Or beat the pinions of the western gale,
All were in vain: the fates thy death demand,
Due to a mortal and immortal hand.’
Then ceas’d forever, by the Furies tied,
This fateful voice. Th’ intrepid chief replied
With unabated rage: ‘So let it be!
Portents and prodigies are lost on me.’”
Zeus. From Pompeii.
In Pegasus, the winged steed of the Nine Muses, we have what might be called the prize horse of all mythology. The old Greek writer Hesiod says he was born near the springs of Ocean. And he, indeed, winging his flight away, left Earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the immortals; in Jove’s house he dwells, bearing to counsellor Jove thunder and lightning. This looks very much as if he began life as a personification of a natural phenomenon, like the Hindoo Asvins and the Norse Sleipner. But he was destined to a more glorious career than any of them. The goddess of wisdom, Athēne, caught him and tamed him, and he became the symbol of the imagination in its highest flights into the region of poetic aspiration and inspiration, a fitting climax to an idea, going back to the very fountains of the imagination which bubbled up in that early stage of life when animals as well as men were thought to be endowed with spirit.