even when his aged father, who was a seer himself, forewarned him of his doom; he boldly dared his fate, and fell at the close of the siege by the hand of Paris.
Under somewhat similar auguries the great hero of Homer’s tale left his home for Troy. Achilles, said the legends, was the son of the ocean-goddess Thetis by a mortal lover, Peleus son of Æacus. The gods had honoured the marriage with their personal presence—
"For in that elder time, when truth and worth
Were still revered and cherished here on earth,
The tenants of the skies would oft descend
To heroes’ spotless homes, as friend to friend;
There meet them face to face, and freely share
In all that stirred the hearts of mortals there.”[1]
The Roman poet Catullus tells us in the same beautiful ode, how mortals and immortals alike brought their wedding gifts: Chiron the centaur (“that divine beast,” as Pindar calls him) comes from the mountains laden with coronals of flowers for the banquet, and Peneus, the Thessalian river-god, brings whole trees of beech and bay and cypress to shade the guests. Even the three weird sisters, the inexorable Fates, tune their voices for this once into a nuptial hymn, and while their spindles “run and weave the threads of doom,” they chant the future glories of the child that shall be born from this auspicious union. Neptune presents the fortunate bridegroom with two horses of divine breed—Xanthus and Balius—and Chiron gives him a wondrous ashen spear. Both these gifts passed after-
- ↑ Catullus’s Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis (transl. by Theodore Martin).
