MEDEIA AND ABSYRTOS. incidents which follow their arrival in Kolchis repeat in part the myth of Kadmos at Thebes; and indeed the teeth of the dragon which Aiêtês bids him sow are the very teeth which Kadmos had not needed to use. The men who spring from them fight with and slay each other as in the Theban legend, and by the aid of Medeia Iasôn also tames the firebreathing bulls, beings which answer to the Minotauros of Crete and the brazen bull in which Phalaris is said to have burnt his victims.' Dangers thicken round them. While Iason is thus doing the bidding of the chieftain, Aiêtês is forming a plan to burn the Achaian ships, and is anticipated only by Medeia, who has lavished her love on Iason with all the devotion of Eôs for Orion. She hastens with her lover on board the Argo, and hurriedly leaves Kolchis, taking with her her brother Absyrtos. But Aiêtês is not yet prepared to yield. The Gorgon sisters cannot rest without at the least making an effort to avenge Medousa on her destroyer Perseus. Aiêtês is fast overtaking the Argo when Medeia tears her brother's body limb from limb, and casts the bleeding and mangled members into the sea-an image of the torn and blood-red clouds reflected in the blue waters, as the blood which streams from the body of Herakles represents the fiery clouds stretched along the flaming sky. But Absyrtos is as dear to Aiêtês as Polyphêmos to Poseidon; and as he stops to gather up the limbs, the Argo makes her way onward, and the Kolchian chief has of ice should have been formed in so vast a basin, borne down from the Northern rivers. When the lake burst its barriers, they would be carried by the current towards the entrance of the straits, and there become stranded, as the story says that in fact they did.'Pindar, introd. xxiv. Among other myths pointing to physical facts of a past age Mr. Paley cites the story of the rising of Rhodos from the sea, comparing with it the fact of the recent upheaval of part of Santorin, the ancient Thera, and the old legend of the upheaving of Delos, as all showing th these islands lie within an area of known volcanic disturbance.' Of any historical Phalaris we know absolutely nothing; and the tradition simply assigns to him the character of the Phenician Moloch. The iniquities 2 The same fate is allotted to Myrtilos, 153 CHAP. III. BOOK Iason and to return home discomfited. The Achaians are now possessed of the golden fleece, but Zeus also is wroth at the death of Absyrtos, and raises a storm, of which the results are similar to those of the tempest raised by Poseidôn to avenge the mutilation of Polyphêmos. In fact, the chief incidents in the return of Odysseus we find here also, in the magic songs of the Seirens, and the wisdom of Kirkê, in Skylla and Charybdis and the Phaiakian people. From the Seirens they are saved by the strains of Orpheus, strains even sweeter than theirs, which make the stuffing of the sailors' ears with wax a work of supererogation. It is useless to go into further detail. The accounts given of the course of the voyage vary indefinitely in the different mythographers, each of whom sought to describe a journey through countries and by tracks least known to himself, and therefore the most mysterious. The geography, in short, of the Argonautic voyage is as much and as little worth investigating as the geography of the travels of Iô and the sons and daughters of her descendants Danaos and Aigyptos. The prophecy uttered long ago to Pelias remained yet unfulfilled; and when Iasôn returned to Iolkos, he found, like Odysseus on his return to Ithaka, according to some versions, that his father Aison was still living, although worn out with age. The wise woman Medeia is endowed with the powers of Asklepios by virtue of the magic robe bestowed on her by Helios himself, and these powers are exercised in making Aison young again. Pelias too, she says, shall recover all his ancient strength and vigour, if his daughters will cut up his limbs and boil them in a caldron; but when they do her bidding, Medeia suffers the limbs to waste away without pronouncing the words which would have brought him to life again. Thus is Iasôn, like Oidipous and Perseus, Cyrus and Romulus, one of the fatal children whose doom it is to slay their sires. The sequel of the myth of lasôn has few, if any, features peculiar to itself. Iasôn can no more be constant to Medeia than Theseus to Ariadnê or Phoibos to Korônis. At Corinth he sees the beautiful Glaukê, another of the bright beings whose dwelling is in the morning or evening sky; but the nuptials must be as fatal as those of Iolê and Herakles. THE CHILDREN OF MEDEIA. 155 III. The robe of Helios, which has been thus far only the golden CHAP. fleece under another name, now assumes the deadly powers of the arrows of Herakles, Achilleus, or Philoktêtês, and eats into the flesh of Glaukê and her father Kreôn, as the robe bathed in the blood of the Kentaur Nessos consumed the body of Herakles. In the murder of the children of Iason by their mother Medeia we have only another version of the slaughter of Pelops by Tantalos, while the winged dragons which bear away her chariot are not the dragons of the night, like the snakes which seek to strangle the infant Herakles, but the keener-eyed serpents of the morning, which feed the babe Iamos with honey in the violet beds. But this portion of the story may be told, and is told, in a hundred different ways. In one version she goes to Thebes, and there cures Herakles of his poisoned wound; in another she is reconciled to Iasôn; in another she becomes the wife of Aigeus, king of Athens, and the enemy of his son Theseus. Others again carry Iasôn back with Medeia to Kolchis, or make him die, crushed beneath the timber-head of the Argo. SECTION II.-HELEN. Helen. There was, however, no need to carry Iasôn and Medeia The with her golden robe back again to the eastern land. The wealth of treasure brought back from that distant shore could not remain long in the west; and in the stealing away of Helen and her wealth we have an incident which, from the magnificent series of myths to which it has given birth or with which it is interwoven, seems to dwarf almost every other feature in the mythical history of the Aryan nations. The story has been complicated with countless local traditions; it has received a plausible colouring from the introduction. of accurate geographical details, of portraits which may be true to national character, of accounts of laws, customs, and usages, which doubtless prevailed at the time when the poet wrote. Yet in spite of epithets which may still be applied to the ruins of Tiryns and Mykenai, in spite of the cairns which still bear the names of Achilleus or of Aias on the shores of the strong-flowing Hellespontos, Helen is simply the radiant BOOK II. The stealing of Helen and her treasures. light, whether of the morning or the evening.' As Saramâ, the dawn which peers about in search of the bright cows which the Panis have stolen from Indra, we have seen her already listening, though but for a moment, to the evil words of the robbers. These evil words are reproduced in the sophistry of the Trojan Paris, who is only a little more successful than the thief of the Vedic hymns, and the momentary unfaithfulness of the one becomes the long-continued faithlessness of the other. But it is a faithlessness more in seeming than in fact. Helen is soon awakened from her evil dream, and her heart remains always in beautiful Argos, in the house of her husband who never showed her anything but kindness and love. Though Paris is beautiful, yet she feels that she has nothing in common with him, and thus she returns with a chastened joy to the home from which she had been taken away. But to be stolen or persecuted for her beauty was the lot of Helen almost from her cradle. In the myth of Theseus she is brought into Attica, and guarded in early youth by Aithra in the stronghold of Aphidnai until she is delivered by her brothers, the Dioskouroi; and when she had been stolen by Paris, and spent ten weary years in Troy, she is said in some versions to have become the wife of Deiphobos, another son of Priam, and another representative of the dark beings who own kinship with the Vedic Vritra. When Paris is slain, the brother of the seducer will not suffer Helen to be given up to the Achaians; and thus, on the fall of Ilion, his house is the first to be set on fire. Even after her death the fate of Helen is not changed. In Leukê, the white island of the dawn, she is wedded to Achilleus, and becomes the mother of Euphorion, the winged child who is first loved and then smitten by the thunderbolts of Zeus in Melos.2 Throughout she is a being not belonging to the land of mortal men. She is sprung from the egg of Leda, the being to whom Zeus comes in the form of a swan, and This is fully recognised by Preller, who compares her, as such, with the Mater Matuta of the Latins. Gr. Myth. ii. 108. But Achilleus has Iphigeneia and Medeia also as his brides in this bright island and these are simply other names for the dawn or the evening light. HELENÉ DENDRITIS. her brothers are the Dioskouroi, or Asvins. When the time for her marriage draws nigh, suitors come thronging from all parts of Hellas, their numbers being one for each day of the lunar month--a myth which simply tells us that every day the sun woos the dawn. In the Iliad she is never spoken of except as the daughter of Zeus; and Isokrates notices the sacrifices offered in Therapnai to her and to Menelaos, not as heroes but as gods. She is worshipped by the women of Sparta as the source of all fruitfulness, and in Argos as the mother of Iphigeneia, the child of Theseus, and as having dedicated a temple to Eileithyia.2 In Rhodes she is Helenê Dendritis, and a wild legend was invented to account for the name. Lastly, the myth of her journey to Ilion and her return is in its framework simply the myth of Augê, the mother of Telephos, like her, taken away to the same land, and, like her, brought back again when all enemies have been overcome." 157 CHAP. III. Gulban. This is, practically, the Gaelic story of Conall Gulban, The story which may be fairly regarded as embodying a whole cycle of of Conall mythical tradition. The materials of which it is made up carry us to a vast number of legends in Aryan mythology, but the main story is that of Herakles, Achilleus, and Helen. Conall himself is the solar hero, despised at first for his homely appearance and seeming weakness, but triumphant in the end over all his enemies. Nay, as he becomes an idiot in the Lay of the Great Fool, so here he is emphatically Analkis, the coward. But he is resolved nevertheless to 1 Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 109-110; I. iii. 426; Od. iv. 184, &c.: Isokr. Helen. Enkom. 63. * Paus. ii. 22, 7. Id. ii. 19, 10. This story relates that Helen, being persecuted by Megapenthes and Nikostratos after the death of Menelaos, took refuge at Rhodes in the house of Polyxô, who, being angry with Helen as the cause of the Trojan war and thus of the death of her husband Tlepolemos whom Sarpêdôn slew, sent some maidens, disguised as Erinyes, who surprised Helen while bathing, and hung her up to a tree. This myth is simply a picture of the dawn rising like Aphroditê from the sea; and it preserves the recollection of the Erinyes as dawn-goddesses, while it This myth is to Preller eine |