All three then make their exit.
Enter, then, on the ground plane, from behind the stage platform, Servus, a house-slave, masked as such. He places on the platform a low seat and, beside it, a heap of wool and spinning materials. Then he prostrates himself toward the left ground entrance, as enter there—dancing to cymbal music—a group of young girl-mimes [without masks], dressed as Nymphs and carrying distaffs.
In the midst of these—preceded by most of them—enter Hercules, in grotesque mask, which depicts a comic-dejected expression. He is wadded after the manner of the comic histrionic vase-figures of antiquity, and walks downcast. Instead of his legendary lion’s skin, there hangs from his shoulder the wooly pelt of a sheep; in place of his knotted club, his hand holds a huge distaff; and for the rest he is dressed like a Greek woman.
He is accompanied by Omphale, masked as a beautiful and amorous nymph. Over her shoulders she wears his lion’s skin; in one hand she holds his massive club; with the other she caresses him.
With coquetting wiles, the Nymphs in their dancing draw the two toward the centre, where they sit beside the wool—Hercules, with heavy sighs, beginning to spin, while Omphale, posing in the lion’s skin, approves his labor. Here the Nymphs, reclined about them on the platform and the ground, execute a rhythmic dance with their arms and distaffs, singing to their movement:
Angustam amice pauperiem pati robustus acri militia puer condiscat et Parthos feroces vexet eques metuendus hasta vitamque sub divo et trepides agat in rebus ilium ex moenibus hosticis matrona bellanti tyranni prospiciens et adulta virgo suspiret, eheu, ne rudis agminum sponsus lacessat regius asperum tactu leonem, quem cruenta per medias rapit ira caedes.
At the culmination of this, Hercules, who has been repelling the attentions of Omphale, at first with feeble ennui, but afterward with increasing determination, now rises in grandiose disgust, and—snatching from her his lion’s skin and club—repudiates her and the Nymphs.
Flinging down the sheep’s pelt and setting his foot upon it, he breaks his distaff in pieces and, threatening Omphale, drives the Nymphs off the scene, left. [During this excitement, Servus—who has been standing aside—seizes the heap of wool, and exit with it in flight.] Turning then to the image of the Sphinx, Hercules expresses in dumb-show how, lured by the riddle of the Sphinx, he aspires to fight and conquer the world for her sake. Laying his club and lion’s skin devoutly at the foot of the column, he kneels, embraces it, and raises then his arms in supplication to the Sphinx.
Thus kneeling, he is watched furtively at a distance by Omphale, who, at his outburst, has run to the edge of the foliage, right. Hercules, rising, puts on his lion’s skin, and brandishing his club heroically for the benefit of the immovable Sphinx, goes off, left.
Immediately Omphale seizes from amid the foliage a sylvan pipe, and blows on it a brief, appealing ditty. At this, from behind the foliage, run out boy-mimes, in the guise of Fauns; she gesticulates to them beseechingly. They run back and presently return, advancing to pipe-music, accompanying and leading a goat, astride of which sits Silenus, an old grotesque Satyr, in mask.