Page:Euripides (Donne).djvu/138

126 climb the hills, and scare the fox and the wild cat from their holes. From this sudden mania neither age nor rank is free: sober housewives are themselves doing what a few days before they would have blushed to see done by others. Even the Queen Agavè and her attendant ladies are swept into the vortex, and prance like so many peasant girls at a wake.

The cause of this strange and unseemly revel is the appearance in Bœotia of a young man of handsome presence, with flowing locks like grape-bunches, and a delicate yet somewhat ruddy visage. His errand to Thebes is a strange one. He pretends to be a native of that city; he points to a charred mound of earth as his mother's grave, and, wondrous to relate, since he first visited it, the blackened turf is covered and canopied over with a luxuriant vine! He began by claiming near kinship "with the royal house of Cadmus; and because the female members scoffed at his pretensions, he drives them insane. His retinue are as strange as his errand. It is composed of dark-eyed swarthy women, such as might be seen in the streets of Tyre and Sidon celebrating the feast of Astartè with dance and song. The dull, yet by no means sober, Bœotians cannot tell what to make of these eccentric visitors. Some think that the magistrates—the Bœotarchs—should clap them into the town jail: but how to catch, and, when caught, how to keep, these wild damsels, is the difficulty; for they are as slippery to handle as the eels in Lake Copaïs, and as fierce as the lynxes that swarm on Mount Cithæron. Never had Thebes, since Amphion had drawn the stones of