And wing your way around the man so blessed with blissful fortune. Oh, oh—such beauty and such youth! What a blessing for this city of the birds is this fine marriage you have made.
A great good fortune now attends us, the race of birds—such mighty bliss, thanks to this man. So welcome back with nuptial chants and wedding songs our man himself and his Princess.
Olympian Hera and great Zeus who rules the gods on lofty thrones the Fates once joined with wedding songs. O Hymen, Hymenaeus.
And rich young Eros in his golden wings held tight the reins as charioteer at Zeus’ wedding to the happy Hera.
O Hymen, Hymenaeus, O Hymen, Hymenaeus.
Your chants fill me with great delight, as do you songs. And I just love your words.
Come now, celebrate in song earth-shattering thunder, Zeus’s lightning fire— which now belong to him— that dreaded bolt white lighting, too. Oh, that great golden blaze of lightning, that immortal fiery spear of Zeus, and groaning thunders bringing rain—
with you this man now rattles Earth.
And everything that Zeus once had, he’s got it all—and that includes our Princess, who once sat by Zeus’s throne. O Hymen, Hymenaeus!
Now all you feathered tribes of friends, come follow me on this my wedding flight. Let’s wing our way up there to Zeus’ house and to our wedding bed. Reach out your hand, my blissful love, and take hold of my wing—
then dance with me. I’ll lift and carry you.
Alalalalai—
Raise triumphal cries of joy, sing out the noble victor’s song— the mightiest and highest of all gods!
Frederick William Hall (1865–1948) was a classical scholar and Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Together with William Martin Geldart, he produced the Oxford Classical Text of several authors. Hall was a careful editor known for his thorough collation of manuscripts and his conservative approach to textual criticism.
The Hall–Geldart editions in the Oxford Classical Texts series provide reliable critical texts with selective apparatus criticus. The OCT series, established in 1894 as the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, aims to present the best available Greek and Latin texts in a format suitable for both scholarly use and teaching. Each volume provides a clean text with the most significant manuscript variants recorded at the foot of each page.
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