When now Agenor had his daughter lost,
He sent his son to search on every coast,
And sternly bid him to his arms restore
The darling maid, or see his face no more,
But live in exile in a foreign clime;
Thus was the father pious to a crime.
The restless youth search’d all the world around;
But how can Jove in his amours be found?
When, tired at length with unsuccessful toil,
To shun his angry sire and native soil,
He goes a suppliant to the Delphic dame;
There asks the god what new-appointed home
Should end his wand’rings, and his toil relieve.
The Delphic oracles this answer give:
“Behold among the fields a lonely cow,
Unworn with yokes, unbroken to the plough:
Mark well the place where first she lays her down,
There measure out thy walls, and build thy town;
And from the guide Boeotia call the land,
In which the destined walls and town shall stand.”
No sooner had he left the dark abode,
Big with the promise of the Delphic god,
When in the fields the fatal cow he view’d,
Nor gall’d with yokes, nor worn with servitude;
Her gently at a distance he pursued,
And, as he walk’d aloof, in silence pray’d
To the great power whose counsels he obey’d.
Her way through flowery Panope she took,
And now, Cephisus, cross’d thy silver brook,
When to the heavens her spacious front she raised,
And bellow’d thrice, then backward turning gazed
On those behind, till on the destined place
She stoop’d, and couch’d amid the rising grass.
Cadmus salutes the soil, and gladly hails
The new-found mountains and the nameless vales,
And thanks the gods, and turns about his eye
To see his new dominions round him lie;
Then sends his servants to a neighb’ring grove
For living streams, a sacrifice to Jove.
O’er the wide plain there rose a shady wood
Of aged trees; in its dark bosom stood
A bushy thicket, pathless and unworn,
O’errun with brambles, and perplex’d with thorn:
Amid the brake a hollow den was found,
With rocks and shelving arches vaulted round.
Deep in the dreary den, conceal’d from day,
Sacred to Mars, a mighty dragon lay,
Bloated with poison to a monstrous size;
Fire broke in flashes when he glanced his eyes;
His towering crest was glorious to behold,
His shoulders and his sides were scaled with gold;
Three tongues he brandish’d when he charged his foes,
His teeth stood jaggy in three dreadful rows.
The Tyrians in the den for water sought,
And with their urns explored the hollow vault;
From side to side their empty urns rebound,
And rouse the sleeping serpent with the sound.
Straight he bestirs him, and is seen to rise,
And now with dreadful hissings fills the skies,
And darts his forky tongues, and rolls his glaring eyes.
The Tyrians drop their vessels in the fright,
All pale and trembling at the hideous sight.
Spire above spire uprear’d in air he stood,
And gazing round him overlook’d the wood,
Then floating on the ground in circles roll’d,
Then leap’d upon them in a mighty fold.
Of such a bulk and such a monstrous size
The serpent in the polar circle lies,
That stretches over half the northern skies.
In vain the Tyrians on their arms rely,
In vain attempt to fight, in vain to fly;
All their endeavours and their hopes are vain;
Some die entangled in the winding train;
Some are devour’d, or feel a loathsome death,
Swoln up with blasts of pestilential breath.
And now the scorching sun was mounted high,
In all its lustre, to the noonday sky,
When, anxious for his friends, and fill’d with cares,
To search the woods the impatient chief prepares.
A lion’s hide around his loins he wore,
The well-poised javelin to the field he bore,
Inured to blood, the far-destroying dart,
And, the best weapon, an undaunted heart.
Soon as the youth approach’d the fatal place,
He saw his servants breathless on the grass;
The scaly foe amid their corpse he view’d,
Basking at ease and feasting in their blood.
“Such friends,” he cries, “deserved a longer date;
But Cadmus will revenge, or share their fate.”
Then heaved a stone, and rising to the throw,
He sent it in a whirlwind at the foe;
A lower, assaulted by so rude a stroke,
With all its lofty battlements had shook;
But nothing here the unwieldy rock avails,
Rebounding harmless from the plaited scales,
That, firmly join’d, preserved him from a wound,
With native armour crusted all around.
With more success the dart unerring flew,
Which at his back the raging warrior threw:
Amid the plaited scales it took its course,
And in the spinal marrow spent its force.
The monster hiss’d aloud, and raged in vain,
And writhed his body to and fro with pain;
He bit the dart, and wrench’d the wood away;
The point still buried in the marrow lay;
And now his rage, increasing with his pain,
Reddens his eyes and beats in every vein;
Churn’d in his teeth the foamy venom flows,
While from his mouth a blast of vapours rose,
Such as the infernal Stygian waters cast;
The plants around him wither in the blast.
Now in a maze of rings he lies enroll’d;
Now all unravell’d and without a fold;
Now, like a torrent, with a mighty force
Bears down the forest in his boist’rous course.
Cadmus gave back, and on the lion’s spoil
Sustain’d the shock, then forced him to recoil:
The pointed javelin warded off his rage:
Mad with his pains, and furious to engage,
The serpent champs the steel, and bites the spear,
Till blood and venom all the point besmear.
But still the hurt he yet received was slight;
For, while the champion with redoubled might
Strikes home the javelin, his retiring foe
Shrinks from the wound, and disappoints the blow.
The dauntless hero still pursues his stroke,
And presses forward, till a knotty oak
Retards his foe, and stops him in the rear;
Full in his throat he plunged the fatal spear,
That in the extended neck a passage found,
And pierced the solid timber through the wound.
Fix’d to the reeling trunk, with many a stroke
Of his huge tail he lash’d the sturdy oak,
Till spent with toil, and lab’ring hard for breath,
He now lay twisting in the pangs of death.
Cadmus beheld him wallow in a flood
Of swimming poison intermix’d with blood,
When suddenly a speech was heard from high
(The speech was heard, nor was the speaker nigh),
“Why dost thou thus with secret pleasure see,
Insulting man! what thou thyself shalt be?”
Astonish’d at the voice, he stood amazed,
And all around, with inward horror, gazed,
When Pallas, swift descending from the skies,
Pallas, the guardian of the bold and wise,
Bids him plough up the field, and scatter round
The dragon’s teeth o’er all the furrow’d ground;
Then tells the youth how to his wondering eyes
Embattled armies from the field shall rise.
He sows the teeth at Pallas’s command,
And flings the future people from his hand;
The clods grow warm, and crumble where he sows,
And now the pointed spears advance in rows;
Now nodding plumes appear, and shining crests,
Now the broad shoulders and the rising breasts;
O’er all the field the breathing harvest swarms,
A growing host, a crop of men and arms.
So through the parting stage a figure rears
Its body up, and limb by limb appears
By just degrees, till all the man arise,
And in his full proportion strikes the eyes.
Cadmus, surprised and startled at the sight
Of his new foes, prepared himself for fight;
When one cried out, “Forbear, fond man, forbear,
To mingle in a blind promiscuous war.”
This said, he struck his brother to the ground,
Himself expiring by another’s wound;
Nor did the third his conquest long survive,
Dying ere scarce he had begun to live.
The dire example ran through all the field,
Till heaps of brothers were by brothers kill’d;
The furrows swam in blood, and only five
Of all the vast increase were left alive.
Echion one, at Pallas’s command
Let fall the guiltless weapon from his hand,
And with the rest a peaceful treaty makes,
Whom Cadmus as his friends and partners takes.
So founds a city on the promised earth,
And gives his new Boeotian empire birth.
Here Cadmus reign’d; and now one would have guess’d
The royal founder in his exile bless’d:
Long did he live within his new abodes,
Allied by marriage to the deathless gods;
And in a fruitful wife’s embraces old,
A long increase of children’s children told:
But no frail man, however great or high,
Can be concluded bless’d before he die.
Actaeon was the first of all his race,
Who grieved his grandsire in his borrow’d face,
Condemn’d by stern Diana to bemoan
The branching horns and visage not his own;
To shun his once loved dogs, to bound away,
And from their huntsman to become their prey.
And yet consider why the change was wrought,
You’ll find it his misfortune, not his fault;
Or, if a fault, it was the fault of chance:
For how can guilt proceed from ignorance?