Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/276

244 BOOK II. HSro and l-eiandros. The Brides of the Sun.

he is at feud with the king, for Priam fails to do him honour, as Agamemnon heaps disgrace on Achilleus. From the flames of the ruined Ilion he escapes bearing on his shoulders his father Anchises, the aged man who, while yet he had the youth and beauty of Tithonos, had been the darling of Aphrodite. His wufe Creusa (Kreiousa, a name answering to that of Euryanassa, the wide-ruling, and being simply the feminine form of Kreon or Kreion) comes behind him like the twilight following the sun who is hastening on into the land of night. But the twilight must vanish before the sun can be seen again, and Creusa dies or disappears, like Helle, — the converse of the myth of Hero and Leiandros (Leander). But ^neas, like Herakles, has other loves before him ; and the fortunes of Dido and Anna are brought before us again in the legend of the Italian Lavinia She too is the bright Helen for whom kings and nations are ready to fight and die ; but although ^neas wins her, there re- main yet other dangers and other enemies, and in the final strife with the Rutulians the dawn-child vanishes in the stream of Numicius, as Arethousa and Daphne plunge into the waters from which Ana- dyomene comes up in the morning. The true feeling of the people who recounted this myth is shown in the title which they accorded to him. Henceforth he is Jupiter Indiges, the father from whom they spring, and who bestows upon them all that makes life worth living for.

The same story of disastrous love is presented under other names in the legend of Leiandros (Leander), a myth which exhibits the sun as plunging through the waters to reach the beautiful morning, who holds out her gleaming light in the east ; for Hero (whose name is identical with that of Here) is the priestess of the dawn-goddess Aphrodite, and the road which separates her lover from herself is the Hellespontos, the Lykabas or path of light, the track of Helle the dawn-maiden. Hero, again, dwells in the eastern Lesbos, while Leiandros has his home in Abydos. He is thus the Phoibos Del- phinios, the fish or frog-sun, who dies in the furious storm; and through grief for her lost love Hero casts herself into the waters, like Kephalos from the Leukadian cliff after the death of Prokris.

Not less sad than that of Prokris or of Dido is the lot of lole, lokaste, Aithra, Auge, Danae, or Ariadne. In the first two of these forsaken wives or desolate mothers we see the violet tints of morning, which reappear in Lamos, lolaos, and lason. From Herakles, lole is parted almost at the moment when she meets him. Her beautiful form is seen near his funeral pile, as the violet-tinted clouds may be seen among the flaming vapours lit up in a blood-red sunset ; and as