Thamyris

“ Accordingly he said to Theoclia, Where is my Thecla?
6 Theoclia replied, Thamyris, I have something very strange to tell you; for Thecla, for the space of three days, will not move from the window, not so much as to eat or drink, but is so intent in hearing the artful and delusive discourses of a certain foreigner, that I perfectly wonder Thamyris, that a young woman of her known modesty, will suffer herself to be so prevailed upon.
7 For that man has disturbed the whole city of Iconium, and even your Thecla, among others. All the women and young men flock to him to receive his doctrine ”

“ Christ; and, after a council called,
he summoned Thecla, and said to
her, Why do you not, according
to the law of the Iconians, marry
Thamyris?
8 She stood still, with her eyes
fixed upon Paul; and finding she
made no reply, Theoclia, her
mother cried out saying, Let the
unjust creature be burnt; let her
be burnt in the midst of the theatre,
for refusing Thamyris, that all
women may learn from her to avoid
such practices.
9 Then the governor was exceedingly
concerned, and ordered Paul to be
whipt out of the city, and Thecla
to be burnt. ”

“ The trumpets had silenced to be ready for a blast to drown any cry of anguish. The naked Greek girl had lighted agile as a bird on her feet, and she moved not so much as a hair’s breadth from the crouching lioness now snarling and lashing head and tail from side to side. Her flesh looked fresh as a little child’s.
“Little fool! Why doesn’t she fight, or run!” demanded the Roman beside Thamyris. The Greek merchant sank heavily where he sat and hid his face in his hands. ”

“ Thamyris! this man will overturn the city of the Iconians, and thy Thecla too, besides; for all the women and the young men go in beside him to be taught by him, who says one must fear only one God and live in chastity. ”

“ I can also say, that the poet Amphion, whose chants were, on the contrary, so powerful and so virile, typifies the orthodox solar poetry, opposed by these same Thracians; whereas the prophet Thamyris, who, it is said, celebrated in such stately verse the creation of the world and the war of the Titans, [34] represents quite plainly the universal doctrine of Olen, re-established by his followers. The name of Amphion signifies the orthodox or national voice of Greece; that of Thamyris, the twin lights of the gods. ”

“ Mount Athos is pap-shaped, and so lofty that the husbandmen on the summit are already weary of their labour, the sun having long since risen to them, when to the inhabitants of the shore it is the beginning of cockcrowing. Thamyris, the Thracian, was king of this coast, and followed the same practices as Orpheus. Here also, at Acanthus, is seen the canal, which Xerxes is said to have made, and through which he is said to have brought the sea from the Strymonic Gulf, across the isthmus. ”

“ It is true that in Homer we have no example of competition among bards actually exhibited; but neither do the poems furnish us with an occasion when it might have been looked for. The ordinary place of the bard was as a member of a king’s or chieftain’s household. At the great assemblages of tribes, or of the Greek race, to which the chiefs repaired in numbers, more bards than one would also probably appear. Some light is thrown upon this subject by the passage relating to Thamyris in the second Book of the Iliad. ”

“ They sometimes appear as one; for instance, in the first verse of each of the poems: sometimes as many; for instance, in the invocation before the Catalogue. Even their action is so combined, that what at one time they do as one, at others they do as many. It is the Muses who maim Thamyris: it is the Muse, who greatly loves Demodocus, who lays upon him the burden of blindness, but endows him with the gift of [62] song: and again, who instructs and loves the tribe of Bards in general [68] .
The Muses are, with Homer, of Olympian rank ”

“ To assume—as the exotericist may—that such a being as Orpheus could be born as a swan in reality thus appears to the esotericist to be untenable.
Likewise, Thamyras, an ancient Thracian bard, renowned as a harp-player and singer, symbolically chooses the life of the sweet-singing nightingale.
Ajax, the Homeric hero, who, next to Achilles, was the bravest of the Greeks, most fittingly chooses the life of a lion; for the king of beasts is, and has been for unknown ages, the symbol denoting bravery or fearlessness, which almost all nations and races of men have recognized. ”

“ Folks say that her spirit still haunts that wood, and that on dark and stormy nights her shrieks may be heard, accompanied by the growling of the wehr-wolves and the laugh of the exulting demon. But you and I, Brother Thames, know well how foolish mortals are with their tales of horror, and how ready they are to mistake a creaking tree for a shriek and a moonbeam for a spirit. ”

“ THE WAPPING DELUGE.
Father Thames, not content with his customary course, has been “swelling it” in the course of the week, through some of the streets of the metropolis. As if to inculcate temperance, he walked himself down into public-house cellars, filling all the empty casks with water, and adulterating all the beer and spirits that came in his way; turning also every body’s fixed into floating capital. ”

“ Why was there ever a River Thames at all? To answer it we must go back—far, far back into the dim past. As you know, this world of ours is millions of years old, and like most ancient things it has seen changes—tremendous changes. Its surface has altered from time to time in amazing fashion. Whole mountain ranges have disappeared from sight, and valleys have been raised to make fresh highlands. ”

“ The Thames is flowing in the midst of an unbroken forest, its bosom rippled only by the zephyr, the waterfowl, or the bark canoe. Here and there above the tree tops curls of blue smoke arise from the wigwams of the savages, and a savory smell of venison and fish comes up from the Groton shore. Around us spreads the broad fair land known as the Pequot country, extending from the Nahantic, on the west, to the dominion of the Narragansets—the Rhode Island line—on the east, and northward it interlocks with that of the Mohegans, where Uncas, the rebel sachem, afterward bore rule. ”

“ Third Part King Henry VI, ii, 5.
The morning was far advanced when Tamworth reached the bottom of the steps of the Old Swan. There, where the ebb and flow of the Thames had placed its mark upon the masonry, he embarked in a wherry and was soon passing under London Bridge. The hot rays of the June sun were for a few moments intercepted. The swift current bore them with the velocity of a mill-race under the arch beneath which the rower had directed the wherry’s prow. ”

“ It need hardly be pointed out that no regular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as we have already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundary between any two definable societies, yet those who regard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeared a few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, the Mercians—probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying the middle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of land are, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most of our measures. ”

“ In 1184 the Red Cross Knights settled on the banks of the River Thames, and made their home there in what was called the New Temple. For 130 years they abode there, gradually increasing in wealth and power, till in the end their very strength defeated them. Princes and nobles who had given them great gifts of money for their worthy work saw that money used, not for charitable purposes, but to keep [200] up the pomp and luxury of the place, and soon various folk in high places coveted the Templars’ wealth and power, and determined to defeat them. ”

“ And out from the fields around, glitter the faint lights of more distant camps, as here some great lord’s followers lie mustered, and there false John’s French mercenaries hover like crouching wolves without the town.
And so, with sentinel in each dark street, and twinkling watch-fires on each height around, the night has worn away, and over this fair valley of old Thame has broken the morning of the great day that is to close so big with the fate of ages yet unborn. ”

“ A civilised man can cross a river more easily than a barbarian; and in civilised times there are permanent bridges, where in barbaric times there would be only fords or ferries.
Nevertheless, it is true of the Thames, as of nearly every other division in Europe, that it was much more of a boundary at the end of the Roman Empire, and is more of a strict boundary to-day, than it was during the Dark Ages, and presumably also before the Claudian invasion. ”

“ But the Thames (or Isis as it is invariably called in Oxford) is the place of more serious matters. To the rowing man “the River” means only one thing, and really only a very short space of that: he is accustomed to speak of “the River” and “the Cher,” and with him the latter does not count at all. Everybody in the valley, certainly every boy and girl, knows about the Oxford and Cambridge Boatrace, which is held annually on the Thames at Putney, when two selected crews from the rival universities race each other over a distance. ”

“ As early man grew to be civilized, as he learned to drain the flooded lands by the side of the stream and turn them from desolate fens and marshes to smiling productive fields, and as he learned slowly how to get from the hillsides and the plain the full value of his labour, so he realized more and more the possibilities of the great river valley.
The Thames flows in what may be regarded as an excellent example of a river-basin. ”

“ England in the Middle Ages, and on till a century or more ago, was an agricultural country; its wealth lay very largely in what it grew and what it reared; and the south provided the most suitable countryside for this sort of production. The consequence was that the Thames flowed right down through the centre of wealthy England. All round it were the chalk-ranges on which throve the great herds of long-fleeced sheep that provided the wonderful wool for which England was famous, and which was in many respects the main source of her prosperity. ”

“ Yet I tell you that, heavy as your losses may seem, Spargapises, Tomyris and fifty thousand Massagetae can never outweigh the spirit of one king of Persia, least of all of a Cyrus."
"In our country," answered the envoy, "death makes all men equal. The spirits of the king and the slave are of equal worth. Your father was a great man, but we have undergone awful sufferings for his sake. My tale is not yet ended. After the death of Tomyris discord broke out among the Massagetae. ”

“ The glory of the Thames is measured by the density of the population to which it ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential stream. ”

“ AT that spot below Reading where the Kennet pours its comparatively crystal waters into the main stream of the Thames, there is to be seen by all that look for it a very picturesque, if irritatingly new, boat-house. It is here that the youth of Reading hires its skiffs when contemplating an assault upon the silence of the early night; here that many an old river-man chooses to mark time upon the journey downwards from his Mecca at Oxford. And here it was that, some two years ago, I found the racing-shell which brought me indirectly to knowledge of the ragged intruder. ”

“ Whether, however, the number given in the town list of the Conqueror is or is not due to the destruction wrought by the Conquest we must be very careful not to estimate the population of that time upon the basis to-day such a list would afford. The figures of Domesday stand for a much larger population than most historians have hitherto been inclined to grant, as may be shown by considerations to which I shall only allude here, as I shall have to repeat them more fully upon a later page when I speak of urban life upon the Thames. ”

“ As we picture the prosperity of those medieval days there comes into our minds that winding [164] silver stream which made such prosperity possible, and we seem to see the River Thames crowded with ships from foreign parts, many of them bringing wine from France, Spain, and other lands, for wine was one of the principal imports of the Middle Ages, and filling up the great holds of their empty vessels with England’s superior wool; others from Italy, laden with fine weapons and jewels, with spices, drugs, and silks, and all wanting our wool. ”

“ Thus addressed, the old king pondered for awhile, and then made answer as follows:—“Yes, we have had giants, of one sort or another, in old England, but rarely of the size, and scarce even of the mischievous character, of your Daddyroarers. But since you have told me a tale of the giant, let me give you a legend of the small people;” and so saying Father Thames commenced the history of—
THE MANNIKINS’ CASTLE I don’t pretend, Brother Rhine, to have as many haunted castles upon my banks as you have on and about the sides of your famous river. ”

“ They take up a withy from the bundle last landed from the pound, draw it rapidly through a couple of pieces of iron fixed to a stand, and in a twinkling the bright green osier has become a snow-white wand. This humble colony of workers, about whom little is generally known, is one of many engaged in an out-of-the-way industry, hidden from the eyes of the world in some nook of the Thames. ”