DIONYSOS THE WANDERER. 295 VIII. the prominent feature in the later developements of the wan- CHAP. dering wine-god. It is unnecessary to trace these journeys in detail, for when the notion was once suggested, every country and even every town would naturally frame its own story of the wonderful things done by Dionysos as he abode in each. Thus he flays Damaskos alive for refusing to allow the introduction of the vine which Dionysos had discovered, and a false etymology suggested the myth that a tiger bore him across the river Tigris. But wherever he goes there is the same monotonous exhibition of fury and frenzy by which mothers become strange unto their own flesh and maidens abandon themselves to frantic excitement. All this is merely translating into action phrases which might tell of the manifest powers of the wine-god; and the epithets applied to him show that these phrases were not limited merely to his exciting or maddening influences. In his gentler aspects he is the giver of joy, the healer of sicknesses, the guardian against plagues. As such he is even a lawgiver, and a promoter of peace and concord. As kindling new or strange thoughts in the mind, he is a giver of wisdom and the revealer of hidden secrets of the future. In this, as his more genuine and earlier character, he is attended by the beautiful Charites, the maidens and ministers of the dawn-goddess Aphroditê, who give place in the later mythology to fearful troops of raging Mainades or Bassarides, bearing in their hands the budding thyrsus, which marks the connection of this cultus with that of the great restoring or revivifying forces of the world. The changes which come over the person of Dionysos are The woin accordance with the natural facts indicated by his attri- manly Dionysos. butes. Weak and seemingly helpless in his infancy, like Hermes or Phoibos himself, he is to attain in the end to boundless power; but the intervening stages exhibit in him the languid and voluptuous character which marks the early foliage and vegetation of summer. Hence the story that Persephone placed her child Dionysos in the hands of Inô and Athamas to be brought up as a girl; and from this character of feminine gracefulness he passes to the vehement licence of his heated worshippers. BOOK II. The mothers of Dionysos Persephonê, as we have seen, is not his only mother; nor is the myth which makes him born of his mother Semelê amidst the blaze of the thunderbolts the only legend of his birth. He is spoken of sometimes as a son of Iô, or of Argê, of Diônê, or Amaltheia, the nurse of Zeus; and there was a tale which related how, when Kadmos heard that Zeus had made his child Semelê a mother, he placed her and her babe in a chest, and launched them, as Akrisios launched Danaê and her infant, upon the sea. The chest, according to local tradition, was carried to Brasiai, where the babe was rescued by Inô; Semelê, who was found dead, being solemnly buried on the shore.1 The story of Perse phonê.; SECTION II.-DÊMÊTÊR. The myth which gives most fully and most clearly the history of the earth through the changing year is to be found not so much in the legend of Adonis as in the legend of Persephonê herself. This story as related in the Hymn to Dêmêtêr tells us how the beautiful maiden (and in her relations with the upper world she is pre-eminently the maiden, Korê), was playing with her companions on the flowery Nysian plain, when far away across the meadow her eye caught the gleam of a narcissus flower. As she ran towards it alone, a fragrance, which reached to the heaven and made the earth and sea laugh for gladness, filled her with delight; but when she stretched out her arms to seize the stalk with its hundred flowers, the earth gaped, and before her stood the immortal horses bearing the car of the king Polydegmôn, who placed her by his side. In vain the maiden cried aloud, and made her prayer to the son of Kronos; for Zeus was far away, receiving the prayers and offerings of men in his holy place, and there was none to hear save Hekatê, who in her secret cave heard the wail of her agony, and Helios, the bright son of Hyperîôn, and one other--the loving mother, 1 Preller, Gr. Myth. i. 523, regards the name Dionysos as simply an epithet of Zeus as the Nysaian or ripening god: Der Name scheint einen feuchten, saftig fruchtbaren Ort zu bedeuten, wie jenes Leibethron am Makedonischen Olymp, wo Dionysos und Orpheus seit alter Zeit in der Umgebung der Musen verehrt wurden.' THE SEARCH FOR THE LOST MAIDEN. whose heart was pierced as with a sword, as the cry of her child reached her ears, a cry which echoed mournfully over hills, and vales, and waters. Then Dêmêtêr threw the dark veil over her shoulders, and hastened like a bird over land and sea, searching for her child. But neither god nor man could give her tidings until, with torch in hand, she reached the cave of Hekatê, who knew only of the theft of the maiden, but could not tell whither she had gone. From Helios, whom she addresses as the all-seeing, Dêmêtêr receives clearer tidings and a deeper sympathy, and now she learns that her child is the bride of Aidoneus, who reigns in the unseen land beneath the earth. The grief of the mourning mother is almost swallowed up in rage, as she leaves the home of the gods and wanders along the fields and by the cities of men, so changed in form, and so closely veiled that none could know the beautiful queen who had till then shed a charm of loveliness over all the wide world. At last she sat down by the wayside, near Eleusis, where the maidens of the city come to draw water from the fountain. Here, when questioned by the daughters of Keleos the king, the mourner tells them that her name is Dêô, and that, having escaped from Cretan kidnappers, she seeks a refuge and a home, where she may nurse young children. Such a home she finds in the house of Keleos, which the poet makes her enter veiled from head to foot. Not a word does she utter in answer to the kindly greetings of Metaneira, and the deep gloom is lessened only by the jests and sarcasms of Iambê. When Metaneira offers her wine, she says that now she may not taste it, but asks for a draught of water mingled with flour and mint, and then takes charge of the new-born son of Keleos, whom she names Demophoôn. Under her care the babe thrives marvellously, though he has no nourishment either of bread or of milk. The kindly nurse designs, indeed, to make him immortal; and thus by day she anoints him with ambrosia, and in the night she plunges him, like a torch, into a bath of fire. But her purpose is frustrated by the folly of Metaneira, who, The hymn writer forgets for a moment the veiled Mater Dolorosa, when at her entrance he says that her head seeing the child thus basking touched the roof, while a blaze of light 297 CHAP. VIII. BOOK Iduna. in the flames, screams with fear, and is told by Dêmêtêr that, though her child shall ever receive honour because he has slumbered in her arms, still, like all the sons of men, and like Achilleus himself, he must die. Nevertheless, though she cast the child away from her, she abode yet in the house of Keleos, mourning and grieving for the maiden, so that all things in the heaven above and the earth beneath felt the weight of her sorrow. In vain the ploughs turned up the soil, in vain was the barley seed scattered along the furrows. In Olympos itself there was only gloom and sadness, so that Zeus charged Iris to go and summon Dêmêtêr to the palace of the gods. But neither her words nor those of the deities who follow her avail to lessen her grief or to bend her will. The mourning mother will not leave the place of her exile till her eyes have looked upon her child once more. Then Hermes, at the bidding of Zeus, enters the dismal underworld, and Polydegmôn consents to the return of Persephonê, who leaps with delight for the joy that is coming. Still he cannot altogether give up his bride, and Persephonê finds that she has unwittingly eaten the pomegranate seed,' and must come back to Aidôneus again. But even with this condition the joy of the meeting is scarcely lessened. A third part only of the year she must be queen in Hades; through all the other months she is to be once more the beautiful maiden who sported on the plains of Nysa. The wrath of Dêmêtêr has departed with her grief, the air is filled with fragrance, and the corn-fields wave with the ripening grain. In Teutonic tradition Persephonê is represented by Iduna, the beautiful, whom Loki brings back in the shape of a quail (Wachtel), a myth which cannot fail to remind us of Artemis Ortygia. Loki here distinctly plays the part of Perseus, for the giants of cold hasten after him as he bears away Iduna, as the Gorgon sisters chase Perseus on his way 'Am häufigsten ward der Granatapfel als Symbol des Zeugung und Empfängniss verwendet, was wohl davon herrührt dass er, weil seine Kerne zugleich Samenkerne sind, Samenbehältniss ist; und insofern diese Kerne in zahlreicher Menge in ihm enthalten sind, diente er sehr passend zum Symbol des Geschlechtsverhaltnisses, . . . In den Mythen erscheint der Granatbaum als entsprossen aus dem auf die Erde geflossenen Blute eines des Zeugegliedes beraubten Gottes: und Nana, die Tochter des Flussgotts Sangarus, wurde schon dadurch schwanger, weil sie einen Granatapfel in ihren Schooss gelegt hatte (Arnob. adr, Gent, 5).' Nork, s, v. Apfel. THE MAIDEN AND THE MOTHER. 299 VIII. to the Hyperborean gardens. This myth in Bunsen's belief CHAP. 'is an exact counterpart of the earliest myth of Herakles, who falls into the sleep of winter and lies there stiff and stark till Iolaus wakes him by holding a quail to his nose.' This idea of the palsied or feeble sun is reproduced in the Egyptian Harp-i-chruti (the Grecised Harpokrates), the sun regarded as an infant, the lame child of Isis, the earth,-a phrase which carries us to that wide class of legends, which speak of the sun, or the wind, or the light, as weak, if not impotent, in their first manifestations. Osiris can be avenged only by Horos, the full-grown sun, after the vernal equinox. Although with the mythical history of Persephonê are The stupifying mingled some institutional legends explaining the ritual of Narcissus. the Eleusinian mysteries, the myth itself is so transparent as to need but little interpretation. The stupifying narcissus with its hundred flowers springing from a single stem is in the opinion of Colonel Mure a monstrous hyperbole; yet it must be a narcotic which lulls to sleep the vegetation of nature in the bright yet sad autumn days when heaven and earth smile with the beauty of the dying year, and the myth necessarily chose the flower whose name denoted this dreamy lethargy. Even in her gloomy nether abode the character of the maiden is not wholly changed. She is still not the fierce queen who delights in death, but the daughter yearning to be clasped once more in her mother's arms. That mother is carefully nursing the child of Keleos, the seed which grows without food or drink, except the nourishment of the dew and the heat which still lurks in the bosom of the winter-smitten earth. But while she is engaged in this task, she is mourning still for the daughter who has been taken away from her, and the dreary time which passes before they meet again is the reign of the gloomy winter, which keeps the leaves off the trees and condemns the tillers of the soil to unwilling idleness. The sequel of the hymn simply depicts the joy of returning spring and summer, when the mourning mother is exalted in glory to the everlasting halls of Olympos. Hence, so far as the meaning of the myth is concerned, it matters little whether Dêmêtêr be herself the earth grieving for the lost treasures of summer, |