the chamber; and now she opens the door; now she is led in; but her
knees tremble beneath her sinking hams, her colour and her blood vanish;
and her courage deserts her as she moves along. The nearer she is to
{the commission of} her crime, the more she dreads it, and she repents
of her attempt, and could wish to be able to return unknown. The old
woman leads her on by the hand as she lingers, and when she has
delivered her up on her approach to the lofty bed, she says, 'Take her,
Cinyras, she is thy own,' and {so} unites their doomed bodies. The
father receives his own bowels into the polluted bed, and allays her
virgin fears, and encourages her as she trembles. Perhaps, too, he may
have called her by a name {suited to} her age, and she may have called
him 'father,' that the {appropriate} names might not be wanting in this
deed of horror. Pregnant by her father, she departs from the chamber,
and, in her impiety, bears his seed in her incestuous womb, and carries
{with her}, criminality in her conception. The ensuing night repeats the
guilty deed; nor on that {night} is there an end. At last, Cinyras,
after so many embraces, longing to know who is his paramour, on lights
being brought in, discovers both the crime and his own daughter.

"His words checked through grief, he draws his shining sword from the
scabbard as it hangs. Myrrha flies, rescued from death by the gloom and
the favour of a dark night; and wandering along the wide fields, she
leaves the Arabians famed for their palms, and the Panchaean fields. And
she wanders during nine horns of the returning moon; when, at length,
being weary, she rests in the Sabaean country,[50] and with difficulty
she supports the burden of her womb. Then, uncertain what to wish, and
between the fear of death and weariness of life, she uttered such a
prayer {as this}: 'O ye Deities, if any of you favour those who are
penitent; I have deserved severe punishment, and I do not shrink from
it. But that, neither existing, I may pollute the living, nor dead,
those who are departed, expel me from both these realms; and
transforming me, deny me both life and death.' {Some} Divinity {ever}
regards the penitent; at least, the last of her prayers found its Gods
{to execute it}. For the earth closes over her legs as she speaks, and a
root shoots forth obliquely through her bursting nails, {as} a firm
support to her tall trunk. Her bones, too, become hard wood, and her
marrow continuing in the