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“Rhoetus groaned and with a great effort pulled
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the stake out from the bone, then fled away,
drenched in his blood. And Orneus followed him.
Lycabas fled, and Medon with a wound
in his right shoulder. Thaumas and Pisenor
and Mermerus fled with them. Mermerus,
who used to excell all others in a race,
ran slowly, crippled by a recent wound.
Pholus and Melaneus ran for their lives
and with them Abas, hunter of wild boars
and Asbolus, the augur, who in vain
had urged his friends to shun that hapless fight.
As Nessus joined the rout, he said to him,
‘You need not flee, for you shall be reserved
a victim for the bow of Hercules!’
but neither Lycidas, Eurynomus
nor Areos, nor Imbreus had escaped
from death: for all of these the strong right hand
of Dryas pierced, as they confronted him.
Crenaeus there received a wound in front.
Although he turned in flight, as he looked back,
a heavy javelin between his eyes
pierced through him, where his nose and forehead joined.
“In all this uproar, Aphidas lay flat,
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in endless slumber from the wine he drank,
incessant, and his nerveless hand still held
the cup of mixed wine, as he lay full stretched,
upon a shaggy bear-skin from Mount Ossa.
When Phorbas saw him, harmless in that sleep,
he laid his fingers in his javelin's thong,
and shouted loudly, ‘Mix your wine, down there,
with waters of the Styx!’ And stopping talk,
let fly his javelin at the sleeping youth—
the ashen shaft, iron-tipped, was driven through
his neck, exposed, as he by chance lay there—
his head thrown back. He did not even feel
a touch of death—and from his deep-pierced throat
his crimson blood flowed out upon the couch,
and in the wine-bowl still grasped in his hand.
“I saw Petraeus when he strove to tear
