Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/342

310 enemies ; for Antiope, who is stolen away by Herakles, becomes the bride of Theseus and the mother of Hippolytos,^ whose story exhibits the action of a moral sentiment which has impressed itself even more deeply on the traditions of Thebes. Hippolytos is to Theseus what Patroklos is to Achilleus, or Phaethon to Helios, or Little John to Robin Hood, the reflexion of the sun in all its beauty, but without its strength and power ; and the love of Phaidra (the gleaming) for the glorious youth is simply the love of Aphrodite for Adonis, and, like that of Aphrodite, it is repulsed. But Phaidra is the Avife of Theseus, and thus her love for Hippolytos becomes doubly a crime, while the recoil of her feelings tempts her to follow the example of Anteia in the myth of Bellerophon. Her trick is successful, and Hippolytos, going forth under his father's curse, is slain by a bull which Poseidon sends up from the sea, the storm-cloud which Theseus had fought with on the plains of Marathon. But Hippolytos, like Adonis, is a being whom death cannot hold in his power, and Asklepios raises him to life, as in the Italian tradition Virbius, the darling of the goddess of the groves, is brought back from the dead and entrusted to the care of the nymph Egeria.

Theseus, indeed, like Herakles, is seen almost everywhere. He is one of the chiefs who sail in the divine Argo to recover the golden fleece ; he joins the princes of Aitolia in the hunt of the Kalydonian boar, and takes part in the war of the Epigonoi before Thebes. But a more noteworthy myth is that which takes him, like Orpheus, into the nether world to bring back another Eurydike in the form of the maiden Persephone. This legend exhibits another reflexion of Theseus in Peirithoos, a son of Zeus or Ixion, the heaven or the proud sun, and Dia, the clear-shining dawn.^ Peirithoos had already aided Theseus when he took Helen from Sparta and placed her in the hands of his mother Aithra, an act requited in the myth which carries Aithra to Ilion and makes her the handmaid of Helen. The attempt of Peirithoos ends as disastrously as the last exploits of Patroklos, and Theseus himself is shut up in Hades until Herakles comes to his rescue, as he does also to that of Prometheus. The presence of the Dioskouroi, the bright Asvins or horsemen, com- plicates the story. These carry away Helen and Aithra, and when Theseus comes back from the unseen land, he finds that his strong-

Hippolytc, the Amazonian queen, whose girdle Ilcraklcs brings to Eurystheus, and who is thus not the enemy of The- seus, as in some versions, but his bride.
 * Others make Hippolytos a son of

• The carrying off of Hippodamcia, the bride of Peirithoos, at her wedding- feast, by the drunken Kentaur Eurytion, is a myth of the wind-driven and stag- gering cloud bearing away the golden light into the distant heavens.