Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/207

Rh If from the Greek conceptions of Zeus we separate all those chap. which, springing from the idea of his relations to men as a Father, grew up into a moral and religious faith, the rest may all be traced to mythical phrases which describe the varying appearances of the traditions, heavens and the manifold influence of the atmosphere on the earth and its fruits. Of the countless names thus employed the most transparent would remain as attributes, while the greater number would be localised either as places or as persons. Hence would spring up distinctions between the Zeus of Arkadia, Dodona, Olympos and Crete, distinctions arising wholly from a forgetfulness of the original meaning of words, but fixed irrevocably by the real or apparent identity of the mythical epithets with any mythical names which had become geographical.^ The sun as Endymion plunges into Latmos, the land of sleep ; but the presence of the Latmian hill was a conclusive answer to any who might dare to call in question the veracity of the local legend. The old mythical speech had its Phaiakian or cloudland geography. It had its Arkadia and Delos, the birthplace of the light, its Phoinikia and Ortygia, the purple land of the quail and the dawn, its bright Lykian regions with its golden stream of Xanthos, its Ida or earth on which rest the rays of the newly risen sun, its Graian or Hesperian lands where the light dies out in the evening. Carrying with them the treasures of their common inheritance, the Aryan tribes could not fail to give to the hills and streams of their new homes the names which had once described only the morning, the heaven, or the sun. The lord of day sinks to sleep in the glowing west : and the tomb of Endymion could therefore be only in Elis, on the western, not on the eastern, shore of the Peloponnesos. The god of the blue ether is throned in light : so also must the seat of the anthropomorphised Zeus be on some hill whose name, like the Delos of Apollon and the Athens of his virgin sister, expresses the one idea of splendour ; and thus he was made to dwell on the summit of the Arkadian Lykaios and the Olympian heights of Mysia and Thessaly, As the veil of night is slowly withdrawn, the clear heaven is first seen in the east, and thus Zeus must be born in Lyktos or in Dikte, but the Cretan who could point to a Diktaian cave in his own land clung tenaciously to the notion that the child who was there nourished by Amaltheia was not the Zeus of Arkadia and Olympos.

The story of his birth and exploits is to be gathered not so much The birth from the Iliad and Odyssey as from the Hesiodic or Orphic theogonies; but unless we find manifest contradictions between the

' See Cook i. ch. x.