A Book of Myths
behold the ruin that had been wrought by the chariot of the Sun. And
Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, looked down and beheld. And at the sight of
that piteous devastation his brow grew dark, and terrible was his
wrath against him who had held the reins of the chariot. Calling upon
Apollo and all the other gods to witness him, he seized a lightning
bolt, and for a moment the deathless Zeus and all the dwellers in
Olympus looked on the fiery chariot in which stood the swaying,
slight, lithe figure of a young lad, blinded with horror, shaken with
agony. Then, from his hand, Zeus cast the bolt, and the chariot was
dashed into fragments, and Phaeton, his golden hair ablaze, fell, like
a bright shooting star, from the heavens above, into the river
Eridanus. The steeds returned to their master, Apollo, and in rage and
grief Apollo lashed them. Angrily, too, and very rebelliously did he
speak of the punishment meted to his son by the ruler of the
Immortals. Yet in truth the punishment was a merciful one. Phaeton was
only half a god, and no human life were fit to live after the day of
dire anguish that had been his.
Bitter was the mourning of Clymene over her beautiful only son, and so
ceaselessly did his three sisters, the Heliades, weep for their
brother, that the gods turned them into poplar trees that grew by the
bank of the river, and, when still they wept, their tears turned into
precious amber as they fell. Yet another mourned for Phaeton--Phaeton
"dead ere his prime." Cycnus, King of Liguria, had dearly loved the
gallant boy, and again and yet again he dived deep in the river and
brought forth the charred fragments of what had once been the
beautiful son of a god, and gave to them honourable burial. Yet he
could not rest satisfied that he had won all that remained of his
friend from the river's bed, and so he continued to haunt the stream,
ever diving, ever searching, until the gods grew weary of his restless
sorrow and changed him into a swan.
And still we see the swan sailing mournfully along, like a
white-sailed barque that is bearing the body of a king to its rest,
and ever and anon plunging deep into the water as though the search
for the boy who would fain have been a god were never to come to an
end.
To Phaeton the Italian Naiades reared a tomb, and inscribed on the
stone these words:
"Driver of Phoebus' chariot, Phaeton,
Struck by Jove's thunder, rests beneath this stone,
He could not rule his father's car of fire,
Yet was it much, so nobly to aspire."
Ovid.
ENDYMION
To the modern popular mind perhaps none of the goddesses of
Greece--not even Venus herself--has more appeal than has the huntress
goddess, Diana. Those who know but little of ancient statuary can
still brighten to intelligent recognition of the huntress with her
quiver and her little stag when they meet with them in picture gallery
or in suburban garden. That unlettered sportsman in weather-worn pink,
slowly riding over the fragrant dead leaves by the muddy roadside on
this chill, grey morning, may never have heard of Artemis, but he is
quite ready to make intelligent reference to Diana to the handsome
young sportswoman whom he finds by the covert side; and Sir Walter's
Diana Vernon has helped the little-read public to realise that the
original Diana was a goddess worthy of being sponsor to one of the
finest heroines of fiction.
But not to the sportsman alone, but also to the youth or maid who
loves the moon--they know not why--to those whom the shadows of the
trees on a woodland path at night mean a grip of the heart, while
"pale Dian" scuds over the dark clouds that are soaring far beyond the
tree-tops and is peeping, chaste and pale, through the branches of the
firs and giant pines, there is something arresting, enthralling, in
the thought of the goddess Diana who now has for hunting-ground the
blue firmament of heaven where the pale Pleiades
"Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid."
Tennyson.
"She gleans her silvan trophies; down the wold
She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee
Mixed with the music of the hunting roll'd,
But her delight is all in archery,
And naught of ruth and pity wotteth she
More than her hounds that follow on the flight;
The goddess draws a golden bow of might
And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay.
She tosses loose her locks upon the night,
And through the dim wood Dian threads her way."
Andrew Lang.
Again and again in mythological history we come on stories of the
goddess, sometimes under her best known name of Diana, sometimes under
her older Greek name of Artemis, and now and again as Selene, the
moon-goddess, the Luna of the Romans. Her twin brother was Apollo, god
of the sun, and with him she shared the power of unerringly wielding a
bow and of sending grave plagues and pestilences, while both were
patrons of music and of poetry.
When the sun-god's golden chariot had driven down into the west, then
would his sister's noiseless-footed silver steeds be driven across the
sky, while the huntress shot from her bow at will silent arrows that
would slay without warning a joyous young mother with her newly-born
babe, or would wantonly pierce, with a lifelong pain, the heart of
some luckless mortal.
Now one night as she passed Mount Latmos, there chanced to be a
shepherd lad lying asleep beside his sleeping flock. Many times had
Endymion watched the goddess from afar, half afraid of one so
beautiful and yet so ruthless, but never before had Diana realised the
youth's wonderful beauty. She checked her hounds when they would have
swept on in their chase through the night, and stood beside Endymion.
She judged him to be as perfect as her own brother, Apollo--yet more
perfect, perhaps, for on his upturned sleeping face was the silver
glamour of her own dear moon. Fierce and burning passion could come
with the sun's burning rays, but love that came in the moon's pale
light was passion mixed with gramarye. She gazed for long, and when,
in his sleep, Endymion smiled, she knelt beside him and, stooping,
gently kissed his lips. The touch of a moonbeam on a sleeping rose was
no more gentle than was Diana's touch, yet it was sufficient to wake
Endymion. And as, while one's body sleeps on, one's half-waking mind,
now and again in a lifetime seems to realise an ecstasy of happiness
so perfect that one dares not wake lest, by waking, the wings of one's
realised ideal should slip between grasping fingers and so escape
forever, so did Endymion realise the kiss of the goddess. But before
his sleepy eyes could be his senses' witnesses, Diana had hastened
away. Endymion, springing to his feet, saw only his sleeping flock,
nor did his dogs awake when he heard what seemed to him to be the
baying of hounds in full cry in a forest far up the mountain. Only to
his own heart did he dare to whisper what was this wonderful thing
that he believed had befallen him, and although he laid himself
down, hoping that once again this miracle might be granted to him, no
miracle came; nor could he sleep, so great was his longing.
All the next day, through the sultry hours while Apollo drove his
chariot of burnished gold through the land, Endymion, as he watched
his flocks, tried to dream his dream once more, and longed for the day
to end and the cool, dark night to return. When night came he tried to
lie awake and see what might befall, but when kind sleep had closed
his tired eyes,
"There came a lovely vision of a maid,
Who seemed to step as from a golden car
Out of the low-hung moon."
Lewis Morris.
Always she kissed him, yet when her kiss awoke him he never could see
anything more tangible than a shaft of silver moonlight on the moving
bushes of the mountain side, never hear anything more real than the
far-away echo of the baying of pursuing hounds, and if, with eager,
greatly-daring eyes, he looked skywards, a dark cloud, so it seemed to
him, would always hasten to hide the moon from his longing gaze.
In this manner time passed on. The days of Endymion were filled by
longing day-dreams. His sleeping hours ever brought him ecstasy. Ever,
too, to the goddess, the human being that she loved seemed to her to
grow more precious. For her all the joy of day and of night was
concentrated in the moments she spent by the side of the sleeping
Endymion. The flocks of the shepherd flourished like those of no other
herd. No wild beast dared come near them; no storm nor disease
assailed them. Yet for Endymion the things of earth no longer held any
value. He lived only for his dear dream's sake. Had he been permitted
to grow old and worn and tired, and still a dreamer, who knows how his
story might have ended? But to Diana there came the fear that with age
his beauty might wane, and from her father, Zeus, she obtained for the
one she loved the gifts of unending youth and of eternal sleep.
There came a night when the dreams of Endymion had no end. That was a
night when the moon made for herself broad silver paths across the
sea, from far horizon to the shore where the little waves lapped and
curled in a radiant, ever-moving silver fringe. Silver also were the
leaves of the forest trees, and between the branches of the solemn
cypresses and of the stately dark pines, Diana shot her silver arrows.
No baying of hounds came then to make Endymion's flocks move uneasily
in their sleep, but the silver stars seemed to sing in unison
together. While still those gentle lips touched his, hands as gentle
lifted up the sleeping Endymion and bore him to a secret cave in Mount
Latmos. And there, for evermore, she came to kiss the mouth of her
sleeping lover. There, forever, slept Endymion, happy in the perfect
bliss of dreams that have no ugly awaking, of an ideal love that knows
no ending.
ORPHEUS
"Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow themselves when he did sing;
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Everything that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads, and then lay by,
In sweet music is such art,
Killing care and grief of heart
Fall asleep, or hearing die."
Shakespeare.
"Are we not all lovers as Orpheus was, loving what is
gone from us forever, and seeking it vainly in the
solitudes and wilderness of the mind, and crying to
Eurydice to come again? And are we not all foolish as
Orpheus was, hoping by the agony of love and the ecstasy
of will to win back Eurydice; and do we not all fail, as
Orpheus failed, because we forsake the way of the other
world for the way of this world?"
Fiona Macleod.
It is the custom nowadays for scientists and for other scholarly
people to take hold of the old myths, to take them to pieces, and to
find some deep, hidden meaning in each part of the story. So you will
find that some will tell you that Orpheus is the personification of
the winds which "tear up trees as they course along, chanting their
wild music," and that Eurydice is the morning "with its short-lived
beauty." Others say that Orpheus is "the mythological expression of
the delight which music gives to the primitive races," while yet
others accept without hesitation the idea that Orpheus is the sun
that, when day is done, plunges into the black abyss of night, in the
vain hope of overtaking his lost bride, Eurydice, the rosy dawn. And,
whether they be right or wrong, it would seem that the sadness that
comes to us sometimes as the day dies and the last of the sun's rays