LEGEND OF HERCULES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19412, 21 August 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

LEGEND OF HERCULES.

THE TUNIC OF NESSUS. STORY RECALLED BY LAWSUIT TRAGEDY OF EXPLOSIVE SCARF. An extraordinary case has come to light in the French law courts to stir a host of memories. The story is that a manufacturer produced an artificial silk. scarf which proved explosive in use. Nitric acid entered into the composition, and was not extracted, it is said, before the yarn was used. The result was, according to the legal argument, that a boy, wearing a scarf of this material, was burned to death owing to the scarf bursting into flames. Here is a sad, real-life story recalling an immortal legend of the death of Hercules.

To the ancient Greeks, Hercules Was the son of Jupiter dwelling on Earth as a mortal, put to terrific tasks —the Labours of Hercules, which make up the marvellous tales we read from childhood

to' old age; the strangling of the serpents in his baby hands, the killing of the lion sent against him, the destruction of the Hydra with nine heads, the cleansing of the Augean stables by turning a river through them, the gaining of the girdle of the Queen of the Amazons, the ..release of Prometheus from the rock to which he had been fixed as punishment for bringing fire from Heaven for the service of man. ' .

Hercules is married..to. .Deianira, who is loved by 'Nessus, a centaur. The Greeks believed in a race of creatures half-horse and half-man, as they and later peoples believed in mermaids of the sea. Nessus controlled a ferry,, and received fees for conveying human passengers over it. Hercules, having, to cross this river, entrusted Deianira to Nessus while he himself.swam across, Nessus played' him false and tried to carry off the fair Deianira, and Hercules, perceiving the act, shot the centaur with an arrow.

. Guileful to the last, Nessus told Deianira, as he was dying, that if she preserved his tunic, stained with his blood, she might use' it as a love-charm to keep constant the affections of anyone she wished to love her. She believed him, and, desiring none but the affections of Hercules, she steeped one' of his garments in a potion obtained from the centaur's tunic. Hercules, on putting, it on, found his flesh burned and blistered beyond endurance.

With the despairing strength of a Samson, he climbed Mount Oeta, tore down the forest trees, built himself a funeral pyre, laid himself upon it, bade his faithful friend, Philoctetes, to apply a lighted brand and perished in the flames. The very gods, grieved to see the end of Hercules, the stoiy goes, but Jupiter, his father, pointed out the lesson of immortality of the soul. Only the mortal part of ■ Hercules had perished, and his immortal spirit was exalted to the skies to dwell for ever with his peers. To this day, after more than two thousand years, men speak of the Shirt of Nessus to indicate a tortured conscience, a fatal gift, a misfortune from which there is no escape. To the poor little French boy, his scarf of artificial silk seems to have been of that kind. Does not modern fact here, asks the writer of the story, seem to have borrowed from ancient fiction ?