And all the fruit of youth wastes, as the Sun Wastes and is spent in sunbeams, and to die Not live is best, for evils many a one Are born within the soul. And Poverty Has wasted one man’s house with niggard care, And one has lost his children. Desolate Of this his earthly longing, he must fare To Hades. And another for his fate Has sickness sore that eats his soul. No man Is there but Zeus hath cursed with many a ban. Here is the same dismal primitive faith, or rather fear. All things are beset by Keres, and Keres are all evil. The verses of Mimnermus are of interest at this point because they show the emergence of the two most dreaded Keres, Old Age and Death, from the swarm of minor ills. Poverty, disease and desolation are no longer definitely figured as Keres. The vase-painter shows this fact in a cruder form. On a red-figured amphora (fig. 18) in the Louvre[446] Herakles is represented lifting his club to slay a shrivelled ugly little figure leaning on a stick—the figure obviously is an old man. Fortunately it is inscribed γῆρας. It is not an old man, but Old Age itself, the dreaded Ker. The representation is a close parallel to Herakles slaying the Ker in fig. 17. The Ker of Old Age has no wings: these the vase-painter rightly felt were inappropriate. It is in fact a Ker developed one step further into an impersonation. The vase may be safely dated as belonging to about the middle of the 5th century B.C. It is analogous in style, as in subject, to an amphora[447] in the British Museum bearing the love-name Charmides. [Illustration: FIG. 18.] Gradually the meanings of Ker became narrowed down to one, to the great evil, death and the fate of death, but always with a flitting remembrance that there were Keres of all mortal things. This is the usage most familiar to us, because it is Homeric. Homer’s phraseology is rarely primitive—often fossilized—and the regularly recurring ‘Ker of death[448]’ (κὴρ θανάτοιο) is heir to a long ancestry. In Homer we catch the word Ker at a moment of transition; it is half death, half death-spirit. Odysseus[449] says ‘Death and the Ker avoiding, we escape,’ where the two words death and Ker are all but equivalents: they are both death and the sprite of death, or as we might say now-a-days death and the angel of death. Homer’s conception so dominates our minds that the custom has obtained of uniformly translating ‘Ker’ by fate, a custom that has led to much confusion of thought.