being all descendents of
the sacred one in the Erechtheum). And thus, in one direction, we get to
the "children like olive plants round about thy table" and the olive
grafting of St. Paul; while the use of the oil for anointing gives chief
name to the rod itself of the stem of Jesse, and to all those who were by
that name signed for his disciples first in Antioch. Remember, further,
since that name was first given the influence of the symbol, both in
extreme unction and in consecration of priests and kings to their "divine
right;" and thing, if you can reach with any grasp of thought, what the
influence on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose leaves
give gray bloom to the hillsides under every breeze that blows from the
midland sea. But, above and beyond all, think how strange it is that the
chief Agonia of humanity, and the chief giving of strength from heaven
for its fulfilment, should have been under its night shadow in Palestine.

39. Thirdly, Athena is the air in its power over the sea.

On the earliest Panathenaic vase known--the "Burgon" vase in the British
museum--Athena has a dolphin on her shield. The dolphin has two
principal meanings in Greek symbolism. It means, first, the sea;
secondarily, the ascending and descending course of any of the heavenly
bodies from one sea horizon to another--the dolphins' arching rise and
replunge (in a summer evening, out of calm sea, their black backs roll
round with exactly the slow motion of a water-wheel; but I do not know
how far Aristotle's exaggerated account of their leaping or their
swiftness has any foundation) being taken as a type of the emergence
of the sun or stars from the sea in the east, and plunging beneath in the
west. Hence, Apollo, when in his personal power he crosses the sea,
leading his Cretan colonists to Pytho, takes the form of a dolphin,
becomes Apollo Delphinius, and names the founded colony "Delphi." The
lovely drawing of the Delphic Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le
Normand and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6) gives the entire conception of this
myth. Again, the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent Taras coming to
found the city, riding on a dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have partly
the rage of the sea in them, and partly the spring of the horse, because
the splendid riding of the Tarentines had made their name proverbial in
Magna Graeca. The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the same
thought; and, again, the p