Metamorphoses

The priest had ordered both mistresses and maids, laying aside their employments, to have their breasts covered with skins, and to loosen the fillets of their hair, and to put garlands on their locks, and to take the verdant thyrsi in their hands; and had prophesied that severe would be the resentment of the Deity, if affronted. Both matrons and new-married women obey, and lay aside their webs and work-baskets, and their tasks unfinished; and offer frankincense, and invoke both Bacchus and Bromius, and Lyæus, and the son of the Flames, and the Twice-Born, and the only one that had two mothers. To these is added the name of Nyseus, and the unshorn Thyoneus, and with Lenæus, the planter of the genial grape, and Nyctelius, and father Eleleus, and Iacchus, and Evan, and a great many other names, which thou, Liber, hast besides, throughout the nations of Greece. For thine is youth everlasting; thou art a boy to all time, thou art beheld as the most beauteous of all in high heaven; thou hast the features of a virgin, when thou standest without thy horns. By thee the East was conquered, as far as where swarthy India is bounded by the remote Ganges. Thou God , worthy of our veneration, didst smite Pentheus, and the axe-bearing Lycurgus, sacrilegious mortals ; thou didst hurl the bodies of the Etrurians into the sea. Thou controllest the neck of the lynxes yoked to thy chariot, graced with the painted reins. The Bacchanals and the Satyrs follow thee ; the drunken old man, too, Silenus , who supports his reeling limbs with a staff, and sticks by no means very fast to his bending ass. And wherever thou goest, the shouts of youths, and together the voices of women, and tambourines beaten with the hands, and hollow cymbals resound, and the box-wood pipe , with its long bore. The Ismenian matrons ask thee to show thyself mild and propitious, and celebrate thy sacred rites as prescribed.

MetamorphosesOvidHenry T. RileyEnglishVerse permalinkRead in Book 4

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