The forty-first tells how Aphrodite bore Amymone a second Cypris to the son of Myrrha.
Already he had planted in the earth the clustering vintage of his glorious fruit under the beetling crags of Lebanon, and intoxicated all the winebearing bottoms of the land. He saw the wedding-chamber of Paphia ; there with newgrown shoots of the gardenvine he roofed a deep-shaded grove, then presented the viny gift to Adonis and Cythereia. There was also a troop of Graces ; and from the luxuriant coppice high leapt the ivy in his girdle of cultivated vine, and climbed aloft embracing the cypress.
Come now, ye Muses of Lebanon on the neighbouring land of Beroe, that handmaiden of law ! recite the lay of Amymone, the war between Cronides of the deep and well-besung Lyaios, the war of waters and the strife of the vine.
There is a city Beroe, the keel of human life, harbour of the Loves, firmbased on the sea, with fine islands and fine verdure, with a ridge of isthmus narrow and long, where the rising neck between two seas is beaten by the waves of both. On one side it spreads under the deepwooded ridge of Assyrian Lebanon in the blazing East, and there comes for its people a lifesaving breeze, whistling loud and shaking the cypress trees with fragrant winds. There the ancient shepherd shared his domain and made his music along with the fisherman ; there was the dwelling of the farmers, where often near the woodland, Deo sickle in hand met Pan playing on his pipes ; and the husbandman bending his neck over the plowpole, and showering the corn behind him into the newcut furrows with backturned wrist, the bowed plowman gripping his yoke of bulls, had converse with his neighbour the shepherd along the foothills of the woodland pasture. The other part by the seas the city possesses, where she offers her breast to Poseidon, and her watery husband embraces the girl’s pregnant neck with wet arm, putting moist kisses on the bride’s lips; his bedfellow in her well-accustomed bosom accepts Poseidon’s familiar bride-gifts from his hand out of the deep, the seabred flocks of the waters, the fishes of many colours for her banqueting-table, which dance on the table of Nereus in the brine, in the region of the Bear, where the northerly coast receives the deep waves into its long channel. About the southern neck of this delightful country sandy roads lead to the southern hills and the Sidonian land, where are all manner of trees and vines thick with foliage in the gardens, and a highway stretches that no traveller can miss, overshadowed with long leafy branches. The sea bending its course beats on the shore about the darkfaced west, while the bight of Libya is fanned by the dewy whistle of Zephyros as he rides with shrill-sounding heel over the western channels, where is a flowery land, where nurseries bloom hard by the sea, and the fragrant forest pervaded by humming winds sings from its leafy trees.
Here dwelt a people agemates with the Dawn, whom Nature by her own breeding, in some unwedded way, begat without bridal, without wedding, fatherless, motherless, unborn : when the atoms were mingled in fourfold combination, and the seedless ooze shaped a clever offspring by commingling water with fiery heat and air, and quickened the teeming mud with the breath of life. To these Nature gave perfect shape : for they had not the form of primeval Cecrops, who crawled and scratched the earth with snaky feet that spat poison as he moved, dragon below, but above from loins to head he seemed a man half made, strange in shape and of twyform flesh ; they had not the savage form of Erechtheus, whom Hephaistos begat on a furrow of Earth with fertilizing dew ; but now first appeared the golden crop of men brought forth in the image of the gods, with the roots of their stock in the earth. And these dwelt in the city of Beroe, that primordial seat which Cronos himself builded, at the time when invited by clever Rheia he set that jagged supper before his voracious throat, and having the heavy weight of that stone within him to play the deliverer’s part, he shot out the whole generation of his tormented children. Gaping wide, he sucked up the storming flood of a whole river, and swallowed it in his bubbling chest to ease his pangs, then threw off the burden of his belly ; so one after another his pregnant throat pushed up and disgorged his twiceborn sons through the delivering channel of his gullet.
Zeus was then a child, still a baby methinks ; not yet the lightning flashed and cleft the hot clouds with many a dancing leap, not yet bolts of Zeus were shot to help in the Titans’ war, not yet the rainy sound of thunderclaps roared heavily with bang and boom through colliding clouds : but before that, the city of Beroe was there, which Time with her first appearing saw when born together with her agemate Earth. Tarsos the delight of mankind was not then, Thebes was not then, nor then was Sardis where the bank of Pactolos sparkles with opulent ooze disgorged, Sardis agemate of Helios. The race of men was not then, nor any Achaian city, nor yet Arcadia itself which came before the moon. Beroe alone grew up, older than Phaethon, from whom Selene got her light, even before all the earth, milking out from Helios the shine of his newmade brightness upon her all-mothering breast and the later perfected light of unresting Selene Beroe first shook away the cone of darkling mist, and threw off the gloomy veil of chaos. Before Cyprus and the Isthmian city of Corinth, she first received Cypris within her welcoming portal, newly born from the brine; when the water impregnated from the furrow of Uranos was delivered of deepsea Aphrodite ; when without marriage, the seed plowed the flood with male fertility, and of itself shaped the foam into a daughter, and Nature was the midwife — coming up with the goddess there was that embroidered strap which ran round her loins like a belt, set about the queen’s body in a girdle of itself. Then the goddess, moving through the water along the quiet shore, ran out, not to Paphos, not to Byblos, set no foot on land by the dry beach of Colias, even passed by Cythera’s city itself with quicker circuit : aye, she rubbed her skin with bunches of seaweed and made it purpler still ; paddling with her hands she cleft the birthwaters of the waveless deep, and swam ; resting her bosom upon the sea she struck up the silent brine, marking it with her feet, and kept her body afloat, and as she cut through the calm, pushed the water behind her with successive thrusts of her feet, and emerged at Beroe. Those footsteps of the goddess coming out from the sea are all lies of the people of Cyprus.
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