Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/66

34 groundwork for the apologue of Prodikos. Other legends there were which perverted this idea; and in these he is exhibited under gross, uncouth, or repulsive forms. But he goes upon his way, and is hurried on through many lands. In all he has mighty works to do, and he fails in none. The remembrance of Iolê may linger in his memory, but there are others who claim his love in the days of his strength and power, and it would seem as though he had forgotten the daughter of Eurytos. But his time draws towards its close: the beautiful maiden, whose face had gladdened him long ago, returns to cheer him in the evening of his life. With her comes the poisoned robe (the mantle of cloud), which he strives in vain to tear away from his bleeding limbs. In a deeper and redder stream flows the lifeblood, till, after a convulsive struggle, the strife is closed in the dead silence of night.

But it is in the case of Heraklês that the perfect truth of the old mythical language gave rise more especially to that apparently strange and perplexing meaning which repelled and even disgusted the poets and philosophers of Greece. Pindar refuses to believe that any god could be a sensualist or a cannibal; he might in the same spirit have rejected the tales which impute something of meanness or cowardice to the brave and high-souled Heraklês. For Heraklês fights with poisoned arrows, and leaves them as his bequest to Philoktêtês. But the poisoned arrows are the piercing rays which burn in the tropical noon-day, and they reappear as well in the poisoned robe of Deianeira as in that which the Kolchian Medeia professes to have received from her kinsman Hêlios.

A deeper mythical meaning, however, underlies and accounts for the immorality and licence which was introduced into the transmuted legend of Heraklês. The sun looks down on the earth, and the earth answers to his loving glance by her teeming and inexhaustible fertility. In every land she yields her special harvest of fruits and flowers, of corn and wine and oil. Her children are countless, but all spring up under the eye of the sun as he journeys through the wide heaven. It is easy to see what must be the result when the sun is transmuted into the human, yet god-like, Heraklês, and how repulsive that myth must become which, in its primitive form, only told how

The same explanation removes the mystery of the even greater degradation to which the Hellenic mythology reduces Zeus himself, the