56 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, 



scholars incline to believe (Moevers, vol. i. p. 385), really was a sun god, the 

 twelve labours of Hercules will, of course, only be the symbolical expression 

 for the progress of the Titan sun through the twelve months of the solar year. 

 This the ancients themselves, in the Orphic theology, at least distinctly recognised. 



XLIV. In Bellerophon the Germans find a favourite example of their 

 theory, that all the heroes of the so-called heroic age are the degraded gods of 

 an early elemental worship. How this theory is worked out in the present case 

 it may be instructive to consider. The winged steed, of course, brings you at 

 once into the region of the sun. Then you turn up Eustathius' commentary on 

 the well-known episode of the Corinthian hero in the sixth book of the Iliad 

 (v. 181), and you find there that there was an old Greek word eXXepos, used by 

 Callimachus, which is equivalent to kcikos or bad; but bad things are black 

 things ; therefore, with the help of the digamma, transmuting eXXepos into 

 /3eXXepo?, we arrive at the conclusion that fie\\epo(f>6vTr)<s means the slayer of 

 darkness, and, of course, can be nothing but the light, or the sun. Bellerophon 

 is thus, by a dexterous etymological feat, already a solar god in full panoply ; 

 and when, in addition to this, we find that the worship of the sun was much 

 practised at Corinth, the native place of the hero, and that he died in Lycia, a 

 country famous for its devotion to the same deity, the case for a degraded 

 "HXto? seems to be satisfactorily made out. But, on the other hand, the oldest 

 version of the story in Homer has no hint of the winged horse ; and for the 

 rest, looks in every trait as much like a purely human history of those early 

 Greek times as the story of St Columba shows like a real legend of a real 

 Catholic apostle in early Christian times. "We shall, therefore, in my opinion, 

 more wisely say that the airy flight of the grandson of Corinthian Sisyphus on 

 his winged Pegasus, is only the imaginative painting out of a real human journey 

 made from such real and natural causes as those which Homer details ; and, if 

 the winged horse has anything to do with the worship of the sun at Corinth, it 

 is more reasonable to suppose that such a blazon should have been added for 

 the glorification of a real great man, than that all the great men of early Corinth 

 should have been clean swept from the popular memory to make way for an 

 unmeaning Pantheon of degraded and forgotten gods. 



XLV. Descending lower down into the region of what has the aspect, not 

 of metamorphic theology, but of plain human fact, we may take the names of 

 Achilles and Theseus as examples of how far the German school is inclined 

 to carry its peculiar tactics of finding nothing in all early tradition but theolo- 

 gical ideas and symbols. As to Achilles, the favourite notion with most German 

 writers is that this hero is a water god, — a notion founded on nothing that I can 

 see, save on the etymological analogy of Achelous, the happy coincidence of 



