Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE WISDOM OF ATLAS. 37
to the daily toil of heaving a stone to the summit of a hill CHAP.
from which it immediately rolls down. This idea of tasks
unwillingly done, or of natural operations as accomplished
by means of punishment, is found also in the myth of Atlas,
a name which like that of Tantalos denotes endurance and
suffering, and so passes into the notion of arrogance or
presumption. But the idea of a being who supported the
heaven above the earth, as of a being who guides the horses
of the sun, was awakened in the human mind long before
the task was regarded as a penalty. Indeed, it can scarcely
be said that this idea is clearly expressed in the Odyssey,
which says of Atlas that he knows all the depths of the sea
and that he holds or guards the lofty pillars which keep the
heaven from falling to crush the earth. 1
It is scarcely pro-
minent even when the Hesiodic poet speaks of him as doing
his work under a strong necessity, for this is no more than
the force which compels Phoibos to leave Delos for Pytho,
and carries Kephalos, Bellerophon, and Odysseus to their
doom in the far west. Nor in either of these poems is there
anything to warrant the inference that the poet regarded
Atlas as a mountain. This idea comes up in the myth of
Perseus, who sees the old man bowing beneath his fearful
load, and holding the Gorgon's face before his eyes, turns him
into stone ; and the stone which is to bear up the brazen heaven
must needs be a great mountain, whether in Libya or in
other regions, for the African Atlas was not the only moun-
tain which bore the name. But the phrase in the Odyssey
which speaks of him as knowing all the depths of the sea
points to a still earlier stage of the myth, in which Atlas
was possessed of the wisdom of Phoibos and was probably
Phoibos himself. Eegarded thus, the myths which make
the Okeanid Pleione his wife and the Pleiades his children,
or which give him Aithra for his bride and make her the
1
It can scarcely be doubted that the surrounding either a square or a circular
words a/Mph exovcriv, Od. i. 54, do not
mean that these columns surround the
earth, for in this case they must be not
only many in number, but it would be
obvious to the men of a mythmaking
and mythspeaking age, that a being
stationed in one spot could not keep up,
or hold, or guard, a number of pillars
earth. It is at the least certain that
t'lis is not the meaning of the Hesiodic
piet, who gives to Atlas a local habita-
tion at the utmost bounds of the earth
near the abode of the Hesperides, and
makes him bear the heavens on his
heads and hands. The Hellenic Atla< is
simply the Vedic Skambha, vol. i. p. 388,
II.