BOOK II
might be spoken of as relentless and cruel, and as rightly punished by their injured children.^
«ie^Tltan*s^ A hard fight now awaited Zeus, who, by delivering the children
of Ouranos, had been armed for the struggle with thunder and
lightnmg.^ On his side against the Titans and the offspring of
Kronos were ranged Kottos, Gyas, and Briareos, who cast the Titans
into Tartaros and there left them chained. The struggle itself is
described in language which shows how little the poet cared about
the subject. Thunders, lightning, and earthquake attest the majesty
of Zeus, by whose thunderbolts land and ocean are wrapped in
seething fire ; the din of the conflict is as though the earth and the
solid heavens were crashing together ; and nine days would pass
before a brazen anvil (Akmon) let down from the earth could fathom
the depths of Tartaros.^ Above this gloomy prison-house are the
roots of the earth and the barren sea, and there within walls and
gates built by Poseidon dwell the three sons of Ouranos who be-
friended Zeus in his hour of need.
Other Yet this struggle which, like that between Zeus and Typhoeus latest-born child of Gaia and Tartaros, is related with so much struggle, pomp of high-sounding but empty words, is the conflict which runs through all mythology and which, in its more human forms, has a smgular and unfaiUng interest. It is the battle of Phoibos with the Pythian monster, of Indra with the throttling snake Vritra, of Sigurd with the dragon of the Glistening Heath, of Oidipous with
' The opinion that Kronos himself Yisdom : but as the older myth spoke Is indeed simply produced from the of the dawn as springing from the fore- epithet Kronides as applied to Zeus in a head of the sky, there was no help for sense corresponding to the Hebrew the later mylhopoeists but to make Zeus phrase "Ancient of Days," must, pro- swallow Metis, bably, be given up. It is, of course, * Hesiod, T/ieo^. 504. possible that when the word was re- ^ This is indubitably the hammer of garded as meaning " son of Kronos," it Thor, which is sunk eight rasks beneath became necessary to assign Kronos a the surface of the earth and which takes place in the Theogony and provide him nine months to rise again to Asgard. with a wife and children. — MaxMliller, In fact the Greek word translated by Chips, ii. 152. In Mr. Brown's eyes " anvil " is etymologically identicaHvith Zeus Kronides is the same personage as the Teutonic "hammer." "Professor Zeus Meilichios, both names being Curtius," says Mr. Peile, "seems to be adaptations of Greek sounds to Semitic right in combining the O. H. G. hatnar, names. He therefore regards Kronos our //^ww^r, with the Lithuanian akman as the equivalent of Karnos, Karneios, and the Sk. acman, each of which the horned god, the fire-breathing, flesh- means ' a stone, and the latter also ' a devouring Moloch. — Great Dionysiak thunderbolt;' and with the Greek Myth, ii. 128, et seq.; ii. 127. The fif^o;;' which commonly means an anvil, name Metis is closely connected with but which in Hesiod, Theog. 722, where Medeia, and denotes the wisdom which he speaks of the xnAffos S'i';^««'»'oi'po;'J6ff stands out with special clearness in the Kariuv, can mean nothing but the thun- Latin Minerva. Thus the phrase would derbolt." — Introduction to Greek and run that the Dawn was the daughter of Latin Etymology, 37.
