Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/200

168 BOOK II. The Lntin Jupiter.

gradually to a conscious perception of the things around him, the sensation most comforting in the alternations of a day and night alike uncomprehended would be that of the pure and bright heaven which broods over the earth as the sun speeds on his journey across the sky. If, then, in the names which were afterwards used to denote the supreme God we have words which in all Aryan dialects convey this primary idea of brightness, a clear light is at once shed on the first stages in the mental and moral education of mankind. The profound splendour of the unclouded heaven must mark the abode of the Being who made and sustains all things ; and thus names denoting at first only the sky became in the West as in the East names of God, the Zeus Pater (the Father) of the Greeks correspond- ing to the Dyauspitar of the Hindu. If even in the Vedic hymns the most prominent deity is Indra, still Indra was himself worshipped as the god of the bright sky, and as the son of the brilliant Dyu. As in the Hellenic land Kronos was displaced by Zeus, so in the country of the seven rivers Dyu gave way to the lord of the wealth- bringing rain-clouds. The process (even if we assign a very late origin to the mythical Kronos) was in both cases the same. The epithet could not become or be long retained as a personal name until its original meaning had been obscured or forgotten. The Greek had his Aer, his Aither, and his Ouranos to express the visible heavens, and Zeus became to him more and more the personal God whose hand is seen in his works. In India the name Dyaus retained, as we have seen, its appellative force, and as a designation for the supreme God, was supplanted by the less significant Indra.

But in the West, as in the East, the original character of the god is in close accordance with the etymology of the word. The Athe- nians called on Zeus to rain on their land ; the Latin poet spoke of the glistening heaven which by all is named Jove, while the phrases "sub dio vivere," "sub Jove frigido," and even " malus Jupiter " remained common expressions in every-day speech.* But although between the Latin Jupiter and the Greek Zeus Pater there is as close an affinity of names as between the latter and the Dyaus Pitar of the Rig Veda, the mythology of the Latin tribes introduces us prac- tically into almost a new world. We are, indeed, apt to confuse under the term two wholly distinct thing.s. We read in the yEneid of Virgil, for instance, a story which may be regarded as a pendant

' So-of, d! ie Ziv, KOTO tTjj apovpas The word evSios has the same trans- T&iv 'AB-rji/aioiv- parent meaning. — Ma. Miillcr, Leclttres Aspice hoc suV)lime candens nuem on Language, second series, 434. Ilinc, invocanl oniiics Jovtm. History of Rome, x. 11 8.