Context: Myrrha’s soliloquy, in which she meditates on her forbidden sexual love for her own father, yet unconsummated.
Starting at line 349, this was a hard sentence for me. I quickly got a general idea of what was suggested in the lines, but I could find no parsing until after reading a translation.
“Nec metues atro crinitas angue sorores,
quas facibus saevis oculos atque ora petentes
noxia corda vident?”
The implicit premise is that there exist punishing divinities, sisters with black snakes for hair, who, with torches, attack the faces and eyes of evil-hearted persons. I don’t know the mythology here. Humans with guilty hearts (noxia corde) see these sisters. The passage suggests that the sisters are the last things the guilty-hearted do see, since the sisters are attacking eyes with torches.
“quas”: antecedent is “sorores”
“petentes”: present active participle, accusative plural, agrees with “quas”
“noxia corda”: neuter plural, nominative, “guilty hearts”. This agrees with the implied plural subject of “vident”. Either “noxia corda” is the subject, or an appositive to the subject.
“quas . . . petentes”: This seems to be a frequent pattern in Latin. A word and its modifier enclose a phrase. So in English literally the line says:
“whom [quas] with cruel torches eyes and faces attacking [petentes]”
Of course, the torches aren’t fierce–the Furies are. The epithet is transferred. The technical name for this figure, which, as you must have noticed by now, is very common in Latin poetry, is hypallage (I had to look this up to make sure).
The Myrrha episode is one of Ovid’s tragic stories of women tormented by, and eventually yielding to, illicit passions. For the most part, these are in the middle third of the Metamorphoses, and they are generally drawn with sympathy for their protagonists, at least in my reading. The middle section moves seamlessly from the “crimes of the gods” that predominated in the earlier part of the poem to more profoundly sympathetic stories of humans, most but not all tragic, with little or no divine intervention.
The Fury Tisiphone (the name means “avanger of murder”) figured prominently in the story of Athamas and Ino, beginning at 4.416, part of the “crimes of the gods” series.