Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

VIl] Marriage of Sun and Moon 227
looking much more like a goddess than a ravished bride. The
olive trees and the two doves flying close together to perch on one
of them seem to take us back to the trees and birds of the
marriage of Sky and Earth on the Hagia Triada sarcophagos 1 .
The chariot of Pelops is the four-horsed chariot of the sun,
which Erichthonios the mythical founder of the Panathenaea also
imitated 2 . That
the Sun and Moon should drive in the same
chariot may seem strange, since of course they never rise together
in the same quarter of the sky. But we have already seen them
mxmmm%\mmmxmmm\izMmmixmnam\n\v!mv\
Fig. 58.
so represented on the Louvre krater (Fig. 51) 3 ; and the same
conjunction appears in literature. At the marriage of Kapaneus,
Helios and Selene drove their chariot together over the sky 4 . At
the two ends of the pedestal of the great statue of Zeus at
1 Supra, p. 176.
2 Verg. Gi'org. in. 113 Primus Erichthonius currus et quatuor ausus iungere
|
equos.
ii. 13
Eratosth. catast. 13 rrj rod 'HXtou avripufjiop iwoi-qaaTO 5«f>peiav. Hyg. Astr.
Heniockus, Erichthonium... quern Jupiter, cum vidisset primum inter
homines equos quadrigis iunxisse, admiratus est ingenium hominis ad Solis inventa
accessisse, quod is princeps quadrigis inter deos est usus. Others identified the
celestial Charioteer with Myrtilus, Hyg. ibid.
3 Compare also the coin of Gellia, figured in Roscher, Lex., s.v. Mars, col. 2110,
which shows Mars as a warrior and Nerine—the Roman Sun or Year God with his
bride—standing in a quadriga.
4 Eur. Suppl. 990 ri (piyyos, riv' aXy\av
eduppeuerov "AXios
~e\dva re Kar 1
aidepa
f\ap.Trd5' iV uKvOoai vv^4>aif...
My attention was drawn to this passage by Prof. Murray.
15—2