lute assurance of Admetus and his household, that on that day she would inevitably die. Much in the same way the old Pheraean, the leader of the Chorus, makes no impression on Heracles whatever by telling him (what he has never heard) that the horses of Diomede, the horses which he proposes to steal, eat human flesh. Heracles derides the story, and when the other persists, parries him with the sneering question, 'And whose son does the breeder brag himself?''Son of Ares'.'Still my hard fate! I have fought two sons of Ares already!'[1] The attitude is intelligible and intelligent; but it certainly suggests a suspicion that, however he might feel in moments of peculiar mental and physical stimulus[2], this cool-headed fighter must often have known misgivings about the superhuman parentage attributed to himself.
But perhaps the most striking revelation of Heracles is given us in the story told by and about himself to account for his possession of the disguised Alcestis and his return with her to the house of Admetus. Here it is—Mr Way is more exact, for Balaustion as usual drags in the 'labours', but somehow a little too weighty—in the version of Browning:
Take and keep for me
This woman, till I come thy way again,
Driving before me, having killed the king
O' the Bistones, that drove of Thrakian steeds:
In such case, give the woman back to me!
But should I fall—as fall I fain would not,
Seeing I hope to prosper and return—
Then I bequeath her as thy household slave.
She came into my hands with good hard toil!
For what find I, when started on my course,
But certain people, a whole country-side,
Holding a wrestling-bout? as good to me
As a new labour:
—for which read simply 'worth exertion'—
whence I took, and here
Come keeping with me this, the victor's prize.
For such as conquered in the easy work[3]
