Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/304

272 BOOK II. The infant Phoibos.

there were other traditions about his birth. Any word expressing the ideas of Ught and splendour might be the name of his birthplace ; and so the tale ran that Apollon and Artemis were both born in Ortygia, the land of the quail, the earliest bird of spring/ and thus of the early morning. No mythical incidents were attached to his epithet Lykegencs ; but this name speaks of him simply as born in that land of light, through which flows the Xanthian or golden stream, and where dwell Sarpedon, the creeping flush of morning, and Glaukos the brilliant, his friend. He is the Phanaian^ or glistening king, who gave his name to the Chian promontory on which his worshippers assembled to greet him.

In the Dalian hymns Apollon soon attains his full might and majesty. Still for a time he lies still and helpless, with a golden band around his body which is clad in white swaddling clothes. These white mists which seem to cling to the rising sun are wrapped more tightly round the Theban Oidipous, and the golden band gives place to the nails which pierce his feet when he is exposed on the heights of Kithairon. But in both alike the time of weakness is short. Oidipous returns to Thebes, mighty in strength of arm and irre- sistible in wisdom, to slay the terrible Sphinx. In one version Phoibos is only four days old when, hurrying to Parnassos, he slays the dragon which had chased his mother Leto in her wanderings to Delos, The more elaborate legend of the hymn places the slaying of the Python later in his career ; but like the Sphinx, Python ^ is not only the darkness of night, but the black storm-cloud which shuts up the waters, and thus it guards or blockades the fountain which is to yield water for the Delphian temple.* In other respects the later of

says nothing of the resurrection of the Phenix from his own ashes ; while others, instead of saying that a new Phenix sprung full-grown from the funeral pile of the old one, spoke of a worm which came out from the dead body and gradually grew up into another Phenix. — Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, ii. 2(X).

' Professor Max Miiller finds this word in the Latin Vertumnus. — Selected Essays, i. 565. In its Latin form the name belongs to the class of partici- pial predicates, e.g. Picumnus, Auc- tumnus. ' PylhOn is here called the nurse of Typhaon, the dragon-child or monster, to which Here gives birth by her own unaided power, as Athene is the daughter of Zeus alone, Typhaon, one of the many forms of Vritra, Ahi, and Cacus, stands to Here, the bright god- dess of the upper air, in the relation of the Minotauros to the brilliant Pasiphae, wife of Minos. sleeps in a mountain cave through the winter months, but at the equinox bursts forth. ' In a moment the heaven was darkened, and became black as pitch, only illumined by the fire which Hashed from the dragon's jaws and eyes. The earth shuddered, the stones rattled down the mountainsides into the glens ; right and left, left and right, did the dragon lash his tail, overthrowing pines and bushes, and snapping them as reeds. He evacuated such floods of water that the mountain torrents were full. But, after a while, his power was exhausted ; h; lashed no more with his tail, ejected
 * Virg. Georg. ii. 98.
 * "In a Slovakian legend the dragon