METAMORPHOSES BOOK VII will give them; for not in vain have the stars gleamed in reply, not in vain is my car at hand, drawn by winged dragons." There was the car, sent down from the sky. therein and stroked the bridled necks of the dragon team, shaking the light reins with her hands she was whirled aloft. She looked down on Thessalian Tempe lying below, and turned her dragons towards regions that she knew. All the herbs that Ossa bore, and high Pelion, Othrys and Pindus and Olympus, greater than Pindus, she surveyed: and those that pieased her, some she plucked up by the roots and some she cut off with the curved blade of a bronze pruning-hook. Many grasses also she chose from the banks of the Apidanus, many from Amphrysus. Nor were you, Enipeus, left without toll; Peneus also, and Spercheus gave something, and the reedy banks of Boebe. From Euboean Anthedon she culled a grass that gives long life, a herb not yet made famous by the change which it produced in Glaucus' body. When she had mounted And now nine days and nine nights had seen her traversing all lands, drawn in her car by her winged dragons, when she returned. The dragons had not been touched save by the odour of the herbs, and yet they sloughed off their skins of many long years. As she came Medea stopped this side of the threshol and the door; covered by the sky alone, she avoided her husband's embrace, and built two turf altars, one on the right to Hecate and one on the left to Youth. She wreathed these with boughs from the wild wood, then hard by she dug two ditches in the earth and performed her rites; plunging her knife into the throat of a black sheep, she drenched the open ditches with his blood. Next she poured upon 359
