Nonnus Raise Seas

When the god had spoken, the wineloving maiden turned her eyes about, and ran to the place. Beside the oracular wall she saw the first tablet, old as the infinite past, containing all things in one: upon it was all that Ophion5 lord paramount had done, all that ancient Cronos accomplished: when he cut off his father’s male plowshare, and sowed the teeming deep with seed on the unsown back of the daughterbegetting sea; how he opened a gaping throat to receive a stony son, when he made a meal of the counterfeit body of a pretended Zeus; how the stone played midwife to the brood of imprisoned children, and shot out the burden of the parturient gullet.

But when the stormfoot Season, Phaëthon’s handmaid, had seen the fiery shining victory of Zeus at war and the hailstorm snowstorm conflict of Cronos, she looked at the next tablet in its turn. There was shown how the pine was in labour of the human race– how the tree suddenly burst its tree-birth and disgorged a son unbegotten self-completed; how Raincloud Zeus brought the waters up in mountainous seas on high and flooded all cities, how Notos and Boreas, Euros and Lips in turn lashed Deucalion’s wandering hutch, lifted it castaway on waves in the air and left it harbourless near the moon.

When the priestess of the lichtgang passed with nimble foot to the third tablet, the circling maiden stood gazing at the manifold oracles of the world’s fate, in letters of glowing colour engraved with the artist’s vermilion, all that elaborate story which the primeval mind had inscribed; and this was the prophecy that she read in the tablets:


- Nonnus, Dionysiaca, Book 12