Mythology: Parts Six–Seven

They bound him with rosy garlands, set a flowering wreath on his head, woke him up, and bore him in this ridiculous guise to Midas as a great joke.

It is said that the news was brought to him by his bird, the raven, then pure white with beautiful snowy plumage, and that Apollo in a fit of furious anger, and with the complete injustice the gods usually showed when they were angry, punished the faithful messenger by turning his feathers black.

Chiron was learned in the use of herbs and gentle incantations and cooling potions.

He was able to give aid in all manner of maladies. Whoever came to him suffering, whether from wounded limbs or bodies wasting away with disease, even those who were sick unto death, he delivered from their torment.

At the river’s edge they filled forever jars riddled with holes, so that the water poured away and they must return to fill them again, and again see them drained dry.

She fled from him until she stood on a lofty promontory where she could safely watch him, wondering at the half-man, half-fish.

She prepared a vial of very powerful poison and, going to the bay where Scylla bathed, she poured into it the baleful liquid.

One woman had power given her to assume different shapes, power as great as Proteus had. She used it, strangely enough, to procure food for her starving father.

Her story is the only one in which the good goddess, Ceres, appears cruel and vindictive.

Erysichthon had the wicked audacity to cut down the tallest oak in a grove sacred to Ceres.

His servants shrank from the sacrilege when he ordered them to fell it; whereupon he seized an ax himself and attacked the mighty trunk around which the dryads used to hold their dances.

She cared for fruits and orchards and that was all she cared for. Her delight was in pruning and grafting and everything that belongs to the gardener’s art.

Of all that sought her Vertumnus was the most ardent, but he could make no headway.

Pomona yielded to such beauty joined to such eloquence, and henceforward her orchards had two gardeners.

She was said to have a horn which was always full of whatever food or drink anyone wanted, the Horn of Plenty (in Latin Cornu copiae—also known as “the Cornucopia” in Latin mythology).

Both set up their looms and stretched the warp upon them.

Heaps of skeins of beautiful threads colored like the rainbow lay beside each, and threads of gold and silver too.

Proteus had the power to change himself into any number of different forms. However, if his captor was resolute enough to hold him fast through all the changes, he would finally give in and answer what he was asked.

She pined away sitting on the ground out-of-doors where she could watch him, turning her face and following him with her eyes as he journeyed over the sky.

Marsyas, a satyr, found it and played so enchantingly upon it that he dared to challenge Apollo to a contest. The god won, of course, and punished Marsyas by flaying him.

He learned in this way the art of divination as no one ever had, and he became a famous soothsayer.

These were men created from ants on the island of Aegina, in the reign of Aeacus, Achilles’ grandfather, and they were Achilles’ followers in the Trojan War. Not only were they thrifty and industrious, as one would suppose from their origin, but they were also brave.

A peal of thunder seemed to answer him and that night he dreamed that he saw the ants being transformed into human shape.

This man was another illustration of how fatal it was for mortals to try to emulate the gods.

He had a chariot made in such a way that there was a loud clanging of brass when it moved. On the day of Zeus’s festival he drove it furiously through the town, scattering at the same time firebrands and shouting to the people to worship him because he was Zeus the Thunderer.

The only sustaining support possible for the human spirit, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attain, is heroism; and heroism depends on lost causes.

Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason.

Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason.

Everywhere else in northwestern Europe the early records, the traditions, the songs and stories, were obliterated by the priests of Christianity, who felt a bitter hatred for the paganism they had come to destroy.

The chief part of it is a technical treatise on how to write poetry, but it also contains some prehistoric mythological material which is not in the Elder Edda.

He is a strange and solemn figure, always aloof.

Even so, whenever she had to empty the cup and the poison fell on him, though but for a moment, his agony was so intense that his convulsions shook the earth.

Frigga, Odin’s wife, for whom some say Friday is named, was reputed to be very wise, but she was also very silent and she told no one, not even Odin, what she knew.

In the world were also dwarfs—ugly creatures, but masterly craftsmen, who lived under the earth; and elves, lovely sprites, who tended the flowers and streams.

Allot their lives to the sons of men,
And assign to them their fate.

This vision of a happiness infinitely remote seems a thin sustenance against despair, but it was the only hope the Eddas afforded.

This Norse wisdom-literature is far less profound than the Hebrew Book of Proverbs; indeed it rarely deserves to have the great word “wisdom” applied to it, but the Norsemen who created it had at any rate a large store of good sense, a striking contrast to the uncompromising spirit of the hero.

A man knows nothing if he knows not
That wealth oft begets an ape.

Some show a shrewd knowledge of human nature...

A paltry man and poor of mind
Is he who mocks at all things.