f the three-headed hound. The whole mythic host
regarded Jove's court as a place of final resort, of ultimate appeal.
He was recognized as the Supreme Father, Papa, or Pope, of the Greek
mythic realm. The nod of his immortal head was decisive. His azure
eyebrows and ambrosial hair were full of fate.

The wars of mortals in Hellas and Dardanland were matters of more
interest to the Olympian celestials than any other mere human
transactions. These occasioned partisanships, heartburnings, and
factions in the otherwise serene Olympian palaces. Even Father Zeus
himself acknowledged a bias for sacred Ilium and its king and people
over all the cities of terrestrial men beneath the sun and starry
heaven. In the ten-years' war at Troy, the Olympians were active
partisans upon both sides at times, now screening their favorites from
danger, and now even pitting themselves against combatants of more
vulnerable flesh and blood. But in the matter of vulnerability they
seem not to have enjoyed complete exemption, any more than did Milton's
angels. Although they ate not bread nor drank wine, still there was in
their veins a kind of ambrosial blood called _ichor_, which the prick
of a javelin or spear would cause to flow freely. Even Ares, the genius
of homicide and slaughter, was on one occasion at least wounded by a
mortal antagonist, and sent out of the melee badly punished, so that he
bellowed like a bull-calf, as he mounted on a dusty whirlwind to
Olympus. Over his misadventures while playing his own favorite game
certainly there were no tears to be shed; but when, prompted by
motherly tenderness, Aphrodite, the soft power of love,--she of the
Paphian boudoir, whose recesses were glowing with the breath of Sabaean
frankincense fumed by a hundred altars,--she at whose approach the
winds became hushed, and the clouds fled, and the daedal earth poured
forth sweet flowers,--when such a presence manifested herself on the
field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection, and attempted
to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes with a fold of
her shining _peplum_, surely the audacious Grecian king should have
forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his wrath
elsewhere. But no,--he pierced her skin with his spear, so that,
shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her
immortal homestead. The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who
put his lance in rest against the immortals had