“The son of the Midwife’s sister here, she who formerly served the famous ‘Nymph in Antro’ until she was made big with child by that King of the Latins who is building in Italy a New Troy upon Seven Hills, has been weaned from his mother’s breasts and can now be fed by hand. There have been rumours in the Palace that the marriage of the Maiden Leipephile to Agelaos the son of Krateros Naubolides will shortly take place. It is also reported that the other divine horse, the beautifully-maned one who has so often accompanied Pegasos when not using his wings or crossing the sea, has on several occasions been heard exchanging human speech with the Herdsman Tis. This strange event which seems to be unquestionably true has had the effect of greatly increasing the already high esteem with which Herdsman Tis is regarded, not only by Krateros Naubolides and his son Agelaos, but also by Nosodea the mother of both Leipephile and Spartika the Priestess of Athene’s Temple.”
Here the Fly’s lively rendering of the conversation between the Sixth Pillar and the Club of Herakles was broken up by the Fly himself. As a scientific translator of the measured monotone in which the Sixth Pillar reported to the Heraklean Club the elemental gossip that reached it through earth and air and fire and water the Fly, for all his extravagant “adverbialism”, was intelligible and sensible.
It was, in the manner of most great scientists, only when he enlarged on his purely personal grievances that his emotions tended to erupt in spasms of disconcerting spleen. “The bitch! The bitch! the bitch! the bitch!” he now buzzed in our friend’s ears.
“Excuse me, O thou newly-proclaimed son of abysmally-enduring Odysseus, but I must incontinently go to emphatically warn that adulterously-and-slavishly-behaving whore that I’ve got my eye on her!”
It was indeed clear to Nisos that what the Fly feared was that Pegasos might suddenly spread his tremendous wings and create such a rush of wind that the Moth would be perforce carried off through the air to the land of Phaiakia and that he would never see her again. And as the pair of them, for like other fluttering priest-worshippers the Moth was susceptible to firm handling, returned to the weapon in the old hero’s grasp, it struck the boy’s mind as a topic upon which it was really incumbent upon him to ponder carefully in view of his future as prophet, namely as to what part the material size of a living Being ought to play in diminishing or increasing that Being’s moral responsibility. To put it plainly, should the conscience of an insect be as tender and as quickly touched by remorse as the conscience of a whale?
A rasping stab in the vitals not so much of his conscience as of his intelligence hit him at that moment; and to the end of his days he always associated it with two things whose logical connection was merely that they belonged to the same animal. Something in the mast or the rigging interfered with the fall of the moonlight upon that glossy-dark supernatural form, whose fibres and muscles and tendons and curving sinews seemed to ripple in their relaxed quiescence not unlike the way the surface of the ocean itself was at that moment faintly stirring, but whatever it was that caused it, some kind of phantom-foam-drop appeared on the left front hoof of Pegasos gleaming with a light which seemed, in spite of it having descended from the full moon, to be an inner light, the light of a mind rather than of any external luminary.
And what became for Nisos a life-long memory, what became for him yet another symbol of that spoudazo-terpsis, “my whole will to enjoy what happens”, which was now his war-cry, was the strange fact that this inward gleam in the left front hoof of the flying horse corresponded with, and answered to, an inner light in the fathomless depth of the liquid eye which Pegasos turned upon his passengers as he twisted his flexible neck round to see whether everyone was comfortably and securely mounted.
But no metaphysical war-cries and no mystical symbols can keep certain painful and jarring jolts and jerks from destroying our peace; and the splinter that now pierced our young friend’s ideal chain of reasoning was a teasing and academic kind of question following closely on the childish one he had just asked himself about the conscience of a fly compared with that of a whale.
And the point was this. How far were the gods, by nature, by tradition, by custom, by international law, and finally by the necessity of the case, exempt from the moral law that all human beings of every tribe in the world feel an instinctive imperative, wherever it comes from, to obey?
When for instance Zeus swallowed the great prophetess Metis for fear of a fatal rival, was he breaking the moral law? The result, our teachers say, was the birth of Athene from his head. But does that redeem his murder of Metis? Athene was not Metis. To be the daughter of a mother born out of the head of the person who swallowed her does not make you your mother. It makes you a woman with every reason to avenge your mother on the person who swallowed her.
Themis the Goddess of Order may have been forced to yield to the embraces of Zeus, but it was she who named her daughter Dike, “Just Retribution” and all his thunderings and lightnings cannot save the All-Father from the penalty of his crimes.
“By Aidoneus, no! When the time comes for me to be a Prophet the great test of my truth and the truth of what I prophesy can be only one thing, whether I do or do not make it clear that not one of the gods — no! not even the Son of Kronos himself — can escape from the Law of Retribution. Shall I really be what I so long to be when I return from this voyage? O Atropos, thou great little goddess of Fate, give me—” His thoughts, and, we are compelled to add, his prayer to Destiny too, were broken off short by seeing Zeuks rush to the stern of the ship and disappear down the ladder. “He is after Arsinöe! He is after my girl!”
Every muscle in Nisos’ tall slender frame grew stiff and tense. “I forgot her! I forgot her! I forgot her! And he had forgotten her. Hypnotized by the fathomless moon-stone of that unnatural eye in the hoof of the Flying Horse, and quivering with excitement, as indeed was Pegasos himself, in anticipation of the spreading of those tremendous wings and of the immortal creature’s leap upwards into the air, Nisos had not only forgotten his deliberate association of his newly formulated life-logos, spoudazo-terpsis, with Arsinöe rather than with Eione or Pontopereia; but he had completely lost the image — though it now came back with a rush and filled his whole consciousness — of the Trojan maid herself.
“God! What a ‘kakos’, what a cad I am!” But it was no use dancing a remorse dance, or calling upon Dionysos or Eros. What he had to do, if he had anything left in him but downcast aidos or pure “shame”, was to go after this incorrigible Zeuks and snatch Arsinöe away from him. But how could he, though he was the son of Odysseus and not of Krateros Naubolides, contend with the son of an immortal god, and that god none other than Arcadian Pan, whose passion for girls and obsession by girls amounted to an absolute mania?
“But you never know,” he told himself.
“For not only is ‘all fair in love and war’, but in all earthly struggles, whether between races, or persons, or things, it is Chance, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, who changes the wind, and gathers the rain, and loses or saves the day.
“What a curious nature mine is!” Nisos said to himself, instinctively making use of all the analytical intelligence he had, and he had a good deal more than most young men, to put an end to the smarting sting of self-reproach. “Here I am shivering with intense interest to see Pegasos mount up from the deck of the ‘Teras’ and yet I feel if I am to keep any self-respect at all I ought to invent some excuse, any confounded excuse, such as a desire to use a bucket down below, or to get a weapon from the pile of them in the big cabin, or to ask one of those Libyans to lend me his pocket-knife, and, muttering this same invented excuse, I ought to throw an easy self-contained glance at Odysseus, and slip off past Akron.