Arachne. Georg Ebers
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“What contradictions! ‘Woman’s hair is long, but her wit is short,’ says the proverb. ‘Waiting is the merchant’s wisdom,’ I have heard your master say more than once, and to obey the words of shrewd people is the best plan for those who are not so wise. Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that curiosity alone brought Daphne—who, after all, is only a woman—to this place. She wants to see the statues of Demeter which her father ordered from us.”
“And the Arachne?” asked the maid. This was an opportune question to the slave—how often he had heard the artists utter the word “Arachne!”—and his pride of education had suffered from the consciousness that he knew nothing about her except the name, which in Greek meant “the spider.”
Some special story must surely be associated with this Arachne, for which his master desired to use his young countrywoman, Ledscha, as a model, and whose statues Archias intended to place in his house in Alexandria and in the great weaving establishment at Tennis beside the statue of Demeter.
Stephanion, a Greek woman who grew up in a Macedonian household, must know something about her.
So he cautiously turned the conversation to the spinner Arachne, and when Stephanion entered into it, admitted that he, too, was curious to learn in what way the sculptors would represent her.
“Yes,” replied the maid, “my mistress has more than once racked her brains over that, and Archias too. Perhaps they will carve her as a girl at work in the house of her father Idmon, the purple dyer of Colophon.”
“Never,” replied Bias in a tone of dissent. “Just imagine how the loom would look wrought in gold and ivory!”
“I thought so too,” said Stephanion, in apology for the foolish idea. “Daphne thinks that the two will model her in different ways: Myrtilus, as mistress in the weaving room, showing with proud delight a piece just completed to the nymphs from the Pactolus and other rivers, who sought her at Colophon to admire her work; but Hermon, after she aroused the wrath of Athene because she dared to weave into the hangings the love adventures of the gods with mortal women.”
“Father Zeus as a swan toying with Leda,” replied Bias as confidently as if Arachne’s works were before his eyes, “and in the form of a bull bearing away Europa, the chaste Artemis bending over the sleeping Endymion.”
“How that pleases you men!” interrupted the maid, striking him lightly on the arm with the duster which she had brought from the tent. “But ought the virgin Athene to be blamed because she punished the weaver who, with all her skill, was only a mortal woman, for thus exposing her divine kindred?”
“Certainly not,” replied Bias, and Stephanion went on eagerly: “And when the great Athene, who invented weaving and protects weavers, condescended to compete with Arachne, and was excelled by her, surely her gall must have overflowed. Whoever is just will scarcely blame her for striking the audacious conqueror on the brow with the weaver’s shuttle.”
“It is that very thing,” replied Bias modestly, “which to a short-sighted fool like myself—may the great goddess not bear me a grudge for it!—never seemed just in her. Even the mortal who succumbs in a fair fight ought not to be enraged against the victor. At least, so I was taught. But what, I ask myself, when I think of the stones which were flung at Hermon’s struggling Maenads, could be less suited for imitation than two women, one of whom strikes the other?”
“The woman who in her desperation at that blow desires to hang herself, must produce a still more horrible impression,” replied Stephanion. “Probably she will be represented as Athene releases her from the noose rather than when, as a punishment for her insolence, she transforms Arachne into a spider.”
“That she might be permitted, in the form of an insect, to make artistic webs until the end of her life,” the slave, now sufficiently well informed, added importantly. “Since that transformation, as you know, the spider has been called by the Greeks Arachne. Perhaps—I always thought so—Hermon will represent her twisting the rope with which she is to kill herself. You have seen many of our works, and know that we love the terrible.”
“Oh, let me go into your studio!” the maid now entreated no less urgently than her mistress had done a short time before, but her wish, too, remained ungratified.
“The sculptors,” Bias truthfully asserted, “always kept their workrooms carefully locked.” They were as inaccessible as the strongest fortress, and it was wise, less on account of curious spectators, from whom there was nothing to fear, than of the thievish propensities of the people. The statues, by Archias’s orders, were to be executed in chryselephantine work, and the gold and ivory which this required might only too easily awaken the vice of cupidity in the honest and frugal Biamites. So nothing could be done about it, not to mention the fact that he was forbidden, on pain of being sold to work in a stone quarry, to open the studio to any one without his master’s consent.
So the maid, too, was obliged to submit, and the sacrifice was rendered easier for her because, just at that moment, a young female slave called her back to the tent where Chrysilla, Daphne’s companion, a matron who belonged to a distinguished Greek family, needed her services.
Bias, rejoicing that he had at last learned, without exposing his own ignorance, the story of the much-discussed Arachne, returned to the house, where he remained until Daphne came back from shooting with her companions. While the latter were talking about the birds they had killed, Bias went out of doors; but he was forced to give up his desire to listen to a conversation which was exactly suited to arrest his attention, for after the first few sentences he perceived behind the thorny acacias in the “garden” his countrywoman Ledscha.
So she was keeping her promise. He recognised her plainly, in spite of the veil which covered the back of her head and the lower portion of her face. Her black eyes were visible, and what a sinister light shone in them as she fixed them sometimes on Daphne, sometimes on Hermon, who stood talking together by the steps!
The evening before Bias had caught a glimpse of this passionate creature’s agitated soul. If anything happened here that incensed or wounded her she would be capable of committing some unprecedented act before the very master’s honoured guest.
To prevent this was a duty to the master whom he loved, and against whom he had only warned Ledscha because he was reluctant to see a free maiden of his own race placed on a level with the venal Alexandrian models, but still more because any serious love affair between Hermon and the Biamite might bring disastrous consequences upon both, and therefore also on himself. He knew that the free men of his little nation would not suffer an insult offered by a Greek to a virgin daughter of their lineage to pass unavenged.
True, in his bondage he had by no means remained free from all the bad qualities of slaves, but he was faithfully devoted to his master, who had imposed upon him a great debt of gratitude; for though, during the trying period of variance with his rich and generous uncle, Hermon had often been offered so large a sum for him that it would have relieved the artist from want, he could not be induced to yield his “wise and faithful Bias” to another. The slave had sworn to himself that he would never forget this, and he kept his oath.
Freedmen and slaves were moving to and fro in the large open square before him, amid the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the male and female venders of fruit, vegetables, and fish, who hoped to dispose of their wares in the kitchen tent of the wealthy strangers.
The single veiled woman attracted no attention here, but Bias kept his gaze fixed steadily upon her, and as she curved her little slender hand above her brow to shade her watchful eyes from the dazzling sunlight, and set her beautifully arched foot on a stone near one of the trees in order to gain a better view, he thought of the story of the weaver which he had just heard.
Though the stillness of the hot noontide was interrupted by many sounds, it exerted a bewitching influence over him.
Ledscha seemed like the embodiment of some great danger, and when she lowered one arm and raised the other to protect herself again from the radiance of the noonday sun, he started; for through the brain of the usually fearless man darted the thought that now the nimble spider-legs were