The Argonautica

her quick heart throbbed in her breast with anguish; no other

memory held her; in sweet anguish her spirit melted.

As when a poor woman heaps dry twigs round a blazing firebrand,

a worker for hire, whose hands tend the labor of wool-spinning,

so she may kindle a lamp's bright flame at night beneath her roof,

after she rises right early; the flame from the small firebrand

rises to wondrous strength and reduces all twigs into ashes;

so, coiled deep under her heart, that fire burned in secret,

ruinous Eros; her delicate cheeks kept changing their color,

now pallor, now blush, in the anxious distraction of mind.

When servants brought in and set the ready meal before them,

they themselves brightened their bodies in baths of warm water,

gladly, with supper and drink, contentment filled their spirits.

Then Aeetes began to question the sons of his daughter,

he spoke to soothe them, using these warm words of welcome:

Sons of my child and of Phrixus, whom more than all strangers

I welcomed as an honored guest in my own household halls,

how have you doubled your course and come backward to Aea?

Did disaster break off your homeward flight midway?

You never heeded the boundless road I set out before you.

I knew it once, when my father Helios' bright chariot

whirled me along at the time he was carrying my own sister,

Circe, deep in the far west; and at last we had reached

the shore of the Tyrrhenian mainland, where still at the present day