THE VENGEANCE OF ODYSSEUS. III. 409 lay his hands. Of the incidents of this struggle it is unnecessary here CHAP. to say more than that they exhibit the victory of the poor despised outcast, whether it be Boots, or Cinderella, or Jack the Giant Killer, or the Great Fool, over those who pride themselves on their grandeur and their strength. He stands a beggar in his own hall. Athênê herself has taken all beauty from his face, all colour from his golden hair; but there remains yet the bow which he alone can bend, the gleaming slipper which Cinderella alone can put on. The whole picture is wonderfully true to the phenomena of the earth and the heavens, but as a portrait of human character, it is not more happy than that of Achilleus. There is the same complete disproportion between the offence committed and the vengeance taken, the same frightful delight in blood and torture-the mutilation of Melanthios and the deliberate slaughter of the handmaidens answering to the insults offered by Achilleus to the body of Hektor, and the coldblooded murder of the twelve Trojan youths on the funeral pyre of Patroklos. The incidents of the decisive conflict answer completely to those of the battle of Achilleus; and all that we need say is that Odysseus is united with his wife, to whom Athênê imparts all the radiant beauty of youth in which she shone when Odysseus had left her twenty years ago. The splendid scene with which the narrative ends answers to the benignant aspect in which Achilleus appears when Hektor is dead. SECTION III.—THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN. We have thus far traced the second return of the treasure-seekers. The expulsion of In each case the work to which they had devoted themselves is the Heraaccomplished. The golden fleece and Helen are each brought back kleids. to the land from which they had been taken; and though Odysseus may have suffered many and grievous disasters on the way, still even with him the destruction of the suitors is followed by a season of serene repose. But the poet who here leaves him with the bride of his youth restored to all her ancient beauty, tells us nevertheless that the chieftain and his wife must again be parted; and myths might be framed from this point of view as readily as from the other. It was as natural to speak of the sun as conquered in the evening by the powers of darkness as it was to speak of him as victorious over these same foes in the morning--as natural to describe the approach of night under the guise of an expulsion of the children of Helios or Herakles, as to represent the reappearance of the sunset hues in BOOK the west by a myth relating their triumphant return. II. The return of kleids. Such myths are in fact the germs of those recurring expulsions, and those attempted or successful restorations which form what is commonly called the history of the Herakleidai. The extent to which an element of actual history may be traced in these mythical narratives is a question on which something has been said already, and probably it will not be disputed that even if many of the names may be those of real local chieftains (and some of the incidents may possibly be traditions of real local events), yet the narratives in their main features closely resemble the other epical myths with which they are connected. These stories were altered at will by later poets and mythographers in accordance with local or tribal prejudices or fancies, and forced into arrangements which were regarded as chronological. Thus, some speak of the Trojan war as taking place in the interval between the death of Hyllos and the return of his son Kleodaios; but the historical character of all these events has been swept away, and we are left free to reduce the narratives to the simple elements of which they are composed. Thus the story ran that when Heraklês died, his tyrant and tormentor Eurystheus insisted on the surrender of his sons, and that Hyllos, the son of Dêianeira, with his brothers, hastily fled, and after wandering to many other places at last found a refuge in Athens. This was only saying in other words that on the death of the sun the golden hues of evening were soon banished from the western sky, but that after many weary hours they are seen again in the country of the Dawn, as indeed they could be seen nowhere else. Athens is the only possible refuge for the children of Heraklês; but their enemies will not allow them to slip from their hands without a struggle. The Gorgon sisters almost seize Perseus as he hurries away after the slaughter of Medousa; and thus Eurystheus marches with his hosts against Athens. But the dawn must discomfit the dark beings. The Athenians are led on by Theseus, the great solar hero of the land, by Iolaos, the son of Iphikles, the twin brother of Heraklês, and by the banished Hyllos. Eurystheus is slain, and Hyllos carries his head to Alkmênê. If we choose now to follow the ordinary arrangement of these the Hera- stories, we shall see in them a series which might be indefinitely extended, but of whose mythical origin we can scarcely feel a doubt. If after the defeat of Eurystheus the Herakleids return to the Peloponnesos, we find that they cannot maintain their footing there for more than a year, and that then by an irresistible necessity they find their way back to Athens; and these alternations, which represent simply the succession of day and night, might and would have been KARMOS AND CHRYSÊS. III. 411 repeated any number of times, if the myths had not at length become CHAP. mixed up with traditions of the local settlement of the country— in other words, if certain names found in the myths had not become associated with particular spots or districts in the Peloponnesos. To follow all the versions and variations of these legends is a task perhaps not much more profitable than threading the mazes of a labyrinth; but we may trace in some, probably in most of them, the working of the same ideas. Thus the version which after the death of Eurystheus takes Hyllos to Thebes makes him dwell by the Elektrian or amber-gates. The next stage in the history is another return of the children of Heraklês, which ends in the slaughter of Hyllos in single combat with Echemos-a name connected perhaps with that of Echidna, Ahi, the throttling snake. The night is once more victorious, and the Herakleidai are bound by a compact to forego all attempts at return for fifty or a hundred years, periods which are mere multiples of the ten years of the Trojan war, and of the Nosto or homeward wanderings of the Achaian chiefs. Once more the children of the dawn goddess give them shelter in Trikorythos, a region answering to the Hypereia or upper land, in which the Phaiakians dwelt before they were driven from it by the Kyklopes. The subsequent fortunes of Kleodaios and Aristomachos the son and grandson of Heraklês simply repeat those of Hyllos; but at length in the next generation the myth pauses, as in the case of Odysseus and Achilleus in the Iliad and the Odyssey, at the moment of victory, and the repetition of the old drama is prevented by the gradual awakening of the historical sense in the Hellenic tribes. For this last return the preparations are on a scale which may remind us in some degree of the brilliant gathering of the Achaian chieftains with their hosts in Aulis. A fleet is built at the entrance of the Corinthian gulf, at a spot which hence bore the name of Naupaktos, and the three sons of Aristomachos, Aristodemos, Temenos, and Kresphontes, make ready for the last great enterprise. But Aristodemos is smitten by lightning before he can pass over into the heritage of his fathers, and his place is taken by his twin sons Eurysthenes and Prokles, in whose fortunes we see that rivalry and animosity which, appearing in its germ in the myth of the Dioskouroi, is brought to a head in the story of Etcokles and Polyneikes, the sons of Oidipous. The sequel exhibits yet other points of resemblance to the story of the Trojan war. The soothsayer Chrysês reappears as the prophet Karnos, whose death by the hand of Hippotês answers to the insults offered to Chrysês by Agamemnon. In either case the wrath of Apollon is roused, and a plague is the BOOK II. consequence. The people die of famine, nor is the hand of the god lifted from off them, until, as for Chrysês, a full atonement is made. Hippotês is banished, and the chiefs are then told to take as their guide the three-eyed man, who is found in the Aitolian Oxylos who rides on a one-eyed horse. But as the local myth exhibited Tisamenos the son of Orestes as at this time the ruler of Peloponnesos, that prince must be brought forward as the antagonist of the returning Herakleids; and a great battle follows in which he is slain, while, according to one version, Pamphylos and Dymas, the sons of the Dorian Aigimios, fall on the side of the invaders. With the partition of the Peloponnesos among the conquerors the myth comes to an end. Argos falls to the lot of Temenos, while Sparta becomes the portion of the sons of Aristodemos, and Messênê that of Kresphontes. A sacrifice is offered by way of thanksgiving by these chiefs on their respective altars; and as they drew near to complete the rite, on the altar of Sparta was seen a serpent, on that of Argos a toad, on that of Messênê a fox. The soothsayers were, of course, ready with their interpretations. The slow and sluggish toad denoted the dull and unenterprising disposition of the future Argive people; the serpent betokened the terrible energy of the Spartans; the fox, the wiliness and cunning of the Messenians. As indications of national character, more appropriate emblems might perhaps have been found; but it may be noted that the toad or frog reappears in the Hindu legend of Bhekî, the frog-sun, and in the German story of the frog-prince; that the serpent in this legend belongs to the class of dragons which appear in the myths of Helios, Medeia, and Iamos; and that the Messenian fox is an animal closely akin to the wolf which we meet in the myths of the Lykian Apollón and the Arkadian Lykâôn.1 Adrastos and Amphiaraos. SECTION IV.-THE THEBAN WARS. In spite of all differences of detail between the legends of the Trojan and the Theban wars, the points of resemblance are at the least as worthy of remark. In each case there are two wars and two The three sons, Aristodemos, Temenos, and Kresphontes, who in this stage of the myth represent the line of Heraklês, are seen again in the three sons of the German Mann, the Mannus of Tacitus: but the names in the Teutonic story are more significant. The names of the three great tribes, Ingævones, Iscævones, Herminones, point to Yng, Askr, and Irmin. To Yng, probably, we may trace the English name: in Askr we see the ashborn man, the race of which the Greek spoke as sprung ἐκ μελιᾶν : Irmin is the old Saxon god, whose name is familiar to us under its later form Herman, the Arminius of Tacitus.-Max Müller, Lectures, second series, 458. AMPHIARAOS AND ERIPHYLÊ. 413 III. sieges; and if the Argive chiefs under Adrastos are not so successful CHAP. as Heraklês with his six ships at Ilion, still the Trojan power was no more destroyed by the latter than that of Eteokles was crushed by Polyneikes and his allies. In either case also there is a hero whose presence is indispensable to the success of the enterprise. In the Theban story this hero is Amphiaraos, the Achilleus of the Trojan legend in this its most important feature: and as Troy cannot fall unless Achilleus fights against it, so the Argives cannot hope to take Thebes unless Amphiaraos goes with them. But as neither Achilleus nor Odysseus wished to fight in a quarrel which was not their own, so Amphiaraos shrinks from any concern in a contest in which the prophetic mind inherited by him from his ancestor Melampous tells him that all the chiefs engaged in it must die with the one exception of Adrastos. But he had promised the Argive king that in any differences which might arise between them he would abide by the decision of his wife Eriphylê, and Eriphylê had been bribed by Polyneikes with the gift of the necklace and peplos of Harmonia to decide in favour of the expedition. Thus Amphiaraos departs for Thebes with a presentiment of his own coming doom as strong as the consciousness of Achilleus that his career must be brief; but before he sets out, he charges his sons Amphilochos and Alkmaion to slay their mother, so soon as they hear of his death, and to march against the hated city of Thebes; and thus the starting-point was furnished not only for the Theban war, but for a new series of woes to be wrought by the Erinyes of Eriphylê. The germs of the rivalry, which in the case of the sons of Oidipous The sons of Oidipous. grew into a deadly hatred, are seen in the points of contrast afforded by almost all the correlative deities of Greek and Vedic mythology, and the twin heroes whether of the east or the west. Thus there is a close parallel between the Dioskouroi and the sons of Oidipous. The former may not be seen together; the latter agree to reign over Thebes in turn; and it was a ready device to account for the subsequent feud by saying that the brother whose time was over refused to abide by his compact. Hence Polyneikes became an exile; but it is not easy to determine precisely to what degree a purely moral element has forced its way into this series of legends from the horror which a union like that of Iokastê and Oidipous, when regarded as a They are, in short, the rival brothers not only of the royal houses of Sparta, but in a vast number of stories in Aryan folk-lore, and are represented by Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful in Grimm's collection, by True and Untrue, by Big Peter and |