Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/334

302 But the mythical history of Herakles is bound up with that of his progenitors and his descendants, and furnishes many a link in the twisted chain presented to us in the prehistoric annals of Greece. The myth might have stopped short with the death of the hero; but a new cycle is, as we have seen, begun when Hebe becomes the mother of his children in Olympos, and Herakles, it is said, had in his last moments charged his son Hyllus on earth to marry the beautiful lole. The ever-moving wheels, in short, may not tarry. The children of the sun may return as conc|uerors in the morning, bringing with them the radiant woman who with her treasures had been stolen away in the evening. After long toils and weary conflicts they may succeed in bearing her back to her ancient home, as Perseus bears Danae to Argos; but not less certainly must the triumph of the powers of darkness come round again, and the sun-children be driven from their rightful heritage. Thus was framed that woeful tale of expulsion and dreary banishment, of efforts to return many times defeated but at last successful, which make up the mythical history of the descendants of Herakles. But the phenomena which rendered their expulsion necessary determined also the direction in which they must move, and the land in which they should find a refuge. The children of the sun can rest only in the land of the morning, and accordingly it is at Athens alone and from the children of the dawn-goddess that the Herakleids can be sheltered from their enemies, who press them on every side. Thus we find ourselves in a cycle of myths which might be repeated at will, which in fact were repeated many times in the so-called prehistoric annals of Greece, and which doubtless would have been repeated again and again, had not the magic series been cut short by the dawn of the historical sense and the rise of a real historical literature.

In the Argive tradition the myth of Perseus is made to embrace the whole legend of Herakles, the mightiest and the most widely known of all the mythical heroes of the Greeks. It is as belonging