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175 ANTIGONE 175

Of yon Edonian tribes, for vile reproach,

By Dionysos' hands, and so his strength loso

And soul o'ermad wastes drop by drop away.

And so he learnt that he, against the God,

Spake his mad words of scorn ;

For he the Maenad throng

And bright fire fain had stopped, loss

And roused the Muses' wrath.

Strophe II. And by the double sea ^ of those Dark Rocks ^

Are shores of Bosporos, And Thracian isle, as Salmydessos ^ known.

Where Ares, whom they serve, mo

God of the region round.

Saw the dire, blinding wound,

That smote the twin-bom sons Of Phineus by relentless step-dame's hand, —

Dark wound, on dark-doomed eyes, ims

Not with the stroke of sword. But blood-stained hands, and point of spindle sharp.

Antistrophe II. And they in misery, miserable fate,

Wasting away, wept sore, Born of a mother wedded with a curse. loso

1 The last instance is taken from the early legends of Attica. Boreas, it was said, carried off Oreithyia. daughter of Erechtheus. and by her had two sons and a daughter, Cleopatra. The latter became the wife of Phineus, king of Salmydessus, and bore two sons to hiin, Plexippus and Pandion. Phineus then divorced her, married another ■wife, Idaea, and then, at her instigation, deprived his two sons by the former marriage of their sight, and confined Cleopatra in a dungeon. She too, like Danae and Niobe, was "a child of Gods." and the Erech- theion on the Acropolis was consecrated to the joint worship of her grandfather and of Poseidon.

'^ See Pindar, page S2. ^ See Aeschylus, page 118, line 847.