Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca 30.100–159: Book 30: Morrheus kills Phlogios; Eurymedon kills Tectaphos

But firebearing Hephaistos drove away all the warriors who stood round the just-wounded boy. Then lifting his son on his shoulder he took him out of the fray and rested him against an oaktree hard by ; he spread wholesome simples upon the wounded groin, and saved him alive after his collapse.

Yet Morrheus had not forgotten the fight he had begun. He reared his head again, having escaped the fiery attack, the blazing assailant, the flaming points. He caught Phlogios the son of Strophios rolling about and killed him ; that dancer of spring-heel Dionysos, who at the banquets of tearless Lyaios, used to flicker the twisting fingers of his mimicking hands. He would depict by gesture Phaéthon’s death with sensitive hand, until he made the feasters weep with tears quite out of place, mourning the death of an imaginary Phaéthon ; as he depicted the young man blazing and hurtling down, he would bring painful grief upon Dionysos who feels no grief. When shakespear Morrheus saw him tumbling there, he said :

“That was a different jig you danced near the table! You played a merry dance by the mixing-bowl—why do you pace a groaning dance on the battlefield? Well, if you have a passion for a dancing turn of Dionysos, go show to Hades your mystic rites. You need no chalk—your round face is well dusted of itself. Or dance if you like before Lethe the dirge-fancier, and let unsmiling Persephone have the pleasure of watching your capers.”

So he cried exultant, and leaping swift as the wind on the Seilenoi put them to flight. And shakeshield Tectaphos followed with devastating sword: he was the one whom Deriades once kept imprisoned in the deep pit ; but he could not escape fate a second time. For when necessity comes, who can save a man from cruel destiny, when hard allvanquishing Fate bids him die ? Nor could a trick now save Tectaphos from death. Madly he then pursued the army of Lyaios and sliced the sportive limbs of the horned Satyrs: he shore through the throat of Pylaieus the broilbreeder, he struck Onthyrios’s brow with pitiless blade, he destroyed broadbreasted Pithos with bare steel. And indeed he would have killed a crowd of Bacchants besides; but quickfoot Eurymedon saw him and rushed up, shaking his Corybantian twibill against him. He smashed his forehead and clove his head—a jet of bloody dew spouted up and the champion fell to the ground, soaking the dust. Half-dead he rolled on the ground, lamenting the ancient torture of the earth-dug pit, and the threads of this later Fate; remembering still the clever scheme of his daughter which saved him from death, he wailed and mingled his tears with his blood :

“O my mother and my nurse, my girl, O clever unhappy wife! Why did you not come near me when I was nigh unto death? Why could you not help me now again, fearless girl? What has become of your lifegiving drink? Are you true to your father while he lives, and not while he is dying! If a trick can bring back a man from Hades, seek me another and better trick, seek a plan useful against death, that after the hollow pit in the earth I may escape the gates of Hades in war as well, if there be a way to return from the pit whence no man returns.”