Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/329

Rh when he asks the aid of Herakles in recovering the lost cattle, the CHAP. angry hero turns on his friend and slays him. The friendship of ' ^^—^ Herakles is as fatal to Iphitos as that of Achilleus to Patroklos. Incident is now crowded on incident, all exhibiting the working of the same idea. It is the time of the wild simoon. Herakles ap- proaches the sanctuary of Phoibos, but the Pythia will yield no answer to his questions, and a contest follows between Herakles and Phoibos himself, which is ended only when Zeus sunders them by a flash of lightning. When thus for the time discomfited, he is told that he can be loosed from his madness and again become sound in mind only by consenting to serve for a time as a bondman ; and thus the myth which makes Apollon serve in the house of Admetos, and which made Herakles all his life long the slave of a mean tyrant, is again brought into the story. He is now sold to Omphale (the correlative of Omphalos), and assumes something like the guise of the half-feminine Dionysos. But even with this story of subjection a vast number of exploits are interwoven, among these being the slaying of a serpent on the river Sygaris and the hunting of the Kalydonian boar.

The tale of his return from the conquest of Ilion presents the iierakies same scenes under slightly different colours. In his fight with the ^"'^ ^ug^- Meropes he is assailed by a shower of stones, and is even wounded by Chalkodon, — another thunderstorm recalling the fight with Ares and Kyknos: and the same battle of the elements comes before us in the next task which Athen^ sets him, of fighting with the giants in the burning fields of Phlegrai. These giants, it had been foretold, were to be conquered by a mortal man, a notion which takes another form in the surprise of Polyphemos when he finds himself outwitted by so small and insignificant a being as Odysseus. At this point, after his return to Argos, some mythographers place his marriage with Auge, the mother of Telephos, whose story reproduces that of Oidipous or Perseus.

His union with Deianeira, the daughter of the Kalydonian chief, Herakles brings us to the closing scenes of his troubled and tumultuous career, The name points, as we have seen, to the darkness which was to be his portion at the ending of his journey, and here also his evil fate pursues him. His spear is fatal to the hoy Eunomos, as it had been to the children of Megara ; but although in this instance the crime had been done unwittingly, Herakles would not accept the pardon tendered to him, and he departed into exile with Deianeira. At the ford of a river Herakles entrusts her to the charge of the Kcntaur Nessos, who acted as ferryman, and who attempting to lay hands on