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Every sixty years the festival of the Great Daedala was celebrated by all the people of Boeotia; and at it all the images, fourteen in number, which had accumulated at the lesser festivals, were dragged on wains in procession to the river Asopus and then to the top of Mount Cithaeron, where they were burnt on a great pyre.
Indeed it is shrewdly conjectured that Daedalus derived his name from wooden statues called Daedala; and that amongst the ancient Greeks, Daedalus meant nothing more than one skilled in making Daedala. The earliest sculptures of the Greeks were fashioned of materials easily worked, as plaster, clay, and wood.
Every few years the people of Plataea, in Boeotia, held a festival called the Little Daedala, at which they felled an oak-tree in an ancient oak forest. Out of the tree they carved an image, and having dressed it as a bride, they set it on a bullock-cart with a bridesmaid beside it.
"The varied earth, the moving heaven, The rapid waste of roving sea, The fountain-pregnant mountains riven To shapes of wildest anarchy, By secret fire and midnight storms That wander round their windy cones." These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the classical transcript, "the varied earth," daedala tellus. There is the geological interest in the forces that shape the hills.
She throws open the flood-gates of her heart as in words recalling Lucretius: Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli Adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus Summittit floras, tibi rident sequora ponti. She tells of the all-ruling, all-subduing might of "Frau Minne."
Yet in Latin the divini gloria ruris is praised and Natura daedala rerum worshipped, as we are wont to praise and worship them, for their own sweet sakes. It is one of the ways, one of the simpler ways, in which the Roman world seems nearer to us than the Greek: and not only seems, but is so.
His contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions; Nature is not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life, manifesting itself in a million workings, creatrix, gubernans, daedala rerum.
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