38.  Secondly, Athena is the air giving vegetative impulse to the earth.  She is the wind and the rain, and yet more the pure air itself, getting at the earth fresh turned by spade or plough, and, above all, feeding the fresh leaves; for though the Greeks knew nothing about carbonic acid, they did know that trees fed on the air.

Now, note first in this, the myth of the air getting at ploughed land.  You know I told you the Lord of all labor by which man lived was Hephaestus; therefore Athena adopts a child of his, and of the Earth,—­ Erichthonius,—­literally, “the tearer up of the ground,” who is the head (though not in direct line) of the kings of Attica; and, having adopted him, she gives him to be brought up by the three nymphs of the dew.  Of these, Aglauros, the dweller in the fields, is the envy or malice of the earth; she answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the ground, against his shepherd brother, in her own envy against her two sisters, Herse, the cloud dew, who is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury; and Pandrosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven.  Literally, you have in this myth the words of the blessing of Esau:  “Thy dwelling shall be of the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above.”  Aglauros is for her envy turned into a black stone; and hers is one of the voices —­the other being that of Cain—­which haunts the circle of envy in the Purgatory: 

      “Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso.”

But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius (or the hero Erectheus), is built the most sacred temple of Athena in Athens; the temple to their own dearest Athena—­to her, and to the dew together; so that it was divided into two parts:  one, the temple of Athena of the city, and the other that of the dew.  And this expression of her power, as the air bringing the dew to the hill pastures, in the central temple of the central city of the heathen, dominant over the future intellectual world, is, of all the facts connected with her worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most important.  I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth part of the different ways in which it bears both upon natural beauty, and on the best order and happiness of men’s lives.  I hope to follow out some of these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about field herbage; but I must say briefly here that the great sign, to the Greeks, of the coming of spring in the pastures, was not, as with us, in the primrose, but in the various flowers of the asphodel tribe (of which I will give you some separate account presently); therefore it is that the earth answers with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida; and the power of Athena in eternal life is written by the light of the asphodel on the Elysian fields.