Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/293

261 II. herself as the eldest daughter of Kronos, by whom, like the rest of his progeny, she was swallowed, and as having been given by Rheia into the charge of Okeanos and Tethys, who nursed and tended her after Kronos had been dethroned and imprisoned by Zeus beneath the earth and sea.^ This myth passed naturally into many forms, and according to some she was brought up by the daughters of the river Asterion (a phrase which points to the bright blue of heaven coming into sight in the morning over the yet starlit waters), while others gave her as her nurses the beautiful Horai,^ to whose charge are committed the gates of heaven, the clouds which they scatter from the summit of Olympos and then bring to it again.* In other words, the revolving seasons all sustain the beauty and the splendour of the bright ether. When she became the bride of Zeus, she presented him with the golden apples, the glistening clouds of the morning,* guarded first by the hundred-headed offspring of Typhon and Echidna, and afterwards by Aigle, Erytheia, Hestia, and Are- thousa, the glistening children of Hesperos, whether in Libya or in the Hyperborean gardens of Atlas.^

Throughout the Iliad, which makes no mention of this incident, Relatii ns of Zeus the will of Here, though compelled to submit, is by no means always and in harmony with the will of Zeus. The Argives, the children of the bright evening land, are exclusively the objects of her love ; and the story of the judgment of Paris was designed to furnish a reason for this exclusive favour. So the tale went that when the gods were assembled at the marriage board of Thetis and Peleus, Eris flung on the table a golden apple to be given to the fairest of the fair. The trial which follows before the shepherd of Ida is strictly in accordance with the mythical characters of Here and Athene, as well as of Aphrodite, to whom, as the embodiment of the mere physical loveliness of the dawn (apart from the ideas of wisdom or power underlying the conceptions of Here and Athene), the golden prize is awarded. Henceforth Aphrodite threw in her weight on the side of the Trojans, while Athene and Here gave their aid to the kinsfolk or the avengers of Helen. But the way was not so clear to Zeus as it seemed to be to Here. Hektor himself was the darling of Apollon,

' //. xiv. 201. * raits, ii. 13, 3. Freller, Gr. Myth. 374. ' In tliis case we have the authority •• This myth, which arose from the of the Iliad itself for an interpretation confusion of the word yurjAo^, an apple, which would otherwise be probably with fxi'iAof, a sheep, is really only censured as a violent straininp; of the another form of the legend which gave text : but the office of the gatekeeper of the story of Phaethousa and Lam- Olympos is expressly stated to be petie. il/iff avaKvat irvKii'hv vf<pos iiS' diriOe^vai' Apollod. u. 5) H. V. 751.