CHAP. V.
night, dark and still as death, promises that Phoibos shall long abide in Delos, the bright land. Doubtless she made the same promise to Lykians, Argives, Arkadians, Athenians, and all others who called themselves the children of the light; but the sun cannot tarry, and in spite of her plighted word he hastens onward to slay the serpent of darkness. In Herakles we see the sun in other guise, loving and beloved wherever he goes, seeking to benefit the sons of men, yet sometimes harming them in the exuberance of his boisterous strength. In the tale of Althaia we read the sentence that the bright sun must die when the torch of day is burnt out. In Phaethon we seem to see the plague of drought which made men say, "Surely another, who cannot guide the horses, is driving the chariot of the sun." The beautiful herds, which the bright and glistening daughters of early morning feed in the pastures of Thrinakia, seem to tell us of the violet-coloured clouds which the dawn spreads over the fields of the blue sky. In Bellerophon, as in Perseus, Theseus, Phoibos, and Herakles, we find again the burden laid on the sun, who must toil for others, although the forms of that toil may vary. Perseus goes to the dwelling of the Graiai, as men might have said, "The sun has departed to the land of the pale gloaming." When Perseus slays Medousa, the sun has killed the night in its solemn and death-like beauty, while the wild pursuit of the immortal Gorgons seems to be the chase of Darkness after the bright Sun who, with his golden sandals, just escapes their grasp as he soars into the peaceful morning sky, the Hyperborean gardens, which sorrow, strife, and death can never enter. In the death of Akrisios we have the old tale which comes up in many another legend, where Oidipous and Theseus mourn that they have unwittingly slain their fathers.
The Norse mythology points in precisely the same direction. If the Greek legends by themselves thus exhibit, or seem to The Norse exhibit, their ancient framework, the Norse tradition points with at "mythology points in the least equal clearness in the same direction. If any now can be precisely found to assert that the one set of legends were copied from the direction, other, he not only maintains a theory which hangs on a single thread,[1] but he displays a credulity which needs not to shrink from the avowal that the whole of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments is a genuine and veracious history. The wildest prejudice can scarcely shelter itself behind these treacherous and crumbling barriers, although it may urge that, whether in Teutonic or in Greek mythology, the dawn, the evening, and the night, the toiling and capricious sun, are already persons with human forms and a fixed local habitation. But oven this position would be greatly strained. Mr. Grote himself
- ↑ Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse, introduction, p. xliii.
