Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

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MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK to be capriciously distributed, so that on the one side we
n -
. have the squalid beggar, on the other the man whose pros-
perity is so unvarying that his friend, foreseeing the issue,
sends to renounce all farther alliance with him. This in-
equality it is the business of Nemesis to remedy ; and thus
she becomes practically an embodiment of righteous indig-
nation at successful wrong, although she is also regarded as
the minister of the gods who are jealous when the well-being
of man passes beyond a certain limit. 1 In either aspect she
is Adrasteia, the being from whom there is no escape.
Tyche In "the meaning commonly attached to the word, Tyche
Akraiii. denoted the idea of mere blind chance, scattering her gifts
without any regard to the deserts of those on whom they
might fall. But this was not the conception which led some
to represent her with a rudder as guiding the affairs of the
world, and not only to place her among the Moirai, but to
endow her with a power beyond that of the others. 2 In her
more fickle aspect she carries the ball in her hand, while her
wealth and the nature of her gifts are denoted by the horn of
Amaltheia at her side, and the boy Eros who accompanies
her, or the Good Demons who sometimes surround her. As
Akraia, Tyche becomes simply a name of Athene, the wealth-
bringer ; with the epithet Agathe, good, she becomes prac-
tically identical with the Agathos Daimon, the nameless
benignant deity invoked by cities and individual men. The
names Theos and Daimon are often given to those unnamed
forces in nature which, in Preller's words, are more felt in
their general influences than in particular acts. 3
JSTor is the
assertion without warrant that the genuine utterances of the
heart were addressed to this incomprehensible power, of whose
goodness generally they felt assured, and not to any mythical
deities on whose capricious feelings no trust could be placed.
When the swineherd Eumaios talks with Odysseus, we hear
nothino- of Zeus or Phoibos, but we are told simply that the
unnamed God gives and takes away as may seem to him best.
1 d>6ovepbi> rb haifxoviov—the doctrine Rhamnusian egg of Nemesis belongs to
which lies at the root of the philosophy the story of Leda and Helen,
attributed by Herodotos to Solon, and Pans. vii. 26, 3.
of the policy of Amasis in his dealings
3 Gr. Myth. i. 421.
with Polykrates. The myth of the