Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/283

Rh and Athene, while another version expressed the same idea by chap. making them the parents of Lychnos (the brilliant), another Phaethon.^ As the dawn-goddess, she can keep men young, or make them old. She rouses them to fresh vigour from healthful sleep, or as the days come round she brings them at last to old age and death. From her come the beauty and strength, the golden locks and piercing gkmces of Achilleus and Odysseus. But when for the accomplishment of the great work it becomes needful that Odysseus shall enter his own house as a toilworn beggar, it is Athene who dims the brightness of his eye, and wraps him in squalid raiment,^ and again she restores his former majesty when once more he is to meet his son Telemachos.^ So, again, she preserves to Penelope all the loveliness of her youth, and presents her to Odysseus as beautiful as when he left her twenty years ago, when the Achaian hosts set out for Ilion, while she restores Laertes also to something of his ancient vigour.

Of the vast number of names by which she was known and Epithets of worshipped, the earliest probably, and certainly the most common, denote the light. She is especially the goddess of the grey or gleam- ing face, Glaukopis. She is Optiletis, Oxyderkes, Ophthalmitis, the being of keen eyes and piercing vision. But these epithets might, it is plain, be made to bear a moral or intellectual meaning ; and thus a starting-point would be furnished for the endless series of names which described her as full of wisdom and counsel, as enforcing order and justice, as promoting the tillage of the earth, and as fostering all science and all art. Thus the epithets Akria and Akraia, which can be rightly interpreted only after a comparison with her other names, Koryphasia and Capta, might be taken to denote her protection of cities and fortresses, while her name Ageleia, as the driver of the clouds whom Sarama leads forth to their pastures, might be regarded as denoting her care for those who till the soil or keep herds. But her physical character is never kept out of sight. She is the goddess especially of the Athenians, and of the dawn city which received her name after the contest in which she produced the olive against the horse created by Poseidon, for so it was decreed by Zeus that the city should be called after the deity who should confer the greatest boon on man, and the sentence was that the olive, as the

Erechtheus, and lodges him in her own bidden only by the form which the idea temple. On this Mr. Grote, History of of Athene assumed in the minds of the Greece, i. 75, remarks, "It was alto- Athenians; and the reason is obvious, gether impossible to make Erechtheus * Od. xiii. 430. the son of Athene : the type of the god- • Od. xvi. 172. * lb. xxiv. 368.
 * Athene also brings up and nourishes dess forbade it." Rather, it was for-