with his sister and of his being sawn in two (Chapter 9). But he was remem-
bered chiefly in association with the transition to mortality. Yima is portrayed
as a world ruler in whose reign paradisiac conditions prevailed. There was
no summer and winter, no old age, sickness, or death, but an unfailing
abundance of food and water (Y. 9. 4 f., Yt. 15. 15–17, 19. 30–3, Vd. 2. 5). But
he sinned, and his majesty departed stage by stage (Yt. 19. 34–8). Or the world
became overcrowded with the swelling human and animal population: Ahura
Mazda ̄ prepared a killing winter, instructing Yima to build a stronghold and
withdraw to it with the seeds of all the best men and women and animals
and plants. He did so, and there the elect dwell, apart from this world (Vd. 2.
8–43). As for the Vedic Yama, he is celebrated as the one who marked himself
off from the gods by renouncing immortality and opting for death as the
price of having progeny (RV 10. 13. 4). He found the path for the many, the
path that our fathers have trodden (10. 14. 1 f.). He is the king of the dead, to
whose abode all go on the road that he established.^6
The separation of the two races, the celestial and the terrestrial, is not
absolute. It cannot be, so long as there are particular families that insist on
their descent from a divinity. Indian Rishis traced themselves back to gods
(RV 1. 139. 9; 7. 33. 11). Many of the heroes of Greek legend were sons or
descendants of gods. The Scythian king Idanthyrsos claimed descent from
‘Zeus’ (Hdt. 4. 127. 4). Romulus and Remus were sons of Mars. Sundry
Germanic kings and heroes boasted divine parentage or ancestry, especially
from Odin/Woden.^7 The giantess Hyndla proposes to Freyja that they sit and
talk ‘of the lineage of princes, of those men who came from gods’ (Hyndlulióð
8). Saxo tells of a Norwegian king Frogerus, ‘ut quidam ferunt Othino patre
natus’, and of a Swede Haldanus Biargrammus who was held to be a son of
Thor (4. 8. 1 p. 101; 7. 2. 3 p. 184). The British Royal Family’s pedigree leads
back ultimately to Woden, though they make little of it these days. There is no
reason why such claims should not go back to Indo-European times.
Human and animal lifespansThe ideal length of a human life in Indo-European thinking is a hundred
rather than the Psalmist’s threescore years and ten or fourscore. ‘A hundred
autumns are before us, O gods, in which you have fixed the ageing of our
bodies’ (RV 1. 89. 9). ‘That eye set by the gods, may we see it going forth in
(^6) The Gauls claimed descent from ‘Dis pater’ (Caes. Bell. Gall. 6. 18. 1); in other words they
identified their first ancestor with the lord of the dead. Is this a version of the same myth?
(^7) Cf. Grimm (1883–8), 367 f., 1387, 1390; K. Sisam, PBA 39 (1953), 287–348; M. L. West, The
Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford 1985), 20.
- Mortality and Fame 377