LOCAL TRADITIONS. I. 175 The Zeus of local If from the Greek conceptions of Zeus we separate all those CHAP. which, springing from the idea of his relations to men as a Father, grew up into a moral and religious faith, the rest may all be traced to mythical phrases which describe the varying appearances of the traditions. heavens and the manifold influence of the atmosphere on the earth and its fruits. Of the countless names thus employed the most transparent would remain as attributes, while the greater number would be localised either as places or as persons. Hence would spring up distinctions between the Zeus of Arkadia, Dodona, Olympos and Crete, distinctions arising wholly from a forgetfulness of the original meaning of words, but fixed irrevocably by the real or apparent identity of the mythical epithets with any mythical names which had become geographical.' The sun as Endymiôn plunges into Latmos, the land of sleep; but the presence of the Latmian hill was a conclusive answer to any who might dare to call in question the veracity of the local legend. The old mythical speech had its Phaiakian or cloudland geography. It had its Arkadia and Delos, the birthplace of the light, its Phoinikia and Ortygia, the purple land of the quail and the dawn, its bright Lykian regions with its golden stream of Xanthos, its Idâ or earth on which rest the rays of the newly risen sun, its Graian or Hesperian lands where the light dies out in the evening. Carrying with them the treasures of their common inheritance, the Aryan tribes could not fail to give to the hills and streams of their new homes the names which had once described only the morning, the heaven, or the sun. The lord of day sinks to sleep in the glowing west and the tomb of Endymion could therefore be only in Elis, on the western, not on the eastern, shore of the Peloponnesos. The god of the blue ether is throned in light so also must the seat of the anthropomorphised Zeus be on some hill whose name, like the Delos of Apollôn and the Athens of his virgin sister, expresses the one idea of splendour; and thus he was made to dwell on the summit of the Arkadian Lykaios and the Olympian heights of Mysia and Thessaly. As the veil of night is slowly withdrawn, the clear heaven is first seen in the east, and thus Zeus must be born in Lyktos or in Diktê; but the Cretan who could point to a Diktaian cave in his own land clung tenaciously to the notion that the child who was there nourished by Amaltheia was not the Zeus of Arkadia and Olympos. of Zeus. The story of his birth and exploits is to be gathered not so much The birth from the Iliad and Odyssey as from the Hesiodic or Orphic theogonies; but unless we find manifest contradictions between the See Book i. ch. x. BOOK II. The iniquities of Kronos. accounts which they set before us, it is unsafe to infer that the poets whom we style Homeric were unacquainted with details or incidents about which they are silent, even if it be assumed that their poems in their present shape are more ancient than those which bear the names of Hesiod or Orpheus. That the theogony of the former was far less complicated and retrospective than that of the latter, there can scarcely be a doubt. The prison to which they assign Kronos is proof that they looked on Zeus as one who had not always been supreme in power; but the names with which their theogony begins are not those of Chaos and Gaia, but those of Têthys and Okeanos.1 The struggle between Zeus and the Titans may be inferred from the fact that Hêrê and Hephaistos speak of them as thrust away under Tartaros; but the Polyphêmos of the Odyssey who feeds his flocks in broad pastures has nothing but his size and his one eye in common with the Hesiodic Kyklôpes who forge the thunderbolts of Zeus.3 The lateness of many at least among the Hesiodic ideas seems to be manifested not so much in the allegorical elements introduced,ʻ as in the transparent meaning of the names. Zeus and Hades, Phoibos and Lêtô already denoted the conflicting powers of light and darkness, of day and night; but these words had in great part lost their original force, and the poet who wished to frame a systematic theogony felt constrained to speak of Aithêr (ether) and Hêmera as children of Nyx and Erebos. In some important points the story of Ouranos is told over again in the myths of Kronos and Zeus. From Ouranos and Gaia, according to the Hesiodic theogony, spring Koios and Krios, Hyperíôn and Iapetos, the Kyklôpes and other monstrous beings, together with Rhea the mother of Zeus. All these 1 II. xiv. 201. 2 Ibid. 279. In the Gaelic story of Osgar, the son of Oisein, the monster appears with two eyes; but he is blinded, as in all other forms of the myth, and for the same reason.-Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, iii. 297. Still, it is significant that "not a bit of him was to be seen but his eyes with blue-green scales of hardening upon him, the livid garment of storm-cloud. But in another legend we have the genuine Kyklops. "There was seen nearing us A big man upon one foot, With his hammering tools and his steel THE VORACITY OF KRONOS. 177 Ouranos hid away in the secret places of Gaia who called on Kronos СНАР. to avenge her wrongs and his own. From the blood of the mutilated Ouranos which fell on the broad sea was born the laughter-loving Aphroditê. Thus the goddess of love and beauty is, like the Kyklôpes, older than the Father of gods and men; nor can anything show more clearly how thoroughly the mythology of the Aryan world was in conflict with its religion. Kronos and Rhea, then, became the parents of Hestia, Dêmêtêr, Hêrê, and Hades; but these are all swallowed by Kronos, who knows that some day he will be dethroned by some child of his own. In grief of heart, Rhea, shortly before the birth of Zeus, betakes herself to Ouranos and Gaia, who send her to the Cretan Lyktos, and there Zeus, like Mithras and Krishna, was born in a cave which Apollodoros calls the cave of Diktê. A stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes was presented to Kronos, who, taking it for the new-born babe, swallowed it as he had swallowed the others. Deceived at length by Gaia, Kronos disgorged them all, the stone first and the living children afterwards. The stone was set up by Zeus for a memorial in Pytho. But Zeus, when he became the husband of Mêtis, felt the same strange desire which had led Ouranos and Kronos to consume their children; and thus, by the advice again of Ouranos and Gaia, he swallowed Mêtis before she became the mother of Athênê. In these exaggerations of a late age we trace the same thought which made the Vedic poet speak of the Dawn as making men old, yet as ever young herself. The light of the heaven calls all things into life; but the heaven retains its unchangeable beauty while generations spring up on the earth and pass away. The children swallowed are thus produced again; and so the Heaven or the Dawn This is probably the only meaning which the word φιλομμειδής conveyed to the poets of the Iliad and Odyssey. But the whole mythology of Aphroditê renders it far more likely that we have here a confusion similar to that which turned Lykâôn into a wolf, and that the epithet was originally φιλομμηδής, not perhaps, as in the line (200) marked as spurious in the Hesiodic Theogony, dτɩ μηδέων ἐξεφαάνθη, but from the attributes which made her the vehement lover of Adonis. With this epithet we may compare that of Pallas (the Phallic) Athênê. * With this myth Grimm's story of the Wolf and the Seven Little Goats presents a striking parallel. The wolf is here the night or the darkness which tries to swallow up the seven days of the week, and actually swallows six. BOOK might be spoken of as relentless and cruel, and as rightly punished by their injured children.1 II. The war of the Titans. Other forms of this struggle. A hard fight now awaited Zeus, who, by delivering the children of Ouranos, had been armed for the struggle with thunder and lightning. On his side against the Titans and the offspring of Kronos were ranged Kottos, Gyas, and Briareôs, who cast the Titans into Tartaros and there left them chained. The struggle itself is described in language which shows how little the poet cared about the subject. Thunders, lightning, and earthquake attest the majesty of Zeus, by whose thunderbolts land and ocean are wrapped in seething fire; the din of the conflict is as though the earth and the solid heavens were crashing together; and nine days would pass before a brazen anvil (Akmôn) let down from the earth could fathom the depths of Tartaros. Above this gloomy prison-house are the roots of the earth and the barren sea, and there within walls and gates built by Poseidôn dwell the three sons of Ouranos who befriended Zeus in his hour of need. Yet this struggle which, like that between Zeus and Typhôeus the latest-born child of Gaia and Tartaros, is related with so much pomp of high-sounding but empty words, is the conflict which runs through all mythology and which, in its more human forms, has a singular and unfailing interest. It is the battle of Phoibos with the Pythian monster, of Indra with the throttling snake Vritra, of Sigurd with the dragon of the Glistening Heath, of Oidipous with 1 The opinion that Kronos himself The Wisdom but as the older myth spoke of the dawn as springing from the forehead of the sky, there was no help for the later mythopoists but to make Zeus swallow Mêtis. 2 Hesiod, Theog. 504. This is indubitably the hammer of Thor, which is sunk eight rasks beneath the surface of the earth and which takes nine months to rise again to Asgard. In fact the Greek word translated by "anvil" is etymologically identical with the Teutonic hammer." "Professor Curtius," says Mr. Peile, seems to be right in combining the O. H. G. hamar, our hammer, with the Lithuanian akman and the Sk. açman, each of which means a stone,' and the latter also a thunderbolt;' and with the Greek Kμw which commonly means an anvil, but which in Hesiod, Theog. 722, where he speaks of the χάλκεος ἄκμων οὐρανόθεν KaTiwy, can mean nothing but the thunderbolt."-Introduction to Greek and Latin Etymology, 37 THE TITANS AND THEIR KINSFOLK. 179 the Sphinx, and in the earlier phase of the legend, of Achilleus CHAP. and Agamemnôn with Paris. of Zeus. Having related the story of Typhoeus, the Hesiodic Theogony The loves recounts the loves of Zeus with Mêtis, Themis, Eurynomê, Dêmêtêr, Mnemosynê, Lêtô, and with Hêrê, who in this scheme is the latest of his brides and has fallen far below the majesty with which she is invested in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of these names some are the growth of a comparatively late age. The dawn-goddess of the far east is described as waking all men and receiving praise from every thinker; and the character here faintly attributed to her is brought out more clearly in the Hellenic Athênê, and finds its utmost developement in the Latin Minerva. Athênê, then, as the goddess of the morning, must have a mother with qualities corresponding to her own, and this parent was found in the Wisdom which is wedded to Zeus. To this class of invented names belong those of the Hôrai, or Hours, and their mother Themis; but the name of Eurynomê, the mother of the Charites, is more true to the original character of these beautiful maidens. The broad spreading light' is the parent of the glistening beings who in the form of horses draw the chariot of Indra, and in the west are the maidens who attend on Aphroditê. as the dawn may be regarded as springing from the face of the sky, so in another and an earlier myth Athênê springs armed from the forehead of Zeus, and the dark powers of night at once retreat before her. The same idea rendered it necessary to assign to Hêrê some offspring of her own unaided power whether in the person of Typhôeus,' or, as the Hesiodic theogony relates, of Hephaistos also. But deities. Thus the number of the kinsfolk and the children of Zeus is The twelve Olympian already large; but of the class of deities specially known at Athens in the days of Thucydides as the twelve Olympian gods neither our Homeric poems nor the Hesiodic theogony know anything. In the latter, Zeus and Poseidon are the shakers of the earth and sea, while Hades dwells in the regions under the earth; but of a threefold partition of the Kosmos between the three Kronid brothers we have no formal mention. Of Poseidôn the Theogony tells us only that he built the walls within which Briareôs guards the Titans: nor is there any difference of rank between Arês and his sisters Hêbê and Eileithyia, or again between Dêmêtêr and Eurynomê. From the number of the so-called twelve, Hades is excluded; but in the Iliad 1 66 'Typhoeus, the whirlwind or Typhoon, has a hundred dragon or serpent heads, the long writhing striæ of vapour which run before the hurricane-cloud. He belches fire, that is, lightnings issue |