Now Deriades with exceeding great boldness attacked the Bacchant women, while Dionysos was being shaken at the command of Hera. As when the sea bellowing with the rush of wintry surge, unnavigable, is driven wildly by contrary winds, and floods the soaking air with waves mountain-high : the blasts have parted the stern-hawsers in the pitiless assault of the billows, the violent wind has tangled up the canvas with its breath and made a cloak of girdling sails round the bending mast, the yard is askew, the sailors in despair have thrown hope to the sea—so the Indian Ares threw into confusion the whole Bacchic army.
Then came a struggle out of all order, then came an unequal fight, a one-sided struggle ; for brazen Ares came back unwearied to awaken the conflict. He took the form of the champion Modaios, more than all others unsated with battle, whose Joy was joyless carnage, whom bloodshed pleased better than banquets. On the shield he bore the graven image of Medusa with her bush of hair, like the viperine tresses of the Gorgon’s head, and he was equal to Deriades, of the same colour. So then Ares took on Modaios’s terrible shape and the copy of his unsmiling face, his curly hair and the blazon of his shield, and furiously raging rushed amid the fray to scatter the people, giving courage to his warriors. With one voice the Indians fearlessly roared their warcry, now Bacchos was not there, and deathly Ares shouted as loud as nine thousand, with Discord moving by his side to support him; in the battle he placed Rout and Terror to wait upon Deriades. So the army of Dionysos, absent in the wilderness, was driven pellmell by Deriades, and his comrade Ares, and the slumber of Zeus.
So the mingled battalions fighting with one common ardour girded the whole company of Bassarids with a ring of steel; many were slain by one slayer in their flight, smitten by swords. O ye Muses of Homer! Tell me who died, who fell to the spear of Deriades! Aibialos and Thyamis, Ormenios and Opheltes, Criasos Argasides, Telebes and Lyctian Antheus, Thronios and Aretos, Moleneus with his ashplant and Comarcos in his might—a host were laid out dead one upon another by the spear of Deriades. They fell as they were slain, one stretched out on the ground ; one swam in the water enduring trouble amid the waves; one drowned in the sea hard by, whom Arabian Nereus buried in the waves newly wounded by the pursuing spear ; another ran over the hills with stormswift sole fleeing his fate ; another left the lance planted in the middle of his back and crawled into the heart of the bushes, longing for absent Dionysos to save him.
Proud Echelaos fell, and was left unburied, crushed by the manbreaking rock from gigantic Morrheus : he was a Cyprian, with the down fresh around his cheeks. He lay then like a palm spire with a head of leaves ; but in the battle he rushed about shaking his torch, a tender lad with uncropt hair, until he was struck on the top of the hip, where nature had fitted the axle in the cup of the thigh to grow together with the flesh of his body. He died holding the mystic pine still alight, and in his convulsions burnt his head to ashes with his own torch, setting fire to the braided hair with the smoking brand. Then Morrheus triumphed over him and mocked him :
“Boy, you must be a stranger to the land which is called your nurse—Echelaos lad, you have belied your birth as a Cyprian! You are not sprung from Pygmalion, to whom Cypris gave a long course of life and many years. Ares the bridegroom of your Paphian did not save you. Your Cythereia did not grant you infinite circles of revolving years and a car that stumbled not, that you might escape your fate on that fatefending waggon, as you ever drove a kneeheavy run of mules !—Wrong ! you do come from Cyprus. Fate caught you also quick when Ares vanquished you just like Myrrha’s son.”
Cite This Text