Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/503

Rh CHAP. The myth is transparent enough. They are as mighty in their infancy as Hermes. When they are nine years old, their bodies are nine cubits in breadth and twenty-seven in height — a rude yet not inapt image of the stormy wind heaping up in a few hours its vast masses of angry vapour. It was inevitable that the phenomena of storm should suggest their warfare with the gods, and that one version should represent them as successful, the other as vanquished. The storm-clouds scattered by the sun in his might are the Aloadai when defeated by Phoibos before their beards begin to be seen, in other words, before the expanding vapours have time to spread themselves over the sky. The same clouds in their triumph are the Aloadai when they bind Ares and keep him for months in chains, as the gigantic ranges of vapours may be seen sometimes keeping an almost motionless guard around the heaven, while the wind seems to chafe beneath, as in a prison from which it cannot get forth. The piling of the cumuli clouds in the skies is the heaping up of Ossa on Olympos and of Pelion on Ossa to scale the heavens, while their threat to make the sea dry land and the dry land sea is the savage fury of the storm when the earth and the air seem mingled in inextricable confusion. The daring of the giants goes even further. Ephialtes, like Ixion, seeks to win Here while Otos follows Artemis, who, in the form of a stag, so runs between the brothers that they, aiming at her at the same time, kill each other, as tlae thunderclouds perish from their own discharges.^

Ares, the god imprisoned by the Aloadai, whose name he shares, Ares and Athene. represents like them the storm-wmd raging through the sky. As the idea of calm yet keen intellect is inseparable from Athene, so the character of Ares exhibits simply a blind force without foresight or judgment, and not unfrequently illustrates the poet's phrase that strength without counsel insures only its own destruction. Hence Ares and Athene are open enemies. The pure dawn can have nothing in common with the cloud-laden and wind-oppressed atmosphere. He is then in no sense a god of war, unless war is taken as mere quarrelling and slaughtering for its own sake. Of the merits of con- tending parties he has neither knowledge nor care. Where the carcases are likely to lie thickest, thither like a vulture will he go ;

' " Otos and Ephialtes, the wind ^res and the Marttts, discovered the and the hurricane," i.e. the leaper. personification of the sky as excited by Max Miiller, Led. on Lang, second storm." Athene then, according to series. Preller, " als Gottin der reinen Luft und 325, that " In Ares, Preller, without any Ares ist." — Gr. Myth. 202. thought of the relationship between
 * Professor Max Miiller remarks, ib. des /Ethers die natnrliche Feindin des