Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/383

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THEBAID, I. 42–65

wrath? the sudden chasm that gaped for the laurel-crowned prophet? Distraught Hippomedon, too, repelling his river-foe with corpses demands my song, and I must lament the gallant Arcadian and his wars, and sing with a yet fiercer thrill the fate of Capaneus.

Already had Oedipus with avenging hand probed deep his sinning eyes and sunk his guilty shame in eternal night, abiding in a long and living death. But while he hugs his darkness and the uttermost seclusion of his dwelling, and keeps his secret chamber which the sun’s rays and heaven behold not, yet with unwearied wings the fierce daylight of the mind hovers around him,[1] and the Avenging Furies of his crimes assail his heart. Then he displays to heaven those empty orbs, the cruel, pitiful punishment of his life, and with blood-stained hands beats upon the hollow earth,[2] and in dire accents utters this prayer: “Gods who hold sway over guilty souls and over Tartarus crowded with the damned, and thou O Styx, whom I behold, ghastly in thy shadowy depths, and thou Tisiphone, so oft the object of my prayer, be favourable now, and further my unnatural wish: if in aught I have found favour; if thou didst cherish me in thy bosom when I fell from my mother’s womb, and didst heal the wounds of my pierced feet; if I sought the lake of Cirrha where it winds between the two summits of the range,[3] when I could have lived contented with the false Polybus, and in the Phocian strait where three ways meet grappled with the aged king and cleft the visage of the trembling dotard,

  1. ↑ Oedipus had torn out his own eyes when he realized that he was guilty of parricide and incest. Statius has in mind the Virgilian “nox atra caput circumvolat” Aen. vi. 866 (cf. also Hor. S. ii. 1. 58), but here it is the “saeva dies” that hovers round.
  2. ↑ Or, as some take it, “beats upon the empty sockets”; but to beat on the earth was a recognized way of summoning infernal deities.
  3. ↑ i.e., the Castalian spring at Delphi, beneath the two peaks of Parnassus, where he went to consult the oracle. He was brought up as the son of Polybus, king of Corinth (hence “falso”).

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