Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/329

Rh So spake Teiresias, and despite the weight of his many years, pushed back the ivory chair and was gone.

And Heracles, called now the son of Amphitryon of Argos, waxed under his mother’s eye like a sapling set in a vineyard. Letters learned he of a sleepless guardian, a Hero, son of Apollo, aged Linus; and to bend a bow and shoot arrows at the mark, of one that was born to wealth of great domains, Eurytus; and he that made of him a singer and shaped his hand to the box-wood lyre, was Eumolpus, the son of Philammon. Aye, and all the tricks and falls both of the cross-buttockers of Argos, and of boxers skilly with the hand—strap, and eke all the cunning inventions of the catch-as-catch-can men that roll upon the round, all these things learnt he at the feet of a son of Hermes, Harpalycus of Phanote, whom no man could abide conﬁdently in the ring even so much as to look upon him from aloof, so dread and horrible was the frown that sat on his grim visage.

But to drive horses in a chariot and guide the nave of his wheel safely about the turnpost, that did Amphitryon in all kindness teach his son himself; for he had carried off a multitude of precious things from swift races in the Argive grazing-land of steeds, and Time alone had loosed the harness from his chariots, seeing he kept them ever unbroken. And how to abide the cut and thrust of the sword or to lunge lance in est and shield swung over back, how to marshal a company, measure an advancing squadron of the foe, or give the word to a troop of Rh