Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/513

Rh The myth which makes Poseidon and Phoibos together build the CHAP. walls of Ilion for Laomedon belongs to the earlier stage in the — : — growth of the myth, during which he is still the king of the upper J^^^g*^" ^ air, and therefore may be represented, like the Delian god and the man. heroes who share his nature, as toiling for the benefit of mean and unCTateful man.^ For at the hands of Laomedon he receives no better recompense than that which Eurystheus accords to Herakles ; and hence the ATath of Poseidon against Ilion and its people burns as fiercely as that of Here. The monster which he brings up from the sea to punish Laomedon is the huge storm-cloud, which appears in the Cretan legend as the bull sent by Poseidon to be sacrificed by Minos, who instead of so dealing with it hides it among his own cattle, the fitting punishment for thus allowing the dark vapours to mingle with the bright clouds being that the love of Pasiphae is given to the monster, and thus is born the dreadful Minotauros. Lastly, his union with Amphitrite carries us to the Vedic god Trita, who reigns over the water and the sea. In the AssjTian my- thology he had been the husband of the fish-goddess Derketo, whom the Greeks called Atergatis, the mother of Sammuramit or Semiramis.

Among other mythical inhabitants of the sea are Ino, the daugh- Meli- ter of Kadmos and Harmonia, and her child Melikertes. Theu: earthly history belongs to the myth of the Golden Fleece ; but when on failing to bring about the death of Phrixos she plunges, like Endy- mion, into the sea, she is the antithesis of Aphrodite Anadyomene. With her change of abode her nature seemingly becomes more genial. She is the pitying nymph who hastens to the help of Odys- seus as he is tossed on the stormy waters after the breaking up of his raft ; and thus she is especially the white goddess whose light tints the sky or crests the waves. In his new home her son Meli- kertes, we are told, becomes Palaimon,^ or, as some would have it, Glaukos. The few stories related of him are as significant as his name. The latter is clearly that of the Semitic Melkarth, and thus the sacrifices of children in his honour, and the horrid nature of his cultus generally, are at once explained. It becomes, therefore, the more probable that Kadmos is but a Greek form of the Semitic Kedem, the east ; and without going further we have a sufficient warrant for the assertion that the influence of the Assyrian or Semitic

name Asphaliaios. the nearest Greek sounds. Palaimon
 * As the builder, Poseidon has the merely an assimilation of Semitic to

name might denote the wrestler ; but Great Dionysiak Myth. there can be no doubt here that we have
 * Regarded as an Aryan word, this is the Semitic Baal-hamon. — Brown,