KARNOS AND CHRYSÊS. the preparations are on a scale which may remind us in some degree of the brilliant gathering of the Achaian chieftains with their hosts in Aulis. A fleet is built at the entrance of the Corinthian gulf, at a spot which hence bore the name of Naupaktos, and the three sons of Aristomachos, Aristodemos, Temenos and Kresphontes, make ready for the last great enterprise. But Aristodemos is smitten by lightning before he can pass over into the heritage of his fathers, and his place is taken by his twin sons Eurysthenes and Prokles, in whose fortunes we see that rivalry and animosity which, appearing in its germ in the myth of the Dioskouroi, is brought to a head in the story of Eteokles and Polyneikes, the sons of Oidipous. The sequel exhibits yet other points of resemblance to the story of the Trojan war. The soothsayer Chrysês reappears as the prophet Karnos, whose death by the hand of Hippotês answers to the insults offered to Chrysês by Agamemnon. In either case the wrath of Apollon is roused, and a plague is the consequence. The people die of famine, nor is the hand of the god lifted from off them, until, as for Chrysês, a full atonement and recompense is made. Hippotês is banished, and the chiefs are then told to take as their guide the three-eyed man, who is found in the Aitolian Oxylos who rides on a one-eyed horse. But as the local myth exhibited Tisamenos the son of Orestes as at this time the ruler of Peloponnesos, that prince must be brought forward as the antagonist of the returning Herakleids; and a great battle follows in which he is slain, while, according to one version, Pamphylos and Dymas, the sons of the Dorian Aigimios, fall on the side of the invaders. With the partition of the Peloponnesos among the conquerors the myth comes to an end. Argos falls to the lot of Temenos, while Sparta becomes the portion of the sons of Aristodemos, and Messênê that of Kresphontes. A sacrifice is offered by way of thanksgiving by these chiefs on their respective altars; and as they drew near to complete the rite, on the altar of Sparta was seen a serpent, on that of Argos a toad, on that of Messênê a fox. The soothsayers were, of course, ready with their interpretations. The slow and sluggish toad denoted the dull and unenterprising dis 183 CHAP. III. BOOK II. position of the future Argive people; the serpent betokened the terrible energy of the Spartans; the fox, the wiliness and cunning of the Messenians. As indications of national character, more appropriate emblems might perhaps have been found; but it may be noted that the toad or frog reappears in the Hindu legend of Bhekî, the frog-sun, and in the German story of the frog-prince; that the serpent in this legend belongs to the class of dragons which appear in the myths of Helios, Medeia and Iamos; and that the Messenian fox is an animal closely akin to the wolf which we meet in the myths of the Lykian Apollôn and the Arkadian Lykâôn.1 Adrastos and Amphiaraos. SECTION IV.-THE THEBAN WARS. In spite of all differences of detall between the legends of the Trojan and the Theban wars, the points of resemblance are at the least as worthy of remark. In each case there are two wars and two sieges; and if the Argive chiefs under Adrastos are not so successful as Herakles with his six ships at Ilion, still the Trojan power was no more destroyed by the latter than that of Eteokles was crushed by Polyneikes and his allies. In either case also there is a hero whose presence is indispensable to the success of the enterprise. In the Theban story this hero is Amphiaraos, the Achilleus of the Trojan legend in this its most important feature: and as Troy cannot fall unless Achilleus fights against it, so the Argives cannot hope to take Thebes unless Amphiaraos goes with them. But as neither Achilleus nor Odysseus wished to fight in a quarrel which was not their own, so Amphiaraos shrinks from any concern in a contest in which the prophetic mind inherited by him from his ancestor Melampous tells him that all the chiefs engaged in it must die The three sons, Aristodemos, Temenos and Kresphontes, who in this stage of the myth represent the line of Herakles, are seen again in the three sons of the German Mann, the Mannus of Tacitus: but the names in the Teutonic story are more significant. The names of the three great tribes, Ingævones, Iscævones, Herminones. point to Yng, Askr, and Irmin. To Yng, probably, we may trace the English name: in Askr we see the ashborn man, the race of which the Greek spoke as sprung èk μeλiây: Irmin is the old Saxon god, whose name is familiar to us under its later form Herman, the Arminius of Tacitus. Max Müller, Lectures. second series, 458. AMPHIARAOS AND ERIPHYLÊ. 185 III. with the one exception of Adrastos. But he had promised CHAP. the Argive king that in any differences which might arise between them he would abide by the decision of his wife Eriphylê, and Eriphylê had been bribed by Polyneikes with the gift of the necklace and peplos of Harmonia to decide in favour of the expedition. Thus Amphiaraos departs for Thebes with a presentiment of his own coming doom as strong as the consciousness of Achilleus that his career must be brief; but before he sets out, he charges his sons Amphilochos and Alkmaion to slay their mother, so soon as they hear of his death, and to march against the hated city of Thebes; and thus the starting point was furnished not only for the Theban war, but for a new series of woes to be wrought by the Erinyes of Eriphylê. of Oidi pous. The germs of the rivalry, which in the case of the sons of The son Oidipous grew into a deadly hatred, are seen in the points of contrast afforded by almost all the correlative deities of Greek and Vedic mythology, and the twin heroes whether of the east or the west.1 Thus there is a close parallel between the Dioskouroi and the sons of Oidipous. The former may not be seen together; the latter agree to reign over Thebes in turn; and it was a ready device to account for the subsequent feud by saying that the brother whose time was over refused to abide by his compact. Hence Polyneikes became an exile; but it is not easy to determine precisely to what degree a purely moral element has forced its way into this series of legends from the horror which a union like that of Iokastê and Oidipous, when regarded as a fact in the lives of two human beings, could not fail to inspire. Here also the Erinys might exercise her fatal office, for the blood of Iokastê must cry for vengeance as loudly as that of Iphigeneia or Amphiaraos; and the same feeling which suggested the curse of Amphiaraos on Eriphylê would also suggest the curse of Oidipous on his children. In the They are, in short, the rival brothers not only of the royal houses of Sparta, but in a vast number of stories in Aryan folk-lore, and are represented by Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful in Grimm's collection, by True and Untrue, by Big Peter and BOOK Tydeus. older poems on the subject this curse was pronounced for offences not very grave, if regarded merely from an ethical point of view. His sons had been accustomed to bring him the shoulders of victims offered in sacrifice, and they once brought him a thigh. At another time they put before him the table and the wine-cup of Kadmos, although he had charged them never to do so. But the former of these two acts implied a slight like that which Prometheus put upon Zeus when giving him the choice of the portion for the gods; and the latter made him think of the golden days when he sat down with Iokastê to banquets as brilliant as those of the long-lived Aithiopians and drank purple wine from the inexhaustible horn of Amaltheia. But to Sophoklês, who looked at the matter simply as a moralist, these causes were so inadequate that he at once charged the sons with cruel treatment of their father, whom they drove away from his home to fight with poverty as well as blindness. Polyneikes, when in his turn an exile, betook himself to Argos where he fell in with Tydeus,' with whom he quarrels. But it had been shown long ago to Adrastos that he should wed his two daughters to a lion and a boar; and when he found these two men fighting, with shields which had severally the sign of the boar and the lion, he came to the conclusion that these were the destined husbands of Argeia and Deipylê. Hence also he readily agreed to avenge the alleged wrongs of Polyneikes, and the league was soon formed, which in the later Attic legend carried the Seven Argive Chiefs to the walls of Thebes, but which for the poets of the Thebais involved as large a gathering as that of the chieftains who assembled to hunt the Kalydonian boar or to recover the Golden Fleece. How far these poets may have succeeded in imparting to their subject the charm of our Iliad or Odyssey, the scanty fragments of the poem which alone we possess make it impossible to say; but there was more than one incident in the struggle which might be so treated as fairly to win for the poem a title to the high This name, like that of Tyndareôs, means apparently the hammerer. The two forms may be compared with the Latin tundo, tutudi, to beat. The idea conveyed by the word is thus precisely that of Thor Miölnir, of the Molionids and the Aloadai. THE DEATH OF AMPHIARÃOS. praise bestowed upon it by Pausanias. Thus the story told by Diomêdês of his father Tydeus when sent to Thebes to demand the restoration of Polyneikes reproduces in part the story of Bellerophôn.2 Victorious in the strife of boxing or wrestling to which he had challenged the Kadmeians, he is assailed on his way back to the Argive host by an ambuscade of fifty Thebans, all of whom he slays except Maion, who is saved by the special intervention of the gods. So too the prophecy of Teiresias that the Thebans should be conquerors in the war if Arês received the youthful Menoikeus as a victim, must be compared with those utterances of Kalchas which sealed the doom of Iphigeneia and Polyxena; and finally when the Argives are routed and Periklymenos is about to slay Amphiaraos, we see in his rescue by the earth which receives him with his chariot and horses another form of the plunge of Endymiôn into the sea or of the leap of Kephalos from the Leukadian cape. It is the vanishing from mortal sight of the sun which can never die, and so the story went that Zeus thus took away Amphiaraos that he might make him immortal. This first assault of the Argives against Thebes answers to the ineffectual attempts of the Herakleidai to recover their paternal inheritance. It was therefore followed by a second attack in the struggle known as the war of the Epigonoi, or the children of the discomfited chiefs of the former expedition. But it must be noted that as the Herakleids find a refuge in Athens after the slaughter of Hyllos by Echemos, so Adrastos, who alone had been saved from the carnage by the speed of his horse Areion, betakes himself to the Attic Eleusis, whence Theseus marches against the Thebans to insist on the surrender and the burial of the dead, an incident in which the historical Athenians took pride as an actual event in their annals. The doom of Thebes was now come, and the Epigonoi approach like the Herakleidai when their period of inforced idleness is at an end. The Thebans are utterly routed by the Argives under Alkmaion, the son of Amphiaraos; and Teiresias declares I ix. 9, 3. Grote, History of Greece, i. 364. 2 Il. iv. 384, et seq. 187 СНАР. III. The war of the Epi gonoi. |