more mystic and ideal than that of any other deity, just on
account of the constant and real presence of the cloud itself under
different forms, giving rise to all kinds of minor fables. The play of
the Greek imagination in this direction is so wide and complex, that I
cannot give you an outline of its range in my present limits. There is
first a great series of storm-legends connected with the family of the
historic AEolus centralized by the story of Athamas, with his two wives,
"the Cloud," and the "White Goddess," ending in that of Phrixus and
Helle, and of the golden fleece (which is only the cloud-burden of Hermes
Eriophoros). With this, there is the fate of Salmoneus, and the
destruction of the Glaucus by his own horses; all these minor myths of
storm concentrating themselves darkly into the legend of Bellerophon and
the Chimaera, in which there is an under story about the vain subduing of
passion and treachery, and the end of life in fading melancholy,--which,
I hope, not many of you could understand even were I to show it you (the
merely physical meaning of the Chimaera is the cloud of volcanic lightning
connected wholly with earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in
its height and its thunder). Finally, in the AEolic group, there is the
legend of Sisypus, which I mean to work out thoroughly by itself; its
root is in the position of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the two seas
--the Corinthean Acropolis, two thousand feet high, being the centre of
the crossing currents of the winds, and of the commerce of Greece.
Therefore, Athena, and the fountain-cloud Pegasus, are more closely
connected with Corinth than even with Athens in their material, though
not in their moral, power; and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in
connection with a melancholy story about the sea gods; but he himself is
'kerdotos andron', the most "gaining" and subtle of men; who having the
key of the Isthmus, becomes the type of transit, transfer, or trade, as
such; and of the apparent gain from it, which is not gain; and this is
the real meaning of his punishment in hell--eternal toil and recoil (the
modern idol of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a
vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, throughout, the old ideas of
the cloud power and cloud feebleness,--the deceit of its hiding,--and the
emptiness of its banishing,--the Autolycus enchantment of making black
seem white,--and the disappointed fury of Ixion (takin