Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 | Page 3

human
transactions. These occasioned partisanships, heartburnings, and
factions in the otherwise serene Olympian palaces. Even Father Zeus
himself acknowledged a bias for sacred Ilium and its king and people
over all the cities of terrestrial men beneath the sun and starry heaven.
In the ten-years' war at Troy, the Olympians were active partisans upon
both sides at times, now screening their favorites from danger, and now
even pitting themselves against combatants of more vulnerable flesh
and blood. But in the matter of vulnerability they seem not to have
enjoyed complete exemption, any more than did Milton's angels.
Although they ate not bread nor drank wine, still there was in their
veins a kind of ambrosial blood called _ichor_, which the prick of a
javelin or spear would cause to flow freely. Even Ares, the genius of
homicide and slaughter, was on one occasion at least wounded by a
mortal antagonist, and sent out of the melee badly punished, so that he
bellowed like a bull-calf, as he mounted on a dusty whirlwind to
Olympus. Over his misadventures while playing his own favorite game
certainly there were no tears to be shed; but when, prompted by
motherly tenderness, Aphrodite, the soft power of love,--she of the
Paphian boudoir, whose recesses were glowing with the breath of
Sabaean frankincense fumed by a hundred altars,--she at whose
approach the winds became hushed, and the clouds fled, and the daedal

earth poured forth sweet flowers,--when such a presence manifested
herself on the field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection,
and attempted to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes
with a fold of her shining _peplum_, surely the audacious Grecian king
should have forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his
wrath elsewhere. But no,--he pierced her skin with his spear, so that,
shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her
immortal homestead. The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who
put his lance in rest against the immortals had but a short lease of life to
live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire's return, nor
climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Homer, in the first books of his "Ilias," permits us to glance into the
banqueting-hall of Olympus. The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit,
Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty. Hephaestus the Cripple has taken
their place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable
laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of "passing the
rosy." His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos
from the threshold of heaven. So, all day long, says the poet, they
revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop. It
is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours, conforming, in
this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard. Duly at set of sun they betook
themselves to their couches. Zeus himself slept, and by his side Herè of
the Golden Throne.
Who would wish to have lived a pagan under that old Olympian
dispensation, even though, like the dark-eyed Greek of the Atreidean
age, his fancy could have "fetched from the blazing chariot of the Sun a
beardless youth who touched a golden lyre and filled the illumined
groves with ravishment"?--even though, like him, he might in
myrtle-grove and lonely mountain-glen have had favors granted him
even by Idalian Aphrodite the Beautiful, and felt her warm breath
glowing upon his forehead, or been counselled by the blue-eyed Athene,
or been elevated to ample rule by Herè herself, Heaven's queen? That
Greek heaven was heartless, libidinous, and cold. It had no mild
divinities appointed to bind up the broken heart and assuage the grief of
the mourner. The weary and the heavy-laden had no celestial resource
amongst its immortal revellers and libertines, male and female. There
was no sympathy for mortal suffering amongst those divine sensualists.

They talked with contempt and unsympathizing ridicule of the woes of
the earthborn, of the brevity of mortal life, and of its miseries. A boon,
indeed, and a grateful exchange, was the Mother Mild of the Roman
Catholic Pantheon, the patroness of the broken-hearted, who inclines
her countenance graciously to the petitions of womanly anguish, for the
voluptuous Aphrodite, the haughty Juno, the Di-Vernonish Artemis,
and the lewd and wanton nymphs of forest, mountain, ocean, lake, and
river. Ceres alone, of the old female classic daemons, seemed to be
endowed with a truly womanly tenderness and regard for humankind.
She, like the Mater Dolorosa, is represented in the myths to have
known bereavement and sorrow, and she, therefore, could sympathize
with the grief of mothers sprung from Pyrrha's stem. Nay, she had
envied them their mortality, which enabled them to