Preparatory works.—Bos quoque formosa est.—Zeus as a bull.—Iô and Eurôpê as cows.—The cow sacred to Minerva, the calf to Mercury, and the bull to Zeus.—Demoniacal bulls.—Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco.—White bulls sacrificed to Zeus, and black ones to Poseidôn.—Poseidôn as a bull.—The horn of abundance broken off the bull Acheloos.—The bulls of Aiêtas.—The bull who kills Ampelos.—Dionysos a bull.—The bull that comes out of the sea.—The eaters of bulls.—The sacrifice of the bull.—The intestines of the bull.—From the cow, the lamb.—The bull's entrails are wanting when the hero is about to die, that is, when the hero has no heart.—Even the bull goes into the forest.—The bull that flees is a good omen when taken and sacrificed.—The bull and the cow guide the lost hero.—Analogy between solar and lunar phenomena.—Hêraklês passes the sea now on the cow's neck, now in a golden cup.—Hêraklês shoots at the sun.—The moon, the bull of Hêraklês, becomes an apple-tree; anecdote relating to this.—The moon as a golden apple.—The moon as a cake.—The funeral cake.—Instead of a cow of flesh, a cow made of paste, in Plutarch and Æsop.—Ashes and excrement of the cow.—L'eau de millefleurs.—The bulls of the sun.—Hêraklês stable-boy and cleaner of the herds.—The bull Phaethôn.—The myth of the bull and the lion.—The bull's horns.—The god a witty thief; the demon an infamous one.—The myth of Cacus again.—The worm or serpent that eats bulls.—The bellowing or thundering bull, celestial musician.—The bull and the lyre.—The voice of Zeus—Bull-god and cow-goddess.
In descending now from the North upon the Hellenic and Latin soils, to search for the mythical and legendary forms assumed there by the bull and the cow, the mass of available material in point which offers, instead of diminishing, has increased prodigiously. Not to speak of the rich literary traditions of mediæval Italy and Spain (as to those of France, they are often but an echo of the Celtic and Germanic), nor the significant traditions of the Latin historians and poets themselves, nor the beliefs, superstitious customs, and legends still existing on the half-Catholic, half-Pagan soil of Italy, all of which are notably fraught with the earliest mythical ideas, we here find ourselves face to face with the colossal and splendid edifice of Greek poetry or mythology itself; for that which constitutes the greatness and real originality of Greek poetry is its mythology, by means of which it is that a divinity breathes in every artistic work of Hellenic genius. The poet and the artist are almost always in direct correspondence with the deities, and therefore it is that they so often assume such a divine and inspired expression. It would, therefore, be a bold presumption on my part if I were to essay to extract and present, in a few pages, the soul, the contents of this endless mythology. I have, moreover, the good fortune of being able to plead relief from the obligation to venture on any such attempt, by referring the reader to the learned preparatory works published in England, in the same interest, by Max Müller and George Cox, upon the Hellenic myths in relation to the other mythologies. It is certainly possible to take exception to interpretations of particular myths proposed by these two eminent scholars, as, no doubt, might be the fate of many of mine, were I to enter into minute explanations, and were my lucubrations fortunate enough to obtain any measure of consideration. But as I flatter myself with the hope that, notwithstanding occasional diversions, in which I may have gone aside and lost myself for a few minutes, I am taking the royal road which alone leads to the solution of the great questions of comparative mythology, I recognise with gratitude the labours of Max Müller and Cox upon Greek mythology, the writings of Michael Bréal upon Roman mythology, the immortal work of Adalbert Kuhn upon the Indo-European myth of fire and water, and a few other helpful beacon-towers which send their light-shafts clear and steady athwart the waste, and serve as useful guides to the studious navigator of the mare magnum of the myths. And because that which there is yet to do is immense in proportion to the little that has been done well, I shall take for granted what has already been demonstrated by my learned predecessors (to one and all of whom I confidently and respectfully refer my readers), and go on with my own researches, restricting myself, however, entirely to the zoological field, in order not to increase, out of all proportion, the dimensions of this opening chapter, which already threatens to straiten the space I must leave for the rest of my undertaking.
"Bos quoque formosa est,"
says Ovid, in the first book of the Metamorphoses, when the daughter of Inachos is transformed into a luminous cow by Jupiter. The bull Zeus of Nonnos is also beautiful, as he swims on the sea, carrying the beautiful maiden Eurôpê. Her brothers wonder why oxen wish to marry women; but we shall not wonder when we remark that Iô and Eurôpê are duplicates of one and the same animal, or, at least, that Iô and Eurôpê both took the shape of a cow—one as the moon especially,[483] the other, the far-observing daughter of Telephaessa, the far-shining,[484] as the moon also, or the aurora. In the first case it is the heroine that becomes a cow; in the second, it is the hero who shows himself in the shape of a bull.[485] These forms are, however, only provisional and unnatural, in the same way as in the Vedic hymns the representation of the aurora, the moon, and the sun as cow and bull is only a passing one. The cow and the bull send their calf before them; the sun, the moon, and the aurora are preceded or followed by the twilight. Jupiter and Minerva have for their messenger the winged Mercurius; and hence also Ovid[486] was able to sing:—
"Mactatur vacca Minervæ,
Alipedi vitulus, taurus tibi, summe Deorum."[487]
The fruit of the nuptials of Iô and of Eurôpê with Zeus is of a monstrous nature, such as the evil-doing daughters of Danaos, who, on account of their crimes, are condemned in hell to fill the famous barrel (the cloud) that is ever emptying (the counterpart of the cup which, in the Scandinavian myth, is never emptied); such too as Minôs, he who ordered the labyrinth to be made, the infernal judge, the feeder of the Minôtauros (of which the monstrous bull of Marathon, first subdued by Hêraklês and afterwards killed by Theseus, is a later form), the son of his wife and the gloomy and watery black bull Poseidôn. Even Kadmos, the brother of Eurôpê, ends his life badly. He descends into the kingdom of the dead in the form of a serpent. Of good, evil is born, and of evil, good; of the beautiful, the hideous, and of the hideous, the beautiful; of light, darkness, and of darkness, light; of day, night, and of night, day; of heat, cold, and of cold, heat. Each day and each year the monotonous antithesis is renewed; the serpent's head always finds and bites its tail again. A Tarentine verse of Arnobius expresses very happily these celestial vicissitudes:
"Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco."
Thus, in the romance of Heliodoros (Aithiopika) we read that the queen of Ethiopia, being black, gave birth to a white son; that is to say, the black night gives birth to the white moon and to the white dawn of morning. To Zeus (Dyâus, the luminous,) are sacrificed white bulls; to his brother Poseidôn, black ones; indeed, entirely black[488] ones, according to the Homeric expression.
Poseidôn, in Hesiod (Theog. 453), is the eldest brother; in Homer (Il. xv. 187), he is, on the contrary, the youngest; and both are right; it is the question of the egg and the hen; which is born first, darkness or light? The son of Poseidôn, Polyphêmos the Cyclop, is blinded by Odysseus. Poseidôn, representing the watery, cloudy, or nocturnal sky, his one-eyed son seems to be that sky itself, with the solar star, the eye of the heavens, in the midst of the darkness or of the clouds (the mouth of the barrel). When Odysseus blinds his son, Poseidôn avenges him by condemning Odysseus to wander on the waters (that is, lost in the ocean or the clouds of night). Inasmuch, moreover, as Zeus, properly the luminous one, is often called and represented by Homer as black as the clouds and pluvial,[489] he is assimilated to Poseidôn, the presbýtatos or oldest; in fact, in the oldest Hellenic myths, Poseidôn is essentially the pluvial form of Zeus. When Poseidôn, in the form of a bull, seduces Pasiphaê, the daughter of the sun and wife of Minôs, he appears, indeed, of a white colour, but has between his horns a black spot.[490] This spot, however small, is enough to betray his tenebrous nature. Thus Acheloos, vanquished by Hêraklês in the shape of a serpent, rises again in that of a pugnacious bull, one of whose horns Hêraklês breaks,[491] which he gives to the Ætolians, who receive abundance from it (the waters of the Acheloos fertilise the country traversed by them; the dragon of the cloud kept back the waters; Hêraklês discomfits the dragon, i.e., the darkness, and it then reappears in the form of a bull; when its horns are broken, abundance is the consequence). This monster reappears in the two perverse and terrible bulls of King Aiêtas, with copper feet (taurô chalkópode), which breathe dark-red flames and smoke, and advance against the hero Iêsôn in the cavern; in the same way as the king of the monkeys in the Râmâyaṇam vanquishes the demoniacal bull that fights with its horns, by taking hold of the horns themselves, and throwing it down; so Iêsôn does in Apollônios.[492] The same bull is repeated in that ridden by the youth Ampelos, dear to Diónysos (who has also the nature of a bull, taurophüsês, but of a luminous one). Ampelos, persuaded by the death-bringing Atê (thanatêphóros Atê), mounts on this bull, and is thrown by it upon a rock where his skull is broken, because he was full of pride against the horned moon, her who agitates the oxen, who, offended, sends a gadfly to the bull and maddens it. The bull Diónysos wishes to avenge the young Ampelos, by fixing his horns in the belly of the perverse and homicidal bull.[493] In this myth, the black bull of night and the bull-moon are confounded together in one sinister action.
From the ocean of night comes forth the head of the solar and lunar bull, and on this account, in Euripides[494] Okeanos is called the bull-headed (taurókranos); or else the head of the solar bull enters the nocturnal forest, or that of the lunar bull comes out of it. This phenomenon gave rise to several poetical images. The bull is devoured by the monsters of night; hence in the Seven at Thebes (xlii.) of Æschylos, the messenger accuses of impiety the seven eaters of bulls, who touch with their hands the blood of bulls; hence in the forty-third fable of Æsop, the dogs flee, horrified, from the peasant who, being of a gluttonous nature (like the old man of the Russian story who eats all his cows), after having devoured sheep and goats, prepares to eat the working oxen themselves.[495] The bulls head, or even the bull itself, or the milch-cow, which must not be eaten, can, however, be sacrificed; nay, he is lucky who offers them up (except when the deity is named Heliogabalus, who receives the taurobolium as a homage due to him, without giving anything in exchange to the devoted sacrificers).[496] According to Valerius Maximus,[497] the empire of the world would, by an oracle of the time of Servius Tullius, belong to the nation who should sacrifice to the Diana of the Aventine a certain wonderful cow belonging to a Sabine (the aurora or the moon, from the sacrifice of which the sun comes out at morning). The Sabine prepares to sacrifice it, but a Roman priest takes it from him by fraud, whilst the Sabine is sent to purify himself in the water near at hand. This is a zoological form of the epico-mythic rape of the Sabines, of the exchange of the wife or of the precious object, of the exchange effected in the sack. In Ovid,[498] the same myth occurs again with a variation: