Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/508

476 BOOK II. Triton and Am- phitrittJ. The Seirens. Skylla and Charjbdis.

the last sad scene, wlicn, rising from the sea Avith her attendant nymphs, she bathes the body of her dead son, and wraps it in a robe of spotless white, in which the same nymphs folded the infant Chrysaor.

But as the sea-goddess thus puts on some of the qualities and is invested Avith some of the functions which might seem to belong ex- clusively to the powers of the heavens and the light, so the latter are all connected more or less closely with the waters, and the nymphs might not unnaturally see their kinsfolk in Athene Tritogeneia ; in Daphne, the child of the Peneian stream ; in Phoibos Apollon her lover, and in Aphrodite Anadyomene herself All these, indeed, whatever may be their destiny, are at their rising the offspring of Tritos (Triton), the lord of the waters. The Triton of Hellenic my- thology, who dwells in his golden palace in the lowest depths of the sea, rides on the billows which are his snow-crested horses. This god of the waters is reflected in Amphitrite, the wife of Poseidon in some versions, who is present at the birth of Phoibos in Delos. In the Odyssey she is simply the sea, purple-faced and loud-sounding.

Another aspect of the great deep is presented in the Seirens, who by their beautiful singing lure mariners to their ruin. As basking among the rocks in the sunlit waters, they may represent, as some have supposed, the belts (Seirai) of deceitful calms against which the sailor must be ever on his guard, lest he suffer them to draw his ship to sandbanks or quicksands. But apart from the beautiful passage in the Odyssey, which tells us how their song rose with a strange power through the still air when the god had lulled the waves to sleep, the mythology of these beings is almost wholly artificial. They are children of Acheron and Sterope, of Phorkos, Melpomene, and others, and names were devised for them in a-:cordance with their parentage. In form they were half women, half fishes, and thus are akin to Echidna and Melusina ; and their doom was that they should live only until some one should escape their toils. Hence by some mythographers they are said to have flung themselves into the sea and to have been changed into rocks, when Odysseus had effected his escape, while others ascribe their defeat to Orpheus.^ Other versions gave them wings, and again deprived them of them, for aid- ing or refusing to aid Demeter in her search for Persephone.

Nor are there wanting mythical beings who work their will among storm-beaten rocks and awful whirlpools. Among the former dwells Skylla, and in the latter the more terrible Charybdis. These creatures the Odyssey places on two rocks, distant about an arrow's flight from

' See page 461.