Page:Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.djvu/257

 fluttering down to the ground, and the fruit fell to the ground because Boreas blew very fiercely at the behest of Zeus; the deep seethed and all things trembled at his blast: the strength of mankind consumed away and the fruit failed in the season of spring, at that time when the Hairless One in a secret place in the mountains gets three young every three years. In spring he dwells upon the mountain among tangled thickets and brushwood, keeping afar from and hating the path of men, in the glens and wooded glades. But when winter comes on, he lies in a close cave beneath the earth and covers himself with piles of luxuriant leaves, a dread serpent whose back is speckled with awful spots.

But when he becomes violent and fierce unspeakably, the arrows of Zeus lay him low....Only his soul is left on the holy earth, and that flits gibbering about a small unformed den. And it comes enfeebled to sacrifices beneath the broad-pathed earth....and it lies...."

Agamemnon and Menelaus likewise according to Hesiod and Aeschylus are regarded as the sons of Pleisthenes, Atreus' son. And according to Hesiod, Pleisthenes was a son of Atreus and Aërope, and Agamemnon, Menelaus and Anaxibia were the children of Pleisthenes and Cleolla the daughter of Dias.

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