And he shall slay the triple daughters of Tethys’ son, who imitated the strains of their melodious mother: self-hurled from the cliff’s top they dive with their wings into the Tyrrhenian sea, where the bitter thread spun by the Fates shall draw them.
One of them washed ashore the tower of Phalerus shall receive, and Glanis’ wetting the earth with its streams. There the inhabitants shall build a tomb for the maiden and with libations and sacrifice of oxen shall yearly honour the bird goddess Parthenope. And Leucosia shall be cast on the jutting strand of Enipeus and shall long haunt the rock that bears her name, where rapid Is and neighbouring Laris’ pour forth their waters. And Ligeia shall come ashore at Tereina spitting out the wave. And her shall sailormen bury on the stony beach nigh to the eddies of Ocinarus; and an ox-horned Ares shall lave her tomb with lois streams, cleansing with his waters the foundation of her whose children were turned into birds. And there one day in honour of the first goddess of the sisterhood shall the ruler of all the navy of Mopsops array for his mariners a torch-race, in obedience to an oracle, which one day the people of the Neapolitans shall celebrate, even they who shall dwell on bluff crags beside Misenum’s sheltered haven untroubled by the waves.
And he shall shut up the blustering winds in the hide of an ox, and wandering in woes that ebb and flow, he, the sea-gull, shall be burnt with the lash of the thunderbolt, clinging to the branch of a wild fig-tree so that the wave which draws spouting Charybdis to the deep may not swallow him in the surge.
And, after brief pleasure in wedlock with the daughter of Atlas, he dares to set foot in his offhand vessel that never knew a dockyard and to steer, poor wretch, the bark which his own hands made, vainly fastened with dowels - to the midst of the keel. Wherefrom Amphibaeus shall toss him forth, as it were the tiny unfledged brood of the halcyon’s bride, and cast him, with mid-beams and deck together, headlong as a diver into the waves, entangled in the ropes, and sleepless, - swept in the secret places of the sea, he shall dwell with the citizen of Thracian Anthedon. And like a branch of pine, blast after blast shall toss him as a cork, leaping on him with their gusts. And hardly shall the frontlet of Byne save him from the evil tide with torn breast and fingers wherewith he shall clutch the flesh-hooking rocks and be stained with blood by the sea-bitten spikes. And crossing to the island abhorred by Cronus—the isle of the Sickle that severed his privy parts—he a cloakless suppliant, babbling of awful sufferings, shall yelp out his fictitious tale of woe, paying the curse of the monster whom he blinded. Ah! not yet, not yet!
Let not such sleep of forgetfulness find Melanthus, the Lord of Horses, bending. For he shall come, he shall come to Rheithron’s sheltering haven and the cliffs of Neriton. And he shall behold all his house utterly overthrown from its foundations by lewd wife-stealers. And the vixen, primly coquetting, will make empty his halls, pouring forth the poor wight’s wealth in banqueting. And he himself, poor parasite, shall see trouble beyond what he endured at the Scaean gates; he shall endure to bear with submissive back sullen threats from his own slaves and to be punished with jeers; shall endure, too, to submit to buffeting of fists and hurling of potsherds. For not alien stripes but the liberal seal of Thoas shall remain upon his sides, engraved with rods: stripes which he, our destroyer, shall consent without a murmur to have engraved upon him, putting the voluntary weal upon his frame, that he may ensnare the foemen, with spying wounds and with tears deceiving our king. He whom of old the Temmician hill. of Bombyleia bare to be our chiefest bane—he alone of all his mariners, wretched one, shall win safely home. And lastly, like a sea-gull that roams the waves, worn all about by the salt water even as a shell and finding his possessions swallowed up in banqueting of the Pronians by the
Laconian lady of fatal frenzy, ancient as a crow he shall flee with his weapons the shelter of the sea and in wrinkled age die beside the woods of Neriton. The deadly spike, hard to heal, of the Sardinian fish shall wound his sides with its sting and kill him; and his son shall be called the butcher of his father, that son who shall be the own cousin of the bride of Achilles. And in death he shall be garlanded as a seer by the Eurytanian folk and by the dweller in the steep abode of Trampya, wherein one day hereafter the Tymphaean dragon, even the king of the Aethices, shall at a feast destroy Heracles sprung from the seed of Aeacus and Perseus and no stranger to the blood of 'Temenus.
When he is dead, Perge, hill of the Tyrrhenians, shall receive his ashes in the land of Gortyn; when, as he breathes out his life, he shall bewail the fate of his son and his wife, whom her husband shall slay and himself next pass to Hades, his throat cut by the hands of his sister, the own cousin of Glaucon and Apsyrtus.!
And having seen such a heap of woes he shall go down a second time to unturning Hades, having never beheld a day of calm in all his life. O wretched one! how much better had it been for thee to remain in thy homeland driving oxen, and
to harness still the working stallion ass to the yoke, frenzied with feigned pretence of madness, than to suffer the experience of such woes!
And he again—the husband seeking for his fatal bride snatched from him, having heard rumours, and yearning for the winged phantom that fled to the sky,—what secret places of the sea shall he not explore? What dry land shall he not come and search? First he shall visit the watching-place of Typhon, and the old hag turned to stone, and the jutting shores of the Erembi, abhorred by mariners. And he shall see the strong city of unhappy Myrrha, who was delivered of the pangs of child-birth by a branching tree; and the tomb of Gauas whose death the Muses wrought—wept by the goddess of the Rushes, Arenta, the Stranger: Gauas whom the wild boar slew with white tusk. And he shall visit the towers of Cepheus and the place that was kicked by the foot of Hermes Laphrios, and the two rocks on which the petrel leapt in quest of food, but carried off in his jaws, instead of a woman, the eagle son of the golden Sire—a male with winged sandals who destroyed his liver.
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