Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/312

 288 TJie European Sky -god.

probably implied by a fragment of the Aegimtus,^"'^ which speaks of him as " looking this way and that with four eyes." Cratinus^"' the comedian wrote a play called the Tiavoirrai, in which the members of the chorus had " two heads apiece and countless eyes." The vase-painters also sometimes conceived of Argus as possessing a double set of eyes. An early Chalcidian amphora now at Munich ^'^- gives him a pair of eyes in the ordinary position and an extra pair on his breast. A black-figured Attic amphora, now at Naples,^^^ shows him with a Janiform head com- posed of a bearded and an unbearded face, united under a petasos, or flat felt hat : his body, wherever visible, is marked with a series of eyes.

It appears, then, that the Arglve Zeus was sufficiently barbaric to conform to the multiple, the triple, and the dual types of divinity. Probably, however, it was the triple type that appealed most strongly to the popular mind and received the sanction of actual worship. For, on the one hand, threefold sight recurs as a family peculiarity among the descendants of Argus: his grandson was called Triopas, "the Three-eyed." ^''^ And, on the other hand, the cult of a three-eyed Zeus flourished at Argos for well over a millennium. Pausanias,^*^^ writing in the second century of our era, tells us that he saw on the Argive Larisa "a wooden image of Zeus with two eyes in the usual place, and a third eye on the forehead. They say that this Zeus was the paternal {TrarpMov) god of Priam, son of Laomedon, and stood in the courtyard under the open sky ; and when Ilium

'^^ Hes. ^i^^-, flag. 5 Kinkcl, Kai oi InlaKoirov "Apyov ai Kpanpov te jiiyav re, I TcTpauiv otpOaXiMolaiv opoifievov ivOa kciI evOa.

"' Memeke,fra^. com. Gr., ii., 102, Kpdna ciaau (popeTv, c(p6a\^oi S' ovk apiOfiiiroi.

'" Wiener Vorlegebliitter, 1890-1S91, pi. 12, i a. b.

"^ Reviie Archeologique, iii. 309 f. ; Daremberg-Saglio, Diet, Ant., i., 419, fig. 508.

"■• Pans., 2. 16. I ; Ilyg./a/'., 124, 145.

'^^ Paus., 2. 24. 3, I*'razcr.