Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

BOOK
II.
MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
light, whether of the morning or the evening. 1 As Sarama,
the dawn which peers about in search of the bright cows
which the Panis have stolen from Indra, we have seen her
already listening, though but for a moment, to the evil words
of the robbers. These evil words are reproduced in the
sophistry of the Trojan Paris, who is only a little more
successful than the thief of the Vedic hymns, and the mo-
mentary unfaithfulness of the one becomes the long-continued
faithlessness of the other. But it is a faithlessness more in
seeming than in fact. Helen is soon awakened from her
evil dream, and her heart remains always in beautiful Argos,
in the house of her husband who never showed her anything
but kindness and love. Though Paris is beautiful, yet she
feels that she has nothing in common with him, and thus
she returns with a chastened joy to the home from which
she had been taken away.
But to be stolen or persecuted for her beauty was the lot
of Helen almost from her cradle. In the myth of Theseus
she is brought into Attica, and guarded in early youth by
Aithra in the stronghold of Aphidnai until she is delivered
by her brothers, the Dioskouroi; and when she had been
stolen by Paris, and spent ten weary years in Troy, she is
said in some versions to have become the wife of Deiphobos,
another son of Priam, and another representative of the
dark beings who own kinship with the Vedic Yritra. When
Paris is slain, the brother of the seducer will not suffer
and thus, on the fall
Helen to be given up to the Achaians ;
of Ilion, his house is the first to be set on fire. Even after
her death the fate of Helen is not changed. In Leuke, the
white island of the dawn, she is wedded to Achilleus, and
becomes the mother of Euphorion, the winged child who is
first loved and then smitten by the thunderbolts of Zeus in
Melos. 2 Throughout she is a being not belonging to the
land of mortal men. She is sprung from the egg of Leda,
the being to whom Zeus comes in the form of a swan, and
1 This is fully recognised by Preller,
•who compares her, as such, with the
Mater Matuta of the Latins. Or. Myth.
ii. 108.
- But Achilleus has Iphigcneia and
Medeia also as his brides in this bright
island : and these are simply other
names for the dawn or the evening
light.