Book 4

4. For the third time the west winds had loosened the bristling year, and Phoebus along his vernal track was driving the scant day onward to a longer course, when their plans, broken and battered by the fates, and at last the chance of war granted to the wretched men, Bellona with her own hand showed first from the Larissan height a glowing torch, and with her right hand whirled and drove a beam-like spear, which, hissing through the liquid sky, flew and stood fixed on the high rampart of Aonian Dirce. Soon too she entered the camp, and among men flashing with iron and gold she roared a squadron's cry; she gave swords to those who marched, clapped the horses, called them to the gates; the brave outran her urgings, and even to the timid a brief courage was added.

The appointed day was come; a great victim falls in due rite to the Thunderer and to Gradivus, and the priest, with no favouring sign in the entrails, grows pale and feigns to hope before the armed men. And now around their own the boys and brides and fathers pour out mingled, and block the way at the topmost doorposts. There is no measure to their weeping: the shields and the plumes are wet with the sad farewells, and from every weapon hangs the home that must be sighed for; it pleases them to press kisses on the closed helmets and to draw down the fierce crests in an embrace. Those men, to whom only the sword, to whom death itself was pleasing, give groans, and their broken anger falters with sobs. So when, perhaps, men are about to go over the long sea, when now the south winds call to the sails and the anchor returns from the torn bottom, the loving company clings: they vie to twine their arms about the neck, and now kisses confound the streaming eyes, now the mist of the great sea, and at last, left behind, they still stand upon the rock; sweet it is to follow with the gaze the fleeing canvas, and they grieve that the homeward winds grow thicker. Still they stand, and from the known rock they salute the ship.

Now help me. Earlier Fame, and the world's secret Antiquity, whose care it is to remember leaders and to lengthen lives, unfold the men; and you, O queen of the grove of old, Calliope, what bands, what arms Gradivus stirs, how many cities he has comforted among the peoples, fashion with the lifted lyre: for to no one comes a loftier mind from that fountain once drunk. The king, sad and sick with the weight of cares, and nearer to his departing years, among men who exhort him scarce of his own will moves forward, Adrastus, content to gird his side with iron; the companies carry his arms behind, and at the very gates the charioteer grooms the swift horses, and already Arion struggles against the yoke. For him Larissa arms her men, for him lofty Prosymna, and Midea fitter for herds, and Phlius rich in flocks, and Neris, which dreads in its long valley the foaming Charadrus, and Cleonae, towered with its huge mass, and Thyrea, which shall gather Lacedaemonian blood, are joined, mindful of the king transmitted from their origin, who sow the cultivated fields of Drepanum's crags and of olive-bearing Sicyon, which sluggish Strangilla licks with its slow ford, and Elisson, curved with the winding of its banks. A grim honour belongs to that river: it is said to wash the Stygian Eumenides with its stern waters; here they are wont to plunge their faces and their snakes panting from Phlegethon once drunk, whether they overturn the homes of the Thracians, or the dwellings of Mycenae, the impious roof, or the Cadmean hearth; the stream itself flees the swimmers, and the pools grow livid with countless poisons. There goes as a comrade Ephyre, who soothed the laments of Ino, and the band of Cenchreae, where the stream conscious of poets, struck by the Gorgon's horse, flows, and where the Isthmus lies against the deep and drives back from the lands the sloping seas. This band, who followed Adrastus three thousand in number, exult; some have javelins in hand, some have oak shafts long hardened in the flames—for there is not one custom in the companies, nor one blood—some are accustomed to whirl smooth slings and to gird the day with the empty circling. He himself comes forward, venerable alike in his years and his sceptre: as a bull moves, lofty, among pastures long possessed, now with loosened neck and idle shoulders, yet still the leader: the young bulls have no heart to challenge him in battle; for they see the horns maimed from many a wound, and the great knots of blows upon his breast.

Next after aged Adrastus the Dircaean son-in-law brings forward his standards, for whom the wars take part, to whom the whole cohort lends its angers: to him too from his native land men came willing, whether the exile moves them and a loyalty grown firm and increased by his griefs, or whether to change rulers is a chief thing—many, whom a better cause reconciles to one complaining; and he himself had given to be ruled Aegion and Arene, and the wealth which Theseian Troezen adds, lest moving thin ranks he should go inglorious, or feel the honours of his fatherland torn from him. The same bearing, the same arms the man has, which as a guest he owed he bore beneath the winter night: the Teumesian lion fills his back, and his spear gleams with twin iron heads, below his side, with a wound-dealing sword, stiffens the rough Sphinx; already the kingdom and his mother's bosom and his faithful sisters he holds in hope and prayer, yet even from the topmost tower he looks back upon Argia, stunned and standing far out with her whole body; she draws back his mind and his eyes, his wife, and turns sweet Thebes from his heart.

Lo, amid the midst the fiery Tydeus rouses the ranks of his father's nation, now joyful and whole in his limbs, as the first trumpets sounded: as a slippery snake rises from the deep ground at the soft breathing of the spring sun, free, stripped of its old age and its squalid years, and, menacing, gleams green among the glad grasses: ah, wretched is he among the country-folk who through the meadow, meeting it with mouth agape, is cheated by its first venom. For him too the report of war brings present men from the Aetolian cities: rocky Pylene felt it, and Meleagrian Pleuron, wept by its kindred birds, and headlong Calydon, and Olenos, which with its Jove provokes Ida, and Chalcis, hospitable in its harbour to the Ionian waves, and the river whose face was disfigured by the Herculean wrestling; still from its lowest waters scarcely daring to lift its maimed brow and with its head sunk in the grey-green cave it mourns, and the panting banks grow sick with dust, for all of them brazen wicker-shields guard their breasts, and the cruel javelin in their hands; their father Mavors stands upon the helm, on every side the chosen youth crown great-hearted Oeneus' son, cheerful in war and graced with well-known wounds; he is not inferior in threats and anger to Polynices, so that it is in doubt for which of the two the war is waged.

But from there comes the Doric line, greater, beneath new arms, those who burden your banks, Lyrcius, and your shores with much ploughing, leader of the Achaean rivers, Inachus—for no more violent stream issues from the Persean soil than you, when foaming you have drunk up the Bull or the watery Pleiades and swelled, with Jove for your son-in-law—whom swift Asterion encircles and Erasinus, dragging the corn-ears of the Dryopes, and those who tame the Epidaurian fields—a hill kindly to Iacchus, but denied to Hennaean Ceres—; pathless Dyme sends aid, and Neleian Pylos its dense squadrons; not yet famous Pylos, and Nestor, a youth in his second age, and yet he refused to go into the camp that was doomed to perish. These the steep Hippomedon drives on, and teaches the love of beautiful virtue; on his head trembles the brazen helmet, as thrice the snow-white plume climbs it; his whole side beneath his arms sewn iron plates wear thin, and his shoulders and breast broadly a flame-coloured orb covers, and wrought in the gold there lives the night of Danaus: guilty by the Furies' black torch, fifty bridal chambers burn; the father himself, on the bloody threshold, both praises the crime and inspects the swords. Him the Nemean steed from the Palladian citadel bears down, fearing his arms, and with its huge flying shadow fills the fields, and with its long dust lifts up the plain, not otherwise than when, breaking the woods with his shoulders and either breast, double Hylaeus rushes headlong from his mountain cave: Ossa fears his ways, and the flocks and wild beasts have sunk down in terror; not even from his brothers was horror absent, until with a vast leap he entered the Peneian pools and, set against it, held back the great river.

Who, sounding mortal, could match in the telling the number of iron and the nations and their strength? Her own god rouses to arms ancient Tiryns; not barren of brave men is that land, nor does the fame of its monstrous nursling degenerate, but its fortune has slipped through neglect, and wealth adds no strength; a rare dweller in the empty fields shows the citadels raised by the toil of the Cyclopes, yet she gives these breasts of three hundred youths, a crowd numberless in war, for whom neither thongs nor swords flash grimly: the tawny spoils of lions cover their heads and backs, the honour of their race, and a pine club arms them, and their darts are crowded in inexhaustible quivers. They sing the Herculean paean, and all that has been laid waste of monsters; from leafy Oeta the god hears them afar. Nemea gives companions, and the strength which the sacred vineyards of Cleonaean Molorchus muster for the battles. Known is the glory of his cottage, on its willow doors are imaged the arms of the divine guest, and on a small field is shown the oak where he reclined his loosened limbs, the ilex, and where on the ground the print of his elbow remains.

But on foot, and looking down on the war from his whole height, Capaneus turns the load of four backs torn from untamed bullocks, and over it, stiff with a covering of brazen mass. The ramose Hydra bristles with a triple crown, newly slain: part rough with living snakes gleams chased in silver, part, found by art, is hidden and, dying, blackens into tawny gold; round it the sluggish stream and the iron-dark Lerna. But the stretches of his flanks and his spacious breast a coiling corselet of countless Chalybian thread guards, a fearful work, not his mother's; and from the gleaming peak of his helmet a giant juts forth; and his alone, for hurling, stands a cypress fixed with a point, stripped of its leaves. To him are given to obey those whom fertile Amphigenia and level Messene and mountainous Ithome nourish, whom Thryon and Aepy, heaped on the highest mountains, whom Helos and Pteleon, and Dorion, tearful to the Getic bard; here Thamyris, who trusted to surpass in song the learned Aonides, condemned to dumb years at once in voice and lyre—who would scorn the powers that oppose him?— fell silent headlong, who would not have known the contests of Phoebus and illustrious Celaenae with the Satyr hung up.

And now the mind of the prophet-augur, conquered, gives way as well; he indeed saw the disasters and the dread signs, but Atropos with her own hand had thrust the arms upon him as he hesitated, and had overwhelmed the god, nor were absent his wife's snares, and now the house gleams with the forbidden gold. This gold the fates warned was fatal to the Argive seer; she herself too knows it—a wickedness!—but the faithless wife would fain change her husband's gift, and she covets and longs to excel in the spoils of the powerful Argia and her ravished adornment. That lady gladly—for she sees that the minds of kings and the weight of war waver upon this, unless the provident hero share the campaign alike—had herself stripped from the lap of her beloved Polynices the sacred adornments, not sad, and besides she adds: 'Not for me these times,' she says, 'are fit for shining ornaments, nor let the marks of unhappy beauty please me without you: it is enough, in this doubtful hour, with comforting company to cheat my fear, and to turn unadorned tresses to the altars. Shall it be—unspeakable!—that when you are mocked by the threatening helmet and sound in iron, I shall wear the gold of rich Harmonia, my dowry? A more fitting chance shall some god give of that. And shall I outshine in dress the Argive wives, when the king's consort, when, you being safe to me, the temples must be filled with votive choirs? Now let her put it on who seeks it and is able to rejoice in a warring husband.' So the fatal gold burst into the Eriphylan household and stirred the huge seeds of crimes, and Tisiphone laughed, grim and pleased at what was to come.

Here, lofty on his Taenarian horses—offspring which from an unequal mating Cyllarus had begotten, Castor unaware— he shakes the ground; the Parnassian fleeces mark out the seer by his dress: his helmet is crowned with leafy olive, and a white fillet interweaves the crimson crests, at once he governs his arms and the reins pressed beneath the yoke. On this side and on that, javelins are his delay, and an iron forest trembles on his car; far off he himself, dread with his heavy spear, stands out, and flashes on his shield the conquered Python. Apolline Amyclae attend his car, those whom Pylos sends, and Malea shunned by doubtful keels, and Caryae, fit to resound to clapping Diana, whom Pharis and Messe, mother of birds, child of Cytherea, and the phalanx of Taygetus and the hardy company of swan-bearing Eurotas; the god Arcas himself nourishes the men in the raw dust, and breeds in them the modes of naked virtue and anger; thence comes vigour to their spirits, and of an honourable death the sweet rite; parents rejoice at the deaths of their sons and exhort them to die, and now the whole throng laments the youth, but the mother is content with a crowned funeral. They hold the reins, and a double dart with knotted thong, their great shoulders bare, a rough cloak hangs down, and on the cone a Ledaean crest. Not for you alone, Amphiaraus, do these earn their pay: supine Elis swells the companies, the people who dwell in low-lying Pisa come up, and those whom you, tawny Alpheus, swim through the Sicanian lands, a stranger, never tainted in so long a deep. With countless cars far and wide they harry the crumbling fields and tame the herds in mock wars: that glory belongs to the nation from the unspeakable custom, and lasts on from the very broken axles of Oenomaus; the foaming bridles grind with the bite, and the snowy shower wets the dug-up sands.

You too lead the Parrhasian troops, your mother unaware— ah, raw in arms, only the new glory persuades you!— Parthenopaeus, you carry them off; the remote glades then by chance your grim parent was pacifying with her horn, turned away from cold Lycaeus—for this power to go would not have been the youth's. Fairer was the face of none who went to grim peril, and so great was the indulgence of his exceptional beauty; nor was courage lacking, only let a stronger age come: what leaders of the woods, what powers dedicated to the rivers, what wood-nymphs did he not carry off with a great fire? They say that Diana herself, when she saw the boy in the Maenalian shade marking the grass with his tender step, forgave her companion. And his Dictaean weapons and the Amyclaean quivers she herself fitted to his shoulders. He leaps forth, smitten with a bold love of Mars, his arms—burning to hear the trumpets and with the dust of war to soil his yellow hair, and to be carried back on a captured enemy horse: the woods weary him, and it is a shame to leave unknown the title harmful to human blood, his arrows. Fiery before all he flashes with gold, fiery with purple, and his waving fold he wrinkles with Iberian knots. On his peaceful shield are painted his mother's Calydonian battles: grimly his bow sounds on his left, and his quiver, rough with feathers, beats his back with the Cydonian reed, pale with electrum and bright with Eastern jasper. His horn-footed steed, wont to outstrip the trembling stags, veiled with the twin hide of a slain lynx, and marvelling at the arms of its now heavier master, he drove on high, sweetly blushing, his cheeks notable in his green age. To him the Arcadians, old as their caves and older than the moon, give faithful ranks, whom fame reports sprung from the hard stock of the woods, when the earth first marvelled at the prints of feet and bore them; not yet were there fields or homes or cities, nor any limit to marriages; the oaks and laurels bore the raw births, and the shady ash created peoples, and from the pregnant green mountain-ash a boy fell forth. They are said to have been amazed at the changes of light and the clouds of night, and, following Titan far at his setting, to have despaired of the day. The high Maenalus grows thin of settlers, the Parthenian grove is abandoned, ranks for the war Rhipe and Stratie and windy Enispe bestow. Not Tegea, not Cyllene herself, happy in her winged god, is free, and the grove-temple of Alean Minerva, and swift Clitor, and Ladon, who, Pythian one, was almost your father-in-law, and Lampia, white with its snowy ridges, and Pheneos, believed to send the Styx down to black Dis. Azan came too, a rival in his howlings to those of Ida, and the Parrhasian leaders, and the Nonacrian fields pleasing to the quiver-bearing Thunderer, at which, you Loves, you laughed, and Orchomenos rich in flocks and Cynosura rich in beasts. The same ardour lays waste the Aepytian fields and lofty Psophis and the mountains made famous by the Herculean might and monster-bearing Erymanthus and brass-resounding Stymphalus. These are the Arcadians, one nation of men, but split apart and discordant in their dress: these bend Paphian myrtles from the stem and rehearse battles with a shepherd's staff, these have bows, these darts of stakes, this man's hair a helmet covers, that one keeps the fashion of the Arcadian cap, that one roughens his head with the open jaws of a Lycaonian bear. These bands of war and breasts sworn to Mars neighbouring Mycenae helped with no soldier; for then were the funeral feasts and the sun's mid-recoil, and here other brothers were mingling in battle.

And now the messenger had filled the ears of Atalanta: that her son went to the war and was driving the whole of Arcadia on; her steps trembled, and from beside her slipped her weapons: she fled the woods, swifter than a winged wind, over rocks and the rivers that blocked her with their full banks, such as she was, her dress caught up, and her tawny hair scattered by the south wind; as a tigress, fierce, when her young are seized, follows the tracks of the plundering horse, so, when she had stood and dashed her breast against the opposing reins —he pale upon the ground—: 'Whence this raging desire, my son, has come to you? Whence in your tender breast this reckless valour? Can you fit men for wars, can you bear the weight of Mars and go among sword-bearing troops? Would that you could! Lately I saw you pale, while you pressed your hunting-spears close against the straining boar, your knee giving way, fallen back and almost sinking, and had I not bent my horn and shot my darts, where now is the war for you? My weapons will help you nothing, nor my smooth bows; nor this horse, dappled with black spots, in which you trust: at great attempts you press on, scarcely ripe, boy, for the marriage-chambers of the Dryads and the frenzy of the Erymanthian Nymphs. The omens are true: I wondered why lately Diana's temple seemed to me to tremble, and the goddess seemed of a lower countenance, and from the sacred dome the trophies fell; the slower my bow is for this, my hands difficult, and sure in no wound. Wait until a greater honour, until a firmer age, until the shadow comes to your rosy cheeks and the looks of me depart from your face; then the wars and the iron that you burn for I myself will give you, and by no weeping of your mother shall you be called back. Now carry your arms home! But you, Arcadians, will you let him go, O you born surely of rocks and oak?' More she desires to say; poured around her, her son and the leaders console her and lessen her fears, and now the bristling trumpets blare their signals; she cannot let go her son from her loving embrace, and much she commends him to the leader Adrastus.

But on the other side the Martial people of Cadmus, saddened by their leader's frenzy and not terrified by soft rumour, since it was published abroad that with these forces Argos descended on them, slower indeed and with shame at the king's cause, yet they move to war; not all have the impulse to draw the sword, or to close their shoulders behind their father's shield, or, with delight, to comb the yokes of the swift-footed horses, such as are the joys of war; cast down, with no spirit, with no anger they pledged their trembling hands; this man for his unhappy lot laments his like-minded parent, this man the sweet years of his young wife, and his wretched children growing up at his bosom. The warrior god warmed none of them; the very walls, fallen through ancient neglect, and the citadels of great Amphion now lay bare a flank weary with age, and with sacred strings they make firm the work, deaf and ignoble, that once was levelled with the sky. Yet to the Boeotian cities too the avenging madness of iron breathes, not in aid of the unjust king, so much as they are moved for their allied nation. He, like a wolf, the despoiler of a rich flock, heavy in his breast with rotting gore and shaggy with bristles, his bloodied jaws, deformed, gaping with wool, withdraws from the stalls, rolling his troubled eyes hither and thither, lest the shepherds, having learned of the slaughter, follow him with hardship; and he flees, not unaware of his great daring.

Fame, troubler of peace, heaps up frequent terrors: here, she says, the Lernaean horsemen now wander scattered along the Asopid bank; here you, Bacchus-haunted Cithaeron, are being seized, says she, and Teumesus, and through the shadows of night she announces that wakeful Plataea has been set ablaze by the watch-fires. For that the Tyrian household gods sweat, and Dirce flows red with blood, and that the Sphinx has brought forth new offspring and again has spoken from the rocks—who had not the licence to know and to have seen these things everywhere? Above these a new fear troubles their anxious hearts: snatched up suddenly, her baskets scattered, the queen of the woodland choir runs down to the level ground from the Ogygian peak, and, sad, this way and that with bloodshot eye hurls her three-forked pine, and burning fills the upright city with stunned outcries: 'All-powerful Nysean father, for whom the love of your ancestral race long ago lapsed, you now beneath the bristling north are shaking warlike Ismara, swift with your iron-tipped thyrsus, and bid the vine-grove creep upon Lycurgus, or over the swollen Ganges or the farthest barriers of the Red Tethys and the Eastern homes with blazing triumph you rage, or golden you come forth from the springs of Hermus: but your offspring, the festal rites that they offer you with their ancestral arms laid aside, are war and tears and fear and kindred wickedness, the gifts of an unjust kingdom, which we pay. Rather, Bacchus, set me down among the eternal frosts beyond, and the Caucasus howled over by Amazonian arms, bearing me, than that I should speak of the monstrous deeds of leaders and a profane stock. See, you press me; another frenzy, Bacchus, I have sworn to you: I see like bulls run together; the same honour belongs to both, and one blood from their origin; straining, with foreheads joined, they mingle their steep horns, and grim they die in mutual anger. You are the worse, you give way, you the guilty, who alone of the ancestral pastures and the common mountain seek to defend your share, while the other leader holds his ground.' So she spoke, with frozen features, and now with Bacchus departing she grew still.

But trembling at the portent and unequal to the various terrors, the aged king seeks the help of the seer and the sagacious darkness of Tiresias—as is the way with those who fear uncertain things—, sick at heart he consults. He, that the gods, not by lavish slaughter of bullocks, not by the swift wing or the truth of leaping entrails, nor by the entwined tripod and the numbers that follow the stars, nor by the incense smoke flitting above the altars, are so deeply opened as the ghosts called forth from the threshold of harsh Death—so he declares; and the Lethean rites and the offerings of Ismenus, where it mingles its waters beneath, with the sea, he prepares before the leader, and round about with the torn entrails of the sheep and the breath of pungent sulphur and fresh herbs and a long murmur he purifies him.

A wood, capacious of age and bowed with mighty old age, of leafage forever unshorn, stands pierced by no sunbeams; the frosts do not lessen it, nor has the South wind any right over it, nor Boreas driven from the Getic Bear. Beneath is hidden rest, and a horror keeps the empty silences, and the image of the shut-out light grows pale and faint, nor is the shade without its god: the Latonian worshipper is given to the grove; her image fashioned in pitch-pine and cedar and in every oak the wood enshrines in holy darkness. In her grove unseen the arrows whistle, and the nightly groans of dogs, when she escapes the thresholds of her uncle and returns better to the face of the new Diana; or when, wearied with the ridges, and the high light moves her sweetest sleep, here, with javelins fixed on every side around, she rests, her neck poured forth, her quiver taken aside. Beyond stretches the Martial earth of the plain, vast and open, the field that bore for Cadmus its crop. Hard was he who with the first ploughshare, after the kindred ranks and the guilty furrows, dared to turn the soil and the meadows soft with blood to dig up; the unhappy earth breathes forth huge tumults still in the midst of the light and alone in the night through the shadows, when the black earth-born rise to their empty battles; the husbandman, trembling, fled the field he had begun, and the maddened oxen returned home.

Here the aged seer—for the earth is suited to Stygian rites, and ground fat with living gore pleases— gives warning that flocks of dark fleece and black herds be set up, whatever neck, fairest of the flocks, is led; Dirce groaned and sad Cithaeron, and the clamorous valleys were amazed at the strange silence. Then he wreathed the wild horns with dark-blue garlands, handling them himself, and on the edge of the known wood at the start, nine times into the hollowed earth he pours the streams of Bacchus and the gifts of spring milk and the Actaean showers and the suasive blood to the shades; as much as the dry earth drinks, so much is heaped up; then they roll up severed groves, and the sad priest bids that for Hecate there be three hearths, and as many for the maidens born of accursed Acheron; for you, ruler of Avernus, though it is sunk in the ground, yet a pinewood mound rises into the air; near it, with a lesser heap, an altar to deep Ceres is raised; cypress, bewailed, weaves the brows and all the side, and now, the heads marked with iron and with a pure libation of corn, the flocks fell into the wound; then unwed Manto, catching the blood in bowls, makes first offering, and all the pyres thrice circled about, after the manner of her holy father, she renders the half-dead fibres and the still-breathing entrails, nor does she delay to thrust the swift torches beneath the dark leaves, and when Tiresias himself heard the brushwood crackling in the flames and the sad heaps, —for the greatest heat pants before his cheeks and the fiery vapour fills the hollow orbs of his eyes,— he cries out—the pyres trembled and his voice terrified the fire:— 'Tartarean seats and dread kingdom of insatiate Death, and you, O most savage of brothers, to whom the shades are given to serve, and the eternal punishments of the guilty, and the palace of the lowest world obeys, open, to me who knock, the silent places and the void of stern Persephone, and call up the throng laid away in the hollow night. And let the ferryman return with full Styx in his boat. Bring your steps together, and let there be no single way for the shades to come back into the light; do you, Persei, in a company apart drive the pious Elysians, and let cloud-wrapt Arcas guide them with his potent wand; but against them, those who passed through crimes, who are more numerous in Erebus and more from the blood of Cadmus, you, Tisiphone, with your snake thrice shaken and your blazing yew as guide, lead, opening the day; nor let Cerberus, lacking the light, turn aside the shades with the onset of his heads.'

He had spoken, and at once the old man and the Phoebean maid lifted up their spirits: they with no fear, for the god was in their hearts; only a vast terror overwhelmed the son of Oedipus, and at the seer's chanting his dread songs, now his shoulders, now his hands and the fleeces he presses, anxious, and would fain desist from the rites begun, like a hunter who at the broken rocks of a Gaetulian wood awaits the lion, stirred by a long-drawn roar, steadying his courage and gripping his spear that sweats with effort; fear freezes his face and his steps tremble, who comes and how great, but the bristling signs of the roaring beast he receives, and with blind care measures its murmurs.

And here Tiresias, the shades not yet approaching: 'I call to witness,' he says, 'the goddesses with whom I have glutted this fire and to the cleft earth on the left have given the cups, now I cannot endure the delay. Is the priest heard in vain? Or, if a Thessalian witch should bid you with raving chant, would you go, and as often as the Colchian, drugged with Scythian poisons, should drive you, would Tartarus grow pale with trembling motion, yet care of me is less? Unless it please me to lift bodies from the tombs and to empty urns full of ancient bones, and to defile under one curse the gods of heaven and of Erebus mingled, or with the sword to pursue the bloodless faces and pluck the sick fibres of the dead? Do not despise my thin years and this cloud upon my shaded brow, do not, I warn you; we too have the power to rage, and we know whatever you fear to be spoken and known, and to trouble Hecate, did I not stand in awe of you, Thymbraeus, and the highest of the threefold world, whom it is forbidden to know. Him—but I am silent: my tranquil old age forbids it, and now I—' eagerly Phoebean Manto breaks in: 'You are heard, father, and the bloodless throng draws near. Elysium's chaos is laid open, and the capacious shade of the covered earth bursts apart, and the woods and the black rivers are disclosed, livid Acheron casts up its sands. Smoky Phlegethon rolls its black fires through the shallows, and Styx, flowing between, parts the sundered shades and bars them. I behold the pallid one himself upon his throne, and round about the Eumenides, ministers of deadly works, and the stern bridal-chamber of Stygian Juno and the grim couches. In her watchtower black Death sits, and to her lord counts up the silent peoples: a greater rank looms above. The arbiter, the Gortynian, turns these in his harsh urn, demanding the truth with threats, and forces them to declare their lives far back, and at last to confess the gains of their punishments. Why speak to you of the monsters of Erebus, the Scyllas and the vainly raging Centaurs and the chains of the Giants twisted of solid adamant, and the narrow shade of the hundred-armed Aegaeon?'

'Nay,' he says, 'O guidance and strength of my old age, do not give me what is common. For who would not know the rock that rolls back, and the cheating pools, and Tityos, food for the birds, and Ixion darkening in his long circles? I myself too, when my blood was better, looked upon the hidden seats, with Hecate leading, before the god overwhelmed my eyes and bore down all the light into my breast. Bring rather hither by your prayer the Argive souls and the Theban; bid the others turn their steps aside, four times sprinkled with milk, and depart from the sad grove, daughter; then what faces and what bearing, what ardour there is for the blood poured out, which of the two races stands prouder, come, tell, and instruct my night through every particular.'

She does as bidden, and weaves the song by which she scatters the shades, by which she calls back the scattered: such, if you take away the crimes, was the Colchian, and Circe, the counterfeiter on the Aeaean shore, then with these words she addressed her sacrificing father: 'First Cadmus lowers his sluggish face into the bloody pool, and beside the man the offspring of Cytherea follows, and the twin serpent drinks from the head. The earth-born comrades, that Martial race, surround them, for whom the measure of their age was a single day; every hand is in arms, every one on the sword-hilt; they ward off and oppose and rush with the fury of the living, nor have they care to lean over the sad trench, but a thirst to drain in turn each other's blood. Nearest is the band of the daughters and the wept grandsons, here we see bereft Autonoe and panting Ino looking back at the bow and sweetly pressing to her breast her pledge, and Semele with arms set against her womb. Now the Cadmean mother, her thyrsi broken, and now released by the god, her bloody breast laid bare, pursues Pentheus with lamentation; he flees the trackless ways of Lethe and even over the Stygian pools, where his father will become kinder to him and Echion lays out his mangled body. I know sad Lycus, and the son of Aeolus with his hand twisted behind his back, casting the corpse on his burdened shoulder. Nor yet does the son of Aristaeus change either his bearing or the marks of his altered form: his brow rough with horn, weapons in hand, and he drives back the dogs gaping at his wound. But lo, there comes, hateful, with a great company, the daughter of Tantalus, and counts over her dead in swelling grief, in no way cast down by her woes; it pleases her to have escaped the powers of the gods and to grant now still more to her mad tongue.'

While the unspotted priestess sings such things to her father, his white hairs, made to tremble, rise with the lifted fillets, and his thin face is driven on by the blood, nor now does he lean upon his steadying staff nor on his faithful maiden, but, raised from the ground: 'Cease singing, daughter,' he says; 'enough is the borrowed light for me. The dull mists withdraw, and the black air leaps from my face. Is it from the shades, or sent down by Apollo above, that the breath fills me? Lo, I see all that was heard, but behold, the Argive shades mourn with downcast eye! Grim Abas and guilty Proetus and gentle Phoroneus and mutilated Pelops and Oenomaus, foul with savage dust, wet their faces with copious showers. From this I augur better of the war for Thebes. But who are these in a dense flock, as much as their arms and wounds show, warlike souls, who strain against us in much blood their faces and breasts and their hands, raised with a false cry, without peace? King, am I deceived, or are these those famous fifty? You see Chthonius and Chromis and Phegeus, and Maeon, marked out with our laurel. Do not rage, leaders: nothing here was dared against mortals by counsels, believe me: these years iron Atropos had spun. You have come out of the disaster: dread wars await us, and again Tydeus.' He spoke, and with his fillet of bound leaves he drives off those who press, and points to the blood.

There stood, bereft of his companions, on the sad shore of Cocytus, Laius, whom the winged god had now restored from pitiless Avernus. And gazing askance at his dread grandson— for he knows him by his face—he neither drinks of the blood, like the rest of the throng, nor comes near another draught, breathing immortal hatred, but the Annian seer himself lures him on: 'Glorious leader of Tyrian Thebes, from whose destruction no friendly day has the citadel of Amphion seen; O shade now sufficiently avenged for your bloody death and much appeased by your descendants, whom do you flee, pitiable one? He lies in a long death, at whom you murmur, and feels the borders of a joined death, overspread, his exhausted face foul with filth and blood, and cast out from the day: a lot harder than any death, believe me! What cause have you to shun your guiltless grandson? Turn your face and be sated with the sacrificial blood, and the coming changes and the deaths of war unfold, whether hostile or pitying the affairs of your own; then I will grant you to cross the longed-for Lethe, forbidden to you, in the boat, and will lay you peaceful in pious earth and commend you to the Stygian gods.' He is soothed by the gifts of honour and feigns his cheeks, then returns such words: 'Why, when you turn the shades, O priest of equal age, was I chosen for the augury and for ghosts so great above the rest, I who am to speak of things to come? It is enough to remember the past. Do you, illustrious grandsons—for shame!—demand our counsels? Him, him, apply to the unhallowed rites, who with glad sword dug into his father, who turned himself back to his own origin and thrusts his own pledges on his unworthy mother, and now he wearies the gods and the black councils of the Furies, and asks our shades into these battles. But if indeed I have pleased as a seer for these times that must be wept, I will speak, indeed, as far as Lachesis, as far as grim Megaera still allows me: war, from every side comes war with countless host. And fatal Gradivus drags the Lernaean nurslings with his goads; these the monsters of the earth and the weapons of the gods await, and beautiful deaths, and, by the law of delay, from the last fire the guilty ones. Sure is the victory for Thebes. Do not tremble, nor shall your fierce brother hold the realm, but the Furies, and the twofold crime, and through countless swords, ah me! the cruel father conquers.' When he had spoken this, he glides away and leaves them in doubt with his crooked riddle.

Meanwhile cold Nemea and the thickets conscious of Herculean praise the sons of Inachus were holding with their wandering legion; now they burn to carry off the Sidonian spoils, to lay low, to ravage the homes, and they press on. Who bent their angers, whence the delays, what wandering came between them as they went, Phoebus, teach: for us the rare beginnings of the tale await. Wasted, Liber was bringing back the war from subdued Haemus; there, for two winters' constellations now, the armed Getae had been wont to bear his orgies, and Othrys to grow green with hoar on its ridge and Rhodope with the Icarian shade, and now he moves his vine-clad cars toward his mother's walls; on right and left unbridled lynxes follow, and tigers, wet with wine, lick the reins, behind, exulting, they carry the spoils of the herd and half-dead wolves, and the Mimallones, the torn bears. Nor is his retinue idle: there are Anger and Frenzy and Fear and Valour and never-sober Ardour and faltering steps, and a camp most like its king. And he, when he sees Nemea boil up in a dusty cloud and the sun grow fiery with the rays of iron, and Thebes not yet composed for the contests of war, struck by what he saw, though in face and breast he droops, bids the bronzes and timbrels and the double-throated tumult be still, which is most loud about his stunned ears, and thus: 'That globe is preparing to cut down me and my race; from long ago the frenzy grows warm again; this is what the savage Argos and the untamed anger of my stepmother stir against me as war. Is it then too little that my mother was given to the unjust ashes and the natal pyres, and the lightnings that I myself felt flashing? My relics too, and Thebes, the rival's tomb, lying idle, impious it seeks with the sword. I will weave delays by cunning; that field, that field make for, make for, ho, comrades!' The Hyrcanian yoke-beasts swelled their manes at the signal, and he stood on the fields before his word was done.

It was the hour when the panting day lifts the sun to the heights of the mid-world. To you, in the gaping fields, the sluggish heat-haze stands, and all the groves admit the air. He calls the goddesses of the waters, and amid the silent ones begins: 'Rustic Nymphs, divinities of the rivers, and a great part of my company, endure the labour that I give you. From your fountains, for a little, the Argive streams and the pools and the wandering brooks cover over with dust for me, Nemea above all, where now is my road to my walls for the wars. Let the liquid flee from the deep; Phoebus himself helps still, on the topmost track, unless your will should cease; the stars favour my undertaking, and the heat-bringing dog of my Erigone foams. Go willingly, go into the hidden places of the soil; afterwards I, with full flood, will call you forth, and what gifts are most ample to my rites, your honour shall have, and I will ward off the nightly thefts of the wanton horn-footed ones and the greedy ravaging of the Fauns.' He had spoken: but over their faces a thin film of mould seemed to run, and the green moisture bristled on their hair. Straightway a fiery thirst drinks up the Inachian fields: the waters fled apart, the fountains and the lakes grow foul, and the hollow rivers harden in the boiling mud. A sickly leanness on the ground, and in its very origin the stalk's crop bends low, and, cheated by the edge of the bank, the herd stands, and the cattle seek the streams they once swam. So when, ebbing, the Nile has suppressed itself in its great caverns and holds in its mouth the flowing nourishment of the Eastern winter, the deserted valleys smoke with the loss of their flood, and gaping Egypt awaits the sound of the watery father, until, being asked, he gives nourishment to the Pharian fields and brings on a great year for the harvests. Lernia the harmful dries, dries Lyrcius and huge Inachus, and Charadrus, rolling its swimming rocks, and Erasinus, never bold within its banks, and Asterion, equal to the waves, that famous river through the high pathless places, heard from afar and breaking the shepherds' sleep. One river alone keeps its silent waters, but by command of the divinity, this too Langia nourishes in secret beneath the shade, not yet had the snatched-away Archemorus given it the tearful name, nor the goddess her fame; yet it guards the pathless places and the grove and the stream; a great glory awaits the Nymph, when sad Hypsipyle, and the games sweated over by the Achaean leaders, and the dark triennial rite shall renew the sacred Opheltes.

Therefore neither to carry the burning shields nor the close fastenings of their corselets—so dreadfully does the bristling thirst parch them— are they able: not in their mouths only, scorched in their narrow throats, but an inner force shakes them, their hearts rough with the throbbing, their veins freeze, and the sick blood clings to the dry entrails: then the earth, rotten with sun, then with dust breathes out a hot cloud, no foaming shower flows from the horses: with dry curb-bits they dash their mouths, their mouths that thrust forth chained tongues far out; and they bear neither law nor masters, but the maddened flock rages through the fields aflame; this way and that Adrastus drives scouts, to see if the Licymnian pools remain, if any water of Amymone survives: all by blind fires drained away has settled, nor is there hope of a moist heaven. As though they were ranging the tawny Libya and the deserts of African dust, and Syene shaded by no cloud.

At last among the woods—so Euhius himself had ordained— as they wander they catch sight of Hypsipyle, of a sudden, in her fair sorrow; though even at her breast Opheltes, not her own, the ill-starred child of Inachian Lycurgus, hangs—her hair neglected, nor rich in raiment— yet her face is marked as royal, nor is her honour, drowned by bitter griefs, stifled; then thus, amazed, Adrastus: 'Goddess mighty over the groves—for your face and your modesty deny that you are of mortal stock—you who, glad beneath this fire of the sky, do not seek the waters, succour the neighbouring nations: whether the Bow-bearer, Latona's son, sent you from his chaste flock to the marriage-bed, or, fallen from the stars, no humble love makes you fruitful—for not even the arbiter of the gods himself is a stranger to the marriage-beds of Argive women—: behold the sad ranks. Our purpose was to cut down with the sword guilty Thebes, but now the bitter thirst, by an unwarlike fate, bows down our spirits and wastes our idle strength; give aid to our weary fortunes, whether a turbid river or a foul marsh is yours; nothing in this lot is shameful, nothing is base: you are now asked in place of the Winds and rainy Jove; refill our fleeing strength and our breasts undone by the wars: so, under this favouring star, may this burden of yours grow. Only let Jupiter grant us to turn our steps homeward, and oh, with how great spoil of war shall you be gifted! Dircaean flocks to you, goddess, and a count of blood will I repay, and a grove shall be marked out with a great altar.' He spoke, and amid his prayers his burning breath snatches away half the words, and his parched tongue falters in the rush of breath; the same pallor and the same broken gasps of the loosened mouth hold all the men; the Lemnian woman answers with downcast face: 'A goddess indeed to you, although my origin is heavenly— but what am I? Would that I had not passed beyond mortals in my griefs! You see a nurse bereaved of the pledge entrusted to her; but whether any lap or breasts of mine remain, the god knows, and yet I too have a kingdom and a mighty father— but why do I tell these things, and delay the weary from their longed-for waters? Come now with me. If perhaps in its channel Langia keeps its perennial waters; it is wont, even beneath the track of the raging Crab, ever to flow, although the mane of the Icarian star may flash.' So saying, at once she lays down the child clinging to her—lest she should be a slow leader to the Pelasgians, ah! the wretched nursling, on the nearby turf— so the Fates were rolling it—and as he refuses to be set down, with gathered flowers and a friendly murmur she soothes his sweet tears: as the Berecynthian mother, while she bids the trembling Curetes leap around the little Thunderer; they clap their rival rites, but Ide resounds with mighty wailings. But the boy, in the lap of the kindly earth and in the deep grass, now in his crawlings strews the easy herbs as he strains face downward, now, wanting milk, calling his dear nurse with wailing, and again smiling and trying struggling words with his tender lips, marvels at the murmurs of the woods, or plucks what meets him, or draws in the day with his open mouth, and of the grove's evils unaware and quite careless of life he wanders astray. So tender was Mavors in the Odrysian snow, so the winged boy on the Maenalian peak, such, creeping along the shores, the wanton Apollo leaned upon the side of Ortygia.

They go through the thickets and the trackless byways dark with green shadows; some encircle, some in close throng follow and outrun the leader; she goes through the midst of the host, hastening in no humble manner; and now, the river near, the valley sounds hoarse, and a stony murmur struck their ears: there, exulting, the first from the host cries out, just as he was, lifting his standards with his light companies, Argus: 'Water!' and a long cry of the men ran over their faces: 'Water!' So along the shores of the Ambracian sea the nautical sound of the youths at the oars, with the master pointing the way, arises, and in turn the struck land cries back in answer, when, saluted, Apollo opens up Leucas. They fell upon the shallows everywhere with no distinction, the throng at once and the foremost; equal thirst cannot separate the mingled men; the curbed herds enter in their own cars, and the four-footed beasts are borne along full of masters and arms; some the rapacious whirlpool, some the slippery rocks cheat, nor have they, tangled in the river, any reverence to trample on the kings or to drown in the ford the faces of a friend calling out. The waves roar, and the long stream from its fountains is torn apart; lately, smoothly green and clear with a pure flood, now it is fouled with waters, the channel dredged up from the depths; thence the banks of the shores and the uptorn grasses trouble it; now thick and foul with mire and dust, though the thirst is sated, it is drunk all the same; you would think the ranks were fighting it out in war and that a true Mars was raging in the flood, or that a captured city was being borne off by the victors.

And some one of the kings, surrounded by the river in the midst: 'Of the green woods, Nemea, far the queen, chosen seat for the rivers, you, no harder than the deeds of Hercules, when he made the shaggy neck of the raging monster swell, and squeezed its life into the swollen limbs! Let it suffice to have raged thus far against the undertakings of your peoples: and you, O unwont to be tamed by any suns, horn-bearer, giver of eternal water, go glad, from whatever home you loose your cold mouth, immortal, swelling; for not for you does hoary Winter pour back its stored snows, nor does the Rainbow refund waters snatched from another spring, nor do the heavy clouds of the North wind indulge you. But you are your own, and you rush, unconquerable by any star. Not Apolline Ladon, nor either Xanthus, nor threatening Spercheus, nor Centaurean Lycormas would surpass you; you in peace to me, you beneath the very cloud of arms and on festal tables shall be celebrated above all— may you receive us, and gladly, as host, again to the weary open your streams, and be willing to recognize the troops you defended.'