The twenty-seventh deals with the array in which Cronion musters the dwellers in Olympos for battle to help Dionysos.
Now warbreeding Dawn had just shaken off the wing of carefree sleep and opened the gates of sunrise, leaving the lightbringing couch of Cephalos. Dark Ganges was whitened as he met the touches of Phaé- thon, and the cone of gloom newly cleft apart fled away torn by his beams; the crops were bathed in the spring morning by the drops of dew from his car.
Then came tumult. Phaéthon, blazing shepherd of the everflowing years, checked the course of his firebred steeds, when he heard the sound of flashhelm Ares rattling close by, and summoned the host to spearthrust, shooting a rosy ray with witnessing torch : Rainy Zeus poured down from heaven a rain of blood, a strange shower which foretold bloodshed for the Indians. The thirsty back of black dust on the Indian ground was reddened with those gory drops of battle-shower ; the sheen of newburnished steel glittered against the beams of Helios.
Now the battalions of Indians were seen: Deriades the presumptuous made them arm for battle, and encouraged his soldiers as he uttered this menacing speech :
“Fight, my servants, and look for our wonted victory! The bold hornbearing son of Thyone, as they call him, you must make the lackey of Deriades, who also bears horns on his head! Kill me those Pans also with devastating steel. Or if they are gods, and it is not permitted to pierce the body of unwounded Pan with cutting steel, then I make prey of the mountainranging Pans, and they shall tend herds of elephants in the wilderness. There are plenty of wild beasts here also, with which I will join the wildbeast Centaurs and Pans of hillranging Dionysos ; or I will make them a swarm of attendants for my daughter, and waiters upon the festal table of Morrheus.
“Many a Phrygian soldier in the train of wineface Bacchos will bathe his body in the streams of the Indian river, and call Hydaspes home instead of Sangarios; many a soldier who has come from Alybe with Dionysos shall here be a serf—let him forget the water of his silvern “river and drink of the goldgleaming Ganges.
“‘Give place to me, Dionysos! flee from the spear of Deriades! We have a vast sea here also ; then let ours also receive you, after the Arabian waves! Ours is a wider deep which spouts its wild waters, enough to swallow Satyrs and Bacchants and ranks of Bassarids. Here no friendly Nereus, no Indian Thetis will receive you and save you, like those hospitable waves, when you flee a second time; for our Thetis dreads the deep rumbling Hydaspes of my home. But you will say: ‘I have in me Cronion’s Olympian blood.’ But Earth produced the sky dotted with its troop of stars: you have your birth from heaven, but my Earth shall cover you up. Cronos himself, who banqueted on his own young children in cannibal wise, was covered up in Earth’s bosom, son of Heaven though he was. I am chief of a spearbold army; I am stronger than Lycurgos, who drove you away and your unwarlike Bacchant women. Your divine birth does not trouble me, for I have heard of the firestruck nuptials of your illfated Semele. Speak not of the lightning which attended upon the bed of Zeus, boast not of Cronion’s head or his manly thigh. The childbed of Zeus in labour does not trouble me; I have often seen my own wife in labour. Let your father help you, if he likes, your father Zeus self-delivered by arming female Athena, whom they call Victory, to help you the male: only that I may break off cliffs, and make the head of Pallas bloody with a cutflesh rock or a daring spear, and hit with an arrow from my bow of horn the thigh of threatening Dionysos, while he leads his horned Satyrs; and when he is wounded may fasten disgrace upon Zeus and Bromios and Pallas! And if the Hobbler shall arm to support them both, Hephaistos the artist is the one I want, to make all sorts of armour in his smithy for Deriades also. I fear not the female chieftain: if she brandishes her father’s lightning, I have my father’s water.
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