731as it did for you, Proteus, dweller in the sea that embraces the earth. 732For they have seen you now as a young man, now as a lion; 733now you were a violent boar, now a snake which they would fear to touch, now horns made you a bull. 735Often you could seem a stone, often a tree too; 736sometimes, imitating the look of flowing waters, you were a river, sometimes fire, the enemy of water. 738Nor has the wife of Autolycus, daughter of Erysichthon, less power. 739Her father was a man who scorned the divinity of the gods and burned no fragrant offerings on their altars. 741He is even said to have violated the grove of Ceres with the axe and to have profaned her ancient woods with iron.
743There stood among them a huge oak of age-old timber, a grove in itself; 744ribbons and grateful tablets and garlands encircled its middle, proofs of prayers granted. 746Often beneath it the dryads led their festal dances, often too, with hands joined in a row, they circled the measure of its trunk, and the girth of its timber filled fifteen ells. 749And the rest of the wood, too, was as far beneath it as the grass was beneath all the wood. 751Yet not for that reason did the son of Triopas keep the iron from it, and he orders his servants to cut down the sacred oak; 753and when he saw them hesitate at the order, the wicked man snatched an axe from one of them and uttered these words: 'Not only beloved of the goddess, but even if it is the goddess herself, it will now touch the ground with its leafy top.' 757He spoke, and while he poised the weapon for slanting blows, Deo's oak trembled and gave a groan: and at once its leaves, at once its acorns began to grow pale, and its long branches to take on pallor.
761And when his impious hand had made a wound in its trunk, blood flowed from the split bark, no differently from the way gore pours from the severed neck when a huge bull, as a victim, falls before the altars. 765All were stunned, and one out of them all dares to deter the wickedness and to hold back the savage axe. 767He looks at him and: 'Take the reward of your pious mind!' 767said the Thessalian, and turned the iron from the tree against the man and cuts off his head, and strikes the oak again, and from the middle of the oak there came a voice like this: 'I am a nymph beneath this wood, most dear to Ceres, and dying I prophesy to you that punishment for your deeds is at hand, the consolation of my death.' 774He pursues his crime, and at last, weakened by countless blows and pulled by ropes, the tree crashed down and laid flat much of the wood with its weight.
777The dryads, all sisters, stunned by the loss of the groves and their own, approach Ceres in black clothes, mourning, and pray for punishment for Erysichthon. 780She assented to them, and with a movement of her head, most beautiful one, she shook the fields laden with heavy harvests. 782And she devises a kind of punishment that would be pitiable, if he were not pitiable to no one for his deeds: to torture him with baleful Hunger. 784And since Hunger may not be approached by the goddess herself (for the fates do not allow Ceres and Hunger to meet), she addresses one of the mountain spirits, a rustic oread, with these words: 'There is an icy place on the furthest shores of Scythia, a gloomy soil, a barren land without crops, without trees; 790sluggish Cold lives there, and Pallor and Trembling and starving Hunger.
791Bid her bury herself, the wicked one, in the vitals of the sacrilegious man; 792and let no abundance of things overcome her, and let her overpower my strength in the contest. 794And so that the length of the journey may not frighten you, take my chariot, take the dragons to guide with reins on high.'