Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/338

320 many bleeding wounds, and shrouding himself in his cloak to die in darkness. Of Cæsar, better than of Cassius his slayer, it might have been said in the language of sun-myth:

'... O setting sun, As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night, So in his red blood Cassius' day is set; The sun of Rome is set!'

Thus, in interpreting heroic legend as based on nature-myth, circumstantial analogy must be very cautiously appealed to, and at any rate there is need of evidence more cogent than vague likenesses between human and cosmic life. Now such evidence is forthcoming at its strongest in a crowd of myths, whose open meaning it would be wanton incredulity to doubt, so little do they disguise, in name or sense, the familiar aspects of nature which they figure as scenes of personal life. Even where the tellers of legend may have altered or forgotten its earlier mythic meaning, there are often sufficient grounds for an attempt to restore it. In spite of change and corruption, myths are slow to lose all consciousness of their first origin; as for instance, classical literature retained enough of meaning in the great Greek sun-myth, to compel even Lempriere of the Classical Dictionary to admit that Apollo or Phœbus 'is often confounded with the sun.' For another instance, the Greeks had still present to their thoughts the meaning of Argos Panoptes, Io's hundred-eyed, all-seeing guard who was slain by Hermes and changed into the Peacock, for Macrobius writes as recognizing in him the star-eyed heaven itself; even as Indra, the Sky, is in Sanskrit the 'thousand-eyed' (sahasrâksha, sahasranayana). In modern times the thought is found surviving or reviving in a strange region of language: whoever it was that brought argo as a word for 'heaven' into the Lingua Furbesca or Robbers' Jargon of Italy, must have been thinking of the starry sky watching