Orion, too, has solar connexions. In the Fifth Odyssey (121-24), Calypso relates to Hermes how the love for him of Aurora excited the jealousy of the gods, extinguished only when he fell a victim to it, slain by the shafts of Artemis in Ortygia. Obviously, a sun-and-dawn myth slightly modified from the common type. The post-Homeric stories, too, of his relations with Œnopion of Chios, and of his death by the bite of a scorpion (emblematical of darkness, like the boar’s tusk in the Adonis legend), confirm his position as a luminous hero.[39] Altogether, the evidence is strongly in favour of considering Orion as a variant of Adonis, imported into Greece from the East at an early date, and there associated with the identical group of stars which commemorated to the Accads of old the fate of Dumuzi (_i.e._ Tammuz), the ‘Only Son of Heaven.’ Footnote 39: R. Brown, _Archælogia_, vol. xlvii. p. 352; _Great Dionysiak Myth_, chap. x. § v. It is remarkable that Homer knows nothing of stellar mythology. He nowhere attempts to account for the names of the stars. He has no stories at his fingers’ ends of translations to the sky as a ready means of exit from terrestrial difficulties. The Orion of his acquaintance—the beloved of the Dawn, the mighty hunter, surpassing in beauty of person even the divinely-born Aloidæ—died and descended to Hades like other mortals, and was there seen by Ulysses, a gigantic shadow ‘driving the wild beasts together over the mead of asphodel, the very beasts which he himself had slain on the lonely hills, with a strong mace all of bronze in his hand, that is ever unbroken.’[40] His stellar connexion is treated as a fact apart. The poet does not appear to feel any need of bringing it into harmony with the Odyssean vision. Footnote 40: _Odyssey_, xi. 572-75. The brightest star in the heavens is termed by Homer the ‘dog of Orion.’ The name _Seirios_ (significant of sparkling), makes its _début_ in the verses of Hesiod. To the singer of the Iliad the dog-star is a sign of fear, its rising giving presage to ‘wretched mortals’ of the intolerable, feverish blaze of late summer (_opora_). The deadly gleam of its rays hence served the more appropriately to exemplify the lustre of havoc-dealing weapons. Diomed, Hector, Achilles, ‘all furnish’d, all in arms,’ are compared in turn, by way of prelude to an ‘_aristeia_,’ or culminating epoch of distinction in battle, to the same brilliant but baleful object. Glimmering fitfully across clouds, it not inaptly typifies the evanescent light of the Trojan hero’s fortunes, no less than the flashing of his armour, as he moves restlessly to and fro.[41] Of Achilles it is said: Footnote 41: _Iliad_, xi. 62-66.