220But if you should happen to ask Amathus, rich in metals, whether it would wish to have borne the Propoetides, it would refuse, just as it would refuse those men whose brows were once rough with twin horns: whence they also took the name of Cerastae. 224Before their doors stood an altar of Jupiter, god of guests; 225if any stranger, unaware of the crime, had seen it stained with blood, he would have believed that suckling calves and Amathusian sheep had been slaughtered there: it was a guest who had been killed. 228Offended by these unspeakable rites, kindly Venus herself was preparing to desert her cities and the Ophiusian fields.
230'But what wrong have these beloved places, what wrong have my cities done? 231What crime,' she said, 'is there in them? 232Let the impious race pay the penalty rather by exile, or by death, or by whatever lies between death and exile. 234And what can that be but the punishment of a changed form?'