Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

Triptolemos

211

wheel of the mythical Ixion was the torture-wheel of real life,
I would urge that we have not thus got to the bottom of the matter.
Why were men burnt upon a revolving wheel ? Why on a engine of
this particular shape ? Why not tied to a stake, or cross-bar, or
triangles, for instance ? Because—I venture to reply—this form of
punishment, like so many others (impaling, hanging, crucifixion,
perhaps even ordinary flogging), originated in the service of religion,
or at least in a definitely religious idea. And the idea in the
present case was that the victim represented the sun. The mythical
Ixion, if I am not mistaken, typifies a whole series of human
Ixions, who in bygone ages were done to death as effete embodi-
ments of the sun-god. Evidence in support of this view will be
forthcoming in subsequent sections.

(ft) Triptolemos.

Triptolemos is first mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,
a poem referable to the seventh century B.C., as one of the 'kings'
or chiefs at Eleusis, whom Demeter instructed in mystic rites for
the fertility of the soil1. Apart from the fact that his name thrice
heads the list, there is nothing to distinguish him from the other
chieftains of the place—Diokles or Dioklos, Dolichos, Eumolpos,
Keleos, Polyxeinos. The position of divine nurseling and favourite
is reserved for Demophon, son of Keleos and Metaneira. But in
course of time Triptolemos appears to have usurped the place of
Demophon. His story is thus told by Apollodoros2: 'Metaneira
the wife of Keleos had a child, whom Demeter took and reared.
Wishing to make the babe immortal, she put it down every night
in fire and so took off its covering of mortal flesh. Demophon—
for that was the child's name—grew so fast by day that Metaneira
kept watch, found him plunged in fire, and shrieked aloud. Conse-
quently the babe was destroyed by the fire3, and the goddess
revealed herself. But for Triptolemos, the elder of Metaneira's
children, she made a chariot-seat (diphros) of winged snakes. She
gave him grain, and he, soaring aloft through the sky, sowed the
whole world with it.' Others make Triptolemos the son of Eleusis4,

1 H. Dem. 474 ff., cp. 153 ff.

2 Apollod. 1. 5. 1—2.

3 In the h. Dem. 250 ff. (cp. Qv.fast. 4. 555 ff.) the child is not destroyed by the fire,
but only robbed of immortality through his mother's interruption of the rite—a ceremony
of purification (F. B. Jevons An Introduction to the History of Religion London 1896
p. 365, E. E. Sikes on h. Dem. 239) and initiation (W. R. Halliday in the Class. Rev.
1911 xxv. 8 ff.).

4 Panyasis frag. 24 Kinkel ap. Apollod. 1. 5. i-.

14—2