Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/409

 The European Sky-god. 379

appears in the myth of Lityerses : this son of Midas, king of Phrygia, used to challenge people to a reaping-match with him and beat them if they were worsted ; but one day he fell in with a stronger reaper and was himself put to death.^*

The foregoing tales do not actually state that the victor became king in the room of the vanquished. But it is noticeable that in these and other similar stories the victor may take the wife, or more often the daughter, of the vanquished to be his wife, and that sometimes at least he receives the kingdom along with her. Theseus, after he had slain Cercyon, gave the kingdom (which must there- fore have been his by right of conquest) to Hippothous, whom Cercyon's daughter Alope had born to Poseidon, ^^ but himself consorted with Alope.^^ So Heracles, when he had thrown Antaeus, had intercourse with his wife Iphinoe ^~' or Tinge, ^^ whose son Sophax became king of the country. According to Pindar,^^ Antaeus had a fair daughter — Alcei's or Barce, the scholiast ^° calls her — who was wooed by many of her kinsmen and by many strangers too. "But her father gained for his daughter a marriage more glorious still. Now he had heard how sometime Danaos ^^ at Argos devised for his forty and eight maiden daughters, ere mid-day was upon them, a wedding of utmost speed — for he straightway set the whole company at the race-course end, and bade determine by a foot-race which maiden each hero should have, of all the suitors that

Roscher Lex., ii., 2065 ff., Frazer, Golden Bough j- ii., 224 ff., 248 ff. ^ Uyg. fab., 187.
 * Poll., 4. 54. Other versions of the tale are discussed by O. Crusius in

^ Plut. vit. Thes., 29, Ister and Pherecydes ap. Athen., 557 A f. " Pherecydes ap. Tzetz. in Lye. Alex., 663, and Etynn. t?tagn., 679, 49 ff. ^* Plut. vit. Sertor., 9. ^ Pind. Pyth., 9. 181 ff., E. Myers. ^ Schol. Pind. Pyth., 9. 183. ^' The stor>- is told by Paus., 3. 12. 2.