Volume II Part 18 (1/2)
**** Paus., iii. 21, l; but the reading is doubtful.
The tradition of descent from this or that beast or plant has been shown to be most widely prevalent. On the general establishment of a higher faith in a national deity, these traditions, it is presumed, would not wholly disappear, but would be absorbed into the local legend of the G.o.d. The various beasts would become sacred to him, as the sheep was sacred to Hera in Samos, according to Mandrobulus,* and images of the animals would congregate in his temple. The amours of Zeus, then, are probably traceable to the common habit of deriving n.o.ble descents from a G.o.d, and in the genealogical narrative older totemistic and other local myths found a place.** Apart from his intrigues, the youth of Zeus was like that of some masquerading and wandering king, such as James V. in Scotland. Though Plato, in the _Republic_, is unwilling that the young should be taught how the G.o.ds go about disguised as strangers, this was their conduct in the myths. Thus we read of
Lycaon and his fifty sons, whom Zeus In their own house spied on, and unawares Watching at hand, from his disguise arose, And overset the table where they sat Around their impious feast, and slew them all.***
Clemens of Alexandria**** contrasts the ”human festival” of Zeus among the Ethiopians with the inhuman banquet offered to him by Lycaon in Arcadia.*****
* Op. Clem. Alex., i. 36.
** Compare Heyne, Observ. in Apollodor., i. 8, 1.
*** Bridges, _Prometheus the Firegiver_.
**** Clem. Alex., L 31.
***** Paus., viii. 2, l.
The permanence of Arcadian human sacrifice has already been alluded to, and it is confirmed by the superst.i.tion that whoever tasted the human portion in the mess sacrificed to Zeus became a were-wolf, resuming his original shape if for ten years he abstained from the flesh of men.*
A very quaint story of the domestic troubles of Zeus was current in Plataea, where it was related at the festival named _Daedala_. It was said that Hera, indignant at the amours of her lord, retired to Euboae.
Zeus, wis.h.i.+ng to be reconciled to her, sought the advice of Cithaeron, at that time king of Plataea. By his counsel the G.o.d celebrated a sham marriage with a wooden image, dressed up to personate Plataea, daughter of Asopus. Hera flew to the scene and tore the bridal veil, when, discovering the trick, she laughed, and was reconciled to her husband.**
Probably this legend was told to explain some incident of ritual or custom in the feast of the Daedala, and it is certainly a more innocent myth than most that were commemorated in local mystery-plays.
* The wolves connected with the wors.h.i.+p of Zeus, like his rams, goats, and other animals, are commonly explained as mythical names for elemental phenomena, clouds and storms.
Thus the ram's fleece, (--------), used in certain expiatory rites (Hesych., s. v., Lobeck, p. 183), is presumed by Preller to be a symbol of the cloud. In the same way his regis or goat-skin is the storm-wind or the thunder-cloud.
The opposite view will be found in Professor Robertson Smith's article on ”Sacrifice” in _Encyc. Brit_., where the similar totemistic rites of the lower races are adduced. The elemental theory is set forth by Decharme, _Mythologie de la Grece Antique_ (Paris, 1879), p. 16. For the ”storm-wolf,”
see Preller, i. 101. It seems a little curious that the wolf, which, on the solar hypothesis, was a brilliant beast connected with the wors.h.i.+p of the sun-G.o.d, Apollo Lycaeus, becomes a cloud or storm-wolf when connected with Zeus. On the whole subject of the use of the skins of animals as clothing of the G.o.d or the ministrant, see Lobeck, _Aglaoph_., pp. 188-186, and Robertson Smith, op. cit.
** Paus., ix. 3, 1.
It was not only when he was _en bonne fortune_ that Zeus adopted the guise of a bird or beast. In the very ancient temple of Hera near Mycenae there was a great statue of the G.o.ddess, of gold and ivory, the work of Polycletus, and therefore comparatively modern. In one hand the G.o.ddess held a pomegranate, in the other a sceptre, on which was perched a cuckoo, like the Latin woodp.e.c.k.e.r Picus on his wooden post. About the pomegranate there was a myth which Pausanias declines to tell, but he does record the myth of the cuckoo. ”They say that when Zeus loved the yet virgin Hera, he changed himself into a cuckoo, which she pursued and caught to be her playmate.” Pausanias admits that he did not believe this legend. Probably it was invented to account for the companions.h.i.+p of the cuckoo, which, like the cow, was one of the sacred animals of Hera. Myths of this cla.s.s are probably later than the period in which we presume the divine relations.h.i.+ps of G.o.ds and animals to have pa.s.sed out of the totemistic into the Samoan condition of belief. The more general explanation is, that the cuckoo, as a symbol of the vernal season, represents the heaven in its wooing of the earth. On the whole, as we have tried to show, the symbolic element in myth is late, and was meant to be explanatory of rites and usages whose original significance was forgotten. It would be unfair to a.s.sume that a G.o.d was disrespectfully viewed by his earliest wors.h.i.+ppers because aetiological, genealogical, and other myths, crystallised into his legend.
An extremely wild legend of Zeus was current among the Galatae, where Pausanias expressly calls it a ”local myth,” differing from the Lydian variant. Zeus in his sleep became, by the earth, father of Attes, Va being both male and female in his nature. Agdistis was the local name of this enigmatic character, whom the G.o.ds feared and mutilated. From the blood grew up, as in so many myths, an almond tree. The daughter of Sangarius, Nana, placed some of the fruit in her bosom, and thereby became pregnant, like the girl in the Kalewala by the berry, or the mother of Huitzilopochtli, in Mexico, by the floating feather. The same set of ideas recurs in Grimm's _Marchen Machandelhoom_,* if we may suppose that in an older form the juniper tree and its berries aided the miraculous birth.** It is customary to see in these wild myths a reflection of the Phrygian religious tradition, which leads up to the birth of Atys, who again is identified with Adonis as a hero of the spring and the reviving year. But the story has been introduced in this place as an example of the manner in which floating myths from all sources gravitate towards one great name and personality, like that of Zeus. It would probably be erroneous to interpret these and many other myths in the vast legend of Zeus, as if they had originally and intentionally described the phenomena of the heavens. They are, more probably, mere accretions round the figure of Zeus conceived as a personal G.o.d, a ”magnified non-natural man”.***
* Mrs. Hunt's translation, i. 187.
** For parallels to this myth in Chinese, Aztec, Indian, Phrygian and other languages, see _Le Fils de la Vierge_, by M. H. de Charency, Havre, 1879. See also ”Les Deux Freres”
in M. Maspero's _Contes Egyptians_
***As to the Agdistis myth, M. de Charency writes (after quoting forms of the tale from all parts of the world), ”This resemblance between different shapes of the same legend, among nations separated by such expanses of land and sea, may be brought forward as an important proof of the antiquity of the myth, as well as of the distant date at which it began to be diffused”.
Another example of local accretion is the fable that Zeus, after carrying off Ganymede to be his cupbearer, made atonement to the royal family of Troy by the present of a vine of gold fas.h.i.+oned by Hephaestus.* The whole of the myth of Callisto, again, whom Zeus loved, and who bore Areas, and later was changed into a bear, and again into a star, is clearly of local Arcadian origin. If the Arcadians, in very remote times, traced their descent from a she-bear, and if they also, like other races, recognised a bear in the constellation, they would naturally mix up those fables later with the legend of the all-powerful Zeus.**
* Scholia on _Odyssey_, xL 521; Iliad, xx. 234; Eurip., Orestes, 1392, and Scholiast quoting the _Little Iliad_.
** Compare C. O. Muller, _Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology_, London, 1884, pp. 16,17; Pausaniaa, i 25, 1, viii. 35, 7.
So far we have studied some of the details in the legend of Zeus which did not conspicuously win their way into the national literature. The object has been to notice a few of the myths which appear the most ancient, and the most truly native and original. These are the traditions preserved in mystery-plays, tribal genealogies, and temple legends, the traditions surviving from the far off period of the village Greeks. It has already been argued, in conformity with the opinion of C.