32. First, and chiefly, she is air as the spirit of life, giving
vitality to the blood. Her psychic relation to the vital force in matter
lies deeper, and we will examine it afterwards; but a great number of the
most interesting passages in Homer regard her as flying over the earth in
local and transitory strength, simply and merely the goddess of fresh
air.
It is curious that the British city which has somewhat saucily styled
itself the Modern Athens is indeed more under her especial tutelage and
favor in this respect than perhaps any other town in the island. Athena
is first simply what in the Modern Athens you practically find her, the
breeze of the mountain and the sea; and wherever she comes, there is
purification, and health, and power. The sea-beach round this isle of
ours is the frieze of our Parthenon; every wave that breaks on it
thunders with Athena's voice; nay, wherever you throw your window wide
open in the morning, you let in Athena, as wisdom and fresh air at the
same instant; and whenever you draw a pure, long, full breath of right
heaven, you take Athena into your heart, through your blood; and, with
the blood, into the thoughts of your brain.
Now, this giving of strength by the air, observe, is mechanical as well
as chemical. You cannot strike a good blow but with your chest full;
and, in hand to hand fighting, it is not the muscle that fails first, it
is the breath; the longest-breathed will, on the average, be the victor,
--not the strongest. Note how Shakespeare always leans on this. Of
Mortimer, in "changing hardiment with great Glendower":
"Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood."
And again, Hotspur, sending challenge to Prince Harry:
"That none might draw short breath to-day
But I and Harry Monmouth."
Again, of Hamlet, before he receives his wound:
"He's fat, and scant of breath."
Again, Orlando in the wrestling:
"Yes; I beseech your grace
I am not yet well breathed."
Now, of all the people that ever lived, the Greeks knew best what breath
meant, both in exercise and in battle, and therefore the queen of the air
becomes to them at once the queen of bodily strength in war; not mere
brutal muscular strength,--that belongs to Ares,--but the strength of
young lives passed in pure air and swift exercise,--Camilla's virginal
force, that "flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main."
33. Now I will rapidly give you two or three instances of her direct
agency in this function. First, when she wants to make Penelope bright
and beautiful; and to do away with the signs of her waiting and her
grief. "Then Athena thought of another thing; she laid her into a deep
sleep, and loosed all her limbs, and made her taller, and made her
smoother, and fatter, and whiter than sawn ivory; and breathed ambrosial
brightness over her face; and so she left her and went up to heaven."
Fresh air and sound sleep at night, young ladies! You see you may have
Athena for lady's maid whenever you choose. Next, hark how she gives
strength to Achilles when he is broken with fasting and grief. Jupiter
pities him and says to her, "'Daughter mine, are you forsaking your own
soldier, and don't you care for Achilles any more? See how hungry and
weak he is,--go and feed him with ambrosia.' So he urged the eager
Athena; and she leaped down out of heaven like a harpy falcon,
shrill-voiced; and she poured nectar and ambrosia, full of delight, into
the breast of Achilles, that his limbs might not fail with famine; then
she returned to the solid dome of her strong father." And then comes the
great passage about Achilles arming--for which we have no time. But here
is again Athena giving strength to the whole Greek army. She came as a
falcon to Achilles, straight at him, a sudden drift of breeze; but to the
army she must come widely, she sweeps around them all. "As when Jupiter
spreads the purple rainbow over heaven, portending battle or cold storm,
so Athena, wrapping herself round with a purple cloud, stooped to the
Greek soldiers, and raised up each of them." Note that purple, in
Homer's use of it, nearly always means "fiery," "full of light." It is
the light of the rainbow, not the color of it, which Homer means you to
think of.
34. But the most curious passage of all, and fullest of meaning, is when
she gives strength to Menelaus, that he may stand unwearied against
Hector. He prays to her: "And blue-eyed Athena was glad that he prayed
to her, first; and she gave him strength in his shoulders, and in his
limbs, an she gave him the courage"--of what animal, do you suppose? Had
it been Neptune or Mars, they would have given him the courage of a bull,
or a lion; but Athena gives him the courage of the most fearless in
attack of all creatures, small or great, and very small it is, but wholly
incapable of terror,--she gives him the courage of a fly.
35. Now this simile of Homer's is one of the best instances I can give
you of the way in which great writers seize truths unconsciously which
are for all time. It is only recent science which has completely shown
the perfectness of this minute symbol of the power of Athena; proving
that the insect's flight and breath are co-ordinated; that its wings are
actually forcing-pumps, of which the stroke compels the thoracic
respiration; and that it thus breathes and flies simultaneously by the
action of the same muscles, so that respiration is carried on most
vigorously during flight, "while the air-vessels, supplied by many pairs
of lungs instead of one, traverse the organs of flight in far greater
numbers than the capillary blood-vessels of our own system, and give
enormous and untiring muscular power, a rapidity of action measured by
thousands of strokes in the minute, and an endurance, by miles and hours
of flight."*
* Ormerod: "Natural History of Wasps."
Homer could not have known this; neither that the buzzing of the fly
was produced, as in a wind instrument, by a constant current of air
through the trachea. But he had seen, and, doubtless, meant us to
remember, the marvellous strength and swiftness of the insect's flight
(the glance of the swallow itself is clumsy and slow compared to the
darting of common house-flies at play); he probably attributed its
murmur to the wings, but in this also there was a type of what we shall
presently find recognized in the name of Pallas,--the vibratory power
of the air to convey sound, while, as a purifying creature, the fly holds
its place beside the old symbol of Athena in Egypt, the vulture; and as
a venomous and tormenting creature has more than the strength of the
serpent in proportion to its size, being thus entirely representative
of the influence of the air both in purification and pestilence; and its
courage is so notable that, strangely enough, forgetting Homer's simile,
I happened to take the fly for an expression of the audacity of freedom
in speaking of quite another subject.* Whether it should be called
courage, or mere mechanical instinct, may be questioned, but assuredly
no other animal, exposed to continual danger, is so absolutely without
sign of fear.
* See farther on, §148, pp. 154-156.
36. You will, perhaps, have still patience to hear two instances, not of
the communication as strength, but of the personal agency of Athena as
the air. When she comes down to help Diomed against Ares, she does not
come to fight instead of him, but she takes his charioteer's place.
"She snatched the reins, she lashed with all her force,
And full on Mars impelled the foaming horse."
Ares is the first to cast his spear; then--note this--Pope says:
"Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance,
Far from the car, the strong immortal lance."
She does not oppose her hand in the Greek--the wind could not meet the
lance straight--she catches it in her hand, and throws it off. There is
no instance in which a lance is so parried by a mortal hand in all the
Iliad, and it is exactly the way the wind would parry it, catching it,
and turning it aside. If there are any good rifleshots here, they know
something about Athena's parrying; and in old times the English masters
of feathered artillery knew more yet. Compare also the turning of
Hector's lance from Achilles: Iliad, xx. 439.
37. The last instance I will give you is as lovely as it is subtile.
Throughout the Iliad, Athena is herself the will or Menis of Achilles.
If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms him; if angered, it is she
who inflames him. In the first quarrel with Atreides, when he stands at
pause, with the great sword half drawn, "Athena came from heaven, and
stood behind him and caught him by the yellow hair." Another god would
have stayed his hand upon the hilt, but Athena only lifts his hair. "And
he turned and knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon him." There is
an exquisite tenderness in this laying her hand upon his hair, for it is
the talisman of his life, vowed to his own Thessalian river if he ever
returned to its shore, and cast upon Patroclus' pile, so ordaining that
there should be no return.
38. Secondly, Athena is the air giving vegetative impulse to the earth.
She is the wind and the rain, and yet more the pure air itself, getting
at the earth fresh turned by spade or plough, and, above all, feeding the
fresh leaves; for though the Greeks knew nothing about carbonic acid,
they did know that trees fed on the air.
Now, note first in this, the myth of the air getting at ploughed land.
You know I told you the Lord of all labor by which man lived was
Hephæstus; therefore Athena adopts a child of his, and of the Earth,--
Erichthonius,--literally, "the tearer up of the ground," who is the head
(though not in direct line) of the kings of Attica; and, having adopted
him, she gives him to be brought up by the three nymphs of the dew. Of
these, Aglauros, the dweller in the fields, is the envy or malice of the
earth; she answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the ground,
against his shepherd brother, in her own envy against her two sisters,
Herse, the cloud dew, who is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury; and
Pandrosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven. Literally, you have in
this myth the words of the blessing of Esau: "Thy dwelling shall be of
the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above." Aglauros
is for her envy turned into a black stone; and hers is one of the voices
--the other being that of Cain--which haunts the circle of envy in the
Purgatory:
"Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso."
But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius (or the hero Erectheus), is
built the most sacred temple of Athena in Athens; the temple to their own
dearest Athena--to her, and to the dew together; so that it was divided
into two parts: one, the temple of Athena of the city, and the other that
of the dew. And this expression of her power, as the air bringing the
dew to the hill pastures, in the central temple of the central city of
the heathen, dominant over the future intellectual world, is, of all the
facts connected with her worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most
important. I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth part of the
different ways in which it bears both upon natural beauty, and on the
best order and happiness of men's lives. I hope to follow out some of
these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about
field herbage; but I must say briefly here that the great sign, to the
Greeks, of the coming of spring in the pastures, was not, as with us, in
the primrose, but in the various flowers of the asphodel tribe (of which
I will give you some separate account presently); therefore it is that
the earth answers with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida; and the power
of Athena in eternal life is written by the light of the asphodel on the
Elysian fields.
But further, Athena is the air, not only to the lilies of the field, but
to the leaves of the forest. We saw before the reason why Hermes is said
to be the son of Maia, the eldest of the sister stars of spring. Those
stars are called not only Pleiades, but Vergiliæ, from a word mingling
the ideas of the turning or returning of springtime with the outpouring
of rain. The mother of Vergil bearing the name of Maia, Vergil himself
received his name from the seven stars; and he, forming first the mind of
Dante, and through him that of Chaucer (besides whatever special minor
influence came from the Pastorals and Georgics) became the fountainhead
of all the best literary power connected with the love of vegetative
nature among civilized races of men. Take the fact for what it is worth;
still it is a strange seal of coincidence, in word and in reality, upon
the Greek dream of the power over human life, and its purest thoughts, in
the stars of spring. But the first syllable of the name of Vergil has
relation also to another group of words, of which the English ones,
virtue and virgin, bring down the force to modern days. It is a group
containing mainly the idea of "spring," or increase of life in
vegetation--the rising of the new branch of the tree out of the bud, and
of the new leaf out of the ground. It involves, secondarily, the idea
of greenness and of strength, but, primarily, that of living increase of
a new rod from a stock, stem, or root ("There shall come forth a rod out
of the stem of Jesse"); and chiefly the stem of certain plants--either of
the rose tribe, as in the budding of the almond rod of Aaron; or of the
olive tribe, which has triple significance in this symbolism, from the
use of its oil for sacred anointing, for strength in the gymnasium, and
for light. Hence, in numberless divided and reflected ways, it is
connected with the power of Hercules and Athena: Hercules plants the wild
olive, for its shade, on the course of Olympia, and it thenceforward
gives the Olympic crown of consummate honor and rest; while the prize at
the Panathenaic games is a vase of its oil (meaning encouragement to
continuance of effort); and from the paintings on these Panathenaic vases
we get the most precious clue to the entire character of Athena. Then to
express its propagation by slips, the trees from which the oil was to be
taken were called "Moriai," trees of division (being all descendents of
the sacred one in the Erechtheum). And thus, in one direction, we get to
the "children like olive plants round about thy table" and the olive
grafting of St. Paul; while the use of the oil for anointing gives chief
name to the rod itself of the stem of Jesse, and to all those who were by
that name signed for his disciples first in Antioch. Remember, further,
since that name was first given the influence of the symbol, both in
extreme unction and in consecration of priests and kings to their "divine
right;" and thing, if you can reach with any grasp of thought, what the
influence on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose leaves
give gray bloom to the hillsides under every breeze that blows from the
midland sea. But, above and beyond all, think how strange it is that the
chief Agonia of humanity, and the chief giving of strength from heaven
for its fulfilment, should have been under its night shadow in Palestine.