nly known by the change of the body of Glaucus.[29] And now
the ninth day,[30] and the ninth night had seen her visiting all the
fields in her chariot, and upon the wings of the dragons, when she
returned; nor had the dragons been fed, but with the odors {of the
plants}: and yet they cast the skin of old age full of years. On her
arrival she stood without the threshold and the gates, and was canopied
by the heavens alone, and avoided the contact of her husband, and
erected two altars of turf; on the right hand, one to Hecate, but on the
left side one to Youth.[31] After she had hung them round with vervain
and forest boughs, throwing up the earth from two trenches not far off,
she performed the rites, and plunged a knife into the throat of a black
ram, and besprinkled the wide trenches with blood. Then pouring thereon
goblets[32] of flowing wine, and pouring brazen goblets of warm milk;
she at the same time utters words, and calls upon the Deities of the
earth, and entreats the king of the shades[33] below, together with his
ravished wife, that they will not hasten to deprive the aged limbs of
life. When she had rendered them propitious both by prayers and
prolonged mutterings, she commanded the exhausted body of AEson to be
brought out to the altars, and stretched it cast into a deep sleep by
her charms, {and} resembling one dead, upon the herbs laid beneath him.

She orders the son of AEson to go far thence, and the attendants, too, to
go afar; and warns them to withdraw their profane eyes from her
mysteries. At her order, they retire. Medea, with dishevelled hair, goes
round the blazing altars like a worshipper of Bacchus, and dips her
torches, split into many parts, in the trench, black with blood, and
lights them, {thus} dipt, at the two altars. And thrice does she[34]
purify the aged man with flames, thrice with water, and thrice with
sulphur. In the meantime the potent mixture[35] is boiling and heaving
in the brazen cauldron, placed {on the flames}, and whitens with
swelling froth. There she boils roots cut up in the Haemonian valleys,
and seeds and flowers and acrid juices. She adds stones fetched from the
most distant East, and sand, which the ebbing tide of the ocean has
washed. She adds, too, hoar-frost gathered at night by the light of the
moon, and the ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together with its
flesh; and the entrails of an ambiguous wolf, that was wont to change
its appearance of a wild beast