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In the footsteps of du Comte follows Bacon, in his De Sapientia Veterum; to the moral and physical allegories he adds political ones, as when Jove’s struggle with Typhoeus is made to symbolise a wise ruler’s treatment of a rebellion.
This is the source of those combats which all antiquity has supposed to exist between good and wicked gods, between an Osiris and a Typhoeus; between an Orosmadis and an Arimanis; between a Jupiter and the Titanes; in these rencounters man for his own peculiar interest always gave the palm of victory to the beneficent deity; this, according to all the traditions handed down, ever remained in possession of the field of battle; it was so far right, as it is evidently for the benefit of mankind that the good should prevail over the wicked.
Me, who am attached to your fountains and dances, not the army put to flight at Philippi, not the execrable tree, nor a Palinurus in the Sicilian Sea has destroyed. But what could Typhoeus, and the strong Mimas, or what Porphyrion with his menacing statue; what Rhoetus, and Enceladus, a fierce darter with trees uptorn, avail, though rushing violently against the sounding shield of Pallas?
Under the island of Aetna lies Typhoeus the Titan, in punishment for his share in the rebellion of the giants against Jupiter. Two mountains press down the one his right and the other his left hand while Aetna lies over his head. As Typhoeus moves, the earth shakes; as he breathes, smoke and ashes come up from Aetna.
O, lucky fellow. I only know one stanza and that not perfectly; let me see `Nam quid Typhoeus et validus Mimas nam quid' no; I don't know even that, I see." "Here, let me hear you."
And because the ancients perceived that Heaven to be here below the cause of Love, they said that Love was the son of Venus, as Virgil testifies in the first book of the Æneid, where Venus says to Love: "Oh! son, my virtue, son of the great Father, who takest no heed of the darts of Typhoeus."
After this fashion we gained the spine of mountain which composes Ischia the smooth ascending ridge that grows up from those eastern waves to what was once the apex of fire-vomiting Inarime, and breaks in precipices westward, a ruin of gulfed lava, tortured by the violence of pent Typhoeus. Under a vast umbrella pine we dismounted, rested, and saw Capri.
Typhoeus and Mimas, Porphyrion and Rhoecus, the giant brood of old, steeped in ignorance and wedded to corruption, had scaled the heights of Olympus, assisted by that audacious flinger of deadly ponderous missiles, who stands ever ready armed with his terrific sling Supplehouse, the Enceladus of the press.
Of Atlas there is another story, which I like better than the one told. He was one of the Titans who warred against Jupiter like Typhoeus, Briareus, and others. After their defeat by the king of gods and men, Atlas was condemned to stand in the far western part of the earth, by the Pillars of Hercules, and to hold on his shoulders the weight of heaven and the stars.
Thus marched the host like a consuming fire, and the earth groaned beneath them when the lord of thunder is angry and lashes the land about Typhoeus among the Arimi, where they say Typhoeus lies. Even so did the earth groan beneath them as they sped over the plain. And now Iris, fleet as the wind, was sent by Jove to tell the bad news among the Trojans.
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