Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

BOOK
II.
MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
If we choose now to follow the ordinary arrangement of
these stories, we shall see in them a series which might be
indefinitely extended, but of whose mythical origin we can
scarcely feel a doubt. If after the defeat of Eurystheus the
Herakleids return to the Peloponnesos, we find that they
cannot maintain their footing there for more than a year,
and that then by an irresistible necessity they find their
way back to Athens ; and these alternations, which represent
simply the succession of day and night, might and would
have been repeated any number of times, if the myths had
not at length become mixed up with traditions of the local
settlement of the country—in other words, if certain names
found in the myths had not become associated with particular
spots or districts in the Peloponnesos. To follow all the
versions and variations of these legends is a task perhaps
not much more profitable than threading the mazes of a
labyrinth ; but we may trace in some, probably in most of
them, the working of the same ideas. Thus the version
which after the death of Eurystheus takes Hyllos to Thebes
makes him dwell by the Elektrian or amber-gates. The
next stage in the history is another return of the children of
Herakles, which ends in the slaughter of Hyllos in single
combat with Echemos—a name connected perhaps with that
of Echidna, Ahi, the throttling snake. The night is once
more victorious, and the Herald eidai are bound by a compact
to forego all attempts at return for fifty or a hundred years,,
periods which are mere multiples of the ten years of the
Trojan war, and of the Nostoi or homeward wanderings of
the Achaian chiefs. Once more the children of the dawn
goddess give them shelter in Trikorythos, a region answering
to the Hypereia or upper land, in which the Phaiakians
dwelt before they were driven from it by the Kyklopes. The
subsequent fortunes of KLeodaios and Aristomachos the son
and grandson of Herakles simply repeat those of Hyllos
but at length in the next generation the myth pauses, as in
the case of Odysseus and Achilleus in the Iliad and the
Odyssey, at the moment of victory, and the repetition of the
old drama is prevented by the gradual awakening of the
historical sense in the Hellenic tribes. For this last return