HERAKLES THE BONDMAN Iphitos as that of Achilleus to Patroklos. Incident is now crowded on incident, all exhibiting the working of the same idea. It is the time of the wild simoom. Herakles approaches the sanctuary of Phoibos, but the Pythia will yield no answer to his questions, and a contest follows between Herakles and Phoibos himself, which is ended only when Zeus sunders them by a flash of lightning. When thus for the time discomfited, he is told that he can be loosed from his madness and again become sound in mind only by consenting to serve for a time as a bondman; and thus the myth which makes Apollôn serve in the house of Admêtos, and which made Herakles all his life long the slave of a mean tyrant, is again brought into the story. He is now sold to Omphalê (the correlative of Omphalos), and assumes something like the guise of the half-feminine Dionysos. But even with this story of subjection a vast number of exploits are interwoven, among these being the slaying of a serpent on the river Sygaris and the hunting of the Kalydonian boar. 53 CHAP. II. The tale of his return from the conquest of Ilion presents Herakles the same scenes under slightly different colours. In his and Augê. fight with the Meropes he is assailed by a shower of stones, and is even wounded by Chalkôdôn,- another thunderstorm recalling the fight with Arês and Kyknos: and the same battle of the elements comes before us in the next task which Athênê sets him, of fighting with the giants in the burning fields of Phlegrai. These giants, it had been foretold, were to be conquered by a mortal man, a notion which takes another form in the surprise of Polyphêmos when he finds himself outwitted by so small and insignificant a being as Odysseus. At this point, after his return to Argos, some mythographers place his marriage with Augê, the mother of Telephos, whose story reproduces that of Oidipous or Perseus. and Deianira. His union with Dêianeira, the daughter of the Kalydonian Herakles chief, brings us to the closing scenes of his troubled and tumultuous career. The name points, as we have seen, to the darkness which was to be his portion at the ending of his journey, and here also his evil fate pursues him. His spear is fatal to the boy Eunomos, as it had been to the BOOK II. The death of Hera kles. children of Megara; but although in this instance the crime had been done unwittingly, Herakles would not accept the pardon tendered to him, and he departed into exile with Dêianeira. At the ford of a river Herakles entrusts her to the charge of the Kentaur Nessos, who acted as ferryman, and who attempting to lay hands on Dêianeira is fatally wounded by the hero. In his last moments Nessos bids her preserve his blood, as the sure means of recovering her husband's love if it should be transferred to another. The catastrophe brought about by these words of Nessos is related by Sophokles; but before this end came, Herakles had aided many friends and vanquished many foes. Among these was Augeias, whom he attacked at the head of an Arkadian host, the men of the bright land. Against him were arrayed, among other allies of the Eleian king, Eurytos and Kteatos, the sons of the grinders or crushers Molionê and Aktor. But here the strength of Herakles for a time fails him, and the enemy hesitates not to attack him during his sickness; but the hero lies in ambush, like the sun lurking behind the clouds while his rays are ready to burst forth like spears, and having slain some of his enemies, advances and takes the city of Elis, making Phyleus king in place of Augeias, whom he slays together with his children. When at length the evening of his life was come, Dêianeira received the tidings that her husband was returning in triumph from the Euboian Oichalia, not alone, but bringing with him the beautiful Iolê, whom he had loved since the hour when he first put the shaft to his bow in the contest for that splendid prize. Now he had slain her father, as Perseus slew Akrisios and as Oidipous smote down Laios, and the maiden herself was coming to grace his home. Then the words of Nessos come back to the memory of the forsaken wife, who steeps in his blood the white garment which at the bidding of Herakles Lichas comes to fetch from Trachis. The hero is about to offer his sacrifice to the Kenaian Zeus, and he wishes to offer it up in peace, clad in a seemly robe of pure white, with the fair and gentle Iolê standing by his side. But so it is not to be. Scarcely has he put on the robe which Lichas brings than the poison begins to course through his veins HERAKLES AND BELLEROPHÔN. II. 55 and rack every limb with agony unspeakable, as the garment CHAP. given by Helios to Medeia consumed the flash of Glaukê and of Kreôn. Once more the suffering hero is lashed into madness, and seizing the luckless Lichas he hurls him into the sea. Thus, borne at last to the heights of Oita, he gathers wood, and charges those who are around him to set the pile on fire, when he shall have laid himself down upon it. Only the shepherd Poias ventures to do the hero's will: but when the flame is kindled, the thunder crashes through the heaven, and a cloud comes down which bears him away to Olympos, there to dwell in everlasting youth with the radiant Hêbê as his bride.' It is a myth in which looms a magnificent sunset,' the forked flames as they leap from the smoke of the kindled wood being the blood-red vapours which stream from the body of the dying sun. It is the reverse of the picture which leaves Odysseus with Penelopê in all the brightness of early youth, knowing indeed that the night must come, yet blessed in the profound calm which has followed the storms and troubles of the past. It is the picture of a sunset in wild confusion, the multitude of clouds hurrying hither and thither, now hiding, now revealing the mangled body of the sun,-of a sunset more awful yet not more sad than that which is seen in the last hours of Bellerophôn, as he wanders through the Aleian plain in utter solitude,the loneliness of the sun who has scattered the hostile vapours and then sinks slowly down the vast expanse of pale light with the ghastly hues of death upon his face, while none is nigh to cheer him, like Iolê by the funeral pile of Herakles.3 There was no reason why the myth should stop short here; and the cycle already so many times repeated is carried on by making Herakles and Hêbê the parents of Alexiarês and Anikêtos, names which again denote the irresistible strength and the benignant nature of the parent whose blood flows in their veins. The name Alexiarês belongs to the same class with Alexikakos, an epithet which Herakles shares with Zeus and Apollôn, along with Daphnêphoros, Olympios, Pangenetôr, and others.-Max Müller, Chips, ii. 89. * Max Müller, ib. ii. 88. 'It was easy to think of Herakles as never wearied and never dying, but as BOOK II. Hercules. Of the Latin Hercules we need say but little here. The most prominent myth connected with the name in comparaThe Latin tively recent times is that of the punishment of Cacus for stealing the oxen of the hero; and this story must be taken along with the other legends which reproduce the great contest between the powers of light and darkness set forth in the primitive myth of Indra and Ahi. The god or hero of whom the Latins told this story is certainly the same in character with the Hellenic son of Alkmênê; but, as Niebuhr insisted, it is not less certain that the story must have been told from the first not of the genuine Latin Hercules or Herculus, a deity who was the guardian of boundaries, like the Zeus Herkeios of the Greeks, but of some god in whose place Hercules has been intruded, from the phonetic resemblance between his name and that of Herakles. Apart from this story the Latin Hercules, or rather Recaranus, has no genuine mythology, the story of the Potitii and Pinarii being, like a thousand others, a mere institutional legend, to account for ceremonies in the later ritual. Egyptian myths. Still less is it necessary to give at length the points of likeness or difference between the Hellenic Herakles and the deities of whom Herodotos or other writers speak as the Herakles of Egypt or other countries. By their own admission their names at least had nothing in common; and the affinity between the Greek hero and the Egyptian Som, Chon, or Makeris, must be one of attributes only. It is, indeed, obvious that go where we will, we must find the outlines, at least, of the picture into which the Greek mind crowded such an astonishing variety of life and action. The sun, as toiling for others, not for himself, as serving beings who are as nothing in comparison with his own strength and splendour, as cherishing or destroying the fruits of the earth which is his bride, as faithful or fickle in his loves, as gentle or furious in his course, could not fail to be the subject of phrases which, as their original meaning grew fainter, must suggest the images wrought up with lavish but somewhat undiscerning zeal into the stories of the Hellenic Herakles. Not less certainly would these stories exhibit him under forms varying indefinitely from the most exalted majesty to the coarsest bur THE BANISHMENT OF THE HERAKLEIDS. lesque. He might be the devoted youth, going forth like Sintram to fight against all mean pleasures, or the kindly giant who almost plays the part of a buffoon in the house of the sorrowing Admêtos. Between the Herakles of Prodikos and that of Euripides there was room for a vast variety of colouring, and thus it was easy to number the heroes bearing this name by tens or by hundreds. The obvious resemblances between these deities would lead the Greeks to identify their own god with the Egyptian deity, and suggest to the Egyptians the thought of upholding their own mythology as the sole source or fountain of that of Hellas. 57 CHAP. II. titions of the Herakles. But the mythical history of Herakles is bound up with Repethat of his progenitors and his descendants, and furnishes many a link in the twisted chain presented to us in the pre- myth of historic annals of Greece. The myth might have stopped short with the death of the hero; but a new cycle is, as we have seen, begun when Hêbê becomes the mother of his children in Olympos, and Herakles, it is said, had in his last moments charged his son Hyllus on earth to marry the beautiful Iolê. The ever-moving wheels, in short, may not tarry. The children of the sun may return as conquerors in the morning, bringing with them the radiant woman who with her treasures had been stolen away in the evening. After long toils and weary conflicts they may succeed in bearing her back to her ancient home, as Perseus bears Danaê to Argos; but not less certainly must the triumph of the powers of darkness come round again, and the sun-children be driven from their rightful heritage. Thus was framed that woful tale of expulsion and dreary banishment, of efforts to return many times defeated but at last successful, which make up the mythical history of the descendants of Herakles. But the phenomena which rendered their expulsion necessary determined also the direction in which they must move, and the land in which they should find a refuge. The children of the sun can rest only in the land of the morning, and accordingly it is at Athens alone and from the children of the dawn-goddess that the Herakleids can be sheltered from their enemies, who press them on every side. Thus we find ourselves in a cycle of myths which might be repeated at will, |