Athena, but the entire hiding or withdrawal of her help, and beyond even this, her deadliest of all hostility,—­the darkness by which she herself deceives and beguiles to final ruin those to whom she is wholly adverse; this contradiction of her own glory being the uttermost judgment upon human falsehood.  Thus it is she who provokes Pandarus to the treachery which purposed to fulfil the rape of Helen by the murder of her husband in time of truce; and then the Greek king, holding his wounded brother’s hand, prophesies against Troy the darkness of the aegis which shall be over all, and for ever.**

* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are all of this dark color, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows; but through all this splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly that the literal “splendor,” with its relative shade, are prevalent in the conception; and that there is always a tendency to look through the hue to its cause.  And in this feeling about color the Greeks are separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times.  I cannot find that they take pleasure in color for its own sake; it may be in something more than color, or better; but it is not in the hue itself.  When Homer describes cloud breaking from a mountain summit, the crags become visible in light, not color; he feels only their flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the “infinite,” “unspeakable” aether is torn open—­but not the blue of it.  He has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold; but only in their shade or flame.

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task, belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones); but it is, I believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality.  The restriction of the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white, is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of color-perception is partly noble, partly base:  noble, in its earnestness, which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere colorist nations like the Chinese, as men’s thoughts are above children’s; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C.  On the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools. ** ’eremnen Aigida pasi’.—­Il. iv. 166.