ART.
This marble, one of the most noticeable and interesting in the Louvre, is a colossal fragment of a winged Victory discovered in 1863 on the Island of Samothrace. The head, arms and feet are lacking. The statue must originally have been at least twelve feet high.
The figure seems sweeping down through the air and in the very act of alighting. Every fold in the floating garment has a direct purpose, at first indistinctly manifest, then widening and finally lost in the general mass.
The pediment on which the statue stood represents the prow of a ship, and makes it clear that it was executed to commemorate a naval victory of the Athenians off Cyprus, 306 B. C. As restored by Zumbusch, Nike holds in one hand a trumpet and in the other a rod intended to support the trophies.
The Three Fates
“The Weird Sisters.”
“Twist ye, twine ye! even so,
Mingle shades of joy and woe,
Hope, and fear, and peace, and strife,
In the thread of human life.”
—Scott.
STORY.
THE DAUGHTERS OF NIGHT.
“In their dark House of Cloud
The three weird sisters toil till time be sped:
One unwinds life; one ever weaves the shroud;
One waits to cut the thread.”
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
The Fates were three sisters, daughters of Night, and were named Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Alotter), and Atropos (Unchangeable).
They exercised a great influence over human life from the cradle to the grave. They spent their time spinning a thread of gold, silver or wool—now tightening, now slackening, and at last cutting it off. This occupation was so arranged that Clotho put the thread around the spindle, Lachesis spun it, and Atropos, the eldest, cut it off—
“Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears
And slits the thin spun life.”
—Milton.
Catullus thus gives a description of their spinning—
“Still as they span, as they span, was the tooth kept nipping and smoothing,
And to the withered lips clung morsels of wool as they smoothed it—
Filaments erstwhile rough that stood from the twist of the surface.
Close at their feet meantime, were woven baskets of wicker,
Guarding the soft white balls of the wool resplendent within them.
Thus then, parting the strands, these three with resonant voices
Uttered in chant divine, predestined sooth of the future—
Prophecy neither in time, nor yet in eternity shaken.”