Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/311

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The European Sky-god.
287

When the Greek conception of Zeus had reached this level, and was destined to rise to yet higher heights,[1] barbaric beliefs were bound to be forgotten and left behind in the valley. Zeus was now contrasted, rather than compared, with the old polymorphic powers of nature. He figures as the foe of the Titans, not as a Titan himself, though their name, as M. Mayer[2] has shown, may well be a mere reduplication of his own. He chains the fifty-headed and hundred-handed Briareus in a subterranean prison.[3] He blasts with his thunderbolt the hundred-headed Typhon.[4] Nevertheless there are not wanting indications that Zeus himself had been at one time on much the same footing as these his monstrous rivals. Argus, the Argive Zeus, surnamed (Symbol missingGreek characters), "the All-seeing," had eyes all over his body.[5] They might be reckoned at a hundred,[6] or for that matter at ten thousand.[7] Pherecydes,[8] however, obeying what we may call the law of triadity, declared that Argus had but three eyes, one of which was in the back of his head. Others, following the second of the rules enunciated above, represented Argus as having a Janiform head. This is

  1. E.g., in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. For the former see Plat., Phileb., 30 d, Tim., 29 d—30 b, alib. For the latter, Aristot. met., 12. 7. 1072 b. 2, 15 ff., 1074 b. 33 ff., alib.
  2. M, Mayer, Die Giganten u. Titanen, p. 81, compares (Symbol missingGreek characters) with Cretan forms of the names of Zeus, such as (Symbol missingGreek characters), and supports the (Symbol missingGreek characters) of the supposed reduplication by (Symbol missingGreek characters) (cp. (Symbol missingGreek characters)), (Symbol missingGreek characters).
  3. Hes. theog., 147 ff., 617 ff.
  4. Ib., 821 ff.
  5. Apollodor., 2. 1. 2, schol. Il., 2. 103, alib.
  6. Ov. met., 1. 625, Mythograph. Vatic., 1. 1. 18.
  7. 68 Aesch., P. V., 568 f.
  8. Pherecyd. ap. schol. Eur. Phœn., 1116, (Symbol missingGreek characters). A krater at Ruvo shows Argus with three pairs of eyes, two of which are on his breast and two on his thighs (Monumenti inediti dell' Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, ii. pi. 59 = S. Reinach, Répertoire des Vases Peints, i. iii, 4).