Page:Metamorphoses.djvu/405

METAMORPHOSES BOOK VII horns, have fallen without waiting for the stroke! While l to Jove on my own behalf and for my country and my three sons, the victim uttered dreadful bellowings and, suddenly falling without any stroke of mine, it barely stained the knife with its scanty blood; the diseased entrails also had lost the marks of truth and the warnings of the gods: for to the very vitals does the grim pest go. Before the temple doors I saw the corpses cast away, nay, before the very altars, that their death might be even more odious. Some hung themselves, driving away the fear of death by death and going out to meet their approaching fate. The dead bodies were not borne out to burial in the accustomed way; for the gates would not accommodate so many funerals, They either lie on the ground unburied, or else they are piled high on funeral pyres without honours. And by this time there is no reverence for the dead; men fight for pyres, and with stolen flames they burn There are none left tomourn the dead. Unwept they go wandering out, the souls of matrons and of brides, of men both young and old. There was no myself was sacrificing more space for graves, nor wood for fires. Dazed by such an overwhelming flood of woe, 1 cried to Jove: 'O Jove, if it is not falsely said that thou didst love Aegina,daughter of Asopus,and if thou, great father, art not ashamed to be our father, either give me back my people or consign mealso tothe tomb.' He gave a sign with lightning and a peal of thunder in assent. 'I accept the sign,' I said, 'and may those tokens of thy mind towards us be happy signs. 'The omen which thou givest me I take as pledge.' It chanced there was an oak near by with branches un- usually widespread, sacred to Jove and of Dodona's stock. Here we spied a swarm of grain-gathering 385