470.0

“Get of Zeus” (Apollo, Athena, Ares, and Aphrodite), Wild Storm, the Fates, and the rocky ground itself are all joined as one to pursue the blood-stained killer, who is imagined as a herd of wild horses set into thunderous stampede. The divine and natural worlds have united, galvanized by their violent reaction to unspeakable human misdeed. [Dp] Yet the utterly frightful minions of justice are said to be attired as hoplites (ἐνόπλος) and so to take the form of human warriors. The image of hoplites formed up in ranks, all too familiar to the Athenian audience, is thus combined with the most forceful images of natural upheaval and divine power that geographically connects Athens with Delphi (and indeed all of Greece). These imagistic verses vivify the audience’s imagination of the sacred precinct in Delphi and join to it the scene of war. Indeed, the effect of this song is to galvanize the entire world, natural, mortal, and divine, from the very geology upon which men walk and build to the stormy skies above their heads, from Hades below to Olympus above, from the domain of mortals to the domain of gods. [Dp] [Ap]