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Updated: April 30, 2025
How terrible is the one fact of beauty! not only the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium" for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and carries a torch and wears a serpent for a wreath as truly as any of the Eumenides.
To none but Timotheus, the high-priest of Serapis, had he spoken graciously. Others confirmed this report; and dissatisfaction found expression in muttered abuse or satirical remarks and bitter witticisms. "Why did he drive past so quickly?" asked a tailor's wife; and some one replied: "Because the Eumenides, who haunt him for murdering his brother, lash him on with their whips of snakes!"
Such a moaning of the shadows has the tenacity of a syllogism. Here is a vast trouble for thought. Here is the raison d'être of mythologies and polytheisms. To the terror of those great murmurs are added superhuman outlines melting away as they appear Eumenides which are almost distinct, throats of Furies shaped in the clouds, Plutonian chimeras almost defined.
"Prometheus" shows us the martyrdom which waits for all the saviors of men; the "Eumenides" is the glorification of Athens and the Areopagus that is to say, of a truly human civilization. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal type of tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of nations! March 31, 1873.
The man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine destiny. Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.
He had been a king among his schoolfellows largely because of them, and of the athletic prowess which went with them; and while at Oxford he had been cast for the part of Apollo in "The Eumenides," Nature having clearly designed him for it in spite of the lamentable deficiencies in his Greek scholarship, which gave his prompters and trainers so much trouble.
The three Eumenides at this period were half-grown girls, whom their mother was carefully tutoring to drive guilty persons mad by the stings of conscience: and very quaint it was to see the young Furies at practise in the schoolroom, black-robed, and waving lighted torches, and crowned each with her garland of pet serpents.
Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury; even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug.
But should the Lady Thyone speak of the Eumenides who pursued me, tell her that they had probably again extended their arms toward me, but when I return to-morrow from the palaestra I shall be freed from the terrible beings."
She was indeed a new Antigone, ready to lead him in his moral blindness to an altar of atonement more pure than the ensanguined shrine of the Athenian Eumenides. Her visits to Omega Street were not entirely devoted to tete-a-tetes with her father. Of course such interviews could not take place in the presence of Diana.
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