Look into the ninth, and you will see the son of Maia, and the daughters of Lamos, and Mystis, and the flight of Ino. Zeus the Father received Dionysos after he had broken out of his mother’s fiery lap and leapt through the delivering thunders half-formed ; he sowed him in his manly thigh, while he waited upon the light of the moon which was to bring him to birth. Then the hand of Cronides guiding the birth was his own midwife to the sewn-up child, by cutting the labour threads in his pregnant thigh. So the rounded thigh in labour became female, and the boy too soon was brought forth, but not in a mother’s way, having passed from a mother’s womb to a father’s. No sooner had he peeped out by this divine delivery, than the childbed Seasons crowned him with an ivy-garland in presage of things to come ; they wreathed the horned head of a bullshaped Dionysos with twining horned snakes under the flowers. Hermes Maia’s son received him near the birth place hill of Dracanon and holding him in the crook of his arm flew through the air. He gave the newborn Lyaios a surname to suit his birth, and called him Dionysos, or Zeus-limp, because Zeus while he carried his burden lifted his foot with a limp from the weight of his thigh, and nysos in the Syracusan language means limping. So he dubbed Zeus newly delivered Eiraphiotes, or Father Botcher, because he had sewed up the baby in his breeding thigh.
Thus Hermes carried upon his arm the little brother who had passed through one birth without a bath, and lay now without a tear, baby with a good pair of horns like the Moon. He gave him in charge of the daughters of Lamos, river nymphs—the son of Zeus, the vine-planter. They received Bacchos into their arms ; and each of them dropt the milky juice of her breast without pressing into his mouth. And the boy lay on his back unsleeping, and fixt his eye on the heaven above, or kicked at the air with his two feet one after the other in delight ; he stared at the unfamiliar sky, and laughed in wonder to see his father’s vault of stars.
The consort of Zeus beheld the babe, and suffered torments. Through the wrath of resentful Hera, the daughters of Lamos were maddened by the lash of that divine mischief-maker. In the house they attacked the servants, in the threeways they carved up the wayfaring man with alien-slaying knife ; they howled horribly, with violent convulsions they rolled the eyes in their disfigured faces ; they scampered about this way and that way at the mercy of their wandering wits, running and skipping with restless feet, and the mad breezes made their wandering locks dance wildly into the air; the yellow shift round the bosom of each was whitened with drops of foam from the lips of the girls. Indeed they would have chopt up little Bacchos a baby still piecemeal in the distracted flood of their vagabond madness, had not Hermes come on the wing and stolen Bacchos again with a robber’s untracked footsteps: the babe lately brought he caught and carried in his life protecting bosom, until he brought him to the house where Ino had lately brought forth a son,
She was nursing her boy Melicertes lately born and a baby still, and held him in her arms with caressing hands ; her swelling breasts dropt the dew of the bursting milk. The god spoke to her in friendly coaxing tones, and let pass a divine message from his prophetic throat :
Madam, receive a new son : lay in your bosom the child of Semele your sister. Not the full blaze of the lightning destroyed him in her chamber ; even the sparks of the thunderbolt which killed his mother did him no harm. Let the child be kept safe in a gloomy room, and let neither the Sun’s eye by day nor the Moon’s eye by night see him in your roofed hall. Cover him up, that jealous resentful Hera may never see him playing, though she is said to have eyes to see a bull. Receive your sister’s boy, and you shall have from Cronion a reward for his nurture worthy of your pains. Happy are you among all the daughters of Cadmos for already Semele has been brought low by a fiery bolt ; Autonoe shall lie under the earth with her dead son, and Cithairon will set up one tomb for both ; Agaue shall see the fate of Pentheus among the hills, and she shall touch his […], a banished woman, but you alone shall be proud ; shall inhabit the mighty sea and settle in Poseidon’s house ; in the brine like Thetis, like Galateia, your name shall be Ino of the Waters, Cithairon shall not hide you in the hollow earth, but you shall be one of the Nereids, instead of Cadmos, you shall call Nereus father, with happier hopes. You shall ever live with Melicertes your immortal son as Leucothea, holding the key of calm waters, mistress of good voyaging next to Aiolos ; the merchant seaman trusting in you shall have a fine-weather voyage over the brine ; he shall set up one altar for the Earthshaker and Melicertes, and do sacrifice to both together. Seabluehair shall accept Palaimon as guide for his coach of the sea”
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