one abruptly opens, the thought of all those many others whom the sea
had swallowed down overwhelming him as he tells the fate of the
drowned man.[30] The ocean never forgot its cruelty. {Pasa thalassa
thalassa}, "everywhere the sea is the sea," wails Aristagoras,[31]
past the perilous Cyclades and the foaming narrows of the Hellespont
only to be drowned in a little Locrian harbour; the very sound of the
words echoes the heavy wash of blind waves and the hissing of eternal
foam. Already in sight of home, like Odysseus on his voyage from
Aeolia, the sailor says to himself, "to-morrow the long battle against
contrary winds will be over," when the storm gathers as the words
leave his lips, and he is swept back to death.[32] The rash mariner
who trusts the gale of winter draws fate on himself with his own
hands; Cleonicus, hastening home to Thasos with his merchandise from
Hollow Syria at the setting of the Pleiad, sinks with the sinking
star.[33] But even in the days of the halcyons, when the sea should
stand like a sheet of molten glass, the terrible straits swallow
Aristomenes, with ship and crew; and Nicophemus perishes, not in
wintry waves, but of thirst in a calm on the smooth and merciless
Lybian sea.[34] By harbours and headlands stood the graves of drowned
men with pathetic words of warning or counsel. "I am the tomb of one
shipwrecked"; in these words again and again the verses begin. What
follows is sometimes an appeal to others to take example: "let him
have only his own hardihood to blame, who looses moorings from my
grave"; sometimes it is a call to courage: "I perished; yet even then
other ships sailed safely on." Another, in words incomparable for
their perfect pathos and utter simplicity, neither counsels nor warns:
"O mariners, well be with you at sea and on land; but know that you
pass the tomb of a shipwrecked man." And in the same spirit another
sends a blessing out of his nameless tomb: "O sailor, ask not whose
grave I am, but be thine own fortune a kinder sea."[35]