Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/406

374 BOOK II. 16 and Prometheus.

heaven.^ This time was naturally conceived as one of trouble and toil, and so the myth went that 16 was driven from one place to another by a gadfly sent by Here, who suffers her neither to rest by day nor to sleep by night

These wanderings have been related by yEschylus in his immortal drama of the bound Prometheus. They carry her over regions, some of whose names belong to our earthly geography ; but any attempts to fix her course in accordance with the actual position of these regions is mere labour lost. That for such accuracy ^schylus cared nothing is plain from the fact that the course which 16 takes in his play of the Suppliants cannot be reconciled with the account given in the Pro- metheus. It is enough to note that the poet takes his moon from the West towards the North, gradually approaching the East and the South, until in the beautiful Aigj-ptos she is suffered to resume her proper form, or in other words, appear as the full moon," the shape in which she was seen before Zeus changed her into the horned heifer or new moon. This mention of Egypt, or the land of the Nile, as the cradle of her child Epaphos, naturally led the Greeks to identify 16 with the Eg}'ptian Isis, and her son with the bull Apis,^ — an identification to which no objection can be raised, so long as it is not maintained that the Hellenic names and conceptions of the gods were borrowed from those of Egypt The great Athenian poet would naturally introduce among the places visited by 16, places and peoples which excited his curiosity, his wonder, or his veneration. She from whom was to spring the deliverer of Prometheus must herself learn from the tortured Titan what must be the course of her own sufferings and their issue. She must cross the heifer's passage, or Bosporos, which bears her name : she must journey through the countr}' of the Chalybes, beings akin to the Kyklopes who forge the thunderbolts of Zeus ; she must trust herself to the guidance of the Amazons who will lead her to the rocks of Salmydessos, rocks not unlike the Symplegades in the Argonautic story : she must encounter the Graiai and the Gorgons in the land of the gloaming and the night, and finally she is to see the end of her sorrows when she reaches the well or fountains of the sun. There her child will be born, and the series of genera-

' Gr. Myth. ii. 39.

' Mr. Brown (^The Unicorn, p. 27) cites some Mardian coins as furnishing the eailiest known instances of the lunar emblem which exhibits three crescent moons issuing from the full moon, in connexion with the unicorn. This emblem exj^laiiis at once the three- Icgjjed unicorn ass of the Bundahish, and also the arms of the Kingdom of Mau, in uliich we see three legs at- tached to a central orb.

' This calf-god was supposed to manifest himself from time to time in a bull, which, being recognised by certain signs, was consecrated and received high worship. It was not suffered to live more than twenty-five years, and his burial was followed by a general mourn- ing until a new calf, with the proper mark, was discovered. Apis, deified after death, became Serapis,