In this state he embarked on board a ship and was conveyed home. Dejanira, on seeing what she had unwittingly done, hanged herself. Hercules, prepared to die, ascended Mount Eta, where he built a funeral pile of trees, gave his bow and arrows to Philoctetes,1 and laid himself upon the pile, his head resting on his club and his lion's skin spread over him. With a countenance as serene as if he were taking his place at a festal board, he commanded Philoctetes to apply the torch. The flames spread apace, and soon invested the whole mass.2

The gods themselves grieved to see the champion of the earth so brought to his end. But Jupiter took care that only his mother's part in him should perish by the flames. The immortal element, derived from Jupiter himself, was translated to heaven; and by the consent of the gods even of reluctant Juno - Hercules was admitted as a deity to the ranks of the immortals. The whitearmed queen of heaven was finally reconciled to the offspring of Alcmene. She adopted him for her son and gave him in marriage her daughter Hebe.

Deep degraded to a coward's slave,
Endless contests bore Alcides brave,
Through the thorny path of suffering led;
Slew the Hydra, crushed the lion's might,
Threw himself, to bring his friend to light,
Living, in the skiff that bears the dead.
All the torments, every toil of earth,
Juno's hatred on him could impose,
Well he bore them, from his fated birth
To life's grandly mournful close.

Till the god, the earthly part forsaken,
From the man in flames asunder taken,
Drank the heavenly ether's purer breath.
Joyous in the new unwonted lightness,
Soared he upwards to celestial brightness,
Earth's dark heavy burden lost in death.
High Olympus gives harmonious greeting

1 See § 220. According to Sophocles, Philoctetes' father Pœas applied the torch. 2 See the spirited poems, Deïaneira and Herakles, in the classical, but too little read, Epic of Hades, by Lewis Morris,

To the hall where reigns his sire adored;

Youth's bright goddess, with a blush at meeting,
Gives the nectar to her lord.1

In the tragedy called The Maidens of Trachis, Sophocles describes this hero as "The noblest man of all the earth, of whom thou ne'er shalt see the like again." To some of us the manner of his earthly end may seem unworthy; but the Greek poets teach that, in the unabated vigor of one's powers, serenely to meet and accept one's doom is the happiest death. This view is well expressed by Matthew Arnold in the following fragment of a Greek chorus sung with reference to the death of Hercules:

And him on whom, at the end

Of toil and dolor untold,

The Gods have said that repose

At last shall descend undisturb'd
Him you expect to behold

In an easy old age, in a happy home;
No end but this you praise.

But him, on whom, in the prime
Of life, with vigor undimm'd,
With unspent mind, and a soul
Unworn, undebased, undecay'd,
Mournfully grating, the gates

Of the city of death have forever closed -
Him, I count him, well-starr'd.2

Here we take leave for a time of the descendants of Inachus. We shall revert to them in the stories of Minos of Crete and of the house of Labdacus.

1 Schiller's Ideal and Life. Translated by S. G. Bulfinch, brother of Thomas Bulfinch. 2 From Fragment of Chorus of a " Dejaneira."

163. Descendants of Deucalion. Athamas, brother of Sisyphus, was descended from Eolus, whose father, Hellen, was the son of Deucalion of Thessaly. Athamas had by his wife Nephele two children, Phryxus and Helle. After a time, growing indifferent to his wife, Athamas put her away and took Ino, the daughter of Cadmus. The unfortunate sequel of this second marriage we have already seen.1

Nephele, apprehending danger to her children from the influence of their stepmother, took measures to put them out of her reach. Mercury gave her a ram with a golden fleece, on which she set the two children. Vaulting into the air, the animal took his course to the east; but when he was crossing the strait that divides Europe and Asia, the girl Helle fell from his back into the sea, which from her was afterward called the Hellespont-now the Dardanelles. The ram safely landed the boy Phryxus in Colchis,

1§ 144.

229