Chapter XIII: Section VI

THE BULL AND THE COW IN GREEK AND LATIN TRADITION.

SUMMARY.

Preparatory works.--Bos quoque formosa est.--Zeus as a bull.--Iô and
Eurôpê as cows.--The cow sacred to Minerva, the calf to Mercury, and
the bull to Zeus.--Demoniacal bulls.--Taurus draconem genuit et
taurum draco.--White bulls sacrificed to Zeus, and black ones to
Poseidôn.--Poseidôn as a bull.--The horn of abundance broken off the
bull Acheloos.--The bulls of Aiêtas.--The bull who kills
Ampelos.--Dionysos a bull.--The bull that comes out of the sea.--The
eaters of bulls.--The sacrifice of the bull.--The intestines of the
bull.--From the cow, the lamb.--The bull's entrails are wanting when
the hero is about to die, that is, when the hero has no heart.--Even
the bull goes into the forest.--The bull that flees is a good omen
when taken and sacrificed.--The bull and the cow guide the lost
hero.--Analogy between solar and lunar phenomena.--Hêraklês passes
the sea now on the cow's neck, now in a golden cup.--Hêraklês shoots
at the sun.--The moon, the bull of Hêraklês, becomes an apple-tree;
anecdote relating to this.--The moon as a golden apple.--The moon as
a cake.--The funeral cake.--Instead of a cow of flesh, a cow made of
paste, in Plutarch and Æsop.--Ashes and excrement of the cow.--L'eau
de millefleurs.--The bulls of the sun.--Hêraklês stable-boy and
cleaner of the herds.--The bull Phaethôn.--The myth of the bull and
the lion.--The bull's horns.--The god a witty thief; the demon an
infamous one.--The myth of Cacus again.--The worm or serpent that
eats bulls.--The bellowing or thundering bull, celestial
musician.--The bull and the lyre.--The voice of Zeus--Bull-god and
cow-goddess.

In descending now from the North upon the Hellenic and Latin soils, to search for the mythical and legendary forms assumed there by the bull and the cow, the mass of available material in point which offers, instead of diminishing, has increased prodigiously. Not to speak of the rich literary traditions of mediæval Italy and Spain (as to those of France, they are often but an echo of the Celtic and Germanic), nor the significant traditions of the Latin historians and poets themselves, nor the beliefs, superstitious customs, and legends still existing on the half-Catholic, half-Pagan soil of Italy, all of which are notably fraught with the earliest mythical ideas, we here find ourselves face to face with the colossal and splendid edifice of Greek poetry or mythology itself; for that which constitutes the greatness and real originality of Greek poetry is its mythology, by means of which it is that a divinity breathes in every artistic work of Hellenic genius. The poet and the artist are almost always in direct correspondence with the deities, and therefore it is that they so often assume such a divine and inspired expression. It would, therefore, be a bold presumption on my part if I were to essay to extract and present, in a few pages, the soul, the contents of this endless mythology. I have, moreover, the good fortune of being able to plead relief from the obligation to venture on any such attempt, by referring the reader to the learned preparatory works published in England, in the same interest, by Max Müller and George Cox, upon the Hellenic myths in relation to the other mythologies. It is certainly possible to take exception to interpretations of particular myths proposed by these two eminent scholars, as, no doubt, might be the fate of many of mine, were I to enter into minute explanations, and were my lucubrations fortunate enough to obtain any measure of consideration. But as I flatter myself with the hope that, notwithstanding occasional diversions, in which I may have gone aside and lost myself for a few minutes, I am taking the royal road which alone leads to the solution of the great questions of comparative mythology, I recognise with gratitude the labours of Max Müller and Cox upon Greek mythology, the writings of Michael Bréal upon Roman mythology, the immortal work of Adalbert Kuhn upon the Indo-European myth of fire and water, and a few other helpful beacon-towers which send their light-shafts clear and steady athwart the waste, and serve as useful guides to the studious navigator of the _mare magnum_ of the myths. And because that which there is yet to do is immense in proportion to the little that has been done well, I shall take for granted what has already been demonstrated by my learned predecessors (to one and all of whom I confidently and respectfully refer my readers), and go on with my own researches, restricting myself, however, entirely to the zoological field, in order not to increase, out of all proportion, the dimensions of this opening chapter, which already threatens to straiten the space I must leave for the rest of my undertaking.

"Bos quoque formosa est,"

says Ovid, in the first book of the _Metamorphoses_, when the daughter of Inachos is transformed into a luminous cow by Jupiter. The bull Zeus of Nonnos is also beautiful, as he swims on the sea, carrying the beautiful maiden Eurôpê. Her brothers wonder why oxen wish to marry women; but we shall not wonder when we remark that Iô and Eurôpê are duplicates of one and the same animal, or, at least, that Iô and Eurôpê both took the shape of a cow--one as the moon especially,[483] the other, the far-observing daughter of Telephaessa, the far-shining,[484] as the moon also, or the aurora. In the first case it is the heroine that becomes a cow; in the second, it is the hero who shows himself in the shape of a bull.[485] These forms are, however, only provisional and unnatural, in the same way as in the Vedic hymns the representation of the aurora, the moon, and the sun as cow and bull is only a passing one. The cow and the bull send their calf before them; the sun, the moon, and the aurora are preceded or followed by the twilight. Jupiter and Minerva have for their messenger the winged Mercurius; and hence also Ovid[486] was able to sing:--

"Mactatur vacca Minervæ,
Alipedi vitulus, taurus tibi, summe Deorum."[487]

The fruit of the nuptials of Iô and of Eurôpê with Zeus is of a monstrous nature, such as the evil-doing daughters of Danaos, who, on account of their crimes, are condemned in hell to fill the famous barrel (the cloud) that is ever emptying (the counterpart of the cup which, in the Scandinavian myth, is never emptied); such too as Minôs, he who ordered the labyrinth to be made, the infernal judge, the feeder of the Minôtauros (of which the monstrous bull of Marathon, first subdued by Hêraklês and afterwards killed by Theseus, is a later form), the son of his wife and the gloomy and watery black bull Poseidôn. Even Kadmos, the brother of Eurôpê, ends his life badly. He descends into the kingdom of the dead in the form of a serpent. Of good, evil is born, and of evil, good; of the beautiful, the hideous, and of the hideous, the beautiful; of light, darkness, and of darkness, light; of day, night, and of night, day; of heat, cold, and of cold, heat. Each day and each year the monotonous antithesis is renewed; the serpent's head always finds and bites its tail again. A Tarentine verse of Arnobius expresses very happily these celestial vicissitudes:

"Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco."

Thus, in the romance of Heliodoros (_Aithiopika_) we read that the queen of Ethiopia, being black, gave birth to a white son; that is to say, the black night gives birth to the white moon and to the white dawn of morning. To Zeus (Dyâus, the luminous,) are sacrificed white bulls; to his brother Poseidôn, black ones; indeed, entirely black[488] ones, according to the Homeric expression.

Poseidôn, in Hesiod (_Theog._ 453), is the eldest brother; in Homer (_Il._ xv. 187), he is, on the contrary, the youngest; and both are right; it is the question of the egg and the hen; which is born first, darkness or light? The son of Poseidôn, Polyphêmos the Cyclop, is blinded by Odysseus. Poseidôn, representing the watery, cloudy, or nocturnal sky, his one-eyed son seems to be that sky itself, with the solar star, the eye of the heavens, in the midst of the darkness or of the clouds (the mouth of the barrel). When Odysseus blinds his son, Poseidôn avenges him by condemning Odysseus to wander on the waters (that is, lost in the ocean or the clouds of night). Inasmuch, moreover, as Zeus, properly the luminous one, is often called and represented by Homer as black as the clouds and pluvial,[489] he is assimilated to Poseidôn, the _presbýtatos_ or oldest; in fact, in the oldest Hellenic myths, Poseidôn is essentially the pluvial form of Zeus. When Poseidôn, in the form of a bull, seduces Pasiphaê, the daughter of the sun and wife of Minôs, he appears, indeed, of a white colour, but has between his horns a black spot.[490] This spot, however small, is enough to betray his tenebrous nature. Thus Acheloos, vanquished by Hêraklês in the shape of a serpent, rises again in that of a pugnacious bull, one of whose horns Hêraklês breaks,[491] which he gives to the Ætolians, who receive abundance from it (the waters of the Acheloos fertilise the country traversed by them; the dragon of the cloud kept back the waters; Hêraklês discomfits the dragon, _i.e._, the darkness, and it then reappears in the form of a bull; when its horns are broken, abundance is the consequence). This monster reappears in the two perverse and terrible bulls of King Aiêtas, with copper feet (_taurô chalkópode_), which breathe dark-red flames and smoke, and advance against the hero Iêsôn in the cavern; in the same way as the king of the monkeys in the _Râmâyanam_ vanquishes the demoniacal bull that fights with its horns, by taking hold of the horns themselves, and throwing it down; so Iêsôn does in Apollônios.[492] The same bull is repeated in that ridden by the youth Ampelos, dear to Diónysos (who has also the nature of a bull, _taurophüsês_, but of a luminous one). Ampelos, persuaded by the death-bringing Atê (_thanatêphóros Atê_), mounts on this bull, and is thrown by it upon a rock where his skull is broken, because he was full of pride against the horned moon, her who agitates the oxen, who, offended, sends a gadfly to the bull and maddens it. The bull Diónysos wishes to avenge the young Ampelos, by fixing his horns in the belly of the perverse and homicidal bull.[493] In this myth, the black bull of night and the bull-moon are confounded together in one sinister action.

From the ocean of night comes forth the head of the solar and lunar bull, and on this account, in Euripides[494] Okeanos is called the bull-headed (_taurókranos_); or else the head of the solar bull enters the nocturnal forest, or that of the lunar bull comes out of it. This phenomenon gave rise to several poetical images. The bull is devoured by the monsters of night; hence in the _Seven at Thebes_ (xlii.) of Æschylos, the messenger accuses of impiety the seven eaters of bulls, who touch with their hands the blood of bulls; hence in the forty-third fable of Æsop, the dogs flee, horrified, from the peasant who, being of a gluttonous nature (like the old man of the Russian story who eats all his cows), after having devoured sheep and goats, prepares to eat the working oxen themselves.[495] The bulls head, or even the bull itself, or the milch-cow, which must not be eaten, can, however, be sacrificed; nay, he is lucky who offers them up (except when the deity is named Heliogabalus, who receives the _taurobolium_ as a homage due to him, without giving anything in exchange to the devoted sacrificers).[496] According to Valerius Maximus,[497] the empire of the world would, by an oracle of the time of Servius Tullius, belong to the nation who should sacrifice to the Diana of the Aventine a certain wonderful cow belonging to a Sabine (the aurora or the moon, from the sacrifice of which the sun comes out at morning). The Sabine prepares to sacrifice it, but a Roman priest takes it from him by fraud, whilst the Sabine is sent to purify himself in the water near at hand. This is a zoological form of the epico-mythic rape of the Sabines, of the exchange of the wife or of the precious object, of the exchange effected in the sack.

In Ovid,[498] the same myth occurs again with a variation:

"Matre satus Terra, monstrum mirabile, taurus
Parte sui serpens posteriore fuit.
Hunc triplici muro lucis incluserat atris
Parcarum monitu Styx violenta trium.
Viscera qui tauri flammis adolenda dedisset,
Sors erat, æternos vincere posse Deos.
Immolat hunc Briareus factu ex adamante securi;
Et jam jam flammis exta daturus erat.
Jupiter alitibus rapere imperat. Attulit illi
Milvus; et meritis venit in astra suis."

We shall return to this myth in the following chapters. The monster is killed only when his heart, which he keeps shut up, is taken away. Sometimes he does not keep it shut up in his own body, but in a duck (the aurora), which comes out of a hare (the moon sacrificed in the morning).[499] When this duck is opened, a golden egg (the sun) is found. When the egg is thrown on the ground, or at the monster's head, the monster dies. The golden duck, whence the monster's heart, the sun, comes forth, is the same as the cow which gives birth to the lamb (the night gives birth to the aurora, and the aurora to the solar lamb). The historian Flavius cites, among the prodigies which preceded the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem, a miracle of this kind, which took place in the middle of the temple itself, in the case of a cow led thither to be sacrificed. It occurs still every morning in the mythical heavens, and was a phenomenon familiar to human observation in the remotest antiquity, when it became a proverb; but, as often happened, the proverb which affirmed an evident myth, when its sense was lost, was adopted to indicate an impossibility; wherefore we read in the second satire (cxxii.) of Juvenal:--

"Scilicet horreres maioraque monstra putares,
Si mulier vitulum, vel si bos ederet agnum?"

In Greek and Latin authors[500] we find frequent examples of the sacrifice of a bull a short time before the death of the hero by whom it was ordered, in which it was noticed as a very sinister omen that the entrails were missing, and particularly the heart or the liver. Having observed that the monster's heart is the solar hero, or the sun itself, we can easily understand how, in the sacrifice of a bull, this heart must be wanting when the hero approaches his end. In the mythical bull sacrificed at evening, the hero's heart is not to be found; the monster has eaten his intestines, of which, according to the legend, he is particularly greedy.

But the bull does not always let himself be sacrificed patiently; he often flees in order not to be killed. We have seen in the Russian stories how the bull, which his owner intends to sacrifice, flees into the forest, with the lamb (the bull and the lamb are two equivalent forms of the morning and evening solar hero) and the other domestic animals. The proverb of Theokritos, "Even the bull goes into the forest,"[501] can have no other origin than in the two analogous myths of the moon which wanders through the forest of night, and of the sun who hides himself in the same forest, when he sees the preparations made for the sacrifice; the sun in the night becomes the moon.

I have said that the bull, when sacrificed, often, on account of his being devoid of intestines, forebodes unlucky occurrences to the hero; the solar bull of the evening is without strength, he has no heroic entrails. But after he has been to pasture freely in the forest, after having exercised his powers in battle with the wolves of night, after having, by his bellowing (in the darkness, in the thundering cloud), filled all the animals with terror, the bull is found again and led towards his dwelling of the morning, full of light, like a sacrificed hero; heroic entrails are found in him; from the black bull who is sacrificed towards morning, from the forest, from the bull of night, come forth the heart, the liver, the life and strength, the sun, the hero-sun; and the human hero, observing his sacrifice, considers it a good omen. We can thus understand the narrative of Ammianus Marcellinus: "Decimus (taurus) diffractis vinculis, lapsus ægre reductus est, et mactatus ominosa signa monstravit."[502] Whilst he is hidden in the forest, the solar bull is black, but often (_i.e._, in all the nights illumined by the moon), giving up his place to the moon, he appears in the form of a white bull or cow, who guides the hero lost in the darkness. Thoas is called the king of the Tauroi (or bulls) in the _Iphigenia in Tauris_ of Euripides, because he has wings on his feet. The cow Iô flees without stopping in the _Prometheus_ of Æschylos. Euripides[503] says that she gave birth to the king of the Kadmoeans. Here, therefore, we find once more the intimate relation between Iô and Eurôpê, the sister of Kadmos, which I noticed above. Kadmos, the brother of Eurôpê, unites himself with Iô. But Iô is a cow, and we find a cow, a travelling cow, marked with a white spot in the shape of a full moon (the moon itself, or Iô), in the legend of Kadmos in Boeotia, according to Pausanias,[504] and to Ovid,[505] who sings--

"Bos tibi, Phoebus ait, solis occurret in arvis,[506]
Nullum passa jugum, curvique immunis aratri.
Hac duce carpe vias, et, qua requieverit herba,
Moenia fac condas: Boeotia ilia vocato.
Vix bene Castalio Cadmus descenderat antro:
Incustoditam lente videt ire juvencam,
Nullum servitii signum cervice gerentem.
Subsequitur, pressoque legit vestigia gressu;
Auctoremque viæ Phoebum taciturnus adorat.
Jam vada Cephisi, Panopesque evaserat arva;
Bos stetit; et, tollens spatiosam cornibus altis
Ad coelum frontem, mugitibus impulit auras.
Atque ita, respiciens comites sua terga sequentes,
Procubuit, teneraque latus submisit in herba."

This is the good fairy, or good old man, who shows the way to the heroes in popular tales; it is the cow which succours the maiden persecuted by her step-mother, the puppet which spins, sews, and weaves for the maiden aurora. For just as we have seen that the wooden girl is the aurora herself, which at morn comes out of, and at even re-enters, the forest of night,[507] as is clearly shown by the myths of Urvaçî and of Daphne, so in like manner the moon comes out of and re-enters the nocturnal forest, transforming herself from a tree to a cow, and from a cow to a tree, wooden girl, or puppet. Some myths relating to the aurora are also applicable to the moon, on account of the resemblance of the phenomena (the lunar and solar bulls also are interchangeable), as they both come out of the nocturnal gloom, both drop dewy humours, and both run after the sun, of which the aurora is the deliverer in the morning, and the moon the protectress, guide, hostess, and good advising fairy, who teaches him the secret by which to avoid the ambuscades of the monster. Hêraklês passes the sea upon the neck of the cow-moon; but instead of the cow, we also find in the mythical sky of Hêraklês the golden cup, which is the same thing. From the cow-moon comes forth the horn of abundance; from the cornucopia to the cup the passage is easy. It is said that Hêraklês, approaching the oxen of Geryon, the West, felt himself burned by the sun's rays, and shot arrows at him (in the same way as Indras in the _Rigvedas_ breaks a wheel of the car of Sûryas, the sun). The sun admires the courage and strength of the hero, and lends him his golden cup, upon which Hêraklês passes the sea. This being accomplished, Hêraklês restores the cup to the sun, and finds the oxen.

The bull which carries the hero and heroine, in the Russian story, arises again in another form, if its essential part (now the intestines, now the bones, now the ashes) is preserved. The cow which helps the maiden becomes, as we have already seen, an apple-tree, and helps her again in this form. We find the same myth transformed in Greece. In _Coelius_, quoted by Aldrovandi,[508] we read, "Cum rustici quidam Herculi Alexicaco bovem essent immolaturi, isque rupto fune profugisset (the bull destined to the sacrifice repairs to the forest of night), nec esset quod sacrificaretur, malum arreptum suppositis quatuor ramis crurum vice, deinde additis alteris duobus ceu cornuum loco, bovem utcumque fuisse imitatos, idque ridiculum simulacrum pro victima sacrificasse Herculi." This account is confirmed by the facts recorded by Julius Pollux,[509] that the apple-tree was sacrificed to Hêraklês. The moon, on account of its circular form, assumed, besides the figure of a pea, a pumpkin and a cabbage, also that of a golden apple. As it contains honey, the sweet apple represents well the ambrosial moon. Moreover, in the same way as we have seen the pea which fell on the ground become a tree, and rise to heaven, so the apple became an apple-tree, the tree of golden apples found in the Western garden of the Hesperides.

The moon, besides the form of a horned cow, also assumed, in the popular Âryan belief, that of a tart, of a cake, either on account of its circular shape, or of the ambrosial honey supposed to be contained by the moon, because of the dew or rain which it spreads on the ground. The cake has in Slavonic tradition the same importance as the pea, kidney-bean, or cabbage. The bull or cow of the fool, bartered for a pea, is perhaps the same as the sun or aurora of evening, bartered during the night for the moon, or else meeting the moon. The funereal pea or kidney-bean, the vegetable which serves as provision for the journey in the kingdom of the dead, and which brings the hero riches, is perhaps only the moon, which the solar hero finds on the way during the night, and which he receives in exchange for his cow's hide. When the hero possesses this pea, he is assured of every kind of good fortune, and can enter or ascend into the luminous sky, as well as come out of the gloomy hell, into which the monster has drawn him. A similar virtue is attributed to the cake, which we find in Indo-European funeral customs instead of the vegetable of the dead.

After this we can understand what Plutarch tells us in the Life of Lucullus concerning the Cyziceni, of whom he writes, that, pressed by siege, they offered up to Proserpine (the moon in hell) a cow of black paste, not being able to offer up one of flesh; and he adds, that the sacrifice was agreeable to the goddess. Thus, in the thirty-sixth fable of Æsop, we read of an invalid who promises to the gods that he will sacrifice a hundred oxen to them in the event of a cure; when cured, as he does not possess a hundred oxen of flesh, he makes a hundred of paste, and burns them upon the hearth. But, according to Æsop, the gods were not satisfied, and endeavoured to play off a joke upon him; an attempt, which, however, did not succeed, inasmuch as the cunning man used it to his own profit; for the solar hero in the night, not being really a fool, merely feigns to be one.

But, to return to the cow-moon: we must complete the explanation of another myth, that of the excrement of the cow considered as purifying. The moon, as the aurora, yields ambrosia; it is considered to be a cow; the urine of this cow is ambrosia or holy water; he who drinks this water purifies himself, as the ambrosia which rains from the lunar ray and the aurora cleans the paths of the sky, purifies and makes clear (_dîrghaya cakshase_) the paths of the sky which the shadows of night darken and contaminate. The same virtue is attributed, moreover, to cow's dung, a conception also derived from the cow, and given to the moon as well as to the morning aurora. These two cows are conceived as making the earth fruitful by means of their ambrosial excrements; these excrements, being also luminous, both those of the moon and those of the aurora are considered as purifiers. The ashes of these cows (which their friend the heroine preserves) are not only ashes, but golden powder or golden flour (the golden cake occurs again in that flour or powder of gold which the witch demands from the hero in Russian stories), which, mixed with excrement, brings good fortune to the cunning and robber hero. The ashes of the sacrificed pregnant cow (_i.e._, the cow which dies after having given birth to a calf) were religiously preserved by the Romans in the temple of Vesta, with bean-stalks (which are used to fatten the earth sown with corn), as a means of expiation. Ovid[510] mentions this rite:--

"Nox abiit, oriturque Aurora. Palilia poscor,
Non poscor frustra, si favet alma Pales.
Alma Pales, faveas pastoria sacra canenti;
Prosequor officio si tua festa pio.
Certe ego de vitulo cinerem, stipulasque fabales,
Sæpe tuli plena februa casta, manu."

The ashes of a cow are preserved both as a symbol of resurrection and as a means of purification. As to the excrements of the cow, they are still used to form the so-called _eau de millefleurs_, recommended by several pharmacopoeias as a remedy for cachexy.[511]

I have noticed above the myth of Hêraklês, in which, having passed the sea upon the golden cup, he finds the oxen upon the shore. These oxen are thus described by Theokritos, in the myth of King Augeias, as the child of the sun. The sun, says Theokritos, granted to his son the honour of being richer than all other men in herds. All these herds are healthy, and multiply without limit, always becoming better. Among the bulls, three hundred have white legs (like the alba of morning), two hundred are red (like the sun's rays), with curved horns. These bulls are to be used for purposes of reproduction; besides them there are twelve sacred to the sun, which shine like swans. One of them is superior to all the rest in size, and is called a star, or Phaethôn (the luminous, an epithet given to Hêlios, the sun, in the _Odyssey_, the guider of the chariot of the sun, who, after finishing his diurnal course, is unable to rein in the horses, and is precipitated with the chariot into the water, in order that the burning horses may not set fire to the world. Instead of solar oxen, which draw the chariot, and fall, at evening, into the nocturnal marsh, we find in this myth the chariot drawn by horses overturned into the waves; but the Phaethôn, the very luminous and excellent ox, as represented by Theokritos, justifies our identification of the two mythical episodes of the ox and of the horse which falls into the water). The bull Phaethôn of Theokritos sees Hêraklês, and, taking him for a lion, rushes upon him and endeavours to wound him with his horns. The sun, as a golden-haired hero, is a very strong lion (Hêraklês, Samson); as a golden-horned hero, he is a very strong bull; enclosed in the cloud, they roar and bellow. The two images of the sun-lion and of the sun-bull are now in harmony and now in discordance, and fight with one another. In the _Râmâyanam_ we found the two brother-heroes Râmas and Lakshmanas, an epic form of the two Açvinâu, represented respectively as a bull and a lion. In the Hellenic fables we frequently find the lion and the bull together, and afterwards in discordance, as happens in the legend of the two brother-heroes. In Æsop and in Avianus, the bull (perhaps the moon) fleeing from the lion (_i.e._, from the sun in its monstrous evening or autumnal form of a lion), enters the hiding-place of the goat (the moon in the grotto of night), and is insulted and provoked by it. In another Æsopian fable, on the contrary, it is the lion who fears the horns of the bull, and induces him to part with them, in order that the bull may become his prey.[512] In yet another Æsopian fable taken from Syntipa, the bull kills the lion, while asleep, with his horns. In Phædrus, the wild boar with his tusks, the bull with his horns, and the ass with kicks, put an end to the old and infirm lion. In Phædrus's fable of the ox and the ass drawing together, the ox falls inert upon the ground when he loses his horns. Aristoteles, in the third book on the Parts of Animals, censures the Momos of Æsop, who laughs at the bull because he has his horns on his forehead instead of on his arms, showing that if the bull had his horns on any other part of his body, they would be a useless weight, and would impede his other functions without aiding him in anything. The ox and the lion were also painted together in Christian churches.[513]

To continue the legend of the solar hero and the oxen, we find again in Hêraklês, as employed among the herds in the service of King Augeias, the sun, the usual hostler-hero; he is not only to guard the herds well, but in one day to cleanse them thoroughly, and make them shine. Defrauded of the price by Augeias, he kills him, and ravages all his country. In the same way, in Homer, Apollo guards, for a stipulated price, the herds of King Laomedon upon Mount Ida, and is cheated of his reward. In the same way, Hermes takes the herds of King Admetos to pasture; he leads them to browse near the herds of Apollo, from whom he steals a hundred bulls and twelve cows, preventing the dogs from barking (as Hêraklês does when he leads away Geryon's oxen). This Hermes, this god Mercury, god of merchants, this merchant and robber, is the same as the skilful and cunning thief of the stories who carries off horses, draught oxen, caskets, and ear-rings from the king; he is the hero-thief; but a shade distinguishes him from the monster brigand or Vedic demoniacal Panis; the hero who hides himself and the monster that hides things both do a furtive action. When Hermes leads away the herds stolen from the solar god, the sun, he also takes care to fasten branches of trees to their tails, which, by sweeping the road, shall destroy the track of the bulls and cows that have been led away. The shepherd Battos plays the spy, although, as the price of his silence, Hermes has promised him a white cow (the moon, and perhaps Battos himself, the spy, is the moon). Hermes tests him, by disguising himself and promising him a bull and a cow if he speaks. Battos speaks, and Hermes punishes him by transforming him into a stone:--

"Vertit
In durum silicem, qui nunc quoque dicitur index."[514]

This god Mercury, who steals the bulls from Apollo (as Hêraklês leads away the oxen of Geryon), is the divine form of the thief. His demoniacal form, is--Cacus, the son of Vulcan (as the Vedic Vritras is the son of Tvashtar), who vomits fire; a giant who envelops himself in darkness, in Virgil; three-headed (like the Vedic monster), in Propertius;[515] who inhabits in the Aventine forest a cavern full of human bones (like the monster of fairy tales); who thunders (flammas ore sonante vomit), who fights with rocks and trunks of trees, in Ovid[516] (like the heroes in the Hindoo, Slavonic, German, and Homeric tradition); who steals the cows from Hêraklês, and hides their footprints by dragging them backwards into the cavern, in Livy; who also tells us that the cows in the cavern low, wishing for the bulls from whom they are separated (as in the Vedic hymns). The hero, hearing them, finds the cavern, overturns with a great noise the rock which five pair of oxen yoked together could scarcely have moved (like the Marutas who break the rock, like Indras who splits the crag open), and with the three-knotted club (trinodis) kills the monster and frees the cows. The solar hero who at evening leads away oxen or cows, or who at morning steals them from the stable, is a skilful robber who has acted meritoriously, and marries, in reward, the princess aurora; the cloudy or gloomy monster who steals the solar cows to shut them up in the cavern, whence he then throws out smoke and flames, is an infamous criminal. The divine thief steals almost out of playfulness, either to show his craftiness or to prove his valour; the demoniacal thief steals because of his malevolent character, and instinct to devour what he steals, as does the fabled worm of the river Indus (the Vedic Sindhus, or heavenly ocean), who draws into the abyss and devours the thirsty oxen who go to drink.[517]

The monster of the clouds who whistles and thunders only terrifies; the god who whistles and thunders in the cloud, on the other hand, is _par excellence_ a celestial musician; his musical instrument, the thunder, astonishes us by its marvels,[518] and makes stones and plants tremble, that is, makes stones and plants move, especially celestial ones (_i.e._, cloud-mountains and cloud-trees); it draws after it the wild animals (of the heavenly forest), tames and subdues them. The bellowing bull terrifies the lion himself. We, therefore, also read in Nonnos,[519] that Dionysos gives a bull in reward to Æagros, who has won in the competition of song and of the lyre, whilst he reserves a hirsute he-goat for him who loses; on this account we find on the capitals of columns in old Milanese churches, calves and bulls represented as playing on the lyre.[520] It is a variation of the myth of the ass and the lyre, which has the same meaning. The bull and the ass, for the same reason, are found represented together, because they bellow and bray (like Christian Corybantes) near the cradle of the new-born god, in order to hide, by their noise, his birth from the old king or deity who is to be dethroned.[521] The conch of Bhîmas, the elephant-horn of Orlando, the Greek war-bugle tauraia, by means of which armies were moved, derived their character and their name from the mythical bull, the thundering god. The voice of the bull is compared in Euripides to the voice of Zeus;[522] the music which pleases the heroes is certainly not the air of the _Casta diva_; it is the braying of the ass,[523] the roar of the lion, the bellowing of the bull, who occupies the first place in the heavens, and has occupied us so long, because the supreme god took his form, after having carried off Eurôpê. Zeus left on the earth his divine form, and the more generally preferred heroic form of a bull took him up to heaven:--

"Litoribus tactis stabat sine cornibus ullis
Juppiter, inque deum de bove versus erat.
Taurus init coelum."[524]

We thus, after a long pilgrimage in the fields of tradition, return to the Vedic bull Indras, from whom we started, and to his female form, which, having a human nature, became a cow, and being a cow, assumed a divine shape:--

"Quæ bos ex homine, ex bove facta Dea."[525]

FOOTNOTES:

[483] According to Eustatius, "Iô gar hê selênê katà tên tôn Argetôn dialekton."

[484] Cfr. Pott, _Studien zur griechischen Mythologie_, Leipzig, Teubner, 1859; and Cox, the work quoted before.

[485] _Dionysiakôn_, i. 45, and following; iii. 306, and following.

[486] _Metamorphoseôn_, iv. 754.

[487] In England, as I have already noticed, the bull or ox is sacred to St Luke; in Russia, to the saints Froh and Laver. In Sicily, the protector of oxen is San Cataldo, who was bishop of Taranto. (For the notices relating to Sicilian beliefs concerning animals, I am indebted to my good friend Giuseppe Pitrè.) In Tuscany, and in other parts of Italy, oxen and horses are recommended to the care of St Antony, the great protector of domestic animals. In the rural parts of Tuscany, it was the custom, on the 17th of February, to lead oxen and horses to the church-door, that they might be blessed. Now, to save trouble, only a basket of hay is carried to be blessed; which done, it is taken to the animals that they may eat it and be preserved from evil. On Palm Sunday, to drive away every evil, juniper is put into the stables in Tuscany.

[488] Taúrous pammélanai, in the _Odyssey_; the commentator explains that the bulls are black because they resemble the colour of water.

[489] Kelainefès-nefelêgeréta Zeús; _Odyssey_, xiii. 147 and 153.

[490]

Signatus tenui media inter cornua nigro
Una fuit labes; coetera lactis erant.
Ovidius, _De Arte Amandi_.

[491] In _Diodoros_, Hammon loves the virgin Amalthea, who has a horn resembling that of an ox. The goat and the cow in the lunar and cloudy myth are the same; and on this account we find them both in connection with the apple-tree, a vegetable form, and with the cornucopia, since both are seers, and spies, and guides. The golden doe is a variation of the same lunar myth.

[492] _Argonantikôn_, iii. 410, 1277.

[493] Nonnos, _Dionysiakôn_, xi. 113 and following.

[494] _Orestês_, 1380.

[495] _Ergazoménous Bóas._--In the twelfth book of his _History of Animals_, Ælianos writes: "Among the Phrygians, if any one kills a working ox, he atones for it with his life." And Varro, _De Re Rusticâ_: "Bos socius hominum in rustico opere et Cereris minister. Ab hoc antiqui ita manus abstineri voluerunt ut capite sanxerint si quis occidisset."

[496] _Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ_, Lampridius, in the life of Heliogabalus.

[497] vii. 3.

[498] _Fasti_, iii. 800.

[499] Cfr. the chapter on the Hare.

[500] Plutarch, in the Life of Marcellus, Arrianos and Appianos among the Greeks, Livy, Cicero (De Divinatione), Pliny the elder, Julius Capitolinus, Julius Obsequens among the Latins.

[501] _Éba kai táuros an hülan_, xiv. 43. In Theokritos, the proverb is used to intimate that he is gone to other and perfidious loves; he, too, is a traitor.

[502] _Rerum gestarum_, xxii.--Cfr. the episode of the ox which lets itself fall into the marsh or swamp, in the various versions of the first book of the _Pancatantram_.--The astrologers placed the brain under the protection of the moon, and the heart under that of the sun; Celoria, _La Luna_, Milano, 1871.

[503] Kadmeiôn Basilêas egeinato; _Phoinissai_, 835.

[504] _Boiotia._

[505] _Metam._, iii. 10.--Cfr. Nonnos, _Dionys._, iv. 290, and following.

[506] Or, on the path of the sun in the sky.

[507] In an unpublished Piedmontese story, which is very widely spread, the girl carried off by robbers escapes from their hands, and hides in the trunk of a tree.

[508] _De Quadrupedibus Bisulcis_, i.

[509] _De Vocabulis_, i., quoted by Aldrovandi.

[510] _Fasti_, iv. 721.

[511] Cfr. Ott. Targioni Tozzetti, _Lezioni di Materia Medica_, Firenze, 1821.

[512] In an Æsopian fable taken from Syntipa, which corresponds to the first of Lokman, two bulls combine against the lion, and resist him; the lion excites them against each other, and tears them to pieces. In the sixth fable of Aphtonios, the bulls are three; in the eighteenth of Avianus, they are four. The lion already knew the motto of kings: "Divide et impera."

[513] Durandus, _Rational._ i. 3, quoted by Du Cange.

[514] Ovidius, _Metam._, ii. 706.

[515] Per tria partitos qui dabat ora sonos; _Ecl._ iv.

[516] _Fasti_, i. 550.

[517] Philê, _Stichoi peri zôôn idiotêtos_, lix.

[518] In Italian, _attonito_ (or, properly speaking, struck by thunder) is the same as "who is much surprised").

[519] _Dionys._ xix 58.

[520] Cfr. Martigny, _Dictionnaire des Antiquités Chrétiennes_, s. v. _veau._

[521] In _Phædrus_, as we have already observed, the ox and the ass are yoked together.

[522] _Ippolitos_, _Ôs fonê Diòs_, 1200-1229.

[523] Cfr. the chapter relating to the Ass.

[524] Ovidius, _Fasti_, v. 615.

[525] _Ib._ v. 620.