Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/439

Rh impels them to open the bag, and all the winds of heaven burst forth in wild fury, and carry them back to Aiolia, whence the king drives " ' them away as being under the curse of the gods, and says that hence- forth he will not help them more. At once Odysseus is made to relate how his men were now thed out with rowing day and night, because there was not a breath of air to speed them on their voyage. In the city of the Laistrygonians, Lamos, a name connected with The the Greek Lamuroi and the Latin Lemures, the seizers and swal- nians.' lowers, we see the awful caves in which the Vritra hides away the stolen cattle of Indra. It is hard by the confines of Day and Night, and round it rise the rocks sheer and smooth from the sea, while two promontories leave a narrow entrance for ships. "N^'ithin it there is neither wave nor wind, but an awful stillness broken only by the dull sound when

Shepherd calls to shepherd, entering through The portals, and the other makes answer due,^

like thunder-clouds greeting each other with their mysterious voices. No cheering sight, however, meets the eye ; and when the men of Odysseus are led by the daughter of Antiphates the chief into his palace, they gaze with horror at his wife, who stands before them huge as a rock. By Antiphates himself they are necessarily treated like their comrades in the Kyklops' island, and Odysseus escapes after losing many of his men only by cutting the mooring-ropes of his ship and hastening out to sea.

In the land of the Lotos-eaters Odysseus encounters dangers The Lotos- of another kind. The myth carries us to the many emblems of the Ki'dle reproductive powers of nature, of which the Lotos is one of the most prominent. It here becomes the forbidden fruit, and the eating of it so poisons the blood as to take away all memory and care for home and kinsfolk, for law, right, and duty. The sensual inducements held out by the Lotophagoi are, in short, those by which Venus tempts Tanhaiiser into her home in the Horselberg ; and the degradation of the bard answers to the dreamy indolence of the groups who make life one long holiday in the Lotos land. The Venus of the mediaeval story is but another form of Kirke, the queen of Aiaia ; but the sloth and sensuality of the Lotos-eaters here turns its victims into actual swine, while the spell is a tangible poison poured by Kirke into their cups. The rod which she uses as the instrument of transformation gives a further significance to the story. From these swinish pleasures they are awakened only through the


 * Worsley, Odyssey, x. 234.