Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/445

Rh CHAP, sieges ; and if the Argive chiefs under Adrastos are not so successful as Herakles with his six ships at lUon, still the Trojan power was no more destroyed by the latter than that of Eteokles was crushed by Polyneikes and his allies. In either case also there is a hero whose presence is indispensable to the success of the enterprise. In the Theban story this hero is Aniphiaraos, the Achilleus of the Trojan legend in this its most important feature : and as Troy cannot fall unless Achilleus fights against it, so the Argives cannot hope to take Thebes unless Amphiaraos goes with them. But as neither Achilleus nor Odysseus wished to fight in a quarrel which was not their own, so Amphiaraos shrinks from any concern in a contest in which the prophetic mind inherited by him from his ancestor Melampous tells him that all the chiefs engaged in it must die with the one exception of Adrastos. But he had promised the Argive king that in any differences which might arise between them he would abide by the decision of his wife Eriphyle, and Eriphyle had been bribed by Polyneikes with the gift of the necklace and peplos of Harmonia to decide in favour of the expedition. Thus Amphiaraos departs for Thebes with a presentiment of his own coming doom as strong as the consciousness of Achilleus that his career must be brief; but before he sets out, he charges his sons Amphilochos and Alkmaion to slay their mother, so soon as they hear of his death, and to march against the hated city of Thebes ; and thus the starting-point was furnished not only for the Theban war, but for a new series of woes to be wrought by the Erinyes of Eriphyle.

The germs of the rivalry, which in the case of the sons of Oidipous of Oidipous, grew mto a deadly hatred, are seen in the points of contrast afforded by almost all the correlative deities of Greek and Vedic mythology, and the twin heroes whether of the east or the west.^ Thus there is a close parallel between the Dioskouroi and the sons of Oidipous. The former may not be seen together ; the latter agree to reign over Thebes in turn ; and it was a ready device to account for the sub- sequent feud by saying that the brother whose time was over refused to abide by his compact Hence Polyneikes became an exile ; but it is not easy to determine precisely to what degree a purely moral element has forced its way into this series of legends from the horror which a union like that of lokaste and Oidipous, when regarded as a

' They are, in short, the rival brothers True and Untrue, by Big Peter and not only of the royal houses of Sparta, Little Peter in Dasent's Ahorse Tales, but in a vast number of stories in Aryan In the story of the Widow's Son (Dasent) folk-lore, and are represented by Ferdi- we have a closer adherence to the type nand the Faithful and Ferdinand the of the Dioskouroi in the two princes, one Unfaithful in Grimm's collection, by of whom is turned into a horse.