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

ix] Heraides with Cornucopia and Klados 367
functions as a daimon were forgotten,
cumbersome. Tradition held to
it as we see in the design in
Fig. 98. It could not, like the
branch, be transformed from a
fertility-emblem into a weapon ;
it had to be accounted for ; it
called aloud in fact for an aetio-
logical myth. The cornucopia,
men said, did not originally
belong to Herakles, it was the
guerdon of one of his great
labours ; he broke it off from
the bull-headed river Acheloos.
Dejaneira speaks.
the cornucopia became
Fig. 98.
'A river was my lover, him I mean
Great Acheloos, and in threefold form
Wooed me, and wooed again. .A visible bull
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled, gleaming snake,
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard
Fountains of clear spring water glistening 1 .' flowed
The vase-painting 2 in Fig. 99 reads like a commentary on
Dejaneira's words. It just gives us the needful clue. Here is the
great daimon of fertility in his familiar form, half man, half bull.
And, as on countless coins the bull-man is the local river-god, so
from his mouth flow the fertilizing streams, for is he not irayicpaTrjs
ydvovs, ' Lord of all that is wet and gleaming"1 '
? And, that there
be no mistake, a great cornucopia lies parallel above the life-giving-
waters 4 .
Nowhere perhaps does the fertility-daimon come so vividly
before us as in the words of Dejaneira. We see him shifting from
1 Soph. Track. 9ff.
2 Arch. Zeit. xvi. (1883), Taf. 11.
3 Such are the deol yavdevres invoked by the Danaid chorus at the close of the
Supplices of Aeschylus (v. 993).
local gods
They leave the praises of the Nile and implore the
Trora/novs o'i 5ia x^Pas de\e/j.6i> vQfxa x^ovaiu 1T0\VT€KV01.
4 Life-giving and also land-making. For the story of Alkmaion and the new
alluvial earth deposited at the mouth of the Acheloos see Prolegomena, pp. 220, 221.