The hero's virtues--strength, courage, patriotism--are
those which have ever won the hearts of men, and they present
themselves as but the more admirable, as they are made to appear more
natural, by pairing with that amiable weakness, susceptibility to
woman's charms.

After all Samson is a true type of the tragic hero, whatever Dr.
Chrysander or another may say. He is impelled by Fate into a commission
of the follies which bring about the wreck of his body. His marriage
with the Philistine woman in Timnath was part of a divine plot, though
unpatriotic and seemingly impious. When his father said unto him: "Is
there never a woman among the daughters of thy brethren or among all my
people that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised
Philistines?" he did not know that "it was of the Lord that he sought
an occasion against the Philistines." Out of that wooing and winning
grew the first of the encounters which culminated in the destruction of
the temple of Dagon, when "the dead which he slew at his death were
more than they which he slew in his life." So his yielding to the
pleadings of his wife when she betrayed the answer to his riddle and
his succumbing to the wheedling arts of Delilah when he betrayed the
secret of his strength (acts incompatible with the character of an
ordinary strong and wise man) were of the type essential to the
machinery of the Greek drama.

A word about the mythological interpretation of the characters which
have been placed in parallel: It may be helpful to an understanding of
the Hellenic mind to conceive Herakles as a marvellously strong man,
first glorified into a national hero and finally deified. So, too, the
theory, that Herakles sinking down upon his couch of fire is but a
symbol of the declining sun can be entertained without marring the
grandeur of the hero or belittling Nature's phenomenon; but it would
obscure our understanding of the Hebrew intellect and profane the
Hebrew religion to conceive Samson as anything but the man that the
Bible says he was; while to make of him, as Ignaz Golziher suggests, a
symbol of the setting sun whose curly locks (crines Phoebi) are sheared
by Delilah-Night, would bring contumely upon one of the most beautiful
and impressive of Nature's spectacles. Before the days of comparative
mythology scholars were not troubled by such interpretations. Josephus
disposes of the Delilah episode curtly: "As for Samson being ensnared
by a woman, that is to be