The flaying of Marsyas

Sic ubi nescio quis Lycia de gente virorum
rettulit exitium, satyri reminiscitur alter,
quem Tritoniaca Latous harundine victum
adfecit poena. ‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit;
‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti!’
clamanti cutis est summos direpta per artus,
nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat; cruor undique manat,
detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla
pelle micant venae; salientia viscera possis
et perlucentes numerare in pectore fibras.
illum ruricolae, silvarum numina, fauni
et satyri fratres et tunc quoque carus Olympus
et nymphae flerunt, et quisquis montibus illis
lanigerosque greges armentaque bucera pavit.
fertilis inmaduit madefactaque terra caducas
concepit lacrimas ac venis perbibit imis;
quas ubi fecit aquam, vacuas emisit in auras.
inde petens rapidus ripis declivibus aequor
Marsya nomen habet, Phrygiae liquidissimus amnis.

And as someone thus told of the fate of those Lycians, another recalls Marsyas, whom Apollo visited with punishment when he had excelled the satyr’s performance on Pallas’s pipe. “You are tearing me apart! Why?” Marsyas cries, “Aaah! I wish I hadn’t done it! Aaah! No flute is worth  as much as this!” he yelled. And as he yelled, his skin was ripped off past the ends of his limbs,  he was just one big wound, and everywhere blood flows; stripped bare, tendons lie open to the view, quivering veins pulse with no skin to cover them; and you could count each twitching entrail and translucent fibre in his chest. The country-dwellers wept for him, native spirits of the woods, his brother fauns and satyrs, the nymphs and those Olympians who cared for him too, and all that pasture woolly sheep and horned cattle on those mountains. The moist, fertile earth caught their falling tears and drank them into her deepest veins and, turned back to water, returned them to the open air. From them, as, rushing down its steep banks, it seeks the sea, the Marsyas, Phrygia’s clearest river, takes its name.