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of Sicyon in Sicily. The legend of Aesculapius is that after a life devoted to healing, he raised Glaucus, son of Sisyphus the Corinthian, from the dead, and was burned to cinders by Zeus in a fit of jealousy; he had been rescued as a child from a bonfire in which his mother and her paramour Ischys (‘Strength’) perished. Bran was likewise destroyed by his jealous enemy Evnissyen, a comrade of Matholwch King of Ireland to whom he had given a magical cauldron for raising dead soldiers to life; but in the Welsh legend it is Bran’s nephew and namesake, the boy Gwern, who after being crowned King is immediately thrown into a bonfire and burned to death; Bran himself is wounded in the heel by a poisoned dart – like Achilles the Minyan, the Centaur Cheiron’s pupil, and Cheiron himself – then beheaded; his head continues to sing and prophesy. (In Irish legend Aesculapius figures as Midach, killed after the Second Battle of Moytura by his father Diancecht, the Apollo of Healing, who was jealous of his cures.) Aesculapius and Bran were both demi-gods with numerous shrines, and both were patrons of healing and resurrection. Another point of resemblance between them is their love-adventures: Aesculapius lay with fifty amorous girls in a night, and Bran had a similar jaunt in the Isle of Women, one of three times fifty that he visited on a famous voyage. Aesculapius is represented in Greek art with a dog beside him and a staff in his hand around which twine oracular snakes.
    The theft of the Dog and the Roebuck from the Underworld by Amathaon supports the Irish view that the Children of Danu came from Greece in the middle of the second millennium BC , since there are several analogous Greek legends of Bronze Age origin. For example, that of Hercules, the oak-hero, who was ordered by his task-master King Eurystheus of Mycenae to steal the dog Cerberus from the King of theUnderworld, and the brass-shod white roebuck from the Grove of the Goddess Artemis at Ceryneia in Arcadia. In another of his adventures Hercules snatched from Herophile – the priestess of Delphi whose father (according to Clement of Alexandria) was Zeus disguised as a lapwing, and whose mother was Lamia, the Serpent-goddess – the oracular tripod on which she was sitting, but was forced to restore it. Among the favourite subjects of Greek and Etruscan art are Hercules carrying off the Dog and his struggles with the guardian of the Lamian oracle at Delphi for the possession of the roebuck and of the tripod. To call this guardian Apollo is misleading because Apollo was not at that time a Sun-god, but an Underworld oracular hero. The sense of these myths seems to be that an attempt to substitute the cult of the oracular oak for that of the oracular laurel at Delphi failed, but that the shrines at Ceryneia in Arcadia and Cape Taenarum in Laconia, where most mythographers place the entrance to the Underworld visited by Hercules, were captured. Other mythographers say that the entrance was at Mariandynian Acherusia (now Heracli in Anatolia) and that where the saliva of Cerberus fell on the ground, up sprang the witch-flower aconite – which is a poison, a paralysant and a febrifuge; but this account refers to another historical event, the capture of a famous Bithynian shrine by the Henetians.
    But why Dog? Why Roebuck? Why Lapwing?
    The Dog with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the Dog days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius. But the poetic meaning of the Dog in the Câd Goddeu legend, as in all similar legends, is ‘Guard the Secret’, the prime secret on which the sovereignty of a sacred king depended. Evidently Amathaon had seduced some priest of Bran – whether it was a