Woe-worn, soon as the vine's stream filleth them.
And sleep, the oblivion of our daily ills,
He gives—there is none other balm for toils.
He is the Gods' libation, though a God,
So that through him do men obtain good things. 285
And dost thou mock him, as in Zeus's thigh
Sewn?—I will show thee all the legend's beauty:—
When Zeus had snatched him from the levin-fire,
And bare the babe to Olympus, Hera then
Fain would have cast his godhead out of heaven. 290
Zeus with a God's wit framed his counterplot.
A fragment from the earth-enfolding ether,
He brake, and wrought to a hostage,[1] setting so
Dionysus safe from Hera's spite. In time
Men told how he was nursed in Zeus's thigh. 295
Changing the name, they wrought a myth thereof,
Because the God was hostage once to Hera.[2]
A prophet is this God: the Bacchic frenzy
And ecstasy are fulfilled of prophecy:
For, in his fulness when he floods our frame, 300
He makes his maddened votaries tell the future.
Somewhat of Ares' dues he shares withal,
For hosts in harness clad, in ranks arrayed,
He thrills with panic ere a spear be touched.
This too is a frenzy Dionysus sends. 305
Yet shalt thou see him even on Delphi's crags[3]
- ↑ i.e. Gave this counterfeit Dionysus to Hera, to hold as a hostage, as a guarantee against his investing her rival Semelê's child with the honours of divinity.
- ↑ The genuineness of this passage (ll. 286–227) is greatly disputed. The point of the rationalistic derivation lies in the similarity of three Greek words:—meros, a fragment; homēros, hostage; ho mēros, the thigh.
- ↑ Hitherto consecrated to Apollo alone.
