III The Moon and the Sun from the Homeric Hymns to Keats DIANA AND ENDYMION BEFORE AND AFTER KEATS HE myth of Diana and Endymion has ap TH pealed to many poets and artists because of its intrinsic loveliness. Each poet who has versified the story has found some different element to emphasize in his interpretation of the myth,-to all, however, it has been the symbol of some exquisite ideal. The myth was originally told of an earlier moon-goddess than Diana or Artemis as the Greeks called her. This earliest of Greek moon-goddesses was Selene, and so primitive is the conception of her that she is hardly more than a simple personification of the Moon, like those to be found in the myths of primitive races all over the globe, and like the Moon in many of these myths she is the sister of Helios or the Sun, while her father is the Titan, Hyperion, a still older form of the Sun, and her sister Eos, the Dawn. This is according to the account in Hesiod. In Homer the relationships are somewhat confused through the identifying of Helios and Hyperion as the same person. Most of the gods and goddesses of the great Olympian hierarchy in the Greek mythology, were, originally personifications of natural phenomena. At first these cosmic objects-such as the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Sky and the Dawn were thought of as personal beings. Later the personal Sun or Moon gave place to a spirit of the Sun or the Moon, and still later this spirit was almost freed from its connection with the original natural phenomenon, and so left free to develop a complex intellectual and spiritual personality such as that of the later Apollo and Artemis, doubtless originally the Sun and the Moon, but so much more, as they are portrayed in the Greek poets, that their origin is only recognized in elements which seem to be survivals of the earlier personal Sun and Moon. |