Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/360

 she is the daughter of Atlas, the upholder of the heavens, who in fulfilment of his office is variously placed by mythologists in the extreme East and the remotest West. Where the was situated, of which Apollodorus speaks, in the fragment preserved by Strabo 432. Oxf., we are not informed; but as it is mentioned along with the land of the Gorgons and Hesperides and the Rhipæan mountains, it was probably an imaginary chain of mountains on the western boundary of the world, which hid the sun and caused the darkness, as the Rhipæan mountains did on the North. The name, given to the king of Lydia, whose wealth and power of darkening himself, so as to become invisible, remind us so strongly of the Nibelunghort and the Tarnkappe of the Northern poem, is probably derived from the same root. The story of what passed between him and Candaules (Her. 8. 12) seems to have had a mythological origin, although Herodotus, or those who had told the tale before him, have contrived to give it so much the air of a court anecdote. is also the name of one of the three children of and, Hes. Theog. 149.

The ideas of darkness and antiquity are closely connected:


 * ambagibus ævi

Obtegitur densa caligine mersa vetustas. Sil. Il. 44.

and hence might easily come to signify  and be applied to an ancient king, of whom nothing more was known than that he was ancient. But I believe the origin of the king to be different. Pausanias says (Attic. 38) that the people of Eleusis alleged their city to have been founded by a hero Eleusis, whom some made the son