Page:Statius (Mozley 1928) v2.djvu/79

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THEBAID, VI. 78–102

loud-ringing belts[1] too are brought, and armour waiting for a mightier frame. Insatiable hopes! what garments did she not make for him in eager haste, credulous woman, and robes of purple, emblems of royalty, and childish sceptre? Yet all does the sire himself ruthlessly condemn to the murky flames, and bid his own signs of rank be borne withal, if by their loss he may sate his devouring grief.

In another region the army hastens at the bidding of the wise augur to raise an airy pile, high as a mountain, of tree-trunks and shattered forests, to expiate the crime of the serpent’s slaying and make dark burnt-offering for the ill-omened war. These labour to cut down Nemea and its shady glens and hurl them to the ground, and to lay the forests open to the sunlight. Straightway a wood that axe has never shorn of its ancient boughs is felled, a wood than which none more rich in abundant shade between the vales of Argolis and Mount Lycaeus ever raised aloft its head above the stars; in reverend sanctity of eld it stands, and is said not only to reach back in years beyond the grandsires of men, but to have seen Nymphs pass[2] and flocking Fauns and yet be living. Upon the wood came pitiful destruction: the beasts are fled, and the birds, terror-driven, flutter forth from their warm nests; the towering beeches fall and the Chaonian[3] groves and the cypress that the winter harms not, spruces are flung prostrate that feed the funeral flames, ash-trees and trunks of holm-oak and yews with poisonous sap, and mountain ashes destined to drink the gore

  1. ↑ Perhaps because belts were commonly adorned with gold and silver and precious stones, and would therefore ring against the armour; cf. Aen. v. 312.
  2. ↑ There appears to be no parallel for this use of “muto,” “to take one for another,” i.e., “to see one (generation of Nymphs) succeed another”; but Statius is very free in his use of the word, cf. ii. 672, vii. 71.
  3. ↑ i.e., Of oaks, from Chaonia in Epirus, where was the oak-grove of Dodona.

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