by Virgil
pools forming part of caverns and gurgling groves,
he wanders, astounded by majestic movements of the water,
rivers rippling under earth’s great dome and reaching out
in all directions—one called Phasis, and another Lycus,
and the source from which the deep Enipeus makes its first appearance,
and from which father Tiber, and Anio, come streaming,
and rattling down through rocks, Hypanis, and Caicus of Mysia,
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and that river that wears a bull’s expression, and gilded horns,
Eridanus, than which no river throws itself more forcefully
through rich farmlands into shining sea.
Then, when he reached his mother’s chamber, its hanging soft stone roof,
and Cyrene had recognized his idle tears,
his sisters formed a line to offer him
spring water for his hands and special cloths to dry them.
Others piled the table high with dishes for the feast
and kept refilling goblets, while others still fuelled the altar fires with incense from Arabia.
His mother then spoke out, ‘Raise up your glasses, let’s drink a toast of wine
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to Oceanus.’* And then to him, of everything the father,
she said her private prayer, and to the sisterhood of nymphs,
guardians of a hundred forests, and a hundred rivers, too.
And then three times she sprinkled nectar on the sacred hearth,
three times a flame flared to the ceiling, giving out its light,
a sign to lift the heart, and then she spoke these words:
‘Deep in Carpathian woods, there is a prophet by the name of Proteus,*
who is the colour of the sea, who travels the wide watery range
pulled by a team that’s one half fish, the other half two-leggèd horse.
And as we speak, he is returning to the havens of Emathia and Pallene,
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the place where he was born—it’s him, we nymphs
and even agèd Nereus,* revere, for everything is known
to that seer—whatever was, what is, and all that is to come.
(For this is just what Neptune wanted—whose herds
of fulsome seals he pastures underneath the waves.)
He’s the one that you, my son, must bind in chains
so he’ll explain the sorry story of the cause of sickness and bring it to a good conclusion.
If he’s not forced he’ll tell you nothing,
nor will you bring him round by begging. Brute strength alone
will grind him down and run his useless wiles aground.
I myself, when the sun has turned noon’s heat full up,
when grasses shrivel and herds appreciate the shade,
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will bring you to the old man’s private quarters where he retreats
exhausted from work in the waves, where you’ll be able to accost him as he lies asleep.
But even when you’ve grabbed a hold of him and fettered him
he’ll conjure different forms and features of wild animals to foil you.
One minute he’ll become a bristling boar, a shady tiger,
scaly snake, or lion with its tawny mane,
or burst into a whiff of flame to slough off his chains,
or melt into thin air—and away with him!
But the more he plies his repertoire of shapes,
my son, the more you must maintain a grip
till his physique reverts and so resumes the profile
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you first set eyes on when you found him, draped beneath the weight of sleep.’
And after she had said her say, she poured a perfume of ambrosia
and covered her son’s body, tip to toe, so that
from the hairs of his combed head a sweet essence emanated
and strength returned to his nimble limbs.
Etched into a
mountainside,
there’s an enormous cavern where wave on wave
driven by the wind shatters itself in the recesses,
time after time the safest shelter for sailors waylaid in a storm.
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That’s where you’ll find this Proteus—hiding behind a shield of rock.
And there, just there the nymph instructs the boy to lie in ambush
when it’s dark, while she stands hard by hidden in a mist.
The Dog Star by this time was all ablaze, burning up the sky and leaving the people of the Indies
parched with the thirst, and the fiery sun had gobbled
half his daily course,* the grasses wilted and withered, and the shrivelled river beds,
their dried-up channels, were baked to dust by its beams’ burn.
While Proteus was making from the waves to the cave,
as was his wont, round about him ran the race of mermen
and splashed the briny spray here, there and everywhere.
Seals lay about along the shore and settled down to sleep,
while he, the master, like that herdsman in the mountains,*
when twilight draws young cattle from the outfields
and the lambs’ baaing grabs the wolves’ attention,
sat himself down on a rock and took stock of every one of them.
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Aristaeus saw his chance—and seized it.
He scarcely gave the old man a split second to compose his tired self,
but rushed in with a roar and slapped the chains on him
before he could get up. But he, to nature true and conscious of his powers,
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transformed himself into the weirdest things—
fire, or a fearsome beast, or rushing stream—
but of these ruses none succeeded in securing his escape
and, subjugated, he resumed his former and first self, and then, with a human’s voice,
spoke up, and asked, ‘Who ordered you, most bold of youths,
to break into our homes, what do you want of me?’ And Aristaeus answered,
‘But, Proteus, you know, it’s well you know, for nothing can be lost on you;
desist, and don’t pretend otherwise. I come, instructed by the gods,
to find an answer and a reason for what has left me weary and worn out.’
That’s all he said. At this, at last, the seer turned his sea-green eyes
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and stared at him. Then, grinding his teeth hard,
he opened up to explain his destiny,
‘Don’t think they don’t have gods’ support, the angers you are weighted with,
you’re paying for a grievous offence. For it is Orpheus,* the pitiful,
who is handing down this punishment, by no means as much as you deserve,
had fate not stood in the way, for his bitter rage about his bride’s abduction.
It’s true, in hasty flight from you, she failed to see—
doomed as she was—hiding in tall grass and right in front of her,
the seven-headed serpent, a sentry on the river bank.
Then the chorus of her peers, the Dryads,* filled the mountaintops with their lament,
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the heights of Rhodope cried out, too, in mourning,
as did lofty Pangaea, and the land of warring Rhesus,
and the Getae, the river Hebrus and the princess Orithyia.
‘Heartsick and sore, Orpheus sought consolation on his lyre,
a hollowed tortoiseshell.* Of you, sweet wife, of you, he sang his sorry song,
all lonesome on the shore, at dawning of the day, of you, at day’s decline, of you.
He risked even the gorge of Taenarus,* the towering portals of the underworld,
and the abode of spirits where darkness reigns like a dismal fog;
these he passed through to approach the shades and their scaresome lord,
those hearts
that don’t know how to be swayed by human pleas for prayers.
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But, unsettled by his singing, from the nether reach of Hell,
came insubstantial phantoms, like those who have lived long away from light,
teeming like the countless birds that lurk among the leaves
until, at evening time, winter rains herd them home from the hills,
mothers and men, the build of once big-hearted heroes,
now dead and done with; boys, too, and unwed girls,
and youths borne on their funeral pyres before their parents’ eyes—
around whom lay the clabber, and disfigured reed beds by Cocytus, that kept them
locked in, among stagnant pools and murky marshes,
and the Styx’ nine coils that kept them prisoner.
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Instead they froze, spellbound, Death’s inner rooms and depths of Tartarus,
the Furies, too, their hair a knot of writhing snakes,
and gawking Cerberus stopped in his tracks, his three mouths open wide,
and Ixion’s wheel, wind-propelled, settled to a standstill.*
‘And now, on his way home, he had avoided every pitfall,
and Eurydice, restored to him and trailing close behind (as Proserpina
had decreed),* was emerging into heaven’s atmosphere
when a stroke of madness caught him, who loved her, off his guard—
a pardonable offence, you’d think, if the Dead knew how to pardon.
He stopped, and for a moment wasn’t thinking—no!—
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Eurydice was his again and on the brink of light, and who knows what possessed him
but he turned back to look. Like that, his efforts were undone, and the pacts he’d entered
with that tyrant had dissolved. Three peals of thunder clapped across that paludal hell.
“What,” she cried, “what wretched luck has ruined me—and you, O Orpheus,
what burning need? Look, cold-hearted fate is calling me
again; sleep draws its curtain on my brimming eyes.
And so, farewell, I’m carried off in night’s immense embrace,
and now reach out my hands to you in vain—for I am yours no more.”
‘So she spoke, and suddenly, like wisps of smoke, she vanished
in thin air. She watched him for the final time, while he,
with so much still to say, attempted to cling on to shadows.
No longer would the ferryman permit him cross
the marshy pool that lay between them.*
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What was left for him to do? Where could he turn, his wife now taken
twice from him? Would any wailing move the shades—or please the gods?
Already she was making her stiff way across the Styx.
‘For seven whole long months, they say, one following the other,
he slumped in mourning, alone beneath a towering cliff, by the waterside of Strymon,
expounding under frozen stars his broken-hearted threnody
to the delight of tigers, and even drew the oak to him with his style of singing,
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just as a nightingale will sorrow under poplar shade
for her lost brood which some brute ploughboy spotted
and pilfered from the nest, though it was not yet fledged.
That bird still weeps by night and, perched in a tree, repeats
her plaintive keen, filling far and wide with the ache of her heartbreak.
No thought of love, or marriage, could distract him.
Disconsolate, through icefields of the north, the snow-kissed river Tanais,
and the Riphaean range whose peaks are never free from frost,
he drifted, lamenting lost Eurydice and Pluto’s broken boon.
But the bacchantes thought themselves scorned by such devotion
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and, one night of rites and revelling,
tore him apart, this youth, and broadcast the pieces through the land.*
Even then, sundered from a neck as pale as marble
and carried in the current down the Hebrus,
that voice, that stone-cold tongue, continued to cry out,
“Eurydice, O poor Eurydice,” as its life’s blood drained out of it
and the river banks repeated that “Eurydice”, a dolorous refrain.’
Thus spoke Proteus,* and then he plunged into the sea
and where he plunged an eddy swirled down in the wave.
But not Cyrene. Unasked, she uttered to her trembling audience:
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‘My son, cast off the burden of your cares
for here’s the reason for the sickness of your bees
and this is why the nymphs with whom Eurydice danced in the groves
brought rack and ruin to the hives. So you, a supplicant,
must make an offering, with peace the aim,
and pray, and pay respect in atonement to the gracious nymphs.
And in response they’ll grant forgiveness and repeal their rage.
‘The way to supplicate I will first tell:
select four bulls, superior in form and frame,
such as you’ve grazing now on lush uplands of Lycaeus,
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and an equal count of heifers, whose neck no yoke has ever touched;
erect for these four altars by the tall temples of the goddesses,
lance them, and let the sacred blood spill from their throats,
and leave these carcasses abandoned in a leafy den.
And later, when nine days have dawned, you’ll send as offerings to Orpheus
soporific poppies, and sacrifice a ewe that’s black,
then go back to the thicket and worship with a slaughtered calf
Eurydice, who by now will be appeased.’
And with no halt or
hesitation
he did all that his mother bid.* Come to the temple, he raised the altars as prescribed,
led in four bulls, superior in form and frame,
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and an equal count of heifers, whose neck no yoke has ever touched.
And later, when nine days have dawned, he sends his offerings
to Orpheus and goes back to the thicket …
And there they met a miracle and looked it in the face—from those cattle’s decomposing flesh, the hum of bees,
bubbling first, then boiling over and, trailing giant veils into the trees,
they hung like grapes in bunches from the swaying branches.
Such was the song* that I took on to sing, about the care of crops
and stock, and trees with fruit, while he, our mighty Caesar,
was going hell for leather along the great Euphrates
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adding victory to triumph, winning the war for people who appreciate his deeds,