Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/338

306 Herakles;" nor, if attention had been specially fixed on the task of tracing out such resemblances, would very keen powers of criticism have been needed to show that the same process might be applied to the legends of all the Hellenic tribes.

The myth of Theseus is indeed more transparent than that of his two great kinsmen. As Perseus is the son of the golden shower, so is Theseus the child of Aithra, the pure air ; and if in one version he is said to be a son of Aigeus, king of Athens, in another he is called a son of Poseidon, as Athene is Tritogeneia, and Aphrodite comes up from the sea ; but Aigeus himself is only Poseidon under a name denoting the dash of the waves on the shore, and when Apollodoros speaks of Aigeus as a son not of Pandion but of Skyrios, we are still in the same magic circle, for the island of Skyros seems to have been noted especially for the worship of the Ionian Poseidon.^ In some of its earlier incidents the myth carries us to the story of Sigurd and Brynhild. As he grows up his mother tells him that a mighty work lay before him so soon as he could lift the great stone beneath which lay his father's sword and sandals, the sword and sandals which Perseus had worn when he went to the Gorgons' land. Thus gaining these prizes as Sigmund obtained the good sword Gram, Theseus started on that career of adventure and conquest which, with differences of local colouring and detail, is the career of Oidipous, Meleagros, Belle- rophon, Odysseus, Sigurd, Grettir, and other mythical heroes, as well as of Herakles and Perseus. Like these, he fights with and overcomes robbers, murderers, dragons, and other monsters. Like some of them, also, he is capricious and faithless. Like them, he is the terror not only of the evil men but of the gods of the under world.

At his birth Poseidon gave to his son the three wishes which appear again and again in Teutonic folk-lore, and sometimes in a ludicrous form.^ The favour of the sea-deities is also shown in the anecdote told by Pausanias ^ that when Minos cast doubts on his being a son of Poseidon, and bade him, if he were such, to bring up a ring thrown into the sea, Theseus dived and reappeared not only with the ring but with a golden crown, which Aphrodite had placed upon his head. His journey from Troizen to Athens is signalised by exploits which later mythographers regarded as six in number, as twelve were assigned to Herakles. They are all, as we might expect, merely different forms of the great fight waged by Indra and Oidipous

Preller, ''Gr. Myth''. ii. 287. The name Pandiôn is manifestly a masculine form of Pandia, an epithet of Selên the moon, when at its full.

Eur. Hipp. 46; Preller, ''Gr. Myth''. ii. 288.

i. 16, 3; Preller, ib.