Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/448

416 BOOK II.

Alkmaidn and Eri- phyl^

say here is that they belong seemingly rather to the Eastern than the Western world, and may be a genuine portion of the Persian myth which Herodotos has clothed in a Greek garb in the story of the Seven Conspirators. But the dismal cave in which she is left to die seems but the horrid den into which the Panis sought to entice Sarama, and in which they shut up the beautiful cattle of the dawn. It is the cave of night into which the evening must sink and where she must die before the day can again dawn in the east. Nor can we well fail to notice the many instances in which those who mourn for mythical heroes taken away put an end to their own lives by hang- ing. It is thus that Haimon ends his misery when he finds himself too late to save Antigone ; it is thus that lokaste hides her shame from the sight of the world ; it is thus that Althaia and Kleopatra hasten away from life which without Meleagros is not worth the living for. The death of these beings is the victory of Echidna and Ahi, the throttling or strangling snake ; and the tradition uncon- sciously preserved may have determined the mode in which these luckless beings must die.

Nor may we forget that after the death of Amphiaraos the fortunes of his house run parallel with those of the house of Agamemnon after his return from Ilion. In obedience to his father's command Alkmaion slays his mother Eriphyle, and the awful Erinys, the avenger of blood, pursues him with the unrelenting pertinacity of the gadfly sent by Here to torment the heifer 16. Go where he will, she is there to torture him by day and scai'e him by night ; and not until he has surrendered to Phoibos the precious necklace of Har- nionia or Kadmos, and found out a spot to dwell in on which the sun had never looked at the time when Eriphyle met her doom, can Alkmaion have any rest. Such a refuge was furnished by the Oiniadai, islands which had grown up at the mouth of the river Acheloos from the deposits brought down by the stream to the sea. Here he marries Kallirhoe the daughter of the river god, who causes his death at the hands of the sons of Phegeus by insisting on his fetching her the necklace of Eriphyle. But Kallirhoe is, like Leda and Leto, the mother of twin sons, and she prays that they may at once grow into mature manhood and become the avengers of their father, as Hyllos is avenged by the Herakleids of a later generatioa

This is substantially the story of Orestes, who slays Klytaimnestra for murdering her husband Agamemnon as Eriphyle had brought about the death of Amphiaraos, and who is therefore chased, like Alkmaion, from land to land by the Erinyes of his mother, until at last he comes to Athens, the dawn city, and is there by the casting vote