“Like to the bow which Jove amid the clouds
Placed as a token to desponding man.”
Also—Il. xvii. 547.
ἡὕτε πορφυρεήν ιριν θνητοῖσι τανύσσ
Ζεὺς ἐξ οὐρανόθεν τέρας ἐμμεναι.
“Just as when Jove mid the high heavens displays
His bow mysterious for a lasting sign.”
And the lines (Theog. v. 700) in Hesiod, in which Iris is called the daughter of Wonder, who is sent over the broad surface of the sea when strife and discord arose among the immortals, and who is also called “the great oath of the gods”—[“This is the token of the covenant between you and me, for perpetual generations,” Gen. ix. 12.]—who is told to bring from afar in her golden pitcher the many-named water.
Iris is called the daughter of Thaumas (which so closely approximates to the Greek Θαυμα = wonder, Bryant says to the Egyptian “Thaumus”). Bryant further thinks that Iris and Eros were originally the same term, but that in time the latter was formed into the boyish deity Cupid = Eros. According to some, Iris was the mother of Eros by Zephyrus. [There were indeed three Eroses, which mark three different lines of tradition, vide Gladstone on Iris (the rainbow), “Homer and the Homeric Age,” ii. 156.] Eros (Cupid), though a boy, was supposed to have been at the commencement of all things; and Lucian says, “How came you with that childish face, when we know you to be as old as Japetus?” The union of Cupid and Chaos (the Deluge is frequently alluded to as chaos, vide Bryant) “gave birth to men and all the animals.” Hesiod makes Eros the first to appear after Chaos. “At this season (Deluge) another era began; the earth was supposed to be renewed, and time to return to a second infancy. They therefore formed an emblem of a child with a rainbow, to denote this renovation of the world, and called him Eros, or Divine Love,” ... “yet esteemed the most ancient among the gods.”—Bryant, ii. 349. (Cupid is represented with a bow, as is also Apollo and Diana, which was an allusion to the supposed resemblance of the bow and the rainbow.) Probably from his connection with Iris, he is represented as breaking the thunderbolts of Jupiter, and riding on dolphins and subduing other monsters of the sea. Smith (“Myth. Dict.”) says Iris is derived from ἐρῶ εἴρω, “so that Iris would mean the speaker or messenger,” ... “but it is not impossible that it may be connected with εἴρω, ‘I join,’ whence εἰρήνη; so that Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, would be the joiner, or conciliator, or the messenger of heaven, who restores peace in nature,” It appears to me more likely that εἰρηνη = peace (derivation uncertain—Liddell and Scott) was derived directly from Iris, in accordance with the tradition, and that the Greek word for wool, εἰρος, was cognate to εἰρηνη, from being an emblem of peace (e.g. the pontiff’s caduceator, woollen veil). In the same way, if we do not actually find the rainbow as the token of the herald or caduceator, may we not discover it conversely in the circumstance that Iris is represented as carrying in her hand a _herald’s_ staff?
It is curious that we actually find, what I may call the sister emblem, viz. the Dove, used by the ancients, though just as we find, if I am right in the conjecture, the rainbow among the Polynesians, used in a perverted way as an ensign of war. It was possibly in superstitious remembrance of the tradition which we find more directly among the ancient Aryans and the Peruvians (p. 326–400), that war ought only to be made with a disposition towards peace; and that they thought to place themselves under the sanction of heaven by carrying this emblem as their ensign of war. Such, however, was the fact. Bryant (ii. 302) says:—“The dove became a favourite hieroglyphic among the Babylonians and Chaldees.... In respect to the Babylonians, it seems to have been taken by them for their national ensign, and to have been depicted on their military standard when they went to war. They seem likewise to have been styled Iönim, or the children of the Dove;” and they are thus alluded to by the Prophet Jeremiah, ch. xxv. ver. 38 (id.) Bryant says (ii. 285), “The name of the Dove among the ancient Amonians (by which term he intends the descendants of Chus) was Iön and Iönah; sometimes expressed Iönas, from whence came the Οινας of the Greeks.”