Have I wept bitter tears for. Now of one
I'll tell thee, which I never knew before;
For when our king, our Heracles, went forth
From home for his last journey, then with me
He leaves a tablet, old, and written o'er
With special rules, which never until then
Had he the heart to tell me, though he went
On many a labour, but still started forth,
As one about to prosper, not to die.160
But now, like one as good as dead he told
What chattels I should take as marriage dower,
What shares of all their father's land he gave
In portions to his sons,[1] and fixed a time
That when for one whole year and three months more
He from this land was absent, then 'twas his,
Or in that self-same hour to die, or else,
Escaping that one crisis, thenceforth live
With life unvexed. Such things, he said, stood firm170
By doom of Gods, and thus the end would come
Of all the labours wrought by Heracles;
For so, he said, Dodona's[2] ancient oak
Had spoken by the voice of twin-born doves.
And of these things the unerring truth is come,
This very hour, as fate decreed it should;
And so, my friends, while sleeping sweetest sleep,
I start in fear and terror, lest I live
Bereaved of him, the noblest man of all.
- ↑ The division connects itself with the mythos of the return of the Heracleidæ to claim the whole Peloponnesos as their inheritance.
- ↑ The oracles at Dodona, given by the Pelasgic Zeus in the land of the Thesprotians, were uttered from a grove of oaks. At first the Selli were the interpreters, then three aged priestesses. Then grew up the mythos (rising partly from a play on words) that two doves had flown from Egyptian Thebes, and that one of them flew to the oracle at Dodona, the other to that of Ammon in the Libyan oasis.
