BOOK II. The Arka anxious like Laios to preserve his own life, placed Danaê and her child in a chest, as according to one version Oidipous also was placed and borne away to Brasiai. The story of her sojourn in the house of Polydektês at Seriphos, of his persecutions and the more benignant treatment of his brother Diktys, of her rescue on the return of her son, and her restoration to her native land, belongs rather to the mythical history of Perseus. The myth of Andromeda, the beautiful daughter of the Aithiopian king Kepheus, is less gloomy; but although her woes seem to end with her deliverance from the dragon, she had up to that time had her full share of sorrow. Her mother Kassiopeia had, like Niobê, boasted that her child was more beautiful even than the daughters of Nereus, who prayed to Poseidôn to avenge the insult, as Lêtô called on Phoibos to requite the wrong done to her by Niobê. Poseidôn accordingly brought the waters of the sea over the land, and with them a sea-monster who, like the Sphinx or the Minotauros, can be satisfied only with human blood. The former fills the streets of Thebes with corpses; the latter exacts the yearly tribute of the dawn-children. But the solitary Andromeda, abandoned to the huge sea-dragon, takes a firmer hold on the popular imagination, and is reproduced in a thousand forms, from the women rescued by Oidipous and Theseus down to Una and her Red Cross Knight. All these deliverers are men unknown to fame; but they are all endowed with powers for which they who see them give them no credit, and they all exhibit the manly type of generous chivalry which finds its consummation in the pure Sir Galahad. The same idea is the groundwork of the myth of the Arkadian dian Augê. Augê, the clear atmosphere of the land of light. Hence the local myth necessarily related that Heraklês came to her whenever he visited Tegea, and thus she becomes the mother of one of the fatal children whose life begins and ends in disaster. No sooner is her son born than her father Aleos decrees her death and the exposure of the child. But Augê is saved to become the wife of the Mysian Teuthras, or, according to another version, to escape narrowly the fate of the Theban Iokastê, and in the end to be brought back to Tegea by her son Têlephos, as Perseus brings his mother back to Argos. Europe and the Bull. The story of Eurôpê brings before us the dawn, not as fleeing from the pursuit of the sun, but as borne across the heaven by the lord of the pure ether. Zeus here, like Indra, himself assumes the form of a bull, and takes away the child as she plays with her brother in her Phenician home.1 Almost every name in the myth This bull reappears in the Norse tale of Katic Wooden-cloak (Dasent), endowed with the powers of Wish. In its left ear is a cloth which, when spread THE BURNING BRAND. 247 II. tells its own tale, although we may perhaps have to put aside the CHAP. names of Agênôr and Kadmos as merely Hellenised forms of the Semitic Kedem and Chnas. Eurôpê herself, the splendour of morning, seen first in the Phoinikian or purple land, is the child of Têlephassa, the being whose light streams from afar; and in her first loveliness she is lost to those who delight in her, when she is snatched away to her western exile. Then follows the long journey of Kadmos and Têlephassa, the weary search of the sun through the livelong day for his early lost sister or bride. There were obviously a thousand ways of treating the myth. They might recover her in the end, as Alpheios is reunited to Arethousa and Perseus comes again to Danaê; but as it might be said that they might behold her like hereafter, so the tale might run that the being who had delighted them with her beauty should be seen herself again no more. The myth of Europê sets forth the latter notion. Têlephassa sinks down and dies far in the west on the plains of Thessaly, and Kadmos, journeying westward still, learns at Delphoi that he is to seek his sister no longer. and the The myth of Althaia sets forth the dawn or morning as the Althaia mother of a child whose life is bound up with a burning brand. As burning soon as the brand is burnt out her son will die, according to the brand, inexorable doom pronounced by the Moirai. This brand is the torch of day, which is extinguished when the sun sinks beneath the western horizon. From this conception of the sun's course sprung the idea that his mother kept him alive by snatching the log from the fire. But although Meleagros is, like Phoibos and Achilleus, invincible and invulnerable, the words of the Moirai must be accomplished; and as the mother of the sun may be either the dark night or the nourishing dawn (Althaia), so the wife of Oineus has her kinsfolk among the dark beings; and when these are slain by Meleagros, she thrusts the brand again into the fire, and the life of her brilliant child smoulders away. But his death brings with it the death alike of his mother and his bride, for the tints of the dawn or the gloaming cannot linger long after the sun is down. The names introduced out, furnishes abundant banquets for the dawn-maiden, who has been thrust out of her father's house; but when the stepmother says that she cannot rest until she has eaten the Dun Bull's flesh, the beast, hearing her, tells the dawnmaiden that, if she wills, he will carry her away. The pursuit of Katie on her bull is the chase of Iason by the angry Aictes, not the loving search of Kadmos and Telephassa; and the bull has to go through fearful conflicts with the Trolls, Pindar (Pyth, iv.) speaks of Europê BOOK II. The original idea of Athêne purely physical. Athênê Tritoge neia. into this myth are found for the most part in a host of other stories. She is the daughter of Eurythemis, a reflexion of Eurôpê or Euryganeia, and a sister of Leda, the mother of the brilliant Dioskouroi ; and among her own children is Dêianeira, whose union with Heraklês is fatal to the hero.1 Of Kleopatra, the beautiful wife of Meleagros, there is little more to say than that she is, like Daphne and Arethousa, a child of the waters, the Euênos being her father, and that, like Oinônê and Brynhild, she dies of grief when the chequered life of the being whom she loves has been brought to an end. SECTION VI.—ATHÊNÊ. The name Athênê is practically a transliteration of the Vedic Ahanâ, the morning, which in a cognate form appears as Dahanâ, the Greek Daphnê. The myths which have clustered round this greatest of Hellenic dawn-goddesses differ indefinitely in detail; but all may manifestly be traced back to the same source, and resolved into the same mythical phrases. She is pre-eminently the child of the waters, she springs from the forehead of the sky, and remains fresh, pure, and undefiled for ever. In her origin the virgin deity of the Athenian Akropolis was strictly physical; but the notion of the being who wakes up the world after the darkness of night might soon pass into that of wisdom, the connexion between light and knowledge (the ps and yvôous of the Fourth Gospel) being of the closest kind. Thus, in one of the Vedic hymns we have already had the phrase that the dawn as waking every mortal to walk about receives praise from every thinker. But as being sprung from the forehead of the sky, she may be expected to know the secrets of heaven; and thus we have in Athênê a being who, like Phoibos, is filled with all the wisdom of Zeus. In the earlier form of the myth neither the Vedic Ahanâ nor the Hellenic Athênê has any mother. In the Rig Veda, "Ushas, the dawn, sprang from the head of Dyu, the mûrddhadivah, the East, the forehead of the sky."" But if Athênê is Zeus-born, the poet, when he tells us this, speaks of her as Tritogeneia, the child of Tritos. It is strange that this 1 Dêianeira is the last of the many brides of Herakles, and belongs, in truth, rather to the darkness than the light, and as sending to him the fatal garment, may be regarded as rather the colleague or bride of the enemy of the day: and thus her name is Dâsyanarî, the wife of the fiend.-Chips, &c., ii. 89, 234. 2 See note 4, p. 230. 3 Max Müller, ib. "Homer knows of no mother of Athênê, nor does the Veda mention a name for the mother of the dawn, though her parents are spoken of in the dual.' Hes. Theog. 924. II. god, whose name differs so slightly from that of the water-god Triton, CHAP. should have so far disappeared from the memory of the Greeks as to leave them at a loss to account for the epithet except by connecting it with places bearing a similar name, as among others the Libyan lake Tritonis, and the Boiotian stream Triton, on whose banks, as on those of the Attic stream, towns sprung up called Athênai and Eleusis. In short, every stream so named became a birthplace for Athênê, although the meaning of the old phrase was not lost, until an attempt was made, by referring the myth to the alleged Eolic word for a head, to resolve it into the story of her springing from the head of Zeus. But the fact that in the Veda Trita rules over the water and the air, establishes the identity of Trito or Tritos, the father of Athênê, not only with that deity, but with Triton, Amphitritê, and the Tritopatores or lords of the winds. The theory which, from the supposed Libyan birthplace of Athênê, infers a relation between Egyptian and Hellenic mythology need not be considered here. 1 This connexion of the dawn with water runs through almost every legend which turns on the phenomena of morning. Thus in the Norse tale of Katie Wooden-cloak, the dawn-maiden, while working humbly like Cinderella in the kitchen, asks permission to take up water for the prince, who will receive no service from one so mean-looking. Next day she appears at the palace on a splendid steed, and to his question whence she comes, her reply is, “I'm from Bath; the next day she is from Towel-land, the third day from Combland, the comb being that with which the dawn-maidens always comb their golden locks by the water-side. 2 M. Bréal, who traces this identity, Hercule et Cacus, 17, cites the words of Suidas, · τριτοπάτορες Δήμων ἐν τῇ ̓Ατθίδι φησὶν ἀνέμους εἶναι τοὺς ΤριτοπάTopas." It is said of Indra that, "animated by the sacrificial food, he broke through the defences of Vala, as did Trita through the coverings of the well." -H. H. Wilson, R. V. S., vol. i. p. 141. Professor Wilson here remarks that "Ekata, Dwita, and Trita [the first, second, and third] were three men produced in water, by Agni, for the purpose of removing or rubbing off the reliques of an oblation of clarified butter. Scholiast... says that Agni threw the cinders of the burnt offering into the water, whence successively arose Ekata, Dwita, and Trita, who, as elsewhere appears, were therefore called Aptyas or The sons of water." Noticing Dr. Roth's opinion that Trita is the same name as Thraetana (Feridun), he says that the identity of Trita and Traitana remains to be established. It is, at the least, not disproved by the story which he cites as setting it aside. This story is that "the slaves of Dirghotamas, when he was old and blind, became insubordinate, and attempted to destroy him, first by throwing him into the fire, whence he was saved by the Asvins, then into water, whence he was extricated by the same divinities; upon which Traitana, one of the slaves, wounded him on the head, breast, and arms, and then inflicted like injuries on himself, of which he perished." This story becomes clear throughout when compared with the myth of Eôs, who, like the slaves of Dirghotama, shut up the decrepit Tithonos. In the story of Dirghotamas and Yayatis, Count de Gubernatis discerns King Lear in embryo. Cordelia is here the third son who consents to become old in his father's stead, when his two elder brothers refuse; or in another version the youngest child, who remains with his parents when these have been driven from their home by the elder children. In Thractana Athwyâna, the son of Thrita Athwya, Professor Th. Benfey recognises the Tritonis Athana of the Greeks. See also Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, i. 24. BOOK Birth of Parentage of Athêne. Athênê The Hesiodic Theogony assigns Mêtis (a name akin to that of the wise Medeia) as a mother to Athênê; but this story is reconciled with the other myth by saying, that by the counsel of Ouranos and Gaia Zeus swallowed Mêtis before her child was born. The saying of Pindar, that Hephaistos at her birth split the forehead of Zeus with a brazen axe, may point to the sudden stream of light shooting up in the morning sky, or to the lightning flash which reveals the darkened heaven;1 and in the golden shower which falls at her birth, we have a repetition of the mode in which Danaê became the mother of Perseus. When Apollodoros and others say that the forehead of Zeus was cloven by Prometheus or Hermes, we have only to remember that these are both spoken of (together with the Argive Phorôneus) as the first givers of the boon of fire to mankind. As springing from the forehead of Zeus, Athênê was known as Koryphasia in Messênê, as Akria in Argos, while Minerva was called Capta (capita) at Rome. But there were also traditions which spoke of her as a child not of Zeus, but of the giant Pallas," who attempts to violate her purity, and is therefore slain by her. Here we have the dawn regarded as springing from the night, and the night as seeking to mar or to destroy his offspring. It is, in short, the myth which makes Laios, Akrisios, and Astyages hate their children, who are in their turn doomed to slay their sires, as Athênê slays the monster Pallas. The legend which makes her a daughter of Poseidôn is merely a statement that the morning is born from the waters. But as with the dawn there comes generally the morning breeze (Sarameya, Hermeias, Hermes, the child of Saramâ) with its sweet and soothing tones, so when, by the aid of Athênê, Perseus has slain the dark Gorgon, Athênê is said, like Hermes, to have invented the flute in order to imitate the plaintive sounds in which the Gorgon sisters mourned the slain Medousa. 4 But pure and undefiled though the dawn may be, she is yet mother of followed by the sun, who may therefore be regarded as her offspring; and Lych- and thus Phoibos Apollôn was sometimes called a son of Hephaistos Phoibos |