But his false semblance soon is set aside:
on reaching Crete, Jove shows his own true guise.
Meanwhile the father of the ravished girl,
not knowing what had taken place, commands
Cadmus, his son, to find Europa or
to suffer exile from Agenor’s land—
a cruel threat, but born of love!
And so
he roamed the world in vain; what man could hope
to bring to light the secret loves of Jove?
Agenor’s son stays on his wandering path—
far from his home, far from his father’s wrath.
And he consults Apollo’s oracle:
he wants to find where it is best to settle.
The oracle replies: “You’ll meet a heifer
in a deserted place—a cow that never
has worn the yoke or drawn a curving plow.
You are to follow in that heifer’s tracks;
and where she stops to rest upon the grass,
you are to build your walls and call that land
Boeotia.” As soon as Cadmus left
the grotto of Castalia, he saw
a heifer—with no herdsman—passing by:
upon her neck she bore no servile sign.
He follows—carefully—the heifer’s path
and offers to Apollo silent thanks
for showing him the way he was to take.
The heifer now had forded the Cephisus
and crossed the fields of Panope. She halted;
and as she lifted heavenward her brow
from which two tall horns spread, she filled the air
with lowings; she looked back on those who
now were close behind; she kneeled; then, on her side,
she rested on the grass. The grateful Cadmus’
lips kissed this foreign land—so did he greet
these fields he’d never seen before, these peaks.
But then, for the libations to complete
Latin [1–26]
the sacrifice he now would offer Jove,
he needed living water from a spring:
and this he sent his servingmen to seek.
An ancient forest lay at hand: no ax
had ever violated it. A mass
of rocks, a grotto forming a low arch,
stood there among dense shrubs and pliant boughs;
and from that cave abundant waters gushed.
That grotto served a serpent as his den—
a serpent that was sacred unto Mars.
He had a golden crest; his eyes flashed flames;
and all his body was puffed out with poison.
He had three tongues that flickered, and his teeth
were set in three rows. And into this wood
the luckless men of Tyre now made their way.
They lowered urns into the grotto’s waters;
their pitchers splashed and clattered, and the dark—
blue serpent, hissing horribly, thrust out
his head from the deep cave. Their hands were quick
to drop the urns; their blood ran cold; fear-struck,
they trembled suddenly. The serpent twists
and twines his body into scaly knots:
he darts and flashes; in a giant arch,
he rises through the unresisting air
to half his height; and all the forest lies
beneath his gaze; and you could see his size—
a mass to match the Snake that stands between
the two Bears. He is quick to spring upon
the men of Tyre: whether they prepare
to fight or just take flight or—paralyzed
by fear—do nothing, he attacks them all.
His fangs kill some, and some his crushing coils,
and some he kills with his infested breath.
The sun had reached its zenith; shadows now
were at their thinnest. Cadmus, wondering
what’s kept his comrades back, sets out in search.
Latin [26–52]
He has a shield of lion’s hide, a lance
with gleaming iron tip, and a javelin—
and, better than all arms, his daring soul.
On entering the woods, he sees his friends’
cadavers—and the giant victor licking
the horrid wounds with bloody tongue. Cadmus
cries out: “My faithful friends, I shall avenge
your death or die beside you!” Saying that,
he lifts a massive rock with his right hand
and, straining to his utmost, heaves it at
the serpent. Such a blow would surely have
smashed in the sturdiest of walls with all
its tallest towers; but the snake was left
unscathed: the scales of his dark hide—much like
a hard cuirass—repelled the crashing rock.
Yet they’re not tough enough to stand against
the javelin; it strikes his flexing spine
just at the middle coil; its iron tip
drives deep into his innards. Mad with pain,
the snake twists back his head, he sees his wound;
his teeth grip tight the shaft; and even as
his body shakes, at last he frees the shaft;
but in his bones the iron tip holds fast.
At that, his wrath can only grow. The veins
along his throat are swollen; his dread jaws
are flecked with white foam; even as they scrape
along the ground, his scales resound; the breath
that issues from his Stygian cave infects
the air. He writhes in giant coils, and then
he stiffens like a towering trunk, erect,
or, like a swollen river, thrusts ahead,
smashing the trees with his onrushing chest.
Agenor’s son gives way a bit; his shield
of lion’s hide repels the snake’s attack;
his thrusting spearhead holds those jaws in check.
The angry serpent snaps at the hard shaft—
Latin [52–83]
no use, his teeth are caught on the hard tip.
Down from his poisonous palate, blood now drips,
staining the green grass, but the wound can’t take
its full effect: the snake draws back his neck—
the shaft cannot sink deep. Yet now at last,
Agenor’s son draws closer, planting fast
the shaft into the serpent’s throat until
the snake, in his retreat, meets at his back
an oak tree: Cadmus spears both tree and neck.
Beneath the serpent’s mass, the oak tree bends;
and at the lashing of his tail, it groans.
The victor looks at the defeated hulk;
but suddenly he hears a voice (although
he can’t tell where it comes from, it is heard):
“Why, Cadmus, do you stare at that slain snake?
You, too, will be a snake at whom men gaze.”
There, Cadmus, pale, his senses gone, dismayed,
stood—with his hair erect, on end—afraid.
But then Minerva came, that warrior’s aid;
she glided from the sky and ordered him
to plow the ground and then to plant within
the earth the viper’s teeth: these were to be
the seeds of men to come. And he obeyed;
and even as he pressed his plow—as she
had bid him do—he scattered the snake’s teeth
within the ground: from such seed, men would spring.
At that—a thing beyond belief—the ground
began to stir, and from the furrows sprang
spear-tips, then casques with waving plumes, and next,
shoulders and chests, and weapon-bearing arms:
a harvest crop of warriors with shields.
Just so, on holidays, the theater’s
backdrop is raised and human forms appear:
one sees the faces first, then—slowly—all
the rest, as rolling upward steadily,
full forms appear until, at the stage-edge,
their feet are planted.
Latin [84–114]
Frightened at the sight
of these new enemies, Agenor’s son
prepared his weaponry. But “Set those down!”
one of the race sprung from the ground cried out;
“This is a civil strife! Do not intrude!”
That said, with his hard sword, in hand-to-hand
combat he struck a brother born of earth,
then fell himself beneath a javelin
flung from afar. He who had touched that shaft
was also quick to fall; he soon gave up
the breath he had received so recently.
And battle frenzy soon had seized them all;
each at the other’s hand, those brothers fell:
their wounds were mutual. Now those young men,
destined to such brief lives, beat with their chests
against their mother earth, warmed with their blood.
Five youths alone were left alive: Echion
was one of these. Warned by Athena, he
cast down his weapons to the ground: he sought—
and made—a pact of peace with his four brothers.
All five were at his side when—to fulfill
the orders of Apollo’s oracle—
the stranger come from Sidon, on the soil
the god had promised to him, founded Thebes.