Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/554

522 BOOK II. Pelops,

A more transparent myth of the earth is found in the history of ' Pelops, the son of Tantalos and Dione, or as some have it, Klytia or Euryanassa. His father in his magnificent palace and with his inexhaustible wealth is manifestly only another form of Ixion and Helios ; and the child whom he slays represents not less clearly the fruits of the earth first sustained by his warmth and then scorched by his raging heat. This horrible banquet of his flesh he sets before Zeus, for the ravages of drought are accomplished in the face of the blue heaven ; but none of the gods will eat of it, except Demeter, who, plunged in grief for the loss of her child, eats the shoulder : and thus the story ran that when at the bidding of Zeus Hermes boiled the limbs and restored them to life, an ivory shoulder supplied the place of the part devoured by Demeter.^ In the story of Hippodameia, a name which occurs as an epithet of Aphrodite,^ Pelops plays the part of the successful hero in the myths of Brynhild, or Briar Rose. The heads of those who have failed to conquer Oinomaos in the chariot race stare down upon him from the doorposts ; but nothing daunted, he makes a compact with Myrtilos the charioteer to loosen the wheels of Oinamaos. Pelops is thus the victor; but as even the summer which succeeds in ripening the grape must die, so Pelops is made to fall under the curse of Myrtilos, whom he ungratefully drowns in the sea. This curse was wrought out in the fortunes of all his children, whose life and death do but exhibit one of the many aspects of the great tragedy of nature. Gaia and Ouranos. The earth itself, as the soil distinguished from the fruits which grow from it or the power which nourishes them, is known as Gaia in the Hesiodic Theogony, where she is described seemingly as self- existent, for no parents are assigned either to her or to Chaos, Tartaros, and Eros. All this, however, with the assignment of Erebos and Nyx as children of Chaos, and of Aither and Hemera as children of Nyx, the night, may have been to the poet as mere an allegory as

adopt or reject Preller's explanation of the word : " Der Name scheint mit Kapirhs und Kpdnriov zusammenhangen, so dass sich also sclion dadurch die Bezichung auf Frucht und Erndte an- kiiiidigen wiirde." — Gr. Myth. ii. 137. Others look upon it as a variant of Ker- knjjs, Kerkope, the grasshopper. But the name has a suspiciously non-Aiyan look.

' Hence the notion that his de- scendants likewise had one shoulder white as ivory. Pindar rejects the story, preferring the version that he was carried off by Poseidon, as Canyintdes was taken by the eagle to Olympos. — 01. i. 40.


 * Preller, Cr. Myth. ii. 385.