And he bears the tender little ones in a line at his saddle-bow.”[[11]]
Around the next corner, especially toward the end of Lent when spring lamb is due in the markets and shepherds troop to town, another song from the “Alcestis” may displace the strain of melancholy. For Apollo, Pythian lord of song, once served Admetus,—
“Like a shepherd, piping, piping,
Hymeneal echoes raising
Down along the sloping hillside
Where the woolly flocks are grazing.”
In the guise of a young man, the herdsman of a flock, most delicate, as are the sons of kings, Athena once appeared to Odysseus. And it was to a man who was pasturing his flocks on many-fountained Ida that Aphrodite gave her immortal heart. Perhaps thereafter in the streets of Troy Anchises made people think suddenly of early dawns on the mountain-side when the silver car of the moon hangs low over the sea and the nightingale sings and the bleating flocks answer the pipe’s ethereal cry. In Athens a transient shepherd, with his crook and his coat of fleece, may fling the townsman’s thoughts abroad to the men he has seen among the hills of Arcadia, where as of old a misty night is hateful to shepherds and goatherds, and a bright moon their heart’s delight; or in Lesbos, where still in mountain pastures the hyacinth is trampled under foot and darkens the ground. A flock of sheep following the bellwether from the country to the town is a reminder that the Greeks before Troy were ordered about like a great flock of white ewes by the thick-fleeced leader, Odysseus; and that the astute one, in the course of his later adventures, saved himself from the wrath of blind Polyphemus by clinging face upwards and with a steady heart, beneath the shaggy belly of his best and goodliest ram. Aristophanes in the “Wasps” parodies the Homeric ram. Here it is the family donkey which, led out to be sold, is smuggling under its shaggy belly the old man imprisoned by his son to cure him of the “jury habit.” The dejected donkey is addressed by the son:—
“Packass! why weepest thou? Because thou shalt be sold
To-day? Come, double-quick! Why these repeated groans
Unless, perchance, that some Odysseus thou dost bear?”