call me a liar if, when night has darkened the world, you do not see stars newly honored in the very height of heaven — my open wound — set there where the last and smallest circle wheels around the topmost point of the axis. So now there is every reason to think twice before wronging Juno, every reason to tremble at offending me — me, whose only way of helping is to harm! Oh, what a great thing I have done! How vast my power is! I forbade her to be human — and she has been made a goddess! This is how I punish the guilty; this is my mighty authority! Let him give her back her old face and strip off this beast-shape, the way he did before for that Argive girl, Io. Why not divorce Juno outright, marry the creature, move her into my bed, and take Lycaon for a father-in-law? But you — if the insult done to your foster-child touches you at all — bar the seven stars of the Wain from your blue depths, drive off from the sky those constellations taken up as the wages of adultery, and let no mistress bathe in your clean waters!"
The gods of the sea gave their consent. Juno stepped up into her nimble chariot through the clear air, drawn by her painted peacocks — peacocks so lately given their colors, when Argus was killed, just as lately, chattering raven, as you were suddenly turned to black-winged, you who had been white before. For this bird was once silver, with snowy feathers, the equal of any spotless dove; he yielded nothing to the geese whose watchful cries would one day save the Capitol, nor to the swan that haunts the rivers. His tongue was his ruin: because of that gossiping tongue, the color that was white is now the very opposite of white.
There was no one lovelier in all of Thessaly than Coronis of Larissa. She certainly pleased you, god of Delphi — Apollo — as long as she stayed faithful, or went unwatched. But Apollo's bird, the raven, caught her out in her betrayal, and the pitiless informer set his course straight for his master, to lay her hidden guilt bare. After him, flapping her wings, came the chattering crow, wanting to hear the whole story; and when she learned the reason for his errand, she said, "You're flying an unlucky road. Don't scorn what my voice foretells. Think what I once was and what I am now, and ask what I did to deserve it — you'll find that loyalty was my downfall.
"There was a time when Pallas Minerva had shut up the infant Erichthonius, a child born of no mother, in a basket woven of Athenian osier, and handed it to the three daughters of two-formed Cecrops to guard, with strict orders: they were not to pry into her secret. Hidden in the light leaves of a thick elm, I watched to see what they would do. Two of them — Pandrosos and Herse — kept the trust without treachery. Only Aglauros called her sisters cowards, and undid the knots with her own hand; and inside they saw a baby, and a snake stretched out beside it. I carried the news to the goddess — and this is the thanks I get for it: I am cast out from Minerva's protection, and ranked below the bird of night, the owl! Let my punishment be a warning to birds not to go courting danger with their tongues.
"And mind — it wasn't as if she came looking for me, when I never asked for such a favor. Ask Pallas herself, if you doubt it; angry as she is, not even her anger will deny me this. I am the daughter of Coroneus, a man famous in the land of Phocis — this is common knowledge — and I was a princess, a virgin of royal blood, courted by wealthy suitors; so don't look down on me. My beauty was my misfortune. For as I was pacing the shore one day with my slow, usual step, along the top of the sand, the god of the sea, Neptune, saw me and caught fire. When he had wasted his time in vain, coaxing me with soft words, he turned to force and gave chase. I ran, I left the packed shore behind and wore myself out for nothing in the soft sand. Then I called on gods and men — but no mortal ear caught my voice. A virgin goddess was moved for a virgin, and came to my aid. I was stretching my arms toward the sky when those arms began to darken with soft feathers. I fought to throw the clothing off my shoulders — but it was already plumage, its roots sunk deep into my skin. I tried to beat my bare breast with my palms, but I no longer had either palms or bare breast. I ran, and the sand no longer dragged at my feet as before; I was lifted clear of the ground, and soon I was carried high through the air and given to Minerva as her blameless companion.
"And what good has it done me? — when Nyctimene, made a bird for a monstrous crime, has taken my place of honor. Or haven't you heard the thing they all know throughout Lesbos, how Nyctimene defiled her own father's bed? She is a bird, true enough — but knowing her guilt, she flees the sight of men and the daylight, and hides her shame in the dark, and every bird in the whole sky drives her out."
To all this the raven only said, "Choke on your warnings, I pray — I've no use for an empty omen." And he did not give up the road he had begun, but told his master he had seen Coronis lying with a young Thessalian man. At the word of his beloved's guilt, the laurel slipped from Apollo's brow; in the same instant the god's face changed, his color drained, the plectrum dropped from his hand. And as his heart boiled up with swelling rage, he snatched his familiar weapons, bent the bow from horn to horn, and drove an arrow no one could dodge through that breast — the very breast so often pressed against his own. She cried out at the blow, and drawing the steel from the wound she drenched her white limbs with crimson blood, and said, "I could have paid you what I owed, Phoebus — but I should have given birth first. Now two of us die in one." That was all; her life poured out with her blood, and the deadly chill of death crept over the body that no longer held a soul.
Too late — too late! — the lover repents of his cruel revenge, and hates himself for listening, for flaring up so fast. He hates the bird that forced him to learn the crime and the cause of his grief; he hates the bowstring, the bow, his own hand, and, with the hand, those reckless weapons, the arrows. He gathers her fallen body up and tries, too late, to beat back fate with his skill, and works his healing arts on her for nothing. And when he saw that all his efforts failed, that the pyre was being built and her limbs were about to burn in the last flames, then he groaned from the very bottom of his heart — for a god's face may not be wet with tears — groaning like a heifer who stands watching while the hammer, swung from beside the butcher's right ear, crashes down and shatters the hollow temples of her suckling calf. Yet after he had poured perfumes she could not feel over her breast, held her in a last embrace, and paid the funeral rites she should never have needed so soon, Apollo would not let his own seed sink into those same ashes. He tore the child from the flames and from his mother's womb and carried him to the cave of two-formed Chiron. And the raven, who had counted on a reward for telling no lie — him he forbade forever to take his place among the white birds.
Meanwhile Chiron, the half-beast, was delighted with a pupil of divine blood, glad of the honor that came with the charge. And look — the Centaur's daughter arrives, her shoulders wrapped in her red-gold hair. The nymph Chariclo had once borne her on the banks of a rushing stream and named her Ocyrhoe. This girl was not content to master her father's arts; she sang the secrets of the Fates. So when she had caught the prophetic frenzy in her mind and glowed with the god shut up inside her breast, she looked at the infant and said: "Grow, child — you who will bring the whole world healing! Again and again mortal bodies will owe their lives to you. You will be allowed to call back the dead — and once, having dared that against the will of the gods, you will be stopped from doing it again by your grandfather's fire. From a god you will become a bloodless corpse, and from that corpse a god once more, and twice you will make your own destiny new.
"And you too, dear father — immortal now, born under the law of living forever — you will long to be able to die, that day when you writhe in agony, the blood of the deadly serpent seeping through your torn limbs. The gods will make you mortal, you who cannot die, and the three goddesses of fate will loose your thread at last." Something more remained to be said. She sighed from the depths of her breast, tears welled and slid down her cheeks, and she said: "The Fates cut me short; I am forbidden to say more, and the use of my voice is being taken from me. My arts were not worth the price — not worth drawing a god's anger down on me. I wish I had never known the future! Already the human shape seems to be draining out of me; already grass is a delight to eat; already I long to gallop over the wide plains. I am turning into a mare, into a body like my father's. And yet — why wholly a mare? My father, after all, is of two shapes."
As she spoke, the last part of her lament grew hard to follow; her words ran together. Soon they were not words at all, nor quite the sound of a mare, but of someone imitating one, and in a little while she was neighing outright and had lowered her arms into the grass. Then her fingers drew together, and a single smooth hoof of unbroken horn bound her five nails into one; her face and her neck stretched out long; the greater part of her sweeping robe became a tail, and the loose hair that streamed down her neck fell over to the right and became a mane. Voice and shape were made new together — and the marvel gave her a new name as well.
Chiron, son of Philyra, wept, and begged your help, god of Delphi, but in vain. For you could not undo great Jupiter's decrees, and even if you could have, you were not there to do it — you were away in Elis and the fields of Messenia. This was the season when a shepherd's hide clothed you, when a rough cudgel filled your left hand and, in the other, a pipe of seven unequal reeds. And while love was your whole concern, while your own pipe was soothing you, some cattle — so they say — wandered untended into the plains of Pylos. The son of Maia, the daughter of Atlas — Mercury — spotted them and, with his usual cunning, hid the stolen beasts away in the woods. No one had noticed the theft except one old man, well known in that country; the whole neighborhood called him Battus. He served as watchman over the glades and grassy pastures of rich Neleus and his herds of fine mares.
Mercury was wary of him, and drew him gently aside by the hand. "Whoever you are, stranger," he said, "if anyone comes asking after these cattle, say you never saw them — and so you don't go unrewarded for it, take this fine cow." And he gave him one. The old man took it and answered, "Go on, you're safe with me. That stone there will tell of your theft before I ever do" — and he pointed to a stone. The son of Jupiter pretended to leave. But soon he came back, changing his shape and his voice, and said, "Countryman, if you've seen any cattle come along this path, help me out and don't keep the theft a secret — you'll have a cow and her bull together as your reward." And when the price was thus doubled, the old man said, "They'll be under those hills over there" — and under those hills they were. Mercury laughed and said, "You'd betray me to my own face, would you, you cheat? Betray me to myself?" And he turned that perjured heart into hard flint, the stone that even now is called the Informer — an old disgrace clinging to a rock that never earned it.
From there the god of the winged sandals lifted himself on level wings and, as he flew, looked down on the fields of Munychia, on the land dear to Minerva, and on the tended groves of the Lyceum. It happened that on that day the chaste young women were carrying, in their purity, the sacred offerings on their heads in flower-crowned baskets, up to Pallas Minerva's festal citadel. The winged god watched them coming back down, and did not hold his course straight on but wheeled around in a circle — the way the kite, quickest of birds, when it spots the entrails of a sacrifice but is nervous, with the priests crowded thick around it, banks in tight rings and dares not stray far off, and hovers, greedy, on beating wings above the thing it wants. Just so the swift Cyllenian god leaned his flight over the towers of Athens and circled the same stretch of air. As much as the Morning Star outshines the other stars, and as much as the golden Moon outshines the Morning Star, so much did Herse outshine every other girl as she walked — the crown and glory of the whole procession and of her companions. The son of Jupiter was struck dumb by her beauty; hanging there in the air, he caught fire — the way a leaden pellet slung from a Balearic sling flies and grows red-hot as it goes, finding under the clouds a fire it never had before.
He turned aside, left heaven, and took a new road, and made no attempt to hide who he was — such was his confidence in his own good looks. And though that confidence was justified, still he took pains to help it along: he smoothed his hair, arranged his cloak to hang just so, letting the border and all its gold show, made sure the polished wand — the one that summons and banishes sleep — was in his right hand, and that his winged sandals gleamed on his spotless feet.
Deep in the house there were three bedchambers finished in ivory and tortoiseshell. Yours, Pandrosos, was on the right, Aglauros had the left, and Herse the one between. Aglauros, in the left-hand room, was the first to notice Mercury coming, and dared to ask the god his name and the reason for his visit. And the grandson of Atlas and Pleione answered her: "I am the one who carries my father's commands through the air — and my father is Jupiter himself. I won't make up excuses. Just be loyal to your sister, be willing to be called aunt to my child. Herse is the reason I've come; help a lover, I beg you." Aglauros eyed him with the very same look she had turned on the hidden secrets of golden-haired Minerva, and demanded, as the price of her help, a great weight of gold — and meanwhile made him wait outside.
The warrior goddess turned the orbs of her stern eyes upon her and heaved a sigh so deep it shook her breast and the aegis that lay against her mighty chest. It came back to her: that this was the hand that had laid bare her secret, when Aglauros had looked, against Minerva's own command, on the motherless child of Vulcan, the god of Lemnos — and that now she would be dear both to the god and to her sister, and rich besides on the gold her greed had demanded. At once Minerva went to the house of Envy, filthy with black corruption. Her home lies hidden in the depths of a valley, starved of sun, closed to every wind, dismal, brimming with a numbing cold, forever without a fire and forever choked with fog.
When the goddess who is a terror in war reached the place, she stopped before the door — for she thought it wrong to go under that roof — and struck the doorposts with the tip of her spear. The doors shuddered open. Inside she saw Envy eating the flesh of vipers, the food that feeds her own vices, and at the sight she turned her eyes away. But Envy dragged herself up sluggishly from the ground, left the half-gnawed bodies of the snakes, and shuffled forward with a listless step. And when she saw the goddess in her beauty and shining armor, she groaned and drew a long sigh at the very sight. Pallor sits on her face, and all her body is wasted; she never looks at you straight; her teeth are rotted black; her breast is green with gall, her tongue drips venom. She never smiles, unless the sight of another's suffering moves her to it; she gets no sleep, kept awake by gnawing cares, but watches men's successes with misery and pines away at the watching. She tears at others and is torn apart in the tearing, her own perpetual torment. Still, hateful to her as Envy was, Minerva spoke to her briefly: "Infect one of the daughters of Cecrops with your poison. It has to be done. Aglauros is the one." Saying no more, she pushed off from the ground with her planted spear and was gone.
Envy, watching the goddess flee with a sidelong glare, muttered under her breath, grudging Minerva her success, and took up her staff, wreathed all over with brambles. Wrapped in black clouds, wherever she goes she tramples the flowering fields, scorches the grass, and crops the tops off the blossoms; with her breath she fouls whole peoples, cities, and homes. At last she caught sight of the citadel of Athens, thriving in arts and wealth and glad peace — and she could barely hold back her tears, because she saw nothing there to weep at. But once she had entered the bedroom of Cecrops's daughter, she carried out her orders. She laid her hand, stained with rust, on the girl's breast, packed her heart with barbed thorns, breathed a poisonous venom into her, and spread it black as pitch through her bones and deep into the middle of her lungs. And so that the seeds of the sickness would not stray too widely, she set the girl's sister before her eyes — the fortunate marriage, the god in all his beauty — and made every detail of it enormous.
Goaded by all this, Cecrops's daughter is gnawed by a hidden grief; she groans, tormented by night and tormented by day, and wastes away, wretched, in a slow decline, like ice worn down by a fitful sun. She smolders at happy Herse's good fortune — smolders the way a fire smothered under thorny brushwood sends up no flame but burns with a low, creeping heat. Again and again she wanted to die, so as not to see such a thing; again and again to tell it all, as if it were a crime, to her stern father. In the end she sat herself down across the threshold to shut the god out when he came. And when he tried his coaxing, his pleas, his gentlest words, she said, "Stop this. I'm not moving from here until you're driven off." "Done — let's hold to that bargain," said the swift Cyllenian god, and touched the carved door open with his wand. But when she tried to rise, the parts we bend to sit down would not move for their own dead weight. She fought to lift herself straight up, but the joints of her knees were rigid; a chill slid down through her nails, and her veins went pale as the blood drained away. And as an incurable cancer spreads in every direction and adds the sound flesh to the ruined, so, little by little, the deadly cold crept into her breast and closed off the passages of life and breath. She made no attempt to speak — and if she had, there was no road left for her voice. Stone already held her neck; her face had hardened, and she sat there, a bloodless statue. And the stone was not white: her own mind had stained it dark.
When the grandson of Atlas had punished her words and her unholy heart this way, he left the land that bears Pallas's name and rose into the sky on beating wings. His father called him aside, and, not admitting the real cause — his own new love — said, "My son, faithful carrier of my orders, shake off delay, drop down swift as ever on your usual course, and make for the country that looks up on the left at the constellation your mother is part of — the natives call it Sidon. There's a royal herd you'll see grazing far off on the mountain grass; drive it down to the shore." He spoke, and already the young bulls, driven off the mountain, were making for the shore he had named, where the great king's daughter — Europa — used to play, attended by her Tyrian companions.
Majesty and love do not sit well together, nor keep house in the same place. So the father and ruler of the gods, whose right hand is armed with the three-forked lightning, who shakes the world with a nod, laid aside the weight of his rule and put on the shape of a bull. Mixing in with the cattle, he lowed and strolled, beautiful, over the tender grass. His color was the white of snow that no hard hoof has trodden and no rain-bringing south wind has melted. The muscles bunched on his neck, and a dewlap hung down from his shoulders; his horns were small, true — but you'd have sworn a craftsman made them by hand, clearer and more shining than any polished gem. There was no menace in his forehead, nothing to fear in his eye; his whole face wore peace.
Agenor's daughter marveled that he was so beautiful, and that he threatened no attack; but gentle as he was, at first she was afraid to touch him. Little by little she came closer and held out flowers to his white mouth. The lover rejoiced, and, while the pleasure he hoped for held off, kissed her hands — barely, oh barely, could he put off the rest. Now he frolicked and skipped on the green grass; now he laid his snowy flank down on the yellow sand. And as her fear ebbed away, bit by bit, he offered his chest now for her girl's hand to pat, now his horns to be tangled with fresh garlands. At last the princess, not knowing whose back she pressed, even dared to climb up and sit on the bull — and the god, easing gradually off the land and away from the dry shore, set the false hoofs of his feet first in the shallows at the water's edge. Then he went further out, and carried his prize away over the open middle of the sea. She is terrified, and, borne off, looks back at the shore she is leaving; her right hand grips a horn, the other rests on his back, and her fluttering robes billow in the wind.
And now the god had set aside the shape of the lying bull, confessed himself for who he was, and reached the fields of Crete. But her father knew nothing of any of this. He ordered Cadmus to go and search for his stolen sister, and — loving and cruel in the very same command — added exile as the penalty if he failed to find her. So Cadmus wandered the whole world over. For who could ever track down the thefts of Jupiter? A fugitive from his own country and his father's anger, the son of Agenor went as a suppliant to the oracle of Apollo and asked what land he was meant to live in.
"A heifer will meet you," Apollo said, "out in the lonely fields — a cow that has never worn a yoke, never known the curved plow. Follow where she leads. Where she lies down in the grass, there build your city walls, and call that country Boeotia."
Cadmus had barely come down from the Castalian cave at Delphi when he saw a heifer, unguarded, moving slowly along with no mark of servitude on her neck. He fell in behind her and tracked her footsteps at a measured pace, silently thanking Apollo for showing him the road. He had already crossed the fords of the Cephisus and the fields of Panope when the cow stopped, lifted toward the sky a forehead crowned with tall handsome horns, and set the air ringing with her lowing. Then she looked back at his men following behind, sank down, and laid her flank in the soft grass. Cadmus gave thanks. He pressed his lips to the foreign ground and greeted the unfamiliar mountains and fields as his own.
He meant to make a sacrifice to Jupiter. He sent his servants to go and fetch running spring water for the offering. An ancient forest stood nearby, never once violated by an axe. In the middle of it was a cave thick with brush and twisted branches, its low arch built up out of joined stones, rich with a plentiful spring. Hidden away in that cave lay a serpent sacred to Mars, splendid with a golden crest. Its eyes flashed with fire; its whole body was swollen with venom; three tongues flickered in its mouth, and its teeth stood in a triple row.
When the men who had set out from the Tyrian people reached that grove with their ill-fated steps, and the urn plunged into the water gave its splash, the sea-blue serpent lifted its head from deep in the cave and hissed a horrifying hiss. The urns dropped from their hands. The blood drained out of their bodies, and a sudden shudder seized their stunned limbs. The serpent twisted its scaly coils into rolling spirals, sprang, and bent itself into enormous arcs. Rearing up more than half its length into the light air, it looked down on the whole forest — a thing as huge, if you could see it all at once, as the Dragon in the sky that separates the two Bears. There was no delay. Whether the Phoenicians were reaching for their weapons or for flight, or whether sheer terror froze them from doing either, it was on them: some it killed with its bite, some crushed in its long coils, some it poisoned with the deadly breath of its venom.
The sun stood at its peak now and shrank the shadows to almost nothing. The son of Agenor began to wonder what was keeping his men, and went to look for them. His covering was a lion's hide stripped from the beast; his weapon a lance of shining steel, and a javelin — and a courage greater than any weapon. When he entered the grove and saw the lifeless bodies, and above them the victorious enemy, immense, licking the horrible wounds with its bloody tongue, he cried, "Either I will avenge your deaths, my faithful friends, or I will share them." With that he lifted a boulder in his right hand and hurled the vast weight with a tremendous heave. Walls and high towers would have shaken at that blow, but the serpent took it without a wound. Its scales shielded it like a coat of mail, and the toughness of its black hide turned the mighty stroke aside. But that same toughness did not beat the javelin. It stuck fast in the middle of the pliant spine and drove its whole iron point down into the guts. Wild with pain, the serpent wrenched its head back over its own body, looked at its wound, bit at the shaft lodged there, and worked it loose on every side with all its strength — barely tearing it free at last, though the iron stayed buried in the bone.
Then, when this fresh cause was added to its usual rage, the throat swelled with gorged veins, white foam frothed around its pestilent jaws, the ground scraped by its scales rasped and hissed, and the black breath pouring from its Stygian mouth fouled the tainted air. Now it wound itself into vast circling coils; now it stood up straighter than a long beam; now, driven forward with enormous force like a river swollen with rain, it swept along and battered down the trees in its path with its chest. The son of Agenor gave a little ground, taking the charge on his lion's hide, holding off the lunging mouth with his spear-point thrust out before him. The serpent raged and drove its teeth uselessly against the hard steel, biting at the point. Now blood began to run from its venomous palate and stained the green grass with its spray — but the wound was slight, because the serpent kept pulling back from the blow, drawing its hurt neck away, and by retreating kept the stroke from sinking and biting deep. At last the son of Agenor drove the iron into its throat and kept coming, following it, pressing after it, until an oak stood in the serpent's way as it backed off and its neck was pinned through, nailed to the wood. The tree bent under the serpent's weight and groaned as the tip of that lashing tail whipped against its trunk.
While the victor stood measuring the size of his beaten enemy, a voice was suddenly heard. Where it came from was impossible to say — but heard it was. "Why, son of Agenor, do you stand staring at the serpent you have killed? You too will be gazed upon as a serpent." For a long time he stood there terrified, his color and his wits drained away together, his hair stiff with a cold horror. Then, look — Pallas, the hero's champion, came gliding down through the upper air and stood beside him. She told him to plow the ground and sow the serpent's teeth in it, the seeds of a people yet to come. He obeyed. He opened a furrow with the pressing plow and scattered the teeth as ordered across the earth — mortal seed. Then, past all belief, the clods began to stir. First the point of a spear rose out of the furrows; next helmets, their painted crests nodding; then shoulders, chests, arms already loaded with weapons came up; a whole crop of shielded men sprang into being. It was like a theater on a festival day, when the curtain is drawn up and the painted figures rise into view, showing their faces first, then the rest little by little, drawn up in one smooth motion until they stand there entire, feet planted on the lower edge of the stage.
Frightened by these new enemies, Cadmus reached for his weapons. "Don't!" shouted one of the men the earth had made. "Keep out of our civil war!" And with that he struck one of his earth-born brothers with a stroke of his sword, hand to hand — then fell himself to a javelin thrown from a distance. The one who had killed him lived no longer than his victim, and breathed out the very air he had so lately breathed in. The whole crowd went mad in the same way, and these brothers, sprung up together only moments before, fell in battle against each other, wound trading for wound. So the young men, whose share of life had been so brief, beat their bloodied mother earth with dying chests — until only five were left. One of them was Echion. At the warning of Minerva he threw his weapons down and both offered and received a pledge of brotherly peace. These were the companions the wanderer from Sidon had when he built the city Apollo's oracle had commanded.
And now Thebes stood. Now, Cadmus, you might have seemed happy even in your exile. Mars and Venus themselves were your father-in-law and mother-in-law; add to that children by so glorious a wife, so many sons and daughters, and grandchildren too, those dear pledges of love, already grown to young men and women. But of course — a man's last day must always be waited for, and no one should be called happy before his death and his final funeral rites.
Among so much good fortune, Cadmus, it was your grandson who first became your cause of grief — the stranger's horns set on his forehead, and you, his hounds, glutted on your own master's blood. And yet, if you look at it honestly, you will find in him the fault of bad luck, not of crime. For what crime is there in an honest mistake?
There was a mountain stained with the killing of every kind of wild beast. The day had shortened the shadows to their noon length, and the sun stood equally far from both ends of its course, when the young Boeotian called out in a gentle voice to the companions who shared his work as they roamed the pathless wilds: "Our nets are wet, my friends, and our spears too, with the blood of the beasts; the day has given us sport enough. When Dawn returns tomorrow, riding her saffron chariot to bring back the light, we'll take up our task again. Right now the sun stands halfway between east and west and splits the fields open with its heat. Break off the work you're at, and gather up the knotted nets." The men did as he asked and set their labor aside.
There was a valley dense with pine and sharp-pointed cypress, called Gargaphie, sacred to Diana, who tucks up her robe to hunt. Deep in its farthest recess was a woodland grotto shaped by no art at all — nature, with her own genius, had counterfeited art. She had drawn a natural arch out of the living pumice and the light tufa stone. A spring ran murmuring on the right, clear and shallow, its wide pool fringed with a border of grass. Here the goddess of the woods, when tired with the hunt, used to bathe her virgin limbs in the clear water.
She came to it now. She handed her javelin, her quiver, and her unstrung bow to one of the nymphs, her armor-bearer; another slipped her arms under the robe as it came off; two more unlaced the sandals from her feet. Crocale, daughter of Ismenus, more skilled than the rest, gathered up the goddess's hair, scattered loose over her neck, and bound it into a knot — though her own hair hung free. Nephele, Hyale, Rhanis, Psecas, and Phyale scooped up water and poured it from their broad urns. And while Diana was there, washing in the water where she always washed, look — the grandson of Cadmus, his day's hunting cut short, came wandering with uncertain steps through unfamiliar woods and into that grove. So his fate led him.
The moment he entered the cave dripping with spring water, the nymphs, naked, seeing a man, beat their breasts and filled the whole forest with sudden shrieks, and crowded around Diana to shield her with their own bodies. But the goddess stood taller than they were, head and shoulders above them all. The color that fills the clouds when the sun strikes them from across the sky, or the color of rosy Dawn, rose in the face of Diana caught without her robes. Hemmed in as she was by the packed ring of her attendants, she still turned herself sideways and twisted her face back — and how she wished she had her arrows within reach! What she did have within reach was the water, and she scooped it up and flung it into the man's face. Drenching his hair with that avenging stream, she added these words, the forewarning of the doom to come: "Now you may tell how you saw me undressed — if you can tell it at all!" No further threat. She set on his dripping head the antlers of a full-grown stag, drew his neck out long, tapered the tips of his ears to points, changed his hands into feet and his arms into long forelegs, and wrapped his body in a dappled hide. And she added fear. The son of Autonoe fled — and marveled, even as he ran, at how fast he was. But when he saw his face and the antlers in the water, he tried to say, "Oh, this is misery" — and no voice came. He groaned; the groan was all his voice now, and tears ran down a face that was no longer his. Only his old mind stayed behind.
What was he to do? Go home, back to the royal halls? Or hide in the woods? Shame blocked the one, terror the other. While he wavered, the hounds caught sight of him. Melampus and the keen-nosed Ichnobates were the first to bay the signal — Ichnobates of Knossos, Melampus of Spartan stock. Then the rest came rushing, faster than the racing wind: Pamphagus, Dorceus, and Oribasus, all bred in Arcadia; powerful Nebrophonus, and savage Theron running with Laelaps; Pterelas, best of them for speed, and Agre, best of them for scent; fierce Hylaeus, gored by a wild boar not long ago; Nape, sired by a wolf; Poemenis, who used to herd the flocks; Harpyia with her two pups at her side; Ladon of Sicyon, lean in the flank; Dromas and Canache and Sticte and Tigris and Alce; Leucon with his snow-white coat and Asbolus with his black one; brawny Lacon and Aello, strong at the run; Thous, and swift Lycisca beside her Cyprian brother; Harpalus, his black face marked with a white blaze down the middle; Melaneus, and Lachne with her shaggy body; Labros and Agriodus, sons of a Cretan father and a Spartan mother; and shrill-voiced Hylactor — and more it would take too long to name. The whole pack, wild for the kill, poured after him over rocks and cliffs and crags no path could reach, wherever the way was hard and wherever there was no way at all.
He ran along the very trails he had so often hunted down — running, God help him, from his own servants. He longed to cry out, "I am Actaeon! Recognize your own master!" but the words would not come. The air rang with barking. Melanchaetes was the first to tear a wound in his back, Blackfoot the next; Oresitrophus sank into his shoulder. They had set out late, but a shortcut over the hill had brought them up in time. While those three held their master down, the rest of the pack closed in and buried their teeth in his body. Soon there was no room left for more wounds. He groaned and made a sound that was not a man's, though no stag could make it either, and filled the ridges he knew so well with his anguished cries. Down on his knees, like a suppliant begging for mercy, he turned his silent face this way and that, as if it were his pleading arms. His companions, knowing nothing, egged the ravening pack on with their usual shouts, hunting the grove with their eyes for Actaeon and calling out "Actaeon!" over and over, as though he were somewhere else — he lifted his head at the name — complaining that he wasn't there, that the lazy man was missing the fine spectacle their prey was giving them. He wished with all his heart he were somewhere else, but he was here. He wished he could watch, and not feel, the savage work of his own dogs. They stood around him on every side, sank their muzzles into his flesh, and tore their master to pieces under the false shape of a stag. Not until his life had run out through wound after wound, they say, was the rage of the quiver-bearing goddess satisfied.
People took it different ways. To some, the goddess seemed harsher than she had any right to be; others praised her and called the punishment worthy of her strict virginity. Both sides found their reasons. Only Jupiter's wife did not so much say whether she condemned it or approved as take open joy in the ruin of the house sprung from Agenor — carrying over onto the whole line the hatred she had first conceived for her Tyrian rival, Europa. And now, look, a fresh grievance was heaped on the old one: she was galled that Semele was pregnant with the seed of great Jupiter. She loosed her tongue to rage — then checked herself. "And what," she said, "have I ever gained by all this railing? It's the woman herself I have to go after. Her I will destroy — if I am rightly called almighty Juno, if it becomes me to hold the jeweled scepter in my hand, if I am the queen, and the sister and wife of Jupiter — well, the sister, at least, beyond dispute. But I suppose she's content with a stolen tumble, and the insult to my bed is a small thing. She's pregnant — that was all that was missing! — carrying the plain proof of his guilt in her swollen belly, wanting to be made a mother by Jupiter, which is more than I ever managed for myself. That's how sure she is of her beauty. I'll see to it her beauty fails her. Let me be no daughter of Saturn if I don't send her down to the waters of the Styx, sunk there by her own dear Jupiter."
At that she rose from her throne and, wrapped in a tawny cloud, went to Semele's door. She did not shed the cloud until she had disguised herself as an old woman — set gray hair at her temples, plowed her skin into wrinkles, hunched her body and moved it with a trembling, palsied step. She made her voice an old woman's voice too. She became Beroe herself, Semele's nurse from Epidaurus. So, drawing the girl into conversation and talking on and on, they came around to the name of Jupiter, and the old woman sighed and said, "I do hope it's Jupiter — but I'm afraid of everything. Plenty of men have talked their way into a decent girl's bed under a god's name. And it's not enough that he's Jupiter. If he really is the true one, let him give you some proof of his love: ask him to hold you exactly as great and glorious as he is when he's welcomed by lofty Juno, and to put on all his royal splendor first." That was how Juno primed the unsuspecting daughter of Cadmus. And Semele asked Jupiter for a gift without naming it. "Choose," the god said, "you'll be refused nothing. And so you'll believe me all the more, let the divine power of the Stygian torrent be my witness too — the terror and the god even of the gods."
Delighted with what would destroy her, too successful, and about to die of her lover's compliance, Semele said, "Show yourself to me just as the daughter of Saturn holds you when the two of you seal the bond of love — give yourself to me like that." The god wanted to clap a hand over her mouth as she spoke, but the words had already rushed out into the air. He groaned. She could not now unwish it, and he could not now unswear it. So in the deepest grief he climbed the high sky and drew the trailing clouds along after him with a nod, and added rainstorms and lightning mixed with wind, and thunder, and the bolt there is no escaping. Yet as much as he could, he tried to strip himself of his own power. He did not arm himself with the fire that had brought down hundred-handed Typhoeus — there was too much savagery in that one. There is a lighter bolt, into which the hands of the Cyclopes had forged less cruelty, less flame, less rage; the gods call it the second-rank weapon. That one he took up, and entered the house of Agenor's line. Her mortal body could not bear the storm of heaven, and she burned to ash in the fire of her wedding gift.
The infant, still unformed, was pulled from his mother's womb and — if this is worthy of belief — sewn, tender as he was, into his father's thigh, to finish out the months that belonged to the mother. His aunt Ino secretly nursed him in his first cradle; then the nymphs of Nysa took him, hid him in their caves, and fed him milk.
And while all this was going on down on earth by the law of fate, and the cradle of twice-born Bacchus lay safe, they say that Jupiter, well soaked in nectar and off his guard, set his heavy cares aside and fell to trading idle jokes with Juno in a slack hour. "There's no question," he said, "the pleasure you women get out of love is greater than what falls to us men." She said no. They agreed to ask the learned Tiresias for a ruling, since he had known love as both. For once, in a green wood, he had struck with his staff two great serpents coupling, and — the marvel of it — had been changed from a man into a woman and lived seven autumns so. In the eighth he came upon the same pair again and said, "If there's such power in a blow struck against you that it turns the striker into his opposite, I'll strike you now once more." He struck those same snakes, and his earlier form came back, the shape he was born with. So he was chosen as judge in this playful quarrel and backed Jupiter's word. Saturn's daughter, they say, took it harder than the matter warranted, out of all proportion, and condemned the eyes of her judge to everlasting night. But the almighty father — since no god is permitted to undo what another god has done — gave him, in return for his lost sight, the knowledge of things to come, and eased the punishment with that honor.
Famous now throughout the cities of Boeotia, Tiresias gave flawless answers to all who came to consult him. The first to test his voice and prove it true was sea-blue Liriope, a water nymph, whom the river Cephisus once wound in his curving current and, trapping her inside his waters, forced. In the fullness of time the loveliest of nymphs bore a child, one who even then could stir love, and she named him Narcissus. Asked about the boy — whether he would live to see the long years of a ripe old age — the prophet who spoke destiny said, "If he never comes to know himself." For a long time the seer's answer seemed empty. Then the outcome proved it — the way it all turned out, the manner of his death, the strange new kind of madness.
For the son of Cephisus had added one year to three times five, and could pass for either a boy or a young man. Many a youth desired him, many a girl — but there was so hard a pride in that tender beauty that no youth, no girl could touch him. Once, as he was driving frightened deer into his nets, a nymph with a voice caught sight of him — resounding Echo, who had never learned to keep quiet when another spoke, nor to speak first herself. Echo still had a body then, she was not just a voice; and yet, chatterer that she was, she could do no more with her mouth than she can now — give back, out of many words, only the last. Juno had done this to her. Time and again, when the goddess might have caught the nymphs lying with her Jupiter in the mountains, Echo would cunningly hold Juno in long conversation while the nymphs slipped away. When the daughter of Saturn saw through it, she said, "That tongue of yours, that made a fool of me — I'll give you only the smallest power over it, the briefest use of your voice." And she made good on the threat. So now Echo only doubles back the end of what is said and returns the words she hears.
So when she saw Narcissus wandering through the trackless country and caught fire, she followed his tracks in secret, and the more she followed, the closer the flame, the hotter she burned — the way quick sulphur smeared around the top of a torch snatches up a flame brought near it. Oh, how often she longed to come up to him with coaxing words and soft pleas! Her nature fought her and would not let her begin. But what her nature did allow, she was ready for — to wait for his sounds and send her own words back to them. By chance the boy, having lost the trusty band of his companions, called out, "Is anyone here?" and "Here," Echo answered. He stood amazed, and casting his eyes in every direction, shouted, "Come!" — and she called back the one who called. He looked around, and when no one came, said, "Why do you run from me?" — and got back exactly the words he had spoken. He stood his ground, fooled by the answering voice that seemed another's, and said, "Here, let us meet" — and Echo, who would never answer any sound more gladly, called back, "Let us meet," and made good on her own words, and came out of the woods and started toward him, to throw her arms around the neck she had longed for. He ran. And as he ran he cried, "Keep your hands off me! I'll die before I'll give myself to you!" She answered nothing but "I'll give myself to you." Spurned, she hid in the woods, covering her shamed face with leaves, and from that day lived alone in caves. But her love clung on and grew with the pain of being refused. Sleepless heartache wasted her wretched body away; her skin shriveled with a wasting thinness, and all the sap of her body drained off into the air. Only her voice and her bones were left. Then only her voice — her bones, they say, took on the shape of stone. Ever since, she hides in the woods and is seen on no mountain, but is heard by all: it is sound, and sound alone, that lives on in her.
So he had toyed with her, and with other nymphs born of the water or the mountains, and before them with whole crowds of admiring young men. At last someone he had scorned lifted his hands to the sky and prayed: "Then let him love the same way — and never have the thing he loves!" It was a fair prayer, and Nemesis, the goddess who punishes such pride from her shrine at Rhamnus, granted it.
There was a spring, clear and unclouded, its waters bright as silver, that no shepherd had ever muddied, no she-goat grazing down from the hills, no cattle of any kind. No bird had troubled it, no wild beast, no branch fallen from a tree. Grass grew all around it, fed by the nearby water, and a ring of trees that let no sun in to warm the place. Here the boy came, worn out by the heat and the work of hunting, drawn by the beauty of the spot and its cool spring. He lay down, and while he bent to quench his thirst, another thirst began to grow in him. As he drank, he was captivated by the reflection of the face he saw in the water, and fell in love with a hope that had no body — mistaking for a real thing what was only a shadow.
He stared at himself, stunned, and hung there motionless with the same fixed expression, like a statue carved from Parian marble. Stretched on the ground, he gazed at the twin stars that were his own eyes, at hair worthy of Bacchus, worthy of Apollo, at his smooth boyish cheeks, his ivory neck, the loveliness of his mouth, the rosy flush blended into snow-white skin. Everything he admired was exactly what made him admirable. Without understanding, he wanted himself. The one who praised was the thing being praised; as he chased, he was chased; he lit the fire and he burned in it. How many times did he lean down to give useless kisses to that lying spring! How many times did he plunge his arms into the middle of the water to catch the neck he saw, and never catch himself! He did not know what he was looking at, but what he looked at set him alight; the same illusion that fooled his eyes drove them wild.
Poor gullible boy, why do you keep grabbing at a fleeting image? What you want is nowhere. What you love — only turn away, and you will lose it. The thing you see is the shadow of a reflection; it has nothing of its own. It comes with you and stays with you; it will leave with you — if only you could leave.
No thought of food could pull him away, no thought of rest. Sprawled in the shaded grass, he stared with eyes that never had enough at the lie of that beautiful shape, and through his own eyes he was destroyed. Raising himself a little, he stretched his arms toward the surrounding woods and cried, "Oh, you woods — has anyone ever loved more cruelly than this? You would know; you have been a good hiding place for so many lovers. In all the long ages you have lived, do you remember anyone who wasted away like this? He delights me, and I see him — but the thing I see and love, I still cannot reach. That's how completely a lover can be deceived. And this makes my grief worse: no vast sea keeps us apart, no long road, no mountains, no city walls with the gates shut. Only a little water stands between us. He wants to be held himself — for every time I stretch down my lips to the clear pool, every time he strains up toward me, face lifted. You'd think I could touch him. It is the smallest thing that keeps lovers apart.
"Whoever you are, come out to me! Why do you fool me, one boy in all the world? Where do you go when I reach for you? It can't be my looks or my age that drive you off — nymphs have loved me too. That friendly face of yours promises me some kind of hope. When I reach my arms out to you, you reach yours back. When I smile, you smile. And often I have watched your tears while I was weeping. You answer my nods with nods, and — as far as I can guess from the movement of your lovely mouth — you send back words that never reach my ears. That boy is me! I understand it now; my own reflection does not fool me anymore. I am on fire with love for myself. I light the flames and I suffer them. What do I do? Ask, or be asked? And then, ask for what? What I want is already mine. My riches have made me a beggar. Oh, if only I could step out of my own body! It's a strange wish for a lover, but I want the thing I love to be gone from me. And now grief is stealing my strength; not much of my life is left. I am dying young. But death is no hardship — it will lay my sorrows down. I only wish the one I love could live longer. As it is, the two of us, one soul, will die together in a single life."
He spoke, and, out of his mind, went back to the same face, and blurred the water with his tears until the shape rippled and dimmed. Seeing it start to vanish, he cried out, "Where are you going? Stay! Don't abandon me, cruel one — don't leave the one who loves you! Let me at least look at what I'm not allowed to touch, and feed my wretched madness that way." Grieving, he tore his tunic down from the top and beat his bare chest with hands white as marble. The struck chest took on a soft red glow — the way apples do, pale on one side, red on the other, or the way grapes in their dappled clusters, still unripe, begin to blush with purple. As soon as he saw this in the water, now grown clear again, he could bear no more. As yellow wax melts before a small flame, as morning frost melts under a warming sun, so he wasted away, thinned by love, slowly consumed by the fire hidden inside him. The white blended with red was gone; gone was the strength, the vigor, all the things that had been so lovely to see a moment ago. Nothing was left of the body that Echo had once loved.
And when she saw it — still angry, still remembering how he had used her — she grieved anyway. Every time the pitiful boy said "Alas," she gave back "Alas" in her echoing voice; and when he struck his arms with his hands, she gave back the same sound of the blow. His last words, as he looked into the familiar pool, were these: "Oh boy I loved in vain!" — and the place gave back just as many words. When he said "Farewell," Echo said "Farewell" too. He let his weary head sink into the green grass, and death closed the eyes that still marveled at their master's beauty. Even then, taken down into the world below, he kept gazing at himself in the waters of the Styx. His sisters the Naiads wept for him and cut off their hair to lay upon their brother; the Dryads wept too, and Echo echoed their grieving back. They were already making ready the pyre, the shaken torches, the bier — but the body was nowhere to be found. In its place they found a flower, saffron at its heart, with white petals ringed around it.
When the story got out, it brought the prophet the fame he deserved through the cities of Greece, and the name of Tiresias the seer stood high. Yet one man alone despised him — Pentheus, son of Echion, a scorner of the gods. He laughed at the old man's warnings and threw his blindness in his face, the ruin of his lost sight. Tiresias only shook his temples, white with age, and said: "How lucky you would be if you too were robbed of this light, and could not watch the rites of Bacchus. For the day is coming — and I foretell it is not far off — when a new god will arrive here, Liber, the son of Semele. Unless you honor him with a temple, you will be torn to a thousand pieces and scattered, and with your blood you will defile the woods, your own mother, and your mother's sisters. It will happen. You will refuse the god his honor, and then you'll be sorry that in this darkness I saw all too clearly." As he said it, Echion's son shoved him away — but truth came behind the words, and the seer's prophecy was carried out.
Liber arrived, and the fields roared with festive shrieking. The people rushed out — mothers, brides, and men all mixed together, common folk and nobles alike, swept along to rites they had never known. "What madness," Pentheus shouted, "has stunned your minds, you sons of the Dragon, you children of Mars? Can bronze clashed against bronze do so much? A pipe with its curved horn, and cheap magic tricks? Are you men whom no war-sword could frighten, no trumpet, no ranks with drawn weapons — and now women's voices, and drunken raving, and packs of degenerates, and empty tambourines defeat you? Should I be amazed at you old men, who sailed across the wide seas and set up a new Tyre here, your household gods carried into exile — and now let them be taken without a fight? Or at you, the younger and stronger, closer to my own age — you should be gripping weapons, not fennel-wands, your heads covered by helmets, not leaves! Remember, I beg you, the stock you sprang from, and take on the spirit of that serpent who, one against many, destroyed so many. He died for his spring and his pool — but you, conquer for your own good name! He put brave men to death; you can drive off these soft ones and hold on to the honor of your fathers. If fate forbids Thebes to stand for long, I'd rather it were war engines and soldiers tearing down her walls, iron and fire roaring. Then we'd be wretched without disgrace; our fate would be worth grieving, but nothing to hide, and our tears would carry no shame. But now Thebes will fall to an unarmed boy, one who cares nothing for battles or weapons or horses, but only for hair soaked in myrrh, soft garlands, purple robes, and gold woven into embroidered cloth. I'll force him soon enough — just stand aside — to confess his father is a lie and his rites a fraud. Acrisius had spirit enough to scorn this hollow god and shut the gates of Argos in his face; and shall this foreigner terrify Pentheus and all of Thebes? Go quickly" — this to his servants — "go, and drag their leader here in chains. No sluggish delay in carrying out my orders!"
His grandfather Cadmus, and Athamas, and the rest of his household rebuked him and tried in vain to hold him back. Their warnings only made him fiercer. Curbed, his fury was goaded and grew, and the very restraint did harm. I have watched a torrent do the same — where nothing blocked its path, it ran gently, with a modest murmur; but wherever fallen logs and rocks stood in its way, it went foaming and boiling, wilder for the barrier.
Then — look — the servants came back covered in blood, and when their master demanded where Bacchus was, they said they had not seen him. "But we captured this one," they said, "his companion, a servant of the rites" — and they handed over a man, his hands bound behind his back, someone of Etruscan stock who had followed the god's worship. Pentheus fixed him with eyes that anger had made terrible, and though he could barely put off the moment of punishment, he said: "You there — soon to die, and by your death to be a lesson to the rest — tell me your name, your parents' names, your country, and why you take part in these newfangled rites." Without fear, the man answered: "My name is Acoetes; my homeland is Maeonia, my parents were common folk. My father left me no fields for hardy oxen to plow, no woolly flocks, no herds. He himself was poor, and made his living with line and hooks and rod, tricking the leaping fish and reeling them in. His skill was his whole fortune. When he handed the trade down to me, he said, 'Take what I have, heir and successor to my craft,' and dying, he left me nothing but the waters — the one thing I can call my inheritance from him. Soon, so I wouldn't be stuck forever among the same rocks, I learned to steer a ship, my right hand guiding the keel. I marked with my eyes the rainy star of the Olenian she-goat, and Taygete, and the Hyades, and the Bear, and the homes of the winds, and the harbors fit for ships.
"Once, making for Delos, I happened to touch the coast of the island of Chios. I brought us to shore with a pull of the right-hand oars, sprang lightly out, and landed on the wet sand. We spent the night there. As soon as dawn began to redden, I got up and told my men to bring fresh water, pointing out the path that led to a stream. Then I climbed a high hill myself to see what the breeze promised, called my crew, and headed back to the ship. 'Here we are!' said Opheltes, first of my mates, and — thinking he'd found a prize in that lonely field — he led along the shore a boy with the beauty of a girl. The boy seemed heavy with wine and sleep, staggering, barely able to keep up. I looked at his clothes, his face, his walk — I could see nothing about him that seemed mortal. I sensed it, and told my crew: 'What god is in that body I can't say — but there is a god in that body! Whoever you are, be kind to us, help our labors, and forgive these men.' 'Stop praying for us!' said Dictys — no one quicker at scrambling up to the top yardarms or sliding back down a rope. Libys agreed, and blond Melanthus, watchman of the prow, and Alcimedon, and Epopeus, who called out the rhythm to the oars and cheered their spirits — all of them agreed. So blind is the greed for plunder.
"'I will not let this ship be defiled by carrying off something sacred,' I said. 'Here I have the greatest authority.' And I blocked the gangway. Lycabas, the boldest of the whole crew, went into a rage. He had been driven out of an Etruscan town, paying for a brutal murder with exile. As I held my ground, he punched me in the throat with his young fist and would have thrown me overboard into the sea, if I hadn't caught a rope and clung to it, dazed as I was. The godless crew cheered him on. And then Bacchus — for it was Bacchus — as if the shouting had shaken off his sleep and the wine were draining from his mind and his wits returning, said, 'What are you doing? What's this shouting? Tell me, sailors, how did I get here? Where do you mean to take me?' 'Have no fear,' said Proreus. 'Just name the harbor you want to reach. We'll set you down on whatever land you ask.' 'Steer your course for Naxos,' said Liber. 'That is my home; it will be a friendly shore to you.'
"By the sea and by all the gods those liars swore it would be so, and told me to give sail to the painted ship. Naxos lay to our right. As I set the canvas for the right, each man in his own way hissed at me: 'What are you doing, you fool? What madness has hold of you, Acoetes? Steer left!' Most signaled their meaning with a nod; some whispered it in my ear. I was stunned. 'Let someone else take the helm,' I said, and pulled myself out of their crime and my own craft. The whole crew reviled me, muttering. One of them, Aethalion, said, 'As if all our safety depended on you alone!' — and he took over my job himself, and, leaving Naxos behind, steered the other way. Then the god, toying with them, as though only now he'd caught on to the trick, gazed out at the sea from the curved stern and, as if weeping, said: 'These are not the shores you promised me, sailors. This is not the land I asked for. What have I done to deserve this? What glory is it for you — grown men — to cheat a boy? For so many to deceive one?' I had been weeping already. The impious gang laughed at my tears and drove the sea faster with hurrying oars.
"Now I swear to you by the god himself — for no god is nearer than he is — that what I'm telling you is as true as it is beyond belief. The ship stood still on the water, as if it were held fast in a dry dock. Bewildered, the men kept working the oars, unfurled the sails, and tried to run with both together. Ivy tangled the oars, twisting up them in curling coils and spreading over the sails in heavy clusters of berries. And the god himself, his brow wreathed in bunches of grapes, brandished a lance draped in vine-leaves. Around him lay tigers, and the phantom shapes of lynxes, and the fierce spotted bodies of panthers.
"The men leaped overboard — whether from madness or from terror — and first Medon began to blacken all over, his body flattening, his spine bending into a curve. 'What monstrous thing are you turning into?' Lycabas said to him — and as he spoke, his own mouth gaped wide, his nose hooked, and his hardening skin drew scales across it. Libys, trying to pull back the resisting oars, saw his hands shrink into a small space — no longer hands, more like fins now. Another, reaching his arms toward the twisted ropes, found he had no arms, and, arching his limbless body, plunged into the waves; the tip of his tail was hooked, curved like the horns of a half moon. They flung themselves everywhere, spattering the ship with spray, surfacing and diving back under, playing like a dancing troupe, tossing their frolicking bodies and blowing the seawater out through their wide nostrils. Of the twenty who had been aboard just before — for the ship carried that many — I was the only one left. As I shook, frozen with fear, barely master of myself, the god steadied me. 'Cast the fear from your heart,' he said, 'and steer for Dia.' Landing there, I joined his worship, and I keep the rites of Bacchus to this day."
"We've lent our ears to a long rambling story," said Pentheus, "so that time might wear down our anger. Servants — drag this man off headlong, rack his body with hideous tortures, and send it down to the night of the Styx!" At once the Etruscan Acoetes was hauled away and locked in a solid cell. But while the cruel instruments of the death he'd ordered were being prepared — the iron, the fire — the story goes that the doors swung open by themselves and the chains slipped from his arms by themselves, with no one loosening them.
Echion's son held firm. Now he did not send others; he went himself, to where Mount Cithaeron, chosen for the sacred rites, rang with singing and the shrill cries of the Bacchantes. As a spirited warhorse whinnies when the trumpeter signals battle on the ringing bronze and it seizes on the lust for the fight, so the air, struck by those long wailing cries, stirred Pentheus, and hearing the clamor his rage flared white-hot again. About halfway up the mountain, ringed at its edges by woods, there was a clearing, free of trees, open to view on every side. Here, as he watched the sacred rites with unhallowed eyes, the first to see him was his own mother; the first to charge at him in a frenzy; the first to wound her son Pentheus, hurling her wand. "Come, my two sisters!" she cried. "That boar, the huge one roaming our fields — that boar is mine to strike!" The whole raving crowd rushed at him alone; they closed in together and chased him, trembling now, now speaking with less fury, now blaming himself, now confessing his sin.
Wounded, he still managed to say, "Help me, my aunt Autonoe! Let the ghost of Actaeon move your heart!" But she did not know who Actaeon was; she tore off his right hand as he pleaded, and his other arm was ripped away by Ino. The wretched man had no arms left to stretch toward his mother; showing her the raw wounds where his limbs had been torn away, he said, "Look at this, Mother!" At the sight, Agave howled, threw back her neck, tossed her hair through the air, and, gripping his severed head in her bloody fingers, cried out, "Look, my companions — this victory is our doing!" No faster does the wind strip from a tall tree the leaves touched by autumn's cold, barely still clinging, than the man's limbs were torn apart by those unspeakable hands. Warned by such an example, the women of Thebes flocked to the new rites, burned their incense, and worshiped at the holy altars.
But Alcithoë, daughter of Minyas, will have none of it. She refuses to accept the god's wild rites, and in her recklessness she still denies that Bacchus is any son of Jupiter — and she has her sisters for partners in that impiety.
The priest had commanded the whole city to keep the festival: mistresses and serving-women alike were to lay their work aside, to cover their breasts with skins, to loosen the ribbons that bound their hair and wind garlands through it, and to take up the leaf-wreathed thyrsus in their hands; and he had prophesied that the anger of the slighted god would be savage if he were offended. The matrons obeyed, and the young brides too. They put away their weaving and their work-baskets and their half-finished wool, and they offered incense and called on the god by all his names — Bacchus, and Bromius, and Lyaeus; the Fire-born, the Twice-born, the only god ever given two mothers; and they added Nyseus, and unshorn Thyoneus, and Lenaeus lord of the winepress who first planted the joy-giving vine, and Nyctelius of the night-rites, and father Eleleus, and Iacchus, and Euhan — and all the other names besides that you bear, Liber, up and down the peoples of Greece.
For your youth is never used up. You are the boy who never ages; you are seen, most beautiful of all, high in the sky; and when you stand without your horns you have the face of a girl. The East was conquered by you, all the way to where dark-skinned India is washed by the far Ganges. It was you, god worthy of our worship, who struck down Pentheus and axe-bearing Lycurgus for their sacrilege, you who flung the Etruscan sailors into the sea, you who press the necks of the yoked lynxes under their painted reins. Bacchant women and satyrs come streaming after you — and that drunken old man, Silenus, propping his tottering limbs on a staff and clinging none too steadily to the swayback of his donkey. Wherever you go, the shouting of young men and the cries of women rise together, and hand-beaten drums, and the hollow clash of bronze, and the boxwood pipe with its long throat all sing out. "Be with us," the women of Thebes pray, "calm and kind" — and they keep the sacred rites as they were told.
Only the daughters of Minyas stay indoors, spoiling the festival with work no one should be doing on such a day. They card their wool, or twist the thread between their fingers, or bend to the loom, and keep their maids hard at it. At last one of them, drawing out her thread with a light thumb, said: "While the others are idling, crowding to these made-up rites, let us, whom Minerva keeps at her better craft, lighten our useful work with a bit of talk. Let's take turns telling a story, each to the others' unoccupied ears, so the long hours won't drag." The sisters liked the idea, and told her to be first.
She turned over in her mind which of the many tales she knew to tell — for she knew a great many — and could not decide. Should it be your story, Dercetis of Babylon, whom the Palestinians believe took on a new shape, scales sheathing your limbs, and stirred their pools? Or how your daughter grew wings and lived out her last years in whitewashed towers? Or how a water-nymph, with her spells and her too-powerful herbs, turned the bodies of young men into silent fish, until at last the same fate came for her? Or how the tree that once bore white fruit now bears it dark, stained by the touch of blood? That last one pleased her — it was no everyday tale — and so, while the wool ran out along her thread, she began.
"Pyramus and Thisbe — he the handsomest of young men, she the loveliest girl the East could show — lived in houses that shared a wall, in the city where Semiramis is said to have raised her high walls of baked brick. Being neighbors brought them together; it was where they first met, and where love first took its first steps. In time it grew. They would have joined hands in marriage, too, but their fathers forbade it. One thing, though, no father could forbid: they burned, both of them, their captured hearts on equal fire. There was no one they could confide in; they spoke by nods and signs. And the more the fire was smothered, the hotter it burned under the smothering.
"In the wall the two houses shared there was a thin split, a crack it had taken on long ago, when it was built. No one in all those years had ever noticed the flaw — but what does love not notice? You lovers were the first to find it, and you made it the road for your voices. Through it, safely, in the softest whisper, your endearments used to cross. Often, when they had taken their places — Thisbe here, Pyramus there — and each had caught the other's breath as it came, they would say, 'Jealous wall, why do you stand between two lovers? How hard would it be to let us join, our whole bodies together? Or if that's too much, at least open enough for a kiss. And don't think us ungrateful — we know we owe it to you that our words are given this crossing to loving ears.' So they would talk, apart and hopeless on their two sides, until, as night came on, they said 'Goodbye,' and each pressed kisses to their own face of the wall that could never reach across.
"The next morning had swept away the fires of the stars, and the sun had dried the frost from the grass, when they met again at the usual spot. First, in low murmurs, they poured out their long complaints; then they made a plan. That night, in the silence, they would try to slip past their guards and out their doors; and once out of the house, they would leave the city behind as well. But so as not to lose each other, wandering across the open country, they would meet at the tomb of Ninus and hide in the shadow of a tree — a tall mulberry, thick with snow-white fruit, standing close beside a cold spring. The plan pleased them, and the daylight, which seemed so slow to leave, at last sank into the sea, and out of that same sea the night came up.
"In the dark, clever Thisbe worked the door on its hinge and slipped out, unseen by her household. With her face veiled she reached the tomb and sat down under the appointed tree; love made her brave. And now — look — a lioness came, her foaming jaws smeared with the fresh kill of cattle, to quench her thirst at the neighboring spring. By the light of the moon Thisbe of Babylon saw her, still far off, and on trembling feet fled into a dark cave — and as she fled, the veil slipped from her shoulders and she left it lying behind. When the fierce lioness had drunk her fill of water and was turning back into the woods, she happened on the thin veil, without the girl in it, and shredded it in her bloodied mouth.
"Pyramus, who came out later, saw the unmistakable tracks of a wild beast in the deep dust, and the color drained from his whole face. But when he found the veil as well, soaked in blood, he said, 'One night will destroy two lovers. She was the one who deserved a long life; mine is the guilty soul. I killed you, my poor love — I, who told you to come by night to a place full of terror, and did not come here first myself. Tear my body apart, rip out my guilty guts with your savage jaws, all you lions who lurk beneath this rock! — But wishing for death is the coward's part.' He gathered up Thisbe's veil and carried it with him into the shade of the tree they had chosen, and when he had wept over the well-known cloth and covered it with kisses, he said, 'Now take a drink of my blood too.' And he drove the sword he wore into his side, and at once, dying, drew it back out of the hot wound. He fell on his back to the ground, and the blood leapt up high — the way water bursts from a lead pipe when the metal splits, hissing out through the narrow crack in a long jet, cutting the air. The fruit of the tree, spattered by that spray of death, turned dark, and the roots, drenched with his blood, dyed the hanging mulberries a deep purple.
"And now — look — with her fear not yet put aside, but afraid she might fail her lover, Thisbe came back, searching for the young man with her eyes and with all her heart, longing to tell him what great dangers she had escaped. She knew the place, she knew the shape of the tree — but the color of the fruit made her doubt: was this really it? While she wavered, she saw limbs on the bloody ground, quivering, twitching. She drew her foot back. Her face went paler than boxwood, and she shuddered like the surface of the sea when a light breeze skims across it and it trembles. But when she paused, and recognized her own love, she beat her innocent arms with loud blows of grief, and tore her hair, and threw her arms around the body she loved, filling his wounds with her tears, mixing her weeping into his blood; and pressing kisses on his cold face she cried out, 'Pyramus! What accident has torn you from me? Pyramus — answer me! It's your own Thisbe, your dearest, calling your name. Hear me — lift your fallen face!'
"At the name of Thisbe, Pyramus raised his eyes, already heavy with death, and once he had seen her, closed them again. When she saw her own veil, and saw the ivory sheath empty of its sword, she said, 'It was your own hand, and your love, that destroyed you, poor one. I too have a hand brave enough for this one thing, and I too have love — it will give me the strength to strike. I will follow you into death, and they will call me the most wretched cause and companion of your fate. You who could be torn from me by death alone — not even death will tear you from me now. And this one thing we ask of you both, with the words of us two: O our most wretched parents, mine and his, do not begrudge us this — that those whom a sure love and a last hour have joined be laid together in one tomb. And you, tree, whose branches now shade one poor body, and soon will shade two: keep the marks of this death. Bear fruit forever dark and fit for mourning, in memory of two lovers' blood.' She spoke, and set the point beneath her breast, and leaned down onto the blade still warm with his blood.
"Her prayers reached the gods; they reached the parents. For the color of the ripened fruit is black, and what the fire left of the two of them rests in a single urn."
She finished, and after a short pause Leuconoë began to speak, and her sisters fell silent.
"Even the Sun — who governs all things with his heavenly light — even he was caught by love. Let me tell you the loves of the Sun. This god is thought to have been the first to see the affair between Venus and Mars; this god sees everything first. Grieved at what he saw, he went to Venus's husband — Vulcan, the son of Juno — and showed him the wrong done to his marriage bed, and the place where it was done. Vulcan's mind reeled, and the work he was holding in his craftsman's hand dropped from it. At once he began to file out fine chains of bronze, and nets, and snares too delicate for the eye to catch — thread finer than the finest weaving, finer than the cobweb that hangs from the top of a rafter. He made them to yield to the lightest touch, the smallest movement, and arranged them cunningly around the bed. When his wife and her lover came together into that one bed, both were caught by the husband's craft, snared in the fetters he had rigged by this new trick, and pinned fast in the very middle of their embrace. The Lemnian god threw open the ivory doors and let the other gods in. There the two lay, bound in their shame — and more than one of the gods, and not the solemn ones, wished he could be shamed just so. The gods of heaven laughed, and for a long time this was the best-known story in all the sky.
"But the goddess of Cythera — Venus — did not forget the one who had exposed her. She took her revenge, and made the god who had wounded her secret love feel a wound of the same kind. What good now, son of Hyperion, is your beauty, your heat, your radiant light? You who scorch every land with your fire are burning with a strange new fire yourself. You who ought to be watching everything are watching Leucothoë, and on one girl you fix the eyes you owe to the whole world. Sometimes you rise too early in the eastern sky; sometimes you sink too late into the waves, and by lingering to look at her you stretch out the short hours of midwinter. Sometimes you fail altogether, and the trouble of your mind passes into your light, so that, darkened, you frighten the hearts of mortals. And it is not the moon, standing closer to earth, that blocks your face and makes you pale: it is this love that gives you that color. You love her alone. Clymene cannot hold you now, nor Rhodos, nor Perse, the lovely mother of Circe of Aeaea, nor Clytie, who longed for your embrace though you scorned her, and who at that very time was nursing a deep wound of love. Leucothoë made you forget them all — Leucothoë, whom Eurynome, loveliest woman of the perfume-bearing lands, brought into the world; but once the daughter grew up, she outshone her mother as far as her mother had outshone all others. Her father, Orchamus, ruled the Persian cities, seventh in line from old Belus at the root of the family.
"Under the western sky lie the pastures of the Sun's horses. Instead of grass they feed on ambrosia; it restores their limbs, worn out by the day's labor, and refits them for their work. And while the horses cropped their heavenly fodder there, and night was taking her turn at the sky, the god slipped into the chamber he longed for, changed into the shape of Eurynome, the girl's mother. There, among twice six handmaids by the lamplight, he saw Leucothoë drawing out smooth threads on her turning spindle. And so, like a mother kissing her dear daughter, he kissed her, and said, 'There is a private matter — maids, leave us; don't rob a mother of the right to speak with her own daughter alone.' They obeyed, and with no witness left in the room the god said, 'I am the one who marks out the long year, who sees everything, through whom the earth sees everything — the eye of the world. Believe me: you please me.' She was terrified; in her fear the distaff and spindle fell from her loosened fingers. Even her fear became her. He waited no longer, but returned to his true form and his familiar brightness. And the girl, though shaken by the sudden sight, was overcome by the god's radiance, and, all her protests set aside, she let his violence be done to her.
"Clytie was jealous — for her own love of the Sun had been anything but moderate — and, stung by rage at a rival, she spread the affair abroad and, once it was talked of, carried it to Leucothoë's father. He was fierce and unforgiving. As his daughter reached out her hands toward the Sun's light and pleaded, crying, 'It was he who forced me against my will,' he buried her alive, deep in the ground, and heaped a mound of heavy sand on top of her. The son of Hyperion scattered it with his rays and opened a passage for her to lift her buried face through — but by now, nymph, you could not raise your head, crushed under the weight of earth, and you lay there, a bloodless body. The driver of the winged horses is said to have seen nothing more heartbreaking since the fires that killed Phaethon. He tried, if he could, to call the cold limbs back to living warmth with the force of his rays; but since fate stood in the way of so great an effort, he sprinkled her body and the place with fragrant nectar, and, after a long lament, said, 'Still, you will reach the sky.' At once the body, steeped in that heavenly nectar, dissolved and soaked the earth with its perfume, and a shoot of frankincense, sending its roots down slowly through the soil, rose up and split the mound with its tip.
"But to Clytie the giver of light came no more — though her love might have excused her grief, and her grief her betrayal — and he ended everything between them. From that time she wasted away, having used her passion so madly. She could not bear the company of the other nymphs, and day and night, under the open sky, she sat on the bare ground, her hair loose and uncared for. For nine days she went without water, without food, feeding her fast on nothing but dew and her own tears, and never stirred from the ground. She only gazed at the face of the god as he moved across the sky, and turned her own face to follow him. They say her limbs took root in the soil; a sickly paleness turned part of her color into that of a bloodless plant, but part of her is red, and a flower much like a violet hides her face. And though a root holds her fast, she turns toward the Sun, and, changed as she is, she keeps her love."
She had finished, and the wondrous tale had caught their ears. Some of the sisters said it could never have happened; others insisted that true gods can do anything — but Bacchus is not among them. When they had fallen silent, Alcithoë was called on next. Running her shuttle through the threads of the loom strung before her, she said, "I'll pass over the well-known love of Daphnis, the shepherd of Ida, whom a nymph's jealous rage — she was his lover, and he wronged her — turned into a stone: such is the pain that burns those in love. Nor will I tell how Sithon, when nature's law was overturned, was of both sexes, now a man, now a woman. You too I skip over, Celmis — now hard adamant, but once the most faithful playmate of the infant Jupiter — and the Curetes, born from a heavy shower of rain, and Crocus, changed together with Smilax into little flowers. Instead I'll hold your minds with a sweet novelty.
"Learn how the spring of Salmacis got its evil name, and why it saps a man's strength and softens the limbs of whoever bathes in it. The reason is hidden, but the power of the fountain is famous. To Mercury the goddess of Cythera — Venus — bore a boy, and the water-nymphs raised him in the caves of Mount Ida. In his face you could make out both his mother and his father, and from them he took his name too. As soon as he had turned fifteen, he left his native mountains, left Ida where he had been reared, and delighted in wandering strange places and seeing unknown rivers, his eagerness making the hardship light. He came at last to the cities of Lycia, and to the Carians who border on them. There he found a pool of water, clear all the way down to the bottom — no marsh-reeds around it, no barren sedge, no sharp-tipped rushes; the water was pure and see-through, and the edges of the pool were ringed with fresh turf and grass forever green.
"A nymph lived there — but one no good at hunting, who never learned to bend a bow or race for speed; the only water-nymph swift Diana never knew. Her sisters, it's said, often told her, 'Salmacis, take up a javelin, or a painted quiver, and mix some hard hunting into your idleness.' But she took up no javelin and no painted quiver, and mixed no hunting into her idleness. Instead she would bathe her lovely limbs in her own spring, or comb her hair smooth with a boxwood comb from Mount Cytorus, and, looking into the water, ask its reflection what suited her best. Or, wrapping her body in a sheer robe, she would lie on the soft leaves or the soft grass, and often she gathered flowers. And she happened to be gathering them just then, when she saw the boy, and, seeing him, longed to have him.
"Still, though she was eager to go to him, she did not go before she had set herself in order, arranged her robe, composed her face, and made sure she looked beautiful. Then she began: 'You boy, worthy to be taken for a god — if you are a god, you could be Cupid; but if you are mortal, then blessed are the parents who made you, lucky your brother, and fortunate indeed any sister you have, and the nurse who gave you her breast. But far, far happier than all of them is she — if you have any bride, if you would ever grant a girl the honor of your marriage bed. If there is such a girl, let my pleasure at least be stolen; and if there is none, then let it be me — let us go into one bed together.' The nymph said no more. A blush colored the boy's face — he did not know what love was — but even the blush became him: it was the color of apples hanging on a sunlit tree, or of stained ivory, or of the moon reddening under her own brightness when the bronze cymbals ring out to rescue her, in vain. When the nymph would not stop begging for kisses — at least a sister's kisses — and was already laying her hands on his ivory-white neck, he said, 'Will you stop, or must I run for it and leave this place, and you with it?'
"Salmacis took fright. 'I give the place up to you freely, stranger,' she said, and pretended to turn and go. But she kept looking back, and hid herself in a thicket of shrubs, sinking down on one bent knee. The boy, thinking himself alone and unwatched on the empty grass, wandered here and there, and dipped the tips of his feet, then his feet up to the ankles, in the playful water. And with no delay — charmed by the gentle warmth of it — he slipped the soft clothes from his tender body. Then indeed Salmacis was lost, on fire with desire for his naked beauty. Her eyes blazed, no differently than when the sun, at its brightest, is caught and flung back from the face of a mirror. She could hardly bear to wait, hardly hold off her joy now, longing to hold him, out of her mind and barely in command of herself. He slapped his body with his cupped palms and dove quickly into the pool, and, throwing one arm after the other, shone through the clear water like an ivory statue, or white lilies, set behind clear glass.
"'I've won — he's mine!' the nymph cried, and, flinging every stitch of clothing far off, she plunged into the middle of the water. She seized him as he fought her, tore reluctant kisses from him, forced her hands beneath him, touched his unwilling body, and wound herself around the boy now one way, now another. At last, as he strained against her and tried to slip free, she twisted around him like a serpent that the eagle, the king's own bird, snatches up and carries aloft — the snake, hanging, binds its head and feet and wraps its coiling tail through the spread wings. Or as ivy weaves itself along tall tree-trunks; or as the octopus holds an enemy it has caught underwater, letting down its suckers from every side — so the boy held out and refused the nymph the joy she hoped for. She pressed harder, and clinging to him with her whole body, gripping fast, she said, 'Fight all you like, cruel one — you still won't escape. So ordain it, you gods: let no day part him from me, or me from him.' The gods heard her prayer and granted it. The two bodies, mingled, were joined together, and a single face was drawn over them both. Just as, when someone grafts branches under a single bark, he sees them join as they grow and mature together, so, when their limbs met in that stubborn embrace, they were no longer two, and their form was double: it could be called neither woman nor boy — it seemed neither, and both.
"So when Hermaphroditus saw that the clear water he had gone down into as a man had made him only half a man, and that his limbs had gone soft in it, he lifted his hands — but no longer with a man's voice — and said, 'Grant your son this gift, father and mother, since I bear the name of you both: whoever comes into these waters a man, let him go out half a man, and let him weaken the instant he touches the pool.' Both his parents were moved, and made the words of their two-shaped son come true, and tainted the fountain with a strange, unnatural drug."
That was the end of the stories — and still the daughters of Minyas pressed on with their work, still scorned the god and profaned his festival, when all at once drums no one could see boomed out with their harsh, jarring beat, and the pipe with its curved horn and the ringing bronze sounded, and the air went sweet with myrrh and saffron. And then, past all belief, the weaving began to grow green: the cloth hanging in the loom put out leaves like ivy; part of it turned into grapevine; what had been threads a moment before became tendrils; vine-shoots sprang from the warp; and the purple dye lent its glow to the painted grapes.
And now the day was spent, and there came that hour you could call neither dark nor light, but the very border of doubtful night mixed with the last of day — when suddenly the house seemed to shake, and torches thick with oil seemed to blaze, and the whole place to glow with red fires, and phantom shapes of savage beasts to howl through it. The sisters hid, scattering through the smoke-filled house, ducking into different corners to escape the fires and the light. And while they groped for the dark, a thin membrane stretched over their shrinking limbs and sheathed their arms in delicate wings. The darkness would not let them know how they had lost their old shape. No feathers lifted them, yet they held themselves up on see-through wings, and when they tried to speak they gave off a voice as tiny as their bodies, and wrung out their little complaints in a faint, thin squeak. They keep to houses, not woods; they hate the light, and fly by night — creatures that take their name from the fallen dusk of evening: bats.
But now the power of Bacchus was the great story in every corner of Thebes, and his aunt Ino went about telling everyone of the mighty new god's deeds — she alone, of so many sisters, free of grief, except for the grief her sisters had brought on her. Juno watched her: watched her carry her head high because of her children, her marriage to Athamas, and above all the god she had reared. She could not stomach it. "The son of my rival," she said to herself, "was able to change the sailors of Lydia into fish and drown them, was able to hand a son over to his own mother to be torn to pieces, was able to fold three daughters of Minyas into new-grown wings — and Juno can do nothing but weep over wrongs no one has answered for? And that is to be enough for me? That is the whole of my power? He himself shows me what to do. There's no shame in learning even from an enemy — and what madness can do, he's proved past all doubt in the butchering of Pentheus. So why shouldn't Ino be goaded by madness too, and driven down the same road her sisters took?"
There is a downward path, shaded with dismal yew, that leads through the depths of silence to the halls of the dead. Here the sluggish Styx breathes up its fogs, and this is the way the newly made ghosts come down, and the shades of those who have had their burial rites. A deathly pallor and an unending winter hold those bleak wastes far and wide, and the newcomer dead do not know the road that leads to the Stygian city, or where the grim palace of black Pluto stands. The vast city has a thousand entrances and gates thrown open on every side; and as the sea takes in the rivers of the whole earth, so that place takes in every soul, and is never too small for any tide of people, and never feels the crowd grow. The shades wander bloodless, without body or bones; some throng the place of judgment, some the hall of the king below; some ply the trades they knew, in imitation of the life they had before, while their own punishment holds the rest fast.
Juno, daughter of Saturn, so far gave in to her hatred and her rage that she left her home in heaven and went down there. The moment she stepped in, and the threshold groaned under the weight of her sacred body, Cerberus lifted his three heads and let out three barks at once. She called on the Sisters born of Night, terrible and unappeasable goddesses. They sat before the prison door, shut close with adamant, combing black vipers out of their hair. As soon as they knew her, there among the shadows of the dark, the goddesses rose. This is the place they call Accursed. Here Tityos gave up his innards to be mangled, stretched across nine acres of ground. You, Tantalus, could reach no water, and the tree that leaned over you kept snatching itself away. Sisyphus, you were forever chasing or shoving that stone that must roll back again. Ixion spun on his wheel, fleeing himself and following himself at once. And the granddaughters of Belus, who had dared to plot the murder of their cousins, kept fetching over and over the water they kept losing.
When Juno had looked over all of them with a hard eye — Ixion first of all, and then, turning from him, Sisyphus — she said, "Why should this one, alone of all the brothers, suffer punishment without end, while a rich palace keeps proud Athamas, who along with his wife has always held me in contempt?" And she laid out the reason for her hatred and her coming, and what she wanted. What she wanted was this: that the house of Cadmus should not stand, and that the Furies should drag Athamas into some horror. Command, promise, and plea she rolled into one, and pressed the goddesses hard. When Juno had finished, Tisiphone shook her tangled white hair as it was, tossed the snakes back from across her face, and said: "No need for a long speech. Whatever you order, count it done. Leave this loveless kingdom and take yourself back to the better air of heaven." Juno went back overjoyed; and as she made ready to enter the sky, Iris, the rainbow's goddess, purified her with a sprinkle of dewy water.
There was no delay. Grim Tisiphone caught up a torch soaked in gore, pulled on a cloak red with dripping blood, wound a writhing snake about her waist for a belt, and went out from her house. Mourning went with her as she walked, and Fright, and Terror, and Madness with its trembling face. She stopped on the threshold. The doorposts of Athamas, the son of Aeolus, are said to have shuddered; the maple doors went pale, and the sun fled the spot. His wife was terrified by these signs; Athamas was terrified too, and the two of them were getting ready to leave the house — but the deadly Fury planted herself in the doorway and blocked the way out. She spread wide her arms knotted with vipers and shook her hair. The snakes she shook cried out; some lay along her shoulders, some slid around her breast, hissing and spewing corruption and flickering their tongues. Then she wrenched two snakes from the middle of her hair and threw them, in her plague-bringing hand, at the pair of them; and the snakes went crawling over the breast of Ino and the breast of Athamas, breathing their foul breath into them. They left no wound on the body — it was the mind that felt the dreadful blows.
She had brought with her, too, a monstrous brew of liquid poison: foam from the mouths of Cerberus, and the venom of Echidna, and blind wanderings, and the forgetfulness of a darkened mind, and crime, and tears, and rabid fury, and the love of killing — all of it ground together, mixed with fresh blood, and boiled in a hollow bronze pot, stirred with a stalk of green hemlock. And while the two of them stood shaking, she poured the maddening poison over both their hearts and stirred it down into their inmost being. Then, whirling her torch round and round the same circle, she chased fire with fire until the flames blurred into one ring. So, triumphant, her orders carried out, she went back to the empty kingdom of great Pluto and unwound the snake she had worn as a belt.
At once the son of Aeolus, out of his mind, cried out in the middle of his hall: "Ho, men! Spread your nets here in these woods! I just saw a lioness with a pair of cubs!" And, insane, he chased the tracks of his wife as if she were a wild beast, and snatched Learchus — the boy smiling and stretching out his little arms from his mother's breast — and swung him two or three times through the air like a stone in a sling, and, savage, smashed the baby's small face against the hard rock. Then at last the mother, roused — whether by grief, or by the poison spread through her — screamed aloud and ran, out of her senses, with her hair streaming, carrying you, little Melicerta, in her bare arms, and shouting "Euhoe, Bacchus!" At the name of Bacchus, Juno laughed. "May your foster-child do you many such favors," she said.
A cliff hangs out over the sea. Its base is hollowed by the waves and shelters the water beneath it from the rain; its top is jagged and stretches its brow out over the open water. Ino climbed it — madness had given her the strength — and, held back by no fear, threw herself and her burden into the deep; the water, struck by her fall, turned white with foam. But Venus, pitying the undeserved sufferings of her granddaughter, coaxed her uncle with soft words: "God of the waters, Neptune, to whom fell a power second only to heaven's own — I ask a great thing, but take pity on my own blood, whom you see tossed on the boundless Ionian sea, and add them to your gods. I have some claim on the sea myself, if it's true that once, in the middle of the deep, I formed out of the foam — and from that foam my Greek name still comes." Neptune granted her prayer. He took from the two of them all that was mortal, laid on them a majesty to be revered, and made both their names and their shapes new: he called the son Palaemon, and his mother Leucothoë.
Her Sidonian companions had followed the prints of Ino's feet as far as they could, and saw the last of her at the edge of the rock. Sure that she was dead, they beat their breasts and tore their hair and their clothes for the house of Cadmus, and heaped the blame on the goddess as unjust and far too cruel to her rival. Juno would not bear their reproaches. "I'll make you the greatest monuments of my cruelty," she said — and the deed came hard on the word. The one who had loved Ino most cried, "I'll follow my queen into the sea!" and was about to leap, but could not stir a muscle: she stuck fast, fixed to the rock. Another, as she tried to strike her breast with the old blow, felt her arms stiffen mid-motion. One, who had chanced to stretch her hands out over the waves of the sea, turned to stone with her hands still reaching over those same waves. Another, tearing at the hair she had caught at the crown of her head, you would have seen — her fingers suddenly hardening in the hair. Whatever posture each was caught in, she froze in it. And some turned into birds — the Ismenides, who to this day skim the surface of that same water with the tips of their wings.
The son of Agenor does not know that his daughter and his little grandson are now gods of the sea. Broken by grief, by one calamity heaped on the next, and by all the omens he had seen, Cadmus the founder fled his own city, as though the bad luck of the place, and not his own, were bearing down on him. Driven by long wandering, he came at last, an exile with his exiled wife, to the borders of Illyria. And now, weighed down with woes and years, while they were dwelling again on the first disasters of their house and going back over their sufferings in talk, Cadmus said: "That serpent I ran through with my spear — was it a sacred one, back when I set out from Sidon and sowed the viper's teeth across the ground, a strange new seed? If the gods are avenging it with such unerring rage, then I pray that I myself may be stretched out as a serpent into a long belly." He had barely spoken when, as a serpent, he was stretched into a long belly, and felt scales rising over his toughening skin, and his darkening body flecked with spots of blue-green. He fell forward onto his breast; his legs, fused into one, tapered slowly to a smooth, rounded point. His arms were all that was left. He stretched out the arms that were left, and, with the tears still running down his face — a face still human — he said, "Come here, my wife, come here, most wretched of women, and while some part of me is still here, touch me, take my hand while it is still a hand, while the snake has not taken all of me." He wanted to say more, but his tongue split suddenly into two, and the words would not come to him though he willed them, and every time he tried to force out some lament, he hissed. That was the voice Nature left him.
His wife struck her bare breast with her hand and cried out: "Cadmus, stay! Unhappy man, free yourself from this monstrous shape! Cadmus, what is this? Where are your feet, where your shoulders and your hands, your color, your face — where, while I am still speaking, is all the rest of you? Why, gods of heaven, do you not turn me too into the same serpent?" So she cried; and he licked his wife's face, and slid into her dear breast as though he knew her, and gave her the old embraces and reached for the neck he knew so well. Everyone there — for companions were present — was horrified; but she stroked the smooth, crested neck of the dragon, and all at once there were two of them, gliding along in joined coils, until they slipped into the cover of a nearby grove. Even now they neither flee from a man nor strike him with a wound: gentle serpents, they remember what they once were.
Yet, changed as they were, the two of them found great comfort in their grandson — Bacchus, whom a conquered India worshipped as a god, and whom Achaia honored with temples raised in his name. Only Acrisius, son of Abas, sprung from the same line, was left to bar the god from the walls of Argos and take up arms against him and refuse to believe that he was any son of Jupiter. He did not believe Perseus a son of Jupiter either — Perseus, whom Danae had conceived in a shower of gold. But soon (such is the force of truth) Acrisius was sorry both that he had wronged the god and that he had failed to recognize his grandson: for the one was already set in heaven, while the other, carrying the memorable spoils of the viper-haired monster, was slicing through the yielding air on whirring wings. And as the conqueror hung over the Libyan sands, drops of blood fell from the Gorgon's head; the earth caught them and quickened them into snakes of every kind — which is why that land, to this day, swarms and seethes with serpents.
Carried on from there through the vast sky by warring winds, borne now here, now there, like a rain-heavy cloud, he looked down from the heights on the far-off earth below and flew over the whole round world. Three times he saw the cold Bears, three times the claws of the Crab; often he was swept off toward the west, often toward the east. And now, as the day was failing, afraid to trust himself to the night, he came to rest in the western part of the world, in the kingdom of Atlas, and looked for a little rest until the Morning Star should call up the fires of Dawn, and Dawn the chariot of the day.
Here lived Atlas, the son of Iapetus, greater than all other men in the sheer bulk of his body. Under this king lay the world's farthest edge, and the sea that takes in the panting horses of the Sun and receives his weary chariot. A thousand flocks and a thousand herds roamed his pastures, and no neighbor crowded his land. And here leaves of gleaming, radiant gold hid golden branches and golden fruit. "Friend," Perseus said to him, "if the glory of a great line means anything to you, Jupiter is the father of my blood; and if you admire great deeds, you'll admire mine. I ask for shelter and rest." But Atlas remembered an old prophecy — the one Themis of Parnassus had given him: "A time will come, Atlas, when your tree will be stripped of its gold, and a son of Jove will carry off the glory of the prize." Dreading it, Atlas had walled his orchard round with solid stone and given it over to a huge dragon to guard, and kept all strangers out of his land. To Perseus, too, he said, "Get far away from here, or the glory of the deeds you lie about — and Jupiter with it — will be far off when you need them!" And he added force to his threats, and tried to shove him from the door as Perseus held back and mixed brave words with gentle ones. Weaker in strength — for who could match Atlas for strength? — Perseus said, "Well, since my friendship means so little to you, then take this gift!" And, turning his own face away, he thrust out, on his left, the ghastly head of Medusa.
Huge as he was, Atlas became a mountain. His beard and his hair passed into forests; his shoulders and his arms became ridges; what had been his head was now the peak at the mountain's top; his bones turned to stone. Then, swelling out on every side, he grew to an immense height — so you ordained it, gods — and the whole sky, with all its stars, came to rest on him.
The grandson of Hippotas — Aeolus, keeper of the winds — had shut the winds up in their eternal prison, and the Morning Star, that rouses men to their work, had risen bright in the high heavens. Perseus took up his wings again, strapped them to his feet on either side, buckled on his hooked sword, and cut through the clear air on his beating ankle-wings. Leaving countless nations behind him, around and below, he came in sight of the Ethiopians and the fields of Cepheus. There the unjust judgment of Ammon had condemned the innocent Andromeda to pay the penalty for her mother's boasting tongue.
The moment Perseus saw her, her arms bound to the hard rock — but for the light breeze stirring her hair and the warm tears running from her eyes, he would have taken her for a statue of marble — he caught fire without knowing it, and stood amazed; seized by the vision of the beauty before him, he all but forgot to keep beating his wings in the air. When he had landed, he said, "You do not deserve these chains — only the chains that bind eager lovers to each other. Tell me, since I ask it, the name of this land and your own name, and why you are in chains." At first she was silent — a girl, she dared not speak to a man — and she would have hidden her modest face in her hands, if she had not been bound. Her eyes, all she could do, she filled with welling tears. When he pressed her again and again, she told him — so that she would not seem unwilling to confess some fault of her own — the name of her country and her own name, and how great her mother's confidence in her own beauty had been. Not everything was yet told when the water roared, and a monster came looming over the boundless sea, its head raised high, its breast covering the wide expanse of water. The girl shrieked. Her grieving father and mother were there, both of them wretched — though the mother more justly so — and they brought no help with them, only tears fit for the moment and loud lamentation, and they clung to her bound body.
Then the stranger spoke: "There will be a long time left for tears; the hour for bringing help is short. If I were to ask for her hand — I, Perseus, son of Jove and of the woman whom Jove filled, shut in her tower, with his fertile gold; Perseus, who overcame the snake-haired Gorgon, and dared to travel the winds of the air on beating wings — surely I would be preferred above all others as your son-in-law. But I'll try to add merit of my own to gifts like these, if only the gods are with me: I bargain only that she be mine, once she is saved by my courage." Her parents accepted the terms — who could hesitate? — and begged for his help, and promised the kingdom too, as a dowry on top.
Look now: as a ship with its beak fixed at the prow plows the water, driven on by the sweating arms of young rowers, so the monster came, shoving the waves aside with the thrust of its breast. It was as far from the rocks as a Balearic sling can send its whirled lead across the middle of the sky, when suddenly the youth, kicking off from the ground, shot high into the clouds. As the hero's shadow fell on the surface of the sea, the monster hurled all its fury at the shadow it saw. And just as the bird of Jupiter, when it spots in an open field a serpent baring its blue-black back to the sun, takes it from behind, and, to keep it from twisting its savage mouth around, sinks its greedy talons into the scaly neck — so the winged hero, plunging headlong through the empty air in his swift flight, pressed down on the monster's back, and, as it roared, drove his sword up to the curved hook into its right shoulder.
Torn by the deep wound, the beast now reared high into the air, now dove beneath the water, now wheeled about like a wild boar hemmed in and terrified by a baying pack of hounds. Perseus dodged the greedy jaws on his swift wings, and wherever the beast lay open he struck with his curved blade — now its back, crusted with hollow shells, now the ribs of its flanks, now where the tail thinned away and ended in a fish. The beast vomited from its mouth a flood of seawater mixed with red blood, and the spray soaked the hero's wings and weighed them down. Perseus no longer dared trust his dripping ankle-wings; he spotted a rock that stood clear of the water at its highest point when the sea lay calm, though now it was hidden by the heaving waves. Bracing himself on it, gripping the top of the ridge with his left hand, three or four times he drove the iron through the monster's guts. A shout of applause filled the shores and the high halls of the gods; Cassiope and Cepheus the father rejoiced, and hailed him as their son-in-law, and confessed that he was the prop and the savior of their house. Freed from her chains, the girl came walking forward — at once the reward of his labor and its cause.
Perseus washed his victorious hands in water dipped from the sea; and so that the harsh sand would not bruise the snake-bearing head, he softened the ground with leaves, spread over it fronds grown beneath the water, and laid Medusa's face, the daughter of Phorcys, on them. The fresh fronds, still alive with their thirsty pith, drank in the monster's power and hardened at its touch, taking a strange new stiffness in branch and leaf. And the sea-nymphs tried the wondrous thing on more fronds, and, delighted by the same result, scattered the seeds of them across the waves. Even now that same nature stays in the coral: it takes its hardness from the touch of the air, and what was a soft plant under the sea becomes stone above it.
To three gods he built three altars of turf: the left one to Mercury, the right one to you, warlike maiden — Minerva — and Jove's altar in the middle. A cow was sacrificed to Minerva, a calf to the wing-footed god, and a bull to you, greatest of the gods. And straightaway he took Andromeda, the prize of so great a deed, with no dowry asked. Hymen and Cupid waved the wedding torches before them; the fires were heaped high with rich perfumes; garlands hung from the houses; and everywhere lyres and flutes and pipes and singing rang out, the glad tokens of a joyful heart. The doors were thrown open, and the golden halls stood wide and displayed, and the nobles of King Cepheus came in to a banquet laid out in splendor.
When the feast was done and their spirits opened with the gift of generous Bacchus, Perseus asked about the ways and the character of the country and of its people. And when one of them had told him, he said, "Now, bravest Perseus, tell us, I beg you, by what courage and by what arts you carried off that head bristling with serpents." Perseus told them of a place lying beneath cold Atlas, safe behind a bulwark of solid rock; how at its entrance lived two sisters, the daughters of Phorcys, who shared the use of a single eye between them; how, by sly craft, he slipped his hand in the way as the eye was being passed from one to the other, and stole it; and how, through hidden, pathless country, over crags bristling with rough woods, he reached the home of the Gorgons; and how, along the fields and the roads, he saw the shapes of men and beasts turned from their own forms into stone at the sight of Medusa. Yet he himself had looked at Medusa's face only in the bronze of the shield on his left arm, in the reflection thrown back from it; and while a deep sleep held her and her snakes, he had struck the head from her neck — and Pegasus, the swift-winged, and his brother had been born from their mother's blood. He added, too, the dangers of his long journey — no invention, those — what seas and what lands he had seen far below him from on high, and what stars he had brushed with his beating wings.
Yet he fell silent sooner than they expected. Then one of the nobles took it up, asking why she alone of the sisters wore snakes braided in among her hair. And the stranger said: "Since you ask a thing worth the telling, hear the reason. She was once famous for her beauty, the envied hope of many suitors; and in her whole person there was no part more striking than her hair — I've met a man who said he'd seen it. The ruler of the sea, they say, forced himself on her in the temple of Minerva. Jove's daughter turned away and covered her chaste eyes with her shield; and, so that it would not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon's hair into hideous water-snakes. And now, to strike terror into the enemies she stuns with dread, she still wears on her breast the very snakes that she made."
And while Perseus — the son of Danaë — was still in the middle of telling these tales to the gathered lords of Cepheus's people, the royal halls filled with the roar of a raging crowd. This was no clamor that sings a wedding; it was the din that cries out war. You could have compared that banquet, turned in an instant to uproar, to a calm sea that the wild fury of the winds churns up, lashing its waters into waves.
At the head of it all came Phineus, the reckless author of this attack, brandishing an ashwood spear tipped with bronze. "Look — here I am," he shouted, "here I stand, come to avenge the bride stolen from me! Now let your wings save you, if they can; let Jupiter save you, turned to his lying shower of gold — neither will tear you out of my hands!" And he drew back to hurl the lance.
But Cepheus cried out, "What are you doing? What madness, brother, drives you to this crime? Is this the thanks you pay for a service so great? Is this the bride-price you give for the life that was saved? It was not Perseus who took her from you — if you want the truth of it — but the terrible power of the Nereids, and horned Ammon, and the sea-beast that came to gorge itself on flesh torn from my own child. She was lost to you at the very hour she was doomed to die — unless, cruel as you are, that is exactly what you want: that she should die, so my grief can be your comfort. Was it not enough that you stood and watched her chained, and lifted not a finger to help — you, her uncle and her betrothed both? Now will you grieve on top of it that another man saved her, and rob him of his reward? If that reward looks so precious to you, you should have gone to fetch it off the rock where she hung bound. Let the man who did go — the man through whom my old age is not left childless — keep what he earned, by his deeds and by our given word. And understand this: he was not chosen over you, but over certain death."
Phineus said nothing back. He only looked from Cepheus to Perseus and back again, unsure which of them to strike first. Then, after a short pause, he threw his spear — hurled it with all the force his rage could lend — and threw it for nothing: it stuck fast in the couch. At that Perseus sprang up from the cushions at last, and in his fury he would have driven the weapon back through his enemy's chest — but Phineus had ducked behind an altar, and so (the shame of it) an altar sheltered a scoundrel. Still, the spear did not fly wasted: it lodged in the forehead of Rhoetus, who dropped, and when the iron was wrenched from the bone he thrashed on the ground and spattered the laid tables with his blood.
Then indeed the mob blazed up into ungovernable rage and flung their weapons. There were some who said that Cepheus deserved to die along with his son-in-law — but Cepheus had already gone out through the doorway, calling on right and good faith and the gods of hospitality to witness that this violence was done against his will. Warlike Minerva was there: she covered her brother Perseus with her aegis and put heart into him.
There was an Indian named Athis, born — so it is believed — beneath the glassy waters of the Ganges, to Limnaee the river's daughter. He was strikingly beautiful, and his rich dress only heightened it. He was in his prime, just sixteen, wrapped in a Tyrian purple cloak edged with a golden hem; a chain of gold set off his throat, and a curved clasp held back his hair, glossy with myrrh. He had been trained to hit a target however far off with a thrown javelin, but he was better still at drawing the bow. Even now, as he was bending the pliant horns of that bow with his hands, Perseus caught up a smoldering brand from the middle of the altar and struck him down, smashing his face into the splinters of his own skull.
When Lycabas the Assyrian — Athis's closest companion, and no man to hide the true love he bore him — saw those features, so often praised, rolling now in blood, he wept for Athis as the youth breathed his life out through that bitter wound. Then he snatched up the bow Athis had been bending. "Now the fight is with me," he said. "You will not gloat long over a boy's death — a thing that wins you more hatred than glory." He had not yet finished speaking when the piercing arrow leapt from the string. Perseus dodged it, and it hung caught in the folds of his robe. He turned on Lycabas the curved falchion that had already proved itself in the killing of Medusa, and drove it into his chest. Even as he died, his eyes swimming in a black night, Lycabas looked round for Athis, sank down against him, and carried to the shades below the comfort of a death shared with the one he loved.
Then Phorbas of Syene, Metion's son, and Amphimedon the Libyan, both hungry to join the fight, went down as they slipped in the blood that lay warm and wide across the floor; as they struggled up, the sword met them — driven into the ribs of the one, into the throat of Phorbas. But against Erytus, Actor's son, whose weapon was a broad double-axe, Perseus did not use his hooked sword. Instead he lifted in both hands a huge mixing-bowl, all deep-carved figures and massive weight, and smashed it down on the man. Erytus vomited red blood, toppled backward, and beat the ground with his dying head. Then Perseus struck down Polydegmon, of Semiramis's line, and Abaris from the Caucasus, and Lycetus the son of Sperchius, and long-haired Helix, and Phlegyas, and Clytus — and trampled the mounded heaps of the dying he had piled up.
Phineus, not daring to close with his enemy hand to hand, hurled a javelin — but a slip sent it into Idas instead, a man who had held back from the war in vain and taken up arms for neither side. Idas glared at cruel Phineus with hard eyes. "Since you drag me into a side after all," he said, "then take the enemy you have made, Phineus — and pay for this wound with a wound." He was just drawing the dart from his body to throw it back when he crumpled, collapsing on limbs emptied of blood.
Here too Hodites — next in rank among Cepheus's men after the king himself — fell beneath the sword of Clymenus. Hypseus cut down Prothoenor, and Perseus cut down Hypseus. Among them was old Emathion as well, a man who loved justice and feared the gods; since his years forbade him the sword, he fought with his voice instead, condemning and cursing those wicked weapons. As he clung to the altars with trembling hands, Chromis struck his head off; it fell straight onto the altar, and there, on the half-living tongue, it still spat out its curses before he breathed his last soul into the flames.
After them the twin brothers Broteas and Ammon — unbeaten with the boxing-glove, if only swords could be beaten by boxing — died by Phineus's hand; and Ampycus too, the priest of Ceres, his temples bound with a white fillet. And you, Lampetides — you were never meant for work like this, but for tuning the lyre to your voice, the labor of peacetime; you had been asked to grace the feast and the festival with your song. As you stood off to one side, holding your harmless plectrum, Pedasus jeered at you: "Go sing the rest to the ghosts down by the Styx!" and fixed his sword-point in your left temple. You fell, and your dying fingers plucked once more at the lyre's strings, so that as you dropped you struck out, by chance, one last mournful song.
Fierce Lycormas would not let him die unavenged: he tore a stout bar from the right-hand doorpost and slammed it against the bones at the center of Pedasus's neck, and Pedasus dropped to the ground like a felled bullock.
Pelates of the Cinyps was trying to wrench the oak bar from the left-hand post — and as he tried, his right hand was pinned to it by the spear of Corythus the Marmarid, nailed fast to the wood. While he hung there caught, Abas ran him through the side; but he did not fall — dying, he hung from the post that still gripped his hand.
Melaneus went down too, a man of Perseus's own side, and Dorylas, the richest lord of Nasamonian land — Dorylas, rich in acres, whom no one matched for the breadth of his fields or the heaps of incense they yielded him. The hurled steel stuck slantwise in his groin, a killing spot. When Halcyoneus of Bactria, who had dealt the wound, saw him sobbing out his soul and rolling his eyes, he said, "Out of all your fields, keep this one patch of earth you lie on," and left the lifeless body.
But Perseus, as his avenger, wrenched the still-warm spear from the wound and flung it back at Halcyoneus; it took him full in the nostrils, drove clean through his neck, and jutted out on either side. And while Fortune was steadying his hand, he laid low Clytius and Clanis, sons of one mother, each by a different wound: through both of Clytius's thighs an ash spear was driven by a strong arm, while Clanis bit down on the javelin in his mouth. Down went Celadon of Mendes; down went Astreus, born of a Palestinian mother and no certain father; and Aethion, once sharp-eyed to read the things to come, now fooled by a false omen; and Thoactes, the king's armor-bearer; and Agyrtes, infamous for the murder of his own father.
Still more work remained than was already done, for the whole mob had set its mind on crushing one man. From every side the sworn ranks pressed the fight, in a cause that made war on merit and good faith alike. On Perseus's side his father-in-law stood loyal — and helpless — with the new bride Andromeda and her mother, who filled the halls with their shrieks of encouragement; but the clash of weapons and the groans of the dying drowned them out. Bellona, the goddess of war, was flooding the household gods, defiled now, with a tide of blood, and stirring the battle to fresh life.
Phineus and the thousand who followed Phineus ringed Perseus in, alone. Their darts flew past him thicker than winter hail — past both his flanks, past his eyes, past his ears. He set his shoulders against the stone of a great pillar, and with his back thus guarded he turned to face the crowd bearing down on him and held them off. On his left pressed Molpeus of Chaonia, on his right Ethemon of Nabataea. Like a tiger that hears, from two different valleys, the lowing of two herds, and, goaded by hunger, cannot choose which to charge though it burns to charge at both — so Perseus, torn between right and left, drove off Molpeus with a wound clean through the leg and was content to let him flee. Ethemon gave him no such time, but raged in, mad to sink a wound deep in Perseus's neck; he swung with reckless force, and his sword shattered against the column's edge; the blade sprang off and lodged in its own owner's throat — though the blow had not force enough to kill him. Perseus stabbed the trembling man, who stretched out his unarmed hands in vain, with the falchion Mercury had given him.
But when Perseus saw his courage giving way at last to sheer numbers, he called out, "Since you force my hand yourselves, I will fetch help from an enemy. Turn your faces away, every friend of mine here!" — and he raised the Gorgon's head. "Find someone else to work your marvels on," said Thescelus — and even as his hand made ready to hurl its deadly javelin, he froze in that very pose, a statue of marble. Next to him, Ampyx thrust his sword at the breast of Perseus, that man of great and daring heart — and in the thrusting his right hand stiffened, unable to move forward or back. But Nileus, who had falsely bragged that the seven-mouthed Nile had fathered him, and had engraved its seven channels on his shield, half in silver, half in gold, cried, "Look, Perseus, at the source of my line! You will carry a great comfort down to the silent shades — that you fell to a man as great as I am." The last of his words was choked off in the middle of the sound; you would think his half-open mouth was still trying to speak, but it gave his words no way through. Eryx rounded on them: "It is your own cowardice that has frozen you, not the Gorgon's locks! Charge in with me and throw down this boy and his sorcerer's weapons!" He was about to charge when the ground caught his feet, and he stood there an immovable stone, an armed statue.
These men earned their punishment. But there was one, Aconteus, a soldier of Perseus's own: fighting for his lord, he caught sight of the Gorgon and hardened, stone rising over him. Astyages, thinking he was still alive, struck him with a long sword — and the sword rang out with a shrill, clear note. While Astyages stood there stunned, he took on the same nature himself, and the look of a man caught in astonishment stayed fixed on his marble face. It would take too long to name the men of lower rank. Two hundred bodies were still left for the fight; two hundred bodies stiffened at the sight of the Gorgon.
Now at last Phineus was sorry for his unjust war. But what could he do? He saw the statues standing in their scattered poses, recognized his own men, and, calling each by name, begged them for help. Not yet believing it, he touched the bodies nearest him: marble. He turned his face away, and — a suppliant now — stretched out his hands and held his arms aside in confession of his guilt. "You win, Perseus!" he said. "Take away your monster, take that stone-making face of your Medusa, whatever she is — take it away, I beg you! It was not hatred, not the lust for a throne, that drove me to war — it was for a wife that I took up arms. Your claim was the better one in merit, mine only in time. I am not ashamed to yield. Grant me nothing, bravest of men, but this one life; let all the rest be yours."
As he said all this, not daring even to look at the man he was pleading with, Perseus answered: "What I can give you, most craven Phineus — and it is a great gift for a coward — that I will give. Put away your fear: no weapon shall touch you. Better still, I will make you a monument to last forever; in my father-in-law's house you will always be on show, so that my wife can console herself with the likeness of the man she was promised to." And with that he swung Medusa, the daughter of Phorcys, round to the side toward which Phineus had turned his frightened face. Then, even as Phineus struggled to twist his eyes away, his neck went rigid, and the very moisture of his eyes hardened into stone. But still the fearful face, the pleading look, the hands hanging down, the guilty crouch — all of it stayed, exactly as it was.
Perseus came home victorious, his wife beside him, and entered the walls of his fathers' city. There, as the champion and avenger of his wronged grandfather Acrisius, he moved against Proetus — for Proetus had driven his brother out by force of arms and seized the citadel of Acrisius. But neither his weapons nor the stronghold he had so wrongly taken could save him against the grim eyes of the snake-haired monster.
And yet you, Polydectes, lord of little Seriphus — the young man's courage, proven through so many trials, had not softened you, nor had his sufferings; you nursed instead a hard and unbending hatred, and there was no end to your unjust spite. You even belittled his fame, and claimed that the killing of Medusa was a lie. "Then we will give you proof of the truth," said Perseus. "Shield your eyes, the rest of you!" — and with Medusa's face he turned the king's own face to bloodless stone.
All this while, Minerva had stayed at the side of her brother — Perseus, the child of the golden shower. Now, wrapped in a hollow cloud, she left Seriphus behind, with Cythnus and Gyarus on her right, and, taking the shortest way across the sea, made for Thebes and Helicon, the mountain of the virgin Muses. Reaching it, she came to rest and spoke to the learned sisters: "The fame of a new spring has come to my ears — one that the hard hoof of the winged horse, sprung from Medusa's blood, struck open. That is what brings me here. I wanted to see the marvel for myself; I saw the horse himself born out of his mother's blood." Urania answered, "Whatever brings you to our home, goddess, you are most welcome to us. The story is true: Pegasus is indeed the maker of this spring" — and she led Minerva to the sacred waters.
Minerva marveled a long while at the pool struck open by a hoof, then looked round at the groves of the ancient woods, the caves, the grass picked out with countless flowers, and called the daughters of Mnemosyne happy alike in their art and in their home. One of the sisters answered her: "O Minerva — you who would have come to be one of our number, had your valor not carried you off to greater deeds — you speak truly, and you are right to praise both our art and our home; ours is a happy lot, if only we can be safe. But nothing is off-limits to wickedness any longer, and so everything frightens our virgin minds. Cruel Pyreneus still turns before our eyes, and I have not yet fully come back to myself. That savage man had seized the lands of Daulis and Phocis with his Thracian troops and ruled them by force. We were on our way to the temple on Parnassus; he saw us going, and, pretending to honor our godhead with a false face — for he knew who we were — he said, 'Daughters of Mnemosyne, stop here. Do not scruple, I beg you, to shelter under my roof from the foul weather and the rain' — for it was raining — 'the gods above have often gone into humbler cottages than mine.' Moved by his words and by the weather, we agreed and stepped into the front rooms of his house. The rain soon stopped; the North Wind mastered the South, and the dark clouds fled from a clearing sky. We meant to leave — but Pyreneus shut up his house and made ready to force us, and we escaped him only by taking wing. He stood high on his rooftop as though to follow: 'Whatever way is open to you,' he said, 'will be open to me as well' — and in his madness he flung himself from the top of the tower, and fell on his face, and shattered the bones of his skull, and dying beat the ground he had stained with his wicked blood."
So the Muse was speaking — when wings whirred through the air, and a voice, as if in greeting, came down from the high branches. Jupiter's daughter looked up, searching for where such clear-speaking tongues could be sounding from, and thought a human being had spoken. But it was birds — nine magpies, perched on the boughs, bewailing their fate, mimicking every sound. As the goddess wondered at them, Urania began: "These too, not long ago, were beaten in a contest and added to the flock of birds. Pierus, rich in the fields of Pella, was their father; their mother was Euippe of Paeonia, who called nine times on Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, and nine times gave birth. Puffed up with their own number, the foolish sisters came marching through all the cities of Thessaly and Achaea, and challenged us to a contest with words like these: 'Stop cheating the ignorant crowd with your empty sweetness. If you have any faith in yourselves, contend with us, you goddesses of Thespiae — we will not be beaten in voice or in skill, and there are just as many of us. Either yield, if you lose, the spring that Medusa's steed opened and the fountain of Aganippe as well, or we will give up the plains of Emathia as far as the snowy Paeonians. Let the nymphs be the judges between us.' It was shameful to compete with them — but to back down seemed more shameful still. The chosen nymphs swore their oath by the rivers and took their seats on thrones of living rock. Then, without even drawing lots, the one who had first proposed the contest began to sing: the wars of the gods, and false glory heaped on the Giants, and the great gods belittled. She sang how Typhoeus, sent up from the deepest realm of the earth, had struck terror into the dwellers in heaven, so that they all turned their backs and fled, until the land of Egypt took them in, exhausted, and the Nile that splits into seven mouths. She told how earth-born Typhoeus came even there, and the gods above hid themselves in borrowed shapes. 'Jupiter,' she said, 'became the leader of a flock — which is why, even now, Libyan Ammon is shown with curling horns. Apollo hid as a crow, Bacchus, Semele's son, as a goat, Diana, Apollo's sister, as a cat, Juno, the daughter of Saturn, as a snow-white cow, Venus as a fish, and Mercury under the wings of an ibis.'
"So far she had raised her singing voice to the lyre. Then it was our turn — we of Aonia were called on to sing. But perhaps you have no leisure for this, no time to spare your ears to our songs?" "Have no doubt of it — tell me your song, in its proper order," said Minerva, and she settled down in the light shade of the grove. So the Muse went on. The whole conduct of the contest, she told Minerva, had been handed to one of their number; and that one rose now, and bound up her loose-flowing hair with ivy.
Calliope brushed her thumb across the plaintive strings to try them, and to the struck chords she wedded this song:
Ceres was the first to break the clod with the curved plough, the first to give the earth its grain and its gentle nourishment, the first to give it laws. Everything we have is the gift of Ceres. She must be my song — if only I could sing verses worthy of the goddess. And she is surely worthy of a song.
The vast three-cornered island of Sicily lies heaped upon the limbs of a giant, and with its enormous weight it pins down Typhoeus, who once dared to hope for a home in heaven. He strains, of course, and struggles again and again to rise — but his right hand is trapped beneath Pelorus, the cape toward Italy, his left beneath you, Pachynus, and his legs are crushed under Lilybaeum, while Etna weighs down his head. Beneath it Typhoeus lies on his back, flinging up sand and vomiting flame from his savage mouth. Often he wrestles to shove off the weight of the land, to roll the towns and the great mountains from his body — and then the earth shudders, and even the king of the silent dead trembles, afraid the ground will split, gape wide in a great chasm, and let the daylight come pouring in to terrify the cowering ghosts.
Fearing that ruin, the lord of the dead had come up out of his shadowy kingdom, and, riding in his chariot behind black horses, he went carefully round the foundations of the Sicilian land. When he had searched enough to be sure that no part of the ground was giving way, he laid his fear aside. But Venus, sitting on her own mountain of Eryx, saw him wandering there, and, drawing her winged son into her arms, she said: "My son — my weapon, my hands, my power — take up those arrows of yours that conquer everyone, Cupid, and drive your swift shafts into the heart of the god who drew the last lot when the three brothers split the world three ways, the one who got the realm of the dead. You master the gods above, and Jupiter himself; you master the beaten powers of the sea and the very one who rules them. Why should the underworld hold out? Why not spread your empire — and your mother's — over it too? A third of the whole world is at stake. And yet even in heaven, such is the patience I've been reduced to, we are treated with contempt, and the power of Love dwindles along with mine. Don't you see how Pallas has slipped away from me, and Diana with her hunting-javelin? And Ceres' daughter, too, will stay a virgin, if we let her — for she is reaching after the very same hopes. So, for the sake of the realm we would share, if that means anything to you, join the goddess to her uncle." So Venus spoke. He opened his quiver and, as his mother wished, set apart out of his thousand arrows a single one — but the sharpest of them all, the surest, the most obedient to the bow. He braced the pliant horn against his knee, bent it, and struck Pluto through the heart with the barbed reed.
Not far from the walls of Henna lies a deep lake named Pergus. Not even the Cayster, gliding along, hears more swan-song on its waters than that lake does. A wood crowns the pool, ringing it on every side, and with its leaves, like an awning, it keeps off the blows of the sun. The branches give coolness, the moist ground gives flowers of Tyrian purple. It is spring there without end. In this grove Proserpine was playing, gathering violets or white lilies, filling her baskets and the fold of her dress with a girl's eager delight and racing her friends to pick the most — when, almost in the same instant, Pluto saw her, loved her, and swept her away. So headlong was his love. Terrified, the goddess cried out in her grief for her mother and her friends — but for her mother most of all. And when she tore her dress from its upper hem, the flowers she had gathered spilled from the loosened folds. So untouched was she in her childish years that even this loss — the fallen flowers — stirred a sorrow in her. Her captor drove his chariot on, urging his horses forward, calling each by its name, shaking along their necks and manes the reins stained a dark iron-rust. He was carried past deep lakes, past the pools of the Palici that reek of sulphur and boil up where the earth has burst open, and past the place where the Bacchiadae — a people sprung from Corinth of the two seas — built their city walls between two harbors of unequal size.
Between Cyane and Pisaean Arethusa there is a stretch of water that draws together, penned in by two narrow horns of land. Here lived Cyane, most famous of the Sicilian nymphs, and the pool took its name from her. From the middle of the water she rose, bare to the waist, and knew the god. "You'll go no further!" she cried. "You cannot be Ceres' son-in-law against her will. The girl should have been asked for, not stolen. And if I may compare small things with great, Anapis loved me too — but he wooed me, and I married him won over, not frightened into it, the way this girl has been." She spoke, and, spreading her arms wide to either side, she blocked his way. The son of Saturn held his rage no longer. Spurring on his terrible horses, he swung his royal sceptre with his strong arm and drove it down into the very bottom of the pool. The struck earth opened a road down to Tartarus and took the plunging chariot into the mouth of the crater.
But Cyane, grieving for the goddess snatched away and for the slighted rights of her own spring, carried an inconsolable wound in her silent heart, and wasted entirely into tears. Into the very waters whose great presiding spirit she had just now been, she melted away. You could see her limbs soften, her bones grow supple and bend, her nails lose their hardness. The slenderest parts of her went first, dissolving — her sea-blue hair, her fingers, her legs and feet, for it is a short passage from such thin limbs into cold water. After these her shoulders, her back, her sides, her breast faded away into thin trickling streams. At the last, in place of living blood, clear water crept into her failing veins, and nothing was left that a hand could hold.
Meanwhile the frightened mother searched for her daughter through every land, over every sea — and searched in vain. Dawn, coming up with dew still in her hair, never found her resting; neither did the evening star. In both hands she kindled pine torches at the fires of Etna and carried them, never resting, through the frost-bound dark. And again, when the kindly day had dimmed the stars, she went on hunting for her daughter from the setting of the sun to its rising. Worn out with her labor, she grew thirsty, and no spring had washed her lips, when by chance she caught sight of a little cottage roofed with thatch, and knocked at its small door. Out came an old woman, who saw the goddess, and when Ceres begged for water gave her a sweet drink she had covered over with toasted barley-meal. While Ceres drank what she was given, a bold, hard-faced boy stood in front of her, laughed, and called her greedy. The goddess took offense, and with the part of the drink not yet swallowed she flung the barley-and-water full in his face as he spoke. His skin drank in the spots. Where a moment before he had arms, now he had legs; a tail was added to his altered body. He shrank into a tiny shape — so there would be no great power in him to do harm — smaller in measure than a little lizard. The old woman stared and wept and reached to touch the strange thing, but it fled from her and made for a hiding place. Its name suits its shame: the star-spotted newt, its body flecked all over with scattered spots.
Through what lands and what waters the goddess wandered would take too long to tell. The whole world ran out before her searching did. She came back to Sicily, and, as she ranged over everything on her way, she reached Cyane too. Had Cyane not been changed, she would have told her everything; but though she longed to speak, she had no mouth and no tongue, nothing left to speak with. Still, she gave a plain sign: on the surface of her sacred pool, where it happened to have fallen, she showed Proserpine's sash, which the mother knew at once. The moment she recognized it — as if only now she had learned her daughter was stolen — the goddess tore at her disheveled hair and struck her breast again and again with her open hands. She still did not know where the girl was, but she cursed every land, called them ungrateful and unworthy of her gift of grain — and Sicily above the rest, where she had found the traces of her loss. So there, with a savage hand, she smashed the ploughs that turn the clods; in the same fury she struck down the farmers and their working oxen and gave them to death; she ordered the fields to betray the seed entrusted to them, and she blighted the seed itself. Sicily's famous fertility, its fame spread across the wide world, now lay exposed as a lie: the crops died in the first green blade; now too much sun scorched them, now too much rain. Stars and winds did their damage; greedy birds picked up the scattered seed; darnel and thistle and stubborn couch-grass wore down the wheat.
Then Arethusa lifted her head from her Elean waters and swept the dripping hair back from her forehead to her ears, and said: "You who have sought your daughter over the whole world, mother of the harvest — put an end to your measureless toil, and don't turn your anger and violence on a land that has been faithful to you. The land has done nothing to deserve it; it opened against its will to the theft. And it isn't for a homeland of my own that I plead — I came here a stranger. Pisa is my homeland; my origin is from Elis. I live in Sicily as a foreigner, yet this land is dearer to me than any soil on earth. This is Arethusa's home now, these my household gods, this my dwelling — spare it, gentlest goddess. Why I was moved from my own place and carried across so great a sea to Ortygia, there will come a fitting hour to tell, when you are eased of your grief and your face is happier. The earth gives me passage: carried down through its deepest caverns, I lift my head here and look on stars I had long done without. And so, while I glide underground through the Stygian stream, there with my own eyes I saw your Proserpine. She was sad, and her face not yet free of fear — but a queen even so, the greatest lady of that shadowed world, the mighty consort of the tyrant of the dead."
The mother stood stunned at these words, as if turned to stone, and for a long while she seemed a woman thunderstruck. When at last the crushing grief gave way to a fury as crushing as itself, she rode out in her chariot into the upper air. There, her whole face clouded, her hair streaming loose, she stood before Jupiter, a figure of grievance, and said: "I have come to you as a suppliant, Jupiter, for my own blood and for yours. If a mother counts for nothing, let the daughter move the father. Don't, I beg you, let your care for her be worth less because I was the one who bore her. Look — my daughter, sought so long, is found at last — if you call it finding to lose her more surely, or if you call it finding merely to learn where she is. That she was carried off, I will bear — so long as he gives her back. A daughter of yours does not deserve a robber for a husband — if she is no longer a daughter of mine."
Jupiter answered: "She is a pledge and a charge we share, this daughter, yours and mine alike. But if we care to give things their true names, this was no wrong that was done — it was love. And that son-in-law will be no shame to us, if only you are willing, goddess. Even if all else were lacking, how much it is to be Jupiter's brother! And in fact nothing else is lacking, and he yields to me in nothing but the draw of the lots. But if your desire for the parting is so strong, Proserpine shall return to heaven — on one fixed condition: that there she has touched no food with her lips. For so it has been settled by the compact of the Fates."
He had spoken; and Ceres was resolved to bring her daughter up. But the Fates would not allow it, for the girl had already broken her fast. While she wandered, all innocence, in the tended gardens, she had picked a red pomegranate from a bending branch, and, taking seven seeds from its pale rind, she had crushed them in her mouth. And of everyone there, one alone had seen it — Ascalaphus, whom the nymph Orphne, no obscure figure among the nymphs of Avernus, is said once to have borne to her own Acheron beneath the black woods. He saw, and by his cruel tattling he robbed her of her return. The queen of Erebus groaned, and turned that unholy witness into a bird: she sprinkled his head with water from Phlegethon and changed it into a beak, into feathers, into great round eyes. Lost to his own shape, he is wrapped in tawny wings; his head swells, his nails curve back into long talons, and he can barely stir the feathers that have sprung along his sluggish arms. He becomes a loathsome bird, the herald of grief to come — the slothful screech-owl, a dire omen to mortals.
He, at least, might be thought to have earned his punishment by his tattling tongue. But you, daughters of Achelous — where did your feathers come from, and your birds' feet, when you still wear the faces of girls? Was it because, learned Sirens, you were among her companions when Proserpine gathered the flowers of spring? After you had searched the whole world for her in vain, you longed — so that the seas too might feel your care for her — to be able to hover above the waves on the oars of wings; and you found the gods willing. And you saw your limbs turn golden with sudden feathers. But so that your singing, born to charm the ear, and so rich a gift of voice, should not lose the use of a tongue, your girls' faces stayed, and your human voice remained.
Then Jupiter, standing between his brother and his grieving sister, split the rolling year into equal halves. Now the goddess, a divinity shared between two kingdoms, spends as many months with her mother as with her husband. At once both her mood and her face are transformed: the brow that only lately could look sorrowful even to Pluto is now bright with gladness. She is like the sun, hidden before behind watery clouds, that now, the clouds beaten back, breaks free of them.
Kindly Ceres, at ease now that her daughter was safely won back, asked Arethusa what had caused her flight — why she was a sacred spring. The waters fell silent, and their goddess raised her head from the deep fountain, dried her green hair with her hand, and told the old story of the river Alpheus and his love.
"I was one of the nymphs of Achaia," she said. "None of them ranged the woodland glades more eagerly than I, none set her hunting-nets more keenly. And though I never sought a name for beauty, though I was all strength and muscle, still I had the name of a beauty. My much-praised looks gave me no pleasure. The gift of body that other girls delight in — I, like some country lass, blushed at it, and thought it a fault to be pleasing.
"I was coming back tired — I remember it — from the Stymphalian wood. The day was hot, and my exertion had doubled the great heat. I came upon a stream running without an eddy, without a murmur, clear all the way to the bottom, so that you could count every pebble deep down, and would hardly believe the water moved at all. Hoary willows and poplars, fed by the water, spread of their own accord a shade along the sloping banks. I went to it, and first dipped the soles of my feet, then went in to the knee. Not content with that, I loosened my belt, laid my soft clothes on a bending willow, and plunged in naked.
"While I struck the water and drew it toward me, gliding in a thousand ways and flinging out my arms, I felt some strange murmur beneath the middle of the stream, and in terror I scrambled onto the edge of the nearer bank. 'Where are you rushing, Arethusa?' Alpheus called from his waters. 'Where are you rushing?' he said to me again, in a hoarse voice. Just as I was, I fled without my clothes — the other bank had them. So much the more he pressed on and burned; and because I was naked, I seemed to him the readier prey. So I ran, and so that wild thing bore down on me — as doves flee the hawk on trembling wings, as the hawk drives the trembling doves. On past Orchomenus and Psophis and Cyllene, past the folds of Maenalus and cold Erymanthus and Elis I held to my running, and he was no faster than I. But, no match for him in strength, I could not keep the pace for long, while he could endure the long chase. Still I ran — over the plains, over the tree-covered mountains, over rocks and crags, and where there was no path at all. The sun was at my back. I saw a long shadow stretch out before my feet — unless it was only my fear that saw it. But surely the sound of his feet terrified me, and the great gusts of his breath were stirring the ribbons in my hair.
"Worn out with the effort of flight, I cried, 'Help me, Diana — I am being caught! Help your armor-bearer, the one you so often let carry your bow and the arrows sealed in your quiver!' The goddess was moved. She took one of the thick clouds and threw it over me. The river searched all round me where I lay hidden in the mist, and, not knowing, hunted about the hollow cloud, and twice, without realizing, circled the very spot where the goddess had hidden me, and twice he called, 'Arethusa! Arethusa!' What were my feelings then, in my misery? What the lamb feels, hearing the wolves growling around the high sheepfold — or the hare that, crouched in a thornbush, sees the enemy jaws of the hounds and dares not stir a muscle. Still he would not leave; for he could find no tracks of my feet leading away. He kept his watch on the cloud and the spot. A cold sweat seized my besieged limbs, and dark-blue drops ran down my whole body. Wherever I moved my foot, a pool welled up; dew dripped from my hair; and faster than I now tell it to you, I was changed into flowing water. But the river knew the waters he loved, and, laying aside the man's shape he had put on, he turned back into his own streams to mingle with me. Diana split the earth, and I, plunging into its blind caverns, was carried to Ortygia — which, dear to me because it bears the surname of my own goddess, was the first to bring me up into the light of day."
So far Arethusa. Then the goddess of the harvest yoked a pair of serpents to her chariot, curbed their mouths with the bridle, and was borne through the air midway between heaven and earth. She guided her light chariot to the city of Athens, to Triptolemus, and gave him seed, bidding him scatter it, part on untilled ground, part on ground brought back to cultivation after long years. By now the young man had been carried high over Europe and the land of Asia, and he turned toward the coasts of Scythia. There Lyncus was king, and Triptolemus entered the king's house. Asked where he came from, and the reason for his journey, and his name and his country, he said: "My homeland is famous Athens; my name is Triptolemus. I came neither by ship over the waves nor on foot over the land: the open sky gave me a road. I bring the gifts of Ceres, which, scattered over the broad fields, will yield you fruitful harvests and gentle nourishment." The barbarian was jealous. So that he himself might be the author of so great a gift, he took his guest in, and when the young man was heavy with sleep he came at him with a sword. As he tried to pierce that breast, Ceres turned him into a lynx, and once more sent the young Athenian on to drive her sacred team through the air.
The greatest of us had by now finished her learned song, and the nymphs with one voice declared that the goddesses who dwell on Helicon had won. Then, when the losers began flinging insults, I said: "Since it is not enough for you to have earned punishment by challenging us, and you add abuse to the offense, and our patience has its limits — we will go on to punishment, and follow wherever our anger calls us." The daughters of Pierus laughed and scorned my threatening words. But as they tried to speak and to raise their insolent hands with a great outcry, they saw feathers sprouting from their nails, saw their arms clothing over with plumage. Each watched the other's face harden into a stiff beak, and new birds join the woods. And when they tried to beat their breasts in grief, the motion of their arms lifted them, and they hung poised in the air — magpies, the scolds of the woodland. Even now, as birds, their old gift for talk remains: a raucous, grating chatter, and a monstrous, unquenchable craving to speak.
Minerva had been listening to all of this — the songs of the Muses, the daughters of Aonia — and she approved both their artistry and the justice of their anger. Then she said to herself: "To praise is not enough. Let me be praised as well. Let no one scorn my own divine power and go unpunished." And she turned her mind to the fate of Arachne, a girl of Lydia who, she had heard, refused to grant that anyone outdid her in the craft of working wool.
Arachne owed her fame to no famous birthplace and no famous family — only to her skill. Her father, Idmon of Colophon, dyed thirsty wool in Phocaean purple. Her mother was dead, but she too had been a woman of the common people, no higher than her husband. Even so, in the towns of Lydia the girl had won a name worth remembering for her art, though she came from a humble house and lived in humble Hypaepa. To watch her marvelous work, the nymphs would often leave the vineyards of their own Mount Tmolus, and the nymphs of the river Pactolus would leave their golden streams. And it was not only the finished cloth that gave them pleasure — it was watching her make it, there was such grace in the working. Whether she was winding the raw wool into its first soft balls, or teasing the fleece out again and again between her fingers, drawing it long and fine as mist; whether she was twirling the smooth round spindle with a light thumb, or picking out a picture with her needle — you could tell she had been taught by Minerva herself.
But Arachne denied it. Offended at the very idea of so grand a teacher, she said, "Let her compete with me. There is nothing I would refuse to suffer, if she beats me."
So Minerva took the shape of an old woman. She set false gray hair at her temples, and leaned her weak old limbs on a staff, and began: "Not everything old age brings is to be run from. Long years bring experience. Don't scorn my advice. By all means, seek the greatest fame among mortals for your weaving — but yield to the goddess, you reckless girl, and beg pardon for your words in a humble voice. She will forgive you, if you ask."
Arachne shot her a black look and let the threads drop. She could barely keep her hand still; her fury showed in her face; and she snapped back at the disguised goddess: "You come here out of your wits, worn down by too many years, and living too long is your curse. Save this lecture for a daughter-in-law, if you have one, or a daughter of your own. I know enough for myself, all by myself. Don't imagine your advice has done any good — my mind is unchanged. Why doesn't she come herself? Why does she dodge this contest?"
"She has come," said the goddess — and she threw off the old woman's shape and showed herself as Minerva. The nymphs bowed down, and the Phrygian women bowed; only the girl was not afraid. And yet she blushed. A sudden flush marked her face against her will, then faded again — the way the sky turns crimson when Aurora first stirs at daybreak, and a short while later goes white as the sun climbs. Arachne held to her purpose. Hungry for a foolish victory, she rushed headlong toward her own ruin. And the daughter of Jupiter did not refuse. She gave no more warnings; she put the contest off no longer.
Without delay they took their places, one here, one there, and stretched two webs on the looms with a fine warp. The warp was bound to the beam, a rod kept the threads apart, and the pointed shuttles drove the weft down the middle; the fingers worked it through, and once it was drawn between the warp-threads the notched teeth of the beater struck it home. Both women hurried, their robes hitched up to their breasts, moving their skilled arms, their eagerness making the labor no labor at all. Into the cloth went purple that had drunk the dye of the Tyrian vat, and shade after shade so close you could hardly tell them apart — the way a rainbow, when sunlight strikes the falling rain, arches its long curve across the whole sky: a thousand different colors shine in it, yet the eye that looks cannot catch the moment one becomes the next, so alike is each stripe to the stripe beside it, and only the ends stand far apart. Into the cloth, too, went threads of supple gold, and each loom told an old, old story.
Minerva wove the hill of Mars in Athens, the citadel of Cecrops, and the ancient quarrel over what the land should be named. Twelve gods of heaven sat on high thrones in solemn majesty, with Jupiter in the middle, each rendered so that his own face gave him away: Jupiter's image was every inch a king. She made the lord of the sea stand and strike the rough rock with his long trident, and out of the wound in the stone a rush of seawater leaped — the pledge by which he laid claim to the city. To herself she gave a shield, a spear with a sharp point, a helmet on her head, and the aegis to guard her breast; and she showed the earth, struck by her own spear, bringing forth a pale-green olive shoot heavy with berries, and the gods marveling at it. Victory closed the scene. But so that her rival might learn from examples what reward to expect for such mad daring, she added four contests in the four corners, each bright in its own colors, each picked out in small figures. One corner held Thracian Rhodope and Haemus — cold mountains now, once human beings, who took to themselves the names of the highest gods. Another corner held the pitiful fate of the Pygmy queen: Juno, having beaten her in a contest, ordered her to become a crane and make war on her own people. She wove Antigone as well, who once dared to match herself against the wife of mighty Jupiter, and whom royal Juno turned into a bird; neither Troy nor her father Laomedon could save her from sprouting feathers and, as a white stork, applauding herself with a clattering beak. The one corner left held Cinyras, robbed of his children: he lay clasping the temple steps that had once been his daughters' living limbs, and seemed to be weeping on the stone. Minerva bordered the outer edges with peaceful olive, and there she stopped, closing her work with her own tree.
Arachne, the girl of Lydia, drew Europa fooled by the shape of a bull — you would have thought the bull real and the sea real. Europa herself seemed to look back at the land she was leaving, to cry out to her companions, to shrink from the touch of the leaping water and pull up her frightened feet. She drew Asterie gripped by the struggling eagle; she drew Leda lying back beneath the swan's wings. She added how Jupiter, hidden in a satyr's shape, filled beautiful Antiope, the daughter of Nycteus, with twin children; how he was Amphitryon when he took Alcmene, the Tirynthian bride; how he cheated Danaë as a shower of gold, and the daughter of Asopus as fire, and Mnemosyne as a shepherd, and Proserpine, Ceres' daughter, as a speckled serpent. She set down Neptune too, changed into a fierce bull for the sake of the Aeolian girl; how, in the likeness of the river Enipeus, he fathered the giant Aloidae; how as a ram he deceived Theophane, the daughter of Bisaltes; how the golden-haired mother of the grain, Ceres, knew him as a stallion, and the snake-haired mother of the winged horse — Medusa — knew him as a bird, and Melantho knew him as a dolphin. To every one of these she gave its true face and the true look of the place. There was Apollo dressed as a countryman, and how he wore the feathers of a hawk one time and a lion's skin another, and how, as a shepherd, he deceived Isse, the daughter of Macareus. There was Bacchus tricking Erigone with false grapes, and Saturn as a horse fathering the double-natured centaur Chiron. The last strip of the web, framed in a fine border, had flowers woven through with twining ivy.
Neither Minerva nor Envy herself could fault that work. The golden-haired warrior-goddess was cut to the heart by her rival's success, and she tore the woven cloth with its record of the crimes of heaven; then, with the boxwood shuttle still in her hand, three and four times she struck the forehead of Arachne, daughter of Idmon. The wretched girl could not bear it. Full of spirit, she knotted a noose around her throat. As she hung there, Minerva took pity and lifted her up, and said: "Live, then — but hang, you insolent thing. And so that you can never rest easy about the future, let this same sentence fall on your whole line, down to your last descendants." Then, turning to go, she sprinkled her with the juices of an herb of Hecate — and at the touch of that grim drug, Arachne's hair fell away, and with it her nose and her ears. Her head shrank to almost nothing; her whole body turned tiny. Slender fingers clung to her sides in place of legs; all the rest was belly — and from it, even so, she still sends out her thread, and works her old craft, a spider at her web.
All Lydia was in an uproar. The story ran through the towns of Phrygia and filled the wide world with talk. Now, Niobe had known Arachne before her own marriage, back when she was a girl still living in Maeonia, under Mount Sipylus. And yet the punishment of her countrywoman did not teach her to yield to the powers of heaven and use humbler words. She had many things to feed her pride, but neither her husband's artistry, nor the high birth of them both, nor the might of a great kingdom pleased her — much as all of these did please her — as much as her own children. Niobe might have been called the happiest of mothers, if only she had not thought herself so.
For Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, who could read the future, had passed through the streets in the grip of a divine urging, crying her prophecy aloud: "Women of Thebes, go, all of you, and offer Latona and Latona's two children your pious incense and your prayers, and bind your hair with laurel. Latona commands it through my mouth." They obeyed. All the women of Thebes crowned their brows with the leaves the goddess had named, and offered incense and words of prayer to the sacred flames.
And then Niobe came, hemmed in by a crowd of attendants, dazzling in Phrygian robes shot through with gold, and beautiful — as beautiful as anger would let her be. Tossing the hair that fell across both shoulders, holding her lovely head high, she stopped and swept her proud eyes around, and said: "What madness is this, to set gods you have only heard of above gods you can see? Why is Latona honored at altars, while my own godhead still goes without its incense? Tantalus was my father — the only man ever allowed to sit at the tables of the gods. My mother is the sister of the Pleiades. Mighty Atlas, who carries the vault of heaven on his neck, is one of my grandfathers; Jupiter is the other — and I boast of him as my father-in-law too. The peoples of Phrygia fear me. The palace of Cadmus obeys me as its mistress. The walls my husband raised with the music of his lyre, and the people within them, are ruled by me and by him. Whichever way I turn my eyes in this house, I see measureless wealth — and add to it a face fit for a goddess. Add my seven daughters and my seven sons, and soon their husbands and their wives! Now ask yourselves what grounds my pride has. And then dare to prefer to me this Latona, daughter of some nobody Titan named Coeus — Latona, whom the whole broad earth once refused even a scrap of ground to give birth on! Your goddess was taken in by neither sky nor land nor sea; she was an outcast from the world, until Delos took pity on her wandering and said, 'You roam a stranger on land; I am a wanderer on the waves' — and gave her an unsteady resting place. There she became the mother of two. That is one seventh of what I have borne. I am fortunate — who could deny it? — and fortunate I shall stay: who could doubt that? My abundance keeps me safe. I am too great for Fortune to harm; strip away much as she may, far more she must leave me. My blessings have long outgrown my fears. Suppose it were possible for some of this crowd of my children to be taken from me: even robbed like that, I could not be brought down to Latona's two — and with her two, how far is she, I ask you, from being childless? Go — that's enough sacrifice for the occasion — and take the laurel from your hair!" They took it off, they left the rites unfinished, and they did the one thing still allowed them: they worshiped the goddess in silent murmurs.
Latona was outraged. On the highest peak of Mount Cynthus she spoke to her twin children: "Look at me — your mother, so proud to have borne you, ready to yield to no goddess but Juno alone, and now they doubt whether I am a goddess at all. For all the ages to come I am shut out from the altars that were mine, unless you help me, my children. And that is not my only grief. The daughter of Tantalus has piled insults on top of outrage; she has dared to rank her own children above the two of you, and she has called me childless — may that word fall back on her own head! — showing, the wicked woman, a tongue as vile as her father's." Latona was about to add her pleas to the report, but Apollo said, "Stop — your complaint only puts off her punishment." Diana said the same, and in a swift glide down the air the two of them came, wrapped in cloud, to the citadel of Cadmus.
Near the walls there was a level plain, wide open, forever pounded by horses, where the crowd of wheels and hard hooves had softened the clods beneath them. There, some of Amphion's seven sons were up on their spirited horses, pressing the saddlecloths red with Tyrian dye, wielding reins heavy with gold. Ismenus, who had once been the first burden his mother carried, was wheeling his mount's course into a perfect ring, reining in its foaming mouth, when he cried, "Oh, I'm hit!" — an arrow fixed square in the middle of his chest. The reins slid from his dying hand, and little by little he tipped sideways over the horse's right shoulder to the ground. The next in line, Sipylus, heard the whir of the quiver through the empty air and gave his horse its head — the way a helmsman who senses a coming storm flees at the sight of a cloud and lets out every stretch of sail on all sides, so that not the lightest breeze can slip past unused. He gave the horse its head; and even so the unerring shaft ran him down, an arrow quivering where it lodged at the top of his neck, the bare iron jutting out through his throat. Bent forward as he was, he rolled over the loosened neck and the mane, and fouled the ground with his hot blood. Luckless Phaedimus, and Tantalus, heir to his grandfather's name, had finished their usual riding and moved on to the young men's sport in the gleaming wrestling-ground, slick with oil. They had already locked breast to breast in a tight grapple when a single arrow, sped from the taut string, pierced them both just as they were joined together. They groaned in the same instant, in the same instant laid their pain-twisted bodies on the ground, in the same instant rolled their eyes one last time and breathed out their lives. Alphenor saw it and, beating his torn breast, ran to lift their cold limbs in his arms — and fell in the act of that loving duty, for Apollo tore through the depths of his chest with the deadly steel. When the arrow was pulled free, part of a lung came out on the barbs, and his blood, and his life with it, poured into the air. But it was no single wound that struck long-haired Damasicthon: he was hit where the leg begins, where the muscled hollow of the knee makes the joint soft; and while his hand was still trying to draw out the killing weapon, a second arrow drove through his throat up to the feathers. His own blood forced it out — it sprang up on its own and shot high, spurting far through the air. Last of them, Ilioneus lifted his arms in a prayer that would do him no good, and cried, "O all you gods together — spare me!" — not knowing that he need not beg them all. The god who bears the bow was moved, but by now the arrow could not be called back. Still, Ilioneus died of the lightest wound of any: the shaft did not strike deep into his heart.
The rumor of the disaster, the grief of the people, the tears of her own household made the mother certain of a ruin so sudden — that the gods above had dared it, that they held such power, left her stunned and enraged. Their father Amphion had already driven a sword through his chest and, dying, put an end to his grief and to the light together. Oh, how different was this Niobe from the Niobe who not long before had driven the people back from Latona's altars and paraded head-high through the middle of the city, the envy of her own — a Niobe now to be pitied even by an enemy! She flung herself on the cold bodies and scattered her last kisses over all her sons, sparing none. From them she raised her bruised arms to the sky and said: "Feed on my grief, cruel Latona — feed! Gorge your breast on my mourning, glut your savage heart with seven deaths. Through seven funerals I am carried to my grave. Gloat, triumph, my conquering enemy! But why conquering? In all my misery I still have more than you have in all your happiness. After so many deaths, I win." She had barely spoken when the string twanged from the bent bow — a sound that terrified everyone but Niobe alone. Disaster had made her bold.
The sisters were standing in black, hair loose, before their brothers' biers. One of them, drawing out the arrow that clung in her flesh, sank fainting toward death, her face falling across a brother's body. Another, trying to comfort her wretched mother, fell suddenly silent, doubled over by a wound no one saw, and did not close her lips until her breath had gone. Another dropped in a hopeless attempt to flee; another died across her sister; another hid herself; and another you could see shaking. Six had been given to death, wounded each in a different way, and only the last was left. Her mother, covering her with her whole body, her whole spread robe, cried out, "Leave me one — the youngest! Out of so many I beg for the smallest, only the one." And even as she begged, the girl she begged for was struck down.
Childless, Niobe sat among her dead sons and dead daughters and her husband, and hardened in her grief. No breeze stirred a hair of hers. The color in her face was bloodless. Her eyes stood fixed in her mournful cheeks; there was nothing living in the image. Her very tongue froze against the roof of her hard mouth; her veins stopped being able to move; her neck could not bend, her arms could not gesture, her feet could not walk. Inside her too, deep in her body, was stone. And still she wept; and, caught up in a whirlwind of mighty wind, she was carried off to her native land. There, fixed on a mountaintop, she melts away — and even now the marble weeps its tears.
Then indeed every man and woman feared the plainly shown anger of the goddess, and one and all worshiped with fresh zeal the great power of the goddess who bore the twins. And, as tends to happen, one recent event set them telling older ones. One of them said: "Once, in the rich farmland of Lycia, some country people insulted the goddess — and not for nothing. It is little known, because the men were nobodies, but it is a marvel all the same. I have seen the spot myself, the pool and the lake made famous by the miracle. My father, too old and worn for the road by then, had sent me to bring back some choice oxen from that country, and gave me a native guide for the journey. As we crossed the pastures together, look — there in the middle of a lake stood an ancient altar, black with the ash of old sacrifices, ringed round with trembling reeds. My guide halted and whispered, frightened, 'Be good to me,' and in the same whisper I said, 'Be good to me' as well. But I asked him whether the altar belonged to the Naiads, or to Faunus, or to some local god, and the man answered:
"'No mountain spirit owns this altar, young man. She claims it for her own whom royal Juno once banished from the world — she whom drifting Delos, when it was still a light island swimming on the sea, barely took in at her pleading. There, leaning against a palm and against Minerva's tree, the olive, Latona gave birth to twins in spite of their stepmother Juno. From there, too, the story goes, the new mother fled from Juno, carrying her two children, two divine powers, against her breast. And by now the goddess had come to the land of Lycia, the country that bred the Chimaera, worn out with her long journey and parched by the blazing summer sun; her hungry babies had drained her milk dry. By chance she caught sight of a lake of good water down in the bottom of a valley. Country folk were there, gathering bushy willow-shoots and rushes and the sedge that loves the marsh. Latona came up, knelt, and pressed the ground to scoop up the cool water and drink — and the crowd of peasants told her no. So she spoke to them: "Why do you keep me from the water? Water belongs to everyone. Nature made neither the sun nor the air nor the flowing stream the property of any one person. I have come to a gift meant for all — and yet I beg it of you humbly. I was not going to wash my body or my weary limbs here; I only want to ease my thirst. My mouth is dry even as I speak; my throat is parched; my voice can barely find a way through. A drink of water will be nectar to me, and I will admit that with it I have received my life from you: in that water you will be giving me life. And let these move you too, who stretch their little arms toward you from my breast" — and by chance the children were stretching out their arms.
"'Who would not have been softened by the goddess's gentle words? Yet they went on refusing her, and added threats on top of it, and abuse, telling her to clear off — and that was not enough. They churned up the lake itself with their hands and feet, and stirred the soft mud from the very bottom, leaping this way and that out of pure spite. Anger drove out her thirst. The daughter of Coeus would beg such worthless men no longer, could no longer stand to speak words beneath a goddess. She lifted her hands to the stars and said, "Then live forever in that pool of yours!" The goddess got her wish. It delights them to be under the water, now to plunge their whole bodies in the deep pool, now to lift their heads, now to swim along the surface; often to perch on the bank, often to leap back into the cold lake. But even now they keep working their filthy tongues in quarrels, and shameless — though they are under the water — under the water they still try to hurl their insults. Their voices are hoarse now, their bloated necks swell up, and their very cursing stretches their gaping mouths wide. Their backs run into their heads; their necks look cut away; their spines are green, and their bellies, the largest part of them, are white — and as brand-new frogs they go leaping about in the muddy pond.'"
When this man — whoever he was — had told how those people of Lycia were destroyed, another remembered the satyr Marsyas, whom Apollo, the son of Latona, had beaten in a contest on the reed pipe Minerva invented, and then had punished. "Why are you tearing me out of myself?" the satyr had screamed. "Oh, I'm sorry — oh, a flute isn't worth this much!" And as he screamed, the skin was stripped clean off the surface of his body, until he was nothing but one open wound. Blood ran everywhere; his exposed sinews lay bare; his veins throbbed and flickered with no skin to cover them. You could have counted the organs quivering inside him, and the bright fibers of his lungs behind his ribs. The country-dwellers wept for him — the fauns, the spirits of the woods, his brother satyrs, and Olympus, dear to him even then, and the nymphs, and everyone who pastured woolly flocks and horned herds on those mountains. The rich earth was soaked, and soaking, drank down the falling tears into her deepest veins; and when she had turned them to water, she sent them out into the open air. From there, running to the sea in a rush between steep banks, it bears the name of Marsyas — the clearest river in all of Phrygia.
From tales like these the people came back at once to the here and now, and mourned Amphion cut off with all his line. The mother was the object of everyone's hatred. Yet even her, they say, one man — her brother Pelops — did mourn; and when he pulled his robe down from his shoulder toward his chest, he laid bare the ivory on his left shoulder. At his birth this shoulder had matched the right one in color and had been flesh. Long ago, the story goes, his father cut him limb from limb, and afterward the gods pieced him back together; when they had found the other parts, only the piece between the throat and the top of the arm was missing. Ivory was set in to stand for the part that could not be found — and by that means Pelops was made whole again.
The neighboring lords gathered, and the nearby cities begged their kings to go and comfort Pelops in his grief — Argos, and Sparta, and Mycenae, the city of his own line; Calydon, not yet hateful to stern Diana; teeming Orchomenos, and Corinth famous for its bronze; fierce Messene, and Patrae, and lowly Cleonae; Pylos of Neleus, and Troezen, not yet named for Pittheus; and all the other towns shut in by the Isthmus between its two seas, and all those that lie outside it and look back toward that same two-sea Isthmus. Who could believe it? Athens alone — you alone, Athens — sent no one. War stood in the way of the kindness. A barbarian army, ferried in across the water, was hammering at her walls with terror. Tereus of Thrace had broken that army with his allied troops and won a shining name by the victory, and so Pandion, king of Athens, bound the man to his own house — a man rich in wealth and men, and, as it happened, tracing his blood back to mighty Mars himself — by giving him his daughter Procne in marriage.
Juno, who watches over weddings, did not come to that one. Neither did Hymen, god of the marriage-song, nor the Graces. It was the Furies who held the torches that night — torches snatched from a funeral pyre. The Furies made up the marriage-bed. And a filthy owl, that bird of ill omen, settled on the roof and brooded there above the bridal chamber. Under that bird Procne and Tereus were wed; under that bird they became parents. Thrace, of course, congratulated them; they themselves gave thanks to the gods; and they declared two days holy — the day the king had taken Pandion's daughter to wife, and the day Itys, their son, was born. So completely does our real fortune hide itself from us.
By now the Sun had drawn the wheeling seasons through five autumns, when Procne, coaxing her husband, said: "If I have earned any love from you, either send me to see my sister, or let my sister come here. Promise my father she'll be back before long — you'll be giving me a gift worth as much as a god's, just to see her face again."
He ordered the ships hauled down to the water, and with sail and oar he came into the harbor of Athens and stepped onto the shores of Piraeus. The moment he could reach his father-in-law, hand was clasped in hand, and — with a black omen hanging over it — the two of them began to talk. Tereus had just begun to explain why he had come, and to lay out his wife's request, and to promise a quick return for the sister if she were allowed to go — when in walked Philomela, richly dressed in costly finery, and richer still in her own beauty; the kind of girl we imagine when we hear of naiads and dryads moving through the deep woods, if only you dressed and adorned them the same way. The sight of the girl set Tereus alight, exactly as if you touched flame to ripe white wheat, or lit dry leaves and grass stored in a barn. Her beauty was worth catching fire for, true enough — but there was also the lust bred in his bones driving him, for the men of his country run naturally to that vice; he blazed with his people's fault and his own.
His first thought was to buy off her attendants and corrupt the loyalty of her nurse; then to work on the girl herself with lavish gifts, to spend his whole kingdom if he had to — or else to seize her outright and hold what he had seized through savage war. There was nothing this unchained hunger would not dare, and his chest could no longer contain the flames shut inside it. Now delay was unbearable to him. He turned back to Procne's request with hungry eagerness, and used it as cover to plead his own desire. Passion made him eloquent, and every time he pushed further than was decent, he claimed it was Procne who wanted it. He even added tears, as if she had asked him for those too. Great gods above — how much blind night the human heart can hold! By the very effort he put into his crime, Tereus was thought to be devoted, and won praise for his wickedness.
And how does this help? Philomela wants the very same thing. Winding her arms fondly around her father's shoulders, she begs to be allowed to go and see her sister — begs it for her own good, and against her own good. Tereus watches her, and even as he watches he takes hold of her in his mind; and when he sees her kisses, and her arms circling her father's neck, he swallows it all down as goad and torch and fuel for his madness. Every time she embraces her father, he wishes he were that father — though even then his heart would have been no less foul. The old man gives in to the pleading of both of them. Philomela is overjoyed; she thanks her father; and the poor girl counts it a triumph for them both — the very thing that will bring both of them to ruin.
Now only a little of the Sun's day's work was left, his horses striking their hooves down the sloping track of the western sky. A royal feast was laid on the tables, and wine in vessels of gold; then they gave their full bodies over to gentle sleep. But the Thracian king, though he had withdrawn for the night, still burned for her. Turning her face over in his mind, her movements, her hands, he imagined what he had not yet seen exactly as he wished it, and fed his own fire, so that his restlessness drove sleep away.
Day came. Pandion clasped the right hand of his departing son-in-law, and with tears springing up he entrusted the girl to his care. "Dear son-in-law," he said, "since a loving reason has forced me to it, and since both my daughters wished it — and you wished it too, Tereus — I give her into your keeping. And I beg you, as a suppliant, by your honor, by the bond that now joins us, by the gods above: guard her with a father's love, and send her back to me as soon as you can, the sweet comfort of my anxious old age — every day she's gone will be long to me. And you too, Philomela, come home as soon as you can, if you love me at all — it's hard enough that your sister lives so far away." So he charged them, and even as he spoke he kissed his daughter, and soft tears fell between his instructions. He asked for the right hands of them both as a pledge of good faith and joined them together, and asked them to carry his greetings, from his own remembering lips, to his absent daughter and grandson. And with a mouth choked full of sobs he could barely get out the last goodbye — and he shuddered at the warnings of his own heart.
The moment Philomela was set aboard the painted ship, and the sea was churned under the oars, and the land shoved away behind them, Tereus cried out, "I've won! What I longed for is sailing away with me!" The barbarian exulted; he could scarcely hold his joy inside; he never once turned his eyes away from her. It was the look of the eagle, Jupiter's own bird, when its hooked talons have dropped a hare into some high nest: the captive has no escape, and the robber sits and watches his prize.
Now the voyage was over. Now they had stepped out of the weary ships onto his own shore — and the king dragged Pandion's daughter into a high building deep in an ancient wood, hidden among old trees, and there he shut her up. She was pale and shaking, terrified of everything, already weeping, already asking where her sister was. And then he confessed the horror in his mind and took her by force — a virgin, and alone — while she screamed again and again, uselessly, for her father, for her sister, and above all for the great gods. She trembled like a frightened lamb that has been torn, bleeding, from the jaws of a gray wolf and still cannot believe it is safe; like a dove with its feathers soaked in its own blood, still shuddering, still afraid of the greedy talons that gripped it.
Soon her mind came back to her. Tearing her loosened hair, beating her arms like a woman in mourning, she flung out her hands and cried: "You barbarian, you and your monstrous deeds! You cruel thing! Did none of it move you — not my father's charge to you, not his loving tears, not care for my sister, not my virginity, not the laws of marriage? You have thrown everything into ruin. I have been made my sister's rival, and you the husband of us both, and Procne now my enemy, who ought to be punished for what you've done! Why not take this life too, you traitor, so that no crime is left for you to commit? I wish you had killed me before your unspeakable act — then I would have gone down to the shades with a spirit clean of any stain. But if the gods above see these things, if the power of the gods is anything at all, if everything has not died along with me — then one day, whenever it comes, you will pay me for this. I will throw shame aside and tell the world what you have done. If I get the chance, I'll go out among the people; if I'm kept locked in these woods, I'll fill the woods with it and move the very rocks to bear witness. The sky will hear this — and any god there is in it!"
Such words roused the savage tyrant's fury — and his fear was no less than his fury; spurred on by both at once, he pulled from its sheath the sword he wore, seized her by the hair, wrenched her arms behind her back, and forced her into bonds. Philomela, seeing the blade, only bared her throat to it: she had begun to hope for death. But as she cried out in her rage, calling and calling her father's name, struggling to keep speaking, he caught her tongue with a pair of pincers and cut it out with his cruel sword. The last root of it still flickered where it had been torn. The tongue itself fell to the ground, trembling, murmuring against the black earth, and just as the tail of a mangled snake goes on writhing, it twitched — and dying, groped toward its mistress's feet. Even after this — I can hardly bring myself to believe it — they say he came back again and again to satisfy his lust on her ruined body.
After deeds like these he had the nerve to return to Procne. Seeing her husband, she asked at once for her sister; but he groaned false groans and told an invented story of her death, and his tears made it convincing. Procne tore from her shoulders the robes bright with their broad bands of gold, dressed herself in black, built an empty tomb, made offerings to a ghost that did not exist, and mourned the death of a sister who was not, after all, dead to be mourned.
The Sun-god had traveled through all twelve signs; a full year had turned. What could Philomela do? A guard blocked any escape; the walls of her prison stood hard and solid stone; her silenced mouth had no way to name the crime. But grief has a vast ingenuity, and cunning comes to those in misery. She set up a loom in the barbarian fashion and, working the threads with skill, wove crimson signs into the white cloth — the whole crime, spelled out. When it was finished she handed it to a single servant and asked her, with gestures, to carry it to her mistress. The servant carried it to Procne, with no idea what she was carrying. The wife of the savage king unrolled the cloth and read her sister's pitiable fate — and (a wonder she could bear it) said nothing. Grief locked her mouth; her searching tongue could not find words fierce enough; and there was no room even for tears. She rushed straight on, past all thought of right and wrong, wholly given over to the picture of revenge taking shape in her mind.
It was the season when the women of Thrace keep the rites of Bacchus that come round every other year. Night is in on the secret; by night Mount Rhodope rings with the clash of shrill bronze. By night the queen went out from her house, decked in the god's gear, carrying the wild weapons of the festival: her head wound with vine-leaves, deerskins hanging from her left side, a light spear resting on her shoulder. Terrifying, Procne swept through the woods with a crowd of her women around her, driven by the furies of her grief — and pretended, Bacchus, that the frenzy was yours. She came at last to the lonely prison in the wood, shrieked and howled the god's cry, "Euhoe!", broke down the gates, seized her sister, dressed her too in the badges of Bacchus, hid her face under ivy-leaves, and, dragging the bewildered girl along, led her inside her own walls.
When Philomela understood she had reached that accursed house, the poor woman shuddered, and the blood drained from her whole face. Procne found a safe place and stripped off the holy trappings, uncovered the shamed face of her wretched sister, and reached to hold her — but Philomela could not lift her eyes to meet her. She felt herself the woman who had stolen her sister's husband. She kept her face turned down to the ground, and when she wanted to swear, to call the gods to witness that the disgrace had been forced on her, she made her hands speak for the voice she no longer had. Procne caught fire. She could not hold her own rage; she cut short her sister's weeping and said: "This is no time for tears — it's a time for the sword, or for anything, if you have anything, that can go further than the sword. I am ready for any crime, sister. I could set the palace ablaze with torches and throw Tereus into the middle of the flames — the schemer, the artist of all this. I could take the steel to his tongue and his eyes and the parts of him that stole your honor. I could drive his guilty soul out of him through a thousand wounds. Something enormous — that much I've decided; what it will be, I don't yet know."
While Procne was still saying this, in came Itys to his mother. The sight of him showed her what she could do. Looking at him with pitiless eyes, she said, "Ah — how like your father you are." She said no more; grimly she began to plan, seething with a silent rage. And yet, when the boy reached her, and greeted his mother, and pulled her neck down with his small arms, and gave her kisses mixed with a child's coaxing — the mother was moved. Her anger broke and stalled; against her will her eyes filled with forced tears. But the moment she felt her resolve sliding under too much tenderness, she turned away from him, back to her sister's face, and looking from one to the other she said: "Why does the one come with his sweet talk while the other sits silent, her tongue torn out? He calls me mother — why can't she call me sister? Look at the kind of man you're married to, daughter of Pandion! You're betraying your blood. To feel tenderness for the wife of Tereus — that is the crime."
No more delay. She dragged Itys off, the way a tigress on the banks of the Ganges drags a hind's nursing fawn through the shadowed forest. And when they reached a far corner of the high house, as the boy stretched out his hands — for now he saw his fate coming — and cried "Mother! Mother!" and reached for her neck, Procne struck him with the sword where the breast joins the side, and never turned her face away. That one wound was enough to kill him; but Philomela opened his throat with the steel as well. And while the limbs still quivered, still held some scrap of life, the two of them tore the body apart. Part of it leaped in bubbling bronze cauldrons; part hissed on the spits; the inmost rooms ran with gore.
To this feast the wife brought Tereus, who knew nothing, and — pretending it was a sacred rite of her country at which one man alone might be present — she sent away his companions and servants. Tereus himself, sitting high on his ancestral throne, ate, and heaped his own flesh and blood into his own belly. So deep was the darkness over his mind that he said, "Send for Itys — bring him here." Procne could not hide her savage joy. Wanting now to be the one to break the news of the ruin she had made, she said, "The one you're asking for — you have him inside you." He looked around, and asked where the boy was; and while he was still asking, still calling the name, Philomela sprang forward, just as she was, her hair spattered with the frenzied slaughter, and hurled the bloody head of Itys into his father's face. Never had she longed more to have a voice, to speak, to put her joy into the words it deserved.
With a huge cry the Thracian flung the table away from him and summoned the snake-haired sisters, the Furies, up from the valley of the Styx. One moment he wanted, if only he could, to tear open his own chest and empty out the horrible meal, the half-digested flesh; the next he wept and called himself the wretched tomb of his own son; the next he was after Pandion's daughters with his drawn sword. You would have thought the two Athenian women were floating on wings — and they were floating on wings. One made for the woods; the other went up under the eaves of houses. Even now the marks of the murder had not left her breast, and the feathers there were still stained with blood. As for Tereus, made swift by his grief and his craving for revenge, he was turned into a bird with a crest of feathers standing up on its head; a huge beak juts out where the long spear used to be — the bird is called the hoopoe, and its face looks armed for war.
This grief sent Pandion down to the shades of the underworld before his time, before the last stretch of a long old age had run out. Erechtheus took up the scepter of the land and the rule of the state — a man you could not easily say was stronger in his justice or in his strong right arm. He had fathered four sons and as many daughters, and two of the daughters were equal in beauty. One of them, Procris, made Cephalus, the son of Aeolus, a happy husband. But Boreas, the North Wind, was cursed by the memory of Tereus and the Thracians, and for a long time the god went without his beloved Orithyia — because he kept asking, choosing to use prayers rather than force. But when his sweet talk got him nowhere, bristling with the rage that is second nature to him, and only too much at home in that wind, he said: "And I deserve it! Why did I put down my own weapons — my violence, my strength, my anger, my threatening temper — and take up prayers, which don't suit me at all? Force is what fits me. By force I drive off the sullen clouds; by force I shake the seas and throw down the knotted oaks and pack the snow hard and lash the earth with hail. When I meet my brother winds up in the open sky — that's my proper field — I wrestle with such effort that the air between us thunders and fires leap out, struck from the hollow clouds. When I go down into the arched hollows of the earth and set my back fiercely against its lowest caverns, I terrify the ghosts and shake the whole world with earthquakes. That is the power I should have used to win my marriage. Erechtheus should never have been begged to be my father-in-law — he should have been made one."
Having said this, or something no less high and stormy, Boreas shook out his wings, and at the beating of them the whole earth was buffeted and the wide sea shivered from end to end. Dragging his dusty cloak over the mountaintops, he swept the ground, and, wrapped in that darkness, the lover folded his tawny wings around the terrified Orithyia. As he flew his fire burned hotter for the stirring of it, and the ravisher did not rein in his airy course until he reached the people and walls of the Ciconians in Thrace. There the Athenian girl became the wife of the cold king, and a mother too, bearing twin sons who had everything of their mother but their father's wings. Yet they say the wings were not born with their bodies. As long as the red-gold beards were still missing from their cheeks, the boys Calais and Zetes went without feathers. But soon, together, feathers began to fringe both their sides in the way of birds, and together their cheeks began to grow golden with down. And so, once the season of boyhood had passed into young manhood, the two of them sailed off with the Minyae — the Argonauts — in the first ship ever built, over an uncharted sea, chasing the fleece that blazed with its shining wool of gold.
And now the Minyans were cutting the sea in their ship built at Pagasae — the Argo. They had visited Phineus, who dragged out a starved old age under an endless night of blindness, and the young sons of the North Wind, Boreas, had chased the maiden-faced birds, the Harpies, away from the poor old man's table. Under their famous captain Jason they had suffered much, and at last they reached the rushing, muddy waters of the river Phasis, in the land of Colchis.
They go before the king, Aeetes, and ask for the fleece that had once been Phryxus's — the Golden Fleece. Aeetes lays down his terms: a dreadful list of mighty labors. And in that same hour the king's daughter, Medea, catches fire. She fought the flame a long time, and when reason could not master the madness, she said: "It's no use, Medea — you fight it and lose. Some god is against me, I don't know which. This is a strange thing — unless what I feel is the thing they call love, or something so like it there's no telling them apart. Why else do my father's terms look too cruel to me? And they are too cruel! Why am I terrified that a man I only just laid eyes on might die? What is the reason for a fear this great? Drive the flames out of your virgin heart, you wretched girl, if you can! If only I could — I'd be saner for it. But a new force drags me against my will. Desire pulls one way, my better judgment another. I see the right course, and I approve of it — and I follow the wrong one.
"Why are you burning for a stranger, you, a princess? Why long for a marriage bed in a world not your own? This land, too, could give you something to love. Whether he lives or dies rests with the gods. Still — let him live! That much I can pray for even without loving him. For what has Jason done wrong? Whose heart, unless it were made of stone, would not be touched by Jason's youth, his birth, his courage? And even if all the rest were missing — whose heart would his face not move? It has certainly moved mine.
"But unless I help him, the bulls will breathe their fire in his face; he'll come up against a crop of enemies sprung from the very ground he sowed; or he'll be flung to the greedy dragon as its living prey. If I let that happen, then I'll admit I was born from a tiger — that I carry iron and rock inside my chest! And why not go further? Why not watch him die, and stain my eyes by looking on? Why not urge the bulls against him, and the savage earth-born men, and the sleepless dragon? The gods forbid it! But these are not things to pray for — they are things to do. So — am I to betray my father's kingdom? To save some stranger by my art, some man I hardly know, so that once I've delivered him he can spread his sails to the wind without me, become another woman's husband, and leave Medea to her punishment? If he could do that — if he could set another woman above me — then let the ingrate die! But no: that is not his face, that is not the nobility in his spirit, not the grace of his body, for me to fear betrayal, fear he'd forget what he owes me. Besides, he'll pledge his faith first, and I'll make the gods stand witness to our bargain. What are you afraid of, when you're this safe? Get ready, then, and put off every delay. Jason will owe you his life forever; he'll join you to himself by the solemn marriage torch, and through all the Greek cities crowds of mothers will hail you as the woman who saved their sons.
"So I'll be carried off by the winds, and leave behind my sister, my brother, my father, my gods, and the soil where I was born? Well — my father is cruel, and my country is barbarous, and my brother is still a baby; my sister's prayers are on my side, and the greatest of the gods lives inside me. I won't be leaving anything great behind. I'll be chasing something great: the glory of having saved the flower of Greece's young men, and knowledge of a better land, and cities whose fame flourishes even here, and the culture and the arts of those places — and the son of Aeson himself, whom I would trade for everything the whole world holds. With him for my husband I'll be called dear to the gods, and I'll touch the stars with the top of my head. Yes — they say there are mountains that crash together in the middle of the sea, and Charybdis, the enemy of ships, who first gulps down the water and then spits it back up, and greedy Scylla, ringed with savage dogs, barking in the Sicilian deep. But so long as I'm holding what I love, cradled against Jason's chest, I'll be carried over the long seas; in his arms I'll dread nothing — or if I fear anything, I'll fear it for my husband alone.
"Marriage, you call it, Medea? You dress your crime in flattering names? No — look hard at how great a wrong you're about to do, and turn away from the guilt while you still can!"
So she spoke, and there before her eyes stood the right, and loyalty, and shame; and Cupid, beaten, was already turning his back to go. She was walking toward the ancient altars of Hecate, the daughter of Perses, hidden away in a shadowy grove deep in the woods. She was strong again now; the fever had been driven off and had ebbed away — when she caught sight of Jason, and the flame she thought was out blazed up again. Her cheeks flushed; her whole face went hot. As a spark, small while it lay buried under the ash heaped over it, feeds on the wind and grows, and, stirred, rises again to its old strength, so her love — sinking now, now so faint you'd have thought it was dying — flared up at the sight of the young man before her. And by chance Jason was more beautiful that day than usual: you could forgive her for loving him. She stares, and holds her gaze fixed on his face as if she were seeing it now for the first time, and in her madness she thinks she is not looking at any mortal face, and she cannot turn away from him. But when the stranger began to speak, and took her right hand, and asked her help in a low voice, and promised her marriage, she said, with the tears spilling over: "I see what I'm doing. It won't be ignorance of the truth that undoes me — it will be love. My gift will save you. Once saved, keep your promise."
He swears by the rites of the triple goddess Hecate, and by whatever divine power lived in that grove, and by the all-seeing Sun, the father of his future father-in-law, and by his own coming ordeals, and by dangers so great. She believed him, and then and there he took from her the enchanted herbs, learned how to use them, and went back to his lodging glad.
The next dawn had chased off the glittering stars. The people gathered on the field sacred to Mars and took their places on the slopes; in the middle of the crowd sat the king himself, in purple, marked out by his ivory scepter. Look — the bronze-footed bulls breathe out Vulcan's fire from their adamant nostrils, and the grass they graze catches and burns. Like furnaces roaring when they're full of flame, or like lime dissolving in an earthen kiln, hissing into fire when sprinkled with running water — so their chests, rolling the shut-in flames around inside them, and their scorched throats, sound and roar. And yet Jason walks straight up to meet them. As he came on, they turned their terrible faces toward him, and their iron-tipped horns, and stamped the dusty ground with cloven hooves, and filled the place with smoking bellows. The Minyans froze with dread. Jason goes in and feels nothing of the breathed-out fire — such is the power of the drugs — and with a bold right hand he strokes their hanging dewlaps, forces them under the yoke, and makes them drag the heavy weight of the plow and cut into a field that had never known iron. The Colchians are amazed; the Minyans swell it with their cheering and put fresh heart in him.
Then he takes the dragon's teeth from a bronze helmet and scatters them over the plowed field. The earth, steeped beforehand in a strong poison, softens the seed, and the sown teeth grow and turn into new bodies. Just as an infant takes on human shape inside its mother's womb, and is formed there part by part, and does not come out into the open air until it's ready, so, when the shape of a man had been finished inside the belly of the pregnant earth, it rose up out of the teeming field — and, stranger still, at the very moment it was born it clashed the weapons that came into being with it. When the Greeks saw these earth-men getting ready to hurl their sharp-pointed spears at the head of the Thessalian youth, their faces fell and their courage sank with fear. Medea herself was frightened too, the one who had made him safe. When she saw the young man, one against so many enemies, she went pale, and all at once, chilled and bloodless, she sat down; and, in case the herbs she'd already given him should prove too weak, she chants a second charm to help him and calls up her secret arts. Jason flings a heavy stone into the middle of his foes, and turns the war away from himself and onto them. The earth-born brothers die of each other's wounds, and fall in a battle among their own. The Greeks cheer, and hold their champion, and cling to him in hungry embraces. You too, barbarian girl, longed to throw your arms around him. Shame stood in the way of that; and yet you would have embraced him — but regard for your good name held you back from it. What you were free to do, you did: in silence you rejoice, in your heart, and you give thanks to your charms, and to the gods who taught them to you.
Now one thing still remained: to lull to sleep with herbs the ever-wakeful dragon, that guardian of the golden tree, marked out by his crest and his three tongues and terrible with his hooked fangs. After Jason had sprinkled him with the juice of Lethe, the herb of forgetting, and had said three times the words that bring calm sleep — words that could still a storm-tossed sea and stop rushing rivers — sleep came at last upon those eyes that had never known it, and the hero, Aeson's son, took the gold. Proud of his prize, and carrying off the woman who had won it for him as a second prize, he reached the harbor of Iolcos in victory, with his wife.
The mothers and gray-haired fathers of Thessaly bring offerings for the safe return of their sons; frankincense heaped on the flames melts away, and the promised victim, its horns gilded, drops dead. But Aeson is not among those giving thanks. He is close to death now, worn out with the years of old age. So Jason says: "My wife — to whom I confess I owe my life — you have given me everything, and the sum of all you've done for me is past believing; and yet, if your spells can do this too — and what can spells not do? — take away some of my years and add the years you take to my father's."
He could not hold back his tears. She was moved by the loyalty of his plea, and the thought of her own father, Aeetes, abandoned, so unlike Jason, rose in her mind — though she confessed nothing of the sort. "What a wicked thing," she said, "has slipped out of your loving mouth! Do I seem to you the kind who could sign over a stretch of your own life to someone else? Hecate would never allow it, and what you ask is not right. But I'll try, Jason, to grant you a gift greater than the one you ask. By my art I'll try to win back my father-in-law's long years — not by spending yours — if only the triple goddess helps me and is here to nod her blessing on so vast a venture."
Three nights were still missing before the horns of the moon would meet and close into a full circle. When the moon shone at her fullest and looked down on the earth with her disk complete, Medea went out of the house, her robe unbelted and flowing, her feet bare, her hair loose over her shoulders, and she took her wandering steps, alone and unescorted, through the still hush of midnight. Deep quiet had loosened the limbs of men and birds and beasts. No sound came from the hedgerows; the leaves hung motionless and silent; the damp air was silent; only the stars glimmered. To them she stretched out her arms, turned herself around three times, three times splashed her hair with water drawn from the stream, and three times loosed a long wailing cry from her mouth. Then, bending her knee to the hard ground, she said:
"Night, most faithful keeper of my mysteries; and you golden Stars, who with the Moon follow the fires of day; and you, three-headed Hecate, who come knowing my purpose and come to help my chants and the arts of magic; and you, Earth, who furnish the sorcerers their potent herbs; you breezes and winds and mountains, you rivers and lakes, and all you gods of the groves and all you gods of the night — be here with me. By your power, when I've willed it, the rivers have run backward to their springs while their banks stared in wonder; with my chant I still the tossing sea and rouse the calm one; I drive the clouds off and I bring them on; I banish the winds and I summon them; I split serpents' throats with my words and my spells; I move living rock, and oaks torn up with their own earth, and whole forests; I order mountains to tremble and the ground to groan and the dead to come out of their tombs. You too, Moon, I draw down, though the Temesan bronze clangs to ease your pangs during the eclipse; my chant even makes pale the chariot of my grandfather, the Sun, and my poisons make Dawn go pale. It was you who blunted the bulls' flames for me, who pressed the yoke on necks that had never borne it; you who set the dragon's brood at furious war among themselves, and lulled to sleep the never-sleeping guardian and, cheating that keeper, sent the gold off to the Greek cities. Now I need juices by which old age, made new again, can come back into bloom and gather up its first young years. And you will give them — for the stars have not flashed for nothing, and not for nothing has the chariot drawn by the necks of winged dragons arrived."
The chariot was there, let down out of the sky. As soon as she had climbed in and stroked the bridled necks of the dragons and shaken the light reins in her hands, she was snatched up on high. She looked down on Thessalian Tempe far below and steered her serpents to particular districts. She scanned the herbs that Ossa bore, and lofty Pelion, and Othrys, and Pindus, and Olympus taller than Pindus, and some she pulled up by the root and some she cut down with the curve of a bronze sickle. Many herbs on the banks of the river Apidanus pleased her too, and many on the Amphrysus; nor did you escape her, Enipeus. The Peneus contributed something, and the Spercheus, and the reedy shores of the lake Boebe. By Euboean Anthedon she plucked a herb of long life, not yet made famous by the transformation of Glaucus, whose body had not yet been changed.
And now the ninth day and the ninth night had watched her sweep over all those fields in her chariot on the wings of her dragons, when she came home. The dragons had been touched by nothing but the smell of those plants — and yet they cast off the skin of their old age, sloughing away the years. When she arrived she stopped short of the threshold and the doors, roofed by the open sky alone, and shrank from any touch of a man. She built two altars out of turf, one on the right for Hecate, one on the left for Youth. When she had wreathed these with vervain and wild boughs, she dug two trenches in the earth nearby, performed the rite, plunged the knife into the throat of a black ram, and drenched the wide trenches with its blood. Then, pouring goblets of clear wine over it, and pouring bronze goblets of warm milk, she spoke her words and called on the gods of the earth and begged the king of the shades and his stolen bride, Proserpine, not to be in any hurry to rob the old man's limbs of their life.
When she had won them over with prayers and long muttered chants, she ordered Aeson's worn-out body carried out to the altars and, lulling it into a deep sleep with her spell, stretched it out on a bed of herbs, looking like a corpse. She tells Jason to go far off, and the attendants to go far off, and warns them to keep their unhallowed eyes away from her mysteries. They scatter at her command. With her hair streaming loose, Medea circles the blazing altars like a worshipper of Bacchus in a frenzy; she dips torches split into many splinters into the trench black with blood, and lights them, so dipped, at the two altars. Three times she cleanses the old man with flame, three times with water, three times with sulfur.
Meanwhile the powerful brew is boiling in the bronze cauldron set over the fire, seething and going white with a swelling froth. In it she cooks roots cut in the valleys of Thessaly, and seeds and flowers and dark bitter juices; she throws in stones fetched from the farthest East, and sands washed by the ebbing tide of Ocean; she adds hoarfrost gathered by moonlight through the night, and the ill-omened wings of a screech-owl, flesh and all, and the guts of a werewolf, that shifting creature that changes its animal shape into a man's; nor was the thin scaly slough of the Cinyphian water-snake missing, nor the liver of a long-lived stag; and on top of these she puts the egg and the head of a crow that had lived through nine generations. When with these and a thousand other nameless things the barbarian woman had made ready her design, greater than any mortal could attempt, she stirred it all up with a long-dry branch of peaceable olive and mixed the bottom with the top. And look — the old branch, turned in the hot bronze, first goes green, then in no long time puts on leaves, and all at once hangs heavy with ripe olives. And wherever the fire flung the froth out of the hollow cauldron, and the hot drops fell to the earth, the ground blooms, and flowers and soft grass spring up.
The moment she saw this, Medea drew her sword and opened the old man's throat; and, letting the old blood run out, she filled the veins with her juices. When Aeson had drunk them in, taking them by the mouth or through the wound, his beard and his hair lost their whiteness and snatched back a black color; his gauntness fled, driven off; his pallor and his squalor were gone; his hollow wrinkles were filled out with new flesh laid under them; his limbs grew full and strong. Aeson marvels at himself and remembers that this was how he had been forty years ago.
From high above, Bacchus had watched the wonders of so great a marvel, and, learning from it that youth could be given back to his own nurses, he asked this gift from the woman of Colchis.
And, so that her arts should never rest, Medea pretends a false quarrel with her husband and flees as a suppliant to the doorstep of Pelias — the man who had wronged Jason's house. Since Pelias himself is weighed down with old age, his daughters take her in; and in a short time the cunning Colchian binds them to herself with the show of a pretended friendship. As she counts, among the greatest of her good deeds, the story that Aeson's decrepitude has been stripped away — dwelling on that part of the tale — the daughters of Pelias are seized by a hope that their own father might be made young again by the same art. This they beg of her, and press her to name her price, whatever it might be. For a little while she says nothing, and seems to hesitate, and keeps their eager minds in suspense with a put-on solemnity.
Then, when she has promised them, she says: "So that you can trust this skill of mine all the more — the ram that leads your flock, the oldest of your sheep, will be turned into a lamb by my brew." At once a fleecy ram, worn out by countless years, is dragged up, his horns curling around his hollow temples. When she had slit his withered throat with the Thessalian knife, barely staining the blade with his thin blood, the sorceress plunged the animal's limbs, and her potent juices with them, into the hollow bronze. The body's limbs shrink; he loses his horns, and with the horns his years; and out of the middle of the kettle a tender bleating is heard. Without any pause, while they are still marveling at the bleating, a lamb leaps out, frisks off in play, and goes looking for a teat of milk.
The daughters of Pelias are stunned. Now that her promises have proved good, they press her all the harder. Three times the Sun had unyoked his horses as they sank into the Spanish sea, and on the fourth night the radiant stars were glittering, when the treacherous daughter of Aeetes set plain water over a leaping fire, and herbs with no power in them at all. And now a sleep like death held the king, his slack body loosened, and held his guards along with their king — a sleep her chants and the power of her enchanting tongue had brought on. At her order the king's daughters had crossed the threshold with the Colchian and gathered around the bed. "Why do you hang back now, useless girls?" she says. "Draw your swords and drain the old blood out, so I can fill his empty veins with young blood! Your father's life and his years are in your hands. If you have any love in you, if the hopes you nurse are not idle, do your duty to your father: drive out old age with your weapons, and thrust in the steel and let the rotten blood out!" At this urging, the more loving each of them is, the more she is the first to be unnatural — and so as not to be wicked, she does a wicked thing. Yet not one of them can bear to watch her own blow; they turn their eyes away, and with their faces turned aside they deal blind wounds with cruel right hands. Streaming with blood, the old man still lifts himself on his elbow and, half-torn-apart, tries to rise from the bed, and there in the middle of all those swords he stretches out his pale arms and says, "What are you doing, my daughters? What arms you against your father's life?" Their spirits failed them, and their hands. He was about to say more when the Colchian took away his throat along with his words, and sank him, so mangled, into the boiling water.
And if she had not risen into the air with her winged dragons, she would not have escaped punishment. She flees aloft, over shadowy Pelion, the home of Chiron, son of Philyra, and over Othrys, and over the places famous for the fate of old Cerambus — who, lifted into the air on wings by the help of the nymphs, when the heavy earth was buried under the flooding sea, escaped un-drowned the waters of Deucalion's flood. On her left she leaves Aeolian Pitane behind, and the stone shape of the long dragon, and the grove of Ida, where Bacchus hid a stolen bullock under the false form of a stag; and the place where the father of Corythus lies buried under a little sand; and the fields that Maera terrified with her strange new barking; and the city of Eurypylus, where the mothers of Cos wore horns at the time Hercules's company was leaving; and Rhodes, dear to Apollo; and the Telchines of Ialysus, whose eyes ruined everything by the very act of looking, until Jupiter, loathing them, thrust them down under his brother Neptune's waves. She passed over the Cartheian walls of ancient Cea, where her father Alcidamas was one day to marvel that a gentle dove could be born from his daughter's body.
Then she looks down on the lakes of Hyrie and Cycnean Tempe, made famous by a swan that came into being there all at once. For there Phyllius, at a boy's command, had handed over birds he had tamed, and a wild lion tamed as well; ordered to master a bull too, he had mastered it; but, angry that his love had been scorned so many times, he refused the bull as the boy's last prize when he begged for it. The other, indignant, said, "You'll wish you'd given it!" and leaped from a high rock. Everyone thought he had fallen — but he had turned into a swan and hung in the air on snow-white wings. His mother, Hyrie, not knowing he was saved, melted away in her weeping and became a pool that bears her own name. Next to these lies Pleuron, where Combe, daughter of Ophis, escaped her sons' wounds on trembling wings. Then she sees the fields of Calaurea, sacred to Latona, which watched their king and his wife turned into birds. On her right is Cyllene, where Menephron was one day to lie with his own mother, in the way of savage beasts. Far off she looks back at the river-god Cephisus, mourning the fate of his grandson, whom Apollo changed into a bloated seal, and at the house of Eumelus, grieving for his son now in the air.
At last, on her serpents' wings, she reached Ephyre by the spring of Pirene — the city we call Corinth. Here the people of the earliest age told how, long ago, mortal bodies sprang from mushrooms grown out of the rain. But after the new bride burned up with the Colchian's poisons, and both seas watched the king's palace go up in flames, Medea's unnatural sword was steeped in the blood of her own sons; and the mother, having taken this monstrous revenge, fled from Jason's reach. Carried off from there by her Titan-born dragons, she came into the city of Pallas, Athens — the city that had seen the just Phene, and old Periphas, flying together as birds, and Polypemon's granddaughter borne up on new-made wings.
Aegeus takes her in — a man to be condemned for this one deed — and, as if giving her shelter were not enough, he even binds her to himself by the bond of marriage. And now Theseus had arrived, his son, unknown to his father, who by his own courage had brought peace to the Isthmus between its two seas. To destroy him, Medea mixes the wolfsbane, the aconite, that she had once brought with her from the shores of Scythia. This, they say, sprang from the teeth of Echidna's dog, Cerberus. There is a dark blind cave with a shadowy mouth, and a path sloping down, along which the hero of Tiryns, Hercules, dragged Cerberus out — the dog fighting him, twisting his eyes sideways from the daylight and the shining rays, straining against the chains of adamant. Roused to a rabid fury, Cerberus filled the air with barking from all three throats at once and flecked the green fields with white foam. This foam, they think, thickened, and, feeding on the rich and fertile soil, took on the power to do harm; and because it grows, full of life, on the hard rock, the country people call it aconite. This poison, by his wife's contriving, Aegeus himself held out to his own son, as if to an enemy. Theseus had taken the offered cup in his unsuspecting right hand when his father caught sight, on the ivory hilt of the sword, of the tokens of his own family — and struck the guilty drink away from the young man's lips. Medea got away from death by raising up a mist with her spells.
But the father, though he rejoices that his son is safe, is stunned all the same that so great a crime could have come within a hair's breadth of being done. He warms the altars with fires and loads the gods with gifts, and the axes strike the muscled necks of oxen with garlands wound around their horns. No more celebrated day, they say, ever dawned on the people of Erechtheus, the Athenians, than that one. The elders keep the feast, and the common folk, and, with wine sharpening their wit, they sing: "You, greatest Theseus — Marathon marveled at you for the blood of the Cretan bull; and that the farmer plows Cromyon safe from the boar is your gift and your work. Through you the land of Epidaurus saw the club-swinging son of Vulcan go down; the banks of the Cephisus saw the pitiless Procrustes fall; Eleusis, sacred to Ceres, saw the death of Cercyon. Sinis fell too, who put his great strength to cruel use — who could bend down whole tree trunks and used to drag pines from on high to the ground, to fling men's bodies scattered far and wide. The road to Alcathoë, the town of the Lelegians, lies open and safe now that Sciron has been laid low; and the land refuses a resting place, the water refuses a resting place, to the robber's scattered bones — which, tossed about a long time, age is said at last to have hardened into rocks. To those rocks the name of Sciron still clings. If we tried to count your titles and your years, your deeds would outnumber your years. For you, bravest of men, we take the public vows; in your honor we drink these draughts of wine." The palace rings with the people's cheers and the prayers of their applause, and there is not one sorrowing place in the whole city.
And yet — so surely is no one's pleasure ever pure, and some worry always breaks in on our joys — Aegeus did not get to enjoy his son's return untroubled. Minos is preparing for war. Though he is strong in soldiers, strong in ships, he is strongest of all in a father's anger, and he means to avenge his son Androgeus's murder with rightful arms. Before the war, though, he gathers friendly forces and ranges over the sea in the swift fleet that makes his strength. To his side he joins Anaphe and the realm of Astypalaea — Anaphe by a treaty, Astypalaea's realm by war; and then lowly Myconos, and the chalky fields of Cimolus, and Syros flowering with thyme, and level Seriphos, and Paros rich in marble, and Siphnos, which the wicked Arne betrayed. She had demanded gold in her greed, and once she took it she was changed into a bird that even now loves gold — the jackdaw, black of foot and cloaked in black feathers.
But Oliaros and Didyme, Tenos and Andros, and Gyaros, and Peparethos rich in its smooth olives — none of these would lend their ships to the king of Knossos. So Minos bore away to the left, to Oenopia, the kingdom of Aeacus. The old name of the island was Oenopia, but Aeacus himself had renamed it Aegina, after his mother. The crowd came pouring out, eager to lay eyes on a man of such fame, and Telamon went to meet him, and Peleus, younger than Telamon, and Phocus, the third of the sons. Aeacus came too, slow with the weight of his years, and asked what had brought the king. Reminded of his own father's grief, the ruler of a hundred cities sighed, and gave his answer:
"I ask you to help the arms I have taken up for my son's sake — to join a war fought out of love. It is comfort for a grave that I am asking."
"You ask in vain," said the grandson of Asopus, "and you ask my city for what it cannot do. No land is bound more closely to Athens than this one. That is the treaty between us."
Minos went away heavy-hearted. "Your treaty will cost you dear," he said — but he thought it wiser to threaten war than to wage it, and to spend his strength here too soon.
The fleet from Knossos could still be seen from the walls of Oenopia when an Athenian ship came on under full sail and glided into the friendly harbor. It carried Cephalus, and with him the request of his homeland. The young sons of Aeacus knew Cephalus at once, though they had not seen him in years, and gave him their hands and led him into their father's house. Still handsome, still keeping some trace of the beauty that had been his, the hero came in holding a branch of his country's olive; being the elder, he had on either side of him two men younger than himself, Clytus and Butes, the sons of Pallas. After the first greetings had passed, Cephalus delivered the plea of the people of Athens: he asked for help, he recalled the old treaties and alliances of their fathers, and he added that Minos was reaching for the mastery of all Greece. When his eloquence had done its work for the cause he carried, Aeacus, his left hand resting on the bright pommel of his scepter, said:
"Do not ask Athens for our help — take it. Count every resource this island holds as your own, and let all the forces of my kingdom march with you. Strength I have to spare — soldiers enough to defend myself and to face the enemy. Thank the gods, this is a fortunate hour, and one that leaves me no excuse to refuse."
"May it stay so," said Cephalus, "and may your city grow with fine citizens. Truly, as I came just now, it gladdened me to see so many young men come to meet me, all handsome and all of an age. And yet I look for many I once saw here, when this city welcomed me long ago."
Aeacus groaned, and answered in a mournful voice.
A happier fortune had followed a grievous beginning — how he wished he could tell them the one without the other. But he would tell it now, plainly, in no set order, so as not to keep them with a long preamble. Those they were asking after, remembering them so well, were bones and ashes now; and how great a part of all he had were they, who had perished!
A dreadful plague had fallen on his people, sent by the anger of unjust Juno, who hated a land named for her rival. As long as it seemed a natural sickness, and the true, poisonous cause of so great a ruin stayed hidden, they fought it with the art of medicine; but the destruction overran all help, and help lay beaten. In the beginning the sky pressed down on the earth with a thick fog and shut a sluggish heat inside its clouds. And while the Moon four times filled her horns to a full circle and four times, thinning, unspun it again, the hot south winds blew with their deadly breath. It is known for a fact that the sickness reached even the springs and the pools; that thousands upon thousands of serpents crawled across the untilled fields and fouled the rivers with their venom. The strength of the sudden disease first showed itself in the dying of dogs and birds and sheep and cattle and the wild beasts. The luckless ploughman stares to see his strong oxen drop at their work and lie down in the middle of the furrow. The wool-bearing flocks bleat weakly; their wool falls off of itself, and their bodies waste away. The horse, once fiery, once famous on the racecourse, forgets his old honors and his victories and stands groaning at the manger, doomed to die a slow, inglorious death. The boar forgets to be angry, the hind no longer trusts her speed, the bears no longer charge the strong herds. A dull weakness holds everything. In the woods, in the fields, along the roads lie foul carcasses, and the air is spoiled with the stench of them.
And here is a strange thing: the dogs would not touch them, nor the greedy birds, nor the gray wolves. The bodies rotted where they fell, and by their reek did their harm, spreading the contagion far and wide.
Then, with heavier ruin, the plague reached the wretched farmers, and took its throne inside the walls of the great city. First the vitals are scorched; a flush of the skin and a labored breath are the sign of the hidden flame. The tongue swells, rough with fever; the parched mouth hangs open, and the sick gulp at the heavy air. They can bear no bed, no covering; they lay their burning chests on the bare ground — and the body is not cooled by the earth, but the earth grows hot from the body. No one can hold the sickness in check. The cruel plague breaks out upon the very healers, and their arts turn against their owners. The nearer a man is, and the more faithfully he tends the sick, the sooner he takes his own share of death. And once the hope of getting well is gone, and they see the only end of the illness in death, they give themselves up to their whims, and there is no care for what might help — for nothing helps. Everywhere, all shame thrown aside, they cling to fountains and rivers and deep wells, and the thirst is not put out until the life is. Many, too heavy to rise, die in the very water — and still another drinks it. So sick are these wretched people of their hated beds that they spring up, or, if their strength will not let them stand, roll their bodies onto the ground; and every man flees his own house, for each one's home seems deadly to him, and since the cause is hidden, the known place gets the blame. You might see them half dead, wandering the roads as long as they could stand; others weeping and sprawled on the earth, rolling their weary eyes in one last movement. They reach their limbs up toward the stars of the overhanging sky, and here and there, wherever death has caught them, breathe out their lives.
What were his feelings then? What should they have been — to hate his own life and long to be gone with his people? Wherever he turned his eyes, there lay the crowd strewn on the ground, like rotten apples falling from a shaken branch, like acorns from a storm-tossed oak. Across from him stood a high temple, raised on its long flight of steps: the temple of Jupiter. Who did not burn incense at those altars, and burn it for nothing? How often, while a husband spoke words of prayer for his wife, or a father for his son, they died at the unmoved altars, the incense still unburned in their hands! How often the bulls, led to the temple while the priest was pronouncing the vows and pouring pure wine between their horns, fell before the stroke could come! When Aeacus himself was sacrificing to Jupiter for himself, his country, and his three sons, the victim let out a dreadful lowing and dropped all at once, with no blow struck, staining the knife thrust into it with its thin blood. The diseased entrails had lost every true mark and every warning of the gods; the sickness struck inward, to the very organs. He had seen the corpses flung down before the sacred doors, before the very altars — as if to make death more hateful to the gods. Some ended their lives with a noose, driving off the fear of death by death, calling on the fate that was already coming. The dead were carried out with no funeral rites, in the old way — for the city gates could not hold the crowd of processions. Either they lay unburied on the ground, or they were laid on the high pyres without the customary honors. By now there was no more reverence: men fought over the pyres and burned their own dead on fires meant for others. There was no one left to weep; unmourned, the souls of sons and fathers, of young men and old, drifted away — and there was no room for the graves, and no trees enough for the fires.
Stunned by so great a whirlwind of misery, he cried out: "O Jupiter! If the stories do not lie, if you truly came into the arms of Aegina, the daughter of Asopus, and if you are not ashamed, great Father, to be my father — then either give me back my people, or lay me too in the tomb." Jupiter gave his sign, with lightning and a favorable roll of thunder. "I take it," he said, "and I pray these are happy tokens of your will. The omen you give me, I hold as a pledge."
By chance, close by, there stood an oak sacred to Jupiter, grown from Dodona's own seed, with wide-spreading but thin-set boughs. There they saw a long column of ants, the harvesters of grain, carrying their heavy loads in their little mouths and keeping to their track along the wrinkled bark. Marveling at their number, he prayed: "Most gracious Father, give me citizens as many as these, and fill my empty walls again." The tall oak trembled and made a sound in its branches, though no wind stirred them. His limbs shuddered with fear, his hair stood on end — yet he kissed the ground and the oak, and would not confess that he hoped; and hope he did, cherishing his wishes in his heart.
Night came on, and sleep took hold of his body, worn out with worry. Before his eyes the same oak seemed to stand, bearing the same boughs and the same creatures on its boughs, quivering with the same motion, and scattering its grain-gathering troop over the fields below; and these, all at once, seemed to grow, to look bigger and bigger, to lift themselves from the earth and stand upright on their own, and to shed their thinness and their many feet and their black color, and to take on human form in their limbs.
Then sleep left him. Awake, he scorned the vision and complained that there was no help from the gods above. But inside the palace there was a great murmur, and he seemed to hear the voices of men — a sound he had grown unused to. While he was supposing that this too was part of his dream, Telamon rushed in, threw open the door, and said: "Father, come out — you will see more than you dared hope or believe!" Out he went, and there, one after another, he saw and knew the very men he had seemed to see in his sleep. They came forward and hailed him as their king. He paid his vows to Jupiter, and shared out the city and the fields left empty of their old tillers among this new-made people; and he called them Myrmidons, and did not rob the name of the mark of its origin. Their bodies Cephalus had seen. The character they had before, they keep still: a thrifty race, patient in toil, holding tight to what they win and laying by what they hold. These, matched to Cephalus in years and courage, would follow him to the war — as soon as the east wind that had carried him so kindly here (for it was the east wind that had brought him) should shift into the south.
With such talk and much else they filled out the long day. The last of the light was given to the feast, the night to sleep. The golden Sun had raised his beams, but the east wind still blew and held the sails from returning. The sons of Pallas came to Cephalus, who was the elder; and Cephalus, with the sons of Pallas beside him, came to the king — but a deep sleep still held the monarch, and it was Phocus, the son of Aeacus, who received them at the threshold, for Telamon and his brother were levying men for the war. Phocus led the Athenians into an inner room, a handsome chamber, and sat down there with them. As they talked he noticed that Cephalus, grandson of Aeolus, held in his hand a javelin of some unknown wood, its point of gold.
After a few words of idle conversation, he said: "I love the woods and the hunting of wild game; and yet I have been wondering some while now from what tree the shaft of that javelin was cut. If it were ash, it would be tawny; if cornel, it would have knots. Where it comes from I cannot tell — but my eyes have never looked on a lovelier throwing-spear." One of the Athenian brothers answered: "You will admire its use even more than its beauty. Whatever it is aimed at, it strikes; chance does not steer it once it is thrown, and it flies back bloodied, with no one to fetch it." At that the son of Nereus's line asked everything — why it was given, and from where, and who had made him a gift of such worth. What he could tell, Cephalus told; but of the price he had paid for it he was ashamed to speak, and stayed silent. Then, touched with grief for the wife he had lost, he began, with the tears starting from his eyes:
"Son of a goddess, this weapon — who could believe it? — makes me weep, and will do for a long time, if the Fates grant me a long life. It was the ruin of me and my dear wife. Would that I had never had this gift!"
Procris — if by chance the name of Orithyia has more likely reached your ears — was the sister of Orithyia, the girl who was carried off; and if you cared to set the face and the character of the two side by side, Procris was the worthier to be seized. Her father Erechtheus joined her to me; love joined her to me. I was called happy — and happy I was. The gods did not think it should last so; or perhaps, even now, I would be happy still.
The second month was passing since the marriage rites, when the saffron-robed Dawn, driving off the dark, saw me one morning from the top of ever-blooming Hymettus as I was spreading nets for the antlered deer, and carried me off against my will. Let me tell the truth, by the goddess's leave: though she is lovely with her rosy face, though she holds the borders of light and the borders of night, though she is fed on the waters of nectar — still I loved Procris. Procris was in my heart, Procris always on my lips. I kept pleading the sacred bond of marriage, our new-made union, the fresh vows of the bed I had left. The goddess grew angry: "Stop your complaining, you ingrate — keep your Procris. But if my mind sees true, you will wish you never had." And in her anger she sent me back.
On the way home, turning the goddess's words over in my mind, I began to be afraid that my wife had not kept the marriage faith. Her beauty and her youth told me to fear the worst; her character forbade me to believe it. Yet I had been away — and besides, the very one I was coming home from was proof that such a thing could happen — and we who are in love fear everything. So I resolved to search out the very thing that would wound me: to make trial of her chaste faith with gifts. Dawn favored this dread of mine, and altered my shape — so I seemed to feel. Unrecognizable now, I came to Athens, the city of Pallas, and went into my own house. The house itself was blameless: it gave every sign of chastity, and grieved for the master who had been carried off. Only by a thousand tricks did I at last win my way to the daughter of Erechtheus. When I saw her, I was stunned, and nearly gave up the trial of her faith I had planned. It was all I could do not to tell her the truth, all I could do not to give her the kisses I owed her. She was sorrowful — and yet no one could be lovelier than she was in her sorrow — pining with longing for the husband torn from her. Only think, Phocus, how great her beauty must have been, that even grief so became her!
Why should I tell how often her chaste ways threw back my attempts? How often she said, "I am kept for one man only; wherever he is, for him I keep my joys"? For any man in his right mind, what greater proof of faith could there be? I was not content. I fought on to wound myself, promising vast sums for a single night, piling reward on reward until at last I forced her to waver. Then I cried out, in my wretched triumph: "Look — a sham lover, and it is your own husband! I am your witness, you faithless woman: you are caught." She said nothing. Only, overwhelmed with silent shame, she fled that house of treachery and its wicked husband; and in her hatred of me she came to loathe the whole race of men, and wandered the mountains, given over to the pursuits of Diana.
Then, left alone, a fiercer fire reached my bones. I begged forgiveness, confessed my fault, owned that I too might have fallen the same way if gifts so great had been offered me. When I had confessed it — her wounded honor first avenged — she came back to me, and we passed sweet years in harmony. And she gave me besides, as if in giving herself she had given too small a thing, a dog for a present: her own Diana, when she handed it to her, had said, "It will outrun them all." She gave me a javelin too — this one you see in my hand.
You ask what became of the first gift, the dog? Then hear a marvel — the strangeness of it will astonish you. The son of Laius had solved the riddle that no wit before him had understood, and the dark prophetess had flung herself down, forgetting her own riddles. But kindly Themis, of course, does not leave such things unavenged: at once another scourge was loosed on Aonian Thebes, and many country folk fed a savage beast with the ruin of their cattle and of themselves. We of the neighborhood came and ringed the broad fields with our nets. With a light leap the creature cleared them and bounded over the highest of the toils we had set. The dogs were slipped from their leashes, but it fled them as they gave chase and made sport of the pack, no slower than a bird. With one loud voice they all called for my Laelaps — Tempest, that was the name of my wife's gift. He had long been fighting to be free of the leash, straining it against his neck. He was scarcely well let go before we could no longer tell where he was: the warm dust held the prints of his feet, but he himself was snatched from our eyes. No spear flies faster, nor pellets whirled from a twisted sling, nor the light arrow from a Cretan bow. A hilltop rose in the middle, looking down on the plains below. I climbed it and watched that strange chase, in which the beast one moment seemed caught, the next to slip out from under the very bite. Crafty, it would not run straight and clear away, but tricked the mouth that pursued it and wheeled in circles, so its enemy could get no full charge at it. The dog hung close, matched it stride for stride, and — for all the world like a dog with its prey in its teeth — closed on nothing, and snapped again and again at the empty air. I was turning to my javelin for help; while my right hand was balancing it and I was working my fingers into the throwing-loop, I glanced away — and when I looked back to the same spot, there in the middle of the plain, incredibly, I saw two marble shapes: you would swear the one was fleeing, the other barking in pursuit. Some god, surely — if any god was watching them — willed that neither should be beaten in that contest of speed."
He said this much, and fell silent. "But what is the fault in the javelin itself?" said Phocus. And Cephalus told him the javelin's offense:
"Let my joys be the first part of my sorrow, Phocus; those I will tell first. It gladdens me even to remember that blessed time, son of Aeacus, when through the first years of our marriage I was happy in my wife, and she was happy in her husband. A shared devotion, a wedded love, held us both. She would not have set the bed of Jupiter above my love, nor was there any woman who could have taken me — not if Venus herself had come. Equal flames burned in the breasts of us both.
When the Sun was just striking the mountaintops with his early rays, I used to go, with a young man's eagerness, hunting in the woods. I took no servants with me, no horses, no keen-nosed hounds, no knotted nets: I was safe with my javelin. And when my hand had had its fill of the slaughter of wild game, I would seek out the cool and the shade, and the breeze that came breathing from the cold valleys. That gentle breeze I looked for in the heat of the day; for that breeze I waited — it was my rest after my labor. 'Come, breeze,' I would sing, for I remember it well, 'come, most welcome, and enter my breast; be willing, as you always are, to ease the heat that burns me.' Perhaps I added — my fate was drawing me on — still more endearments; perhaps I used to say, 'You are my great delight; you refresh me and cherish me; you make me love the woods and the lonely places, and my mouth is forever reaching for your breath.'
Someone — I do not know who — gave a credulous ear to these double-meaning words, and took the name of the breeze I called on so often to be the name of a nymph: he believed I was in love with some nymph named Aura. And, rash informer of a crime that never was, he went straight to Procris and whispered to her what he had heard. Love is a credulous thing. Struck down by sudden grief, she fainted, so I am told; and recovering after a long while, she called herself wretched, born to a cruel fate, and grieved over my faithfulness. Stirred up by a groundless charge, she dreads a thing that is nothing, fears a name without a body, and in her misery mourns as though over a real rival. Yet often she doubts, and in her wretchedness hopes she is deceived, and refuses to believe the tale, and will not condemn her husband's guilt unless she sees it with her own eyes.
The next morning's light had driven off the night. I went out and made for the woods; and, victorious among the fields, I said, 'Come, breeze, and ease my pain.' And suddenly, in the middle of my words, I thought I heard some sort of groan; but still I said, 'Come, most welcome one.' When the falling leaves made a soft rustle again, I took it for a wild beast and threw my flying weapon. It was Procris. Clutching the wound in the middle of her breast, she cried, 'Ah, wretched me!' When I knew the voice of my faithful wife, headlong and out of my mind I ran toward it. I found her dying, her scattered garments fouled with blood, drawing her own gift — wretched that I am! — out of the wound. In my arms, gentler than my own, I lifted the body dearer to me than my own; I tore the clothing from my breast and bound her cruel wound, and tried to stanch the blood, and begged her not to leave me guilty of her death. She, her strength gone, already dying, forced herself to speak these few words:
'By the bond of our marriage, by the gods above and my own gods, by whatever good I have done you, and by the love that even now, as I die, is the cause of my death — I beg you, do not let Aura take my place in our marriage bed.' She spoke; and only then did I understand — and tell her — the mistake in the name. But what use was the telling? She sinks; her little strength flies out with her blood. And as long as she can look at anything, she looks at me, and breathes out her unhappy life against my face — yet she seems to die at peace, with a more contented look."
In tears, the hero told them this, and they wept to hear it. And now Aeacus came in, with his two sons and his newly levied soldiers; and Cephalus received them, well armed and brave.
Now the Morning Star unveiled the bright day and drove off the hours of night; the east wind dropped, and the moist clouds rose. A gentle south wind gave the sons of Aeacus and Cephalus their passage home, and, carried on it prosperously, they reached the harbor they were bound for sooner than they had hoped.
Meanwhile Minos was laying waste the coast of the Lelegians, trying out the strength of his arms against the city of Alcathoüs, ruled by Nisus — Nisus, among whose honored gray hairs a single lock, bright with purple, grew from the middle of his crown, and on it hung the safety of his great kingdom.
The horns of the rising moon were coming round for the sixth time, and still the fortune of the war hung in the balance, and long did Victory hover between the two on wavering wings. There was a royal tower set against the city's singing walls, on which — so the story goes — the son of Latona once laid his golden lyre; the sound of it sank into the stone. Often, in time of peace, the daughter of Nisus used to climb up there and strike the ringing stones with a little pebble. In wartime, too, she often watched from that tower the struggles of hard warfare; and by now, as the siege dragged on, she knew the names of the chieftains, their weapons and horses, their dress and their Cretan quivers. Above all she had learned the face of the leader, the son of Europa — learned it better than mere knowing needed.
In her eyes, whether Minos had shut his head in a plumed and crested helmet, he was beautiful in the helmet; or whether he had taken up his gold-gleaming shield, taking up the shield became him. When he drew back his arm and hurled the whipping javelin, the girl praised the skill that went with the strength; when he laid an arrow on the wide bow and bent it, she would swear that Apollo stood just so when he took up his arrows. But when he bared his face by lifting off the bronze, and, robed in purple, pressed the back of a white horse gay with embroidered trappings, and reined in its foaming mouth — then the daughter of Nisus was hardly her own mistress, hardly in her right mind. Happy, she called the javelin he touched; happy the reins he pressed with his hand. Her whole impulse was to carry her maiden steps through the enemy ranks, if only she could; her impulse was to fling her body from the top of the towers into the Cretan camp, or to open the bronze-bound gates to the enemy — or anything else that Minos might want. And as she sat gazing at the white tents of the Cretan king, she said:
"I do not know whether to be glad or sorry that this grievous war is fought. I grieve that Minos is the enemy of the woman who loves him; but if there had been no war, he would never have been known to me! And yet — he could lay down the war and take me as a hostage: me for his companion, me as the pledge of peace. If she who bore you, most beautiful of kings, was such as you are yourself, then with reason a god burned for her. Oh, three times happy would I be, if I could rise on wings through the air and light on the camp of the Cretan king, and, confessing myself and my love, ask him at what price he would be bought — only let him not ask for my father's citadel! For let the marriage I long for perish, rather than that I win it by treason! — and yet, the mercy of a gentle conqueror has often made it a blessing to many to be beaten. He wages a just war, surely, for his murdered son, and he is strong both in his cause and in the arms that guard his cause. We shall be beaten, I think; and if that is to be this city's end, why should his own warfare open these walls to him, and not my love? Better for him to win without slaughter and delay and the spending of his own blood. At least I need not fear, Minos, that someone may wound your breast without knowing you — for who is so hard-hearted that he would dare, unless in ignorance, to aim a cruel spear at you? The plan pleases me, and I am resolved: to hand over my country as my dowry and put an end to the war. But to be willing is not enough! A guard watches the gates, and my father keeps the keys. Him alone, in my misery, do I dread; he alone stands in the way of my desire. Would the gods might make me fatherless! But surely everyone is a god to themselves: Fortune has no patience with idle prayers. Another woman, fired by a passion this great, would long since have taken joy in destroying whatever blocked her love. And why should any woman be braver than I am? I would dare to go through fire and swords — and yet here there is no need of fire or swords; I need only my father's lock of hair. That purple lock is more precious to me than gold: it will make me happy, will make me mistress of my own wish."
As she said such things, night came on — the greatest nurse of cares — and with the darkness her boldness grew. The first sleep had come, when sleep takes hold of hearts worn out with the day's worries. Silently she entered her father's chamber and — the horror of it! — the daughter robbed the father of his fatal lock. Having won her unspeakable prize, she carried the plunder out through the very midst of the enemy — so great was her confidence in the service she had done — and came to the king; whom, as he stood aghast, she thus addressed:
"Love urged the crime. I am Scylla, the royal daughter of Nisus, and I hand over to you the fortunes of my country and my own. I ask no reward but you. Take this purple lock as the pledge of my love — and believe that I am handing you not a lock of hair, but my father's life." And in her guilty hand she held out the gift. Minos shrank back from what she offered, and, shaken at the thought of so monstrous a deed, he answered: "May the gods banish you, you disgrace of our age, from their whole world; may earth and sea alike be denied you! I at least will not allow so great a monster to touch Crete, the cradle of Jupiter, which is my realm."
He spoke; and when, most just of lawgivers, he had set his terms on the conquered, he ordered the fleet's cables loosed and the bronze-beaked ships driven on by the oars. When Scylla saw the launched keels cutting the water, and saw that the prince gave her no reward for her wickedness, her pleading spent, she turned to violent rage, and, stretching out her hands, hair streaming, cried in her frenzy:
"Where do you flee, leaving behind the maker of your victory — O you whom I set above my country, above my father? Where do you flee, heartless man, whose triumph is both my crime and my service? Did the gift I gave not move you, nor my love, nor that all my hope was heaped on you alone? For where shall I go, deserted? Home? It lies conquered. But suppose it stood — my treason has closed it to me. To my father's face? The father I handed to you? My people rightly hate me; my neighbors fear my example. I have shut myself out of the whole world, that Crete alone might be open to me — and you forbid me even that, and leave me, ingrate? Then Europa was not your mother, but the pitiless Syrtis, some Armenian tigress, or Charybdis churned by the south wind! Nor are you Jupiter's son, nor was your mother tricked by the shape of a bull. That tale of your birth is a lie: it was a real bull that fathered you, wild, and charmed by love of no heifer. Take your vengeance on me, Nisus my father! Rejoice at my ruin, walls I have just betrayed! For I confess I have deserved it, I am worthy to die. Yet let one of those I so wickedly wronged destroy me. Why should you, who have conquered by my crime, punish that crime? What was treason to my country and my father, let it be a kindness to you! She is a fit wife for you, the one who tricked the savage bull with the wooden cow and carried in her womb that mismatched thing. Do my words reach your ears at all — or do the winds carry off my empty words and your ships together, ungrateful man? Ah, now, now it is no wonder Pasiphaë preferred a bull to you: you were the more savage beast! Wretch that I am — he bids them hurry! The water roars, cleft by the oars, and my own land, and I with it, dwindle from his sight. It is no use — no use your forgetting all I have earned. In spite of you I will follow, and, gripping the curved stern, be dragged across the long seas."
She had scarcely spoken when she leaped into the waves and, with love lending her strength, caught up to the ships and clung, a hateful passenger, to the ship of Knossos. When her father saw her — for now he hung in the air, just made a sea eagle with tawny wings — he swooped to tear her with his hooked beak. In terror she let go the stern; but the light air seemed to hold her as she fell, so she would not touch the sea. It was feathers holding her: changed into a bird, she is called Ciris, the cutter, and she takes that name from the lock she cut away.
Minos, once he stepped from his ships and touched the land of Crete, paid his vow to Jupiter — a hundred bulls' bodies — and his palace was decked with the spoils he hung there. But the reproach of his house had grown, and his wife's shameful adultery was laid bare by the monstrous, two-shaped creature she had borne. Minos resolves to remove the disgrace from his home, to shut it away in a house of many divisions, a dwelling full of blind mazes. Daedalus, most famous of men for his craftsman's skill, laid out the work and confused its marks, leading the eye astray through the tangle of its winding ways. Just as the clear Maeander plays in the fields of Phrygia and flows now forward, now back, in its shifting course, and, meeting itself, looks on its own oncoming waters, and turns now toward its source, now toward the open sea, keeping its uncertain waters at work — so Daedalus filled his countless paths with turnings, and could scarcely find his own way back to the threshold, so great was the trickery of the place.
Here he shut up the double form of the bull and the young man; and when the monster, twice gorged before on Athenian blood, was subdued at the third tribute drawn by lot every ninth year — and when the difficult door, retraced by none who had entered before, was found by the help of the maiden and her gathered-up thread — at once the son of Aegeus, carrying off the daughter of Minos, set sail for Dia, and there on that shore cruelly abandoned his companion. To her, deserted and bitterly weeping, Bacchus brought his embrace and his help; and so that she might shine in a lasting star, he took the crown from her brow and flung it into the sky. Through the yielding air it flew, and as it flew its jewels turned to gleaming fires and settled in their place, the shape of the crown still kept, midway between the Kneeling One and the Serpent-holder.
Meanwhile Daedalus, sick of Crete and of his long exile, and touched by love of his native land, was shut in by the sea. "Though Minos block the land and the water," he said, "still the sky at least is open; we will go that way. Let Minos own all else — he does not own the air." So he spoke, and turned his mind to arts unknown, and made nature new. For he lays feathers in order, beginning with the smallest, a shorter following a longer, so you would think they had grown on a slope — just as a rustic pan-pipe rises little by little on its uneven reeds. Then he binds the middle ones with thread, the lowest with wax, and, so arranged, bends them into a gentle curve, to imitate real birds. His son Icarus stood beside him, and, not knowing that he was handling his own peril, kept catching with a bright face at the feathers the wandering breeze had ruffled, or working the yellow wax soft with his thumb, and by his play hindered his father's marvelous work. When the last touch had been put to the undertaking, the craftsman balanced his own body on the twin wings and hung poised in the beaten air. He fitted his son with wings too, and told him: "Icarus, I warn you, keep to the middle way. If you fly too low, the sea will weight your feathers; too high, and the fire of the sun will scorch them. Fly between the two. And do not watch Boötes, or the Great Bear, or the drawn sword of Orion: take your course with me for guide." At once he gives him the rules of flight and fits the untried wings to his shoulders. As he worked and warned, the old man's cheeks grew wet, and his father's hands trembled. He gave his son kisses never to be given again; and, lifted on his wings, he flew ahead, afraid for his companion, like a bird that has led her tender young out of the high nest into the air. He urges the boy to follow, teaches him the deadly art, moves his own wings, and looks back at his son's.
Some angler, plying his quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman on his plow-handle, saw them and stood amazed, and believed that those who could cut the sky must be gods. And now Samos, sacred to Juno, was on the left (Delos and Paros were behind them), and on the right lay Lebynthos and Calymne rich in honey — when the boy began to delight in his bold flight, and left his guide, and, drawn by longing for the sky, drove his course higher. The nearness of the blazing Sun softened the fragrant wax that bound his feathers; the wax melted. He beat his bare arms, and, having lost his oarage, caught no air, and his mouth, crying out his father's name, was taken into the blue water, which drew its name from him.
But the unhappy father — a father no longer — cried, "Icarus, where are you? In what quarter shall I look for you? Icarus!" he cried — and then he saw the feathers on the waves, and cursed his own arts, and buried the body in a tomb; and the land was called by the name of the boy laid there. As he was laying his poor son's body in the ground, a chattering partridge watched him from a leafy holm-oak, and clapped its wings, and sang out its delight. It was then the only bird of its kind, never seen in earlier years, and, newly made a bird, a lasting reproach to you, Daedalus. For his sister, not knowing what fate held, had once handed her son to him to be taught — a boy of twelve, with a mind quick to learn. The boy it was who studied the backbone he noticed in the middle of a fish and, taking it for a model, cut a row of teeth in sharp iron and so invented the saw; he was the first, too, to bind two iron arms at a single joint, so that, held equally apart, one might stand fixed while the other traced a circle. Daedalus envied him, and threw him headlong from the sacred citadel of Minerva, lying that he had slipped. But Pallas, who favors the clever, caught him and made him a bird and clothed him with feathers in mid-air; yet the force of that quick genius passed into his wings and feet, while his name stayed as before, Perdix. This bird does not raise its body high, or build its nest in branches and treetops; it flutters near the ground and lays its eggs in hedgerows, and, remembering that old fall, it dreads the heights.
And now the land of Etna held Daedalus in his weariness, and Cocalus, who took up arms at his plea, was praised for his kindness. By now, too, Athens had ceased to pay its mournful tribute, thanks to the deeds of Theseus. The temples are hung with garlands; they call on warlike Minerva, with Jupiter and the other gods, honoring them with the blood of vowed victims, with gifts laid down, with censers of incense. Wandering Fame had spread the name of Theseus through the Argive cities, and the peoples of rich Achaia begged his help in their great dangers. Calydon too, though it had Meleager, sought him with anxious, suppliant prayer. The cause of the plea was a boar, the servant and avenger of Diana's wrath.
For they say that Oeneus, for a year full of blessings, had offered the first fruits of the corn to Ceres, his wine to Bacchus, and the oil of Pallas to golden-haired Minerva. Begun with the country gods, that coveted honor went round to all the powers above — all but the altars of Latona's daughter, which alone, they say, were passed over and left without incense. Anger touches even the gods. "But I will not take this quietly," she said; "and I who am dishonored will not be called unavenged as well." And, slighted, she sent an avenging boar through the fields of Oeneus, larger than the bulls that grassy Epirus rears, and bigger than the fields of Sicily have. His eyes glare with blood and fire; his rough neck stands stiff; his bristles stand up like spikes, like a palisade of tall stakes. Boiling foam runs down his broad shoulders with a harsh hiss; his tusks match the tusks of India; lightning comes from his mouth, and the leaves burn at his breath. One while he tramples the growing crops in the blade; another he reaps the ripe hopes of the farmer doomed to weep, and cuts down the grain in the ear. In vain the threshing-floor, in vain the barns wait for the promised harvest. Down go the heavy clusters with their long vine-shoots, down the berries with the boughs of the ever-green olive. He rages against the flocks too: neither shepherd nor dog can guard them, nor the fierce bulls defend the herds. The people scatter and think themselves safe only within a city's walls — until Meleager and a chosen band of young men band together, hungry for glory:
the twin sons of Tyndareus, one famous with the boxing-glove, the other on horseback; and Jason, builder of the first ship; and Theseus with Pirithoüs, a happy pairing; and the two sons of Thestius; and the sons of Aphareus, Lynceus and swift Idas; and Caeneus, now no longer a woman; and fierce Leucippus, and Acastus famed for the javelin, and Hippothoüs, and Dryas, and Phoenix the son of Amyntor, and the matched sons of Actor, and Phyleus, sent from Elis. Nor was Telamon missing, nor the father of great Achilles; and with the son of Pheres and the Boeotian Iolaüs came tireless Eurytion and Echion, unbeaten in the race, and Lelex of Naryx, and Panopeus, and Hyleus, and bold Hippasus, and Nestor, still in his early years; and those Hippocoön sent from ancient Amyclae, and the father-in-law of Penelope with Ancaeus of Parrhasia, and the far-seeing son of Ampycus, and the son of Oecleus, still safe from his wife — and Atalanta of Tegea, the glory of the Lycaean woods. A polished clasp fastened the top of her robe; her plain hair was gathered in a single knot; the ivory guard of her arrows rattled, slung from her left shoulder, and her left hand held the bow. Such was her dress; and her face was one you might truly call a girl's in a boy, a boy's in a girl. The Calydonian hero saw her and, at the same moment, longed for her — though the god was unwilling — and drank in the hidden flame, and said, "Happy the man she thinks worthy of her!" But the moment and his sense of shame let him say no more: the greater work of the great contest presses on.
A wood thick with timber, which no age had felled, rose from the level ground and looked out over the fields below. When the men came there, some spread the nets, some slipped the dogs from their leashes, some followed the pressed prints of the tracks, each eager to find his own danger. There was a hollow gully where rainwater used to drain; at the bottom of the pool grew pliant willows, smooth sedge, marsh rushes, osiers, and thin reeds on their long stalks. Roused from here, the boar hurls himself violently into the midst of his enemies, like lightning struck from bursting clouds. The grove is flattened by his charge; the shoved trees give a crash. The young men shout, and hold their weapons out in strong right hands, the broad iron quivering. On he rushes and scatters the dogs, cutting down with sidelong strokes whichever bays at him in his fury. The spear first hurled by Echion's arm did no good, and only nicked a maple trunk. The next, had it not used too much of the thrower's strength, seemed sure to lodge in the back it was aimed at; but it flew too far — Jason of Pagasae had thrown it. "Phoebus," said the son of Ampycus, "if I have worshiped you and worship you still, grant me to hit my mark with an unerring shot!" The god granted his prayer as far as he could: the boar was struck by him, but without a wound — Diana took the iron head from the flying shaft, and the wood came without its point. The beast's fury was roused, and it blazed no gentler than the lightning: light flashed from its eyes, flame breathed from its chest. As a boulder flies, launched by a taut rope, when it is aimed at walls or towers packed with soldiers, so with sure onset the wound-dealing boar is carried among the young men, and lays low Eupalamus and Pelagon, who guarded the right wing; their comrades snatched them up as they fell. But Enaesimus, son of Hippocoön, did not escape the deadly stroke: as he trembled and made to turn his back, the cut sinews of his knee gave way. Perhaps the Pylian Nestor too would have perished before the time of Troy, but, taking a spring from his planted spear, he leaped into the branches of a tree standing close by and, safe in his perch, looked down on the enemy he had fled. The boar, whetting his tusks on an oak trunk, stood fierce and ready for their ruin, and, trusting his newly sharpened weapons, gored the thigh of great Othriades with his hooked tusk. But the twin brothers — not yet stars of the sky — both conspicuous, both riding horses whiter than snow, both shaking the poised points of their lances with a trembling motion, would have dealt wounds, had the bristly beast not gone into the shadowy woods, a place no javelin or horse could reach. Telamon pursues him and, careless in the heat of the chase, falls headlong, tripped by a tree root. While Peleus lifts him, the girl of Tegea set a swift arrow to the string and let it fly from the bent bow: fixed under the beast's ear, it grazed the top of his body and reddened the bristles with a little blood. Yet she was no more glad at the success of her shot than Meleager was. He is thought to have seen the blood first and first to have shown it to his comrades, and to have said, "You will win the honor your courage has earned." The men flushed with rivalry and cheered one another on, raising their spirits with shouts, and threw their weapons without order; the very crowd of them fouled the throws and baffled the strokes they aimed.
Look — the Arcadian, wielding his double axe and rushing against his fate, cried, "Learn, young men, how much a man's weapons beat a woman's, and give way to my work! Though Latona's daughter herself should shield him with her own arms, still, in spite of Diana, my right hand will destroy him." So he boasted with his swelling mouth; and, lifting the double-edged axe in both hands, he stood on tiptoe, poised for the downward blow. The beast forestalled the bold man, and where the way to death is quickest drove both tusks into the top of his groin. Ancaeus fell, and his coiled bowels slid out in a rush of blood, and the earth was soaked with gore. Pirithoüs, the son of Ixion, was advancing straight at the enemy, shaking his hunting-spear in his strong hand, when the son of Aegeus called to him from a distance: "Stop, O dearer to me than myself, better part of my soul! There is no shame in valor at long range: rash courage was the death of Ancaeus." He spoke, and hurled his heavy cornel spear with its bronze point; well aimed, and about to grant his wish, it was stopped by a leafy bough of a beech. The son of Aeson threw his javelin too, which chance turned aside from the boar to the death of an innocent hound: flung through its belly, it pinned the belly to the ground. But the hand of Oeneus's son had different luck. Of two he threw, the first spear stood fixed in the earth, the second in the middle of the boar's back. There is no delay: while the beast rages, wheeling its body round and spewing hissing foam with fresh blood, the giver of the wound comes up, provokes his enemy to fury, and buries his bright hunting-spear deep in the shoulder facing him. His comrades bear witness to their joy with a glad shout, and reach to clasp the victor's right hand in theirs, and gaze in wonder at the huge beast sprawled over so much ground; and they do not yet think it safe to touch him — but each, all the same, stains his own weapon in the blood.
Then Meleager himself, setting his foot on the deadly head, pressed it down and said, "Take, girl of Nonacris, the spoil that is mine by right, and let my glory be shared with you." At once he gives her the hide, rough with its stiff bristles, and the head marked by its great tusks. The gift, and the giver of the gift, delighted her; but the others envied it, and a murmur ran through the whole company. Of these the sons of Thestius, stretching out their arms, cried in a great voice: "Come, put them down, woman, and don't take our honors from us; and don't let confidence in your beauty fool you — your lovesick giver may be far off when you need him." And they took the gift from her, and from him the right to give it. The war-god's son could not bear it: gnashing in swelling rage, he said, "Learn, you robbers of another's honor, how far deeds stand from threats" — and he ran his cruel sword through the breast of Plexippus, who feared no such thing. Toxeus, still in doubt what to do, at once wanting to avenge his brother and afraid to share his brother's fate, Meleager did not let waver long: he warmed the weapon, still hot from the first killing, again in a brother's blood.
Althaea was carrying gifts to the temples of the gods, her son the victor, when she saw her dead brothers being carried home. She beat her breast and filled the city with mournful cries, and changed her gold-embroidered robes for black. But the moment the author of the deaths was named, all her grief fell away, and turned from tears to a lust for punishment.
There was a billet of wood which, when the daughter of Thestius lay in childbed, the three Sisters, the Fates, had laid on the fire, and, spinning the threads of destiny under their pressing thumbs, had said: "To you, newborn child, and to this wood, we give the same span of life." When they had spoken the charm and gone, the mother snatched the burning branch from the fire and doused it with water. Long had it lain hidden in an inmost room, and, kept safe, had kept safe, O youth, your years. Now the mother brings it out and orders torches and kindling laid, and, when they are laid, sets the hostile fire to them. Then, four times trying to put the branch on the flames, four times she stops. Mother and sister fight in her, and the two names pull one heart two ways. Often her face went pale with dread of the coming crime; often the boiling anger in her eyes gave it a flush; and now her look was like someone's who threatens something cruel, now one you would think full of pity. And when the fierce heat of her rage had dried her tears, tears were found even so. As a ship that the wind seizes, and the tide running against the wind, feels the double force and unsteadily obeys them both, so the daughter of Thestius wavers between two warring loves, laying down her anger and rousing it again. Still, the sister begins to win out over the mother; and, to soothe with blood the kindred shades, she is dutiful in an unnatural way. For when the deadly fire had gained strength, she said, "Let that pyre burn my own flesh." And, holding the fatal wood in her ruthless hand, she stood, poor woman, before the sepulchral altars and said: "You three goddesses of punishment, you Furies, turn your faces to these dread rites. I am avenging, and I am doing wrong. Death must be atoned by death, crime piled on crime, funeral on funeral; through heaped-up grief let this unnatural house perish. Shall Oeneus rejoice in his victorious son, and Thestius be left childless? Better that you both should mourn. Only you, ghosts of my brothers, newly made spirits, feel this service of mine, and take the offering bought at so great a cost — the guilty pledge of my own womb. Ah, wretched me! Where am I carried? Forgive me, brothers, the feelings of a mother! My hands fail at what I began. I own he has deserved to die; but that I should be the cause of his death — that I cannot bear. So shall he go unpunished? Alive, victorious, swollen with his very success, shall he hold the throne of Calydon, while you lie a little cold heap of ashes and lifeless shades? No — I will not endure it. Let the guilty man perish, and drag down with him his father's hope, his kingdom, and his country's ruin. But where is a mother's heart? Where the loving bonds of a parent, and the pangs I bore for twice five months? Oh, that you had burned as an infant in that first fire, and that I had let it be! You lived by my gift; now by your own deserts you shall die. Take the reward of your deeds, and give me back the life twice given you — first at your birth, then when I saved the brand — or lay me too in my brothers' tomb. I long to do it, and I cannot. What shall I do? One moment my brothers' wounds are before my eyes, the image of that dreadful slaughter; the next, love and a mother's name break me. Wretch that I am! To my sorrow you will win, brothers — but win; only let me follow the comfort I give you, and you yourselves." She spoke, and, turning away, with trembling right hand threw the funeral brand into the middle of the flames. The wood gave, or seemed to give, a groan, and, caught by the unwilling fire, it burned.
Far off and unaware, Meleager is scorched by that flame, and feels his vitals seared by hidden fires, and by his courage masters the great pain. Yet he grieves that he dies a bloodless, inglorious death, and calls the wounds of Ancaeus a happy lot; and, with a groan, he calls on his aged father, his brothers, his loving sisters, and, with his last words, the companion of his bed, and perhaps his mother too. The fire and the pain swell, then sink again; both are put out together, and little by little his breath slips away into the light air, as little by little the white ash veils the embers.
Lofty Calydon lies low. Young and old mourn; commons and nobles groan; the mothers of Calydon by the Evenus tear their hair and wail. His father sprawls on the ground, fouling his white hair and aged face with dust, and rails at his long life. As for the mother — her own hand, conscious of the dreadful deed, exacted the penalty, the sword driven through her body. Not if a god had given me a hundred mouths ringing with tongues, and a great genius, and the whole of Helicon besides, could I tell out the sorrowful laments of his unhappy sisters. Careless of dignity, they beat their bruised breasts; and while the body lasts, they warm it and warm it again, they kiss it, they kiss the bier where it lies. After he is ashes, they press the gathered ashes to their breasts and lie sprawled about the tomb, and, clasping his name carved in stone, pour their tears upon the name. Them at last the daughter of Latona, sated with the ruin of the house of Parthaon, lifts up on wings springing from their bodies — all but Gorge and the daughter-in-law of noble Alcmena — and stretches long wings along their arms, makes their mouths horny, and sends them, so changed, through the air.
Meanwhile Theseus, his part in the shared labor done, was making his way to the citadel of Erechtheus, the city of Minerva.
But Acheloüs, swollen with rain, blocked his way and held him up as he went. "Come under my roof, famous son of Cecrops," he said, "and do not trust yourself to the racing flood. It is used to carrying off solid beams and rolling down boulders sideways with a great roar. I have seen high sheepfolds close to the bank swept away, flocks and all; and there it did the strong cattle no good to be strong, nor the horses to be swift. Many a young man's body, too, this torrent has drowned in its whirling eddies when the mountain snows melted. Rest is safer, until the river runs in its usual channel, until its own bed holds only the slender stream." The son of Aegeus agreed. "I will use your house and your advice, Acheloüs," he answered — and he used them both.
He entered a hall built of porous pumice and rough tufa; the floor was damp with soft moss, and shells arched the roof in alternating rows of purple. And now, Hyperion having measured out two parts of the daylight, Theseus and his fellow laborers lay down on the couches — on one side the son of Ixion, on the other Lelex, the hero of Troezen, his temples now flecked with a little gray, and others whom the river of the Acarnanians, overjoyed with so great a guest, had graced with the same honor. At once barefoot nymphs set the tables with the feast, and, the dishes cleared, poured wine in jeweled bowls. Then the mighty hero, looking out over the seas below, said, "What is that place?" — and pointed with his finger — "and tell me the name that island bears, though it does not seem to be one alone."
The River answered: "It is not one thing that you see; five lands lie there — the distance blurs the boundaries between them. And so you may wonder less at what slighted Diana can do, these were once Naiads, who, having killed twice five bullocks and called the country gods to a sacrifice, danced their festal dances and forgot me. I swelled — as great as I ever run at my fullest — and, doubled in rage and in flood, I tore woods from woods and fields from fields, and, together with the ground under them, rolled the nymphs into the sea, who then, at last, remembered me. My waves and the sea's split the once-unbroken land and broke it into as many pieces as you see islands there, the Echinades, out in the waves. But look — as you can see for yourself — one island has drawn far off from the rest, an island dear to me: the sailors call it Perimele. From her, my beloved, I took the name of virgin, which her father Hippodamas took so ill that he pushed the body of his daughter, near her time, from a cliff into the sea. I caught her, and, bearing her up as she swam, I prayed: 'O bearer of the Trident, you who won by lot the realm next below heaven, the waters where we sacred rivers end and to which we run — come, Neptune, and hear me kindly. Her whom I bear I have wronged. Grant her a place, I beg you, plunged in the water by her father's cruelty, or let her become a place herself. Even so I will embrace her.' The king of the ocean nodded, and shook all the waters with his assent. The nymph was afraid, but still she swam. As she swam I touched her breast, throbbing with a trembling motion — and while I felt it, I felt her whole body harden and her breast grow covered with spreading earth. Even as I spoke, fresh soil closed round her floating limbs, and a heavy island grew upon her changed body."
At this the River fell silent. The marvel had moved them all. But the son of Ixion laughed at their belief; a scorner of the gods and fierce of spirit, he said, "You tell a fable, Acheloüs, and think the gods more powerful than they are, if they can give and take away the shapes of things." All were shocked and did not approve such words; and before the rest Lelex, ripe in mind and years, spoke thus:
"The power of heaven is measureless and has no end, and whatever the gods above have willed is done. And that you may doubt it the less — on the Phrygian hills there is an oak beside a linden tree, ringed by a low wall. I have seen the spot myself, for Pittheus once sent me into that land of Pelops, ruled long ago by his father. Not far off is a marsh, once habitable ground, now busy with divers and the coots that love a fen. To this place Jupiter came in mortal shape, and with him his son, the grandson of Atlas, Mercury, his wings laid aside and the caduceus put by. To a thousand houses they went, seeking lodging and rest; a thousand houses shut their bolts against them. Yet one took them in — a small one, thatched with straw and marsh reeds. But a devout old woman, Baucis, and Philemon of the same age had been joined in that cottage in their youth, and in it had grown old together; and by confessing their poverty they made it light, and bore it with a mind not out of tune. It is no use asking there for masters or for servants: the whole household is two, the same who obey and command.
"So when the dwellers of heaven reached this little home and, ducking their heads, went in at the humble door, the old man set out a bench and bade them rest their limbs, and busy Baucis threw a rough cloth over it. Then she raked the warm ashes on the hearth and stirred up yesterday's fire, feeding it with leaves and dry bark and coaxing it to flame with her old woman's breath; she brought down split faggots and dry branches from under the roof, broke them small, and set them under a little copper pot. The greens her husband had gathered in the well-watered garden she strips of their leaves. With a two-pronged fork he lifts down a smoky side of bacon hanging from a black beam, and cuts a small piece from the long-kept chine, and softens it, cut, in boiling water. Meanwhile they beguile the passing hours with talk, and do not let the time be felt. There was a beechwood tub hanging by its handle from a peg; they fill it with warm water to bathe and rest the guests' feet. In the middle of the room, on a couch whose feet and frame were of willow, lay a cushion of soft sedge; over this they spread cloths they were used to lay out only on festival days — and even these were cheap and old, no shame to a willow couch.
"The gods took their places. The old woman, apron on, shaking, sets the table before them — but the third leg of the table was too short, and a potsherd slipped beneath made it level; and once the tilt was gone, green mint wiped the leveled top clean. On it are set the two-colored olives of chaste Minerva, and autumn cornel-berries pickled in dregs, and endive, and radishes, and a lump of curdled cheese, and eggs turned gently in the cooling ash — all in earthenware. After this an embossed mixing-bowl of the same clay is set out, and cups of beechwood, coated where they are hollow with yellow wax. A short pause, and the hearth sent up the warm dishes; and wine of no great age is brought again, then, set a little aside, gives way to the second course: here are nuts, here dried figs mixed with wrinkled dates, plums, and fragrant apples in wide baskets, and grapes gathered from the purple vines. In the middle is a white honeycomb — and, over it all, kind faces, and a good will neither idle nor grudging.
"Meanwhile, each time they see the emptied bowl fill itself of its own accord and the wine rise up again by itself, astonished at the strange sight, Baucis and frightened Philemon lift their hands in prayer and beg pardon for the meal and its poor preparation. There was a single goose, the guardian of that tiny farm, which its owners were making ready to kill for their divine guests; but the goose, quick on the wing, wore out the pair, slow with age, and dodged them a long while, and at last seemed to flee to the gods themselves for safety. The gods forbade its killing. 'We are gods,' they said, 'and this godless neighborhood will pay the penalty it has earned; but you shall be spared this ruin. Only leave your house and follow our steps, and come with us up the high mountain.' Both obey, and, leaning on their staffs, struggle to set their feet up the long slope. They were as far from the top as a shot arrow can carry when they turned their eyes and saw all the rest sunk in a marsh, and only their own house left standing. And while they wondered at it, while they wept for the fate of their people, that old cottage, too small even for its two owners, turned into a temple: columns rose where the forked posts had been, the thatch went golden, the ground was covered in marble, the doors seemed carved, and the roof of gold. Then the son of Saturn spoke, with gentle mouth: 'Tell us, good old man, and you, wife worthy of so good a husband, what you desire.' Philemon spoke a few words with Baucis, then told the gods their shared wish: 'We ask to be your priests and to keep your shrine; and, since we have spent our years in harmony, let the same hour take us both, so that I may never see my wife's grave, nor be buried by her.' Their prayer was granted. As long as life was given, they kept the temple; and when, worn out with years and age, they chanced to be standing before the sacred steps, telling the story of the place, Baucis saw Philemon put out leaves, and old Philemon saw Baucis put out leaves. And now, with the treetops growing over their two faces, while still they could they traded words, and together said, 'Farewell, my dear one' — and at the same moment the bark closed over and hid their faces. The people of Tyana still show there the neighboring trunks made from their two bodies. Honest old men, with no reason to deceive me, told me this; and I myself saw garlands hanging on the branches, and, laying fresh ones there, I said, 'Let those the gods love be gods, and let those who worshiped be worshiped.'"
He had finished; and the story, and the teller of it, had moved them all, and Theseus most of all. As he longed to hear more of the wonderful works of the gods, the Calydonian river, leaning on his elbow, spoke to him thus:
"There are some, bravest of men, whose shape has been changed once and stayed so changed. There are others whose privilege it is to pass into many forms — like you, Proteus, dweller in the sea that clasps the earth. For men have seen you now a young man, now a lion; now you were a raging boar, now a serpent they feared to touch; now horns made you a bull; often you might be seen as a stone, often as a tree; sometimes, mimicking the look of running water, you were a river, sometimes fire, water's very opposite.
"And no less than his is the power of the wife of Autolycus, the daughter of Erysichthon. Her father was one who scorned the majesty of the gods and burned no incense on their altars. He is said, too, to have profaned a grove of Ceres with the axe and violated her ancient woods with iron. In them stood an oak with an aged trunk, a whole wood in itself; fillets and votive tablets and garlands ringed its middle, tokens of prayers that had been answered. Often beneath it the wood-nymphs led their festal dances; often, hands linked in a ring, they measured the girth of its trunk, and the oak's circumference filled fifteen ells; and the rest of the wood stood as far below it as the grass stood below the whole wood. Yet not for that did the son of Triopas hold his axe from it, but bade his servants cut the sacred tree; and when he saw them hesitate at the order, the wicked man snatched an axe from one of them and said, 'Were it not only dear to a goddess, but the goddess herself, still it should touch the ground now with its leafy top.' He spoke, and, poising his weapon for a slanting stroke, the oak of Ceres shuddered and gave a groan, and at once its green leaves and its acorns began to pale, and its long branches to take on a pallor. And when his impious hand had made a wound in the trunk, blood ran from the cut bark just as it pours from the severed neck of a great bull-victim falling before the altar. All were struck dumb, and one of them dared to check the outrage and stay the cruel axe. The Thessalian eyed him: 'Take the reward of your piety,' he said, and turned the axe from the tree onto the man, and struck off his head, and hacked at the oak again — when from within the wood came these words: 'I, a nymph most dear to Ceres, am within this wood; and, dying, I foretell to you that the punishment of your deeds is at hand — the comfort of my death.' He pressed on with his crime; and at last, weakened by countless blows and hauled down with ropes, the tree fell, and with its weight flattened a great stretch of the wood.
"Aghast at the loss — the grove's and their own — all the wood-nymphs, her sisters, went in black robes to Ceres, mourning, and begged for Erysichthon's punishment. She granted it, and, most lovely of goddesses, with a nod of her head shook the fields heavy with their harvest, and devised a kind of punishment to be pitied — if his deeds had left him deserving of any pity: to tear him with deadly Famine. And since the goddess herself may not approach Famine (for the Fates do not let Ceres and Famine come together), she called a rustic mountain-nymph, an Oread, and said: 'There is a place at the far icy edge of Scythia, a dreary soil, a land without grain and without trees; there dwell numbing Cold, and Pallor, and Trembling, and starving Famine. Bid her bury herself in the breast of this sacrilegious wretch; let no plenty of food overcome her, and let her beat my powers in the contest. And so the long road may not frighten you, take my chariot, take the dragons you may drive on high with the reins.' And she gave them.
"Carried through the air on the granted chariot, the nymph came to Scythia, and on the peak of a steep mountain — they call it Caucasus — unyoked the dragons' necks, and saw Famine, whom she sought, in a stony field, tearing at the scattered herbs with nails and teeth. Her hair was matted, her eyes hollow, her face pale, her lips white with scurf, her throat rough with rust; her skin hard, and through it the guts could be seen; her dry bones jutted under her hooked loins; instead of a belly there was only the place for a belly. You would think her chest hung loose, held up only by the frame of her spine. Leanness had swollen her joints, her kneecaps bulged, her ankles stood out in great knobs. As soon as the Oread saw her from a distance — for she did not dare go near — she gave the goddess's orders; and, staying but a short while, though she kept her distance and had only just arrived, she seemed even so to feel hunger; and, turning the reins, she drove the dragons back on high to Thessaly.
"Famine did as Ceres bade, though she is forever the goddess's enemy; carried by the winds through the air to the appointed house, at once she entered the bedroom of the sacrilegious man and, sunk as he was in deep sleep — for it was night — folded him in her two wings, and breathed herself into him, blowing on his throat and chest and mouth, and scattering starvation through his empty veins. Her task done, she left the fruitful world and went back to her famished home, her wonted fields. Gentle Sleep still soothed Erysichthon with its calming wings. In his dream he craves food, works his jaws to no purpose, grinds tooth on tooth, tires his throat with imaginary meat, and instead of a feast devours in vain the yielding air. But when sleep was driven off, his hunger to eat rages, and holds sway over his greedy jaws and his insatiable gut. Without delay he calls for whatever the sea, the earth, the air brings forth, and complains of hunger with the tables set before him, and looks for a feast in the midst of a feast; and what would be enough for whole cities, enough for a whole people, is not enough for one man, and the more he sends down into his belly, the more he wants. As the ocean takes in the rivers of the whole earth and is never sated with water and drinks up the streams of far-off lands, and as the greedy fire never refuses its fuel and burns beams beyond number, and, the more it is given, craves the more, and grows hungrier by the very heap — so the jaws of impious Erysichthon take in every dish and ask for more at once. In him all food is the ground of more food, and there is always an empty place left by eating.
"And now, through his appetite and the pit of his belly, he had worn down his father's wealth; but even then his dreadful hunger stayed undiminished, and the flame of his ravenous throat burned on. At last, his whole fortune swallowed into his guts, only his daughter was left — a daughter who deserved a better father. Her too he sells, in his need. Nobly born, she cannot bear a master, and, stretching her hands over the nearby sea, she cried, 'Free me from my master, you who hold the prize of my ravished virginity!' — that prize Neptune had taken. He did not scorn her prayer; and though the moment before her master had seen her in pursuit, the god changed her shape and gave her the look of a man and the dress of one who catches fish. Her master, seeing her, said, 'O handler of the rod, who hide the hanging bronze hook with a little bait — so may the sea be calm for you, so may the fish in the water be ever credulous and feel no hook till caught — tell me where she is who a moment ago was standing on this shore (for I saw her standing there), her hair loose and in humble dress; for her footprints go no farther.' She saw that the god's gift had turned to good, and, glad to be asked after herself by herself, answered his question: 'Whoever you are, forgive me: I have turned my eyes nowhere from this water, but, busy at my work, have kept to my task. And that you may doubt me the less — so may the god of the sea aid this craft of mine — no man has stood on this shore for some time now, myself excepted, nor any woman.' Her master believed her, and, turning on his heel, paced off across the sand, deceived; and her own shape was given back to her.
"But when her father found she had a body that could be transformed, he sold the granddaughter of Triopas again and again to different masters; and she kept escaping — now a mare, now a bird, now a cow, now a stag — and so found a dishonest living for her hungry father. Yet after the violence of his sickness had used up all provision and heaped fresh fuel on his dreadful malady, he himself began to tear his own limbs with biting, and the wretched man fed his body by making it less. But why do I dwell on the cases of others? I too, young men, have the power to change my body — though only so many times. For one moment I appear as what I now am; the next I am coiled into a snake; then, as the leader of a herd, I take strength into my horns — my horns, so long as I could. Now one side of my brow is stripped of its weapon, as you see for yourself." And a sigh followed his words.
The Neptunian hero asked the cause of the god's groan and of his broken brow; and the Calydonian river, his unkempt hair bound with reeds, began:
"You ask a mournful thing. For what beaten man wants to recount his own battles? Yet I will tell it in order; it was not so shameful to be beaten as it is glorious to have fought, and so great a conqueror is a great comfort to me.
"If the name of Deianira has at last reached your ears — once she was a most beautiful girl, the envied hope of many suitors. When, with the rest, I entered the house of the man I wished for a father-in-law, I said, 'Take me, son of Parthaon, for your son-in-law.' Hercules said the same; the others gave way to us two. He offered Jupiter for a father-in-law, and the fame of his labors, and the tasks his stepmother had set and he had overcome. Against this I said — for I thought it a disgrace for a god to yield to a mortal, and he was not yet a god — 'You see before you a king of the waters, flowing in winding channels through your realm; I am no stranger sent you as son-in-law from foreign shores, but one of your own people, a part of your state. Only let it not count against me that royal Juno does not hate me, and that no punishment of ordered labors comes near me. For you, son of Alcmena, who boast your birth — either Jupiter is your pretended father, or your real one through a crime. By your mother's adultery you claim a father: choose, then, whether you had rather Jupiter were falsely your father, or that you were born of disgrace.'
"As I said this, for a while he glared at me with a grim eye, and did not very well master his kindled anger, and gave me back just these words: 'My right hand is better than my tongue. Only let me win at fighting, and you may win at talking' — and he came at me fiercely. I was ashamed, after such big words, to give way. I threw off the green robe from my body, put up my arms against his, held my hands on guard, curved before my breast, and set my limbs for the fight. He scooped up dust in his hollow hands and threw it over me, and in his turn went yellow with the tawny sand cast on himself. He grabbed now at my neck, now at my legs as they shifted, or you would think he did, and pressed me from every side. My bulk defended me, and he attacked in vain — no differently than a breakwater the waves batter with a great roar: it stands, safe in its own weight. We drew apart a little, then closed again for battle, and stood our ground, resolved not to yield; foot was locked to foot, and I, leaning in full with my chest, pressed finger on finger and forehead on forehead. Just so I have seen strong bulls charge, when the loveliest cow in all the pasture is the prize of the fight, and the herds look on and tremble, not knowing which the mastery of so great a realm awaits. Three times, without success, Hercules tried to fling my chest off him as it bore hard against him; the fourth time he shook off my hold, loosed my clinched arms, and, striking me a blow — I am resolved to tell the truth — spun me right round and clung, a mighty weight, to my back. If you will believe me — and I seek no glory by a false tale — I seemed to have a mountain laid on me. Barely could I work my arms, streaming with sweat, back in; barely loosen his hard grip from my body. He pressed me, panting, gave me no chance to gather strength, and got hold of my neck. Then at last the earth was pressed by my knee, and I bit the sand.
"Weaker in strength, I turned to my arts, and slipped from the hero, changed into a long snake. When I had wound my body into coils and darted my forked tongue with a dreadful hiss, the Tirynthian laughed, and mocking my arts said, 'It was my cradle's work to master snakes; and though you outdo all other serpents, Acheloüs, how small a part of the Lernaean Hydra will you be, a single snake? She grew by her own wounds, and not one head of her hundred could be cut off without new danger — her neck came back stronger, with two heirs for one. Her, branching with serpents sprung from each cut and growing by her losses, I mastered and laid open. What do you think will become of you, who move borrowed weapons in a false snake's shape, hidden under a form you only borrowed?' He spoke, and clamped his fingers on the top of my neck. I was choked, as if my throat were gripped in pincers, and I fought to tear my jaws free of his thumbs.
"Even so beaten, I still had a third shape left, the fierce bull; changed to a bull, I renewed the fight. He threw his arms over my brawny neck on the left, and, dragging as I ran, followed me; and, seizing my horns, he drove them into the hard ground and flattened me on the deep sand. That was not enough: his savage right hand, gripping the stiff horn, broke it and tore it from my mutilated brow. This the Naiads filled with fruit and fragrant flowers and made holy; and now bounteous Plenty is rich by my horn." He spoke; and a nymph, girt like Diana, one of his attendants, her hair loose on either side, came in, and brought all the wealth of autumn in that overflowing horn, and choice fruit for the second course.
Day comes on; and with the first sun striking the peaks the young men leave, for they will not wait until the streams win back their peace and gentle flow and the whole flood sinks. Acheloüs hid his rustic face and his broken-horned head in the middle of the waves. He grieves at the loss of that one stolen honor; in all else he is whole, and the hurt to his head is hidden by a willow branch, or reeds laid over it.
But love of that same girl had been the ruin of you, fierce Nessus, shot through the back by a swift arrow. For the son of Jupiter, returning to his native city with his new bride, had come to the rushing waters of the Evenus. The river was swollen higher than usual with winter rains, full of whirlpools and impassable. Nessus came up — bold for himself but anxious for the wife — strong of limb and knowing the fords: "By my service she shall be set on that far bank, Hercules; use your strength to swim." So the Aonian hero handed the frightened Calydonian woman, pale with fear and dreading both the river and Nessus himself, to Nessus. Then, just as he was, weighed down by his quiver and the lion's skin — for he had thrown his club and curved bow to the far side — he said, "Since I have begun, the river must be crossed," and did not hesitate, or look for where the stream was gentlest, or stoop to be ferried by the river's favor. And now, having gained the bank and lifting the bow he had thrown across, he heard his wife's voice, and, as Nessus made to steal what had been entrusted to him, he shouted: "Where does vain confidence in your feet carry you, you ravisher? To you I speak, two-shaped Nessus! Listen, and do not seize what is mine. If no respect for me moves you, still your father's turning wheel might have kept you from forbidden embraces. You will not escape, for all your trust in your horse's speed: with a wound, not with my feet, I will overtake you." His last words he made good by the deed, and shot the fleeing back through with an arrow. The barbed steel stood out from the breast; and when it was wrenched free, the blood spurted from both wounds, mixed with the Lernaean poison's venom. Nessus caught it, and said to himself, "I shall not die unavenged" — and gave his robe, dyed in the warm blood, as a gift to the woman he was carrying off, as if a charm for love.
Long was the stretch of time between; and the deeds of great Hercules, and his stepmother's hatred, had filled the earth. Victorious, home from Oechalia, he was preparing a sacrifice vowed to Cenaean Jupiter, when chattering Rumor — who loves to add lies to truth, and swells from a tiny start by her falsehoods — ran ahead to your ears, Deianira: that the son of Amphitryon was gripped by love of Iole. In love, she believes it; terrified by the report of this new passion, at first she gives way to tears, and pours out her grief, poor woman, in weeping. Then she says, "But why do I weep? My rival will delight in these tears. Since she is coming, I must hurry, must try something new while I still can, while another has not yet taken my bed. Shall I complain, or keep silent? Go back to Calydon, or stay? Leave the house — or, if nothing else, block her way? What if, Meleager, remembering I am your sister, I steel myself to some desperate deed, and, by cutting my rival's throat, show what injury and a woman's grief can do?" Her mind runs through many courses. Above them all she chooses to send the robe steeped in Nessus's blood, to give strength back to her fading love. Not knowing herself what she gives, she hands the cause of her own sorrows to the unsuspecting Lichas, and, poor wretch, with coaxing words bids him carry this most deadly gift to her husband. Ignorant, the hero takes it, and puts on his shoulders the venom of the Lernaean serpent.
He was laying incense on the first flames, saying the words of prayer, pouring wine from the bowl on the marble altars, when the power of the poison grew warm and, loosed by the flames, ran melting far and wide through the limbs of Hercules. As long as he could, he held back his groans with his old courage. When his endurance was beaten by the pain, he shoved the altars over and filled woody Oeta with his cries. At once he tries to tear off the deadly robe: where it is pulled, it pulls the skin, and — a thing dreadful to tell — either it clings to the limbs when he tries in vain to strip it, or it lays bare the mangled flesh and the huge bones. The blood itself hisses, as a red-hot blade hisses when dipped in cold water, and boils with the burning venom. There is no limit to it; greedy flames drink up his vitals, a blue-black sweat pours from his whole body, his scorched sinews crackle, and, his marrow melted by the hidden decay, he lifts his hands to the stars and cries: "Daughter of Saturn, feed on my ruin — feed, and look down from on high, cruel one, on this destruction of mine, and glut your savage heart! Or, if I am to be pitied even by an enemy — for an enemy I am to you — take away a life racked and hateful to me, born only for toil. Death will be a gift to me; it fits a stepmother to grant such a gift.
"Was it for this I subdued Busiris, who fouled the gods' temples with strangers' blood? For this I tore from savage Antaeus the strength his mother gave him? Did the Iberian herdsman's triple shape not shake me, nor your triple shape, Cerberus? Did you, my hands, grip the horns of the mighty bull? Elis holds your work, and the waters of Stymphalus, and the Parthenian grove. By your valor was won the belt inlaid with the gold of Thermodon, and the apples guarded in vain by the sleepless dragon. Could the Centaurs stand against me, or the boar that ravaged Arcadia? Did it help the Hydra to grow by its own loss and take back double strength? And when I saw the Thracian horses fat with human blood and their mangers full of torn bodies, did I not throw them down and kill both the master and the horses? By these arms the Nemean lion lies crushed; on this neck I carried the sky. Jupiter's cruel wife grew weary of commanding — but I was tireless in doing. Now a new scourge is on me, one no valor, no weapons, no arms can resist. A devouring fire wanders in the depths of my lungs and feeds on all my limbs. And Eurystheus lives and thrives! And are there still men who can believe the gods exist?"
And then, racked with pain, he ranges over high Oeta, no differently than a bull that carries the hunting-spears fixed in its body while the man who threw them flees. Often you might have seen him groaning, often bellowing, often trying to tear off the whole robe, and leveling trees, and raging at the mountains, or stretching his arms toward his father's sky. Look — he spies Lichas, trembling, hidden in a hollow rock; and as his pain gathered all its fury, he cried, "Was it you, Lichas, who brought this deadly gift? Will you be the cause of my death?" The man trembles, pales in terror, and timidly stammers out excuses. As he speaks, reaching to clasp the hero's knees, Hercules seizes him, and, whirling him three and four times, hurls him into the Euboean waves harder than a siege-engine could. Hanging in the air, he hardened; as they say showers freeze in cold winds and turn to snow, and the whirling snow packs soft and rounds into thick hail, so, thrown through the void by those strong arms, drained of blood by fear and with no moisture left in him, he was turned — the old ages tell — into hard flint. Even now a low rock juts from the deep Euboean sea and keeps the traces of a human shape, which sailors fear to tread, as if it could feel, and they call it Lichas.
But you, famous child of Jupiter, cut down the trees that lofty Oeta bore, built them into a pyre, and bade the son of Poeas take the bow and the roomy quiver and the arrows that would visit the Trojan realm again; by his hand the flame was set beneath. And while the heaped wood is caught by the greedy fires, you spread the Nemean lion's skin over the top of the pile and lay down with your neck on your club, no other look on your face than a banqueter's reclining among full cups, wreathed in garlands.
And now the flames, gathering and spreading on every side, roared, and reached the untroubled limbs of the man who scorned them. The gods feared for the earth's champion; and Jupiter, son of Saturn — for he saw it — addressed them with joyful face: "This fear of yours is my delight, gods of heaven, and with all my heart I gladly congratulate myself that I am called the ruler and father of a grateful people, and that my offspring too is safe in your goodwill. For though this is owed to his own mighty deeds, still I am bound by it as well. But do not let your loyal hearts quail with empty fear: scorn the flames of Oeta! He who has conquered all will conquer the fires you see; he will feel the flame's power only in the part he got from his mother. What he drew from me is eternal, exempt and immune from death, to be tamed by no fire. That part, done with earth, I will receive into the heavenly regions, and I trust this act of mine will please all the gods. Yet if anyone — anyone — should grieve that Hercules is a god and grudge him the honor, still he shall know Hercules deserves it, and, unwilling, shall approve." The gods agreed; and even the royal wife seemed to bear the rest of his words with no hard look — only the last with a hard look, taking it ill that she was so plainly named.
Meanwhile whatever the flame could destroy, Vulcan had consumed; and no recognizable shape of Hercules remained, nothing drawn from his mother's likeness — only the marks of Jupiter were kept. And as a fresh serpent, sloughing old age with its skin, grows lush and gleams in new scales, so, when the Tirynthian shed his mortal limbs, he thrived in his better part, and began to look greater and to become awful in august dignity. Him the all-powerful Father, caught up among the hollow clouds, bore in his four-horse chariot up into the shining stars. Atlas felt the weight.
Even now Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus, had not laid aside his wrath, and, fierce, worked out his father-hatred on the offspring. But the Argive Alcmena, worn with long cares for her son, had Iole to pour out her old woman's laments to, to tell of her son's deeds attested by the whole world, and of her own misfortunes. At Hercules' command Hyllus had taken Iole into his bed and heart, and filled her womb with noble seed. To her Alcmena thus began:
"May the gods at least be kind to you, and cut short the long hours when, your time come, you call on Ilithyia, who watches over women in the fear of labor — the goddess whom Juno's favor made pitiless to me. For when the birth-hour of Hercules, born for so many toils, was near, and the tenth sign of the Zodiac was weighed down with the great star, the burden stretched my womb; and what I carried was so great you could easily call Jupiter the father of the hidden weight. I could bear the pains no longer. Even now, as I speak, a cold shudder takes my limbs, and part of the pain is remembering it. Tortured seven nights and as many days, worn out with agony, arms stretched to heaven, I called with loud cries on Lucina and the two Nixi. She came, indeed — but bought beforehand, ready to give my life to vengeful Juno. When she heard my groans, she sat on that altar before the door, and, her right knee pressed on her left, her fingers laced like a comb, she held back the birth; she said charms too, in a low voice, and the charms held back the birth already begun. I strained, and in my frenzy hurled vain reproaches at ungrateful Jupiter, and longed to die, and complained in words that would have moved hard stones. The women of Thebes were with me, made their vows, and cheered me in my pain.
"There was one of my maids, of the common people, Galanthis, golden-haired, quick to do my bidding, dear for her good service. She sensed that something was being worked by hostile Juno; and, going often in and out the door, she saw the goddess sitting on the altar, arms locked on her knees by the fingers, and she said, 'Whoever you are, wish my mistress joy: the Argive Alcmena is delivered; her prayer is won, the child is born.' The goddess of the womb leaped up, and, startled, loosed her joined hands — and I, on the loosing of those bonds, was delivered. They say Galanthis laughed at fooling the goddess. As she laughed, the cruel goddess dragged her by the very hair, and, when she tried to lift her body from the earth, stopped her, and changed her arms to forefeet. Her old quickness stays, and her back has not lost its color; but her shape is not what it was. Because she helped me in labor with a lying mouth, she gives birth from the mouth, and, as before, she haunts my house."
She spoke, and, moved by the memory of her old servant, she sighed. Her daughter-in-law spoke to her as she grieved: "Yet the stolen shape of one no kin to your blood moves you, mother. What if I told you the strange fate of my own sister? — though tears and grief hinder me and forbid me to speak. Dryope, the most beautiful of the Oechalian girls, was her mother's only child (my father had me by another wife). Robbed of her virginity, having suffered force from the god who owns Delphi and Delos, she was married by Andraemon, who was thought lucky in his wife.
"There is a lake whose shelving edge makes the shape of a sloping shore, with myrtle-groves crowning the top. Here Dryope came, knowing nothing of her fate, and — that you may be angrier at her lot — bringing garlands for the nymphs. On her breast she carried her son, not yet a year old, a sweet burden, feeding him with the help of her warm milk. Not far from the lake a water-lotus was blooming, mimicking the Tyrian dye, in hope of berries to come. Dryope had picked some of its flowers to give her child as toys, and I was about to do the same — for I was there — when I saw drops of blood fall from the blossom and the boughs shiver with a trembling dread. For, as the country folk now say too late, the nymph Lotis, fleeing the lust of Priapus, had passed her changed features into this plant, her name still kept.
"My sister did not know it. When, in her alarm, she tried to draw back and leave, having prayed to the nymphs, her feet were held fast by a root. She fights to tear them up, but moves nothing except her upper parts. From below the bark climbs slowly and by degrees covers all her groin. When she saw it, and made to tear her hair, she filled her hand with leaves — leaves were covering all her head. But the boy Amphissos — for his grandfather Eurytus gave him that name — felt his mother's breast go hard, and the milky stream no longer followed his sucking. I watched your cruel fate, sister, and could give you no help; and, as long as I could, I hugged the rising trunk and branches and held them back, and — I confess it — I longed to be hidden under the same bark. Look — her husband Andraemon and her most wretched father come, asking for Dryope; and when they ask for Dryope I show them the lotus. They kiss the wood still warm with life, and, flung down, cling to the roots of their own tree. Now my dear sister had nothing but her face that was not tree. Tears drop on the leaves made from her changed body; and, while she can, while her mouth still gives passage to her voice, she pours out into the air such laments as these:
"'If any faith is owed the wretched, I swear by the gods I did not deserve this cruelty. I am punished without a crime. I have lived in innocence; if I lie, may I dry up and lose the leaves I bear, and be cut down with axes and burned. But take this infant from his mother's branches and give him to a nurse; and often, beneath my tree, let him drink milk, and beneath my tree let him play; and when he can speak, let him greet his mother, and say in sorrow, "My mother is hidden in this trunk." Yet let him fear the ponds, and pick no flowers from the trees, and think all shrubs are the bodies of goddesses. Farewell, dear husband; and you, sister; and you, father — if there is any love in you, guard my branches from the sharp pruning-knife and the bite of the flocks. And since I may not bend down to you, reach your limbs up here and come for my kisses while I can still be touched, and lift up my little son. I can say no more. Already the soft bark creeps up my white neck, and I am buried at the top of my head. Take your hands from my eyes: without your help, let the closing bark cover my dying sight.' At the same moment her mouth ceased to speak and to be; and long after the body was changed, the new-made branches stayed warm."
And while Iole was telling her sister's wretched fate, and while Alcmena was drying the daughter of Eurytus's tears with her fingers — herself weeping too — a new event hushed all their sorrow: for Iolaüs stood at the high threshold, almost a boy again, his cheeks veiled in faint down, his face changed back to the first years of manhood. Hebe, the daughter of Juno, had granted him this favor, won over by her husband's pleas. As she was about to swear she would grant such gifts to no one after him, Themis stopped her: "For now," she said, "Thebes stirs up civil war, and Capaneus cannot be beaten except by Jupiter, and the two brothers will fall equal in their wounds, and the seer Amphiaraüs, the earth opening, will see his own ghosts while still alive; and a son, avenging one parent by killing the other, will be dutiful and wicked in the same act, and, driven mad by his miseries, robbed of reason and of home, will be hounded by the faces of the Furies and his mother's ghost, until his wife demands of him the fatal gold, and the Phegeian sword drains his kinsman's side. Then at last Callirhoë, the daughter of Acheloüs, will beg mighty Jupiter as a suppliant for these years of youth for her infant sons, and not let the avenger's death go unavenged. Jupiter, moved for them, will bestow the gift of his own stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, and make them men in their childhood years."
When Themis, foreknowing the future, had spoken this with prophetic voice, the gods above murmured in mixed talk, and the complaint was, why the same gifts might not be granted by others. Aurora, the daughter of Pallas, complained of her husband's aged years; gentle Ceres complained that Iasion was going gray; Vulcan asked a second life for Erichthonius; concern for the future touched Venus too, and she bargained to renew the years of Anchises.
Every god has some favorite, and the unruly quarrel grew with their partiality, until Jupiter opened his lips and said: "O, if you have any respect for me, where are you rushing? Does any one of you think himself so powerful as to overcome even the Fates? By the Fates has Iolaüs come back to the years he has spent; by the Fates must the sons of Callirhoë grow young — not by ambition or by force of arms. And you too — that you may bear this with a better mind — even me the Fates govern. Could I change them, no late years would bend my Aeacus; Rhadamanthus would keep the everlasting flower of youth, and my Minos with him, who now is despised for the grievous weight of old age and no longer reigns with the dignity he once had."
The words of Jupiter moved the gods; and no one kept complaining when they saw Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Minos worn with years — Minos, who in his prime had terrified great nations with his very name, but was now feeble, and feared Miletus, the son of Deione, proud in the strength of youth and in Apollo his father. And though Minos believed Miletus was reaching for his throne, still he did not dare drive him from his native home. Of your own accord, Miletus, you fled, and in a swift ship measured the Aegean waters, and in the land of Asia founded a city that bears its founder's name. Here, as she followed the windings of her father's bank, Cyanee, the daughter of Maeander that so often returns to the same place, a woman of surpassing beauty, came to know you, and bore twin children, Byblis and her brother Caunus.
Byblis is a warning that girls should love only what the law allows: Byblis, seized with passion for her brother, the descendant of Apollo, loved him not as a sister loves a brother, and not as she ought. At first she understands nothing of the flame, and thinks it no fault to give him so many kisses, to throw her arms round her brother's neck; and long she is fooled by this false likeness of natural love. Little by little the affection slips awry; she comes dressed up to see her brother, is too anxious to look beautiful, and, if any woman there is lovelier, envies her. But she is not yet clear to herself, and under that fire she forms no wish — yet inwardly she burns. Already she calls him her darling; already she hates the words of kinship; already she would rather he call her Byblis than sister.
Still, awake, she does not dare let shameful hopes into her mind; but loosened in soft sleep she often sees what she loves — she even seems to embrace her brother, and she blushes, though she lies buried in sleep. Sleep goes; long she is silent, calling back the vision of her rest, and speaks with a wavering mind:
"Wretched me! What does this vision of the silent night mean? How I would not have it come true! Why have I dreamed this dream? He is beautiful, even to unfriendly eyes; he pleases me, and, were he not my brother, I could love him, and he would be worthy of me. But it is my ruin that I am his sister. Only let me try, awake, to do no such thing — but let sleep return often with the same shape! There is no witness in sleep, and the pleasure it copies is not withheld. O Venus and winged Cupid with your tender mother, what joys I have known! What plain, palpable delight has touched me! How I lay dissolved to the marrow! How sweet to remember it — though that pleasure was brief, and the night sped on, jealous of what I had begun. Oh, if I could be joined to you under a changed name, how good a daughter-in-law I could be, Caunus, to your father; how good a son-in-law you could be, Caunus, to mine! Would the gods grant that all were shared between us — all but our ancestors! I could wish you were the nobler-born. So then, most beautiful one, you will make some woman I do not know a mother; but to me, who have wretchedly drawn the same parents as you, you will be nothing but a brother. The one tie we have is the one that bars all the rest.
"What then do my visions mean? What weight have dreams — do dreams have any weight? The gods fare better: the gods have married their own sisters. So Saturn wed Ops, his kin by blood; Ocean wed Tethys, and the ruler of Olympus, Juno. The gods above have their own laws! Why do I try to measure the ways of heaven by human rule, when the two are so different? Either this forbidden fire will be driven from my heart — or, if I cannot do that, I pray I may die first, and be laid out dead on my bed, and my brother kiss me as I lie. And yet the thing needs the will of two. Suppose it pleases me: to him it will seem a crime. And yet the sons of Aeolus did not shrink from their sisters' beds — but how do I know of them? Why have I furnished myself with such precedents? Where am I carried? Away, far from here, you unclean flames! Let my brother be loved by me only as a sister may. And yet — if he had first been seized with love of me, perhaps I could yield to his madness. So then, I, who would not have refused him had he asked, shall I ask myself? Can you speak it? Can you confess it? Love will force me — I can. Or if shame holds my lips, a secret letter shall confess the hidden fire."
This thought pleases her; this settles her wavering mind. She raises herself on her side, leaning on her left elbow, and says, "Let him see it — let me confess my mad love! Wretched me, where am I sliding? What flame is my mind kindling?" And, with trembling hand, she sets down her well-weighed words. Her right hand holds the iron pen, the other the blank wax. She begins, and hesitates; she writes and blames what she has written; she marks and deletes, alters, condemns, approves; and by turns she throws the tablet down and takes it up again. She does not know what she wants; whatever she seems about to do displeases her. In her face is boldness mixed with shame. She had written "sister"; then she chose to erase "sister" and cut such words as these into the smoothed wax:
"The health that she herself will never have unless you give it, your lover sends you. I am ashamed — ah, ashamed to speak my name; and if you ask what I desire, I could wish my case might be pleaded without a name, and that I not be known as Byblis until my hopes were sure. You might have had, as a sign of my wounded heart, my pallor, my wasting, my downcast looks, my eyes often wet, sighs with no plain cause, frequent embraces, and kisses that — if you happened to notice — could not be felt to be a sister's. Yet, though I bore a heavy wound in my soul, though a fiery madness was within, I did everything — the gods are my witnesses — to be cured at last; long, in my misery, I fought to escape the cruel weapon of Cupid, and endured more than you would think a girl could bear. Beaten, I am forced to confess my passion, and with timid prayers to beg your help. You alone can save, you alone destroy the one who loves you: choose which you will do. It is no enemy who begs this, but one who, though already most closely bound to you, longs to be bound closer still, tied by a nearer knot. Let old men know the ordinances, and ask what is lawful and wicked and right, and keep the balance of the laws. A love that dares all suits our years. What is allowed, we do not yet know, and we believe all things allowed, and follow the example of the great gods. No stern father, no regard for reputation, no fear will stop us — only let the cause of fear be gone. Under a brother's name we will hide our sweet stolen joys. I have the freedom to talk with you in private, and we give embraces and exchange kisses in the open. How little is it that is lacking! Pity one who confesses her love — who would not confess it, did not utmost passion compel — and do not earn a place as the cause written on my tomb."
The full wax fell short of her hand as it vainly traced such words, and the last line clung to the margin. At once she seals her own crime with the stamp of a signet, which she wets with tears, for the moisture had fled her tongue. In shame she called one of her servants and, coaxing the frightened man in timid tones, said, "Carry these, most faithful one, to my—" and, after a long pause, added, "brother." As she gave them, the tablets slipped from her hands and fell. She was shaken by the omen, but sent them still. The servant, finding a fit moment, went and delivered the hidden words. The young son of Maeander's line, seized with sudden anger, threw down the tablets he had taken when he had read part; and, barely holding his hands from the trembling servant's face, he said, "Flee while you can, you cursed pander to forbidden lust! — who, if your ruin would not drag my honor with it, would have paid me with your death." The man fled in terror and reported to his mistress the fierce words of Caunus.
You turn pale, Byblis, hearing of the refusal, and your body, gripped by an icy chill, is struck with dread; yet when your senses return, so does your frenzy, and your tongue barely gives such words as these to the beaten air: "And I deserve it! For why, rashly, did I make this wound known? Why did I so quickly trust to a hasty letter words that should have been hidden? I should first have felt out the leanings of his mind with ambiguous speech. To be sure the wind would follow as I went, I should have watched, with only part of my sail, what breeze it was, and run over a safe sea; and now I have filled my canvas with untried winds. So I am driven upon the rocks, and, capsized, buried under the whole ocean, and my sails have no way back. And was I not forbidden by sure omens to indulge my love, when the wax fell as I bade him carry it, and made my hopes drop to the ground? Should not the day have been changed, or my whole intent — rather, the day? The god himself was warning me, giving sure signs, had I not been out of my mind. And I should have spoken myself, not trusted to wax, and shown my madness in person. He would have seen my tears, seen the face of the woman who loved him; I could have said more than the letter held. I could have thrown my arms round his unwilling neck; and, if refused, could have seemed at the point of death, and clasped his feet, and, flung down, begged for my life. I would have done all this; and if each thing alone could not bend his hard heart, all together might have. Perhaps, too, there is some fault in the servant I sent: he did not approach him well, or choose, I think, a fit time, or seek an idle hour and a free mind. This has undone me. For he was not born of a tigress, nor does he carry hard flint or solid iron or adamant in his breast, nor did he suck a lioness's milk. He will be won! He must be tried again, and I will take no weariness of what I have begun, so long as this breath stays in me. For the best thing — could I recall what is done — was not to have begun; the next best is to press on with what is begun. Even if I gave up my desire, he cannot ever forget that I dared it; and, because I stopped, I will seem to have wanted it lightly, or even to have been testing him, to have solicited him meaning to betray — or at least be thought conquered not by this god who burns me so, but by mere lust. In any case I can no longer be free of a shameful deed: I have written, I have solicited; my will is defiled. Though I add nothing more, I cannot be called innocent. What remains adds much to my desire, little to my guilt."
So she says; and — so great is the discord of her wavering mind — though she is loath to try him, she longs to try him, and, past all bounds, poor woman, lays herself open to be refused again and again. At last, when there is no end to it, he flees his country and the crime, and founds a new city in a foreign land.
Then indeed, they say, the daughter of Miletus wholly lost her mind in grief; then she tore the robe from her breast and beat her arms in frenzy. Now she raves openly, confessing her hope of an unlawful union, and, leaving her country and her hated home, follows the tracks of her fleeing brother. As the Thracian Bacchants, roused by your thyrsus, son of Semele, keep your festivals each third year, so the women of Bubasus saw Byblis howling across the wide fields. Leaving them, she wandered through the land of the Carians, the warlike Leleges, and Lycia; and now she had left behind Cragos and Limyre and the waters of the Xanthus, and the ridge where the Chimaera had fire in its middle, the breast and face of a lioness, the tail of a serpent. The woods gave out at last, when you, Byblis, worn with the chase, fall down, and, your hair on the hard ground, lie silent and press the fallen leaves with your face. Often the Leleges' nymphs try to lift her in their tender arms; often they urge her to master her passion, and bring comfort to a mind that cannot hear. Silent Byblis lies, tearing the green herbs with her nails and watering the grass with her stream of tears. Beneath these tears, they say, the Naiads set a channel that could never run dry — for what greater gift had they to give? At once, as drops ooze from the cut bark of the pitch-pine, or sticky bitumen wells from the heavy earth, or as water frozen with cold melts in the sun at the coming of the gentle west wind, so Byblis, the descendant of Apollo, consumed by her own tears, turns into a fountain, which even now in those valleys bears its mistress's name, and flows beneath a dark oak.
The fame of this new marvel might have filled the hundred cities of Crete, had Crete not lately borne a nearer wonder of her own, in the change of Iphis.
For once the land of Phaestus, next to the kingdom of Knossos, produced a man of no famous name, Ligdus, of the free-born common folk; his means no greater than his rank, but his life and honor untainted. When his wife's delivery was near, he warned her ears with these words: "Two things I pray for: that you be eased with the least pain, and that you bear a boy. The other lot is a heavier trouble, and fortune has denied us the means. What I abhor — if by chance a girl should be born at your delivery — I command it against my will; forgive me, natural love — let it be put to death." He spoke, and both bathed their faces with streaming tears — he who commanded, and she to whom the command was given. But still Telethusa pressed her husband with fruitless prayers not to shut his hope in so narrow a bound. Ligdus's mind was fixed.
And now she could scarcely carry her womb, heavy with its ripe burden, when in the middle of the night, in a vision of sleep, the daughter of Inachus, attended by her train of holy rites, stood, or seemed to stand, before her bed. On her brow were the horns of the moon, and ears of corn bright with shining gold, and the royal splendor of the diadem; with her were barking Anubis, and holy Bubastis, and the dappled Apis, and the god who hushes his voice and bids silence with a finger; there were the sistrums, and Osiris never sought enough, and the foreign serpent full of sleep-bringing venom. Then, as though Telethusa were roused from sleep and seeing all clearly, the goddess spoke: "O Telethusa, one of my worshipers, lay down your grievous cares, and cheat your husband's command. Do not hesitate, when Lucina has eased you with the birth, to raise whatever it shall be. I am a helping goddess, and when called on I bring aid; you shall not complain that you worshiped an ungrateful power." She counseled her, and withdrew from the chamber. The Cretan woman rose from her bed rejoicing, and, lifting her pure hands to the stars as a suppliant, prayed that her vision might prove true.
When her pains grew and the burden forced itself into the light, and a girl was born to the father who did not know, the mother ordered the child raised, pretending it a boy; and the thing was believed — no one but the nurse knew the truth. The father paid his vows and gave the child its grandfather's name: the grandfather had been Iphis. The mother was glad of the name, for it belonged to both sexes, and by it she would deceive no one. From then the pious lie lay hidden. The child was dressed as a boy; and its face was such that, whether you gave it to a girl or a boy, either would be lovely.
Meanwhile the thirteenth year had come, when your father, Iphis, betrothed to you golden-haired Ianthe, most praised of the girls of Phaestus for her beauty's dower, the daughter of Dictaean Telestes. Their age was equal, their beauty equal; and they had their first lessons, the rudiments of their years, from the same teachers. From this, love touched the untried hearts of both and gave each an equal wound — but how unequal their hopes! Ianthe awaits the wedding and the promised time of the torches, and believes that the one she thinks a man will be her husband. Iphis loves one she despairs of ever enjoying, and this very thing feeds her flame; a maid, she burns for a maid. Scarcely holding back her tears, she says: "What end awaits me, held by a passion no one has known, monstrous and strange? If the gods wished to spare me, they should have spared me; if not, and they wished to destroy me, they should at least have given me a natural affliction, one common to my kind. Cow does not burn for cow, nor mare for mares; the ram burns for the ewe, the doe follows her stag. So too the birds mate; and among all the animals no female is seized with desire for a female. Would that I did not exist! Yet, so that Crete might breed every kind of monster, the daughter of the Sun loved a bull — a female, yes, a male. My love, if I confess the truth, is madder than hers. Still she followed the hope of union; still, by a trick, in the shape of a cow, she gave herself to the bull, and there was a lover to be deceived. Though the world's whole ingenuity gathered here, though Daedalus flew back on his waxen wings, what could he do? Could he, by his clever arts, make me a boy from a girl? Could he change you, Ianthe?
"Why not steady your mind, Iphis, and gather yourself, and shake off this foolish, senseless fire? See what you were born — unless you fool yourself as well — and seek what is allowed, and love what, as a woman, you should. It is hope that makes, hope that feeds love; this the very case takes from you. No guard keeps you from her dear embrace, no watchful husband's care, no father's harshness; she herself does not refuse you when you ask — and yet she cannot be yours; and, though all were done, you could not be happy, though gods and men should labor for you. Even now no part of my prayers is empty; the kind gods have given what they could, and what I wish, my father wishes, and she herself, and my father-in-law to be. But nature, more powerful than all these, wills it not — she alone harms me. Look, the longed-for time comes; the wedding-day is here, and Ianthe will soon be mine — and never come to me. In the midst of water I shall thirst. Why, Juno, guardian of weddings, and why, Hymenaeus, do you come to these rites, where there is no man to marry the bride, where we are two women wed?" With that she closed her lips. And no less the other girl burns, and prays you, Hymenaeus, to come quickly.
Telethusa, dreading the very thing Ianthe desires, now puts off the day, now draws out delay with a feigned illness, often pleads omens and visions for excuse. But now she had used up all her store of fictions; the long-delayed wedding-day was upon them, and only one day remained. Then she takes the fillets from her own head and her daughter's, and, embracing the altar with loosened hair, cries: "O Isis, who dwell in Paraetonium and the Mareotic fields and Pharos, and the Nile parted into its seven horns — bring help, I beg, and heal our fear! You, goddess, you and these your emblems I once saw, and knew them all — your attendants, your torches, the sound of the sistrums — and I marked your commands in a mindful heart. That this girl sees the light, that I am not punished — this is your counsel and your gift. Pity us both, and aid us with your help." Tears followed her words. The goddess seemed to move — and did move — her altar; the temple doors shook; her moon-like horns shone, and the ringing sistrum sounded. Not free of care, but glad of the good omen, the mother left the temple; and Iphis followed her as she went, with a longer stride than before. The fairness does not stay in her face; her strength grows, her features sharpen, her loose hair is shorter, and there is more vigor in her than she had as a girl. For you who were a girl just now are a boy! Bring gifts to the temple, and rejoice with no timid faith! They bring their gifts to the temple, and add an inscription too, a short line that ran:
Iphis, a boy, pays the gifts that as a girl he vowed.
The next dawn had opened the wide world with its rays, when Venus and Juno and Hymenaeus came to the wedding fires, and the boy Iphis won his own Ianthe.
From there, wrapped in his saffron cloak, Hymenaeus passed through the measureless air and made for the land of the Ciconians, called — in vain — by the voice of Orpheus. He came, indeed, but he brought no solemn words, no glad face, no lucky omen. The very torch he held kept hissing with a tearful smoke, and, for all his shaking, found no flame. The outcome was heavier than the omen: for the new bride, wandering through the grass with her train of Naiads, fell dead, a serpent's fang in her ankle.
When the bard of Rhodope had wept for her enough in the upper air, he dared, so as to try the shades below as well, to go down to the Styx by the gate of Taenarus; and through the weightless peoples and the ghosts that had had their burial he came to Persephone and to the lord of the shades who holds that joyless realm, and, striking his strings in tune with his words, he sang:
"O powers of the world set beneath the earth, to which we all fall back, all of us who are born to die — if I may, and if you let me speak the truth, laying aside the winding tricks of a false tongue: I have not come down here to see dark Tartarus, nor to bind the triple throat of the Medusan monster, shaggy with snakes. My wife is the reason of my journey — a viper, trodden underfoot, poured its poison into her and cut short her growing years. I wished to be able to bear it, and I will not deny that I tried; but Love has won. That god is well known in the world above; whether he is known here too, I doubt — and yet I think that even here he is, and, if the tale of the old rape is not a lie, Love joined you two as well. By these places full of dread, by this vast Chaos, by the silence of these boundless realms, I beg you: unravel the too-swift fate of Eurydice. To you we all belong; we linger a little while above, then, sooner or later, hurry to this one home. This way we all are bound; this is our last house; you hold the longest reign over the human race. She too, when in due time she has lived out her rightful years, will fall under your law. I ask her use as a gift; and if the Fates deny this favor for my wife, I am resolved not to return — take your joy in the death of us both."
As he spoke this, striking the strings to his words, the bloodless spirits wept. Tantalus did not snatch at the fleeing water; Ixion's wheel stood still in wonder; the birds did not tear at the liver of Tityus; the daughters of Belus paused at their urns; and you, Sisyphus, sat down on your stone. Then, for the first time — so the story goes — the cheeks of the Furies, mastered by the song, were wet with tears; and neither the royal wife nor the ruler of the depths could bear to refuse him, and they called Eurydice. She was among the newly come shades, and came forward with a slow step from her wound. The Rhodopeian hero took her, and with her this condition: that he not turn his eyes back until he had left the vales of Avernus — or the gift would be void.
Up the sloping path they climb through the mute silence, steep, dark, thick with black fog. And now they were not far from the edge of the upper earth, when he, in love, afraid she might fail and hungry to see her, turned his eyes — and at once she slipped back. Reaching out her arms, straining to be held and to hold him, the poor woman caught nothing but the yielding air. And now, dying a second time, she made no complaint of her husband — for what could she complain of but that she was loved? She spoke one last "Farewell," which he could barely catch, and was swept back again to the same place.
No otherwise was Orpheus stunned at his wife's double death than the man who, trembling, saw the three necks of the dog, the middle one in chains, and whom fear did not leave before his old nature did, as stone spread over his body; or than Olenus, who took another's guilt upon himself and chose to seem the guilty one, and than you, unhappy Lethaea, so sure of your beauty — hearts once most closely joined, now stones that watery Ida holds. He begged, and longed in vain to cross again, but the ferryman drove him off. Still, for seven days he sat squalid on the bank, without the gifts of Ceres; care and grief of mind and tears were his food. Crying that the gods of Erebus were cruel, he withdrew to high Rhodope and to Haemus, battered by the north winds.
Three times the sun had ended the year bounded by the ocean's Fishes, and Orpheus had shunned all love of women, whether because it had gone so badly for him, or because he had given his word; yet many women burned to join themselves to the bard, and many grieved to be refused. He was even the first to teach the people of Thrace to turn their love to tender boys, and to pluck the brief spring and the first flowers of their youth this side of manhood.
There was a hill, and on the hill a level stretch of open ground, which the blades of grass made green; the place lacked shade. When the god-born bard sat down there and struck his sounding strings, a shade came over the spot. The tree of Chaonia was not missing, nor the grove of the Heliades, nor the tall-branched winter-oak, nor the soft lindens, nor the beech, nor the unwed laurel, nor the brittle hazels, nor the ash good for spears, nor the knotless fir, nor the holm bent under its acorns, nor the friendly plane, nor the maple of many colors, nor the willows that grow by rivers, and the water-lotus, and the evergreen box, and the slender tamarisks, and the two-colored myrtle, and the tine with its dark-blue berries. You too, ivy of the winding foot, came, and with you the tendriled vines and the elms clothed in vines, the mountain-ash and the pitch-pines, the arbutus loaded with its blushing fruit, the pliant palm, the victor's prize, and the pine with its tufted top bristling — dear to the Mother of the Gods, since for her sake Cybele's Attis put off the man and hardened into that trunk.
Among this throng was the cypress, shaped like a cone — now a tree, but once a boy, beloved of the god who fits the lyre and the bow alike with strings. For there was a great stag, sacred to the nymphs who hold the fields of Carthaea, that gave a wide shade to its own head with its far-spreading antlers. His horns shone with gold; a jeweled collar hung from his smooth round neck down to his shoulders; a silver disc, tied with little straps, played on his brow; and matching pendants of bronze gleamed on his two ears about his hollow temples. Free of fear, his natural shyness laid aside, he used to haunt the houses and offer his neck to be stroked by any hands, even strangers'. But above all others he was dear to you, Cyparissus, most beautiful of the people of Cea. You led the stag to fresh pasture and to the water of the clear spring; now you wove flowers of many colors through his horns, now, seated on his back like a rider, you steered his gentle mouth this way and that with a purple bridle.
It was summer, the middle of the day, and the curving arms of the shore-loving Crab glowed with the sun's heat. The stag, weary, had laid his body on the grassy ground and was drinking the cool of a tree's shade. Without meaning to, the boy Cyparissus pierced him with his sharp javelin; and when he saw him dying of the cruel wound, he resolved to die himself. What comfort did Phoebus not offer, urging him to grieve in measure, and no more than the loss deserved! Still the boy groaned, and asked this last gift of the gods: to mourn forever. And now, his blood drained by endless weeping, his limbs began to turn green, and the hair that lately hung over his snow-white brow became a bristling bush, and, stiffening, pointed to the starry sky with a tapering top. The god groaned and, grieving, said: "You will be mourned by me, and you will mourn for others, and stand by those who sorrow."
Such a wood the bard had drawn about him, and he sat in the midst of a gathering of wild beasts and a crowd of birds. When he had tried the strings enough with his thumb and heard that the different tones, though they sounded apart, still chimed together, he lifted his voice in this song:
From Jove, my mother Muse — all things bow to the reign of Jove — set my song moving! Often before I have sung the power of Jove; in a heavier strain I sang the Giants and the victorious bolts scattered over the Phlegraean plains. Now I need a lighter lyre: let me sing of boys the gods have loved, and of girls struck by forbidden fires who earned punishment for their lust.
The king of the gods once burned with love for Phrygian Ganymede, and something was found that Jupiter would rather be than what he was. Yet he stooped to turn himself into no bird but the one that could carry his bolts. Without delay, beating the air on borrowed wings, he snatched away the boy of Ilium — who even now mixes his cups and, though Juno is unwilling, serves Jove his nectar.
You too, descendant of Amyclas, Phoebus would have set in the sky, if the grim Fates had given him time to set you there. Still, so far as may be, you are immortal; and as often as spring drives off winter, and the Ram follows the watery Fish, so often you rise and bloom on the green turf. My father loved you beyond all others, and Delphi at the center of the earth went without its guardian god while he haunted the Eurotas and unwalled Sparta; his lyre and his arrows were held in no honor. Forgetting himself, he did not refuse to carry the nets, to hold the dogs, to go as a companion over the ridges of the harsh mountains; and by long habit he fed his flame.
Now Titan stood almost midway between the coming and the gone night, an equal distance from both, when they stripped their bodies and shone with the juice of the rich olive and began the game of the broad discus. Phoebus first sent it, well poised, into the airy breeze, and split the facing clouds with its weight. After a long while the heavy mass fell to the solid ground, showing skill joined with strength. At once, thoughtless and driven by eagerness for the sport, the boy of Taenarus hurried to lift the disc — but the hard ground bounced it back with a rebounding stroke into your face, Hyacinthus. The god went as pale as the boy, and caught up the sinking limbs, and now warms you, now stanches your sad wound, now checks the fleeing life with herbs pressed to it. His arts are no use; the wound was past healing. As when, in a well-watered garden, someone breaks off violets, or a stiff poppy, or lilies bristling with their yellow tongues, and, withered, they suddenly droop their heavy heads, and cannot hold themselves up, and look at the ground with their tops — so the dying face sinks, and, its strength gone, the neck is a burden to itself and leans on the shoulder.
"You are falling, son of Oebalus, cheated of your first youth," said Phoebus, "and I see your wound, my own crime. You are my grief and my guilt: my right hand must be charged with your death; I am the author of your dying. Yet what is my fault — unless to have played can be called a fault, unless to have loved can be called a fault? And oh, that I might die with you, or give my life for yours! But since we are held by the law of fate, you shall always be with me, and dwell on my remembering lips. My songs, my lyre struck by my hand, shall sound of you; and, a new flower, you shall copy my laments in your markings. The time will come, too, when a most valiant hero shall join his name to this flower, and it shall be read on the same petals."
While such things were told by Apollo's truthful lips, look — the blood that, spilled on the ground, had stained the grass, ceases to be blood, and a flower springs up, brighter than Tyrian purple, taking the shape lilies have, but for the color: theirs is silver, this is purple. This was not enough for Phoebus — for he was the author of the honor: he himself wrote his laments on the petals, and the flower bears the letters AI, AI inscribed, the mournful marks traced there. Nor is Sparta ashamed to have borne Hyacinthus; his honor lasts to this day, and the Hyacinthia comes round each year to be kept, with its solemn procession, in the manner of old.
But if you should ask Amathus, rich in ores, whether she would wish to have borne the Propoetides, she would say no — as she would to those whose brows were once rough with two horns, from which they took their name, the Cerastae. Before their doors stood an altar of Jupiter the Guest — a scene of horror: if some stranger had seen it stained with blood, he would have thought suckling calves had been killed there, and Amathusian sheep. It was guests who were slaughtered! Kindly Venus, offended at the wicked sacrifices, was making ready to abandon her own cities and the Ophiusian fields. "But how have my pleasant places, how have my cities sinned?" she said. "What crime is theirs? Let this impious race pay instead by exile, or death, or something between death and flight — and what can that be, but the punishment of a changed shape?" While she hesitates what to change them into, she turns her eyes to their horns, and is reminded that these may be left them; and she transforms their huge limbs into fierce bulls.
Yet the vile Propoetides dared to deny that Venus was a goddess. For that, through the goddess's anger, they are said to have been the first to sell their bodies and their good name; and when shame was gone and the blood of their faces had hardened, they were turned, by a small change, into flint.
Because Pygmalion had seen these women living out their lives in crime, offended by the many faults nature had given the female mind, he lived unmarried, without a wife, and long had no partner of his bed. Meanwhile, with wonderful skill he carved snow-white ivory and gave it a beauty no woman could be born with, and fell in love with his own work. The face was that of a real girl, one you would think alive, and, if modesty did not forbid, wishing to move: so well did the art hide its own art. Pygmalion marvels, and draws into his breast the fire of that pretended body. Often he lays his hands on the work to test whether it is flesh or ivory, and will not yet admit it is ivory. He gives it kisses, and thinks they are returned; he speaks to it, holds it, and believes his fingers sink into the limbs he touches, and fears a bruise may come on the pressed flesh. Now he uses soft words, now brings it gifts that please girls: shells and smooth pebbles, little birds and thousand-colored flowers, lilies, painted balls, and the amber tears of the Heliades fallen from the trees. He dresses its limbs too, puts gems on its fingers, a long necklace on its neck; light pearls hang from its ears, ribbons on its breast — all become it, and it seems no less lovely bare. He lays it on a couch dyed with Sidonian purple, calls it the companion of his bed, and rests its reclining neck on soft down, as if it could feel.
The festival day of Venus, kept most solemnly through all Cyprus, had come; heifers with snow-white necks, their curved horns tipped with gold, had fallen at the stroke; the incense smoked; when, his offering made, Pygmalion stood at the altar and shyly said, "If you gods can give all things, let my wife be, I pray" — not daring to say "the ivory maid" — "one like my ivory." Golden Venus, present at her own festival, understood what that prayer meant; and as a sign that the god was kind, three times the flame flared and drew a tongue of fire up through the air. When he came home, he sought the image of his girl, and, leaning on the couch, gave it kisses: it seemed warm. He puts his mouth to it again, feels its breast with his hands — the ivory softens at the touch, and, its hardness gone, yields to the fingers, gives way as Hymettian wax grows soft in the sun and, worked by the thumb, is bent into many shapes and made usable by the very handling. While he stands amazed, and doubtfully rejoices, and fears he is deceived, again and again the lover touches with his hand the object of his prayer. It was a body! The veins throb, tested by the thumb. Then indeed the Paphian hero pours out the fullest words to thank Venus, and at last presses his mouth on a mouth no longer false; and the girl felt the kisses given her, and blushed, and, lifting her timid eyes to the light, saw at once her lover and the sky. The goddess was present at the marriage she had made; and now, when the moon's horns had nine times been gathered to a full circle, the girl bore Paphos, from whom the island keeps its name.
Of him was born that Cinyras who, had he been childless, might have been counted among the happy. I will sing of dreadful things. Daughters, be far from here; parents, be far — or, if my songs charm your minds, do not believe me in this part, do not believe it happened; or, if you will believe it, believe as well in the punishment of the deed. If nature does let such a crime be seen to have been done, then I count this land lucky that it lies far from the regions that bred so great an outrage. Let the land of Panchaia be rich in balsam, and bear its cinnamon and its costmary and its incense sweated from the wood and its other flowers — so long as it bears myrrh too: the new tree was not worth so much. Cupid himself denies, Myrrha, that his arrows hurt you, and clears his torches of that charge; one of the three Sisters breathed on you with a Stygian brand and swollen vipers. To hate a parent is a crime; this love is a crime greater than hate.
On every side chosen nobles want you; from all the East the young men come to the contest for your bed. Choose one man out of them all, Myrrha — only let that one, out of them all, not be your father. She indeed feels her guilt and fights against her foul passion, and says to herself: "Where is my mind carrying me? What am I attempting? I beg you, gods, and natural love, and the sacred bonds of parents — forbid this crime, stop my wickedness, if indeed it is wicked. But they say natural affection does not condemn this love: the other animals couple without distinction; it is no shame for a heifer to bear her sire, a horse takes his own daughter to mate, the he-goat goes with the flocks he fathered, and the bird conceives by the one whose seed conceived her. Happy those to whom such things are allowed! Human care has made spiteful laws, and what nature permits, envious ordinances forbid. Yet there are said to be nations where mother is joined to son and daughter to father, and love grows greater by the doubled bond. Wretched me, that it was not my luck to be born there, and that I am wronged by the accident of place! But why do I dwell on this? Away, forbidden hopes! He is worthy to be loved — but as a father. So then, were I not the daughter of great Cinyras, I could lie with Cinyras. Now, because he is already mine, he is not mine, and my very nearness is my ruin: a stranger, I would be stronger. I would gladly go far from here and leave my country's borders, if only I might escape the crime; but a wicked fire holds me back as I go, so that I may look at Cinyras in the flesh, and touch him, and speak to him, and give him kisses, if nothing more is allowed. But can you hope for anything more, unnatural girl? Do you feel how many ties and names you are confusing? Will you be your mother's rival and your father's mistress? Will you be called your son's sister and your brother's mother? Will you not dread the Sisters with black snakes for hair, whom guilty minds see aiming their cruel torches at their eyes and faces? But you — while you have suffered no crime in body — do not conceive it in mind, and do not defile all-powerful nature's law with a forbidden bed. Suppose you wished it: the thing itself forbids you; he is good, and mindful of what is right — and oh, that the same madness were in him!"
She had spoken; but Cinyras, whom a worthy crowd of suitors puts in doubt what to do, asks the girl herself, running through their names, whose wife she would be. At first she is silent, and, fixed on her father's face, she burns and fills her eyes with warm dew. Cinyras, taking this for a virgin's fear, forbids her to weep, dries her cheeks, and gives her kisses. Myrrha is too glad of the kisses; and, asked what kind of husband she would have, she said, "One like you." He praised the answer he did not understand, and said, "Always be so loving." At the word "loving" the girl, conscious of her guilt, cast down her face.
It was midnight, and sleep had loosed the cares and bodies of mortals; but the daughter of Cinyras, wide awake, is devoured by an unquenched fire and turns over her mad longings. Now she despairs, now she wants to try; she is ashamed, and desires, and cannot find what to do. As a great tree, wounded by the axe, when the last stroke is left, is doubtful which way to fall and is feared on every side, so her mind, shaken by wound after wound, wavers this way and that and takes an impulse both ways; and no bound or rest is found for her love but death. Death pleases her. She rises, resolves to fit her neck in a noose; and, tying her girdle to the top of the doorpost, she said, "Farewell, dear Cinyras, and understand the cause of my death" — and set the band to her pale neck.
The murmur of her words, they say, reached the faithful ears of her nurse, keeping the threshold of her charge. The old woman rises, opens the door, and, seeing the tools of the death she had planned, cries out at the same moment, and beats herself, and tears her breast, and, snatching the band from her neck, rips it apart. Only then had she leisure to weep, to embrace her, to ask the cause of the noose. The girl is silent, as if dumb, and, unmoving, stares at the ground, and grieves that her slow attempt at death is caught. The old woman presses her, and, baring her gray hair and her empty breasts, begs her by her cradle and her first nourishment to trust her with whatever grieves her. The girl turns away from the asking and groans. The nurse is set on finding it out, and pledges not only faith: "Tell me," she says, "and let me help you: my old age is not idle. If it is a frenzy, I have one who can heal with charm and herbs; if someone has hurt you by a spell, you shall be cleansed by magic rite; if it is the gods' anger, that anger can be soothed by sacrifice. What else can I think? Surely your fortune and your house are safe and thriving: your mother and father are alive." At the word "father," Myrrha drew a sigh from the depth of her breast. Even now the nurse conceives no crime in her mind, yet senses it is some love; and, holding to her purpose, she begs her to tell, whatever it is, and lifts the weeping girl into her aged lap, and, so clasping her limbs in her weak arms, says, "I have understood — you are in love! And in this my care will serve you; your father shall never know." The girl sprang up in a frenzy from her lap, and, pressing her face into the bed, said, "Go, I beg, and spare my wretched shame!" And when the nurse pressed on, she said, "Go, or stop asking why I grieve. What you are laboring to know is a crime." The old woman shudders, and stretches out her hands, trembling with years and fear, and falls a suppliant before her nursling's feet; and now she coaxes, now, if she is not told, she frightens her, threatening to reveal the noose and the attempted death, and pledges her service if the love is confided. The girl lifted her head and filled the nurse's breast with bursting tears, and, often trying to confess, as often checked her voice, and hid her blushing face in her robe, and said, "O mother, happy in your husband!" — this much, and groaned. A cold shudder pierced the nurse's limbs and bones — for she understood — and the white hoariness stood bristling all over her head; and she added many words to drive off, if she could, so dreadful a love. But the girl knows she is not warned falsely; still she is resolved to die if she cannot have what she loves. "Live, then," the nurse says, "you shall have your—" and, not daring to say "father," fell silent, and confirmed her promise by a god.
The pious matrons were keeping the yearly festival of Ceres, when, their bodies clothed in snow-white robes, they offer garlands of corn-ears as the first fruits of the harvest, and for nine nights count the touch of a husband among forbidden things. Cenchreis, the king's wife, is in that company, at the secret rites. So, while his lawful wife's bed is empty, the nurse, wickedly diligent, finding Cinyras heavy with wine, tells him of a real love under a false name, and praises the girl's beauty. When he asks the maiden's age, she says, "The same as Myrrha's." Bidden to bring her, and back home, she says, "Rejoice, my child: we have won." The unhappy girl does not feel the joy through her whole heart; her foreboding breast is sad — and yet she is glad too: so great is the discord of her mind.
It was the hour when all things are silent, and Boötes had turned his wain with the pole slanting among the stars. She comes to her crime. The golden moon flees the sky; black clouds hide the lurking stars; the night is without its fires. You first, Icarus, cover your rising face, and you, Erigone, hallowed by holy love of your father. Three times she was called back by the omen of a stumbling foot; three times the funeral owl gave a warning with its deadly cry; yet she goes on, and the darkness and the black night lessen her shame. With her left hand she holds her nurse's, with the other she gropes the blind way. Now she touches the chamber's threshold, now opens the door, now is led inside — but her knees shook and gave beneath her, her color and her blood fled, and her courage left her as she went. The nearer she is to her crime, the more she dreads it; she repents her daring, and would wish she could turn back unknown. As she hesitates, the aged woman leads her by the hand and, bringing her to the high bed, delivers her up: "Take her, Cinyras," she said, "she is your own" — and joined the doomed bodies. The father takes his own flesh into the unclean bed, calms her virgin fears, and encourages her as she trembles. Perhaps, too, by reason of her age, he called her "daughter," and she called him "father," so that the fitting names should not be missing from the horror.
Full of her father, she left his chamber, carrying his unholy seed in her womb, bearing her conceived crime. The next night doubles the deed, nor is there an end in that; until at last Cinyras, eager after so many nights to know his lover, brought in a light and saw both the crime and his daughter. His words checked by grief, he tore his gleaming sword from its hanging sheath. Myrrha fled: saved from death by the dark and the gift of blind night, she wandered over the wide fields, left the palm-bearing Arabs and the Panchaean lands, and roamed through nine horns of the returning moon, until at last, weary, she rested in the Sabaean land; and scarcely could she carry the burden of her womb. Then, not knowing what to wish, between the fear of death and weariness of life, she framed this prayer: "O powers, if any of you are open to those who confess — I have deserved, and I do not refuse, a grim punishment; but, so that I may not defile the living by surviving, nor the dead by dying, drive me from both realms, and, changing me, deny me both life and death." Some power is open to those who confess: her last prayers at least found their gods. For the earth came over her legs as she spoke, and a root spread out slantwise through her bursting nails, a firm base for the tall trunk; her bones turn to hard wood, and, the marrow staying in the middle, her blood runs into sap, her arms into great branches, her fingers into small ones, her skin hardens into bark. And now the growing tree had bound tight her heavy womb, had covered her breast, and was making to close over her neck. She could not bear the delay, and, meeting the rising wood, she sank down and sank her face into the bark. Though she lost her old senses with her body, still she weeps, and warm drops run from the tree. There is honor even in her tears, and the myrrh that drips from the bark keeps its mistress's name, and will be unspoken of in no age.
But the child conceived in guilt had grown beneath the wood and was seeking a way to push out, having left his mother; the swollen belly bulges in the middle of the tree. The burden strains the mother, but the pains have no words of their own, and Lucina cannot be called by the voice of the one giving birth. Yet the tree is like a woman in labor, and, bending, gives frequent groans, and is wet with falling tears. Gentle Lucina stood by the aching boughs, laid on her hands, and spoke the words of childbirth: the tree splits into cracks and, through the cloven bark, gives back its living burden, and the boy cries; the Naiads laid him on soft grass and anointed him with his mother's tears. Even Envy would have praised his face; for such as the bodies of naked Cupids are painted in a picture, such was he — but, that their dress may make no difference, either give him, or take from them, the light quivers.
Winged time slips by unseen and deceives us, and nothing is swifter than the years. He, born of his own sister and his grandfather, so lately shut in a tree, so lately born, just now a most beautiful infant, is now a youth, now a man, now more beautiful than himself; now he pleases even Venus, and avenges his mother's fire. For, while the quiver-bearing boy was kissing his mother, he grazed her breast, unknowing, with a jutting arrow; the hurt goddess pushed her son away with her hand — the wound was driven deeper than it seemed, and had at first deceived even her. Taken with the beauty of the youth, she no longer cares for the shores of Cythera, nor seeks again sea-girt Paphos, or fishy Cnidos, or Amathus rich in ores; she stays away even from the sky — Adonis is preferred to the sky. Him she holds, him she keeps company; and she who was always used to indulge herself in the shade, and to improve her beauty by care of it, now wanders over ridges, through woods, over bushy rocks, her dress girt to the knee in Diana's fashion, and cheers on the dogs and hunts harmless quarry — the fleeing hares, or the high-antlered stag, or the does; she keeps away from the strong boars, and avoids the ravening wolves, the claw-armed bears, and the lions gorged with the slaughter of herds. You too she warns to fear these, Adonis, if warning could do any good, and says: "Be brave against those that flee; against the bold, boldness is not safe. Do not be rash at my peril, young man, and do not provoke the beasts nature has armed, lest your glory cost me dear. Neither your age nor your beauty, nor the things that have moved Venus, move lions and bristly boars and the eyes and hearts of wild beasts. Fierce boars carry lightning in their curved tusks; there is fury in the tawny lions and a boundless rage; and the whole race is hateful to me." When he asks the reason, she says, "I will tell you, and you will marvel at the strange result of an old fault. But this unaccustomed toil has tired me now, and look — a poplar invites us with its welcome shade, and the turf gives a couch: I should like to rest here with you" — and she rested — "on the ground," and pressed both the grass and himself, and, her neck reclined on the young man's breast, she spoke thus, mingling kisses among her words:
Perhaps you have heard how a certain girl outran the swiftest men in the contest of speed. That report was no idle tale — she did outrun them; nor could you have said whether she was more distinguished by the merit of her feet or the gift of her beauty. When she asked the oracle about a husband, the god said: "You have no need of a husband, Atalanta; flee the use of a husband. Yet you will not escape it, and, still living, you will lose yourself." Frightened by the god's answer, she lives unwed in the shady woods, and drives off the pressing crowd of suitors with a fierce condition: "I am not to be won unless first beaten in running. Race with me on foot: a wife and a wedding will be given to the swift; death is the price of the slow. Let that be the law of the contest." She was cruel indeed; but — so great is the power of beauty — a rash crowd of suitors came to that condition.
Hippomenes had sat as a spectator of the unfair race, and had said, "Is a wife sought by anyone through such perils?" — and had condemned the young men's excessive love. But when he saw her face, and her body with the clothing laid aside — such as mine is, or such as yours would be, Adonis, if you became a woman — he was stunned, and, raising his hands, said, "Forgive me, you whom I just now blamed! I did not yet know the prize you contended for." In praising her, he catches fire, and hopes that none of the young men may run faster than she, and fears it in his envy. "But why is the chance of this contest left untried by me?" he says. "The god himself helps the daring." While Hippomenes weighs this within himself, the girl flies on winged foot. Though she seemed to the Aonian youth to go no less swiftly than a Scythian arrow, still he marvels the more at her grace, and the very running makes her graceful. The breeze bears back the wings on her swift feet; her hair is tossed over her ivory shoulders, and the ribboned bands below her knees with their bright border; and over her girlish whiteness her body had drawn a blush, just as when a purple awning over a white hall tints it with a matching shade. While the stranger marks this, the last lap is run, and victorious Atalanta is crowned with the festival wreath. The beaten men groan and pay the penalty by the agreement.
Yet, not daunted by the young men's end, Hippomenes stood up in the midst and, fixing his eyes on the girl, said: "Why seek an easy fame by beating the sluggish? Match yourself with me! If fortune makes me the winner, you will not think it shame to be beaten by so great a man; for my father was Megareus of Onchestus, his grandfather Neptune, and I am the great-grandson of the king of the waters — nor is my worth less than my birth. Or if I am beaten, in beating Hippomenes you will have a great and memorable name." As he spoke, the daughter of Schoeneus looked on him with a soft face, and wavered whether she would rather be beaten or win, and said: "What god, an enemy to the beautiful, wants to destroy this youth, and bids him seek this marriage at the risk of his dear life? In my own judgment I am not worth so much. Nor am I moved by his beauty — though I could be moved by that too — but because he is still a boy; it is not himself that moves me, but his age. And is it not that he has courage, and a mind undismayed by death? And that he is counted fourth from the sea's own line? And that he loves me, and thinks marriage with me worth so much that he would die if hard fortune denied me to him? While you may, stranger, go, and leave this bloodstained wedding. A match with me is cruelly dangerous. No woman will be unwilling to marry you, and a wise girl might well desire you. But why do I care for you, when so many have already died? Let him look to it! Let him die, since he was not warned by the slaughter of so many suitors, and is driven to weariness of life. So he will die, then, because he wished to live with me, and suffer an undeserved death, the reward of his love? My victory will not bear the hatred of it. But it is no fault of mine! I wish you would give up — or, since you are mad, I wish you were swifter! But what a girlish look there is in his boyish face! Ah, poor Hippomenes, I wish you had never seen me! You were worthy to live. And if I had been luckier, and the grudging Fates had not denied me marriage, you are the one man I would have shared my bed with." So she said; and, untried and touched by love for the first time, not knowing what she does, she loves, and does not feel that she loves.
And now the people and her father demand the usual race, when Hippomenes, the descendant of Neptune, called on me with anxious voice: "I pray that Cytherea may favor my daring, and aid the love she has given me." A breeze, not unfriendly, carried the tender prayer to me; I was moved, I confess, and there was no long delay in giving aid. There is a field the natives call the Tamasenian, the choicest part of the Cyprian land, which the elders of old made holy to me and ordered added as an endowment to my temples. In the middle of it a tree shines, tawny of leaf, its branches rattling with tawny gold. Coming from there, by chance, I was carrying three golden apples I had picked in my hand; and, seen by none but him, I came to Hippomenes and showed him what use to make of them. The trumpets had given the signal, when each darted forward from the barrier and skimmed the surface of the sand with quick feet: you would think they could graze the sea with dry step, and run over the standing ears of white grain. Shouts and cheers give the youth heart, and the cries of those who call, "Now, now is the time to press on, Hippomenes! Hurry! Now use all your strength! Away with delay — you will win!" It is doubtful whether the hero of Megara or the daughter of Schoeneus was the gladder of these words. O how often, when she could have passed him, she slowed, and unwillingly left behind the face she had long gazed on! A dry, panting breath came from his tired mouth, and the goal was far off; then, at last, the son of Neptune threw one of the three fruits of the tree. The girl was amazed and, in her longing for the shining apple, turned aside from her course and picked up the rolling gold. Hippomenes passes her; the stands ring with applause. She makes up for her delay and the time lost with a swift run, and again leaves the youth behind. Slowed by the throw of a second apple, again she overtakes and passes the young man. The last stretch of the race remained. "Now," he said, "be with me, goddess who gave the gift!" — and, with a young man's throw, he flung the shining gold slantwise to the side of the field, where she would come back the slower. The girl seemed to doubt whether to fetch it; I made her take it up, and, when she had taken it, added weight to the apple, and hindered her both by the burden's heaviness and by the delay of reaching it. And, that my story may not be slower than the race itself — the girl was outrun; the winner led away his prize.
Was I not worthy, Adonis, that he should thank me and bring me the honor of incense? But, ungrateful, he gave me neither thanks nor incense. I was thrown into sudden anger; and, stung at being slighted, and lest I be despised in time to come, I guarded against it by an example, and roused myself against them both. They were passing a temple hidden in shady woods, which famous Echion had once built by vow to the Mother of the Gods; and the long journey urged them to rest there. There an untimely desire to embrace his wife seized Hippomenes, stirred by my power. Near the temple was a dim recess, like a cave, roofed with native pumice, holy by an ancient rite, where the priest had gathered many wooden images of the old gods. This he entered, and defiled the shrine with a forbidden shame. The sacred images turned away their eyes, and the tower-crowned Mother wondered whether to plunge the guilty in the Stygian stream. That seemed too light a penalty; so tawny manes cover their necks, so lately smooth; their fingers curve into claws; their shoulders become forelegs; all their weight passes into their chests; their tails sweep the surface of the sand. Their look has anger in it; instead of words they give growls; instead of chambers they haunt the woods; and, lions dreaded by others, they champ Cybele's bit with tamed jaws. These, my beloved, and with them every kind of beast that turns not its back in flight but its breast to the fight, avoid — lest your courage be the ruin of us both.
She warned him thus, and, yoking her swans, took her way through the air; but his courage stood against her warning. By chance his dogs, following a sure track, roused a boar, and, as it made to leave the wood, the son of Cinyras pierced it with a glancing stroke in the side. At once the fierce boar struck out the blood-stained hunting-spear with its curved snout, and pursued him as he trembled and sought a safe retreat, and buried its whole tusks in his groin, and stretched him dying on the tawny sand. Cytherea, borne in her light chariot through the middle air, had not yet come to Cyprus on her swans' wings; she knew the groan of the dying from afar and turned her white birds that way; and when, from the high sky, she saw him half dead, his body thrashing in its own blood, she leaped down, and tore both her robe and her hair, and beat her breast with unworthy hands, and, reproaching the Fates, said: "Yet all shall not be in your power. The memorial of my grief, Adonis, will last forever; and the yearly re-enactment of your death shall carry out an image of my mourning. But your blood shall be changed into a flower. Was it once allowed you, Persephone, to change a woman's limbs into fragrant mint — and shall the hero, the son of Cinyras, be a grudge against me if he is changed?" So saying, she sprinkled his blood with sweet-smelling nectar; and, touched by it, the blood swelled up, as a clear bubble is wont to rise in tawny mud; and no longer than a full hour's delay had passed when a flower sprang from the blood, its own color, such as the pomegranates bear that hide their seeds beneath a tough rind. Yet the enjoyment of it is short-lived; for the very winds that give it its name beat it down, since it clings poorly and falls by its own lightness.
While the Thracian bard was drawing the woods and the hearts of wild beasts and the following rocks with such a song, look — the women of the Ciconians, their raving breasts covered with the skins of beasts, spied Orpheus from a hilltop as he set his voice to the sounded strings. One of them, tossing her hair on the light breeze, cried, "See! see — here is the man who scorns us!" and hurled her spear at the singing mouth of Apollo's bard; wreathed with leaves at the tip, it made a mark without a wound. Another's weapon was a stone, which, thrown, was overcome in the very air by the harmony of his voice and lyre, and lay before his feet like a suppliant for so mad a daring. But the reckless warfare swells, all measure is gone, and frenzied Fury reigns. All their weapons would have been softened by his song — but the huge clamor, the Berecynthian pipe with its blaring horns, the tambourines, the clapping and the Bacchic howling drowned the sound of the lyre; and then at last the stones grew red with the bard's blood, for now he could not be heard.
First the Maenads seized the countless birds still spellbound by his singing voice, and the snakes, and the throng of beasts — the glory of Orpheus's audience; then with bloodied hands they turned on Orpheus, and flocked together as birds do when they see the bird of night wandering by day; and, as when a stag doomed to die in the morning arena is a prey to the dogs in the built-up amphitheater, they set upon the bard and hurled their thyrsi, green with leaves, never made for such use. Some throw clods, some branches torn from trees, some flung flints; and, so their fury should not lack weapons, by chance some oxen were turning the earth with the driven ploughshare, and not far off some brawny farmers were digging the hard fields, winning their harvest with much sweat. Seeing the frantic troop, they flee and leave the tools of their work: hoes and heavy rakes and long mattocks lie scattered through the empty fields. Snatching these, and tearing apart the oxen with their threatening horns, the women rush back to the bard's undoing; and, as he stretched out his hands and for the first time spoke words that did nothing, moving them not at all with his voice, the sacrilegious women killed him — and through that mouth, O Jupiter, heard by rocks and understood by the senses of wild beasts, his breath went out and passed away on the winds.
The mournful birds wept for you, Orpheus, the throng of beasts, the hard flints, the woods that had so often followed your song; the tree, shedding its leaves, mourned you, shorn of its hair. They say the rivers too swelled with their own tears, and the Naiads and Dryads wore dark mourning and loosened hair. His limbs lie in scattered places. His head and lyre you receive, Hebrus; and — a marvel — as they float down the middle of the stream, the lyre laments some sad thing, the lifeless tongue murmurs something sad, and the banks answer sadly. And now, borne out to sea, they leave their native river and reach the shore of Methymnaean Lesbos. Here a fierce serpent went for the head cast up on the foreign sand and the hair dripping with dew; but at last Phoebus came, and drove it off as it made to sting, and froze the serpent's open jaws to stone, hardening the gaping mouth just as it was.
His ghost sinks under the earth, and knows again all the places he had seen before; and, seeking Eurydice through the fields of the blessed, he found her and folded her in his eager arms. Here now they walk side by side; now he follows as she goes before, now goes ahead and leads — and now, in safety, Orpheus looks back at his Eurydice.
Yet Bacchus did not let this wickedness go unpunished. Grieving for the lost bard of his rites, he at once bound down in the woods, by a twisting root, all the Edonian women who had seen the crime. He drew out the toes of each one's feet, just as she had pursued him, and drove their points into the solid earth; and, as a bird whose leg has caught in a snare the cunning fowler hid, when it feels itself held, beats its wings and, fluttering, tightens the noose by its struggles, so each of them, as she stuck fast, fixed in the ground, tried in vain to flee in her terror; but the tough root held her and checked her as she strained. And while she looks for where her toes are, where her feet, where her nails, she sees wood climbing up her shapely legs; and, trying to strike her thigh with a grieving hand, she struck oak — her breast, too, becomes oak, her shoulders are oak; and you would think her outstretched arms real branches, and thinking it you would not be wrong.
And this is not enough for Bacchus. He resolves to leave the country itself, and with a better troupe seeks the vineyards of his own Tmolus, and Pactolus — though it was not golden then, nor to be envied for its precious sand. His usual band, the Satyrs and Bacchants, throng about him, but Silenus is missing: the Phrygian country folk had taken him, staggering with age and wine, and, bound with garlands, led him to their king Midas, to whom, with the Athenian Eumolpus, Thracian Orpheus had once handed the mysteries of Bacchus. When he knew this partner and companion of the rites, Midas kept a glad festival for the coming of his guest, twice five days and as many nights joined in a row. And now the eleventh Morning Star had driven off the lofty host of the stars, when the king came rejoicing into the Lydian fields and gave Silenus back to his young foster-son. The god, glad at the return of his foster-father, gave Midas the choice of a wish — pleasing, but useless, as it turned out. Midas, doomed to make a foolish use of the gift, said, "Grant that whatever I touch with my body turn to yellow gold." Liber granted his wish and gave the harmful gift, and was sorry he had not asked for something better.
The Berecynthian hero goes off glad, rejoicing in his own ruin, and tests the truth of the promise by touching things one by one. Scarcely believing himself, he pulled a green twig from a low branch of a holm-oak: the twig turned to gold. He lifts a stone from the ground: the stone too paled with gold. He touched a clod: at the mighty touch the clod became a mass of gold. He plucked dry ears of corn: the harvest was golden. He holds an apple picked from a tree: you would think the Hesperides had given it. If he laid his fingers on the tall doorposts, the posts seemed to shine; even when he washed his hands in the clear water, the water flowing from his hands could have fooled Danaë. He can scarcely hold his own hopes in his mind, imagining all things gold. As he rejoices, his servants set before him a table heaped with food, and not lacking roasted grain; but then, whether he touched the gifts of Ceres with his hand, the gifts of Ceres went stiff, or whether he made to tear the food with hungry teeth, a yellow plate pressed the food as his teeth came down; and he mixed the giver of the gift, Bacchus's wine, with pure water — you could see molten gold flowing through his jaws.
Stunned by the strangeness of his misfortune, rich and wretched at once, he longs to flee his wealth, and hates what he lately prayed for. No plenty relieves his hunger; dry thirst burns his throat; and, rightly, he is tortured by the hated gold. Lifting his hands and shining arms to heaven, he cried, "Forgive me, father Lenaeus! I have sinned; but pity me, I pray, and snatch me from this fair-seeming ruin!" The gods' power is gentle. Bacchus, when Midas confessed his fault, restored him, and undid the gift given by their bargain: "So that you may not stay coated with the gold you so unluckily wished, go," he said, "to the river that neighbors great Sardis, and, climbing the ridge, make your way against the falling waters until you come to the stream's source; and there, where it bubbles up most fully, plunge your head under the foaming spring, and your body with it, and wash away your crime at once." The king went under the water as bidden: the golden power tinged the river and passed from the human body into the stream; and even now the fields, taking the seed of that old vein, are hard, pale with gold from their soaked clods.
Hating riches, Midas dwelt in the woods and fields, following Pan, who always lives in the mountain caves; but his dull wit stayed, and, as before, the folly of his stupid mind was fated to hurt its owner again. For lofty Tmolus, looking out wide over the sea, rises steep in its high ascent, and, stretching down on either side, is bounded on one hand by Sardis, on the other by little Hypaepae. While Pan was there boasting of his tunes to the tender nymphs, and warbling a slight song on his waxed reeds, daring to scorn Apollo's playing beside his own, he came to an unequal contest under the judgment of Tmolus. The old judge sat on his own mountain and freed his ears of the crowding trees; only oak wreathes his dark-blue hair, and acorns hang about his hollow temples. Looking at the god of the flocks, he said, "There is no delay in your judge." Pan sounds his rustic reeds and charms Midas with his rough song — for Midas happened to be there. After him, the sacred Tmolus turned his face to the face of Phoebus; his own woods followed his face. Apollo, his golden head wreathed with Parnassian laurel, sweeps the ground with a robe soaked in Tyrian purple, holds up in his left hand his lyre inlaid with gems and Indian ivory, and in the other holds the plectrum; his very posture was an artist's. Then he plucks the strings with a skilled thumb, and, caught by their sweetness, Tmolus bids Pan lower his reeds before the lyre.
The judgment and verdict of the sacred mountain pleased them all — yet it is faulted, and called unjust, by the voice of Midas alone. The Delian god does not let those stupid ears keep their human shape, but draws them out to length, fills them with gray hairs, makes them unsteady at the base, and gives them the power to move. The rest is a man's; in one part alone is he punished, and he wears the ears of a slow-moving ass. He tries indeed to hide them, and to veil his temples, loaded with the ugly shame, in a purple turban. But a servant who used to cut his long hair with the shears saw it; and though he dared not tell the disgrace he had seen, longing to bring it into the open yet unable to keep it in, he went off, dug up the ground, and, in a low voice, whispered into the dug earth what kind of ears he had seen on his master; then he buried this witness of his voice under the earth thrown back, and, the trench covered, stole away in silence. There a thick grove of quivering reeds began to rise; and, as soon as it ripened at the full year, it betrayed the planter: stirred by the gentle south wind, it repeated the buried words and gave away its master's ears.
Avenged, the son of Latona left Tmolus and, borne through the clear air, came to rest on the plains of Laomedon, this side of the narrow sea of Helle. On the right of Sigeum, on the left of deep Rhoeteum, there is an old altar sacred to the Thunderer who hears all voices. From there Apollo sees Laomedon just then building the walls of rising Troy, and that the great work is growing with hard toil and demanding no small resources; and so, with the trident-bearing father of the swelling deep, he took mortal shape, and for the Phrygian king they built the walls, a sum of gold agreed on for the defenses. The work stood done; the king denies the reward, and, to crown his treachery, adds perjury with false words. "You will not do this unpunished," said the king of the sea, and drove all his waters against the shores of greedy Troy, and turned the land into the shape of a sea, and carried off the farmers' wealth, and buried the fields in waves. Nor is this penalty enough: the king's daughter too is demanded for a sea-monster. Chained to the hard rocks, she is freed by Hercules, who demands the promised reward, the horses agreed on; and, the wage of so great a work denied, he takes the twice-perjured walls of conquered Troy. Nor did Telamon, a sharer in the war, go off without honor; he won Hesione, given to him.
For Peleus was made famous by a goddess for his wife, no prouder of his grandfather's name than of his father-in-law's — since it fell to more than one man to be Jove's grandson, but to one man alone to have a goddess for a wife. For old Proteus had said to Thetis: "Goddess of the wave, conceive: you will be the mother of a youth who, in his strong years, will surpass his father's deeds and be called greater than he." So, lest the world hold anything greater than Jove, though he had felt no gentle fire in his breast, Jupiter fled the marriage of sea-born Thetis, and bade his grandson, the son of Aeacus, take his place in the wish, and go to the embrace of the sea-maiden.
There is a bay of Thessaly curved into a bending arch; its arms run out; there, were the water deeper, would be a harbor, but the sea just covers the surface of the sand; the shore is firm, keeping no footprint, delaying no step, hidden by no weed; a myrtle grove is near, set with two-colored berries. In the middle is a cave, whether made by nature or art is doubtful — more by art; to which you, Thetis, used often to come, riding naked on your bridled dolphin. There Peleus seized you as you lay bound in sleep; and since, tried by prayers, you resisted, he made ready force, clasping your neck with both arms. And had you not fled, as often, to your familiar arts of changing shape, he would have won his daring attempt: but now you were a bird — yet a bird he held; now a heavy tree — Peleus clung to the tree; your third shape was a spotted tigress, and, frightened by that, the son of Aeacus loosed his arms from your body. Then, pouring wine on the waters, he worshiped the sea-gods with the entrails of sheep and the smoke of incense, until the Carpathian seer said from the middle of the flood: "Son of Aeacus, you will win the marriage you seek. Only, when she rests asleep in the cool cave, bind her unawares with cords and holding bonds. And let her not deceive you by faking a hundred shapes, but hold her, whatever she is, until she takes back the form she had before." Proteus said this, and hid his face in the sea, and let his own waves in over his last words.
Titan was sinking, and, with his chariot-pole tilted down, was taking the western sea, when the beautiful Nereid, leaving the deep, entered her wonted resting-place. Scarcely had Peleus well seized the maiden's limbs when she began her shapes anew, until she felt her limbs held and her arms stretched apart. Then at last she sighed and said, "You do not conquer without a god's help" — and showed herself as Thetis. The hero embraced her thus revealed, won his wish, and filled her with great Achilles.
Happy Peleus in his son, happy in his wife, and one to whom all blessings had fallen, if you take away the guilt of murdered Phocus. The land of Trachis received him, guilty of his brother's blood and driven from his native home. Here Ceyx, born of Lucifer and bearing his father's brightness in his face, held sway without force or bloodshed — Ceyx, who at that time, sad and unlike himself, mourned a brother taken from him. When the son of Aeacus, worn with trouble and the long road, came there and entered the city with a few companions, leaving the flocks and herds he brought not far from the walls in a shady valley, and when he first had the chance to approach the king, he held out the tokens of peace in a suppliant hand, and told who he was and from whom sprung — hiding only his crime, and lying about the cause of his flight; and he begs help, in the city or the country. The Trachinian answered him with gentle lips: "Our bounties are open even to the middle sort, Peleus, and I hold no unwelcoming realm. To this you add strong weights — a famous name, and Jove for a grandfather. Do not waste your time in asking! All you ask you shall have; and call these things, whatever you see, in part your own — I wish you saw them in better case!" And he wept. Peleus and his companions ask what cause moves such grief; and he tells them:
Perhaps you think this bird, which lives by prey and terrifies all birds, always had wings. He was a man — and so unshaken was his spirit that even then he was fierce, savage in war and ready for violence — Daedalion by name. We were born of the same father, the one who calls forth Aurora and leaves the sky last of all. Peace was my care, the keeping of peace and my marriage; my brother loved cruel wars. His valor subdued kings and nations — that valor which now, changed, chases the doves of Thisbe. He had a daughter, Chione, who, most richly dowered with beauty, had a thousand suitors when she came of age at twice seven years. By chance Phoebus and the son of Maia, returning, the one from his Delphi, the other from the height of Cyllene, saw her at the same moment and at the same moment caught fire. Apollo puts off his hope of enjoyment to the hours of night; the other brooks no delay, and touches the girl's face with his sleep-bringing wand: at the mighty touch she lies still and suffers the god's force. Night had strewn the sky with stars; Phoebus, taking an old woman's shape, took the joys already snatched. When her ripe womb had filled its time, from the stock of the wing-footed god was born a crafty child, Autolycus, clever at every theft, who used to make white of black and black of white, no degenerate of his father's art; and from Phoebus (for she bore twins) was born Philammon, famous for tuneful song and the lyre.
But what did it profit her to have borne two children, and pleased two gods, and sprung from a brave father with the Thunderer for ancestor? Is glory a harm to many, too? To her, at least, it was: she dared to set herself above Diana and faulted the goddess's beauty. Fierce anger was roused in the goddess: "Then we will please you by deeds," she said; and without delay she bent her bow, sent an arrow from the string, and pierced with the reed the tongue that deserved it. The tongue fell silent; no voice, no attempted words followed; and, as she tried to speak, her life left her with her blood. Wretched, I held her then, and bore my brother's grief in my heart, and spoke comfort to my loving brother — which the father took no otherwise than rocks take the murmurs of the sea, and bitterly bewailed his daughter torn away. When he saw her burning, four times he made to rush into the midst of the pyre; four times driven back, he gave his swift limbs to flight and, like an ox carrying the stings of hornets on its galled neck, rushed where there was no path. Already he seemed to me to run more than a man, and you would think his feet had taken wings. So he outran all, and, made swift by the longing for death, gained the heights of Parnassus. Apollo, pitying him, when Daedalion had thrown himself from the high rock, made him a bird and held him hovering on sudden wings, and gave him a hooked beak, curved claws on his talons, his old courage, and strength greater than his body; and now, a hawk, kind enough to none, he rages against all birds, and, grieving himself, becomes a cause of grief to others.
While the son of Lucifer was telling these wonders of his brother, panting with haste, Onetor the Phocian, keeper of his herds, ran up. "Peleus, Peleus! I come to you with news of a great disaster," he said. Peleus bids him tell whatever it is; and the Trachinian too hangs in fear at the trembling mouth. The man tells it: "I had driven the weary bullocks to the winding shore, when the Sun at his highest in mid-course could look back on as much of it as he saw still to come; and part of the oxen had bent their knees on the yellow sand and, lying, watched the plains of wide water, part wandered slowly here and there, and others swam, standing above the waves with lofty necks. There is a temple near the sea, bright with neither marble nor gold, but made of thick beams and shaded by an ancient grove: the Nereids and Nereus hold it — a sailor drying his nets on the shore told us these were its gods. Next to it is a marsh, ringed with thick willows, which the water of the standing sea has made a swamp; from there, roaring with a heavy crash, a huge beast — a wolf — terrifies the neighboring places, and comes out of the marsh thicket, its lightning jaws smeared with foam and clotted blood, its eyes suffused with red flame. Though it rages with both fury and hunger, it is fiercer with fury; for it does not care to end its fast and its dread hunger with the slaughter of oxen, but wounds the whole herd and lays them all low like an enemy. Some of us too, defending them, were killed by the deadly bite; the shore and the near waves are red with blood, and the fens are filled with lowing. But delay is ruinous, and the case does not allow us to waver: while something is still left, let us all band together and take up arms — arms, I say — and bear our weapons in one body!"
So spoke the countryman. But the loss did not move Peleus; remembering his crime, he judges that the bereaved Nereid had sent these ills as an offering to dead Phocus. The king of Oeta bids his men put on their armor and take up stout weapons; and he was making ready to go with them, when Alcyone his wife, roused by the uproar, rushed out, her hair not yet fully done, and threw even the done part into disorder, and, flung on her husband's neck, begged him with words and tears to send help without himself, and so save two lives in one. The son of Aeacus said to her: "Lay aside your lovely, loyal fears, queen! Your kindness is thanks enough. It does not please me to move arms against this new monster; the god of the sea must be worshiped." There was a high tower, a beacon on its top, a welcome sight to weary ships. They climb up there and see with groans the bulls strewn on the shore and the cruel ravager with bloody mouth, its long hair fouled with gore. Then Peleus, stretching his hands toward the open sea, prays the sea-blue Psamathe to end her wrath and bring aid; but she is not bent by the words of the pleading son of Aeacus. Thetis, interceding for her husband, won that favor. Still the wolf holds on, not called back from the fierce slaughter, keen with the sweetness of blood, until she changed it to marble as it clung to the neck of a mangled heifer. The body kept everything but its color; the stone's color shows it is no longer a wolf, and need no longer be feared. Yet the Fates do not let the exiled Peleus settle in that land; the wandering outcast goes to the Magnetes, and there receives from Thessalian Acastus his cleansing of the murder.
Meanwhile Ceyx, his heart troubled by his brother's fate and by the wonders that had followed it, prepared to go to the god of Claros, to consult the sacred oracle, that comfort of mortals — for the profane Phorbas and his Phlegyans had made the oracle at Delphi impossible to reach. But first, most faithful Alcyone, he told you his plan; and at once a chill went to the marrow of your bones, a pallor much like boxwood came over your face, and your cheeks were wet with gushing tears. Three times she tried to speak, three times she drenched her face with tears; and, sobs breaking her loving complaints, she said:
"What fault of mine, dearest, has changed your mind? Where is the care for me that used to come first? Can you now be away without worry, your Alcyone left behind? Now a long journey pleases you? Now am I dearer to you at a distance? But I suppose your road is by land, and I shall only grieve, not fear as well, and my worry will be free of dread. It is the sea that frightens me, the grim face of the ocean. Lately I saw broken planks on the shore, and often I have read names on tombs with no body buried there. And do not let a false confidence touch your mind because the grandson of Hippotas is your father-in-law, who shuts the strong winds in prison and calms the seas when he wishes. Once the winds are let loose and have taken the deep, nothing is forbidden them; every land and every sea is disregarded; they harass even the clouds of heaven and strike out red fires by their wild collisions. The more I know them — and I do know them, for as a child I often saw them in my father's house — the more I think they must be feared. But if your resolve can be bent by no prayers of mine, dear husband, and you are all too set on going, then take me too! Surely we will be tossed together, and I shall fear nothing but what I suffer; together we will bear whatever comes, together be carried over the wide seas."
The starry husband is moved by such words and tears of the daughter of Aeolus — for the fire of love is no less in him. But he will neither give up the voyage he has proposed nor let Alcyone share the danger, and he answers many things to soothe her fearful heart. Yet she does not for that approve his reasons. He added this one comfort, which alone bent his loving wife: "Every delay will be long to me; but I swear to you by my father's fire, if only the Fates let me back, that I will return before the moon fills her circle twice." When by these promises a hope of his return had been raised, at once he ordered a ship drawn from the docks, launched, and fitted with its gear. Seeing it, Alcyone shuddered again, as if foreseeing the future, and shed flowing tears, and gave him embraces, and at last, in her misery, said "Farewell" with a sad voice, and sank down with her whole body.
But the young men, while Ceyx still sought excuses for delay, draw the oars in double rows to their hardy chests and cleave the sea with even strokes. She lifted her wet eyes and saw her husband standing on the curved stern, waving his hand to give her the first signals, and she returned them. When the land had drawn far off, and her eyes could no longer make out his face, still, while she could, she followed the fleeing ship with her gaze; and when that too, borne away, could not be seen for distance, still she watched the sails floating at the masthead; and when she saw the sails no more, she sought her empty bed and laid herself on the couch. The bed and the place renew Alcyone's tears, and remind her what part of herself is gone.
They had left the harbor, and the breeze stirred the ropes; the sailor turns the hanging oars to the sides, sets the yards at the masthead, and lets down the whole canvas from the mast, catching the coming winds. Less than half, or at most half, the sea had been cut by the ship, and each land was far off, when, toward night, the sea began to whiten with swelling waves and the headlong east wind to blow more strongly. "Lower the high yards at once," the master cries, "and reef the whole sail to the spars." He orders, but the head-on storm blocks the orders, and the roar of the sea lets no voice be heard. Yet of their own accord some hurry to draw in the oars, some to brace the sides, some to deny the sails to the winds; this one bails the flood and pours the sea back into the sea, that one hauls the yards down. While these things are done without order, the harsh storm grows, and on every side the fierce winds wage war and churn the raging waters. The master himself is afraid, and himself confesses he does not know how they stand, nor what to order or forbid: so great is the mass of the disaster, so much stronger than any skill. The men roar with shouts, the ropes with creaking, wave crashes on heavy wave, the sky with thunder. The sea rises in billows and seems to reach the heavens and to sprinkle the low-hung clouds with spray; now, when it stirs the yellow sand from the bottom, it is the color of it; now it is blacker than the Stygian wave; sometimes it lies flat, white with hissing foam. The Trachinian ship, too, is driven by these turns: now aloft as if from a mountaintop it seems to look down into the valleys and the depths of Acheron; now, when the curving sea has hemmed it low, it seems to look up at the sky above from an infernal gulf. Struck on its side by the wave, it often gives a huge crash, and sounds no lighter beaten than an iron ram or a catapult shaking a battered tower. And as fierce lions, gathering strength for the charge, rush chest-on against the weapons and the leveled spears, so the water, when it had risen with the risen winds, came on against the ship's rigging and towered far above it. And now the joints give way; stripped of their wax coating, the seams gape and offer a way to the deadly waters.
Look — heavy showers fall from the loosened clouds; you would think the whole sky was coming down into the sea, and the swollen sea climbing up into the tracts of heaven. The sails are soaked with rain, and the sea's waters mix with the sky's; the firmament is without its fires, and blind night is crushed by its own darkness and the storm's. Yet the lightnings scatter this and give a flashing light: the rains catch fire with the flames of the thunderbolt. Now the flood leaps inside the hollow frame of the ship; and as a soldier, above all the rest of the number, when he has often sprung at the walls of a defended city, at last wins his hope and, fired with love of glory, though one among a thousand, mounts the wall alone — so, when the waves had struck the high sides nine times, the onset of a tenth wave, rising vaster, rushes down and does not leave off battering the weary ship until it drops, as it were, within the walls of a captured vessel. So part of the sea was still trying to break into the ship, part was inside it; and all tremble no less than a city trembles when some are undermining the wall outside and others hold it within. Skill fails, courage sinks, and as many deaths seem to rush and break in as there are waves that come. One cannot hold his tears; one is stunned; one calls those happy whom burial awaits; one worships the gods with prayers, and, lifting his hands in vain to the sky he cannot see, begs for help. To one his brother and parent come to mind; to another his home and his children and whatever he has left behind.
The thought of Alcyone moves Ceyx; on Ceyx's lips is nothing but Alcyone, and, though he longs for her alone, he is glad she is away. Gladly, too, he would look back to his native shore and turn his last gaze toward his home — but he does not know where it is: the sea boils in so great a whirl, and, under the shadow of the pitch-black clouds, all the sky is hidden, and the face of night is doubled. The mast is broken by the storm's assault; the helm too is broken; and the wave, proud over its spoils and standing like a conqueror, looks down on the waves below. Then, no less heavily than if a god should hurl Athos or Pindus, torn from their roots, into the open sea, it plunges down, and with weight and blow together sinks the ship to the bottom. With her a great part of the crew, pressed down in the heavy gulf, never rising again to the air, met their fate; others cling to fragments and broken pieces of the ship. Ceyx himself grips a plank of the wreck with the hand that used to hold the scepter, and in vain, alas, calls on his father and his father-in-law. But most on the swimmer's lips is his wife Alcyone: her he remembers and names; he prays the waves to carry his body before her eyes, that dead he may be buried by the hands of friends. As he swims, whenever the billows let him open his mouth, he names the absent Alcyone and murmurs it into the very waves. And now a black arch of water broke over the middle of the waves and buried his sinking head under the bursting wave. The Morning Star was dark that night, past knowing; and, since he could not leave the sky, he veiled his face in thick clouds.
Meanwhile the daughter of Aeolus, knowing nothing of such great ills, counts the nights, and now hurries to ready the clothes he will put on, now those she herself will wear when he comes, and promises herself a return that will never be. She was piously offering incense to all the gods, but before all she tended the temple of Juno and came to the altars for a husband who no longer was, praying that he be safe and return and set no woman above her — and of all her prayers, this one alone could be granted her. But the goddess could no longer bear to be entreated for a dead man; and, to keep the death-polluted hands from her altars, she said: "Iris, most faithful messenger of my voice, go quickly to the sleep-bringing hall of Sleep, and bid him send Alcyone a dream in the shape of dead Ceyx, telling her true disaster." She spoke. Iris puts on her thousand-colored robe and, marking the sky with her arched curve, seeks the house of the king hidden beneath its cloud.
Near the Cimmerians there is a cave in a long recess, a hollow mountain, the home and inmost chamber of lazy Sleep, where the sun can never come, rising or in mid-course or setting; fogs mixed with darkness breathe up from the ground, and a twilight of doubtful light. No watchful cock there calls forth the dawn with the crowing of his crested head; no anxious dogs break the silence, nor geese keener than dogs; no wild beast, no cattle, no boughs stirred by a breeze, no outbursts of the human tongue make a sound. Mute Quiet dwells there; yet from the bottom of the rock runs a stream, the water of Lethe, whose wave, gliding with a murmur over the rattling pebbles, invites sleep. Before the doors of the cave poppies bloom in plenty, and countless herbs, from whose milk dewy Night gathers sleep and scatters it over the darkened earth. There is no door in the whole house, to grind on a turning hinge; no porter at the threshold. But in the middle is a couch, raised high on black ebony, feathered, dark-colored, hidden by a dark coverlet, where the god himself lies, his limbs loosed in languor. Around him, everywhere, lie empty Dreams mimicking many shapes, as many as the harvest bears ears of grain, the wood leaves, the shore cast-up sands.
As soon as the maiden had entered there and pushed aside with her hands the dreams that blocked her way, the sacred house shone with the splendor of her robe; and the god, heavy with slow drowsiness, barely lifting his eyes and again and again sinking back, his nodding chin striking the top of his breast, at last shook himself free of himself, and, raised on his elbow, asked why she had come — for he knew her. And she said: "Sleep, rest of all things, gentlest of the gods, peace of the mind, from whom care flees, who soothe the bodies worn with hard service and refit them for toil — bid a Dream that matches real shapes in its likeness go to Alcyone in Herculean Trachis, in the form of the king, and take on the look of a shipwrecked man. Juno commands it." Her task done, Iris left; she could no longer bear the force of the drowsiness, and, feeling sleep creep into her limbs, fled and went back along the arch by which she had just come.
But the father, out of the crowd of his thousand sons, wakes Morpheus, a craftsman and mimic of shapes: no one more cleverly renders the walk, the face, and the sound of speech; he adds the dress too, and the words each most often uses. But he imitates men only; another becomes a wild beast, a bird, a long-bodied serpent — him the gods call Icelos, the crowd of mortals Phobetor. There is a third of a different art, Phantasos: he changes himself, deceiving, into earth and stone and water and a tree and all things that lack breath. These show their faces by night to kings and generals; others roam among the peoples and the commons. These the old god passes by, and chooses from all his brothers Morpheus alone to carry out the commands of the daughter of Thaumas; and again, loosed in soft drowsiness, he dropped his head and sank back into the high couch.
Morpheus flies through the dark on noiseless wings and, in a short space of time, reaches the Thessalian city; and, laying the wings from his body, he takes the shape of Ceyx, and in that shape, wan, like a bloodless man, without any clothing, he stood before the bed of the wretched wife. The hero's beard seems wet, and heavy water to run from his dripping hair. Then, leaning on the bed, tears pouring down his face, he said: "Do you know your Ceyx, most wretched wife — or is my face so changed by death? Look: you will know me, and instead of your husband you will find your husband's ghost. Your prayers, Alcyone, brought me no help; I am dead. Do not, deceived, promise yourself my return. The cloudy south wind caught my ship in the Aegean sea and, tossing it with its mighty blast, broke it apart; and the waves filled my mouth as it cried your name in vain. It is no doubtful messenger who tells you this, no vague rumor you hear it by: I myself, shipwrecked, in person, tell you my fate. Rise, come, weep, put on mourning, and do not send me unlamented down to empty Tartarus." To these words Morpheus added a voice she would believe her husband's — he even seemed to shed real tears — and his hands had the gestures of Ceyx.
Alcyone groaned, weeping, and moved her arms in her sleep, and, reaching for his body, grasped the air, and cried out, "Stay! Where do you rush? We will go together." Shaken by her own voice and the sight of her husband, she threw off sleep, and first looked around to see if he who had just been seen was there; for the servants, roused by her voice, had brought in a light. When she found him nowhere, she struck her face with her hands, tore the clothes from her breast and beat the breast itself, and did not care to loose her hair — she tore it; and to her nurse, asking the cause of her grief, she said: "There is no Alcyone, none! She is dead, with her Ceyx. Away with words of comfort! He has died by shipwreck. I saw him, I knew him, and, as he left, I stretched out my hands, longing to hold him back. It was a ghost — but even so a clear ghost, the true ghost of my husband. He did not, if you ask, have his wonted look, nor shine with the face he had before; pale and naked and with dripping hair I saw him, poor man. Here, on this very spot, the wretched one stood" — and she looks for any footprints left. "This, this is what I feared in my foreboding mind, and I begged you not to flee me and follow the winds. But surely I could wish, since you went to die, that you had taken me too: it would have been much better for me to go with you; for then I would have spent no part of my life apart from you, nor would death have divided us. Now, absent, I have died; absent, I too am tossed on the waves, and the sea holds me without me. My heart would be crueler than the sea itself if I strove to draw out my life longer, and fought to outlive so great a grief. But I will not fight, nor leave you, poor one; at least I will come now as your companion; and if not an urn, then an inscription in the tomb shall join us; if I do not touch your bones with my bones, still I will touch your name with my name." Grief forbids more, and wailing breaks in on every word, and groans are dragged from her stricken heart.
It was morning: she goes out from the house to the shore and, in her grief, seeks the place from which she had watched him go, and says, "Here he loosed the cables; on this shore he kissed me as he left" — and while she recalls the acts marked by places, and looks out on the sea, she sees, far off on the flowing wave, something like a body; and at first it was doubtful what it was. When the water had brought it a little nearer, and, though still far, it was plainly a corpse, not knowing who it might be — because it was shipwrecked, she was moved by the omen, and, as if giving a tear to a stranger, said, "Alas, poor man, whoever you are, and if you have a wife!" Driven by the waves, the body comes nearer; and the more she looks at it, the less and less she is mistress of her mind; and now, brought close to the land, now that she can make it out, she sees: it is her husband. "It is he!" she cries, and at once tears her face, her hair, her robe, and, stretching her trembling hands to Ceyx, says, "Is it so, dearest husband, is it so, poor man, that you come back to me?"
There is a breakwater, made by human hands, next to the waves, which breaks the sea's first fury and blunts the onset of the waters. Onto this she leaped — and it was a marvel she could: she was flying, and, beating the light air with newly-formed wings, a wretched bird, she skimmed the surface of the water; and, as she flew, her mouth, chattering with its slender bill, gave a sound like one in sorrow, full of complaint. But when she touched the mute, bloodless body, she folded the beloved limbs in her new wings and gave him cold kisses in vain with her hard bill. Whether Ceyx felt this, or seemed to lift his face by the motion of the wave, the people were in doubt; but he had felt it. And at last, by the pity of the gods, both are changed into birds; subject to the same fate, their love stayed even then, and the marriage bond was not dissolved in the birds: they mate and become parents, and for seven calm days in the winter Alcyone broods on her nest floating on the sea. Then the passage of the deep is safe; Aeolus keeps the winds in and holds them from going out, and grants a smooth sea to his grandchildren.
Some old man watched them flying together over the wide sea and praised their love kept to the end of their lives. One near him — or the same, if chance had it so — said, "This one too, which you see cutting the sea with its legs drawn up," pointing at a diver-bird with its broad throat, "was of royal birth. And if you want to come down to him in an unbroken line, his ancestors are Ilus and Assaracus and Ganymede snatched by Jupiter, and old Laomedon, and Priam, whose lot was Troy's last days; this one was Hector's brother, and, had he not met a strange fate in his early youth, perhaps he would have a name no less than Hector's — though the daughter of Dymas bore that one, while Aesacus, they say, was born in secret to Alexirhoë, the daughter of two-horned Granicus, under shady Ida. He hated cities, and, far from the shining court, kept to the lonely mountains and the humble fields, and went but rarely among the crowds of Ilium. Yet his heart was not rustic, nor proof against love: often chased through all the woods, he sees Hesperia, the daughter of Cebren, on her father's bank, drying her hair, tossed over her shoulders, in the sun. The nymph, seen, takes flight, like a frightened hind from a tawny wolf, or a river-duck caught far from her wonted pool by a hawk. The Trojan hero pursues her, and, swift with love, presses the swift girl swift with fear. Look — a snake, hidden in the grass, grazed her fleeing foot with its barbed tooth and left its venom in her body; with her flight her life was cut short. Frantic, he embraces her lifeless, and cries, 'I grieve, I grieve that I ever chased you! But I did not fear this, nor was winning worth so much. We two have destroyed you, poor girl: the wound came from the snake, but the cause from me. I would be more guilty than it, unless I send you, by my death, a comfort for your death.' He spoke, and from a rock the hoarse waves had eaten away he flung himself into the sea. Tethys, pitying him as he fell, caught him softly, and covered the swimmer with feathers, and the power to gain the death he sought was not given. The lover is angry, forced to live against his will, and thwarted when his spirit longed to leave its wretched home; and, as he had taken new wings on his shoulders, he flies up and again throws his body over the sea: the feathers break the fall. Aesacus rages, and headlong plunges into the deep, and endlessly tries the way to death. Love made him lean: the spaces between the joints of his legs are long, his neck stays long, his head is far from his body. He loves the sea, and keeps his name because he plunges into it."
His father Priam mourned Aesacus, not knowing that, having taken wings, he still lived; and Hector, with his brothers, made empty offerings at a tomb that bore his name. The presence of Paris was missing from that mournful rite — Paris, who soon after brought a long war home to his country along with a stolen wife; and a thousand sworn ships followed him, and with them the whole Greek nation. Nor would vengeance have been delayed, had not the raging winds made the seas impassable, and the Boeotian land held the ships, ready to sail, in fishy Aulis. Here, when they had prepared a sacrifice to Jupiter in their fathers' way, as the old altar glowed with the kindled fire, the Greeks saw a blue serpent creep up a plane tree that stood near the sacrifice they had begun. On the top of the tree was a nest of twice-four birds; the serpent seized them all, and the mother as she fluttered around her loss, and buried them in its greedy maw. All stood amazed. But Calchas, the son of Thestor, a seer foreseeing the truth, said, "Rejoice, Greeks — we will conquer! Troy will fall, but the length of our toil will be long"; and he assigned the nine birds to the years of the war. The serpent, just as it was, coiled around the green branches, becomes stone, and keeps the stone in the shape of a serpent.
Nereus stayed rough in the Ionian waves and did not drive the sails on; and there are some who think Neptune spared Troy, because he had made the city's walls. But not so the son of Thestor: for he neither failed to know, nor kept silent, that the wrath of the virgin goddess must be soothed by a virgin's blood. When the public cause had beaten natural love, and the king the father, and Iphigenia, ready to give her chaste blood, stood before the altar while the priests wept, the goddess was appeased, cast a mist before their eyes, and — so it is said — amid the rite and the crowd and the voices of the praying, changed the Mycenaean girl for a substituted hind. So, when Diana had been soothed by a death more fitting, and at the same moment the wrath of Phoebe and of the sea passed, the thousand ships took the winds astern and, after much hardship, reached the Phrygian shore.
There is a place in the middle of the world, between land and sea and the tracts of heaven, the meeting-point of the threefold universe; from it is seen whatever is anywhere, however far off, and every voice pierces the hollow ears. Fame holds it, and chose herself a house on the top of a tower, adding countless entrances and a thousand openings, and closing the doorways with no gates. Night and day it stands open; it is all of sounding bronze, all humming, echoing the voice and repeating what it hears. Within there is no rest, no silence anywhere; yet there is no shout, but the murmur of a low voice, such as comes from the sea's waves if you listen far off, or the sound the end of the thunder makes when Jupiter has clashed the black clouds. A crowd fills the hall; the fickle rabble come and go, and a thousand rumors, false mixed with true, wander up and down and roll about their muddled words. Some of these fill idle ears with talk, some carry off elsewhere what they were told; the measure of the fiction grows, and each new teller adds something to what he heard. There is Credulity, there rash Error, and empty Joy, and startled Fears, and sudden Sedition, and Whispers of doubtful source. Fame herself sees whatever happens in heaven and sea and earth, and searches the whole world.
She had made it known that Greek ships were coming with valiant troops; nor does the enemy appear in arms unlooked-for. The Trojans block the landing and guard the shore; and you, Protesilaus, are the first, by fate's decree, to fall by Hector's spear; and the battles now joined, and the brave spirits of the Trojans, and Hector, known then for the first time, cost the Greeks dear. Nor did the Phrygians learn at small cost of blood what the Greek right hand could do; and now the shores of Sigeum were red, now Cycnus, the son of Neptune, had given a thousand men to death, now Achilles pressed on in his chariot, leveling whole ranks with the stroke of his Pelian spear; and, seeking through the lines either Cycnus or Hector, he meets Cycnus — Hector was put off to the tenth year. Then, urging on his horses, their white necks pressed under the yoke, he steered his chariot at the enemy and, shaking his quivering spear in his arm, said, "Whoever you are, young man, take this comfort in your death: that you were killed by Haemonian Achilles." So far the grandson of Aeacus; his heavy spear followed his words. But though there was no missing in the sure spear, still the sharp point, so hurled, did nothing, and only bruised the breast with a blunt blow. "Son of a goddess — for by report we knew you beforehand," said Cycnus, "why do you wonder that wounds are kept from me?" — for Achilles was wondering. "This helmet you see, tawny with a horse's mane, and the hollow shield, the burden of my left arm, are no help to me; grace alone is sought from them — Mars too takes up arms for that. All the service of this covering shall be removed, and still I will go off unscratched. It is something to be born not of a Nereid, but of one who rules Nereus and his daughters and the whole sea."
He spoke, and hurled at the descendant of Aeacus a spear meant to lodge in the shield's rim; it broke through the bronze and the next nine folds of bull's hide, but stopped in the tenth circle. The hero wrenched it out and again hurled the quivering weapon with a strong hand; again the body was without a wound, unharmed; nor could a third point so much as graze Cycnus, open and offering himself. Achilles blazed no otherwise than a bull in the open arena, when with its dreadful horns it charges the purple cloths that provoke it and feels its wounds evaded. Still he checks whether the point has fallen from the spear: it was clinging to the shaft. "Is my hand weak, then," he says, "and has it poured out on one man all the strength it had before? Surely it was strong enough when I first threw down the walls of Lyrnessus, or when I filled Tenedos and Eëtion's Thebes with their own blood, or when the Caÿcus flowed purple with the slaughter of its people, and Telephus twice felt the work of my spear. Here too, with so many slain, whose heaps along this shore I have both made and see, my right hand has proved mighty, and is mighty." He spoke, and, as if he distrusted his earlier deeds, hurled his spear at Menoetes, one of the Lycian crowd, standing opposite, and tore through both his mail and the breast beneath. As Menoetes beat the solid earth with his dying head, Achilles drew the same weapon from the reeking wound and said, "This is the hand, this the spear, with which I have just conquered; I will use them on him — and I pray the end may be the same." So saying, he aimed again at Cycnus, and the ash spear did not miss; it rang, unavoided, on his left shoulder, then was thrown back as if by a wall or a solid rock. Yet, where he had struck, Achilles saw Cycnus marked with blood, and rejoiced in vain: there was no wound — the blood was Menoetes'.
Then indeed, roaring, he leaped headlong from his high chariot, and, striking at his fearless foe hand to hand with his bright sword, he sees that the shield and the helmet are pierced by his blade, but that his weapon too is blunted on the hard body. He bore it no longer; drawing back his shield, three and four times he struck the hero's face and his hollow temples with the sword-hilt, and, pressing on as the other gave ground, confounded him, drove him back, and gave him no rest in his daze. Terror takes Cycnus, darkness swims before his eyes; and, as he carried his backward steps in retreat, a stone in the middle of the field stood in his way. Over it Achilles, with great force, threw Cycnus on his back and dashed him to the earth; then, pressing his chest with shield and hard knees, he drew tight the straps of the helmet, which, fastened under the pressed chin, crushed the throat and took away the breath and the passage of life. He was making ready to strip the beaten man — and saw only the armor left behind; the god of the sea had turned the body into a white bird, whose name he had so lately borne.
This labor, this battle, brought a rest of many days, and both sides paused and laid down their arms. And while a watchful guard kept the Phrygian walls, and a watchful guard kept the Greek trenches, a festival day had come, on which Achilles, the conqueror of Cycnus, was appeasing Pallas with the blood of a fillet-decked heifer. When he had laid its cut portions on the glowing altars, and the smell, welcome to the gods, rose into the sky, the sacred rite had its share, and the rest was served at the table. The chiefs reclined on couches and filled themselves with roasted meat, and eased their cares and thirst with wine. No harps, no songs, no long boxwood pipe of many holes delights them; but they draw out the night in talk, and valor is the matter of their words. They tell of the battles of the enemy and their own, and often gladly recount, in turn, the dangers they have met and come through. For of what else should Achilles speak, or what should be spoken before great Achilles? But most of all the recent victory over Cycnus was the theme: it seemed a marvel to all that the youth's body was pierced by no weapon, took no wound, and blunted the steel itself. Both the grandson of Aeacus and the Greeks were wondering at it, when Nestor said:
"Cycnus was the only despiser of weapons in your time, and pierced by no blow. But I myself once saw Caeneus of Perrhaebia bear a thousand strokes with his body unhurt — Caeneus of Perrhaebia, who, famous for his deeds, lived on Othrys; and, that this might be the more wondrous in him, he had been born a woman." Whoever is there is moved by the strange marvel, and they beg him to tell it; and Achilles among them: "Tell it, come — for we all have the same wish to hear, eloquent old man, wisdom of our age: who was this Caeneus, and why changed to the opposite sex? In what war, in what contest of battle did you know him? By whom was he conquered, if by anyone?"
Then the old man said: Though slow age is against me, and many things I saw in my early years escape me now, still I remember most; and among so many deeds of war and peace, nothing clings more firmly to my mind than that. And if a long life could make anyone a witness of many deeds, I have lived two hundred years; now my third age is being spent.
Caenis, the daughter of Elatus, was famous for her beauty — the loveliest maiden of Thessaly, longed for in vain by the prayers of many suitors through the neighboring cities and through your cities, Achilles, for she was your countrywoman. Perhaps Peleus too would have tried that marriage; but by then either your mother's marriage had fallen to him, or been promised. Caenis married no one; and, walking a lonely shore, she suffered force from the god of the sea — so report told. And when Neptune had taken the joys of this new love, he said, "Let your wishes be safe from all refusal: choose what you desire." (The same report told this too.) Caenis said, "This wrong makes my wish a great one — that I may be able to suffer no such thing again. Grant that I be no longer a woman: you will have granted me everything." She spoke the last words in a deeper tone, and the voice could seem a man's, as it was; for already the god of the deep sea had granted her wish, and had given besides that he could be wounded by no blows and fall to no steel. Glad of the gift, the son of Atrax went off, and spent his life in a man's pursuits, roaming the Peneian fields.
Pirithous, born of bold Ixion, had married Hippodame, and had bidden the cloud-born monsters take their places at the tables set in a tree-shaded cave. The Thessalian nobles were there; I too was there; and the festive palace rang with the mingled crowd. Look — they sing the wedding song, the halls smoke with fires, and the bride comes in, ringed by a company of matrons and young wives, outstanding in beauty. We called Pirithous lucky in his wife — an omen we almost proved false. For your breast, Eurytus, most savage of the savage Centaurs, is fired as much by the wine as by the sight of the girl, and drunkenness, doubled by lust, reigns. At once the overturned tables throw the feast into uproar, and the new bride is dragged off by force, seized by the hair. Eurytus snatches Hippodame; the others each seize the one they fancied or could; and it was the very look of a captured city. The house rings with women's cries. Quickly we all rise, and Theseus first cries, "What madness drives you, Eurytus, that while I live you provoke Pirithous, and, blind, wrong two men in one?" And, that the great-hearted hero might not say it in vain, he pushes off the pressing crowd and takes the seized girl from them in their fury.
Eurytus says nothing in reply — for he cannot defend such deeds with words — but attacks her champion's face with insolent hands and strikes his noble breast. By chance there was near an ancient mixing-bowl, rough with jutting figures, which — huge as it was — the still huger son of Aegeus lifted and hurled full in Eurytus's face; and he, vomiting from wound and mouth together clots of blood and brains and wine, kicked on his back on the soaking sand. His twin-formed brothers blaze at the killing, and all, vying, with one voice cry "Arms! arms!" The wine gave them spirit, and in the first fighting flung cups fly, and shattered jars and curved cauldrons — things once for feasting, now fit for war and slaughter.
First Amycus, son of Ophion, did not fear to strip the inner house of its gifts, and first tore from the shrine a chandelier thick with blazing lamps, and, lifting it high like one who makes to break the white neck of a bull with the sacrificial axe, dashed it against the forehead of Celadon the Lapith and left the bones a shapeless mash in his face. The eyes leaped out, and, the face-bones scattered, the nose was driven back and fixed in the middle of the palate. Pelates of Pella, tearing off the foot of a maple table, laid him low on the ground, his chin sunk on his chest, and, as he spat out teeth mixed with black blood, sent him by a second wound to the shades of Tartarus.
Gryneus, standing next and glaring at the smoking altar, said, "Why not use this?" and lifted the huge altar, fire and all, and threw it into the midst of the Lapiths, and crushed two, Broteas and Orios — Orios, whose mother was Mycale, known to have often drawn down the horns of the struggling moon by her singing. "You will not do it unpunished, if only I get a weapon!" cried Exadius, and, for a weapon, seizes the antlers of a votive stag that hung on a tall pine. With the double branches Gryneus is pierced through the eyes and has them scooped out — part clinging to the antlers, part running down his beard and hanging clotted with gore.
Look — Rhoetus snatches a blazing brand of plum-wood from the middle of the altar and, on the right side, breaks through the temples of Charaxus, covered with yellow hair. His locks, caught by the swift flame, burned like dry corn, and the blood seared in the wound gave a dreadful hissing sound, as red-hot iron often does when the smith draws it out with the curved tongs and plunges it in the trough: it hisses and sinks bubbling in the water. Wounded, Charaxus shakes the greedy fire from his shaggy hair, and lifts to his shoulders a threshold torn from the ground, a wagon's load — whose very weight keeps him from throwing it at the enemy; the stone mass crushed his own comrade Cometes, standing too near. Rhoetus cannot hold his joy: "So, I pray, may the rest of your camp's crowd be brave!" he cries, and renews the wound with the half-burnt stake, and three and four times breaks the sutures of the skull with heavy blows, and the bones sank into the running brain.
Victorious, he passes to Evagrus, Corythus, and Dryas. Of these, when Corythus, his cheeks covered with their first down, had fallen, Evagrus said, "What glory have you won by killing a boy?" Rhoetus lets him say no more, and fiercely buried the red flames in the open mouth of the man as he spoke, and through the mouth into the breast. You too, cruel Dryas, he pursues, whirling fire around his head — but the same end did not wait for you: as he exulted in his run of unbroken slaughter, you pierced him with a fire-hardened stake where the neck joins the shoulder. Rhoetus groaned and barely wrenched the stake from the hard bone, and, drenched in his own blood, fled. Orneus fled too, and Lycabas, and Medon, wounded in the right shoulder, and Thaumas with Pisenor, and Mermeros, who had lately beaten all in the footrace but now went slower for his wound, and Pholus and Melaneus and Abas the boar-hunter, and Astylos the augur, who had vainly warned his own side against this war — he even said to Nessus, dreading his wounds, "Do not flee! You are saved for the bow of Hercules." But Eurynomus and Lycidas and Areos and Imbreus did not escape death; the right hand of Dryas struck them all as they faced him. You too, Crenaeus, took your wound facing him, though you had turned your back in flight: looking back, you took the heavy steel between the two eyes, where the nose joins the brow.
Amid all that din, Aphidas lay dead asleep from the wine he had drunk without stop, unwaking, holding the mixed cup in his slack hand, sprawled on the shaggy skin of an Ossaean bear. When Phorbas saw him from afar, wielding no weapon, he fitted his fingers into the strap and said, "You will drink your wine mixed with the Styx," and, without more delay, hurled the javelin at the youth; and the steel-tipped ash was driven into his neck as he lay by chance on his back. Death came without his feeling it, and the black blood flowed from his full throat onto the couch and into the very cup.
I saw Petraeus trying to tear an acorn-bearing oak from the earth; and while he grips it in his arms and shakes it this way and that and works the loosened trunk, the lance of Pirithous, thrown at Petraeus's ribs, pinned his straining breast to the tough oak. By the valor of Pirithous, they said, Lycus fell, and by the valor of Pirithous Chromis — but each gave less glory to the victor than Dictys and Helops. Helops was run through by a javelin that pierced his temples and, thrown from the right, reached his left ear. Dictys, slipping from the sheer point of a rock as he fled the pursuing son of Ixion in terror, fell headlong and, by the weight of his body, broke a great mountain-ash and impaled his own guts on it. Aphareus comes as avenger, and tries to hurl a rock torn from the mountain; but, as he tries, the son of Aegeus forestalls him with an oaken club and breaks the huge bones of his arm; and, with no leisure or care to give the useless body to death, he leaps onto the back of tall Bianor, not used to carry anyone but himself, and, planting his knee in his ribs and gripping the hair in his left hand, shatters the man's face and threatening features and hard temples with the knotty oak. With that oak he lays low Nedymnus, and Lycopes the javelin-thrower, and Hippasus, his breast covered by his flowing beard, and Ripheus, who towered above the treetops, and Thereus, who used to carry home alive the raging bears he caught in the Thessalian mountains.
Demoleon could bear no longer to see Theseus enjoying this success in the fight, and with vast effort tried to tear an aged pine from the thick wood; and, since he could not, he hurled it, broken short, at his enemy. But Theseus drew far back from the coming missile, warned by Pallas — so at least he wished it thought. Yet the tree did not fall for nothing: it sheared from the throat of tall Crantor both his breast and his left shoulder. He had been your father's armor-bearer, Achilles — one whom Amyntor, king of the Dolopians, beaten in war, had given the son of Aeacus as a pledge of peace. When Peleus saw him from afar, mangled with the foul wound, he cried, "Take this offering, Crantor, dearest of young men," and with a strong arm and all his force hurled his ash spear at Demoleon, which broke through the cage of his ribs and quivered, sticking in the bones. He drew out the shaft without the point by hand — that too barely followed; the point stayed in his lung. The very pain gave his spirit strength: sick, he reared against the enemy and trampled the man with his horse's feet. Peleus takes the ringing blows on helmet and shield, guards his shoulders, holds his arms out before him, and through the shoulders pierces two breasts at one stroke. But first, from afar, he had killed Phlegraeus and Hyles, and, in close combat, Iphinoüs and Clanis; to these is added Dorylas, who wore a wolf's skin on his temples, and, for a cruel weapon, the crooked horns of oxen reddened with much blood.
To him I said — for courage gave me strength — "See how far your horns fall short of my steel," and threw my javelin. When he could not dodge it, he held up his right hand before the brow that would take the wound; the hand was pinned to the brow. A shout went up; and Peleus — for he stood nearer — struck him as he stuck fast, overcome by the cruel wound, with his sword beneath the middle of the belly. He leaped forward, fiercely dragged his own bowels on the ground, trod on them as he dragged, burst them as he trod, tangled his legs in them too, and fell with an emptied belly.
Nor did your beauty save you in battle, Cyllarus — if we grant beauty to that monstrous nature. His beard was starting, the color of his beard gold, and golden hair hung from his shoulders to the middle of his flanks. There was a pleasing spirit in his face; his neck and shoulders and hands and breast were near the praised statues of the artists, in every part where he was a man; nor was the horse-shape beneath faulty or worse than the man's. Give him a horse's neck and head, and he would be worthy of Castor: so fit for a rider was his back, so raised with muscle his chest. He was all blacker than black pitch, but his tail was white, and the color of his legs was white too. Many of his own kind sought him, but Hylonome alone won him, than whom no lovelier female lived among the half-beasts in the high woods. She alone holds Cyllarus by coaxing and by loving and by confessing her love, and by her grooming too, as far as those limbs allow: so that her hair is smoothed with a comb, that she twines herself now with rosemary, now with violet or rose, sometimes wears white lilies, and twice a day washes her face in the springs that fall from the height of the Pagasaean wood, and twice dips her body in the stream, and throws over her shoulder or her left side no skins but such as suit her, of chosen beasts. Their love was equal: they wandered the mountains together, went into the caves together; and now they had entered the Lapith house together, together were waging the fierce war. The thrower is unknown, but a javelin came from the left and pierced you, Cyllarus, just below where the breast joins the neck. The heart, hurt by that small wound, grew cold with the whole body once the weapon was drawn out. At once Hylonome takes his dying limbs, warms the wound with her hand laid on it, sets her mouth to his, and strives to stop the fleeing life; and when she sees him dead, having said something the din kept from my ears, she fell on the weapon that had pierced him, and, dying, embraced her husband.
He stands before my eyes too — Phaeocomes, who had bound six lions' skins together with knots, and covered both man and horse: he, hurling the trunk of a tree two yoke of oxen could hardly move, broke Tectaphon, son of Olenus, on the top of his head. The very broad round of his skull was crushed, and through his mouth and hollow nostrils and eyes and ears his soft brains poured, as curdled milk drips through oaken wickerwork, or as liquid oozes under a well-pierced sieve and is squeezed out thick through the many holes. But I, while he was making to strip the fallen man of his arms — your father knows this — plunged my sword into the base of his belly as he plundered. Chthonius too, and Teleboas, lie slain by my sword; the first had borne a two-forked bough for a weapon, the other a javelin, and with his javelin he wounded me — you see the marks; the old scar still shows. Then I should have been sent to the taking of Troy; then I could have stayed, if not overcome, the arms of great Hector with mine! But at that time there was no Hector, or only a boy — and now my age fails me. Why tell you of Periphas, conqueror of two-formed Pyraethus, or of Ampyx, who fixed his pointless cornel-spear full in the face of four-footed Echeclus? Macareus laid low the Pelethronian Erigdupus by driving a crowbar into his breast; and I remember a hunting-spear thrown by Nessus's hand buried in the groin of Cymelus. And do not think Mopsus, son of Ampycus, only foretold the future: at Mopsus's throw a two-formed monster fell, and Hodites tried in vain to speak, his tongue nailed to his chin and his chin to his throat.
Caeneus had put five to death — Styphelus and Bromus and Antimachus and Elymus and axe-bearing Pyracmon: their wounds I do not remember, but I marked their number and names. Latreus, huge in limbs and body, sallied out, armed with the spoils of Emathian Halesus, whom he had slain. His age was between youth and old man; his force was a youth's; gray flecked his temples. Conspicuous with shield and helmet and Macedonian pike, turning his face to both ranks, he shook his arms, rode in one same circle, and poured out these many words boldly into the empty air: "And shall I put up with you too, Caenis? For to me you will always be a woman, to me always Caenis. Does your birth-origin not shame your spirit? Does it not come to mind by what deed you got your reward, and at what price the false shape of a man? See what you were born, or what you submitted to; go, take up a distaff with your work-baskets and twist the thread with your thumb — leave war to men." As he boasted such things, Caeneus, with a hurled lance, tore open his stretched-out side as he ran, where man was joined to horse. He raves with pain and strikes at the bare face of the Phyllean youth with his pike: it bounces back no otherwise than hail from a housetop, or as if one struck a hollow drum with a little pebble. He comes to close quarters and struggles to bury his sword in the tough side — but the parts are impervious to the sword. "Yet you will not escape me! You will be killed by the middle of the blade, since the point is blunt," he says, and slants the sword against his side, and clasps his belly with his long right arm. The blow gives a groan, as a body of marble struck; and the shattered blade flew apart on striking the neck. When Caeneus had shown his unhurt limbs enough to his amazement, "Come now," he said, "let us try your body with my steel!" and up to the hilt he drove his deadly sword into the shoulder, and worked his hand, unseen, into the entrails, and made a wound within the wound.
Look — the double-limbed monsters, enraged, rush in with a vast roar, and all hurl and thrust their weapons at him alone. The weapons fall blunted; unstabbed and bloodless the Elatean Caeneus stays from every blow. The strange thing left them stunned. "O huge disgrace!" cries Monychus. "A whole people, we are beaten by one, and scarcely a man — though he is a man, and we, by our craven deeds, are what he once was. What use are our huge limbs? Our double strength? That our twofold nature has joined the strongest creatures in us? I do not believe we were born of a goddess, nor of Ixion, who was so great he could hope for lofty Juno. We are beaten by a half-male foe! Heap on him stones and beams and whole mountains, and crush out his stubborn breath with cast-down woods! Let a whole wood choke his jaws, and weight will stand for wounds." He spoke, and, chancing on a tree thrown down by the mad force of the south wind, hurled it at the strong foe; and he was an example to the rest, and in a short time Othrys was bare of trees and Pelion had no shade. Buried under the huge heap, Caeneus struggles beneath the weight of the wood and bears the piled oaks on his hard shoulders; but when the load grew over his face and head and his breath had no air to draw, at times he faints, at times he tries in vain to lift himself into the open and to roll off the cast woods — and sometimes he moves it, as, look, if lofty Ida were shaken by earthquakes. The end is doubtful: some said his body was thrust down to roomy Tartarus by the mass of wood; the son of Ampycus denied it, and saw, from the middle of the heap, a bird with tawny wings go out into the clear air — which then for the first time, and then for the last, was seen by me. When Mopsus saw it surveying his camp in gentle flight and clanging around it with a great cry, following it with eyes and heart, he said, "Hail, glory of the Lapith race, once greatest of men, but now the only bird of your kind, Caeneus!" The thing was believed on his word. Grief added anger, and we bore it hard that one had been overwhelmed by so many foes; nor did we stop working our weapons in blood before part were killed and flight and night took the rest away.
As the Pylian told this fight between the Lapiths and the half-human Centaurs, Tlepolemus could not bear his grief that Hercules had been passed over in silence, and said, "It is strange, old man, that you should forget the deeds of Hercules; my father himself often used to tell me that these cloud-born monsters were tamed by him." The Pylian, sad at this, said, "Why do you force me to remember my sorrows, to tear open grief hidden by the years, and to confess my hatred and offense against your father? He did indeed do things beyond belief, and filled the world with his services — which I could rather wish could be denied; but we praise neither Deiphobus nor Polydamas nor Hector himself: for who would praise an enemy? That father of yours once leveled the walls of Messene, and destroyed guiltless cities, Elis and Pylos, and drove sword and fire into my home. And, to say nothing of the others he killed, we were twice six sons of Neleus, a fine band; twice six fell to the might of Hercules, all but me alone. That the others could be beaten, one might bear; but the death of Periclymenus is a marvel, to whom Neptune, founder of the Neleian line, had given the power to take whatever shapes he chose and, once taken, to lay them aside. When he had in vain turned into every other shape, he turned into the bird that carries the lightnings in its curved talons, dearest to the king of the gods; using the bird's strength — its wings, its hooked beak, its clawed talons — he tore the hero's face. The Tirynthian aims at him his too-unerring bow and hits him as he carries his limbs aloft among the clouds and hangs in the air, where the wing joins the side. The wound was not great, but the sinews, cut by it, fail him and deny him motion and the strength to fly. He fell to the earth, his weakened wings not catching the air; and where the light arrow had stuck in the wing, it was pressed farther by the weight of the falling body, and driven up through the top of the side into the left of the neck. Do I seem, then, to owe praises to the deeds of your Hercules, most handsome leader of the Rhodian fleet? Yet I will avenge my brothers no further than by keeping silent on his brave deeds; my friendship with you is firm."
When the son of Neleus had said this with his sweet tongue, and the gift of Bacchus was taken up again after the old man's tale, they rose from the couches; the rest of the night was given to sleep.
But the god who rules the sea's waters with his trident grieves, with a father's love, for the body of his son turned into the bird named for Sthenelus's son, and, hating cruel Achilles, presses his remembering wrath more than in ordinary measure. And now, the war dragged out nearly twice five years, he speaks thus to the unshorn Smintheus: "O dearest by far to me of my brother's sons, who built with me the walls of Troy in vain — do you not groan when you see these towers so soon to fall? Do you not grieve that so many thousands are slain defending these walls? Does not — to name no others — the ghost of Hector, dragged around his own Pergamum, come to you? And still fierce Achilles, bloodier than war itself, lives on, the ravager of our work. Let him but give himself to me, and I will make him feel what I can do with my triple spear; but since we may not meet the enemy hand to hand, destroy him unawares with a hidden arrow." Apollo nodded, and, indulging both his uncle's wrath and his own, veiled in a cloud, came to the Trojan army, and, in the midst of the slaughter, saw Paris scattering his darts, at intervals, among the common Greeks; and, revealing himself as a god, said, "Why waste your arrows on the blood of the rabble? If you have any care for your own, turn on the grandson of Aeacus, and avenge your slaughtered brothers." He spoke, and, pointing at the son of Peleus mowing down Trojan bodies with the sword, turned the bow at him and guided the sure arrow with a deadly hand. This was the one thing that old Priam could rejoice at after Hector. So you, Achilles, conqueror of such great men, are conquered by the cowardly stealer of a Greek wife! But if you had to fall by a woman's war, you would rather have fallen by the Amazon's axe.
Now that terror of the Phrygians, the glory and shield of the Greek name, the grandson of Aeacus, a head unconquerable in war, had burned: the same god had armed him and had burned him. Now he is ash, and of Achilles, so great, there remains some little thing that would not well fill an urn — but his glory lives, to fill the whole world. This measure suits that man, and in this the son of Peleus is equal to himself, and knows no empty Tartarus. Even his shield stirs a war, so you may know whose it was; and arms are wielded for arms. The son of Tydeus does not dare claim them, nor Ajax son of Oïleus, nor the younger son of Atreus, nor the elder, greater in war and years, nor any others: only the sons of Telamon and of Laertes had confidence for so great a prize. To spare himself the burden and the odium of a decision, the descendant of Tantalus bade the Greek leaders sit in the midst of the camp, and passed the judgment of the dispute to them all.
The chiefs sat down, and, with a ring of the common people standing around, Ajax, lord of the sevenfold shield, rose before them; and, impatient in his anger, he looked back with a grim face on the Sigean shores and the fleet on the beach, and, stretching out his hands, said:
"We plead our cause before the ships, O Jupiter, and Ulysses vies with me! But he did not hesitate to give way before Hector's fires, which I withstood, which I drove from this fleet. It is safer, then, to fight with invented words than with the hand. But neither is speaking easy for me, nor acting for him; and as much as I am worth in fierce war and in the line, so much is he worth in talking. Nor do I think, Greeks, that my deeds need be told to you — for you have seen them. Let Ulysses tell his, which he does without a witness, of which night alone is aware. I own the prize sought is great; but a rival cheapens its honor: it is no proud thing for Ajax to hold whatever Ulysses has hoped for, great though it be; he has already gained the reward of this contest — that, when he is beaten, he will be said to have contended with me.
"And I, if my valor were in doubt, would be strong in noble birth, the son of Telamon, who took the walls of Troy under brave Hercules and entered the Colchian shore in the ship of Pagasae. His father was Aeacus, who gives law to the silent dead there, where the heavy stone weighs down Sisyphus, son of Aeolus. Highest Jupiter owns Aeacus and confesses him his offspring: so Ajax is the third from Jove. And yet let this line not help my cause, Greeks, if it is not shared with great Achilles: he was my cousin — I ask what belonged to my cousin! Why do you, sprung from the blood of Sisyphus and most like him in thefts and fraud, thrust a stranger family's name in among the sons of Aeacus? Are the arms to be denied me because I took up arms first, with no informer, while he seems preferable who took them last and shirked service by feigned madness, until the son of Nauplius, cleverer than he but unluckier for himself, unmasked his coward's ruse and dragged him to the arms he had dodged? Shall he now take the best, because he was willing to take none — and shall I go dishonored, robbed of my cousin's gifts, because I offered myself first to danger?
"And would that his madness had been real, or believed — that this counselor of crimes had never come with us to the towers of Phrygia! Then, son of Poeas, Lemnos would not hold you cast away, by our fault; you who now, they say, hidden in the woodland caves, move the very rocks with your groans and pray for the son of Laertes what he deserves — which, if there are gods, you do not pray in vain. And now he who was sworn on the same campaign with us, one of our leaders, alas — the man whose bow, as heir, uses the arrows of Hercules — broken by disease and hunger, is clothed and fed by birds, and, hunting fowl, spends on them the shafts owed to the fate of Troy. Yet he lives, because he did not go with Ulysses. Unhappy Palamedes too would rather have been left — then he would be alive, or at least have had a death without a charge; whom Ulysses, remembering too well the exposing of his madness, framed as betraying the Greek cause, and proved his false charge, and showed the gold he had buried before. So by exile or by death he has robbed the Greeks of their best strength: that is how Ulysses fights, that is why he is to be feared.
"Though he outdo faithful Nestor himself in speech, he will never make me think Nestor's abandonment no crime — Nestor, who, when he begged Ulysses' help, slowed by his horse's wound and worn with age, was deserted by his companion. That I do not invent these charges, the son of Tydeus knows well, who, calling him by name again and again, rebuked him and reproached his trembling friend with his flight. The gods above watch the deeds of men with just eyes: see, he who gave no help now needs it, and, as he left another, so was he to be left — the law he made for himself! He shouted to his comrades: I came, and saw him trembling, pale with fear, quaking at the death to come. I set the mass of my shield before him, covered him as he lay, and saved — this is the least of my glory — his cowardly life. If you insist on the contest, let us go back to that place: give back the enemy, and your wound, and your old fear, hide behind my shield, and under it contend with me! But after I had rescued him, he whom his wounds had left no strength to stand fled, slowed by no wound at all.
"Hector comes, and brings the gods with him to battle; and where he charges, not only you, Ulysses, are afraid, but the brave too — so much terror he brings. Him, as he exulted in his bloody success, I laid flat from afar with a huge stone; him, demanding someone to face, I alone withstood; and you, Greeks, prayed the lot might fall to me — and your prayers prevailed. If you ask the issue of that fight, I was not beaten by him. Look — the Trojans bring fire and sword and Jove himself against the Greek fleet: where now is eloquent Ulysses? I, with my breast, protected a thousand ships, the hope of your return: grant me the arms for so many ships. And, if I may speak the truth, a greater honor is sought for them than for me: our glory is joined, and it is Ajax that is sought for the arms, not the arms by Ajax. Let the Ithacan set beside these deeds Rhesus, and unwarlike Dolon, and Helenus the son of Priam taken with the stolen Pallas: nothing done by day, nothing without Diomedes! If you give these arms for services so cheap, divide them, and let Diomedes' share be the greater.
"But why these for the Ithacan, who works by stealth, always unarmed, and cheats the unwary enemy by tricks? The very shine of the helmet, gleaming with bright gold, will betray his plots and show him where he hides. Nor will the Dulichian head bear so great a weight under Achilles' helm, nor the Pelian spear be anything but heavy and burdensome for unwarlike arms; nor will the shield engraved with the image of the vast world suit a timid left hand made for theft. Why ask, wretch, for a gift that will only weaken you? If the Greek people's mistake gave it you, it would be a reason to be stripped, not feared; and your flight — the one thing in which, most cowardly of men, you beat all others — will be slowed as you drag so great a load. Add that your shield, so rarely in the fight, is unhurt; mine, gaping with a thousand blows from bearing weapons, needs a new successor. In short — what need of words? Let us be tried in action! Let the arms of the brave man be thrown among the enemy: order them fetched from there, and deck out with them the one who brings them back."
The son of Telamon had ended, and a murmur of the crowd followed his closing words, until the Laertian hero stood, and, holding his eyes a little on the ground, raised them to the chiefs and loosed the voice they awaited; nor was grace missing from his eloquent words:
"If my prayers had prevailed with yours, Greeks, the heir of so great a contest would not be in doubt: you would have your arms, Achilles, and we would have you. But since unfair Fates have denied him to me and to you" — and here he wiped his eyes with his hand as if weeping — "who should better succeed great Achilles than the man through whom great Achilles joined the Greeks? Only let it not help him that he seems as dull as he is; and let my talents, which have ever served you, be no harm to me; and let this eloquence of mine, if there is any, which now pleads for its owner and has often pleaded for you, be free of envy — and let no man disown his own gifts. For as to descent, and ancestors, and the things we did not make ourselves, I scarcely call these our own; but since Ajax has boasted himself Jove's great-grandson, Jupiter is the founder of my line too, and I am just as many steps from him: for Laertes is my father, his was Arcesius, his Jupiter — and none of these was condemned or exiled. Through my mother, too, Cyllenian Mercury adds another nobility: on both parents' side there is a god. But not because I am nobler-born on my mother's side, nor because my father is innocent of a brother's blood, do I claim these arms. Weigh the case by merit — only let it be no merit in Ajax that Telamon and Peleus were brothers, and let not blood-order but the honor of valor be sought in these spoils. Or if nearness and the next heir is wanted, Peleus is Achilles' father and Pyrrhus his son: what place is there for Ajax? Let the arms go to Phthia or Scyros! And Teucer is no less Achilles' cousin than he — yet does he claim, does he expect to carry them off?
"Since, then, the contest is simply of deeds — I have done more than I can easily put in words, yet I will go in order. His mother, the Nereid, foreseeing his death, hid her son in a disguise, and the trick of the assumed dress deceived all, Ajax among them. I mixed arms, to stir a manly mind, among a woman's wares; and the hero had not yet thrown off the maiden's dress when, as he gripped a shield and spear, I said, 'Son of a goddess, Troy keeps itself to fall by you: why delay to overthrow mighty Troy?' And I laid my hand on him and sent the brave man to brave deeds. So his deeds are mine: I subdued Telephus fighting with his spear, and healed him when he begged, beaten. That Thebes fell is my doing; believe that I took Lesbos, took Tenedos, Chryse and Cilla, cities of Apollo, and Scyros; consider that the walls of Lyrnessus fell, shaken by my right hand; and, to name no others, I gave you the one who could kill fierce Hector — through me the famous Hector lies dead! By the arms through which Achilles was found, I claim these arms: to the living I gave them; after his death I ask them back.
"When the grief of one had reached all the Greeks, and a thousand ships filled Euboean Aulis, the winds long awaited were either lacking or against the fleet, and the harsh oracles bade Agamemnon slay his innocent daughter for cruel Diana. The father refuses, and rages at the gods themselves — a king, yet still a father. By my words I turned the parent's gentle nature to the public good. This cause — I confess it, and let Atrides forgive the confession — I upheld before a biased judge, a hard case; yet the good of the people, and his brother, and the height of the granted scepter, move him to balance praise against blood. I was sent, too, to the mother, who was not to be persuaded but tricked by craft; had the son of Telamon gone, our sails would even now be without wind. I was sent, a bold envoy, to the towers of Troy; the senate-house of lofty Troy was seen and entered by me, still full of its heroes; undaunted, I pleaded the common cause that all Greece had entrusted me, and accused Paris, and demanded back the plunder and Helen, and moved Priam and Antenor at Priam's side; but Paris and his brothers and the ravishers under him barely held their wicked hands — you know this, Menelaus — and that first day of danger was mine, with you.
"It would be long to tell what I did well, by counsel and by hand, in the length of that war. After the first battles the enemy kept long within the city walls, and there was no chance of open war; only in the tenth year did we fight. What were you doing meanwhile, you who know nothing but battles? What use were you? But if you ask my deeds: I lay ambushes for the enemy, ring the defenses with a trench, cheer the allies to bear the tedium of a long war with a calm mind, teach how we are to be fed and armed, and am sent where need requires. Look — by Jove's warning, the king, deceived by a shape in his sleep, orders the war's care dismissed; he can defend his word by its author. Ajax should not have allowed it, but demanded Troy be razed, and fought — the one thing he can do. Why does he not stop those about to leave? Why not take up arms and give the wavering crowd a lead? That was not too much for one who never says anything but grand. And did you yourself flee? I was witness, and ashamed to see, when you turned your back and readied the sails of disgrace. Without delay I cried, 'What are you doing? What madness stirs you, friends, to let Troy go, all but taken, and to carry home, in the tenth year, nothing but disgrace?' With such words, and others grief itself made me eloquent, I led the turned-away back from the fleeing fleet. The son of Atreus calls the allies, struck with terror; and still the son of Telamon dares not open his mouth — yet Thersites dared to attack the kings with insolent words, and not unpunished by me! I rise, and rouse the frightened citizens against the foe, and by my voice restore their lost courage. From that time, whatever this man may seem to have done bravely is mine, who drew him back as he turned his back.
"In short, who of the Greeks praises you, or seeks you out? But the son of Tydeus shares his deeds with me, approves me, and always trusts in Ulysses his comrade. It is something, out of so many thousands of Greeks, to be singled out by Diomedes! Nor did the lot order me to go; yet, scorning the peril of night and enemy, I killed Dolon of the Phrygian race, who dared the same as we — but not before I made him tell everything, and learned what treacherous Troy was planning. I had found out all, with nothing more to spy, and could have returned with praise going before me; not content with that, I sought the tent of Rhesus, and in his own camp killed him and his men, and so, a victor with my wish won, I rode home in the captured chariot like a joyful triumph. The horses whose owner the enemy had demanded as the price of one night's work — deny me the arms, and let Ajax be your greater benefactor! Why speak of the ranks of Lycian Sarpedon laid waste by my sword? With much bloodshed I felled Coeranus son of Iphitus, and Alastor, and Chromius, and Alcander, and Halius, and Noemon, and Prytanis, and put to death Thoön with Chersidamas, and Charops, and Ennomus driven by his cruel fate, and others less famous who fell by my hand beneath the walls. I too have wounds, citizens, honorable in their place; do not trust his crafty words — look!" And with his hand he pulled his garment open: "This is the breast," he said, "that has ever been busy in your service! But the son of Telamon has spent no blood on his friends in all these years, and has a body without a wound.
"Yet what of that, if he says he bore arms for the Greek fleet against the Trojans and Jove himself? I confess he did — nor is it mine to belittle others' good deeds with malice — but let him not alone seize what is common to all, and let him give you too some of the honor. The descendant of Actor, safe in Achilles' likeness, drove the Trojans and their champion from the ships about to burn. He fancies, too, that he alone dared meet Hector in combat, forgetting the king and the chiefs and me — ninth in that duty, and preferred by the favor of the lot. But what was the issue of your combat, bravest of men? Hector went off, hurt by no wound. Wretched me — with how much grief I must recall the time when Achilles, the wall of the Greeks, fell! No tears, no grief, no fear held me from lifting his body from the ground: on these shoulders — these shoulders, I say — I bore the body of Achilles, and his arms with it, which now too I am striving to bear. I have strength enough for such a weight, and surely a soul that will feel your honors. Was his sea-blue mother, then, so anxious for her son, that a rough soldier, one without a mind, should put on the heavenly gifts, the work of so great an art? For he will not understand the shield's engravings — the Ocean, the lands, the stars with the lofty sky, the Pleiades and Hyades and the Bear that shuns the sea, and the different cities, and the bright sword of Orion: he demands to receive arms he does not understand!
"And that he charges me with shirking the hard duties of war and coming late to the toil begun — does he not see that in this he slanders great Achilles? If you call feigning a crime, we both feigned; if delay is a fault, I was earlier than he. A loving wife held me back, a loving mother Achilles; the first of our time was given them, the rest to you. I do not fear a charge shared with so great a man, even if I could not defend it — yet he was found out by Ulysses' cleverness, but not Ulysses by Ajax's. And let us not wonder that he pours out the abuse of his stupid tongue on me, when he casts at you too things worthy of shame. Is it base for me to have charged Palamedes with a false crime, and honorable for you to have condemned him? But the son of Nauplius could not defend a deed so great and so plain, and you did not merely hear the charges against him — you saw them, and the bribe itself made the charge plain. Nor did I deserve blame because Vulcan's Lemnos still holds the son of Poeas — defend your own act, for you agreed to it! — nor will I deny I advised him to withdraw from the toil of war and voyage, and to try to ease his cruel pains by rest. He obeyed — and lives! The advice was not only loyal but lucky, though loyal was enough. And since the seers demand him to destroy Troy, do not send me! The son of Telamon will go better, and by his eloquence soften the man maddened by disease and rage, or cleverly bring him back by some art! Sooner will Simois flow backward and Ida stand without leaves, and Achaia promise aid to Troy, than the skill of stupid Ajax help the Greeks while my breast is idle in your cause. Though you rage at friends and king and me, hard Philoctetes, though you curse and devote my head without end, and long to have me thrown in your way and to drink my blood — still I will approach you, and strive to bring you back with me, and win your arrows as surely (may Fortune favor) as I won the Dardanian seer I took, as I laid open the answers of the gods and the fates of Troy, as I stole the inmost image of Phrygian Minerva from the midst of the enemy.
"And does Ajax match himself with me? The Fates forbade Troy to be taken without that statue: where is the brave Ajax? Where are the great man's huge words? Why do you fear here? Why does Ulysses dare to go through the watches and trust himself to the night and, through cruel swords, enter not only the walls of Troy but its highest towers, and tear the goddess from her shrine and carry her, so torn, through the enemy? Had I not done it, the son of Telamon would have borne the seven bull-hides on his left arm in vain. On that night the victory over Troy was won by me: then I conquered Pergamum, when I made it able to be conquered. Stop showing me the son of Tydeus with your looks and muttering: a share of the glory in these things is his. Nor were you alone when you held your shield for the fleet: a crowd was with you; to me fell one. Who, did he not know that a fighter is less than a wise man, and that the prize is not owed to an untamed hand, would himself be claiming these arms — the more discreet Ajax would claim them, and fierce Eurypylus, and the son of famous Andraemon, and no less Idomeneus and Meriones of the same land, and the brother of the greater son of Atreus. But these, brave in action and no second to you in war, have all yielded to my wisdom. Your right hand is useful in war; your temper needs my guidance. You have strength without a mind; mine is the care for the future. You can fight; the son of Atreus, with me, picks the time for fighting. You serve only with your body; we with the mind; and as much as the one who steers the ship surpasses the oarsman's work, as much as the general is greater than the soldier, so much do I surpass you. In our body, too, the heart is worth more than the hand: all vigor lies there.
"But you, chiefs, give the reward to your watchman; and for the care of so many years I have spent in anxiety, return this honor to weigh against my services. The toil is now at its end: I have removed the opposing Fates, and by making it possible to take lofty Pergamum, I have taken it. By our shared hopes, by the walls of Troy doomed to fall, by the gods I lately took from the enemy, by anything that remains to be done by wisdom, by anything still to be dared from a desperate place — remember me! Or, if you do not give me the arms, give them to this," and he showed the fatal image of Minerva.
The body of chiefs was moved; and then it appeared what eloquence can do, and the fluent man carried off the arms of the brave one. He who alone had so often withstood Hector, and the sword, and fire, and Jove himself, could not withstand one thing — his own grief; and grief conquered the unconquered man. He seized his sword and said, "This at least is my own — or will Ulysses claim this too for himself? This must I use against myself; and the blade often wet with Phrygian blood will now be wet with its owner's death, that no one may conquer Ajax but Ajax." He spoke, and drove the deadly sword into his breast — then for the first time taking a wound — where it lay open to the steel. His hands could not draw the fixed weapon out; the blood itself forced it out; and the earth, reddened with blood, bore from the green turf a purple flower, the same once born from the wound of Hyacinthus. Letters shared by the boy and the hero are written in the middle of the petals: these for the name, those for the lament.
The victor, Ulysses, set sail for the country of Hypsipyle and famous Thoas, the land infamous for the old slaughter of husbands, to bring back the arrows, the weapons of Hercules. When he had carried them back to the Greeks, their owner along with them, the last hand was at length put to the long war. Troy and Priam fell together; Priam's wife, poor woman, after losing everything else, lost her human shape and frightened a foreign air with new barkings, where the long Hellespont narrows.
Ilium was burning, and the fire had not yet died, and the altar of Jove had drunk the scanty blood of old Priam; the priestess of Apollo, dragged by the hair, stretched to heaven her hands that would not avail; the Dardanian mothers, embracing while they could the images of their country's gods and clinging to the burning temples, the victorious Greeks drag off, an envied spoil. Astyanax is hurled from the towers from which, shown by his mother, he used often to watch his father fighting for himself and defending his ancestors' kingdom. And now Boreas urges them to go, and the sails, stirred by a fair breeze, resound; the sailor bids them use the winds. "Troy, farewell! We are torn away," the Trojan women cry, and kiss the soil, and leave the smoking roofs of their land. Last to board the fleet — a pitiful sight — is Hecuba, found among the graves of her children; clutching the tombs and kissing the bones, Dulichian hands dragged her off — yet she took up the ashes of one, and carried Hector's ashes with her in her breast; on Hector's tomb she left the gray hair of her head, a poor offering, her hair and her tears.
There is, opposite Phrygia where Troy stood, a land inhabited by the men of Bistonia. There stood the rich palace of Polymestor, to whom your father, Polydorus, secretly entrusted you to be raised, and removed you far from the Phrygian war — a wise plan, had he not added great riches as well, the reward of crime, the spur of a greedy heart. When the fortunes of the Phrygians fell, the wicked king of Thrace took a sword and drove it into the throat of his foster-child, and, as if the crime could be removed with the body, threw him lifeless from a cliff into the waters below.
On the Thracian shore the son of Atreus had moored his fleet, until the sea should be calm and the wind kinder. Here, suddenly, Achilles, as great as he used to be alive, rose from the earth that split wide, and, like one threatening, wore the face of that hour when he fiercely attacked lawless Agamemnon with the sword, and said: "Do you leave, forgetful of me, Greeks? Is all thanks for my valor buried with me? Do not! And, so that my tomb may not be without honor, let Polyxena be slain to appease the ghost of Achilles." He spoke; and his companions obeying the pitiless shade, the girl — brave and unhappy, and more than a woman — was torn from her mother's bosom, which she now cherished almost alone, and led to the tomb, and made a victim at the cruel pyre.
Mindful of herself, when she had been brought to the cruel altar and knew the savage rite was prepared for her, and saw Neoptolemus standing with sword in hand, fixing his eyes on her face, she said: "Use my noble blood at once; there is no holding back. Bury your weapon in my throat or my breast" — and bared throat and breast together. "Surely Polyxena would not want to be any man's slave; nor by such a rite will you appease any god. Only I could wish my death might be hidden from my mother. My mother is my one grief, and lessens the joy of my death — though it is not my death but her own life that should be mourned. Only, that I may not go unfree to the shades below, stand off, if what I ask is just, and keep men's hands from a maiden's touch: my blood will be the more welcome, whoever he is you make ready to appease by my killing, if it is free. Yet if the last words of my mouth move any of you — it is King Priam's daughter, not a captive, who asks — give my body back to my mother unransomed, and let her buy the sad right of a grave not with gold but with tears. When she could, she used to buy it with gold too."
She spoke; and the people did not hold back the tears she held. Even the priest, weeping and unwilling, split the offered breast with the driven steel. She, sinking to the ground on her failing knees, kept an unafraid face to her last moment; and even then it was her care, as she fell, to veil the parts that should be hidden, and to keep the honor of chaste modesty.
The Trojan women take her up and count over the mourned children of Priam, and how much blood one house has spent, and mourn you, girl, and you, so lately called a royal wife and royal mother, image of flourishing Asia, now even the wretched lot of the plunder — whom the victor Ulysses would not have wished his, but that you had borne Hector: Hector barely found his mother a master! She, embracing the body void of that brave soul, gave to it too the tears she had so often given her country, her sons, her husband; she pours her tears into the wounds, covers them with kisses from her mouth, beats the breast she is now so used to beating, and, tearing her gray hair clotted with blood, said much, and this too, tearing at her breast:
"Daughter, last grief of your mother — for what is left? — daughter, you lie dead, and I see your wound as my own. See: lest I lose any of my children without bloodshed, you too have a wound. Because you were a woman, I thought you safe from the sword — and yet, a woman, you have fallen by the sword; and the same Achilles who destroyed so many of your brothers has destroyed you, the ruin of Troy, the robber of me! But after he fell to the arrows of Paris and Phoebus, 'Now at least,' I said, 'Achilles is not to be feared' — and even now he was to be feared by me: the very ashes of the buried man rage against this house, and even in the tomb we have found him an enemy. For the son of Aeacus I was fruitful! Great Ilium lies fallen, and the public disaster is ended in a heavy end — but ended; only for me does Pergamum remain, and my grief still runs its course. So lately the greatest of all, strong in so many sons and daughters and in-laws and my husband, now I am dragged off an exile, destitute, torn from the tombs of my kin, a gift for Penelope — who, showing me to the Ithacan matrons as I spin my allotted task, will say, 'This is that famous mother of Hector, this is the wife of Priam.' And now you, who alone eased your mother's grief after so many losses, have made atonement at the enemy's tomb! An offering for the enemy I bore! Why do I hold out, hard as iron? Why do I linger? For what do you keep me, aged old age? For what, cruel gods, unless to see fresh deaths, do you reprieve an old woman so long-lived? Who would have thought Priam could be called happy after Pergamum fell? Happy in his death — he did not see you cut down, and lost his life and kingdom together. But you, I suppose, a royal maiden, will be honored with funeral rites, and your body laid in your ancestors' tombs! This is not the fortune of your house: your mother's gifts will be your lot — tears, and a handful of foreign sand. We have lost all; only one, dearest to his mother, remains, a reason to bear life a little longer — Polydorus, once the youngest of my sons, given to the Ismarian king on these coasts. Why do I delay, meanwhile, to wash her cruel wounds and her face smeared with dreadful blood?"
She spoke, and went to the shore with an old woman's step, tearing her white hair. "Give me an urn, Trojan women," the unhappy mother said, to draw the flowing water — and saw the body of Polydorus cast up on the shore, and the great wounds made by Thracian weapons. The Trojan women cried out; she was struck dumb with grief, and grief itself swallowed both her voice and the tears that rose within, and, most like a hard rock, she stiffened, now fixing her eyes on the ground before her, now lifting her grim face to the sky, now looking at her son's face, now at his wounds — the wounds above all — and she arms and readies herself with rage. As soon as it flared, she resolved to be avenged, as if she were still a queen, and was wholly in the image of punishment. And as a lioness rages, robbed of her suckling cub, and, finding the prints of his feet, follows the enemy she does not see, so Hecuba, having mixed rage with mourning, not forgetting her spirit but forgetting her years, went to Polymestor, the contriver of the dreadful murder, and asked to speak with him — for she wished, she said, to show him a hidden hoard of gold left for her son. The Thracian believed her, and, used to the love of gain, came to a secret place. Then, with coaxing lips, he cunningly said, "Away with delay, Hecuba, give the gift to your son; all you give, and all you gave before, will be his, I swear by the gods above." She eyes him grimly as he speaks and swears falsely, and boils with heaving rage, and, seizing him, calls up the throng of captive mothers and drives her fingers into his treacherous eyes and gouges them from his cheeks — rage makes her strong — and plunges her hands in, and, fouled with his guilty blood, tears out, not the eyes, for none are left, but the sockets of the eyes.
Provoked by their king's ruin, the Thracian people begin to attack the Trojan woman with thrown darts and stones; but she pursues the hurled stone with a hoarse growl and, her mouth set for words, barks as she tries to speak. The place still stands and takes its name from the event; and long remembering her old sorrows, even then she howled mournfully across the Sithonian plains. Her fate moved her own Trojans and her Greek foes, and all the gods too — so much that even the wife and sister of Jove denied that Hecuba had deserved that end.
Though she had favored those same arms, Aurora has no leisure to be moved by the disasters and fall of Troy and Hecuba: a nearer care, a grief at home, torments the goddess — her lost Memnon, whom his saffron mother saw perish by Achilles' spear on the Phrygian plains. She saw it, and that color with which the morning hours grow red went pale, and the sky hid in clouds. But the mother could not bear to watch his limbs laid on the last fire; with loose hair, just as she was, she did not scorn to fall at great Jove's knees and add these words to her tears: "Lowest of all the goddesses the golden sky holds — for my temples are the fewest in all the world — yet a goddess, I come; not that you grant me shrines and days of sacrifice and altars warm with fire, but, if you consider how much I, a woman, do for you when at each new dawn I keep the borders of night, you would think some reward due. But that is not my care, nor is Aurora in a state now to demand deserved honors: bereft of my Memnon I come, who bore brave arms in vain for his uncle, and in his early years — so you willed it — was killed by brave Achilles. Grant him, I pray, highest ruler of the gods, some honor as a comfort for his death, and ease a mother's wounds."
Jove nodded; and suddenly Memnon's high pyre sank with its towering fires, and rolls of black smoke stained the day, as when a river-nymph breathes up fogs and the sun is not let below. The black ash flies, gathers into one body, thickens, takes a shape, draws heat and life from the fire — its own lightness gave it wings — and, first like a bird, then a true bird, it whirred with its wings; and at once countless sisters whirred with it, born of the same origin. Three times they circle the pyre, and three times a joined wailing rises into the air; at the fourth flight they part their company; then two fierce tribes from opposite sides wage war, and with beaks and hooked claws work out their rage and weary their wings and clashing breasts, and fall, kindred bodies, an offering to the buried ash, remembering they were born of a brave man. Their maker gives these sudden birds a name: after him they are called the Memnonides; when the sun has run the twelve signs, they fight again, doomed to die in their parent's honor. So, while to others it seemed sad that the daughter of Dymas now barked, Aurora is intent on her own sorrow, and even now sheds loving tears and drips them in dew over all the world.
Yet the Fates do not let the hope of Troy be destroyed with its walls: the Cytherean hero bears on his shoulders the sacred relics and, another sacred relic, his father, a venerable burden. Out of such great wealth, in his devotion he chooses that prize and his own Ascanius, and with his fleeing fleet is carried over the seas from Antandros, and leaves the accursed thresholds of the Thracians and the earth streaming with Polydorus's blood, and, with helpful winds and favoring tide, enters the city of Apollo with his companions. Here Anius, by whom, as king, men were tended, and, as priest, Phoebus was duly served, received him into temple and house, and showed him the city, the famous shrines, and the two trees Latona once clutched in her labor. Incense given to the flames, wine poured over the incense, the entrails of slain oxen duly burned, they seek the palace, and, reclining on high couches, take the gifts of Ceres with flowing wine. Then devout Anchises said, "O chosen priest of Phoebus, am I wrong, or, when I first saw these walls, did you not have a son and, as I recall, twice-two daughters?" Anius answered, shaking his temples wreathed in snow-white fillets, and said sadly: "You are not wrong, greatest hero; you saw me the father of five children, whom now — such change of fortune turns among men — you see almost bereft of all. For what help is my absent son, whom Andros, a land named for him, holds, keeping that place and kingdom for his father? The Delian god gave him augury; to my daughters Liber gave gifts beyond wish and belief: for at the touch of my daughters all things turned to grain, and the stream of wine, and the olive of Minerva, and rich was the use of them. When the son of Atreus, the destroyer of Troy, learned this — that you may not think we too felt nothing of your storm — he used the force of arms and dragged them unwilling from their father's bosom, and ordered them to feed the Greek fleet with their heavenly gift. Each fled where she could; Euboea was sought by two, and by as many, Andros, their brother's island. The soldiers came and threatened war if they were not surrendered; loyalty, beaten by fear, gave up the kindred bodies to punishment — and you might forgive a timid brother: there was no Aeneas, no Hector to defend Andros, through whom you Trojans held out to the tenth year. And now chains were being readied for their captive arms; lifting to heaven their still-free arms, they cried, 'Father Bacchus, help!' and the giver of their gift did help — if to destroy them in a strange way be called helping. By what means they lost their shape I could not learn, and cannot now tell; the sum of the loss is known: they took wings and became birds of your consort, snow-white doves."
With such talk and other they filled the feast, and, the table removed, sought sleep, and rose with the day, and went to the oracle of Phoebus, who bade them seek their ancient mother and kindred shores. The king sees them off and gives gifts to the departing: a scepter to Anchises, a scarf and a quiver to his grandson, a mixing-bowl to Aeneas, which once Therses of Thebes, his guest, had sent him from the Aonian shore — Therses had sent it, but Alcon of Hyle had made it and carved it with a long design. There was a city, and you might point out its seven gates: these stood for a name and showed which city it was. Before the city, funerals and tombs and fires and pyres, and mothers with loosened hair and bared breasts, showed grief; the nymphs too seem to weep and mourn their dried-up springs; a leafless tree stands bare and stiff, and goats gnaw the parched stones. Look — in the middle of Thebes he shows the daughters of Orion, one giving her bared throat a more-than-womanly wound, the other driving a weapon through her brave breast, dying for her people, and borne through the city in honored funerals and burned in a public place; then from the virgin ashes, lest the race fail, twin youths rising, whom fame calls the Coronae, leading the procession for their mother's ashes. So far for the figures shining on the ancient bronze; the rim of the bowl was rough with gilded acanthus.
Nor do the Trojans send back gifts of less worth: they give the priest an incense-box for the frankincense, a bowl, and a crown bright with gold and gems. Then, recalling that the Teucrians drew their origin from Teucer's blood, they made for Crete, but could not long bear its air; and, leaving its hundred cities, they long to reach the Ausonian harbors. A storm rages and tosses them, and winged Aëllo frightens them, taken into the unsafe harbors of the Strophades. And now, carried on, they had passed the Dulichian harbors, and Ithaca and Same and the Neritian homes, the kingdom of the lying Ulysses; and they see Ambracia, contested in a dispute of the gods, now famous for the Actian Apollo, and the stone that was once the transformed judge, and the land of Dodona, vocal with its oaks, and the Chaonian bays, where the sons of the Molossian king escaped the wicked fires on borrowed wings. They make for the neighboring land of the Phaeacians, planted with lovely fruit; then Epirus, and Buthrotos ruled by the Phrygian seer, and a copied Troy; and, sure of the future — all that Helenus, son of Priam, had faithfully foretold — they enter Sicily. With three points it runs out into the sea: Pachynos turned to the rainy south, Lilybaeum facing the soft west winds, and Peloros looking to the north, away from the open sea. Here the Trojans come, and with oars and favoring tide, at nightfall the fleet gains the sands of Zancle.
Scylla infests the right side, restless Charybdis the left: one swallows and vomits up again the ships it takes; the other, with a maiden's face, has her dark belly girt with fierce dogs — and, if the poets have not left it all a fiction, she too was once a maiden. Many suitors sought her; refusing them, she used to go — most dear to the sea-nymphs — to the nymphs of the sea, and tell of the youths' baffled loves. As Galatea gave her hair to be combed, she addressed her thus, drawing sighs: "Yet you, girl, no ungentle race of men courts, and you can refuse them, as you do, unharmed; but I, whose father is Nereus, whom sea-blue Doris bore, guarded too by a crowd of sisters, could not escape the Cyclops' love except through sorrow" — and tears choked her voice. When the girl had wiped them with her marble thumb and comforted the goddess, she said, "Tell me, dearest, and do not hide from me — I am true to you — the cause of your grief." The Nereid answered the daughter of Crataeis:
Acis was the son of Faunus and the nymph Symaethis, a great delight to his father and mother, but a greater to me; for he had joined himself to me alone. Beautiful, and having passed twice eight birthdays, he had marked his soft cheeks with faint down. Him I pursued; me the Cyclops pursued without end. Nor, should you ask, could I say whether the hatred of the Cyclops or the love of Acis was stronger in me: they were equal. O kindly Venus, how great is the power of your reign! For that savage, dreaded even by the very woods, seen by no stranger and unharmed, the scorner of great Olympus and the gods themselves, now feels what love is, and, caught by a strong desire, burns, forgetting his flocks and his caves. And now you care for your looks, now for pleasing, Polyphemus; now you comb your stiff hair with rakes, now it pleases you to cut your shaggy beard with a sickle, and to look at your fierce face in the water and compose it. Your love of slaughter, your fierceness, your endless thirst for blood cease, and the ships come and go in safety.
Meanwhile Telemus, come to Sicilian Etna — Telemus, son of Eurymus, whom no omen had ever deceived — approached the dreadful Polyphemus and said, "The single eye you carry in the middle of your brow, Ulysses will take from you." He laughed and said, "O most foolish of seers, you are wrong: another has already taken it." So he scorns the one who warns him truly, in vain, and either burdens the shore, striding with huge steps, or, tired, goes back to his shady cave. A hill, wedge-shaped, runs out in a long point into the sea, the ocean's wave flowing round both sides. Here the fierce Cyclops climbed and sat in the middle; his woolly flocks followed with no one leading. When the pine that served him for a staff — fit for a mast — was laid at his feet, and he had taken up his pipe of a hundred reeds, all the mountains felt the shepherd's piping, and the waves felt it. Hidden in a rock and resting in my Acis's lap, I caught from afar with my ears such words as these, and marked them in my mind:
"O Galatea, whiter than the leaf of the snow-white privet, more flowery than the meadows, taller than the tall alder, brighter than glass, friskier than a tender kid, smoother than shells worn by the ceaseless sea, more welcome than the winter sun or the summer shade, more graceful than the tall plane, clearer than ice, sweeter than the ripe grape, softer than swan's down and than curdled milk — and, if you would not flee, lovelier than a watered garden. Yet you, the same Galatea, are wilder than untamed bullocks, harder than aged oak, more treacherous than the waters, tougher than willow twigs and white vines, more immovable than these rocks, more violent than a torrent, prouder than the praised peacock, fiercer than fire, rougher than thistles, more savage than a she-bear with young, deafer than the sea, crueler than a trodden snake — and, what most I would take from you, fleeter not only than the deer driven by loud barkings, but even than the winds and the fleeting air! But if you knew me well, you would repent your flight, and blame your own delay, and strive to keep me. I have, part of the mountain, caves hung with living rock, where neither the sun is felt at noon nor the winter; there are apples that weigh down the boughs, gold-like grapes on the long vines, and purple ones too: both these and those I keep for you. With your own hands you will gather the soft strawberries born under the woodland shade, the autumn cornels, and plums, not only darkened with black juice but of the choicest kind, like new wax. With me for husband you will lack no chestnuts, no arbute fruit: every tree will serve you.
"All this flock is mine; many too wander in the valleys, many the wood hides, many are stalled in my caves; nor, should you ask, could I tell you how many — it is a poor man who counts his cattle. For their praises trust me not at all; you can see for yourself how they can barely carry their swollen udders on their legs. There are lambs, the younger breed, in the warm folds, and kids of equal age in other folds. Snow-white milk I always have: part is kept for drinking, part the curdled rennet hardens. Nor will only common delights and ordinary gifts be yours — does and hares and a she-goat, a pair of doves, or a nest taken from a treetop: I have found on the mountaintop twin cubs of a shaggy she-bear that can play with you, so alike you could scarcely tell them apart; I found them and said, 'These I will keep for my mistress.' Now raise your bright head from the blue sea, now, Galatea, come, and do not scorn my gifts! Surely I know myself, for I lately saw myself in the reflection of clear water, and my form pleased me as I looked. See how huge I am: not Jove in heaven is bigger than this body — for you are wont to tell of some Jupiter reigning; my thick hair hangs over my grim face and shades my shoulders like a wood. And do not think it ugly that my body bristles with stiff hair: a tree is ugly without leaves, a horse ugly unless a mane veils its tawny neck; feathers cover birds, their wool becomes the sheep, a beard and rough hair suit men. I have one eye in the middle of my brow, but it is like a great shield. What of it? Does not the great Sun see all this from heaven — and the Sun has but one eye? Besides, my father reigns in your sea: him I give you for a father-in-law; only pity me and hear a suppliant's prayer! For to you alone I yield, I who scorn Jove and heaven and the piercing bolt; you, daughter of Nereus, I dread — your anger is fiercer to me than the lightning. And I could bear these slights more patiently if you fled all men; but why, rejecting the Cyclops, do you love Acis, and prefer his embrace to mine? Let him please himself and please you too — though I would not have it, Galatea — only let me get the chance: he will feel that my strength matches my great body! I will drag out his living guts and scatter his torn limbs through the fields and through your waves — so let him mingle with you! For I burn, and, slighted, the fire rages fiercer, and I seem to carry Etna, moved with all its flames, in my breast — and you, Galatea, are unmoved."
Having in vain made such complaints — for I saw it all — he rises, and, like a bull raging when the cow is taken from him, he cannot stand still, but wanders the wood and the known glades; when the savage saw me and Acis, unsuspecting and fearing nothing, he cried, "I see you — and I will make that the last union of your love!" And that voice was as loud as an angry Cyclops should have: Etna shuddered at the cry. I, terror-struck, plunged into the near sea; the hero, son of Symaethis, turned and fled, crying, "Help me, Galatea, I beg! Help me, her parents, and take me, about to die, into your realms!" The Cyclops pursued, and threw a piece torn from the mountain; and though only the farthest edge of the rock reached him, it buried all of Acis. But I did the one thing the Fates allowed: I made Acis take on his grandfather's power. Red blood ran from beneath the mass, and in a little the redness began to fade, and became the color of a stream muddied by rain, and cleared with time; then the thrown mass gaped, and through the cracks a living, tall reed sprang up, and the hollow mouth of the rock rang with leaping waters; and — a marvel — suddenly, up to the waist, a youth stood forth, his new horns wreathed with bending reeds, who, but that he was larger and all blue in the face, was Acis. But even so it was Acis, changed into a river; and the stream kept its old name.
Galatea ceased speaking, and, the company breaking up, the Nereids swim off in the calm waves. Scylla returns — for she does not dare trust herself to the open sea — and either wanders without clothes on the thirsty sand, or, when tired, finding a hidden nook of the water, cools her limbs in the enclosed wave. When, look — cutting the deep, a new dweller of the high sea, his limbs lately changed at Anthedon near Euboea, Glaucus comes, and, in his longing for the maiden he has seen, lingers and says whatever he thinks may hold her as she flees. Yet she flees, and, swift with fear, reaches the top of a mountain near the shore. In front of the sea a huge ridge rises to a single peak, curving far over the waves, treeless. Here she stops, and, safe in the place, not knowing whether he is a monster or a god, admires his color and his flowing hair that covers his shoulders and back, and how a coiling fish closes the end of his groin. He sees it, and, leaning on a nearby rock, says: "I am no monster, no wild beast, maiden, but a god of the water; nor have Proteus and Triton and Palaemon, son of Athamas, a greater right over the sea. Yet once I was mortal — but, owed even then to the deep, I was busy in it: for at one time I would haul the nets that drew the fish, at another, seated on a rock, I would work the line with the rod. There is a shore next to a green meadow, one part ringed by water, the other by grass, which no horned heifers had ever cropped, nor you, gentle sheep, nor shaggy goats; no busy bee took gathered blossoms from it, no festive garlands were made from it, no mower's hand had ever cut it. I was the first to sit on that turf, drying my dripping nets; and, to count my captive fish in order, I laid out on it those that chance had driven to my nets or their own credulity to my hooks. It is like a fiction — but what use to me to invent? — at the touch of the grass my prey began to stir, to shift its sides, and to move on land as in the sea; and while I paused and wondered, the whole crowd fled to the waves and left their new master and the shore. I stood amazed, and long in doubt sought the cause: whether some god had done it, or the juice of some herb. 'And what herb,' I said, 'has this power?' and with my hand I plucked the grass and chewed it. Scarcely had my throat swallowed the strange juices when suddenly I felt my heart throb within, and my breast seized with love of another nature; and I could not stay there, and cried, 'Land never to be revisited, farewell!' and sank my body beneath the sea. The sea-gods thought me worthy of a share in their honor, and asked Oceanus and Tethys to take from me whatever was mortal; and I was cleansed by them, and, a purging charm said over me nine times, was bidden to put my breast beneath a hundred streams. No delay: rivers from different springs, and whole seas, poured over my head. So far I can tell you what happened worth telling, so far I remember; the rest my mind did not feel. When it came back, I found myself, in all my body, another than I had been, and not the same in mind: then for the first time I saw this beard, green with its deep hue, and my flowing hair which I sweep along the wide seas, and my huge shoulders and blue arms, and my legs ending, curved, in a finny fish. But what use is this shape, what use to have pleased the sea-gods, what use to be a god, if you are not moved by these things?" As he spoke such things, and would have said more, Scylla left the god; and he, raging, stung by the refusal, made for the marvelous halls of Circe, daughter of the Sun.
And now Glaucus, the Euboean plougher of the swelling waves, had left behind Etna, laid on the Giant's jaws, and the fields of the Cyclops, that knew no harrow, no plow, that owed nothing to the yoked oxen; had left Zancle too, and the facing walls of Rhegium, and the ship-wrecking strait which, pressed between the two shores, holds the border of the Ausonian and Sicilian lands. Thence, swimming with his huge hands through the Etruscan seas, Glaucus came to the grassy hills and the halls of Circe, daughter of the Sun, full of many wild beasts. When he saw her, greetings given and received, he said: "Have pity, goddess, on a god, I pray! For you alone — if only I seem worthy — can ease this love. How great the power of herbs is, daughter of Titan, none knows better than I, who was changed by them. And that the cause of my madness may not be unknown to you: on the Italian shore, opposite the walls of Messina, I saw Scylla. I am ashamed to tell my promises, prayers, caresses, and scorned words; but you, if there is any power in incantation, move the charm with your holy lips, or, if some herb is stronger, use the proven force of a potent herb. I do not ask you to cure me and heal these wounds — there is no need of an end: let her share in the flame." But Circe — for no one has a nature more open to such fires, whether the cause is in herself or Venus, offended by her father's disclosure, makes it so — answered thus: "You would do better to court one who is willing, who wants the same, caught by an equal desire. You are worthy — surely you could be — to be courted of your own accord; and if you give hope, believe me, you will be courted. That you may not doubt it, and that confidence in your beauty not fail you — see, I, though a goddess, and daughter of the shining Sun, though I can do so much with charms and so much with herbs, vow to be yours. Scorn her who scorns you, requite her who follows you, and by one act take vengeance on two." To her attempt Glaucus said: "Sooner will leaves grow in the sea and seaweed spring on the mountaintops than my love change, while Scylla lives." The goddess was outraged; and, since she could not hurt him — nor, loving him, would — she turned her anger on the one preferred to herself; and, stung by the rebuff of her love, at once she grinds herbs infamous for their horrid juices, and mixes with the grinding the charms of Hecate, and puts on sea-blue robes, and comes out through the throng of fawning beasts from the middle of her hall; and, making for Rhegium, opposite the rocks of Zancle, she enters the waves boiling with the tides, and sets her steps on them as on solid ground, and skims dry-footed over the surface of the sea.
There was a little bay, curved into a bent bow, a favorite retreat of Scylla, where she used to withdraw from the heat of sea and sky, when the sun was highest and made the shortest shadows. This the goddess taints beforehand and fouls with monster-breeding drugs; on it she sprinkles the juices pressed from a noxious root, and thrice nine times, with her magic lips, she mutters over the dark charm of strange words. Scylla comes, and had gone in up to the waist, when she sees her loins made hideous with barking monsters; and, at first not believing they are parts of her own body, she flees and drives them off and dreads the rude mouths of the dogs — but those she flees she draws along with her; and, feeling for her thighs and legs and feet, she finds Cerberus-jaws in place of those parts. She stands on the rage of the dogs, and holds the backs of savage beasts beneath her cut-off loins and her jutting belly.
Glaucus, still in love, wept for her, and fled a marriage with Circe, who had used the power of herbs too cruelly. Scylla stayed in that place; and, when the chance was given, in her hatred of Circe she robbed Ulysses of his companions. Soon she would have sunk the Trojan ships too, had she not first been turned into a rock, which even now stands out with its crags — a rock the sailor avoids.
When the Trojan ships had passed her and greedy Charybdis with their oars, and were near the Ausonian shore, they were carried back by the winds to the Libyan coast. There the Sidonian Dido, doomed not to bear easily the loss of her Phrygian husband, received Aeneas into her home and her heart; and on a pyre built under the pretense of sacred rites she fell on the sword, and, herself deceived, deceived all. Fleeing again the new-built walls of the sandy land, and carried back to the seat of Eryx and faithful Acestes, he sacrifices and honors his father's tomb. He looses the ships that Juno's Iris had nearly burned, and passes the realm of the son of Hippotas, the lands smoking with hot sulphur, and leaves behind the rocks of the Sirens, daughters of Acheloüs; and, its pilot lost, the ship coasts Inarime and Prochyte and Pithecusae, set on a barren hill, named for its inhabitants. For the father of the gods, once loathing the frauds and perjuries of the Cercopes and the crimes of that cheating race, changed the men into ugly animals, so that the same beings could look both unlike and like men: he shrank their limbs, flattened and bent back their noses from the brow, furrowed their faces with an old man's wrinkles, and, their whole bodies clothed in yellow hair, sent them to these homes — and first he took away the use of words, and of the tongue made for dreadful perjury, and left them only the power to complain with a harsh screech.
When he had passed these and left the walls of Parthenope on the right, on the left he comes to the tomb of the tuneful son of Aeolus, and enters the shores of Cumae, a region of marsh-sedge, and the cave of the long-lived Sibyl, and begs that through Avernus he may visit his father's shade. She raised her face, long held on the ground, and at last, frenzied with the god within her, said: "You ask a great thing, hero greatest in deeds, whose hand was proved by the sword, whose devotion by the flames. Yet lay aside fear, Trojan: you will win your wish, and with me for guide you will know the halls of Elysium and the last realm of the world, and the dear image of your parent. To valor no way is closed." She spoke, and showed a branch gleaming with gold in the wood of Avernus's Juno, and bade him tear it from its stem. Aeneas obeyed, and saw the powers of dread Orcus, and his own ancestors, and the aged ghost of great-hearted Anchises; he learned, too, the laws of those regions, and what dangers he must face in new wars. Retracing his weary steps by the backward path, he eased his labor in talk with his Cumaean guide. And while he made the fearful journey through the dim twilight, he said: "Whether you are a goddess in person, or dearest to the gods, you will always be to me like a god, and I will confess I live by your gift, who willed that I visit the places of death and escape the death I saw. For these kindnesses, brought up to the airy world, I will build you a temple and give you the honors of incense." The seer looked at him and, drawing sighs, said: "I am no goddess, nor honor a human head with holy incense; and, that you may not err in ignorance — eternal light, and without end, was offered me, had my virginity yielded to Phoebus in love. While he hoped for it, while he wished to bribe me first with gifts, he said, 'Maiden of Cumae, choose what you wish: you will win your wish.' I, pointing to a heap of gathered dust, foolishly asked that as many birthdays might be mine as the dust held grains; it slipped me to ask as well for years still young. Yet he offered me these, and eternal youth, if I would yield to his love: scorning Phoebus's gift, I stay unwed. But now my happier years have turned their back, and sick old age comes on trembling feet, to be long endured. For now I have lived seven ages; still, to equal the number of the dust, three hundred harvests and three hundred vintages remain to be seen. The time will come when length of days will make me tiny from so large a frame, and my limbs, wasted by age, shrink to the least weight; I will seem never to have been loved or pleased a god; and Phoebus himself, perhaps, will not know me, or deny he loved me. So changed I will be, seen by none — yet known by my voice; the Fates will leave me my voice."
While the Sibyl told such things on the upward road, the Trojan Aeneas emerged from the Stygian realms into the Euboean city, and, the sacrifice duly made, came to the shore that did not yet bear his nurse's name. Here too, after long weariness of toil, Macareus of Neritos, a companion of much-tried Ulysses, had rested; and he recognized Achaemenides, once left among the crags of Etna, and, amazed to find him alive so unexpectedly, said, "What chance or god saves you, Achaemenides? Why does a foreign ship carry a Greek? What land does your bark seek?" To his questions Achaemenides — no longer shaggy in his dress, now his own man, his covering pinned with no thorns — replied: "May I see Polyphemus again, and those jaws dripping with human blood, if home and Ithaca are dearer to me than this ship, if I honor Aeneas less than my own father; and, though I did everything, I could never be grateful enough. That I speak and breathe and see the sky and the sun's light — can I be ungrateful and forget it? Through him this life of mine did not go into the Cyclops's mouth; and though even now I left the light of life, I would be buried in a tomb, or at least not in that belly. What were my feelings then — unless terror took all sense — when, left behind, I saw you making for the deep? I longed to shout, but feared to betray myself to the enemy: even Ulysses' shout nearly ruined your ship. I saw him, when he tore a huge rock from the mountain and hurled it into the middle of the waves; I saw him again throwing vast stones with his giant arm, as if driven by a siege-engine, and I dreaded, forgetting I was no longer aboard, that the wave or the wind might sink the ship. And when your flight had saved you from a sure death, he paced all Etna, groaning, groped the woods with his hands, and, robbed of his eye, stumbled on the rocks, and, stretching his gore-stained arms to the sea, cursed the Greek race, and said, 'Oh, if some chance would bring me back Ulysses, or one of his men, on whom my rage might feed — whose guts I might eat, whose living limbs I might tear with my hand, whose blood might flood my throat, whose crushed limbs might quiver under my teeth: how slight the loss of my stolen sight would be!' This, and more, in his fury. A ghastly horror seized me as I watched his face still wet with slaughter, his cruel hands, the empty ring where the eye had been, his limbs, his beard clotted with human blood. Death was before my eyes — yet that was the least of my woes; and I thought he would seize me now, now sink my guts in his; and there stuck in my mind the picture of that time when I saw two bodies of my companions dashed three and four times against the ground, while he, lying over them like a shaggy lion, stowed their guts and flesh and white-marrowed bones and half-living limbs in his greedy belly. A trembling took me; I stood pale and bloodless, watching him chew and belch his bloody feast and vomit lumps mixed with wine; and I fancied such a fate readied for wretched me. Hiding many days, trembling at every sound, both fearing death and longing to die, staving off hunger with acorns and grass mixed with leaves, alone, helpless, hopeless, given over to death, after a long time I saw this ship far off, and by signs I begged for rescue, and ran to the shore, and moved them: a Trojan ship took in a Greek! Now do you tell your adventures, dearest of comrades, and your leader's, and the crew's that trusted the sea with you."
Macareus tells how Aeolus, grandson of Hippotas, rules the Etruscan deep and keeps the winds in prison; how the Ithacan chief received them shut in an ox-hide, a wondrous gift, and for nine days sailed with a fair breeze and saw the land he sought; how, when the dawn after the ninth arose, his companions, beaten by envy and desire for booty, thinking it gold, cut the fastenings of the winds; how with these the ship went back through the very waves it had come, and returned to the harbor of the Aeolian king. "From there," he said, "we came to the ancient city of Lamus the Laestrygonian; Antiphates reigned in that land. I was sent to him, two others with me, and safety was barely won by flight for me and one companion; the third of us stained the Laestrygonian's wicked mouth with his own blood. Antiphates pressed us as we fled and roused his band; they gathered and hurled stones and beams, and sank men and sank ships; only one, that carried us and Ulysses himself, escaped. Grieving for the lost part of our companions, and lamenting much, we came to the land you see far off — far off, believe me, be that island I saw! And you, most righteous of the Trojans, son of a goddess — for, the war ended, you are not to be called an enemy, Aeneas — I warn you: flee the shores of Circe!
"We too, our ship moored on Circe's shore, remembering Antiphates and the savage Cyclops, refused to go and enter her unknown house; but we were chosen by lot to go: the lot sent me and faithful Polites, and Eurylochus, and Elpenor, too fond of wine, and twice nine companions to Circe's walls. As soon as we reached them and stood at the threshold, a thousand wolves, and bears and lionesses mixed with wolves, made us fear at the meeting — but none was to be feared, none would wound our bodies; rather, they wagged coaxing tails in the air and, fawning, followed our steps, until the maidservants received us and led us through marble halls to their mistress. She sits in a lovely alcove on her wonted throne, clad in a shining robe, and over it wrapped in a garment of gold. The Nereids and nymphs, who card no fleece with moving fingers nor draw out threads, arrange herbs and sort the scattered flowers into baskets, and the plants of varied hue; she herself sets the tasks they do, herself knows the use of each leaf, and what harmony there is in the mixture, and, attentive, weighs the herbs she has portioned. When she saw us, greetings given and received, she brightened her face and answered our wishes with good omens; and without delay she orders roasted barley grains mixed, and honey, and the strength of wine, and curds with pressed milk, and secretly adds drugs to lurk beneath the sweetness. We took the cups given by her sacred hand; and as soon as, thirsty, we drained them with parched mouths, and the cruel goddess touched the tops of our hair with her wand, I began — I am ashamed, but I will tell it — to bristle with hair, and could no longer speak, but gave a harsh growl for words, and fell face-down to the ground, and felt my mouth harden into a curved snout, my neck swell with muscle, and, with the part that had just now taken the cup, I made my footprints. With the rest who had suffered the same — so powerful are the drugs — I was shut in a sty; and we saw that Eurylochus alone kept his shape: he alone fled the offered cup. Had he not dodged it, I would be one of the bristle-clad beasts even now, nor would Ulysses, told of the disaster by him, have come as our avenger to Circe. The peace-bringing Cyllenian had given him a white flower — the gods call it moly, held by a black root; safe with it and with heaven's counsel, he entered Circe's house, and, called to the treacherous cups, he pushed back her hand as she tried to stroke his hair with the wand, and, drawing his sword, frightened her off. Then faith was pledged and hands given, and, received into her bed, he asked his companions' bodies as the marriage-gift. We are sprinkled with the kinder juice of a strange herb, struck on the head with the reversed wand, and words are said, the reverse of the words before; the more she chants, the more we rise up from the ground, the bristles fall, the cleft leaves our split feet, our shoulders return, our arms are set below the upper arms; weeping, we embrace our weeping chief, and cling to his neck, and speak no words before those that prove us grateful.
"A year's stay held us there, and in so long a time I saw much and heard much — this too among many, which one of the four maids appointed for such rites privately told me. For while Circe lingered apart with my chief, she showed me a statue of snow-white marble, bearing a woodpecker on its head, set in a sacred shrine and marked with many wreaths. When I asked and wished to know who he was, and why he was honored in the holy shrine, and why he bore that bird, she said: 'Hear, Macareus, and learn from this too what my mistress's power is; give your mind to my words.
"'Picus, the son of Saturn, was a king in Ausonia, keen on horses good for war. His form was such as you see; you may see his beauty here, and judge the true from the copied image. His spirit matched his beauty; and he had not yet, in his years, seen the Greek games at Elis held four times. He had turned to himself the Dryads born on the Latian hills; the fountain-powers wooed him, the Naiads that Albula and Numicus, that Anio's waters and the too-short Almo, and headlong Nar and shady Farfar bore, and those that haunt the woodland pool of Scythian Diana and the neighboring lakes; yet, slighting all, he loved one nymph, whom on the Palatine hill Venilia is said to have borne to two-faced Janus. When she first ripened to marriageable years, she was given to Laurentine Picus, preferred to all; rare indeed in beauty, but rarer in the art of singing, whence she was called Canens. She used to move woods and rocks with her voice, to tame wild beasts, to stay the long rivers, to hold the wandering birds.
"'While she sang her songs in a woman's voice, Picus had gone from his house into the Laurentine fields to spear the native boars, pressing the back of a spirited horse, carrying two javelins in his left hand, in a purple cloak clasped with yellow gold. The daughter of the Sun had come into the same wood; and, to pluck fresh herbs on the fruitful hills, she had left the Circaean fields named for her. As soon as, hidden in the thickets, she saw the youth, she was stunned; the herbs she had gathered fell from her hand, and a flame seemed to wander through all her marrow. When she gathered her mind from that strong heat, she was ready to confess her wish; but the speed of his horse and the ringing guards kept her from approaching. 'You will not escape me,' she said, 'though you be caught up by the wind, if I know myself, if all power in herbs has not vanished, and my charms do not fail me.' She spoke, and made a phantom of a false boar, with no body, and bade it run past the king's eyes and seem to go into a dense-timbered wood, where the forest is thickest and no horse can enter. Without delay Picus, unknowing, follows the shadow of the prey, and, quick, leaves the steaming back of his steed and, chasing a vain hope, wanders on foot in the deep wood. She frames prayers and says magic words, and worships strange gods with a strange charm, by which she is wont to blot the face of the snow-white Moon and draw thirsty clouds over her father's head. Then too, at the chanting, the sky thickens and the ground breathes fog, and his companions wander on the blind paths, and the king's guard is gone. Finding place and time, she said, 'By your eyes, which have caught mine, and by this beautiful form, most handsome one, which makes me, a goddess, your suppliant, favor my love, and take the all-seeing Sun for your father-in-law, and do not, in your cruelty, scorn Circe, daughter of Titan.' She spoke; he fiercely rejects her and her prayers, and says, 'Whoever you are, I am not yours; another holds me captive, and long, I pray, may she hold me, nor will I harm the marriage bond with a stranger's love, while the Fates keep Canens, daughter of Janus, for me.' The daughter of Titan, having tried her prayers in vain, said, 'You will not do it unpunished, nor go back to Canens; and by the event you will learn what one slighted, what one in love, what a woman can do — and Circe is in love, and slighted, and a woman!' Then twice she turned to the west, twice to the east, three times touched the youth with her wand, spoke three charms. He fled — and, marveling that he ran faster than usual, saw wings on his body; and, angry that he was added, a new bird, to the Latian woods, he strikes the hard oaks with his hard beak and, enraged, wounds the long branches; his wings took the purple of his cloak; the gold that had clasped his garment became feathers, and his neck was ringed with tawny gold, and nothing of the old Picus remained but the name.
"'Meanwhile his companions, having called on Picus in vain through the fields and found him nowhere, meet Circe — for now she had thinned the air and let the clouds be scattered by wind and sun — and charge her with true crimes, and demand back their king, and threaten force, and make to attack her with cruel weapons. She scatters harmful venom and poisonous juices, and summons Night and the gods of Night from Erebus and Chaos, and calls on Hecate with long howls. Wondrous to tell, the woods leaped from their place, the ground groaned, the nearby tree paled, the grass grew wet with sprinkled drops of blood, the stones seemed to give hoarse lowings, the dogs to bark, the earth to crawl with black snakes, and the thin ghosts of the silent dead to flit. The crowd, stunned by the marvels, is afraid; she touched their frightened, wondering faces with her poisoned wand, and at its touch the monstrous shapes of various beasts came upon the young men: none kept his own form.
"'The setting sun had now come down on the Tartessian shores, and in vain, with eyes and heart, Canens awaited her husband; her servants and people run through all the woods and carry lights to meet him. Nor is it enough for the nymph to weep and tear her hair and beat her breast — though she does all this — she rushes out and, wild, wanders the Latian fields. Six nights, and as many returning lights of the sun, saw her, without sleep or food, going over ridges and valleys wherever chance led. Last of all Tiber saw her, worn out with grief and wandering, laying her body on his long bank; there, weeping, she poured out words tuned to her very grief in a thin voice, as the dying swan sings its funeral song. At last, melting to her thin marrow with grief, she pined away and by degrees vanished into thin air; yet fame marked the spot, which the ancient Muses rightly called Canens, after the nymph's name.'
"Many such things were told me and seen by me in that long year. Idle and slow from disuse, we were bidden again to take to the sea, again to set sail; the daughter of Titan had said that doubtful ways, and a vast voyage, and the perils of the cruel sea awaited us. I was afraid, I confess, and, reaching this shore, here I stayed."
Macareus had finished; and the nurse of Aeneas, buried in a marble urn, had this short verse on her tomb:
Here Caieta was burned by her foster-child of proven love, snatched from the Argive fire, with the fire that was her due.
The moored cable is loosed from the grassy bank, and they leave far behind the wiles and the halls of the ill-famed goddess, and seek the groves where the Tiber, dark with the shade of trees, breaks into the sea with its yellow sands. Aeneas gains the house and the daughter of Latinus, son of Faunus — but not without war. War is waged with a fierce nation, and Turnus rages for his betrothed wife. All Etruria meets Latium in battle, and long is victory sought with anxious arms. Each side swells its strength with foreign force, and many defend the Rutulians, many the Trojan camp; nor had Aeneas come in vain to the walls of Evander, but Venulus came in vain to the city of the exiled Diomedes. He had founded a great city under Iapygian Daunus, and held the lands given in dower; but when Venulus had done Turnus's bidding and asked for aid, the Aetolian hero pleaded his want of resources: he would not commit his father-in-law's people to war, nor had he men of his own nation to arm. "And, that you may not think this a pretext — though my grief be renewed at the bitter memory — I will bear to tell it. After lofty Ilium burned, and Pergamum had fed the Greek flames, and the Narycian hero, for a maiden ravished, brought on all the vengeance he alone deserved for the maiden, we were scattered and driven by winds over hostile seas; we Greeks endured lightning, darkness, rain, and the wrath of sky and sea, and Caphereus, the crown of our disaster. Not to hold you with these sad events in order — Greece then might have seemed worthy even of Priam's tear. Yet the care of armed Minerva saved me, snatched from the waves; but again I was driven from my fathers' fields, and kindly Venus exacted, in revenge, the penalty for her old wound, and I bore such toils on the deep sea, such amid arms on land, that often I called those happy whom the common storm and grim Caphereus swallowed in the threatening waves — and I wished I had been one of them. My companions, having endured the utmost in war and on the sea, lost heart and asked an end of their wandering; but Acmon, hot of temper and now made bitter by disaster, said, 'What is left, men, that your patience should refuse to bear? What has Cytherea, suppose she wished, that she can do beyond this? For while worse is feared, there is room for prayers; but where one's lot is the worst, fear is trodden underfoot, and the height of misfortune is free of care. Let her hear it herself, if she likes; let her hate, as she does, all the men under Diomedes; still we all scorn her hatred — our great power is bought at no great price.' With such words the Pleuronian Acmon provokes Venus against her will and revives her old anger. His words please few; the greater part of us, his friends, rebuke Acmon; and as he made to answer, his voice and its passage grew thin, his hair turned to feathers, his new-formed neck and breast and back were covered with down, his arms took longer plumes, his elbows curved into light wings; a great part of his foot took toes, his mouth stiffened and hardened with horn and ended in a point. Lycus and Idas, and Nycteus with Rhexenor, and Abas marveled at him; and while they marveled, they took the same shape, and the greater part of the company flew up and wheeled around the oars with beating wings. If you ask the form of these sudden birds — not swans', but nearest to white swans'. With difficulty I, son-in-law of Iapygian Daunus, hold these homes and the parched fields, with a very small remnant of my men."
So far the grandson of Oeneus. Venulus leaves the Calydonian realm, and the Peucetian bays, and the Messapian fields, in which he sees a cave that, shaded by a dense grove and trickling with a smooth stream, half-goat Pan now holds, but once the nymphs held. An Apulian shepherd scared them from that spot and first moved them with a sudden fright; then, when their minds returned and they scorned him as he followed, they danced in time, moving their feet; the shepherd mocked them, and, aping them with rustic leaps, added coarse country abuse in filthy words, nor was his mouth silent until a tree closed his throat — for he is a tree, and by its sap you may know his manners: the wild olive, by its bitter berries, marks the vileness of his tongue; the roughness of his words passed into them.
When the envoy had come back with word that the Aetolian arms were refused them, the Rutulians waged the prepared war without those forces, and much blood was spilled on both sides. Look — Turnus bears the greedy torches against the pine-built ships, and those the waves had spared now dread the fire. And now the flame was burning the pitch and wax and the rest of the fuel, and climbing the tall mast to the sails, and the benches of the curved ships smoked, when the holy Mother of the Gods, remembering these pines were cut on the heights of Ida, filled the air with the clash of struck cymbals and the sound of the blown boxwood pipe, and, borne through the yielding air by her tamed lions, said: "In vain, Turnus, you hurl the flames with sacrilegious hand: I will save them, and the devouring fire shall not, with my leave, burn parts and limbs of my own groves." As the goddess spoke, it thundered, and after the thunder heavy showers fell with bounding hail; the sons of Astraeus stir the air and the swelling sea with sudden clashes and rush to battle. The kindly Mother, using the force of one of them, snapped the hempen cables of the Phrygian fleet, and carries the ships headlong, and sinks them beneath the sea. Their wood softened and changed to flesh, the curved sterns become the features of a head, the oars taper into fingers and swimming feet, the side stays what it was before, and the keel laid beneath the middle of the ship changes to serve as a spine; the cordage becomes soft hair, the yards become arms; their color is blue, as before; and, as sea-Naiads, with their maiden sports they stir the very waves they once dreaded, and, born on the harsh mountains, they haunt the flowing sea, untouched by their origin. Yet, not forgetting how many dangers they often bore on the deep, they often put a hand under tossed ships — unless one carried Greeks. Still keeping in mind the Phrygian disaster, they hated the Greeks; and with glad faces they looked on the wreck of the ship of Neritos, and with pleasure saw the ship of Alcinous harden on the breakers and stone grow over the wood.
There was a hope that, the fleet made living as sea-nymphs, the Rutulian might give up the war in fear at the marvel; but he holds on, and each side has its own gods, and — what is like the gods — they have courage; and now they seek not a dowry-kingdom, nor a father-in-law's scepter, nor you, maiden Lavinia, but only to win, and wage war for shame of stopping. At last Venus sees her son's arms victorious, and Turnus falls; Ardea falls, called mighty while Turnus lived. After the barbarous fire took it and the roofs sank in the warm ash, a bird, then known for the first time, flew up from the middle of the heap and beat the ashes with its wings. Its cry, its leanness, its pallor, all that befits a captured city — even the city's name — stayed in the bird; and Ardea itself is mourned by the beating of its wings.
And now the valor of Aeneas had forced all the gods, and Juno herself, to end their old wrath; when, the power of rising Iulus well founded, the hero, son of Cytherea, was ripe for heaven. Venus had appealed to the gods above, and, hanging round her father's neck, said: "Father, never unkind to me at any time, be gentlest now, I pray, and grant my Aeneas, who from my blood made you a grandfather, a godhead — even the lowest kind — so long as you grant some! It is enough to have seen the joyless realm once, once to have crossed the Stygian streams." The gods agreed; nor did the royal wife keep her face unmoved, but nodded assent with a calmed look. Then the father said, "You are worthy of the gift of heaven, both you who ask and he for whom you ask: take, daughter, what you wish." He spoke; she rejoices and thanks her father, and, borne by her yoked doves through the light air, comes to the Laurentine shore, where Numicius, hidden in reeds, winds to the neighboring sea with his river waters. Him she bids to wash from Aeneas whatever is subject to death, and carry it beneath the sea in his silent course. The horned river does Venus's bidding, and with his waters washes away from Aeneas whatever was mortal, and sprinkled him; his best part remained. His mother anointed the cleansed body with divine perfume, touched his face with ambrosia mixed with sweet nectar, and made him a god, whom the people of Quirinus call Indiges, and received with temple and altars.
From then Alba and the Latin state were under Ascanius of the two names; Silvius followed him; sprung of him, Latinus took back the old name with the scepter; famous Alba came after Latinus; from him was Epytus; after him Capetus and Capys — but Capys was first; Tiberinus took the kingdom after them, and, drowned in the Etruscan river's waters, gave his name to the water; of him were born Remulus and fierce Acrota. Remulus, the elder, an imitator of the lightning, died by a lightning-stroke. Acrota, more moderate than his brother, handed the scepter to brave Aventinus, who lies buried on the same hill he ruled, and gave the hill his name; and now Proca held the height of the Palatine race.
Under this king lived Pomona, than whom no Hamadryad of Latium tended her gardens more skillfully, nor was any keener on the fruit of the trees; from that she takes her name. She cares not for woods or streams, but loves the country and the boughs that bear thriving fruit; her hand is not weighed with a javelin, but with a curved pruning-knife, with which now she checks the too-lush growth and reins in the branches straying every way, now slits the bark and sets in a graft and gives sap to a stranger nursling; nor does she let them feel thirst, but waters the curling fibers of the drinking root with running streams. This is her love, this her pursuit; and no desire has she for love. Yet, fearing the force of the country folk, she shuts her orchard within, and forbids and flees the approach of men. What did the Satyrs, a young crew apt at the dance, not do — and the Pans with pine-wreathed horns, and Silvanus ever younger than his years, and the god who scares thieves with pruning-hook or groin — to win her? But Vertumnus surpassed even these in love, and was no luckier than they. O how often, in the guise of a hardy reaper, he carried ears of corn in a basket, and was the very picture of a reaper! Often, his temples bound with fresh hay, he could seem to have turned the mown grass; often he carried a goad in his sturdy hand, so you would swear he had just unyoked the weary oxen; given a pruning-knife, he was a woodman and a vine-pruner; he put on a ladder — you would think he meant to pick fruit; he was a soldier with a sword, a fisher with a rod taken up; in short, by many shapes he often found his way in, to enjoy the sight of her beauty.
He too, his temples wreathed with a colored kerchief, leaning on a staff, white hair set about his brow, took on the shape of an old woman, entered the well-kept gardens, admired the fruit, and said, "So much the better off are you!" and gave her, thus praised, a few kisses, such as no real old woman ever gave; and, stooping, sat on a clod, looking up at the boughs bent under the weight of autumn. There was an elm opposite, splendid with shining grapes; when he had praised it, with the vine joined to it, he said: "But if that trunk stood single, without the vine, it would have nothing to seek it for but its leaves; and this vine, which finds rest joined to the elm, if it were not wedded to it, would lie flat on the ground. Yet you are not moved by the example of this tree; you flee marriage and do not care to be joined. Would that you wished it! Helen would not be courted by more suitors, nor she who stirred the Lapiths' battles, nor the wife of over-slow Ulysses. Even now, when you flee and turn from those who court you, a thousand men desire you, and demigods and gods, and whatever powers hold the Alban hills. But if you are wise, if you would make a good match and hear an old woman — who loves you more than all of them, more than you believe — reject a common match, and choose Vertumnus for your bed! And take me as his surety: he is not better known to himself than to me; he does not roam wandering over the whole world, he haunts only these places; nor, like most of your suitors, does he love the one he has just seen: you will be his first and last flame, and to you alone he devotes his years. Add that he is young, has the natural gift of grace, will shape himself neatly into any form, and will become whatever he is bidden, though you bid him be everything. And what of this — you love the same things: he is the first to have the fruit that is your delight, and holds your gifts in his glad hand! But now he longs neither for fruit plucked from the tree, nor the herbs the garden grows with their sweet juices, nor anything but you. Pity his passion, and believe that he who woos you is here in person, pleading with my lips. And fear the avenging gods, and the Idalian goddess who hates hard hearts, and the vengeful anger of the goddess of Rhamnus! And, that you may fear them the more — for old age has let me know many things — I will tell you a story famous through all Cyprus, by which you may easily be bent and softened.
Iphis, born of a humble family, had seen the noble Anaxarete, sprung from the line of ancient Teucer — had seen her, and felt the fire in all his bones; and, struggling long, when he could not conquer his madness by reason, he came a suppliant to her doors. Now he confessed his wretched love to her nurse and begged her, by the hopes she placed in her charge, not to be hard to him; now, flattering each of her many servants, he sought their favor with an anxious voice. Often he gave his words to be carried on coaxing tablets; sometimes he hung garlands wet with the dew of his tears on the doorposts, and laid his soft side on the hard threshold, and reproached the cruel bolt. She, deafer than the sea rising when the Kids are setting, harder than the iron the Norican fire refines, and than the rock still held by its living root, scorns and laughs at him, and to her cruel deeds she adds proud words, and robs the lover even of hope. Iphis, unable to bear the torments of long grief, endured them no longer, and before her doors spoke these last words: "You win, Anaxarete, and you will have no more annoyance from me: prepare your glad triumph, call on Paean, and crown yourself with shining laurel! For you win, and I die willingly; rejoice, woman of iron! At least you will be forced to praise something in me, some point in which I please you, and you will confess my merit. Yet remember that my love for you ended no sooner than my life, and that at one moment I lose a twofold light. Nor will report come to you as the messenger of my death: I myself will come, doubt not, and be seen in person, that you may feed your cruel eyes on my lifeless body. But if you gods above see the deeds of mortals, remember me — my tongue can pray no more — and make me spoken of in the long ages, and give to fame the time you have taken from my life." He spoke, and, lifting his swimming eyes and pale arms to the doorposts he had so often decked with wreaths, when he had tied a noose's cord to the top of the doors, he said, "Do these garlands please you, cruel, unfeeling woman?" and put his head in — but even then turned toward her — and hung, a hapless burden, by his strangled throat. The door, struck by the motion of his quivering feet, seemed to give a sound as of one groaning much, and, flying open, betrayed the deed; the servants cried out, and, having lifted him in vain — for his father was dead — carried him to his mother's house. She took him into her lap, and, embracing her son's cold limbs, when she had said the words natural to wretched mothers and done the deeds of wretched mothers, led the tearful funeral through the middle of the city and carried the ghastly limbs on the bier to be burned. By chance her house was near the road where the mournful procession passed, and the sound of wailing came to the ears of hard Anaxarete, whom now an avenging god pursued. Moved, though, she said, "Let us watch this pitiful funeral," and went up to a high room with wide windows; and scarcely had she well seen Iphis laid on the bier when her eyes stiffened, and, a pallor coming on, the warm blood fled her body; and trying to step back she stuck fast, trying to turn her face away she could not, and little by little the stone, long since in her hard breast, took over her limbs. And, that you not think this a fiction, Salamis still keeps the statue in the maiden's shape, and has a temple too under the name of Venus the Watcher. Remembering this, O nymph of mine, lay aside your long disdain and join yourself to one who loves you: so may no spring cold nip your budding fruit, nor rough winds strike off the blossoms!"
When the god, fit for every shape, had said this in vain, he returned to his young form and took off the old woman's garb, and appeared to her such as when the brightest image of the sun overcomes the facing clouds and shines out with nothing to block it; and he made ready force — but force was not needed, and the nymph was caught by the god's beauty and felt an answering wound.
Next the soldiery of wicked Amulius held sway over Ausonia; and by his grandsons' aid aged Numitor won back the kingdom he had lost; and on the festival of Pales the walls of the City were founded. Tatius and the Sabine fathers wage war, and, the way to the citadel laid open, Tarpeia by just retribution lost her life, the arms heaped on her. Then the men of Cures, like silent wolves, hushed their voices with their lips and fell on the bodies overcome by sleep, and made for the gates that the son of Ilia had shut with a strong bolt. But Juno, daughter of Saturn, opened one herself, and made no sound at the turning hinge; Venus alone felt that the bars of the gate had fallen, and would have shut it, but that a god may never undo another god's act. The Ausonian Naiads held a spot near the temple of Janus, dripping with a cold spring; of these she begs help. Nor did the nymphs resist the goddess's just request, and gave vent to the springs and streams of their fountain; yet the way to the open temple of Janus was not yet blocked, nor had the water closed the road. They set pale sulphur beneath the plenteous spring and kindled the hollow channels with smoking pitch. By these and other means the heat pierced to the depths of the spring; and you, waters, that so lately dared to rival the cold of the Alps, now yield not to the flames themselves! The two posts smoked with the flaming spray, and the gate, promised in vain to the fierce Sabines, was blocked by the new-made fountain, until the warlike soldiers could arm; and when Romulus had led them out, and the Roman ground was covered with Sabine bodies and with its own, and the wicked sword had mixed the son-in-law's blood with the father-in-law's gore, they agreed to end the war in peace, not to fight it out with the sword, and that Tatius should share the throne.
Tatius was dead, and you, Romulus, were giving laws in common to both peoples, when Mars, his helmet laid aside, addressed the father of gods and men: "The time has come, father — since the Roman state stands on a great foundation and no longer hangs on one guardian — to pay the reward promised to me and to your deserving grandson, and, taking him from earth, to set him in heaven. You once said to me, with the council of the gods present — for I remember, and marked the loving words in a mindful heart — 'There will be one whom you will raise to the blue of heaven.' Let the sum of your words be made good!" The all-powerful god nodded, hid the air in thick clouds, and terrified the City with thunder and lightning. Mars knew this was the signal given him for the promised removal; and, leaning on his lance, he fearlessly mounted behind his steeds, laden on the blood-stained pole, cracked the lash, and, gliding down the steep air, stood on the top of the wooded Palatine, and took away the son of Ilia as he was giving royal laws to his own Quirites: his mortal body dissolved through the thin air, as a leaden bullet shot from a wide sling melts in mid-sky; a beautiful form came on, worthier of the high couches of heaven — the shape of Quirinus in his royal robe.
His wife mourned him as lost, when royal Juno bade Iris go down to Hersilia along her curving path and give the bereft woman her commands: "O matron, chief glory of the Latin and the Sabine race, most worthy to have been the wife of so great a man, and now of Quirinus, stop your weeping; and, if you wish to see your husband, follow me to the grove that greens on the hill of Quirinus and shades the temple of the Roman king." Iris obeyed, and, gliding to earth along her painted bow, spoke to Hersilia the bidden words; she, scarcely lifting her eyes with a modest face, said, "O goddess — for I cannot say who you are, yet it is clear you are a goddess — lead me, oh lead me, and show me my husband's face! If the Fates grant me but once to see it, I will confess I have looked on heaven." Without delay she climbed the hill of Romulus with the daughter of Thaumas; there a star fell from the sky to the earth, and, kindled by its light, Hersilia's hair went up with the star into the air. Her the founder of the Roman city caught in his well-known hands, and, with her body, changed her old name, and called her Hora — the goddess who now is joined with Quirinus.
Meanwhile one is sought who can bear so great a weight, and succeed so great a king; and Fame, the herald of truth, marks out famous Numa for the throne. Not content to know the rites of the Sabine nation, in his large mind he conceives greater things, and inquires into the nature of the world. Love of this pursuit led him to leave his country and Cures and travel to the city of the stranger Hercules; and when he asked what founder had set Greek walls on the Italian shore, one of the elder natives, not ignorant of the old days, told him:
The son of Jove, enriched with the oxen of Iberia, is said to have reached the Lacinian shore from the ocean, after a lucky voyage; and, while his herd strayed over the soft pastures, to have entered the home of great Croton, no unwelcoming house, and rested from his long labor; and, at parting, to have said, "In the time of your grandsons this will be the site of a city" — and the promise came true. For there was a certain Myscelus, son of Alemon, an Argive, most dear to the gods of that age. Leaning over him as he lay heavy with sleep, the club-bearer said, "Come, leave your native home; go, seek the pebbly waters of the far-off Aesar" — and threatened many fearful things if he did not obey; then sleep and the god departed together. The son of Alemon rose and turned the fresh vision over in his silent mind, and long his purpose fought within him: the god bids him go, the laws forbid his leaving, and death is set as the penalty for one who would change his country. The bright Sun had hidden his shining head in the ocean, and thickest Night had raised her starry face, when the same god seemed to be there and give the same commands, and threaten more and heavier things if he did not obey. He was afraid, and at once made ready to move his home to a new land; a murmur rose in the city, and he was charged with despising the laws. When the case had been made, and the crime was plain, proved without a witness, the accused, in squalid garb, lifting his face and hands to the gods above, cried, "O you for whom the twice-six labors won the right of heaven, help me, I pray — for you were the cause of my crime!" It was the old custom to condemn the accused with black pebbles, to acquit them with white; and so now the grim sentence was passed, and every black pebble was dropped into the pitiless urn. But when it was turned over to pour out the pebbles for counting, the color of them all had changed from black to white; and the verdict, made favorable by the power of Hercules, freed the son of Alemon. He thanked his father, the son of Amphitryon, and with favoring winds sailed the Ionian sea, passed Spartan Tarentum and Sybaris and Salentine Neretum and the bay of Thurium and the fields of Iapyx, and, scarcely having coasted the lands that face those seas, found the fated mouth of the river Aesar, and, not far off, a mound under which the earth covered the sacred bones of Croton; and there, on the bidden ground, he founded his walls, and drew the name of the buried man onto the city. Such, by sure tradition, was the origin of that place and of the city set on the Italian borders.
There was a man here, Samian by birth, who had fled both Samos and its masters and, in hatred of tyranny, was a willing exile. In his mind he approached the gods, far off in the region of heaven, and what nature denied to human sight he drank in with the eyes of his heart; and when he had searched out all things with mind and watchful care, he gave them to the public to learn, and taught the crowds who sat in silence and marveled — the origins of the great universe, the causes of things, what nature is, what god, whence the snow, what the source of lightning, whether Jupiter or the winds thunder when the cloud is split, what shakes the earth, by what law the stars move, and whatever else lies hidden. He was the first to forbid animals to be served at table, and the first to open his lips — learned indeed, but not believed — in words like these:
Spare yourselves, mortals, from defiling your bodies with wicked food! There is corn; there are apples that bow the boughs with their weight, and swelling grapes on the vines; there are sweet herbs, and some that can be softened and made mild by fire; and the milky stream is not denied you, nor honey fragrant with the thyme-flower. The lavish earth heaps up her riches and her gentle food, and offers feasts without slaughter and blood. Beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh — and not even all of them, for the horse and the sheep and the herds live on grass; but those whose nature is wild and savage — Armenian tigers and raging lions, and bears with wolves — delight in a bloody meal. Alas, what a crime it is for flesh to be buried in flesh, for one greedy body to grow fat on another crammed into it, for one living creature to live by the death of another! In such abundance, which the earth, best of mothers, brings forth, does nothing please you but to gnaw the sad wounds with cruel teeth and bring back the ways of the Cyclops? Can you not calm the hunger of a greedy, ill-ruled belly unless you first destroy another?
But that old age we have named the Golden was blessed in the fruit of the trees and the herbs the ground rears, and did not stain the mouth with blood. Then the birds moved their wings safely through the air, the hare wandered fearless in the open fields, and no credulity had hung the fish on the hook; all was without ambush, fearing no trickery, and full of peace. But when someone — whoever he was, no good adviser — envied this simple diet and buried a meal of flesh in his greedy belly, he made a road for wickedness; and the steel, first stained with blood, may well have grown warm from the slaughter of wild beasts — and that would have been enough. We admit that creatures which seek our destruction may be killed without breach of piety; but, though they might be killed, still they were not to be eaten. From there the wrong went further: the pig is thought to have first earned death, because it grubbed up the seeds with its snout and cut off the year's hope; the goat, for gnawing the vine, is led to the altars of avenging Bacchus — their own faults ruined the two. But what have you deserved, sheep, a gentle flock, born to tend to men, who carry nectar in your full udders, who give your wool for our soft clothing, and help us more by your life than your death? What have the oxen deserved, a beast without fraud or guile, harmless, simple, born to bear labor? Ungrateful indeed, and unworthy of the harvest's gift, is the man who could slaughter his own field-tiller the moment he had lifted off the weight of the curved plow, who could strike with the axe that neck worn bare by work, through which he had so often renewed the hard field and won so many harvests. And it is not enough to commit such a crime: they have charged the gods themselves with it, and believe a power in heaven can rejoice in the killing of the toiling ox. A victim without blemish, and finest in form — for being fair brings ruin — decked with fillets and gold, is set before the altars and, unknowing, hears the prayer, and sees the grain it helped to grow laid between its horns, and, struck, stains with its blood the knives it perhaps saw before in the clear water. At once they examine the entrails torn from the living breast and search the gods' minds in them; and then — so great is man's hunger for forbidden food — you dare to eat! Do not, I beg, and turn your minds to my warning: when you give the limbs of slaughtered oxen to your palate, know and feel that you are chewing your own farmhands.
And since a god moves my lips, I will duly follow the god who moves them, and open my own Delphi and the very sky, and unlock the oracles of a lofty mind. I will sing great things, never traced by the wits of old, things long hidden. It delights me to go among the high stars, to leave the earth and this dull place and ride on the clouds and stand on the shoulders of mighty Atlas, and look down from afar on men wandering aimlessly, lacking reason, and, trembling and fearing death, to hearten them thus and unroll the order of fate.
O race stunned by the dread of icy death, why fear the Styx, the shadows, the empty names, the poets' stuff, the bogeys of a false world? Bodies, whether the pyre takes them with flame or age with decay, cannot suffer any harm. Souls have no death, and, leaving their former seat, they live in new homes and dwell there, received. I myself — for I remember — in the time of the Trojan war was Euphorbus, son of Panthous, in whose breast once stuck the heavy spear of the younger son of Atreus; lately I recognized the shield, the burden of my left arm, in the temple of Juno at Argos! All things change, nothing perishes: the spirit wanders and comes from there to here, from here to there, and takes possession of any limbs it will, and passes from beasts into human bodies and ours into beasts, and never in any time does it die; and as pliant wax is stamped with new figures and does not stay as it was or keep the same shape, but is still the same wax, so I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into different forms. Therefore, lest piety be beaten by the belly's craving, cease, I warn you, to drive out kindred souls by wicked slaughter, and let not blood be fed with blood.
And since I am carried over a great sea and have given full sails to the winds: there is nothing in all the world that stays fixed. All things flow, and every image is formed in passing; time itself glides on in ceaseless motion, no differently than a river — for neither the river nor the fleeting hour can stop, but, as wave is driven by wave, and the one before is pressed by the one that comes and presses the one before, so the moments flee alike and follow alike, and are always new: for what was before is left behind, and what was not comes to be, and every instant is renewed.
You see the spent nights press on toward the light, and this bright radiance follow the black night; nor is the color the same in the sky when all things lie weary in mid-rest, and when Lucifer comes out bright on his white horse, and again when the daughter of Pallas, herald of the light, tints the world she will hand to Phoebus. The god's own disk, when it rises from the earth's edge, is red in the morning, and red when it hides at the earth's edge; at its height it is bright white, because there the nature of the aether is purer and flees far the earth's infection. Nor can the shape of nocturnal Diana ever be equal or the same, but always today's is less than tomorrow's if she is waxing, greater if she draws in her circle.
And do you not see the year pass through four seasons, giving a likeness of our life? For in early spring it is tender and milky and most like the age of a child: then the fresh blade, without strength, swells and is soft and delights the farmer with hope; all is in flower, and the kindly field plays with the colors of blossoms, and there is not yet any strength in the leaves. After spring the year passes, sturdier, into summer, and becomes a strong young man: no age is more robust, more fruitful, or burns with more warmth. Then comes autumn, the ardor of youth laid by, ripe and mild, midway between young man and old, temperate, its temples flecked with a little gray. Then comes aged winter, bristling with trembling step, its hair either stripped or white.
Our own bodies too are always changing, without rest, and what we were or are, we shall not be tomorrow. There was a day when, only as seeds and the first hope of men, we lay hidden in our mother's womb; nature laid on her skillful hands and would not have our bodies cramped, shut in the stretched mother's belly, and sent us out from that home into the empty air. Brought to the light, the infant lay strengthless; soon, on all fours, it moved its limbs like the beasts, and little by little, trembling, on knees not yet firm, it stood, its sinews helped by some support. Then it was strong and swift, and passed the span of youth; and, the years of middle life served out, it slides down the sloping path of failing age. This undermines and pulls down the strength of former years: old Milo weeps when he sees the arms that once, in the mass of their solid muscle, were like Hercules', hang loose and weak; the daughter of Tyndarus weeps too when she sees the old woman's wrinkles in her mirror, and asks herself why she was twice carried off. Time, devourer of things, and you, envious Age, destroy all, and, gnawed by the teeth of the years, you consume all things little by little in a slow death.
Nor do these things we call the elements stay fixed; give me your minds, and I will teach the changes they go through. The everlasting universe holds four generative bodies; of them two are heavy and are carried downward by their weight — earth and water — and as many lack weight and, with nothing pressing them, seek the heights — air, and fire purer than air. Though they stand apart in space, still all things are made from them and fall back into them: the loosened earth thins into flowing water, the water, made fine, passes off into breeze and air, and the air, its weight taken away, shoots up, finest of all, into the fires of the aether; then they come back again, and the same order is unwoven — for fire, thickened, passes into dense air, this into water, and earth is packed from the water made dense. Nor does its own shape stay with each; and nature, the renewer, makes new shapes from old. In all this vast world, believe me, nothing perishes, but it varies and renews its face; and to be born is to begin to be something other than before, and to die is to cease to be the same — though perhaps these things are moved here, those there, yet in the whole all things endure.
I could not believe anything lasts long under one form. So, ages, you came down from gold to iron; so the fortune of places has so often turned. I have seen what was once most solid earth be sea, and lands made from the sea; far from the ocean sea-shells lay, and an old anchor was found on a mountaintop; a rush of water made a valley of what was a plain, and a flood carried a mountain down into the sea; ground that was swampy is parched with dry sand, and places that had borne drought are wet with standing pools. Here nature has opened new springs, there shut them; and rivers, roused by old earthquakes, have burst forth, or, drying, sunk down. So, when Lycus is swallowed by a chasm in the earth, it rises again far off with another mouth; so the great Erasinus is now drunk up, now, gliding with hidden stream, is given back on the Argive plains; and they say the Mysian Caicus, weary of its source and its former banks, now goes another way; and Amenanus, rolling the Sicilian sands, now flows, now is dry, its springs stopped up. Once the Anigrus was drunk; now it pours waters you would not touch, since — unless all faith is to be taken from the poets — the Centaurs there washed the wounds made by the bow of club-bearing Hercules. And does not the Hypanis too, sprung from the Scythian mountains, once sweet, grow foul with bitter salt? Antissa and Pharos and Phoenician Tyre were once ringed by waves; none of them is now an island. The old settlers had Leucas joined to the mainland; now the sea surrounds it. Zancle too, they say, was joined to Italy, until the sea took away the border and pushed back the land with a wave between. If you seek Helice and Buris, cities of Achaia, you will find them under the water, and sailors still point out the sunken towns with their drowned walls. Near Troezen of Pittheus there is a hill without any trees, once the flattest stretch of a plain, now a hill; for — dreadful to tell — the wild force of the winds, shut in dark caverns, longing to breathe out somewhere and struggling in vain for freer air, since there was no crack in all their prison and no way out for their blasts, swelled the stretched ground, as breath from the mouth inflates a bladder or the hide stripped from a two-horned goat; that swelling stayed on the spot, took the look of a high hill, and hardened in the long years.
Though many instances come to mind, heard and known, I will add a few more. Does not water too give and take new forms? At noon your water is icy, horned Ammon, and at the rising and setting of the sun it is warm; the Athamanians, they say, kindle wood by pouring on their water when the moon has shrunk to her smallest circle. The Cicones have a river that turns the drinker's inwards to stone and lays marble on things it touches; the Crathis, and the Sybaris near it, in our own country, make the hair like amber and gold. And, what is more wondrous, there are waters that can change not only bodies but minds too. Who has not heard of shameful Salmacis and the Ethiopian lake — whose water, if a man drinks it, drives him mad or sinks him in a strangely heavy sleep? Whoever eases his thirst at the Clitorian spring flees wine and, sober, delights in pure water — whether there is a power in the water opposed to heating wine, or, as the natives tell, after the son of Amythaon, by charm and herb, had freed the maddened daughters of Proetus from their frenzy, he threw the mind's cleansings into that stream, and a hatred of wine stayed in the waters. The Lyncestian river runs opposite in effect: whoever draws of it with unruly throat reels as if he had drunk unmixed wine. There is a place in Arcadia the ancients called Pheneos, suspect for its double-natured water: fear it at night — drunk at night it harms, by day it is drunk without hurt. So lakes and rivers have, some one power, some another. There was a time when Ortygia floated on the waves; now it sits still; the Argo feared the Clashing Rocks scattered by the surge of the dashing waters, which now stand unmoved and resist the winds. Nor will Etna, that burns with sulphurous furnaces, always be fiery — nor was it always fiery. For if the earth is a living thing and breathes and has vents in many places that exhale flame, it can change the ways of its breathing and, whenever it stirs, close these caverns and open those; or if light winds are shut in its lowest caves and hurl rock against rock and matter holding the seeds of flame, and it catches fire at the blows, the caves will grow cold when the winds are calmed; or if bituminous forces catch fire, or yellow sulphur burns with a faint smoke — then, when the earth no longer gives food and rich fuel to the flame, its strength spent in the long ages, and nature's nourishment fails its greedy fire, it will not bear the hunger, and, abandoned, will abandon its flames.
There are men, they say, in northern Pallene, who are wont to veil their bodies in light feathers when they have gone nine times under the Tritonian lake; I do not believe it — though the Scythian women, their limbs sprinkled with drugs, are said to practice the same arts. But if any faith is to be given to things proved by experience — do you not see that whatever bodies waste away by time or dissolving heat turn into small living things? Bury slain oxen in a pit — the thing is known by use — and from the rotting flesh, everywhere, flower-gathering bees are born, that, like their parents, work the fields and toil in hope. The warhorse buried in the ground is the source of the hornet; take the curved claws from a shore-crab and put the rest under the earth, and from the buried part a scorpion will come out and threaten with its hooked tail; and the caterpillars that weave gray threads over the leaves — a thing farmers have watched — change their form to the deadly moth. Mud holds the seeds that breed green frogs, and breeds them without feet; soon it gives them legs fit for swimming; and, that the same may be fit for long leaps, the back pair outdo the front. Nor is the cub the bear bears at birth anything but a barely-living lump of flesh: by licking, the mother shapes it into limbs and brings it to a form like her own. Do you not see that the young of the honey-bees, hidden in the six-sided wax, are born without limbs, and only later take on feet and wings? Who would think — did he not know it happens — that the bird of Juno, which carries stars on its tail, and the eagle, the armor-bearer of Jove, and the doves of Venus, and all the race of birds come to be from the middle of an egg? Some believe that human marrow, when the spine has rotted in the closed tomb, changes into a snake.
Yet these draw their origin from other things; there is one bird that renews and reseeds itself: the Assyrians call it the phoenix. It lives not on grain or grass, but on the tears of frankincense and the juice of balsam. When it has filled the five ages of its life, it builds itself, with talons and clean beak, a nest in the branches of an oak or on the top of a swaying palm; and, when it has strewn there cassia and spikenard and bruised cinnamon with tawny myrrh, it lays itself on it and ends its life amid the fragrance. From there, they say, from the parent's body, a small phoenix is reborn, to live as many years; and when age has given it strength to bear the weight, it lifts the nest's burden from the boughs of the tall tree and, dutiful, carries its own cradle and its father's tomb, and, reaching the city of Hyperion through the light air, lays it before the sacred doors in Hyperion's temple.
And if there is anything of strange novelty in these, we may marvel more that the hyena changes its sex, and that the one which just now, a female, took the male, is now itself a male; and that the creature fed on wind and air at once takes on whatever colors it touches. Conquered India gave lynxes to grape-crowned Bacchus, and, they say, whatever their bladder gives off turns to stone and hardens at the touch of the air. So coral too, at the first moment it touches the air, grows hard: it was a soft plant beneath the waves.
The day will fail me, and Phoebus will dip his panting steeds in the deep sea, before I can take in with my words all that is changed into new forms. So we see the ages turn, and these nations gain strength while those fall: so Troy was great in wealth and men and could give so much blood for ten years, but now, laid low, shows only her old ruins and, for riches, the tombs of her ancestors. Sparta was famous, great Mycenae flourished, and the citadels of Cecrops and of Amphion; now Sparta is a worthless spot, lofty Mycenae has fallen; what is Thebes of Oedipus but a name, what remains of Athens of Pandion but a name? Now, too, there is report that Dardanian Rome is rising, which, by the waters of the Apennine-born Tiber, lays the foundations of her greatness under a vast structure: she then, by growing, changes her form, and one day will be the head of the boundless world. So the seers say, and the fate-telling oracles; and, as I recall, Helenus, son of Priam, said to weeping Aeneas, doubtful of his safety, when the Trojan state was failing: "Son of a goddess, if you well grasp the presage of my mind, Troy will not wholly fall while you live! Flame and sword will give you a way: you will go, and carry off ruined Pergamum with you, until a foreign soil, kinder than your native land, falls to Troy and to you; and I see even now that Phrygian descendants are destined to build a city so great as none is, or will be, or was seen in earlier years. Other chiefs will make her mighty through long ages, but one born of the blood of Iulus will make her mistress of the world; and when earth has had the use of him, the heavenly halls will hold him, and heaven will be his end." This, I remember, Helenus prophesied to Aeneas, bearer of the household gods from Troy; and I rejoice that my kindred walls are rising, and that to such good end the Greeks conquered the Phrygians.
But, that we not stray too far with steeds forgetful of the goal — the heavens, and all beneath them, change their forms, and the earth and all in it. We too, a part of the world, since we are not only bodies but fleeting souls as well, and can go into the homes of beasts and be hidden in the breasts of cattle — let us leave safe and unharmed the bodies that may hold the souls of our parents, or brothers, or those joined to us by some tie, or at least of men, and not heap our tables as at the feast of Thyestes! How ill he schools himself, how he readies himself for human blood, the impious man who cuts the calf's throat with the knife and lends a deaf ear to its lowing, or who can kill the kid that cries like a child, or feed on the bird he himself has fed! How little is lacking there for utter crime? What a short step onward is prepared! Let the ox plow, or owe its death to old age; let the sheep give us defense against shivering Boreas; let the well-fed she-goats offer their udders to be pressed by the hand. Away with nets and snares and nooses and cunning tricks! Do not deceive the bird with the limed twig, nor pen the deer with dreaded feathers, nor hide the barbed hook in treacherous bait.
If anything is harmful, destroy it — but even so, only destroy it: keep your mouths free of blood, and take the gentler food!
His heart schooled with such teachings and others, Numa, they say, returned to his country and, invited of their own will, took up the reins of the Roman people. Blessed with a nymph for his wife and the Muses for his guides, he taught the rites of sacrifice, and led a nation used to fierce war over to the arts of peace. When, full of years, he had finished his reign and his life, the Latian matrons and the people and the fathers wept for Numa dead; but his wife left the city and lay hidden in the thick groves of the vale of Aricia, and by her groaning and lament disturbed the rites of Diana, brought there by Orestes. Ah, how often the nymphs of the grove and the lake begged her not to, and spoke words of comfort! Ah, how often the hero, the son of Theseus, said to her as she wept, "Set a limit to it; your lot is not the only one to be mourned. Look at the like disasters of others: you will bear yours the more mildly — and would that examples not my own could lighten your grief! But even mine can.
"If, in talk, it has ever reached your ears that a certain Hippolytus died through his father's credulity, by the trickery of a wicked stepmother, you will be amazed, and I shall hardly prove it — but I am he. Once the daughter of Pasiphaë, having tried in vain to tempt me to defile my father's bed, pretended I had wished what she herself wished, and, turning the charge about — whether more from fear of exposure or from spite at the rebuff — condemned me; and my father, though I was guiltless, drove me from the city and, as I went, cursed my head with cruel prayers. In my flying chariot I was making for Troezen, the city of Pittheus, and now was skirting the shores of the Corinthian gulf, when the sea rose, and a huge heap of water seemed to bend into the shape of a mountain and to grow and to give a bellowing and to split at its very peak; and out of the burst waves a horned bull was thrown, and, reared breast-high into the light air, spewed a mass of sea-water from his nostrils and open mouth. My companions' hearts quailed; my mind stayed unafraid, intent only on my exile — when the fierce horses turned their necks to the sea and shied with pricked-up ears, and, terrified of the monster, dashed the chariot over the high rocks. I struggled, with useless hand, to hold the reins white with foam, and, thrown back, pulled at the slack traces. Yet my strength would not have beaten the madness of the horses, had not the wheel, running against a stump, been broken and torn from the long axle. I was hurled from the chariot, and, the reins tangling my limbs, you might have seen my living guts dragged, my sinews caught on the stump, my limbs partly torn away and partly held back, my broken bones give a heavy sound, and my spent breath breathe out — and no part of my body you could recognize: the whole of me was one wound. Can you, or dare you, nymph, set your misfortune beside mine? I have seen, too, the lightless realm, and bathed my mangled body in the wave of Phlegethon; nor would life have been given back to me but for the powerful medicine of Apollo's son. When, by strong herbs and the healing art, I had it back, against Pluto's will, then Cynthia, that I might not by my presence deepen his anger at the gift, threw thick clouds around me; and, that I might be safe and be seen unharmed, she added years to my look and left me no face that could be known, and long she wavered whether to give me Crete or Delos to hold; and, leaving Crete and Delos, she set me here, and bade me lay aside the name that might remind me of my horses. 'You who were Hippolytus,' she said, 'be now Virbius.' Since then I haunt this grove and, one of the lesser gods, lie hidden under my mistress's power, and am numbered among her own."
Yet the misfortunes of others could not ease Egeria's grief; and, lying at the mountain's foot, she melted into tears, until the sister of Phoebus, moved by the love of her sorrow, made a cool fountain from her body and thinned her limbs into ever-flowing waters.
This new thing amazed the nymphs, and the son of the Amazon was astonished no otherwise than when the Etruscan ploughman saw the fateful clod in the middle of the field move first of itself, no one touching it, then take on a human shape and lose the earth's, and open its new-made mouth with the destinies to come — the natives called him Tages, the first to teach the Etruscan nation to unfold the future; or as when Romulus once saw his spear, fixed on the Palatine hill, suddenly put out leaves, standing now on a new-made root, not on the driven iron, and, now no dart but a tree of pliant twigs, give the wondering onlookers an unlooked-for shade; or as when Cipus saw his own horns in the stream's water — for he did see them — and, thinking the reflection false, kept bringing his fingers back to his brow and touched what he saw; and, no longer blaming his eyes, he stopped where he was, coming home victorious over the beaten enemy, and, raising his eyes and his hands to heaven, cried, "Whatever this marvel foretells, you gods above — if it is happy, let it be happy for my country and the people of Quirinus; if it threatens, let it threaten me." And he soothes the grassy altars, built of green turf, with fragrant fires, and pours wine from bowls, and consults the quivering entrails of slain sheep for their meaning. When the Etruscan seer looked at them, he saw great designs of things in them, but not clear; but when he lifted his keen eye from the sheep's flesh to the horns of Cipus, he said, "Hail, O king! For you, Cipus, you and your horns this place and the Latian towers will obey. Only break off delay, and hurry to enter the open gates! So the fates command: for, once received in the city, you will be king, and safely hold a lasting scepter." He stepped back, and, turning his stern face from the walls of the city, said, "Far, far may the gods drive all such omens! Far more rightly will I pass my life in exile than see the Capitol make me king." He spoke, and at once called together the people and the grave senate; but first he veiled his horns with the laurel of peace, and stood on a mound raised by his brave soldiers, and, praying to the old gods in the ancient way, said, "There is one here who will be king unless you drive him from the city. Who he is I will tell you by a sign, not a name: he wears horns on his brow! The augur warns you that, if he enters Rome, he will make you slaves by his laws. He could have burst through the open gates, but I opposed him — though no one is more closely bound to him than I. Keep the man from the city, Romans; or, if he deserves it, bind him with heavy chains, or end your fear by the death of the destined tyrant." Such a murmur as rises in the tall pines when the fierce east wind whistles through them, or as the sea-waves make if one hears them far off, so the people sounded; but through their confused, roaring words one cry stood out: "Which is he?" And they scan the foreheads and look for the foretold horns. Cipus spoke to them again: "The one you seek, you have," and, tearing the wreath from his head though the people forbade it, showed his temples marked with a twin horn. All cast down their eyes and groaned, and — who could believe it? — unwilling, looked on that head famous for its merits; and, no longer letting it lack its honor, they set the festive wreath on it. And the nobles, since you were forbidden to enter the walls, gave you, Cipus, as a mark of honor, as much land as you could enclose with the plow, oxen yoked, from the sun's rising to its setting; and they carved the horns, keeping their wondrous shape, on the bronze-plated doorposts, to last through the long ages.
Now tell, Muses, the present powers of poets — for you know, and the wide reach of time does not deceive you — how the island washed by the deep Tiber's stream added the son of Coronis to the sacred rites of Romulus's city. A dreadful plague had once fouled the Latian air, and pale bodies were wasted by a bloodless sickness. When, weary with funerals, they saw that mortal efforts availed nothing, and the arts of healers nothing, they sought help from heaven, and, going to Delphi that holds the middle place of the world, the oracle of Phoebus, they begged that he would come to their misery with a health-bringing answer and end so great a city's woes. The place, and the laurels, and the very quivers he holds trembled together, and the tripod gave this voice from the depths of the shrine and shook their frightened breasts: "What you seek here, Roman, you should have sought in a nearer place; and seek it now in a nearer place: you need not Apollo to lessen your grief, but Apollo's son. Go with good omens, and summon my offspring."
When the prudent senate had received the god's command, they searched out which city the young son of Phoebus dwelt in, and sent men to reach the shores of Epidaurus with the winds. As soon as those sent had touched there in the curved ship, they came to the council and the Greek elders and begged them to grant the god who, present, might end the deaths of the Ausonian nation — for so the sure oracle had said. Opinion was split and wavering; some thought aid should not be refused, many urged them to keep their own protector and not send away their guardian god. While they hesitated, the twilight had driven off the fading day, and the earth's shadow had drawn darkness over the world, when in your sleep, Roman, the saving god seemed to stand before your couch, just as he is wont to be in his temple, holding a rustic staff in his left hand and stroking the long hair of his beard with his right, and to speak such words from his gentle breast: "Lay aside your fears! I will come, and leave these statues of mine. Only look at this serpent that winds its coils about my staff, and mark it well with your eyes, so you can know it: into this I will change, but I shall be greater, and seem as great as heavenly bodies ought to be when they are transformed." At once, with these words, the god departed, and with his words and the god sleep departed, and kindly light followed the flight of sleep.
The next dawn had scattered the starry fires; unsure what to do, the nobles met in the god's rich temple and begged him to show, by heavenly signs, in what place he would abide. Scarcely had they ceased when the golden god, in the serpent's form, with high crest, sent forth a hiss to announce his coming, and at his approach shook his statue and the altars and doors and marble floor and gilded roof, and, reared breast-high in the middle of the temple, rolled around his fire-flashing eyes. The frightened crowd trembled; the priest, his chaste hair bound with a white fillet, knew the god and cried, "The god — behold the god! Be of good omen in mind and tongue, whoever is here! May you be seen to our good, most beautiful one, and aid the peoples that keep your rites!" All present worship the god as bidden, and all repeat the priest's words again, and the sons of Aeneas give holy favor in heart and voice. The god nods to this, and, shaking his crest, gives sure pledges with his darting tongue thrice repeated; then he glides down the polished steps and turns his face back, and, about to leave, looks back at his old altars and salutes his wonted home and the temple he has so long lived in. Then, through the ground strewn and covered with scattered flowers, he glides, huge, coiling his folds, and through the middle of the city makes for the harbor guarded by its curving quay. Here he stopped, and, seeming with a calm face to dismiss his train and the dutiful crowd that followed, laid his body on the Ausonian ship; it felt the god's weight, and the keel was pressed low by the god's heaviness. The sons of Aeneas rejoice, and, a bull first slain on the shore, loose the twisted cables of the garlanded ship. A light breeze drove the ship on; the god stands out on high, pressing the curved stern with his neck laid on it, and looks down on the blue water; and with gentle west winds along the Ionian sea, at the sixth rising of the dawn, he reached Italy, and was borne past the Lacinian shore, famed for the goddess Juno's temple, and the Scylacean coast; he leaves Iapygia, and flees the Amphrisian rocks with oars to the left, the steep Cocinthian on the right, and coasts Romethium and Caulon and Narycia, and crosses the strait and the narrows of Sicilian Pelorus, and the home of King Aeolus, grandson of Hippotas, and the mines of Temesa, and makes for Leucosia and the rose-beds of warm Paestum. Then he coasts Capreae, and the headland of Minerva, and the hills noble with the Surrentine vine, and the city of Hercules, and Stabiae, and Parthenope made for ease, and, past it, the temple of the Cumaean Sibyl. Then the warm springs are passed, and mastic-bearing Liternum, and Volturnus dragging much sand under its stream, and Sinuessa busy with white doves, and heavy Minturnae, and the town her foster-child gave a tomb, and the house of Antiphates, and Trachas ringed by marsh, and the land of Circe, and Antium with its rocky shore. When the sailors turned the sail-bearing ship here — for now the sea was rough — the god unfolds his coils and, gliding in many a fold and great winding, enters the temple of his father that skirts the yellow shore. The sea calmed, the god of Epidaurus leaves his father's altars, and, having enjoyed the welcome of the god akin to him, furrows the shore sand with the drag of his rattling scales, and, leaning on the helm, laid his head on the high stern, until he came to Castrum and the sacred seats of Lavinium and the mouths of the Tiber. Here all the people, a crowd of matrons and men alike, rush to meet him — and they too who keep your fires, Vesta — and hail the god with glad shouts. And where the swift ship is steered up the stream, incense crackles on the altars set in rows along both banks, and perfumes the air with smoke, and the felled victim warms the knives thrust in it. And now he had entered Rome, the head of the world: the serpent rises erect, lifts his neck that rested on the masthead, and looks around for a home fit for himself. There is a spot where the flowing river splits in two — it is called the Island — and stretches out from either side equal arms, the dry land in the middle. Here the serpent, son of Phoebus, came from the Latian ship, and, taking back his heavenly form, put an end to the mourning, and came, the bringer of health, to the City.
Yet he came a stranger to our shrines: Caesar is a god in his own city, whom, chief in war and in peace, not his wars ended in triumphs, nor his deeds at home, nor his swift-won glory turned into a new star, a comet with streaming hair, so much as his own offspring. For of all the deeds of Caesar there is none greater than that he was the father of this our Caesar. Was it more, then, to have subdued the sea-girt Britons, and steered victorious ships up the seven-mouthed streams of the papyrus-bearing Nile, and added to the people of Quirinus the rebel Numidians and Cinyphian Juba and Pontus swollen with the fame of Mithridates, and earned many triumphs and held some — than to have fathered so great a man, under whose rule over the world you gods have shown abundant care for the human race? That this man, then, might not be born of mortal seed, Julius had to be made a god. When the golden mother of Aeneas saw this, and saw too that a sad death was being prepared for the high priest, and the conspirators' arms were being moved, she went pale, and said to each of the gods as she met them: "See on how vast a scale treason is plotted against me, and with what great guile that life is sought which alone is left me from Dardanian Iulus! Shall I alone be forever harried by just cares — I, whom now the Calydonian spear of the son of Tydeus wounds, now the walls of Troy, defended in vain, grieve, who have seen my son driven through long wanderings, tossed on the sea, entering the homes of the silent, and waging war with Turnus, or, if we tell the truth, with Juno rather? Why do I now recall the old wrongs of my line? This fear does not let me remember the past. Look, you see the wicked swords whetted — keep them off, I beg, and thwart the crime, and do not, by the priest's murder, put out the fires of Vesta!"
Such anxious words Venus threw in vain through all heaven, and moved the gods above; who, though they could not break the iron decrees of the ancient sisters, still gave no doubtful signs of the coming grief. They say that arms clashing among the black clouds, and dreadful trumpets and horns heard in the sky, warned of the crime; the sad face of the sun, too, gave a lurid light to the anxious earth; often torches seemed to burn among the stars, often drops of blood fell in the rain; the Morning Star was dark, his face sprinkled with black rust, the chariot of the moon sprinkled with blood; in a thousand places the Stygian owl gave sad omens, in a thousand places the ivory statues wept, and dirges, they say, were heard, and threatening words, in the sacred groves. No victim gave a favorable omen; the entrails warned that great tumults were near, and a cut-off head was found among them; and in the Forum, and around the houses and the temples of the gods, dogs howled by night, they say, and the ghosts of the silent walked, and the City was shaken by tremors. Yet the gods' warnings could not overcome treachery and the fate to come, and drawn swords were carried into the temple: for no other place in the whole city pleased them for the crime and the dreadful murder than the senate-house. Then indeed Venus beat her breast with both hands, and made to hide the son of Aeneas in the cloud in which Paris was once snatched from the hostile son of Atreus, and Aeneas escaped the sword of Diomedes. Her father spoke to her thus: "Do you, daughter, alone try to move the unconquerable fate? You may enter the house of the three sisters yourself: there you will see, in a vast structure of bronze and solid iron, the records of things, which fear neither the crash of the sky nor the wrath of the lightning nor any ruin, safe and eternal; there you will find the fates of your line engraved in everlasting adamant. I myself have read them and marked them in my mind, and I will tell them, that you may not still be ignorant of the future. He for whom you labor, Cytherea, has filled his time, the years ended that he owed to earth. That he may enter heaven as a god and be worshiped in temples, you will bring it about, with his son, who, heir to his name, will bear alone the burden laid on him, and, our bravest avenger of his murdered father, will have us to aid him in his wars. Under his command the besieged walls of Mutina, beaten, will sue for peace; Pharsalia will feel him, and Philippi again be soaked with Emathian blood, and the great name will be beaten in the Sicilian waves; and the Egyptian wife of the Roman general, trusting ill in that match, will fall, and in vain will she have threatened that our Capitol should serve her Canopus. Why count you the barbarian lands and the nations by either ocean? Whatever the habitable earth bears will be his — the sea too will serve him! Peace given to the lands, he will turn his mind to civil law, and, most just of lawgivers, bring in laws, and by his own example rule men's ways; and, looking to the age of the time to come and his coming descendants, he will bid the child born of his holy wife bear both his name and his cares; nor, until as an old man he has matched his years to his deeds, will he reach the heavenly seats and his kindred stars. Meanwhile, this soul, snatched from the murdered body, make into a star, so that the deified Julius may always look down from his high place on our Capitol and Forum."
He had barely said this when kindly Venus, seen by none, stood in the middle of the senate-house and snatched the soul, just freed, from the limbs of her Caesar, and, not letting it dissolve into air, bore it up among the stars of heaven; and, as she bore it, she felt it take light and catch fire, and let it go from her breast: higher than the moon it flies, and, drawing a flaming trail through a wide track, gleams as a star; and, seeing his son's good deeds, it owns them greater than its own, and rejoices to be surpassed by him. Though the son forbids his own deeds to be set above his father's, still Fame, free and bound by no commands, prefers him against his will, and in this one thing disobeys him. So great Atreus yields to the glory of Agamemnon, so Theseus outdoes Aegeus, so Achilles Peleus; and, to use examples that match their own case, so too Saturn is less than Jove. Jupiter rules the heavenly halls and the realms of the threefold world; the earth is under Augustus; each is a father and a ruler. Gods, companions of Aeneas, before whom sword and fire gave way; and you, native gods; and Quirinus, father of the City; and Mars, father of unconquered Quirinus; and Vesta, held sacred among the household gods of Caesar; and with Caesar's Vesta, you, Phoebus of the home; and Jupiter, who hold on high the Tarpeian heights; and whatever other gods a poet may rightly call on — late, I pray, be that day, and beyond my own time, on which Augustus, leaving the world he rules, shall reach heaven, and, gone from us, listen favorably to those who pray.
And now I have finished a work that neither the anger of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor devouring time can destroy. Let that day, which has power over nothing but this body of mine, end when it will the span of my uncertain life; yet in my better part I shall be borne immortal above the high stars, and my name shall never be blotted out; and wherever Roman power reaches over the conquered lands, I shall be read on the lips of the people, and — if the prophecies of poets have any truth — through all the ages, in fame, I shall live.