Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/363

Rh Phoibos and Helios, is yet regarded as the ruler of mortal Lykians, CHAP, and his cairn is raised high to keep alive his name amongst his people. With IMemnon the myth has not gone so far. He is so transparently the son of Eos that he must rise again. Like Zeus, Eos weeps tears of dew at the death of her child, but her prayers avail to bring him back, like Adonis or Tammuz, from the shadowy region, to dwell always in Olympos. If again Sarpedon is king of the land of light (Lykia), Memnon rules over the glistening country of Aithiopia (Ethiopia), the ever youthful child of Tithonos, the sun whose couch Eos leaves daily to bring back morning to the earth. Nay, so clear is the meaning of the story, that he is by some called the child of Hemera, the day ; and his gleaming armour, like that of Achilleus, is wrought by the fire-god Hephaistos. When Memnon falls in atonement for the slaughter of Antilochos, the son of Nestor, his comrades are so plunged in grief that they are changed into birds, which yearly visit his tomb to water the ground with their tears. Not less obvious is the meaning of another storj', which brings before us the battle of the clouds over the body of the dead sun — a fight which we see in a darker form in the desperate struggle of the Achaians and Trojans over the body of Achilleus. To comfort Eos, Zeus makes two flocks of birds (the swan maidens or winged clouds of Teutonic folk-lore) meet in the air and fight over Memnon's funeral sacrifice, until some of them fall as victims on the altar. Of Memnon's head the tale was told that it retained the prophetic power of the Hving Helios, a story which is found in the myth of the Teu- tonic Mimir, and which might also have been related of Kephalos, the head of the sun.

Like Minos and Sarpedon, Kephalos is assigned in different Kephalcw versions of the myth to different parents, whose names denote, how- ^" "^' ever, the same idea ; but there is no other reason for dividing him into two persons. In the one account he is a son of Hermes and Herse, the morning breeze and the dew, and by him Eos becomes the mother of Tithonos or, as others said, of Phaethon. In the other he is the son of the Phokian Deion, and Herse appears as the wife of Erechtheus, and the mother of his wife Prokris or Prokne, who is only the dew under another name.^ Nor is the whole story

' Preller, Cr. Myth. ii. 145, is form of Prokris, cannot be referred to content to regard the name as an abbre- r irpoictKpiij.fi'Tj. PrcIler adduces the viated form of rj irpoKfKptixfvrj, alleging expression applied to Hekate, t7> nfpl the use of wpinptv for irpuKpiaiv by Trdprwv Zds KpoviSr]s riV^lcre, in illus- Ilesiod, a fact which, if proved, is but tralion of his etymology and of his a slender warrant for the other. But belief that Prokris is the moon. But Herse, the mother of Prokris, is con- the incidents in the life of Piokris do fessedly the dew, and Prokne, the other not point to the course of the moon and