THE DEATH OF OIDIPOUS. In this beautiful being, over whom Sophokles has thrown a 73 CHAP. II. BOOK The story of Têlephos. reflecting more than ever the loveliness of the Eastern Saranyû. Then comes the signal of departure, that voice of the divine thunder which now, as before, when he encountered the Sphinx, Oidipous alone can understand. Without a murmur he prepares to obey the summons, and with Theseus alone, the son of the sea and air, by his side, calmly awaits the end. With wonderful fidelity to the old mythical phrases, the poet brings before us a sunset which dazzles the eyes even of the Athenian king, and tells us of the hero who has passed away, by no touch of disease, for sickness could not fasten on his glorious form, by no thunderstroke or sea-roused whirlwind, but guided by some heaven-sent messenger, or descending into the kindly earth where pain and grief may never afflict him more. Well may the poet speak as though he were scarcely telling the story of the death of mortal man.' The tomb of Endymion was shown in Elis, and the Cretans pointed to the grave of Zeus; but no man could say in what precise spot the bones of Oidipous reposed. It was enough to know that a special blessing would rest on the land which contained his sepulchre; and what place could be more meet for this his last abode than the dearest inheritance of Athênê? The Theban myth of Oidipous is repeated substantially in the Arkadian tradition. As Oidipous is the son of Laios and Iokastê, the darkness and the violet-tinted sky, so is Têlephos (who has the same name with Têlephassa, the far-shining), the child of Aleos the blind, and Augê the brilliant and as Oidipous is left to die on the slopes of Kithairon, so Têlephos is exposed on mount Parthenion. There the babe is suckled by a doe, which represents the wolf in the myth of Romulus and the dog of the Persian story of Cyrus, and is afterwards brought up by the Arkadian king Korythos. Like Oidipous, he goes to Delphoi to learn who is his mother, and is there bidden to go to Teuthras, king of Mysia. But thither Augê had gone before him, and thus in one version Teuthras promised her to Têlephos as his wife, if he would help him against his 1 Soph. Oid. Colon. 1665. TELEPHOS AND PARIS. II. 75 enemy Idas. This service he performs, and Augê differs CHAP. from Iokastê only in the steadiness with which she refuses to wed Têlephos, although she knows not who he is. Têlephos now determines to slay her, but Herakles reveals the mother to the child, and like Perseus, Têlephos leads his mother back to her own land. In another version he becomes the husband not of Augê, but of a daughter of Teuthras, whose name Argiopê shows that she is but Augê under another form. In this tradition he is king of Mysia when the Achaians come to Ilion to avenge the wrongs of Helen, and he resists them with all his power. In the ensuing strife he is smitten by Achilleus, and all efforts to heal the wound are vain. In his misery he betakes himself again to the oracle, and learns that only the man who has inflicted the wound can heal it. In the end, Agamemnon prevails on Achilleus to undo his own work, and to falsify in the case of Telephos the proverb which made use of his name to describe an incurable wound. The means employed is the rust of the spear which had pierced him,-an explanation which turns on the equivocal meaning of the words ios, ion, as denoting rust, poison, an arrow, and the violet colour. As we read the story of Têlephos we can scarcely fail to think of the story of the Trojan Paris, for like Têlephos Paris is exposed as a babe on the mountain side, and like him he receives at the hands of Achilleus a wound which is either incurable or which Oinônê either will not or cannot heal. It is true that the only portion of the myth of Paris introduced into our Iliad is that which relates to the stealing away of Helen, and to the time which she spent with him in Ilion: but it is really unnecessary to adduce again the evidence which proves that the poets of the Iliad used only those myths or portions of myths which served their immediate purpose. Even in what they do tell us about him we discern that twofold aspect which the process of mythical disintegration would lead us to look for. There is on the one side not the slightest doubt that he is the great malefactor who by taking Helen from Sparta brings the Achaian chiefs to the assault of Troy; and as Helen is manifestly the Vedic Saramâ, the beautiful light of the morning or the evening, Paris as con Twofold aspect of the Trojan Paris. BOOK veying her to his stronghold is the robber who drives off the shining cattle of Indra to his dungeon. The fight at Troy is thus the struggle of the children of the Sun to recover from the dreary caves of night the treasure of which the darkness deprived them in the evening; in other words, Ilion is the fortress of Vritra or Ahi, and Paris the successful seducer of Helen represents the unsuccessful seducer of Saramâ. On the other hand it is not less clear that the character of Paris in his capriciousness, his moody sullenness, his self-imposed inaction, singularly resembles that of Meleagros, and so likewise that of Achilleus. The cause also is the same. Achilleus is angry because Brisêis is taken away: Paris is indignant because he is desired to give up Helen: we have therefore simply to distinguish the incidents which exhibit Paris as the dark cheat and plunderer, from the details which ascribe to him a character more or less resembling that of the great solar heroes. This twofold aspect should cause us no perplexity. If the Trojans as a whole represent the enemies of Indra, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that many of those chiefs who take his part are heroes whose solar origin is beyond all question. On his side may be seen the Ethiopian Memnôn, over whose body the morning weeps tears of dew, and who, rising from the dead, is exalted for ever to the bright halls of Olympos. With them are ranged the chieftains of the bright Lykian land; and assuredly in Glaukos and Sarpêdôn we discern not a single point of likeness with the dark troops of the Panis. There is nothing in the history of mythology which should make this result a matter of surprise. The materials for the great epic poems of the Aryan world are the aggregations of single phrases which have been gradually welded into a coherent narrative; and the sayings which spoke of the light as stolen away in the evening from the western sky and carried away to the robber's stronghold far away towards the east, of the children of the light as banding together to go and search out the thief, of their struggle with the seducer and his kinsfolk, of the return of the light from the eastern sky back again to its home in the west, were represented by the mythical statements that Paris stole Helen from the Western Sparta THE ACHAIAN AND TROJAN CHIEFS. and took her away to Ilion, that the kinsfolk of Helen roused the Achaian chiefs to seek out the robber and do battle with him and his people, and that after a hard fight Helen was rescued from their grasp and brought back to the house of Menelaos. But there was a constant and an irresistible tendency to invest every local hero with the attributes which are reflected upon Herakles, Theseus, and Perseus from Phoibos and Helios the lords of light; and the several chiefs whose homes were localised in Western Asia would as naturally be gathered to the help of Hektor as the Achaian princes to the rescue and avenging of Helen. Over every one of these the poet might throw the rich colours of the heroic ideal, while a free play might also be given to purely human instincts and sympathies in the portraits of the actors on either side. If Paris was guilty of great crimes, his guilt was not shared by those who would have made him yield up his prey if they could. He might be a thief, but they were fighting for their homes, their wives, and their children: and thus in Hektor we have the embodiment of the highest patriotism and the most disinterested self-devotion,-a character, in fact, infinitely higher than that of the sensitive, sullen, selfish and savage Achilleus, because it is drawn from human life, and not, like the other, from traditions which rendered such a portrait in his case impossible. Hence between Paris the Ilian hero and the subject of local eastern myths, and Paris in his relations with the Western Achaians, there is a sharp and clear distinction; and if in the latter aspect he is simply the Vritra of Hindu mythology, in the former he exhibits all the features prominent in the legends of Herakles, Dionysos, Theseus and Achilleus.' 1 'Wie Aphroditê und Helena, so erschien auch Paris in den Kyprien, vermuthlich nach Anleitung örtlicher Traditionen, in einem andern Lichte und als Mittelspunkt eines grösseren Sagencomplexes, welcher gleichfalls bei den späteren Dichtern und Künstlern einen lebhaften Anklang gefunden hat. Er ist ganz der Orientalische Held, zugleich mannhaft und weichlich wie Dionysos, wie Sardanapal, wie der Lydische Herakles, gross in der Schlacht und gross im Harem, die gerade Gegen- 77 CHAP. II. |