ANTIGONE.
163
But great and dread the might of Destiny;
Nor kingly wealth, nor war,
Nor tower, nor dark-hulled ships
Beaten by waves, escape.
Antistroph. I.
So too was shut, enclosed in dungeon cave,
Bitter and fierce in mood,
The son of Dryas,[1] king
Of yon Edonian tribes, for vile reproach,
By Dionysos' hands, and so his strength
And soul o'ermad wastes drop by drop away,
And so he learnt that he, against the God,960
Spake his mad words of scorn;
For he the Mænad throng
And bright fire fain had stopped,
And roused the Muses' wrath.
Stroph. II.
And by the double sea[2] of those Dark Rocks
Are shores of Bosporos,
And Thrakian isle, as Salmydessos known,
Where Ares, whom they serve,970
God of the region round,
- ↑ The son of Dryas was Lycurgos, who appears in the Iliad, vi. 130, as having, like Pentheus, opposed the worship of Dionysos, and so fallen under the wrath of Zeus, who deprived him of sight, and entombed him in a cavern. The Muses are here mentioned as the companions and nurses of Dionysos.
- ↑ The last instance was taken from the early legends of Attica. Boreas, it was said, carried off Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus, and by her had two sons and a daughter, Cleopatra. The latter became the wife of Phineus, king of Salmydessos, and bore two sons to him, Plexippos and Pandion. Phineus then divorced her, married another wife, Idæa, and then, at her instigation, deprived his two sons by the former marriage of their sight, and confined Cleopatra in a dungeon. She too, like Danae and Niobe, was "a child of Gods," and the Erechtheion on the Acropolis was consecrated to the joint worship of her grandfather and of Poseidon.
