Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/275

3 CHAP. to her as Paris became to the Helen whom he had stolen with her treasures. As faithful to the memory of her lost love as is Sarama to Indra, Dido pretends to listen to the traitor, while she makes ready for flight. In her new home another suitor appears in the Libyan Hiarbas, who repeats the importunities of the Ithakan suitors, until Dido, wearied out, promises to do as he wishes ; but having made a huge pile for the offering of a hecatomb, she slays herself upon it, declaring that now she is going, as her people and the Libyans desired it, to her husband. The version of Virgil differs from this in little more than a name, ^neas is only another form of the bright being with whom Dido would willingly have dwelt for ever ; but he is the sun-god who cannot pause to bestow on her his love, or who must hasten away after a brief mockery of gladness. In the former case, the myth answers to the legends of Adonis, Endymion, or Narkissos ; in the latter the desertion of Dido is but the desertion of Prokris, Ariadne, or Koronis ; and the Tyrian Elissa dies, like Herakles, amid the flames of a fiery sunset. The same story is repeated yet again in the myth of Anna, the sister of Dido, whom Latin tradition identified with the goddess Anna Perenna^ After her sister's death Anna follows ^neas to Italy, where, though she is kindly received by him, she finds in Lavinia a Prokris, whom she, like Eos, must regard with deadly jealousy. But her arms are turned not upon her rival but upon herself; and the second woman who has lavished her affections on ^neas casts herself into the same Numician stream in which ^neas afterwards disappears from the sight of men. The same repetitions mark the story of yEneas, who, although fight- ing (reluctantly, as some versions have it) on the side of the thief who steals Helen, is yet a being like the Lykian Sarpedon or the Aithiopian Memnon. Like them, he is the child not of a mortal mother, but of the brilliant goddess of the dawn, and in the Trojan army he plays the part of Achilleus in the Achaian host. Like the son of Thetis, he is the possessor of immortal horses, and like him

' This name was naturally referred to head: She gives suV^sistence ; she is the words a >i mis a.nd/>era2)tis by a. people bent by the weight of her full breasts, who had retained the mere name with- all good is united in her." In short, out its meaning. Hence the goddess she is a deity who, in Colebrooke's became to the Latins the bestower of words, " fills with food, and is very fruitful seasons ; but the false etymology similar to Lakshmi, or the goddess of of the prayer, " ut annare perennareque abundance, although not the same commode liceat," happened to coiTe- deity." The title Apnn, in which we spond with the original force of the see the root ap (aqua), points to nourish- name, if Anna Perenna be the San- ment by water, while the name Purna skrit Apnapurna, who is described comes apparently from the same stem as " of ruddy complexion, her robe of with the Latin pario, to produce. — various colours, a ci escent on her fore- Nork, J^ea/- IVorterbuch, i. 89.