Bird Gods in Ancient Europe 



great hero of the Iliad thus begins life like a 

 young eagle with the fire test and ends it with 

 a fire burial, not, it is true, on a pyre kindled 

 by his own hands, as Herakles did himself to 

 death, but one raised by the sorrowing sur- 

 vivors. The idea at bottom of his story is 

 that if he had endured the fire test at birth, 

 if his father had not plucked him prematurely 

 from the flames in which his mother Thetis 

 cast him, he would have been immortal like 

 the eagle or phoenix, needing only a period- 

 ical flame bath to " renew his youth like the 

 eagles." 



We have no exact idea what the pre-Homeric 

 Achilleus was, whose name and part of whose 

 traits appear in the hero of the Trojan war. 

 But we are not left in the dark as to the exist- 

 ence of earlier beings of his name who are less 

 realistic and human, more shadowy and super- 

 natural. He appears as a son of Galatus re- 

 markable for the whiteness of his hair, as if in 

 allusion to the bald or white-headed eagle. In 



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