481Without delay, relentless Tisiphone takes up a torch soaked in blood, puts on a robe red with flowing gore, girds herself with a twisted snake, and goes out of the house. 484Grief goes with her as she goes, and Panic and Terror and Madness with trembling face. 486She had stopped at the threshold: the doorposts of Aeolus' son are said to have trembled, and pallor stained the maple doors, and the sun fled the place. 488Terrified by the portents was the wife, terrified was Athamas. 489And they were preparing to leave the house: the ill-omened Fury stood in the way and blocked the entrance, and stretching out her arms entwined with knots of vipers, she shook out her hair.
492Disturbed, the snakes hissed aloud, and some lie on her shoulders, some, gliding around her breast, give hisses and vomit gore and flicker with their tongues. 495Then she tears two snakes from the midst of her hair and, seizing them with her pestilent hand, hurled them. 496And they glide all over the breasts of Ino and of Athamas, and breathe their noxious breath into them. 498Nor do they inflict any wounds on their limbs: it is the mind that feels the dreadful blows. 500She had brought with her also monstrous liquid poisons, foam from Cerberus' mouth and the venom of Echidna, and aimless wanderings and the oblivion of a blinded mind, and crime and tears and rage and the love of slaughter, all ground together; 504these, mixed with fresh blood, she had boiled in a hollow bronze pot, stirred with green hemlock.
506And while they tremble, she pours the maddening poison into the breasts of both and stirred their innermost hearts. 508Then, whirling the torch again and again round the same circle, she makes fires follow fires with the swift movement. 510So, victorious and having carried out her orders, she returns to the empty realm of great Dis and ungirds the snake she had put on. 512At once the son of Aeolus, raving in the middle of the hall, shouts: 'Ho, comrades, spread the nets in these woods! 514Here just now I saw a lioness with her twin cubs!' and, frantic, he follows the tracks of his wife as of a wild beast, and from his mother's bosom he snatches Learchus, laughing and stretching out his little arms, and two and three times whirls him through the air like a sling, and savagely dashes the infant's face on a hard rock.
519Then at last the mother, roused, whether grief did this or the cause was the poison sprinkled on her, howls aloud and flees, out of her mind, with her hair streaming, and carrying you, little Melicertes, in her bare arms, she cries 'Euhoe, Bacchus!' 523At the name of Bacchus Juno laughed and said, 'May your foster-child do you this service!' 525A cliff overhangs the sea: its lowest part is hollowed out by the waves and shields the waters it covers from the rain; its top is stiff and stretches its brow out over the open sea. 528Ino seizes this (madness had given her strength), and, held back by no fear, throws herself and her burden over the sea; 530the water, struck, foamed white.
531But Venus, pitying the undeserved sufferings of her granddaughter, coaxed her uncle thus: 'O deity of the waters, Neptune, to whom fell the power next to heaven, I ask great things indeed, but have pity on my kin, whom you see tossed on the boundless Ionian sea, and add them to your gods. 536I too have some favour with the sea, if indeed I was once foam formed in the midst of the deep, and my Greek name remains to me from that.' 539Neptune assented to her plea and took away from them what was mortal, and put upon them a majesty to be revered, and changed both their name and their appearance, and named the god Palaemon, and his mother with him Leucothea.
543Her Sidonian companions, following the prints of her feet as far as they could, saw the last ones at the edge of the rock; 545and, thinking her death beyond doubt, they mourned the house of Cadmus with beating palms, tearing their hair along with their clothes, and they cast reproach on the goddess as too little just and too savage towards a rival. 548Juno did not bear their abuse and said: 'I will make you yourselves the greatest monuments of my cruelty.' 550The deed followed the word. 551For the one who had been most devoted said, 'I will follow the queen into the sea,' and, about to make the leap, could not move anywhere, but clung fixed to the rock.
554Another, while she tries to strike her breast with the usual beating, felt the arms she tried to move grow stiff; 556one, as she had chanced to stretch out her hands towards the waves of the sea, turned to stone, stretches out her hands towards the same waves; 558of another, as she was tearing the hair she had seized on her head, you would have seen the fingers suddenly hardened in the hair: in whatever gesture each was caught, in that she stayed fixed. 561Some were made birds; 561and these Theban women even now skim the surface of the waters in that gulf with their wingtips.