Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/316

284 BOOK Kephalos, Belleroi^hon, and Odysseus to their doom in the far west. Nor in either of these poems is there anything to warrant the inference that the poet regarded Atlas as a mountain. This idea comes up in the myth of Perseus, who sees the old man bowing beneath his fearful load, and holding the Gorgon's face before his eyes, turns him into stone ; and the stone which is to bear up the brazen heaven must needs be a great mountain, whether in Libya or in other regions, for the African Atlas was not the only mountain which bore the name. But the phrase in the Odyssey which speaks of him as knowing all the depths of the sea points to a still earlier stage of the myth, in which Atlas was possessed of the wisdom of Phoibos and was probably Phoibos himself. Regarded thus, the myths which make the Okeanid Pleione his wife and the Pleiades his children, or which give him Aithra for his bride and make her the mother of the Hyades and the Hesperides, are at once explained. He is thus naturally the father of Hesperos, the most beautiful star of the heavens, who appears as "the herald of Eos in the morning and is again seen by her side in the evening. The Hellenic Heosphoros, the Latin Lucifer, the Light-bringer, who is Phosphoros, is also called a son of Astraios and Eos, the starlit skies of dawn.

Tiie gar- Far away in the west by the stream of the placid Ocean is Hes^pe-*^^ the dwelling of the Hesperides, the children or sisters of Hesperos, rides. the evening star, or, as they might also be termed, of Atlas or of Phorkys. This beautiful island w^iich no bark ever approaches, and where the ambrosial streams flow perpetually by the couch of Zeus, is nevertheless hard by the land of the Gorgons and near the bounds of that everlasting darkness which is the abode of Ahi and Pani, of Geryon, Cacus, and Echidna. Hence the dragon Ladon guards with them the golden apples which Gaia gave to Here when she became the bride of Zeus, these apples being the golden-tinted clouds or herds of Helios, the same word being used to denote both.^ It remained only to give them names easily supplied by the countless epithets of the morning or evening twilight, and to assign to them a local habitation, which was found close to the pillars or the mountain of Atlas which bears up the brazen heaven above the earth.

Atlas and Atlas is thus brought into close connexion with Helios, the bright Hyperion, god, the Latin Sol" and our sun. Li the Iliad and Odyssey he is himself Hyperion, the climber : in the Hesiodic Theogony, Hyperion becomes his father by the same process which made Zeus the son of Kronos, — his mother being Theia, the brilliant, or Euryphaessa, the shedder of the broad light. In the former poems he rises every

' Max Miillcr, Sckdcd Essays, i. C03. * See note ^, p. 260,