Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/295

 The European Sky-god. 271

his daughters — " Call ye likewise on yonder bird of Zeus" — to which they reply — " Lo, we call on the saving rays of the sun." In the story of Atreus' golden Iamb Zeus causes the sun to travel backwards/^ and, since con- trol of the sun's course constituted an equal claim to king- ship with possession of the golden lamb, it is not improbable that the golden lamb was the sun itself. ^° Again, the golden ram, which carried Phrixus and Helle through the air till the latter fell into the Hellespont, affords so close a parallel to the myth of Phaethon that we are forced to interpret it as a piece of solar symbolism. ^^ Phrixus, who got safe to Colchis, sacrificed this ram to Zeus u^i09 and gave its fleece to Aeetes, son of Helios, who hung it on an oak-tree in the grove of Ares : so much we are told by the Greek mythographer Apollodorus,^'"^ but a valuable Latin treatise on mythology preserved in a Vatican manu- script adds that the golden fleece stripped from Phrixus' ram was that "in which Zeus climbs the sky"'^^ — a clear case of Zeus being equated with the sun. Similarly Zeus "A/x/ia)y was at once sun-god and ram-god f^ and Herodotus accounts for the yearly clothing of his statue at Thebes with a fresh ram's skin by the quaint tale that Zeus put on the head and skin of a ram before he would show himself

^ //., 2. 106, schol. A.D., alib. For the details of the stoiy see itifra, p. 305.

^ Class. Rev., xvii., 184.

in Zeitschr. f. Ethnol. 1875, p. 243 ff., &c. Strabo 499 asserts that the whole legend arose from the practice of the Soanes, a Colchian tribe, who were said to catch in fleeces the gold that was brought down by mountain torrents. This explanation, though plausible (see Ridgeway, Oright of Curriency and Weight Standards, p. 70), is — like almost all rationalising explanations — wrong. The golden ram cannot be thus separated from the golden lamb. Besides, the analog}' of the myth of Phaethon and the parentage of Aeetes, child of the Sun, confirm the solar connection.
 * ' So Kuhn in Abkandl. d. Berl. Akad. d. Wissensch. 1873, P- ^SS. Mannhardt

^ ApoUod., I. 9. 16.

^ Myth. Vat. ed. Angelo Maio, i., 24 (Pelias sent Jason to Colchis) ut inde detulisset pellem auream in qua Jupiter in caelum ascendit.

^ Class. Rev., xvii., 404.