Works of Nonnus
Page 7
[247] Such was the sort of things the travellers said to himself, looking keenly at Harmonia out of the corner of his eye.
[249] So Cadmos finished his voyage to Hellas, with the inspired voice in his mind stinging like a gadfly; and the inspired word of Zeus ever ran unerring in his ears and dove him on. There he was to present newer gifts to All Hellenes, and to make them forget the lifebringing art of Danaos the master-mischiefmaker, Danaos the waterbringer: for what good did he do for the Achaians, if once he had dug the ground with his brazen pickaxes, and pecking at the flooded hollow of the gaping earth quenched the thirst of Argos? if he made wet the steppings of their feet for his dusty people, and brought up a streamlet from the deep caves – the stranger’s gift of water?
[260] But Cadmos brought gifts of voice and thought for all Hellas; he fashioned tools to echo the sounds of the tongue, he mingled sonant and consonant in one order of connected harmony. So he rounded off a graven model of speaking silence; for he had learnt the secrets of his country’s sublime art, an outside intruder into the wisdom of Egypt, while Agenor dwelt nine years in Memphis and founded hundred-gated Thebes. There he pressed out the milk of the holy books ineffable, scratched their scratches across with backfaring hand and traced their rounded circles. And he showed forth the Euian secrets of Osiris the wanderer, the Egyptian Dionysos. He learned the nightly celebration of their mystic art, and declaimed the magic hymn in the wild secret language, intoning a shrill alleluia. While a boy in the temple full of stone images, he had come to know the inscriptions caved by artists deep into the walls. With much-pondering thought he had measured the flaming arch of the innumerable stars, and learnt the sun’s course and the measure of the earth, turning the intertwined fingers of his flexible hand. He understood the changing circuits of the moon as he comes back and back again – how she changes her returning shape in three circles, new-shining, half-moon, and gleaming with full face; how her splendour now touching, now shrinking back, at the male furnace of father Helios is brought to birth without a mother, as she filches the father’s selfbegotten fire ever lighted again.
[285] Such was Cadmos. Quickly he set out for the Achaian cities, and left his seafaring. With Harmonia, he conveyed a swarm of seawandering companions turned travellers by land, in horsecarriages and laden wagons, on the way to the oracular sanctuaries. Then he reached Delphi, and asked an oracle from the midnipple axle of never-silent Pytho; and the Pythian axle speaking of himself uttered oracles of sense, resounding about in hollow tone:
[293] “Cadmos, in vain you travel round and round with wandering steps. You seek a bull which now cow ever calved; you seek a bull which no mortal knows how to find. Renounce Assyria, and take an earthly cow to guide your mission; search not for a bull of Olympos. Europa’s bridegroom no drover knows how to drive; he frequents no pasture, no meadow, obeys no goad, is ordered by no whip. He knows how to bear the dainty harness of Cypris, not the plow’s yokeband; he strains his neck for Love alone, and not for Demeter. No, let pass your regret for your Tyrian father, and abide among foreigners; found a city with the name of Egyptian Thebes your home, in the place where the cow of fortune shall sink and rest her heavyknee foot.”
[307] So speaking he lulled the tripods’ wild voice: the ridges of Parnassos quaked, when they heard the noise of their neighbour Phoibos; Castalia marked it, and her inspired water bubbled in oracular rills.
[311] The god spoke: and Cadmos gave place. Near the temple he saw a cow, and went beside her as she walked. His men followed, and made sparing pace, equal to the slow-obeying hoof of the unerring cow, sedulous servants. On the way, Cadmos espied from the road a sacred place conspicuous; the place where the Pythian hand noticed on a hill the ninecircling coil of the dragon’s back, and put to sleep the deadly poison of the Cirrhaian serpent. Then the wanderer left the heads of Parnassos and trod the neighbouring soil of Daulis, whence comes the tale I hear of the dumb woespinner Philomela and her talking dress, whom Tereus defiled, when Hera, queen of wedlock, turned her back on the wedding among the mountains with no wedding dances; how the girl mourned over the undecked pallet of the bridebed on the common road; how the girl tongue-shorn bewailed this Thracian rape; and how voiceless Echo copied her tears and groaned too, bewailing the bedshy maiden Philomela, as the blood of her maidenhood ran mingling with the red stream from her new-severed tongue.
[331] He saw too the city of Tityos, where that bold son of Earth marching through the fair-leafy woods of Panopeus lifted the sacred robe of Leto and attempted violence. He set a footstep on Tanagra bottom; and passing from Coroneia to the soil of Haliartos, he came near to the city of Thespiai, and Plataiai in its deep ravines, and Aonia on the Boitoian ground. This is the place where Orion the lovesick son of Earth was brought low, great as he was, by the Scorpion, who came to help the hard-hearted Archeress: he was in the act of lifting the lowest edge of the tunic of the unmated goddess, when crawling slow came that earthly horror, hit his adversary’s heal and pierced it with freezing sting.
[344] He traversed the land of Chaironeia, where the cow’s hoof was whitened in cutting the silvery dust, and following the many winding circuits of the rocky path it shook off the white dirt from its dusty feet. Then the oracular hoof of the cow gave way, and she sank to the ground foretelling the city to be. Now that the divine utterance out of the Pythian cave was fulfilled, Cadmos brought the sacred cow beside an altar smoking with incense, and sought for a rill of spring water, that he might cleanse his ministering hands and pour the pure water over the sacrifice; for as yet there were no wineplanted gardens to show the delicate fruit of their ripening crop.
[356] He stayed his feet beside dragonbreeding Dirce: and stood amazed when he saw the speckleback serpent, Ares’ child, appear from one side and girdle the spring with snaky coil. The serpent scared away the great company who followed Cadmos, biting tone under the chest with his flashing jaws, rending another with a stroke of bloody tooth, tearing another’s lifesaving liver when he showed fight and laying him dead: a rough mane slipping out of the dank head ran down disorderly over his neck. Another he scared leaping above the man’s temples, ran up another’s chin irresistible to strike his eye with poison-shooting dew, and darkened the sparkling gleam of the closing orb. One he caught by the foot and held it in his jaws, tearing it with his bite – spat out green foam from his teeth upon the lad’s body, and the greenish poison froze the body livid like steel. Another panted under the strokes of the jaws, and the membranes of the brain billowed throbbing out of the head at the poisonous bite, while a stream of matter ran down through the drenched nostrils out of the melting brain.
[365] Then quickly the dragon curled round Cadmos, creeping up his legs, and bound him in dangerous bonds; then raising his body high above him with a mounting lurch of his limbs, darted at the round midnipple of his oxhide shield. The man with his legs enclosed by those slanting rings was exhausted by the heavy weight of the long trailing snake – a horrible burden! but the wearied bearer still stood upright, until the serpent dragged him to the ground and opened his cruel mouth – the monster gaped, and the bloody portal of his raw-ravening throat yawned wide: he turned his head sideways, and with shaking hood curved his neck backwards stretched high over the middle of his coils.
[389] But when Cadmos was nearly exhausted, Athena came near, shaking the aegis-cape with the Gorgon’s head and snaky hair, the forecast of coming victory; and the nation-mustering deity cried aloud to the dumbfounded man –
[393] “Cadmos, helpmate and ally of Zeus Giantslayer in the battle! Are you afraid when you see only one snake? In those battles Cronion trusted in you, and brought low Typhon with all that shock of heads, and every one a snake! Tremble no more at the hiss from the creature’s teeth. Pallas bids you on! Brazen Ares shall not save his reptile guardian beside murderous Dirce. But when he is killed, take the creature’s horrible teeth, sow the ground all about with the snaky corn, reap the viperous harvest of warrior giants, join the battalions of the Earth
born in one common destruction, and leave only five living: let the crop of the Sown sprout up to glorious fruitage for Thebes that shall be.”
[406] With these words Athena encouraged the discomfited Cadmos, and then she cleft the aery deeps with windswift foot, until she entered the house of Zeus. But Cadmos where he stood on the dry earth lifted a well-rounded boundary-stone of the broad farm-land, a rocky missile! and with a straight cast of the stone smashed the top of the dragon’s head; then drawing a whetted knife from his thigh he cut through the monster’s neck. The hood severed from the body lay apart, but the tail still moved, rolling in the dust until it had uncoiled again its familiar rings. There lay the dragon stretched on the ground, dead, and over the corpse furious Ares shouted in heavy anger. By his wrath Cadmos was destined to change his limbs for a curling shape, and to have a strange aspect of dragon’s countenance at the ends of the Illyrian country.
[421] But that was ordained for long after. Now he gathered the fruit of death inside a helmet of bronze, the grim harvest of the creature’s jaws. Then he drew upon the land the humped plow of Pallas from her holy place in those parts, and plowed a battle-breeding furrow in the bright earth, and sowed long lines of the poison-casting teeth. There grew out the self-delivered crop of giants: one shot up with head high, shaking the top of a mailcoated breast; one with jutting head stretched a horrid shoulder over the opening earth; another bent forward above ground as far as the midnipple, one again rose on the ground half-finished and lifted a soil-grown shield; another shook a nodding plume before him and showed not yet his chest; while still creeping up slowly from his mother’s flanks he showed fight against fearless Cadmos, clad in armour he was born in. O what a great miracle! Eileithyia armed him whom the mother had not yet spawned! And there was one who cast his brother-spear, fumbling and half-visible; one who lightly drew the whole body into the light, but left his toes unfinished sticking in the ground.
[441] Cadmos for all that did not neglect Athena’s injunction. He reaped the stubble of giants springing up ever anew. One he struck with windswift spear over the breast, hit one on the broad neck by the collarbone shearing the bones of the hairy throat: another he tore with hurtling stone while he sowed as far as the belly. The blood of the dreadful giants flowed in rivers; Ares slipt in the gore staining his limbs with crimson, and Victory’s robe was reddened with purple drops while she stood beside the battle. Another showed fight, and Cadmos ran his sword through his cognate shield of oxhide, into the hipjoint and out at the small of his back. The slaughter stayed not: as the giants were cut and smitten with the sword, a deadly spout of bloody dew bubbled up.
[455] Then by the wise counsel of Pallas he lifted a stone high above the giants’ heads; and they drunken with gory lust for Enyo, went wild with warlike fury and destroyed each other with the steel of their cousin, and found burial in the dust. One fought with another: with ruddy gore the surface of the shield was drenched and spotted and darkened, as a giant died; the crop of that field was shorn by the brother-murdering blade of an earthgrown knife.
BOOK V
Look into the fifth next, and you will see Actaion also, whom no pricket brought forth, torn by dogs as a fleeing fawn.
As soon as Cadmos had reaped the snaky crop of toothplanted battles, and shorn the stubble of the giants, pouring the bloodlibation to Ares as the firstling feast of harvestslaughter, he cleansed his body in dragonbreeding Circe, and sacrificed the Delphian cow on the godbuilt altar as fair offering for Pallas. As the first rite in the sacrifice, he sprinkled the two horns on both sides with barleygrains; he drew out and bared the falchion knife which hung at his thigh alongside by an Assyrian strap, and cut the top hairs of the longhorned head with the hilted blade. Theoclymenos grasped the heifer’s horn and drew back the throat, Thyestes cut through the sinews of the neck with a double-edged axe; the stone altar of Athena Onca was reddened with the smear of the creature’s blood. Then the cow’s horned front was struck, and prone the creature fell. They brittled her with the steel, they cut through the sides and carved her up with the knife, they strips the hard covering of hide and stretched it out.
[20] The prince himself was busy, after folding his bright mantle and laying it on the ground. He cut out raw slices of the sturdy thighs, chopt them small and set them between two layers of fat; he pierced the long tripes with iron spits and stretched them over the embers, grilling them with gentle heat; then he brought them, pierced on the pointed bronze, and lifting the glowing spits one by one, laid them in a row on the grass amid the flowers – steward of a lowly table! The fragrant smoke of Assyrian incense scattered curling through the air. The sacrifice ended, there was a feast: and Cadmos took and held out and served to each an equal portion of choice food. The rows of banqueters at the round table soon had enough and wanted no more.
[35] The dragon’s death was not the end of the labours of Cadmos; but after the Serpent, and after the savage tribes of giants, he fought the champions of the Ectenes and the Aonian people, reaping a barbarian harvest of Ares, and fell on the neighbouring Temmicans: when he called for soldiers, a motley swarm of neighbours came to his help. To both armies alike Strife joined Enyo and brought forth Tumult: when they met in battle bows were bent, spears hurled, helmets shook, shots whizzed, oxhides rattled struck on the bossy round with chunks like millstones. The blood of the fallen ran in streams; many a man fell headlong half-dead on the fruitful earth, and rolled in the dust. Then the army of his adversaries bowed suppliant before Cadmos, and the conflict ceased. After the bloody whirl of battle Cadmos laid the foundation of Thebes yet unfortified.
[51] He divided the spaces, and many furrows were cut this way and that, the beds of many branching roads were cut by the sharp-footed iron of the oxplow; many streets were measured at right angles to the four opposing winds to take their share of the grasslands. Then the Aonian city was embellished with the stony beauty of Tyrian art: all were busy, one workman with another, cutting under the Boiotian slopes with earthcleaving pick the variegated rock, which the hills near the thick forest of tree-clad Teumessos brought forth, which Helicon grew and Cithairon brought to birth. He completed temples for the gods and houses for the people, planning with his builder’s rules. He scored the shape of a city surrounded by walls upon impregnable foundation-stones, with seven entries, imitating in his art heaven with its seven zones, but he left the walls for Amphion to build for the future inhabitants, and to protect, with towerbuilding harp.
[67] He dedicated seven gates, equal in number to the seven planets. First towards the western clime he allotted the Oncaian Gate to Mene Brighteyes, taking the name from the honk of cattle, because the Moon herself, bullshaped, horned, driver of cattle, being triform is Tritonis Athene. The second gate he gave in honour to Hermaon, the shining neighbour of Mene. The fourth he traced out and named for Electra Phaëthon’s daughter, because when he appears, Electra’s morning gleam sparkles with like colour; and the midmost gate opposite the Dawn he dedicated to fiery Helios, since he is in the middle of the planets. The fifth he gave to Ares, the third to Aphrodite, in order that Phaëthon might be between them both on either side, and cut off his neighbour the furious Ares from Aphrodite. The sixth he made an image of Zeus, shining high with more glorious craftsmanship. The last fell to the lot of Cronos the seventh planet.
[85] Such he made this seat; and having founded the sacred city, he called it by the name of Thebes in Egypt, decking out an earthly image like to Olympos with all its adornments.
[88] The daughters of the Aonians struck up Harmonia’s marriage-hymn with dances: the dancing girls sang the name of the Thracian bride, in that palace and its fine bridal chamber. The Paphian also, her lovely mother, decorated her daughter’s newbuilt bower for Cadmos, while she sang of the god-ordained marriage; her father danced with joy for his girl, bare and stript of his armour, a tame Ares! and laid his right arm unweaponed about Aphrodite, while he sounded the spirit of the Loves on his wedding-trumpet answering the panspipes: he had
shaken off from his helmet head the plumes of horsehair so familiar in the battlefield, and wreathed bloodless garlands about his hair, weaving a merry song for Love. Dancing with the immortals came Ismenian Apollo to Harmonia’s wedding, while he twangled a hymn of love on his sevenstring harp. The nine Muses too struck up a lifestirring melody: Polymnia nursingmother of the dance waved her arms, and sketched in the air an image of a soundless voice, speaking with hands and moving eyes in a graphic picture of silence full of meaning. Victory turned a tripling foot for the pleasure of Zeus, and stood by as bridesmaid crying triumph for Cadmos the god’s champion; about the bridebed she wove the wedding song with her virgin voice, and moved her gliding steps in the pretty circles of the dance, while she fluttered her wings, shamefast beside the wings of the Loves.
[113] A light arose, like a misnamed dawn in the evening, from the splendour no less brilliant of those gleaming torches scattered everywhere. All night long, the merry rout of untiring dancers were singing with clear voices beside the bridal chamber in happy romps; since
[121] And now rose the Serpent, companion of the northern Waggon, bringing the bride-adorning season to the marriage halls, a messenger with news of things to come: for Harmonia’s bridegroom along with his agemate bride was destined to change his human shape for a serpent’s. The Blessed, one after another, brought their gifts of honour to Cadmos as he hastened to his chamber. Zeus gave success in all things. Horsemaster Seabluehair proffered the gifts of the sea, in honour to his sister Hera the renowned, for she was Ares’ mother. Hermes gave a sceptre, Ares a spear, Apollo a bow. Hephaistos lifted upon Harmonia’s head a crown plumed with precious stones of many colours, a golden circlet hung over her temples. Goldenthrone Hera provided a jewel-set throne. Aphrodite wishing to delight Ares in the deep shrewdness of her mind, clasped a golden necklace showing pale about he girl’s blushing neck, a clever work of Hephaistos set with sparkling gems in masterly refinement. This he had made for his Cyprian bride, a gift for his first glimpse of Archer Eros. For the heavyknee bridegroom always expected that Cythereia would bear him a hobbling son, having the image of his father in his feet. But his thought was mistaken; and when he beheld a whole-footed son brilliant with wings like Maia’s son Hermes, he made this magnificent necklace.