Why, being thus great, is she wholly unfurnished with attributes or functions, either general or specific?
Why, on the other hand, does so much obscurity hang about her origin, and what are we to say as to her divinity, in answer to the question, whether it was original or acquired?
The name of Latona appears to have been a perpetual puzzle to the expounders of Greek mythology. It is taken to mean Night, which, combined with Day, produces the Sun[259]; or ‘obscure,’ or ‘concealed,’ as that from which issues the visible deity, the Sun in heaven. But surely these explanations can have no bearing upon the Homeric mythology, where it is matter of question even whether Apollo and the Sun have any mutual relations at all, and where it is quite clear that the personality of Apollo is far older and riper, as well as far higher and more comprehensive; which implies of necessity, that Latona must have been known, and must have held her place, quite apart from any relation to the Sun. An explanation of this kind is simply an indication, that the problem has not yet been solved.
But now, if we presume Apollo to be the representative of the Messianic tradition, that the Seed of the woman should crush the serpent’s head, the state of the case is entirely changed. And the explanation of the name in particular, instead of being hopeless, becomes easy, and even auxiliary to the general hypothesis. For now Latona stands in the tradition as a person anterior to the whole Olympian mythology: a person for whose extraction that mythology does not and ought not to account. Its Jupiter and Juno are referred to a parentage, that of Κρόνος and Ῥέα, and through these perhaps afresh to Oceanus and Tethys as their ultimate source. Everything, again, that is connected with the genesis of the Olympian system, properly so called, is made to conform to anthropomorphous ideas: but here are two of its deities, one of them among its very greatest, who have a mother that forms part of the earliest known tradition respecting them, while that mother is herself without an origin. What could be more natural, than that a name should fasten itself upon her, simply importing that, illustrious as was her motherhood, the fountain-head of her own life and destiny was lost in oblivion? For it lay beyond the point from which all mythical knowledge was held to spring. A certain motherhood was known of her, and that was all.
Again, the mother of the Deliverer was to be a woman. But in the Greek mythology it could not be, that a woman should stand as the giver of life to one of its most august divinities. Yet the woman of the tradition could not be transferred from the tradition as a great substantive personage into the Greek mythology, because in the tradition she stood an unembellished figure, wholly without attributes. Hence invention would, on taking over the tradition, be at fault; and could not but present to us an ambiguous and inconsistent picture, such as now stands before us in the Latona of Homer.
Let us next set forth the facts regarding Latona, as they stand in the poems.
In the first place, then, her divinity is beyond all doubt; for she is one of those deities who take part in the war[260], and this although, almost alone among them, she has no office whatever to associate her with it, and no part to play in the conduct of it. She ranges herself on the side of the Trojans; apparently, like Diana, drawn in that direction by Apollo, the central and really important figure of the group. While Venus, who appears in the first enumeration, is omitted in the array[261] of deities for action, Latona has Mercury assigned to her for an antagonist. And, when the crisis comes, we observe in her case a marked instance of that care, with which Homer preserves her, like the greater traditive deities, from anything like discredit. Mercury declines the combat, on the ground that it is hard to fight against the wives of Jupiter; and tells her she is at liberty to announce that she has vanquished him. Whence has this pale and colourless figure such very high honour so jealously asserted for her[262]?
When Niobe, proud of her numerous offspring, taunts Latona as the mother of only two children, summary and awful punishment follows: the children are slain, the unhappy mother is turned to stone. Yet she herself takes no part in the vengeance, a fact remarkably in harmony with her place as defined by the primitive tradition of Holy Scripture. Of the three or four suffering figures in the Shades, only one has the cause of his punishment stated, and it is much the severest of all. It is Tityus, whose entrails are continually devoured by vultures, because he offered violence to Latona as she was going to the Pythian temple of her son.
When, in the Fourteenth Iliad, Jupiter recites the mothers of certain of his offspring, beginning with women and ending with goddesses, Latona appears in the latter category, after Ceres and before Juno: and, as the scale is an ascending one, she must clearly rank before the first and next to the last named deity.
There are, however, various indications that this had not always been so: but that, according to original tradition, she had been of the human order, and had undergone a sort of translation into the ranks of the Immortals.