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At first he showed himself in the garb of a private man, and went about the cities without any of the badges of a king. One who saw him thus at Thebes applied to him not inaptly, the lines of Euripides, Humbled to man, laid by the godhead's pride, He comes to Dirce and Ismenus' side.
Very wroth is he because the soothsayer, Amphiaraüs, suffereth him not to cross the Ismenus, for that the omens promise not victory. A triple crest he hath, and there are bells of bronze under his shield which ring terribly. And on his shield he hath this device: the heaven studded with stars, and in the midst the mightiest of the stars, the eye of night, even the moon.
Whether on far Italia's shores obey'd, Or where Eleusis joins thy solemn rites With the great mother's , in mysterious vales Bacchus in Bacchic Thebes best known, Thy Thebes, who claims the Thyads as her daughters; Fast by the fields with warriors dragon-sown, And where Ismenus rolls his rapid waters.
It is said, also, that at the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Thebans received an oracle from the sanctuary of Ismenus, referring at once to the battle at Delium, and to this which thirty years after took place at Haliartus. It ran thus: Hunting the wolf, observe the utmost bound, And the hill Orchalides where foxes most are found.
And just as youths set up a dance in honour of Phoebus either in Pytho or haply in Ortygia, or by the waters of Ismenus, and to the sound of the lyre round his altar all together in time beat the earth with swiftly-moving feet; so they to the sound of Orpheus' lyre smote with their oars the rushing sea-water, and the surge broke over the blades; and on this side and on that the dark brine seethed with foam, boiling terribly through the might of the sturdy heroes.
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