Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/420

 39° The European Sky-god.

slain king was supposed to escape in the form of a bird, and that its transmission to his successor was fitly symbo- lised by the eagle-tipped sceptre handed down from king to king. Thus the soul of Agamemnon, according to Plato,^''° became an eagle. His sceptre, according to Aristophanes and the scholiast, ^^^ had an eagle perched upon it ; and, as Pausanias^°- states, was handed down from, one member of the divine dynasty to another. Other early kings, such as Merops^^^ son of Triopas the Coan, and Periclymenus^^^ son of Neleus the Pylian, were transformed into eagles. And the eagle appears repeatedly as a portent in connexion with several lines of historical kings. Coins of Alexander the Great and his successors represent Zeus seated on a throne with an eagle in his right hand, a sceptre in his left.^'^" On the day when Alexander was born two eagles perched on the roof of his father's house, " an omen of his two-fold rule over Europe and Asia."^°^ Ptolemy Soter was exposed as an infant on a bronze shield ; and a Mace- donian tradition declared that an eagle hovering over him had by the spread of its wings protected him against sun and rain, driving off birds of prey and feeding him on the blood of quails.^*^'' Coins of the Ptolemaic dynasty regularly symbolise the reigning sovereign as an eagle, or the sovereign and his consort as a pair of eagles.^*^* Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, kept a tame eagle which on the death of its

"» Plat, rep., 620 B.

'"' Aristoph. av., 510, with schol. ad loc.

'"- Paus., 9. 40. II.

'"^ Eustath., 1351, 29, schol. //.. 24. 293, Yiy^. poet, as/r., 2. 16.

'"'' Ov. met., 12. 556 ff., Hyg. fab., 10. So Pandareos of Ephesus was changed by Zeus into a sea-eagle (Ant. Lib., 11, after Boios ornith.'), as was also Nisus king of Megara (Ov. met., 8. 146, Hyg. /a<^., 198, Ciris 536).

'"^ See e.g. B. V. Head, Coins of the Ancients, p. 56 ff., pi. 27, 2, 4-8, 10, pi. 28, 12, 20, pi. 30, 5-7, 9-1 1, pi. 31, 12-14, 18.

'** Just. 12. 16. 5.

"^ Suid. s. V. Aayoc.

108 ggg Svoronos' Coi-pus of Ptolemaic Coins, iii., pi. 2 ff.