Then her
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, sec. 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 aether; 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.
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