"Happy the man whose heart is pure from guilt and crime! Him we avengers touch not; he treads the path of life secure from us. But woe! woe! to him who has done the deed of secret murder. We, the fearful brood of Night, fasten ourselves upon him, soul and flesh. Thinks he by flight to escape us? Fly we still faster in pursuit, twine our snakes around his feet, and bring him to the ground. Unwearied we pursue; no pity checks our course; still on, still on to the end of life, we give no peace, no rest." Stillness like the stillness of death sat over the assembly. Suddenly a cry burst from one of the uppermost benches,--"Lo, comrade, the avengers of Ibycus!" A flock of cranes crossed the sky. "The murderer has informed against himself," shouted the assemblage. The inference was correct. The criminals, straightway seized, confessed the crime and suffered the penalty. FOOTNOTES: [169] His name is not derived from the Greek _p[=a]n_, all, but from the root _p[)a]_, to feed, to pasture (i.e. the flocks and herds). [170] Milton, Hymn on the Nativity. [171] Translated by C. M. Gayley. [172] By Edmund Clarence Stedman. [173] From The Satyr, by Robert Buchanan. [174] Ovid, Metam. 3, 339-510. [175] Idyl VI (Lang's translation). For Moschus, see Commentary, § 298. [176] From The Naiad, by Robert Buchanan. [177] Ovid, Metam. 8, 738-884. [178] See note (Scholium) on the Argonautics of Apollonius, B 477. Keil's edition, p. 415, l. 32. [179] J. R. Lowell, Rh[oe]cus. The student should read the whole poem. [180] Ovid, Metam. 14, 623-771. [181] Thomson, Seasons. [182] Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4. 33, 71; and Statius, Silvæ, 5. 3, 152. CHAPTER XIII MYTHS OF LESSER DIVINITIES OF THE WATERS =141. Galatea and Polyphemus.= The water-gods may be roughly classed as dwellers in the sea and dwellers in the streams. Of the former, daughters of Nereus and Doris, none was fairer than Galatea, sister of Amphitrite and Thetis. She loved Acis, the son of Faunus by a Naiad, and was loved in return; but her happiness was disturbed and finally ruined by the persistent and jealous attentions of the Cyclops Polyphemus. For the first time in his life the Cyclops began to care for his appearance; he harrowed his coarse locks with a currycomb, mowed his beard with a sickle, and, looking into the sea when it was calm, soliloquized, "Beautiful seems my beard, beautiful my one eye,--as I count beauty,--and the sea reflects the gleam of my teeth whiter than the Parian stone."[183] ... He loved, not with apples, not roses, nor locks of hair, but with fatal frenzy; and all things else he held but trifles by the way. Many a time from the green pastures would his ewes stray back, self-shepherded, to the fold. But he was singing of Galatea; and pining in his place, he sat by the seaweed of the beach from the dawn of day with the direst hurt beneath his breast of mighty Cypris' sending,--the wound of her arrow in his heart!