“Behold us!
Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man”—
a man with bodily powers constantly renewed, to enable him to suffer. Above the torment is a rainbow of hope, built of the vapour, pain-wrung, which the light of heaven, in passing tinges with the colour of hope. Endowed with bodily powers intended to be God’s ministers, Ixion has been betrayed by them. But he was but man foiled by sense; he has endured enough suffering to teach him his error and his folly. “Why make the agony perpetual?” “To punish thee,” Zeus may reply. Ixion says he once was king of Thessaly: he had to punish crime. Had he been able to read the hearts of the criminals whom he sent to their doom, and had plainly seen repentance there, would he not have given them
“Life to retraverse the past, light to retrieve the misdeed?”
Zeus made man, with flaw or faultless: it was his work. Ixion had been admitted, all human as he was, to the company of the gods as their equal. He had faith in the good faith and the love of Zeus, and for acting upon it was cast from Olympus to Erebus. Man conceived Zeus as possessing his own virtues: he trusted, loved him because Zeus aspired to be equal in goodness to man. Ixion defies him, tells him he apes the man who made him; it is Zeus who is hollowness. The iris, born of Ixion’s tears, sweat and blood, bursting to vapour above, arching his torment, glorifies his pain; and man, even from hell’s triumph, may look up and rejoice. He rises from the wreck, past Zeus to the Potency above him—
“Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus, keep the godship and sink!”
The Zeus of the poem bears no relation whatever to the Christian’s God. The Potency over all is the All-Father, the God of Love, who yet, in Infinite Love, may punish rebellious man, who conceivably may reject His love, may never feel a touch of the repentance which Ixion declared he felt, who suffering and still sinning, hating and still rebelling, may conceivably be left to the consequences of the rebellion which knows no cessation, as the suffering no respite.
Notes.—Sisuphos, “the crafty”: son of Æolus, punished in the other world by being forced for ever to keep on rolling a block of stone to the top of a steep hill, only to see it roll again to the valley, and to start the toilsome task again. Tantalos, a wealthy king of Sipylus in Phrygia. He was a favourite of the gods, and allowed to share their meals; but he insulted them, and was thrown into Tartarus. He suffered from hunger and thirst, immersed in water up to the chin; when he opened his mouth the water dried up and the fruits suspended before him vanished into the air. Heré, in Greek mythology the same as Juno, queen of heaven and wife of Zeus or Jupiter. Thessaly, a country of Greece, bounded on the south by the southern parts of Greece, on the east by the Ægean, on the north by Macedonia and Mygdonia, and on the west by Illyricum and Epirus. Olumpos, a mountain in Thessaly. On the highest peak is the throne of Zeus, and it is there that he summons the assemblies of the gods. Erebos, in Greek mythology “the primeval darkness.” The word is usually applied to the lower regions, filled with impenetrable darkness. Tartaros-doomed == hell-doomed.
Jacopo (Luria) was the faithful secretary of the Moorish mercenary who led the army of Florence.
Jacynth. (Flight of the Duchess.) The maid of the Duchess, who went to sleep while the gipsy woman held the interview with her mistress, and induced her to leave her husband’s home.