Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (e book reader TXT) 📗

‘Let the youth listen, gentlemen. He is but a monk and a plebeian, and knows no better; he has been taught thus. Let him sit here quietly, and perhaps we may be able to teach him otherwise.’

And without interrupting, even by a change of tone, the thread of her discourse, she continued—

‘Listen, then, to a passage from the sixth book of the Iliad, in which last night I seemed to see glimpses of some mighty mystery. You know it well: yet I will read it to you; the very sound and pomp of that great verse may tune our souls to a fit key for the reception of lofty wisdom. For well said Abamnon the Teacher, that “the soul consisted first of harmony and rhythm, and ere it gave itself to the body, had listened to the divine harmony. Therefore it is that when, after having come into a body, it hears such melodies as most preserve the divine footstep of harmony, it embraces such, and recollects from them that divine harmony, and is impelled to it, and finds its home in it, and shares of it as much as it can share.”’

And therewith fell on Philammon’s ear, for the first time, the mighty thunder-roll of Homer’s verse—

So spoke the stewardess: but Hector rushed From the house, the same way back, down stately streets, Through the broad city, to the Scaian gates, Whereby he must go forth toward the plain, There running toward him came Andromache, His ample-dowered wife, Eetion’s child— Eetion the great-hearted, he who dwelt In Thebe under Placos, and the woods Of Placos, ruling over Kilic men. His daughter wedded Hector brazen-helmed, And met him then; and with her came a maid, Who bore in arms a playful-hearted babe An infant still, akin to some fair star, Only and well-loved child of Hector’s house, Whom he had named Scamandrios, but the rest Astyanax, because his sire alone Upheld the weal of Ilion the holy. He smiled in silence, looking on his child But she stood close to him, with many tears; And hung upon his hand, and spoke, and called him. ‘My hero, thy great heart will wear thee out; Thou pitiest not thine infant child, nor me The hapless, soon to be thy widow; The Greeks will slay thee, falling one and all Upon thee: but to me were sweeter far, Having lost thee, to die; no cheer to me Will come thenceforth, if thou shouldst meet thy fate; Woes only: mother have I none, nor sire. For that my sire divine Achilles slew, And wasted utterly the pleasant homes Of Kilic folk in Thebe lofty-walled, And slew Eetion with the sword! yet spared To strip the dead: awe kept his soul from that. Therefore he burnt him in his graven arms, And heaped a mound above him; and around The damsels of the Aegis-holding Zeus, The nymphs who haunt the upland, planted elms. And seven brothers bred with me in the halls, All in one day went down to Hades there; For all of them swift-foot Achilles slew Beside the lazy kine and snow-white sheep. And her, my mother, who of late was queen Beneath the woods of Places, he brought here Among his other spoils; yet set her free Again, receiving ransom rich and great. But Artemis, whose bow is all her joy, Smote her to death within her father’s halls. Hector! so thou art father to me now, Mother, and brother, and husband fair and strong! Oh, come now, pity me, and stay thou here Upon the tower, nor make thy child an orphan And me thy wife a widow; range the men Here by the fig-tree, where the city lies Lowest, and where the wall can well be scaled; For here three times the best have tried the assault Round either Ajax, and Idomeneus, And round the Atridai both, and Tydeus’ son, Whether some cunning seer taught them craft, Or their own spirit stirred and drove them on.’ Then spake tall Hector, with the glancing helm All this I too have watched, my wife; yet much I hold in dread the scorn of Trojan men And Trojan women with their trailing shawls, If, like a coward, I should skulk from war. Beside, I have no lust to stay; I have learnt Aye to be bold, and lead the van of fight, To win my father, and myself, a name. For well I know, at heart and in my thought, The day will come when Ilios the holy Shall lie in heaps, and Priam, and the folk Of ashen-speared Priam, perish all. But yet no woe to come to Trojan men, Nor even to Hecabe, nor Priam king, Nor to my brothers, who shall roll in dust, Many and fair, beneath the strokes of foes, So moves me, as doth thine, when thou shalt go Weeping, led off by some brass-harnessed Greek, Robbed of the daylight of thy liberty, To weave in Argos at another’s loom, Or bear the water of Messeis home, Or Hypereia, with unseemly toils, While heavy doom constrains thee, and perchance The folk may say, who see thy tears run down, “This was the wife of Hector, best in fight At Ilium, of horse-taming Trojan men.” So will they say perchance; while unto thee Now grief will come, for such a husband’s loss, Who might have warded off the day of thrall. But may the soil be heaped above my corpse Before I hear thy shriek and see thy shame!’ He spoke, and stretched his arms to take the child, But back the child upon his nurse’s breast Shrank crying, frightened at his father’s looks. Fearing the brass and crest of horse’s hair Which waved above the helmet terribly. Then out that father dear and mother laughed, And glorious Hector took the helmet off, And laid it gleaming on the ground, and kissed His darling child, and danced him in his arm; And spoke in prayer to Zeus, and all the gods ‘Zeu, and ye other gods, oh grant that this My child, like me, may grow the champion here As good in strength, and rule with might in Troy That men may say, “The boy is better far Than was his sire,” when he returns from war, Bearing a gory harness, having slain A foeman, and his mothers heart rejoice. Thus saying, on the hands of his dear wife He laid the child; and she received him back In fragrant bosom, smiling through her tears.

[Footnote: The above lines are not meant as a ‘translation,’ but as an humble attempt to give the literal sense in some sort of metre. It would be an act of arrogance even to aim at success where Pope and Chapman failed. It is simply, I believe, impossible to render Homer into English verse; because, for one reason among many, it is impossible to preserve the pomp of sound, which invests with grandeur his most common words. How can any skill represent the rhythm of Homeric Greek in a language which—to take the first verse which comes to hand—transforms ‘boos megaloio boeien,’ into ‘great ox’s hide’?]

‘Such is the myth. Do you fancy that in it Homer meant to hand down to the admiration of ages such earthly commonplaces as a mother’s brute affection, and the terrors of an infant? Surely the deeper insight of the philosopher may be allowed without the reproach of fancifulness, to see in it the adumbration of some deeper mystery!

‘The elect soul, for instance—is not its name Astyanax, king of the city; by the fact of its ethereal parentage, the leader and lord of all around it, though it knows it not? A child as yet, it lies upon the fragrant bosom of its mother Nature, the nurse and yet the enemy of man—Andromache, as the poet well names her, because she fights with that being, when grown to man’s estate, whom as a child she nourished. Fair is she, yet unwise; pampering us, after the fashion of mothers, with weak indulgences; fearing to send us forth into the great realities of speculation, there to forget her in the pursuit of glory, she would have us while away our prime within the harem, and play for ever round her knees. And has not the elect soul a