—
Schiller. When Hercules’ twelve labors were ended he married Dejanira and lived in peace with her for three years. One day when they were traveling, in crossing a river, the ferryman, a Centaur by the name of Nessus, endeavored to carry away Dejanira, but Hercules heard her cries and pierced the Centaur through the heart with one of his poisoned arrows. With dying accents Nessus professed repentance and begged Dejanira to take his robe and keep it for its magic power.
“Take
This white robe. It is costly. See my blood
Has stained it but a little. I did wrong:
I know it and repent me. If there come
A time when he grows cold—for all the race
Of heroes wander, nor can any love
Fix theirs for long—take him and wrap him in it
And he shall love again.”
—Wm. Morris.
Soon afterwards the news was brought to Dejanira that Hercules was in love with Iola and she sent to him by his page, Lichas, the robe given her by the Centaur. When Hercules donned the robe poison seized upon his frame.
“Clasping each limb the tunic racked each joint,
Convulsive pains, but when he felt the accurst
Fell serpents’ venom batten in his flesh
He cried aloud for Lichas, the ill-starred.”
Lichas vainly denied all knowledge of the treacherous deed, but Hercules, maddened by his agony, seized him by the foot and hair and hurled him into space. “Lichas congealed like hail in mid air and turned to stone, then falling into the Euboic sea became a rock which still bears his name and retains the human form.” Hercules wrenched off the garment, but it stuck to his flesh and with it he tore away whole pieces of his body. In this condition he ascended Mt. Œta, where he built a funeral pyre, and laying himself upon it, commanded his son to apply the torch. The flames soon put an end to his suffering and his spirit passed in a thunder cloud to Olympus. Dejanira, seeing the calamity she had unwittingly caused, took her own life.
INTERPRETATION.
The slaughter of the Centaur by Hercules signifies the dissipation of vapors by the sun. Dejanira, “the destroying spouse,” is daylight, Iola the beautiful twilight, and the bloody robe a sun cloud, now concealing, now revealing, the mangled body of the sun. Hercules ends his career in one grand flame, the emblem of the sun setting in a framework of blazing crimson clouds.
ART.
This spirited group by Canova, in the Torloni Palace, Rome, represents Hercules throwing Lichas into the sky. The poisoned garment clings most painfully to his body. The lion skin and club have slipped to the base of the altar upon which he was about to offer sacrifice.
