lunge, before their transformation, of the
ships of AEneas. Then, this idea of career upon, or conquest of, or by
dolphin-like ships (compare the Merlin prophecy,

"They shall ride
Over ocean wide
With hempen bridle, ad horse of tree,")

connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in
the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either
of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does
often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the
repetition of her own aegis-snakes as the further expression of her power
over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with
her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocooen from the
sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on
the ocean also, and the madness of the aegis-snake is give to the
wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of
Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her
beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation
possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being
carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.

In Plate cxv. of vol. ii, Le Normand, are given two sides of a vase,
which, in rude and childish ways, assembles most of the principal
thoughts regarding Athena in this relation. In the first, the sunrise is
represented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, foreshortened; the light
is supposed to blind the eyes, and no face of the god is seen (Turner, in
the Ulysses and Polyphemus sunrise, loses the form of the god in light,
giving the chariot-horses only; rendering in his own manner, after 2,200
years of various fall and revival of the arts, precisely the same thought
as the old Greek potter). He ascends out of the sea; but the sea itself
has not yet caught the light. In the second design, Athena as the
morning breeze, and Hermes as the morning cloud, fly over the sea before
the sun. Hermes turns back his head; his face is unseen in the cloud, as
Apollo's in the light; the grotesque appearance of an animal's face is
only the cloud-phantasm modifying a frequent form of the hair of Hermes
beneath the back of his cap. Under the morning breeze, the dolphins leap
from the rippled sea, and their sides catch the light.

The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give a fair representation o