Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/169

 THE GIGANTIC ALOIDS. 137 The genealogy assigned to Calyce, another daughter of JEolus, conducts us from Thessaly to Elis and ^tolia. She married Aethlius (the son of Zeus by Protogeneia, daughter of Deukalion and sister of Hellen), who conducted a colony out of Thessalr and settled in the territory of Elis. He had for his son Endy- mi6n, respecting whom the Hesiodic Catalogue and the Eoiai related several wonderful things. Zeus granted him the privilege of determining the hour of his own death, and even translated him into heaven, which he forfeited by daring to pay court to Here: his vision in this criminal attempt was cheated by a cloud, and he was cast out into the under-world. 1 According to other meric legend, see Heyne, ad Apollodor. 1. c., and Hyginus, f. 28. The Aloids were noticed in the Hesiodic poems (ap. Schol. Apoll. Ehod. i. 482). Odys seus does not see them in Hades, as Heyne by mistake says ; he sees their mother Iphimedea. Virgil (JEn. vi. 582) assigns to them a place among the sufferers of punishment in Tartarus. Eumelus, the Corinthian poet, designated Aloeus as son of the god Helios and brother of .ZEetes, the father of Medea (Eumel. Fragm. 2, MarktschefFel). The scene of their death was subsequently laid in Naxos ( Pindar, Pyth. iv. 68) : their tombs were seen at Anthedon in Bcaotia (Pausan. ix. 22, 4). The very curious legend alluded to by Pausanias from Hegesinoos, the author of an Atthis, to the effect that Otos and Ephialtes were the first to establish the worship of the Muses in Helicon, and that they founded Ascra along with CEoklos, the son of Poseidon, is one which we have no means of tracing farther (Pausan. ix. 29, 1). The story of the Aloids, as Diodorus gives it (v. 51, 52), diverges on almost every point : it is evidently borrowed from some Naxian archaeologist, and the only information which we collect from it is, that Otos and Ephialtes received heroic honors at Naxos. The views of 0. Muller (Orchomenos, p. 387) appear to me unusually vague and fanciful. Ephialtes takes part in the combat of the giants against the gods (Apollo- dor, t. 6, 2), where Heyne remarks, as in so many other cases, " Ephialtes hie uon confundendus cum altero Aloei filio ; " an observation just indeed, if we are supposed to be dealing with personages and adventures historically real, but altogether misleading in regard to these legendary characters ; for here the general conception of Ephialtes and his attributes is in both cases tha same ; but the particular adventures ascribed to him cannot be made to con- sist, as facts, one with the other. 1 Hesiod, Akusilaus and Pherekydes, ap. Schol. Apollon. Rhod. iv, 57. Iv f av~u -Bavdrov TO/UTJC:. The Scholium is very full of matter, and ex hibits many of the diversities in the tile of Endjmion : see also Apollod6i L 7, 5 ; Pausan. v. 1, 2 ; Conon. Narr. 14.