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Solar Motifs or, Something New Under The Sun
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2015
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Our level of tolerance of solar and lunar symbolism is now much lower than it was when devotees went questing in the fields of mythology in the nineteenth century. Should a scholar now appear automatically to equate an epiphany of Apollo with the rising of the sun, he will find it hard to carry conviction, and rightly so. At the other pole is the thesis of J.E. Fontenrose, recently accorded the accolade by G. Karl Galinsky as neither to be ‘ignored nor disputed’. He argues that, while Diana was clearly identified with the moon in Roman literature of the first century B.C. because of her association with Hecate in the triformis dea, Apollo was never equated with the sun until the Imperial period.
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1 Cf. Dorson, Richard M., ‘The Eclipse of Solar Mythology’, Journ. Amer. Folklore 68 (1955), 393–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar = The Study of Folklore (ed. Dundes, Alan, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1965), pp. 57–83Google Scholar. There are signs of this attitude in e.g. Kerenyi, K.'s article, ‘Apollon-Epiphanien’, Eranos-Jahrbuch 13 (1945), 11–48Google Scholar = Spirit and Nature: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Bollingen Series xxx. 1, 1954), pp. 49-74. (He is more circumspect in Töchter der Sonne: Betrachtungenuber griechische Gottheiten [Zurich, 1944], p. 29Google Scholar, when he calls Apollo ‘das Sonnenhafteste von alien sonnenhaften göttlichen Kindein’.)
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5 Altheim and Fraenkel for, Vahlen and Heinze against. Cf. Fraenkel, , Horace, pp. 371-3.Google Scholar
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23 I join him at least in reading myrrhea (myrrea g) rather than myrtea (mirthea A). Myrtea is odd, and possibly a confused memory of Tib. i 3. 66 et gerit insigni myrtea serta coma.
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29 E. g. RE V 2669. 21Google Scholar on Eos: ‘Spätere Dichter sprechen von ihren tauigen Haaren, Ovid … Sil. Ital… Stat…’
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31 Euripides:Phaethon, App. A (pp. 180-200). For Nonnos' knowledge of Claudian's works, cf. Cameron, Alan, Qaudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford, 1970), pp. 8–11.Google Scholar
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37 La Crue du Nil, Vol. i (Paris, 1964), p. 187.Google Scholar
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