Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

THE TOILS OF HERAKLES. 45
which Arete and Kakia, virtue and vice, each claim his obe- CITAP.
dience, as Aphrodite and Athene each claim the golden „
prize which. Paris must adjudge. The one promises endless
pleasures here and hereafter ; the other holds out the pro-
spect of hard days followed by healthful slumbers, and warns
him that nothing good was ever won without labour, nothing
great ever done without toil. The mind of Herakles is made
up at once ; and the greatest of all mythical heroes is thus
made to inforce the highest lessons of human duty, and to
present the highest standard of human action. The apologue
is full of beauty and truth, and there is manifestly no harm
in such applications of myths when the myths themselves
are not strained or distorted in the process. The images of
self-restraint, of power used for the good of others, are pro-
minent in the lives of all or almost all the Zeus-born heroes ;
but these are not their only aspects, and it is as necessary to
remember that other myths told of Herakles can no more be
reconciled with this standard of generous self-devotion than
the conduct of Odysseus as he approaches the Seirens' island
with the Christian duty of resisting temptation.
With this high heroic temper Herakles sets forth for his The lions
first great fight with the lion of Kithairon, and whether from airfaAnd
its carcase or from that of the Nemean beast, he obtains the Nemea.
lion's skin with which he is seen so commonly represented,
and which reappears in the jackal's skin in the story of the
enchanted Hindoo rajah. 1 The myth of the fifty daughters
of Thestios or Thespios, which in some versions is con-
nected with his first great exploit, is akin to that of the fifty
daughters of Danaos and the fifty children whom Asterodia
bare to Endymion. 2
It is but one instance out of many in
1 With this lion's skin must he com- Faiths avd Lrr/r?uJs, 31. Maury enters
pared the fish-skin with which the sun- at length into the physiological questions
god is represented in the characters of which on the Euemeristic hypothesis
Proteus and Onnes or Dagon, and must be connected with the myth of the
which might he worn hy Phoibos Del- Nemean Lion. However conclusive his
phinios. With the later, it is simply a arguments may be, the inquiry is almost
sign of the sun as rising like Aphrodite superfluous. It cannot be necessary
from the sea; the lion's skin may denote to disprove the existence of lions in
perhaps the raiment of tawny cloud the Peloponnese, unless we must also
which the sun seems to trail behind him disprove that of the Sphinx or the
as he fights his way through the vapours Chimaira.
whom he is said to overcome. See vol. i.
p. 135. In his chapters on Ancient
8 See p. 30.