Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v1.djvu/505

All this will our youth behold, yet green to war; as for me, may I be granted, while it may be, my own funeral pyre, and be laid in my ancestral earth!” So spoke the aged man, and heaped high the crimes of Eteocles, calling him cruel and abominable and doomed to punishment. Whence came this freedom of speech? his end was near, and all his life behind him, and he would fain add glory to a late-found death.

All this the creator of the stars had long observed from the summit of the world, and seen the peoples stained by the first bloodshed; then bids he Gradivus straight be called. He having laid waste with slaughter the wild Bistonian folk and Getic towns was driving his chariot in hot haste toward the ethereal heights, flashing the splendour of his lightning-crested helm and angry golden armour, alive with monstrous shapes of terror; heaven’s vault roars thunderous, his shield glows with blood-red light and its emulous orb strikes on the sun from far. When Jupiter saw that he yet panted with his Sarmatic toils, and that all the tempest of war yet swayed his breast: “Even as thou art, my son, even so hie thee through Argos, with thy sword thus dripping, in such a cloud of wrath. Let them cast off the sloth that curbs them, let them hate all and desire but thee, let them in frenzy vow to thee their lives and hands; sweep away the doubting, confound all treaties; thou mayst consume in war—to thee have I granted it—even gods themselves, ay, and the peace of Jove. Already I have sown the seeds of battle: Tydeus, as he returns, brings news of monstrous outrages, the monarch’s crime, the first beginnings of base warfare, the ambush and the