quency in the domestic life as well as in the religious worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it even became the special qualification of a priest of the Great Mother Cybelê,[1] as well as of the Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination familiar with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected with and partially resembled the Krêtan.[2] And this deduction becomes the more probable when we connect it with the first genesis of iron, which Hesiod mentions to have been produced for the express purpose of fabricating the fatal sickle; for metallurgy finds a place in the early legends both of the Trojan and of the Kretan Ida, and the three Idæan Dactyls, the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one and sometimes to the other.[3]
As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of gods by prefix ing the dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theog-
- ↑ Herodot. viii. 105, εὐνοῦχοι. Lucian, De Deâ Syriâ, c. 50. Strabo, xiv. pp. 640-641.
- ↑ Diodor. v. 64. Strabo, x. p. 460. Hoeckh, in his learned work Krêta (vol. i. books 1 and 2), has collected all the information attainable respecting the early influences of Phrygia and Asia Minor upon Krête: nothing seems ascertainable except the general fact; all the particular evidences are lamentably vague.
The worship of the Diktaaan Zeus seemed to have originally belonged to the Eteokrêtes, who were not Hellens, and were more akin to the Asiatic population than to the Hellenic. Strabo, x. p. 478. Hoeckh, Krêta, vol. i. p. 139.
- ↑ Hesiod, Theogon. 161,
Αἶψα δὲ ποιήσασα γένος πολιοῦ ἀδάμαντος,
Τεῦξε μέγα δρέπανον, etc.See the extract from the old poem Phorônis ap. Schol Apoll. Rhod. 1129; and Strabo, x. p. 472.
named Adamas by the Thracian king Kotys, in Aristot. Polit. v. 8, 12, and the tale about the Corinthian Periander, Herod, iii. 48.
It is an instance of the habit, so frequent among the Attic tragedians, of ascribing Asiatic or Phrygian manners to the Trojans, when Sophoclês in his lost play Troilus (ap. Jul. Poll. x. 165) introduced one of the characters of his drama as having been castrated by order of Hecuba, Σκαλμῇ γὰρ ὄρχεις βασιλὶς ἐκτέμνουσ' ἐμούς,—probably the Παιδαγωγὸς, or guardian and companion of the youthful Troilus. See Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. vol. i. p. 125.
