PAN AND PITYS. Professor Max Müller's words, "We need but walk with our eyes open along the cliffs of Bournemouth to see the meaning of that legend," the tale of Pitys, the "pine-tree wooed by Pan, the gentle wind, and struck down by jealous Boreas, the north wind." Of Boreas himself we need say but little. His true character was as little forgotten as that of Selênê, and thus the name remained comparatively barren. The Athenian was scarcely speaking in mythical language when he said that Boreas had aided his forefathers by scattering the fleets of Xerxes. The phrases were almost as transparent which spoke of him as a son of Astraios and Eôs, the star-god and the dawn, or as carrying off Oreithyia, the daughter of Erechtheus, the king of the dawn-city. 467 CHAP. V. Another myth made Pan the lover of the nymph Syrinx ; but this Pan and is but a slight veil thrown over the phrase which spoke of the wind Syrinx. playing on its pipe of reeds by the river's bank; and the tale which related how Syrinx, flying from Pan, like Daphnê from Phoibos, was changed into a reed, is but another form of the story which made Pan the lover of the nymph Echo, just as the unrequited love of Echo for Narkissos is but the complement of the unrequited love of Selênê for Endymion. SECTION V.-AMPHION AND ZETHOS. Theban The same power of the wind which is signified by the harp of The Orpheus is seen in the story of Amphion, a being localised in the Orpheus. traditions of Thebes. But Amphion is a twin-brother of Zethos, and the two are, in the words of Euripides, simply the Dioskouroi, riding on white horses, and thus fall into the ranks of the correlative deities of Hindu and Greek mythology. But the myth runs into many other legends, the fortunes of their mother Antiopê differing but little from those of Augê, Tyrô, Evadnê, or Korônis. The tale is told in many versions. One of these calls her a daughter of Nykteus, the brother of Lykos, another speaks of Lykos, as her husband; but this is only saying that Artemis Hekatê may be regarded as either the child of the darkness or the bride of the light. A third version makes her a daughter of the river Asôpos, a parentage which shows her affinity with Athênê, Aphroditê, and all other deities of the light and the dawn. Her children, like Oidipous, Têlephos, and many others, are exposed on their birth, and like them found and brought up by shepherds, among whom Antiopê herself is said to have long remained a captive, like Danaê in the house of Polydektes. We have now the same distinction of office or employment which marks the other twin BOOK II. Zethos and Proknê. brothers of Greek myths. Zethos tends the flocks, while Amphion receives from Hermes a harp which makes the stones not merely move but fix themselves in their proper places as he builds the walls of Thebes. The sequel of the history of Antiopê exhibits, like the myths of Tyrô, Inô, and other legends, the jealous second wife or step-mother, who is slain by Amphion and Zethos, as Sidêrô is killed by Pelias and Neleus. Amphion himself becomes the husband of Niobê, the mother who presumes to compare her children with the offspring of Zeus and Lêtô. In one tradition Zethos, the brother Amphion, is the husband of Proknê, the daughter of the Athenian Pandion; and in this version the story ran that she killed her own child by mistake, when through envy of her fertility she proposed to slay the eldest son of her sisterin-law Niobe.1 But in its more complete form the myth makes her a wife of Tereus, who is king either of the hill-country (Thrace) or of the Megarian Pegai. When her son Itys was born, Tereus cut out his wife's tongue and hid her away with her babe, and then married her sister Philomela, whom he deceived by saying that Proknê was dead. When the sisters discovered his guilt, Proknê killed her own child Itys, and served up his flesh as a meal for Tereus. Tereus in his turn, learning what had been done, pursues the sisters as they fly from him, and he has almost seized them when they pray that they may be changed into birds. Tereus thus became a hoopoe, Proknê a swallow, and Philomêla a nightingale. Hence it is that as the spring comes round, the bride mourns for her lost child with an inconsolable sorrow, as in the Megarian legend the living Proknê wept herself to death, like Niobê mourning for her sons and daughters. The story is easily taken to pieces. The transformation is the result of the same process which turned Lykâôn into a wolf, and Kallistô into a bear; and as Philomêla was a name for the nightingale, so the daughter of Pandion is said to have been changed into that bird. With the nightingale as a bird of spring the swallow is closely associated, and this fitting transformation was at once suggested for Proknê. But it becomes at the least possible that in its earlier shape the myth may have known only one wife of Tereus, who might be called either Proknê or Philomêla. Of these two names Proknê is apparently only another form of Prokris, who is also the daughter of an Athenian king; and thus the legend seems to explain itself, for as in Tantalos and Lykâôn we have the sun scorching up and destroying 1 Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 141. 2 Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, ii. 229. 3 Another version reversed the doom of the sisters, and made Prokne the nightingale and Philomela the swallow, PROKNE AND PHILOMELA. V. 469 his children, so here the dew is represented as offering the limbs of CHAP her murdered child to her husband, the sun, as he dries up the dewdrops. The myth is thus only another version of the tale of Kephalos or Prokris. The name Philomêla, again, may denote one who loves the flocks, or one who loves apples; but we have already seen how the sheep or flocks of Helios become the apples of the Hesperides, and thus Philomêla is really the lover of the golden-tinted clouds, which greet the rising sun, and the name might well be given to either the dawn or the dew. The mournful or dirge-like sound of the wind is signified by Linos and Zephyros. another Boiotian tradition, which related how the matrons and maidens mourned for Linos at the feast which was called Arnis because Linos had grown up among the lambs,-in other words, the dirge-like breeze had sprung up while the heaven was flecked with the fleecy clouds which, in the German popular stories, lured the rivals of Dummling to their destruction in the waters. The myth that Linos was torn to pieces by dogs points to the raging storm which may follow the morning breeze. Between these two in force would come Zephyros, the strong wind from the evening-land, the son of Astraios the starry heaven, and of Eôs who closes, as she had begun, the day. The wife of Zephyros is the Harpyia Podargê, the white-footed wind, Notos Argêstês, who drives before her the snowy vapours, and who is the mother of Xanthos and Balios, the immortal horses of Achilleus. But as the clouds seem to fly before Podargê or Zephyros, so the phenomenon of clouds coming up seemingly against the wind is indicated in the myth of the wind Kaikias, a name which seems to throw light on the story of Hercules and Cacus. SECTION VI.-AIOLOS AND ARÊS. Guardian In the Odyssey all the winds are placed by Zeus under the The charge of Aiolos, who has the power of rousing or stilling them at his of the will. But beyond this fact the poem has nothing more to say of him Winds. than that he was the father of six sons and six daughters, and that he dwelt in an island which bore his name. With the mythology which grew up around the persons of his supposed descendants we are not here concerned. As a local or a tribal name, it has as much and as little value as that of Hellen, Ion, or Achaios. In itself the word is connected apparently with the names Aia and Aiêtês, and may denote the changeful and restless sky from which the winds are born. But the ingenuity of later mythographers was exercised in arranging BOOK The Storms. or reconciling the pedigrees of the several children assigned to Aiolos, and their efforts were rewarded by complications which were relieved of intolerable weariness only by the mythical interest attaching to some of the many names thus grouped in a more or less arbitrary connexion. With them this association was valuable, chiefly as accounting for the historical distribution of certain Hellenic clans; and this supposed fact has been imported into the controversy respecting the date and composition of our Homeric poems, by some critics who hold that Homer was essentially an Aiolic poet, who wished to glorify his tribesmen over all the other members of the Hellenic race. It may be enough to say that there is no trace of such a feeling in either our Iliad or our Odyssey, which simply speak of Aiolos as a son of Hippotês and the steward of the winds of heaven. But Hermes, Orpheus, Amphion, and Pan, are not the only conceptions of the effects of air in motion to be found in Greek mythology. The Vedic Maruts are the winds, not as alternately soothing and furious, like the capricious action of Hermes, not as constraining everything to do their magic bidding, like the harping of Orpheus and Amphion, nor yet as discoursing their plaintive music among the reeds, like the pipe of Pan; but simply in their force as the grinders or crushers of everything that comes in their way. These crushers are found in more than one set of mythical beings in Greek legends. They are the Moliones, or mill-men, or the Aktoridai, the pounders of grain, who have one body but two heads, four hands, and four feet, who first undertake to aid Heraklês in his struggle with Augeias, and then turning against the hero are slain by him near Kleônai. These representatives of Thor Miölnir we see also in the Aloadai,' the sons of Iphimedousa, whose love for Poseidon led her to roam along the sea-shore, pouring the salt water over her body. The identity of the names Aloadai and Moliones must be determined by the answer to be given to the question, whether aλwh, a threshing-floor, can be traced back to the root mal which indubitably yields Molionê, uúλn, the Latin mola, our mill and meal. There is no proof that certain words may in Greek assume an initial which is merely euphonic but there is abundant evidence that Greek words, which originally began with μ, occasionally drop it. This, Professor Max Müller admits, is a violent change, and it would seem physically unnecessary; but he adduces the analogies of μόσχος and ὄσχος, a : tender shoot or branch, fa for μía in Homer, the Latin mola, and the Greek oùλaí, meal, adding that "instead of our very word &λeupov, wheaten flour, another form, μáλevpov, is mentioned by Helladius."-Lect. on Lang. second series, 323. The same change is seen in ue as corresponding to the numeral ër. The idea of the storm as crushing and pounding is seen in molnija, a name for lightning among the Slavonic tribes, and in Munja, the sister of Grom, the thunderer, in Serbian songs.-Max Müller, ib. 322. With these we may compare Menia and Fenia, the grinders of Frodi's quern. THE MOLIONES AND AKTORIDAI. V. 47I The myth is transparent enough. They are as mighty in their infancy CHAP. as Hermes. When they are nine years old, their bodies are nine cubits in breadth and twenty-seven in height-a rude yet not inapt image of the stormy wind heaping up in a few hours its vast masses of angry vapour. It was inevitable that the phenomena of storm should suggest their warfare with the gods, and that one version should represent them as successful, the other as vanquished. The storm-clouds scattered by the sun in his might are the Aloadai when defeated by Phoibos before their beards begin to be seen, in other words, before the expanding vapours have time to spread themselves over the sky. The same clouds in their triumph are the Aloadai when they bind Arês and keep him for months in chains, as the gigantic ranges of vapours may be seen sometimes keeping an almost motionless guard around the heaven, while the wind seems to chafe beneath, as in a prison from which it cannot get forth. The piling of the cumuli clouds in the skies is the heaping up of Ossa on Olympos and of Pelion on Ossa to scale the heavens, while their threat to make the sea dry land and the dry land sea is the savage fury of the storm when the earth and the air seem mingled in inextricable confusion. The daring of the giants goes even further. Ephialtes, like Ixiôn, seeks to win Hêrê while Otos follows Artemis, who, in the form of a stag, so runs between the brothers that they, aiming at her at the same time, kill each other, as the thunderclouds perish from their own discharges.1 Athênê. Arês, the god imprisoned by the Aloadai, whose name he shares, Arês and represents like them the storm-wind raging through the sky. As the idea of calm yet keen intellect is inseparable from Athênê, so the character of Arês exhibits simply a blind force without foresight or judgment, and not unfrequently illustrates the poet's phrase that strength without counsel insures only its own destruction. Hence Arês and Athênê are open enemies. The pure dawn can have nothing in common with the cloud-laden and wind-oppressed atmosphere. He is then in no sense a god of war, unless war is taken as mere quarrelling and slaughtering for its own sake. Of the merits of contending parties he has neither knowledge nor care. Where the carcases are likely to lie thickest, thither like a vulture will he go; "Otos and Ephialtes, the wind and the hurricane, i.e. the leaper. Max Müller, Lect. on Lang. second series. 2 Professor Max Müller remarks, ib. 325, that " In Ares, Preller, without any thought of the relationship between Ares and the Maruts, discovered the |