BOOK 26
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blazing grandfather. Your body is not mortal: neither sword nor spear shall bring you low when you throw yourself on Lyaios.” So spoke artful Athena, and returned to Olympos, when she had put off the shape of the dream.
In the morning, Deriades sent heralds to summon his far-scattered troops from cities and from islands. Many a herald went this way and that way on stormswift shoe to gather the people from the various cities of the eastern region; warriors mad
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First to arm themselves were those pilots of warfare, Agraios and Phlogios, the two sons of Eulaios, partners in leadership, after the burial lately made of their father newly dead. With them came all the people who dwelt in Cyra and Baidion beside the broad barbarian stream of Indian Ombelos; those from castellated Rhodoe, a place of war-mad Indians, and rocky Propanisos," and those who held the round island of the Graiai, where children use the manly breast of a milch father, and steal thence their drink with pouting lips in place of the usual mother.
Others came from steep Sesindion, and those who had fortified Gazos with a rampart of linen built with blocks of plaited threads, impregnable, wellmade with wellspun foundations, a steadfast fortress of Ares: no enemy hand has ever broken with bronze that line of linenclad towers.
After them followed those warriors bold, the Dardian and Prasian armies, and the tribes of goldwearing Salangoi, where Wealth is a family friend. Their way it is to eat pulse as their fruit of life; this they grind with round millstones instead of corn. Then a procession of curlyheaded Zabioi; their leader was wise Palthanor, a man of godfearing ways, who hated Deriades and was of one mind with Dionysos. After the war, Dionysos took this man with him and settled him as a foreign settler in lyrebuilt Thebes; there he remained beside Dirce,
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Next came Morrheus Didnasides, proud of his vast armed host. His father Didnasos came with him to the war, his old age embittered with sorrow. He bore a buckler of wonderful work upon his aged arm; a wreath of hoary white spread shadows over his chin, proclaiming of itself how many and how long were his years. He still mourned his son untimely dead, Indian Orontes. There was Didnasos dropping tears; King Morrheus followed, holding upright his avenging spear, ready to slay the whole host of Bromios — indeed he was resolved to fight alone with Bacchos who slew his brother, he meant to wound the unwounded son of Thyone, his brother's murderer! With them came a polyglot host of Indians: those who dwelt in fairbuilded Aithra, the city of the Sun, founded upon a cloudless plain; those who dwelt both in the jungles of Anthene and the reedbeds of Orycie, in blazing Nesaia, and winterless Melainai, and the round seagirt district of Patalene.
Next came thick companies of Dyssaioi, and with them terrible armed hordes of shaggybreast Sabeiroi — thick hair is upon their hearts, wherefore they always have boldness of soul and shrink not from battle.
With them marched the Uatocoitai, the Earsleepers, men whose way it is to sleep lying upon their long ears. These were led to the war by Phringos and Aspetos and haughty Danyclos, who came together, and with them Hippuros Horsetail
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Farshooter Tectaphos came to the war. Once he had been saved from fate by sucking the milk from a daughter's breast with starving lips — she devised this trick to nourish her father — Tectaphos, parched, with crumbling skin, a living corpse. Deriades the monarch had carried out a heartless threat, and bound him fast with twisted ropes, and held him a prisoner behind lock and key in a mouldy pit, unfed, unwashed, worn out with famine, without his part in the sun or the rounded moon. There lay the man fettered in the depths of the earth, with no drink, no food, seeing no man, there in a cavern dug deep under the soil he lay in agony. Long he was wasted by famine, breathing yet like those who breathe not, as the air passed weak and fluttering through his hungry lips; ugly whiffs came from his dry flesh as if he were a corpse. There was a band of jailers watching the imprisoned man, but his clever daughter outwitted them with delusive words, a young nursing mother, when she uttered a mournful appeal and shook her deceiving garments:
“Do not let me die, watchmen! I have nothing here, I have brought no drink and no food for my father! Tears, only tears I bring for him that begat me! My empty hands tell you that! If you do not believe me, if you do not believe, undo my innocent girdle, tear off my veil, shake my dress — I have brought no drink to save his life! Do but shut
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Her pleading won them. The girl ran into the den, bringing light for her father's darkness. In that pit, she let the milk of her breast flow into her father's mouth, to avert his destruction, and felt no fear.
Deriades marvelled to hear the pious deed of Eerie. He set free the clever girl's father from his prison, like a ghost; the fame of it was noised abroad, and the Indian people praised the girl's breast which had saved a life by its cunning.
So now this man was conspicuous among the Bolinges, as Hesperos shines amid the stars and brightens the sky, Hesperos, harbinger of the murky gloom which follows when light fails.
Ginglon highheaded, and Thyraieus striding big, and Hippalmos tall as the clouds, beyond the farthest region of earth had armed the different tribes of spearproud Arachotes, and battalions of Dersaioi their neighbours, who when men are slain with steel in battle cover their bodies under mounds of earth.
Habrathoos came with a host of bowmen whom he had gathered in support, but he had been slow in arming for shame of his hair newly shorn. He nursed
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Besides these came the Cyraioi, ready for diving-work in the war. They know the seabeaten coasts of islands, and they are skilful in battle by sea; but seafaring barges they know not. They go floating in coracles of untanned hide, which they manage as well as a shipwright's vessel of wood; they guide their makeshift course in the skins, where the mariner sits in shelter, navigating over the waves and cutting the back of the sea in his mimic barge. These were commanded by Thyamis and princely
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A great swarm had come from Areizanteia, nurse of the strange tree-honey; where the trees drink the fruitful moisture of morning dew, and their leaves run honey, and so they produce the neat travail of the clever bee as if from a hive, the yellow juice born of the leaves alone." For Hyperion, just appearing after his bath in the Ocean, scatters upon the plain the wholesome juice of his hair in the morning, and waters the plant-growing furrows of earth the giver of life. Such honey Areizanteia brings: rejoicing in this, great flocks of birds swim on their wings and dance above the leaves; or a coiling serpent creeps along, and girdles the sweet tree with enfolding loops, while he sucks the delicate juice with greedy mouth and licks with his lips the sweet travail of the clusters. So snakes dribble out the treejuice and drop delicious honey, they spit out abroad more of the sweet sap of the bee than their own bitter scattering poison. There on the honeydropping branches is that sweet bird the horion, singing like the inspired swan. He does not strike up in tune with the west wind whirring in the air with musical wings; but he sings a lay with understanding beak, like a man twangling the strings for a wedding hymn to wait upon a bride. There the catreus foretells a shower
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Next came the Sibai under arms, and the Hydarcan people, with another host from the city of Carmina. Their joint leaders were Cyllaros and Astraeis the Indian prince, two sons of Brongos honoured by Deriades.
Another host came from three hundred islands, scattered here and there, or in groups together, which lie about that place where the Indus on an endless course pours out its winding travelling stream by two enclosing mouths, after creeping in its slow curving course from the Indian reedbeds over the plain to its mouth by the Eastern sea, after first rolling down the heights of the Ethiopian mountains: swollen by the mass of summerbegotten waters it increases cubit by cubit with selfrising floods, and embraces the rich land like a watery husband, who rejoices a thirsty bride with his moist kisses and enfolds her in many passionate arms for a sheafbearing bridal, while he begets in his turn other
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Such are said to be the doings of the mighty Indian river like sevenmouth Nile. These men of war then, from the rounded shores of the islands and from the settlements of the Indus, now came under arms: their leader was Rhigbasos, one of gigantic stature.
Nor was old Aretos missing when Deriades summoned all to war. A heavy man he was; but he fitted a heavy bronze corselet over his hairy chest, and carried an oxhide shield on his aged back, slung by a strap over his bent neck. He also armed his force under compulsion for the war, he and five sons, Lycos and Myrsos together, Glaucos and Periphas and Melaneus the lateborn. He covered his gray curly hairs with a helmet, and repaired to the left wing of his battle circuit, leaving the right to his sons.
These were men whose lips nature had closed with the seal of silence, having tied each tongue, the channel of intelligent speech. For when at the doorposts of the bridal chamber in the sacred dance
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He asked the prophetic interpreter of God's will: to the question, he foretold a succession of dumb children to come, like the voiceless generation of the deep sea. And the seer bade him to hide the prophetic oracle, that he might propitiate the longwinged son of Maia, governor of the tongue, guide of intelligent speech.
Laobie was brought to bed, and in one birth after another brought forth children equal in number to the sow's young ones, and dumb like fishes. After the victory. Lord Bacchos had pity on these, and loosed the tie of the tongue in their dumb throats, drove away the silence which had been their companion from birth, bestowed upon each a voice perfected at last.
Along with these were mustered shieldbearing warriors: those who dwelt in Pylai, and those who
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After these came armed those who possessed the curves of Oita, woody mother of longliving elephants, to which nature has granted to live through two hundred rolling years, rounding so often the turning-point of eternal time, or even three hundred. Black they are from the point of the foot to the head, and they feed side by side. Each has projecting teeth on his long jaws, two of them, hooked like a reaper's sickle, sharp and cutting, and he marches through the ranks of trees on his long legs; he has a curved neck like a camel, and on his capacious back he carries an innumerable swarm of riders in rows, swinging a firm foot with unbending knees. He has a short curved neck, and a wide forehead shaped like a snake. The eyes on his face are like the little eyes of a pig. He is towering, enormous: as he rolls along, the skinny ears close to the temple on each side, move like fans in the lightest breath of air. A thin little restless waving tail whips the body with a continual regular movement. Often in battle the mountainous beast shakes a tusk and attacks a man like a pilking bull, striking with the borrowed sharptoothed sickle on each side of his mouth and swinging natural spears on both cheeks. Often when he has pierced a man, he lifts him straight up with greedy throat, armour and shield and all; or he throws one down with sharppointed tusk, picks up the body as it rolls helpless
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These creatures after the Indian war" Lord Dionysos led to the Caucasian district by the Amazonian River, and scattered those helmeted women, as he sat on the back of a mountainous elephant. But this was after the war. In this conflict, when Deriades sent out his summons to war with Lyaios, the chieftain Pyloites joined him driving a straight-legged elephant into the fray. He was the warlike blood of the race which produced Marathon, one blessed in his children; and he was followed to the conflict by a neighbouring people of different speech, from Eristobareia with her lovely coronals.
Tribes of Derbices were there with Deriades, Ethiopians and Sacai and various nations of Bactrians,' and a great host of woolly-headed Blemyes. The Ethiopians follow a peculiar and clever fashion in battle. They wear the top of a dead horse's head, hiding in this disguise the true shape of their faces. Thus they fasten another face on the human head, and join the dead to the living. So in the battle they startle the unwitting foe with this bastard head; and their chieftain lets out a deceitful sound from his mouth, and gives vent to a horse's neigh with his manly voice.
These were the hosts which gathered at their
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So great then, was the host there assembled. The city was crammed with people; helmeted crowds were surrounded by favourite young squires till they filled the circle of the streets that ran all four ways in the city, some thick at the three ways, some in the moat, some on the height of the walls, while others lay quietly on the turrets and slept under arms. The company of leaders was entertained by Deriades in his own hall, and all touched the same table as their hospitable king in turns on rows of seats. Feasting engaged them in the evening, the wing of sleep in the night: the army slumbered under arms on the eve of battle, and slumbering they had to do with battlestirring dreams, as they fought against shadows like Satyrs.
Dionysiaca. Nonnus of Panopolis. W. H. D. Rouse (Translator). Cambridge, Mass.. 1940.
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