XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 399

241. From the cap hangs a long scarf-like veil. It is twisted once about the princess’s left arm, and then floats in the air. The effect of this veil strikes one on the first glance at the picture. It gives force to the impression of natural fear, yet strangely, in light fold, adds a secret sense of security, as though the gauze were some sacred aegis. And such indeed it is, nor seen first by Carpaccio, though probably his intuitive invention here. There is a Greek vase-picture* of Cadmus attacking a dragon, Ares-begotten, that guarded the sacred spring of the warrior-god. That fight was thus for the same holy element whose symbolic sprinkling is the end of this one here. A maiden anxiously watches the event; her gesture resembles the princess’s; her arm is similarly shielded by a fold of her mantle. But we have a parallel at once more familiar and more instructively perfect than this. Cadmus had a daughter, to whom was given power upon the sea, because in utmost need she had trusted herself to the mercy of its billows. Lady of its foam, in hours when “the blackening wave is edged with white,”¹ she is a holier and more helpful Aphrodite,-a “water-sprite” whose voice foretells that not “wreck” but salvation “is nigh.” In the last and most terrible crisis of that long battle with the Power of Ocean, who denied him a return to his Fatherland, Ulysses would have perished in the waters without the veil of Leucothea wrapped about his breast as divine life-buoy. And that veil, the “immortal” krhdemnon,† was just such a scarf attached to the head-dress as this one of the princess’s here.‡ Curiously, too, we shall see that Leucothea (at first called Ino), of Thebes’ and Cadmus’ line, daughter of Harmonia, is closely connected

* Inghirami gives this (No. 239).

† In pursuance of the same symbolism, Troy walls were once literally called “salvation,” this word, with, for certain historical reasons, the added epithet of “holy,” being applied to them. With the Krhdemna, Penelope shielded her “tender” cheeks in presence of the suitors.

‡ Vide Nitsch ad Od., v. 346.

¹ [Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto vi. 23.]

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