BOOK
ahvays conquerors whenever Meleagros is among them. But the
Kouretes are, like the Korybantes and the Idaian Daktyloi, the mystic
dancers who can change their forms at will, and thus their defeat is
the victory of the sun who scatters the clouds as they wheel in their
airy movements round him. These clouds reappear in the brothers
of Althaia, and when they are slain her ^Tath is roused, like the anger
of Poseidon when Polyphemos is blinded, or the rage of Zeus when
the Kylopes are slain. The curse now lies heavy on Meleagros.
His voice is no more heard in the council ; his spear is seen no more
in the fight. He lies idle in his golden chambers with the beautiful
Kleopatra ; Kephalos is taking his rest with Eos behind the clouds
which hide his face from mortal men, and he will not come forth.
Wearied out at last, his mother brings forth the fatal brand and
throws it into the fire, and as its last spark flickers out, Meleagros
dies. With him die his wife and his mother ; Deianeira and Oinone
cannot live when Herakles and Paris are gone.^ So passes away the
hero who can only thus be slain, and his sisters who are changed into
guinea-hens weep for his death, as the sisters of Phaethon, the bright
fleecy clouds, shed tears of amber over their brother's grave.
Thetis and In this story Phoinix tells Achilleus that he may see a reflexion of Achilleus. 1-iimgeif . and the parallel is closer than perhaps the poet imagined. Like Meleagros, he is a being in whose veins flows the blood of the gods. His mother is the sea-nymph Thetis, for, like Kephalos and Aphrodite, like Athene and lamos, the sun-god must rise from the waters ; and in the life of his father Peleus the threads of a large number of myths are strangely ravelled together. The tale of his sojourn in lolkos repeats the story of Bellerophon and Anteia ; and as Proitos sends Bellerophon that he may be put to death by other hands than his own, so Akastos, the husband who thinks himself injured, leaves Peleus without arms on the heights of Pelion, that the wild beasts may devour him. He is here attacked by Kentaurs, but saved by Cheiron, who gives him back his sword. Here also he becomes the husband of Thetis, at whose wedding-feast the seeds of the strife are sown which produce their baleful fruits in the stealing away of Helen and all its wretched consequences. But the feast itself is made the occasion for the investiture of Peleus with all the insignia of Helios or Phoibos. His lance is the gift of Cheiron : from Poseidon, the god of the air and the waters, come the immortal horses Xanthos and Balios, the golden and speckled steeds which draw the
- In the Iliad Meleagros does not heard the curse of Althaia overtake
return home from the fight with the him. This is only another form of the Kouretes, for the Erinyes who have myth of Helene Dendritis.
