563The son of Agenor does not know that his daughter and little grandson are gods of the sea: overcome by grief and the series of misfortunes and by the portents, of which he had seen a great many, the founder leaves his city, as if the fortune of the place, and not his own, were pressing on him; 567and driven by long wanderings he reached, with his wife sharing his exile, the borders of Illyria. 569And now, weighed down with misfortunes and years, while they go back over the first fates of their house and review their sufferings in talk, Cadmus said: 'Was that serpent sacred, the one pierced by my spear, at the time when, having set out from Sidon, I scattered the viper's teeth over the ground, a new kind of seed?
574If the care of the gods avenges it with such unerring anger, may I myself, I pray, be stretched out as a serpent into a long belly.' 576He spoke, and like a serpent he is stretched into a long belly, and feels scales grow over his hardened skin, and his blackened body become speckled with blue spots. 579And he falls forward onto his breast. 579And, joined into one, his legs are gradually thinned to a smooth point. 581His arms still remain: the arms that remain he stretches out, and with tears flowing down his face, still human, he said: 'Come near, O wife, come near, most wretched one, and while something of me is left, touch me, and take my hand, while it is a hand, while the snake does not possess all of me!' 586He wants indeed to say more, but his tongue is suddenly split into two parts: words do not come to him as he wishes, and whenever he prepares to utter some lament, he hisses: this is the voice nature left him.
590Striking her bare breast with her hand, his wife cries out: 'Cadmus, stay, and put off these monstrous shapes, unhappy man! 592Cadmus, what is this? 592Where are your feet, where are your shoulders and hands and colour and face and, while I speak, everything? 593Why do you not, heavenly ones, turn me too into the same serpent?' 595She had spoken: he was licking his wife's face, and went into her dear bosom as if he recognised it, and gave embraces and sought her familiar neck. 598Whoever is there (his companions were there) is terrified: but she strokes the slippery neck of the crested serpent. 600And suddenly there are two, and they creep along with coils entwined, until they went into the hiding places of a nearby grove.
602Even now they neither flee from people nor harm them with a wound, and, gentle serpents, they remember what they were before.