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Updated: June 13, 2025


A temple girt with mysterious shade, lifting its colonnade above a sunlit harbour; and before the temple, vine-wreathed nymphs waving their thyrsi through the turns of a melodious dance such was the vision that caught up Odo and swept him leagues away from the rouged and starred assemblage gathered in the boxes to gossip, flirt, eat ices and chocolates, and incidentally, in the pauses of their talk, to listen for a moment to the ravishing airs of Metastasio's Achilles in Scyros.

A pink house with green shutters, half-hidden amid the sombre foliage, appears at the end of an alley of lilacs, "which sway in the spring under the weight of their balmy thyrsi."

The hedges have put on their best draperies of leaves and flowers, and, girdled in at their waist by double osier bands, stagger luxuriantly along the road like a drunken Bacchanal procession, crowned with festive ivy, and holding aloft their snowy clusters of elder-blossoms like thyrsi.

The open lawns were adorned by various plants, amongst which we noticed a species of Drosera, with white and red blossoms? a Mitrasacme; a narrow-leaved Ruellia, the white primrose, the red prostrate malvaceous plant, a low shrubby Pleurandra, and an orchideous plant one of the few representatives of this family in the Australian tropics; the most interesting, however, was a prostrate Grevillea, with oblong smooth leaves, and with thyrsi of fine scarlet flowers; which I consider to be Grevillea Goodii, R. Br.

Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway; nor could he deal with subjects demanding pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates for instance like young and joyous Bacchantes; if we placed rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, they might figure upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii.

And the Maenad there, carrying the torn limb! Also the border of vine-leaves and crossed thyrsi; though that, to be sure, is usual enough. And this next? Ah, I remember 'Tu cum parentis regna per arduum'; but what a devil of a design! And, above all, what mellowness!

'What was our surprise, writes Dr. Meryon, 'to see, as we rode up the avenue, that several beautiful girls had been placed on these pedestals in the most graceful postures, and with garlands in their hands.... On each side of the arch other girls stood by threes, while a row of six was arranged across the gate of the arch with thyrsi in their hands.

Every joint was plainly visible in the mosaic of the pavement, which represented the reception of Heracles into Olympus, the feast of the gods, and the astonishment of the amazed hero at the splendor of the celestial banquet; and hundreds of torches were reflected in the walls of polished yellow marble, brought from Hippo Regius; these were inlaid by skilled artists with costly stones, such as lapis lazuli and malachite, crystals, blood-stone, jasper, agates and chalcedony, to represent fruit-pieces and magnificent groups of game or of musical instruments; while the pilasters were decorated with masks of the tragic and comic Muses, torches, thyrsi wreathed with ivy and vine, and pan-pipes.

In like manner he could not deal with subjects which demand a pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates like young and joyous Bacchantes, places rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii.

And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them. Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of the shore.

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