Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/293

 ION.

. Atlas, who bears upon his brazen back the pressure of the sky, ancient dwelling of the gods, begat Maia from a daughter of one of those gods, and she bare me Hermes to mighty Zeus, to be the servant of the powers divine. Lo! I am come to this land of Delphi where sits Phœbus on the centre of the world and giveth oracles to men, ever chanting lays prophetic of things that are to be. Now there is a city in Hellas of no small note, called after Pallas, goddess of the golden lance; there did Phœbus force his love on Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, beneath the rock of Pallas, northward of Athens' steep realm, called Macræ by the kings of Attica. And she without her father's knowledge—for such was the god's good pleasure,—bore the burden in her womb unto the end, and when her time came, she brought forth a child in the house and carried him away to the self-same cave wherein the god declared his love to her, and she cradled him in the hollow of a rounded ark and cast him forth to die, observant of the custom of her ancestors and of earth-born Erichthonius, whom the daughter of Zeus gave into the charge of the daughters of Agraulus, after setting on either side, to keep him safe, a guard of serpents twain. Hence in that land among the Erechthidæ 'tis a