"A Pelion ash, which Chiron gave to his (Achilles') father, cut from the top of Mount Pelion, to be the death of heroes."
Chaucer, Squieres Tale: --
"And of Achilles for his queinte spere,
For he coude with it bothe hele and drere."
And Shakespeare, in King Henry the Sixth, V. i.: --
"Whose smile and frown, like to Achilles' spear,
Is able with the change to kill and cure."
"He now blew a loud blast with his horn, to summon any Christian concealed in the adjacent woods to his assistance, or to recall his friends beyond the pass. This horn was endued with such power, that all other horns were split by its sound; and it is said that Orlando at that time blew it with such vehemence, that he burst the veins and nerves of his neck. The sound reached the king's ears, who lay encamped in the valley still called by his name, about eight miles from Ronceval, towards Gascony, being carried so far by supernatural power. Charles would have flown to his succor, but was prevented by Ganalon, who, conscious of Orlando's sufferings, insinuated it was usual with him to sound his horn on light occasions. `He is, perhaps', said he, `pursuing some wild beast, and the sound echoes through the woods; it will be fruitless, therefore, to seek him.' O wicked traitor, deceitful as Judas! What dost thou merit?"
Walter Scott in Marmion, VI. 33, makes allusion to Orlando's horn: --
"O for a blast of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
That to King Charles did come,
When Rowland brave, and Oliver,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died!"
Orlando's horn is one of the favorite fictions of old romance, and is surpassed in power only by that of Alexander, which took sixty men to blow it and could be heard at a distance of sixty miles!
And Ampère, Voyage Dantesque, 277, remarks:
"Here Dante takes as a point of comparison an object of determinate size; the pigna is eleven feet high, the giant then must be seventy; it performs, in the description, the office of those figures which are placed near monuments to render it easier for the eye to measure their height."
Mr. Norton, Travel and Study in Italy, 253, thus speaks of the same object:
"This pine-cone, of bronze, was set originally upon the summit of the Mausoleum of Hadrian. After this imperial sepulchre had undergone many evil fates, and as its ornaments were stripped one by one from it, the cone was in the sixth century taken down, and carried off to adorn a fountain, which had been constructed for the use of dusty and thirsty pilgrims, in a pillared enclosure, called the Paradiso, in front of the old basilica of St. Peter. Here it remained for centuries; and when the old church gave way to the new, it was put where it now stands, useless and out of place, in the trim and formal gardens of the Papal palace."
And adds in a note: --
"At the present day it serves the bronze-workers of Rome as a model for an inkstand, such as is seen in the shop windows every winter, and is sold to travellers, few of whom know the history and the poetry belonging to its original."
Cory, Ancient Fragments, 51, gives this extract from the Sibylline Oracles: --
"But when the judgments of the Almighty God Were ripe for execution, when the Tower Rose to the skies upon Assyria's plain, And all mankind one language only knew; A dread commission from on high was given To the fell whirlwinds, which with dire alarms Beat on the Tower, and to its lowest base Shook it convulsed. And now all intercourse, By some occult and overruling power, Ceased among men: by utterance they strove Perplexed and anxious to disclose their mind; But their lip failed them, and in lieu of words Produced a painful babbling sound: the place Was thence called Babel; by th' apostate crew Named from the event. Then severed far away They sped uncertain into realms unknown; Thus kingdoms rose, and the glad world was filled."
"God-like Otus and far-famed Ephialtes; whom the faithful earth nourished, the tallest and far the most beautiful, at least after illustrious Orion. For at nine years old they were also nine cubits in width, and in height they were nine fathoms. Who even threatened the immortals that they would set up a strife of impetuous war in Olympus. They attempted to place Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa leafy Pelion, that heaven might be accessible. And they would have accomplished it, if they had reached the measure of youth; but the son of Jove, whom fair-haired Latona bore, destroyed them both, before the down flowered under their temples and thickened upon their cheeks with a flowering beard."
"Aegaeon, who, they say, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands, and flashed fire from fifty mouths and breasts; when against the thunder-bolts of Jove he on so many equal bucklers clashed; unsheathed so many swords." He is supposed to have been a famous pirate, and the fable of the hundred hands arose from the hundred sailors that manned his ship.
"To Afric's coast he cuts the foamy way,
Where low the once victorious Carthage lay.
There landing, to the well-known camp he hies,
Where from afar the distant seas he spies;
Where Bagrada's dull waves the sands divide,
And slowly downward roll their sluggish tide.
From thence he seeks the highest renowned by fame,
And hallowed by the great Cornelian name:
The rocks and hills which long, traditions say,
Where held by huge Antaeus' horrid sway.
But greater deeds this rising mountain grace,
And Scipio's name ennobles much the place,
While, fixing here his famous camp, he calls
Fierce Hannibal from Rome's devoted walls.
As yet the mouldering works remain in view,
Where dreadful once the Latin eagles flew."
"Here too you might have seen Tityus, the foster-child of all-bearing earth, whose body is extended over nine whole acres; and a huge vulture, with her hooked beak, pecking at his immortal liver." Also Odyssey, XI., in similar words.
Typhoeus was a giant wih a hundred heads, like a dragon's who made war upon the gods as soon as he was born. He was the father of Geryon and Cerberus.
"Bright in Olympic oil Alcides shone,
Antaeus with his mother's dust is strown,
And seeks her friendly force to aid his own."