tales of sea-peril and shipwreck had the most powerful fascination.
Yet to that race of sailors the sea always remained in a manner
hateful; "as much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother," says
Antipater,[27] "so much is earth dearer than the dark sea." The
fisherman tossing on the waves looked back with envy to the shepherd,
who, though his life was no less hard, could sit in quiet piping to
his flock on the green hillside; the great merchantman who crossed the
whole length of the Mediterranean on his traffic, or even ventured out
beyond Calpe into the unknown ocean, hungered for the peace of broad
lands, the lowing of herds.[28] /Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec
nautica pinus mutabit merces/: all dreams of a golden age, or of an
ideal life in an actual world, included in them the release from this
weary and faithless element. Even in death it would not allow its
victims rest; the cry of the drowned man is that though kind hands
have given him burial on the beach, even there the ceaseless thunder
of the surge is in his ears, and the roar of the surf under the broken
reef will not let him be quiet; "keep back but twelve feet from me,"
is his last prayer, "and there billow and roar as much as thou
wilt."[29] But even the grace of a tomb was often denied. In the
desolation of unknown distances the sailor sank into the gulfs or was
flung on a desert beach. Erasippus, perished with his ship, has all
the ocean for his grave; somewhere far away his white bones moulder on
a spot that the seagulls alone can tell. Thymodes rears a cenotaph to
his son, who on some Bithynian beach or island of the Pontic lies a
naked corpse on an inhospitable shore. Young Seleucus, wrecked in the
distant Atlantic, has long been dead on the trackless Spanish coasts,
while yet at home in Lesbos they praise him and look forward to his
return. On the thirsty uplands of Dryopia the empty earth is heaped up
that does not cover Polymedes, tossed up and down far from stony
Trachis on the surge of the Icarian sea. "Also thee, O Cleanoridas,"