Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/467

Rh which is altogether at variance with the true Promethean legend. CHAP. The disaster thus caused by Pandora occurs long after the theft of the - fire from Olympos, and at a time when Prometheus was paying the penalty for his offence. But in the version given by ^schylos Prometheus mentions, as one of his reasons for wishing to bestow on men the boon of fire, the crowd of diseases and plagues which they were unable either to mitigate or to cure. The reconciliation of these two myths, thus sprung from two different lines of thought, is an impossibility. But the Hesiodic legend is indeed inconsistent throughout. The mere comparison instituted between Prometheus and Epimetheus, the fore-thinker and the after-thinker, implies that there must be some advantage in the one, some loss in the other, if the contrast is to have any force. But in the Theogony and the Works and Days there is no more to be said in behalf of one than of the other. The provident and the improvident are alike outwitted and punished ; and the gain, if any there be, is decidedly to the man who does not see the coming evils as they cast their shadows before them.

Putting aside these myths as the result of a mistaken etymology, Prome- we see in Prometheus simply another Phoroneus, the giver of fire, d^!^"^ and, by consequence, of the blessings which spring from the know- ledge of fire. As wakening the senses of men, as providing them with the appliances and comforts of life, as teaching them how to plough and build, to cross the seas and search the mines, he is prac- tically the creator as well as the preserver of men ; and the creative function thus assigned to him is brought out still more in the story of his son Deukalion, in whose days the great flood of waters over- whelms the whole of Hellas. By his father's advice Deukalion builds an ark, in which mth his wife Pyrrha he floats for nine days and nights until the vessel rested on the summits of Parnassos.^ When descending from the ark with Pyrrha (a name denoting redness, whether of the soil, or, as other names in the myth render far more probable, of the early morning), he offers his first sacrifice. Hermes is sent to grant them any one thing which they may choose. The prayer of Deukalion reflects the spirit of Prometheus ; and he

' For other versions of this Flood see pp. 226, 327. In all these deluges only the righteous, or those who have a consecrated character, are saved. The men of Delphoi are the ministers of the light-god Phoibos : hence wolves, by the same equivocation which led to the con- founding of the tail of light, Lykosoura (Lykabas), with that of the wolf, led them to the heights of Pamassos, where, of course, the city of Lykoreia, or Mountain of Light, is founded. Me- garos, again, who is saved by following the high-soaring cranes, is a son of Zeus and a Sithnian nymph, or, in other words, a child of the waters, akin to the morning deities Athene, Artemis, and Aphrodite. — Paus. i. 40, i.