Hyperion to Bellarmin
Even canny Notara was captivated by the new project, promised me strong backing, hoped soon to occupy the Corinthian Isthmus and grasp Greece here as by the helve. But fate willed otherwise and rendered his work futile before it reached its goal.
He advised me not to go to Tinos, but to head straight down the Peloponnese, and as unobtrusively as possible. I should write to my father on the way, he said; the cautious old man would more easily condone a step that had been taken than allow one that hadn’t. I wasn’t wholly at ease with that, but we so readily sacrifice our own feelings when a great goal stands before our eyes.
‘I doubt,’ continued Notara, ‘whether you'll be able to count on your father’s help in a case like this. So I shall give you what you're surely going to need along the way so as to live and do your work for a time, come what may. If you can someday, then pay it back; if not, then what was mine was also yours. Don’t be ashamed to take the money,’ he added with a smile; ‘even the steeds of Phoebus don’t live on air alone, so the poets tell us.’