364 071 the Early Kings of Attica, vengeance of the goddess is characteristic — she inflicts insa- tiable hunger on Erysichthon ; from which circumstance, or because the rust seems to burn up the plant, he was called
- 'AiO(Dv. This fable is exceedingly appropriate to the worship
of the Triopian Ceres, to which it properly belongs (Miiller Proleg. 162) but I see no natural connection of it with either Attica or Delos, in the fables of which also Erysichthon appears. I am therefore inclined to conjecture that two names, slightly differing, have been confounded ; that the name of the Attic and Delian hero is properly '^piaL^Ooyv or 'EjOecr/^^wi^^^ which will then correspond with ^Epe'^^Oeu^ and ' Epi^Oovio^ ; for epeaaco, epeOco, ept^w, belong to the same family as epe^doo, and signify primarily to agitate, or assail with violence. ' Rpe(jL')(Ooov would then have a very appropriate place in the mythology of the island of Delos, to which the lonians so much resorted ; for Neptune and Apollo were their chief divinities. He was said to have died at sea on his return from the Delian Theoria (Pans. i. 31), and later writers made him the founder of the temple of Apollo at Delos. With Erechtheus the lonians are connected, by the mar- riage of Xuthus with his daughter Creusa. (ApoU. i. 7. 2.) I must here revert briefly to what was said at the conclusion of my former paper, (Phil. M. i. 627) respecting the differ- ence between the lonians and the Pelasgians. In the mythi of other parts of Greece, where Pelasgian population is ad- mitted to have existed, as Argos, Arcadia, Thessaly, we find a Pelasgus connected with the events of the earliest times, but he has no place at all in the Attic mythi, from which we may conclude that the Athenians did not attribute to them- selves a Pelasgian origin. They well knew that the Pelas- gians who were, as Herodotus says, cvvolkol toI^ Qi]vaLOi^ Ch. i:iN a lucky star^ as we say, my stars ! To roast is to redden by the application of heat. 20 '^pL(TLX^wv is the reading of several MSS. in Plat. Crit. iii. 110. § 4. where the Attic hero is clearly meant, and 'E^eo-tx^wi; ApoUod. 3, 14, 6 Heyne. In Ovid Met. 8, 737 seq. the name is spelt Erisichthon. Ovid combines the two personages; for Metra, the daughter of Erisichthon, is represented as receiving from Neptune the gift of changing herself into all shapes, which belonged to the marine deities and heroes, Proteus, Nereus, Glaucus. Hence the name M^Tpa (/xiTxi?) such deities being preeminently oracular. Neptune was the Consus of the Romans, the god of counsels, an union of attributes which Scaliger could not comprehend. See Vossius Etym. L. L.
