Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/506

474 BOOK II. Glaukos. Naiads and Nereids.

applied to the sea by a people who, till they had seen the great water, had used it only of roadways on land. In the myth of Thaumas, the son of Pontos and the father of Iris and the Harpyiai, we are again carried back to the phenomena of the heavens ; the latter being the greedy storm-clouds stretching out their crooked claws for their prey, the former the rainbow joining the heavens and the earth with its path of light.

Another son of Poseidon, whose home is also in the waters, is the Boiotian Glaukos, the builder of the divine ship Argo and its helms- man. After the fight of lason with the Tyrrhenians, Glaukos sinks into the sea, and thenceforth is endowed with many of the attributes of Nereus. Like him, he is continually roaming, and yearly he visits all the coasts and islands of Hellas ; like him, he is full of ^visdom, and his words may be implicitly trusted.

The domain in which these deities dwell is thickly peopled. Their subjects and companions are the nymphs, whose name, as de- noting simply water, belongs of right to no beings who live on dry land, or in caves or trees.^ The classification of the nymphs as Oreads, Dryads, or others, is therefore in strictness an impossible one ; and the word Naiad, usually confined to the nymphs of the fresh waters, is as general a term as the name Nymph itself. Nor is there any reason beyond that of mere usage why the Nereides should not be called Naiads as well as Nymphs. But the tendency was to multiply classes : and seldom perhaps has the imagination of man been exercised on a more beautiful or harmless subject than the nature and tasks of these beautiful beings who comfort Prometheus in his a^vful agony and with Thetis cheer Achilleus when his heart is riven with grief for his friend Patroklos. For the most part, indeed, they remain mere names ; but their radiant forms are needed to fill up the background of those magnificent scenes in which the career of the short-lived and suffering sun is brought to a close. And beyond this, they answered a good purpose by filling the whole earth with a joyous and unfailing life. If it be said that to the Greek this earth was his mother, and that he cared not to rise above it, yet it was better that his thoughts should be where they were, than that he should make vain profession of a higher faith at the cost of peopling whole worlds with beings malignant as they were powerful. The effect of Christian teaching would necessarily invest the Hellenic nymphs with some portion of this malignity, and as they would still be objects of worship to the unconverted, that worship would become

Latin lympha, and thus the Latin lymphaticus corresponds to the Greek
 * vv/jLn answers precisely to the