And, rending earth, their brazen hoofs rebound.
Yet these he yoked, with none to aid, and straight the shapely furrows made,
And scored a fathom deep the loamy ground,
Then spake,—'This work accomplished, let the king
That rules yon barque win from me that immortal covering,
His be the fleece tasselled with gleaming gold.'
He spake, and Jason laid aside his saffron vest, and, fortified
With trust in Heaven, his task began: nor feared the flames, made bold
By his weird hostess' hest. The plough he grasped,
Round the bulls' necks constraining fetters clasped,
Smote with fierce goad each massy frame, and to his hard task's ending came!
In speechless pain, yet groaning as amazed,
On his might Æëtes gazed."
But a new danger still awaited Jason. The fleece was guarded by a monstrous serpent, huge as the keel of a fifty-oared galley,
"Shaped amid the crash of steel."
Pindar hurries over this and the remaining points of the legend at a bound. "Time draws close," he cries—"I must hasten on. I know of a shorter path, and cannot linger on the beaten track!" The serpent was slain, he tells us, "by guile," and forthwith he conducts Jason on his homeward voyage, lingering for a moment to tell how the Argonauts touched at Lemnos, and how there their comrade Euphemus became parent of the princely race that now rules Cyrenè. To that race, he says, Apollo has promised
