BOOK II. Io and Prometheus. heaven.1 This time was naturally conceived as one of trouble and toil, and so the myth went that Iô was driven from one place to another by a gadfly sent by Hêrê, who suffers her neither to rest by day nor to sleep by night. These wanderings have been related by Æschylus in his immortal drama of the bound Prometheus. They carry her over regions, some of whose names belong to our earthly geography; but any attempts to fix her course in accordance with the actual position of these regions is mere labour lost. That for such accuracy Eschylus cared nothing is plain from the fact that the course which Iô takes in his play of the Suppliants cannot be reconciled with the account given in the Prometheus. It is enough to note that the poet takes his moon from the West towards the North, gradually approaching the East and the South, until in the beautiful Aigyptos she is suffered to resume her proper form, or in other words, appear as the full moon, the shape in which she was seen before Zeus changed her into the horned heifer or new moon. This mention of Egypt, or the land of the Nile, as the cradle of her child Epaphos, naturally led the Greeks to identify Iô with the Egyptian Isis, and her son with the bull Apis,- an identification to which no objection can be raised, so long as it is not maintained that the Hellenic names and conceptions of the gods were borrowed from those of Egypt. The great Athenian poet would naturally introduce among the places visited by Iô, places and peoples which excited his curiosity, his wonder, or his veneration. She from whom was to spring the deliverer of Prometheus must herself learn from the tortured Titan what must be the course of her own sufferings and their issue. She must cross the heifer's passage, or Bosporos, which bears her name: she must journey through the country of the Chalybes, beings akin to the Kyklôpes who forge the thunderbolts of Zeus; she must trust herself to the guidance of the Amazons who will lead her to the rocks of Salmydessos, rocks not unlike the Symplegades in the Argonautic story: she must encounter the Graiai and the Gorgons in the land of the gloaming and the night, and finally she is to see the end of her sorrows when she reaches the well or fountains of the sun. There her child will be born, and the series of genera 1 Gr. Myth. ii. 39. 2 Mr. Brown (The Unicorn, p. 27) cites some Mardian coins as furnishing the earliest known instances of the lunar emblem which exhibits three crescent moons issuing from the full moon, in connexion with the unicorn. This emblem explains at once the threelegged unicorn ass of the Bundahish, and also the arms of the Kingdom of Man, in which we see three legs at tached to a central orb. This calf-god was supposed to manifest himself from time to time in a bull, which, being recognised by certain signs, was consecrated and received high worship. It was not suffered to live more than twenty-five years, and his burial was followed by a general mourning until a new calf, with the proper mark, was discovered. Apis, deified after death, became Serapis. HEKATE AND PHOIBOS. 375 tions will roll on, which are to end in the glorious victories of her CHAP. descendant, Heraklês.1 II. To Phoibos, as Hekatos, the far-shooting lord of light, Hekatê Hekatê. stands in the relation which Diana holds towards Dianus or Janus. She falls, in short, into the ranks of correlative deities with the Asvins and the Dioskouroi, Suryâ and Savitri, and many others already named. Her keenness of hearing and sight is second only to that of Helios, for when Dêmêtêr is searching in agony for her lost child, it is Hekatê alone who says that she has heard her cries, while Helios is further able to tell her whither Hades has departed with the maiden. She is then the queen of the night, the moon, and as such she may be described as sprung either from Zeus and Hêrê, or like Phoibos himself, from Lêtô, or even from Tartaros, or again, from Asteria, the starlit night. In a comparison of offices and honours it is hard to see whether Phoibos or Hekatê stands higher; and all that can be said is that the Hesiodic poet could hardly have spoken of her in a strain so highflown if the thought of Apollôn and his wisdom, incommunicable even to Hermes, had at the moment crossed his mind, just as the worshipper of Brahma or Vishņu must have modified his language, had he wished to bring it into apparent consistency with what he may have said elsewhere in his devotions to Varuņa, Dyaus, or Soma. She is the benignant being, ever ready to hear those who offer to her a holy sacrifice. Nor has she fallen from the high estate which was hers before Zeus vanquished the Titans ; but she remains mighty as ever, in the heavens, on the earth, and in the sea. She is the giver of victory in war, the helper of kings in the ministration of justice, the guardian of the flocks and of the vineyards; and thus she is named pre-eminently Kourotrophos, the nurse and the cherisher of But these great powers could scarcely fail to throw over her an air of mystery and awe. She would be sometimes the solitary inhabitant of a dismal region, caring nothing for the sympathy or the love of others; and the very help which with her flaming torch she gives to Dêmêtêr would make her a goddess of the dark nether world to which she leads the sorrowing mother. Her ministers therefore must be as mysterious as herself, and thus the Kourêtes and Kabeiroi become the chosen servants of her sacrifices. Like Artemis, she is accompanied by hounds, not flashing-footed like that which Prokris. received from the twin-sister of Phoibos, but Stygian dogs akin to men. It is, of course, quite possible that with this particular myth of Io some features borrowed from Semitic mythology may have been designedly blended. The Phenician Astarte, Ashtaroth, was also represented as a wandering heifer, or a horned maiden. Both alike lose Hes. Theog. 411. BOOK II. Artemis. Kerberos and the awful hounds of Yama. Only one step more was needed to reach that ideal of witchcraft which is exhibited in its most exalted form in the wise woman Medeia. It is from a cave, like that in which Kirkê and Kalypso dwell, that she marks the stealing away of Persephonê, and her form is but dimly seen as she moves among murky mists. She thus becomes the spectral queen who sends from her gloomy realm vain dreams and visions, horrible demons and phantoms, and who imparts to others the evil knowledge of which she has become possessed herself. Her own form becomes more and more fearful, Like Kerberos, she assumes three heads or faces, which denote the monthly phases of the moon--the horse with its streaming mane being the crescent moon, the snake denoting the rays of light from the circular or full moon, and the dog, who is only partially visible, representing the half-moon.1 In some traditions Artemis is the twin-sister of Phoibos, with whom she takes her place in the ranks of correlative deities. In others she is born so long before him that she can aid Lêtô her mother at the birth of Phoibos—a myth which speaks of the dawn and the sun as alike sprung from the night. Thus her birthplace is either Delos or Ortygia, in either case the bright morning land, and her purity is that of Athênê and Hestia. Over these three deities alone Aphroditê has no power. Love cannot touch the maiden whose delight is in the violet tints of dawn or in the arrows which she sends forth with never failing precision, and which seal the doom, while they are given to avenge the wrongs, of Prokris. Like Phoibos, she has the power of life and death; she can lessen or take away the miseries and plagues which she brings upon men, and those who honour her are rich in flocks and herds and reach a happy old age. From those who neglect her she exacts a fearful penalty; and the Kalydonian boar ravages the fields of Oineus only because he had forgotten to include her among the deities to whom he offered sacrifice.3 In a word, the colours may be paler, but her features and form generally are those of her glorious brother. With him she takes delight in song,^ 1 Brown, The Unicorn, 44-46. 3 Grote remarks that in the hunt 229, et seq. Hymn to Aphrodite, 19. Preller (Gr. Myth. i. 228) adopts the explana tion which connects her name with the word ȧpreuns, and regards the epithet as denoting her unsullied purity as well as her physical vigour. Her kindly and indignant aspects are with him the varying, yet constantly recurring, effects produced by the moon on the phenomena of the seasons, and, as was sup posed, of human life. For the Ephesian Artemis, see note3, p. 309. THE ASIATIC ARTEMIS. 377 and as Phoibos overcomes the Pythôn, so is she the slayer of CHAP. Tityos.1 II. kadian and It seems unnecessary to draw any sharp distinction between the The ArArkadian and the Delian Artemis. If she is no longer the mere Delian reflexion of Phoibos, she still calls herself a child of Lêtô, and Artemis. appears as the glorious morning roving through the heaven before the birth of the sun. This broad-spreading light is represented by her wanderings among the glens and along the mountain summits of Arkadia. Like Athênê and Aphroditê, she belongs to or springs from the running waters, and she demands from Zeus an attendant troop of fifty Okeanid and twenty Amnisiad, or river, nymphs. With these she chases her prey on the heights of Erymanthos, Mainalos, and Taygetos. Her chariot is fashioned by the fiery Hephaistos, and Pan, the breeze whispering among the reeds, provides her with dogs, the clouds which speed across the sky driven by the summer winds. Here, like Arethousa, she is loved and pursued by Alpheios, who fails to seize her. Orthia pola. But the cultus of the Spartan Artemis, whose epithet Orthia Artemis would seem to denote a phallic deity, is marked by features so and Taurorepulsive, and so little involved in the myth of the Delian sister of Phoibos, that the inference of an earlier religion, into which Aryan mythical names were imported, becomes not unwarrantable. Whether or not this Artemis be the same as the Artemis known by the epithets Taurica or Tauropola," she is a mere demon, glutted with the human sacrifices which seem to have formed a stage in the religious developement of every nation on the earth. We have here manifestly the belief that the gods are all malignant powers, hungering for the blood of human victims, and soothed by the smoke of the fat as it curls up heavenwards." But the prevalence of this earlier form of faith or There is something altogether nonHellenic in the worship of Artemis generally, as in that of Zeus under some of his many epithets. The phallic nature of this worship is indicated by the statements of Pausanias that Zeus Meilichios was worshipped at Sikyon in the form of a pyramid, and Artemis Patrôa in that of a column. The cruelty of the ritual led Bunsen to suppose that the epithet Meilichios was used in irony; but it is clear that Meilichios represents the Semitic Moloch, and thus the name accounts for the character of the worship. For Mr. Brown's interpretation of this epithet, see his Great Dionysiak Myth, ii. 136. His conclusion is that the word denotes "the Kosmos considered as alive and animated, replete with motive life-power." The extent to which these horrible superstitions prevailed among the historical Greeks as well as among other races and tribes has been excellently traced by Mr. Paley in a paper on "Chthonian Worship" (Journal of Philology, No. I. June, 1868). His conclusion is that, as "the propitiation of malignant powers rather than the adoratian of a supreme good seems to have formed the basis of the early religions of the world," so a large part of the early religious systems of the Greeks exhibits II. BOOK practice would tend to prove only that the mythology of the Greeks was not necessarily their religion, and was certainly not commensurate with it. Still, although there is not much in the phenomena of morning, or in the myth of the Delian Artemis, to suggest the practice of slaying youths and maidens, or scourging them until the blood ran in streams to glut the angry demon, there are not wanting mythical phrases which, if translated into the conditions of human life, would point to such revolting systems.1 Adonis cannot rise to the life of the blessed gods until he has been slain. The morning cannot come until the Eôs who closed the previous day has faded away and died in the black abyss of night. So it is also with Memnon and Sarpêdôn, with Endymion and Narkissos. But all these are the children of Zeus or Phoibos, or some other deity of the heaven or the sun; and thus the parents may be said to sacrifice their children, as Tantalos placed the mangled Pelops on the banquettable of Zeus. It is thus seemingly that Iphigeneia must die before Helen can be brought again from Ilion: but Helen is herself Iphigeneia, and thus the return of Helen is the resurrection of the victim doomed by the words of Kalchas and the consent of Agamemnon, and Iphigeneia becomes the priestess of Artemis, whose wrath she had been slain to expiate. With an unconscious fidelity to the old mythical phrases, which is still more remarkable, Iphigeneia is herself Artemis, and thus the story resolves itself into the saying that the evening and the morning are the same, but that she must die at night before she can spring into life again at dawn. Nor must it be forgotten that Helen stolen away from the Argive or gleaming land this character of devil-worship, in which not called upon to reconcile them. We are not building up questionable theories, but expounding unquestionable matters of fact; and it is a perfectly open subject of discussion whether the pagan idea of sacrifice is a corruption of a revealed obligation of man to his Creator, or whether it was (as many will think more probable) independently derived and developed from the materialistic and sensuous notions of the untutored races of antiquity about the nature, condition, and wants of beings, infernal and supernal," p. 13. 1 Mr. Brown (Great Dionysiak Myth, i. 135) regards the version of the myth which speaks of the substitution of the stag for Iphigeneia at the moment of sacrifice, as being, like the similar substitution in the case of Isaac, an instance "of disapprobation of the bloody cult peculiar to Kanaanite, Phenician, and Karthaginian." |