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Then the serpents, in their turn, wound with their coils about the young child, the child unweaned, that wept never in his nursling days; but again they relaxed their spines in stress, of pain, and strove to find some issue from the grasp of iron. Now Alcmena heard the cry, and wakened first, 'Arise, Amphitryon, for numbing fear lays hold of me: arise, nor stay to put shoon beneath thy feet!
A sad dialogue between Megara the wife and Alcmena the mother of the wandering Heracles. Megara had seen her own children slain by her lord, in his frenzy, while Alcmena was constantly disquieted by ominous dreams. My mother, wherefore art thou thus smitten in thy soul with exceeding sorrow, and the rose is no longer firm in thy cheeks as of yore? why, tell me, art thou thus disquieted?
"Then I saw Alcmena, the wife of Amphitryon, who also bore to Jove indomitable Hercules; and Megara who was daughter to great King Creon, and married the redoubtable son of Amphitryon. "I also saw fair Epicaste mother of king Oedipodes whose awful lot it was to marry her own son without suspecting it.
In Moore's "Rhymes on the Road," the poet, speaking of Alpine scenery, alludes to the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes thus: "Even here, in this region of wonders, I find That light-footed Fancy leaves Truth far behind, Or at least, like Hippomenes, turns her astray By the golden illusions he flings in her way." Hercules was the son of Jupiter and Alcmena.
That of Alcmena, in Plautus, is much to the purpose, where he brings in a young woman speaking thus: "I take not that to be my dowry, which The vulgar sort do wealth and honour call; That all my wishes terminate in this: I'll obey my husband and be chaste withall; To have God's fear, and beauty in my mind, To do those good who are virtuously inclined."
The stock instance of the dreadful consequences that might flow from doing one or the other was that of Alcmena, who travailed with Hercules for seven days and seven nights, because the goddess Lucina sat in front of the house with clasped hands and crossed legs, and the child could not be born until the goddess had been beguiled into changing her attitude.
True, there had been the wife of Ixion and Danae, and Europa and Semele, and Alcmena, and Latona, not to mention herself in days gone by, but he never loved any of these as he now loved her, in spite of his having been married to her for so many years. What then does she want?
The sixth is the son of Alcmena by Jupiter; but by the third Jupiter, for there are many Jupiters, as you shall soon see.
Some modern Pantagruelists, to shun and avoid that manual labour which such a separating and partitional work would of necessity require, employ certain cataractic instruments, composed and formed after the same manner that the froward, pettish, and angry Juno did hold the fingers of both her hands interwovenly clenched together when she would have hindered the childbirth delivery of Alcmena at the nativity of Hercules; and athwart those cataracts they break and bruise to very trash the woody parcels, thereby to preserve the better the fibres, which are the precious and excellent parts.
They may please and charm for their hour, but they have not the immortality of the first heroines of all of Helen, or of that Alcmena who makes even comedy grave when she enters, and even Plautus chivalrous.
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