Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/309

Rh The same fatal pursuit is the burden of the legend of the hunts- chap. man Alpheios. Like Daphne and Aphrodite Anadyomene, he is the child of the waters, whether he be described as a son of Okeanos -A^pheios and Are- and Thetis, or of Helios himself. He is in short the Elf, or water- thousa. sprite, whose birthplace is the Elbe or flowing stream. But Arethousa must fly from him as Daphne flies from Phoibos ; and Pausanias takes her to the Syracusan Ortygia, where she sinks into a well with which the waters of Alpheios become united. This is but saying, in other words, that she fled to the Dawnland, where Eos closes as she begins the day, and where the sun again greets the love whom he has lost. In another version she is aided by Artemis, who, herself also loved by Alpheios, covers her own face and the faces of her companions with mud, and the huntsman departs bafiled; or, to recur to old phrases, the sun cannot recognise the dawn on whom he gazes, because her beauty is faded and gone. With these legends are closely connected the stories of Hippodameia, Atalante, and the Italian Camilla, who become the prize only of those who can over- take them in fair field; a myth which reappears in the German story, " How Six travelled through the World," as well as in the Nibelung legend of Brynhild. It is repeated of Phoibos himself in the myth of Bolina, who, to escape from his pursuit, threw herself into the sea near the mouth of the river Argyros (the silver stream). The name Bolina looks much like a feminine form of Apollon.^

The reverse of these stories is obviously presented in the trans- Endymion. parent myth of Endymion and the scarcely less transparent story of Narkissos. The former belongs, indeed, to that class of stories which furnish us with an absolutely sure starting-point for the interpreta- tion of myths. When we find a being, described as a son of Zeus and Kalyke (the heaven and the covering night), or of Aethlios (the man of many struggles), or of Protogeneia (the early dawn), married to Selene (the moon), or to Asterodia^ (the being whose path is among the stars), we at once see the nature of the problem vnth which we have to deal, and feel a just confidence that other equally transparent

fancy; and, like Apolirm, whose favour- ' Pausanias vii. 23, 3. ite he is, lie is tended l>y nymphs, one ' Some are inclined apparently to of whom (named in one version Lyke, connect Asterodia and Asterie with Ash- the shining) loves him, and tells him taroth and Ishtar. It is quite possible that blindness will be his punishment if that the Greek may have substituted for he is unfaithful to her. This blindness Semitic names the sounds which ap- is the blindness of Oidipous. The proached nearest to those in his own sequel is that of the legends of Prokris language; but in this instance he lighted or Koronis, and the blinded Daphnis on a genuine Aryan word, and the word falls from a rock (the Leukadian cliff of chosen leaves us in no doubt as to the Kephalos) and is slain. If the sun meaning which he attached to the name would but remain with the dawn, the and to the story, blindness of night would not follow.