CHAP. II.
tells its own tale, although we may perhaps have to put aside the
names of Agenor and Kadmos as merely Hellenised forms of the
Semitic Kedem and Chnas. Europe herself, the splendour of morn-
ing, seen first in the Phoinikian or purple land, is the child of Tele-
phassa, the being whose light streams from afar ; ^ and in her first
loveliness she is lost to those who delight in her, when she is snatched
away to her western exile. Then follows the long journey of Kad-
mos and Telephassa, the weary search of the sun through the
livelong day for his early lost sister or bride. There were obviously
a thousand ways of treating the myth. They might recover her in
the end, as Alpheios is reunited to Arethousa and Perseus comes
again to Danae ; but as it might be said that they might behold her
like hereafter, so the tale might run that the being who had delighted
them with her beauty should be seen herself again no more. The
myth of Europe sets forth the latter notion. Telephassa sinks down
and dies far in the west on the plains of Thessaly, and Kadmos,
journeying westward still, learns at Delphoi that he is to seek his
sister no longer.
The myth of Althaia sets forth the dawn or morning as the Aithaia mother of a child whose life is bound up with a burnintj brand As burning soon as the brand is burnt out her son will die, according to the brand. inexorable doom pronounced by the Moirai. This brand is the torch of day, which is extinguished when the sun sinks beneath the western horizon. From this conception of the sun's course spruno- the idea that his mother kept him alive by snatching the log from the fire. But although Meleagros is, like Phoibos and Achilleus, invincible and invulnerable, the words of the Moirai must be accom- plished ; and as the mother of the sun may be either the dark night or the nourishing dawn (Althaia), so the wife of Oineus has her kins- folk among the dark beings ; and when these are slain by Meleagros, she thrusts the brand again into the fire, and the life of her brilliant child smoulders away. But his death brings with it the death alike of his mother and his bride, for the tints of the dawn or the gloaming cannot linger long after the sun is down. The names introduced
out, furnishes abundant banquets for the dawn-maiden, who has been thrust out of her father's house ; but when the stepmother says that she cannot rest until she has eaten the Dun Bull's flesh, the beast, hearing her, tells the dawn- maiden that, if slie wills, he will carry her away. The pursuit of Katie on her bull is the chase of Ias6n by the angiy Aietes, not the loving search of Kadmos and Telephassa ; and the bull has to go through fearful conflicts with the Trolls, before the happy end is brought about by means of a golden slipper as in the stories of Cinderella and Sodewa Bai. ' Pindar {Pylh. iv. ) speaks of Europ6 as a daughter of Tityos, a gigantic being, who is slain by the swift arrow of Artemis, and condemned to a like penalty with Ixion, Sisyphos, Tantalos, and Prometheus.
