Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/418

 388 The European Sky -god.

ancient Delphic priestess or, at a later date, to one Boios.^^ It was one of the sources from which Antoninus Liberalis compiled his Metamorphoses, a valuable work preserved to us in a single manuscript at Heidelberg.^'' The follow- ing samples of its contents must suffice. Aegypius the Thessalian was dear to the gods on account of his piety; to men, on account of his nobility and justice. He consorted with a certain widow Timandra, whose son Neophron, disliking it, treated Bulis, the mother of Aegypius, in the same way, and even contrived that Aegypius should lie with Bulis in mistake for Timandra. When the facts were discovered, Bulis caught up a sword and would have blinded her son with it and slain herself, while Aegypius looked towards heaven and prayed that he and all con- cerned might vanish. Hereupon Zeus changed them into birds. Aegypius became a vulture (alyvTTLo'i) ; Neophron, a smaller vulture of different colour ; Bulis, another bird (jTwvy^) ; Timandra, a titmouse (aljlOaWo';).^^ Again, when Anthus, the son of Autonous and Hippodamia, was devoured by his father's horses,^'' Zeus and Apollo out of pity for his fate turned the whole family into birds — Auto- nous into a kind of heron (o/cfo?), Hippodamia into a lark («:o/3u8o9), Anthus into a bird that imitates the neighing of a horse {avdo^), his brothers Erodius, Schoeneus, and Acanthus into a heron {epwSto'i), a wagtail {a'^oivi\o<;), and a linnet or goldfinch {aKavd[<i), his sister Acanthyllis into a hen-linnet.^^ Similarly certain Cretans, who attempted to


 * ' Pauly-Wissowa, iii., 633 f.

^ lb., {., 2572 f.

" Ant. Lib., 5, after Boios ornilh., I.

^ Cp. the fate of Lycurgus (^Folk-Lore, xv., 313) and Ilippolytus (Frazer Golden Bough,''- i., 6, ii., 313 ff.); also the man-devouring horses of Diomedes son of Ares (Roscher Lex., i., 1022), and the tradition attaching to Mount Lycceus in Arcadia (Frazer Pausanias, iv., 382).

^ Ant. Lib., 7, after Boios ornith., i, cp. Aristot. de hist, an., 9. i. 609 b. 14 f., Ael. de nat. an., 5. 48, 6. 19, Flin. nat. hist., 10. 116.