abylon, Thisbe arrives first; but at the sight of a lioness,
she runs to hide herself in a cave, and in her alarm, drops her veil.
Pyramus, arriving soon after, finds the veil of his mistress stained
with blood; and believing her to be dead, kills himself with his own
sword. Thisbe returns from the cave; and finding Pyramus weltering in
his blood, she plunges the same fatal weapon into her own breast.

But Alcithoe, the daughter of Minyas,[1] does not think that the
rites[2] of the God ought to be received; but still, in her rashness,
denies that Bacchus is the progeny of Jupiter; and she has her
sisters[3] as partners in her impiety.

The priest had ordered both mistresses and maids, laying aside their
employments, to have their breasts covered with skins, and to loosen the
fillets of their hair, and {to put} garlands on their locks, and to take
the verdant thyrsi in their hands; and had prophesied that severe would
be the resentment of the Deity, {if} affronted. Both matrons and
new-married women obey, and lay aside their webs and work-baskets,[4]
and their tasks unfinished; and offer frankincense, and invoke both
Bacchus and Bromius,[5] and Lyaeus,[6] and the son of the Flames, and the
Twice-Born, and the only one that had two mothers.[7] To these is added
{the name of} Nyseus, and the unshorn Thyoneus,[8] and with Lenaeus,[9]
the planter of the genial grape, and Nyctelius,[10] and father Eleleus,
and Iacchus,[11] and Evan,[12] and a great many other names, which thou,
Liber, hast besides, throughout the nations of Greece. For thine is
youth everlasting; thou art a boy to all time, thou art beheld {as} the
most beauteous {of all} in high heaven; thou hast the features of a
virgin, when thou standest without thy horns. By thee the East was
conquered, as far as where swarthy India is bounded by the remote
Ganges. Thou {God}, worthy of our veneration, didst smite Pentheus, and
the axe-bearing Lycurgus,[13] sacrilegious {mortals}; thou didst hurl
the bodies of the Etrurians into the sea. Thou controllest the neck of
the lynxes yoked to thy chariot, graced with the painted reins. The
Bacchanals and the Satyrs follow {thee}; the drunken old man, too,
{Silenus}, who supports his reeling limbs with a staff, and sticks by no
means very fast to his bending ass. And wherever thou goest, the shouts
of youths, and together the voices of women, and tambourines beaten with
the hands, and hollow cymbals resound, and the bo