Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/351

Rh surprise. The materials for the great epic poems of the Aryan world are the aggregations of single phrases which have been gradually welded into a coherent narrative ; and the sayings which spoke of the light as stolen away in the evening from the western sky and carried away to the robber's stronghold far away towards the east, of the children of the light as banding together to go and search out the thief, of their struggle with the seducer and his kinsfolk, of the return of the light from the eastern sky back again to its home in the west, were represented by the mythical statements that Paris stole Helen from the Western Sparta and took her away to Ilion, that the kinsfolk of Helen roused the Achaian chiefs to seek out the robber and do battle with him and his people, and that after a hard fight Helen was rescued from their grasp and brought back to the house of Menelaos. But there was a constant and an irresistible tendency to invest every local hero with the attributes which are reflected upon Herakles, Theseus, and Perseus from Phoibos and Helios the lords of light; and the several chiefs whose homes were localised in Western Asia would as naturally be gathered to the help of Hektor as the Achaian princes to the rescue and avenging of Helen. Over every one of these the poet might throw the rich colours of the heroic ideal, while a free play might also be given to purely human instincts and sympathies in the portraits of the actors on either side. If Paris was guilty of great crimes, his guilt was not shared by those who would have made him yield up his prey if they could. He might be a thief, but they were fighting for their homes, their wives, and their children: and thus in Hektor we have the embodiment of the highest patriotism and the most disinterested self-devotion, — a character, in fact, infinitely higher than that of the sensitive, sullen, selfish and savage Achilleus, because it is drawn from human life, and not, like the other, from traditions which rendered such a portrait in his case impossible.^

The eastern myth then begins with incidents parallel to those The birth which mark the birth and childhood of Dionysos, Telephos, Oidipous, Romulus, Perseus, and many others. Before he is born, there are Paris, portents of the ruin which, like Oidipous, he is to bring upon his house and people. His mother Hekabe dreams that her child will be a torch

erschien auch Paris in den Kyprien, ver- gleich mannhaft und weichlich wie muthlich nach Anleitung ortlicher Tra- Dionysos, wie Sardanapal, wie der Ly- ditionen, in einem andern Lichte und dische Herakles, gross in der Schlacht als Mittelspunkt eines grosseren Sagen- und gross im Harem, die gerade Gegen- complexes, welcher gleichfalls bei den satz zu den Griechischen Helden, na- spateren Dichtem und Kiinstlern einen mentlich zu Menelaos und zum Achill." lebhaflen Anklang gefunden hat. Er — Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 413.
 * "Wie Aphrodite und Helena, so ist ganz der Orientalische Held, zu-