The Queen of the Air | Page 7

bestowal of favor and of indignation); Fortitude (patience
under trial by pain); and Temperance (patience under trial by pleasure).
With respect to these four virtues, the attributes of Athena are all
distinct. In her prudence, or sight in darkness, she is "Glaukopis,"
"owl-eyed."* In her justice, which is the dominant virtue, she wears
two robes, one of light, and one of darkness; the robe of light, saffron
color, or the color of the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her wholly
with favor and love,--the calm of the sky in blessing; it is embroidered
along its edge with her victory over the giants (the troublous powers of
the earth), and the likeness of it was woven yearly by the Athenian
maidens and carried to the temple of their own Athena, not to the
Parthenon, that was the temple of all the world's Athena,--but this they
carried to the temple of their own only one who loved them, and stayed

with them always. Then her robe of indignation is worn on her breast
and left arm only, fringed with fatal serpents, and fastened with
Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone; physically, the lightning and hail
of chastisement by storm. Then in her fortitude she wears the crested
and unstooping hemlet;** and lastly, in her temperance, she is the
queen of maidenhood--stainless as the air of heaven.
* There are many other meanings in the epithet; see farther on, §91, pp.
133, 134. ** I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one
meaning at a time. Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask, sometimes a
sign of anger, sometimes of the highest light of æther; but I cannot
speak of all this at once.
16. But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the
two main ones,--of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble
patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have
divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs,
--one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a
mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the
incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight
and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal
whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of
sorrow, the much enduring, and the long-suffering.
* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin
Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the
root of the English "mind."
17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in
religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I hope
some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the
ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical
nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their
essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this
character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is one of
the most curious errors of modernism,--the peculiar and judicial
blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the
sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language
when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed
to a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests,

studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and
especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely
ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two
broad classes of worthy or worthless,--good, and good for nothing. And
even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or
disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive
because it is not like a sermon. Horce does not say that it is like a
sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had
had the advantage of hearing a sermon. "I have been reading that story
of Troy again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared
for), "quietly at Præneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly
I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless,
may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's
talk put together."* Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only, but
of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are didactic
in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first,