Book 3
From swift Cephisus' fate-declaring stream,
1
And Theban Dirce, chiefs Boeotian came:
All Pisa mustered and Alpheus' youths,It was generally believed that the river Alpheus of the Peloponnesus passed under the sea and reappeared in the fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse. A goblet was said to have been thrown into the river in Greece, and to have reappeared in the Sicilian fountain. See the note in Grote's 'History of Greece,' Edition 1862, vol. ii., p. 8.
Alpheus who in far Sicilian lands
Beyond the billows seeks the day again:
Arcadian Maenalus, and OEta loved
By Hercules, and old Dodona's oaks
Are left to silence; for the sacred train
With all Epirus rushes to the war.
Athens, deserted at the call to arms,
Yet found three vessels in Apollo's port
To prove her triumph o'er the Persian king.
Next seek the battle Creta's hundred tribes
Beloved of Jove and rivalling the east
In skill to wing the arrow from the bow.
The walls of Dardan Oricum, the woods
Where Athamanians wander, and the banks
Of swift Absyrtus foaming to the main
Are left forsaken. Enchelaean tribes
Whose king was Cadmus, and whose name records
His transformation,As a serpent. ἔγχελυς is the Greek word for serpent. join the host; and those
Who till Penean fields and turn the share
Above Iolcos in Thessalian lands.
There first men steeled their hearts to dare the waves Conf. Book VI., 472.
And 'gainst the rage of ocean and the storm
To match their strength, when the rude Argo sailed
Upon that distant quest, and spurned the shore,
Joining remotest nations in her flight,
And gave the fates another form of death.
Left too was Pholoe; pretended home
Where dwelt the fabled race of double form; The Centaurs.
Arcadian Maenalus; the Thracian mount
Named Hemus; Strymon, whence, as autumn falls,
Winged squadrons seek the banks of warmer Nile;
And all those isles the mouths of Ister bathe
Mixed with the tidal wave; the land through which
The cooling eddies of Caicus flow
Idalian; and Arisbe bare of glebe.
The hinds of Pitane, and those who till
Celaenae's fields which mourned of yore the gift
