Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek HistoryYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
History
Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Greece -- History -- Juvenile literature; Mythology, Greek -- Juvenile literature
Now, having told you that bit of truth, I will go back to what the Greeks
thought. They said that Deucalion had a son whose name was Hellên, and
that he again had three sons, called Æolus, Dorus, and Xuthus. Æolus was
the father of the Æolian Greeks, and some in after times thought that he
was the same with the god called Æolus, who was thought to live in the
Lipari Islands; and these keep guard over the spirits of the
winds—Boreas, the rough, lively north wind; Auster, the rainy south wind;
Eurus, the bitter east; and Zephyr, the gentle west. He kept them in a
cave, and let one out according to the way the wind was wanted to blow,
or if there was to be a storm he sent out two at once to struggle, and
fight, and roar together, and lash up Neptune’s world, the sea. The
Æolians did chiefly live in the islands and at Corinth. One of the sons
of Æolus turned out very badly, and cheated Jupiter. His name was
Sisyphus, and he was punished in Tartarus—Pluto’s world below—by having
always to roll a stone up a mountain so steep that it was sure to come
down upon him again.
Dorus was, of course, the father of the Dorians; and Xuthus had a son,
called Iôn, who was the father of the Ionians. But, besides all these,
there was a story of two brothers, named Ægyptus and Danaus, one of whom
settled in Egypt, and the other in Argos. One had fifty sons and the
other fifty daughters, and Ægyptus decreed that they should all marry;
but Danaus and his daughters hated their cousins, and the father gave
each bride a dagger, with which she stabbed her bridegroom. Only one had
pity, and though the other forty-nine were not punished here, yet, when
they died and went to Tartarus, they did not escape, but were obliged to
be for ever trying to carry water in bottomless vessels. The people of
Argos called themselves Danai, and no doubt some of them came from Egypt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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