Metamorphoses

My mind moves me to tell of forms changed into new bodies. Gods, since you changed those too, breathe your favor on what I have begun, and spin out an unbroken song from the very first origin of the world down to my own times.

A god, a kindlier nature, settled this strife. He cut the lands off from the sky and the waters off from the lands, and he separated the clear heavens from the thick air. When he had unwound these and freed them from the blind heap, he bound them, each set apart in its place, in harmonious peace. The fiery, weightless force of the vaulted sky flashed upward and made itself a place in the highest citadel. Next to it in lightness and in position is air. Earth, denser than these, drew the heavy elements down with it and was pressed down by its own weight. The encircling water took the outermost place and held the solid globe in check. When he, whichever of the gods he was, had arranged that mass in this way, cut it up, and shaped what he had cut into members, he first rolled the earth into the form of a great ball, so that it would not be uneven on any side.

Then he poured out the seas and ordered them to swell under the rushing winds and to surround the shores of the encircled earth. He added springs as well, and vast pools and lakes, and he bound the down-flowing rivers within slanting banks. Scattered in different places, some of these are swallowed by the earth itself, while others reach the sea, and there, received into the plain of freer water, they beat against shores instead of banks. He ordered the plains to stretch out, the valleys to sink, the woods to be covered with leaves, and the rocky mountains to rise. And as two zones cut the sky on the right and as many on the left, with a fifth hotter than these, so the god’s care marked off the enclosed mass by the same number, and as many regions are stamped upon the earth.

Eurus withdrew to Aurora and the Nabataean kingdoms, to Persia and the ridges that lie beneath the morning rays. The evening and the shores warmed by the setting sun lie nearest to Zephyrus. Bristling Boreas seized Scythia and the seven stars of the Plow. The land opposite is drenched with constant clouds and rain from Auster. Over all these he set the clear ether, which has no weight and holds none of the dregs of earth. Scarcely had he walled everything off within fixed boundaries when the stars, long hidden and pressed beneath that mass, began to blaze out across the whole sky. And so that no region would be left without its own living creatures, the stars and the forms of the gods occupy the floor of heaven. The waters fell to the shining fish to dwell in, the earth took in the wild beasts, and the moving air the birds.note

Still missing was a creature holier than these, more capable of lofty thought, one that could rule over the rest. Then the human being was born. Perhaps that craftsman of things, the source of a better world, made him from divine seed. Or perhaps the earth, newly made and only lately parted from the high ether, still held seeds of its kindred sky, and the son of Iapetus mixed it with rainwater and molded it into the likeness of the gods who govern all things. And while the other animals bend down and look at the ground, he gave the human being an uplifted face and told him to look at the sky and raise his upturned gaze to the stars. So the earth, which a moment before had been rough and shapeless, was changed and put on the unknown shapes of human beings.note

Golden was the first age sown. With no one to enforce it, of its own accord, without law, it kept faith and did what was right. Punishment and fear were absent. No threatening words were read on bronze tablets fixed in place, and no suppliant crowd trembled before the face of its judge. Without anyone to enforce the law, they were safe. Not yet had the pine been felled on its mountains and come down into the flowing waves to visit a foreign world, and mortals knew no shores but their own. Not yet were towns surrounded by steep ditches. There was no straight war trumpet, no curved horn of bronze, no helmet, no sword. With no need for soldiers, nations lived out their gentle leisure free from care.

After Saturn had been sent down to dark Tartarus and the world was under Jupiter, the silver race came in, worse than gold but more precious than tawny bronze. Jupiter shortened the time of the old spring, and through winters, summers, unsteady autumns and a brief spring he completed the year in four seasons. Then for the first time the air glowed white-hot, scorched by dry heat, and icicles hung, bound fast by the winds. Then for the first time people went into houses. Their houses were caves and thick shrubs and twigs bound together with bark. Then for the first time the seeds of Ceres were buried in long furrows, and bullocks groaned under the weight of the yoke.note

Third after that came the bronze race, fiercer in temper and quicker to take up savage arms, but not yet wicked. The last is of hard iron. At once every crime burst into this age of baser metal. Shame fled, and truth and faith, and in their place came tricks and deceits, plots and violence and the wicked love of possessing. The sailor spread his sails to the winds, though he did not yet know them well. Keels that had long stood on high mountains leapt over unfamiliar waves. And the wary surveyor marked out with long boundary lines the ground that had once been common to all, like the light of the sun and the air.

And so that the high heavens would be no safer than the earth, they say the Giants grasped at the kingdom of heaven and piled up mountains to build a way to the lofty stars. Then the almighty father hurled his thunderbolt, shattered Olympus, and shook Pelion off Ossa, which lay beneath it. When those dreadful bodies lay buried under their own mass, they say that Earth, drenched with the copious blood of her sons, was soaked through. She gave life to the warm gore and, so that some memorial of her offspring would remain, turned it into human form. But that stock too despised the gods, lusted for savage slaughter and was violent. You could tell they were born of blood.note

When the father, Saturn’s son, saw this from his highest citadel, he groaned. He recalled the foul feast at Lycaon’s table, not yet widely known because the deed was recent, and conceived in his mind a vast anger worthy of Jupiter. He called a council, and nothing delayed those he summoned. There is a road on high, plain to see when the sky is clear. It is called the Milky Way, marked out by its very whiteness. By this road the gods travel to the halls of the great Thunderer and his royal home. To the right and left, the halls of the noble gods are thronged, their doors thrown open. The common gods live elsewhere, scattered in different places. Here the mighty and illustrious heaven-dwellers have set their household gods. This is the place which, if I may speak boldly, I would not be afraid to call the Palatine of great heaven.note

So when the gods had taken their seats in the marble chamber, he himself, on a higher seat and leaning on his ivory scepter, shook the awesome locks of his head three times, four times, and with them he shook the earth, the sea and the stars. Then he opened his indignant lips in words like these: “I was not more anxious for the rule of the world in that stormy time when each of the snake-footed ones was preparing to throw his hundred arms around a captured sky. For fierce as that enemy was, that war still hung on a single body and sprang from a single origin. Now, wherever Nereus roars around the whole world, I must destroy the race of mortals. I swear it by the rivers below, which glide beneath the earth through the Stygian grove! Everything has been tried first. But a body past healing must be cut away with the sword, so that the sound part is not dragged down too.note

I have demigods, I have rustic divinities: nymphs and fauns and satyrs and the silvani who live on the mountains. Since we do not yet think them worthy of the honor of heaven, let us at least allow them to live in the lands we have given them. Or do you believe, gods above, that they will be safe enough, when Lycaon, known for his savagery, has laid a trap for me, who hold and rule the thunderbolt, who hold and rule you?” They all roared together and, burning with zeal, demanded the man who had dared such things. So too, when an impious band raged to blot out the Roman name in Caesar’s blood, the human race was stunned with terror at so great and sudden a ruin, and the whole world shuddered. Nor is the devotion of your people less pleasing to you, Augustus, than theirs was to Jupiter. When he had checked their murmuring with his voice and hand, they all held their silence. When the clamor had died away, subdued by their ruler’s authority, Jupiter broke the silence again with these words:note

“He has certainly paid the penalty, so put that worry aside. But I will tell you what the crime was and what the punishment. Reports of how evil the times were had reached my ears. Hoping they were false, I glided down from the top of Olympus and, a god in human form, traveled the lands. It would take too long to list how much wickedness I found everywhere. The reports themselves fell short of the truth. I had crossed Maenalus, bristling with the lairs of wild beasts, Cyllene, and the pine woods of chilly Lycaeus. From there I entered the seat and inhospitable house of the Arcadian tyrant, as late twilight was drawing on the night. I gave signs that a god had come, and the people had begun to pray. Lycaon first mocked their pious prayers, then said, ‘I will put it to an open test whether he is a god or a mortal. The truth will not be in doubt.’note

And now he was about to scatter his thunderbolts over all the lands. But he feared that so many fires might set the sacred ether ablaze and the long axis of the heavens might catch fire. He also remembered that it was fated that a time would come when sea and earth and the palace of heaven would be seized by fire and burn, and the besieged mass of the world would collapse. The weapons forged by the hands of the Cyclopes were put away. He chose a different punishment: to destroy the mortal race beneath the waves and send down rain from every part of the sky. At once he shut Aquilo in the caves of Aeolus, together with every blast that chases gathered clouds away, and he let Notus loose. Notus flew out on dripping wings, his terrible face shrouded in pitch-black gloom. His beard was heavy with rain, water streamed from his white hair, mists sat on his brow, and his feathers and the folds of his robe dripped with dew.note

When his hand squeezed the clouds that hung far and wide, there was a crash, and dense rain poured down from the sky. Juno’s messenger, Iris, dressed in many colors, drew up water and brought fresh supplies to the clouds. The crops were flattened, the farmers’ prayers lay wept over and lost, and the labor of a long year perished for nothing. Nor was Jupiter’s anger content with his own sky. His sea-blue brother helped him with waves of his own. He summoned the rivers, and when they had entered their sovereign’s house, he said, “There is no time now for a long speech. Pour out your strength, for that is what is needed! Open your houses, clear away your dams, and give your streams free rein!” He had given the order. They went back, loosened the mouths of their springs, and rolled toward the sea in an unbridled course.

He himself struck the earth with his trident, and it trembled and with the shock opened paths for the waters. The rivers burst their bounds and rushed across the open plains, sweeping away crops along with orchards, flocks and people, houses and shrines with their sacred objects. If any house still stood and could withstand so great a disaster without falling, a higher wave covered its roof all the same, and its towers lay hidden beneath the flood. And now sea and land could not be told apart. Everything was sea, and the sea had no shores. One man took to a hill. Another sat in a curved boat and pulled his oars where he had lately plowed. One sailed over his crops or the roof of his sunken farmhouse, another caught a fish in the top of an elm.

An anchor, as chance would have it, lodged in a green meadow, or curved keels scraped the vineyards below. Where slender goats had lately cropped the grass, ungainly seals now laid their bodies down. The Nereids marveled at groves and cities and houses under water. Dolphins took over the woods, charged into the high branches and buffeted the swaying oaks. The wolf swam among the sheep, the wave carried tawny lions, the wave carried tigers. The boar’s lightning strength was no help to him, nor were swift legs to the stag as he was swept away. The wandering bird searched long for land where it could settle, and finally fell into the sea on weary wings. The boundless license of the sea had buried the hills, and strange waves beat against the mountain peaks. Most were carried off by the water. Those the water spared were overcome by long fasting, for lack of food.

Phocis separates the Aonian fields from the fields of Oeta. It was fertile land while it was land, but at that time it had become part of the sea, a broad plain of sudden waters. There a steep mountain reaches for the stars with its two peaks. Its name is Parnassus, and its summits rise above the clouds. When Deucalion came to rest there with the partner of his bed, carried in a small boat, for the sea had covered everything else, they worshiped the Corycian nymphs, the divinities of the mountain, and prophetic Themis, who held the oracle in those days. No man was better than he or more devoted to justice, and no woman more reverent toward the gods than she. When Jupiter saw the world flooded with standing water, and saw that only one man was left of so many thousands just now, and only one woman left of so many thousands just now, both innocent, both worshipers of the gods, he scattered the clouds, drove off the rain with the north wind, and showed the lands to the sky and the heavens to the lands.note

Even now our hold on life is not secure enough. Even now the clouds terrify my mind. What would you feel now, poor woman, if fate had spared you without me? How could you bear your fear alone? Who would comfort you in your grief? For believe me, if the sea had you too, I would follow you, my wife, and the sea would have me too. Oh, if only I could restore the peoples by my father’s arts and pour souls into molded earth! As it is, the mortal race survives in the two of us. So the gods have willed it, and we remain as the last specimens of humankind.” He had spoken, and they wept. They resolved to pray to the heavenly power and seek help through the sacred oracle.

There was no delay. Together they went to the waters of the Cephisus, which, though not yet clear, were already cutting through their familiar channel. Then, when they had drawn water and sprinkled it on their clothes and heads, they turned their steps toward the shrine of the holy goddess. Its gables were pale with foul moss, and its altars stood without fires. When they reached the temple steps, each of them fell face-down on the ground and, trembling, pressed kisses on the cold stone. Then they said, “If the gods are won over and softened by righteous prayers, if the anger of the gods can be turned aside, tell us, Themis, by what art the loss of our race can be repaired, and bring help, most gentle one, to a drowned world.” The goddess was moved and gave her oracle: “Leave the temple, veil your heads, loosen your girded robes, and throw the bones of your great mother behind your backs.”note

For a long time they stood stunned. Pyrrha was the first to break the silence. She refused to obey the goddess’s command and, her voice trembling, begged her forgiveness, for she was afraid of wounding her mother’s shade by throwing her bones. Meanwhile they went back over the words of the oracle they had been given, dark and hidden in obscurity, and turned them over in their minds and between themselves. Then the son of Prometheus soothed the daughter of Epimetheus with calming words and said, “Either my cleverness deceives me, or oracles are holy and urge no crime. Our great mother is the earth. I think the stones in the earth’s body are what are called her bones. These are what we are told to throw behind our backs.” Though the Titan’s daughter was moved by her husband’s reading, her hope still wavered, so deeply did they both distrust the heavenly counsel. But what harm can it do to try? They went off, veiled their heads, ungirded their tunics, and threw the stones, as ordered, behind their footsteps.note

The stones (who would believe this if antiquity did not stand witness?) began to lay aside their hardness and stiffness, to soften little by little, and once softened, to take on shape. Soon, as they grew and a gentler nature came over them, a kind of human form could be seen, though not yet distinct, like a figure begun in marble, not finished enough and very like rough statues. The part of them that was moist with some juice and earthy was turned to serve as flesh. What was solid and could not bend was changed into bones. What had just been a vein kept the same name. In a short time, by the power of the gods above, the stones thrown by the man’s hands took on the appearance of men, and from the woman’s throw woman was made anew. That is why we are a hard race, inured to toil, and we give proof of the origin from which we were born.note

The other animals, in all their different forms, the earth produced of her own accord. The moisture left from before grew warm in the fire of the sun, the mud and the wet marshes swelled in the heat, and the fertile seeds of things, nourished in the life-giving soil as in a mother’s womb, grew and in time took on some kind of shape. In the same way, when the seven-streamed Nile has left the soaked fields and returned its waters to their old bed, and the fresh silt has been baked by the heavenly star, the farmers turning the clods find a great many animals. Among them they see some just begun, at the very moment of their birth, and some unfinished and lacking their proper parts. Often in one and the same body one part is alive while the other is still raw earth. For when moisture and heat are blended in due measure, they conceive, and from these two everything arises. Fire is at war with water, yet moist heat creates all things, and this discordant harmony is fit for breeding.

He said, and beating the air with his wings he swiftly alighted on the shady height of Parnassus. From his arrow-bearing quiver he drew two shafts with opposite effects: one drives love away, the other makes it. The one that makes it is golden and gleams with a sharp point; the one that drives it away is blunt and has lead beneath the shaft. The second the god fixed in the nymph, Peneus’ daughter, but with the first he wounded Apollo, piercing through his bones to the marrow. At once the one was in love; the other fled the very name of lover. She delighted in the darkness of the woods and the skins of the beasts she caught, a rival of the virgin Phoebe. A ribbon held back her hair, which fell in no order. Many sought her, but she turned away from her suitors, and, intolerant of men and knowing none, she roamed the pathless groves, caring nothing for what Hymen is, or Love, or marriage.note

Yet ask whom you are pleasing. I am no mountain-dweller, no shepherd; I am no shaggy fellow guarding herds and flocks around here. You don’t know, rash girl, you don’t know whom you are fleeing, and that is why you flee. The land of Delphi serves me, and Claros and Tenedos and the palace of Patara. Jupiter is my father. Through me what will be, what has been and what is are revealed; through me songs are brought into harmony with strings. My arrow is sure indeed, but one arrow is surer than mine, the one that has wounded my heart when it was free. Medicine is my invention; throughout the world I am called the Helper, and the power of herbs is subject to me. Ah—love cannot be healed by any herbs, and the arts that help everyone else do not help their master!”note

He would have said more, but the daughter of Peneus ran from him in fear and left him there with his words unfinished—and even then she looked lovely. The winds bared her body, the breezes blowing against her set her clothes fluttering, and a light air sent her hair streaming behind her; her beauty was only increased by flight. But the young god could no longer bear to waste his coaxing words, and, just as Love himself urged, he followed her tracks at full speed. As when a Gallic hound sees a hare in an open field, and one runs for its prey, the other for its life—the one, seeming about to fasten on it, hopes any moment now to catch it, and grazes its heels with outstretched muzzle, while the other is unsure whether it has been caught, snatches itself from the very jaws and leaves behind the mouth that touches it—so it was with the god and the girl: he was swift with hope, she with fear.

The god said to her, “Since you cannot be my wife, you will at least be my tree. My hair, my lyre, my quivers will always have you, laurel. You will attend Latin generals when the joyful voice sings out the triumph and the Capitol sees the long processions. You will stand at the doorposts of Augustus as their most faithful guardian, before his doors, and will protect the oak between. And as my head is forever young, with uncut hair, you too must always wear the lasting honor of your leaves.” Paean had finished. The laurel nodded its newly made branches and seemed to move its top as if it were a head.note

There is a grove in Haemonia, closed in on every side by steep wooded slopes; they call it Tempe. Through it the Peneus, pouring out from the foot of Pindus, rolls on in foaming waters. Its heavy fall gathers clouds that drive along thin mists, showers spray on the treetops, and wearies far more than its neighborhood with its roar. This is the home, this the seat, these are the inner chambers of the great river. Here, seated in a cave hollowed out of rock, he gave laws to the waters and to the nymphs who live in the waters. There the rivers of his country gathered first, not knowing whether to congratulate the father or console him: poplar-bearing Spercheus and restless Enipeus, old Apidanus, gentle Amphrysus and Aeas; and soon other rivers, which, wherever their impulse carries them, lead down to the sea their waters weary with wandering.note

Only Inachus was missing. Hidden away in the depths of his cave, he swelled his waters with his tears and, in utter misery, mourned his daughter Io as lost. He did not know whether she was alive or among the shades; but since he could not find her anywhere, he thought she was nowhere, and in his heart he feared worse. Jupiter had seen her returning from her father’s river and had said, “Girl worthy of Jupiter, who will make some man or other happy in your bed, go into the shade of these deep woods”—and he had pointed to the shade of the woods—“while it is hot and the sun is at its highest in the middle of its course. If you are afraid to enter the lairs of wild beasts alone, you will go safely into the secret places of the woods with a god to protect you—and no common god, but I who hold the great scepter of heaven in my hand, I who hurl the roving thunderbolts.note

Even as a cow she was beautiful. Saturn’s daughter, though against her will, admired the heifer’s looks, and asked, as if she did not know the truth, whose she was, where she came from, and from what herd. Jupiter lied that she had been born from the earth, so that there would be no more questions about her origin. Saturn’s daughter asked for her as a gift. What was he to do? It was cruel to hand over his love, but not to give her would look suspicious. Shame urged him one way, love dissuaded him the other. Shame would have been overcome by love; but if a cow, so trifling a gift, were refused to one who shared his blood and his bed, the cow might seem to be no cow. Though her rival had been given to her, the goddess did not at once lay aside all her fear; she distrusted Jupiter and was anxious that he might steal her away, until she handed her over to Argus, son of Arestor, to be guarded.

Argus had a head ringed with a hundred eyes. Of these, two at a time took their rest in turn, while the rest kept watch and stayed at their post. However he stood, he was looking at Io; even with his back turned, he had Io before his eyes. By day he let her graze; when the sun was deep beneath the earth, he shut her in and put chains around her undeserving neck. She fed on the leaves of trees and bitter grass; instead of a bed, the poor creature lay on the earth, which did not always have grass, and she drank from muddy streams. When she wanted to stretch out her arms to Argus in supplication, she had no arms to stretch out to Argus; when she tried to complain, a lowing came from her mouth, and she was terrified at the sounds, frightened by her own voice.

She came, too, to the banks where she had so often played, the banks of Inachus; and when she saw her new horns in the water, she was terrified and fled in panic from herself. The Naiads did not know who she was; Inachus himself did not know. But she followed her father and followed her sisters, let herself be touched, and offered herself to them as they marveled. Old Inachus had plucked some grass and held it out to her. She licked his hands and kissed her father’s palms, and could not hold back her tears; if only words would come, she would beg for help and tell her name and what had happened to her. Instead of words, the writing her hoof traced in the dust gave the sad proof of her changed body.

“How wretched I am!” cried her father Inachus, and, hanging on the horns and the snow-white neck of the moaning heifer, he said again, “How wretched I am! Are you the daughter I searched for through all the lands? Unfound, you were a lighter grief than you are now that you are found. You are silent and give no words in answer to mine; you only heave sighs from deep in your breast and—the one thing you can do—low in reply to what I say. And I, knowing nothing, was preparing a marriage chamber and wedding torches for you; my first hope was of a son-in-law, my second of grandchildren. Now you must take a husband from the herd, now a son from the herd. Nor may I end such great grief by death; it is my misfortune to be a god, and the door of death, shut against me, stretches out my mourning through all eternity.”

As he lamented like this, starry Argus drove him away and dragged the daughter, torn from her father, off to distant pastures. He himself took up his place on the lofty summit of a mountain, where he sat and watched in every direction. The ruler of the gods could no longer bear the terrible suffering of Phoroneus’ sister. He called his son, whom the shining Pleiad had borne, and ordered him to put Argus to death. It took him only a moment to put the wings on his feet, take the sleep-bringing wand in his powerful hand and put the cap on his hair. When he had arranged this, Jupiter’s son leapt down from his father’s citadel to the earth. There he took off his cap and laid aside his wings; only the wand he kept.note

With it, like a shepherd, he drove through the lonely countryside some goats he had rounded up on the way, and played on pipes of bound reeds. Captivated by the new sound, Juno’s guard said, “You there, whoever you are, you could sit with me on this rock. There is no place where the grass is richer for a flock, and you can see the shade here suits shepherds.” Atlas’ grandson sat down, held back the passing day with his long talk, and tried, by playing on the joined reeds, to overcome the watching eyes. But Argus fought to conquer gentle sleep, and though sleep had been let in by some of his eyes, others still stayed awake. He asked, too—for the pipe had only recently been invented—how it had been invented.

Then the god said, “In the cold mountains of Arcadia, among the hamadryads of Nonacris, there was one Naiad more celebrated than the rest; the nymphs called her Syrinx. More than once she had escaped the satyrs who chased her, and every god that the shady wood and the fertile countryside hold. She worshiped the Ortygian goddess in her pursuits and in her very virginity. Dressed in Diana’s fashion, too, she could fool the eye and be taken for Latona’s daughter, except that her bow was of horn and Diana’s of gold. Even so she fooled people. As she was coming back from the Lycaean hill, Pan saw her, and, his head crowned with sharp pine needles, spoke these words”—it remained to tell the words, and how the nymph, scorning his pleas, fled through pathless country until she came to the calm stream of sandy Ladon; how here, when the waters blocked her course, she begged her sisters of the stream to change her; and how Pan, when he thought he had caught Syrinx at last, held marsh reeds instead of the nymph’s body.note

Saturn’s daughter took the eyes and set them in the feathers of her bird, filling its tail with starry jewels. At once she blazed with anger and did not delay her vengeance. She set a horrifying Fury before the eyes and mind of her Argive rival, buried unseen goads in her breast, and drove her in terror, a fugitive, through the whole world. You, Nile, remained, the last stage of her boundless labor. As soon as she reached it, she sank down on her knees at the edge of the bank, stretched her neck back and lifted her face to the stars—the only thing she could lift—and with groans and tears and mournful lowing she seemed to complain to Jupiter and beg for an end to her sufferings.note

He threw his arms around his wife’s neck and begged her to end the punishment at last, and he said, “Put aside your fears for the future: she will never be a cause of grief to you,” and he called on the Stygian marshes to hear his words. As soon as the goddess was appeased, Io took on her former looks and became what she had been before. The bristles fled from her body, the horns shrank, the round of her eye narrowed, her gaping jaws contracted, her shoulders and hands returned, and the hoof split into five nails and vanished. Nothing of the cow’s form remained in her except her whiteness. The nymph, content now with the service of two feet, stood upright; she was afraid to speak in case she lowed like a heifer, and timidly tried again the words she had so long left off.note

Now she is worshiped as a goddess, most celebrated, by crowds dressed in linen. Now Epaphus is believed at last to have been born from the seed of great Jupiter, and in cities everywhere he has temples joined to his mother’s. His equal in spirit and in age was Phaethon, son of the Sun. Once, when Phaethon was boasting grandly, refusing to yield to him and proud of having Phoebus as his father, the grandson of Inachus could not bear it and said, “You are mad to believe everything your mother says; you are puffed up with the fantasy of a false father.” Phaethon blushed, held back his anger out of shame, and brought Epaphus’ insults to his mother Clymene.note

“To make you grieve the more, mother,” he said, “I, so outspoken, I, so fierce, said nothing. I am ashamed that such insults could be spoken against me and could not be refuted. But if I really am born of heavenly stock, give me some sign of such great descent and claim me for heaven.” He said this, threw his arms around his mother’s neck, and begged her by his own head and Merops’, and by his sisters’ wedding torches, to give him proof of who his true father was. Whether you, Clymene, were moved more by Phaethon’s prayers or by anger at the charge made against you is uncertain. You stretched both arms toward the sky and, gazing at the light of the sun,note

said, “By this radiance, brilliant with flashing rays, which hears and sees us, I swear to you, my son, that you are born of this Sun you are looking at, of this Sun who governs the world. If I am lying, may he himself refuse to let me see him, and may this light be the last my eyes behold. It is no long labor for you to come to know your father’s house: the home from which he rises borders on our land. If your heart is set on it, go, and you will learn the truth from him himself.” At once, after his mother’s words, Phaethon sprang up overjoyed, already grasping the heavens in his mind. He passed his own Ethiopians and the Indians who live beneath the fires of the sky, and eagerly made his way to the place where his father rises.

The palace of the Sun stood high on lofty columns, bright with glittering gold and with bronze that mimicked flame. Gleaming ivory covered its topmost gables, and its double doors shone with the radiance of silver. The workmanship surpassed the material, for there Mulciber had engraved the seas that encircle the lands at their center, the round of the lands, and the sky that hangs over that round. The waters hold the sea-blue gods: tuneful Triton, shifting Proteus, and Aegaeon, his arms clasping the huge backs of whales; Doris and her daughters, some of whom seem to swim, some to sit on a rock drying their green hair, some to ride on fish. They do not all have one face, and yet their faces are not different, just as sisters’ faces should be. The land bears men and cities, woods and wild beasts, rivers and nymphs and the other divinities of the countryside. Above these was set an image of the shining sky, with six of the zodiac’s signs on the right-hand door and as many on the left.note

As soon as Clymene’s son had climbed the steep path there and entered the house of the father he had doubted, he at once turned his steps toward his father’s face, and stood at a distance, for he could not bear the light any nearer. Clothed in a purple robe, Phoebus sat on a throne gleaming with bright emeralds. To his right and left stood Day and Month and Year and the Centuries, and the Hours set at equal intervals. Young Spring stood there, wreathed with a crown of flowers; naked Summer stood there, wearing garlands of wheat-ears; Autumn stood there too, stained from trampling grapes, and icy Winter, shaggy with white hair. From his place in their midst, the Sun, with the eyes that see all things, saw the young man, frightened by the strangeness of it all, and said: “What brings you on this journey? What have you come to this citadel to seek, Phaethon, my son, a son no father would deny?”

He answered: “O light shared by the whole vast world, Phoebus, my father—if you allow me to use that name, and if Clymene is not hiding some fault behind a false pretense—give me proofs, father, by which I may be believed your true offspring, and take this uncertainty from my mind.” He had spoken; and his father laid aside the rays that glittered all around his head and told him to come closer. Embracing him, he said: “You do not deserve to be disowned as mine, and Clymene told you your true origin. And so that you may doubt the less, ask for any gift you like, and you shall have it from my hand. Let the marsh by which the gods must swear, which my eyes have never seen, be witness to my promise.” He had scarcely finished when the boy asked for his father’s chariot, and the right to control the wing-footed horses for one day.note

His father regretted his oath. Shaking his shining head three and four times, he said: “Your words have made mine rash. If only I were allowed not to grant what I promised! I confess, my son, this is the one thing I would refuse you. But I may still dissuade you. What you want is not safe. You ask for a great deal, Phaethon—gifts that suit neither your strength nor years so boyish. Your lot is mortal; what you wish for is not for mortals. In your ignorance you even aspire to more than the gods above may have. Let each of them be as pleased with himself as he likes: no one but me has the power to stand on the fire-bearing axle. Even the ruler of vast Olympus, who hurls the savage thunderbolts with his terrible right hand, could not drive this chariot—and what do we have greater than Jupiter?

He had finished his warnings; but the boy fought against his words, pressed his purpose, and burned with desire for the chariot. So his father, having delayed as long as he could, led the young man to the lofty chariot, Vulcan’s gift. The axle was gold, the pole was gold, gold the rims that curved around the wheels, and the spokes stood in a silver row; along the yoke, chrysolites and gems set in order gave back a brilliant light as Phoebus’ radiance struck them. And while great-hearted Phaethon marveled at it and examined the workmanship, look: wakeful Aurora opened her purple doors in the shining east, and her halls full of roses. The stars fled, their ranks marshaled by Lucifer, who was the last to leave his post in the sky. When Titan saw him make for the earth, and the world grow red, and the horns of the waning moon seem to vanish, he ordered the swift Hours to yoke the horses.note

The goddesses swiftly carried out his orders: from their high stalls they led the four-footed steeds, breathing fire and filled with the juice of ambrosia, and put on them the ringing bridles. Then the father touched his son’s face with a sacred ointment, made it able to endure the consuming flame, and set the rays on his hair; and, drawing up from his anxious breast sighs that foretold grief, he said: “If you can at least obey these warnings of your father, spare the goad, boy, and use the reins more firmly. They hurry on of their own accord; the labor is to hold them back when they are eager. And do not take the road straight through the five zones: the track is cut slantwise in a wide curve, and, keeping within the limits of three zones, it avoids the southern pole and the Bear that is joined to the north winds. Let this be your way: you will see the clear tracks of the wheels. And so that heaven and earth may receive equal warmth, neither press the chariot down nor drive it up through the highest air.

If you go too high you will burn the dwellings of heaven, too low, the earth: you will go most safely in the middle. And do not let the right wheel swerve toward the twisting Serpent, nor the left lead you down to the low-lying Altar: keep between the two. The rest I leave to Fortune; I pray she helps you and takes better thought for you than you do yourself. While I am speaking, dewy night has touched the turning-posts set on the western shore. We are not free to delay; we are summoned. The darkness is put to flight and dawn shines out. Seize the reins in your hand—or, if your heart can still be changed, use my counsel, not my chariot, while you can, while you still stand on solid ground, and while you are not yet, in your ignorance, riding the chariot you so unwisely desired. Let me give the earth the light that you can watch in safety!”

With his young body he took possession of the light chariot, stood upright on it, delighted to grasp the reins put into his hands, and from there thanked his unwilling father. Meanwhile the Sun’s winged horses, Pyrois, Eous, and Aethon, and the fourth, Phlegon, filled the air with fiery neighing and pounded the barriers with their hooves. When Tethys, knowing nothing of her grandson’s fate, pushed these back and the boundless sky lay open to them, they tore along the road, and with their feet moving through the air they cut through the clouds in their way, and, lifted on their wings, outran the east winds that had risen from the same quarter. But the weight was light, not one the Sun’s horses could recognize, and the yoke lacked its usual heaviness. And just as curved ships without their proper ballast roll and are carried unsteadily over the sea because they are too light, so the chariot, empty of its accustomed load, leaped into the air, was tossed up high, and seemed to be empty.

As soon as they felt this, the team of four rushed off and left the well-worn track, and did not run in their former order. He himself was terrified; he did not know which way to turn the reins entrusted to him, nor where the road was; nor, if he had known, could he have controlled them. Then for the first time the cold stars of the Plow grew hot under the rays and tried in vain to plunge into the sea forbidden to them; and the Serpent that lies nearest the icy pole, sluggish before with cold and frightening to no one, grew hot and took on new rage from the heat. You too, Boötes, they say, fled in confusion, though you were slow and your wagon held you back. And when unhappy Phaethon looked down from the height of heaven at the lands lying far, far below, he turned pale, his knees trembled with sudden fear, and in all that light, darkness rose over his eyes.

And now he wished he had never touched his father’s horses; now he was sorry he had learned his parentage and had won his request; now, longing to be called Merops’ son, he was carried along like a pine ship driven before a headlong north wind, whose helmsman, beaten, has let go the helm and abandoned the ship to the gods and to prayers. What was he to do? Much of the sky was left behind his back; more lay before his eyes. He measured both in his mind: now he looked ahead to the west, which fate did not allow him to reach, now he looked back to the east. Not knowing what to do, he was stunned; he neither let go the reins nor had the strength to hold them, nor did he know the horses’ names. Trembling, he also saw marvels scattered everywhere across the varied sky, and the shapes of huge beasts. There is a place where the Scorpion bends its arms into twin arcs, and, with its tail and its claws curving on either side, stretches its limbs across the space of two signs.note

When the boy saw it, wet with the sweat of black venom and threatening wounds with its curved sting, out of his mind with cold fear he dropped the reins. When the horses felt them lying slack across their backs, they bolted, and with no one to check them they went through the air of an unknown region, and wherever their impulse drove them they rushed there lawlessly; high in the heavens they charged into the fixed stars and dragged the chariot through trackless places. Now they made for the heights, now they were carried down steep slopes and pathways into space closer to the earth. The Moon was amazed to see her brother’s horses running below her own, and the scorched clouds smoked. The earth caught fire at every highest point, split open in cracks, and dried up as its moisture was taken away. The pastures turned gray, trees burned along with their leaves, and the dry crops furnished the fuel for their own destruction.

These are small things to lament: great cities perished together with their walls, and the fires turned whole nations, with their peoples, into ash. The woods burned with the mountains: Athos burned, and Cilician Taurus, Tmolus and Oeta, and Ida, dry then though once teeming with springs; Helicon of the maiden Muses, and Haemus, not yet Oeagrian. Etna blazed immensely with doubled fires, and twin-peaked Parnassus, Eryx and Cynthus and Othrys, and Rhodope, at last to lose its snows, and Mimas, Dindyma and Mycale, and Cithaeron, born for sacred rites. Scythia’s cold was no help to it: the Caucasus burned, Ossa with Pindus, and Olympus, greater than both, and the towering Alps, and the cloud-bearing Apennines.note

Then indeed Phaethon saw the world on fire on every side, and could not endure such great heat. He drew into his mouth air as scorching as from a deep furnace, and felt his chariot glowing white-hot. He could no longer bear the ash and the flying cinders, and he was wrapped all around in hot smoke; covered in pitch-black darkness, he did not know where he was going or where he was, and he was swept along at the will of the winged horses. It was then, people believe, that the peoples of Ethiopia, as their blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies, took on their dark skin. It was then that Libya, its moisture snatched away by the heat, became dry; then the nymphs, with hair unbound, wept for their springs and lakes. Boeotia looked for Dirce, Argos for Amymone, Ephyre for the waters of Pirene.

All the ground split apart; light penetrated through the cracks into Tartarus and terrified the king of the underworld and his wife. The sea shrank, and what had just been open sea was a plain of dry sand; mountains that the deep waters had covered rose up and added to the scattered Cyclades. The fish sought the depths, and the curved dolphins did not dare to leap above the surface into the air as they used to; the bodies of seals floated lifeless, belly up, on the surface of the deep. Nereus himself too, the story goes, and Doris and her daughters hid in caves grown warm. Three times Neptune had dared to thrust his arms out of the waters with a scowling face; three times he could not bear the fiery air.

But nurturing Earth, surrounded as she was by the sea, between the waters of the ocean and her springs, which had shrunk on every side and hidden themselves in the bowels of their dark mother, lifted her stifled face, parched, as far as the neck, put her hand to her brow, and, shaking everything with a great tremor, sank down a little lower than she usually is, and spoke thus in a dry voice: “If this is your will, and I have deserved it, why, greatest of gods, do your thunderbolts hold back? If I must perish by the power of fire, let me perish by your fire, and let my ruin be lightened by the one who causes it. I can barely open my throat to say even these words”—the heat had choked her mouth—“look, see my scorched hair, and all the ash in my eyes, all the ash over my face! Is this the reward, is this the honor you pay me for my fertility and my service—that I bear the wounds of the hooked plow and the hoe and am worked all year round, that I provide leaves for the flocks, mild nourishment and grain for the human race, and incense for you gods too?

But suppose I have deserved destruction: what have the waves done, what has your brother done to deserve it? Why are the seas allotted to him shrinking and drawing farther away from the sky? If neither your brother nor I can win your favor, at least take pity on your own heaven. Look around at both: both poles are smoking. If the fire damages them, your halls will fall. Look, Atlas himself is struggling, and can barely hold the white-hot axis of heaven on his shoulders. If the seas perish, if the lands, if the palace of heaven, we are thrown back into the confusion of ancient Chaos. Snatch from the flames whatever is still left, and take thought for the whole universe.” So Earth spoke; for she could no longer endure the heat or say any more, and she drew her face back into herself, into the caverns closer to the dead.

But the all-powerful father called the gods to witness, and the very one who had lent the chariot, that unless he brought help everything would perish in a grievous doom. Then he climbed high to the topmost summit, from which he spreads clouds over the broad earth, from which he stirs the thunder and hurls his brandished lightning. But at that moment he had no clouds to spread over the earth and no rain to send down from the sky. He thundered, poised a thunderbolt by his right ear, and flung it at the charioteer. With one stroke he drove him out of life and out of the chariot, and with savage fire he quelled the fire. The horses panicked. Leaping apart in opposite directions, they wrenched their necks from the yoke and left the broken reins behind. There lay the bridle, there the axle torn from the pole, here the spokes of the shattered wheels, and the remains of the wrecked chariot were scattered far and wide.

But Phaethon, the flames ravaging his red-gold hair, went hurtling headlong and was carried in a long trail through the air, as a star sometimes seems to have fallen from a clear sky even though it has not fallen. Far from his homeland, in another part of the world, the mighty Eridanus received him and bathed his smoking face. The Naiads of the West gave his body, still smoking from the three-forked flame, to a tomb, and they marked the stone with a verse: HERE LIES PHAETHON, DRIVER OF HIS FATHER’S CHARIOT; HE COULD NOT HOLD IT, YET HE FELL IN A GREAT ATTEMPT. For his father, pitiful in his sick grief, had covered and hidden his face. And, if we can believe it, they say that one day passed without the sun. The fires gave light, and that disaster was of some use.note

But Clymene, when she had said everything that had to be said in such great sorrows, mourning and out of her mind, her robe torn at the breast, searched the whole world. She looked first for his lifeless limbs, then for his bones, and found them, but bones buried on a foreign bank! She threw herself down on the place, bathed with tears the name she read on the marble, and warmed it against her bared breast. No less did the Heliades mourn, giving their tears, an empty gift to death. Beating their breasts with their palms, night and day they called on Phaethon, who would never hear their pitiful laments, and they lay stretched upon his grave. Four times the moon had joined her horns and filled her disc, and they, as was their custom (for habit had made it a custom), had raised their lament. Among them Phaethusa, the eldest of the sisters, wanting to throw herself to the ground, complained that her feet had grown stiff. Fair Lampetie tried to come to her, and was held back by a sudden root.note

A third, as she made to tear her hair with her hands, tore away leaves. One grieved that her legs were held fast in a trunk, another that her arms were becoming long branches. And while they marveled at this, bark closed around their groins, and step by step it wrapped their bellies, breasts, shoulders and hands, until only their mouths stood out, calling for their mother. What could their mother do but rush wherever her impulse drew her, here and there, and join her kisses to theirs while she still could? It was not enough. She tried to pull their bodies out of the trunks and broke off slender branches with her hands, but from them drops of blood came flowing, as if from a wound. “Spare me, mother, please,” cried whichever of them was hurt,

Cycnus became a new bird. He did not trust himself to the sky or to Jupiter, as one who remembered the fire unjustly hurled by him. He sought out pools and wide lakes, and, hating fire, he chose to live in rivers, the opposite of flames. Meanwhile Phaethon’s father, unkempt and stripped of his own splendor, as he looks when he fails the world in eclipse, hated the light, himself and the day. He gave his mind over to grief, added anger to his grief, and refused his service to the world. “Enough,” he said. “Since the beginning of time my lot has been restless, and I am weary of my labors, endless and unhonored. Let anyone else drive the chariot that carries the light!

If there is no one, and all the gods confess they cannot, let him drive it himself, so that, at least while he tries my reins, he may for once lay aside the lightning that robs fathers of their sons. Then, when he has felt the strength of the fire-footed horses, he will know that the one who failed to drive them well did not deserve death.” As the Sun spoke like this, all the gods stood around him and begged him in suppliant voices not to bring darkness over the world. Jupiter, too, excused the fires he had hurled, and, like a king, added threats to his pleas. Phoebus gathered up the horses, still frenzied and trembling with terror, and in his pain raged at them with goad and whip. He raged indeed, and reproached them with his son and laid his death to their charge.

But the all-powerful father went around the huge walls of heaven, inspecting them in case anything weakened by the force of the fire should collapse. When he saw that they were firm and kept their strength, he surveyed the earth and the works of men. Yet his own Arcadia was his more pressing care. He restored the springs and the rivers that did not yet dare to flow, gave grass to the earth and leaves to the trees, and ordered the damaged forests to grow green again. As he came and went, back and forth, he stopped short at a girl of Nonacris, and the fire he had caught grew hot in his very bones. It was not her task to soften wool by spinning it, or to vary her hair by arranging it. Once a brooch had fastened her dress and a white ribbon had held back her careless hair, and she had taken up now a light javelin, now a bow, she was a soldier of Phoebe; and no girl who set foot on Maenalus was dearer to Trivia than she. But no favor lasts long.note

The sun stood high, a little past the middle of its course, when she entered a wood that no age had ever cut. Here she took the quiver from her shoulder, unstrung her pliant bow, and lay down on the ground that the grass had covered, resting her neck on her painted quiver. When Jupiter saw her tired and unguarded, he said, “This secret affair, at least, my wife will never know of; or if she does find out, quarrels are worth it, oh, they are worth it!” At once he put on the face and dress of Diana and said, “Girl, one of my own companions, on which ridges have you been hunting?” The girl raised herself from the turf and said, “Greetings, divine one, in my judgment greater,”

Look—Dictynna, walking with her band along high Maenalus and proud of her kill of wild beasts, caught sight of her and, seeing her, called her. At the call she fled, fearing at first that it was Jupiter inside that form. But when she saw the nymphs walking along with her, she realized there was no trick and joined their number. Alas, how hard it is not to betray a crime by one’s face! She barely lifted her eyes from the ground. She did not walk close at the goddess’s side, as she used to, nor at the head of the whole troop, but kept silent, and by her blushes gave signs of her wounded modesty. Were she not a virgin herself, Diana could have sensed her fault from a thousand signs; the nymphs, they say, did sense it.note

The wife of the great Thunderer had long since realized this, and had put off severe punishment to a suitable time. Now there was no reason for delay: already a boy, Arcas, had been born to her rival, and that in itself galled Juno. As soon as she turned her savage mind, along with her gaze, upon her, she said, “Of course this was all that was left, adulteress: that you should be fertile, that the wrong should be made known by a birth, and that the disgrace of my Jupiter should be proven. You will not get away with it. I will take away that shape of yours, you shameless creature, with which you please yourself and please my husband.” She said this, and seizing her by the hair at the front, threw her face down on the ground. She stretched out her arms in supplication: her arms began to bristle with black hair, her hands to curve and grow into hooked claws and to serve as feet, and the face once praised by Jupiter to become ugly with wide gaping jaws.

And so that her prayers and pleading words might not sway anyone’s heart, the power of speech was taken from her; an angry, menacing voice, full of terror, came from her hoarse throat. Yet her old mind remained, even when she had become a bear. Bearing witness to her sufferings with constant moaning, she raised such hands as she had to the sky and the stars, and felt Jupiter’s ingratitude, though she could not put it into words. Ah, how often, not daring to rest in the lonely wood, she wandered in front of her house and in the fields that were once her own! Ah, how often she was driven over the rocks by the barking of hounds, and the huntress fled in terror from the hunters! Often she hid at the sight of wild beasts, forgetting what she was; a bear herself, she shuddered at the bears she saw in the mountains, and she was terrified of wolves, although her father was among them.note

Look—Lycaon’s grandson Arcas arrived, knowing nothing of his mother, with nearly fifteen birthdays behind him. While he was tracking wild beasts, choosing suitable glades and encircling the Erymanthian woods with knotted nets, he came upon his mother. She stood still at the sight of Arcas and seemed to recognize him. He shrank back, and, not knowing, was frightened of her as she kept her eyes fixed on him without end. And as she longed to come closer, he would have pierced her breast with his wounding spear. The all-powerful one held him back, and removed both them and the crime together. Sweeping them up in a swift wind through the void, he set them in the sky and made them neighboring stars.note

Juno swelled with rage when her rival shone among the stars, and she went down into the sea to white-haired Tethys and old Ocean, whom the gods have often held in reverence. When they asked the reason for her journey, she began: “Do you ask why I, the queen of the gods, have come here from my heavenly home? Another holds heaven in my place. Call me a liar if, when night has darkened the world, you do not see stars newly honored in highest heaven, my wounds, there where the last circle, the smallest in extent, surrounds the end of the axis. Is there really any reason why anyone should not want to injure Juno, or should tremble at offending her, when I am the only one who does good by doing harm?note

Oh, what great things I have accomplished! How vast my power is! I forbade her to be human: she has become a goddess. That is how I punish the guilty; that is how great my power is! Let him restore her old face and strip off her beast’s features, as he did before for the Argive Phoronis. Why does he not drive Juno out, marry her, install her in my bedchamber, and take Lycaon as his father-in-law? But you, if the contempt shown to your wronged foster-child moves you, keep the Seven Oxen out of your blue waters, and drive off the stars that were received into the sky as the price of debauchery, so that the mistress may not bathe in your pure sea.”note

The gods of the sea nodded assent. Saturn’s daughter rose into the clear air in her nimble chariot drawn by painted peacocks—peacocks painted as recently, when Argus was killed, as you, talkative raven, were recently and suddenly turned to black wings, though before you had been white. For this bird was once silvery, with snowy feathers, so that he rivaled the doves that are entirely without blemish, and yielded neither to the geese that would one day save the Capitol with their watchful cries, nor to the swan that loves rivers. His tongue was his undoing. Because of his talkative tongue, the color that was white is now the opposite of white.note

In all Haemonia there was none more beautiful than Coronis of Larisa. She certainly pleased you, god of Delphi, as long as she was chaste—or unobserved. But Phoebus’ bird discovered her adultery and, an informer who would not be won over, was making his way to his master to reveal the hidden fault. The chattering crow followed him on flapping wings, to find out everything. When she heard the reason for his journey, she said, “It is no profitable path you are taking: do not despise the warnings of my tongue. Look at what I was and what I am, and ask what I deserved: you will find that loyalty did me harm. For once upon a time Pallas had shut Erichthonius, a child created without a mother, in a chest woven of Attic wicker. She gave it to the three girls born of two-formed Cecrops, and laid down the rule that they were not to look at her secret.note

As she was saying this, the raven answered: “May those warnings bring harm on you, I pray. I scorn your empty omen.” He did not abandon the journey he had begun. He told his master that he had seen Coronis lying with a young man from Haemonia. When the lover heard of the crime, the laurel slipped from his head, and in the same moment the god’s expression, his plectrum and his color all fell away. As his mind seethed with swelling anger, he seized his familiar weapons, bent the bow from its horns and strung it. With an arrow there was no escaping, he pierced that breast which had so often been joined to his own.

When he saw that all these had been tried in vain, that the pyre was being prepared and her limbs were about to burn in the last fires, then he truly groaned. For heavenly faces may not be wet with tears, so he uttered groans drawn from deep in his heart. They were like the groans of a heifer forced to watch as the mallet, poised beside the right ear, shatters with a ringing blow the hollow temples of her suckling calf. He poured unwelcome perfumes on her breast, gave her his embraces, and performed the rightful rites of a wrongful death. Yet Phoebus could not bear that his own seed should sink into the same ashes. He snatched his son from the flames and from his mother’s womb and carried him to the cave of two-formed Chiron. As for the raven, who hoped for a reward for his truthful tongue, Phoebus forbade him ever again to take his place among white birds.note

Meanwhile the half-beast was glad of his foster-child of divine stock and delighted in a burden mixed with honor. Then came the Centaur’s daughter, her shoulders covered with reddish-gold hair. The nymph Chariclo had once borne her on the banks of a swift river and called her Ocyroe. She was not content to have learned her father’s arts. She sang the secrets of the Fates. So when she had taken prophetic frenzy into her mind and grew hot with the god she held shut in her breast, she looked at the infant and said: “Grow, child, bringer of health to the whole world. Mortal bodies will often owe themselves to you. You will have the right to restore souls that have been taken away. But once you have dared this, to the gods’ indignation, your grandfather’s flame will stop you from granting it again. From a god you will become a bloodless body, and then a god again, you who were just now a body, and so you will twice renew your fate.note

You too, dear father, are now immortal, created by the law of your birth to endure through all the ages. Yet you will long to be able to die, when you are tortured by the blood of the dread serpent taken into your wounded limbs. Then the gods will make you, once eternal, subject to death, and the three goddesses will unravel your thread.” There was still more of fate to tell. She sighed from the depths of her breast, tears welled up and slid down her cheeks, and she said: “The Fates forestall me. I am forbidden to say more, and the use of my voice is shut off. My arts were not worth so much, since they have drawn the anger of a god upon me. I would rather not have known the future. Already my human face seems to be slipping away from me. Already grass pleases me as food. Already I feel the urge to gallop over the broad plains. I am turning into a mare, into bodies akin to mine. But why entirely? My father, after all, is only half a horse.”note

As she was saying this, the last part of her lament could barely be understood, and her words were confused. Soon they seemed neither words nor yet the sound of a mare, but of someone imitating a mare. In a short time she let out true whinnies and moved her arms down into the grass. Then her fingers grew together, and a light hoof bound her five nails in one continuous piece of horn. Her mouth and neck lengthened. The greater part of her long robe became a tail, and the loose hair that had lain over her neck turned into a mane falling to the right. Her voice and her face were made new together, and these marvels gave her a new name as well.note

The hero, Philyra’s son, wept and called in vain for your help, Delphic god. For you could not undo the commands of great Jupiter, and even if you could have undone them, you were not there then. You were living in Elis and the fields of Messenia. That was the time when a shepherd’s skin covered you. In your left hand you carried a woodland staff, in your other hand a pipe of seven unequal reeds. While love occupied you and your pipe soothed you, it is said that your cows wandered unguarded into the fields of Pylos. The son of Maia, Atlas’ daughter, saw them, drove them off, and with his special skill hid them in the woods. No one had noticed the theft except an old man well known in that countryside. The whole neighborhood called him Battus. He worked as keeper of the glades and grassy pastures of rich Neleus and guarded his herds of pedigree mares. Mercury was afraid of him. He drew him aside with a coaxing hand and said to him:note

From there the wand-bearer rose up on balanced wings. As he flew, he looked down on the fields of Munychia, on the land dear to Minerva, and on the groves of the cultivated Lyceum. That day, as it happened, chaste girls were carrying pure sacred objects, as was the custom, to Pallas’ citadel for her festival, in garlanded baskets balanced on their heads. As they were returning, the winged god saw them. He did not keep a straight course but bent it round in the same circle. A kite, swiftest of birds, sees the entrails of a sacrifice but is afraid, while the attendants stand thick around the offering. So he wheels in a circle and dares not go farther, greedily circling his hope on beating wings. In just this way the nimble Cyllenian bent his course over the Actaean citadel and circled through the same air.note

Aglauros looked at him with the same eyes with which she had lately seen the hidden secrets of golden-haired Minerva. In return for her service, she demanded a great weight of gold, and meanwhile she made him leave the house. The warrior goddess turned the circle of her grim eye on her and drew a sigh so deep and so violent that it shook both her breast and the aegis lying on that mighty breast. She remembered how this girl had uncovered secrets with a profane hand, back when, breaking the pact she had agreed to, she saw the motherless child of the god who dwells on Lemnos. And now, she thought, the girl would win the favor of the god, the favor of her sister, and riches too, once she had taken the gold she had greedily demanded.note

At once she made for the house of Envy, filthy with black gore. Envy’s home is hidden deep in a valley. It has no sun, and no wind can reach it. It is gloomy and full of sluggish cold, always without fire, always thick with murk. When the warrior maiden, so fearsome in battle, arrived there, she stopped in front of the house, since she may not enter that dwelling, and struck the doorposts with the tip of her spear. Shaken, the doors flew open. She saw Envy inside, eating vipers’ flesh, the food of her vices, and at the sight she turned her eyes away. But Envy got up sluggishly from the ground, leaving the half-eaten bodies of snakes, and came forward with a lazy step. When she saw the goddess, beautiful in her form and her armor, she groaned, and her face twisted as she sighed from the depths.

Envy watched the goddess flee with a sidelong look and gave a low mutter, already resentful of Minerva’s coming success. She took up her staff, wound all over with bands of thorns. Wrapped in black clouds, wherever she went she trampled the flowering fields, scorched the grass and nipped off the tallest blooms, and with her breath she polluted peoples, cities and homes. At last she caught sight of Tritonia’s citadel, flourishing in talent, wealth and festive peace, and she could barely hold back her tears, because she saw nothing to cry about. Once she had entered the bedroom of Cecrops’ daughter, she carried out her orders. She touched the girl’s breast with a hand stained with rust and filled her heart with hooked thorns. She breathed harmful venom into her, scattered the pitch-black poison through her bones, and spread it deep in her lungs.

When Atlas’ grandson had exacted this penalty for her words and her profane mind, he left the land named after Pallas and rose into the air on beating wings. His father called him aside. Without admitting that love was the reason, Jupiter said: “Son, faithful minister of my commands, put off delay and glide down swiftly in your usual course. Make for the land that looks up at your mother from the left; the natives call it Sidonian. There you will see a royal herd grazing far off on the mountain grass. Drive it down to the shore.” He said this, and at once the bullocks, already driven from the mountain, made for the shore as ordered, where the great king’s daughter used to play with the Tyrian girls who were her companions.note

Majesty and love do not go well together, nor do they linger in one place. Setting aside the weight of his scepter, the father and ruler of the gods took on the look of a bull. He whose right hand is armed with three-forked fire, he who shakes the world with a nod, now mingled with the bullocks, lowed, and wandered about in his beauty on the tender grass. His color was that of snow which no hard foot has trodden and no rainy south wind has melted. His neck bulged with muscle, and a dewlap hung down between his shoulders. His horns were small, it is true, but you could argue they had been made by hand, and they were more translucent than a flawless gem. There was no menace on his brow and nothing fearsome in his eye. His face was all peace. Agenor’s daughter marveled that he was so beautiful and that he threatened no fight. Yet gentle as he was, at first she was afraid to touch him. Soon she came close and held out flowers to his white mouth.

And now the god had laid aside the likeness of the deceitful bull, had revealed who he was, and was in the fields of Dicte. Meanwhile her father, knowing nothing of this, ordered Cadmus to search for the stolen girl, and added exile as the penalty if he did not find her: a father loving and wicked in one and the same act. Agenor’s son wandered the whole world (for who could catch Jupiter in his stolen loves?), and as an exile he shunned both his homeland and his father’s anger. He went as a suppliant to consult the oracle of Phoebus and asked what land he should make his home. “In lonely fields,” said Phoebus, “you will meet a cow that has never borne the yoke and is free of the curved plow. With her as your guide, take to the road, and where she rests on the grass, see that you found city walls, and call that country Boeotia.”note

Cadmus had hardly come down from the Castalian cave when he saw a heifer walking slowly along, unguarded, with no mark of servitude on her neck. He followed close behind, tracing her footprints with careful steps, and silently worshiped Phoebus, the guide of his journey. He had already crossed the shallows of the Cephisus and the fields of Panope when the cow stopped. Lifting her handsome brow with its tall horns to the sky, she struck the air with her lowing. Then, looking back at the companions following behind her, she lay down and sank her flank onto the soft grass. Cadmus gave thanks, pressed kisses on the foreign soil, and greeted the unknown mountains and fields. He was about to offer sacrifice to Jupiter, and he ordered his attendants to go and fetch water from running springs for the libation.note

There stood an ancient forest, never violated by an ax. In the middle was a cave, thick with brushwood and osiers, whose fitted stones formed a low arch. It was rich in abundant waters, and hidden in it was the serpent of Mars, conspicuous for its crests and its gold. Its eyes flashed with fire, its whole body swelled with poison, its three tongues flickered, and its teeth stood in a triple row. When the men who had set out from the Tyrian people set their ill-fated steps in this grove, and the pitcher they let down into the water made a sound, the dark-blue serpent thrust its head out from the depths of the cave and gave out horrifying hisses. The pitchers slipped from their hands, the blood drained from their bodies, and a sudden trembling seized their stunned limbs.

When he entered the wood and saw the dead bodies, and above them their victorious enemy, its huge body stretched over them, licking their grim wounds with its bloody tongue, he said, “My most faithful friends, I will either avenge your deaths or share them.” He spoke, and with his right hand he lifted a rock as big as a millstone and hurled it, huge as it was, with a huge effort. Its blow would have shaken high walls with lofty towers. Yet the serpent remained unwounded. Its scales protected it like a breastplate, and with the hardness of its black skin its hide warded off the mighty blow. But that same hardness did not also defeat the javelin. It stuck fast in the middle curve of the supple spine, and the whole iron head sank down into the creature’s guts.

Agenor’s son gave way a little. He took its charges on the lion’s hide and held back the menacing jaws with the point of his spear thrust out in front. The serpent raged, dealing useless wounds to the hard iron and fixing its teeth on the point. And now blood had begun to flow from its poisonous palate and had stained the green grass with its spatter. But the wound was slight, because the serpent kept drawing back from the blow, pulling its injured neck away. By retreating it kept the stroke from settling in and would not let it go deeper. Then Agenor’s son, following it all the way, drove the iron he had planted in its throat until an oak blocked the serpent’s retreat, and the neck was pinned to the trunk. The tree bent under the serpent’s weight and groaned as its trunk was lashed by the end of the tail.

While the victor was gazing at the size of his vanquished foe, suddenly a voice was heard. It was not easy to tell where it came from, but it was heard: “Son of Agenor, why do you gaze at the serpent you have killed? You too will be gazed at as a serpent.” For a long while he stood terrified, having lost his color and his wits together, and his hair stood stiff with icy terror. And look, the hero’s patron, Pallas, gliding down through the upper air, was there. She ordered him to plow the earth and bury the serpent’s teeth in it, the seed of a people to come. He obeyed. When he had opened a furrow with the pressed-down plow, he scattered the teeth over the ground as he was told, a seed of mortal men. Then, past belief, the clods began to stir. First the points of spears appeared from the furrows. Next came helmets nodding with painted crests, then shoulders and chests and arms loaded with weapons rose up, and a crop of shielded men grew.note

So, when the curtain is raised in a theater on a festival day, the figures on it rise up, showing their faces first and then the rest of them little by little, until, drawn smoothly upward, they stand fully revealed and plant their feet on the lower edge. Frightened by this new enemy, Cadmus was getting ready to take up arms. “Don’t take them,” cried one of the people the earth had created, “and don’t involve yourself in civil wars.” With that, he struck one of his earthborn brothers with his rigid sword at close quarters, and he himself fell to a javelin thrown from a distance. The one who had given him over to death lived no longer than he did, and breathed out the air he had only just received. The whole crowd raged in the same way, and in a war of their own these brothers of a moment fell by wounds they gave one another.note

Amid so much good fortune, Cadmus, the first cause of grief for you was a grandson: the alien horns placed on his brow, and you, his hounds, glutted with your master’s blood. But if you look into it properly, you will find that the fault in him was fortune’s, not a crime. For what crime was there in a mistake? There was a mountain stained with the slaughter of all kinds of wild beasts. Midday had shrunk the shadows of things, and the sun stood equally distant from either end of its course, when the young Hyantian called in a calm voice to the companions of his labors as they roamed through the pathless coverts: “Friends, our nets and our spears are wet with the blood of beasts, and the day has had luck enough. When another dawn, riding on saffron wheels, brings back the light, we will take up our planned work again. Now Phoebus stands the same distance from either horizon and is cracking the fields with his heat. Stop the work at hand and take up the knotted nets.” They carried out his orders and broke off their work.note

There was a valley thick with pines and pointed cypresses, called Gargaphie, sacred to Diana of the girded tunic. In its farthest recess was a woodland cave, shaped by no art. Nature, by her own genius, had imitated art, for she had drawn a natural arch out of living pumice and light tufa. On the right a spring splashed, clear with its thin stream, its wide pool ringed by a grassy edge. Here the goddess of the woods, when she was tired from the hunt, used to bathe her virgin limbs in the clear water. When she had come there, she handed her javelin, her quiver, and her unstrung bow to one of the nymphs, her armor-bearer. Another held out her arms to take the robe Diana had laid aside, and two untied the sandals from her feet. Meanwhile Crocale, daughter of Ismenus, more skilled than they, gathered into a knot the hair that was scattered over the goddess’s neck, though her own hair hung loose. Nephele and Hyale and Rhanis and Psecas and Phiale drew water and poured it out of capacious urns.note

And while Titania was bathing there in her usual pool, look: Cadmus’ grandson, his labors put off for a while, came wandering with uncertain steps through the unfamiliar wood and arrived at the grove. So his fate was carrying him. As soon as he entered the cave, wet with spray from the springs, the nymphs, naked as they were, beat their breasts at the sight of a man and filled the whole grove with sudden shrieks. Crowding around Diana, they covered her with their own bodies. But the goddess herself was taller than they and stood above them all from the neck up. The color that tinges clouds struck by the rays of the sun facing them, or the color of a crimson dawn, was the color that came into Diana’s face when she was seen without her clothes.note

Though she was surrounded by the crowd of her companions, she still stood turned to one side and twisted her face back. Much as she wished she had her arrows ready, she took up what she had, the water, and drenched the man’s face. Sprinkling his hair with the avenging water, she added these words, foretelling the disaster to come: “Now you may tell that you saw me with my clothes put off, if you can tell it.” Threatening no more, she gave his sprinkled head the horns of a long-lived stag. She gave length to his neck, sharpened the tips of his ears, changed his hands into feet and his arms into long legs, and covered his body with a spotted hide.

Then the others rushed in, swifter than the rushing wind: Pamphagus and Dorceus and Oribasus, all Arcadians; strong Nebrophonus, and fierce Theron with Laelaps; Pterelas, prized for his feet, and Agre for her nose; fierce Hylaeus, lately gashed by a boar; Nape, sired by a wolf; Poemenis, who had once followed the flocks; Harpyia, with her two pups at her side; Sicyonian Ladon with his lean, tucked-up flanks; Dromas and Canache and Sticte and Tigris and Alce; Leucon with his snowy coat and Asbolus with his black; mighty Lacon, and Aello, strong in running; Thous, and swift Lycisce with her Cyprian brother; Harpalos, his black forehead marked in the middle with white; Melaneus, and Lachne with her shaggy body; Labros and Argiodus, born of a Cretan father but a Spartan mother; Hylactor with his shrill bark; and others it would take too long to name. Eager for their prey, this pack followed over cliffs and crags and rocks with no approach, where the way was hard and where there was no way at all.note

He fled through the very places where he had often been the pursuer. Alas, he fled from his own servants! He longed to shout, “I am Actaeon! Recognize your master!” Words failed his will, and the air echoed with barking. Melanchaetes made the first wounds in his back, Therodamas the next, and Oresitrophus clung to his shoulder. They had set out later than the rest, but had got ahead by a shortcut over the mountain. While they held their master down, the rest of the pack gathered and sank their teeth into his body together. Soon there was no room left for wounds. He groaned, a sound that, though not human, was still one no stag could make, and he filled the familiar ridges with mournful cries.

Opinion was divided. To some the goddess seemed more violent than was fair. Others praised her and called her actions worthy of her strict virginity. Each side found its reasons. Jupiter’s wife alone did not so much say whether she blamed or approved, as rejoice in the disaster of the house descended from Agenor. The hatred she had gathered against her Tyrian rival she transferred to those who shared that woman’s blood. And look, a fresh cause followed the earlier one: she was resentful that Semele was pregnant by the seed of great Jupiter. As she was loosening her tongue to rail, she said, “Yet what have I ever gained by all my railing?”note

With that she rose from her throne and, hidden in a tawny cloud, went to Semele’s threshold. She did not remove the cloud until she had disguised herself as an old woman: she put gray hair at her temples, furrowed her skin with wrinkles, and carried her bent limbs with a tottering step. She made her voice an old woman’s too, and became Beroe herself, Semele’s nurse from Epidaurus. So when, after striking up a conversation and talking for a long time, they came to the name of Jupiter, she sighed and said, “I hope it is Jupiter. But I fear everything. Many men have entered chaste bedrooms using the names of gods. And it is not enough for him to be Jupiter. Let him give a pledge of his love, if he really is the true one. Ask him to embrace you as great and as glorious as he is when lofty Juno receives him, and first to put on his own insignia.”

With such words Juno had molded the unsuspecting daughter of Cadmus. Semele asked Jupiter for a gift without naming it. The god said to her, “Choose. You will suffer no refusal. And so that you may believe it all the more, let the divine power of the Stygian torrent be witness too. That god is the dread even of gods.” Glad of what would harm her, too powerful for her own good, and about to perish through her lover’s compliance, Semele said, “As Saturn’s daughter is used to embracing you when you enter the bond of Venus, give yourself to me like that.” The god wanted to stop her mouth as she spoke, but her hasty words had already gone out into the air. He groaned: she could not unwish her wish, and he could not unswear his oath. So, deeply grieved, he climbed to the high heavens and with a look drew the clouds after him. To them he added storms and lightning mixed with winds, and thunder, and the inescapable thunderbolt.note

While these things were happening on earth by the law of fate, and the cradle of twice-born Bacchus was safe, they say that Jupiter, mellowed with nectar, happened to have put aside his heavy cares. At his ease, he was trading lighthearted jokes with Juno and said, “Your pleasure is certainly greater than the pleasure that falls to males.” She denied it. They decided to ask the opinion of learned Tiresias: he had known love from both sides.note

For once, in a green wood, he had struck with his staff the bodies of two great serpents as they mated, and, changed from a man into a woman—marvelous to tell—he had spent seven autumns. In the eighth he saw the same snakes again and said, “If striking you has such power that it changes the striker’s lot into its opposite, I will strike you now too.” When he struck those same snakes, his former shape returned, and the form he was born with came back. So he was taken as judge of the playful dispute, and he confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturn’s daughter, they say, was more aggrieved than was just or than the matter warranted, and she condemned the eyes of her judge to eternal night. But the all-powerful father, since no god may undo what another god has done, gave him knowledge of the future in return for the sight taken from him, and lightened the punishment with honor.

So when she saw Narcissus wandering through the pathless countryside and grew warm with desire, she followed his tracks in secret, and the more closely she followed, the nearer the flame that warmed her, just as quick-burning sulfur, smeared around the tops of torches, snatches at a flame brought close to it. Oh, how often she wanted to approach him with coaxing words and add soft pleas! Her nature fought against it and would not let her begin. But what it did allow, she was ready for: to wait for sounds to which she could send back words of her own. By chance the boy, separated from his faithful band of companions, had said, “Is anyone here?” and “Here!” Echo had answered. He was astonished, and as he cast his gaze in every direction, he shouted at the top of his voice, “Come!” She called him as he called. He looked behind him, and when again no one came, “Why,” he said,

So he had mocked her, so other nymphs born of waters or mountains, so, before that, gatherings of young men. Then one of those he had scorned raised his hands to the heavens and said, “So may he himself love, and so may he never possess what he loves!” Rhamnusia assented to this just prayer. There was a pool, unmuddied, silvery with shining water, which neither shepherds nor goats grazing on the mountain nor any other herd had touched, which no bird or beast or branch fallen from a tree had disturbed. Grass grew around it, fed by the water nearby, and a wood that would never let the sun warm the place. Here the boy, tired from the effort of the hunt and from the heat, lay down, drawn by the look of the place and by the spring.note

While he drank, seized by the image of the beauty he saw, he was struck with wonder at himself and hung there motionless, his expression unchanging, like a statue carved from Parian marble. Lying on the ground, he gazed at the twin stars that were his eyes, at hair worthy of Bacchus, worthy of Apollo, at his beardless cheeks, his ivory neck, the beauty of his face and the blush mixed with snowy whiteness, and he admired everything for which he himself was admired. Unwittingly he desired himself; the one who approved was himself approved; while he sought, he was sought; he kindled the flame and burned in it at once. How often he gave useless kisses to the deceptive pool! How often he plunged his arms into the water to catch the neck he saw, and did not catch himself in it!

“O woods,” he said, “has anyone ever loved more cruelly? For you know, and you have been a convenient hiding place for many. In all the long ages of your life, through so many centuries, do you remember anyone who wasted away like this? He pleases me and I see him; but what I see and what pleases me, I cannot find—such is the delusion that holds a lover. And to make my pain worse, no vast sea separates us, no road, no mountains, no walls with gates shut: a little water keeps us apart. He himself wants to be held, for every time I have stretched my lips toward the clear water, he has strained toward me with upturned face. You would think he could be touched: it is the smallest thing that stands between us lovers.

While he grieved, he pulled his tunic down from its upper edge and beat his bare chest with hands white as marble. His chest, where he struck it, took on a delicate flush, just as apples often do that are white in part and red in part, or as grapes in their mottled clusters take on a purple tinge when not yet ripe. As soon as he saw this in the water, now clear again, he could bear no more; but as yellow wax melts at a gentle flame, or the morning frost when the sun grows warm, so he, worn thin by love, melted away and was slowly consumed by a hidden fire. And now there was no longer the color of red mixed with white, nor the vigor and strength, nor what had pleased him when he saw it just now, nor did the body remain that Echo once had loved.

Yet when she saw this, though still angry and remembering, she grieved, and whenever the pitiful boy said “Alas!” she repeated “Alas!” with echoing voice, and when he struck his arms with his hands, she gave back the same sound of beating. His last words, as he gazed into the familiar water, were these: “Alas, boy loved in vain!” and the place returned just as many words; and when he said “Farewell!” Echo too said “Farewell!” He laid his weary head down on the green grass; death closed the eyes that marveled at their owner’s beauty. Even then, after he had been received into the world below, he kept gazing at himself in the water of the Styx. His sisters the Naiads beat their breasts in mourning and laid their shorn hair as an offering for their brother; the Dryads beat their breasts; and Echo echoed the mourners. And now they were preparing the pyre, the brandished torches and the bier: the body was nowhere; in place of the body they found a saffron-yellow flower, its center ringed with white petals.

This story, once known, brought the seer well-deserved fame throughout the cities of Achaea, and the prophet’s name was great. Yet one man alone of them all, the son of Echion, Pentheus, a despiser of the gods, scorned him; he laughed at the old man’s prophetic words and taunted him with his darkness and the misfortune of his lost sight. The seer, shaking his temples, white with gray hair, said, “How fortunate you would be if you too were robbed of this light, so that you would not see the rites of Bacchus! For the day will come, and I foresee that it is not far off, when a new god will arrive here, Liber, Semele’s son; and unless you honor him with temples, you will be torn apart and scattered in a thousand places, and with your blood you will foul the woods, and your mother, and your mother’s sisters. It will happen, for you will not honor the god, and you will complain that in this darkness of mine I saw all too much.” As he was saying such things, Echion’s son drove him away.note

Fulfillment followed his words, and the seer’s prophecies came to pass. Liber arrived, and the fields roared with festive howling; the crowd rushed out; mothers and young wives mingled with men, common people and nobles, were swept along to the unknown rites. “What frenzy, you sons of the serpent, offspring of Mars, has stunned your minds?” said Pentheus. “Do bronze cymbals clashing on bronze have such power, and the pipe with its curved horn, and magic tricks, that you, whom no sword of war, no trumpet, no columns with drawn weapons could terrify, are conquered by women’s voices, madness stirred up by wine, obscene mobs and empty drums? Shall I marvel at you, old men, who sailed across long seas and here set up Tyre, here your exiled household gods, and now let them be taken without a battle? Or at you, young men, of a fiercer age and closer to my own, who ought to be holding weapons, not thyrsi, and wearing helmets, not leaves?note

Remember, I beg you, from what stock you were born, and take on the spirit of that serpent who single-handed destroyed many! He died for his springs and his pool: but you must conquer for your good name! He put brave men to death; you must drive out soft ones and keep your fathers’ honor. If the fates forbade Thebes to stand for long, I wish that siege engines and men had torn down its walls, and sword and fire had roared! We would be wretched but without disgrace; our lot would be one to lament, not to hide, and our tears would be free of shame. But now Thebes will be captured by an unarmed boy, who takes no pleasure in wars or weapons or horsemanship, but in hair drenched with myrrh, soft garlands, purple, and gold woven into embroidered robes.

And now the servants came back, bloodied, and when their master asked where Bacchus was, they said they had not seen Bacchus. “But this man,” they said, “a companion and servant of his rites, we did catch”; and they handed over, his hands tied behind his back, a man of the Tyrrhenian people who had once followed the god’s rites. Pentheus looked at him with eyes that anger had made terrible, and though he could barely put off the time for punishment, he said, “You who are about to die, and by your death to be a lesson to others, tell me your name and the names of your parents and your country, and why you practice the rites of this new cult.” Free of fear, the man said, “My name is Acoetes; my country is Maeonia; my parents were humble common folk.note

My father did not leave me fields for hardy bullocks to plow, or woolly flocks, or any herds; he was poor himself, and used to trick leaping fish with line and hooks and land them with his rod. His skill was all his wealth. When he handed his skill down to me, he said, ‘Take what riches I have, successor and heir to my calling’; and dying, he left me nothing but the waters: that is the one thing I can call my inheritance. Soon, so as not to be stuck forever on the same rocks, I learned besides to steer a ship with my right hand on the helm, and I marked with my eyes the rainy star of the Olenian She-Goat, Taygete and the Hyades and the Bear, the homes of the winds, and the harbors suited to ships. By chance, making for Delos, I put in at the shores of the land of Chios, rowing in to the beach with the oars on the right; I made a light leap down and landed on the wet sand.note

“We have lent our ears to your long, winding tale,” said Pentheus, “so that my anger might spend its strength in the delay. Servants, seize him at once, torture his body with dreadful torments, and send him down to the night of the Styx!” Immediately Tyrrhenian Acoetes was dragged away and shut up in a solid-walled building; and while the cruel instruments of the death ordered for him, the sword and fire, were being prepared, the story goes that the doors flew open of their own accord, and of their own accord, with no one loosening them, the chains slipped from his arms. Echion’s son persisted. He no longer ordered others to go, but went himself to where Cithaeron, chosen for the performance of the rites, rang with songs and the clear voices of the Bacchants. As a spirited horse snorts when the warlike trumpeter has given the signal with ringing bronze, and takes on a passion for battle, so the sky, struck by long howls, roused Pentheus, and when he heard the shouting, his anger blazed white-hot again.note

About halfway up the mountain, ringed at its edges by woods, there was an open plain, clear of trees and visible from every side. Here, as he watched the rites with profane eyes, the first to see him, the first to rush at him in a mad rush, the first to wound her own Pentheus with a hurled thyrsus, was his mother. “Oh, my two sisters,” she cried, “come here! That boar, that enormous boar roaming our fields—that boar is mine to strike.” The whole raging throng rushed at the one man; they all converged and chased him as he trembled—trembling now, now speaking less violent words, now condemning himself, now admitting that he had done wrong. Wounded, he still said, “Help me, Autonoe, my aunt! Let Actaeon’s ghost move your heart.”note

But Alcithoe, daughter of Minyas, did not think the god’s rites should be accepted. Still reckless, she denied that Bacchus was Jupiter’s son, and she had her sisters as partners in her impiety. The priest had ordered a festival: servants and their mistresses were to be released from work, cover their breasts with skins, loosen the ribbons in their hair, put garlands on their heads and take leafy thyrsi in their hands. He had prophesied that the anger of the offended god would be savage. Mothers and young wives obeyed. They put away their weaving, their wool baskets and their unfinished spinning, offered incense, and called on Bacchus, Bromius and Lyaeus, the fire-born, the twice-born, the only one with two mothers.note

She wondered which of many stories to tell, for she knew a great many, and could not decide. Should she tell of you, Babylonian Dercetis, whom the people of Palestine believe stirred the waters of their lakes after you were changed in shape and scales covered your limbs? Or rather how her daughter took on wings and spent her last years on white towers? Or how a Naiad, with song and herbs too potent, turned young men’s bodies into silent fish, until she suffered the same fate herself? Or how the tree that used to bear white fruit now bears black, from the touch of blood? She chose this one, since it was not a common tale, and began like this, while the wool followed into her thread:note

After talking like this in vain from their separate sides, they said ‘Goodbye’ at nightfall, and each gave their own side of the wall kisses that did not reach through to the other. The next dawn had put out the fires of night, and the sun’s rays had dried the frosty grass, when they met at their usual place. Then, after many complaints in a low murmur, they decided that in the silence of night they would try to slip past their guards and get out of doors, and once they were out of their homes, they would leave the city buildings behind as well. So that they would not lose their way roaming the open country, they would meet at the tomb of Ninus and hide in the shade of a tree. There was a tree there, a tall mulberry loaded with snow-white fruit, next to a cool spring. They agreed on the plan. And the daylight, which seemed slow to leave, plunged into the waters, and from the same waters night came out.note

Thisbe cleverly turned the door on its hinge, went out into the darkness unseen by her family, and with her face veiled reached the tomb and sat down under the tree they had named. Love made her bold. Then, look, a lioness came, her foaming jaws smeared with the fresh blood of slaughtered cattle, to quench her thirst in the water of the nearby spring. Babylonian Thisbe saw her far off by the light of the moon and fled on frightened feet into a dark cave, and as she fled, she left behind her veil, which had slipped from her back. When the savage lioness had quenched her thirst with plenty of water, she was returning to the woods when she happened to find the thin veil without its owner and tore it with her bloody mouth.

Pyramus came out later. He saw the unmistakable tracks of the beast in the deep dust, and his whole face went pale. But when he also found the veil stained with blood, he said: ‘One night will destroy two lovers. Of the two of us, she was the more deserving of a long life; mine is the guilty soul. I have killed you, poor girl, I who told you to come by night to a place full of terrors, and did not come here first myself. Tear my body apart and devour my wicked flesh with savage bites, all you lions who live beneath this rock!

And now, though she had not yet shaken off her fear, Thisbe came back, so as not to fail her lover. She searched for the young man with her eyes and her heart, eager to tell him of the great dangers she had escaped. She recognized the place and the shape of the tree she had seen, yet the color of the fruit made her unsure: she hesitated, wondering whether this was the one. While she hesitated, she saw, trembling, limbs twitching on the bloodstained ground. She stepped back, her face paler than boxwood, and shuddered like the sea, which trembles when a faint breeze ruffles its surface. But when, after a moment, she recognized her love, she beat her undeserving arms with loud blows, tore her hair, embraced the body she loved, filled his wounds with her tears, mingled her weeping with his blood, and pressing kisses on his cold face

Yet hear this request in the words of us both, you most unhappy parents, mine and his: do not begrudge those whom unwavering love and their last hour have joined to be laid together in the same tomb. And you, tree, who now cover with your branches the pitiful body of one, and soon will cover two, keep the marks of our death, and always bear dark fruit, fit for mourning, a memorial of our twofold blood,’ she said, and setting the point beneath her breast, she fell upon the sword, which was still warm from his death. Yet her prayers touched the gods, and touched the parents: for the fruit, when fully ripe, is dark, and what remained of them from the pyres rests in a single urn.”

She had finished. A brief pause followed, and then Leuconoe began to speak; her sisters were silent. “Even the Sun, who governs all things with his starry light, was captured by love: I will tell of the Sun’s loves. This god is thought to have been the first to see the adultery of Venus with Mars: this god sees everything first. He was pained by the deed, and showed the husband, Juno’s son, the theft of his marriage bed and the place where it happened. The husband lost his wits, and the work his craftsman’s hand was holding dropped from it. At once he filed fine chains of bronze, nets and snares that could deceive the eye (the finest threads could not outdo that work, nor the spider’s web that hangs from the highest beam). He made them respond to the lightest touch and the slightest movement, and set them skillfully all around the bed.note

When the wife and her lover came together on the couch, both were caught and held fast in the middle of their embrace by the husband’s skill and the chains prepared in this new way. The Lemnian at once threw open the ivory doors and let in the gods. There the two lay, shamefully bound; and one of the gods, not at all displeased, wished he might be shamed like that. The gods above laughed, and for a long time this was the best-known story in all of heaven.note

Cytherea exacted a punishment that remembered his betrayal: in her turn, she wounded him who had wounded her secret love, with a love just like it. What good to you now, son of Hyperion, are your beauty, your color and your radiant light? You, who burn all lands with your fires, are burned by a new fire; you, who ought to watch over all things, gaze at Leucothoe, and fix on one girl the eyes you owe to the world. Now you rise too early in the eastern sky, now you sink too late into the waves, and lingering to look at her, you lengthen the winter hours. Sometimes you fail altogether: the sickness of your mind passes into your light, and, darkened, you terrify the hearts of mortals.

Beneath the western sky lie the pastures of the Sun’s horses. Instead of grass they have ambrosia: it nourishes their limbs, tired from their daily service, and restores them for their work. While the horses were grazing there on heavenly fodder and night was taking its turn, the god entered the chamber of his beloved, changed into the likeness of her mother Eurynome. Among twelve maidservants, by lamplight, he saw Leucothoe drawing out fine threads on her turning spindle. So, when he had kissed his dear daughter as a mother would, he said, ‘This is a private matter. Servants, leave us, and do not rob a mother of the right to speak in secret.’ They obeyed; and the god, left in the room without a witness,

The son of Hyperion scattered the mound with his rays and opened a way for you to bring out your buried face. But you could no longer lift your head, nymph, crushed by the weight of earth, and you lay there, a lifeless body. Nothing, it is said, did the driver of the winged horses see more grievous than this since the fires of Phaethon. He tried, indeed, with the power of his rays, to call those cold limbs back to living warmth, if he could. But since fate opposed his mighty efforts, he sprinkled the body and the place with fragrant nectar and, after many laments, said, ‘Even so, you shall reach the sky.’ At once the body, soaked in heavenly nectar, melted and drenched the earth with its fragrance; and a shoot of frankincense, slowly driving its roots down through the soil, rose up and broke through the mound with its tip.

But to Clytie—though love could have excused her resentment, and resentment her betrayal—the author of light came no more, and he put an end to his lovemaking with her. From then on the nymph wasted away, having used her love so madly. Unable to bear her home, she sat night and day on the bare ground under Jupiter’s open sky, bareheaded, her hair uncombed. For nine days, without water or food, she fed her fasting on pure dew and her own tears, and never moved from the ground. She only gazed at the face of the god as he went on his way, and turned her face toward him. Her limbs, they say, stuck fast to the soil, and a ghastly pallor turned part of her color into bloodless leaves; part of her is red, and a flower very like a violet covers her face. Though she is held by a root, she turns toward her Sun, and, changed, she keeps her love.”note

She had finished, and the marvelous tale had captured their ears. Some said it could not have happened; others recalled that true gods can do anything—but Bacchus was not among those. When the sisters had fallen silent, they called on Alcithoe. Running her shuttle through the threads of the upright loom, she said: “I say nothing of the well-known loves of the shepherd Daphnis of Ida, whom a nymph, angry at a rival, turned to stone (such is the resentment that burns in lovers). Nor do I tell how once, when the law of nature was overturned, Sithon was ambiguous, now a man, now a woman. You too, Celmis, now adamant, once most faithful to Jupiter when he was small, and the Curetes born from a heavy rain, and Crocus turned into tiny flowers along with Smilax, I pass over, and I will hold your minds with a sweet novelty. Learn why Salmacis is ill-famed, why it weakens men with its enervating waters and softens the limbs it touches. The cause is hidden; the spring’s power is very well known.note

There was a boy born to Mercury and the Cytherean goddess, whom the Naiads raised in the caves of Ida. His face was one in which both mother and father could be recognized, and he took his name from them as well. As soon as he turned fifteen, he left his native mountains, and, leaving Ida, his nurse, he delighted in wandering through unknown places and seeing unknown rivers, his eagerness lightening the toil. He even went to the cities of Lycia, and to the Carians, Lycia’s neighbors. Here he saw a pool of water shining right down to the bottom. There were no marsh reeds there, no barren sedge, no sharp-pointed rushes: the water was clear, and the edges of the pool were ringed with living turf and grass forever green. A nymph lived there, but not one suited to hunting, not one who would bend a bow or compete in running, the only one of the Naiads unknown to swift Diana.note

Then she began to speak: ‘Boy, most worthy to be believed a god—if you are a god, you could be Cupid; or if you are mortal, blessed are those who gave you life, happy is your brother, and fortunate indeed your sister, if you have one, and the nurse who gave you her breast. But far, far more blessed than all of them is she, if you have a bride, if you will think anyone worthy of the marriage torch. If there is one, let mine be a stolen pleasure; if there is none, let me be the one, and let us enter the same bridal chamber.’ After this the Naiad fell silent. A blush colored the boy’s face (for he did not know what love is), and even blushing became him.

This is the color of apples hanging on a sunny tree, or of dyed ivory, or of the moon reddening beneath its whiteness, when bronze cymbals sound in vain to help her. When the nymph kept demanding kisses, sisterly ones at least, and was already reaching her hands toward his ivory neck, he said: ‘Will you stop? Or I will run away and leave all this to you.’ Salmacis took fright. ‘I give this place up to you freely, stranger,’ she said, and pretended to walk away, turning on her heel, though even then she looked back. Then she hid, concealed in a thicket of shrubs, and dropped down on bended knee. But he, thinking of course that he was unobserved in the empty meadow, strolled here and there, dipped the tips of his toes in the playful water, then went in up to his ankles; and at once, captivated by the warmth of the coaxing water, he took the soft clothes off his tender body.note

Her prayer found its gods: their two bodies were mingled and joined, and a single face was laid over them both, as when someone grafts branches onto bark and sees them unite as they grow and mature together. So, when their limbs had come together in that clinging embrace, they were no longer two, and yet the form was double, one that could be called neither woman nor boy: they seemed neither and both. And so, when Hermaphroditus saw that the clear water into which he had gone down a man had made him half-male, and that his limbs had grown soft in it, he stretched out his hands and said, though no longer in a man’s voice: ‘Father and mother, grant this gift to your son, who bears the names of you both: whatever man comes into this spring, let him leave it only half a man, and grow soft at once at the touch of its waters.’ Both parents were moved, granted the words of their two-formed son, and tainted the spring with an impure drug.”

Her tale was at an end. But the daughters of Minyas still pressed on with their work, scorning the god and profaning his festival. Suddenly unseen drums broke in with their harsh din, and the flute with its curved horn and the jingling bronze rang out. There was a scent of myrrh and saffron, and, past all belief, the looms began to turn green and the hanging cloth to put out leaves like ivy. Part of it turned into vines, and what had just been threads changed into tendrils; vine leaves sprang from the warp; the purple lent its sheen to painted grapes. And now the day was done, and the hour was coming on that you could call neither darkness nor light, but the borderland of dim night with light still in it. Suddenly the house seemed to shake, the oil-fed lamps to blaze, the rooms to glow with red fires, and phantom shapes of savage beasts to howl.

Then indeed the godhead of Bacchus was renowned throughout Thebes, and his aunt told everywhere of the new god’s great powers. Of all those sisters she alone was untouched by grief, except the grief her sisters had caused her. Juno saw her, proud and high-minded in her children, in her marriage to Athamas, and in the god she had nursed, and could not bear it. She said to herself: “A rival’s son could transform the Maeonian sailors and plunge them into the sea, give a son’s flesh to his own mother to be torn apart, and cover the three daughters of Minyas with strange new wings. Will Juno be able to do nothing but weep over her unavenged wrongs? Is that enough for me? Is this my only power? He himself teaches me what to do (it is right to learn even from an enemy). With the slaughter of Pentheus he has shown, enough and more than enough, what frenzy can do. Why should Ino not be goaded on, and follow her kinsfolk’s example into frenzies of her own?”note

There is a downward path, gloomy with deadly yew; it leads through mute silence to the seats below. There the sluggish Styx breathes out mists, and down that way go the new shades, the phantoms of those who have received their burial. The city is roomy, with a thousand entrances and gates open on every side. As the sea receives the rivers from all the earth, so that place receives all souls; it is never too small for any people, nor does it feel the crowd increase. The bloodless shades wander without body or bones. Some throng the forum, some the palace of the lord of the depths, some pursue various crafts, imitations of their former life. Saturn’s daughter Juno brought herself to go there, leaving her heavenly seat, so much did she give way to hatred and anger.

As soon as she entered, and the threshold groaned under the weight of her sacred body, Cerberus raised his three heads and gave three barks at once. She summoned the sisters born of Night, a grim and implacable power. They were sitting before the prison’s doors, which were shut with adamant, combing black snakes from their hair. As soon as they recognized her among the shadows of the gloom, the goddesses rose. The place is called the Accursed Seat. Tityos was offering his entrails to be torn, stretched out over nine acres. For you, Tantalus, no water can be caught, and the tree that overhangs you flees away. You, Sisyphus, either chase or push the rock that is bound to roll back. Ixion turns on his wheel, both following and fleeing himself. And the granddaughters of Belus, who dared to plot death for their cousins, ceaselessly fetch again the water they will lose.note

Saturn’s daughter looked at them all with a grim stare, and at Ixion above all. Then, turning from him to Sisyphus, she said: “Why does this brother suffer endless punishment, while a rich palace houses proud Athamas, who with his wife has always scorned me?” She explained the reasons for her hatred and her journey, and what she wanted. What she wanted was that the house of Cadmus should not stand, and that the sisters should drive Athamas into crime. Commands, promises, and prayers she poured out all together, urging the goddesses on. When Juno had spoken, Tisiphone shook her white hair, disheveled as it was, and tossed back the snakes that hung across her face. Then she said: “There is no need of long, roundabout talk. Count whatever you command as done. Leave this unlovely kingdom and take yourself back to the air of a better sky.”note

Juno went back gladly, and as she was about to enter heaven, Iris, daughter of Thaumas, purified her with sprinkled water. Without delay the relentless Tisiphone took up a torch soaked in blood, put on a robe red with dripping gore, girded herself with a twisting snake, and left her home. Mourning went with her as she went, and Dread, and Terror, and Madness with frantic face. She stood on the threshold. The doorposts of Aeolus’ son, they say, trembled, a pallor stained the maple doors, and the sun fled the place. His wife was terrified by the portents, and Athamas was terrified. They were getting ready to leave the house, but the baleful Fury stood in their way and blocked the doorway. Stretching out her arms, knotted with coils of vipers, she shook out her hair. The snakes rustled as they were tossed; some lay on her shoulders, some slid around her breast, hissing, spewing venom, and flickering their tongues.

Then she tore two snakes from the middle of her hair, seized them in her pestilent hand, and hurled them. They glided all over the breasts of Ino and Athamas, breathing their noxious breath into them. Yet they inflicted no wounds on their limbs: it is the mind that feels the cruel blows. She had brought with her, too, monstrous liquid poisons: foam from Cerberus’ mouth and the venom of Echidna, aimless wanderings and the oblivion of a blinded mind, crime and tears and rage and the love of slaughter, all ground together. She had mixed these with fresh blood and boiled them in a hollow bronze pot, stirring them with green hemlock. While the two of them cowered, she poured the maddening poison into both their breasts and stirred them to their inmost hearts. Then, whirling her torch again and again around the same circle, she quickly made fire chase fire.

So, victorious and her orders carried out, she went back to the empty realm of great Dis and unbound the snake she had girded on. At once Aeolus’ son, raving in the middle of his hall, shouted: “Ho there, comrades, spread the nets in these woods! I just saw a lioness here with her two cubs!” In his madness he followed his wife’s tracks as if she were a wild beast. He snatched Learchus from his mother’s lap as the child laughed and stretched out his little arms, swung him two and three times through the air like a sling, and savagely dashed the baby’s head against a hard rock. Then at last the mother was roused, whether grief did this or the poison spread within her. She howled aloud and fled, out of her mind, her hair streaming, carrying you, little Melicerta, in her bare arms, and cried, “Euhoe, Bacchus!” At the name of Bacchus Juno laughed and said, “May your foster child do you such services as these!”

A cliff overhangs the sea. Its base is hollowed out by the waves and shelters the water beneath it from the rain; its top stands stiff and juts its brow out over the open sea. Ino climbed it (madness had given her strength) and, held back by no fear, threw herself and her burden into the sea; the water, struck, foamed white. But Venus, pitying the ordeals of her blameless granddaughter, coaxed her uncle with these words: “Neptune, power of the waters, to whom fell the dominion next to heaven’s, I ask a great thing, but take pity on my own, whom you see tossed on the vast Ionian sea, and add them to your gods. I too have some favor with the sea, if indeed I was once foam, thickened in the middle of the deep, and my Greek name still comes from it.”note

Neptune granted her prayer. He took from them whatever was mortal and endowed them with an awe-inspiring majesty; he changed both their names and their looks, and named the god Palaemon, and his mother Leucothoe. Her Sidonian companions followed the traces of her footsteps as far as they could, and saw the last of them at the edge of the rock. Thinking her death beyond doubt, they mourned the house of Cadmus, beating their breasts with their hands and tearing their clothes and their hair, and they cast blame on the goddess as unjust and too cruel toward a rival. Juno could not bear their abuse and said, “I will make you yourselves the greatest monuments of my cruelty.” The deed followed the word.

For the one who had been most devoted said, “I will follow my queen into the sea,” and, about to leap, could not move at all, but stuck fast, fixed to the cliff. Another, as she tried to beat her breast in the usual lament, felt her arms stiffen as she tried. One, who happened to have stretched her hands out toward the waves of the sea, now turned to stone and stretched those stone hands toward the same waves. Of another, as she was tearing the hair she had seized from her head, you could have seen the fingers suddenly hardened in her hair. In whatever gesture each was caught, she stayed fixed in it. Some became birds; even now these Ismenian women skim the waters of that gulf with the tips of their wings.

Agenor’s son did not know that his daughter and little grandson were gods of the sea. Overcome by grief, by the long chain of misfortunes, and by the many portents he had seen, the founder left his own city, as if it were the fortune of the place, not his own, that weighed him down. Driven through long wanderings, he reached the borders of Illyria with his wife, who shared his exile. Now, weighed down with sorrows and years, they went back over the first fortunes of their house and talked over their trials again. “Was that serpent sacred,” Cadmus said, “the one my spear pierced through, when, setting out from Sidon, I scattered its viper’s teeth over the ground, a new kind of seed? If the gods’ concern is avenging it with such unerring anger, I pray that I myself may become a serpent and be stretched out into a long belly.”note

He spoke, and like a serpent he was stretched out into a long belly. He felt scales growing over his hardened skin and his body, now black, becoming mottled with dark blue spots. He fell forward onto his chest, and his legs, joined into one, gradually tapered to a smooth point. Now only his arms remained; he stretched out the arms that remained, and with tears streaming down his face, still human, he said: “Come here, my wife, come, my poor unhappy wife, and while something is left of me, touch me and take my hand, while it is a hand, while the snake has not taken all of me!” He wanted to say more, but suddenly his tongue was split in two. Words failed him as he tried, and whenever he prepared to utter some lament, he hissed: this was the voice nature left him. Striking her bare breast with her hand, his wife cried out:

“Cadmus, stay! Unhappy man, cast off these monstrous shapes! Cadmus, what is this? Where are your feet, where are your shoulders and hands, your color, your face, and, even as I speak, everything? Why do you not turn me too, you heavenly ones, into the same serpent?” She finished. He licked his wife’s face and glided into the breast he loved, as if he recognized it, and embraced her and sought her familiar neck. All who were there (their companions were there) were terrified, but she stroked the slippery neck of the crested serpent. And suddenly there were two, and they crawled with coils entwined, until they slipped into the hiding places of a nearby grove. Even now they neither flee from people nor harm them with a wound, and, gentle serpents, they remember what they once were.

Yet for both of them their grandson had provided a great consolation for their changed form: conquered India worshiped him, and Achaea thronged to the temples it had built for him. Only Acrisius, son of Abas, sprung from the same stock, remained to bar him from the walls of his Argive city, to take up arms against the god, and to deny that he was of Jupiter’s race. For he did not believe that Perseus either was Jupiter’s son, whom Danae had conceived from a shower of gold. Yet soon Acrisius (so strong is the presence of the truth) regretted both having outraged the god and having failed to acknowledge his grandson. The one was already set in heaven; the other, bringing back the memorable spoil of the viper-haired monster, was cleaving the soft air on whirring wings. As he hovered in victory over the Libyan sands, drops of blood fell from the Gorgon’s head. The ground received them and brought them to life as snakes of many kinds, and so that land is full of serpents and dangerous with them.note

From there, driven through the vastness by warring winds, he was carried now this way, now that, like a rain cloud. From the high air he looked down on lands far below and flew over the whole world. Three times he saw the frozen Bears, three times the Crab’s claws; often he was swept away to the west, often to the east. And now, as day was falling, afraid to trust himself to the night, he halted in the western world, the realm of Atlas, and sought a brief rest until Lucifer should call forth Aurora’s fires, and Aurora the chariot of day. Here was Atlas, son of Iapetus, surpassing all men in his huge size. Under this king lay the farthest land and the sea that spreads its waters beneath the Sun’s panting horses and receives his weary chariot. He had a thousand flocks and as many herds roaming over the grass, and no neighbors pressed upon his land.

The leaves of his trees, gleaming with radiant gold, covered branches of gold and fruit of gold. “Friend,” Perseus said to him, “if you are moved by the glory of high birth, Jupiter is the author of my birth; or if you are an admirer of great deeds, you will admire mine. I ask for hospitality and rest.” But Atlas remembered an ancient oracle; Themis of Parnassus had given him this oracle: “A time will come, Atlas, when your tree will be stripped of its gold, and a son of Jupiter will have the glory of this plunder.” Fearing this, Atlas had enclosed his orchards with solid walls and given them to a huge serpent to guard, and he kept all strangers away from his borders. To this one too he said: “Go far away, or the glorious deeds you lie about will be far from you, and far from you your Jupiter!”

He added force to his threats and tried to drive him out with his hands, while Perseus lingered and mingled bold words with mild ones. Being weaker in strength (for who could be a match for the strength of Atlas?), Perseus said, “Well, since you think so little of my goodwill, take this gift!” and, turning his own face away, he held out Medusa’s hideous head on his left. Atlas became a mountain as large as he had been: his beard and hair turned into forests, his shoulders and hands became ridges, what had been his head became the peak at the mountain’s top, and his bones turned to stone. Then, enlarged in every part, he grew to an immense size (so you gods decreed), and the whole sky with all its stars rested on him.

Aeolus, son of Hippotes, had shut the winds in their everlasting prison, and Lucifer, who rouses us to our work, had risen, brightest in the high sky. Perseus took up his wings again and bound them to both his feet, girded on his hooked blade, and cleft the clear air with beating sandals. Leaving countless peoples around him and below him, he caught sight of the peoples of the Ethiopians and the lands of Cepheus. There unjust Ammon had ordered the innocent Andromeda to pay the penalty for her mother’s tongue. As soon as Abas’ descendant saw her, her arms chained to the hard rocks, he would have thought her a marble statue, had a light breeze not stirred her hair and warm tears flowed from her eyes. Without knowing it he caught fire and was stunned, and, seized by the image of the beauty he saw, he almost forgot to beat his wings in the air.note

When he had come to a halt, he said, “You who do not deserve these chains, but rather those that bind eager lovers to each other, tell me, since I ask, the name of this land and your own, and why you wear these bonds.” At first she was silent; an unmarried girl, she did not dare to speak to a man. She would have hidden her modest face with her hands if she had not been bound; she did what she could, and filled her eyes with welling tears. When he pressed her again and again, so as not to seem unwilling to confess some fault of her own, she told him the name of the land and her own, and how great her mother’s confidence in her own beauty had been. And before she had told it all, the sea roared, and a monster, coming from the vast deep, loomed up, covering the broad expanse of water beneath its breast.

The girl screamed. Her grief-stricken father was there, and her mother with him, both wretched, but she with more reason. They brought no help with them, only the weeping and beating of breasts the moment called for, and they clung to her bound body, when the stranger spoke: “There will be long years left you for tears; the time for bringing help is short. If I were to ask for her hand as Perseus, son of Jupiter and of the woman whom Jupiter filled, locked away as she was, with fertile gold, Perseus, conqueror of the snake-haired Gorgon, who dared to travel through the airy breezes on beating wings, I would surely be preferred over all as a son-in-law. To such great endowments I am trying to add a service too, if only the gods are kind. I make this bargain: that she be mine if she is saved by my courage.” The parents accepted the terms (for who would hesitate?), and they begged him, and promised a kingdom as her dowry besides.

Look! Just as a ship, speeding along with its beak fixed at the prow, plows the waters, propelled by the sweating arms of young men, so the beast, parting the waves with the thrust of its breast, came on until it was as far from the rocks as a Balearic sling can send its whirled lead shot through the middle air. Then suddenly the young man pushed off from the ground with his feet and rose high into the clouds. When the hero’s shadow was seen on the surface of the sea, the beast raged at the shadow it saw. As Jupiter’s eagle, when it has seen in an empty field a serpent offering its livid back to Phoebus, seizes it from behind and, so that it cannot twist back its cruel jaws, fixes its greedy talons in its scaly neck, so the descendant of Inachus, hurling himself headlong through the void in swift flight, pressed down on the beast’s back and, as it roared, buried his sword in its right shoulder up to the curved hook.

Hurt by the deep wound, it now reared high into the air, now plunged under the water, now turned about like a fierce boar terrified by a pack of hounds baying around it. He escaped its greedy bites on swift wings, and wherever it lay open he struck with his curved sword, now at its back encrusted with hollow shells, now at the ribs of its flanks, now where its tail, at its thinnest, ends in a fish’s. The monster spewed from its mouth waves mixed with crimson blood, and his wings grew wet and heavy with the spray. No longer daring to trust his soaking sandals, Perseus caught sight of a rock whose top stands out when the waters are still and is covered when the sea is stirred. Bracing himself on it and gripping the top of the ridge with his left hand, three, four times he drove his sword through its belly, again and again.

Shouts and applause filled the shore and the high halls of the gods. Cassiope and Cepheus, her father, rejoiced, hailed him as son-in-law, and declared him the help and savior of their house. Freed from her chains, the girl walked forward, both the prize and the cause of his labor. He himself drew water and washed his conquering hands. So that the hard sand might not harm the snake-bearing head, he softened the ground with leaves, spread out twigs that grow under the sea, and laid on them the face of Medusa, daughter of Phorcys. The fresh twigs, their spongy pith still alive, absorbed the monster’s power, hardened at its touch, and took on a strange stiffness in their branches and leaves. The sea nymphs tried the wondrous feat on more twigs and were delighted that the same thing happened, and they produced more by scattering seeds from them over the waves.

When they had finished the feast and their spirits had been opened by the gift of noble Bacchus, Lynceus’ descendant asked about the way of life and the nature of the region, and the customs and character of its men. As soon as he had been told all this, his informant said, “Now, bravest Perseus, tell us, I beg you, with what courage and by what arts you carried off the head with its hair of serpents.” Agenor’s descendant told them that beneath cold Atlas lies a place made safe by the defense of a solid mass of rock. At its entrance, he said, lived twin sisters, the daughters of Phorcys, who shared the use of a single eye. He had stolen it by a clever trick, slipping his hand under it while it was being passed from one to the other. Then, through remote and trackless regions and rocks bristling with rugged woods, he had reached the home of the Gorgons, and everywhere in the fields and along the roads he had seen the shapes of men and beasts, turned from their real selves to stone at the sight of Medusa.note

He himself, however, had looked at the dreadful form of Medusa reflected in the bronze of the shield he carried on his left arm, and while deep sleep held both the snakes and Medusa herself, he had cut the head from her neck. He added how Pegasus, swift on his wings, and his brother were born from their mother’s blood, and he told of the dangers of his long journey, which were no fiction: what seas, what lands he had seen beneath him from on high, and what stars he had touched on his beating wings. Yet he fell silent sooner than they expected. One of the nobles took up the talk, asking why she alone of the sisters had snakes woven in among her locks. The guest replied: “Since you ask about something worth telling, hear the reason for what you ask. She was famed for her beauty and was the envied hope of many suitors, and of all her beauty nothing was more striking than her hair. I have met a man who said he had seen her. The ruler of the sea, they say, raped her in Minerva’s temple. Jupiter’s daughter turned away and covered her chaste face with her aegis; and so that this should not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon’s hair into foul snakes.”

While the son of Danae was telling these things among the gathered Cephenes, the royal halls filled with a roaring crowd. It was not the kind of shouting that celebrates a wedding feast, but the kind that announces savage war. You could compare the banquet, suddenly turned to uproar, to a calm sea that the fierce rage of the winds roughens as it whips up the waves. Foremost among them was Phineus, the reckless instigator of the fighting, brandishing an ash spear tipped with bronze. “Look,” he said, “look, here I am, the avenger of the bride stolen from me! Neither your wings nor Jupiter, turned into counterfeit gold, will snatch you from me now.” As he made to throw, Cepheus cried out: “What are you doing? What madness drives you, brother, raging like this, to such a crime? Is this the thanks repaid for such great services? Is this the dowry you pay for the life of the girl who was saved?note

It was not Perseus who took her from you, if you want the truth. It was the stern divine power of the Nereids, it was horned Ammon, it was the sea monster that was coming to glut itself on my own flesh and blood. She was taken from you at the very moment she was about to die—unless, cruel as you are, you demand exactly that, that she should die, and you will find relief in our grief. Clearly it is not enough that she was chained up while you looked on, and that you, her uncle and her betrothed, brought her no help at all. Will you also resent that anyone saved her, and snatch away his reward? If it seems so great to you, you should have claimed it from those rocks it was fastened to. Now let the man who did claim it, the man who saved my old age from childlessness, take what he bargained for by his deeds and by his word; and understand that he was preferred not to you, but to certain death!”note

Phineus said nothing in reply. Looking from Cepheus to Perseus and back again, he did not know whether to aim at the one or the other; then, after a brief hesitation, he hurled his spear, whirled with all the strength his anger gave him, at Perseus—in vain. When it stuck in the couch, then at last Perseus leaped up from the cushions, and, fiercely sending the weapon back, he would have burst open his enemy’s chest, had Phineus not gone behind the altar: and (outrageous!) the altar served the criminal. Still, the point did not strike for nothing: it lodged in Rhoetus’ forehead. When he fell and the iron was wrenched out of the bone, he kicked and spattered the laden tables with blood. Then indeed the mob blazed into uncontrollable anger. They hurled their weapons, and there were some who said that Cepheus ought to die along with his son-in-law. But Cepheus had gone out over the threshold of the house, calling justice and good faith and the gods of hospitality to witness that this was being stirred up against his will.

Warlike Pallas was there; she shielded her brother with the aegis and gave him courage. There was an Indian, Athis, whom Limnaee, daughter of the river Ganges, was believed to have borne beneath its glassy waters. He was outstanding in beauty, which he enhanced with rich dress, still untouched at twice eight years of age. He wore a Tyrian cloak edged with a golden border; gilded necklaces adorned his neck, and a curved band his hair, wet with myrrh. He was skilled at hitting targets however distant with a thrown javelin, but more skilled still at drawing the bow. And now, as he was bending its pliant horns with his hand, Perseus struck him with a log that lay smoking in the middle of the altar, and smashed his face into its broken bones.

When Assyrian Lycabas saw him rolling that much-praised face in his blood—Lycabas, his closest companion, who made no secret of his true love—he first lamented Athis as he breathed out his life under the cruel wound, then seized the bow Athis had drawn and said: “Let your fight be with me. You will not rejoice for long in the boy’s death, which brings you more hatred than glory.” He had not yet finished saying all this when the piercing arrow flashed from the string; but it was dodged, and it hung caught in the folds of Perseus’ clothing. Acrisius’ grandson turned on him the curved sword proven in the slaughter of Medusa and drove it into his chest. But Lycabas, already dying, his eyes swimming in black night, looked around for Athis, leaned himself against him, and carried down to the shades the comfort of a death they shared.

Look: Phorbas of Syene, son of Metion, and Amphimedon of Libya, eager to join battle, had slipped and fallen in the blood that soaked the ground far and wide and kept it warm. As they rose, the sword met them, driven into the ribs of one and the throat of Phorbas. But Erytus, son of Actor, whose weapon was a broad double axe, Perseus did not attack with his hooked sword. Instead he lifted with both hands a huge mixing bowl, standing out with figures in high relief and enormously heavy, and dashed it against the man. Erytus vomited red gore and, falling on his back, beat the ground with his dying head. Next Perseus laid low Polydegmon, sprung from the blood of Semiramis, and Abaris of the Caucasus, and Lycetus, son of Spercheus, and long-haired Helices, and Phlegyas and Clytus, and he trampled the heaps he had piled up of the dying.

Phineus, not daring to meet his enemy hand to hand, hurled a javelin. A wild throw carried it onto Idas, who had kept out of the fighting in vain and had followed neither side. Glaring with fierce eyes at pitiless Phineus, Idas said: “Since I am dragged into taking sides, Phineus, take the enemy you have made, and pay for this wound with a wound!” And just as he was about to send back the weapon he had pulled from his wound, he collapsed, falling on limbs drained of blood. Here too Hodites, first among the Cephenes after the king, lay dead by Clymenus’ sword; Hypseus struck Prothoenor, and Lynceus’ descendant struck Hypseus. Among them too was aged Emathion, a lover of justice who feared the gods. Since his years kept him from fighting, he fought with words: he went at them and cursed their criminal arms.

As he clung to the altar with trembling hands, Chromis struck off his head with a sword. It fell straight onto the altar, and there, with half-living tongue, it uttered curses and breathed out its life into the midst of the flames. Next the twin brothers Broteas and Ammon, unbeaten with the boxing gloves—if swords could be beaten by boxing gloves—fell by Phineus’ hand, and so did Ampycus, priest of Ceres, his temples wrapped in a white headband. You too, son of Lampetus, were not meant for uses like these: you were the one who, in the work of peace, played the lyre as you sang, and you had been bidden to grace the banquet and the feast with your song. As he stood far off, holding a plectrum unfit for war, Pettalus mocked him: “Sing the rest to the Stygian shades,” he said, and drove his blade into his left temple. He collapsed, and with dying fingers he tried the strings of the lyre again; and by chance it made a pitiful song.

Fierce Lycormas did not let him fall unavenged. Tearing the sturdy bar from the right-hand doorpost, he smashed it against the bones in the middle of Pettalus’ neck, and Pettalus fell forward to the ground like a slaughtered bullock. Pelates, from the Cinyps, was trying to wrench the oak bar from the left-hand doorpost too; as he tried, his right hand was pinned by the spear of Corythus the Marmarid and stuck fast to the wood. As he hung there, Abas pierced his side. He did not fall, but, dying, hung from the post that held his hand. Menaleus too was struck down, who had taken Perseus’ side, and Dorylas, the richest man in Nasamonian land—Dorylas, rich in land, than whom no one possessed broader acres or raised so many heaps of incense. A weapon, thrown at a slant, stuck in his groin: that spot is deadly. When the author of the wound, Bactrian Halcyoneus, saw him gasping out his life and rolling his eyes, he said, “Out of all your lands, keep this much earth that you are lying on,” and left the bloodless body.

At him Abas’ descendant, avenging Dorylas, hurled the spear snatched from the warm wound. It entered at the middle of his nose, was driven out through his neck, and stuck out on both sides. And while Fortune favored his hand, he laid low Clytius and Clanis, born of one mother, with different wounds: the heavy ash spear, poised by his powerful arm, was driven through both of Clytius’ thighs, while Clanis bit on a javelin with his mouth. Celadon of Mendes died too; Astreus died, born of a Palestinian mother and an uncertain father; and Aethion, once shrewd at foreseeing what was to come, but deceived then by a false bird omen; and Thoactes, the king’s armor-bearer; and Agyrtes, notorious for killing his father.

Yet more remained than had been done. All of them had one aim, to crush one man; on every side sworn bands fought for a cause that made war on merit and good faith. On Perseus’ side were his father-in-law, dutiful in vain, and his new bride with her mother: they cheered him on and filled the halls with wailing. But the clash of arms and the groans of the falling drowned them out, and Bellona drenched the household gods, already defiled, with streams of blood and stirred up the battle afresh. Phineus and a thousand followers of Phineus surrounded the one man. Weapons flew thicker than winter hail past both his sides and past his eyes and ears. He set his shoulders against the stone of a great column, and, keeping his back safe and facing the ranks opposed to him, he held off his attackers. Pressing him on the left was Molpeus the Chaonian, on the right Echemmon the Nabataean.note

“Find someone else to be moved by your marvels,” said Thescelus; and as he was preparing to hurl a deadly javelin, he froze in that pose, a statue of marble. Next to him, Ampyx aimed his sword at the breast of Lynceus’ descendant, a breast full of great courage; and in the act of aiming his right hand stiffened and moved neither forward nor back. But Nileus, who had falsely claimed to be the son of the sevenfold Nile and had engraved seven rivers on his shield as well, partly in silver, partly in gold, said: “Look, Perseus, at the origins of our race! You will carry a great consolation for your death down to the silent shades: that you fell by so great a man.” The last part of his speech was choked off in mid-sound; you would think his open mouth was trying to speak, but it gave no passage to words.

Eryx rebuked them. “It is your own lack of spirit,” he said, “not the Gorgon’s power, that numbs you. Charge with me, and lay low on the ground this youth who wields magic weapons!” He was about to charge: the ground held his feet fast, and he remained a motionless stone, an armed statue. These men, though, suffered the punishment they deserved. But there was one soldier of Perseus’, Aconteus, who, while fighting for him, caught sight of the Gorgon and hardened as stone spread over him. Astyages, thinking he was still alive, struck him with his long sword: the sword rang with shrill clangs. While Astyages stood amazed, he took on the same nature, and the look of wonder stayed on his marble face. It would take too long to name the men from the rank and file: two hundred bodies were left for the fight; two hundred bodies grew stiff at the sight of the Gorgon.

Then at last Phineus regretted his unjust war. But what could he do? He saw statues in every kind of posture and recognized his own men; he called on each by name and begged for help, and, hardly believing it, he touched the bodies nearest him: they were marble. He turned away, and so, a suppliant, holding out hands that admitted defeat and arms stretched out sideways, he said: “You win, Perseus. Take away your horrors; that stone-making face of your Medusa, whoever she is—take it away, I beg you. It was not hatred or desire for the kingdom that drove us to war: we took up arms for a bride. Your claim was better in merit, ours in time. I am sorry I did not give way. Grant me nothing, bravest of men, except this life; let everything else be yours.”

As he said this, not daring to look at the man he was entreating, Perseus replied: “What I can grant, most cowardly Phineus—and it is a great gift for a coward—I will grant (put away your fear): no blade shall harm you. Indeed, I will give you a monument to last through the ages, and you will always be on display in my father-in-law’s house, so that my wife may console herself with the image of her betrothed.” He said this, and moved the daughter of Phorcys to the side toward which Phineus had turned his trembling face. Then too, as Phineus struggled to turn his eyes away, his neck stiffened, and the moisture of his eyes hardened into stone. But still the cowardly mouth, the suppliant look in marble, the lowered hands and the cringing expression remained.

Victorious, Abas’ descendant entered his ancestral walls with his wife, and, as champion and avenger of his undeserving grandfather, he attacked Proetus; for Proetus had driven his brother out by force of arms and seized the citadel of Acrisius. But neither the help of arms nor the citadel he had wrongfully taken let him overcome the grim eyes of the snake-bearing monster. Yet you, Polydectes, ruler of little Seriphos, were not softened either by the young man’s courage, proven in so many labors, or by his sufferings: hard as you are, you went on with your implacable hatred, and there was no end to your unjust anger. You even belittled his glory and claimed that Medusa’s death was a fiction. “I will give you proof of the truth. Spare your eyes!” said Perseus, and with Medusa’s face he turned the king’s face into bloodless stone.note

Up to this point Tritonia had kept her gold-born brother company. Then, wrapped in a hollow cloud, she left Seriphos, passing Cythnos and Gyaros on her right, and by the route over the sea that seemed shortest she made for Thebes and maiden Helicon. Reaching that mountain, she halted and spoke to the learned sisters: “Word has reached my ears of a new spring, which the hard hoof of Medusa’s winged horse broke open. That is the reason for my journey. I wanted to see this marvel: I saw the horse himself born from his mother’s blood.” Urania answered: “Whatever your reason for visiting our home, goddess, you are most welcome to our hearts. The report is true, and Pegasus is the source of this spring.” And she led Pallas down to the sacred waters.note

Pallas marveled for a long time at the waters created by the blows of a hoof; then she looked around at the groves of ancient woods, the caves, and the grass dotted with countless flowers, and called the daughters of Mnemosyne fortunate alike in their pursuits and in their home. One of the sisters answered her: “O Tritonia, who would have joined our choir had your excellence not carried you on to greater tasks, what you say is true: you are right to praise our arts and our home, and ours is a happy lot—if only we were safe. But (so true it is that nothing is forbidden to crime) everything frightens our maiden hearts. Dreadful Pyreneus is always before my eyes, and I have not yet fully come to my senses. That fierce man had seized Daulis and the fields of Phocis with Thracian soldiers and held an unjust rule. We were on our way to the temple on Parnassus. He saw us going, and, honoring our divinity with a deceitful face,note

he said (for he had recognized us), ‘Daughters of Mnemosyne, stop! Do not hesitate, I beg you, to shelter in my house from the harsh weather and the rain’ (it was raining); ‘the gods above have often entered humbler huts.’ Moved by his words and the weather, we agreed and went into the front of the house. The rain stopped; the south wind was overcome by the north winds, and the dark clouds were fleeing from a sky swept clean. We wanted to go: Pyreneus shut his doors and prepared to use force. We escaped it by taking to our wings. He stood high on his citadel, as if about to follow, and said, ‘Whatever way you take, I will take the same.’ Out of his mind, he hurled himself from the top of his highest tower, fell on his face, and with the bones of his face shattered, he struck the ground as he died, staining it with his criminal blood.”

The Muse was still speaking when wings sounded through the air, and voices of greeting came from the high branches. Jupiter’s daughter looked up, searching for the source of tongues that spoke so clearly, and thought a human being had spoken. It was birds: nine of them, lamenting their fate, had settled on the branches—magpies, which mimic everything. As she marveled, the goddess spoke to the goddess: “These too were defeated in a contest not long ago and swelled the flock of birds. Pierus, rich in the fields of Pella, was their father; Euippe of Paeonia was their mother. Nine times she called on mighty Lucina, nine times she gave birth. Puffed up by their number, this crowd of foolish sisters came here through so many cities of Haemonia and Achaea, and opened hostilities with words like these:note

‘Stop deceiving the ignorant crowd with your empty sweetness. Compete with us, Thespian goddesses, if you have any confidence. We will not be beaten in voice or in skill, and we are as many as you. If you lose, give up Medusa’s spring and Hyantean Aganippe; or if we lose, we will give up the Emathian plains as far as the snowy Paeonians. Let the nymphs judge the contest.’ It was shameful, of course, to compete; but to give way seemed more shameful. The nymphs who were chosen swore by the rivers and sat down on seats carved from the living rock. Then, without drawing lots, the one who had offered to compete first sang of the wars of the gods above. She gave the Giants honor they did not deserve and belittled the deeds of the great gods. She told how Typhoeus, sent up from the lowest depths of the earth, struck fear into the heavenly ones, and how they all turned their backs and fled, until the land of Egypt and the Nile, divided into seven mouths, took them in, exhausted.note

‘Ceres was the first to turn the clod with the curved plow. She was the first to give the earth its crops and gentle foods, and the first to give laws: all things are Ceres’ gift. She is the one I must sing. If only I could sing a song worthy of the goddess: the goddess is surely worthy of song. The vast island of Trinacris is heaped on the giant’s limbs, and under its great mass it pins down Typhoeus, who dared to hope for a home in the heavens. He strains, it is true, and often fights to rise again, but his right hand lies pinned beneath Ausonian Pelorus, his left beneath you, Pachynus. His legs are crushed by Lilybaeum, and Etna weighs down his head. Beneath it, lying on his back, fierce Typhoeus hurls out sand and vomits flame from his mouth. Often he struggles to heave off the weight of the earth and to roll the towns and great mountains from his body.note

So the earth trembles, and the king of the silent dead himself is afraid that the ground may split open, laid bare by a wide chasm, and that daylight may break in and terrify the trembling shades. Fearing this disaster, the lord of the dead had left his shadowy seat. Borne in a chariot drawn by black horses, he was cautiously going round the foundations of Sicily. When he had made sure that no place was giving way, he laid aside his fear. Then Erycina, seated on her own mountain, saw him wandering. She embraced her winged son and said, “My son, my arms, my hands, my power, take up those weapons, Cupid, with which you conquer everyone, and drive your swift arrows into the heart of the god who drew the last lot of the threefold kingdom. You tame the gods above and Jupiter himself; you conquer and tame the powers of the sea, and him who rules the powers of the sea.note

Why does Tartarus hold back? Why not extend your mother’s empire and your own? A third of the world is at stake. And yet even in heaven, so long-suffering have I become, we are scorned, and with me the power of Love is shrinking. Don’t you see that Pallas and Diana the javelin-thrower have withdrawn from me? Ceres’ daughter too will stay a virgin, if we allow it, for she has the same ambitions. But you, for the sake of our partnership in power, if that means anything to you, join the goddess to her uncle.” So Venus spoke. He opened his quiver and, as his mother wished, picked out one arrow from his thousand. None was sharper, none surer, none more obedient to the bow. Setting the pliant bow against his knee, he bent it and with the barbed shaft struck Dis in the heart.

Not far from the walls of Henna there is a lake of deep water called Pergus. Not even the Cayster hears more songs of swans on its gliding waters. A wood crowns the water, encircling it on every side, and its leaves, like an awning, keep off the blows of Phoebus. The branches give coolness, the moist ground gives purple flowers: it is always spring. In this grove Proserpina was playing, picking violets or white lilies. With girlish eagerness she was filling her baskets and the fold of her dress, trying to outdo her companions in gathering, when, almost in a single moment, she was seen, loved and carried off by Dis, so headlong was his love. The terrified goddess cried out in a grief-stricken voice for her mother and her companions, but more often for her mother. She had torn her dress from its upper edge, and the flowers she had gathered fell from her loosened tunic.

She rose from the middle of her pool as far as her waist and recognized the goddess. “You will go no farther!” she said. “You cannot be Ceres’ son-in-law against her will: the girl should have been asked for, not snatched. And if I may compare small things with great, Anapis loved me too. But I married him after he had courted me, not terrified like her.” She spoke, and stretching out her arms in opposite directions she blocked his way. The son of Saturn held back his anger no longer. Urging on his terrifying horses, he whirled his royal scepter with his mighty arm and plunged it into the depths of the pool. The earth, struck, opened a road to Tartarus and took the chariot as it plunged headlong into the middle of the crater.note

But Cyane, grieving for the abducted goddess and for the rights of her spring treated with contempt, carried in her silent heart a wound past all consolation. She was entirely consumed by tears, and melted away into the very waters whose great divinity she had been until a moment before. You could have seen her limbs grow soft, her bones begin to bend, her nails lose their hardness. The slenderest parts of her melted first: her dark-blue hair, her fingers, her legs and feet, for slender limbs pass quickly into cold water. After that her shoulders, back, sides and breasts vanished and passed away into thin streams. Finally, in place of living blood, water entered her weakened veins, and nothing was left that you could grasp.

Meanwhile the frightened mother searched in vain for her daughter through every land and over every sea. Neither Aurora, coming with dewy hair, saw her resting, nor Hesperus. She lit pine torches from Etna’s flames, one in each hand, and carried them restlessly through the frosty darkness. And when kindly day had dimmed the stars again, she searched for her daughter from the setting of the sun to its rising. Worn out by her labors, she had grown thirsty, and no spring had wet her lips, when by chance she saw a cottage thatched with straw and knocked at its little door. An old woman came out and saw the goddess, and when she asked for water, gave her a sweet drink that she had sprinkled with roasted barley. While the goddess was drinking what she had been given, a hard-faced, impudent boy stood in front of her, laughed, and called her greedy. She was offended, and since she had not yet drunk it all, she drenched him, as he spoke, with the barley and the liquid mixed together.

His face soaked up spots. The limbs that had just been arms became legs, and a tail was added to his altered body. He shrank into a small form, so that he would have no great power to do harm, smaller in size than a little lizard. The old woman marveled and wept and reached out to touch the creature, but he fled from her and looked for a hiding place. He has a name suited to his coloring, his body starred with scattered spots. To tell through what lands and over what waters the goddess wandered would take too long: the world ran out before her search did. She returned to Sicily, and while she was going everywhere in turn, she came to Cyane too. If Cyane had not been changed, she would have told her everything, but though she wished to speak, she had neither mouth nor tongue, nothing to speak with. Still, she gave clear signs. On the surface of her waters she showed the mother Persephone’s girdle, which she knew well, and which had happened to fall there into the sacred pool.note

As soon as she recognized it, as if only then had she learned that her daughter had been carried off, the goddess tore her disheveled hair and beat her breast again and again with her palms. She did not yet know where her daughter was, yet she reproached every land, calling them ungrateful and unworthy of the gift of grain, and Trinacria above all, where she had found the traces of her loss. So there, with a savage hand, she broke the plows that turn the clods. In her anger she sent farmers and the oxen of the fields alike to their deaths, ordered the fields to betray what had been entrusted to them, and blighted the seeds. The land’s fertility, famed throughout the wide world, was proved false. The crops died in their first green blades. Now too much sun, now too much rain ruined them. Stars and winds did harm, and greedy birds picked up the seed as it was sown. Darnel and thistles and unconquerable grass wore down the wheat harvests.

Then Alpheus’ beloved raised her head from her Elean waters, swept her dripping hair back from her forehead to her ears, and said, “Mother of the girl sought through all the world, mother of the crops, stop your endless labors, and do not rage so violently against the earth, which is faithful to you. The earth has done nothing to deserve this; it opened unwillingly for the abduction. And I do not plead for my own country: I came here as a guest. Pisa is my homeland, and I trace my origin to Elis. I live in Sicily as a stranger, but this land is dearer to me than any other soil. Here I, Arethusa, now have my household gods, here my home: protect it, gentlest of goddesses.note

When she heard these words, the mother was stunned as if turned to stone, and for a long time she was like one thunderstruck. When her heavy stupor had been driven out by heavy grief, she rode in her chariot out into the regions of heaven. There, her face all clouded and her hair streaming, she stood before Jupiter to reproach him and said, “Jupiter, I have come to you as a suppliant for my own flesh and blood and for yours. If the mother counts for nothing with you, let the daughter move her father, and do not, I beg you, care for her any less because I gave birth to her. See, my daughter, long sought, is found at last, if you call it finding to lose her more surely, or if you call it finding to know where she is. That she was carried off, I will bear, as long as he gives her back. For your daughter does not deserve a robber for a husband, even if she is no longer mine.”

Jupiter replied, “Our daughter is a pledge and a burden we share, you and I. But if we are willing to give things their true names, what was done here is not an injury but love. And that son-in-law will be no disgrace to us, if only you, goddess, consent. Even if all else were lacking, what a thing it is to be Jupiter’s brother! And what of the fact that nothing else is lacking, and that he yields to me only by the lot? But if you are so set on separating them, Proserpina shall return to heaven, on one fixed condition: that she has touched no food there with her lips. For so the covenant of the Fates has decreed.”

He had spoken. But Ceres was determined to bring her daughter out. Fate did not allow it, for the girl had broken her fast. While she was wandering innocently in the well-tended gardens, she had plucked a pomegranate from a bending tree, taken seven seeds from its pale rind, and pressed them in her mouth. Of all there, only Ascalaphus saw it. Orphne, it is said, not the least known among the nymphs of Avernus, once bore him to her Acheron in the dark woods. He saw, and by informing on her he cruelly robbed her of her return. The queen of Erebus groaned and turned the informer into a bird of ill omen. She sprinkled his head with water from Phlegethon and changed it into a beak, feathers and great eyes.

But so that your singing, born to charm the ear, and so rich a gift of voice would not lose the use of the tongue, your girls’ faces and human voices remained. Jupiter, mediating between his brother and his grieving sister, divided the turning year equally. Now the goddess, a divinity shared by two kingdoms, spends as many months with her mother as with her husband. At once the look of her mind and of her face was changed. Her brow, which a moment before could have looked sad even to Dis, was joyful, like the sun that has been hidden by rain clouds and comes out from the clouds it has overcome.

Kindly Ceres, free of care now that her daughter was restored, asked what had made you flee, Arethusa, and why you are a sacred spring. The waters fell silent. Their goddess raised her head from the deep spring, wrung her green hair dry with her hand, and told the old love affair of the river of Elis. “I was one of the nymphs who live in Achaea,” she said, “and no other ranged the glades more eagerly or set her nets more eagerly. But though I never sought a reputation for beauty, and though I was strong, I was known as the beautiful one. My face, too often praised, gave me no pleasure. The bodily gift that others usually delight in made me, country girl that I was, blush, and I thought it a crime to please.

I was coming back, tired, from the Stymphalian woods, I remember. It was hot, and my exertion had doubled the great heat. I came upon a stream flowing without an eddy, without a murmur, clear to the bottom, so that every pebble in its depths could be counted; you would hardly have thought it was moving. Silvery willows and poplars fed by its water gave shade that grew of its own accord along the sloping banks. I went up and first dipped the soles of my feet, then waded in up to my knees. Not content with that, I untied my girdle, hung my soft clothes on a bending willow, and plunged naked into the water. While I was striking it and drawing it toward me, gliding in a thousand ways and flinging out my arms, I felt some kind of murmur beneath the middle of the stream, and in terror I stepped onto the edge of the nearer bank. ‘Where are you rushing, Arethusa?’ Alpheus called from his waters,

So far Arethusa. The goddess of plenty yoked twin serpents to her chariot, curbed their mouths with bits, and was carried through the air between heaven and earth. She sent her light chariot to Tritonia’s city, to Triptolemus, and ordered him to scatter the seeds she gave him, partly on untilled ground, partly on land tilled again after a long time. Now the young man had been carried high over Europe and the land of Asia; he turned toward the shores of Scythia. The king there was Lyncus, and Triptolemus entered the king’s house.note

The greatest of us had finished her learned song. With one voice the nymphs declared that the goddesses who dwell on Helicon had won. When the defeated sisters hurled abuse at us, she said, ‘Since it is not enough for you to have earned punishment by the contest, and you add insults to your offense, and our patience is not unlimited, we will proceed to punishment and follow where our anger calls.’ The Emathian sisters laughed and scorned her threats. But as they tried to speak and, with loud shouts, to shake their insolent fists at us, they saw feathers sprouting through their nails and their arms being covered with plumage. Each saw another’s face harden into a rigid beak, and new birds joining the woods. And as they tried to beat their breasts in grief, they were lifted by the motion of their arms and hung in the air: magpies, the scolds of the woods. Even now their old eloquence remains in these birds, their hoarse chattering and their enormous passion for talk.”

Pallas takes the shape of an old woman: she puts false gray hair on her temples and gives herself feeble limbs, which she props on a stick. Then she began to speak: “Not everything that comes with greater age is to be shunned: experience comes with later years. Do not scorn my advice. Aim for the greatest fame among mortals in working wool, but yield to the goddess, rash girl, and in a suppliant voice ask pardon for your words: she will grant pardon if you ask.” Arachne glares at her, drops the threads she had begun, and, barely holding back her hand, her face confessing her anger, she answered the disguised Pallas with these words: “You come weak in mind and worn out by long old age. Too long a life does harm. Let your daughter-in-law, if you have one, or your daughter, if you have one, listen to talk like this.

I have advice enough of my own. And so that you don’t think your warnings have done any good, my opinion is unchanged. Why doesn’t she come herself? Why does she avoid this contest?” Then the goddess said, “She has come,” and threw off the old woman’s form and revealed Pallas. The nymphs and the Mygdonian women worship her divinity; the girl alone was not afraid. Even so she blushed: a sudden flush marked her face against her will and then faded again, as the sky turns crimson when dawn first stirs and a little later grows white at the rising of the sun. She holds to her purpose and, in her desire for a foolish victory, rushes to her doom; for Jupiter’s daughter does not refuse, nor warn her any further, nor put off the contest any longer.

Without delay they take their places on opposite sides, and both stretch two looms with fine warp threads (the web is bound to the beam, the reed separates the warp). The weft is threaded through the middle with sharp shuttles; their fingers draw it through, and once it is led between the warp threads, the notched teeth of the comb strike and pack it down. Both of them hurry, and with their robes girded up to their breasts they move their skilled arms, their eagerness beguiling the toil. There they weave purple that has known the Tyrian vat, and delicate shades with scarcely any difference between them, as when the sun’s rays are struck by a shower and the rainbow stains the long sky with its huge curve: though a thousand different colors shine in it, the passage from one to the next deceives the watching eye, so alike are the colors that touch, and yet the outermost ones are far apart. There too pliant gold is worked in with the threads, and an ancient tale is spun out on the loom.

Pallas depicts the crag of Mars on Cecrops’ citadel and the ancient quarrel over the naming of the land. Twice six heavenly gods sit on lofty thrones in august solemnity, with Jupiter in the middle. Each god is marked by his own features: the image of Jupiter is a king’s. She shows the god of the sea standing and striking the rugged rock with his long trident, and from the middle of the wound in the rock seawater leaping out, the token by which he would claim the city. To herself she gives a shield, she gives a sharp-pointed spear, she gives a helmet for her head; her breast is guarded by the aegis; and she shows the earth, struck by her spear, bringing forth the gray-green olive with its berries, and the gods marveling. Victory crowns the work. Yet so that her rival for glory may learn from examples what reward to expect for such mad daring, she adds four contests in the four corners, bright with their own colors, picked out with small figures.note

One corner holds Thracian Rhodope and Haemus—now icy mountains, once mortal bodies!—who took for themselves the names of the highest gods. Another part holds the pitiable fate of the Pygmy mother: Juno defeated her in a contest and ordered her to become a crane and to declare war on her own people. She also painted Antigone, who once dared to compete with the consort of great Jupiter, and whom royal Juno turned into a bird; neither Ilium nor her father Laomedon could save her from taking on feathers and, as a white stork, applauding herself with her clattering beak. The one corner left holds Cinyras, bereaved: he is embracing the steps of a temple, which were once his daughters’ limbs, and lying on the stone he seems to weep. She edges the outer borders with olives of peace. That is the limit; she ends her work with her own tree.note

The Maeonian girl portrays Europa, deceived by the image of a bull: you would have thought it a real bull, a real sea. Europa herself seemed to look back at the land she had left, to call to her companions, to fear the touch of the leaping water, and to draw up her timid feet. She also made Asterie, held by a struggling eagle; she made Leda lying beneath a swan’s wings. She added how Jupiter, hidden in the image of a satyr, filled the lovely daughter of Nycteus with twin offspring; how he was Amphitryon when he took you, woman of Tiryns; how as gold he tricked Danae, as fire the daughter of Asopus, as a shepherd Mnemosyne, as a speckled serpent Deo’s daughter. You too, Neptune, she pictured, changed into a fierce bullock, with the daughter of Aeolus. Appearing as Enipeus, you father the Aloidae; as a ram you deceive Bisaltis; the golden-haired, gentlest mother of crops felt you as a horse; the snake-haired mother of the winged horse felt you as a bird; Melantho felt you as a dolphin.note

The unhappy girl could not bear it, and in her pride she bound her throat with a noose. As she hung there, Pallas took pity and lifted her up, and said, “Live, then, but hang all the same, wicked girl; and so that you may not be free of care for the future, let the same law of punishment be declared for your race and for your descendants to come.” Then, as she left, she sprinkled her with the juices of Hecate’s herb; and at once, touched by the grim drug, her hair fell away, and with it her nose and ears; her head became tiny, her whole body small; slender fingers clung to her sides in place of legs; the rest was belly. Yet from it she still lets out a thread and, as a spider, works at her webs as of old.

All Lydia is in an uproar; the rumor of the deed goes through the towns of Phrygia and fills the wide world with talk. Niobe had known Arachne before her marriage, when as a girl she lived in Maeonia and on Sipylus; yet she was not warned by her countrywoman’s punishment to yield to the gods and use humbler words. Many things made her proud; but neither her husband’s art, nor the lineage of them both, nor the power of a great kingdom pleased her as much—though all of them pleased her—as her own children; and Niobe would have been called the happiest of mothers, had she not seemed so to herself. For Manto, daughter of Tiresias, who foresaw what was to come, had gone through the middle of the streets prophesying, stirred by a divine impulse: “Women of Ismenus, go in crowds and give Latona and Latona’s two children incense with devout prayer, and wreathe your hair with laurel.note

The peoples of Phrygia fear me; the royal house of Cadmus is under my rule; and the walls that were joined together by my husband’s lyre are ruled, with their people, by me and my husband. Wherever in my house I turn my eyes, vast riches meet the view. On top of this comes a face worthy of a goddess. Add to this seven daughters, and as many sons, and soon sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. Ask now what grounds my pride has, and dare to prefer to me Latona, the Titaness, daughter of Coeus, whoever he is—Latona, to whom the great earth once refused even a tiny place when she was about to give birth. Neither heaven nor earth nor the waters received your goddess: she was an exile from the world, until, pitying her as she wandered,

The goddess was indignant, and on the very summit of Cynthus she spoke to her twin children with these words: “See, I, your mother, proud to have borne you, who would yield to no goddess but Juno, am now doubted whether I am a goddess at all; and unless you come to my aid, my children, I am being barred from altars that have been worshipped through all the ages. Nor is this my only grief: Tantalus’ daughter has added insults to her dreadful deed, has dared to rank you below her own children, and has called me childless—may it fall back on her own head!—and, wicked woman, she has shown her father’s tongue.” Latona was about to add pleas to this account. “Stop!” said Phoebus. “Long complaint only delays the punishment.” Phoebe said the same; and gliding swiftly through the air, hidden in clouds, they reached the citadel of Cadmus.note

Near the walls there was a level plain stretching far and wide, constantly pounded by horses, where crowds of wheels and hard hoofs had softened the clods beneath. There some of Amphion’s seven sons mount their strong horses, sit astride backs red with Tyrian dye, and guide reins heavy with gold. One of them, Ismenus, who had once been the first burden his mother bore, while he is turning his horse’s course in a fixed circle and reining in its foaming mouth, cries out, “Oh, no!” and carries arrows fixed in the middle of his chest; the reins slip from his dying hand, and little by little he slides sideways off the horse’s right shoulder.

Ah, how far this Niobe was from that Niobe who had just now driven the people from Latona’s altars and carried herself, head thrown back, through the middle of the city—envied by her own people then, but now pitiable even to an enemy! She throws herself on the cold bodies and, in no order, distributes last kisses among all her sons. Raising her bruised arms from them to the sky, she said, “Feed, cruel Latona, on my grief, feed on it, and glut your heart with my mourning: I go to my own funeral. Exult, and triumph, my victorious enemy! But why victorious? In my misery I have more left than you in your happiness: even after so many deaths, I win.”

She had spoken, and the string twanged from the drawn bow. It terrified everyone except Niobe alone: misfortune has made her bold. The sisters were standing in black clothes, their hair unbound, before their brothers’ biers. One of them, pulling at the arrow stuck in her body, sank down dying, her face on her brother. Another, trying to comfort her poor mother, suddenly fell silent and doubled over with a wound. This one collapses as she flees in vain; that one dies upon her sister; this one hides; that one you could see trembling. When six had been given to death, each suffering a different wound, the last was left. Her mother, covering her with her whole body, her whole robe, cried out, “Leave me one, the youngest! Of so many I ask only for the youngest, and only one.”

Then indeed everyone, woman and man, fears the manifest anger of the divine power, and all worship with greater zeal the great godhead of the goddess who bore twins; and, as happens, starting from this recent event they retell earlier ones. One of them says, “In the fertile fields of Lycia too, the peasants of old scorned the goddess, and not unpunished. The story is little known, since the men were of no account, but it is a marvel. I saw with my own eyes the pond and the place made famous by the wonder. For my father, by then advanced in years and unable to bear the journey, had told me to drive some choice cattle from there, and had himself given me a man of that people as a guide on my way. While I was going over the pastures with him, look: in the middle of a lake stood an old altar, black with the ash of sacrifices, surrounded by trembling reeds. My guide stopped and said in a fearful murmur, ‘Be kind to me!’ and in a similar murmur I said, ‘Be kind!’

Still, I asked whether it was an altar of the Naiads, or of Faunus, or of some local god, when my guide answered thus: ‘No mountain divinity dwells in this altar, young man. She calls it her own to whom the royal wife once forbade the world, whom wandering Delos barely received when she begged, in the days when it floated, a light island. There, leaning on a palm and on Pallas’ tree, Latona gave birth to twins, against their stepmother’s will. From there too, it is said, the new mother fled from Juno, carrying her children, two divinities, at her breast. And now, in the land of Lycia that bred the Chimaera, when the heavy sun was scorching the fields, the goddess, wearied by her long labor and parched by the blazing heat of the sky, grew thirsty, and her hungry children had drained her milk-filled breasts.note

By chance she caught sight of a lake of modest size at the bottom of a valley; country people were gathering bushy osiers there, with rushes and the sedge that marshes love. The Titaness came near and, kneeling, pressed the ground, meaning to drink the cool water. The rustic crowd forbids her. The goddess addressed those who forbade her: “Why do you keep me from the water? The use of water is common to all. Nature has made neither the sun, nor the air, nor clear water anyone’s private property: I have come to share a public gift. Yet I ask you as a suppliant to give it to me. I was not preparing to wash my body and tired limbs here, only to relieve my thirst. As I speak, my mouth has no moisture, my throat is parched, and there is hardly a passage for my voice in it.

So when someone or other had told how the men of the Lycian race were destroyed, another recalled the satyr whom Latona’s son defeated on Tritonia’s reed pipe and then punished. “Why are you tearing me from myself?” the satyr cried. “Oh, I repent! Oh,” he kept shouting, “a pipe is not worth this much!” As he shouted, the skin was ripped from the surface of his limbs, and he was nothing but one wound. Blood flowed everywhere, his sinews lay bare and exposed, and his trembling veins pulsed with no skin to cover them; you could have counted his throbbing organs and the fibers glistening in his chest. The fauns who dwell in the countryside, spirits of the woods, wept for him, and so did his brothers the satyrs, and Olympus, dear to him even then, and the nymphs, and everyone who pastured woolly flocks and horned herds on those mountains. The fertile earth grew wet. Soaked, it took in the falling tears and drank them deep into its veins, and when it had made them into water, it sent them out into the open air. From there, seeking the swift sea between sloping banks, the clearest river in Phrygia bears the name Marsyas.note

With these words the crowd at once returned to present matters and mourned Amphion, destroyed along with his offspring. The mother bore the blame. Yet even then, they say, one person wept for her: Pelops. Drawing his robe down from his chest, he showed the ivory on his left shoulder. At the time of his birth this shoulder had been flesh, the same color as the right. Later, they say, when his father’s hands had cut him to pieces, the gods joined his limbs together again. The other parts were found, but the place between the throat and the top of the upper arm was missing. Ivory was set there to serve for the part that could not be found, and by that work Pelops was made whole.note

The leading men of the neighboring lands gathered, and the nearby cities begged their kings to go and offer comfort: Argos and Sparta and Mycenae, city of Pelops’ line; Calydon, not yet hated by grim Diana; fertile Orchomenus and Corinth, famed for its bronze; fierce Messene and Patrae and lowly Cleonae; Pylos, city of Neleus, and Troezen, not yet the city of Pittheus; and the other cities enclosed by the Isthmus between two seas, and those that lie outside it and are seen from the Isthmus between two seas. Who could believe it? You alone, Athens, held back. War stood in the way of that duty. Foreign hosts, carried over the sea, were terrifying the Mopsopian walls. Thracian Tereus had routed them with his auxiliary forces, and by his victory he had won a glorious name.note

He was powerful in wealth and men, and he happened to trace his descent from great Gradivus, so Pandion bound him to himself through marriage with Procne. Neither Juno, patron of brides, nor Hymen, nor any Grace was present at that bed. The Eumenides held torches snatched from a funeral, the Eumenides spread the couch, and an unholy owl brooded over the house and sat on the roof of the bridal chamber. Under this omen Procne and Tereus were joined, and under this omen they became parents. Thrace congratulated them, of course, and they themselves gave thanks to the gods. They ordered that the day on which Pandion’s daughter was given to the illustrious king, and the day on which Itys was born, should be called festivals. So well hidden is what is truly good for us. Now Titan had led the seasons of the circling year through five autumns, when Procne, coaxing her husband, said, “If I have found any favornote

At the sight of the girl Tereus blazed up, just as if someone set fire beneath whitening ears of grain, or burned leaves and hay stored in a loft. Her face indeed deserved it. But an inborn lust also goaded him, and the people of those regions are prone to desire: he burned with his nation’s vice and his own. His impulse was to corrupt the vigilance of her attendants and the loyalty of her nurse, and even to tempt the girl herself with huge gifts and spend his whole kingdom on her, or else to seize her and defend his prize with savage war. There was nothing he would not have dared, gripped by unbridled love, and his breast could not contain the flames shut inside it. Now he could hardly bear delay. With eager lips he returned to Procne’s request, and under cover of her wishes he pursued his own.

“Dear son-in-law, since a loving duty has compelled me, and both of them have wished it, and you too have wished it, Tereus, I give her to you. As a suppliant I beg you, by your good faith and our kindred hearts, and by the gods above, to protect her with a father’s love, and to send this sweet comfort of my anxious old age back to me as soon as possible. Every delay will be long for me. And you too, Philomela, if you have any devotion, come back to me as soon as possible. It is enough that your sister is far away.” So he charged them, and as he did he kissed his daughter, and gentle tears fell among his instructions. As a pledge of good faith he asked for the right hands of both, joined them as they were given to each other, and asked them to remember to greet his absent daughter and grandson for him. With his mouth full of sobs he could barely say his final farewell, and he feared what his mind foreboded.

As soon as Philomela was placed on board the painted ship, the sea was driven by the oars and the land pushed back. “I have won!” he cried. “What I prayed for is carried with me!” The savage exulted, scarcely able to put off his pleasure, and never turned his eyes from her. So it is when Jupiter’s bird, the predator, has set a hare down in its high nest with hooked talons: there is no escape for the captive, and the robber gazes at his prize. Now the journey was done, and they had disembarked from the weary ships onto their own shores, when the king dragged Pandion’s daughter into a high-walled lodge hidden in ancient woods. There, pale and trembling and fearing everything, and already asking in tears where her sister was, he shut her in. Openly declaring his crime, he raped her by force, a virgin and alone, while again and again she cried in vain to her father, often to her sister, and above all to the great gods.

Such words stirred the brutal tyrant’s anger, and no less his fear. Goaded by both, he freed from its sheath the sword he wore at his side, seized her by the hair, bent her arms behind her back, and forced her to endure chains. Philomela was offering her throat; at the sight of the sword she had conceived the hope of dying. But as her tongue protested and kept calling her father’s name and struggled to speak, he gripped it with pincers and cut it out with his savage sword. The last stump of the tongue’s root quivered, while the tongue itself lay trembling and murmuring on the black earth. As the tail of a mutilated snake will leap, it writhed and, dying, sought its mistress’s feet. Even after this crime—I would hardly dare believe it—he is said to have gone back again and again in his lust to her mangled body.

After such deeds he brought himself to return to Procne. When she saw her husband she asked for her sister, but he gave false groans and told a made-up story of her death, and his tears won belief. Procne tore from her shoulders the robe that gleamed with broad bands of gold. She put on black clothing, built an empty tomb, brought offerings of atonement to spirits that were not there, and mourned the fate of a sister who should not have been mourned like this. The god had passed through the twice six signs, and a year was over. What was Philomela to do? A guard blocked escape, the walls of the lodge stood rigid, built of solid stone, and her mute mouth had no way to reveal the deed. But grief is greatly inventive, and resourcefulness comes in misery.

Cunningly she hung the warp on a foreign loom and wove purple signs into the white threads, a disclosure of the crime. When it was finished she gave it to a single serving woman and asked her by gestures to take it to her mistress. Asked, the woman carried it to Procne, not knowing what she was handing over in it. The savage tyrant’s wife unrolled the cloth, read the pitiful poem of her own fortune, and—astonishing that she could—was silent. Grief pressed her lips shut, and words indignant enough failed the tongue that searched for them. There was no time for tears: she rushed ahead, ready to confound right and wrong, wholly absorbed in the image of revenge.

It was the time when the Sithonian women celebrate the rites of Bacchus held every other year; night is the accomplice of those rites. By night Rhodope rang with the clash of shrill bronze, and by night the queen left her house, equipped herself for the god’s rites, and took up the weapons of frenzy. Her head was covered with vine leaves, deerskins hung from her left side, and a light spear rested on her shoulder. Rushing through the woods with a crowd of her women around her, terrible Procne, driven by the frenzy of grief, feigned your frenzy, Bacchus. At last she came to the remote lodge. Howling and crying “Euhoe!” she broke down the doors and seized her sister. She dressed her captive in the trappings of Bacchus, hid her face with ivy leaves, and, dragging her along in a daze, led her within her own walls.

Without delay she dragged Itys off, as a tigress of the Ganges drags a doe’s suckling fawn through the dark woods. When they reached a remote part of the lofty house, he stretched out his hands, already seeing his fate, and cried “Mother, mother!” and reached for her neck. Procne struck him with a sword where chest meets side, and did not turn her face away. Even that one wound was enough to kill him, but Philomela cut open his throat with the steel. They tore apart the limbs while they were still alive and held some breath. Then part of them bubbled in hollow bronze cauldrons, part hissed on spits, and the inner rooms dripped with gore.

To this feast the wife invited Tereus, who knew nothing. Pretending it was a sacred rite of her ancestral custom, which only the husband may attend, she sent away companions and servants. Tereus himself, sitting high on his ancestral throne, ate, stuffing his own flesh and blood into his belly. So deep is the night of his mind that he said, “Fetch Itys here!” Procne could not hide her cruel joy. Eager now to be the messenger of her own calamity, she said, “The one you ask for, you have inside.” He looked around and asked where. As he asked and called again, Philomela leapt out, just as she was, her hair spattered from the frenzied slaughter, and threw Itys’ bloody head into his father’s face. Never did she more wish she could speak and declare her joy in words.

This grief sent Pandion down to the shades of Tartarus before his time, before the last days of a long old age. Erechtheus took the scepter of the land and the governing of affairs, and no one could say whether he was more powerful in justice or in strong arms. He had fathered four sons and as many daughters, and two of the daughters were equal in beauty. Of these, Procris, you were the wife who made Cephalus, son of Aeolus, happy. But Tereus and the Thracians harmed Boreas’ suit, and the god was long denied his beloved Orithyia, while he kept asking and preferred prayers to force. When coaxing achieved nothing, bristling with anger, which is usual for that wind and all too familiar, he said, “And rightly so! Why did I give up my weapons—savagery and strength, anger and threatening passion—and turn to prayers, which disgrace me?note

Trailing his dusty cloak over the highest peaks, he swept the ground, and, wrapped in darkness, the lover clasped Orithyia, trembling with fear, in his tawny wings. As he flew, the fires he fanned burned more fiercely. Her abductor did not rein in his airy course until he reached the peoples and walls of the Cicones. There the Athenian girl became the wife of the frozen king, and a mother too, giving birth to twin sons who had their mother’s other features and their father’s wings. Yet they say these wings were not born with their bodies. As long as there was no beard beneath their red-gold hair, the boys Calais and Zetes were featherless. Soon, at the same time, wings began to cover both their sides like birds’, and at the same time their cheeks turned golden. So when boyhood gave way to youth, they sailed with the Minyans across an unknown sea in the first ship, to seek the fleece shining with its gleaming wool.note

And now the Minyans were cutting through the sea in the ship from Pagasae. They had seen Phineus, dragging out a destitute old age in unending night, and the young sons of the North Wind had chased the girl-faced birds away from the wretched old man’s mouth. After enduring much under the famous Jason, they had at last reached the swift waters of the muddy Phasis. While they approached the king and demanded the fleece of Phrixus, and the Minyans were given terrible terms and enormous labors, Aeetes’ daughter meanwhile conceived a powerful fire. She struggled long, and when reason could not conquer her frenzy, she said: “It is useless to resist, Medea: some god or other stands in your way. It would be a wonder if this, or something very like it, were not what they call love.note

She was going to the ancient altars of Hecate, daughter of Perses, hidden in a shady grove deep in a secluded wood. And now she was strong, and the passion she had driven off had died down, when she saw the son of Aeson, and the extinguished flame blazed up again. Her cheeks reddened, her whole face glowed hot again; and as a tiny spark that has lain hidden under a covering of ash is apt to feed on the winds, to grow, and, once stirred, to rise again to its former strength, so her love, already slackening, love you would have thought was fading, flared up when she saw the young man, at the sight of him standing there. And as chance would have it, Aeson’s son was more handsome than usual that day: you could have forgiven the lover. She gazed, and kept her eyes fixed on his face as if she were seeing it for the first time; in her madness she thought it no mortal face she was looking at, and she could not turn herself away from him.note

But when the stranger began to speak, and took her right hand, and in a low voice asked for help and promised to marry her, she said, with tears pouring down: “I see what I am doing: it is not ignorance of the truth that will deceive me, but love. You will be saved by my gift; once saved, keep your promises.” He swore by the rites of the three-formed goddess, by whatever divine power dwelt in that grove, by the all-seeing father of his future father-in-law, by his own success and his great dangers. She believed him; he at once received the enchanted herbs, learned their use, and went back to his lodging rejoicing. The next dawn had driven away the glittering stars: the people gathered at the sacred field of Mars and took their places on the ridges. In the middle of the throng sat the king himself, clad in purple and distinguished by his ivory scepter.note

And look: the bronze-footed bulls were breathing Vulcan’s fire from nostrils of adamant, and the grass their vapors touched burst into flame; and as full furnaces roar, or as stones broken down in an earthen kiln catch fire when sprinkled with water, so their chests, churning the flames shut up inside them, and their scorched throats roared. Yet the son of Aeson went to meet them. As he came, they turned their terrible faces toward him, and their iron-tipped horns, and pawed the dusty ground with their cloven hooves, and filled the place with smoky bellowing. The Minyans went rigid with fear. He went up to them and did not feel the fire they breathed—such is the power of drugs—and stroked their hanging dewlaps with his bold right hand, and, putting them under the yoke, forced them to draw the plow’s heavy weight and to cut with iron a field that had never felt it.

The Colchians were amazed; the Minyans cheered him with shouts and added to his courage. Then from a bronze helmet he took the serpent’s teeth and scattered them over the plowed fields. The earth softened the seeds, steeped in strong poison beforehand, and the sown teeth grew and became new bodies. And just as an infant takes on human form in its mother’s womb, and is put together inside, part by part, in due proportion, and does not come out into the common air until it is fully formed, so, when the image of a man had been completed in the womb of the pregnant earth, it rose up in the teeming field, and—what is more wonderful—brandished weapons at the moment of its birth. When the Pelasgians saw them preparing to hurl their sharp-pointed spears at the Haemonian youth’s head, they lowered their faces and their spirits in fear.

It remained to lull with herbs the ever-wakeful dragon which, conspicuous for its crest and triple tongue and terrifying with its hooked teeth, guarded the golden tree. After she had sprinkled it with the juice of a Lethaean herb and three times spoken the words that bring peaceful sleep, words that calm the troubled sea and stop rushing rivers, sleep came to eyes that had never known it, and the Aesonian hero took possession of the gold. Proud of his spoil, and carrying with him the giver of the gift as a second spoil, he reached the harbor of Iolcus as victor, with his wife.

The Haemonian mothers and aged fathers brought offerings for their sons’ return, and melted heaps of incense in the flames, and the vowed victim fell, its horns overlaid with gold. But Aeson was absent from the celebrations, already nearer to death and worn out by the years of old age. Then the son of Aeson spoke: “O my wife, to whom I confess I owe my life—though you have given me everything, and the sum of your services is past belief—yet if spells can do this (and what can spells not do?), take some years from mine and add them, once taken, to my father.” He could not hold back his tears. She was moved by the devotion of his plea, and Aeetes, whom she had abandoned, came into her mind, a mind so unlike Jason’s. Yet without admitting such feelings, she said: “What crime has fallen from your lips, husband? Do you think I can transfer any span of your life to someone else? Hecate would not allow it, and what you ask is not fair. But I will try, Jason, to give you a greater gift than the one you ask for.

“Night,” she said, “most faithful keeper of secrets, and you golden stars who, with the moon, take over from the fires of day; and you, three-headed Hecate, who come as one who knows my undertakings, a helper to the chants and the art of magicians; and you, Earth, who supply magicians with potent herbs; you breezes and winds, mountains, rivers and lakes, all you gods of the groves, all you gods of the night: be present. With your help, whenever I wished, rivers have run back to their sources while their banks marveled; with my chant I calm the churning seas and churn the calm ones; I drive the clouds away and draw the clouds on; I banish the winds and summon them; with words and spells I burst the jaws of snakes; I move living rocks, and oaks torn from their soil, and whole forests; I command the mountains to tremble, the ground to rumble, and the shades of the dead to come out of their tombs.

As soon as she had mounted it, stroked the bridled necks of the dragons, and shaken the light reins in her hands, she was swept aloft. She looked down on Thessalian Tempe below and steered her serpents toward Thracian lands; and she surveyed the herbs that Ossa bore, and high Pelion, and Othrys and Pindus, and Olympus, greater than Pindus; those that pleased her she partly tore out by the root, partly cut with the curve of a bronze sickle. Many herbs pleased her on the banks of the Apidanus, many on the banks of the Amphrysus, and you were not spared either, Enipeus; the Peneus too, and the waters of the Spercheus, contributed something, and the reedy shores of Boebe. At Euboean Anthedon she also plucked a life-giving herb, not yet famous for the change of Glaucus’ body. And now the ninth day and the ninth night had seen her traveling over all the fields in her chariot drawn by the dragons’ wings, when she returned. The dragons had been touched by nothing but the scent, and yet they cast off the skin of their aged years.note

On arriving she stopped short of the threshold and the doors, with only the sky for a roof, and avoided all contact with men. She set up two altars of turf, Hecate’s on the right, and on the left the altar of Youth. When she had wreathed them with sacred boughs and wild foliage, she dug two pits in the earth not far away and performed the rites, plunging her knife into the throat of a black-fleeced sheep and drenching the wide pits with its blood. Then, pouring over it cups of clear wine, and pouring next cups of warm milk, she poured out words at the same time, called on the divine powers of the earth, and begged the king of the shades, with his stolen bride, not to hurry to rob the old man’s limbs of life.

So that her trickery would not stop there, the woman from the Phasis pretended to hate her husband and fled as a suppliant to the threshold of Pelias. Since he himself was weighed down by old age, his daughters received her. In a short time the cunning Colchian captured them with a show of false friendship. And as she told, among the greatest of her services, how she had stripped the decay of age from Aeson, and dwelt on that part of the story, the daughters of Pelias were led to hope that their own father could grow young again by the same art. This they begged of her, and told her to name her price without limit. For a little while she was silent and seemed to hesitate, and with pretended gravity she kept their minds in suspense as they pleaded. Then, when she had promised, she said: “So that you may have greater faith in this gift, the oldest in your flock, the leader among the sheep, will become a lamb through my drug.”note

At once a woolly ram, worn out by countless years, was dragged in, its horns curling around its hollow temples. When she had stabbed its withered throat with a Haemonian knife and stained the blade with its scanty blood, the sorceress plunged the animal’s limbs, together with her potent juices, into a hollow bronze cauldron. And see—they shrank its limbs and burned away its horns, and with its horns its years, and a tender bleating was heard from the middle of the cauldron. Instantly, while they marveled at the bleating, out leaped a lamb, frisked away, and looked for a milky udder. The daughters of Pelias were astounded; and once the promise had proved its truth, then indeed they pressed her all the harder.

Three times Phoebus had unyoked his horses after plunging them into the Iberian river, and on the fourth night the radiant stars were twinkling, when the deceitful daughter of Aeetes set plain water and herbs without any power over a fierce fire. And now a sleep like death held the king, his body slack, and with their king his guards—a sleep that her chants and the power of her magic tongue had given. As they had been told, the daughters had entered the threshold with the Colchian and stood around the bed. “Why do you hesitate now and do nothing? Draw your swords,” she said, “and drain out the old blood, so that I may refill the empty veins with young blood. Your father’s life and youth are in your hands. If you have any devotion, and the hopes you nurse are not empty, do your duty by your father: drive out his old age with your weapons, and thrust in the steel to let the foul matter out.”

At these urgings, the more dutiful each daughter was, the quicker she was to be undutiful, and to avoid being wicked, she did a wicked thing. Yet none of them could bear to watch her own blows: they turned their eyes away, and with faces averted dealt blind wounds with cruel hands. He, streaming with blood, still raised himself on his elbow, and, half-mangled, tried to rise from the bed; and in the midst of so many swords, stretching out his pale arms, he said, “What are you doing, my daughters? Who arms you to bring about your father’s death?” Their courage failed, and their hands fell. As he was about to say more, the Colchian cut his throat, and his words with it, and plunged his mangled body into the boiling water.

Had she not gone up into the air with her winged serpents, she would not have escaped punishment. She fled high above shady Pelion, the Philyrean home, above Othrys and the places made famous by what befell old Cerambus. He, lifted into the air on wings with the nymphs’ help, when the heavy earth was overwhelmed by the sea pouring in, escaped Deucalion’s flood undrowned. She left on her left Aeolian Pitane, and the image of a long serpent made of stone, and the grove of Ida, where Liber hid a bullock, his son’s theft, under the false likeness of a stag; and the place where the father of Corythus lies buried in a little sand; and the fields that Maera terrified with her strange new barking; and the city of Eurypylus, where the women of Cos wore horns at the time when Hercules’ troop was departing; and Phoebus’ Rhodes, and the Telchines of Ialysos, whose eyes blighted everything by their very gaze, until Jupiter, loathing them, sank them beneath his brother’s waves.note

She passed also the walls of Carthaea on ancient Cea, where the father Alcidamas would one day marvel that a gentle dove could be born from his daughter’s body. Then she saw the lake of Hyrie and the Cycnean vale, made famous by a sudden swan. For there Phyllius, at a boy’s command, had handed over birds and a fierce lion, tamed; ordered also to subdue a bull, he had subdued it; but, angry that his love was spurned so often, he refused the boy the bull, the last of his prizes, when he asked for it. The boy, indignant, said, “You will wish you had given it,” and leaped from a high rock. Everyone thought he had fallen: turned into a swan, he hung in the air on snowy wings. But his mother Hyrie, not knowing he had been saved, melted away in weeping and made a lake that bears her name. Next to these lies Pleuron, where on trembling wings Combe, daughter of Ophius, escaped the wounds her sons would have dealt her.note

Next she looked on the fields of Calaurea, sacred to Latona’s daughter, which witnessed the king turned into a bird together with his wife. On the right was Cyllene, where Menephron was to sleep with his mother in the manner of savage beasts. Far off from there she looked back at Cephisus weeping over the fate of his grandson, turned by Apollo into a bloated seal, and at the house of Eumelus, who mourned his son now living in the air. At last, on her serpents’ wings, she reached Ephyre of the spring Pirene. Here, the ancients spread the tale, human bodies in the earliest age sprang from mushrooms swollen by rain. But after the new bride had burned from the Colchian’s poisons, and both seas had seen the king’s palace ablaze, her impious sword was drenched in the blood of her sons; and the mother, wickedly avenged, fled from Jason’s arms. From there, carried off by the Titan’s dragons, she entered the citadel of Pallas, which saw you, most just Phene, and you, old Periphas, flying side by side, and the granddaughter of Polypemon resting on new wings. Aegeus received her—a man to be condemned for this one deed alone; and hospitality was not enough: he also bound her to himself in the pact of marriage.note

And now Theseus had arrived, a son unknown to his father, who by his own courage had brought peace to the Isthmus between two seas. To destroy him, Medea mixed the aconite she had long ago brought with her from the shores of Scythia. That poison, they say, sprang from the teeth of Echidna’s dog. There is a blind cave with a gloomy mouth; there is a sloping path, down which the Tirynthian hero dragged Cerberus, bound in chains of adamant, as he resisted and turned his eyes aside from the daylight and its glittering rays. Roused to rabid fury, the dog filled the air with his threefold barking and spattered the green fields with white foam. This foam, people think, congealed, and drawing nourishment from the rich and fertile soil, gained the power to harm. Because it springs up hardy on hard rock, country people call it aconite. Through his wife’s cunning, Aegeus himself, the father, held it out to his son as if to an enemy.note

That Sinis has fallen, who misused his great strength: he could bend tree trunks, and would force pines down from on high to the earth to scatter bodies far and wide. The road to Alcathoe, the walls of the Leleges, lies open and safe now that Sciron is laid low; and when the robber’s bones were scattered, the earth refused them a resting place, the sea refused them a resting place; long tossed about, they are said to have hardened with age into crags, and to the crags the name of Sciron clings. If we wished to count your honors and your years, your deeds would outnumber your years. For you, bravest of men, we offer public vows; to you we drink our draughts of Bacchus.” The palace echoed with the people’s approval and the prayers of their goodwill, and nowhere in the whole city was there any place of sadness.note

And yet (so true is it that no pleasure is unmixed, and some worry always intrudes on happiness) Aegeus did not enjoy a carefree joy at the return of his son. Minos was preparing war. Though he was strong in soldiers and strong in ships, he was strongest of all in a father’s anger, and he was avenging the death of Androgeos with a just war. First, however, he gathered friendly forces for the war, and with his swift fleet roamed the seas where he was held to be powerful. Here he won over Anaphe and the realm of Astypalaea—Anaphe by promises, the realm of Astypalaea by war; here low-lying Myconos, the chalky fields of Cimolos, Cythnos blooming with thyme, little Seriphos, marble Paros, and the place where the impious Sithonian woman betrayed Arne (she received the gold her greed had demanded and was changed into a bird that even now loves gold: the jackdaw, black-footed, clothed in black feathers).note