Volume II Part 19 (2/2)

****** _Odyssey_, x. 139.

According to the early lyric poet Stesichorus, the sun sails over ocean in a golden cup or bowl. ”Then Helios Hyperionides went down into his golden cup to cross Ocean-stream, and come to the deeps of dark and sacred Night, to his mother, and his wedded wife, and his children dear.” This belief, in more barbaric shape, still survives in the Greek islands.* ”The sun is still to them a giant, like Hyperion, bloodthirsty when tinged with gold. The common saying is that the sun 'when he seeks his kingdom' expects to find forty loaves prepared for him by his mother.... Woe to her if the loaves be not ready! The sun eats his brothers, sisters, father and mother in his wrath.”** A well-known amour of Helios was his intrigue with Rhode by whom he had Phaethon and his sisters. The tragedians told how Phaethon drove the chariot of the sun, and upset it, while his sisters were turned into poplar trees, and their tears became amber.***

* Bent's _Cyclades_, p. 57.

** Stesichorus, _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_, Pomtow, vol. i. p.

148; qf. also Mimnermus, op. cit.,i. 78.

*** _Odyssey_, xvii. 208; Scholiast. The story is ridiculed by Lucian, De Electro.

Such were the myths about the personal sun, the hero or demiG.o.d, Helios Hyperion. If we are to believe that Apollo also is a solar deity, it appears probable that he is a more advanced conception, not of the sun as a person, but of a being who represents the sun in the spiritual world, and who exercises, by an act of will, the same influence as the actual sun possesses by virtue of his rays. Thus he brings pestilence on the Achaeans in the first book of the _Iliad_, and his viewless shafts slay men suddenly, as sunstroke does. It is a pretty coincidence that a German scholar, Otfried Muller, who had always opposed Apollo's claim to be a sun-G.o.d, was killed by a sunstroke at Delphi. The G.o.d avenged himself in his ancient home. But if this deity was once merely the sun, it may be said, in the beautiful phrase of Paul de St. Victor, ”Pareil a une statue qui surgit des flammes de son moule, Apollo se degage vite du soleil”.* He becomes a G.o.d of manifold functions and attributes, and it is necessary to exercise extreme caution in explaining any one myth of his legend as originally a myth of the sun.** _Phoibos_ certainly means ”the brilliant” or ”s.h.i.+ning”. It is, however, unnecessary to hold that such epithets as _Lyceius, Lycius, Lycegenes_ indicate ”light,” and are not connected, as the ancients, except Macrobius, believed, with the wors.h.i.+p of the wolf.*** The character of Apollo as originally a sun-G.o.d is a.s.serted on the strength not only of his names, but of many of his attributes and his festivals. It is pointed out that he is the deity who superintends the measurement of time.**** ”The chief days in the year's reckoning, the new and full moons and the seventh and twentieth days of the month, also the beginning of the solar year, are reckoned Apolline.”

That curious ritual of the Daphnephoria, familiar to many English people from Sir Frederick Leighton's picture, is believed to have symbolised the year. Proclus says that a staff of olive wood decorated with flowers supported a central ball of bra.s.s beneath which was a smaller ball, and thence little globes were hung.*****

* _Homines et Dieux_, p. 11.

** There is no agreement nor certainty about the etymology and original meaning of the name Apollo. See Preller, Or.

Myth., i. 189. ”Comparative philologists have not yet succeeded in finding the true etymology of Apollo” (Max Muller, _Selected Essays_, i. 467).

*** Compare Zeus Lyceius and his wolf-myths; compare also Roscher, _Ausf.u.krliches_ Lexikon, p. 423.

**** _Sonnengott als Zeitordner_, Roscher, op. cit., p. 423.

***** Cf. Photius, Bibl.,321.

The greater ball means the sun, the smaller the moon, the tiny globes the stars and the 365 laurel garlands used in the feast are understood to symbolise the days. Pausanias* says that the ceremony was of extreme antiquity. Heracles had once been the youth who led the procession, and the tripod which Amphitryon dedicated for him was still to be seen at Thebes in the second century of our era. Another proof of Apollo's connection with the sun is derived from the cessation of his rites at Delphi during the three winter months which were devoted to Dionysus.**

The sacred birthday feasts of the G.o.d are also connected with the year's renewal.*** Once more, his conflict with the great dragon, the Pytho, is understood as a symbol of the victory of light and warmth over the darkness and cold of winter.

The discomfiture of a dragon by a G.o.d is familiar in the myth of the defeat of Ahi or Vritra by Indra, and it is a curious coincidence that Apollo, like Indra, fled in terror after slaying his opponent. Apollo, according to the myth, was purified of the guilt of the slaying (a ceremony unknown to Homer) at Tempe.**** According to the myth, the Python was a snake which forbade access to the chasm whence rose the mysterious fumes of divination. Apollo slew the snake and usurped the oracle. His murder of the serpent was more or less resented by the Delphians of the time.*****

* i ix. 10, 4.

** Plutarch, Depa El. Delph., 9.

*** Roscher, op. cit., p. 427.

**** Proclus, Chresl, ed. Gaisford, p. 387; Homer, Hymn to Apollo, 122, 178; Apollod., i. 4, 3; Plutarch, Quaest.

Groec., 12.

***** Apollod., Heyne, Observationes, p. 19. Compare the Scholiast on the argument to Pindar's Pythian odes.

The snake, like the other animals, frogs and lizards, in Andaman, Australian and Iroquois myth, had swallowed the waters before its murder.* Whether the legend of the slaying of the Python was or was not originally an allegory of the defeat of winter by sunlight, it certainly at a very early period became mixed up with ancient legal ideas and local traditions. It is almost as necessary for a young G.o.d or hero to slay monsters as for a young lady to be presented at court; and we may hesitate to explain all these legends of an useful feat of courage as nature-myths. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo Pythius, the monster is called _Dracaena_, the female form of _drakon_. The Drakos and his wife are still popular bogies in modern Greek superst.i.tion and folk-song.**

* Preller, i. 194.

** Forchhammer takes the _Dracaena_ to be a violent winter torrent, dried up by the sun's rays. Cf. Decharme, Myth.

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