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There was one Cyanippus a Syracusan, that sacrificed to all the Gods but Bacchus; who took the contempt
so heinously that he made him drunk, in which fit he got
his daughter Cyane into a corner and lay with her. She
in the mean time slipped his ring off his finger, and gave it
to her nurse to keep, as a circumstance that some time or
other might come to be brought in evidence. There brake
out a pestilence, and the Pythian oracle advised the sacrificing of an incestuous person to the Gods that are the
averters of such calamities, as the only remedy. Cyane,
that understood the meaning of the oracle better than
other people, took her father by the hair of the head
and dragged him forth, first stabbing him and then herself.—
[p. 463]
Dositheus, in the Third Book of his Sicilian
History.
In the time of celebrating the Bacchanalia at Rome,
Aruntius, that had never drunk any wine since he was
born, did not show such reverence for the power of the
God as he ought to have done, so that Bacchus intoxicated
him; and in that freak, Aruntius ravished his daughter
Medullina. She came to know the ravisher by his ring,
and an exploit came into her head, above what from her
age could have been expected. She made her father drunk
and set a garland upon his head, carrying him to the altar
of Thunder, where with tears she killed him for robbing
her so treacherously of her virginity.—Aristides, in the
Third Book of his Italian History.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 5.
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