Realms Frequented By The Muses

The Olympian assembly is honored by the appearance of the renowned terrestrial hero Hercules. In order to impress his divine audience, and no less to cement his, at present honorary membership in the pantheon he supplies a graphic proof of his regrettable and not very chivalrous deed, wherein he is depicted shooting poisonous arrows at the defenseless Centaur Nessos. Furthermore he is shown shooting the deadly venom across the river Euenos, well beyond  the Centaur's reach! . And the possibility of there being other reasons for the Deianeira's loud cries never enters his mind nor, like a fool does he seem to be aware of the fact, that Deianeira, who till then never had it with a Centaur, had made some subtle passive feminine advances at Nessos. The latter however being a child of mother nature, took them at their face value, which Deianeira, as she admitted it publically later, had of course presumed he would not, it being a civil society norm, which one could take for granted, even in realms, like the one they were presently wandering through and wherein the behavioral fidelity to such norms might appear as some kind of a pathological syndrome to some, as anything bereft of its original historical function appears to every native (like Nessos) everywhere, which means as a bizarre traditional convention of the barbarians, maintained for some mythical reasons unknown to the actor. To some however it might appear as just plain hypocrisy, obviously, due lack of other conceivable motives attributed to some kind of subconscious sadism residing in the recesses of the foreigner’s (like Deianeira’s ) soul!

However some fans of Deianeira claim that it was probably only because of some subconscious sigmundian slipping of her negligee down to her hips or her clothes getting wet in the river and therfore semi transparent, just like the from-the-rain drenched Sari of a Diva in Bombay films, which made the lusty Nessos helplessly lustful. They even admit, that her eyes, although absolutely uninviting may have involuntarily opened wide in astonishment, thereby emanating a sparkling premonition of some vaguely felt desire for yet untested and certainly forbidden fruits, as she perceived his masculinity, barely hidden in his savage native innocence. Yes her eyes probably might have opened wide at the sheer size of this unambiguous symbol of masculinity and the epitome of male dominance, that would have put any Hercules to shame and found an eternal mention in the Guinness book of records, if not for the fact, that civilizations like to call a spade a hammer and prefer to talk about it as spade only in colloquial or in the intimacy of home, when nobody is eaves dropping, and loath to call it directly by its name anywhere else, least of all in learned journals and popular record books. Poor Centaur, he was absolutely unaware of doing anything wrong, and certainly ignorant of the fact that she was a private property in some social exchange system. Besides he only wanted to give her that, what her eyes apparently so moistly wished and he had to die for his such an innocently natural deed. And worse at the hands of some one, using cowardly poisonous arrows and that too out of range from across the river Euenos! Anyway his admission of guilt and of having trespassed the chivalric codex made Hercules an honorable guest of the Olympians and the poor Nessos was soon forgotten.