BOOK II. Phoibos and Daphne. zenith, would give rise to the stories of Ixîôn on his flaming wheel and of Sisyphos with his recoiling stone. If again the sun exhibits an irresistible power, he may also be regarded as a being compelled to do his work, though it be against his own will. He must perform his daily journey; he must slay the darkness which is his mother; he must be parted from the Dawn which cheered him at his birth; and after a few hours he must sink into the darkness from which he had sprung in the morning. His work again may be benignant; the earth may laugh beneath his gaze in the wealth of fruits and flowers which he has given her. But these gifts are not for himself; they are lavished on the weak and vile beings called men. These are really his masters, and he must serve them as a bondman until his brief career comes to an end. These ideas lie at the bottom of half the Aryan mythology. They meet us, sometimes again and again, in every legend; and it is scarcely possible to arrange in strict method either the numberless forms in which these ideas are clothed, or the stories in which we find them. The order of the daily phenomena of day and night may furnish the best clue for threading the mazes of the seemingly endless labyrinth. In the myth of Daphnê we see the sun as the lover of the Dawn, to whom his embrace is, as it must be, fatal. Whether as the daughter of the Arkadian Ladon or of the Thessalian Feneios, Daphnê, or the Dawn, is the child of the earth springing from the waters when the first flush of light trembles across the sky. But as the beautiful tints fade before the deepening splendour of the sun, so Daphne flies from Apollôn, as he seeks to win her. The more eager his chase, the more rapid is her flight, until in her despair she prays that the earth or the waters may deliver her from her persecuter; and so the story went that the laurel tree grew up on the spot where she disappeared, or that Daphnê herself was changed into the laurel tree, from which Apollôn took his incorruptible and glorious wreath.2 From the roots ah and dah (to burn), which stand to each other in the relation of as and das (to bite), as in the Sanskrit asru and the Greek δάκρυ, a tear, are produced the names Ahana, the Vedic dawn-goddess, and Athênê, as well as the Sanskrit Dahanâ and the Hellenic Daphne. These names denote simply the brightness of morning; but the laurel, as wood that burns easily, received the same name. "Afterwards the two, as usual, were supposed to be one, or to have some connexion with each other, for how-the people would say-could they have the same name?" And hence the story of the transformation of Daphnê.-Max Müller, Lectures on Language, second series, 502; Chips, &c., ii. 93. The idea of fury or madness was closely connected with that of fire; hence the laurel which grew on the tomb of Amykos had the quality of making the crew of a ship quarrel till they threw it overboard.-Plin. H. N. xvi. 89. 2 The story of the Sicilian Daphnis is simply a weak version of that of Daphnê, with some features derived from other myths. Like Telephos, Oidipous, and others, Daphnis is exposed in his in DAPHNE AND BOLINA. II. 277 and Are The same fatal pursuit is the burden of the legend of the hunts- CHAP. man Alpheios. Like Daphnê and Aphroditê Anadyomenê, he is the child of the waters, whether he be described as a son of Okeanos Alpheios and Thetis, or of Helios himself. He is in short the Elf, or water- thousa. sprite, whose birthplace is the Elbe or flowing stream. But Arethousa must fly from him as Daphnê flies from Phoibos; and Pausanias takes her to the Syracusan Ortygia, where she sinks into a well with which the waters of Alpheios become united. This is but saying, in other words, that she fled to the Dawnland, where Eôs closes as she begins the day, and where the sun again greets the love whom he has lost. In another version she is aided by Artemis, who, herself also loved by Alpheios, covers her own face and the faces of her companions with mud, and the huntsman departs baffled; or, to recur to old phrases, the sun cannot recognise the dawn on whom he gazes, because her beauty is faded and gone. With these legends are closely connected the stories of Hippodameia, Atalantê, and the Italian Camilla, who become the prize only of those who can overtake them in fair field; a myth which reappears in the German story, "How Six travelled through the World," as well as in the Nibelung legend of Brynhild. It is repeated of Phoibos himself in the myth of Bolina, who, to escape from his pursuit, threw herself into the sea near the mouth of the river Argyros (the silver stream). The name Bolina looks much like a feminine form of Apollôn.1 The reverse of these stories is obviously presented in the trans- Endymiôn. parent myth of Endymion and the scarcely less transparent story of Narkissos. The former belongs, indeed, to that class of stories which furnish us with an absolutely sure starting-point for the interpretation of myths. When we find a being, described as a son of Zeus and Kalykê (the heaven and the covering night), or of Aethlios (the man of many struggles), or of Protogeneia (the early dawn), married. to Selênê (the moon), or to Asterodia" (the being whose path is among the stars), we at once see the nature of the problem with which we have to deal, and feel a just confidence that other equally transparent fancy; and, like Apollon, whose favour ite he is, he is tended by nymphs, one of whom (named in one version Lykê, the shining) loves him, and tells him that blindness will be his punishment if he is unfaithful to her. This blindness is the blindness of Oidipous. The sequel is that of the legends of Prokris or Korônis, and the blinded Daphnis falls from a rock (the Leukadian cliff of Kephalos) and is slain. If the sun would but remain with the dawn, the blindness of night would not follow. 1 Pausanias vii. 23, 3. 2 Some are inclined apparently to connect Asterodia and Asterie with Ashtaroth and Ishtar. It is quite possible that the Greek may have substituted for Semitic names the sounds which approached nearest to those in his own language; but in this instance he lighted on a genuine Aryan word, and the word chosen leaves us in no doubt as to the meaning which he attached to the name and to the story. BOOK to mean. names in other Greek myths meant originally that which they appear Thus, when we find that Prokris is a daughter of Hersê, we know that whatever Prokris may be, she is the child of the dew, and hence we have solid grounds for connecting her name with the Sanskrit prish, to sprinkle. The myth of Endymion was localised in Elis (where his tomb was shown in the days of Pausanias), doubtless because it was the westernmost region of the Peloponnesos, just as the Leukadian rocks, the most westerly point of northern Hellas, were associated with the name of Kephalos; and when it was once localised, fresh names and incidents, mostly of little value or significance, were readily imported into the tale. Thus one version gave him fifty daughters by Selênê, to match the fifty sons and daughters of Danaos and Aigyptos; others gave him Nêis, Iphianassa, and others as his wives, or made him, under the unconscious influence of the old mythical phrases, the father of Eurydikê, the broad flashing dawn, who is the bride of Orpheus. In fact, the myth of Endymion has produced rather an idea than a tale. It has little incident, and scarcely anything which might entitle it to be regarded as epical history, for the few adventures ascribed to him by Pausanias1 have manifestly no connexion with the original legend. The visit of Selênê, followed by an endless sleep, is in substance all that poets or antiquarians tell us of; and even this is related by Pausanias with so many variations as to show that the myth, from its obvious solar character, was too stubborn to be more than thinly disguised. If Endymion heads an army, or dethrones a king, this is the mere arbitrary and pointless fiction of a later age. The real scene of the myth is the land of Latmos, not the Karian hill or cave to which Pausanias made him migrate from Elis, but that western region of the heavens where the wearied sun finds a resting-place. The word itself belongs to the root which has produced the word Lêthê, forgetfulness, as well as the names of Lêtô and Leda, the mothers of Phoibos and the Dioskouroi. The simplest form of the story is perhaps that of Apollodoros, who merely says that Selênê loved him and that Zeus left him free to choose anything that he might desire. 1 viii. I. 2 An address of "Ossian" to the Hast left the blue distance of heaven? The billows came slowly around, They witless have fled from thy side, Here we have not only the Latmian ENDYMION AND TITHÔNOS. His choice was an everlasting sleep, in which he might remain youthful for ever.1 His choice was wiser than that of Eôs (the morning or evening light), who obtained for the beautiful Tithônos the gift of immortality without asking for eternal youth; a myth as transparent as that of Endymiôn, for Eôs, like Iokastê, is not only the wife but also the mother of Tithônos, who in one version is a son of Laomedon the Ilian king, in another of Kephalos, who woos and slays Prokris. The hidden chamber in which Eôs placed her decrepit husband is the Latmian hill, where the more fortunate Endymion lies in his charmed sleep. Endymiôn is in short, as his name denotes, simply the sun setting opposite to the rising moon. Looking at the tale by the light which philology and comparative mythology have thus thrown upon it, we may think it incredible that any have held it to be an esoteric method of describing early astronomical researches. It is scarcely less difficult to see in it, as some have discerned, simply a personification of sleep. In his father Aethlios, we see one who, like Odysseus, has suffered much, the struggling and toiling sun,3 and his own name expresses simply the downward plunge of the sun into the western waters.* The whole idea of Endymion, who is inseparable from the material sun, is altogether distinct from that of the separate divinity of Phoibos Apollôn, to whom he stands in the relation of Gaia to Dêmêtêr, or of Nereus to Poseidon. 279 CHAP. II. The The story of Nar Of the story of Narkissos Pausanias gives two versions. former, which describes him as wasting away and dying through love of his own face and form reflected in a fountain, he rejects on account of the utter absurdity of supposing that Narkissos could not distinguish between a man and his shadow. Hence he prefers the other, but less known, legend, that Narkissos loved his own twin sister, and that on her death he found a melancholy comfort in noting the likeness of his own form and countenance to those of his lost love. But the more common tale that Narkissos was deaf to the 1 i. 7, 5. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 312. 3 There is no difference of meaning between Aethlios and ToλÚTλas, the stock epithet of Odysseus. It can hardly be questioned that ἐνδύμα ἡλίου was once the equivalent of ἡλίου δυσμαί, and that originally the sun ἐνέδυ πόντον, where in the Iliad and Odyssey we have only the simple verb. Had Endymion remained a recognised name for the sunset, the myth of Endymion, as Professor Max Müller remarks (Chips, &c., ii. 80), could not 5 ix. 31, 6. He rejects also the notion that the flower was so named kissos. II. BOOK entreaties of the nymph Echo is nearer to the spirit of the old phrase, which spoke of the sleep of the tired sun.1 His very name denotes the deadly lethargy (váрkn) which makes the pleadings of Selênê fall unheeded on the ear of Endymiôn; and hence it is that when Persephonê is to be taken at the close of summer to the land of darkness, the narcissus is made the instrument of her capture. It is the narcotic which plunges Brynhild into her profound slumber on the Glistening Heath, and drowns Briar Rose and her fellows in a sleep as still as death. Iamos and From the lot of Endymiôn, Narkissos, and Tithônos, Apollôn is freed only because he is regarded not as the visible sun who dies when his day's journey is done, but as the living power who kindles his light afresh every morning. The one conception is as natural as the other, and we still speak of the tired or the unwearied sun, of his brief career and his everlasting light, without any consciousness of inconsistency. Phoibos is then the ever bright sun, who can never be touched by age. He is emphatically the Akersekomês, the glory of whose golden locks no razor is ever to mar. He is at once the comforter and healer, the saviour and destroyer, who can slay and make alive at will, and from whose piercing glance no secret can be kept hid. But although these powers are inseparable from the notion of Phoibos Apollôn, they are also attributed separately to beings whose united qualities make up his full divinity. Thus his knowledge of things to come is given to Iamos; his healing and life-giving powers to Asklepios. The story of the latter brings before us another of the countless instances in which the sun is faithless to his love or his love is faithless to him. In every case there must be the separation; and the doom of Korônis only reflects the fate which cuts short the life of Daphnê and Arethousa, Prokris and Iokastê. The myth 1 The myth of Echo merely reproduces that of Salmakis, p. 290. Mr. 2 This name belongs to the class which cannot be explained by referring it to any Greek or Aryan words. Brown says that Asklepios was early identified with the Phenician Esmun; but this leaves the name just where it was.--Great Dionysiak Myth, ii. 258. 3 The story of the birth of Asklepios agrees substantially with that of Dionysos; and the legends of other Aryan tribes tell the same tale of some of their mythical heroes. Of children so born, Grimm says generally, " Ungeborne, d. h. aus dem Mutterleib geschnittne Kinder pflegen Helden zu werden," and adds that this incident marks the stories of the Persian Rustem, the Tristram of Eilhart, the Russian hero Dobruna Nikitisch, of the Scottish Macduff, of Volsung who yet kissed his mother before she died, of Signrd, and of Sceaf the son of Scild, the child brought in the mysterious skiff, which needs neither sail, rudder, nor oarsmen. Whence came the popular belief attested by such a phrase as that which Grimm quotes from the Chronicle of Peterhouse, "dentalibus excisis literæ testantur quod, si vita comes fuerit, felices in mundo habeantur?"-Deutsche Mythologie, 362. The Teutonic myths must clearly be compared with that of Hlödr (Lodur), who is born with helmet and sword, and this again with the story of Athène, who springs fully armed from the forehead of Zeus. |