FORE-THOUGHT AND AFTER-THOUGHT.

175

cumber the earth. He expresses no fear, and Prometheus opposes him not for his severity to enemies whom he dreads, but because he feels no pity for beings whose misery calls only for compassion. The gift of fire now bestowed on man by Prometheus rouses Zeus to fury, and Prometheus is sentenced to a punishment far surpassing the worst agonies of mankind.

and Epi

The name Prometheus represents, as we have seen, the Vedic Pramantha. To the Greeks it suggested a connexion with words springing from the root con- Prometheus tained in the names Metis and Medeia. It came, in metheus. short, to mean Forethought or Providence; and the idea of Epimetheus, or Afterthought, was at once suggested. But to be wise after an event is often to be wise too late; and thus the rashness of Epimetheus brings on him a terrible punishment for the offence which had already brought down the wrath of Zeus on his mightier brother. He had been warned to receive no gifts from the gods; but the advice of Prometheus was thrown away. The temptation came in a form which it was impossible to resist. By the bidding of Zeus, Hephaistos took earth and moulded it into the shape of a woman. This image Athênê dressed out in a beautiful robe, while Hermes gave her the power of words and a greedy mind, to cheat. and deceive mankind. Zeus then led Pandora (for so she was named, as being, it was supposed, the gift of all the gods) to Epimetheus, who received her into his house. Thus far men had been plagued, it is said, with no diseases; but in the house of Epimetheus was a great jar or cask, whose cover could not be lifted without grievous consequences to mankind. Pandora, of course, raised the lid, and a thousand evils, strife and war, plague and sickness, were let loose. The air was filled with the seeds of diseases, which took root wherever they fell; and the only possible alleviation of their woe was rendered impossible by the 1 See p. 165.

shutting up of Hope, which alone remained a prisoner within the cask, when Pandora in her terror hastily replaced the cover.1

Prometheus and Deuka

lion.

But in truth these tales are in great part the result of a mistaken etymology. The name Prometheus has no necessary connexion with forethought, and Epimetheus was called into being only by the exigencies of this error. Prometheus, so far as his name will carry us, is simply a giver or bringer of fire. The various functions ascribed to him by Æschylus make him virtually the creator as well as the preserver of men; and we are thus brought back to the language in which the poets of the Vedic hymns address Agni. This creative power reappears especially in his son Deukalion, in whose days the flood overwhelmed all Hellas. The wickedness of man, we are told, had reached its height in the iniquity of Lykaon and his sons, and Zeus resolved to punish them. The waters began to rise; and Deukalion bade his wife, Pyrrha, make ready the ark which he had built on the warning of his father Prometheus. Then getting into it, he and his wife were borne for eight days on the waters, and on the ninth the ark rested on the heights of Parnassos. There, having left the ark, they offered sacrifice to Zeus,

In

1 Some have thought that Hope was shut up in the cask out of mercy to men, and not to heighten their misery. But this is clearly not the meaning of the story in Hesiod, for Pandora does not bring the cask with her. She finds it in the house of Epimetheus, and the diseases and evils can do no hurt till they are let loose. Hence the shutting up of Hope makes matters worse instead of better. Nor is this the only difficulty connected with the tale. the version given by Æschylus, Prometheus mentions, as one of his reasons for wishing to bestow on men the gift of fire, the crowd of diseases and plagues which without it they were unable either to avoid, to mitigate, or to cure. But the Hesiodic legend is, indeed, inconsistent throughout. The mere comparison between the forethinker and the afterthinker implies that there must be some advantage in the one, some loss in the other. But in the Theogony, and in the Works and Days, there is no more to be said in behalf of one than of the other. The provident and the improvident are alike outwitted and punished; and the gain, if any there be, is to the man who does not see the coming evils as they cast their shadows before them. In the story of the gitt of fire by Prometheus and in that of the letting loose of the evils by Pandora we have two contradictory legends. We can but take them as they are, for the task of reconciling them is hopeless.

who sent Hermes to grant any prayer that Deukalion might offer. Deukalion prayed for the restoration of the human race, and Hermes said that he and his wife should cover their faces with their mantles, and cast the bones of their mother behind them as they went upon their way. The wisdom which came to him from his father Prometheus taught him that his mother was the earth, and that they were to cast the stones behind them as they went down from Parnassos. The stones thus thrown became men and women, who at once began the life of hard toil which ever since that day has been the lot of mankind. By some this flood was assigned to the reign of Ogyges,' a mythical king of Athens; but there are many variations in the tale. Some said that all men then perished; others held that the men of Delphi escaped. So in the Babylonish story of Xisuthros the flood spares all the pious. In some versions of the Indian tale, Manu, as we have seen, enters the ark with the seven sages or Rishis, who remain with him till they land on the peaks of Naubandhana.

of Prometheus.

The name Deukalion comes from the same source with that of Polydeukes (Pollux), the brilliant son of Leda. But one of the most noteworthy features of Ramification this myth lies in its ramifications into others. of the myths The legend of his father Prometheus is bound up with the legend of Zeus, Io, and Herakles, of Epimetheus, Pandora, Athênê, and others. Deukalion, again, is the father of Minos, and Minos is the Indian Manu (the thinker or man), who enters the ark in the east. Minos in his turn is the father of Ariadne, whom Theseus led to Naxos after slaying the Minotaur with her help, and he is further connected with Argive tradition through the tale of Nisos and Skylla. Deukalion is further called the father of Hellen, the eponymous ancestor of the Hellenes, and of Protogeneia, the early morning. The latter becomes the mother of Aëthlios, the toiling and striving sun, who like

See p. 49.

N

Herakles and Achilles labours for others, not for himself, and Aethlios, as we have seen, is the father of Endymion, who sleeps in the cave of Latmos, and from whom spring the fifty children of Asterodia. The mode adopted by Deukalion in repeopling the earth reappears in the traditions of some savage tribes, who would seem to have nothing in common with any of the Aryan nations. The Macusi Indians of South America relate that the last man who survived the flood re-peopled the world by changing stones into men. According to the Tamanaks of Orinoko, it was a pair of human beings who cast behind them the fruit of a certain palm, and out of the kernels sprang men and women.

VII.

The Titans.

The myths of the fire-gods already noticed have shown us that men may see the fire not only as it burns ordinarily on the earth, but as it flashes in the lightning across the heavens, or issues in blood-red streams from the bowels of the volcano. The lightnings are the mighty flames in which irresistible weapons are forged for the hands of the gods, or they are the weapons themselves. The rivers of fire which hurry down the sides of burning mountains are the floods sent forth by rebellious giants chained to scorching couches in their depths. We have here the simple framework of myths which tell us of the gigantic moulders of the thunderbolts, or of rebels to the power and the majesty of the gods. For the most part the stories do not go far beyond these simple ideas, which are exhibited with an iteration which is apt to become tedious. It is happily unnecessary to go through the cumbrous genealogies with which the Theogonies are overloaded; but we can be under no doubt that, when Arges, Steropes, and Brontes are spoken of as Kyklopes, these are the lightning flashes which plough up the stormy heaven. The affinity of these gigantic beings with the Kyklopes, or Cyclopes, of the Odyssey is distant, although it may be traced. The latter have seemingly nothing to do with fire. The Kyklops whom Odysseus blinds is the son of Poseidon

and the nymph Thoôsa; in other words, he is the child of the waters, and instead of forging armour, he feed his flocks on the hill side.' We are tempted to discern in these shaggy troops of goats the rough vapours which cling to the mountains, and in the Kyklops himself the blackening cloud through which, like a solitary eye, glares the ghastly and shrouded sun. There seems to be every reason to carry us to this conclusion, and none to stand in the way of it. Odysseus, it is true, is a solar hero, and he may therefore be said to be putting out his own eye and extinguishing himself when he blinds Polyphemos. But we have already seen that this distinction between the agent and the patient, when both are identical, is common to a large number of myths; 2 and it is exhibited most conspicuously in the stories of Ixion and Sisyphos, where the former is the wheel on which he is stretched, while the latter is the sphere which he is compelled to roll up to the mountain summit.

The distant kinsmen of these Kyklopes are seen in the ministers of the fire-god Hephaistos. These, with the hundred-handed monsters, called Hekatoncheires, The Kyklopes are the true Gigantes, the earth-born children of (Cyclopes). Ouranos, who thrusts them down into Tartaros. The Titans, however, remain free; and between these and their father another war is waged, which ends in the mutilation of Ouranos and the birth of Aphroditê and the Erinyes. The Kyklopes are now brought up from their dungeons, and Kronos, who swallows the things which he has made and vomits them forth again, becomes the lord of heaven. A second imprisonment of the Kyklopes soon follows, and lasts until the Titans, led on by Zeus, hurl Kronos from

1 Mr. Brown regards the Kyklopes as belonging properly to Semitic mythology, and thinks that their name describes them as circle builders. Great Dionysiak Myth. i. III. It seems strange, to say the least, that if the poet wished to say that they raised circular structures, he should say instead that they had round faces. But it does not, therefore, follow that Semitic ideas may not underlie the traditions of these uncouth creatures.

2 See p. 107.