1While with such song the Thracian bard leads the woods and the spirits of wild beasts and the rocks that follow him, behold, the women of the Ciconians, their frenzied breasts covered with the skins of beasts, catch sight from the top of a hill of Orpheus, matching his songs to the struck strings. 6One of them, tossing her hair through the light breezes, says: 'Look, look, here is the man who scorns us!' 7and she hurled her spear at the singing mouth of Apollo's bard; sewn over with leaves at its tip, it left a mark without a wound; 10another's weapon is a stone, which, thrown, was overcome in the very air by the harmony of voice and lyre, and lay before his feet as if a suppliant for such frenzied daring.
13But in truth the reckless warfare grows, all restraint is gone, and mad Fury reigns. 15And all the weapons would have been softened by the song, but the huge clamour, the Berecyntian pipe with its broken horn, the drums and the clapping and the Bacchic howls drowned the sound of the cithara: then at last the stones grew red with the blood of the bard, no longer heard. 20And first the Maenads seized the countless birds, still spellbound by the singer's voice, and the snakes and the troop of wild beasts, the glory of Orpheus' audience. 23Then they turn on Orpheus with bloodstained hands and flock together like birds, if ever they see the bird of night wandering in daylight.
25And as when, in the theatre built up on either side, a stag doomed to die on the morning sand is the prey of hounds, they make for the bard and hurl their thyrsi, green with leaves and not made for such a service. 29Some throw clods, others branches torn from a tree, some hurl flints. 30And so that weapons should not be lacking for their fury, it happened that oxen were working the earth with the pressed-down ploughshare, and not far from there brawny farmers, preparing the harvest with much sweat, were digging the hard fields. 34Seeing the throng, they flee and leave behind the tools of their work, and scattered through the empty fields lie hoes and heavy rakes and long mattocks.
37When the savage women had seized these and torn apart the oxen with their threatening horns, they run back to the bard's doom, and as he stretches out his hands and, for the first time then, speaks in vain and moves nothing with his voice, the sacrilegious women kill him. 41And through that mouth, O Jupiter! 41which was heard by the rocks and understood by the senses of wild beasts, his breath was breathed out and passed away into the winds. 44For you, Orpheus, the grieving birds, for you the throng of beasts, for you the hard flints, for you the woods that had often followed your songs wept; for you the tree, laying aside its leaves, mourned with shorn locks.
47They say the rivers too swelled with their own tears, and naiads and dryads wore linen edged with black and let their hair hang loose. 50His limbs lie scattered in different places. 50His head and lyre, Hebrus, you receive, and (a wonder!) while it glides in midstream, the lyre laments something mournful, the lifeless tongue murmurs something mournful, mournfully the banks reply. 54And now, carried out to sea, they leave their native river and reach the shore of Methymnean Lesbos. 56Here a fierce snake attacks the face cast up on the foreign sands and the hair sprinkled with dripping spray. 58At last Phoebus is there, and wards off the serpent as it prepares to bite, and freezes its open jaws into stone and hardens its gaping mouth just as it was.
61The shade passes beneath the earth and recognises all the places it had seen before, and searching through the fields of the blessed finds Eurydice and clasps her in eager arms. 64Here now they stroll side by side with joined steps, now he follows as she goes ahead, now he goes before her leading the way, and Orpheus looks back, safely now, at his Eurydice. 67Yet Lyaeus does not let this crime go unpunished, and, grieving at the loss of the bard of his rites, he at once bound fast in the woods with twisted root all the Edonian mothers who had seen the outrage. 73and as a bird, when it has trusted its leg to the snares which the cunning fowler has hidden, and feels that it is held,