Virgil, the Georgics 4.450-503, tr. C. Day Lewis (Oxford, 1966).
Aristaeus is having trouble with his bees. He goes to the seer Proteus for help; reluctantly, Proteus tells him this story in reply.
"So much he said. At last now the seer convulsively Rolled his glaring eyes so they shone with a glassy light, Harshly ground his teeth, and thus gave tongue to Fate.-- 'Not without sanction divine is the anger that hunts you down. Great is the crime you pay for. Piteous Orpheus calls This punishment on you. Well you deserve it. If destiny So wills it.Bitter his anguish for the wife was taken from him. Headlong beside that river she fled you. She never saw, Poor girl, her death there, deep in the grass before her feet-- The watcher on the river-bank, the savage watersnake. The band of wood-nymphs, her companions, filled with their crying The hilltops: wailed the peaks of Rhodope: high Pangaea, The unwarlike land of Rhesus, The Getae lamented, and Hebrus, and Attic Orithyia. Orpheus, sick to the heart, sought comfort of his hollow lyre: You, sweet wife, he sang alone on the lonely shore, You at the dawn of day he sang, at day's decline you. The gorge of Taenarus even, deep gate of the Underworld, He entered, and that grove where fear hangs like a black fog: Approached the ghostly people approached the King of Terrors And the hearts that know not how to be touched by human prayer. But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost basements, Flocked out the flimsy shades, the phantoms lost to light, In number like to the millions of birds that hide in the leaves When evening or winter rain from the hills has driven them-- Mothers and men, the dead |
Bodies of great-heart heroes, boys and unmarried maidens,
Young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes-- And about them lay the black ooze, the crooked reeds of Cocytus, Bleak the marsh that barred them in with its stagnant water,And the Styx coiling nine times around corralled them there. Why, Death's very home and holy of holies was shaken To hear that song, and the Furies with steel-blue snakes entwined In their tresses; the watch-dog Cerberus gaped open his triple mouth; Ixion's wheel stopped dead from whirling in the wind. And now he's avoided every pitfall of the homeward path, And Eurydice, regained, is nearing the upper air Close behind him (for this condition has Proserpine made), When a moment's madness catches her lover off his guard-- Pardonable, you'd say, but Death can never pardon. He halts. Eurydice, his own, is now on the lip of Daylight. Alas! he forgot. His purpose broke. He looked back. His labour was lost, the pact he had made with the merciless king Annulled.- Three times did thunder peal over the pools of Avernus. 'Who?,' she cried, 'Has doomed me to misery, who has doomed us? What madness beyond measure? Once more a cruel fate Drags me away, and my swimming eyes are drowned in darkness. Good-bye. I am borne away. A limitless night is about me And ever the strengthless hands I stretch to you, yours no longer.' Thus she spoke: and at once from his sight, like a wisp of smoke Thinned into air, was gone. Wildly he grasped at shadows, wanting to say much more, But she did not see him; nor would the ferryman of the Inferno Let him again cross the fen that lay between them." |
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