Alexandra

I will tell all truly, the things you ask of me, from the very beginning; but if the tale runs long, forgive me, master. For the maiden did not, as before, loose her shimmering mouth of oracles in calm, but, pouring out a measureless, all-mingled cry, raised her voice frenzied from her laurel-eating throat, mimicking the speech of the dark Sphinx. Of these things, all that I hold in heart and memory, you may hear, my lord, and, reckoning them over in a mind close-pressed, thread your way through the riddles' baffling paths, unwinding them, where a well-marked track by a straight road guides the feet through darkness. And I, slipping the topmost barrier of the cord, set out upon the windings of these crooked words, striking the first post like a winged runner. Dawn was even now over the steep crag of Phegium soaring on the swift wings of Pegasus, leaving Tithonus in his bed near Cerne, your half-brother by another mother. And the sailors, from the smooth hollow of the rock, were casting off, releasing from the land the starting-ropes. And the stork-coloured maidens, the down-footed, fair-faced ones, the daughters of Phalacra, struck the maiden-slaying Thetis with their blades— above Calydnae showing their white plumes, their stern-ornaments, and their sail-cloths spread a fathom wide to the northern blasts of the blazing hurricane. Then she, loosing her god-filled, Bacchic mouth, from the topmost ridges of Ate, built by the wandering ox, Alexandra began her words from such a beginning: Alas, unhappy nurse, burned once before by the troop-bearing pines of the lion of three nights, whom once in his jaws the jagged hound of Triton mangled; but living, a carver of livers, scorched on the flameless hearths of the cauldron's heat, he dripped the bristles of his scalp upon the ground— the child-destroyer, the ruin of my fatherland, who smote the unwounded breast of his second mother with a heavy shaft, and in the middle channel of the wrestling-father gripped his frame in his hands by the steep bank of Cronus, where is the tomb of earth-born Ischenus, the disturber of horses; who slew the wild she-dog that watched the narrow recesses of the Ausonian sea, fishing above her cavern— the bull-slaying lioness, whom again her father, burning her flesh with brands, built up anew, Leptynis, the not-trembling, the goddess of the underworld; the man who once, by a swordless trick, despoiled a corpse that long had welcomed Hades. I see you, wretched one, set ablaze a second time by the hands of Aeacus' line and of Tantalus, who keep the remnants of fire at Letrina— the body of the boy devoured in the smoke, by the Teutarian wings of the herdsman. All these things into the light the jealous wife, having sent forth the boy who would accuse the land, will bring, enraged by her father's reproaches and for the sake of the bed and the imported marriage. And she herself a drug-worker, beholding the deadly, incurable wound of her bedfellow, struck by the Giant-slaying arrows of his foeman in arms, will share a common death, from the topmost towers hurling her body headlong with a rush down upon the newly-slain corpse; and, barbed with longing for the dead, she will breathe out her soul over the still-gasping body. I groan, I groan for you, twice and three times, for the spear again raised to the fight, and the plundering of homes and the destroying fire that lights all to nothing. I groan for you, my fatherland, and for the tombs of the diver son of the daughter of Atlas, who once in a stitched vessel, like a four-legged Istrian wicker-trap, alone, wrapping his body in a hide, like a Rhithymnian storm-petrel swam, leaving the Zerynthian cave of the dog-slaying goddess, Saon, the strong-built foundation of the Corybantes, when, raining on all the earth, it crumbled it to dust, the surging flood of Zeus; and the towers fell down to the ground, and men swam their last lot of fate, gazing on death before their eyes. And acorns and oak-fruit and the sweet grape-cluster the whales and dolphins and the seals that lust after the beds of mortal males fed upon. I see the winged firebrand running to the seizing of the dove of Pephnos, whom the moisture-roving vulture brings to birth, shelled within the round egg's husk. And you the descending Acherousian path shall lodge as a sailor, a white-rump, not treading your father's dung in the battered ox-stalls, as before—you who measured beauty by three. But instead of the cattle-stalls you shall pass the Ass's Jaws and Las, and instead of the well-foddered crib and the sheepfolds and the landsman's oar, a ship shall carry you, and the feet of Phereclus, to the two Salambae and the flats of Gytheium, in which, against the dog-tails loosing the curved teeth of pine, the anchors of the flood, you shall lull to rest your nine-sailed fleet of leaps. And, having seized the unwedded heifer, the wolf, orphaned of her parentage by the two doves and a second time fallen into the snare of alien nooses, the captive caught by the fowler's wing, as she even now burns at Thysae the first-fruits of sheep among the saffron-flowers, and to the goddess Byne, you shall run past Scandeia and the headland of Aegilus, a blazing huntsman exulting in your prey. And on the island, having poured out your longing for the snake of Acte, the two-formed earth-born sceptred power, you shall not see the second love, stale by morning, a cold embrace, and out of dreams grasping at the empty bed with empty arms. For the husband of your Phlegraean bedmate, the grim spouse of Torone, to whom laughter is hateful and tears, who is unversed in and bereft of both—he who once from Thrace to the seaward shore furrowed by the outpourings of Triton crossed the dry land, not in a sailing fleet, but by an untrodden path, like some burrowing mole, having pierced the inmost recesses of a hidden cavern, and made his way beneath the sea, escaping his children's stranger-slaying wrestlings, and sending to his father the prayers that won a hearing to set him back homeward, whence in his wandering he came to Pallene, nurse of the earth-born— he, like Gouneus, a worker of justice and arbiter of the Ichnaean daughter of the Sun, by hurling baleful reproaches will deprive you of marriage, casting you out as you long for the dove-cote of your cousin; who, not revering the tombs of Lycus and Chimaereus, glorified with oracles, nor the loves of Antheus, nor the holy rock of Aegaeon, fellow-feaster with strangers, you dared, accursed of the gods, to step beyond justice, spurning the table and overturning Themis, moulded in the ways of the she-bear that nursed you. Therefore you shall pluck your bowstring's twang in vain, striking up songs unfed and ungifted; and weeping for your fatherland, burned of old, you shall come embracing in your arms the phantom of the five-bedded raving woman of Pleuron. For the palsied, ancient granddaughters of aged Hals with their threefold spindles spun out the doom that her five-times-married bridals should be feasted upon. Two ravening wolves shall she behold, winged buzzards, eagle-eyed, and him who from Plynos and Carian waters sprang of his stock, a half-bred barbarian, Epeius, not a pure Argive in his birth. Whose grandfather once in her jaws the Ennaean Hercynna, the Thurian sword-bearing Fury, having minced him fleshless, entombed in her gullet, devouring the gristle of his arm. He, twice come to manhood, and having fled the heavy lust and ravishing hand of Naumedon, Erechtheus sent to the fields of Letrina to grind smooth the rock of Molpis, whose body had been carved up for Rainy Zeus, to crush the son-in-law-slayer by unholy counsels, the destroyer of fathers-in-law, which the son of Cadmilus contrived. And the last man, having drained the cup, plunged into the tombs that bear the name of Nereus, having shrieked utter ruin upon his race— he who guided the swift-footed Psylla as charioteer and Harpinna, equal in her hooves to the Harpies. And the fourth she shall behold, brother by blood of the swooping falcon, whom of his brethren men shall proclaim to have won the second place in the death-dealing wrestling. And in his bed the fifth, distracted out of dreams, she shall waste away with her phantom-shaping face— the bridegroom-to-be, the bedfellow of the Cytaean, the stranger-Bacchant; whom once the exile of Oenone, having raised to manhood the six-footed army of ants, the Pelasgian Typhon, begets as father, having alone escaped, of seven sons consumed by the spark, the blazing ash. And the one shall come by a backward-running path, having drawn the blood-red wasps out of their holes, as a boy stirs up a house with smoke; and the others, the raw-flesh-eaters, having with stormy hands purified the heifer who bore the army's namesake, the pregnant mother in childbed of the Scyrian dragon, whom her bedfellow, searching within the Salmydesian sea for the beheader of Hellas, shall long inhabit a foaming, whitening rock by the outpourings of the Celtic marshy waters, yearning for his wife, whom once in the slaughter a hind, setting her throat forward, shall ransom from the swords. And deep within the surf shall be told of the bridegroom's lonely course among the saffron-flowers, as he groans for the ruin and the empty voyage and her changed and vanished form, the old woman near the slaughter-pits and lustral water and Hades seething from the depths with fire of the bowl, which the black female shall blow up, stewing the flesh of the dead in her cookery-craft. And the one shall tread the Scythian land, lamenting, longing for his wife for some five years. And the others, about the altar of Cronus the foreteller, with the mother who shared out the flesh of her infant children, having fitted the second yoke of oaths, shall arm in their arms the stout oar, hailing Bacchus the saviour from former woes, Sphaltes, with the Bacchic cry, to whom once in the recesses of the Delphinian, by the caves of the gainful god, with a bull the leader of a thousand shall begin the secret lustral rites of the city-wrecking host. To whom, paying the sudden grace of sacrifices, the god Enorches, Phigalian, Faustarius, shall hold back a lion from his feast, entangling its track in withes, that it may not utterly destroy the corn-stalk at the root, shearing it with tooth and ravening jaws. Long since I see the coil of the trailing evils, dragging through the brine and hissing against my fatherland dread threats and fire-blazing harms. Would that Cadmus had never planted you in sea-girt Issa, a guide of foes, a fourth offspring from wretched Atlas, Prylis, the helper in razing your own kinsmen, O seer most unerring toward the best; nor would that my father had thrust away the night-roving terrors of the Aesacian oracles, but had hidden the two of us, for the fatherland's sake, in a single fate, burning our limbs with Lemnian fire; then no wave of so many evils would have flooded over. And lo, the infant-slaying Palaemon beholds the aged Titaness, bedfellow of Ogenus, seething with cormorants that voyage in fleets. And lo, two children are dashed to ruin with their father, his collar-bones struck by the firm, ruling millstone, who before had escaped the flute-player's chest-destroying castings, by false rumours, in which the grim butcher of children trusting, the gull-reared net-hauler of the wicker traps, friend of the samphire and the crooked sea-snails, penned up in a chest the twin offspring. And with them the wretch, not heeding the goddess his mother's mindful commands, but tripped up by forgetfulness, shall die face-down, his breast pierced by a sword. And lo, Myrina groans, and the shoreline beaches that have received the snorting of horses, when the Pelasgian leap of the swift foot, propping itself on the last strand, the blazing wolf, shall whirl up the fountain-gleam from the sand, opening the springs long hidden. And lo, the dancer Ares scorches the earth, striking up the bloody strain with the war-trumpet. And all the land, ravaged before my eyes, lies waste, and the fields bristle like a corn-crop, glittering with spears; and the wailing, to my ears, seems to come from the topmost towers, reaching to the windless seats of heaven, with the lament of women and the rending of robes, as they receive one disaster after another. That woe, O wretched heart, that woe shall gnaw you, that highest of sufferings, when the rushing, dusky spearman, fierce, an eagle marking out the dry land with his wings in a track stamped by his crooked, curved foot, and screaming a harsh, unmingled cry from his mouth, having snatched aloft the dearest nursling of your womb and of the Ptoan father, bloodying his body with talons and jaws, stains the native fens and the ground with slaughter, a ploughman cleaving the earth along a smooth furrow. And taking the loan of the slain bull, weighed in the exact balance of the scale, and pouring in again an equal counter-price, the Pactolian ingot, far-gleaming in the weights, he shall sink into the bowl of Bacchus, bewept by the nymphs who loved the gleam of Bephyrus and the Leibethrian height above Pimpleia— the corpse-seller, who, fearing his doom beforehand, will even endure to put a woman's robe about his body, touching the rattle of the shuttle at the loom, and to be last to cast his foot on the foeman's land, cowering, my brother, even in sleep before your spear. O divine power, what a pillar of the house you shall destroy, drawing away the prop of the ill-fated fatherland! Yet not unpunished, nor without bitter toils and grief, shall the robber Dorian host laugh, exulting over the doom of the fallen, but, running about the sterns his very last course of life, he shall be burned with the pines, calling upon, with prayers, Zeus the God of Flight to ward off bitter dooms from those being sacked. Then neither trench, nor the bulwark of the ship-stations, nor the wing crowned with palisades, nor copings shall avail, nor battlements; but like bees confounded with smoke and by the gusts of soot and the casting of firebrands, stern-ornaments and prow-tops and the thrones of the steersmen in close throngs the tumblers, leaping from the benches, shall bloody the alien dust. And many chieftains, bearing the first-fruits of Hellas on their spear-points and swollen with their lineage, your mighty hands shall destroy, gushing with slaughter and craving battle. And I shall bear a grief no less, groaning for your tombs and through all time. For piteous, piteous shall be that light I shall behold, and highest of the woes of which finishing Time, rolling the circle of the moon, shall be told. Alas, I lament also your milk-sweet shoot, O cub, the delightful embrace of your kin, who, striking the wild serpent with the fire-bearing lure of your arrows, and seizing the stricken one in inescapable snares for a brief, unloved while, by him you subdued, yourself unwounded, beheaded, shall bloody your father's tomb. Ah me, ill-fated, I bewail too the two nightingales and your doom, wretched whelp. Of whom the one, root and all, the earth that bore her, gaping, shall hide in her hollow cleft, as she beholds ruin close at the heels of her groans, where the leap of the grandfather and the deaths of the bedded on the ground, of the secretly-wed heifer, mingled with the cub, are poured out—before she has tasted the gleam of life, before she has bathed her limbs in the dew after childbirth. But you to the savage bridal and the wedding sacrifices the grim lion of Iphis shall lead, imitating the lustral rites of his dark mother, whom, having cut her throat into the deep cattle-pen, a garland-bearing cow, the dread butcher-serpent shall slay with the thrice-fathered sword of Candaon, loosing to the wolves the first-slaughtered oath-offering. And you, by the hollow captive shore, an old man of the Dolonci, stoned by the people, with the arm by reviling curses provoked, a tunic of pelting stones shall hide, when you change to the dark form of Maera. And he who at Agamemnon's tomb subdued shall beautify the base below with frost-pale hair— the wretch, bought for the veil of his own sister, come to the smoke-blackened fatherland, having blotted out in darkness his once dim name, when the snake, the heavy firebrand, raw-haired, the seller of his native land, having burned the brood that labours in the womb, the dreadful ambush, draws out the bands of its belly and unstrings them, and from the Sisyphean curved fire-tail kindles an evil beacon, that cousin, for those who have sailed out to narrow Leucophrys and the two islands of child-eating Porceus. And I, the wretched one who refuse marriage, within the hewn stone of the maiden's chamber, roofless, in a chamber without a ceiling, having sunk my body deep into the gloomy prison, I who cast from my bed the Thoraean Ptoan Horite god as he longed for a loveless couch, that, having won an imperishable maidenhood to the last of old age, in emulation of Pallas, the marriage-hating Laphria of the Gates, then by force, a dove to the vulture's bed, with curved talons, frenzied, shall I be dragged, I who often called upon Budeia, the Aethyian Maiden, as helper and champion of my marriage. And she, turning her eyeballs up to the roof of the carved timber chamber, will be wroth with the host, fallen from heaven and the throne of Zeus, a thing most prized by her lord and grandfather. And for one man's outrage, of ten thousand children all Hellas shall groan over the empty tombs, not in bone-vaults, but perched on reefs, holding no last ashes from the fire, buried in urns, as is the law of the dead, but a piteous name and the painted images of cenotaphs bathed in the warm tears of parents and children and the laments of bedfellows. O Opheltes and Zarax, recess of the reefs, and you crags, and Trychas, and rough Nedon, and all the dens of Dirphossus and the Diacrian hills, and the dwelling-place of Phorcys— of how many groans of corpses cast up with half-shattered planks shall you hear, and of what surf of the surge, with no way out, as the swell drags back with refluent eddies, and of how many tunny-rows of men, furrowed, about the frying-pans of the headland, of whom the descending thunderbolt shall taste as they perish in the night, when, leading the heavy-headed from drunkenness, the plunderer shows a lantern, the guide of darkness, sitting at his sleepless craft. And one, like a diving halcyon, through a narrow channel a wave shall carry, a naked sea-bream, swept between the twin reefs. And on the Gyraean rocks, drying his feathers dripping with the sea, he shall drink a second draught of brine, cast from the cliffs by the three-pronged spear, with which the dread chastiser, his servant, wounding him, shall force him to share the course with the whales, as he boasts his cuckoo-vauntings of the empty wind. And cold, cast up upon the shore, his corpse the Dolphin's Sirian ray shall parch. And, rotting amid the seaweed and the moss, his pickled flesh the sister of Nesaea shall hide in pity, the helper of Cynaetheus of the great discus. And his tomb, neighbour to the petrified quail, trembling, shall keep watch over the roar of the Aegaean sea. And the Castnian and Melinaean goddess the wretch shall revile beside Hades, reviling her with evil words, who shall lure him with the inescapable snares of frenzy, loves that are not loves, but having stripped off the bitter wax-drawing trap of the Furies. And all shall receive the pains of wailings, as many as the Aratthus within and the hard-to-cross Leibethrian gates of Dotium enclose, to whom my marriage even by the Acherousian surf shall long be groaned over. For in the bowels of many shall be entombed, devoured by the many-rowed jaws of sea-monsters, a numberless swarm; and others, strangers in a strange land, bereft of kinsmen, shall welcome their tombs. For the one the Bisaltian land of Strymon's Eïon, bordering on the Apsynthians and the Bistones, the child-rearing crab, near the Edonians, shall hide, before he sights the Tymphrestian crag— him most hated of mortals by his father, who made him a hostage, having bored out his lamps, when he lay in the bastard bed of the dove. And three the glens of Cercaphus shall entomb, the gulls not far from the waters of Aleis; the one, the swan of Molossian Cypeus Coetus, led astray by the offspring of a female sow, when, having drawn his rival into the clever contest of figs, himself, baffled by the oracles, he shall sleep the destined doom; the other again, fourth of the descendants of Erechtheus, own brother of the blazing one in the false paintings; and the third, son of him who once dug up with the hard mattock the offspring of the towers of the Ectenes, whom Gongylates, Bulaeus the Miller, slew, shattering his head with the expiatory scourge, when the daughters of Night armed the brothers against their father in the self-slaughtering frenzy of death. And two by the outpourings of the streams of Pyramus, slain by self-murdering slaughters, the hounds of Derainus, shall raise their last battle-cry beneath the heels of the towers of the Pamphylian maiden. And a steep sea-eaten mound between them, Magarsus, of the holy graves shall stand, that they may not see, nor, sunk into the seats of those below, behold each other's tombs bathed in blood. And the five, having gone to Sphecia in Cerastia and to Satrachus and the land of Hylates, shall dwell beside Morpho the Zerynthian. The one, driven by his father's reproaches from the caves of Cychreus and the streams of Bocarus, my own brother, as the slayer of the colt by the same father, the bastard offshoot, the harm of his kin, who poured out warlike madness among the flocks— whom the hide of the raw-flesh-eating monster made not pierceable by bronze in battle, having won one road to Hades and the dead, which the Scythian quiver hid— when, burning offerings to Comyrus, the lion cried aloud the prayers that won a hearing to his own father, casting the cub into the arms of his comrade. For he shall not persuade his son, how the Lemnian thunderbolt of Enyo, never turned to flight, the heavy-minded bull, by the gift of the most hostile of strangers struck his vitals, having leapt the baleful plunge upon the dagger to the self-wrought slaughter. And he shall drive far from his fatherland the brother of Trambelus, whom the sister of his father bore, given as first spoils of war to the tower-digger. Whom once, standing in the assemblies of the people, the boastful sire who begot her urged to set out as a dark supper for the grey hound— three daughters—he who turns all the land to mud with brine, when he belches forth the surges of his jaws, shaking with violent third-wave all the ground. And he, instead of a young bird, having drawn a scorpion to his throat, wept to Phorcus the burden of an evil birth-pang, wishing to learn the counsel of his woes. And the second, come to the island as a husbandman, a landsman, self-fed, of the offspring of the oak, the wolf-shaped flesh-sharers of Nyctimus, who before the moon thawed their store of oaken bread with the ash of the fire at the height of winter, shall dig for copper and draw from the pit the clod, mining all the soil with his mattock. Whose son the Oetaean point destroyed, having crushed his frame in the sockets of the groin. And the wretch learned the saying, taught with woe, how the all-contriving doom of mortals rolls many things in the midst between the lip and the cup's draught. And he himself, all whitening with bright gore, the point, having fallen, warded off his slayer, striking unescapably the dancer's heel-tip. And the third, son of him who seized from the hollow rock the giant's arms, to whose secret bed the Idaean heifer, self-summoned, shall come, descending alive to Hades, wasted away with laments, the mother of Munitus; whom once, as he hunted, the Crestonian viper shall slay, striking his heel with a wild dart, when, a captive into the hands of his sire, his father's mother shall cast the newborn cub reared in the gloom. On her alone the Actaean wolves fixed the yoke of slavery in requital for the ravished raving woman, of whom the carved shell-spiral shields the temple, a defence against the bloody spear. And as for the rest, the worm-eaten, untouched seal of the house keeps watch, a great wonder to the natives. Which to the ladder of the stars shall set the course of the half-dead twin Lapersians; whom never, O Zeus the saviour, to my fatherland may you send as helpers to the twice-ravished cry, nor, having armed their winged ships, from the topmost stern cast a bare, swift foot onto the landing-place of the Bebryces, nor those mightier than these lions, unmatched in valour, whom Ares loved, and divine Enyo, and the thrice-born goddess Boarmia Longatis Homoloïs Bia. Otherwise, what the two handiwork labourers, Drymas and Prophantus, the lord of Cromna, hewed out of stone for the falsely-swearing king, one day would not suffice the plundering wolves to ward off the heavy, crushing assault, though before the towers they have great Canastraean giant, a native bar against the foes, and him, the first to rush with a well-aimed cast to strike, the avenger of the flocks. Whom once the blazing falcon shall first initiate the spear, the bold one, hurling his swift leap, the best of the Greeks, for whom long since the shore of the Dolonci, ready, makes tombs when he is dead, Mazousia jutting out at the landward horn. But there is, there is even beyond hope a helper for us, kindly, the Drymnian god Promantheus, Aethiops, Gyrapsius, who, when into their houses the wandering Orthanes, the harming, downward-rushing, bitter one, they receive— those destined one day to suffer dread and accursed things— and at the feast and in the harvest-libations appease the unloved Cragus, shall set a heavy strife in the midst of the gatherings. And first with words they shall gnash at one another, biting with revilings, made sharp, and then shall fight in arms, cousins against cousins, wishing to aid the marriages of their cousin-birds and the violent thefts and ravishments of their kin, the requital for the dowerless rape. Truly many shafts the ford of Cnaecion shall behold, hurled by the daring of the eagles, unbelievable and astounding for the Pheraeans to hear. The one, having pierced the hollow trunk of a dark oak with cornel-wood, shall destroy one of the twin pair, the lion that joined battle with the bull. And the other, having ripped open the bull's flank with a javelin, shall lay it on the ground. And against him a second blow the undismayed ram shall butt with his head, having hurled, as a glory, one of the Amyclaean tombs. And together bronze and thunderbolt casts shall destroy the bulls, of whose valour—of one— not even the Shader, the Orchian Tilphusian, found fault, having bent his horn in the battles. And some Hades, and some the Olympian plains day by day shall ever welcome as guests, loving their own blood, both immortal and mortal. And of these the god shall lull our spear to rest, granting some small remedy amid our evils. But of others he shall stir up an unapproachable cloud with his hand, whose fury not even the son of Rhoeo, lulling it, shall stay, bidding them remain on the island the nine-years' time, persuaded by the oracles, and saying he will furnish to all blameless food by his three daughters, who, awaiting the Cynthian watch-place, wander near the Inopus, drawing the Egyptian draught of Triton. Whom bold Problastus taught to make, the deft contrivers of the mill-crushed fodder, both wine and the oil's rich fat, the wine-changing doves, descendants of Zarex. Who also shall heal the army's ox-hunger of alien hounds that wears them down, having come once to the bedchamber of Sithon's daughter. And these things the aged maidens hiss long since to the threads of the bronze whirling spindles; and Cepheus and Praxandrus, not leaders of ship-companies of peoples, but nameless offspring, fifth and fourth shall come to the land of the goddess, queen of Golgi; of whom the one, leading a Laconian crowd of Therapne, the other from Olenus and Dyme, leader of the Buraean host. And he, Argyrippa, the whole inheritance of the Daunians by the Ausonian Phylamus shall build, having seen the bitter, winged fate of his comrades, mixed with birds, who shall praise the sea as their dwelling, like the diving-birds, changed in form to swans with fair eyes. And hunting with their beaks the spawn of fishes, they shall dwell on the islet named after their chief, on a theatre-shaped, earth-mounded slope having built up their lanes with firm-set rows, close-set nests, in imitation of Zethus. And together to the hunt and to the resting-glen they shall set out by night, fleeing all the foreign crowd of mortals, and in Greek robes seeking the wonted resting-places of bosoms, and crumbs from hands and the after-dinner morsel of barley-cake they shall snatch, whimpering fondly, the wretches, mindful of their former life. And the soothing of the roving Troezenian, of his wandering and of his evil sufferings shall be a partial cause, when the bold, lusting bitch shall rage frenzied toward the bed. But a tomb shall save him from doom, the tomb of Hoplosmia, when he is made ready for slaughter. And, planting his steps colossus-like in the folds of the Ausonians, he shall set his limbs upon stones, of the wall-builder Amoebeus of the lands, having cast out the ballast-stone of his ship. And, baffled in the judgment of his brother Alaenus, he shall hurl true curses about the fields, that Deo may never send up the nourishing corn-ear, though Zeus moisten the lands with watering, unless someone, having drawn a root of the Aetolians, shall till the dry land, cutting furrows with oxen. And with unmoving pillars he shall hold the ground fast, which no man shall boast to have shifted with force, even a little. For truly without wings they themselves shall come to a backward-running step, sharing out the field with sluggish footsteps. And a high god he shall be called by many, as many as inhabit the hollow plain by Io, having slain the serpent that destroyed the Phaeacians. And the others, the wave-washed reefs of the Gymnesiae, sheepskin-divers, crabs, having sailed, shall draw out a cloakless, barefoot life, armed with three two-jointed slings. Of whom the mothers shall teach the far-shooting art to their infant offspring, keeping them dinnerless. For none of them shall feed bread to his jaw, before he hits with the well-aimed stone the loaf set as a mark above a wooden stake of the target. And they shall set foot on the rugged shores that feed the Iberians, near the gate of Tartessus, offspring of ancient Arne, chiefs of the Temmices, longing for the old land and the hills of Leontarne and Scolus and Tegyra and the seat of Onchestus and the stream of Thermodon and the water of Hypsarnus. And those about the Syrtis and the Libyan flats and the narrow meeting of the Tyrrhenian strait and the sailor-destroying watch-towers of the half-beast, of her who once died at the hands of Mecisteus, the leather-clad Digger, the Boagis, and the crags of the Harpy-kneed nightingales, shall they be driven astray, feasting on raw flesh; all of them Hades the all-receiving shall hunt down, torn apart by all manner of outrages, leaving one messenger of his destroyed comrades, the dolphin-marked thief of the Phoenician goddess. Who shall behold the dwellings of the one-eyed monster, holding out to the flesh-eater a cup of wine in his hands, the after-dinner draught. And he shall behold the remnant of the arrows of Ceramyntes Peuceus Palaemon, who, having shattered all the well-turned vessels, shall pierce with a rush-rope the wretched catch of grey mullet. And one toil upon another shall await in his trials, each ever more utterly ruinous than the one before. What Charybdis shall not feast on his dead? What half-maiden Fury-bitch? What barren nightingale, slayer of Centaurs, Aetolian or Curetian, with shifting song shall not persuade his flesh, lacking food, to waste away? What beast-shaped she-dragon shall he not behold, mixing magic herbs in the barley-meal, and a doom of serpent-form? And the ill-fated, groaning their ruin, in the styes as feeding-beasts shall gnaw the grape-pips mingled with the fodder of lees and the pressed husks. But him from harm the moly root shall save, and Ctaros appearing, the Nonacriatian, Three-headed, Bright god. And he shall come to the murky plain of the dead and shall seek out the corpse-prophet, the aged one, who knows the couplings of men and women, having sprinkled warm blood upon the pit for the souls, and, brandishing the defence of his sword, a terror to those below, shall hear there the thin voice of the spirits with the utterances of a dim mouth. Whence the island of the Giants, which crushed the back and the body of wild Typhon, seething with fire, shall receive the lone voyager, in which the king of apes settled the imperishable ill-shaped race of monkeys, in reproach for so much, those who stirred up war against the offspring of Cronus. And, passing the tomb of Baius the helmsman and the steadings of the Cimmerians and the Acherousian flood billowing with the roar of its swell, and Ossa and the heaped-up paths of the bellowing lion and the grove of Obrimo, the goddess of the underworld, and the Pyriphlegethon stream, where, hard to climb, the Polydegmon hill stretches its head toward the sky, from which all the streams and all the springs of the recesses are drawn through the Ausonian land, and leaving the lofty crag of Lethaeon and the lake Aornos rounded in a noose and the stream of Cocytus made fierce by darkness, the flow of black Styx, where Termieus made for the immortals the oath-sworn seats, drawing the gleaming libations in golden bowls, when about to march against the Giants and the Titans; he shall give a gift to Daeira and her bedfellow, having fitted a helmet to the head of a pillar. And he shall slay the three daughters of Tethys' child, who copy the strains of their melodious mother, by self-slaughtering casts from the topmost watch-place diving on their wings into the Tyrrhenian wave, where the linen-wrought spinning shall draw them to a bitter end. The one the tower of Phalerus, cast up, and Glanis, wetting the land with his streams, shall receive; where the natives, having built a tomb of the maiden, with libations and sacrifices, hailing Parthenope, shall yearly honour the bird-goddess. And the headland jutting out toward Enipeus Leucosia, cast forth, shall long inhabit the rock that bears her name, where impetuous Is and his neighbour Laris pour out their waters. And Ligeia to Terina shall be carried by the waves, vomiting up the surge. And her the sailors shall bury in the shoreline sands, close to the eddies of Ocinarus. And the ox-horned Ares shall bathe her tomb with his streams, hallowing the haunt of the bird-child with his waters. And to her first one day of his kin, the goddess, the leader of all the fleet of Mopsops, shall furnish for the sailors a torch-bearing course, obedient to oracles. Whom one day the people of the Neapolitans shall magnify, those who by the wave-sheltered covert of the harbours of Misenum settle the rugged slopes. And, having shut up the gales in an ox-hide bag, wandering in back-whirling sufferings, he shall be burned by the thunderbolt-scourge, the gull, clinging to the branch of a wild fig that the wave may not gulp him down in the roarings, drawing him into the depths of Charybdis as she spews. And, having briefly delighted in the marriage of the daughter of Atlas, a haven-less, makeshift skiff he shall dare to embark, and to steer, wretch, a self-built craft to its very keel, haphazardly bound together with pegs. From which, as Amphibaeus casts forth a little the unfledged brood of the halcyon his wife, with the very cross-beams and benches he shall cast into the wave, the diver entangled in the cordage. And sleepless, swept into the recesses of the deep, he shall come to dwell with a citizen of Thracian Anthedon. And by one and another, like a branch of pine, the gale shall whirl the cork, leaping upon it with its blasts. And scarcely from the evil ebb of Byne shall the diadem save him, his breast all flayed and the tips of his hands, with which, gripping the flesh-tearing rocks, he shall be bloodied by the sea-eaten points. And to the island hated by Cronus, the sickle, the carver of his members, having passed, a cloakless suppliant, a babbler of his baleful woes, he shall bark out his fable-shaping lament, having paid the curses of the blinded monster. Not yet at all, not yet—may no such sleep of forgetfulness take Melanthus the Horse-driver, fallen asleep. For he shall come, he shall come to the ship-sheltering covert of Rheithron and the headlands of Neritus. And he shall behold all his hall utterly overturned from its foundations by the lewd women-thieves. And the she-fox, solemnly playing the whore, shall empty his halls, pouring out in feastings the wealth of the wretch. And he himself, having seen more toils than those at the Scaean gates, the glutton, shall endure to bear on his patient back the hateful threats of his servants, chastened by revilings, and shall endure also to yield to the blows of hands and the casting of potsherds. For not foreign are the scourgings, but the lavish mark of Thoas shall still abide on his sides, pierced with withes, which the ravager shall consent, ungroaning, to have engraved further, applying a willing weal to his frame, that he may lure his foes, having beguiled the chief with spying outrages and weepings. Whom the Temmician slope of Bombyleia once bore as our highest woe, the only wretch saved to the homes of the sailors. And last, like a gull, a runner over the waves, like a shellfish worn smooth on all sides by the brine, having reached his ravenous plundering of the substance of the Pronians by the feasting of the dread-Bacchic Laconian woman, a withered husk he shall die, having fled the sea's covert, a raven, with his arms, near the Neritan thickets. And a deadly point shall slay him, striking his side, hard to heal, with the sting of the Sardinian fish. And the son shall be called the carver of his father, the cousin of the wife of Achilles. And the dead seer the Eurytanian people shall crown and those who dwell in the steep abode of Trampya, where once again a serpent shall destroy Heracles, the Tymphaean, chief of the Aethices, at the feast— him sprung from Aeacus and from Perseus' seed, and not far from the blood of the Temenids. And Perge, the mountain of the Tyrrhenians, in Gortynaea shall receive him dead and burned, when, groaning, he shall breathe out his life's dooms for his child and his wife, whom her husband, having slain, himself goes a second journey to Hades, his neck furrowed by his sister's slaughter, the cousin of Glaucon and Apsyrtus. And he, having seen so great a heap of woes, shall sink the second time into unturning Hades, never having beheld a calm day in life. O wretched man, how better it had been for you to remain in your fatherland driving oxen, and the labouring lewd ass still to yoke beneath the collar with feigned contrivances of madness, frenzied, than to undergo the trial of such great evils. And the husband who seeks his ill-bedded, ravished wife, having learned it from the rumours, and longing for the winged phantom that fled into the sky, what recesses of the sea shall he not search out? What dry land shall he not track down, going his way? First he shall behold the watch-towers of Typhon, and the aged crone with her marble body, and the jutting shores of the Erembi, hateful to sailors. And he shall behold the wretched Myrrha's strong-built city, whose travail-loosing birth-pangs a tree-like branch released, and the tomb of Gauas, bewept by the goddess, Muse-destroyed for the Schoenean Stranger Arenta, whom once the elm slew with its white grinder. And he shall behold the Cephean towers and the kickings of the Hermaean foot of Laphrius and the two rocks, to which the storm-petrel leapt longing for a feast. And instead of a female he went, having seized in his jaws the golden-fathered sea-eagle, the liver-working male with sandalled wings. And by the reaper's razor shall be slain the loathsome, sinewless whale, when he opens the horse-mortal birth-pangs of the offspring of the neck-childed, marble-eyed weasel; who, moulding men to life from the very tip of the foot and turning them to statues, shall wrap them in stone, the lamp-thief of the three-wandering guidance. And he shall behold the sun-drunk fields and the stream of Asbystes and the ground-bedded couches, sleeping with foul-smelling beasts. And he shall endure all for the sake of the Aegyan bitch, the daughter who bore a daughter and the wife of three husbands. And he shall come, a wanderer, to the host of the Iapyges, and shall hang up gifts to the maiden Scyletria, a Tamassian mixing-bowl and an ox-hide shield and the well-fitted shoes of his wife. And he shall come to Siris and the recesses of Lacinium, in which a heifer shall make an orchard for the goddess Hoplosmia, adorned with plants. And it shall be a law for the native women ever to mourn the nine-cubit third son of Aeacus and Doris, the thunderbolt of deadly battle, and neither to deck their bright faces with gold, nor to put on robes of fine thread dyed with purple, because goddess to goddess grants to found a great point of the mainland. And he shall come to the wrestling-pits of the bull, the inhospitable training-grounds, whom Colotis bears, the Alentian, queen of the recesses of Longurus, having rounded the Sickle of Cronus' leap and the water of Cancheia, and Gonousa and the flats of the Sicani, and the precinct of the beast-cloaked, raw-eating wolf, which the descendant of Cretheus, having anchored his ship, built with fifty shipwrecked men. And the strands keep the well-oiled scrapings of the Minyans, and neither does the surge of the brine cleanse them nor the rain-cloud washing them with its long-lasting snow. And others the sands and the ant-hills near Taucheira bewail, cast up to the desert dwelling-place of Atlas, grinning with the gore-skins of mangled wounds; where the sailors buried Mopsus Titaeronius dead, and over the burial-mound set up the broken plank of the Argo's timber, a treasure of those below, Ausigda, which the Cinyphian stream, wetting, makes fat with its waters; and to the son of Nereus, Triton, the Colchian woman gave a gift, a broad bowl wrought of gold, when he showed the sailing path, by which through the narrows of the ant-folk Tiphys steered the unbroken vessel. And that then the Greeks shall take the power of the land the sea-child, the two-formed god, declares, when the country-dwelling Libyan people, having robbed him of his fatherland, shall offer the Greek a backward-bearing gift. And the Asbystae, fearing the prayers, the treasure shall hide unseen in the lowest recesses of the earth, in which the ill-fated leader of the Cyphaeans the northern blasts shall cast up with the sailors, and him sprung from Palauthra, descendant of Tenthredon, the sceptred lord of the Amphrysian Euryampi, and the ruler of the petrified wolf, the ransom-feaster, and of the Tymphrestian hills. Of whom some, the wretches, longing for their fatherland Aegonea, others for Echinus, others for Titarus and Irus and Trachis and Perrhaebian Gonnus and Phalanna and the fields of the Olossonians and Castanaea, an unburied life among the rocks shall bewail, furrowed by the sea. And one fate after another the god shall stir up, granting a baleful disaster before their return. And him the streams of Aesarus and the small-citied land of Oenotria, eaten by the horned snake, Crimisa shall receive, the murderer by the firebrand; for the trumpet herself shall guide the arrow-point straight in his hands, twanging off the Maeotian curl; by the banks of Dyras, who once, having burned the bold lion, armed the crooked hands for Seuthes, a serpent with inescapable molars, the lyre-striker. And Crathis shall behold the tomb of the fallen, hard by the shrine of Alaeus Patareus, where Nauaithos belches forth toward the wave. And the Ausonian Pellenians shall slay him as he runs to the aid of the Lindian captains, whom far from Thermydron and the mountains of Carpathos the blazing Thracian dog shall send as wanderers, to settle a strange, alien land. And again at Macalla the natives, a great shrine having built above the tombs, an everlasting god with libations and sacrifices of oxen shall honour. And the horse-builder in the arms of Lagaria, bristling with spear and rushing phalanx, paying his father's false-sworn oath, which once about the spear-won flocks the wretch, the towers of Comaetho being confounded with the host for the sake of the loved unions of bedfellows, endured to swear to Aloitis the Cydonian Thraso and to the god of Crestone, Candaon, or the man-at-arms wolf Mamertus, he who within his mother's womb the grim battle set up, striking with his hands against his brother, not yet beholding the bright light of Tito nor escaped the painful birth-pangs of his bearing. Therefore the gods made manly a fugitive offspring, a good boxer, but a coward in the press of the spear, and one who greatly aided the host with his crafts; who about Ciris and the gleam of Cylistanus, an immigrant, shall dwell far from his fatherland, and the tools, with which he bored the image that one day shall make a baleful harm for the natives, he shall consecrate in the shrine of the Myndian goddess. And others shall dwell in the land of the Sicani, having come as wanderers, where Laomedon gave to sailors the three daughters of Phoenodamas, stung by the sea-monster-feeding disasters, to set them far off as food for the raw-eating beasts, come to the western land of the Laestrygones, where lavish desolation dwells. And they, having escaped death and the lonely seats, built a great shrine to the wrestler's mother, the Zerynthian, a gift to the goddess; of whom one Crimisus, the river, taking the form of a dog, yoked to his bed; and she to the daemon, the beast-mingled one, bears a noble whelp, the joint-settler and founder of three places. Who, guiding the bastard scion of Anchises, shall bring him to the three-necked island as his journey's end, voyaging from the Dardanian lands. Wretched Aegesta, for you, by the warnings of the daemons, the greatest grief and through all time, for your fatherland set ablaze by the blasts of fire, shall there be. And alone, the wretched razings of the towers unceasingly bewailing and lamenting, long shall you groan. And all the people, a gloomy suppliant garb wearing as a cloak, squalid with filth, shall draw out a wretched life. And the unshorn locks of your head shall adorn your back, keeping the memory of ancient lamentations. And many about Siris and the Leutarnian land shall dwell, where the ill-fated Calchas of the countless figs, the Sisyphean, lies, his head struck with the round scourge, where swift Sinis weeps in his streams, watering the deep inheritance of Chonia. And a city like to Ilium the ill-fated, having built, they shall grieve the Laphrian maiden, the trumpet, having slain in the goddess's temple those who had before inhabited the seat, the Xuthids. And the statue with its bloodless eyeballs shall close them, beholding the hateful harm of the Achaeans to the Ionians and the kindred slaughter of the country-dwelling wolves, when the slain leader of the people, the whelp of the priestess, shall first bloody the altar with dark gore. And others the hard-to-cross headlands of Tylesium and the neck-like cape of the sea-cleansed linen, a portion shared with the Amazon, shall reap, having received the yoke of a slave woman, whom, a serving-maid of the bronze-girt, busy maiden, the wave shall bring as a wanderer to a foreign land. As she breathes her last, her eye struck by the ape-shaped Aetolian destroyer shall make a doom with the bloody stake that cut it. And the Crotoniates shall one day sack the city of the Amazon, having destroyed the fearless maiden Clete, queen of the city named after her. And many before her shall bite the earth with their teeth, fallen face-down, nor without toils shall the offspring of Laurete shatter the towers. And others Terina, where Ocinarus makes the land wet with his waters, belching the bright stream, shall inhabit, wearied by bitter wandering. And him who won the second prize of beauty, and the war-leader boar from the waters of Lycormas, the strong son of Gorge, to the one shore the Thracian blasts shall bring, to the Libyan sand, filling their foot-spread linen sails; and to the other from Libya again the south wind, falling upon them, to the Argyrini and the glens of the Ceraunians shall drive them, shepherding the sea with its heavy hurricane. There they shall behold a wretched wandering life, drinking the streams of Lacmonian Aeas. And the neighbouring Crathis and the borders of the Mylaces, the place shall receive as fellow-settlers with the Colchian Polae, whom as searchers for his daughter the heavy Aeas sent, lord of Corinth, husband of Eidyia, hunting after the bride-leading keel, who settled by the deep ford of Dizerus. And others the island Melite near Othronus shall inhabit as wanderers, which all round the surge, the Sicanian, near Pachynus, shall touch— of the Sisyphean son the cliffed headland, writing its name one day in later time, and the famous foundation of the maiden Longatis, where Helorus casts out his cold water. And the grandfather-slaying wolf shall inhabit Othronus, longing far off for his father's streams of Coscynthus. Who, standing on the reefs in the sea, shall speak to the citizens the laws for the sea-voyage. For that the slayer should touch his fatherland's dry land with his feet, before he has fled a great year, the avenger of justice shall not allow, the Telphusian bitch dwelling by the streams of Ladon. Whence, having fled the dread battle of the creeping things, the serpent-shaped, to the city of Amantia he shall sail, and coming near the land of the Atintanes, by Practis itself shall inhabit a steep crag, drawing the stream of Chaonian Polyanthes. And he, near the tombs of Ausonian Calchas, one of two brothers, false sepulchres, shall heap foreign dust upon his bones. And to those who sleep on the tomb in fleeces of sheep he shall give in their sleep an unerring oracle to all, and shall be called a healer of diseases by the Daunians, when, wetting themselves in the streams of Althaenus, they call upon the son of the Gentle One as helper, to come kindly to the citizens and the flocks. And one day to the envoys of the Aetolians a light shall there appear, mournful and most hateful, when, having come to the land of the Salangi and the seats of the Angaesi, they ask of the chief for fields, the fat of the good arable, the apportioned land. And them alive into a murky tomb the raw-flesh-eaters shall hide in the recesses of a hollow cleft. And to them an unburied monument the Daunians of the dead shall set up, roofed with heaped-up gravel, giving the land which they had craved to take, of the head-eating son, the fearless boar. And to Temesa the sailors of the offspring of Naubolus shall come, where Lampetes of the Hipponian crag toward Tethys its horn has bent, hard. And instead of the borders of Crisa a Crotoniate furrow across the strait they shall plough with oxen, with the trailing share, longing for their fatherland Lilaea and the land of Anemoreia and Amphissa and famous Abae. Wretched Setaea, for you upon the rocks a doom of ill fortune awaits, where, with limb-holding fetters of bronze most piteously stretched a fathom wide, you shall die, having burned with fire the fleet of your masters, bewailing your body cast out near the Crathis, swung aloft for the bloody vultures. And that reef, named after your fate, gazing toward the sea, shall be renowned. And others of the Pelasgians, about the streams of Membles and the Cernean island having sailed out, beyond the Tyrrhenian strait, in the Lametian eddies shall inhabit the flats of the Lucanians. And these pains and varied disasters shall hold them bewailing a returnless fortune for the sake of my ill-wedded ravishments. Nor shall those who in time come gladly to their homes light up the prayed-for gleam of sacrifices, paying their thanks to Cerdylas Larynthius. By such contrivances the house-wrecking hedgehog shall beguile the bitter cock-birds that keep his nest. Nor shall the shipwrecking, hostile beacon-fires cease from grief, the scion having been shattered, whom newly-dug the roof of Medymne shall one day hide in the allotments. For he, seeking about the lustral water the hard-to-find paths of the throttling noose, entangled in the casting-net, with blind hands shall grope for the tasselled stitches. And, plunging beneath the warm roof of the bath-house, the basin and cup he shall sprinkle with his brain, struck in the midst of the skull with the well-sharpened adze. And a piteous shade shall flutter to Taenarus, having seen the wretched housekeeping of the lioness. And I shall lie on the ground near the bathing-tub, shattered together by the Chalybdic blade, since me, as one might split the trunk of a pine or the stem of an oak, a wood-cutting mountain labourer, she shall break the broad sinew and the back, and, rending all my cold body in slaughter, the thirst-snake she-dragon, mounting upon my neck, shall fill her teeming heart with wild gall, as one jealous, in implacable vengeance, for the bride-stolen and not spear-won prize. And, crying to my lord and husband who does not hear, I shall run upon her track, wind-borne on wings. And the cub, seeking out the doom of his father's murder, shall dip his sword with his own hand into the viper's vitals, healing one kindred pollution with another evil. And my consort, the lord of the slave-bride, Zeus shall be called by the wily Spartans, having received the greatest honours from the sons of Oebalus. Yet not nameless among men shall my worship be, withered straightway in oblivious darkness. And a temple the chiefs of the Daunians shall build for me by the banks of Salpe, and those who dwell in the city of Dardanus, bordering on the waters of the lake. And the maidens, when they wish to escape the yoke of maidenhood, refusing as bridegrooms those adorned with Hectorean locks, having a blemish of form or a reproach of race, shall embrace my image in their arms, winning the greatest defence against marriage, clad in the garb of the Furies and with their faces dyed with magical drugs. To those wand-bearing women shall I long be called an immortal goddess. And grief to many bereft of their maiden daughters I shall again make for the women, who the war-leader, the lawless-bedded one, the robber of the goddess Cypris, long groaning over, into a hostile lot shall send their children, deprived of marriage. O Larymna, and Spercheius, and Boagrius, and Cynus, and Scarpheia, and Phalorias, and the city of Naryx, and the Thronian streets of the Locrians, and the glens of Pyronaea, and all the house of Hodoedocian Ileus, you, for the sake of my impious marriage, shall pay penalties to the Gygaean Agrisca goddess, for the thousand-year time keeping in old age your unwedded maidens by the awards of the lot. For whom an unburied tomb in a strange land, strangers, in the sand of the surge, wretched, shall be washed away, when, having burned their limbs with barren plants, Hephaestus casts the ash into the sea, of her perished from the hills of Traron. And others by night, like to those about to die, shall come to the fields of Sithon's daughter, by secret, off-the-road paths peering about, until they run into the house of Ampheira, weasels supplicating Stheneia with prayers. And they shall sweep the goddess's floor, adorning it, and shall hallow it with dew, having fled the unloved wrath of the citizens. For every Ilian man shall watch for the maidens, holding a stone in his hands, or a black sword, or the bull-slaying hard double-axe, or a Phalacraean branch, craving to glut his hand thirsting for slaughter. And the people shall praise unpunished him who has slain, having engraved in law the race set apart for outrage. O mother, O ill mother, not even your fame shall be unheard of; but the maiden of Perseus, Brimo Trimorphos, shall make you her attendant, terrifying with night cries those mortals who do not revere with torch-processions the images of the Zerynthian queen of Strymon, appeasing the Pheraean goddess with sacrifices. And the island stake of Pachynus shall hold a false sepulchre, august, from dreams, reared by my mistress-arms, buried before the streams of Helorus; who by the shores shall pour libations for the wretched one, fearing the wrath of the three-necked goddess, because, having first cast a stone as a stoner, he shall begin dark sacrifices to Hades. And you, my brother, most loved of my heart, prop of the halls and of the whole fatherland, not in vain shall you redden the altar-base with the blood of bulls, to the lord of Ophion's thrones offering very many first-fruits of sacrifices. But he shall lead you to the native plain that is exceedingly hymned among the Greeks, where his mother, skilled in wrestling, having cast the former queen into Tartarus, loosed the birth-pangs of her secret offspring, having escaped the child-devouring, unholy feasts of her bedfellow, nor did he fatten his belly with food, having gulped the substitute stone, wrapped in limb-binding swaddling-clothes, having become a tomb, the raw-minded Centaur of the offspring. And in the islands of the blessed you shall dwell, a great hero, a helper against the arrows of plague, where the sown people of Ogygus, persuaded by the oracles of the Healer, Lepsian, Terinthean, having drawn you up from the Ophrynian graves, shall lead you, a saviour, to the tower of Calydnus and the land of the Aones, when they are hard-pressed by a host in arms sacking the land and the shrines of Tenerus. And your fame the chiefs of the Ectenes with imperishable libations shall honour as equal to the gods'. And to Cnossus and the houses of Gortyn shall come my woe, the wretched one's; and all the house of the generals shall be overthrown. For not in peace shall the rower drive his two-oared deck, sailing to whirl up Leucus the guardian of the monarchy, and weaving hatred with false contrivances. Who shall spare neither his children nor his bedfellow Meda his wife, savage in mind, nor his daughter Cleisithera, whose bed her father shall consent, a bitter consent, to a fostered serpent. And all of them with unholy hands in the temple he shall slay, outraged with mutilations at the Oncaean pit. And the fame of the race of my ancestors again the descendants shall one day greatly increase, having won with their spears the first crown, taking the sceptres of land and sea and the monarchy. Nor, O wretched fatherland, shall you hide your glory, withered, in darkness. Such twin lion-cubs shall one kinsman of mine leave, a race surpassing in might, the offspring of the Castnian and Cheiras, best in counsels, and not to be despised in battles. Who first shall come and dwell in Rhaecelus, by the steep crag of ivy and the horned women of Laphystia. And from Almopia as a wanderer-back Tyrrhenia shall receive him and Lingeus, belching forth the stream of warm waters, and Pisa and the sheep-rich glens of Agylla. And with them, though an enemy, he shall mingle his friendly host, having prevailed by oaths and prayers of supplication, the dwarf, who in his wanderings searched out every recess of sea and land. And with him the twin offspring of the Mysian king, whose spear once Theoenus the Housekeeper shall bend, having bound his limbs with withes, Tarchon and Tyrsenus, blazing wolves, sprung from the blood of Heracles. There, finding a table full of victuals, the table afterward devoured by his attendants, he shall take the memory of ancient prophecies. And he shall found a land in the places of the Boreigoni, settled above the Latins and the Daunians, thirty towers, having numbered the offspring of the dark sow, which from the Idaean hills and the Dardanian lands he shall convey by ship, the nurse of as many piglets in her litter; of whom in a single city he shall set up an image, having stamped it in bronze, of her and her milk-nursed young. And, having built a shrine to the Myndian Pallenis, he shall set within it the ancestral images of the gods. Which, having thrust aside both wife and children and all his other rich store of treasures, he shall honour above all, with his aged father, covering them with robes, when the spearmen hounds, having plundered by lot all the things of the fatherland, to him alone grant a choice, to take from the house what he wishes and carry off the loan. Wherefore, judged even by his enemies most pious, the fatherland most hymned in battles he shall build, blessed, among his late-born children, a tall tower about the glens of Circaeum and the famous harbour of the Argo, great Aeetes, and the waters of the Phorcean lake Marsionis and the Titonian flood of the river that beneath the earth sinks into the unseen depths of its hollow, and the slope of Zosterius, where is the gloomy dwelling-place of the maiden Sibyl, roofed over with a hollow, cavernous chamber. So many grievous evils shall they suffer who are destined to lay waste my fatherland. For what bond is there between the wretched mother of Prometheus and the nurse of Sarpedon, whom the sea of Helle and the Symplegades rocks and Salmydesus and the inhospitable surge, neighbour to the Scythians, shut off with hard frosts, and the pure Tanais, cutting the lake in the middle with its streams, bounds—most dear to mortals, to the Maeotians who bewail the chilblains of their feet? May they perish first, the Carnite hounds, the sailors, who carried off the ox-eyed, bull-maiden girl from Lerna, the freight-bearing wolves, to bear her as a bride, a doom, to the Memphite chief, and raised the firebrand of enmity for the two continents. For again the heavy outrage of that rape the Idaean boars, the Curetes, seeking in requital, carried off a captive heifer in the bull-shaped form of a ship, Saraptian, to the Dictaean palace, as a wife for the war-leader of Crete, Asterus. Nor were they content, having taken equal for equal, but a thieving host with Teucer and with Scamander the Drauchian sire they sent to the dwelling of the Bebryces, to war with the field-mice, of whose seed Dardanus begot my founders, having married Arisbe, a noble Cretan maiden. And second they sent the Atracian wolves to steal, under a one-sandalled captain, the fleece, guarded by serpent-warded watches. Who, having come to Libyan Cytaea, and lulled to rest with charms the four-jawed water-snake, and lifted the curved ploughs of the fire-breathing bulls, and had his body carved up in the cauldron, not gladly seized the dragon's spoil, but, having snatched the self-summoned destroyer, the brother-slaying, child-avenging woman, loaded her aboard the chattering Cissa, that from the Chaonian benches sends forth a mortal voice, skilled in courses. And again he who drew up the shoes of stone and the sword-belt and the sword of his father, the son of Phemius, to whom Scyros, sheer above the resounding cliffs below, long since marks out the grievous tombs, the unburied castings, having gone with the beast that drew the foeman's milk from the well-suckled breast of the Tropaean goddess, Myste, the belt-thief, stirred up a double strife, both having robbed of Storne and from Themiscyra carried off the bow-conquering Orthosia. Whose sisters, the maidens of Neptune's daughter, leaving strife, Lagmos and Telamos, and the stream of Thermodon and the Actaean mount, seeking unyielding vengeance and rapine, beyond the dark Ister drove the Scythian horses, sending forth a summoning cry to the Greeks and the descendants of Erechtheus. And all of Acte they sacked with the spear, having burned the Mopsopian fields. And my grandfather, having laid waste the plain of Thrace and the land of the Eordi and the ground of the Galadraei, fixed his borders about the waters of Peneus, having put a hard yoke on her neck with fetters, young in strength, most outstanding of his race. And she in requital for these things, having sent her champion the ox-driver, the six-sterned one, clad in a hide, with shovels overthrew the steep crag, which the perverse-minded Gorge in the lots of the gods shall consecrate, the originator of woes. And again the falcons, having left Tmolus and Cimpsus and the gold-working waters of Pactolus, and the stream of the lake, where the wife of Typhon haunts the dread-bedded recess of the cavern, revelled into Ausonian Agylla, having joined in the spear-battles a grim wrestling with the Ligurians and those who hold from the blood the root of the Sithonian giants. And they took Pisa and all the spear-won land they subdued that lies near the Umbrians and that goes upon the steep crags of the Salpians. And the last firebrand kindles the ancient strife, setting alight with flame the fire that slept before, when he saw the Pelasgians dip the gleam of the waters of Rhyndacus in foreign urns. And she, frenzied again in vengeance, shall pay back threefold, fourfold the harms, sacking the shore across the strait. First shall come, namesake of Lapersian Zeus, a Zeus, who, coming down as a descender, shall burn with the thunderbolt all the steadings of the foes. With whom I shall die, and, dwelling among the dead, the rest I shall hear, these things which now I am about to cry. And the second, son of the man slain like a mute fish in the casting-nets, shall set ablaze the foreign land, having come by the oracles of the Healer with a many-tongued host. And the third, son of the oak-hewing lord, the armour-moulding maiden of Branchus having beguiled, to give the clod soaked in streams to him who needed it as a loan, to fit the seal of his fingers to the tablet, shall settle the mountain monarchy of the lice, having destroyed the first-hired Carian host, when the harlot maiden, into wanton mockery barking, shall revile the marriages, that they make their bridals into pulley-drawn ones for the barbarians. And the fourth, of the Dymantian seed, the Lacmonian and Cytinaean Codri, who shall inhabit Thigrus and the mount of Satnion, and the peninsula, the journey's end of old, utterly hated by the goddess Cyrita, the all-shaped vixen's fire-tail, the father, who with his daily mealings healed the keen ox-hunger of his father, as the blazing one cut foreign wings from the land. And the Phrygian, avenging his brother's blood, shall in turn ravage the nursing land of the corpse-marshaller, who pronounces unflattering judgments to the dead in an unloving manner. Who one day from the tips of the lobes of the double-toothed having destroyed the cataracts, shall beautify the cheeks, contriving a terror for the blood-drinking devourers. By him all the Phlegraean land shall be enslaved and the Thrambusian ridge and the shoreward point of Titon and the flats of the Sithones and the Pallenian field, which the ox-horned Brychon makes fat, the servant of the earth-born. And of many woes by turns shall begin Candaeus or Mamertus, or what must one call him who is feasted in blood-mingled battles? Not, indeed, shall the mother of Epimetheus yield, but in requital for all she shall send forth one of the seed of Perseus, a giant, for whom the sea shall be passable on foot one day, and the land shall be sailed over as he strikes the dry land with oars. And the houses of Laphria Mamersa, set ablaze with flame with the wooden bulwarks of their walls, shall blame the oracle-babbler for the harm, Psainynthus prophesying, the servant of Pluto. And by the unmixed host all shall be devoured, stripping off its bark-like double covering, the fruit-bearing oak and the wild mountain-flourishing one. And every flow of the mountain-streams shall be dried up, as they slake greedily their black thirst. And the cataracts of arrows hissing from afar shall whistle above their heads, and, like Cimmerian gloom, a shadow shall cover the air, dimming the sunlight. And, like a brief-blooming rose, having made the Locrian flourish, and having burned all, like a dry corn-stalk, again he shall taste of a back-sailing flight, as a maiden, near at hand, peering about, dreads the gloomy wolf-light, the oaken tower, terrified by the bronze-wrought blade. And many contests and slaughters in the no-man's-land shall loose of men, some in the wrestlings on land as they contend about dread dominions, others in the ox-turned backs of the earth, until the blazing one shall lull the heavy tumult, sprung from Aeacus and from Dardanus, a Thesprotian both and a Chalastraean lion, and, having overturned face-down all the house of his kin, shall force the cowering chiefs of the Argives to fawn upon the war-leading wolf of Galadrae and to hold out the sceptre of the ancient monarchy. To whom, after the sixth generation, a kinsman of mine, a certain wrestler, having matched the might of his spear of sea and land, and come to terms of reconciliation, shall be hymned as most honoured among friends, having taken the spear-won first-fruits of the spoils. Why, wretched one, do I cry at length to the deaf rocks, to the dumb wave, to the dread-haunted glens, striking the empty noise of my mouth in vain? For the Lepsian has robbed me of credence, having smeared my words with false-speaking rumours, and of my unerring prophetic mind, the foreteller of oracles, in anger at the bed of which he longed to win. Yet he shall make them true. And one, having learned with woe, when there shall be no remedy to help the fatherland, shall praise the god-possessed swallow. So much she spoke, and back with her feet she went within the prison. And in her heart she groaned a last Siren-song, a Mimallon of Claros, or the babbler of Melancraera, daughter of Neso, or some Phician monster, twittering her winding words past all interpreting. And I came, my lord, announcing to you this crooked tale of the prophetic maiden, since you set me as a guard of the stone chamber and to report and reckon over every word truly, and sent me back as a swift courier. And may the god make the rumours run out for the better, he who cares for your throne, preserving the ancient inheritance of the Bebryces.