rocks at Biarnarhaf, and a fence between my property and that of my neighbours; thou shalt also construct a house for the reception of my flocks, and these tasks accomplished thou shalt have Adisa to wife."1 Homer does not mention the Task imposed upon Herakles of cleaning the Augean stable; but this is one of the three Tasks the Giant in the Highland tale of the Battle of the Birds requires, the others being to bring the eggs of the magpie unbroken from a lofty tree, and to thatch the byre with bird's down.2 In another form of the story the Tasks are byre-cleaning, byrethatching, and swan-watching. So in Nicht, Nought, Nothing the Giant requires the boy to clean his byre, to drain a lough, and to fetch eggs from a tree. In these cases, as in Lady Featherflight, the hero is aided by the friendly daughter of the Giant, an incident which, as we shall see, appears in the Homeric tale of Proteus. The records of this cycle of tales displays infinite variety. In one of Somadeva's Hindu stories the Task is to sow an immense quantity of sesame, while in an Arabian story the lover is obliged to sift a great pile of this same grain mixed with clover seed and lentils. In the Italian versions, besides the usual physical Tasks, a higher form of cultured life has suggested the winning of the bride by solving a riddle.7

The Chimaira, which appears in this Homeric Saga"the unconquerable one," "of divine birth was she and not of men, in front a lion and behind a serpent, and

1 Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 526.

2 Campbell, Popular Tales of Western Highlands, i. 29 ff.

* MacInnes-Nutt, Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition, 436 f. Lang, Custom and Myth, 90.

5

Folk-lore Congress Report, 40 ff.

6 Tawney, Katha, i. 360; Burton, Nights, xi. 159.

"Crane, Italian Popular Tales, 66 f.; Max Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, i. 80 ff. For Tasks generally, McCulloch, Childhood of Fiction, 17, 392.

she breathed out dread fierceness of blazing fire," in another place called "the bane of many a man"1—is the only Homeric example of the fell beasts of later Creek and oriental mythology. Such were the fantastic monsters of Egypt and Babylonia. By some she has been less probably identified with a volcano, and Pliny3 tells of a Lycian mountain of that name which poured forth fire continually. But she seems rather akin to the tribe of monsters, like the later Harpies, Cerberus, the Hydra of Lerna, and the Sphinx.

This leads us to the Centaurs. Homer does not mention the horse Centaurs, which were a creation of later writers; and Ixion, their reputed father, is not named in the epics, where he might have been classed with those famous criminals, Sisyphus and Tantalus, who expiate their crimes in the underworld. Homer seems to regard the Centaurs as men. He speaks of the famous heroes who destroyed the Pheres, or wild men of the mountain caves; he tells how the renowned Centaur, Eurytion, went to the Lapithae, and how when his soul was darkened with wine he wrought foul deeds in the house of Peirithous, how the heroes mutilated him with the sword, and ever after with darkened mind he bare about with him the burden of his sins in the foolishness of his heart. Hence arose the feud between the Centaurs and the sons of men. Of this remarkable myth many explanations have been suggested. Some have supposed that it describes the contest between civilised man and the aborigines; others see in it a comparison of the mountain torrents with galloping horses. To one school of mythologists, now in disrepute, it was sufficient to derive the name from the Gandharva

1 II. vi. 179 ff. [ii. a], xvi. 325 ff. [i.].

2 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, 84, 539, 582; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, Intro. 20; Sayce, Ibid. 392.

Nat. Hist. ii. 106, v. 28.

II. i. 266 ff. [i.], ii. 742 [iv.].

of Hindu myth, though Cheiron alone is said have been skilled in music. This derivation is now cially abandoned. The connexion, again, of the Chaldus with Thessaly has been supposed to imply hecae worship, while others suggest an ass cult. Recently 4 more plausible explanation has been suggested by Processor Gardner, that they are forest or mountain Spaita, a common folk belief representing that the devastation caused by hurricanes is due to the conflict of these spirits when they hurl tree-trunks and rocks at each other. "The appropriateness of the form of the horse, or of association with the horse, to spirits that ride the storm, is both obvious in itself and attested by numerous instances from folk-lore; but the peculiar form taken by this association in the earliest Greek Centaurs, which are merely men with a horse's body and hind quarters growing out of their back, is probably due to some accidental association, or to some too literal interpretation of a metaphor used by an early poet." 3

Next comes the tale of the Amazons. Professor Geddes remarks that they appear only in what he calls the Ulyssean cantos of the Iliad, where he finds frequent indications of oriental influence. Priam says that he was an ally of the men of Phrygia when the Amazons came, and the third task imposed on the Lycian Bellerophon was to slay the Amazons, women peers of men. According to one theory, the legend of these warrior women is based on the hosts of female slaves employed in the temples of Asia Minor and the further cast. But against this it may be urged that the legend

Macdonell, Fedic Mythology, 137.

*Coddes, PuMom of the Homeric Poems, 246 f.; Journal Hellenic Simich, alv. 90,

* Journal Hellenic Studies, xvii. 301.

* Pubium, ang f. ↑ 77. iii, 189 [ii. B], vi. 186 [ii. A].

*Sayce, MiMount Lectures, 235; Müller, Dorians, E.T. i. 405.

has a much wider provenance, and the stories of the many kingdoms in which women by the law of succession and otherwise asserted superiority over men may be connected with the matriarchate or with crude ideas of conception, such as those adopted by the Australian Arunta.1 Stories of this kind are current in South America, which are supposed to be based either on the warlike character of the women of some tribes or on the effeminate appearance of the men.2 In the east we meet many stories of a Kingdom of Women, such as that of Rāma Paramita in the Mahabharata, which also appears in Chinese tradition, and in the "Island of Wāk" and the "City of Women" in the Arabian Nights. Among a people beyond Cathay the women were said to have reason like men, while the males were great hairy dogs; even nowadays in Assam there is a tale of a village in which only women dwell; near Sumatra is an island of women, who, like the mares in Virgil's Georgics, conceive by the agency of the wind. The same legend appears in North Europe, where in the Celtic land of the Everliving "there is no race but women and maidens alone." It is current among the Ainos of Japan; in Africa it is supported by accounts of the female bodyguard of the kings of Dahome and Ashanti; and North American tradition tells of an island in which the men are ruled by a tall, fair woman. The story is, in short,

1 Spencer-Gillen, Tribes of Central Australia, 663.

2 Bates, A Naturalist on the River Amazon, i. 215 n.; Frazer, Pausanias, ii. 139.

3 Yule, Marco Polo,1 ii. 396; Burton, Nights, vi. 217, vii. 252.

4 Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, i. Intro. 129; Gait, Assam Census Report, 1891, i. 250; Marsden, History of Sumatra, 297.

5 Rhys, Celtic Folk-lore, ii. 661; Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, iii. 777; Pinkerton, Voyages, iii. 704.

Chamberlain, Aino Folk Tales, 37; Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, iii. 153; Burton, Mission to Galele, ii. 63; Im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, 385.

L

a world-wide myth which was adopted by Greek storytellers.

Another tale of the same kind reported by early mariners appears in Homer's account of the Cranes, who with approaching winter wing their flight to the streams of Ocean, bearing slaughter and fate to the Pygmy race.1 The orderly flight of the cranes in the direction of the great African lakes naturally gave rise to the belief that they marched as an army does to attack an enemy, and this enemy could only be the Pygmies, whom recent explorations have made familiar to us. Accounts of them must at an early date have reached the Greeks through the Egyptians, to whom they were familiar. Such travellers' tales did not lose in the telling, and the story was more generally believed in Europe as these Pygmies came to be connected with the tiny fairies which occupy the burial mounds. The course of the myth was perhaps from west to east; and so they come into the tale of Sindibad the Seaman, and even the matter-of-fact traveller, Marco Polo, identified them with the apes of Java.3

Iphimedeia, wife of Aloeus, bore, we are told, twin sons to Poseidon, Otos and Ephialtes. Doomed to enjoy but short life, they were far the tallest men that earth ever reared, and the goodliest after Orion. At nine years of age they were in breadth nine cubits and nine fathoms high. They threatened war on the gods, and essayed to pile Ossa on Olympus, and on Ossa Pelion, that there might be a pathway to the sky; and this they would have accomplished had they reached full manhood. But Apollo slew them ere their cheeks were

1 I. iii. 2 ff. [ii. a].

2 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, 397, 428.

3 Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 388; Burton, Nights, iv. 364; Yule, Marco Polo, ii. 228; Pinkerton, Voyages, iii. 601; Sir T. Brown, Works, i. 424; Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, i. 122.