Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/573

Rh CHAP. I years in Ilion/ as the clouds are shut up in the prison-house of the Panis, and that the fight between Paris and Menelaos with his Achaian hosts ends in a discomfiture precisely corresponding to the defeat and death of Pani by the spear of Indra, we have in fact noted every feature in the western legend which identifies Paris with the dark powers, and invests him with the beauty of jMedousa.

In the Odyssey, Sarama reappears as in the older Vedic portraits, Helen and pure and unswerving in her fidelity to her absent lord. The dark powers or Panis are here the suitors who crowd around the beautiful Penelope, while Odysseus is journeying homewards from the plains of Ilion. But the myth has here reached a later stage, and the treasures of Indra are no longer the refreshing rain-clouds, but the wealth which Odysseus has left stored up in his home, and which the suitors waste at their will The temptation of Penelope assumes the very form of the ordeal which Sarama is obliged to go through. She, too, shall have her share of the t "asures, if she will but submit to become the wife of any one of the chiefs who are striving for her hand. The wheedling and bullying of the Panis in the Vedic hymns are reproduced in the alternate coaxing and blustering of the western suitors ; but as Sarama rejects their offers, strong through the might of the absent Indra, so Penelope has her scheme for frustrating the suitors' plans, trusting in the midst of all her grief and agony that Odysseus will assuredly one day come back. This device adheres with singular fidelity to the phenomena w^hich mark the last moments of a summer day. Far above, in the upper regions of Hypereia, where the beautiful Phaiakians dwelt before the uncouth Kyklopes sought to do them mischief, the fairy network of cirri clouds is seen at sundown flushing with deeper tints as the chariot of the lord of day sinks lower in the sky. This is the network of the weaver Penelope, who like lole spreads her veil of violet clouds over the heaven in the morning and in the evening. Below it, stealing up from the dark waters, are seen the sombre clouds which blot the light from the horizon, and rise from right and left as with out- stretched arms, to clasp the fairy forms which still shed their beauty over the upper heavens. At first their efi"orts are vain; twice it may be, or thrice, the exquisite network fades from sight,

' This Ilion Dr. O. Meyer, in his to a mere name, and that therefore it Quas/iones HomericcB, has sought to may have originally retained its purely identify with the Sanskrit word vl/u, appellative power in Greek as well as in which he translates by stronghold. On Sanskrit, and from meaning a stronghold this Professor Max Miiller {Rig Veda in general, have come to mean the Sanhita, i. 31) remarks " that vl/ii in stronghold of Troy." the Veda has not dwindled down as yet