Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 327 pages of information about Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.

Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 327 pages of information about Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.

(ll. 820-868) But when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bare her youngest child Typhoeus of the love of Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite.  Strength was with his hands in all that he did and the feet of the strong god were untiring.  From his shoulders grew an hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared.  And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.  And truly a thing past help would have happened on that day, and he would have come to reign over mortals and immortals, had not the father of men and gods been quick to perceive it.  But he thundered hard and mightily:  and the earth around resounded terribly and the wide heaven above, and the sea and Ocean’s streams and the nether parts of the earth.  Great Olympus reeled beneath the divine feet of the king as he arose and earth groaned thereat.  And through the two of them heat took hold on the dark-blue sea, through the thunder and lightning, and through the fire from the monster, and the scorching winds and blazing thunderbolt.  The whole earth seethed, and sky and sea:  and the long waves raged along the beaches round and about, at the rush of the deathless gods:  and there arose an endless shaking.  Hades trembled where he rules over the dead below, and the Titans under Tartarus who live with Cronos, because of the unending clamour and the fearful strife.  So when Zeus had raised up his might and seized his arms, thunder and lightning and lurid thunderbolt, he leaped from Olympus and struck him, and burned all the marvellous heads of the monster about him.  But when Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned.  And flame shot forth from the thunder-stricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount (26), when he was smitten.  A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapour and melted as tin melts when heated by men’s art in channelled (27) crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is softened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus (28).  Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire.  And in the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus.

(ll. 869-880) And from Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply, except Notus and Boreas and clear Zephyr.  These are a god-sent kind, and a great blessing to men; but the others blow fitfully upon the seas.  Some rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with their evil, raging blasts; for varying with the season they blow, scattering ships and destroying sailors.  And men who meet these upon the sea have no help against the mischief.  Others again over the boundless, flowering earth spoil the fair fields of men who dwell below, filling them with dust and cruel uproar.

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Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.