Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

250 MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK
II.
Z ethos
and
Prokne.
age which shows her affinity with Athene, Aphrodite, and
all other deities of the light and the dawn. Her children,
like Oidipous, Telephos and many others, are exposed on
their birth, and like them found and brought up by shep-
herds, among whom Antiope herself is said to have long
remained a captive, like Danae* in the house of Polydektes.
We have now the same distinction of office or employment
which marks the other twin brothers of Greek myths. Zethos
tends the flocks, while Amphion receives from Hermes
a harp which makes the stones not merely move but fix
themselves in their proper places as he builds the walls of
Thebes. The sequel of the history of Antiope exhibits,
like the myths of Tyro, Ino, and other legends, the jealous
second wife or step-mother, who is slain by Amphion and
Zethos, as Sidero is killed by Pelias and Neleus. Amphion
himself becomes the husband of Niobe, the mother who presumes
to compare her children with the offspring of Zeus
and Leto.
In one tradition Zethos, the brother Amphion, is the husband
of Prokne, the daughter of the Athenian Pandion ; and
in this version the story ran that she killed her own child
by mistake, when through envy of her fertility she proposed
to slay the eldest son of her sister-in-law Mobe. 1 But in its
more complete form the myth makes her a wife of Tereus,
who is king either of the hill-country (Thrace) or of the
Megarian Pegai. When her son Itys was born, Tereus cut
out his wife's tongue and hid her away with her babe, and
then married her sister Philomela, whom he deceived by
saying that Prokne was dead. When the sisters discovered
his guilt, Prokne killed her own child Itys, and served up
his flesh as a meal for Tereus. Tereus in his turn, learning
what had been done, pursues the sisters as they fly from him,
and he has almost seized them when they pray that they
may be changed into birds. Tereus thus became a hoopoe,
Prokne a swallow, and Philomela a nightingale. 2 Hence it
is that as the spring comes round, the bride mourns for her
lost child with an inconsolable sorrow, as in the Megarian
1 Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 141. of the sisters, and made Prokne the
2 Another version reversed the doom nightingale and Philomela the swallow.