Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/446

414 BOOK in the lives of two human beings, could not fail to inspire. Here also the Erinys might exercise her fatal office, for the blood of lokaste must cry for vengeance as loudly as that of Iphigeneia or Amphiaraos ; and the same feeling which suggested the curse of Amphiaraos on Eri- phyle would also suggest the curse of Oidipous on his children. In the older poems on the subject this curse was pronounced for offences not very grave, if regarded merely from an ethical point of view. His sons had been accustomed to bring him the shoulders of victims offered in sacrifice, and they once brought him a thigh. At another time they put before him the table and the wine-cup of Kadmos, although he had charged them never to do so. But the former of these two acts implied a slight like that which Prometheus put upon Zeus when giving him the choice of the portion for the gods ; and the latter made him think of the golden days when he sat down with lokaste to banquets as brilliant as those of the long-lived Aithiopians and drank purple wine from the inexhaustible horn of Amaltheia. But to Sophokles, who looked at the matter simply as a moralist, these causes were so inadequate that he at once charged the sons with cruel treatment of their father, whom they drove away from his home to fight with poverty as well as blindness.

Tydeus. Polyneikes, when in his turn an exile, betook himself to Argos, where he fell in with Tydeus,^ with whom he quarrels. But it had been shown long ago to Adrastos that he should wed his two daughters to a lion and a boar : and when he found these two men ficrhtins. with shields which had severally the sign of the boar and the lion, he came to the conclusion that these were the destined husbands of Argeia and Deipyle. Hence also he readily agreed to avenge the alleged wTongs of Polyneikes, and the league was soon formed, which in the later Attic legend carried the Seven Argive Chiefs to the walls of Thebes, but which for the poets of the Thebais involved as large a gathering as that of the chieftains who assembled to hunt the Kalydonian boar or to recover the Golden Fleece. How far these poets may have succeeded in imparting to their subject the charm of our Iliad or Odyssey, the scanty fragments of the poem which alone we possess make it impossible to say ; but there was more than one incident in the struggle which might be so treated as fairly to win for the poem a title to the high praise bestowed upon it by Pausanias.'

means apparently the hammerer. The daughter of Tyrtdareos, is the child of two forms may be compared with the Zeus the thunderer. Latin tundo, tutudi, to beat. The idea * ix. 9, 3; Grote, History of Greece, conveyed by the word is thus precisely i. 364. that of Thor Miolnir, of the ^iolionids
 * This name, like that of Tyndareos, and the Aloadai. Hence Helen, as the