How could I give less to such an inventive interpretation of an old tale in such a beautifully written book? The sun comes up again.Īnd a life of a common man is as valuable as a life of king… Mightn’t the gods regret it too, and think they acted too hasty, and be sorry now to have seen all that strength go for nothing in the world? Ah, there’s many things we don’t know, sir. The King of Troy and a plebeian mule driver are carrying the treasure to Achilles in order to ransom the corpse of King’s son Hector and it is a common carter who teaches King a lesson. An old, dreamlike passivity in him that he no longer finds it necessary to resist will dissolve the boundary between what is solid and tangible in the world around him – mulberry leaves afloat on their shadows, the knobbly extrusions on the trunk of a pine – and the weightless medium in which his consciousness is adrift, where the gods, in their bodily presence, have the same consistency as his thoughts.
Often, in the lapse of light in the chamber where he sits nodding, or in a leisure hour beside the fishpond in his garden, one or other of the gods will materialise, jelly-like, out of the radiant vacancy. It’s a shame that in the modern times we can see nothing but dreams. In the ancient times, when gods were many, they were easy to reach – should one just doze off and some numinous being wouldn’t take long to appear. The ancient times… They still agitate us and we are ready to return to antiquity again and again.
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