Cyane

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Cyane is one of the few actual heroes of the Metamorphoses – standing up for the rights of someone else, and someone to whom she is not even related.

She is a nymph living in a pool near Syracuse in Sicily.
This rocky area is one of the places that Proserpine, daughter of Demeter and Jupiter, frequents with her friends gathering the flowers that grow in the rich volcanic ash.

As she was doing this one day, out of the forest rode Pluto, the King of Hell (her uncle, actually he is brother to both her parents as they themselves are brother and sister, this is a very closely related Ruling Family). He grabbed her and pulled her aboard his smokey chariot.

Cyane realises what is going on and rising out of the water and despite the fact that she is wearing no clothes and he is King of Hell and in a chariot with horses and wheels and waving a sceptre, she argues with him and tells him that what he is doing is a disgrace.
That if he was really in love with Proserpine he should try talking to her and not just abduct her just because he has a chariot and can …
When this line of reasoning fails to make any impression she stands in front of the chariot with her arms out and obstructs it.

But to no avail as Pluto makes a path through her pool to the Underworld.

“ The son of Saturn could scarcely contain his wrath, and urging on the dread horses, he turned his royal sceptre with powerful arm, and plunged it through the bottom of the pool. The earth, pierced, made a road to Tartarus, and swallowed the headlong chariot, into the midst of the abyss.”

Cyane is inconsolable at her inability to prevent the abduction of Proserpine and the desecration of her beautiful fountain. Gradually she disolves into liquid and becomes the pool she had once lived in.

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Bk V:385-424 Calliope sings: Dis and the rape of Proserpine

“Not far from the walls of Enna, there is a deep pool. Pergus is its name. Caÿster does not hear more songs than rise from the swans on its gliding waves. A wood encircles the waters, surrounds them on every side, and its leaves act as a veil, dispelling Phoebus’s shafts. The branches give it coolness, and the moist soil, Tyrian purple flowers: there, it is everlasting Spring. While Proserpine was playing in this glade, and gathering violets or radiant lilies, …
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… The ravisher whipped up his chariot, and urged on the horses, calling them by name, shaking out the shadowy, dark-dyed, reins, over their necks and manes, through deep pools, they say, and the sulphurous reeking swamps of the Palici, vented from a crevice of the earth, to Syracuse where the Bacchiadae, a people born of Corinth between two seas, laid out their city between unequal harbours.

Between Cyane and Pisaean Arethusa, there is a bay enclosed by narrow arms. Here lived Cyane, best known of the Sicilian nymphs, from whom the name of the spring was also taken. She showed herself from the pool as far as her waist, and recognising the goddess, cried out to Dis, ‘No’, and ‘Go no further!’ ‘You cannot be Ceres’s son against her will: the girl should have been asked, and not abused. If it is right for me to compare small things with great, Anapisprized me and I wedded him, but I was persuaded by talk and not by terror.’ Speaking, she stretched her arms out at her sides, obstructing him. The son of Saturn could scarcely contain his wrath, and urging on the dread horses, he turned his royal sceptre with powerful arm, and plunged it through the bottom of the pool. The earth, pierced, made a road to Tartarus, and swallowed the headlong chariot, into the midst of the abyss.”

Bk V:425-486 Calliope sings: Ceres searches for Proserpine

“Cyane, mourning the rape of the goddess, and the contempt for the sanctities of her fountain, nursed an inconsolable grief in her silent heart, and pined away wholly with sorrow. She melted into those waters whose great goddess she had previously been. You might see her limbs becoming softened, her bones seeming pliant, her nails losing their hardness. First of all the slenderest parts dissolve: her dusky hair, her fingers and toes, her feet and ankles (since it is no great transformation from fragile limbs to cool waters). Next her breast and back, shoulders and flanks slip away, vanishing into tenuous streams. At last the water runs in her ruined veins, and nothing remains that you could touch.

Meanwhile the mother, fearing, searches in vain for the maid, through all the earth and sea. Neither the coming of dewy-haired Aurora, nor Hesperus, finds her resting. …
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… It would take too long to tell through what lands and seas the goddess wandered. Searching the whole earth, she failed to find her daughter: she returned to Sicily, and while crossing it from end to end, she came to Cyane, who if she had not been changed would have told all. But though she wished to, she had neither mouth nor tongue, nor anything with which to speak. Still she revealed clear evidence, known to the mother, and showed Persephone’s ribbon, fallen, by chance, into the sacred pool. As soon as she recognised it, the goddess tore her dishevelled hair, and beat her breast again and again with her hands, as if she at last comprehended the rape. She did not know yet where Persephone was, but condemned all the lands, and called them thankless and unworthy of her gift of corn, Sicily, that Trinacria, above all, where she had discovered the traces of her loss.

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorph5.php#Bkfive250

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