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his right to name the city for that gift.
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And then she wove a portrait of herself,
bearing a shield, and in her hand a lance,
sharp-pointed, and a helmet on her head—
her breast well-guarded by her Aegis: there
she struck her spear into the fertile earth,
from which a branch of olive seemed to sprout,
pale with new clustered fruits.—And those twelve Gods,
appeared to judge, that olive as a gift
surpassed the horse which Neptune gave to man.
And, so Arachne, rival of her fame,
might learn the folly of her mad attempt,
from the great deeds of ancient histories,
and what award presumption must expect,
Minerva wove four corners with life scenes
of contest, brightly colored, but of size
In one of these was shown
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the snow-clad mountains, Rhodope,
and Haemus, which for punishment were changed
from human beings to those rigid forms,
when they aspired to rival the high Gods.
And in another corner she described
that Pygmy, whom the angry Juno changed
from queen-ship to a crane; because she thought
herself an equal of the living Gods,
she was commanded to wage cruel wars
upon her former subjects. In the third,
she wove the story of Antigone,
who dared compare herself to Juno, queen
of Jupiter, and showed her as she was
transformed into a silly chattering stork,
that praised her beauty, with her ugly beak.—
Despite the powers of Ilion and her sire
Laomedon, her shoulders fledged white wings.
And so, the third part finished, there was left
one corner, where Minerva deftly worked
the story of the father, Cinyras;—
as he was weeping on the temple steps,
which once had been his daughter's living limbs.
