uch me; and take my hand,
while it is {still} a hand, {and} while I am not a serpent all over."
He, indeed, desires to say more, but, on a sudden, his tongue is divided
into two parts. Nor are words in his power when he offers {to speak};
and as often as he attempts to utter any complaints, he makes a hissing:
this is the voice that Nature leaves him. His wife, smiting her naked
breast with her hand, cries aloud, "Stay, Cadmus! and deliver thyself,
unhappy one, from this monstrous form. Cadmus, what means this? Where
are thy feet? where are both thy shoulders and thy hands? where is thy
color and thy form, and, while I speak, {where} all else {besides}? Why
do ye not, celestial Gods, turn me as well into a similar serpent?"
{Thus} she spoke; he licked the face of his wife, and crept into her
dear bosom, as though he recognized her; and gave her embraces, and
reached her well-known neck.

Whoever is by, (some attendants are present), is alarmed; but the
crested snakes soothe them with their slippery necks, and suddenly they
are two {serpents}, and in joined folds they creep along, until they
enter the covert of an adjacent grove. Now, too, do they neither shun
mankind, nor hurt them with wounds, and the gentle serpents keep in mind
what once they were.

EXPLANATION.

After Cadmus had reigned at Thebes many years, a conspiracy was formed
against him. Being driven from the throne, and his grandson Pentheus
assuming the crown, he and his wife Hermione retired into Illyria,
where, as Apollodorus says, he commanded the Illyrian army, and at
length was chosen king: on his death, the story here related by Ovid
was invented. It is possible that it may have been based on the
following grounds:--

The Phoenicians were anciently called 'Achivi,' which name they still
retained after their establishment in Greece. 'Chiva' being also the
Hebrew, and perhaps Phoenician word for 'a serpent,' the Greeks,
probably in reference to the Phoenician origin of Cadmus, reported
after his death, that he and his wife were serpents; and in time, that
transformation may have been stated to have happened at the end of his
life. According to Aulus Gellius, the ancient inhabitants of Illyria
had two eyelids to each eye, and with their looks, when angered, they
were able to kill those whom they beheld stedfastly. The Greeks hence
called them serpents and basilisks; and, it is not unlikely, that when
Cadmus reti