=192. Achilles, Son of Peleus.= So the sisters prophesied the future of the hero, Achilles,--from his father called Pelides; from his grandfather, Æacides. How by him the Trojans should fall, as fall the ears of corn when they are yellow before the scythe; how because of him Scamander should run red, warm with blood, choked with blind bodies, into the whirling Hellespont; how finally he himself, in his prime, should fall, and how on his tomb should be sacrificed the fair Polyxena, daughter of Priam, whom he had loved. "So," says Catullus, "sang the Fates. For those were the days before piety and righteous action were spurned by mankind, the days when Jupiter and his immortals deigned to consort with zealous man, to enjoy the sweet odor of his burnt-offering, to march beside him to battle, to swell his shout in victory and his lament in defeat, to smile on his peaceful harvests, to recline at his banquets, and to bless the weddings of fair women and goodly heroes. But now, alas," concludes Catullus, "godliness and chastity, truth, wisdom, and honor have departed from among men": [Illustration: FIG. 149] Wherefore the gods no more vouchsafe their presence to mortals, Suffer themselves no more to be touched by the ray of the morning. But there were gods in the pure,--in the golden prime of the Ages. The hero of the Trojan War, here prophesied, =Achilles=, fleet of foot, the dauntless, the noble, the beloved of Zeus, the breaker of the ranks of men, is the ideal hero of the Greeks,--the mightiest of the Achæans far. Of his youth many interesting stories are told: how his mother, endeavoring to make him invulnerable, plunged him in the river Styx, and succeeded save with regard to his ankles by which she held him; and how he was educated in eloquence and the arts of war by his father's friend Ph[oe]nix, and by his father's other friend Chiron, the centaur, in riding and hunting and music and the art of healing. One of the most Greek-minded of our English poets, Matthew Arnold,[279] singing of a beauteous dell by Etna, tells how In such a glen, on such a day, On Pelion, on the grassy ground, Chiron, the aged Centaur, lay, The young Achilles standing by. The Centaur taught him to explore The mountains; where the glens are dry And the tired Centaurs come to rest, And where the soaking springs abound And the straight ashes grow for spears, And where the hill goats come to feed And the sea eagles build their nest. He showed him Phthia far away. And said, "O boy, I taught this lore To Peleus, in long distant years!" He told him of the gods, the stars, The tides;--and then of mortal wars, And of the life which heroes lead Before they reach the Elysian place And rest in the immortal mead; And all the wisdom of his race.