Book 12
with passion at his death, all shouted out,
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‘To arms! to arms!’ Their courage raised by wine!
In their first onset, hurled cups flew about,
and shattered wine casks, hollow basins—things
before adapted to a banquet, now
for death and carnage in the furious fight.
Amycus first (Opinion's son) began to spoil
the inner sanctuary of its gifts.
He snatched up from that shrine a chandelier,
adorned with glittering lamps, and lifted high,
with all the force of one who strives to break
the bull s white neck with sacrificial axe,
he dashed it at the head of Celadon,
one of the Lapithae, and crushed his skull
into the features of his face. His eyes
leaped from his sockets, and the shattered bones
of his smashed face gave way so that his nose
was driven back and fastened in his throat.
But Belates of Pella tore away
a table-leg of maple wood and felled
Amycus to the ground; his sunken chin
cast down upon his breast; and, as he spat
his teeth out mixed with blood, a second blow
despatched him to the shades of Tartarus.
“Gryneus, seeing a smoking altar, cried,
‘Good use for this,’ with which words he raised up
that heavy, blazing altar. Hurling it
into the middle of the Lapithae,
he struck down Broteas and Orius:
Mycale, mother of that Orius,
was famous for her incantations,
which she had often used to conjure down
the shining twin-horns of the unwilling moon.
Exadius threatened, ‘You shall not escape!
Let me but have a weapon!’ And with that,
he whirled the antlers of a votive stag,
which he found there, hung on a tall pine-tree;
and with that double-branching horn he pierced
the eyes of Gryneus, and he gouged them out.
One eye stuck to the horn; the other rolled
