THE CAPTIVES.
Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its full radiance.
This was the form of a man grinding at a mill-stone; the majestic, symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.
In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth asthough no mortal tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that toiled beside him.
It was the great Apollo in Pherae.
The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood stained with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement of Zeus.
He whose glances had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh with fruitfulness and gladness—he whose prophetic sight beheld all things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the doom of all unspent ages—he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.
In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io paean sounded still.
Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of sacrifice.
With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of Leto’s son.
The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of Delphinios.
At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phodis,his oracles still breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him wheresoever they wandered; and the lion and the bear came at his bidding from the deserts to bend their necks and their wills of fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.
Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his bondage stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen eyes, even as though he cried:
“O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to me the golden rod of thy wealth and thy dominion over the flocks and the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell—for a melody not even thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to me. Will human ears give heed to thy song now thy sceptre has passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?”
Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes of the deities sometimes speak. Thus he sees them, thus he hears, whilst the pale and watery sunlight lights up the form ofthe toiler in Pherae. For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave to the grind-stone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
He can bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he choose, as the chained god in Pherae bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stands fettered to the mill to grind for bread.
Ouida.