The consummation of the whole tale lies in this: that the vengeance is not the mere personal act of the Sun, but is inflicted by Jupiter himself on behalf of the whole Olympian Court, to which the appeal had been already made[781].
2. Another instance, confirmatory of the statement of Döllinger as to the rationale of brute-worship, is to be found in the curious passage of the Iliad where Xanthus, the horse of Achilles, is endowed with speech. The gift is from Juno, but the limit of the gift is carefully defined[782]:
αὐδήεντα δ’ ἔθηκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη.
It was utterance that Juno gave, not intelligence. The matter to be spoken was not a gift. The horse proceeds, evidently by a native insight into the future, to intimate to Achilles his coming fate; at first more darkly (v. 409); but when he comes nearer the point and glances at a man as the ordained instrument of doom (416),
ἀλλὰ σοὶ αὐτῷ
μόρσιμόν ἐστι θεῷ τε καὶ ἀνέρι ἶφι δαμῆναι·
then, I suppose lest the animal should proceed to particularize, and, though prophetic yet unwise, should break the current of the hero’s thought and action at the critical moment by naming Paris—the Ἐρινύες are made to interfere; they restore the order of nature, and stay the exercise of Juno’s irregular and abnormal gift.
3. The immortality of these horses is probably conceived in the same spirit. We may the more easily understand it to be a poetical rendering of the Egyptian belief in the divinity of many animals, when we recollect that exemption from death is, with Homer, the one and perhaps only essential characteristic of deity, so that his gods are ordinarily defined by it as ἀθάνατοι.
4. We have another indication of relation to the same ideas, in the assumption by deities of the forms of various birds: namely, by Minerva, as Od. i. 320; iii. 372; Il. vii. 59; Od. xxii. 240; by Apollo, Il. vii. 59; by Sleep, Il. xiv. 290; and by Ino Leucothee, Od. v. 353. In this instance we again see the refining power of the Greek imagination. It is only the forms of birds which are assumed by Homeric deities: creatures more ethereal, though not more intellectual, than the other brute races; and whose figure, when assumed, at once bestows in visible form an attribute of high superiority to man, namely, the increased facility and speed of locomotion.
5. One or two other traces may be suggested, but they are slighter and more dubious. It is possible that Homer drew from this source the Olympian horses of Juno (Il. v. 720, 768–72) and the sea-horses of Neptune (Il. xiii. 23). A similar notion may be involved, when the Poet makes Apollo stoop to feed the horses of Admetus in Pieria, and the oxen of Laomedon on Ida (Il. ii. 766, and xxi. 448). The serpent (δρακὼν) appears in Homeric portents as a symbol, but without peculiar meaning.