BOOK Tydeus. fact in the lives of two human beings, could not fail to inspire. Here Polyneikes, when in his turn an exile, betook himself to Argos, where he fell in with Tydeus,' with whom he quarrels. But it had been shown long ago to Adrastos that he should wed his two daughters to a lion and a boar; and when he found these two men fighting, with shields which had severally the sign of the boar and the lion, he came to the conclusion that these were the destined husbands of Argeia and Deipylê. Hence also he readily agreed to avenge the alleged wrongs of Polyneikes, and the league was soon formed, which in the later Attic legend carried the Seven Argive Chiefs to the walls of Thebes, but which for the poets of the Thebais involved as large a gathering as that of the chieftains who assembled to hunt the Kalydonian boar or to recover the Golden Fleece. How far these poets may have succeeded in imparting to their subject the charm of our Iliad or Odyssey, the scanty fragments of the poem which alone we possess make it impossible to say; but there was more than one incident in the struggle which might be so treated as fairly to win for the poem a title to the high praise bestowed upon it by Pausanias. 1 This name, like that of Tyndareôs, means apparently the hammerer. The two forms may be compared with the Latin tundo, tutudi, to beat. The idea conveyed by the word is thus precisely that of Thor Miölnir, of the Molionids and the Aloadai. Hence Helen, as the daughter of Tyndareos, is the child of Zeus the thunderer. 2 ix. 9, 3; Grote, History of Greece, i. 364. THE DEATH OF AMPHIARAOS. Thus the story told by Diomêdês of his father Tydeus when sent to Thebes to demand the restoration of Polyneikes reproduces in part the story of Bellerophôn.1 Victorious in the strife of boxing or wrestling to which he had challenged the Kadmeians, he is assailed on his way back to the Argive host by an ambuscade of fifty Thebans, all of whom he slays except Maion, who is saved by the special intervention of the gods. So too the prophecy of Teiresias that the Thebans should be conquerors in the war if Arês received the youthful Menoikeus as a victim, must be compared with those utterances of Kalchas which sealed the doom of Iphigeneia and Polyxena; and finally when the Argives are routed and Periklymenos is about to slay Amphiaraos, we see in his rescue by the earth which receives him with his chariot and horses another form of the plunge of Endymiôn into the sea or of the leap of Kephalos from the Leukadian cape. It is the vanishing from mortal sight of the sun which can never die, and so the story went that Zeus thus took away Amphiaraos that he might make him immortal. 415 CHAP. III. gonoi. This first assault of the Argives against Thebes answers to the The war of ineffectual attempts of the Herakleidai to recover their paternal the Epiinheritance. It was therefore followed by a second attack in the struggle known as the war of the Epigonoi, or the children of the discomfited chiefs of the former expedition. But it must be noted. that as the Herakleids find a refuge in Athens after the slaughter of Hyllos by Echemos, so Adrastos, who alone had been saved from the carnage by the speed of his horse Areion, betakes himself to the Attic Eleusis, whence Theseus marches against the Thebans to insist on the surrender and the burial of the dead,-an incident in which the historical Athenians took pride as an actual event in their annals. The doom of Thebes was now come, and the Epigonoi approach like the Herakleidai when their period of inforced idleness is at an end. The Thebans are utterly routed by the Argives under Alkmaion, the son of Amphiaraos; and Teiresias declares that there is no longer any hope, as the gods have abandoned them. The city is therefore surrendered, and Thersandros, the son of Polyneikes, is seated on the throne of Kadmos. and Hai Of the remaining incidents connected with these two great struggles Antigone the most remarkable is the doom of Antigonê, who is condemned by mon. Kreôn to be buried alive because she had performed the funeral rites over the body of Polyneikes, which had been cast forth to the birds and dogs. Of the sentiments which Sophokles puts into her mouth as explaining her motives and justifying her actions, all that we need to 1 II. iv. 384, et seq. BOOK Alkmaiôn and Eriphylê. Orestes and Kly say here is that they belong seemingly rather to the Eastern than the Western world, and may be a genuine portion of the Persian myth which Herodotos has clothed in a Greek garb in the story of the Seven Conspirators. But the dismal cave in which she is left to die seems but the horrid den into which the Panis sought to entice Saramâ, and in which they shut up the beautiful cattle of the dawn. It is the cave of night into which the evening must sink and where she must die before the day can again dawn in the east. Nor can we well fail to notice the many instances in which those who mourn for mythical heroes taken away put an end to their own lives by hanging. It is thus that Haimon ends his misery when he finds himself too late to save Antigonê; it is thus that Iokastê hides her shame from the sight of the world; it is thus that Althaia and Kleopatra hasten away from life which without Meleagros is not worth the living for. The death of these beings is the victory of Echidna and Ahi, the throttling or strangling snake; and the tradition unconsciously preserved may have determined the mode in which these luckless beings must die. Nor may we forget that after the death of Amphiaraos the fortunes of his house run parallel with those of the house of Agamemnon after his return from Ilion. In obedience to his father's command Alkmaion slays his mother Eriphylê, and the awful Erinys, the avenger of blood, pursues him with the unrelenting pertinacity of the gadfly sent by Hêrê to torment the heifer Iô. Go where he will, she is there to torture him by day and scare him by night; and not until he has surrendered to Phoibos the precious necklace of Harmonia or Kadmos, and found out a spot to dwell in on which the sun had never looked at the time when Eriphylê met her doom, can Alkmaion have any rest. Such a refuge was furnished by the Oiniadai, islands which had grown up at the mouth of the river Achelôos from the deposits brought down by the stream to the sea. Here he marries Kallirhoe the daughter of the river god, who causes his death at the hands of the sons of Phegeus by insisting on his fetching her the necklace of Eriphylê. But Kallirhoe is, like Leda and Lêtô, the mother of twin sons, and she prays that they may at once grow into mature manhood and become the avengers of their father, as Hyllos is avenged by the Herakleids of a later generation. This is substantially the story of Orestes, who slays Klytaimnêstra taimnestra. for murdering her husband Agamemnon as Eriphylê had brought about the death of Amphiaraos, and who is therefore chased, like Alkmaion, from land to land by the Erinyes of his mother, until at last he comes to Athens, the dawn city, and is there by the casting vote ORESTES AND PYLADES. III. 417 of Athênê herself acquitted in the court of Areiopagos. Of this myth CHAP. there were, as we might expect, many variations: and among these we may notice the story which speaks of him and his friend Pylades as slaying Helen when Menelaos refused to rescue them from the angry Argives, and lastly, the legend that Orestes himself, like Eurydikê, died from the bite of a snake, the throttling serpent of Vedic mythology. CHAPTER IV. THE FIRE. II. Light and heat. SECTION I.—AGNI. BOOK WHEN the old Vedic faith had been long overlaid by an elaborate sacerdotal ceremonialism, Agni still remained, as it had been from the first, a name for light or heat as pervading all things or as concentrated in the flame of fire. In the Satapatha-Brâhmana, Svetaketu tells king Janaka that he sacrifices to two heats in one another which are ever shining and filling the world with their splendour. When the king asks how this may be, the answer is, "Aditya (the sun) is heat to him. do I sacrifice in the evening in the fire (Agni). Agni is heat to him do I sacrifice in the morning in the sun (Aditya)." When to Somasushma, who says that he sacrifices to light in light, the king puts the same question, the Brahman replies, "Aditya is light; to him do I sacrifice in the evening in Agni. Agni is light; to him do I sacrifice in the morning in Âditya."1 The majesty of Agni Thus Agni, like Indra, is sometimes addressed as the one great god who makes all things, sometimes as the light which fills the heavens, sometimes as the blazing lightning, or as the clear flame of earthly fire. The poets pass from one application of the word to another with perfect ease, as conscious that in each case they are using a mere name which may denote similar qualities in many objects. There is no rivalry or antagonism between these deities. Agni is greatest, Varuņa is greatest, and Indra is greatest; but when the one is so described, the others are for the time unnoticed, or else are placed in a subordinate position. Thus Agni is said to be the creator, who knows all that exists, to comprehend all other gods within himself, as the circumference of a wheel embraces its spokes; and not 1 Max Müller, Sanskrit Lit. 421. Professor Müller traces the name to the root contained in the Greek Kús, the Lat. agilis, the idea first impressed on men being that of its quick movement. -Hibbert Lectures, p. 206. 2 Professor Max Müller, making this remark, adds, "This is a most impor tant feature in the religion of the Veda, and has never been taken into consideration by those who have written on the history of ancient polytheism."-Sanskr. Lit. 546. 570. Muir, Principal Deities of R. V. |