BOOK II. Achilleus, which bears him up as a bird upon the wing. He is now the Chrysâôr, armed for the battle and ready for his journey; and like the sun, he may veil himself in clouds when he wishes not to be seen. But he cannot reach the Gorgon's den until he has first passed the home of the Graiai, the land of the gloaming, whose solitary eye and tooth he refuses to restore until they have pointed out the road which shall bring him to his journey's end. In other words, the sun must go through the twilight-land before he can pierce the regions of utter darkness and reappear in the beautiful gardens of the Hyperboreans, the asphodel meadows of the tinted heavens of morning. When at length his task is done, and he turns to go to the upper world, the Gorgon sisters (the clouds of darkness) start up in fury, and their brazen talons almost seize him as he reaches the clear blue heaven, which is called the land of the brilliant Ethiopians. Here, again, the same war is going on in which he has already been the conqueror. The stormcloud is seeking to devour the dawn and to blot out its tender light; in other words, the Libyan dragon seeks to make Andromeda his prey, as the maiden stands motionless on the rock to which she has been fastened. The monster is soon destroyed, as the Sphinx is soon discomfited by Oidipous; and the awful power of the Gorgon's glance is seen in the death of Phineus, and in the merciful ending of the long labours of Atlas. But the great work remains yet to be done, the avenging of the wrongs of Danaê, as the Achaians fought to avenge the griefs and woes of Helen. The vengeance of Perseus must be as terrible as that of Achilleus or the stern chieftain of Ithaka. But when Polydektes and his abettors have been turned into stone and Diktys made king of the land, Perseus yields up his magic weapons to the gods who gave them, and departs with his mother to the old home in Argos. Once more Danaê treads her native soil, as Helen graces the halls of Menelaos when Paris the thief has been slain. But the doom pronounced by the Delphian priestess was still unfulfilled; and Akrisios no sooner hears that Perseus is coming than he flies to Larissa. Thither Perseus follows him, not as a foe, but as a friend, and takes part in the DANAÊ AND AITHRA. games which Teutamidas the chief holds in his honour. Presently a quoit hurled by Perseus lights on the feet of Akrisios, and the prophecy is accomplished which makes Oidipous, Romulus, and Cyrus slay their parents or their grandsires. The sequel is given in two versions, corresponding to the choice given to Achilleus. In the one Perseus returns to Argos, and there dies in peace; in the other grief and shame for the death of Akrisios drive him to abandon his Argive sovereignty for that of Tiryns, where his kinsman Megapenthes is king. In the latter, he may be compared with Bellerophôn wandering in gloom and loneliness through the Aleian plain; in the former we have the tranquil time which follows the great vengeance of Achilleus and Odysseus. Thus as the unwilling destroyer even of those whom he loves, as the conqueror of monstrous beasts and serpents, as toiling for a mean and cruel master, yet as coming forth in the end victorious over all his enemies, Perseus is at once the forefather and the counterpart of Herakles. He is himself born in Argos the bright land, as Phoibos springs to life in Delos or Artemis in Ortygia; but his mother Danaê is almost as neutral and colourless as Lêtô or Iokastê or Hekabê or Semelê. The Argive tradition runs in a circle, and the Athenian myth, jealously prized as a wholly independent history, is made up of the same materials. The practical identity of the Athenian legend of Theseus and the Argive legend of the son of Alkmênê suggested the proverb 'Another Herakles;' nor, if attention had been specially fixed on the task of tracing out such resemblances, would very keen powers of criticism have been needed to show that the same process might be applied to the legends of all the Hellenic tribes. 61 CHAP. II. The myth of Theseus is indeed more transparent than that Birth and of his two great kinsmen. As Perseus is the son of the Theseus. youth of golden shower, so is Theseus the child of Aithra, the pure air; and if in one version he is said to be a son of Aigeus, king of Athens, in another he is called a son of Poseidôn, as Athênê is Tritogeneia, and Aphroditê comes up from the sea; but Aigeus himself is only Poseidôn under a name denoting the dash of the waves on the shore, and when Apollodoros speaks 1Пl. ix. 411; xvi. 685. BOOK The six of Aigeus as a son not of Pandion but of Skyrios, we are still in the same magic circle, for the island of Skyros seems to have been noted especially for the worship of the Ionian Poseidôn.1 In some of its earlier incidents the myth carries us to the story of Sigurd and Brynhild. As he grows up his mother tells him that a great work lay before him so soon as he could lift the great stone beneath which lay his father's sword and sandals, the sword and sandals which Perseus had worn when he went to the Gorgons' land. Thus gaining these prizes as Sigmund obtained the good sword Gram, Theseus started on that career of adventure and conquest which, with differences of local colouring and detail, is the career of Oidipous, Meleagros, Bellerophôn, Odysseus, Sigurd, Grettir, and other mythical heroes, as well as of Herakles and Perseus. Like these, he fights with and overcomes robbers, murderers, dragons, and other monsters. Like some of them, also, he is capricious and faithless. Like them, he is the terror not only of evil men but of the gods of the underworld. At his birth Poseidôn gave to his son the three wishes exploits of which appear again and again in Teutonic folk-lore, and his first journey. sometimes in a ludicrous form.2 The favour of the seadeities is also shown in the anecdote told by Pausanias that when Minos cast doubts on his being a son of Poseidôn, and bade him, if he were such, to bring up a ring thrown into the sea, Theseus dived and reappeared not only with the ring but with a golden crown, which Aphroditê herself had placed upon his head. His journey from Troizen to Athens is signalised by exploits which later mythographers regarded as six in number, as twelve were assigned to Herakles. They are all, as we might expect, merely different forms of the great fight waged by Indra and Oidipous against Vritra, Ahi, or the Sphinx. Thus the robber Periphêtês is the clubbearing son of Hephaistos, who, being weak in the feet, uses his weapon to smite down the passers by-an image of the stormcloud which in a mountain pass seems to rest on the hill-side, and to discharge its fiery bolts on defenceless 1 Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 287. The name Pandîôn is manifestly a masculine form of Pandia, an epithet of Selênê, the moon, when at its full. Eur. Hipp. 46. Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 288. 3 i. 16, 3; Preller, ib. SINIS, THE PINE-BENDER. travellers below. But Sinis the robber, or plunderer, is his kinsman, being like himself a son of Poseidôn, and from his name Pityokamptes is the stormwind which bends the pine trees. Hence the myth went that he slew his victims by compelling them to bend a fir tree which he allowed to fly back upon them, and that Theseus who caught him in his own trap nevertheless felt that he needed to purify himself for the death of one who was also a son of the sea. The same idea gave rise to the myth of Phaia, the dark or ashencoloured sow of Krommyon, who shares the fate of all such monsters, and again to that of Skeiron, who hurls from the cliffs the travellers whom he has constrained to kneel and wash his feet,' and who in his turn is in like manner destroyed by Theseus. In Kerkyon, whose name apparently connects him with the Kerkôpes, we have a reflection of Laios, Akrisios, Amulius, and other beings who seek from fear for themselves to destroy their children or their children's children. The story of his daughter Alopê is simply the story of Augê, Semelê, Danaê, and many others; but Kerkyon himself is the Eleusinian wrestler, who is defeated by Theseus in his own art and slain. The robber Prokroustes is a being of the same kind; but the myth attached to his name does not explain itself like the rest, and may perhaps have been suggested by the meaning of the word which may denote either the process of beating or hammering out, or simply a downright blow. In the latter case Prokroustes would simply be Sinis or Periphêtês under another name; in the former, the story of a bed to which he fitted the limbs of his victims by stretching them or cutting them off might not unnaturally spring up. 63 CHAP. Theseus now enters the dawn city with a long flowing Theseus at robe, and with his golden hair tied gracefully behind his Athens. head; and his soft beauty excites the mockery of some workmen, who pause in their work of building to jest upon the maiden who is unseemly enough to walk about alone. It is the story of the young Dionysos or Achilleus in woman's 1 Preller has no doubt on this head. 'Es scheint wohl dass dieser Skeiron.. ein Bild für die heftigen Stürme ist, welche den Wanderer von den Skeiron ischen Felsen, so hiess dieser Pass, BOOK II. Theseus and the Minotauros. garb; but Theseus is mightier than they, and, without saying a word, he unspans the oxen of the builders' wagon, and hurls the vehicle as high above the temple pillars as these rose above the ground. In the house of his fathers he was still surrounded by enemies. Aigeus was now wedded to the wise woman Medeia, who in her instinctive jealousy of the beautiful youth makes Aigeus an accomplice in her scheme for poisoning him. The deadly draught is placed on the banquet-table, but Aigeus recognises the sword which Theseus bears, and, embracing him as his, bids Medeia depart with her children to her own land. He encounters foes more formidable in the fifty gigantic sons of Pallas, who have thrust themselves into the place of Aigeus, as the suitors in Ithaka usurp the authority of Odysseus; but by the aid of the herald Leos, who betrays them, Theseus is again the conqueror. He is, however, scarcely more than at the beginning of his toils. The fields of Marathon are being ravaged by a bull,3 in whom we see a being akin to the terrible Cretan Minotauros, the malignant power of darkness hidden away in its labyrinth of stars. In his struggle with this monster he is aided by the prayers and offerings of the benign and aged Hekalê, whose eyes are not permitted to look again on the youth whom she has so tenderly loved-a myth which brings before us the gentle Têlephassa sinking down in utter weariness, before her heart can be gladdened once more by the sight of her child Eurôpê.4 He has now before him a still harder task. The bull which now fills Athenian hearts with grief and fear has his abode not at Marathon, but at Knossos. In the war waged by Minos in revenge for the death of his son Androgeos, who had been slain on Attic soil, the Cretan king was the conqueror. With the war had come famine and pestilence; 1 Paus. i. 19, 1; Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 291. 2 These fifty sons of Pallas must be compared with the fifty sons and daughters of Ægyptos, Danaos, Asterodia and Selênê. But these are clearly images of the starry heavens; and thus the myth of the Pallantides is simply a story of the night vieing with, or usurping the prerogatives of, the day. In the story of Krishna this bull is animated by the demon Arishta. Vishnu Purana, H. H. Wilson, 536. The name Hekalê is the same as Hekatê and Hekatos, and thus, like Têlephassa, has simply the meaning of rays shot from a distant orb. 5 The myth of Androgeôs has many versions. The most important exhibits him as a youth of great beauty and |