The roofs resound with causeless laughter loud;

Floating in gore, portentous to survey!

In each discolour’d vase the viands lay;

Then down each cheek the tears spontaneous flow

And sudden sighs precede approaching woe.

In vision wrapp’d, the Hyperesian seer

Uprose, and thus divined the vengeance near:


“O race to death devote! with Stygian shade

Each destin’d peer impending fates invade;

With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drown’d;

With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:

Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,

To people Orcus, and the burning coasts!

Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,

But universal night usurps the pole!”


Yet warn’d in vain, with laughter loud elate

The peers reproach the sure divine of Fate;

And thus Eurymachus: “The dotard’s mind

To every sense is lost, to reason blind;

Swift from the dome conduct the slave away;

Let him in open air behold the day.”


“Tax not (the heaven-illumined seer rejoin’d)

Of rage, or folly, my prophetic mind,

No clouds of error dim the ethereal rays,

Her equal power each faithful sense obeys.

Unguided hence my trembling steps I bend,

Far hence, before yon hovering deaths descend;

Lest the ripe harvest of revenge begun,

I share the doom ye suitors cannot shun.”


This said, to sage Piraeus sped the seer,

His honour’d host, a welcome inmate there.

O’er the protracted feast the suitors sit,

And aim to wound the prince with pointless wit:

Cries one, with scornful leer and mimic voice,

“Thy charity we praise, but not thy choice;

Why such profusion of indulgence shown

To this poor, timorous, toil-detesting drone?

That others feeds on planetary schemes,

And pays his host with hideous noon-day dreams.

But, prince! for once at least believe a friend;

To some Sicilian mart these courtiers send,

Where, if they yield their freight across the main,

Dear sell the slaves! demand no greater gain.”