The Queen of the Air - Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm by John Ruskin
page 17 of 152 (11%)
page 17 of 152 (11%)
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robe of indignation is worn on her breast and left arm only, fringed with
fatal serpents, and fastened with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone; physically, the lightning and hail of chastisement by storm. Then in her fortitude she wears the crested and unstooping hemlet;** and lastly, in her temperance, she is the queen of maidenhood--stainless as the air of heaven. * There are many other meanings in the epithet; see farther on, §91, pp. 133, 134. ** I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one meaning at a time. Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask, sometimes a sign of anger, sometimes of the highest light of æther; but I cannot speak of all this at once. 16. But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the two main ones,--of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs, --one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much enduring, and the long-suffering. * This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the |
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