Ceres is still a prey to anxiety; half distraught she fears everything as though all were not yet accomplished. Anon she turns her head and eyes to heaven and with raging breast inveighs against its denizens; even as lofty Niphates shakes to the roaring of the Hyrcan tigress whose cubs the terrified horseman has carried off to be the playthings of Persia’s king. Speedier than the west wind that is her paramour[129] rushes the tigress, anger blazing from her stripes, but just as she is about to engulf the terrified hunter in her capacious maw, she is checked by the mirrored image of her own form[130]: so the mother of Proserpine rages over all Olympus crying: “Give her back; no wandering stream gave me birth; I spring not from the Dryad rabble. Towered Cybele bare me also to Saturn. Where are the ordinances of the gods, where the laws of heaven? What boots it to live a good life? See, Cytherea dares show her face (modest goddess!) even after her Lemnian[131] bondage! ’Tis that chaste sleep and a loverless couch have given her this courage! This is, I suppose, the reward of those maidenly embraces! Small wonder that after such infamy she account nothing disgraceful. Ye goddesses that have known not marriage, is it thus that ye neglect the honour due to virginity?
[129] marito Zephyro (ll. 265, 266) refers to the theory of impregnation by wind commonly accepted by the ancients (see Arist. H.A. vi. 19; Verg. Georg. iii. 275, etc.).
[130] It was supposed that the robbed tigress on being confronted with a convex mirror supposed the reduced image to be her cub and contentedly retired with the mirror in her mouth. Another story makes the tigress vent her anger on an ordinary (not convex) mirror.
[131] A reference to the binding by Hephaestus (to whom Lemnos was sacred) of Ares and Aphrodite whom he had surprised in adulterous intercourse. The story is told in Homer (Θ 266 et sqq.). Statius (Silv. i. 2. 60) uses this very phrase “Lemnia vincula.”
virginitatis honos? tantum mutata voluntas? 280
iam Veneri iunctae, sociis raptoribus, itis?
o templis Scythiae atque hominem sitientibus aris
utraque digna coli! tanti quae causa furoris?
quam mea vel tenui dicto Proserpina laesit?