Metamorphoses
that rises from muck; and in no more than an hour
a flower sprang out of that soil, blood red in its color,
just like the flesh that lies underneath the tough rind
of the seed-hiding pomegranate. Brief is its season,
for the winds from which it takes its name, the anemone,
shake off those petals so lightly clinging and fated to perish.”
BOOK XI
ROME BEGINS AT TROY
The death of Orpheus The transformation of the Maenads Midas The perfidy of Laomedon Daedalion Peleus and Thetis The wolf of Psamathe Ceyx and Alcyone (1) The house of Sleep Ceyx and Alcyone (2) Aesacus
The death of Orpheus
Meanwhile, as Orpheus compelled the trees
and beasts to follow him with suchlike songs,
and made the very stones skip in his wake,
behold: a raving mob of Thracian women
with the pelts of wild beasts draped across their breasts
observed him from the summit of a hill
setting the words to music on his lyre.
One of them tossed her hair in the light breeze:
“Look over there!” she cried. “The one who scorns us!”
And with no more ado, she cast her lance
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at the vocalizing mouth of Apollo’s seer;
it struck without wounding, being wreathed in leaves.
Another’s weapon was the stone she cast,
that even in midflight was overwhelmed
by words and music joined in harmony,
and, as though begging pardon for its mad daring,
fell at the poet’s feet.
Nevertheless,
the level of their mindless rage increased
and measure fled: mad fury was in charge,
but even so, their weapons would have been
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made mild by the enchantment of his song,
had not the shrill clamor of Phrygian flutes,
the breaking tones of horns, the frenzied drums,
and the Bacchantes’ applause and ululations
together overwhelmed his lyre’s music;
when Orpheus no longer could be heard,
the stones were reddened with a poet’s blood.
Up until now, his voice had held in thrall
the countless birds, the snakes, the surging beasts
that were the indication of his triumph:
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all these the Maenads savagely drove off,
then turned their bloody hands against the poet
and swarmed upon him as the birds will do,
when in the daylight they discern an owl
among them, dazed; or as when, in the arena,
on the morning of the games, the fated stag
is torn by dogs, and bleeds into the sand;
just so the Maenads search the poet out
and throw at him their wands wrapped in green leaves,
not meant for such a use.
Then some hurl clods,
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and others, branches broken from the trees,
while others are still busy throwing rocks;
and, lest their madness lack for proper weapons
there happened to be oxen yoked nearby,
tilling the soil—and not too far from them,
some brawny peasants, breaking the hard ground,
sweating at their labors.
But when these men saw
the Maenads surging toward them, they took off,
abandoning their work and implements;
scattered throughout the vacant fields now lay
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their hoes and rakes and mattocks, which the Maenads
captured, and having torn apart the oxen
whose horns had threatened them, they hastened back
to finish off the seer, who, with raised hands,
spoke words unheeded for the first time ever,
his voice not moving them the slightest bit;
the sacrilegious women struck him down,
and past those lips—ah, Jupiter!—to which
the stones would listen and the beasts respond,
his exhaled ghost receded on the winds.
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For you now, Orpheus, the grieving birds,
the thronging beasts, the sharp, unyielding rocks,
the trees that often gathered for your songs,
and which, like men who tear their hair in grief,
have shed their leaves for you—all these now wept,
and it is said that rivers were increased
by their own tears, and water nymphs galore
distressed their tresses and dressed all in grey.
His limbs lay scattered all about; his head
and lyre, as they glide on down your stream,
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O Hebrus, now (miraculously!) mourn;
the plaintive lyre makes some kind of moan,
the lifeless tongue moans on along with it,
the moaning riverbanks respond in turn.
Now head and lyre are borne down to the sea
beyond their native stream, until they reach
the coast of Lesbos, near Methymna’s walls:
here, as it lay at risk on foreign sands,
that head (its locks still dripping with salt spray)
was set upon by a ferocious snake;
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just as the serpent spread its jaws to strike,
Phoebus at last appeared and drove it off,
then turned the serpent’s open jaws to stone,
just as they were—and will forever be.
The shade of Orpheus now fled below,
and recognized all he had seen before;
and as he searched through the Elysian Fields,
he came upon his lost Eurydice,
and passionately threw his arms about her;
here now they walk together, side by side,
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or now he follows as she goes before,
or he precedes, and she goes after him;
and now there is no longer any danger
when Orpheus looks on Eurydice.
The transformation of the Maenads
Nevertheless, Bacchus did not permit
the murder of his seer to go unpunished,
and as he grieved for Orpheus, he bound
those Thracian women who had looked upon
that outrage: for now roots spring from the path
that each one walks upon, gripping her toes,
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drawing them out and down into the earth,
as when a bird steps right into the snare
the skillful fowler cunningly conceals,
and sensing itself caught, it beats its wings
in agitated fear that only serves
to draw the noose more tightly round its leg;
just so, as each of them, fixed to the soil
in terror, vainly tries to get away,
is kept in place by the resistant roots,
and as she struggles upward, is drawn back,
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and when she seeks her hands, her feet, her nails,
beholds the bark surmounting her trim calves;
and when her grieving hand would strike her thighs,
she strikes an oak; of oak is her breast made,
and oaken are the Maenad’s shoulders, too;
you would have thought her knotty arms were branches—
and you would not have been at all mistaken.
Midas
Nor does this placate Bacchus, still so mad
that he removes himself from these same fields,
and, with a better crowd, sets out to find
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the vineyards of Mount Timolus and the banks
of the river Pactolus, which, in those days,
was water, not a stream of flowing gold,
nor envied fo
r the value of its sands.
The usual throng of Satyrs and Bacchantes
accompanied the god—save for Silenus:
staggering from age and inebriation,
he had been taken captive in Phrygia,
and led in chains of chaplets to King Midas,
who, with the Athenian king Eumolpus,
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had once been taught the Bacchic mysteries
by Orpheus himself.
On recognizing
his comrade and companion in the rites,
King Midas joyfully proclaimed a feast,
which lasted for ten days and nights together,
to celebrate his guest’s arrival.
Now,
when Lucifer, on the eleventh day,
had driven off the ranks of stars above,
King Midas joyfully came to the fields
of Lydia, returning old Silenus
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to Bacchus, who had been his foster child.
The god, rejoicing in his safe return,
offered the king whatever he might choose,
a gratifying, although useless gift;
and destined to make evil use of it,
King Midas answered with, “Grant that whatever
my body touches will turn into gold!”
Bacchus assented to this harmful gift,
and granted him his wish—although he grieved
that Midas had not asked for something better.
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The Phrygian king took leave of him, rejoicing
in his misfortune—and as he went, essayed
the efficacy of his gift by touching
one thing and another: even he
could scarcely credit it, but when he snapped
a green twig from the low branch of an oak,
the twig immediately turned to gold;
he picked a stone up, and it did the same;
he touched a clod, and at his potent touch,
the piece of earth became a lump of ore;
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ripe wheat-heads plucked produced a golden harvest,
and when he took an apple from a tree,
you would have thought that the Hesperides
had given it to him. His fingertips
brushed lofty columns, and they seemed to glow;
and when he washed his hands in water, why
the water would have gotten past Danaë:
All turns to gold! He scarcely could imagine!
As he rejoiced, his servants set a table
with heaps of roasted meats and fresh-baked breads,
the gifts of Ceres; when he touched a loaf,
it hardened, and when Midas greedily
prepared to sink his teeth into his meat,
the teeth encountered golden dinnerware;
he mixed his Bacchic beverage with water,
and you could see him swallow liquid gold!
Astounded by this strange catastrophe
of wretchedness in wealth, he longs to flee
its trappings—now despising what he’d prayed for.
Abundance was unable to relieve
his empty stomach or his burning throat;
so justly tortured by the hateful gold,
he raised his hands and gleaming arms to heaven:
“O Father Bacchus,” he cried, “show your favor!
Though I have sinned, I beg you, grant me mercy,
save me from this ruinous extravagance!”
The gods are gentle: when the king confessed
to having sinned, Bacchus repaired his case,
released him from the gift that he had given
to keep his pledge, and said, “Lest you remain
surrounded by the gold you wrongly wished for,
go to the stream that flows past mighty Sardis
as swiftly as you can, and climb upstream
until you come upon the river’s source,
then plunge your head and body both at once
beneath the fountain that it burbles from,
and in that moment you will purge your crime.”
The king went where the god had ordered him;
the stream was colored by the force of gold
as it exchanged his body for the river;
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and even now, the seed of that old vein
is taken up by the surrounding fields
whose soil, in hardness and in golden color,
still shows the influence of Midas’ touch.
Detesting wealth, he dwelled in woods and fields,
and worshiped Pan, who haunts the mountain caves;
but he remained not altogether bright,
and as it happened once, now once again
his foolishness would do him injury.
For Mount Timolus, looking out to sea
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from his high peak, stands loftily between
the town of Sardis and little Hypaepa;
and there, while Pan was boasting to the gentle
nymphs of his skill at fingering the pipes
and playing melodies on waxen reeds,
he dared speak poorly of Apollo’s gift
compared to his own—a boast which brought about
the uneven contest which Timolus judged.
The aged judge was seated on his mountain,
and shook his ears free of the greenery;
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a wreath of oak leaves bound up his dark hair,
and acorns dangled from his bulging temples.
At sight of Pan, the shepherd-god, he said,
“Court is in session: on with the proceedings.”
Pan made a noise on his outlandish reeds,
and that barbaric song charmed Midas (who
just happened to be present for the singing);
when Pan had finished, Mount Timolus turned
his face to Phoebus—and his forest followed.
Apollo’s golden locks were crowned with laurel
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from Mount Parnassus, and his mantle, trimmed
with Tyrian purple, swept along the ground;
in his left hand, the god held up his lyre,
inlaid with precious gems and ivory,
and in his other hand he held the plectrum:
an artist, in his bearing and his manner.
And when his skillful thumb aroused the strings,
the judge, so taken by that sweetness, ruled
that Pan’s reeds must be humbled by the lyre.
The judgment that the sacred mountain gave
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on the contestants was approved by all
but one man, Midas, who alone opposed it,
calling it unjust. Apollo could not bear
that ears so dull should keep their human shape,
and so he drew them out to greater length,
and stuffed them full of gray and shaggy hair,
and made them wobbly where they joined his head
and capable of moving back and forth;
the rest stayed human: just in that one part
was Midas punished, whom the god compelled
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to wear the ears of a lackadaisical ass.
Now Midas, eager to alleviate
the shame upon his temples, tried to hide it
beneath a purple turban, but the slave
who barbered him took note of his disgrace,
and he, because he did not dare expose
the shameful sight, yet wished to speak of it,
and was unable not to bring it up,
went off a ways and dug himself a hole,
and in that hole he whispered quietly
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what he had noticed about his master’s ears,
and then concealed the vocal evidence
by shoveling the dirt back in the hole,
and, having filled it, silently slipped off.
And on that spot, there
started to spring up
a thickly planted grove of whispering reeds,
which, at year’s end, when they had reached their growth,
betrayed their secret—stirred by the south wind,
they breathed the hidden words, and so revealed
the secret story of the master’s ears.
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The perfidy of Laomedon
Avenged, Apollo left Timolus, borne
through fluid air until he came to earth
in the land that Laomedon was ruler of,
on this side of the narrow Hellespont.
Sigeum on the right, Rhodes on the left:
between them on a promontory stands
an ancient altar, consecrated to
the Thunderer, Jove of the Oracles;
and there Apollo watched as Laomedon
began the walls of his new city, Troy,
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an undertaking of great magnitude,
which was not going well, the god perceived,
and which required very great resources;
so he and Neptune, father of the seas,
assumed the shapes of mortals and erected
walls there for the tyrant of Phrygia,
after arranging to be paid in gold.
The work was soon accomplished, but the king
denied the debt, and in addition, swore
(the finishing touch put on his treachery!)
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that he had never promised compensation.
“You will not get away with this unpunished,”
Neptune said, releasing all his waters
against the shores of avaricious Troy,
and drenched the land until it seemed a sea,
and overwhelmed the fields and ruined the crops.
Nor did he think this punishment sufficient:
the daughter of the king must be surrendered
to a sea monster! It was Hercules
who freed her from the rocks that she was bound to,
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and when he sought the horses he’d been promised,
the reward for his great service was denied;
so, for his prize, the hero took instead
the twice-perjured walls of vanquished Troy.
And Hercules’ companion, Telamon,
was given Hesione as his reward
for the role that he had taken in this action;
a goddess bride brought fame to Peleus,
who had no reason to be prouder of
his grandfather than of his father-in-law,
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for Jove had many mortal grandchildren,
but only one had an immortal wife.
Peleus and Thetis
Old Proteus had prophesied to Thetis:
“Conceive, O water goddess: you will be
the mother of a youth who, in his prime,
will outperform the deeds of his own father,
and will be called the greater.”