The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911)

80. Centaurs. Monsters represented as men from the head to the loins, while the remainder of the body was that of a horse. Centaurs are the only monsters of antiquity to which any good traits were assigned. They were admitted to the companionship of men. Chiron was the wisest and justest of the Centaurs. At his death he was placed by Jupiter among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer). Messenia: in the Peloponnesus. Æsculapius: there were numerous oracles of Æsculapius, but the most celebrated was at Epidaurus. Here the sick sought responses and the recovery of their health by sleeping in the temple. It has been inferred from the accounts that have come down to us that the treatment of the sick resembled what is now called animal magnetism or mesmerism.

Serpents were sacred to Æsculapius, probably because of a superstition that those animals have a faculty of renewing their youth by a change of skin. The worship of Æsculapius was introduced into Rome in a time of great sickness. An embassy, sent to the temple of Epidaurus to entreat the aid of the god, was propitiously received; and on the return of the ship Æsculapius accompanied it in the form of a serpent. Arriving in the river Tiber, the serpent glided from the vessel and took possession of an island, upon which a temple was soon erected to his honor.

Interpretative. The healing powers of nature may be here symbolized. But it is more likely that the family of Asclepiadæ (a medical clan) invented Asklepios as at once their ancestor and the son of the god of healing, Apollo.

Illustrative. Milton, Paradise Lost, 9, 506; Shakespeare, Pericles, III, ii; Merry Wives, II, iii.

In Art. Æsculapius (sculpture), Vatican; also the statue in the Uffizi, Florence (text, Fig. 63). Thorwaldsen's (sculpture) Hygea (Health) and Æsculapius, Copenhagen.

81. Interpretative. Perhaps the unceasing and unvarying round of the sun led to the conception of him as a servant. Max Müller cites the Peruvian Inca who said that if the sun were free, like fire, he would visit new parts of the heavens. "He is," said the Inca, "like a tied beast who goes ever round and round in the same track" (Chips, etc., 2, 113). Nearly all Greek heroes had to undergo servitude, – Hercules, Perseus, etc. No stories are more beautiful or more lofty than those which express the hope, innate in the human heart, that somewhere and at some time some god has lived as a man among men and for the good of men. Such stories are not confined to the Greeks or the Hebrews.

Illustrative . R. Browning, Apollo and the Fates; Edith M. Thomas, Apollo the Shepherd; Emma Lazarus, Admetus; W. M. W. Call, Admetus.

83. Textual. Alcestis was a daughter of the Pelias who was killed at the instigation of Medea (167). In that affair Alcestis took no part. For her family, see Table G. She was held in the highest honor in Greek fable, and ranked with Penelope and Laodamia, the latter of whom was her niece. To explain the myth as a physical allegory would be easy, but is it not more likely that the idea of substitution finds expression in the myth? – that idea of atonement by sacrifice, which is suggested in the words of Œdipus at Colonus (185), "For one soul working in the strength of love Is mightier than ten thousand to atone." Koré (the daughter of Ceres): Proserpina. Larissa: a city of Thessaly, on the river Peneüs.

Illustrative. Milton's sonnet, On his Deceased Wife:

Methought I saw my late espousèd saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave,Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

Chaucer, Legende of Good Women, 208 et seq.; Court of Love (?), 100 et seq.

Poems. Robert Browning's noble poem, Balaustion's Adventure, purports to be a paraphrase of the Alcestis of Euripides, but while it maintains the classical spirit, it is in execution an original poem. The Love of Alcestis, by William Morris; Mrs. Hemans, The Alcestis of Alfieri, and The Death Song of Alcestis; W. S. Landor, Hercules, Pluto, Alcestis, and Admetus; Alcestis: F. T. Palgrave, W. M. W. Call, John Todhunter (a drama).

In Art. Fig. 64, in text, Naples Museum; also the relief on a Roman sarcophagus in the Vatican.

84. Textual. This Laomedon was descended, through Dardanus (the forefather of the Trojan race), from Jupiter and the Pleiad Electra. For further information about him, see 119, 161, and Table I.

Interpretative. Apollo evidently fulfills, under Laomedon, his function as god of colonization.

85-86. Textual. For Pan, see 43; for Tmolus, 76. Peneüs: a river in Thessaly, which rises in Mount Pindus and flows through the wooded valley of Tempe. Dædal: variously adorned, variegated. Midas was king of Phrygia (see 113).

Illustrative. The story of King Midas has been told by others with some variations. Dryden, in the Wife of Bath's Tale, makes Midas' queen the betrayer of the secret:

This Midas knew, and durst communicateTo none but to his wife his ears of state.

87. Illustrative. M. Arnold, Empedocles (Song of Callicles); L. Morris, Marsyas, in The Epic of Hades; Edith M. Thomas, Marsyas; E. Lee-Hamilton, Apollo and Marsyas.

In Art. Raphael's drawing, Apollo and Marsyas (Museum, Venice); Bordone's Apollo, Marsyas, and Midas (Dresden); the Græco-Roman sculpture, Marsyas (Louvre); Marsyas (or Dancing Faun), in the Lateran, Rome.

89. Textual. Daphne was a sister of Cyrene, another sweetheart of Apollo's (145). Delphi, in Phocis, and Tenedos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor, near Troy, were celebrated for their temples of Apollo. The latter temple was sacred to Apollo Smintheus, the Mouse-Apollo, probably because he had rid that country of mice as St. Patrick rid Ireland of snakes and toads. Dido: queen of Carthage (252), whose lover, Æneas, sailed away from her.

Interpretative. Max Müller's explanation is poetic though not philologically probable. "Daphne, or Ahanâ, means the Dawn. There is first the appearance of the dawn in the eastern sky, then the rising of the sun as if hurrying after his bride, then the gradual fading away of the bright dawn at the touch of the fiery rays of the sun, and at last her death or disappearance in the lap of her mother, the earth." The word Daphne also means, in Greek, a laurel; hence the legend that Daphne was changed into a laurel tree (Sci. Relig., 378, 379). Others construe Daphne as the lightning. It is, however, very probable that the Greeks of the myth-making age, finding certain plants and flowers sacred to Apollo, would invent stories to explain why he preferred the laurel, the hyacinth, the sunflower, etc. "Such myths of metamorphoses" are, as Mr. Lang says, "an universal growth of savage fancy, and spring from a want of a sense of difference between men and things" (Myth, Ritual, etc., 2, 206).

Illustrative. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, II, ii; Taming of the Shrew, Induction ii; Troilus and Cressida, I, i; Milton, Comus, 59, 662; Hymn on the Nativity, II. 176-180, Vacation, 33-40; Paradise Lost, 4, 268-275; Paradise Regained, 2, 187; Lord de Tabley (Wm. Lancaster), Daphne, "All day long, In devious forest, Grove, and fountain side, The god had sought his Daphne," etc.; Lyly, King Mydas; Apollo's Song to Daphne; Frederick Tennyson, Daphne. Waller applies this story to the case of one whose amatory verses, though they did not soften the heart of his mistress, yet won for the poet widespread fame:

Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain.All but the nymph that should redress his wrong,Attend his passion and approve his song.Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise,He caught at love and filled his arms with bays.

In Art. Fig. 67, in text; Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, in the Villa Borghese, Rome (see text, opp. p. 112). Painting: G. F. Watts' Daphne.

91. Illustrative. Hood, Flowers, "I will not have the mad Clytia, Whose head is turned by the sun," etc.; W. W. Story, Clytie; Mrs. A. Fields, Clytia. The so-called bust of Clytie (discovered not long ago) is possibly a representation of Isis.

93. Textual. Elis: northwestern part of the Peloponnesus. Alpheüs: a river of Elis flowing to the Mediterranean. The river Alpheüs does in fact disappear under ground, in part of its course, finding its way through subterranean channels, till it again appears on the surface. It was said that the Sicilian fountain Arethusa was the same stream, which, after passing under the sea, came up again in Sicily. Hence the story ran that a cup thrown into the Alpheüs appeared again in the Arethusa. It is, possibly, this fable of the underground course of Alpheüs that Coleridge has in mind in his dream of Kubla Khan:

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man,Down to a sunless sea.

In one of Moore's juvenile poems he alludes to the practice of throwing garlands or other light objects on the stream of Alpheüs, to be carried downward by it, and afterward reproduced at its emerging, "as an offering To lay at Arethusa's feet."

The Acroceraunian Mountains are in Epirus in the northern part of Greece. It is hardly necessary to point out that a river Arethusa arising there could not possibly be approached by an Alpheüs of the Peloponnesus. Such a criticism of Shelley's sparkling verses would however be pedantic rather than just. Probably Shelley uses the word Acroceraunian as synonymous with steep, dangerous. If so, he had the practice of Ovid behind him (Remedium Amoris, 739). Mount Erymanthus: between Arcadia and Achaia. The Dorian deep: the Peloponnesus was inhabited by descendants of the fabulous Dorus. Enna: a city in the center of Sicily. Ortygia: an island on which part of the city of Syracuse is built.

Illustrative. Milton, Arcades, 30; Lycidas, 132; Margaret J. Preston, The Flight of Arethusa; Keats, Endymion, Bk. 2, "On either side out-gushed, with misty spray, A copious spring."

95. See genealogical table E for Actæon. In this myth Preller finds another allegory of the baleful influence of the dog days upon those exposed to the heat. Cox's theory that here we have large masses of cloud which, having dared to look upon the clear sky, are torn to pieces and scattered by the winds, is principally instructive as illustrating how far afield theorists have gone, and how easy it is to invent ingenious explanations.

Illustrative. Shakespeare, Merry Wives, II, i; III, ii; Titus Andronicus, II, iii; Shelley, Adonais, 31, "Midst others of less note, came one frail Form," etc., a touching allusion to himself; A. H. Clough, Actæon; L. Morris, Actæon (Epic of Hades).

96. Chios: an island in the Ægean. Lemnos: another island in the Ægean, where Vulcan had a forge.

Interpretative. The ancients were wont to glorify in fable constellations of remarkable brilliancy or form. The heavenly adventures of Orion are sufficiently explained by the text.

Illustrative. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 1, 3, 31; Milton, Paradise Lost, 1, 299, "Natheless he so endured," etc.; Longfellow, Occultation of Orion; R. H. Horne, Orion; Charles Tennyson Turner, Orion (a sonnet).

97. Electra. See genealogical table I. See same table for Merope, the mother of Glaucus and grandmother of Bellerophon (155).

Illustrative. Pleiads: Milton, Paradise Lost, 7, 374; Pope, Spring, 102; Mrs. Hemans has verses on the same subject; Byron, "Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below."

In modern sculpture, The Lost Pleiad of Randolph Rogers is famous; in painting, the Pleiades of Elihu Vedder (Fig. 72, in text).

98. Mount Latmos: in Caria. Diana is sometimes called Phœbe, the shining one. For the descendants of Endymion, the Ætolians, etc., see Table I.

Interpretative. According to the simplest explanation of the Endymion myth, the hero is the setting sun on whom the upward rising moon delights to gaze. His fifty children by Selene would then be the fifty months of the Olympiad, or Greek period of four years. Some, however, consider him to be a personification of sleep, the king whose influence comes over one in the cool caves of Latmos, "the Mount of Oblivion"; others, the growth of vegetation under the dewy moonlight; still others, euhemeristically, a young hunter, who under the moonlight followed the chase, but in the daytime slept.

Illustrative. The Endymion of Keats. Fletcher, in the Faithful Shepherdess, tells, "How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove, First saw the boy Endymion," etc. Young, Night Thoughts, "So Cynthia, poets feign, In shadows veiled, … Her shepherd cheered"; Spenser, Epithalamion, "The Latmian Shepherd," etc.; Marvel, Songs on Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell (chorus, Endymion and Laura); O. W. Holmes, Metrical Essays, "And, Night's chaste empress, in her bridal play, Laughed through the foliage where Endymion lay."

Poems. Besides Keats' the most important are by Lowell, Longfellow, Clough (Epi Latmo, and Selene), T. B. Read, Buchanan, L. Morris (Epic of Hades). John Lyly's prose drama, Endymion, contains quaint and delicate songs.

In Art. Fig. 73, in text; Diana and the sleeping Endymion (Vatican).

Paintings. Carracci's fresco, Diana embracing Endymion (Farnese Palace, Rome); Guercino's Sleeping Endymion; G. F. Watts' Endymion.

100. Textual. Paphos and Amathus: towns in Cyprus, of which the former contained a temple to Venus. Cnidos (Cnidus or Gnidus): a town in Caria, where stood a famous statue of Venus, attributed to Praxiteles. Cytherea: Venus, an adjective derived from her island Cythera in the Ægean Sea. Acheron, and Persephone or Proserpine: see 44-48. The wind-flower of the Greeks was of bloody hue, like that of the pomegranate. It is said the wind blows the blossoms open, and afterwards scatters the petals.

Interpretative. Among the Pœnicians Venus is known as Astarte, among the Assyrians as Istar. The Adonis of this story is the Phœnician Adon, or the Hebrew Adonai, 'Lord.' The myth derives its origin from the Babylonian worship of Thammuz or Adon, who represents the verdure of spring, and whom his mistress, the goddess of fertility, seeks, after his death, in the lower regions. With their departure all birth and fruitage cease on the earth; but when he has been revived by sprinkling of water, and restored to his mistress and to earth, all nature again rejoices. The myth is akin to those of Linus, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus. Mannhardt (Wald-und Feld-kulte, 274), cited by Roscher, supplies the following characteristics common to such religious rites in various lands: (1) The spring is personified as a beautiful youth who is represented by an image surrounded by quickly fading flowers from the "garden of Adonis." (2) He comes in the early year and is beloved by a goddess of vegetation, goddess sometimes of the moon, sometimes of the star of Love. (3) In midsummer he dies, and during autumn and winter inhabits the underworld. (4) His burial is attended with lamentations, his resurrection with festivals. (5) These events take place in midsummer and in spring. (6) The image and the Adonis plants are thrown into water. (7) Sham marriages are celebrated between pairs of worshipers.

Illustrative. The realistic Idyl XV of Theocritus contains a typical Psalm of Adonis, sung at Alexandria, for his resurrection. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis; Taming of the Shrew, Induction ii; 1 Henry VI, I, vi. In Milton, Comus, 998:

Beds of hyacinth and roses,Where young Adonis oft reposes,Waxing well of his deep wound,In slumber soft, and on the groundSadly sits th' Assyrian queen.

Drummond, The Statue of Adonis; Pope, Summer, 61; Winter, 24; Miscel. 7, 10; Moral Essays, 3, 73; Dunciad, 5, 202. See C. S. Calverley, Death of Adonis (Theocritus); L. Morris, Adonis (Epic of Hades).

In Art. Fig. 74, in text, from a Roman sarcophagus. The Dying Adonis, (sculpture), Michelangelo; the Adonis of Thorwaldsen in the Glyptothek, Munich.

101-102. Textual. Psyche does not eat anything in Hades, because, by accepting the hospitality of Proserpina, she would become an inmate of her household. The scene with the lamp and knife probably indicates the infringement of some ancient matrimonial custom. Erebus: the land of darkness, Hades. For Zephyr, Acheron, Cerberus, Charon, etc., see Index.

Interpretative. The fable of Cupid and Psyche is usually regarded as allegorical. The Greek name for butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as that of the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, groveling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness. It is probable that the story allegorizes a philosophical conception concerning three stages of the soul's life: first, a former existence of bliss; second, an earthly existence of trial; third, a heavenly future of fruition. Cox, by his usual method, finds here a myth of the search for the Sun (Eros) by the Dawn (Psyche). Many of the incidents of the story will be found in modern fairy tales and romances, such as Beauty and the Beast, Grimm's Twelve Brothers; the Gaelic stories: The Three Daughters of King O'Hara; Fair, Brown, and Trembling; The Daughter of the Skies; and the Norse tale – East of the Sun and West of the Moon. See Cox 1, 403-411.

Illustrative. Thomas Moore, Cupid and Psyche; Mrs. Browning, Psyche, Paraphrase on Apuleius; L. Morris, in The Epic of Hades; Frederick Tennyson, Psyche; Robert Bridges, Eros and Psyche. Most important is W. H. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, which contains the story as given by Apuleius.

In Art. Psyche is represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly, in the different situations described in the allegory. The Græco-Roman sculpture of Cupid and Psyche, in the Capitol at Rome, is of surpassing beauty; so also is Canova's Cupid and Psyche.

Paintings. Raphael's frescoes in the Farnesina Villa, twelve in number, illustrating the story; François Gérard's Cupid and Psyche; Paul Thumann's nine illustrations of the story (see Figs. 75, 76, in text); R. Beyschlag's Psyche with the Urn, Psyche Grieving, and Psyche and Pan; W. Kray's Psyche and Zephyr; Psyche: by A. de Curzon; by G. F. Watts, a series of three illustrations by H. Bates. The Charon and Psyche of E. Neide is a sentimental, simpering conception. A. Zick also has a Psyche.

103. According to another tradition, Atalanta's love was Milanion. The nuptial vow was ratified by Hera (Juno). This, the Bœotian, Atalanta is sometimes identified with the Arcadian Atalanta of the Calydonian Hunt. (See 168 and Table D). It is better to discriminate between them. The genealogy of this Atalanta will be seen in Tables G and I.

Illustrative. W. Morris, Atalanta's Race (Earthly Paradise); Moore, Rhymes on the Road, on Alpine Scenery, – an allusion to Hippomenes.

In Art. Painting by E. J. Poynter, Atalanta's Race (Fig. 78, in text); and Guido Reni's brilliant picture of the same subject.

104. Textual and Illustrative. The story of Hero and Leander is the subject of a romantic poem by Musæus, a grammarian of Alexandria, who lived in the fifth century A.D. This author, in distinction from the mythical poet of the same name, is styled the Pseudo-Musæus. The epyllion has been translated by Sir Robert Stapylton, Sir Edwin Arnold, and others. The feat of swimming the Hellespont was performed by Lord Byron. The distance in the narrowest part is not more than a mile, but there is a constant dangerous current setting out from the Sea of Marmora into the Archipelago. For an allusion to the story see Byron, Bride of Abydos, Canto II. For Byron's statement concerning the breadth of the water see footnote to "Stanzas written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos."

Poems. Hero and Leander: by Leigh Hunt, by Tom Hood, by Moore; sonnet by D. G. Rossetti, Hero's Lamp (House of Life); a poem not in later editions of Tennyson, Hero to Leander, 1830; Chapman's continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander.

Paintings. G. von Bodenhausen; F. Keller (Fig. 79, in text).

105. Interpretative. Another illustration of the vivifying influence of love. Preller deems Pygmalion's story nearly akin to the Adonis myth. He regards the festival of Venus, during which the statue of Galatea (or passive love) receives life, as the usual Adonis-festival.

Table G. The Connections of Atalanta the Bœotian

Illustrative. Thomson, Castle of Indolence, 2, 12; R. Buchanan, Pygmalion the Sculptor; Morris, and Lang, as in text; Pygmalion: by T. L. Beddoes, by W. C. Bennett. The seventeenth-century satirist, Marston, wrote a Pygmalion, of no great worth. Frederick Tennyson, Pygmalion (in Daphne and other Poems); Arthur Henry Hallam, Lines spoken in the Character of Pygmalion; Thomas Woolner, Pygmalion.

In Art. The Pygmalion series of four scenes, by E. Burne-Jones.

106. Textual. Semiramis: wife of King Ninus and the queen of Assyria. Famous for her administrative and military ability. A mythical character with features of historic probability.

Illustrative. Chaucer, Thisbe, the Martyr of Babylon (Legende of Good Women). Allusions in Surrey, Of the Death of Sir Thomas Wyatt; Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, III, ii; V, i; Merchant of Venice, V, i. Moore, in the Sylph's Ball, draws a comparison between Thisbe's wall and the gauze of Davy's safety lamp. Mickle's translation of the Lusiad (Island of Love).

In Art. Burne-Jones' three paintings, Cupid, Pyramus, and Thisbe (Fig. 80, in text); E. J. Paupion's painting, Thisbe.

107. Textual. Lesbos and Chios: islands in the Ægean. For Sappho see 298 (3).