Now Pallas shines confess’d; aloft she spreads
The arm of vengeance o’er their guilty heads: 
The dreadful aegis blazes in their eye: 
Amazed they see, they tremble, and they fly: 
Confused, distracted, through he rooms they fling: 
Like oxen madden’d by the breeze’s sting,
When sultry days, and long, succeed the gentle spring,
Not half so keen fierce vultures of the chase
Stoop from the mountains on the feather’d race,
When, the wide field extended snares beset,
With conscious dread they shun the quivering net: 
No help, no flight; but wounded every way,
Headlong they drop; the fowlers seize their prey. 
On all sides thus they double wound on wound,
In prostrate heaps the wretches beat the ground,
Unmanly shrieks precede each dying groan,
And a red deluge floats the reaking stone.

Leiodes first before the victor falls: 
The wretched augur thus for mercy calls: 
“Oh gracious hear, nor let thy suppliant bleed;
Still undishonoured, or by word or deed,
Thy house, for me remains; by me repress’d
Full oft was check’d the injustice of the rest: 
Averse they heard me when I counselled well,
Their hearts were harden’d, and they justly fell. 
O spare an augur’s consecrated head,
Nor add the blameless to the guilty dead.”

“Priest as thou art! for that detested band
Thy lying prophecies deceived the land;
Against Ulysses have thy vows been made,
For them thy daily orisons were paid: 
Yet more, e’en to our bed thy pride aspires: 
One common crime one common fate requires.”

Thus speaking, from the ground the sword he took
Which Agelaus’ dying hand forsook: 
Full through his neck the weighty falchion sped;
Along the pavement roll’d the muttering head.

Phemius alone the hand of vengeance spared,
Phemius the sweet, the heaven-instructed bard. 
Beside the gate the reverend minstrel stands;
The lyre now silent trembling in his hands;
Dubious to supplicate the chief, or fly
To Jove’s inviolable altar nigh,
Where oft Laertes holy vows had paid,
And oft Ulysses smoking victims laid. 
His honour’d harp with care he first set down,
Between the laver and the silver throne;
Then prostrate stretch’d before the dreadful man,
Persuasive thus, with accent soft began: 

“O king! to mercy be thy soul inclined,
And spare the poet’s ever-gentle kind. 
A deed like this thy future fame would wrong,
For dear to gods and men is sacred song. 
Self-taught I sing; by Heaven, and Heaven alone,
The genuine seeds of poesy are sown: 
And (what the gods bestow) the lofty lay
To gods alone and godlike worth we pay. 
Save then the poet, and thyself reward! 
’Tis thine to merit, mine is to record. 
That here I sung, was force, and not desire;
This hand reluctant touch’d the warbling wire;
And let thy son attest, nor sordid pay,
Nor servile flattery, stain’d the moral lay.”