Returning after nine days, you will examine the bodies of the cattle slain and see what will befall.”  Aristaeus faithfully obeyed these directions.  He sacrificed the cattle, he left their bodies in the grove, he offered funeral honors to the shades of Orpheus and Eurydice; then returning on the ninth day he examined the bodies of the animals, and, wonderful to relate! a swarm of bees had taken possession of one of the carcasses and were pursuing their labors there as in a hive.

In “The Task,” Cowper alludes to the story of Aristaeus, when speaking of the ice-palace built by the Empress Anne of Russia.  He has been describing the fantastic forms which ice assumes in connection with waterfalls, etc.: 

    “Less worthy of applause though more admired
     Because a novelty, the work of man,
     Imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ,
     Thy most magnificent and mighty freak,
     The wonder of the north.  No forest fell
     When thou wouldst build, no quarry sent its stores
     T’ enrich thy walls; but thou didst hew the floods
     And make thy marble of the glassy wave. 
     In such a palace Aristaeus found
     Cyrene, when he bore the plaintive tale
     Of his lost bees to her maternal ear.”

Milton also appears to have had Cyrene and her domestic scene in his mind when he describes to us Sabrina, the nymph of the river Severn, in the Guardian-spirit’s Song in “Comus”: 

“Sabrina fair! 
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honor’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake! 
Listen and save.”

The following are other celebrated mythical poets and musicians, some of whom were hardly inferior to Orpheus himself: 

AMPHION

Amphion was the son of Jupiter and Antiope, queen of Thebes.  With his twin brother Zethus he was exposed at birth on Mount Cithaeron, where they grew up among the shepherds, not knowing their parentage.  Mercury gave Amphion a lyre and taught him to play upon it, and his brother occupied himself in hunting and tending the flocks.  Meanwhile Antiope, their mother, who had been treated with great cruelty by Lycus, the usurping king of Thebes, and by Dirce, his wife, found means to inform her children of their rights and to summon them to her assistance.  With a band of their fellow-herdsmen they attacked and slew Lycus, and tying Dirce by the hair of her head to a bull, let him drag her till she was dead.  Amphion, having become king of Thebes, fortified the city with a wall.  It is said that when he played on his lyre the stones moved of their own accord and took their places in the wall.

See Tennyson’s poem of “Amphion” for an amusing use made of this story.

LINUS