Works of Nonnus

by Nonnus

  [207] “Tell me, my queen, why are your cheeks so pale? where is your beauty? Who has grudged that loveliness and dimmed the red sparkling colours of your face, changed the roses to quickfading anemones? Why are you downcast and languishing? Have you heard yourself those insults which the people are shouting? Curse the tongue of women, from which all troubles come! Tell me who laid rough hands on your girdle – hide it not! Which of the gods has besmirched you, which has ravished your maidenhood?

  [216] “If Ares has wedded my girl in secret, if he has slept with Semele and neglected Aphrodite, let him come to your bed grasping his spear as a marriage-gift – your mother knows her begetter, the terrible warrior! If quickshoe Hermes has made merry bridal with you, if he has forgotten his own Peitho for Semele’s beauty, let him bring you his rod to herald your wedding, or let him fit you with his own golden shoes as a gift worthy of your bed, that you too may be goldshod like Hera the bedfellow of Zeus! If handsome Apollo has come from heaven to be your husband, if he has forgotten Daphne because of his love for Semele, let him away with furtive guile, and come to your through the air drawn in his car by singing swans, and dancing delicately let him offer his harp as a gift for your favours, to show a trusty proof of the wedding! Cadmos will know that heavenly harp at sight, for he saw it, and heard the melodious tones, when it made music at his festal board for the wedding of Harmonia with a mortal.

  [235] “If Seabluehair went womanmad and forced you, preferring you to Melanippe the sage, sung by the poet, let him make merry in full view, and plant the prongs of his trident as a bridal gift before the gates of Cadmos; so let him bestow the same honour beside snakecherishing Dirce, as he gave to lionbreeding Lerna in the Argive country as a mark of his marriage with Amymone, where the place of the Lernaian nymph still bears the trident’s name. But why do I call you the bedfellow of Earthshaker? What tokens have you of Poseidon’s bed? Tyro was embraced in a flood by watery hands, when counterfeit Enipeus came with his deceitful bubbling stream.

  [247] “Or if as you say, Cronion is your bridegroom, let him come to your bed with amorous thunders, armed with bridal lightning, that people may say - `Hera and Semele both have thunders in waiting for the bedchamber!’ The consort of Zeus may be jealous, but she will not hurt you, for Ares your mother’s father will not allow it. Europa is more happy than Semele, for a horned Zeus carried her on his back; the hoof of the lovestricken bull ran unwetted on the top of the water, and one so mighty was Love’s boat. O what a great miracle! A maiden held the reins of him who holds the reins of heaven! I call Danaë happier than Semele, for into her bosom Zeus poured a shower of gold from the roof, torrents of mad love in abundant showers! But that most blessed bride asked no gifts of gold; her lovegift was her whole husband. But let us be quiet, or your father Cadmos will hear.”

  [264] With these words Hera left the house, and the girl still in her grief, jealous of the inimitable state of Hera’s marriage and unsatisfied with Cronion. Hera returned to heaven and went indoors. There beside the heavenly throne she saw the weapons of Zeus lying without their owner; and as if they could hear, she addressed them in friendly cajoling words: “Dear Thunder, has Zeus my cloudgatherer deserted you too then? Who has stolen you again and left your owner naked? Thunder, you have been plundered! But Typhoeus has nothing to do with it. The same has happened to Hera, my comforter: Rainy Zeus ahs a bride to look after and neglects us both. The earth is no more sprinkled with showers: the downfall of rain has ceased, drought feeds on the plowland furrows and makes the crops worthless, the countryman speaks not more of Cloudy Zeus but Zeus Cloudless. My dear Lightnings, utter your fiery appeal to Cronion, call upon womanmad Zeus, my thunderbolts! Avenge the jealous pain of Hera, attend upon Semele’s wedding! Let her pray for a wedding-gift and receive her own fiery destroyers!”

  [284] Such was the appeal of sorrowing Hera to the voiceless weapons, while the goddess was boiling with jealousy and fury.

  [286] But Semele heavily fettered with this new distress for her temper, longed for the lightning to be the fiery escort of their loves; and she complained to Zeus, as the prayed for a show of fires about her bed like Hera: “By Danaë’s opulent wooing I pray, grant me this grace, horned husband of Europa! for I dare not call you Semele’s husband, when I have seen you only like a dream! Acrisios was more blessed than Cadmos; but I too should have been glad to see a wedding of gold, Zeus of the Rain, if the mother of Perseus had not first stolen that honour from thee. I should have been glad if you had carried me on your shoulders in the waters as a travelling bull, and my brother Polydoros like Cadmos could have hunted the robber of the wandering bride, Cronion who carried me. But what have I to do with wedlock in shape of a bull or a shower? I want no honour equal to some earthly bride. Leave Europa her bull, leave Danaë her shower of gold: Hera’s state is the only one I envy. If you hold me worthy of honour, deck out my chamber with your heavenly fire! Kindle a lovelight in the clouds, show incredulous Agauë the lightning as my lovegift. Let Autonoë in her room close by hear the thunderous tune of our attendant Loves, and tremble at the selfannouncing token of our unpublished marriage.

  [310] “Give it – let me embrace the dear flame and rejoice my heart, touching the lightning and handling the thunderbolts! Give me the bridal flame of your own chamber; every bride has torches to escort her in the marriage procession. Am I not worthy of your bridal thunderbolts, when I have the blood of Ares and your Aphrodite? How wretched I am! Semele’s wedding has quickfading fire and earthly torches, – your Hera is a bride who grasps the thunderbolt and touches the lightning! Thunderhurling bridegroom! You go to Hera’s bed in divine shape, illuminating your bride with bridal lightnings until the chamber shines with many lights – fiery Zeus! but to Semele you come as dragon or a bull. She hears for her love the heavy Olympian rolling boom – Semele hears the sham bellow of a false bull under a vague shadowy shape. Soundless, cloudless, Zeus comes to my bed: Cloudgatherer he mingles with Hera. Well may she hold up her head! My father shrinks from insults for a daughter unhappily married, hides in the corners of the house – your Cadmos! avoids the place where men tread, ashamed to show himself to his people, because all the people deride this secret union with you, and blame Semele for having a furtive bedmate.

  [333] “A fine wedding-fit you have found me – the sneers of women! The attendants about me slander me, and far above the rest I fear the rough tongue of this garrulous nurse. Remember who wove the wilywitted fate for Typhon, and brought back to you the stolen spark of your thunder! Show it to my father, who got it back, for old Cadmos demands of me a proof of your bed. Never yet have I seen the countenance of the true Cronion, never beheld the flashing gleam from his eyelids, or the rays from his face, or the lustrous beard! Your Olympian shape I have never seen, but I expect a panther or lion – I have seen no god as a husband. I see you something mortal, and I am to bring forth a god! Yet I heave heard of another fiery wedding: did not Helios embrace his bride Clymene with fiery nuptials?”

  [348] Thus Semele prayed for her own fate: the shortlived bride hoped to be equal to Hera, and to see at her nuptials the spark of the thunderbolt gentle and peaceful.

  [351] Father Zeus heard, and blamed the jealous Portioners, and pities Semele so soon to die; but he understood the scheming resentment of implacable Hera against Bacchos. Then he ordered Hermes to catch up his newborn son out of the thunderfire when it should strike Thyone. He spoke thus in answer to the highheaded girl: “Wife, the jealous mind of Hera has deceived you by a trick. Do you really think, wife, that my thunders are gentle? Be patient until another time, for now you carry a child. Be patient until next time, and first bring forth my son. Do not demand from me the murderous fire before that birth. I had no lightning in my hand when I took Danaë’s maidenhood; no booming thunder, no thunderbolts celebrated my union with your Europa, the Tyrian bride; the Inachian heifer saw no flames: you alone, a mortal, demand from me what a goddess Leto did not ask.”

  [367] So he spoke, but he
had no though of fighting against the threads of Fate. He passed from the bosom of the sky shooting fire, and Flashlighning Zeus the husband unwillingly fulfilled the prayer of his young wife. He danced into Semele’s chamber, shaking in a reluctant hand the bridegift, those fires of thunder which were to destroy his bride. The chamber was lit up with the lightning, the fiery breath made Ismenos to glitter and all Thebes to twinkle.

  [375] When Semele saw her fiery murderers, she held up a proud neck and said with lofty arrogance: “I want no clearsounding cithern, I need no hoboy! Thunders are here for my panspipes of Zeus’s love, this boom is my Olympian hoboy, the firebrands of my bridal are the flashes of heavenly lightning! I care not for common torches, my torches are thunderbolts! I am the consort of Cronion, Agauë is only Echion’s. Let them call Autonoë Aristaios’s wife. Ino’s rival is only Nephele – Semele’s is Hera! I was not the wife of Athamas, I was not the mother of Actaion the forester, so quickly killed and torn by dogs. I want no lesser harp, for Cithara the heavenly harp makes music for Semele’s wedding!”

  [389] So she spoke in her pride, and would have grasped the deadly lightning in her own hands – she touched the destroying thunderbolts with daring palm, careless of Fate. Then Semele’s wedding was her death, and in its celebration the Avenging Spirit made her bower serve for pyre and tomb. Zeus had no mercy; the breath of the bridal thunder with its fires of delivery burnt her all to ashes.

  [396] Lightning was the midwife, thunder our Lady of childbed; the heavenly flames had mercy, and delivered Bacchos struggling from the mother’s burning lap when the married life was withered by the mothermurdering flash; the thunders tempered their breath to bathe the babe, untimely born but unhurt. Semele saw her fiery end, and perished rejoicing in a childbearing death. In one bridal chamber could be seen Love, Eileithyia, and the Avengers together. So the babe half-grown, and his limbs washed with heavenly fire, was carried by Hermes to his father for the lying-in.

  [407] Zeus was able to change the mind of jealous Hera, to calm and undo the savage threatending resentment which burdened her. Semele consumed by the fire he translated into the starry vault; he gave the mother of Bacchos a home in the sky among the heavenly inhabitants, as one of Hera’s family, as daughter of Harmonia sprung from both Ares and Aphrodite. So her new body bathed in the purifying fire . . . she received the immortal life of the Olympians. Instead of Cadmos and the soil of earth, instead of Autonoë and Agauë, she found Artemis by her side, she had converse with Athena, she received the heavens as her wedding-gift, sitting at one table with Zeus and Hermaon and Ares and Cythereia.

  BOOK IX

  Look into the ninth, and you will see the son of Maia, and the daughters of Lamos, and Mystis, and the flight of Ino.

  Zeus the Father received Dionysos after he had broken out of his mother’s fiery lap and leapt through the delivering thunders half-formed; he sewed him in his manly thigh, while he waited upon the light of the moon which was to bring him to birth. Then the hand of Cronides guiding the birth was his own midwife to the sewn-up child, by cutting the labouring threads in his pregnant thigh. So the rounded thigh in labour became female, and the boy too soon born was brought forth, but not in a mother’s way, having passed from a mother’s womb to a father’s. No sooner had he peeped out by this divine delivery, than the childbed Seasons crowned him with an ivy-garland in presage of things to come; they wreathed the horned head of a bullshaped Dionysos with twining horned snakes under the flowers.

  [16] Hermes Maia’s son received him near the birthplace hill of Dracanon, and holding him in the crook of his arm flew through the air. He gave the newborn Lyaios a surname to suit his birth, and called him Dionysos, or Zeus-limp, because while he carried his burden lifted his foot with a limp from the weight of his thigh, and nysos in the Syracusan language means limping. So he dubbed Zeus newly delivered Eiraphiotes, or Father Botcher, because he had sewed up the baby in his breeding thigh.

  [25] Thus Hermes carried upon his arm the little brother who had passed through one birth without a bath, and lay now without a tear, a baby with a good pair of horns like the Moon. He gave him in charge of the daughters of Lamos, river nymphs – the son of Zeus, the vineplanter. They received Bacchos into their arms; and each of them dropt the milky juice of her breast without pressing into his mouth. And the boy lay on his back unsleeping, and fixt his eye on the heaven above, or kicked at the air with his two feet one after the other in delight; he stared at the unfamiliar sky, and laughed in wonder to see his father’s vault of stars.

  [37] The consort of Zeus beheld the babe, and suffered torments. Through the wrath of resentful Hera, the daughters of Lamos were maddened by the lash of that divine mischiefmaker. In the house they attacked the servants, in the threeways they carved up the wayfaring man with alienslaying knife; they howled horribly, with violent convulsions they rolled the eyes in their disfigured faces; they scampered about this way and that way at the mercy of their wandering wits, running and skipping with restless feet, and the mad breezes made their wandering locks dance wildly into the air; the yellow shift round the bosom of each was whitened with drops of foam from the lips of the girls. Indeed they would have chopt up little Bacchos a baby still piecemeal in the distracted flood of their vagabond madness, had not Hermes come on the wing and stolen Bacchos again with a robber’s untracked footsteps: the babe lately brought he caught up, and carried in his lifeprotecting bosom, until he brought him to the house where Ino had lately brought forth a son.

  [55] She was nursing her boy Melicertes, lately born and a baby still, and held him in her arms with caressing hands; her swelling breasts dropt the dew of the bursting milk. The god spoke to her in friendly coaxing tones, and let pass a divine message from his prophetic throat:

  [61] “Madam, receive a new son; lay in your bosom the child of Semele your sister. Not the full blaze of the lightning destroyed him in her chamber; even the sparks of the thunderbolt which killed his mother did him no harm. Let the child be kept safe in a gloomy room, and let neither the Sun’s eye by day nor the Moon’s eye by night see him in your roofed hall. Cover him up, that jealous resentful Hera may never see him playing, though she is said to have eyes to see a bull. Receive your sister’s boy, and you shall have from Cronion a reward for his nurture worthy of your pains. Happy are you among all the daughters of Cadmos! for already Semele has been brought low by a fiery bolt; Autonoë shall lie under the earth with her dead son, and Cithairon will set up one tomb for both; Agauë shall see the fate of Pentheus among the hills, and she shall touch his ashes all deceived. A sonslayer she shall be, and a banished woman, but you alone shall be proud; you shall inhabit the mighty sea and settle in Poseidon’s house; in the brine like Thetis, like Galateia, your name shall be Ino of the Waters. Cithairon shall not hide you in the hollow earth, but you shall be one of the Nereïds. Instead of Cadmos, you shall call Nereus father, with happier hopes. You shall ever live with Melicertes your immortal son as Leucothea, holding the key of clam waters, mistress of good voyaging next to Aiolos. The merchant seaman trusting in you shall have a fineweather voyage over the brine; he shall set up one altar for the Earthshaker and Melicertes, and do sacrifice to both together; Seabluehair shall accept Palaimon as guide for his coach of the sea.”

  [92] With these words Hermes was off into the sky unapproachable, twirling in the air the windswift soles of his shoes. And Ino was not disobedient. With loving care she held the motherless Bacchos in her nursing arm, and laying out the pair, the two children, upon it offered her two breasts to Palaimon and Dionysos. She gave the baby in charge to Mystis her attendant maid, Mystis the finehaired Sidonian, whom Cadmos had brought up from a girl to attend in Ino’s chamber. She then took Bacchos away from those godfeeding breasts, and hid him from all eyes in a dark pit. But a brilliant light shone from his face, which declared of itself the offspring of Zeus: the gloomy walls of the house grew bright, and the light of unseen Dionysos hid the darkness. All night long Ino sat beside Bromios as he play
ed. Often Melicertes jumped up with wavering steps and pressed his lips to pull at the other breast as he crawled close to Bacchos babbling “Euoi!”

  [111] Mystis also nursed the god after her mistress’s breast, watching by the side of Lyaios with sleepless eyes. The clever handmaid taught him the art that bears her name, the mystic rites of Dionysos in the night. She prepared the unsleeping worship for Lyaios, she first shook the rattle, and clanged the swinging cymbals with the resounding double bronze; she first kindled the nightdancing torch to a flame, and cried Euion to sleepless Dionysos; she first plucked the curving growth of ivy-clusters, and tied her flowing hair with a wreath of vine; she alone entwined the thyrsus with purple ivy, and wedged on the top of the clusters an iron spike, covered with leaves that it might not scratch Bacchos. She thought of fitting plates of bronze over the naked breast, and fawnskins over the hips. She taught Dionysos to play with the mystical casket teeming with sacred things of worship, and to use them as his childish toys. She first fastened about her body a belt of braided vipers, where a serpent coiling round the belt on both sides with encircling bonds was twisted into a snaky not.