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harmony and concord than those of many other pairs of twins in Aryan story. These sons of Belos marry many wives, and while Aigyptos has fifty sons, Danaos has fifty daughters, numbers which must be compared with the fifty daughters of Nereus or the fifty children of Endymion and Asterodia. The action of the story begins with the tyranny of Aigyptos and his sons over Danaos and his daughters. By the aid of Athênê, Danaos builds a fifty-oared vessel, and departing with his children, comes first to the Rhodian Lindos, then to Argos, where they disembark near Lernai during a time of terrible drought caused by the wrath of Poseidon. He at once sends his daughters to seek for water; and Amymonê (the blameless), chancing to hit a Satyr while aiming at a stag, is rescued from his hot pursuit by Poseidôn whose bride she becomes and who calls up for her the never-failing fountain of Lerna. But Aigyptos and his sons waste little time in following them. At first they exhibit all their old vehemence and ferocity, but presently changing their tone, they make proposals to marry, each, one of the fifty Danaides. The proffer is accepted in apparent friendship; but on the day of the wedding Danaos places a dagger in the hands of each maiden, and charges her to smite her husband before the day again breaks upon the earth. His bidding is obeyed by all except Hypermnestra (the overloving or gentle) who prefers to be thought weak and wavering rather than to be a murderess. All the others cut off the heads of the sons of Aigyptos, and bury them in the marshland of Lerna, while they placed their bodies at the gates of the city: from this crime they were purified by Athênê and Hermes at the bidding of Zeus, who thus showed his approval of their deed. Nevertheless, the story grew up that in the world of the dead the guilty daughters of Danaos were condemned to pour water everlastingly into sieves.

Danaos had now to find husbands for his eight and forty and Lyn- daughters, Hypermnestra being still married to Lynkeus and Amymone to Poseidôn. This he found no easy task, but at length he succeeded through the device afterwards

keus.

With this number we may compare the fifty daughters of Daksha in Hindu mythology, and of Thestios, and the fifty sons of Pailas and Priam.

DANAOS AND GELANOR.

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adopted, we are told, by Kleisthenes. There were, however, CHAP. versions which spoke of them as all slain by Lynkeus, who also put Danaos himself to death. There is little that is noteworthy in the rest of the legend, unless it be the way in which he became chief in the land where the people were after him called Danaoi. The dispute for supremacy between himself and Gelanor is referred to the people, and the decision is to be given on the following day, when, before the appointed hour, a wolf rushed in upon the herd feeding before the gates and pulled down the leader. The wolf was, of course, the minister of the Lykian Apollôn; the stricken herd were the subjects of the native king, and the smitten ox was the king himself. The interpretation was obvious, and Gelanor had to give way to Danaos.

What is the meaning and origin cf this strange tale? Origin of With an ingenuity which must go far towards producing the myth. conviction, Preller answers this question by a reference to the physical geography of Argolis. Not much, he thinks, can be done by referring the name Danaos to the root da, to burn, which we find in Ahanâ, Dahanâ, and Daphnê,1 as denoting the dry and waterless nature of the Argive soil. This dryness, he remarks, is only superficial, the whole territory being rich in wells or fountains which, it must be specially noted, are in the myth assigned as the works of Danaos, who causes them to be dug. These springs were the object of a special veneration, and the fifty daughters of Danaos are thus the representatives of the many Argive wells or springs, and belong strictly to the ranks of water nymphs.2 In the summer these springs may fail. Still later even the beds of the larger streams, as of the Inachos or the Kephisos, may be left dry, while in the rainy portion of the year these Charadrai or Cheimarroi, winter flowing streams, come down with great force and overflow their banks. Thus the myth resolves itself into phrases which described ori

The objection on the score of the quantity of the first syllable, which in Danaos is short, while in Daphnê and davà túλa, wood easily inflammable, it is long, is perhaps one on which too much stress should not be laid.

2 If the name Danaos itself denotes water, it must be identified with Tanais, Don, Donau, Tyne, Teign, Tone, and other forms of the Celtic and Slavonie words for a running stream.

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BOOK ginally these alternations of flood and drought. The downward rush of the winter torrents is the wild pursuit of the sons of Aigyptos, who threaten to overwhelm the Danaides, or nymphs of the fountains; but as their strength begins to fail, they offer themselves as their husbands, and are taken at their word. But the time for vengeance has come; the waters of the torrents fail more and more, until their stream is even more scanty than that of the springs. In other words, they are slain by their wives, who draw or cut off the waters from their sources. These sources are the heads of the rivers, and thus it is said that the Danaides cut off their husbands' heads. A precise parallel to this myth is furnished by the Arkadian tale, which speaks of Skephros (the droughty) as slandering or reviling Leimon (the moist or watery being), and as presently slain by Leimon, who in his turn is killed by Artemis. If in place of the latter we substitute the Danaides, and for the former the sons of Aigyptos, we have at once the Argive tradition. The meaning becomes still more obvious when we mark the fact that the Danaides threw the heads into the marsh-grounds of Lernai (in other words, that there the sources of the waters were preserved according to the promise of Poseidon that that fountain should never fail), while the bodies of the sons of Aigyptos, the dry beds of the rivers, were exposed in the sight of all the people. It may therefore well be doubted whether the name Aigyptos itself be not a word which may in its earlier form have shown its affinity with Aigai, Aigaion, Aigialos, Aigaia, and other names denoting simply the breaking or dashing of water against the shores of the sea or the banks of a river.1

The Lyrkeios.

But one of the Danaides refused or failed to slay her husband. The name of this son of Aigyptos is Lynkeus, a myth to which Pausanias furnishes a clue by giving its other form Lyrkeios. But Lyrkeios was the name given to the river Inachos in the earlier portion of its course, and thus this story would simply mean that although the other streams

1 Preller thinks that when the idea of a foreign origin for Aigyptos and Danaos was once suggested, the Nile with its yearly inundations and shrink

ings presented an obvious point of comparison with the Cheimarroi or wintertorrents of the Peloponnesos. Gr. Myth. ii. 47.

were quite dried up, the waters of the Lyrkeios did not CHAP. wholly fail.1

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madness of Herakles falls on Athamas, who carries out the sentence of the Pythia by slaying his son Learchos. The drought has reached its height; and Inô, with her other child, Melikertes, casts herself into the sea. Left alone, Athamas now asks whither he must go and where he may find a home: and the answer is that he must make his abode where wild beasts receive him hospitably. This welcome he finds in a spot where wolves, having torn some sheep, leave for him the untasted banquet. The beasts must needs be wolves, and the country of which he thus becomes the lord is the Aleian plain, through which the lonely Bellerophôn wandered in the closing days of his life.

The Phaiakians.

SECTION II.-THE CLOUD-LAND.

Nephele then is the mist of morning tide, which vanishes, like Daphne and Arethousa, when the sun becomes Chrysâôr. The myths of the earth under its many names bring the clouds before us in other forms, as the Kourêtês, who weave their mystic dances round the infant Zeus; the Idaian Daktyls, who impart to the harp of Orpheus its irresistible power; and the marvellous Telchînes, who can change their forms at will. But the cloud-land in all its magnificence and imperial array is displayed not so much in these isolated stories as in the great Phaiakian legend of the Odyssey. It may be safely said that there is scarcely a single detail in this marvellous narrative which fails to show the nature and the origin of the subjects of Alkinoös. We may, if we please, regard them as a people settled historically in the island known to us as Korkyra or Corfu; and with Preller or other writers we may lay stress on the fact that they are altogether a people of ships and of the sea, living far away from mortal men near the western Okeanos; but no one who wishes really to get at the truth of facts can thus convince himself that he has solved the problem. Whether Scheria be or be not the Mediterranean Korkyra, the meaning of most of the names occurring in the myth is beyond all doubt; and we have simply to follow the poet as he tells the 1 See p. 261.