Matthew Ted > Books: greek-roman‎ (9)

The crisis began one early afternoon when Pliny the Younger was seventeen and staying with his mother and uncle in a villa overlooking the bay of Naples. His mother noticed it first, ‘a cloud, both strange and enormous in appearance’, forming in the sky in the distance. Pliny said that it looked like an umbrella pine tree, ‘for it raised high on a kind of very tall trunk and spread out into branches’. But it was also like a mushroom [1]: as light as sea foam — white, but gradually turning dirty, elevated on a stem, potentially deadly. They were too far away to be certain which mountain the mushroom cloud was coming from, but Pliny later discovered it was Vesuvius, some thirty kilometres from Misenum, where he and his mother Plinia were watching.

Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my
spirit impels me
now to recite. Inspire me, O gods (it is you who have even transformed my art), and spin me a thread from the
world's beginning
down to my own lifetime, in one continuous poem.

Where other animals walk on all four and look to the
ground,
man was given a towering head and commanded to stand
erect, with his face uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven.
Thus clay, so lately no more than a crude and formless
substance,
was metamorphosed to assume the strange new figure of
Man.

Then Prometheus
Gathered that fiery dust and slaked it
With the pure spring water,
And rolled it under his hands,
Pounded it, thumbed it, moulded it
Into a body shaped like that of a god.

He ceased to follow his leader; he'd fallen in love with the sky,
and soared up higher and higher. The scorching rays of
the sun
grew closer and softened the fragrant wax which fastened
his plumage.
The wax dissolved; and as Icarus flapped his naked arms,
deprived of the wings which had caught the air that was
buoying them upwards,
'Father!' he shouted, again and again. But the boy and his
shouting
were drowned in the blue-green main which is called the
Icárian Sea.
His unhappy father, no longer a father, called out, 'Icarus!
Where are you, Icarus? Where on earth shall I find you?
Icarus!'
he kept crying. And then he caught sight of the wings in the
water.
Daedalus cursed the skill of his hands and buried his dear son's
corpse in a grave. The land where he lies is known as
Icária.

Not far to go now; the exit to earth and the light was
ahead!
But Orpheus was frightened his love was falling behind;
he was desperate
to see her. He turned, and at once she sank back into
the dark.
She stretched out her arms to him, struggled to feel his
hands in her own,
but all she was able to catch, poor soul, was the
yielding air.
And now, as she died for the second time, she never
complained
that her husband had failed her—what could she complain
of, except that he'd loved her?
She only uttered her last 'farewell', so faintly he hardly
could hear it, and then she was swept once more to the land
of the shadows.

[...] She had hardly ended her prayer when a
heavy numbness
came over her body; her soft white bosom was ringed
in a layer
of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into
branches.
The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish
roots;
her head was confined in a treetop; and all that remained
was her beauty.

So saying, he pointed the hero out, still hacking the
Trojans
down; then turning Paris' bow in the same direction
he guided an arrow with deadly aim at Achilles' heel.
If Priam, after the death of Hector, had cause for rejoicing,
this surely was it. So Achilles who'd vanquished the
mightiest heroes
was vanquished himself by a coward who'd stolen the wife
of his Greek host.
If he was destined to die at the hands of a woman in war,
he'd rather be cut down by the axe of Penthesilea.