led bodies, did I throw them down when {thus} beheld,
and slay both the master and {the horses} themselves? {And} does the
carcass of the Nemean {lion} lie crushed by these arms? With this neck
did I support the heavens?[22] The unrelenting wife of Jupiter[23] was
weary of commanding, {but} I was {still} unwearied with doing. But {now}
a new calamity is come upon me, to which resistance can be made neither
by valour, nor by weapons, nor by arms. A consuming flame is pervading
the inmost recesses of my lungs, and is preying on all my limbs. But
Eurystheus {still} survives. And are there," says he, "any who can
believe that the Deities exist?"

And {then}, racked with pain, he ranges along the lofty Oeta, no
otherwise than if a tiger should chance to carry the hunting spears
fixed in his body, and the perpetrator of the deed should be taking to
flight. Often might you have beheld him uttering groans, often shrieking
aloud, often striving to tear away the whole of his garments, and
levelling trees, and venting his fury against mountains, or stretching
out his arms towards the heaven of his father. Lo! he espies Lichas,
trembling and lying concealed in a hollow rock, and, as his pain has
summoned together all his fury, he says, "Didst thou, Lichas, bring
{this} fatal present; and shalt thou be the cause of my death?" He
trembles, and {turning} pale, is alarmed, and timorously utters some
words of excuse. As he is speaking, and endeavouring to clasp his knees
with his hands, Alcides seizes hold of him, and whirling him round three
or four times, he hurls him into the Euboean waves, with greater force
than {if sent} from an engine of war. As he soars aloft in the aerial
breeze he grows hard; and as they say that showers freeze with the cold
winds, {and} that thence snow is formed, and that from the snow,
revolving {in its descent}, the soft body is compressed, and is {then}
made round in many a hailstone,[24] so have former ages declared, that,
hurled through the air by the strong arms {of Hercules}, and bereft of
blood through fear, and having no moisture left in him, he was
transformed into hard stone. Even to this day, in the Euboean sea,
a small rock projects to a height, and retains the traces of the human
form. This, the sailors are afraid to tread upon, as though it could
feel it; and they call it Lichas.

But thou, the famous offspring of Jupiter, having cut down, trees which
lofty Oeta bore, and having raised them f