Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK Thebes. But before he can offer the cow in sacrifice to the
_ ,' .• dawn-goddess Athene, he has to fight with the cloud in a
form akin to that of the Pythian monster, or of the Sphinx
which at a later period of its mythical history was to vex
Minos and
the Mino
taur.
his own people. A great dragon, the child of Ares, the
grinder or crusher, guards the well from which he seeks to
obtain water, and slays the men whom he sends to fetch it.
Kadmos alone, like Oidipous, can master it ; but his victory
is followed by another struggle or storm. He sows in the
earth the dragon's teeth, which, as in the story of Iason in
Kolchis, produce a harvest of armed men who slay each
other, leaving five only to become the ancestors of the
Thebans. It is the conflict of the clouds which spring up
from the earth after the waters have been let loose from the
prison-house, and mingle in wild confusion until a few only
remain upon the battle-field of the heaven. But if Phoibos
himself paid the penalty for slaying the Kyklopes, Kadmos
must not the less undergo, like him, a time of bondage, at the
end of which Athene makes him king of Thebes, and Zeus
gives him Harmonia as his bride. These incidents interpret
themselves ; while the gifts which Kadmos bestowed on
Harmonia suggest a comparison with the peplos of Athene
and the hangings woven for the Ashera by the Syrian women,
as well as with the necklace of Eriphyle, and thus with the
circular emblems which reproduce the sign of the Toni.
There is but little more worth telling in this Theban legend.
The wars in which Kadmos fights are the wars of Kepha-
los or Theseus, with fewer incidents to mark them ; and the
spirit of the old myth is better seen in the legend, that
when their work here was done, Kadmos and his wife were
changed into dragons (like the keen-sighted creatures which
draw the chariot of Medeia), and so taken up to Elysion. 1
The children of Europe are more prominent in Hellenic
mythology than Kadmos himself. Minos who appears first
1 The question of the colonisation of This word, together with the occurrence
Boiotia by Phenicians must be settled, of Banna as the Boiotian word for
if settled at all, by evidence which it is daughter, seemed to satisfy Niebuhr as
vain to seek in the incidents of the myth, to the fact of this Phenician settlement.
One item may perhaps be furnished by We must add to the list of such words
the name Kadmos, if this be the Grecised the epithet of Palaimon, Melikertes, the
form of the Semitic Kedem, the east. Syrian Melkarth or Moloch.