Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/306

 282 The European Sky -god.

"the earth." Hades would thus be "Zeus-of-the-earth,"^^^ a conception for which we have already found ample justi- fication.

In early times the Greeks, like other semi-civilized peoples, ascribed to their gods a plurality of heads, arms, legs, &c., with a view to expressing superhuman powers. For instance, Typhon had a hundred heads,^-^ Briareus a hundred arms,^^° Scylla a dozen feet.^'^^ Naturally the numbers differed in different myths, or even in different forms of the same myth. Without attempting to be exhaustive in the matter, we may here mark two main tendencies, [a) In the first place, the total was commonly reduced, sooner or later, to three. This reduction may, no doubt, have been due in part to artistic conveni- ence : ^^"^ to depict a hundred arms or even a dozen feet in a realistic or convincing way was difficult, if not impossible. But it was also due in part to a yet more elementary diffi- culty, viz., the primitive inability to count beyond two, which, as Professor Tylor^^^ long since showed, has left traces of itself both in the popular conception of the numeral three as a kind of superlative and in the gram- matical recognition of singular, dual, and plural. These

'-* H. L. Ahrens (Philologus, xxiii., 21 1) hints at this derivation : in sup- port of Tloaeicwv = the Water-Zeus he says — " Diese deutung wird noch eine sehr kriiftige bestiitigung erhalten, wenn es mir geUngen sollte den namen des dritten Zeus 'Aictjc in ganz analoger weise zu deuten." G. F. Unger (^Philologiis, xxiv., 385 ff.) attempted to explain 'Atcijg as the patronymic form of ala. My own belief (Class. Rev., xvii., 176) is that* al-i- A7]g, " Zezis-of-the- Earth" passed into a-t-A?/f, with initial a lengthened to compensate for the loss of t : see Hoffmann, die griech. Dialekie, iii., 318 f.

'=> Find., 01., 4. 7, Fyth., 8. 16; Aesch. P. V., 353 f. ; Aristoph., «;/3.,

336.

^"^ //.,!., 402 f. ; Plut. de amic. multit., 6 ; Apollod., I. I. I ; Palaeph., 20.

'" Od., 12. 89 ; Tzetz. in Lye. Alex., 650.

'*2 See Roscher, Lex., ii., 1126, 11 ff.

'*' E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture,^ \., 265.