Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/208

176 BOOK II. The iniquities of Krunos.

accounts which they set before us, it is unsafe to infer that the poets ,vhom we style Homeric were unacquainted with details or incidents about which they are silent, even if it be assumed that their poems in their present shape are more ancient than those which bear the names of Hesiod or Orpheus. That the theogony of the former was far less complicated and retrospective than that of the latter, there can scarcely be a doubt. The prison to which they assign Kronos is proof that they looked on Zeus as one who had not always been supreme in power ; but the names with which their theogony begins are not those of Chaos and Gaia, but those of Teiiiys and Okeanos.^ The struggle between Zeus and the Titans may be inferred from the fact that Here and Hephaistos speak of them as thrust away under Tartaros ; ^ but the Polyphemos of the Odyssey who feeds his flocks in broad pastures has nothing but his size and his one eye in common with the Hesiodic Kyklopes who forge the thunderbolts of Zeus.*

The lateness of many at least among the Hesiodic ideas seems to be manifested not so much in the allegorical elements introduced,^ as in the transparent meaning of the names. Zeus and Hades, Phoibos and Leto already denoted the conflicting powers of light and darkness, of day and night ; but these words had in great pait lost their original force, and the poet who wished to frame a systematic theogony felt constrained to speak of Aither (ether) and Hemera as children of Nyx and Erebos. In some important points the story 01 Ouranos is told over again in the myths of Kronos and Zeus. From Ouranos and Gaia, according to the Hesiodic theogony, spring Koios and Krios, Hyperion and lapetos, the Kyklopes and other monstrous beings, together with Rhea the mother of Zeus. All these

» //. xiv. 201. " Ibid. 279. ' In the Gaelic story of Osgar, the son of Oisein, the monster appears vith two eyes ; but he is blinded, as in all other forms of the myth, and for the same reason. — Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, iii. 297. Still, it is significant that "not a bit of him was to be seen but his eyes with blue-green scales of hardening upon him," the livid garment of storm-cloud. But in another legend we have the genuine Kyklops.

"There was seen nearing us A big man upon one foot, With his black, dusky black-skin mantle, With his hammering tools and his steel lathe. " One shaggy eye in his forehead ;. . . He set otf like the wind of the spring- time Out to the dark mountains of the high grounds. He would take but a single leap O'er each single cold glen of the desert." — Campbell, ib. 392. All this explains itself. The hammer- ing tools and steel lathe are the thunder arnl lightning ; and the thundercloud strides across whole valleys at each step, and clings to the high grounds and the mountain sides.

belief, manifest allegory when the "long hills," "the pleasant dwellings of the gods," are reckoned among the children ol Gaia. — Chips, ii. 66.
 * It is, in Professor Max Miiller's