The wars of mortals in Hellas and Dardanland were matters of more interest to the Olympian celestials than any other mere human transactions.  These occasioned partisanships, heartburnings, and factions in the otherwise serene Olympian palaces.  Even Father Zeus himself acknowledged a bias for sacred Ilium and its king and people over all the cities of terrestrial men beneath the sun and starry heaven.  In the ten-years’ war at Troy, the Olympians were active partisans upon both sides at times, now screening their favorites from danger, and now even pitting themselves against combatants of more vulnerable flesh and blood.  But in the matter of vulnerability they seem not to have enjoyed complete exemption, any more than did Milton’s angels.  Although they ate not bread nor drank wine, still there was in their veins a kind of ambrosial blood called ichor, which the prick of a javelin or spear would cause to flow freely.  Even Ares, the genius of homicide and slaughter, was on one occasion at least wounded by a mortal antagonist, and sent out of the melee badly punished, so that he bellowed like a bull-calf, as he mounted on a dusty whirlwind to Olympus.  Over his misadventures while playing his own favorite game certainly there were no tears to be shed; but when, prompted by motherly tenderness, Aphrodite, the soft power of love,—­she of the Paphian boudoir, whose recesses were glowing with the breath of Sabaean frankincense fumed by a hundred altars,—­she at whose approach the winds became hushed, and the clouds fled, and the daedal earth poured forth sweet flowers,—­when such a presence manifested herself on the field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection, and attempted to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes with a fold of her shining peplum, surely the audacious Grecian king should have forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his wrath elsewhere.  But no,—­he pierced her skin with his spear, so that, shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her immortal homestead.  The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who put his lance in rest against the immortals had but a short lease of life to live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire’s return, nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Homer, in the first books of his “Ilias,” permits us to glance into the banqueting-hall of Olympus.  The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit, Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty.  Hephaestus the Cripple has taken their place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of “passing the rosy.”  His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos from the threshold of heaven.  So, all day long, says the poet, they revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop.  It is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours, conforming, in this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard.  Duly at set of sun they betook themselves to their couches.  Zeus himself slept, and by his side Here of the Golden Throne.