Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/591

Rh extent in the Trojan legend. The warmer hues which are seen in the pictures of Phoibos, Perseus, and Herakles have been shed over the features even of Paris himself, while Glaukos, Sarpedoh, and RIemnon are children of the dawn who come from the gleaming eastern lands watered by golden streams. Hence it is that Aphrodite the dawn- goddess has her child Aineias within the Trojan lines ; and when the brave Hektor has been smitten beneath the spear of Achilleus, she keeps his body from decay as Athene watched over the corpse of Patroklos.

Thus far the struggle between the bright being and his enemy Contrast has been entirely physical ; and nothing more than the faintest germs Hindu and of moral sentiment or conviction as attaching to this conflict can be Iranian traced in the mythology whether of the Hindus or of the Western Ar}'ans. In the mere expression of the wish that the wicked Vritra might not be suffered to reign over the worshippers of Indra, and in the admission made by Zeus ^ that the fight between the Kronid gods and the Titans is one for sovereignty or subjection, for life or death, we have all that we can cite as symptoms of that marvellous change which on Iranian soil converted this myth of Vritra into a religion and a philosophy. So completely does the system thus developed exhibit a metaphysical character, and so distinctly does it seem to point to a purely intellectual origin, that we might well doubt the identity of Ahriman and Vritra, were it not that an identity of names and attributes runs through the Vedic and Iranian myths to a degree which makes doubt impossible.

This agreement in names is indeed far more striking between the identity of Hindu and Persian mythology than between that of the former and the Greeks. The names of Ahi, Vritra, Sarama, and the Panis Persian reappear in the west as Echidna, Orthros, Helene, and Paris; but Trita or Traitana as a name of the god of the air has been lost, and we fail to find the form Orthrophontes as a parallel to Vritrahan, although such epithets as Leophontes and Bellerophontes would lead us to expect it. In the Zendavesta not merely does this name seem but little changed, as Verethragna,^ but we also find the Trita, Yama, and Krisasva of the Veda in the Yima-Kshaeta, Thraetana, and Keresaspa of the Avesta, the representatives of three of the earliest

' Hesiod, T/icoj;. 6^6, ' Gulieinatis, Zoological Mytliolo!;}', ii. 172.