Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/292

 260 HISTORY OF GREECE. rounded him when he approached Here herself. The god un- willingly consented, and came in his chariot in the midst of thunder and lightning, under which awful accompaniments the mortal frame of Semele perished. Zeus, taking from her (he child of which she was pregnant, sewed it into his own thigh : after the proper interval the child was brought out and born, and became the great god Dionysus or Bacchus. Hermes took him to Ino and Athamas to receive their protection. Afterwards, however, Zeus having transformed him into a kid to conceal him from the persecution of Here, the nymphs of the mountain Nysa became his nurses. 1 Aulonoe, the third daughter of Kadmus, married the pastoral hero or god Aristaeas, and was mother of Aktaeon, a devoted hunter and a favorite companion of the goddess Artemis. She however became displeased with him either because he looked into a fountain while she was bathing and saw her naked or according to the legend set forth by the poet Stesichorus, because he loved and courted Semele or according to Euripides, be- cause he presumptuously vaunted himself as her superior in the chase. She transformed him into a stag, so that his own dogs set upon and devoured him. The rock upon which Aktaeon used to sleep when fatigued with the chase, and the spring whose transparent waters had too clearly revealed the form of the god- dess, were shown to Pausanias near Plataea, on the road to Megara. 2 1 Apollodor. iii. 4, 2-9 ; Diodor. iv. 2. 8 See Apollodor. iii. 4, 3 ; Stesichor. Fragm. xvii. Kleine ; Pansan. ix. 2, 3; Eurip. Bacch. 337; Diodor. iv. 81. The old logographer Akusilaus copied Stesichorus. Upon this well-known story it is unnecessary to multiply references. I shall however briefly notice the remarks made upon it by Diodorus and by Pausanias, as an illustration of the manner in which the literary Greeks of a later day dealt with their old national legends. Both of them appear implicitly to believe the fact, that Aktoeon was devoured by his own dogs, but they differ materially in the explanation of it Diodorus accepts and vindicates the miraculous interposition of the dis- pleased goddess to punish Aktason, who, according to one story, had boasted of his superiority in the chase to Artemis, according to another story, had presumed to solicit the goddess in marriage, emboldened by the great num- bers of the feet of animals slain in the chase which he had hung up as offer-