Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/61

THE GREEK GODS 47 the place of Apollo. Therefore in worship, which kept strictly to the ancient ideas, she stood quite in the background. In mythology her husband or lover is Endymion. He probably stands for the sun god who has entered into his cavern (eVSixo), i.e. the sun after it has set, with whom the moon goddess is united on the night of new moon. According to the Elean version of the myth she brought forth fifty daughters begotten by him, the representatives of the fifty months in the cycle of the Olympian games ; but in the Carian myth the hunter, or herdsman, Endymion, was sleeping in a grotto of Mount Latmus, when Selene approached him by stealth, to kiss the beautiful sleeper. 62. The heroines Europa, Pasiphae, and Antiope (the mother of Amphion and of Zethus) are to be regarded as representatives of Selene, and may, of course, be considered rivals of Hera. The Cretan-Boeotian Europa (' the wide-seeing '), daughter of Phoenix, or sister of Cad- mus and daughter of Agenor and Telephassa (' the far- shining ' moon goddess), was kidnaped on the shores of Sidon or Tyre by the bull-formed sun god Zeus Asterios (a divinity probably of Phoenician origin) and carried off to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos and Ehadamanthus. A Cretan also, and perhaps origi- nally like her, is Pasiphae (' the one shining on all '), the daughter of Helios and Perseis ('the glittering'). She became the mother of the Minotaurus, a monster which had the body of a man and the head of a bull. His father was the Cretan bull, i.e. the same bull-formed Zeus Asterios, whose worship was prominent at Gortyna, with whom king Minos also, the husband of Pasiphae, must probably be identified.