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    CHILDREN OF THE DAWN

    OLD TALES OF GREECE


    [Illustration: Each night Hero lighted her torch; each night Leander
                   swam across the narrow sea. _Page 117._]




    CHILDREN OF THE DAWN OLD TALES OF GREECE

    WRITTEN BY

    ELSIE FINNIMORE BUCKLEY


    INTRODUCTION BY      ILLUSTRATIONS BY
    ARTHUR SIDGWICK      FRANK C PAPE

    NEW YORK
    FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS




INTRODUCTION:


The aim of this volume is to present, in a form suitable for young
readers, a small selection from the almost inexhaustible
treasure-house of the ancient Greek tales, which abound (it is
needless to say) in all Greek poetry, and are constantly referred to
by the prose-writers. These stories are found, whether narrated at
length, or sometimes only mentioned in a cursory and tantalising
reference, from the earliest poets, Homer and Hesiod, through the
lyric age, and the Attic renaissance of the fifth century, when they
form the material of the tragic drama, down to the second century
B.C., when Apollodorus, the Athenian grammarian, made a prose
collection of them, which is invaluable. They reappear at Rome in the
Augustan age (and later), in the poems of Vergil, Ovid, and
Statius--particularly in Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Many more are
supplied by Greek or Roman travellers, scholars, geographers, or
historians, of the first three centuries of our era, such as
Strabo, Pausanias, Athenaeus, Apuleius and AElian. The tales are
various--stories of love, adventure, heroism, skill, endurance,
achievement or defeat. The gods take active part, often in conflict
with each other. The heroes or victims are men and women; and behind
all, inscrutable and inexorable, sits the dark figure of Fate. The
Greeks had a rare genius for storytelling of all sorts. Whether the
tales were of native growth, or imported from the East or
elsewhere--and both sources are doubtless represented--once they had
passed through the Greek hands, the Greek spirit, "finely touched to
fine issues," marked them for its own with the beauty, vivacity,
dramatic interest, and imaginative outline and detail, which were
never absent from the best Greek work, least of all during the
centuries that lie between Homer and Plato.

The eleven tales here presented from this vast store are (as will be
seen) very various both in date, character, and detail; and they seem
well chosen for their purpose. The writer of these English versions of
ancient stories has clearly aimed at a terse simplicity of style,
while giving full details, with occasional descriptive passages where
required to make the scene more vivid; and, for the same end, she has
rightly made free use of dialogue or soliloquy wherever the story
could thus be more pointedly or dramatically told.

The first story, called "The Riddle of the Sphinx," gives us in brief
the whole Theban tale, from King Laius and the magical building of the
city, to the incomparable scene from Sophocles' last play, describing
the "Passing of OEdipus." It even includes the heroic action of
Antigone, in burying with due rites her dead brother, in spite of the
tyrant's threats, and at the cost of her own life. No tale was more
often treated in ancient poetry than this tragedy of Thebes. Homer and
Hesiod both refer to it, AEschylus wrote a whole trilogy, and
Sophocles three separate dramas, on this theme. Euripides dealt with
it in his "Phoenissae," which survives, and in his "OEdipus and
Antigone," of which a few fragments remain. And several other poets
whose works are lost are known by the titles of their plays to have
dealt with the same subject.

One other tale in this selection rests in large measure on the Attic
drama--namely, the story of Alcestis, the fourth in this series. As
far as we know, Euripides alone of the ancients treated this theme, in
his beautiful and interesting play "