The completely rationalised version represents him as a king in the far West, skilled in astronomy, and the inventor of the globe. This story may have had its origin in Homer’s ‘wizard’ Atlas, and was probably connected with the far older myths of Atlantis and the Garden of the Hesperides.
It is evident that we have to thank the Phœnicians for bringing one great mountain so prominently before the Greeks that alone of all mountains in their literature it is endued with personality. But it is lamentable to observe how the affairs of Atlas, once released from Phœnician control, descend into the bourgeois rut of semi-divine nonentity. He proceeded to marry a nymph, who bore him seven other nymphs, of whom Maia, mother of Hermes, is alone conspicuous. These nymphs lived together on Mount Cyllene until forced to fly from Orion, whom they escaped by the conventional stage-device of metamorphosis, becoming first doves (πελείαδες) and then the constellation of the Pleiades.
Mr. Bury[33] traces a connection between the epithet ὀρειᾶν as applied to the Pleiades and the name Ὠαρίων, translating
ἐστι δ’ ἐοικὸς
ὀρειᾶν γε Πελειάδων
μὴ τήλοθεν Ὠαρίων’ ἀνεῖσθαι.
by ‘It is meet that the rising of the Mountain Hunter should not be far from the Mountain Pleiades.’ This would be unique among Greek references to the mountains if the remotest etymological connection could be traced between Ὠαρίων and ὄρος; but this is rather a B in ‘Both’ derivation, and it may be mentioned for what it is worth that the name Orion is otherwise explained for us by Ovid.[34]
One alone of the Pleiad nymphs is justified, to a follower of Mr. Bury, in her mountain abode. If we accept Ἀλκυόνη as a personification of ἄλκη,[35] we must certainly allow her to enthrone herself on the highest peaks of the ancient world, provided, of course, that she was not so presumptuous as to sit on her father.
It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks owed the introduction of the mountain into the Titan story to the Phœnicians’ description of Teneriffe, and that they elaborated the myth with very little regard for geography and none at all for consistency. In spite of Mr. Bury’s gallant salvage work, we must confess that the mountain element is lost from the story as soon as it is left in the hands of the Greeks, who treat it as a hen treats the duckling she has hatched: an adaptable duckling, for as a metamorphosis story it has made a very good chicken, though in the process it shames its proper parents.
In Theocritus we find an exception to the absence of mountain personification in Menalkas’ Αἴτνα, μᾶτερ ἔμα,[36] but it stands alone: the Cyclops, who was quite as much the child of Ætna, seems to regard the mountain merely as an ice-box providing him with cool water:—
ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ, τό μοι ἁ πολυδένδρεος Αἴτνα
λευκᾶς ἐκ χίονος πότον ἀμβρόσιον προίητι.[37]
It would be hard, in speaking of the snows of a mountain, to find a less appropriate epithet than πολυδένδρεος.