Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/285

Rh as being in perfect accord with the will of Zeus, she engages, CHAP. as we have seen, in an abortive conspiracy to bind Zeus, in which she is the accomplice of Here and Poseidon.^

In all her essential attributes, the Hellenic Athene is represented The Latin by the Latin Minerva, a name which Professor Max Miiller connects ' with mens, the Greek /xeVos, and the Sanskrit matias, mind, and com- pares it with mane, the morning. Mania, an old name of the mother of the Lares, and the verb manare as applied especially to the sun, while Matuta and other kindred words denote the dawn.^ Whatever may be the connexion between Minerva and Matuta, we can scarcely fail to see the affinity of the name with the verb promenervare, used in the Carmen Saliare as an equivalent to the kindred moneo, to admonish. The Latin Minerva, as embodying a purely intellectual idea, is thus a being even more majestic than the Hellenic Athene ; and to so intellectual a conception we should scarcely expect that many fables would attach themselves. Hence the Latin Minerva can scarcely be said to have any mythology. Like Ceres she stands alone in incom- municable sanctity and in unfathomable wisdom. The story told in the Hesiodic Theogony is manifestly a com- Birth of paratively late form of the legend of Aphrodite. Yet it resolves Aphrodite, itself almost at the first touch into the early mythical phrases. From the blood of the mutilated Ouranos which fell upon the sea sprang the beautiful goddess who made Kythera and Kypros her home, as Phoibos dwelt in Lykia and in Delos. This is but saying in other words that the morning, the child of the heaven, springs up first from the sea, as Athene also is born by the water-side. But as Athene became the special embodiment of the keen wisdom which Phoibos alone shared with her, so on Aphrodite, the child of the froth or foam of the sea, was lavished all the wealth of words denoting the lovehness of the morning ; and thus the Hesiodic poet goes on at once to say that the grass sprung up under her feet as she moved, that Eros, Love, walked by her side, and Himeros, Longing, followed after her.* At her birth she is not only the beautiful Anadyomene of Apelles, as the sun whom Selene comes to greet is Endymion,* but she is also

' //. i. 400. searches, 136. esries, 505. To the same root, probaljly, * The words tell each its own story, must be referred the epithet moneUi, the one denoting uprising from water, applied to Juno as the guardian of as the other denotes the down-pkmging the mint on the Capitoline hill. But into it, the root being found also in the see also Isaac Taylor, Etruscan Ke- English dive, and the German taufcn.
 * Lectures on Language, second * Theog. 194-201.