Ciris

Ciris

Although I, long tossed by a fickle love of praise, having tested the vain rewards of the deceiving crowd, am now embraced by the Cecropian garden, breathing sweet airs, within the green shade of flowering wisdom— though this is what it seeks, to seek for itself a worthy song, girded for a far other pursuit and for other labours, mounting more loftily toward the stars of the great universe and daring to climb the hill that pleases but a few; yet I will not refrain from weaving out the task once begun, in which I would my Muses might rightfully find rest and gently lay aside their coaxing love. But if I had followed every wondrous kind of wisdom (wondrous indeed—if only the desire to do so were yours), if highest philosophy were now setting me upon its summit,

brought forth as a partner-heir among four ancient heirs, whence I might look down upon the errors of men spread far and wide across the world, and scorn their lowly cares; not even then would I honour such a man as you with such a gift, not I indeed—though sometimes it is granted us to play and to close a slender verse on a soft and yielding foot— but, if I may say it, weaving you into a mighty robe, such as is borne of old in Erechthean Athens, when the vows owed to chaste Minerva are paid and the slow five years return, the lustrum completed, when the light West-wind has thickened, the East alternating with it, and has driven the heavy chariot forward by its sloping weight. Happy is that day, happy too is the year called, happy those who looked upon such a year and day. And so the battles of Pallas are woven there in order, the great robes are adorned with Giant-trophies, the bristling combats are painted in blood-red scarlet. There is added Typhon, struck down by the gilded spear-point, who once, strewing the sky with Ossaean boulders, had doubled high Olympus with its Emathian peak. Such is the veil the goddess's people bear at the solemn season.

In such a rite I would wish you, most learned of young men, amid the purple stars of the sun and the bright constellations of the moon, which beat the sky with sky-blue chariots, to be woven into the great pages of the nature of things, so that the name of wisdom, joined forever in song, my page might speak of as yours through aged generations. But since we are now first born to arts so great, now first we strengthen our tender sinews with might: yet take, meanwhile, these things I can offer, in which I have spent the first lessons of my life and my young years— take these gifts long watched over by my labour, promised, and at long last now the beginnings . . . how once, terrified by portents, the soft Scylla, raised aloft into the air, beheld strange flocks of birds, and mounting the sky on a slender wing, flew on dark-blue pinions above her own roofs, paying this penalty for the purple lock, expiating it by her city uprooted from its foundations. Many great poets, Messalla, tell of her—

(for let us confess the truth: Polyhymnia loves the truth)— they say she, changed in body into far other shape, is called the Scyllaean rock, haunting it as a monster. Her we often read of as the bane of Odysseus' troubles, her white loins girt with barking monsters, who harried the Dulichian ships and in the deep gulf seized the sailors and tore them with her sea-dogs. But neither do the Maeonian pages allow us to believe this, nor is that an honest author of doubtful wanderings. For different poets have fashioned different girls, who are said by Colophonian Homer to be the Scyllae. He himself names Crataeis as mother; but whether of Hecate's stock, or whether the two-formed Graena bore her as a monster, or whether neither is her parent—and in this whole song there is a fault of the loins and the lust of Venus described— or whether, her form changed by scattered poisons,

the luckless maiden (for what had she done wrong? her own father, embracing her naked on the cruel sand, had violated the marriage-bed of chaste Amphitrite: yet long afterward she exacted her penalty, so that when she was borne over the deep, caring for her bride, she herself mingled the savage sea with much blood)— or whether truly, as they tell, since she outdid all in beauty and plundered her eager lovers everywhere for gain, she, walled round on a sudden by fish and evil dogs, saw horrible shapes stand about her. Alas how often, marvelling, she grew pale at her new limbs, how often, alas, she dreaded her own barkings! Because a woman dared to cheat the deities of the gods and to divert from Venus the penalty promised by her vow, because, hemmed by the manifold throng of young men, she had spoken—a harlot tossed in her mind among wild beasts— that she was thus by just desert in such ill repute, the learned voice of Palaepaphian Pachynus bears witness.

Whatever each man has said of such a disaster, are dreams: rather let it be granted that the Ciris become known, and that this one Scylla is not the same among many girls. Wherefore, you who gave me, as I meditate sending forth sure songs, great rewards for my desire, divine Pierides, whose chaste altars often the doorposts stain with my offering, and at whose doors hyacinths lay down their flowers, or the sweetly blushing narcissus, or the crocus joining lilies with alternate marigold, and the scattered rose blossoms at the threshold—now come, goddesses, now above all breathe upon my labour, and fringe my new volume with everlasting honour. There are cities near the seats of Pandion, between the Actaean hills and the bright shores of Theseus, laughing far and wide with purple shells, to none of which is Megara accounted worthy to yield in fame—Megara, once fortified by the Actaean toil of Alcathous and of Phoebus; for the god was present to that man; whence too, imitating the high notes of the lyre,

the stone, when struck, often rings back Cyllenian murmurs and bears witness by its sound to Phoebus' ancient love. This city, beyond others, Minos—who then flourished in arms— had made his foe, a ravager with his oared fleet, because Polyidus, fleeing the Carpathian sea and the Caeratean rivers, had sheltered himself in the ancestral guest-friendship of Nisus. Seeking him again in war, the Gortynian hero was laying low the Attic fields with Cretan arrow. But neither then does the citizen, nor then the king himself, fear to strike the squadrons flying in hostile array against the walls, and to beat back their untamed spirits by valour, since it is enough to remember the answer of the gods. For from the king's very crown—wondrous to tell— his temples flowered with white locks of bay, and a rosy lock rose up in the midst of his head. And as long as the nature of this had been preserved, so long should the fatherland of Nisus and his realm stand unharmed; thus the harmonious Fates confirmed it by their abiding will.

Therefore all his care rested in that dear hair, which a golden brooch in solemn fashion adorned, and biting cicadas bound with their smooth-worn teeth. Nor would this watch of yours have been in vain, nor was it—had not Scylla, seized by a strange frenzy, Scylla, found to be the grave of her wretched father and fatherland, gazed with too-eager eyes upon Minos. But that evil boy, whom neither his own mother could turn from his anger, nor his father and grandfather alike, Jupiter—he who taught even the Punic lions to be tamed, and the strong tigers to grow gentle with their might, he who taught even the gods, and men—but to tell it is too great— that same small boy was then whetting the grim wrath of mighty Juno, whose oaths (the perjuries of the goddess of old, but they remember them long) the perjured girl, unwitting, had violated by trespassing on no permitted ground, while, busied at the goddess's rites, she frolicked and beyond the throng of mothers and companions advanced far,

rejoicing that the loose robe played upon her body, and loosening her swelling folds as the north-wind stirred them. Not yet had she tasted the chaste honours of the fire, not yet had the priestess, drenched with the solemn water, adorned her head with the pale leaves of the olive, when the ball slipped from her hands and fled, and where it rolled back the maiden ran. Would that, betrayed by your game, you had not loosened the golden mantle from your slender body! All the things that might have kept your step and slowed your course, O would that you had always kept them with you! Never then, hapless one, would you have profaned with your hand the goddess's shrine, expiating in vain by your oath what was right. And yet who would believe that perjury harmed you? The cause is innocent: Juno feared to show you to her brother. But that fickle god, who is ever, for vengeance, seeking it out of any insult of any spoken word, drawing the golden shafts from his glittering quiver (alas, too much he terrifies, too dread to the sight),

had fixed them all in the maiden's tender mind. As soon as she drank the fire into her thirsting veins and conceived the strong frenzy deep within her bones, fierce as the Bistonian woman on the cold shores of the Edoni, or smitten by Cybele's barbaric boxwood pipe, the luckless maiden raves through the whole city, her flagrant hair not anointed with Idaean storax, not wearing scarlet Sicyonian shoes on her tender feet, not keeping the pearled necklaces upon her snow-white neck. Much do her footsteps falter in their uncertain course. Often she returns, lost, to climb her father's walls and makes a pretext of visiting the airy towers; often too, rolling her sad laments in the night, from the high seats she watches for her love across the sky, and looks out at the camp gleaming with thronging fires. She knows no distaff now, she looks not on dear gold, the shrill harps sound not with their slender string,

the soft webs are not beaten with the Libyan comb. There is no blush upon her face: for where there is a blush, it bars love. And when she finds no solace for ills so great, and sees a wasting death glide through her vitals, where grief calls her to go, where the Fates compel her to bend, she is borne headlong, driven on by the horrible gadfly, that—madwoman!—she might cut the lock from her father's crown and send it stealthily, shorn, to the shrill-tongued foe. For this one condition is set before the wretched girl, whether unknowing—who that is good would not prefer to believe all things, rather than to condemn the girl of so great a crime?— yet, alas, unhappy: for what does ignorance avail? Father Nisus, for whom, your city cruelly plundered, there will scarcely be one seat left in the high towers, where, wearied, you may settle on a built-up nest, you too shall die a bird: your daughter shall give you your due. Rejoice, O swift ones, upborne on the high clouds, who inhabit the sea, the green woods and the sounding groves, rejoice, you birds before your wandering hearth,

and you above all, you maidens, your human limbs transformed, you Daulian daughters, by the cruel law of the fates, rejoice: there comes, most dear to you, swelling the number of your kindred kings and of your own, the Ciris, and her father himself. You, O bodies once most beautiful, outstrip the dark-blue clouds into the upper air, where the strange osprey may rise to the gods' abodes, and where the white Ciris may climb to her granted honours. And now, with eyes bound fast in sweet sleep, Nisus lay, and far off the watch of the sentinels was casting its idle guard with vain zeal at the first doors, when, stealthily descending from her silent couch, Scylla, with ears pricked up, tries the nocturnal silences and, choking back her sobs, catches the slender air. Then, lifting her steps suspended on her fingertips, she goes forth, her hand armed with the two-pronged blade, and flies out: but her strength fails in sudden dread: first her dark crimes she attests to the shadows. For where the path led toward her father's threshold, in the entrance of his chamber she lingers a little, and on high

she looks up to the nodding stars of the chill firmament, promising to the holy gods gifts not accepted. As soon as the old Ogygian woman—Carme, daughter of Phoenix— felt her rise (for the brazen, creaking hinge in the marble doorway had made a sound to her), at once she seizes the girl, weary with languor, and at the same time says: "O sacred head, my nursling, not for nothing has the green pallor through your flesh suffused your sickly veins with thin blood, nor would you do this lightly—nor can you—unless care had driven you, or I am wrong: yet would, O Rhamnusia, that I were wrong! For why shall I say that you touch neither the sweet cups of Bacchus nor the heavy fruits of Ceres? Why do you keep watch alone at your father's couch, at the time when mortal breasts rest their wearied cares, when even the rushing rivers stay their swift courses? Tell me now, at least, wretched one, what you so often, when I begged, swore was nothing to me, when, sorrowing, around your parent's

comely locks you, a maiden, were like to die. Ah me, lest that frenzy have entered your limbs, that which once seized the eyes of Arabian Myrrha, so that by unspeakable crime (which may Adrastea forbid) you strive to wound both parents by one error! But if you are tossed by some other love of the heart (for that you are tossed—Amathusia is not so ignorant of us that I could know it by no sign)— if a permitted love wears you with its familiar fire: I swear to you by the present powers of Dictynna, first of the gods, who gives you, sweet nursling, to me, that I will sooner see all things worthy and unworthy, a thousand toils, than suffer you to waste away in this so wretched squalor and such filth." Thus she speaks, and as she wrapped herself in her soft mantle, she casts the garment around and enfolds the chilled girl, who before had been girt in a thin saffron robe.

Then, fixing sweet kisses on her dewy cheeks, she goes on to search out the causes of the wretched one's wasting, nor yet does she suffer her to return any words, until, trembling, she had drawn her marble foot within. But the girl said: "Why, little nurse, do you torment me? Why do you so hasten to know my frenzies? I do not burn with the love customary to mortals, nor do my eyes turn aside from familiar faces, nor is my father dear to me: indeed I hate all besides. This heart loves nothing, nurse, that it ought to love, in which yet a false image of duty might lie hidden, but from the midst of the battle-line and from the midst of the foe. Alas, alas, what shall I say, or with what sick mouth begin this evil? I will tell it indeed, since you do not let me, nurse, refrain from telling. Have this as the last gift of one dying. He, you see, who sits in siege against our walls, the foe, to whom the father of the gods himself granted the honour of the sceptre, to whom the Fates have granted to be wounded by no wound, (it must be said—in vain I circle all with words)— he it is, that same Minos, who assaults my heart. By this I call to witness the frequent loves of the gods, and by your breast remembered, that nursed me, your nursling,

if you can save me, do not choose rather to destroy me. But if the hope of my longed-for safety is cut off, do not begrudge me, little nurse, the death I have deserved. For unless an evil—O evil!—chance or god had borne you, best Carme, before me into this sight, either with this iron" (she opens the iron that lay hid in her dress) "I would have stripped the purple lock from my father's crown, or by a present wound I would have wrought my own death." Scarcely had she uttered this when Carme, terrified by the grim disaster, defiles her unshorn hair with much dust, and heavily, with an old woman's lament, weeps aloud: "O Minos, now once more given back to me, cruel one, O Minos, once more the enemy of my old age, that ever either of old, on your account, for the same daughter, or now Love has brought mourning to my mad nursling! Could I not flee you, captured and carried off so far, having borne so heavy a slavery, such hard labours, O twice now the cruel ruin of my own? Now, now, for us elders there is no race left to live, that I might wish to live as it lives. Why, distraught,

with you snatched away, O Britomartis, my one hope of safety, with you, Britomartis, could I prolong the daylight of my life? And would that, only too dear to swift Diana, you, a maiden following the hunts of men, had not been so; nor, drawing your Gnosian arrows with Parthian horn, had driven your Dictaean goats to the known pastures! Never, fleeing so stubbornly the loves of Minos, would you have gone headlong from the watch-tower of the airy mountain, whence others say you fled, and they assign the divinity of the maiden Aphaea; others, that you might be the more renowned, called the Moon Dictynna from your name. Would these things were true: but to me at least, my child, you have perished: never shall I behold you flitting on the mountain's high crest among your Hyrcanian companions and the troop of wild beasts, nor shall I, embracing, hold you returning. But those things then were grievous and unworthy to us—

then, my nursling, while your hope stood whole, and that voice of yours had not yet violated my ears. Has cruel fortune taken even you from me, you, who alone were the reason of my old age's living? Often, vainly caught by your sweet sleep, when nature pressed, I denied that I wished to die, that I might wind for you the flame-coloured threads in Corycian dye. To what now, unhappy one, do the fates reserve me, or what fates? Do you not know by what law from the crown of your father's head the purple bordered his whitening hairs as they were brought forth? What slender pledge hangs suspended upon your father's hair? If you do not know, I can hope for some safety, since in ignorance you have devised an unspeakable crime. But if it is what I fear, by yourself, my nursling, and by your love, tested by me in many wretched matters, I beg you, by the savage streams of Ilithyia, do not perish, do not with so mindless a heart pursue so great a crime. I do not try to bend you from the love you have begun— a thing that cannot be—nor is it ours to contend with the gods;

but rather wed, your father's realm unharmed, and wish to have at least some household gods, my nursling. This one thing, taught and tested, I warn for your ruin's sake. But if by no other means you can bend your parent (but you will be able: for what could you, the only one, not do?), you, rather, do those things when by holy right it shall be allowed, when you shall have cause and time for grief at the deed; then rather report your attempts and your beginnings, and me, and the gods, your companions, my nursling, to be I promise: nothing is long that is woven in order." When with these words she had relieved the anxious heats of the mind, and had beguiled the sick breast with coaxing hope, little by little, trembling, to draw the garment over the cheeks of the maiden, and to catch a peaceful rest in the darkness, quenching the thirsty lamp by turning down the oil, she begins, and to the frequent throbs of the frantic breast to bring her hand, soothing the heart with constant palms. That night thus, sorrowing over her dying nursling, propped on her elbow she hung above the chilled eyes. When the next light, joyful, shook the kindly day for mortals, and (for the coming dawn) was shaking it from chill Oeta—

which the fearful maidens by turns flee and long for, they shun the Evening, they long for the Morning star to glow— the maiden obeys the precepts of her nurse, and everywhere diligently seeks out reasons for marrying. Her father's ears are sounded with lowered voice, and the blessings of a new peace are praised: much strange talk, unwonted, wanders on the lips of the unaccustomed maiden. Now she says she trembles at the impending strifes of war, and fears the god they share; now of the king's friends, and now she has feared for him himself: she weeps, mourning, for her orphaned father, who grants not to have grandchildren shared with Jove. Now too she invents lies forged with base deceit, and terrifies the citizens with dread of the gods. Now from one thing she seeks other omens (nor are they lacking). Indeed she even dared to corrupt the chaste seers, so that, when a victim had fallen, slain by the holy knife,

there might be one to advise, the entrails being his authority, to join Minos as son-in-law and lift the doubtful battles. But the nurse, mixing brimstone in a wide-mouthed dish, pounds narcissus and cassia and pungent herbs, and binding thrice nine threads of triple, diverse colour, "Thrice into my lap," she says, "spit with me, maiden, spit thrice, maiden: the god rejoices in an odd number." Then to great Jove redoubling the rites of frenzy, rites known neither to Idaean crones nor to Greeks, she proceeds, sprinkling the altars with the Amyclaean spray, to fix the king's mind with Iolcian vows. But when no deceit moves steadfast Nisus, and neither men nor gods can bend him, (so great is the confidence of safety in a small lock)— again she joins herself as ally to her nursling's undertaking, and again prepares to shear the purple hair, which now she seeks to bring help to a love so long. None the less, that the walls of Rhaucus may grow,

she rejoices, and the fatherland is pleasant to its buried ashes. So then, through fear, Scylla becomes the enemy of her father's head: then the lock, blooming with Sidonian purple, is cut away; then Megara is taken, and the gods' answers are proved true; then, hung in strange fashion from the high ships, the Nisean maiden is dragged through the dark-blue sea. Many nymphs marvel at her amid the waves, father Ocean marvels, and white Tethys, and Galatea, carrying off her eager sisters with her. She too who measures the great sea with yoked fishes and with a sea-green chariot of two-footed horses, Leucothea, and little Palaemon, the god with his mother, they too who drew the lot to live on alternate days, the dear offspring of Jove, the great increase of Jove, the sons of Tyndareus, marvel at the snow-white limbs of the maiden. These cries, then, and these laments through the air, in the midst of the waves she rolled with vain complaint, stretching her burning eyes to heaven, unhappy, her eyes—for chains hemmed her tender soles— "Hold back, O winds, a little your troubled gusts, while I lament and the gods—though with them as witnesses I have gained nothing—dying, I yet address in my last hour. You, you I will call to witness, winds, and breezes,

you, O if any come of the Numantine race, do you see? I am she of kindred blood to you, Scylla (which—O let it be lawful to say with you safe, Procne)— I am she, once the daughter of mighty Nisus, whom Greece sought in rivalry from every realm, where the curving Hellespont embraces the lands. I am she, Minos, called your wife by sacred pledge: yet, though you do not accept this, you hear it. Shall I, bound, swim across the waves of so great a gulf? Bound, shall I hang in order through so many ceaseless days? Indeed I cannot claim myself worthy of any other punishment, who thus, unwitting, betrayed my fatherland and dear household gods to the foe and to a pitiless tyrant. But these things, Minos, I, the wicked one, thought that they— if some chance had first laid bare our pact— would do it, whose walls and city torn down, O cruel I sought the shrines with fire. But that you, the victor, sooner—nay, that the stars would change their courses—than that you would do such things to me, your captive, did I fear. Now, now crime conquers all. Did I, ruined, love you more than my father's realm? Did I? Nor is it strange; a girl deceived by your face,

as I saw, as I perished, as evil error carried me away. Indeed I never hoped that from that body of yours such evil could be born, deceived as I am by the star of your beauty. Me the rich palace moved not with its delights, rich with brittle coral and tearful amber, me the nymphs blooming with form like my own moved not, nor could the fear of the gods, kindling, hold me back. Love conquered all: for what would he not conquer? No more shall my temples sweat with rich myrrh, nor shall the bridal pine kindle the chaste honours, nor shall the Libyan couch be spread with Assyrian purple. Great are my complaints: nay, you will not even bury me, that nursling common to all, O earth, cast forth, with heaped-up sand. Among mothers and the wives of slaves—must I, among others, perform the duty of handmaids— of your wife, whoever she shall be, the blessed one—

was it not allowed me to wind the heavy spindles with their wool? Or at least you might have slain me, a captive by the law of war! Now at last my weary strength flees from my body, and my head, the neck bent, sinks slack, my marble arms grow livid with the drawn-tight knots. The sea-monsters of the deep, the huge bodies of the sea, gather from all sides, and around in the sea-green gulf they threaten with the lashing of their tails and the gape of their mouths. Now at last, now look back, Minos, on the misfortunes of men! Let it suffice that Scylla has seen so much of woe. Whether by fate this plague has been owed to me, or by uncertain chance, or at last by deserved fault: for I will think anything sooner than that you have done it." Meanwhile the fleet, loosed from the shore, glides on, the great sails belly in the sudden north-wind. The oar is bent in the green brine; the languid lament of the wearied maiden dies away on the long voyage. She leaves the Isthmus, shut in by its narrow throat, the flourishing realms of great Corinth of the Cypselids; she straightway passes by the broken crags of Sciron, and goes forth past the cave deadly to its own— the den of the dire tortoise—and the rocks bloody with many a guest.

And now far off she descries Piraeus, safe, and looks back, alas, in vain upon her familiar Athens. Now from the flood she looks back on the Salaminian fields and now sees the flowering Cyclades: here Venus' isle to her, here the harbour opens against the Hermionean coast. Delos is left behind, far the most pleasing beyond the others to the mother of the Nereids and to Aegean Neptune. She sees Cythnus, girt by its foaming shore, and marble Paros, and green Donysa as she glides past, and Aegina too, and life-bringing Seriphos. She is borne on, and tossed by uncertain winds toward all things, like a little skiff, when it follows a great fleet, and the African whirlwind rages on the wintry sea. Until that the husband of Neptune's stock, mighty in his

sea-green realm, did not endure that such a glory of form be tossed by the waves, and changed the wretched maiden's limbs. Yet he did not resolve to clothe the girl forever in scales and commit her, the tender one, among the faithless fishes (too greedy is the flock of Amphitrite): rather he raised her aloft on sharp wings, that on earth, from the deed, there might be the Ciris by name, the Ciris, more beautiful than the Amyclaean swan of Leda. Here, as in a snow-white egg, when first there is the tender likeness of a living thing, and the joints of its limbs, unfinished, float, congealed by the new warmth, so Scylla's body, washed round by the flowing sea, its limbs half-wild, in parts still uncertain even now, were everywhere changing and everywhere being changed. First the grace of the mouth, and the lips longed for by many, and the look of the broad brow began to draw together into one, and the chin to lengthen into a slender beak. Then where the central parting of the head ran, behold, suddenly, as if imitating her father's honours, a crest shook a crimson plume on her crown, while a soft feather, weaving its varied colours, clothed the marble body in a winged covering, and her supple arms poured forth unbroken plumes.

Then her other parts, and her legs, dyed with reddening vermilion, and a squalid leanness drew a new skin over them, and to her tender feet it fixed sharp talons. And yet this at last—to succour the wretched one by such a pact— was scarcely worthy of the gentle wife of Neptune. Never after this did the eyes of her own people behold her holding the purple fillets upon her golden crown, no chamber, fragrant with Syrian balsam, received her, no abodes were hers: for what had she to do with abodes? And as soon as, swift, with a sound she lifted herself from the white gulf to the sky on whistling wings, and scattered much spray far and wide over the seas, the unhappy maiden, vainly rescued from death, spends her unkempt life on the lonely cliffs, on cliffs and crags and deserted shores. Yet not even this itself was without penalty: for the king of the gods, who turns all the thousands of the lands by his command, moved that such a girl should flit among the powers above, while her father lay extinguished beneath the blind night, to her, for her piety (for often with the blood

of vigorous bulls, suppliant, she had sprinkled the altars, often had adorned the gods' abodes with lavish gift), he gave back her longed-for life with body changed, and made it so that on earth there was the osprey, a bird: for that god ever rejoices in the gleaming eagles. But to her, the wretched one, since she had been condemned by the judgment of the gods and of her father and husband before, he set the cruel hatred of her hostile parent. For as, pre-eminent in the heavenly array of the signs, the one I have seen with a double star of constellations, Scorpio in turn drives bright Orion to flight; so between themselves the grim osprey keeps its wrath and the Ciris through the ages, by their remembering fate. Wherever she, fleeing, cleaves the light air with her wings, behold, the fierce foe, with a great whirring through the breezes, Nisus pursues; where Nisus bears himself to the breezes, she, fleeing, swiftly cleaves the light air with her wings.