Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/322

290 BOOK II. The lions of Kith- airon and Nemea.

bright period in which Phoibos is tended by the nymphs in his infancy, when his face is unsoilcd, and his raiment all white, and his terrible sword is not yet belted to his side. It is the picture of the unclouded sun rising in pure splendour, seeing the heavens which he must climb, and ready for the conflicts which may await him — gloomy mists and angry storm-clouds. The moral aspect which this myth may be made to assume must be that of self-denial. The smooth road of indulgence is the easiest on which to travel ; he who takes the rugged path of duty must do so from deliberate choice ; and thus the brave Herakles, going forth to his long series of labours, suggests to the sophist Prodikos the beautiful apologue in which Arete and Kakia, virtue and vice, each claim his obedience, as Aphrodite and Athene each claim the golden prize which Paris must adjudge. The one promises end- less pleasures here and hereafter ; the other holds out the prospect of hard days followed by healthful slumbers, and warns him that nothing good was ever Avon without labour, nothing great ever done without toil. The mind of Herakles is made up at once ; and the greatest of all mythical heroes is thus made to inforce the highest lessons of human duty, and to present the highest standard of human action. The apologue is full of beauty and truth, and there is manifestly no harm in such applications of myths when the myths themselves are strained or not distorted in the process. The images of self-restraint, of power used for the good of others, are prominent in the lives of all or almost all the Zeus-born heroes ; but these are not their only aspects, and it is as necessary to remember that other myths told of Herakles can no more be reconciled with this standard of generous self-devotion than the conduct of Odysseus as he approaches the Seirens' island with the Christian duty of resisting temptation.

With this high heroic temper Herakles sets forth for liis first great fight with the lion of Kithairon, and whether from its carcase or from that of the Nemean beast, he obtains the lion's skin with which he is seen so commonly represented, and which reappears in the jackal's skin in the story of the enchanted Hindoo raja.^ The

' With this lion's skin must be com- pared the fish-skin with wiiich the sun- god is represented in the characters of Proteus and Onnes or Dagon, and which might be worn by Phoibos Del- phinios. With the latter, it is simply a sign of the sun as rising like Apiiiodite from the sea ; the lion's skin may denote perhaps the raiment of tawny cloud which the sun seems to trail behind him as he fights his way through the vapours whom he is said to overcome. In his chapters on Aiuieiit Faiths and Lt-^citJs, M. Maury enters at length into the physiological questions which on the Euemerisiic hypothesis must be connected with the myth of the Nemean Lion. However conclusive his arguments may be, the inquiry is almost superlluous. It cannot be necessary to disprove the existence of lions in the Peloponnese, unless we must also dis- prove that of the Sphinx or the Chi- niaira. But, in truth, the dwelling of