Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/562

530 BOOK II. The Latin Silanus. Priapos.

dymion, he plunges beneath the waters. A faint reflexion of similar ideas seems to mark the story which accounted for the ass's ears, as a punishment for adjudging the prize to Marsyas in his contest with Phoibos. It now becomes a mysterious secret; but his servant discovers it, and being unable to keep it to himself, digs a hole and whispers into it that Midas has ass's ears. A reed growing up on the spot repeats the words, and the rushes all round take up the strain, and publish the fact to all the world.

The name of Seilenos as a water-sprite suggests to Preller its affinity with the Italian Silanus, a word for gushing or bubbling water j nor is it easy to avoid a comparison with the Seirenes, who, like Seilenos, haunt the waters. As the dweller in the fertilising streams, he can bestow draughts of wonderful sweetness ; and the wine which his son Evanthes gives to Odysseus is pronounced by Polyphemos to be more delicious than honey. As such also, he is the guardian and teacher of Dionysos, for from the life-giving streams alone can the grape acquire its sweetness and its power.

But this higher and more dignified aspect of Seilenos, which led Plato to speak ofSokrates as getting wisdom from him as well as from his scholar Marsyas, was obscured in the folk-lore of the western tribes by the characteristics of jollity and intemperance exhibited by the Satyrs and the Herakles whom they cheat and tease, while his office as the fertiliser of the vineyard brought him into close con- nexion with Priapos, who exhibits the merely sensuous idea of repro- duction in its grossest form, and of whom we need only say here that he is a son of Dionysos, Adonis, Hermes, or Pan, while his mother is Aphrodite or the Naiad Chione, names denoting simply the relations of the waters with the winds or the sun.^

with the O.N. friofr, fecundus, Goth, frair, seed, is, in short, only a coarser form of Vishnu, Proteus, Onnes, and other like beings : and as such, he has like them the power of predicting th'ngs to come. The same idea ^^ as expressed by the Latin Mutinus, Mutunus, or Mut- tunus, who was represented by the same symb/jU
 * Priapos, which Grimm connects