525What use is his labour, or his services? 525What use to have turned the heavy soil with the ploughshare? 526And yet no Massic gifts of Bacchus, no feasts served again and again have harmed them: they feed on leaves and the fare of simple grass, their cups are clear springs and rivers exercised in running, and no care breaks their healthy sleep. 531At no other time, they say, were cows sought in vain in those regions for the rites of Juno, and the chariots drawn to her lofty shrines by ill-matched wild oxen. 534So men scratch the earth laboriously with rakes, and dig in the seed with their very nails, and over the high mountains, with straining neck, drag the creaking wagons.
537The wolf does not spy out ambushes around the sheepfolds, nor prowl at night about the flocks; 538a sharper care subdues him; 539timid does and fleeing stags now wander among the dogs and round the houses. 541Now the wave washes the brood of the boundless sea and every race of swimming things on the edge of the shore, like shipwrecked bodies; 543seals, against their custom, flee into rivers. 544The viper too perishes, defended in vain by her winding lair, and the water-snakes, astonished, their scales on end. 546To the very birds the air is unkind, and they fall headlong and leave their lives beneath the high cloud. 548Moreover, it is now of no avail to change pastures; the remedies sought do harm; 549the masters gave way, Chiron, son of Phillyra, and Melampus, son of Amythaon.
551Pale Tisiphone, let out into the light from the darkness of Styx, rages, drives Diseases and Fear before her, and, rising day by day, lifts her greedy head higher: the rivers and parched banks and sloping hills resound with the bleating of flocks and constant lowing: and now she deals death in droves, and in the very stalls heaps up corpses rotting with foul putrefaction, until men learn to cover them with earth and bury them in pits. 559For neither was there any use for the hides, nor could anyone cleanse the flesh with water or overcome it with fire; 561they cannot even shear the fleeces eaten away with disease and filth, nor touch the rotten webs; 563but indeed, if anyone had tried on the loathsome garments, burning blisters and a foul sweat ran over his stinking limbs, and before long the accursed fire was devouring his infected limbs.