CHAP.
and many changes and wanderings ; in other words, her life is the life
of the moon in its several phases, from full to new, and thence back
to the full again. She is the pure priestess of the great queen of
heaven, on whom Zeus, the lord of the untroubled ether, looks down
with unfailing love.^ But Here is the wite of Zeus, and thus at once
she is jealous of 16, whom Zeus vainly changes into a heifer- (the well-
known symbol of the young or horned morn) in the hope of saving
her from Here. Here gains possession of the heifer, and places her
in the charge of Argos Panoptes, the being with a thousand eyes,
some of which he opens when the stars arise, while others he closes
when their orbs go down. Whether these eyes are, as in some
versions, placed on his brow and on the back of his head, or, as in
others, scattered all over his body, Argos is the star-illumined sky
watching over the moon as she wanders
Pale for very weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth. Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth.*
In this aspect Argos appears in the Cretan myth as Asterion, or the Minotauros, the guardian of the Diadalean labyrinth, the mazes of the star-clothed heavens.
From this terrible bondage she is rescued at the bidding of Zeus Argos by Hermes, who appears here as a god of the morning-tide. By the ^^"°P'^'-* power of his magic rod, and by the music of his flute, the soft whisper of the morning breeze, he lulls even Argos himself into slumber, and then his sword falls, and the thousand eyes are closed in death, as the stars go out when the morning comes, and leave the moon alone.* This rescue of 16 by Hermes is, in the opinion of Preller, the tem- porary disappearance of the moon, during her wanderings in unknown regions until she appears as Pandia, the full moon, in the eastern
here as clearly described as the effects ^ It is not likely that Shelley was of wind in the myth of Hermes. — thinking of the myth of Argos Panoptes Brown, The Unicorn, 12. when he wrote these lines ; but he has
' 16 becomes a mother t'l iirnrvolas singularly reproduced this idea of the Aids, yEsch. Sttpp. 18 ; a myth which antagonism between the moon and the may be compared with the story of the stars, mares of Diomedes. The myth is thus explained which
- In the Norse story of Tatterhood, makes Hermes the father of Autolykos,
the younger of the two sisters who who in the Odyssey is the grandfather answer to the Dioskouroi is changed into of Odysseus and the craftiest of men — a a calf, and the tale immediately con- character which, as Preller remarks, is nects the transformation with the voyage simply reflected from Hermes. 6>. of Isis. The same incidents are found My/h. i. 305. The name Autolykos is in the Arabian Aig/its in the story of as transparent as that of Argos Pa- the Old Man and the Hind, where the noptes. The eyes of the dead Argos are transformation is precisely owing to the placed by Here in the peacock's tail ; jealousy of Here for 16 and her off- but this was only another symbol for spring, the starry heavens. Preller, ib. ii. 41.
