Page:Metamorphoses.djvu/355

 METAMORPHOSES BOOK VI acred feast after their ancestral fashion, of which only a husband nay partake, and removes all and slaves. So Tereus, sitting alone in high ancestral banquet-chair, begins the feast and gorges himself with flesh of his own flesh. Anod in the utter blindness of his understanding he cries: Go, call me ltys hither!" Procne cannot hide her cruel joy, and eager to be the messenger of her loody news, she says: "You have, within, him whom vou want." He looks about and asks where the boy is. And then, as he asks and calls again for his on, just as she was, with streaming hair, and all stained with her mad deed of blood, Philomela springs forward and hurls the gory head of Itys straight into his father's face; nor was there ever any time when she longed more to be able to speak, and to express her joy in fitting words. Then the Thracian king overturns the table with a great cry and invokes the snaky sisters from the Stygian pit. Now, if he could, he would gladly lay open his breast and take thence the horrid feast and vomit forth the flesh of his son; now he weeps bitterly and calls hinmself his son's most wretched tomb; then with drawn sword he pursues the two daughters of Pandion. As they fly from him you would think that the bodies of the two Athenians were poised on wings: they were poised on wings! One flies to the woods, the other rises to the roof. And even now their breasts have not lost the marks of their mur- derous deed, their feathers are stained with blood. Tereus, swift in pursuit because of his grief and eager desire for vengeance, is himself changed into a bird Upon his head a stiff crest appears, and a huge beak stands forth instead of his long sword. He is the attendants his ες hoopoë, with the look of one armed for war. 335