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

344 The Sun as the Bird of Zeus

after he was thrown into the pit he found a dead bird somewhere. He stuck its
wings on to his hands and flew up. He knocked his head on the mountain and
sent it spinning up to the sun. He then flew further afield and soared high
into the air. But a rain-storm came on and softened the clay, with which he
had stuck the feathers on. So Captain Thirteen fell into the sea. Out came
the sea-god1 and with his three-pronged fork gave him such a blow that the sea
turned red with his blood, and changed him into a big fish, a dolphin. He told
him too that he could never change back again till he found a girl willing to
marry him. Now the sea in which the dolphin lived was of such a sort that no
ship entering it could get out again. It so happened that a king and his
daughter came that way. They got in easily enough but couldn't get out again ;
and so fearful a storm overtook them that their ship broke up. Nobody was
saved but the princess and the king ; for the dolphin took them both on his
back to a small island, and then set them ashore on the coast they had come
from. The princess resolved to wed the dolphin, and, to get him up to her
castle, had a big canal dug from the sea to it. When all was ready for the
wedding, the dolphin shook off his skin and changed into a young man of
gigantic strength and great beauty. He married the princess, and they lived
happily ever after—but we here more happily still.'

This tale combines the characteristics of Ikaros with those of
Pterelaos, the Taphian hero whose life depended on a golden hair.
Amphitryon and his allies could not capture Taphos till Komaitho
the daughter of Pterelaos, in love with the hostile chief, plucked or
cut the fateful hair from her father's head2. O. Gruppe3 infers
from the name Pterelaos that a bird played an important part in
the Taphian legend4, and justly compares the Megarian myth of
Nisos and Skylla, which not only contained the same episode of
the purple or golden life-lock but also involved the metamorphosis
of the father into a sea-eagle and of the faithless daughter into a
heron5.

Ikaros' tomb was shown on a headland of Ikaria, the island
west of Samos6. Daidalion and Talos were both precipitated
from a rocky eminence. And the story of Skylla was associated
with the point Skyllaion near Hermione7. This recurrence of a
headland suggests comparison with the ritual of the Leucadian
promontory. The ' White Rock,' as Homer calls it8, is a cliff that

1 6 dal/xovas rijs ddXaacas.

2 Apollod. 2. 4. 7, Tzetz. in Lyk. Al. 932, Dion Chrys. or. 64 p. 341 Reiske, Ov.
ibis 361 f.

3 Gruppe Gr. Myth. Rel. p. 1412 n. 6.

4 O. Hofer in Roscher Lex. Myth. iii. 3266 conjectures that Pterelaos was changed
into a Kpt£, Komaitho into an aWvia (so M. Mayer in Hermes 1892 xxvii. 489), its natural
enemy (Ail. de-nat. an. 4. 5). But this is hardly to be got out of Souid. s.v. icpeKa' tt)v
rptxa- iroptpvptrfv ^p.y)<xe /cp^ca, which may refer to Nisos and Skylla.

5 Roscher Lex. Myth. iii. 425 ff.

6 Paus. 9. 11. 5. • • •

7 Roscher Lex. Myth. iii. 426.

8 Od. 24. 11 AevK&Sa ireTpr)v.