Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE CHARITES OR GRACES. '}
Charites of the Odyssey, the graceful beings whose form in CHAP.
IL
Hellenic mythology is always human. 1
With this origin of the name Charis all the myths which The mini-
have gathered round the Charites are in the closest agree- A^hrodit*
inent ; and they do but resolve themselves, somewhat monotonously,
into expressions denoting the birth of the morn-
ing from the heavens or the sky, and the sea or the waters.
In the Hesiodic Theogony, the Charis who is the wife of
Hephaistos is called Aglaia (the shining), whose name is also
that of Aigle, Glaukos, and Athene of the bright face
(Glaukopis). In other versions their mother is herself Aigle,
who here becomes a wife of Phoibos ; in others again she is
Eurydomene, or Eurynome, names denoting with many others
the broad flush of the morning light ; or she is Lethe, as
Phoibos is also a son of Leto, and the bright Dioskouroi
spring from the colourless Leda. So too the two Spartan
Charites are, like Phaethousa and Lampetie, Klete and
Phaenna (the clear and glistening). But beautiful though
they all might be, there would yet be room for rivalry or
comparison, and thus the story of the judgment of Paris is
repeated in the sentence by which Teiresias adjudged the
prize of beauty to Kale, the fair. The seer in this case
brings on himself a punishment which answers to the ruin
caused by the verdict of Paris. 2
As the goddess of the dawn, Aphrodite is endowed with The
arrows irresistible as those of Phoibos or Achilleus, the ravs a / r f ws of
1 .
7 J Aphrodite.
which stream like spears from the flaming sun and are as
fatal to the darkness as the arrows of Aphrodite to the giant
Polypheinos. Nay, like Ixion himself, she guides the four-
spoked wheel, the golden orb at its first rising : but she does
not share his punishment, for Aphrodite is not seen in the
blazing noontide. 3 In her brilliant beauty she is Arjuni, a
1 Professor MUller, Led. 372. remarks poets, for in one hymn the Harits are
that in Greek the" name Charis never called the Sisters, and in another are
means a horse, and that ' it never passed represented with beautiful wings,
through that phase in the mind of the - Sostratos ap. Eustath. ad Horn.
Greek poets which is so familiar in the p. 166o. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and
poetry of the Indian bards.' But the Horn. Biography, s. v. Charis.
Greek notion, he observes, had at the 3 Pind, Pyth. iv. 380.
least dawned on the mind of the Vedic
b 2
.
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