playing at soldiers—because no bodies are there to stamp on.

What is the point of a host of thousands starting a fight

if no one is killed? And so the attack grows fiercer; they look for

stones on the ground; then, bending their arms, they proceed to hurl them—

the type of weapon normally used by rioting crowds,

not great rocks of the size propelled by Turnus and Ajax,

and not so heavy as that with which the son of Tydeus

smashed Aeneas’ hip, but such as the hands of today

can manage to throw, hands of a kind so different from theirs.

For the human race was already declining in Homer’s time.

Now the earth gives birth to such nasty and puny creatures

that any god who observes them is moved to laughter and loathing.

After that brief digression our story continues. When one side

was joined by reserves, suddenly swords appeared in their hands;

they at once stepped up the attack with showers of deadly arrows.

As Ombi advanced, those who reside in the shady palmgrove

of nearby Téntyra turned their backs and fled in disorder.

One, as he ran in mindless panic, happened to trip,

and was seized. He was promptly chopped into countless bits and pieces,

so that a single corpse might furnish numerous helpings.

After that, the victorious mob devoured the lot,

and picked his bones. They didn’t boil him in a seething cauldron

or roast him on spits. It seemed too long and too slow a business

to wait for a hearth. They were happy to eat the carcase raw.

One can only be grateful here, that they didn’t profane the fire

which you, Prometheus, stole from the highest courts of heaven

and gave to earth. Three cheers for that element! And I imagine

you share my pleasure. But, to the man who chewed the corpse,

that was the most delicious meat he had ever tasted.

Nor, in this horrid act, would I leave you wondering whether

it was only the leader’s gullet that experienced pleasure. The man

who had stood on the edge of the scrimmage, when nothing was left of the carcase,

scratched the ground with his nails to obtain a lick of the gore.

The Váscones, so the story goes, turned to such victuals

to prolong their lives. But the case was different; for over there

they had to contend with a hostile fortune, the disasters of war,

desperate conditions, the appalling distress of a lengthy siege.

It was when they had eaten every plant and creature and object

to which the pangs of a famished stomach drove them, when even too

their enemies pitied their pallor and their wasted skeletal limbs,

that they tore at another’s flesh in their hunger; they were ready to swallow

even their own. What man or god could withhold indulgence

from bellies reduced to such frightful, and such outlandish, extremities,