ABSTRACT

The bull declines from his position of primacy among the animals in which the god was manifested, to become one of a line of animals prepared for sacrifice. He still retained some of his divine character, however, in Aegean lands, during the rise of Greece and the development of all the multifarious cults which comprised the Greek's fractious pantheon. Europa, the daughter of Agenor, King of Tyre in Phoenicia, was a beautiful and evidently a simple-minded girl. The story of the abduction of Europa, by contrast, provides some small comfort to followers of the bull, for in this myth, it might be said, it is for once the bull who gets the girl. The story is also a precise expression, in mythic form, of the transference of the skills of animal husbandry and of political management from the eastern Mediterranean to the still barbarous islands and, hence, to the mainstream of European history.