LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 75 declares his chief office to be the promulgation of the councils of Zeus*. The entire fable of the birth of Apollo is treated so as to give great honour to the island of Delos, which alone takes pity on Latona, and dares to offer her an asylum ; the fittest subject of a hymn for the joyful spring festival, to which the Ionians flocked together from far and wide on their pilgrimage to the holy island. § 4. The hymn to the Pythian Apollo is a most interesting record of the ancient mythus of Apollo in the district of Pytho. It belongs to a time when the Pythian sanctuary was still in the territory of Crissa : of the hostility between the Pythian priests and the Crissaeans, which afterwards led to the war of the Amphictyons against the city of Crissa (in Olymp. 47.), there is no trace ; a passage of the hymn also shows that horse-races t had not as yet been introduced at the Pythian games, which began immediately after the Crisssean war : the ancient Pythian contests had been confined to music. The following is the connexion of this hymn. Apollo descends from Olympus in order to found a temple for himself; and while he is seeking a site for it in Boeotia, he is recommended by a water-goddess, Tilphussa or Delphussa, to place it in the territory of Crissa in the ravine of Parnassus : her ad- vice being prompted by the malicious hope that a dangerous serpent, which abode there, would destroy the youthful god. Apollo accepts her counsel, but frustrates her intent : he founds his temple in this solitary glen, slays the dragon, and then punishes Tilphussa by stopping up her fountain J. Apollo then procures priests for the new sanctuary, Cretan men, whom he, in the form of a dolphin, brings to Crissa, and consecrates as the sacrificers and guardians of his sanctuary. § 5. The hymn to Hermes has a character very different from the others; which is the reason why modern critics have taken greater liberties with it in the rejection of verses supposed to be spurious. With that lively simplicity which gives an air of credibility to the most marvellous incidents, it relates how Hermes, begotten by Zeus in secret, is able, when only a new-born child, to leave the cradle in which his mother believed him to be safely concealed, in order to steal Apollo's cattle from the pastures of the gods in Pieria. The miraculous child succeeds in driving them away, using various contrivances for con- cealing his traces, to a grotto near Pylos, and slays them there, with all the skill of the most experienced slaughterer of victims. At the same time he had made the first lyre out of a tortoise which had fallen in his way on his first going out ; and with this he pacifies Apollo, who had at length,
- s'/»j fioi x,'i6a.(As ts ifikn kcc) xa.fi.'XvXa. ro^a,
Xfh<">> S' tt.vQpa'xoHn A/oj v7if*ie<riu flovXriv. — Hymn. Del. Ap. 131 — 2. t Hymn ii. 81, 199, where the noise of horses and chariots is given as a reason why the place is not fitted for a temple of Apollo. I It is not necessary to the right comprehension of this hymn to explain the obscurer connexion of this mythus with the worship of a Demeter Tilphosssea, or Eriunys, hostile to Apollo.
