hic et Apollinea victus testudine pastor
suspensa memores inlustrat pelle Celaenas.
heart, and his stiffened hair sank down again, he made all haste to carry out the commands of the goddess. He told his followers all that he had seen and urged them to follow him. Rebellious Barbary had found a champion and openly threw off the Latin yoke.
That part of Phrygia which lies towards the north beneath the cold constellation of the Wain borders on Bithynia; that towards the sunset on Ionia, and that towards the sunrise on Galatia. On two sides runs the transverse boundary of Lydia while the fierce Pisidians hem it in to the south. All these peoples once formed one nation and had one name: they were of old called the Phrygians, but (what changes does time not bring about?) after the reign of a king Maeon, were known as Maeones. Then the Greeks settled on the shores of the Aegean, and the Thyni from Thrace cultivated the region now called Bithynia. Not long since a vast army of Gauls, nomad hitherto, came at last to rest in the district; these laid by their spears, clothed them in the civilized robe of Greece and drank no longer from Rhine’s, but from Halys’, waters. All antiquity gives priority to the Phrygian, even Egypt’s king had perforce to recognize it when the babe, nourished at no human breast, first opened his lips to lisp the Phrygian tongue.[112]
Here fell the pipe once hurled into the marshes of Libya, what time the stream reflected Minerva’s disfigured countenance.[113] Here, too, there perished, conquered by Apollo’s lyre, the shepherd Marsyas whose flayed skin brought renown to the city of
[112] The reference is to Herodotus ii. 2. Psammetichus, King of Egypt, wishing to find out which was the most ancient nation, had two children reared in complete silence. As the first word they uttered was “Becos,” the Phrygian word for “bread,” Phrygia was accorded the honour.
[113] Minerva is said to have thrown her pipe into the river when she observed in the reflection the facial contortions apparently necessary to play it; cf. Ovid, Fasti, vi. 699.
quattuor hinc magnis procedunt fontibus amnes