BUT MINYAS’ DAUGHTER, his Alcithoe,
will take no part in Bacchus’ sacred orgies:
she even dares to say he’s not Jove’s son.
Her sisters share in her impiety.
The priest has given orders: there will be
a Bacchic festival: all women-servants
must be relieved from labor on that day;
they and their mistresses are all to wrap
the hides of animals around their breasts,
loosen the bands that bind their tresses, and
wear garlands on their heads, and in their hands
hold fast the leafy thyrsus. And he adds
that any who would slight the deity
will face the unrelenting Bacchus’ wrath.
They all obey: the matrons and young wives
desert their looms and baskets, set aside
their labors; burning incense, they invoke
Bacchus and also call him Bromius,
Lyaeus, and the twice-born, and the one
who has two mothers, blazing lightning’s son—
and Nyseus, and Thyoneus the unshorn,
Lenaeus, and the planter of the vine
that brings such joy, Nyctelius, as well
as father Eleleus, and Euhan, Iacchus,
and all the endless other names you bear,
through town on town in all of Greece, o Liber.
For you are blessed with endless youth: you are
eternally a boy; high heaven’s star—
the handsomest of all; your face is like
a virgin’s when you don’t display your horns.
You’ve won the Orient; its farthest bounds
are yours, where sun-scorched India is bathed
by Ganges. You, the god men venerate,
killed sacrilegious Pentheus and Lycurgus,
the one who plied the two-edged battle-ax;
it’s you who seized the Tuscans—you who cast
Latin [1–23]
their bodies overboard. Your chariot
rolls heavily across the mountaintops;
it’s drawn by lynxes, and it has bright reins.
Bacchants and satyrs follow in your wake,
together with Silenus: that old man
is drunk; he staggers, leaning on his staff—
or hardly keeps his seat upon the back
of the bent ass he rides. And where you pass,
young men and women chant and clamor—glad.
Palms beat the tambourines, bronze cymbals clash,
long flutes of perforated boxwood add
their strident music. Theban women cry:
“Be with us now, o merciful and mild!”
observing, as the priest had asked, your rites.
And only Minyas’ daughters stay at home;
they violate the holy day; the tasks
Minerva sets are theirs: close to the loom,
they give their household women work to do.
They thumb the twisting threads, they spin their wool.
And one, whose thumb is agile, as she draws
a thread, says to her sisters: “Let us now—
while others stop their work to join the crowd
upon this so-called feast day—on our part
(since we are great Minerva’s votaries,
and she is a much finer deity),
lighten the useful labor of our hands
with varied talk; our ears are idle; let
each take her turn at telling tales, so that
the hours may seem less tedious to those
who listen.” And to this they all agree:
they say that she should be the first to speak.
But she, who knows so many fables, finds
it hard to choose the tale that’s best to try.
O Dercetis of Babylonia, shall
the change you suffered be the tale she tells?
For you—the Palestinians are convinced—
Latin [24–46]
found all your limbs were veiled by scales: as fish,
it’s pools that you were driven to inhabit.
Or should she speak of Dercetis’ great daughter,
Semiramis, the queen who had to wear
white feathers and, as dove, spend her last years
perched on high towers? Or recount instead
how, using chants and potent herbs, a Naiad
transformed the bodies of young boys? She changed
those boys into mute fishes—until fate
forced her own self to take that same sad shape.
Or how the mulberry, which once had borne
white berries, now has such dark fruit, because
it has been touched by blood? This last seems best:
it’s not a tale that many know as yet.
So even as she weaves, she tells her story: