with his warm blood.
Ill-fated Phaedimus
and Tantalus (the grandson of the hero)
had finished with their horses and moved on
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to boyish pleasures in the wrestling ring;
their well-oiled bodies glistening, they gripped
each other, breast to breast, in a tight clinch;
a bowstring is drawn back and then released:
a single arrow pierces both of them.
They groan together and together fall,
together writhing in death’s agony;
they roll their eyes and breathe their last together.
Alphenor saw this and flew toward the pair,
beating his grief-stricken breast, and as he
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lifted their limbs, already cold, in his embrace,
he, in that act of piety, was felled
when Delian Apollo drove a shaft
right through his diaphragm: when they withdrew it,
a part of his torn lung stuck on the barb;
his lifeblood followed, gushing in the air.
Longhaired Damascithon came to a more
complicated end, struck by an arrow
between the ligaments behind his knee;
and as he struggled with that fatal shaft,
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a second arrow punched right through his throat,
up to the feathers. His hot blood expelled it,
drilling the air through in a slender column.
Ilioneus was the last to die;
raising his arms to heaven in a prayer
that would prove ineffectual, he cried
in desperation, “Spare me, all you gods!”
(not knowing that not all gods needed asking!).
Although the god who bent the bow was moved,
his arrow (not to be recalled) sped on:
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nevertheless, a slight wound did for him,
for the arrow didn’t pierce his heart—too deeply.
Rumor of evil spreads across the city,
touching with sorrow every group it meets,
until her own attendants, now in tears,
assure the mother of her certain ruin;
she can’t believe that this could happen to her,
and that it had happened was outrageous;
that the gods could dare so, were within their rights;
that father Amphion had killed himself,
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putting one end to sorrow and to life.
How sadly different is this Niobe
from that Niobe who so recently
dispersed the people at Latona’s shrine,
who sailed so proudly down the city’s streets
with head held high, the envy of her friends—
who now is pitied even by her foes!
She flings herself onto the lifeless corpses
in her derangement, kisses them farewell,
then lifts her bruised arms to the sky and says,
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“Now feast your cruel heart upon our grief,
feast yourself, Latona, till you’re sated!
Glut your bloodthirsty heart! These seven deaths
have ruined me: exult then, in the triumph
of the victor over her defeated foe!
“But who is victor? In my wretchedness
I still have far more children left to me
than you in all your bliss! Thus, even after
so many deaths, I am the victor still!”
No sooner had she spoken when the taut
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bowstring twanged with its release, a sound
that terrified them all except Niobe:
ruin had made her reckless.
The seven sisters stood,
in black for mourning, with their hair unbound,
before the corpses laid out in a row;
the first sister, attempting to remove
an arrow threaded through a brother’s guts,
collapsed and died, her lifeless cheek on his;
the second sister, trying to console
her grieving mother, suddenly bent over
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in agony, struck by an unseen wound.
This one dies fleeing; that one falls upon
a sister’s corpse; this one hides, and that one
stands up where you can see her shivering;
now six, diversely wounded, have been slain;
the last of them still lives; her mother stretches
her body and her garment over her,
and cries, “Leave me my youngest one at least,
spare me but one, the youngest of my many!”
And as she prayed, the one for whom she prayed
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fell dead, the last of them; and now bereft,
she sits, surrounded by the lifeless bodies
of her sons, her daughters, and her husband,
she sits there stilly, rigid in her grief:
not a hair upon her head stirs in the breeze,
her face is colorless, and her eyes fixed,
and in this image of her nothing lives;
her tongue is stone, frozen to her palate,
her veins no longer move; she cannot turn
her head nor raise her hand nor move a foot;
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her viscera are stone; and yet Niobe wept.
A whirlwind carried her back to her homeland;
there, set upon the summit of a mountain,
Niobe weeps, and even to this day,
she bathes the marble with her flowing tears.
And now, for certain, men and women fear
the revelation of Latona’s wrath,
and tend her altars with a greater ardor,
showing their awe before the power of
the goddess-mother of the sacred twins.
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Latona
And as so often happens in such cases,
recent events remind folks of old stories,
until one says, “Something like this took place
in fruitful Lycia, once, long ago,
when peasants spurned the goddess to their grief;
only the humble birth of those involved
has kept this tale from being better known,
yet it’s amazing—with my own eyes I saw
the pond, the place touched by that miracle.
It happened like this.
“My father, being then…
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too far advanced in years to brave the rigors
of cattle driving, ordered me to move
some fancy stock of his out of that region,
and gave me a local fellow for a guide.
“And as we made our way through the grasslands,
I saw, right in the middle of a lake,
surrounded by reeds that trembled in the breeze,
an ancient altar coated with a crust
of black ash from sacrificial fires.
“He stopped right there and whispered fearfully,
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‘Show me your favor!’ And I did likewise.
‘So now,’ I ask him, ‘would that be an altar
to Faunus? The naiads? Some local god perhaps?’
“The fellow answers, ‘Young sir, that there altar
hasn’t to do with any mountain god:
she calls it hers whom once the queen of heaven
put earth off-limits to, until (but just)
the floating island Delos took her in.
“‘She braced herself against a pair of trees,
the olive and the palm, Latona did,
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and brought forth twins upon that very spot,
in spite of all their stepmother could do.
“‘She fled, they say: the goddess-mother left
with the baby deities upon her breast,
until she reached the borders of Lycia,
where the
Chimaeras live. A blazing sun
scorched the fields bare; assailed by heat and thirst,
her breasts drained dry by her greedy nurslings,
it happened that she saw, down in a dell,
a lake of modest size; there, at its edges,
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peasants were gathering bushy osiers
and other useful grasses from the marsh.
“‘The Titan’s daughter came to them, and knelt
at the lake’s margin for a cooling drink;
the rustic mob forbade her. She appealed:
“And why do you prohibit me from drinking?
Surely the water is for everyone.
Nature has given no one ownership
of sunlight, air, and water! I have come
to exercise what is a public right;
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nevertheless, it’s as a suppliant
that I am here to beg this gift from you.
“‘“I have not come to bathe my weary limbs,
but to relieve my thirst: for I’m so dry
that I can hardly speak, my throat is parched,
and I have almost no voice left at all!
A draft of water will be nectar to me,
and I will say I’ve been restored to life,
yes, it is life you give me with this water!
“‘“And let my little children move you too,
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my pretty babes, who even now beseech you,
stretching their tiny arms out from my breast!”
(And as it happened, they stretched out their arms!)
“‘And who would not have been won over by
such winning words? But they, despite her pleas,
continued to restrain her, threatening
to do her harm unless she goes away,
and adding insults to such injuries.
“‘Nor did that end it, for they roiled the pond
with hands and feet, and from its bottom stirred
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the oozy muck by jumping up and down,
out of no other motive than pure meanness.
“‘Anger put thirst off, for the Titan’s daughter
now would no longer beg unworthily,
nor could she bear not speaking as a goddess.
Turning her palms up to the stars, she cried,
“Dwell in this pond of yours forevermore!”
“‘And as the goddess ordered, so it was.
It pleases them, the underwater life,
sometime to hide, submerged in muck completely,
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sometime to poke a head out or to swim
across the surface of the pond, or sit,
as they quite often do, along its banks,
only to leap on back into its cool water;
but now, as in the past, they exercise
their foul tongues in shameless quarreling,
and even underwater, utter curses.
“‘They’ve raucous voices now and swollen throats,
and constant quarreling has given them
distended jaws; their heads now seem to sit
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on shoulders without benefit of necks;
green are their backs and white their bellies (now
their largest parts); no longer laboring,
they all cavort in ponds and mucky bogs,
after their transformation into—frogs.’”
Marsyas
No sooner had that nameless fellow finished
his tale of how the Lycians came to ruin,
than someone called to mind the old story
of how Latona’s son trounced the Satyr
in a match played upon Minerva’s pipes,
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then punished him:
“Why do you deconstruct me?”
cried the Satyr. “Oh! I am mortified!
What a great price I’m paying for this flute!”
And as he cries, the skin is stripped from his body
until he’s all entirely one wound:
blood runs out everywhere, and his uncovered
sinews lie utterly exposed to view;
his pulsing veins were flickering, and you
could number all his writhing viscera
and the gleaming organs underneath his sternum.
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Then came the country folk to weep for him,
gods of the forest, nymphs and fauns, his fellow
Satyrs, and his favorite boy, Olympus,
along with shepherds who, in mountain pastures,
tended their woolly flocks and horny herds.
All wept for him, drenching the fertile earth;
she then absorbed their transitory tears
into her veins and turned them into droplets
of vapor. Sent back out into the air,
they gathered together in a single stream
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descending swiftly between narrow banks
until it reached the ocean; that stream is known
as the clearest river in all Phrygia,
and takes its name from his: the Marsyas.
Pelops
Immediately after this, the crowd
turned to the present day, mourning the death
of Amphion, destroyed with all his offspring.
All blame the mother; nonetheless, folks say
one man, her brother Pelops, mourned for her,
and when he ripped his garment from his breast,
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revealed the ivory patch on his left shoulder.
At birth, both shoulders were the same in color
and both were made of flesh; when Tantalus,
his father, chopped him up in little pieces,
they say the gods put him back together,
and all the other parts of him were found
except for one between his arm and neck.
An ivory chip replaced the missing piece,
and Pelops was made once again complete.
Tereus, Procne, and Philomela
Neighboring nobles assembled, and nearby cities
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encouraged their kings to pay condolence calls:
Argos, Sparta, Pelopeidean Mycenae,
and Calydon (which had not yet acquired
the emnity of fierce Diana); fertile
Orchomenus and Corinth (famed for bronze);
fearsome Messene and Patrae and low-lying Cleonae;
and Nelean Pylos and Troezen (not yet ruled
by Pittheus); and all the other cities
to the north and south of Corinth
sent delegates to pay their last respects.
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Who would believe that only you, Athens,
did nothing? Warfare kept you from your duty,
for a barbaric horde from overseas
had marched its terror right up to your walls.
Tereus of Thrace had raised that siege
with his auxiliaries, had driven off the foe,
and now was famous for his victory.
And since he was a man of wealth and power,
and a descendant of the god of war,
King Pandion had bonded with Tereus
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by joining him in marriage to his daughter,
Procne.
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But neither Juno, who presides
at weddings, nor the wedding god himself,
Hymenaeus, nor the required Graces
attended theirs. Instead, the Furies shook
the torches they had snatched from funerals,
and turned down the coverlet upon their bed;
and all night long, an evil owl perched
and brooded on the roof of their bedchamber.
Under these omens, Tereus and Procne
are wed; and under them, their child is born;
and naturally all of Thrace is one
in its felicitations to the parents,
; who offer up their own thanks to the gods.
That day is now proclaimed a festival
on which the king of Athens gave his daughter
to the distinguished ruler, and the day
as well on which Itys, their son, was born.
What does us good is to a great extent
concealed from us.
Five autumns passed,
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then Procne coaxed her husband with these words:
“If I am at all pleasing in your sight,
then either let me visit with my sister
or let her visit me; you must assure
my father we won’t keep her for too long!
The sight of her would be the finest gift
that you could give me!”
So he orders ships
brought down to waterside, then sail and oar
swiftly convey Tereus overseas
to Athens and the harbor at Piraeus.
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Admitted to the presence of the king
upon arrival, it so happens that
the two men clasp each other’s hands and start
their conversation on that lucky omen.
He had just mentioned his young wife’s request
to see her sister, and assured the king
that she, if sent, would be sent promptly back,
when look! where Philomela now appears
richly adorned, but richer still in beauty,
one to be spoken of in the same terms
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as often we hear used of nymphs and dryads
glimpsed in the woods—if only they were dressed
as well as she and were quite as refined.
When he first saw her, Tereus caught fire
as instantly as ripe grain or dry leaves,
or as hay stored in a barn goes up in blazes.
Her beauty surely justified such passion,
but he was driven by an innate lust,
a bent that Thracians have for lechery:
he burned with his and with his nation’s heat.
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What tack to take here? Bribe her attendants?
Make his way to her through her faithful nurse?
Seduce the girl with rare and precious gifts,
even at the cost of his whole kingdom?
Or seize her and defend his theft with warfare?
Nothing at all he would not dare to do
in his unbridled passion, so fierce the flames
that would not be contained within his breast.
And now delay was unendurable:
he eagerly repeated Procne’s speech,
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and raised his own desires under hers.
Love lent him eloquence, and when he seemed
to go beyond the mandate he’d been given,
he said that this was merely Procne’s wish,
and added tears, as though they too were part
of his commission. By the gods above,
what utter blindness dwells in human hearts!
Here Tereus achieves a reputation