Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/577

Rh the Kronid Zeus. Of these beings it is enough to say that later my- CHAP. thologists arranged their names and their functions almost at their • : vvilL Among the former appear some, as Hyperion and Phoibe. which are elsewhere mere names for the sun and moon ; and in thi? its later form the myth is little more than an attempt to explain how it was that Kronos, time, was not able to devour and destroy all his children. With this insatiable parent Zeus must be inevitably en- gaged in an internecine war, the issue of which could not be doubtful. The thunder-bolts by which Indra overwhelms his foe reappear in the Greek myth as the Kyklopes and the Hekatoncheires or hundred- handed beings whom on the advice of Gaia the king of the blue heaven summons from the depths of Tartaros into which Kronos and his associates are hurled. This struggle is, indeed, reproduced in myth after myth. The enemies who had assailed Ouranos are seen once more in the Gigantes or earth-born beings who league them- selves against all the gods. These giants are mentioned in Hesiod merely as children sprung from Gaia along with the Erinyes after the mutilation of Ouranos. Elsewhere they are a horrible race destroyed for their impiety, fearful in aspect, and like Echidna and Ahi, with snaky bodies.'^ Against these foes even Zeus himself is powerless unless he can gain the help of the mortal Herakles, and the latter in his turn can prevail over Alkyoneus only by taking him away from his own soil, from which, like Antaios, he rises with renewed strength after every downfall. When at length the struggle is ended, the giants are imprisoned, like the Titans, beneath the islands of the sea.

The main features of the myths of Vritra, Gerj-on, and Echidna Hercules reappear in the singular Latin legend known to us as that of Hercules and Cacus. This story had undergone strange transformations before it assumed its Euemerised forms in the hands of Livy and of the Halikarnassian Dionysios, with whom even the account which he re- jects as mythical has been carefully stripped of all supernatural in- cidents. According to Dionysios, Herakles, driving before him the oxen of Geryon, had reached the Palatine hill when, as in the myth of Echidna, he was overcome by sleep. On waking he found that some of his cattle had been stolen by some thief who had dragged them away by their tails. Doubtless Dionysios means that Herakles saw through the clumsy device, which the writer of the Homeric hymn

• Paus. viii. 29, 3.