Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/121

 DANAE AND PERSEUS. 9 and simple equipments of Here : the religious character of the old legend here displays itself in a remarkable manner. Unable to cure his daughters, Prcetos invoked the aid of the renowned Pylian prophet and leech, Melampus son of Amythaon, who undertook to remove the malady on condition of being rewarded with the third part of the kingdom. Proctos indignantly refused these conditions : but the state of his daughters becoming aggra- vated and intolerable, he was compelled again to apply to Melampus ; who, on the second request, raised his demands still higher, and required another third of the kingdom for his brother Bias. These terms being acceded to, he performed his part of the covenant. He appeased the wrath of Here by prayer and sacrifice; or, according to another account, he approached the deranged women at the head of a troop of young men, with shouting and ecstatic dance, the ceremonies appropriate to the Bacchic worship of Dionysos, and in this manner effected their cure. Melampus, a name celebrated in many different Grecian mythes, is the legendary founder and progenitor of a great and long-continued family of prophets. He and his brother Bias became kings of separate portions of the Argeian territory : he is recognized as ruler there even hi the Odyssey, and the prophet Theoklymenos, his grandson, is protected and carried to Ithaca by Telemachus. 1 Herodotus also alludes to the cure of the women, and to the double kingdom of Melampus and Bias in the Argeian land : he recognizes Melampus as the first person who introduced to the knowledge of the Greeks the name and wor- ship of Dionysos, with its appropriate sacrifices and phallic pro- cessions. Here again he historicizes various features of the old legend in a manner not unworthy of notice. 2 But Danae, the daughter of Akrisios, with her son Perseus 1 Odyss. xv. 240-256. 1 Herod, ix. 34 ; ii. 49: compare Pausan. ii. 18,4. Instead of the Free- tides, or daughters of Prcetos, it is the Argeian women generally whom he represents Melampus as having cured, and the Argeians generally who send to Pylus to invoke his aid : the heroic personality which pervades the prim- itive story Las disappeared. Kallimachus notices the Proetid virgins as the parties suffering from madness, but he treats Artemis as the healing influence (Hymn, ad Dianam 235).