Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/425

Rh which that year might produce, and how he had failed to fulfil his vow. But now the evening must die if the light of morning is to be seen again : and Iphigeneia is slain that Helen may come back to Sparta. But although her blood flows to the grief and agony of her father and her kinsfolk, the war must still last for ten years, for so it had been decreed by Zeus, who sent the snake to eat up the sparrow and her young ; ^ and thus room was given for the introduction of any number of episodes, to account for, or to explain the lengthening out of the struggle ; and the machinery of a thousand myths was obviously available for the purpose. Like Hippodameia or Atalante, Helen was beautiful, but many must fail while one alone could win her. Sigurd only can waken Brynhild ; and the dead bodies of the unsuccessful knights lie before the hedge or wall of spears in the Hindu folk-lore. Thus with the introduction of Achilleus, as the great hero without whom the war can never be brought to an end, the whole framework of the epic poem was complete. It only remained to show what the others vainly attempted, and what Achilleus alone succeeded in doing. That the life of Achilleus should run in the same magic groove with the lives of other heroes, mattered nothing. The story which most resembled that of Achilleus is indeed chosen by the poet to point to him the moral which he needed most of all to take to heart

This stor>' is the life of IMeleagros, and it is recited to Achilleus Melea^os by Phoinix, the teacher of his childhood, the dweller in that purple patra, ^°" land of the east from which Europe was taken to her western home. It is the picture of the short-lived sun, whose existence is bound up with the light or the torch of day, who is cursed by his mother for killing her brothers, the clouds which are scattered by his spear rays, who moves on his way moodily and sullenly, as the clouds pass across his face, and appears at intervals to the terror of all his enemies. He is a son of Oineus or Ares, and Althaia the nourishing Demeter ; and he proves his skill in the use of the javelin by bringing down the monstrous boar which the chieftains assembled at Kalydon had failed to kill. But the interest of his Hfe lies in the burning torch and the prophecy of the Moirai, that with its extinction his own life must come to an end. His mother therefore snatches it from the fire, and carefully guards it from harm. But the doom must be accomplished. Artemis stirs up strife between the men of Kalydon and the Kouretes for the spoils of the boar, and a war follows in which the former are

' This incident, //. ii. 300, is related and not at all as the cause of the length simply as a sign of the number of years of the struggle, which must precede the fall of Ilion,