BOOK
anxious like Laios to preserve his own life, placed Danae and her
f^- child in a chest, as according to one version Oidipous also was
placed and borne away to Brasiai. The story of her sojourn in the
house of Polydektes at Seriphos, of his persecutions and the more
benignant treatment of his brother Diktys, of her rescue on the return
of her son, and her restoration to her native land, belongs rather
to the mythical history of Perseus. The myth of Andromeda, the
beautiful daughter of the Aithiopian king Kepheus, is less gloomy ;
but although her woes seem to end with her deliverance from the
dragon, she had up to that time had her full share of sorrow. Her
mother Kassiopeia had, like Niobe, boasted that her child was more
beautiful even than the daughters of Nereus, who prayed to Poseidon
to avenge the insult, as Leto called on Phoibos to requite the wrong
done to her by Niobe. Poseidon accordingly brought the waters of
the sea over the land, and with them a sea-monster who, like the
Sphinx or the Minotauros, can be satisfied only with human blood.
The former fills the streets of Thebes with corpses ; the latter exacts
the yearly tribute of the dawn-children. But the solitary Andromeda,
abandoned to the huge sea-dragon, takes a firmer hold on the popu-
lar imagination, and is reproduced in a thousand forms, from the
women rescued by Oidipous and Theseus down to Una and her Red
Cross Knight. All these deliverers are men unknown to fame ; but
they are all endowed with powers for which they who see them give
them no credit, and they all exhibit the manly type of generous
chivalry which finds its consummation in the pure Sir Galahad.
The Arka- The same idea is the groundwork of the myth of the Arkadian dian Aug6. Auge, the clear atmosphere of the land of light. Hence the local myth necessarily related that Herakles came to her whenever he visited Tegea, and thus she becomes the mother of one of the fatal children whose life begins and ends in disaster. No sooner is her son born than her father Aleos decrees her death and the exposure of the child. But Auge is saved to become the wife of the Mysian Teuthras, or, according to another version, to escape narrowly the fate of the Theban lokaste, and in the end to be brought back to Tegea by her son Telephos, as Perseus brings his mother back to Argos.
Eurdp6 The story of Europe brings before us the dawn, not as fleeing and the from the pursuit of the sun, but as borne across the heaven by the lord of the pure ether. Zeus here, like Indra, himself assumes the form of a bull, and takes away the child as she plays with her brother in her Phenician home.^ Almost every name in the myth
- This bull reappears in the Norse endowed with the powers of Wish. In
tale of Katie Wooden-cloak (Dasent), its left ear is a cloth which, when spread
