“Worship these alone; and Eros will give you the only clue to the inexhaustible joy of life, and Dionysos will give you the only redemption from the inexhaustible misery of life!”
It was at that moment, as the voice of Enorches died down, that Nisos recalled a curious little event that had occurred just before he set out that morning with Odysseus. Carrying the heavy load with which he had started, his head held high and his right hand raised to keep the balance of the great sack which was swaying on his shoulder, he had been too excited to give much thought to those he was leaving.
In her natural feeling for her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros Naubolides, Leipephile had turned aside while the king’s old Nurse was waving them goodbye.
Naturally enough also the Trojan maid Arsinöe had turned aside from watching them depart. But Eione, the little sister of Tis, had followed them. Yes, she had followed them as far as the last Olive-Tree in the palace garden.
Here, as she waved her farewell, the wind from the bay, which they were facing as they went off, blew a loose fold of her garment so shamelessly clear from her perfectly formed thighs that unwilling to give an impression of immodesty and at the same time reluctant to stop waving to them till they were out of sight she went on waving with one hand while with bent head and floating hair she re-folded her garment about her limbs with the other hand; and it was the simple and direct childishness with which she accomplished this double task of waving with one hand and controlling her rebellious clothes with the other that so particularly touched Nisos and became for him a kind of visual symbol or dramatic emblem of the charm of the eternal feminine.
He had been rather slow to recognize the peculiar quality of Eione’s charm, owing to the fact that there was nothing in her plain and simple face to correspond with the unusual loveliness and grace of her figure, but now that he was setting off on this historic expedition the whole quality of her personality invaded him.
He wasn’t a conceited fool. He wasn’t so fanatically hostile to this sinister Priest of the Mysteries as not to admit to himself that what filled his mind at that moment with this plain-faced, exquisitely moulded young girl was what the fellow was saying about Eros. He had never heard till now of the primordial cosmology, so to speak, of the Mysteries, and there was something about the thought of shaking off the familiar personalities of the Olympians and concentrating upon the idea that the primeval origin of all things was Eros, that appealed to him extremely.
He had always tried to think of himself as born to grow into a mysterious prophet, and the notion of such a prophet having a love-affair with some dedicated female was peculiarly appealing to him. Nor at this moment as the echoes of Enorches’ voice died away among the rocks and caves of his native island, did it seem a negligible stroke of fate on his behalf — perhaps showing the hand of Atropos herself, to whom he had been of some service — that the female to be associated with his career should be the youthful sister of his faithful old friend, Tis.
In any case the Spinners of our human destiny did not give Nisos at this moment any further time for romantic thoughts about the youthful Eione with her homely face and her exquisite limbs, for he was called to the king’s side by an imperative summons.
He obeyed with alacrity; and he found at once as he placed his treasure-bearing sack at the feet of the two protagonists that the transaction had been, with satisfaction to them both, brought to a successful conclusion.
Odysseus was obviously in the particular mood into which he never rose or sank except when things fell out almost exactly as he had hoped, and yet without any exhausting effort on his part. His great square head seemed more like a fleshless skull now that he’d got what he wanted than when he was still fighting for it. His chin was so relaxed and at ease that his beard had the look of the bowsprit of a vessel that has reached a halcyon sea of undisturbed calm, with the Sirens in the form of friendly birds clinging contentedly to the rigging.
As for Zeuks, he turned his head slowly towards Odysseus, then slowly towards the Priest of Orpheus who had now rushed between them, shooting himself down from the lichen-covered rostrum of his eloquence like a fleshly arrow from an hieratic bow.
“Eros!” cried Zeuks with the inconceivable gusto of a guest at a delicious private banquet who has just tasted what to him is the renewal of a long series of forgotten delights, enjoyed long ago and far away. “Eros! Why it’s wonderful to realize at last that we can freely embrace our divine boy as a grown-up independent Deity, acting on his own without any woman’s help!” And as if to prove his delight Zeuks started singing:
“Ha! Ha! Ha!
Hee! Hee! Hee!
Smell, taste, listen!
Touch and see!
Touch, see, listen!
Taste every juice!
Embrace Aidoneus!
And you won’t fear Zeus!”
Nisos felt such a burning atmospheric fire-ball of protection whirling round his head from Zeuks’ deep-set humorous eyeholes that he actually dared to make a faint flicker of an ugly face of impudent defiance at the Priest of Orpheus: and when he turned to see how Odysseus was responding to the encounter between these two formidable ones he experienced an agreeable shock; for Odysseus was, as a matter of fact, making much the same sort of grimace as he was making himself, only it was made in accordance with the hero’s age, dignity, and heroic past. The old king indeed scrupled not to nod several times with his great massive head in the direction of Zeuks, as much as to say: “I am entirely of your opinion, O most excellent dealer in immortal horse-flesh! And as for this noisy rhetorician, he hides, as his type usually do, his only spadeful of good turf under bushels of mystical bad hay.”
Obviously aware that their presence, combined with the special quality of their unusual nature, had much to do with this unseemly contention, both the winged Pegasos and the black-maned ivory-coloured Arion now began to use all their animal powers, four legs, their muscular shoulders, their nervous haunches, their arching necks, even the flashing wings of the one and the sweeping mane of the other, to thrust their way into the very centre of the contest.
This put the torch to the pyre. The fury of the Priest of Orpheus broke all bounds. “What?” he shouted, projecting his carrion-crow physiognomy so close to the king’s impassive skull that it really did cross Nisos’ mind to wonder what would happen if the man’s vulturine beak were actually to snatch a gobbet of bleeding flesh from the throat beneath that proud ship’s bow.
“Have you been dreaming,” was what the Priest had the gall to mutter to the King, “in the decrepit vanity of your degenerate flesh to which in the solitude of its ancestral cave an outworn Olympian, herself a refugee in Ethiopia, has granted a retreat wherein your moribund body can decompose at leisure; have you, I say, been dreaming that the present-day inhabitants of Ithaca, only a few among whom can even remember the lies and tricks and multiple disguises and devices, for which in days before their parents were born, you won for a year or two some kind of a melodramatic notoriety, will stand by quiescent while you terminate Tyrian transactions with dung-heap pirates, and hand over treasures which properly belong to the people of this island to do with as they wish? Give me these two horses, this moment, you Zeuks, if that is the ridiculous appellation put on you by some former clown in mischievous blasphemy or cringing sycophancy towards the tottering Thunderer we call Zeus whose very thunderbolts have fallen once more into the hands of that one-eyed race of Cyclopean Giants from whom he originally stole them; yes! yes! give me these horses this moment!