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

468 The Bull and the Sun in Crete

I would venture to offer the same explanation of the dazzling
white bull that shone conspicuous in the herd of Minos1. Ovid,
thinking perhaps of the marks that characterised the Apis-bull2,
says of it:

Beneath the shady vales of wooded Ide
Was once a white bull, glory of the herd,
Signed with a line of black between the horns :
That its one fleck ; the rest was milk to see3.

As in Egypt4, so in Crete, the fertilising bull was in the long run
identified with the sun. Apollodoros states that Tdlos or Ta/os, the
man of bronze, about whom we shall have more to say5, was by some
called Tartros6. But Tdlos or Talos means ' the sun7,' and Tauros
means 'a bull.' It follows that some who wrote on Cretan mythology
spoke of the Sun as the ■ Bull.' Presumably, therefore, the Cretans,
or at least certain Cretans, conceived him to be a bull. But, more
than this, another lexicographer expressly asserts that the Cretans
called the sun the 'Adiounian bull' on the ground that, when he
changed the site of his city, he led the way in the likeness of a
bull8.

A similar story is told of Ilos, son of Tros, who came to
Phrygia, won a wrestling-match arranged by the king, and received
as his prize fifty boys and fifty girls. The king, in accordance
with an oracle, gave him also a dappled or variegated cow with
instructions that wherever it lay down he should found a city.
The cow went before him to the hill of the Phrygian Ate and there
lay down. So Ilos founded his city and called it Ilion9. Or, as
another authority told the tale, when Ilos (whose name appeared
to mean 'Cow-herd30') was feeding his cattle in Mysia, Apollon
gave him an oracle to the effect that he should found a city
wherever he saw one of his cows fall : one of them leapt away, and

1 Supra p. 467. 2 Supra p. 432 f.

3 Ov. ars am. r. 289 if. 4 Supra p. 430 ff. 5 Infra ch. i § 6 (h).

6 Apollod. 1. 9. 26. The editors print 6 TdXws, but the name was also accented
TdXws: see Stephanus Thes. Gr. Ling. vii. 1794 D.

7 Hesych. s.v. raXcDs- 6 rfhios. So M. Schmidt: J. Alberti prints TdXws.

8 Xwayioyr] Xe^ewv xPWWwp k.t.X. in Bekker anecd. i. 344, 10 ff. 'Adiovvios ravpos'
6 rj\ios biro tG>v Kp7]Tu>v ovtco Xiyerai. (paai yap tt)v irbXiv fxeroLKi^ovra ratipq? irpoaeLKaadevra
TrpoTjyeiadai. H. van Herwerden Lexicon Graecum suppletorium et dialecticum Lugduni
Batavorum 1902 p. ^ s.v. adiovvios ravpos says: 'Adiectivum non expedio.' But may it
not be a dialect-form from "Adwvis, whose name often appears on Etruscan mirrors as
Atunis [e.g. Gerhard Etr. Spiegel iii pis. 111, 114—116, v pis. 24—28) or Atuns [id. v
pi. 23)? On the Cretan Zeus as a sort of Adonis see supra p. i 57 n. 3.

9 Apollod. 3. T2. 3, Tzetz. in Lyk. A I. 29.

10 The real origin of the name is uncertain; but the Greeks probably connected it
with tXy, 'herd' (see Roscher Lex. Myth. ii. 121).