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THEBAID, V. 531–558

alien sky,[1] or as he that shook the horns of sacred Parnassus, twining his coils among them, until pierced by a hundred wounds he bore, O Delian, a forest of thy arrows.[2]

What god appointed for thee, little one, the burden of so dire a fate? Scarce on thy life’s earliest threshold, art thou slain by such a foe? Was it that thus thou mightest be sacred for ever to the peoples of Greece and dying merit so glorious a burial? Thou diest, O babe, struck by the end of the unwitting serpent’s tail, and straightway the sleep left thy limbs and thine eyes opened but to death alone. But when thy frightened dying wail rose upon the air and the broken cry fell silent on thy lips, like the half-finished accents of a dream, Hypsipyle heard it and sped with faint and failing limbs and stumbling gait; her mind forebodes sure disaster, and with gaze turned to every quarter she scans the ground in search, vainly repeating words the babe would know; but he is nowhere, and the recent tracks are vanished from the meadows. Gathered in a green circle lies the sluggish foe and fills many an acre round, so lies he with his head slantwise on his belly. Struck with horror at the sight the unhappy woman roused the forest’s depths with shriek on shriek; yet still he lies unmoved. Her sorrowful wail reached the Argives’ ears: forthwith the Arcadian knight[3] at his chief’s word flies thither in eager haste and reports the cause. Then at last, at the glint of armour and the shouting of the men he rears his scaly neck in wrath: with a vast effort tall Hippo-

  1. ↑ He means the snake (Draco) that winds between the two Bears (cf. Virg. G. i. 244), but his expression is difficult; nor does Draco go anywhere near the southern hemisphere, though Statius may have been thinking of either Hydra or Serpens, which do, and confused them somehow with Draco.
  2. ↑ Python, slain by Apollo at Delphi.
  3. ↑ Parthenopaeus.

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