ROMULUS AND CYRUS. II. 83 at his birth. He is taken away in a thunderstorm, wrapped CHAP. in the clouds which are to bear him in a fiery chariot to the palace of Jupiter. The myth of Cyrus differs from the Romulean legend only Cyrus and Astyages. in the fact that here it has gathered round an unquestionably historical person. But it cannot be too often repeated that from the myth we learn nothing of his history, and his history confers no sort of credibility on the myth. So far as the latter is concerned, in other words, in all that relates to his earlier years, he remains wholly unknown to us, while the story resolves itself into the stock materials of all such narratives. As Laios in the Theban myth is the enemy, Dasyu, of the devas or bright gods, so is Astyages only a Grecised form of Asdahag, the Azidahaka or biting snake of Hindu legend and the Zohak of the epic of Firdusi. Like Laios also he is told that if his daughter Mandanê has a son, that child will live to be king in his stead. In this case the emblem seen before the birth of the infant is not a torch but a vine which overspreads the whole of Asia, and the babe who is exposed is not the child whom Harpagos delivers to the herdsman clad in a magnificent golden robe, but the dead child which happens to be born in the herdsman's house just as he enters it with the doomed son of Mandanê. Under this man's roof Cyrus grows up with the true spirit of kingship, and when he is chosen despot by the village boys in their sport, he plays his part so well that Artembares, the father of a boy who has been scourged by his orders, complains to Astyages of the insult. The bearing of the youth and his apparent age make Astyages think of the babe whose death he had decreed, and an examination of the herdsman justifies his worst fears. On Harpagos, to whom he had in the first instance intrusted the child, he takes an awful vengeance; but the magi satisfy him that the election of Cyrus to be king of the village boys fulfils the terms of the prophecy, and that therefore he need have no further fears on his account. Thus Cyrus is suffered to grow up in the palace, and is afterwards sent to his father, the Persian Kambyses. Harpagos thinks that the time is now come for requiting Astyages for his detestable cruelty, and BOOK Chandragupta. counsels Cyrus to raise the standard of revolt. The sequel is an institutional legend, of much the same value with the story of the setting up of the Median monarchy by Deiokes, a name in which we also recognise the Dahak or biter of Hindu mythology. In its earlier scenes the legend of Chandragupta presents some points of difference with that of Cyrus. The child is exposed to great danger in his infancy; but it is at the hands, not of his kinsman, but of a tributary chief who has defeated and slain his suzerain, and it is his mother who, 'relinquishing him to the protection of the devas, places him in a vase, and deposits him at the door of a cattle-pen.' Here a bull named Chando comes to him and guards him, and a herdsman, noting this wonder, takes the child and rears him as his own. The mode by which he is subsequently discovered differs from the Persian story only by the substitution of the chopping off of hands and feet instead of scourging. This is done by axes made of the horns of goats for blades, with sticks for handles; and the lopped limbs are restored whole at Chandragupta's word when the play is done. Slightly altered, this story becomes the legend of Semiramis, whom her mother the fish-goddess Derketo exposes in her infancy; but she was saved by doves, and like Cyrus, Romulus, and Chandragupta, brought up by a shepherd until her beauty attracts Onnes, one of the king's generals, and afterwards makes her the wife of king Ninus himself, whom in some versions she presently puts to death, in order that she may reign alone, like Eôs surviving Kephalos.2 1 Max Müller, Sanskr. Lit. 290. Unlike Cyrus and Chandragupta, Ninus and Semiramis are, like Romulus, purely mythical or fabulous beings. The name of Ninus is derived from the city: he is the eponymous king and founder of Nineveh, and stands to it in the same relation as Tros to Troy, Medus to Media, Mæon to Mæonia, Romulus to Rome. His conquests and those of Semiramis are as unreal as those of Sesostris. It is the characteristic of these fabulous conquerors, that, although they are reported to have overrun and subdued many countries, the history of those countries is silent on the subject. Sesostris is related to have conquered Assyria; and the king of Assyria was doubtless one of those whom he har nessed to his chariot. But the history of Assyria makes no mention of Sesostris. Semiramis is related to have con quered Egypt; but the history of Egypt makes no mention of Semiramis.' Sir G. C. Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients, 408. Romulus is one of seven kings whose chronology is given with great precision; but this chronology is throughout, in Niebuhr's trenchant words, a forgery and a fiction.'-Hist. THE CHILDREN OF TELEPHASSA. 85 CHAP. and II. The story of Eurôpê, like that of Daphnê or Arethousa, Psyche or Urvasî, is but one of the many forms assumed by the myth that the sun and the dawn are soon parted. The Kadmos scene is here laid in the Phoinikian or purple land, a Europê. region belonging to the same aerial geography with Lykia, Delos, Ortygia, the Arkadia of Kallisto or the Athens of Theseus and Peirithoös. But when Phenicia became to the Greeks the name of an earthly country, versions were not long wanting, which asserted that Agenor was born in Tyre or Sidon, or some other spot in the territories of Canaanite tribes. Of these we need take no account, while in its names and incidents generally the myth explains itself. Agenor is the husband of Têlephassa, the feminine form of the name Têlephos, a word conveying precisely the same meaning with Hekatos, Hekate, Hekatebolos, well known epithets of the sun and moon. His children are Kadmos, Phoinix, Kilix and Eurôpê, although in some accounts Eurôpê is herself a daughter of Phoinix. On this maiden, the broadflushing light of dawn, Zeus, the heaven, looks down with love; and the white bull, the spotless cloud, comes to bear her away to a new home, in Crete, the western land. She becomes the mother of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpêdôn. But in the house from which she is thus torn all is grief and sorrow. There can be no more rest until the lost one is found again; the sun must journey westwards until he sees again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning. Kadmos therefore is bidden to go in search of his sister, with strict charge never to return unless he finds her. With him goes his mother, and a long and weary pilgrimage brings them at length to the plains of Thessaly, where Têlephassa worn out with grief and anguish lies down to die. But Kadmos must journey yet further westward; and at Delphoi he learns that he must follow a cow which he would be able to distinguish by certain signs, and where she lay down from weariness, there he must build his city. The cow, doubtless one of the herd to which belong the bull of Europe and the cattle of Helios, lies down on the site of Rome, vol. i.; Edinburgh Review, Jan. 1867, p. 130; Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art, s. v. Tabulation of BOOK II. Minos and the Minotaur. Thebes. But before he can offer the cow in sacrifice to the dawn-goddess Athênê, he has to fight with the cloud in a form akin to that of the Pythian monster, or of the Sphinx which at a later period of its mythical history was to vex his own people. A great dragon, the child of Arês, the grinder or crusher, guards the well from which he seeks to obtain water, and slays the men whom he sends to fetch it. Kadmos alone, like Oidipous, can master it; but his victory is followed by another struggle or storm. He sows in the earth the dragon's teeth, which, as in the story of Iason in Kolchis, produce a harvest of armed men who slay each other, leaving five only to become the ancestors of the Thebans. It is the conflict of the clouds which spring up from the earth after the waters have been let loose from the prison-house, and mingle in wild confusion until a few only remain upon the battle-field of the heaven. But if Phoibos himself paid the penalty for slaying the Kyklôpes, Kadmos must not the less undergo, like him, a time of bondage, at the end of which Athênê makes him king of Thebes, and Zeus gives him Harmonia as his bride. These incidents interpret themselves; while the gifts which Kadmos bestowed on Harmonia suggest a comparison with the peplos of Athène and the hangings woven for the Ashera by the Syrian women, as well as with the necklace of Eriphylê, and thus with the circular emblems which reproduce the sign of the Yoni. There is but little more worth telling in this Theban legend. The wars in which Kadmos fights are the wars of Kephalos or Theseus, with fewer incidents to mark them; and the spirit of the old myth is better seen in the legend, that when their work here was done, Kadmos and his wife were changed into dragons (like the keen-sighted creatures which draw the chariot of Medeia), and so taken up to Elysion.' The children of Europê are more prominent in Hellenic mythology than Kadmos himself. Minos who appears first 1 The question of the colonisation of Boiotia by Phenicians must be settled, if settled at all, by evidence which it is vain to seek in the incidents of the myth. One item may perhaps be furnished by the name Kadmos, if this be the Grecised form of the Semitic Kedem, the east. This word, together with the occurrence of Banna as the Boiotian word for daughter, seemed to satisfy Niebuhr as to the fact of this Phenician settlement. We must add to the list of such words the epithet of Palaimôn, Melikertes, the Syrian Melkarth or Moloch. to THE MINOTAUROS. in the lists of Apollodoros, is in some accounts split up into two beings of the same name; but the reason which would justify this distinction might be urged in the case of almost all the gods and heroes of Aryan tradition. It is enough say that as the son of Zeus and Eurôpê he is the son of the heaven and the morning; as the offspring of Lykastos and Ida, he has the same brilliant sire, but his mother is the earth. In his name he is simply man, the measurer or thinker, the Indian Manu: and if in the Hindu legend Manu enters the ark with the seven rishis at the time of the great deluge, so Minos is the father of Deukalion, in whose days the floods are let loose in the western land. Thus as the representative of the great human family, he becomes not merely like Manu the giver of earthly codes or institutes, but a judge of the dead in the nether world, with Rhadamanthys and Aiakos, who were admitted to share this office. The conception which made Manu the builder of the ark is seen apparently in the maritime power and supremacy attributed to the Cretan Minos, a supremacy which to Thucydides. seemed as much a fact of history as the Peloponnesian war. This power, according to Apollodoros, Minos the grim' obtained by overcoming his brothers, who quarrelled after Asterion the king of Crete had married their mother Europê,-in other words, after the evening stars began to twinkle in the light-flushed skies. But although Minos had boasted that whatever he desired the gods would do, he was none the more shielded against disaster. At his wish Poseidon sent up a bull from the sea, on the pledge of Minos that he would offer the beast in sacrifice. Minos offered one of his own cattle in his stead; and Poseidôn not only made the bull mad, but filled Pasiphaê with a strange love for the monster. From the union of the bright heaven with this sombre progeny of the sea sprang the Minotauros, who in his den far away within his labyrinth of stars devoured the tribute children sent from the city of Athênê, and who, by the help of Ariadnê, falls under the sword of Theseus as lasôn by the aid of Medeia conquers the fire-breathing bulls of Kolchis. So transparent is the legend of the solar hero and solar king 1 Od. xi. 322. 87 CHAP. II. |