Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/116

 84 HISTORY OF GREECE. very powerful prince who is said to have had eyes distributed over all his body, and to have liberated Peloponnesus from sev- eral monsters and wild animals which infested it : l Akusilaus and ^Eschylus make this Argos an earth-born person, while Phere- kydes reports him as son of Arestor. lasus was the son of Argos Panoptes by Ismene, daughter of Asopus. According to the authors whom Apollodorus and Pausanias prefer, the celebrated 16 was his daughter : but the Hesiodic epic (as well as Akusilaus) represented her as daughter of Peiras, while JEschylus and Kastor the chronologist affirmed the primitive king Inachus to have been her father. 2 A favorite theme, as well for the ancient genealogical poets as for the Attic tragedians, were the adven- tures of 16, of whom, while priestess of Here, at the ancient and renowned Heneon between Mykente and Argos, Zeus became amorous. When Here discovered the intrigue and taxed him with it, he denied the charge, and metamorphosed 16 into a white cow. Here, requiring that the cow should be sur- rendered to her, placed her under the keeping of Argos Panop- tes ; but this guardian was slain by Hermes, at the command of Zeus : and Here then drove the cow 16 away from her native land by means of the incessant stinging of a gad-fly, which com- pelled her to wander without repose or sustenance over an immeasurable extent of foreign regions. The wandering 16 gave her name to the Ionian Gulf, traversed Epirus and Illyria, passed the chain of Mount Hsemus and the lofty summits of Caucasus, and swam across the Thracian or Cimmerian Bosporus (which also from her derived its appellation) into Asia. She then went through Scythia, Cimmeria, and many Asiatic regions, until she arrived in Egypt, where Zeus at length bestowed upon her rest, restored her to her original form, and enabled her to give birth to his black son Epaphos. 3 1 Akusil. Fragm. 17, cd. Didot; JEsch. Prometh. 568 ; Phcrekyd. Fragm. 22, ed. Didot ; Hcsiod. ^Egimius. Fr. 2, p. 56, cd. DQntzer : among the varieties of the story, one was that Argos was changed into a peacock (Schol. Aristoph. Aves, 102). Macrobius (i. 19) considers Argos as an alle- gorical expression of the starry heaven ; an idea which Panofska also upholds in one of the recent Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy. 1837, p ?21 tetj. 1 JEscM. Prom. v. 790-850; Apollod. ii. 1. ./Eschylus in the Supplied
 * Apollod. ii. 1, 1 ; Pausan. 5i. 16, 1 ; JEsch. Prom. v. 590-663.