Works of Nonnus

by Nonnus

  [495] This was he whom the nymph beheld on the fertile slope of the woodland. She bowed weeping before him in prayer, and pointed to the horrible reptile, her brother’s murderer, and Tylos newly mangled and still breathing in the dust. The Giant did not reject her prayer, that monstrous champion; but he seized a tree and tore it up from its roots in mother earth, then stood and came sidelong upon the ravening dragon. The coiling champion fought him in serpent fashion, hissing battle from the wartrumpet of his throat, a fiftyfurlong serpent coil upon coil. With two circles he bound first Damasen’s feet, madly whipping his writhing coils about his body, and opened the gates of his raging teeth to show a mad chasm: rolling his wild eyes, breathing death, he shot watery spurts from his lips, and spat into the giant’s face fountains of poison in showers from his jaws, and sent a long spout of yellow foam out of his teeth. He darted up straight and danced over the giant’s highcrested head, while the movement of his body made the earth quake.

  [514] But the terrible giant shook his great limbs like mountains, and threw off the weight of the serpent’s long spine. His hand whirled aloft his weapon, shooting straight like a missile the great tree with all its leaves, and brought down the plant roots and all upon the serpent’s head, where the backbone joins it at the narrow part of the rounded neck. Then the tree took root again, and the serpent lay on the ground immovable, a coiling corpse. Suddenly the female serpent his mate came coiling up, scraping the ground with her undulating train, and crept about seeking for her misshapen husband, like a woman who missed her husband dead. She wound her long trailing spine with all speed among the tall rocks, hurrying towards the herbdecked hillside; in the coppice she plucked the flow er of Zeus with her snaky jaws, and brought back the painkilling herb in her lips, dropt the antidote of death into the dry nostril of the horrible dead, and gave life with the flower to the stark poisonous corpse. The body moved of itself and shuddered; part of it still had no life, another part stirred, half-restored the body shook another part and the tail moved of itself; breath came again through the cold jaws, slowly the throat opened and the familiar sound came out, pouring the same long hiss again. At last the serpent moved, and disappeared into his furtive hole.

  [539] Moria also caught up the flower of Zeus, and laid the lifegiving herb in the lifebegetting nostril. The wholesome plant with its painhealing clusters brought back the breathing soul into the dead body and made it rise again. Soul came into body the second time; the cold frame grew warm with the help of the inward fire. The body, busy again with the beginning of life, moved the sole of the right foot, rose upon the left and stood firmly based on both feet, like a man lying in bed who shakes the sleep from his eyes in the morning. His blood boiled again; the hands of the newly breathing corpse were lifted, the body recovered its rhythm, the feet their movement, the eyes their sight, and the lips their voice.

  [553] Cybele also was depicted, newly delivered; she seemed to hold in her arms pressed to her bosom a mock-child she had not borne, all worked by the artist’s hands; aye, cunning Rheia offered to her callous consort a babe of stone, a spiky heavy dinner. There was the father swallowing the stony son, the thing shaped like humanity, in his voracious maw, and making his meal of another pretended Zeus. There he was again in heavy labour, with the stone inside him, bringing up all those children squeezed together and disgorging the burden from his pregnant throat.

  [563] Such were the varied scenes depicted by the artist’s clever hand upon the warshield, brought for Lyaios from Olympos with its becks and brooks. All thronged about to see the bearer of the round shield, admiring each in turn, and praising the fiery Olympian forge.

  [568] While they still enjoyed the sight, the daylight crossed the west and veiled the light of her fire-eyed face; quiet Night covered all the earth in her dark shades, and after their evening meal all the people lay down in their mountain bed, scattered on pallets here and there over the ground.

  BOOK XXVI

  The twenty-sixth has the counterfeit shape of Athena, and the great assembly of the Indian host to stir up battle.

  WHILE Deriades slept on his mournful bed, bold Athena approached, faithful to Bacchos, and wooing a second victory for her brother. She had changed her shape to one like Orontes, and imitated the goodson of highcrested Deriades. So although he had thrown off the murderous ardour for war, scared by the fate of those who had perished, he was deceived by the counterfeit vision of a false dream, which encouraged him again to make war against Dionysos, in these words:

  [10] “You sleep, Deriades, but I blame you : for it is not proper that princes who rule a city should sleep all the night. The sleep of the Counsellor is measured. About your walls the enemy are thronging; and you raise not the soldier’s spear, you hear not the surging noise of drums or the sound of pipes, or the voice of the murderous trumpet summoning the host. Pity your daughter Protonoe, a young widow mourning a husband, and leave not, O King, your Orontes unavenged! Slay my unarmed slayers — the murderers of your goodson untimely dead — who yet live! See my breast pierced by a sharp thyrsus-wand. Alas that brave Lycurgos dwells not here! Alas that you rule not the proud Arabs! Dionysos was no god, when a mortal man chased him and made him migrate below the sea! I have beheld Deriades running away before battling women! Be a fearless lion, for a man in armour made Dionysos in his tunic of fawnskins run like a fawn! Not he destroyed that nation of warlike Indians — your own father destroyed them: for Hydaspes saw your champions in flight, and he brought them low! You are not like other men, for you have in you the heavenly blood of a daughter of Phaethon, your blazing grandfather. Your body is not mortal: neither sword nor spear shall bring you low when you throw yourself on Lyaios.”

  [36] So spoke artful Athena, and returned to Olympos, when she had put off the shape of the dream.

  [38] In the morning, Deriades sent heralds to summon his farscattered troops from cities and from islands. Many a herald went this way and that way on stormswift shoe to gather the people from the various cities of the eastern region; warriors mad for war gathered from every side at the summons of their king.

  [44] First to arm themselves were those pilots of warfare, Agraios and Phlogios, the two sons of Eulaios, partners in leadership, after the burial lately made of their father newly dead. With them came all the people who dwelt in Cyra and Baidion beside the broad barbarian stream of Indian Ombelos; those from castellated Rhodoe, a place of warmad Indians, and rocky Propanisos, and those who held the round island of the Graiai, where children use the manly breast of a milch father, and steal thence their drink with pouting lips in place of the usual mother. Others came from steep Sesindion, and those who had fortified Gazos with a rampart of linen built with blocks of plaited threads, impregnable, wellmade with wellspun foundations, a steadfast fortress of Ares: no enemy hand has ever broken with bronze that line of linenclad towers.

  [60] After them followed those warriors bold, the Dardian and Prasian armies, and the tribes of gold-wearing Salangoi, where Wealth is a family friend. Their way it is to eat pulse as their fruit of life; this they grind with round millstones instead of corn. Then a procession of curlyheaded Zabioi; their leader was wise Palthanor, a man of godfearing ways, who hated Deriades and was of one mind with Dionysos. After the war, Dionysos took this man with him and settled him as a foreign settler in lyrebuilt Thebes; there he remained beside Dirce, and drank the Ismenian water of the Aonian river, having left his native Hydaspes.

  [72] Next came Morrheus Didnasides, proud of his vast armed host. His father Didnasos came with him to the war, his old age embittered with sorrow. He bore a buckler of wonderful work upon his aged arm; a heath of hoary white spread shadows over his chin, proclaiming of itself how many and how long were his years. He still mourned his son untimely dead, Indian Orontes. There was Didnasos dropping tears; King Morrheus followed, holding upright his avenging spear, ready to slay the whole host of Bromios — indeed he was resolved to fight alone with Bacchos who slew his brother, he meant to wound the unwou
nded son of Thyone, his brother’s murderer! With them came a polyglot host of Indians: those who dwelt in fairbuilded Aithra, the city of the Sun, founded upon a cloudless plain; those who dwelt both in the jungles of Anthene and the reedbeds of Orycie, in blazing Nesaia, and winterless Melainai, and the round seagirt district of Patalene. Next came thick companies of Dyssaioi, and with them terrible armed hordes of shaggybreast Sabeiroi — thick hair is upon their hearts, wherefore they always have boldness of soul and shrink not from battle.

  [94] With them marched the Uatocoitai, the Earsleepers, men whose way it is to sleep lying upon their long ears. These were led to the war by Phringos and Aspetos and haughty Danyclos, who came together, and with them Hippuros Horsetail and his farshooting comrade Morrheus: thus the whole host of Earsleepers moved by one purpose were commanded by five bloodthirsty chieftains.

  [101] Farshooter Tectaphos came to the war. Once he had been saved from fate by sucking the milk from a daughter’s breast with starving lips — she devised this trick to nourish her father — Tectaphos, parched, with crumbling skin, a living corpse. Deriades the monarch had carried out a heartless threat, and bound him fast with twisted ropes, and held him a prisoner behind lock and key in a mouldy pit, unfed, unwashed, worn out with famine, without his part in the sun or the rounded moon. There lay the man fettered in the depths of the earth, with no drink, no food, seeing no man, there in a cavern dug deep under the soil he lay in agony. Long he was wasted by famine, breathing yet like those who breathe not, as the air passed weak and fluttering through his hungry lips; ugly whiffs came from his dry flesh as if he were a corpse. There was a band of jailers watching the imprisoned man, but his clever daughter outwitted them with delusive words, a young nursing mother, when she uttered a mournful appeal and shook her deceiving garments:

  [121] “Do not let me die, watchmen! I have nothing here, I have brought no drink and no food for my father! Tears, only tears I bring for him that begat me! My empty hands tell you that! If you do not believe me, if you do not believe, undo my innocent girdle, tear off my veil, shake my dress — I have brought no drink to save his life! Do but shut me up too with my father in the deep pit. I am nothing for you to fear, nothing, even if the king hears of it. Who is angry with one who pities a corpse? Who is angry with one dying a cruel death? Who does not pity the dead? I will close my father’s sinking eyes. Shut me up there: who grudges death? Let us die together, and let one tomb receive daughter and father!”

  [135] Her pleading won them. The girl ran into the den, bringing light for her father’s darkness. In that pit, she let the milk of her breast flow into her father’s mouth, to avert his destruction, and felt no fear.

  [138] Deriades marvelled to hear the pious deed of Eerie. He set free the clever girl’s father from his prison, like a ghost; the fame of it was noised abroad, and the Indian people praised the girl’s breast which had saved a life by its cunning.

  [143] So now this man was conspicuous among the Bolinges, as Hesperos shines amid the stars and brightens the sky, Hesperos, harbinger of the murky gloom which follows when light fails.

  [146] Ginglon highheaded, and Thyraieus striding big, and Hippalmos tall as the clouds, beyond the farthest region of earth had armed the different tribes of spearproud Arachotes, and battalions of Dersaioi their neighbours, who when men are slain with steel in battle cover their bodies under mounds of earth.

  [152] Habrathoos came with a host of bowmen whom he had gathered in support, but he had been slow in arming for shame of his hair newly shorn. He nursed resentment and grievance against Deriades the horned king; because the overbearing monarch in a fit of mad folly had cut off all his hair, a bitter insult to an Indian. Compelled to join in the war, he came unwillingly, and hid the shame of his hairless temples under a highplumed helmet, cherishing secret rancour in his heart. When battle came, he joined the fight in the daytime; but always in the hours of the night he would send a trusty servant to Bacchos, and tell him the plans of Deriades. Thus he fought secretly for Deriades, but openly for Dionysos. He brought the savage tribes of Xuthoi and of battlestirring Arienoi and the breed of Zoares and the clan of Eares, the Caspeirian peoples and Arbians: those who held Hysporos that bright shining stream, so proud of its deep wealthy mines of amber; and those who held conspicuous Arsanie, where the women in one day at the loom of Pallas, which they know so well, finish a whole robe with their quick hands.

  [173] Besides these came the Cyraioi, ready for diving-work in the war. They know the seabeaten coasts of islands, and they are skilful in battle by sea; but seafaring barges they know not. They go floating in coracles of untanned hide, which they manage as well as a shipwright’s vessel of wood; they guide their makeshift course in the skins, where the mariner sits in shelter, navigating over the waves and cutting the back of the sea in his mimic barge. These were commanded by Thyamis and princely Holcasos, two sons of one father, Tarbelos the javelineer.

  [183] A great swarm had come from Areizanteia, nurse of the strange tree-honey; where the trees drink the fruitful moisture of morning dew, and their leaves run honey, and so they produce the neat travail of the clever bee as if from a hive, the yellow juice born of the leaves alone. For Hyperion, just appearing after his bath in the Ocean, scatters upon the plain the wholesome juice of his hair in the morning, and waters the plant-growing furrows of earth the giver of life. Such honey Areizanteia brings: rejoicing in this, great flocks of birds swim on their wings and dance above the leaves; or a coiling serpent creeps along, and girdles the sweet tree with enfolding loops, while he sucks the delicate juice with greedy mouth and licks with his lips the sweet travail of the clusters. So snakes dribble out the treejuice and drop delicious honey, they spit out abroad more of the sweet sap of the bee than their own bitter scattering poison. There on the honeydropping branches is that sweet bird the horion, singing like the inspired swan. He does not strike up in tune with the west wind whirring in the air with musical wings; but he sings a lay with understanding beak, like a man twangling the strings for a wedding hymn to wait upon a bride. There the catreus foretells a shower of rain to come, goldenyellow, clearintoning; sparkles flash from his eyes like the morning gleams of Dawn. Often trilling upon a treetop in the air he weaves a song in tune with the horion beside him, splendid “with purple wings; if you hear the catreus singing his early hymn, you might almost say it was the nightingale pouring her morning music from her changeful throat. There also dwelt the battlestirring host which Pyloites the fearless son of Hippalmos had armed for the war, and with him was Billaios his brother and fellow-leader.

  [218] Next came the Sibai under arms, and the Hydarcan people, with another host from the city of Carmina. Their joint leaders were Cyllaros and Astraeis the Indian prince, two sons of Brongos honoured by Deriades.

  [222] Another host came from three hundred islands, scattered here and there, or in groups together, which lie about that place where the Indos on an endless course pours out its winding travelling stream by two enclosing mouths, after creeping in its slow curving course from the Indian reedbeds over the plain to its mouth by the Eastern sea, after first rolling down the heights of the Ethiopian mountains: swollen by the mass of summerbegotten waters it increases cubit by cubit with selfrising floods, and embraces the rich land like a watery husband, who rejoices a thirsty bride with his moist kisses and enfolds her in many passionate arms for a sheafbearing bridal, while he begets in his turn other ever-recurrent streams: so Nile in Egypt, and the eastern Hydaspes in India. There swims the travelling riverhorse through the waters, cleaving with his hoof the blackpebble stream, just like the dweller in my own Nile, who cuts the summer-begotten flood and travels through the watery deeps with his long jaws. He mounts the shores, splitting the woody ridges with sharp-pointed tooth; with only a wet ungraven jaw to ravage the fruits, he cuts the cornbearing harvest with this makeshift sickle, reaper of sheafbearing crops without steel.

  [245] Such are said to be the doings of the mighty Indian river like sevenmou
th Nile. These men of war then, from the rounded shores of the islands and from the settlements of the Indos, now came under arms: their leader was Rhigbasos, one of gigantic stature.

  Nor was old Aretos missing when Deriades summoned all to war. A heavy man he was; but he fitted a heavy bronze corselet over his hairy chest, and carried an oxhide shield on his aged back, slung by a strap over his bent neck. He also armed his force under compulsion for the war, he and five sons, Lycos and Myrsos together, Glaucos and Periphas and Melaneus the lateborn. He covered his gray curly hairs with a helmet, and repaired to the left wing of his battle circuit, leaving the right to his sons.

  [261] These were men whose lips nature had closed with the seal of silence, having tied each tongue, the channel of intelligent speech. For when at the doorposts of the bridal chamber in the sacred dance Aretos pledged his troth to Laobie, according to the rites of lawful marriage, joining with her in wedlock for the begetting of children, a miracle divine was wrought. The bridegroom, fresh from his own wedding dance, had been busy at the marriage-altar sacrificing to Aphrodite the Lady of Brides; and while the hall resounded with hymns, a sow big with young in her pain shrieked out the cry of labour from her throat, prophetic of things to come, and dropt an uncanny incredible litter — a bastard brood of marine creatures, a shoal of wet fish she shot out of her womb, spat of the brine not spat of the land! Rumour flew abroad with many mouths, telling of the fishmother sow and gathering the people; farscattered burghers came to stare at this numerous generation of land-creatures, the very image of seaborn spawn.