Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/422

390 BOOK when she had been stolen by Paris, and spent ten weary years in Troy, she is said in some versions to have become the wife of Deiphobos, another son of Priam, and another representative of the dark beings who own kinship with the Vedic Vritra When Paris is slain, the brother of the seducer will not suffer Helen to be given up to the Achaians ; and thus, on the fall of Ilion, his house is the first to be set on fire. Even after her death the fate of Helen is not changed. In Leuke, the white island of the dawn, she is wedded to Achilleus, and becomes the mother of Euphorion, the winged child who is first loved and then smitten by the thunderbolts of Zeus in Melos.'- Throughout she is a being not belonging to the land of mortal men. She is sprung from the egg of Leda, the being to whom Zeus comes in the form of a swan, and her brothers are the Dioskouroi, or Asvins. When the time for her marriage draws nigh, suitors come thronging from all parts of Hellas, their numbers being one for each day of the lunar month — a myth which simply tells us that every day the sun woos the dawn. In the Iliad she is never spoken of except as the daughter of Zeus ; and Isokrates notices the sacrifices offered in Therapnai to her and to iNIenelaos, not as heroes but as gods.^ She is worshipped by the women of Sparta as the source of all fruitfulness, and in Argos as the mother of Iphigeneia, the child of Theseus, and as having dedicated a temple to Eileithyia^ In Rhodes she is Helene Dendritis, and a wild legend was invented to account for the name.* Lastly, the myth of her journey to Ilion and her return is in its framework simply the myth of Auge, the mother of Telephos, like her, taken away to the same land, and, like her, brought back again when all enemies have been overcome.^

' But Achilleus has Iphigeneia and dawTi rising like Aphrodite from the Medeia also as his brides in this bright sea; and it preserves the recollection of island : and these are simply other the Erinyes as dawn-goddesses, while it names for the dawn or the evening mingles with it the later notion which light. represented them as Furies. The tree ^ Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. IC9-110; //. points probably to her connexion with iii. 426 ; Od. iv. 184, <S:c. ; Isokr. Helen. the sun, and thus carries us back to the Enkom. 63. special form of worship paid to her

' I'aus. ii. 22, 7. at Sparta, as well as to the myth of that Helen, being persecuted by Mega- of Helene Dendritis must be compared penthes and Nikoslratos after the death with the story of the death of Ophelia of Menelaos, took refuge at Rhodes in in Hamlet, and with that of Wuotan or the house of Polyxo, who, being angry Odin on the world-tree ggdrasil. See with Helen as the cause of the Trojan also Brown, The Unicorn, 91. war and thus of the death of her * This myth is to Preller " eine husband Tlepolemos whom Sarpedon Vorstellung welche urspriinglich hochst slew, sent some maidens, disguised as wahrscheinlichauchmit ihrer Bedeutung Erinyes, who surprised Helen while im Naturleben zusammenhing " {Gr. bathing, and hung her up to a tree. Myth. ii. no): and he draws between This myth is simply a picture of the the stories of Helen and Auge a parallel
 * /(/. ii. 19, 10. This story relates Wuotan. See pp. 1S9, 240. The myth