De dochters van Minyas
(Met. 4.1-54, 4.167-168, 4.271-284, 4.389-415)
Minyas was de koning en stichter van de stad Orchomenus in Boeotië (Noord-Griekenland). Hij had drie dochters: Arsippe, Leuconoë en Alcithoë.
Het verhaal van de dochters van Minyas vormt een geheel, maar wordt drie maal onderbroken als de drie dochters verhalen gaan vertellen. Hieronder is de vertaling van het verhaal van de dochters van Minyas gegeven, voor de drie verhalen die ze vertellen wordt een korte samenvatting gegeven en verwezen naar de respectievelijke pagina's.
Boek III van de Metamorphoses eindigt met de dood van Pentheus.
Bk III:692-733 Pentheus is killed by the Maenads
‘We have only listened to this winding tale’, said Pentheus, ‘so that our anger might spend its strength in delay. ‘You, attendants, remove this man, quickly, and let his body be tortured in greatest anguish, and send him down to Stygian night!’ Acoetes, the Tyrrhenian, was dragged out, straightaway, and shut in a deep dungeon. But while the instruments of cruelty, the irons and the fire, were being prepared to kill him as had been ordered, the doors flew open by themselves, the chains loosening without any effort, so tradition holds.
The son of Echion persisted in his purpose, not ordering others to go, but now going himself, to where Mount Cithaeron, chosen for performing the rites, was sounding with the chants and shrill cries of the Bacchantes. As a brave horse snorts and shows his love for the fight, when the trumpeter’s brass gives the signal for attack, so the heavens pulsating from the long drawn-out cries stirred Pentheus, and, hearing the clamour, his anger flared again.
Near the middle of the mountainside, was a clearing surrounded with remote woods, free of trees, and visible from all sides. Here as he watched the mysteries, with profane eyes, his mother was the first to see Pentheus, the first roused to run at him madly, the first to wound him, hurling her thyrsus. She shouted ‘O you two, sisters, come! That huge boar, who is straying in our fields, that boar is my sacrifice.’ They all rush on him in one maddened crowd: they converge together pursuing the frightened man, frightened now, speaking words free of violence now, cursing himself now, realising his own offence. Stricken, he still shouts ‘Help me, aunt Autonoë! Let Actaeon’s shade move your spirit!
She, not remembering Actaeon, tears away the suppliant’s right arm. Ino, in frenzy, rips off the other. Now the unhappy man has no limbs to hold out to his mother, but, showing his wounded trunk shorn of its members, he cries ‘Mother, see!’. Agave howls, and twists her neck about, and thrashes her hair in the air, and tearing off his head, holding it in her bloody hands, shouts ‘Behold, sisters, this act marks our victory!’
The wind does not strip the leaves clinging there, from the high tree touched by an autumn frost, more quickly than this man’s limbs are torn by those terrible hands. Warned by such an example, the Theban women throng to the new religion, burn incense, and worship at the sacred altars.
- Met. 4.55-166 – Pyramus en Thisbe
- Met. 4.169-270 – Leucothoë (Met 4.169-189 – Overspel van Venus en Mars; Met 4.190-213 – Venus' wraak op de zon)
- Met. 4.285-388 – Salmacis en Hermaphroditus
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