504He was giving these charges and at the same time kissing his daughter, and gentle tears fell amid his instructions. 506And he asked for the right hands of both as a pledge of faith, and joined them together as they were given, and asks them with remembering lips to greet his absent daughter and grandson for him; 509and he scarcely said his last farewell, his mouth full of sobs, and feared the forebodings of his mind. 511As soon as Philomela was placed on the painted ship, and the sea was stirred by the oars and the land pushed away, 'We have won,' cries the barbarian, 'my prayers are carried with me,' and he exults and can scarcely put off his joys in his mind, and nowhere turns his gaze from her, no differently than when the bird of Jupiter, the plunderer, has set down a hare in its lofty nest with hooked feet: the captive has no escape, the robber gazes at his prize.
519And now the journey was done, and now they had disembarked from the weary ships on their own shores, when the king drags Pandion's daughter into a lofty steading, hidden in ancient woods, and there shuts her in, pale and trembling and fearing everything and now asking with tears where her sister is: and, confessing his crime, he overpowers her by force, a maiden and alone, as she calls in vain, often on her father, often on her sister, on the great gods above all. 527She trembles like a frightened lamb that, wounded and shaken from the mouth of a grey wolf, does not yet think itself safe, and like a dove, its feathers wet with its own blood, still shudders and fears the greedy talons in which it had been held.
531Soon, when her mind returned, tearing her loosened hair, like one in mourning, her arms bruised with beating, stretching out her palms, she says, 'O barbarian of dreadful deeds, O cruel one, neither my father's charges given with dutiful tears moved you, nor care for my sister, nor my maidenhood, nor the laws of marriage! 537You have confounded everything: I have been made my sister's rival, you a husband twice over; Procne must be my enemy. 539Why do you not snatch away this life too, traitor, so that no crime remains for you? 540and would that you had done so before that unspeakable union: I would have had a ghost free of guilt.
542Yet if the gods above see these things, if the powers of the gods are anything, if all things have not perished with me, sometime you will pay me the penalty. 544I myself, casting shame aside, will tell of your deeds. 545If the chance is given, I shall go among the people; 546if I am kept shut up in the woods, I shall fill the woods and move the rocks to share my knowledge: the sky will hear this, and any god, if there is one in it.' 549After the savage tyrant's anger was stirred by such words, and his fear no less than his anger, goaded by both causes he frees from its sheath the sword with which he was girded, and seizing her by the hair, her arms bent behind her back, forces her to suffer chains.
553Philomela was offering her throat and had conceived the hope of death at the sight of the sword: he, as she protested and kept calling her father's name and struggled to speak, seized her tongue with pincers and cut it off with the savage sword. 557The root of the tongue quivers at the back; the tongue itself lies murmuring, trembling, into the black earth; 559and as the tail of a mutilated snake is wont to leap, it twitches and, dying, seeks its mistress's footprints. 561Even after this crime (I would scarcely dare believe it) he is said often to have sought her mangled body again in his lust. 563He has the face to return to Procne after such deeds.
564On seeing her husband she asks for her sister: but he gives feigned groans and tells of an invented death, and his tears won belief. 566Procne tears from her shoulders her robe gleaming with broad gold, and puts on black garments, and builds an empty tomb, and brings offerings to false shades, and mourns the fate of a sister not to be mourned so. 571The god had passed through the twice six signs, a year completed. 572What is Philomela to do? 572a guard bars escape, the walls of the steading stand rigid, built of solid stone, her mute mouth lacks a means of telling the deed. 574Great is the ingenuity of grief, and resourcefulness comes in misfortune.
576Cleverly she hangs the warp on a barbarian loom and weaves purple marks into white threads, a record of the crime; 578and when it was finished she handed it to one woman and asks by gesture that she take it to her mistress: she, as asked, carried it to Procne, nor does she know what she hands over in it. 581The wife of the savage tyrant unrolls the cloth and reads the pitiful poem of her own fortune, and (wonderful that she could) is silent. 583Grief checked her lips, and words indignant enough failed her searching tongue; 585nor is there time to weep, but she rushes on, ready to confound right and wrong, and is wholly absorbed in the image of revenge.