Thebaid, Volume 1 (Books I–IV)

My spirit is touched by Pierian fire to recount the strife of brethren, and the battle of the alternate reign fought out with impious hatred, and all the guilty tale of Thebes. Whence, O goddesses, do ye bid me begin?—Shall I sing the origins of the dreadful race, the Sidonian rape and the inexorable terms of Agenor’s law, and Cadmus searching o’er the main? Far backward runs the story, should I tell of the anxious husbandman of hidden war, sowing battles in the unhallowed soil, and, searching to the uttermost, relate with what song Amphion bade the Tyrian mountains move to form a city’s walls, whence came Bacchus’ grievous wrath against his kindred towers; what deed fierce Juno wrought; against whom unhappy Athamas caught up his bow, and why with Palaemon in her arms his mother quailed not to leap into the vast Ionian sea. Nay rather here and now I will suffer the sorrows and the joys of Cadmus to have gone by: let the troubled house of Oedipus set a limit to my song, since not yet may I venture to utter the theme of the standards of Italy and the triumphs of the North, or Rhine twice brought beneath our yoke and Ister twice subject to our law and the Dacians hurled down from their conspiring mount, or how in those days of scarce-approaching manhood Jove was forfended from attack, and of thee, O glory added to the Latian name, whom succeeding early to thy sire’s latest exploits Rome longs to be her own for ever. Yea, though a closer bound confine the stars, and the shining quarter of the sky that knows nought of Pleiads or Boreas or rending thunderbolt tempt thee, though he who curbs the fiery-footed steeds set with his own hand upon thy locks the exalted radiance of his diadem, or Jupiter yield thee an equal portion of the great heaven, abide contented with the governance of men, thou lord of earth and sea, and give constellations to the sky. A time will come when emboldened by Pierian frenzy I shall recount thy deeds: now do I pitch my harp but to the singing of Aonian arms and the sceptre fatal to both tyrants; of their madness unchecked by death and the strife of flames in the dissension of the funeral pyre; of kings’ bodies lacking burial and cities drained by mutual slaughter, when the dark-blue waters of Dirce blushed red with Lernaean gore, and Thetis stood aghast at Ismenos, once wont to graze arid banks, flowing down with mighty heaps of slain. Which hero first dost thou make my theme, O Clio? Tydeus, uncontrolled in wrath? the sudden chasm that gaped for the laurel-crowned prophet? Distraught Hippomedon, too, repelling his river-foe with corpses demands my song, and I must lament the gallant Arcadian and his wars, and sing with a yet fiercer thrill the fate of Capaneus.