It would carry us too far aside were I to tell you the story of Pandareos' dog-or, rather, of Jupiter's dog, for Pandareos was its guardian only. All that bears on our present purpose is that the guardian of this golden dog had three daughters, one of whom was subject to the power of the Sirens, and is turned into the nightingale; and the other two were subject to the power of the Harpies, and this was what happened to them. They were very beautiful, and they were beloved by the gods in their youth, and all the great goddesses were anxious to bring them up rightly. Of all types of young ladies' education, there is nothing so splendid as that of the younger daughters of Pandareos. They have literally the four greatest goddesses for their governAthena teaches them domestic accomplishments; how to weave, and sew, and the like; Artemis* teaches them to hold themselves up straight; Herat how to behave proudly and oppressively to company; and Aphrodite‡-delightful governessfeeds them with cakes and honey all day long. All goes well, "until just the time when they are going to be brought out; then there is a great dispute whom they are to marry, and in the midst of it they are carried off by the Harpies, given by them to be slaves to the Furies, and never seen more. But of course there is nothing in Greek myths; and one never heard of such things as vain desires, and empty hopes, and clouded passions, defiling and snatching away the souls of maidens, in a London

esses.

season.

I have no time to trace for you any more harpy legends, though they are full of the most curious interest; but I may confirm for you my interpretation of this one, and prove its importance in the Greek mind, by noting that Polygnotus painted these maidens in his great religious series of paintings at Delphi, crowned with flowers and playing at dice; and that Penelope remembers them in her last fit of despair, just before the return of

*Artemis or Diana, a moon-goddess; she was a great huntress, and gave security against the attacks of wild animals.

+Hera, or Juno, the wife of Zeus. The name seems to have meant, originally, "heavenly air."

Aphrodite, or Venus, the goddess of love. The legend is that she sprang from the foam of the sea; hence her name Aphros, (froth), and Anadyomene (she who rises up).

Ulysses; and prays bitterly that she may be snatched away at once into nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daughters, rather than be tormented longer by her deferred hope, and anguish of disappointed love.

Ruskin here

shows Hermes

as both a wind

in order to compare him

with Athena. He
was the mes-
senger of the
gods, and was

said to have in-
vented the
lyre.

I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the winds. We pass now to a far more important group, the Deities of Cloud. Both of these are subordinate to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the cloud-firmament detaches itself from the air, and has a wider range of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with Neptune; and cloud deity, and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character, because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt; so that the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian and Phœnician god, are greater than in any other case of adopted tradition. In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a conductor of the dead to judgment. The Greeks take away much of this historical function, assigning it to the Muses; but, in investing him with the physical power over clouds, they give that which the Muses disdain, the power of concealment and of theft. The snatching away by the Harpies is with brute force, but the snatching away by the clouds is connected with the thought of hiding and of making things seem to be what they are not; so that Hermes is the god of lying, as he is of mist; and yet, with this ignoble function of making things vanish and disappear, is connected the remnant of his grand Egyptian authority of leading away souls in the cloud of death (the actual dimness of sight caused by mortal wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent of clouds, and continually being so described in the Iliad); while the sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road follows necessarily. You cannot but remember how this thought of cloud guidance and cloud receiving of souls at death has been elsewhere ratified.

Without following that higher clue, I will pass to the lovely

1

group of myths connected with the birth of Hermes on the Greek mountains.

Ruskin then proceeds to describe Sparta in the month of May, with its mountain-tops veiled in mist, and he shows that Hermes' characteristics correspond to his physical environments.

There, first cradled and wrapped in swaddling clothes; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into his wandering power-is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and deceiving— blinding the eyes of Argus-escaping from the grasp of Apollorestless messenger between the highest sky and topmost earth— 'the herald Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing kill.'

Now, it will be wholly impossible, at present, to trace for you any of the minor Greek expressions of this thought, except only that Mercury, as the cloud shepherd, is especially called Eriophoros, the wool-bearer. You will recollect the name from the common wooly rush 'eriophorum,' which has a cloud of silky seed; and note also that he wears distinctively the flat cap, petasos, named from a word meaning to expand; which shaded from the sun, and is worn on journeys. You have the epithet of mountains cloud capped' as an established form with every poet, and the Mont Pilate of Lucerne is named from a Latin word signifying specially a woolen cap; but Mercury has, besides, a general Homeric epithet, curiously and intensely concentrated in meaning, 'the profitable or serviceable by wool,'-that is to say, by shepherd wealth; hence, 'pecuniarily,' rich, or serviceable; and so he passes at last into a general mercantile deity, while yet the cloud sense of the wool is retained by Homer

Hermes as a shepherd god; the origin of the idea from

the winds driving the fleecy clouds.

6

always, so that he gives him this epithet when it would otherwise have been quite meaningless, when he drives Priam's chariot, and breathes force into his horses, precisely as we shall find Athena drive Diomed; and yet the serviceable and profitable sense-and something also of gentle and soothing character in the mere woolsoftness, as used for dress and religious rites-is retained also in the epithet, and thus the gentle and serviceable Hermes is opposed to the deceitful one.

The name Hermes itself means impulse, and he is especially the shepherd of the flocks of the sky, in driving, or guiding, or stealing them; and yet his great name, Argeiphontes, not only— as in different passages of the olden poets-means 'Shining White,' which is said of him as being himself the silver cloud lighted by the sun; but 'Argus-Killer,' the killer of brightness, which is said of him as he veils the sky, and especially the stars, which are the eyes of Argus; or, literally, eyes of brightness, which Juno, who is, with Jupiter, part of the type of highest heaven, keeps in her peacock's train. We know that this interpretation is right, from a passage in which Euripides describes the shield of Hippomedon, which bore for its sign, Argus the all-seeing, covered with eyes; open towards the rising of the stars, and closed towards their setting.' And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of the movement of the sky or firmament; not merely the fast flying of the transitory cloud, but the great motion of the heavens and stars themselves.

The position in the Greek mind of Hermes as the Lord of cloud is, however, more mystic and ideal than that of any other deity, just on account of the constant and real presence of

Hermes as a

an expression

of the effect

the clouds had on the Greek imagination.

cloud myth is the cloud itself under different forms, giving rise to all kinds of minor fables. The play of the Greek imagination in this direction is so wide and complex, that I cannot even give you an outline of its range in my present limits. There is first a great series of storm-legends connected with the family of the historic Æolus, ending in that of Phrixus and Helle*, and of the golden fleece (which is only the cloud-burden of Hermes Eriophoros).

In the Eolic group, there is the legend of Sisyphus, which I mean to work out thoroughly by itself: its root is in the position of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the two seas-the Corinthian Acropolis, two thousand feet high, being the centre of the cross

*Phrixus and Helle were children of Eolus. The shade of their mother, to save them from their step-mother, appeared to them bringing a large ram with a golden fleece, on whose back they should escape over the sea. Helle fell from the ram's back into the strait, which was called Hellespont in consequence. Phrixus reached the other shore, offered the ram a sacrifice to Jupiter, and hung up the golden fleece in the temple of Mars.

The origin and meaning of the myth of Sisyphus.

ing currents of the winds, and of the commerce of Greece. Therefore, Athena, and the fountain cloud Pegasus, are more closely connected with the Corinth than even with Athens in their material, though not in their moral power; and Sisyphus* founds the Isthmian games in connection with a melancholy story about the sea gods; but he himself is the most gaining' and subtle of men; who, having the key of the Isthmus, becomes the type of transit, transfer, or trade, as such; and of the apparent gain from it, which is not gain: and this is the real meaning of his punishment in hell-eternal toil and recoil (the modern idol of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But throughout, the old ideas of the cloud power and cloud feebleness, the deceit of hiding,-and the emptiness of its vanishing, -the Autolycus enchantment of making black seem white,and the disappointed fury of Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends; and give an aspect at last, not only of foolish cunning, but of. impiety or literal idolatry," 'imagination worship,' to the dreams of avarice and injustice, until this notion of atheism and insolent blindness becomes principal; and the 'Clouds' of Aristophanes, with the personified 'just' and 'unjust' sayings in the latter part of the play, foreshadow, almost feature by feature, in all that they were written to mock and to chastise, the worst elements of the impious tumult in men's thoughts, which have followed on their avarice in the present day, making them alike forsake the laws of their ancient gods, and misapprehend or reject the true words of their existing teachers.

All this we have from the legends of the historic Eolus only; but, besides these, there is the beautiful story of Semele, the Mother of Bacchus. She is the cloud with the strength of the vine in its bosom, consumed by the light which matures the fruit;

*Sisyphus was a Corinthian hero-punished for treachery by having to roll a huge stone up a height, which when it had gained the summit immediately rolled back.

The motion of stones being rolled backward and forward by the waves of the sea may have been the physical basis of the story.

+Ixion, for wooing Hera, the wife of Zeus (or Jupiter), was bound to a winged wheel which revolved constantly.