Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/416

384 BOOK II. Repetition of this myth under dif- ferent forms. The Golden Fleece.

back, are we to believe that the errand on which the Achaian chief- tains depart from Hellas is in every case different? If it be urged that such movements are those of a squirrel in its cage, and that such movements, though they may be graceful, yet must be monotonous, the answer is that not only is the daily alternation of light and dark- ness thus proved to be monotonous, but all the incidents and the whole course of human life may be invested with the same dull colouring. Men are married, love and hate, get wealth or struggle in poverty, and die; and the monotony is broken only when we have distinguished the toils and acts of one man from those of another and learnt to see the points of interest which meet us everywhere on the boundless field of human life, as they meet us also in all the countless aspects of the changing heavens. There is, in short, no dulness except in those who bring the charge ; and the story of Daphne and Echo does not lose its charm because it is all told over again in the legends of Arethousa and Selene.

The taking away of precious things, and the united search of armed hosts for their recover}', come before us first in the great myth of the Argonautic Voyage. The tale is repeated in the stealing of Helen and her treasures, and is once more told in the banishment of the Herakleidai and their efforts, at last successful, to recover their lost inheritance. These myths fall into a regular series, and are repeated until we find ourselves on the confines of genuine history, which cuts the threads of the mythical drama just where it happens to meet them ; and we leave the subject in the full confidence that the radiant maiden would have been stolen and the children of the sun banished from the west yet many times more under different names and with circumstances sufticiently varied, had not men been awakened to the need of providing in contemporary writing a sure means for the preservation of historical facts.

Into the Argonautic story, as into the mythical histories or sagas which follow it, a number of subordinate legends have been inter- woven, many of which have been already noticed as belonging to the myths of the heavens and the fight, clouds, waters, winds, and darkness ; and Ave have now only to follow the main thread of the narrative from the moment when Phrixos,^ the child of the mist, has reached the Kolchian land and the home of king Aietes. Helle, the warm and brilliant-tinted maiden, has died by the way, and the cold light only remains when the golden-fleeced ram, the offspring of

' The name belongs apparently to the same root with Prokris,note^ p. 240, and is thus connected with (ppi(r(Tw, OMX freeze, the story of the spoiling of ihc com being the result of frost not less surely than of drought, with which the form Phryxos led the Greek to connect it.