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Let whoever is not flighty in his wits know this, when he has learned of the device of a lit brand contrived by Thestius' heartless daughter:1 [605] she destroyed her own child by burning the charred brand of the same age as he when, coming from his mother's womb, he cried out, and it aged in pace with him through his life [610] to the day decreed by fate.
1 When Meleager, the child of Althaea, who was daughter of Thestius, king of Aetolia, and wife to Oeneus of Calydon, was a week old, the Fates appeared to the mother and declared that he would die when the brand on the hearth was consumed. Whereupon Althaea took the brand and put it in a chest; but when Meleager, grown to youthful manhood, slew her brothers, she threw it into the fire, and her son died suddenly.
Aeschylus. Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. in two volumes. 2. Libation Bearers. Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1926.
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