Bk IX:394-417 The prophecies of Themis. While Eurytus's daughter was relating this marvellous happening, and Alcmena was wiping away Iole's tears (still weeping herself) a wonderful thing suspended all sadness. There, on the steep threshold, stood Iolaüs, Hercules's nephew and companion, alive again, with the look of his early years, a hint of down on his cheeks, almost, again, a child. Overwhelmed by the prayers of her husband, Hercules, Juno's daughter, Hebe, had granted him this gift. When she was about to swear that, after this, she would never allow any further such favour, Themis would not allow it. She prophesied. "Thebes is now moving towards civil war, and, of the Seven against her, Capaneus will not be overcome, except by Jupiter himself. Two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, will die of mutually inflicted wounds. Amphiaraüs, the seer, swallowed by the earth, still living, will gaze on the ghosts of his own dead. His son, Alcmaeon, shall avenge him, with his mother Eriphyle's death, filial and sinful in the same act. Terrified at his own evil, exiled from home and sanity, he will be pursued by the faces of the Eumenides, and by his mother's shade, until his wife, Callirhoë demands the fatal necklace, that Venus gave Harmonia, and until the sword, of his first father-in-law, Phegeus, in the hands of Phegeus's sons, shall drain his son-in-law's blood. Then at last, Callirhoë, the daughter of Acheloüs, as a suppliant, will ask of mighty Jupiter to add years to her infant sons, and not allow the avenger's murder to be un-avenged. In anticipation of being moved by her prayers, Jupiter claims for them this gift that you, his stepdaughter and daughter-in-law, possess, and will make them men, in their childhood years." |
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