BOOK XXVI

The twenty-sixth? has the counterfeit shape of Athena, and the great assembly of the Indian host to stir up battle. Wuite Deriades slept on his mournful bed, bold Athena approached, faithful to Bacchos, and wooing a second victory for her brother. She had changed her shape to one like Orontes, and imitated the goodson of highcrested Deriades. So although he had thrown off the murderous ardour for war, scared by the fate of those who had perished, he was deceived by the counterfeit vision of a false dream, which encouraged him again tosmake war against Dionysos, in these words : it is not proper that princes who rule a city should sleep all the night. The sleep of the Counsellor is the rivers Indus, Jhelum, and Ganges. Of the Indian peninsula he knows nothing. Some of his geographic names are unknown elsewhere, and cannot be identified. Lastly, there is in him a tendency common amongst the ignorant of every Graeco-Roman age—namely, to believe that Indians were somehow connected with the Ethiopians of North-East Africa, and that India and North-East Africa were joined together.

ing; and you raise not the soldier’s spear, you hear not the surging noise of drums or the sound of pipes, or the voice of the murderous trumpet summoning the host. Pity your daughter Protonoé, a young widow mourning a husband, and leave not, O King, your Orontes unavenged! Slay my unarmed slayers yet live! See my breast pierced by a sharp thyrsuswand. Alas that brave Lycurgos dwells not here ! Alas that you rule not the proud Arabs! Dionysos was no god, when a mortal man chased him and made him migrate below the sea! I have beheld Deriades running away before battling women! Be a fearless lion, for a man in armour made Dionysos in his tunic of fawnskins run like a fawn! Not he destroyed that nation of warlike Indians—your own father destroyed them: for Hydaspes saw your champions in flight, and he brought them low! You are not like other men, for you have in you the heavenly blood of a daughter of Phaéthon, your blazing grandfather. Your body is not mortal: neither sword nor spear shall bring you low when you throw yourself on Olympos, when she had put off the shape of the mon his farscattered 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 for war gathered from every side at the summons of their king.

fare, 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 Rhodoé, a place of warmad 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. Dardian ὁ 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 ἢ 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, wonders of the East, but it does not seem to be known what his source is. mouth of the Ganges, and centred round Palibothra (Patna). and drank the Ismenian water of the Aonian river, having left his native Hydaspes. 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 heath 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 Orycié, 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 have boldness of soul and shrink not from battle. sleepers, 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 Europe or Asia. and his farshooting comrade Morrheus: thus the were commanded by five bloodthirsty chieftains. 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 : 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 cA pee east of the middle Indus.

me up too with my father in the deep pit. I am nothing for you to fear, nothing, even if the king hears of it. Who is angry with one who pities a corpse ? Who is angry with one dying a cruel death ὃ Who does not pity the dead? I will close my father’s sinking eyes. Shut me up there: who grudges death? Let us die together, and let one tomb receive daughter and father ! ”’ 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 Kérié. 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. Bolinges,? as Hesperos shines amid the stars and brightens the sky, Hesperos, harbinger of the murky gloom which follows when light fails.

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 he had gathered in support, but he had been slow in arming for shame of his hair newly shorn. He nursed to the effect that those who are not killed in battle are buried in some other way, or not at all. resentment and grievance against Deriades the horned king ; because the overbearing monarch in a fit of mad folly had cut off all his hair, a bitter insult to an Indian. Compelled to join in the war, he came unwillingly, and hid the shame of his hairless temples under a highplumed helmet, cherishing secret rancour in his heart. When battle came, he joined the fight in the daytime ; but always in the hours of the night he would send a trusty servant to Bacchos, and tell him the plans of Deriades. Thus he fought secretly for Deriades, but openly for Dionysos. He brought the savage tribes of Xuthoi and of battlestirring Arienoi? and the breed of Zoares and the clan of Eares, the Caspeirian ° peoples and Arbians?: those who held Hysporos that bright shining stream, so proud of its deep wealthy mines of amber ; and those who held conspicuous Arsanié, where the women in one day at the loom of Pallas, which they know so well, finish a whole robe with their quick hands.

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 or else the Habb, both situated west of the Indus. ae it alludes to tappi el for toddy. horion is uniden Holeasos, two sons of one father, Tarbelos the 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 except that its eyes are dark blue, an admirable singer and the accounts we have of it (this passage, Cleitarchos in Aelian, op. cit. xvii. 23, Strabo xv. 1. 69, which also mentions the melodious song of the horion and cites Cleitarchos) give no accurate picture and contain details which do not fit the monal. Anyhow, no pheasant can sing a note.

of rain to come, goldenyellow, clearintoning ; sparkles flash from his eyes like the morning gleams of Dawn. Often trilling upon a treetop in the air he weaves a song in tune with the horion beside him, splendid with purple wings; if you hear the catreus singing his early hymn, you might almost say it was the nightingale pouring her morning music from her changeful throat. There also dwelt the battlestirring host which Pyloites the fearless son of Hippalmos had armed for the war, and with him was Billaios his brother and fellow-leader. Hydarean people, with another host from the city of Carmina. Their joint leaders were Cyllaros and Astraéis the Indian prince, two sons of Brongos honoured by Deriades. scattered here and there, or in groups together, which lie about that place where the Indos 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 in Hom. Od. i. 23. Nonnos seems to see the Eastern in the Himalayas or the Hindu Kush.

ever-recurrent streams : so Nile in Egypt, and the eastern Hydaspes in India. There swims the travelling riverhorse through the waters, cleaving with his hoof the blackpebble stream, just like the dweller in my own Nile, who cuts the summerbegotten flood and travels through the watery deeps with his long jaws. He mounts the shores, splitting the woody ridges with sharp-pointed tooth ; with only a wet ungraven jaw to ravage the fruits, he cuts the cornbearing harvest with this makeshift sickle, reaper of sheafbearing crops without steel. Indian river like sevenmouth Nile. These men of war then, from the rounded shores of the islands and from the settlements of the Indos, now came under arms: their leader was Rhigbasos, one of gigantic 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 of his battle circuit, leaving the right to his sons.

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 Aretos pledged his troth to Laobié, according to the rites of lawful marriage, joining with her in wedlock for the begetting of children, a miracle divine was wrought. The bridegroom, fresh from his own wedding dance, had been busy at the marriage-altar sacrificing to Aphrodite the Lady of Brides; and while the hall resounded with hymns, a sow big with young in her pain shrieked out the cry of labour from her throat, prophetic of things to come, and dropt an uncanny incredible litter—a bastard brood of marine creatures, a shoal of wet fish she shot out of her womb, spat of the brine not spat of the land! Rumour flew abroad with many mouths, telling of the fishmother sow and gathering the people ; farscattered burghers came to stare at this numerous generation of land-creatures, the very image of seaborn spawn.

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 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. warriors : those who dwelt in Pylai, and those who possessed a habitation in Eucolla, the district of warlike Eos near the East Wind, and divine Goryandis with soil well fitted for seed. 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 ὃ knees. He has a short curved neck, and a wide forehead shaped like asnake. 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 in a swirl of dust and throws it hurtling through the air at random; he throws about this way and that way the jagged ring of teeth in his crooked jaw, beside the tusks ranged in strings like the backbone of a snake, and stretches down to his feet the sharp sword of the tusks.

Dionysos led to the Caucasian district by the Amazonian River, and scattered those helmeted women, as he sat on the back οὗ 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 straightlegged 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. 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.

Ethiopians had no connexion with India. king’s call. The whole army was led to battle by the emperor of the Indians, son of Hydaspes the watery lover in union with Astris daughter of Helios, happy in her offspring—men say that her mother was Ceto, a Naiad daughter of Oceanos—and Hydaspes crept into her bower till he flooded it, and wooed her to his embrace with conjugal waves. He had the genuine Titan blood ; for from the bed of primeval Thaumas his rosyarm consort Electra brought forth two children—from that bed came a river and a messenger of the heavenly ones, Iris quick as the wind and swiftly flowing Hydaspes, Iris travelling on foot and Hydaspes by water. Both had an equal speed on two contrasted paths: Iris among the immortals and Hydaspes among the rivers. 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 threeways, 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