Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/419

Rh dents which follow their arrival in Kolchis repeat in part the myth of Kadnios at Thebes ; and indeed the teeth of the dragon which Aietes bids him sow are the very teeth which Kadmos had not needed to use. The men who spring from them fight with and slay each other as in the Theban legend, and by the aid of Medeia lason also tames the fire-breathing bulls, beings which answer to the Minotauros of Crete and the brazen bull in which Phalaris is said to have burnt his victims.^ Dangers thicken round them. While lason is thus doing the bidding of the chieftain, Aietes is forming a plan to burn the Achaian ships, and is anticipated only by Medeia, who has lavished her love on lason with all the devotion of Eos for Orion. She hastens with her lover on board the Argo, and hurriedly leaves Kolchis, taking with her her brother Absyrtos. But Aietes is not yet prepared to yield. The Gorgon sisters cannot rest without at the least making an effort to avenge Medousa on her destroyer Perseus. Aietes is fast overtaking the Argo when Medeia tears her brother's body limb from limb, and casts the bleeding and mangled members into the sea — an image of the torn and blood-red clouds reflected in the blue waters, as the blood which streams from the body of Herakles represents the fiery clouds stretched along the flaming sky.^ But Absyrtos is as dear to Aietes as Polyphemos to Poseidon ; and as he stops to gather up the limbs, the Argo makes her way onward, and the Kolchian chief has to return home discomfited. The Achaians are now pos- sessed of the golden fleece, but Zeus also is wroth at the death of Absyrtos, and raises a storm, of which the results are similar to those of the tempest raised by Poseidon to avenge the mutilation of Poly- phemos. In fact, the chief incidents in the return of Odysseus we

of ice should have been formed in so the Phenician Moloch. The iniquities vast a basin, borne down from the attributed to him are the horrid holo- Northern rivers. When the lake burst causts which defiled the tem])les of its barriers, they would be carried by Carthage and the valley of Hinnom. the current towards the entrance of the His name is probably connected with straits, and there become stranded, as Pales, Palikoi, Pallas, Palatium, and the story says that in fact they did." — Phallos, and would thus point to the Findar, introd. xxiv. Among other cruel forms which the worship of Aph- myths pointing to physical facts of a rodite, Artemis, and the Light deities of past age Mr. Paley cites the story of the the Phenicians generally, often assumed,

rising of Rhodes from the sea, compar- ' The same fate is allotted to Myr- ing with it the fact of the recent up- tilos, whom Pelops throws into that heaval of part of Santorin, the ancient portion of the Egean sea which was Thera, and the old legend of the up- supposed to bear his name. It is, in heaving of Delos, as all showing that fact, half the myth of Pelops himself, these islands lie "within an area of the difterence being that while all are known volcanic disturbance." See also thrown into the water, Pelops is brought Tylor, Primitive Cullure, i. 315. to life again — the difference, in other ' Of any historical Phalaris we know words, between Sarpedun in the com- absolutcly nothing ; and the tradition mon version and Memnon, between simply assigns to him the character of Asklepios and Osi/is and Baldur.