Book 12

12. Not yet had the watchful sunrise tilted all the stars in the pole, and the Moon with thinner horn was watching the day press on, when now the Tithonian goddess scatters the timorous clouds and prepares the great heaven for returning Phoebus: already the Dircaean bands stray through their scattered homes, complaining of the delays of night; though then at last there was leisure and the first sleep after the wars, yet sickly peace puts flight to rest, and victory remembers the savage war, scarcely do they dare at first to step forth and loosen the defences of the rampart, scarcely with courage to unbar all the gates; their old fears stand before their eyes, and the dread of the empty plain: as when the earth, tossed by a ceaseless sea, seems at first to reel, so, astonished, they marvel that nothing comes against them, and think the scattered squadrons are rising, so when, scaling the threshold of a clear-seen tower, the Idalian birds have spied the tawny serpent, they drive their young within and wall the brooded nests with their claws and rouse their unwarlike wings to battle; soon though he rush back, yet the white throng fears the bare air, and at last, having begun their flight, shudders and even from the mid stars still looks back.

They go among the bloodless people and the remnants of the prostrate war, wherever grief and bloody mourning have driven the leaders; these see the weapons, these the bodies, but those only the faces of the slain and the breasts of others beside them; some bewail the cars and speak to the widowed horses, because this alone is left; some press kisses on the great wounds and complain of their courage. The cold carnage is sorted out: hands lay open, severed with their hilts and spears, and arrows standing fixed in the midst of eyes; for many there are no traces of the slaughter, they rush in, their lament hovering and everywhere ready, but around the shapeless trunks a pitiable contest rises, who shall bring the rites, who lead the funerals. Often even, deceived — Fortune sported a little while — they wept over enemy men; nor is there sure power to know what blood the wretched should avoid or trample, but those whose house is unharmed and free of grief either range the deserted tents of the wandering Danaans and fling in their torches, or — what chance there is after the war — they search in what dust scattered Tydeus lies, whether the cave of the snatched augur lies open, or where the foe of the gods is, whether ethereal embers still live among his limbs. Now the day is spent with tears, nor did the late evening drive them off: the wretched love laments and feast upon their woes. Nor did they go beneath their roofs, but round the corpses all night the throng sits, and by turns, groaning in alternation, they drive off the beasts with fire and beating of breasts; nor, conquered by the sweet stars, nor with ceaseless weeping did their eyes close, the third Lucifer fought against the Dawn, and now, the mountains bereaved, the glory of the groves, the great beams of Teumesos came, and Cithaeron, friend to the pyres with its wood; the entrails of the cut-down race burn on the heaped-up piles: the Ogygian shades rejoice in the last gift; the naked cohort of the Greeks complains, pitiable, and groaning circles round the forbidden fire, the savage shade of Eteocles too receives unjust honours, by no means royal; the Argive brother is bidden to be held still, and an exile is driven from the flame.

But the king his father and Thebes do not permit Menoeceus to smoke on a common pyre, nor did they build a cheap pyre of oak in the wonted way; but a warlike mound is heaped with cars and shields and all the arms of the Greeks; above the hostile heaps he himself, as victor, his hair adorned with peace-bearing laurel and fillets, reclines: no otherwise than when, the stars demanding it, the Tirynthian lay, glad, on kindled Oeta. Upon the living funeral-offerings the father slaughtered the captive bodies of the Pelasgians and the bridled horses, the solaces of war to the brave man; with these the lofty fire throbs, and at last the paternal groans burst forth:

'O if too great an ardour for great-souled praise had not seized you, my son, venerable with me in the Echionian household and meant to rule beyond me, you who now make bitter the coming joys and the thankless gift of the kingdom! You, though you dwell in the vaults of the gods above and their company with eternal valour — so indeed I believe — to me forever a god to be wept will you be: let Thebes raise altars and lofty temples to you; let it be right for one father to mourn, and now, alas, what worthy rites or what funeral can I bestow on you? Not if I had power to mix fatal Argos and Mycenae, driven against it, into ashes, and myself upon them, I whose life — abomination! — and honour are won by my son's blood; did the same day, the same impious war send you, my boy, and your dread brothers wretchedly into Tartarus? And now is the fortune of grief for Oedipus equal to mine? How like, good Jupiter, are the shades we bewail! Receive, my son, the fresh offerings of your triumph, receive also this guidance of my right hand and the bonds of my proud brow, which you gave your father with little cause for gladness. A king, you a king, let the sad shades of Eteocles behold.' Saying this, he tears at his hair and his hand, and, his anger kindled, more violently he repeats:

'Come then, let them call me savage and harsh, if I forbid the dead of Lerna to burn with you; would it were right to add long feeling to the bodies, and to drive the guilty souls from heaven and Erebus, and to follow the very beasts, the very curved beaks of the birds, and to point out the unspeakable limbs of the kings! Ah me, that the kindly earth and the day will dissolve them where they lie. Wherefore again and again I declare it: let no one dare to help the Pelasgians with last aid and with flames; or, if he does, he shall pay with his death and fill out the number of the bodies taken; by the gods and by great Menoeceus I swear.' He spoke, and his companions, taking him up, bore him into the dwelling.

Meanwhile, escorted, in tears, from empty Argos — rumour draws the wretched ones on — bereaved and widowed the women of Inachus rushed forth like a captive band; each has her own wounds, all have the same garb, hair cast down upon the breast and girdled bosoms; their torn faces stream with bloody nails, and their soft arms grow rough with beating. First through the stunned bands of the black throng the queen, sinking among the sorrowing families and rising again, seeks the way, helpless, Argia; not the palace is in her heart, not her father: one faith, one name, of her beloved Polynices, sits upon her lips; Dirce and the ill-omened walls of Cadmus she would choose to dwell in, Mycenae set aside. Next, drawing the Calydonian women mingled with the Lernaean band to Tydeus' funeral, not yielding to her sister, comes Deipyle; she indeed had heard the crime and the profane biting of her husband, pitiable; but to him lying low all things unhappy love forgives. After her, harsh to behold, and yet to be wept, Nealce, summoning Hippomedon with worthy lament, then the augur's impious wife, alas, about to set up empty pyres. The last of the mourning bands the bereaved companion of Maenalian Diana leads, and grievous Evadne: this one grieves and complains of the toils of her bold boy, that one, mindful of her great husband, goes weeping grimly and is angry at the highest stars. And Hecate, watching them from the Lycaean groves, follows them with her groans, and the Theban mother bewailed them from her Isthmian tomb as they went to the double shore, and Eleusis, though she mourns for herself, wept for the night-wandering band and brought out for the wanderers her secret fires, Saturnia herself leads them by hidden paths and conceals the ways, lest the people of their own, having met them, forbid them to go, and the glory of the great enterprise perish, and Iris too has the care of tending the dead bodies of the leaders, and bedews their rotting limbs with secret dews and the juices of ambrosia, that they may resist longer and await the pyre and not crumble before their time.

Lo, squalid in his cheeks and pale with an empty wound, Ornytus — here deserted by the band of his comrades, a fresh blow slows him — by timid stealth through secret byways takes his feeble road and leans upon a broken spear, and when he was amazed at the lonely places stirred by a new tumult and the band of women, whom now above the bands of Lerna he alone sees, he does not ask the way or the reasons, for they are plain, but with sad face he thus first forestalls them:

'Whither, wretched ones, whither do you bear your way? Do you hope for a funeral and ashes for your slain men? There stands, ever wakeful, a guardian of the shades, and the unburied bodies he reckons up to the king. Nowhere are tears, the approach of men is driven far off: to the birds and beasts alone is it allowed to go; will Creon, fair, grant honour to your mourning? Sooner may you win over the altars of pitiless Busiris and the hunger of the Odrysian stall and the Sicilian gods; he will snatch you, perhaps, as you pray, if his mind is known to me, and over your nuptial funerals he will not slay you, but far from the dear shades. Why do you not flee, while the road is safe, and, returned to Lerna, give what is left, the names, bereaved, to empty tombs, and call the absent souls to vacant pyres? Or do you implore the Cecropian help — for nearby, and the report is that Theseus returns glad from his Thermodontian triumph? Creon must be forced by war and arms into civilized ways and into man.' So he spoke, but for them their tears froze, and the immense impulse of their going was stunned, and their faces were chilled with one pallor. No otherwise, if ever the fasting murmur of a Hyrcanian tigress breathes upon the soft heifers, and the very field is troubled at the sound, a vast fear comes upon all, which one she will choose, on whose shoulders that hunger will climb.

At once their discordant opinion, with various movement, is split: to these it pleases to go round to Thebes and swollen Creon, to these, if the clemency of the Actaean race grant anything; the last of cares and shameful is to return. Here Argia gathers the sudden love of a valour not womanly, and, monstrously laying aside her sex, handles the work: it pleases her — the hard hope of a noble danger! — to approach hand to hand the laws of the unspeakable kingdom, where no daughter of Rhodope nor nursling of snowy Phasis would go, fenced with unwed cohorts. Then she contrives a trick by art, by which she may part herself from her faithful band, and, scorner of her life and reckless with her great grief, may provoke the pitiless gods and the bloody king; piety urges her on, and chaste fires. He himself too is plain before her eyes in every act, now a guest of the wretched woman, now a bridegroom at the first altars, now a gentle husband, now beneath his grim helmet sorrowful in her embrace, and from the topmost threshold often looking back: but no image turns more frequently in her mind than that which, from the blood of the Aonian field, comes naked and demands the pyre. With these furies, anxious in mind, she sickens, and, with the chastest passion, loves the dead man: then, turned to her Pelasgian companions:

'You,' she says, 'make for the Actaean lines and the Marathonian arms, and may Fortune favour the pious labour: let me alone, who was the only cause of so great a ruin, enter the Ogygian homes and bear the first bolts of the kingdom; nor in vain shall we beat upon the deaf thresholds of the savage city: there I have a father-in-law and I have sisters of my husband, and I shall go up to Thebes not unknown. Only do not call back my steps: thither my great impulse and the augury of my mind.' No more, and Menoetes alone — once the guardian and counsellor of her maiden modesty — she chooses, and, though untrained and ignorant of the places, takes her headlong steps the way Ornytus had come. And when she seemed to have left her companions in woe far off, 'Shall I,' she says, 'while you decay through the hostile fields — ah grief! — wait, what the resolve of slow Theseus may be? Whether the chiefs assent to war, whether the soothsayer is favourable? Meanwhile the corpse dwindles. And do we not rather set these limbs beneath the curved birds? And now you complain of me as hard, if any sense remains to you among the shades, of me as slow to the Stygian gods, most faithful one. Alas if still naked, alas if now perhaps buried: each is our crime; is there then no power to the grieving, no Death anywhere, nor savage Creon? You urge me on as I go, Ornytus!' So saying, with great pace headlong she seizes the Megarian fields, each one she meets points out the nearest way and shudders at her aspect and stands in awe of the wretched woman. She goes fierce in look, fearing nothing in heart or ear, and trusting in her too-great woes, and nearer to being feared: as when, lamented through the Phrygian night, Dindyma re-echoes, the maddened leader of the chorus is borne to the stream of pine-bearing Simois, whom the goddess, his blood chosen, herself gave the iron and marked with the filleted bough.

Now father Titan had hidden his car, blazing in the Hesperian flood, to return from other waves, yet she, her heavy toil beguiled by grief, knows not that the day has gone: nor would she be borne through the darkening fields, nor does she break her way through pathless rocks and beams about to slip and the secret places of the woods, black on a clear day, and the new fields cut by hidden ditches, heedless of the ford through the rivers, and past the slumbers of beasts and the dread lairs haunted by monsters, so much do courage and grief avail! It shames Menoetes to go more slowly, and he marvels at the pace of his weak ward, what homes of beasts and men did she not strike with her grievous groaning! How often, as she went, the path was lost, and the solaces of the friendly flame deserted her wandering and the cold darkness overcame her torch! And now the slopes of Pentheus' ridge bend back, wearied, and gape wide far around, when, with panting breast, now nearly failing, Menoetes thus begins his words:

'Not far off, if the hope of my finished labour does not flatter, Argia, I think the Ogygian homes lie, and the pyres that lack a tomb; close at hand the foul air seethes heavy, and the great birds return through the void, this is that cruel ground, nor are the walls far. Do you see how the plain spreads out the huge shadows of the walls, and how the dying fire flickers from the watchtowers? The walls are near; just now the night itself was more silent, and the stars alone loosened the blackening darkness.' Argia shuddered, and stretching her right hand toward the walls: 'City longed for before, now hostile dwellings, Thebes, and yet, if you give back unharmed the shade of my husband, so too you are sweet soil; do you see in what attire I am dressed, with what escort attended, that close to your thresholds first I come, the daughter-in-law of great Oedipus? My vows are not shameless: as a guest I ask the pyre and the lament and the funeral, him, I pray, the exile from the kingdom and routed by war, him, whom you did not deem worthy of his father's throne, give him back to me! And you, I pray, come, if any image exists for the shades and souls wander, freed after the limbs, do you unfold the ways for me, and lead me yourself to your funeral, if I have deserved it!' She spoke, and reaching the shepherd's roof of a nearby hut, restores the breath of the spent fire, and bursts in tumult upon the dreadful fields, as, her torch kindled from the Aetnaean rocks, bereaved Ceres lit up with the changing image of the great flame the Ausonian and Sicilian shore, gathering in the dust the traces of the dark ravisher and the vast furrows; at her frenzied howls Enceladus himself bellows back and lights the ways with bursting fire: the rivers, woods, seas, clouds cry Persephone, only the hall of her Stygian husband is silent of Persephone.

Her faithful guardian warns her, astonished, to remember Creon and to lower her torch in secret stealth, the queen, lately dreaded through the Argive cities, the immense vow of suitors and the most august hope of her race, beneath the hostile night, with no leader and the foe near, alone through the obstacles of arms and the grass slippery with gore, not the darkness, not the encompassing assemblies of shades trembling at, nor the souls bewailing their own limbs, often with blind step she dissembles the iron and the trampled weapons, and her only toil is to have avoided the fallen, while she thinks every corpse her own, and with keen gaze searches out those laid there and turns the prone bodies face up, leaning over, and complains that the stars give too little light.

By chance, through the sleep-bringing shadows of the secret sky, Juno, having stolen herself from the bosom of her great husband, was going to the walls of Theseus, to bend Pallas and open easy Athens to the pious suppliants, and when from the height of the sky she looked back and saw guiltless Argia weary with vain straying through the fields, she grieved at the sight, and meeting the lunar pair turned her face and thus spoke with gentle voice:

'Grant me a small gift as I ask, Cynthia, if any honour for Juno remains; surely at the wicked bidding of Jove you thrice prolonged the Herculean night — but I let go old complaints: lo, here is a chance for service: the most pleasing worshipper of mine, Inachian Argia, do you see by what night she strays, nor can the sick woman find her husband in the dense darkness? And for you too the cloudy radiance grows faint: thrust forth, I pray, your horns, and let your orbit press nearer the earth than is its wont, this one too, who bends the dripping reins for you in your car, let down upon the Aonian watchmen, Sleep.' Scarcely had she said it, when, the clouds rent, the goddess brought forth her great orb; the shades took fright, and the gleam was cut back from the stars; Saturnia herself scarcely bore the flames.

First, through the fields, by the in-poured light, the pitiable woman herself recognizes her own labours by the cloak of her husband, though the weaving is hidden and the purple mourns, suffused with blood; and while she calls the gods and thinks this remains of her dear funeral, she sees the man himself in the dust, almost trampled. Her spirit fled, and her sight and her voice, and grief shut in her tears; then with her whole body she stretches over his face and seeks through kisses the absent soul, and gathers the blood pressed in his hair and garment, to keep it, soon at last, her voice returning:

'Is it you, my husband, set out for your due kingdom, the leader of the war and son-in-law of powerful Adrastus, whom I behold, and is it such triumphs of yours that I meet? Lift hither your cheeks and your failing eyes: there comes to your Thebes Argia; come, lead me into the walls and show your ancestral home and return the mutual hospitality, alas, what do I do? Cast out on the bare turf, this much of your native land you have, what quarrels? Surely your brother does not hold the empire; have you stirred no tears of your own? Where is your mother, where is glorious Antigone of the famous report? For me indeed you lie, for me alone you are conquered! I used to say: whither do you direct your road? Why do you demand the denied sceptre? You have Argos, you will reign in your father-in-law's hall; here is lasting honour for you, here undivided power. Why do I complain? I myself gave the war and sadly begged my father myself, that I might now hold you, such as this, embraced, but it is well, you gods, I am grateful, Fortune; the distant hope of the journey is accomplished: I have found his whole body, ah me, but with how deep a gap the wound descends! Did the brother do this? In what part, I pray, lies that unspeakable plunderer? I shall conquer the birds — let there be power to approach — and shut out the beasts; or does the deadly man have fires too? But neither shall your own land see you destitute of flames: you shall burn and shall have the tears which it is denied to kings to have, and forever, serving your tomb, my deserted faith shall endure, and there shall be a son of grief, and with little Polynices I shall warm the bed.'

Lo, other groans and another torch to the pyres bore pitiable Antigone, having scarcely won the sought exit through the walls; for at all times the watchmen attend her, and the king himself bids her be held, the watches drawn closer and the fire keeping more frequent guard, therefore to the gods and her brother she excuses her delays, and, frantic, when a little the bristling sentry yielded to sent-down sleep, she bursts from the walls: with such a roar as the maiden lioness' wrath terrifies the fields, whose rage at last is free and her first frenzy without her mother, nor did she long delay, for the savage field, and in what dust her brother was laid, she had known: and against her Menoetes sees Argia going, who has the leisure, and checks the groans of his dear ward, yet when the last sound reached the erect ears of the maiden, and when, beneath the black garb and hair, squalid and her face fouled with thick blood, she saw her by the rays of the stars and by both their torches:

'Whose shade,' she says, 'or who, rash, do you seek in my night?' That one for long said nothing, but over her husband's face she casts, and equally over her own, her veils, seized by sudden fear and a little forgetful of her grief, the more chiding the suspect silences, Antigone persists, pressing both the companion and the woman herself; but both fail and stand fixed in silence, at last Argia unveils her face, and yet, embracing the body, declares:

'If you come to seek anything in this old blood of the wars with me, if you too dread the harsh commands of Creon, I can confide and confess myself to you, if you are wretched — surely I see your tears and laments — join, come, join your faith: I am the royal offspring of Adrastus — ah me, is anyone near? — at the pyre of my dear Polynices, though the kingdoms forbid it.' The Cadmean maiden was amazed and trembled at once, and forestalls her as she speaks: 'Me, then — O ignorant chance! — do you fear, the partner of woes, me? You hold my limbs, you bewail my dead. I yield, hold him, alas, shame! the cowardly piety of a sister! This one first—!' Here, fallen together and in an embrace joined over the very man, they eagerly mingle their tears and their hair, and, sharing the limbs, by turns groaning they return to his face, and in alternation take joy of the dear neck. And while now this one recalls her brother, now that one her husband, and beginning in turn they tell over again Thebes and Argos, Argia more at length remembers their wretched fortunes:

'By the holy bond shared in our secret grief, by the allied shades and the conscious stars I swear: not here his lost honours, though a wandering exile, not his native soil, not the heart of his dear mother, you alone did he desire, speaking nights and days of Antigone; I was the lesser care and easy to be left. You, however, perhaps from the lofty citadel, on high, before the crime, giving the standards to the Greek companies, you saw him, and he looked back at you from the very line of battle, saluted with the sword and the nodding peak of his cone: we were far off, but what god drove you to the last wraths? Were your prayers of no avail? Did he deny you this as you begged?' The causes and the sad fates to recount Antigone had begun; her faithful companion warns them both: 'Come, rather, to your undertaking! Already the stars grow pale, troubled by the near day, carry through your labour, there will be time for tears, you shall weep when the fire is lit.'

Not far off the murmurs showed the banks of Ismenos, where it went, still troubled and discoloured with blood. Hither they carry the torn limbs by their joint effort, the feeble women, and the companion, no stronger, joins his arms. So the sisters washed Hyperion's Phaethon, smoking, in the warm Po; scarcely had he been laid in his tomb, and the weeping woods stood by the rivers. When the gore was cleansed in the shallows and the honour of death returned to his limbs, the wretched women, after their last kisses, seek a fire; but cold and lifeless are the embers in the crumbling hollows round about, and all the pyres are at rest. There still stood, whether by chance the pyre, or by the will of the gods, to which it was given to scorch the savage limbs of Eteocles, or whether Fortune was again preparing the place for portents, or whether the Fury had kept the fires that would dissent, here a thin light still living in the black oak both eager women alike saw, and at once rejoiced, with cause for tears; nor yet had they found whose pyre it was, but whoever it is, they pray that it, gentle and mild, admit a sharer of the last ash and mingle the shades.

Lo, the brothers again: as soon as the devouring fire touched the first limbs, the pyres trembled and the new stranger is driven from the tomb; the flames overflow with divided crest and flash their alternate tips with broken light. As if pale Orcus had set the fires of the Furies clashing, each globe is threatening and each strives to reach further; the very beams too, their weight stirred a little, drew apart, and the terrified maiden cries out:

'We are undone, and have goaded with our hand the wraths of the dead. It was the brother: for what savage approach of a guest's shade would drive him off? Lo, I recognize the fragment of the shield and the half-burned belt, it was the brother! Do you see how the flame recoils and yet rushes together? The wicked hatreds live, they live, nothing was done by the war; wretched ones, thus, while you move arms, Creon, surely, has conquered! Nowhere now are the kingdoms, what is this ardour? For whom do you rage? Calm your threats; and you, an exile everywhere, ever destitute of fairness, now yield: this your bride begs, this your sister, or we shall come savage into the midst of the fires.'

Scarcely had she said it, when a sudden tremor shook the fields and the high roofs, and the gaping of the discordant pyre aided it, and the rest of the watchmen was troubled, for whom sleep itself was vexing with the images of woes: 'It crashes,' one says, surveying all the prospect, a soldier with an armed cordon, the old man alone fears them pressing on; but they themselves, before the pyre and openly, confess they have scorned the commands of savage Creon and their stealth, with a clear lament, careless, since they see that every corpse has been brought. A contest is held over the savage death, and the spirited hope of dying rages: this one claims to have snatched her brother's, this her husband's limbs, and in turn they prove it: 'I the body, I the fires, me piety, me love led on.' It pleases them to demand savage punishments and to thrust their right hands into the chains. Nowhere is that reverence which lately was in their alternating words, you would think it wrath and hatred; so great is the discordant clamour on either side, and they are dragged to the king, who is to judge them.

But far off, with Pallas now favourable, to the Actaean walls Juno, going before, leads the Phoronean mothers, astonished, no less than she herself, and reconciles the groaning throng to the peoples, and adds honour to the Athenians. She herself with her hand hands them the olive boughs and the suppliant fillets, and teaches them to lower their eyes beneath the spread cloak and to hold out the empty urns without hands. All the ages, poured out from the Erechthean households, fill the houses and the ways: whence this swarm and so many wretched women at once? Not yet do they know the causes of the woes, and already they groan. The goddess mingles herself in both councils, teaching everything, from what race they sprang, what funerals they bewail, or what they seek; and besides, with various addresses, the women themselves loudly and everywhere murmur much against the Ogygian laws and untamed Creon. The Getic birds complain no more in their guest-roofs with mangled speech, when they cry out the double marriage-chamber and unjust Tereus.

In the midst of the city there was an altar granted to none of the powerful gods; gentle Clemency set there her seat, and the wretched made it sacred; never without a new suppliant was she, never did she condemn any vow with refusal, all who ask are heard, and it is given to come night and day and to appease her power with complaints alone, a thrifty worship: no incense-flame, no deep blood is received: the altars sweat with tears, and above hang the offerings of the cut hair of the mournful and the garments left behind when their lot was changed. A gentle grove is round about, marked with venerable worship, filleted laurels and the suppliant's tree, the olive. But there is no image, no shape of the god committed to any metal; she rejoices to dwell in minds and hearts, always she has the trembling, always the place stands awesome with needy gatherings, only to the fortunate are the altars unknown. The report is that the Herculean grandsons, defended in battle, founded the seat after the burial of their father's divine power, a report less than the deeds: for it is worthy to believe that the heaven-dwellers themselves, to whom Athens was ever a hospitable land, as laws and a new manhood and the rites of worship and the seeds descending hence into the empty earth, so consecrated to the place a common refuge for the suffering living, whence far off might stand the wraths and threats and kingdoms, and Fortune withdraw from the just altars. Even then countless nations knew the altars: hither came those conquered in wars and driven from their native seat, destitute of kingdoms and guilty by the straying of crimes, and they beg for peace; soon the hospitable seat prevailed, and covered the Furies of Oedipus and the funeral of Olynthus, and removed the mother from wretched Orestes. Hither, the people pointing out the place, the anxious band of Lerna come down, and the throng of the wretched who came before give way, scarcely there, their cares calmed, did their hearts find rest: as cranes, put to flight on high by the native North wind, when they have seen Pharos; then they fill the air more widely, then they sound with glad clamour; it gladdens them, the sky serene, to have scorned the snows and to dissolve the frosts in the Nile.

And now, as he comes beneath in his laurelled car to his ancestral home after the hard battles of the Scythian race, Theseus, glad applause and the clamour of the crowd sent up to the stars and the cheerful trumpet announce his completed arms, before the leader are the spoils and, the image of harsh Mars, the maidens' cars and the litters heaped with crests and the sad horses led and the broken battle-axes, with which they were wont to cut the groves and the solid Maeotis, and the light quivers are borne, and the belts fiery with gems and the shapeless shields with the blood of their mistresses. The women themselves, not yet trembling, do not confess their sex, nor groan in common fashion and disdain to pray, and only seek the shrine of unwed Minerva, their first love to behold the victor borne on his snowy four-horse team; and Hippolyte too drew the peoples upon herself, now soft of cheek and patient of the marriage bond with her husband; that she broke the severe customs of her country the Attic women marvel among themselves with sidelong, hidden murmur, that her hair is sleek, that her breast is hidden by her whole cloak, that, a barbarian, she mingles herself with great Athens and comes, about to bear a child, to her enemy husband.

A little the mournful daughters of Pelops moved their step from the altars they had occupied, and marvel at the train and the gifts of the triumph, and, conquered in spirit, returned to their husbands, and when the victor slowed his car and from his proud axle inquires the causes and asks with kindly ear their prayers, daring before the others, the wife of Capaneus:

'Warlike son of Aegeus, for whom the greatest seeds of sudden praise Fortune opens out of our ruins, we are not a foreign race, nor a throng conscious of a dread crime: our home was Argos and our husbands kings, not — would they had been! — also brave! For what was it to set in motion the seven camps and to mend the Agenorean household? Nor do we complain that they were slain: these are the laws of war and the turns of arms; but no monsters born under Sicilian caves, nor the double-formed of Ossa fell in the war. I pass over their race and famous fathers: they were the blood of men, illustrious Theseus, men, created for the same stars, the same allotment of souls, and your nourishment, whom Creon forbids the fire, and from the threshold of the Stygian gate, like the father of the Furies or the ferryman of the Lethaean stream, he removes and detains them beneath the doubtful hinge of heaven and Erebus, alas, Nature the leader! Where are the divine powers, where is that hurler of the unjust bolt? Where are you, Athens? Now the seventh Aurora, rising, turns away from the lying dead with her trembling horses; she bends down her rays and shudders at all the radiance of the star-bearing pole; now hand to hand the very beasts loathe the dreadful fodder, and the birds loathe the field breathing with gore and weighing down the sky and the winds. For how much do I think remains? Let him allow us to sweep the bare bones and the rotting matter, hasten, venerable sons of Cecrops; that vengeance becomes you, before the Emathians and Thracians grieve, and whatever race anywhere exists, to be burned on pyres and to have its last shades, for what limit will there be to his rage? We made war, be it so; but the hatreds fell, and death overwhelmed the grim wraths. You too, as by report we have known your noble deeds, gave not Sinis to savage monsters nor unspeakable Cercyon, and you would have savage Sciron burned. I believe even Tanais smoked with Amazonian tombs, whence you bring back these arms; but deign this triumph too, give to the lands one labour, and to heaven and Erebus, if you have lifted from your native Marathon its fear, if from the Cretan roofs, and if the hospitable old woman shed no vain tears, so may no battles be yours without Pallas as ally, nor may the sacred Tirynthian envy you deeds equal to his own, ever and on your car, ever may your mother behold you exulting, and may unconquered Athens pray for nothing such.'

She had spoken; all take it up and stretch out their hands, praying, with a cry; the Neptunian hero blushed, moved by their tears; soon, stirred by just anger, he cries out: 'What Fury has brought in these new customs of kingdoms? I did not leave these hearts of the Greeks when I departed, when I sought Scythia and the snowy Pontus; whence this new madness? Did you think Theseus conquered, dread Creon? I am here, nor believe me wearied of blood; this spear thirsts still for deserved gore. There is no delay; turn this very steed, most faithful Phegeus, and, carried straightway into the Tyrian citadels, proclaim to the Danaans pyres or battles to Thebes.' So he speaks, forgetting the toils of the war and the road, and exhorts his men and renews their panting strength: as when a bull, his mate and woodland pasture lately won, has laid aside his fights, if by chance the grove bellows with another warrior, though his face and neck are wet with a bloody rain, he prepares fresh arms anew, and provoking the field dissembles his groans and hides his wounds in the dust. Tritonia herself stirred the Libyan terrors and Medusa, the saviour of her breast, when her shield was struck, forthwith all together, erect along the whole column, the snakes looked back at Thebes; nor yet was the Attic soldier preparing to go, and unhappy Dirce took fright at the trumpet-calls.

At once not only the youth was kindled for the fights, who lately returned as comrades of the Caucasian triumph: the whole countryside roused its untrained nurslings to arms. They gather and of their own will follow the standards of the leader, the men of cold Brauron, the men who till the Monychian fields and Piraeus, stable for trembling sailors, and Marathon, not yet famous for the Eastern triumph, sends its hands to arms, hospitable to its kindred gods, the house of Icarius and of Celeus and the green Melaenae, and rich Aegaleos and Parnes, kindly to the vines and groves, and fat Lycabessus, better for the olive, fierce Alaeus comes and the ploughman of fragrant Hymettus, and you, Acharnae, who clothe the rude thyrsi with ivy. There is left, far off, watchable from the Eastern prows, Sunion, whence the Cretan ship deceived wandering Aegeus, about to fall as a name upon the sea, with its false sail. These peoples Salamis, those Ceres' Eleusis sent, bristling with hung-up ploughs, to the battles, and those whom Callirhoe entangles with nine times wandering waves, and he who, conscious of the rape of Orithyia, hid on his banks the Getic loves of Ilissus, the hill itself too is emptied for the fights, where there was a great strife of the gods, until a new tree should rise on the doubtful rocks and break the recoiling sea with its long shadow, and Hippolyte, leading her Northern troops, would have gone to the Cadmean walls: now a sure hope of her swelling womb holds her back, and her husband begs her to dismiss the cares of Mars and to consecrate to the marriage-chamber her deserving quiver.

When the leader sees that these wish for the lines and grow eager with the sweet sword, and that they hastily give kisses to their dutiful children and brief embraces, he thus speaks from his lofty car:

'Cohort about to defend with me the laws of the lands and the covenants of the world, take on minds worthy of the undertaking: on this side it is plain that all the favour of gods and men, and Nature the leader, and the assemblies of silent Avernus stand; there the bands of the Punishments, practiced upon Thebes, and the snake-haired sisters lead the standards, go eager, and trust, I pray, in so great a cause.' He spoke, and his spear hurled, headlong he begins the way: as when cloudy Jupiter has settled upon the Hyperborean poles and shaken the first stars with early winter, Aeolia is broken open, and winter, indignant at the long quiet, lifts its courage and the windy Bear hisses; then the mountains and waves roar, then the battles in the blind clouds and the thunder and the mad lightnings rejoice. Struck, the earth groans, the heavy hoof changes the green fields, and with the countless bands of foot and horse the trampled ground breathes out, nor in the thick dust does the gleam of arms, conquered, perish, but into the air it breaks in a long line, and the spears blaze amid the clouds. So far did they join night and quiet darkness to their work, and a vast contest there was for the men, whither to direct the roused bands, who should cry out Thebes seen from the mound, in whose hand the foremost lance should stand on the Ogygian wall. But far off, with his huge shield, Neptunian Theseus narrows the bands, and on his boss he bears the beginnings of his own glory, the hundred cities and the hundred walls of Crete, and himself, in the windings of the monstrous cave, twisting the bristling neck of the struggling bullock, binding it with alternate hands and his knotted arms about it, and avoiding the horns with his face drawn back, terror holds the peoples, when, fenced with the grim image, he enters the fights: twice they saw Theseus and twice his hands bloody with slaughter; he himself, gazing, recalls his old deeds, and the band of comrades, and the thresholds once to be feared, and the Cnossian maiden growing pale, the thread spent.

But meanwhile savage Creon brings to death Antigone, her hands bound behind with iron, and Adrastus' widowed daughter; both glad and proud with love of death hold their throats out to the swords and defy the bloody king: when, bearing Theseus' words, Phegeus took his stand, he indeed, peace-bringing, with the boughs of innocent olive, but he stirs war and threatens war, roaring greatly, and too mindful of his commission, and that he himself was now near, now covering the mid fields with his cohorts, repeating it; the Theban stood in a doubtful tide of cares, and his threats waver and his earlier wrath grows cool. Then he steadies himself, and smiling grimly through his weeping: 'Did we sanction small lessons,' he says, 'with Mycenae overthrown? Lo, again there are those to assail our walls. We accept it, let them come; but let them not complain after the war: the same law for the conquered.' He speaks; but he sees that with thick dust the day grows dim and that the Tyrian ridges lose their mountains; yet he himself, pale, bids the peoples be armed and arms be borne, and in the seats of the middle hall he sees, in confusion, the sudden Furies and weeping Menoeceus and the Pelasgians rejoicing, set upon the pyres. What was that day? With so great blood at Thebes does the peace newly found perish? Just now they tear from their fathers' gods the fixed arms, and cover their breasts with broken shields, and the humble helmets and the javelins still foul with gore: no one is graced with quivers, none with sword, none worth seeing on horseback; the trust in the rampart fails, every side of the walls lies open, the gates demand defences: the foe holds the higher ground first; the battlements are gone: Capaneus cast them down; the bloodless and sick youth now joins neither last kisses to their wives nor to their sons, and the stunned parents wished for nothing.

Meanwhile the Attic host, when it saw the radiance grow clear, the clouds rent, and the sun upon the first arms, leaps down into the field which, beneath the walls, keeps the bare shades, and drawing deep beneath his helmet the air sickened with dreadful vapours and dust, groans and is inflamed into the just wraths of war. This honour at least the Theban leader granted to the wretched Danaans, that he did not over the very bodies of the fallen mingle warlike lines and a second Mars; or was it that the unspeakable man might lose nothing of the torn carnage, that the raw earth was chosen to drink the savage gore? And now to the battles, by turns, the nations a different Bellona stirs; no clamour on either side, no trumpets on either side: the one feeble youth stands holding its lowered swords in vain and the thongs slack in its right hands; they yield ground, and with arms drawn back they still show the old wounds in their blood. Now the same ardour is not in the Cecropian leaders, and the threats grow languid and the secure valour subsides: as the wrath of the winds is lesser, unless a wood hinders their raging, and the mad waves are silent without a shore.

But when sea-born Theseus lifted the Marathonian oak, whose shadow falls cruelly upon the upraised enemies and the gleam of the spear-point fills the savage field: as when father Mars from the peak of Edonian Haemus has driven his cars, bearing death and flight on his swift axle, so pallor draws the lifeless Agenorids back upon their backs; it wearies Theseus to use his sword upon the fleeing, nor does his right hand deign the easy gore, the rest of his valour rages itself out in plebeian blood, so the lifeless and cast-out prey gladdens the dogs and the degenerate wolves: wrath feeds the great lions. Yet Olenius and Lamyrus, the one bringing weapons from his quiver, the other lifting the weights of a savage stone, he casts down, and the Alcetid brothers, trusting in the triple strength of their kin, as many as he joins in one with spears from afar; Phyleus spent the iron in his breast, Helops bit it in his mouth, Iapyx passed it through his shoulder. And now too he seeks lofty Haemon on his four-horse car, and whirls the dread weapon in his hand: he turned aside his frightened horses; carried with a long sweep the spear passed through two, and thirsted for a third wound as well, but the point was held back in the mid pole. But with his vows alone, with his dreadful cry alone in all the squadrons he longs for and calls upon Creon. And on the opposite front of the war he sees him exhorting the companies with words and vainly threatening to the last; his comrades withdraw: but, bidden, they were leaving Theseus, trusting in the gods and in his very arms; he holds them and calls his men back; and when he marked the equal hatreds on this side and on that, he gathers himself in his last wrath, now raging deadly, and bold with his coming death: 'This is not your fight with shield-bearing girls,' he says, 'do not believe them maidens' hands: here are the raw battles of men, we who sent great Tydeus and raging Hippomedon to death and the breast of Capaneus to the shades, which a headlong madness counselled to war, wicked one? Do you not see those you would avenge, lying low?' So he speaks, and in vain he fixed his doomed missile on the top of the shield, the grim son of Aegeus laughed at his words and his hand, and with the iron-shod tree he makes great casts, and besides first thunders with proud mouth: 'Argive shades, to whom this victim is given, open the Tartarean chaos and prepare the avenging Furies, lo, Creon comes!' So he spoke, and the spear, trembling, scatters the breezes; then where, with hard weft, the fine chains repeat the manifold breastplate, it falls: the impious blood spurted through a thousand openings; he, his eyes loosed in their last straying, sinks, Theseus, grave, stands by and lifting his arms: 'Does it please you now,' he says, 'to give the just fires to the slain enemies, now to cover the conquered? Go, you who shall give the black punishments and yet are secure of a last tomb.'

From either side the standards approach in pious tumult and mingle hands; now treaties amid the war, now Theseus a guest; they beg him to come up to the walls and to deem the homes worthy, nor does the victor enter the hostile roofs with scorn; the mothers and the daughters-in-law of Ogygia rejoice, as Ganges, subdued by the warring thyrsus, already drooping, praised the gentle orgies. Lo, through the opposing shadows of the Dircaean peak a womanly clamour shakes the stars, and the Pelasgian mothers run down: such as the Thyiads, called to the Bacchic wars, frantic, whom you would think to be demanding or to have done some great crime; they rejoice in laments and new tears leap up; the impulse snatches them this way and that, whether they should seek great-souled Theseus first, or Creon, or their own: their widowed mournings lead them to the bodies.

I would not, though some god should loosen my breast with a hundred voices, match so many funerals at once of the crowd and the leaders, so many groans alike, with worthy efforts: in what whirlwind bold Evadne filled herself with the dear fires and sought the bolt in her great breast; in what manner, lying over the kisses of the savage body, the unhappy wife excuses Tydeus; how Argia tells of the cruel watchmen to her sister; with what beating the Erymanthian mother cries for the Arcadian, the Arcadian, keeping his face though his blood was spent, the Arcadian, whom the twin cohorts alike bewept, scarcely could a fresh frenzy and Apollo coming fill all this, and now my ship has earned its harbour after the long sea.

Will you endure far off and, surviving your master, be read, O Thebaid, watched over much by me through twice six years? Now surely present Fame has strewn a kindly road for you and begun to show you, new, to those to come, now great-souled Caesar deigns to know you, now the Italian youth with eagerness learns and recites you. Live, I pray; nor attempt the divine Aeneid, but follow far behind and ever revere its footsteps. Soon, if any envy still spreads clouds before you, it shall perish, and after me your deserved honours shall be paid.