Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca 37.0–102: Book 37: The burial of the Indian dead

When the thirty-seventh takes its turn, there are contests about the tomb, the men competing for prizes.

So the Indians, now sensible and busy with friendship, threw their Bacchic war to the winds, and buried their dead with tearless eyes, as prisoners now set free from the earthy chains of human life, and the soul returning whence it came, back to the starting-place in the circling course. So the army of Bacchos had rest.

“When Dionysos saw friendly calm instead of war, early in the morning he sent out mules and their attendant men to bring dry wood from the mountains, that he might burn with fire the dead body of Opheltes.

Their leader into the forest of pines was Phaunos who was well practised in the secrets of the lonely thickets which he knew so well, for he had learnt about the highland haunts of Circe his mother. The woodman’s axe cut down the trees in long rows. Many an elm was felled by the long edge of the axe, many an oak with leaves waving high struck down with a crash, many a pine lay all along, many a fir stooped its dry needles ; as the trees were felled far and wide, little by little the rocks were bared. So many a Hamadryad Nymph sought another home, and swiftly joined the unfamiliar maids of the brooks.

Parties coming up would often meet, men on the hills traversing different mountain-paths. One saw them up aloft, out in front, coming down, crossing over, with feet wandering in all directions. The sticks were packed in bundles with ropes well twisted and fastened tight and trim, and laid on the mules’ backs ; the animals set out in lines, and the hooves rang on the mountain-paths as they hurried along, the surface of the sandy dust was burdened by heavy logs dragged behind. Satyrs and Pans were busy ; some cut wood with axes, . . . some pulled it from tree after tree with their hands, ... or lifted trunks with untiring arms and rattled over the rocks with dancing feet. All this woodmen laid out upon the earth, where Euios had marked a place on the ground for the tomb of Opheltes.

“There was a great swarm of men from different cities. Over the body they cut the tress of mourning with the steel of sadness. Groaning for him, they streamed one after another, and covered the whole body with their hair each in his turn. Bacchos lamented the dead with unmournful face and tearless eyes, and cutting one lock from his uncropt head he laid it upon Opheltes as his gift.

The Idaian servants of mountainbred Dionysos built the pyre a hundred feet this way and that way, and on the middle of the pyre they laid out the body. Asterios of Dicte drew the sword that hung by his side, and cut the throats of twelve swarthy Indians over the body, then brought and laid them in a close orderly circle around it. There also he placed jars of honey and oil. Many oxen and sheep of the flock were butchered in front of the pyre ; he heaped the bodies of the slain cattle round the body, together with rows of newly slaughtered horses, taking from each of them in turn all the fat which he laid like a rich girdle all round the body.

Now fire was wanted. So Phaunos the son of rock-loving Circe, the frequenter of the wilderness, who dwelt in the Tyrsenian land, who had learnt as a boy the works of his wild mother, brought from a rock the firebreeding stones which are tools of the mountain lore ; and from a place where thunderbolts falling from heaven had left trusty signs of victory, he brought the relics of the divine fire to kindle the pyre of the dead. With the sulphur of the divine bolt he smeared and anointed the hollows of the two firebreeding stones. Then he scraped off a light dry sprig of Erythraian growth and put it between the two stones ; he rubbed them to and fro, and thus striking the male against the female, he drew forth the fire hidden in the stone to a spontaneous birth, and applied it to the pyre where the wood from the forest lay.

But the fire kindled would not run round the dead man’s pyre ; so the god came near, and fixing his eye on Phaethon, called upon Euros the eastern wind to bring him a breeze to blow on his pyre and help. As Bromios called, the Morning Star hard by heard his appeal, and sent his brother to Lyaios, to make the pyre burn up by his brisker breath.

The Wind left the rosy chamber of Dawn his mother, and fanned the blazing pyre all night long, stirring up the windfed leaping fire ; the wild breezes, neighbours of the sun, shot the gleams into the air. Along with sorrowing Lyaios, Asterios of Dicte who was one of his kindred, holding a twohandled cup of sweet fragrant wine, made the dust of the earth drunken in honour of the soul of Arestor’s son now carried on the wind.

But when morning, the harbinger of Dawn’s dewy car, scored the night with his ruddy gleams, then all awoke, and quenched their comrade’s pyre with cups of Bacchos’s juice in turn. Then the hot wind returned on quick pinions to the lightbringing mansion of Helios. Asterios collected the bones, and wrapping them in folded fat laid the relics of the dead in a golden urn. Then the whirling Corybants, since their lot was cast in the haunts of Ida, gave burial to the body as an inhabitant of one country, a trueborn son of Crete, and digging the foundations deep they made his round tomb in a hollow dug in the earth, and last of all they poured foreign dust over Opheltes. They built up his barrow with taller stones, and engraved these lines on this monument of their recent sorrow : “Here lies Arestor’s son who untimely died : Cnossian, Indianslayer, comrade of Bromios, Opheltes.”