Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/287

Rh CHAP. whose name is also that of Aigle, Glaukos, and Athene of the bright face (Glaukopis). In other versions their mother is herself Aigle, who here becomes a wife of Phoibos ; in others again she is Eury- domene, or Eurynome, names denoting with many others the broad flush of the morning light ; or she is Lethe, as Phoibos is also a son of Leto, and the bright Dioskouroi spring from the colourless Leda, So too the two Spartan Charites are, like Phaethousa and Lampetie, Klete and Phaenna (the clear and glistening). But beautiful though they all might be, there would yet be room for rivalry or comparison, and thus the story of the judgment of Paris is repeated in the sentence by which Teiresias adjudged the prize of beauty to Kale, the fair. The seer in this case brings on himself a punishment which answers to the ruin caused by the verdict of Paris.^

As the goddess of the dawn, Aphrodite is endowed with arrows The irresistible a^ those of Phoibos or Achilleus, the rays which stream 1-1 /-in- •, Aphrodiie. like spears from the flaming sun and are as fatal to the darkness as the arrows of x^phrodite to the giant Polyphemos. Nay, like Ixion himself, she guides the four-spoked wheel, the golden orb at its first rising : but she does not share his punishment, for Aphro- dite is not seen in the blazing noontide.^ In her briUiant beauty she is Arjuni, a name which appears again in that of Arjuna, the com- panion of Krishna, and the Hellenic Argynnis.

But the conception of the morning in the form of Aphrodite Her exhibits none of the severity which marks the character of Athene. She is the dawn in all her loveliness and splendour, but the dawn not as unsullied by any breath of passion, but as waking all things into life, as the great mother who preserves and fosters all creatures in whom is the breath of life. She would thus be associated most closely with those forms under which the phenomena of reproduction were universally set forth. She would be a goddess lavish of her smiles and of her love, ip^ost benignant to her closest imitators ; and as the vestals of Athens showed forth the purity of the Zeus-born goddess, so the Hierodouloi of Corinth would exhibit the opposite sentiment, and answer to the women who assembled in the temples of the Syrian Mylitta. The former is really Aphrodite Ourania ; the latter the Aphrodite known by the epithet Pandemos. Aphrodite is thus the mother of countless children, not all of them lovely and beautiful like herself, for the dawn may be regarded as sprung from the darkness, and the evening (Eos) as the mother of the darkness again. Hence like Echidna and Typhon, Phobos and Deimos (fear

' Sostratos ap. Eustath. ad Horn. and Rom. Biography, s.v. Cliaris. p. 1665. Smith, Dictionary of Greek * Pind. Pyth. iv. 3S0.