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

VIIl] Erichthonios as Daimon-Hero 265
They have cause for haste, cause more imminent than a guilty
conscience. The design in Fig. 64 a shows two guardian snakes,
but rooted to the rocks. The child Erichthonios himself is a
human child. But the design in Fig. 65 from a cylix by Brygos 1
Fig. 65.
tells us another and a more instructive tale. The scene, of
which only a part is given here, takes place just after the opening
of the chest. The two terrified sisters are pursued by a huge
snake, a snake so huge that his tail coils round to the other side
of the cylix not figured here. He is not one of the guardian
snakes, he is the actual dweller in the chest. Cecrops is a snake,
Erichthonios is a snake, the old snake-king is succeeded by a new
snake-king.
There are no such things as snake-kings. What the myths of
Cecrops and Erichthonios tell us is that, for some reason or
another, each and every traditional Athenian king was regarded
as being also in some sense a snake. How this came to be
we might never have guessed but for the story of the cista. In
Dionysiac rites the snake in the cista was a constant factor. A
whole class of coins of Ephesus known as cistophoroi 2 show us
1 Frankfort. In the Stadel-Institut ; see W. Klein, Meistersignaturen, p. 179,
and W iener-Vorlegeblatter, Serie vm. Taf. 2. On the reverse is the sending forth
of the Eleusiuian 'hero,' Triptolemos, the correlative of Erichthonios.
2 See Head, Hist. Num. p. 461. For cistae and snakes on coins see L. Anson,
Numismata Graeca, Part i. Cista xni. 936, where all the known instances are
collected.