Types of Children's Literature: A Collection of the World's Best Literature for Children, For Use in Colleges, Normal Schools and Library Schools
General
Types of Children's Literature: A Collection of the World's Best Literature for Children, For Use in Colleges, Normal Schools and Library Schools
Children's literature
But that fair Ariadne never came to Athens with her husband. Some say
that Theseus left her sleeping on Naxos among the Cyclades; and that
Dionusos the wine-king found her, and took her up into the sky, as you
shall see some day in a painting of old Titian's, one of the most
glorious pictures upon earth. And some say that Dionusos drove away
Theseus, and took Ariadne from him by force: but however that may be,
in his haste or in his grief, Theseus forgot to put up the white sail.
Now Ægeus his father sat and watched on Sunium day after day, and
strained his old eyes across the sea to see the ship afar. And when he
saw the black sail, and not the white one, he gave up Theseus for dead,
and in his grief he fell into the sea, and died; so it is called the
Ægean to this day.
And now Theseus was king of Athens, and he guarded it and ruled it well.
For he killed the bull of Marathon, which had killed Androgeos, Minos's
son; and he drove back the famous Amazons, the warlike women of the East,
when they came from Asia, and conquered all Hellas, and broke into Athens
itself. But Theseus stopped them there, and conquered them, and took
Hippolyte their queen to be his wife. Then he went out to fight against
the Lapithai, and Peirithoos their famous king: but when the two heroes
came face to face they loved each other, and embraced, and became noble
friends; so that the friendship of Theseus and Peirithoos is a proverb
even now. And he gathered (so the Athenians say) all the boroughs of the
land together, and knit them into one strong people, while before they
were all parted and weak: and many another wise thing he did, so that
his people honored him after he was dead, for many a hundred years, as
the father of their freedom and their laws. And six hundred years after
his death, in the famous fight at Marathon, men said that they saw the
ghost of Theseus, with his mighty brazen club, fighting in the van of
battle against the invading Persians, for the country which he loved.
And twenty years after Marathon, his bones (they say) were found in
Scuros, an isle beyond the sea; and they were bigger than the bones of
mortal man So the Athenians brought them home in triumph; and all the
people came out to welcome them; and they built over them a noble
temple, and adorned it with sculptures and paintings; in which were
told all the noble deeds of Theseus, and the Centaurs, and the Lapithai
and the Amazons; and the ruins of it are standing still.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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