Metamorphoses

  “The Cyclops followed, pausing just to fling

  a portion that he’d broken off the mountain,

  and even though the barest corner struck him,

  it nonetheless crushed Acis altogether.

  I (who could do but as the Fates permitted)

  caused Acis to assume ancestral powers.

  “Bright purple blood streamed from beneath the rock,

  and in a little while the redness faded

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  until it turned the color of a stream

  swollen from the first rainstorms of spring,

  then shortly afterward completely cleared.

  “The boulder that the Cyclops threw cracked open,

  and from within, there sprang a living reed

  of noble size; and from the hollow rock

  there came the sound of waters leaping up,

  and marvelous! there suddenly emerged,

  from the middle of that womb, a tender youth

  whose fresh new horns were wreathed in streaming rushes,

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  and who, though larger than he used to be,

  and with a face now of immortal blue,

  was Acis, changed into a river god,

  whose waters kept the name he had before.”

  Scylla and Glaucus

  When Galatea finished with her story,

  the company of Nereids dissolved

  and went off swimming in the placid waters.

  Not Scylla, though: the maiden did not dare

  entrust her body to the liquid depths,

  but wandered naked on the thirsty beach

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  or swam, when she was weary, in a pool

  secluded and remote, to cool her limbs.

  But look, where other limbs, so lately changed

  (near Anthedon, a town set in Boeotia),

  belonging to a strange new resident

  of the deep sea, skim now across its waves:

  Glaucus is here—and brought to a standstill

  by his desire at first sight of her,

  he says whatever comes into his mind

  that he thinks might be able to prevent her

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  from fleeing him; but she flees anyway,

  fear speeding her, until she comes to rest

  atop a mountain very near the shore,

  a massive mountain, facing out to sea,

  which rose up till it gathered in a peak

  of shaded woods that hung out over it:

  here, in a place of safety, Scylla stopped,

  not knowing whether he was god or monster,

  admiring his color and the hair

  descending past his shoulders to his back,

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  where at his groin began a fish’s tail.

  He senses her discomfiture, and says,

  while leaning on a rock that stood nearby,

  “Maiden, I am no monster, no wild thing;

  I am, in fact, a god of these same deeps,

  and of no less authority to govern

  than Proteus or Triton or Palaemon.

  “Before that, I was, nonetheless, a mortal,

  but so bound to the ocean, to be sure,

  that even then I schooled myself in it:

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  now I would draw in nets laden with fish,

  and now, while sitting on a rock, employ

  my rod and line.

  “There is a strip of beach

  adjacent to green meadows: on one side,

  the waves, and on the other, fields,

  undamaged by the grazing of horned cattle,

  or depredations made by sheep or goats;

  no busy bee has gathered flowers here,

  no festive wreathes were ever taken hence,

  and grasses never felt the sickle’s sweep.

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  “I was the first to stop there on that turf,

  while my wet fishing lines were drying out

  and I examined my catch of the day,

  all laid out in a line along the shore,

  the fish that chance had swept into my nets

  or whom credulity brought to my hooks.

  “Now comes what sounds like fiction, I admit,

  but what advantage would I gain by feigning?

  Lying on the grass, my plunder from the surf

  began to stir, and flipped from side to side,

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  as all at once, they strove to leave the earth

  and get back to the water. While I watched,

  dumbfounded and incapable of moving,

  they fled, the lot of them, abandoning

  the shore and their new master for the sea.

  “I stood stock-still in wonder a long time,

  asking myself how such a thing could be;

  was it some god—or something in the grass?

  ‘How could mere grass,’ I asked, ‘be strong as that?’

  “I plucked some and I ground it in my teeth,

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  and scarcely had I gulped that unknown liquid,

  when suddenly my heart began to pound,

  and my whole sensibility was taken

  with the desire for another element,

  which I could not resist for long: ‘Farewell,

  O earth, which I will nevermore return to,’

  I said, and plunged beneath the ocean’s waves.

  “The sea gods welcomed me, pronounced me fit

  to join their honorable company,

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  and asked the Ocean and his consort, Tethys,

  to take away whatever still remained

  of my mortality; and this they did

  first, by the recital of a hymn, nine times,

  to purge me of my evil; then they bade

  me to immerse myself a hundred times

  in just as many rivers; when I did,

  the rivers that flow on from every part

  poured all their cleansing waters on my head.

  “I can recall what happened up to this point,

  and repeat it to you; this I recollect,

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  but I don’t understand the rest of it.

  When I awoke, my body and my mind

  were both much changed from what they once had been:

  I saw then for the first time my green beard,

  and my long hair, which spreads across the waves,

  and my broad shoulders, and my sea-blue arms

  and legs which vanish in a fish’s tail.

  “But where’s the benefit of my new form,

  and that the sea gods are all pleased with me—

  what point is there to my divinity,

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  if you have not been touched by all of this?”

  And so he spoke, and had much more to say,

  and would have said it, had not Scylla fled;

  then he, enraged by her rejection, went

  to the wondrous halls of Titan’s daughter, Circe.

  BOOK XIV

  AROUND AND ABOUT WITH AENEAS

  Glaucus Aeneas wanders The Sybil Cyclops revisited Circe revisited Circe and Picus Acmon transformed The wild olive tree The transformation of Aeneas’ ships The Heron The deification of Aeneas Pomona and Vertumnus (1) Iphis and Anaxaretes Pomona and Vertumnus (2) A Roman spring The deification of Romulus

  Glaucus

  Now he who dwells among the swelling waves

  left Etna, perched upon the Giant’s Neck,

  and left the Cyclops’ fields, that were unused

  to rake and plow and unbeholden to

  the oxen yoked together in matched pairs;

  Messana, too, he left behind, and left

  the walls of Rhegium, on the far side

  of that shipwrecking strait which separates

  the shores of Sicily and Italy.

  From there, with mighty strokes propelling him

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  across the Tyrrhene Sea,
Glaucus arrived

  at the grass-covered hills and fabled halls

  inhabited by many varied beasts,

  where Circe, daughter of the Sun, held sway.

  No sooner had he seen her and exchanged

  greetings, when he urgently implored her:

  “Have pity on a god, I beg you, goddess,

  for you alone can cure my passion—if

  you find me worthy! The strength of magic herbs

  is better known to no one than to me,

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  for they have utterly transformed my life!

  “What caused my madness? This: one glimpse of Scylla

  on the Italian coast, off Sicily!

  It would be much too shameful to repeat

  the promises that she dismissed with scorn,

  the vows and the endearments she rejected!

  “But if there is some power found in charms,

  then by all means, recite a charm for me;

  or, if herbs should be of greater potency,

  rely on those you know as efficacious;

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  I am not asking to be healed and whole,

  to have this burden lifted from my heart,

  but that these flames should burn her in some part.”

  Such flames burned no one more than they burned Circe,

  (either because of her own inclinations

  or by the agency of Venus, acting

  in retribution for the Sun’s exposure

  of her own indiscretion once, with Mars)

  and who responded to his plea with this:

  “You would do better to pursue someone

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  as ready and as willing as yourself,

  someone who reciprocates your passion.

  “For you were worthy once (most certainly!)

  of being asked, and, take my word for it,

  if only you will give a girl some hope,

  you will assuredly be asked again.

  “Don’t think that you are lacking in appeal,

  for I, a goddess, the daughter of the Sun,

  the mistress of strong drugs and incantations,

  I pray that you will have me! Only spurn

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  the one who spurns your passion, and return

  the love of one who loves you: let one deed serve

  two women as they each of them deserve.”

  Glaucus responded to her proposition:

  “The leaves of trees will spring out of the ocean,

  and seaweed will be found on mountain ranges,

  before my love for Scylla ever changes.”

  The goddess was offended; even though

  she could not injure him, another god

  (nor did she wish to, being so in love),

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  yet stung by his rejection, she concocted

  at once a mess of horrifying herbs

  and poison potions; as she blended these,

  she murmured certain charms of Hecate’s,

  then dressed herself in a cloak of azure hue,

  and passing on through throngs of cringing beasts,

  she left her palace, seeking Rhegium,

  across the straits directly from Messana,

  and made her way over the roiling waters

  as if she walked upon the solid earth,

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  her bare feet dry as she skimmed the tops of waves.

  There was a little pool, curved like a bow,

  that Scylla found appealing for its quiet;

  here she restored herself from midday heat,

  when the sun was high and shadows disappeared.

  Circe got here before the maiden did,

  and fouled that place with poisons that produced

  prodigious monsters; juice of noisome roots

  she sprinkled there, and three times nine times spoke

  the dark and winding words of incantation,

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  her lips well practiced in the magic arts.

  Arriving, Scylla sinks into the pool

  up to her waist, and when she first beholds

  her private parts deformed into the shapes

  of barking dogs, cannot believe them her,

  and in her fear, attempts to drive them off,

  and then flees from their gaping wantonness;

  but what she flees is drawn along with her,

  and reaching down to touch herself below,

  discovers not her thighs and legs and feet,

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  but that those parts of her have been replaced

  by gaping mouths, like those of Cerberus;

  she stands on rabid dogs and on the backs

  of beasts beneath her, and her private parts

  are girded with a ring of monstrous shapes.

  Her lover Glaucus wept at this and fled

  from having any more to do with Circe,

  whose use of potent herbs was too aggressive.

  Scylla remained where she was standing, though,

  and when the opportunity arose

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  for her to show the hatred she bore Circe,

  she carried off Ulysses’ men as plunder,

  and would have done the same to the Trojan ships

  had she not been transformed into a rock

  before their coming—a rock that stands there still,

  deep in the water, shunned by navigation.

  Aeneas wanders

  When the Trojans had passed Scylla and Charybdis,

  and were quite near the shores of Italy,

  a head wind drove them to the Libyan coast,

  where Dido took Aeneas to her heart

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  and home, but was unable to endure

  a separation from her Phrygian mate;

  and on a pyre built to counterfeit

  the sacred rites, she fell upon his sword:

  and she, who had been tricked, tricked everyone.

  And fleeing that new city in the sands,

  Aeneas once again returned to Eryx,

  the royal residence of his true friend

  Acestes; here, at Anchises tomb,

  he honored his father with gift offerings

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  And setting out again in ships that Iris,

  the messenger of Juno, almost burned,

  he soon sailed past the Aeolian isles,

  and the lands that reek of burning sulfur,

  and the rocky islets haunted by the Sirens,

  the daughters of Acheloüs; and then,

  once he had lost the helmsman of his ship,

  he coasted past Inareme and Prochyte,

  and Pithecusae on its barren hill,

  an island named for its inhabitants.

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  For to be sure, the father of the gods,

  enraged by all the fraud and perjury

  and criminality of the Cercopians,

  transformed their men into misshapen creatures,

  so that they should seem unlike human beings

  and yet appear quite similar as well,

  with shortened limbs and flattened, pushed-back noses

  and faces deeply lined with old-age furrows;

  and with their bodies cloaked in yellow hair,

  he sent them off to dwell in these abodes,

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  but not before he took from them the use

  of their congenitally lying tongues,

  yet left them with the power to complain,

  in raucous, strident noises, of their lot.

  The Sybil

  When he had sailed past these and left behind

  the walls of Parthenope on his right,

  there, on his left side he beheld the tomb

  of Misenus, Aeolus’ tuneful son,

  and the fertile lowlands’ sedgy marsh

  on the coast of Cumae, where he stopped and entered

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  the cave of the superannuated Sibyl

 
to pray that he might journey through Avernus

  for consultation with his father’s shade.

  For a long time, the Sybil kept her gaze

  fixed on the ground, but when the god within

  had stirred her to frenzy, she raised her eyes to his:

  “It is a great thing that you ask of me,”

  the Sybil said, “O man of mighty deeds,

  whose strength and piety have been essayed

  by sword and fire and are well esteemed.

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  “So put aside your apprehension here,

  Aeneas: what you ask for will be granted;

  and with me leading, you will come to know

  the Elysian abodes and that extraordinary

  kingdom within whose borders you will find

  the shade of your dear father: nothing prevents

  such access to the man of excellence.”

  She spoke and showed him, deep within the wood

  of Proserpina, a shining golden branch

  and ordered him to break it from its tree.

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  Aeneas did as he was told and saw

  the underworld’s formidable resources,

  and his ancestral spirits, and the shade

  of that great-spirited and venerable man,

  father Anchises. He carefully observed

  the laws and customs of the places there,

  and learned what dangers he himself would face

  in the wars to come. And afterward,

  as he retraced his steps in weariness,

  struck up a conversation with his guide,

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  to alleviate the journey’s tedium.

  And while they were returning through dim twilight

  on that dreadful road, Aeneas said to her,

  “Whether you are yourself a goddess, or

  are one who is most pleasing to the gods,

  you will seem always most divine to me.

  I will avow that my opportunity

  to tour the underworld and leave it alive

  has been your gift to me; and in exchange,

  when I return to where the air is fresh,

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  I will erect a temple and establish

  a cult that will burn incense in your honor.”

  The Sybil took a deep breath and responded,

  “I am no goddess—and no mere mortal

  is worthy of the gift of sacred incense!

  But lest you err by ignorance, know that

  eternal life was offered to me once,

  if I would yield my maidenhead to Phoebus,

  who, while he thought I would submit to him,

  attempted to seduce me with fine gifts:

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  “‘Select, Cumaean virgin, what you wish,

  and you will have whatever it may be.’

  “I pointed to a piled-up heap of sand

  and asked a gift that would prove meaningless:

  that I should have as many years of life