most lovely of the sights of nature, Aphroditê became to the Greek, as she was to the Hindu, the goddess of perfect beauty. On her was lavished all the wealth of words denoting the loveliness of the morning; and thus the Hesiodic poet, having spoken of her birth, goes on at once to say that the grass sprang up under her feet as she moved, and that all earthly things rejoiced to look upon her. She is also spoken of as Enalia and Pontia, the deity who sheds her glory on the deep sea; and, again, Ourania and Pandemos, as the goddess, in the one case of pure, in the other of gross and sensual, love.

In the Odyssey she is the wife of Hephaistos, the firegod; and in this poem she is attended by the Charites,' who wash her and anoint her with oil at Paphos. Aphrodite and In the Iliad the wife of Hephaistos is Charis ; Hephaistos. and thus we are brought back to the old myth in which both Charis and Aphroditê are mere names for the glistening dawn. Between the language addressed by the Greek poets to Aphroditê and the phrases applied in Vedic hymns to Ushas there is a close correspondence. The latter is Duhitâ Divah, the daughter of Dyaus, just as Aphroditê is the daughter of Zeus. Another Sanskrit name for the morning was Arjuni,' the brilliant; but of this word the Greek in his westward journeyings had forgotten the meaning, and Argynnis became for him a beautiful maiden loved by Agamemnon.

The idea of the morning embodied in Aphroditê exhibits none of the severity which marks the character of Athênê. She is the dawn, not as unsullied by The children any breath of passion, but as preserving and fos- of Aphrodite. tering all creatures in whom is the breath of life. She would thus be associated with those forms under which the phenomena of reproduction were universally set forth. She is, therefore, the mother of countless children, not all of them beautiful like herself, for the dawn twilight may be 2 See p. II.

1 See p. 63.

regarded as sprung from the darkness, and that of the evening as the parent of the night. Hence Phobos and Deimos, fear and dread, are among the children born by Aphroditê to Ares, while Priapos and Bacchus are her children by Dionysos. As rising from the sea, she was loved by Poseidon; and as the lover of Anchises, she became the mother of Aineias, Æneas, whom Latin poets arbitrarily chose as the mythical progenitor of the Roman people. As such, she takes part in the action of the Iliad, throwing her influence, such as it is, on the side of the Trojans; and when the body of Hector has been dragged in the dust behind the chariot of Achilles, it is Aphroditê who cleanses it from all that is unseemly, and brings back to it the beauty of death, anointing it with the ambrosial oil which makes all decay impossible. Of this war she may, indeed, be regarded as the cause. Her beauty led Paris to adjudge to her the golden apple, flung on the table by Eris 1 at the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, as a gift for the most fair; and the poison instilled into his soul by her promise that he should have the loveliest of women as his wife made him steal Helen from her home, and kindle the strife which ended in the downfall of Ilion.

But Aphroditê is more particularly the lover of Adonis. This name is clearly the Semitic Adon, Adonai, lord.2 Aphrodite and The influence of Asiatic thought in the later outAdonis. growths of the myth cannot be denied, and the consequences of the admission may be indefinitely important; but the myth itself is one which must spring up wherever there is any visible change or alternation of the seasons. Adonis, as denoting the fruitfulness and fruits of the earth, must spring from its plants; and so the story went that he was born from the cloven body of his mother, who had been changed into a tree, as Athênê sprang from the cloven head of Zeus. The babe, anointed by the Naiads with his mother's tears (the dews of spring-time), 2 See note 2, p. 67.

1 See p. 60.

was placed in a chest and put into the hands of Persephone, the queen of the under-world, who, seeing his loveliness, refused to yield up her charge to Aphrodite. The latter carries her complaint to Zeus, who decides that the child shall remain during four months of each year with Persephone, and for four he should be with his mother, while the remaining four were to be at his own disposal. In a climate like that of Greece the story would as certainly relate that these four months he chose to spend with Aphroditê, as on the fells of Norway it would run that he must spend them in Niflheim. Still the doom is upon him. He must beware of all noxious and biting beasts. The savage boar was ready to pierce him with his tusk; and, as some said, this boar was Ares disguised.

The myth of Adonis links the legends of Aphroditê with those of Dionysos. Like the latter, Adonis is born only on the death of his mother, while, like Aphroditê and Adonis, Dionysos is placed in a chest which Dionysos. carries him to the spot where the body of his mother is buried. But like Adonis or the Syrian Tammuz, Semele is raised from the under-world, and, receiving the name of Diônê, becomes the mother of Aphroditê.

XXV. Venus.

But

Of the Latin Venus it is unnecessary to say more than that her name is not borrowed from the Greek. It is the genuine growth of Italian speech, being connected with venia, grace, favour, or pardon, with the verb venerari, to venerate, and with the English winsome. so far as the Latin tribes were concerned, it remained a mere name, to which, as to Fortuna or others, any epithet might be applied according to the taste or the wants of the worshipper. Thus she might be Venus Cloacina, or the purifier; barbata, the bearded, militaris, equestris, and many more. The stories told about her by later Latin poets were simply borrowed from the traditions of the Greek Aphroditê ; and as the latter was said to be the mother of Æneas, the an

cestor of Romulus, so was Venus supposed to be the special protector of the Roman state.

XXVI.
Hêrê..

In the mythology of the Greeks Hêrê is the queen of heaven; but, in spite of her majesty, she belongs to the class of beings of whom Kronos may be taken as a type. Zeus had been Kronîon, the ancient of days; but the word had a patronymic form, and so Kronos was assigned to him as a father. In like manner he must have a wife, and her name must denote her abode in the brilliant ether. The word belongs probably to the same group with the Sanskrit Svar, the gleaming heaven, and the Zend Hvar, the sun, which in Sanskrit reappears in the kindred form Surya, the Greek Helios, the sun. Little is told about her beyond the story which she tells of herself in the Iliad,' namely, that like the rest of his progeny she was swallowed by her father Kronos, and that she was placed by Rhea in the charge of Okeanos 2 and Tethys, who nursed and tended her after Kronos had been dethroned and imprisoned by Zeus beneath the earth and sea. But Greek tradition had different versions for almost every tale; and according to some Hêrê was brought up by the daughters of the river Asterion, while others gave to her as nurses the beautiful Horai (the hours as meaning the seasons), who guard the gates of heaven. When she became the bride of Zeus, she brought him the golden apples which had been guarded by the hundred-headed offspring of Typhaon and Echidna.3

Hêrê with

Zeus.

Although compelled to submit to Zeus, Hêrê is by no means always in harmony with his will. Her love is Relations of given exclusively to the Argives; and the story of the judgment of Paris was devised to furnish a reason for this exclusive favour. According to this tale, when the gods were assembled at the marriage board of Peleus, Eris flung on the table a golden apple to be given to the fairest of the fair. In the trial which followed, Hêrê, Apollod. ii. 5. 11.

14. 202.

2 See p. 49.

Aphroditê, and Athênê appear before Paris, the Trojan shepherd, as claimants of the apple, which is given to Aphroditê as the embodiment of the mere physical loveliness of the dawn, apart from the ideas of wisdom and power which underlie the conceptions of Athênê and Hêrê. From that time forth Hêrê and Athênê are said to have hated the city of Priam. But the way was not so clear to Zeus as it seemed to be to Hêrê. Hektor himself was the darling of Apollo; and this of itself was a reason why Zeus could not eagerly wish to bring about the victory of the Achaians; but, beyond this, there were among the allies of Priam some in whose veins his own blood was running—the Ethiopian Memnon, the child of the morning; Glaukos, the brave chieftain of Lykia, and, dearest of all, Sarpedon. Here were ample causes of strife between Zeus and his queen; and in these quarrels Hêrê wins her ends partly by appealing to his policy and his fears, and in part by obtaining from Aphroditê her girdle of irresistible power. Once only we hear of any attempt to use force; and this is in the strange story which tells us of the plot of Hêrê with Poseidon and Athênê to put Zeus in chainsa tale which seems to point to the struggles consequent on the attempt to introduce the foreign worship of Poseidon into the west.1 The pendant to this story may be found in the legend which says that Zeus once hung up Hêrê in the heaven, with golden handcuffs on her wrists and two heavy anvils suspended from her feet. In the same way she quarrels with Herakles, and is wounded by his arrows. Otherwise she is endowed with attributes equal to those of Phœbus himself. Thus she imparts to the horse Xanthos the gifts both of human speech and of prophecy, and sends the unwilling sun, Helios, to his ocean bed, when Patroklos falls beneath the spear of Hektor.

1 Brown, Great Dionysiak Myth. I do not wish to commit myself to Mr. Brown's conclusions; but I am bound to admit the great ability with which he has brought together all the evidence bearing on this very important subject.