The Argonautica

we reach Achaean land again through all our voyaging,

we shall repay you first with gifts beyond all counting:

libations, feasts, all offered from our willing hearts.

So Orpheus prayed in an earnest voice; and the nymphs pitied

the grieving men nearby; and from the earth they first made

grass spring upward; high above the grass, long shoots

began to grow, and after them flourishing saplings rose

upright and towered very far over the surface of earth.

Hespere became a poplar, and Erytheis an elm tree;

Aegle became a willow's sacred trunk; and out of those

trees, in the shapes they possessed before, the nymphs again

appeared unchanged, a surpassing wonder; and Aegle spoke

in gentle words, answering heroes pressed by need:

Surely as a very great help in all of your labors

there came to this place that most shameless man, who robbed

our guardian serpent of life; the goddesses' all-golden apples

he bore away; bitter grief is all that remains to us.

For yesterday there came a man most ruinous in violence

and bodily form; fierce eyes flashed under his grim brow;

pitiless, he wore a monstrous lion's hide around him,

raw and untanned; he held a sturdy branch of olive

and the bow whose deadly arrows killed this monstrous creature.

That man came wandering on foot across the whole country,

his throat parched by thirst; he rushed wildly throughout this place,