Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/311

Rh His choice was an everlasting sleep, in which he might remain ^^f"^- youthful for ever.^ His choice was wiser than that of Eos (the ' ' morning or evening light), who obtained for the beautiful Tithonos the gift of immortality without asking for eternal youth; a myth as transparent as that of Endymion, for Eos, like lokaste, is not only the wife but also the mother of Tithonos, who in one version is a son of Laomedon the Ilian king, in another of Kephalos, who woos and slays Prokris.^ The hidden chamber in which Eos placed her decrepit husband is the Latmian hill, where the more fortunate Endymion lies in his charmed sleep. Endymion is in short, as his name denotes, simply the sun setting opposite to the rising moon. Looking at the tale by the light which philology and comparative mythology have thus thrown upon it, we may think it incredible that any have held it to be an esoteric method of describing early astrono- mical researches. It is scarcely less difficult to see in it, as some have discerned, simply a personification of sleep. In his father Aethlios, we see one who, like Odysseus, has suffered much, the struggling and toiling sun,^ and his own name expresses simply the downward plunge of the sun into the western waters.* The whole idea of Endymion, who is inseparable from the material sun, is altogether distinct from that of the separate divinity of Phoibos ApoUon, to whom he stands in the relation of Gaia to Demeter, or of Nereus to Poseidon.

Of the story of Narkissos Pausanias^ gives two versions. The The story former, which describes him as wasting away and dying through love kissos"^" of his own face and form reflected in a fountain, he rejects on ac- count of the utter absurdity of supposing that Narkissos could not distinguish between a man and his shadow. Hence he prefers the other, but less known, legend, that Narkissos loved his own twin sister, and that on her death he found a melancholy comfort in noting the likeness of his own form and countenance to those of his lost love. But the more common tale that Narkissos was deaf to the

' i. 7, 5-. remarks {Chips, &=€., ii. 80), could not

' There is no difference of meaning forgotten, the name Endymion was between Aethlios and iroAi/rAay, the formed in a manner analogous to Hy- stock epithet of Odysseus. perion, a name of the high-soaring sun. ivZvfxa 7]lov was once the equivalent of notion that the flower was so named illov Svafial, and that originally the after Narkissos, the former having sun ivfSv ir6i/Tov, where in the //iad certainly existed before his time, inas- and Odvssev we have only the simple much as Persephone, who belongs to an verb. Had Endymion remained a re- earlier period, was caught while pluck- cognised name for the sunset, the mvth ing a narcissus from its stem. of Endymion, as Professor Max Miillcr
 * Tylor, Primitive C%dtiire, i. 312. have arisen ; but as its meaning was
 * It can hardly be questioned that * ix. 31, 6. He rejects also the