Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/294

266 custom to protect their babes with charms of golden snakes. But ere she left the babe to die, the young mother tied about him her own broidered robe. And this is the request that Phœbus craves of me, for he is my brother, "Go, brother, to those children of the soil that dwell in glorious Athens, for well thou knowest Athena's city, and take a new-born babe from out the hollow rock, his cradle and his swaddling-clothes as well, and bear him to my prophetic shrine at Delphi, and set him at the entering-in of my temple. What else remains shall be my care, for that child is mine, that thou mayst know it." So I, to do my brother Loxias a service, took up the woven ark and bore it off, and at the threshold of the shrine I have laid the babe, after opening the lid of the wicker cradle that the child might be seen. But just as the sun-god was starting forth to run his course, a priestess chanced to enter the god's shrine; and when her eyes lit upon the tender babe she thought it strange that any Delphian maid should dare to cast her child of shame down at the temple of the god; wherefore her purpose was to remove him beyond the altar, but from pity she renounced her cruel thought, and the god to help his child did second her pity to save the babe from being cast out. So she took and brought him up, but she knew not that Phœbus was his sire nor of the mother that bare him, nor yet did the child know his parents. While yet he was a child, around the altar that fed him he would ramble at his play, but when he came to man's estate, the Delphians made him treasurer of the god and steward of all his store, and found him true, and so until the present day he leads a holy life in the god's temple. Meantime Creusa, mother of this youth, is wedded to Xuthus; and thus it came to pass; a war broke out 'twixt Athens and the folk of Chalcodon who dwell in the land of Eubœa; and Xuthus took part therein and helped to end it, for which he received the hand of Creusa as his guerdon,