But now I hear that it was washed down from the ship and departed into the sea with the salt spray of evening, following the watery deep. Yet verily often did I charge the labour-lightening servants that they should keep it safe, but they forgot: and now upon this island[1] is the imperishable seed of spacious Libya strown before the time appointed; for if the royal son[2] of Poseidon, lord of horses, whom Europa Tityos' child bare him on Kephisos' banks, had in his own home thrown it down beside the mouth of Hades'[3] gulf, then in the fourth generation of his sons his seed would have taken that wide continent of Libya, for then they would have gone forth from mighty Lakedaimon, and from the Argive gulf, and from Mykenai.
But now he shall in wedlock with a stranger-wife raise up a chosen seed, who coming to this island with worship of their gods shall beget one to be lord of the misty plains[4]. Him sometime shall Phoibos in his golden house admonish by oracles, when in the latter days he shall go down into the inner shrine at Pytho, to bring a host in ships to the rich Nile-garden of the son of Kronos[5].'
So ran Medea's rhythmic utterance, and motionless in silence the godlike heroes bowed their heads as they hearkened to the counsels of wisdom.
Thee, happy son[6] of Polymnestos, did the oracle of the
- ↑ Thera.
- ↑ Euphemos.
- ↑ At Tainaros there was a cave supposed to be a mouth of Hades.
- ↑ Of Libya.
- ↑ The purport of this is: If Euphemos had taken the clod safely home to Tainaros in Lakonia, then his great-grandsons with emigrants from other Peloponnesian powers would have planted a colony in Libya. But since the clod had fallen into the sea and would be washed up on the shore of the island of Thera, it was necessary that Euphemos' descendants should first colonize Thera, and then, but not till the seventeenth generation, proceed, under Battos, to found the colony of Kyrene in Libya.
- ↑ Battos.
