THE MOLIONES AND AKTORIDAI. V. 253 Storms. But Hermes, Orpheus, Amphîon, and Pan, are not the СНАР. only conceptions of the effects of air in motion to be found in Greek mythology. The Vedic Maruts are the winds, not The as alternately soothing and furious, like the capricious action of Hermes, not as constraining everything to do their magic bidding, like the harping of Orpheus and Amphîon, nor yet as discoursing their plaintive music among the reeds, like the pipe of Pan; but simply in their force as the grinders or crushers of everything that comes in their way. These crushers are found in more than one set of mythical beings in Greek legends. They are the Moliones, or mill-men, or the Aktoridai, the pounders of grain, who have one body but two heads, four hands, and four feet,-who first undertake to aid Herakles in his struggle with Augeias, and then turning against the hero are slain by him near Kleônai. These representatives of Thor Miölnir we see also in the Aloadai,' the sons of Iphimedousa, whose love for Poseidon led her to roam along the sea-shore, pouring the salt water over her body. The myth is transparent enough. They are as mighty in their infancy as Hermes. When they are nine years old, their bodies are nine cubits in breadth and twentyseven in height-a rude yet not inapt image of the stormy wind heaping up in a few hours its vast masses of angry vapour. It was inevitable that the phenomena of storm should suggest their warfare with the gods, and that one version should represent them as successful, the other as vanquished. The storm-clouds scattered by the sun in his might are the Aloadai when defeated by Phoibos before their beards begin to be seen, in other words, before the The identity of the names Aloadai, and Moliones must be determined by the answer to be given to the question, whether awn, a threshing-floor, can be traced back to the root mal which indubitably yields Molionê, uúan, the Latin mola, our mill and meal. There is no proof that certain words may in Greek assume an initial μ which is merely euphonic: but there is abundant evidence that Greek words, which originally began with μ. occasionally drop it. This, Professor Max Müller admits, is a violent change, and it would seem physically unnecessary; but he adduces the analogies of μóoxos and boxos, a tender The idea of the storm as crushing and II. BOOK expanding vapours have time to spread themselves over the sky. The same clouds in their triumph are the Aloadai when they bind Arês and keep him for months in chains, as the gigantic ranges of vapours may be seen sometimes keeping an almost motionless guard around the heaven, while the wind seems to chafe beneath, as in a prison from which it cannot get forth. The piling of the cumuli clouds in the skies is the heaping up of Ossa on Olympos and of Pelion on Ossa to scale the heavens, while their threat to make the sea dry land and the dry land sea is the savage fury of the storm when the earth and the air seem mingled in inextricable confusion. The daring of the giants goes even further. Ephialtes, like Ixîôn, seeks to win Hêrê while Otos follows Artemis, who, in the form of a stag, so runs between the brothers that they, aiming at her at the same time, kill each other, as the thunderclouds perish from their own discharges.1 Arês and Athênê. Arês, the god imprisoned by the Aloadai, whose name he shares, represents like them the storm-wind raging through the sky. As the idea of calm yet keen intellect is inseparable from Athênê, so the character of Arês exhibits simply a blind force without foresight or judgment, and not unfrequently illustrates the poet's phrase that strength without counsel insures only its own destruction. Hence Arês and Athênê are open enemies. The pure dawn can have nothing in common with the cloud-laden and wind-oppressed atmosphere. He is then in no sense a god of war, unless war is taken as mere quarrelling and slaughtering for its own sake. Of the merits of contending parties he has neither knowledge nor care. Where the carcases are likely to lie thickest, thither like a vulture will he go; and thus he becomes preeminently fickle and treacherous,3 the object of hatred and disgust to all the gods, except when, as in the lay of Demodokos, he is loved by Aphroditê. But this legend implies that 2 Otos and Ephialtes, the wind and the hurricane,' i. e. the leaper. Max Müller, Lect. on Lang. second series. Professor Max Müller remarks, ib. 325, that In Ares, Preller, without any thought of the relationship between Ares and the Maruts discovered the personification of the sky as excited by storm.' Athêne then, according to Preller, als Göttin der reinen Luft und des Ethers die naturliche Feindin des Ares ist.'-Gr. Myth. 202. ་ * ἀλλοπρόσαλλος. ARES AND ADONIS. the god has laid aside his fury, and so is entrapped in the coils cast round him by Hephaistos, an episode which merely repeats his imprisonment by the Aloadai. Like these, his body is of enormous size, and his roar, like the roar of a hurricane, is louder than the shouting of ten thousand men. But in spite of his strength, his life is little more than a series of disasters, for the storm-wind must soon be conquered by the powers of the bright heaven. Hence he is defeated by Herakles when he seeks to defend his son Kyknos against that hero, and wounded by Diomêdês, who fights under the protection of Athênê. In the myth of Adonis he is the boar who smites the darling of Aphroditê, of whom he is jealous, as the storm-winds of autumn grudge to the dawn the light of the beautiful summer.' When Herodotos says that Arês was worshipped by Scythian tribes under the form of a sword, to which even human sacrifices were offered, we have to receive his statement with as much caution as the account given by him of the Arês worshipped by the Egyptians. That the deities were worshipped under this Hellenic name, no one will now 255 CHAP. V. CHAPTER VI. THE WATERS. BOOK Proteus and Nereus. SECTION I.-THE DWELLERS IN THE SEA. BETWEEN Proteus, the child of Poseidôn, and Nereus, the son of Pontos, there is little distinction beyond that of name. Both dwell in the waters, and although the name of the latter points more especially to the sea as his abode, yet the power which, according to Apollodoros, he possesses of changing his form at will indicates his affinity to the cloud deities, unless it be taken as referring to the changing face of the ocean with its tossed and twisting waves. It must, however, be noted that, far from giving him this power, the Hesiodic Theogony seems to exclude it by denying to him the capricious fickleness of Proteus. He is called the old man, we are here told, because he is truthful and cannot lie, because he is trustworthy and kindly, because he forgets not law but knows all good counsels and just words-a singular contrast to the being who will yield only to the argument of force. Like Proteus, he is gifted with mysterious wisdom, and his advice guides Herakles in the search for the apples (or flocks) of the Hesperides. His wife Doris is naturally the mother of a goodly offspring, fifty in number, like the children of Danaos, Aigyptos, Thestios, and Asterodia ; but the ingenuity of later mythographers was scarcely equal to the task of inventing for all of them names of decent mythical semblance. Some few, as Amphitrîtê and Galateia, are genuine names for dwellers in the waters; but most of them, as Dynamenê, Pherousa, Proto, Kymodoke, Nesaia, Aktaia, are mere epithets denoting their power and strength, their office or their abode. Of Pontos himself, the father of Nereus, there is even less to be said. In the Hesiodic THE NYMPHS. VI. 257 Theogony he is a son of Gaia alone, as Typhôeus springs CHAP. only from Hêrê and Athênê has no mother. In the Iliad and Odyssey, Pontos is a mere name for the sea; and the phrases πόντος ἁλος πολιῆς and θάλασσα πόντου show that the poets were not altogether unconscious of its meaning and of its affinity with their word máτos, a path. It is therefore a name applied to the sea by a people who, till they had seen the great water, had used it only of roadways on land. In the myth of Thaumas, the son of Pontos and the father of Iris and the Harpyiai, we are again carried back to the phenomena of the heavens; the latter being the greedy storm-clouds stretching out their crooked claws for their prey, the former the rainbow joining the heavens and the earth with its path of light. Another son of Poseidôn, whose home is also in the waters, Glaukos. is the Boiotian Glaukos, the builder of the divine ship Argô and its helmsman. After the fight of Iasôn with the Tyrrhenians, Glaukos sinks into the sea, and thenceforth is endowed with many of the attributes of Nereus. Like him, he is continually roaming, and yearly he visits all the coasts and islands of Hellas; like him, he is full of wisdom, and his words may be implicitly trusted. and Nereids. The domain in which these deities dwell is thickly peopled. Naiads Their subjects and companions are the nymphs, whose name, as denoting simply water, belongs of right to no beings who live on dry land, or in caves or trees. The classification of the nymphs as Oreads, Dryads, or others, is therefore in strictness an impossible one; and the word Naiad, usually confined to the nymphs of the fresh waters, is as general a term as the name Nymph itself. Nor is there any reason beyond that of mere usage why the Nereides should not be called Naiads as well as Nymphs. But the tendency was to multiply classes: and seldom perhaps has the imagination of man been exercised on a more beautiful or harmless subject than the nature and tasks of these beautiful beings who comfort Prometheus in his awful agony and with Thetis cheer Achilleus when his heart is riven with grief for his vuon answers precisely to the lymphaticus corresponds to the Greek Latin lympha, and thus the Latin vμpóληTOS. |