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Argeiphontes in Homer—The Dragon-Slayer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
According to Elliot Smith, the dragon ‘is most intimately associated with the earliest stratum of divinities, for it has been homologized with each of the members of the earliest Trinity, the Great Mother, the Water God, and the Warrior Sun God, both individually and collectively. To add to the complexities of the story, the dragon-slayer is also represented by the same deities, either individually or collectively; and the weapon with which the hero slays the dragon is also homologous both with him and his victim, for it is animated by him who wields it, and its powers of destruction make it a symbol of the same power of evil which it itself destroys.’
Wherever it is found the dragon displays a special partiality for water. It dwells in pools or wells or in the clouds on the tops of mountains, or at the bottom of the sea where it guards vast treasures, or even on the top of a high mountain. It has the same characteristics everywhere, for the dragon of the North is essentially the same as that of the South and the East, an evil power, guarding hoards and withholding good things from men. ‘The slaying of a dragon is the achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram…But if in the West the dragon is usually a “power of evil”, in the far East he is equally emphatically a symbol of beneficence. He is identified with emperors and kings; he is the son of heaven, the bestower of all bounties.’
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1953
References
page 33 note 1 Smith, G. Elliot, The Evolution of the Dragon (Longmans, 1919), pp. 77–78Google Scholar; cf. ibid., p. 81. The dragon is actually a composite wonder-beast ranging from western Europe to the Far East of Asia and to America. ‘In most places where the dragon occurs the substratum of its anatomy consists of a serpent or a crocodile usually with the scales of a fish for covering, and the feet and wings, and sometimes also the head, of an eagle, falcon or hawk, and the forelimbs and sometimes the head of a lion.’ Cf. Swinburne, A. C. ‘Hertha’, in the Oxford Book of English Verse (Clarendon Press, 1912), p. 925Google Scholar: ‘I am stricken, and I am the blow. I the mark that is miss'd And the arrows that miss.’
page 33 note 2 Cf. Birrell, Augustine, Essays, 1899, ii. 140Google Scholar: ‘From the dragon-warder'd fountains Where the springs of knowledge are.’
page 33 note 3 Elliot Smith, op. cit., pp. 81–82.
page 33 note 4 Ibid., pp. 78 ff. Elliot Smith would trace back the mythical conflict of hero and dragon to the earliest known of such conflicts, that between Osiris (later, his son Horus) and his enemy Set. Cf. p. 137. Set, the enemy of Osiris, is the real prototype of the evil dragon and so the prototype of Satan. The Biblical references to Satan identify him with the dragon who is mentioned (Rev. xx. 2)
page 34 note 1 Sophocles, fr. 1024. See Pearson, , The Fragments of Sophocles (Cambridge, 1917), vol. iii, p. 139.Google Scholar
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page 36 note 7 The name Asklepios is connected by some with ἀσκ;λβoς ‘serpent’ or ‘lizard’. Asklepios not only cured all the sick but called the dead back to life again (Pindar, Pyth. iii). The essential part of his temple worship was the sleeping in the temple itself (incubatio), where an oracle through a dream revealed to the patient the method of cure (Arist. Plut. 421 ff.). For Trophonios see Paus. ix. 36. 6. He was said to inhabit a cave in the shape of a snake: snakes were sacred to him as they were to Asklepios.
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page 37 note 2 Ibid., p. 206.
page 37 note 3 Paus. vii. 22. 2–3.
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page 38 note 2 For the Pythia as the medium of the snake god Cf. Hastings, , Encyc. of Religion and Ethics, vol. xiGoogle Scholar, s.v. ‘Serpent-worship’, p. 400. Cf. also Massey, G., The Natural Genesis, p. 300.Google Scholar
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