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 who guards the golden apples in earth's utmost clime. And of other toils ten thousand I had taste, and no man got a trophy from my hands. But now with joint thus wrenched from joint, with frame torn to shreds, I have been wrecked by this blind curse—I, who am named son of noblest mother—I, who was called the offspring of starry Zeus!"

Anon he learns that the venom which is devouring him is the poisoned blood of his old enemy, the Centaur Nessus. That knowledge gives him at once the calm certainty of death; and now, in the nearness of the passage to his Father, there arises, triumphant over bodily torment, the innate, tranquil strength of his immortal origin. He sees in this last chapter of his earthly ordeal the foreordained purpose of Zeus:—

"It was foreshown to me by my Father of old that I should die by no creature that had the breath of life, but by one who was dead and a dweller in Hades. So this monster, the Centaur, even as the god's will had been foreshown, slew me, a living man, when he was dead."

He directs that he shall be carried to the top of Mount Œta, above Trachis, sacred to Zeus; that a funeral pyre shall there be raised, and he, while yet living, laid upon it; that so the flame which frees his spirit from the flesh may in the same moment bear it up to Zeus. No one of the sacred places of Greece was connected with a legend of such large meaning, with one which was so much a world-legend, as this mountain-summit looking over the