Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/437

are heard there and the moaning of the damned, and the land is all astir with hurrying grisly forms; often the cries and blows of the Furies have resounded till mid-day, and the baying of Death’s tri-formed warder has scared the rustics from the fields.

By this way then did the nimble god, all wrapped about with dusky shadow, leap forth to the upper world, and shake from his face the vapours of the nether region, and make serene his countenance with draughts of living air. Thence by Arcturus and the moon’s mid silences o’er fields and cities he wends his way. Sleep, driving Night’s coursers, met him, and rose abashed to salute his godhead, turning aside from his celestial path. Beneath the god flies the shade, and knows again his lost stars and the land that bore him; and now he looks down on Cirrha’s heights and Phocis, that his own corpse polluted. Now they were come to Thebes, and hard by his own son’s threshold Laius groaned, tarrying to enter the well-known house. But when he saw his own yoke hanging on the lofty pillars and the chariot still stained with blood, almost had he in wild fear turned back and fled, nor could the Thunderer’s high commands restrain him, nor the waving of the Arcadian^[1] wand.

That too chanced to be the day marked by the well-known falling of the Thunderer’s brand, when thy birth’s untimely hastening, O infant Euhius,^[2] caused thy sire to take thee to himself. Therein had the Tyrian settlers^[3] found cause to pass the night in sleepless rivalry of sport; scattered far and wide through house and field, amid garlands and mixing-bowls drained dry they panted forth the wine-god under the light of day; then many a boxwood