Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/405

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THEBAID, I. 332–357

Thereafter with dizzy climb along a rocky path he puts behind him Sciron’s infamous cliffs and Scylla’s country where the purple monarch ruled,[1] and kindly Corinth, and in the midmost plain hears two shores resound.

But now through the wide domains which Phoebus, his day’s work ended, had left bare, rose the Titanian queen, borne upward through a silent world, and with her dewy chariot cooled and rarefied the air; now birds and beasts are hushed, and Sleep steals o’er the greedy cares of men, and stoops and beckons from the sky, shrouding a toilsome life once more in sweet oblivion. Yet no reddening clouds gave promise of the light’s return, nor as the shadows lessened did the twilight gleam with long shafts of sun-reflecting radiance;[2] black night, blacker to earthward and shot by never a ray, veiled all the pole. And now the rocky prisons of Aeolia[3] are smitten and groan, and the coming storm threatens with hoarse bellowing: the winds loud clamouring meet in conflicting currents, and fling loose heaven’s vault from its fastened hinges, while each strives for mastery of the sky; but Auster most violent thickens gloom on gloom with whirling eddies of darkness, and pours down rain which keen Boreas with his freezing breath hardens into hail; quivering lightnings gleam, and from the colliding air bursts sudden fire. Already Nemea and the high peaks of Arcadia that border the forests of Taenarum are drenched; Inachus flows in mighty spate, and Erasinus swelling

  1. ↑ Scylla was the daughter of Nisus, king of Megara, who had the purple lock.
  2. ↑ i.e., there was no morning twilight giving promise of the coming day. “longa” might be taken as long-abiding, not far-streaming.
  3. ↑ The domain of Aeolus, lord of the winds, as in Virg. Aen. i. 52.

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