Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/280

248 BOOK II. into this myth are found for the most part in a host of other stories. She is the daughter of Eurythemis, a reflexion of Europe or Eury- ganeia, and a sister of Leda, the mother of the brilhant Dioskouroi ; and among her own children is Deianeira, whose union with Herakles is fatal to the hero.^ Of Kleopatra, the beautiful wife of Meleagros, there is little more to say than that she is, like Daphne and Arethousa, a child of the waters, the Euenos being her father, and that, like Oinone and Brynhild, she dies of grief when the chequered life of the being whom she loves has been brought to an end.

The ori- ginal idea of Athens purely physical. AthSn6 Tritoge- neia. The name Athene is practically a transliteration of the Vedic Ahana, the morning, which in a cognate form appears as Dahana, the Greek Daphne.^ The myths which have clustered round this greatest of Hellenic dawn-goddesses differ indefinitely in detail ; but all may manifestly be traced back to the same source, and resolved into the same mythical phrases. She is pre-eminently the child of the waters, she springs from the forehead of the sky, and remains fresh, pure, and undefiled for ever. In her origin the virgin deity of the Athenian Akropolis was strictly physical ; but the notion of the being who wakes up the world after the darkness of night might soon pass into that of wisdom, the connexion between light and knowledge (the o}<s and yvcoo-ts of the Fourth Gospel) being of the closest kind. Thus, in one of the Vedic hymns we have already had the phrase that the dawn as waking every mortal to walk about receives praise from every thinker. But as being sprung from the forehead of the sky, she may be expected to know the secrets of heaven ; and thus we have in Athene a being who, like Phoibos, is filled with all the wisdom of Zeus. In the earlier form of the myth neitlier the Vedic Ahana nor the Hellenic Athene has any mother. In the Rig Veda, " Ushas, the dawn, sprang from the head of Dyu, the murddhadivah, the East, the forehead of the sky."*

But if Athene is Zeus-born, the poet, when he tells us this, speaks of her as Tritogeneia, the child of Tritos.^ It is strange that this

' Deianeira is the last of the many brides of Herakles, and belongs, in truth, rather to the darkness tlian the light, and as sending to him the fata! garment, may be regarded as rallier the colleague or bride of the enemy of the day : and thus her name is Dasyanari, the wife of the fiend. — C/ii'p, 6~=c., ii. 89, 234.


 * See note 4, p. 230.

' Max Miilier, id. " Homer knows of no mother of Athene, nor does the Veda mention a name for the mother of the dawn, though her parents are spoken of in the dual."
 * Has. Tlieog. 924.