II. BOOK and thus he becomes pre-eminently fickle and treacherous,' the object of hatred and disgust to all the gods, except when, as in the lay of Demodokos, he is loved by Aphroditê. But this legend implies that the god has laid aside his fury, and so is entrapped in the coils cast round him by Hephaistos, an episode which merely repeats his imprisonment by the Aloadai. Like these, his body is of enormous size, and his roar, like the roar of a hurricane, is louder than the shouting of ten thousand men. But in spite of his strength, his life is little more than a series of disasters, for the storm-wind must soon be conquered by the powers of the bright heaven. Hence he is defeated by Heraklês when he seeks to defend his son Kyknos against that hero, and wounded by Diomêdês, who fights under the protection of Athênê. In the myth of Adonis he is the boar who smites the darling of Aphroditê, of whom he is jealous, as the storm-winds of autumn grudge to the dawn the light of the beautiful summer.2 1 ἀλλοπρόσαλλος. When Herodotos says that Arês was worshipped by Scythian tribes under the form of a sword, to which even human sacrifices were offered, we have to receive his statement with as much caution as the account given by him of the Arês worshipped by the Egyptians. That the deities were worshipped under this Hellenic name, no one will now maintain; and the judgment of Herodotos on a comparison of attributes would not be altogether trustworthy. The so-called Egyptian Arês has much more of the features of Dionysos. The Scythian sword belongs to another set of ideas. See ch. ii. sect. xii, ( 473 ) CHAPTER VI. THE WATERS. SECTION I.-THE DWELLERS IN THE SEA. VI. Proteus Nereus. BETWEEN Proteus, the child of Poseidôn, and Nereus, the son of CHAP. Pontos, there is little distinction beyond that of name. Both dwell in the waters, and although the name of the latter points more and especially to the sea as his abode, yet the power which, according to Apollodoros, he possesses of changing his form at will indicates his affinity to the cloud deities, unless it be taken as referring to the changing face of the ocean with its tossed and twisting waves. It must, however, be noted that, far from giving him this power, the Hesiodic Theogony seems to exclude it by denying to him the capricious fickleness of Proteus. He is called the old man, we are here told, because he is truthful and cannot lie, because he is trustworthy and kindly, because he forgets not law but knows all good counsels and just words a singular contrast to the being who will yield only to the argument of force. Like Proteus, he is gifted with mysterious wisdom, and his advice guides Heraklês in the search for the apples (or flocks) of the Hesperides. His wife Doris is naturally the mother of a goodly offspring, fifty in number, like the children of Danaos, Aigyptos, Thestios, and Asterodia; but the ingenuity of later mythographers was scarcely equal to the task of inventing for all of them names of decent mythical semblance. Some few, as Amphitrîtê and Galateia, are genuine names for dwellers in the waters; but most of them, as Dynamenê, Pherousa, Proto, Kymodoke, Nesaia, Aktaia, are mere epithets denoting their power and strength, their office or their abode. Of Pontos himself, the father of Nereus, there is even less to be said. In the Hesiodic Theogony he is a son of Gaia alone, as Typhôeus springs only from Hêrê and Athênê has no mother. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Pontos is a mere name for the sea ; and the phrases πόντος ἁλος πολιῆς and θάλασσα πόντου show that the poets were not altogether unconscious of its meaning and of its affinity with their word máτos, a path. It is therefore a name II. BOOK applied to the sea by a people who, till they had seen the great water, had used it only of roadways on land. In the myth of Thaumas, the son of Pontos and the father of Iris and the Harpyiai, we are again carried back to the phenomena of the heavens; the latter being the greedy storm-clouds stretching out their crooked claws for their prey, the former the rainbow joining the heavens and the earth with its path of light. Glaukos. Naiads and Nereids. Another son of Poseidôn, whose home is also in the waters, is the Boiotian Glaukos, the builder of the divine ship Argô and its helmsman. After the fight of Iasôn with the Tyrrhenians, Glaukos sinks into the sea, and thenceforth is endowed with many of the attributes of Nereus. Like him, he is continually roaming, and yearly he visits all the coasts and islands of Hellas; like him, he is full of wisdom, and his words may be implicitly trusted. The domain in which these deities dwell is thickly peopled. Their subjects and companions are the nymphs, whose name, as denoting simply water, belongs of right to no beings who live on dry land, or in caves or trees.1 The classification of the nymphs as Oreads, Dryads, or others, is therefore in strictness an impossible one; and the word Naiad, usually confined to the nymphs of the fresh waters, is as general a term as the name Nymph itself. Nor is there any reason beyond that of mere usage why the Nereides should not be called Naiads as well as Nymphs. But the tendency was to multiply classes: and seldom perhaps has the imagination of man been exercised on a more beautiful or harmless subject than the nature and tasks of these beautiful beings who comfort Prometheus in his awful agony and with Thetis cheer Achilleus when his heart is riven with grief for his friend Patroklos. For the most part, indeed, they remain mere names; but their radiant forms are needed to fill up the background of those magnificent scenes in which the career of the short-lived and suffering sun is brought to a close. And beyond this, they answered a good purpose by filling the whole earth with a joyous and unfailing life. If it be said that to the Greek this earth was his mother, and that he cared not to rise above it, yet it was better that his thoughts should be where they were, than that he should make vain profession of a higher faith at the cost of peopling whole worlds with beings malignant as they were powerful. The effect of Christian teaching would necessarily invest the Hellenic nymphs with some portion of this malignity, and as they would still be objects of worship to the unconverted, that worship would become Η νύμφη answers precisely to the lymphaticus corresponds to the Greek νυμφόληπτος. THETIS. VI. 475 constantly more and more superstitious; and superstition, although CHAP. its nature remains unchanged, is stripped of half its horrors when its objects are beings whose nature is wholly genial. This comparatively wholesome influence the idea of nymphs inhabiting every portion of the world exercised on the Hellenic mind. Each fountain and lake, each river and marsh, each well, tree, hill, and vale had its guardian, whose presence was a blessing, not a curse. As dwelling in the deep running waters, the nymphs who in name answer precisely to the Vedic Apsaras, or movers in the waters, have in some measure the wisdom of Nereus, Glaukos, and of Proteus; hence the soothsayer, as he uttered the oracles of the god, was sometimes said to be filled with their spirit. They guarded the flocks and fostered the sacredness of home, while on the sick they exercised the beneficent art and skill of Asklepios. Maidens and These kindly beings must, however, be distinguished from the SwanSwan-maidens and other creatures of Aryan mythology, whose nature is more akin to the clouds and vapours. The lakes on which these Apsaras. maidens are seen to swim are the blue seas of heaven, in which may be seen beautiful or repulsive forms, the daughters of Phorkys, Gorgons, Harpies, Kentaurs, Titans, Graiai, Phaiakians. Nor can it be said that Thetis, though called a Nereid, is in all points like the companions among whom she dwells. She lives, indeed, in the sea; but she has been brought up by Hêrê the queen of the high heaven, and like the Telchînes and Kourêtes, like Proteus and Glaukos, she can change her form at will, and Peleus obtains her as his bride only when he has treated her as Aristaios treats the guardian of the ocean herds. She belongs thus partly to the sea, and in part to the upper air, and thus the story of her life runs through not a little of the mythical history of the Greeks. When Dionysos flies from Lykourgos, and Hephaistos is hurled down from Olympos, it is Thetis who gives them a refuge; and if she is married to a mortal man, it is only be. cause at the suggestion, it is said, of Hêrê, she refuses to become the bride of Zeus, or as others would have it, because it was fated that her child should be mightier than his father—a myth which can be only solar in its character. In yet another version she plays the part of Aphroditê to Anchises in the Homeric Hymn, and wins Peleus as her husband by promising that his son shall be the most renowned of all the heroes. The story of her wedding carries us far away from her native element, and when, as in the Iliad, she preserves the body of Patroklos from decay, she appears rather in the character of the dawn-goddess who keeps off all unseemly things from the slain Hektor. Nor is she seen in her true character as a Nereid, before BOOK Triton and Amphitrite. The Skylla and the last sad scene, when, rising from the sea with her attendant nymphs, she bathes the body of her dead son, and wraps it in a robe of spotless white, in which the same nymphs folded the infant Chrysâôr. But as the sea-goddess thus puts on some of the qualities and is invested with some of the functions which might seem to belong exclusively to the powers of the heavens and the light, so the latter are all connected more or less closely with the waters, and the nymphs might not unnaturally see their kinsfolk in Athênê Tritogeneia; in Daphnê, the child of the Peneian stream; in Phoibos Apollón her lover, and in Aphroditê Anadyomenê herself. All these, indeed, whatever may be their destiny, are at their rising the offspring of Tritos (Triton), the lord of the waters. The Triton of Hellenic mythology, who dwells in his golden palace in the lowest depths of the sea, rides on the billows which are his snow-crested horses. This god of the waters is reflected in Amphitritê, the wife of Poseidôn in some versions, who is present at the birth of Phoibos in Delos. In the Odyssey she is simply the sea, purple-faced and loud-sounding. Another aspect of the great deep is presented in the Seirens, who by their beautiful singing lure mariners to their ruin. As basking among the rocks in the sunlit waters, they may represent, as some have supposed, the belts (Seirai) of deceitful calms against which the sailor must be ever on his guard, lest he suffer them to draw his ship to sandbanks or quicksands. But apart from the beautiful passage in the Odyssey, which tells us how their song rose with a strange power through the still air when the god had lulled the waves to sleep, the mythology of these beings is almost wholly artificial. They are children of Acheron and Steropê, of Phorkos, Melpomenê, and others, and names were devised for them in accordance with their parentage. In form they were half women, half fishes, and thus are akin to Echidna and Melusina; and their doom was that they should live only until some one should escape their toils. Hence by some mythographers they are said to have flung themselves into the sea and to have been changed into rocks, when Odysseus had effected his escape, while others ascribe their defeat to Orpheus.1 Other versions gave them wings, and again deprived them of them, for aiding or refusing to aid Dêmêtêr in her search for Persephonê. Nor are there wanting mythical beings who work their will among Charybdis, storm-beaten rocks and awful whirlpools. Among the former dwells Skylla, and in the latter the more terrible Charybdis. These creatures the Odyssey places on two rocks, distant about an arrow's flight from See page 461. |