Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/324

 300 The European Sky-god.

an old Pelasgian belief that the king was indeed divine,"-'*'^ being none other than Zeus incarnate. That this was so, I infer partly from a consideration of several early Greek myths, partly from the occasional recrudescence of the belief in historical times, and lastly from the direct testimony of ancient authors.

Let us take the myths first. The story of Salmoneus is given wuth most detail by Apollodorus,"^* who says : " Salmoneus. . . came to Elis and founded a town there. He was a proud man and fain to place himself on a level with Zeus ; for which impiety he was punished. For he declared that he was Zeus, and depriving Zeus of his sacrifices he bade men offer them to himself. He attached to a chariot leather thongs with bronze caldrons and trailing them after him said that he was thundering ; he tossed blazing torches towards the sky and said that he was lightening. Zeus therefore struck him with a thunderbolt and destroyed the town founded by him and all its inha- bitants." The mythographer of course, judging from a later standpoint, regards Salmoneus as a paragon of impiety. But, that he was no such exceptional sinner, appears from the case of his own sister Alcyone. " Ceyx, son of Heosphorus, married Alcyone. They perished through their overweening pride. For Ceyx declared that his wife was Hera ; Alcyone, that her husband was Zeus. Zeus then changed them into birds, making the one a halcyon, the other a ceyx."~^^ Apollodorus must needs tax them both with superhuman conceit : but in point of fact they were within their rights. The same primitive custom perhaps underlies the legend'-^'^ that Polytechnus and Aedon

-" This belief is rather near the surface in such a passage as //., 24. 258 f., where Priam speaks of his son " Hector, who was a god (Sfof) among men, nor was he like unto the son of a mortal man, but of a god (0£O(o).'

2« Apollod., I. 9. 7.

^» lb., I. 7. 4.

^'' Anton. Lib., 11. See Class Rev,, xviii. 80 f.