Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/211

Rh the Sphinx, and in the earHer phase of the legend, of Achilleus CHAP, and Agamemnon with Paris.

Having related the story of Typhoeus, the Hesiodic Theogony The loves recounts the loves of Zeus with Metis, Themis, Eurynome, Demeter, Mnemosyne, Leto, and with Here, who in this scheme is the latest of his brides and has fallen far below the majesty with which she is invested in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of these names some are the growth of a comparatively late age. The dawn-goddess of the far east is described as waking all men and receiving praise from every thinker, and the character here faintly attributed to her is brought out more clearly in the Hellenic Athene, and finds its utmost developement in the Latin Minerva. Athene, then, as the goddess of the morning, must have a mother with qualities corresponding to her ovs-n, and this parent was found in the Wisdom which is wedded to Zeus. To this class of invented names belong those of the Horai, or Hours, and their mother Themis ; but the name of Eurynome, the mother of the Charites, is more true to the original character of these beautiful maidens. The broad spreading light is the parent of the glistening beings who in the form of horses draw the chariot of Indra, and in the west are the maidens who attend on Aphrodite. But as the dawn may be regarded as springing from the face of the sky, so in another and an earlier myth Athene springs armed from the forehead of Zeus, and the dark powers of night at once retreat before her. The same idea rendered it necessary to assign to Here some offspring of her own unaided power whether in the person of Typhoeus,^ or, as the Hesiodic theogony relates, of Hephaistos also.

Thus the number of the kinsfolk and the children of Zeus is The twelve already large ; but of the class of deities specially known at Athens ddti^r^"^ in the days of Thucydides as the twelve Olympian gods neither our Homeric poems nor the Hesiodic theogony know anything. In the latter, Zeus and Poseidon are the shakers of the earth and sea, while Hades dwells in the regions under the earth; but of a threefold partition of the Kosmos between the three Kronid brothers we have no formal mention. Of Poseidon the Theogony tells us only that he built the walls within which Briareos guards the Titans : nor is there any difference of rank between Ares and his sisters Hebe and Eileithyia, or again between Demeter and Eurynome. From the number of the so-called twelve, Hades is excluded ; but in the Iliad

' "Typhfieus, the whirlwind or Ty- He belches fire, that is, lightnings issue phoon, has a hundred dragon or serpent from the clouds, and his roaring is like neads, the long writhing strise of vapour the howling of wild dogs." — S. B. which run before the hurricane-cloud. Gould, The Were Wolf, p. 174.