The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them; yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.
Amongst them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its full radiance.
This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic, symmetrical, supple form of a man who was also a god.
In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the corn-mill he laboured, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that toiled beside him.
For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.
The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained with murder; the beauty which had the light and lustre of the sun had been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement of Zeus.
He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh with fruitfulness and gladness—he whose prophetic sight beheld all things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the doom of all unspent ages—he, the Far-Striking King, laboured here beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.
In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.
Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of sacrifice.
With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of Lêtô's son.