Metamorphoses

The daughters of Minyas alone, within doors, interrupting the festival with unseasonable labor, are either carding wool, or twirling the threads with their fingers, or are plying at the web, and keeping the handmaids to their work. One of them, as she is drawing the thread with her smooth thumb, says, “While others are idling, and thronging to these fanciful rites, let us, whom Pallas, a better Deity, occupies, alleviate the useful toil of our hands with varying discourse; and let us relate by turns to our disengaged ears, for the general amusement , something each in our turn, that will not permit the time to seem long.” They approve of what she says, and her sisters bid her to be the first to tell her story.

MetamorphosesBook 4, Line 3Henry T. RileyEnglishVerse permalinkRead in Book 4

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