The first of these is the taunt of Niobe. The boast of richer fecundity is natural in a human mother’s mouth, as against another mother reputed to be human[263]; but entirely strange and absurd, if we suppose it directed against a deity. Dione and Demeter have but one child each. Nor is there a marked difference in this respect between the Latona and the Juno of Homer; for Juno’s children are but two, or at most three[264].
Next, we can account for the origin and parentage of all the great Olympian deities of Homer, with the single exception of Latona. She is no one’s daughter, no one’s sister: but is a wife (that also equivocally), and a mother only. When, indeed, we part company with Homer, the scene changes, and a father is found for her in the Hymns: she is the daughter, according to one reading, of Saturn,
κυδίστη θύγατερ μεγάλοιο Κρόνοιο[265].
In Hesiod she is the daughter of a Titan: but even here she retains this mark of a most ancient tradition, that she is said to have been married to Jupiter before the great Juno[266]: though she comes after Metis, or Wisdom, the oldest of all his consorts; an order not at variance with the traditional ideas.
Her anomalous position in mythology.
But there must have been some cause or process that brought her into the Homeric Olympus, an anomaly alike among mortals and Immortals. What could it have been, except an illustrious maternity, to account for her elevation, and at the same time her original womanhood to account for the blank in the descent and consanguinity, and for her total want of attributes?
It must be granted that there is a certain degree of resemblance between Latona and Dione: turning mainly upon this, that Dione seems to be in Olympus without either dignity or power, and simply as the vehicle, through which her daughter Venus was brought into existence. But then the want of basis is in her case immediately made evident by results. Even in Homer she is not among the gods of the Theomachy; nor is she named among the mothers in the Fourteenth Book; and Hesiod, though she is invoked in the suspected Proem of his Theogony, entirely passes her over in the body of it, and furnishes Venus with another origin. She remains all but a cipher ever after.
Again, the epithets attached to Latona are such as to leave her, and her alone among all deities of such dignity, wholly functionless, and also wholly inactive. I distinguish the two, because Juno has only a limited function, but she has power, and an immense activity. Latona has beauty and majesty, qualities which appertain to every goddess as such: she is καλλιπάρῃος, εὐπλόκαμος, καλλιπλόκαμος, χρυσοπλόκαμος, ἠΰκομος, κυδρὴ, πότνια, and ἐρικύδης: and we may observe in the more personal portion of these epithets how Homer, with his usual skill, has avoided placing her in any kind of rivalry with Juno, who is usually praised for her eyes and arms, not her cheeks and hair. But they all leave her void of purpose; and she must stand as a sheer anomaly, unless there is some better explanation of her being and place in mythology, than mythology itself can supply.
Her relation to primitive Tradition.
Even in the later tradition, Latona never gains a definite office: she remains all along without any meaning or purpose intrinsic to herself: she shines only in the reflected glory of her offspring, and is commonly worshipped only in union with them[267]. If therefore it has been shown, that the mythological character of Apollo is clearly the vehicle of the ancient tradition, known to us in the Book of Genesis, respecting the Seed of the woman, it seems plain that in Latona is represented the woman from whom that Seed was to spring.