PARTISAN REVIEW
like a leopard. Disarmed, she brought her teeth and nails into play;
enraged by my laughter (for I, too, had no weapons) and because
she could not stop herself from loving me. I have never leaped anyone
more virginal. And little did it matter to me that later she could only
suckle my Hippolytus, her son, with one breast. It was this chaste
and savage being whom I wished to make my heir. I shall speak,
during the course of my story, of what has been the greatest grief of
my life. For it
is
not enough to exist, and then to have existed. One
must make one's legacy and act in such a way that one is not ex–
tinguished with oneself, so my grandfather had often told me. Pittheus
and Aegeus were much more intelligent than I; so
is
Pirithous. But
people give me credit for good sense. The rest is added with the
determination to do well that has never left me. Mine, too, is the kind
of courage which incites me to desperate enterprises. On top of all
this I was ambitious. The great deeds of my cousin Hercules, which
they used to report to me, exasperated my young blood, and when
it was time to leave Troezen where I had lived till then and rejoin
my so-called father in Athens, I refused altogether to accept the
advice, sound though it was, to go by sea because that route was the
safer. Well I knew it. But it was the very hazards of the overland
route, with its immense detour, which tempted me; a chance to prove
my worth. Thieves of every sort were beginning once again to infest
the country, and did so with impunity now that Hercules was squan–
dering his manhood with Omphale. I was sixteen. All the cards were
in my hand. My tum had come. In great leaps my heart was bound–
in~r
towards the extremity of my happiness. "What have I to do
with safety!" I cried. "And a route that's set in order." I despised
comfort and idleness and unlaurelled ease. So it was on the road to
Athens by way of the isthmus of the Peloponnese that I first put
myself to the test, that my heart and my arm together taught me
their full strength, when I cut down some well-known and well–
hated robbers: Sinnis, Periphetes, Procrustes, Geryon (no that was
Hercules, I meant to say Cercyon.) By the way I made a slight mis–
take at that time, where Scyron was concerned, for he turned out
afterwards to have been a very worthy man, good-natured and most
helpful to passing travellers.
As
I had just done away with him it
was soon agreed that he had been a rascal.
Also on the road to Athens, in a thicket of asparagus, there
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