Heathen mythology, Illustrated by extracts from the most celebrated writers, both ancient and modern. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ I have eased my bosom of the pain,

      Till the next longing fit returns again!'"

      Ovid.

      The story of Phaeton, (son of Apollo under the name of Phœbus) is as follows: Venus becoming enamoured of Phaeton, entrusted him with the care of one of her temples. This distinguished favour of the Goddess rendered him vain and aspiring; and when told, to check his pride, that he was not the son of Phœbus, Phaeton resolved to know his true origin; and at the instigation of his mother, he visited the palace of the sun, to beg that Phœbus, if he really were his father, would give him proofs of his paternal tenderness, and convince the world of his legitimacy. Phœbus swore by the Styx that he would grant him whatever he required; and Phaeton demanded of him to drive his chariot (that of the sun) for one day. In vain Phœbus represented the impropriety of his request, and the dangers to which it would expose him; the oath must be complied with. When Phaeton received the reins from his father, he immediately betrayed his ignorance and incapacity. The flying horses took advantage of his confusion, and departed from their accustomed track. Phaeton repented too late of his rashness, for heaven and earth seemed threatened with an universal conflagration, when Jupiter struck the rider with a thunderbolt, and hurled him headlong into the river Po. His body, consumed by fire, was found by the nymphs of the place, and honoured with a decent burial.

      The Heliades, his sisters wept for four months, without ceasing, until the Gods changed them into poplars, and their tears into grains of amber; while the young king of the Ligurians, a chosen friend of Phaeton, was turned into a swan at the very moment he was yielding to his deep regrets. Aurora is also the daughter of Apollo. She granted the gift of immortality to Tithonus, her husband, son of the king of Troy; but soon perceiving that the gift was valueless, unless the power of remaining ever young was joined with it, she changed him into a grasshopper. From their union sprang Memnon, who was killed by Achilles at the siege of Troy. The tears of his mother were the origin of the early dew, and the Egyptians formed, in honour of him, the celebrated statue which possessed the wonderful property of uttering a melodious sound every morning at sunrise, as if in welcome of the divine luminary, like that which is heard at the breaking of the string of a harp when it is wound up. This was effected by the rays of the sun when they fell on it. At its setting, the form appeared to mourn the departure of the God, and uttered sounds most musical and melancholy; this celebrated statue was dismantled by the order of Cambyses, when he conquered Egypt, and its ruins still astonish modern travellers by their grandeur and beauty.

      "Unto the sacred sun in Memnon's fane,

      Spontaneous concords quired the matin strain;

      Touched by his orient beam, responsive rings

      The living lyre, and vibrates all its strings;

      Accordant aisles the tender tones prolong,

      And holy echoes swell the adoring song."

      Darwin.

      Apollo having slain with his arrows, Python, a monstrous serpent which desolated the beautiful country around Parnassus, his victory was celebrated in all Greece by the young Pythians; where crowns, formed at first of the branches of oak, but afterwards of laurel, were distributed to the conquerors, and where they contended for the prize of dancing, music and poetry.

      It is from his encounter with this serpent, that in the statues which remain of him, our eyes are familiar with the bow placed in his grasp.

      ————————"The lord of the unerring bow,

      The god of life, and poesy, and light,

      The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow,

      All radiant from his triumph in the fight;

      The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow, bright

      With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye

      And nostril, beautiful disdain, and might,

      And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,

      Developing in that one glance the Deity.

      "But in his delicate form, a dream of love,

      Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast

      Longed for a deathless lover from above,

      And maddened in that vision, are exprest

      All that ideal beauty ever blest

      The mind with, in its most unearthly mood,

      When each conception was a heavenly guest,

      A ray of immortality, and stood

      Star like, around, until they gathered to a God!

      "And if it be Prometheus stole from Heaven

      The fire which we endure, it was repaid

      By him to whom the energy was given,

      Which this poetic marble hath arrayed

      With an eternal glory, which if made

      By human hands, is not of human thought,

      And Time himself hath hallowed it, nor laid

      One ringlet in the dust, nor hath it caught

      A tinge of years, but breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought."

      Byron.

      But the gods grew jealous of the homage shewn to Apollo, and recalling him from earth, replaced him in his seat at Olympus.

      The fable of Apollo is, perhaps, that which is most spread over the faith of antiquity. Pæans were the hymns chanted in his honour, and this was the war cry he shouted in his onset against the serpent Python. On his altars are immolated a bull or a white lamb—to him is offered the crow, supposed to read the future, the eagle who can gaze on the sun, the cock whose cry welcomes his return, and the grasshopper, who sings during his empire.

      This God is represented in the figure of a young man without beard, with curling locks of hair, his brow wreathed with laurels, and his head surrounded with beams of light. In his right hand he holds a bow and arrows; in the left, a lyre with seven chords, emblem of the seven planets to which he grants his celestial harmony. Sometimes he carries a buckler, and is accompanied by the three Graces, who are the animating deities of genius and the fine arts, and at his feet is placed a swan.

      He had temples and statues in every country, particularly in Egypt, Greece, and Italy; the most famous was that of Delos, where they celebrated the Pythian games, that of Soractes, where the priests worshipped by treading with their naked feet on burning coals, though without feeling pain, and that of Delphi, in which the youth of the place offered to the gods their locks of hair, possibly because this offering was most difficult to the vanity of youth. Apollo made known his oracles through the medium of a sibyl. This was a female, named also a Pythoness, on account of her seat being formed of massive gold resembling the skin of the serpent Python. The history of the tripod will be found to СКАЧАТЬ