Ion (0-40)

Atlas, who bears upon his brazen back the pressure of the sky, ancient dwelling of the gods, begat Maia from a daughter of one of those gods, and she bare me Hermes to mighty Zeus, to be the servant of the powers divine.

Lo! I am come to this land of Delphi where sits Phoebus on the centre of the world and giveth oracles to men, ever chanting lays prophetic of things that are to be. Now there is a city in Hellas of no small note, called after Pallas, goddess of the golden lance;

there did Phoebus force his love on Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, beneath the rock of Pallas, northward of Athens’ steep realm, called Macrae by the kings of Attica. And she without her father’s knowledge—for such was the god’s good pleasure,—

bore the burden in her womb unto the end, and when her time came, she brought forth a child in the house and carried him away to the selfsame cave wherein the god declared his love to her, and she cradled him in the hollow of a rounded ark and cast him forth to die,

observant of the custom of her ancestors and of earth-born Erichthonius, whom the daughter of Zeus gave into the charge of the daughters of Agraulus, after setting on either side, to keep him safe, a guard of serpents twain. Hence in that land among the Erechthidae ’tis a

custom to protect their babes with charms of golden snakes. But ere she left the babe to die, the young mother tied about him her own broidered robe. And this is the request that Phoebus craves of me, for he is my brother, Go, brother, to those children of the soil

that dwell in glorious Athens, for well thou knowest Athena’s city, and take a new-born babe from out the hollow rock, his cradle and his swaddling-clothes as well, and bear him to my prophetic shrine at Delphi, and set him at the entering-in of my temple.

What else remains shall be my care, for that child is mine, that thou mayst know it. So I, to do my brother Loxias a service, took up the woven ark and bore it off, and at the threshold of the shrine I have laid the babe,

after opening the lid of the wicker cradle that the child might be seen.