Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

HERAKLES THE BONDMAN 53
Iphitos as that of Achilleus to PatroMos. Incident is now CHAP,
crowded on incident, all exhibiting the working of the same
idea. It is the time of the wild simoom. Herakles ap-
proaches the sanctuary of Phoibos, but the Pythia will yield
no answer to his questions, and a contest follows between
Herakles and Phoibos himself, which is ended only when
Zeus sunders them by a flash of lightning. When thus for
the time discomfited, he is told that he can be loosed from
his madness and again become sound in mind only by consenting
to serve for a time as a bondman; and thus the myth
which makes Apollon serve in the house of Admetos, and
which made Herakles all his life long the slave of a mean
tyrant, is again brought into the story. He is now sold to
Omphale (the correlative of Omphalos), and assumes some-
thing like the guise of the half- feminine Dionysos. But even
with this story of subjection a vast number of exploits are
interwoven, among these being the slaying of a serpent on
the river Sygaris and the hunting of the Kalydonian boar.
The tale of his return from the conquest of Hion presents Herakles
the same scenes under slightly different colours. In his
fight with the Meropes he is assailed by a shower of stones,
and is even wounded by Chalkodon,— another thunder-
storm recalling the fight with Ares and Kyknos : and the
same battle of the elements comes before us in the next task
which Athene sets him, of fighting with the giants in the
burning fields of Phlegrai. These giants, it had been fore-
told, were to be conquered by a mortal man, a notion which
takes another form in the surprise of Polyphemos when he
finds himself outwitted by so small and insignificant a being
as Odysseus. At this point, after his return to Argos, some
mythographers place his marriage with Auge, the mother
of Telephos, whose story reproduces that of Oidipous or
Perseus.
and Auge '
His union with Deianeira, the daughter of the Kalydonian Heraklea
chief, brings us to the closing scenes of his troubled and D n
/ianira
tumultuous career. The name points, as we have seen, to
the darkness which was to be his portion at the ending of
his journey, and here also his evil fate pursues him. His
spear is fatal to the boy Eunomos, as it had been to the