Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/354

322 stress laid in the Iliad on these stolen treasures. All are taken: Paris leaves none behind him; ^ and the proposals of Antenor and Hektor embrace the surrender of these riches not less than that of Helen. The narrative of the war which avenges this crime belongs rather to the legend of Achilleus; and the eastern story of Paris is resumed only when, at the sack of Troy, he is wounded by Philoktetes in the Skaian or western gates, and with his blood on fire from the poisoned wound, hastens to Ida and his early love. Long ago, before Aphrodite helped him to build the fatal ship which was to take him to Sparta, Oinone had warned him not to approach the house of Menelaos, and when he refused to listen to her counsels she had told him to come to her if hereafter he should be wounded.^ But now when he appears before her, resentment for the great wrong done to her by Paris for the moment overmasters her love, and she refuses to heal him. Her anger lives but for a moment; still when she comes with the healing medicine it is too late, and with him she lies down to die.' Eos cannot save Memnon from death, though she is happier than Oinone, in that she prevails on Zeus to bring her son back from the land of the dead.

So ends the legend of the Trojan Alexandros, with an incident which recalls the stories of Meleagros and Sigurd, and the doom of Kleopatra and Brynhild; and such are the materials from which Thucydides has extracted a miUtary history quite as plausible as that of the siege of Sebastopol.

A happier fate than that of Telephos or Paris attends the child. Arkadian lamos, the child of Evadne and Phoibos. Like his father and like Hermes, he is weak and puny at his birth, and Evadne in her misery and shame leaves the child to die. But he is destined for great things, and the office of the dog and wolf in the legends of Cyrus and Romulus is here performed by two dragons, not the horrid snakes which seek to strangle the infant Herakles, but the glistening creatures who bear a name of like meaning with that of Athene, and who feed the child with honey. But Aipytos, the chieftain of Phaisana, and the father of Evadne, had learnt at Delphoi that a cliild of Phoibos had been born who should become the greatest of all the seers and prophets of the earth, and he asked all his people where the babe was: but none had heard or seen him, for he lay far away amid the thick bushes, with his soft body bathed in the golden and purple rays of the violets.* So when he was

'. iii. 70, 91.

Apollod. iii. 12, 6.

• So in the cycle of the Arthur myths,

Ysolde alone can heal Tristram. ios, twice, as denoting in the one case
 * In this myth Pindar uses the word