BOOK the life of the being whom they had loved and lost. Here again Antigonê, betrothed to the youthful Haimon, dies in the dark cave, like the bright clouds which Vritra shuts up in his horrid dungeons. But before this last catastrophe is brought about, there is a time of brief respite in which Oidipous reposes after all the griefs and sorrows which have come upon him, some at the rising of the sun or its setting, some at noonday or when the stars twinkled out in the sky. All these had burst as in a deluge on his devoted head;1 but now he draws nigh to the haven of rest. His feet tread the grass-grown pathway; over his head the branches sigh in the evening breeze; and when an Athenian in holy horror bids him begone from the sacred grove of the Eumenides, Oidipous replies that their sanctuary can never be violated by him. He is not merely their suppliant, but their friend; and they it is who will guide him peacefully through the dark valley of the shadow of death. One prayer only he has to make, and this is that some one will bring Theseus, the Athenian king, to his side before he dies. The wish is realised; and we see before us perhaps the most striking of all mythical groups, the blinded Oidipous sinking peacefully into his last sleep, as he listens to the voice of the man who rules in the city of the dawn-goddess Athênê, and feels the gentle touch of his daughter's hand, while over him wave the branches in the grove of the Eumenides, benignant always to him, and now reflecting more than ever the loveliness of the Eastern Saranyû. Then comes the signal of departure, that voice of the divine thunder which now, as before, when he encountered the Sphinx, Oidipous alone can understand. Without a murmur he prepares to obey the summons, and with Theseus alone, the son of the sea and air, by his side, calmly awaits the end. With wonderful fidelity to the old mythical phrases, the poet tells us of the hero who has passed away, by no touch of disease, for sickness could not fasten on his glorious form, by no thunderstroke or sea-roused whirlwind, but guided by some heaven-sent messenger, or descending into the kindly earth where pain and grief may never afflict him more. Well may the poet speak as though he were scarcely telling the story of the death of mortal man.2 1 Soph. Oid. Kol. 1248. 2 Ibid. 1665. We have here the image of the wise and beneficent king smitten by the stroke of an unutterable woe, yet going down blinded to his grave with incommunicable dignity and majesty. But there might be another side to the picture. The exquisite tints of evening twilight are seen to spread themselves languishingly across the blue heaven, which, growing darker every moment, seems to be lulled in the profoundest slumber. Here the sky is passive, while the twilight with its lovely clouds is active; but when we remember that the twi light is the daughter of the heaven, we have, Dr. Goldziher insists (Mythology among the Hebrews, p. 189, et seq.), the framework of the story of Lot and his AUGE AND ARGIOPÊ. II. 317 The tomb of Endymion was shown in Elis, and the Cretans CHAP. pointed to the grave of Zeus; but no man could say in what precise spot the bones of Oidipous reposed. It was enough to know that a special blessing would rest on the land which contained his sepulchre ; and what place could be more meet for this his last abode than the dearest inheritance of Athênê? of Tele The Theban myth of Oidipous is repeated substantially in the The story Arkadian tradition. As Oidipous is the son of Laios and Iokastê, phos. the darkness and the violet-tinted sky, so is Têlephos (who has the same name with Têlephassa, the far-shining) the child of Aleos the blind, and Augê the brilliant: and as Oidipous is left to die on the slopes of Kithairon, so Têlephos is exposed on mount Parthenion. There the babe is suckled by a doe,' which represents the wolf in the myth of Romulus and the dog of the Persian story of Cyrus, and is afterwards brought up by the Arkadian king Korythos. Like Oidipous, he goes to Delphoi to learn who is his mother, and is there bidden to go to Teuthras, king of Mysia. But thither Augê had gone before him, and thus in one version Teuthras promised her to Têlephos as his wife, if he would help him against his enemy Idas. This service he performs, and Augê differs from Iokastê only in the steadiness with which she refuses to wed Têlephos, although she knows not who he is. Têlephos now determines to slay her, but Heraklês reveals the mother to the child, and like Perseus, Têlephos leads his mother back to her own land. In another version he becomes the husband not of Augê, but of a daughter of Teuthras, whose name Argiopê shows that she is but Augê under another form. In this tradition he is king of Mysia daughters a story which may be matched with a hundred others. When in the Vedic hymn Prajapati seeks to do violence to his daughter Ushas, the myth is transparent; for Prajapati is literally the lord of light, and Ushas is the dawn. It is scarcely less obvious in the Volsung story, where the sister deceives the brother and becomes the mother of Sinfjotli. But the hero who slays the slayer of the sun must himself be the offspring of his murdered father, and of the beautiful maiden whom he loves in the morning and greets again at eventide. Like that of Signy, the purpose of Lot's daughters is avowed. Besides themselves and their father no human being is left, and the race must not be suffered to die out. In both stories there is the same neccssity. Etymologically, Lot, Dr. Goldziher asserts, is the coverer, and thus the name BOOK II. Twofold aspect of Paris. when the Achaians come to Ilion to avenge the wrongs of Helen, and he resists them with all his power. In the ensuing strife he is smitten by Achilleus, and all efforts to heal the wound are vain. In his misery he betakes himself again to the oracle, and learns that only the man who has inflicted the wound can heal it. In the end, Agamemnon prevails on Achilleus to undo his own work, and to falsify in the case of Têlephos the proverb which made use of his name to describe an incurable wound. The means employed is the rust of the spear which had pierced him,-an explanation which turns on the equivocal meaning of the words ios, ion, as denoting rust, poison, an arrow, and the violet colour. As we read the story of Têlephos we can scarcely fail to think of the Trojan the story of the Trojan Paris, for like Telephos Paris is exposed as a babe on the mountain side, and like him he receives at the hands of Achilleus a wound which is either incurable or which Oinônê either will not or cannot heal. Paris is the great malefactor who by taking Helen from Sparta brings the Achaian chiefs to the assault of Troy ; and as Helen is manifestly the Vedic Saramâ, the beautiful light of the morning or the evening, Paris as conveying her to his stronghold is the robber who drives off the shining cattle of Indra to his dungeon. The fight at Troy is thus the struggle of the children of the Sun to recover from the dreary caves of night the treasure of which the darkness deprived them in the evening; in other words, Ilion is the fortress of Vritra or Ahi, and Paris the successful seducer of Helen represents the unsuccessful seducer of Saramâ. But even in the eyes of Saramâ the Pani is not altogether repulsive; and the Gorgon Medousa shares the beauty of Asterodia and Selênê, of Ursula and the Fairy Queen. Hence to a large extent a parallel may be drawn between the career of the bright heroes and that of the dark beings who oppose them. In his capriciousness, his moody sullenness, his self-imposed inaction, Paris resembles Meleagros and Achilleus. The cause also is the same. Achilleus is angry because Brisêis is taken away: Paris is indignant because he is desired to give up Helen. But if the Trojans as a whole represent the enemies of Indra, many of those chiefs who take his part are heroes whose solar origin is beyond all question. On his side may be seen the Ethiopian Memnón, over whose body the morning weeps tears of dew, and who, rising from the dead, is exalted for ever to the bright halls of Olympos. With them are ranged the chieftains of the bright Lykian land; and assuredly in Glaukos and Sarpêdôn we discern not a single point of likeness with the dark troops of the Panis. There is nothing in the history of mythology which should make this result a matter of THE ACHAIAN AND TROJAN CHIEFS. surprise. The materials for the great epic poems of the Aryan world are the aggregations of single phrases which have been gradually welded into a coherent narrative; and the sayings which spoke of the light as stolen away in the evening from the western sky and carried away to the robber's stronghold far away towards the east, of the children of the light as banding together to go and search out the thief, of their struggle with the seducer and his kinsfolk, of the return of the light from the eastern sky back again to its home in the west, were represented by the mythical statements that Paris stole Helen from the Western Sparta and took her away to Ilion, that the kinsfolk of Helen roused the Achaian chiefs to seek out the robber and do battle with him and his people, and that after a hard fight Helen was rescued from their grasp and brought back to the house of Menelaos. But there was a constant and an irresistible tendency to invest every local hero with the attributes which are reflected upon Heraklês, Theseus, and Perseus from Phoibos and Helios the lords of light; and the several chiefs whose homes were localised in Western Asia would as naturally be gathered to the help of Hektor as the Achaian princes to the rescue and avenging of Helen. Over every one of these the poet might throw the rich colours of the heroic ideal, while a free play might also be given to purely human instincts and sympathies in the portraits of the actors on either side. If Paris was guilty of great crimes, his guilt was not shared by those who would have made him yield up his prey if they could. He might be a thief, but they were fighting for their homes, their wives, and their children: and thus in Hektor we have the embodiment of the highest patriotism and the most disinterested self-devotion,-a character, in fact, infinitely higher than that of the sensitive, sullen, selfish and savage Achilleus, because it is drawn from human life, and not, like the other, from traditions which rendered such a portrait in his case impossible.1 319 CHAP. II. and in The eastern myth then begins with incidents parallel to those The birth which mark the birth and childhood of Dionysos, Têlephos, Oidipous, fancy of Romulus, Perseus, and many others. Before he is born, there are Paris. portents of the ruin which, like Oidipous, he is to bring upon his house and people. His mother Hekabê dreams that her child will be a torch "Wie Aphroditê und Helena, so erschien auch Paris in den Kyprien, vermuthlich nach Anleitung örtlicher Traditionen, in einem andern Lichte und als Mittelspunkt eines grösseren Sagencomplexes, welcher gleichfalls bei den späteren Dichtern und Künstlern einen lebhaften Anklang gefunden hat. Er ist ganz der Orientalische Held, zu- BOOK The judg ment of Paris. to set Ilion in flames; and Priam, like Laios, decrees that the child shall be left to die on the hillside. But the babe lies on the slopes of Ida (the Vedic name for the earth as the bride of Dyaus the sky), and is nourished by a she-bear.1 The child grows up, like Cyrus, among the shepherds and their flocks, and for his boldness and skill in defending them against the attacks of thieves and enemies he is said to have been called Alexandros, the helper of men. In this his early life he has the love of Oinônê, the child of the river-god Kebrên, and thus a being akin to the maidens who, like Athênê and Aphroditê, are born from the waters. Meanwhile, he had not been forgotten in Ilion. His mother's heart was still full of grief, and Priam at length ordered that a solemn sacrifice should be offered to enable his dead son to cross the dark stream of Hades. The victim chosen is a favourite bull of Paris, who follows it in indignation, as the men lead it away. In the games now held he puts forth his strength, and is the victor in every contest, even over Hektor. His brothers seek to slay the intruder, but the voice of Kasandra his sister is heard, telling them that this is the very Paris for whose repose they were now about to slay the victim, and the long-lost son is welcomed to his home. At this point the legend carries us to the Thessalian myth. When Thetis rose from the sea to become the bride of Peleus, Eris, who alone was not invited with the other deities to the marriage-feast, threw on the banquet-table a golden apple, with the simple inscription that it was a gift for the fairest. Her task of sowing the seeds of strife was done. The golden apple is the golden ball which the Frog-prince brings up from the water, the golden egg which the red hen lays in the Teutonic story, the gleaming sun which is born of the morning; and the prize is claimed, as it must be claimed, by Hêrê, Athênê, and Aphroditê, the queens of heaven and the goddesses of the dawn. For the time the dispute is settled by the words of Zeus, who bids them carry their quarrel before the Idaian Paris, who shall decide between them. As the three bright beings draw near, the shepherd youth is abashed and scared, and it is only after long encouragement that he summons spirit to listen to the rival claims. Hêrê, as reigning over the blue ether, promises him the lordship of Asia, if he will adjudge the prize to her; Athênê, the morning in its character as the awakener of men's minds and souls, assures him of the Greek Aúkos, a wolf, denote the glossiness of their coats. The equivocal meaning of the name Arktos, the bear, has already come before us in the myths of the seven arkshas and the seven rishis; and probably all the animals selected to perform this office of nourishing exposed children will be found to have names which, like 2 That this name Kebrên is probably the same as Severn, the intermediate forms leave little room for doubting. 3 See Campbell's Tales of the West Highlands, i. Ixxxii., &c. |