Robert Graves
1955, revised 1960
The scan is very corrupt, though it’s possible to make it out in most places. Except for line and page breaks, few of the errors have been corrected. Some bad parts are marked with emphasis style.
Robert Graves was born in 1895 at Wimbledon, son of Alfred Perceval Graves, the Irish writer, and Amalia von Ranke. He went from school to the First World War, where he became a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His principal calling is poetry, and his Selected Poems have been published in the Penguin Poets. Apart from a year as Professor of English Literature at Cairo University in 1926 he has since earned his living by writing, mostly historical novels which include: I, Claudius; Claudius the God; Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth; Count Belisarius; Wife to Mr Milton (all published as Penguins); Proceed, Sergeant Lamb; The Golden Fleece; They Hanged My Saintly Billy; and The Isles of Unwisdom. He wrote his autobiography,Goodbye to All That (a Penguin Modem Classic), in 1929. His two most discussed non-fiction books are The White Goddess, which presents a new view of the poetic impulse, and The Nazarene Gospel Restored (with Joshua Podro), a re-examination of primitive Christianity. He has translated Apuleius, Lucan, and Suetonius for the Penguin Classics. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1962.
Foreword
Introduction
I. The Pelasgian Creation Myth
2. The Homeric And Orphic Creation Myths
3. The Olympian Creation Myth
4. Two Philosophical Creation Myths
5’ The Five Ages Of Man
6. The Castration Of Uranus
7. The Dethronement Of Cronus
8. The Birth Of Athene
9. Zeus And Metis
10. The Fates
11. The Birth Of Aphrodite
12. Hera And Her Children
5ř
13. Zeus And Hera
14. Births Of Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, And Dionysus
15. The Birth Of Eros
16. Poseidon’s Nature And Deeds
17. Hermes’s Nature And Deeds
18. Aphrodite’s Nature And Deeds
19. Ares’s Nature And Deeds
20. Hestia’s Nature And Deeds
21. Apollo’s Nature And Deeds
22.Artemis’s Nature And Deeds
23. Hephaestus’s Nature And Deeds
24. Demeter’s Nature And Deeds
25. Athene’s Nature And Deeds
26. Pan’s Nature And Deeds
27. Dionysus’s Nature And Deeds
28. Orpheus
29. Ganymedes
30. Zagreus
31. The Gods Of The Underworld
32. Tyche And Nemesis
33. The Children Of The Sea
34’ Tile Children Of Echidne ..
35. The Giants’ Revolt
36. Typhon
$7. ?~ Alo~Ds
38. Deucalion’s Flood
39. Atlas And Prometheus
40. Eos
41, Orion
42. Helius
43. The Sons Of Hellen
44. Ion
45. AlcťOns And ›~Yx
46. Ter~Us
47. Brechth~Us And Eumolpus
48. Boreas
49—Alopb
5ř. Asclepius
510 The Oracles
52. The Alphabet
53’ The Dactyls
54. The Telchines
55—The Empusa~
56. Io
57. Phoroniius
58. Europe And Cadmus
59’ Cadmus And Harmonia
60. Belus And The Danaids
61. Lamia
62. Leda
63. Ixion
64. Endymion
65. Pygmalion And Galatea
66. Aeacus
67. Sisyphus
68. Salmonbus And Tyro
69. Alc~Stis
70. Att-Iamas
71. The Mares 01~ Glaucu5
72—Melampus
73. Perseus
74. T~E Rival Xwi~S
75. Bellerophon
76. Antiop~
77. Niobe
78. Caenis And Caeneus
79. Erigone
80. The Calydonian Boar
81. Telamon And Peleus
82. Aristaeus
83. Midas
84. Cleobis And Biton
85. Narcissus
86. ~Hyllis And Carya
87. Arion
88. Minos And His Brothers
89. The Loves Of Minos
90. The Children Of Pasiphaii
91. Scylla And Nisus
92. Daedal’us And Tai. Os
93. Catreus And Althaemenes
94—The Sons Op Pandion
95’ The Birth Of Theseus
96. The Labours Of Theseus
97. Theseijs And Medea
98. Theseus In Crete
99’ The Federalization Of Attica
Ioo. Theseus And The Amazons
Ioi. Phaedra And Hippolytus
102. Lapiths And Centaurs
103. Theseus In Tartarus
L04. The Death Of Theseus
105. Oedipus
L06. The Seven Against Thebes
107. The Epigoni
108. Tantalus
L09. Pelops And Oenomaus
Iio. The Children Of Pelops
111. Atreus And Thyestes
112. Agamemnon And Clytaemnestra
113. The Vengeance Of Orestes
114. The Trial Of Orestes
115. The Pacification Of The Erinnyes
116. Iphigeneia Among The Taurians
117. The Reign Of Orestes
118. The Birth Of Heracles
119. The Youth Of Heracles
120. The Daughters Of Thespius
121. Erginus
122. The Madness Of Heracles
123, The First Labour: The Nemean Lion
124. The Second Labour: The Lernaean Hydra
125. The Third Labour: The Ceryneian Hind
126.The Fourth Labour: The Eryminthian Boar
127.The Fifth Labour: The Stables Of Tugeias
Izs.The Sixth Labour: The Stymphalian Birds
12~).The Seventh Labour: The Cretan Bull
130.The Eighth Labour: The Mares Op Diomedes
131.The Ninth Labour: Hippolyte~S Girdle
132.The Tenth Labour: The Cattle Of Geryon
133.The Eleventh Labour: The Apples Of The Hesperides
134. The Twelfth Labour: The Capture Of Cerberus
135. The Murder Of Iphitus
136. Omphale
137. Hesione
138. The Conquest Of Elis
139. The Capture Of Pylus
140. The Sons Of Hippocoi~N
141. Auge
142. Deianeira
143, Heracles In Trachis
144. Iole
145. The Apotheosis Of Rieracles
146. The Children Of Heracles
147. Linus
148. The Argonauts Assemble
149. The Lemnian Women And King Cyzicus
150. Hylas~ Amycus~ And Phineus
151, From The Symplegades To Colchis
152. The S~Izure Of The Fleece
153. The Murder Of Apsyrtus
154. The Argo Returns To Greece
155. The Death Of Pelias
156. Medea At Ephyra
157. Medea In Exile
158. The Foundation Of Troy
159. Paris Anr~ Hblen
160. The First Gathering At Aulis
161. The Second Gathering At Aulis
162. Nine Years Of War
163. The Wrath Of Achilles
164. The Death Of Achilles
165. The Madness Of Ajax
166. The Oracles Of Troy
I67. The Wooden Horse
168. The Sack Of Troy
169. The Returns
170. Odysseus’s Wanderings
171. Odysseus’s Homecoming
Index
Maś shouting the gtes mentioned in text
A complete index to both volumes and a map showing the sites mentioned in the text will be be found at the end of volume II.
The death of the Old Bull of the Year apparently poleaxed, and the birth of the New Year’s Bull-Calf from a date cluster; under the supervision of a Cretan priestess, who identifies herself with the palm-tree.
From a Middle-Minoan bead-seal in the author’s collection (diameter enlarged x« times). About 1900 B.C.
SINCE revising The Greek Myths in 1958, I have had second thoughts about the drunken god Dionysus, about the Centaurs with their contradictory reputation for wisdom and misdemeanour, and about the nature of divine ambrosia and nectar. These subjects are closely related, because the Centaurs worshipped Dionysus, whose wild autumnal feast was called ‘the Ambrosia’. I no longer believe that when his Maenads ran raging around the countryside, tearing animals or children in pieces (see 27. f) and boasted afterwards of travelling to India and back (see 27. c), they had intoxicated themselves solely on wine or ivyale (see 27.3). The evidence, summarized in my What Food the Centaurs Ate (Steps: Cassell & Co., 1958, pp. 319-343), suggests that Satyrs (goat-totem tribesmen), Centaurs (horse-totem tribesmen), and their Maenad womenfolk, used these brews to wash down mouthfuls of a far stronger drug: namely a raw mushroom, areanita muscaria, which induces hallucinations, senseless rioting, prophetic sight, erotic energy, and remarkable muscular strength. Some hours of this ecstasy are followed by complete inertia; a phenomenon that would account for the story of how Lycurgus, armed only with an ox-goad, routed Dionysus’s drunken army of Maenads and Satyrs after its victorious return from India (see 27—e).
On an Etruscan mirror the areanita muscaria is engraved at Ixion’s feet; he was a Thessalian hero who feasted on ambrosia among the gods (see 63. b). Several myths (see 102, 126, etc.) are consistent with my theory that his descendants, the Centaurs, ate this mushroom; and, according to some historians, it was later employed by the Norse ‘berserks’ to give them reckless power in battle. I now believe that ‘ambrosia’ and ‘nectar’ were intoxicant mushrooms: certainly the areanita muscaria; but perhaps others, too, especially a small, slender dung-mushroom named panaeolus papiliouaceus, which induces harmless and most enjoyable hallucinations. A mushroom not unlike it appears on an Attic vase between the hooves of Nessus the Centaur. The ‘gods’ for whom, in the myths, ambrosia and nectar were reserved, will have been sacred qu :ens and kings of the pre-Classical era. King Tantalus’s crime (see 108. c) was that he broke the taboo by inviting commoners to share his ambrosia.
Sacred queenships and kingships lapsed in Greece; ambrosia then became, it seems, the secret element of the Eleminian, Orphic and other Mysteries associated with Dionysus. At all events, the participants swore to keep silence about what they ate or drank, saw unforgettable visions, and were promised immortality. The ‘ambrosia’ awarded to winners of the Olympic footrace when victory no longer conferred the sacred kingship on them was clearly a substitute: a mixture of foods the initial letters of which, as I show in What Food the Centaurs Ate, spelled out the Greek word ‘mushroom’. Recipes quoted by Classical authors for nectar, and for cecyon, the mint-flavoured drink taken by Demeter at Eleusis, likewise spell out ‘mushroom’.
I have myself eaten the hallucigenic mushroom, psilocybe, a divine ambrosia in immemorial use among the Masatec Indians of Oaxaca Province, Mexico; heard the priestess invoke Tlaloc, the Mushroom-god, and seen transcendental visions. Thus I wholeheartedly agree with R. Gordon Wasson, the American discoverer of this ancient rite, that European ideas of heaven and hell may well have derived from similar mysteries. Tlaloc was engendered by lightning; so was Dionysus (see 14. c); and in Greek folklore, as in Masatec, so are all mushrooms—proverbially called ‘food of the gods’ in both languages. Tlaloc wore a serpent-crown; so did Dionysus (see 27. a). Tlaloc had an underwater retreat; so had Dionysus (see 27. e). The Maenads’ savage custom of tearing off their victims’ heads (see 27. f and 28. d) may refer allegorically to tearing off the sacred mushroom’s head—since in Mexico its stalk is never eaten. We read that Perseus, a sacred King of Argos, converted to Dionysus worship (see 27. i), named Mycenae after a toadstool which he found growing on the site, and which gave forth a stream of water (see 73. r). Tlaloc’s emblem was a toad; so was that of Argos; and from the mouth of Tlaloc’s toad in the Tepentitla fresco issues a stream of water. Yet at what epoch were the European and Central American cultures in contact?
These theories call for further research, and I have therefore not incorporated my findings in the text of the present edition. Any expert help in solving the problem would be greatly appreciated.
R.G.
Deyfi, Majorca,
Spain, 1960.
THE mediaeval emissaries of the Catholic Church brought to Great Britain, in addition to the whole corpus of sacred history, a Continental university system based on the Greek and Latin Classics. Such native legends as those of King Arthur, Guy of Warwick, Robin Hood, the Blue Hag of Leicester, and King Lear were considered suitable enough for the masses, yet by early Tudor times the clergy and the educated classes were referring far more frequently to the myths in Ovid, Virgil, and the grammar school summaries of the Trojan War. Though official English literature of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries cannot, therefore, be properly understood except in the light of Greek mythology, the Classics have lately lost so much ground in schools and universities that an educated person is now no longer expected to know (for instance) who Deucalion, Pelops, Daedalus, Oenone, Laocoön, or Antigone may have been. Current knowledge of these myths is mostly derived from such fairy-story versions as Kingsley’s Heroes and Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales; and at first sight this does not seem to matter much, because for the last two thousand years it has been the fashion to dismiss the myths as bizarre and chimerical fancies, a charming legacy from the childhood of the Greek intelligence, which the Church naturally depreciates in order to emphasize the greater spiritual importance of the Bible. Yet it is difficult to overestimate their value in the study of early European history, religion, and sociology.
‘Chimerical’ is an adjectival form of the noun chimaera, meaning ‘she-goat’. Four thousand years ago the Chimaera can have seemed no more bizarre than any religious, heraldic, or commercial emblem does today. She was a formal composite beast with (as Homer records) a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. A Chimaera has been found carved on the walls of a Hittite temple at Carchemish and, like such other composite beasts as the Sphinx and the Unicom, will originally have been a calendar symbol: each component represented a season of the Queen of Heaven’s sacred year—as, according to Diodorus Siculus, the three strings of her tortoise-shell lyre also did. This ancient three-season year is discussed by Nilsson in his Primitive Time Reckoning 1910).
Only a small part, however, of the huge, disorganized corpus of Greek mythology, which contains importations from Crete, Egypt, Palestine, Phrygia, Babylonia, and elsewhere, can properly be classified with the Chimaera as true myth. True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially on temple walls, vases, seals, bowls, mirrors, chests, shields, tapestries, and the like. The Chimaera and her fellow calendar-beasts must have figured prominently in these dramatic performances which, with their iconographic and oral records, became the prime authority, or charter, for the religious institutions of each tribe, clan, or city. Their subjects were archaic magic-makings that promoted the fertility or stability of a sacred queendom, or kingdom—queendoms having, it seems, preceded kingdoms throughout the Greek-speaking area—and amendments to these, introduced as circumstances required. Lucian’s essay On the Dance lists an imposing number of ritual mimes still performed in the second century A.D.; and Pausanias’s description of the temple paintings at Delphi and the carvings on Cypselus’s Chest, suggests that an immense amount of miscellaneous mythological records, of which no trace now remains, survived into the same period.
True myth must be distinguished from:
(1) Philosophical allegory, as in Hesiod’s cosmogony.
(2) ‘Aetiological’ explanation of myths no longer understood, as in Admetus’s yoking of a lion and a boar to his chariot.
(3) Satire or parody, as in Silenus’s account of Atlantis.
(4) Sentimental fable, as in the story of Narcissus and Echo.
(5) Embroidered history, as in Arion’s adventure with the dolphin.
(6) Minstrel romance, as in the story of Cephalus and Procris.
(7) Political propaganda, as in Theseus’s Federalization of Attica.
(8) Moral legend, as in the story of Eriphyle’s necklace.
(9) Humorous anecdote, as in the bedroom farce of Heracles, Omphale, and Pan.
(10) Theatrical melodrama, as in the story of Thestor and his daughters.
(11) Heroic saga, as in the main argument of the Iliad.
(12) Realistic fiction, as in Odysseus’s visit to the Phaeacians.
Yet genuine mythic elements may be found embedded in the least promising stories, and the fullest or most illuminating version of a given myth is seldom supplied by any one author; nor, when searching for its original form, should one assume that the more ancient the written source, the more authoritative it must be. Often, for instance, the playful Alexandrian Callimachus, or the frivolous Augustan Ovid, or the dry-as-dust late-Byzantine Tzetzes, gives an obviously earlier version of a myth than do Hesiod or the Greek tragedians; and the thirteenth-century Excidium Troiae is, in parts, mythically sounder than the Iliad. When making prose sense of a mythological or pseudomythological narrative, one should always pay careful attention to the names, tribal origin, and fates of the characters concerned; and then restore it to the form of dramatic ritual, whereupon its incidental elements will sometimes suggest an analogy with another myth which has been given a wholly different anecdotal twist, and shed light on both. A study of Greek mythology should begin with a consideration of what political and religious systems existed in Europe before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North and East. The whole of neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many-titled Mother-goddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya.
Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery. Thus the first victim of a Greek public sacrifice was always offered to Hestia of the Hearth. The goddess’s white aniconic image, perhaps her most widespread emblem, which appears at Delphi as the oraphalos, or navel-boss, may originally have represented the raised white mound of tightly-packed ash, enclosing live charcoal, which is the easiest means of preserving fire without smoke. Later, it became pictorially identified with the lime-whitened mound under which the harvest corn-doll was hidden, to be removed sprouting in the spring; and with the mound of sea-shells, or quartz, or white marble, underneath which dead kings were buried. Not only the moon, but (to judge from Hemera of Greece and Grairme of Ireland) the sun, were the goddess’s celestial symbols. In earlier Greek myth, however, the sun yields precedence to the moon—which inspires the greater superstitious fear, do~ ~t ~ow dimmer as ~ year w~,
~e~ted wi~ ~ ~wer to gr~t ~ ~ny water ~ ~e field.
The m~n’s ~ree phis of new, fu~, and old r~alled ~e mat~
daree pMs~ of m~den, nymph (nubfie woman), ~d crone.
s~ce the s~’s ~ual course similarly re~ed ~e rise ~d her ph~ ~we~—spring a ~den, su~er a nymph, w~
cr~—~e god’s ~came id~tff~ed with ~son~ ch~ges and phm hfe; ~ ~us wi~ Mo~er ~h who, at ~e beg~
ú e veg~five y~r, pr~ oMy l~ves ~d b~, then flow~
f~in, ~d ~ l~t ce~= to b~r. S~ ~Md hter be conceived
~o~r ~: ~e ~id~ of~e up~r ~r, ~ nymph of~e sea, ~e crone of ~ ~derworld—~ff~ r~pe~vely by Se
A~o~te, ~d H~te. Three m~ ~ogues fos~rM
~ ~ ~ numar ~r~ ~ ~e Moon-god~ss ~came ~arg~
nine w~ ~ of ~e ~ee pe~—mai~ nympk
a~ed ~ =~ to ~m=ate her ~W. H~ d~otees nev~
forgot ~t ~e w~e n~ t~ee goddms~, but ~e goddess; by Cla~k~ ~, ~ S~p~ w~ one of~e f~ rem~
s~es wh~e tMy ~ bore ~e s~e ~e: H~a.
Once ~e relevance of coition to cMd-b~rNg had been o~
~—~ a~o~t ~ ~~t ~ ~on app~rs
Hitfi~ m~ ~ s~~ ~pu {H. G. Gfiterbock:
1946)—~’s re~giom sm~ grad~y ~pr~ed, ~d ~m& or
~ ~ Io~er ~v~ ~e~ f~ ~pre~a~g women.
Nym~ it m chose ~ ~ lover ~om her mm~age ram, a king ~ be sa~ed ~en ~ y~r reded; ma~ng h
~mbol of f~, ra~ ~ ~e o~ of her erotic pleasure wear~ ~e m~ M~, mat~, ~ m~ Ne~, ~ amm~
m~ ~ ~ or toppled m—a conv~mt and~ irish mr red, ~ a rewar& r~ted ~ ~ order serpmt. ~e
m a~ ex~e ~wer oMy whm ~mi~d m depufi~ fc
Q~ by w~f~ h~ ~0~ mbe~ Thin ~Np developM
~o~ ~ S~ b~me a s~ol of~e fe~iW once ~
~d ~m id~o~ed ~th ~ sm~ tourre, k ~ remaNed Moon’s m~c; as ~c king rcn~incd under the Qu~n’s ~tcl~c,
~ at least, ~ng ~r ~c m~iarc~l phase ~ b~n .o~o~.
~ ~ wi~ of Thusly, a ~a~vc region, would ~rcat~’~c
Sm ~ ~e Moon’s nine, wi~ beNg eng~ed by pe~etual Nght.
There N, however, no evid~ ~at, even w~n wom~ w~e sovereign ~ rehgi~ ma~s, ~n were &nied fields in which ~ey
~t a~ wit~ut fmle supe~sion, ~ough it ~y we~
~op~d mmy of ~e ‘weaker~ex’ c~ra~ ~er~ ~ought
~~y ~cu~ to ~. T~y cou~ be ~d ~ ~t,
~ cermM %ods, m~d ~ks a~ h~ds, =d help defend ~ tr~
territo~ aga~t Mtruders, so long as they did not transgr~s matriarchM law. Leaders of to~m cl~ were chosen ~ ceru~ powers awar&d them, ~peda~y ~ ~es of migration or war. R~es for &ter~g who sh~d a~ as ~ eommand~Mef vafiM, it ~pea~,
ú ff~e~ maWrcM.: u~y ~e q~en’s ~mal ~, or her
&~, or ~e ~ ~r ma~ ~t w~ c~.’The most profive
~co~r~f~o ~d ~fiW ~ act ~ju~e m ~1
~ ~een ram, ~ so far as the qu~’s religi~s a~oriw was not ~y ~ir~. T~ ~st prove maff~e~ so~i~
today is ~at of ~e Nayars of Southern h~a, where the
~ugh ~rri~ to ~~& wh~ ~y ~m~ately div~ce,
b~ ~ldrm ~ loves of no p~ r~; a~ ~ pr~ of
1. T~ roy~ womm d pre-~l~c Greece also ~ug~ ~g of
~g byers from ~ng t~ ~s, ff~e H~dr~ ~i~
~ Epi~phyrian ~ w~e n~ ex~.
Time wa tint re~oned by l~a~, md ev~ ~r~t c~
mony ~ pl~e at a cem~ ph~ of ~e moon; ~ so&~
~u~o~ n~ ~g ~cdy d~ b~ a~r~ed ~ ~e
~re~ new or fu~ ~on. ~e numb~ ~ ~ir~ ~
&y. Even wh~, afar ~r~l m~omi~ ~e~ation, ~e
y~r proved ~ ~ve 3~ da~, wi~ a few houri le~ over, ~ ~d ~ be
~ded into mon~—~ ~, ~a~d~—rather ~ ~to f~
of the s~ar ~de. T~’m~ ht~ ~c~me wha ~e Eng~sh-s~~g world ~ ~” co~-hw monks’, e~h d~~ht ~; w~h w~ a sa~ n~b~, ~ ~ s~ ~at ~e ~ co~ be wor~hp~d as a womb, ‘who~ ~tr~ ~cle h ~y ~ys, md ~at ~ ~ ~ ~e ~ue period of ~ m~’s r~ol~
terms of the sun. The seven-day week was a unit of the common-law month, the character of each day being deduced, it seems, from the quality attributed to the corresponding month of the sacred king’s life. This system led to a still closer identificafion of woman with moon and, since the 364-day year is exactly divisible by twenty-eight, the annual sequence of popular festivals could be geared to these common-law months. As a religious tradition, the thirteen-month years survived among European peasants for more than a millennium after the adoption of the Julian Calendar; thus Robin Hood, who lived at the time of Edward II, could exclaim in a ballad celebrating the May Day festival:
How many merry/months be in the year?
There are thirteen, I say ...
which a Tudor editor has altered to
... There are but twelve, I say ...’
Thirteen, the number of the sun’s death-month, has never lost its evil reputation among the superstitious. The days of the week lay under the charge of Titans: the genii of sun, moon, and the five hitherto discovered planets, who were responsible for them to the goddess as Creatrix. This system had probably been evolved in matriarchal Sumeria.
Thus the sun passed through thirteen monthly stages, beginning at the winter solstice when the days lengthen again after their long autumnal decline. The extra day of the sidereal year, gained from the solar year by the earth’s revolution around the sun’s orbit, was intercalated between the thirteenth and the first month, and became the most important day of the 365, the occasion on which the tribal Nymph chose the sacred king, usually the winner of a race, a wrestling match, or an archery contest. But this primitive calendar underwent modifxcations: in some regions the extra day seems to have been intercalated, not at the winter solstice, but at some other New Year—at the Candlemas cross-quarter day, when the first signs of spring are apparent; or at the spring equinox, when the sun is regarded as coming to maturity; or at midsummer; or at the rising of the Dog Star, when the Nile floods; or at the autumnal equinox, when the first rains fall.
Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice-yearly, sacrifices; and end, at the time when the Iliad was composed and kings boasted:’ We are far better than our fathers ! ‘, with her eclipse by an unlimited male monarchy. Numerous African analogues illustrate the progressive stages of this change.
A large part of Greek myth is pollrico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a variant of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus’s mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Seal Perseus’s name should properly be spelled Pterseus, ‘the destroyer’; and he was not, as Professor Kerenyi has suggested, an archetypal Death-figure but, probably, represented the patriarchal Hellenes who invaded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium B.c., and challenged the power of the Triple-goddess. Pegasus had been sacred to her because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the instalment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speedú Jane Harrison has pointed out (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, chapter v) that Medusa was once the goddess herself, hiding behind a prophylactic Gorgon mask: a hideous face intended to warn the profane against trespassing on her Mysteries. Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses—an early representation of the goddess with a Gorgon’s head and a mare’s body has been found in Boeotia. Bellerophon, Perseus’s double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another.
Again, Apollo’s destruction of the Python at Delphi seems to record the Achaeans’ capture of the Cretan Earth-goddess’s shrine; so does his attempted rape of Daphne, whom Hera thereupon metamorphosed into a laurel. This myth has been quoted by l:reuaian psychologists as symbolizing a girl’s instinctive horror of the sexual ac~; yet Daphne was anything but a frightened virgin. Her name is a contraction of Daśhoene, ‘the bloody one’, the goddess in orgiastic mood, whose priestesses, the Maenads, chewed laurel-leaves as an intoxicant and periodically rushed out at the full moon, assaulted unwary travellers, and tore children or young animals in pieces; laurel contains cyanide of potassium. These Maenad colleges were suppressed by the Hellenes, ú and only the laurel grove testified to Daphoene’s former occupancy of the shrines: the chewing of laurel by anyone except the prophetic Pythian Priestess, whom Apollo retained in his service at Delphi, was tabooed in Greece until Roman times.
The Hellenic invasions of the early second millennium D.c., usually called the Aeolian and Ionian, seem to have been less destructive than the Achaean and Dorian ones, which they preceded. Small armed bands of herdsmen, worshipping the Aryan trinity of gods—Indra, Mitra, and Varuna—crossed the natural barrier of Mount Othrys, and attached themselves peacefully enough to the pre-Hellenic settlements in Thessaly and Central Greece. They were acceFted as children of the local goddess, and provided her with sacred kings. Thus a male military aristocracy became reconciled to female theocracy, not only in Greece, but in Crete, where the Hellenes also gained a foothold and exported Cretan civilization to Athens and the Peloponnese. Greek was eventually spoken throughout the Aegean and, by the time of Herodotus, one oracle alone spoke a pre-Hellenic hnguage (Herodotus: v’fii. 134-5). The king acted as the representative of Zeus, or Poseidon, or Apollo, and called himself by one or other of their names, though even Zeus was for centuries a mere demi.god, not an immortal Olymp’uan deity. All early myths about the gods’ seduction of nymphs refer patenfly to marriages between Hellenic chieftains and local Moonpriestesses; bitterly olyposed by Hera, which means by conservative religious feeling. When the shortness of the king’s reign proved irksome, it was agreed ~ prolong the thirteen-month year to a Great Year of one hundred lunation~, in the la~t of which occurs a near-coincidence of solar and lunar time. But since the fields and crops still needed to be fructified, the king agreed to suffer an annual mock death and yield hi~ sovereignty for one day—the intercatated one, lying outside the sacred sidereal year—to the surrogate boy-king, or interrex, who clied at its dose, and whose blood was used for the sprinkling ceremony. Now the sacred king either reigned for the entire period of a Great Year, with a tanist as his lieutenant; or the two reigned for alternate years; or the Queen let them divide the queendom into halves and reign concurrently. The king deputized for the Queen at many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical art of rain-making. His ritttal death varied greatly in c’zrcumstance; he might be tom in pieces by wild women, transfixed with a ~ting-ray spear, relied with an axe, !14cked in the her with a poboned arrow, flung over a cliff, burned to death on a pyre, drowned in a pool, or killed in a luredarranged chariot crash. But die he must. A new stage was reached when came to be substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar, and the king refused death after his lengthened reign ended. Dividing the realm into three parts, and awarding one part to each of his successors, he would reign for another term; his excuse being that a closer approximation of sohr and lunar time had now been found, namely nineteen years, or 325 lunations. The Great Year had become a Greater Year.
Throughout these successive stages, reflected in numerous myths, the sacred king continued to hold his position only by right of marriage to the tribal Nymph, who was chosen either as a result of a foot race between her companions of the royal house or by ultimogeniturethat is to say, by being the youngest nubile daughter of the junior branch. The throne remained matrilineal, as it theoretically did even in Egypt, and the sacred king and his tarfist were therefore always chosen from outside the royal female house; until some daring king at last ú decided to commit incest with the heiress, who ranked as his daughter, and thus gain a new title to the throne when his reign needed renewal. Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century ~3.c. seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition. It seems that the king now contrived to reign for the term of his natural life; and when the Dorians arrived, towards the dose of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the rule. A prince no longer left his father’s house and married a foreign princess; she came to him, as Odysseus persuaded Penelope to do. Genealogy became patrilineal, though a Samian incident mentioned in the Pseudo-Herodotus’s Lift of Homer shows that for ;ome time after the Apatoria, or Festival of Male Kinship, had replaced that of Female Kinship, the rites still consisted of sacrifices to the Mother Goddess which men were not eligible to attend.
The familiar Olympian system was then agreed upon as a compromise between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic views: a divine family of six gods and six goddesses, headed by the co-sovereigns Zeus and Hera and forming a Council of Gods in Babylonian style. But after a rebellion of the pre-Hellenic population, described in the Iliad as a con~ spiracy against Zeus, Hera became subservient to him, Athene avowed herself ‘all for the Father’ and, in the end, Dionysus assured male preponderance in the Council by displacing Hestia. Yet the goddesses, though left in a minority, were never altogether ousted—as they were at Jerusalem—because the revered poets Homer and Hesiod had ‘given the deities their tides and distinguished their several provinces and special powers’ (Herodotus: ii. 53), which could not be easily expropriated Moreover, though the system of gathering all the women of royal blood together under the king’s control, and thus discouraging outsiders from attempts on a matrilineal throne, was adopted at Rome when the Vestal College was founded, and in Palestine when King David formed his royal harem, it never reached Greece. Patrilineal descent, succession, and inheritance discourage further myth-making; historical legend then begins and fades into the light of common history.
The lives of such characters as Heracles, Daedalus, Teiresias, and Phineus span several generations, because these are titles rather than names of particular heroes. Yet myths, though difficult to reconcile with chronology, are always practical: they insist on some point of tradition, however distorted the meaning may have become in the telling. Take, for instance, the confused story of Aeacus’s dream, where ants, falling from an oracular oak, turn into men and colonize the island of Aegina after Hera has depopulated it. Here the main points of interest are: that the oak had grown from a Dodonian acorn; that the ants were Thessalian ants; and that Aeacus was a grandson of the River Asopus. These elements combined to give a concise account ofimmigratious into Aegina towards the end of the second millennium B.c. Despite a sameness of pattern in Greek myths, all detailed interpreta~ tions of particular legends are open to question until archaeologists can provide a more exact tabulation of tribal movements in Greece, and their dates. Ye~ the historical and anthropological approach is the only reasonable one: the theory that Chimaera, Sphinx, Gorgon, Centaurs, Satyrs and the like are blind uprushes of the Jungian collective unconscious, to which no precise meaning had ever, or could ever, have been attached, is demonstrably unsound. The Bronze and early Iron Ages in Greece were not the childhood of mankind, as Dr Jung suggests. That Zeus swallowed Metis, for instance, and subsequently gave birth to Athene, through an orifice in his head, is not an irrepressible fancy, but an ingenious theological dogma which embodies at least three conflicting views:
(x) Athene was the parthenogenous daughter of Metis; i.e. the youngest person of the Triad headed by Metis, Goddess of
Wisdom.
(z) Zeus swallowed Metis; i.e. the Achaeans suppressed her cult and arrogated all wisdom to Zeus as their patriarchal god.
(3) Athene was the daughter of Zeus; i.e. the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans spare. d Athene’s temples on condition that her rotaries accepted his paramount sovereignty.
Zeus’s swallowing of Metis, with its sequel, will have been represented graphically on the walls of a temple; and as the erotic Dionysus—once a parthenogenous son of Semele—was reborn from his thigh, so the intellectual Athene was reborn from his head.
If some myths are baffling at first sight, this is often because the mythographer has accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted a sacred picture or dramatic rite. I have called such a process’ iconotropy’, and examples of it can be found in every body of sacred literature which sets the seal upon a radical reform of ancient beliefs. Greek myth teems with iconotropic instances. Hephaestus’s three-legged workshop tables, for example, which ran by themselves to assemblies of the gods, and back again (Iliad xviii. 368 if..), are not, as Dr Charles Seltman arcMy suggests in his Twelve Olympian Gods, anticipations of automobiles; but golden Sun-disks with three legs apiece (like the emblem of the Isle of Man), apparently representing the number of three-season years for which a ‘son of Hephaestus’ was permitted to reign in the island of Lemnos. Again, the so-called ‘Judgement of Paris’, where a hero is called upon to decide between the rival charms of three goddesses and awards his apple to the fairest, records an ancient ritua! situation, outgrown by the time of Homer and Hesiod. These three goddesses are one goddess in triad: Athene the maiden, Aphrodite the nymph, and Hera the crone—and Aphrodite is presenting Paris with the apple, rather than receiving it from him. This apple, symbolizing her love bought at the price of his life, will be Paris’s passport to the Elysian Fields, the apple orchards of the west, to which only the souls of heroes are admitted. A similar gift is frequendy made in Irish and Welsh myth; as well as by the Three Hesperides, to Heracles; and by Eve,’ the Mother of All Living’, to Adam. Thus Nemesis, goddess of the sacred grove who, in late myth, became a symbol of divine vengeance on proud kings, carries an apple-hung branch, her gift to heroes. All neolithic and Bronze Age paradises were orchard-islands; paradise itself means ‘ orchard’.
A true science of myth should begin with a study of archaeology, history, and comparative religion, not in the psycho-therapist’s consuiting-room. Though the ]ungians hold that ‘myths are original revelations of the pre-conscious psyche, involuntary st~tements about unconscious psychic happenings’, Greek mythology w~ no more mysterious in content than are modern election carroom, and for the most part formulated in territories which maintained close political relations with Minoan Crete—a country sophisticated enough to have written archives, four-storey buildings with hygienic plumbing, doors with modern400king locks, registered trademarks, chess, a central system of weights and measures, and a calendar based on patient astronomic observation.
My method has been to assemble in harmonious narrative all the scattered elements of each myth, supported by little-known variants which may help to determine the meaning, and to answer all questions that arise, as best I can, in anthropological or historical terms. This is, I am well aware, much too ambitious a task for any single mythologist to undertake, however long or hard he works. Errors must creep in. Let we emphasize that any statement here made about Mediterranean religion or ritual before the appearance of written records is conjectural. Nevertheless, I have been heartened, since this book first appeared in 1955, by the close analogues which E. Meyrowitz’s Akan Cosmological Drama (Faber & Faber) offers to the religious and social changes here presumed. The Akan people result from an ancient southward emigration of U~byo-Berbers—cousins to the pro-Hellenic population of Greece—from the Sahara desert oases (see 3.3) and their intermarriage at Timbuctoo with Niger River negroes. In the eleventh century/~.2~. they moved still farther south to what is now Ghana. Four different cult-types persist among them. In the most primitive, the Moon is worshipped as the supreme Triple-goddess Ngame, clearly identical with the Libyan Neith, the Carthaginian Tanit, the Canaanite Anatha, and the early Greek Athene (see 8.1). Ngame is said to have brought forth the heavenly bodies by her own efforts (see ~. I), and then to have vitalized men and animals by shooting magical arrows from her new-moon bow into their inert bodies. She also, it is said, takes life in her killer aspect; as did her counterpart, the Moongoddess Artemis (see 22.1). A princess of royal line is judged capable, in unsettled times, of being overcome by Ngame’s lunar magic and bearing a tribal deity which takes up its residence in a shrine and leads a group of emigrants to some new region. This woman becomes queenmother, war-leader, judge, and priestess of the settlement she founds. The deity has meanwhile revealed itself as a totem animal which is protected by a close taM, apart from the yearly chase and sacriftce of a single specimen; this throws light on the yearly owl-hunt made by the Pelasgians at Athens (see 97. 4). States, consisting of tribal federatiom, are then formed, the most powerful tribal deity becoming the Stategod. The second cult-type marks Akan coalescence with Sudanese worshippers of a Father-god, Odomankoma, who claimed to have made the universe single-handedly (see 4—c); they were, it seems, led by elected male chieftains, and had adopted the Sumerian seven-day week. As a compromise myth, Ngame is now said to have vitalized Odomankoma’s lifeless creation; and each tribal deity becomes one of the seven planetary powers. These planetary powers—as I have presumed also happened in Greece when Titan-worship came in from the East (see ~L 3)—form male-and-female pairs. The queen-mother of the state, as Ngame’s representative, performs an annual sacred marriage with Odomankoma’s representative: namely her chosen lover whom, at the close of the year, the priests murder, skin, and flay. The same practice seems to have obtained among the Greeks (see 9—a and 2L 5).
In the third cult-type, the queen-mother’s lover becomes a king; and is venerated as the male aspect of the Moon, corresponding with the Phoenician god Baal Haman; and a boy dies vicariously for him every year as a mock-king (see 30. 1). The queen-mother now delegates the chief executive powers to a vizier, and concentrates on her ritual fertilizing functions.
In the fourth cult-type, the king, having gained the homage of several petty kings, abrogates his Moon-god aspect and proclaims himself Sunking in Egyptian style (see 67. I and 2). Though continuing to celebrate the annual sacred marriage, he frees himself from dependence on the Moon. At this stage, pattilocal supersedes matrilocal marriage, and the tribes are supplied with heroic male ancestors to worship, as happened in Greece—though sun-worship there never displaced thunder-god worship.
Among the Akan, every change in court-ritual is marked by an addition to the accepted myth of events in Heaven. Thus, if the king has appointed a royal porter and given his office lustre by marrying him to a princess, a divine porter in Heaven is announced to have done the same. It is likely that Heracles’s marriage to the Goddess Hebe and his appointment as porter to Zeus (see 145. i and j) reflected a similar event at the Mycenaean Court; and that the divine feastings on Olympus reflected similar celebrations at Olympia under the joint presidency of the Zeus-like High King of Mycenae and Hera’s Chief Priestess from Argos.
I am deeply grateful to Janet Seymour-Smith and Kenneth Gay for helping me to get this book into shape, to Peter and Lalage Green for proof-reading the first few chapters, to Frank Seymour-Smith for sending scarce Latin and Greek texts from London, and to the many friends who have helped me to amend the first edition.
R.G.
Deyl, Majorca,
Spain.
Each myth is first recounted as a narrative, the paragraphs being identit~ed by italic letters (a, b, c .... ). Next follows a list of sources, numbered in accordance with the references in the text. Then comes an explanatory comment, divided into paragraphs identified by italic numbers (~, 2, $ .... ). Cross-references from one explanatory section to another are made by giving the myth number and paragraph number, thus: (43—4) directs the reader to par. 4 of the third (explanatory) section of myth 43.
In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon, and therefore divided the sea from the sky, dancing lone~ upon its waves. She danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hanck, and behold! the great serpent Ophion. Eurynome danced to warm herself, wildly and more wildly, until Ophion, grown lustful, coiled about those divine limbs and was moved to couple with her. Now, the North Wind, who is also called Boreas, fertilizes; which is why mares often turn their hind-quarters to the wind and breed foals without aid of a stallion.1 So Eurynome was likewise got with child.
b. Next, she assumed the form of a clove, brooding on the waves and, in due process of time, laid the Universal Egg. At her bidding, Oplaion coiled seven times ~bout this egg, until it hatched and split in two. Out tumbled all things that exist, her children: sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth wi~h its mountains and rivers, its ~rees, herbs, and living creatures.
c. Eurynome and Ophion made their home upon Mount Olympus, where he vexed her by claiming to be the artthor of the Universe. Forthwith she bruised his head with her heel, kicked out his teeth, and banished him to the da~k caves below the eaxth.2
d. Next, the goddess creatod the seven plar~etary powers, ~etting a Titaness and a Titan over each. Theia and Hyperion for the Stm; Phoebe and Arias for the Moon; Dione and Crius for the planet Mars; Metis and Coeus for the planet Mercury; Themis and Eurymedon for the planet Jupiter; Tethys and Oceanus for Venus; Rhea and Cronus for the planet Saturn.a But the first man was Pelasgus, ancestor of the Pelasgians; he sprang from the soil of Arcadia, followed by certain others, whom he taaaght to make huts and feed upon acorns, and :sesv pig-skin Ixmics such as poo~ folk still wear ia Euboea and
1. Pliny: Natural History iv. 35 and viii. 67; Homer: Iliadxx.
2. Only tantalizing fragments of this pre-Hellenic myth.survive in Greek literotic, the largest being Apotlonius :Rhodi~s’s nautka i. 496-505 and Tzetzes: On L7cośhron I~91; but it is imphcit in the Orphic Mysteries, and can be restored, as above, from the Berossian Fragment and the Phoenician cosmogonies quoted by Philo Byb[ius and Damascius; from the Canaanitish elements in the Hebrew Creation story; from Hyginus (Fabula 197—see
62. a); from the Boeotian legend of the dragoh’s teeth (see 58.5); and from early ritual art. That all Pelasgians were born from Ophion is suggested by their common sacrifice, the Peloria
(Athenaeus: xiv. 45—639-’40), Ophion having been a Petor, or
‘prodigious serpent’.
3. Homer: Iliad v. 898; Apollonius Rhoclius: ii. 1232; Apollodorus: i. ~. 3; Hesiod: Theogony ~ 33; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Adana; Aristophanes: Birds 692 if.; Clement of Rome: Homilies vi. 4. 72; Proclus on Plato’s Timaeus ii. p. 307.
4. Pausanias: viii. x. 2.
1. In this archaic religious system there were, as yet, neither gods nor priests, but only a universal goddess and her priestesses, woman being the dominant sex and man her frightened victim. Fatherhood was not honoured, conception being attributed to the wind, the eating of beans, or the accidental swallowing of an insect; inheritance was matrilineal and snakes were regarded as incarnations of the dead. Eurynome (‘wide wandering’) was the goddess’s title as the visible moon; her Sumerian name was Iahu (‘exalted dove’), a title which later passed to Jehovah as the Creator. It was as a dove that Marduk symbolically sliced her in two at the Babylonian Spring Festival, when he inaugurated the new world order.
2. Ophion, or Boreas, is the serpent demiurge of Hebrew and Egyptian myth—in early Mediterranean art, the Goddess is constantly shown in his company. The earth-born Pelasgiaus, whose claim seems to have been that they sprang from Ophion’s teeth, were originally perhaps the neolithic ‘Painted Ware’ people; they reached the ma’mland of Greece from Palestine about 3500 B.C., and the early Hellads—immigrants from Asia Minor by way of the Cyclades—found them in occupation of the Peloponnese seven hundred years later. But ‘Pelasg~ans’ became loosely applied to all pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece. Thus Euripides (quoted by Strabo v. 2.4) records that the Pelasgians adopted the name’ Danaans’ on the coming to Argos of Danaus and his fifty daughters (see 60. f). Strictures on their licentious conduct (Herodotus: vi. ~ 37) refer probably to the pre-Hellenic custom of erotic orgies. Strabo says in the same passage that those who lived near Athens were known as Pelargi (‘ storks ‘); perhaps this was their totem bird.
3. The Titans (‘lords ‘) and Titanesses had their counterparts in early Babylonian and Palestinian astrology, where they were deities ruling the seven days of the sacred planetary week; and may have been introduced by the Canaanite, or Hittite, colony which settled the Isthmus of Corinth early in the second millennium B.c. (see 67. 2), or even by the Early Hellads. But when the Titan cult was abolished in Greece, and the sevenday week ceased to figure in the official calendar, their number was quoted as twelve by some authors, probably to make them correspond with the signs of the Zodiac. Hesiod, Apollodorus, Stephanus of Byzantium, Pausanias, and others give inconsistent lists of their names. In Babylonian myth the planetary rulers of the week, namely Samas, Sin, Nergal, Bel, Beltis, and Ninib, were all male, except Beltis, the Lovegoddess; but in the Germanic week, which the Celts had borrowed from the Eastern Mediterranean, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday were ruled by Titanesses, as opposed to Titans. To judge from the divine status of Aeolus’s paired-offdaughters and sons (see 43.4), and the myth of Niobe (see 77. ~), it was decided, when the system first reached pre-Hellenic Greece from Palestine, to pair a Titaness with each Titan, as a means of safeguarding the goddess’s interests. But before long the fourteen were reduced to a mixed company of seven. The planetary powers were as follows: Sun for illumination; Moon for enchantment; Mars for growth; Mercury for wisdom; Jupiter for law; Venus for love; Saturn for peace. Classical Greek astrologers conformed with the Babylorfians, and awarded the planets to Helius, Selene, Ares, Hermes (or Apollo), Zeus, Aphrodite, Cronus—whose Latin equivalents, given above, still name the French, Italian, and Spanish weeks.
4. In the end, mythically speaking, Zeus swallowed the Titans, including his earlier self—since the Jews of Jernsalem worshipped a transcendent God, composed of all the planetary powers of the week: a theory symbolized in the seven-branched candlestick, and in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The seven planetary pillars set up near the Horse’s Tomb at Sparta were said by Pausanias (iii. 20. 9) to be adorned in ancient fashion, and may have been connected with the Egyptian rites introduced by the Pelasgians (Herodotus: ii. 57). Whether the Jews borrowed the theory from the Egyptians, or contrariwise, is uncertain; but the so-called Heliopolitan Zeus, whom A. B. Cook discusses in his .Zeus (i. 570-76), was Egyptian in character, and bore busts of the seven planetary powers a~ frontal ornaments onhis body sheath; usually, also, busts of the remaining Olympians as rear ornaments. One bronze statuette of this god was found at Tortosa in Spain, another at Byblos in Phoenicia; and a marble stele from Marseilles displays six planetary busts and one full-length figure of Hermes—who is also given greatest prominence in the statueRes—presumably as the inventor of astronomy. At Rome, Jupiter was fimilarly claimed to be a transcendent god by Quintus Valetins Soranus, though the week was not observed there, as it was at Marseilles, Byblos~ and (probably~ Tortosa. But planetary powers were never allowed ~o ~~tuence the official Olympian cult, being regarded as un-Greek (Herodotus: i. 131), and therefore unpatriotic: Aristophanes (Peace 403 ~~~) makes Tryga2us say that the Moon aad ‘that old villain the Sun’ are hatching a plot to herray Greece into the hands of the Persian barbarians. 5. Pausanias’s statement that Pelasgus was the first of men records the continuance ofa ~aeoli~hic culture in Arcadia until Classical times.
Some say that all gods and all living creatures originated in the stream of Ocean which girdles the world, and that Tethys was the mother of all his children.
b. But the Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe,2 was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Pananes, was hatched from this egg and set the Universe in motion. Eros was double-sexed and golden-w:mged and, having fottr heads, sometimes roared like a bull or a lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram. Night, wfio aamed him Ericepaius ;tad Protog~nus Pha&hon, a lived in a cave ~da him, dripplaying herself’m triad: Night, Order, and Justice. Before fids cave sat the inescapable mother Rhea, playing on a brazen drum, and compelFrog man’s attemion to the oracles of the goddess. Phanes created earth, sky, sun, and moon, but the triple-goddess ruled the universe, until her sceptre passed to ~. Homer~. iliad xiv. zot.
1. Ibid.: xiv. 26~.
3. Orphic Fvagrnents 60, 6~, and 70.
4. Ibid.: 86.
1. I-lx~ller’s myth is a version oftthe Pelasgian.cre~ion story (see t. ~)., sin~e T~:hy~ reigned over the sea like Eury~tome, and Ocea~m g~rdled the Ulsiv~se tike Oplfion.
2. The Orphic myth is another ve~-sion, but ~a~uet~ed by a m~tical doctrine of love (.E:ros) and .theories abo~t the l~roper of the sexes. Night’s silver egg means the moon, silver being the lunar met~. As Ericepaius (‘feeder upon heather’), the love-god Phanes (‘revealer’) is a loudly-buzzing celestial bee, son of the Great Goddess (see ~8.4). The beehive was studied as an ideal repubhc, and confirmed the myth of the Golden Age, when honey dropped from the trees (see 5. b). Rhea’s brazen drum was beaten to prevent bees from swarming in the wrong place, and to ward off evil influences, like the bull-roarers used in the Mysteries. As Pha~thon Protogenus (‘first-born shiner’), Phanes is the Sun, which the Orphics made a symbol of illumination (see 28. d), and his four heads correspond with the symbolic beasts of the four seasons. According to Macrobius, the Oracle of Colophon identified this Phanes with the transcendent god lao: Zeus (ram), Spring; Helius (lion), Summer; Hades (snake), Winter; Dionysus (bull), New Year. Night’s sceptre passed to Uranus with the advent ofpatriarchalism. 3
AT the beginning of all things Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and bore her son Uranus as she slept. Gazing down fondly at her from the mountains, he showered fertile rain upon her secret clefts, and she bore grass, flowers, and trees, with the beasts and birds proper to each. This same rain made the rivers flow and filled the hollow places with water, so that lakes and seas came into being.
b. Her first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briarcus, Gyges, and Cottus. Next appeared the three wild, one-eyed Cyclopes, builders of gigantic walls and master-smiths, formerly of Thrace, afterwards of Crete and Lycia,’ whose sons Odysseus encountered in Sicily.
2 Their names were Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, and their gtmsts have dwelt in the caverns of the volcano Aetna since Apollo killed them in revenge for the death of Asclepius.
c. The Libyans, however, claim that Garamas was born before the Hundred-handed Ones and that, when he rose from the plain, he offercd Mother Earth a sacrifice of the sweet acorn.
x. Apollodorus: i. I-2; Euripides: Chryslppus, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, p. 75~; Lucretius: i. 250 and ii. 991 fie_
2. Homer: Odyssey, ix. 106-566; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 43. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1493 ff.; Pindar: Fragment 84, ed. Bergk. * I. This patriarchal myth of Uranus gained official acceptance under the Olympian religious system. Uranus, whose name came to mean
‘the sky’, seems to have won his position as First Father by being identified with the pastoral god Varuna, one of the Aryan male trinity; but his Greek name is a masculine form of Ur-ana (‘ queen of the mountains ‘, ‘ queen ofsummer’~’ queen of the winds’, or’ queen of wild oxen ‘)—the goddess in her orgiastic midsummer aspect. Uranus’s marriage to Mother Earth records an early Hellenic invasion of Northern Greece, which allowed Varuna’s people to claim that he had fathered the native tribes he found there, though acknowledging him to be Mother Earth’s son. An emendation to the myth, recorded by Apollodorus, is that Earth and Sky parted in deadly strife and were then reunited in love: this is mentk)ned by Euripides (Melanippe the Wise, fragment 484, ed. Nauck) and Apollonius Rhodius (Argonaution i. 494). The deadly strife must refer to the clash between the patriarchal and matriarchal principles which the Hellenic invasions caused. Gyges (‘ earth-born’) has another form, gigas (‘ giant’), and giants are associated in myth with the mountains of Northern Greece. Briareus (‘strong’) was also called Aegaeon (Iliad L 403), and his people may therefore be the Libyo-Thracians, whose Goat-goddess Aegis (see 8. ~) gave her name to the Aegean Sea. Cottus was the eponymous (name-giving) ancestor of the Cotfinns who worshipped the orgiastic Cotytto, and spread her worship from Thrace throughout North-western Europe. These tribes are described as ‘hundred-handed’, perhaps because their priestesses were organized in colleges of fifty, like the Danaids and Nereids; perhaps because the men were organized in war-bands of one hundred, like the early Romans.
2. The Cyclopes seem to have been a guild of Early Helladlc bronzesmiths. Cyclops means ‘ring-eyed’, and they are likely to have been tattooed with concentric rings on the forehead, in honour of the sun, the source of their furnace fires; the Thracians continued to tattoo themselves until Classical times (see zS. 2). Concentric circles are part of the mystery of smith-craft: in order to beat out bowls, helmets, or ritual masks, the smith would guide himself with such circles, described by compass around the centre of the flat disk on which he was working. The Cyclopes were one-eyed also in the sense that smiths often shade one eye with a patch against flying sparks. Later, their identity was forgotten. and the mythographers fancifully placed their ghosts in the caverns of Aetna, to explain the fire and smoke issuing from its crater (see 35—~). A close cultural connexion existed between Thrace, Crete, and Lycia; the Cydopes will have been at home in all these countries. Early Helladic culture also spread to $;.c.;ly; but it may well be (as Samuel Butler first suggested) that the Sicilian composition of the Odyssey explains the Cyclopes’ presence there (see 170. b). The names Brontes, Steropes, and Arges (‘ thunder’, ‘lightning ‘, and ‘brightness ‘) are late inventions. 3—Garamas is the eponymous ancestor of the Libyan Garamantians who occupied the Oasis of Djado, south of the Fezzan, and were conquered by the Roman General Balbus in ~9 B.c. They are said to have been of Cushite-Berber stock, and in the second century A.D. were subdued by the matrilineal Lemta Berbers. Later they fused with the Negro :boriginals on the south bank of the Upper Niger, and adopted their language. They survive today in a single village under the name of Koromantse. Garamant› is derived from the words gara, man, and te, meatLi~g ‘Gara’s state people’. Gara seems to be the Goddess Ker, or Q’re, or Car (see 82. 6 and 86. 2), who gave her name to the Carians, among other people, and was associated with apiculture. Esculent acorns, a staple food of the ancient world before the introduction of corn, grew in Libya; and the Garamantian settlement of Ammon was joined with the Northern Greek settlement 0f Dodona in a religious league which, according to Sir Flinders Petrie, may have originated as early as the third millennium B.c. Both places had an ancient oak-oracle (see 51—a). Herodotus describes the Garamantians as a peaceable but very powerful people, who cultivate the date-palm, grow corn, and herd catfie {iv. 174 and 4
SOME say that Darkness was first, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos sprang Night, Day, Erebus, and the Air.
From a union between Night and Erebus sprang Doom, Old Age, Death, Murder, Continence, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Misery, Vexation, Nemesis, Joy, Friendship, Pity, the Three Fates, and the Three Hesperides.
From a union between Air and Day sprang Mother Earth, Sky, and Sea.
From a union between Air and Mother Earth sprang Terror, Craft, Anger, Strife, Lies, Oaths, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Treaty, Oblivion, Fear, Pride, Battle; also Oceanus, Metis, and the other Titans, Tartarus, and the Three Erinnyes, or Furies.
From a union between Earth and Tartarus sprang the Giants.
b. From a union between the Sea and its Rivers sprang the Nereids. But, as yet, there were no mortal men until, with the consent of the goddess Athene, Prometheus, son oflapetus, formed them in the likeness of gods. He used clay and water of Panopeus in Phocis, and Athene breathed life into them.x
c. Others say that the God of All Things—whoever he may have been, for some call him Nature—appearing suddenly in Chaos, separated earth from the heavens, the water from the earth, and the upper air from the lower. Having unravelled the elements, he set them in due order, as they are now found. He divided the earth into zones, some very hot, some very cold, others temperate; mottided it into plains and mountains; and clothed it with grass an8 trees. Above it he set the rolling firmament, spangling it with stars,’ and assigned stations to the four winds. He also peopled the waters with fish, the earth with beasts, and the sky with the sun, the moon, and the five planets. Lasfiy, he made man—who, alone of all beasts, raises his face to heaven and observes the sun, the moon, and the stars—unless it be indeed true that Promethe~, son of Iapetus, made man’s body from water and clay, and that his soul was supplied by certain wandering divine elements, which had survived from the First Creation.2
x. Hesiod: Theogony 21 x-32; Hyginus: Fabulae, Proem; Apollod.orus: i. 7—x; Lucian: Prometheus on Caucasus ~3; Pausanias: x. 4—3.
2. Ovid: Metamorphoses i-ii.
* I. In Hesiod’s Theogony—on which the first of these philosophical myths is based—the list of abstractions is confused by the Nereids, the Titans, and the Giants, whom he feels bound to include. Both the Three Fates and the Three Hesperides are the Triple Moon-goddess in her death aspect.
2. The second myth, found only in Ovid, was borrowed by the later Greeks from the Babylonian Gilgamesl~ epic, the introduction to which records the goddess Aruru’s particular creation of the first man, Eabani, from a piece of clay; but, although Zeus had been the Universal Lord for many centuries, the mythographers were forced to admit that the Creator of all things might possibly have been a Creatrix. The Jews, as inheritors of the ‘Pelasgian’, or Canaanitish, creation myth, had felt the same embarrassment: in the Genesis account, a female ‘Spirit of the Lord’ broods on the face of the waters, though she does not lay the world egg; and Eve, ‘ the Mother of All Living ‘, is ordered to bruise the Serpent’s head, though he is not destined to go down to the Pit until the end of the world.
3. Similarly, in the Talmudic version of the Creation, the archangel Michael—Prometheus’s counterpart—forms Adam from dust at the order, not of the Mother of All Living, but of Jehovah. Jehovah then breathes life into him and gives him Eve who, like Pandora, brings mischief on mankind (see 39. j). ,/. Greek philosophers distinguished Promethean man from the imperfect earth-born creation, part of which was destroyed by Zeus, and the rest washed away in the Deucalionian Flood (see 38. c). Much the same distinction is found in Genesis vi. 2-4 between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’, whom they married.
5. The Gilgamesh tablets are late and equivocal; there the ‘Bright Mother of the Hollow’ is credited with having formed everything‘Aruru’ is only one of this goddess’s many titles—and the principal theme is a revolt against her matriarchal order, described as one of utter confusion, by the gods of the new patriarchal order. Marduk, the Babylonian city-god, eventually defeats the goddess in the person of Tiamat the Sea-serpent; and it is then brazenly announced that he, not anyone else, created herbs, lands, rivers, beasts, birds, and mankind. This Marduk was an upstart godling whose claim to have defeated Tiamat and created the world had previously been made by the god Bel—Bel being a masculine form of Belili, the Sumerian Mother-goddess. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to have come about in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, through the revolt of the Queen’s consort to whom she had deputed executive power by allowing him to adopt her name, robes, and sacred instruments (see 136. 4). of the ‘Pelasgian’, or Canaanirish, creation myth, had felt the same embarrassment: in the Genesis account, a female ‘Spirit of the Lord’ broods on the face of the waters, though she does not lay the world egg; and Eve, ‘ the Mother of All Living ‘, is ordered to bruise the Serpent’s head, though he is not destined to go down to the Pit until the end of the world.
3. Similarly, in the Talmudic version of the Creation, the archangel Michael—Prometheus’s counterp,qrt—forms Adam from dust at the order, not of the Mother of All Living, but of Jehovah. Jehovah then breathes life into him and gives him Evc who, like Pandora, brings mist chief on manichad (see 39. j).
4. Greek philosophers distinguished Promethean man from the impeft fect earth-born creation, part of which was destroyed by Zeus, and the rest washed away in the Deucalionian Flood (see 38. c). Much the same distinction is found in Genesis vi. 2-4 between the’ sons of God’ and the ‘ daughters of men’, whom they married.
5. The Gilgamesh tablets are late and eclu’tvocal; there the ‘Bright Mother of the Hollow’ is credited with having formed everything‘Aruru’ is only one of this goddess’s many titles—and the principal theme is a revolt against her matriarchal order, described as one of utter confusion, by the gods of the new patriarchal order. Marduk, the BabyIonian city-god, eventually defeats the goddess in the person of Tiamat the Sea-serpent; and it is then brazenly announced that he, not anyone else, created herbs, lands, rivers, beasts, birds, and mankind. This Marduk was an upstart godling whose claim to have defeated Tiamat and created the world had previously been made by the god Bel—Bel being a masculine form of Belili, the Sumerian Mother-goddess. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy seems to have come about in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, through the revolt of the Queen’s consort to whom she had deputed executive power by allowing him to adopt her name, robes, and sacred instruments (see 136. 4).
5
SoM~ deny that Prometheus created men, or that any man sprang from a serpent’s teeth. They say that Earth bore them spontaneously, as the best of her fruits, especially in the soil of Attica,~ and that Alalcomeneus was the tint man to appear, by Lake Copais in Boeotia, before
even the Moon was. He acted as Zeus’s counsellor on the occasion of his quarrel with Hera, and as tutor to Athene while she was still a girl.2
b. These men were the so-called golden race, subjects of Cronus, who lived without cares or labour, eating only acorns, wild fruit, and honey that dripped from the trees, drinking the milk of sheep and goats, never growing old, dancing, and laughing much; death, to them, was no more terrible than sleep. They are all gone now, but their spirits survive as genii of happy rustic retreats, givers of good fortune, and upholders of justice.
c. Next came a silver race, eaters of bread, likewise divinely created. The men were utterly subject to their mothers and dared not disobey them, although they might live to be a hundred years old. They were quarrelsome and ignorant, and never sacrificed to the gods but, at least, did not make war on one another. Zeus destroyed them all.
d. Next came a brazen race, who fell like fruits from the ash-trees, and were armed with brazen weapons. They ate flesh as well as bread, and delighted in war, being insolent and pitiless men. Black Death has seized them all.
e. The fourth race of men was brazen too, but nobler and more generous, being begotten by the gods on mortal mothers. They fought gloriously in the siege of Thebes, the expedition of the Argonauts, and the Trojan War. These became heroes, and dwell in the Elysian Fields.
fi The fifth race is the present race of iron, unworthy descendants of the fourth. They are degenerate, cruel, unjust, malicious, libidinous, unfilial, treacherous.3
x. Plato: Menexenus 6-7.
2. Hippolytus: Refutation oJAll Heresies v. 6. 3; Eusebius: Preparation for the Gospel iii. x. 3.
3. Hesiod: Works and Days ~09-20~, with scholiast.
* ~. Though the myth of the Golden Age derives eventually from a tradition of tribal subservience to the Bee-goddess, the savagery of her reign in pro-agricultural times had been forgotten by Hesiod’s day, and all that remained was an idealistic conviction that men had once lived i~ harmony together like bees (see 2. 2). Hesiod was a small farmer, and the hard life he lived made him morose and pessimistic. The myth of the silver race also records matriarchal conditions—such as those surviving in Classical times among the Picts, the Moesynoechians of the Black Sea (see 151. e), and some tribes in the Baleares, Galicia, and the Gulf oś Sirt~—under Which men were still the despised sex, though agriculture had been introduced and wars were infrequent. Silver is the metal of the Moon-goddess. The third race were the earliest Hellenic invaders: Bronze Age herdsmen, who adopted the ash-tree cult of the Goddess and her son Poseidon (see 6. 4 and 57. ~)—The fourth race were the warriorkings of the Mycenaean Age. The fifth were the Dorians of the twelfth century ~3.c., who used iron weapons and destroyed the Mycenaean civilization.
Alalcomeneus (‘ guardian’) is a fictitious character, a masculine form of Alalcomene~s, Athene’s title (Iliad iv. 8) as the guardian of Boeotia. He serves the patriarchal dogma that no woman, even a goddess, can be wise without male instruction, and that the Moon-goddess and the Moon itself were late creations of Zeus.
U aA/~ u s lathered the Titans upon Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons, the Cyclopes, into Tartarus, a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as far distant from the earth as the earth does from the sky; it would take a falling anvil nine days to reach its bottom. In revenge, Mother Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father; and they did so, led by Cronus, the youngest of the seven, whom she armed with a flint sickle. They surprised Uranus as he slept, and it was with the flint sickle that the merciless Cronus castrated him, grasping his genitals with the left hand (which has ever since been the hand of ill-omen) and afterwards throw’rag them, and the sickle too, into the sea by Cape Drepanum. But drops of blood flowing from the wound fell upon Mother Earth, and she bore the Three Erinnyes, furies who a~enge crimes ofp~rricide and perjury—by name Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. The nymphs of the ash-tree, called the Meliae, also sprang from that blood.
b. The Titans then released the Cyclopes from Tartarus, and awarded the sovereignty of the earth to Cronus.
However, no sooner did Cronus find himself in supreme command than he confined the Cyclopes to Tartarus again together with the Hundred-handed Ones and, taking his sister Rhea to wife, ruled in Elis.I
1. Hesiod: Theogon}~ 133-87 and 616-23; Apollodorus: i. L 4-5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v.
1. Hesiod, who records this myth, was a Cadreelan, and the Cadmeians came from Asia Minor (see 59.5), probably on the collapse of the Hittite Empire, bringing with them the story of Uranus’s castration. It is known, however, that the myth was not of Hittite composition, since an earlier Hurrian (Horite) version has been discovered. Hesiod’s version may reflect an alliance between the various pre-Hellenic settlers in Southern and Central Greece, whose dominant tribes favoured the Titan cult, against the early Hellenic invaders from the north. Their war was successful, but they thereupon claimed suzerainty over the northeru natives, whom they had freed. The castration of Uranus is not necessarily metaphorical if some of the victors had originated in East Africa where, to this day, Galla warriors carry a miniature sickle into battle to castrate their enemies; there are close affinities between East African religiom rites and those of early Greece.
2. The later Greeks read ‘ Cronus’ as Chronos, ‘ Father Time’ with his relentless sickle. But he is pictured in the company of a crow, like Apollo, Asclepius, Saturn, and the early British god Bran; and cronos probably means ‘crow’, like the Latin cornix and the Greek conSne. The crow was an oracular bird, supposed to house the soul of a sacred king after his sacrifice (see 25.5 and 50. I).
3. Here the three Erinnyes, or Furies, who sprang from the drops of Uranus’s blood, are the Triple-goddess herself; that is to say, during the king’s sacrifice, designed to fructify the cornfields and orchards, her priestesses will have worn menacing Gorgon masks to frighten away profane visitors. His genitals seem to have been thrown into the sea, to encourage fish to breed. The vengeful Erinnyes are understood by the mythographer as warning Zeus not to emasculate Cronus with the same sickle; but it was their original function to avenge injuries inflicted only on a mother, or a suppliant who claimed the protection of the Hearthgoddess (see xoS. k, 107. d, and ~3—a), not on a father. 4. The ash-nymphs are the Three Furies in more gracious mood: the sacred king was dedicated to the ash-tree, originally used in rain-making ceremonies (see 57. x)—In Scandinavia it became the tree of universal magic; the Three Norns, or Fates, dispensed justice under an ash which Odin, on claiming the fatherhood of mankind, made his magical steed. Women must have been the first rain-makers in Greece as in Libya. 5. Neolithic sickles of bone, toothed with flint or obsidian, seem to have continued in ritual use long after their supersession as agricultural instruments by sickles of bronze and iron.
6. The Hittites make Kumarbi (Cronus) biteoffthegenitalsofthe Skygod Anu (Uranus), swallow some of the seed, and spit out the rest on Mount Kansura where it grows into a goddess; the God of Love thus conceived by him is cut from his side by Anu’s brother Ea. These two births have been combined by the Greeks into a tale of how Aphrodite rose from a sea impregnated by Uranus’s severed genitals (see ~o. b). Kumarbi is subsequently delivered of another child drawn from his thigh—as Dionysus was reborn from Zeus (see 27. b)—who rides a storm-chariot drawn by a bull, and comes to Anu’s help. The ‘knife that separated the earth from the sky’ occurs in the same story, as the weapon with which Kumarbi’s son, the earth-born giant Ullikummi, is destroyed (see 35.4).
Cao~/us married his sister Rhea, to whom the oak is sacred.1 But it was prophesied by Mother Earth, and by his dying father Uranus, that one of his own sons would dethrone him. Every year, therefore, he swallowed the children whom Rhea bore him: first Hestia, then Demeter and Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon.2
b. Rhea was enraged. She bore Zeus, her third son, at dead of night on Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia, where no creature casts a shadow 3 and, having bathed him in the River Neda, gave him to Mother Earth; by whom he was carried to Lyctos in Crete, and hidden in the cave of Dicte on the Aegean Hill. Mother Earth left him there to be nursed by the Ash-nymph Adrasteia and her sister Io, both daughters of Melisseus, and by the Goat-nymph Amaltheia. His food was honey, and he drank Amaltheia’s milk, with Goat-Pan, his foster-brother. Zeus was grateful to these three nymphs for their kindness and, when he became Lord of the Universe, set Amaltheia’s image among the stars, as Capricorn.4 He also borrowed one of her horns, which resembled a cow’s, and gave it to the daughters of Melisseus; it became the famous Cornucopia, or horn of plenty, which is always ftlled with whatever food or drink its owner may desire. But some say that Zeus was suckled by a sow, and rode on her back, and that he lost his navelstring at Omphalion near Cnossus.S ›. Around the infant Zeus’s golden cradle, which was hung upon a tree (so that Cronus might find him neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in the sea) stood the armed Cureres, Rhea’s sons. They clashed their spears against their shields, and shouted to drown the noise of his wailing, lest Cronus might hear it from far off. For Rhea had wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes, which she gave to Cronus on Mount Thaumasium in Arcadia; he swallowed it, believing that he was swallowing the infant Zeus. Nevertheless, Cronus got wind of what had happened and pursued Zeus, who transformed himself into a serpent and his nurses into bears: hence the constellations of the Serpent and the Bears.6
d. Zeus grew to manhood among the shepherds of Ida, occupying another cave; then sought out Metis the Titaness, who lived beside the Ocean stream. On her advice he visited his mother Rhea, and asked to be made Cronus’s cup-bearer. Rhea readily assisted him in his task of vengeance; she provided the emetic potion, which Metis had told him to mix with Cronus’s honeyed drink. Cronus, having drunk deep, vomited up first the stone, and then Zeus’s elder brothers and sisters. They sprang out unhurt and, in gratitude, asked him to lead them in a war against the Titans, who chose the gigantic Atlas as their leader; for Cronus was now past his prime.7
e. The war lasted ten years but, at last, Mother Earth prophesied victory to her grandson Zeus, if he took as allies those whom Cronus had confined in Tartarus; so he came secretly to Campe, the old gaoleress of Tartarus, killed her, took her keys and, having released the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handed Ones, strengthened them with divine food and drink. The Cyclopes thereupon gave Zeus the thunderbolt as a weapon of offence; and Hades, a helmet of darkness; and Poseidon, a trident. After the three brothers had held a counsel of war, Hades entered unseen into Cronus’s presence, to steal his weapons; and, while Poseidon threatened him with the trident and thus diverted his attention, Zeus struck him down with the thunderbolt. The three Hundredhanded Ones now took up rocks and pelted the remaining Titans, and a sudden shout from Goat-Pan put them to flight. The gods rushed in pursuit. Cronus, and all the defeated Titans, except Atlas, were banished to a British island in the farthest west (or, some say, confined in Tartarus), and guarded there by the Hundred-handed Ones; they never troubled Hellas again. Atlas, as their war-leader, was awarded an exemplary punishment, being ordered to carry the sky on his shoulders; but the Titanesses were spared, for the sake of Metis and Rhea.8
f. Zeus himself set up at Delphi the stone which Cronus had disgorged. It is still there, constantly anointed with oil, and strands of unwoven wool are offered upon it.9
g. Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horseherds? And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is buried. ~~
1. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 1124.
2. Apollodorus: i. I. 5; Hesiod: Theogony 453-67.
3. Polybius: xvi. 12. 6 iT.; Pausanias: viii. 38.5.
4. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 13; _A_rams: Phenomena 163; Hesiod: loc. cit.
5. Philemon: Pterygium Fragment i. ! if.; Apollodorus: i. I. 6; Athenaeus: 375f. and 376a; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 42.
6. Hesiod:485 ff..;Apollodorus:i. 1.7;FirstVaticanMythographer: I04; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 52 if..; Lucretius: ii. 633-9;
Scholiast on Aratus: v. 46; Hyginus: Fabula 139.
7. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hesiod: loc. tit. 8. Hesiod: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula ~tS; Apollodorus: i. r. 7 and 1. 2. 1; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 52 if.; Diodorus Siculus:
v. 70; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 27; Pausanias: viii. 8. 2; Plutarch: Why Oracles Are Silent ~6. 9. Pausanias: x. 24. 510. Ibid.: viii. 8.2.
~x. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 19; Callimachus: Hymn to Zeus 8.
1. Rhea, paired with Cronus as Titaness of the seventh day, may be equated with Dione, or Diana, the Triple-goddess of the Dove and Oak cult (see II. 2). The bill-hook carried by Saturn, Cronus’s Latin counterpart, was shaped like a crow’s bill and apparently used in the seventh month of the sacred thirteen-month year to emasculate the oak by lopping off the mistletoe (see 50. 2),just as a ritual sickle was used to reap the first ear of corn. This gave the signal for the sacred Zeus-king’s sacrifice: ~u~d at Athens, Cronus, who shared a temple with Rhea, was worshipped as the Barley-god Sabazius, annually cut down in the cornfield and bewailed like Osiris or Lityerses or Maneros (see 136. e). But, by the times to which these myths refer, kings had been permitted to prolong their reigns to a Great Year of one hm~dred lunarions, and offer annual boy victims in their stead; hence Cronus is pictured as eating his own sons to avoid dethronement. Porphyry (On Abstinence ii. 56) records that the Cretan Cureres used to offer child sacrifices to Cronus in ancient times. 2. In Crete a kid was early substituted for a human victim; in Thrace, a bull-calf; among the Aeolian worshippers of Poseidon, a foal; but in backward districts of Arcadia boys were still sacrificially eaten even in the Christian era. It is not clear whether the Elean ritual was cannibalistic, or whether, Cronus being a Crow-Titan, sacred crows fed on the slaughtered victim. 3. Amalthcia’s name, ‘tender’, shows her to have been a maidengoddess; Io was an orgiastic nymph-goddess (see 56. ~); Adrasteia means ‘the Inescapable One’, the oracular Crone of autumn. Together they formed the usual Moon-triad. The later Greeks identified Adrasteia with the pastoral goddess Nemesis, of the rain-making ash-tree, who had become a goddess of vengeance (see 3 z. 2). Io was pictured at Argos as a white cow in heat—some Cretan coins from Praesus show Zeus suckled by her—but Amaltheia, who lived on’ Goat H’fil’, was always a she-goat; and Melisseus (‘ honey-man’), Adrasteia and Io’s reputed father, is really their mother—Melissa, the goddess as Queen-bee, who annually killed her male consort. Diodorus Siculus (v. 70) and Cahimachus (Hymn to Zeus 49) both make bees feed the infant Zeus. But his foster-mother is sometimes also pictured as a sow, because that was one of the Cronegoddesses’s emblems (see 74—4 and 96. 2); and on Cydonian coi~s she is a bitch, like the one that suckled Neleus (see 68. d). The she-bears are Artemis’s beasts (see 22.4 and 80. c)—the Curetes attended her holocausts —and Zeus as serpent is Zeus Ctesius, protector of store-houses, because snakes got rid of mice~
4. The Cureres were the sacred king’s armed companions, whose weapon-dashing was intended to drive off evil spirits during ritual performances (see 30. a). Their name, understood by the later Greeks as ‘young men who have shaved their hair’, probably meant ‘devotees of Ker, or Car’, a widespread title of the Triple-goddess (see 57. 2). Heracles won his cornucopia from the Achelous bull (see ~42. d), and the enormous size of the Cretan wild-goat’s horns have led mythographers unacquainted with Crete to give Amaltheia an anomalous cow’s horn. 5—Invading Hellenes seem to have offered friendship to the preHellenic people of the Titan-cult, but gradually detached their subjectallies from them, and overrun the Peloponnese. Zeus’s victory in alliance with the Hundred-handed Ones over the Titans of Thessaly is said by Thallus, the first-century historian, quoted by TatJan in his Address to the Greeks, to have taken place’ 322 years before the siege of Troy’: that is to say ~ 505 B.c., a plausible date for an extension of Hellenic power in Thessaly. The bestowal of sovereignty on Zeus recalls a similar event in the Babylonian Creation Epic, when Marduk was empowered to fight Tiamat by his elders Lahmu and Lahamu.
6. The brotherhood of Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus recalls that of the Vedic male trinity—Mitra, Varuna, and Indra—(see 3. ~ and 132. 5) who appear in a Hittite treaty dated to about ~ 380 B.c.—but in this myth they seem to represent three successive Hellenic invasions, commonly known as Ionian, Aeolian, and Achaean. The pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Mother-goddess assimilated the Ionians, who became children of Io; tamed the Aeolians; but were overwhelmed by the Achaeans. Early Hellenic chieftai~s who became sacred kings of the oak and ash cults, took the t~,~cs ‘ Zeus’ and’ Poseidon ‘, and were obliged to die at the end of their set reigns (see 45—z). Both these trees tend to attract lightning, and therefore figure in popular rain-making and fire-making ceremonies throughout Europe. 7—The victory of the Achaeans ended the tradition of royal sacrifices. They ranked Zeus and Poseidon as immortals; picturing both as armed with the thunderbolt—a flint double-axe, once wielded by Rhea, and in the Minoan and Mycenaean religions withheld from male use (see ~3~.6). Later, Poseidon’s thunderbolt was converted into a threepronged fish-spear, his chief devotees having turned seafarers; whereas Zeus retained his as a symbol of supreme sovereignty. Poseidon’s name, which was sometimes spelt Potidan, may have been borrowed from that of his goddess-mother, after whom the city Potidaea was called: ‘the water-goddess of Ida’—Ida meaning any wooded mountain. That the Hundred-handed Ones guarded the Titans in the Far West may mean that the Pelasgians, among whose remnants were the Centaurs of Magnesia—centaur is perhaps cognate with the Latin centuria, ‘a war-band of one hundred’—did not abandon their Titan cult, and continued to believe in a Far Western Paradise, and in Atlas’s support of the firmament. 8. Rhea’s name is probably a variant of Era, ‘earth’; her chief bird was the dove, her chief beast the mountain-lion. Demeter’s name means ‘Barley-mother’; Hestia (see zo. c) is the goddess of the domestic hearth. The stone at Delphi, used in rain-making ceremonies, seems to have been a large meteorite.
9. Dicte and Mount Lycaeum were ancient seats of Zeus worship. A fire sacrifice was probably offered on Mount Lycaeum, when no creature cast a shadow—that is to say, at noon on midsummer day; but Pausanias adds that tl~ough in Ethiopia while the sun is in Cancer men do not throw shadows, this is invariably the case on Mount Lycaeum. He may be quibbling: nobody who trespassed in this precinct was allowed to live (Aratus: Phenomena 9~), and it was well known that the dead cast no shadows (Plutarch: Greek Questions 39)—The cave of Psychro, usually regarded as the Dictacan Cave, is wrongly sited to be the real one, which has not yet been discovered. Omphalion (‘little navel’) suggests the site of an oracle (see 20. 2).
~o. Pan’s sudden shout which terrified the Titans became proverbial and has given the word ‘panic’ to the English language (see 26. c~.
ACCOaDT~e to the Pelasgians, the goddess Athene was born beside Lake Tritonis in Libya, where she was found and nurtured by the three nymphs of Libya, who dress in goat-skins. X As a girl she killed her playmate, Pallas, by accident, while they were engaged in friendly combat with spear and shield and, in token of grief, set Pallas’s name before her own. Coming to Greece by way of Crete, she lived first in the city of Athenae by the Boeofian River Triton.1
1. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~Sxo.
:~. Apollodorus: iii. i~.. 3; Pausanias: ix. 3~. S.
1. Plato identified Athene, patroness of Athens, with the Libyan goddess Neith, who belonged to an epoch when fatherhood was not recognized (see x. ~). Neith had a temple at Sais, where Solon was treated well merely because he was an Athenian (Plato: Timaeus 5). Virgin-priestesses of Neith engaged annually in armed combat (Herodotus: iv. ~80), apparently for the position of High-priestess. Apollodorus’s account (iii. xz. 3) of the fight between Athene and palla~ is a late patriarchal version: he says that Athene, born of Zeus and brought up by the River-god Triton, acddentally killed her foster-sister Pallas, the River Triton’s daughter, because Zeus interposed his aegis when Pallas was about to strike Athene, and so distracted her attention. The aegis, however, a magical goat-skin bag containing a serpent and protected by a Gorgon mask, was Athene’s long before Zeus claimed to be her father (see 9—d). Goat-skin aprons were the habitual costume of Libyan girls, and Pallas merely means ‘maiden’, or ‘youth’. Herodotus writes (iv. 189): ‘Athene’s garments and aegis were borrowed by the Greeks from the Libyan women, who are dressed in exactly the same way, except that their leather garments are fringed with thongs, not serpents.’ Ethiopian girls still wear this costume, which is sometimes omamented with cowries, a yonic symbol. Herodotus adds here that the loud cries of triumph, oloh~, ololu, uttered in honour of Athene above (Iliad vi. 297-30~) were of Libyan origin. Tritone means ‘the third queen’: that is, the eldest member of the triad—mother of the maiden who fought Pallas, and of the nymph into which she grew—just as Core-Persephone was Demeter’s daughter (see 24.3).
2. Pottery finds suggest a Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4000 d.c.; and a large number of goddess-worshipping Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about the year 3000 B.c. The First Minoan Age began soon afterwards, and Cretan culture spread to Thrace and Early Helladic Greece.
3. Among other mythological personages named Pallas was the Titan who married the River Styx and lathered on her Zelus (‘zeal’), Cratus (‘strength’), Bia (‘force’), and Nic~ (‘victory’) (Hesiod: Theogony 376 and 383; Pausanias: vii. ~.6. 5; Apollodorus: 2. 2-4); he was perhaps an allegory of the Pelopian dolphin sacred to the Moon-goddess (see ~08. $). Homer calls another Pallas ‘the father of the moon’ (Homeric Hymn to Hermes ~oo). A third begot the fifty Pallantids, Theseus’s enemies (see 97—g and 99. a), who seem to have been originally fighting priestesses of Athene. A fourth was described as Athene’s father (see 9—
SOME Hellenes say that Athene had a father named Pallas, a winged goatish giant, who later attempted to outrage her, and whose name she added to her own after stripping him of his skin to make the aegis, and of his wings forher own shoulders;~ if, indeed, the aegis was not the skin of Medusa the Gorgon, whom she rayed after Perseus had’decapitated her.2
b. Others say that her father was one Itonus, a king of Itoh in Phthiofis, whose daughter Iodama she killed by accidentally letting her see the Gorgon’s head,3 and so changing her into a block of stone, when she trespassed in the precinct at night.
c. Still others say that Poseidon was her father, but that she disowned him and begged to be adopted by Zeus, which he was glad to do.4
d. t3ut Athene’s own priests tell the following story of her birth Zeus lusted after Metis the Titaness, who turned into many shapes to escape him until she was caught at last and got with child. An oracle of Mother Earth then declared that this would be a girl-child and that, ifMetis conceived again, she wou]d bear a son who was fated to depose Zeus, .}ust as Zeus had deposed Cronus, and Cronus had deposed Uranus. Therefore, having coaxed Metis to a couch with honeyed words, Zeus suddenly opened his mouth and swallowed her, and that was the end of Metis, though he claimed afterwards that she gave him counsel from inside his belly. In due process of time, he was seized by a raging headache as he walked by the shores of Lake Triton, so that his skull seemed about to burst, and he howled for rage until the whole firmament echoed. Up ran Hermes, who at once’divined the cause of Zeus’s discomfort. He persuaded Hephaestus, or some say Prometheus, to fetch his wedge and beetle and make a breach in Zeus’s skull, from which Athene sprang, fully armed, with a mighty shout.5
x. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 3552. Euripides: Ion 995.
3. Pausanias: ix. 34—I.
4. Herodotus: iv. ~80.
5. Hesiod: Theogony 886-900; Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 34 if-; Apollodorus: i. 3.6.
1. J. E. Harrison rightly described the story of Athene’s birth from Zeus’s head as’ a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions.’ It is also a dogmatic insistence on wisdom as a male prerogative; hitherto the goddess alone had been wise. Hesiod has, in fact, managed to reconcile three conflicting views in his story: Athene, the Athenians’ city-goddess, was the parthenogenous daughter of the immortal Metis, Titaness of the fourth day and of the planet Mercury, who presided over all wisdom and knowledge. Zeus swallowed Metis, but did not thereby lose wisdom (i.e. the Achaeans suppressed the Titan cult, and ascribed all wisdom to their god Zeus).
Atheue was the daughter of Zeus (i.e. the Achaeans insisted that the Athenians must acknowledge Zeus’s patriarchal overlordship). He has borrowed the mechanism of his myth from analogous examples: Zeus pursuing Nemesis (see 32. b); Cronus swallowing his sons and daughters (see 7. a); Dionysus’s rebirtl~ from Zeus’s thigh (see 14. c); and the opening of Mother Earth’s head by two men with axes, apparently in order to release Core (see 24. 3)—as shown, for instance, on a blackfigured oil-jar in the Bibl~oth~que Nationale at Paris. Thereafter, Athene is Zeus’s obedient mouthpiece, and deliberately suppresses her antecedents. She employs priests, not priestesses.
2. Pallas, meaning ‘maiden’, is an inappropriate name for the winged giant whose attempt on Athene’s chastity is probably deduced from a picture of her ritual marriage, as Athene Laphria, to a goat-king (see 89.4) after an armed contest with her rival (see 8. ~). This Libyan custom of goat-marriage spread to Northern Europe as part of the May Eve merrymakings. The Akan, a Libyan people, once rayed their kings.
3. Athene’s repudiation of Poseidon’s fatherhood concerus an early change in the overlordship of the city of Athens (see ~6.3).
4. The myth of Itonus (‘willow-man’) represents a claim by the Itonians that they worshipped Athene even before the Athenians did; and his name shows that she had a willow cult in Phthiotis—like that of her counterpart, the goddess Anatha, at Jerusalem until Jehovah’s priests ousted her and claimed the rain-making willow as his tree at the Feast of Tabernacles.
5. It will have been death for a man to remove an aegis—the goat-skin chastity-tunic worn by Libyan girls—without the owner’s consent; hence the prophylactic Gorgon mask set above it, and the serpent concealed in tl~e leather pouch, or bag. But since Athene’s aegis is described as a shield, I suggest in The White Goddess (p. 279) that it was a bag—cover for a sacred disk, like the one which contained Palamedes’s alphabetical secret, and which he is said to have invented (see 52. a and ~62. 5). Cyprian figurines holding disks of the same proportionate size as the famous Phaestos one, which is spirally marked with a sacred legend, are held by Professor Richter to anticipate Athene and her aegis. The heroic shields so carefully described by Homer and Hesiod seem to have borne pictographs engraved on a spiral band.
6. Iodama, probably meaning ‘heifer calf of Io’, will have been an antique stone image of the Moon-goddess (see 56. ~), and the story of her petrification is a warning to inquisitive girls against violating the Mysteries (see 25. d).
7. It would be a mistake to think of Athene as solely or predominantly the goddess of Athens. Several ancient acropolises were sacred to her, including Argos (Pausanias: ii. 24. 3), Sparta (ibid.: 3—~7—~), Troy (Iliad vi. 88), Smyrna (Strabo: iv. ~. 4), Epidaurus (Pausanias: ii. 32. 5), Troezen (Pausanias: iii. 23. Io), and Pheneus (Pausanias: x. 38. 5). All these are pre-Hcllenic sites.
THERE are three conjoined Fates, robed in white, whom Erebus begot on Night: by name Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Of these, Atropos is the smallest in stature, but the most terrible.1
b. Zeus, who weighs the lives of men and informs the Fates of his decisions can, it is said, change his mind and intervene to save whom he pleases, when the thread of life, spun on Clotho’s spindle, and measured by the rod of Lachesis, is about to be snipped by Atropos’s shears. Indeed, men claim that they themselves can, to some degree, control their own fates by avoiding unnecessary dangers. The younger gods, therefore, laugh at the Fates, and some say that Apollo once mischievously made them drunk in order to save his friend Admetus from death.2
c. Others hold, on the contrary, that Zeus himself is subject to the Fates, as the Pythian priestess once confessed in an oracle; because they are not his children, but parthenogenous daughters of the Great Goddess Necessity, against whom not even the gods contend, and who is called ‘The Strong Fate’.3
d. At Delphi only two Fates are worshipped, those of Birth and Death; and at Athens Aphrodite Urania is called the eldest of the three.4
1. Homer: Iliad xxiv. 49; Orphic Hymn xxxiii; Hesiod: Theogony 217 if. and 904, Shield of Heracles 259.
2. Homer: Iliad viii. 69 and xxii. 209; xvi. 434 and 441-3; Virgil: Aeneid x. 8~4; Homer: Odyssey i. 34; Iliad ix. 411.
3. Aeschylus: Prometheus 51~ and $~5; Herodotto: i. 91; Plato: Republic x. 14-16; Simonides: viii. 20.
4. Pausamias: x. 24. 4 and i. 19. 2.
1. This myth seems to be based on the custom of weaving family and clan marks into a newly-born child’s swaddling bands, and so allotting him his place in society (see 60. 2); but the Moerae, or Three Fates, are the Triple Moon-goddess—hence their white robes, and the linen thread which is sacred to her as Isis. Clotho is the ‘spinner’, Lachesis the ‘measurer’, Atropos is ‘she who cannot be turned, or avoided ‘. Moera meam
‘a share’ or ‘a phase ‘, and the moon has three phases and three persons: the new moon, the Maiden-goddess of the spring, the first period of the year; the full moon, the Nymph-oddess of the summer, the second period; and the old moon, the Crone-goddess ofautnmn, the last period (see 60. z).
2. Zeus called himself ‘The Leader of the Fates’ when he assumed supreme sovereignty and the prerogative of measuring man’s life; hence, probably, the disappearance of Lachesis, ‘the measurer’, at Delphi. But his claim to be their father was not taken seriously by Aeschylus, Herodotus, or Plato. 3—The Athenians called Aphrodite Urania ‘the eldest of the Fates’ because she was the Nymph-goddess, to whom the sacred king had, in ancient times, been sacrificed at the summer solstice. ‘Urania’ mean~ ‘queen of the mountains’ (see 19. 3)—
APHRODITE, Goddess of Desire, rose naked from the foam of the sea and, riding on a scallop shell, stepped ashore first on the island of Cythera; but finding this only a small island, passed on to the Peloponnese, and eventually took up residence at Paphos, in Cyprus, still the principal seat of her worship. Grass and flowers sprang from the soil wherever she trod. At Paphos, the Seasore, daughters of Themis, hastened to clothe and adorn her.
b. Some hold that she sprang from the foam which gathered about the genitals of Uranus, when Cronus threw them into the sea; others, that Zeus begot her on Dione, daughter either of Oceanus and Tethys the sea-nymph, or of Air and Earth. But all agree that she takes the air accompanied by doves and sparrows.x
x. Hesiod: Theogony 188-200 and 353; Festus Grammaticus: iii.
2; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite ii.
3; Apollodorus: i. x. 3.
1. Aphrodite (‘foam-born’) is the same wide-ruling goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea, and who was worshipped in Syria and Palestine as Ishtar, or Ashtaroth (~ee x. 1). Her most famous centre of worship was Paphos, where the original white aniconic image oś the goddess is still shown in the ruins of a grandiose Roman temple; there every spring her priestess bathed in the sea, and rose again reffewed.
2. She is called daughter olDlone, because Dione was the goddess of the oak-tree, in which the amorous dove nested (see $~. a). Zeus claimed to be her father after seizing Dione’s oracle at Dodona, and Dione therefore became her mother. ‘Tethys’ and ‘Thetis’ are names of the goddess as Creatrix (formed, like ‘Themis’ and ‘Theseus’, from tithenai, ‘to dispose’ or ‘to order’), and as Sea-goddess, since life began in the sea (see z. a). Doves and sparrows were noted for their lechery; and sea food is still regarded as aphrodisiac throughout the Mediterranean.
3. Cythera was an important centre of Cretan trade with the Peloponncse, and it will have been from here that her worship first entered Greece. The Cretan goddess had close associations with the sea. Shells carpeted the floor of her palace sanctuary at Cnossus; she is shown on a gem from the Idean Cave blowing a triton-shell, with a sea-anemone lying beside her altar; the sea-urchin and cuttle-fish (see 8 ~. ~) were sacred to her. A triton-shell was found in her early sanctuary at Phaestus, and many more in late Minoan tombs, some of these being terracotta replicas.
HERA, daughter of Cronus and Rhea, having been born on the islancl of Samos or, some say, at Argos, was brought up in Arcadia by Temenus, son of Pelasgus. The Seasons were her nurses. I After banishing their father Cronus, Hera’s twin-brother Zeus sought her out at Cnossus in Crete or, some say, on Mount Thornax (now called Cuckoo Mountain) in Argolis, where he courted her, at first unsuccessfully. She took pity on him only when he adopted the disguise of a bedraggled cuckoo, and tenderly warmed him in her bosom. There he at once resumed his true shape and ravished her, so that she was shamed into marrying him.2
b. All the gods brought gifts to the wedding; notably Mother Earth gave Hera a tree with golden apples, which was later guarded by the Hesperides in Hera’s orchard on Mount Atlas. She and Zeus spent their wedding night on Santos, and it lasted three hundred years. Hera bathes regularly in the spring of Canathus, near Argos, and thus renews her virginity.1
c. To }tera and Zeus were born the deities Ares, Hephaestus, and Hebe, though some say that Ares and his tw’m-sister Eris were conceived when Hera touched a certain flower, and Hebe when she touched a lettuce,4 and that Hephaestus also was her parthenogenous child—a wonder which he would not believe until he had imprisoned her in a mechanical chair with arms that folded about the sitter, thus forcing her to swear by the River Styx that she did not lie. Others say that Hcphaestus was her son by Talos, the nephew of Daedalus.1
1. Pausanias: vii. 4. 4 and viii. 22. 2; Strabo: ix. 2. 36; Olen, quoted by Pausanias: ii. ~3—3.
2. l)iodorus Siculus: v. 72; Pausanias: ii. 36. 2 and ~7—4.
3. Scholiast on Homer’s. Iliad i. 609; Pausanias: ii. 38.2.
4. Homer: Iliad iv. 44~; Ovid: Fasti v. 255; First Vatican Mytho~ grapher: 204.
5. Servius ou Virgil’s Eclogues iv. 62; Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: viii. $ 3. ~..
1. Hera’s name, usually taken to be a Greek word for ‘lady’, may represent an original Herw~ (‘ Protectress ‘). She is the pre-Hellenic Great Goddess. Samos and Argos were the chief seats of her worship in Greece, but the Arcadians claimed that their cult was the earliest, and made it contemporary with their earth-born ancestor Pelasgus (‘ancient’). Hera’s forced marriage to Zeus commemorates conquests of Crete and Mycenaean—that is to say Cretanized—Greece, and the overthrow of her supremacy in both countries. He probably came to her disguised as a bedraggled cuckoo, in the sense that certain Hellenes who came to Crete as fugitives accepted employment in the royal guard, made a palace conspiracy and seized the kiugdom. Cnossus was twice sacked, apparently by Hellenes: about ~700 B.c., and about ~400 B.c.; and Mycenae fell to the Achaeans a century later. The God Indra in the Ramayana had similarly wooed a nymph in cuckoo disguise; and Zeus now borrowed Hera’s sceptre, which was surmounted with the cuckoo. Gold-leaf figurines of a naked Argive goddess holding cuckoos have been found at Mycenae; and duckoos perch on a gold-leaf model temple from the same site. In the well-known Cretan sarcophagus from Hagia Triada a cuckoo perches on a double-axe.
2. Hebe, the goddess as child, was made cup-bearer to the gods in the Olympian cult. She eventually married Heracles (see 145—i and 5), after Ganymedes had usurped her office (see 29. c). ‘Hephaestus’ seems to have been a title of the sacred king as solar demi-god; ‘Ares ‘, a title of his warchief, or tanist, whose emblem was the wild boar. Both became divine names when the Olympian cult was established and they were chosen to fill the r61es, respectively, of War-god and Smith-god. The ‘certain flower’ is likely to have been the may-blossom: Ovid makes the goddess Flora—with whose worship the may-blossom was associated—point it out to Hera. The may, or whitethom, is connected with miraculous conception in popular European myth; in Celtic literature its ‘sister’ i~ the blackthorn, a symbol of Strife—Ares’s twin, Eris.
3. Talos, the smith, was a Cretan hero born to Daedalus’s sister Perdix (‘partridge’), with whom the mythographer is identifying Hera. Partridges, sacred to the Great Goddess, figured in the spring equinox orgies of the Eastern Mediterranean, when a hobbling dance was performed in imitation of cock-partridges. The hens were said by Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian to conceive merely by hearing the cock’s voice. Hobbling Hephaestus and Talos seem to be the same parthenogenous character; and both w~e cast down from a height by angry rivals (see 21. ~ and 92. ~)originally in honour of their goddess-mother.
4. In Argos, Hera’s famous statue was seated on a throne of gold and ivory; the story of her imprisonment in a chair may have arisen from the Greek custom of era’ming divine statues to their thrones ‘to prevent e~cape’. By losing an ancient statue of its god or goddess, a city might forfeit divine protection, and the Romans, therefore, made a practice of what was politely called ‘enticing’ gods to Rome—which by Imperial times had become a jackdaw’s nest of stolen images. ‘The Seasons we~ her nurses’ is one way of saying that Hera was a goddess of the calendar year. Hence the spring cuckoo on her sceptre, and the ripe pomegranate 0flute autumn, which she carried in her left hand to symbolize the death of the year.
5. A hero, as the word indicates, was a sacred king who had been sacrificed to Hera, whose body was safely under the earth, and whose soul had gone to enjoy her paradise at the back of the North Wind. His golden apples, in Greek and Celtic myth, were passports to this paradise (see 53.7, 133.4, and ~59.3).
6. The annual bath with which Hera renewed her virginity was also taken by Aphrodite at Paphos; it seems to have been the purification ceremony prescribed to a Moon-priestess after the murder of her lover, the sacred king (see 22. ! and ~50. ~). Hera, being the goddess of the vegetative year, spring, summer, and autumn (also symbolized by the new, full, and old moon) was worshipped at Stymphalus as Child, Bride, and Widow (Pausanias: viii. 22. 2—see 128. d).
7. The wedding-night on Samos lasted for three hundred years: perhaps because the Samian sacred year, like the Etruscan one, consisted of ten thirty-day months only: with January and February omitted (Macrobius: i. 13). Each day was lengthened to a year. But the mythographer may here be hinting that it took the Hellenes three hundred years before they forced monogamy on Hera’s people.
Only Zeus, the Father of Heaven, might wield the thunderbolt; ancl it was with the threat of its fatal flash that he controlled his quarrelsome and rebellious family of Mount Olympus. He also ordered the heavenly bodies, made laws, enforced oaths, and pronounced oracles. When his mother Rhea, foreseeing what trouble his lust would cause, forbade him to marry, he angrily threatened to violate her. Though she at once tvn~ed into a mefiacing serpent, this did not daunt Zeus, who became a male serpent and, twining about her in an indissoluble knot, made good his threat.1 It was then that he began his long series of adventures in love. He fathered the Seasons and the Three Fates on Themis; the Charites on Eurynome; the Three Muses on Mnemosyne, with whom he lay for nine nights; and, some say, Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, whom his brother Hades forcibly married, on the nymph Styx. Z Thus he lacked no power either above or below earth; and his wife Hera was equal to him in one thing alone: that she could still bestow the gift of prophecy on any man or beast she pleased. 3
b. Zeus and Hera bickered constantly. Vexed by his infidelities, she often humiliated him by her scheming ways. Though he would confide his secrets to her, and sometimes accept her advice, he never full) trusted Hera, and she knew that if offended beyond a certain point he would flog or even hurl a thunderbolt at her. She therefore resorted to ruthless intrigue, as in the matter of Heracles’s birth; and sometimes borrowed Aphrodite’s girdle, to excite his passion and thus weaken his will.1
c. A time came when Zeus’s pride and petulance became so intolerable that Hera, Poseidon, Apollo, and all the other Olympians, except Hc~tia, surrounded him suddenly as he lay asleep on his couch and bound him with rawhide thongs, knotted into a hundred knots, so that be could not move. He threatened them with instant death, but they had placed his thunderbolt out of reach and laughed insultingly at him. While they were celebrating their victory, and jealously discussing who was to be his successor, Thetis the Nereid, foreseeing a civil war on Olympus, hurried in search of the hundred-handed Briareus, who swiftly untied the thongs, using every hand at once, and released his master. Because it was Hera who had led the conspiracy against him, Zeus hung her up from the sky with a golden bracelet about either wrist and an anvil fastened to either ankle. The other deifies were vexed beyond words, but dared attempt no rescue for all her piteous cries. In she end Zeus undertook to free her if they swore never more to rcbcl against him; and this each in turn grudgingly did. Zeus pun/shed Poseidon and Apollo by sending them as bond-servants to King Laoroedon, for whom they built the city of Troy; but he pardoned the others as having acted under duress.5
1. Orphic Fragment 58; Hesiod: Theogony 56.
2. Apollodorus: i. 3.
3. Homer: Iliad xix. 407.
4. Ibid.: i. 547; xvi. 458; viii. 407-8; xv. r7; viii. 397-404; xiv. 197-223.
5. Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xxi. 444; Tzetzes: On L1/cophron 34; Homer: Iliad i. 399 if. and xv. 18-22.
1. The marital relations of Zeus and Hera reflect those of the barbarous Dorian Age, when women had been deprived of all their magical power, except that of prophecy, and come to be regarded as chattels. It is possible that the occasion on which the power of Zeus was saved only by Thetis and Briareus, after the other Olympians had conspired against him, was a palace revolution by vassal princes of the Hellenic High King, who nearly succeeded in dethroning him; and that help came from a company of loyal non-Hellenic household troops, recruited in Macedonia, Briareus’s home, and from a detachment of Magnesians, Thetis’s people. If so, the conspiracy will have been instigated by the High-priestess of Hera, whom the High King subsequently humiliated, as the myth describes. 2. Zeus’s violation of the Earth-goddess Rhea implies that the Zeusworshipping Hellenes took over all agricultural and funerary ceremonies. She had forbidden him to marry, in the sense that hitherto monogamy had been unknown; women took whatever lovers they pleased. His fatherhood of the Seasons, on Themis, means that the Hellenes also assumed control of the calendar: Themis (‘ order’) was the Great Goddess who ordered the year of thirteen months, divided by the summer and winter solstices into two seasons. At Athens these seasons were personified as Thallo and Carpo (originally ‘Carpho’), which mean respectively ‘sprouting’ and ‘withering’, and their temple contained an altar to the phal12c Dionysus (see 27. 5). They appear in a rock-carving at Hattusas, or Pteria, where they are twin aspects of the Lion-goddess Hepta, borne on the wings of a double-headed Sun-eagle.
3. Charis (‘grace’) had been the Goddess in the disarming aspect she presented when the High-priestess chose the sacred king as her lover. Homer mentions two Charites—Pasithea and Cale, which seems to be a forced separation of three words: Pasi rhea cale, ‘the Goddess who is beautiful to all men’. The two Charires, Auxo (‘increase’) and Hegemone (‘ mastery’), whom the Athenians honoured, corresponded with the two Seasons. Later, the Charites were worshipped as a triad, to match the Three Fates—the Triple-goddess in her most unbending mood (see I06. 3)—Thai they were Zeus’s children, born to Eurynome the Creatrix, implies that the Hellenic overlord had power to dispose of all marriageable young women. 4. The Muses (‘mountain goddesses’), originally a triad (Pausanias: ix. a9. z), are the Triple-goddess in her orgiastic aspect. Zeus’s claim to be their father is a late one; Hesiod calls them daughters of Mother Earth and Air.
AMOROUS Zeus lay with numerous nymphs descended from the Titans or the gods and, after the creation of man, with mortal women too; no less than four great Olympian deities were born to him out of wedlock. First, he begat Hermes on Maia, daughter of Atlas, who bore him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Next, he begat Apollo and Artemis on Leto, daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, transforming himself and her into quails when they coupled;x but jealous Hera sent the serpent Python to pursue Leto all over the world, and decreed that she should not be delivered in any place where the sun shone. Carried on the wings of the South Wind, Leto at last came to Ortygia, close to Delos, where she bore Artemis, who was no sooner born than she helped her mother across the narrow straits, and there, between an olive-tree and a date-palm growing on the north side of Delian Mount Cynthus, delivered her of Apollo on the ninth day of labour. Delos, hitherto a floating island, became immovably fixed in the sea and, by decree, no one is now allowed either to be born or to die there: sick folk and pregnant women are ferried over to Ortygia instead.2
b. The mother of Zeus’s son Dionysus is variously named: some say ‘that she was Detnetcr, or Io;3 some name her Dione; some, Persephone, with whom Zeus coupled in the likeness of a serpent; and some, Lethe.1
c. But the common story runs as follows. Zeus, disguised as a mortal, had a secret love altair with Semele (‘ moon’), daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes, and jealous Hera, disguising herself as an old neighbout, advised Semele, then already six months with child, to make her mysterious lover a request: that he would no longer deceive her, but reveal ‘aimselfin his true nature and form. How, otherwise, could she know that he was not a monster.> Semele followed this advice and, when Zeus refused her plea, denied him further access to her bed. Then, m anger, he appeared as thunder and lightning, and she was consumed. But Hermes saved her six-months son; sewed him up inside Zeus’s thigh, to mature there for three months longer; and, in due course of time, delivered him. Thus Dionysus is called ‘twice-born’, or ‘the child of the double door’.5
1. Hesiod: Theogony 9~8; Apollodorus: i. 4. ~; Aristophanes: Birds 870; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii.
2. Homeric Hymn to Apollo 14 if.; Hyginus: Fabuta 140; Aelian:
Varia Historia v. 4; Thucydides: iii. 104; Strabo: x. $. $.
3. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 62 and 74; iv. 44. Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes iii. ~77; OrIohic Fragment 59; Plutarch: Symposiacs vii. 5.
$. Apollodorus: iii. 4. 3; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. H37.
1. Zeus’s rapes apparently refer to Hellenic conquests of the goddess’s ancient shrines, such as that on Mount Cyllene; his marriages, to an ancient custom of giving the title ‘Zeus’ to the sacred king of the oak cult. Hermes, his son by the rape of Maia—a title of the Earth-goddess as Crone—was originally not a god, but the totemistic virtue ofa phallic pillar, or cairn. Such pillars were the centre of an orgiastic dance in the goddess’s honour.
2. One component in Apollo’s godhead seems to have been an oracular triouse—Apollo Smintheus (‘ Mouse-Apollo ‘) is among his earliest titles (see x 58.2)—consulted in a shrine of the Great Goddess, which perhaps explains why he was born where the sun never shone, namely underground. Mice were associated with disease and its cure, and the Hellenes therefore worshipped Apollo as a god of medicine and prophecy; afterwards saying that he was born under an olive-tree and a date-palm on the north side of a mountain. They called him a twin-brother of Artemis Goddess of Childbirth, and made his mother Leto—the daughter of the Titans Phoebe (‘moon’) and Coeus (‘intelligence’)—who was known in Egypt and Palestine as Lat, fertility-goddess of the date-palm and olive: hence her conveyance to Greece by a South Wind. In Italy she became Latona (‘ Queen Lat ‘). Her quarrel with Hera suggests a conflict between early immigrants from Palestine and native tribes who worshipped a different Earth-goddess; the mouse cult, which she seems to have brought With her, was well estabhshed in Palestine (I Samuel vi. 4 and Isaiah lxvi. 17). Python’s pursuit of Apollo recalls the use of snakes in Greek and Roman houses to keep down mice. But Apollo was also the ghost of the sacred king who had eaten the apple—the word Apollo may be derived from the root abol, ‘apple’, rather than from apollunai, ‘destroy’, which is the usual view.
3. Artemis, originally an orgiastic goddess, had the lascivious quail as her sacred bird. Flocks of quailwill have made Ortygia a resting-place on their way north during the spring migration. The story that Delos, Apollo’s birthplace, had hitherto been a floating island (see 43—4) may be a misuuderstanding of a record that his birthplace was now officially fixed: since in Homer (Iliad iv. IoI) he is called Lycegenes, ‘born iu Lycia’; and the Ephesians boasted that he was born at Ortygia near Ephesus (Tacitus: Annals iii. 61). Both the Boeotian Tegyrans and the Attic Zosterans also claimed him as a native son (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Tegyra).
4. Dionysus began, probably, as a type of sacred king whom the goddess ritually killed with a thunderbolt in the seventh month from the winter solstice, and whom her priestesses devoured (see ~7—$)—This explains his mothers: Dione, the Oak-goddess; Io and Demeter, Corn-goddesses; and Persephone, Death-goddess. Plutarch, when calling him ‘Dionysus, a son of Lethe (“ forgetfulness “)’, refers to his later aspect as God of the Vine.
5. The story of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, seems to record the summary action taken by Hellenes of Boeotia in ending the tradition of royal sacrifice: Olympian Zeus asserts his power, takes the doomed king under his own protection, and destroys the goddess with her own thunderbolt. Dionysus thus becomes an immortal, after rebirth from his immortal father. Semele was worshipped at Athens during the Lenaea, the Festival of the Wild Women, when a yearling bull, representing Dionysus, was cut into nine pieces and sacrificcd to her: one piece being burned, the remainder eaten raw by the worshippers. Semele is usually explained as form of Selene (‘ moon’), and nine was the traditional number of org astic moon-priestesses who took part in such feasts—nine such are show dancing around the sacred king in a cave painting at Cogul, and nine mo~ killed and devoured St Samson of Dol’s acolyte in mediaeval times.
SOMU argue that Eros, hatched from the world-egg, was the first the gods since, without him, none of the rest could have been bon they make him coeval with Mother Earth and Tartarus, and deny he had any father or mother, unless it were Eileithyia, Goddess Childbirth.
b. Others hold that he was Aphrodite’s son by Hermes, or by Are or by her own father, Zeus; or the son of Iris by the West Wind. E was a wild boy, who showed no respect for age or station but fie’ about on golden wings, shooting barbed arrows at random or wantonly setting hearts on fire with his dreadful torches.2
1. Orphic Hymn v; Aristotle: Metaphysics i. 4; Hesiod: Theogony 120; Meleager: Epigrams 50; Olen, quoted by Pausanias: ix. 27. a. Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods iii. 23; Virgil: Ciris x 34; Alcaeu quoted by Plutarch: Amatorius 20.
1. Eros (‘sexual passion’) was a mere abstraction to Hesiod. Tk early Greeks pictured him as a Ker, or winged’ Spite’, like Old Age, Plague, in the sense that uncontrolled sexual passion could be disturbing to ordered society. Later poets, however, took a perverse pleasure in his antics and, by the time of Praxiteles, he had become sentimentalized as beautiful youth. His most famous shrine was at Thespiae, where tl~ Boeotians worshipped him as a simple phallic pillar—the pastoral Herme or Priapus, under a different name (see 150. a). The various accounts his parentage are self-explanatory. Hermes was a phallic god; and Are as a god of war, increased desire in the warriors’ womenfolk. ThafAphrc dire was Eros’s mother and Zeus his father is a hint that sexual passio does not stop short at incest; his birth from the Rainbow and the We~ Wind is a lyrical faucy. Eileithyia, ‘ she who comes to the aid of women i childbed’, was a title of Artemis; the meaning being that there is no love so strong as mother-love.
2. Eros was never considered a sufficiently responsible god to figure among the ruling Olympian family of Twelve.
WH~ Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, after deposing their father Cronus, shook lots in a helmet for the lordship of the sky, sea, and murky underworld, leaving the earth common to all, Zeus won the sky, Hades the underworld, and Poseidon the sea. Poseidon, who is equal to his brother’Zeus in dignity, though not in power, and of a surly, quarrelsome nature, at once set about building his under-water palace off Aegae in Euboea. In its spacious stables he keeps white chariot horses with brazen hooves and golden manes, and a golden chariot at the approach of which storms instantly cease and sea-monsters rise, frisking, around it.x
b. Needing a wife who would be at home in the sea-depths, he courted Thetis the Nereid; but when it was prophesied by Themis that any son born to Thetis would be greater than his father, he desisted, and allowed her to marry a mortal named Peleus. Amphitrite, another Nereid, whom he next approached, viewed his advances with repugnonce, and fled to the Arias Mountains to escape him; but he sent messengers after her, among them one Delphinus, who pleaded Poseidon’s cause so winningly that she yielded, and asked him to arrange the marriage. Gratefully, Poseidon set Delphinus’s image among the stars as a constellation, the Dolphin.2 Amphitrite bore Poseidon three children: Triton, Rhode, and Benthe~icyme; but he caused her almost as much jealousy as Zeus did Hera by his love affairs with goddesses, nymphs, and mortals. Especially she loathed his infatuation with Scylla, daughter of Phorcys, whom she changed into a barking monster with six heads and twelve feet by thro~’ing magical herbs into her bathing pool.3
c. Poseidon is greedy of earthly kingdoms, and once claimed possession of Attica by thrusting his trident into the acropolis at Athens,
where a well of sea-water immediately gushed out and is still to seen; when the South Wind blows you may hear the sound of the su: far below. Later, during the reign of Cecrops, Athene came and to~ possession in a gender manner, by planting the first olive-tree besic the well. Poseidon, in a fury, challenged her to single combat, an Athene would have accepted had not Zeus interposed and ordere them to submit the dispute to arbitration. Presently, then, they a1 peared before a divine court, consisting of their supernal fellow-deiti› who called on Cecrops to give evidence. Zeus himself expressed opinion, but while all the other gods supported Poseidon, all the go~ desses supported Athene. Thus, by a majority of one, the court rule that At~ene had the better right to the land, because she had given the better gift.
d. Greatly vexed, Poseidon sent huge waves to flood the Thriasi: Plain, where Athene’s city of Athenae stood, whereupon she took her abode in Athens instead, and called that too after herself. Howeve to appease Poseidon’s wrath, the women of Athens were deprived. their vote, and the men forbidden to bear their mothers’ names hitherto.1
e. Poseidon also disputed Troezen with Athene; and on this occasi, Zeus issued an order for the city to be shared equally between them an arrangement disagreeable to both. Next, he tried unsuccessfully claim Aegina from Zeus, and Naxos from Dionysus; and in a claim f Corinth with Helius received the Isthmus only, while Helius awarded the Acropolis. In fury, he tried to seize Argolis from Hera, was again ready to fight, refusing to appear before his Olympian pe~ who, he said, were prejudiced against him. Zeus, therefore, referr the matter to the River-gods Inachus, Cephissus, and Asterion, judged in Hera’s favour. Since he had been forbidden to revenge hi~ self with a flood as before, he did exactly the opposite: he dried up judges’ streams so that they now never flow in summer. However, the sake of Amymone, one of the Danaids who were distressed by tl drought, he caused the Argive river of Lerna to flow perpetually.s fi Heboasts of having created the horse, though some say that, wh he was newly born, Rhea gave one to Cronus to eat; and of havi invented the bridle, though Athene had done so before him; but 1 claim to have instituted horse-racing is not disputed. Certainly, hor: are sacred to him, perhaps because of his amorous pursuit of Demet, when she was tearfully seeking her daughter Persephone. It is said Demeter, wearied and disheartened by her search, and disinclined for passionate dalliance with any god or Titan, transformed herself into a mare, and began to graze with the herd of one Oncus, a son of Apollo’s who reigned in Arcadian Onceium. She did not, however, deceive Poseidon, who transformed himself into a stallion and covered her, from which outrageous union sprang the nymph Despoena and the wild horse Arion. Demeter’s anger was so hot that she is still worshipped locally’as ‘Demeter the Fury’.6
1. Homer: Iliadxv. 187-93; viii. 2~o-xI; xiii. 21-30; Odysseyv. 381; Apollonius Rhodius: iii. i240.
2. Apollodorus: iii. 13.5; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii.
3. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 45 and 50.
4. Herodotus: viii. 55; Apollodorus: iii. 14. x; Pausanias: i. 24. 3; Augustine: On the City of God xviii. 9; Hyginus: Fabula 164.
5. Pausanias: ii. 30. 6; Plutarch: Syrnposiacs ix. 6; Pausanias: ii. ~. 6; ii. 15.5; ii. 22.5—
6. Pindar: Pythian Odes vi. 50; Pausanias: viii. 25.3-5; Apollodorus; iii. 6. 8.
1. Thetis, Amphitrite, and Nereis were different local titles of the Triple Moon-goddess as ruler of the sea; and since Poseidon was the Father-god of the Aeolians, who had taken to the sea, he claimed to be her husband wherever she found worshippers. Peleus married Thetis on Mount Pelion (see 8 x. l). Nereis means ‘the wet one’, and Amphitrite’s name refers to the ‘third element’, the sea, which is cast about earth, the first element, and above which rises the second element, air. In the Homeric poems Amphitrite means simply ‘the sea’; she is not perso~~fied as Poseidon’s wife. Her reluctance to marry Poseidon matches Hera’s reluctance to marry Zeus, and Persephone’s to marry Hades; the marriage involved the interference by male priests with female control o~ the fishing industry. The fable of Delphinus is sentimental allegory: dolphins appear when the sea grows calm. Amphitrite’s children were herself in triad: Triton, lucky new moon; Rhode, full harvest-moon; and Benthesicyme, dangerous old moon. But Triton has since become masculinized. Aegae stood on the sheltered Boeotian side of Euboea and served as a port for Orchomenus; and it was hereabouts that the naval expedition mustered against Troy.
2. The story of Amphitrite’s vengeance on Scylla is paralleled in that of Pasipha~’s vengeance on another Scylla (see 9~. 2). Scylla (‘she who rends’ or ‘puppy’) is merely a disagreeable aspect of herself: the dogheaded Death-goddess Hecate (see 3 I.f), who was at home both on land and in the waves. A seal impression from Cnossus shows her threatening a man in a boat, as she threatened Odysseus in the Straits of Messina (see ~70. t). The account quoted by Tzetzes seems to have been mistakenly deduced from an ancient vase-painting in which Amphitrite stands beside a pool occupied by a dog-headed mouster; on the other side of the vase is a drowned hero caught between two dog-headed triads of goddesses at the entrance to the Underworld (see 3~. a and ~34. ~).
$. Poseidon’s attempts to take possession of certain cities are political myths. His dispute over Athens suggests an unsuccessful attempt to make him the city’s tutelary deity in place of Athene. Yet her victory was impaired by a concession to patriarchy: the Athenians abandoned the Cretan custom which prevailed in Caria until Classical times (Herodotus: i. r73) when they ceased to take their mother’s names. Varro, who gives this detail, represents the trial as a plebiscite of all the men and women of Athens.
It is plain that the Ionian Pelasgians of Ather~ were defeated by the Aeolians, and that Athene regained her sovereignty only by alliance with Zeus’s Achaeans, who later made her disown Poseidon’s paternity and admit herself reborn from Zeus’s head.
,t. The cultivated olive was originally imported from Libya, which supports the myth of Athene’s Libyan origin; but what she brought will have been only a cutting—the cultivated olive does not breed true, but must always be grafted on the oleaster, or wild ohve. Her tree was still shown at Athens during the second century .1.D. The flooding of the Thriasian Plain is hkely to be a historical event, but cannot be dated. It is possible that early in the fourteenth century B.c., which meteorologists reckon to have been a period of maximum rainfall, the ri~/ers of Arcadia never ran dry, and that their subsequent shrinking was attributed to the vengeance of Poseidon. Pre-Hellenic Sun-worship at Corinth is well estabhshed (Pausanias: ii. 4. 7—see 67.
5. The myth of Demeter and Poseidon records a Hellenic invasion of Arcadia. Demeter was pictured at Phigalia as the mare-headed patroness .of the pre-Hellenic horse cult. Horses were sacred to the moon, because their hooves make a moon-shaped mark, and the moon was regarded as the source of all water; hence the association of Pegasus with springs of water (see 75—b). The early Hellenes introduced a larger breed of horse into Gi’cece from Trans-Caspia, the native variety having been a~out the size of a Shetland pony and unsuitable for chariotry. They seem to have seized the centres of the horse cult, where their wart/or-kings forcibly married the local priestesses and thus won a title to the land; incidentally suppressing the wild-mare orgies (see 72.4)—The sacred horses Arson and Despoena (this being a title of Demeter herself) were then claimed as Poseidon’s children. Amymone may h~ve been a name for the goddess at Lerna, the centre of the Danaid water cult (see 60. g and 4).
6. Demeter as Fury, like Nemesis as Fury (see 32-$), was the goddess in her annual mood of murder; and the story, also told of Poseidon and Demeter at Thelpusia (Pausanias: viii. 42), and of Poseidon and an unnamed Fury at the fountain of Tilphusa in Boeotia (Schohast on Homer’s Iliad xxiii. 346) was already old when the Hellenes came. It appears in early Indian sacred hterature, where Saranyu turns herself into a mare, Vivaswat becomes a stallion and covers her; and the fruit of this union are the two heroic Asvi~s. ‘Demeter Erinnys’ may, in fact, have stood not for ‘Demeter the Fury’, but for ‘Demeter Saranyu’—an attempted reconciliation of the two warring cultures; but to the resentful Pelasgians Demeter was, and remained, outraged.
WHEN Hermes was born on Mount Cyllene his mother Maia laid him in swaddling bands on a winnowhag fan, but he grew with astonishing quickness into a little boy, and as soon as her back was turned. slipped off and went looking for adventure. Arrived at Pieria, where Apollo was tending a fine herd of cows, he decided to steal them. But, fearing to be betrayed by their tracks, he quickly made a number of shoes from the bark of a fallen oak and tied them with plaited grass to the feet of the cows, which he then drove off by night along the road. Apollo discovered the loss, but Hermes’s trick deceived him, and though he went as far as Pylus in his westward search, and to Onchestus in his eastern, he was forced, in the end, to offer a reward for the apprehension of the thief. Silenus and his satyrs, greedy of reward. spread out in different directions to track him down but, for a long while. without success. At last, as a party of them passed through Arcadia, they heard the muffled sound of music such as they had never heard before, and the nymph Cyllene, from the mouth of a cave, told them that a most gifted child had recently been born there. to whom she was acting as nurse: he had constructed an ingenious musical toy from the shell of a tortoise and some cow-gut, with which he had luHed his mother to sleep.
b. ‘And from whom did he get the cow-gut?’ asked the alert satyrs, noticing two hides stretched outside the cave. ‘Do yo,, charge the poor child with theft?’ asked Cyllene. Harsh words were exchanged.
c. At that moment Apollo came up, having discovered the thief’s identity by observing the suspicious behaviour of a long-winged bit Enterin g the cave, he awakened Maia and told her severely that Herin must restore the stolen cows. Maia pointed to the child, still wrapp, in his swaddling bands and feigning sleep. ‘What an absurd charge she cried. But Apollo had already recognized the bades. He picked Hermes, carried him to Olympus, and there formally accused him theft, offering the hides as evidence. Zeus, loth to believe that his o~ new-born son was a thief, encouraged him to plead not guilty, b Apollo would not be put off and Hermes, at last, weakened confessed]
‘Very well, come with me,’ he said, ‘and you may have your her
I slaughtered only two, and those I cut up into twelve equal portio as a sacrifice to the twelve gods.’
‘ Twelve gods?’ asked Apollo. ‘Who is the twelfth?’
‘Your servant, sir,’ replied Hermes modestly. ‘l ate no more my share, though I was very hungry, and duly burned the rest.’
Now, this was the first flesh-sacrifice ever made.
d. The two gods returned to Motrot Cyllene, where Hermes greet his mother and retrieved something that he had b~dden tu~derneatl~ sheepskin.
‘What have you there?’ asked Apollo.
In answer, Hermes showed his newly-invented tortoise-shell lyl and played such a ravishing tune on it with the plectrum he had al invented, at the same time singing in praise of Apollo’s nobility, i telligence, and generosity, that he was forgiven at once. He led t surprised and delighted Apollo to Pylus, playing all the way, there gave him the remainder of the cattle, wluch he had hidden it cave.
‘A bargain !’ cried Apollo. ‘You keep the cows, and [ take the lyr ‘Agreed,’ said Hermes, and they shook hands on at.
e. Wlfilc the hungry cows were grazing, Hermes cut reeds, ma them into a shepherd’s p~pe, and played another tune. Apollo, ag: delighted, cried: ‘A bargain! If you give me that p~pe, 1 will give y, this golden staff with wbach I herd my cattle; m future you shall be t god of all herdsmen and shepherds.’
‘My pipe is worth more than your staff,’ replied Hermes. ‘But I will make the exchange, if you teach me augury too, because it seems to be a most useful art.’
‘I cannot do that,’ Apollo said, ‘but if you go to my old nurses, the Thriae who live on Parnassus, they will teach you how to divine from pebbles.’
fi They again shook hands and Apollo, taking the child back to Olympus, told Zeus all that had happened. Zeus warned Hermes that hencefbrth he must respect the rights of property and refrain from telling downright lies; but he could not help being amused. ‘You seem to be a very ingenious, eloquent, and persuasive godling,’ he said. ‘Then make me your herald, Father,’ Hermes answered, ‘ and I will be responsible for the safety of all divine property, and never tell lies, though I cannot promise always to tell the whole truth.’
‘That would not be expected of you,’ said Zeus, with a smile. ‘But your duties would include the making of treaties, the promotion of commerce, and the maintenance of free rights of way for travellers on any road m the world.’ When Hermes agreed to these conditions, Zeus gave h~m a herald’s staff with white ribbons, which everyone was ordered to respect; a round hat against the rain, and winged golden sandals which carried him about with the swiftness of wind. He was at once welcomed mto the Olympian fami]y, whom he taught the art of making fire by the rapid twirling of the fire-stick.
g. Afterwards, the Thriae showed Hermes how to foretell the future from the dance of pebbles in a basin of water; and he himself invented both the game of knuckle-bones and the art of divining by them. Hades also engaged him as his herald, to summon the dying gently and eloquently, by laying the golden staff upon their eyes.1
h. He then assisted the Three Fates in the composition of the Alphabet, invented astronomy, the musical scale, the arts of boxing and gym- nastics, weights and measures (which some attribute to Palamedes), and the cultivation of the olive-tree.2
i. Some hold that the lyre invented by Hermes had seven strings; others, that it had three only, to correspond with the seasons, or four to correspond with the quarters of the year, and that Apollo brought the number up to seven.3
j. Hermes had numerous sons, including Echion the Argonauts’
herald; Autolycus the thief; and Daphnis the inventor of bucolic poetry. ]7his Daplmis was a beautiful Sicilian youth whom his mother, a nymph, exposed in a laurel grove on the Mountain of Hera; hence the
name given him by the shepherds, his foster parents. Pan taught him to play the pipes; he was beloved by A?ollo, and used to hunt with Artemis, who took pleasure in his music. He lavished great care on his many herds of cattle, which were of the same stock as Helius’s. A nymph named Nomia made him swear never to be unfaithful to her, on pa~ of being bl~nded; but her rival, Chimaera, contrived to seduce him when he was drunk, and Nomia blinded him in fulfilment of her threat. Daphnis consoled himself for a while with sad lays about the loss of sight, but he did not live long. Hermes turned him into a stone, which is still shown at the city of Cephalenitanum; and caused a fountain called Daphnis to gush up at Syracuse, wh~re annual sacrifices are offered.4
It. Homeric H7mn to Hermes x-543; Sophocles: Fragments of The Trackers; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 2. a. Diodorus Siculus: v. 75; Hyginus: Fabula 277; Plutarch: Symposiacs ix. 3. ~. Homeric Hymn to Hermes 5~; Diodorus Siculus: i. 16; Macrobius: Saturnaliorum Conviviorum i. ~9; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 253. 4—Diodorus Siculus: iv. 84; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues v. 20; viii. 68; x. 26; Plfilargyrius on Virgil’s Eclogues v. ao; Aelian: Varia Historia x. 18.
1. The myth of Hermes’s childhood has been preserved in a late literary form only. A tradition of cattle raids made by the crafty Messenians on their neighbouts (see 74.g and 17~. h), and of’a treaty by which these were discontinued, seems to have been mythologically combined with an account of how the barbarous Hellenes took over and exploited, in the name of their adopted god Apollo, the Creto-Helladic civilization which they found in Central and Southern Greece—boxing, gymnastics, weights and measures, music, astronomy, and ohve culture were all preHellenic (see 162. 6)—and learned pohte manners.
2. Hermes was evolved as a god from the stone phalli which were local centres ofa pre-Hellenic fertility cult (see ~ 5—~)—the account of his rapid growth may be Homer’s playful obscenity—but also from the Divine Child of the pre-Hellenic Calendar (see 24. 6, 44. t, tos. t, t7r. 4, etc.); from the Egyptian Thoth, God oflntelhgence; and from Anubis, conductor of souls to the Underworld.
3. The heraldic white ribbons on Hermes’s staff were later mistaken for serpents, because he was herald to Hades; hence Echion’s name. The Thnae are the Triple-Muse (‘mountain goddess’) of Parnassus, their divination by means of dancing pebbles was also practised at Delphi (Mythographi Graeci: Appendix Narrationurn 67). Athene was first credited with the invention ofdivinatory dice made from knuckle-bones (Zenobius: Proverbs v. 75), and these came into popular use; but the art of augury remained an aristocratic prerogative both in Greece and at Rome. Apollo’s ‘long-winged bird’ was probably Hermes’s own sacred crane; for the Apollonian priesthood constantly trespassed on the territory of Hermes, an earlier patron of soothsaying, literature, and the arts; as did the Hermetic priesthood on that of Pan, the Muses, and Athene. The invention of fire-making was ascribed to Hermes, because the twirhng of the male drill in the female stock suggested phallic magic.
4. Silenus and his sons, the satyrs, were conventional comic characters in the Attic drama (see 85.5); originally they had been primitive mountaineersof Northern Greece. He was called an autochthon, or a son of Pan by one of the nymphs {Normus: Dionysiaca xiv. 97; xx/x. 262; Aelian: Varia Historia iii. 18).
5. The romantic story of Daphnis has been built around a phallic pillar at Cephalenitanum, and a fountain at Syracuse, each probably surrounded by a laurel grove, where songs were sung in honour of the sightless dead. Daphnis was said to be beloved by Apollo because he had taken the laurel from the orgiastic goddess of Tempe (see 2 ~. 6).
APHRODITE could seldom be persuaded to lend the other goddesses her magic girdle which made everyone fall in love with its wearer; for she was jealous of her position. Zeus had given her in marriage to Hephaestus, the lame Smith-god; but the true father of the three children with whom she presented him—Phobus, Deimus, and Harmonia—was Ares, the straight-limbed, impetuous, drunken, and quarrelsome God of War. Hephaestus knew nothing of the deception until, one night, the lovers stayed too long together in bed at Ares’s Thracian palace; then Helius, as he rose, saw them at their sport and told tales to Hephaestus.
b. Hephaestus angrily retired to his forge, and hammered out a bronze hunting-net, as free as gossamer but quite unbreakable, which he secretly attached to the posts and sides of his marriage-bed. He told Aphrodite who returned from Thrace, all smiles, explainLag that she
had been away on business at Corinth: ‘Pray excuse me, dear wife, I am taking a short holiday on Lemnos, my favourite island.’ Aphrodite did not offer to accompany him and, when he was out of sight, sent hurriedly for Ares, who soon arrived. The two went merrily to bed but, at dawn, found themselves entangled in the net, naked and unable to escape. Hephaestus, turning back from his journey, surprised them there, and summoned all the gods to witness his dishonour. He then announced that he would not release his wife until the valuable marriage-gifts which he had paid her adoptive father, Zeus, were restored to him.
c. Up ran the gods, to watch Aphrodite’s embarrassment; but the goddesses, from a sense of delicacy, stayed in their houses. Apollo, nudging Hermes, asked: ‘You would not mind being in Ares’s position, would you, net and all?’
Hermes swore by his own head, that he would not, even if there were three times as many nets, and all the goddesses were looking on with disapproval. At this, both gods laughed uproariously, but Zeus was so disgusted that he refused to hand back the marriage-gifts, or to interfere in a vulgar dispute between a husband and wife, declaring that Hephaestus was a fool to have made the affair public. Poseidon who, at sight of Aphrodite’s naked body, had fallen in love with her, concealed his jealousy of Ares, and pretended to sympathize with Hephaestus. ‘ Since Zeus refuses to help,’ he said, ‘I will undertake that Ares, as a fee for his release, pays the equivalent of the marriage-gifts in question.’ ‘That is all very well,’ Hephaestus replied gloomily. ‘But if Ares defaults, you will have to take his place under the net.’’In Aphrodite’s company?’ Apollo asked, laughing. ‘I cannot think that Ares will default,’ Poseidon said nobly. ‘But if he should do so, I am ready to pay the debt and marry Aphrodite myself.’ So Ares was set at liberty, and returned to Thrace; and Aphrodite went to Paphos, where she renewed her virginity in the sea.1
d. Flattered by Hermes’s frank confession of his love for her, Aphrodite presently spent a night with him, the fruit of which was Hermaphroditus, a double-sexed being; and, equally pleased by Poseidon’s intervention on her behalf, she bore him two sons, Rhodus and Herophilus.2 Needless to say, Ares defaulted, pleading that if Zeus would not pay, why should he? In the end, nobody paid, because Hephaestus was madly in love with Aphrodite and had no real intention of divorcing her.
e. Later, Aphrodite yielded to Dionysus, and bore him Priapus; an ugly child with enormous genitals—it was Hera who had given him this obscene appearance, in disapproval of Aphrodite’s promiscuity. He is a gardener and carries a pruning-knife.3
f. Though Zeus never lay with his adopted daughter Aphrodite, as some say that he did, the magic of her girdle put him under constant temptation, and at last he decided to humiliate her by making her fall desperately in love with a mortal. This was the handsome Anchises, King of the Dardanians, a grandson ofllus and, one night, when he was asleep in his herdsman’s hut on Trojan Mount Ida, Aphrodite visited him in the guise of a Phrygian princess, clad in a dazzlingly red robe, and lay with him on a couch spread with the sicins of bears and lions, while bees buzzed drowsily about them. When they parted at dawn, she revealed her identity, and made him promise not to tell anyone that she had slept w~th him. Anchises was horrified to learn that he had uncovered the nakedness of a goddess, and begged her to spare his life. She assured him that he had nothing to fear, and that their son would be famous.4 Some days later, while Anchises was drinking with his companions, one of them asked: ‘Would you not rather sleep with the daughter of So-and-so than with Aphrodite herself?’ ‘No,’ he replied unguardedly. ‘Having slept with both, I find the question inept.’
g. Zeus overheard this boast, and threw a thunderbolt at Anchise$, which would have killed him outright, had not Aphrodite interposed her girdle, ~nd thus diverted the bolt into the ground at his feet. Nevertheless, the shock so weakened Pmchises that he could never stand upright again, and Aphrodite, after bearing his son Aeneas, soon lost her passion for him.5
h. One day, the wife of King Cinyra~ the Cyprian—but some call him King Phoenix of Byblus, and some King Theias the Assyrianfoolishly boasted that her daughter Smyrna was more beautiful even than Aphrodite. The goddess avenged this insult by making Smyrna fall in love with her father and climb into his bed one dark night, when her nurse had made him too drunk to realize what he was doing. Later, Cinyras discovered that he was both the father and grandfather of Smyrna’s unborn child and, wild with wrath, seized a sword and chased her from the palace. He overtook her on the brow of a hill, but ^phrodite hurriedly changed Smyrna into a myrrh-tree, which the descending sword split in ‘halves. Out tumbled the infant Adonis. Aphrodite, already repenting of the mischief that the had made,
concealed Adonis in a chest, which she entrusted to Persephone, Queen of the Dead, asking her to stow it away in a dark place.
i. Persephone had the curiosity to open the chest, and found Adonis inside. He was so lovely that she lifted him out and brought him up in her own palace. The news reached Aphrodite, who at once visited Tartarus to claim Adonis; and when Persephone would not assent, having by now made him her lover, she appealed to Zeus. Zeus, well aware that Aphrodite also wanted to lie with Adonis, refused to judge so unsavoury a dispute; and transferred it to a lower court, presided over by the Muse Calliope. Calliope’s verdict was that Persephone and Aphrodite had equal claims on Adonis—Aphrodite for arranging his birth, Persephone for rescuing him from the chest—but that he shot~id be allowed a brief annual holiday from the amorous demands of both these insatiable goddesses. She therefore divided the year into three equal parts, of which he was to spend one with Persephone, one with Aphrodite, and the third by himself.
Aphrodite did not play fair: by wearing her magic girdle all the time, she persuaded Adonis to give her his own share of the year, grudge the share due to Persephone, and disobey the court-order.6
j. Persephone, justly aggrieved, went to Thrace, where she told her benefactor Ares that Aphrodite now preferred Adonis to himself. ‘A mere mortal,’ she cried, ‘ and effeminate at that !’ Ares grew jealous and, disguised as a wild boar, rushed at Adonis who was out hunting on Mount Lebanon, and gored him to death before Aphrodite’s eyes. Anemones sprang from his blood, and his soul descended to Tartarus. Aphrodite went tearfully to Zeus, and pleaded that Adonis should not have to spend more than the gloomier half of the year with Persephone, but might be her companion for the summer months. This Zeus magnanimously granted. But some say that Apollo was the boar, and revenged himself for an injury Aphrodite had done him.7
k. Once, to make Adonis jealous, Aphrodite spent several nights at Lilybaeum with Butes the Argonaut; and by him became the mother ofEryx, a king of Sicily. Her children by Adonis were one son, Golgos, fota~der of Cyprian Golgi, and a daughter, Bero~, founder of Beroea in Thrace; and some say that Adonis, not Dionysus, was the father of her son priapus.s
l. The Fates assigned to Aphrodite one divine duty only, namely to make love; but one day, Athene catching her surreptitiously at work on a loom, complained that her own prerogatives had been infringed and threatened to abandon them altogether. Aphrodite apologized profusely, and has never done a hand’s turn of work since.0
1. Homer: Odysxey viii. 266-367.
2. Diodorus Siculu~: iv. 6; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes viii. 24. 3. Pausanias: ix. 3~. 2; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 932. 4. Homeric H7mn to Aśhrodite 45-200; Theocritus: Idylls i. ~05-7; Hyginus: Fabula 945. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 649.
6. Apollodorus: iii. ~4—3-4; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 7 and Fabulae 58, ~64, 25~; Fulgentius: Mythology iii. 8.
7. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues x. xS; Orphic Hymn lv. ~o; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i. 306.
8. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 914-~9; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 83; Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls xv. Ioo; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 83~.
9. Hesiod: Theogony 203-4; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xxiv. 274-8 I.
1. The later Hellenes belittled the Great Goddess of the Mediterranean, who had long beeu supreme at Corinth, Sparta, Thespiae, and Athens, by placing her under male tutelage and regarding her solemn sex-orgies as adulterous indiscretions. The net in which Homer represents Aphrodite as caught by Hephaestus was, originally, her own as Goddess of the Sea (see 89. 2), and her priestess seems to have worn it during the spring carnival; the priestess of the Norse Goddess Holle, or Gode, did the same on May Eve.
2. Priapus originated in the rude wooden phallic images which presided over Dionysian orgies. He is made a son of Adonis because of the miniature ‘gardens’ offered at his festivals. The pear-tree was sacred to Hera as prime goddess of the Pelopormese, which was therefore called Apia (see 64. 4 and 74. 6).
3. Aphrodite Urania (‘queen of the mountain’) or Erycina (‘of the heather’) was the nymph-goddess of midsummer. She destroyed the sacred king, who mated with her on a mountain top, as a queen-bee destroys the drone: by tearing out his sexual organs. Hence the heatherloving bees and the red robe in her mountain-top affair with Artcrises; hence also the worship of Cybele, the Phrygian Aphrodite of Mount Ida, as a queen-bee, and the ecstatic self-castration of her priests in memory ot her lover Attis (see 79-1). Anchises was one of the many sacred kings who were struck with a ritual thunderbolt after consorting with the Death-inLife Goddess (see 24. a). In the earliest version of the myth he was killed, but in later ones he escaped: to make good the story of how pious Aeneas, who brought the sacred Palladium to Rome, carried his father away from burning Troy (see ~68. c). His name identifies Aphrodite with Isis, whose husband Osiris was castrated by Set disguised as a boar; ‘Anchises’ is, in fact, a synonym of Adonis. He had a shrine at Aegesta near Mount Eryx {Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 53) and was therefore said by Virgil to have died at Drepanum, a neighbouring town, and been buried on the mountain {Aeneid iii. 710, 759, etc.). Other shrines of Anchises were shown in Arcadia and the Troad. At Aphrodite’s shrine on Mount Eryx a golden honey-comb was displayed, said to have been a votive offering presented by Daedalus when he fled to Sicily (see 92. h).
4. As Goddess of Death-in-Life, Aphrodite earned many titles which seem inconsistent with her beauty and complaisance. At Athens, she was called the Eldest of the Fates and sister of the Erinnyes; and elsewhere Melaenis (‘black one’), a name ingeniously explained by Pausanias as meaning that most love-making takes place at night; Scotia (‘ dark one’); Androphonos (‘man-slayer’); and even, according to Plutarch, Epitymbria (‘ of the tombs’).
5. The myth of Cinyras and Smyrna evidently records a period in Iristory when the sacred ‘king in a matrilineal society decided to prolong his reign beyond the customary length. He did so by celebrating a marriage with the young priestess, nominally his daughter, who was to be queen for the next term, instead of letting another princeling marry he~ and take away his k~ngdom (see 65. l).
6. Adonis (Phoenician: adon, ‘lord’) Ls a Greek version of the Syrian demi-god Tammuz, the spirit of annual vegetation. In Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, the goddess’s sacred year was at one time divided into three parts, ruled by the Lion, Goat, and Serpent (see 75.2). The Goat, emblem of the central part, was the Love-goddess Aphrodite’s; the Serpent, emblem of the last part, was the Death-goddess Persephone’s; the Lion, emblem of the first part, was sacred to the Birth-goddess, here named Smyrna, who had no claim on Adonis. In Greece, this calendar gave place to a two-season year, bisected either by the equinoxes ha the Eastern style, as at Sparta and Delptfi; or by the solstices in the Northern style, as at Athens and Thebes; which explains the difference between the respective verdicts of the Mountain-goddess Calliope and Zeus.
7. Tammuz was killed by a boar, like many similar mythical characten —Osiris, Cretan Zeus, Ancaeus of Arcadia (see I$7. e), Carmanor o~ Lydia (see 136. b), and the Irish hero Diarmuid. This boar seems once tc have been a sow with cresceut-shaped tusks, the goddess herself as Per. sephone; but when the year was bisected, the bright half ruled by the sacred king, and the dark half ruled by his tanist, or rival, this rival came i~ wild-boar disguise—like Set when he killed Osiris, or Finn mac Coo when he killed Diarmuid. Tammuz’s blood is allegorical of the anemone that redden the slopes of Mount Lebanon after the winter rains; th~ Adonia, a mourning festival in honour of Tammuz, was held at Byblu every spring. Adouis’s birth from a myrrh-tree—myrrh being a well. known aphrodisiac—shows the orgiastic character of his rites. The drops of gum which the myrrh-tree shed were supposed to be tears shed for him (Ovid: Metamorphoses x. 500 if.). Hyginus makes Cinyras King of Assyria (Fabula 58), perhaps because Tammuz-worstfip seemed to have originated there.
8. Aphrodite’s son Hermaphroditus was a youth with womanish breasts and long hair. Like the androgyne, or beardcd woman, the hermaphrodite had, of course, its freakish physical counterpart, but as religious concepts both originated ha the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. Hermaphrod~tus is the sacred kiug deputizing for the Queen (see ~36.4), and wearing artificial breasts. Audrogyne is the mother ofa pre-Hellenic clan which has avoided being patriarchalized; in order to keep her magistratal powers or to ennoble children born to her from a slave-father, she assumes a false beard, as was the custom at Argos. Bearded goddesses like the Cyprian Aphrodite, and womanish gods like Dionysus, correspond with these trarisitional social stages.
9. Harmonia is, at first sight, a strange name for a daughter borne by Aphrodite to Ares; but, then as now, more than usual affection and harmony prevailed in a state which was at war.
TI~IRA›IAIq Ares loves battle for its own sake, and his sister Eris is always stirring up occasions for war by the spread of rumour and the inculcation of jealousy. Like her, he never favours one city or party more than another, but fights on this side or that, as inclination prompts him, delighting in the slaughter of men and the sacking of towns. All his fellow-immortals hate him, from Zeus and Hera downwards, except Eris, and Aphrodite who nurses a perverse passion for him, and greedy Hades who welcomes the bold young fighting-men slain in cruel wars.
b. Ares has not been consistently victorious. Athene, a much more skilful fighter than he, has twice worsted him in battle; and once, the gigantic sons of Aloeus conquered and kept him imprisoned in a brazen vessel for thirteen months until, half dead, he was released by Hermes; and, on another occasion, Heracles sent him running in fear back to Olympus. He professes too deep a contempt for litigation ever to appear in court as a plaintiff, and has only once done so as a defendant: that was when his fellow-deities charged him with the wilful murder of Poseidon’s son Halirrhothius. He pleaded justification, claiming to have saved his daughter Alcippe, of the House of Cecrops, from being violated by the said Halirrhothius. Since no one had witnessed the incident, except Ares himself, and Alcippe, who naturally confirmed her father’s evidence, the court acquitted him. This was the first judgement ever pronounced in a murder trial; and the hill on which the proceedings took place became kaown as the Areiopagus, a name it still bears.1
1. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 2; Pausanias: i. 2~. 7.
1. The Athenians disliked war, except in deśence ofliberty, or for some other equally cogent reason, and despised the Thracians as barbarous because they made it a pastime.
2. In Pausanias’s account of the murder, Halirrhothius had already succeeded in violating Alcippe. But Halirrhothius can only be a synouym for Poseidon; and Alcippe a synonym for the mare-headed goddess. The myth, in fact, recalls Poseidon’s rape of Demeter, and refers to a conquest of Athens by Poseidon’s people and the goddess’s humiliation at their hands (see ~6. 3)—But it has been altered for patriotic reasons, and combined with a legend of some early murder trial. ‘Areiopagus’ probably means ‘the kill of the propitiating Goddess’, areia being oue of Athene’s titles.
IT is Hestia’s glory that, alone of the great Olympians, she never takes part in wars or disputes. Like Artemis and Athene, moreover, she has always resisted every amorous invitation offered her by gods, Titans, or others; for, after the dethronement of Cronus, when Poseidon and Apollo came forward as rival suitors, she swore by Zeus’s head to remain a virgin for ever. At that, Zeus gratefully awarded her the first victim of every public sacr’ffice,~ because she had preserved the peace of Olympus.
b. Drunken Priapus once tried to violate her at a rustic feast attended by accident or in token of mourning, it is kindled afresh with the aid of a fire-wheel.3
1. Homeric Hylnn to Aphrodite 2~-30,
2. Ovid: Fasti vi. 3 ~9 if3. Diodorus Siculus: v. 68.
1. The centre of Greek life—even at Sparta, where the family had been subordinated to the State—was the domestic hearth, also regarded as a sacrificial altar; and Hestia, as its goddess, represented personal security and happiness, and the sacred duty of hospitality. The story of her marriage-offers from Poseidon and Apollo has perhaps been deduced from the joint worship of these three deities at Delphi. Priapus’s attempt to violate her is an anecdotal warning against sacrilegious ill-treatment of women-guests who have come under the protection of the domestic or public hearth: even the ass, a symbol of lust (see 35.4), proclaims Priapus’s criminal folly.
2. The archaic white aniconic image of the Great Goddess, in use throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, seems to have represented a heap of glowing charcoal, kept alive by a covering of white a.1h, which was the most cosy and economical means of heating in ancient times; it gave out neither smoke nor flame, and formed the natural centre oś family or clan gatherings. At Delphi the charcoal-heap was translated into limestone for out-of-doors use, and became the omphalos, or navel-boss, frequently shown in Greek vase-paintings, which marked the supposed centre of the world. This holy object, which has survived the ruin of the shrine, is inscribed with the name of Mother Earth, stands ~ x¬ inches high, and measures xS« inches across: about the size and shape of a charcoal fire needed to heat a large room. In Classical times the Pythoness had an attendant priest who induced her trance by burning barley grains, hemp, and laurel over an oil lamp in an enclosed space, and then interpreted what she said. But it is likely that the hemp, laurel, and barley were once laid on the hot ashes of the charcoal mound, which is a simpler and more effective way of producing narcotic fttmes (see $x. b). Numerous triangular or leaf-shaped ladles in stone or clay have been found in Cretan and Mycenaean shrines—some of them showing signs of great heat—and seem to have been used for tending the sacred fire. The charcoal mound was sometimes built on a round, three-legged day table, painted red, white, and black, which are the moon’s colours (see 90. 3); examples have been fom~d in the Pelopounese, Crete, and Delos—one of them, from a chamber tomb at Zafer Papoura near Cnossus, had the charcoal still piled on it.
APOLLO, Zeus’s son by Leto, was a seven-months’ child, but gods grow up swiftly. Themis fed him on nectar and ambrosia, and when the fourth day dawned he called for bow and arrows, with which Hephaestus at once provided him. On leaving Delos he made straight for Mount Parnassus, where the serpent Python, his mother’s enemy, was lurking; and wounded him severely watt arrows. Python fled to the Oracle of Mother Larth at Delphi, a city so named in honour of the monster Delphyne, his mate; but Apollo dared follow him into the shrine, and there despatched him beside the sacred chasm.1
b. Mother Earth reported this outrage to Zeus, who not only ordered Apollo to v~sit Tempe for purification, but instituted the Pythian Games, in honour of Python, over which he was to preside penitenfially. Quite unabashed, Apollo disregarded Zeus’s command to visit Tempe. Instead, he went to Aigialac’a for purification, accompanied by Artemis; and then, disliking the place, sailed to Tarrha in Crete, where K~ag Carmanor performed the ceremony.2
c. On his return to Greece, Apollo sought out Pan, the disreputable old goat-legged Arcadian god and, having coaxed him to reveal the art of prophecy, seized the Delphic Oracle and retained its priestess, called the Pythoness, m Ins own service.
d. Leto, on hearnag the news, came with Artemis to Delphi, where she turned aside to perform some private rite m a sacred grove. The giant Tityus interrupted her devotions, and was trying to violate her, when Apollo and Artenus, hearing screams, ran up and killed him with a volley of arrows—a vengeance which Zeus, Tityus’s father, was pleased to consider a pious one. In Tartarus, Tityus was stretched out for torment, his arms and legs securely pegged to the ground; the area covered was no less than nine acres, and two vultures .ate his liver.3
e. Next, Apollo killed the satyr Marsyas, a follower of the goddess Cybele. This was how it came about. One day, Athene made a doubleflute from stag’s bones, and played on it at a banquet of the gods. She could not understand, at first, why Hera and Aphrodite were laughing silently behind their hands, although her music seemed to delight the other deities; she therefore went away by herself into a Phrygian wood, took up the flute again beside a stream, and watched her image in the water, as she played. Realizing at once how ludicrous that bluish face and those swollen cheeks made her look, she threw down the flute, and laid a curse on anyone who picked it up.
f. Marsyas was the innocent victim of this curse. He stumbled upon the flute, which he had no sooner put to his lips t~an ~t played of itself, inspired by the memory of Athene’s music; and he went about Phrygia in Cybele’s train, delighting the ignorant peasants. They cried out that Apollo himself could not have made better music~ even on his lyre, and Marsyas was foolish enough not to contradict them. This, of course, provoked the anger of Apollo, who invited him to a contest, the winner of which should inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the loser. Marsyas consented, and Apollo impanelled the Muses as a jury. The contest proved an equal one, the Muses being charmed by both instruments, until Apollo cried out to Marsyas: ‘ I challenge you to do with your instrument as much as I can do with mine. Turn it upside down, and both play and sing at the same time.’
g. This, with a flute, was manifestly impossible, and Marsyas failed to meet the challenge. But Apollo reversed his lyre. and sang such delightful hymns in honour of the Olympian gods that the Muses could not do less than give the verdict in his fayour. Then, for all his prete/~ded sweetness, Apollo took a most cruel revenge on Marsyas: flaring him alive and nailing his skin to a pine (or, some say. to a planetree). It now hangs in the cavern whence the Marsyas River rises.4 1~. Afterwards, Apollo won a second musical contest, at which King Midas presided; this time he beat Pan. Becoming the acknowledged god of Music, he has ever since played on his seven-stringed lyre while the gods banquet. Another of his duties was once to guard the herds and flocks which the gods kept in Picria; but he later delegated this task to
i. Though Apollo refuses to bind himself in marriage, he has got many nymphs and mortal women with child; among them, Phthia, on whom he tithered Dorus and his brothers; and Thalia the Muse, on whom he lathered the Corybantes; and Coronis, on whom he la~hered Asclepius; and Aria, on whom he tithered Miletus; and Cyrene, on whom he lathered Aristaeus.6
j. He also seduced the nymph Dryope, who was tending her father’s flocks on Mount Oeta in the company of her friends, the Hamadryads. Apollo disguised himself as a tortoise, with which they all played and, when Dryope put him into her bosom, he turned into a hissing serpent, scared away the Hamadryads, and enjoyed her. She bore him Amphissus, who founded the city of Oeta and built a teml?le to his father; there Dryope served as priestess until, one day, the Hamadryads stole her away, and left a poplar in her place.7
k. Apollo was not invaria~ly successful in love. On one occasion he tried to steal Marpessa from Idas, but she remained true to her husband. On another, he pursued Daphne, the mountain nymph, a priestess of Mother Earth, daughter of the river Peneius in Thessaly; but when he overtook her, she cried out to Mother Earth who, in the nick of time, spirited her away to Crete, where she became known as Pasipha&
Mother Earth left a laurel-tree in her place, and from its leaves Apollo made a wreath to console himself?
l. His attempt on Daphne, it must be added, was no sudden impulse. He had long been in love with her, and had brought about the death of Iris rival, Leucippus, son of Oenomaus, who disguised himself as a girl and joined Daphne’s mountain revels. Apollo, know’rag of this by divination, advised the mountain nymphs to bathe naked, and thus make sure that everyone in their company was a woman; Leucipp~s’s imposture was at once discovered, and the nymphs tore him to pieces.9
m. There was also the case of the beautiful youth Hyadnthus, a Spartan prince, with whom not only the poet Thamyris fell in lovethe first man who ever wooed one of his own sex—but Apollo himself, the first god to do so. Apollo did not find Thamyris a serious rival; having overheard his boast that he could surpass the Muses in song, he maliciously reported it to them, and they at once robbed Thamyris of his sight, his voice, and his memory for harping. But the West Wind had also taken a fancy to Hyacinthus, and became, insanely jealous of Apollo, who was one day teaching the boy how to hurl a discus, when the West Wind caught it in mid-air, dashed it against Hyacinthus’s skull, and killed him. From his blood sprang the hyacinth flower, on which his initial letters are still to be traced.10
n. Apollo earned Zeus’s anger only once after the famous conspiracy to dethrone him. This was when his son Asclepius, the physician, had the temerity to resurrect a dead man, and thus rob Hades of a subject; Hades naturally lodged a complaint on Olympus, Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and Apollo in revenge killed the Cydopes. Zeus was enraged at the loss of his armourers, and would have banished Apollo to Tartarus for ever, had not Leto pleaded for his forgiveness and undertaken that he would mend his ways. The sentence was reduced to one year’s hard labour, which Apollo was to serve in the sheep-folds of King Admetus of Therae. Obeying Leto’s advice, Apollo not only carried out the sentence humbly, but conferred great benefits on Admetus. ~
o. Having learned his lesson, he thereafter preached moderation in all things: the phrases ‘Know thyself!’ and ‘Nothing in excess!’ were always on his lips. He brought the Muses down from their home os Mount Helicon to Delphi, tamed their wild frenzy, and led them in formal and decorous dances?
2. Hyginus: Fabula 240; Apollodorus: i. 4. I| Homeric’ Hyrrm t~ .4pollo 300—306; Scholiast on Apollordus Rhodius: ii. 706.
3. Aelian: Varia Historia iii. x; Plutarch: Greek Questions xz; 14,’hlt Oracles Are Silent x$; Pausanias: ii. 7. 7; x. 16. 3_a. Apollodorus: i. 4—I; Pausanias: ii. 30.3 and x. 6.5; Plutarch: Greek Questions ~2; Hyginus: Fabula 55; Homer: Odyssey xi. 57~ if-; Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 90 if.
4. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 58-9; Hyginus: Fabula 165: Apollodorus: ~ i. 4—2; Second Vatican Mythographer: x~$; Plmy: Natural
History xvi. 89; Xenophon: Anabasis i. xb.
5. Hyginus: Fabula 191; Homer: Iliad i. 603.
6. Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; i. 3—4; iii. xo. 3; iii. z. 2; Pausanias: x. ~7. 3.
Antoninus Liberalis: 32; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Dryope;
Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 325 if.
Apollodorus: i. 7—9; Plutarch: Agis 9.
Hyginus: Fabula 203; Pausanias: viii. 20. 2; x. 5—3; Parthenius: Erotica xS; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 6.
Homer: Iliad ii. 595-600; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 14;
ApoIlodorus: i. 3.3; Pausanias: iii. x. 3.
7.
8.
9.
IO. Apollodorus: ~ii. ~o. 4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ?~.
Homer: lIiad i. 603-4; Plutarch: On the P~/thian Oracles I?.
1. Apollo’s history is a confusing one. The Greeks made him the son of Leto, a goddcss known as Lot in Southern Palestine (see 14. 2), but he was also a god of the Hyperborcans (‘ beyond-the-North-Wind-men’), whom Hecataeus (Diodorus Siculus: ii. 47) clearly identified with the British, though Pindar (Pythian Odes x. 50-55) regarded them as Libyans. Delos was the centre of this Hyperborean cult which, it seems, extended south-eastward to Nabataea and Palestine, north-westward to Britain, and included Athens. Visits were consrandy exchanged between the states united in thi: cult (Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.).
2. Apollo, among the Hyperboreans, sacrificed hecatombs of asses (Pindar: loc. tit.), which identifies him with the ‘Child Horus’, whose defeat of his enemy Set the Egyptians annually celebrated by driving wild asses over a precipice (Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 30). Horus was avenging Set’s murder of his father Osiris—the sacred king, beloved of the Triple Moon-goddess Isis, or Lot, whom his tanist sacrificed at midsummer and midwinter, and of whom Horus was himself the reincarnation. The myth of Leto’s pursuit by Python corresponds with the myth of lsis’s pursuit by Set (during the seventy-two hottest days of the year). Moreover, Python is identified with Typhon,.the Greek Set (see 36. ~), in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius. The Hyperborean Apollo is, i~a fact, a Greek Horus.
3. But the myth has been given a political turn: Python is said to have been sent against Let6 by Hera, who had borne h~m parthenogenetically, to spite Zeus (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 305); and Apollo, after killing Python (and presumably also his mate Delphyne), seizes the oracular shrine of Mother Earth at Delphi-for Hera was Mother Earth, or
Delphyne, in her prophetic aspect. It seems that certain Northern Hellenes, allied with Thraco-Libyans, invaded Central Greece and the Peloponnese, where they were opposed by the pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Earth-goddess. but captured her chief oracular shrines. At Delphi, they destroyed the sacred oracular serpent—a similar serpent was kept in the Erechtheum at Athens (see 25. g)—and took over the oracle in the name of their god Apollo Smintheus. $minthetts (‘ mousy’), like Esmun the Canaanite god of healing, had a curative mouse for his emblem. The invaders agreed to identify him with Apollo, the Hyperborean Horus, worshipped by their allies. To placate local opinion at Delphi, regular funeral games were ~nstituted in honour of the dead hero Python. and his priestess was retained in office.
4. The Moon-goddess Brizo (‘soother’), of Delos, indistinguishable from Leto, may be identified with the Hyperborean Triple-goddess Brigit, who became Christianized as St Brigit, or St Bride. Brigit was patroness of all the arts, and Apollo followed her example. The attempt on Leto by the giant Tityus suggests an abortive rising by the mountaineers of Phocis against the invaders. 5—Apollo’s victories over Marsyas and Pan commemorate the Hellenic conquests of Phrygia and Arcadia, and the consequent supersession in those regions of wind instruments by stringed ones, except among the peasantry. Marsyas’s punishment may refer to the ritual flaying~ of a sacred king—as Athene stripped Pallas of his magical aegis (see 9. a)—or the removal of the ent~r› bark from an alder-shoot, to make a shepherd’s pipe, the alder being perso~ified as a god or demi-god (see 28. I and 57. ~ )—Apollo was claimed as an ancestor of the Dorian Greel~s, and of the Milcsians, who pard lure especial honours. The Corybantes, dancers at the Winter Solstice festival, were called his children by Thaha the Muse, because he was god of Music;
6. His pursuit of Daphne the Mountain-nymph, daughter of the river Peneros, and priestess of Mother Earth, refers apparently to the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene C bloody one’) was worshipped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads (see 46. 2 and 5~—~)—After suppressing the college—Plutarch’s account suggests that the priestesse~ fled to Crete, where the Moon-goddess was called Pas~pha~ (see 88. e)—Apollo took over the laurel which, afterwards, only the Pythoness might chew. Daphoene will have been mareheaded at Tempe, as at Phigalia (see ~6..5); Leucippus (‘white horse’) was the sacred king of the local horse cult, annually torn in pieces by the wild women, who bathed after his murder to purit~, themselves, not before (see 22. ~ and ~50. ~).
7. Apollo’s seduction of Dryope on Oeta perhaps records the local supersession of an oak cult by a cult of Apollo, to whom the poplar was sacred (see 4~. d); a~ does his seduction of Aria. His tortoise disguise is a reference to the lyre he had bought from Hermes {see ~7. d). Phthia’s name suggests that she was an autumnal aspect of the goddess. The unsuccessful attempt on Marpessa (‘snatcher’), seems to record Apollo’s failure to seize a Me~enia~ shrine: that of the Gram-goddess as Sow (see 74.4). Apollo’s serrarude to Admetus of Pherae may recall a historical event: the humiliation of the Apollonian priesthood in punishmenl: for their massacre of a pre-Hellenic smith-guild which had enjoyed Zeus’s protection.
8. The myth of Hyacinthus, which seems at first sight no more than a sentimental fable told to explain the mark on the Greek hyacinth {see 165.j and 2) concerns the Cretan Flower-hero Hyacinthus (see 159. 4), also apparently called Narcissus (see 85. ~), whose worship was introduced into Mycenaean Greece, and who named the late summer month of Hyacinthius in Cre~e, Rhodes, Cos, Theta, and at Sparta. Dorian Apollo usurped Hyacinthus’s name at Tarentum, where he had a hero tomb (Polybius: viii. 30); and at Amyclae, a Mycenaean city, another ‘tomb of Hyacinthus ‘ became the foundation of Apollo’s throne. Apollo was an immortal by this time, Hyacinthus reigned only for a season: his death by a discus recalls that of his nephew Acrisius (see 73.3)9—Coronis (‘crow’), mother of Asclepius by Apollo, was probably a rifle of Athene’s (see 25.5); but the Athenians always denied that she had children, and disguised the myth (see 50. b).
~0. In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy. astronomy, mathematics, medicine. and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lyre were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet (see 52. 8), given mystical significance. and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, whose Corinthian cult had been taken over by Solar Zeus; and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.
~l. Cicero, in his essay On the Nature of the Gods (iii. 23), makes Apollo son of Leto only the fourth of an ancient series: he distinguishes Apollo son of Hephaestus, Apollo the father of the Cretan Corybantes, and the Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws.
~2. Apollo’s killing of the Python is not, however, so simple a myth as at first appears, because the stone ornphalos on which the Pythoness sat was traditionally the tomb of the hero incarnate in the serpent, whose oracles she delivered (Hesychius sub Archus’s Mound; Varro: On the Latin Languages vii. 17). The Hellenic priest of Apollo usurped the functions of the sacred king who, legitimately and ceremonially, had always killed his predecessor, the hero. This is proved by the Stepteria rite recorded in Plutarch’s Why OraHes Are Silen! (~5). Every ninth year a hut representing a king’s dwelling was built on the threshing floor at Delphi and a night attack suddenly made on it by .. [here there is a gap in the account] .. The table of first-fruits was overturned, the hut set on fire, and the torch-men fled from the sanctuary without looking behind them. Afterwards the youth who had taken part in the deed went to Tempe for purification, whence he returned in triumph, crowned and carrying a laurel branch. ~3—The sudden concerted assault on the inmate of the hut recalls the mysterious murder of Romulus by his companions. It also recalls the yearly Buphouia sacrifice at Athens when the priests who had killed the Zeus—ox with a double-axe, fled without looking behind them (see 53.7); then ate the flesh at a commtmal feast, staged a mimic resurrection of the ox, and brought up the axe for trial on a charge of sacrilege.
14. At Delphi, as at Cnossus, the sacred king must have reigned until the ninth year (see 88.6). The boy went to Tempe doubtless because the Apollo cult had originated there.
ARTEMIS, Apollo’s sister, goes armed with bow and arrows and, hke him, has the power both to send plagues or sudden death among mortals, and to heal them. She is the protectress of little children, and of all sucking animals, but she also loves the chase, especially that of stags.
b. One day, while she was still a three-year-old child, her father Zeus, on whose knee she was sitting, asked her what presents she would like. Artemis answered at once: ‘Pray give me eternal virginity; as many names as my brother Apollo; a bow and arrows like his; the office of bringing light; a saffron hunting tunic with a red hem reaching to my knees; sixty young ocean nymphs, all of the same age, as my maids of honour; twenty river nymphs from Amnisus in Crete, to take care of my buskin~ and feed my hounds when I am not out shooting; all the mountains in the world; and, lasdy, any city you care to choose for me, but one will be enough, because I intend to live on mountains most of the time. Unfortunately, women in labour will often be invoking me, since my mother Leto carried and bore me without pains, and the Fates have therefore made me patroness of childbirth.’ ~
c. She stretched up for Zeus’s beard, and he smiled proudly, saying: ‘ With children like you, I need not fear Hera’s jealous anger ! You shall have all this, and more besides: not one, but thirty cities, and a share in many others, both on the mainland and in the archipehgo; and I
appoint you guardian of their roads and harbours.’ 2
d. Artemis thanked him, sprang from his knee, and went first to Mount Leucus in Crete, and next to the Ocean stream, where she chose numerous nine-year-old nymphs for her attendants; their mothers were delighted to let them go.3 On Hephaestus’s invitation, she then visited the Cyclopes on the Island of Lipara, and found them hammering away at a horse-trough for Poseidon. Brontes, who had been instructed to make whatever she wanted, took her on his knee; but, disliking his endearments, she tore a handful of hair from his chest, where a bald patch remained to the day of his death; anyone might have supposed that he had the mange. The nymphs were terrified at the wild appearance of the Cyclopes, and at the din of their smithy—well they might be, for whenever a little girl is disobedient her mother threatens her with Brontes, Arges, or Steropes. But Artemis boldly told them to abandon Poseidon’s trough for a while, and make her a silver bow, with a quiverful of arrows, in return for which they should eat the first prey she brought dovn~.4 With these weapons she went to Arcadia, where Pan was engaged in cutting up a lynx to feed his bitches and their whelps. He gave her three lop-cared hounds, two patti-coloured and one spotted, together capable of dragging live lions back to their kennels; and seven swift hounds from Sparta. S
e. Having captured alive two couple ośhorned hinds, she harnessed them to a golden chariot with golden bits, and drove north over Thrac’mn Mount Haemus. She cut her first pine torch on Mysian Olympus, and lit it at the cinders of a lightning-struck tree. She tried her silver bow four times: her first two targets were trees; her third, a wild beast; her fourth, a city of unjust men.6
f. Then she returned to Greece, where the Amnisiaa nymphs unyoked her hinds, rubbed them down, fed them on the same quickgrowing trefoil, from Hera’s pasture, which t~e steeds of Zeus eat, and watered them from golden trouglisy
g. Once the River-god A1pheius, son of Thetis, dared fall in love with Artemis and pursue her across Greece; but she came to Letrini in Elis (or, some say, as far as ~the island of Ortygia near Syracuse), where she daubed her face, and those of all her nymphs, with white mud, so that she became indistinguishable from the rest of the company. pheius was forced to retire, pursued by mocking laughter?
h. Artemis requires the same perfect chastity from her companions as she practises herself. When Zeus had seduced one of them, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis noticed that she was with child. Changing her into a bear, she shouted to the pack, and Callisto would have been hunted to death had she not been caught up to Heaven by Zeus who, later, set her image among the stars. But some say that Zeus himself changed Callisto into a bear, and that jealous Hera arranged for Artemis to chase her in error. Callisto’s child, Arcas, was saved, and became the ancestor of the Arcadians.9
i. On another occasion, Actaeon, son of Aristaeus, stood leaning against a rock near Orchomenm when he happened to see Artemis bathing in a stream not far off, and stayed to watch. Lest he should afterwards dare boast to his companions that she had displayed herself naked in his presence, she changed him into a stag and, with his own pack of fifty hounds, tore him to pieces.1O
1. Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis x if.
2. Ibid.: 26 if.
3. Ibid.: 40 if.
4. Ibid.: 47
5. Ibid.: 69 if.
6. Ibid.: xxo if.
7. Ibid.: 162 if.
8. Pausanias: vi. 22. 5; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes ii.
9. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. x; Apollodorus: ifi. 8.2.
10. Hyginus: Fabula 18~; Pausanias: ix. 2. 3.
1. The Maiden of the Silver Bow, whom the Greeks enrolled in the Olympian family, was the youngest member of the Artemis Triad, ‘Artemis’ being one more title of the Triple Moon-goddess; and had a right therefore to feed her hinds on trefoil, a symbol of trinity. Her silver bow stood for the new moon. Yet the Olympian Artemis was more than a Maiden. Elsewhere, at Ephesus, for instance, she was worshipped in her second person, as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort, and the date-palm (see ~4. a), stag, and bee (see 18.3) for her principal emblems. Her midwifery belongs, rather, to the Crone, as do her arrows of death; and the nine-year-old priestesses are a reminder that the moon’s death number is three times three. She recalls the Cretan ‘Lady of the Wild Things ‘, apparently the supreme Nymph-goddess of archaic totem societies; and the ritual bath in which Actaeon surprised her, like the horned hinds of her chariot (see 125. a) and the quails of Ortygia (see ~4.3), seems more appropriate to the Nymph than the Maiden. Actaeon was, it seems, a sacred king of the pre-Hellenic stag cult, tom to pieces at the end of his reign of fifty months, namely halfa Great Year; his co-king, or tanist, reigning for the remainder. The Nymph properly took her bath after, not before, the murder. There are numerous parallels to this ritual custom in Irish and Welsh myth, and as late as the first century A.D. a man dressed in a stag’s skiu was periodically chased and killed on the Arcadian Mount Lycaeum (Plutarch: Greek Questions 39). The hounds will have been white with red ears, like the ‘hounds of Hell’ in Cel~c mythology. There was a fifth horned hind which escaped Artemis (see ~25. a).
2. The myth of her pursuit by Alpheius seems modelled on that of his hopeless pursuit of Arethusa which turned her into a spring and him into a river (Pausanias: v. 7. 2), and may have been invented to account for the gypsum, or white clay, with which the~ priestesses of Artemis Alpheia at Letrini and Ortygia daubed tbeir faces in honour of the White Goddess. Alph denotes both whiteness and cereal produce: alśhos is leprosy; alphe is gain; alśhiton is pearl barley; Alśhito was the White Grain-goddess as Sow. Artemis’s most famous statue at Athens was called ‘the White-browed’ (Pausanias: i. 26. 4). The meatting of Artemis is doubtful: it may be ‘strong-[imbed’, from arternes; or ‘she who cuts up’, since the Spartans called her Artamis, from artao; or ‘the lofty convener’, from airo and themis; or the ‘themis’ syllable may mean ‘ water’, because the moon was regarded as the source of all water. 3. Ortygia, ‘Quail Island’, near Delos, was also sacred to Artemis (see 14. a).
4. The myth of Callisto has been told to account for the two small girls, dressed as she-bears, who appeared in the Attic festival of BrautonJan Artemis, and for the traditional connexion between Artemis and the Great Bear. But an earlier version of the myth may be presumed, in which Zeus seduced Artemis, although she first transformed herself into a bear and then daubed her face with gypsum, in an attempt to escape him. Artemis was, originally, the ruler of the stars, but lost them to Zeus.
5. Why Brontes had his hair plucked out is doubt ful; Callimachus may be playfully referring to some well-known picture of the event, in which the paint had worn away from the Cyclops’ chest.
6. As ‘Lady of Wild Things’, or patroness of all the totem dans, Artemis had been annually offered a living holocaust of totem beasts, birds, and plants, and this sacrifice survived in Classical time at Patrae, a Calydonian city (Pausanias: iv. 3~. 6); she was there called Artemis Laphria. At Messene a similar burnt sacrifice was offered to her by the Curetes, as totem-clan representatives (iv. 32. 9); and another is recorded fxom Hierapohs, where the victims were hung to the trees of an artificial forest inside the goddess’s temple (Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess 4~)7. The olive-tree was sacred to Athene, the date-palm to Isis and Lat. A Middle Minoan bead-seal in my possession shows the goddess standing beside a palm, dressed in a palm-leaf skirt, and with a small palm-tree held in her hand; she watches a New Year bull-calf being born from a datecluster. On the other side of the tree is a dying bull, evidently the royal bull of the Old Year.
HEPHAESTUS, the Smith-god, was so weakly at birth that his disgusted mother, Hera, dropped him from the height of Olympus, to rid herself of the embarrassment that his pitiful appearance caused her. He survived this misadventure, however, without bodily damage, because he fell into the sea, where Thetis and Enrynome were at hand to rescue him. These gentle goddesses kept him with them in an underwater grotto, where he set up his first smithy and rewarded their kindness by making them all sorts of ornamental and useful objects.x
One day, when nine years had passed, Hera met Thetis, who happened to be wearing a brooch of his workmanship, and asked: ‘My dear, where in the world did you find that wonderful jewel?’
Thetis hesitated before replying, but Hera forced the tru~ from her. At once she fetched Hephaestus back to Olympus, where she set him upin a much finer smithy, wit~ twenty bellows working day and night, made much of him, and arranged that he should marry Aphrodite.
b. Hephaestus became so far reconciled with Hera that he dared reproach Zeus himself for hanging her by the wrists from Heaven when she rebelled against him. But silence would have been wiser, because angry Zeus only heaved him down from Olympus a second time. He was a whole day failing. On striking the earth of the island of Lemnos, he broke both legs and, though immortal, had litde life left in his body when the islanders found Ibm. Afterwards pardoned and restored to Olympus, he could walk only with golden leg-supports.1
c. Hephaesms is ugly and ill-tempered, but has great power in his arms and shoul&n, and all his work is of matchless skill. He once made a set of golden mechanical women to help him in his smithy; they can even talk, and undertake the most difficult tasks he entrusts to them. And he owns a set of three-legged tables with golden wheels, ranged around his workshop, whid~ can run by themselves to a meefmg of the gods, and back again. s
x. Homer: Hiad xviii. 394-409.
2. Ibid.: i. 586-94.
3. Ibid.: xviii. 368 fE
1. Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name may be a worn-down form of hefnero-phaistos, ‘he who shines by day’ (i.e. the sun), whereas Athene was the moon-goddess,’ she who shines by night’, patroness ofsmithcraft and of all mechanical arts. It is not generally recognized that every Bronze Age tool, weapon, or utensil had magical properties, and that the smith was something of a sorcerer. Thus, of the three persons of the Brigit Moon-triad (see z~. 4), one presided o poets, another over smiths, the third over physicians. When the god~ has been dethroned the sn~ith is elevated to godhead. That the Smith-~ hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposely lan to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes. Bu hobbling partridge-dance was also performed in erotic orgies connec with the mysteries of smithcraft (see 92. 2) and, since Hephaestus 1 married Aphrodite, he may have been hobbled only once a year: at Spring Festival.
Metallurgy first reached Greece from the Aegean Islands. The impo~ tion of finely worked Helladic bronze and gold perhaps accounts for myth that Hephaestus was guarded in a Lemnian grotto by Thetis Eurynome, titles of the Sea-goddess who created the raftverse. The n years which he spent in the grotto show his subservience to the moon. ] fall, like that of Cephaim (see 89. j), Talos (see 9Z—b), Sciron (see 96 Iphitus (see ~ 35. b), and others, was the common fate of the sacred kin~ many parts of Greece when their reigns ended. The golden leg-supp› were perhaps designed to raise his sacred heel from the ground. 2. Hephaestus’s twenty three-legged tables have, it seems, much same origin as the Gasterocheires who built Tiryns (see 73.3), golden sun-disks with three legs, like the heraldic device of the Isle of M doubtless bordering some early icon which showed Hephaestus bei married to Aphrodite. They represent three-season years, and denote !~ngth of his reign; he dies at the beginning of the twentieth ye when a close approximation of solar and lunar time occurs; this cycle officially recognized at Athens only towards the close of the fifth cent~ B.c., but had been discovered several hundred years before (White G~ dess, pp. 284 and ~92). Hephaestu$ was connected with Vulcan’s fort in the volcanic Lipari islands because Lemnos, a seat of his worship, volcanic and a jet of natural aspbaltic gas which issued from the summit Mount Moschylus had burned steadfly for centuries (Tzetzes: On Ly phron 227; Hesychius sub Moschylus). A similar jet, described by Bish Methodius in the fourth century A.D., burned on Mount Lemnos Lycia and was still ahght in 180i. Hephaestus had a shrine on both th mountains. Lemnos (probably from leibein,’ she who pours out’) was name of the Great Goddess of this matriarchal island (Hecataeus, quo~ by Stephanus of Byzantium sub Lenmos—see 149. l).
T }~ o u G~ the priestesses of Demeter, goddess of the cornfield, initiate brides and bridegrooms into the secrets of the couch, she has no husband of her own. While still young and gay, she bore Core and the lusty Iacchus to Zeus, her brother, out ofwedlock.1 She also bore Plutus to the Titan Iasius, or Iasion, with whom she fell in love at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia. Inflamed by the nectar which flowed like water at the feast, the lovers slipped out 6f the house and lay together openly in a thrice-ploughed field. On their return, Zeus guessing from their demeanour and the mud on their arms and legs what they had been at, and enraged that Iasius should have dared to touch Demeter, struck him dead with a thunderbolt. But some say that lasius was killed by his brother Dardanus, or tom to pieces by his own horses.2
b. Demeter herself has a gentle soul, and Erysichthon, son of Tropias, wa~ one of the few men with whom she ever dealt harshly. At the head of twenty companions, Erysichthon dared invade a grove which the Pelasgians had planted for her at Dotium, and began cutting down the sacred trees, to provide timber for his new banqueting hall. Demeter assumed the form ofNicippe, prieste~ of the grove, and mildly ordered Erysichthon to desist. It was only when he threatened her with his axe that she revealed herself in splendour and condemned him to suffer perpetual hunger, however much he might eat. Back he went to dinner, and gorged all day at his parents’ expense, growing hungrier and thinner the more he ate, until they could no longer afford to keep him supplied with food, and he became a beggar in the streets, eating frith. Contrariwise, on Pandareus the Cretan, who ~tole Zeus’s golden dog and thus avenged her for the killing of Iasius, Demeter bestowed the royal gift of never suffering from the belly-ache.3
c. Demeter lost her gaiety for ever when young Core, afterwards called Persephone, was taken from her. Hades fell in love with Core, and went to ask Zeus’s leave to marry her. Zeus feared to offend his eldest brother by a downright refusal, but knew also that Demeter would not forgive him if Core were committed to Tartarus; he therefore answered politically that he could neither give nor withhold his consent. This emboldened Hades to abduct the girl, as she was picking flowers in a meadow—it may have been at Sicilian Enna; or at Attic Colonus; or at Hermione; or somewhere in Crete, or near Pisa, or near Lerna; or beside Arcadian Pheneus, or at Boeotian Nysa, or anywhere ~lse in the widely separated regions which Demeter visited in her wandering search for Core. But her own priests say that it was at Eleusis. She sought Core without rest for nine days and nights, neither eating nor dr’mking, and calling fruitlessly all the while. The only news she could get came from old Hecate, who early one morning had heard Core crying’ A rape! A rape !’ but, on hurrying to the rescue, found no sign of her.4
d. On the tenth day, after a disagreeable encounter with Poseidon among the herds of Oncus, Demeter came in disguise to Eleusis, where King Celeus and his wife Metaneira entertained her hospitably; and she was invited to remain as wet-nurse to Demoph06n, the newlyborn prince. Their lame daughter Ialnbe tried to console Demeter with comically lascivious verses, and the dry-nurse, old Baubo, persuaded her to drink barley-water by a jest: she groaned as if in travail and, unexpectedly, produced from beneath her skirt Demeter’s own son Iacchus, who leaped into his mother’s arms and kissed her.
e. ‘Oh, how greedily you drink!’ cried Abas, an elder son of Celeus’s, as Demeter gulped the pitcherful of barley-water, which was flavoured with mint. Demeter threw him a grim look, and he was metamorphosed into a lizard. Somewhat ashamed of herself, Demeter now decided to do Celeus a service, by making Demoph06n immortal. l~hat night she held him over the fire, to bum away his mortality. Metaneira, who was the daughter of Amphictyon, happened to enter the hall before the process was complete, and broke the spell; so DemophoBn died. ‘Mine is an unlucky house!’ Celeus complained, weeping at the fate of his two sons, and thereafter was called Dysaules. ‘ Dry your tears, Dysaules,’ said Demeter. ‘You st’ill have three sons, including Triptolemns on whom I intend to confer such great gifts that you will forget your double loss.’
f For Triptolemus, who herded his father’s cattle, had recognized Demeter and given her the news she needed: ten days before this his brothers Eumolpus, a shepherd, and Eubuleus, a swineherd, had been out in the fields, feeding their beasts, when the earth suddenly gaped open, engulfing Eubuleus’s swine before his very eyes; then, with a heavy thud of hooves, a chariot drawn by black horses appeared, and dashed down the chasm. The chariot-driver’s face was invisible, but hi~ fight arm was tighdy clasped around a shrieking girl. Eumolpus had been told of the event by Eubuleus, and made it the subject for ,a lament.
g. Armed with this evidence, Demeter summoned Hecate. Together they approached Helius, who sees everything, and forced him to admit that Hades had been the villain, doubtless with the connivance of his brother Zeus. Demeter was so angry that, instead of returning to Olympus. she continued to wander about the earth, forbidding the trees to yield fruit and the herbs to grow, until the race of men stood in danger of extinction. Zeus, ashamed to visit Demeter in person at Eleusis, sent her first a message by Iris (of which she took no notice), and then a deputation of the Olympian gods, with conciliatory gifts, begging her to be reconciled to his will. But she would not return to Olympus, and swore that the earth must remain barren until Core had been restored.
h. Only one course oF action remained for Zeus. He sent Hermes with a message to Hades: ‘If you do not restore Core, we are all undone!’ and with another to Demeter: ‘You may have your daughter again, on the single condition that she has not yet tasted the food of the dead.’
i. Because Core had refused to eat so much as a crust of bread ever śtnce her abduction. Hades was obliged to cloak his vexation, telling her mildly:’ My child, you seem to be unhappy here. and your mother weeps for you. 1 have therefore decided to send you home.’
j. Core’s tears ceased to flow, and Hermes helped her to mount his chariot. But, just as she was setting off for Eleusis. one of Hades’s gardeners, by name Ascalaphus, began to cry and hoot derisively.’ Having ~een the Lady Core.’ he said, ‘pick a pomegranate from a tree in your orchard, and eat seven seeds, I am ready to bear witness that she has tasted the food of the dead!’ Hades grinned, and told Ascalaphus to perch on the back of Hermes’s chariot.
k. At Eleusis, Demeter joyfully embraced Core; but, on hearing about the pomegranate, grew more dejected than ever, and said again: ‘I will neither return to Olympus, nor remove my curse from the land.’ Zeus then persuaded Rhea, the mother of Hades, Demeter, and himself, to plead with her; and a compromise was at last reached. Core should spend three months of the year in Hades’s company, as Queen of Tartarus, with the title of Persephone, and the remaining nine in Demeter’s. Hecate offered to make sure that this arrangement was kept, and to keep corotant watch on Core.
l. Demeter finally consented to return home. Before leaving Eleusis, she instructed Triptolemus, Enmol?us, and Celeus (together with Diocles, ICing of Fherae, who had been assiduously searching for Core all this while) in her worship and mysteries. But she punished Ascalaphus for his tale-bearing by pushing him down a hole and covering it with an enormous rock, from which he was finally released by Heracles; and then she changed him into a short-cared owl.s She also rewarded the Phonearians of Arcadia, in whose house she rested after Poseidon had outraged her, with all kinds of gram, but forbade them to sow beans. One Cyan~ites was the first who dared do so; he has a shrine by the river Cephissus.6
m. Triptolemus she supplied with seed-corn, a wooden plough, and a chariot drawn by serpents; and sent him all over the world to teach mankmd the art of agriculture. But first she gave him lessons on the Rarian Plato, which is why some call him the son of King Rarus. And to Phytalus, who had treated her kindly on the banks of the Cephissus, she gave a fig-tree, the first ever seen in Attica, and taught him how to cultivate it.7
1. Aristophanes: Frogs 338; Orphic Hymn li.
2. Homer: Odyssey v. 125-8; Diodorus Sictrim: v. 49; Hesiod:
Theogony 969 if.
1. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Hyginus: Fabula 250; Callimachit~: Hymn to Demeter 34 fl.; Antonmus Liberalis: Transformations ~ x: Pausanias: x. 30. I. 4—Hyginus: Fabula ~46; Diodorus Sicaxius: v. 3; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus ~ 590: Apollodorus: L 5—x; Scholiast on Hesiod’s Theogony 9~4; Pau~samas: vi. zt. ~ and i. 38.5; Conon: Narrations 15; Homeric Hymn to Demeter 17.
5. Apollodorus: i. 5. x-3 and t2; Homeri~ Hymn to Demeter 398 ff—and 445 if6. Pausanias: viii. ~5—x and i. 37—37. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 231-74; Apol]odorus: i. 5. 2; Orphic Fragment 50, Hyginus: Fabula ~46; Ovid: Metamorphoses v. 450563 and Fasti iv. 614; Nicander: Ther~a~a; Pausanias: i. ~4—;~ and $7—2.
1. Core. Persephone, and Hecate were, clearly, the Goddess in Triad as Maiden, Nymph. and Crone, at a time when only women practised the mysteries of agriculture. Core stands for the green corn, Persephone for d~e ripe ear, and Hecate for the harvested corn—the’ carline wife’ of the English countryside. But Demeter was the goddess’s general title, and Persephone’s name has been given to Core, which confuses the story. The myth of Demcter’s adventure in the thrice-ploughed field points to a fertility rite, which survived until recently in the Balkans: the cornpriestess will have openly ~ouplcd with the sacred king at the autunm sowing in order to ensure a good harvest. In Attica the field was first ploughed in spring; then, after the summer harvest, cross-ploughed with a lighter share; finally, when sacrifices had been offered to the Tillagegods, ploughed again in the original direction during the autumn month of Pyanepsion, as a preliminary ro sowing (Hesiod: Works and Days 432-3,460, 462; Plutarch: On [sis and Osiris 69; .Against Colores 22). 2. Persephone (fromphero andphonos, ‘she who brings destruction’), also called Persephatta at Athens (from piersis and ephapto, ‘she who fixes destruction’) and Proserpina (‘ the &arful one’) at Rome was, it seems, a title of the Nymph when she sacrificed the sacred king. The title’ Hecate’ (‘one hundred’) apparently refers to the hundred lunar months of his reign, and to the hmldrcdfold harvest. The king’s death by a thunderbolt, or by the teeth of horses, or at the hands of the tamst, was his common fate hi primitive Greece.
3. Core’s abduction by Hades forms part of the myth in which the Hellenic trinity of gods forcibly marry the pre-Hellenic’Triple-goddessZeus, Hera; Zeus or Poseidon, Demeter; Hades, Core—as in Irish myth Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba marry the Triple-goddess Eire, Fodhla, and Banbha (see 7—6 and 16. ~). It refers to male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in primitive times. Thus the incident of Demeter’s refusal to provide corn for mankind is only another version of Ino’s conspiracy to destroy Athamas’s harvest (see 70 c). Further, the Core myth accounts for the winter burial of a female corn-puppet, which was uncovered in the early spring and found to be sprouting: this pre-Hellenic custom survived in the countryside in Classical times, and is filustrated by vase-paintings of men freeing Core from a mound of earth with mattocks, or breaking open Mother Earth’s head with axes.
4. The story of Erysichthon, son of Tropias, is moral anecdote: among the Greeks, as among the Latim and early Irish, the fellrag of a sacred grove carried the death penalty. But a desperate and useless hunger for food, which the Elizabethans called ‘the wolf’, would not be an appropriate punishment for tree-felling, and Erysichthon’s name—also borne by a son of Cecrops the patriarchalist and introducer of barley-cakes (see 25. d)—means ‘earth-rearer’, which suggests that his real crime was daring to plough without Demeter’s consent, like Athamas. Pandareus’s steali~g of the golden dog suggests Cretan intervention m Greece, when the Achaeans tried to reform agricultural ritual. This dog, taken from the Earth-goddess, seems to have been the visible proof of the Achaean High King’s independence of her (see 134. ~).
$. The myths of Hylas (‘of the woodland’-see 150. ~), Adonis (see ~8. 7), LitTerses (see 136. e), and Linus (see 147. ~) describe the annual mourning for the sacred king, or his boy-surrogate, sacrificed to placate the goddess of vegetation. This same surrogate appears in the legend of Triptolemus, who rode in a serpent-drawn chariot and carried sacks of corn, to symbolize that his death brought wealth. He was also Ptutus (‘ wealth ‘), begotten in the ploughed field, from whom Hades’s euphemistic title ‘Pluto’ is borrowed. Triptolemus (triśtolmaios, ‘thrice darh~g ‘) may be a title awarded the sacred king for having three times dared to plough the field and couple with the corn-priestess. Celeus, Diocles, and Eumolpus, whom Demeter taught the art of agriculture, represent priestly heads of the Amphictyonic League—Metaneira is described as Amplfictyon’s daughter—who honoured her at Eleusis.
6. It was at Eleusis (‘advent’), a Mycenaean city, that the great Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated, in the month called Boedro~ion (‘running for help’). Demeter’s ecstatic initiates symbolically consummated her love affair with Iasius, or Triptolemus, or Zeus, in an inner recess of the shrine, by working a phallic object up and down a woman’s top-boot; hence Eleusis suggests a worn—down derivative of Eilythuies, ‘ [the temple] of her who rages in a lurking place’. The mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, then entered with joyful shouts, and disptaycd a winnowing-fan, contah~mg the child Branus, son of Brimo (‘a~gry one’), the immediate fruit of this ritual marriage. Brimo was a ti~ic of Demeter’s, and Brimus ~ synonym for Plutus; but his celebrants knew him best as Iacchus—from the riotous hymn, the Iacchus, which was sung on the sixth day of the Mysteries during a torchlight procession from Demeter’s temple.
7. Eumolpus represents the singing shepherds who brought in the child; Triptolemus is a cowherd, in service to Io the Moon-goddess as cow (see 56. ~), who watered the seed-corn; and Eubuleus a swineherd, in service to the goddess Marpessa (see 74.4 and 96. g), Phorcis, Choerc, or Cerdo, the Sow-goddess, who made the corn sprout. Eubuleus was the fzrst to reveal Core’s fate, because ‘swineherd’, in early European myth, means soothsayer, or magician. Thus Eumaeus (‘ searching well’), Odysseus’s swineherd (see X7L a), is addressed as dios (‘god4ike’); and though, by Classical times, swineherds had long ceased to exercise tl~cir prophetic art, swine were still sacrificed to Demeter and Persephone by being thrown down natural chasms. Eubuleus is not said to have benefited from Demcter’s instruction, probably because her cult as Sow-goddess had been suppressed at Eleusis.
8. ‘Rarus’, whether it means ‘an abortive child’, or ‘a womb’, is an inappropriate name for a king, and will have referred to the womb Corn-mother from which the corn sprang.
9. Iarabe and Baubo personify the obscene songs, in iambic metre, which were sung to relieve emotional tension at the Eleusinian Mysteries; but Iambe, Demeter, and Baubo form the familiar triad of maiden, nymph, and crone. Old nurses in Greek myth nearly always stand for the goddess as Crone. Abas was turned into a lizard, because lizards are found in the hottest and driest places, and can live without water; this is a moral anecdote told to teach children respect for their elders and reverence for the gods.
~0. The story of Demeter’s attempt to make Demopho~3n immortal is paralleled in the myths of Medea (see z$6. a) and Thetis (see 81. r). It refers, partly, to the widespread primitive custom of’saining’ children against evil spirits w~th sacred fire carried around them at birth, or with a hot griddle set under them; partly to the custom of burning boys to death, as a vicarious sacrifice for the sacred king (see 92. 7), and so con~ ferring immortality on them. Celeus, the name of Demopho~3n’s father, can mean ‘burner’ as well as ‘woodpecker’ or ‘sorcerer’.
~ t. A primitive taboo rested on red-coloured food, which might be offered to the dead only (see ~70. 5); and the pomegranate was supposed to have sprung—like the eight-petalled scarlet anemone—from the blood of Adonis, or Tammuz (see xS. 7)—The seven pomegranate seeds represent, perhaps, the seven phases of the moon during which farmers wait for the green corn-shoots to appear. But Persephone eating the pomegranate is originally Sheol, the Goddess of Hell, devouring Tamnauz; while Ishtar (Sheol herself ha a different guise) weeps to placate his ghost. Hera, as a former Death-goddess, also held a pomegranate. ~2. The ascalaphos, or short-eared owl, was a bird of evil omen; and the fable of his tale-bearing is told to account for the noisiness of owls in November, before the three winter months of Core’s absence begin. Heracles released Ascalaphus (see ~ 34. d).
~$. Demeter’s gift of the fig to Phytalus, whose family was a leading one in Attica (see 97. a), means no more than that the practice of figcaprification—pollcnizing the domestic tree with a branch of the wild one—ceased to be a female prerogative at the same time as agriculture. The taboo on the planting of beans by men seems to have survived later than tl~at on grain, because of the close connexion between beans and ghosts. In Rome beans were thrown to ghosts at the All Souls’ festival, and if a plant grew from one of these, and a woman ate its beans, she would be impregnated by a ghost. Hence the Pythagoreans abstained from beans lest they might deny an ancestor his chance of reincarnation. ~4. Demeter is said to have reached Greece by way of Crete, landing at Thoricus in Attica (Hymn to Demeter t23). This is probable: the Cretans had established themselves in Atfzca, where they first worked the silver mines at Laureium. Moreover, Eleusis is a Mycenaean site, and l)iodorus $iculus (v. 77) says that rites akin to the Eleusiman were performed at Cnossus for all who cared to attend, and that (v. 79) according to the Cretans all rites of initiation were invented by their ancestors. ] Demeter’s origin is to be looked for in Libya.
~5. The flowers which, according to Ovid, Core was picking v~
poppies. An image of a goddess with poppy-heads in her headdress, found at Gazi in Crete; another goddess on a mould from Palaioka~, holds poppies in her hand; and on the gold ring from the Acrop Treasure at Mycenae a seated Demeter gives three poppy-heads t standing Core. Poppy-seeds were used as a condiment on bread, ~ poppies are naturally associated with Demeter, since they grow in co fields; but Core picks or accepts poppies because of their soporific qu ties, and because of their scarlet colour which promises resurrection a: death (see 27. ~2). She is about to retire for her annual sleep.
ATI-I~N~ invented the flute, the trumpet, the earthenware pot, plough, the rake, the ox-yoke, the horse-bridle, the chariot, and ship. She first taught the science of numbers, and all women’s arts, s~ as cooking, weaving, and spinning. Although a goddess of war, gets no pleasure from battle, as Ares and Eris do, but rather from settl disputes, and upholding the law by pacific means. She bears no arm time of peace and, if ever she needs any, will usually borrow a set fr, Zeus. Her mercy is great: when the judges’ votes are equal in a crimi trial at the Areiopagus, she always gives a casting vote to liberate accused. Yet, once engaged in battle, she never loses the day, e~ against Are, himself, being better grounded in tactics and strategy d he; and wise captains always approach her for advice.x
b. Many gods, Titans, and giants would gladly have mart Athene, but she has repulsed all advances. On one occasion, in course of the Trojan War, not wishing to borrow arms from Zeus, ~a had declared himself neutral, she asked Hephaestm to make her a se~ her own. Hephaestus refused payment, saying coyly that he wol undertake the work for love; and when, missing the implication these words, she entered the smithy to watch him beat out the red-] metal, he suddenly turned about and tried to outrage her. Hephaest who does not often behave so grossly, was the victim of a malicious joke: Poseidon had just informed him that Athene was on her way t~ the smithy, with Zeus’s consent, hopefully expecting to have violent love made to her. As she tore herself away, Hephaestus ejaculated against her thigh, a little above the knee. She wiped off t~e seed with a handful of wool, which she threw away in disgust; it fell to the ground near Athens, and accidentally fertilized Mother Earth, who was on a visit them. Revolted at the prospect of bearing a child which Hephaesms had tried to father on Athene, Mother Earth declared that she would accept no respomibility for its upbringing.
c. ‘Very well,’ said Athene,’ I will take care of it myself.’ So she took charge of the infant as soon as he was born, called him Erichthonius and, not wishing Poseidon to laugh at the success of his practical joke, hid him in a sacred basket; this she gave to Aglauros, eldest daughter of the Athenian King Cecrops, with orders to guard it carefully.2
d. Cecrops, a son of Mother Earth and, like Erichthonius—whom some suppose to have been his father—part man, part serpent, was the first king to recognize paternity. He married a daughter of Actaeus, the earliest King of Attica. He also instituted monogamy, divided Attica into twelve communities, built temples to Athene, and abolished certain bloody sacrifices in fayour of sober barley—cake offerings.3 His wife was named Agraulos; and his three daugl~ters, Aglauros, Herse, and Pandrosos, lived in a three-roomed house on the Acropolis. One everting, when the girls had returned from a festival, carrying Athene’s sacred baskets on their heads, Hermes bribed Aglauros to give him access to Herse, the youngest of the t~ree, with whom he had fallen violently in love. Aglauros kept Hermes’s gold, but did nothing to earn it, because Athene had made her jealous of Herse’s good fortune; so Hermes strode angrily into the house, turned Aglauros to stone, and had his will of Herse. After Herse had borne Hermes two sons, Cephalus, the beloved of Eos, and Ceryx, the first herald of the Eleusinian Mysteries, she and Pandrosos and their mother Agraulos were curious enough to peep beneath the lid of the basket which Aglauros had cardled. See~g a child with a serpent’s tail for legs, they screamed in fear and, headed by Agraulos, leaped from the Acropolis.4
e. On learning of this fatality, Athene was so grieved that she let fall the enormous rock which she had been carrying to the Acropolis as an additional fortification, and it became Mount Lycabettus. As for the crow that had brought her the news, she changed its colour from white to black, and forbade all crows ever again to visit the Acropolis. Erichthonius then took refuge in Athene’s aegis, where she reared him so tenderly that some mistook her for his mother. Later, he became King of Athens, where he instituted the worship of Athene, and taught his fellow-citizens the use of silver. His image was set among the stars as the constellation Auriga, since he had introduced the four-horse chariot.s fi Another, very different, account of Agraulos’s death is current: namely that once, when an assault was being launched against Athens, she threw herself from the Acropolis, in obedience to an oracle, and so saved the day. This version purports to explain why all young Athenians, on first taking up arms, visit the temple of Agraulos and there dedicate their lives to the city.6
g. Athene, though as modest as Artemis, is far more generous.
When Teiresias, one day, accidentally surprised her in a bath, she laid her hands over his eyes and blinded him, but gave him inward sight by way of a compensation.?
h. She is not recorded to have shown petulant jealousy on more than a single occasion. This is the story. Arachne, a princess of Lydian Colophon—famed for its purple dye—was so skilled in the art of weaving that Athene herself could not compete with her. Shown a cloth into which Arachne had woven illustrations of Olympian love affairs, the goddess searched closely to find a fault but, unable to do so, tore it up in a cold, vengeful rage. When the terrified Arachne hanged herself from a rafter, Athene turned her into a spider—the insect she hates most—and the rope into a cobweb, up wlfich Arachne climbed to safety.s
2. Tzet, zes: On Lycophron 520; Hesychius sub Hippia; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iv. 402; Pindar: Olympian Odes xiii. 79; Livy: vii. 3; Pausanias: i. 24. 3, etc.; Homer: Iliadi. 199 if.; v. 736; v. 840863; xxi. 391-422; Aeschylus: Eumenides 7532. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 13; Apollodorus: iii. 14. 6; Hyginus: Fabula ~ 66.
3. Pausanias: i. 5.3; viii. 2. x; Apollodorus: iii. 14. z; Strabo: ix. ~. 20; Aristophanes: Plutus 773; Athenaeus: p. 555c; Eustathius: On Homer p. x 156; Parian Marble: lines 2-4.
4. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 3 and 6; Inscriptiones Graecae xiv. 1389; Hygiuus: Fabula 166.
5. Antigonus Carystius: ~2; CalIimachus: Hecale i. 2. 3; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vii. 24; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 13; Fabula 274; Apollodorus: iii. 14. x. Suldas and Hesyckius sub Agraulos; Plutarch: Alcibiades ~ 5. 7. Callimachus: The Bathing of Pallas.
8. Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. ~-145; Virgil: Georgics iv. 246. ~. The Athenians made their goddess’s maidenhood symbolic of the dty’s invincibility; and therefore disguised early myths of her outrage by Poseidon (see ~ 9—2), and Boreas (see 48.1 ); and denied that Erichthonius, Apollo, and Lychnus (‘lamp’) were her sons by Hephaestus. They derived ‘Erichthonius’ from either erion, ‘wool’, or eris, ‘strife’, and chthonos, ‘earth’, and invented the myth of his birth to explain the presence, in archaic pictures, of a serpent-child peeping from the goddess’s aegis. Poseidon’s part in the birth of Erichthonius may originally have been a simpler and more direct one; why else should Erichthonius introduce the Poseidonian four-horse chariot into Athens.1 2. Athene had been the Triple-goddess, and when the central person, the Goddess as Nymph, was suppressed and myths relating to her transferred to Aphrodite, Oreithyia (see 48. b), or Alcippe (see t9. b), there remai,~ed the Maiden clad in goat-skins, who specialized in war (see 8. s), and the Crone, who inspired oracles and presided over all the arts. Ericl~thonius is perhaps an expanded form of Erechtheus (see 47—1), meaning ‘from the land of hcather’ (see 18. 1) rather than ‘much earth’, as is usually said: the Athenians represented him as a serpent with a human head, because he was the hero, or ghost, of the sacrificed king who made the Crone’s wishes known. In this Crone-aspect, Athene was attended by an owl and a crow. The andent royal family of Athens claimed descent from Erichthonius and Erechtheus, and called themselves Erechtheids; they used to wear golden serpents as amulets and kept a sacred serpent in the Erechtheum. But Erichthonius was also a procreative wind from the heather-clad mountains, and Athene’s aegis (or a replica) was taken to all newly married couples at Athens, to ensure their fertility (Suidas st~b Aegis).
3. Some of the finest Cretan pots are known to have been made by women, and so originally, no doubt, were all the useful instruments invented by Athene; but in Classical Greece an artisan had to be a man. Silver was at first a more valuable metal than gold, since harder to refine, and sacred to the moon; Periclean Athens owed her pre-eminence largely to the rich silver mines at Laureium first worked by the Cretans, which allowed her to import food and buy allies.
4. The occasion on which Cecrops’s daughters leaped from the Acropolis may have been a Hellenic capture of Athens, after which an attempt was made to force monogamy on Athene’s priestesses, as in the myth of Halyrrhothius (see 19. b). They preferred death to dishonour—hence the oath taken by the Athenian youths at Agraulos’s shrine. The other story of Agraulos’s death is merely a moral anecdote: a warning against the violation of Athene’s mysteries. ‘Agraulos’ was one more title of the Moon-goddess: agraulos and its transliteration aglauros mean much the same thing, agraulos being a Homeric epithet for shepherds, and agIauros (like herse and pandrosos) referring to the moon as the reputed source of the dew which refreshed the pastures. At Athens girls went out under the full moo~ at midsummer to gather dew—the same custom survived in England until the last century—for sacred purposes. The fe~tival was called the Hersephor/a, or ‘dew-gathering’; Agraulos or Agraule was, in fact, a title of Athene herself, and Agraule is said to have been worshipped in Cyprus until late times (Porphyry: On VeśetarianLvrn 30) with human sacrifices. A gold ring from Mycenae shows three priestesses advancing towards a temple; the two leaders scatter dew, the third (presumably Agraulos) has a branch tied to her elbow. The ceremony perhaps originated in Crete. Hermes’s seduction of Herse, for which he paid Aglauros in gold, must refer to the ritual prostitution of priestesses before an image of the goddess—Aglauros turned to stone. The sacred baskets carried on such occasions will have contained phaliic snakes and similar orgiastic objects. Ritual prostitution by devotees of the Moongoddess was practised in Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Asia Minor, and Palestine. 5—Athene’s expulsion of the crow is a mythic variant of Cronus’s banishment—Cronus means ‘crow’ (see 6. 2)—the triumph, in fact, of Olympianism, with the introduction of which Cecrops, who is really Ophion-Boreas the Pelasgian demiurge (see ~. ~), has here been wrongly credited. The crow’s change of colour reca7~ls the name of Athene’s Welsh counterpart: Branwen, ‘white crow’, sister to Bran (see 57. ~). Athene was, it seems, tified ‘Coronis ‘.
6. Her vengeance on Arachne may be more than just a pretty fable, if it records an early commercial rivalry between the Athenians and the Lydio-Carian thalassocrats, or sea-rulers, who were of Cretan origin. Numerous seals with a spider emblem which have been found at Cretan Miletus—the mother city of Carian Miletus mad the largest exporter of dyed woollens in the ancient world—suggest a public textile industry operated there at the beginning of the second millennium B.c. For a while the Milesians controlled the profitable Black Sea trade, and had an entrep~t at Naucratis in Egypt. Athene had good tearan to be jealous of the spider.
7. An ~pparent contradiction occurs in Homer. According to the Catalogue of the Ships (Iliad ii. 547 if.), Athene set Erechtheus down in her rich temple at Athens; but, according to the Odyssey (vii. 80), she goes to Athens and enters his strong house. The fact was that the sacred king had his own quarters in the Queen’s palace where the goddess’s image was kept. There were no temples in Crete or Mycenaean Greece, only domestic shrines or oracular cave~.
SEVERAL powerful gods and goddesses of Greece have never been enrolled among the Olympian Twelve. Pan, for instance, a humble fellow, now dead, was content to live on earth in rural Arcadia; and Hades, Persephone, and Hecate know that their presence is unwelcome on Olympus; and Mother Earth is far too old and set in her ways to accommodate herself to the family life of her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.
b. Some say that Hermes fathered Pan on Dryope, daughter of Dryops; or on the nymph Oeneis; or on Penelope, wife of Odysseus, whom he visited in the form of a ram; or on Amaltheia the Goat.; He is said to have been so ugly at birth, with horns, beard, tail, and goatlegs, that his mother ran away from him in fear, and Hermes carried him up to Olympus for the gods’ amusement. But Pan was Zeus’s foster-brother, and therefore far older than Hermes, or than Penelope, on whom (others say) he was fathered by all the suitors who wooed her during Odysseus’s absence. Still others make him the son of Cronus and Rhea; or of Zeus by Hybris, which is the least improbable account.2
c. He lived in Arcadia, where he guarded flocks, herds, and beehives, took part in the revels of the mountain-nymphs, and helped hunters to find their quarry. He was, on the whole, easy-going and lazy, loving nodting better than his afternoon sleep, and revenged himself on those who disturbed him with a sudden loud shout from a grove, or grotto, which made the hair bristle on their heads. Yet the Arcadians paid him so little respect that, if ever they returned em}~tyhanded after a long day’s hunting, they dared scourge him with squills.3
d. Pan seduced several nymphs, such as Echo, who bore him Iynx and came to an unlucky end for love of Narcissus; and Eupheme, nurse of the Muses, who bore him Crotus, the Bowman in the Zodiac. He also boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus’s drunken Maenads.4
e. Once he tried to violate the chaste Pitys, who escaped him only by being metamorphosed into a fir-tree, a branch of which he afterwards wore as a chaplet. On another occasion he pursued the chaste Syrinx from Mount Lycaeum to the River Ladon, where she became a reed; there, Since he could not distinguish her from among all the rest, he cut several reeds at random, and made them into a Panopipe. His greatest success in love was the seduction of Selene, which he accomplished by disguising his hairy black goatishness with well-waslied white fleeces. Not realiz’mg who he was, Selene consented to ride on his back, and let him do as he pleased with her. S
f. The Olympian gods, while despising Pan for his simplicity and love of riot, exploited his powers. Apollo wheedled die art of prophecy from him, and Hermes copied a pipe which he had let fall, claimed it as his own invention, and sold it to Apollo.
g. Pan is the only god who has died in our time. The news of his death came to one Thamus, a sailor in a ship bound for Italy by way of the island of Paxi. A divine voice shouted across the sea: ‘Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead!’, which Thamus did; and the news was greeted from the shore with groans and laments.6
x. Homeric Hymn to Pan 34 if-; Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls i. 3; Herodotus: ii. 145; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 27.
2. Homeric Hymn to Pan: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Georgics i. ~6; Duris, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 772; Apollodorus: i. 4. ~; Scholiast on Aeschylus’s Rhesus 30.
3. Theocritus: Idylls i. ~6; Euripides: Rhesus 36; Hesychius sub Agrcus; Theocritus: Idylls vii. I07.
4. Ovid: Metamorphoses hi. 356—40x; Hyginus: Fabula 224; Poetic Astronomy ii. 27.
5. Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods xxii. 4; Ovid: Metamorphoses L 694-712; Philargyrius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 392.
6. Plutarch: Why Oracles Are Silcnt ~7.
1. Pan, whose name is usually derived from paein, ‘ to pasture ‘, stands for the ‘devil’, or ‘upright man ‘, of the Arcadian fcrtihty cult, which closely resembled the witch cult of North-western Europe. This man, dressed in a goat-skiu, was the chosen lover of the Maenads during their drunken orgies on the high moua~taius, and sooner or later paid for his privilege with dcath.
2. The accounts of Pan’s birth vary greatly. Since Hermes was the power resident in a phallic stone which formed the centre of these orgies (see ~4—~), the shepherds described their god Pan as his son by a woodpecker, a bird whose tapping is held to portend the welcome summer rain. The myth that he fathered Pan on Oeneis is self-exphnatory, though the original Maenads used other intoxicants than wine (see 27. ~); and the name of his reputed mother, Penelope (‘ with a web over her face’), suggests that the Maenads wore some form of war paint for their orgies, recalling the stripes on the penelope, a variety of duck. Plutarch says (On the Dela),s of Divine Punishment ~~). that the Maenads who killed Orpheus were tattooed by their husbands as a punishment (see 28.f); and a Maenad whose legs and arms are tattooed with a webbed pattern appears on a vase at the British Museum (Catalogue E. 30x). Hermes’s visit to Penelope in the form of a ram—the ram devil is as common in the North-western witch cult as the goat—her impregnation by all the suitors (see 171. l), and the claim that Pan had coupled with every one of the Maenads refers to the promiscuous nature of the revels in honour of the Fir-goddess Pitys or Elate (see 78. l). The Arcadian mountaineers were the most primitive in Greece (see x. 5), and their more civilized neighbouts professed to despise them.
$. Pan’s son, the wryneck, or make-bird, was a spring migrant employed in erotic charms (see 56. ~ and xSz. 2). Squills contain an irritant poison—valuable against mice and rats—and were used as a purge and diuretic before taking part in a ritual act; thus squill came to symbolize the removal of evil influences (Pliny: Natural History xx. 39), and Pan’s image was scourged with squill if game were scarce (see xog. ~o).
4. His seduction of Selene must refer to a moonlight May Eve orgy, in wl~ch the young Queen of the May rode upon her upright man’s back before celebrating a greenwood marriage with him. By this time the ram cult had superseded the goat cult in Arcadia (see 27.
.5. The Egyptian Thamus apparently mSsheard the ceremonial lament Thamus Pan-t~:egas 7Ythn?ce (‘the all-great Tammuz is dead !’) for the message: ‘Thamus, Great Pan is dead ? At any rate, Plutarch, a priest at Delphi in the latter half of the first century a.1), believed and published it; yet when Pausanias made his tour of Greece, about a century later, he found Pan’s shrines, altars, sacred caves, and sacred mountains still much fxequented.
/kX Hera’s orders the Titans seized Zeus’s newly-born son Dionysus, a horned child crowned with serpents and, despite his transformations, tore him into shreds. These they boiled in a cauldron, while a pomesprouted from the soil where his blood had fallen; but, rescued and reconstituted by his grandmother Rhea, he came to life again. Persephone, now entrusted with his charge by Zeus, brought him to King Athamas of Otchomenus and his wife lno, whom she persuaded to rear the child in the women’s quarters, disguised as a girl. But Hera could not be deceived, and punished the royal pair with m~dness, so that Athamas killed their son Learchus, mistaking him for a stag.1
b. Then, on Zeus’s instructions, Hermes temporarily transformed Dionysus into a kid or a ram, and presented him to the nymphs Macris, Nysa, Erato, Bromie, and Bacche, of HeliconJan Mount Nysa. They tended Dionysus in a cave, cosseted him, and fed him on honey, for which service Zeus subsequently placed their images among the stars, naming thcm the Hyades. It was on Mount Nysa that Dionysus invented wine, for which he is chiefly celebrated.2 When he grew to manhood Hera recognized him as Zeus’s son, despite the effeminacy to which his education had reduced him, and drove him mad also. He went wandering all over the world, accompanied by his tutor Silenus and a wild army of Satyrs and Maenads, whose weapons were the ivy-twined staff tipped with a pine-cone, called the thyrsus, and swords and serpents and fear-’maposing bullroarers. He sailed to Egypt, bringing the vine with him; and at Pharos King Proteus received him hospitably. Among the Libyans of the Nile Delta, opposite Pharos, were certain Amazon queens whom Dionysus invited to march with him against the Titans and restore King Ammon to the kingdom from which he had been expelled. Dionysus’s defeat of the Titans and restoration of ICing Ammon was the earliest of lxis many military successes.a
c. He then turned east and made for India. Coming to the Euphrates, he was opposed by the King of Damascus, whom he fiayed alive, but built a bridge across the river with ivy and vine; after which a tiger, sent by his father Zeus, helped him across the river Tigris. He reached India, having met with much opposition by the way, and conquered the whole country, which he taught the art ofviniculture, also giving it laws and founding great cities.4
d. On his return he was opposed by the Amazons, a horde of whom he chased as far as Ephesus. A few took sanctuary in the Temple of Artemis, where their descendants are still living; odaers fled to Samos, and Dionysus followed them in boats, killing so many that the battlefidd is called Panhaema. Near ?floeurn some of the elephants which he had brought from India died, and their bones are still pointed out. S
e. Next, Dionysus returned to Europe by way of Phrygia, where his grandmother Rhea purified him of the many murders he had committed during his madness, and initiated him into her Mysteries. He then invaded Thrace; but no sooner had his people landed at the mouth of the fiver Strymon than Lycurgus, King of the Edonians, opposed them savagely with an ox-goad, and captured the entire army, except Dionysus himself, who plunged into the sea and took refuge in Thetis’s grotto. Rhea, vexed by this reverse, helped the prisoners to escape, and drove Lycurgus mad: he struck his own son Dryas dead with an axe, in the belief that he was cutting down a vine. Before recovering his senses he had begun to prune the corpse of its nose and ears, fingers and toes; and the whole land of Thrace grew barren in horror of his crime. When Dionysus, returning from the sea, announced that this barrenness would continue unless Lycurgus were put to death, the Edonians led him to Mount Pangaeum, where wild horses pulled his body apart.6
f. Dionysus met with no fu~ther opposition in Thrace, but travelled on to his well-beloved Boeotia, where he visited Thebes, and invited the women to join his revels on Mount Cithaeron. Penthens, King of Thebes, disliking Dionysus’s dissolute appearance, arrested him, together with all his Maenads, but went mad and, instead of shackling Dionysus, shackled a bull. The Maenads escaped again, and went raging out upon the mountai~, where they tore calves in pieces. Penthens attempted to stop them; but, inflamed by wine and religxous ecstasy, they rent him limb from limb. His mother Agave led the riot, and it was she who wrenched off his head.7
g. At Orchomenus the three daughters of Minyas, by name Alcitho~, Leucippe, and Arsippe, or Aristippe, or Arsino~, refused to join in the revels, though Dionysus himself invited them, appearing in the form of a girl. He then changed his shape, becoming successively a lion, a bull, and a panther, and drove them insane. Leucippe offered her own son Hippasus as a sacrifice—he had been chosen by lot—and the three sisters, having torn him to pieces and devoured him, skimmed the mountains in a frenzy until at last Hermes changed them into birds, though some say that Dionysus changed them into bats.8 The murder of Hippasus is annually atoned at Orchomenus, in a feast called Agrionia (‘provocation to savagery’), when the women devotees pretend to seek Dionysus and then, having agreed that he must be away with the Muses, sit in a circle and ask riddles, until the priest of Dionysus rushes from his temple, with a sword, and kills the one whom he fit catches.0
h. When all Boeotia had acknowledged Dionysus’s divinity, t made a tour of the Aegean Is/ands, spreading joy and terror wherev, he went. Arriving at Icaria, he found that his ship was unseaworth and hired another from certain Tyrrhenian sailors who claimed to ! bound for Naxos. But they proved to be pirates and, unaware of ~ godhead, steered for Asia, intending to sell him there as a slave. Di~ nysus made a vine grow from the deck and enfold the mast, while ix twined about the rigging; he also turned the oars into serpents, ar became a lion himself, filling the vessel with phantom beasts and fi sound of flutes, so that the terrified pirates leaped overboard and b came dolphins.1O
i. It was at Naxos that Dionysus met the lovely Ariadne who:
Theseus had deserted, and married her without delay. She bore hi: Oenopion, Thoas, Staphylus, Latromis, Euanthes, and Tauropolt Later, he placed her bridal chaplet among t~e stars.1
j. From Naxos he came to Argos and punished Perseus, who at fi~ opposed him and killed many of his followers, by inflicting a madne on the Argive women: they began devouring their own infants rax Perseus hastily admitted his error, and appeased Dionysus by buildir a temple in his honour.
k. Finally, having established his worship throughout the worl Dionysus ascended to Heaven, and now sits at the right hand of Ze~ as one of the Twelve Great Ones. The self-effacing goddess Hest resigned her seat at the high table in his favour; glad of any excuse ~ escape the jealous wranglings of her family, and knowing that sl could always count on a quiet welcome in any Greek city which might please her to visit. Dionysus then descended, by way of Leto to Tartarus where he bribed Persephone with a gift of myrtle to relea his dead mother, Semele. She ascended with him into Artemis’s temp at Troezen; but, lest other ghosts should be jealous and aggrieved, 1 changed her name and introduced her to his fellow-Olympians Thyone. Zeus placed an apartment at her disposal, and Hera preserv{ an angry but resigned silence.xz Euripides: Bacchae 99—l02; Onomacritus, quoted by Pausani~
viii. 37—3; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 62; Orphic Hymn xlv. 6; Cleme of Alexandria: Address to the Greeks ii. ~6.
2. Apollodorus: iii. 4. 3; Hyginus: Fabula 182; Theon on Aratus’s Phenomena 177; Diodorus Siculus: iJJ. 68—69; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~31; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi.
3. Apollodorus: iii. 5. x; Aeschylus: The Edonians, a Fragment; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 70-71. 4, Euripides: Bacchae ~3; Theophilus, quoted by Plutarch: On Rivers 24; Pausanias: x. 29. 2; Diodorus Siculus: ii. 38; Strabo: xi. 5.5; Philostratus: Life of Zlpollonius of Tyana ii. 8-9; Arrian: Indka 5.
5. Pausanias: vii. 2.4-5; Plutarch: Greek Questions 56.
6. Apollodorus: ill. 5—~; Homer: Iliad vi. 130-40.
7. Theocritus: Idylls xxvi.; Ovid: Metamorphoses ifi. 714 if.; Euripides: Bacchae, passim. 8. Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. x-40; 390—415; Antoninus Liberalis: ~o; Aelian: Varia Historia i~i. 42; Plutarch: Greek Questions 38.
9. Plutarch: loc. cit.
~o. Homeric Hymn to Dionysus 6 iT.; Apollodorus: i/i. 5—3; Ovid: Metamorphoses ill. 577-699.
~ x. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 996; Hesiod: Theogony 947; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 5.
~2. Apoliodorus: iii. 5.3; Pausanias: ii. 31. 2.
* ~. The main clue to Dionysus’s mystic history is the spread of the vine cult over Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Wine was not invented by the Greeks: it seems to have been first imported in jars from Crete. Grapes grew wild on the southern coast of the Black Sea, whence their cultivation spread to Mount Nysa in Libya, by way of Palestine, and so to Crete; to India, by way of Persia; and to Bronze Age Britain, by way of’ the Amber Route. The wine orgies of Asia Minor and Palestine—the Canaanite Feast of Tabernacles was, originally, a Bacchanal orgy—were marked by much the same ecstasies as the beer orgies of Thrace and Phrygia. Dionysus’s triumph was that wine everywhere superseded other intoxicants (see 38.3). According to Pherecydes (178) N3,sa means ‘tree’.
g. He had once been subservient to the Moon-goddess Semele (see 14.5)—also called Thyone, or Cotytto (see 3. ~)—and the destined victim of her orgies. His being reared as a girl, as Achilles also was (see 160. $), recalls the Cretan custom of keeping boys ‘in darkness’ (scotioi), that is to say, in the women’s quarters, u,itil puberty. One of his titles was Dendrites, ‘ tree-youth’, and the Spring Festival, when the trees suddenly burst into leaf and the whole world is intoxicated with desire, celebrated his emanc’~pation. He is described as a horned child in order not to particularize the horns, which were goat’s, stag’s, bull’s, or ram’s according to the place of his worship. When Apollodorus says that he was disguised as a kid to save him from the wrath of Hera—’Eriphus’ (‘kid’) was one of his rifles (Hesychius sub Eriphos)—tkis refers to the Cretan cult of DionysusZagreus, the wild goat with the enormous horns. Virgil (Georgics ii. 380-84) wrongly explains that the goat was the animal most commonly sacrificed to Dionysm ‘because goats injure the vine by gnawing it.’ Dionysus as a stag is Learchus, whom Athamas killed when driven mad by Hera. In Thrace he was a white bull. But in Arcadia Hermes disguised him as a ram, because the Arcadians were shepherds, and the Sun was entering the Ram at their Spring Festival. The Hyades (‘ rain-makers’), into whose charge he gave Dionysus, were renamed’ the tall ‘,’ the lame’, ‘ the passionate’,’ the roaring ‘, and ‘ the raging’ Ones, to describe his ceremonies. Hesiod (quoted by Theon: On Aratus ~71) records the Hyadcs’ earlier names as Phaesyle (? ‘filtered light’), Coronis (‘crow’), Cleia (‘ famous’), Phaeo (‘ dim’), and Eudore (‘ generous ‘); and Hyginus’s list (Poetic Astronomy ii. 21) is somewhat similar. Nysus means ‘lame’, and in these beer orgies on the mountain the sacred king seems to have hobbled like a partridge—as in the Canaanite Spring Festival called the Pesach (‘hobbling’-see 23’. ~). But that Macris fed Dionysus on honey, and that the Maenads used ivy-twined fir-branches as thyrsi, records an earlier form of intoxicant: spruce-beer, laced with ivy, and sweetened with mead. Mead was ‘nectar’, brewed from fermented honey, which the gods continued to drink in the Homeric Olympus.
3. J-E. Harrison, who first pointed out (Prolegornena ch. viii) that Dionysus the Wine-god is a late superimposition on Dionysus the Beergod, also called Sabazius, suggests that tragedy may be derived not from tragos, ‘a goat’, as Virgil suggests (lot. tit.), but from tragos, ‘spelt’—a grain used in Athens for beer-brewing. She adds that, in early vasepaintings, horse-men, not goat-men, are pictured as Dionysus’s companions; and that his grape-basket is, at first, a winnowing fan. In fact, the Libyan or Cretan goat was associated with wine; the Helladic horse with beer and nectar. Thus Lycurgus, who opposes the later Dionysus, is torn to pieces by wild horses—priestesses of the Mare-headed goddesswhich was the fate of the earlier Dionysus. Lycurgus’s story has been confused by the irrelevant account of the curse that overtook his land after the murder of Dryas (‘oak’); Dryas was the oak-king, annually killed. The trimming of his extremities served to keep his ghost at bay (see 153—b and 17~. i), and the wanton felling of a sacred oak carried the death penalty. Cotytto was the name of the goddess in whose honour the Edonian Rites were performed (Strabo: x. 3. 16).
4. Dionysus had epiphanies as Lion, Bull, and Serpent, because these were Calendar emblems of the tripartite year (see 3 x. 7; 75.2, and 123. i). He was born in winter as a serpent (hence his serpent crown); became a lion in the spring; and was killed and devoured as a bull, goat, or stag at midsummer. These were his transformations when the Titans set on him (see 30. a). Among the Orchomenans a panther seems tO have taken the serpent’s place. His Mysteries resembled Osiris’s; hence his visit to Egypt. 5. Hera’s hatred of Dionysus and his wine-cup, 1/ke the hostility shown by Penthens and Perseus, reflects conservative opposition to the ritual use of wine and to the extravagant Maenad fashion, which had spread from Thrace to Athens, Corinth, Sicyon, Delphi, and other civilized cities. Eventually, in the late seventh and early sixth centuries B.c., Perlander, tyrant of Corinth, Cleisthenes, tyrant oś Sicyon, and Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, deciding to approve the cult, founded official Dionysiac feasts. Thereupon Dionysus and his vine were held to have been accepted ha Heaven—he ousted Hestia from her position as one of the Twelve Olympians at the close of the fifth century B.c.—though some gods continued to exact’ sober sacrifices’. But, although one of the recently deciphered tablets from Nestor’s palace at Pylus shows that he had divine status even in the thirteenth century B.c., Dionysus never really ceased to be a demi-god, and the tomb of his annual resurrection continued to be shown at Delphi (Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 35), where the priests regarded Apollo as his immortal part (see 28..5). The story of his rebirth from Zeus’s thigh, as the Hittite god of the Winds had been born from Kumabi’s (see 6. 6), repudiates his original matriarchal setting. Ritual rebirth from a man was a well-known Jewish adoption ceremony (Ruth Hi. 9), a Hittite borrowhag.
6. Dionysus voyaged in a new-moon boat, and the story ofhi~ conflict with the pirates seems to have been based on the same icon which gave rise to the legend of Noah and the beasts in the Ark: the lion, serpent, and other creatures are his seasonal epiphanies. Dionysus i~, ha fact, Deucalion (see 38. $). The Laconians of Brasiae preserved an uncanonical account of his birth: how Cadmus shut Semele and her child ha an ark, which drifted to Brasiae, where Semele died and was buried, and how Ino reared Dionysus (Pausanias: Hi. 24. 3)7. Pharos, a small island off the Nile Delta, on the shore of which Protens went through the same transformations as Dionysus (see 169. a), had the greatest harbour of Bronze Age Europe (see 39—2 and ~69. 6). It was the dep6t for traders from Crete, Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, Greece, and Palestine. From here the vine cult will have spread in every direction. The account of Dionysus’s campaign in Libya may record military aid sent to the Garamantians by their Greek allies (see 3.3); that of his Indian campaign has been taken for a fanciful history of Alexander’s drunken progress to the Indus, but is earlier in date and records the eastward spread of the vine. Dionysus’s visit to Phrygia, where Rhea initiated him, suggests that the Greek rites of Dionysus as Sabazius, or Bromius, were of Phrygian origin.
8. The Corona Borealis, Ariadne’s bridal chaplet, was also called ‘the Cretan Crown’. She was the Cretan Moon-goddess, and her vinous children by Dionysus—Oenopion, Thoas, Staphylus, Tauropolus, Latromis, and Euanthes—were the eponymous ancestors of Helladic tribes living in Chios, Lemnos, the Thracian Chersonese, and beyond (see 98. o). Because the vine cult reached Greece and the Aegean by way of Crete—oinos, ‘wine’, is a Cretan word—Dionysus has been confused with Cretan Zagreus, who was similarly torn to pieces at birth (see 30. a). 9. Agave, mother of Pentheus, is the Moon-goddess who ruled the beer revels. The tearing to pieces of Hippasus by the three sisters, who are the Triple-goddess as Nymph, is paralleled in the Welsh tale of Pwyll Prince of Dyfedd where, on May Eve, Rhiannon, a corruption of Rigantona (‘great queen’), devours a foal who is really her son Pryderi (‘anxiety’). Poseidon was also eaten in the form of a foal by his father Cronus; but probably in an earlier version by his mother Rhea (see 7. g). The meaning of the myth is that the ancient rite in which mare-headed Maenads tore the annual boy victim—Sabazius, Bromius, or whatever he was called—to pieces and ate him raw, was superseded by the more orderly Dionysian revels; the change being signalized by the killing of a foal instead of the usual boy.
10, The pomegranate which sprouted from Dionysus’s blood was also the tree of Tammuz-Adonis-Rimmon; its ripe fruit splits open like a wound and shows the red seeds inside. It symbolizes death and the promise of resurrection when held in the hand of the goddess Hera or Persephone (see 24. 11).
~1. Dionysus’s rescue of Semele, renamed Thyone (‘raging queen’), has been deduced from pictures of a ceremonial held at Athens on the dancing floor dedicated to the Wild Women. There to the sound of singing, piping, and dancing, and with the scattering of flower petals from baskets, a priest summoned Semele to emerge from an omphalos, or artificial mound, and come attended by ‘the spirit of Spring’, the young Dionysus (Pindar: Fragment 75.3). At Delphi a similar ascension ceremony conducted wholly by women was called the Herois, or ‘feast of the heroine’ (Plutarch: Greek Questions ~2; Aristophanes: Frogs 373-96, with scholiast). Still another may be presumed in Artemis’s temple at Troezen. The Moon-goddess, it must be remembered, had three different aspectsin the words of John Skelton: Diana in the leav’ds green; Luna who so bright doth sheen; Persephone in Hell.
Semele was, in fact, another name for Core, or Persephone, and the ascension scene is painted on many Greek vases, some of which show Satyrs assisting the heroine’s emergence with mattocks; their presence indicates that this was a Pelasgian rite. What they disinterred was probably a corn-doLl buried after the harvest and now found to be sprouting green. Core, of course, did not ascend to Heaven; she wandered about on earth with Demeter until the time came for her to return to the Underworld. But soon after the award of Olympic status to Dionysus the Assumption of his virgin-mother became dogmatic and, once a goddess, she was differentiated from Core, who continued heroine-like to ascend aid descend.
12. The vine was the tenth tree of the sacral tree-year and its month corresponded with September, when the vintage feast ‘took place. Ivy, the eleventh tree, corresponded with October, when the Macnads revelled and intoxicated themselves by chewing ivy leaves; and was important also because, hke four other sacred trees—El’s prickly oak on which the cochineal insects fed, Phoroneus’s alder, and Dionysus’s own v’me and pomegranate—it provided a red dye (see 52.3)—Theophilus, the Byzantine monk (Rugerus: On Handicrafts, ch. 98), says that ‘poets and artists loved ivy because of the secret powers it contained ... one of which I will tell you. In March, when the sap rises, if you perforate the stems of ivy with an auger in a few places, a gummy hquid will exude which, when mixed with urine and boiled, tums a blood colour called “lake “, useful for painting and illumination.’ Red dye was used to colour the faces of male fertility images (Pausanias: ii. 2.5), and of sacred kings (see ~70. ~1); at Rome this custom survived in the reddening of the triumphant general’s face. The general represented the god Mars, who was a Spring-Dionysus before he specialized as the Roman God of War, and who gave his name to the month of March. English kings still have their faces slightly rouged on State occasions to make them look healthy and prosperous. Moreover, Greek ivy, hke the vine and plane-tree, has a five-pointed leaf, representing the creative hand of the Earth-goddess Rhea (see 53. a). The myrtle was a death tree (see I09.4).
0 a p H E u s, son of the Thracian King Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope, was the most famous poet and musician who ever lived. Apollo presented him with a lyre, and the Muses taught him its use, so that he not only enchanted wild beasts, but made the trees and rocks move from their places to follow the sound of his music. At Zone in Thrace a number of ancient mountain oaks are still standing in the pattern of one of his dances, just as he left them. After a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined the Argonauts, with whom he sailed to Colchis, his music helping them to overcome many difficulties—and, on his return, married Eurydice, whom some called Agriope, and settled among the savage Cicones of Thrace.2
c. One day, near Tempe, in the valley of the river Peneius, Eurydice met Aristaeus, who tried to force her. She trod on a serpent as she fled, and died of its bite; but Orpheus boldly descended into Tartarus, hoping to fetch her back. He used the passage which opens at Aornum in Thesprotis and, on his arrival, not only charmed the ferryman Charon, the Dog Cerberus, and the three Judges of the Dead with his plaintive music, but temporarily suspended the tortures of the clanmeal; and so far soothed the savage heart of Hades that he won leave to restore Eurydice to the upper world. Hades made a single condition: that Orpheus might not look behind him until she was safely back under the light of the sum Eurydice followed Orpheus up through the dark passage, guided by the soun~ of his lyre, and it was only when he reached the sunlight again that he turned to see whether she were still behind him, and so lost her for ever.3
a/. When Dionysus invaded Thrace, Orpheus neglected to honour hiln, but taught other sacred mysteries and preached the evil of sacrificial murder to the men of Thrace, who listened reverently. Every morning he would rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mount Pangaeum, preaching that Helius, whom he named Apollo, was the greatest of all gods. In vexation, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him at Deium in Macedonia. First waiting until their husbands had entered Apollo’s temple, where Orpheus served as priest, they seized the weapons stacked outside, burst in, murdered their husbands, and tore Orpheus limb from limb. His head they threw into the fiver Hebrus, but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, and was carried to the island of Lesbos.4
e. Tearfully, the Muses collected his limbs and buried them at Leibethra, at the foot of Mount Olympus, where the nightingales now sing sweeter tlmu anywhere else in the world. The Maenads had attempted to cleanse themselves of Orpheus’s blood in the fiver Helicon; but the River-god dived under the ground and disappeared for the space of nearly four miles, emerging with a different name, the Baphyra. Thus he avoided becoming an accessory to the murder. S .f. It is said that Orpheus had condemned the Maenads’ promiscuity and preached homosexual love; Aphrodite was therefore no less angered than Dionysus. Her fellow-Olympians, however, could not agree that his murder had been justified, and Dionysus saved the Maenads’ hves by turning them into oak-trees, which remained rooted to the ground. The Thracian men who had survived the massacre decided to tattoo their wives as a warning against the murder ośpriests; and the custom survives to this day.6
g. As for Orpheus’s head: after being attacked by a jealous Lemnian serpent (which Apollo at once changed into a stone) it was laid to rest in a cave at Antissa, sacred to Dionysus. There it prophesied day and night until Apollo, finding that his oracles at Delphi, Gryneium, and Clarus were deserted, came and stood over the head, crying: ‘Cease from interference in my business; I have borne long enough with you and your singing!’ Thereupon the head fell silent.70rpheus’s lyre had likewise drifted to Lesbos and been laid up in a temple of Apollo, at whose intercession, and that of the Muses, the Lyre was placed in heaven as a Constellation.8
h. Some give a wholly different account of how Orpheus died: they say that Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt for divulging divine secrets. He had, indeed, instituted the Mysteries of Apollo in Thrace; those of Hecate in Aegina; and those of Subterrene Demeter at Sparta.9 I. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 176, with scholiast; Aeschylus:.Agamernnon 1629—30; Euripides: Bacchae 56~-4; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 28-3 I.
2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 25; Hyginus: Fabula ~64; Athenaeus: xii/. 7. 2—Hyginus: loc. dr.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: ix. 30. 3; Euripides: Alcestis 357, with scholiast.
4. Aristophanes: Frogs ~032; Ovid: Metarnorśhoses xi. ~-85; Conon: Narrations 455—Aeschylus: Bassarids, quoted by Eratosthenes: Catasterisraoi 24; Pausanias: ix. 30. 3-4.
6. Ovid: loc. tit.; Conon: loc. tit.; Plutarch: On the Slousness Divine Vengeance 12.
?. Lucian: Against the Unlearned ii; Philostratus: Heroica v. 704; Life of Apollonius of Trana iv. ~4.
8. Lucian: loc. dt.; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 24; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 7.
9. Pausanias: ix. 30. 3; ii. 30.
* I. Orpheus’s singing head recalls that of the decapitated Alder-god Bran which, according to the Mabinogion, sang sweetly on the rock at Harlech in North Wales; a fable, perhaps, of funera~ pipes made from alder-bark. Thus the name Orpheus, if it stands.for ophruoeis,’ on the river bank’, may be a title of Bran’s Greek counterpart, Phoroneus (see 57. I), or Cronus, and refer to the alders ‘ growing on the banks of’ the Peneius and other rivers. The name of Orpheus’s father, Oeagrus (‘of the wild sorb-apple’), points to the same cult, since the sorb-apple (French~ alisier) and the alder (Spanish—-aIiso) both bear the name of the preHellenic River-goddess Halys, or Alys, or Elis, queen of the Elysian Islands, where Phoroneus, Cronus, and Orpheus went after death. Aomum is Avernus, an Italic variant of the Celtic Avalon (‘apple-tree island’—see 3 x. 2).
2. Orpheus is said by Diodorus Siculus to have used the old thirteenconsonant alphabet; and the legend that he made the trees move and charmed wild beasts apparently refers to its sequence of seasonal trees and symbolic animals (see 52. 3; 132..3 and 5). As sacred king he was struck by a thunderbolt—that is, killed with a double-axe—in an oak grove at the summer solstice, and then dismembered by the Maenads of the bull cult, like Zagreus (see 30. a); or of the stag cult, like Actaeon (see 22. i); the Maenads, in fact, represented the Muses. In Classical Greece the practice oftattooing was confined to Thracians, and in a vase-painting of Orpheus’s murder a Maenad has a small stag tattooed on her forearm. This Orpheus did not come in conflict with the cult of Dionysus; he was Dionysus, and he played the rude alder-pipe, not the civilized lyre. Thus Proclus (Commentary on Plato’s Politics: p. 398) writes:
Orpheus, because he was the principal in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god, and Apollodorus (i. 3.2) credits him with having invented the Mysteries of Dionysus.
$. The novel worship of the Sun as All-father seems to have been brought to the Northern Aegean by the fugitive priesthood of the monotheistic Akhenaton, in the fourteenth century B.C., and grafted upon the local cults; hence Orpheus’s alleged visit to Egypt. Records of this faith are found in Sophocles (Fragments 523 and ~o~7), where the sun is referred to as’ the eldest flame, dear to the Thracian horsemen’, and as’ the sire of the gods, and father of all things.’ It seems to have been forcefully resisted by the more conservative Thracians, and bloodily suppressed in some parts of the country. But later Orphic priests, who wore Egyptian costume, called the demi-god whose raw bull’s flesh they ate ‘Dionysus’, and reserved the name Apollo for the immortal Sun: distinguishing Dionysus, the god of the senses, from Apollo, the god of the intellect. This explains why the head of Orpheus was laid up in Dionysus’s sanctuary, but the lyre in Apollo’s. Head and lyre are both said to have drifted to Lesbos, which was the chief seat of lyric mmic; Terpander, the earliest historical musician, came from Antissa. The serpent’s attack on Orpheus’s head represents either the protest of an earlier oracular hero against Orpheus’s intrusion at Antissa, or that of Pythian Apollo which Philostratus recorded in more direct language. 4—Eurydice’s death by snake-bite and Orpheus’s subsequent failure to bring her back into the sunlight, figure only in late myth. They seem to be mistakenly deduced from pictures which show Orpheus’s welcome in Tartarus, where his music has charmed the Snake-goddess Hecate, or Agriope (‘savage face’), into giving special privileges to all ghosts initiated into the Orphic Mysteries, and from other pictures showing Dionysus, whose priest Orpheus was, descending to Tartarus in search of his mother Semele (see 27. k). Eurydice’s victims died of snake-bite, not herself (see 33. I).
5. The alder-month is the fourth of the sacral tree-sequence, and it precedes the willow-month, associated with the water magic of the goddess Helice (‘ willow’—see 44—1); willows also gave their name to the river Helicon, which curves around Parnassus and is sacred to the Muse~the Triple Mountain-goddess of inspiration. Hence Orpheus was shown in a temple-painting at Delphi (Pausanias: x. 30. 3) leaning against a willow-tree and touching its branches. The Greek alder cult was suppressed in very early times, yet vestiges of it remain in Classical literature: alders enclose the death-island of the witch-goddess Circe (Homer: Odyssey v. 64 and 239)—she also had a willow-grove cemetery at Colchis (Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 200—see ~52. b) and, according to Virgil, the sisters of Pha~thon were metamorphosed into an alder thicket (see 42.3)6. This is not to suggest that Orpheus’s decapitation was never more than a metaphor applied to the lopped alder-bough. A sacred king necessarily suffered dismemberment, and the Thraciaus may well have had the same custom as the Iban Dayaks of modern Sarawak. When the men come home from a successful head-hunting expedition the Iban women use the trophy as a means of fertilizing the rice crop by invocation. The head is made to sing, mourn, and answer questio~s, and nursed tenderly in every lap until it finally consents to enter an oracular shrine, where it gives advice on all important occasions and, like the heads of Eurystheus, Bran, and Adam, repels invasions (see 146. 2).
GANYMEDES, the son of King Tros who gave his name to Troy, wa~ the most beautiful youth alive and therefore chosen by the gods to be Zeus’s cup-bearer. It is said that Zeus, desiring Ganymedes also aa his bedfellow, disguised himself in eagle’s feathers and abducted him from the Trojan plain.
b. Afterwards, on Zeus’s behalf, Hermes presented Tros with a golden vine, the work of Hephaestus, and two fine horses, in compensation for his loss, assuring him at the same time that Ganymedes had become immortal, exempt from the miseries of old age, and was now smiling, golden bowl in hand, as he dispensed bright nectar to the Father of Heaven.2
c. Some say that Eos had first abducted Ganymedes to be her paramour, and that Zeus took him from her. Be that as it may, Hera certainly deplored the insult to herself, and to her daughter Hebe, until then the cup-bearer of the gods; but she succeeded only in vexing Zeus, who set Ganymedes’s image among the stars as Aquarius, the water-carrier.a
1. Homer: II/ad xx. 23~-5; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2; Virgil: Aeneid v. 252 if.; Ovid: Metamorphoses x. ~55 if.
2. Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres ~39~: Homer: Iliad v. 266; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 202-17; Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Pausanias: v. 24. ~. 1—Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. ~$; Virgil: Aeneid i. 32, with scholiast; Hyginus: Fabula 224; Virgil: Georgics iii. 304.
1. Ganymedes’s task as wine-pourer to all the gods—not merely Zeus in early accounts—and the two horses, given to King Tros as compensation for his death, suggest the misreading of an icon which showed the new king prepari. ng for his sacred marriage. Ganymedes’s bowl will have . contained a libation, poured to the ghost of his royal predecessor; and the officiating priest in the picture, to whom he is making a token resistance, has apparendy been misread as amorous Zeus. Similarly, the waiting bride has been misread as Eos by a mythographer who recalled Eos’s abduction of Tithonus, son of Laomedon—because Laomedon is also said, by Euripides (Trq/an Women 822), to have been Ganymedes’s father. This icon would equally illustrate Peleus’s marriage to Thetis, which the gods viewed from their twelve thrones; the two horses were ritual instruments of his rebirth as king, after a mock-death (see 8~. 4)The eagle’s alleged abduction of Ganymedes is explained by a Caeretan black-figured vase: an eagle darting at the thighs of a newly enthroned king named Zeus typifies the divine power conferred upon him—his ka, or other ~elf-just as a solar hawk descended on the Pharaohs at their coronation. Yet the trad~tion of Oanymedes’s youth suggests that the Icing shown in the icon was the royal surrogate, or interrex, rul~ng only for a single day: l~ce Pha~thon (see ~2. 2), Zareus (see 30. 1), Chrysippus (see los. 2), and the rest. Zeus’s eagle may therefore be said not only to have enroyalled him, but to have snatched him up to Olympus.
2. A royal ascent to Heaven on eagle-back, or in the form of an eagle, is a widespread religious fancy. Aristophanes caricatures it in Peace (~ if.) by sending his hero up on the back of a dung-beetle. The soul of the Celtic hero Lugh—Llew Llaw in the Mabinogion—flew up to Heaven as an eagle when the tarfist killed him at midsummer. Etana, the Babylonian hero, after his sacred marriage at Kish, rode on eagle-back towards lshtar’s heavenly courts, but fell into the sea and was drowned. Etana’s death, by the way, was not the usual end-of-the-year sacrifice, as ha the case of Icarus (see 92. $), but a punishment for the bad crops which had characterized his reign—he was flying to discover a magical herb of fertility. His story is woven into an account of the continuous struggle between Eagle and Serpent—waxing and waning year, King and Tanistand as in the myth ofLlew Llaw, the Eagle, reduced to his last gasp at the winter solstice, has its life and strength magically renewed. Thus we find in Psalm ciii. 5: ‘Thy youth is renewed, as the eagle’s.’
3. The Zeus-Ganymedes myth gained immense popularity in Greece and Rome because it afforded religious justification for a grown man’s passionate love of a boy. Hitherto, sodomy had been tolerated only as an extreme form of goddess-worship: Cybele’s male devotees tried, to achieve ecstatic unity with her by emasculating themselves and dressing like women. Thus a sodomitic priesthood was a recognized institution in the Great Goddess’s temples at Tyre, Joppa, Hierapolis, and at Jerusalem (~ Kingsxv. ~z and z Kings xxiii. 7) until just before the Exile. But this new passion, for the introduction of which Thamyris (see zI. m) has been given the credit by Apollodorus, emphasized the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. It turned Greek philosophy into an intellectual game that men could play without the assistance of women, now that they had found a new field of homosexual romance. Plato exploited this to the ~all, and used the myth of Ganymedes to justify his own sentimental feelings towards his pupils (Phaedrus 79); though elsewhere (Laws i. 8) he notraced sodomy as against nature, and called the myth of Zeus’s indulgence in it ‘a wicked Cretan invention’. (Here he has the support of Stephanus of Byzantium [sub Harpagia], who says that King Minos of Crete carried off Ganymedes to be his bedfellow, ‘having received the laws from Zeus ‘.) With the spread of Platonic philosophy the hitherto intellectually dominant Greek woman degenerated into an unpaid worker and breeder of children wherever Zeus and Apollo were the ruling gods.
4. Ganymedes’s name refers, properly, to the joyful stirring of his own desire at the prospect of marriage, not to that of Zeus when refreshed by nectar from his bedfellow’s hand; but, becoming catamitus in Latin, it has given English the word ‘catamite’, meaning the passive object of male homosexual lust.
5. The constellation Aquarius, identified with Ganymedes, was originally the Egyptian god, presiding over the source of the Nile, who poured water, not wine, from a flagon (Pindar: Fragment ~~o); but the Greeks took little interest in the Nile.
6. Zeus’s nectar, which the later mythographers described as a supernatural red wine, was, in fact, a primitive brown mead (see 27. 2); and ambrosia, the delectable food of the gods, seems to have been a porridge of barley, oil, and chopped fruit (see 98. ?), with which kings were pampered when their poorer subjects still subsisted on asphodel (see 3 I. 2), mallow, and acorns.
Z~us secretly begot his son Zagreus on Persephone, before she was taken to the Underworld by her uncle Hades. He set Rhea’s sons, the Cretan Curetes or, some say, the Corybantes, to guard his cradle in the Idaean Cave, where they leaped about him, clashing their weapons, as they had leaped about Zeus himself at Dicte. But the Titans, Zeus’s enemies, whitening themselves with gypsum until they were unrecogr. izable, waited until the Curetes slept. At midnight they lured Zagreus away, by offering him such childish toys as a cone, a bull-roarer, golden apples, a mirror, a knuckle-bone, and a tuft of wool. Zagreus showed courage when they murderously set upon him, and went through several transformations in an attempt to delude them: he became successively Zeus in a goat-skin coat, Cronus making rain, a lion, a horse, a horned serpent, a tiger, and a bull. At that point the Titans seized him firmly by the horns and feet, tore him apart with their teeth, and devoured his flesh raw.
b. Athene interrupted this grisly banquet shortly before its end and, rescuing Zagreus’s heart, enclosed it in a gypsum figure, into which she 5reathcd hfe; so that Zagreus became an immortal. His bones were collected and buried at Delphi, and Zeus struck the Titans dead with thunderbolts.1
1. Diodorus Siculus: v. 75.4; Nonnus: Dionysiacavi. 269 and xxvii. ~28; Harpocration sub apomatton; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ii. 73 $; Firmicus Maternus: Concerning the Errors of Profane Religions vi; Euripides: The Cretans, Fragment 475—Orphic Fragments (Kern, 34)—
1. This myth concerns the annual sacrifice of a boy which took place in ancient Crete: a surrogate for Minos the Bull-king. He reigned for a single day, went through a dance illustrative of the five seasons—lion, goat, horse, serpent, and bull-ca~f—and was then eaten raw. All the toys with which the Titans lured him away were objects used by the philosophical Orphics, who inherited the tradition of this sacrifice but devoured a bull-calf raw, instead of a boy. The bull-roarer was a pierced stone or piece of pottery, which when whirled at the end of a cord made a noise like a rising gale; and the tuft of wool may have been used to daub the Cureres with the wet gypsum—these being youths who had cut and dedicated ttaeir first hair to the goddess Car (see 95.5). They were also called Corybarites, or crested dancers. Zagreus’s other gifts served to explain the nature of the ceremony by which the participants became one with the god: the cone was an ancient emblem of the goddess, in whose honour the Titans sacrificed him (see go. 2); the mirror represented each initiate’s other self, or ghost; the golden apples, his passport to Elysium after a mock-death; the knucklebone, his divinatory powers (see ~7.3).
2. A Cretan hymn discovered a few years ago at Palaiokastro, near the Dictaean Cave, is addressed to the CronJan One, greatest of youths, who comes dancing at the head of his demons and leaps to increase the fertility of soil and flocks, and for the success of the fishhag fleet. Jane Harrison in Themis suggests that the shielded tutors there mentioned, who’ took thee, immortal child, from Rhea’s side’, merely pretended to kill and eat the victim, an initiate into their secret society. But all such mock-deaths at initiation ceremonies, reported from many parts of the world, seem ultimately based on a tradition of actual hmna~ sacrifice; and Zagreus’s calendar changes distinguish him from an ordinary member of a totemistic iYaternity. 3. The uucanonical tiger in the last of Zagreus’s transformations is explained by his identity with Dionysus (see 27. c), of whose death and resurrection the same story is told, although with cooked flesh instead of raw, and Rhea’s name instead of Athene’s. Dionysus, too, was a horned serpent—he had horns and serpent locks at birth (see ~7—a)—and his Orphic devotees ate him sacramentally in bull form. Zagreus became ‘Zeus h~ a goat-skin coat’, because Zeus or his child surrogate had ascended to Heaven wearing a coat made from the hide of the goat Amaltheia (see 7. b). ‘Cronus making rain’ is a reference to the use of the bull-roarer in rain-making ceremonies. In this context the Titaus were Titanoi, ‘white-chalk men ‘, the Curetes themselves disguised so that the ghost of the victim would not recognize them. When human sacrifices weut out of fishion, Zeus was represented as hurling his thunderbolt at the cannibals; and the Tirades, ‘lords of the seven-day week’, became confused with the Titanol, ‘the white-chalk men’, because of theh’ hostility to Zeus. No Orphic, who had once eaten the flesh of his god, ever again touched meat of any kind.
4. Zagreus-Dionysus was also known in Southern Palestine. Accordh~ to the Ras Shamra tablets, Ashtar temporarily occupied the throne of Heaven wh~le the god Baal languished i~ the Underworld, having eaten the food of the dead. Ashtar was only a child and when he sat on the throne, his feet did not reach the footstool; Baal presently returned and killed him with a club. The Mosaic Law prohibited initiation śeasts in Ashtar’s honour: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’—an injunction three times repeated (Exodus xxiii. 19; xxxiv. 26; Deuteronomy
WHEN ghosts descend to Tartarus, the main entrance to which lies i’~i a ~rove of black poplars beside the Ocean stream, each is supplied by pious relatives with a coin laid under the tongue of its corpse. They are thus able to pay Charon, the miser who ferries them in a crazy boat across the Styx. This hatefnl river bounds Tartarus on the western side,~ and has for its tributaries Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Aornis, and Le~e. Penniless ghosts must wait for ever on the near bank; unless they have evaded Hermes, their conductor, and crept down by a back entrance, such as at Laconian Taenarus,z or Thesprotian Aornum. A three-beaded or, some say, fifty-headed dog named Cerberus; guards the opposite shore of Styx, ready to devour living intruders or ghostly fugitives.3
b. The first region of Tartarus contains the cheerless Asphodel Fields, where souls of heroes stray without purpose among the throngs of Jess distinguished dead that twitter like bats, and where only Orion still has the heart to hunt the ghostly deer.4 None of them but would rather live in bondage to a landless peasant than rule over all Tartarus. Their one delight is in libations of blood poured to them by the living: when they drink they feel themselves almost men again. Beyond these meadows lie Erebus and the palace of Hades and Persephone. To the left of the palace, as one approaches it, a white cypress shades the pool of Lethe, where the common ghosts flock down to drink. Initiated souls avoid this water, choosing to drink instead from the pool of Memory, shaded by a white poplar [?], which gives them a certaha advantage over their fellows. S Close by, newly arrived ghosts are daily judged by Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus at a place where three roads meet. Rhadamanthys tries Asiatics and Aeacus tries Europeans; but both refer the difficult cases to Minos. As each verdict is given the ghosts are directed along one of the three roads: that leadhag back to the Asphodel Meadows, if they are neither virtuous nor evil; that leading to the punishment-field of Tartarus, if they are evil; that leading to the orchards of Elysium, if they are virtuous.
c. Elysium, ruled over by Cronus, hes near Hades’s dominions, its entrance close to the pool of Memory, but forms no part of them; it is a happy land of perpetual day, without cold or snow, where games, music, and revels never cease, and where the inhabitants may elect to be reborn on earth whenever they please. Near by are the Fortunate Islands, reserved for those who have been three times born, and three times attained Elysium.6 But some say that there is another Fortunate Isle called Leuce in the Black Sea, opposite the mouths of the Danube, wooded and full of beasts, wild and tame, where the ghosts of Helen and Achilles bold high revelry and declaim Homer’s verses to heroes who have taken part in the events celebrated by him.?
d. Hades, who is fierce and jealous of his rights, seldom visits the upper air, except on business or when he is overcome by sudden lust. Once he dazzled the Nymph Minthe with the splendour of his golden chariot and its four black horses, and would have seduced her without difficulty had not Queen Persephone made a timely appearance and metamorphosed Minthe into sweet-smelling mint. On another occasion Hades tried to violate the Nymph Leuce, who was similarly metamorphosed into the white poplar standing by the pool of Memory. S He willingly allows none of his subjects to escape, and few who visit Tartarus return alive to describe it, which makes him the most hated of the gods.
e. Hades never knows what is happening in the world above, or in Olympus,9 except for fragmentary information which comes to him when mortals str’~e their hands upon the earth and invoke him with oaths and curses. His most prized possession is the helmet of invisibility, given him as a mark of gratitude by the Cyclopes when he consented to release them at Zeus’s order. All the riches of gems and precious metals hidden beneath the earth are his, but he owns no property above ground, except for certain gloomy temples in Greece and, possibly, a herd of cattle in the island of Erytheia which, some say, really belong to Helius.10
f Queen Persephone, however, can be both gracious and merciful. She is faithful to Hades, but has had no children by him and prefers the company of Hecate, goddess of witches, to his.1 Zeus himselfhonours Hecate so gready that he never denies her the ancient power which she has always enjoyed: of bestowing on mortals, or withholding from them, any desired gift. She has three bodies and three heads—lion, dog, and mare.12
g. Tisiphone, Alecto, and Megaera, the Erinnyes or Furies, live in Erebus, and are older than Zeus or any of t~e other Olympians. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants—and to punish such crimes by hounding the culprits relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country. These Erinnyes are crones, with snakes for hair, dogs’ heads, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings, and bloodshot eyes. In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, and their victims die in torment.13 It is unwise to mention them byname in conversation; hence they are usually styled the Eumenides, which means ‘ The Kindly Ones’—as Hades is styled Pluton, or Pluto,’ The Rich One’. x. Pausanias: x. 28. I.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5—2; Strabo: viii. 5. x.
3. Homer: Iliad viii. 368; Hesiod: Theogony 31~; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Euripides: Heracles 24.
4. Homer: Odyssey .xi. 539; xi. 572-5; xi; 487-9L
5. Petelia Orphic Tablet.
6. Plato: Gorgias ~68; Pindar: Olympian Odes ii. 68-80; Hesiod: Works and Days 167 if.
7. Pausanias: iii. 19. xr; Philostratus: Heroica x. 32-40.
8. Strabo: viii. 3~ 14; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogue vii.
9. Homer: Iliad ix. 158-9; xx.
~o. Homer: Iliad ix. 567 if.; Apollodorus: ii. 5—~o; Scholiast on Pindar’s Isthmian Odes vi. 3:~. xx. Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 529; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 405; Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls ii.
~z. Hesiod: Theogony 411-52.
~3. Apollodorus: i. ~. 4; Homer: Iliad ix. 454-7; xv. 204; xix. 259; Odyssey ii. 135 and xvii. 475; Aeschylus: Eumenides 835 and Libation Bearers 290 and 924; Euripides: Oresres 317 if.; Orphic Hymn lxviii. 5.
1. The mythographers made a bold effort to reconcile the conflicting views of the afterworld held by the primitive inhabitants of Greece. One view was that ghosts lived in their tombs, or underground caverns or fissures, where they might take the form of serpents, mice, or bats, but never be reincarnate as human beings. Another was that the souls of sacred kings walked visibly on the sepulchral islands where their bodies had been buried. A third was that ghosts could become men again by entering beans, nuts, or fish, and being eaten by their prospective mothers. A fourth was that they went to the Far North, where the sun never shines, and returned, if at all, only as fertilizing winds. A fifth was that they went to the Far West, where the sun sets in the ocean, and a spirit world much like the present. A sixth was that a ghost received punishment according to the life he had led. To this the Orphics finally added the theory metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls: a process which could be to some degree controlled by the use of magical formulas.
2. Persept~one and Hecate stood for the pre-Hellenic hope of regeneration; but Hades, a Hellenic concept, for the ineluctability of death. Cronus, despite his bloody record, continued to enjoy the pleasures of Elysium, since that had always been the privilege of a sacred king, and Menelaus (Odyssey iv. 56~) was promised the same enjoyment, not because he had been particularly virtuous or courageous but because he had married Helen, the priestess of the Spartan Moon-goddess (see ~59. ~). The Homeric adjective asphodelos, applied only to leim~nes (‘ meadows ‘), probably means’ in the valley of that which is not reduced to ashes’ (from a—-not, spodos= ash, elos~ valley)—namely the hero’s ghost after his body has been burned; and, except in acorn-eating Arcadia, asphodel roots and seeds, offered to such ghosts, made the staple Greek diet before the introduction of corn. Asphodel grows freely even on waterless islands and ghosts, like gods, are conservative in their diet. Elysium seems to mean ‘apple-land’—alisier is a pre—~;alllc word for sorb-apple—as do the Arthurian ‘Avalon’ and the Latin ‘Avernus’, m ‘Avohius’, both formed from the Indo-European root abol, meanin~ apple.
3. Cerberm was the Greek counterpart of Anubis, the dog-headed son oi the Libyan Death-goddess Nephthys, who conducted souls to the Under. world. In European folklore, which is partly of Libyan origin, the soul of the damned were hunted to the Northern Hell by a yelling pack o hounds—the Hounds of Annwin, Herne, Arthur, or Gabriel—a myfi derived from the noisy summer migration of wild geese to their breedin! places in the Arctic circle. Cerberus was, at first, fifty-headed, like th, spectral pack that destroyed Actaeon (see zz. ~); but afterwards three. headed, like his mistress Hecate (see 134. ~).
4. Styx (‘ hated’), a small stream in Arcadia, the waters of which we~ supposed to be deadly poison, was located in Tartarus o~fiy by lat, mythographers. Acheron (‘stream of woe’) and Cocytus (‘wailing’ are fanciful names to describe the misery of death. Aornis (‘ birdless ‘) is; Greek rnistranslation of the Italic’ Avernus ‘. Lethe means’ forgetfulness’ and Erebus ‘covered’. Phlegethon (‘burning’) refers to the custom o cremation but also, perhaps, to the theory that sinners were burned i~ streams of lava. Tartarm seems to be a reduplication of the pre-Helleni word tar, which occurs in the names of places lying to the West; its sens of infernality comes late.
5. Black poplars were sacred to the Death-goddess (see 5~—7 an, ~ 70./); and white poplars, or aspens, either to Persephone as Goddess o Regeneration, or to Heracles because he barrowed Hell (see t34. f)’ golden head-dresses of aspen leaves have been found in Mesopotamiai burials of the fourth millennium B.c. The O .rphic tablets do not name th tree by the pool of Memory; it is probably the white poplar into whic] Leuce was transformed, but possibly a nut-tree, the emblem of Wisdon (see 86. ~). White-cypress wood, regarded as an anti—corruptive, wa used for homehold chests and coffins.
6. Hades had a temple at the foot of Mount Menthe in Elis, and hJ rape of Minthe (‘mint’) is probably deduced from the me of mifit i~ funerary rites, together with rosemary and myrtle, to offset the smell c decay. Demeter’s barley-water drink at Eleusis was fiavoured with rain (see 24. e). Though awarded the sun-cattle of Erytheia (‘red land’i became that was where the Sun met his nightly death, Hades is mo~ usually called Cronus, or Geryon, in this context (see 132. 4)7. Hesiod’s account of Hecate shows her to have been the origin~ Triple-goddess, supreme in Heaven, on earth, and in Tartarus; but th Hellenes emphasized her destructive powers at the expense of her creativ ones until, at last, she was invoked only in clandestine rites of black magic especially at places where three roads met. That Zeus did not deny he the anciont power of granting every mortal his heart’s desire is a tribut to the Thessalian witches, of whom everyone stood in dread. Lion, dog, and horse, her heads, evidently refer to the ancient tripartite year, the dog being the Dog-star Sirius; as do also Cerberus’s heads.
8. Hecate’s companions, the Erinnyes, were personified pangs of con~ science after the breaking of a taboo—at first only the taboo of insult, disobedience, or violence to a mother (see I05. k and 114. I). Suppliants and guests came under the protection of Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth (see 20. c), and to ill-treat them would be to disobey and insult her. 9. Leuce, the largest island in the Black Sea, but very small at that, is now a treeless Rumanian penal colony (see 164. $).
T~eca~ is a daughter of Zeus, to whom he has given power to decide what the fortune of this or that mortal shall be. On some she heaps gifts from a horn of plenty, others she deprives of all that they have. Tyche is altogether irresponsible in her awards, and runs about juggling with a ball to exemplify the uncertainty of chance: sometimes up, sometimes down. But if it ever happens that a man, whom she has favoured, boasts of his abundant riches and neither sacrifices a part of them to the gods, nor alleviates the poverty of his fellow-citizens, then the ancient goddess Nemesis steps in to humiliate him.1 Nemesis, whose home is at Attic Rhamnus, carries an apple-bough in one hand, and a wheel in the other, and wears a silver crown adorned with stags; the scourge hangs at her girdle. She is a daughter of Oceanus and has something of Aphrodite’s beauty.
b. Some say that Zeus once fell in love with Nemesis, and pursued her over the earth and through the sea. Though she consrandy changed her shape, he violated her at last by adopting the form of a swan, and from the egg she laid came Helen, the cause of the Trojan War. Z I. Pindar: 011/mpian Odes xii. i-2; Herodotus: i. 34 and iii. 40; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. I04-2-3; Sophocles: Philoctetes 518.
2. Pausanias: i. 33—3; Homer’s Cyśria, quoted by Athenaeus p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 7.
1. Tyche (‘fortune’),likeDiceandAedos (personificationsofNatural Law, or Justice, and Shame), was an artificial deity invented by the early philosophers; whereas Nemesis (‘ due enactment’) had been the Nymphgoddess of Death-’m-Life (see 18. $) whom they now redefined as a moral control on Tyche. That Nemesis’s wheel was originally the solar year is suggested by the name of her Latin counterpart, Fortuna (from vortumna, ‘she who turns the year about ‘). When the wheel had turned half circle, the sacred king, raised to the summit of his fortune, was fated to die—the Actaeon stags on her crown (see a2. i) announce this—but when it came full circle, he revenged himself on the rival who had supplanted him. Her scourge was formerly used for ritual flogging, to fructify the trees and crops, and the apple-bough was the king’s passport to Elysium (see 53—5; 80. 4; and 133.
2. The Nemesis whom Zeus chased (see 62. b), is not the philosophical concept of divine vengeance on overweer~ing mortals, but the original Nymph-goddess, whose usual name was Leda. In pre-FIellenic myth, the goddess chases the sacred king and, although he goes through his seasonal transformations (see 30. l), counters each of them in turn with her own, and devours him at the summer solstice. In Hellenic myth the parts are reversed: the goddess flees, changing shape, but the king pursues and finally violates her, as in the story of Zeus and Metis (see 9—d), or Peleus and Thetis (see 81. k). The required seasonal transformations will have been indicated on the spokes of Nemesis’s wheel; but in Homer’s Cypria only a fish and’ various beasts’ are mentioned (see 89. z).’ Leda’ is another form of Leto, or Latona, whom the Python, not Zeus, chased (see 14. a). Swans were sacred to the goddess (Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians ~095 if.), because of their white plumage, also because the Vformation of their flight was a female symbol, and because, at midsummer, they flew north to unknown breeding grounds, supposedly taking the dead king’s soul with them (see 33.5 and 142. 2).
3. The philosophical Nemesis was worshipped at Rhamnus where, according to Pausanias (i. 33. z-3), the Persian commander’m-chief, who had intended to set up a white marble trophy in celebration of his conquest of Attica, was forced to retire by news of a naval defeat at Salamis; the marble was used instead for an image of the’local Nymph-goddess Nemesis. It is supposed to have been from this event that Nemesis came to personify ‘Divine vengeance’, rather than the ‘due enactment’ of the annual death drama; since to Homer, at any rate, nemesis had been merely a warm human feeling that payment should be duly made, or a task duly performed. But Nemesis the Nymph-goddess bore the title Adrasteia (‘inescapable’—Strabo: xiii. ~. 13), which was also the name of Zeus’s foster-nurse, an ash-nymph (see 7—b); and since the ash-nymphs and the Erinnyes were sisters, born from the blood of Uranus, this may hax~e been how Nemesis came to embody the idea of vengeance. The ash-tree was one of the goddess’s seasonal disguises, and an important one to her pastoral devotees, because of its association with thunderstorms and with the lambing month, the third of the sacral year (see 52. 3).
4. Nemesis is called a daughter of Oceanus, because as the Nymphgoddess with the apple-bough she was also the sea-born Aphrodite, sister of the Erinnyes (see 18.4).
TH~ fifty Nereids, gende and beneficent attendants on the Sea-goddess Thetis, are mermaids, daughters of the nymph Doris by Nereus, a prophetic old man of the sea, who has the power of changing his shape.t
b. The Phorcids, their cousins, children of Ceto by PhorcTs, another wise old man of the sea, are Ladon, Echidne, and the three Gorgons, dwellers in Libya; the three Graeae; and, some say, the three Hesperides. The Gorgons were named Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa, all once beautiful. But one night Medusa hy with Poseidon, and Athene, enraged that they had bedded in one of her own temples, changed her into a winged monster with glaring eyes, huge teeth, trudmg tongue, brazen claws and setpeat locks, whose gaze turned men to stone. When eventually Perseus decapitated Medusa, and Poseidon’s children Chrysaor and Pegasus sprang from her dead body, Athene fastened the head to her aegis; but some say that the aegis was Medusa’s own skin, rayed from her by Athene.2
c. The Graeae are fair-faced and swan4ike, but with hair grey from birth, and only one eye and one tooth between the three of them. Their names are Enyo, Pemphredo, and Deino.1
d. The three Hesperides, by name Hespere, Aegle, and Erytheis, live in the far-western orchard which Mother Earth gave to Hera. Some call them daughters of Night, others of Atlas and of Hesperis, daughter of Hesperus; sweetly they sing.4
e. Half of Echidne was lovely woman, half was speckled serpent. She once lived in a deep cave among the Arimi, where she ate men raw, and raised a brood of frightful toototers to her husband Typhon; but hundred-eyed Argus killed her while she slept.s
f. Ladon was wholly serpent, though gifted with the power of human speech, and guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides until Heracles shot him dead.6
g. Nereus, Phorcys, Thaumas, Eurybia, and Ceto were all children born to Pontus by Mother Earth; thus the Phorcids and Nereids claim cousinhood with the Harpies. These are the fair-haired and swiftwinged daughters of Thaumas by the Ocean-nymph Electra, who snatch up criminals for ptmishment by the Erinnyes, and live in a Cretan cave.7
x. Homer: Iliad xvifi. 36 if.; Apollodorus: i. 2. 7.
2. Hesiod: Theogony 270 if. and 333 if.; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv._792-802; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhoclius iv. 1399; Euripides: Ion 989 if.
3. Hesiod: Theogony 270-4; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 2.
4. Hesiod: Theogony 2~5 and 528; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 27. z; Euripides: Heracles 394.
5. Homer: Iliad ii. 783; Hesiod: Theogony 295 if.; Apollodorus: ii. 6. Hesiod: Theogony 333-5; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1397; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 7—Apollodorus: i. z. 6; Hesiod: Theogony 265-9; Homer: Odyssey xx. 77-8; Apollonius Rh9dius: ii. 298-9.
1. It seems that the Moon-goddess’s title Eurynome (‘wide rule’ or ‘wide wandering’) proclaimed her ruler of heaven and earth; Eurybia (‘ wide strength ‘), ruler of the sea; Eurydice (‘ wide justice’) the serpentgrasping ruler of the Underworld. Male human sacrifices were offered to her as Eurydice, their death being apparently caused by viper’s venom (see 28.4; 154—b and ~68. e). Echidne’s death at the hated of Argus probably refers to the suppression of the Serpent-goddess’s Argive cult. Her brother Ladon is the oracular serpent who haunts every paradise, his coils embracing the apple-tree (see 133.4)
2. Among Eurybia’s other sea-titles were Thetis (‘ disposer’), or its variant Tethys; Ceto, as the sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Rahab, or the Babylonian Tiamat (see 73.7); Nereis, as the goddess of the wet dement; Electra, as provider of amber, a sea product highly valued by the ancients (see 148. 11); Thaumas, as wonderful; and Doris, as bountiful. Nereus—alias Proteus (‘ first man ‘)—the prophetic ‘old man of the sea’, who took his name from Nereis, not contrariwise, seems to have been an oracular sacred king, buried on a coastal island (see 133. d); he is pictured in an early vase-painting as fish-tailed, with a lion, a stag, and a viper emerging from his body. Proteus, in the Odyssey, similarly cha~ged shapes, to mark the seasons through which the sacred king moved from birth to death (see 30. ~).
3. The fifty Nereids seem to have been a college of fifty Moonpriestesses, whose magic rites ensured good fishing; and the Gorgons, representatives of the Triple-goddess, wearing prophylactic maskswith scowl, glaring eyes, and protruding tongue between bared teethto frighten strangers from her Mysteries (see 73.9). The Sons of Homer knew only a single Gorgon, who was a shade in Tartarus (Odyssey xi. 633-5), and whose head, an object of terror to Odysseus (Odyssey xi. 634), Athene wore on her aegis, doubtless to warn people against examining the divine mysteries hidden behind it. Greek bakers used to paint Gorgon masks on their ovens, to discourage busybodies from opening the oven door, peeping in, and thus allowing a draught to spoil the bread. The Gorgons’ names—Stheino (‘strong’), Euryale (‘wide roaming’), and Medusa (‘cunning one’)-are titles of the Moon-goddess; the Orphics called the toOOh’S face ‘the Gorgon’s head’.
4. Poseidon’s lathering of Pegasus on Medusa recalls his tithering of the horse Arion on Demeter, when she disguised herself as a mare, and her subsequent fury (see 16. f); both myths describe how Poseidon’s Hellenes forcibly married the Moon-priestesses, disregarding their Gorgon masks, and took over the rain-making rites of the sacred horse cult. But a mask of Demeter was still kept in a stone chest at Pheneus, and the priest of Demeter assumed it when he performed the ceremony of beating the Infernal Spirits with rods (Pausanias: viii. xS. l).
5. Chrysaor was Demeter’s new-moon sign, the golden sickle, or falchion; her consorts carried it when they deputized for her. Athene, in this version, is Zeus’s collaborator, reborn from his head, and a traitress to the old religion (see 9. 1). The three Harpies, regarded by Homer as personifications of the storm winds (Odyssey xx. 66-78), were the earlier Athene, the Triple-goddess, in her capacity of sudden destroyer. So were the Graeae, the Three Grey Ones, as their names Enyo (‘warlike’), Pemphredo (‘wasp’), and Deino (‘terrible’) show; their single eye and tooth are misreadings of a sacred picture (see 73.9), and the swan is a death-bird in European mythology (see 32. 2).
6. Phorcys, a masculine form of Phorcis, the Goddess as Sow (see 74.4 and 96.2), who devours corpses, appears in Latin as Orcus, a title of Hades, and as porcus, hog. The Gorgons and Grey Ones were called Phorcides, because it was death to profane the Goddess’s Mysteries;. but Phorcys’s prophetic wisdom must refer to a sow-oracle (see 24.. 7)7. The names of the Hesperides, described as children either of Ceto and Phorcys, or of Night, or of Atlas the Titan who holds up the heavens in the Far West (see 39. I and 133. e), refer to the sunset. Then the sky is green, yellow, and red, as if it were an apple-tree in full bearing; and the Sun, cut by the horizon like a crimson half-apple, meets his death dramatically in the western waves. When the Sun has gone, Hesperus appeax This star was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphzodite, and the apple w the gift by which her priestess decoyed the king, the Sun’s representafiv to his death with love-songs; if an apple is cut in two transversely, h, five-pointed star appears in the centre of each half.
ECI-IIDNI~ bore a dreadful brood to Typhon: namely, Cerberus, d three-headed Hound of Hell; the Hydra, a many-beaded water-serpe~ living at Lerna; t~e Chimaera, a fire-breathing goat with lion’s and serpent’s body; and Orthrus, the two-headed hound of Geryo: who lay with his own mother and begot bn her the Sphinx and fi Nemean Lion.1
x. Hesiod: Theogony 306 if.
1. Cerberus (see 3L a and 134. e), associated by the Dorians with dog-headed Egyptian god Anubis who conducted souls to the Unde world, seems to have originally been the Death-goddess Hecate, , Hecabe (see 168. ~); she was portrayed as a bitch because dogs eat corp flesh and howl at the moon.
2. The Chimaera was, apparently, a calendar-symbol of the triparfi year (see 75—2), of which the seasonal emblems were lion, goat, a~ serpent.
3. Orthrus (see 132. d), who lathered the Chimaera, the Sphinx (s xos. e), the Hydra (see 60. h and ~24. c), and the Nemean Lion (see 123..on Echidne was Sirius, the Dog-star, which inaugurated the Atheni; New Year. He had two heads, like Janus, because the reformed year Athens had two seasons, not three: Orthrus’s son, the Lion, emblemizi~ the first half, and his daughter, the Serpent, emblemizing the secon When the Goat-emblem disappeared, the Chimaera gave place to Sphinx, with her wingedlion’s body and serpent’s taft. Since the reform New Year began when the Sun was in Leo and the Dog Days had nc begun, Orthrus looked in two directions—forward to the Ne backward to the Old—like the Calendar-goddess Cardea, whom the Romans named Postvorta and Antevorta on that account. Orthrus called ‘early’ presumably because he introduced the New Year.
Esa~n because Zeus had confined thdr brothers, the Titans, in Tartarus, certain tall and terrible giants, with long locks and beards, and serpent-tails for feet, plotted an assault on Heaven. They had been born from Mother Earth at Thracian Phlegra, twenty-four in number. X
b. Without warning, they seized rocks and fire-brands and hurled them upwards from their mountain tops, so that the Olympians were hard pressed. Hera prophesied gloomily that the giants could never be killed by any god, but only by a single, lion-skinned mortal; and that even he could do nothing unless the enemy were anticipated in their search for a certain herb olinvulnerability, which grew in a secret place on ‘earth. Zeus at once took counsel with Athene; sent her off to warn Heracles, the lion-skinned mortal to whom Hera was evidently referring, exactly how matters stood; and forbade Eos, 5~4enc, and Helius to shine for a while. Under the feeble light of the stars, Zeus groped about on earth, in the region to which Athene directed him, found the herb, and brought it safely to Heaven.
c. The Olympians could now join battle with the giants. Heracles let loose his first arrow against Alcyoneus, the enemy’s leader. He fell to the ground, but sprang up again revived, because this was his native soil of Phlegra. ‘Quick, noble Heracles!’ cried Athene. ‘Drag him .away to another country!’ Heracles caught Alcyoneus up on his shoulders, and dragged him over the Thracian border, where he despatched him with a club.
d. Then Porphyrion leaped into Heaven from the great pyramid of rocks which the giants had piled up, and none of the gods stood his ground. Only Athene adopted a posture of defence. Rushing by her, Porphyrion made for Hera, whom he tried to strangle; but, wounded i~ the liver by a timely arrow from Eros’s bow, he turned from anger to lust, and ripped off Hera’s glorious robe. Zeus, seeing that his wife was about to be outraged, ran forward in jealous wrath, and felled Porphyrion with a thunderbolt. Up he sprang again, but Heracles, returning to Phlegra in the nick of time, mortally wounded him with an arrow. Meanwhile, Ephialtes had engaged Ares and beaten lfim to his knees; however, Apollo shot the wretch in the left eye and called to Heracles, who at once planted another arrow in the rig Thus died Ephialtes.
e. Now, wherever a god wounded a giant—as when Diony felled Eurytus with his thyrsus, or Hecate singed Clyfius with torches, or Hephaestus scalded Mimas with a ladle ofredohot metal, Athene crushed the lustful Pallas with a stone, it was Heracles who t to deal the death blow. The peace40ving goddesses Hestia and Deme took no part in the conflict, but stood dismayed, wringing their ban the Fates, however, swung brazen pestles to good effect.2
f Discouraged, the remahfing giants fled back to earth, pursued the Olympians. Athene threw a vast missile at Enceladus, wh crushed him flat and became the island of Sicily. And Poseidon br( off part of Cos with his tr~dent and threw it at Polybutes; this beta the nearby islet of Nisyros, beneath which he lies buried.3
g. The remaining giants made a last stand at Bathos, near Arcad Trapezus, where the ground still burns, and giants’ bones are sometix turned up by ploughmen. Hermes, borrowing Hades’s helmet invisibility, struck down Hippolytus, and Artemis pierced Grat with an arrow; while the Fates’ pestles broke the heads of Agrius Thoas. Ares, with his spear, and Zeus, with his thunderbolt, n accounted for the rest, though Heracles was called upon to desp~ each giant as he fell. But some say that the batde took place on Phlegraean Plain, near Cumae in Italy.4
h. Silenus the earth-born Satyr claims to have taken part in battle at the side of his pupil Dionysus, killing Enceladus and spread panic among the giants by the braying of his old pack-ass; but Silo is usually drunken and ca,mot disthxgtfish truth from falsehood.s ~. Apollodorus: i. 6. x; Hyginus: Fabulae, Proem.
2. Apollodorus: i. 6. 2.
3. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Strabo: x. 5. ~6.
4. Pausanias: viii. 29. x-z; Apollodorus: Io~. tit.; Diodorus Sic~ iv.
5. Euripides: Cyclops 5 if.
1. This is a post-Homeric story, preserved in a degenerate vets: Eros and Dionysus, who take part in the fighting, are late-comer Olympus (see ~ 5—1—z and 27.5), and Heracles is admitted there befor~ apotheosis on Mount Oeta (see 147. h). It purports to account for finding of mammoth bones at Trapezus (where they are sffil shown in a local museum); and for the volcanic fires at Bathos near by—also at Arcadian, or Thracian, Pallene, at Cumae, and in the islands of Sicily aud Nisyros, beneath which Athene and Poseidon are said to have buried two of the giants.
2. The historical incident underlying the Giants’ Revolt—and also the 3_/oeids’ Revolt (see 37. b), of which it is usually regarded as a doubletseems to be a concerted attempt by non-Hellenic mountaineers to storm certain Hellenic fortresses, and their repulse by the Hellenes’ subjectallies. But the powerlessness and cowardice of the gods, contrasted with the invincibility of Heracles, and the farcical incidents of the battle, are more characteristic of popular fiction than of myth.
3. There is, however, a hidden religious element in the story. These giants are not flesh and blood, but earth-born spirits, as their serpent-tails prove. and can be thwarted only by the possession of a magical herb. No mythographer mentions the name of the herb, but it was probably the ephialtion, a specific against the nightmare. Ephialtes, the name of the giants’ leader, means literally ‘he who leaps upon’ (incubus in Latin); and the attempts of Porphyrion to strangle and rape Hera, and of Pallas to rape Athene, suggest that the story mainly concerns the wisdom of invoking Heracles the Saviour, when threatened by erotic nightmares at any hour of the twenty-four.
4. Alcyoneus (‘mighty ass ‘) is probably the spirit of the sirocco, ‘the breath of the Wild Ass, or Typhon’ (see 36. l), which brings bad dreams, and murderous inclinations, and rapes; and this makes Silenus’s claim to have routed the giants with the braying of his pack-ass still more ridiculous (see 20. b). Mimas (‘ mimicry’) may refer to the delusive verisimilitude of dreams; and Hippolytus (‘ stampede of horses ‘) recalls the ancient attribution ofterror-dreams to the Mare-headed goddess. In the north, it was Odiu whom sufferers from ‘the Nightmare and her ninefold’
invoked, until his place was taken by St Swithold.
5. What use Heracles made of the herb can be deduced from the Babylonian myth of the cosmic fight between the new gods and the old. There Marduk, Heracles’s counterpart, holds a herb to his nostrils against the noxious smell of the goddess Tiamat; here Alcyoneus’s breath has to be counteracted.
IN revenge for the destruction of the giants, Mother Earth lay with Tartarus, and presently in the CorycLan Cave of Cilicia brought forth her youngest child, Typhon: the largest monster ever born.1 From the thighs downward he was nothing but coiled serpents, and his arms which, when he spread them out, reached a hundred leagues in either direction, had countless serpents’ heads instead of hands. His brutish ass-head touched the stars, 1~ vast wings darkened the sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming rocks hurtled from his mouth. When he came rushing towards Olympus, the gods fled in terror to Egypt, where they disguised themselves as animals: Zeus becoming a ram; Apollo, a c~ow; Dionysus, a goat; Hera, a white cow; Artemis, a cat; Aphrodite, a fish; Ares, a boar; Hermes, an ibis, and so on.
b. Athene alone stood her ground, and taunted Zeus with cowardice until, resuming his true form, he let fly a thunderbolt at Typhon, and followed this up with a sweep of the same flint sickle that had served to castrate his father Uranus. Wounded and shouting, Typhon fled to Mount Casius, wh~ch looms over Syria from the north, and there the two grappled. Typhon twined his myriad coils about Zeus, disarmed him of his sickle and, after severing the sinews of his hands and feet x~’ith it, dragged him into the Coryclan Cave. Zeus is immortal, but now he could not move a finger, and Typhon had hidden the sinews in a bear-skin, over which Delphyne, a serpent-tailed sister-monster, stood guard.
c. The news of Zeus’s defeat spread dismay among the gods, but Hermes and Pan went sccredy to the cave, where Pan frightened Delphyne with a sudden horrible shout, while Hermes skilfully abstracted the sinews and replaced them on Zeus’s limbs.2
d. But some say that it was Cadmus who wheedled the sinews from Delphyne, saying that he needed them for lyre-strings on which to play her delightful music; and Apollo who shot her dead.3
e. Zeus returned to Olympus and, mounted upon a chariot drawn by winged horses, once more pursued Typhon with thunderbolts.
Typhon had gone to Motrot Nysa, where the Three Fates offered him ephemeral fruits, pretending that these would restore. his rigour though, in reality, they doomed him to certain death. He reached Mount Haemus in Thrace and, picking up whole mountains, hurled them at Zeus, who interposed his thunderbolts, so that they rebounded on the monster, wounding him frightfully. The streams of Typhon’s blood gave Mount Haemus its name. He fled towards Sicily, where Zeus ended the running fight by hurling Mount Aetna upon him, and fire belches from its cone to this day.1
1. Hesiod: Theogony 819 if.; Pindar: Pythian Odes i. ! 5 if-; Hyginus: Fabula 152.
2. Apollodorus: i. 6.33. Nonnus: Dionysiaca i. 481 if.; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 706. 4—Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. tit.
1. ‘Corycian’, said to mean ‘of the leather sack’, may record the ancient custom of confining winds in bags, followed by Aeolus (see 170. g), and preserved by mediaeval witches. In the other Corydan Cave, ,~t Delphi, Delphyne’s serpent-mate was called Python, not Typhon. Python (‘ serpent’) personified the destructive North Wind—winds were habitually depicted with serpent tails—which whirls down on Syria from Mount Casius, and on Greece from Mount Haemus (see 21. 2). Typhon, on the other hand, means ‘stupefying smoke’, and his appearance describes a volcanic eruption; hence Zeus was said to have buried him at last under Mount Aetna. But the name Typhon also meant the burning Sirocco from the Southern Desert, a cause of havoc in Libya and Greece, which carries a volcanic smell and was pictured by the Egyptians as a desert ass (see 35.4 and 83.2). The god Set, whose breath Typhon was said to be, maimed Osiris in much the same way as Python maimed Zeus, but both were finally overcome; and the parallel has confused Python with Typhon.
2. This divine flight into Egypt, as Lucian observes (On Sacrifices ~4), was invented to account for the Egyptian worship of gods in animal form—Zeus-Ammon as ram (see 133.j), Hermes-Thoth as ibis or crane (see 5~. 6), Hera4sis as cow (see 56. 2), Artemis-Pasht as cat, and so on; but it may also refer historically to a frightened exodus of priests and priestesses from the Aegean Archipelago, when a volcanic eruption engulfed half of the large island of Theta, shortly before zooo B.c. Cats were not domesticated in Classical Greece. A further source of this legend seems to be the Babylonian Creation Epic, the Enuma Elish, according to which, in Damascius’s earlier version, the goddess Tiamat, her consort’ Apsu, and their son Mummi (‘confusion’), let loose Kingu and a horde of other monsters against the newly-born trinity of gods: Ea, Anu, and Bel. A panic flight follows; but presently Bel rallies his brothers, takes command, and defeats Tiamat’s forces, crushing her skull with a club and sticiug her in two ‘like a fiat-fish’.
3. The myth of Zeus, Delphyne, and the bear-skin records Zeus’s humiliation at the hands of the Great Goddess, worshipped as a She-bear, whose chief oracle was at Delptfi; the historical occasion is unknown, but the Cadmcians of Boeot’~a seem to have been concerned with preserving the Zeus cult. Typhon’s ‘ephemeral fruits’, given him by the Three Fates, appear to be the usual death-apples (see xS. 4; 32. 4; 33, 7, etc.). In a proto-Hittite version of the myth the serpent Illyunka overcomes ~ Storm-god and takes away his eyes and heart, which he recovers by stratagem. The Divine Council then call on the goddess Inara to exa~ vengeance. Illyunka, invited by her to a feast, eats until gorged; when upon she binds him with a cord and he is despatched by the Storm-go~ 4—Mount Casius (now Jebe]-el-Akra) is the Mount Hazzi whic figures in the Hittite story of Ullikummi the stone giant, who grew at a enormous rate, and was ordered by his father Kumarbi to destroy ~ seventy gods of Heaven. The Storm-god, the Sun-god, the Goddess ~ Beauty and all their fellow-deities failed to kill Ullikummi, until Ea t~ God of Wisdom, using the knife that originally severed Heaven fro~ Earth, cut offthe monster’s feet and sent it crashing into the sea. Elemen of this story occur in the myth of Typhon, and also in that of the Aloeid who grew at the same rate and used mountains as a ladder to Heave (see 37. b). The Cadmeians are likely to have brought these legends int Greece from Asia Minor (see 6. ~).
E~,~ ALTZS and Otus were the bastard sons of Iphlmedeia, a daught~ of Triops. She had fallen in love with Poseidon, and used to crouch the seashore, scooping up the waves in her hands and pouring they into her lap; thus she got herself with child. Ephialtes and Otus wet, however, called the Aloeids because Iphimedeia subsequently marrie Aloeus, who had been made king of Boeotian Asopia by his fatl~e Helius. The Aloeids grew one cubit in breadth and one fathom height every year and, when they were nine years old, being then n~ cubits broad and nine fathoms high, declared war on Olympu Ephialtes swore by the river Styx to outrage Hera, and Otus similarl swore to outrage Artemis.1
b. Deciding that Ares the God of War must be their first captur, they went to Thrace, disarmed him, bound him, and confined him
a brazen vessel, which they hid in the house of their stepmoth~ Eriboea, Iphimedeia being now dead. Then their siege of Olymp~
began: they made a mound for its assault by piling Mount Pehon Mount Ossa, and further threatened to cast mountains into the sea unt it became dry land, though the lowlands were swamped by the waves. Their confidence was unquenchable because it had been prophesied that no other men, nor any gods, could kill them.
c. On Apollo’s advice, Artemis sent the Aloeids a message: if they raised their siege, she would meet them on the island of Naxos, and there submit to Otus’s embraces. Otus was overjoyed, but Ephialtes, not having received a similar message from Hera, grew jealous and angry. A cruel quarrel broke out on Naxos, where they went together: Ephialtes insisting that the terms should be rejected unless, as the elder of the two, he were the first to enjoy Artemis. The argument had reached its height, when Artemis herself appeared in the form of a white doe, and each Aloeid, seizing his javelin, made ready to prove himself the better marksman by flinging it at her. As she darted between them, swift as the wind, they let fly and each pierced the other through and through. Thus both perished, and the prophecy that they could not be killed by other men, or by gods, was justified. Their bodies were carried back for interment in Boeotian Anthedon; but the Naxians still pay them heroic honours. They are remembered also as the founders of Boeotian Astra; and as the first mortals to worship the Muses of Helicon.2
d. The siege of Olympus being thus raised, Hermes went in search of Ares, and forced Eriboea to release him, half—dead, from the brazen vessel. But the souls of the Alocids descended to Tartarus, where they were .securely tied to a pillar with knotted cords of living vipers. There they sit, back to back, and the Nymph Styx perches grimly on the pillar-top, as a reminder of their unfulfilled oaths.3
x. Apollodorus: i. 7. 4; Pausanias: ii. 3.8; Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 88-92.
2. Homer: Odysseyxi. 30$-20; Iliadv. 385-90; Pausanias: ix. 29. I-2. 3. Apollodorus: i. 7. 4; Hyginus: Fabula 28.
* ~. This is another popular version of the Giants’ Revolt (see 35—b). The name Ephialtes, the assault on Olympus, the threat to Hera, and the prophecy of their invulnerability, occur in both versions. Ephialtes and Otus, ‘sons of the threshing-floor’ by ‘her who strengthens the genitals’, grandsons of’Three Face’, namely Hecate, and worshippets of the wild Muses, personify the incubus, or orgiastic nightmare, which stifles and outrages sleeping women. Like the Nightmare in British legend, they are associated with the number nine. The myth is confused by a shadowy historical episode reported by Diodorus Siculus (v. 50 if.). He says that Aloeus, a Thessalian, sent his sous to liberate their mother Iphimedeia and their sister Pancrafts (‘ all-strength’) from the Thracians, who had carried them off to Naxos; their expedition was successful, but they quarrelled about the partition of the island and killed each other. However, though Stephanus of Byzantium records that the city of Aloeium in Thessaly was named after the Aloeids, early mythographers make them Boeotians. ~. The twins’ mutual murder recalls the eternal rivalry for the love of the White Goddess between the sacred king and his tanist, who alternately meet death at each other’s hands. That they were called’ sons of the threshing-floor’ and escaped destruction by Zeus’s lightning, connects them with the corn cult, rather than the oak cult. Their punishment in Tartarus, like that of Theseus and Peirithous (see 103. c), seems to be deduced from an ancient calendar symbol showing the twins’ heads turned back to back, on either side of a column, as they sit on the Chair of Forgetfulness. The column, on which the Death-in-Life Goddess perches, marks the height of summer when the sacred king’s reign ends and the tanist’s begins. In Italy, this same symbol became two-headed Janus; but the Italian New Year was in January, not at the heliacal rising of twoheaded Sirius (see 34—3). 3. Ares’s imprisonment for thirteen months is an unrelated mythic fragment of uncertain date, referring perhaps to an armistice of one whole year—the Pelasgian year had thirteen months—agreed upon between the Thessalo-Boeotians and Thracians, with war-like tokens of both nations entrusted to a brazen vessel in a temple of Hera Eriboea. Pelion, Ossa, and Olympus are all mountains to the east of Thessaly, with a distant view of the Thracian Chersonese where the war terminated by this armistice may have been fought.
D n u › A t ~ o ~/’ s Flood, so called to distinguish it from the Ogygian and other floods, was caused by Zeus’s anger against the impious sons of Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus. Lycaon himself first civilized Arcadia and instituted the worship of Zeus Lycaeus; but angered Zeus by sacfś~cing a boy to him. He was therefore transformed into a wolf, and his house struck by lighufing. Lycaon’s son~ were, some say, twenty-two in number; but others say fifty.1
b. News of the crimes committed by Lycaon’s sons reached Olympus, and Zeus himself visited them, disguised as a poor traveller. They had the effrontery to set umble soup before him, mixing the guts of their brother Nyctimus with the umbles of sheep and goats that it contamed. Zeus was undeceived and, thrusting away the table on which they had served the loathsome banquet—the place was afterwards known as Trapezus—changed all of them except Nyctimus, whom he restored to life, into wolves.2
c. On his return to Olympus, Zeus in disgust let loose a great flood on the earth, meaning to wipe out the whole race of man; but Deucahon, King of Phthia, warned by his father Prometheus the Titan, whom he had visited in the Caucasus, built an ark, victualled it, and went aboard with his wife Pyrrha, a daughter of Epimetheus. Then the South Wind blew, the rain fell, and the rivers roared down to the sea which, rising with astonishing speed, washed away every city of the coast and plain; until the entire world was flooded, but for a few mountain peaks, and all mortal creatures seemed to have been lost, except Deucahon and Pyrrha. The ark floated about for nine days until, at last, the waters subsided, and it came to rest on Mount Parnassus or, some tell, on Mount Aetna; or Mount Athos; or Mount Othrys in Thessaly. It is said that Deucalion was reassured by a dove which he had sent on an exploratory flight.a
d. Disembarking in safety, they offered a sacrifice to Father Zeus, the preserver of fugitives, and went down to pray at the shrine of Themis, beside the river Cephissus, where the roof was now draped with seaweed and the altar cold. They pleaded humbly that mankind should be renewed, and Zeus, hearing their voices from afar, sent Hermes to assure them that whatever request they might make would be granted forthwith. Themis appeared in person, saying: ‘Shroud your heads, and throw the bones of your mother behind you!’ S’mce Deucahon and Pyrrha had different mothers, both now deceased, they decided that the Titaness meant Mother Earth, whose bones were the rocks lying on the river bank. Therefore, stooping with shrouded heads, they picked up rocks and threw them over their shoulders; these became either men or women, according as Deucahon or Pyrrha had handled them. Thus mankind was renewed, and ever since’ a people’ (laos) and ú a stone’ (laas) have been much the same word in many languages.a
e. However, a~ it proved, Deucalion and Pyrrha were not the sole survivors of the Flood, for Megarus, a son of Zeus, had been roused from his couch by the scream of cranes that summoned him to the peak of Mount Gerania, which remained above water. Another who escaped was Cerambus of Pelion, whom the nymphs changed to a scarabaeus, and he flew to the summit ofParnassus. S
f Similarly, the inhabitants of Parnassus—a city founded by Parnasus, Poseidon’s son, who invented the art of augury—were awakened by the howling of wolves and followed them to the mountain top. They named their new city Lycorea, after the wolves.6
g. Thus the flood proved of little avail, for some of the Parnassians migrated to Arcadia, and revived Lycaon’s abominations. To this day a boy is sacrificed to Lycaean Zeus, and his guts mixed with others in an umble soup, which is then served to a crowd of shepherds beside a stream. The shepherd who eats the boy’s gut (assigned to him by lot), howls like a wolf, hangs his clothes upon an oak, swims across the stream, and becomes a werewolf. For eight years he herds with wolves~ but if he abstains from eating men throughout that period, may return at the close, swim back across the stream and resume his clothes. Not long ago, a Parrhasian named Damarchus spent eight years with the wolves, regained his humanity and, in the tenth year, after hard practice in the gymnasium, won the boxing prize at the Olympic Games.7
h. This Deucalion was the brother of Cretan Ariadne and the father of Orestheus, King of the Ozolian Locrians, in whose time a white bitch littered a stick, which Orestheus planted, and which grew into a vine. Another of his sons, Amphictyon, entertained Dionysus, and was the first man to mix wine with water. But his eldest and most famous son was Hellen, father of all Greeks.8
1. Apollodorus: iii. 8. ~; Pausanias: viii. z. ~; Scholiast on Caesai Germanicus’s Aratea 89; Ovid: Metamorphoses i. 230 iT.
2. Apollodorus: 10c. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 48 x; Pausanias: viii. 3. x; Ovid: Metamorphoses i. 230 IT.
3. Ovid: ibid. i. 3~7; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes ~095; Hyginus: Fabula 153; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 4t; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odesix. 42; Plutarch: Which Animals Are Craftier? 13.
4. Apollodorus: i. 7. 2; Ovid: Metamorphoses i. 260—415.
5. Pausanias: i. 40. I; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 352-6.
6. Pausanias: x. 6. ~-2.
7. Pausanias: vi’fi. 2. 3 and vi. 8. % Pliny: Natural History viii. 34; Plato: Republic viii. 16.
8. Pausanias: x. 38.1; Eustathius on Homer: p. ~S~s; Apollodorus; i. 7. 2.
1. The story of Zeus and the boy’s guts is not so much a myth as a moral anecdote expressing the disgust felt in more civilized parts of Greece for the ancient cannibalistic practices of Arcadia, which were still performed in the name of Zeus, as ‘barbarous and unnatural’ (Plutarch: Life of Pelopidas). Lycaon’s virtuous Athenian contemporary Cecrops (see 25. d) offered only barley—cakes, abstaining even from animal sacrifices. The Lycaonian rites, which the author denies that Zeus ever countenanced, were apparently intended to discourage the wolves from preying on flocks and herds, by sending them a human king. ‘Lycaeus’ means ‘of the she-wolf’, but also ‘of the light’, and the lightning in the Lycaon myth shows that Arcadian Zeus began as a rain-making sacred king—in service to the divine She-wolf, the Moon, to whom the wolfpack howls.
2. A Great Year of one hundred months, or eight solar years, was divided equally between the sacred king and his tanist; and Lycaon’s fifty sons—one for every month of the sacred king’s reign—will have been the eaters of the umble soup. The figure twenty-two, unless it has been arrived at by a count of the families who claimed descent from Lycaon and had to participate in the umble-feast, probably refers to the twenty-two five-year lustra which composed a cycle—the 110-year cycle constituting the reign of a particular line of priestesses.
3. The myth of Deucalion’s Flood, apparently brought from Asia by the Hellads, has the same origin as the Biblical legend of Noah. But though Noah’s invention of wine is the subject of a Hebrew moral tale, iucidentallyjustifying the enslavement of the Canaanites by their Kassite and Semitic conquerors, Deucalion’s claim to the invention has been suppressed by the Greeks in fayour of Dionysus. Deucalion is, however, described as the brother of Ariadne, who was the mother, by Dionysus, of various vine-cult tribes (see 27.8), and has kept his name ‘new-wine sailor’ (from deucos and halieus). The Deucahon myth records a Mesopotamian flood of the third millennium B.c.; but also the autumnal New Year feast of Babylonia, Syria, and Palestine. This feast celebrated Parnapishtim’s outpouring of sweet new wine to the builders of the ark, in which (according to the Babylonian G’figamesh Epic) he and his family survived the Deluge sent by tlle goddess Ishtar. The ark was a moon-ship (see 123. 5) and the feast was celebrated on the new moon nearest to the autumnal equinox, as a means of inducing the winter rains. Ishtar, in the Greek myth, is called Pyrrha—the name of the goddess-mother of the Puresati (Philistines), a Cretan people who came to Palestine by way of Cilicia about the year 1200 ~3.c.; in Greek, pyrrha means ‘fiery red’, and is an adjective applied to wine.
4. Xisuthros was the hero of the Sumerian Flood legend, recorded by Berossus, and his ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. All these arks were built of acacia-wood, a timber also used by Isis for building Osiris’s death-barge.
5. The myth of an angry god who decides to punish man’s wickedness with a deluge seems to be a late Greek borrowing from the Phoeniciare, or the Jews; but the number of different mountains, in Greece, Thrace, and Sicily, on which Deucalion is said to have landed, suggests that an ancient Flood myth has been superimposed on a later legend of a flood in Northern Greece. In the earliest Greek version of the myth, Themis renews the race of man without first obtaining Zeus’s consent; it is therefore likely that she, not he, was credited with the Flood, as in Babylonia. 6. The transformation of stones into a people is, perhaps, another Helladic borrowing from the East; St John the Baptist referred to a similar legend, in a pun on the Hebrew words banira and abanirn, declaring that God could raise up children to Abraham from the desert stones (Matthew iii. 3-9 and Luke iii. 8).
7. That a white bitch, the Moon-goddess Hecate, littered a me-stock in the reign of Deucalion’s son Orestheus is probably the earliest Greek wine myth. The name Ozolian is said to be derived from ozoi, ‘vine shoots’ (see 147. 7)—One of the wicked sons of Lycaon was also named Orestheus, which may account for the forced connexion which the mythographers have made between the myth of the tumble soup and the Deucalionian Flood.
8. Amphictyon, the name of another of Deucalion’s sons, is a male form of Amphictyonis, the goddess in whose name the famous northern confederation, the Amph/ctyonic League, had been founded; according to Strabo, Callimachns, and the Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres, it was regularized by Acrisius of Argos (see 73—a). Civilized Greeks, unlike the dissolute Thradans, abstained from neat wine; and its temper’rag with water at the conference of the member states, which took place in t.he vintage season at Antb_ela near Thermopylae, will have been a precaution against murderous disputes.
.9. Deucalion’s son Hellen was the eponymous ancestor of the entire Hellenic race (see 43. b): his name shows that he was a royal deputy for the priestess of Helle, or Hellen, or Helen, or Selene, the Moon; and, according to Pausanias (iii. 20. 6), the first tribe to be called Hellenes came from Thessaly, where Helle was worshipped (see 70.
lo. Aristotle (Meteorologica i. ~4) says that Deucalion’s Flood took place ‘in ancient Greece (Graecia), namely the district about Dodonaand the Achelous River’. Graeci means ‘ worshippets of the Crone’, presumably the Earth-goddess of Dodona, who appeared in triad as the Graeae (see 33. c); and it has been suggested that the Achaeans were forced to invade the Peloponnese because unusually heavy rains had swamped their grazing grounds. Helle’s worship (see 62.3; 70. 8 and r59. 1) seems to have ousted that of the Graeae.
11. The scarabaeus beetle was an emblem of immortality in Lower Egypt because it survived the flooding of the Nile—the Pharaoh as Osiris entered his sun-boat in the form of a scarabaeus—and its sacral use spread to Palestine, the Aegean, Etruria, and the Balearic Islands. Antoninus Liberalis also mentions the mythof Cerambus, or Terambus, quoth~g Nicande~
Pao~av. X~~US, the creator of mankind, whom some inclade among the seven Titans, was the son eidxer of the Titan Eurymedon, or of lapetus by the nymph Clymene; and his brothers were Epimetheus, Atlas, and Menoetius.x
b. Gigantic Arias, eldest of the brothers, knew all the depths of the sea; he ruled over a kingdom with a precipitous coastline, larger than Africa and Asia put together. This land of Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles, and a chain of fruit-bearing islands separated it from a farther continent, unconnected with ours. Atlas’s people canalized and cultivated an enormous central plain, fed by water from the hills which ringed it completely, except for a seaward gap. They also built palaces, baths, race-courses, great harbour works, mad temples; and carried war not only westwards as far as the other continent, but eastward as far as Egypt and Italy. The Egyptians say that Aras was the son of Poseidon, whose five pairs of male twins all swore allegiance to their brother by the blood of a bull sacrificed at the pillar-top; and that at first they were extremely virtuous, bearing with fortitude the burden of their great wealth m gold and silver. But one day greed and cruelty overcame them and, with Zeus’s permission, the Athenians defeated them single-handed and destroyed thei~ power. At the same time, the gods sent a deluge which, in one day and one night, ovenvhelmed all Atlantis, so that the harbour works and temples were buried beneat a waste of mud and the sea became unnavigable.2
c. Atlas and Menoetius, who escaped, then joined Cronus and the Titans in their unsuccessful war against the Olympian gods. Zeu: killed Menoetius with a thunderbolt and sent him down to Tartaras: but spared Atlas, whom he conderm~ed to support Heaven on hi:
shoulders for all eternity.3
d. Atlas was the father of the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the Hesperide.s; and has held up the Heavens ever since, except on one occasion~ when Heracles temporarily relieved him of the task. Some say tha! Perseus petrified Atlas into Mount Atlas by showing him the Gorgon’~ head’ but they for et that Pers us ~t ‘s t t r ~ Heracles.4
e. Prometheus, being wiser than Arias, foresaw the issue of the rebellion against Cronus, and therefore preferred to fight on Zeus’s side, persuading Epimetheus to do the same. He was, indeed, the wisest of his race, and Athene, at whose birth from Zeus’s head he had assisted, taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind. But Zeus, who had decided to extirpate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents. S
f One day, when a dispute took place at Sicyon, as to wl~ich portions of a sacrificial bull should be offered to the gods, and which should be reserved for men, Prometheus was invited to act as arbiter. He therefore rayed and jointed a bull, and sewed its hide to form two open-mouthed bags, filling these with what he had cut up. One bag contained all the flesh, but this he concealed beneath the stomach, which is the least tempting part of any animal; and the other contained the bones, hidden beneath a rich layer of fat. When he offered Zeus the choice of either, Zeus, easily deceived, chose the bag containing the bones and fat (which are still the divine portion); but punished Prometheus, who was laughing at him behind his back, by withholding fire from mankind. ‘Let them eat their flesh raw!’ he cried.6
g. Prometheus at once went to Athene, with a plea for a backstairs admittance to Olympus, and this she granted. On l~is arrival, he lighted a torch at the fiery chariot of the Sun and presently broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoil, which he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel-stalk. Then, extinguishing his torch, he stole away undiscovered, and gave fire to mankind.7
h. Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses of Olympus to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever created, Zeus sent as a gift to Epimetheus, under Hermes’s escort. But Epimetl~eus, having been warned by his brother to accept no gift from Zeus, respectfully excused himself. Now artgrief even than before, Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture tore at his liver all day, year in, year out; and there was no end to the pain, because every n~ght (during which Prometheus was exposed to cruel frost and cold) his liver grew whole again.
i. But Zeus, loth to confess that he had been vindictive, excused his savagery by circulating a falsehood: Athene, he said, had invited Prometheus to Olympus for a secret love affair.
j. Epimetheus, alarmed by his brother’s fate, hastened to marry Pandora, whom Zeus had made as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful—the first of a long line of such women. Presently she opened a jar, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion. Out these flew in a cloud, stung Epimetheus and Pandora in every part of their bodies, and then attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the jar, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide.8 x. Eustathius: On Homer p. 987; Hesiod: Theogony 507 if.; Apollodorus: i. 2. 3. 2. Plato: Timaeus 6 and Critias 9-zo.
3. Homer: Odyssey i. $z-4; Hesiod: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula
4. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 27; Apollodorus: ii. 5—zz; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 630. 5. Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound 22 8,252,445 if., 478 if-, and 228-36. 6. Hesiod: Theogony 522-64; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods z and Prometheus on Caucasus 3.
7. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 42.
8. Hesiod: Works and Days 42-z05 and Theo~gony 565-626; Scholiast on Apollouius Rhodius ii. 2249.
1. Later mythographers understood Atlas as a simple personification of Mount Atlas, in North-western Africa, whose peak seemed to hold up the Heavens; but, for Homer, the colunms on which he supported the firmament stood far out in the Atlantic Ocean, afterwards named in his honour by Herodotto. He began, perhaps, as the Titan of the Second of the Week, who separated the waters of the firmament from the ware of the earth. Most rain comes to Greece from the Atlantic, especially the heliacal rising of Atlas’s star-daughters, the Hyades; which part explains why his home was in the west. Heracles took the Heavens fro: his shoulders in two senses (see 133.3-4 and 123.4).
2. The Egyptian legend of Atlantis—also current in folk-tale along t] Atlantic seaboard from Gibraltar to the Hebrides, and among the Yorub in West Africa—is not to be dismissed as pure fancy, and seems to da from the third millennium B.c. But Plato’s version, which he claims th Solon learned from his friends the Libyan priests of Sa~s in the Delta, h apparently been grafted on a later tradition: how the Minoan Creta~ who had extended their influence to Egypt and Italy, were defeated a Hellenic confederacy with Athens at its head (see 98. ~); and ho, perhaps as the result of a submarine earthquake, the enormous harbo works built by the Keftiu (‘sea-people’, meaning the Cretans and th~ allies) on the island of Pharos (see 27. ? and x 69. 6), subsided under seve~ fathoms of water—where they have lately been rediscovered by dive: These works consisted of an outer and an inner basin, together coverh some two hundred and. fifty acres (GastonJondet: Les Ports submerges l’ancienne ~le de Pharos, 19~6). Such an identification of Ariantis with Pharos would account for Atlas’s being sometimes described as a son of Iapetus—the Japhet of Genesis, whom the Hebrews called Noah’s son and made the ancestor of the Sea-people’s confederacy—and sometimes as a son of xxx and, though in Greek myth Iapetus appears as Deucalion’s grandfather, this need mean no more than that he was the eponymous ancesto: of the Canaanite tribe which brought the Mesopotamian Flood legend rather than the Atlantian, to Greece. Several details in Plato’s account such as the pillar..sacrifice of bulls and the hot-and-cold water systems h Atlas’s palace, make it certain that the Cretans are being described, an~ no other nation. Like Arias, the Cretans ‘knew all the depths of the sea’ According to Diodorus (v. 3), when most of the inhabitants of Greec, were destroyed by the great flood, the Athenians forgot that they ha~ founded Sais in Egypt. This seems to be a muddled way of saying tha after the submergence of the Pharos harbour-works the Athenians forgo their religious ties with the city of Sais, where the same Libyan goddes Neith, or Athene, or Tanit, was worshipped.
3. Plato’s story is ‘confused by his account of the vast numbers o elephants in Atlantis, which may refer to the heavy import ośJwoty~tt Greece by way ośPtlaros, but//as per//aps been borrowed from the elder legend. The whereabouts of the folk-tale Atlantis has been the subject of numerous theories, though Plato’s influence has naturally concentrated popular attention on the Atlantic Ocean. Unt’fi recently, the Atlantic Ridge (stretching from Iceland to the Azores and then bending southeastward to Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha) was supposed to be its remains; but oceanographic surveys show that apart from these peaks the entire ridge has been under water for at least sixty million years. Only one large inhabited island in the Atlantic is known to have disappeared: the plateau now called the Dogger Bank. But the bones and implement~ hauled up in cod-nets show that this disaster occurred in paleolithic times; and it is far less likely that the news of its disappearance reached Euxope from survivors who drifted across the intervening waste of waters than that the memory of a different catastrophe was brought to the Atlantic seaboard by the highly civilized neolithic immigrants from Libya, usually known as the passage-grave builders.
4. These were farmers and arrived in Great Britain towards the close of the third millennium B.›J; but no explanation has been offered for their ~nass movement westwards by way of Tunis and Morocco to Southern Spain and then northward to Portugal and beyond. According to the Welsh Atlantis legend of the lost Cantrevs of Dyfed (impossibly located in Cardigan Bay), a heavy sea broke down the sea-walls and destroyed sixteen cities. The Irish Hy Brasil; the Breton City of Ys; the Cornish Land of Lyonesse, (impossibly located between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles); the French lie Verte; the Portuguese Ilha Verde: all are variants of. this legend. But if what the Egyptian priests really told Solon was that the disaster took place in the Far West, and that the survivors moved’ beyond the Pillars of Heracles’, Atlantis can be easily identified.
5. It is the country of the Atlantians, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (see 131. rn) as a most civilized people living to the westward of Lake Tritonis, from whom the Libyan Amazons, meaning the matriarchal tribes later described by Herodotus, seized their city ofCerne. Diodorns’s legend cannot be archaeologically dated, but he makes it precede a Libyan invasion of the Aegean Islands and Thrace, an event which cannot have taken place later than the third millennium B.C. If, then, Atlantis was Western Libyfi, the floods which caused it to disappear may have been due either to a phenomenal rainfall such as caused the famous Mesopotamian and Ogygian Floods (see 38. $-5), or to a high tide with a strong north-westerly gale, such as washed away a large part of the Netherlands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and formed the Zuider Zee,* or to a subsidence of the coastal region. Atlantis may, fia fact, have been swamped at the formation of Lake Tritonis (see 8. a), which apparently once covered several thousand square miles of the Libyan lowlands; and perhaps extended northward into the Western Gulf of Sirte, called by the geographer Scylax ‘the Gulf of Tritonis’, where the dangerous reefs suggest a chain ośislands of which onlyJerba and the Kerkennahs survive. * S’mce this was written, history has repeated itself disastrously.
6. The island left in the centre of the Lake mentiohed by Diodorus (see x 3 I. l) was perhaps the Chaamba Bou Rouba in the Sahara. Diodorus seems to be referring to such a catastrophe when he writes in his account of the Amazons and Atlanfians (‘fii. 55): ‘And it is said that, as a restfdt of oarthquakes, the parts of Libya towards the ocean engulfed Lake Tritonis, making it disappear.’ Si~ce Lake Tritonis still existed in his day, what he had probably been told was that’ as a restfit of earthquakes in the Western Mediterrauean the sea engulfed part of Libya and formed Lake Tritonis.’ The Zuider Zee and the Copaic Lake have now both been reclaimed; and Lake Tritonis, which, according to Scylax, still covered nine hundred square miles in Classical times, has shrunk to the salt-marshes of Chott Melghir and Chott el Jerid~ If this was Atlantis, some of the dispossessed agriculturists were driven west to Morocco, others south across the Sahara, others east to Egypt and beyond, taking their story with them; a few remained by the lakeside. Plato’s elephants may well have been found in this territory, though the mountainous coastline of Atlantis belongs to Crete, of which the sea-hating Egyptians knew only by hearsay. 7. The five pairs of Poseidon’s twin sons who took the oath of allegiance to Atlas will have been representatives at Pharos of ‘Keftiu’ kingdoms allied to the Cretans. In the Mycenaean Age double-sovereignty was the rule: Sparta with Castor and Polydeuces, Messeuia with Idas and Lynceus, Argos with Proetus and Acrisius, Tiryns with Heracles and Iphicles, Thebes with Eteocles and Polyneices. Greed and cruelty will have been displayed by the Sons of Poseidon only after the fall of Cnossus, when commercial integrity declined and the merchant turned pirate. 8. Prometheus’s name~ ‘forethought’, may originate in a Greek misunderstanding of the Sanskrit word pramantha, the swastika, or fire-drill, which he had supposedly invented, since Zeus Prometheus at Thurii was shown holding a fire-drill. Prometheus, the Indo-European folk-hero, became confused with the Carian hero Palamedes, the inventor or distributor of all civilized arts (under the goddess’s inspiration); and with the Babylonian god Ea, who claimed to have created a splendid man from the blood ofKingu (a sort of Cronus), while the Mother-goddess Aruru created an inferior man from day. The brothers Pramanthu and Manthu, who occur in the Bh~gavata Purc~na, a Sanskrit epic, may be prototypes of Prometheus and Epimetheus (‘ afterthought’); yet Hesiod’s account of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora is not genuine myth, but an antifeminist fable, probably of his own invention, though based on the story of Demophon and Phyllis (see 169. j). Pandora (‘all-giving’) was the Earth-goddess Rhea, worshipped under that title at Athens and elsewhere (Aristophanes: Birds 97~; Philostratus: L(śe of ApolIonius of Tyana vi. 39), whom the pessimistic Hesiod blames for man’s mortality and all the ills which beset life, as well as for the frivolous and unseemly behaviour of wives. His story of the division of the bull is equally unmythical: a comic anecdote, invented to account for Prometheus’s punishment, and for the anomaly of presenting the gods only with the thigh-bones and fat cut from the sacrificial beast. In Genesis the sanctity of the thigh-bones is explained by Jacob’s lameness which an angel inflicted on him during a wrestling match. Pandora’s jar (not box) originally contained winged souls.
9. Greek islanders still carry fire from one place to another in the pith of giant fennel, and Prometheus’s enchainment on Mount Caucasus may be a legend picked up by the Hellenes as they migrated to Greece from the Caspian Sea: of a frost-giant, recumbent on the snow of the high peaks, and atteuded by a flock of vultures.
10. The Athenians were at pains to deny that their goddess took Prometheus as her lover, which suggests that he had been locally identified with Hephaestus, another fire-god and inventor, of whom the same story was told (see 25. b) because he shared a temple with Athene on the Acropolis.
~I. Menoetius (‘ruined strength’) is a sacred king of the oak cult; the name refers perhaps to his ritual maiming (see 7—~ and 50. 2).
~2. While the right4aanded swastika is a symbol of the sun, the lefthanded is a symbol of the moon. Among the Akan of West Africa, a people of Libyo-Berber ancestry (see Introduction, end), it represents the TriFle-goddess Ngame.
AT the close of every night, rosy-fingered, saffron-robed Eos, a daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, rises from her couch in the east, mounts her chariot drawn by the horses Lampus and Pha~thon, and rides to Olympus, where she announces the approach of her brother Helius. When Hellus appears, she becomes Hemera, and accompanies him on his travels until, as Hespera, she announces their safe arrival on the western shores of Ocean.I
b. Aphrodite was once vexed to find Ares in Eos’s bed, and cursed her with a constant long’rag for young mortals, whom thereupon she secredy and shamefacedly began to seduce, one after the other. First, Orion; next, Cephalus; then Cleitus, a grandson of Melampus; though she was married to Astraeus, who came of Titan stock, and to whom she bore not only the North, West, and South Winds, but also Pho: phorus and, some say, all the other stars of Heaven.2
c. Lastly, Eos carried off Ganymedes and Tithonus, sore of Tr~
or Ilus. When Zeus robbed her of Ganymedes she begged him t grant Tithonus immortality, and to this he assented. But she forgot t ask also for perpetual youth, a gift won by Selene for Endymion; an Tithonus became daily older, greyer, and more shrunken, his vok grew shrill, and, when Eos tired of nursing him, she locked him in h~ bedroom, where he turned into a cicada.1
1. Homer: Odyssey v. ~ and xxiii. 244-6; Theocrims: Idylls ii.
:~. Apollodorus: i. 4.4; Homer: Odyssey xv. 250; Hesiod: Theogon 378-82.
_t. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 115; Homertc Hymn Aphrodite z18-38; Hesiod: Theogony 984; Apollodorus: iii. ~~.
Horace: Odes i~. 20; Ovid: Fasti i. 461;
1. The Dawn-maiden was a Hellenic fancy, grudgingly accepted b the mythographers as a Titaness of the second generation; her two-hor~ chariot and her annouucement of the Sual’s advent are allegories. Sh evolved from the bloody-fiugered Indian Mother-goddess Usha
= Eos).
2. Eos’s constant love affairs with young mortals are also allegorie dawn brings midnight lovers a renewal of eroflc passion, and is the mo usual time for men to be carried off by fever. The allegory of her unic with Astraeus is a simple one: the stars merge with dawn in the east Astraeus, the dawu wind, rises as if it were their emanation. Then, becau wind was held to be a fertilizing agent, Eos became the mother Astrams of the Morning Star left alone in the sky. (Astraeus was anoth, name for Cephalus, also said to have lathered the Morning Star on her It followed philosophically that, since the Evening Star is identical wi~ the Morning Star, and since Evening is Dawn’s last appearance, all tt stars must be born from Eos, and so must every wind but the dawn win, This allegory, however, contradicted the myth of Boreas’s creation the Moon-goddess Eurynome (see ~.
3. In Greek art, Eos and Hemera are indistinguishable charactel Tithonus has been taken by the allegotist to mean’ a grant of a stretchin1 out’ (from tein~ and an~), a reference to the stretching-out of his life, Eos’s plea; but it is likely, rather, to have been a masculine form oleos own name, TitonE—from titS, ‘day’ (Tzetzes: On Li/cophron 941) ar one’, ‘queen’—and to have meant ‘partner of the Queen of Day’. Cicad are active as soon as the day warms up, and the golden cicada was an en blem of Apollo as the Sun-god among the Greek colonists of Asia Mine
Ou~o/~, a hunter of Boeotian Hy-ria, and the handsomest man alive, was the son of Poseidon and Euryale. Coming one day to Hyria in Chios, he fell in love with Merope, daughter of Dionysus’s son Oenopi0n. Oenopion had promised Merope to .Orlon in marriage, if he would free the island from the dangerous wild beasts that infested it; and this he set himself to do, bringing the pelts to Merope every evening. But when the task was at last accomplished, and he claimed her as his wife, Oenopion brought him rumours of lions, bears, and wolves still lurking in the hills, and refused to give her up, the fact being that he was in love with her himself.
b. One night Orion, in disgust, drank a skinful of Oenopion’s wine, which so inflamed him that he broke into Merope’s bedroom, and forced her to lie with him. When dawn came, Oenopion invoked his ~~ther, Dionysus, who sent satyrs to ply Orion with still more wine, until he fell fast asleep; whereupon Oenopion put out both his eyes and flung him on the seashore. An oracle announced that the blind man would regain his sight, if he travelled to the east and turned his eye-sockets towards Helius at the point where he first rises from Ocean. Orion at once rowed out to sea in a small boat and, following the sound of a Cyclops’s hammer, reached Lemnos. There he entered the smithy of Hephaestus, snatched up an apprentice named Cedalion, and carried him off on his shoulders as a guide. Cedalion led Orion over land and sea, until he came at last to the farthest Ocean, where Eos fell in love with him, and her brother Helius duly restored his sight.
c. After visiting Delos in Eos’s company, Orion returned to avenge himself on Oenopion, whom he could not, however, find anywhere in Chios, because he was hiding in an underground chaxnber made for him by Hephaestus. Sailing on to Crete, where he thought that Oenopion might have fled for protection to his grandfather Minos, Orion met Artemis, who shared his love of the chase. She soon persuaded him to forget his vengeance and, instead, come hunting with her.I
d. Now, Apollo was aware that Orion had not refused Eos’s invitation to her couch in the holy island of Delos—Dawn still daily blushes to remember this indiscretion-and, further, boasted that he rid the whole earth of wild beasts and monsters. Fearing, thereśore, his sister Artemis might prove as susceptible as Eos, Apollo went Mother Earth and, mischievously repeating Orion’s boast, arran~ for a monstrous scorpion to pursue him. Orion attacked the scorpi~ first with arrows, then with his sword, but, finding that its armour v proof against any mortal weapon, dived into the sea and swam in the direction of Delos where, he hoped, Eos would protect hi Apollo then called to Artemis: ‘Do you see that black object bobbi about in the sea, far away, close to Ortygia? It is the head ofa vill~. called Candaon, who has just seduced Opis, one of your Hyperborc priestesses. I challenge you to transfix it with an arrow!’ Now, C~ daon was Orion’s Boeotian nickname, though Artemis did not kn(
this. She took careful aim, let fly, and, swimming out to retrieve t quarry, found that she had shot Orion through the head. In great gr she implored Apollo’s son Asclepius to revive him, and he consent~ but was destroyed by Zeus’s thunderbolt before he cotfid accompl his task. Artemis then set Orion’s image among the stars, eterna pursued by the Scorpion; his ghost had already descended to Asphodel Fields.
e. Some, however, say that the scorpion stung Orion to death, a that Artemis was vexed with him for having amorously chased t virgin companions, the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleio~ ~hey fled across the meadows of Boeotia, until the gods, havi changed them into doves, set their images among the stars. But thi.. a mistaken account, since the Pleiades were not virgins: three of the had lain with Zeus, two with Poseidon, one with Ares, and the sever married Sisyphus of Corinth, and failed to be included in the constel tion, because Sisyphus was a mere mortal.2
f Others tell the following strange story of Orion’s birth, to accot for his name (which is sometimes written Urion) and for the traditi that he was a son of Mother Earth. Hyricus, a poor bee-keeper a farmer, had vowed to have no children, and he grew old and impore When, one day, Zeus and Hermes visited him in disguise, and w, hospitably entertained, they enquired what gift he’most desired. Si~ ing deeply, Hyrieus replied that what he most wanted, namely to h: a son, was now impossible. The gods, however, instructed him sacrifice a bull, make water on its hide, and then bury it in his wit grave. He did so and, nine months late}, a child was born to him, wht he named Urion-’he who makes water’-and, indeed, both the rising and setting of the constellation Orion bring rain.3
x. Homer: Odyssey xi. 310; Apollodorus: i. 4—3-4; Partl~:~fius: Love Stories 20; Lucian: On the Hall 28; Theon: On Afar;rs 638; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 34.
2. Apollodorus: loc. cit.
3. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidi. 539; Ovid: Fasti v. 537 if..; Hyginus: ‘ Poetic Astronomy ii. 34.
1. Orion’s story consists of three or four unrelated myths strung together. The first, confusedly told, is that of Oenopion. This concerns a sacred king’s unwillingness to resign his throne, at the close of his term, even when the new candidate for kingship had been through his ritual combats and married the queen with the usual feasting. But the new king is only an interrex who, after reigning for one day, is duly murdered and devoured by Maenads (see 30. 1); the old king, who has been shamming dead in a tomb, then remarries the queen and continues his reign (scc 123.4).
2. The irrelevant detail of the Cyclops’s hammer explains Orion’s blindness: a mythological picture of Odysseus searhag the drunken Cyclops’s eye (see 170. d) has apparently been combined with a Hellenic allegory: how the Sun Titan is blinded every evening by his enemies, but restored to sight by the following Dawn. Orion (‘the dweller on the mountain’) and Hyperion (‘ the dweller on high ‘) are, in fact, identified here. Orion’s boast that he would exterminate the wild beasts not only refers to his ritual combats (see 123. I), but is a fable of the rising Sun, at whose appearance all wild beasts retire to their dens (compare Psabn civ. 22).
3. Plutarch’s account of the scorpion sent by the god Set to kill the Child Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, in the hottest part of the summer, explains Orion’s death by scorpion-bite and Artemis’s appeal to Asclepius (Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 19). Horus died, but Ra, the Sun-god, revived him, and later he avenged his father Osiris’s death; in the original myth Orion, too, will have been revived. Orion is also, in part, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian Heracles, whom Scorpion-men attack in the Tenth Tablet of the Calendar epic—a myth which concerned the mortal wounding of the sacred king as the Sun rose in Scorpio. Exactly at what season the wounding took place depends on the antiquity of the myth; when the Zodiac originated, Scorpio was probably an August sign, but in Classical times the precession of the equinoxes had advanced it to October.
4. Another version of Orion’s death is recorded on one of the Hittite Ras Shamra tablets. Anat, or Anatha, the Battle-goddess, fell in love with a handsome hunter named Aqhat, and when he vexatiously refused t~ give her his bow, asked the murderous Yatpan to steal it from him. T~ her great grief the clumsy ťatpan not only killed Aqhat, but dropped th, bow into the sea. The astronomical meaning of this myth is that Orio~ and the Bow—a part of the constellation, which the Greeks called ‘Th, Hound’—sink below the southern horizon for two whole months ever,. spring. In Greece this story seems to have been adapted to a legend o how the orgiastic priestesses of Artemis—Opis be’mg a rifle of Artemi herself—killed an amorous visitor to their islet of Ortygia. And in Egypt since the return of the constellation Orion introduces the summer heat, i was confusingly identified with Horus’s enemy Set, the two bright star above him being his ass’s ears.
5. The myth of Orion’s birth is perhaps more than a comic tale modelled on that of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid: Metamorphoses vii~ 670-7~4), and told to account for the first syllable of his.ancient name Urion—as though it were derived from ourein, ‘to urinate’, not fro~ ouros, the Homeric form of oros, ‘mountain’. Yet a primitive Africa~ rain-producing charm, which consists in making water on a bull’s hide may have been known to the Greeks; and that Orion was a son c Poseidon, the water-god, is a clear allusion to his rain-making powers.
6. The name Pleiades, from the root plei,’ to sail’, refers to their risinl at the season when good weather for sailing approaches. But Pindar’ form Peleiades, ‘flock of doves’, was perhaps the original form, since th Hyades are piglets. It appears that a seventh star in the group becam extinct towards the end of the second millennium n.›. (see 67. j); sinc Hyginus (Fabula ~92) says that Electra d.isatSpeared in grief for the destruc tion of the House of Dardanus. Orion’s vain pursuit of the Pleiades, whic~ occur in the Bull constellation, refers to their rising above the horizo’. just before the reappearance of Orion.
HELIUS, whom the cow-eyed Euryphaessa, or Theia, bore to th Titan Hyperion, is a brother of Selene and Eos. Roused by the crowin of the cock, which is sacred to him, and heralded by Eos, he drives b~ four-horse chariot daily across the Heavens from a magnificent palac in the far east, near Colchis, to an equally magnificent far-wester palace, where his unharnessed horses pasture in the Islands of th Blessed.x He sails home along the Ocean stream, which flows around the world, embarking his chariot and team on a golden ferry-boat made for him by Hephaestus, and sleeps all nigh~ in a comfortable cabin.2
b. Helius can see everything that happens on earth, but is not particularly observant—once he even failed to notice the robbery of his sacred cattle by Odysseus’s companions. lie has several herds of such cattle, each consisting of three hundred and fifty head. Those in Sicily are tended by his daughters Phaetusa and Lampefta, but he keeps his finest herd in the Spanish island of Erytheia.3 Rhodes is his freehold. It happened that, when Zeus was allotting islands and cities to the various gods, he forgot to include Helius among these, and ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘now I shall have to begin all over again.’
‘No, Sire,’ replied lielius politely, ‘today I nofxced signs’ of a new island emerging from the sea, to the south of Asia Minor. I shall be well content with that.’
c. Zeus called the Fate Lachesis to witness that any such new island should belong to Helius;4 and, when Rhodes had risen well above the waves, Helius claimed it and begot seven sons and a daughter there on the Nymph Rhode. Some say that Rhodes had existed before this time, and was re-emerging from the waves after having been overwhelmed by the great flood which Zeus sent. The Telchines were its aboriginal inhabitants and Poseidon fell in love with one of them, the nymph Halia, on whom he begot Rhode and six sons; which six sons insulted Aphrodite in her passage from Cythera to Paphos, and were struck ,had by her; they ravished their mother and committed other outrages so foul that Poseidon sank them underground, and they became the Eastern Demons. But Halia threw herself into the sea and was deified ‘as Leucothea—though the same story is told of Ino, mother of Corinthian Melicertes. The Telchines, foreseeing the flood, sailed away in all directions, especially to Lycia, and abandoned their claims on Rhodes. Rhode was thus left the sole heiress, and her seven sons by Helius ruled in the island after its re-emergence. They became famous astronomers, and had one sister named Electryo, w. ho died a virgin and is now wor~ shipped as a demi-goddess. One of them, by name Actis, was banished for fratricide, and fled to Egypt, where he founded the city of Heliopolis, and fixst taught the Egyptians astrology, inspired by his father Helius. The Rhodians have now built the Colossus, seventy cubits high, in his honour. Zeus also added to Helius’s dominions the new island of Sicily, which had been a missile flung in the battle with the
d. One morning Helius yielded to his son Pha~thon who had been constantly plaguing him for permission to drive the sun-chariot. Phaithon wished to show his sisters Prote and Clymene what a free fellow he was: and his fond mother Rhode (whose name is uncertain because she had been called by both her daughters’ names and by that of Rhode) encouraged him. But, not being strong enough to check the career of the white horses, which his sisters had yoked for him, Pha~thon drove them first so high above the earth that everyone shivered, and then so near the earth that he scorched the fields. Zeus, in a fit of rage, killed him with a thunderbolt, and he fell into the river Po. His grieving sisters were changed into poplar-trees on its banks, which weep amber tears; or, some say, into alder-trees. S
x. Homeric Hymn to Helius 2 and 9-16; Homeric Hymn to Athene ~3; Hesiod: Theogony 37~-4; Pausanias: v. 25.5; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xii. x; Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. ~ if. and I06 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 183; Athenaeus: vii. 296.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5. xo; Athenaeus: xi. 39.
3. Homer: Odyssey xii. 323 and 375; Apollodorus: i. 6. x; Theocritus: Idylls xxv. ~30. 4—Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 54 if.
5. Scholiast on Pi~dar’s Olympian Odes vi. 78; Tzetzes: Chiliads iv. 137; Hyginus: Fabulae 52, ~$2 and ~54; Euripides: Hippolytus
737; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 598 if.; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 25; Ovid: Metamorphoses i. 755 if.; Virgil: Eclogues vi. 62; Diodorus Siculus v. 3; Apollodorus: i. 4. 5— , 1. The Sun’s subordination to the Moon, unt’ll Apollo usurped Helius’s ú place and made an intellectual deity of him, is a remarkable feature of early Greek myth. Helius was not even an Olympian, but a mere Titan’s son; and, although Zeus later borrowed certain solar characteristics from the Hittite and Corinthian god Tesup (see 67. I) and other oriental sungods, these were unimportant compared with his command of thunder and lightni~g. The number of’cattle in Helius’s herds—the Odyssey makes him Hyperion (see ~70. t)—is a reminder of his tutelage to the Great Goddess: being the number of days covered by twelve complete ltmations, as in the Numan year (Censorinus: xx), less the five days sacred to Osiris, Isis, Set, Horus, and Nephthys. It is also a multiple of the Moon-numbers fifty and seven. Helius’s so-called daughters are, in fact, Moon-priestesses—cattle being lunar rather than solar animals in early European myth; and Hellus’s mother, the cow-eyed Euryphaessa, is the Moon-goddess herself. The allegory of a sun-chariot coursing across the sky is Hellenic in character; but Nilsson in his Primitive Time Reckoning (1920) has shown that the ancestral clan cults even of Classical Greece ~rere regulated by the moon alone, as was the agricultural economy of Hesiod’s Boeotia. A gold ring from Tiryns and another from the Acropolis at Mycenae prove that the goddess controlled both the moon and the sun, which are placed above her head.
a. In the story of Pha~thon, which is another name for Helius himself (Homer: Iliad xi. 735 and Odyssey v. 479), an instructive fable has been grafted on the chariot allegory, the moral being that fathers should not spoil their sons by listening to female advice. This fable, however, is not quite so simple as it seems: it has a mythic importance in its reference to the annual sacrifice of a royal prince, on the one day reckoned as belonging to the terrestrial, but not to the sidereal year, namely that which followed the shortest day. The sacred king pretended to die at sunset; the boy interrex was at once invested with his titles, dignities, and sacred implements, married to the queen, and killed twenty-four hours later: in Thrace, torn to pieces by women disguised as horses (see 27. d and 130. ~), but at Corinth, and elsewhere, dragged at the tail of a sun-chariot drawn by maddened horses, until he was crushed to death. Thereupon the old king reappeared from the tomb where he had been hiding (see 4~. ~), as the boy’s successor. The myths of Glaucus (see 71. a), Pelops (see 109. j), and Hippolytus (‘ stampede of horses’—see xox. g), refer to this custom, which seems to have been taken to Babylon by the Hittites. 3. Black poplars were sacred to Hecate, but the white gave promise of resurrection (see 3 ~—5 and x 34-f); thus the transformation of Pha&hon’s sisters into poplars points to a sepulchral island where a college of priestesses officiated at the oracle of a tribal king. That they were also said to have been turned into alders supports this view: since alders fringed Circe’s Aeaea (‘wailing’), a sepulchral island lying at the head of the Adriatic, not far from the mouth of the Po (Homer: Odyssey v. 64 and 239). Alders were sacred to Phoroneus, the oracular hero and inventor of ftte (see 57. ~)—The Po valley ~was the southern terminus of the Bronze Age route down which amber, sacred to the Sun, travelled to the Mediterranean from the Baltic (see 148. 9)4. Rhodes was the property of the Moon-goddess Dana~—called Cameira, Ialysa, and Linda (see 60. 2)—until she was extruded by the Hittite Sun-god Tesup, worshipped as a bull (see 93. ~)—Dana~ may be identified with Halia (‘of the sea’ ), Leucothea (‘white goddess’), and Electryo (‘amber’). Poseidon’s six sons and one daughter, and Helius’s seven sons, point to a seven-day week ruled by planetary powers, or Titans (see x. 3)—Actis did not found Hellopolls—Onn, or Aunis—one of the mo~t ancient dries in Egypt; and the claim that he taught the Egyptians astrology is ridiculous. But after the Trojan War the Rhodians were for a while the only sea-traders recognized by the Pharaohs, and seem to have had ancient re~ligious ties with Heliopolis, the centre of the Ra cult. The ‘Heliopolitan Zeus’, who bears busts of the seven planetary powers on his body sheath, may be of Rhodian inspiration; lil~e similar statues found at Tortosa in Spain, and B yblos in Phoenicia (see x. 4)—
Hn. LL~N, son of Deucalion, married Orseis, and settled in Thessaly, where his eldest son, Aeolus, succeeded him.I
‘b. Hellen’s youngest son, Dorus, emigrated to Mount Parnas sus, where he founded the first Dorian community. The second son, Xuthus, had already fled to Athens after being accused of theft by his brothers, and there married Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, who bore him Ion and Achaeus. Thus the four most famous Hellenic nations, namely the Ionians, Aeolians, Achaeans, and Dorians, are all descended from Hellen. But Xuthus did not prosper at Athens: when chosen as arbitrator, upon Erechtheus’s death, he pronounced his eldest brotherin-law, Cecrops the Second, to be the rightful heir to the throne. This decision proved unpopular, and Xuthus, banished from the city, died in Aegialus, now Achaia. Z
c. A~olus seduced Cheiron’s daughter, the prophetess Thea, by some called Thefts, who was Artemis’s companion of the chase. Thea feared that Cheiron would punish her severely when he knew of her condition, but dared not appeal to Artemis for assistance; however, Poseidon, wishing to do his friend Aeolus a layout, temporarily disguised her as a mare called Euippe. When she had dropped her foal, Melanippe, which he afterwards transformed into an infant girl, Poseidon set Thea’s image among the stars; this is now called the constellation of the Horse. Aeolus took up Melanippe, renamed her Ame, and entrusted her to one Desmontes who, being childless, was glad to adopt her. Cheiron knew nothing of all this.
d. Poseidon seduced Arne, on whom he had been keeping an eye, so soon as she was of age; and Desmontes, discovering that she was with child, bl]nded her, shut her in an empty tomb, and supplied her with the very least amount of bread and water that would serve to sustain life. There she bore twin sons, whom Desmontes ordered his servants to expose on Mount Pelion, for the wild beasts to devour. But an Icarian herdsman found and rescued the twins, one of whom so closely resembled his maternal grandfather that he was named Aeolus; the other had to be content with the name B~)eotus.
e. Meanwhile, Metapontus, King oflcaria, had threatened to divorce his barren wife Theano unless she bore him an heir within the year. While he was away on a visit to an oracle she appealed to the herdsman for help, and he brought her the foundlings whom, on Metapontus’s return, she passed off as her own. Later, proving not to be barren after all, she bore him twin sons; but the foundlings, being of divine parentage, were far more beautiful than they. Since Metapontus had no reason to suspect that Aeolus and Boeotus were not his own children, they remained his favourites. Growing jealous, Theano waited until Metapontus left home again, this time for a sacrifice at the shrine of Artemis Metapontina. She then ordered his own sons to go hunting with t~eir elder brothers, and murder them as if by accident. Theano’s plot failed, however, because in the ensuing fight Poseidon came to the assistance of his sons. Aeolus and Boeotus were soon carrying their assailants’ dead bodies back to the palace, and when Theano saw them approach she stabbed herself to death with a hunting knife.
f. At tlfis, Aeolus and Boeoms fled to their foster-father, the herdsman, where Poseidon in person revealed the secret of their parentage. He ordered them to rescue their mother, who was still languishing in the tomb, and to kill Desmontes. They obeyed without hesitation; Poseidon then restored Arne’s sight, and all three went back to lcaria. When Metapontus learned that Theano had deceived him he married Arne and formally adopted her sons as his heirs.3
g. All went well for some years, until Metapontus decided to discard Ame and marry again. Aeolus and Boeotus took their mother’s side in the ensuing wrangle, and ldlled Autolyre, the new queen, but were obliged to forfeit their inheritance and flee. Boeotus, with Arne, tool~ refuge in the palace of his grandfather Aeolus, who bequeathed him the southern part of his kingdom, and renamed it Am.e; the inhabitants are still called Boeotians. Two Thessalian cities, one of which later became Chaeronaea, also adopted Arne’s name.1
h. Aeolus, meanwhile, had set sail with a number of friends an steering west, took possession of the seven Aeolian Islands in the Ty rhenian Sea, where he became famous as the confidant of the gods at guardian of the winds. His home was on Lipara, a floating island sheer cliff, within which the winds were confined. He had six sons at six daughters by his wife Enarete, all of whom lived together, wc content with one another’s company, in a palace surrounded by brazen wall. It was a life of perpetual feasting, song, and merrime~ until, one day, Aeolus discovered that the youngest son, Macareu had been sleeping with his sister Canache. In horror, he threw the fru of their incestuous love to the dogs, and sent Canache a sword wi~ which she dutifully killed herself. But he then learned that his oth, sons and daughters, having never been warned that incest amor humans was displeasing to the gods, had also innocently paired off, considered themselves as husbands and wives. Not wishing to offer Zeus, who regards incest as an Olympic prerogative, Aeolus broke these unions, and ordered four of his remaining sons to emigrate. The visited Italy and Sicily, where each founded a famous kingdom, an rivalled his father in chastity and justice; only the fifth and e~dest sc stayed at home, as Aeolus’s successor to the throne of Lipara. But son say that Macareus and Canache had a daughter, Amphissa, lat, beloved by Apollo.s
i. Zeus had confined the winds because he feared that, unless ke1 under control, they might one day sweep both earth and sea away in~ the air, and Aeolus took charge of them at Hera’s desire. His task wa~ t let them out, one by one, at his own discretion, or at the considere request of some Olympian deity. If a storm were needed he wou]
pltmge his spear into the cliff-side and the winds would stream out the hole it had made, until he stopped it again. Aeolus was so discre, and capable that, when his death hour approached, Zeus did not con mit him to Tartarus, but seated him on a throne within the Cave oftt Winds, where he is still to be found. Hera insists that Aeolus’s respons bilities entitle him to attend the feasts of the gods; but the other Olyn pians—especially Poseidon, who claims the sea, and the air above it, his own property, and grudges anyone the right to raise storms regard him as an interloper.6
x. Apollodorus: i. 7—3.
2. Herodotus: i. 56; Pausanias: vii. r. 2.
3. Hyginus: Fabtda 186; Poetic Astronomy ii.
4. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 67. 6; Pausanias: ix. 40. 3.
5. Ovid: Heroides xi; Homer: Odyssey x. ~ if.; Hyginus: Fabula 238; Plutarch: Parallel Stories ~8; Diodorus Sictrim: v. 8; Pausanias: x. 38.2.
6. Homer: Odysset/ Ioc. tit.; Virgil: Aeneid i. 142-5. ~r
s. The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade Greece. were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi,’ worshippers of the Grey Goddess, or Crone’). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus as first-generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen—a masculine form of the Moon-goddess Helle or Helen. The Parian Chronicle records that this change from Greeks to Hellenes took place in which seems a reasonable enough date. Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation, and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite—whose sacred bird was the xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that women were the property of their fathers and husbands. But Euripides, as a loyal Ionian of Athens, makes Ion elder brother to Dorus and Achaeus, and the son of Apollo as well (see 44. a).
2. Poseidou’s seduction of Mclanippe, his seduction of the Mareheaded Demeter (see 16./), and Aeolus’s seduction of Euippe, all refer perhaps to the same event: the seizure by Aeolians of the pre-Hcllenic horse-cult centres. The myth of Arne’s being blinded and imprisoned in a tomb, where she ‘bore the twins Aeolus and Boeotus, and of their subsequent exposure on the mountain among wild beasts, is apparently deduced from the familiar icon that yielded the myths of Dana~ (see 73—4), Antiope (see 76. a), and the rest. A priestess of Mother Earth’s is shown crouched in a tholus tomb, presenting the New Year twins to the shepherds, for revelation at her Mysteries; tholus tombs have their entrances always facing east, as if in promise of rebirth. These shepherds are instructed to report that they found the infants abandoned on the mountainside, being suckled by some sacred animal-cow, sow, she-goat, bitch, or she-wolf. The wild beasts from whom the twins are supposed to have been saved represent the seasonal transformations of the newlyborn sacred king (see 30. I). 3—Except for the matter of the imprisoned winds, and the family incest on Lipara, the remainder of the myth concerns tribal migrations. The mythographers are thoroughly confused between Aeolus the son of Hellen; another Aeolus who, in order to make the Aeolians into third-generation Greeks, is said to have been the son of Xuthus; and the thi, Aeolus, grandson of the first.
4. Since the Homeric gods did not regard the incest of Aeolus’s so, and daughters as in the least reprehensible, it looks as if both he an Enarete were not mortals and thus bound by the pr~estly tables orkintire and affinity, but Titans; and that their sons and daughters were t~ remaining six couples, in charge of the seven celestial bodies and t} seven days of the sacred week (see I. d). This would explain their priv leged a~ci god~like existence, without problems of either food, drink, ~ clothing, in an impregnable palace built on a floating island—like DeI( before the birth of Apollo (see 14.3)-’ Macareus’ means’ happy’, as onl gods were happy. It was left for Latin mythographers to humani: Aeolus, and awaken him to a serious view of his family’s conduct; the amendment to the myth permitted them to account both for the found; tion of Aeolian kingdoms in Italy and Sicily, and—because ‘ Canach~ means ‘barking’ and her child was thrown to the dogs—for the Italia custom of puppy sacrifice. Ovid apparently took this story from t~ second book of Sostratus’s Etruscan History (Plutarch: Parallel Stories 28 5—The winds were originally the property of Hera, and the male go~ had no power over them; indeed, in Diodorus’s account, Aeolus mere] teaches the islanders the use of sails in navigation and foretells, from sig, in the fire, what winds will rise. Control of the winds, regarded as tt spirits of the dead, is one of the privileges that the Death-goddess’s repr, sentatives have been most loth to surrender; witches iu England; Scotlan, and Brittany still claimed to control and sell winds to sailors as late as t} sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the Dorians had been thorougl already by Homer’s time they had advanced Aeolus, the eponymo~
ancestor of the Aeolians, to the rank ofgodling, and given him charge, his fellow-winds at Hera’s expense—the Aeolian Islands, which bore h name, being situated in a region notorious for the violence and diversil of its winds (see ~70. g). This compromise was apparently accepted wi~ bad grace by the priests of Zeus and Poseidon, who opposed the creatic of any new deities. and doubtless also by Hera’s conservative devotee wlxo regarded the winds as her inalienable property.
A vozzo lay secretly with Erechtheus’s daughter Creusa, wife Xuthus, in a cave below the Athenian Propylaea. When her son
born Apollo spirited him away to Delphi, where he became a temp servant, and the priests named him Ion. Xuthus had no heir and, after many delays, went at last to ask the Delphic Oracle how he might procure one. To his surprise he was told that the first person to meet him as he left the sanctuary would be his son; this was Ion, and Xuthus concluded that he had begotten him on some Maenad in the promiscuous Dionysiac orgies at Delphi many years before. Ion could not contradict this, and acknowledged him as his father. ]3ut Creusa was vexed to find that Xuthus now had a son, while she had none, and tried to murder Ion by offering him a cup of poisoned wine. Ion, however, first poured a libation to the gods, and a dove flew down to taste the spilt wine. The dove died, and Creusa fled for sanctuary to Apollo’s altar. When the vengeful Ion tried to drag her away, the priestess intervened, explaining that he was Creusa’s son by Apollo, though Xuthus must not be undeceived in the belief that he had fathered him on a Maenad. Xuthus was then promised that he would beget Dorus and Achaeus on Creusa.
b. Afterwards, Ion married Helice, daughter of Selinus, King of Aegialus, whom he succeeded on the throne; and, at the death of Erechtheus, he was chosen King of Athens. The four occupational classes of Athenians—farmers, craftsmen, priests, and soldiers—are named after the sons borne to him by Helice.x
1. Pausanias: vii. L :~; Euripides: Ion; Strabo: viii. 7. ~; Conon: Narrations 27.
1. This theatrical myth is told to substantiate the Ionians’ seniority over Dorians and Achaeans (see 43.1), and also to award them divine descent from Apollo. But Creusa in the cave is perhaps the goddess, presenting the New Year infant, or infants (see 43. 2), to a shepherd—mistaken for Apollo in pastoral dress. Helice, the willow, was the tree of the fifth month, sacred to the Triple Muse, whose priestess used it in every kind of witchcraft and water-magic (see 28. 5); the Ionians seem to have subordinated themselves willingly to her.
ALCYONE was the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, and Aegiale. She married Ceyx of Trachis, son of the Morning-star, and 45. a—45—z they were so happy in each other’s company that she daringly called herself Hera, and him Zeus. This naturally vexed the Olympian Zeus and Hera, who let a thunderstorm break over the ship in which Ceyx was sailing to consult an oracle, and drowned him. His ghost appeared to Alcyone who, greatly against her will, had stayed behind in Trachis, whereupon distraught with grief, she leapt into the sea. Some pitying god transformed them both into kingfishers.
b. Now, every winter, the hen-kingfisher carries her dead mate with great wailing to his burial and then, building a closely compacted nest from the thorns of the sea-needle, launches it on the sea, lays her eggs in it, and hatches out her chicks. She does all this in the Halcyon Daysthe seven which precede the winter solstice, and the seven which succeed it—while Aeolus forbids his winds to sweep across the waters.
c. But some say that Ceyx was turned into a seamew.x
x. Apollodorus: x. 7. 3; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Birds ~50; Scholiast and Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ix. 562; Pliny: Natural History x. 47; Hyginus: Fabula 65; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 4~0748; Lucian: Halcyon i.; Plutarch: Which Animals Are the Craftier? 35.
1. The legend of the halcyon’s, or kingfisher’s, nest (which has no fotmdation in natural history, since the halcyon does not build any kind of nest, but lays eggs in holes by the waterside) can refer only to the birth of the new sacred king at the winter solstice—after the queen who represents his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. But because the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, ‘every year’ must be understood as ‘every Great Year’, of one hundred ltmations, in the last of which solar and hmar time were roughly synchronized, and the sacred king’s term ended.
e. Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone (see 80. d), a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (Iliad ix. 562), and with a daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds (see 43—h). Halcyon cannot therefore mean hal-cyon, ‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for alcy-one, ‘the queen who wards off evil ‘. This derivation is confirmed by the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, and the manner of their punishment by Zeus and Hera. The seamew part of the legend need not be pressed, although this bird, which has a plaintive cry, was sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite, or Leucothea (see x 70. y), like the halcyon of Cyprus (see 160. g). It seems that late in the second millennium s.c. the sea-faring Aeolians, who had agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans, and were forced to accept the Olympian religion. ‘ Zeus’, which according to Johannes Tzetzes (Antehomerica ~02 ft. and Chiliades i. 474) had hitherto been a title born by petty kings (see 68. ~), was henceforth reserved for the Father of Heaven alone. But in Crete, the ancient mystical tradition that Zeus was born and died annually lingered on i~to Christian times, and tombs of Zeus were shown at Cnossus, on Mount Ida, and on Mount Dicte, eaclx a different cult-centre. Callimachus was scandalized, and in his Hymn to Zeus wrote: ‘The Cretans are always liars. They have even built thy tomb, O Lord ! But thou art not dead, for thou livest for ever.’ This is quoted in Titus i. 12 (see 7. 6)..3. Pliny, who describes the halcyon’s alleged nest in detail—apparently the zotSphyte called halcyoneurn by L’mnaeus—reports that the halcyon is rarely seen, and then only at the two solstices and at the setting of the Pleiades. This proves her to have originally been a manifestation of the Moon-goddess, who was alternately the Goddess of Life-in-Death at the winter solstice, and of Death-m-Life at the summer solstice; and who, every Great Year, early in Nov. ember, when the Pleiades set, sent the sacred king his death summons.
4. Still another Alcyone, daughter of Pleione (‘sailing queen’) by Atlas, was the leader of the seven Pleiades (see 39. d). The Pleiades’ heliacal rising in May began the navigational year; their setting marked its end, when (as Pliny notes in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold north wind blows. The circumstances of Ceyx’s death show that the Aeolians, who were famous sailors, worshipped the goddess as’ Alcyone’ because she protected them from rocks and rough weather: Zeus wrecked Ceyx’s ship, i~ defiance of her powers, by hurling a thunderbolt at it. Yet the halcyon was still credited with the magical power of allaying storms; and its body, when dried, was used as a talisman against Zeus’s lightning—presumably on the ground that where once it strikes it will not strike again. The Mediterra~aean is inclined to be calm about the time of the winter solstice.
T~u~v0s, a son of Ares, ruled over the Thracians then occupying Phocian Daulis—though some say that he was King of Pagae in Megaris ~—and, having acted as mediator in a boundary dispute for Pandion, King of Athens and father office twins Butes and Erecht~ married their sister Procne, who bore him a son, Irys.
b. Unfortunately Tereus, enchanted by the voice of Pandi, younger sister Philomela, had fallen in love with her; and, a year la concealing Procne in a rustic cabin near his palace at Daulis, he repo~ her death to Pandion. Pandion, condoling with Tereus, genero~
offered him Philomela in Procne’s place, and provided Athet guards as her escort when she went to Daulis for the wedding. TI guards Tereus murdered and, when Philomela reached the palace had already forced her to lie with him. Procne soon heard the news l as a measure of precaution, Tereus cut out her tongue and confined to the slaves’ quarters, where she could communicate with Philon only by weaving a secret message into the pattern of a bridal r intended for her. This ran simply: ‘Procne is among the slaves.’
c. Meanwhile, an oracle had warned Tereus that Itys would die the hand of a blood relative and, suspecting his brother Dryas ~ murderous plot to seize t~e throne, struck him down unexpect~
with an axe. The same day, Philomela read the message woven into robe. She hurried to the slaves’ quarters, found one of the rooms bol broke down the door, and released Procne, who was chattering tu telligibly and running around in circles.
‘ Oh, to be revenged on Tereus, who pretended that you were de and seduced me!’ wafted Philomela, aghast.
Procne, being tongueless, could not reply, but flew out and, sei~ her son Itys, killed him, gutted him, and then boiled him in a col cauldron for Tereus to eat on his return.
d. When Tereus realized what flesh he had been tasfmg, he gras the axe with which he had killed Dryas and pursued the sisters as t fled from the palace. He soon overtook them and was on the poin committing a double murder when the gods changed all three i birds; Procne became a swallow; Philomela, a nightingale; Tereu hoopoe. And the Phocians say that no swallow dares nest in Dauli its environs, and no nightingale sings, for fear of Tereus. But swallow, having no tongue, screams and flies around in circles; vd the boopoe flutters in pursuit of her, crying ‘Pou? Pou?’ (wh~
where?). Meanwhile, the nighfmgale retreats to Athens, where mourns without cease for. Itys, whose death she inadvertendy cau~ singing ‘ Itu! Itu!’ z
e. But some say that Tereus was turned into a hawk.a i. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 8; Thucydides: ii. 29; Strabo: ix. 3—~3; Pausanias: i. 4~. 8.
2. Apollodorus: iii. ~4. 8; Nonnus: Dionysiaca iv. 320; Pausanias: i. 5—4; i. 4~. 8 and x. 4. 6; Hyginus: Fabula 45; Fragments of Sophocles’s Tereus; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xix. 4t8; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 426-674; First Vatican Mythographer:
217.
3. Hyginus: Fabula 45.
1. This extravagant romance seems to have been invented to account for a series of Thraco-Pelasgian wall-paintings, found by Phocian invaders in a temple at Daulis (‘shaggy’), which illustrated dilTerent methods of prophecy in local use.
2. The cutting-out oF Procne’s tongue misrepresents a scene showing a prophetess in a trance, induced by the chewing of laurel-leaves; her face is contorted with ecstasy, not pain, and the tongue which seeins to have been cut out is in Fact a laurel-leaś handed her by the priest who interprets her wild babblings. The weaving of the letters into the bridal robe misrepresents another scene: a priestess has cast a handful of oracular sticks on a white cloth, in the Celtic Fashion described by Tacitus (Germania x), or the $cythian fashion described by Herodotus (iv. 67); they take the shape of letters, which she is about to read. In the so-called eating ośItys by Tereus, a willow-priestess is taking omens from the entrails of a child sacrificed for the benefit oFa king. The scene of Tereus and the oracle probably showed him asleep on a sheep-skin in a temple, receiving a dream revelation (see $ ~. g); the Greeks would not have mistaken this. That of Dryas’s murder probably showed an oak-tree and priests taking omens beneath it, in Druidic fashion, by the way a man fell when he died. Procne’s transformatiou into a swallow will have been deduced from a scene that showed a priestess in a Feathered robe, taking auguries from the flight of a swallow; Philomela’s transformation into a nightingale, and Tereus’s into a hoopoe, seem to result from similar misreadings. Tcrcus’s name, which means ‘watcher’, suggests that a male augur figured in the hoopoe picture.
3. Two further scenes may be presumed: a serpent-tailed oracular hero, being offered blood-sacrifices; and a young man consulting a beeoracle. These are, respectively, Erechtheus and Butes (see 47. I) who was the most famous bee-keeper of antiquity, the brothers of Procne and Philomela. Their mother was Zeuxippe, ‘ she who yokes horses ‘, doubtless a Mare-headed Demeter.
4. All mythographers but Hyginus make Procne a nightingale, and Philomela a swallow. This must be a clumsy attempt to rectify a slip made by some earlier poet: that Tereus cut out Philomela’s tongue, not Procne’s. The hoopoe is a royal bird, becau~e it has a crest of feathe~ is particularly appropriate to the story of Tereus, because its ne notorious for their stench. According to the Koran, the Solomon prophetic secrets.
5. Daulis, afterwards called Phocis, seems to have been the cent~ bird cult. Phocus, the eponymous founder of the new state, was the son of On~ytiol~ (‘ moon bird’—see 8 ~. b), and a later king was n Xuthus (‘sparrow’—see 43. ~). Hygi,.aus reports that Tereus bec~ hawk, a royal bird of Egypt, Thrace, and North-we.1tern Europe.
K IN e P A~ r~ o/~ died prematurely of grief when he learned wh: befallen Procne, Philomela, and Itys. His twin sons shared the in ance: Erechtheus becoming King of Athens, while Butes ser~
priest both to Athene and Poseidon.1
b. By his wife Praxithea, Erechtheus had four sons, among the successor, Cecrops; also seven daughters: namely Protogonia, P~ Procnis, wife ofCephalus, Creusa, Oreithyia, Chthonia, who m:
her uncle Butes, and Otionia, the youngest.2
c. Now, Poseidon secretly loved Chione, Oreithyia’s daught Borea~. She bore him a son, Eumolpus, but threw him into the se Boreas should be angry. Poseidon watched over Eumolpus, an him up on the shores of Ethiopia, where he was reared in the
t3enthesicyme, his half-sister by the Sea-goddess Amphitrite.
Eumolpus came of age, Benthesycime married him to one e daughters; but he fell in love with another of them, and she thex banished him to Thrace, where he plotted against his protector, Tegyrius, and was forced to seek refuge at Eleusis. Here he mend ways, and became priest of the Mysteries of Demeter and Persep into v~&ich he subsequently initiated Heracles, at the same time tea him to sing and play the lyre. With the lyre, Eumolpus had grea~ and was ~.dso victorious in the flute contest at Pelias’s funeral g His Eleusiniau co-priestesses were the daughters of Celeus; a~
well~known piety at last earned him the dying forgiveness of Tegyrius, who bequeathed him the throne of Thrace.3
d. When war broke out between Athens and Eleusis, Eumolpus brought a large force of Thracians to the Eleusinians’ assistance, claiming the throne of Attica himself in the name of his father Poseidon. The Athenians were greatly alarmed, and when Erechtheus consulted an oracle he was told to sacrifice his youngest daughter Otionia to Athene, if he hoped for victory. Otionia was willingly led to the altar, whereupon her two eldest sisters, Protogonia and Pandora, also killed themselves, having once vowed that if one of them should die b~’ violence, they would die too.4
e. In the ensuing batde, Ion led the Athenians to victory; and Erechtheus struck down Eumolpus as he fled. Poseidon appealed for vengeance to his brother Zeus, who at once destroyed Erechtheus w’~th a thunderbolt; but some say that Poseidon felled him with a trident blow at Macrae, where the earth opened to receive him.
f. By the terms of a peace then concluded, the Eleusinians became subject to the Athenians in everything, except the control of their Mysteries. Eumolpus was succeeded as priest by his younger son Ce.ryx, whose descendann still enjoy great hereditary privileges at Eleusis.s
g. Ion reigned after Erechtheus; and, because of his three daughters’ self-sacrifice, wineless libations are still poured to them today.6 x. Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 675 if.; Apollodorus: iii. ~$. I.
1. Ovid: loc. cit.; Suidas sub Parthenoi; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 46.
3. Plutarch: On Exile ~7; Apollodorus: ii. $. 12; Theocritus: Idyll xxiv. ~o; Hyginus: Fabula 273; Pausanias: i. 38.3.
4. Apollodorus: iii. xS. 4; Hyginus: Fabula 46; Suidas: Ioc. cit. 5. Pausanias: vii. x. 2 and i. 38.3; Euripides: Ion 277 if.
6. Scholiast on Sophodes’~ Oedipus at Colonus xoo.
1. The myth of Erechtheus and Eumolpus concerns the subjugation of Eleusis by Athens, and the Thraco-Libyan origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries. An Athenian cult of the orgiastic Bee-nymph of Midsummer also enters into the story, since Butes is associated in Greek myth with a bee cult on Mount Eryx (see x$4—d); and his twin brother Erechtheus (‘he who hastens over the heather’, rather than ‘shatterer’) is the husband of the ‘Active Goddess ‘, the Queen-bee. The name of King Tegyrius of Thrace, whose kingdom Erechtheus’s grandson inherited, makes a further association with bees: it means’ beehive coveter’. Athens was famous for its honey.
2. Erechtheus’s three noble daughters, like the three daughters a ancestor Cecrops, are the Pelasgian Triple-goddess, to whom liba~ were poured on solemn occasions: Ofionia (‘ with the ear-flaps’), w~ said to have been chosen as a sacrifice to Athene, being evidentl) Owl-goddess Athene herself; Protogonia, the Creatrix Eurynome (s 1); and Pandora, the Earth-goddess Rhea (see 39. 8). At the trans: from matriarchy to patriarchy some of Athene’s priestesses may been sacrificed to Poseidon (see ~21. 3).
3. Poseidon’s trident and Zeus’s thunderbolt were originally the ~ weapon, the sacred labrys, or double-axe, but distinguished from other when Poseidon became god of the sea, and Zeus claimed the right to the thunderbolt (see 7.7).
4. Butes, who was enrolled among the Argonauts (see r48. t ), dk really belong to the Erechtheid family; but his descendants, the Bu of Athens, forced their way into Athenian society and, by the ~ century, held the priesthoods of Athene Polias and of Poseidon Et theus—this was a fusion of the Hellenic Poseidon with the old Pelas hero—as a family inheritance (Pausanias: i. 26. 6), and seem to ] altered the myth accordingly, as they also altered the Theseus ~ (see 95..3). They combined the Attic Butes with their ancestor, Thracian son of Boreas, who had colonized Naxos and in a rak Thessaly violated Coronis (see 50. 5), the Lapith princess (Diod Siculus: v. 50).
Oa~ir~ť~a, daughter of Erechtheus, King of Athens, and his’
Praxithea, was one day whiffing in a dance beside the river Ili: when Boreas,.son of Astraeus and Eos, and brother of the South West Winds, carried her off to a rock near the river Ergines w} wrapped in a mantle of dark clouds, he ravished her. X
b. Boreas had long lovecl Oreithyia and repeatedly sued for her h; but Erechtheus put him off with vain promises until at length, c, plaining that he had wasted too much time in words, he resorted t~ natural violence. Some, however, say that Oreithyia was carryh basket in the annual Thesmophorian procession that winds up slope of the Acropolis to the temple of Athene Polias, when Boreas tucked her beneath his tawny wings and whirled her away, unseen by the surrounding crowd.
c. He took her to the city of the Thracian Cicones, where she became his wi~e, and bore him twin sons, Calais and Zetes, who grew wings when they reached manhood; also two daughters, namely Chione, who bore Eumolpus to Poseidon, and Cleopatra, who married King Phineus, the victim of the Harpies. Z
d. Boreas has serpent-tails for feet, and inhabits a cave on Mount Haernus, in the seven recesses of which Ares stables his horses; but he is also at home beside the river Strymon.3
e. Once, disguising himself as a dark-maned stallion, he covered twelve of the three thousand mares belonging to Erichthonius, son of Dardanus, which used to graze in the water-meadows beside the river Scamander. Twelve illlies were born from this union; they could race over ripe ears of standing corn without bending them, or over the crests of waves.4
f The Athenians regard Boreas as their brother-in4aw and, having once successfully invoked him to destroy King Xerxes’s fleet, they built him a fine temple on the banks of the river Ilissus. S
x. Apollodorus: iii. 15. x-2; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 212 if.
2. Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 677 if.; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xiv. 533; Apollodorrus: iii. xS. 33. Pausanias: v. ~9. ~; Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis x~4 and Hymn to Delos 26 and 63-5.
4. Homer: Iliad xx. 2~9 if.
5. Herodotus: vii. 189.
1. Serpeut-tailed Boreas, the North Wind, was another name for the demiurge Ophion who danced with Eurynomc, or Oreithyia, Goddess of Creation (see x. a), and impregnated her. But, as Ophion was to Eurynome, or Boreas to Oreithyia, so was Erechtheus to the original Athene; and Athene P~1ias (‘ of the city’), for whom Oreithyia danced, may have been Athene Polias-Athene the Filly, goddess of the local horse cult, and beloved by Boreas-Erechtheus, who thus became the Athenians’ brother-in-law. The Boreas cult seems to have originated in Libya. It should be remembered that Hermes, falling in love with Oreithyia’s predecessor Herse while she was carrying a sacred basket in a similar procession, to the Acropolis, had ravished her without incurring Athene’s displeasure. The Thesmophoria seems to have once been an orgiastic festival in whicl~ priestesses publicly prosfituted themselves as a means fertilizing the cornfields (see 24. ~). These baskets contained pha~ objects (see 25.4).
2. A primitive theory that children were the reincarnations of & ancestors, who entered into women’s wombs as sudden gusts of wh lingered in the erotic cult of the Mare-goddess; and Homer’s autho~ was weighty enough to make educated Romans still believe, with Pli~ that Spanish mares could conceive by turning their hindquarters to wind (Pliny: Natural History iv. 35 and viii. 67). Varro and Colum~ mention the same phenomenon, and Lactantius, in the late third cent~ t,.D., makes it an analogy of the Virgin’s impregnation by the San~ Spiritus.
3. Boreas blows in winter from the Haemus ra~.ge and the Stryr~ and, when Spring comes with its flowers, seenas to have impregnated whole land of Attica; but, since he cannot blow backwards, the myt~ Oreithyia’s rape apparently also records the spread of the North W: cult from Athens to Thrace. From Thrace, or directly from Athens reached the Troad, where the owner of the three thousand mares ~ Erichthonius, a synonym of Erechtheus (see 158. g). The twelve fil will have served to draw three four-horse chariots, one for each of annual triad: Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Mount Haemus wa haunt of the monster Typhon (see 36. e).
4. Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the poin~ Oreithyia’s rape: he suggests that a princess of that name, playing on cliffs near the Ilissus, or on the Hill of Ares, was accidentally blown o the edge and killed (Plato: Phaedrus vi. 229b). The cult of Boreas 1 recently been revived at Athens to commemorate his destruction of Persian fleet (Herodotus: vii. ~89). He also helped the Megalopolit against the Spartans and earned annual sacrifices (Pausanias: viii. 36.
T~ Arcadian King Cercyon, son of Hephaestus, had a beaut daughter, Alope, who was seduced by Poseidon and, without father’s knowledge, bore a son whom she ordered a nurse to expose a mountain. A shepherd found him being suckled by a mare, and t( him to the sheep-cotes, where his rich robe attracted great interest fellow-shepherd volunteered to rear the boy, but insisted on taking ~obe too, in proof of his noble birth. The two shepherds began quarrel, and murder would have been done, had their companions not led them before King Cercyon. Cercyon called for the disputed robe and, when it was brought, recognized it as having been cut from a garment belonging to his daughter. The nurse now took fright, and confessed her part in the affair; whereupon Cercyon ordered Alope to be immured, and the child to be exposed again. He was once more suckled by the mare and, this time, found by the second shepherd who, now satisfied as to his royal parentage, carried him to his own cabin and called him Hippothous. ~
b. When Theseus killed Cercyon, he set Hippothous on the thro~e of Arcadia; Alope had meanwhile died in prison, and was buried beside the road leading from Eleusis to Megara, near Cercyon’s wrestling ground. But Poseidon transformed her body into a spring, named Alope. Z
x. Hygi~us: Fabulae 38 and 187.
2. Pausaaaias: i. 39. 3; Aristophanes: Birds 533; Hyginus: Fabula 187. * ~. This myth is of familiar pattern (see 43. e; 68. d; xos. a, etc.), except that Hippothous is twice exposed and that, on the first occasion, the shepherds come to blows. The anomaly is perhaps due to a misreading of an icon-sequence, which showed royal twins being found by shepherds, and these same twins coming to blows when grown to manhood—like Pelias and Neleus (see 68.f), Proetus and Acrisius (see 73—a) or Eteocles and Polyneices (see I06. b).
2. Alope is the Moon-goddess as vixen who gave her name to the Thessalian city ofAlope (Pherecydes, quoted by Stephanus of Byzanfium sub Alope); the vixen was also the emblem of Messenia (see 89. 8 and ~46. 6). The mythographer is probably mistaken in recording that the robe worn by Hippothous was cut from Alope’s dress; it will have been the swaddling band into which his dan and family marks were woven (see xo. ~ and 60. 2).
Co~oNis, daughter of Phlegyas, King of the Lapiths, Ixion’s brother, lived on t~e shores of the Thessalian Lake ]3eobeis, in which she used to wash her feet.1
b. Apollo became her lover, and left a crow with snow-w~
feathers to guard her while he went to Delphi on business. But Cor~ had long nursed a secret passion for Ischys, the Arcadian son of Ela and now admitted him to her couch, though already with child Apollo. Even before the excited crow had set out for Delphi, to re~ the scandal and be praised for its vigilance, Apollo had divined Cc nis’s infidelity, and therefore cursed the crow for not having pec out Ischys’s eyes when he approached Coronis. The crow was tur black by this curse, and all its descendants have been black ever sin
c. When Apollo complained to his sister Artemis of the insult d him, she avenged it by shooting a quiverful of arrows at Coro Afterwards, gazing at her corpse, Apollo was filled with sud remorse, but could not now restore her to life. Her spirit had descen to Tartarus, her corpse had been laid on the funeral pyre, the last fumes poured over it, and the fire already lighted, before Ap~
recovered his presence of mind; then he motioned to Hermes, who the light of the flames cut the still living child from Coronis’s worr It was a boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, and carried off to the c of Cheiron the Centaur, where he learned the arts of medicine and chase. As for Ischys, also called Chylus: some say that he was killed Zeus with a thunderbolt, others that Apollo himself shot him dog
d. The Epidaurians, however, tell a very different story. They that Coronis’s father, Phlegyas, who founded the city of that na where he gathered together all the best warriors of Greece, and li~ by raiding, came to Epidaurus to spy out the land and the strengt~c the people; and that his daughter Coronis who, unknown to him, with child by Apollo, came too. In Apollo’s shrine at Epidaurus, with assistance of Artemis and the Fates, Coronis gave birth to a boy, wh. she at once exposed on Mount Titthion, now famous for the medici virtues of its plants. There, Aresthanas, a goatherd, noticing that bitch and one of his she-goats were no longer with him, went in sea: of them, and found them tak’mg tums to suckle a child. He was to hft the child up, when a bright light all about it deterred him. L, to meddle with a divine mystery, he piously turned away, thus lear. Asclepius to the protection of his father Apollo.s
e. Asclepius, say the Epidaurians, learned the art of healing b~ from Apollo and from Cheiron. He became so skilled in surgery the use of drugs that he is revered as the founder of medicine. Not did he heal the sick, but Athene had given him two phials of the Gorgon Medusa’s blood; with what had been drawn from the veins of her left side, he could raise the dead; with what had been drawn from her right side, he could destroy instantly. Others say that Athene and Asclepius divided the blood between them: he used it to save life, but she to destroy life and instigate wars. Athene had previously given two drops of this same blood to Erichthonius, one to kill, the other to cure, and fastened the phials to his serpent body with golden bands.6
f. Among those whom Asclepius raised from the dead were Lycurgus, Capaneus, and Tyndareus. It is not known on which occasion Hades complained to Zeus that his subjects were being stolen from him-whether it was after the resurrection of Tyndareus, or of Glaucus, or of Hippolytus, or of Orion; it is certain only that Asclepius was accused of having been bribed with gold, and that both he and his patient were killed by Zeus’s thunderbolt.7
g. However, Zeus later restored Asclepius to life; and so fulfilled an indiscreet prophecy made by Cheiron’s daughter Euippe, who had declared that Asclepius would become a god, die, and resume godhead—thus twice renewing his destiny. Asclepius’s image, holding a curative serpent, was set among the stars by Zeus?
h. The Messenians claim that Asclepius was a native of Tricca in Messene; the Arcadians, that he was born at Thelpusa; and the Thessalians, that he was a native of Tricca in Thessaly. The Spartans call him Agnitas, because they have carved his image from a willow-trunk; and the people of Sicyon honour him in the form of a serpent mounted on a mule-cart. At Sicyon the left hand of his image holds the cone of a pistachio-pine; but at Epidaurus it rests on a serpent’s head; in both cases the right hand holds a sceptre.9
i. Asclepius was the father of Podaleirius and Machaon, the physicians who attended the Greeks during the siege of Troy; and of the radiant Hygieia. The Latins call him Aesculapius, and the Cretans say that he, not Polyeidus, restored Glaucus, son of Minos, to life; using a certain herb, shown him by a serpent in a tomb. IO
2. Strabo: ix. 5.21 and xiv. x. 40.
2. Pausanias: ii. 26. 5; Pindar: Pythian Odes iii. 25 if.; Apollodorus: iii. IO.3.
3. Pindar: Pythian Odes iii. 8 if.; Pausanias: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 202; Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. 612 if.
›. Apollodorus: iii. zo. 3; Hyginus: loc. cit. and Poetk Astronomy ii. 40.
5. Pausanias: ix. 36. I and ii. 26. 4; Inscriptiones Graecae iv. I. 28. 6. Diodorus Siculus: v. 74. 6; Apollodorus: iii. ~o. 3; TatJan: Address to the Greeks; Euripides: Ion 999 if.
7. Apollodorus: iii. ~o. 3-4; Lucian: On the Dance 45; Hyginus:
Fabula 49; Eratosthenes, quoted by Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~4; Pindar: Pj/thian Odes iii. 55 if., with scholiast. 8. Germanicus Caesar: On Aratus’s Phenomena 77 if-; Ovid: Metamorphoses 642 if.; Hyginus: Ioc. cit. 9. Pausanias: ii. 26. 6; viii. 25.6; iii. 14. 7 and ii. ~o. 3; Strabo: xiv. r. 3910. Homer: Iliad ii. 732; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~4. , ~. This myth concerns ecclesiastical politics in Northern Greece~ Attica, and the Peloponnese: the suppression, in Apollo’s name, of ~ pre-Hellenic medical cult, presided over by Moon-priestesses at the oracular shrines of local heroes reincarnate as serpents, or crows, o~ ravens. Among their names were Phoroneus, identifiable with the Celti~ Raven-god Bran, or Vron (see 57. ~); Erichthonius the serpent-tailed (see 25.2); and Cronus (see 7—~), which is a form of Coronus (‘crow’ o~ ‘raven’), the name of two other Lapith kings (see 78. a). ‘Asclepius (‘unceasingly gentle’) will have been a complimentary title given to a~ physician heroes, in the hope of winning their benevolence.
2. The goddess Athene, patroness of this cult, was not originall3 regarded as a maiden; the dead hero having been both her son and he~ lover. She received the title ‘Coronis’ because of the oracular crow, o~ raven, and ‘Hygieia’ because of the cures she brought about. Her all-hea was the mistletoe, ixias, a word with which the name Ischys (‘ strength ‘ and Ixion (‘ strong native’) are closely connected (see 63. ~). The EasternEuropean mistletoe, or 10ranthus, is a parasite of the oak and not like the Western variety, of the poplar or the apple-tree; and ‘Aescula. plus’, the Latin form of Asclepius—apparently meaning ‘that whict hangs from the esculent oak ‘, i.e. the misdetoe—may well be the earlie: rifle of the two. Mistletoe was regarded as the oak-tree’s genitals, ~n~ when the Druids ritually lopped it with a golden sickle, they were per. forming a symbolic emasculation (see 7—~). The viscous juice of it berries passed for oak-sperm, a liquid of great regenerative virtue. Si: ~ames Frazcr has pointed out in his Golden Bough that Aeneas visited th~ Underworld with mistletoe in his hand, and thus held the power o returning at will to the upper air. The ‘certain herb’, which raise~ Glaucus from the tomb, is likely to have been the mistletoe also. Ischys Asclepius, Ixion, and Polyeidus are, in fact, the same mythic character personifications of the curative power resident in the dismembere~ genitals of the sacrificed oak-hero. ‘ Chylus ‘, Ischys’s other name, mean ‘the juice of a plant, or berry’.
3. Athene’s dispensation of Gorgon-blood to Asclepius and Erichtlaonim suggests that the curative rites used in this cult were a secret guarded by priestesses, which it was death to investigate—the Gorgon-head is a formal warning to pryers (see 73.5). But the blood of the sacrificed oakking, or of his child surrogate, is likely to have been dispensed on these occasions, as well as mistletoe-juice.
4. Apollo’s mythographers have made his sister Artemis responsible for Ischys’s murder; and, indeed, she was originally the same goddess as Athene, in whose honour the oak-king met his death. They have also made Zeus destroy both lschys and Asclepius with thunderbolts; and, indeed, all oak-kings fell beneath the double-axe, later formalized as a thunderbolt, and their bodies were usually roasted in a bonfire. 5. Apollo cursed the crow, burned Coronis to death for her illegitimate love affair with Ischys, and claimed Asclepius as tfis own son; then Chciron and he taught him the art of healing. In other words: Apollo’s Hellenic priests were helped by their Magnesian allies the Centaurs, who were hereditary enemies of the Lapiths, to take over a Thessalian croworacle, hero and all, expelling the college of Moon-priestesses and suppressing the worship of the goddess. Apollo retained the stolen crow, or raven, as an emblem of divination, but his priests found dream-interpretation a simpler and more effective means of diagnosing their patients’ ailments than the birds’ enigmatic croaking. At the same time, the sacral use of mistletoe was discontinued in Arcadia, Messenia, Thessaly, and Athens; and Ischys became a son of the pine-tree (Elatus), not of the oakhence the pistachio-cone in the hands of Asclepius’s image at Sicyon. There was another Lapith princess named Coronis whom Butes, the ancestor of the Athenaan Butadae, violated (see 47. 4).
6. Asclepius’s serpent form, like that ofErichthonius—whom Athene also empowered to raise the dead with Gorgon-blood—shows that he was an oracular hero; but several tame serpents were kept in his temple at Epidaurus (Pausanias: ii. 28. I) as a symbol of renovation: became serpents cast their slough every year (see ~60. 12). The bitch who suckled Asclepius, when the goatherd hailed him as the new-born king, must be Hecate, or Hecabe (see 31. 3; 38.7; ~34. ~; ~68. n and l); and it is perhaps to accomat for this bitch, with whom he is always pictured, that Cheiron has been made to tutor him in hunting. His other foster-mother, the shegoat, must be the Goat-Athene, in whose aegis Erichthonius took refuge (see 25. 2); indeed, if Asclepius originally had a twin—as Pelias was suckled by a mare, and Neleus by a bitch (see 68. d}—this will have been Erichthonius.
7. Athene, when reborn as a loyal virg’m-daughter of Olympian Zeus, had to follow Apollo’s example and curse the crow, her former familiar (see 25. e).
& The willow was a tree of powerful moon-magic (see 28.5; 44.1 and r ~6.,~); and the bitter drug prepared from its bark is still a specific against rheumatism—to which the Spartans in their damp valleys will have been mucb subject. But branches of the particular variety of willow with which the Spartan Asclepius was associated, namely the agnus castus, were strewn on the beds of matrons at the Athenian Thesmophor~a, a fertility festival (see 48. ~). supposedly to keep off s,erpents (Arrian: History o.f Animals ix. 26), though really to encourage serpent-shaped ghosts; and Asclepius’s priests may therefore have specialized in the cure of barreniless,.
T~T~ Oracles of Greece and Greater Greece are many; but the eldest is that of Dodonian Zeus. In ages past, two black doves flew from Egypnan Thebes: one to Libyan Ammon, the other to Dodona, and each alighted on an oak-tree, which they proclaimed to be an oracle of Zeus. At Dodona, Zeus’s priestesses listen to the cooing of doves, or to the rustling of oak-leaves, or to the clanking of brazen vessels suspended from the branches. Zeus has another famous oracle at Olympia, where his priests reply to questions after inspecting the entrails of sacrificial victims.1
b. The Delphic Oracle first belonged to Mother Earth, who appointed Daphnis as her prophetess; and Daphnis, seated on a tripod, drank in the fumes of prophecy, as fi~e Pythian priestess still does. Some say that Mother Earth’later resigned her rights to the Titaness Phoebe, or Thentis; and that she ceded them to Apollo, who built himself a shrine of laurel-boughs brought from Tempe. But others say that Apollo robbed the oracle from Mother Earth, after killing Python, and that his Hyperborean priests Pagasus and Agyieus established his worship there.
c. At Delphi it is said that the first shrine was made of bees’ wax and feathers; the second, of fern-stalks twisted together; the third, of laurel-boughs; that Hephaestus built the fourth ofbrortze, with golden song-birds perched on the roof, but one day the earth engulfed it; and that the fifth, built of dressed stone, burned down in the year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad [489 ~.›.], and was replaced by the present shrine.2
d. Apollo.owns numerous other oracular shr’mes: such as those in the Lycaeum and on the Acropolis at Argos, both presided over by a priestess. But at Boeotian Ismenium, his oracles are given by priests, after the inspection of entrails; at Clarus, near Colophon, his seer drinks the water of a secret well and pronounces an oracle in verse; while at Telmessus and elsewhere, dreams are interpreted.3
e. Demeter’s priestesses give oracles to the sick at Patrae, from a mirror lowered into her well by a rope. At Pharae, in return for a copper coin, the sick who consult Hermes are granted their oracular responses in the first’ chance words that they hear on leaving the market place.1
f. Hera has a venerable oracle near Pagae; and Mother Earth is still consulted at Aegeira in Achaea, which means ‘The Place of Black Poplars’, where her priestess drinks bull’s blood, deadly poison to all other mortals.5
g. Besides these, there are many other oracles of heroes, the oracle of Heracles, at Achaean Bura, where the answer is given by a throw of four dice; ~5 and numerous oracles of Asclepius, where the sick flock for consultation and for cure, and are told the remedy in their dreams after a fast.7 The oracles of Theban Amphiaraus and MallJan Amphilochus—with Mopsus, the most infallible extant—follow the Asclepian procedure.8
h. Moreover, Pasipha~ has an oracle at Laconian Thalamae, patronized by the Kings of Sparta, where answers are also given in dreams.9 i. Some oracles are not so easily consulted as others. For instance, at Lebadeia there is an oracle of Trophonius, son of Erginus the Argonaut, where the suppliant must purify himself several days beforehand, and lodge in a building dedicated to Good Fortune and a certain Good Genius, bathing only in the river Hercyna and sacrificing to Trophonius, to his nurse Demeter Europe, and to other deities. There he feeds on sacred flesh, especially that of a ram which has been sacrificed to the shade of Agamedes, the brother of Trophonius, who helped him to build Apollo’s temple at Delphi.
j. When fit to consult the oracle, the suppliant is led down to the river by two boys, thirteen years of age, and there bathed and anoint-ed. Next, he drinks from a spring called the Water of Lethe, which will help him to forget his past; and also from another, close by, called the Water of Memory, which will help him to remember what he ha and heard. Dressed in country boots and a linen tunic, and we fillets like a sacrificial victim, he then approaches the oracular c~ This resembles a huge bread-baking pot eight yards deep, and descending by a ladder, he finds a narrow opening at the b~
through which he thrusts his legs, holding in either hand a bade3 mixed with honey. A sudden tug at his ankles, and he is pulled thl as if by the swirl of a swift river, and in the darkness a blow falls skull, so that he seems to die, and an invisible speaker then reve.’ future to him, besides many mysterious secrets. As soon as the has finished, he loses all sense and understanding, and is pre: returned, feet foremost, to the bottom of the chasm, but witho’ honey-cakes; after which he is enthroned on the so-called Ch Memory and asked to repeat what he has heard. Finally, still in a condition, he returns to the house of the Good Genius, wh›
regaim his senses and the power to laugh.
k. The invisible speaker is one of the Good Genii, belonging 4
Golden Age of Cronus, who have descended from the moon tx charge of oracles and initiatory rites, and act as chasteners, war and saviours everywhere; he consults the ghost ofTrophonius ~
in serpent form and gives the required oracle as payment for th~ pliant’s honey-cakes.10
x. Herodotus: ii. 55 and viii. 134; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Homer: Odyssey xiv. 328; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bounc Suidas sub Dodona; Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus 900.
:~. Aeschylus: Eumenides x-19; Pausanias: x. 5.3-53—Pausanias: ii. 24. x; Plutarch: Pyrrhus 31; Herodotus: vii and i. 78; Tadms: Annals ii. 54.
4. Pausanias: vii. 21. 5 and 22. 2.
$. Strabo: viii. 6. 22; Pliny: NaturalHi~torlt xxviii. 41; Apollo~ i. 9. 27.
6. Pausanias: vii. 25.6.
7. Ibid.: ii. 27. 2.
8. Ibid.: i. 34—2; Herodotus: viii. ~34.
9. Plutarch: Cleomenes 7; Pausanias: iii. 26. t.
zo. Pausanias: ix. 39. ~-5; Plutarch: On Socrates’s Demon xxi The Face on the Orb of the Moon xxx.
1. All oracles were originally delivered by the Earth-goddess,, authority was so great that patriarchal invaders made a practice of s, her shrines and either appointing priests or retaining the priestesses in their own service. Thus Zeus at Dodona, and Ammon in the Oasis of Siwwa, took over the cult of the oracular oak, sacred to Dia or Dione (see 7. ~)—as the Hebrew Jehovah did that of Ishtar’s oracular acacia (I Chronicles xiv. xs)—and Apollo captured the shrines of Delphi and Argos. At Argos, the prophetess was allowed full freedom; at Delphi, a priest intervened between prophetess and votary, translating her incoherent utterances into hexameters; at Dodona, both the Dove-priestesses and Zeus’s male prophets delivered oracles.
2. Mother Earth’s shrine at Delphi was founded by the Cretans, who left their sacred music, ritual, dances, and calendar as a legacy to the Hellenes. Her Cretan sceptre, the labr?s, or double-axe, named the priestly corporation at Delphi, the Labryadae, which was still extant in Classical times. The temple made from bees’ wax and feathers refers to the goddess as Bee (see 7-3; x 8.3 and 47.1 ) and as Dove (see x. b and 62. a); the temple of fern recalls the magical properties attributed to fern-seed at the summer and winter solstices (Sir James Frazer devotes several pages to the subject in his Golden Bough); the shrine of laurel recalls the laurelleaf chewed by the prophetess and her companions in their orgiesDaphnis is a shortened form of Daphoenissa (‘the bloody one’), as Daphne is of Daphoene (see 21. 6 and 46. e). The shrine of bronze engulfed by the earth may merely mark the fourth stage of a Delphic song that, like ‘London Bridge is Broken Down’, told of the various unsuitable matedhals with which the shrine was successively built; but it may also refer to an underground tholos, the tomb of a hero who was incarnate in the python. The tholos, a beehive-shaped ghost-house, appears to be of African origi~, and introduced into Greece by way of Palestine. The Witch of Endor presided at a similar shrine, and the ghost of Adam gave oracles at Hebron. Philostratus refers to the golden birds in his Life of Apollonius of Tyi~na vi. x~ and describes them as siren-like wrynecks; but Pindar calls them nightingales (Fragment quoted by Athenaeus 290e). Whether the birds represented oracular nightingales, or wrynecks used as love-charms (see 152. a) and rain-inducers (Mar’mus on Proclus 28), is disputable.
3. Inspection of entrails seems to have been an Indo—European mantic device. Divination by the throw of four knucklebone dice was perhaps alphabetical in origin: since ‘signs’, not numbers, were said to be marked onthe only four sides of each bone which could turn up. Twelve consonants and four vowels (as in the divinatory Irish Ogham called’ O’Sullivan’s’) are the simplest form to which the Greek alphabet can be reduced. But, in Classical times, numbers only were marked—~, 3, 4, and 6 on each knucklebone—and the meanings of all their possible combinations had been codified. Prophecy from dreams is a universal practice. 4—Apollo’s priests exacted virginity from the Pythian priestesses at Delphi, who were regarded as Apollo’s brides; but when one of was scandalously seduced by a votary, they had thereafter to be a~ fifty years old on installation, though still dressing as brides. Bull’s 1 was thought to be highly poisonous, because of its magical potenc~ ~$5. a): the blood of sacred bulls, sometimes used to consecrate a x tribe, as in Exodus xxiv. 8, was mixed with great quantities of ú before being sprink/ed on the fields as a fertilizer. The Priestess of! however, could drink whatever Mother Earth herself drank.
5. Hera, Pasipha~, and Ino were all titles of the Triple~goddes interdependence of whose persons was symbohzed by the tripe which her priestess sat.
6. The procedure at the oracle ofTrophonius—which Pausanias self visited—recalls Aeneas’s descent, mistletoe in hand, to Av~ where he consulted his father Anchises, and Odysseus’s earlier con tion of Teiresias; it also shows the relevance of these myths to a con form of initiation rite in which the novice suffers a mock-death, re~ mystical instruction from a pretending ghost, and is then rebon~ i new clan, or secret society. Plutarch remarks that the Trophoniads mystagogues in the dark den—belong to the pre-Olympian a~
Cronus, and correctly couples them with the Idaean Dactyls who formed the Samothracian Mysteries.
7. Black poplar was sacred to the Death-goddess at Pagae, and sephone had a black poplar grove in th9 Far West (Pausanias: x. 30. see 170. l).
8. Amphilochus and Mopsus had killed each other, but their ~~
agreed to found a joint oracle (see 169. e).
THz Three Fates or, some say, Io the sister ofPhoroneus, invente five vowels of the first alphabet, and the consonants B and T; medes, son of Nauplius, invented the remaining eleven consor, and Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, using wedge s]
because cranes fly in wedge formation, and carried the system Greece to Egypt. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus brought back to Boeotia, and which Evarider of Arcadia, a Pelas introduced into Italy, where his mother Carmenta formed the fa~ fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet.
b. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet by Simonides of Samos, and Epicharmus of Sicily; and two vowels, long O and short E, by the priests of Apollo, so that his sacred lyre now has one vowel for each of its seven strings.
c, Alpha was the first of the eighteen letters, because alphe means honour, and alphainein is to i~vent, and because the Alpheius is the most notable of rivers; moreover, Cadmus, though he changed the order of the letters, kept alpha in this place, because aleph, in the Phoenician tongue, means an ox, and because Boeotia is the land of oxen.1
1. Hyginus: Fabula 277; Isidore of Seville: Origins viii. 2.84; Philostratus: Heroica x. 3; Pli~y: Natural History vii. 57; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 593; Plutarch: Symposiacs ix. 3.
1. The Greek alphabet was a simplification of the Cretan hieroglyphs. Scholars are now generally agreed that the first written alphabet developed in Egypt during the eighteenth century ~3.c. tnader Cretan influence; which corresponds with Aristides’s tradition, reported by Pliny, that an Egyptian called Menos (‘ moon ‘) invented it ‘fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus, King of Argos ‘.
2. There is evidence, however, that before the introduction of the modified Phoenician alphabet into Greece an alphabet had existed there as a religious secret held by the priestesses of the Moon—Io, or the Three Fates; that it was closely linked with the calendar, and that its letters were represented not by writteu characters, but by twigs cut from different trees typical of the year’s sequent months.
3. The ancient Irish alphabet, like that used by the Gallic druids of whom Caesar wrote, might not at first be written down, and all its letters were named after trees. It was called the Beth-luis-nion (‘birch-rowanash’) after its first three consonants; and its canon, which suggests a Phfygian provenience, corresponded with the Pelasgian and the Latin alphabets, namely thirteen consonants and five vowels. The original order was A, t3, L, N, O, F, S, H, U, D, T, C, E, M, G, Ng or Gn, R, I, which is likely also to have been the order used by Hermes. Irish ollaves made it into a deaf-and-dumb language, using finger-joints to represent the different letters, or one of verbal cyphers. Each consonant represented a twenty-eight-day month of a series of thirteen, beginning two days after the winter solstice; namely:
1 Dec. 24 B birch, or wild olive
2 Jan. 21 L rowan
3 Feb. 18 N ash
4 March 18 F alder, or cornel
5 April 15 S willow; SS (z), blackthorn
6 May 13 H hawthorn, or wild pear
7 June ~o D oak, or terebinth
8 July 8 T holly, or prickly oak
9 Aug. $ C nut; CC (Q), apple, sorb or qtti;
10 Sept. 2 M vine
11 Sept. 30 G ivy
12 Oct. 28 Ng or Gn reed, or guelder rose
13 Nov. 25 R cider, or myrtle
4. About 400 ~3.c.,as the restfit of a religious revolution, the ord~ .changed as follows to correspond with a new calendar system: B, I. N, H, D, T, C, Q, M, G, Ng, Z, R. This is the alphabet associatec Heracles Ogmius, or ‘Ognxa Sunface’, as the earlier is with Phor (see ~ 32.3)
5. Each vowel represented a quarterly station of the year: O (1 the Spring Equinox; U (heather) the Summer Solstice; E (popla Autumn Equi~ox. A (fir, or palm) the birth-tree, and I (yex~
death-tree, shared the Winter Solstice between them. This order o is implicit in Greek and Latin myth and the sacral tradition of all E and, routaris mutandis, Syria and Asia Minor. The goddess Carmen~ 86. 2 and 132.6) invented B and T as well as the vowels, because e: these calendar-consonants introduced one half of her year, as di between the sacred king and his tanist.
6. Cranes were sacred to Hermes (see 17. $ and 36. 2), piotec poets before Apollo usurped his power; and the earliest alphabetic acters were wedge-shaped. Palamedes (‘ ancient i~telligence’), wi sacred crane (Martial: Epigrams xiii. 75) was the CarJan counterpart Egyptian god Thoth, inventor of letters, with his crane-like ibi~ Hermes was Thoth’s early Hellenic counterpart (see 162. s).
Simonides and Epicharmus added new letters to the alphabet is hi not myth; though exactly why they did so remains doubtful. Two additions, xi and psi, were unnecessary, and the removal of the as (H) and digaroma (F) impoverished the canon.
7. It can be shown that the names of the letters preserved in th~ Beth-luis-nlon, which are traditionally reported to have come Greece and reached Ireland by way of Spain (see 132. 5), form archaic Greek charm in honour of the Arcadian White Goddess A~
who, by Classical times, had degenerated i~to a mere nursery I: The Cadmean order of letters, perpetuated in the familiar ABC, see be a deliberate mis-arrangement by Phoenician merchants; they us~ ~ecret alphabet for trade purposes but feared to offend the godd, revealing its true order.
This complicated and important subject is discussed at length ~ White Goddess (Chapters x-15 and 21).
8. The vowels added by the priests of Apollo to his lyre were probably those mentioned by Demetrius, an Alexandrian philosopher of the first century b.c., when he writes in his dissertation On Style:
In Egypt the priests sing hymns to the Gods by uttering the seven voweIs in succession, the sound of wl~.ich produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if the flute and lyre were used.. but perhaps I had better not enlarge on this theme.
This suggests that the vowels were used in therapeutic lyre music at Apollo’s shrines.
SOME say that while Rhea was bearing Zeus, she pressed her fingers into the soil to ease her pangs and up sprang the Dactyls: five females from her left hand, and five males from her right. But it is generally held that they were living on Phrygian Mount Ida long before the birth of Zeus, and some say that the nymph Anchiale bore them in the Dictaean Cave near Oaxus. The male Dactyls were smiths and first discovered iron in near-by Mount Berecy nthus; and their sisters, who settled in 5arnothrace, excited great wonder there by casting magic spells, and taught Orpheus the Goddess’s mysteries: their names are a well-guarded secret.1
b. Others say that the males were the Cureres who protected Zeus’s cradle in Crete, and that they afterwards came to Elis and raised a temple to propitiate Cronus. Their names were Heracles, Paeonius, Epimedes, Iasius, and Acesidas. Heracles, having brought wild-olive from the Hyperboreans to Olympia, set his yoanger brothers to run a race there, and thus the Olympic Games originated. It is also said that he crowned Paeonius, the victor, with a spray of wild-olive; and that, afterwards, they slept in beds made from its green leaves. But the truth is that wild-olive was not used for the victor’s crown until the seventh Olympiad, when the Delphic Oracle had ordered Iphitus to substitute it for the apple-spray hitherto awarded as the prize ofvictory. z
c. Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis are tides of the three eldest Dactyls; some say that Celmis was turned to iron as a punishme~ insulting l~ea.3
x. Diodorus Sicu~us: v. 64; Sophocles: The Deaf Satyrs, quote Strabo: x. 3.22; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 509 and
2. Pausanias: v. 7. 4; Phlegou of Tralles: Fragmenta Historica C ill 604.
3. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 1129; Ovid: Metarnor~
iv. 281.
1. The Dactyls personify the fingers, and Heracles’s Olympic
a childish fable illustrated by drumming one’s fingers’on a table, omi the thumb—when the forefinger always wins the race. But secret lore was based on a calendar sequence of magical trees, each all a scparate finger joint in the sign-language and a separate letter c Orphic calendar-alphabet, which seems to have been Phrygian in e (see 52.3)—Wild-olive belongs to the top-joint of the thumb, suppo the seat of virility and therefore called Heracles. This Heracles to have had leaves growing from his body (Palaephatus: 37)—The is recalled in the popular Western finger-names: e.g. ‘fool’s fin which corresponds with Epimedes, the middle finger, and the ‘p finger’, which corresponds with Iasius, the fourth; and in the fn names of palnfistry: e.g. Saturn for Epimedes—Satuna having shown himself slow-witted in his struggle with Zeus; and Apollo, god of he: for Iasius. The forefinger is given to Juppiter, or Zeus, who won the The litfie finger, Mercury or Hermes, is the magical one. Throu~ primitive Europe, metallurgy was accompanied by incantations, an smiths therefore claimed the fingers of the right hand as their Da leaving the left to the sorceresses.
2. The story of Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis, whose n refer to smithcraft, is another childish fable, illustrated by tappinl ibrefinger on the thumb, as a hammer on an anvil, and then slippin tip of the middle finger between them, as though it were a piece ot hot iron. Iron came to Crete through Phrygia from farther alon1 Southern Black Sea coast; and Celmis, being a personification ofsm iron, will have been obnoxious to the Great Goddess Rhea, patron, smiths, whose religious decline began with the smelt/ng of iron an arrival of the iron-weaponed Dorians. She had recognized only silver, copper, lead, and tin as terrestrial ores; though lumps of met iron were highly prized because of their miraculous origin, and one have fallen on Mount Berecynthus. An unworked lump was fount neolithic deposit at Phaestus beside a squatting clay image of the goc sea-shells, and offering bowls. All early Egyptian iron is meteor contains a high proportion of nickel and is nearly rust-proof. Ceimis’s insult to Hera gave the middle finger its name: digita impudica.
3. The Olympic Games originated in a foot race, run by girls, for the privilege of becoming the priestess oft!~e Moon-goddess Hera (Pausanias: v. ~ 6. ~); and since this event took place in the month Parthenios, ‘of the maiden’, it seems to have been annual. When Zeus married Hera—when, that is, a new form of sacred kingship had been introduced into Greece by the Achaeans (see x~. 7)—a second foot race was run byyoung men for the dangerous privilege of becoming the priestess’s consort, Sun to her Moon, and thus Ki~g of Elis; just as Antaeus made his daughter’s suitors race for her (Pindar: Pythian Odes ix), following the example of Icarius /see ~60. d) and Danaus (see 60. m).
4. The Games were thereafter held every four years, instead of annually, the girls~ foot race being run at a separate festival, either a fortnight before or a fortnight after the Olympian Games proper; and the sacred kingship~ conferred on the victor of the foot race at his marriage to the new priestess, is recalled in the divine honours that the victory continued to bestow in Classical times. Having been wreathed with Heracles’s or Zeus’s ohve, saluted as ‘King Heracles’, and pelted with leaves hke a Jack o’ Green, he led the dance in a triumphal procession and ate sacrificial bull’s flesh in the Council Hall.
5. The original prize, an apple, or an apple-spray, had been a promise of immortality when he was duly killed by his successor; for Plutarch (Syn;posiac Questions v. 2) mentions that though a foot race was the sole contest in the original Olympic Games, a siugle combat also took place, which ended only in the death of the vanquished. This combat is mythologically recorded in the story that the Olympic Games began with a wrestling match between Zeus and Cronus for the possession of Elis (Pausanias: v. 7), namely the midsummer combat between the king and his tanist; and the result was a foregone conclusion—the tanist came armed with a spear.
6. A scholiast on Pindar (Olympian Odes iii. 33), quoting Comarchus, shows that the Elian New Year was reckoned from the full moon nearest to the winter solstice, and that a second New Year began at midsummer. Presumably therefore the new Zeus-Heracles, that is to say, the winner of the foot race, killed the Old Year tanist, Cronus-lphiclcs. at midwinter. Hence Heracles first instituted the Games and named the sepulchral Hill of Cronus ‘at a season when the summit was wet with much snow’ (Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 49)
7. In ancient times, Zeus-Heracles was pelted with oak-leaves and given the apple-spray at midsummer, just before being killed by his tanist; he had won the royal wild-olive branch at midwinter. The replacement of the apple by wild-olive, which is the tree that drives away evil spirits, implied the abohtion of this death-combat, :u~d the conversion of the single year, divided into two halves, into a Great This began at midwinter, when solar and lunar time coincided f, ably for a Sun-and-Moon marriage, and was divided into two Oly~ of four years apiece; the king and his tanist reigning successively o currently. Though by Classical times the solar chariot race—for the mythological authority is Pelops’s contest with Oenomaus fo dameia (see 109.3)—had become the nmst important event in the it was still thought somehow unlucky to be pelted with leaves victory i~ the foot race; and Pythagoras advised his friends to cornl this event but not to win it. The victory-ox, eaten at the Counci was clearly a surrogate for the king, as at the Athenian Buphorfia f (see 21. ~3).
8. Olympia is not a Mycenaean site and the pre-Achaean therefore unhkcly to have been borrowed from Crete; they seem Pelasgian.
THE nine dog-headed, flipper-handed Telchines, Children oftl~
originated in Rhodes, where they founded the cities of Can Ialysus, and Lindus; and migrating thence to Crete, became i inhabitants. Rhea entrusted the infant Poseidon to their care, an forged his trident but, long before this, had made for Cron toothed sickle with which he castrated his father Uranus; and moreover, t~e first to carve images of the gods.
b. Yet Zeus resolved to destroy them by a flood, because th~
been interfering with the weather, raising magic mists and bli1 crops by means of sulphur and Stygian water. Warned by A~
they all fled overseas: some to Boeotia, where they built the t of Athene at Teumessus; some to Sicyon, some to Lycia, or!
Orchomenus, where they were the hounds that tore Actaeon to But Zeus destroyed the Teumessian Telchines with a flood; ~~
disguised as a wolf, destroyed the Lycian ones, though they ha, to placate him with a new temple; and they are no longer to be at Orchomenus. Rumour has it that some are still living in Sicy
1. Eustathins on Homer, p. 771-~; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 365-7; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 55. 2-3; Strabo: x. iv. 5. 7; Calhmachus: Hymn to Delos 31; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iv. 377—
1. That the nine Telchines were Children oś the Sea, acted as the~ hounds of Artemis. created magic mists, and founded the cities named after the three Dauaids, Cameira, lalysa, and Linda (see 60. d) suggests that they were originally emanations of the Moon-goddess Dana,: eacl~ of her three persons in triad (see 60. e). ‘Telchin’ was derived by the Greek grammarians from thelgein, ‘to enchant ‘. But, since woman, dog and fish were likewise combined in pictures of Scylla the Tyrrhenian—who. was also at home in Crete (see 91.2)—and in the figure*heads of TyrthenJan ships, the word may be a variant of’ Tyrrhen’ or ‘Tyrsen’; l and r having been confused by the Libyans, and the next consonant being something between an aspirate and a sibilant. They were, it seems, worshipped by an early matriarchal people of Greece, Crete, Lydia, and the Aegean Islands, whom the invading patriarchal He/lenes persecuted; absorbed or forced to emigrate westward. Their origin may have been East African.
2. Magic mists were raised by willow spells. Styx water (see 3t. 4) was supposedly so holy that the least drop of it caused death, unless drunk from a cup made ofa horse’s hoof, which proves it sacred to the Mareheaded goddess of Arcadia. Alexander the Great is said to have been poisoned by Styx water (Pausanias: viii. ~8.2). The Telchines’ magical use of it suggests that their devotees held near-by Mount Nonacrid, (‘nine peaks ‘), at one time the chief religious centre of Greece; even the Olympic gods swore their most solemn oath by the Styx.
Ta~ filthy demons called Empusae, children of Hecate, are assMunched and wear brazen slippers—unless, as some declare, each has one ass’s leg and one brazen leg. Their habit is to frighten travellers, but they may be routed by insulting words, at the sound of which they flee shrieking. Empusae disguise themselves in the forms of bitches, cows, or beautiful maidens and, in the latter shape, w’fil lie with men by night, or at the time of midday sleep, sucking their vital forces u~ they die. X
1. Aristophanes: Frogs 288 if.; Parliament of Women 1056 and Papyri Magici Graeci iv. 2334; Philostratus: Life of Apolloniu: T~,ana iv. 25; Suidas sub Empusae.
s. The Empusae (‘forcers-in’) are greedily seductive female dcmo a concept probably brought to Greece from Palestine, where they w, by the name of Lilim (‘children of Lilith’) and were thought to be haunchcd, the ass symbolizing lechery and cruelty. Lilith (‘ scritch-o~ was a Canaanite Hecate, and the Jews made amulets to protect selves against her as late as the Middle Ages. Hecate, the real ruler Tartarus (see 3~-f), wore a brazen sandal-the golden sandal Aphrodite’s—and her daughters, the Empusae, followed this exam~ They could change themselves into beautiful maidens or cows, as as bitches, because the Bitch Hecate, being a member of the Moon-tri was the same goddess as Aphrodite, or cow-eyed Hera.
Io, daughter of the River-god Inachus, was a priestess of Argive He Zeus, over whom lynx, daughter of Pan and Echo, had cast a spell, ~ in love with Io, and when Hera charged him with infidelity and turf lynx into a wryneck as a punishment, lied: ‘I have never touched l He then turned her into a white cow, which Hera claimed as hers ~ handed over for safe keeping to Argus Panoptes, order’rag hi
‘Tether this beast secretly to an olive-tree at Nemea.’ But Zeus s~ Hermes to fetch her back, and himself led the way to Nemea—or, so: say, to Mycenae—dressed in woodpecker disguise. Hermes, thou the cleverest of thieves, knew that he could not steal Io without bei detected by one of Argus’s hundred eyes; he therefore charmed h asleep by playing the flute, crushed him with a boulder, cut off head, and released Io. Hera, having placed Argus’s eyes in the tail e peacock, as a constant reminder of his foul murder, set a gadfly to sfi Io and chase ker all over the world.
b. Io first went to Dodona, and presently reached the sea called the Ionian after her, but there turned Back and travelled north t{~ Mount Haemus and then, by way of the Danube’s delta, coursed sun-wise around the Black Sea, crossing the Crimean Bosphorus, and following the River Hybristes to its source in the Caucasus, where Prometheus still hnguished on his rock. She regained Europe by way of Colchis, the land of the Chalybes, and the Thracian Bosphorus; then away she galloped through Asia Minor to Tarsus and Joppa, thence to Media, Bactria, and India and, passing south-westward through Arabia, across the Indian Bosphorus [the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb], reached Ethiopia. Thence she travelled down from the sources of the Nile, where the pygmies make perpetual war with the cranes, and found rest at last in Egypt. There Zeus restored her to human form and, having married Tdegonus, she gave birth to Epaphus—her son by Zeus, who had touched her to some purpose—and founded the worship of Isis, as she called Demeter. Epaphus, who was rumoured to be the divine bull Apis, reigned over Egypt, and had a daughter, Libya, the mother by Poseidon of Agenor and Belus.1
c. But some believe that Io bore Epaphus in a Euboean cave called BoiSsaule, and afterwards died there from the sting of the gadfly; and that, as a cow, she changed her colour from white to violet-red, and from violet-red to black.2
d. Others have a quite different story to tell. They say that Inachus, a son oflapetus, ruled over Argos, and founded the city oflopolis—for lo is the name by which the moon was once worshipped at Argos—and called his daughter Io in honour of the moon. Zeus Picus, King of the West, sent his servants to carry offlo, and outraged her as soon as she reached his palace. After bearing him a daughter named Libya, Io fled to Egypt, but found that Hermes, son of Zeus, was reigning there; so continued her flight to Mount Silpium in Syria, where she died of grief and shame. Inachus then sent Io’s brothers and kinsfolk in search of her, warning them not to return empty-handed. With Triptolemus for their guide, they knocked on every door in Syria, crying: ‘May the spirit of Io find rest!’; until at last they reached Mount Silpium, where a phantasmal cow addressed them with: ‘Here am I, Io.’ They decided that Io must have been buried on that spot, and therefore founded a second Iopolis, now called Antioch. In honour of Io, the Iopolitans knock at one another’s doors in the same way every year, using the same cry; and the Argives mourn annually for her.3
1. Callimachus: On Birds, Fragment Ioo; Apoltodorus: ii. ~. ~
Hyginus: Fabula ~45; Suidas sub Io; Lucian: Dialogues of the Go~ 3; Moschus: Idyll ii. 59; Herodotus: i. t a~d ii. 4~; Homer: Ilia iii. 6; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound 705 if. and Suppliants 547 ff Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 382; Tzetzes: On Lyc~
phron 835 if.
2. Strabo: x. x. 3; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Argura; Suidas s~ Isis.
3. John Malalas: Chronicles ii. p. 28, ed. Dindorff.
1. This myth consists of several strands. The Argives worshipped tl moon as a cow, because the horned new moon was regarded as the sour~ of all water, and therefore of cattle fodder. Her three colours: white fi the new moon, red for the harvest moon, black for the moon when it waned, represented the three ages of the Moon-goddess—Maide Nymph, and Crone (see 90. 3)—Io changed her colour, as the moon changes, but for ‘red’ the mythographer substitutes ‘violet’ because i, is Greek for the violet flower. Woodpeckers were thought to be knocki~ for rain when they tapped on oak-trunks; and Io was the Moon as rai bringer. The herdsmen needed rain most pressingly in late summ~ when gadflies attacked their cattle and sent them frantic; in Afri~ cattle-owning Negro tribes still hurry from pasture to pasture wh attacked by them. Io’s Argive priestesses seem to have performed annual he~fer-clance in which they pretended to be driven mad by ga flies, while woodpecker-men, tapping on oak-doors and caring ‘I Io!’, invited the rain to fall and relieve their torments. This seems to the origin of the myth of the Coan women who were turned into co~ (see ~37—s). Argive colonies founded in Euboea, the Bosphorus, t Black Sea, Syria, and Egypt, took their rain-making dance with the The wryneck, the Moon-goddess’s prime orgiastic bird, nests in willox and was therefore concerned with water-magic (see ~ 52. ~).
2. The legend invented to account for the eastward spread of t ritual, as well as the similarity between the worship of Io in Greece, ~ in Egypt, Astarte in Syria, and Kali in India, has been grafted on t~ unrelated stories: that of the holy moon-cow wandering around ~ heave~s, guarded by the stars—there is a cognate Irish legend of ‘ Green Stripper’—and that of the Moon-priestesses whom the leader~ the invading Hellenes, each calhng himself Zeus, violated to the dish of the local population. Hera, as Zeus’s wife, is then made to exp~ iealousy of Io, though Io was another name for ‘cow-eyed’ H~
Demeter’s mourning for Persephone is recalled in the Argive festiva’~ mourning for Io, since Io has been equated in the myth with Deme~ Moreover, every three years Demeter’s Mysteries were celebrated Celeae (‘calling’), near Corinth, and said to have been founded by a brother of Celeus (‘woodpecker’), King of Eleusis. Hermes is called the son of Zeus Picus (‘ woodpecker’)—Aristophanes in his Birds (480) accuses Zeus of stealing the woodpecker’s sceptre—as Pan is said to have been Hermes’s son by the Nymph Dryope (‘ woodpecker’); and Faunus, the Latin Pan, was the son of Picus (‘ woodpecker’) whom Circe turned into a woodpecker for spurning her love (Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 6). Faunus’s Cretan tomb bore the epitaph: ‘Here lies the woodpecker who was also Zeus’ (Suidas sub Picos). All three are rain-making shepherdgods. Libya’s name denotes rain, and the winter rains came to Greece from the direction of Libya.
3. Zeus’s fatheting of Epaphus, who became the ancestor of Libya, Agenor, Belus, Aegyptus, and Danaus, implies that the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans claimed sovereignty over all the sea-peoples of the southeastern Mediterranean. 4. The myth of pygmies and cranes seems to concern the tall cattlebreeding tribesmen who had broken into the upper Nile-valley from Somaliland and driven the native pygmies southward. They were called ‘cranes’ because, then as now, they would stand for long periods on one leg, holding the ankle of the other with the opposite hand, and leaning on a spear.
Tuu first man to found and people a market-town was Io’s brother Phoroneus, son of the River-god Inachus and the Nymph Melia; later its name, Phoronicum, was changed to Argos. Phoroneus was also the first to discover the use of fire, after Prometheus had stolen it. He married the Nymph Cerdo, ruled the entire Peloponnese, and initiated the worship of Hera. When he died, his sons Pelasgus, Iasus, and Agenor divided the Peloponnese between them; but his son Car founded the city of Megara.1
x. Hyginus: Fabulae r43 and 274; Apollodorus: ii. ~. x; Pausanias: i. 39—4-6; ii. ~5.5 and iv. 40. 5—
1. Phoroneus’s name, which the Greeks read as ‘bringer of a price’ in the sense that he invented markets, probably stands for Fearham (‘ of the dawn of the year’, i.e. the Spring); variants are Bran, Barn, Bergn, Vrot Ephron, Gwem, Fearn, and Brennus. As the spirit of the alder-tree whic presided over the fourth month in the sacred year (see 28. l and 5; 52. and 170. 8), during which the Spring Fire Festival was celebrated, h was described as a son of Inachus, because alders grow by rivers. I~ mother is the ash-nymph Melia, because the ash, the preceding tree oftl~ same series, is said to ‘court the flash’-lightning-struck trees we~ primitive man’s first source of fire. Being an oracular hero, he was als associated with the crow (see 50. ~). Phoroneus’s discovery of the use ( fire may be explained by the ancient smiths’ and potters’ preference ft alder charcoal, which gives out more heat than any other. Cerdo (‘ gai~ or ‘art’) is one of Demeter’s titles; it was applied to her as weasel, or fo: both considered prophetic animals. ‘Phoroneus’ seems to have been title of Cronus, with whom the crow and the alder are also associate (see 6. 2), and therefore the Titan of the Seventh Day. The division ~ Phoroneus’s kingdom between his sons Pclasgus, lasus, and Agen~ recalls that of Cronus’s kingdom between Zeus, Poseidon, and I-Iad› but perhaps describes a pre-Achaean partition of the Peloponnese. 2. Car is Q’re, or Carius, or the Great God Ker, who seems to ha~ derived his title from his Moon-mother Artemis Caria, or Caryatis.
AGENOR, Libya’s son by Poseidon and twin to Belus, left Egypt’
settle in the Land of Canaan, where he married Telephassa, oth:r~i.. called Argiope, who bore him Cadmus, Phoenix, Cilix, Thasc Phineus, and one daughter, Europe.x
b. Zeus, falling in love with Europe, sent Hermes to drive Ageno~ cattle down to the seashore at Tyre, where she and her companio: used to walk. He himselfj oined the herd, disguised as a snow-white bt with great dewlaps and small, gem-like horns, between which ran single black streak. Europe was struck by his beauty and, on findix him gende as a lamb, mastered her fear and began to play with hit putting flowers in his mouth and hanging garlands on his horns; in t] end, she climbed upon his shoulders, and let him amble down with h to the edge of the sea. Suddenly he swam away, while she looked ba~
~ron~
hich
l, he His gere also
e of in terror at the receding shore; one of her hands dung to his right horn, the other still held a flower-basket.2
c. Wading ashore near Cretan Gortyna, Zeus became an eagle and ravished Europe in a willow-thicket beside a spring; or, some say, under an evergreen phne-tree. She bore him three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon.3
d. Agenor sent his sons in search of their sister, forbidding them to return without her. They set sail at once but, having no notion where the bull had gone, each steered a different course. Phoenix travelled westward, beyond Libya, to what is now Carthage, and there gave his name to the punics; but, after Agenor’s death, returned to Canaan, since renamed Phoenicia in his honour, and became the father of Adonis by A1phesiboea.4 Cilix went to the Land of the Hypachaeans, which took his name, Cilicia;s and Phineus to Thynia, a peninsula separating the Sea of Marmara from the Black Sea, where he was later much distressed by harpies. Thasus and his followers, first making for Olympia, dedicated a bronze statue there to Tyrian Heracles, ten ells high, holding a club and a bow, but then set off to colonize the island of Thasos and work its rich gold mines. All this took place five generations before Heracles, son of Amphitryon, was born in Greece.6
e. Cadmus sailed with Telephassa to Rhodes, where he dedicated a brazen cauldron to Athene of Lindus, and built Poseidon’s temple, leaving a hereditary priesthood behind to care for it. They next touched at Theta, and built a similar temple, finally reaching the land of the Thracian Edonians, who received them hospitably. Here Telephassa died suddenly and, after her funeral, Cadmus and his companions proceeded on foot to the Delphic Oracle. When he asked where Europe might be found, the Pythoness advised him to give up his search and, instead, follow a cow and build a city wherever she should sink down for weariness.
.f. Departing by the road that leads from Delphi to Phocis, Cadmus came upon some cowherds in the service of King Pelagon, who sold him a cow marked with a white full moon on each flank. This b~ast he drove eastward through Boeotia, never allowing her to pause until, at last, she sank down where the city of Thebes now stands, and here he erected an image of Athene, calling it by her Phoenician name of Onga.7
g. Cadmus, warn’mg his companions that the cow must be sacrificed to Athene without delay, sent them to fetch lustral water from the Spring of Ares, now called the Castalian Spring, but did not know th it was guarded by a great serpent. This serpent killed most of Cadmus, men, and he took vengeance by crushing its head with a rock. N
sooner had he offered Athene the sacriftce, than she appeared, praisk him for what he had done, and ordering him to sow the serpent’s tee~ in the soil. When he obeyed her, armed Sparti, or Sown Men, at on, sprang up, clashing their weapons together. Cadmus tossed a sto~ among them and they began to brawl, each accusing the other , having thrown it, and fought so fiercely that, at last, only five survive Echion, Udaeus, Chthonius, Hyperenor, and Pelorus, who una~
mously.offered Cadmus their services. But Ares demanded vengean for the death of the serpent, and Cadmus was sentenced by a divh court to become his bondman for a Great Year?
1. Apollodorus: iii. I. ~; Hyginus: Fabulae 178 aud 19; PausanL v. 25.7; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. ~78.
2. Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. 836 if.; Moschus: Idylls ii. 37-62.
3. The Coins of Gortyna; Theophrastus: History of Plants i. 9.
Hyginus: Fabula 178.
4. Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Apollodorus: iii. x. ~ and 14—4.
5. Herodotus: vii. 91.
6. Pausanias: v. 25.7; Herodotus: iv. 47 and ii. 44.
7. Pausanias: ix. 12. I-2.
8. Hyginus: Fabula 178; Apollodorus: iii. 4. ~-2.
1. There are numerous confush~g variations of the genealogy giv above: for instance, Thasus is alternatively described as the son of Pos don, Cilix (Apollodorus: iii. x. x), or Tityus (Pindar: Pythian Odes 46). Agenor is the Phoenician hero Chnas, who appears in Genesis ‘ Canaan’; many Canaanite customs point to an East African provenien and the Canaanites may have originally come to Lower Egypt fro Uganda. The dispersal of Agenor’s sons seems to record the westw: flight of Canaanite tribes early in the second millennium ~3.c., um pressure from Aryau and Semitic invaders.
2. The story of Iuachus’s sons and their search for Io the moon-c~ (see 56. d) has influenced that of Agenor’s sons and their search: Europe. Phoenix is a masculine form of Phoenissa (‘ the red, or bloo one’), a title given to the moon as goddess of Death-in-Life. Eure means ‘broad-face’, a synonym for the full moon, and a title of Moon-Goddesses Demeter at Lebadeia and Astarte at Sidon. If, however, the word is not eur-ośe but eu-rope (on the analogy of euboea), it may mean ‘good for willows’—that is, ‘well-watered’. The willow rules the fifth month of the sacred year (see 52.3), and is associated with witchcraft (see 28.5) and with fertility rites throughout Europe, especially on May Eve, which falls in this month. Libya, Telephassa, Argiope, and Alphesiboea are all, similarly, titles of the Moon-goddess.
3. Zeus’s rape of Europe, which records an early Hellenic occupation of Crete, has been deduced from pre-Hellenic pictures of the Moon-priestess triumphautly riding on the Sun-bull, her victim; the scene survives in eight moulded plaques of blue glass, found in the Mycenaean city of Midea. This seems to have been part of the fertility ritual during which Europe’s May-garland was carried in procession (Athenaeus: p. 678 a-b). Zeus’s seduction of Europe in eagle-disguise recalls his seduction of Hera in cuckoo-disguise (see 12. a); since (according to Hesychius) Hera bore the title’ Europia’. Europe’s Cretan and Corinthian name was Hellotis, which suggests Helice (‘willow’); Helle (see 43. l and 70. 8) a~d Helen are the same divine character. Callimachus in his Epithalarnion /}~r Helen menf~ons that the plane-tree was also sacred to Helen. Its sanctity lay iu its five-pointed leaves, representing the hand of the goddess (see’ 53. a), and its annual sloughlug of bark; but Apollo borrowed it (see 160. ~0), as the God Esmun did Tanit’s (Neith’s) open-handemblem (see ex.3). 4. It is possible that the story of Europe also commemorates a raid on Phoenicia by Hellenes from Crete. John Malalas will hardly haveinvented the ‘Evil Evening’ at Tyre when he writes: ‘Taurus (“bull”), King Crete, assaulted Tyre after a sea-battle during the absence of Agenor and his sons. They took the city that same evening and carried off many capfives, Europe among them; this event is still recalled in the annual “Evil Evening” observed at Tyre’ (Chronicles ii. p. 30, ed. Dindorff). Herodotus (i. z) agrees with Malalas (see ~60. ~). 5. Tyrian Heracles, whom Theseus worshipped at Olympia, was thc god Melkarth; and a small tribe, speaking a Semitic language, seems to have moved up from the Syrian plains to Cadmeia in Caria—Cadmus is a Semitic word meaning ‘eastern’—whence they crossed over to Boeotia towards the end of the second millennium, seized Thebes, and became masters of the country. The myth of the Sown Men and Cadmus’s bondage to Ares suggest that the invading Cadmeans secured their hold on Boeotia by successfully intervening in a civil war among the Pelasgian tribes who claimed to be autochthonous; and that they accepted the local rule of an eight-year reign for the sacred king. Cadmus killed the serpent in the same sense as Apollo killed the Python at Delphi (see z~. ~). The names of the Sown Men—Echion (‘ viper ‘); Udaeus (‘ of the earth’); Chthonius (‘ of the soil ‘); Hyperenor (‘ man who comes up ‘) and Pelorus (‘serpent’)—are characteristic of oracular heroes. But’Pelorus’ suggests that all Pelasgians, not merely the Thebans, claimed to be born in this way; their common feast being the Peloria (see i. ~). Jason’s crop of dragoh’s teeth was probably sown at Iolcus or Corinth, not C (see ~52.3).
6. Troy and Antioch were also said to have been founded os selected by sacred cows (see 158. h and 56. d). But it is less likely th practice was literally carried out, than that the cow was turned loo~ restricted part of a selected site and the temple of the Moon-go founded where she lay down. A cow’s strategic and commercial bilities are not highly developed.
WHEN Cadmus had served eight years in bondage to Ares, to e:
the murder of the Castallan serpent, Athene secured him the la Boeotia. With d~e helu of his Sown Men, he built the Theban polis, named ‘The Cadmea’ in his own honour and, after being ini into the mysteries which Zeus had taught Iasion, married Harn the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares; some say that Athene had her to him when he visited Samothrace.’
b. This was the first mortal wedding ever attended by the ś plans. Twelve golden thrones were set up for them in Cadmus’s t which stood on the site of the present Theban market place; ant all brought gifts. Aphrodite presented Harmonia with the fi golden necklace made by Hephaestus—originally it had been; love-gift to Cadmus’s sister Europe-which conferred irres beauty on its wearer.2 Athene gave her a golden robe, which sirr conferred divine dignity on its wearer, also a set of flutes; and Her lyre. Cadmus’s own present to Harmonia was another rich rob~
Electra, Iasion’s mother, taught her the rites of the Great Go, while Demeter assured her a prosperous barley harvest by lyin~
Iasion in a thrice-ploughed field during the celebrations. The Th still show the place where the Muses played the flute and sang o occasion, and where Apollo performed on the lyre.$
c. In his old age, to placate Ares, who had not yet wholly for him for killing the serpent, Cadmus resigned the Theban thrc favour of his grandson Pentheus, whom his daughter Agave had to Echion the Sown Man, and lived quietly in the city. But when Pentheus was done to death by his mother, Dionysus foretold that Cadmus and Harmonia, riding in a chariot drawn by heifers, would rule over barbarian hordes. These same barbarians, he said, would sack many Greek cities until, at last, they plundered a temple of Apollo, whereupon they would suffer just punishment; but Ares would rescue Cadmus and Harmonia, after turning them into serpents, and they would live happily for all time in the Islands of the Blessed.4
d. Cadmus and Harmonia therefore emigrated to the land of the Encheleans who, when attacked by the Illyrians, chose them as their rulers, in accordance with Dionysus’s advice. Agave was now married to Lycotherses, King of Illyria, at whose court she had taken refuge aśter her murder oś Pentheus; but on hearing that her parents commanded the Enchelean śorces, she murdered Lycotherses too, and gave the kingdom to Cadmus. S
e. In thei~ old age, when the prophecy had been wholly fulfilled, Cadmus and Harmonia duly became blue-spotted black serpents, and were sent by Zeus to the Islands of the Blessed. But some say that Ares changed them into lions. Their bodies were buried in Illyria, where Cadmus had built the city ośButho~. He was succeeded by Illyrius, the son ośhis old age.6
1. Pausanias: ix. 5. I; Diodorus Siculus: v. 48; Apollodorus:
~,. Diodorus Siculus: v. 49 and iv. 65.5; Pindar: P),thian Odes lii. 94; Pausa~fias: ix. ~z. 3; Pherecydes, quoted by Apollodorus: iii. 4. 3. Diodorus Siculus: v. 49; Pausanias: ix.
4. Hyginus: Fabula 6; Apollodorus: ili. 4—z; Euripides: Bacch,~e 43 and 1350 if.
5. Hyginus: Fabulae 184 and 240.
6. Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 562-602; Apollodorus: iii. 5.4; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 517.
1. Cadmus’s marriage to Harmonia, in the presence of the Twelve Olympian deities, is paralleled by Peleus’s marriage to Thetis (see 8 x. I), and seems to record a general Hellenic recognition of the Cadreelan conquerors of Thebes, after they had been sponsored by the Athenians and decently initiated into the Samothracia~ Mysteries. His founding of Butho~ constitutes a claim by the Illyrians to r~u~k as Greeks, and therefore to take part in the Olympic Games. Cadmus will have had an oracle in Rlyria, if he was pictured there as a serpent; and the lions into which he and Harmonia are also said to have been transformed, were perhaps twin heraldic supporters of the Great Goddess’s aniconic image—as on the famous Lion Gate at Mycenae. The mythographer suggests that he was allowed to emigrate with a colony at the close of his reign, instead of being put to death (see 117. 5)—
K~/~e ]3EL-IJs, who ruled at Chemmis in the Thebaid, was the son of Libya by Poseidon, and twin-brother of Agenor. His wife Anchino~, daughter of Nilus, bore him the twins Aegyptus and Danaus, and a third son, Cepheus.1
b. Aegyptus was given Arabia as his kingdom; but also subdued the country of the Melampodes, and named it Egypt after himself. Fifty sons were born to him of various mothers: Libyans, Arabians, Phoenicians, and the hke. Danaus, sent to rule Libya, had fifty daughters, called the Danaids, also born of various mothersi Naiads, Hamadryads, Egyptian princesses of Elephantis and Memphis, Ethiopians, and the like.
c. On Belus’s death, the twins quarrelled over their inheritance, and as a conciliatory gesture Aegyptus proposed a mass-marriage between the fifty princes and the fifty princesses. Danaus, suspecting a plot, would not consent and, when an oracle conf~rmed his fears that Aegyptus had it in his mind to kill all the Danaids, ~repared to flee from Libya.2
d. With Athene’s assistance, he built a ship for himself and his daughters—the first two-prowed vessel that ever took to sea—and t~ey sailed towards Greece together, by way of Rhodes. There Danaus dedicated an image to Athene in a temple raised for her by the Danaids, three of whom died during their stay in the island; t~e cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus are called after them.3
e. From Rhodes they sailed to the Peloponnese and landed near Lerna, where Danaus announced that he was divinely chosen to become King of Argos. Though the Argive King, Gelanor, naturally laughed at this claim, his subjects assembled that evening to discuss it. Gelanor would doubdess have kept the throne, despite Danaus’s dechration that Athene was supporting him, had not the Argives postponed their decision until dawn, when a wolf came boldly down from the hills, attacked a herd of cattle grazing near the city walls, and killed the leading bull. This they read as an omen that Danaus wo~d take the throne by violence if he were opposed, and therefore persuaded Gelanor to resign it peacefullyi fi Danaus, convinced that the wolf had been Apollo in disguise, dedicated the famous shrine to Wolf~sh Apollo at Argos, and became ~o powerful a ruler that all the Pelasgians of Greece called themselves Danaans. He also built the citadel of Argos, and his daughters brought the Mysteries of Demeter, called Thesmophoria, from Egypt, and taught these to the Pelasgian women, But, since the Dorian invmion, the Thesmophoria are no longer performed in the Peloponnese, except by the Arcadians.4
g. Danaus had found Argolis suffering from a prolonged drought, since Poseidon, vexed by Inachus’s decision that the land was Hera’s, had dried up all the riven and streams. He sent his daughters in search of water, with orders to placate Poseidon by any means they knew. One of them, by name Amymone, while chasing a deer in the forest, happened to disturb a sleep’rag satyr. He sprang up and tried to ravish her; but Poseidon, whom she invoked, hurled his trident at the satyr. The fleeing satyr dodged, the trident stuck quivering in a rock, and Poseidon himself lay with Amymone, who was glad that she could carry out her fither’s instructions so pleasantly. On learning her errand, Poseidon pointed to his trident and told her to pull it from the rock. When she did so, three streams ofwaterjetted up from the three tine-holes. This spring, now named Amymone, is the source of the river Lerna, which never fails, even at the height of summer. S
h. At Amymone the monstrous Hydra was born to Echidne under a plane-tree. It lived in the near-by Lernaean Lake, to which murderers come for purification—hence the proverb: ‘A Lerna of evils.’6
i. Aegyptus now sent his sons to Argos, forbidding them to return until they had punished Danaus and his whole family. On their arrival, they begged Danaus to reverse his former decision and let them marry his daughters—intending, however, to murder them on the wedding night. When he still refused, they laid siege to Argos. Now, there are no springs on the Argive citadel, and though the Danaids afterwards invented the art of sinking wells, and supphed the city with several of these, including four sacred ones, it was waterless at the time in que~ tion. Seeing that thirst would soon force him to capitulate, Danat promised to do what the sons of Aegyptus asked, as soon as they raise the siege.?
j. A mass-marriage was arranged, and Danaus paired off the couple~ his choice being made in some cases because the bride and bridegroo~ had mothers of equal rank, or because their names were similar—tht Cleite, Sthenele, and Chrysippe married Cleitus, $thenelus, and Chr3 sippus—but in most cases he drew lots from a helmet?
k. During the wedding-feast Danaus secretly doled out sharp pi~ which his daughters were to conceal in their hair; and at midnight eac stabbed her husband through the heart. There was only one survivo on Artemis’s advice, Hypermnestra saved the life ofLynceus, becau~ he had spared her maidenhead; and helped him in his flight to the cit of Lyncea, sixty furlongs away. Hypermnestra begged him to light beacon as a signal that he had reached safety, undertaking to answer with another beacon from the citadel; and the Argives still light annu beacon-fires in commemoration of this pact. At dawn, Danaus learn› of Hypermnestra’s disobedience, and she was tried for her life; b~ acquitted by the Argive judges. She therefore raised an image to torious Aphrodite in the shrine of Wolfish Apollo, and also dedicate a sanctu2rť to Persuasive Artemis.9
/. The murdered men’s heads were buried at Lerna, and their bodi. given full funeral honours below the walls of Argos; but, altliou~. Athene and iHermes purified the Danaids in the Lernaean Lake wi~ Zeus’s permission, the Judges of the Dead have condenmed them the endless task of carrying water in jars perforated like sieves? rn. Lynceus and Hypermnestra were reunited, and Danaus, decidin te marry off the other daughters as fast as he could before noon on tt day of their pur’ff~cation, called for suitors. He proposed a marria~ race starting from the street now called Apheta: the winner to ha~ fast choice of a wife, and the others the next choices, in their order fmishing the race. Since he could not find enough men who wou]
risk their lives by marrying murderesses, only a few ran; but when t~ wedding night passed without disaster to the new bridegrooms, mo~ suitors appeared, and another race was run on the following day. A descendants of these marriages rank as Danaans; and the Argives sti celebrate the race in their so-called I-Iymenaean Contest. Lynceus lat~ killed Danaus, and reigned in his stead. He would willingly have kille his sisters4n4aw at the same time, to avenge his murdered brothers, had the Argives permitted this.1X
n. Meanwhile, Aegyptus had come to Greece, but when he learned of his sons’ rite, fled to Aroe, where he died, and was buried at Patrae, in a sanctuary of Serapis.xz
0. Amymone’s son by Poseidon, Nauplius, a famous navigator, discovered the art of steering by the Great Bear, and founded the city of Nauplius, where he settled the Egyptian crew that had sailed with his grandfather. He was the ancestor of Nauplius the Wrecker, who used to lure hostile ships to their death by light’rag false beacons.13 x. Herodotus: ii. 91; Euripides, quoted by Apollodorus: ii. x. 4. 2. Apollodorus:ii. t. $;Hyginus:Fabula ~68; Eustathius ortHomet, P—373. Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: ii. L 4; Herodotus: ii. 234; Diodorus Siculus: v. 58. ~; Strabo: xiv. 2. 8.
4. Pausanias: ii. 38.4 and 19. 3; Euripides, quoted by Strabo: viii. 6. 9; Strabo: loc. tit.; Herodotus: ii. 171; Plutarch: On the Malice of Herodotus ~ 3.
5. Hyginus: Fabula ~69; Apollodorus: ii, x. 46. Pausanias: ii. 37. x and 4; Strabo: viii. 6. 8. 7. Hyginus: Fabula 168; Apollodorus: ii. x. 5; Strabo: viii. 6. 9. 8. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 170.
9. Apotlodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 25.4; ~9.6 and 21. x. Io. Apollodorus: 10c. tit.; Lucian: Marine Dialogues vi; Hyginus: Fabula 168; Ovid: Heroides x. iv; Horace: Odes iii. ~x. 30.
1. Pindar: Pythian Odes ix. x~7 if.; Pausanias: iii. 12. 2; Hyginus: Fabula 170; Servius on VirgiPs Aeneid x. 497.
1. Pausanias: vii. 21. 6.
53. Apolloniu~ Rhodius: i. 136-8; Theon on Aratus’s Phenomena 27; Pausanias: iv. 35—2.
~r
1. This myth records the early arrival in Greece of Helladic colonists from Palestine, by way of Rhodes, and their introduction of agriculture into the Peloponnese. It is claimed that they included emigrant~ from Libya and Ethiopia, which seems probable (see 6. ~ and 8. z). Belus is the Baal of the Old Testament, and the Bel of the Apocrypha; he had taken ~is name from the Sumerian Moon-goddess Belili, whom he ousted.
2. The three Danaids, also known as the Telchines, or ‘enchanters’, who named the three chief cities of Rhodes, were the Triple Moongoddcss Dana~ (see 54. ~ and 73—4). The names Linda, Cameira, and Ialysa seem to be worn-down forms of linodeousa (‘bi~der with linen thread’), catamerizousa (‘sharer out ‘), and ialemistria (‘ walling worn; they are, in fact, the familiar Three Fates, or Moerae, otherwise kno Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos (see ~o. l) because they exercised very functions. The Classical theory of the linen-thread was th~ goddess tied the human being to the end of a carefully measured t~ which she paid out yearly, until the time came for her to cut it aud relinquish his soul to death. But originally she bound the wailing i with a linen swaddling band on which his clan and family marks aembroidered and thus assigned him his destined place in society.
3—DanaE’s Sumerian name was Dam-kina. The Hebrews calle Dinah (Genesis xxxiv), also masculinized as Dan. Fifty Moon-pries were the regular complement of a college, and their duty was to land watered by rain-making charms, irrigation, and well-dig hence the Danaids’ name has been comaected with the Greek word ‘parched’, and with danos, ‘a gift’, the first a of which is sometimes sometimes short. The twinship of Agenor and Belus, like that old and Aegyptus, points to a regal system at Argos, in which each co married a Chief-priestess and reigned for fifty lunar months, or Great Year. Chief-priestesses were chosen by a foot race (the origin ~ Olympic Games), run at the end of the fifty months, or of forty-n~ alternate years (see 53—~). And the New Year foot race at Olympi 53-3), Sparta (see ~60. d),Jerusalem (Hooke: Origin of Early Semitic 1935, p. 53), and Babylon (Langdon: Epic of Creation, lines 57 and was rua for the sacred kingship, as at Argos. A Sun-king must be
4. The Hydra (see 34—$ and 60. h), destroyed by Heracles, seel have ~na’solaified this college of water-providing priestesses (see 124. and the myth of the Danaids apparently records two Hellenic attem ~ Ilaeir sanctuary, the first of which failed signally. After the se, successful attempt, the Hellenic leader married the Ckief-priestess distributed the water-pr/estesses as wives among his chieftains. street called Aptera’ will have been the starthag-point in the girls for the office of Chief-priestess; but also used in the men’s foot ra~ the sacred kingship (see 53—$ and ~60. d). Lynceus, a royal title in Me too (see 74. ~), means’ of the lynx’—the caracal, a sort of lion, famo~ its sharp sight..
5. ‘Aegyptus’ and ‘Danaus’ seem to have been early titles of T~ co—kings; and since it was a widespread custom to bury the sacred head at the approaches of a city, and thus protect it against (see ~46. ~), the supposed heads of Aegyptus’s sons buried at Lerna probably those of successive sacred kings. The Egyptians were Melampodes (‘ black feet’) because they paddled about in the black mud during the sowing season.
6. A later, monogamous, society represented the Danaids with leaking water-pots as undergoing eternal punishment for matr~ But in the icon from which this story derived, they were performing a necessary charm: sprinkling water on the ground to produce rain showers by sympathetic magic (see 4~. 5 and 68. i). It seems that the sieve, or leaking pot, remained a distinguishing mark of the wise woman many centuries after the abolition of the Danaid colleges: Philostratus writes (Life of Apollonius of Tyana vi. I x) of’women with sieves in their hands who go about pretending to heal cattle for simple cowherds.’
7. Hypermnestra’s and Lynceus’s beacon-fires will have been those lighted at the Argive Spring Festival to celebrate the triumph of the Sun. It may be that at Argos the sacred king was put to death with a long needle thrust through his heart: a comparatively merciful end.
8. The Thesmophoria (‘due offerings’) were agricultural orgies celebrated at Athens (see 48. b), in the course of which the severed genitals of the sacred king, or his surrogate, were carried in a basket; these were replaced in more civilized times by phallus-shaped loaves and live serpents. Apollo Lycius may mean ‘Apollo of the Light’, rather than ‘Wolfish Apollo’, but the two concepts were connected by the wolves’ habit of howling at the full moon.
BELUS hacl a beautiful daughter, Lamia, who ruled in Libya, ancl on whom Zeus, in acknowledgement of her favours, bestowed the singular power of plucking out and replacing her eyes at will. She bore him several children~ but all of them except Scylla were killed by Hera in a fit of jealousy. Lamia took her revenge by destroying the children of others, and behaved so cruelly that her face turned into a nightmareish mask.
b. Later, she joined the company of the Empusae, lying with young men and sucking their blood while they slept. ~
1. Diodorus Siculus: xx. 4~; Suidas sub Lamia; Plutarch: On Curiosity 2; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Peace 757; Strabo: i. IL 8; Eustathius on Homer p. ~7~4; Aristotle: Ethics vii. 5.
1. Lamia was the Libyan Neith, the Love-and-Batfie goddess, also named Anatha and Athene (see 8.1; 25. z and 61. 1), whose worship the Achaeans suppressed; like Alphito of Arcadia, she ended as a nurse bogey (see 52. 7). Her name, Lamia, seems to be akin to lamyros (‘git tonous’), from lairnos (‘ gullet’)—thus, of a woman: ‘lecherous’her ugly face is the prophylactic Gorgon mask worn by her priestes~ during their Mysteries (see 33.3), of which infanticide was an integ: part. Lamia’s removable eyes are perhaps deduced from a picture of t goddess about to bestow mystic sight on a hero by proffering him an e {see 73.8). The Empusae were incubae {see 55.
So~ say that when Zeus fell in love with Nemesis, the fled from hi into the water and became a fish; he pursued her as a beaver [
ploughing up the waves. She leaped ashore, and transformed hers~ into this wild beast or that, but could not shake Zeus off, because borrowed the form of even fiercer and swifter beasts. At last she to, to the air as a wild goose; he became a swan, and trod her triumpham at Rhamnus in Attica. Nemesis shook her feathers resignedly, and car to Sparta, where Leda, wife of King Tyndareus, presently found hyacinth-coloured egg lying in a marsh, which she brought home a2 hid in a chest: from it Helen of Troy was hatched.1 But some say t} this egg dropped from the moon, like the egg that, in ancient tim. plunged into the river Euphrates and, being towed ashore by fis~ and hatched by doves, broke open to reveal the Syrian Goddess b. Others say that Zeus, pretending to be a swan pursued by an eag took refuge in Nemesis’s bosom, where he ravished her and that, in d process of time, she laid an egg, which Hermes threw between Led thighs, as she sat on a stool with her legs apart. Thus Leda gave birth Helen, and Zeus placed the images of Swan and Eagle in the Heave~ to commemorate this ruse.3
c. The most usual account, however, is that it was Leda herselfwi whom Zeus companied in the form of a swan beside the river Eurot: that she laid an egg from which were hatched Helen, Castor, a:
Polydeuces; and that she was consequently deified as the godd, u~ery
‘ glut—and
;tesses
~egral
)f the
n eye he ok
~ly ne
a ~d at
~f Nemesis.4 Now, Leda’s husband Ty:adareus had also lain with her the same night and, though some hold that all these three were Zeus’s children—and Clytaemnestra too, who had been hatched, with Helen, from a second egg—others record that Helen alone was a daughter of Zeus, and thatCastor and Polydeuces were Tyndareus’s sons; s others again, that Castor and Clytaerrmestra were children of Tyndareus, while Helen and Polydeuces were children of Zeus.6
2. Athenaetu, quoting Homer’s Cypria p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 7; Sappho: Fragment I05; Pausanias: i. 33.7; Eratosthenes:
Catasterismoi 25.
2. Athenaeus: 57 f-; Plutarch: Symposiacs ii. 3.3; Hyginus: Fabula 197.
:!. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 8.
4. Lactantius: i. 21; Hyginus: Fabula 77; First Vatican Mythographer: 78 and 204. 2. Homer: Odyssey xi. 299; Iliad iii. 426; Euripides: Helena 254, 2497 and 2680.
6, Pindar: Nemean Odes x. 80; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 6-7.
1. Nemesis was the Moon-goddess as Nymph (see 32. 2) and, in the earliest form of the love-chase myth, she pursued the sacred king through his seasonal changes of hare, fish, bee, and mouse—or hare, fish, bird, and grain of wheat—and finally devoured him. With the victory of the patriarchal system, the chase was reversed: the goddess now fled from Zeus, as in the English ballad of the Coal-black Smith (see 89. ~). She had changed into an otter or beaver to pursue the fish, and Castor’s name (‘beaver’) is clearly a survival of this myth, whereas that of Polydeuces (‘much sweet wine’) records the character of the festivities during which the chase took place.
2. Lada is said to be the Lycian (i.e. Cretan) word for ‘woman’, and Leda was the goddess Latona, or Leto, or Lat, who bore Apollo and Artemis at Delos (see ~4. ~)—The hyacinth~coloured egg recalls the blood-red Easter egg of the Druids, called the glain, for which they searched every year by the seashore; in Celtic myth it was laid by the goddess as sea-serpent. The story of its being thrown between Leda’s thighs may have been deduced from a picture of.the goddess seated on the birth-stool, with Apollo’s head protruding from her womb.
3. Helen [a] and Helle, or Selene, are local variants ofthe Moon-goddess (see 43. ~0; 70. 8; and x 59—~), whose identity with Lucian’s Syrian goddess is emphasized by Hyginus. But Hyg!nus’s account is confused: it was the goddess herself who laid the world-egg after coupling with the serpent Ophion, and who hatched it on the waters, adopting the form of a do She herself rose from the Void (see x. a). Helen had two temples near Sparta: one at Therapnae, built on a Mycenaean site; another at Dendra, connected with a tree cult, as her Rhoclian shrine also was (see 88. ~0). Pollux (x. ~9~) mentions a Spartan festival called the Helenephoria, dosely resembling Athene’s Thesmophoria at Athens (see 48. b), during which certain unmentionable objects were carried in a special basket called a helene; such a basket Helen herself carries in reliefs showing her accompanied by the Dioscuri. The objects may have been phallic emblems; she was an orgiastic goddess.
4. Zeus tricked Nemesis, the goddess of the Peloponnesian swan cult, by appealing to her pity, exactly as he had tricked Hera of the Cretan cuckoo cult (see 12. a). This myth refers, it seems, to the arrival at Cretan or Pelasgian cities of Hellenic warriors who, to begin with, paid homage to the Great Goddess and provided her priestesses with obedient consorts, but eventually wrested the supreme sovereignty from her.
Ix~o~/, a son of Phlegyas, the Lapith king, agreed to marry Dia, daughter of Eioneus, promising rich bridal gifts and inviting Eioneus to a banquet; but had laid a pitfall in front of the palace, with a great charcoal fire underneath, into which the unsuspecting Eioneus fell and was burned.
b. Though the lesser gods thought this a heinous deed, and refused to purify Ixion, Zeus, having behaved equally ill himself when in love, not only purified him but brought him to eat at his table.
c. Ixion was ungrateful, and planned to seduce Hera who, he guessed, would be glad of a chance to revenge herself on Zeus for his frequent unfaithfulness. Zeus, however, reading Ixion’s intentions, shaped a cloud into a false Hera with whom Ixion, being too far gone in drink to notice the deception, duly took his pleasure. He was surprised in the act by Zeus, who ordered Hermes to scourge him mercilessly until he repeated the words: ‘Benefactors deserve honour’, and then bind him to a fiery wheel which rolled without cease through the sky.
d. The false Hera, afterwards called Nephele, bore Ixion the outcast child Centaurus who, when he grew to manhood, is said to have sired horse-centaurs on Magnesian mares, of whom the most celebrated was the learned Cheiron.1
x. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 62; Hyginus: Fabulae 33 and 62; Pindar: Pythian Odes ii. 33-89, with scholiast; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 6; Schohast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women 1185.
1. lxlon’s name, form~.xt from ixchys (‘strength’) and io (‘moon’) (see 6~. 2), also suggests ixias (‘ mistletoe ‘). As an oak-king with misdetoe genitals (see 50. 2), representing the thunder-god, he ritually married the raM-making Moon-goddess; and was then scourged, so that hi~ blood and sperm would fructify the earth (see 116. 4), beheaded with an axe, emasculated, spread—eagled to a tree, and roasted; after which his kinsmen ate him sacramentally. Eion is the Homeric epithet for a river; but Dia’s father is called Deioneus, meaning ‘ ravager’, as well as Eioneus. J. The Moon-goddessofthe oak cult wasknownas Dia (‘ofthesky’),
a title of the Dodonan Oak-goddess (see 5 r. I) and therefore of Zeus’s wife Hera. That old-fashionedkings called themselves Zeus (see 43.2; 45.2; 68. I; and 256.4) and married Dia of the Rain Clouds, naturally displeased the Olympian priests, who misinterpreted the ritual picture of the spread-eagled Lapith king as recording his punishment for impiety, and invented the anecdote of the cloud. On an Etruscan mirror, Ixion is shown spread-eagled to a f~re~wheel, with mushroom tinder at his feet; elsewhere, he is bound in the same ‘ fivefold bond’ with which the Irish hero Curoi tied Cuchulain—bent backwards into a hoop (Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vii. 12), with his ankles, wrists, and neck tied together, like Osiris in the Book of the Dead. This attitude recalls the burning wheels rolled downhill at European midsummer festivities, as a sign that the sun has reached its zenith and must now decline again until the winter solstice. Ixion’s pitfall is unmetaphorical: surrogate victims were needed for the sacred king, such as prisoners taken in battle or, failing these, travellers caught in traps. The myth seems to record a treaty made by Zeus’s Hellenes with the Lapiths, Phlegyans, and Centaurs, which was broken by the ritual murder of Hellenic travellers and the seizure of their womenfolk; the Hellenes demanded, and were given, an official apology.
$. Horses were sacred to the moon, and hobby-horse dances, designed to make rain fall, have apparently given rise to the legend that the Centattrs were half horse, half man. The earliest Greek representation of Centam—two men joined at the waist to horses’ bodies—is found on a Mycenaean gem from the Heraeum at Argos; they face each other and are dancing. A similar pair appear on a Cretan bead-seal; but, since there was no native horse cult ha Crete, the motif has evidently been imported from the mainland. In archaic art, the satyrs were also pictured as hobbyhorse men, but later as goats. Centaurus will.have been an oracular hero with a serpent’s tail, and the story of Boreas’s mating with mares is therefore attached to him (see 48.
E ~/x~Y/a ~ o N was the handsome son of Zeus and the Nymph Calyc4, an Aeolian by race though Carlan by origin, and ousted Clymenus fro~ the kingdom of Elis. His wife, known by many different names, such a! Iphianassa, Hypcrippe, Chromia, and Neis, bore him four sons; he alsc fathered fifty daughters on Selene, who had fallen desperately in lov~ ~ith him. !
b. Endymion was lying asleep in a cave on Carian Mount Latmtt one still night when Selene first saw him, lay down by his side, ant gendy kissed his closed eyes. Afterwards, some say, he returned to th~ same cave and fell into a dreamless sleep. This sleep, from which he h~ never yet awakened, came upon him either at his own request, becau~ he hated the approach of old age; or because Zeus suspected him ofa~ intrigue with Hera; or because Selene found that she preferred gentl~ kissing him to being the object of his too fertile passion. In any case, h~ has never grown a day older, and preserves the bloom of youth on hi: cheeks. But others say that he lies buried at Olympia, where his foul sons ran a race for the vacant throne, which Epeius won.2
c. One of his defeated sons, Aetolus, later competed in a chariot-rac~ at the funeral games of Azan, son of Arcas, the first ever celebrated i~ Greece. Since the spectators were unaware that they should keep of the course, Aetolus’s chariot accidentally ran over Apis, son of Phoro. neus, and fatally injured him. Salmoneus, who was present, banishec Aetolus across the Gulf of Corinth, where he killed Dorus and hi: brothers and conquered the land now called Aetolia after him.3
x. Apollodorus: i. 7. 5-6; Pausanias: v. 8. x and x. 2
2. Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; Scholiast on Theocntus s Idylls iii. 49 Cicero: Tuscan Debates i. 38; Pausanias: v. L 3, Pausanias: viii. 4. 2-3 and v. I. 6; Apollodoms: i. ?. 6; Strabo: viii. 3.33.
1. This myth records how an Aeolian chief invaded Elis, and accepted the consequences of marrying the Pelasgian Moon-goddess Hera’s representative—the names of Endymion’s wives are all moon-titles—head of a college of fifty water-priestesses (see 60.3). When his reign ended he was duly sacrificed and awarded a hero shrine at Olympia. Pisa, the city to which Olympia belonged, is said to have meant in the Lydian (or Cretan) language ‘ private resting-place’: namely, of the Moon (Servius on Virgil x. ~79).
2. The name Endymion, from enduein (Latin: inducere), refers to the Moon’s seduction of the king, as though she were one of the Empusac (see 55. a); but the ancients explain it as referring to somnurn ei inducturn, ‘the sleep put upon him’.
$. Aetolus, like Pelops, will have driven his chariot around the Olympian stadium in impersonation of the sun (see 69. I); and his accidental killing of Apis, which is made to account for the Elean colonization of Aetolia, seems to be deduced from a picture of the annual chariot crash, in which the ldng’s surrogate died (see 7~—I and I09. 4). But the foot race won by Epeius (‘successor’) was the earlier event (see 53.3)—The existence of an Endymion sanctuary on Mount Latmus in Caria suggests that an Aeolian colony from Elis settled there. His ritual marriage with Hera, like Ixion’s, will have offended the priests of Zeus (see 63.2). 4. Apis is the noun formed from apios, a Homeric adjective usually meaning ‘far off’ but, when applied to the Peloponnese (Aeschylus: Suppliants 262), ‘of the pear-tree’ (see 74. 6).
PYe~az~o~, son of Belus, fell in love with Aphrodite and, because she would not lie with him, made an ivory image of her and laid it in his bed, praying to her for pity. Entering into this image, Aphrodite brought it to life as Galatea, who bore him Paphus and Metharme. Pa?hus, Pygmalion’s successor, was the father of Cinyras, who founded the Cyprian city of Paphos and built a famous temple to Aphrodite there.I
1. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 3; Ovid: Metamorphosesx. 243 if.; Arnobius: Against the Nations vi. 22.
1. Pygmalion, married to Aphrodite’s priestess at Paphos, seenas to have kept the goddess’s white cult-image (cf. ~ Samuel xix. ~ 3) in his bed as a means of retaining the Cyprian throne. If Pygmalion was, in fact, succeeded by a son whom this priestess bore him, he will have been the first king to impose the pattilinear system on the Cypriots. But it is more likely that, like his grandson Cinyras (see ~ 8.5), he refused to give up the goddess’s image at the end of his eight-year reign; and that he prolonged this by marriage with another o(Aphrodite’s priestesses—technically hh daughter, since she was heiress to the throne—who is called Metharrne (‘ change’), to mark the innovation.
T~z River-god Asopus—whom some call the son of Oceanus and Tethys; some, of Poseidon and Pero; others, of Zeus and Eurynomemarried Metope, daughter of the river Ladon, by whom he had twc sore and either twelve or twenty daughters. I
b. Several of these had been carried off and ravished on various occasions by Zeus, Poseidon, or Apollo, and when the youngest, Aegina, twin sister of Thebe, one of Zeus’s victims, also disappeared, Asoptu set out in search of her. At Corinth he learned that Zeus was once again the culprit, went vengefully in pursuit, and found him embracin~ Aegina in a wood. Zeus, who was unarmed, fled ignominiously through the thickets and, when out of sight, transformed himselfintc a rock until Asopus had gone by; whereupon he stole back to Olympu! and from the safety of its ramparts pelted him with thtu~derbolts hsopus still moves slowly from the wounds he then received, an~ lumps of burned coal are often fetched from his river bed.2
c. Having thus disposed of Aegina’s father, Zeus conveyed secretly to the island then called Oenone, or Oenopia, where he la~ with her in the form of an eagle, or of a flame, and cupids hovered ovel their couch, administering the gifts of love.3 In course of time Her: discovered that Aegina had borne Zeus a son named Aeacus, ant resolved to destroy every inhabitant of Oenone, where he She introduced a serpent into one of its streams, which water and hatched out thousands of eggs; so that swarms
0fserpents went wriggling over t~e fields into all the other streams and rivers. Thick darkness and a drowsy heat spread across the island, which /ieacus had renamed Aegina, and the pestilential South Wind blew for n0 less than four months. Crops and pastures dried up, and famine ensued; but the islanders were chiefly plagued with thirst and, when their wine was exhausted, would crawl to the nearest stream, where they died as they drank its poisonous water.
d. Ap?eals to Zeus were in vain: the emaciated suppliants and their sacrificial beasts fell dead before his very altars, until hardly a single warm-blooded creature remained aliYe.4
e. One day, Aeacus’s prayers were answered with thunder and lightning. śncouraged by this favourable omen, he begged Zeus to replenish the empty land, giving him as many subjects as there were ants carrying grains of corn up a near-by oak. The tree, sprung from a Dodonian acorn, was sacred to Zeus; at Aeacus’s prayer, therefore, it trembled, and a rustling came from its widespread boughs, not caused by any wind. Aeacus, though terrif~ed, did not flee, but repeatedly kissed the tree-trunk and the earth beneath it. That night, in a dream, he saw a shower of ants filling to the grotrod from the sacred oak, and ~?ringing up as men. When he awoke, he dismissed this as deceitful fintasy; but suddenly his son Telamon called him outside to watch a host of men approaching, and he recognized their faces from his dream. The plague of serpents had vanished, and rain was falling in a steady s[rC~tlll.
f. Aeacus, with grateful thanks to Zeus, divided the deserted city and lands among his new people, whom he called Myrmidons, that is
‘ants’, and whose descendants still displhy an ant-like thrift, patience, and tenacity. Later, these Myrmidons followed Peieus into exile from Aegina, and fought beside Achilles and Patroclus at Troy.s
.1,. But some say that Achilles’s allies, the Myrmidons, were so named in honour of Ird_ng Myrmidon, xvhose daughter Eurymedusa was seduced by Zeus in the form of an ant—wlfich is why ants are sacred in Thessaly. And others tell of a nymph named Myrmex who, u4~en her companion Athene invented the plough, boasted that she had made the discovery herself, and was turned into an ant as a punishIllent.6
h. Aeacus, who married Endeis of Megara, was widely renowned for his piety, and hem in such honour that men longed to feast theh eyes upon him. All the noblest heroes of Sparta and Athens clamoure~ to fight under his command, though he had made Aegina the mos~
difficult of the Aegean islands to approach, surrounding it with sunker rocks and dangerous reefs, as a protection against pirates.? When al Greece was af~icted with a drought caused by Pelops’s murder of th~ Arcadian king Stymphalus or, some say, by the Athenians’ murder o Androgeus, the Delphic Oracle advised the Greeks: ‘Ask Aeacas t( pray for your delivery!’ Thereupon every city sent a herald to Aeacus who ascended Mount Panhellenius, the highest peak in his island, robe~ as a priest of Zeus. There he sacrificed to the gods, and prayed fo: an end to the drought. His prayer was answered by a loud thunde clap, clouds obscured the sky, and furious showers of rain soaked th, whole land of Greece. He then dedicated a sanctuary to Zeus on Pan hellenius, and a cloud settling on the mountain summit has ever sinc, been an unfailing portent of rain?
i. Apollo and Poseidon took Aeacus with them when they built th, walls of Troy, knowing that unless a mortal joined in this work, th. city would be impregnable and its inhabitants capable of defying th. gods. Scarcely had they finished their task when three grey-eye~ serpents tried to scale the walls. Two chose the part just completed b the gods, but tumbled down and died; the third, with a cry, rushed Aeacus’s part and forced his way in. Apollo then prophesied that Tro’ would fall more than once, and that Aeacus’s sons would be among it captors, both in the first and fourth generations; as indeed came to in the persons of Telamon and Ajax.9
j. Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthys were the three of Zeus~
sons whom he would have most liked to spare the burden of old ag~ The Fates, however, would not permit this, and Zeus, by graciousl accepting their ban, provided the other Olympians with a goo example.1ř
1. When Aeacus died, he became one of the three Judges in Ta~
tarus, where he gives laws to the shades, and is even called upon t arbitrate quarrels that may arise between the gods. Some add that keeps the keys of Tartarus, imposes a toll, and checks the ghosts brougl down by Hermes against Atropos’s invoice.x~
1. Apollodorus: iii. x:z. 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72.
2. Diodorus SictHus: Ioc. cit.; Pindar: Isthmian Odes viii. ~7 if.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 78; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebaid vii. 215.
3. Apollodorus: iii. ~2. 6; Pindar: loc. tit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 7; Pindar: Nemean Odes viii. 6; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 113.
4. Hyginus: Fabula 52; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 520 if.
5. Ovid: Metamorphoses: vii. 614 if.; Hyginus: Ioc. tit.; Apollodorus: 10c. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 29. 2; Strabo: viii. 6. ~6 and ix. 5.96. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 7 and iv. 40:2; Clement of Alexandria: Address to the Gentiles ii. 39—6. 7—Apollodorus: iii. 12.6; Pindar: Nemean Odes viii. 8 if.; Pausanias: ii. 29. 5.
8. Diodorus SictHus: iv. 61. ~; Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis vi. 3.28; Pausanias: ii. 30. 4; Theophrastus: Weather Signs i. 24. 9. Pindar: Olympian Odes viii. 30 if., with scholiast.
~o. Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 4.26 if.
~ ~. Ibid.: xiii. 25; Pindar: Isthmian Odes viii. 24-; Apollo dorus: iii. 6; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead xx. x; Charon 2; and Voyage Below iv.
1. Asopns’s daughters ravished by Apollo and Poseidon will have been colleges of Moon-priestesses in the Asopus valley of the North—eastern Peloponnese, whose fertile lands were seized by the Aeolians. Aegina’s rape seems to record a subsequent Achaean conquest ofPhlius, a city at the headwaters of the Asopus; and an unsuccessful appeal made by their neighbours for military aid from Corinth. Eurynome and Tethys (see ~. a and d), the names of Asopus’s mother, were ancient titles of the Moon-goddess, and ‘Pero’ points to pera, a leather bag (see 36. 1), and thus to Athene’s goat-skin aegis—as ‘Aegi~a’ also does.
1. The Aeacus myth concerns the conquest of Aegina by Phthiofian Myrmidons, whose tribal emblem was an ant. Previously, the island was, it seems, held by goat-cult Pelasgians, and their hostility towards the invaders is recorded in Hera’s poisoning of the streams. According to Strabo, who always looked for reas(~:~able explanations of myths, but seldom looked far enough, the soil of Aegina was covered by a layer of stop,cs, and the Aeginctans called themselves Myrmidons because, like ants, they had to excavate before they could till their fields, and because they were troglodytes (Strabo: viii. 6. ~6). But the Thessalian legend of Myrmex is a simple myth of origin: the Phthiotian Myrmidons claimcd to be autochthonous, as ants are, and showed such loyalty to the laws of their priestess, the Queen Ant, that Zeus’s Hellenic representative who married her had to become an honorary ant himself. If Myrmex was, in fact, a title of the Mother-goddess of Northern Greece, she might well claim to have invented the plough, because agriculture had been established by immigrants from Asia Minor before the Hellenes reached Athens.
$. The Phflfi06an colouists of Aegina later merged their myths wit~ those of Achaean invaders śrom Phlius on the fiver Asopus; and, sinc~ these Phhans had retained their allegiance to the oak-oracle of Dodon~ (see 5 I. a), the ants are described as filling from a tree, instead ofemergin~ from the ground.
4. In the original myth, Aeacus will have induced the rain-storm no~ by an appeal to Zeus, but by some such magic as Salmoneus used (se~ 68. ~). His law-givi~g in Tartarus, like that of Minos and Rhadamanthys suggests that an Aeginetan legal code was adopted in other parts o Greece. It probably applied to commercial, rather than criminal, law judging from the general acceptance, in Classical times, of the Aegineta~ talent as the standard weight of precious metal. It was of Cretan origix and turned the scales at xoo lb. avoirdupois.
$xs~ePI~US, son of Aeolus, married Atlas’s daughter Merope, th Pleiad, who bore him Glaucus, Ornytion, and Sinon, and owned a fin herd ofcatde on the Isthmus of Corinth.1
b. Near him lived Autolycus, son of Chione, whose twin-brothe philammon was begotten by Apollo, though Autolycus himse]
claimed Hermes as his father.2
c. Now, Autolycus was a past master in theft, Hermes having give him the power of metamorphosing whatever beasts he stole, fror horned to unhorned, or from black to white, and contrariwise. Thtt although Sisyphus noticed that his own herds grew steadily smalle~ while those of Autolycus increased, he was unable at first to convk him of theft; and therefore, one day, engraved the inside of all h catfle’s hooves with the monogram SS or, some say, with the wore ‘ Stolen by Autolycus’. That night Autolycus helped himself as usua and at dawn hoof-prints along the road provided Sisyphus with suff dent evidence to summon neighbouts in witness of the theft. He visite Autolycus’s stable, recognized his stolen beasts by their marked hooves and, leaving his wimesses to remonstrate with the thief, l~urried around the house, entered by the portal, and while the argument was in progress outside seduced Autolycus’s daughter Anticleia, wife to Laertes the Argive. She bore him Odysseus, the manner of whose conception is enough to account for the cunning he habitually showed, and for his nickname’ Hypsipylon’.S
d. Sisyphus fottnded Ephyra, afterwards known as Corinth, and peopled it with men sprung from mushrooms, unless it be true that Medea gave him the kingdom as a present. His contemporaries knew !tim as the worst knave on earth, granting only that he promoted Corinthian commerce and navigation.4
e. When, on the death of Aeolus, Salmoneus usurped the Tressallan throne, Sisyphus, who was the rightful heir, consulted the Delphic Oracle and was told: ‘Sire children on your niece; they w/11 avenge you!’ He therefore seduced Tyro, Salmoneus’s daughter, who, happening to discover that his motive was not love for her, but hatred of her father, killed the two sons she had borne him. Sisyphus then entered the market place of Larissa [? produced the dead bodies, falsely accused Saimoneus of incest and murder] and had him expelled from Thessaly.s
f. After Zeus’s abduction of Aegina, her father the River-god Asopus came to Corinth in search of her. Sisyphus knew well what had hal>pened to Aegina but would not reveal anything unless &sopus undertook to supply the citadel of Corinth with a perennial spring. Asopus accordingly made the spring Peirene rise behind Aphrodite’s temple, where there are now images of the goddess, armed; of the Sun; and of Eros d~e Archer. Then Sisyphus told him all he knew.6
g. Zeus, who had narrowly escaped Asopus’s vengeance, ordered his brother Hades to fetch Sisyphus down to Tartarus and punish him everlastingly for his betrayal of divine secrets. Yet Sisyphus would not be daunted: he cunningly put Hades himself in handcuffs by persuading him to demonstrate their use, and then quickly locking them. Thus Hades was kept a prisoner in Sisyphus’s house for some days—an impossible situation, because nobody could die, even men who had been beheaded or cut in pieces; until at last Ares, whose interests were threatened, came hurrying up, set him free, and delivered Sisyl~hus into his clutches.
h. Sisyphus, however, kept another trick in reserve. Before descending to Tartarus, he instructed his wife Merope not to bury him; and, on reaching the Palace of Hades went straight to Persephone, and told her that, as an unburied person, he had no right to be there but sh have been left on the far side of the river Styx. ‘Let me return t› upper world,’ he pleaded, ‘arrange for my burial, and avenge neglect shown me. My presence here is most irregular. I will be~ within three days.’ Persephone was deceived and granted his req~ but as soon as Sisyphus found himself once again under the light o sun, he repudiated his promise to Persephone. Finally, Hermes called upon co hale him back by śorce.?
i. It may have been because he had injured Salmoneus, or becau~ had betrayed Zeus’s secret, or because he had always lived by rob’ and often murdered unsuspecting travellers—some say that it Theseus who put an end to Sisyphus’s career, though this is not ge ally mentioned among Theseus’s Feats—at any rate, Sisyphus was g an exemplary punishment.8 The Judges of the Dead showed him a t block of stone—identical in size with that into which Zeus had tu~ himself when fleeing from Asopus—and ordered him to roll it Ul~ brow of a hill and topple it down the farther slope. He has nevez succeeded in doing so. As soon as he has almost reached the summi is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounce the very bottom once more; where he wearily retrieves it and r begin all over again, though sweat bathes his limbs, and a cloud of rises above his head.0
j. Mcrope, ashamed to find herself the only Pleiad with a busban the Underworld—and a criminal too—deserted her six starry sistel the night sky and has never been seen since. And as the whereabou: Neleus’s tomb on the Corinthian Isthmus was a secret which Sisy[ refused to divulge even to Nestor, so the Corinthiahs are now equ reticent when asked for the whereabouts of Sisyphus’s own bt L Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Pausanias: ii. 4—3; Servius on Vir Aeneid ii. 79.
2. Hyginus: Fabula 200.
3. Polyaenus: vi. 52; Hyginus: Fabula 20~; Suidas sub Sisyp]
Sophocles: Ajax t90; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Philoctetes 4~’
4. 2kpollodorus: i. 9. 3; Ovid: Metarnorphoses vii. 393; Eum~
quoted by Pausanias: ii. 3.8; Homer: Iliad vi. 153; Scholias~
Aristophanes’s Acarnanians 390; Scholiast on Sophocles’s ~
190; Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 980; Ovid: Heroides xii. 203; Hot:
Satires ii. ~7. ~2.
5. Hyginus: Fabula 60.
6. Pausanias: ii. 5. I.
7. Theognis: 712 if.; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliadpp. 487, 631, and ! 702.
8. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 6~6; Scholiast on Statius’s Thebald ii. 380; Hyginus: Fabula 38.
9. Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. ~80; Pausanias: x. 31. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 459; Homer: Odyssey xi. 593—600.
xo. Ovid: Fasti iv. ~75-6; Eumelus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 2. 2. ~. ‘Sisyphus’, though the Greeks understood it to mean ‘very wise’, is sprit Sesephus by Hesychius, and is thought to be a Greek variant of Tesup, the Hittite Sun-god, identical with Atabyrius the Sun-god of Rhodes (see 42. 4 and 93—~), whose sacred animal was a bull. Bronze statuettes and reliefs of this bull, dating from the fourteenth century B.c., have been found, marked with a sceptre and two disks on the flank, and with a trefoil on the haunch. Raids on the Sun-god’s marked cattle are a commonplace in Greek myth: Odysseus’s companions made them (see ~70. u), so also did Alcyoneus, and his contemporary, Heracles (see 132. d and w). But Autolycus’s use of magic in his theft from Sisyphus recalls the story of Jacob and Laban (Genesis xxix and xxx). Jacob, like Autolycus, had the gift of turning cattle to whatever colour he wanted, and thus diminished Laban’s flocks. The cultural connexion between Corinth and Canaan, which is shown in the myths of Nisus (see 91—~), Oedipus (see l05. t and 7), Alcathous (see x~o. 2), and Melicertes (see 70. 2), may be Hittite. Alcyoneus also came from Corinth.
2. Sisyphus’s ‘ shameless stone’ was originally a sun—disk, and the hill up which he rolled it is the vault of Heaven; this made a famihar enough icon. The existence of a Corinthian Sun cult is well established: Hehus and Aphrodite are said to have held the acropolis in succession, and shared a temple there (Pausanias: ii. 4.7)—Moreover, Sisyphus is invariably placed next to Ixion in Tartarus, and Ixion’s fire-wheel is a symbol of the sun. This explains why the people of Ephyra sprang from mushrooms: mushrooms were the ritual tinder of Ixion’s fire-wheel (see 63. x), and the Sun-god demanded human burnt sacrifices to inaugurate his year. Anticlcia’s seduction has been deduced perhaps from a picture showing Helius’s marriage to Aphrodite; and the mythographer’s hostihty towards Sisyphus voices Hellenic disgust at the strategic planting of nonl-tdlcnic settlements on the narrow isthmus separating the Pe16ponnese fr{~m Attica. His outwitting of Hades probably refers to a sacred king’s refusal to abdicate at the end of his reign (see ~70. 1). To judge from the sun-bull’s markings, he contrived to rule for two Great Years, represented by the sceptre and the sun-disks, and obtained the Triple-goddess’s assent, represented by the trefoil. Hypsipylon, Odysseus’s nickname, the masculine form ofHypsipyle: a title, probably, of the Moon-goddes (see ~06. $).
$. Sisyphus and Neleus were probably buried at strategic points on th Isthmus as a cl~arm against invasion (see ~o~. 3 and ~46. 2). A lacun occurs in Hyginus’s account of Sisyphus’s revenge on Salmoneus; I hay supplied a passage (l~ara. e, above) which makes sense’of the story. 4—Peirene, the spring on the citadel of Corinth where Belleropho: took Pegasus to drink (see 75—~), had no e~~~ux and never failed (Pausa~fi~ ii. 5—~; Strabo: viii. 6.2 x). Peirene was also the name of a fountain outsid the city gate, on the way from the market-place to Lechaeum, whe~ Peirene (‘of the osiers’)—whom the mythographers describe as th daughter of Achelous, or of Oebalus (Pausan/as: 10c. tit.); or of Asop~ and Merope (Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72)—was said to have been tun~e into a spring when she wept for her son Cenchrias (‘spotted serpent’i whom Artemis had unwittingly killed. ‘Corinthian bronze’ took characteristic colour from being plunged red-hot into this spring (Pat ~anias: ii. 3—3).
.1. One of the seven Pleiads disappeared in early Classical times, an her absence had to be explained (see 4t—6).
.6. A question remains: was the double-S really the monogram Sisyphus.1 The icon illustrating the myth probably showed him examir ing the tracks of the stolen sheep and catfie which, since they ‘parted hoof’, were formalized as CD. This sign stood for SS in the earlie Greek script, and could also be read as the conjoined halves of the hin; month and all that these implied—waxing and waning, increase an decline, blessing and cursing. Barireals which ‘parted the hoof’ we~ self-dedicated to the Moon—they are the sacrifices ordained at the Moon Festivals in Leviticus—and the SS will therefore have referred Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite, rather than to Sisyphus, who as Sm king merely held her sacred herd in trust (see 42. ~). The figure CC representing the full moon (as distinguished from O, representing tt simple sun-disk) was marked on each flank of the sacred cow whir directed Cadmus to the site of Thebes (see $8.f).
S~z~IONZ~S, a son, or grandson, of Aeolus and Enarete, reigned for time in Thessaly before leading an Aeolian colony to the eastern confines of Elis; where he built the city of Salmonia near the source of the river Enipeus, a tributary of the Alpheius.x Salmoneus was hated by his subjects, and went so far in his royal insolence as to transfer Zeus’s sacrifices to his own altars, and announce that he was Zeus. He even drove through the streets of Salmonia, dragging brazen cauldrons, bound with hide, behind his chariot to simulate Zeus’s thunder, and hurling oaken torches into the air; some of these, as they fell, scorched his unforttmate subjects, who were expected to mistake them for lightning. One fme day Zeus punished Salmoneus by hurling a real thunderbolt, which not only destroyed him, chariot and all, but burned down the entire city.2
b. Alcidice, Salmoneus’s wife, had died many years before, in giving birth to a beautiful daughter named Tyro. Tyro was under the charge of her stepmother Sidero, and treated with great cruelty as the cause of the family’s expulsion from Thessaly; having killed the two sons she bore to her evil uncle Sisyphus. She now fell in love with the river Enipeus, and haunted its banks day after day, weeping for loneliness. But the River-god, although amused and even flattered by her passion, would not show her the least encouragement.
c. Poseidon decided to take advantage of this ridiculous situation. Disguising himself as the River-god, he invited Tyro to join him at the confluence of the Enipeus and the A1pheius; and there threw her into a magic sleep, while a dark wave rose up like a mountain and cured in crest to screen his knavery. When Tyro awoke, and found herself ravished, she was aghast at the deception; but Poseidon laughed as he t01d her to be off home and keep quiet about what had happened. Her reward, he said, would be fine twins, sons of a better father than a mere river-god.3
d. Tyro contrived to keep her secret until she bore the promised twins, but then, unable to face Sidero’s anger, exposed them on a mountain. A passing horse-herd took them home with him, but not before lfis brood-mare had kicked the elder in the face. The horse-her~l’s wife reared the boys, giving the bruised one to the mare for suckling and calling him Pelias; the other, whom she called Neleus, took his savage nature from the bitch which served as his foster-mother. But some say that the twins were found floating down the Enipeus in a w00dcn ark. As soon as Pelias and Neleus discovered their mother’s name and learned how unkindly she had been treated, they set out to avenge her. Sidero took refuge in the temple of Hera; but Pelias struck her down as she clung to the horns of the altar. This was many insults that he offered the goddess.4
e. Tyro later married her uncle Cretheus, founder of]
whom she bore Aeson, father of Jason the Argonaut; he alsc Pelias and Neleus as his sons. S
fi After Cretheus’s death, the twins came to blows: Pelias throne of Iolcus, exiled Neleus, and kept Aeson a prisoner in Neleus led Cretheus’s grandsons Melampus and Bias with company of Achaeans, Phthiotians, and Aeo]ians to the lan~
sene, where he drove the Lelegans out of Pylus, and raised tl such a height of fame that he is now acclaimed as its fou:
married Chloris; but all their twelve children, except Nesl eventually killed by Heracles.6
x. Apollodorus: i. 7. 3; Hyginus: Poetic Astronotny ii. 20
viii. 3.32.
2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68. x; Apollodorus: i. 9—7; Fabula 6~.
3. Apollodorus: i. 9. 8; Homer: Od)~ssey xi. 235 if-; Lucia~
Dialogues ~ 3.
4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey Sophocles: Tyro, quoted by Aristotle: Poetics xvi. 1454.
5. Pausanias: iv. 2. 3; Apollodorus: i. 9—xI; Hyginus: Fabt
6. Hesiod: Theogony 996; Scholiast on Euripides’s Alcestis dorus Siculus: iv. 68. 6; Pausanias: iv. 2. 3; 36. x and Homer: Iliad xi. 682.
1. Antigonus of Carystus (Account of Marvellous Things that a rain-bringing bronze wagon was kept at Crannon: whirl of drought the people drove over rough ground to shake it an~
clang—and also (as Crannonian coins show) to splash about tl from the jars which it contained. Rain always came, according gonus. Thus Salmoneus’s charm for inducing thunderstorms been common religious practice: like rattling pebbles in a d~
tapping on oak doors, rolling stones about in a chest, dancing, shields, or swinging bull-roarers. He was pictured as a criminal or the impersonation of Zeus had been forbidden by the Achaea~
authority (see 45.2). To judge from the Danaids’ sieves (see 60 the Argive cow dance (see 56. I), rain-making was originally prerogative—as it remains amoug certain primitive African tribe,, the Hereros and the Damaras—but passed into the sacred king when the Queen permitted him to act as her deputy (see ~36. 4
2. Tyro was the Goddess-mother of the Tyrians and Tyrrhenians, or Tyrsenians, and perhaps also of the Tirynthians; hers is probably a preHellenic name, but supplied Greek with the word t?rsis (‘walled city’), and so with the concept of’tyranny’. Her ill-treatment by Sidero recalls that of Antiope by Dirce, a myth which it closely resembles (see 76. a); and may originally have recorded an oppression of the Tyrians by their neighbours, the Sidonians. River water was held to impregnate brides who bathed in it—bathing was also a purifying ritual after menstruation, or child-birth—and it is likely that Tyro’s Enipeus, like the Scamander (see 137-3), was invoked to take away virginity. The anecdote of Tyro’s seduction by Poseidon purports to explain why Salmoneus’s descendants were sometimes called’ Sons of Enipeus’, which was their original home, and sometimes ‘ Sons of Poseidon ‘, because of their naval fame. Her previous seduction by Sisyphus suggests that the Corinthian Sun cult had been planted at Salmonia; Antlope was also connected by marriage with Sisyphus (see 76. b).
3. Tyro’s ark, in which she sent the twins floating down the Enipeus, will have been of alder-wood, like that in which Rhea Silvia sent Romulus and Remus floating down tlie Tiber. The quarrel of Pelias and Neleus, with that of Eteocles and Polyneices, Acrisius and Proetus, Atreus and Thyestes, and similar pairs of kings, seems to record the breakdown of the system by which king and tanist ruled alternately for ~’orty-nine or fifty months in the same kingdom (see 69. I; 73. a and 106. b). 4. The horns of the altar to which Sidero clung were those habitually fixed to the cult-image of the Cow-goddess Hera, Astarte, Io, Isis, or Hathor; and Pelias seems to have been an Achaean conqueror who forcibly reorganized the Aeolian Goddess cult of Southern Thessaly. li~ Palestine horned altars, like that to which Joab clung (~ Kings ii. 28, etc.), survived the dethronement of the Moon-cow and her golden Calf.
A L c ~ s xx s, the most beautiful of Pelias’s daughters, was asked in marriage by many kings and princes. Not wishing to endanger his political position by refusing any of them, and yet clearly unable to satisfy more than one, Pelias let it be known that he would marry Alcestis to the man who could yoke a wild boar and a lion to his chariot and drive them around the race-course. At this, Admetus King of Pherae summoned Apollo, whom Zeus had bound to him for one year as a herdsman, an~ asked: ‘Have I treated you with the respect due to your godhead? ‘You have indeed,’ Apollo assented, ‘and I have shown my gratitud~ by making all your ewes drop twins.’ ‘As a final favour, then,’ pleade~ Admetus, ‘pray help me to win Alcestis, by enabl’mg me to full/ Pelias’s conditions.’ ‘I shall be pleased to do so,’ rephed Apollo Heracles lent him a hand with the taming of the wild beasts presently Admetus was driving his chariot around the race-course Iolcus, drawn by this savage team.1
b. It is not known why Admetus omitted the customary sacrif~ce t~ Artemis before marrying Alcestis, but the goddess was quick enougt to punish him. When, flushed with wine, anointed with essences garlanded with flowers, he entered the bridal chamber that night, recoiled in horror. No lovely naked bride awaited him on the marriag, couch, but a tangled knot of hissing serpents. Admetus ran shoutinl for Apollo, who kindly intervened with Artemis on his behalf. Th, neglected sacrifice having been offered at once, all was well, Apolh even obtaining Artemis’s promise that, when the day of Admetus’ death came, he should be spared on condition that a member of hi family died voluntarily for love of him.
c. This fatal day came sooner than Admetus expected. Hermes fle~ into the palace one morning and summoned him to Tartarus. Genera consternation prevailed; but Apollo gained a httle time for Admetu by making the Three Fates drunk, and thus delayed the fatal scission o his life’s thread. Admetus ran in haste to his old parents, clasped thei knees, and begged each of them in turn to surrender him the butt-en~ of existence. Both roundly refused, saying that they still derived mud enjoyment from life, and that he should be content with his appointe~ lot, like everyone else.
d. Then, for love of Admetus, Alcestis took poison and her ghos descended to Tartarus; but Persephone considered it an evil thing tha a wife should die instead of a husband. ‘Back with you to the uppe air!’ she cried.2
e. Some tell the tale differently. They say that Hades came in persc~ to fetch Admetus and that, when he fled, Alcestis volunteered to tak. his place; but Heracles arr’lved unexpectedly with a new wild-oily, club, and rescued her.3
x. Hyginus: Fabula 50; Apolloclorus: ili. xo. 4; Callimachus: Hymn to Apollo 47-54; Scholiast on Euripides’s Alcestis 2; Fulgenfius: i. 27.
2. Apollodorus: i. 9. ~53—Euripides: Alcestis.
1. The yoking of a lion and a wild boar to the same charlot is the theme of a Theban myth (see 106. a), where the original meaning has been equally obscured. Lion and boar were the animal symbols given to the first and second halves of the Sacred Year, respectively—they constantly occur, in opposition, on Etruscan vases—and the oracle seems to have proposed a peaceful settlement of the traditional rivalry between the sacred king and his tanist. This was that the kingdom should be divided in halves, and that they should reign concurrently, as Proetus andAcrisius eventually did at Argos (see 73. a), rather than keep it entire, and rule alternately—as Polyneices and Eteocles did at Thebes (see 106. b). A drcuit of the race-course in a chariot was a proof of royalty (see 64. 3). 2. Artemis was hostile to monogamic marriage because she belonged to the pre-Hellenic cult in which women mated promiscuously outside their own clans; so the Hellenes propitiated her with wedding sacrifices, carrying torches of the chaste hawthorn in her honour. The patriarchal practice of suttee, attested here and in the myths of Evadne (see ~06. t) and Polyxena (see 168. k), grew from the Indo-European custom which forbade widows to remarry; once this ban was relaxed, suttee became less attractive (see 74. a).
$. In the first version of this myth, Persephone refused Alcestis’s sacrifice—Persephone represents the matriarchal point of view. In the second version, Heracles forbade it, and was chosen as the instrument of Zeus’s will, that is to say of patriarchal ethics, on the ground that he once harrowed Hell and rescued Theseus (see 103. d). Wild-olive served in Greece to expel evil influences (see ~19. 2); as the birch did in Italy and northern Europe (see 52. 3).
A T u ~ M A s the Aeolian, brother of Sisyphus and Salmoneus, ruled over Boeotia. At Hera’s command, he married Nephele, a phantom whom Zeus created in her likeness when he wished to deceive Ixion the Lapith, and who was now wandering disconsolately about the halls Of Olympus. She bore Athamas two sons: Phrixus and Leucon, and a daughter, Helle. But Athamas resented the disdain in which Nephele held him and, falling in love with Ino, daughter of Cadmus, brought her secretly to his palace at the foot of Mount Laphystium, where he begot Learchus and Melicertes on her.
b. Learning about her rival from the palace servants, Nephele re~ turned in a fury to Olympus, complaining to Hera that she had been insulted. Hera took her part, and vowed: ‘M~’ eternal vengeance shall fall upon Athamas and his House!’
c. Nephele thereupon went back to Motrot Laphystium, where she publicly reported Hera’s vow, and demanded that Athamas should die. But the men of Boeotia, who feared Athamas more than Hera, would not listen to Nephele; and the women of Boeotia were devoted to Ino, who now persuaded them to parch the seed-corn, without their husbands’ knowledge, so that the harvest would fail. Ino foresaw that when the grain was due to sprout, but no blade appeared, Athamas would send to ask the Delphic Oracle what was amiss. She had already bribed Athamas’s messengers to bring back a false reply: namely, that the land would regain its fertility only if Nephele’s son Phrixus were sacrificed to Zeus on Mount Laphystium.
d. This Phrixus was a handsome yotmg man, with whom his aunt Biadice, Cretheus’s wife, had fallen in love, and whom, when he rebuffed her advances, she accused of trying to ravish her. The men of Boeotia, believing Biadice’s story, applauded Apollo’s wise choice of a sin-offering and demanded that Phrixus should die; whereupon Athamas, loudly weeping, led Phrixus to the mountain top. He was on the point of. cutting his throat when Heracles, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, came nmning up and wrested the sacr’ff~cial flint from his hand. ‘My father Zeus,’ Heracles exclaimed, ‘loathes human sacrifices!’ Nevertheless, Phrixus would have perished despite tiffs plea, had not a winged golden ram, supplied by Hermes at Hera’s order—or, some say, by Zeus himself—suddenly flown down to the rescue from Olympus.
‘Climb on my back!’ cried the ram, and Phrixus obeyed.
‘Take me too!’ pleaded Helle. ‘Do not leave me to the mercy of my father.’
e. So Phrixus pulled her up behind him, and the ram flew eastwards, making for the land of Colchis, where Helius stables his horses. Before long, Helle felt’giddy and lost her hold; she fell into the straits between Europe and Asia, now called the Hellespont in her honour; but Phrixus reached Colchis safely, and there sacrificed the ram to Zeus the Deliverer. Its golden fleece became famous a generation later when ‘the Argonauts came in search of it.
f Overawed by the miracle of Mount Laphystium, Athamas’s messengers confessed that they had been bribed by Ino to bring back a false reply from Delphi; and presently all her wiles, and Biadice’s, came to light. Nephele thereupon again demanded that Athamas should die, and the sacrif~cial fillet, which Phrixus had worn, was placed on his head; only Heracles’s renewed intervention saved him from death.
g. But Hera was incensed with Athamas and drove him mad, not only on Nephele’s account, but because he had connived at Ino’s barbouting of the infant Dionysus, Zeus’s bastard by her sister Semele, who was living in the palace disguised as a girl. Seizing his bow, Athamas suddenly .yelled: ‘Look, a white stag! Stand back while I shoot !’ So saying, he transfixed Learchus with an arrow, and proceeded to tear his still-quivering body into pieces.
h. Ino snatched up Melicertes, her younger son, and fled; but would hardly have escaped Athamas’s vengeance, hadnot the infant Dionysus temporarily blinded him, so that he began to flog a she-goat in mistake for her. Ino ran to the Molurian Rock, where she leaped into the sea and was drowned—this rock afterwards became a place of ill repute, because the savage Sciron used to hurl strangers from it. But Zeus, remembering Ino’s kindness to Dionysus, would not send her ghost down to Tartarus and deified her instead as the Goddess Leucothea. He also deWted her son Melicertes as the God Palaemon, and sent him to the Isthmus of Corinth riding on dolphin-back; the Isthmian Games, founded in his honour by Sisyphus, are still celebrated there every fourth year.
i. Athamas, now banished from Boeotia, and childless because his remaining son, Leucon, had sickened and died, enquired from the Delphic Oracle where he should setde, and was told: ‘Wherever wild beasts entertain you to dinner.’ Wandering aimlessly northward, without food or drink, he came on a wolf-pack devouring a flock of sheep in a desolate Thessalian plain. The wolves fled at his approach, and he and his starving companions ate what mutton had been left. Then he recalled the oracle and, having adopted Haliartus and Coronea, his Corinthian grand-nephews, forreded a city which he called Alos, from his wanderings, or from his serving-maid Alos; and the country was called Athamania; afterwards he married Themisto and raised a new family.’
j. Others tell the tale differently. Omitting Athamas’s marriage to Nephele, they say that one day, after the birth of Learchus and Mehcertes, his wife Ino went out hunting and did not return. Bloodstains on a torn tunic convinced him that she had been killed by wild beasts; but the truth was that a sudden Bacchic frenzy had seized her when she was attacked by a lynx. She had strangled it, fiayed it with her teeth and nails, and gone off, dressed only in the pelt, for a prolonged revel on Mount Parnassus. After an interval of mourning, Athamas married Themisto who, a year later, bore him twin sons. Then, to has dismay, he learned that Ino was still alive. He sent for her at once, installed her in the palace nursery, and told Themisto: ‘We have a likely-looking nurse-maid, a captive taken in the recent raid on Mount Cithaeron.’ Themisto, whom her maids soon undeceived, visited the nursery, pretending not to know whd Ino was. She told her: ‘Pray, nurse, get ready a set of white woollen garments for my two sons, and a set of mourning garments for those of my unfortunate predecessor Ino. They are to be worn tomorrow.’
/›. The following day, Themisto ordered her guards to break into the royal nursery and kill the twins who were dressed in mounting, but spare the other two. Ino, however, guessing what was in Themisto’s mind, had provided white garments for her own sons, and mourning garments for her rival’s. Thus Themisto’s tw’ms were murdered, and the news sent Athamas mad: he shot Learchus dead, mistaking him for a stag, but Ino escaped with Melicertes, sprang into the sea, and became immortal.
1. Others, aga’m, say that Phrixus and Helle were Nephele’s children by Ixion. One day, as they wandered in a wood, their mother came upon them in a Bacchic frenzy, leading a golden ram by the horns. ‘ Look,’ she babbled,’ here is a son of your cousin Theophane. She had too many suitors, so Poseidon changed her into a ewe and himself into a ram, and tupped her on the Island of Crumissa.’
‘What happened to the suitors, mother?’ asked little Helle.
‘They became wolves,’ Ino answered, ‘and howl for Theophane all night long. Now ask’ me no more questions, but climb on this ram’s back, both of you, and ride away to the kingdom of Colchis, where FIelius’s son Ae~tes reigns. As soon as you arrive, sacrifice it to Ares.’ Phrixus carried out his mother’s strange instructions, and hung up the golden fleece in a temple of Ares at Colchis, where it was guarded by a dragon; and, many years later his son Presbon, or Cytis0rus, coming to Orchomenus from Colchis, rescued Athamas as he was being sacrificed for a sin-offering.a
1. Pausanias: i. 44. Ix; ix. 34—4-5 and 23.3; Apollodorus: i. 7. 3 and iii. 4. 3; Hyginus: Fabulae 2 and 4; Poetic Astronomy ii. 20; Fragments of Sophocles’s Athamas; Normus: Dionysiaca x. x fl.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad vii. 86; Eustathius on the same; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 480-54~; Etymologicurn Magnum 70. 8; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Athamania. 2. Hyginus: Fabulae x, 3, 5 and 88; Fragments of Euripides’s lno; Herodotus: vii. 197; Pausanias: ix. 34—5.
. I. Athamas’s name is connected in the myth with Athamania, the city which he is said to have founded in the Thessalian wilderness; but seems formed, rather, from Ath (‘high’), and amaein (‘to reap’)—meaning ‘the king dedicated to the Reaper on High’, namely the Goddess of the Harvest Moon. The conflict between his rival wives Ino and Nephele was probably one between early Ionian settlers in Boeotia, who had adopted the worship of the Corn-goddess Ino, and the pastoral Aeolian invaders. An attempt to make over the agricultural rites of the Ionian goddess Ino to the Aeolian thunder-god and his wife Nephele, the raincloud, seems to have been foiled by the priestesses’ parching of the seed-corn.
2. The myth of Athamas and Phrixus records the annual mountain sacrifice of the king, or of the king’s surrogate—first a boy dressed in a ram’s fleece, and later a ram—during the New Year rain-inducing festival which shepherds celebrated at the Spring Equinox. Zeus’s ram-sacrifice on the summit of Mount Pehon, not far from Laphystium, took place in April when, according to the Zodiac, the Ram was in the ascendant; the chief men of the district used to struggle up, wearing white sheep-skins (Dicearchus: ii. 8), and the rite still survives there today in the mocksacrifice and resurrection of an old man who wears a black sheep’s mask (see 148. io). The mourning garments, ordered for the children sentenced to death, suggest that a black fleece was worn by the victim, and white ones by the priest and the spectators. Biadice’s love for Phrixus recalls Potiphar’s wife’s love for Joseph, a companion myth from Canaan; much the same story is also told of Anteia and Bellerophon (see 75. a), Cretheis and Peleus (see 8~. g), Phaedra and Hippolytus (see xox. a-g), Phylonome and Tenes (see 16i. g). 3. That Nephele (‘cloud’) was Hera’s gift to Athamas and created in her own image, suggests that in the original version Athamas tt Aeolian king himself represented the thunder-god, like his predecess~ Ixion (see 63.1 ), and his brother Salmoneus (see 68. I ); and that, when t married Themisto (who, in Euripides’s version of the myth, is Ine rival), she took the part of the thunder-god’s wife.
4. Ino was Leucothea, ‘ the White Goddess ‘, and proved her identil with the Triple Muse by revelling on Mount Parnassus. Her name (‘ st who makes sinewy’) suggests ithyphallic orgies, and the sturdy growl of corn; boys will have been bloodily sacrificed to her before eve, winter sowing. Zeus is hinaself credited with having defied Ino in grat rude for her kindness to Dionysus, and Athamas bears an agricultur name in her honour; in other words, the Ionian farmers settled the religious differences with the Aeolian shepherds to their own advantag 5—The myth, however, is a medley of early cult elen~ents. The sacr; . mental Zagreus cult, which became that of Dionysus the Kid (see 30. 3 is suggested when Athamas takes Ino for a she-goat; the sacrament Actaeon cult is suggested when he takes Learchus for a stag, shoots tY~n and tears him in pieces (see 22. I). IllO’S younger son Meticertes is tt Canaanite Heracles Mclkarth (‘ protector of the city’), arias Moloch as the new-born solar king, comes riding on dolphin-back towards t~ isthmus; and whose death, at the dose of his four years’ reign, was cel~ brated at the Isthmian Funeral Games. Infants were sacrificed to Mel certes on the Island of Tenedos, and probably also at Corinth (see x 56. z as they were to Moloch at Jerusalem (Leviticus xviii. 21 and ~ Kings xi. 7 6. Only when Zeus became god of the clear sky and usurped tk goddess’s solar attributes did the fleece become golden—thus the Fir: Vatican Mythographer says that it was’ the fleece in which Zeus ascende the sky’—but while he was induccr of the thunderstorm it had bee purple-black (Simonides: Fragment 2~).
7. In one version of the myth (Hippias: Fragment 12), [no is calle Gorgopis (‘grim-faced’), a title of Athene’s; and savage Sciron wh hurled travellers over the cliff, took his name from the white parasol more properly a paralune—carried in Athene’s processions. The
—arian Rock was evidently the cliff’ f~om which the sac~ed—king, or h surrogates, were thrown into the sea in honour of the Moon-godde: Athene, or Ino, fiae parasol being apparently used to break the fall (s› 89. 6; 92. 3; 96. 3 and 98.7).
& Helle’s drowning parallels Ino’s. Both are Moon-goddesses, and th myth is ambivalent: it represents the nightly setting of the Moon and, the same time, the abandonment of Helle’s lunar cult in favour of Zeus’ solar one. Both are equally Sea-goddesses: Helle gave her name to th junction of two seas, Ino-Leucothea appeared to Odysseus in the guise a seamew and rescued him from drowning (see 170. y).
9. Athamas’s tribe is more likely to have migrated from Boeotia. Mount Laphystium and Athamania to Thessalian Mount Laphystius and fi. thamania, than contrariwise; he had a strong connexion with Corinth, the kingdom of his brother Sisyphus, and is said to have founded the city of Acraephia to the east of Lake Copais, where there was a ‘Field of Athamas’ (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Acraephia; Pausanias: ix. 24. ~). Several of his sons are also credited with the foundation of Boeotian cities. He is indeed plausibly described as a son of Minyas, and King of Orchomenus, which would have given him power over the Copaic Plain and Mount Laphystium (Schohast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 230; Hellanicus on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 265) and alhed him with Corinth against the intervening states of Athens and Thebes. The probable reason for the Athamanians’ northward wande~ngs into Thessaly was the disastrous war fought between Orchomenus and Thebes, recorded in the Heracles cycle (see ~ z ~. d). Nephele’s ragings on the mountain recall the daughters of Minyas who are said to have been overtaken by a Bacchic frenzy on Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Lycophron’s Alexandra
1237): the alleged origin of the Agrionia festival at Orchomenus,
GLAUCUS, son of Sisyphus and Merope, and father of Bellerophon, lived at Potniae near Thebes where, scorning the power of Aphrodite, he refused to let his mares breed. He hoped by this means to make them more spirited than other contestants in the chariot races which were his chief interest. But Aphrodite was vexed; and complained to Zeus that he had gone so far as to feed the mares on human flesh. When Zeus permitted her to take what action she pleased against Glaucus, she led the mares out by night to dr’ink from a well sacred to herself, and graze on a herb called hippomanes which grew at its lip. This she did just before Jason celebrated the funeral games of Pelias on the seashore at Iolcus; and no sooner had Glaucus yoked the mares to his chariot pole than they bolted, overthrew the chariot, dragged him along the ground, entangled in the reins, for the whole length of the stadium, and then ate him a[ive.x But some say that this took place at Potniae, not 101cus; and others, that Glaucus leaped into the sea in grief for Me[icertes son of Athamas; or that Glaucus was the name given to Melicertes after his death.2 b. Glaucus’s ghost, called the Taraxippus, or Horse-scarer, still haunts the Isthmus of Corinth, where his father Sisyphus first taught him the charioteer’s art, and delights in scaring the horses at the Isthmian Games, thus causing many deaths. Another horse-scarer is the ghost of Myrtilus whom Pelops killed. He haunts the stadium at Olympia, where charioteers offer him sacrif~ces in the hope of avoiding destruction.3 I. Homer: Iliad vi. ~54; Apollodorus: ii. 3. ~; Pausanias: vi. 20. 9; Hyginus: Fabulae 250 and 273; Ovid: Ibis 557; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 318 and Phoenician Women I~31; Aelian:
Nature of Animals xv. 25.
2. Strabo: ix. 2. 24-; Athenaeus: vii. pp. 296-7.
~!. Pausanias: vi. 20. 8.
1. The myths of Lycurgus (see 27. e) and Diomedes (see ~30. b) suggest that the pre-Hellenic sacred king was tom in pieces at the close of his reign by women disguised as mares. In Hellenic times, this ritual was altered to death by being dragged at the tail of a four-horse chariot, as in the myths of Hippolytus (see ~ox. g), Laius (see ~05. d), Oenomaus (see ~09. j), Abderus (see 130. 1), Hector (see 163. 4), and others. At the Babylonian New Year festivities, when the Sun-god Marduk, incarnate in the King, was believed to be in Hell fighting the sea-monster Tiamat (see 73—7), a chariot drawn by four masterless horses was let loose in the streets, to symbolize the chaotic state of the world during the demise of the crown; presumably with a puppet charioteer entangled in the reins. If the Babylonian ritual was of common origin with the Greek, a boy interrex will have succeeded to the King’s throne and bed during his demise of a single day and, at dawn next morning, been dragged at the charlot’s tail—as in the myths of Pha~thon (see 42. ~) and Hippolytus (see ~oI. g). The King was then reinstailed on his throne.
1. The myth of Glaucus is unusual: he is not only involved in a chariotwreck, but eaten by the mares. That he despised Aphrodite and would not let his mares breed, suggests a patriarchal attempt to suppress Theban erotic festivities in honour of the Potniae, ‘powerful ones ‘, namely the Moon triad.
$. The Taraxippus seems to have been an archaic royal statue, marking the first turn of the race-course; horses new to the stadium were dis-! tracted by it at the moment when their charioteer was trying to cut in and ~ take the inner berth; but this was also the place where the chariot-crash was staged for the old king, or his interrex, by the removal of his linchpins (see ~09. j).
4. Glaucus (‘grey-green’) is Likely to have been in one sense the Minoan representative who visited the Isthmus (see 90. 7) with the annual edicts; and in another Melicertes (Melkarth, ‘guardian of the city’), a Phoenician title oś the King of Corinth, who theoretically arrived every year, new-born, on dolphin-back (see 70. 5 and 87. ~), and was flung into the sea when his reign ended (see 96.
M~La/*lPus the Minyan, Cretheus’s grandson, who lived at Pylus in Messene, was the first mortal to be granted prophetic powers, the first to practise as a physician, the first to build temples to Dionysus in Greece, and the first to temper wine with water?
b. His brother Bias, to whom he was deeply attached, fell in love with their cousin Pero; but so many suitors came for her hand that she was promised by her father Neleus to the man who could drive off King Phylacus’s cattle from Phylace. Phylacus prized these cattle above everything in the world, except his only son Iphiclus, and guarded them in person with the help of an unsleeping and unapproachable dog. ›. Now, Melampus could understand the language of birds, his ears having been licked clean by a grateful brood of young serpents; he had rescued these from death at the hands of his attendants and piously buried their parents’ dead bodies. Moreover, Apollo, whom he met one day by the banks of the river A1pheius, had taught him to prophesy from the entrails of sacrificial victims.2 It thus came to his knowledge that whoever tried to steal the catde would be made a present of them, though only after being imprisoned for exactly one year. Since Bias was in despair, Melampus decided to visit Phylacus’s byre by dead of night; but as soon as he laid his hand on a cow, the dog bit his leg, and Phylacus, springing up from the straw, led him away to prison. This was, of course, no more than Melampus expected.
d. On the evening before his year of imprisonment ended, Melampus heard two woodworms talking at the end of a beam which was socketed into the wall above his head. One asked with a sigh of fatigue: ‘How many days yet of gnawing, brother?’
The other worm, his mouth full of wood-dust, replied: ‘We a making good progress. The beam will collapse tomorrow at dawn, we waste no time in idle conversation.’
Melampus at once shouted: ‘Phylacus, Phylacus, pray transfer n to another cell!’ Phylacus, though laughing at Melampus’s reasons this request, did not deny him. When the beam duly collapsed ar killed one of the women who was helping to carry out the be Phylacus was astounded at Melampus’s prescience. ‘I will grant yc both your freedom and the cattle,’ he said, ‘if only you would cure n son Iphiclus of impotency.’
e. Melampus agreed. He began the task by sacrificing two bulls Apollo, and after he had burned the thigh-bones with the fat, left the carcasses lying by the altar. Presendy two vultures flew down, and remarked to the other: ‘It must be several years since we were here—that time when Phylacus was gelding rams and we collected o perquisites.’
‘I well remember it,’ said the other vulture. ‘Iphiclus, who was th~ still a child, saw his father com’mg towards him with a blood-stain, knife, and took fright. He apparently feared to be gelded himse became he screamed at the top of his voice. Phylacus drove the km into the sacred pear-tree over there, for safe-keeping, while he ran comfort Iphiclus. That fright accounts for the impotency. Loo Phylacus forgot to recover the knife! There it still is, sticking in tree, but bark has grown over its blade, and only the end of its han~ shows.1
‘In that case,’ remarked the f~rst vulture, ‘the remedy for Iphiclu: impotency would be to draw out the knife, scrape off the rust left the rams’ blood and administer it to him, mixed in water, every for ten days.’
‘I concur,’ said the other vulture. ‘But who, less intelligent ourselves, would have the sense to prescribe such a medicine?’
f. Thus Melampus was able to cure Iphiclus, who soon begot a s~ named Podarces; and, having claimed first the cattle and then Pero, presented her, st’all a virgin, to his grateful brother Bias.a
g. Now, Proetus, son of Abas, joint-king of Argolis with Acrish had married Stheneboea, who bore him three daughters nam~
Lysippe, Iphino~, and Iphianassa—but some call the two young ones Hippono~ and Cyrianassa. Whether it was became they h:
offended Dionysus, or because they had offended Hera by t~eir over-indulgeace in love-affairs, or by stealing gold from her image at Tirym, their father’s capital, all three were divinely afflicted by n~dness and went raging on the mountains, like cows stung by the gadfly, behaving in a most disorderly fashion and assaulting travellers.4
h. Melampus, when he heard the news, came to Tiryns and offered to cure them, on co~ditioa that Proems paid him with a third sh~re of his kingdom.
‘The price is far too high,’ said Proetus brusquely; and Melampus retired.
The madness then spread to the Argive women, a great many of whom killed their children, deserted their homes, and went raving off to join Proetus’s three daughters, so that no roads were safe, and sheep and cattle suffered heavy losses because the wild women tore them in pieces and devoured them raw. At this Proetus sent hastily for Mehmpus, to say that he accepted his terms. ‘No, no,’ said Melampus, ‘as the disease has increased, so has my fee! Give me one third of your kingdom, and another third to my brother Bias, and I undertake to save you from this calamity. If you refuse, there will not be one Argive woman left in her home.’
When Proems agreed, Melampus advised him: ‘Vow twenty red oxen to Helius—I will tell you what to say—and all will be well.’ i. Proetus accordingly vowed the oxen to Helius, on condition that his daughters and their followers were cured; and Helius, who sees everything, at once promised Artemis the names of certain kings who had omitted their sacrif~ces to her, on condition that she persuaded Hera to remove the curse from the Argive women. Now, Artemis had recently hunted the Nymph Callisto to death for Hera’s sake, so found no difficulty in carrying out her side of the bargain. This is the way that business is done in Heaven as on earth: hand washes hand.
j. Then Melampus, helped by Bias and a chosen company of sturdy young men, drove the disorderly crowd of women down from the mountains to Sicyon, where their madness left them, and then purified them by immersion in a holy well. Not finding Proetus’s daughters among this rabble, Melampus and Bias went off again and chased all three of them to Lusi in Arcadia, where they took refuge in a cave overlooking the river Styx. There Lysippe and Iphianassa regained their sanity and were purif~ed; but Iphino~ had died on the way.
k. Melampus then married Lysippe, Bias (whose wife Pero had recently died) married Iphianassa, and Proetus rewarded them both accordting to his promise. But some say that Proetus’s true name wa Anaxagoras.5
x. Apollodorus: ii. 2. 2; Athenaeus: ii. p. 45.
2. Apollodorus: i. 9—~.
3. Homer: Odyxseyxi. 281-97, with scholiasts; Apollodorus: i. 9. 12 4—Hesiod: Catalogue of Women; Apollodorus: ii. 4—~; Diodoru Siculus: iv. 68; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 48.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 2. ~-2; Bacchylides: Epinkia x. 40-~~2; Hero dotus: ix. 34; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68; Pausanias: ii. ~8.4; iv. 36 3; v. 5.5 and viii. ~ 8.3; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes ix. ~ I. It was a common claim of wizards that their ears had been licked b~ serpents, which were held to be incarnate spirits of oracular heroes (‘ Th, Language of Animals’ by J. R. Frazer, Archaeological Review i, ~888) and that they were thus enabled to understand the language of birds an~ insects (see ~05. g and ~$8 p). Apollo’s priests appear to have been mot, than usually astute in claiming to prophesy by this means.
2. Iphiclus’s disability is factual rather than mythical: the rust of th~ gelding-knife would be an appropriate psychological cure for impotenc~ caused by a sudden fright, and in accordance with the principles ofsym pathetic magic. Apollodorus describes the tree into which the knife wa thrust as an oak, but it is more likely to have been the wild pear-tre, sacred to the White Goddess of the Peloponnese (see 74. 6), which fruit in May, the month of enforced chastity; Phylacus had insulted the god dess by wounding her tree. The wizard’s claim to have been told o the treatment by vultures—important bird~ in augury (see ~9—i). would strengthen the belief in its efficacy. Pero’s name has been inter preted as meaning ‘maimed or deficient’, a reference to Iphiclus’s dis ability, which is the main point of the story, rather than as meaninI ‘leather bag’, a reference to her control of the winds (see 36. ~). z~. It appears that ‘Melampus ‘, a leader of Aeolians from Pylus, seize~ part of Argolis from the Canaanite settlers who called themselves Son of Abas (the Semitic word for ‘father’), namely the god Melkarth (se, 70. 5), and instituted a double kingdom. His winning of the cattle fron Phylacus (‘guardian’), who has an unsleeping dog, recalls Heracles’ Tenth Labour, and the myth is similarly based on the Hellenic custom o buying a bride with the proceeds of a cattle raid (see ~32. ~). 4. ‘Proetus’ seems to be another name for Ophion, the Demiurg
(see ~. a). The mother of his daughters was Stheneboea, the Moon-god dess as cow—namely Io, who was maddened in much the same way
56. a)—and their names are titles of the same goddess in her destructiv~ capacity as Lamia (see 6~. ~), and as Hippolyte, whose wild mares tor~ the sacred king to pieces at the end of his reign (see 7t. a). But the orgy for which the Moon-priestesses dressed as mares, should be distinguished from the raN-making gadfly dance for which they dressed as heifers (see 56. ~); and from the autumn goat-cult revel, when they tore children and animals to pieces under the toxic influence of mead, wine, or ivy-beer (see 27. z). The Aeolians’ capture of the goddess’s shrine at Lusi, recorded here in mythic form, w’dl have put an end to the wild-mare orgies; Demeter’s rape by Poseidon (see 16. 5) records the same event. Libations poured to the Serpent-goddess in an Arcadian shrine between Sicyon and Lusi may account for the story of Iphino~’s death.
5. The official recognition at Delphi, Corinth, Sparta, and Athens of Dionysus’s ecstatic wine cult, given many centuries later, was aimed at the discouragement of all earher, more primitive, rites; and seems to have put an end to cannibalism and ritual murder, except in the wilder parts of Greece. At Patrae in Achaea, for instance, Artemis Trialaria (‘threefold assigner of lots ‘) had required the annual sacrifice of boys and girls, their heads wreathed with ivy and corn, at her harvest orgies. This custom, said to atone for the desecration of the sanctuary by two lovers, Melanippus and Comaetho priestess of Artemis, was ended by the arrival of a chest containing an image of Dionysus, brought by Eurypylus (see 160. x) from Troy (Pausanias: vii. 19. I-3).
6. Melarnśodes (‘black feet’), is a common Classical name for the Egyptians (see 60. a); and these stories of how Melampus understood what birds or insects were saying are likely to be of African, not Aeolian, origin.
^sas, King of Argolis and grandson of Danaus, was so renowned a warrior that, after he died, rebels against the royal House could be put to flight merely by displaying his shield. He married Aglaia, to whose twin sons, Proetus and Acrisius, he bequeathed his kingdom, bidding them rule alternately. Their quarrel, which began in the womb, became more bitter than ever when Proetus lay with Acrisius’s daughter Dana’j, and barely escaped alive? Since Acrisius now refused to give up the throne at the end of his term, Proetus fled to the court of Iobates, King of Lycia, whose daughter Stheneboea, or Anteia, he married; returning presently at the head ofa Lycian army to support his claims to the succession. A bloody batde was fought, but since neither side gained the advantage, Proetus and Acrisius reluctantly agreed to divide the kingdom between them. Acrisius’s share was to be Argos and its environs; Proetus’s was to be Tiryns, the Heraeum (now part of Mycenae), Midea, and the coast of Argolis. Z
b. Seven gigantic Cyclopes, called Gasterocheires, because they earned their living as masons, accompanied Proetus from Lycia, and fortified Tiryns with massive walls, using blocks of stone so large that a mule team could not have stirred the least ofthem. S
c. Acrisius, who was married to Aganippe, had no sons, but only this one daughter Dana~ whom Proteus had seduced; and, when he asked an oracle how to procure a male heir, was told: ‘You will have no sons, and your grandson must kill you.’ To forestall this fate, Acrisius imprisoned Dana~ in a dungeon with brazen doors, guarded by savage dogs; but, despite these precautions, Zeus came upon her i~ a shower of gold, and she bore him a son named Perseus. When Acrisius learned olDahab’s condition, he would not believe that Zeus was the father, and suspected his brother Proetus of having renewed his intimacy with her; but, not daring to kill his own daughter, locked her and the infant Perseus in a wooden ark, which he cast into the sea. This ark was washed towards the island of Seriphos, where a fisherman named Dictys netted it, hauled it ashore, broke it open and found both Dana’~ and Perseus still alive. He took them at once to his brother, King Polydectes, who reared Perseus in his own house.4
d. Some years passed and Perseus, grown to manhood, defended Dana~ against Polydectes who, with his subjects’ support, had tried to force marriage upon her. Potydectes then assembled his frieuds and, pretending that he was about to sue for the hand of, Hippodameia, daughter of Pelops, asked them to contribute one horse apiece as his love-gift.’ Seriphos is only a small island,’ he said,’ but I do not wish to cut a poor figure beside the wealthy suitors from the mainland. Will you be able to help me, noble Perseus?’
‘Alas,’ answered Perseus, ‘I possess no horse, nor any gold to buy one. But if you intend to marry Hippodameia, and not my mother, I will contrive to win whatever gift you name.’ He added rashly: ‘Even the Gorgon Medusa’s head, if need be.’
e. ‘ That would indeed please me more than any horse in the world,’ rephed Polydectes at once. S Now, the Gorgon Medusa had serpents for hair, huge teeth, protrnding tongue, and altogether so ugly a face that all who gazed at it were petrif~ed with fright.
f. ~kthene overheard the conversation at Seriphos and, being a sworn enemy of Medusa’s, for whose frightful appearance she had herself been responsible, accompanied Perseus on his adventure. First she led ~ma to the city of Deicterion in Samos, where images of all the three Gorgons are displayed, thus enabling him to distinguish Medusa from her immortal sisters Stheno and Euryale; then she warned him never to look at Medusa directly, but only at her reflection, and presented him with a brighdy-polished shield.
g. Hermes also helped Perseus, giving him an adamantine sickle with which to cut offMedusa’s head. But Perseus still needed a pair of winged sandals, a magic wallet to contain the decapitated head, and the dark helmet of invisibility which belonged to Hades. All these things were in the care of the Stygian Nymphs, from whom Perseus had to fetch them; but their whereabouts were known only to the Gorgons’ sisters, the three swan-like Graeae, who had a single eye and tooth among the three of them. Perseus accordingly sought out the Graeae on their thrones at the foot of Mount Atlas. Creeping up behind them, he snatched the eye and tooth, as they were being passed from one sister to another, and would not return either until he had been told where the Stygian Nymphs lived.6
h. Perseus then collected the sandals, wallet, and helmet from the nymphs, and flew westwards to the Land of the Hyperboreans, where he ś~und the Gorgons asleep, among rain-worn shapes of men and wild beasts petrif~ed by Medusa. He fixed his eyes on the reflection in t!~e ~hield, Athene guided his hand, and he cut offMedusa’s head with one stroke of the sickle; whereupon, to his surprise, the winged horse Pegasus, and the warrior Chrysaor grasping a golden falchion, sprang fully-grown from her dead body. Perseus was unaware that these had been begotten on Medusa by Poseidon in one of Athene’s temples, but decided not to antagonize them further. Hurriedly thrusting the head into his wallet, he took flight; and though Stheno and Euryale, awakened by their new nephews, rose to pursue him, the helmet made Perseus invisible, and he escaped safely southward.7
i. At sunset, Perseus alighted near the palace of the Titan Arias to whom, as a punishment for his inhospitahty, he showed the Gorgon’s head and thus transformed him into a mountain; and on the following day turr~cd eastward and flew across the Ulbyan desert, Hermes helping him to carry the weighty head. By the way he dropped the Graeae s and tooth into Lake Triton; and some drops of Gorgon blood fell the desert sand, where they bred a swarm of venomous serpents, one of which later killed Mopsus the Argonaut.8
j. Perseus paused for refreshment at Chemmis in Egypt, where he is still worshipped, and then flew on. As he rounded the coast of Philistia to the north, he caught sight of a naked woman chained to a sea-cliff, and instantly fell in love with her. This was Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, the Ethiopian King of Joppa, and Cassiopeia.9 Cassiopeia had boasted that both she and her daughter were more beautiful than the Nereids, who complained of this insult to their protector Poseidon. Poseidon sent a flood and a female sea-monster to devastate Philistia; and when Cepheus consulted the Oracle of Ammon, he was told that his only hope of deliverance lay in sacrificing Andromeda to the monster. His subjects had therefore obliged him to chain her to a rock, naked except for certain jewels, and leave her to be devoured.
k. As Perseus flew towards Andromeda, he saw Cepheus and Cas-]
siopeia watching anxiously from the shore near by, and alighted beside~ them for a hurried consultation. On condition that, if he rescued her, she should be his wife and return to Greece with him, Perseus took to the air again, grasped his sickle and, diving murderously from above, beheaded the approaching monster, which was deceived by his shadow on the sea. He had drawn the Gorgon’s head from the wallet, lest the monster might look up, and now laid it face downwards on a bed of leaves and sea-weed (which instantly turned to coral), while he cleansed his hands of blood, raised three altars and sacrificed a calf, a cow, and a bull to Hermes, Athene, and Zeus respectively. xO
1. Cepheus and Cassiopeia grudgingly welcomed him as their sonin-law and, on Andromeda’s insistence, the wedding took place at once; but the festivities were rudely interrupted when Agenor, King Belus’s twin brother, entered at the head of an armed party, claiming Andromeda for himself. He was doubtless summoned by Cassiopeia, since she and Cepheus at once broke faith with Perseus, pleading that the promise of Andromeda’s hand had been forced from them by circumstances, and that Agenor’s claim was the prior one.
‘Perseus must die!’ cried Cassiopeia fiercely.
m. In the ensuing fight, Perseus struck down many of his opponents but, being greatly outnumbered, wa~ forced to snatch the Gorgon’s head from its bed of coral and turn the remaining two hundred of them to stone. X~
n. Poseidon set the images of Cepheus and Cassiopeia among the stars—the latter, as a punishment for her treachery, is tied in a marketbasket which, at some seasons of the year, turns upside-down, so that she looks ridiculous. But Athene afterwards placed Andromeda’s image in a more honourable constellation, because she had insisted on marrying Perseus, despite her parents’ ill faith. The marks left by her chains are still pointed out on a cliff near Joppa; and the monster’s petr’rfied bones were exhibited in the city itself until Marcus Aemilius Scaurus had them taken to Rome during his aedileship.12
o. Perseus returned hurriedly to Seriphos, taking Andromeda with him, and found that Dana~ and Dictys, threatened by the violence of Polydectes who, of course, never intended to marry Hippodameia, had taken refuge in a temple. He therefore went straight to the palace where Polydectes was banqueting with his companions, and announced that he had brought the promised love-gift. Greeted by a storm of insults, he displayed the Gorgon’s head, averfrog his own gaze as he did so, and turned them all to stone; the circle of boulders is still shown in Seriphos. He then gave the head to Athene, who fixed it on her aegis; and Hermes returned the sandals, wallet, and helmet to the guardianship of the Stygian nymphs.1a
p. After raising Dictys to the throne of Seriphos, Perseus set sail for Argos, accompanied by his mother, his wife, and a party of Cyclopes. Acrisius, hearing of their approach, fled to Pelasgian Larissa; but Perseus happened to be invited there for the funeral games which King Tentamides was holding in honour of his dead father, and competed in the fivefold contest. When it came to the discus-throw, his discus, carried out of its path by the wind and the will of the Gods, struck Acrisius’s foot and killed him.14
q. Greatly grieved, Perseus buried his grandfather in the temple of Athene which crowns the local acropolis and then, being ashamed to reign in Argos, went to Tiryns, where Proetus had been succeeded by his son Megapenthes, and arranged to exchange kingdoms with him. So Megapenthes moved to Argos, while Perseus reigned in Tiryns and presendy won back the other two parts of Proetus’s original kingdom.
r. Perseus fortified Midea, and founded Mycenae, so called because, when he was thirsty, a mushroom [rnycos] sprang up, and provided him with a stream of water. The Cyclopes built the walls of both cities.1s
~r
s. Others give a very different account of the matter. They say that Polydectes succeeded in marry’rag Dana~, and reared Perseus in the temple of Athene. Some years later, Acrisius heard of their survival and sailed to Seriphos, resolving this time to kill Perseus with his own hand. Polydectes intervened and made each of them solemnly swear never to attempt the other’s life. However, a storm arose and, while Acrisius’s ship was still hauled up on the beach, weather-bound, Polydectes died. During his funeral games, Perseus threw a discus which accidentally struck Acrisius on the head and killed him. Perseus then sailed to Argos and claimed the throne, but found that Proetus had usurped it, and therefore turned him into stone; thus he now reigned over the whole of Argolis, until Megapenthes avenged his father’s death by murdering him?
1. As for the Gorgon Medusa, they say that she was a beautiful daughter of Phorcys, who had offended Athene, and led the Libyans of Lake Tritonis in battle. Perseus, coming from Argos with an army, was helped by Athene to assassinate Medusa. He cut off her head by night, and buried it under a mound of earth in the market place at Argos. This mound lies close to the grave of Perseus’s daughter Gorgophone, notorious as the first widow ever to remarry. X7
x. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidiii. 286; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 965; Apollodorus: ii. 2. x and 4. 72. Homer: Iliadvi. 160; Apollodorus: ii. 2. I; Pausanias: ii. 16. 2. 3. Pausanias: ii. 25.7; Strabo: viii. 6. II.
4. Hyginus: Fabula 63; Apollodorus: ii. 4. I; Horace: Odes iii. 16. ~. 5—Apollodorus: ii. 4—2.
6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 12.
7. Pindar: Pythian Odes x. 3 ~; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 780; Apollodorus: ii. 4—3. 8. Euripides: Electra 459-63; Hyghaus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 12; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1513 if..
9. Herodotus: ii. 9~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 836; Strabo: i. 2. 35; Pliny: Natural History vi. 35.
xo. Apollodorus: ii. 4. 3; Hyginus: Fabula 64; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 740 if.
x~. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses v. 1-235; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
12. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomyii. 9-~oand 12;Josephus: Jewish Wars iii. 9. ~; Pliny: Natural History ix. 4.
13. Strabo: x. 5. xo; Apollodorus: i’~. 4—3.
14. Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 953; Apollodorus: ii. 4, 4. x 5. Clement of Alexandria: Address to the Greeks iii. 45; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 4-5.
26. Ovid: Metamorphoses v. 236-41; Hyginus: Fabulae 63 and 244. 17. Pausanias: ii. 21. 6-8.
2. The myth of Acrisius and Proetus records the foundation of an Argive double-kingdom: instead of the king’s dying every midsummer, and being succeeded by his tarfist for the rest of the year, each reigned in turn for forty-nine or fifty months-namely halfa Great Year (see 106. ~ ). This kingdom was later, it seems, divided in halves, with co-kings ruli~g concurrently for an entire Great Year. The earlier theory, that the bright spirit of the Waxing Year, and his tanist twin, the dark spirit of the Waning Year, stand in endless rivalry pervades Celtic and Palestinian myth, as well as the Greek and Latin.
2. Two such pairs of twins occur in Genesis: Esau and Jacob (Ge~t~sis xxiv. 24-6), Pharez (see ~59.4) and Zarah (Genesis xxxviii. 27-30), both of whom quarrel for precedence in the womb, like Acrisius and Proetus. In tlie simpler Palestinian myth of Mot and Aleyn, the twins quarrel about a woman, as do Acrisius and Proetus; and as their counterparts do in Celtic myth—for instance, Gwyn and Gwythur, in the Mabinogion, duel every May Eve until the end of the world for the hand of Creiddylad, daughter of Llyr (Cordelia, daughter of King Lear). This woman is, in each case, a Moon-priestess, marriage to whom confers kingship. 3. The building of Argos and Tiryns by the seven Gastcrocheires (‘ bellies with hands ‘), and the death of Acrisius, are apparently deduced from a picture of a walled city: seven sun-disks, each with three limbs but no head (see 23.2), are placed above it, and the sacred king is being killed by an eighth sun-disk, with wings, which strikes his sacred heel. This would mean that seven yearly surrogates die for the king, who is then himself sacrificed at the priestess’s orders; his successor, Perseus, stands by. 4. The myth of Dana~, Perseus, and the ark seems related to that of Isis, Osiris, Set, and the Child Horus. In the earliest version, Proetus is Perseus’s fat~er, the Argive Osiris; DanaE is his sister-wife, Isis; Perseus, the Child Horus; and Acrisius, the jealous Set who killed his twin Osiris and was taken vengeance on by Horus. The ark is the acacia-wood boat in which Isis and Horus searched the Delta for Osiris’s body. A similar story occurs in one version of the Semele myth (see 27. 6), and in that of Rhoeo (see 160. 7). But Dana,, imprisoned in the brazen dungeon, where she bears a child, is the subject of a familiar New Year icon (see 43—~); Zeus’s impregnation of Dana~ with a shower oś gold must refer tc the ritual marriage of the Sun and the Moon, from which the Ne~ Year king was born. It can also be read as pastoral allegory: ‘water i/ gold’ for the Greek shepherd, and Zeus sends thunder-showers on the earth—Dana,. The name’ Deicterion’ means that the Gorgon’s head wa~ shown there to Perseus.
5. Dynastic disputes at Argos were complicated by the existence of an Argive colony in Caria—as appears both in this myth and in that ot Bellerophon (see 75—b); when Cnossus fell about ~400 B.c., the Carian navy was, for a while, one of the strongest in the Mediterranean. The myths of Perseus and Bellerophon are closely related. Perseus killed the monstrous Medusa with the help of winged sandals; Bellerophon used a winged horse, born from the decapitated body of Medusa, to kill the monstrous Chimaera. Both feats record the usurpation by Hellenic invaders of the Moon-goddess’s powers, and are unified in an archaic Boeotian vase-painting of a Gorgon-headed mare. This mare is the Moon-goddess, whose calendar-symbol was the Chimaera (see 75.2); and the Gorgon-head is a prophylactic mask, worn by her priestesses to scare away the uninitiated (see 33. $), which the Hellenes stripped from them.
6. In the second and simpler version of the myth, Perseus fights a Libyan queen, decapitates her, and buries her head in the market place of Argos. This must record an Argive conquest of Libya, the suppression there of the matriarchal system, and the violation of the goddess Neith’s mysteries (see 8. l). The burial of the head in the market place suggests that sacred relics were locked in a chest there, with a prophylactic mask placed above them, to discourage municipal diggers from disturbing the magic. Perhaps the relics were a pair of little pigs, like those said in the Mabinogion to have been buried by King Lud in a stone chest at Carfax, Oxford, as a protective charm for the whole Kingdom of Britain; though pigs, in that context, may be a euphemism for children.
7. Andromeda’s story has probably been deduced from a Palestinian icon of the Sun-god Marduk, or his predecessor Bel, mounted on his white horse and killing the sea-monster Tiamat. This myth also formed part of Hebrew mythology: Isaiah mentions that Jehovah (Marduk) hacked Rahab in pieces with a sword (Isaiah li. 9); and according to Job x. 13 and xxvi. 12, Rahab was the Sea. In the same icon, thejewelled, naked Andromeda, standing chained to a rock, is Aphrodite, or Ishtar, or Astarte, the lecherous Sea-goddess,’ ruler of men’. But she is not waiting to be rescued; Marduk has bound her there himself, after killing her emanation, Tiamat the sea-serpent, to prevent further mischief. In the Babylonian Creation Epic, it was she who sent the Flood. Astarte, as Seagoddess, had temples all along the Palestinian coast, and at Troy she was Hesione, ‘ Queen of Asia ‘, whom Heracles is said to have rescued from another sea-monster (see 137. 2). A Greek colony planted at Chemmis, apparently towards the end of the second millennium B.C., identified Perseus with the god Chem, whose hieroglyph was a winged bird and a solar disk; and Herodotus emphasizes the connexion between Dan~ie, Perseus’s mother, and the Libyan invasion of Argos by the Danaans. The myth of Perseus and the mushroom is of unusual interest. For a theory that this was the intoxicaring mushroom of Dionysus, to whose worship he had been converted (see 27. i), read the Foreword to this revised edition.
9. The second, simpler version ot the myth suggests that Perseus’s visit to the Graeae, his acquisition of the eye, tooth, wallet, sickle, and helmet of darkness, and his pursuit by the other Gorgons after the decapitation of Medusa are extraneous to his quarrel with Acrisius. In The White Goddess (Chapter 13), I postulate that these fairy-tale elements are misreadings of a wholly different icon: which shows Hermes, wearing his familiar winged sandals and helmet, being given a magic eye by the Three Fates (see 6~. ~). This eye symbolizes the gift of perception: Hermes is enabled to master the tree-alphabet, which they have invented. They also give him a divinatory tooth, like the one used by Fionn in the Irish legend; a sickle, to cut alphabetic twigs from the grove; a crane-skin bag, in which to stow these safely; and a Gorgon-mask, to scare away the curious. Hermes is flying through the sky to Tartessus, where the Gorgons had a sacred grove (see 132. $), escorted, not pursued, by a triad of goddesses wearing Gorgon-masks. On the earth below, the goddess is shown again, holding up a mirror which reflects a Gorgon’s face, to emphasize the secrecy of his lesson (see $2. 7). Hermes’s association with the Graeae, the Stygian Nymphs, and the helmet of invisibility proves that he is the subject of this picture; the confusion between him and Perseus may have arisen because Hermes, as the messenger of Death, had also earned the title of Pterseus, ‘the destroyer’.
W~E~/the male line of Polycaon’s House had died out after five generations, the Messenians invited Perleres, the son of Aeolus, to be their king, and he married Perseus’s daughter Gorgophone. She survivcd him and was the first widow to remarry, her new husband being 0ebalus the Spartan.1 Hitherto it had been customary for women to commit suicide on the death of their husbands: as did Meleager’s daughter Polydora, whose husband Protesilaus was the first to leap ashore when the Greek fleet reached fl~e coast of Troy; Marpessa; Cleopatra; and Evadne, daughter of Phylacus, who threw herself on the funeral pyre when her husband perished at Thebes.2
b. Aphareus and Leucippus were Gorgophone’s sons by Perieres, whereas Tyndareus and Icarius were her sons by Oebalus.3 Tyndareus succeeded his father on the throne of Sparta, Icarius acting as his coking; but Hippoco/Sn and his twelve sons expelled both of themthough some, indeed, say that Icarius (later to become Odysscus’s father-in-law) took Hippoco~3n’s side. Taking refuge with ICing Thest’~us in Aetolia, Tyndareus married his daughter Leda, who bore him Castor and Clytaemnestra, at the same time bearing Helen and Polydeuces to Zeus.4 Later, having adopted Polydeuces, Tyndarcus gained the Spartan throne, and was one of those whom Asclepius raised from the dead. His tomb is still shown at Sparta.5
c. Nleanwhile, his half-brother A~hareus had succeeded Perieres on the throne of Messene, where Leucip?us—from whom, the Messenians say, the city of Leuctra took its name—acted as his co-king and enjoyed the lesser powers. Aphareus took to wife his half-sister Arene, who bore him Idas and Lynceus; though Idas was, in truth, Poseidon’s son.6 Now, Leucippus’s daughters, the Leucippides, namely Phoebe, a priestess ot Athene, and Hilaeira, a priestess of Artemis, were betrothed to their cousins, Idas and Lynceus; but Castor and Polydeuces, who are commonly known as the Dioscuri, carried them off, and had sons by them’: which occasioned a bitter rivalry between the two sets of twins.7
d. The Dioscuri, who were never separated from one another in an~ adventure, became the pride of Sparta. Castor was famous as a soldie~ and tamer of horses, Polydeuces as the best boxer of his day; both won prizes at the Olympic Games. Their cousins and rivals were no devoted to each other; Idas had greater strength than Lynceus, Lynceus such sharp eyes that he could see in the dark or divine th~ whereabouts of buried treasure?
e. Now, Evenus, a son of Ares, had married Alcippe, by whom h~
became the father of Marpessa. In an attempt to keep her a virgin, h~ invited each of her suitors in turn to run a chariot race with him; victor would win Marpessa, the vanquished would forfeit his head Soon many heads were nailed to the walls of Evenus’s house ant
—Apollo, filling in love with Marpessa, expressed his disgust of so bar. barous a custom; and said that he would soon end it by challengin~ 74. e—74. h 247
Evenus to a race. But Idas had also set his heart on Marpessa, and begged a winged chariot from his father Poseidon.9 Before Apollo could act, he had driven to Aetolia, and carried Marpessa away from the midst of a band of dancers. Evenus gave chase, but could not overtake Idas, and felt such mortification that, after killing his horses, he drowned himself in the river Lycormas, ever since called the Evenus.xo
f. When Idas reached Messene, Apollo tried to take Marpessa from him. They fought a due], but Zeus parted them, and ruled that Marpcssa herself should decide whom she r2r~6-_~r~~4_ ~....... ~. ~~,’,,,~ e .... Apollo would cast her off when she grew old, as he had done with many another of his loves, she chose Idas for her husband.1t
,g. ldas and Lynceus were among the Calydonian hunters, and sailed iu tl~e Argo to Colchis. One day, after the death of Aphareus, they and the Dioscuri patched up their quarrel suff~qiently to join forces in a cattle-raid on Arcadia. The raid proved successful, and Idas was chosen by lot to divide the booty among the four of them. He therefore quartered a cow, and ruled that half the spoil should go to the man who ate his share first, the remainder to the next quickest. Almost before the others had settled themselves to begin the contest, Idas bolted his own share and then helped Lynceus to bolt his; soon down went the last gobbet, and he and Lynceus drove the cattle away towards Messene. The Dioscuri remained, until Polydeuces, the slower of the two, had finished eafmg; whereupon they marched against Messene, and protested to the citizens that Lynceus had forfeited his share by accepting help from Idas, and that Idas had forfeited his by not waiting until all the contestants were ready. Idas and Lynceus happened to be away on Mount Taygetus, sacrif~cing to Poseidon; so the Dioscuri seized the disputed cattle, and other plunder as well, and then hid inside a hollow oak to await their rivals’ return. But Lynceus had caught sight of them from the summit of Taygetus; and Idas, hurrying down the mountain slope, hurled his spear at the tree and transfixed Castor. When Polydeuces rushed out to avenge his brother, Idas tore the carved headstone from Aphareus’s tomb, and threw it at him. Although badly crushed, Polydeuces contrived to kill Lynceus with his spear; and at this point Zeus intervened on behalf of his son, striking Idas dead with a thunderbolt.tz
h. But the Messenians say that Castor killed Lyncetts, and that Idas, distracted by grief, broke off the fight and began to bury him. Castor then approached and insolently demolished the monument which Idas had just raised, denying that Lynceus was worthy of it. ‘Your brother put up no better fight than a woman would have done!’ he cried tauntingly. Idas turned, and plunged his sword into Castor’s belly; but Polydeuces took instant vengeance on him.13
i. Others say that it was Lynceus who mortally wounded Castor in a batfie fought at Aphidna; others again, that Castor was killed when Idas and Lynceus attacked Sparta; and still others, that both Dioscuri survived the fight, Castor being killed later by Meleager and Polyncices.14
j. It is generally agreed, at least, that Polydeuces was the last survivor of the two sets of twins and that, after setting up a trophy beside the Spartan race-course to celebrate his victory over Lynceus, he prayed to Zeus:’ Father, let me not outlive my dear brother !’ Since, however, it was fated that only one of Leda’s sons should die, and since Castor’s father Tyndareus had been a mortal, Polydeuces, as the son of Zeus, was duly carried up to Heaven. Yet he refused immortality unless Castor might share it, and Zeus therefore allowed them both to spend their days alternately in the upper air, and under the earth at Therapne. In further reward of their brotherly love, he set their images among the stars as the Twius.1s
k. After the Dioscuri had been deified, Tyndareus summoned Menelaus to Sparta, where he resigned the kingdom to him; and since the House of Aphareus was now also left without an heir, Nestor succeeded to the throne of all Messenia, except for the part ruled. over by the sore of Asclepius. 16
1. The Spartans still show the house where the Dioscuri lived. It was afterwards owned by one Phormio, whom they visited one night, pre—! tending to be strangers from Cyrene. They asked him for lodging, and begged leave to sleep in their old room. Phormio replied that they were i~ welcome to any other part of the house but that, regrettably, his daughter was now occupying the room of which they spoke. Next morning, the girl and all her possessions had vanished, and the room was empty, except for images of the Dioscuri and some herb-benjamin laid upon a table.1?
m. Poseidon made Castor and Polydeuces the saviours of shipwrecked sailors, and granted them power to send favourable winds; in response to a sacrifice of white lambs offered on the pro ship, they will come hastening through the sky,
n. The Dioscuri fought with the Spartan fleet at Aegospotamoi, and the victors afterwards hung up two golden stars in their honour at Delphi; but these fell down and disappeared shordy before the fatal battle of Leuctra. 19
o. During the second Messenian War, a couple of Messenians aroused the Dioscuri’s anger by impersonalrag themú It happened that the Spartan army was celebrating a feast of the demi-gods, when twin spearmen rode into the camp at full gallop, dressed in white tunics, purple cloaks, and egg-shell caps. The Spartans fell down to worship them, and the pretended Dioscuri, two Messenian youths named Gonippus and Panormus, killed many of them. After the battle of the Boar’s Grave, therefore, the Dioscuri sat on a wild pear-tree, and spirited away the shield belonging to the victorious Messenian commander Aristomenes, which prevented him from pressing on the Spartan retreat, and thus saved many lives; again, when Aristomenes attempted to assault Sparta by night, the phantoms of the Dioscuri and of their sister Helen turned him back. Later, Castor and Polydeuces forgave the Messenians, who sacrif~ced to them when Epaminondas founded the new city of Messene.20
p. They preside at the Spartan Games, and because they invented the war-dance and war-like mmic are the patrons of all bards who sing of ancient batdes. In Hilaeira and Phoebe’s sanctuary at Sparta, the two priestesses are still called Leucippides, and the egg from which Leda’s twins were hatched is suspended from the roof..2~ The Spartans represent the Dioscuri by two parallel wooden beams, joined by two transverse ones. Their co-kings always take these into battle and when, for the first time, a Spartan army was led by one king alone, it was decreed that one beam should also remain at Sparta. According to those who lave seen the Dioscuri, the only noticeable difference between them is that Polydeuces’s face bears the scars of boxing. They dress alike: each has his half egg-shell surmounted by a star, each his spear and white horse. Some say that Poseidon gave them their horses; others, that P01ydeuces’s Thessalian charger was a gift from Hermes. Za
x. Pausanias: iv. 2.2 and iii. x. 4; Apollodorus: i. 9. 5.
2. Cypria, quoted by Pausanias: iv. 2. 5; Pausanias: iii. x. 4. 3. Apollodorus: i. 9. 5; Pausanias: 10c. cit.
4. Pausanias: Ioc. tit.; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 5-75. Panyasis, quoted by Apollodorus: iii. xo. 3; Pausanias: iii. 17. 4. 6. Pausanias: iii. :26, 3 and iv. 2. 3; Apollodorus: iii. xo. 3.
7. Apollodorus: iii. x~. s; Hyginus: Fabula 80.
8. Apollodorus: loc. tit. and iii. xo. 3; Homer: Odyssey ~i. 30~ Pausanias: iv. s. 4; Hyginus: Fabula 14; Palaephatus: Incredibl Stories x.
9. Hyginus: Fabula s4s; Apollodorus: i. 7. 8; Plutarch: ParaIl~ Stories 40; Scholiast and Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ix. 557.
xo. Pintarch: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
1. Apollodorus: i. 7. 9.
xs. Apollodorus: i. 8. s; i. 9. 16 and iii. xI. s; Theocritus: Idylls xx~ 137 if.; Pindar: Nemean Odes x. 55 if..
13. Hyginus: Fabula
14. Ovid: Fasti v. 699 if..; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 2s; The0 critus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Od?ssey xi. 300.
15. Pausanias: iii. ~4.7; Apollodorus: iii. xi. s; Pindar: Nemean x. 55 if..; Lucian: Dialogues qf the Gods s6; Hyginus: loc. cit. 16. Apo!lod~rus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: iv. 3—x.
17. Pausanias: iii. 16. 318. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ss; Euripides: Helen 1503; Homer~ Hymn to the Dioscuri 7 if.
19. Cicero: On Divination i. 34. 75 and ii. 3s. 68.
20. Pausanias: iv. ~7. x; iv. ~6. ~ and v. 27. 3.
sx. Pindar: Nemean Odes x. 49; Cicero: On Oratory ii. 8.86; The0 critus: Idylls xxii. sxS-ZO; Pausanias: iii. ~6.
s2. Plutarch: On Brotherly Love i; Herodotus: v. 75; Lucian: Dia lo~ues of the Gods 26; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. es; Proleto, Hephaestionos: viii, quoted by Photius: p. 490.
1. In order to allow the sacred king precedence over his tanist, he wa usually described as the son of a god, by a mother on whom her husba~ subsequently tithered a mortal twin. Thus Heracles is Zeus’s son b~ Alcmene, but his twin Iphicles is the son of her husband Amphitryon:’, similar story is told both about the Dioscuri of Laconia, and about thei rivals, Idas and Lynceus of Messenia. The perfect harmony exisfmI between the twins themselves marks a new stage in the development 0 kingship, when the tanist acts as vizier and chief-of-staff (see 94.1 ), beinI nominally less powerful than the sacred king. Castor therefore, not Poly deuces, is the authority on war—he even instructs Heracles in militan arts, thus identifying himself with Iphicles—and Lynceus, not Idas, gifted with acute vision. But until the double-kingdom system had b~ evolved, the tanist was not regarded as immortal, nor granted the sama posthumous status as his twin.
1. The Spartans were frequently at war with the Messenians and, k Classical times, had sufficient military power, and influence over the Delphic Oracle, to impose the’~r twin heroes on the rest of Greece, as enjoy’rag greater favour with Father Zeus than any other pair; and the Spartan kingdom did indeed outlast all its rivals. Had this not been so, the constellation of the Twins might have commemorated Heracles and I?h~des, or Idas and Lynceus, or Acrisius and Proetus—instead of merely Castor and Polydeuces, who were not even the only heroes privileged to fide white horses: every hero worthy of a hero-feast was a horseman. It is these sunset feasts, at which a whole ox was eaten by the hero’s descendants, that account for the gluttony attributed to Lepreus (see 138. h) and Heracles (see 143. a); and here to Idas, Lynceus and their rivals. 3. Marriage to the Leucippides enroyalled the Spartan co-kings. They were described as priestesses of Athene and Artemis, and given moonnames, being, in fact, the Moon-goddess’s representatives; thus, in vasepah~tings, the chariot of Selene is frequently attended by the Dioscuri. As the Spirit of the Waxing Year, the sacred king would naturally mate with Artemis, a Moon-goddess of spring and summer; and his tanist, as Spirit of the Waning Year, with Athene, who had become a Moongoddess of autumn and winter. The mythographer is suggesting that the Spartans defeated the Messenians, and that their leaders forcibly married the heiresses of Arene, a principal city of Messenia, where the Mareheaded Mother was worshipped; thus establishing a claim to the surrounding region. 4. Similarly with Marpessa: apparently the Messenians made a raid on the Actolians in the Evenus valley, where the Sow-mother was worshipped, and carried off the heiress, Marpessa (‘ snatcher’ or ‘gobbler’). They were opposed by the Spartans, worshippets of Apollo, who grudged them their success; the dispute was then referred to the central authority at Mycenae, which supported the Messenians. But Evenus’s chariot-race with Idas recalls the Pelops-Oenomaus (see ~09. j) and the Heraclcs-Cycnus (see 143. e-g) myths. In each case the skulls of the king’s rivals are mentioned. The icon from which all these stories are deduced must have shown the old king heading for his destined chariot crash (sec 7~. ~) after having offered seven annual surrogates to the goddess (scc 42. 2). His horses are sacrificed as a preliminary to the installation of t;n~ new king (see 29. ~ and 8 r. 4). The drowning of Evenus is probably ~nisrcad: it shows Idas being purified before marriage and then riding off’ ~riumphantly in the Queen’s chariot. Yet these Pelasgian marriage rites have bccn combined in the story with the Hellenic custom of marriage by capture. The fatal cattle-raid may record a historical incident: a quarrd between the Messenians and Spartans about the sharing of spoil in a joint expedition against Arcadia (see 17. ~).
5. Castor and Polydeuces’s visit to Phormio’s house is disingenuously described: the author is relating another trick played on the stupid Spartans by an impersonation of their national heroes. Cyrene, where the Dioscuri were worshipped, supplied herb-benjamin, a kind ofasafoetid the strong smell and taste of which made it valued as a condiment. TI two Cyrenian merchants were obviously what they professed themselv to be, and when they went off with Phormio’s daughter, left their war behind in payment; Phormio decided to call it a miracle.
6. Wild pear-trees were sacred to the Moon because of their whi blossom, and the most ancient image of the Death-goddess Hera, in tl Heraeum at Mycenae, was made of pear-wood. Plutarch (Greek Questio~ 51) and Aelian (Varia Historia iii. 39) mention the pear as a fruit peculia~ venerated at Argos and Tiryns; hence the Peloponnese was called Api ‘of the pear-tree’ (see 64.4). Athene, also a Death-goddess, had the su name Once (‘ pear-tree’) at her pear-sanctuary in Boeotia. The Dioscu chose this tree for their perch in order to show that they were genul, heroes; moreover, the pear-tree forms fruit towards the end of May (s~ 72. 2), when the sun is in the house of the Twins; and when the sailir season begins in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sparrows that follow tl Dioscuri, when they appear in answer to sailors’ prayers, belong to tt Sea-goddess Aphrodite; Xuthus (‘sparrow’), the father of Aeolus (s~ 43.1 ), was an ancestor of the Dioscuri, who worshipped her.
7. In the Homeric H?mn to the Dioscuri (7 if.), it is not made de~ whether Castor and Polydeuces are followed by sparrows or wheth~ they come darting on ‘sparrowy wings’ through the upper air, to he] distressed sailors; but on Etruscan mirrors they are sometimes pictur~ as winged. Their symbol at Sparta, the docana, represented the two sul porting pillars of a shrine; another symbol consisted of two amphora each entwined by a serpent—the serpents being the incarnate Dioscu who came to eat food placed in the amphoras.
8. Gorgophone defied the Indo-European convention of suttee ~
marrying again (see 69. 2; 74—a and ~06. l).
B ~ L ~~a o ~u o ~/, son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, left Corinl under a cloud, hay’rag first killed one Bellerus—which earned him nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon—and then own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades. ~ He fled as suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but (so ill luck would have Anteia, Proetus’s wife whom some call Stheneboea, fell in love wit him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he daxed not risk the Furies’ vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia’s father Iobates~ King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: ‘Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.’
b. Iobates, equally loth to ill-treat a royal guest, asked Bellerophon to do him the service of destroying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing shemonster with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail.’ She is’, he explained, ‘a daughter of Echidne, whom my enemy, the King of Carla, has made a household pet.’ Before setfrog about this task, Bellerophon consulted the seer Polyeidus, and was advised to catch and tame the winged horse Pegasus, beloved by the Muses of Mount Helicon, for whom he had created the well Hippocrene by stamping his moon-shaped hoof.2
c. Pegasus was absent from Helicon, but Bellerophon found him drinking at Peirene, on the Acropolis of Corinth, another of his wells; and threw over his head a golden bridle, Athene’s timely present. But some say that Athene gave Pegasus already bridled to Bellerophon; and others, that Poseidon, who was really Bellerophon’s father, did so. Be that as it may, Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera by flying above her on Pegasus’s back, riddling her with arrows, and then thrusting between her jaws a lump of lead which he had fixed to the point of his spear. The Chimaera’s fiery breath melted the lead, which trickled down her throat, searing her vitals.3
d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once aga’mst the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bowshot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian Plain of Xanthus, he beat offa band of Carian pirates led by one Cheimarrhus, a fiery and boastful warrior, who sailed in a ship adorned with a lion figurehead and a serpent stern. When Iobates showed no gratitude even then but, on the contrary, sent the palace guards to ambush him on his return, Bellerophon dismounted and prayed that, while he advanced on foot, Poseidon would flood the Xanthian Plain behind him. Poseidon heard his prayer, and sent great waves rolling slowly forward as Bellerophon approached Iobates’s palace; and, because no man could persuade him to retire, the Xanthian women hoisted their skirts to the waist and came rushing towards him full butt, offering themselves to him one and all, if only he would relent. Bellerophon’s modesty was such that he turned tail and ran; and the waves retreated with him.
e. Convinced now that Proetus must have been mistaken about the attempt on Anteia’s virtue, Iobates produced the letter, and demanded an exact account of the affair. On learning the truth, he implored Bellerophon’s forgiveness, gave him his daughter PhilohoE in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xantkian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, ~ll Xanthians should reckon descent from the mother, not the father.
f. Bellerophon, at the height of his fortune, presumptuously undertook a flight to Olympus, as though he were an immortal; but Zeus sent a gadfly, which stung Pegasus under the tail, making him rear and fling Bellerophon ingloriously to earth. Pegasus completed the flight to Olympus, where Zeus now uses him as a pack-beast for thunderbolts; and Bellerophon, who had fallen into a thorn-bush, wandered about the earth, lame, blind, lonely and accursed, always avoiding the paths of men, until death overtook him.4
x. Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Homer: Iliad vi. 155.
1. Homer: Iliad vi. 160; Eustathius on the same text; Apollodorus: ii. 3—x; Antoninus Liberalis: 9; Homer: Iliad xvi. 328 if.
3. Hesiod: Theogony 3~9 if-; Apollodorus: ii. 3.2; Pindar: OIympia~ Odes xiii. 63 if..; Pausanias: ii. 4—x; Hyginus: Fabula 157; Scholia$~ on Homer’s Iliad vi. 155; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 17.
4. Pindar: Olympian Odes xiii. 87-90; Isthmian Odes vii. 44; Apollo. dorus: loc. cit.; Plutarch: On the Virtues of Women 9; Homer:
Iliad vi. 155-203 and xvi. 3~8; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 646~
Tzetzes: On Lycophron 838.
* ~. Anteia’s attempted seduction of Bellerophon has several Greek parallels (see 70. e), besides a Palestinian parallel in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, and an Egyptian parallel in The Tale of the Two Brothers The provenience of the myth is uncertain.
2. Echidne’s daughter, the Chimaera, who is depicted on a Hiiti~ building at Carchemish, was a symbol of the Great Goddess’s triparti~ Sacred Year—lion for spring, goat for summer, serpent for winter. ~ damaged glass plaque found at Dendra near Mycenae shows a her~
tussling with a lion, from the back of which emerges what appears to b a goat’s head; the tail is long and serpentine. Since the plaque dates fron a period when the goddess w~s still suprexne, this icon—paralleled in a~ Etruscan fresco at Tarquinia, though the hero here is mounted, like Bellerophon—must be read as a king’s coronation combat against men in beast disguise (see 81. 2 and 123. z) who represent the different seasons of the year. After the Achaean religious revolution which subordinated the goddess Hera to Zeus, the icon became ambivalent: it could also be read as recording the suppression, by Hellenic invaders, of the ancient Carian calendar.
3. Bellerophon’s taming of Pegasus, the Moon-horse used in rainmaking, with a bridle provided by Athene, suggests that the candidate for the sacred kingship was charged by the Triple Muse (‘ mountain goddess’), or her representative, with the capture of a wild horse; thus Heracles later rode Arion (‘moon-creature on high’) when he took possession of Elis (see z 38. g). To judge from primitive Danish and Irish practice, the flesh of this horse was sacramentally eaten by the king after his symbolic rebirth from the Mare-headed Mountain-goddess. But this part of the myth is equally ambivalent: it can also be read as recording the seizure by Hellenic invaders of the Mom~tain-goddess’s shrines at Ascra on Mount Helicon, and Corinth. A similar event is recorded in Poseidon’s violation of the Mare-headed Arcadian Demeter (see 16.f), on whom he begot this same Moon-horse Arion; and of Medusa, on whom he begot Pegasus (see 73—h); which explains Poseidon’s intrusion into the story of Bellcrophon. How Zeus humbled Bellerophon is a moral anecdote told to discourage revolt against the Olympian faith; Bellerophon, the dartbearer, flying across the sky, is the same character as his grandfather Sisyphus, or Tesup (see 67. z), a solar hero whose cult was replaced by that of solar Zeus; he is therefore given a similarly luckless end, which recalls that of Helius’s son Pha~thon (see 42.
4. Bellerophon’s enemies, the Solymians, were Children of $alma. Since’all titles and capes begin~ing with the syllable salrn have an easterly situation, she was probably the Goddess of the Spring Equinox; but she soon became masculinized as the Sun-god Solyma, or Selim, Solomon, or Ab-Salom, who gave his name to Jerusalem. The Amazons were the Moon-goddess’s fighting priestesses (see too. ~).
5. Bellerophon’s retreat from the Xanthian women may have been deduced from an icon which showed the Wild Women maddened with
~llppomanes—either a herb, or the slimy vaginal issue of a mare in heat, or the black membrane cut from the forehead of a new-born foal—dosing in on the sacred king by the seashore at the end of his reign. Their skirts wcre hoisted, as in the erotic worship of Egyptian Apis (Diodorus Siculus: i. 85), so that when they dismembered him, his spurting blood would quicken their wombs. Since Xanthus (‘yellow’) is the name of one of Achilles’s horses, and of one belonging to Hector, and of one given to Peleus by Poseidon, these women perhaps wore ritual horse-masks with moon-yellow manes, like those ofpalominos; for wild mares had eaten Bellerophon’s father Glaucus by the seashore of Corinth (see 7L t Yet this reformed myth retains a primitive element: the approach, naked women from the ~hieftain’s own clan, with whom intercour was forbidden, would force him to retreat and hide his face, and in Ir~ legend this same ruse was employed against Cuchulain, when his fm could not otherwise be checked. The account of the Xanthian matriline reckoning of descent has been turned inside out: it was the Hellenes wh on the contrary, managed to enforce pattilineal ~eckoning on all CarJar except the conservative Xanthians.
6. Cheimarrhus’s name is derived from chirnaros, or chirnaera (‘goat’ both his fiery nature and his ship with the lion figurehead and serpe: stern have been introduced into Bellerophon’s story by some euheme~ to explain away the fire-breathing Chimaera. Mount Chimaera (‘ goa mountain’) was also the name of an active volcano near Phaselis in Lye (Pliny: Natural History ii. 106 and v. 27), which accounts for the fie~ breath.
S o/~ say that when Zeus seduced Antiope, daughter of Nycteus tl Theban, she fled to the King of Sicyon, who agreed to marry her, a~ thus occasioned a war in which Nycteus was killed. Antiope’s unc Lycus presently defeated the Sicyonians in a bloody battle and broug her back, a widow, to Thebes. After giving birth in a wayside thick to the twins Amphion and Zethus, whom Lycus at once exposed (
Mount Cithaeron, she was cruelly ill-treated for many years by h aunt Dirce. At last, she contrived to escape from the prison in which s] was immured, and fled to the hut where Amphion and Zethus, who
a passing cattleman had rescued, were now living. But they misto~ Antlope for a rtmaway slave, and refused to shelter her. Dirce th, came rushing up in a Bacchic frenzy, seized hold of Antlope, as dragged her away.
‘ Mylads,’ cried the cattleman, ‘you had better beware of the Furie~ ‘Why the Furies?’ they asked.
‘Because you have refused to protect your mother, who is nc being carried off for execution by that savage aunt of hers.’
The t-wins at once went in pursuit, rescued Antiope, and tied Dir by the hair to the horns of a wild bull, which made short work of her.x
b. Others say that the river Asopus was Antiope’s father, and that one night the King of Sicyon impersonated Lycus, to whom she was married, and seduced her. Lycus divorced Antiope in consequence and married Dirce, thus leaving Zeus free to court the lonely Antlope, and get her with child. Dirce, suspecting that this was Lycus’s doing, freed Antiope in a dark dungeon; from which, however, she was freed by Zeus just in time to bring forth Amphion and Zethus on Mount Cithaeron. The twins grew up among the cattlemen with whom Antlope had taken refuge and, when they were old enough to understand how unkindly their mother had been treated, she persuaded them to avenge her. They met Dirce roaming the slopes of Mount Cithaeron in a Bacchic frenzy, tied her by the hair to the horns of a wild bull and, when she was dead, flung her body on the ground; where a spring welled up, afterwards called the Dircaean Stream. But Dionysus avenged this murder of his votary: he sent Antiope raging madly all over Greece until at last Phocus, a grandson of Sisyphus, cured and marricd her in Phocis.
c. Amphion and Zethus visited Thebes, where they expelled King Laius and built the lower city, Cadmus having already built the upper. Now, Zethus had often taunted Amphion for his devotion to the lyre given him by Hermes. ‘It distracts you’, he would say, ‘from useful ~’ork.’ Yet when they became masons, Amphion’s stones moved to the sound of his lyre and gently slid into place, while Zethus was obliged to use main force, lagging far behind his brother. The twins rtficdjointly in Thebes, where Zethus married Thebe, after whom the city—previously known as Cadmeia—is now named; and Amphion married Niobe. But all her children except two were shot dead by Apollo and Artemis, whose mother Leto she had insulted. Amphien was himself killed by Apollo for trying to take vengeance on the Delphic priests, and further punished in Tartarus.2 Amphion and Zctl~us are buried in one grave at Thebes, which is guarded carefully when the sun is in Taurus; for then the people ofPhocian Tithorea try to steal earth from the mound and place it on the grave of Phocus and Antiope. An oracle once said that this act would increase the fertility of all Phocis at the expense of Thebes.3
x. Hyginus: Fabtda 8; Apollodorus: iii. 5. 5; Pausanias: ii. 6. 2; Euripides: AntioRe, Fragments; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1090, with scholiast.58 76. l—77. a ~1 ~. Homer: Odyssey xi. 260; Hyginus: Fabula 7; Pausanias: vi. 20 ix. 5.3 and 17. 4; Horace: Epistles i. 18.41; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 735-41.
3. Pausanias: ix. ~7. 3.
~e
1. These two versions of the Dirce myth show how free the myth0graphers felt to make their narrative fit the main elements of a literary tradition which, in this case, seems to have been deduced from a series of sacred icons. Antlope, emerging joyfully out of her dungeon and followed by the scowling Dirce, recalls Core’s annual reappearance in Hecate’s company (see 24. k). She is called Antlope (‘ confronting ‘) in tiff~ context, because her face is upturned to the sky, not bent towards the Underworld, and’ Daughter of Night’—Nycteis, not Nycteus ~. because she emerges from the darkness. The ‘raging on the mom~tain’ by Dirce and Antiope has been misinterpreted as a Bacchic orgy; theirs was clearly an erotic gadfly dance, for which they behaved like Moon-heifers in heat (see 56. ~). Dirce’s name (‘double’) stands for the horned moon, and the icon from which the myth is taken will have shown her not being tied to the bull in punishment, but ritually marryixxg the bull-k’mg (see 88.7). A secondary meaning may be concealed in dirce: namely ‘cleft’, that is, ‘in an erotic condition’. The Dircaean spring, like Hippocrene, will have been moon-shaped. Antiope’s sons are the familiar royal twins borne b~ the Moon-goddess: her sacred king and his tanist.
1. Amphion’s three-stringer lyre, with which he raised the walls o] Lower Thebes—since Hermes was his employer, it can have had onl~ three strings—was constructed to celebrate the Triple-goddess, wh› reigned in the air, on earth, and in the Underworld, and will have beer played during the building to safeguard the city’s foundations, gates, ant towers. The name’ Amphion’ (‘ native of two lands’) records his citizenship of Sicyon and Thebes.
N~o~3~, sister of Pelops, had married Amphion King of Thebes an borne him seven sons and seven daughters, of whom she was s inordinately proud that, one day, she disparaged Leto herself for havin only two children: Apollo and Artemis. Mante, the prophetic daught~ of Teiresias, overhearing this rash remark, advised the Theban wome to placate Leto and her children at once: burning frankincense and wreathing their hair with laurel branches. When the scent of incense was already floating in the air, Niobe appeared, followed by a throng of attendants and dressed in a splendid Phrygian robe, her long hair flowing loose. She interrupted the sacrifice and furiously asked why Leto, a woman of obscure parentage, with a mannish daughter and a womanish son, should be preferred to her, Niobe, grandchild of Zeus and Atlas, the dread of the Phrygians, and a queen of Cadmus’s royal house? Though fate or ill-luck might carry off two or three of her children, would she not still remain the richer?
b. Abandoning the sacrif~ce, the terrif~ed Theban women tried to placate Leto with murmured prayers, but it was too late. She had already sent Apollo and Artemis, armed with bows, to punish Niobe’s presumption. Apollo found the boys hunting on Mount Cithaeron’and shot them down one by one, sparing only Amyclas, who had wisely offered a propitiatory prayer to Leto. Artemis found the girls spinn’mg in the palace and, with a quiverful of arrows, despatched all of them, except Melibo~a, who had followed Amydas’s example. These two survivors hastened to build Leto a temple, though Melibo~a had turned so pale with fear that she was still nicknamed Chloris when she married bleleus some years later. But some say that none of Niobe’s children survived, and that her husband Amphion was also killed by Apollo.
c. For nine days and nine nights Niobe bewailed her dead, and found no one to bury them, because Zeus, taking Leto’s part, had turned all the Thebans into stone. On the tenth day, the Olympians themselves deigned to conduct the funeral. Niobe fled overseas to Mount Sipylus, the home of her father Tantalus, where Zeus, moved by pity, turned her into a statue which can still be seen weeping copiously in the early sulnmer. I
d. All men mourned for Amphion, deploring the extinction of his race, but none mourned for Niobe, except her equally proud brother Pelops.2
x. Hyginus: Fabulae 9 and ~o; Apollodorus: iii. 5.6; Homer: Iliad xxiv. 6~z if.; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. ~›6—312; Pausanias: v.
3; viii. 2. 5 and i. 21. 5; Sophocles: Electra i50-52.
9.. Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 40I-4.
1. The number of Niobe’s children is given by Homer as twelve and (according to various scholiasts) by Hesiod as twenty, by Herodotus as four, and by Sappho as eighteen; but the account followed by Euripkh and Apollodorus, which makes the best sense, is that she had seven and seven daughters. Since Niobe, i~ the Theban version of the mytl was a grand-daughter of the Titan Atlas aud, in the Argive version, w: daughter or mother of Phoroneus (see 57. a), also described as a Tita (Apollodorus: ii. x. x and Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 93~), and Pelasgus; and could claim to be the first mortal woman violated by (l)iodorus Siculus: iv. 9. z.4; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 22.6 the myth may concern the defeat of the seven Titans and TitaI~csses the Olympians. If so, it records the supersession of the calendar syste~ prevailing in Pelasgian Greece, Palestine, Syria, and North-weste~ Europe; which was based on a month divided into four weeks of sevc days, each ruled by one of the seven planetary bodies (see ~. 3 and 43. Amphion and his twelve children, in Homer’s version of the my~
(Iliadxxiv. 603-~7), perhaps stand for the thirteen months of this ca/enda Mount Sipylus may have been the last home in Asia Minor of the Tit~ cult, as Thebes was in Greece. The statue of Niobe is a crag ofroughl human shape, which seems to weep when the sun’s arrows strike i winter cap of snow, and the likeness is reinforced by a Hittite Goddes mother carved in rock on the same mountain and dating from perhai the late fifteenth century B.c. ‘Niobe’ probably means snowy—the representing the v in the Latin nivis, or theph in the Greek nipha. One, her daughters is called Chiade by Hyginus: a word which makes no sen in Greek, unless it be a worn-down form of ohionos niphades, ‘sno’ flakes ‘.
g. Parthenius (Love Stories 33) gives a different account of NioN puaaishment: by Leto’s contrivance, Niobe’s father fell incestuously love with her and, when she repulsed him, burned her children to dear’ her husband was then mangled by a wild boar, and she threw hem from a rock. This story, confirmed by the scholiast on Euripide Phoenician Women (~59), is influenced by the myths ofCinyras, Smyn and Adonis (see ~ 8. h), and by the custom of burning children to the g( Moloch (see 70. 5 and t56. ~).
Pos~no~ once lay with the Nymph Caenis, daughter of Elatus ~
Magnesian or, some say, of Coronus the Lapith, and asked her to na~ a love-gift.
‘Transform me’, she said, ‘into an invulnerable fighter. I am weary of being a woman.’
Poseidon obligingly changed her sex, and she became Caeneus, waging war with such success that the Lapiths soon elected her their king; and she even begot a son, Coronus, whom Heracles killed many years later while fighting for Aegimius the Dorian. Exalted by this new condition, Caeneus set up a spear in the middle of the market-place, where the people congregated, and made them sacrifice to it as if to a god, and honour no other deity whatsoever.
b. Zeus, hearing of Caeneus’s presumption, instigated the Centaurs to an act of murder. During the wedding of Peirithous they made a sudden attack on her, but she had no difficulty in killing five or six of them, without incurring the slightest wound, because their weapons rebounded harmlessly from her charmed skin. However, the rema’m’mg Centaurs beat her on the head with fir logs, until they had driven her under the earth, and then piled a mound of logs above. So Caeneus smothered and died. Presently out flew a sandy-winged bird, which the seer Mopsus, who was present, recognized as her soul; and when they came to bury her, the corpse was again a woman’s.I
x. Apollodorus: i. 9. 16; ii. 7. 7 and Epitome i. 22; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 57-64, with scholiast; Hyginus: Fabula ~4; Oxyrhynchus Papyri xiii. p. ~33 if.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 448; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 458-53 ~; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 264..1
1. This mythhas three distinct strands. First, a custom which still prevails in Albania, of girls joining a war-band and dressing in men’s clothes, so that when they are killed in battle the enemy is surprised to discover their sex. Second, a refusal of the Lapiths to accept Hellenic overlordship; the spear set up for worship is likely to have been a maypole in honour of the New Moon-goddess Caenis, or Elate (‘fir-tree’), to whom the fir was sacred. The Lapiths were then defeated by the Acolians of Iolcus who, with the help of their allies the Centaurs, subjected them to their god Poseidon, but did not interfere with tribal law. Only, as at Argos, the clan chieftainess will have been obliged to assume an artificial beard to assert her right to act as magistrate and commander: thus Caenis became Caeneus, and Elate became Elatus. A similar change of sex is still announced by the Queen of the South, a joint ruler of the Lozi Kingdom in the Zambesi basin, when she enters the council chamber: ‘ I am transformed to a man !’ —but this is because one of her ancestresses usurped a patriarchal throne. Third, the ritual recorded on a black-f~gured oil jar (see 9—~), in which naked men, armed with mallets, beat an effigy of Mother Earth on head, apparently to release Core, the Spirit of the New Year; ‘Cae~~ means ‘new’.
2. The variety of sandy-winged bird released from the effigy wi~ depend on the season at which the rite was performed. If spring, it may have been a cuckoo (see 12.
ALTHOUGH Oeneus was the first mortal to be given a vine plant by Dionysus, Icarius anticipated him in the making of wine. He offered ~ sample from his trial j arful to a party of shephcrds in the Marathonian woods beneath Mount Pentelicus, who, failing to mix it with water, as Oenopion later advised, grew so drunk that they saw everything double, believed themselves bewitched, and killed Icarius. His hound Maera watched while they buried him trader a pine-tree and, after. wards, led his daughter Erigone to the grave by catching at her robe, and then dug up the corpse. In despair, Erigone hanged herself from the pine, praying that the daughters of Athens should suffer the same fate as hers while Icarius remained unavenged. Only the gods heard her, and the shepherds fled overseas, but many Athenian maidens were found hanging from the pine one after another, until the Delphic Oracle explained that it was Erigone who demanded their lives. The guilty shepherds were sought out at once and hanged, and the present Vintage Festival instituted, during which libations are poured to Icarius and Erigone, while girls swing on ropes from the branches of the tree, their feet resting on small platforms; this is how swings were invented. Masks are also hung from the branches, which twist around with the wind.
b. The image of Maera the hound was set in the sky, and became the Lesser Dog-star; some, therefore, identify Icarius with B06tes, and Erigone with the constellation of the Virgin.1
x. Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xxii. 29; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xlvii. 34-245; Hyginus: Fabula 130 and Poetic Astronomy ii. 4; Apollodorus: i. 8. I and iii. 14. 7; Athenaeus: xiv. Io; Festus sub Oscfilantes; $tatius: Thebald xi. 644-7; Servius on Virgil’s Georgics ii. 388-9.
* I. Maera was the name given to Priam’s wife Hecabe, orHecuba, after her transformation into a dog (see ~68. ~), and since Hecuba was really the three-headed Death-goddess Hecate (see 3~. 7), the libations poured to Erigone and Icarius were probably meant for her. The valley in which this ceremony took place is now called ‘Dionysus’. Erigone’s pine will have been the tree under which Attis the Phrygian was castrated and bled to death (Ovid: Fasti iv. 22~ if.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ix. ~6), and the explanation of the myth seems to be that when the Lesser Dog-star was in the ascendant, the shepherds of Marathon sacrificed one of their number as an annual victim to the goddess called Erigone.
2. Icarius means’ from the Icarian Sea ‘, i.e. from the Cyclades, whence the Attis cult came to Attica. Later, the Dionysus cult was superimposed on it; and the story of the Athenian girls’ suicide may have been told to account for the masks of Dionysus, hung from a pine-tree in the middle of a vineyard, which turned with the wind and were supposed to fructify the vines wherever they looked. Dionysus was usually portrayed as a long-haired, effeminate youth, and his masks would have suggested hanged women. But it is likely that dolls representing the ferffiity goddess Ariadne or Helen were previously hung from fruit-trees (see 88. ~0 and 98. 5). The girls’ swinging at the vintage festival will have been magical in its original intention: they represented bird-goddesses, and their swings made a semi-drcle in honour of the new moon. This custom may have been brought to Attica from Crete, since a terracotta group found at Hagia Triada shows a girl sw’mging between two pillars, on each of which a bird is perched.
3. The name Erigone is explained by the mythographer as ‘child of strife’, because of the trouble she occasioned; but its obvious meaning is ‘plentiful offspring ‘, a reference to the plentiful crop induced by the dolls.
0 ~ ~ E ts s, King of Calydon in Aetolia, married Althaea. She first bore him Toxeus, whom Oeneus killed with his own hands for rudely leaping over the fosse which had been dug in defence of the city; and then Meleager, said to have been, in reality, her son by Ares. When Meleager was seven days old, the Fates came to Althaea’s bedroom am announced that he could live only so long as a certain brand on the hearth remained unburned. She at once snatched the brand from the fire, extinguishing it with a pitcherful of water, and then hid it in a chest.
b. Meleager grew up to be a bold and invulnerable fighter, and the best javelin-thrower in Greece, as he proved at Acastus’s funeral games. He might still be alive but for an indiscretion committed by Oeneus who, one summer, forgot to include Artemis in his yearly sacrifices to the twelve gods of Olympus. Artemis, when informed of this neglect by Helius, sent a huge boar to kill Oeneus’s catde and labourers, and to ravage his crops; but Oen~us despatched heralds, inviting all the: bravest fighters of Greece to hunt the boar, and promising that whoever killed it should have its pelt and tusks.
c. Many answered the call, among them Castor and Polydeuces from Sparta; Idas and Lynceus from Messene; Theseus from Athens and Peirithous from Larissa; Jason from Iolcus and Admetus from Pherae; Nestor from Pylus; Peleus and Eurytion from Phthia; Iphicles from Thebes; Amphiaraus from Argos; Telamon from S~amis; Caeneus from Magnesia; and finally Ancaeus and Cepheus from Arcadia, followed by their compatriot, the chaste, swift-footed Atalanta, only daughter of Iasus and Clymene. X Iasus had wished for a male heir and Atalanta’s birth disappointed him so cruelly that he exposed her on the Parthenlan Hill near Calydon, where she was suckled by a bear which Artemis sent to her aid. Atalanta grew to womanhood among a dan of hunters who found and reared her, but remained a virgin, and always carried arms. On one occasion she came fainting fc~r thirst to Cyphanta and there, calling on Artemis, and striking a rock with the point of her spear, made a spring of water gush out. But she was not yet reconciled to her father.2
d. Oeneus entertained the huntsmen royally for nine days; and though Ancaeus and Cepheus at first refused to hunt in company with a woman, Meleager declared, on Oeneus’s behalf, that unless they withdrew their objection he would cancel the chase altogether. The truth was that Meleager had married Idas’s daughter Cleopatra, but now felt a sudden love for Atalanta and wished to ingratiate himself with her. His uncles, Althaea’s brothers, took an immediate dislike to the girl, convinced that her presence could lead only to mischief, because he kept sighing’deeply and exclaiming: ‘Ah, how happy the man whom she marries l’ Thus the chase began under bad auspices; Artemis herself had seen to this.
e. Amphiaraus and Atalanta were armed with bows and arrows; others with boar-spears, javelins, or axes, each being so anxious to win the pelt for himself that hunt discipline was neglected. At Meleager’s, suggestion, the company advanced in a half-moon, at some paces interval, through the forest where the boar had its lair.
f. The first blood shed was human. When Atalanta posted herself on the extreme right flank at some distance from her fellow-htmters, two Centaurs, Hylaeus and Rhaecus, who had joined the chase, decided to ravish her, each in turn assisting the other. But as soon as they ran towards her, she shot them both down and went to hunt at Meleager’s side.
g. Presently the boar was flushed from a water-course overgrowu with willows. It came bounding out, killed two of the hunters, hamstrung another, and drove young Nestor, who afterwards fought at Troy, up a tree. Jason and several others flung ill-aimed javelins at the boar, Iphicles alone contriving to graze its shoulder. Then Telamon and Peleus went in boldly with boar-spears; but Telamon tripped over a tree root and, while Peleus was pulling him to his feet, the boar saw them and charged. Atalanta let fly a timely arrow, which sank in behind the ear, and sent it scurrying off. Ancaeus sneered: ‘That is no way to hunt! Watch me!’ He swung his battle-axe at the boar as it charged, but was not quick enough; the next instant he lay castrated and disembowelled. In his excitement, Peleus killed Eurytion with a javelin aimed at the boar, which Amplfiaraus had succeeded in blinding with an arrow. Next, it rushed at Theseus, whose javelin flew wide; but Meleager also flung and transfixed its right flank, and then, as the boar whirled around in pain, trying to dislodge the missile, drove bSs hunting-spear deep under its left shoulder-blade to the heart.The boar fell dead at last. At once, Meleager flayed it, and presented the pelt to Atalanta, saying: ‘You drew first blood, and had we left the beast alone~ it would soon have succumbed to your arrow.’
b. His uncles were deeply offended. The eldest, Plexippus, argued that Meleager had won the pelt himself and that, on his refusal, it ~hould have gone to the most honourable person present—namely himself, as Oeneus’s brother-in-law. Plexipp~as’s younger brother supp0rtcd him with the contention that Iphicles, not Atalanta, had drawn first blood. Meleager, in a lover’s rage, killed them both.
i. Althaea, as she watched the dead bodies being carried home, set a curse upon Meleager; which prevented him from defending Calydon when his two surviving uncles declared war on the city and killed many of its defenders. At last his wife Cleopatra persuaded him to take up arms, and he killed both these uncles, despite their support by Apollo; whereupon the Furies instructed Althaea to take the unburned brand from the chest and cast it on the fire. Meleager felt a sudden scorching of his inwards, and the enemy overcame him with ease. Althaea and Cleopatra hanged themselves, and Artemis turned all but two of Meleager’s shrieking sisters into guinea-hens, which she brought to her island of Leros, the home of evil-livers.3
j. Delighted by Atalanta’s success, Iasus recognized her at last as his daughter; but when she arrived at the palace his first words were: ‘My child, prepare to take a husband!’—a disagreeable announcement, since t~e Delphic Oracle had warned her against marriage. She answered: ‘ Father, I consent on one condition. Any suitor for my hand must either beat me in a foot race, or else let me kill him.’ ‘So be it,’ said Iasus.
k. Many unfortunate princes lost their lives in consequence, because she was the swiftest mortal alive; but Melanion, a son of Amphidamas the Arcadian, invoked Aphrodite’s assistance. She gave him three golden apples, saying: ‘Delay Atalanta by letting these fall, one after the other, in the course of the race.’ The stratagem was successful. Atalanta stooped to pick up each apple in turn and reached the winning-post just behind Melanion.
l. The marriage tot;k place, but the Oracle’s warning was just~fied because, one day, as they passed by a precinct of Zeus, Melanion persuaded Atalanta to come inside and lie with him there. Vexed that his precinct had been defiled, Zeus changed them both into lions: for lions do not mate with lions, but only with leopards, and they were thus prevented from ever again enjoying each other. This was Aphrodite’s punishment first for Atalanta’s obstinacy in remaining a virgin, and then for her lack of gratitude in the matter of the golden apples.4 But some say that before this Atalanta had been untrue to Melanion and borne Meleager a child called Parthenopaeus, whom she exposed on the same hill where the she-bear had suckled her. He too survived and afterwards defeated Idas in Ionia and marched with the Seven Champions against Thebes. According to others, Ares, not Meleager, was Parthenopaeus’s father;5 Atalanta’s husband was not Melanion but Hippomenes; and she was the daughter of Schoeneus, who ruled
1. 0eofian Onchestus. It is added that she ancl he prośanecl a sanctuary not of Zeus but of Cybele, who turned them into lions and yoked them to her chariot.*
1. Aelian: Varia Historia xiii. ~; Callimachus: Hytn# to Artemis 2~6. 2. Apollodorus: iii. 9—2.
3. Homer: Iliad ix. 527—600; Apollodorus: i. 8. 2-3; Hyginus:
Fabulae ~7~, 174, and 273; Ovid: Metarnorphoxes viii. 270—545; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 48; Pausanias: iv. 2. 5; viii. 4. 7; and x. 3~. 2; Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 220-24; Antoninus Liberalis:
2; Athenaeus: xiv. 7~.
4. Apollodorus: iii. 9—2; Hyginus: Fabula ~85; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. :t ~3; ]First Vatican Mythographer: 39.
5. Hyginus: Fabulae 70, 99, and 270; First Vatican Mythographer: ~74.
6. Apollodorus: hi. 9.2, quoting Euripides’s Meteager; Ovid: Metamorphoses x. 565 fl.; Tzetzes: Chiliades xiii. 453; Lactantius on Statius’s Theb~id vi. 563; Hyginus: Fabula ~85.
1. Greekphysicianscreditedthemarshmallow (alth~ia, from althat’neln, ‘to cure’) with healing virtue and, being the first spring flower from which bees suck honey, it had much the same myth/c importance as ivyblossom, the last. The CalydonJan hunt is heroic saga, based perhaps on a famous boar hunt, and on an Aetolian clan feud occasioned by it. But the sacred king’s death at the onset of a boar—whose curved tusks dedicated it to the moon—is ancient myth (see ~8. $), and explains the introduction into the story of heroes from several different Greek states who had suffered this fate. The boar was peculiarly the emblem of Calydon (see ~06. c), and sacred to Ares, Meleager’s reputed father.
2. Toxeus’s leap over the fosse is paralleled by Remus’s leap over Romulus’s wall; i~ suggests the widespread custom of sacrificing a royal prince at the foundation of a city (I Kings xvi. 34). Meleager’$ brand recalls several Celtic myths: a hero’s death taking place when some external object—a fruit, a tree, or an animal—is destroyed.
3. Artemis was worshipped as a rneleagris, or guinea-hen, in the island of Leros, and on the Athenian Acropolis; the cult is of East African origin, to judge from this particular variety of guinea-fowl—wh/ch had a blue wattle, as opposed to the red-watfied Italian bird introduced from Numidia—and its queer cluckings were taken to be sounds of mourning. Devotees of neither Artemis nor Isis might eat guinea-fowl. The Ledans’ reputation for evil-living may have been due to their rehgious conservatism, like the Cretans’ reputation for lying (see 45—2). 4. She-bears were sacred to Artemis (see 22.4), and Atalanta’s race against Melanion is probably deduced from an icon which showed the doomed king, with the golden apples in his hand (see 32. l and 53.5), being chased to death by the goddess. A companion icon will have shown an image of Artemis supported by two lions, as on the gate at Mycenae, and on several Mycenaean and Cretan seals. The second version of the myth seems to be the older, if only because Schoeneus, Atalanta’s father, stands for Schoenis, a title of Aphrodite’s; and because Zeus does not figure in it.
.1. Why the lovers were punished—here the mythographers mistakenly refer to Pliny, though Pliny says, on the contrary, that lions vigorously punish lionesses for mating with leopards (Natural History viii. 17)—is a problem of greater interest than Sir Jam, es Frazer in his notes on Apollodorus allows. It seems to record an old exogamic ruling, according to which members of the same totem clan could not marry one another, nor could lion clansmen marry into the leopard clan, which belonged to the same sub-phratry; as the lamb and goat clans could not intermarry at Athens (see 97. $).
6. Oeneus was not the only Hellenic king who withheld a sacrifice from Artemis (see 69. b and 72. i). Her demands were much more severe than those of other Olympian deities, and even in Classical times included holocausts of living animals. These Oeneus will hardly have denied her; but the Arcadian and Boeotian practice was to sacrifice the king himself, or a surrogate, as the Actaeon stag (see 22. 1 ); and Oeneus may well have refused to be torn in pieces.
T ~ E mother of Aeacus’s two elder sons, namely Telamon and Pcleus, was Endels, Sciron’s daughter. Phocus, the youngest, was a son of the Nereid Psamathe, who had turned herself into a seal while unsuccessfully trying to escape from Aeacus’s embraces. They all lived together in the island of Aegina.1
b. Phocus was Aeacus’s favourite, and his excellence at athletic games drove Telamon and Peleus wild with jealousy. For the sake of peace, therefore, he led a party of Aeginetan emigrants to Phociswhere another Phocus, a son of Ornytion the Corinthian, had already colonized the neighbourhood of Tithorea and Delphi-and in the course of time his sons extended t~he state of Phocis to its present lixrfits.
One day Aeacus sent for Phocui, perhaps intending to bequeath him the island kingdom; but, encouraged by the’zr mother, Telamon and Peleus plotted to kill him on his return. They challenged Phocus to a fivefold athletic contest, and whether it was Telamon who felled him, as if accidentally, by throwing a stone discus at his head, and Peleus who then despatched him with an axe, or whether it was the other way about, has been much disputed ever since. In either case, Telamon and ?eleus were equally guilty of fratricide, and together hid the body in a wood, where Aeacus found it. Phocus lies buffed dose to the Aeaceum.2
c. Telamon took refuge in the ixland of Salamis, where Cychreus was king, and sent back a messenger, denying any part in the murder. heacus, in reply; forbade him ever again to set foot in Aegina, though permitting him to plead his case from the sea. Rather than stand and shout on the rocking deck of his ship anchored behind the breakers, Telamon sailed one night into what is now called the Secret Harbour, and sent masons ashore to build a m01e, which would serve him as rostrum; they finished this task before dawn, and it is still to be seen. Aeacus, however, rejected his eloquent plea that Phocus’s death was accidental, and Telamon returned to Salamis, where he married the king’s daughter Glauce, and succeeded to Cychreus’s throne.3
d. This Cychreus, a son of Poseidon and Salamis, daughter of the fiver Asopus, had been chosen King of Salamis when he killed a serpent to end its widespread ravages. But he kept a young serpent of the same breed which behaved in the same destructive way until expelled by Eurylochus, a companion of Odysseus; Demeter then welcomed it at Eleusis as one of her attendants. But some explain that Cychreus himself, called’ Serpent’ because of his cruelty, was banished by Eurylochus and took refuge at Eleusis, where he was appointed to a minor office in Demeter’s sanctuary. He became, at all events, one of the guardian heroes of Salamis, the Serpent Isle; there he was bttried, his face turned to the west, and appeared in serpent form among the Greek ships at the famous victory of Salamis. Sacrifices were offered at his tomb, and when the Athenians disputed the possession of the island with the Megarians, Solon the famous law-giver sailed across by night and propitiated him.4
e. On the death of his wife Glauce, Telamon married Periboea of Athens, a grand-daughter of Pelops, who bore him Great Ajax; and later the captive Hesione, daughter of Laomedon, who bore him the equ~ well-lmown Teucer.s J~ Peleus fled to the court of Actor, King of Phthia, by wh0~
adopted son Eurytion he was purified. Actor then gave him ~
claughter Polymela in marriage, and a third part of the kingdom. One day Eurytion, who ruled over another third part, took Peleus to hunt the Calydonian hoar, but Peleus speared him accidentally and fled to Iolcus, where he was once more purrfled, this time by Acastus, son 0~ Pelias.6
g. Acastus’s wife, Cretheis, tried to seduce Peleus and, when he rebuffed her advances, lyingly told Polymela: ‘He intends to desen you and marry my daughter Sterope.’ Polymela believed Cretheis’~ mischievous tale, and hanged herself. Not content with the harm she had done, Cretheis went weeping to Acastus, and accused Peleus 0i having attempted her virtue.
h. Loth to kill the man whom he had purified, Acastus challenge~ him to a hunting contest on Mount Pelion. Now, in reward for h~ chastity, the gods had given Peleus a magic sword, forged by Daedalus which had the property of making its owner victorious in battle an( equally successful in the chase. Thus he soon piled up a great heap o stags, bears, and boars; but when he went off to kill even more Acastus’s companions claimed the prey as their master’s and jeered a his want of skill. ‘Let the dead beasts decide this matter with their ova mouths!’ cried Peleus, who had cut out their tongues, and now pro duced them from a bag to prove that he had easily won the contest.? i. After a festive supper, in the course of which he outdid all other as a trencherman, Peleus fell fast asleep. Acastus then robbed him of hi magic sword, hid it under a pile of cow-dung, and stole away with hi followers. Peleus awoke to find himself deserted, disarmed, and sur rounded by wild Centaurs, who were on the point of murdering him however, their king Cheiron not only intervened to save his life, bu divined where the sword lay hidden and restored it to him.8
j. Meanwhile, on the advice of Themis, Zeus chose Peleus to be th husband of the Nereid Thetis, whom he would have married himsell had he not been discouraged by the Fates’ prophecy that any son bo~ to Thetis would become far more powerful than his father. He was als, vexed that Thetis had rej~cted his advances, for her foster-mothe Hera’s sake, and therefore vowed that she should never marry a immortal. Hera, however, gratefully decided to match her with th noblest of mortals, and summoned all Olympians to the wedding whe: the moon should next be full, at the same time sending her messeng› to King Cheiron’s cave with an order for Peleus to make ready.9
k. Now, Cheiron foresaw that Thetis, being immortal, would at first resent the marriage; and, acting on his instructions, Peleus concealed himself behind a bush of patti-coloured myrtle-berries on the shores ofa Thessalian islet, where Thetis often came, riding naked on a harnessed dolphin, to enjoy her midday sleep in the cave which this bush half screened. No sooner had she entered the cave and fallen asleep than Peleus seized hold of her. The struggle was silent and fierce. Thetis turned successively into fire, water, a lion, and a serpent; ~o but Peleus had been warned what to expect, and clung to her resolutely, even when she became an enormous slippery cutde-fish and squirted ink at him—a change which accounts for the name of Cape Sepias, the near-by promontory, now sacred to the Nereids. Though burned, drenched, mauled, stung, and covered with sticky sepia ink, Peleus would not let her go and, in the end, she yielded and they lay locked in a passionate embrace. i i
1. Their wedding was celebrated outside Cheiron’s cave on Mount Pelion. The Olympians attended, seated on twelve thrones. Hera herself raised the bridal torch, and Zeus, now reconciled to his defeat, gave Thetis away. The Fates and the Muses sang; Ganymedes poured nectar; and the fifty Nereids performed a spiral dance on the white sands. Crowds of Centaurs attended the ceremony, wearing chaplets 0fgrass, brandishing darts of fir, and prophesying good fortune.12 in. Cheiron gave Pcleus a spear; Athene had polished its shaft, which was cut from an ash on the summit of Pelion; and Hephaestus had forged its blade. The Gods’ joint gift was a magnixqcent suit of golden armour, to which Poseidon added the two immortal horses Balius and Xanthus—by the West Wind out of the Harpy Podarge.13
n. But the goddess Eris, who had not been invited, was determined to put the divine guests at loggerheads, and while Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite were chatting amicably together, arm in arm, she rolled a golden apple at their feet. Peleus picked it up, and stood embarrassed by its inscription: ‘To the Fairest!’, not knowing which of the three might be intended. This apple was the protocatarctical cause of the Trojan War.14
0. Some describe Peleus’s wife Thetis as Cheiron’s daughter, and a mere mortal; and say that Cheiron, wishing to honour Peleus, spread the rumour that he had married the goddess, her mistress.1S
ś. Meanwhile Peleus, whose fortunes the kindly Cheiron had restored, and who now also acquired hrge herds of cattle as a dowry, sent some of these to Phthia as an indemnity for his accidental ltillin of Eurytion; but, when the payment was refused by the Phthians, 1›~ them to roam at will about the countryside. This proved to have been a fortunate decision, because a fierce wolf which ?samathe had sent after him, to avenge the death of her son ?hocus, so glutted its hunger on these masterless cattle that it could hardly crawl. When Peleus and Thetis came face to face with the wolf, it made as if to spring at Peleus’s throat, but Thetis glowered balefully with protruded tongue, and turned it into a stone, which is still pointed out on the road betwee~ Lochs and ?hocis.16
q. Later, Peleus returned to Iolcus, where Zeus supplied him with an army of ants transformed into warriors; and thus he became known a~ King of the Myrmidons. He captured the city single-handed, killed first Acastus, then the cowering Cretheis; and led his Myrmidons into the city between the pieces of her dismembered body.17
r. Thetis successively burned away the mortal parts of her six sons by Peleus, in order to make them immortal like herself, and sent each of them in turn up to Olympus. But Peleus contrived to match the seventh from her when she had already made all his body, except the a~le-bone, immortal by laying it on the fire and afterwards rubbing it with ambrosia; the half-charred ankle-bone had escaped this final treatment. Enraged by his interference, Thetis said farewell to ?eleus, and returned to her home in the sea, naming her son’ Achilles’, because he had as yet placed no liivs to her breast. Peleus provided Achilles with a new ankle-bone, taken from the skeleton of the swift giant Damysus, but this was fated to prove his undoing. X8
s. Too old to fight at Troy himself, Peleus later gave Achilles the golden armour, the ashen spear, and the two horses which had been his wedding presents. He was eventually expelled from Phthia by Acastus’s sons, who no longer feared him when they heard of Achilles’s death; but Thetis instructed him to visit the cave by the myrtle-bush, where he had first mastered her, and wait there until she took him away to live with her for ever in the depths of the sea. Peleus went to the cave, and eagerly watched the passing ships, hoping that one of them might be bringing his grandson Neoptolemus back from Troy. X9
1. Neoptolemus, meanwhile, was refitting his shattered fleet in Molossia and, when he heard of Peleus’s banishment, disguised himself as a Trojan captive and took ship for Iolcus, there contrix~mg to kill Aca~tus’s sons and seize ~› cit~. But ~eleus, rowin impatient, had chartered a vessel for ~ voyage to Molossia; rough weather drove her to the island of Icos, near Euboea, where he died and was buried, thus forfeiting the immortality which Thetis had ‘promised him. ZO
x. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar: Nemean Odes v.
2. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 25; Pausanias: x. x. ~ and ii. 29. 7; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; The Alcmaeonis, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache 687; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 175; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72. 3. Apollodorus: hi. 12.7; Pausanias:ii. 29.7; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit. 4. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hesiod, quoted by Strabo: ix. x. 9; Stephanus o f Byzantium sub Kychreios Pagos; Eustathius on Dionysius’s Description of the Earth 507; Plutarch: Solon 9; Lycophron: Cassandra ~xo; Pausanias: i. 36. x. 5. Apollodorus: loc. tit.
6. Ibid.: iii. 13. ~-2; Diodorus Sictrim: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 175; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ii. 648. 7. Pindar: Nemean Odes v. 26 iT. and iv. 59; schohast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iv. 54 and 59; Zenobius: Proverbs v. 20; Apollodorus: loc. tit. 8. Apollodorus: iii. ~3.3; Hesiod, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iv. 59.
9. Apollonius Rhodim: iv. 790 iT.; Pindar: Isthmian Odes viii. 41 if. Io. Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 221 l~,; Sophocles: Troilus, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iii. 35; Apollodorus: iii. ~3—5; Pindar: Nemean Odes iv. 62; Pausanias: v. ~8. ~.
XL Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~75 and ~78; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 582; Herodotus: vii. ~9~; Philostratus: Heroica xix. 12. Euripides: Iphigeneia in Aulis 703 if. and ~036 IT..; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 790; Catullus: xliv. 305 if.
~3—Apollodorus: iii. ~3—5; Homer: Iliad xvi. ~44; xviii. 84 and xvi. 149; Cypria quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xvi. ~40.
~4. Hyginus: Fabula 92; Fulgentius: hi. 7~5. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 558; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius iv. 816.
16. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 38; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~75 and 90~.
17. Tzctzes: On Lťcophron ~75; Homer: Iliad xxiv. 536; Pindar:
mean Odes iii. 34; Apollodorus: iii. ~3.7; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 224.
18. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv, quoted by Photius: p. 487; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 6; Lycophron: Cassandra ~78 if.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xvi. 37.
19. Homer: Iliad xviii. 434 and xvi. 149; Euripides: Trojan Wor~ 1128, with scholiast; Andromache i253 iT.
20. Dictys Cretensis: vi. 7-9; Stephanus of Byzantinm sub Icos; Palatine Anthology vii. 2. 9 IT. ~. The~nyth ofAeacus, Psamathe (‘sandy shore’), and Phocus (‘seal’) occurs in the folklore of almost every European country. Usually the hero sees a flock of seals swimming towards a deserted shore under a fu~ moon, and then stepping out of their skins to reveal themselves as young women. He hides behind a rock, while they dance naked on the sand, then seizes one of the seal skins, thus winning power over its owner, whom he gets with child. Eventually they quarrel; she regains her skin and swims away. The dance of the fifty Nereids at Thetis’s wedding, and her return to the sea after the birth of Achilles, appear to be fragments the same myth—the origin of which seems to have been a ritual dance fifty seal-priestesses, dedicated to the Moon, which formed a proem tc the Chief-priestess’s choice of a sacred king. Here the scene is set Aegina but, to judge from the story of Peleus’s struggle near Cap~ Sepias, a similar ritual was performed in Magnesia by a college ofcuttl~ fish priestesses—the cuttie-fish appears prominently in Cretan works art, including the standard weight from the Royal Treasury at Cnossus, and also on megalithic monuments at Carnac and elsewhere in Brittany. It has eight tentacles, as the sacred anemone of Pelion has eight petals eight being the number of fertility in Mediterranean myth. Peleu~ (‘muddy’) may have become the sacred king’s title after he had beer~ anointed with sepia, since he is described as the son of Endels, ‘the entangler’, a synonym for the cuttle-fish.
2. Acastus’s hunting party, the subsequent banquet, and the loss Peleus’s magic sword seem to be mistakenly deduced from an icon which showed the preliminaries to a coronation ceremony: coronation implying marriage to the tribal heiress. The scene apparently included the king’s ritual combat with men dressed as beasts, and the drawing a regal sword from a cleft rock (misinterpreted by the mythographer as a heap of cow dung)—as in the myths of Theseus (see 95. e) and King Arthur of Lyonesse. But the ashen spear cut by Cheiron from Mount Pelion is an earlier symbol of sovereignty than the sword.
3. Thetis’s transformations suggest a display of the goddess’s seasonal powers presented in a sequence of dances (see 9. d and 32. b). The myrfi› behind which Peleus first met her, emblemized the last month of his predecessor’s reign (see 52. $ and I09. 4); and therefore served as theiI rendezvous when his own reign ended.
This myth seems to record a treaty-marriage, attended by representatives of twelve confederate tribes or dans, between a Phthian prince and the Moon-priestess of Iolcus in Thessaly.
4. It may well be that the author of the old English Seege or Battafle of Troy drew on a lost Classical source when he made Peleus ‘half man, half horse’: that is to say, Peleus was adopted into an Aeacid horse-cuk clan. Such an adoption will have implied a sacrificial horse-feast (see 75.3): which explains the wedding g~ft of Balius and Xanthus without a chariot for them to draw. The Centaurs of Magnefia and the Thessalians of 10lcus seem to have been bound by an exogamic alJiance: hence the statement by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius that Peleus’s wife was, in reality, Cheiron’s daughter.
5. Peleus’s embarrassment when he looked at the apple thrown down by Eris suggests a picture of the Moon-goddess, in triad, presenting the apple of immortality to the sacred king (see 32. 4; 53. 5; and 159. 3)—Acastus’s murder, and Peleus’s march into the city between the dismembered pieces of Cretheis’s body, may be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed a new king about to ride through the streets of his capital after having ritually hacked his predecessor in pieces with an axe.
6. The frequent murders, accidental or intentional, which caused princes to leave home and be purified by foreign kings, whose daughters they then married, are an invention oś1ater mythographers. There is no reason to suppose that Pelcus left Aegina, or Phthia, under a cloud; at a time when kingship went by matrilineal succession, candidates for the throne always came from abroad, and the new king was reborn into the royal house after ritually murdering his predecessor. He then changed his name and tribe, which was expected to throw the vengeful ghost of the murdered man off his scent. Similarly, Telamon of Aegina went to Salamis, was chosen as the new king, killed the old king—who became an oracular hero—and married the chief-priestess of an owl college. It was found convenient, in more civilized times, when much the same ritual was used to purify ordinary criminals, to forget that kingship implied murder, and to suggest that Peleus, Telamon, and the rest had been involved in crimes or scandals unconnected with their accession to the throne. The scandal is frequently a false accusation of having attempted a queen’s virtue (see 75. a and ~ox. e). Cychreus’s connexion with the Eleusinian Mysteries and Telamon’s marriage to an Athenian princess became important when, in 620 B.C., Athens and Megara disputed the possession of Salamis. The Spartans judged the case, and the Athenian ambassadors successfully based their claim on Telamon’s connexion with Attica (Plutarch: Solon 8 and 9). 7. Phocus’s death by the discus, like that of Acrisius (see 72. p), seems to be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed the end of the sealking’s reign—the flying discus being a sun-disk; as the myth makes plain, the sacrificial weapon was an axe. Several heroes besides Achilles were killed by a heel wound, and not only in Greek but in Egyptian, Celtic, Lydian, Indian, and Norse mythology (see 90. 8 and 92. ~o).
8. The burning of Thetis’s sons was ,common practice: the yearly sacrifice of boy surrogates for the sacred king (see 24. ~o and ~56. 2). At the close of the eighth year the king himself died (see 9~—4 and ~09.3). A parallel in the Indian Mahabharata is the drowning by the Gangesgoddess of her seven sons by the God Krishna. He saves the last, Bhishma; then she deserts him. Actor’s division of his kingdom into three parts is paralleled in the myth ośProetus (see 72. h): the sacred king, instead of letting himself be sacrificed when his reign was due to end, retah~ed one part of his kingdom, and bequeathed the remainder to his successors. Subsequent kings insisted on a lifetime tenure of sovereignty. ‘~ 9. Peleus’s death at Cos suggests that his name was a royal title there as~ well as at Phthia, Iolcus, and Salamis. He became king of the Myrmidons! because the Phthians worshipped their goddess as Myrmex (‘ ant’—se~ 66. 2). Antoninus Liberalis’s story of Thetis and the wolf seems to hayel been deduced from an icon which showed a priestess of Wolfish Aphr0dite (Pausanias: ii. 3~. 6) wearing a Gorgon mask as she sacrifices cattle.
Hť v s ~ u s, a high-king of the Lapiths, whom the Naiad Creusa bore to the River-god Peneius, married Chlidanope, another Naiad, and had by her a daughter, Cyrene. Cyrene despised spinning, weaving, and similar household tasks; instead, she would hunt wild beasts on Mount Pelion all day and half the night, explaining that her father’s flocks and herds needed protection. Apollo once watched her wrestling with a powerful lion; he summoned King Cheiron the Centaur to witness the combat (from which Cyrene, as usual, emerged triumphant) asking her name, and whether she would make him a suitable bride. Cheiron laughed. He was aware that Apollo not only knew her name, but had already made up his mind to carry her off, either when he saw her guarding Hypseus’s flocks by the river Peneius, or when she received two hunting dogs from his hands as a prize for winning the foot race at Pclias’s funeral games.1
t~. Cheiron fnrther prophesied that Apollo would convey Cyrene overseas to the richest garden of Zeus, and make her the queen of a great city, having first gathered an island people about a hill rising from a plain. Welcomed by Ulbya to a golden palace, she would win a queendom equally beneficent to hunters and farmers, and there bear him a son. Hermes would act as man-midwife and carry the child, called Aristeus, or Aristaeus, to the enthroned Hours and Mother Earth, bidding them feed him on nectar and ambrosia. When Aristaeus grew to mai~ood, he would win the titles of’Immortal Zeus’, ‘Pure Apollo’, and ‘Guardian of the Flocks’.2
c. ApoLlo duly tookCyrene away in his golden chariot, to the site of what is now the city of Cyrene; Aphrodite was waiting to greet their arrival, and bedded them without delay in Libya’s golden chamber. That evening Apollo promised Cyrene a long life in which to indulge her passion for hunting and reign over a fertile country. He then left her to the care of certain Myrtle-nymphs, children of Hermes, on the near-by hills, where she bore Aristaeus and, after a second visit from Apollo, Idmon the seer. But she also lay with Ares one night, and bore him the Thracian Diomedes, owner of the man-eating mares.3
d. The Myrtle-nymphs, nicknaming Aristaeus ‘Agreus’ and ‘Non~ius’, taught him how to curdle milk for cheese, build bee-hives, and make the oleaster yield tl~e cultivated olive. These useful arts he passed on to others, who gratefully paid him divine honours. From U~bya he sailed to Boeotia, after which Apollo led him to Cheiron’s cave for instruction in certain Mysteries.
e. When Aristaeus had grown to manhood, the Muses married him to Autoho~, by whom he became the father of the ill-fated Actaeon, and of Macris, nurse to Dionysus. They also taught him the art of healing and prophecy, and set him to watch over their sheep which grazed across the Athamantian Plain of Phthia, and about Mount Othry’s, and in the valley of the river Apidanus. It was here that ^ristaeus perfected the art of hunting, taught him by Cyrene.1
f. One day he went to consult the Delphic Oracle, and was told to viasit the island of Ceos, where he would be greatly honoured. Setting sail at once, Aristaeus found that the scorching Dog-star had caused a plague among the islanders, in vengeance of Icarius whose secret murderers were sheltering among them. Aristaeus summoned the people, raised a great altar in the mountains, and offered sacrifices on it to Zeus, at the same time propitiating the Dog-star by putting the murderers to death. Zeus was gratif~ed and ordered the Etesian Winds, in future, to cool ~ Greece and its adjacent islands for forty days from the Dog-star’s rising. Thus the plague ceased, and the Ceans not only showerec Aristaeus with gratitude, but still continue to propitiate the Dog-sta~ every year before its appearance. S
g. He then visited Arcadia and, later, settled at Tempe. But there al his bees died and, greatly distressed, he went to a deep pool in the rive Peneius where he knew that Cyrene would be staying with her Naia~ sisters. His aunt, Arethusa, heard an imploring voice through the water put out her head, recognized Aristaeus, and invited him down to th~ wonderful palace of the Naiads. These washed him with water drav~ from a perpetual spring and, after a sacrif~cial feast, he was advised b] Cyrene: ‘Bind my cousin Proteus, and force him to explain why yo~ bees sickened.’
h. Proteus was taking his midday rest in a cave on the island 0 Pharos, sheltering from the heat of the Dog-star, and Aristaeus, havint overcome hi/n, despite his changes, learned that the bees’ sickness wa his punishment for having caused Eurydice’s death; and it was true that when he had made love to her on the river-bank near Tempe, she ha( fled from him and been bitten by a serpent.
1. Aristaeus now returned to the Naiads’ palace, where Cyren~
instructed him to raise four altars in the woods to the Dryads, Eury. dice’s companions, and sacrifice four young bulls and four heifers; then to pour a libation of blood, leaving the carcasses where they lay and finally to return in the morning, nine days later, bringing poppie of forgetfuhiess, a fatted calf, and a black ewe to propitiate the ghost 0t Orpheus, who had now joined Eurydice below. Aristaeus obeyed and, on the ninth morning, a swarm of bees rose from the rotting carcasse! and settled on a tree. He captured the swarm, which he put into a hive; and the Arcadians now honour him as Zeus for having taught them this method of raising new swarms of bees.6
j. Later, distressed by the death of his son Actaeon, which rmasedi, him a hatred of Boeotia, he sailed with his followers to Libya, where he asked Cyrene for a fleet in which to emigrate. She gladly complied, and soon he was at sea again, making north-westward. Enchanted by the savage beauty of Sardinia, his first landfall, he began to cultivate it and, having begotten two sons there, was presently joined by Daedalus; but is said to have founded no city there.7
k. Aristaeus visited other distant islands, and spent some years in Sicily, where he received divine honours, especially from the olivegrowers. Finally he went to Thrace, and supplemented his education by taking part in the Mysteries of Dionysus. After living for a while near Mount Haemus, and founding the city of Aristaeum, he disappeared without trace, and is now worshipped as a god both by the Thracian barbarians and by civilized Greeks?
1. Pindar: Pythian O#es ix. 5 if.; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 500 if.; Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 206.
2. Pindar: Ioc. cit.
3. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 81; Pindar: foe. elt.; Apollonius Rhodius: Ioc. tit.; Hyginus: Fa&ala ~4; Apollodorus: ii. 5.8.
4. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: iii. 4. 4; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1131 and ii. 500 if.; Pindar: Ioc. tit.
5. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 500 if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 82; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 4.
6. Virgil: Georgicsiv. 3~7-$58; Pindar, quotedby Servius on Virgil’s Georgics i. ~47—$ervius: Ioc. tit.
8. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: x. ~7. 3.
* I. Aristaeus’s origins have been embroidered upon by Pindar, to flatter a descendant of Battus who, in 69~ ~3.›., led a colony from Theta to Libya, where he founded Cyrene, and was the first king of a long dynasty. The Cyreneans claimed their ancestor Aristaeus—according to Jt~stin (xiii. 7), Battus (‘ tongue-tied ‘) was only his nickname-as the son 0fApollo, because Apollo had been worshipped in Thera; and the port of Cyrene was consequently called Apollonia. But Cyrene was a mythological figure long before Battus’s time. Her association with the Centaurs shows that she was goddess ofa Magnesian horse cult imported toThera; śor Cheiron’s name also appears in early Theran rock inscriptions. The n~ťth ofldmon’s birth from Cyrene and Ares refers to this earlier goddess. 2. Myrtle is originally a death-tree (see 109.4), and the Myrtle-nymphs were therefore prophetesses capable of instructing young Aristaeus; but it became symbolic of colonization, because emigrants took myrtleboughs with them to demonstrate that they had ended an epoch. 3. Aristaeus was a cult-title of Arcadian and Cean Zeus; and elsewhere 0fApollo and Hermes. According to Servius (on Virgil’s Georgics i. 14) Hesiod called Aristaeus ‘a pastoral Apollo’. At Tanagra in Boeotia (Pausanias: ix. 22. I) Hermes was known as ‘Ram-bearer’, and fish were sacred to him at Pharae in Achaea (Pausanias: vii. zz. 2). Thus a tombpainting at Cyrene shows ‘Aristaeus ‘ surrounded by sheep and fish and c,rrťing a ram. His wanderings are offered in explanation of the cult~clc Aristaeus, which occurs in Sicily, Sardinia, Ceos, Boeotia, Thessaly, \~accdonia, and Arcadia. The Dog-star is the Egyptian god Thoth, :~ientified with Hermes, who was known as Aristaeus by the Ceans.
4. His raising of bees from the carcasses of cattle has been mistold by Virgil. They will have swarmed, rather, from the lion which Cyrene lolled, or which was killed in her honour. This myth, like that of Samson’s bees which swarmed from a lion’s carcass, seems to be deduced from a primitive icon showing a naked woman tussliug amorously with a lion, while a bee hovers above the carcass of another liou. The naked woman is the Lion-goddess Cyrene, or Hepatu the Hittite, or Anatha of Syria, or Hera the Lion-goddess of Mycenae, and her partner is the sacred king, who is due to die under the midsummer sign of Leo, emblemized by a knife in the Egyptian Zodiac. Like Theseus or Heracles, he wears a lion~ mask and skin, and is animated by the spirit of the dead lion, his pre-~ decessor, which appears as a bee (see 90. 3). This is spring-time, when bees first swarm, but afterwards,as the Midsummer Bee-goddess, she will sting him to death, aud emasculate him (see 18.3). The lion which the sacred king himself killed—as did both Heracles and his friend Phylius (see 153.i e-f) in the Peloponnese; or Cyzicus on Mount Dindymum in the Sea 0f Marmara (see ~49. h); or Samson in Philistia (Judges x/v. 6);’or David at Bethlehem (~ Samuel xvii. 34)—was one of the beasts which challenged him to a ritual combat at his coronation.
5. Virgil’s account of Aristaeus’s visit to the river Peneius illustrates thel irresponsible use of myth: Proteus, who lived at Pharos off the Nile Delta,! has been dragged into the story by the heels—there was a famous oracle of Apollo at Tempe, which Aristaeus, his son; would naturally have consuited; Arethusa, a Peloponnesian stream, had no business in the Peneius; and Aristaeus is shown different chambers in the Naiads’ palace, where’ the sources of the Tiber, the Po, the Anio, the Phasis, and other widely separated rivers are kept—a mythologically absurd conception.
6. Export of oil to Sicily will have been more profitable to the Creta~z,~ than that of olive-grafts; but once Hellenic colonies had been founded oa~] the southern coast in late Mycenaean times, olive-culture was established’ there. The Afistaeus who vzs~ted S~cily may be ~dentified w~th Zeusi Morius, who was responsible for distributing grafts of the sacred olivetrees descended from the one planted by Athene on the Athenian Acropolis (see 16. c). He may also have introduced the science of bee-keeping which came to Athens from Minoan Crete, where professional beekeepers had a bee and a glove as their trade device, and used terracotta hives. The Greek word for bee-bread, cerinthos, is Cretan; and so must all the related words be, —...... waxen’ such as certon, honey-comb , certnos, , and cgraphis, ‘bee-moth’—a kind of locust~ Cer, in fact, whose name (als0 spelt Car or Q’re) came generally to mean ‘fate’, ‘doom’, or ‘destiny’ multiplied into ceres, ‘spites, plagues, or unseen ills’—must have been the Cretan Bee-g ddess, a goddess of Death in Life. Thus the Sphinx-goddess of Thebes i~ called by Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes 777) ‘ the mansnatching Cer. 0
M~D,~s, son of the Great Goddess of Ida, by a satyr whose name is not remembered, was a pleasure-loving King of Macedonian Bromium’, where he ruled over the Brigians (also called Moschians) and planted his celebrated rose gardens.1 In his infancy, a procession of ants was observed carrying grains of wheat up the side of his cradle and placing them between his lips as he slept—a prodigy which the soothsayers read as an omen of the great wealth that would accrue to him; and when he grew older, Orpheus tutored him.2
b. One day, the debauched old satyr Silenus, Dionysus’s former pedagogue,, happened to straggle from the main body of the riotous Dionysian army as it marched out of Thrace into ]30eoda, and was found sleeping off his drunken fit in the rose gardens. The gardeners bound him with garlands of flowers and led him before Midas, to whom he told wonderful tales of an immense continent lying beyond the Ocean stream-altogether separate from the conjoined mass of Europe, Asia, or Africa—where splendid cities abound, peopled by gigantic, happy, and long-lived inhabitants, and enjoying a remarkable legal system. A great expedition—at least ten million strong ~ once set out thence across the Ocean in ships to visit the Hyperboreans; but on learning that theirs was the best land that the old world had to offer, retired in disgust. Among other wonders, Silenus mentioned a frightful whirlpool beyond which no trave, ller may pass. Two streams flow close by, and trees growing on the banks of the first bear fruit that causes those who eat it to weep and groan and pine away. But fruit growing by the other Stream renews the youth even of the very aged: in fact, after passing backwards through middle age, young manhood, and adolescence, they become children again, then infants—and finally disappear! Midas, enchanted by Silenus’s fictions, entertained him for five days and nights, and then ordered a guide to escort him to Dionvsus’s headquarters.3
c. Dionysus, who had been anxious on Silenus’s account, sent to ask how Midas wished to be rewarded. He replied without hesitation: ‘Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.’ However, not only stones, flowers, and the furnishings of his house turned to gold but, when he sat down to table, so did the food he ate and the water drank. Midas soon begged to be released from his wish, because he wa fast dying of hunger and thirst; whereupon Dionysus, highly enter tained, told him to visit the source of the river Pactolus, near Mount Tmolus, and there wash himself. He obeyed, and was at once freed from the golden touch, but the sands of t~e river Pactolus are bright with gold to this day.1
d. Midas, having thus entered Asia with his train of Brigians, was adopted by the childless Phrygian King Gordius. While only a poor peasant, Gordius had been surprised one day to see a royal eagle perch on the pole of his ox-cart. Since it seemed prepared to settle there all ú day, he drove the team towards Phrygian Telmissus, now a part 0~ Galatia, where there was a reliable oracle; but at the gate of the city he met a young prophetess who, when she saw the eagle still perched on the pole, insisted on his offering immediate sacrifices to Zeus the King~ ‘Let me come with you, peasant,’ she said, ‘to make sure that you choose the correct victims.’ ‘By all means,’ replied Gordius. ‘You appear to be a wise and considerate young woman. Are you prepared to marry me?’ ‘As soon as the sacrifices have been offered,’ she answered.
e. Meanwhile, the King of Phrygia had died suddenly, without issue, and an oracle announced:’ Phrygians, your new king is approaching with his bride, seated in an ox-cart!’ When the ox-cart entered the market place of Telmissus, the eagle at once attracted popular attention, and Gordius was unanimously acclaimed king. In gratitude, he dedicated the cart to Zeus, together with its yoke, which he had knotted to the pole in a peculiar manner. An oracle then declared that whoever d~covered how to untie the knot would become the lord of all Asia. Yoke and pole were consequently laid up in the Acropolis at Gordium, a city which Gordius had founded, where the priests of Zeus guarded them jealously for centuries—until Alexander the M~cedonian petulantly cut the knot with his sword.s f After Gordius’s death, Midas succeeded to the throne, promoted the worship of Dionysus, and founded the city of Ancyra. The ]3figians who had come with him became known as Phrygians, and the kings of Phrygia are alternately named Midas and Gordius to this day; so that the first Midas is now mistakenly described as a son of Gordius.6
g. Midas attended the famous musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, umpired by the River-god Tmolus. Tmolus awarded the prize to Apollo who, when Midas dissented from the verdict, punished him with a pair ofass’s cars. For a long time, Midas managed to conceal these under a Phrygian cap; but his barber, made aware of the deformity, found it impossible to keep the shameful secret close, as Midas had enjoined him to do on pain of death. He therefore dug a hole in the river-bank and, first making sure that nobody was about, whispered into it:’ King Midas has ass’s ears !’ Then he filled up the hole, and went away, at peace with himself until a reed sprouted from the bank and whispered the secret to all who passed. When Midas learned that his disgrace had become public knowledge, he condemned the barber to death, drank bull’s blood, and perished miserably.7
1. Hyginus: FabuIa 274; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vi. 27; Herodotus: i. 14 and viii. 138.
2. Cicero: On Divination i. 36; Valerius Maximus: i. 6. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 92-3.
3. Aelian: Varia Historia iii. ~S.
4. Plutarch: Minos 5; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 90 if.; Hyginus:
Fabula 191; Virgil: Eclogues vi. ~ 3 if.
5. Arrian: Anabasis of Alexander ii. 3.
6. Justin: xi. 7; Pausanias: i. 4—5; Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 17. 7. Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. ~46 if.; Persius: Satires i. ~2~; Strabo: i. 3.1.
1. Midas has been plausibly identified with Mita, King of the Moschians (‘ calf-men’), or Mushki, a people of Pontic origin who, in the middle of the second millennium B.c., occupied the western part .of Thrace, afterwards known as Macedonia; they crossed the Hellespont about the year ~200 B.c., broke the power of the Hittites in Asia Minor, and captured Pteria, their capital.” Moschians’ refers perhaps to a cult of the bull-calf as the spirit of the sacred year. Midas’s rose gardens and the account of his birth suggest an orgiastic cult of Aphrodite, to whom the rose was sacred. The story of the golden touch has been invented to account for the riches of the Mita dynasty, and for the presence of gold in the Pactolus river; and it is often said that the ass’s ears were suggested by Midas’s representation as a satyr, with hideously lengthened ears, in Athe~fian comic drama.
2. But since asses were sacred to his benefactor Dionysus, who set a pair of them among the stars (Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~3), it is likely that the original Midas gloried in his ass disguise. A pair ofass’s ears at the tip of a reed sceptre was the token of royalty carried by all Egyptian dynastic gods, in memory of the time when ass-eared Set (see 35—4) ruled their pantheon. Set had gready declined in power until his temporary revival by the Hyksos kings of the early second millennium B.c.; bt because the Hittites formed part of the great horde ofnortheru conquero~ led by t~e Hyksos, ass~ared Midas may well have claimed sorerelgar over the Hittite Empire in Set’s name. In pre-dynastic times, Set ha ruled the second half of the year, and annually murdered his broth~ Osiris, the spirit of the 6rst half, whose emblem was a bull: they were, fact, the familiar rival twins perpetually contending for the fayours their sister, the Moon-goddess Isis.
3. It is likely that the icon from which the story of Midas’s barb~ derives showed the death of the ass-king. His sun-ray hair, the seat royal power, is shorn off, like Samsoh’S (see 9:~. l); his decapitated hca is buried in a hole to guard the city orAntyre from invasion. The reed an ambivalent symbol: as the ‘tree’ of the twelfth month (see 52.3), gives him oracular warning of imminent death; it also enroyals his su~ cessor. Because of the great magical potency of bull’s blood, only esses of the Earth-mother could drink it without harm (see 51. 4 an ~55. a), and being the blood of Osiris, it would be pecuharlť poisonous an ass-king.
4. The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious on~ probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot—cypher tied in the ra~ hide thong. Gordium wa~ the key to Asia (Asia Minor) because its citad~ commanded the only practicable trade route from Troy to Antioch; an the local priestess or priest will have communicated the secret to the Kin of Phrygia alone, as the High-priest alone was entrusted with the ineffab] name of J~hovah at Jerusalem. Alexander’s brutal cutting of the kn0 when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Grcat~ Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sw0r above that of religious mystery. Gordius (from gruzein, ‘ to grunt’ c ‘grumble’) was perhaps so named from the muttering at his oracul: shrine.
5. Why the story of the Atlantic Continent should have been attr buted to the drunken Silenus may be divined from three incidea~ reported by Plutarch (Life of Solon 25-9). The first is that Solon travelle extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt; the second, that he believed t~ story of Atlantis (see 39—b) and turned it into an epic poem; the thirc that he quarrelled with Thespis the dramatist who, in his plays ab0t Dionysus, put ludicrous speeches, apparently full of topical allusion into the mouths of satyrs. Solon asked: ‘Are you not alarmed, Thespi to tell so many lies to so large an audience?’ Wheu Thespis answere~ ‘What does it matter when the whole play is a joke.1’, Solon struck ground violently with his staff: ‘Encourage such jokes in our theatre, an they will soon creep into our contracts and treaties!’ Aclian, who quot~ Theopompus as his authority, seems to have had access at second or thix hand to a comedy by Thespis, or his pupil Pratinas, ridiculing Solon fc Utopian lies told in the epic poem, and presenting him as Silenus, footloose about Egypt and Asia Minor (see a7. b). S’denus and not dissimilar names and as Silenus was tutor to Dionysus, so was tutor to Peisistratus who—perhaps on his advice—founded rites at Athens (see 27. 5)6. It is possible that Solon during his travels had picked up scraps of which he incorporated in his epic, and which lent themparody: such as the Gaelic legend of a Land of Youth Ocean—where Niamh of the Golden Hair took Oisin, and whence he returned centuries later on a visit to Ireland. Oisin, it will be of his own people compared
, and bitterly regretted having come back. The unnavigable is the famous one, assumed by ancient physicists, where the of the world int6 nothingness. Solon seems to have heard geographers discussing the possible existence of an Continent: Eratosthenes, Mela, Cicero, and Strabo speculated
: and Seneca foretold its discovery in the second act of his Medea—a which is said to have made a deep impression on the young
Ct~oB~s and Biton, two young Argives, were the sons of Hera’s priestess at Argos. When the time came for her to perform the rites of the goddess, and the white oxen which were to draw her sacred chariot led not yet arrived from the pasture, Cleobis and Biton, harnessing ; to the chariot, dragged it to the temple, a distance of nearly miles. Pleased with their filial devotion, the priestess prayed that the goddess would grant them the best gift she could bestow on mortals; and when she had performed her rites, they went to sleep in the temple, never to wake again.1
b. A similar gift was granted to Agamedes and Trophonius, sons of Erginus. These twins had built a stone threshold upon foundations laid ~ Apollo himself for his temple at Delphi. His oracle told them: ‘Live and indulge yourselves in every pleasure for six days; on the your heart’s desire shall be granted.’ On the seventh day both whom the were found dead, in thei beds. Hence it is said: Those love die young. z
c. Trophonius was later awarded an oracle ośkis own at Lebade~! Boeotia.a
L Herodotus: i. jr; Pausanias: ii. 20. a.
Pindar, quoted by Plutarch: Consolation to Apollonius
2. Comedyiv, Hl~rnn to Apollo 294-99; Menander: Fragments of Greek
~05, ed. Meinecke.
3. Herodotus: i. 46; Euripides:,Ion 300.
1. The myth of Cleobis and Biton apparently refers to the hunan sacriftces offered when a new temple was dedicated to the Moon-goddess: at Argos, twin brothers were chosen as surrogates for the co-kings, and harnessed to a moon-chariot in place of the white bulls, the usual sacrifice. They will have been buried under the temple threshold to keep away hostile influences (see 169. h); perhaps this was why the twins Castor and Polydeuces (see 62. c) were sometimes called Oebalides, which may mean ‘ sons of the temple threshold’ rather than ‘ of the speckled sheep-skin’. The priests of Apollo evidently adopted this practice at Delphi, although they denied the Moon-goddess, to whom the sacrif~ce should have been made, any foothold in the temple.
1. The seventh day, which was sacred to the Titan Cronus (and to Cronian Jehovah at Jerusalem) had’ repose’ as its planetary function; but ‘repose’ signified death in the goddess’s honour—hence the hcro-oracle awarded to Trophonius (see $I. i).
Nsac~ssus was a Thespian, the son o~ the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the windi~
of his streams, and ravished. The seer Teiresias told Leidope, the fast person ever to consult him: ‘Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself.’ Anyone might excusably have fallen in love with Narcissus, even as a child, and when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers 0f both sexes; for he had a stubborn pride in his own beauty.
b. Among these lovers was the nymph Echo, who could no longer use her voice, except in foolish repetition of another’s shout: a ptmishment for having kept Hera entertained with long stories while Zeus’s concubines, the mountain nymphs, evaded her jealous eye and made good their escape. One day when Narcissus went out to net stags, Echo stealthily followed him through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but tinable to speak ftrst. At last Narcissus, finding that he had strayed from his companions, shouted: ‘Is anyone here?’
‘Here!’ Echo answered, which surprised Narcissus, since no one was in sight.
‘Come!’
‘Come!’
‘Why do you avoid me?’
‘Why do you avoid me?’
‘Let us come together here!’
‘Let us come together here!’ repeated Echo, and joyfully rushed from her hiding place to embrace Narcissus. Yet he shook her off~ roughly, and ra~ away. ‘I will die before you ever lie with me!’ he cried.
‘Lie with me!’ Echo pleaded.
But Narcissus had gone, and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for love and mortification, until only her voice remained. ~
c~ One day, Narc~ssus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Hclisson, which flows into the Alpheius. Ameinius killed himself on Narcissus’s threshold, calling on the gods to avenge his death.
d. Artemis heard the plea, and made Narcissus fall in love, though denying him love’s consummation. At Donacon in Thespia he came upo~~ a spring, clear as silver, and never yet disturbed by cattle, birds, wild beasts, or even by branches dropping off the trees that shaded it; a~~d as he cast himsclf down, exhausted, on the grassy verge to slake his thirst, he fell in love with his reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently recog~~zed himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torn~ents; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened.
e. Echo, although she had not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed’Alas ! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in breast, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!’ expired. His blood soaked the earth, and up sprang the white narcissu~ flower with its red corollary, from which an unguent balm is now distilled at Chacronea. This is recommended for affections of the ea~ (though apt to give headaches), and as a vuhierary, and for the cure of frost-bite.2
x. Ovid: Metamorphoses iii. 341-40x.
1. Pausanias: viii. 29.4 and ix. 3~—6; Ovid: Metamorphoses Conon: Narrations :~4; Pliny: Natural History xxi. 75—
1. The ‘narcissus’ used in the ancient wreath of Demeter and Pers~ phone (Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus 682-4), and also called leirion was the three-petalled blue fleur-de4ys or iris: sacred to the Triple-goddess, and worn as a chaplet when the Three Solemn Ones (see xxS. c), or Erinnyes, were being placated. It flowers in late autumn, shortly before the’ poet’s narcissus’, which is perhaps why Leiriope has been descfibecl as Narcissus’s mother. This fanciful moral tale—incidentally accounting for the medicinal properties of narcissus-oil, a well-known narcotic, as the first syllable of ‘Narcissus’ implies—may be deduced from an icon which showed the despairing Alcmaeon (see 107. e), or Orestes (see ~14. a), lying crowned with lilies, beside a pool i~ which he has vainly tried to purify himself after murdering his mother; the Erinnycs having refused to be placated. Echo, in this icon, would represent the mockh~g ghost of his mother, and Ameinius his murdered father.
g. But—issus, like—inthus, is a Cretan termination, and both Narcissus and Hyacinthus seem to have been names for the Cretan springflowerhero whose death the goddess bewails on the gold ring from the Mycenaean Acropolis; elsewhere he is called Antheus (see ~59.4), a sur~ame of Dionysus. Moreover, the lily was the royal emblem of the Cnossian king. In a painted relic f found among the Palace ruins, he walks, sceptre in hand, through a lily-meadow, wearing a crown and necldace offieur-dc-lys.
Px~ťn~is, a Thracian princess, was in love with Acamas a son of Theseus, who had gone to fight at Troy. When Troy fell, and the Athenian fleet returned, Phyllis paid frequent visits to the shore, hoping to sight his ship; but this had been delayed by a leak, and she died of grief after her ninth fruitless visit, at a place called Enneodos. She was metamorphosed by Athene into an almond-tree, and Acamas, arriving on the following day, embraced only her rough bark. In response to his caresses the branches burst into flower instead of leaf, which has been a peculiarity of almond-trees ever since. Every year, the Athenians dance in her honour, and in his.1
b. And Carya, daughter of a Laconian king, was beloved of Dionysus, but died suddenly at Caryae, and was metamorphosed by him into a walnut-tree. Artemis brought the news to the Laconians, who thereupon built a temple to Artemis Caryatis, from which Caryatidsfemale statues used as columns—take their name. At Caryae too, the Laconian women dance annually in the goddess’s honour, having been instructed by the Dioscuri.2
x. Lucian: On the Dance 40; Hyginus: Fabula 59; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues v. ~o; First Vatican Mythographer ~59.
1. Pausanias: iii. io. 8 and iv. 16. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues viii. 29.
1. Both these myths are told to account for the festal use of almond or walnut, in honour of Car, or Carya (see 57.2), otherwise known as Metis (see 1. d and 9. d), the Titaness of Wisdom; and are apparently deduced from an icon which showed a young poet worshipping a nut-tree in the goddess’s presence, while nine young women performed a round dance. Enneodos, which occurs also in the legend of the Thracian Phyllis who drove Demophon mad (see ~69. i), means ‘nine journeys’, and the number nine was connected with nuts by the Irish bards, and nuts with poetic inspiration; and in their tree-alphabet (see 52. 3) the letter coll (‘c’), meaning ‘hazel’~ also expressed the number nine. According to the Irish Dinnschenchas, the fountain of inspiration in the river Boyne was overhung by the nine hazels of poetic art, and inhabited by spotted fish which sang. Another Caryae (‘ walnut-trees ‘) m Arcadia, stood close to a stream reported by Pausa~ias to contain the same peculiar kind of fish (Pausanias: viii. ~4. x-3 and 21. ~; Athenaeus: viii. p. 33~). 2. The goddess Car, who gave her name to Caria, became the Italian divinatory goddess Carmenta, ‘Car the Wise’ (see 52.5; 82. 6; 95.5 and ~32. o), and the Caryatids are her nut-nymphs—as the Meliae are ashnymphs; the M~liae, apple-nymphs; and the Dryads, oak-nymphs. Pliny has preserved the tradition that Car invented augury (Natural History ú 90 86. ~—$% b ~i viii. 57)—Phyllis (‘leafy’) may be a humble Greek version of the ?ale~ inian and Mesopotarnian Great Goddess Belili; in the Demophon myth she is associated with Rhea (see ~69.j).
AaxoN of Lesbos, a son of Poseidon and the Nymph Oneaea, was a master of the lyre, and invented the dithyramb in Dionysus’s honour. One day his patron Periander, tyrant of Corinth, reluctantly gave him permission to visit Taenarus in Sicily, where he had been invited to compete in a musical festival. Arion won the prize, and his admirers showered on him so many rich gifts that these excited the greed of the sailors engaged to bring him back to Corinth.
‘We much regret, Arion, that you will have to die,’ remarked the captain of the ship.
‘What crime have I committed?’ asked Arion.
‘You are too rich,’ replied the captain.
‘ Spare my life, and I will give you all my prizes,’ firion pleaded. ‘You would only retract your promise on reaching Corinth,’ said the captain, ‘and so would I, in your place. A forced gift is no gift.’ ‘Very well,’ cried Arion resignedly. ‘But pray allow me to sing a last song.’
When the captain gave his permission, Arion, dressed in his finest robe, mounted on the prow, where he invoked the gods with impassioned strains, and then leaped overboard. Tke ship sailed on.
b. However, his song had attracted a school of music-loving dolphins, one of which took Arion on his back, and that evening he overtook the ship and reached the port of Corinth several days before it cast anchor there. Periander was overjoyed at his miraculous escape, and the dolphin, loth to part from Arion, insisted on accompanying him to court, where it soon succumbed to a life of luxury. Arion gave it a .splendid funeral.
When the ship docked, Perlander sent for the captain and crew, whom he asked with pretended anxiety for news of Arion.
‘He has been delayed at Taenarus,’ the captain answered, ‘by the lavish hospitality of the inhabitants.’
Pcriander made them all swear at the dolphin’s tomb that this was the truth, and then suddenly confronted them with Arion. Unable to deny their guilt, they were executed on the spot. Apollo later set the images of Arion and his lyre among the stars.x
c. Nor was Arion the first man to have been saved by a dolphin. A dolphin rescued Enalus when he leaped overboard to join his sweetheart Phineis who, in accordance with an oracle, had been chosen by lot and thrown into the sea to appease Amphitrite—for this was the cxpcdition which the sons of Pcnthilus were leading to Lesbos as the island’s first colonists—and the dolphin’s mate rescued Phineis. Another dolphin saved Phalanthus from drowning in the Crisaean Sea on his way to Italy. Likewise Icaclius, the Cretan brother of Iapys, when shipwrecked on a voyage to Italy, was guided by a dolphin to Delphi and gave the place its name; for the dolphin was Apollo in disguise.2 x. Herodotus: i. 24; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes xiii. zS; Hyginus: Fabula 194; Pausanias: iii. 25.5~.. Plutarch: Banquet of the Seven Wise Men zo; Pausanias: x. 13. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 332.
1. Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh, century B.c., and a fragment of Arion’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arion’s songs attracted a school of dolphins and thus dissuaded some sailors from murdering him for his money—dolphins and seals are notoriously susceptible to musicpartly on a misinterpretation of a statue which showed the god Palaemon, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back (see 70.’ 5). Mythic colour is lent to the story by making Arion a son of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse. Arion (see 16.f), and by giving his name to the Lyre constellation. Pausanias, a level-headed and truthful writer, doubts Hcrodotus’s hearsay story about Arion; but reports that he has seen with his own eyes the dolphin at Poroselene, which was mauled by fishermen, but had its wounds dressed by a boy, coming in answer to the boy’s call and gratefully allowing him to ride on its back (iii. 25.5). This suggests that the ritual advent of the New Year Child was dramatically presented at Corinth with the aid of a tame dolphin trained by the Sun-priests. 2. The myth of Enalus and Phineis is probably deduced from an icon which showed Amphitrite and Triton riding on dolphins. Enalus is also associated by Plutarch with an octopus cult, and his name recalls that ot Oedipus. the Corinthian New Year Child (see ~o$. ~), he will have been at Mytilene, as Phalanthus was in Italy. Taras, a son of Poseidon by Mh~os’s daughter Satyraca (‘ of the satyrs’), was the dolphinriding New Year Child of Tarentum, which he is said to have fom~ded, and where he had a hero shrine (Pausanias: x. ~o. 4 and ~3.5; Strabo: vi. 3.2); Phalanthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 ~3.c., took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicels whom he found there. $. Icadius’s name, which means ‘twentieth’, is connected perhaps with the date of the month on which his advent was celebrated.
Wx~E/q Zeus left Europe, after having lathered Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon on her in Crete, she married Asterius, the reigning king, whose father Tectamus son of Dorus had brought a mixed colony of Aeolian and Pelasgian settlers to the island and there married a daughter of Cretheus the Aeolian. I
b. This marriage proving childless, Asterius adopted Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon, and made them his heirs. But when the brothers grew to manhood, t~ey quarrelled for the love of a beautiful boy named Miletus, begotten by Apollo on the Nymph Areia, whom some call Deione, and others, Theia.2 Miletus having decided that he liked Sarpedon best, was driven from Crete by Minos, and sailed with a large fleet to Carla in Asia Minor, where he founded the city and kingdom of Miletus. For the previous two generations, this country, then called Anactoria, had been ruled by the giant Anax, a son of Uranus and Mother Earth, and by his equally gigantic son Asterius. The skeleton of Asterius, whom Miletus killed and afterwards buried on an islet lying off Lade, has lately been disenterred; it is at least ten cubits long. Some, however, say that Minos suspected Miletus of plotting to overthrow him and seize the kingdom; but that he feared Apollo, and therefore refrai~ed from doing more than warn Miletus, who fled to Caria of his own accord.3 Others say that the boy who occasioned the quarrel was not Miletus but one Atymnius, a son of Zeus and Cassiopeia, or of Phoenix.4
1. After Asterius’s death, Minos claimed the Cretan throne and, proof of his right to reign, boasted that the gods would answer whatever prayer he offered them. First dedicating an altar to Poseidon, and making all preparations for a sacrifice, he then prayed that a bull might emerge from the sea. At once, a dazzlingly-white bull swam ashore, but Minos was so struck by its beauty that he sent it to join his own herds, and slaughtered another instead. Minos’s claim to the throne was accepted by every Cretan, except Sarpedon who, still grieving for Miletus, declared that it had been Asterius’s intention to divide the kingdom equally between his three heirs; and, indeed, Minos himself had already divided the island into three parts, and chosen a capital for
d. Expelled from Crete by Minos, Sarpedon fled to Cilicia in Asia Minor, where he allied himself with Cilix against the Milyans, conquered them, and became their king. Zeus granted him the privilege 0fliving for three generations; and when he finally died, the Milyan kingdom was called Lycia, after his successor Lycus, who had taken refuge with him upon being banished from Athens by Aegeus.6
e. Meanwhile, Minos had married Pasipha~, a daughter of Helius and the nymph Crete, otherwise known as Perseis. But Poseidon, to avenge the affront offered him by Minos, made Pasipha~ fall in love with the white bull which had been withheM from sacrif~ce. She confided her unnatural passion to Daedalus, the famous Athenian craftsman, who now lived m exile at Cnossus, delighting Minos and his family with the animated wooden dolls he carved for them. Daedalus promised to help her, and built a hollow wooden cow, which he upholstered with a cow’s hide, set on wheels concealed in its hooves, and pushed into the meadow near Gortys, where Poseidon’s bull was grazing under the oaks among Minos’s cows. Then, having shown Pasipha~ how to open the folding doors in the cow’s back, and slip inside with her legs thrust down into its hindquarters, he discreetly retired. Soon the white bull ambled up and mounted the cow, so that Pasipha~ had all her desire, and later gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a buL!’s head and a human body.?
f But some say that Minos, having annually sacrificed to Poseidon the best bull in his possession, withheld his gift one year, and sacrif~ced merely the next best; hence Poseidon’s wrath; others say that it was Zeus whom he offended; others again, that Pasipha~ had failed for several years to propitiate Aphrodite, who now pun/shed her with this monstrous lust. Afterwards, the bull grew savage and devastated the whole of Crete, until Heracles captured and brought it to Greece, where it was eventually killed by Theseus.8
g. Minos consulted an oracle to know how he might best avoid scandal and conceal Pasipha~’s disgrace. The response was: ‘Instruct Daedalus to build you a retreat at Cnossus!’ This Daedalus did, and Minos spent the remainder of his life in the inextricable maze called the Labyrinth, at the very heart of which he concealed Pasipha~ and the Minotaur.9
h. Rhadamanthys, wiser than Sarpedon, remained in Crete; he lived at peace with Minos, and was awarded a third part of Asterius’s dominions. Renowned as a just and upright law-giver, inexorable in punishment of evildoers, he legislated both for the Cretans and for the islanders of Asia Minor, many of whom voluntarily adopted iudicial code. Every ninth year, he would visit Zeus’s cave and br’mg back a hew set of laws, a custom afterwards followed by his brother Minos? But some deny that Rhadamanthys was Minos’s brother, and call him a son of Hephaestus; as others deny that Minos was Zeus’s son, making him the son of Lycastus and the nymph of Ida. He queathed land i~ Crete to his son Gortys, after whom the Cretan dty is named, although the Tegeans insist that Gortys was an Arcadian, the son of Tegeates. X~ Rhadamanthys also bequeathed land in As’a Minor to his son Erythrus; and the island of Chios to Oenopion, the son of Ariadne, whom Dionysus first taught how tO make wine; and Lemnos to Thoas, another of Ariadne’s sons; and Cournos to Enyues; and Peparethos to S~aphylus; and Maroneia to Euanthes; and Paros to Alcaeus; and Delos to Anius; and Andros to Andrus.1z
1. Rhadamanthys eventually fled to Boeotia because he had killed kinsman, and lived there in exile at Ocaleae, where he married Alco mene, Heracles’s mother, after the death of Amphitryon. His tomb, and that of Alcmene, are shown at Haliartus, close to a plantation of the tough canes brought from Crete, from which javelins and flutes are cut. But some say that Alcmene was married to .Rhadamanthys in the Elysian Fields, after her death.13 For Zeus had appointed him one of the three Judges of the Dead; his colleagues were Minos and Aeacus, and he resided in the Elysian Fields.14
1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 80.
2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Apollodorus: iii. ~. 2; Ovid: Metamor. phoses ix. 442; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 30.
3. Pausanias: vii. z. 3 and i. 35.5; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 436 if. 4—Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 278. 5—Strabo: x. 4—8.
6. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Herodotus: i. 173.
7. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: vii. 4. 5; Virgil: Eclogues vi. 5 if-; Apollodorus: loc. cit. and i’d. x. 3-4.
8. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 77. g and 13.4; First Vatican Mythographer: 47; Hyginus: Fabula 40 [but the text is corrupt].
9. Ovid: Metamorphoses viii. 155 if.; Apollodorus: iii. I. 410. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60 and v. 79; Apollodorus: iii. L 2; Strabo: loc. tit.
xx. Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: viii. 53.2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Pausanias: viii. 53—v..
12. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 997; Diodorus Sicaxlus: v. 79—x-2.
13. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 50; Apollodorus: ii. 4—xx; Plutarch:
Lysander 28; Strabo: ix. z ~. 30; Pherecydes, quoted by Ant.oninus Liberalis: Transformations 33.
14. Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Homer: Odyssey iv. 564.
~r
1. Sir Arthur Evans’s classification ofsuccessive periods ofpre-Classical Cretan Culture as Minoan I, II, and III, suggests that the ruler of Crete was already called Minos in the early third millennium s.c.; but this ~ misleading. Minos seems to have been the royal tide of an Hellenic dynasty which ruled Crete early in the second millennium, each king ritually marrying the Moon-priestess of Cnossus and taking his title of ‘Moon-being’ from her. Minos is anachronistically made the successor 0t’ Asterius the grandson of Dorus, whereas the Dorians did not invade Crete until the close of the second millennium. It is more likely that the Aeolians and Pelasgians (perhaps including’ Ionians from Attica’) brought i~ by Tectamus (‘ craftsman’)—a name which ident’~fies him with Daedalus, and with Hephaestus, Rhadamanthys’s alleged father—were Minos’s original companions; and that Asterius (‘ starry’) is a masculinization of ^stcri[:, the goddess as Queen of Heaven and creatrix of the planetary powers (see x. d). Creteitself is a Greek word, a form ofcrateia, ‘strong, or r~ali~g, goddess’—hence Creteus, and Cretheus. Messrs M. Ventris and J. Chadwick’s recent researches into the hitherto undeciphered Linear Script B, examples of which have been found at Pylus. Thebes, and Mycenae, as well as among the ruins of the Cnossian palace sacked in 1400 B.C., show that the official language at Cnossus in the middle of the second millermium was an early form of Aeolic Greek. The script seems to have been originally invented for use with a non-Aryan language and adapted to Greek with some diff:culty. (Whether inscriptions in Linear Script A are written in Greek or Cretan has not yet been establishe . great number of names from Greek mythology occur in both Cretan and mainland tablets, among them: Achilles, Idomeneus, Theseus, Crctheus, Nestor, Ephialtes, Xuthus, Ajax, Glaucus, and Aeolus—which suggests that many of these myths date back beyond the Fall of Troy.
2. Since Miletus is a masculine name, the familiar myth of two brothers who quarrel for the fayours of a woman was given a homosexual turn. The truth seems to be that, during a period of disorder following the Achaean sack of Cnossus in about 1400 B.c., numerous Greek-speaking Cretan aristocrats of Aeolo-Pelasgian or Ionian stock, for whom the Moon-goddess was the supreme deity, migrated with their native dependants to Asia Minor, especially to Caria; Lycia, and Lydia; for, disregarding the tradition of Sarpedon’s dynasty ha Lycia, Herodotus records that the Lycians of his time still reckoned by matrilinear descent (Her0dotus: i. 173; Strabo: xii. 8.5), like the Carians (see 75.5). Miletos may be a native Cretan word, or a transliteration ofrnilteios,’ the colour of red ochre, or red lead’; and therefore a synonym for Erythrus, or Phoenix, both of which mean’ red ‘. Cretan complexions were redder than Helle~fic ones, and the Lycians and Carians came of partly Cretan stock; as did the Puresati (Philistines), whose name also means ‘red men’ (see 38.3). $. The gigantic rulers of Anactoria recall the Anakim of Genesis, giants (Joshua xiv. 13) ousted by Caleb from the oracular shrine which had once belonged to Ephron the son ofHcth (Tethys ~). Ephron gave his name to Hebron (Genesis xxiii. 16), and may be identified with Phoroneus. These Anakim seem to have come from Greece, as members of the Sea-peoples’ confederation which caused the Egyptians so much trouble in the fourteenth century B.c. Lade, the burial place of Anax’s son Asterius, was probably so called in honour of the goddess Lat, Leto, or Latona (see 14. z), and that thisAsterius bears the same name as Mi~os’s father suggests that the Milesians brought it with them from the Cretan Miletus (see 25.6). According to a plausible tradition in, the Irish Book Invasions, the Irish Milesians originated in Crete, fled to Syria by way Asia Minor, and thence sailed west in the thirteenth century B.C. tc Gaetulia in North Africa, and fmally reached Ireland by way of Brigantium (Compostela, in North-western Spaha). 4—Miletus’s claim to be Apollo’s son suggests that the MilesJan king~ were given solar attributes, like those of Corinth (see 67.
5. The triumph of Minos, son of Zeus, over his brothers refers to the Dorians’ eventual mastery of Crete, but it was Poseidon to whom Mino~ sacrificed the bull, which again suggests that the earlier holders of th~ title ‘Minos’ were Aeolians. Crete had for centuries been a very rid country and, ~n the late eighth century B.C., was shared between th~ Achaeans, Dorians, Pelasgians, Cydonians (Aeolians), and in the far wes of the island, ‘ true Cretans’ (Od~/ssey xix. ~ 7 x—5). Diodorus Siculus trie
to distinguish Minos son of Zeus from his grandson, Minos son of Lycastus; but two or three Minos dynasties may have successively reigned in Cnossus.
6. Sarpedon’s name (‘rejoicing in a wooden ark’) suggests that he brought with him to Lycia (see 162. n) the ritual of the Sun-hero who, at New Year, makes his annual rcappearance as a child floating in an arklike Moses, Perseus (see 73. c), Anius (see ~60. t), and others. A Cretan connexion with the Perseus myth is prov/ded by Pasipha~’s mother Petsels. Zeus’s concession to Sarpedon, that he should live for three generations, means perhaps that instead of the u~ual eight years—a Great Year-which was the length of Minos’s reign, he was allowed to keep his throne m~til the nineteenth year, when a closer synchronization of ~olar and lunar time occurred than at the end of eight; and thus broke into the third Great Year (see 67. 2).
ú ?. Since ‘PasiphaE’, according to Pausania~ (iii. 26. I), is a title of the Moon; and ‘ltone’, her other name, a title of Athene as rain-maker (Pausanias: ix. 34. x), the myth of PasiphaE and the bull points to a ritual marriage under an oak between the Moon-priestess, wearing cow’~ horns, and the Minos-king, wearing a bull’s mask (see 76. 1). According to Hesychius (sub Carten), ‘ Gortys’ stands for Carten, the Cretan word for a cow; and the marriage seems to have been understood as one between Sun and Moon, since there was a herd of cattle sacred to the Sun in Gortys (Scrvius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 60). Daedalus’s discreet retirement from the meadow suggests that this was not consummated pubhcly in the Pictish or Moesynoechian style. Many later Greeks disliked the PasiphaE myth, and preferred to beheve that she had an affair not with a bull, but with a man called Taurus (Plutarch: Theseus 19; Palaephatus: 0~ Incredible Stories ii). White bulls, which were peculiarly sacred to the ;%on (see 84. ~), figured in the annual sacr’ff’~ce on the Alban mount at Rome. in the cult of Thracian Dionysus, in the mistletoe-and-oak ritual 0f the Gallic Druids (see 50. ~) and, according to the Book of the Dun Cow, in the divinatory rites which preceded an ancient Irish coronation. ~g. Miuos’s palace at Cnossus was a complex of rooms, ante-rooms, l~alls, a~d corridors in which a country visitor might easily lose his way. Sir Arthur Evans suggests that this was the Labyrinth, so called from the labr},x, or double-headed axe; a familiar emblem of Cretan sovereigntyslyaped hkc a waxi~g and a waning moon joi~ed together back to back, a~d symbolizing the creaf~ve as well as the destructive power of the goddess. But the maze at Cnossus had a separate existence from the palace: it was a true maze, in the Hampton Court sense, and seems to have been marked out in mosaic on a pavement as a ritual dancing pattern —a pattern which occurs in places as far apart as Wales and North-eastern l~nssia, for usein the Easter maze-dance. This dance was performed in Italy (Pli~y: Natural History xxxvi. 85), and in Troy (Scholiast on Eunpides’s Andrornache 1139), and seems to have been introduced into Britain, t~ wards the end of the third millennium s.c., by neohthic immigrant from North Africa. Homer describes the Cnossus maze (Iliad xviii. 592} Daedalus in Cnossus once contrived
A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne and Lucian refers to popular dances in Crete connected with Ariadne an{l i the Labyrinth (On the Dance 49).
9. The cult of Rhadamanthys may haYe been brought from Boeotia t0 Crete, and not contrariwise. Haliartus, where he had a hero-shrine, was apparently sacred to the ‘White Goddess of Bread’, namely Demetet~ for Halia, ‘of the sea’, was a title of the Moon ~s Leucothca, ‘the Whil Goddess’ (Diodorus Siculus: v. 55), and afros means ‘bread’. Alcrae~ (‘strong in wrath’) is another Moon-tkle. Though said to bca Creta word, Rhadamanthys may stand for Rhabdornantis, ‘divining with wand’, a name taken from the reed-bed at Haharms, whcre his spid stirred the tops oracularly (see 83.3). If so, the tradition of his hayin legislated for all Crete and the islands of Asia Minor will mean that: similar oracle in Crete was consuked at the beghming of each new reign, and that its pronouncements carried authority whcrcver Cretan wcights, measures, and tra.ding conventions were accepted. He is called a son of Zeus, rather than of Hephaestus, doubtless because the Rhadamanthine oracles came from the Dictaean Cave, sacred to Zeus (see 7. b). so. At Petsofa in Crete a hoard of human heads and limbs, of clay, have been found, each with a hole through which a string could be passed. If once fixed to wooden trunks, they may have formed part of Dacdalus’s jointed dolls, and represented the Fertility-goddess. Their use was perhaps to hang from a fruit-tree, with their limbs moving about in the wind, to ensure good crops. Such a doll is shown hanging from a fruit-tree in the famous gold ring from the Acropolis Treasure at Mycenae. Tree worship is the subject of several Minoan works of art, and Ariadne, the Cretan goddess, is said to have hanged herself (Contest of Horner and Hesiod ~4), as the Attic Erigone did (see 79. a). Artemis the Hanged One, who had a sanctuary at Condyleia i~ Arcadia (Pausanias: v’fii. 23.6), and Helen of the Trees, who had a sanctuary at Rhodes and is said to have been hanged by Polyxo (Pausanias: iii. 19. xo), may be variants of the same goddess,
MllqOS lay with the nymph Paria, whose sons colonized Paros anti were later killed by Heracles; also with Androgeneia, d~e mother of the ser Asterius,’ as well as many others; but especially he pursued Britomartis ofGortyna, a daughter of Leto. She invented hunting-nets and was a close companion to Artemis, whose hounds she kept on a leash.2
b. Britomartis hid from Minos under thick-leaved oak-saplings in the water meadows, and then for nine months he pursued her over craggy mountains and level plains until, in desperation, she threw herself into the sea, and was hauled to safety by fishermen. Artemis deified Britomartis under the name of Dictynna; but on Aegina she is worshipped as Aphaea, because she vanished; at Sparta as Artemis, surnamed ‘the Lady of the Lake’; and on Cephallonia as Laphria; the Samians, however, use her true name in their invocations.a
c. Minos’s mafiy infidelities so enraged Pasipha~ that she put a spell upon him: whenever he lay with another woman he discharged, not seed, but a swarm of noxious serpents, scorpions, and millepedes, which preyed on her vitals.4 One day~ Procris, daughter of the Athenian King Erechtheus, whom her husband Cephalus had deserted, visited Crete. Cephalus was provoked to this by Eos, who fell in love with him. When he politely refused her advances, on the ground that he could not deceive Procris, with whom he had exchanged vows of perpetual faithfulness, Eos protested that Procris, whom she knew better than he did, would readily forswear herself for gold. Since Cephalus indignantly denied this, Eos metamorphosed him into the likeness of one Pteleon, and advised him to tempt Procris to his bed by offering her a golden crown. He did so, and, finding that Procris was easily seduced, felt no compunction about lying wit~ Eos, of whom she was painfully jealous.
d. Eos bore Cephalus a son named Phaithon; but Aphrodite stole him while still a child, to be the night-watchman of her most sacred sl~rincs; and the Cretans call him Adymnus, by which they mean the m0ming and the evening star. S
e. Meanwhile, Procris could not bear to stay in Athens, her desertion being the subject of general gossip, and therefore came to Crete, where Minos found her no more difficult to seduce than had the supposed Pteleon. He bribed her with a hound that never failed to catch his quarry, and a dart that never missed its mark, both of which had been given him by Artemis? Procris, being an ardent huntress, gladly accepted these, but insisted that Minos should take a prophylactic draught—a decoction of magical roots invented by the witch Circe— to prevent him from f~lling her with reptiles and insects. This drau had the desired effect, but Procris feared that Pasipha~ might bewitch her, and therefore returned hurriedly to Athens, d~sguised as a hanq some boy, having f~rst changed her name to Pterelas. She never saw Minos again.
f Cephalus, whom she now joined on a hunting expedition, did not recognize her and coveted Laelaps, her hound, and the unerring dans0 much that he offered to buy them, naming a huge sum of silver. But Procris refused to part with either, except for love, and when he agreed to take her to his bed, tearfully revealed herself as his w~fe. Thus theyi were reconciled at last, and Cephalus enjoyed great sport with the and the dart. But Artemis was vexed that her valuable gifts should tht4 be bandied from hand to hand by these mercenary adulterers, and~~ plotted revenge. She put it into Procris’s head to suspect that Cephalu~ was still visiting Eos when he rose two hours after midmght and went! off to hunt.
g. One night Procris, wearing a dark runic, crept out after him in the half light. Presently he heard a rustle in a thicket behind him, Laelaps growled and stiflened, Cephalus let fly with the u~erring d~ and transfixed Procris. In due course the Areiopagus sentenced him to perpetual banishment for murder.?
h. Cephalus retired to Thebes, where King Amphitryon, the suI~
posed father of Heracles, borrowed Laclaps to hunt the Teumessian vixen which was ravaging Cadmeia. This vixen, divinely fated never to be caught, could be appeased only by the monthly sacrifice of a child. But, since Laelaps was divinely fated to catch whatever he pursued, doubt arose in Heaven as to how this contradiction should be resolved: in the end, Zeus angrily settled it by turning both Laelaps and vixen into stone.8
1. Cephalus next assisted Amphitryon in a successful war against Teleboans and Taphians. Before it began, Amph~tryon made all hi~ allies swear by Athene and Ares not to hide any of the spoils; only one, Panopeus, broke this oath and was punished by begetting a coward, the notorious Epeius.9 The Teleboan king was Pterelaus, on whose heacl Poseidon, b_is grandfather, had planted a golden lock of immortality. His daughter Comaetho fell in love with Amphitryon and, wishing to gain his affections, plucked out the golden lock, so that Pterelaus died and Amphitryon swiftly conquered the Teleboans with the help of Cephalus; but he sentenced Comaetho to death for parricide. Cephalus’s share of the Teleboan dominions was the island of Ce?hallenia, which still bears his name. He never pardoned Minos for having seduced Procris and given her the fatal dart; nor yet could he acquit himself of responsibility. After all, he had been th~ first to forswear himself, because Procris’s affair with the supposed Pteleon could not be reckoned as a breach of faith; ‘No, no,’ he grieved, ‘I should never have bedded with Eos!’ Though purif~ed of bas gtnlt, he was haunted by Procris’s ghost and, fearing to bring m~sfortune on his companions, went one day to Cape Leucas, where he had bruit a temple to Apollo of the White Rock, and plunged into the sea froxn the cliff top. As he fell he called aloud on the name of Pterelas; for it was under this name that Procris had been most dear to him?
1. Apoltodorus: ii. 5.9 and iii. x. 2; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xiii. 222 :~nd xl. 284.
2. Solinus: xi. 8; Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 189; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taur~ns ~26; Diodorus S~culus: v. 76; Aristophanes: Frogs ~3593. Pausanias: ii. 30. 3 and iii. ~4-z; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 40; Herodotus: iii. 59. 4. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations
5. Hesiod: Theogony 986; Solinus: xi. 9; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xi. ~31 and xii. z17.
6. Apollodorus: ii. 4—7; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 77~; Hyginus: Fabula 189.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit. and iii. ~S. ~; Antoninus Liberalis: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabulae ~25 and 189; Scholiast on Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis 209.
8. Pausanias: ~. 37—6 and ix. t9. x.
9. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 933.
10. ApoIlodorus: ii. 4. 7; Strabo: x. z. 9 and 14.
ú ~. Minos’s seduction of nymphs in the style of Zeus doubtless records the Cnossian king’s ritual marriage to Moon-priestesses of various city states in his empire.
_~. The Moon-goddess was called Britomartis in Eastern Crete. Hence the Greeks identif~ed her with Artemis ~Diodorus Siculus: v. 76; Euripides: Hippolytus ~45 and Iphigene~a Among the Taurians 127; Hesychius sub Britomartis), and with Hecate (Euripides: Hippolytus 14~, with scholiast). In Western Crete she was Dictynna, as Virgil knew: ‘They called the Moon Dictynna after your name’ (Virgil: Ciris 305). Dictynna is connected in the myth with dietyon, which means a net, of the sort used for hunting or fishing; and Dicte is apparently a worn-down form ~ dictynnaeon—’ Dictynna’s place’. After the introduction of the system a murderous chase of the sacred ki~g by the goddess armed with a net was converted into a love chase of the goddess by the sacred king~ (see 9. ~ and 32. b). Both chases occur frequently in European folklore (see 6:~. ~). Minos’s pursuit of Britomartis, which is paralleled in Philistia by Moxus’s, or Mopsus’s, chase of Derceto, begins when the oaks are in full leaf—probably in the Dog Days, which was when Set pursued Isis and the Child Horus in the water meadows of the Nile Delta—and ends nine months later, on May Eve. Zeus’s seduction of Europe was also a May Eve event (see 58.3).
.1. To judge from the ritual of the Celtic NOrth, where the goddess is called Goda (‘ the Good ‘)—Neanthcs translates the syllable brito as’ good’ (Greek Historical Fragments iii, ed. M~iller)—she originally rode on a goat, naked except for a net, with an apple in one hand, and accompanied by a hare and a raven, to her annual love-feast. The carved miserere seat in Coventry Cathedral, where she was thus portrayed, recorded the Christian May Eve ceremonies at Southam and Coventry, from the legend of Lady Godiva has been piously evolved. In Celtic Germany, Scandinavia, and probably England too, Goda had ritual connexion with the goat, or with a man dressed in goat-skins—the sacred king who later became the Devil of the witch cult. Her apple is a token of the kin approaching death; the hare symbolizes the chase, during herself into a greyhound; her. net will catch him when he becomes a fish the raven will give oracles from his tomb.
4. It seems that, in Crete, the goat-cult preceded the bull-cult, and tha~ Pasipha~ originally married a goat-king. Laphria (‘ she who wins booty’), Dictyrma’s title in Aegina, was also a title of the goat-goddess Athene, who is said to have been assaulted by the goatish Pallas, whose skin she fiayed and converted into her aegis (see 9. a). ‘ Laphria’ suggests that the goddess was the pursuer, not the pursued. Inscriptions from Aegina show that the great temple of Artemis belonged to Artemis Aphaea (‘not dark’, to distinguish her from Hecate); in the myth, Aphaea is takea~ to. mean aphanes, ‘ disappearing ‘.
5. The story of Minos and Procris has passed from myth into anecdote, and from anecdote into street-corner romance, recalling some of the tales in the Golden Ass. Being linked with Minos’s war against Athem, and the eventual downfall of Cnossus, it records perhaps the Cretan king’s demand for a ritual marriage with the High-priestess of Athem, which the Athenians resented. Pteleon (‘elm-grove’), the name of Procris’s seducer, may refer to the vine-cult which spread from Crete in. the time of Minos (see 88. h), since vines were trained on elms; but it may also be derived from ptelos, ‘wild-boar’. In that case, Cephalus and Pteleon will have originally been the sacred king and his tanist, disguised as a wild boar (see xS. 7). Pasipha~’s witchcrafts are characteristic of an angry Moon-goddess; and Procris counters them with the witchcrafts of Circe, another title of the same goddess.
6. Cephalus’s leap from the wliite rock at Cape Leucas rightly reminds $trabo (x. 2. 9) that the Leucadians used every year to fling a man, provided with wings to break his fall, and even with live birds corded to his body, over the cliff into the sea. The victim, a pharmacos, or scapegoat, whose removal freed the island from guilt, seems also to have carried a white sunshade as a parachute (see 70. 7). Boats were waiting to pick him up if he survived, and convey him to some other island (see 96.3)7. The myth of Comaetho and Pterelaus refers to the cutting of the solar king’s hair before his death (see 83. $; 9~. ~ and 95..5); but the name Pterclaus suggests that the wingedpharmacos flung to his death was originally the king. The syllable eldos, or elaios, stands for the wild olive which, like the bircb in Italy and North-western Europe, was used for the expulsion of evil spirits (see 89. 7 and 52.3); and in the Rhodian dialect elaios meant simply pharmacos. But the fates of Pterelaus and Cephalus are mythically linked by Procri~’s adoption of the name Pterelas, and this suggests that she was really the priestess of Athene, who launched the leathered Cephalus to his death.
8. The fox was the emblem of Messene (Apollodorus: ii. 8. $—see 49. z and ~46. 6); probably because the Aeolians worshipped the Moongoddcss as a vixen; and the myth of the Teumessian vixen may record Aeolian raids on Cadmeia in search of child sacrifices, to which the Zeusworsbipping Achaeans put an end. 9. Pha~!thon and Adymnus (from a-dťomenos, ‘he who does not set’) are both allegorical names for the planet Venus. But Pha~thon, son oleos and Cephalus, has been confused by Normus with Pha~thon, son of Helius, who drove the sun-chariot and was drowned (see 42. d); and with Atymnius (from atos and hymnos, ‘insatiate of heroic praise’), a sun-hero worshipped by the Milesians (see 88. b).
~0. Epeius, who built the wooden horse (see ~67. a), appears in early legends as an outstandingly courageous warrior; but his name was ironically applied to boasters, until it became synonymous with cowardice (Hesychius sub Epeius).
A~oNc, Pasipha~’s children by Minos were Acacallis, Ariaclne, Androgeus, Catreus, Glaucus, and Phaedra.1 She also bore Cydon to Hermes, and Libyan Aremort to Zeus.2
b. Ariadne, beloved first by Theseus, and then by Dionysus, b manx, famous children. Catreus, who succeeded Minos on the throne, was killed in Rhodes by his own son. Phaedra married Theseus and won notoriety for her unfortunate love-affalr with Hippolytus, her stepson. Acacallis was Apollo’s first love; when he and his sister Artemis came for purification to Tarrha, from Aegialae on the mainland, he found Acacallis at the house of Carmanor, a maternal relative, and seduced her. Minos was vexed, and banished Acacallis to Libya where, some say, she became the mother of Garamas, though others claim that he was the first man ever to be born.3
›. Glaucus, while still a child, was playing ball one day in the palace atCnossus or, perhaps, chasing a mouse, when he suddenly disappeared. Minos and Pasipha~ searched high and low but, being unable to find him, had recourse to the Delphic Oracle. They were informed that whoever could give the best simile for a recent portentous birth in Crete would find what was lost. Minos made enquiries and learned that a heifer-calf had been born among his herds which changed its colour thrice a day—from white to red, and from red to black. He summoned his soothsayers to the palace, but none could think of a simile until Polyeidus the Argive, a descendant of Melampus, said: ‘This calf resembles nothing so much as a ripening blackberry [or mulberry].’ Minos at once commanded him to go in search of Glaucus.4
d. Polyeidus wandered through the labyrinthine palace, until he came upon an owl sitting at the entrance to a cellar, frightening away a swarm of bees, and took this for an omen. Below in the cellar he found a great jar used for the storing of honey, and Glaucus drowned in it, head downwards. Minos, when this discovery was reported to him, consulted with the Cureres, and followed their advice by telling Polyeidus: ‘Now that you have found my son’s body, you must restore him to life!’ Polyeidus protested that, not being Asclepius, he was incapable of raising the dead. ‘A h, I know better,’ replied Minos. ‘You will be locked in a tomb with Glaucus’s body and a sword, and there you will remain until my orders have been obeyed!’
e. When Polyeidus grew accustomed to the darkness of the tomb he saw a serpent approaching the boy’s corpse and, seizing his sword, killed it. Presently another serpent, gliding up, and finding that its mate was dead, retired, but came back shortly with a magic herb in its mouth, which it laid on the dead body. Slowly the serpent came to life again. Polyeidus was astounded, but had the presence of mind to apply the same herb to the body of Glaucus, and with the same happy result. He and Glaucus then shouted loudly for help, until a passer-by heard them and ran to summon Minos, who was overjoyed when he opened the tomb and found his son alive. He loaded Polyeidus with gifts, but would not let him return to Argos until he had taught Glaucus the art of divination. Polyeidus unwillingly obeyed, and when he was about to sail home, told Glaucus: ‘Boy, spit into my open mouth!’ Glaucus did so, and immediately forgot all that he had learned.s
g. Later, Glaucus led an expedition westward, and demanded a kingdom from the Italians; but they despised him for failing to be so great a man as his father; however, he introduced the Cretan military girdle and shield into Italy, and thus earned the name Labicus, which means ‘girdled’.6
h. Androgeus visited Athens, and won every contest in the AllAthenian Games. But King Aegeus knew of his friendship for the fifty rebellious sons of Pallas and fearing that he might persuade his father Minos to support these in an open revolt, conspired with the Megareans to have him ambushed at Oeno~ on the way to Thebes, where he was about to compete in certain funeral games. Androgeus defended him-. self with courage, and a fierce battle ensued in which he was killed.? i. News of Androgeus’s death reached Minos while he was sacrificing to the Graces on the island of Paros. He threw down the garlands and commanded the flute-players to cease, but completed the ceremony; to this day they sacrifice to the Graces of Paros without either music or flowers.8
j. Glaucus son of Minos has sometimes been confu~ed with AnthedonJan Glaucus, son of Anthedon, or of Poseidon, who once observed the restorative property of a certain grass, sown by Cronus in the Golden Age, when a dead fish (or, some say, a hare) was laid upon it and came to life again. He tasted the herb and, becoming immortal, leaped into the sea, where he is now a marine god, famous for his amorous adventures. His underwater home lies off the coast of Delos, and evcry year he visits all the ports and islands of Greece, issuing oracles much prized by sailors and fishermen-Apollo himself is described as Glaucus’s pupil.9
x. Pausanias: viii. 53.2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60; Apollodorus: iiL 1[.1.
1. Pausanias: loc. tit.; Plutarch: Agis 9.
3. Plutarch’: Theseus 20; Apollodonas: iii. 2. ~-2; Euripides: Hip~pol~. tus; Pausanias: ii. 7. 7; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~493 if.
4. Hyginus: Fabula 136; Apollodorus: iii. 3. x; Pausanias: i. ›3.5. 5. Apollodorus: toc. tit.; Hyginus: Ioc. dr.
6. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 796.
7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 60. 4; Apollodorus: iii. ~5.7; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. ~4; Hyginus: Fabula 41.
8. Apollodorus: iii. ~5—7.
9. Athenaeus: vii. 48; Tzetzes~ On Lycophron 754; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 924 if.; Pausanias: ix. 22.6; Servius on Virgil’s Georgi~s i. 437.
1. Pasipha~ as the Moou (see $~. h) has been credited with numerous sons: Cydon, the eponymous hero of Cydon near Tegea, and of the Cydonian colony in Crete; Glaucus, a Corinthian sea2hero (see ‘7~. 4); Androgeus, in whose honour annual games were celebrated at Ceramicus, and whom the Athenians worshipped as ‘Eurygyes’ (‘ broad-circling’), to show that he was a spirit of the solar year (Hesychius sub Androgeus); Ammon, the oracular hero of the Ammon Oasis, later equated with Zeus; and Catreus, whose name seems to be a masculine form of Catarrhoa, the Moon as raiu-maker. Her daughters Ariadne and Phaedra are reproductions of herself; Ariadne, though read as ariagne, ‘most pure’, appears to be a Sumerian name, Ar-ri-an-de, ‘high fruitful mother of the barley ~, and Phaedra occurs in South Palestinian inscriptions as Pdri. 2. The myth of Acacallis (‘tinwalled’) apparently records the capture, by invading Hellenes from Aegialae, of the West Cretan city of Tarrt~a which, like other Cretan cities, was unwalled (see 98. i ); and the flight of the leading inhabitants to Libya, where they became the rulers of the unwarlike Garamantians.
3. White, red, and black, the colours of Minos’s heifer, were also those oflo the Moon-cow (see 56.1); those of Augeias’s sacred bulls (see ~ 27.1 ); and on a Caeretan vase (Monumenti Inediti vi-vii. p. 77) those of the Minos bull which carried off Europe. Moreover, clay or plaster tripods sacred to the Cretan goddess found at Ninou Khani, and a similar tripod found at Mycenae, were painted in white, red, and black; and according to Ctesias’s Indica, these were the colours of the unicorn’s horn—the u~ficorn, as a calendar symbol, represented the Moon-goddess’s dominion over the five seasons of the Osirian year, each of which contributcd part of an animal to its composition. That Glaucus was chasing a mouse may point to a conflict between the Athenian worshippers of Athene, who had an owl (glaux) for her familiar, and the worshippers ofApoll0 Smintheus (‘ Mouse Apollo ‘); or the original story may have been that Minos gave him a mouse coated with honey to swallow—a desperate remedy 90. $—90. 7 307 prescribe.cl for sick children in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His manner of death may also refer to the use of honey as an embalming fluid—manyjar-burials of children occur in Cretan houses—and the owl was a bird of death. The bees are perhaps explained by a misreading of certain cut gems (Weiseler: Denkrnale der Alten Kunst ii. 252), which showed Hermes summoning the dead from burial jars, while their souls hovered above in the form of bees (see 39.8 and 82. 4)4. Polyeidus is both the shape-shifting Zagreus (see 30. a) and the demi-god Asclepius, whose regenerative herb seems to have been mistletoe (see 50. 2), or its Eastern-European counterpart, the loranthus. The Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh provides a parallel to the serpent’s rev/vification. His herb of eternal life is stolen from him by a serpent, which thereupon casts its slough and grows young again; Gilgamesh, unable to recover the herb, resigns himself to death. It is described as resembling buckthorn: a plant which the Greeks took as a purge before performing their Mysteries.
5. Glaucus’s spitting into the open mouth of Polyeidus recalls a similar action of apollo when Cassandra failed to pay him for the gift of prophecy; in Cassandra’s case, however, the result was not that she lost the gift, but that no one believed her (see x$8. q).
6. The goddesses to whom Minos sacrificed without the customary flutes or flowers, when he heard that his son had died, were the Pariae, or ^ncient Ones (see 89. a), presumably the Three Fates, euphemistically called the’ Graces’. Myth has here broken down into street-corner anecdote. Androgeus’s death is a device used to account for the Cretan quarrel with Athens (see 98. c), based, perhaps, on some irrelevant tradition of a murder done at Oeno&
7. Anthedonian Glaucus’s oracular gifts, his name, and his love-affairs, one of which was with Scylla (see ~70. t), suggest that he was a personification of Cretan sea-power. Both Minos (who received his oracles from Zeus) and Poseidon, patron of the Cretan confederacy (see 39—7), had enjoyed Scylla (see 9~—z); and Anthedon (‘rejoicing in flow~ rs’) was apparently a title of the Cretan Springflower hero incarnate in every Late Minoan king .(see 85.2). The King of Cnossus seems.to have been connected by sacred marriages with all member states of his confederacy (see 89. t); hence Glaucus’s amatory reputation. It is probable that a representative from Cnossus made an annual progress around the Cretan overseas dependencies in the style of Talos (see 9:2. 7), giving out the latest oracular edicts. Delos was a Cretan island and perhaps a distribution centre for oracles brought from the Dictaean Cave at Cnossus. But this Glaucus also resembles Proteus, the oracular sea-god of Cretan Pharos (see ~69. 6), and Melicertes the sea-god of Corinth, identified with another Glaucus (see 71. 4)—Cronus’s grass of the Golden Age may have been the magical herbe d’or of the Druids.
308 90. 8-91. c
8. A version of the Glaucus myth is quoted from the Lydian hist0~ Xanthus by Pliny (Natural History xxv. 14) and Nonnus (Dionysiaca xxv. 45~-55~), and commemorated on a series of coins from Sardis. When the hero Tylon, or Tylus (‘ knot’ or ‘phallus’), was fatally bitten iu the heel by a poisonous serpent (see ~17. ~), his sister Moera (‘fate’) appealed to the giant Damasen (‘ subduer’), who avenged him. Another serpent the~ fetched ‘the flower of Zeus’ from the woods, aud laid it on the lips 0fit~ dead mate, which came to life again; Mocta followed this example ~n( similarly restored Tylus.
M~N o s was the first king to control the Mediterranean Sea, which cleared of pirates, and in Crete ruled over ninety cities. When th Athenians had murdered his son Androgeus, he decided to take veng~ ante on them, and sailed around the Aegean collecting ships and arme levies. Some islanders agreed to help him, some refused. Siphnos yielded to him by the Princess Arne, whom he bribed with gold; the gods changed her into a jackdaw which loves gold and all thiu,: that glitter. He made an alliance with the people of Anaphe, but rebuffed by King Aeacus of Aegina and departed, swearing rcvcng~ Aeacus then answered an appeal from Cephahis to join the Athenia~ against Minos.1
b. Meanwhile, Minos was bartying the Isthmus of Corinth.
siege to Nisa, ruled by Nisus the Egyptian, who had a daughter name Scylla. A tower stood in the city, built by Apollo land Poseidon ?], an at its foot lay a musical stone which, if pebbles were dropped upon from above, rang like a lyre—because Apollo had once rested his ly~ there while he was working as a mason. Scylla used to spend much titr at the top of the tower, playing tunes on the stone with a lapful pebbles; and here she climbed daily when the wa~ began, to watch
c. The siege of Nisa was protracted, and Scylla soon came to kno~ the name of every Cretan warrior. Struck by the beauty of Minos, an by his magnificent clothes and white charger, she fell perversely in lov 91. c—91. h 309 with him. Some say that Aphrodite willed it so; others blame Hera.2
d. One night Scylla crept into her father’s chamber, and cut off the famous bright lock on which his life anti throne clepenclect; then, ta~ing from him the keys of the city gate, she opened it, and stole out. She made straight for Minos’s tent, and offered him the lock of hair in exchange for his love. ‘It is a bargain!’ cried Minos; and that same night, having entered the city and sacked it, he duly lay with Scylla; but would not take her to Crete, because he loathed the crime of parricide. Scylla, however, swam after his ship, and dung to the stem until her father Nisus’s soul in the form of a sea-eagle swooped down upon her with talons and hooked beak. The terrified Scylla let go and was drowned; her soul flew off as a ciris-bird, which is well known for its purple breast and red legs.3 But some say that Minos gave orders for Scylla to be drowned; and others that her soul became the fish ciris, not the bird of that name.4
e. Nisa was afterwards called Megara, in honour ofMegareus, a son 0ś Oenope by Hippomenes; he had been Nisus’s ally and married his daughter Iphino~~, and is said to have succeeded him on the throne.5 ~f. This war dragged on until Minos, finding that he could not subdue Athens, prayed Zeus to avenge Androgeus’s death; and the whole of ~reece was consequently afflicted with earthquakes and famine. The kings of the various city states assembled at Delphi to consult the Oracle, and were instructed to make Acacus offer up prayers on their behalf. When this had been done, the earthquakes everywhere ceased, except in Attica.
,~. The Athenians thereupon sought to redeem themselves from the curse by sacrif~cing to Persephone the daughters of Hyacinthus, namely Antheis, Aegleis, Lyctaea, and Orthaea, on the grave of the Cyclops Gcracstus. These girls had come to Athens from Sparta. Yet the earthquakes continued and, when the Athenians again consulted the Delphic Oracle, they were told to give Minos whatever satisfaction he might ask; which proved to be a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens, sent cvcry ~fine years to Crete as a prey for the Minotaur.6
lz. Minos then returned to Cnossus, where he sacrificed a hecatomb 0f bulls in gratitude for his success; but his end came in the ninth year.7 x. Strabo: x. 4. 8 and xS; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 480-viii. 6. 2. Hyginus: Fabula ~t98; Virgil: Ciris.
3. Apollodorus: iii. ~5. 8; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses viii. 6-~[51; Virgil: loc. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 34. 7.
9~. ~-9~.
4. Apollodorus: loc. ›it.; Pausanias: loe.
5. Pausanias: i. 39. 4-5.
6. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 6~.
7. Ovid: Metamorphoses viii. ~$2 if.; Homer: Odyssey xix. 178.
* ~. The historical setting of the Scylla myth is apparently a dispute between the Athenians and their Cretan overlords not long before the sack of Cnossus in ~400 B.c. The myth itself, almost exactly repeated in the Taphian story of Pterelaus and Comaetho, recalls those of Sanason and Delilah in Philisfia; Curoi, Blathnat, and Cuchulain in Ireland; Llew Llaw, Blodeuwedd, and Gronw in Wales: all variations on a single pattern. It concerns the rivalry between the sacred king and his tanist for the fayour of the Moon-goddess who, at midsummer, cuts off the king’~ hair and betrays him. The kiug’s strength resides in his hair, because he represents the Sun; and his long yellow locks are compared to its rays. Delilah shears Samson’s hair before calling in the Philistines; Blathna~ ties Curoi’s to a bed-post before summoning her lover Cuchulain to ki~ him; Blodeuwedd ties Llew Llaw’s to a tree before summoning her love~ Gronw. Llew Llaw’s soul takes the form of an eagle, and Blodeuwed~ (‘ fair flower aspect ‘), a woman magically made of nine different flowers. is metamorphosed into an owl—as Scylla perhaps also was in the origina’ Greek legend. A collation of these five myths shows that Scylla-C~ maetho-Blodeuwedd-Blathnat~Delilah is the Moon-goddess in he~
spring and summer aspect as Aphrodite Comaetho (‘ bright-haired’); it the autumn she turns into an owl, or a cirls, and becomes the Death. goddess Athene-who had many bird-epiphanies, including the o
(see 97.4)—or Hera, or Hecate. Her name Scylla indicates that the kinI was torn to pieces after his head had been shaven. As in the myth of Lle~ Llaw, the punishment subsequently inflicted on the traitress is a latl moral addition.
2. Ovid (Art of Love i. 3 3 t ) identifies this Scylla with a namesake whon Aphrodite turned into a dog-monster because Poseidon had seduced he: (see ~6. ~), and says that she harboured wild dogs in her womb and loin: as a punishment for cutting offNisus’s lock. Ovid is rarely mistaken in hi: mythology, and he may here be recording a legend that PasiphaE’s curs~ upon Minos made him fdl Scylla’s womb with puppies, rather than witl serpents, scorpions, and millepedes. PasiphaE and Amphitrite are th~ same Moon-and-Sea-goddess, and Minos, as the ruler of the Mediter. ranean, became identified with Poseidon.
3. The sacrifice of the daughters of Hyacinthus on Geraestus’s tonal may refer to the ‘gardens of Adonis’ planted ha honour of the doonaet king—being cut flowers, they withered in a few hours. But Geraestu was a pre-Achaean Cyclops (see 3. b), and according to the Etymologicun 91. $-92. b 31~
(sub Geraestides), his daughters nursed the infant Zero at Gotmoreover, Geraestion was a city in Arcadia where Rhea swaddled Zeus. The Hyacinthides, then, were probably the nurses, not the daughters, of Hyacinthus: priestesses of Artemis who, at Cnidus, bore the title ‘Hyacinthotrophos’ (‘nurse of Hyacinthus’), and identifiable with the Geraestides, since the annually dyh~g Cretan Zeus (see 7—l) was indistinguishable from Hyacinthus. Perhaps, therefore, the myth concerns four dolls hung from a blossoming fruitatree, to face the cardinal points 0fthe compass; in a fructifyhag ceremony of the ‘Hanged Artemis’ (see 79. ~ and 88.10).
4. The seven Athenian youths dedicated to the Minotaur were probsurrogates sacrif~ced annually in place of the Cnossian king. It will have been found convenient to use foreign victims, rather than native Cretans; as happened with the Canaanite ritual of Cruciftxion for which, in the end, captives and criminals sufficed as Tammuz’s surrogates. ‘Every ninth year’ means’ at the end of every Great Year of one hundred lunations’. After seven boys had been sacrificed for the sacred king, he himself died (see 81. 8). The seven Athenian maider~ were not sacrificed; they became attendants on the Moon-priestess, and performed bull-fights, such as are shown in Cretan works of art: a erous but not necessarily fatal sport.
5. A set of musical stones may have existed at Megara on the model of a ~10phone; it would not have been difficult to construct. But perhaps there is a recollection here of Memnon’s singing statue ha Egypt: hollow, with an orifice at thc back of the open mouth, through which the hot dawn when the sun warmed the stone (see 164. ~).
r.1 parentage of Daedalus is disputed. His mother is named Alcippe by some; by others, Merope; by still others, Iphino~; and all give him a father, though it is generally agreed that he belonged to the house of Athens, wh~ch claimed descent from Erechtheus. He was a wonderful smith, having been instructed in his art by Athene herself.1
b. One of his apprentices, Talos the son of his sister Polycaste, or had already surpassed him in craftsmanship while only twelve
3 t2 92. b—92. e years old. Talos happened one day to pick up the jawbone of a serpent or, some say, a fish’s spine; and, finding that he could use it to cut a stick in half, copied it in iron and thereby invented the saw. This, and other inventions of his—such as the potter’s wheel, and the compass for marking out circles—secured him a great reputation at Athens, and Daedalus, who himself claimed to have forged the first saw, soon grew unbearably jealous.2 Leading Talos up to the roof of Athene’s temple on the Acropolis, he pointed out certain distant sights, and suddenly toppled him over the edge. Yet, for all his jealousy, he would have d0ne~ Talos no harm had he not suspected him of incestuous relations with~ his mother Polycaste. Daedalus then hurried down to the foot of the Acropolis, and thrust Talos’s corpse into a bag, proposing to bury it secretly. When challenged by passers-by, he explained that he h~ piously taken up a dead serpent, as the law required—which was n0t altogether untrue, Talos being an Erechthcid—but there were bl00dstains on the bag, and his crime did not escape detection, whereupo~ the Areiopagas banished him for murder. According to another accou~ he fled before the trial could take place.3
c. Now, the soul of Talos—whom some call Calus, Circinus, ›
Tantalus—flew off in the form of a partridge, but his body was buri› where it had fallen. Polycaste hanged herself when she heard of h death, and the Athenians built a sanctuary in her honour beside tt Acropolis.*
d. Daedalus took refuge in one of the Attic domes, whose people ~ named Daedalids after him; and then in Cretan Cnossus, where Kin{ Minos delighted to welcome so skilled a craftsman. He lived there fa some time, at peace and in high favour, until Minos, learning that h had helped Pasipha~ to couple with Poseidon’s white bull, locked hin up for a while in the Labyrinth, together with his son Icarus, who~ mother, Naucrate, was one of Minos’s slaves; but Pasipha~ freed the~ both.s
e. It was not easy, however, to escape from Crete, since Minos kep all his ships under military guard, and now offered a large reward his apprehension. But Daedalus made a pair of wings for himself, an4 another for Icarus, the quill feathers of which were threaded tog,ethel~ but the smaller ones held in place by wax. Having tied on Icarus s P4 for him, he said with tears in his eyes: ‘My son, be warned! Neither soar too high, lest the sun melt the wax; nor swoop too low, lest feathers be wetted by the sea.’ Then he slipped his arms into his wings and they flew off. ‘Follow me closely,’ he cried, ‘do not take your own course !’
As they sped away from the island in a north-easterly direction, the fishermen, shepherds, and ploughmen who gazed mistook them for gods.
They had left Naxos, Delos, and Paros behind them on the left and were leaving Lebynthos and Calymne behind on the right, when Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions and began soaring toward the sun, rejoiced by the lift of his great sweeping wings.
But when Daedalus looked over his shoulder, he could no longer see anything but scattered feathers floated on the waves below. The heat of the sun had melted the wax, and Icarus had fallen into the sea and drowned. Daedalus circled around, until the corpse rose to the surface, and carried it to the near-by island now called Icaria, where he buried it. A partridge sat perched on a holm-oak and watched him—the soul of his sister Polycaste, at last avenged. l.md has now given its name to the surrounding sea.6
But some, disbelieving the story, say that Daedalus fled from Crete in a boat provided by Pasiphae; and that, on their way to Sicily, they were about to disembark at a small island, when Icarus fell into sea and drowned. They add that it was Heracles who buried him, in gratitude for which, Daedalus made so lifelike a statue of him that Heracles mistook it for a rival and felled it with a stone. that Daedalus invented sails, not wings, as a means of outrunning Minos’s galleys; and that Icarus, steering carelessly, was heir boat capsized.7
Daedalus flew westward until, alighting at Cumae near Naples, he dedicated his wings to Apollo there, and built him a golden-roofed temple. Afterwards, he visited Camicus in Sicily, where he was hos, received by King Cocalus, and lived among the Sicilians, enjoying great fame and erecting many fine buildings. Meanwhile, Minos had raised a considerable fleet, and set out in pursuit of Daedalus. He brought with him a Triton shell, and wherever he went promised to reward anyone who could pass a linen thread it: a problem which, he knew, Daedalus alone would be able solve. Arrived at Camicus, he offered the shell to Cocalus, who to have it threaded; and, sure enough, Daedalus found out do this. Fastening a gossamer thread to an ant, he bored a hole in the point of the shell and lured the ant up the spirals by smearing honey on the edges of the hole. Then he tied the linen thread to the other end of the gossamer and drew that through as well.
Cocalus returned the threaded shell, claiming the reward, and Minos that he had at last found Daedalus’s hiding-place, demanded render. But Cocalus’s daughters were loth to lose Daedalus, who made them such beautiful toys, and with his help they concocted a plan. Daedalus led a pipe through the roof of the bathroom, down which they poured boiling water or, some say, pitch upon Minos, who was luxuriated in a warm bath. Cocalus, who may well have been implicated in the plot, returned the corpse to the Cretans, saying that Minos had stumbled over a rug and fallen into a cauldron of boiling water.9
j. Minos’s followers buried him with great pomp, and Zeus made him a judge of the dead in Tartarus, with his and his enemy Aeacus as colleagues. Since Minos’s tomb occupied centre of Aphrodite’s temple at Camicus, he was honoured there many generations by great crowds’ of Sicilians who came Aphrodite. In the end, his bones were returned to Crete b, the tyrant of Acragas.
k. After Minos’s death the Cretans fell into complete because their main fleet was burned by the Sicilians. Of the crews were forced to remain overseas, some built the city of Minoa, the beach where they had landed; other., still others, marching into the centre of Sicily, fortified a hill became the city of Enguos, so called from a spring which flo There they built a temple of the Mothers, whom they continueal~ honour greatly, as in their native Crete.10
1. But Daedalus left Sicily to join Iolaus, the ne of Tirynthian Heracles, who led a body of Athenians and Thes’
Sardinia. Many of his works survive to this day in Sardinia called Daedateia. ~~
m. Now, Talos was also the name of Minos’s bull-headed servant, given him by Zeus to guard Crete. Some say that he survivor of the brazen race who sprang from the ash-trees; he was forged by Hephaestus in Sardinia, and that he had a which ran from his neck down to his ankles, where it was stoppered~ a bronze pin. It was his task to run thrice daily around the island~ Crete and throw rocks at any foreign ship; and also to go thrice at a more leisurely pace, through the villages of Crete,
92. m-9~. ~ 3~
laws inscribed on brazen tablets. When the Sardinians tried to the island, Talos made himself red-hot in a f~re and destroyed his burning embrace, grinning f~ercely; hence the expresgrin’. In the end, Medea killed Talos by pulling out the lettang his life-blood escape; though some say that Poeas the with a poisoned arrow?
1. Apollodorus: iii. ES. 8; Plutarch: Theseus 19; Pherecydes, quoted by Scholiast on Sophodes’s Oedipus at Colonus 472; Hyginus:
Fabula 392. Apollodorus: loe. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses viii. 2 36—$9; Hyginus: lZabula 274; Pliny: Natural History vii. 573—Fulgeutius: Myths iii. 2; First Vatican Mythographer: 232; Second Vancan Mythographer: 130; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 76. 6; Hyginus: Fabula 39; Pausanias: vii. 4—54—Pausanias: i. 2~. 6; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 14; Hellanicus, quoted by Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres ~650; Ovid: loc. tit.; Suidas and Photius sub Sanctuary of Perdix.
5. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome i. I~.
6. I~idore of Seville: Origins xiv. 6; Hyginus: Fabula 40; Ovid: Metantorphoses viii. x 82-235.
7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 77; Apollodorus: ii. 6. ~; Pausanias: ix. ~. 2-3.
8. Virgil: Aeneid vi. 14 if.; Pausanias: vii.
g. 5; Diodorus Sicnius: iv. 78.
9. Pausanias: Ioc. rit.; Apollodorus: Epitome i, 14-15; Zenobius: Proverbs iv. 92; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 7910. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Herodotus: vii. 170. t~. Pausanias: vii. 2. 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 30.
~2. Suidas sub Risus Sardonicus; Apollonius Rhodius: Argonautica 1639 if.; Apollodorus: i. 9. 26; Plato: Minos 320c.
1. Hephaestus is sometimes described as Hera’s son by Talos (see 12. c), young nephew; but Daedalus was a junior mereHouse of Erechtheus, which was founded long after the birth Such chronological discrepancies are the rule in mythoDaedalus {‘bright’ or ‘cunningly wrought’), Talos (‘sufferer’), (‘ he who shines by day’), are shown by the similarity of attributes to be merely different tides of the same mythical char. Icarus (from io.-carios,’ dedicated to the Moon-goddess Car’) may yet another of his titles. For Hephaestus the smith-god married to whom the partridge was sacred; the sister of Daedalus the Pe~dix (‘ partridge’); the soul of Talos the smith fle off as a partridge; a partridge appeared at the burial of Daedalus’s ~ Icarus. Besides, Hephaestus was flung from Olympus; Talos was flt~ from the Acropolis. Hephaestus hobbled when he walked: one ofTri0 names was Tantalus (‘ hobbling, or lurching ‘); a cock-partridge hobb~ in his love-dance, holding one heel ready to strike at rivals. More0v, the Latin god Vulcan hobbled. His cult had been introduced from Cre where he was called Velchanus and had a cock for his emblem, becat the cock crows at dawn and was therefore appropriate to a Sun-l~e~ But the cock did not reach Crete until the sixth century B.c., and is lik~ to have displaced the partridge as Velchanus’s bird.
2. It seems that in the spring an erotic partridge dance was perform in honour of the Moon-goddess, and that the male dancers hobbled a wore wings. In Palestine this ceremony, called the Pesach (‘ the hobblint was, according to Jerome, still performed at Beth-Hoglah (‘ the Shrine the Hobbler’), where the devotees danced in a spiral. Beth-Hogl~ identified with ‘the threshing-floor of Atad’, on which mourning ~ made for the lame King Jacob, whose name may mean.Jab Aceb (‘~
heel-god’). Jeremiah warns the Jews not to take part in those orgia~ Canaanite rites, quoting: ‘The partridge gathereth young that she h~ not brought forth.’ Anaphe, a~x island to the north of Crete, with wh Minos made a treaty (see 91. a), was famous in antiquity as a resting-p[ for migrant partridges.
$. The myth of Daedalus and Talos, like its variant, the myth Daedalus and Icarus, seems to combine the ritual of burning the st king’s surrogate, who had put on eagle’s wings (see 29. l),’ in the spr bonfire o when the Palestinian New Year began—with the rituals flinging the partridge-winged pharrnacos, a similar surrogate, over a ( into the sea (see 96. $), and of pricking the king in the heel with a pois0~ arrow (see ~o below). But the fishermen’s and peasants’ admiration of flying Daedalus is probably borrowed from an icon of the win1
Perseus or Marduk (see 73.7)4. In one sense the labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus esca] was the mosaic floor with the maze pattern, which they had to follo~ the ritual partridge dance (see 98. ~); but Daedalus’s escape to Sic Cumae, and Sardima refers perhaps to the flight of the native bron workers from Crete as the result of successive Hellenic invasions. q ruse of the Triton shell, and Minos’s burial in a shrine of Aphrodit~ whom this shell was sacred (see x x. 3), suggest that h/hnos was also, in context, regarded as Hephaestus, the Sea-goddess’s lover. His death i bath is an incident that has apparently become detached from the m of Nisus and Scylla (see 9~—b-d); Nisus’s Celtic counterpart, Llew LI: was killed in a bath by a trick; and so was another sacred King, Agaric non of Mycenae (see xxg. ~).
.5. The name Naucrate (‘sea-power’) records the historical consequences of Minos’s defeat in Sicily—the passing of sea-power from ~g ~~ Cretan into Greek bands. That she was one of Minos’s slaves suggests ~’s ~ a palace revolution of Hellenic mercenaries at Cnossus.
es ~ 6. IfPolycaste, the otlrer name of Talos’s mother Perdix, means potyr, [ cassitere, ‘much tin’, it belongs to the myth of the bronze man, Talos’s e, ~ namesake. Cretan supremacy depended largely on plentiful supplies of se ~ tin, to mix with Cyprian copper; according to Professor Christopher ~, ] Hawkes, the nearest source was the island of Ma30rca.
[Y ~ 7. Talos is said by Hesychius to be a name for the Sun; originally, there ~ fore, Talos will have coursed only once a day around Crete. Perhaps, ~’cl~ however, the harbours of Crete were guarded against pirates by three ~d J watches which sent out patrols. And since Talos the Sun was also called 3 ! ~aurus (‘ the’ bull’—[3ekker: Anecdotaei. 344. io if.; Apollodorus: i. 9-26), ~f ‘, his thrice-yearly visit to the villages was probably a royal progress of the is i Sun-king, wearing h~s ritual bull-mask—the Cretan year being divided into three seasons (see 75. z). Talos’s red-hot embrace may record the he t human burnt sacrifices offered to Moloch, alia~ Melkarth, who was worshipped ~t Corinth as Melicertes (see 70. 5), and probably also known in h Crete. Since this Talos came from Sardinia, where Daedalus was said to h l~ave fled when pursued by Minos, and was at the same (~me Zeus’s e ..r~sc~t to Minos, the rnythographers have simplified the story by g~ving i~:phacstus, rather than Daedalus, credit for its construction; Hephacstus ~:~11)a~dalus being the same character. The sarc~on~cus risus, or n~’tus, a :.., ~sti~g of the facial muscles, symptomatic of lock-jaw, was perhaps so ~1~cd because the stag-man of early Sardinian bronzes wears the same :]~irthlcss, gaping grin.
“. ~I alos’s single vein belongs to the mystery of early bronze casting by :t ~i~’ cir(‘-?erdt~e method. First, the smith made a beeswax image wh~ch he :~cd with a layer of clay, and laid in an oven. As soon as the clay had .1 well baked he pierced the spot between heel and ankle, so that the i~t wax ran out and deft a mould, into which molten bronze could be ?~,~rcd. When he had filled this, and the metal inside had cooled, he broke :i~. c[a~’, leaving a bronze image of the same shape as the original wax one. Ii~~ Cretans brought the cire-perdue method to Sardmsa, together with ~i~ i)acdalus cult. Since Daedalus learned his craft from Athene, who was k~ ~v~ as Medea at Corinth, the story of Talos’s death may have been a :~i~cading of an icon which showed Athene demonstrating the cirev:r~i~ll~ ~ethod. The tradition that melted wax caused lcarus’s death seems :~ i~k~g, rather, to the myth of his cousin Talos; because Talos the ~,,~zc x~an is closely connected with his namesake, the worker in ~r.,~:zc a~d the reputed inventor of compasses.
1. Compasses are part of the bronze-worker’s mystery, essential for :i~c accurate drawing of concentric circles when bowls, helmets, or masks have to be beaten out. Hence Talos was known as Circinus, ‘the circular’, 92. 9—93. c
a title which referred both to the course of the sun and to the use ~ compass (see 3.2). His invention of the saxv has been rightly empha~ the Cretans hac~ m’mute ctouble-toothefi turning-saws for free ~ which they used with marvellous dexterity. Talos is the son of an asl nymph, because ash-charcoal yields a very high heat for smelting. myth sheds light also on Prometheus’s creation of man from el:
Hebrew legend Prometheus’s part was played by the Archangel Mi~ who worked under the eye of Jehovah.
t0. Poeas’s shooting of Talos recalls Paris’s shooting of Achillet in the heel, and the deaths of the Centaurs Pholus and Cheiron (see x: These myths are closely related. Pholus and Cheiron died from Her: poisoned arrows. Poeas was the father of Philoctetes and, when He had been poisoned by another Centaur, ordered him to kindle the as a result, Philoctetes obtained the same arrows (see 145.f), one ofx poisoned him (see 161. 1). Paris then borrowed Thessalian Ap deadly arrows to kill AchiLles, Cheiron’s foster-son (see 164. j) finally, when Philoctetes avenged Achilles by shooting Paris, he another from Heracles’s quiver (see 166. e). The Thessalian sacred was, it seenas, killed by an arrow smeared with viper venom, whic tarfist drove between his heel and ankle. In the Sanskrit Mahabharat, divine hero Krishna, whom Alexander’s Greeks identified with Her was shot in the heel and killed by the lmnter Jara who, in some m appears as his brother: i.e. tanist.
~i. In Celtic myth thelabyrinth came to mean the royal tomb (I
Goddess p. 105); an~ that it also did so among the early Greeks is sugg by its definition in the Etymologicum Magnum as ‘ a mountain cave’ by Eustathius (On Homer’s Odyssey xi. p. 1688) as ‘ a subterranean c Lars Porsena made one for his tomb (Varro, quoted by Pliny: N, History xxxvi. 91-3), and there were labyrinths in the ‘Cyclop, i.e. pre-Hellenic, caves near Nauplia (Strabo: viii. 6.2); on Samos (P Natural History xxxiv. 83); and on Lemnos (Pliny: Natural History x: 90). To escape from the labyrinth, therefore, is to be reincarnate. 12. Although Daedalus ranl~s as an Atlaeman, I~ecause ot tlae deme named in his honour, the Daedalic crafts were introduced Attica from Crete, not contrariwise. The toys that he made fo daughters of Cocalus are likely to have been dolls with movable li like those which pleased Pasipha~ and her daughter Ariadne (see 8 and which seem to have been used in the Attic tree cult ofErigone. A rate, Polycaste, Daedalus’s sister, hanged herself, as did two Erigone Ariadne herself (see 79—z and 88. ~0).
~$. The Messapians of Hyria, later Uria, now Oria, were kno~
Classical times for their Cretan customs—kiss-curl, fiower-embroi~ robes, double-axe, and so on; and pottery found there can be dat~ ~400 B.C., which bears out the story.
CATREUS, Minos’s eldest surviving son, had three daughters: Aerope, Clymene, and Apemosyne; and a son, Althaemenes. When an oracle predicted that Catreus would be killed by one of his own children, Althaemenes and the swift-footed Apemosyne piously left Crete, with a large following, in the hope of escaping the curse. They landed on the island of Rhodes, and founded the city of Crefinia, naming it in honour of their native island. Althaemenes afterwards settled at Cameirus, where he was held in great honour by the inhabitants, and raised an altar to Zeus on the near-by Mount Atabyrius, from the summit of which, on clear days, he could gain a distant view of his beloved Crete. Around this altar he set brazen bulls, which roared aloud whenever danger threatened Rhodes.2
b. One day Hermes fell in love with Apemosyne, who rejected his and fled from him. That evening he surprised her near a spring. Again she turned to flee, but he had spread slippery hides on the one path of escape, so that she fell flat on her face and he succeeded in ravishing her. When Apemosyne returned to the palace, and ruefully told Althaemenes of this misadventure, he cried out ‘Liar and harlot!’ and put her to death.
c. Meanwhile Catreus, mistrusting Aerope and Clymene, the other daughters, banished them from Crete, of which he was now king. Aerope, having been seduced by Thyestes the Pelopid, married Pleisthenes, brother of Agamenmon and Menelaus; and Clythe celebrated navigator. At last, in lonely old age and, so far as he knew, without an heir to his throne, Catreus went search of Althaemenes, whom he loved dearly. Landing one night on Rhodes, he and his companions were mistaken for pirates, and slain by the Cameiran cowherds. Catreus tried to explain who he was and why he had come, but the barking of dogs drowned his voice. Althaemenes came from the palace to beat off the supposed raid and, seeing his father, killed him with a spear. When he learned that the oracle had been fulfilled after all, despite his long, self-imposed swallowed up by the earth. A chasm opened accordingly and he disappeared, but is paid heroic honours to this day.3
1. Apollodorus: iii. 2. x.
2. Diodorus Siculus: v. 78; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Strabo: xiv. Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes vii. t59.
3. Apollodorus: iii. z. t-z; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.
1. This artificial myth, which records a Mycenaeo-Minoan occupatio of Rhodes in the fifteenth century B.C., is intended also to account for libations poured down a chasm to a Rhodian hero, as well as for erotic sports in the course of which women danced on the newly-flayed hide of sacrificial beasts. The termination byrlos, or bur;ash, occurs in the royal title of the Third Babylonian Dynasty, founded in ~750 B.c.; and deity of Atabyrius in Crete, like that of Atabyrium (Mount Tabor) i Palestine, famous for its golden calf worship, was the Hittite Tesup, cattle-owning Sun-god (see 67. I). Rhodes first belonged to the Sume~ Moon-goddess Dam-KLna, or Dana’d (see 60. 3), but passed into th possession of Tesup (see 42. 4); and, on the breakdown of the Hitfit Empire, was colonized by Greek-speaking Cretans who retained the cult, but made Atabyrius a son of Proetus (‘first man’) and Eurynom the Creatrix (see r. a). In Dorian times Zeus Atabyriu~ usurped Tesup’ Rhodian cult. The roar of bulls will have been produced by the whirli~ of rhomboi, or bull-roarers (see 30. ~), used to frighten away evil spirits.
g. Apemosyne’s death at Cameira may refer to a brutal repression, by the Hittite rather than the Cretan invaders, of a college of Oracular priestesses at Cameirus. The three daughters of Catreus, like the Danae, are the familiar Moon-triad: Apemosyne being the third person, eira’s counterpart. Catreus accidentally murdered by Althaeamenes, Laius accidentally murdered by his son Oedipus (see 105. d), and Odysseus by his son Telegonus (see 170. k), will have been a predecessor in sacred kingship rather than a father; but the story has been mistold. the son, not the father, should land from the sea and hurl the sting-ray spear.
WHEN Erechtheus, King of Athens, was killed by Poseidon, his son Cecrops, Pandorus, Metion, and Orneus quarrelled over the succession and Xuthus, by whose verdict Cecrops, the eldest, became king, had to leave Attica in haste.1
b. Cecrops, whom Metion and Omeus threatened to kill, fled first to xxx and then to Euboea, where Pandorus joined him and founded a colony. The throne of Athens fell to Cecrops’s son Pandion, whose mother was Metiadusa, daughter of Eupalamus.2 But.he did not long his power, for though Medon died, his sons by Alcippe, or proved to be as jealous as himself. These sons were named Daedalus, whom some, however, call his grandson; Eupalamus, whom others call his father; and Sicyon. Sicyon is also variously called the son of Erechtheus, Pelops, or Marathon, these genealogies being in great c0nfusion.1 .
c When the sons of Metion expelled Pandion from Athens he fled
:0 the court of Pylas, Pyhts, or Pylon, a Lelegian king of Megara,4 ‘~i~)se daughter Pylia he married. Later, Pylas killed his uncle Bias and, ic.1ving Pandion to rule Megara, took refuge in Messenia, where he (~’~ndcd the city of Pylus. Driven thence by Neleus and the Pelasgians c,(101cus, he entered Elis, and there founded a second Pylus. Pylia bore i)a~dion four sons at Megara: Aegeus, Pallas, Nisus, and Lycus, though ~.1ct~s’sjealous brothers spread the rumour that he was the bastard son ~’:~~ne Scyrius.s Pandion never returned to Athens. He enjoys a hero ~i:rinc in Megara, where his tomb is still shown on the Bluffof Athene :he 1)ivcr-bird, in proof that this territory once belonged to Athens; it ,.,,a~ disguised as this bird that Athene hid his father Cecrops under her ..1~~gs, and carried him in safety to Megara.6
d. After Pandion’s death his sons marched against Athens, drove out :~c sons of Metion, and divided Attica into four parts, as their father i:.,ci instructed them to do. Aegeus, be’rag the eldest, was awarded the ,:~verci(.,mty of Athens, while his brothers drew lots for the remainder ;.(rile kingdom: Nisus won Megara and the surrounding country as far ‘~c~t as Corinth; Lycus won Euboea’; and Pallas Southern Attica, where i:o bred a rugged race of giants.7
c. P~4as’s son Sciron, who married one of Pandion’s daughters, disbarred [qisus’s claim to Megara, and Aeacus, called in to judge the dis~[!re, awarded the kingship to Nisus and his descendants, but the com~,~ai~d of its armies to Sciron. In those days Megara was called Nisa, ~d Nisus also gave his name to the port of Nisaca, which he founded. ‘~x ‘~:c~, Minos killed Nisus he was buried in Athens, where his tomb is .::I sl~wn behind the Lyceum. The Megarms, however, who do not admit that their city was ever captured by the Cretans, claim that !,’,c~:~r~’t~s married Nisus’s daughter Iphino~ and succeeded him?
f. Aegeus, like Cecrops and Pandion, found his life consta~
threatened by the plots of his kinsmen, among them Lycus, whom is said to have exiled from Euboea. Lycus took refuge with Sarpedt and gave his name to Lycia, after first visiting Aphareus at Arene, initiating the royal household into the Mysteries of the Great Goddes Demeter and Persephone, and also into those of Atthis, at the and Messenian capital of Andania. This Arthis, who gave Attica its na~ was one of the three daughters of Cranaus, the autochthonous k’~n~ Athens reigning at the time of the Deucalonian Flood. The oak-cops at Andania, where Lycus purified the initiates, still bears his nam›.Q had been granted the power of prophecy, and it was his oracle w~ later declared that if the Messenians kept a certain secret thing they would one day recover their patrimony, but if not, they w0 forfeit it for ever. Lycus was referring to an account of the Mystcrie the Great Goddess engraved on a sheet of fro, which the Messer/ thereupon buried in a brazen urn between a yew and a myrtle, on summit of Mount Ithone; Epaminondas the Theban eventually, interred it when he restored the Messenians to their former glory.
g. The Athenian Lyceum is also named in honour of Lycus; from very earliest times it has been sacred to Apollo who there first recei the surname ‘Lycaean’, and expelled wolves from Athens by the s~ of his sacfff~ces.1 ~
x. Apollodorus: iii. ~5. x and 5; Plutarch: Theseus 32; Pausanias: ~02.
2. Ibid.: i. 5.3; Eustathius on Homer p. 28~; Apollodorus: iii. ~ 3. Pherecydes, quoted by Scholiast on Sophocles’s Oedipu Colonus 472; Apollodorus: iii. x$. 8; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 7~
Pausanias: ii. 6. 34. Apollodorus: iii. xS. 5; Pausanias: iv. 36. x and i. 29. 5. 5. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: iv. 36. x.
6. Pausanias: i. 41—6; i. 5.3; and i. 39—4; Hesychius sub Aethyi: 7—Apollodorus: iii. xS. 6; Sophocles, qtxoted by Strabo: i. 6; sanias: i. 5—4 and i. 39. 4.
8. Pausanias: i. 39. 4-5 and ~9. 5; Strabo: ix. L 6.
9. Herodotus: i. 173; Pausanias: i. 2. $ and iv. L 4-510. Pausanias: x. Iz. 5; iv. zo. 2 and 26. 6. x~. Ibid.: i. 19. 4; Scholiast on Demosthenes: xxiv. ~4.
* ~. Mythical genealogies such as these were quoted whenever the s~ reignty of states or hereditary privileges came into dispute. The divi ~::’~~ 94.. ~—95. b 323 flvlefMegara between the sacred king, who performed necessary sacrifices, ~YLd his tanist, who commanded the army, is paralleled at Sparta (see hel?4. i). Aegeus’s name records the goat cult in Athens (see 8. I), and ~n, ~l[~ycus’s the wolf cult; any Athenian who killed a wolf was obliged to nd ~ b~y it by public subscription (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 124). se~ t The diver-bird was sacred to Athene as protectress of ships and, since the mt ~ ‘gltuafřfAthene overhung the sea, this may have been another of the cliffs ~ i from which her priestess launched the feathered pharmacos (see 70. 7; ~ t ~’ 6; etc.). Atthis (actes thea, ‘goddess of the rugged coast’) seems to have ~ ~ been a title of the Attic Triple-goddess; her sisters were named Crana~ !5 ] (‘stony’) and Cranaechme (‘rocky point’-Apollodorus: iii. 14. 5); and, ~e ] ;ince Procne and Philomela, when turned into birds, were jointly called ch ~ fitthis (Martial: i. 54.9 and v. 67. 2), she is likely to have been connected with the same cliff-top ritual. Atthis, as Athene, has several other bird epiphanies in Homer (see 97 4)—The Mysteries of the Great Goddesses, of which concerned resurrection, had been buried between yew and myrtle because these stood, respectively, for the last vowel and the last consonant ns he 0fthe tree alphabet (see 52. 3), and were sacred to the Death-goddess.
A~ (;~ us’s first wife was Melite, daughter of Hoples; and his second, Chalcicot>e, daughter of Rhexenor; but neither bore him any children. ^scribing this, and the misfortunes of his sisters Procne and Philomela, to Aphrodite’s anger, he introduced her worship into Athens, and then wc~t to consult the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle warned him not to untie the mouth of his bulging wine-skin until he reached the highest ?oi:~t of Athens, lest he die one day of grief, a response which Aegeus c0t~ld x:ot interpret.1
b. On his way home he called at Corinth; and here Medea made him swear a solemn oath that he would shelter her from all enemies if she ever sought refuge at Athens, and undertook in return to procure l:im a son by magic. Next, he visited Troezen, where his old comrades Pittlxeus and Troezen, sons of Pelops, had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Aef~us. Aetius was the successor of his father Anthas, son of Poseidon and Alcyone who, having founded the 324 95. b—95’. e cities Anthaea and Hyperea, had lately sailed off to found Halicarnass in Caria. But Aetius seems to have enjoyed little power, because 1~ theus, after Troezen’s death, united Anthaea and Hyperea into a sing city, which he dedicated jointly to Athene and Poseidon, calling Troezen.2
c. Pitthem was the most learned man of his age, and one of his m01 apothegms, on friendship, is often quoted: ‘Blast not the hope th friendship hath conceived; but fill its measure high!’ He founded sanctuary of Oracular Apollo at Troezen, which is the oldest surviv’~ shrine in Greece; and also dcdicatcd an altar to the Triple-godd~ Themis. Three white marble thrones, now placed above his t0n behind the temple of Artemis the Saviour, used to serve him and t~ others as judgement seats. He also taught the art of oratory in fl Muses’ sanctuary at Troezen—which was founded by Hephaest~
son Ardalus, the reputed inventor of the flute-and a treatise ~ rhetoric by his hand is extant.3
d. Now, while Pittheus was still living at Pisa, Bellerophon 1~ asked to marry his daughter Aethra, but had been sent away to Carhi disgrace before the marriage could be celebrated; though still ca tracted to Bellerophon, she had little hope of his return. Pitthem, the~ fore, grieving at her enforced virginity, and influenced by the s~ which Medea was casting on all of them from afar, made Aegeus dn4 and sent him to bed with Aethra. Later in the same night, Poseid0 also enjoyed her. For, in obedience to a dream sent by Athene, shele the drunken Acgeus, and waded across to the island of Sphaeria, whk lies close to the mainland of Troezen, carrying libations to pour att[ tomb of Sphaerus, Pelops’s charioteer. There, with Athene’s ance, Poseidon overpowered her, and Aethra subsequently the name of the island from Sphaeria to Hiera, and founded on temple of Apaturian Athene, establishing a rule girl should henceforth dedicate her girdle to the goddess before ~ riage. Poseidon, however, generously conceded to Aegeus the of any child born to Aethra in the
e. Aegeus, when he awoke and found himself in Aethra’s bed, ~
her that if a son were born to them he must not be exposed or:
away, but secretly reared in Troezen. Then he sailed back celebrate the All-Athenian Festival, after hiding his sword sandals under a hollow rock, known as the stood on the road from Troezen to Hermium. If, when the boyI
he cotfid move this rock and recover the tokens, he was to be sent them to Athens. Meanwhile, Aethra must keep silence, lest
s nephews, the fifty children of Pallas, plotted against her hfe. sword was an heirloom from Cecrops. S
fi At a place now called Genethlium, on the way from the city to harbour ofTroezen, Aethra gave birth to a boy. Some say that she once named him Theseus, because the tokens had been deposited that he afterwards won this name at Athens. He was up in Troczen, where his guardian Pittheus discreetly spread rumour that Poseidon had been his father; and one Conn’xdas, to the Athenians still sacrifice a ram on the day before the Thesean acted as his pedagogue. But some say that Theseus grew up at
g. One day Heracles, dining at Troezen with Pittheus, removed his and threw it over a stool. When the palace children came in, screamed and fled, all except seven-year-old Theseus, who ran to axe from the woodpile, and returned boldly, prepared to
a real lion.7
h. At the age of sixteen years he visited Delphi, and offered his first ~ hair-clippings to Apollo. He shaved, however, only the fore:of his head, like the Arabians and Mysians, or like the war-like who thereby deny their enemies any advantage in combat. This kind of tonsure, and the precinct where he perthe ceremony, are both still called Thesean. He was now a intelligent and prudent youth; and Aethra, leading him to the ir0ck underneath which Aegeus had hidden the sword and sandals, told story of his birth. He had no difficulty in moving the rock, called the ‘Rock of Theseus’, and recovered the tokens. Yet,
,. Pitthcus’s warnings and his mother’s cntreaties, he would not visit Athens by the safe sea route, but insisted on travelling over’and; im~ellcd by a desire to emulate the feats of his cousin-german Heracles, whom he greatly admired.8
1. Scholiast on Euripidcs’s Medea 668; Apollodorus: iii. xS. 6; Pausa~~ias: i. ~4—6.
2. Euripides: Medea 660 fl.; Strabo: viii. 6. 14; Plutarch: Theseus 2. 3. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Pausa~xias: ii. 31. 3-4 and 8-9.
4. Pausanias: ii. 31-~2 and 33—x; Apollodorus: iii. 15.7; Plutarch: Theseus 3; Hyginus: Fabula 37.
5. Plutarch: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 32. 7. 326 95. ~—95.4
6. Pausanias: ii. 32. 8; Plutarch: Theseus 4 and 6; Lactantius Statius’s Thebaid xii. 194.
7. Pausanias: i. 27. 8.
8. Homer: Iliad ii. 542; Pausanias: loc. cit. and ii. 32. 7; Plutarc Theseus 5 and 7—
2. Pittheus is a masculine form of Pitrhea. The names of the tow which he united to form Troezen suggests a matriarchal calendar-tri (see 75. 2), consisting of Anthea (‘flowery’), the Goddess of Sprin Hyperea (‘ being overhead’), the Goddess of Sumtact, when the sun is its zenith; and Pitrhea (‘pine-goddess’), worshipped in autumn wh Attis-Adonis (see 79. l) was sacrificed on his pine. They may be idcntifi with the Triple-goddess Themis, to whom Pittheus raised an altar, sin the name Troezen is apparently a worn-down form of trion hezo~nen~ ‘ [the city] of the three sitters’, which refers to the three white thro~ which served ‘Pittheus and two others’ as seats of justice.
1. Theseus nmst originally have had a twin, since his mother lay wi both a god and a mortal on the same night; the myths of Idas and Lynce~ Castor and Polydeuces (see 74. ~), Heracles and Iphicles (see ~ x 8.3), ma this certain. Moreover, he wore the lion-skin, like Heracles, and ~ therefore have been the sacred king, not the tanist. But when, after t Persian Wars, Theseus became the chief national hero of Athens, ] paternity at least had to be Atheniau, because his mother came frc Troezen. The mythographers then decided to have it both ways: he ~ an Athenian, the son ofAegeus, a mortal; but whcnevcr he necdcd claim Poseidon as his father, he could do so (see 98.j and xox.f). In eit~ case, his mother remained a Troezenian; Athens had important inter› there. He was also allowed an honorary twin, Peirithous who, bei mortal, could not escape from Tartarus—as Heracles, Polydcuces, a Theseus himself did (see 74. j; 103. d; and 134—d). No efforts were spa~ to connect Theseus with Heracles, but the Athenians never grew pow~ ful enough to make him into an Olympiau god.
3. There seem, however, to have been at least three mythologi characters called Theseus: one from Troezen, one from Marathon Attica, and the third from Lapith territory. These were not unified int, single character until thd sixth century B.C., when (as Professor Geo~ Thomson suggests) the Butads, a Lapith clan who had become leadi aristocrats at Athens and even usurped the native Pelasgian priesthood Erechtheus, put forward the Athenia~ Theseus as a rival to Do~
Heracles (see 47. 4). Again, Pittheus was clearly both an Elcan an~ Troezenian title—also borne by the eponymous hero of an Attic de~ belonging to the Cecropian tribe.
4. Aethra’s visit to Sphaeria suggests that the ancient custom ofs› 95.4—96. a 327 prostitution by unmarried girls survived in Athene’s temple for some time after the patriarchal system had been introduced. It can hardly have been brought from Crete, since Troezen is not a Mycenaean site; but was perhaps a Canaanite importation, as at Corinth.
5. Sandals and sword are ancient symbols of royalty; the drawing of a sword from a rock seems to have formed part of the Bronze Age coronation ritual (see 8~. z). Odin, Galahad, and Arthur were all in turn required to perform a similar feat; and an immense sword, lion-hilted and plunged i~to a rock, figures in the sacred marriage scene carved at Hattasus (see ~45. 5). Since Aegeus’s rock is called both the Altar of Strong Zeus and the Rock of Thescus, it may be assumed that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Theseus’ were alternative titles of the sacred king who was crowned upon it; but the goddess armed him. The ‘Apollo’ to whom Theseus dedicated his hair will have been Karu (‘ son of the goddess Car’—see 82. 6 and 86. 2), otherwise known as Car, or Q’re, or Carys, the solar king whose locks were annually shorn before his death (see 83.3), like those of Tyrian Samson and Megarean Nisus (see 9~. ~ )—At a feast called the Comyria (‘ hair trimming ‘), young men sacrificed their forelocks in yearly mourning for him, and were afterwards known as Cureres (see 7.4). This custom, probably of Libyan origin (Herodotus: iv. 194), had spread to Asia Minor and Greece; an injunction against it occurs in Leviticus xxi. 5—But, by Plutarch’s time, Apollo was worshipped as the immortal Sun-god and, in proof of this, kept his own hair rigorously ullshorn.
6. Aetius’s division of Troczenia between Troezen, Pittheus, and himself, recalls the arrangement made by Proctus with Mclampus and Bias (see 72. h). The Pittheus who taught rhetoric and whose treatise survived until Classical times must have been a late historical character.
T~ES~VS set out to free the bandit-ridden coast road which led from Troczcn to Athens. He would pick no quarrels but take vengeance on all who dared molest him, making the ptmishment fit the crime, as was Eeracles’s way.x At Epidaurus, Periphetes the cripple waylaid him. Pcri?hetes, whom some call Poseidon’s son, and others the son of Hc?haestus and Anticleia, owned a huge brazen club, with which he used to kill wayfarers; hence his nickname Corunetes, or’ cudgel-man’.
Theseus wrenched the club from his hands and battered him to death, Delighted with its size and weight, he proudly carried it about ever afterwards; and though he himself had been able to parry its murderous swing, in his hands it never failed to kill. z
b. At the narrowest point of the Isthmus, where both the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs are visible, lived Sinis, the son of Pemon; or, some say, of Polypemon and Sylea, daughter of Corinthus, who claimed to be Poseidon’s bastard.3 He had been nicknamed Pityocamptes, or ‘pinebender’, because he was strong enough to bend down the tops of pinetrees until they touched the earth, and would often ask innocent passers-by to help him with this task, but then suddenly release his hold. As the tree sprang upright again, they were hurled high into the air, and killed by the fall. Or he would bend down the tops of two neighbouring trees until they met, and tie one of his victim’s arms to each, so that he was torn asunder when the trees were released.4
e. Theseus wrestled with Sinis, overpowered him, and served him as he had served others. At this, a beautiful girl ran to hide herself in a thicket of rushes and wild asparagus. He followed her and, after a long search, found her invoking the plants, promising never to burn or destroy them fithey hid her safely. When Theseus swore not to do her any violence, she consented to emerge, and proved to be Sinis’s daughter Perigune. Perigune fell in love with Theseus at sight, forgiving the murder of her hateful father and, in due course, bore him a son, Mel~ippus. Afterwards he gave her in marriage to Deionem the Oechalian. Melanippus’s son Ioxus emigrated to Caria, where he became the ancestor of the Ioxids, who burn neither rushes nor wild asparagus, but venerate both.s
d. Some, however, say that Theseus killed Sinis many years later, and rededicated the Isthmian Games to him, although they had been fou~ded by Sisyphus in honour of Melicertes, the son of Ino.6
e. Next, at Crommyum, he hunted and destroyed a fierce and monstrous wild sow, which had killed so many Crommyonians that they no longer dared plough their fields. This beast, named after the crone ~x,ho bred it, was said to be the child of Typhon and Echidne.7 f Following the coast road, Theseus came to the precipitous cliffs rish~g sheer from the sea, which had become a stronghold of the bandit Sciron; some call him a Corinthian, the son of Pelops, or of Poseidon; others, the son of Henioche and Canethus.8 Sciron used to seat hi~ns~4f upon a rock and force passing travellers to wash his feet: when they 96. f—96. k 329 stooped to the task he would kick them over the cliff into the ~ea, where a giant turtle swam about, waiting to devour them. (Turtles dosely resemble tortoises, except that they are larger, and have flippers instead of feet.) Theseus, refusing to wash Sciron’s feet, lifted him from the rock and flung him into the sea.0
g. The Megareans, however, say that the only Sciron with whom Theseus came in conflict was an honest and generous prince of Megara, the father of Endeis, who married Aeacus and bore him Peleus and Telamon; they add, that Thesero killed Sciron after the capture of Eleusis, many years hter, and celebrated the Isthmian Games in his honour under the patronage of Poseidon.1O
fl. The cliffs of Sciron rise dose to the Molurian Rocks, and over them runs Sciron’s footpath, made by him when he commanded the armies of Megara. A violent north-westerly breeze which blows seaward across these heights is called Sciron by the Athenians.iX i. Now, sciron means ‘parasol’; and the month of Scirophodonis so called because at the Women’s Festival of Demeter and Core, on the twelfth day of Scirophorion, the priest of Erechtheus carries a white r.,arasol, and a priestess of Athene Sciras carries another in solemn promssion from the Acropolis—for on that occasion the goddess’s image is daubed with sdras, a sort of gypsum, to commemorate the white image which Theseus made of her after he had destroyed the Minotattr. XZ
j. Continuing his journey to Athens, Theseus met Cercyon the Arcadian, whom some call t~e son of Branchus and the nymph Argiope; others, the son of Hephaestus, or Poseidon.13 He would challenge passers-by to wrestle with him and then crush them to death in his powerful embrace; but Theseus lifted him up by the knees and, to the delight of Demeter, who wimessed the struggle, dashed him headlong to the ground. Cercyon’s death was instantaneous. Theseus did not trust to strength so much as to skill, for he had invented the art of wrestling, the principles of which were not hitherto understood. The Wrestling-ground of Cercyon is still shown near Eleusis, on the road to Megara, close to the grave of his daughter Alope, whom Theseus is said to have ravished.14
k. On reaching Attic Cor3’dallus, Theseus slew Sinis’s father Polypemon, surnamed Procrustes, who lived beside the road and had two beds in his house, one small, the other large. Offering a night’s lodging to travellers, he would lay the short men on the large bed, and rack 330 96. k-96. 2
them out,to fit it; but the tall men on the small bed, sawing off as much of their legs as projected beyond it~ Some say, however, that he used only one bed, and lengthened or shortened his lodgers according to its measure. In either case, Theseus served him as he had served others? t. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Plutarch: Theseus 7 and
2. Hyginus: Fabula 38; Apollodorus: iii. 16. x; Pausanias: ii. I. 4; Plutarch: Theseus 8.
3. Pausanias: Ioc. cit.; Ovid: Ibis 507 if.; Apollodorus: ii’~. ~6. 2; Scholiast on Euripides’s Hippolytus 977.
4. Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 433 if-; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Pausanias: loc. cit.
5. Plutarch: Theseus $ and 29.
6. Parian Marble 35 if.; Plutarch: Theseus 25.
7. Plutarch: Theseus 9; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 433 if-; Apollodorus: Epitome i. x; Hyginus: Fabula 38. 8. Strabo: ix. L 4; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 2; Plutarch: Theseu~ 25. 9. Scholiast on Statius’s Thebaid i. 339; Pausanias: i. 44. ~2; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 2-3. xo. Plutarch: Theseus Io and 25.
II. Pausanias: i. 44. ~o-~2; Strabo: ix. I. 412. Schohast on Aristophanes’s Parliament of Women 18; Aristophanes: Wasps 925; Etymologicum Magnum: sub Scirophorion. 13. Plutarch: Theseus x~; Apollodorus: Epitomei. 3; Hygmus: FabuIa 38; Aulus Gellius: xiii. 21.
14. Ovid: Ibis 407 if.; Apollodorus: foe. tit.; Pausanias: i. 39. 3; Plutarch: Theseus Ix and 29.
xS. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 59; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 4; Pausanias: i. 38. 5; Hyginus: Fabula 38; Plutarch: Theseus
* ~. The k’Llling of Pedphetes has been invented to account for Theseus’s brass-bound club, like the one carried by Heracles (see 120. 5). Periphctcs is ~scribed as a cripple because he was the son of Daedalus the smith, a~ad smiths were often ritually lamed (see 92.
1. Since the North Wind, which bent the pines, was held to fertilizc women, animals, and plants, ‘Pityocamptes’ is described as the father of Perigtme, a cornfield-goddess (see 48. s). Her descendants’ attachment to wild asparagus and rushes suggests that the sacred baskets carried in the Thesmophoria Festival were woven from these, and therefore tabooed for ordinary use. The Crommyonian Sow, alias Phaea, is the white SowDemeter (see 24. 7 and 74. 4), whose cult was early suppressed i~a the Peloponnese. That Theseus went out of his way to kill a mere sow troubled the mythographers: Hyginus and Ovid, indeed, make her a 96. z-96. 4 331 boar, and Plutarch describes her as a woman bandit whose disgusting behaviour earned her the nickname of ‘sow’. But she appears in ea~ly Welsh myth as the Old White Sow, Hen Wen, tended by the swineherd magician Coil ap Collfrewr, who introduced wheat and bees into Britain; and Demeter’s swineherd magician Eubuleus was remembered in the Thesmophoria Festival at Eleusis, when live pigs were flung down a chasm in his honour. Their rotting remains later served to fertilize the seed-corn (Scholiast on Lucian’s Dialogues Between Whores ii. I). 3—The stories of Sciron and Cercyon are apparently based on a series of icons which illustrated the ceremony of hurling a sacred king as a pharrnacos from the White Rock. The first hero who had met his death here was Melicertes (see 70. h), namely Heracles Melkarth of Tyre who seems to have been stripped of his royal trappings—club, lion-skin, and buskins—and then provided with wings, live birds, and a parasol to break his fall (see 89. 6; 92.3; and 98.7). This is to suggest that Sciron, shown making ready to kick a traveller into the sea, is the pharrnacos being prepared for his ordeal at the Scirophoria, which was celebrated in the last month of the year, namely at midsummer; and that a second scene, explained as Theseus’s wrestling with Cercyon, shows him being lifted off his feet by his successor (as i~ the terracotta of the Royal Colonnade at Athens—Pausanias: i. 3—~), while the priestess of the goddess looks on delightedly. This is a common mythological situation: Heracles, for instance, wrestled for a kingdom with Antaeus in Libya (see ~33. h), and with Eryx in Sicily (see 132. q); Odysseus with Philomeleides on Tenedos (see ~6~.f). A third scene, taken for Theseus’s revenge on Sciron, shows the phar~nacos hurtling through the air, parasol in hand. In a fourth, he has reached the sea, and his parasol is floating on the waves—the supposed turtle, waiting to devour him, was surely the parasol, since there is no record of an Attic turtle cult. The Second Vatican Mythographer (127) makes Daedalus, not Theseus, kill Sciron, probably because of Daedalus’s mythic connexion with the pharrnacos ritual of the partridge king (see 92’ 3)’
4. All these feats of Theseus’s seem to be interrelated. Grammarians associate the white parasol with a gypsum image of Athene. This recalls the whitepharmacos dolls, called ‘Argives’ (‘white men’), thrown into running water once a year at the May purification of temples (see 132.p); also the white cakes shaped like pigs, and made of flour mixed with gypsum (Pliny: Natural History xvii. 29. 2), which were used in the Thesmophoria to replace the pig remains recovered from Eubuleus’s chasm‘in order not to defraud his sacred serpents’, explains the scholiast on Lucian’s Dialogues Between Whores. The Scirophoria Festival formed part of the Thesmophoria. Thes has the same meaning in Thesrnolahoria as in Theseus: namely ‘tokens deposited’-in the baskets woven of wild asparagus and rush which Perigune sanctified. They were phallic tokens 96. 4—97. a and the festival was an erotic one: this is justified by Theseus’s seduction of Perigune, and also by Hermes’s seduction of Herse (see 25. d). The priest of Erechtheus carried a parasol, because he was the president of the serpent cult, and the sacred functions of the ancient kings rested with him after the monarchy had been abolished: as they rested at Rome with the Priest of Zeus.
$. Cercyon’s name connects him with the pig cult. So does his parentage: Branchus refers to the grunting of pigs, and Argiope is a synonym for Phaea. It will have been Poseidon’s son Theseus who ravished Alope: that is to say, suppressed the worship of the Megarean Moon-goddess as Vixen (see 49. z).
6. Sinis and Sciron are both described as the hero in whose honour the Isthmian Games were rededicated; Sinis’s nickname was Pityocamptes; and Sciron, like Pityocamptes, was a north-easterly wind. But since the Isthmian Games had originally been founded in memory of Heracles Melkarth, the destruction of Pityocamptes seems to record the suppression of the Boreas cult in Athens—which was, however, revived after the Persian Wars (see 48.4)—In that case, the Isthmian Games are analogous to the Pythi;m Games, founded in memory of Python, who was both the fertilizing North Wind and the ghost of the sacred king killed by his rival Apollo. Moreover,’ Procrustes’, according to Ovid and the scholiast on Euripides’s Hiśpolytus (977), was only another nickname for SinisPityocamptes; and Procrustes seems to be a fictional character, invented ~o ~mt for a familiar icon: the hair of the old king—Samson, Pterelaus ~R $~. 7), Nisus (see 91. ~), Curoi, Llew Llaw, or whatever he may have ~ called—is tied to the bedpost by his treacherous bride, while ~ ~ ~lvances, axe in hand, to destroy him. ‘Theseus’ and his Hellenes ~ the custom of throwing the old king over the Molurian Rock, and rededicated the Games to Poseidon at Ino’s expense, Ino be’rag one of Athene’s earlier tides.
Aaa~vED in Attica, Theseus was met beside the River Cephissus by the sons of Phytalus, who purified him from the blood he had spilled, but especially from that of Sinis, a maternal kinsman of his. The altar of Gracious Zeus, where this ceremony was performed, still stands by the riverside. Afterwards, the Phytalicls welcomed Theseus as their guest, which was the first true hospitality he had received since leaving 97—a—97—e Troezen. Dressed in a long garment that reached to his feet and with his hair neatly plaited, he entered Athens on the eighth day of the month CroNus, now called Hecatomboeon. As he passed the nearly-completed temple of Apollo the Dolphin, a group of masons working on the roof mistook him for a girl, and impertinendy asked why he was allowed to wander about unescorted. Disdainhag to reply, Theseus unyoked the oxen from the masons’ cart and tossed one of them into the air, high above the temple roof. a
b. Now, while Theseus was growing up in Troezen, Aegeus had kept his promise to Medea. He gave her shelter in Athens when she fled from Corinth in the celebrated chariot drawn by winged serpents, and married her, rightly confident that her spells would enable him to beget an heir; for he did not yet know that Aethra had borne him ~heseus.2
1. Medea, however, recognized Theseus as soon as he arrived in the dty, and grew jealous on behalfofMedus, her son by Aegeus, who was generally expected to succeed him on the Athenian throne. She therefore persuaded Aegeus that Theseus came as a spy or an assassin, and had him invited to a feast at the Dolphin Temple; Aegeus, who used the temple as his residence, was then to offer him a cup of wine already prepared by her. This cup contained wolfsbane, a poison which she had brought from Bithynian Acherusia, where it first sprang from the deadly foam scattered by Cerberus when Heracles dragged him out of Tartarus; because wolfsbane flourishes on bare rocks, the peasann call it’aconite’.3
d. Some say that when the roast beef was served in the Dolphin Temple, Theseus ostentatiously drew his sword, as if to carve, and thus attracted his father’s attention; but others, that he had unsuspectingly raised the cup to his lips before Aegeus noticed the Erechtheid serpents carved on the ivory sword-hilt and dashed the poison to the floor~ The spot where the cup fell is still shown, barred off from the rest of the temple.
e. Then followed the greatest rejoicing that Athens had ever known. Aegeus embraced Theseus, summoned a public assembly, and acknowledged ham as his son. He lighted fires on every altar and heaped the gods’ images with gifts; hecatombs of gadanded oxen were sacririced and, throughout the palace and the city, nobles and commoners feasted together, and sang of Theseus’s glorious deeds that already outnumbered the years of his life.4
f. Theseus then went in vengeful pursuit of Medea, who eluded]
by casting a magic cloud about herself; and presently left Athens young Medus, and an escort which Aegeus generously provided.
some say that she fled with Polyxenus, her son by Jason. S
g. Pallas and his fifty sons, who even before this had declared Aegeus was not a true Erechtheid and thus had no right to the thn broke into open revolt when this foodoose stranger threatenec baulk their hopes of ever ruling Athens. They divided their for Pallas with twenty-five of his sons and numerous retainers marc against the city from the direction of Sphettus, while the other twe~ five lay in ambush at Gargettus. But Theseus, informed of their p by a herald named Leos, of the Agnian clan, sprang the ambush destroyed the entire force. Pallas thereupon disbanded his cornre: and sued for peace. The Pallantids have never forgotten Leos’s tre: ery, and still will not intermarry with the Agnians nor allow any he to begin a proclamation with the words ‘Akouete leoi!’ (‘Hearken people!’), because of the resemblance which leoi bean to the ham ~.1OS.6
h. This Leos must be distinguished from the other Leos, Orphe son, and ancestor of the Athenian Leonfids. Once, in a time of fan and plague, Leos obeyed the Delphic Oracle by sacrificing his dau ters Theope, Praxithea, and Eubule to save the city. The Athenian~ up the Leocorium in their honour.7
x. Pausanias: i. 37—3 and ~9—I; Plutarch: Theseus
2. Euripides: Medea 660 if.; Apollodorus: i. 9—28.
3. Plutarch: Theseus 12; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 6; Ovid: Metar~ phoses vii. 4.02 if.
4. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Ovid: loc. tit.
5. Ovid: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. Hellanicus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 3—7.
6. Plutarch: Theseus
7. Pausanias: i. 5—2; Suidas sub Leos; Aristides: Panathenian Orat Jerome: Against Jovinianusp. ~ 85, ed. Mart; Suidas sub Leocori~ Aelian: Varia Historia xii. 28.
1. This artificial romance with its theatrical dgnouernent in the pois ing scene recalls that of Ion (see 44—a); and the incident of the ox to.. into the air seems merely a crude imitation of Heracles’s feats. ú masons’ question is anachronistic, because in the heroic age young wo~ 97. ~—97. 4 335 went about unescorted; neither could Theseus have been mistaken for a girl if he had already dedicated his hair to Apollo and become one of the Curetes. Yet the story’s weaknesses suggest that it has been deduced from an ancient icon which, since the men on the temple roof were recognizably masons, will have shown a sacrifice performed on the day when the temple was completed (see 84. ~). It is likely that the figure, taken for Theseus, who unyokes the sacrificial white ox from a cart, is a priestess; and that, because of its dolphin decorations, the temple has been misread as Apollo’s, though the dolphin was originally an emblem of the Moongoddess. The beast has not been tossed into the air. It is the deity in whose honour the sacrifice is being offered: either a white moon-cow, the goddess herself, or the white bull of Poseidon (see 88. c), who shared a shrine on the Acropolis with Athene and to whom, as Sea-god, dolphins were sacred; Apollo’s priests, Plutarch not the least, were always zealous to enhance his power and authority at the expense of other deities. A companion icon, from which the story of the poisoned cup will have been deduced—aconite was a well-known paralysant—probably showed a priest or priestess pouring a libation to the ghosts of the men sacrificed when the foundations were laid, while Persephone and Cerberus stand by. Plutarch describes Aegeus as living in the Dolphin Temple rather than a private house; and this is correct since, as sacred king, he had apartments in the Queen’s palace (see 25.7).
2. Medea’s expulsion first from Corinth, and then from Athens, refers to the Hellenic suppression of the Earth-goddess’s cult—her serpent chariot shows her to be a Corinthian Demeter (see 24. tn). Theseus’s defeat of the Pallantids similarly refers to the suppression of the original Athene cult (see 9—~ and ~6.2), with its college of fifty priestesses—pallas can mean either ‘youth’ or ‘maiden’. Still another version of the same story is the sacrifice of Leos’s three daughters, who are really the goddess in triad. The Maiden is Theope (‘divine face’), the New Moon; the Nymph is Praxithea (‘ active goddess ‘), the Queen-bee. Cecrops’s mother bore the same name in Euboea (Apollodorus: iii. ~5—~ and 5); the Crone is Eubule (‘ good counsel’), the oracular goddess, whom Eubuleus the swineherd served at Eleusis.
3. That Pallantids and Agnians refrained from inter-marriage may have been a relic of exogamy, with its complex system of group-marriage between phratries, each phratry or sub-phratry consisting of several totem clans: if so, Pallantids and Agnians will have belonged to the same sub-phratry, marriage being permitted only between members of different ones (see 80.5). The Pallantid clan probably had a goat for its totem, as the Agnians had a lamb, the Leontids a lion, and the Erechtheids a serpent. Many other totem clans are hinted at in Attic mythology: among them, crow, nightingale, hoopoe, wolf, bear, and owl.
4. To judge from the Theseus and Heracles myths, both Athene’s chief 336 97. 4—98. a !~1
priestess at Athens, and Hera’s at Argos, belonged to a lion clan, into which they adopted sacred kings; and a gold ring found at Tiryns shows four lion-men offering libation vessels to a seated goddess, who must be Hera, since a cuckoo perches behind her throne (see ~. 4). Despite the absence of lions in Crete, they figured there too as the Goddess’s beasts. Athene was not associated with the cuckoo but had several other bird epiphanies, which may be totemistic by origin. In Homer she appears as a sea-eagle (Odyssey iii. 37~) and a swallow (ibid. xxii. 239); in company with Apollo, as a vulture (Iliad vii. 58); and ~~ company with Hera, asa dove (ibid. v. 778). On a small Athenian vase of 500 8.c. she is shown as a lark; and Athene the diver-bird, or gannet, had a shrine near Mega~a (Pausanias: i. 5—3 and 41. 6—see 94. c). But the wise owl was her principal epiphany. The owl clan preserved their ritual until late Classical times: initiates in owl-disguise would perform a ceremony of catching their totem bird (Aelian: Varia Historia xv. 28; Pollux: iv. 103; Athcnaeus: 391a-b and 629f).
5. Plutarch’s story of Akouete leoi is plamible enough : it often hap penecl h~ primitive religions that words were banned because they sounded like the name of a person, object, or animal, which could not be safely mentioned; especially words suggesting the names of dead kinsmen, even if they had come to a natural end.
6. The Pallantids’ denial that Aegeus and Theseus were true Erechtheids may reflect a sixth-century protest at Athens against the usurpation by the immigrant Butadae (who refurbished the Theseus legend) of the native Erechtheid priesthood (see 95. $).
IT is a matter of dispute whether Medea persuaded Aegeus to send Theseus against Poseidon’s ferocious white bull, or whether it was after her expulsion from Athens that he undertook the destruction of this fire-breathing monster, hoping thereby to ingratiate himself further with the Athenians. Brought by Heracles from Crete, let loose on the plain of Argos, and driven thence across the Isthmus to Marathon, the bull had killed men by the hundred between the cities of Probalinthus and Tricorynthus, including (some say) Minos’s son Androgeus. Yet Theseus boldly seized those murderous horns and dragged the bull 98. a-98. e 337 the streets of Athens, and up the steep slope of the
~olis, where he sacrificed it to Athene, or to Apollo.1
b. As he approached Marathon, Theseus had been hospitably enter~ a needy old spinster named Hecale, or Hecalene, who vowed ram to Zeus ff he came back safely. But she died before his return, instituted the Hecalesian R’ltes, to honour her and Zeus Hecawhich are still performed today. Because Theseus was no more at this time, Hecale had caressed him with childish endearand is therefore commonly oiled by the diminutive Hecalene, Hccale.2
c. In requital for the death of Androgeus, Minos gave orders that the should send seven youths and seven maidens every ninth
‘ at the dose of every Great Year—to the Cretan Labywhere the Minotaur waited to devour them. This Minotaur, name was Asterius, or Asterion, was the bull-headed monster Pasipha~ had borne to the white bull.3 Soon after Theseus’s Athens the tribute fell due for the thiM time, and he so deeply by lot, that offered himself as one of the victims, despite Aegeus’s earnest at dissuasion. But some say that the lot had fallen on him.
to others, King Minos came in person with a large fleet to victims; his eye lighted on Theseus who, though a native not Athens, volunteered to come on the understanding that uered the Minotaur with his bare hands the tribute would be On the two previous occasions, the ship which conveyed the
4calms had carried black sails, but Theseus was confident that
; were on his side, and Aegeus therefore gave him a white sail
ú in signal of success~ though some say that it was a red in juice of the kerm-oak berry.$
e. When the lots had been cast at the Law Courts, Theseus led his on their behalf, he offered
a branch of consecrated olive, bound with white wool. The mothers brought provisions for the voyage, and told their fables and heroic tales to hearten them. Theseus, however, two of the maiden victims with a pair of effeminate youths, of unusual courage and presence of mind. These he comto take warm baths, avoid the rays of the sun, perfume their : and bodies with unguent oils, and practise how to talk, gesture, and 338 98. e-98. j walk like women. He was thus able to deceive Minos by passing off as maidens.6
f. Phaeax, the ancotot of ~c P!laeacialls, among whom fell, stood as pilot at the prow of the thirty-oarcd ship/n which .1l~ sailed, because no Athenian as yet knew anything about navigafi~! Some say that the helmsman was Phereclus; but those who name Nausitheus are likely to be right, since Theseus on his return r~ monuments to Nausitheus and Phaeax at Phalerum, the port of~
g. The Delphic Oracle had advised Theseus to take Aphrodite[
his guide and companion on the voyage. He therefore sacrificed to[ on the strand; and Io! the victim, a she-goat, became a he-goat death-throes. This prodigy won Aphrodite her tide of Epitragia. S
h. Theseus sailed on the sixth day of Munychion [April]. Everyy~ on this date the Athenians still send virgins to the Dolphin Temple! pro~idat’~ort of K~?c,110. l~ecx,.x~e T~csexas ~a6 om’~ttec~ to 30 so bcf0 taking his leave. The god’s displeasure was shown in a storm, whi~ forced him to take shelter at Delphi and there offer belated sacrif~ce i. When the ship reached Crete some days afterwards, Minos r0
down to the harbour to count the v/ctims. Falling in love with one the Athenian maidens-whether it was Periboea (who became mother o fAoixx) or ~FrJb6wa, ar P~ereboea, is not agreed, for these tbx. bore confusingly similar names—he would have ravished her then there, had Theseus not protested that it was his duty as Poseidon’s st to defend virgins against outrage by tyrants. Minos, laughing lewdl replied that Poseidon had never been known to show delicate respe for any virgins who took his fancy?
‘Ha!’ he cried, ‘prove yourself a son of Poseidon, by retrieving bauble for me!’ So saying, he flung his golden signet ring into the se ‘First prove that you are a son of Zeus[‘ retorted Theseus.
./. This Minos did. His prayer: ‘Father Zeus, hear me!’ was at on, answered by lightning and a rap of thunder. Without more ad Theseus dived into the sea, where a large school of dolphim escort~ him honourably down to the palace of the Nereids. Some say th Thetis the Nereid then gave him thejewelled ~c_rp..w/9..,,. ~h$,r [e’o’rw ~l~fo~e, wl’~i’cfi/(ri~c~ne after’wards wore; others, that Arephi trite the Sea-goddess did so herself, and that she sent the Nereids swim ming in every direction to find the golden ring. At all events, who Theseus emerged from the sea, he was carrying both the ring and th 98. j—98. n 339 as Micon has recorded in his painting on the third wall of II
/e. Aphrodite had indeed accompanied Theseus: for not only did and Phereboea invite the chivalrous Theseus to their and were not spurned, but Minos’s own daughter Ariadne in love with him at first sight. ‘I will help you to kill my halfthe Minotaur,’ she secretly promised him, ‘if I may return to with you as your wife.’ This offer Theseus gladly accepted, and marry her. Now, before Daeda]us left Crete, he had given
a magic ball of thread, and instructed her how to enter and Labyrinth. She must open the entrance door and tie the loose
: thread to the lintel; the ball would then roll along, diminishas it went and making, with devious turns and twists, for the irmers where the Minotaur was lodged. This ball Ariadne gave to and instructed him to follow it until he reached the sleeping whom he must seize by the hair and sacrif~ce to Poseidon. He
r back by rolling up the thread into a ball again. l.2
1. That same night Theseus did as he was told; but whether he killed Minotaur with a sword given him by Ariadne, or with his bare or with his celebrated club, is much disputed. A sculptured at Amyclae shows the Minotaur bound and led in triumph by to Athens; but this is not the generally-accepted story.13
m. When Theseus emerged from the Labyrinth, spotted with blood, : embraced him passionately, and guided the whole Athenian
‘ to the harbour. For, in the meantime, the two effeminate-looking had killed the guards of the women’s quarters, and released the ú ‘ They all stole aboard their ship, where Nausitheus and were expecting them, and rowed hastily away. But although
~in the hulls of several Cretan ships, to prevent the alarm sounded and he was forced to fight a sea-battle in the before escaping, fortunately without loss, under cover of Some days later, after disembarking on the island then named but now known as Naxos, Theseus left Ariadne asleep on the and sailed away. Why he did so must remain a mystery. Some that he deserted her in favour of a new mistress, Aegle, daughter of others that, while wind-bound on Dia, he reflected on the at Athens would cause.1S Others again, Dionysus, appearing to Theseus in a dream, threateningly de—
340 98. n—98. q k manded Ariadne for himself, and that, when Theseus awo e to Dion3rsus’s fleet bearing down on Dia, he weighed anchor in sud& terror; Dionysus having cast a spell which made him forget his ?r0mi to Ariadne and even her very existence.16
o. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, Dionysus’s priests Athens affirm that when Ariadne found herself alone on the dese~ shore, she’ broke into bitter laments, remembering how she h trembled while Theseus set out to kill her monstrous half-broth~ how she had offered silent vows for his success; and how, through of him, she had deserted her parents and motherland. She now inv0k the whole tmiverse for vengeance, and Father Zeus nodded assent. Th~ gendy and sweedy, Dionysus with his’merry train of satyrs maenacls came to Ariadne’s rescue. He marfled her without del setting Thetis’s crown upon her head, and she bore him many d drem~? Of these only Thoas and Oenopion are sometimes cal Theseus’s sons. The crown, which Dionysus later set among the as the Corona Borealis, was made by Hephaestus off~ery gold and Indian gems, set in the shape ofroses.18
p. The Cretans, however, refuse to admit that the Minotaur e existed, or that Theseus won Ariadne by clandestine means. T
descr~be the Labyrinth as merely a well-guarded prison, where Athenian youths and maidens were kept in readiness for Androge funeral games. Some were sacr’tf~ced at his tomb; others presente~ the prizewinners as slaves. It happened that Minus’s cruel and arro~ general Taurus had carried all before him, year after year: wint every event in which he competed, much to the disgust of his rivals. had also forfeited Minos’s conf~dence because he was rumoured carrying on a~ adulterous affair with Pasipha~, connived at by dalus, and one of her twin sons bore a dose resemblance to him. Mi therefore, gladly granted Theseus’s request for the privilege of ling against Taurus. In ancient Crete, women as well as men atter the games, and Ariadne fell in love with Theseus when, three time succession, she saw him toss the former champion over his head pin his shoulders to the ground. The sight afforded Minos almost satisfaction: he awarded Theseus the prize, accepted him as h~s son law, and remitted the cruel tribute.19
q. A traditional Bottiaean song confirms this tradition that no the victims were put to death. It records that the Cretans sent an ing of their first-born to Delphi, for the most part children of Cre 98. q—98. $
ired Athenian slaves. The Delphians, however, could not support these ~ the resources of their small city, and therefore packed them off to :found a colony at Iapygia in Italy. Later, they setded at ]]ottiaea in Thrace, and the nostalgic cry raised by the Botfiaean maidens: ‘ O let us return to Athens!’, h a constant rern~der of their orig~.20
r. An altogether different account is given by the Cypriots and others. They say that Minos and Theseus agreed on oath that no shipexcept the Argo, commanded by Jason, who had a commission to clear tbe sea of pirates—might sail in Greek waters with a crew larger than five. When Daedalus fled from Crete to Athens, Minos broke this pact by pursuing him with warships, and thus earned the anger of Poseidon, who had witnessed the oath, and now raised a storm which drove him to his death in Sicily. Minos’s son Deucalion, inheriting the quarrel, threatened that unless the Athenians surrendered Daedalus, he would put to death all the hostages given him by Theseus at the conclusion of the pact. Theseus replied that Daedalus was his blood-relation, and enquired mildly whether some compromise could not be reached. He exchanged several letters on the subject with Deucalion, but meanwhile secretly built warships: some at Thymoetidae, a port off the beaten track, and others at Troezen, where Pittheus had a naval yard about which the Cretans knew nothing. Within a month or two his flotilla set sail, guided by Daedalus and other fugitives from Crete; and the Cretans mistook the approaching ships for part of Minos’s lost fleet and gave them a resounding welcome. Theseus therefore seized the harbour without opposition, and made straight for Cnossus, where he cut down Deucalion’s guards, and killed Deucalion himself in an inner chamber of the palace. The Cretan throne then passed to Ariadne, with whom Theseus generously came to terms; she surrendered the Athenian hostages, and a treaty of perpetual friendship was concluded between the two nations, sealed by a union of the crowns—in effect, she married Theseus?
.1. After long feasti~g they sailed together for Athens, but were driven to Cyprus by a storm. There Ariadne, already with child by Theseus, and fearing that she might miscarry from sea-sickness, asked to be put ashore at Areathus. This was done, but hardly had Theseus regained his ship when a violent wind forced the whole fleet out to sea again. The women of Areathus treated Ariadne kindly, comforting her with letters which, they pretended, had just arrived from Theseus, who was repairing his ship on the shores ofa neighbouring island; and 342 98. s—98. u when she died in childbed, gave her a lavish funeral. Ariadne’s tomb h still shown at Amathus, in a grove sacred to her as Aridela. Theseus, on his eventual return from the Syrian coast, was deeply grieved to learn that she had died, and’endowed her cult with a large sum of money. The Cypriots still celebrate Ariadne’s festival on the second day of September, when a youth lies down in her grove and imitates a travailing woman; and worship two small statues of her~ one in silver, the other in brass, which Theseus left them. They say that Dionysus, so far from marrying Ariadne, was indignant that she and Theseus had pr0faned his Naydan grotto, and complained to Artemis, who killed her in childbed with merciless shafts; but some say that she hanged herself f0r fear of Artemis?
1. To resume the history of Theseus: from Naxos he sailed to Delos, and there sacrificed to Apollo, celebrating athletic games in his honour. It was then that he introduced the novel custom 0fcrowning the victor with palm-leaves, and placing a palm-stem in his right hand. He also prudently dedicated to the god a small wooden image of Aphrodite, the work of Daedalus, which Ariadne had brought from Crete and left aboard his ship—it might have been the subject of cynical comment by the Athenians. This image, still displayed at Delos, rests on a square base instead of feet, and is perpetually garlanded.23
u. A horned altar stands beside the round lake of Delos. Apollo himself built it, when he was only four years of age, with the closely compacted horns of countless she-goats killed by Artemis on Mount Cynthus—his first architectural feat. The foundations of the altar, and its endosing walls, are also made entirely of horns; all taken from the same side of the victims—but whether from the left, or from the right, is disputed.24 What makes the work rank among the seven marvels of the world is that neither mortar nor any other colligative has been used. It was around this altar—or, according to another version, around an altar of Aphrodite, on which the Daedalic image had been set—that Theseus and his companions danced the Crane, which consists of labyrinthine evolutions, trod with measured steps to the accompaniment of harps. The Delians still perform this dance, which Theseus introduced from Cnossus; Daedalus had built Ariadne a dancing-floor there, marked with a maze pattern in white marble relief, copied from the Egyptian Labyrinth. When Theseus and his companions performed the Crane at Cnossus, this was the first occasion on which men and women danced together. Old-fashioned people, especially sailors, 98. u—98. x 343 keep up nmch the same dance in many different cities of Greece and Asia Minor; so do children in the Italian countryside, and it is the foundation of the Troy Game. ZS
v. Ariadne was soon revenged on Theseus. Whether in grief for her loss, or in joy at the sight of the Attic coast, from which he had been kept by prolonged winds, he forgot his promise to hoist the white sail? Aegeus, who stood watching for him on the Acropolis, where the Temple of the Wingless Victory now stands, sighted the black sail, swooncd, and fell headlong to his death into the valley below. But some say that he deliberately cast himself into the sea, which was thenceforth named the Aegean. Z7
w. Theseus was not informed of this sorrowful accident until he had completed the sacrifices vowed to the gods for his safe return; he then buried Aege~~, and honoured him with a hero-shr’me. On the eighth day of Pyanepsion [October], the date of the return from Crete, loyal Athenians flock down to the seashore, with cooking-pots in which they stew different kinds of beans—to remind their children how Theseus, having been obliged to place his crew on very short rations, cooked his remaining provisions in one pot as soon as he landed, and f~lled their empty bellies at last. At this same festival a thanksgiving is sung for the end of hunger, and an olive-branch, wreathed in white wool and hung with the season’s fruits, is carried to commemorate the one which Theseus dedicated before setting out. Since this was harvest time, Theseus also instituted the Festival of Grape Boughs, either in gratitude to Athene and Dionysus, both of whom appeared to him on Naxos, or in honour of Dionysus and Ariadne. The two bough-bearers represent the youths whom Theseus had taken to Crete disguised as maidens, and who walked beside him in the triumphal procession after his return. Fourteen women carry provisions and take part in this sacrifice; they represent the mothers of the rescued victims, and their task is to tell fables and ancient myths, as these mothers also did before the ship sailed.2S
x. Theseus dedicated a temple to Saviour Artemis in the market place at Troezen; and his fellow-citizens honoured him with a sanctuary while he was still alive. Such families as had been liable to the Cretan tribute tradertook to supply the needful sacrif~ces; and Theseus awarded his priesthood to the Phyta]ids, in gratitude for their hospitality. The vessel in which he sailed to Crete has made an annual voyage to Delos and back ever since; but has been so frequently ovcr— 344 98. x hauled and ref~tted that philosophers cite it as a stock instance, when discussing the problem of continuous identity.20
1. Apollodorus: Epitome i. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 294; First Vatican Mythographer: 47; Pausanias: i. 27. 9; Plutarch:
Theseus 14; Hesychius sub Bolynthos.
2. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Callimachus: Fragment 40, ed. Bentley; Ovid: Remedies of Love 747.
$. Diodorus Sictrim: iv. 61; Hyginus: Fabula 41; Apollodorus: iii. x. 4; Pausanias: ii. 3~. ~4—Plutarch: Theseus 17; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 7; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xviii. 590; Diodorus Siculus: ioc. tit.; Hellauicus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 19.
5. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Simonides, quoted by Plutarch:/oc. cit. 6. Plutarch: Theseus xS; Demon’s History, quoted by Plutarch:
Theseus 23.
7. Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 17; Simonides, quoted by Plutarch: Ioc. dr.; Pausanias: i. L 2.
8. Plutarch: Theseus xS.
9. Plutarch: loc. tit.; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Knights 725. ~o. Pausanias: i. 42. ~; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. $; Plutarch: Theseus 29.
xx. Pausanias: i. 17. 3; Hyginus: Ioc. tit.
12. Plutarch: Theseus 29; Apollodorus: Epitome i. $.
13. Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 322, quoted by Pherecydes; Homer: Iliad xvifi. 590; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 320; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 9; Ovid: Heroides iv. x xS; Pausauias: iii. ~8.7.
14. Pausa~fias: ii. 3~—~; Pherecydes, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 19; Demon, quoted by Plutarch: loc. cit.
~5. Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls ii. 45; Diodorus Siculus: ix~. 6~. 5; Catullus: lxiv. 50 if..; Plutarch: Theseus 29; Hyginus: Fabula 43.
~6. Pausanias: x. 29. 2; Diodorus Sictfius: v. 5~—4; Scholiast on Theocritus: loc. cit.
~7. Pausanias: i. 20. 2; Catullus: lxiv. 50 ff.; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 5.
xS. Plutarch: Theseus 20; Bacchylides: xvi. ~6.
~9—Plutarch: Romulus and Theseus Compared; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 15; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. ~4; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus ~9. 20. Aristotle: Constitution of the Bottiaeans, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus ~6; Plutarch: Greek Questions 35.
2~. Cleidemus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus ~9.
2~.. Hesychius sub Aridela; Paeonius, quoted byPlutarch: Theseus 21; Contest of Homer and Hesiod 14.
23. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Pausanias: viii. 48.2 and ix. 40. 2; Callimachus: H),mn to Delos 312.
24. Callimachus: Hymn to Apollo 60 If.; Plutarch: Ioc. clt. and Which Animals Are the Craftier? 35.
25. Plutarch: Theseus 2 x; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 3 ~2 if..; Homer: Iliad xviii. 591-2; Pausanias: ix. 40. 2; Pliny: Natural History xxxvi. 19; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xviii. 590; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 1166; Virgil: Aeneid v. 588 if.
26. Catullus: Lxiv. 50 iT..; Apollodorus: Epitome i. xo; Plutarch: Theseus 22.
27. Catullus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: i. 22. 4-5; Plutarch: /0c. c/t. and Romulus and Theseus Compared; Hyginus: Fabula 43.
28. Pausanias: i. 22. 5; Plutarch: Theseus 22 and 23; Produs: Chrestomathy, quoted by Photius: 989. 29. Pausanias: ii. 31. x; Plutarch: lot. tit.
1. Greece was Cretanized towards the dose of the eighteenth century B.C., probably by an Hellenic aristocracy which had seized power in Crete a generation or two earlier and there initiated a new culture. The straightforward account of Theseus’s raid on Cnossus, quoted by Plutarch ~orn Cleidemus, make~ reasonable sense. It describes a revolt by the Athenians against a Cretan overlord who had taken hostages for their good behaviour; the secret building of a riotilia; the sack of the unwalled city of Cnossus during the absence of the main Cretan fleet in Sicily; and a subsequent peace treaty ratified by the Athenian king’s marriage with Ariadne, the Cretan heiress. These events, which point to about the year 1400 B.C., are paralleled by the mythical account: a tribute of youths and maidens is demanded from Athens in requital for the murder of a Cretan prince. Theseus, by craftily killing the Bull of Minos, or defeating Minos’s leading commander in a wrestling match, relieves Athens of this tribute; marries Ariadne, the royal heiress; and m~kes peace with Minos himself. ~. Theseus’s killing of the bull-headed Asterius, called the Minotaur, or ‘Bull of Minos’; his wrestling match with Taurus (‘bull’); and his capture of the Cretan bull, are all versions of the same event. Bolynthos, which gave its name to Attic Probalinthus, was the Cretan name for ‘ wild bull ‘. ‘ Minos’ was the title ofa Cnossian dynasty, which had a skybull for its emblem—’ Asterius’ could mean’ of the sun’ or’ of the sky’and it was in bull-form that the king seems to have coupled ritually vA~h the Chief-priestess as Moon-cow (see 88.7). One element in the formation of the Labyrh~th myth may have been that the palace at Cnossusthe house of the tabrys, or double-axe—was a complex of rooms and 346 98.2—98. 4
corridors, and that the Athenian raiders had diff, culty in finding and killing the king when they captured it. But this is not all. An open space in f~ont of the palace was occupied by a dance floor with a maze pattern used to guide performers of an erotic spring dance (see 92.4). The origin of this pattern, now also called a labyrinth, seems to have been the traditional brushwood maze used to decoy partridges towards one of their own cocks, caged in a central enclosure, which uttered food-calls, lovecalls, and challenges; and the spring dancers will have imitated the ecstatic hobbling love-dance of the cock-partridges (see 9:2.2), whose fate was to be knocked on the head by the hunter (Fxclesiasticus xi. 30).
3. An Etruscan wine-jar from Tragliatclla (see 104. 4), showing two mounted heroes, explains the religious theory of the partridge-dance. The leader carries a shield with a partridge device and a death-demon perches behind him; the other hero carries a lance, and a shield with a duck device. To their rear is a maze of a pattern found not only on certain Cnossian coins, but in the British turf-cut mazes trodden by schoolchildren at Easter until the nineteenth century. Love-jealousy lured the king to his death, the iconographer is explaining, like a partridge in the brushwood maze, and he was succeeded by his tanist. Only the exceptional hero—a Daedalus, or a Theseus—returned alive; and in this context the recent discovery near Bosinney in Cornwall of a Cretan maze cut on a rock-face is of great importance. The ravine where the maze was first noticed by Dr Renton Green is one of the last haunts of the Cornish chough; and this bird houses the soul of King Arthur—who hartowed Hell, and with whom Bosinney is closely associated in legend. A maze dance seems to have been brought to Britain from the eastern Mediterranean by neolithic agriculturists of the third millennium s.c., si~ce rough stone mazes, similar to the British turf-cut ones, occur in the ‘Beaker B’ area of Scandinavia and North-eastern Russia; and ecclesiastic mazes, once used for penitential purposes, are found in South-eastern Europe. English turf-mazes are usually known as ‘Troy-town’, and so are the Welsh: Caer—droia. The Romaus probably named them after their own Troy Game, a labyrinthine dance performed by young aristocrats in honour of Augustus’s ancestor Aeneas the Trojan; though, according to Pliny, it was also danced by children in the Italian countryside. 4—At Cnossus the sky-bull cult succeeded the partridge cult, and the circling of the dancers came to represent the annual courses o f the heavenly bodies. If, therefore, seven youths and maidens took part, they may have represented the seven Titans and Titanesses of the sun, moon, and five planets (see ~. 3 and 43—4); although no definite evidence of the Titan cult has been found in Cretan works of art. It appears that the ancient Crane Dance of Delos—cranes, too, perform a love dance—was similarly adapted to a maze pattern. In some mazes the dancers held a cord, which helped them to keep their proper distance and execute the pattern fault— 98.4—98. 7 347
lessly; and this may have given rise to the story of the ball of twine (A. B. Cook: Journal of Hellenib Studies xiv. Iox if., 1949); at Athens, as on Mount Sipylus, the rope dance was called cordax (Aristophanes: Clouds 540). The spectacle in the Cretan bull ring consisted of an acrobatic display by young men and girls who in turn seized the horns of the charging bull and turned back-somersaults between them over his shoulders. Th~s was evidently a religious rite: perhaps here also the performers represented planets. It cannot have been nearly so dangerous a sport as most writers on the subject suggest, to judge from the rarity of casualties among banderilleros in the Spanish bull ring; and a Cretan fresco shows that a companion was at hand to catch the somersaulter as he or she came to earth.
5. ‘ Ariadne ‘, which the Greeks understood as’ Ariagne’ (‘ very holy ‘), will have been a title of the Moon-goddess honoured in the dance, and in the bull ring: ‘ the high, fruitful Barley-mother’, also called Aridela, ‘the very manifest one’. The carrying of fruir-laden boughs in Ariadne’s honour, and Dionysus’s, and her suicide by hanging, ‘because she feared Artemis’, suggest t~3at Ariadne-dolls were attached to these boughs (see 79.2). A bell-shaped Boeotian goddess-doll hung in the Louvre, her legs dangling, is Ariadne, or Erigone, or Hanged Artemis; and bronze dolls with detachable limbs have been found in Daedalus’s Sardinia. Ariadne’s crown made by Hephaestus in the form of a rose-wreath is not a fancy; delicate gold wreaths with gemmed flowers were fom~d in the Mochlos hoard.
6. Theseus’s marriage to the Moon-priestess made him lord of Cnossus, and on one Cnossian coin a new moon is set in the centre of a maze. Matrilinear custom, however, deprived an heiress of all claims to her lands if she accompanied a husband overseas; and this explains why Theseus did not bring Ariadne back to Athens, or any farther than Dia, a Cretan island within sight of Cnossus. Cretan Dionysus, represented as a bull—Minos, in fact—was Ariadne’s ~ightful husband; and wine, a Cretan manufacture, will have been served at her orgies. This might account for Dionysus’s indignation, reported by Homer, that she and the intruder Theseus had lain together.
7. Many ancient Athenian customs of the Mycenaean period are ex- plained by Plutarch and others in terms of Theseus’s visit to Crete: for instance, the ritual prostitution of girls, and ritual sodomy (characteristic of Anatha’s worship at Jerusalem (see 6~. ~), and the Syrian Goddess’s at Hierapolis), which survived vestigially among the Athenians in the propitiation of Apollo with a gift of maidens, and in the carrying of harvest branches by two male inverts. The fruit4aden bough recalls the lulab carried at the Jerusalem New Year Feast of Tabernacles, also celebrated in the early autumn. Tabernacles was a vintage festival, and corresponded with the Athenian Oschophoria, or ‘carrying of grape dusters’; the 348 98.7—99. c principal interest of which lay in a foot race (Proclus: Chrestornathia ~). Originally, the winner became the new sacred king, as at Olympia, and received a fivefold mixture of ‘oil, wine, honey, chopped cheese, and meal’-the divine nectar and ambrosia of the gods. Plutarch associates Theseus, the new king, with this festival, by saying that he arrived accidentally while it was in progress, and exculpates him from any part in the death of his predecessor Aegeus. But the new king really wrestled against the old king and flung him, as apharrnacos, from the White Rock into the sea (see 96. 3)—In the illustrative icon which the mythographer has evidenfly misread, Thesens’s black-sailed ship must have been a boat stand~ ing by to rescue the pharmacos; it has dark sails, because Mediterranean f~shermen usually tan their nets and canvas to prevent the salt water from rotting them. The kerm-berry, or cochineal, provided a scarlet dye to stain the sacred king’s face, and was therefore associated with royalty. ‘Hecalene’, the needy old spinster, is probably a worn-down form of ‘Hecate Selene’, ‘the far-shooting moon’, which means Artemis.
8. Bean-eating by men seems to have been prohibited in pre-Hellenic times—the Pythagoreans continued to abstain from beans, on the ground that their ancestors’ souls could well be resident in them and that, ifa man (as opposed to a woman) ate a bean, he might be robbing an ancestor of his or her chance to be reborn. The popular bean-feast therefore suggests a deliberate Hellenic flouting of the goddess who imposed the taboo; so does Theseus’s gift of a male priesthood to the Phytalids (‘ growers’), the feminine form of whose name is a reminder that fig-culture, like bean~ planting, was at fn’st a mystery confined to women (see 24. ~3). 9. The Cypriots WOrshipped Ariadne as the ‘Birth-goddess of Amathus’, a title belonging to Aphrodite. Her autumn festival celebrated the birth of the New Year; and the young man who sympathetically imitated her pangs will have been her royal lover, Dionysus. This custom, known as couvade, i~ found in many parts of Europe, including some districts of East Anglia.
10. Apollo’s horn temple on Delos has recently been excavated. The altar and its foundations are gone, and bull has succeeded goat as the ritual animal in the stone decorations—if it indeed ever was a goat; a Minoan seal show~ the goddess standing on an altar made entirely of bulls’ horns.
1. Micon’s allegorical mural of Thetis presenting a crown and ring to Theseus, while Minos glowers in anger on the shore, will have depicted the passing of the thalassocracy from Cretan to Athenian hands. But it may be that Minos had symbolically married the Sea-goddess by throwing a ring into the sea, as the Doges of Venice did in the middle ages. ~2.’ Oenopion and Thoas are sometimes called Theseus’s sons’ because these were the heroes of Chios and Lemnos (see 88. h), subject allies of the Athenians.
WHEN Theseus succeeded his father Aegeus on the throne of Athens, he reinforced his sovereignty by executing nearly all his opponents, except Pallas and the remainder of his fifty sons. Some years later he killed these too as a precautionary measure and, when charged with murder in the Court of Apollo the Dolphin, offered the unprecedented plea of ‘justifiable homicide’, which secured his acquittal. He was purif~ed of their blood at Troezen, where his son Hippolytus now reigned as king, and spent a whole year there. On his r~turn, he suspected a half-brother, also named Pallas, of disaffection, and banished him at once; Pallas then founded Pallantium in Arcadia, though some say that Pallas son of Lycaon had done so shortly after the Deucalionian Flood.’
b. Theseus proved to be a law-abiding ruler, and initiated the policy of federalization, which was the basis of Athens’ later well-being. Hitherto, Attica had been divided into twelve communities, each managing its own affairs without consulting the Athenian king, except in time of emergency. The Eleusinians had even declared war on Erechtheus, and other internecine quarrels abounded. If these commtmit~es were to relinquish their independence, Theseus must approach each dan and family in turn; which he did. He found the yeomen and serfs ready to obey him, and persuaded most of the large landowners to agree with his scheme by promising to abolish the monarchy and substitute democracy for it, though remaining commander-in-daief and supreme judge. Those who remained unconv’mced by the arguments he used respected his strength at least.a
c. Theseus was thus empowered to dissolve all local governments, after summoning their delegates to Athens, where he provided these with a common Council Hall and Law Court, both of which stand to this day. But he forbore to interfere with the laws of private property. Next, he united the suburbs with the C’lty proper which, until then, had consisted of the Acropolis and its immediate Southern dependencies, inducting the ancient Temples of Olympian Zeus, Pythian Apollo, Mother Earth, Dionysus of the Marshes, and the Aqueduct of Nine Spr’mgs. The Athenians still call the Acropolis ‘the City’.
d. He named the sixteenth day of Hecatomboeon [July] ‘Fede Day’, and made it a public festival in honour of Athene,. when a b100~ less sacrif~ce is also offered to Peace.3 By renaming the Athenian celebrated on this day ‘All-Atherfian’, he opened it to the whole~ Attica; and also introduced the worship of Federal Aphrodite Persuasion. Then, resigning the throne, as he had promised, he gai~ Attica its new constitution, and under the best of auspices: for Delphic Oracle prophesied that Athens would now ride the
‘ 4stormy seas as safely as a pig s bladder.
e. To enlarge the city still further, Theseus invited all worthy strangers to become his fellow-citizens. His heralds, who went throughout Greece, used a formula which is still employed, namely: ‘Come hither, all ye people!’ Great crowds thereupon flocked into Athens, and he divided the population of Attica into three classes: the Eupatrids, or ‘those who deserve well of their fatherland’; the Georges, 0t ‘farmers’; and the Demiurges, or ‘artificers’. The Eupatrids took charge of religious affairs, supplied magistrates, interpreted the laws, embodying the highest dignity of all; the Georges tilled the soil and were the backbone of the state; the Demiurges, by far the most numerous class, furnished such various artificers as soothsayers, surgeons, heralds, carpenters, sculptors, and confectioners.S Thus Theseus became the first king to found a commonwealth, which is why Homer, in the Catalogue of Ships, styles only the Athenians a sovereign people—and his constitution remained in force until the tyrants seized power. Some, however, deny the truth of this tradition: they say that Theseus con~ tinued to reign as before and that, after the death of King Menestheus, who led the Athenians against Troy, his dynasty persisted for three generations.0
f Theseus, the first Athenian king to mint money, stamped his coins with the image of a bull. It is not known whether this represented Poseidon’s bull, or Minos’s general Taurus; or whether he was merely encouraging agriculture; but his coinage caused the standard of value to be quoted in terms of’ten oxen’, or ‘one hundred oxen’, for a considerable time. In emulation of Heracles, who had appointed his father Zeus patron of the Olympic Games, Theseus now appointed his father Poseidon patron of the Isthmian Games. Hitherto the god thus honoured had been Melicertes son of Ino, and the games, which were held at night, had been mysteries rather than a public spectacle. Next, Theseus made good the Athenian claim to the sovereignty of Megara 99. f-99. 3
summoned Peloponnesian delegates to the Isthmus, upon them to settle a long-standing frontier dispute with At a place agreed by both parties, he raised the on its eastern side: ‘This is not the Peloponb~t ~onia!’, and on the western: ‘This is not Ionia, but the ~onx~cse!’ He also won Corinthian assent to the Athenians’ taking of honour at the Isthmian Games; it consisted of as much round as was covered by the mainsail of the ship that had brought 2. Hyginus: Fabula 244; Apollodorus: Epitome i. x~; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 54; Euripides: Hippolytus 34-7; Pausanias: i. 22.2; i. 28. ~o and viii. 3. ~.
2. D iodorus Siculus: iv. 61; Thucydides: ii. 15; Plutarch: Theseus 24. 3. Thucydides: loc. cit.; Plutarch: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Peace 962.
4 Pausanias: viii. 2. x and i. 22. 3; Plutarch: Ioc. tit.
: Plutarch: Thescus 25; Homer: Odyssey 383 fl. and xix. 135; Plato: S~posi~m ~88d and Republic 529e; Herodotus: vii. 31.
6 Plutarch: Ioc. cit.; Homer: Iliadii. 552 if.; Pausanias: i. 3.2. 7. Strabo: ix. ~. 6.
1. ]he mythical element of the Theseus story has kere been submerged in what purports to be Athenian constitutional history; but the Federalyears too early; and Theseus’s propaganda, probably invented by Legal reforms made during the late Jewish monarchy were
ú attributed to Moses by the editors of the Pentateuch.
1. Oxen provided the standard of value in ancient Greece, Italy, and as they still do among backward pastoral tribes of East Africa, the Atheuians struck no coins until nearly five hundred years after ~n War. But it is true that Cretan copper ingots of a fixed weight stamped with a bulPs head. or a recumbent calf(Sir Arthur Minoan Weights and Mediums of Currency p. 335); and the Butadae who seem to have been largely responsible for the develop~ have had this tradition in mind when they moi~ey stamped with the ox-head, their clan-device.
3. ~he division of Attica into twelve commumti~ L paralleled by a :ment in the Nile Delta and in Etruria, and by the distribuuered Ca~aanite territory among the twelve tribes of Israel; ~ number may in each case have been chosen to allow for a monthly monarch from tribe to tribe. Greeks of the heroic age did VOL. I—M
352 99. $—~oo. b ~kl not distinguish between murder and manslaughter; in either case a bl price had to be paid to the v~ctim’s clan, and the ki]Jer then changedhi~I name and left the city for ever. Thus Telamon and Peleus continued t01~i highly regarded by the gods after their treacherous murder of Phooa! (see 81. b); and Medea killed Apsyrtus without antagonizing her new Corinthian subjects (see ~53. a and ~56. a). At Athens, however, in the Classical period, w’flfnl murder (phonos) carried the death penalty; manslaughter (akousia), that of banishment; and the clan was bound by law to prosecute. Phonos hekousios (justifiable homicide) and phonos akousios (excusable homicide) were later refinements, which Draco probably introduced in the seventh century B.c.; the latter alone demanded expiation by ritual cleansing. The mythographers have not understood that Theseus evaded permanent exile for the murder of the Pallantids only by exterminating the entire clan, as David did with the ‘House of Saul’. A year’s absence at Troezen suff~ced to rid the city of the pollution caused by the murder.
S o M ~ say that Theseus took part in Herades’s successful expedition against the Amazons, and received as his share of the booty their queen An60pe, also called Melanippe; but that this was not so unhappy a fate for her as many thought, because she had betrayed the city of Themiscyra on the river Thermodon to him, in proof of the passion he had already kindled in her heart.x
b. Others say that Theseus visited their country some years later, in the company of Peirithous and his comrades; and that the Amazons, delighted at the arrival of so many handsome warriors, offered them no violence. Antiope came to greet Theseus with gifts, but she had hardly climbed aboard his ship, before he weighed anchor and abducted her. Others again say that he stayed for some time in Amazonia, and entertained Antlope as his guest. They add that among his companions were three Athenian brothers, Euneus, Thoas, and Sol06n, the last of whom fell in love with Antlope but, not daring to approach her directly, asked Euneus to plead his cause. Antlope rejected these advances, though continuing to treat Soloi3n no less civilly than before, xoo. b—~oo. e 353
and it was not until he had thrown himself into the river Thermodon and drowned, that Theseus realized what had been afoot, and became much distressed. Remembering a warning given him by the Delphic Oracle that, if he should ever find himself gready afflicted in a strange country, he must found a city and leave behind some of his companions to govern it, he built Pythopoli~, in honour of Pythian Apollo, and named the near-by river Sol06n. There he left Euneus, Thoas, and one Hermus, an Athenian noble, whose former residence in Pythopolis is now mistakenly called ‘Hermes’s House’. He then sailed away with Antiope.2
c. Antiope’s sister Oreithyia, rnistaken by some for Hippolytewhose girdle Heracles won, swore vengeance on Theseus. She concluded an alliance with the Scythians, and led a large force of Amazons across the ice of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, then crossed the Danube and passed through Thrace, Thessaly, and Boeotia. At Athens she encamped on the Areiopagus and there sacrificed to Ares; an event from which, some say, the hill won its name; but first she ordered a detachment to invade Laconia and discourage the Peloponnesians from reinforcing Theseus by way of the Isthmus.3
d. The Athenian forces were already naarshailed, but neither side cared to begin hostilities. At last, on the advice of an oracle, Theseus sacrificed to Phobus, son of Ares, and offered battle on the seventh day of Boedromion, the date on which the Boedromia is now celebrated at Athens; though some say the festival had already been founded in honour of the victory which Xuthus won over Eumolpus in the reign of Erechtheus. The Amazons’ battle-front stretched between what is now called the Amazonium and the Pnyx Hill near Chrysa. Theseus’s right wing moved down from the Museum and fell upon their left wing, but was routed and forced to retire as far as the Temple of the Furies. This incident is recalled by a stone raised to the local commander Chalcodon, in a street lined with the tombs of those who fell, and called after him. The Athenian left wing, however, charged from the Palladium, Mount Ardettus and the Lyceum, and drove the Amazon right wing back to their camp, inflicting heavy casualties.4
e. Some say that the Amazons offered peace terms only after four months of hard fighting; the armistice, sworn near the sanctuary of Theseus, is still commemorated in the Amazonian sacrifice on the eve of his festival. But others say that Antiope, now Theseus’s wife~ fought heroically at his side, until shot dead by one Molpadia, whom Theseus 354 ~oo. e—~00. h then killed; that Oreithyia with a few followers escaped to Megara, where she died of grief and despair; and that the remaining Amazons, driven from Attica by the victorious Theseus, setfled in Scythia. S
f. This, at any rate, was the first time that the Athenians repulsed foreign invaders. Some of the Amazons left wounded on the field of batde were sent to Chalcis to be cured. Antlope and Molt~adia are buried near the temple of Mother Earth, and an earthen pillar marks Antiope’s grave. Others lie in the Amazonium. Those Amazons who fell while crossing Thessaly, lie buried between Scotussaea and Cynosccphalae; a few more, ncar Chaeronaea by the fiver Hatmort. In the Pyrrhichan region of Laconia, shrines mark the place where tl~e Amazons halted their advance and dedicated two wooden image~ to Artemis and Apollo; and at Troezen a temple of Ares commemorates Theseus’s victory over this detachment when it attempted to force the Isthmus on its return.6
g. According to one accotrot, the Amazons entered Thrace by way of Phrygia, not Scythia, and founded the sanctuary of Ephesian Arterials as they marched along the coast. According to another, they had taken refuge in this sanctuary on two earlier occasions: namely in their fli~,,ht from Dionysus, and after Heracles’s defeat of Queen Hippolyte; and its true founders were Cresus and Ephesus.?
h. The truth about Antiope seems to be that she survived the battle, and that Theseus was eventually compelled to kill her, as the Delt~t~ic Oracle had foretold, when he entered into an alliance with King Deucalion the Cretan, and married his sister Phaedra. The jealous Ant~opt, who was not his legal wife, interrupted the wedding festivities by bt~rsting in, fully armed, and threatening to massacre the guests. Theseus and his companions hastily closed the doors, and despatched her in a grim combat, though she had borne him Hippolytus, also called Demophot3n, and never lain with another man.8 x. Apollodorus: Epitome i. 16; Hegias of Troezen, quoted by Pausanias: i. 2. x. 2. Pindar, quoted by Pausanias: i. 2. ~; Pherecydes and Bion, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26; Menecrates, quoted by Plutarch: loc. tit. 3—Justin: ii. 4; Hollanicus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26—7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 28; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 16; Aeschylus: Eumenides 680 iT.
4. Plutarch: Theseus 27;Etym010gicum Magnum: sub Boedromia; Euripides: Ion 59; Cleidemus, quoted by Plutarch: loc. ›it. ~oo. ~—~00. z
5. Cleidemus, quoted by Plutarch: Ioc. cit.; Plutarch: loc. ›it.; Pausanias: i. 41. 7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 28. 6. Plutarch: 10›. cit.; Pausanias: i. 2. ~; i. 4~. 7; iii. 25.2 and ii. 32, 8. 7—Pindar, quoted by Pausanias: vii. 2.4.
8. Hyginus: Fabula 24~; Apollodorus: Epitome i. ~7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62; Ovid: Heroides ~zI ~.; Pausanias: i. zz. z; Pindar, quoted by Plutarch: The$e~s 28.
L ‘Amazons’, usually derived from a and mazon, ‘without breasts’, they were believed to sear away one breast in order to shoot
(but this notion is fantastic), seems to be an Armeuian word, meanSince the priestesses of the Moon-goddess on the ~ shores of the Black Sea bore arms, as they also did in the Gulf of Sirte (see 8. ~), it appears that the accounts of them which brought back confused the interpretation of certain ancient icons depicting women warriors, and gave rise to the Attic of an Amazonian invasion from the river Thermodon. These which were extant in Classical times on the footstool of Zeus’s Olympia (Pausanias: v. ~x. 2); at Athens on the central wall o[ Painted Colonnade (Pausanias: i. xS. ~), on Athene’s shield, i~ the of Theseus, and elsewhere (Pausanias: i. ~7. x), represented the fight between the pre-Hellenic priestesses of Athene for the invasion of Attica and the resistance
‘ them. There will also have been armed priestesses at EphesusMinoan colony, a~ the name of the founder Cresus (‘ Cretan’) suggestsin all cities where Amazons’ graves were shown. Oreithyia, or ,olyte, is supposed to have gone several hundred miles out of her through Scythia; probably because the Cimmerian Bosphorus-
Crimea—was the seat of Artemis’s savage Taurian cult, where the ~atched male victims (see Ii6. 2).
1. Antiope’s interruption of Phaedra’s weddi~g may have been defrom an icon which showed the Hellenic conqueror about to the High-priestess, after he had killed her companions. Antlope was not Theseus’s legal wife, because she belonged to a society which monogamy (see 13 x. k). The names Melanippe and Hippolytus associate the Amazons with the pre-Hellenic horse cult (see 43—2). (‘egg-shaped weight’) may be derived from a weightevent in the funeral games celebrated at the Greek colony of ~Pythopolis, so called after the oracular serpent of its heroic founder; there seems to have been a practice here of throwing human victims into the river Thermodon. The Boedromia (‘ running for help’) was a festival of Artemis, about which little is known: perhaps armed priestesses took part in it, as in the Argive festival of the Hybristica (see ~60..5).
AFTEa marrying Phaedra, Theseus sent his bastard son Hippolytus to Pittheus, who adopted him as heir to the throne of Troezen. Thus Hippolytus had no cause to dispute the right of his legitimate brothers Acamas and Demopho~n, Phaedra’s sons, to reign over Athens.1
b. Hippolytus, who had inherited hi’; mother Antiope’s exclusive devotion to chaste Artemis, raised a new temple to the goddess at Troezen, not far from the theatre. Thereupon Aphrodite, determined to punish him for what she took as an insult to herself, saw to it that when he attended the Eleusinian Mysteries, Phaedra should fall passionately in love with him. He came dressed in white linen, his hair garlanded, and though his features wore a harsh expression, she thought them admirably severe.2
e. Since at that time Theseus was away in Thessaly with Peirithous, or it may have been in Tartarus, Phaedra followed Hippolytus to Troezen. There she built the Temple of Peeping Aphrodite to overlook the gymnasium, and would daily watch unobserved while he kept himself fit by running, leaping, and wrestling, stark naked. An ancient myrtle-tree stands in the Temple enclosure; Phaedra would jab at its leaves, in frustrated passion, with ajewelled hair-pin, and they are still much perforated. When, later, Hippolytus attended the All-Athenian Festival and lodged in Theseus’s palace, she used the Temple of Aphrodite on the Acropolis for the same purpose.3 ~/. Phaedra disclosed her incestuous desire to no one, but ate little, slept badly, and grew so weak that her old nurse guessed the truth at last, and off~ciously implored her to send Hippolytus a letter. Tiffs Phaedra did: confessing her love, and saying that she was now converted by it to the cult of Artemis, whose two wooden images, brought from Crete, she had just rededicated to the goddess. Would he not come hunting one day? ‘We women of the Cretan Royal House,’ she wrote, ‘are doubtless fated to be dishonoured in love: wireess my grandmother Europe, my mother Pasipha~, and lastly my own sister Ariadne! Ah, wretched Ariadne, deserted by your father, the faithless Theseus, who has since murdered your own royal mother—why have the Furies not punished you for showing such unfilial indifference to Iox. a—Iox. h 357 her fate?—and must one day murder me! I count on you to revenge yourself on him by paying homage to Aphrodite in my company.
Could we not go away and live together, for awhile at least, and make a hunfrog expedition the excuse? Meanwhile, none can suspect our true feelings for each other. Already we are lodged under the same roof, and our affection will be regarded as innocent, and even praiseworthy.’4
e. Hippolytus burned this letter in horror, and came to Phaedra’s chamber, loud with reproaches; but she tore her clothes, threw open the chamber doors, and cried out: ‘Help, help! I am ravished!’ Then she hanged herself from the lintel, and left a note accusing him of monstrous crimes.5
f. Theseus, on receiving the note, cursed Hippolytus, and gave orders that he must quit Athens at once, never to return. Later he remembered the three wishes granted him by his father Poseidon, and prayed earnestly that Hippolytus might die that very day.’ Father,’ he pleaded, ‘send a beast across Hippolytus’s path; as he makes for Troezen!’6
g. Hippolytus had set out from Athens at full speed. As he drove along the narrow’ part of the Isthmus a huge wave, which overtopped even the Molurian Rock, rolled roaring shoreward; and from its crest sprang a great dog-seal (or, some say, a white bull), bellowing and spouting water. Hippolytus’s four horses swerved towards the cliff, mad with terror, but being an expert charioteer he restrained them from plunging over the edge. The beast then galloped menacingly behind the chariot, and he failed to keep his team on a straight course. Not far from the sanctuary of Saronian Artemis, a wild olive is still shown, called the Twisted Rhachos—the Troezenian term for a barren olive-tree is rhachos—and it was on a branch of this tree that a loop oś Hippolytus’s reins caught. His chariot was flung sideways against a pile of rocks and broken into pieces. Hippolytus, entangled in the reins, and thrown first against the tree-trunk, and then against the rocks, was dragged to death by his horses, while the pursuer vanished.?
h. Some, however, relate improbably that Artemis then told Theseus the truth, and rapt him in the twinlding of an eye to Troezen, where he arrived just in time to be reconciled to his dying son; and that she revenged herself on Aphrodite by procuring Adonis’s death. For cer~ rain, though, she commanded the Troezenians to pay Hippolytus divine honours, and all Troezenian brides henceforth to cut offa lock of their hair, and dedicate it to him. It was Diomedes who dedicated the ancient temple and image of Hippolytus at Troezen, and who first ~o~. h—~o~. m offered him his annual sacrifice. Both Phaedra’s and Hippolytus tombs, the latter a mound of earth, are shown in the enclosure ofth temple, near the myrtle-tree with the pricked leaves.
i. The Troezenians themselves deny that Hippolytus was dragged death by horses, or even that he lies buried in his temple; nor will the reveal the whereabouts of his real tomb. Yet they declare that the go~ set him among the stars as the Charioteer.8
j. The Athenians raised a barrow in Hippolytus’s memory. close t the Temple of Themis, because his death had been brought about b curses. Some say that Theseus, accused of his murder, was found guilt~ ostracized, and banished to Scyros, where he ended his life in shame an grief. But his downfall is more generally believed to have been cause by an attempted rape of Persephone.0
k. Hippolytus’s ghost descended to Tartarus, and Artemis, in big indignation, begged Asclepius to revive his corpse. Asclepius opene, the doors of his ivory medicine cabinet and took out the herb wi~ which Cretan Glaucus had been revived. With it he thrice touche~ Hippolytus’s breast, repeating certain charms, and at the third touc] the dead man raised his head from the ground. But Hades and th Three Fates, scandalized by this breach of privilege, persuaded Zeus kill Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
1. The Latins relate that Artemis then wrapped I-Iippolytus in~ thick cloud, disguised him as an aged man, and changed lfis feature~ After hesitating between Crete and Delos as suitable places of conceal ment, she brought him to her sacred grove at Italian Aricia. 10 There with her consent, he married the nymph Egeria, and he still lives besi& the lake among dark oak-woods, surrounded by sheer precipices.
he should be reminded of his death, Artemis changed his name Virbius, which means vlr his, or ‘twice a man’; and no horses a~ allowed in the vicinity. The priesthood of Arician Artemis is only to runaway fiaves.II In her grove grows an ancient oak-tree, th~ branches of which may not be broken, but if a slave dares do so thor the priest, who has himself killed his predecessor and therefore lives hourly fear of death, must fight him, sword against sword, for ~ priesthood. The Aricians say that Theseus begged Hippolytus to remai with him at Athens, but he refused.
ns. A tablet in Asclepius’s Epidaurian sanctuary records that Hipp~ iytus dedicated twenty horses to him, in gratitude for having b~ revived?
IOI. ! 359 x. Apollodorm: Epitomei. ~8; Pausanias: i. 22. 2; Ovid: Heroid, siv. 67 if.
2. Pausanias: ii. 3~. 6; Ovid: lot. cit.
3. Ovid: foe. tit.; Seneca: Hippolytus 835 if.; Pausanias: ii. 32. 3 and i. 22.2; Euripides: Hippolytus I if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62. 4. Ovid: loc. tit.; Pausanias: i. 18.5.
5. Apollodorus: Epitome i. 18; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62; Hyginus: Fabula 47.
6. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 34; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 445. 7. Pausanias: ii. 32.8; Euripides: Hippolytus 1193 if-; Ovid: Metamorphoses xv. 506 if.; Plutarch: loc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62. 8. Euripides: Hippolytus 1282 if. and 1423 t:[.; Pausanias: ii. 32. ~—~.
9. Pausanius: i. 22. ~; Ph/lostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vii. 42; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 62.
xo. Ovid: Metamorphoses xv. 532 if—and Fasti vi. 745.
xx. Virgil: Aeneid vii. 775; Ovid: Fasti v. 3 12 and Metamorphoses xv. 545; Strabo: iii. 263 if.; Pausanias: ii. 27. 412. Serius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 136; Strabo: v. 3.12; Suetonius: Caligula 35; Pausanias: loc. tit.
* 1. The incident of Phaedra’s incestuous love for Hippolytus, like that of Potiphar’s wife and her adulterous love for Joseph (see 75. l), is borrowed either from the Egyptian Tale of the Two Brothers, or from a common Canaanite source. Its sequel has been based upon the familiar icon showing the chariot crash at the end of a sacred king’s reign (see 71.1). If, as in ancient Ireland, a prophetic roaring of the November sea warned the king that his hour was at hand, this warning will have been pictured as a bull, or seal, poised open-mouthed on the crest of a wave. Hippolytus’s reins must have caught in the myrtle, rather than in the sinister-looking ohve later associated with the crash: the myrtle, in fact, which grew dose to his hero shrine, and was famous for its perforated leaves. Myrfie symbolized the last month of the king’s reign; as appears in the story of Oenomaus’s chariot crash (see 109. j); whereas wild olive symbolized the first month of his successor’s reign. Vir bis is a false derivation of Virbius, which seems to represent the Greek hierobios, ‘holy life’—the h often becoming v: as in Hestia and Vesta, or Hesperos and Vesper. In the Golden Bough Sir James Frazer has shown that the branch which the priest guarded so jealously was mistletoe; and it is likely that Glaucus son of Minos (see 90. c), who has been confused with Glaucus son of Sisyphus (see 71. a), was revived by mistletoe. Though the pr~Hellenic mistletoe and oak cult had been suppressed in Greece (see 50. a refugee priesthood from the Isthmus may well have brought it to Aricia. Egeria’s name shows that she was death-goddess, living grove of black poplars (see $~. 7 and ~70. I).
2. Hippolytus’s perquisite of the bride’s lock must be a patriarchal innovation, designed perhaps to deprive women of the magical power resident in their hair, as Mohammedan women are shaved on marriage..3. The concealment of Hippolytus’s tomb is paralleled in the stories of Sisyphus and Neleus (see 67. $), which suggests that he was buried at some strategic point of the Isthmus.
SOME say that Peirithous the Lapith was the son of Ixion and Dia, daughter of Eioneus; others, that he was the son of Zeus who, disguised as a stallion, coursed around Dia before seducing her.1
b. Almost incredible reports of Theseus’s strength and valour had reached Peirithous, who ruled over the Magnetes, at the moud~ ol’the river Peneus; and one day he resolved to test them by raiding Attica and driving away a herd of cattle that were grazing at Marathou. When Theseus at once went in pursuit, Peirithous boldly turned about to face him; but each was filled with such admiration for the other’s nobi!itv of appearance that the cattle were forgotten, and they swore an oath of everlasting friendship.2
c. Peirithous married Hippodameia, or Deidameia, daughter of Butes—or, some say, of Adrastus—and invited all the Olyn~pia~s to his wedding, except Ares and Eris; he remembered the mischicf~ i:ich Eris had caused at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Since more fc:,sters came to Peirithous’s palace than it could contain, his cousins the Centaurs, together with Nestor, Caeneus, and other Thessalian princes, were seated at tables in a vast, tree-shaded cave near by.
d. The Centaurs, however, were unused to wine and, ~,hen they smelled its fragrance, pushed away the sour milk which was set before them, and ran to f~ll their silver horns from the wine-skins. In their ignorance they swilled the strong liquor unmixed with water, bec0ming so drunk that when the bride was escorted into the cavern to greet them, Eurytus, or Eurytion, leaped from his stool, overturned the I02. d—~oz. I 361
table, and dragged her away by the hair. At once the other Centaurs f0110wcd his disgraceful example, lecherously straddling the nearest women and boys.3
e. Peirithous and his paranymph Theseus sprang to Hippodameia’s rescue, cut off Eurytion’s ears and nose and, with the help of the La?iths, threw him out of the cavern. The ensuring fight, in the course 0fwhich Caeneus the Lapith was killed, lasted until nightfall; and thus began the long feud between the Centaurs and t~eir Lapith neighbouts, e~gineered by Ares and Eris in revenge for the slight offered them.4
f. On this occasion the Centaurs suffered a serious reverse, and Theseus drove them from their ancient hunting grounds on Mount Pelion to the land of the Aethices near Mount Pindus. But it was not an easy task to subdue the Centaurs, who had already disputed Ixion’s ki~agdom with Peirithous, and who now, rallying their forces, invaded La?ith territory. They surprised and slaughtered the main Lapith army, and when the survivors fled to Pholo~ in Elis, the vengeful Centaurs ~’x?e]]ed them and converted Pholo~ into a bandit stronghold of their 0wu. Finally the Lapiths settled in Malea.
.4’ It was during Theseus’s campaign against the Centaurs that he met HcracIes again for the first time since his childhood; and presently i~itiated him into the Mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis.s
1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 70; Eustathius on Homer p. IOI.
2. Strabo: Fragment 14; Vatican Epitome; Plutarch: Theseus 30.
1. Apollodorus: Epitome i. zx; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 70; Hyginus: FabuIa 33; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 304.
4. Pindar: Fragment 166f, quoted by Athenaeus: xi. 476b; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Ovid: Metan~orśhoses x/i. z~o if.; Homer: Odyssey xxi. ~95; Pausanias: v. xo. ~.
5. Plutarch: loc. cit.; Homer: Iliad ii. 470 if.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Herodotus, quoted by Plutarch: loc. cit.
. ~. Both Lapiths and Centaurs claimed descent from Ixion, an oakhero, and had a horse cult in common (see 63. a and d). They were primiú tire mountain tribes in Northern Greece, of whose ancient rivalry the Hellenes took advantage by allying themselves first with one, and then witIt the other (see 35.2; 78. ~; and 8~. 3). Centaur and Lapith may be lt.1lic words: centuria, ‘war-band of one hundred ‘, and lapicidae, ‘Psintchit~pers’. (The usual Classical etymology is, respectiveJ~, from centta~roi,’ those who spear bulls’, and lapizein, ‘ to swagger’.) These mountah~eers seem to have had erotic orgies,. and thus won a reputation for 102. I—103. a ~~i~1
promiscuity among the monogamous Hellenes; members of this ne0lithic race survived in the Arcadian mountaim, and on Mount Pindry, until Classical times, and vestiges of their pre-Hellenic language are to be found in modern Albania.
a. It is, however, unlikely that the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs —depicted on the gable of Zeus’s temple at Olympia (Pausanias: v. Io. 2); at Athens in the sanctuary of Theseus (Pausanias: i. 17. ~); and on Athene’s aegis (Pausanias: i. 28. z)—recorded a mere struggle between frontier tribes. Being connected with a royal wedding feast, divinely patronized, at which Theseus in his lion-skin assisted, it will have depicted a ritual event of intimate concern to all Hellenes. Lion-skim~ed Heracles ah0 fought the Centaurs on a similarly festive occasion (see 126. g). Homer calls them’ shaggy wild beasts’, and since they are not differentiated from satyrs in early Greek vase-paintings, the icon probably shows a newlyinstalled king—it does not matter who—battling with dancers disguis~t as animals: an event which A. C. Hocart in his Kingship proves to have been an integral part of the ancient coronation ceremony. Eurytion is playing the classical part of interloper (see 142. 5).
3. Whether Ixion or Zeus was Peirithous’s father depended on Ixion’s right to style himself Zeus. The myth of his parentage has evidently been deduced from an icon which showed a priestess of Thetis—Dia, daughter ofEioneus, ‘ the divine daughter of the seashore’—halter in hand, encouraging the candidate for kingship to master the wild horse (see 75.3). Hippodameia’s name (‘ horse-tamer’) refers to the same icon. Zeus, disguised as stallion, ‘coursed around’ Dia, because that is the mea~fing of the name Peirithous; and Ixion, as the Sun-god, spread-eagled to his wheel, coursed around the heavens (see 63. z).
AI:TZI~ Hippodameia’s death Peirithous persuaded Theseus, whose wiśe Phaedra had recently hanged herself, to visit Sparta in Iris company and carry away Helen, a sister ośCastor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, with whom they were both ambitious to be connected by marriage. Where the sanctuary oś Serapis now stands at Athens, they swore to stand by each other in this perilous enterprLse; to draw lots for Helen when they had won her; and then to carry off another of Zeus’s daughter~ for the loser, whatever the danger might be.1
103. b—103. d 363’
‘~ ~. This decided, they led an army into Lacedaemon; then, riding i ahead of the main body, seized Helen while she was offering a sacrifice in the Temple of Upright Artemis at Sparta, and galloped away with her. They soon outdistanced their pursuers, shaking them off at Tegea ~vhere, as had been agreed, lots were drawn for Helen; and Theseus proved the winner.2 He foresaw, however, that the Athenians would by no means approve of his having thus picked a quarrel with the redoubtable Dioscuri, and therefore sent Helen, who was not yet nubilebeing a twelve-year-old child or, some say, even younger—to the Attic village of Aphidnae, where he charged his friend Aphidnus to guard her with the greatest attention and secrecy. Aethra, Theseus’s mother, accompanied Helen and cared well for her. Some try to exculpate Theseus by recording that it was ldas and Lynceus who stole Helen, and then entrusted her to the protection of Theseus, in revenge for the Diosct~ri’s abducf~on of the Leucippides. Others record that Helen’s father Tyndareus himself entrusted her to Theseus, on learning that his nephew Enarephorus, son of HippocoSn, was planning to abduct her.1
c. Some years passed and, when Helen was old enough for Theseus to marry her, Peirithous reminded him of their pact. Together they consulted an oracle of Zeus, whom they had called upon to witness their oath, and his ironical respome was: ‘Why not visit Tartarus and demand Persephone, the wife of Hades, as a bride for Peirithous? She is the noblest of my daughters.’ Theseus was outraged when Peirithous, who took this suggestion seriously, held him to his oath; but he dared not refuse to go, and presently they descended, sword in hand, to Tartarus. Avoiding the ferry-passage across Lethe, they chose the back way, the entrance to which is in a cavern of Laconian Taenarus, and were soon knocking at the gates of Hades’s palace. Hades listened calmly to their impudent request and, feigning hospitality, invited them to be seated. Unsuspectingly they took the settee he offered, which proved to be the Chair of Forgetfulness and at once became part of their flesh, so that they could not rise again without self-mutilation. Coiled serpents hissed all about them, and they were well lashed by the Furies and mauled by Cerberns’s teeth, while Hades looked on, smiling grimly.4
d. Thus they remained in torment for four full years, until Heracles, coming at Eurystheus’s command to fetch up Cerberus, recognized them as they mutely stretched out their hands, pleading for his help. Persephone received Heracles like a brother, graciously permitting him .364 I03. d—l03.1
to release the evil-doers and take them back to the upper air, if he could.s Heracles thereupon grasped Theseus by both hands and heaved with gigantic strength until, with a rending noise, he was tom free; but a great part of his flesh remained sticking to the rock, which is why Theseus’s Athenian descendants are all so absurdly small-buttocked. Next, he seized hold of Peirithous’s hands, but the earth quaked warningly, and he desisted; Peirithous had, after all, been the leading spirit in this blasphemous enterprise.6
e. According to some accounts, however, Heracles released Peirithous as well as Theseus; while, according to others, he released neither, but left Theseus chained for ever to a fiery chair, and Peirith0us reclining beside Ixion on a golden couch—before their famished gaze rise magnificent banquets which the Eldest of the Furies constantly snatches away. It has even been said that Theseus and Peirithous never raided Tartarus at all, but only a Thesprotian or Molossian city named Cichyrus, whose king Aidoneus, finding that Peirithous intended to carry off his wife, threw him to a pack of hounds, and confined Theseus in a dungeon, from which Heracles eventually rescued him.?
1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 63; Pindar, quoted by Pausanias: i. ~8. 5; Pausanias: i. 4~. 5.
2. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 79; Plutarch: Theseus 31.
3. Apollodorus: Epitome i. 24; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 143; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 2~5; Plutarch: Ioc. tit. 4. Hyginus: Fabu[a 79; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Horace: Odes iv. 7—27; Panyasis, quoted by Pausanias: x. 29. 4; Apollodorus:
Epitome i. 24.
$. Seneca: Hippolytus 835 if.; Apollodorus: ii. 5—~2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 26; Euripides: Madness of Heracles 619; Hyginus: loc. tit.
6. Apollodorus: loe. tit.; Sulclas sub Lispoi; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Knights 1368. 7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 63; Virgil: Aeneidvi. 60~-~9; Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5; Plutarch: Theseus 3 ~.
. I. Leading heroes in several mythologies are said to have harrowed Hell: Theseus, Heracles (see ~34. c), Dionysus (see ~70. m), and Orpheus (see 28. c) in Greece; Bel and Marduk in Babylonia (see 7~—2); Aeneas in Italy; Cuchulain in Ireland; Arthur, Gwydion, and Amathaon in Britain; Ogler le Danois in Brittany. The origin of the myth seems to be a tem— z03. ~—z03. $
~ death which the sacred king pretended to undergo at the close of reign, while a boy interrex took his place for a single day, circumventing the law which forbade him to extend his term thirteen months of a solar year (see 7—l; 42. ~; 223.4, etc.).
2. Bel, and his successor Marduk, spent their period ofdernise in battle the marine monster Tiamat, an embodiment of the Sea-goddess who sent the Deluge (see 73.7); like ancient Irish kings, who are to have gone out to do battle with the Atlantic breakers, they to have ceremonially drowned. An Etruscan vase shows the moriwhose name is given as Jason (see ~48.4), in the jaws of a seaan icon from which the moral anecdote of Jonah and the ~arently been deduced, Jonah being Marduk.
3. Athenian mythographers have succeeded in disguising the bitter ú between Theseus and his acting-twin Peirithous (see 95. z) for the ~f the Goddess of Death-m-Life—who appears in the myth as
(see 6~. $) and Persephone—by presenting them as a devoted like Castor and Polydeuces, made an amatory raid on a city (see 74. c), and one of whom was excused death claim divine birth. Idas and Lynceus, a similar pair of have been introduced into the story to emphasize this point. But name, ‘he who turns about’, suggests that he was a sacred in his own right, and on vase-paintings from Lower Italy he is ascending to the upper air and saying farewell to Theseus, who the Goddess of Justice, as though Theseus were merely tarfist.
Helen’s abduction during a sacrifice recalls that of Oreithyia by (see 48. a), and may have been deduced from the same icon, erotic orgies at the Athenian Thesmophoria. It is possible, of that a shrine of the Attic goddess Helen at Aphidnae contained an ~ or other cult object stolen by the Athenians from her Laconian if the visit to Tartarus is a doublet of the story, they may made a sea-raid on Taenarus—and that this was subsequently the Spartans.
5. The four years of Theseus’s stay in Tartarus are the usual period which a sacred king made room for his tanist; a new sacred king, redivivus, would then be instal/ed. An attempt was made by the to the status of an Olympian god, by asserting that he had escaped from death;
~onnesian enemies successfully opposed this claim. Some that he had never escaped, but was punished eternally for his like Ixion and Sisyphus. Others rationalized the story by that he raided Cichyrus, not Tartarus; and took the trouble to Peirithous had not been mauled by Cerberus, but by Molosthe largest and fiercest breed in Greece. The most generous 366 103.5—104. c con~’ession made to Athenian myth was that Theseus, released oaJ after a humiliating session in the Chair of Forgetfulness (see 37. ~), apologetically transferred most of his temples and sanctuaries to Heracl~ flxe Rescuer, whose Labours and sufferings he aped.
6. Yet Theseus was a hero of some importance, and must be giventh~ credit of having hartowed HeR, in the sense that he penetrated to the centre of the Cretan maze, where Death was waiting, and came safdy out again. Had the Athenians. been as strong on land as they were at sea, he would doubtless have become an Olympian or, at least, a na~ional demi-god. The central source of this hostility towards Tl~ese’~s i< probably Delphi, where Apollo’s Oracle was notoriously subservic’nt to the Spartans in their struggle against Athens.
DURING Theseus’s absence in Tartarus the Dioscufi assembled an army of Laconians and Arcadians, marched against Athens, and mantied the return of Helen. When the Athenians denied that they were sheltering her, or had the least notion where she might be, the Dimcuff proceeded to ravage Attica, until the inhabitants of Decelm, who disapproved of Theseus’s conduct, guided them to Aphidnae, where they found and rescued their sister. The Dioscuri then razed Aphidnae to the ground; but the Deceleians are still immune from all Spartan taxes and entided to seats of honour at Spartan festivals—their lands alone were spared in the Peloponnesian War, when the invading Spartans laid Attica waste.x
b. Others say that the revealer of Helen’s hiding-place was one Academus, or Echedemus, an Arcadian, who had come to Attica on Theseus’s invitation. The Spartans certainly treated him with great honour while he was alive and, in their later invasions, spared his small estate on the river Cephissus, six stadia distant from Athens. This is now called the Academia: a beautiful, well-watered garden, where ph’dosophers meet and express their irreligious views on the nature of the gods.2
c. Marathus led the Arcadian contingent of the Dioscuri’s army and, in obedience to an oracle, offered himself for sacrifice at the head of I04. c—I04. g 367 his men. Some say that it was he, not Marathon the father of Sicyon and Cormthus, who gave his name to the city of Marathon.3
d. Now, Peteos sonofOmeus and granclson of Erechtheus had been banished by Aegeus, and the Dioscuri, to spite Theseus, brought back his son Menestheus from exile, and made him regent of Athem. This Menest~cus was the first demagogue. During Theseus’s absence in Tartarus he ingratiated himself with the people by reminding the nobles of the power which. they had forfeited through Federalization, and by telling the poor that they were being robbed of country and rc!igion, and had become subject to an adventurer of obscure originwho, however, had now vacated the throne and was rumoured dead.4
e. When Aphidr~ae fell, and At~ens was in danger, Menestheus persuaded the people to welcome the Dioscuri into the city as their benefactors and deliverers. They c[id indeed behave most cotreedy, and asked only to be admitted to the Eleusinian Mysteries, as Heracles had been. This request was granted, and the Dioscuri became honorary’ citizens of Athens. Aphidnus was their adoptive father, as Pytius had been Heracles’s on a similar occasion. Divine honours were thereafter paid them at the rising of their constellation, in gratitude for the clemency which they had shown to the common people; and they cheerfully brought Helen back to Sparta, with Theseus’s mother Aethra and a sister of Peirithous as her bond-woman. Some say that they found Helen still a virgin; others, that Theseus had got her with child and that at Argos, on the way home, she gave birth to a girl, Iphigencia,’ and dedicated a sanctuary to Artemis in gratitude for her safe delivery. S
f. Theseus, who returned from Tartarus soon afterwards, at once raised an altar to Heracles the Saviour, and reconsecrated to him all but four of his own temples and groves. However, he had been greatly weakened by his tortuxes, and found Athe~xs so sadly corrupted by faction and sedifon that he was no longer able to maintain order.6 First smuggling his children out of the city to Euboea, ~nere BIpenor son of Chalcodon sheltered them—but some say that they had fled there before his return—a~d then soterrmly cttrs/ng the people of Athens from Mount Gargettus, he sailed for Crete, where Deucalion had promised to shelter him.
g. A storm blew r. he ship off her course, and his first landfall was the island of Scyros, near Euboea, where King Lycomedes, though a close friend of Menestheus, received him with all the splendour due to his 368 ~04. g—104. j ‘:~:~1 fame and lineage. Theseus, who had inherited an estate on Scyr,o!, asked permission to settle there. But Lycomedes had long regarded this estate as his own and, under the pretence of showing Theseus its botmdaries, inveigled him to the top of a high cliff, pushed him over, and then gave out that he had fallen accidentally while taking a drunken, post-pranclial stroll.7
h. Menestheus, now left in undisturbed possession of the throne, was among Helen’s suitors, and led the Athenian forces to Troy, where he won great fame as a strategist but was killed in battle. The sons of Theseus succeeded him.8
i. Theseus is said to have forcibly abducted Anaxo of Troezen; and to have lain with lope, daughter ofTirynthian Iph~cles. His love-affairs caused the Athenians such frequent embarrassment that they were slow to appreciate his true worth even for several generations after he had died. At the Battle of Marathon, however, his spirit rose from the earth to hearten them, bearing down fully armed upon the Persians; and when victory had been secured, the Delphic Oracle gave orders that his bones should be brought home. The people of Athens had suffered from the Scyrians’ contumely for many years, and the Oracle announced that this would continue so long as they retained the bones.* But to recover them was a difficult task, because the Scyrians were no less surly than fierce and, when Cimon captured the island, would not reveal t~e whereabouts of Theseus’s grave. However, Cimon observed a she-eagle on a hill-top, tearing up the soil with her talons. Acclaiming this as a sign from Heaven, he seized a mattock, hastened to the hole made by the eagle, and began to enlarge it. Almost at once the mattock struck a stone coffin, inside which he found a tall skeleton, armed with a bronze lance and a sword; it could only be that of Theseus. The skeleton was reverently brought to Athens, and re-interred amid great ceremony in Theseus’s sanctuary near the Gyrnnasium.1ř
j. Theseus was a skilled lyre-player and has now become jointpatron with Heracles and Hermes of every gymnasium and wrestling school in Greece. His resemblance to Heracles is proverbial. He took part in the Calydonian Hunt; avenged the champions who fell at Thebes; and only failed to be one of the Argonauts through being detained in Tartarus when they sailed for Colchis. The first war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenian~ was caused by his abduction of Helen, and the second by his refusal to surrender Herades’s sons to King Eurystheus. Ill-treated slaves and labourers, whose ancestors looked to him for protection against their oppressors, now seek refuge in his sanctuary, where sacrifices are offered to him on the eighth day of every month. This day may have been chosen because he first arrived at Athens from Troezen on the eighth of Hecatomboeon, and returned from Crete on the eighth day of Pyanepsion. Or perhaps because he was a son of Poseidon: for Poseidon’s feasts are also observed on that day of the month, since eight, being the first c~be of an even number, represents Poseidon’s unshakeable power.12
1. Apollodorus: Epitome i. 23; Hereas, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 32; Herodotus: ix. 732. Dicaearchus, quoted by Plutarch: foe. eft.; Diogenes Laertius: I. 9; Plutarch: Cimon 13.
3. Dicaearchus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 32; Pausanias: ii. L 4—Pausanias: x. 35—5; Apollodorus: Epitome i. 23; Plutarch: loc. tit. $. Plutarch: Theseus 33; Hyginus: Fabula 79; Pausanias: ii. 22. 7. 6. Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 35; Plutarch: loc. tit.
7. Pausanias: i. 17. 6; Plutarch: foe. tit.
8. Plutarch: Io›. tit.; Apollodorus: iii. Io. 8.
9. Plutarch: Theseus 29 and 36; Pausanias: i. 15. 4; and iii. 3.6. Io. Pausanias: i. 17. 6; Plutarch: loc. tit.
x ~. Pausanias: v. ~ 9—x; iv. 32. I and i. 32. $; Plutarch: Theseus 29 and 36; Apollonius Rhodius: i.
12. Plutarch: Theseus 36.
1. Menestheus the Erechtheid, who is praised in lliadii. 552 if.. for his outstanding military skill, and reigned at Athens during Theseus’s four years’ absence in Tartarus, seems to have been his mortal twin and coking, the Athenian counterpart of Peirithous the Lapith. Here he appears as a prototype of the Athenian demagogues who, throughout the Peloponnesian War, favoured peace with Sparta at any price; but the mythographer, while deploring his tactics, is careful not to offend the Dioscuri, to whom Athenian sailors prayed for succour when overtaken by storms. ~. The theme of the feathered pharmacos reappears in the names of Menestheus’s father and grandfatker, and in the death of Theseus himself. This took place on the island of Scyros (‘stony’), also spelled Sciros; which suggests that, in the icon from which the story has been deduced, the word stir (an abbreviated form of Scirophoria, explaining why the king is be’mg flung from a cliff) has been mistaken for the name of the island. If so, Lycomedes will have been the victim; his was a common 370 I04. 2—~04. $
Athenian name. Originally, it seems, sacrif~ces were offered to the Moongoddess on the eighth day of each lunarion, when she entered her second phase, this being the right time of the month for planting; but when Poseidon married her, and appropriated her cult, the month became a solar period, no longer linked with the moon.
3. The mythic importance of Marathus (‘fennel’) lay in the me made of fennel stalks for carrying the new sacred fn:e from a central hearth to private ones (see 39. g), after their annual exti~ction (see 149.3). 4—Before closing the story of Theseus, let me here add a further note to the Tragliatella vase (see 98.3), which shows the sacred king and his tanist escaping from a maze. I have now seen the picture on the other side of this vase, which is of extraordinary interest as the prologue to this escape: a sunwise procession on foot led by the unarmed sacred king. Seven men escort him, each armed with three javelins and a shield with a boar device, the spear-armed tanist bringing up the rear. These seven men evidently represent the seven months ruled by the tanist, which fall between the apple harvest and Easter—the boar being his housdaold badge (see ~8. 7). The scene takes place on the day of the king’s ritual death, and the Moon-queen (Pasiphaa—see 88.7) has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm threateningly akimbo. With tl~, outstretched other arm she is offering him an apple, which is his passport to Paradise; and the three spears that each man carries spell death. Yet tile king is being guided by a small female figure robed like the othcr—xv~ may call her the princess Ariadne (see 98. k), who helped Thcseus t0 escape from the death-maze at Cnossos. And he is boldly displaying, as a counter-charm to the apple, an Easter-egg, the egg of resurrections. Easter was the season when ~he Troy-town dances were performed i~ the turf-cut mazes of Britain, and Etruria too. An Etruscan sacred egg of polished black trachite, found at Perugia, with an arrow in relief running around it, is this same holy egg.
Laxus, son of Labdacus, married Iocaste, and ruled over Thebes. Grieved by his prolonged childlessness, he secretly consulted the Delphic Oracle, which informed him that this seeming misfortune was a blessing, because any child born to Iocaste would become his murderer. He therefore put Iocaste away, though without offering any reason for his decision, which caused her such vexation that, having made him drank, she inveigled him into her arms again as soon as night fell. When, nine months later, Iocaste was brought to bed of a son, Laius snatched him from the nurse’s arms, pierced his feet with a nail and, binding them together, exposed him on Mount Cithaeron.
b. Yet the Fates had ruled that this boy should reach a green old age. A Corinthian shepherd found him, named him Oedipus because his feet were deformed by the nail-wound, and brought him to Corinth, where King Polybus was reigning at the time?
c. According to another version of the story, Laius did not expose Oedipus on the mountain, but locked him in a chest, which was lowered into the sea from a ship. This chest drifted ashore at Sicyon, where Periboea, Polybus’s queen, happened to be on the beach, supervising her royal laundry-women. She picked up Oedipus, retired to a thicket and pretended to have been overcome by the pangs of labour. Since the laundry-women were too busy to notice what she was about, she deceived them all into thinking that he had only just been born. But Periboea told the truth to Polybus who, also being childless, was pleased to rear Oedipus as his own son.
One day, taunted by a Corinthian youth with not in the least resembling his supposed parents, Oedipus went to ask the Delphic Oracle what future lay in store for him. ‘Away from the shr’me, wretch!’ the Pythoness cried in disgust. ‘You will kill your father and marry your mother !’
d. Since Oedipus loved Polybus and Periboea, and shrank from bringing disaster upon them, he at once decided against returning to Corinth. But in the narrow defile between Delphi and Daulis he happened to meet Laius, who ordered him roughly to step off the road and make way for his betters; Laius, it should be explained, was in a chariot and Oedipus on foot. Oedipus retorted that he acknowledged n~
betters except the gods and his own parents.
‘ So much the worse for you !’ cried Laius, and ordered his chariotee Polyphontes to drive on.
One of the wheels bruised Oedipus’s foot and, transported by rag~ he killed Polyphontes with his spear. Then, flinging Laius on the roa entangled in the reins, and whipping up the team, he made them dra him to death. It was left to the king of Plataeae to bury both corpses
e. Laius had been on his way to ask the Oracle how he might ri Thebes of the Sphinx. This monster was a daughter of Typhon an Echidne or, some say, of the dog Orthrus and the Chimaera, and ha flown to Thebes from the uttermost part of Ethiopia. She was easil recognized by her woman’s head, lion’s body, serpent’s tail, and eagle’ wings.3 Hera had recently sent the Sphinx to punish Thebes for Laius abduction of the boy Chrysippus from Pisa and, settling on Mour Phici~m, close to the city, she now asked every Theban wayfarer riddle taught her by the Three Muses: ‘What being, with only on voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, an is weakest when it has the most?’ Those who could not solve the ridd] she throtded and devoured on the spot, among which unfortunates w; Iocaste’s nephew Haemon, whom the Sphinx made haimon,or’ bloody indeed.
Oedipus, approaching Thebes fresh from the murder of Laiu..
guessed the answer. ‘Man,’ he replied, ‘because he crawls on all fou~ as an infant, stands firmly on his two feet in his youth, and leans upon staff in his old age.’ The mortified Sphinx leaped from Mount Phiciur and dashed herself to pieces in the valley below. At this the grateft Thebans acclaimed Oedipus king, and he married Iocaste, unawat that she was his mother.
fi Plague then descended upon Thebes, and the Delphic Oracl~
when consulted once more, replied: ‘Expel the murderer of Laius! Oedipus, not knowing whom he had met in the defile, pronounced curse on Laius’s murderer and sentenced him to exile.
g. Blind Teiresias, the most renowned seer in Greece at this tim~ now demanded an audience with Oedipus. Some say that Athene, wh. had blinded him for having inadvertently seen her bathing, was move, by his mother’s plea and, taking the serpent Erichthonius from he aegis, gave the order: ‘Cleanse Teiresias’s ears with your tongue th~ he may understand the language of prophetic birds.’
xos. h—xoS. j xx
h. Others say that once, on Mount Cyllene, Teiresias had seen two serpents in the act of coupling. When both attacked him, he struck at them with his staff, killing the female. Immediately he was turned into a woman, and became a celebrated harlot; but seven years later he happened to see the same sight again at the same spot, and this time regained his manhood by killing the male serpent. Still others say that when Aphrodite and the three Charires, ?asithea, Cale, and Euphrosyne, disputed as to which of the four was most beautiful, Teiresias awarded Cale the prize; whereupon Aphrodite turned him into an old woman. But Calc took him with her to Crete and presented him with a lovely head of hair. Some days later Hera began reproaching Zeus for his numerous inf~delities. He defended them by arguing that, at any rate, when he did share her couch, she had the more enjoyable time by far. ‘Women, of course, derive infinitely greater pleasure from the sexual act than men,’ he blustered.
‘What nonsense!’ cried Hera. ‘The exact contrary is the case, and well you know it.’
Teiresias, summoned to settle the dispute from his personal experience, answered; ‘If the parts of love-pleasure be counted as ten, Thrice three go to women, one only to men.’
Hera was so exasperated by Zeus’s triumphant grin that she blinded Teiresias; but Zeus compensated him with inward sight, and a life extended to seven generations.4
i. Teiresias now appeared at Oedipus’s court, leaning on the cornelwood staff given him by Athene, and revealed to Oedipus the will of the gods: that the plague would cease only ira Sown Man died for the sake of the city. Iocaste’s father Menoeceus, one of those who had risen out of the earth when Cadmus sowed the serpent’s teeth, at once leaped from the walls, and all Thebes praised his civic devotion.
Teiresias then announced further: ‘Menoeceus did well, and the plague will now cease. Yet the gods had another of the Sown Men in mind, one of the third generation: for he has killed his father and married his mother. Know, Queen Iocaste, that it is your husband Oedipus !’
j. At f~rst, none would believe Teiresias, but his words were soon conf~rmed by a letter from Periboea at Corinth. She wrote that the sudden death of Kin,g Polybus now allowed her to reveal the circumstances of Oedipus’s adoption; and this she did in damning detail Iocaste then hanged herself for shame and grief, while Oedipus blinde, himself with a pin taken from her garments.5
k. Some say that, although tormented by the Erirmyes, who accuse him of having brought about his mother’s death, Oedipus continued t~ reign over Thebes for awhile, until he fell gloriouslyin batde.6 Accord ing to others, however, Iocaste’s brother Creon expelled him, but nc before he had cursed Eteocles and Polyneices—who were at once b2 sons and his brothers—when they insolendy sent him the inferior po~ tion of the sacrifacial beast, namely haunch instead of royal shouldel They therefore watched dry-eyed as he left the city which he ha, delivered from the Sphinx’s power. After wandering for many yea~ through country after country, guided by his faithful daughter An6 gone, Oedipus finally came to Colonus in Attica, where the Erirmye: who have a grove there, hounded him to.death, and Theseus burie, his body in the precinct of the Solemn Ones at Athens, lamenting b Antigone’s side.7
1. Apollodorus: iii. 5—7.
2. Hyginus: Fabula 66; Scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Wome 13 and 26; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: x. 5—2.
3. Apollodorus: iii. 5—8; Hesiod: Theogony 326; Sophocles: Oedip~ the Tyrant 391; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Frogs ~287.
4. Apollodorus: iii. 6. 7; Hyginus: Fabula 75; Ovid: Metamorphose iii. 320; Pindar: Nemean Odes i. 9~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 68:
Sosostratus, quoted by Eustathius: p. 1665.
5. Apollodorus: iii. 5—8; Sophocles: Oedipus the Tyrant 447, 71 3, 73~ 774, ~285, etc.
6. Homer: Odyssey xi. 270 and Iliad xxiii. 679.
7. Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus 166 and scholiast on 1375; Eur/ pides: Phoenician Women, Proem; Apollodorus: iii. 5.9; Hyginu~
Fabula 67; Pausanias: i. 20. 7—
1. The story ofLaius, Iocaste, and Oedipus has been deduced from set of sacred icons by a deliberate perversion of their mearting. A my~ which would explain Labdacus’s name (‘help with torches’) has bee lost; but it may refer to the torchlight arrival of a Divine Child, cartie by cattlemen or shepherds at the New Year ceremony, and acclaimed, a son of the goddess Brimo (‘raghag’). This eleusis, or advent, was th most important incident in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and perhaps also/~ the Isthmian (see 70. 5), which would explain the myth of Oedipus’ arrival at the court of Corinth. Shepherds fostered or paid homage to many other legendary or semi-legendary infant princes, such as Hippothom (see 49. a), Pelias (see 68. d), Amphion (see 76. a), Aegisthus (see ~. i), Moses, Romulus, and Cyrus, who were all either exposed on a mountain or else consigned to the waves in an ark, or both. Moses was found by Pharaoh’s daughter when she went down to the water with her women. It is possible that Oedipus,’ swollen foot’, was originally Oedipais, ‘son of the swelling sea’, which is the meaning of the name given to the corresponding Welsh hero, Dylan; and that the piercing of Oedipus’s feet with a nail belongs to the end, not to the beginning, of his story, as in the myth of Talus (see 92. rn and 154. h).
2. Laius’s murder is a record of the solar king’s ritual death at the hands of his successor: thrown from a chariot and dragged by the horses (see 7~—~). His abduction of Chrysippus probably refers to the sacrifice of a surrogate (see 29. 1 ) when the first year of his reign ended.
3. The anecdote of the Sphinx has evidently been deduced from an icon showing the winged Moon-goddess of Thebes, whose composite body represents the two parts of the Theban year—lion for the waxing part, serpent for the waning part—and to whom the new king offers his devotions before marrying her priestess, the Queen. It seems also that the fiddle which the Sphinx learned from the Muses has been invented to explain a picture of an infant, a warrior, and an old man, all worshipping the Triple-goddess: each pays his respects to a different person of the triad. But the Sphinx, overcome by Oedipus, killed herself, and so did her priestess Iocaste. Was Oedipus a thirteenth-century invader of Thebes, who suppressed the old Minoan cult of the goddess and reformed the calendar? Under the old system, the new king, though a foreigner, had theoretically been a son of the old king whom he killed and whose widow he married; a custom that the patriarchal invaders misrepresented as parricide and incest. The Freudian theory that the ‘Oedipus complex’ is an instinct common to all men was suggested by this perverted anecdote; and while Plutarch records (On Isis and Osiris 32) that the hippopotamus ‘murdered his sire and forced his dam’, he would never have suggested that every man has a hippopotanurs complex.
4. Though Theban patriots, loth to admit that Oedipus was a foreigner who took their city by storm, preferred to make him the lost heir to the kingdom, the truth is revealed by the death of Menoeceus, a member of the pre-Hellenic race that celebrated the Peloria festival in memory of Ophion the Demiurge, from whose teeth they claimed to have sprung. He leaped to his death in the desperate hope of placating the goddess, like Mettus Curtius, when a chasm opened in the Roman Forum (Livy: vii. 6); and the same sacrif~ce was offered during the War of the’ Seven Against Thebes’ (see ~06. j). However, he died in vain; otherwise the Sphinx, and her chief priestess, would not have been obliged to commit suicide. The story of Iocaste’s death by hanging is probably an error; Helen of the Olive-trees, like Erigone and Ariadne of the vine cult, was said to have died in this way—perhaps to account for figuri~es of the Moon-goddess which dangled from the boughs of orchard trees, as a fertility charm (see 79—2; 88. lo and 98.5). Similar figurines were used at Thebes; and when Iocaste committed suicide, she doubtless leaped from a rock, as the Sphinx did.
.5. The occurrence of ‘Teiresias’, a common title for soothsayers, throughout Greek legendary history suggested that Teiresias had been granted a remarkably long life by Zeus. To see snakes coupling is still considered unlucky in Southern India; the theory being that the witness will be punished with the’ female disease’ (as Herodotus calls it), namely homosexuality; here the Greek fabulist has taken the tale a stage further in order to raise a laugh against women. Cornel, a divinatory tree sacred to Cronus (see 52. $ and 170. 5), symbolized the fourth month, that of the Spring Equinox; Rome was founded at this season, on the spot where Romulus’s cornel-wood javel/n struck the ground. Hesiod turned the traditional two Charires into three (see 13.3), calling them Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia (Theogony 945)—Sosostratus’s account of the beauty contest makes poor sense, because Pasithea Gale Euphrosyne,’ the Goddess of Joy who is beautiful to all’, seems to have been Aphrodite’s own tide. He may have borrowed it from the Judgement of Paris (see 159. i and3).
6. Two incompatible accounts of Oedipus’s end survive. According to Homer, he died gloriously in battle. According to Apollodorus and Hyginus, he was banished by Iocaste’s brother, a member of the Cadmean royal house, and wandered as a blind beggar through the cities of Greece until he came to Colonus in Attica, where the Furies hounded him to death. Oedipus’s remorseful self-blinding has been interpreted by psychologists to mean castration; but though the blindness of Achilles’s tutor Phoenix (see ~60. l) was said by Greek grammarians to be a euphemism for impotence, primitive myth is always downright, and the castration of Uranus and Attis continued to be recorded unblushingly in Classical text books. Oedipus’s blinding, therefore, reads like a theatrical invention, rather than original myth. Furies were personifications of conscience, but conscience in a very limited sense: aroused only by the breach of a maternal taboo.
7. According to the non-Homeric story, Oedipus’s defiance of the City-goddess was punished by exile, and he eventually died a victim of his own superstitious fears. It is probable that his innovations were repudiated by a body of Theban conservatives; and, certainly, his sons’ and brothers’ unwillingness to award him the shoulder of the sacrif~cial victim amounted to a denial of his divine authority. The shoulder-blade was the priesfly perquisite at Jerusalem (Leviticus vii. 32 and xi. 2~, etc.) and Tantalus set one before the goddess Demeter at a famous banquet of the gods (see 108. c). Among the Akan, the right shoulder still goes to the ruler.
Did Oedipus, like Sisyphus, try to substitute pattilineal for matrilineal hws of succession, but get banished by his subjects? It seems probable. Theseus of Athens, another patriarchal revolutionary from the Isthmus, who destroyed the ancient Athenian clan of Pallantids (see 99. a), is associated by the Athenian dramatists with Oedipus’s burial, and was likewise banished at the close of his reign (see z04.f).
8. Teiresias here figures dramatically as the prophet of Oedipus’s final disgrace, but the story, as it survives, seems to have been turned insideout. It may once have run something like this: Oedipus of Corinth conquered Thebes and became king by marrying Iocaste, a priestess of Hera. Afterwards he announced that the kingdom should henceforth be bequeathed from father to son in the male line, which is a Corinthian custom, instead of remaining the gift of Hera the Throttler. Oedipus confessed that he felt himselfdisgraced as having let chariot horses drag to death Laius, who was accounted his father, and as having married Iocaste, who had enroyalled him by a ceremony of rebirth. But when he tried to change these customs, Iocaste committed suicide in protest, and Thebes was visited by a plague. Upon the advice of an oracle, the Thebans then withheld from Oedipus the sacred shoulder-blade, and banished him. He died in a fruitless attempt to regain his throne by warfare.
S o many princes visited Argos in the hope of marrying either Aegeia, or Deipyla, the daughters of King Adrastus, that, fearing to make powerful enemies if he singled out any two of them as his sons-in-law, he consulted the Delphic Oracle. Apollo’s response was: ‘Yoke to a two-wheeled chariot the boar and lion which fight in your palace.’
b. Among the less fortunate of these suitors were Polyneices and Tydeus. Polyneices and his twin Eteocles had been elected co-kings of Thebes after the banishment of Oedipus, their father. They agreed to reign for alternate years, but Eteocles, to whom the first term fell, would not relinquish his throne at the end of the year, pleading the evil disposition shown by Polyneices, and banished him from the city. Tydeus, son of Oeneus of Calydon, had killed his brother Melanippus when out hunting; though he claimed that this was an accident, it had been prophesied that Melanippus would kill him, and the Calydonians therefore suspected him of having tried to forestall his fate, and he was also banished.
c. Now, the emblem of Thebes is a lion, and the emblem of Calydon, a boar; and the two fugitive suitors displayed these devices on their shields. That night, in Adrastus’s palace, they began to dispute about the riches and glories of their respective cities, and murder might have been done, had not Adrastus parted and reconciled them. Then, mindful of the prophecy, he married Aegeia to Polyneices, and Deipyla to Tydeus, with a promise to restore both princes to their kingdoms; but said that he would first march against Thebes, which lay nearer.1
d. Adrastus mustered his Argive chieftains: Capaneus, Hippomedon, his brother-in-law Amphiaraus the seer, and his Arcadian ally Parthenopaeus, son of Meleager and Atalanta, bidding them arm themselves and set out eastward. Of these champions, only one was reluctant to obey: namely Amphiaraus who, foreseeing that all except Adrastus would die fighting against Thebes, at first refused to go.
e. It happened that Adrastus had formerly quarrelled with Amphiaraus about Argive affairs of state, and the two angry men might have killed each other, but for Adrastus’s sister Eriphyle, who was married to Amphiaraus. Snatching her distaff, she flung herself between them, knocked up their swords, and made them swear always to abide by her verdict in any future dispute. Apprised of this oath, Tydeus called Polyneices and said: ‘Eriphyle fears that she is losing her looks; now, if you were to offer her the magic necklace which was Aphrodite’s wedding gift to your ancestress Harmonia, Cadmus’s wife, she would soon settle the dispute between Amphiaraus and Adrastus by compelling him to come with us.’
fi This was discreetly done, and the expedition set out, led by the seven champions: Polyneices, Tydeus, and the five Argives.2 But some say that Polyneices did not count as one of the seven, and add the name of Eteoclus the Argive, a son of Iphis.3
g. Their march took them through Nemea, where Lycurgus was king. When they asked leave to water their troops in his country, Lycurgus consented, and his bond-woman Hypsipyle guided them to the nearest spring. Hypsipyle was a Lemnian princess, but when the women of Lemnos had sworn to murder all their men in revenge for an injury done them, she saved the life of her father Thoas: they therofore sold her into slavery, and here she was, acting as nursemaid to Lycurgns’~s son Opheltes. She set the boy down for a moment while she guided the Argive army to the drinking pool, whereupon a’ serpent writhed around his limbs and bit him to death. Adrastus and his men returned from the spring too late to do more than kill the serpent and bury the boy.
h. When Amphiaraus warned them that this was an ominous sign, they instituted the Nemean Games in the boy’s honour, calling him Archemorus, which means ‘the beginner of doom’; and each of the champions had the satisfaction of winning one of the seven events. The judges at the Nemean Games, .which are celebrated every four years, have ever since worn dark robes in mourning for Opheltes, and the victor’s wreath is plaited oflucldess parsley.4
i. Arrived at Cithaeron, Adrastus sent Tydeus as his herald to the Thebans, with a demand that Eteocles should resign the throne in fayour of Polyneices. When this was refused, Tydeus challenged their chieftains to single combat, one after another, and emerged victorious from every encounter; soon, no more Thebans dared come forward. The Argives then approached the city walls, and each of the champions took up his station facing one of the seven gates.
j. Teiresias the seer, whom Eteocles consulted, prophesied that the Thebans would be victorious only ira prince of the royal house freely offered himself as a sacrifice to Ares; whereupon Menoeceus, the son of Creon, killed himself before the gates, much as his namesake and uncle had leaped headlong from the walls on a previous occasion. Teiresias’s prophecy was fulfilled: the Thebans were, indeed, defeated in a skirmish and withdrew into the city; but no sooner had Capaneus set a scaling-ladder against the wall and begun to mount it, than Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt. At this, the Thebans took courage, made a furious sally, killing three more of the seven champions; and one of their number, who happened to be named Melanippus, wounded Tydeus in the belly. Athene cherished an affection for Tydeus and, pitying him as he lay half-dead, hastened to beg an infallible elixir from her father Zeus, which would have soon set him upon his feet again. But Amphiaraus hated Tydeus for having forced the Argives to march and, being sharp-witted, ran at Melanippus and cut off his head. ‘Here is revenge !’ he cried, handing the head to Tydeus. ‘ Split open the skull and gulp his brains!’ Tydeus did so, and Athene, arriving at that moment with the elixir, spilt it on the ground and retired in disgust.
k. Only Polyneices, Amphiaraus, and Adrastus now remained of the seven champions; and Polyneices, to save further slaughter, offered to decide the succession of the throne by single combat with Eteodes. Eteocles accepted the challenge and, in the course of a bitter struggle, each mortally wounded the other. Creon, their uncle, then took command of the Theban army and routed the dismayed Argives. Amphiaraus fled in his chariot along the banks of the river Ismenus, and was on the point of being thrust between the shoulders by a Theban pursuer, when Zeus cleft the earth with a thunderbolt and he vanished from sight, chariot and all, and now reigns alive among the dead. Baton, his charioteer, went with him. S
1. Seeing that the day was lost, Adrastus mounted his winged horse Arion and escaped; but when, later, he heard that Creon would not permit his dead enemies to be buried, visited Athens as a suppliant and persuaded Theseus to march against Thebes and punish Creon’s impiety. Theseus took the city in a surprise attack, imprisoned Creon, and gave the dead champions’ corpses to their kinsfolk, who heaped a great pyre for them. But Evadne, Capaneus’s wife, seeing that her husband had been heroized by Zeus’s thunderbolt, would not be parted from him. Since custom demanded that a lightning-struck man should be buried apart from the rest, and his grave fenced off, she flung herself on the general pyre, and was consumed alive.6
rn. Now, before Theseus’s arrival at Thebes, Antigone, sister of Eteodes and Polyneices, had disobeyed Creon’s orders by secretly building a pyre and laying Polyneices’s corpse upon it. Looking out of his palace window, Creon noticed a distant glow which seemed to proceed from a burning pyre and, going to investigate, surprised Antigone in her act of disobedience. He summoned his son Haemon, to whom Antigone had been aftlanced, and ordered him to bury her alive in Polyneices’s tomb. Haemon reigned readiness to do as he was told but, instead, married Antigone secretly, and sent her away to live among his shepherds. She bore him a son who, many years later, came to Thebes, and took part in certain funeral games; but Creon, who was still King of Thebes, guessed his identity by the serpent mark on his body, borne by all descendants of Cadmus, and sentenced him to death. Heracles interceded for his life, but Creon proved obdurate; whereupon Haemon killed both Antigone and himself.?
i. Hyginus: Fabula 69; Euripides: Phoenician Women 408 if., with scholiast on 409; Suppliants 132 if.; Apol/odorus: iii. 6. 1. :~. Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes 375 if.; Homer: Odyssey xi. 326 if. and xv. 247; Sophocles: Electra 836 if. and Fragments of Eriphyle; Hyginus: Fabula 73; Pausanias: v. ~7. 7 if. and ix. 41.2; Diodorus Sicu/us: iv. 65.5 if.; Apollodorus: iii. 6. 2-3. 3—Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes 458 if.; Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus 1316; Pausanias: x. ~o. 3.
4. Apo!lodorus: i. 9—17 and hi. 6. 4; Hyginus: Fabulae 74 and 273; Scholiast on the Argument of Pindar’s Nemean Odes.
$. Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes 375 if.; Euripides: Phoenician Women I05 if.. and ~090 if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 65.7-9; Apollodorus: iii. 6. 8; Hyginus: Fabulae 69 and 70; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes x. 7; Pausanias: ix. 18. I; Ovid: lbis 427 if. and 5 x 5 if. 6. Hyginus: Fabula 273; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Euripides: The Suppliants; Plutarch: Theseus 29; Isocrates: Panegyric 54-8; Pausanias: i. 39. 2.
7. Sophocles: Antigone, passim; Hyginus: Fabula 72; Fragments of Euripides’s Antigone; Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes I005 if.; Apollodorus: iii. 7. I.
1. Apollo’s lion-and-boar oracle will have originally conveyed the wisdom of forming double kingdoms; in order to prevent political strife between the sacred king and his tanist, such as brought about the fall of Thebes (see 69. 1). But the emblem of Thebes was a lion, because of the lion-bodied Sphinx, its former goddess; and the emblem of Calydon was a boar, probably because Ares, who had a shrine there, liked to adopt this disguise (see 18. j). The oracle has therefore been applied to a different situation. Shields with animal devices were regularly used in early Classical times (see 98..3 and 160. n).
2. The mythographers often made play with the syllable eri in a name, pretending that it meant eris, ‘strife’, rather than ‘plentiful’. Hence the myths of Erichthonius (see 25. l ) and Erigone (see 79.3). Eriphyle originally meant ‘many leaves’, rather than ‘tribal strife’. Hesiod (W0rks and Days ~61 if.) says that Zeus wiped out two generations of heroes, the first at Thebes in the war for Oedipus’s sheep, the second at Troy in the war occasioned by fair-haired Helen. ‘ Oedipus’s sheep’ is not explained; but Hesiod must be referring to this war between Eteocles and Polyneices, in. which the Argives supported an unsuccessful candidate for the throne of Thebes. The cause of a similar dispute between brothers was the golden fleece, for which Atreus and Thyestes contended (see x ~ I. c-d); its possession set the owner on the throne of Mycenae. Also, Zeus had goldenfleeced rams on Mount Laphystium, which seem to have been the royal insig~ ofneighbouring Orchomenus and which caused much bloodshed (see 70. 6). $. Hypsipyle (‘high gate’) was probably a title of the Moon-goddess’s, whose cot~tse ~escribes a high arch across the sky; and the Nemean Games, like the Olympian, will have been celebrated at the end of the sacred king’s term, when he had reigned his fifty lunar months as the Chief-priestess’s husband. The myth preserves the tradition that boys were sacrificed annually to the goddess, as surrogates for the king; though the word Ośheltes, which means simply’ benefactor’, has here been given a forced sense: ‘wound about by a serpent’, as though it were derived from ophis, ‘serpent’ and erein, ‘to press together’. Neither does Archemorus mean ‘the beginning of doom’, but rather ‘original olive stock’, which refers to cuttings from Athene’s sacred olive (see ~6. c), presumably those used in the Games as crowns for the victors of the various events. After the disasters of the Persian War, the use of olive was discontinued at the Nemean Games in fayour of parsley, a token of mourning (Scholiast on Pindar’s Argument to the Nemean Games). Parsley was unlucky, perhaps because of its notoriety as an abortificient—the English proverb has it: ‘parsley grows rank in cuckolds’ gardens.’ It grew rank in the death-island of Ogygia (see ~70. w).
4. Tydeus’s gulping of Melanippus’s brains is reported as a moral anecdote. This old-established means of improving one’s fighting skill, introduced by the Hellenes and still practised by the Scythians in Classical times (Herodotus: iv. 64), had come to be regarded as barbarous. But the icon from which the mythographers deduced their story probably showed Athene pouring a libation to Melanippus’s ghost, in approval of Tydeus’s action. The lost epic of the Seven Against Thebes must have closely resembled the Indian Mahabharata, which glorif~es the Maryannu soldier-caste: the same theme of kinsman pitted against kinsman occurs, the conduct of the fighters is nobler and more tragic than in the Iliad, the gods play no mischievous part, suttee is honoured, and Bhishma, like Tydeus, drinks his enemy’s blood (see 8~. 8).
3. Amphiaraus’s end provides yet another example of the sacred king’s death in a chariot crash (see 7~—a; ~ox. g; xos. d; ~09.j, etc.). The descent of Baton (‘blackberry’) to Tartarus in his company seems to be told to account for the widespread European taboo on the eating of blackberries, which is associated with death. 6. Evadne’s self-immolation recalls the myth of Alcestis (see 69. d). Relics of a royal cremation found in a bee-hive tomb at Dendra near Mycenae suggest that, in this particular instance, the king and queen were buried at the same time; and A. W. Persson believes that the queen died voluntarily. But they may both have been murdered, or died of the same illness, and no similar Mycenaean burial is reported elsewhere. Suttee, in fact, which seems to have been a Hellenic practice, soon went out of fashion (see 74—8). Lightning was an evidence ośZeus’s presence, and since’ holy’ and’ unclean’ mean much the same in primitive religion —the tabooed animals in Leviticus were unclean because they were holythe grave oś a man struck by lightning was fenced off, like that of a calf that has died of anthrax on a modern farm, and he was given heroic rites. The graveyard near Eleusis where the champions are said by Pausanias to have been eventually interred, has now been identified and opened by Professor Mylonas. He found one double burial surrounded by a stone circle, and five single burials; the skeletons, as was customary in the thirteenth century B.c., to which the vase fragments are attributable, showed no signs of cremation. Early grave-robbers had evidently removed the bronze weapons and other metallic objects, originally buried with the bodies; and it may have been their finding of two skeletons in the stone circle, and the anomaly of the circle itself, which suggested to the people of Eleusis that this w~s the grave ośCapaneus, struck by lightning, and of his faithful wife Evadne.
?. The myth of Antiope, Haemon, and the shepherds seems to have been deduced from the same icon as those of Arne (see 43—d) and Alope (see 49. a). We are denied the expected end of the story: that he killed his grandfather Creon with a discus (see 73. p).
T~E sons of the seven champions who had fallen at Thebes swore to avenge their fathers. They are known as the Epigoni. The Delphic Oracle promised them victory if Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus, took command. But he felt no desire to attack Thebes, and hotly disputed the propriety of the campaign with his brother Amphilochus. When they could not agree whether to make war or no, the decision was referred to their mother Eriphyle. Recognizing the situation as a familiar one, Thersander, the son of Polyneices, followed his father’s example: he bribed Eriphyle with the magic robe which Athene had given his ancestress Harmonia at the same time as Aphrodite had given her the magic necklace. Eriphyle decided for war, and Alcmaeon reluctantly assumed command.
b. In a battle fought before the walls of Thebes, the Epigoni lost Aegialeus, son of Adrastus, and Teiresias the seer then warned the Thebans that their city would be sacked. The walls, he announced, were fated to stand only so long as one of the original seven champions remained alive, and Adrastus, now the sole survivor, would die of grief when he heard of Aegialeus’s death. Consequently, the Thebans’ wisest course was to flee that very night. Teiresias added that whether they took his advice or no made no odds to him; he was destined to die as soon as Thebes fell into Argive hands. Under cover of darkness, therefore, the Thebans escaped northward with their wives, children, weapons, and a few belongings, and when they had travelled far enough, called a halt and founded the city of Hestiaea. At dawn, Teiresias, who went with them, paused to drink at the spring of Tilphussa, and suddenly expired.
c. That same day, which was the very day on which Adrastus heard of Aegialeus’s death and died of grief, the Argives, finding Thebes evacuated, broke in, razed the walls, and collected the booty. They sent the best of it to Apollo at Delphi, including Teiresias’s daughter Manto, or Daphne, who had stayed behind; and she became his
?ythoness.1
d. Nor was this the end of’ the matter. Thersander happened to boast in Alcmaeon’s hearing that most of the credit for the Argive victory was due to himself: he had bribed Eriphyle, just as his father Polyneices did before him, to give the order to march. Alcmaeon thus learned for the first time that Eriphyle’s vanity had caused his father’s death, and might well have caused his own. He consulted the Delphic Oracle, and Apollo replied that she deserved death. Alcmaeon mistook this for a dispensation to matricide and, on his return, he duly killed Eriphyle, some say with the aid of his brother Amphilochus. But Eriphyle, as she lay dying, cursed Alcmaeon, and cried our: ‘Lands of Greece and Asia, and of all the world: deny shelter to my murderers!’ The avenging Erinnyes thereupon pursued him and drove him mad.
e. Alcmaeon fled first to Thesprotia where he was reśused entry, and then to Psophis, where King ?hegeus purified him for Apollo’s sake. Phegeus married him to his daughter Arsino~, to whom Alcmaeon gave the necklace and the robe, which he had brought in his baggage. But the Erinnyes, disregarding this pur’~cation, cont’mued to plague him, and the land of Psophis grew barren on his account. The Delphic Oracle then advised Alcmaeon to approach the River-god Achelous, by whom he was once more puriśted; he married Achelous’s daughter Callirrho~, and settled on land recently formed by the silt of the river, which had not been included in Eriphyle’s ban. There he lived at peace for awhile.
f A year later, Callirrho~, fearing that she might lose her beauty, refused Alcmaeon admittance to her couch unless he gave her the celebrated robe and necklace. For love of Callirrho~, he dared revisit Psophis, where he deceived Phegeus: making no mention of his marriage to Callirrho~, he invented a prediction of the Delphic Oracle, to the effect that he would never be rid of the Erinnyes until he had dedicated both robe and necklace to Apollo’s shrine. Phegeus thereupon made Arsino~ surrender them, which she was glad to do, believing that Alcmaeon would return to her .as soon as the Erinnyes left him; for they were hard on his track again. But one of Alcmaeon’s servants blabbed the truth about Callirrho~, and Phegeus grew so angry that he ordered his sons to ambush and kill Alcmaeon when he left the palace. Arsino~ witnessed the murder from a window and, unaware of Alcmaeon’s double-dealing, loudly upbraided her father and brothers for having violated guest-right and made her a widow. Phegeus begged her to be silent and listen while he justified himself; but Arsino~ stopped her ears and wished violent death upon him and her brothers before the next new moon. In retaliation, Phegeus locked her in a chest and presented her as a slave to the King of Nemea; at the same time telling his sons: ‘Take this robe and this necklace to Delphic Apollo. He will see to it that they cause no further mischief.’
g. Phegeus’s sons obeyed him; but, meanwhile, Callirrho~, informed of what had happened at Psophis, prayed that her infant sons by Alcmaeon might become full-grown men in a day, and avenge his murder. Zeus heard her plea, and they shot up into manhood, took arms, and went to Nemea where, they knew, the sons of Phegeus had broken their rerum journey from Delphi in the hope of persuading Arsino~ to retract her curse. They tried to tell her the truth about Alcmaeon, but she would not listen to them either; and Callirrho~’s sons not only surprised and killed them but, hastening towards Psophis, killed Phegeus too, before the next moon appeared in the sky. Since no king or rivergod in Greece would consent to purify them of their cr’nnes, they travelled westward to Epirus, and colonized Acamania, which was named after the elder of the two, Acarnan.
h. The robe and necklace were shown at Delphi until the Sacred War [fourth century s.c.], when the Phocian bandit Phayllos carried them off, and it is not known whether the amber necklace set in gold which the people of/~mathus claim to be Eriphyle’s is genuine or false.2 i. And some say that Teiresias had two daughters, Daphne and Manto. Daphne remained a virgin and became a Sibyl, bur 2~dcmaeon begot Amphilochus ancl Tisiphone on Manto before sending her to /[pollo ar Delphi; he entrusted boa children to King Creon of Corinth. Years later, Creon’s wife, jealous of Tisiphone’s extraordinary beauty, sold her as a slave; and Alcmaeon, not knowing who she was, bought her as his serving-girl but fortunately abstained from incest. As for Manto: Apollo sent her to Colophon in Ionia, where she married Rhacius, King of Caria; their son was Mopsus, ~e famous soothsayer.3 I. Diodorus $iculus: iv. 66; Pausanias: ix. 5. 13 IT., ix. 8.6, and ix. 9. 4 if..; Hyginus: Fabula 70; I~ragments of Aeschylus’s and Sophocles’s śpigoni. 2. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 5-7; Athenaeus: vi. 22; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 4~3 t5’.; Pausanias: viii. 24. 8-~o and ix. 41. 2; Parthenius: Narrations 25.
3. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 7. quoting Euripides’s dllcrnaeon; Pausanias: vii. 3. ~ and ix. 33. x; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 66.
1. This is a popular minstrel tale, containing few mythic elements, which could be told either in Thebes or Argos without causing offence; which would be of interest to the people of Psophis, Nemea, and the Achelous valley; which purposed to account for the foundi~g of Hestiaea, and the colonization of Acarnania; and which had a strong moral flavour. It taught the instability of women’s judgement, the folly of men in humouting their vanity or greed, the wisdom of listening to seers who are beyond suspicion, the danger of misinterpreting oracles, and the inescapable curse that fell on any son who killed his mother, even in placation of his murdered father’s ghost (see ~ ~4. a).
2. Eriphyle’s continuous power to decide between war and peace is the most interesting feature of the story. The true meauing of her name, ‘ very leafy’, suggests that she was an Argive priestess of Hera i~ charge of a tree-oracIe, like that of Dodona (see 51—~)—If so, this tree is likely to have been a pear, sacred to Hera (see 74, 6). Both the ‘War of the Seven Against Thebes ‘, which Hesiod calls the ‘War of Oedipus’s Sheep’, and its sequel here recounted, seem to have preceded the Argonautic expedition and the Trojan War, and may be tentatively referred to the fourteenth century B.C.
T~~ parentage and origin of Tantalus are disputed. His mother was Pluto, a daughter of Cronus and Rhea or, some say, of Oceanus and Tethys;~ and his father either Zeus, or Tmolus, the oak-chapleted deity of Mount Tmolus who, with his wife Omphale, ruled over the kingdom of Lydia and had judged the contest between Pan and Apollo.1 Some, however, call Tantalus a king of Argos, or of Corinth; and others say that he went northward from Sipylus in Lydia to reign in Paphlagonia; whence, after he had incurred the wrath of the gods, he was expelled by Ilus the Phrygian, whose young brother Ganymedes he had abducted and seduced.3
b. By his wife Euryanassa, daughter of the River-god Pactolus; or by Eurythemista, daughter of the River-god Xanthus; or by Clytia, daughter of Amphidamantes; or by the Pleiad Dione, Tantalus became the father of Pelops, Niobe, and Broteas.4 Yet some call Pelops a bastard, or the son of Arias and the nymph Linos. S
c. Tantalus was the intimate friend of Zeus, who admitted him to Olympian banquets of nectar and ambrosia unfil~ good fortune turning his head, he betrayed Zeus’s secrets and stole the divine food to share among his mortal friends. Before this crime could be discovered, he committed a worse. Having called the Olympians to a banquet on Mount Sipylus, or it may have been at Corinth, Tantalus found that the food in his larder was insufficient for d~e company and, either to test Zeus’s omniscience, or merely to demonstrate his good will, cut up his son Pelops, and added the pieces to the stew prepared for them, as the sons of Lycaon had done with their brother Nyctimus when they entertained Zeus in Arcadia.6 None of the gods rifled to notice what was on their trenchers, or to recoil in horror, except Demeter who, being dazed by her loss of Persephone, ate the flesh from the left shoulder .?
d. For these two crimes Tantalus was punished with the ruin of his kingdom and, after his death by Zeus’s own hand, with eternal torment in the company of Ixion, Sisyphus, Tityus, the Danaids, and others. Now he hangs, perennially consumed by thirst and hunger, from the bough of a fruit-tree which leaus over a marshy lake. Its waves lap aga’mst his waist, and sometimes reach his chin, yet whenever he bends down to drink, they slip away, and nothing remains but the black mud at his feet; or, if he ever succeeds in scooping up a handful of water, it slips through his fingers before he can do more than wet his cracked lips, leaving him thirstier than ever. The tree is laden with pears, shining apples, sweet figs, ripe olives and pomegranates, which dangle against his shoulders; but whenever he reaches for tl~e luscious fruit, a gust of wind whirls them out ofkis reach?
e. Moreover, an enormous stone, a crag from Mount Sipylus, overhangs the tree and eternally threatens to crush Tantalus’s skull.9 This is his punishment for a third crime: namely theft, aggravated by perjury. One day, while Zeus was still an infant in Crete, being suckled by the she-goat Amaltheia, Hephaestus had made Rhea a golden mastiff to watch over him; which subsequently became the guardian of his temple at Dicte. But Pandareus son of Merops, a native of Lydian or, it may have been Cretan, Miletus—if, indeed, it was not Ephesusdared to steal the mastiff, and brought it to Tantalus for safe keeping on Mount Sipylus. After the hue and cry had died down, Pandareus asked Tantalus to return it to him, but Tantalus swore by Zeus that he had neither seen nor heard of a golden dog. This oath coming to Zeus’s ears, Hermes was given orders to investigate the matter; and although Tantalus continued to perjure himself, Hermes recovered the dog by force or by stratagem, and Zeus crushed Tantalus under a crag of Mount Sipyltts. The spot is still shown near the Tantalid Lake, a haunt of white swan-eagles. Afterwards, Pandareus and his wife Harmotho(: fled to Athens, and thence to Sic’fly, where they perished miserably.,O f According to others, however, it was Tantalus who stole the golden mastiff, and Pandareus to whom he entrusted it and who, on denying that he had ever received it was destroyed, together with his wife, by the angry gods, or turned into stone. But Pandareus’s orphaned daughters Merope and Cleothera, whom some call Cameiro and Clyti~, were reared by Aphrodite on curds, honey, and sweet wine. Hera endowed them with beauty and more than human wisdom; Artemis made them grow tall and strong; Athene instructed them in every known handicraft. It is difficult to understand why these goddesses showed such solicitude, or chose Aphrodite to soften Zeus’s heart towards these orphans and arrange good marriages for themunless, of course, they had themselves encouraged Pandareus to commit the theft. Zeus must have suspected someth’mg, because while Aphrodite was closeted with him on Olympus, the Ilarpies snatched away the three girls, with his consent, and handed them over to the Erinnyes, who made them suffer vicariously for their father’s si11soII
g. This Pandareus was also the father of A~don, the wife of Zethus, to whom she bore Itylus. Aedon was racked with envy of her sister Niobe, who rejoiced in the love of six sons and six daughters and, when trying to murder Sipylus, the eldest of them, she killed Itylus by mistake; whereupon Zeus transformed her into the Nightingale who, in early summer, nightly laments her murdered child?
h. After punishing Tantalus, Zeus was pleased to revive Pelops; and therefore ordered Hermes to collect his limbs and boil them again in the same cauldron, on which he laid a spell. The Fate Clotho then rearticulated them; Demeter gave him a solid ivory shoulder in place of the one she had picked clean; and Rhea breathed life into him; while Goat-Pan danced for joy.13
i. Pelops emerged from the magic cauldron clothed in such radiant beauty that Poseidon fell in love with him on the spot, and carried him off to Olympus in a chariot drawn by golden horses. There he pointed him his cup-bearer and bed-fellow; as Zeus later appointed Ganymedes, and fed him on ambrosia. Pelops first noticed that his left shoulder was of ivory when he bared his breast in mourning for his sister Niobe. All true descendants of Pelops are marked in this way and, after his death, the ivory shoulder-blade was laid up at Pisa.14
j. Pelops’s mother Euryanassa, meanwhile, made the most diligent search for him, not knowing about his ascension to Olympus; she learned from the scullions that he had been boiled and served to the gods, who seemed to have eaten every last shred of his flesh. This version of the story became current throughout Lydia; many still credit it and deny that the Pelops whom Tantalus boiled in the cauldron was the same Pelops who succeeded him.1S
k. Tantalus’s ugly son Broteas carved the oldest image ofthe Mother of the Gods, which still stands on the Coddinian Crag, to the north of Mount $ipylus. He was a famous hunter, but refused to honour Artemis, who drove him mad; crying aloud that no flame could burn him, he threw himself upon a lighted pyre and let the flames consume him. But some say that he committed suicide because everyone hated his ugliness. Broteas’s son and heir was named Tantalus, after his grandfather?
i. Pausanias: ii. 22.4; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes iii. Hesiod: Theogony 3 $ 5, with scholiast.
2. Pausanias: Ioc. cit.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 5; Pliny: Natural History v. 30; Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. ~56; Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3.
3. Hyginus: Fabula 124; Servius on VirgiI’s Aeneidvi. 603; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 74; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355.
4. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 33; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 52; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes I x; Hygiuus: Fabula 83; Pausanias: ~i. 22.4.
5. Lactantius: Stories flora Ovid’s Metamorphoses vi. 6; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 130.
6. Hyginus: FabuIa 82; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 38 and 60; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603 if.; Lactantius: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 152.
7. Hyginus: Fabula 83; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 406. 8. Diodonts Siculus: iv. 74; Plato: CratyIus 28; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead 17; Homer: Odyssey xi. 582-92; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 456; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 60; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. x; Hyginus: Fabula 82.
9. Pausanias: x. 31. 4; Archilochus, quoted by Plutarch: Political Precepts 6; Euripides: Orestes 7.
Io. Antoninus Liberahs: Transformations 36 and Ix; Eustathius and Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xix. 518; Pausanias: x. 30. x and viii. 7. 3.
x L Pausanias: x. 30. ~; Scholiast on Homer: loc. cit.; Homer: Odyssey xx. 66 if.; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 36.
12. Homer: Odyssey xix. 518 if.; Apollodorus: hi. 5—6; Pherecydes: Fragment p. 138, ed. Sturz.
13. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 26; Hyginus: Fabula 83; Scholiast on Aristides: p. 216, ed. Frommel. 14. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 3; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 37 if-; Lucian: Charidemus 7; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 406; Tzetzes: On
L7cophron 152; Pausanias: v. ~3.3.
xS—Pindar: loc. tit.; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 387. 16. Pausauias: iii. 22. 4; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. z; Ovid: Ibis 517, with scholiast.
1. According to Strabo (xii. 8.21), Tantalus, Pelops, and Niobe were Phrygians; and he quotes Demetrius of Scepsis, and also Callisthenes (xiv. 5.28), as saying that the family derived their wealth from the mines of Phrygia and Mount Sipylus. Moreover, ha Aeschylus’s Niobe (cited by Strabo: xii. 8.2t) the Tantalids are said to have had ‘an altar of Zeus, their paternal god, on Mount Ida’; and Sipylus is located ‘in the Idaean land’. Democles, whom Strabo quoted at second hand, rationalizes the Tantalus myth, saying that his reign was marked by violent earthquakes in Lydia and Ionia, as far as the Troad: ent/re villages disappeared, Mount Sipylus was overturned, marshes were converted into lakes, and Troy was submerged (Strabo: i. 3—~7). According to Pausanias, also, a city on Mount Sipylus disappeared into a chasm, which subsequently filled with water and became Lake Salon, or Tantails. The ruins of the city could be seen on the lake bottom until this was silted up by a mountain stream (Pausanias: vii. 24. 7)—Pliny agrees that Tantalis was destroyed by an earthquake (Natural History ii. 93), but records that three successive cities were built on its site before this was finally flooded (Natural History v. 3 I). 2. Strabo’s historical view, however, even ifarchaeologically plausible, does not account for Tantalus’s connexion with Argos, Corinth, and Cretan Miletus. The rock poised over him in Tartarus, always about to fall, identif~es him with Sisyphus of Corinth, whose similarly perpetual punishment was deduced from an icon which showed the Sun-Titan laboriously pushing the sun-disk up the slope of Heaven to its zenith (see 67.2). The scholiast on Pindar was dimly aware of this identification, but explained Tantalus’s punishment rationalistically, by recording that: ‘ some understand the stone to represent the sun, and Tantalus, a physicist, to be paying the penalty for having proved that the sun is a mass of whitehot metal’ (Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes i. 97). Confusingly, this icon of the Sun-Titan has been combined with another: that of a man peering in agony through an interlace of fruit-bearing boughs, and up to his chin in water—a punishment which the rhetoricians used as an allegory of the fate meted out to the rich and greedy (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603; Fulgentius: Mythological Compendium ii. x 8). The apples, pears, figs, and such-like, dangling on Tantalus’s shoulders are called by Fulgentius ‘Dead Sea fruit’, of which Tertullian writes that ‘as soon as touched with the finger, the apple tums into ashes.’
$. To make sense of this scene, it must be remembered that Tantalus’s father Tmolus is described as having been wreathed with oak, and that his son Pelops, one of whose grandsons was also called Tantalus (see x~2. c), enjoyed hero-rites at Olympia, in which ‘Zeus’s forester’ took part. Since, as is now generally agreed, the criminals in Tartarus were gods or heroes of the pre-Olympian epoch, Tantalus will have represented the annual Sacred King, dressed in fruit-hung branches, like those carried at the Oschophoria (see 98. w), who was flung into a river as a pharmacos—a custom surviving in the Green George ritual of the Balkan countryfide, described by Frazer. The verb tantalize, derived from this myth, has prevented scholars from realizing that Tantalus’s agony i~ caused not by thirst, but by fear of drowning or of subsequent immolation on a pyre, which was the fate of his ugly son Broteas.
4. Plato (Cratylus 28) may be right when hc derives Tantalus from t~lantatos, ‘ most wrctchcd’, formcd from thc samc root, tl~, ‘suffcring’, or ‘enduring’, which yields the names of Atlas and Telamon, both oak heroes. But talanteuein means ‘to weigh out money’, and may be a reference to his riches; and talanteuesthai can mean’ to lurch from side to side’, which is the gait of the sacred king with the lame thigh (see 23. ~). It seenas, then, that Tantalus is both a Sun-Titan and a woodland king, whose worship was brought from Greece to Asia Minor by way of Crete —Pandareus is described as a Cretan—in the mid-second millennium and reimported into Greece towards its close, when the collapse of the Hittite Empire forced wealthy Greek-speaking colonists of Asia Minor to abandon their cities.
5. When the mythographers recorded that Tantalus was a frequent guest on Olympus, they were admitting that his cult had once been dominant in the Peloponnese; and, although the banquets to which the gods invited Tantalus are carefully distinguished from the one to which he invited them, in every case the main dish will have been the same umble soup which the cannibalistic Arcadian shepherds of the oak cult prepared for Wolf~sh Zeus (see 38. b). It is perhaps no coincidence that, in Normandy, the Green George victim is called ‘Green Wolf’, and was formerly thrown alive into the midsummer bonfire. The eating of Pelops, however, is not directly connected with the wolf cult. Pelops’s position as Poseidon’s minion, his name, ‘muddy face’, and the legend of his ivory shoulder, point rather to a po~:poise cult on the Isthmus (see 8.3 and 70. 5)—’ dolphin’ in Greek includes the porpoise—and suggests that the Palladium, said to have been made from his bones (see z$9. $ and 166. h), was a cult object of porpoise ivory. This would explain why, according to the scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes i. 37, Thetis the Sea-goddess, and not Demeter, ate Pelops’s shotrider. But the ancient seated statue of Mare-headed Demeter at Phigalia held a dove in one hand, a dolphin (or porpoise) in the other; and, as Pausanias directly says: ‘Why the image was thus made is plain to anyone of ordinary intelligence who has studied mythology’ (viii. 43—3)—He means that she presided over the horse cult, the oak cult, and the porpoise cult.
6. This ancient myth distressed the later mythographers. Not content with exculpating Demeter from the charge of deliberate man-eating, and indignantly denying that all the gods ate what was set before them, to the last morsel, they invented an over-rationalistic explanation of the myth. ú Tantalus, they wrote, was a priest who revealed Zeus’s secrets to the uninitiated. Whereupon the gods unfrocked him, and afliicted his son with a loathsome disease; but the surgeons cut him about and patched him up with bone-graftings, leaving scars which made him look as if he had been hacked in pieces and joined together again (Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~52). Pandareus’s theft of the golden mastiff should be read as a sequel to Herades’s theft of Cerberus, which suggests the Achaeans’ defiance of the death curse, symbolized by a dog, in their seizure of a cult object sacred to the Earth-goddess Rhea (Tantalns’s grandmother), and conferring sovereignty on its possessor. The Olympian goddesses were elearly abetting Pandareus’s theft, and the dog, though P, hea’s property, was guarding the sanctuary of the annually dying Cretan Zeus; thus the myth points not to an original Achaean violation of Rhea’s shrine, but to a temporary recovery of the cult object by the goddess’s devotees.
8. The nature of the stolen cult object is uncertain. It may have been a golden lamb, the symbol of Pelopid sovereignty; or the cuckoo-tipped sceptre which Zeus is known to have stolen from Hera; or the porpoiseivory Palladium; or the aegis bag with its secret contents. It is unlikely to have been a golden dog, since the dog was not the cult object, but its guardian; unless this is a version of the Welsh myth of Amathaon ap Don who stole a dog from Arawn (‘eloquence’) King of Armwm (‘Tartarus ‘) and was by its means enabled to guess the secret name of the god Bran (White Goddess pp. 30 and 48-53).
9. The three daughters of Pandareus, one of whom, Cameiro, bears the same name as the youngest of the three Rhodian Fates (see 60. e), are the Triple-goddess, here humiliated by Zeus for her devotees’ rebellion. Tantalus’s loyalty to the goddess is shown in the stories of his son Broteas, who carved her image on Mount Sipylus, and of his daughter Niobe, priestess of the White Goddess, who defied the Olympians and whose bird was the white swan-eagle of Lake Tantalis. Omphale, the name of Tantalus’s mother, suggests a prophetic navel-shrine like that at Delphi. lO. The annual pharmacos was chosen for his extreme ugliness, which accounts for Broteas. It is recorded that in Asia Minor, thepharmacos was fLrst beaten on the genitals with squill (see 26.3) to the sound of Lydian flutes—Tantalus (Pausanias: ix, 5. 4) and his father Tmolus (Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. ~56) are both associated in legend with Lydian flutesthen burned on a pyre of~orest wood; his ashes were afterwards thrown into the sea (Tzetzes: History xxiii. 726-56, quoting Hipponax—sixth century B.C.). In Europe, the order seems to have been reversed: the Green George śharmacos was first ducked, then beaten, and finally burned.
P~.1.o~’s inherited the Paphlagonian throne from his father Tantalus, and for awhile resided at Enete, on the shores of the Black Sea, whence he also ruled over the Lydians and Phrygians. But he was e~
Paphlagonia by the barbarians, and retired to Lydian Mo his ancestral seat. When Ilus, King of Troy, would not peace even there, but ordered him to move on, Pelops fabulous treasures across the Aegean Sea. He was resolve, new home for himself and his great horde of followers,~
sue for the hand of Hippodameia, daughter of King Oe:
Arcadian, who ruled over Pisa and Elis. Z
b. Some say that Oenomaus had been begotten by Ares daughter of the River-god Asopus; or on the Pleiad As Asterope; or on Eurytho~, daughter of Danaus; while ott the son of Alxion; or of Hyperochus.3
c. By his wife Sterope, or Euarete, daughter of Acrisius became the father ofLeucippus, Hippodamus, and Dyspont of Dyspontium; and of one daughter, Hippodameia.10e famous for his love of horses, and forbade his subjects undel of a curse ever to mate mares with asses. To this day, need mules, they must take their mares abroad to mate at
d. Whether he had been warned by an oracle that hi~
would kill him, or whether he had himself fallen in love~
dameia, is disputed; but Oenomaus devised a new way to from ever getting married. He challenged each of Hi!
suitors in turn to a chariot race, and laid out a long cours which lies beside the river Alpheius, opposite Olympia, altar on the Isthmus of Cot’ruth. Some say that the chariots by four horses;6 others say, by two. Oenomaus insisted dameia must ride beside each suitor, thus distracting his att the teans—but allowed him a start of half an hour or so,
self sacrificed a ram on the altar of Warlike Zeus at Ol3
chariots would then race towards the Isthmus and the sui taken, must die; but should he win the race, Hippodame his, and Oenomaus must die.7 Since, however, the wi mares, Psylla and Harpirma, which Pelops’s father Ares ha~
were immeasurably the best in Greece, being swifter e~
North Wind;8 and since his chariot, skilfully driven by Iv especially designed for racing, he had never yet failed to rival and transfix him with his spear, another gift from A~
e. In this manner Oenomaus disposed of twelve or, so~
teen princes, whose beads and limbs he nailed above the I09. e—I09. i 33 palace, while their trunks were flung barbarously in a heap on the ground. When he killed Marmax, the first suitor, he also butchered his mares, Parthenia and Eripha, and buffed them beside the river Parthen/a, where their tomb is still shown. Some say that the second suitor, Alcathous, was buried near the Horse-scarer in the hippodrome at Olympia, and that it is his spiteful ghost which baulks the charioteers. 10
f. Myrtilus, Oenomaus’s charioteer, was the son of Hermes by Theobule, or Cleobule; or by the Danaid Phaethusa; but others say that he was the son of Zeus and Clymene. He too had fallen in love with Hippodameia, but dared not enter the contest.1I Meanwhile, the Olympians had decided to intervene and put an end to the daughter, because Oenomaus was boasting that he would one day build a temple of skulls: as Evenus, Diomedes, and Antaeus had done.’2When therefore Pelops, landing in Elis, begged his lover Poseidon, whom he invoked with a sacrifice on the seashore, either to give him the swiftest chariot in the world for his courtship of Hippodameia, or to stay the rush of Oenomaus’s brazen spear, Poseidon was delighted to be of assistance. Pelops soon found himself the owner of a winged golden chariot, which could race over the sea without wetting the axles, and was drawn by a team of tireless, winged, immortal h0rses.’3
g. Having visited Mount Sipylus and dedicated to Temnian Aphrodite an image made of green myrtle-wood, Pelops tested his chariot by driving it across the Aegean Sea. Almost before he had time to glance about him, he had reached Lesbos, where his charioteer Cillus, or Cellas, or Cillas, died because of the swiftness of the flight. Pelops spent the night on Lesbos and, in a dream, saw Cillus’s ghost lamenting his fate, and pleading for heroic honours. At dawn, he burned his body, heaped a barrow over the ashes, and founded the sanctuary of Cillaean Apollo dose by. Then he set out again, driving the chariot himself.,4
h. On coming to Pisa, Pelops was alarmed to see the row of heads nailed above the palace gates, and began to regret his ambition. He therefore prom’ned Myrtilus, if he betrayed his master, half the kingdom and the privilege of spending the bridal night with Hippodameia when she had been won?
i. Before entering the race—the scene is carved on the front gable of Zeus’s temple at Olympia—Pelops sacrificed to Cydonian Athene. Some say that Cillus’s ghost appeared and undertook to help him; others, that Sphaerus was his charioteer; but it is more generally believed that he drove his own team, I-Iippodameia standing beside him j. Meanwhile, Hippodameia had fallen in love with Pelops and, from hindering his progress, had herself offered to reward Myrt generously, if her father’s course could by some means be chect Myrtilus therefore removed the lynch-pins from the axles of Oe maus’s chariot, and replaced them with others made of wax. As chariots reached the neck of the Isthmus and Oenomaus, in hot pur~. was poising his spear, about to transfix Pelops’s back, the wheels ot chariot flew off, he fell entangled in the wreckage and was drag to death. His ghost still haunts the Horse-scarer at Olympia.17 Tt are some, however, who say that the swiftness of Poseidon’s win chariot and horses easily enabled Pelops to out-distance Oenom and reach the Isthmus first; whereupon Oenomaus either killed hhr in despair, or was killed by Pelops at the w’mning-post. Accordinl others, the contest took place in the Hippodrome at Olympia, Amphion gave Pelops a magic object which he buried by the Ho scarer, so that Oenomaus’s team bolted and wrecked his chariot. Bu agree that Oenomaus, before he died, laid a curse on Myrtilus, pray that he might perish at the hands of Pelops.18
k. Pelops, Hippodameia, and Myrtilus then set out for an even drive across the sea. ‘Alas!’ cried Hippodameia, ‘I have drunk noth all day; thirst parches me.’ The sun was setting and Pelops called a ] at the desert island of Helene, which lies not far from the istan~ Euboea, and went up the strand in search of water. When he retur] with his helmet filled, Hippodameia ran weeping towards him:
comphined that Myrtilus had tried to ravish her. Pelops ster rebuked Myrfilus, and struck him in the face, but he protested inc nantly: ‘ This is the bridal night, on which you swore d~at I should en Hippodameia. Will you break your oath?’ Pelops made no reply, took the reins from Myrtilus and drove on.19 As they approached C Geraestus—the southernmost promontory of Euboea, now crown with a remarkable temple of Poseidon—Pelops dealt Myrtilus a sudt kick, which sent hun flying head-long into the sea; and Myrtilus, a~ sank, laid a curse on Pelops and all his house?
l. Hermes set Myrtilus’s image among the stars as the constellat of the Charioteer; but his corpse was washed ashore on the coast Euboea and buried in Arcadian Pheneus, behind the temple of Herrr once a year noctumaI sacrifices are offered him there as a hero. l Myrtoan Sea, which stretches from Euboea, past Helene, to the Aege is generally believed to take its name from Myrtilus rather than, as E~boeans insist, from the nymph Myrto. Z~
m. Pelops drove on, until he reached the western stream of Oceanus, where he was cleansed of blood guilt by Hephaestus; afterwards he ~:ame back to Pisa, and succeeded ~to the throne of Oenomaus. He soon subjugated nearly the whole of what was then know~, as Apia, or Pelasgiotis, and renamed it the Petoponnese, meaning the island of Pelops’, after himself. His courage, wisdom, wealth, and numerous children, earned him the envy and veneration of all Greece?
n. From King Epeius, Pelops t~ok Olympia, and added it to his kingdom of Pisa; but being unable to defeat King Stymphalus of Arcadia by force of arms, he invited him to a friendly debate, cut him ~in pieces, and scattered his hmbs far and wide; a crime which caused a famine throughout Greece. But his celebration of the Olympian Games in honour of Zeus, about a generation after that of Endymion, was more splendid than any before.
o. To atone for the murder of Myrtilus, who was Hermes’s son, Pelops built the first temple of Hermes in the Peloponnese; he also tried to appease Myrtilus’s ghost by building a cenotaph for him in the ~ippodtome at Olympia, and paying him heroic honours. Some say that neither Oenomaus, nor the spiteful Alcathous, nor the magic object which Pelops buried, is the true Horse-scarer: it is the ghost of Myrtilus. Z3
p. Over the tomb of Hippodameia’s unsuccessful suitors, on the śa~ther side of the river A1pheius, Pelops raised a tall barrow, paying them heroic honours too; and about a furlong away stands the sanctuary of Artemis Cordax, so called because Pelops’s followers ~here celebrated his victories by dancing the Rope Dance, which they had brought from Lydia.24
q. Petops’s sanctuary, where his bones are preserved in a brazen chest, was dedicated by Tirynthian Heracles, his grandson, when he came to celebrate the Olympian Games; and the Elean magistrates still offer Pelops the annual sacrifice of a black ram, roasted on a fire of white poplar-wood. Those who partake of this victim are forbidden to enter Zeus’s temple until they have bathed, and the neck is the traditional perquisite of his forester. The sanctuary is thronged with visitors every year, when young men scourge themselves at Pelops’s altar, offering him a libation of their blood. His chariot is shown on the roof ‘of the Anactorium in Phhasia; the Sicyonians keep his gold-hilted sword in their treasury at Olympia; and his spear.shaped sceptre, at Chaeronea, is perhaps the only genuine work of Hephaestus still extant. Zeus sent it to Pelops by the hand of Hermes, and Pelops bequeathed it to King Atreus.2s
r. Pelops is also styled ‘CronJan One’, or ‘Hone-beater’; and the Achaeans claim him as their ancestor.26
1. Apollonius Rhodius: Argonauticali. 358 and 790; Sophocles: Ajax 1292; Pausanias: ii. 2:~. 4 and vi. zz. x; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 24. z. Servius on Virgil’s Georgicsiii. 7; Lucian: Charidemus 19; Apollodorus: Epitome fl. 4. 3. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 73; Hyginus: Fabula 250; Poetic Astronomy ii. zx; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 752; Pausanias: v. I. 5; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 149.
4. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 21; Fabula 84; Pausanias: viii. 20. z and vi. zg. z; Lactanfius on Statius’s Thebaid vi. 336; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.
5. Plutarch: Greek Questions 52; Pausanias: v. 5. z and 9. 2.
6. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 4; Lucian: Charidemus 19; Pausanias: v. Io. 2, v. 17. 4 and vi. zI. 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 73.
7. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 5; Lucian: 10c. tit.; Pausanias: v. 14. 5; Diodortts Siculus: loc. cit.
8. Servius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 166; Lucian: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 84; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.
9. Pausanias: v’ni. 14. 7; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 756; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.
~o. Apollodorus: Io›. clt.; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 79 if.; Ovid: Ibis 365; Hyginus: Fabula 84; Pausanias: vi. 21. 6-7 and 20. 8.
x~. Hyginus: Fabula 224; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 156 and 162; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 752; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes Iooz; Pausanias: viii. 14. 712. Lucian: Charidemus 19; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 159. 13. Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 65 if. and i. 79; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 3; Pausanias: v. 17. 4.
x 4—Pausanias: v. 13—4 and x o. 2; Theon: On Aratus p. 2 x; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 38
xS. Hyginus: Fabula 84; Scholiast on Horace’s Odes i. I; Pausanias: viii. ~4-716. Pausanias: vi. 21. 5 and v. Io. 2; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad: loc. tit.; Apollonius Rhodim: i. 753.
17. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~56; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 752 IT..; Pausanias: vi. 20. 8. :18. Pindar: Olympic Odes i. 87; Lucian: Charidemus 19; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 73; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
19.
20.
21.
23.
24.
25.
26.
~09. 1—~09. ~ 37 Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 8; Schohast on Homer’s Iliad ii. 104; Pausanias: viii. 14. 8; Hyginus: Fabula 84.
Strabo: x. ~. 7; Sophocles: Electra 508 if.; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. r4. 7.
Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~3; Pausanias: loc. tit. and viii. ~4. 8; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.
Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 9; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 73; Thucydides: i. 9; Plutarch: Theseus 3. Pausanias: v. x. 5; v. 8. ~ and vi. 20. 8; Apollodorus: iii. 12.6. Pausanias: vi. 21. 7 and 22. x.
Pausanias: v. ~3. ~-2; vi. 22. x; ii. 14—3; vi. ~9. 3 and ix. 4~. x; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 2; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 90 if..; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes i. ~46; Homer: Iliad ii. ~oo if.
Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 23; Homer: Iliad ii. ~04; Pausanias: v. 25.5.
~e
1. According to Pausanias and Apollodorus, Tantalus never left Asia Minor; but other mythographers refer to him and to Pelops as native kings of Greece. This suggests that their names were dynastic titles taken by early Greek colonists to Asia Minor, where they were attested by heroshrines; and brought back by emigrants before the Achaean invasion of the Peloponnese in the thirteenth century B.C. It is known from Hittite inscriptions that Hellenic kings reigned in Pamphylia and Lesbos as early as the fourteenth century ~.›. Pelopo—Tantalids seem to have ousted the Cretanized dynasty of’ Oenomaus’ from the Peloponnesian High Kingship. 2. The horse, which had been a sacred animal in Pelasgian Greece long before the cult of the Sun-chariot, was a native European pony dedicated to the Moon, not the Sun (see 75—3). The larger Trans-Caspian horse came to Egypt with the Hyksos invaders in 1850 B.C.—horse chariotry displaced ass chariotry in the Egyptian armed forces about the year ~ 500 B.c.—and had reached Crete before Cnossus fell a century later. Oenomaus’s religious ban on mules should perhaps be associated with the death of Cillus: in Greece, as at Rome, the ass cult was suppressed (see 83.2) when the sun-chariot became the symbol of royalty. Much the same religious reformation took place at Jerusalem (2 Kings xxiii. ~ ~), where a tradition survived in Josephus’s time of an earlier ass cult (Josephus: Against Apion ii. 7 and xo). Helius of the Sun-chariot, an Achaean deity, was then identified in different cities with solar Zeus or solar Poseidon, but the ass became the beast of Cronus, whom Zeus and Poseidon had dethroned, or of Pan, Silenus, and other old-fashioned Pelasgian god‘ lings. There was also a solar Apollo; since his hatred of asses is mentioned by Pindar, it will have been Cillaean Apollo to whom hecatombs of asses were offered by the Hyperboreans (Pindar: Pythian Odes x. 30 if.). 3. Oenomaus, who represented Zeus as the incarnate Sun, is therefore called a son of Asteri’~, who ruled Heaven (see 88. I), rather than a similarly named Pleiad; and Queen Hippodameia, by marriage to whom he was enroyalled, represented Hera as the incarnate Moon. Descent remained matrilinear in the Peloponnese, which assured the goodwill of the conservative peasantry. Nor might the King’s reign be prolonged Beyond a Great Year of one hundred months, in the last of which the solar and lunar calendars coincided; he was then fated to be destroyed by horses. As a further concession to the older cult at Pisa, where Zeus’s representative had been killed by his tanist each mid-summer (see 53.5), Oenomaus agreed to die a mock death at seven successive mid-winters, on each occasion appointing a surrogate to take his place for twenty-four hours and ride in the sun-chariot beside the Queen. At the close of this day, the surrogate was killed in a chariot crash, and the King stepped out from the tomb where he had been lurking (see 4~. ~ and 123. 4), to resume his reign. This explains the myth of cenomaus and the suitors, another version of which appears in that of Evenus (see 74. e). The mythographers must be mistaken when they mention ‘twelve or thirteen’ suitors. These numbers properly refer to the lunarions—alternately twelve and thirteen—of a solar year, not to the surrogates; thus in the chariot race at Olympia twelve circuits of the stadium were made in honour of the Moon-goddess. Pelops is a type of lucky eighth prince (see 8~. 8) spared the chariot crash and able to despatch the old king with his own sceptre-spear.
4. This annual chariot crash was staged in the Hippodrome. The surrogate could guide his horses—which seem, from the myth of Glaucus (see 7~. a), to have been maddened by drugs—down the straight without coming to grief, but where the course bent around a white marble statue, called the Marmaranax (‘ marble king ‘), or the Horse-scarer, the outer wheel flew off for want of a lynch-pin, the chariot collapsed, and the horses dragged the surrogate to death. Myrtle was the death-tree, that of the thirteenth month, at the close of which the chariot crash took place (see ~oI. ~): hence Myrtilus is said to have removed the metal lynch-pins, and replaced them with wax ones—the melting of wax also caused the death of Icarus, the Sun-king’s surrogate—and laid a curse upon the House of Pelops.
5. In the second half of the myth, Myrtilus has been confused with the surrogate. As interrex, the surrogate was entitled to ride beside the Queen in the sun-chariot, and to sleep with her during the single night of Iris reign; but, at dawn on the following day, the old King destroyed him and, metaphorically, rode on in his sun-chariot to the extreme west, where he was purified in the Ocean stream. Myrtilus’s fall from the chariot into the sea is a telescoping of myths: a few miles to the east of the Hippodrome, where the Isthmian Games took place (see 7r. b), the surrogate ‘Melicertes’, in whose honour they had been founded, was flung over a cliff (see 96.3) and an identical ceremony was probably performed at Geraestus, where Myrtilus died. Horse-scarers are also reported from Thebes and Iolcus (see 7~. b), which suggests that there, too, chariot crashes were staged in the hippodromes. But since the Olympian Hippodrome, sacred to solar Zeus, and the Isthmian Hippodrome, sacred to solar Poseidon, were both associated with the legend of Pelops, the mythographers have presented the contest as a cross-country race between them. Lesbos enters the story perhaps because ‘Oenomaus ‘ was a Lesbian dynastic tide.
6. Amphion,s entry into this myth, though a Theban, is explained by his being also a native of Sicyon on the Isthmus (see 76. a). ‘Myrto’ will have been a title of the Sea-goddess as destroyer, the first syllable standing for’ sea ‘, as in Myrtea, ‘ sea-goddess’; Myrtoessa, a longer form of Myrto, was one of Aphrodite’s tides. Thus Myrtilus may originally mean’ phallus of the sea ‘: rnyr-tylos.
7. Pelops hacks Stymphalus in pieces, as he hin~selfis said to have been treated by Tantalus; this more ancient form of the royal sacrifice has been rightly reported from Arcadia. The Pclopids appear indeed to have patronized several local cults, beside that of the Sun-chariot: namely the Arcadian shepherd cult of oak and ram, attested by Pelops’s connexion with Tantalus and his sacrifice of a black ram at Olympia; the partridge cult of Crete, Troy, and Palestine, attested by the cordax dance; the Titan cult, attested by Pelops’s title of’ Cronian’; the porpoise cult (see ~08.5); and the cult of the ass-god, in so far as Cillus’s ghost assisted him in the race.
8. The butchering of Marmax’s mares may refer to Oenomaus’s coronation ceremony (see 8 ~. 4), which involved mare-sacrifice. A’ Cydonian apple’, or quince, will have been in the hand of the Death-goddess Athene, to whom Pelops sacrificcd, as his safe-conduct to the Elysian Fields (see 32. 1; 53—5 and ~33—4); and the white poplar, used in his heroic rites at Olympia, symbolized the hope of reincarnation (see 3 x. 5 and 134.f) after he had been hacked in pieces—because those who went to Elysium were granted the prerogative of rebirth (see 3~. c). A close parallel to the bloodshed at Pelops’s Olympic altar is the scourging of young Spartans who were bound to the image of Upright Artemis (see 116. 4). Pelops was, in fact, the victim, and suffered in honour of the goddess Hippodameia (see xxo. 3).
I~ gratitude to Hera for facilitating her marriage with Pelops, Hip] dameia summoned sixteen matrons, one from every city of Elis, help her institute the Heraean Games. Every fourth year, ever s~ the Sixteen Matrons, their successors, have woven a robe for Hera celebrated the Games; which consist of a single race between virgins. different ages, the competitors being handicapped according to t? years, with the youngest placed in front. They run clad in tunics of than knee length, their right breasts bared, their hair flying free. Chlo Niobe’s only surviving daughter, was the first victrix in these garr the course of which has been f~xed at f~ve-sixths of the Olympic circ~ The prize is an olive wreath, and a share of the cow sacrif~ced to Ht a victrix may also dedicate a statue of herself i~ her own name?
b. The Sixteen Matrons once acted as peace-makers between Pisans and the Eleans. Now they also organize two groups of danc~ one in honour of Hippodameia, the other in honour of Physcoa, Elean. Physcoa bore Narcaeus to Dionysus, a renowned warrior x~ founded the sanctuary of Athene Narcaea and was the first Elean worship Dionysus. Since some of the sixteen cities no longer exist, Sixteen Matrons are now supplied by the eight Elean tribes, a pair each. Like the umpires,. they purify themselves, before the Gat begin, with the blood of a suitable pig and with water drawn from PierJan Spring which one passes on the road between Olympia Elis.2
›. The following are said to have been children of Pelops and Hipl dameia: Pittheus of Troezen; Atreus and Thyestes; Alcathous, not one killed by Oenomaus; the Argonaut Hippalcus, Hippalcmus, Hippalcimus; Copreus the herald; Sciron the bandit; Epidaurus Argive, sometimes called the son of Apollo;3 Pleisthenes; Dias; Cy] surus; Corinthius; Hippasus; Cleon; Argeius; Aelinus; Astydam, whom some call the mother ofAmphitryon; Lysidice, whose daug~
Hippotho~ was carried off by Poseidon to the Echinadian I slands, there bore Taphius; Eurydice, whom some call the mother of Alcme Nicippe; Antibia;4 and lastly Archippe, mother of Eurystheus Alcyone. S
d. The Megarians, in an attempt to obliterate the memory of how Minos captured theft city, and to suggest that King Nisus was peaceably succeeded by his son-in4aw Megareus, and he in’turn by his son-in-law, Alcathous son of Pelops, say that Megareus had two sons, the elder of whom, Timalcus, was killed at Aphidnae during the invasion of Attica by the Dioscuri; and that, when the younger, Euippus, was killed by the lion ofCithaeron~ Megareus promised his daughter E.uaechme, and his throne, to whoever avenged Euippus. Forthwith, Alcathous killed the lion and, becoming king of Megara, built a temple there to Apollo the Hunter and Artemis the Huntress. The truth is, however, that Alcathous came from Elis to Megara immediately after the death of Nisus and the sack of the city; that Megareus never reigned in Megara; and that Alcathous sacrificed to Apollo and Poseidon as’ Previous Builders’, and then rebuilt the city wall on new foundations, the course of the old wall having been obliterated by the Cretans.6
e. Alcathous was the father of Ischepolis; of Callipolis; of Iphino~, who died a virgin, and at whose tomb, between the Council Hall and the shrine of Alcathous, Megarian brides pour hbations—much as the Delian brides dedicate their hair to Hecaerge and Opis; also of Automedusa, who bore Iolaus to Iphicles; and of Periboea, who married Telamon, and whose son Ajax succeeded Alcathous as King of Megara. Alcathous’s elder son, Ischepolis, perished in the Calydonian Hunt; and Callipolis, the first Megarian to hear the sorrowful news, rushed up to the Acropolis, where Alcathous was offering burnt sacrifices to Apollo, and flung the faggots from the altar in token of mourning. Unaware of what had happened, Alcathous raged at his impiety and struck him dead with a faggory
f. Ischepolis and Euippus are buried in the Law Courts; Megareus on the right side of the ascent to the second Megarian Acropohs. Alcathous’s hero-shrine i~ now the public Record Office; and that of Timalcus, the Council Hall?
g. Chrysippus also passed as a son of Pelops and Hippodameia; but was, in fact, a bastard, whom Pelops had begotten on the nymph Astyoche,9 a Danaid. Now it happened that Laius, when banished from Thebes, was hospitably received by Pelops at Pisa, but fell in love with Chrysippus, to whom he taught the charioteer’s art; and, as soon as the sentence of banishment was annulled, carried the boy off in his chariot, from the Nemean Games, and brought him to Thebes as his catamite.10 Some say that Chrysippus killed himself for shame; others, that Hippodameia, to prevent Pelops from appointing Chrysippus his suc, over the heads of her own sons, came to Thebes, where she tried suade Atreus and Thyestes to kill the boy by throwing him dc well. When both refused to murder their father’s guest, Hippoda at dead of night, stole into Laius’s chamber and, finding him asleep down his sword from the wall and plunged it into his bedfellow’s Laius was at once accused of the murder, but Chrysippus hac Hippodameia as she fled, and accused her with his last breath. n
h. Meanwhile, Pelops marched against Thebes to recover Ch pus but, finding that Laius was already imprisoned by Atreu Thyestes, nobly pardoned him, recognizing that only an overv(
ing love had prompted this breach of hospitality. Some say that not Thamyfis, or Minos, was the first pederast; which is wh Thebans, far from condemning the practice, maintain a regi called the Sacred Baud, composed entirely of boys and their
i. Hippodameia fled to Argolis, and there killed herself; but la accordance with an oracle, her bones were brought back to Oly where women enter her walled sanctuary once a year to off~
sacrifices. At one of the tums of the Hippodrome stands Hippoda~ bronze statue, holding a ribbon with which to decorate Peloj his victory. t3
x. Pausanias: v. 16. 2-3.
2. Pausanias: v. 16. 3-5.
3. Apollodorus: fii. ~z. 7; ii. 5—x and ii. 26. 3; Epitome ii. xo an Hyginus: Fabulae 84 and 14; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympiat
i. 144.
4. Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestea 5; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 5; Plu Theseus 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 9—x; Scholiast on Homer’
xix. r ~9~. Tzetzes: Chiliacies ii. 172 and ~9~; Scholiast on Thucydides, Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.
6. Pausanias: i. 43.4; i. 4L 4-5 and i. 42. 2.
7. Pausanias: i. 42. z and 7 and i. 43.4; Apollodorus: ii. 4. II 8. Pausanias: i. 43—2 and 4; i. 42. ! and 39—Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes i. 144; Hyginus: Fab~ Plutarch: Parallel Stories 3310. ApoIlodorus: iii. 5. 5; Hyginus: śabulae 85 and 27~; Athe~ xm. ~~.
~ ~. Scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women 1760; Plutarch:
Stories 33; Hyginus: Fabula 85; Scholiast on Euripides’s
8~3. I~o. 1-~~. a 43 ~z. Hyginus: 10›. ›it.; Plutarch: loc. tit.; Aelian: Varia Historia xiii. 5. ~3, Hyginus: loc. ›it.; Pausanias: vi. 20. 4 and ~o.
* 1. The He’raean Games took place on the day before the Olympic Games. They consisted of a girls’ foot race, originally for the office of High-priestess to Hera (see 60. 4), and the victrix, who wore the olive as a symbol of peace and fertility, became one with the goddess by partaking of her sacred cow. The Sixteen Matrons may once have taken tums to off~ciate as the High-priestess’s assistant during the sixteen seasons of the four-year Olympiad—each wheel of the royal chariot represented the solar year, and had four spokes, like a fire-wheel or swastika. ‘ Narcaeus’ is clearly a back-formation from Athene Narcaea (‘benumbing’), a death-goddess. The matrons who organized the Heracan Games, which had once involved human sacrifice, propitiated the goddess with pig’s blood, and then washed themselves in running water. Hippodameia’s many children attest the strength of the confederation presided over by . the Pelopid dynasty—all their names are associated with the Peloponnese or the Isthmus.
2. Alcathous’s murder of his son Callipolis at the altar of Apollo has probably been deduced from an icon which showed him offering his son as a burnt sacrifice to the ‘previous builder’, the city-god Melicertes, or Moloch, when he refounded Megara—as a king of Moab also did
(Joshua vi. 26). Moreover, like Samson and David, he had killed a lion in ritual combat. Corinthian mythology has many dose affinities with Palestinian (see 67. ~).
$. The myth of Chrysippus survives in degenerate form only. That he was a beautiful Pisan boy who drove a chariot, was carried off like Ganymedes, or Pelops himself (though not, indeed, to Olympus), and kilied by Hippodameia, suggests that, originally, he was one of the royal surrogates who died in the chariot crash; but his myth has become confused with a justification of Theban perletasty, and with the legend of a dispute about the Nemean Games between Thebes and Pisa. Hippodameia,
‘horse-tamer’, was a title of the Moon-goddess, whose mare-headed statue at Phigalia held a Pdopid porpoise ha her hand; four of Pelops’s sons and daughters bear horse-names.
S 0M~ say that Atreus, who fled from Elis after the death of Chrysippus, in which he may have been more deeply implicated than Pelops knew, took refuge in Mycenae. There fortune favoured him. His nephe~
Eurystheus, who was just about to march against the sons of Heracle appointed him regent in his absence; and, when presendy news cam of Eurystheus’s defeat and death, the Mycenaean notables chose Atreu as their king, because he seemed a likely warrior to protect them again~ the Heradids and had already won the affection of the commons. Thu the royal house of Pelops becam’e more famous even than that c Perseus.1
b. But others say, with greater authority, that Eurystheus’s fathe~ Sthenelus, having banished Amphitryon, and seized the throne c Mycenae, sent for Atreus and Thyestes, his brothers-in-law, and i~ stalled them at near-by Midea. A few years later, when Sthenelus an Eurystheus were both dead, an oracle advised the Mycenaeans to choos a prince of the Pelopid house to rule over them. They thereupon sum moned Atreus and Thyestes from Midea and debated which of thes two (who were fated to be always at odds) should be crowned king.
c. Now, Atreus had once vowed to sacrifice the f~nest of his flocks t. Artemis; and Hermes, anxious to avenge the death of Myrtilus on th Pelopids, consulted his old friend Goat-Pan, who made a horned lara with a golden fleece appear among the Acarnanian flock which Pclo[ had left to his sons Atreus and Thyestes. He foresaw that Atreus woul claim it as his own and, from his reluctance to give Artemis the honou~ due to her, would become involved in fratricidal war with ‘l~yeste: Some, however, say that it was Artemis herself who sent the lamb, t~ try him.3 Atreus kept his vow, in part at least, by sacrificing the lamb’ flesh; but he stuffed and mounted the fleece and locked it in a chest. H grew so proud of his life-like treasure that he could not refrain fron boasting about it in the market place, and the jealous Thyestes, fo whom Atreus’s newly-married wife Aerope had conceived a passion agreed to be her lover if she gave him the lamb [which, he said, ha~ been stolen by Atreus’s shepherds from his own half of the flock]. Fo Artemis had laid a curse upon it, and this was her doing.4
d. In a debate at the Council Hall, Atreus claimed the throne o Mycenae by right of primogeniture, and also as possessor of the lamb Thyestes asked him: ‘Do you then publicly declare that its owne should be king?’ ‘ I do,’ Atreus replied. ‘ And I concur,’ said Thyestes smiling grimly. A herald then summoned the people of Mycenae t( acclaim their new king; the temples were hung with gold, and the~ doors thrown open; fixes blazed on every altar throughout the city and songs were sung in praise of the horned lamb with the golden fleece. But Thyestes unexpectedly rose to upbraid Atreus as a vainglorious boaster, and led the magistrates to his home, where he &played the lamb, justified his claim to its ownership, and was pronounced the rightful king of Mycenae. S
e. Zeus, however, favoured Atreus, and sent Hermes to him, saying: ‘Call Thyestes, and ask him whether, if the sun goes backward on the dial, he will resign his claim to the throne in your favour?’ Atreus did as he was told, and Thyestes agreed to abdicate should such a portent occur. Thereupon Zeus, aided by Eris, reversed the laws of Nature, which hitherto had been immutable. Helius, already in mid-career, wrested his chariot about and turned his horses’ heads towards the clam. The seven Pleiades, and all the other stars, retraced their courses in sympathy; and that evening, for the first and last time, the sun set in the east. Thyestes’s deceit and greed being thus plainly attested, Atreus succeeded to the throne of Mycenae, and banished him.6
When, later, Atreus discovered that Thyestes had committed adultery with Aerope, he could hardly contain his rage. Nevertheless, for awhile he reigned forgiveness.?
f. Now, this Aerope, whom some call Europe, was a Cretan, the daughter of King Catreus. One day, she had been surprised by Catreus while entertaining a lover in the palace, and was on the point of being thrown to the fishes when, countermanding his sentence at the plea of Nauplius, he sold her, and his other daughter Clymene as well, whom he suspected of plotting against lfis life, as slaves to Nauplius for a nominal price; only stipulating that neither of them should ever return to Crete. Nauplius then married Clymene, who bore him Oeax and Palamedes the inventor? But Atreus, whose wife Cleola had died after giving birth to a weakly son, Pleisthenes—this was Artemis’s revenge on him for his failure to keep the vow—married Aerope, and begot on her Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Anaxibia. Pleisthenes had also died: the cut-throats whom Atreus sent to murder his namesake, Thyestes’s bastard son by Ae:ope, murdered him in error—Thyestes saw to g. Atreus now sent a herald to lure Thyestes back to Mycenae, with the offer of an amnesty and a half-share in the kingdom; but, as soon as Thyestes accepted this, slaughtered Aglaus, Orchomenus, and Callile0n, Thyestes’s three sons by one of the Naiads, on the very altar of Zeus where they had taken refuge; and then sought out and killed the infant Pleisthenes the Second, and Tantalus the Second, h/s twin. E hacked them all limb from limb, and set chosen morsels of their fiesl boiled in a cauldron, before Tryestes, to welcome him on his rerun When Thyestes had eaten heartily, Atreus sent in their bloody tea( and feet and hands, laid out on another dish, to show him what w: now inside his belly. Thyestes fell back, vomiting, and laid an ineluc able curse upon the seed of Atreus.10
h. Exiled once more, Thyestes fled first to King Thesprotus:
Sicyon, where his own daughter Pelopia, or Pelopeia, was a priestes For, desiring revenge at whatever cost, he had consulted the Delph Oracle and been advised to beget a son on his own daughter? Thyest, found Pelopia sacrificing by night to Athene Colocasia and, being lot to profane the rites, concealed himself in a near-by grove. Present] Pelopia, who was leading the solemn dance, slipped in a pool of bloc that had flowed from the throat of a black ewe, the victim, and staine her tunic. She ran at once to the temple fish-pond, removed her tuni and was washing out the stain, when Tryestes sprang from the gro~ and ravished her. Pelopia did not recognize him, because he was weal ing a mask, but contrived to steal his sword and carry it back to t} temple, where she hid it under the pedestal of Athene’s image; an Tryestes, finding the scabbard empty and fearing detection, escaped t Lydia, the land of his fathers.-~z
i. Meanwhile, fearing the consequences of his crime, Atreus cot sulted the Delphic Oracle, and was told:’ Recall Tryestes from Sicyon He reached Sicyon too late to meet Thyestes and, falling in love wit Pelopia, whom he assumed to be King Thesprotus’s daughter, aske leave to make her his third wife; having by this time executed Aerop~ Eager for an alliance with so powerful a king, and wishing at the sarr time to do Pelopia a service, Thesprotus did not undeceive Atreus, an the wedding took place at once..In due course she bore the son begotte on her by Thyestes, whom she exposed on a mountain; but goather~ rescued him and gave him to a she-goat for suckling—hence his nam~ Aegisthus, or ‘goat-strength’. Atreus believed that Thyestes had fie from Sicyon at news of his approach; that the child was his own; an that’Pelopia had been affected by.the temporary madness which some times overtakes women after childbirth. He therefore recovered Aegi! thus from the goatherds and reared him as b_is heir.
j. A succession of bad harvests then plagued Mycenae, and Atret sent Agamemnon and Menehus to Delphi for news ofThyestes, whor they met by chance on his return from a further visit to the Oracle. They haled him back to Mycenae, where Atreus, having thrown him iazto prison, ordered Aegisthus, then seven years of age, to kill him as he dept.
k. Thyestes awoke suddenly to find Aegisthus standing over him, sword in hand; he quickly rolled sideways and escaped death. Then he rose, disarmed the boy with a shrewd kick at his wrist, and sprang to recover the sword. But it was his own, lost years before in Sicyon! He seized Aegisthus by the shoulder and cried:’ Tell me insrandy how this came into your possession?’ Aegisthus stammered: ‘Alas, my mother Pelopia gave it me.’ ‘I will spare your life, boy,’ said Thyestes, ‘if you carry out the three orders I now give you.’ ‘ I am your servant in all things,’ wept Aegisthus, who had expected no mercy. ‘My first order is to bring your mother here,’ Thyestes told him.
1. Aegisthus thereupon brought Pelopia to the dungeon and, recognizing Thyestes, she wept on his neck, called him her dearest father, and commiserated with his sufferings. ‘How did you come by this sword, daughter?’ Thyestes asked. ‘I took it from the scabbard of an unknown stranger who ravished me one night at Sicyon,’ she replied. ‘It is mine,’ said Thyestes. Pelopia, stricken with horror, seized the sword, and plunged it into her breast. Aegisthus stood aghast, not understanding what had been said. ‘Now take this sword to Atreus,’ was Thyestes’s second order, ‘and tell him that you have carried out your commission. Then return!’ Dumbly Aegisthus took the bloody thing to Atreus, who went joyfully down to the seashore, where he offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Zeus, convinced that he was rid of Thyestes at last.
m. When Aegisthus returned to the dungeon, Thyestes revealed himself as his father, and issued his third order: ‘Kill Atreus, my son Aegisthus, and this time do not falter!’ Aegisthus did as he was told, and. Thyestes reigned once more in Mycenae.13
n. Another golden-fleeced horned lamb then appeared among Thyestes’s flocks and grew to be a ram and, afterwards, every new PeIopid king was thus divinely confirmed in possession of his golden sceptre; these rams grazed at ease in a paddock enclosed by unscaleable walls. But some say that the token of royalty was not a living creature, but a silver bowl, on the bottom of which a golden lamb had been inlaid; and others, that it cannot have been Aegisthus who killed Atreus, because he was only an infant in swaddling clothes when Agamemnon drove his father Thyestes from Mycenae, wresting the sceptre from him.14
o. Thyestes lies buried beside the road that leads from Mycenae to Argos, near the shrine of Perseus. Above his tomb stands the stone figure of a ram. The tomb of Atreus, and his underground treasury, are st/11 shown among the ruins of Mycenae.Is ?. Thyestes was not the last hero to śmd his own child served up to him on a dish. This happened some years later to Clymenus, the Arcadian son of Schoenus, who conceived an incestuous passion for Harpalyce, his daughter by Epicaste. Having debauched Harpalyce, he married her to Alastor, but afterwards took her away again. Harpalyce, to revenge herself, murdered the son she bore him—who was also her brother—cooked the corpse and laid it before Clymenus. She was transformed into a bird of prey, and Clymenus hanged himself?
x. Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 8~3; Thucydides: i. 9-
2. Apollodorus: ii. 4. 6 and Epitome ii. ~x; Euripides: Oresres 3. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. Io; Euripides: Oresres 995 if., with scholiast; Seneca: Electra 699 if.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 8~z, 990, and 998; Tzetzes: Chiliades i. 433 if.; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 997.
4. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. ~; Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 81z; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad ii. ~06.
5. Tzetzes: Chiliaries i. 426; Apollodorus: toe. tit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad fl. ~06; Euripides: Electra 706 fl.
6. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. ~2; Scholiast on Homer: loc. tit.; Euripides: Oresres ~oo~; Ovid: Art of Love 327 if.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 8~2. 7. Hyginus: Fabula 86; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 13.
8. Lactantius on Statius’s Thebaid vi. 306; Apollodorus: iii. 2.2 and Epitome ii. xo; Sophocles: Ajax 1295 if.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 432.
9. Hyginus: Fabulae 97 and 86; Euripides: Helen 392; Homer: Iliad ii. 13~, etc.
xo. Tzetzes: Chiliades i. 18 if..; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. ~3; Hyginus: Fabulae 88, 246, and 258; Scholiast on Horace’s Art of Poetry; Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1590 if.
xL Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 13-14; Hyginus: Fabulae 87-8; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 262.
12. Athenaeus: iii. x; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Fragments of Sophocles’s Thyestes; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 14.
13. Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit. III, !—III. 2 4-9 X4. Seneca: Thyestes 224 if.; Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods iii. 26 and 68; Herodotus of Heracleia, quoted by Athenaeus: 231c; Emtathius on Homer’s Iliad pp. 268 and ~3 ~9; Aeschylus: Agara,mnon ~603 if. 15. Pausanias: ii. ~6. $ and ii. ~8.2-3.
16. Parthenius: Erotica; Hyginus: Fabulae 242, 246, and 255.
1. The Atreus-Thyestes myth, which survives only in highly theatrical versions, seems to be based on the rivalry between Argive co-kings for supreme power, as in the myth ośAcrisius and Proetus (see 73. a). It is a good deal older than the story of Heracles’s Sons (see 146. k)—the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese, about the year ~o$o B.c.—with which Thucydides associates it. Atreus’s golden lamb, withheld from sacriftce, recalls Poseidon’s white bull, similarly withheld by Minos (see 88. r); but is of the same breed as the golden-fleeced rams sacred to Zeus on Mount Laphystium, and to Poseidon on the island of Crumissa (see 70. 1). To possess this fleece was a token of royalty, because the king used it in an annual rain-making ceremony (see 70. z and 6). The lamb is metaphorically golden: in Greece’ water is gold,’ and the fleece magically produced rain. This metaphor may, however, have been reinforced by the use of fleeces to collect gold dust from the rivers of Asia Minor; and the occasional appearance, in the Eastern Mediterranean, of lambs with gilded teeth, supposedly descendants of those that the youthful Zeus tended on Mount Ida. (In the eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu investigated this persistent anomaly, but could not discover its origin.) It may also be that the Argive royal sceptre was topped by a golden ram. Apollodorus is vague about the legal background of the dispute, but Thyestes’s claim was probably the same as that made by Maeve for the disputed bull in the fratricidal Irish War of the Bulls: that the lamb had been stolen from his own flocks at birfl~.
2. Euripides has introduced Eris at a wrong point in the story: she will have provoked the quarrel between the brothers, rather than helped Zeus to reverse the course of the sun—a phenomenon which she was not empowered to produce. Classical grammarians and philosophers have explained this incident in various ingenious ways which anticipate the attempts made by twentieth-century Protestants to account scientifically for the retrogade movement of the Sun’s shadow on ‘the dial ofAhaz’ (2 Kings xx. I-l~). Ludan and Polybius write that when Atreus and Thyestes quarrelled over the succession, the Argives were already habitual star-gazers and agreed that the best astronomer should be elected king. In the ensuing contest, Thyestes pointed out that the sun always rose in the Ram at the Spring Festival—hence the story of the golden lamb—but the soothsayer Atreus did better: he proved that the sun and the earth travel in differertt directions, and that what appear to be sunsets are, in fact, settings of the earth. Whereupon the Argives made him king (Lucian: O~ .1trotog}, 12; Polybius, quoted by Strabo: i. 2. ~ 5). Hyginus and Servius both agree that Atreus was an astronomer, but make him the first to predict an eclipse of the sun mathematically; and say that, when the calculation proved correct, his jealous brother Thyestes left the city in chagrin (Hyginus: Fabula 258; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 572). Socrates took the myth more literally: regarding it as evidence of his theory that the universe winds and unwinds itself in alternate cycles of vast duration, the reversal of motion at the close of each cycle be’mg accompanied by great destruction of animal hfe (Plato: The Statesman ~2-~4).
$. To understand the story, however, one must think not allegorically, nor philosophically, but mythologically; namely in terms of the archaic conflict between the sacred king and his tanist. The king reigned until the summer solstice, when the sun reached its most northerly point and stood still; then the tanist killed him and took his place, while the sun daily retreated southward towards the winter solstice. This mutual hatred, sharpened by sexual jealousy, because the tanist married his rival’s widow, was renewed between Argive co-kings, whose combined reigns extended for a Great Year; and they quarrelled over Aerope, as Acrisius and. ú Proetus had done over Dana,. The myth of Hezekiah, who was on the point of death when, as a sign of Jehovah’s fayour, the prophet Isaiah added ten years to his reign by turning back the sm~ ten degrees on the dial of Ahaz (2 Kh~gs xx. 8-~ ~ and Isaiah xxxviii. 7-8), suggests a Hebrew, or perhaps a Philistine, tradition of how the king, after the calendar reform caused by adoption of the metonic cycle, was allowed to prolong his reign to the nineteenth year, instead of dying in the ninth. At~eus, at Mycenae, may have been granted a similar dispensation.
4. The cannibalistic feast in honour of Zeus, which appears in the myth of Tantalus (see ~08. c), has here been confused with the annual sacrifice of child surrogates, and with Cronus’s vomiting up of his children by Rhea (see 7. d). Thyestes’s rape of Pelopia recalls the myth of Cinyras and Smyrna (see ~7—h), and is best explained as the king’s attempt to prolon his reign beyond the customary limit by marriage with his step-daughter, the heiress. Aerope’s rescue from the Cretan fishes identifies her with Dictynna-Britomartis, whom her grandfather Minos had chased into the sea (see 89. b). Aegisthus, suckled by a she-goat, is the familiar New Year child of the Mysteries (see 24. 6; 44. ~; 76. a; ~05. ~, etc.). 5—ThestoryofClymenusandHarpalyce—there was another Thracian character of the-same name, a sort of Atalanta—combines the myth of Cinyras and Smyrna (see 18. h) with that of Tereus and Procne (see 46. a). Unless this is an artificial composition for the theatre, as Clymenus’s unmythical suicide by hanging suggests, he will have tried to regain a title to the throne when his reign ended, by marrying the heiress, technically his daughter, to an interrex and then killing him and taking her ‘himself. Alastot means ‘avenger ‘, but his vengeance does not appear in the myth; perhaps the original version made Alastor the victim of the human sacrifice.
SOME say that Agamemnon and Menelaus were of an age to arrest Thyestes at Delphi; others, that when Aegisthus killed Atreus, they were still infants, whom their nurse had the presence of mind to rescue. Snatching them up, one under each arm, she fled with them to Polypheides, the twenty-fourth king of Sicyon, at whose instance they were subsequently entn~sted to Oeneus the Aetolian. It is agreed, however, that after they had spent some years at Oeneus’s court, King Tyndareua of Sparta restored their fortunes. Marching against Mycenae, he exacted an oath from Thyestes, who had taken refuge at the altar of Hera, that he would bequeath the sceptre to Agamenmon, as Atreus’s heir, and go into exile, never to return. Thyestes thereupon departed to Cythera, while Aegisthus, fearing Agamemnon’s vengeance, fled to King Cylarabes, son of King Sthenelus the Argive. X
b. It is said that Zeus gave power to the House of Aeacus, wisdom to the House of Amythaon, but wealth to the House of Atreus. Wealthy indeed it was: the kings of Mycenae, Corinth, Cleonae, Orneiae, Arathyrea, Sicyon, Hyperesia, Gonoessa, Pellene, Aegium, Aegialus, and lielice, all paid tribute to Agamemnon, both on land and sea.2
c. Againchinon f~rst made war against Tantalus, King of Pisa, the son of his ugly uncle Broteas, killed him in battle and forcibly married his widow Clytaenmestra, whom Leda had borne to King Tyndareus of Sparta. The Dioscuri, Clytaerrmestra’s brothers, thereupon marched on Mycenae; but Agamemnon had already gone as a suppliant to his benefactor Tynda~:eus, who forgave him and let him keep Clytaemnestra. After the death of the Dioscuri, Menelaus married their sister Helen, and Tyndareus abdicated in his favour.a
d. Clytaerrmestra bore Agamemnon one son, Oresres, anrl three daughters: Electra, or Laodice; Iphigeneia, or Iphianassa; and Chrysotheru~s; though some say that Iphigcneia was Clytaernnestra’s rfiece, the daughter of Theseus and Helen, whom she took pity upon and adopted.4
e. When Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, abducted Helen and thus provoked the Trojan War, both Agamemnon and Menelaus were absent from home for ten years; but Aegisthus did not join their expedition, preśerring to stay beb2ncl at Argos and seek revenge on the House oś Atreus. S
f. Now, Nauplius, the husband of Clymene, having failed to obtain requital śrom Agamemnon and the other Greek leaders for the stoning of his son Palamedes, had sailed away from Troy and coasted around Attica and the Peloponnese, inci6ng the lonely wives of his enemies to adultery. Aegisthus, therefore, when he heard that Clytaemnestra was among those most eager to be convinced by Nauplius, planned not only to become her lover, but to Ell Agamemnon, with her assistance, as soon as the Trojan War ended.6
g. Hermes, sent to Aegisthus by Omniscient Zeus, warned him to abandon this project, on the ground that when Oresres had grown to ma~ood, he would be bound to avenge his father. For all his eloquence, however, Hermes failed to deter Aegisthus, who went to Mycenae with rich gifts in his hands, but hatred in his heart. At first, Clytaemnestra rejected his advances, because Agamemnon, apprised of Nauplius’s visit to Mycenae, had instructed his court bard to keep close watch on her and report to him, in writing, the least signof infidelity. But Aegisthus seized the old minstrel and marooned him without food on a lonely island, where birds of prey were soon picking his bones. Clytaemnestra then yielded to Aegisthus’s embraces, and he celebrated his unhoped-for success with burnt offerings to Aphrodite, and gifts of tapestries and gold to Artemis, who was nursing a grudge against the House of Atreus.7
h. Clytaemnestra had small cause to love Agamemnon: after killing her former husband Tantalus, and the new-born child at her breast, he had married her by force, and then gone away to a war which promised never to end; he had also sanctioned the sacrifice oflphigeneia at Aulis—and, this she found even harder to bear—was said to be bringing back Priam’s daughter Cassandra, the prophetess, as his wife in all but name. It is true that Cassandra had borne Agamemnon tw’m sons: Teledamus and Pelops, but he does not seem to have intended any insult to Clytaernnestra. Her informant had been Nauplius’s surviving son Oeax who, in vengeance f’or his brother’s death, was maliciously provoking her to do murder.8
i. Clytaemnestra therefore conspired with Aegisthus to kill both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Fearing, however, that they might arrive unexpectedly, she wrote Agamemnon a letter asking him to light a beacon on Mount Ida when Troy f’ell; and herself’arranged f’or a chain of’ fires to relay his signal to Argolis by way of Cape Hermaeum on Lemnos, and the mountains of Athos, Macisms, Messapius, Cithaeron, Aegiplanctus, and Arachne. A watchman was also stationed on the roof’ of the palace at Mycenae: a f’aithful servant of Agamemnon’s, who spent one whole year, crouched on his elbows like a dog, gazing towards Mount Arachne and filled with gloomy f’orebodings. 2~t last, one dark night, he saw the distant beacon blaze and ran to wake Clytaemnestra. She celebrated the news with sacrif~ces of’thanksgiving; though, indeed, she would now have liked the siege of Troy to last f’or ever. P~egisthus thereupon posted one of his own men in a watchtower near the sea, promising him two gold talents f’or the first news of P~gamemnon’s landing.
j. Hera had rescued Agamemnon f’rom the fierce storm which destroyed many of’ the returning Greek ships and drove Menelaus to Egypt; and, at last, a f’air wind carried him to Nauplia. No sooner had he disembarked, than he bent down to kiss the soil, weeping f’or joy. Meanwhile the watchman hurried to Mycenae to collect his f’ee, and Aegisthus chose twenty of the boldest warriors, posted them in ambush inside the palace, ordered a great banquet and then, mounting his chariot, rode down to welcome Agamemnon.0
k. Clytaemnestra greeted her travel-worn husband with every appearance of delight, unrolled a purple carpet f’or him, and led him to the bath-house, where slave-girls had prepared a warm bath; but Cassandra remained outside the palace, caught in a prophetic trance, refusing to enter, and crying that she smelt blood, and that the curse of’ Thyestes was heavy upon the dining-hall. When Agamemnon had washed himself and set one f’oot out of the bath, eager to partake of’the rich banquet now already set on the tables, Clytaemnestra came f’orward, as if’to wrap a towel about him, but instead threw over his head a garment of’net, woven by herself’, without either neck or sleeve-holes. Entangled in this, like a fish, Agamemnon perished at the hands of Aegisthus, who struck him twice with a two-edged sword.10 He f’ell ha&, into the silver-sided bath, where Clytaemnestra avenged her wrongs by beheading him with an axe? She then ran out to kill Cassandra with the same weapon, not troubling first to close her husband’s eyelids or mouth; but wiped off on his hair the blood which had splashed her, to signify that he had brought about his own death? I. A fierce battle was now raging in the palace, between Agamemnon’s bodyguard and Aegisthus’s supporters. Warriors were slain like swine for a rich man’s feast, or lay wounded and groaning beside the laden boards in a welter of blood; but Aegisthus won the day. Outside, Cassandra’s head rolled to the ground, and Aegisthus also had the satisfaction of killing her tw’m sons by Agamemnon; yet he failed to do away with another of Agamemnon’s bastards, by name Halesus, or Haliscus. Halesus contrived to make his escape and, after long wandering in exile, founded the Italian city of Falerii, and taught its inhabitants the Mysteries of Hera, which are still celebrated there in the Argive rn. This massacre took place on the thirteenth day of the month Gamelion [January] and, unafraid of divine retribution, Clytaemnestra decreed the thirteenth day a monthly festival, celebrating it with dancing and offerings of sheep to her guardian deities. Some applaud her resolution; but others hold that she brought eternal disgrace upon all women, even virtuous ones. Aegisthus, too, gave thanks to the goddess who had assisted him. X4
n. The Spartans claim that Agamemnon is buried at Amyclae, no no more than a small village, where are shown the tomb and statue of Clytaemnestra, also the sanctuary and statue of Cassandra; the inhabitants even believe that he was killed there. But the truth is that Agamemnon’s tomb stands among the ruins of Mycenae, close to those of his charioteer, of his comrades murdered with him by Aegisthus, and of Cassandra’s twins.xs
o. Menelaus was later informed of the crime by Proteus, the prophet of Pharos and, having offered hecatombs to his brother’s ghost, built a cenotaph in his honour beside the River of Egypt. Returning to Sparta, eight years later, he raised a temple to Zeus Agamemnon; there are other such temples at Lapersae in Attica and at Clazomene in Ionia, although Agamemnon never reigned in either of these places.16
x. Hyginus: Fabula 88; Eusebius: Chronicles i. 175-6, ed. Schoene; Homer: Iliad ii. ~07-8 and Odyssey iii. 263; Aeschylus: Agamemnon 529; Pausanias: ii. ~8.4; Tzetzes: Chiliades i. 433 if. 2. Hesiod, quoted by Suidas sub alce; Homer: Iliad 108 and 569-80.
3. Apollodorus: iii. Io. 6 and Epitome ii. ~6; Euripides: Iphigen~eia in Aulis 1148 if.
4. Apol/odorus: loc. cit.; Homer: Iliad ix. 145; Dturis, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~83.
5. Homer: Odyssey iii. 263.
6. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 8-9.
7. Homer: Odyssey i. 35 if. and iii. 263-75.
8. Euripides: Iphigeneia in Aulis ~48 if.; Sophocles: Electra Pausanias: iii. ~9. $ and ii. ~6. 5; Hyginus: Fabula
9. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Aeschylus: Agamemnon i. if. and 282 if.; Euripides: Electra ~076 if.; Homer: Odyssey iv. $24-37; Pausanias: ii. ~6. 5.
IO. Aeschylus: Agamemnon ~220—~391 if., ~52~ if. and Eumenides
63~-5; Euripides: Electra ~57 and Oresres 26; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~375; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 267; Triclinius on Sophocles’s Electra ~95; Homer: Odyssey iii. ~93 if—and 303-5; xi. 529-37.
1. Sophocles: Electra 99; Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1372 if. and
~2. Aeschylus: loc. tit.; Sophocles: Electra 445-6.
~3. Homer: Odyssey xi. 400 and 442; Pausanias: ii. 16. 5; Virgil: Aeneid vii. 723; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 695; Ovid: Art of Love iii. ~ 3. 3 ~.
~4. Sophocles: Electra 278-8~; Homer: Odyssey iii. 263; xi. 405 and vi. 5~2 if..
~$. Pausanias: ii. ~6.5 and iii. 19—5; Pindar: Pythian Odesi. 32; Homer: Iliad iv. 228.
~6. Homer: Odyssey iv. 5~2ff. and58~ if.; Tzetzes: OnLycophron
~4 and ~369; Pausanias: vii. 5.5,
1. The myth of Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Clytaemnestra, and O~estes has survived in so stylized a dramatic form that its origins are almost obliterated. In tragedy of tlais sort, the clue is usually provided by the manner of the king’s death: whether he is flung over a cliff like Theseus, burned ahve hke Heracles, wrecked in a chariot like Oenomaus, devoured by wild horses like Diomedes, drowned in a pool hke Tantalus, or killed by lightning like Capaneus. Agamemnon dies in a pecuhar manner: with a net thrown over his head, with one foot still in the bath, but the other on the floor, and in the bath-house anncxe—that is to say, ‘neither clothed nor unclothed, neither in water nor on dry land, neither in his palace nor outside’—a situation recalling the midsummer death, in the Mabinogion, of the sacred king Llew Llaw, at the hands of his treacherous wife Blodeuwedd and her lover Gronw. A similar story told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark suggests that Clytaemnestra may also have given Agamemnon an apple to eat, an~ killed him as he set it to his lips: so that he was’ neither fasting, nor feast hag’ ( White Goddess, pp. 308 and 40~). Basically, then, this is the familia myth of the sacred king who dies at midsummer, the goddess who be trays him, the tarfist who succeeds him, the son who avenges hirr Clytaemnestra’s axe was the Cretan symbol of sovereignty, and the my~ has affinities with the murder of Minos, which also took place in a bat~ Aegisthus’s mountain beacons, one of which Aeschylus records to hay been built of heather (see 18.3), are the bonfires of the midsummer sacri rice. The goddess ha whose honour Agamemnon was sacrificed appea~ in triad as his ‘ daughters ‘: Electra (‘ amber ‘), Iphigcneia (‘ mothering strong race ‘), and Chrysothemis (‘ golden order ‘).
2. This ancient story has been combined with the legend of a disput between rival dynasties in the Poloponnese. Clytaemnestra was a Sparta royal heiress; and the Spartans’ claim, that their ancestor Tyndareus raise Agamemnon to the throne of Mycenae, suggests that they were vk totiota ha a war against the Mycenaeans for the possession of Amycla~ where Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra were both honoured.
3. ‘ Zeus Agamemnon’, ‘ very resolute Zeus ‘, will have been a divin title borne not only by the Mycenaean kings, but by those of Lapersa and Clazomene; and, presumably, also by the kings of a Danaan c Achaean setdement beside the River of Egypt—not to be confused wit the Nile. The River of Egypt is mentioned in Joshua xv. 4 as marking th boundary between Palestine and Egypt; farther np the coast, at Ascalo and near Tyre, there were other Danaan or Achaean setden~ents (se ~69. f).
4. The thirteenth day, also observed as a festal day in Rome, where: was called the Ides, had corresponded with the full moon at a time whe the calendar month was a simple lunation. It seems that the sacrifice ofth king always took place at the full moon. According to the legend, th Greek fleet, returning late in the year from Troy, ran into winter storm~ Agamemnon therefore died in January, not in June.
Oa~sz~s was reared by his loving grand-parents Tyndareus and Led and, as a boy, accompanied Clytaemnestra and Iphigeneia to Aulis. But some say that Clytaeranestra sent him to Phocis, shortly befox return; and others that on the evening of the murder, Oresres, then ten years of age, was rescued by his noble-hearted nurse Arsino~, or Laodameia, or Geilissa who, having sent her own son to bed in the royal nursery, let Aegisthus kill him in Orestes’s place.2 Others again say that his sister Electra, aided by her father’s ancient tutor, wrapped him in a robe embroidered with wild beasts, which she herself had woven, and smuggled him out of the city.3
b. After hiding for awhile among the shepherds of the river Tanus, which divides Argolis from Laconia, the tutor made his way with Oresres to the court of Strophius, a firm ally of the House of Atreus, who ruled over Crisa, at the foot of Mount Parnassus.4 This Strophius had married Agamemnon’s sister Astyochea, or Anaxibia, or Cyndra~ gora. At Crisa, Orestes found an adventurous playmate, namely Stro?hius’s son Pylades, who was somewhat younger than himself, and their friendship was desfined to become proverbial.s From the old tutor he learned with grief that Agamemnon’s body had been flung out of the house and hastily buried by Clytaemnestra, without either libations or myrtle-boughs; and that the people of Mycenae had been forbidden to attend the funeral?
c. Aegisthus reigned at Mycenae for seven years, riding in Agamemnon’s chariot, sitting on his throne, wielding his sceptre, wearing his robes, slceping in his bed, and squandering his riches. Yet despite all these trappings of kingship, he was little more than a slave to Clytaemnestra, the true ruler of Mycenae.7 When drunk, he would leap on ^gamemnon’a tomb and pelt the head-stone with rocks, crying:
‘ Come, Oresres, come and defend your own!’ The truth was, however, that he lived in abject fear of vengeance, even while surrounded by a trusty foreign bodyguard, never passed a single night in sound sleep, and had offered a handsome reward in gold for Orestes’s assassination?
d. Electra had been betrothed to her cousin Castor of Sparta, before Iris death and demi-deification. Though the leading princes of Greece now contended for her hand, Aegisthus feared that she might bear a son to avenge Agamerrmon, and therefore announced that no suitor could be accepted. He would gladly have destroyed Electra, who showed him implacable hatred, lest she lay secrefiy with one of the Palace officers and bore him a bastard; but Clytaemnestra, feeling no qualms about her part in Agamenmon’s murder, and scrupulous not to incur the displeasure of the gods, forbade him to do so. She allowed him, however, to marry Electra to a Mycenaean peasant who, being afraid of Orcstes and also chaste by nature, never consummated their unequal union.9
e. Thus, neglected by Clytaenmestra, who had now borne Aegisthus three children, by name Erigone, Alerts, and the second Helen, E]ectra lived in disgraceful poverty, and was kept under constant close supervision. In the end it was decided that, unless she would accept her fate, as her sister Chrysothcmis had done, and refrain From publicly calling Aegisthus and Clytaerrmcstra ‘murderous adulterers’, she would be banished to some distant city and there conf~ned in a dungeon where the light of the sun never penetrated. Yet Electra despised Chrysothemis for her subservience and disloyalty to their dead father, and secretly sent frequent reminders to Oresres of the vengeance required from him.10
f Oresres, now grown to manhood, visited the Delphic Oracle, to enquire whether or not he should destroy his father’s murderers. Apollo’s answer, authorized by Zeus, was that if he neglected to avenge Agamemnon he would become an outcast from society, debarred from entering any shrine or temple, and a~icted with a leprosy that ate into his flesh, making it sprout white mould.xx He was recommended to pour hbations beside Agamemnon’s tomb, lay a ringlet of his hair upon it and, unaided by any company of spearmen, craftily exact the due punishment from the murderers. At the same time the Pythoness observed that the Erinnyes would not readily forgive a matricide, and therefore, on behalf of Apollo, she gave Oresres a bow of horn, with which to repel their attacks, should they become insupportable. After fulf~lling his orders, he must come again to Delphi, where Apollo would protect him. i2
g. In the eighth year—or, according to some, after a passage of twenty years—Oresres secretly returned to Mycenae, by way of Athens, determined to destroy both Aegisthus and his own mother.1 One morning, with Pylades at his side, he visited Agamemnon’s tomb and there, cutting off a lock of his hair, he invoked Infernal Hermes, patron of fatherhood. When a group of slave-women approached, dirty and dishevelled for the purposes of mourning, he took shelter in a near-by thicket to watch them. Now, on the previous night, Clytaemnestra had dreamed that she gave birth to a serpent, which she wrapped in swaddling clothes and suckled. Suddenly she screamed in her sleep, and alarmed the whole Palace by crying that the serpent had drawn blood from her breast, as well as milk. The opinion of the soothsayers whom she consulted was that she had incurred the anger of the dead; and these mourning slave-women consequently came on her behalf to pour hbations upon Agamemnon’s tomb, in the hope of
~ppeasing his ghost. Electra, who was one of the party, poured the libations in her own name, not her mother’s; offered prayers to Agamemnon for vengeance, instead of pardon; and bade Hermes summon Mother Earth and the gods of the Underworld to hear her plea. Noticing a ringlet of fair hair upon the tomb, she decided that it could belong only to Orestes: both because it closely resembled her own in colour and texture, and because no one else would have dared to make such an offering.14
h. Tom between hope and doubt, she was measuring her feet against Orestes’s foot-prints in the clay beside the tomb, and finding a family ~esemblance, when he emerged from his hiding place, showed her that the ringlet was his own, and produced the robe in which he had escaped from Mycenae.
Electra welcomed him with delight, and together they invoked their ancestor, Father Zeus, whom they reminded that Agamemnon had always paid him great honour and that, were the House of Atreus to die out, no one would be left Jn Mycenae to offer him the customary hecatombs: for Aegisthus worshipped other deities?
i. When the slave-women told Oresres of Clytaemnestra’s dream, he recognized the serpent as himself, and declared that he would indeed play the cubming serpent and draw blood from her false body. Then he instructed Electra to enter the Palace and tell Clytaemnestra nothing about their meeting; he and Pylades would follow, after an interva/, and beg hospitality at the gate, as strangers and suppliants, pretending to be Phocians and using the Panaassian dialect. If the porter refused them admittance, Aegisthus’s inhospitality would outrage the city; if he granted it, t~ey would not fail to take vengeance.
Presently Orestes knocked at the Palace gate, and asked for the master or mistress of the house. Clytaemnestra herself came out, but did not recognize Oresres. He pretended to be an Aeolian from Daulis, bearing sad news from one Strophius, whom he had met by chance on the road to Argos: namely, that her son Orestes was dead, and that his ashes were being kept in a brazen urn. Strophius wished to know whether he should send these back to Mycenae, or bury them at Crisa.16
.j. Clytaemnestra at once welcomed Oresres inside and, concealing her joy from the servants, sent his old nurse, Geilissa, to fetch Aegisthus from a near-by temple. But Ge’fiissa saw through Orestes’s disguise and, altering the message, told Aegisthus to rejoice because he could now safely come alone and weaponless to greet the bearers of glad tidings: his enemy was dead.2?
Unsuspectingly, Aegisthus entered the Palace where, to create a further distraction, Pylades had just arrived, carrying a brazen urn. He told Clytacmnestra that it held Orestes’s ashes, which Strophius had now derided to send to Mycenae. This seeming confirmation of the first message put Aegisthus completely off his guard; thus Orestes had no difficulty in drawing his sword and cutting him down. Clytaemnestra then recognized her son, and tried to soften his heart by bar’rag her breast, and appealing to his filial duty; Orestes, however, beheaded her with a single stroke of the same sword, and she fell beside the body of her paramour. Standing over the corpses, he addressed the Palace servants, holding aloft the still blood-stained net in which Agamemnon had died, eloquently exculpafmg himself for the murder of Clytaemnestra by this reminder of her treachery, and adding that Aegisthus had suffered the sentence prescribed by law for adulterers?
k. Not content with killing Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra, Oresres next disposed of the second Helen, their daughter; and Pylades beat off the sons of Nauphus, who had come to Aegisthus’s rescue.19
1. Some say, however, that these events took place in Argos, on the third day of Hera’s Festival, when the virgins’ procession was about to begin. Aegisthus had prepared a banquet for the Nymphs near the horse-meadows, before sacrif~cing a bull to Hera, and was gathering myrtle-boughs to wreathe his. head. It is added that Electra, meeting Orestes by Agamemnon’s tomb, would not believe at first that he was her long-lost brother, despite the similarity of their hair, and the robe he showed her. Finally, a scar on his forehead convinced her; because once, when they were children together, chasing a deer, he had slipped and fallen, cutting his head upon a sharp rock.
m. Obeying her whispered instructions, Oresres went at once to the altar where the bull had now been slaughtered and, as Aegisthus bent to inspect its entrails, struck off his head with the sacrificial axe. Meanwhile, Electra, to whom he presented the head, enticed Clytaemnestra from the palace by pretending that, ten days before, she had borne a son to her peasant husband; and when Clytaemnestra, anxious to inspect her first grand-child, visited the cottage, Orestes was waiting behind the door and killed her without mercy.20
n. Others, though agreeing that the murder took place at Argos, say that Clytaemnestra sent Chrysothemis to Agamemnon’s tomb with the libations, having dreamed that Agamemnon, restored to life, snatched his sceptre from Aegisthus’s hands and planted it so firmly in the ground that it budded and put forth branches, which overshadowed the entire land of Mycenae. According to this account, the news which deceived Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra was that Oresres had been accidentally killed while competing in the chariot race at the Pythian Games; and that Oresres showed Electra neither a ringlet nor an embroidered robe, nor a scar, in proof of his identity, but Agamemnon’s own seal, which was carved from a piece of Pelops’s ivory shoulder.21 0. Still others, denying that Orestes killed Clytaemnestra with lfis own hands, say that he committed her for trial by the judges, who condemned her to death, and that his one fault, if it may be called a fault, was that he did not intercede on her behalf..22
1. Euripides: Orestes 462 and Iphigeneia in Aulis 622.
2. Aeschylus : Agamemnon 877 ff. and Libation-bearers 732; Euripides: Electra 24 if.; Pindar: Pythian Odes xi. 17, with scholiast.
3. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 24; Euripides: Ioc. tit. and 542 if.; Aeschylus: Libation-bearers 232. 4—Euripides: Electra 409-12; Sophocles: Electra 12 if.; Pindar: Pythian Odes xi. 34-6.
5. Hyginus: Fabula 227; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 33~ 764, and 1235; Euripides: Iphi geneia Among the Taurians 922; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 24; Ovid: Pontic Epistles iil. 2.95-8.
6. Euripides: Electra 289 and 323-5; Aeschylus: Libation-bearers 432. 7. Homer: Odyssey iii. 30$; Euripides: Electra 320 if. and 932 if.; Sophocles: Electra 267 if. and 652.
8. Euripides: Electra 33, 320 if. and 627 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 229. 9—Euripides: Electra 19 if., 253 if., and 322 if.
~o. Hyginus: Fabula 122; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv, quoted by Photius p. 479; Euripides: Electra 60-4; Aeschylus: Libationbearers 130 if..; Sophocles: Electra 341 if.., 379 if—and 5~6 if. II. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 24; Aeschylus: Eumenides 622 and Libation-bearers 269 if. ~2. Sophocles: Electra 36—7 and 52-2; Euripides: Orestes 268-70; Aeschylus: Libation-bearers 2038.
23. Homer: Odyssey iii. 306 if.; Hypothesis of Sophocles’s Electra; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 25.
ú 14. Aeschylus: Libation-bearers.
~5. Aeschylus: ibid.
16. Aeschylus: ibid.
17. Aeschylus: ibid.
xS. Hyginus: Fabula 119; Aeschylus: Eumenides 592 and Libationbearers 973 if. 19. Ptolemy Hephaesfionos: iv, quoted by Photius p. 479; Pausanias: i. 22.6.
20. Euripides: Electra.
2~. Sophocles: Electra 326 and 417ff.; 47-50 and 1223, with scholiast. 22. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 268.
1. This is a crucial myth with numerous variants. Olympianism had been formed as a religion of compromise between the pre-Hellenic matriarchal principle and the Helle~zic patriarchal principle; the divine family consisting, at first, of six gods and six goddesses. An uneasy balance of power was kept until Athene was reborn from Zeus’s head, and Dionysus, reborn from his thigh, took Hestia’s seat at the divine Council (see 27. k); thereafter male preponderance in any divine debate was assured—a situation reflected on earth—and the goddesses’ ancient prerogatives could now be successfully challenged.
g. Matrilinear inheritance was one of the axioms taken over from the pre-Hellenic religion. Since every king must necessarily be a foreigner, who ruled by virtue of his marriage to an heiress, royal princes learned to regard their mother as the main support of the kingdom, and matricide as an unthinkable crime. They were brought up on myths of the earlier religion, according to which the sacred king had always been betrayed by his goddess-wife, killed by his tanist, and avenged by his son; they knew that the son never punished his adulterous mother, who had acted with the full authority of the goddess whom she served.
3. The antiquity of the Orestes myth is evident from his friendship for Pylades, to whom he stands in exactly the same relation as Theseus to Peirithous. In the archaic version, he was doubtless a Phocian prince who ritually killed Aegisthus at the close of the eighth year of his reign, and became the new ldng by marriage to Chrysothemis, Clytaemnestra’s daughter.
4. Other tell-tale traces of the archaic version persis~ in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aegisthus is k’fited during the festival of the Death-goddess Hera, while cutting myrtle-boughs; and despatched, like d~e Minos bull, with a sacrificial axe. Geiiissa’s rescue of Orestes (‘ mountaineer’) in a robe ‘embroidered with wild beasts’, and the tutor’s stay among the shepherds of Tanus, together recall the familiar tale of a royal prince who is wrapped in a robe, left’on a mountain’ to the mercy of wild beasts, and cared for by shepherds—the robe being eventually recognized, as in the Hippothous myth (see 49. a). Geilissa’s substitution of her t)wn son for the royal victim refers, perhaps, to a stage in religious history when the king’s annual child-surrogate was no longer a member of the royal clan.
5. How far, then, can the main features of the story, as given by the Attic dramatists, be accepted? Though it is improbable that the Erirmyes have been wantonly introduced into the myth—which, like that of Alcmaeon and Eriphyle (see ~07. d), seems to have been a moral warning against the least disobedience, injury, or insult that a son might offer his mother—yet it is equally improbable that Orestes killed Clytaemnestra. Had he done so, Homer would certainly have mentioned the fact, and refrained from calling him’ god-like ‘; he records only that crestes killed Aegisthus, whose funeral feast he celebrated jointly with that of his hateful mother (Odyssey iii. 306 if.). The Parian Chronicle, similarly, makes no mention of matricide in Orestes’s indictment. It is probable therefore that Servius has preserved the true account: how Orestes, having killed Aegisthus, merely handed over Clytaemnestra to popular justice—a course significantly recommended by Tyndareus in Euripides’s Orestes (496 if.). Yet to offend a mother by a refusal to champion her cause, however wickedly she had behaved, sufficed under the old dispensation to set the Er’mnyes on his track.
6. It ~eems, then, that this myth, which was of wide currency, had placed the mother of a household in so strong a position, when any family dispute arose, that the priesthood of Apollo and of Zeus-born Athene (a traitress to the old religion) decided to suppress it. They did so by making Orestes not merely commit Clytaemnestra to trial, but kill her himseli’, and then secure an acquittal in the most venerable court of Greece: with Zeus’s support, and the personal intervention of Apollo, who had similarly encouraged Alcmaeon to murder his treacherous mother Eriphyle. It was the priests’ intention, once and for all, to invalidate the religious axiom that motherhood is more divine than fatherhood. 7. In the revision patrilocal marriage and patrilinear descent are taken for granted, and the Erinnyes are successfully defied. Electra, whose name, ‘amber’, suggests the paternal cult of Hyperborean Apollo, is favourably contrasted with Chrysothemis, whose name is a reminder that the ancient concept of matriarchal law was still golden in most parts of Greece, and whose ‘subservience’ to her mother had hitherto been regarded as pious and noble. Electra is’ all for the father’, like the Zeus-born Athene. Moreover, the Erirmyes had always acted for the mother only; and Aeschylus is forcing language when he speaks of Erinnyes charged with avenging paternal blood (Libation-bearers 283-4). Apollo’s threat of leprosy if Orestes did not kill his mother, was a most daring one: to inflict, or heal, leprosy had long been the sole prerogative of the White Goddess Leprea, or Alphito (White Goddess, Chapter 24). In the sequel, not all the Erinnyes accept Apollo’s Delphic ruling, and Euripides appeases his female audience by allowing the Dioscuri to suggest that Apollo’s injunctions had been most unwise (Electra 1246).
8. The wide variations in the recognition scene, and in the plot by which Oresres contrives to kill Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra, are of interest only as proving that the Classical dramatists were not bound by tradition. Theirs was a new version of an ancient myth; and both Sophocles and Euripides tried to improve on Aeschylus, who first formulated it, by making the action more plausible.
T H ~ Mycenaeans who had supported Orestes in his unheard-of action would not allow the bodies of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus to lie within their city, but buried them at some distance beyond the walls.1 That night, Oresres and Pylades stood guard at Clytaemnestra’s tomb, lest anyone should dare rob it; but, during their vigil, the serpenthaired, dog-headed, bat-winged Ednnyes appeared, swinging their scourges. Driven to distraction by these fierce attacks, against which Apollo’s bow of horn was of little avail, Orestes fell prostrate on a couch, where he lay for six days, his head wrapped in a cloak—refusing either to eat or to wash.
b. Old Tyndareus now arrived from Sparta, and brought a charge ofmatricide aga’mst Oresres, summoning the Mycenaean chieftains to judge his case. He decreed that, pending the trial, none shotfid speak eit~er to Orestes or Electra, and t~at both should be denied shelter, fire, and water. Thus Orestes was prevented even from washing his bloodstained hands. The streets of Mycenae were lined with citizens in arms; and Oeax, son of Nauplius, delighted in this opportunity to persecute Agamemnon’s children.2
c. Meanwhile, Menelaus, laden with treasure, landed at Nauplia, where a fisherman told him that Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra had been murdered. He sent Helen ahead to confirm the news at Mycenae; but by night, lest the kinsmen of those who had perished at Troy shotfid stone her. Helen, feeling ashamed to mourn in public for her sister ú Clytaenmestra, since she herself had caused even more bloo&hed by her infidelities, asked Electra, who was now nursing the afflicted Oresres: ‘Pray, niece, take offerings of my hair and lay them on Clytaenmestra’s tomb, after pouring libations to her ghost.’ Electra, when she saw that Helen had been prevented by vanity from cutting off more than the very tips of her hair, refused to do so. ‘Send your daughter Hermione instead,’ was her curt advice. Helen thereupon summoned Hermione from the palace. She had been only a nine-yearold child when her mother eloped with Paris, and Menelaus had committed her to Clytaemnestra’s charge at the outbreak of the Trojan War; yet she recognized Helen at once and dutifully went off to do as she was told.3
d. Menelaus then entered the palace, where he was greeted by his foster-father Tyndareus, clad in deep mourning, and warned not to set foot on Spartan soil until he had punished his criminal nephew and niece. Tyndareus held that Oresres shonld have contented himself with allowing his fellow-citizens to banish Clytaemnestra. If they had demanded her death he should have interceded on her behalf. As matters now stood, they must be persuaded, willy-nilly, that not only Oresres, but Electra who had spurred him on, should be stoned to death as matficides.
e. Fearing to offend Tyndareus, Menelaus secured the desired verdict. But at the eloquent plea of Orestes himself, who was present in court and had the support of Pylades (now disowned by Strophius for his part in the murder), the judges commuted the sentence to one of midde. Pylades then led Oresres away, nobly refusing to desert either him or Electra, to whom he was betrothed; and proposed that, since all three must die, they should first punish Menelaus’s cowardice and disloyalty by killing Helen, the originator of every misfortune that had befallen them. While, therefore, Electra waited outside the walls to execute her own design—that of intercepting Hermione on her return from Clytaemnestra’s tomb and holding her as a hostage for Menelaus’s good behaviour—Orestes and Pylades entered the palace, with swords hidden beneath their cloaks, and took refuge at the central altar, as though they were suppliants. Helen, who sat near by, spinning wool for a purple robe to lay as a gift on Clytaemnestra’s tomb, was deceived by their lamentations, and approached to welcome them. Whereupon both drew their swords and, while Pylades chased away Helen’s Plarygian slaves, Oreste~ attempted to murder her. But Apollo, at Zeus’s command, rapt her in a cloud to Olympus, where she became an immortal; joining her brothers, the Dioscuri, as a guardian of sailors in distress.4
f. Meanwhile, Electra had secured Hermione, led her into the palace, and barred the gates. Menelaus, seeing that death threatened his daughter, ordered an immediate rescue. His men burst open the gates, and Orestes was just about to set the palace alight, kill Hermione, and die himself either by sword or fire, when Apollo providentially appeared, wrenched the torch from his hand, and drove back Menelaus’s warriors. In the awed hush caused by his presence, Apollo commanded Menelaus to take another wife, betroth Hermione to Orestes, and return to rule over Sparta; Clytaemnestra’s murder need no longer concern him, now that the gods had intervened.s
g. With wool-wreathed laurel-branch and chaplet, to show that he was under Apollo’s protection, Orestes then set out for Delphi, still pursued by the Erinnyes. The Pythian Priestess was terrified to see him crouched as a suppliant on the marble navel-stone—stained by the blood from his unwashed hands—and the hideous troop of black Erinnyes sleeping beside him. Apollo, however, reassured her by promising to act as advocate for Orestes, whom he ordered to face his ordeal with courage. After a period of exile, he must make his way to Athens, and there embrace the ancient image of Atliene who, as the Dioscuri had already prophesied, would shield him with her Gorgonfaced aegis, and annul the curse.6 While the Erinnyes were still fast asleep, Orestes escaped under the guidance of Hermes; but Clytaem- nestra’s ghost soon entered the precinct, raking them to task, and reminding them that they had often received libations of wine and grim midnight banquets from her hand. They therefore set off in renewed pursuit, scornful of Apollo’s angry threats to shoot them down.?
h. Orestes’s exile lasted for one year—the period which must elapse before a homicide may again move among his fellow-citizens. He wandered far, over land and sea, pursued by the tireless Erinnyes and’ constantly purif~ed both with the blood of pigs and with running water; yet these rites never served to keep his tormentors at bay for more than an hour or two, and he soon lost his wits. To begin with, Hermes escorted him to Troezen, where he was lodged in what is now called the Booth of Oresres, which faces the Sanctuary of Apollo; and presently nine Troezenians purified him at the Sacred Rock, close to the Temple of Wolfish Artemis; using water from the Spring of Hippocrene, and the blood of sacrificial victims. An ancient laurel-tree marks the place where the victims were afterwards buried; and the descendants of these nine men still dine annually at the booth o.n a set day.8
i. Opposite the island of Crana~, three furlongs from Gythium, stands an unwrought stone, named the stone of Zeus the Reliever, upon which Orestes sat and was temporarily relieved of his madness. He is said to have also been purified in seven streams near Italian Rhegium, where he built a temple; in three tributaries of the Thracian Hebrus; and in the Orontes, which flows past Antioch.9
j. Seven furlongs down the high road from Megalopolis to Messene, on the left, is shown a sanctuary of the Mad Goddesses, a tide of the Er’mnyes, who inflicted a raging fit of madness on Oresres; also a small mound, surmounted by a stone finger and called the Finger Tomb. This marks the place where, in desperation, he bit offa finger to placate these black goddesses, and some of them, at least, changed their hue to white, so that his sanity was restored. He then shaved his head at a near-by sanctuary called Ac~, and made a sin-offering to the black goddesses, also a thank-offering to the white. It is now customary to sacr’zfice to the latter conjoinfly with the Graces.Io
k. Next, Oresres went to live among the Azanes and Arcadians of the Parrhasian Plain which, with the neighbouring city formerly called Oresthasium after its founder Orestheus, son of Lycaon, changed its name to Oresteium. Some, however, say that Oresteium was formerly called Azania, and that he went to live there only after a visit to Athens. Others, again, say that he spent his exile in Epirus, where he founded the city of Orestic Argos and gave his name to the Orestae Paroraei, Epirots who inhabit the rugged foothills of the Illyrian motmtains. n I. When a year had passed, Oresres visited Athens, which was then governed by his kinsman Pandion; or, some say, by Demoph06n. He went at once to Athene’s temple on the Acropolis, sat down, and embraced her image. The Black Erinnyes soon arrived, out of breath, having lost track of him while he crossed the Isthmus. Though at his f~rst arrival none wished to receive him, as being hated by the gods, presently some were emboldened to invite him into their homes, where he sat at a separate table and drank from a separate w’me cup. X2 ns. The Erirmyes, who had already begun to accuse him to the Athenians, were soon joined by Tynclareus with his grand-daughter Erig0ne, daughter of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra; also, some say, by Clytaenmestra’s cousin Perilaus, son of Icarim. But Athene, having heard Orestes’s supplication from Scamander, her newly-acquired Trojan territory, hurried to Athens and, swearing-in the noblest citizens as judges; summoned the Areopagus to try what was then only the second case of homicide to come before it.13
n. In due course the trial took place, Apollo appearing as counsel for the defence, and the eldest of the Erinnyes as public prosecutrix. In an elaborate speech, Apollo denied the importance of motherhood, asserting that a woman was no more than the inert furrow in which the husbandman cast his seed; and that Oresres had been abundandyjusti~ fled in his act, the father being the one parent worthy of the name. When the voting proved equal, Athene confessed herself wholly on the father’s side, and gave her casting vote in favour of Orestes. Thus honourably acquitted, he returned in joy to Argolis, swearing to be a faithful ally of Athens so long as he lived. The Erinnyes, however, loudly lamented this subversal of the ancient law by upstart gods; and Erigone hanged herself for mortification. X4
o. Of Helen’s end three other contradictory accounts survive. The first: that in fulfilment of Proteus’s prophecy, she returned to Sparta and there lived with Menelaus in peace, comfort, and prosperity, until they went hand in hand to the Elysian Fields. The second: that she visited the Taurians with him, whereupon Iphigeneia sacrificed them both to Artemis. The third: that Polyxo, widow of the Rhodian King Tlepolemus, avenged his death by sending some of her serv’mg women, disguised as Erinnyes, to hang Helen.1S
x. Pausanias: ii. ~6. 5.
2. Euripides: C)restes.
3. Homer: Odyssey iii. 306 if.; Apollodorus: Eśitome i/i. 3; Euripides: ibid.
4. Euripides: ibid.
5. Euripides: ibid.
6. Hyginus: Fabula 120; Aeschylus: Libation-~e~rers 1034 if. and Eumenides 34 if., 64 if., and 166-7; Euripides: Electra 1254-7. 7. Aeschylus: Eumenides 94 if., 106-9, and 179 if8. Asclepiades, quoted by Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 1645; Aeschylus: Eumenides 235 if. and 445 if.; Pausanias: ii. 3L 7 and 9—Pausanias: iii. ~2. x; Varro, quoted by Probus on Virgil’s Eclogues i. 4, ed. Keil; Lampridius: Life ofHelio, gabulus vii. p. 809; Libanius: xi. 366d.
xo. Pausanias: viii. 34. x-~xI. Euripides: Oresres 1645-7 and Electra 1254 if.; Pausanias: viii. 3. x; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Azania; Strabo: vii. 7. 8.
12. Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Knights 95; Acharnanians 960; Parian Chronicle 40 if.; Tzeties: On Lycophron 1374; Aeschylus: Eumehides 235 ft.; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 947 fi13. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 25; Pausanias: viii. 34—2; Aeschylus: Eumenides 397, 470 if., and 681 if.
14. Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 961 if.; Aeschylus: Eumenides 574 IT.., 734 if.., and 778 iT..; Etymologicum Magnum p. 42: sub Ai6ra.
xS. Homer: Odyssey iv. 561; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv.; Pausanias: iii. 19.
, I. The tradit~on that Clytaemnestra’s Erinnyes drove Orestes mad cannot be dismissed as an invention of the Attic dramatists; it was too early established, not only in Greece, but in Greater Greece. Yet, just as Oedipus’s crime, for which the Erinnyes hounded him to death, was not that he killed his mother, but that he inadvertently caused her suicide (see xos. k); so Orestes’s murder seems also to have been in the second degree only: he had failed in fd/al duty by not opposing the Mycenaearis’ death sentence. The court was easily enough swayed, as Menelaus and Tyndareus soon demonstrated when they secured a death sentence against Orestes.
2. Erinnyes were personified pangs of conscience, such as are still capable, in pagan Melanesia, of killing a man who has rashly or inadvertently broken a taboo. He will either go mad and leap from a coconut palm, or wrap his head in a cloak, like Orestes, and refuse to eat or drink until he .dies of starvation; even if nobody else is informed of his guilt. Paul would have suffered a similar fate at Damascus but for the timely arrival of Ananias (Acts ix. 9 if.)—The common Greek method of purging ordinary blood guilt was for the homicide to sacrifice a pig and, while the ghost of the victim greedily drank its blood, to wash in running water, shave his head in order to change Iris appearance, and go into exile for one year, thus throwing the vengeful ghost off the scent. Until he had been purified in this manner, his neighbouts shunned him as unlucky, and would not allow him to enter their homes or share their food, for fear of themselves becoming involved in his troubles; and he might still have to reckon with the victim’s family, should the ghost demand vengeance from them. A mother’s blood, however, carried with it so powerful a curse, that common means of purification would not serve: and, short of suicide, the most extreme means was to bite offa finger. This self-mutilation seems to have been at least partially successful in Orestes’s case; thus also Heracles, to placate the aggrieved Hera, will have bitten off the finger which he is said to have lost while tussling with the Nemean Lion (see 123. e). In some regions of the South Seas a finger-joint is always lopped off at the death of a close relative, even when he or she has died a natural death. In the Eumenides (397 fi~) Aeschylus is apparently disguising a tradition that Orestes fled to the Troad and lived, untroubled by the Etinnyes, trader Athene’s protection on silt land wrested from the Seamander and therefore free from the curse (see l07. e). Why else should the Troad be mentioned?
3. Wine instead of blood libations, and offerings of small hair-snippings instead of the whole crop, were Classical amendments on this ritual of appeasement, the significance of which was forgotten; as the presentday custom of wear’rag black is no longer consciously connected with the ancient habit of deceiving ghosts by altering one’s nornlal appearance. 4. Euripides’s imaginative account of what happened when Helen and Menelaus returned to Mycenae contains no mythical element, except for Helen’s dramatic apotheosis; and Helen as the Moon-goddess had been a patroness of sailors long before the Heavenly Twins were recognized as a constellation. Like Aeschylus, Euripides was writing religious propaganda: Orestes’s absolution records the final triumph of patr~archy, and is staged at Athens, where Athene—formerly the Libyan goddess Neith, or Palestinian Anatha, a supreme matriarch, but now reborn from Zeus’s head and acknowledging, as Aeschylus insists, no divine motherconnives at matricide even in the first degree. The Athenian dramatists knew that this revolutionary theme could not be accepted elsewhere in Greece: hence Euripides makes Tyndareus, as .Sparta’s representative, declare passionately that Oresres must die; and the Dioscuri venture to condemn Apollo for having prompted the crime.
5. Orestes’s name, ‘mountaineer’, has connected him with a wild, mountainous district in Arcadia which no King of Mycenae is likely to have visited.
6. These alternative versions of Helen’s death are given for different reasons. The first purports to explain the cult of Helen and Menelaus at Therapne; the second is a theatrical variation on the story of Orestes’s visit to the Taurians (see 116. a-g); the third accounts for the Rhodian cult of Helena Dendritis, ‘ Helen of the Tree’, who is the same character as Ariadne and the other Erigone (see 79—z and 88.10). This Erigone was also hanged.
I~ gratitude for his acquittal, Oresres dedicated an altar to Warlike Athene; but the Erirmyes threatened, if the judgement were not xxS. a—~5. d 71
reversed, to let fall a drop of their own hearts’ blood which would bring barrenness upon the soil, blight the crops, and destroy all the offspring of Athens. Athene nevertheless soothed their anger by flattery: acknowledging them to be far wiser than herself, she suggested that they should take up residence in a grotto at Athens, where they would gather such throngs ofworshippers as they could never hope to f~nd elsewhere. Hearth-altars proper to Underworld deities should be theirs, as well as sober sacrifices, torchlight libations, first-fruits offered after the consummation of marriage or the birth of children, and even seats in the Erechtheum. If they accepted this invitation she would decree that no house where worship was withheld from them might prosper; but they, in return, must undertake to invoke fair winds for her ships, fertility for her land, and fruitful marriage~ for her peoplealso rooting out the impious, so that she might see fit to grant Athens victory in war. The Erinnyes, after a short deliberation, graciously agreed to these proposals.
b. With expressions of gratitude, good wishes, and charms against withering winds, drought, blight, and sedition, the Erinnyes—henceforth addressed as t~e Solemn Ones—bade farewell to Athene, and were conducted by her people in a torchlight procession of youths, matrons, and crones (dressed in purple, and carrying the ancient image of Athene) to the entrance of a deep grotto at the south-eastern angle of the Areopagus. Appropriate sacrifices were there offered to them, and they descended into the grotto, which is now both an oracular shrine and, like the Sanctuary of Theseus, a place of refuge for suppIiants.1
c. Yet only three of the Erinnyes had accepted Athene’s gcnerou~ offer; the remainder continued to pursue Orestes; and some people go so far as to deny that the Solemn Ones were ever Erinnyes. The name ‘ Eumenides’ was first given to the Er’m_nyes by Oresres, in the following year, after his daring adventure in the Tauric Chersonese, when he finally succeeded in appeasing their fury at Carneia with the holocaust of a black sheep. They are called Eumenides also at Colonus, where none may enter their andent grove; and at Achaean Cerynea where, towards the end ofkis hfe, Orestes dedicated a new sanctuary to them.a
d. In the grotto of the Solemn Ones at Athens—which is closed only to the second-fated, that is to say, to men who have been prematurely mourned for dead—their three images wear no more terrible an aspect than do those of the Underworld gods standing beside them, namely Hades, Hermes, and Mother Earth. Here those who have been acquitted of murder by the 3,reopagus sacrifice a black victim; numel ous other offerings are brought to the Solemn Ones in accordance wit Athene’s promise; and one of the three nights set aside every month 1~ the Areopagns for the hearing of murder trials is assigned to each ~ them.3
e. The rites of the Solera Ones are s’~lendy performed; hence the priesthood is hereditary in the clan of the Hesychids, who offer t~ preliminary sacrifice of a ram to their ancestor Hesychus at his herr shrine outside the Nine Gates.4
f. A hearth-altar has also been provided for the Solemn Ones:
Phlya, a small Attic township; and a grove of evergreen oaks is sacre to them near Titane, on the farther bank of the river Asopus. At the Phlyan festival, celebrated yearly, pregnant sheep are sacrif~ced, 1ib~ tions of honey-water poured, and flowers worn instead of the usu~ myrtle wreaths. Similar rites are performed at the altar of the Fate which stands in the oak-grove, unprotected from the weather.s
1. Pausanias:i. 28.5-6;Porphyry: ConcernlngtheCaeesoftheNympi
3; Euripides: Electra 1272; Aristophanes: Knights 13 12; Aeschylu Eumenides 778-1047.
2. Euripides: Iphlgeneia Among the Taurlans 968 if.; Philemon t~ Comedian, quoted by scholiast on Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colont
42; Hypothesis of Aeschylus’s Eumenides; Pausanias: vii. ~5. ~
Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus 37 and 42-3.
3. Hesychius subDeuteropotmoi; Polemon, quoted by scholiast o Sophocles: loc. tit. and 89; Pausanias: i. 28. 6; Scholiast on Ae~ dhnes’s Against Timarchus ~. ~88c; Lucian: On the Ha~l xS; Ac~
chylus: Eumenides 705.
4. Hesychius sub Hesychidae.
5. Pausanias: i, 3~—2 and ii. ~x. 4—
* ~. The ‘hearts’ blood’ of the Erinnyes, with which Attica was threa~ ened, seems to be a euphemism for menstrual blood. An immemork charm used by witches who wish to curse a house, field, or byre is to ru naked around it, counter-sunwise, nine times, wlfile in a menstrual con dition. This curse is considered most dangerous to crops, cattle, an children during an eclipse of the moon; and altogether unavoidable ifth witch is a virgin menstruating for the first time.
2. Philemon the Comedian did right to question the Athenian identifi cation of the Erinnyes with the Solemn Ones. According to the mo., respected authorities, there were only three Erinnyes: Tisiphone, Alectc and Megaera (see 3 ~. g), who lived permanently in Erebus, not at Athens. They had dogs’ heads, bats’ wings, and serpents for ha/r.’; yet, as Pausanias points out, the Solemn Ones were portrayed as august matrons. Athene’s offer, in fact, was not what Aeschylus has recorded; but an ultimatum from the priesthood of Zeus-born Athene to the priestesses of the Solemn Ones—the ancient Triple-goddess of Athens—that, unless they accepted the new view of fatherhood as superior to motherhood, and consented to share their grotto with such male underworld deities as Hades and Hermes, they would forfeit all worship whatsoever, and with it their traditional perquisites of first-fruits.
$. Second-fated men were debarred from entering the grotto of the Underworld goddesses, who might be expected to take offence that their dedicated subjects still wandered at large in the upper world. A similar embarrassment is felt in India when men recover from a deathlike trance on their way to the burning ghat: in the last century, according to Rudyard Kipling, they used to be denied official existence and smuggled away to a prison colony of the dead. The evergreen oak, also called the kerm-oak, because it provides the kerm-berries (cochineal insects) from which the Greeks extracted scarlet dye, was the tree of the tarfdst who killed the sacred king, and therefore appropriate for a grove of the Solemn Ones. Sacrifices of pregnant sheep, honey, and flowers would encourage these to spare the remainder of the flock during the lambing season, fayour the bees, and enrich the pasture.
4. The Erinnyes’ continued pursuit of Orestes, despite the intervention of Athene and Apollo, suggests chat, in the original myth, he went to Athens and Phocis for purification, but without success; as, in the myth of Eriphyle, Alcmaeon went tinsuccessfully to Psophis and Thesprotia. Since Orestes is not reported to have found peace on the reclaimed silt of any river (see ~07. e)—unless perhaps of the Scamander (see 114.2)he will have met his death in the Tauric Chersonese, or at Brauron (see ~~6. ~).
STiL~ pursued by such of the Erinnyes as had turned deaf ears to Athene’s eloquent speeches, Orestes went in despair to Delphi, where he threw himself on the temple floor and threatened to take his own life unless Apollo saved him from their scourgings. In reply, the Pythian priestess ordered him to sail up the Bosphorus and northward across the Black Sea; his woes would end only when he had seized an ancient wooden image of Artemis from her temple in the Tauric Chersonese, and brought it to Athens or (some say) to Argolis.1
b. Now, the king of the Taurians was the fieet-footed Thoas, a son of Dionysus and Ariadne, and father of Hypsipyle; and his people, so called because Osiris once yoked bulls (tauroi) and ploughed their land, came of Scythian stock.2 They still live by rapine, as in Thoas’s days; and whenever one of their warriors takes a prisoner, he beheads him, carries the head home, and there impales it on a tall stake above the chinmey, so that his household may live under the dead man’s protection. Moreover, every sailor who has been shipwrecked, or driven into their port by rough weather, is publicly sacrificed to Taurian Artemis. When they have performed certain preparatory rites, they fell him with a dub and nail his severed head to a cross; after which the body is either buried, or tossed into the sea from the precipice crowned by Artemis’s temple. But any princely stranger who falls into their hands is killed with a sword by the goddess’s virgin-priestess; and she throws his corpse into the sacred fire, welling up from Tartarus, which burns in the divine precinct. Some, however, say that the priestess, though supervising the rites, and performing the preliminary lustration and hair-cropping of the victim, does not herself kill him. The ancient image of the goddess, which Orestes was ordered to seize, had fallen here from Heaven. This temple is supported by vast columns, and approached by forty steps; its altar of white marble is permanendy stained with blood.3
c. Taurian Artemis has several Greek titles: among them are Artemis Tauropolus, or Tauropole; Artemis Dictyrma; Artemis Orthia; Thoantea; Hecate; and to the Latins she is Trivia.4
d. Now, Iphigeneia had been rescued from sacrifice at Aulis by Artemis, wrapped in a cloud, and wafted to the Tauric Chersonese, where she was at once appointed Chief Priestess and granted the sole right of handling the sacred image. The Taurians thereafter addressed her as Artemis, or Hecate, or Orsiloche. Iphigeneia loathed human sacrifice, but piously obeyed the goddess.5
e. Oresres and Pylades knew nothing of all this; they still believed that Iphigeneia had died under the sacrificial knife at Aulis. Nevertheless, they hastened to the land of the Taurians in a fifty-oared ship which, on arrival, they left at anchor, guarded by their oarsmen, while they hid in a sea-cave. It was their intention to approach the temple at nightfall, but they were surprised beforehand by some credulous herdsmen who, assuming them to be the Dioscud, or some other pair of immortals, fell down and adored them. At this juncture Oresres went mad once more, bellowing like a calf and howling like a dog; he mis- took a herd of calves for Erinnyes, and rushed from the cave, sword in hand, to slaughter them. The disillusioned herdsmen thereupon overpowered the two friends who, at Thoas’s orders, were marched off to the temple for immediate sacrifice.6
f. During the prelimina~ rites Oresres conversed in Greek with Iphigeneia; soon they joyftdly discovered each other’s identity, and on learning the nature of his mission, she began to lift down the image for him to carry away. Thoas, however, suddenly appeared, impatient at the slow progress of the sacrifice, and the resourceful Iphigeneia pretended to be soothing the image. She explained to Thoas that the goddess had averted her gaze from the victims whom he had sent, because one was a matticicle, and the other was abetting him: both were quite unf~t for sacrif~ce. She must take them, together with the image, which their presence had polluted, to be cleansed in the sea, and offer the goddess a torchlight sacrif~ce of young lambs. Meanwhile, Thoas was to purify the temple with a torch, cover his head when the strangers emerged, and order everyone to remain at home and thus avoid pollution.
g. Thoas, wholly deceived, stood for a time lost in admiration of such sagacity, and then began to purify the temple. Presently Iphigeneia, Oresres, and Pyladcs conveyed the image down to the shore by torchlight but, instead of bathing it in the sea, hastily carried it aboard their ship. The Taurian temple-servants, who had come with them, now suspected treachery and showed fight. They were subdued in a hard struggle, after which Orestes’s oarsmen rowed the ship away. 3, sudden gale, however, sprang up, driving her back towards the rocky shore, and all would have perished, had not Poseidon calmed the sea at Athene’s request; with a favouring breeze, they made the Island of Sminthos.?
h. This was the home of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, and his grandson of the same name, whose mother Chryseis now proposed to surrender the fugitives to Thoas. For, although some hold that Athene had visited Thoas, who was manning a fleet to sail in pursuit, and cajoled him so successfully that he even consented to repatriate Iphigeneia’s Greek slave-women, it is certain that he came to Sminthos with murderous intentions. Then Chryses the Elder, learning the identity of his guests, revealed to Chryses the Younger that he was not, as Chryseis had always pretended, Apollo’s son, but Agamemnon’s, and therefore half-brother to Orestes and Iphigeneia. At this, Chryses and Oresres rushed shoulder to shoulder against Thoas, whom they succeeded in killing; and Orestes, taking up the image, sailed safely home to Mycenae, where the Erinnyes at last abandoned their chase. S i. But some say that a storm drove Orestes to Rhodes where, in accordance with the Helian Oracle, he set up the image upon a city wall. Others say that, since Attica was the land to which he had been instructed to bring it, by Apollo’s orders, Athene visited him on Sminthos and specified the frontier city of Brauron as its destination: it must be housed there in a temple of Artemis Tauropolus, and placated with blood drawn from a man’s throat. She designated Iphigeneia as the priestess of this temple, in which she was destined to end her days peacefully; the perquisites would include the clothes of rich women who had died in childbed. According to this account, the ship finally made port at Brauron, where Iphigeneia deposited the image and then, while the temple was being built, went with Orestes to Delphi; she met Electra in the shr’me and brought her back to Athens for marriage to Pylades.9
j. What is claimed to be the authentic wooden image of Tauric Artemis may still be seen at Brauron. Some, however, say that it is only a replica, the original having been captured by Xerxes in the course of his ill-fated expedition against Greece, and taken to Susa; afterwards, they add, it was presented by King Seleucus of Syria to the Laodicaeans, who worship it to this day. Others, again, loth to allow credit to Xerxes, say that Orestes himself, on his homeward voyage from the Tauric Chersonese, was driven by a storm to the region now named Seleuceia, where he left the image; and that the natives renamed Mount Melantius, where the madness finally left him, Mount Amanon, that is ‘not mad’, in his memory. But the Lydians, who have a sanctuary of Artemis Anaeitis, also claim to possess the image; and so do the people of Cappadocian Comana, whose city is said to take its name from the mourning tresses (coma/) which Orestes deposited there, when he brought the rites of Artemis Tauropolus into Cappadocia.10
k. Others, again, say that Orestes concealed the image in a bundle of faggots, and took it to Italian Aricia, where he himself died and wa~ buried, his bones being later transferred to Rome; and that the image was sent from Aricia to Sparta, because the cruelty of its rites displeased the Romans; and there placed in the Sanctuary of Upright Artemis.1 I. :But the Spartans claim that the image has been theirs s/nce long before the foundation of Rome, Orestes having brought it with him when he became their king, and hidden it in a w;.110 w thicket. For centuries, they say, its whereabouts were forgotten; until, one day, Astrabaeus and Alopecus, two princes of the royal house, entering the thicket by chance, were driven mad at the sight of the grim image, which was kept upright by the willow-branches wreathed around ithence its names, Orthia and Lygodesma. rn. No sooner was the image brought to Sparta, than an ominous quarrel arose between rival devotees of Artemis, who were sacrificing together at her altar: many of them were killed in the sanctuary itself, the remainder died of plague shortly afterwards. When an oracle advised the Spartans to propitiate the image by drenching the altar with human blood, they cast lots for a victim and sacrificed him; and this ceremony was repeated yearly until King Lycurgus, who abhorred human sacrif~ce, forbade it, and instead ordered boys to be flogged at the altar until it reeked with blood? Spartan boys now compete once a year as to who can endure the most blows. Artemis’s priestess stands by, carrying the image which, although small and light, acquired such relish for blood in the days when human sacrif~ces were offered to it by the Taurians that, even now, if the floggers lay on gently, because the boy is of noble birth, or exceptionally handsome, it grows almost too heavy for her to hold, and she chides the floggers: ‘Harder, harder! You are weighing me down!’ ~
n. Little credence should be given to the tale that Helen and Menelaus went in search of Orestes and, arriving among the Taurians shortly after he did, were both sacr’~ficed to the goddess by Iphigeneia.14 I. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 26; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 77 and 970 if.; Hyginus: Fabula
2. Euripides: Iphigeneia Among theTaurians 32; Scholiast on Apollo~ nius Rhodius: iii. 997; Eustathius: On Dionysius 306; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 26. 3. Herodotus: iv. t03; Ovid: Porttic Epistles iii. 2. 45 if.; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 26; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 40 iT. and 88 if.
4. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 44.7; Sophocles: Ajax ~72; Pausanias: i. 23. 116.
9; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. i16; Valerim Flaccus: viii. 208; Ovid: Ibis 384 and Pontic Epistles iii. 2. 71; Orphic Argonautica l065.
5. Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 784 and I045; Ovid: Pontic Epistles iii. 2.45 if.; Herodotus: iv. ~03; Hesiod: Catalogue of Women, quoted by Pausanias: i. 43—I; Ammianus Marcellinus:
xxii. 8.346. Hyginus: Fabula 120; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. ~77—Ovid: Pontic Epistles loc. tit.; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Euripides: Iśhigefieia Among the Taurians I037 8. Hyginus: Fabulae ~20 and 121; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 1435 if.; Hyginus: Fabula
9. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 27; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 89-91 and 1446 if-; Pausanias: i. 33—x; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1374.
lo. Pausanias: i. 23.9, iii. 16. 6 and viii. 46. g; Tzetzes: Ioc. tit.; Strabo: xii. z. 3.
Ix. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 116andvi. x 36; Hyginus: Fabula g6 L xz. Pausanias: iii. 16. 6-7.
~ 3. Hyginus: Fabula 261; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 116;Pausanias: loc. tit.
14. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv, quoted by Phofius: p. 479—
1. The mythographers’ anxiety to conceal certain barbarous traditions appears plainly in this story and its variants. Among the suppressed elements are Artemis’s vengeance on Agamemnon for the murder of Iphigeneia, and Oeax’s vengeance, also on Agamemnon, for the murder of his brother Palamedes. Originally, the myth seems to have run somewhat as follows: Agamemnon was prevailed upon, by his fellow-chieftains, to execute his daughter Iphigeneia as a witch when the Greek expedition against Troy lay windbound at Aulis. Artemis, whom Iphigeneia had served as priestess, made Agamemnon pay for this insult to her: she helped Aegisthus to supplant and murder him on his return. At her inspiration also, Oeax offered to take Oresres on a voyage to the land reclaimed from the river Scamander and thus help him to escape the Erirmyes; for Athene would protect him there (see 115.4)—hasread, Oeax put in at Brauron, where Oresres was acclaimed as the annual pharmacos, a scapegoat for the guilt of the people, and had his throat slit by Artemis’s virgin-priestess. Oeax, in fact, told Electra the truth when they met at Delphi: that Orestes had been sacrificed by Iphigencia, which seems to have been a tide of Artemis (see 117. ~).
2. Patriarchal Greeks of a later era will have disliked this myth—a version’of which, making Menelaus, not Orestes, the object of Artemis’s vengeance, has been preserved by Photius. They exculpated Agamemnon of murder, and Artemis of opposing the will of Zeus, by saying that she doubtless rescued Iphigeneia, and carried her away to be a sacrif~cial priestess—not at Brauron, but among the savage Taurians, for whose actions they disclaimed responsibility. And that she certainly did not kill Orestes (or, for the matter of that, any Greek victim) but, on the contrary, helped him to take the Tauric image to Greece at Apollo’s orders. 3. This face-saving story, influenced by the myth of Jason’s expedition to the Black Sea—in Servius’s version, Orestes steals the image from Colchis, not the Tauric Chersonese—explained the tradition of human throat-slitting at Brauron, now modified to the extraction of a drop oś blood from a slight cut, and similar sacrifices at Mycenae, Aricia, Rhodes, and Cornaria. ‘Tauropolus’ suggests the Cretan bull sacrifice, which survived in the Athenian Buphonia (Pausardas: i. 28. x I); the original victim is likely to have been the sacred king.
4. The Spartan fertility rites, also said to have once involved human sacrifice, were held in honour of Upright Artemis. To judge from prilnitive practice elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the victim was bound with willow-thongs, full of lunar magic, to the image—a sacred treestump, perhaps of pear-wood (see 74—6), and flogged until the lashes induced an erotic reaction and he ejaculated, fertilizing the land with semen and blood. Alopecus’s name, and the well-known legend of the youth who allowed his vitals to be gnawed by a fox rather than cry out, suggest that the Vixen-goddess of Teumessus was also worshipped at Sparta (see 49. 2 and 89. 8).
5. Meteorites were often paid divine honoun, and so were small ritual objects of doubtful origin which could be explained as having similarly fallen from heaven—such as the carefully worked neolithic spear heads, identified with Zeus’s thunderbolts by the later Greeks (as flint arrows are called ‘elf shots’ in the English countryside), or the bronze pestle hidden in the head-dress worn by the image of Ephesian Artemis. The images themselves, such as the Brauronian Artemis and the olive-wood Athene in the Erechtheum, were then likewise said to have fallen from heaven, through a hole in the roof (see ~$8. k). It is possible that the image at Brauron contained an ancient sacr’ff~cial knife of obsidian—a volcanic glass from the island of Melos—with which the victims’ throats were slit.
6. Osiris’s ploughing of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), seems forced; but Herodotus insists on a close link between Colchis and Egypt (ii. ~04), and Colchis has here been confused with the land of the Taurians. Osiris, like Triptolemus, is said to have introduced agriculture into many foreign lands (see 24.’ra).
AE(glSTHIJS’S son Aletes now usurped the kingdom of Mycenae, believing the malidous rumour [? spread by Oeax] that Oresres and Pylades had been sacrificed on the altar of Tauric Artemis. But Electra, doubting its truth, went to consult the Delphic Oracle. Iphigeneia had just arrived at Delphi, and [? Oeax] pointed her out to Electra as Orestes’s murderess. Revengefully she seized a firebrand from the altar and, not recognizing Iphigeneia after the lapse of years, was about to blind her with it, when Orestes himself entered and explained all. The reunited children of Agamemnon then went joyfully back to Mycenae, where Orestes ended the feud between the House of Atreus and the House of Thyestes, by killing Aleres; whose sister Erigone, it is said, would also have perished by Ns hand, had not Artemis snatched her away to Attica. But afterwards Oresres relented towards her.x
b. Some say that Iphigeneia died eit~er at Brauron, or at Megara, where she now has a sanctuary; others, that Artemi~ immortalized her as the Younger Hecate. Electra, married to Pylade~, bore him Medon and Strophius the Second; she lies buried at Mycenae. Oresres married his cousin Hermione—having been present at the sacrificial murder of Achilles’s son Neoptolemus, to whom she was betrothed.2 By her he became the father of Tisamenus, his heir and successor; and by Erigone his second wife, of Penthilus.a
c. When Menelaus d~ed, the Spartans invited Oresres to become their king, preferring him, as a grandson of Tyndareus, to Nicostratus and Megapenthes, begotten by Menelaus on a slave-girl. Orestes who, with the help of troops furnished by his Phocian allies, had already added a large part of Arcadia to his Mycenaean domains, now made himself master of Argos as well; for King Cylarahes, grandson of Capaneus, left no issue. He also subdued Achaea but, in obedience to the Delphic Oracle, finally emigrated from Mycenae to Arcadia where, at the age of seventy, he died of a snake bite at Oresteium, or Orestia, the town which he had founded during his exile.4
d. Orestes was buried at Tegea, but in the reign of Anaxandridcs, co-king with Aristo, and the only Laconian who ever had two wives and occupied two houses at the same time, the Spartans, in despair because they had hitherto lost every battle fought with the Tegeans, sent to Delphi for advice, and were instructed to possess themselves of Orestes’s bones. Since the whereabouts of these were unknown, they sent Lichas, one of Sparta’s benefactors, to ask for further enlightenment. He was given the following response in hexameters: Level and smooth the plain of Arcadlan Tegea. Go thou Where two winds are ever, by strong necessity, blowing; Where stroke rings upon stroke, where evil lies upon evil; There all-teeming earth doth enclose the prince whom thou seekest. Bring thou him to the, house, and thus be Tegea’ s master!
Because of a temporary truce between the two states, Lichas had no difficulty in visiting Tegea; where he came upon a smith forging a sword of iron, instead of bronze, and gazed open-mouthed at the novel sight. ‘Does this work surprise you?’ cried the jovial smith. ‘Well, I have something here to surprise you even more! It is a coffin, seven cubits long, containing a corpse of the same length, which I found beneath the smithy floor while I was digging yonder well.’
e. Lichas guessed that the winds mentioned in the verses must be those raised by the smith’s bellows; the strokes those of his hammer; and the evil ly’mg upon evil, his hammer-head beating out the iron sword—for the Iron Age brought in cruel days. He at once returned with the news to Sparta, where the judges, at his own suggestion, pretended to condemn him for a crime of violence; then, fleeing to Tegea as if from execution, he persuaded the smith to hide him in the smithy. At midnight, he stole the bones out of the coffin and hurried back to Sparta, where he re-interred them near the sanctuary of the Fates; the tomb is still shown. Spartan armies have ever since been consistendy victorious over the Tegeans. S
f Pelops’s spear-sceptre, which his grandson Oresres also wielded, was discovered in Phocis about this time: lying buried with a hoard of gold on the frontier between Chaeronea and Phanoteus, where it had probably been hidden by Electra. When an inquest was held on this treasure-trove, the Phanotians were content with the gold; but the Chaeroneans took the sceptre, and now worship it as their supreme deity. Each priest of the spear, appointed for one year, keeps it in his own house, offering daily victims to its divinity, beside tables lavishly spread with every kind of food.6
g. Yet some deny that Orestes died in Arcadia. They say that after his term of exile there, he was ordered by an oracle to visit Lesbos and Tenedos and found colonies, with setfiefs gathered from various dties, including Amyclae. He did so, calling his new people Aeolians because Aeolus was their nearest common ancestor, but died soon after building a city in Lesb os. This migration to ok place, they say, four generations before the Ionian. Others, however, declare that Orestes’s son Penthilus, not Oresres himself, conquered Lesbos; that his grandson Gras, aided by the Spartans, occupied the country between Ionia and Mysia, now called Aeolis; and that another grandson, Archelaus, took Aeolian settlers to the present city of Cyzicene, near Dascylium, on the southern shores of the Sea of Marmara.?
h. Tisamenus meanwhile succeeded to his fatber’s dominions, but was driven from the capital cities of Sparta, Mycenae, and Argos by the sons of Heracles, and took refuge with his army in Achaea. His son Cometes emigrated to Asia.8
x. Hyginus: Fabula 122.
2. Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians2464 and 925; Pausanias: i. 43. z and x. 24-. 4-5; Hellanicus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. ~6. 5; Hyginus: Fabula ~23; Strabo: ix. 3.9.
3. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 28; Cinaethon, quoted by Pausanias: ii. ~8.5; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1374.
4. Pausanias: ii. 18.5 and viii. 5—~-3; Asclepiades, quoted by scho~ liast on Euripides’s Orestes ~647; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: loc. tit.
5. Pausanias: viii. 54. 3; iii. 3.7; iii. z L 8 and iii. 3.5-7; Herodotus: i. 67-8.
6. Pausanias: ix. 40. 6.
7. Pindar: Nemean Odes xi. 33-5; Hellanicus, quoted by Tzetzes: 0,~ Lycophron 2374; Pausanias: iii. 2. z; Strabo: xiii. z. 3.
8. Pausanias: ii. 8. 6-7 and vii. 6. 21.
1. Iphigeneia seems to have been a title of the earlier Artemis, who was not merely maiden, but also nymph—’Iphigeneia’ means ‘mothering a strong race’-and crone, namely the Solemn Ones or Triple Hecate. Orestes is said to have reigned in so many places that his name must also be regarded as a title. His death by snake bite at Arcadian Oresteia links him with other primitive kings: such as Apesantus son of Acrisius (see ~ 23. e), identifiable with Opheltes of Nemea (see z06. g); Munitus son of Athamas (see 168. e); Mopsus the Lapith (see ~54-f), bitten by a Libyan snake; and Egyptian Ra, an aspect of Osiris, also bitten by a Libyan snake. These bites are always in the heel; in some eases, among them those of Cheiron and Pholus the Centaurs, Talus the Cretan, Achilles the Myrmidon, and Philoctetes the Euboean, the venom seems to have been conveyed on an arrow-point (see 92. ~0). The Arcadian Oresres was, in fact, a Pelasgian with Libyan connexions.
2. Artemis’s rescue of Erigone from Orestes’$ vengeance is one more incident in the feud between the House of Thyestes, assisted by Artemis, and the House of Atreus, assisted by Zeus. Tisamenus’s name (‘ avenging strength’) suggests that the feud wa~ bequeathed to the succeeding generation: because, according to one of Apollodorus’s accounts (Epitome vi. 28), he was Erigone’s son, not Hermione’s. Throughout the story of this feud it must be remembered that the Artemis who here measures her strength with Zeus is the earlier matriarchal Artemis, rather than Apollo’s loving twin, the maiden huntress; the mythographers have done their best to obscure Apollo’s active participation, on Zeus’s side, in this divine quarrel.
3. Giants’ bones, usually identified with those of a tribal ancestor, were regarded as a magical means of protecting a city; thus the Athenians, by oracular inspiration, recovered what they claimed to be Theseus’s bones from Scyros and brought them back to Athens (see 104. i). These may well have been unusually large, because a race of giants—of which the Hamitic Watusi who live in Equatorial Africa are an offshoot—flourished in neolithic Europe, and their seven-foot skeletons have occasionally been found even in Britain. The Anakim of Palestine and Carla (see 88.3) belonged to this race. However, if Orestes was an Achaean of the Trojan War period, the Athenians cotfid not have found and measured his skeleton, since the Homeric nobles practise. d cremation, not inhumation in the neolithic style. 4—’Evil lying upon evil’ i~ usually interpreted as the iron sword that was Being forged on an iron anvil; but stone anvils were the rule until a comparatively late epoch, and the hammer-head as it rests upon the sword is the more likely explanation—though, indeed, iron hammers were also rare until Roman times. Iron was too holy and infrequent a metal for common use by the Mycenaeans—not being extracted from ore, but collected in the form of divinely-sent meteorites—and when eventually iron weapons were imported into Greece from Tibarene on the Black Sea, the smelting process and manufacture remained secret for some time. Blacksmiths continued to be called’ bronze workers’ even in the Hellenistic period: But as soon as anyone might possess an iron weapon or tool, the age of myth came to an end; if only because iron was not included among the f~ve metals sacred to the goddess and linked with her calendar rites: namely, silver, gold, copper, tin, and lead (see $3.2). 5—Pelops’s spear-sceptre, token of sovereignty, evidently belonged to the ruling priestess; thus, according to Euripides, the spear with which Oenomaus was killed—presumably the same instrument—was hidden in Iphigeneia’s bedroom; Clytaemnestra then claims to possess it (Sophocles: Electra 652); and Electra is said by Pausanias to have brought it to Phocis. The Greeks of Asia Minor were pleased to think that Orestes had founded the first Aeolian colony there: his name bei~g one of their royal titles. They may have been relying on a tradition that concerned a new stage in the history of kingship: when the king’s reign came to an end, he was now spared death and allowed to sacrifice a surrogate—an act of homicide that would account for Orestes’s second exile—after which he might lead a colony overseas. The mythographers who explained that the Spartans preferred Oresres to Menelaus’s sons because these were born of a slave-woman, did not realize that descent was still matrilinear. Orestes, as a Mycenaean, could reign by marriage to the Spartan heiress Hermione; her brothers must seek kingdoms elsewhere. In Argolis a princess could have free-born children by a slave; and there was nothing to prevent Electra’s peasant husband at Mycenae from raising claimants for the throne.
6. The psalmist’s tradition that ‘the days of a man are three score and ten,’ is founded not on observation, but on religious theory: seven was the number of holiness, and ten of perfection. Orestes sindlarly attained seventy years.
7. Anaxandrides’s breach of the monogamic tradition may have been due to dynastic necessity; perhaps Aristo, his co-king, died too soon before the end of his reign to warrant a new coronation and, since he had ruled by virtue of his marriage to an heiress, Anaxandrides substituted for him both as king and husband.
8. Hittite records show that there was already an Achaean kingdom in Lesbos during the late fotlxtecnth century ~.›.
ELECTRYON, SOn of Perseus, High King of Mycenae and husband of Anaxo, marched vengefully against the Taphians and Teleboans. They had joined in a successful raid on his catfie, planned by one Pterelaus, a claimant to the Mycenaean throne; which had resulted in the death of Electryon’s eight sons. While he was away, his nephew King Amphitryon of Troezen acted as regent. ‘ Rule well, and when I return victorious, you shall marry my daughter Alcmene,’ Electryon cried in farewell. Amphitryon, informed by the King of Elis that the stolen cattle were now in his possession, paid the large ransom demanded, and recalled Electryon to identify them. Electryon, by no means pleased to learn that Amphitryon expected him to repay this ransom, asked harshly what right had the Eleans to sell stolen property, and why did Amphitryon condone in a fraud? Disdaining to reply, Amphitryon vented his annoyance by throwing a club at one of the cows which had strayed from the herd; it struck her horns, rebounded, and killed Electryon. Thereupon Amphitryon was banished from Argolis by his uncle Sthenelus; who seized Mycenae and Tirym and entrusted the remainder of the country, with Midea for its capital, to Atreus and Thyestes, the sons ofPelops. t
b. Amphitryon, accompanied by Alcmene, fled to Thebes, where King Creon purrfled him and gave his sister Pealmede in marriage to Electryon’s only surviving son, Uxcynmius, a bastard home by a Phrygian woman named Midea. Z But the pious Alcmene would not lie with Amphitryon until he had avenged the death of her eight brothers. Creon therefore gave him permission to raise a Boeotian army for this purpose, on condition that he freed Thebes of the Teumessian vixen; which he did by borrowing the celebrated hound Laelaps from Cephalus the Athenian. Then, aided by Athenian, Phocian, Argive, and Locdan contingents, Amphitryon overcame the Teleboans and Taphians, and bestowed their islands on his allies, among them his uncle Heleius.
c. Meanwhile, Zeus, taking advantage of Amphitryon’s absence, impersonated him and, assuring Alcmene that her brothers were now avenged—since Amphitryon had indeed gained the required vieto~
that very morning—lay with her all one night, to whi& he gave the length of three.3 For Hermes, at Zeus’s command, had ordered Helius to quench the solar fires, have the Hours unyoke his team, and spend the following day at home; because the procreation of so great a champion as Zeus had in mind could not be accomplished in haste. Helius obeyed, grumbling about the good old times, when day was day, and night was night; and when Crontzs, the then Almighty God, did not leave his lawful wife and go off to Thebes on love adventures. Hermes next ordered the Moon to go slowly, and Sleep to make mankind so drowsy that no one would notice what was happening.4 Alcmene, wholly deceived, listened delightedly to Zeus’s account of the crushing defeat inflicted on Pterelaus at Oechalia, and sported innocendy with her supposed husband for the whole thirty-six hours. On the next day, when Amphitryon returned, eloquent of victory and of his passion for her, Alcmcne did not welcome him to the marriage couch so rapturously as he had hoped.’ We never slept a wink last night,’ she complained. ‘ And surely you do not expect me to listen twice to the story of your exploits?’ Amphitryon, unable to understand these remarks, consulted the seer Teiresias, who told him that he had been cuckolded by Zeus; and thereafter he never dared sleep with Alcmene again, for fear of incurring divine jealousy. S
d. Nine months later, on Olympus, Zeus happened to boast that he had lathered a son, now at the point of birt~, who would be called Heracles, wlfich means ‘Glory of Hera’, and rule the noble House of Perseus. Hera thereupon made him promise that any prince born before nightfell to the House of Perseus should be High IGng. When Zeus swore an unbreakable oath to this effect, Hera went at once to Mycenae, where she hastened the pangs of Nicippe, wife of King Sthenelus. She then hurried to Thebes, and squatted cross-legged at Alcmene’s door, with her clothing tied into knots, and her fingers locked together; by which means she delayed the birth of Heracles, until Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus, a se~en-months child, already lay in his cradle. When Heracles appeared, one hour too late, he was found to have a twin named Iphicles, Amphitryon’s son and the younger by a night. But some say that Heracles, not Iphicle~, was the younger by a night; and others, that the twins were begotten on the same night, and born together, and that Father Zeus divinely illumined the birth chamber. At first, Heracles was called Alcaeus, or Palaemon.6
e. When Hera returned to Olympus, and calmly boasted of her success in keeping śileithyia, goddess of childbirth, from Alcmene’s door, Zeus fell into a towering rage; seizing his eldest daughter Ate, who had blinded him to Hera’s deceit, he took a mighty oath that she should never visit Olympus again. Whirled around his head by her golden hair, Ate was sent hurtling down to earth. Though Zeus could not go back on his word and allow Heracles to rule the House of Perseus, he persuaded Hera to agree that, after performing whatever twelve labours Eurystheus might set him, his son should become a god.7 fi Now, unlike Zeus’s former human loves, from Niobe onwards, Alcmene had been selected not so much for his pleasure—though she surpassed all other women of her day in beauty, stateliness, and wisdom —as with a view to begetting a son powerful enough to protect both gods and men against destruction. Alcmene, sixteenth in descent from the same Niobe, was the last mortal woman with whom Zeus lay, for he saw no prospect ofbegetting a hero to equal Heracles by any other; and he honoured Alcmene so highly that, instead of roughly violat’mg her, he took pains to disguise himself as Amphitryon and woo her with affectionate words and caresses. He knew Alcmene to be incorruptible and when, at dawn, he presented her with a Carchesian goblet, she accepted it without question as spoil won in the victory: Telebus’s legacy from his father Poseidon.8
g. Some say that Hera did not herself hinder iMcmene’~ travail, but sent witches to do so, and that I-Iistoris, daughter of Teiresias, deceived them by raising a cry of joy from the birth chamber—which is still shown at Thebes—so that they went away and allowed the child to be born. According to others, it wa~ Eileithyia who hindered the travail on Hera’s behalf, and a faithful handmaiden of Alcmene’s, the yellowhaired Galanthis, or Galen, who left the birth chamber to announce, untruly, that Alcmene had been delivered. When Eileithyia sprang up in surprise, unclasping her fingers and uncrossing her knees, Heracles was born, and Galanthis laughed at the successful deception—which provoked Eileithyia to seize her by the hair and turn her into a weasel. Galanthis continued to frequent 2~lcmene’s house, but was punished by Hera for having lied: she was condemned in perpetuity to bring forth her young through the mouth. When the Thebans pay Heracles divine honours, they still offer preliminary sacrifices to Galanthis, who is also called Galinthias and described as Proetus’s daughter; saying that she was Heracles’s nurse and that he built her a sanctuary.9
h. This Theban account is derided by the Athenians. They hold that Galanthis was a harlot, turned weasel by Hecate in punishment for practising unnatural lust, who when Hera unduly prolonged Alcmene’s labour, happened to run past and frighten her into delivery?
i. Heracles’s birthday is celebrated on the fourth day ofevery month; but some hold that he was born as the Sun entered the Tenth Sign; others that the Great Bear, swinging westward at midnight over Orion—which it does as the Sun quits the Twelfth Sign—looked down on him in his tenth month.TM
1. Apollodorus: ii. 4. 5-6; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 932; Hesiod:
Shield of Heracles II if.
2. Apollodorus: foe. tit.
3. Hesiod: Shieldof Heracles I-$6; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 7-8; Hyginus: Fabula 28; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 33 and 932; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vii. 5.
4. Luc/an: Dialogues of the Gods x.
5. Hesiod: Shieldof Heracles 1-56; Apollodorus:ii. 4—7-8; Hygin.us: Fabula 29; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 33 and 932; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vii. 5.
6. Hesiod: Shield of Heracles i. 35, 56, and 80; Homer: Iliad xix. 95; Apollodorus: ii. 4-5; Theocritus, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes i. 36; Plautus: Amphitryo 1096; Diodorus Siculus:
iv. lO; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 662.
7. Homer: Iliad xix. 119 if. and 91; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 9 and 8. Hesiod: Shield of Heracles 4 if. and 26 if.; Pherecydes, quoted by Athenaeus: xi. 7; Athenaeus: xi. 99; Plautus: Amphitryo 256 if. 9. Pausanias: ix. Ix. x-2; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 285 if.; Aelian: Nature of Anhnals x~. 5; Antoninus Liberalis: Transfornlations 29. Io. Aelian: Nature of Animals xw. II; Antoninus Liberahs: for. tit. xI. Philochorus: Fragment 177; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 285 if.; Theocritus: Idylls xxiv. II-12.
~r
1. Alcmene {‘stronginwrath’) willhaveorig’mallybeenaMycenaean title of Hera, whose divine sovereignty Heracles (‘glory of Hera’) protected against the encroachments of her Achaean enemy Perseus (‘ destroyer’). The Achaeans eventually triumphed, and their descendants claimed Heracles as a member of the usurping House of Perseus. Hera’s detestation of Heracles is likely to be a later invention; he was worshipped by the Dorians who overran Elis and there humbled the power of Hera. 2. Diodorus Siculus (iii. 73) writes of three heroes named Heracles: an Egyptian; a Cretan Dactyl; and the son of Alcmene. Cicero raises this number to six (On the Nature of the Gods iii. 16); Varro to forty-four (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v’tii. 564). Herodotus (ii. 42) says that when he asked for Heracles’s original home, the Egyptians referred him to Phoenicia. According to Diodorus Siculus (i. 17 and 24; iii. 73), the Egyptian Heracles, called Som, or Chon, lived ten thousand years before the Trojan War, and his Greek namesake inherited his exploits. The story of Heracles is, indeed, a peg on which a great number of related, unrelated, and contradictory myths have been hung. In the main, however, he represents the typical sacred king of early Hellenic Greece, consort of a tribal nymph, the Moon-goddess incarnate; his twin Iphiclcs acted as his tanist. This Moon-goddess has scores of names: Hera, Athene, Auge, Iole, Hebe, and so forth. On an early Roman bronze mirror Juppiter is shown celebrating a sacred marriage between ‘Hercele’ and ‘Juno’; moreover, at Roman weddings the kuot in the bride’s girdle consecrated to Juno was called the ‘Herculean knot’, and the bridegroom had to untie it (Festus: 63). The Romans derived this tradition from the Etruscans, whose Juno was named ‘ Unial’. It may be assumed that the central story of Heracles was an early variant of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epicwhich reached Greece by way of Phoenicia. Gilgamesh has Enkidu for his beloved comrade, Heracles has Iolaus. Gilgamesh is undone by his love for the goddess Ishtar, Heracles by his love for Deianeira. Both are of divine parentage. Both harrow Hell. Both kill lions and overcome divine bulls; and when sailing to the Western Isle Heracles, like Gilgamesh, uses his garment for a sail (see 132. c). Heracles finds the magic herb ośimmortality (see 35—b) as Gilgamesh does, and is similarly connected with the progress of the sun around the Zodiac.
$. Zeus is made to impersonate Amphitryon because when the sacred king underwent a rebirth at his coronation, he became titularly a son of Zeus, and disclaimed his mortal parentage (see 74. ~). Yet custom required the mortal tanist—rather than the divinely-born king, the elder of the twins—to lead military expeditions; and the reversal of this rule in Heracles’s case suggests that he was once the tanist, and Iphicles the sacred king. Theocritus certainly makes Heracles the younger of the twins, and Herodotus (ii. 43), who calls him a son of Amphitryon, surnames him ‘ Alcides’—after his grandfather Alcaeus, not’ Cronides’ after his grandfather Cronus. Moreover, when Iphicles married Creon’s youngest daughter, Heracles married an elder one; although in matrilinear society the youngest was commonly the heiress, as appears in all European folktales. According to Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles (89 if.), Iphicles humbled himself shamefully before Eurystheus; but the circumstances, which might throw light on this change of roles between the twins, are not explained. No such comradeship as existed between Castor and Polydeuces, or Idas and Lynceus, is.recorded between Heracles and Iphicles. Heracles usurps his twin’s functions and prerogatives, leaving him an ineffective and spiritless shadow who soon fades away, unmourned. Perhaps at Tiryns, the tanist usurped all the royal power, as sometimes happens in Asiatic states where a religious king rules jointly with a warking, or Shogun. 4. Hera’s method of delaying childbirth is still used by Nigerian witches; the more enlightened now reinforce the charm by concealing imported padlocks beneath their clothes.
5. The observation that weasels, if disturbed, carry their young from place to place in their mouths, like cats, gave rise to the legend of their viviparous birth. Apuleius’s account of the horrid performance of Thessalian witches disguised as weasels, Hecate’s attendants, and Pausanias’s mention of human sacrifices offered to the Teumessiau Vixen (see 89. h), recall Cerdo (‘weasel’ or ‘vixen’), wife of Phoroneus, who is said to have introduced Hera’s worship into the Peloponnese (sce 57—a). The Theban cult of Galinthias is a relic of primitive Hera-worship, and when the witches delayed Heracles’s birth they will have been disguised as weasels. This myth is more than usually confused; though it appears that Zeus’s Olympianism was resented by conservative religious opinion in Thebes and Argolis, and that the witches made a concerted attack on the House of Perseus.
6. To judge from Ovid’s remark about the Te~eh Sign, and from the story of the Erymanthian Boar, which presents Heracles as the Child Horus, he shared a midwinter birthday with Zeus, Apollo, and other calendar gods. The Theban year began at midwinter. If, as Theocritus says, Heracles wa~ ten months old at the close of the twelfth, then Alcmene bore trim at the spring equinox, when the Italians, Babylonians, and others, celebrated New Year. No wonder that Zeus is said to have illumined the birth chamber. The fourth day of the month will have been dedicated to Heracles because every fourth year was his, as founder of the Olympic Games.
ALCMENE, fearing Hera’s jealousy, exposed her newly-born child in a field outside the walls of Thcbes; and here, at Zeus’s instigation, Athene took Hera for a casual stroll. ‘~,ook, my dear! What a wonderfully robust child!’ said Athene, pretending surprise as she stopped to pick him up. ‘His mother must have been out of her mind to abandon him in a stony fidd! Come, you have milk. Give the poor litde creature suck!’ Thoughdessly Hera took him and bared her breast, at which Heracles drew with such force that she flung him down in pain, and a spurt of milk flew across the sky and became the Milky Way. ‘The young monster!’ Hera cr~ed. But Heracles was now immortal, and Athene returned him to Alcmene with a smile, telling her to guard and rear him well. The Thebans still show the place where this trick was played on Hera; it is called ‘The Plain of Heracles’.1
b. Some, however, say that Hermes carried the infant Heracles to Olympus; that Zeus himself laid him at Hera’s breast while she slept; and that the Milky Way was formed when she awoke and pushed him away, or when he greedily sucked more milk than his mouth would hold, and coughed it up. At all events, Hera was Heracles’s fostermother, if only for a short while; and the Thebans therefore style him her son, and say that he had been Alcaeus before she gave him suck, but was renamed in her honour.2
c. One evening, when Heracles had reached the age of eight or ten mond~s or, as others say, one year, and was still unweaned, Alcmene having washed and suckled her twins, laid them to rest under a lambfleece coverlet, on the broad brazen shield which Amphitryon had won from Pterelaus. At midnight, Hera sent two prodigious azure-scaled serpents to Amphitryon’s house, with strict orders to destroy Heracles. The gates opened as they approached; they ghded through, and over the marble floors to the nursery—their eyes shooting flames, and poison dripping from their fangs.3
d. The twins awoke, to see the serpents writhed above them, with darting, forked tongues; for Zeus again divinely illumined the &amber. Iphicles screamed, kicked off the coverlet and, in an attempt to escape, rolled from the shield to the floor. His frightened cries, and the strange light shining under the nursery door, roused Alcmene. ‘Up with you, Amphitryon!’ she cried. Without waiting to put on his sandals, ^mphitryoa leaped from the cedar-wood bed, seized his sword which hung close by on the wall, and drew it from its polished sheath. At that moment the light in the nursery went out. Shouting to his drowsy slaves for lamps and torches, Amphitryon rushed in; and Heracles, who had not uttered so much as a whimper, proudly displayed the serpents, which he was in the act of strangling, one in either hand. As they died, he laughed, bounced joyfully up and donna, and threw them at Amphitryon’s feet.
e. While Alcmene comforted the terror-striclren Iphicles, P~mphitryon spread the coverlet over Heracles again, and returned to bed. At dawn, when the cock had crowed three times, Alcmene summoned the aged Teiresias and told him of the prodigy. Teiresias, after foretelling Heracles’s future glories, advised her to strew a broad hearth with dry faggots of gorse, thorn and brambles, and burn the serpents upon them at midnight. In the morning, a maid-servant must collect their ashes, take them to the rock where the Sphinx had perched, scatter them to the winds, and run away without looking back. On her return, the palace must be purged with fumes of sulphur and salted spring water; and its roof crowned with wild olive. l:inally, a boar must be sacrif~ced at Zeus’s high altar. All this Alcmene did. But some hold that the serpents were harmless, and placed in the cradle by Amphitryon himself; he had wished to discover which of the twins was his son, and now he knew f.. When Heracles ceased to be a child, 3_rnphitryon taught him how to drive a chariot, and how to turn comers without grazing the goal. Castor gave him fencing lessons, instructed him in weapon drill, in cavalry and infantry tactics, and in the rudiments of strategy. One of Hermes’s sons became his boxing teacher—it was either Autolycus, or else Harpalycus, who had so grim a look when fighting that none dared face him. Eurytus taught him archery; or it may have been the Scythian Teutarus, one of Amphitryon’s herdsmen, or even Apollo.s But Heracles surpassed all archers ever born, even his companion Alcon, father of Phalerus the Argonaut, who could shoot through a succession of rings set on the helmets of soldiers standing in fde, and could cleave arrows held up on the points of swords or lances. Once, when Alcon’s son was attacked by a serpent, which wound its coils about him, Alcon shot with such skill as to wound it mortally without hurting the boy.6
g. Eumolpus taught Heracles how to sing and play the lyre; while Linus, son of the River-god Ismenius, introduced him to the study of literature. Once, when Eumolpus was absent, Linus gave the lyre lessons as well; but Heracles, refusing to change the principles in which he had been grounded by Eumolpus, and being beaten for his stubbornness, killed Linus with a blow of the lyre.* At his trial for murder, Heracles quoted a law of Rhadamanthys, which justif~ed forcible resistance to an aggressor, and thus secured his own acquittal. Nevertheless Amphitryon, fearing that the boy might commit further crimes of violence, sent him away to a cattle ranch, where he remained until his eighteenth year, outstripping his contemporaries in height, strength, and courage. Here he was chosen to be a laurel-bearer of Ismenian Apollo; and the Thebans still preserve the tripod which Amphitryon dedicated for him on this occasion. It is not known who taught Heracles astronomy and philosophy, yet he was learned in both these subjects.a
h. His height is usually given as four cubits. Since, however, he stepped out the Olympian stadium, making it six hundred feet long, and since later Greek stadia are also nominally six hundred feet long, but considerably shorter than the Olympic, the sage Pythagoras decided that the length of Heracles’s stride, and consequendy his stature, must have been in the same ratio to the stride and stature of other men, as the length of the Olympic stadium is to that of other stadia. This calculation made him four cubits and one foot high—yet some hold that he was not above average stature.0
i. Heracles’s eyes flashed fire, and he had an unerring aim, both with javelin and arrow. He ate sparingly at noon; for supper his favourite food was roast meat and Doric barley-cakes, of which he ate sufficient (‘fithat is credible) to have made a hired labouter grunt ‘enough!’ His ttmic was short-skirted and neat; and he preferred a night under the stars to one spent indoors.10 A profound knowledge of augury led him especially to welcome the appearance of vtdtures, whenever he was about to undertake a new Labour. ‘Vultures’, he would say, ‘are the most righteous of birds: they do not attack even the smallest living creature.’ i I
j. Heracles claimed never to have picked a quarrel, but always to have given aggressors the same treatment as they intended for him. One Tcrmerus used to kill travelJets by challenging them to a butting match; Heracles’s skull proved the stronger, and he crushed Termerus’s head as though it had been an egg. Heracles was, however, naturally courteous, and the first mortal who freely fielded the enemy their dead for burial.12
1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1327; Pausanias: ix. 25.2.
2. Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 44; Hyginus: Poetk Astronomy ii. 43; Ptolemy Hephaestionos, quoted by Photius p. 477; Diodorus Siculus: iv. Io.
3. Apollodorus: ii. 4—8; Theocrkus: Idylls xxiv; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes i. 43. 4. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 288; Theocritus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Nemean Odes i. 35 IT.; Pherecydes, quoted by Apollodoms:
ii. 4. 8.
5. Theocritus: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 56; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 14.
6. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues v. ~r; Valer/u~ Flaccus: i. 399 if.; Apollonius Rhoclius: i. 97; Hyginus: Fabula 14.
7. Pausanias: ix. 29. 3; Theocritus: toc. dr.; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 9; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 67.
8. Apollodorus: loc. dr.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. Io; Pausanias: ix. 4; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 865; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 745.
9. Apollodorus: ii. 4. 9; Plutarch, quoted by Aulus Gellius: i.
Herodotus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 662; Pindar: Isthmian Odes iv. 53. co. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Theocritus: Idyll xxiv; Plutarch: Roman Question$ 28.
i i. Plutarch: Roman Questions 93.
12. Plutarch: Theseus II and 29.
1. According to another account, the Milky Way was formed when Rhea forcibly weaned Zeus (see 7—b). Hera’s suckling of Heracles is a myth apparently based on the sacred king’s ritual rebirth from the queenmother (see ~45. $)2. An ancient icon on which the post-Homeric story of the strangled serpents is based, will have shown Heracles caressing them while they cleansed his ears with their tongues, as happened to Melampus (see 72. c), Teiresias (see ~05. g), Cassandra (see ~$8. ś), and probably the sons of Laoco~Sn (see ~67. $). Without this kindly attention he would have been unable to understand the language of vultures; and Hera, had she really wanted to kill Heracles, would have sent a Harpy to carry him off. The icon has been misread by Pindar, or his informant, as an allegory of the New Year Solar Child, who destroys the power of Winter, symbolized by the serpents. Alcmene’s sacrifice of a boar to Zeus is the ancient midwinter one, sullying in the Christmas boar’s head of Old England. Wild olive in Greece, like birch in Italy and North-western Europe, was the New Year tree, symbol of inception, and used as a besom to expel evil spirits (see 53.7); Heracles had a wilcl-olive tree for his dub, and brought a sapling to Olympia from the land of the Hyperborea~ (see ~38. j). What Teiresias told Alcmene to light was the Candlemas bonf~re, still lighted on February 2nd in many parts of Europe: its object be’rag to burn away the old scrub and encourage young shoots to grow.
3. The cake-eating Dorian Heracles, as opposed to his cultured Aeolian and Achaean predecessors, was a simple cattle-king, endowed with the limited virtues of his condition, but making no pretensions to music, philosophy, or astronomy. In Classical times, the mythographers, remembering the principle of mens sana in corpore sano, forced a higher education upon him, and interpreted his murder of Linus as a protest against tyranny, rather than against effeminacy. Yet he remained an embodiment of physical, not mental, health; except among the Celts (see ~32. $), who honoured him as the patron of letters and all the bardie arts. They followed the tradition that Heracles, the ldaean Dactyl whom they called Ogmius, represented the first consonant of the Hyperborean treealphabet, ‘Birch or Wild Olive (see 52. $ and ~25. ~), and that ‘on a switch of birch was cut the first message ever sent, namely Birch seven times repeated’ (White Goddess p. ~2~).
4. Alcon’s feat of shoot’rag the serpent suggests an archery trial like that described in the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum: when the candidate for initiation into the archers’ guild was required to shoot at an object placed on his own son’s cap—either an apple or a silver penny. The brothers of Laodameia, competing for the sacred kingship (see 163. n), were asked to shoot through a ring placed on a child’s breast; but this myth must be misreported, since child-murder was not theix object. It seems that the original task of a candidate for kingship had been to shoot through the coil of a golden serpent, symbolizing immortality, set on a head-dress worn by a royal child; and that in some tribes this custom was changed to the cleaving of an apple, and in others to the shooting between the recurred blades of a double axe, or through the crest-ring of a helmet; but later, as marksmanship improved, through either a row of hehnetfrogs, the test set Alcon; or a row of axe-blades, the test set Odysseus (see 171. h). Robin Hood’s merry men, like the German archers, shot at silver pennies, because these were marked with a cross; the archer-guilds being defiantly anti-Christian.
5. Greek and Roman archers drew the bow-string back to the chest, as children shoot, and their effective range was so short that the javelin remained the chief missile weapon of the Roman armies until the sixth century A.D., when Belisarius armed his cataphracts with heavy bows, and taught them to draw the string back to the ear, in Scythian fashion. Heracles’s accurate marksmanship is therefore accounted for by the legend that his tutor was Teutarus the Scythian—the name is apparently formed from teutaein,’ to practise assiduously’, which the ordinary Greek archer does not seem to have done. It may be because of the Scythians’ ~outstanding skill with the bow that they were described as Herades’s .descendants: and he was said to have bequeathed a bow to Scythes, the ,only one of his sons who could bend it as he did (see 13~.
~N his eighteenth year, Heracles left the cattle ranch and set out to destroy the lion of Cithaeron, which was havocking the herds of Amphitryon and his neighbout, King Thespius, also called Thestius, the Athenian Erechtheid. The lion had another lair on Mount Helicon, atthe foot of which stands the city of Thespiae. Helicon has always been a gay mountain: the Thespians celebrate an ancient festival on its summit in honour of the Muses, and play amorous games at its foot around the statue of Eros, their patron.1
b. King Thespius had fifty daughters by his wife Megamede, daughter of Arneus, as gay as any in Thespiae. ~earing that they might make unsuitable matches, he determined that every one of them should have a child by Heracles, who was now engaged all day in hunting the lion; for Heracles lodged at Thespiae for fifty nights running. ‘You may have my eldest daughter Procris as your bed-fellow,’ Th›spius told him hospitably. But each night another of hi~ daughters visited Heracles, until he had lain with every one. Some say, however, that he enjoyed them all in a single night, except one, who declined his embraces and remained a virgin until her death, serving as his priestess in the shrine at Thespiae: for to this day the Thespian priestess is required to be chaste. But hc had begotten fifty-one sons on her sisters: Procris, the eldest, bearing him the twins Antileon and I-Iippeus; and the youngest sister, another pair.2
c. Having at last tracked down the lion, and de~patched it with an untrimmed club cut from a wild-olive tree which he uprooted on Helicon, Heracles dressed himself in its pelt and wore the gaping jaws for a helmet. Some however say that he wore the pelt of the Nemean Lion; or of yet another beast, which he killed at Teumessus near Thebes; and that it was Alcathous who accounted for the lion of Cithaeron.3
x. Apollodorus: ii. 4. 8-9; Pausanias: ix. 26. 4; 27. I and 31. x; Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idyll x’~ii. 6.
a. Apollodorus: ii. 4—xo and 7. 8; Pausanias: ix. 27. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 29; Scholiast on Hesiod’s Theogony 56.
3. Theocritus: Idyll xxv; Apollodorus: ii. 4. xo; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ix; Lactantius on Statit~’s Thebald: i. 355-485; Pausanias: i. 41.4.
1. Thespius’s fifty daughters—like the fifty Danaids, Pallantids, and Nereids, or the fifty maidens with whom the Celdc god Bran (Phoroneus) lay in a single night—must have been a college of priestesses serving the Moon-goddess, to whom the lion-pelted sacred king had access once a year during their erotic orgies around the stone phallus called Eros (‘ erotic desire’). Their number corresponded with the lunations which fell between one Olympic Festival and the next. ‘Thestius’ is perhaps a masculinizafion of thea he~tia, ‘the goddess Hestia’; but Thespius (‘div’mely sounding’) is not an impossible name, the Chief-p~iestess having an or-acular function.
2. Hyginus (Fabula 262) mentiom only twelve Thespiads, perhaps because this was the number of Latin Vestals who guarded the phallic Palladium and who seem to have celebrated a similar armual orgy on the Alban Hill, under the early Roman monarchy. Both the youngest and the eldest of Thespius’s daughters bore Heracles twins: namely, a sacred king and his tanist. The mythographers are confused here, trying to reconcile the earlier tradition that Heracles married the youngest daughter—matrilineal ultimogeniture—with the pattilineal rights of primogeniture. Heracles, in Classical legend, is a pattilineal figure; with the doubtful exception of Macaria (see 146. b), he begets no daughters at all. His virgin-priestess at Thespiae, like Apollo’s Pythoness at Delphi, theoretically became his bride when the prophetic power overcame her, and could therefore be enjoyed by no mortal husband.
4. Pausanias, dissatisf~ed with the myth, writes that Heracles could neither have disgraced his host by this wholesale seduction of the Thespiacls, nor dedicated a temple to himself—as though he were a god—so early in his career; and consequently refuses to identify the King of Thespiae with the Thespiads’ father.
The killing of a lion was one of the marriage tasks imposed on the candidate for kingship (see 123. I).
5. Heracles cut his club from the wild-olive, the tree of the f~rst month, traditionally used for the expulsion of evil spirits (see 52. $; 89. 7; 119.2, etc.).
S o~ years before these events, during Poseidon’s festival at Onchestus, a trifling haddent vexed the Thebans, whereupon Menoeceus’s charioteer flung a stone which mortally wounded the Minyan King Clymenus. Clymenus was carried back, dying, to Orchomenus where, with his last breath, he charged his sons to avenge him. The eldest of these, Erginus, whose mother was the Boeotian princess Budeia, or Buzyge, mustered an army, marched against the Thebans, and utterly defeated them. By the terms of a treaty then confirmed with oaths, the Thebans would pay Erginus an annual tribute of one hundred cattle for twenty years in requital for Clymenus’s death.I
b. Heracles, on his return from Helicon, fell in with the Minyan heralds as they went to collect the Theban tribute. When he enquired their business, they replied scornfully that they had come once more to remind the Thebans of Erginus’s clemency in not lopping off the ears, nose, and hands of every man in the city. ‘Does Erginus indeed hanker for such tribute?’ Heracles asked angrily. Then he maimed the heralds in the very manner that they had described, and sent them back to Orchomenus, with their bloody extremities tied on cords about their necks.2
c. When Erginus instructed K’mg Creon at Thebes to surrender the author of this outrage, he was willing enough to obey, because the Minyans had disarmed Thebes; nor could he hope for the friendly intervention of any neighhour, in so bad a cause. Yet Heracles persuaded his youthful comrades to strike a blow for śrcedom. Making a round of the city temples, he tore down all the shields, helmets, breastplates, greaves, swords, and spears, which had been dedicated there as spoils; and Athene, greatly admiring such resolution, girded these on him and on his friends. Thus Heracles armed every Theban of fighting age, taught them the use of their weapons, and himself assumed command. An oracle promised him victory if the noblest-horn person in Thebes would take his own life. All eyes turned expecta.ndy towards Antipoenus, a descendant of the Sown Men; but, when he grudged dying for the common good, his daughters Anctrocleia and Alcis gladly did so in his stead, and were afterwards hououred as heroines in the Temple of Famous Artemis.a
d. Presently, the Minyans marched against Thebes, but Heracles ambushed them in a narrow pass, killing Erginus and the greater number of his captains. This victory, won almost single-handed, he exploited by making a sudden descent on Orchomen, us, where he battered down the gates, sacked the palace, and compelled the Minyan$ to pay a double tribute to Thebes. Heracles had also blocked up the two large tunnels built by the Minyam of old, through which the fiver Cephissus emptied into the sea; thu~ flooding the rich cornlands of the Copaic Plain.4 His object was to immobilize the cavalry of the Minyans, their most formidable arm, and carry war into the hills, where he could meet them on equal terms; but, being a friend of all mankind, he later unblocked these tunnels. The shrine of Heracles the Horsebinder at Thebes commemorates an incident in this camp0ign: Heracles came by night into the Minyan camp and, after stealing the chariot horses, which he bound to trees a long way off, put the sleeping men to the sword. Unfortunately, Amphitryon, his foster-father, was killed in the fighting. S
e. On his return to Thebes, Heracles dedicated an altar to Zeus the Preserver; a stone ton to Famous Artemis; and two stone images to Athene the Girder-on-of-Arms. Since the gods had not pun/shed Heracles for his ill-treatment of Erginus’s heralds, the Thebans dared to honour him with a statue, called Heracles the Nose-docker.6
fi According to another account, Erginus survived the Minyan clefeat and was one of’ the Argonauts who brought back the Golden Fleece from Colchis. After many years spent in recovering his former prosperity, he found himself rich indeed, but old and childless. An oracle advising him to put a new shoe on the battered plough coulter, he married a young wife, who bore him Trophonius and Againeries, the renowned architects, and Azeus too.7
1. ApollSdorus: ii. 4. xx; Pausanias: ix. 37—x-2; Eustathius on Homer p. ~076; Schohast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. ~85.
2. Diodorus Siculus: iv. Io.
3. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: ii. 4—I~; Pausanias: ix. 17. I.
4. Euripides: Heracles 220; Diodorus Siculus:/0c. tit.; Pausanias: ix. 38.5; Strabo: ix. I~. 40.
5. Polyaenus: i. 3.5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~8.7; Pausanias: ix. 26. ~; Apollodorus: ii. 4. II.
6. Euripides: Heracles 48-59; Pausanias: ix. 17. ~-2 and 25.4.
7. Pausanias: ix. 37. 2-3 and 25. 4; Eustathius on Homer p. 272. i. Heracles’s treatment of the Minyan heralds is so v’fie—a herald’s person being tmiversally held sacrosanct, with whatever insolence he might behave—that he must here represent the Dorian conquerors of I050 13.c., who disregarded all civilized conventions.
2. According to Strabo (ix. 2. 18), certain natural limestone cha~mels which drained the waters of the Cephissus were sometimes blocked and at other times freed by earthquakes; but eventually the whole Copsic Plain became a marsh, despite the two huge tunnels which had been cut by the Bronze Age Minyans—Minoanized Pelasgians—to make the natural channels more effective. Sir James Frazer, who visited the Plain about fifty years ago, found that three of the channels had been artificially blocked with stones in ancient times, perhaps by the Thebans who destroyed Orchomenus in 368 ILc., put all the male inhabitants to the sword, and sold the women into slavery (Pausanias: ix. 15.3). Recently a British company has drained the marshland and restored the plain to agriculture. 3. When the city of Thebes was in danger (see 105. i and ~ot. j), the Theban Oracle frequently demanded a royalpharmacos; but only in a fully patriarchal society would Androcleia and Alcis have leaped to death. Their names, like those oś Erechtheus’s daughters, said to have been sacrificed in the same way (see 47. d), seem to be titles ośDemeter and Persephone, who demanded male sacrifices. It looks as if two priestesses ‘paid the penalty instead oś’ the sacred king—thereaśter renamed Antipoenus—who reśused to śollow Menoeceus’s example. h~ this sense the Sphinx leaped from the cliff and dashed herself to pieces (see ~05.6). 4—’Heracles the Horse-binder’ may refer to his capture of Diomedes’s wild mares, and all that this feat implied (see 130. 1).
5. Athene Girder-on-of-Arms was the earlier Athene, who distributed arms to her chosen sons; in Celtic and German myths, the giving of arms is a matriarchal prerogative, properly exercised at a sacred marriage (see 95—5).
H~aACL~S’S defeat of the Minyans made him the most famous of’
heroes; and his reward was to marry King Creon’s eldest daughter Megara, or Megera, and be appointed protector of the city; while Iphicles married the youngest daughter. Some say that Heracles had two sons by Megara; others that he had three, four, or even eight. They are known as the Alcaids.1
b. Heracles next vanquished Pyraechrnus, King of the Euboeans, an ally of the Minyans, when he marched against Thebes; and created terror throughout Greece by ordering his body to be torn in two by colts and exposed unburied beside the river Heracleius, at a place called the Colts of Pyraechmus, which gives out a neighhag echo whenever horses drink there.2
c. Hera, vexed by Heracles’s excesses, drove him mad. He first attacked his beloved nephew Iolaus, Iphicles’s eldest son, who managed to escape his wild lunges; and then, mistaking six of his own children for enemies, shot them down, and flung their booties into a fire, together with two other sons of Iphicles, by whose side they were performing martial exercises. The Thebans celebrate an annual festival in honour of these eight mail-clad victims. On the first day, sacrifices are offered and fires bum all night; on the second, funeral games are held and the winner is crowned with white myrfie. The celebrants grieve in memory of the brilliant futures that had been planned for Herades’s sons. One was to have ruled Argos, occupying Eurystheus’s palace, and Heracles had thrown his lion pelt over his shoulders; another was to have been king of Thebes, and in his right hand Heracles had set the mace of defence, Daedalus’s deceitful gift; a third was promised Oechalia, which Heracles afterwards laid waste; and the choicest brides had been chosen for them all—alliances with Athens, Thebes, and Sparta. So dearly did Heracles love these sons that many deny now his guilt, preferring to believe that they were treacherously slain by his guests: by Lycus, perhaps, or as Socrates has suggested, by Augeias.a
d. When Heracles recovered his sanity, he shut himself up in a dark chamber for some days, avoiding all human intercourse and then, after purification by King Thespius, went to Delphi, to enquire what he should do. The Pythoness, addressing him for the first time as Heracles, rather than Palaemon, advised him to reside at Tiryns; to serve Eurystheus for twelve years; and to perform whatever Labours might be set him, in payment for which he would be rewarded with immortality. At this, Heracles felt into deep despair, loathing to serve a man whom he knew to be far inferior to himself, yet afraid to oppose his father Zeus. Many friends came to solace him in his distress; and, finally, when the passage of time’had somewhat alleviated his pain, he placed himself at Eurystheus’s disposal.1
e. Some, however, hold that it was not until his return from Tartarus that Heracles went mad and killed the children; that he killed Megara too; and that the Pythoness then told him: ‘You shall no longer be called Palaemon! Phoebus Apollo names you Heracles, since from Hera you shall have undying fame among men!’—as though he had done Hera a great service. Others say that Heracles was Eurystheus’s lover, and performed the Twelve Labours for his gratification; others again, that he undertook to perform them only if Eurystheus would annul the sentence of banishment passed on Amphitryon. S
f. It has been said that when Heracles ~et forth on his Labours, Hermes gave him a sword, Apollo a bow and smooth-shafted arrows, leathered with eagle feathers; Hephaestus a golden breast-plate; and Athene a robe. Or that Athene gave him the breast-plate, but Hephaestus bronze greaves and an adamantine helmet. Athene and Hephaestus, it is added, vied with one another throughout in benefiting Heracles: she gave him enjoyment of peaceful pleasures; he, protection from the dangers of war. The gift of Poseidon was a team of horses; that of Zeus, a magnificent and unbreakable shield. Many were the stories worked on this shield in enamel, ivory, electrum, gold, and lapis lazuli; moreover, twelve serpents’ heads carved about the boss dashed their jaws whenever Heracles went into battle, and terr’ff~ed his opponents.6 The truth, however, is that Heracles scorned armour and, aft~r his first Labour, seldom carried even a spear, relying rather on his dub, bow and arrows. He had little use for the bronze-tipped club which Hephaestus gave him, preferring to cut his own from wild-olive: first on Helicon, next at Nemea. This second dub he later replaced with a third, also cut from wild-olive, by the shores of the Saron’lC Sea: the club which, on his visit to Troezen, he leaned against the image of Hermes. It struck root, sprouted, and is now a stately tree.7
g. His nephew Iolaus shared in the Labours as his charioteer, or shield-bearer?
1. Scholiast on Pindar’s śsthm~an Odes iv. ~ ~4 and 61; Apollodorm: ii. 4—~~; Diodorus Siculus: iv. Io; Hyginus: Fabula 3~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 38.
2. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 7.
3. Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~~; Apollodorus: il. 4—12; Pindar: Ioe. cit.; Euripides: Heracles 462 if.; Lysimachus, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Isthmian Odes iv. ~44. Diodorus Siculus: iv. xo-~; Apollodorus: loc. ›it. 5—Euripides: Heracles ~ if. and ~ooo if.; Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 38 and 662-3; Diotimus: Heraclea, quoted by Athenaeus: xiii. 8.
6. Apollodorus: ii. 4—~; Hesiod: Shield of Heracles ~22 if., ~4~ if., ~6~ if., and 3~8-~9; Pausanias: v. 8.
7. Euripides: Heracles x $9 ff.;Apollonius Rhoclius: i. ~96; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~4; Theocritus: Idyll xxv; Apollodorus: ii. 4. xx; Pausanias: ii. 3~—~3.
8. Plutarch: On Love 17; Pausauias: v. 8. ~ and ~7. 4; Euripides: Children of Heracles
1. Madness was the Classical Greek excuse for child-sacrifice (see 27. e and 70. g); the truth be’rag that the sacred king’s boy-surrogates (see 8~. 8; and ~56. ~) were burned alive after he had lain hidden for twenty four hours in a tomb, shamming death, and then reappeared to claim the throne once more.
1. The death of Pyraechmus, torn in two by wild horses, is a familiar one (see 7~. ~). Herades’s title Palaemon identifies him with Melicertes of Corinth, who was deified under that name; Melicertes is Melkarth, the Lord of the City, the Tyrian Heracles. The eight Alcaids seem to have been members of a sword-dancing team whose performance, like that of the eight morris-dancers in the English Christmas Play, ended in the victim’s resurrection. Myrtle was the tree of the thirteenth twenty-eighto day month, and symbolized departure; wild-olive, the tree of the first month, symbolized inception (see I~9. 2). Electryon’s eight sons (see ~18. a), may have formed a similar team at Mycenae.
3. Herades’s homosexual re/ations with Hylas, Iolaus, and Eurystheus, and the accounts of his lus~urious armour, are meant to justify Theban military custom. In the original myth, he will have loved Eurystheus’s daughter, .not Eurystheus himself. His twdve Labours, Servius points out, were eventually equated with the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac; although Homer and Hesiod do not say that there were twelve of them, nor does the sequence of Labours correspond with that of the Signs. Like the Celtic God of the Year, celebrated in the Irish Song of.Amergin, the Pelasgian Heracles seems to have made a progress through a thirteenmonth year. In Irish and Welsh myth the successive emblems were: stag, or bull; flood; wind; dewdrop; hawk; flower; bonfire; spear; salmon; hill; boar; breaker; sea-serpent. But Gilgamesh’s adventures in the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic are related to the signs of the Zodiac, and the Tyrian Heracles had much in common with him. Despite Homer and Hesiod, the scenes pictured on ancient shields seem not to have been dazzling works of art, but rough pictograms, indicative of the owner’s origin and rank, scratched on the spiral band which plated each shield. 4—The occasion on which the twelve Olympians heaped gifts on Herades was doubtless his sacred marriage, and they will have all been presented to him by his priestess-bride—Athene, Auge, Iole, or whatever her name happened to be—either directly, or by the hands of attendants (see 81. 1). Here Heracles was being armed for his Labours, that is to say, for his ritual combats and magical feats.
Tug First Labour which Eurystheus imposed on Heracles, when he came to reside at Tiryns, was to kill and flay the Nemean, or Cleonaean lion, a enormous beast with a pelt proof against iron, bronze, andn stone.I
b. Although some call this lion the offspring of Typhon, or of the Chimaera and the Dog Orthrus, others say that Selene bore it with a fearful shudder and dropped it to earth on Mount Tretus near Nemea, beside a two-mouthed cave; and that, in punishment for an Unśulfilled sacrifice, she set it to prey upon her own people, the chief sufferers being the Bambinaeaus.2
c. Still others say that, at Hera’s desire, Selene created the lion from sea foam enclosed in alarge ark; and that Iris, binding it with her girdle, carried it to the Nemean mountains. These were named after a daughter of Asopus, or of Zeus and Selene; and the lion’s cave is still shown about two miles from the city of Nemea.a
d. Arriving at Cleonae, between Corinth and Argos, Heracles lodged in the house ofa day-labourer, or shepherd, named Molorchus, whose son the lion had killed. When Molorchus was about to offer a ram in propitiation of Hera, Heracles restrained him. ‘Wait thirty days,’ he said. ‘IfI return safely, sacrifice to Saviour Zeus; ifI do not, sacrifice to me as a hero?
e. Heracles reached Nemea at midday, but since the lion had depopulated the neighbourhood, he found no one to direct him; nor were any tracks to be seen. Having first searched Mount Apesas—so called after Apesantus, a shepherd whom the lion had killed; though some say that Apesantus was a son of Acrisius, who died of a snake-bite in his heelHeracles visited Mount Tretus, and presently descried the lion coming back to its lair, bespattered with blood from the day’s slaughter.4 He shot a flight of arrows at it, but they rebounded harmlessly from the thick pelt, and the lion licked its chops, yawning. Next, he used his sword, which bent as though made of lead; finally he heaved up his club and dealt the lion such a blow on the muzzle that it entered its double-mouthed cave, shaldng its head—not for pain, however, but because of the singing in its ears. Heracles, with a rueful glance at his shattered dub, then netted one entrance of the cave, and went in by the other. Aware now that the monster was proof against all weapons, he began to wresde with it. The lion bit off one of his fingers; but, holding its head in chancery, Heracles squeezed hard until it choked to death.s f Carrying the carcass on his shoulders, Heracles returned to Cleonae, where he arrived on the thirtieth day, and found Molorchus on the point of offering him a heroic sacrifice; instead, they sacrificed together to Saylout Zeus. When this had been done, Heracles cut himself a new dub and, after making several alterations in the Nemean Games hitherto celebrated in honour of Opheltes, and rededicating them to Zeus, took the lion’s carcass to Mycenae. Eurystheus, amazed and terrif~ed, forbade him ever again to enter the city; in future he was to display the fruits of his Labours outside the gates.6
g. For a while, Heracles was at a loss how to flay the lion, until by divine inspiration, he thought of employing its own razor-sharp claws, and soon could wear the invulnerable pelt as armour, arid the head as a helmet. Meanwhile, Eurystheus ordered his smiths to forge him a brazen urn, which he buried beneath the earth. Henceforth, whenever the approach of Heracles was signalled, he took refuge in it and sent his orders by a herald—a son of Pelops, named Copreus, whom he had purif~ed for murder.?
h. The honours received by Heracles from the city of Nemea in recognit~on of this feat, he later ceded to his devoted allies of Cteonae, who fought at his side in the EleanWar, and fell to the number of three hundred and sixty. As for Molorchus, he fotmded the near-by city of Molorchia, and planted the Nemean Wood, where the Nemean Games are now held.8
i. Heracles was not the only man to strangle a lion in those days. The same feat was accomplished by his friend Phylius as the first of three love-tasks imposed on kim by Cyenus, a son of Apollo by Hyria.
Phylius had also to catch alive several monstrous man-eating birds, not unlike vultures, and after wrestling with a fierce bull, lead it to the altar of Zeus. When all three tasks had been accomplished, Cycnus further demanded an ox which Phylius had won as a prize at certain funeral games. Heracles advised Phylius to refuse this and press for a settlement of his claim with Cycnus who, in desperation, leaped into a lake; thereafter called the-Cyenean lake. His mother Hyria followed him to his death, and both were transformed into swans.*
L Apollodorus: ii. 5—x; Valerius Flaccus: i. 34; Diodorus Siculus: iv. II.
1. Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Hesiod: Theogony 326 if.; Epimenides: Fragment 5, quoted by Aelian: Nature of Animals xii. 7; Plutarch: On the Face Appearing in the Orb of the Moon 24; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 295; Hyginus: Fabula 30; Theocritus: Idyll xxv. zoo if. 3. Demodocus: History of Heracles i, quoted by Plutarch: On Rivers ~8; Pausanias: ii. rS. :~-3; Scholiast on the Hypothesis of Pindar’s Nemean Odes.
4. Strabo: viii. 6. 19; Apollodorus: ii. 5—x; Scrvius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 19; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebald iv. 16~; Plutarch: loc. ›it.; Theocritus: Idyll xx’v. z~x if.
5.
z~3. ~—z~3. ú Bacchylides: xiii. 53; Theocritus: Ioc. clt.; Ptolemy Hepl tionos: ii., quoted by Photius p. 474; Apollodoras: lot. cit.;~ donas Siculus: iv. xx; Euripides: Heracles 153.
6. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit. and ii. 4. 11; Scholiast on the Hypothe: Pindar’s Nemean Odes.
7. Theocritus: Idyll xxv. a72 ff’; Diodřrm Siculus: iv. II;Eurip Heracles 359 if-; Apollodorm: Ioc. cit.
8. Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5; Stephanus of Byzantium sub M~
chia; Virgil: Georgics iii. 19; Servius: ad Io›.
9. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 12; Ovid: Metamorś vii. 371 ff~r
1. The sacred king’s ritual combat with wild beasts formed a re~ part of the coronation ritual in Greece, Asia Minor, Babylonia, Syria; each beast representing one season of the year. Their nu~ varied with the calendar: in a three-seasoned year, they consisted, lik Chimaera, ofliou, goat, and serpent (see 75. ~)—hence the statement the lion of Cithaeron was the Chimaera’s child by Orthrus the Dog (see 34. 3); or of bull, lion, and serpent, which were Dionysus’s seas changes (see 27.4), according to Euripides’s Bacchae; or of lion, horse dog, like Hecate’s heads (see 31.7)—But in a four-seasoned year, they have been bull, ram, lion, and serpent, like the heads of Phanes (see described in Orśhic Fragment 63; or bull, lion, eagle, and seraph, ~ Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel i); or, more simply, ball, lion, scorpion, water-snake, the four Signs of the Zodiac which once fell at tlie equin and solstices. These last four appear, from the First, Fourth, Seventh, Eleventh Labours, to be the beasts which Heracles fought; thoug~ boar has displaced the scorpion—the scorpion being retained only is story of Orion, another Heracles, who was offered a princess in man if he killed certain wild beasts (see 41. a-d). The same situation recu the story of Cycnus and Pliylius—with its unusual substitution ofvull for the serpent—though Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis have given homosexual twist. Theoretically, by taming these beasts, the king rained dominion over the seasons of the year ruled by them. At Th~ Heracles’s native city, the Sphinx-goddess ruled a two-seasoned ~ she was a winged lioness with a serpent’s tail (see I05..1); hence wore a lion pelt and mask, rather than a bull-mask like Minos
98. ~). The lion was shown with the other calendar beasts in the r moon ark, an icon which, it seems, gave rise both to the story of lX and the Flood, and to that of Dionysus and the pirates (see 27. $); h~ Selene (‘ the Moon’) is said to have created it.
2. Photius denies that Heracles lost his finger in fighting the I Ptolemy Hephaestionos says (Nora Historia ii), that he was poisoned . But it is more probable that he bit it off to placate the ghosts of his children—as Orestes did when pursued by his mother’s Erinnyes. Another two-mouthed cave is mentioned incidentally in Odyssey/xiii. ~03 if., as one near which Odysseus first slept on his return to Ithaca at the head of the Bay of Phorcys. Its northern entrance was for men, the southern for gods; and it contained two-handled jars used as hives, stone basins, and plentiful spring-water. There were also stone looms—stalactites?—on which the Naiads wove purple garments. If Porphyry (On the Care of the Nymphs) was right in making this a cave where rites of death and divine rebirth were practised, the basins served for blood and the springs for lustration. The jars would then be burial urns over which souls hovered like bees (see 90. 3), and the Naiads (daughters of the Death-god Phorcys, or Orcus) would be Fates weaving garments with royal clan-marks for the reborn to wear (see ~o. ~). The Nemean Lion’s cave is two-mouthed because this First Labour initiated Heracles’s passage towards his ritual death, after which he becomes immortal and marries the goddess Hebe.
3. The death ofthree hundred and sixty Cleonaeans suggests a calendar mystery—this being the number of days in the sacred Egyptian year, exclusive of the five set apart in honour of Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Set, and Horus. Heracles’s modifications of the Nemean Games may have involred a change in the local calendar. 4. If the King of Mycenae, like Orion’s enemy Oenopion of Hyria (see 41. c), took refuge in a bronze urn underground and emerged only after the danger had passed, he will have made an annual pretence at dying, while his surrogate reigned for a day, and then reappeared. Heracles’s children were among such surrogates (see ~22.1).
5. Apesantus was one of several early heroes bitten in the heel by a viper (see 177. ~). He may be identif~ed with Opheltes (see ~06. g) of Nemea, though what part of Opheltes’s body the serpent bit is not related.
Ti~E Second Labour ordered by Eurystheus was the destruction of the Lernaean Hydra, a monster born to Typhon and Echidne, and reared by Hera as a menace to Herades.1
b. Lerna stands beside the sea, some five miles from the city of Argos. To the west rises Mount Pontinus, with its sacred grove of plane-trees stretching down to the sea. In this grove, bounded on one flank by the river Pontinus—beside which Danaus dedicated a shrine to Atheneand on the other by the river Amymone, stand image~ of Demeter, Dionysus the Saviour, and Prosyme, one of Hera’s nurses; and, on the shore, a stone image of Aphrodite, dedicated by the Danaids. Every year, secret nocturnal fites are held at Lerna in honour of Dionysus, who descended to Tartarus at this point when he went to fetch Semele; and, not far off, the Mysteries of Lernaean Demeter are celebrated in an enclosure which marks the place where Hades and Persephone also descended to Tartarus.2
c. This fertile and holy district was once terrorized by the Hydra, which had its lair beneath a plane-tree at the sevenfold source of the river Amymone and haunted the unfathomable Lernaean swamp near by—the Emperor Nero recently tried to sound it, and failed—the grave of many an incautious traveller.3 The Hydra had a prodigious dog-like body, and eight or nine snaky heads, one of them immortal; but some credit it with fifty, or one hundred, or even ten thousand heads. At all events, it was so venomous that its very breath, or the smell of its tracks, could destroy life.4
d. Athene had pondered how Heracles might best kill this monster and, when he reached Lerna, driven there in his chariot by Iolaus, she pointed out the Hydra’s lair to him. On her advice, he forced the Hydra to emerge by pelting it with burning arrows, and then held his breath while he caught hold of it. But the monster twined around his feet, in an endearour to trip him up. In vain did he batter at its heads with his club: no sooner was one crushed, than two or three more grew in its place. S
e. An enormous crab scuttered from the swamp to aid the Hydra, and nipped Heracles’s foot; furiously crushing its shell, he shouted to Iolaus for assistance. Iolaus set one corner of the grove alight and then, to prevent the Hydra from sprouting new heads, seared their roots with blazing branches; thus the flow of blood was checked.6
f Now using a sword, or a golden falchion, Heracles severed the immortal head, part of which was of gold, and buried it, still hissing, under a heavy rock beside the road to Elaeus. The carcass he disembowelled, and dipped his arrows in the gall. Henceforth, the least wound from one of them was invariably fatal.
g. In reward for the crab’s services, Hera set its image among the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and Eurystheus would not cotrot this Labour as duly accomplished, because Iolaus had supplied the firebrands.? x. Hesiod: Theogony 3~3 iT..
2. Pausanias: ii. 37—~-3 and 5; ii. 36. 6-8.
5. Pausanias: ii. 37. 4; Apollodorus: ii. 5—2; Strabo: v’fii. 6. 8. 4. Euripides: Heracles 419-20; Zenobius: Proverbs vi. 26; Apollodorus: l*c. tit.; Simonides, quoted by scholiast on Hesiod’s Theogony p. 257, ed. Heinsius; Diodoms Siculus: iv. tx; Hyginus: Fabula 30.
$, Hesiod: Theogony 3~3 ft.; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Hyginus: foe. eit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 287.
6. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: foe. eit. and Poetic Astronornyii. 23; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~.
7. Euripides: Ion ~92; Hesiod: Theogony 313 if.; Apollodorus:
›it.; Alexander Myndius, quoted by Photius p. 475.
1. The Lernaean Hydra puzzled the Classical mythographers. Pausanias held that it might well have been a huge and venomous watersnake; but that’ Pisander had śrrst called it many-headed, wishing to make it seem more terrifying and, at the same time, add to the dignity of his own verses’ (Pausanias: ii. 37. 4). According to the euhemeristic Servius (On Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 287), the Hydra was a source of underground rivers which used to burst out and inundate the land: if one of its numerous channels were blocked, the water broke through elsewhere, therefore Heracles first used fire to dry the ground, and then dosed the channels. 2. In the earliest version of this myth, Heracles, as the aspirant for kingship, is likely to have wrestled in turn with a bull, a lion, a boar, or scorpion, and then dived into a lake to win gold from the water-monster living in its depth. Jason was set much the same tasks, and the helpful part played by Medea is here given to Athene—as Heracles’s bride-to-be. Though the Hydra recalls the sea-serpent which Perseus killed with a golden falchion, or new-moon sickle, it was a fresh-water monster, like most of those mentioned by Irish and Welsh mythographers—śiastres or avancs (see ~48.5)—and like the one recorded in the Homeric epithet for Lacedaemon, namely cetoessa,’ of the water-monster’, doubtless haunting some deep pool of the Eurotas (see 125.3). The dog-like body is a reminiscence of the sea-monster Scylla (see 16.2), and of a seven-headed monster (on a late Babylonian cylinder-seal) which the hero Gilgamesh kills. Astrologers have brought the crab into the story so as to make Heracles’s Twelve Labours correspond with the Signs of the Zodiac; but it should properly have figured in his struggle with the Nemean lion, the next Sign. $. This ritual myth has become attached to that of the Danaids, who were the ancient water-priestesses of Lerna. The number of heads given the Hydra varies intelligibly: as a college of priestesses it had fifty heads; as the sacred cuttle-fLsh, a disguise adopted by Thetis—who also had a college of fifty priestesses (see 8 x. l)—it had eight s~aky arms ending in heads, and one head on its trunk, together making nine in honour of the Moon-goddess; one hundred heads suggest the centuriae, or war bands, which raided Argos from Lerna; and ten thousand is a typical embellishment by Euripides, who had little conscience as a mythographer. On Greek coins, the Hydra usually has seven heads: doubdess a reference to the seven outlets of the fiver Amymone.
4. Heracles’s destruction of the Hydra seems to record a historical event: the attempted suppression of the Lemaean fertility rites. But new priestesses always appeared in the plane-tree grove—the plane-tree suggests Cretan religious influence, as does the cutde-ftsh—until the Achaeans, or perhaps the Dorians, burned it down. Originally, it is clear, Demeter formed a triad with Hecate as Crone, here called Prosymne, ‘addressed with hymns’, and Persephone the Maiden; but Dionysus’s Semele (see 27. k) ousted Persephone. There was a separate cult of Aphrodite-Thetis by the seaside.
HERACLES’$ Third Labour was to capture the Ccryneian Hind, and bring her alive from Oenoe to Mycenae. This swift, dappled creature had br~en hooves and golden horns like a stag, so that some call her a stag.1 She was sacred to Artemis who, when ordy a cbald, saw five hinds, larger than bulls, grazing on the banks of the dark-pebbled Thessalian river Anaurus at the foot of the Parrhasian Mountains; the sun twinkled on their horns. Running in pursuit, she caught four of them, one after the other, with her own hands, and harnessed them to her chariot; thc fifth fled across the river Celadon to the Ceryneian Hillas Hera intended, already having Heracles’s Labours in mind. According to another account, this hind was a masterless monster which used to ravage the fields, and which Heracles, after a severe struggle, sacrificed to Artemis on the summit of Mount Artemisium.2
b. Loth either to kill or wound the hind, Heracles performed this Labour without exert’rag the least force. He hunted her tirelessly for one whole year, his chase taking him as far as Istria and the Land of the Hyperboreans. When, exhausted at last, she took refuge on Mount Artemisium, and thence descended to the fiver Ladon, Heracles let tty and pinned her forelegs together with an arrow, which passed between bone and sinew, drawing no blood. He then caught her, laid her across his shoulders, and hastened through Arcadia to Mycenae. Some, however, say that he used nets; or followed the hind’s track until he found her asleep underneath a tree. Artemis came to meet Heracles, rebuking him for having ill-used her holy beast, but he pleaded necessity, and put the blame on Eurystheus. Her anger was thus appeased, and she let him carry the hind alive to Mycenae.3
c. Another version of the story is that this hind was one which Taygete the Pleiad, Alcyone’s sister, had dedicated to Artemis in gratitude for being temporarily disguised as a hind and thus enabled to elude Zeus’s embraces. Nevertheless, Zeus could not long be deceived, and begot Lacedaemon on her; whereupon she hanged herself on the summit of Mount Amyclaeus, thereafter called Mount Taygetus.4 Taygete’s niece and namesake married Lacedaemon and bore him Himeru$, whom Aphrodite caused to deflower his sister Cleodice unwittingly, on a night of promiscuous revel. Next day, learning what he had done, Himerus leaped into the river, now sometimes known by his name, and was seen no more; but oftener it is called the Eurotas, because Lacedaemon’s predecessor, King Eurotas, having suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Athenians—he would not wait for the full moon before giving battle—drowned himself in its waters. Eurotas, son of Myles, the inventor of water mills, was Amyclas’s father, and grandfather both of Hyac’mthu$ and of Eurydice, who married Acrisius.$
1. Apollodorus: ii. 5—3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~3; Euripides: Heracles 375 if-; Virgil: Aeneid vi. 802; Hyginus: Fabula 30.
2. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos I03 and Hymn ~o Artemis ~oo if.; Euripides: loc. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 25.3.
3. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Diodorus Siculu$: iv. ~3; Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 26-7; Hyginus: Fabula 30.
4. Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. 29 if.; Apollodorus: ii. Io. ~; Plutarch: ú On Rivers 17.
5. Pausanias: iii. ~. 2-3 and 20. 2; Plutarch: loc. dt.; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 3.
1. This Third Labour is of a different order from most of the others. Historically it may record the Achaean capture of a shrine where Artemis was worshipped as Elaphios (‘hind4ike’); her four chariot-stags repre~ sent the years of the Olympiad, and at the close of each a victim dressed in deer-skins was hunted to death (see 22. I). Elapbfios, at any rate, is said to have been Artemis’s nurse, which means Artemis herself (Pausanias: vi. 22. ~ ~). Mythically, however, the Labour seems to concern Heracles the Dactyl (see 52. 3), identified by the Gauls with Ogmius (Lucian: Heracles i), who invented the Ogham alphabet and all bardic lore (see 132. $). The chase of the hind, or roe, symbolized the pursuit of Wisdom, and she is found, according to the Irish mystical tradition, harboured under a wild-apple tree (White Goddess p. 2~7). This would explain why Heracles is not said by anyone, except the ill-informed Euripides, to have done the roe any harm: instead he pursued her indefatigably without cease, for an entire year, to the Land of the Hypcrboreans, experts in these very mysteries. According to Pollux, Heracles was called Melon (‘ of apples ‘), because apples were offered to him, presumably in rec%nition of his wisdom; but such wisdom came only with death, and his pursuit of the hind, like his visit to the Garden of the Hesperides, was really a journey to the Celtic Paradise. Zeus had similarly chased Taygete, who was a daughter of Atlas and therefore a non-Hellenic character.
2. In Europe, only reindeer does have horns, and reports of these may have come down from the Baltic by the Amber Route; re’mdeer, unlike other deer, can of course be harnessed.
$. The drowning of Taygete’s son Himerus, and of her father-in-law Eurotas, suggests that early kings of Sparta were habitually sacrificed to the Eurotas water-monster, by being thrown, wrapped in branches, into a deep pool. So, it seems, was Tantalus (see 108.3), another son of Taygete (Hyginus: Fabula 82). Lacedaemon means ‘lake demon’ (see ~ 24.2), and Laconia is the domain of Lacone (‘lady of the lake’), whose image was rescued from the Dorian invaders by one Preugenes and brought to Patrae in Achaea (Pausanias: vii. 20. 4). The story behind Taygete’s metamorphosis seems to be that the Achaean conquerors of Sparta called themselves Zeus, and their wives Hera. When Hera came to be worshipped as a cow, the Lelegian cult of Artemis the Hind was suppressed. A ritual marriage between Zeus as bull and Hera as cow may have beeu celebrated, as in Crete (see 90. 7).
4. Nights of promiscuous revel were held in various Greek states (see 44. a), and during the Alban Holiday at Rome: a concession to archaic sexual customs which preceded monogamy.
BOAR
T~E Fourth Labour imposed on Heracles was to capture alive the Erymanthian Boar: a fierce, enormous beast which haunted the cypresscovered slopes of Mount Erymanthus, and the thickets of Arcadia~ Mount Lampeia; and ravaged the country around Psophis.1 Mount Erymanthus takes its name from a son of Apollo, whom Aphrodite blinded because he had seen her bathing; Apollo in revenge turned himself into a boar and killed her lover Adonis. Yet the mountain is sacred to Artemis.2
b. Heracles, passing through Pholo~ on his way to Erymanthuswhere he killed one Saurus, a cruel bandit—was entertained by the Centaur Pholus, whom one of the ash-nymphs bore to Silenus. Pholus set roast meat before Heracles, but himself preferred the raw, and dared not open the Centaurs’ communal wine jar untfi Heracles reminded him that it was the very jar which, four generations earlier, Dionysus had left in the cave against this very occasion.3 The Centaurs grew angry when they smelt the strong wine. Armed with great rocks, up-rooted fir-trees, firebrands, and butchers’ axes, they made a rush at Pholus’s cave. While Pholus bid in terror, Heracles boldly repelled Ancius and Agrius, his first two assailants, with a volley of firebrands.4 Nephele, the Centaurs’ cloudy grandmother, then poured down a smart shower of rain, which loosened Heracles’s bow-string and made the ground slippery. However, he showed himself worthy of his former achievements, and killed several Centaurs, among them Oreus and Hylaeus. ~he rest fled as far as Malea, where they took refuge with Cheiron, their king, who had been driven from Mount Pelion by the Lapiths.s
c. A parting arrow from Heracles’s bow passed through Elatus’s arm, and stuck quivering in Cheiron’s knee. Distressed at the accident to his old friend, Heracles drew out the arrow and though Cheiron himself supplied the ruineraries for dressing the-wound, they were of no avail and he retired howling in agony to his cave; yet could not die, because he was immortal. Prometheus later offered to accept immortality in his stead, and Zeus approved this arrangement; but some say that Cheiron chose death not so much because of the pain he suffered as because he had grown weary of his long life.6
d. The Centaurs now fled in various directions: some with Euryfic to Pholo~; some with Nessus to the river Evenus; some to Mo~~
Malea; others to Sicily, where the Sirens destroyed them. Poseidc received the remainder at Eleusis, and hid them in a mountain. Amor those whom Heracles later killed was Homadus the Arcadian, who h: tried to rape Eurystheus’s sister Alcyone; by thus nobly avenging .1 insult offered to an enemy, Heracles won great fame.1
e. ?holus, in the meantime, while bury’rag his dead kinsmen, dre out one of Heracles’s arrows and examined it. ‘ How can so robust creature have succumbed to a mere scratch?’ he wondered. But tt arrow slipped from his fingers and, piercing his foot, killed him the and then. Heracles broke off the pursuit and returned to Pholo~, whe. he buried Pholus with unusual honours at the foot of the mount~ which has taken his name. It was on this occasion that the riv, Anigrus acquired the foul smell which now clings to it from its vel source on Mount Lapithus: because a Centaur named Pylenor, whol Heracles had winged with an arrow, fled and washed his wound ther Some, however, hold that Melampus had caused the stench some yea before, by throw’rag into the Anigrus the foul objects used for purify’m the daughters of Proetus.8
fi Heracles now set off to chase the boar by the river Erymanthu To take so savage a beast alive was a task of unusual difficulty; but } dislodged it from a thicket with loud halloos, drove it into a deep sno, drift, and sprang upon its back. He bound it with chains, and carried alive on his shoulders to Mycenae; but when he heard that the Argc nauts were gathering for their voyage to Colchis, dropped the bo~ outside the market place and, instead of waiting for further orders fro~ Eurystheus, who was hiding in his bronze jar, went off with Hylas t join the expedition. It is not known who despatched the capture boar, but its tusks are preserved in the temple of Apollo at Cumae.O
g. According to some accounts, Cheiron was accidentally wounde by an arrow that pierced his left foot, while he and Pholus and th young Achilles were entertaining Heracles on Mount Pelion. Afte nine days, Zeus set Cheiron’s image among the stars as the Centam But others hold that the Centaur is Pholus, who was honoured by Ze[ in this way because he excelled all men in the art ofprophesying fror entrails; The Bowman in the Zodiac is likewise a Centaur: one Crot~ who lived on Mount Helicon, greafiy beloved by his foster-sisters, th Muses.10 L Ovid: Heroides ix. 87; Apollonius Rhodius: i./27; Apollodorus: ii. 5—4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~2.
2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i. 306; Homer: Od),sse~/vi. 105. 3—Pausanias: vi. 2L 5; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.
4. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 670; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit. 5. Pausanias: iii. 18.9; Virgil: Aeneid viii. 293-4; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
6. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead 26.
7. Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 670; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. cit.
8. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: v. 5.6. 9. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. 24. 2; Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. tit.; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 122 if.
~o. Theocritus: Idyll vii; Ovid: Fasti v. 380 if.; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 38 and 27; Fabula 224.
1. Boars were sacred to the Moon because of their crescent-shaped tusks, and it seems that the tanist who killed and emasculated his twin, the sacred king, wore boar-disguise when he did so (see xS. 7 and xSX. 2). The snow drift in which the Erymanthian Boar was overcome indicates that this Labour took place at midwinter. Here Heracles is the Child Horus and avenges the death of his father Osiris on his uncle Set who comes disguised as a boar; the Egyptian taboo on boar’s flesh was lifted only at midwinter. The boar’s head Yuletide c,eremony has its origin in this same triumph of the new sacred king over his rival. Adonis is murdered to avenge the death of Erymanthus, the previous year’s tanist, whose name, ‘divining by lots’, suggests that he was chosen by lot to kill the sacred king. Mount Erymanthus being sacred to Artemis, not Aphrodite, Artemis must have been the goddess who took her bath, and the sacred king, not his tanist, must have seen her doing so (see 22. 2. It is probable that Heracles’s battle with the Centaurs, like the similar batde at Peirithous’s wedding (see I02. 2), originally represented the ritual combat between a newly-installed king and opponents in beastdisguise. His traditional weapons were arrows, one of which, to establish his sovereignty, he shot to each of the four quarters of the sky, and a fifth straight up into the air. Frontier wars between the Hellenes and the preHellenic mountaineers of Northern Greece are also perhaps recorded this myth.
3. Poisoned arrows dropped upon, or shot into, a knee or foot, caused the death not only of Pholus and Cheiron, but also of Achilles, Cheiron’s pupil (see 92. ~o and ~64. j): all of them Magnesian sacred kings, whose souls the Sirens naturally received. The presence of Centaurs at Malea derives from a local tradition that Pholus’s father Silenus was born there (Pausanias: iii. 25.2); Centaurs were often represented as half goat, rather than half horse. Their presence at Eleusis, where Poseidon hid them in a mountain, suggests that when the initiate into the Mysteries celebrated a sacred marriage with the goddess, hobby-horse dancers took part in the proceedings.
HERt, CL~S’S Fifth Labour was to cleanse King Augeias’s filthy cattic yard in one day. Eurystheus gleefully pictured Heracles’s disgust having to load the dung into baskets and carry these away on hi! shoulders. Augeias, King of Elis, was the son of Helius, or Eleius, b) Naupiadame, a daughter of Amphidamas; or, some say, by Iphibo~
Others call him the son of Poseidon. In flocks and herds he was the wealthiest man on earth: for, by a divine dispensation, his were immun~ against disease and inimitably fertile, nor did they ever miscarry Although in almost every case they produced female offspring, h~ nevertheless had three ~undred white4egged black bulls and two hundred red stud-bulls; besides twelve outstanding silvery-white bulls: sacred to his father Helius. These twelve defended his herds agains~ marauding wild beasts from the wooded hills.x
b. Now, the dung in Augeias’s cattle yard and sheepfolds had no~ been teared away for many years, and though its noisome stench not affect the beasts themselves, it spread a pestilence across the whole Peloponnese. Moreover, the valley pastures were so deep in dung tha: they could no longer be ploughed for grain.2
1. Heracles hailed Augalas from afar, and undertook to cleanse the yard before nightfall in return for a tithe of the cattle. Augeias laughec incredulously, and called Phyleus, his eldest son, to wireess Heracles’: offer. ‘Swear to accomplish the task before nightfall,’ Phyleus demanded. The oath which Heracles now took by his father’s name the first and last one he ever swore. Augeias likewise took an oath ~27. c—~27. ~ ~?
keep his side of the bargain. At this poht, Phaethon, t~e leader of the twelve white bulls, charged at Heracles, mistalcing him for a/fion; whereupon he seized the bull’s left horn, forced its neck downwards, and floored it by main strength. ~
d. On the advice of Menedemus the Elean, and aided by Iolaus, Heracles first breached the wall of the yard in two places, and next diverted the neighbouring rivers Alpheus and Peneius, or Men/us, so that their streams rushed through the yard, swept it clean and then went on to cleanse the sheepfolds and the valley pastures. Thus Heracles accompl/shed this Labour in one day, restoring the land to health, and not soiling so much as l’ds little finger. But Augeias, on being informed by Coprcus that Heracles had already been under orders from Eurystheus to cleanse the catde yards, refused to pay the reward and even dared deny that he and Heracles had struck a bargain.
e. Heracles suggested that the case be submitted to arbitration; yet when the judges were seated, and Phyleus, subpoenaed by Heracles, tcstifiecl to the truth, Augeias sprang up in a rage and banished them both śrom Elis, asserting that he had been tricked by Heracles, since the Privet-gods, not he, had done the work. To make matters even worse, Eurystheus refused to count this Labour as one of the ten, because Heracles had been in Augeias’s hire.
f. Prylens then went to Dulichium; and Heracles to the court of Dexamenus, King of Olenus, whose daughter Mnesimache he later rescued from the Centaur Eurytion.4
x. Apollodorus: ii, 5.5 and 7—2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Pausanias: v. x. 7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 41; Hyginus: Fabula ~4.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: loc. ›it. 3. Pausanias: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. ›it.; Plutarch: Roman Questions 28; Theocritus: Idyll xxv. 115 if. 4. l’tolemy Hephaestionos: v, quoted by Protins p. 486; Hyginus: Fabeda 30; Pausanias: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Servius: loc. cit.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos ~02. 1. This confused myth seems to be founded on the legend that Heracles, like Jason, was ordered to tame two bulls, yoke them, dean an overgrown hill, then plough, sow, and reap it in a single day—the usual tasks set a candidate for kingship (see 252. $). Here, the hill had to be dearcd not of trees and stones, as in the Celtic versions of the myth, but of dung—probably because the name of Eurysthcus’s hcndd, v livered the order, was Copreus (‘dung-man’). Sir James Fraze:
menting on Pausanias (v. xo. 9), quotes a Norse tale, ‘The Maste in which a prince who wishes to win a giant’s daughter must fix three stables. For each pitch-fork of dung which he tosses out, ten The princess then advises him to turn the pitchfork upside-down the handle. He does so, and the stable is soon cleansed. Frazer that, in the original version, Athene may have given Heracles tl advice; more likely, however, the Norse tale is a variant of this ] Augeias’s cattle are irrelevant to the story, except to account for t] mass of dung to be removed. Catde manure, as the myth shows, valued by Greek farmers. Hesiod, in his Works and Days, does not r it; and H. Mitchell (Economics of Ancient Greece) shows that the catde on fallow land is prohibited in several ancient leases. Od dog Argus did, indeed, lie on a midden used for dungh~g th
(Odyssey xvii. 299), but wherever the Odyssey may have been
and it certainly was nor on the Greek mainland—the references to~ ture and arboriculture suggest a survival of Cretan practice.
to some mythographers, Augeias was the son of Eleius, which rn more than’ King of Elis’; according to others, a son of Poseidon suggests that he was an Aeolian. But Eleius has here been confus. Helius, the Corinthian Sun-god; and Augeias is therefore creditec herd of sacred cattle, like that owned by Sisyphus (see 67. ~). The of heacls in such herds was 350, representing twelve complete lr less the sacred five-day hol/day of the Egyptian year (see 42. ~ ); tt were lunar cattle was proved by their red, white, and black colo 90.3); and the white bulls represent these twelve ltmations. Sud cattle were often stolen—as by Heracles himself in his Tenth L
and the sequel to his quarrel with Augeias was that he won these bulls as well.
2. The Fifth Labour, which properly concerto only ploughin
i~g, and reaping tasks has, in fact, been confused with two oth Tenth, namely the hfting of Geryon’s cattle; and the Seventh, nan capture of Poseidon’s white Cretan bull—which was not, bower for ploughing. In the cult of Poseidon—who is also described as A father—young men wrestled with bulls, and Heracles’s struggle Phaethon, like Theseus’s against the Minotaur, is best underst0 coronation rite: by magical contact with the bull’s horn, he capable of fertilizing the land, and earned the title ofPotidan, or Pc given to the Moon-goddess’s chosen lover. Similarly, h~ a loveHeracles fought the river Achelous, represented as a bull-heade and broke off his cornucopia (see ~41. d). The deflection of the/~ suggests that the icon from which this incident is deduced Heracles twisting the Cretan Bull a~round by the horns, beside th of a fiver, where numerous cattle were grazing. This bull was mistaken for a fiver-god, and the scene read as meaning that he had deflected the fiver in order to cleanse the field, for ploughing.
HER,~CLES’S Sixth Labour was to remove the countless brazenbeaked, brazen-clawed, brazen-winged, man-eating birds, sacred to Ares which, frightened by the wolves of Wolves’ Ravine on the Orchomenan Road, had flocked to &e Stymphalian Marsh.1 Here they bred and waded beside the river of the same name, occasionally taking to the air in great flocks, to kill men and beasts by discharging a shower of brazen feat~ers and at the same time muting a poisonous excrement, which blighted the crops.
b. On arrival at the marsh, which lay surrounded by dense woods, Heracles found himself unable to drive away the birds with his arrows; they were too numerous. Moreover, the marsh seemed neither solid enough to support a man walking, nor liquid enough for the use of a boat. As Heracles paused irresolutely on the bank, Athene gave him a pair of brazen castanets, made by Hephaestus; or it may have been a rattle. Standing on a spur of Mount Cyllene, which overlooks the marsh, Heracles clacked the castanets, or shook the ratde, raising such a din that the birds soared up in one great flock, mad with terror. He shot down scores of them as they flew off to the Isle of Ares in the Black Sea, where they were afterwards found by the Argonauts; some say that Heracles was with the Argonauts at the time, and killed many more of the birds.2
c. Stymphalian birds are the size of cranes, and closely resemble ibises, except that their beaks can pierce a metal breast-plate, and are not hooked. They also breed in the Arabian Desert, and there cause more trouble even than lions or leopards by flying at tr:/vellers’ breasts and transfixing them. Arabian hunters have learned to wear protective cuirasses of plaited bark, which entangle those deadly l:eaks and enable them to seize and wring the necks of their assailants. It may be that a flock of these birds migrated from Arabia to Stymphalus, and gave their name to the whole breed.3
d. According to some accounts, the so-called Stymphalian Birds were women: daughters of Stymphalus and Ornis, whom Heracles killed because they refused him hospitality. At Stymphalus, in the aucient temple of Stymphalian Artemis, images of these birds are hung from the roof, and behind the building stand statues of maidens with birds’ legs. Here also Temenus, a son of Pelasgus, founded three shrines in Hera’s honour: in the first she was worshipped as Child, because Temenus had reared her; in the second as Bride, because she had married Zeus; in the tlfird as Widow, because she had repudiated Zeus and retired to Stymphalus.1
1. Pausanias: viii. 22. 4-6; Apollodorus: ii. 5—6.
2. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 1052 if.; Pausanias: Ioc. tit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 1037 and ~053, with scholiast; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 30.
3. Pausanias: viii. 22. 4.
4. Mnaseas, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. ~054; Pausanias: viii. 22. 2. and 5—
1. Though Athene continues to help Heracles, this Labour does not Lelong to the marriage-task sequence but glorifies him as the healer who expels fever demons, identified with marsh-birds. The helmeted birds shown on Stymphalian coins are spoon-bills, cousins to the cranes which :,. ppear in English mediaeval carvings as sucking the breath of sick men. ~i~hey are, in fact, bird-legged Sirens, personifications of fever; and castanets, or rattles, were used in ancient times (and still are among primitive peoples) to drive away fever demons. Artemis was the goddess who had ?ower to inflict or cure fever with her ‘merciful shafts’.
2. The Stymphalian marsh used to i~crease in size considerably whenever the underground channel which carried away its waters became [ locked, as happened in Pausanias’s time (viii. 22.6); and Iphicratus, when besieging the city, would have blocked it deliberately, had not a sign trom heaven prevented him (Strabo: viii. 8.5)—It may well be that in one version of the story Heracles drained the marsh by freeing the channd; as he had previously drained the Plain of Tempe (Diodorus Sicflus: iv. ~8).
$. The myth, however, seems to have a historical, as well as a ritual, meaning. Apparently a college of Arcadian priestesses, who worshipped the Triple-goddess as Maiden, Bride, and Crone, took refuge at Styrephalus, after having been driven from Wolves’ Ravine by invaders who worshipped Wolftsh Zeus; and Mnaseas has plausibly explained the expulsion, or massacre, of the Stymphalian Birds as the suppression of this witch-college by Heracles—that is to say, by a tribe of Achaeans. The name Stymphalus suggests erotic practices.
4. Pausanias’s ‘ strong-beaked Arabian birds’ may have been sun-stroke demons, kept at bay by bark spine-protectors, and confused with the powerfully beaked ostriches, which the Arabs still hunt.
Leuc-erodes, ‘white heron’, is the Greek name for spoon-bill; an ancestor of Herod the Great is said to have been a temple slave to Tyrian Heracles (Africanus, quoted by Eusebius: Ecclesiastical Histor}, i. 6. 7), which accounts for the family name. The spoon-bill is closely related to the ibis, another marsh-bird, sacred to the god Thoth, inventor of writing; and Tyrian Heracles, like his Celtic counterpart, was a protector of learning, which made Tyre famous (Ezekiel xxviii. 12). In Hebrew tradition, his priest Hiram of Tyre exchanged riddles with Solomon.
E v a ť s~ n ~ u s ordered Heracles, as his Seventh Labour, to capture the Cretan Bull; but it is much disputed whether this was the bull sent by Zeus, which ferried Europe across to Crete, or the one, withheld by Minos from sacrifice to Poseidon, which sired the Minotaur on Pasi?ha~. At this time it was ravaging Crete, especially the region watered by the river Tethris, rooting up crops and levelling orchard walls.1
b. When Heracles sailed to Crete, Minos offered him every assistance in his power, but he preferred to capture the bull single-handed, though it belched scorching flames. After a long struggle, he brought the monster across to Mycenae, where Eurysthcus, dedicating it to Hera, set it free. Hera however, loathing a gift which redounded to Herades’s glory-, drove the bull first to Sparta, and then back through Arcadia and across the Isthmus to Attic Marathon, whence Theseus later dragged it to Athens as a sacrifice to Athene.2
c. Nevertheless, many still deny the identity of the Cretan and Marathonian bulls.3
1. Apollodorus: ii. 5.7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 13; Pausanias: i. 27. 9; First Vatican Mythographer: 47. ~29. ~—~30. b
2. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 294’, Apollodorus: loc. tit.; First Vatican Mythographer: loc. cit.
3. Theon: On Aratus p. 24.
* ~. The combat with a bull, or a man in bull’s disguise—one of the ritual tasks imposed on the candidate for kingship (see 123. l)—aisc appears in the s~ory of Theseus and the Minotau~ (see 98. z), and ol Jason and the fire-breathing bulls of Ae~tes (see 152.3). When the innnor. tality implicit in the sacred kingship was eventually offered to every initiate of the Dionysian Mysteries, the capture of a bull and its dedica. tion to Dionysus Plutodotes (‘ giver of wealth’) became a common rite both in Arcadia (Pausanias: viii. 19. 2) and Lydia (Strabo: xiv. ~. 44), where Dionysus held the title of Zeus. His principal theophany was as: bull, but he also appeared in the form of a l~on and a serpent (see 27. 4) Contact with the bull’s horn (see 127. 2) enabled the sacred king to ferti. lize the land in the name of the Moon-goddess by making rain—the magical explanation being that a bull’s bellow portended thunder. storms, which rhombi, or bull-roarers, were accordingly swung to induce. Torches were also flung to simulate lightning (see 68. a) and came tc suggest the bull’s fiery breath.
2. Dionysus is calledPlutodotes (‘wealth-giver’) becauseofhis cornucopia, tom from a bull, which was primarily a water charm (see t42. b); he developed from Cretan Zagreus, and among Zagreus’s changes are lion, a horned serpent, a bull, and ‘Cronus making rain’ (see 30.3). 130
EURťSTItEU$ ordered Heracles, as his Eighth Labour, to capture the four savage mares of Thracian King Diomedes—it is disputed whether he was the son of Ares and Cyrene, or born of an incestuous relationship between Asteri~ and her father Atlas—who ruled the warlike Bistones, and whose stables, at the now vanished city of Tirida, were the terror of Thrace. Diomedes kept the mares tethered with iron chains to bronze mangers, and fed them on the flesh of his unsuspecting guests. One version of the story makes them stallions, not mares, and names them Podargus, Lampon, Xanthus, and Deinus.x
b. With a number of volunteers, Heracles set sail for Thrace, visiting his friend King Admetus of Pherae on the way. Arrived at Tirida, he overpow~red Diomedes’s grooms and drove the mares down to the sea, where he left them on a knoll in charge of his minion Abderus, and then turned to repel the Bistones as they rushed in pursuit. His party being outnumbered, he overcame them by ingeniously cutfrog a channd which caused the sea to flood the low-lying plain; when they turned to run, he pursued them, stunned Diomedes with his club, dragged his body around. the lake that had now formed, and set it before his own mares, which tore at the still living flesh. Their hunger’ being now fully assuaged—for, while Heracles was away, they had also devoured Abderus—he mastered them without much trouble.2
c. According to another account Abderus, though a native of Opus in Locris, was employed by Diomedes. Some call him the son of Hermes; and others the son of Heracles’s friend, Opian Menoefius, and thus brother to Patrodus who fell at Troy. After founding the city of Abdera beside Abderus’s tomb, Heracles took Diomedes’s chariot and harnessed the mares to it, though hitherto they had never known bit or bridle. He drove them speedily back across the mountains until he reached Mycenae, where Eurystheus dedicated them to Hera and set them free on Mount Olympus.3 They were eventually destroyed by wild beasts; yet it is claimed that their descendants survived until the Trojan War and even unt’fi the time of Alexander the Great. The ruins of Diomedes’s palace are shown at Cartera Come, and at Abelera athletic games are still celebrated in honour of Abderus—they include all the usual contests, except chariot-racing; which accounts for the story that Abderus was killed when the man-eating mares wrecked a chariot to which he had harnessed them.4
1. Apollodorus: ii. 5.8; Hyginus: Fabulae 250 and 30; Pliny: Natural History iv. 18; Diodorus Siculus: iv.
a. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Euripides: Aloesils 483; Strabo: Fragments 44 and 47; Diodorus Siculus: lot. cit.
3. Hyginus: Fabula 30; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 39; Homer: lliad xi. 608; Euripides: Heracles 380 if.
4. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidi. 756; Diodorus Siculus: iv. xS; Strabo: Fragment 44; Philostratus: Imagines ii. 25; Hyginus: Fabula 250.
1. The bridling of a wild horse, intended for a sacrificial horse feast (see 75—3), seems to have been a coronation rite in some regions of Greece. Heracles’s mastery of Arion (see 138. g)—a feat also performed by Oncus and Adrastus (Pausanias: viii. 25.5)—is paralleled by Bellerophon’s capture of Pegasus. This ritual myth has here been combined with a legend of how Heracles, perhaps representing the Teans who seized Abdera from the Thracians (Herodotus: i. ~68), annulled the custom by which wild women in horse-masks used to chase and eat the sacred king at the end of his reign (see 27. d); instead he was killed in an organized chariot crash (see 7~. l; ~o~. g and I09. j). The omission of chariot-racing from the funeral games at Abdera points to a ban on this revised sacrifice. Podargus is called after Podarge the Harpy, mother of Xanthus, an immortal horse given by Poseidon to Peleus as a wedding present (see 8~. m); Lampus recalls Lampon, one of Eos’$ team (see 40. a). Diodorus’s statement that these mares were let loose on Olympus may mean that the cannibahstic horse cult survived there until Hellenistic times. 2. Canals, tunnels, or natural underground conduits were often described as the work of Heracles (see ~27. d; ~38. d and r42. $). 131
HEaACLES’S Ninth Labour was to fetch for Eurystheus’s daughter Admete the golden girdle of Ares worn by the Amazonian queen Hippolyte. Taking one ship or, some say, nine, and a company of volunteers, among whom were Iolaus, Telamon of Aegina, Peleus of Iolcus and, according to some accounts, Theseus of Athens, Heracles set sail for the river Thermodon.x
b. The Amazons were children of Ares by the Naiad Harmonia, born in the glens of Phrygian Acmonia; but some call their mother Aphrodite, or Otrere, daughter of Ares.2 At first they lived beside the fiver Amazon, now named after Tanais, a son of the Amazon Lysippe, who offended Aphrodite by his scorn of marriage and his devotion to war. In revenge, Aphrodite caused Tanais to fall in love with his mother; but, rather than yield to an incestuous passion, he flung himself into the river and drowned. To escape the reproaches of his ghost, Lysippe then led her daughters around the Black Sea coast, to a plain by the river Thermodon, which rises in the lofty Amazonian mountains. There they formed three tribes, each of which founded a city. S
c. Then as now, the Amazons reckoned descent only through the mother, and Lysippe had laid it down that the men must perform all household tasks, while the women fought and governed. The arms and legs of infant boys were therefore broken to incapacitate them for war or travel. These unnatural women, whom the Scythians call Oeorpata, showed no regard for justice or decency, but were famous warriors, being the first to employ cavalry.4 They carried brazen bows and short shields shaped like a half moon; their helmets, dothes, and girdles were made from the skins of wild beasts.S Lysippe, before she fell in battle, built the great city of Themiscyra, and defeated every tribe as far as the fiver Tanais. With the spoils of her campaigns she raised temples to Ares, and others to Artemis Tauropolus whose worship she estab lished. Her descendants extended the Amazonian empire westward across the river Tanais, to Thrace; and again, on the southern coast, westward across the Thermodon to Phrygia. Three famous Amazonian queens, Marpesia, Lampado, and Hippo, seized a great part of Asia Minor and Syria, and founded the cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyrene, and Myrine. Other Amazonian foundations are Thiba and Sinope.6
d. At Ephesus, they set up an image of Artemis under a beech-tree, where Hippo offered sacrifices; after which her followers performed first a shield dance, and then a round dance, with rattling quivers, beating the ground in unison, to the accompaniment of pipes—for Athene had not yet invented the flute. The temple of Ephesian Artemis, later built around this image and unrivalled in magnif~cence even by that of Delphic Apollo, is included among the seven wonders of the world; two streams, both called Selenus, and flowing in opposite directions, surround it. It was on this expedition that the Amazons captured Troy, Priam being then still a child. 13ut while detachments of the Amazonian army went home laden with vast quantities of spoil, the rest, staying to consolidate their power in Asia Minor, were driven out by an alliance of barbarian tribes, and lost their queen Marpesia.1
e. By the time that Heracles came to visit the Amazons, they had all returned to the river Thermodon, and their three cities were ruled by Hippolyte, Antiope, and Melanippe. On his way, he put in at the island of Paros, famous for its marble, which King Rhadamanthys had bequeathed to one Alcaeus, a son of Androgeus; but four of Minos’s sons, Eurymedon, Chryses, Nephalion, and Philolaus, had also settled there. When a couple of Herades’s crew, landing to fetch water, were murdered by Minos’s sons, he indignandy killed all four of them, and pressed the Parians so hard that they sent envoys offering, in requita for the dead sailors, any two men whom he might choose to be hi slaves. Satisfied by this proposal, Heracles raised the siege and chos, King Alcaeus and his brother Sthenclus, whom he took aboard his ship Next, he saLled through the Hellespont and Bosphorus to Mariandyn, in Mysia, where he was entertained by ICing Lycu~ the Paphlagonian son of Dascylus and grandson of Tantalus.$ In return, he supporte~ Lycus in a war with the Bebrycans, lcilling many, including their kin~ Mygdon, brother of Amycus, and recovered much Paphlagonian lant from the Bebrycans; this he restored to Lycus, who renamed it Heracleia in his honour. Later, Heracleia was colonized by Megarians ant Tanagrans on the advice of the Pythoness at Delphi, who told them t› plant a colony beside the Black Sea, in a region dedicated to Heracles.1
f. Arrived at the mouth of the river Thermodon, Heracles cas~
anchor in the harbour of Themiscyra, where Hippolyte paid him a visi~ and, attracted by his muscular body, offered him Ares’s girdle as a love gift. But Hera had meanwhile gone about, disguised in Amazon dress, spreading a rumour that these strangers planned to abduct Hippolyte; whereupon the incensed warrior-women mounted their horses and charged down on the ship. Heracles, suspecting treachery, killed Hippolyte offhand, removed her girdle, seized her axe and other weapons, and prepared to defend himself. He killed each of the Amazon leaders in turn, putting their army to flight after great slaughter?
g. Some, however, say that Melanippe was ambushed, and ransomed by Hippolyte at the price of the girdle; or contrariwise. Or that Theseus captured Hippolyte, and presented her girdle to Heracles who, in return, allowed him to make Antiope his slave. Or that Hippolyte refused to give Heracles the girdle and that they fought a pitched battle; she was thrown off her horse, and he stood over her, club in hand, offering quarter, but she chose to die rather than yield. It is even said that the girdle belonged to a daughter of Briarcus the Hundredhanded One?
h. On his return from Themiscyra, Heracles came again to Mariandyne, and competed in the funeral games of gang Lycus’s brother Priolas, who had been killed by the Mysians, and for whom dirges are still sung. Heracles boxed against the Mariandynian champion Titias, knocked out all his teeth and killed him with a blow to the temple. In proof of his regret for this accident, he subdued the Mysians and the Phrygians on Dascylus’s behalf; but he also subdued the Bithyniam, as far as the mouth of the river Rhebas and the summit of Mount Colone, and claimed their kingdom for himself. Pelops’s Paphlagonians voluntarily surrendered to him. However, no sooner had Heracles departed, than the Bebrycans, under Amycus, son of Poseidon, once more robbed Lycus of his land, extending their frontier to the river Hypius.1z i. Sailing thence to Troy, Heracles rescued Hesione from a sea~ monster; and continued his voyage to Thracian Aenus, where’he was ‘ entertained by Poltys; and, just as he was putting to sea again, shot and killed on the Aenian beach Poltys’s insolent brother Sarpedon, a son of Poseidon. Next, he subjugated the Thracians who had settled in Thasos, ,and bestowed the island on the sons of Androgeus, whom he had carried off from Paros; and at Torone was challenged to a wresthng match by Polygonus and Telegonus, sons of Proteus, both of whom he killed.13
j. Returning to Mycenae at last, Heracles handed the girdle to Eurys~ them, who gave it to Admete. As for the other spoil taken from the Amazons: he presented their rich robes to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and Hippolyte’s axe to Queen Omphale, who included it among the sacred regalia of the Lydian kings. Eventually it was taken to a Cadan temple of Labradian Zeus, and placed in the hand of his divine image. X4
k. Amazons are st’ill to be found in Albania, near Colchis, having been driven there from Themiscyra at the same time as thdr neigh* hours, the Gargarensians. When they reached the safety of the Albanian mountains, the two peoples separated: the Amazons settling at the foot of the Caucasian Mountains, around the river Mermodas, and the Gargarensians immediately to the north. On an appointed day every spring, parries of young Amazons and young Gargarensians meet at the summit of the mountain which separates their territories and, after performing a joint sacrifice, spend two months together, enjoying promiscuous intercourse under the cover of night. As soon as an Amazon finds herself pregnant, she returns home. Whatever girlchildren are born become Amazons, and the boys are sent to the Gargarensians who, because they have no means of ascertaining their paternity, distribute them by lot among their huts.1s In recent times, the Amazon queen Minythyia set out from her Albanian court to meet Alexander the Great in tiger-haunted Hyrcania; and there enjoyed his company for thirteen days, hoping to have offspring by him—but died childless soon afterwards.16
/. These Amazons of the Black Sea must be distinguished from Dionysus’s Libyan allies who once inhabited Hespera, an island in Lake Tritonis which was so rich in fruit-bearing trees, sheep and goats, that they found no need to grow corn. After capturing all the cities in the island, except holy Mene, the home of the Ethiopian fish-eaters (who mine emeralds, rubies, topazes, and sard) they defeated the neighbouring Libyans and nomads, and founded the great city of Chersonesus, so called because it was built on a peninsula. i7 From this base they attacked the Afiantians, the most civilized nation west of the Nile, whose capital is on the Atlantic island of Cerne. Myrine, the Amazonian queen, raised a force of thirty thousand cavalry and three thousand infantry. All of them carried bows with which, when retreating, they used to shoot accurately at their pursuers, and were armoured with the skins of the almost unbelievably large Libyan serpents.
ns. Invading the land of the Atlantiaus, Myrine defeated them decisively and, crossing over to Cerne, captured the city; she then put every man to the sword, enslaved the women and children, and razed the city walls. When the remaining Afiantians agreed to surrender, she treated them fairly, made friends with them and, in compensation for their loss of Ceme, built the new city of Myr’me, where she settled the captives and all others desirous of living there. Since the Atlantians now offered to pay her divine honours, Myrine protected them against the neighbouring tribe of Gorgons, of whom she killed a great many in a pitched battle, besides taking no less than three thousand prisoners.18 That night, however, while the Amazons were holding a victory banquet, the prisoners stole their swords and, at a signal, the main body of Gorgons who had rallied and hidden in an oak-wood, poured down from all sides to massacre Myrine’s followers.
n. Myrine contrived to escape—her dead lie buffed under three huge mounds, still called the Mounds of the Amazons—and, after traversing most of Libya, entered Egypt with a new army, befriended King Horus, the son of Isis, and passed on to the invasion of Arabia. Some hold that it was these Libyan Amazons, not those from the Black Sea, who conquered Asia Minor; and that Myrine, after selecting the most suitable sites in her new empire, founded a number of coastal cities, including Myrine, Cyme, Pitane, Palerie, and others farther inland. She also subdued several of the Aegean Islands, notably Lesbos, where she built the city of Mitylene, named after a sister who had shared in the campaign. While Myrine was still engaged in conquering the islands, a storm overtook her fleet; but the Mother of the Gods bore every ship safely to Samothrace, then uninhabited, which Myrine consecrated to her, founding altars and offering splendid sacrifices.
0. Myrine then crossed over to the Thracian mainland, where King Mopsus and his ally, the Scythian $ipylus, worsted her in fair fight, and she was killed. The Amazon army never recovered from this setback: defeated by the Thracians in frequent engagements, its renmants finally retired to Libya.19
x. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iii. 64; Apollodorus: ii. 5—9; Justin: ii. 4; Pifidar: Nemean Odes iii. 38 and Fragment 172; Philochorus, quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26. 2. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 990-2; Cicero: In DeJknce ofFlaccus ~5; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. ~89; Hyginus: Fabula 30; Scholiast on Apollonius P, hodius: ii. 1033.
3. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 659; Plutarch: On Rivers’14; Apollo.. nius Rhodius: ii. 976-xooo.
4. ArtJan: Fragment 58; Diodorus Siculus: ii. 451; Herodotus: iv. ~xo; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 987-9; Lysias, quoted by Tzetzes:
On Lycophron 1332,
5. Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 38; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 494; Strabo: xi. 5. ~.
6. Diodorus Siculus:ii. 45—6; Strabo: xi. 5.4;Justin:ii. 4;Hecataeus: Fragment 352.
7. Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 237 if.; Hyginus: Fabulae 223 and 2~5; Pliny: Natural History v. 3~; Homer: Iliad iii. ~89; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 69; Justin: ii. 48. Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Herodotus: vii. 72; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 754. 9. Strabo: xii. 3.4; Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Pausanias: v. 26. 6;Justin: xvi. ~.
~o. Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~6; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Plutarch: Greek Questions 4511. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 966-9; Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1329; Ibycus, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: loc. tit.
12. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 776 fl.
~3—Apollodorus: ii. 5.9.
~4—Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 2327; Euripides: Heracles 4~8 and Ion 1145; Plutarch: Greek Questions 45.
xS. Strabo: xi. 5. ~-2 and 4; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid yd. 659. 16. Justin: ii. 4; Cleitarchus, quoted by Strabo: xi. 5.417. Diodorus Siculus: fii. 52-3. VOL. II-E
~8. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 54.
~9. Diodorus Siculus: iii..55—
1. If Admete was the name of the princess for whose sake. Herac performed all these marriage tasks, the removal of her girdle in the we cling chamber must have marked the end of his Labours. But first Adm{ will have struggled with him, as Hippolyte did, and as Pcnthesil~ struggled with Achilles (see 164. a and 2), or Thetis with ?eleus (see 8~. —whose introduction into the story is thus explained. In that case, s will have gone through her usual transformations, which suggests t! the cuttlefish-like Hydra was Admete—the gold-guarding serpent whi he overcame being Ladon (see ~ 33—a)—and that she may also have turn into a crab (see ~24. e), a hind (see ~25. c), a wild mare (see ~6.f), an› cloud (see ~26. b) before he contrived to win her maidenhead.
2. A tradition of armed priestesses still lingered at Ephesus and ot~ cities in Asia M’mor; but the Greek mythographers, having forgotten t former existence of similar colleges at Athens and other cities in Gree itself, sent Heracles in search of Hippolyte’s girdle to the Black Sea, who matriarchal tribes were still active (see ~oo. l). A three-tribe system is t~ general rule in matriarchal society. That the girdle belonged to a taught of Briareus (‘ strong ‘), one of the Hundred-handed Ones, points to an car setting of the marriage-test story in Northern Greece.
$. Admete is another name for Athene, who must have appeared the icons standing by, under arms, watching Herades’s feats and helph him when in difficulties. Athene was Neith, the Love-and-Batde goddc of the Libyans (see 8. ~); her counterpart in Asia Minor was’the gre Moon-goddess Marian, Myrine, Ay-Mari, Mariamne or Marienna, wt gave her name to Mariandyne—’Marian’s Dune’—and to Myrine, tl city of the gynocratic Lemnians (see ~49. ~); and whom the Troja~ worshipped as ‘Leaping Myrine’ (Homer: 11iad ii. 8~4). ‘Smyrna’ ‘ Myrine’ again, preceded by the definite article. Marienna, the Sumeri~ form, means ‘High fruitful Mother’, and the Ephesian Artem/s was fertility-goddess.
4. Myrine is said to have been caught in a storm and saved by t~ Mother of the Gods—in whose honour she founded altars at Samothra{ —because she was herself the Mother of the Gods, and her rites save sailors from shipwreck (see ~49—~)—Much the same mother-goddess w~ anciently worshipped in Thrace, the region of the river Tanais (Don Armenia, and throughout Asia Minor and Syria. Theseus’s expeditio to Amazonia, a myth modelled on that of Heracles, confuses the issu~ and has tempted mythographers to invent the fictitious invasion › Athens by Amazons and Scythians combined (see zoo. c).
.5. That the Amazons set up an image under an Ephesian beech is a mistake made by Callimachus who, being an Egyptian, was unaware that beeches did not grow so far south; it must have been a date-palm, symbol of fertility (s_ee 14. 2), and a reminder of the goddess’s Libyan origin, since her statue was ‘hung with large golden dates, generally mistaken for breasts. Mopsus’s defeat of the Amazons is the story of the Hittites’ defeat by the Moschians about ~200 s.c.; the Hittites had originally been wholly patriarchal, but under the influence of the matriarchal societies of Asia Minor and Babylonia had accepted goddess-worship. At Hattusas, their capital, a sculptural relief of a battle-goddess has recently been discovered by Garstang; who regards the Ephesian Artemis cult as of Hittite origin. The victories over the Amazons secured by Heracles, Theseus, Dionysus, Mopsus, and others, record, in fact, setbacks to the matriarchal system in Greece, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Syria.
6. StephanusofByzantium (sub Paros) records the tradition that Paros was a Cretan colony. Heracles’s expedition there refers to a Hellenic occupation of the island. His bestowal of Thasos on the sons of Androgeus is a reference to its capture by a force of Parians mentioned in Thucydides iv. 104: this took place towards the close of the eighth century Euboeans colonized Totone at about the same time, representing Totone (‘shrill queen’) as a daughter of Proteus (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Totone). Hippolyte’s double axe (labrys) was not, however, placed in Labradean Zeus’s hand instead of a thunderbolt; it was itself a thunderbolt, and Zeus carried it by permission of the Cretan goddess who ruled in Lydia.
7. The Gargarensians are the Gogarenians, whom Ezekiel calls Gog (Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix).
8. In his account of Myrine, Diodorus Siculus quotes early Libyan traditions which had already acquired a fairy-tale lustre; it is established, however, that in the third m/llennium s.c. neolithic emigrants went out from Libya in all directions, probably expelled by an inundation of their fields (see 39. $-6). The Nile Delta was largely populated by Libyans. 9—According to Apollonius P, hodins (i. x~26-9),Titiaswas’oneofthe o~ily three Idacan Dactyls (“fingers”) who dispense doom.’ He names another Dactyl’ Cyllenius’. I have shown (White Goddess p. 28t) that in finger-magic Titias, the Dactyl, represented the middle finger; that Cyllenius, alias Heracles, was the thumb;. and that Dascylus, the third Dactyl, was the index-finger, as his name implies (see $ 3. I). These three raised, while the fourth and little finger are turned down, made the ‘Phrygian blessing’. Originally given in Myrine’s name, it is now used by Cathol~c priests in that of the Christian Trinity.
10. Tityus, whom Apollo killed (see 21. d), may be a doublet of Titias. Myrine’s capture of the island of Cerne seems a late and unauthorized addition to the story. Ceme has been identified with Fedallah near Fez; or with Santa Cruz near Cape Ghir, or (most plausibly) with Arguin, a little south of Cabo Blanco. It was discovered and colonized by the C~ thaginian Harmo, who described it as lying as far from the Pillars Heracles as these lay from Carthage, and it became the great emporit of West African trade.
, 11. So much for the mythical elements of the Ninth Labour. ~
Heracles’s expedition to the Thermodon and his wars in Mysia a Phrygia must not be dismissed as wholly unhistorical. Like the voyage the Argo (see 148. lo), they record Greek trading ventures in the BI: Sea perhaps as far back as tl~e middle of the second millennium B.C.; a the intrusion of Minyans from Iolcus, Aeacans from Aegina, and Argi’ in these waters suggests that though Helen may have been beautiful, a may have eloped with Paris of Troy, it was not her face that launche, thousand ships, but mercantile interest. Achilles the son of Peleus, A/ the son of Telamon, and Diomedes the Argive were among the Gre allies of Agamemnon who insisted that Priam should allow them the f passage through the Hellespont enjoyed by their fathers—unless wished his city to be sacked as Laomedon’s had been, and for the sa~ reason (see 137. 1). Hence the dubious Athenian claims to have be represented in Heracles’s expedition by Theseus, in the voyage of~ Argo by Phalcrus, and at Troy by Menestheus, Demophon, and Acam These were intended to justify their eventual control of Black Sea tr~ which the destruction of Troy and the decline of Rhodes had allow them to seize (see 159. a; ~60. z-3 and 162..3)—
H~aAcz~s’s Tenth Labour was to fetch the famous catde of Gery from Erytheia, an island near the Ocean stream, without either dema or payment. Getyon, a son of Chrysaor and Callirrho~, a daughter the Titan Oceanus, was the King of Tartessus in Spain, and reputex the strongest man alive.1 He had been born with three heads, six ban and three bodies joined together at the waist. Geryon’s shambling ~ cattle, beasts of marvellous beauty, were guarded by the herdsin Eurytion, son of Ares, and by the two-headed watchdog Orthru formerly Atlas’s property—born of Typhon and Echidne.2 b. During his passage through Europe, Heracles destroyed many wild beasts and, when at last he reached Tartessus, erected a pair of pillars facing each other across the straits, one in Europe, one in Africa. Some hold that the two continents were formerly joined together, and that he cut a channel between them, or thrust the cliffs apart; others say that, on the contrary, he narrowed the existing straits to discourage the entry of whales and other sea-monsters.3
c. Helius beamed down upon Heracles who, finding it impossible to work in such heat, strung his bow and let fly an arrow at the god. ‘Enough of that!’ cried Helins angrily. Heracles apologized for his ill-temper, and unstrung his bow at once. Not to be outdone in courtesy, Helius lent Heracles his golden goblet, shaped like a water-lily, in which he sailed to Erytheia; but the Titan Oceanus, to try him, made the goblet pitch violendy upon the waves. Heracles again drew his bow, which frightened Oceanus into calming the sea. Another account is that Heracles sailed to Erytheia in a brazen urn, using his lion pelt as a
d. On his arrival, he ascended Mount Abas. The dog Orthrus rushed at him, barking, but Heracles’s dub struck him lifeless; and Eurytion, Geryon’s herdsman, hurrying to Orthrus’s aid, ~lied in the same manner. Heracles then proceeded to drive away the cattle. Menoetes, who was pasturing the catde of Hades near by—but Heracles had left these untouched—took the news to Geryon. Challenged to battle, Heracles ran to Geryon’s flank and shot him sideways through all three bodies with a single arrow; but some say that he stood his ground and let loose a flight of three arrows. As Hera hastened to Geryon’s assistance, Heracles wounded her with an arrow in the right breast, and she fled. Thus he won the cattle, without either demand or payment, and embarked in the golden goblet, which he then sailed across to Tartessus and gratefully returned to Helius. From Geryon’s blood sprang a tree which, at the time of the Pleiades’ rising, bears stoneless cherry-like fruit. Geryon did not, however, die without issue: his daughter Erytheia became by Hermes the mother of Norax, who led a colony to Sardinia, even before the time of Hyllus, and there founded Nora, the oldest city in the island.s
e. The whereabouts of Erytheia, also called Erythrea, or Erythria, is disputed. Though some describe it as an island beyond the Ocean stream, others place it off the coast of Lusitania.6 Still others identify it with the island of Leon, or with an islet hard by, on which the earliest city of Gades was built, and where the pasture is so rich that the milk yields no whey but only curds, and the cattle must be cupped e, fifty days, lest they choke for excess of blood. This islet, sacred to H is called either Erytheia, or Aphrodisias. Leon, the island on whic]: present city of Gades stands, used to be called Cotinusa, from its but the Phoenicians renamed it Gadira, or ‘Fenced City’. On western cape stands a temple of Cronus, and the city of Gades; on eastern, a temple of Heracles, remarkable for a spring which ebl flood tide, and flows at ebb tide; and Geryon lies buried in the, equally famed for a secret tree that takes diverse forms.7
f. According to another account, however, Geryon’s cattle were pastured in any island, but on the mountain slopes of the farther pa: Spain, confronfmg the Ocean; and ‘Geryon’ was a title of the nowned King Chrysaor, who ruled over the whole land, and w]
three strong and courageous sons helped him in the defence of his k dom, each leading an army recruited from warlike races. To con
t~ese, Heracles assembled a large expedition in Crete, the birthplat his father Zeus. Before setting out, he was splendidly honoured by Cretans and, in return, rid their island of bears, wolves, serpents, other noxious creatures, from which it is still immune. First, he s~ to Libya, where he killed Antaeus, slaughtered the wild beasts infested the desert, and gave the country unsurpassed fertility. N he visited Egypt, where he killed Busiris; then he marched westw across North Africa, annihilating the Gorgons and the Libyan Ama: as he went, founded the city of Hecatompylus, now Capsa, in soutl Numidia, and reached the Ocean near Gades. There he set up pillar either side of the straits and, ferrying his army across to Spain, fo that the sons of Chrysaor, with their three armies, were encampe some distance from one another. He conquered and killed them, in turn, and finally drove off Geryon’s famous herds, leav’mg government of Spain to the most worthy of the surviving inhabita~
g. The Pillars of Heracles are usually identified with Mount CalF Europe, and Abyle, or Abilyx in Africa. Others make them the near Gades, of which the larger is sacred to Hera. All Spaniards Libyans, however, take the word ‘Pillars’ literalS, and place then Gades, where brazen columns are consecrated to Heracles, eight cu high and inscribed with the cost of their building; here sailors c sacrif~ces whenever they return safely from a voyage. According to people of Gades themselves, the King of Tyre was ordered by oracle to found a colony near the Pillars of Heracles, and sent out d successive parties of exploration. The first party, thinking that the oracle had referred to Abyle and CaIpe, landed inside the straits, where the city of Exitani now stands; the second sailed about two hundred miles beyond the straits, to an island sacred to Heracles, opposite the Spanish city of Onoba; but both were discouraged by unfavourable omens when they offered sacrifices, and returned home. The third party reached Gades, where they raised a temple to Heracles on the eastern cape and successfully founded the city of Gades on the western.9
h. Some, however, deny that it was Heracles who set up these pillars, and assert that Abyle and Calpe were first named ‘The Pillars of Cronus’, and afterwards ‘The Pillars of Briareus’, a giant whose power extended thus far; but that, the memory of Briareus (also called Aegaeon) having faded, they were renamed in honour of Heraclesperhaps because the city of Tartessus, which stands only five miles from Calpe, was founded by him, and used to be known as Heracleia. Vast ancient walls and ship-sheds are still shown there? But it must be remembered that the earliest Herafides had also been called Briareus. The number of Heracles’s Pillars is usually given as two; but some speak of three, or four. ~x So-called Pillars of Heracles are also reported from the northern coast of Germany; from the Black Sea; from the western extremity of Gaul; and fro m India.1z
i. A temple of Heracles stands on the Sacred Promontory in Lusitania, the most westerly point of the world. Visitants are forbidden to enter the precinct by night, the time when the gods take up their abode in it. Perhaps when Heracles set up his pillars to mark the utmost limits of legitimate seafaring, this was the site he chose.13
j. How he then drove the cattle to Mycenae is much disputed. Some say that he forced Abyle and Calpe into temporary union and went across the resultant bridge into Libya; but.according to a more probable account he passed through the territory of what is now Abdera, a Phoenician settlement, and then through Spain, leaving behind some of his followers as colonists.14 In the Pyrenees, he courted and buried the Bebrycan princess Pyrene, from whom this mountain range takes its name; the river Danube is said to have its source there, near a city also named in her honour. He then visited Gaul, where he abolished a barbarous native custom of killing strangers, and won so many hearts by his generous deeds that he was able to found a large city, to which he gave the name Alesia, or ‘Wandering’, in commemoration of his travels. The Gauls to this day honour Alesia as the hearth and mother-city of their whole land—it was unconquered until Caligula’s reignand claim descent from Heracles’s union with a tall princess named Galata, who chose him as her lover and bred that warlike people. iS
k. When Heracles was driving Geryon’s cattle through Liguria, two sons of Poseidon named Ialebion and Dercynus tried to steal them from him, and were both killed. At one stage of his battle with hostile Ligurian forces, Heracles ran out of arrows, and knelt down, in tears, wounded and exhausted. The ground being of soft mould, he could find no stones to throw at the enemy—Ligys, the brother of Ialebion, was their leader—until Zeus, pitying his tears, overshadowed the earth with a cloud, from which a shower of stones hailed down; and with these he put the Ligurians to flight. Zeus set among the stars an image of Heracles fighting the Ligurians, known as the constellation Engonasis. Another memorial of this battle survives on earth: namely the broad, circular plain lying between Marseilles and the mouths of the river Rhtne, about fifteen miles from the sea, called ‘The Stony Plain’, because it is strewn with stones the size of a man’s fist; brine springs are also found there?
1. In his passage over the L’lgurian Alps, Heracles carved a road fit for his armies and baggage trains; he also broke up all robber bands that infested the pass, before entering what is now Cis-alpine Gaul and Etruria. Only after wandering down the whole coast of Italy, and crossing into Sicily, did it occur to him: ‘I have taken the wrong road!’ The Romans say that, on reaching the Albula—afterwards called the Tiber—he was welcomed by King Evander, an exile from Arcadia. At evening, he swam across, driving the cattle before him, and lay down to rest on a grassy bed? In a deep cave near by, lived a vast, hideous, three-headed shepherd named Cacus, a son of Hephaestus and Medusa, who was the dread and disgrace of the Aventine Forest, and puffed flames from each of his three mouths. Human skulls and arms hung nailed above the lintels of his cave, and the ground inside gleamed white with the bones of his victims. While Heracles slept, Cacus stole the two finest of his bulls; as well as four heifers, which he dragged backwards by their tails into his lair. 18
m. At the first streak of dawn, Heracles awoke, and at once noticed that the cattle were missing. After searching for them in vain, he was about to drive the remainder onward, when one of the stolen heifers 10wed hungrily. Heracles traced the sound to the cave, but found the entrance barred by a rock which ten yoke of oxen could hardly have moved; nevertheless, he heaved it aside as though it had been a pebble and, undaunted by the smoky flames which Cacus was now belching, grappled with him and battered his face to pulp.19
n. Aided by King ~.vander, Heracles then built an altar to ~.eus, at which he sacrificed one of the recovered bulls, and afterwards made arrangements for his own worship. Yet the Romans tell this story in order to glorify themselves; the truth being that it was not Heracles who killed Cacus, and offered sacnfices to Zeus, but a gigantic herdsman named Garanus, or Recaranus, the ally of Heracles.20 o. King Evarider ruled rather by personal ascendancy than by force: he was particularly reverenced for the knowledge of letters which he had imbibed from his prophetic mother, the Arcadian nymph Nicostrate, or Themis; she was a daughter of the river Ladon, and though already married to Echenus, bore Eva~der to Hermes. Nicostrate per~ suaded Evander to murder his supposed fat~er; and, when the Arcadians banished them both, went ~vith him to Italy, accompanied by a body of Pelasgians.1 There, some sixty years before the Trojan War, they founded the small city of Pallantium, on the hill beside the river Tiber, later called Mount Palatine; the site having been Nicostrate’s choice; and soon there was no more powerful king than Evander in all Italy. Nicostrate, now called Carmenta, adapted the thirteen-consonant Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus had brought back from Egypt, to form dae fifteen-consonant Latin one. But some assert that it was Heracles who taught Evander’s people the use of letters, which is why he shares an altar with the Muses.22
p. According to the Romans, Heracles freed King Evarider from the tribute owed to the Etruscans; killed King Faunus, whose custom was to sacr’xfice strangers at the altar of his father Hermes; and begot Latinus, the ancestor of the Latins. on Faunus’s widow, or daughter. But the Greeks hold that Latinus was a son of C’zrce by Odysseus. Heracles, at all events, suppressed the annual CronJan ~acrifice of two men, vqho were flung into the river Tiber, and forced the Romans to use puppets instead; even now, in the month of May, when the moon is full, the chief Vestal Virgin, standing on the oaken-timbered Pons $ublici~a, throws whitewashed images of old men, plaited from bulrushes, and called ‘Argives’, into the yellow stream.23 Heracles is also believed to have founded Pompeii and Herculaneum; to have fought giants on the Phiegraean Plain of Cumae; and to have built a causeway one mile long across the Lucrine Gulf, now called the Heradeian Roaxl, down which he drove Ge~on’s cattle.24
q. It is further said that he lay down to rest near the fron’
Rhegium and Epizephyrian Locris and, being much disturl:
cicadas, begged the gods to silence them. His prayer was imme~
granted; and cicadas have never been heard since on the Rhegi; of the river Alece, although they sing lustily on the Locrian side day a bull broke away from the herd and, plunging into the sea, over to Sicily. Heracles, going in pursuit, found it concealed arno herds of Eryx, King of the Elym.-ms, a son of Aphrodite by B
Eryx, who was a wrestler and a boxer, challenged him to a fi’
contest. Heracles accepted the challenge, on condition that Eryx’ stake his kingdom agaimt the runaway bull, and won the firs events; finally, in the wrestling match, he lifted Eryx high into t dashed him to the ground and killed him—which taught the Si that not everyone born of a goddess is necessarily immortal. ]
manner, Heracles won Eryx’s kingdom, which he left the inhal to enjoy until one of his own descendants should come to claim
r. Some say that Eryx—whose wrestling-ground is still shown
a daughter named Psophis, who bore Heracles two sons: Eche and Promachus. Having been reared in Erymanthus, they rena~
Psophis after their mother; and there built a shrine to Erycinian fi dite, of which today only the ruins remain. The hero-shrines of phron and Promachus have long since lost their importance Psophis is usually regarded as a daughter of Xanthus, the grand: Arcas.27
s. Continuing on his way through Sicily, Heracles came to d where now stands the city of Syracuse; there he offered sacrifice instituted the annual festival beside the sacred chasm of Cyane, which Hades snatched Core to the Underworld. To those who oured Heracles in the Plain of Leontini, he left undying memor: his visit. Close to the city of Agyrium, the hoof marks of his cattle found imprinted on a stony road, as though in wax; and, regardk~ as an intimation of his own immortality, Heracles accepted fro: h~habitants those divine honours which he had hitherto consis refused. Then, in acknowledgement of their favours, he dug a lak furlongs in circumference outside the city walls, and established sanctuaries of Iolaus and Geryon.2s
1. Returning to Italy in search of another route to Greece, He ckove his catde up the eastern coast, to the Lacinian Promor where the ruler, King Lacinius, was afterwards able to boast that he had put Heracles to flight; this he did merely by building a temple to Hera, at the sight of which Heracles departed in disgust. Six miles farther on, Heracles accidentally killed one Croton, buried him with every honour, and prophesied that, in time to come, a great city would rise, called by his name. This prophecy Heracles made good after his deification: he appeared in a dream to one of his descendants, the Argive Myscelus, threatening him with terrible punishments if he did not lead a party of colonists to Sicily and found the city; and when the Argives were about to conderrm Myscelus to death for defying their embargo on emigration, he miraculously turned every black voting-pebble into a white one.29
~e. Heracles then proposed to drive Geryon’s catde through Istria into Epirus, and thence to the Pelopormese by way of the Isthmus. But at the head of the Adriatic Gulf Hera sent a gadfly, which stampeded the cows, driving them across Thrace and into the Scythiau desert. There Heracles pursued them, and one cold, stormy night drew the lion pelt about him and fell fast asleep on a rocky hillside. When he awoke, he found that his chariot-mares, which he had unharnessed and put out to graze, were likewise missing. He wandered far and wide in search of them until he reached the wooded district called Hylaea, where a strange being, half woman, half serpent, shouted at him from a cave. She had his mares, she said, but would give them back to him only if he became her lover. Heracles agreed, though with a certain reluctance, and kissed her thrice; whereupon the serpent-tailed woman embraced him ?assionately, and when, at last, he was free to go, asked him:’ What of the three sons whom I now carry in my womb? When they grow to manhood, shall I setde them here where I am mistress, or shall I send them to you?’
v. ‘When they grow up, watch carefully!’ Heracles replied. ‘And iF ever one of them bends this bow—thus, as I now bend it—and girds himselświth this belt’—thus, as I now gird myself—choose him as the ruler of your country.’
So saying, he gave her one of his two bows, and his girdle which had a golden goblet hanging from its clasp; then went on his way. She named her triplets Agathyrsus, Gelonus, and Scythes. The eldest two were unequal to the tasks that their father had set, and she drove them away; but Scythes succeeded in both and was allowed to remain, thus becoming the ancestor of all royal Scythian kings who, to this day, wear golden goblets on their girdles.30 Others, however, say that it was Zeus, not Heracles, who lay with the serpent-tailed woman, and that, when his three sons by her were still ruling the land, there fell from the sky four golden implements: a plough, a yoke, a batfie axe, and a cup. Agathyrsus first ran to recover them, but as he came close, the gold flamed up and burned his hands. Gelonus was similarly rejected. However, when Scythes, the youngest, approached, the fire died down at once; whereupon he carried home the four golden treasures and the elder brothers agreed to yield him the kingdom. a~
w. Heracles, having recovered his mares and most of the strayed cattle, drove them back across the river Strymon, which he dammed with stones for the purpose, and encountered no further adventures until the giant herdsman Alcyoneus, having taken possession of the Corinthian Isthmus, hurled a rock at the army which once more followed Herades, crushing no less than twelve chariots and double that number of horsemen. Tiffs was the same Alcyoneus who twice stole Helius’s sacred cattle: from Erytheia, and from the citadel of Corinth. He now ran forward, picked up the rock again, and this time hurled it at Heracles, who bandied it back with his dub and so killed the giant; the very rock is still shown on the L~thmus.aZ
x. Pausanias: iv. 36. 3; Apollodorus: ii. 5—xo; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 289; Hesiod: Theogony 981.
a. Hesiod: Theogony 287 if.; Lucian: Taxaris 72; Apollodorus: 10c. eit.; Livy: i. 7; Senrim on Virgil’~ Aeneid viii. 300; Scholiast on Apollohim P, hoclius: iv. 1399.
3. Apollodorus:ii. 5—Io;Diodorus Siculus:iv. xd;Pomponius Mela: i. 5.3 andii. 6. 6.
4. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Athenaeus: xi. 39; Senrim on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 662 and viii. 300.
5. Apollodorm: 10c. ›it.; Hyginus: FabuIa 30; Euripides: Heracles 423; Senrim on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 66~; Pausanias: x. ~7. 4; Ptolemy Hephaestionos, quoted by Photius: p. 475; Pindar:
Fragment 169.
6. Solinus: xxiii. xz; Pomponius Mela: iii. 47; Hesiod: Theogony 2.87 if..; Pliny: Natural History iv. 36.
7. Pherecydes, quoted by Strabo: iii. z. 1 I; Strabo: iii. 5.3-4 and 7; Timaeus, quoted by Pliny: loc. eit.; Polybius, quoted by Strabo: iii. 5.7; Pausanias: i. 35.6.
8. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 55 and iv. 17-19.
9. Pliny: Natural History iii, Proem; Strabo: iii. 5.5.
Io. Eustathius on Dionysius’s Description of the Earth 64 if.; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes ‘fii. 37; Aristotle, quoted by Ael~an:
Varia Histaria v. 3; Pliny: Natural History iii. 3; Timotheus, quoted by Strabo: iii. t. 71x. Erasmus: Chiliades i. 7; Zenobius: Proverbs v. 48; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound 349 and 428; Hesychius sub stelas distomous.
12. Tadms: Getmania 34; Servnis on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 262; Scymnius Chius: t88; Strabo:/i. 5.6. 13. Strabo: iii. t. 4; Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 2~ if.
t4. Avienus: Ora Maritima 326; Apollodorus: ii. 5. to; Strabo: iii. 43; Asclepiades of Myrtea, quoted by Strabo: Ioc. tit. 15. Sflius Italicus: iii. 4r7; Herodotus: ii. 33; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 19 and 24.
16. Apollodorus: ii, 5. to; Tzetzes: Chiliaries ii. 340 if. and On Lycophron t312; Aeschylus: Prometheus Unbound, quoted by Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 6 and by Strabo: iv. t. 7; Theon: On Arams p. t2, ed. Marell.
t7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 2~; Ovid: Fasti v. 545 if.; Livy: i. 7. 18. Propertius: Elegies iv. 9—to; Ovid: Fasti i. 545 if.; Livy: loc. cit.; Virgil: Aeneid viii. 207-8.
t9. Livy: loc. tit.; Virgil: Aeneid viii. 2t7 and 233 if..; Ovid: 10c. tit. 20. Plutarch: Roman Questions 18; Ovid: loc. tit.; Livy: loc. cit.; Vetrius Flaccus, quoted by Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 203; Aurelius Victor: On the Origins of the Roman Race 8.
2t. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. St; t30 and 336; Livy: i. 7; Plutarch: Roman Questions 56; Pausanias: viii. 43. 2; Dionysius: Roman Antiquities i. 3 ~.
22. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. t30 and 336; Ovid: Fasti v. 94-5 and i. 542; Hyginus: Fabula 277; Juba, quoted by Plutarch:
Roman Questions 5923. Plutarch: Roman Questions 18 and 32; Dercyllus: Italian Historyiii, quoted by Plutarch: Parallel Stories 38; Tzetzes: On Lycophran t232;Justin: xliii. ~; Hesiod: Theogony tot3; Ovid: Fasti v. 62t if. 24. Solinus: ii. 5; Dionysius: i. 44; Diodorus Siculus: iv. ~-2 and 24; Strabo: vi. 3.5 and 4—6.
25. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 22; Strabo: vi. I. t9; Apollodorus: ii. 5—to; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 574.
26. Pausanias: iv, 36. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 23; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 866; Servius on Vśrgil’s Aeneid x. $ $ t. 27. Tzetzes: loc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. 24. x and 3.
gS. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 23-4 and v. 4.
g9. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 24; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 552; Ovid: Metamorphoses x-v. tz if.
30. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 25; Herodottu: iv. 8-to.
31. Diodorus Siculus: ii. 43; Herodotus: iv. 5.
32. Apollodorus: ii. 5. Io and i. 6. ~; Pindar: Nemean Odes iv. 27 f~. and Isthmian Odes vi. 32 if.; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes loc. cit. and Isthmian Odes vi. 3~.
1. The main theme of Heracles’s Labours is his performance of certain ritual feats before being accepted as consort to Admete, or Auge, or Athene, or Hippolyte, or whatever the Queen’s name was. This wild Tenth Labour may originally have been relevant to the same theme, if it records the patriarchal Hellenic custom by which the husband bought his bride with the proceeds of a cattle raid. In Homeric Greece, women were valued at so many cattle, and still are in parts of East and Central Africa. But other irrelevant elements have become attached to the myth, including a visit to the Western Island of Death, and his successful return, laden with spoil; the ancient Irish parallel is the story of Cuchulain who hartowed Hell—Dun Scaith, ‘ shadow city’—and brought back three cows and a magic cauldron, despite storms which the gods of the dead sent against him. The bronze urn in which Heracles sailed to Erytheia was an appropriate vessel for a visit to the Island of Death, and has perhaps been confused with the bronze cauldron. In the Eleventh Tablet of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Gilgamesh makes a similar journey to a sepulchral island across a sea of death, using his garment for a sail. This i~cident calls attention to many points of resemblance between the Heracles and Gilgamesh myths; the common source is probably Smnerian. Like Heracles, Gilgamesh kills a monstrous lion and wears its pelt (see ~23. e); seizes a sky-bull by the horns and overcomes it (see 129. b); discovers a secret herb of invulnerability (see ~35. b); takes the same journey as the Sun (see ~32. d); and visits a Garden of the Hesperides where, after killing a dragon coiled about a sacred tree, he is rewarded with two sacred objects from the Underworld (see ~33—e). The relations of Gilgamesh and his comrade Enkidu closely resemble those of Theseus, the Athenian Heracles, and his comrade Peirithous who goes down to Tartarus and fails to return (see ~ 03. c and d); and Gilgamesh’s adventure with the Scorpions has been awarded to the Boeotian Orion (see 4~—3).
2. Pre-Phoenician Greek colonies planted in Spain, Gaul, and Italy under Heracles’s protection have contributed to the myth; and, in the geographical sense, the Pillars of Heracles—at which one band ofsetfiers arrived about the year ~ xoo B.C.—are Ceuta and Gibraltar.
3. In a mystical Celto-Iberian sense, however, the Pillars are alphabetical abstractions. ‘Marwnad Ercwlf’, an ancient Welsh poem in the Red Book of Hergest, treats of the Celtic Heracles—whom the Irish called ‘Ogma Sunface’ and Lucian, ‘Ogmius’ (see ~5. ~)—and records how Ercwlf raised ‘four columns of equal height capped with red gold,’ apparently the four columns of f~ve letters each, which formed the twenty-lettered Bardic alphabet known as the Boibel-Loth (White God- desspp. ~33, 199, and 278). It seems that, about the year 400 ~3.c., this new alphabet, the Greek letter-names of which referred to Celestial Heracles’s journey in the sun-goblet, his death on Mount Oeta, and his powers as city-founder and judge (White Goddess p. 136), displaced the Beth-LuisNion tree-alphabet, the letter-names of which referred to the murderous sacrifice of Cronus by the wild women (White Goddess p. 374). Since the Gorgons had a grove on Erytheia—’Red Island’, identified by Pherecydes with the island of Gades—and since ‘ trees’ in all Celtic languages means ‘letters’, I read ‘the tree that takes diverse forms’ as meaning the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet, whose secret the Gorgons guarded in their sacred grove until Heracles ‘ annihilated’ them. In this sense, Heracles’s raid on Erytheia, where he killed Geryon and the dog Orthrus—the Dog-star Sirius—refers to the supersession of the Cronus-alphabet by the Heracles-alphabet.
4. Hesiod (Theogony 287) calls Geryon tricephalon, ‘three-headed’; another reading of which is tricarenon, meaning the same thing. ‘Tricarenon’ recalls Tarvos Trigaranus, the Celtic god with two left hands, shown in the company of cranes and a bull on the Paris Altar, felling a willowtree. Geryon, a meaningless word in Greek, seems to be a worn-down form of Trigaranus. Since alike in Greek and Irish tradition cranes are associated with alphabetical secrets (see 52. 6), and with poets, Geryon appears to be the Goddess’s guardian of the earlier alphabet: in fact, Cronus accompanied by the Dactyls. At the sepulchral island of Erytheia, Cronus-Geryon, who was once a sun-hero of the Heracles-Briareus type, had become a god of the dead, with Orthrus as his Cerberus; and the Tenth Labour, therefore, has been confused with the Twelfth, Menoetes figuring in both. Though the ‘stoneless cherry-like fruit’ sprung from Geryon’s blood rnay have been arbutus-berries, native to Spain, the story has been influenced by the sacredness to Cronus-Saturn of the early-fruiting cornel-cherry (White Goddess p. 172), which yields a red dye like the kerm-berry. Chrysaor’s part in the story is important. His name means ‘golden falchion’, the weapon associated with the Cronus cult, and he was said to be the Gorgon Medusa’s son (see 33. b; 73—h and ~38.j).
5. Norax, Geryon’s grandson by Erytheia and Hermes—Hermes is recorded to h~ave brought the tree-alphabet from Greece to Egypt, and back again—seems to be a ntiswriting of Norops, the Greek word for ‘Sun-face’. Th’~s genealogy has been turned inside-out by the Irish mythographers: they record that their own Geryon, whose three persons were known as Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba—a form of Mitra, Varuna, and Indra—had Ogma for a grandfather, not a grandson, and that his son was the Celt-Iberian Sun-god Lugh, Llew, or Lugos. They also insisted that the alphabet had come to them from Greece by way of Spain. Cronus’s crow was sacred to Lugos, according to Plutarch who records (On Ricers and Mountains v) that ‘ Lugdunum’—Lyons, the fortress of Lugos—’ was so called because an auspice of crows suggested the choice of its site; lug meaning a crow in the Allobrigian dialect.’
6. Vetflus Flaccus seems to have been misreported by Servius; he is more likely to have said that’ three-headed Garanus (Geryon), not Cacus, was the name of Herades’s victim, and Evander aided Heracles.’ This would fit in with the account of how Evander’s mother Carmenta suppressed the thirteen-consonant alphabet, Cronus’s Beth-Luis-Nion, in fayour of Heracles-Ogma’s fifteen-consonant Boibel-Loth (White Goddess p. 272). King Juba, whom Plutarch quotes as saying that Heracles taught Evander’s people the use of letters, was an honorary magistrate of Gades, and must have known a good deal of local alphabetic lore. In this Evander story, Heracles is plainly described as an enemy of the Cronus cult, since he abolishes human sacrifice. His cixcumambulation of Italy and Sicily has been invented to account for the many temples there raised to him; his fivefold contest with Eryx, to .justify the sixthcentury colonizing expeditions which Pentathlus of Cnidos, the Heraclid, and Dorieus the Spartan, led to the Eryx region. The Heracles honoured at Agyrium, a Sicel city, may have been an ancestor who led the Sicels across the straits from Italy about the year ~050 B.c. (Thucydides: vi. 2.5). He was also made to visit Scythia; the Greek colonists on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea incorporated a Scythian Heracles, an archer hero (see 119. $), in the omniumgatherum Tenth Labour. His bride, the serpent-tailed woman, was an Earth-goddess, mother of the three principal Scythian tribes mentioned by Herodotus; in another version of the myth, represented by the English ballad of The Laidley Worm, when he has kissed her three times, she tums into ‘the fairest woman you ever did see.’
7. The Alcyoneus anecdote seems to have become detached from the myth of the Giants’ assault on Olympus and their defeat at Heracles’s hands (see 35—a-e). But Alcyoneus’s theft of Helius’s cattle from Erytheia, and again from the citadel of Corinth, is an older version of Heracles’s theft of Geryon’s cattle; theix owner being an active solar consort of the Moon-goddess, not a banished and enfeebled god of the Dead.
8. The arrow which Heracles shot at the noon-day sun will have been one discharged at the zenith during his coronation ceremony (see 126. and 135.
H~aacL~s had performed these Ten Labours in the space of eight years and one month; but Eurystheus, discounting the Second and the Fifth, set him two more. The Eleventh Labour was to fetch fruit from the golden apple-tree, Mother Earth’s wedding gift to Hera, with which she had been so delighted that she planted it in her own divine garden. This garden lay on the slopes of Mount Atlas, where the panting chariot-horses of the Sun complete their journey, and where Aflas’s sheep and catfie, one thousand herds of each, wander over their undisputed pastures. When Hera found, one day, that Atlas’s daughters, the Hesperides, to whom she had entrusted the tree, were pilfering the apples, she set the ever-watchful dragon Ladon to coil around the tree as its guardian.1
b. Some say that Ladon was the offspring of Typhon and Echidae; others, that he was the youngest-born of Ceto and Phorcys; others again, that he was a parthogenous son of Mother Earth. He had one hundred heads, and spoke with divers tongues.2
c. It is equally disputed whether the Hesperides lived on Mount Atlas in the Land of the Hyperboreans; or on Mount Atlas in Mauretania; or somewhere beyond the Ocean stream; or on two islands near the promontory called the Western Horn, which lies close to the Ethiopian Hesperiae, on the borders of Africa. Though the apples were Hera’s, Atlas took a gardener’s pride in them and, when Themis warned him: ‘One day long hence, Titan, your tree shal~ be stripped of its gold by a son of Zeus,’ Atlas, who had not then been punished with his terrible task of support’rag the celesfal globe upon his shoulders, built solid walls around the orchard, and expelled all strangers from his land; it may well have been he who set Ladon to guard the apples.3
d. Heracles, not knowing in what direction the Garden of the Hesperides lay, marched through Illyria to the river Po, the home of the oracular sea-god Nereus. On the way he crossed ihe Echedorus, a small Macedonian stream, where Cycnus, the son of Ares and Pyrene, challenged him to a duel. Ares acted as Cycnus’s second, and manhailed the combatants, but Zeus hurled a thunderbolt between them and they broke off the fight. When at last Heracles came to the Po, the rivernymphs, daughters of Zeus and Themis, showed him Nereus asleep. He seized the hoary old sea-god and, clinging to him despite his many Protean changes, forced him to prophesy how the golden apples could be won. Some say, however, that Heracles went to Prometheus for this information.4
e. Nereus had advised Heracles not to pluck the apples himself, but to employ Adas’as his agent, meanwhile relieving him of his fantastic burden; therefore, on arriving at the Garden of the Hesperides, he asked Aras to do him this favour. Atlas would have undertaken almost any task for the sake of an hour’s respite, but he feared Ladon, whom Heracles thereupon killed with an arrow shot over the garden wall. Heracles now bent his back to receive the weight of the celestial globe, and Atlas walked away, returning presently with three apples plucked by his daughters. He found the sense of freedom delicious. ‘I will take these apples to Eurystheus myself without fail,’ he said, ‘if you hold up the heavens for a few months longer.’ Heracles pretended to agree but, having been warned by Nereus not to accept any such offer, begged Aras to support the globe for only one moment more, while he put a pad on his head. Arias, easily deceived, laid the apples on the ground and resumed his burden; whereupon Heracles picked them up and went away with an ironical farewell.
f. After some months Heracles brought the apples to Eurystheus, who handed them back to him; he then gave them to Athene, and she returned them to the nymphs, since it was unlawful that Hera’s property should pass from their hands.s Feeling thirsty after this Labour, Heracles stamped his foot and made a stream of water gush out, which later saved the lives of the Argonauts when they were cast up high and dry on the Libyan desert. Meanwhile Hera, weeping for Ladon, set his image among the stars as the constellation of the Serpent.6
g. Heracles did not return to Mycenae by a direct route. He first traversed Libya, whose King Antaeus, son of Poseidon and Mother Earth, was in the habit of forcing strangers to wrestle with him until they were exhausted, whereupon he killed them; for not only was he a strong and skilful athlete, but whenever he touched the earth, his strength revived. He saved the skulls of his victims to roofa temple of Poseidon.? It is not known whether Heracles, who was determined to end this barbarous practice, challenged Antaeus, or was challenged by him. Antaeus, however, proved no easy victim, being a giant who lived in a cave beneath a towering cliff, where he feasted on the flesh of lions, and slept on the bare ground in order to conserve and increase his already colossal strength. Mother Earth, not yet sterile after her birth of’the Giants, had conceived Antaeus in a Libyan cave, and found more reason to boast of him than even of her monstrous elder children, Typhon, Tityus, and Briareus. It would have gone ill with the Olympians if he had fought against them on the Plains of Phlegra.
h. In preparation for the wrestling match, both combatants cast off their lion pelts, but while Heracles rubbed himself with oil in the Olympic fashion, Antaeus poured hot sand over his limbs lest contact with the earth through the soles of his feet alone should prove insuff~dent. Heracles planned to preserve his strength and wear Antaeus down, but after tossing him full length on the ground, he was amazed to see the giant’s muscles swell and a healthy flush suffuse his limbs as Mother Earth revived him. The combatants grappled again, and presently Antaeus flung himself down of his own accord, not waiting to be thrown; upon which, Heracles, realizing what he was at, lifted him high into the air, then cracked his ribs and, despite the hollow groans of Mother Earth, held him aloft unfil he died?
i. Some say that this conflict took place at Lixus, a small Mauretanian city some fifty miles from Tangier, near the sea, where a hillock is shown as Antaeus’s tomb. Ira few basketsful of soil are taken from this hillock, the natives beheve, rain will fall and continue to fall until they are replaced. It is also claimed that the Gardens of the Hesperides were the near-by island, on which stands an altar of Heracles; but, except for a few wild-olive trees, no trace of the orchard now remains. When Sertorius took Tangier, he opened the tomb to see whether Antaeus’s skeleton were as large as tradition described it. To his astonishment, it measured sixty cubits, so he at once closed up the tomb and offered Antaeus heroic sacrifices. It is said locally either that Antaeus founded Tangier, formerly called Tingis; or that Sophax, whom Tinga, Antaeus’s widow, bore to Heracles, reigned over that country, and gave l~is mother’s name to the city. Sophax’s son Diodorus subdued many African nations with a Greek army recruited from the Mycenaeart colonists whom Heracles had settled there.9 The Mauretanians are of eastern origin and, like the Pharusii, descended from certain Persians who accompanied Heracles to Africa; but some hold that they are descendants of those Canaanites whom Joshua the Israelite expelled from their country?
j. Next, Heracles visited the Oracle at Aremort, where he asked for an interview with his father Zeus; but Zeus was loth to reveal himself and, when Heracles persisted, flayed a ram, put on the fleece, with the ram’s head hiding his own, and issued certain instructions. Hence the l~gyptians give their images of Zeus Aremort a ram’s face. The Thebans sacrifice rams only once a year when, at the end of Zeus’s festival, they slay a single ram and use its fleece to cover Zeus’s image; after which the ~w ~tcsh~,ners beat their breasts in mournin~~~ for the victim, and bury it in a sacred tomb.1~
k. Heracles then struck south, and founded a hundred-gated city, named Thebes in honour of his birthpIace; but some say that Osiris had already founded it. All this time, the King of Egypt was Antaeus’s brother Busiris, a son of Poseidon by Lysianassa, the daughter of Epaphus or, as others say, by Anippe, a daughter of the river Nile.1 Now, Busiris’s kingdom had once been visited with drought and famine for eight or nine years, and he had sent for Greek augurs to give him advice. His nephew, a learned Cyprian seer, named Phrasius, Thrasius, or Thasius, son of Pygmalion, announced that the famine would cease if every year one stranger were sacrificed in honour of Zeus. Busiris began with Phrasius himself, and afterwards sacrificed tnher chance guests, until the arrival of Heracles, who let the priests hale him off to the altar. They bound his hair with a fillet, and Busiris, calling upon the gods, was about to raise the sacr’ff~cial axe, when Heracles burst his bonds and slew Busiris, Busiris’s son Amphidamas, and all the priestly attendants.13
1. Next, Heracles traversed Asia and put in at Thermydrae, the harbour of Rhodian Lindus, where he unyoked one of the bullocks from a farmer’s cart, sacrif~ced it, and feasted on its flesh, while the owner stood upon a certain mountain and cursed him from afar. Hence the Lindians still utter curses when they sacrifice to Heracles. Finally he reached the Caucasus Mountains~ where Prometheus had been lettered for thirty years—or one thousand, or thirty thousand years—while every day a griffon-vulture, born of Typhon and Echidne, tore at his liver. Zeus had long repented of his punishment, because Prometheus had s’mce sent him a kindly warning not to marry Thetis, lest he might beget one greater than himself; and now, when Heracles pleaded for Prometheus’s pardon, granted this without demur. 14 Having once, however, condemned him to everlasting punishment, Zeus stipulated that, in order still to appear a prisoner, he must wear a ring made from his chains and set with Caucasian stone—and this was the first ring ever to contain a setting. But Prometheus’s sufferings were destined to last until some immortal should voluntarily go to Tartarus in his stead; so Heracles reminded Zeus of Cheiron, who was longing to resign the gift of immortality ever since he had suffered his incurable wound. Thus no further impediment rema’med, and Heracles, invoking Hunter Apollo, shot the griffon-vulture through the heart and set Prometheus free. IS
m. Mankind now began to wear rings in Prometheus’s honour, and also wreaths; because when released, Prometheus was ordered to crown himself with a willow wreath, and Heraeles, to keep him company, assumed one ofwild-olive.16
n. Almighty Zeus set the arrow among the stars as the constellation Sagitta; and to this day the inhabitants of the Caucasus Mountains regard the griffon-vulture as the enemy of mankind. They buru out its nests with flaming darts, and set snares for it to avenge Prometheus’s suffering.17
1. Apollodorus: ii. 5. IX; Euripides: Heracles 396; Pherecydes: Marriage of Hera ii, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 2396; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi iii; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 3; Germanicus Caesar: On Aratus’s Phenomena; sub Draco.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5—~l; Hesiod: Theogony 333-5; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~396.
3. Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Scholiast on Virgil’s Aeneidiv. 483; Hesiod: Theogony 2~5; Pliny: Natural History vi. 35-6; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 637 if. 4. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Herodotus: vii. 124-7; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~ 5.
5. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhoclius: iv. ~396; Apollonius Rhodius: ~396-~484. 6. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 3.
7. A pollodorus : Ioc. cit.; H y gin us : Fabula 3 ~ ; Diodorus Siculus : iv. t 7. 8. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pindar: Isthmian Odes iv. 52-5; Lucan: iv. 589-655.
9. Pliny: Natural Hi~tory v. ~; Strabo: xvii. 3—2; Pomponius Mela: iii. ~06; Plutarch: Sertorius 9.
~o. Strabo: xvii. 3.7; Pliny: Natural History v. 8; Procopius: On the Vandal War ii. ~o.
Ix. Callisthenes, quoted by Strabo: xvii. I. 43; Herodotus: ii. 42. 12. Diodorus Siculus: i. 15 and iv. 18; Ovid: Ibis 399; Apollodorus: ii. 5. x x; Agathon of Samos, quoted by Plutarch: ParallelStories 38. ~50
i3.
133. ~—133. $
Philargyrius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 5; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabulae 31 and 56; Ovid: Art of Love i. 649.
14. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 54; Strabo: xi. 5—5; Aeschylus, quoted by Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. iS; Hesiod: Theogony 529 if.
15. Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 42; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Pliny: Natural History xxxiii. 4 and xxxvii. I; Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound I025 and Prometheus Unbound, Fragment 195, quoted by Plutarch: On Love ~4; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
16. Athenaeus: xv. x~-13; Aeschylus: Fragments 202 and 235, quoted by Athenaeus p. 674d; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
17. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. xS; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana ii. 3.
1.
1. The different locations of the Hesperides represent different views of what constituted the Farthest West. One account placed the scene of this Labour at Berenice, formerly called the city of the Hesperides (Pliny: Natural History v. 5), Eusperides (Herodotus: iv. 171), or Euesperites (Herodotus: iv. 198), but renamed after the wife of Ptolemy Euergetes. It was built on Pseudopenias (Strabo: xvii. 3.20), the western promontory of the Gulf of Sirte. This city, washed by the river Lathon, or Lcthon, had a sacred grove, known as the’ Gardens of the Hesperides’. Moreover, the Lathon flowed into a Hesperian Lake; and near by lay another, Lake Tdtonis, enclosing a small island with a temple of Aphrodite (Strabo: loc. cit.; Pliny: Ioc. tit.), to whom the apple-tree was sometimes said to belong (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iv. 485). Herodotus (lot. tit.) describes this as one of the few fertile parts of Libya; in the best years, the land brought forth one hundredfold.
2. Besides these geographical disputes, there were various rationalizations of the myth. One view was that the apples had.really been beautiful sheep (melon means both ‘sheep’ and ‘apple’), or sheep with a peculiar red fleece resembling gold, which were guarded by a shepherd named Dragon to whom Hesperus’s daughters, the Hesperides, used to bring food. Heracles carried off the sheep (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid: loc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 26) and killed (Servius: loc. tit.) or abducted, the shepherd (Palaephatus: t9). Palaephatus (lot. cit.) makes Hesperus a native of CarJan Miletus, which was still famous for its sheep, and says that though Hesperus had long been dead at the time of Heracles’s raid, his two daughters survived him.
3. Another view was that Heracles rescued the daughters of Atlas, who had been abducted from their family orchard by Egyptian priests; and Atlas, in gratitude, not only gave him the object of his Labour, but taught him astronomy into the bargain. For Atlas, the first astronomer, knew so much that he carried the celestial globe upon his shoulders, as it were; hence Heracles is said to have taken the globe from him (Diodorus Siculus: iii. 60 and iv. 27). Heracles did indeed become Lord of the Zodiac, but the Titan astronomer whom he superseded was Coeus
(alias Thoth), not Atlas (see x. 3)4. The true explanation of this Labour is, however, to be found in ritual, rather than allegory. It will be shown (see 148.5) that the candidate for the kingship had to overcome a serpent and take his gold; and this Heracles did both here and in his battle with the Hydra. But the gold which he took should not properly have been in the form of golden apples—those were given him at the close of his reign by the Triplegoddess, as his passport to Paradise. And, in this ftnterary context, the Serpent was not his enemy, but the form that his own oracular ghost would assume after he had been sacrif~ced. Ladon was hundred-headed and spoke with divers tongues because many oracular heroes could call themselves ‘Heracles’: that is to say, they had been representatives of Zeus, and dedicated to the service of Hera. The Garden of the three Hesperides—whose names identify them with the sunset (see 33.7 and 39. ~)—is placed in the Far West because the sunset was a symbol of the sacred king’s death. Heracles received the apples at the dose of his reign, correctly recorded as a Great Year of one hundred lunations. He had taken over the burden of the sacred kingship from his predecessor, and with it the title’ Atlas ‘,’ the long-suffering one’. It is likely that the burden was originally not the globe, but the sun-disk (see 67. z).
5. Nereus’s behaviour is modelled on that of Proteus (see 169. a), whom Menelaus consulted on Pharos (Homer: Odyssey iv. 581 if.). Heracles is said to have ascended the Po, because it led to the Land of the Hyperboreans (see/25. b). We know that the straw-wrapped gifts from the Hyperboreans to Delos came by this route (Herodotus: iv. 33). But though their land was, in one sense, Britain—as the centre of the Boreas cult-it was Libya in another, and the Caucasus in another; and the Paradise lay either i~ the Far West, or at the back of the North Wind, the mysterious region to which the wild geese flew in summertime (see ~6~. 4). Heracles’s wanderings illustrate this dubiety. If he was in search of the Libyan Paradise, he would have consulted Proteus King of Pharos (see ~69. a); if of the Caucasian Paradise, Prometheus (which is, indeed, Apollodorus’s version); if of the Northern, Nereus, who lived near the sources of the Po, and whose behaviour resentbled that of Proteus. 6. Antaeus’s bones were probably those of a stranded whale, about which a legend grew at Tangier: ‘This must have been a giant—only Heracles could have killed him. Heracles, who put up those enormous pillars at Ceuta and Gibraltar !’ A wrestling match between the candidate for kingship and local champions was a widely observed custom: the fight with Antaeus for the possession of the kingdom, like Theseus’s fight with Sciron (see 96. 3), or Odysseus’s with Philomdeides (see 161.f), must be understood in this context. Praxiteles, the sculptor oś the Parthe~on, regarded the overthrow of Antaeus as a separate labour (Pausanias: iv. x~. 4)7—An ancient religious association linked Dodona and Ammon; and the Zeus worshipped in each was originally a shepherd-king, annually sacrificed, as on Mounts Pelion and Laphystius. Heracles did right to visit his father Zeus when passing through Libya; Perseus had done so on his way to the East, and Alexander the Great followed suit centuries later. & The god Set had reddish hair, and the Busirians therefore needed victims with hair of that colour to offer Osiris, whom Set murdered; redheads were rare in Egypt, but common among the Hellenes (Diodorus Siculus: i. 88; Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 3 o, 33 and 73 )—Heracles’s killin g of Busiris may record some punitive action taken by the Hellenes,.whose nationals had been waylaid and killed; there is evidence for an early Hellenic colony at Chemmis.
9. Curses uttered during sacrifices to Heracles (see 143. a) recall the well-established custom of cursing and insulting the king from a near-by hill while he is being crowned, in order to ward off divine jealousyRoman generals were similarly insulted at their triumphs while they impersonated Mars. But sowers also cursed the seed as they scattered it in the furrows.
~0. The release of Prometheus seems to have been a moral fable in-. vented by Aeschylus, not a genuine myth (see 39. h). His wearing of the willow-wreath—corroborated on an Etruscan mirror—suggests that he had been dedicated to the Moon-goddess Anatha, or Neith, or Athene (see 9—1). Perhaps he was originally bound with willow thongs to the sacrificial altar at her autumn festival (see ~ ~6.4).
11. According to one legend, Typhon killed Heracles in Libya, and Iolaus restored him to life by holding a quail to his nostrils fEudoxus of Cnidus: Circuit of the Earth i, quoted by Athenaeus: ix. x~). But it was the Tyrian Heracles Melkarth, whom the god Esmun (‘he whom we evoke’), or Asclepius, restored in this way; the meaning is that the year begins in March with the arrival of the quails from Sinai, and that quailorgies were then celebrated in honour of the goddess (see ~ 4. $)—
H~Rt~›L~S’S last, and most difficult, Labour was to br’mg the dog Cerberus up from Tartarus. As a preliminary, he went to Eleusis where he asked to partake of the Mysteries and wear the myrtle wreath.1 Nowadays, any Greek of good repute may be initiated at Eleusis, but since in Herades’s day Athenians alone were admitted, Theseus suggested that a certain Pylius should adopt him. This Pylius did. and when Heracles had been purif~ed for his slaughter of the Centaurs, because no one with blood-stained hands could view the Mysteries, he was duly initiated by Orpheus’s son Musaeus, Theseus acting as his sponsor.2 However, Eumolpus, the founder of the Greater Mysteries, had decreed that no foreigners should be admitted, and therefore the Eleus’mians, loth to refuse Heracles’s request, yet doubtful whether his adoption by PyLius would qualify him as a true Athenian, established the Lesser Mysteries on his account; others say that Demeter herself honoured him by founding the Lesser Mysteries on this occasion.1
b. Every year, two sets of Eleusiman Mysteries are held: the Greater inhonour of Demeter and Core, and the Lesser inhonour of Core alone. These Lesser Mysteries, a preparation for the Greater, are a dramatic reminder of Dionysus’s fate, performed by the Eleusinians at Agrae on the river Ilissus in the month Anthesterion. The principal rites are the sacrifice of a sow, which the initiates first wash in the river Cantharm, and their subsequent purification by a priest who bears the name Hydranus.4 They must then wait at least one year until they may participate in the Greater Mysteries, which axe held at Eleusis itself in the month Boeclromion; and must also take an oath of secrecy, administered by the mystagogue, before being prepared for these. Meanwhile, they are refused admittance to the sanctuary of Demeter, and wait in the vestibule throughout the solenmities.s
c. Thus cleansed and prepared, Heracles descended to Tartarus from Laconian Taenarum; or, some say, from the Acherusian peninsula near Heracleia on the Black Sea, where marks of his descent are still shown at a great depth. He was guided by Athene and Hermes—for whenever, exhausted by his Labours, he cried outin despair to Zeus, Athene always came hastening down to comfort him.6 Terrif~ed by Heracles’s scowl, Charon fortied him across the river Styx without demur; in punishment o fwhich irregularity he was lettered by Hades for one entire year. As Heracles stepped ashore from the crazy boat, all the ghosts fled, except Meleager and the Gorgon Medusa. At sight of Medusa he drew his sword, but Hermes reassured him that she was only a phantom; and when he aimed an arrow at Meleager, who was wearing bright armour, Mcleager laughed. ‘You have nothing to fear from the dead,’ he said, and they chatted amicably for awhile, Heracles offer’rag in the end maxry Meleager’s sister Deianeira.7
d. Near the gates of Tartarus, Heracles found his friends Theseus.1 Peirithous fastened to cruel chairs, and wrenched Theseus free, but ~ obliged to leave Peirithous behind; next, he rolled away the sto: under which Demeter had imprisoned Asca]aphus; and then, wishi~ to gratify the ghosts with a gift of warm blood, slaughtered one Hades’s cattle. Their herdsman, Menoetes, or Menoet~us, the son Ceuthonymus, challenged him to a wrestling match, but was seiz around the middle and had his ribs crushed. At this, Persephone, w] came out from her palace and greeted Heracles like a brother, int~ vened and pleaded for Menoetes’s life.8
e. When Heracles demanded Cerberus, Hades, standing by his wif side, replied grimly:’ He is yours, if you can master him without us~ your club or your arrows.’ Heracles found the dog chained to the ga~ of Acheron, and resolutely gripped him by the throat—from whi rose three heads, each maned with serpents. The barbed tail flew up strike, but Heracles, protected by the lion pelt, did not relax his gJ until Cerberus choked and yielded.9
f On his way back from Tartarus, Heracles wove himsella wrea from the tree which Hades had planted in the Elysian Fields as a mere rial to his mistress, the beautiful nymph Leuce. The outer leaves oft] wreath remained black, because that is the colour of the Underwor] but those next to Herades’s brow were bleached a silver-white by 1 glorious sweat. Hence the white poplar, or aspen, is sacred to him: colour signifying that he has laboured in both worlds.10
g. With Athene’s assistance, Heracles recrossed the river Styx safety, and then half-dragged, half-carried Cerberus up the chasm n› Troezen, through which Dionysus had conducted his mother Seme In the temple of Saviour Artemis, built by Theseus over the mouth this chasm, altars now stand sacred to the infernal deities. At Troeze also, a fountain discovered by Heracles and called after him is shown front of Hippolytus’s former palace.1 ~
h. According to another account, Heracles dragged Cerberus, born with adamantine chains, up a subterrene path which leads to the gloon cave of Acone, near Mariandyne on the Black Sea. As Cerberus rcsist› averting his eyes from the sunlight, and barking furiously with all thr mouths, his slaver flew across the green fields and gave birth to t~ poisonous plant aconite, also called hecateis, because Hecate was t~ first to use it. Still another account is that Heracles came back to the upper air through Taenarum, famous for its cave-like temple with an image of Poseidon standing before it; but ira road ever led thence to the Underworld, it has since been blocked up. Finally, some say that beemerged from the precinct of Laphystian Zeus, on Mount Laphystius, where stands an image of Bright-eyed Heracles. X2 i. Yet all agree at least that, when Heracles brought Cerberus to Mycenae, Eurystheus, who was offering a sacrifice, handed him a slave’s portion, reserving the best cuts for his own kinsmen; and that Heracles showed his just resentment by killing three of Eurystheus’s sons: Perimedes, Eurybius, and Eurypilus. X3
j. Besides the aconite, Heracles also discovered the followingsimples: the all-heal heracleon, or ‘wild origanum’; the Sider/an heracleon, with its thin stem, red flower, and leaves like the coriander’s, which grows near lakes and rivers, and is an excellent remedy for all wounds inflicted by iron; and the hyoscyamos, or henbane, which causes vertigo and insanity. The Nymphaean heracleon, which has a dub-like root, was named after a certain nymph deserted by Heracles, who died of jealousy; it makes men impotent for the space of twelve days. X4 I. Homer: Odyssey xl. 624; Apollodorus: ii. 5.
2. Herodotus: viii. 65; Apollodorus: log. tit.; Plutarch: Theseus 3ř and 33; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 25.
3. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1328; Diodorus Siculus: iv.
4. Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Plutus 85 and Peace 368; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Agra; Plutarch: Demetrius 26 and Phocion 28; Aristophanes: Acharnians 703, with scholiast on 720; Varro: On Country Matters ii. 4; Hesychius sub Hydranus; Polyaenus:
v. 17.
5. Plutarch: Phocion 28; Seneca: Natural Questions vii. 31.
6. Apollodorus: ii. 5—12; Xenophon: Anabasis ci. ~. z; Homer:
Odyssey xi. 626 and Iliad viii. 36v. if.
7. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 392; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Bacchy~ lides: Epinicia v. 71 If. and 165 If.
8. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: Chiliaries: ii. 396
9. Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.
Io. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 276 and Eclogues vii. 6~.
x x. Homer: Iliad viii. 369; Apollodorus: lo›. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 3 and ii. 32.3.
12. Ovid: Metamorlvhoses vii. 409 if.; Germanicus Caesar on Virgil’s Georgics ii. ~SZ; Pausanias: iii. zS. 4 and ix. 34. 4. 156 134. 1—134. $
13. AnticSides, quotedby Athenaeus: iv. ~ag; Scholiast on Thucydides: i. 9.
~4. Pliny: Natural History xxv. 12, ~5, 27, and 37.
1. This myth seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed Heraeles descending to Tartarus, where Hecate the Goddess of the Dead welcomed him in the form of a three-headed monster—perhaps with one head for each of the seasons (see 3~.fand 75—2)—and, as a natural sequel to her gift of the golden apples, led him away to the Elysian Fields. Cerberus, in fact, was here carrying off Heracles; not contrariwise. The familiar version is a logical result of his elevation to godhead: a hero must remain in the Underworld, but a god will escape and take his gaoler with him. Moreover, deification of a hero in a society which formerly worshipped only the Goddess implies that the king has defied immemorial custom and refused to die for her sake. Thus the possession of a golden dog was proof of the Achaean High King’s sovereignty and escape from matriarchal tutelage (see 24. 4)—Menoetes’s presence in Tartarus, and Heracles’s theft of one of Hades’s cattle, shows that the Tenth Labour is another version of the Twelfth: a harrowing of Hell (see ~ 32. i). To.judge from the corresponding Welsh myth, Menoetes’s father, though purposely ‘nameless’, was the alder-god Bran, or Phoroneus, or Cronus; which agrees with the context of the Tenth Labour (White Goddess p. 48).
2. The Greater Eleusinian Mysteries were of Cretan origin, and held in Boedromion (‘ ruuning for help’) which, in Crete, was the fxrst month of the year, roughly September, and so named, according to Plutarch (Theseus 27), to commemorate Theseus’s defeat of the Amazons, which means his suppression of the matriarchal system. Originally, the Mysteries seem to have been the sacred king’s preparation, at the autumnal equinox, for his approaching death at midwinter—hence the premonitory myrtle wreath (see 109.4)—in the form of a sacred drama, which advised him what to expect in the Underworld. After the abolition of royal male sacrifices, a feature of matriarchy, the Mysteries were open to all judged worthy of initiation; as in Egypt, where the Book of the Dead gave similar advice, any man of good repute could become an Osiris by being purified of all uncleanness and undergoing a mock death. In Eleusis, Osiris was identified with Dionysus. White poplar leaves were a Sumerian symbol of renascence and, in the tree-calendar, white poplar stood for the autumnal equinox (see 52.3)$. The Lesser Mysteries, which became a preparation for the Greater, seem to have been an independent Pelasgian festival, also based on the hope of rebirth, but taking place early in February at Candlemas, when the trees first leaf—which is the meaning of’ Anthesterion’. Now, since Dionysus was identified with Osiris, Semele must be Isis; and we know that Osiris did not rescue Isis from the Underworld, but she, him. Thus the icon at Troezen will have shown Semele restoring Dionysus to the upper air. The goddess who similarly guides Heracles is Isis again; and his rescue of Alcestis was probably deduced from the same icon—he is led, not leading. His emergence in the precinct of Mount Laphystius makes an interesting variant. No cavern exists on the summit, and the myth must refer to the death and resurrection of the sacred king which was celebrated there—a rite that helped to form the legend of the Golden Fleece (see 70. 2 and 148. ~0).
5. Aconite, a poison and paralysant, was used by the Thessalian witches in the manufacture of their flying ointment: it humbed the feet and hands and gave them a sensation of being off the ground. But since it was also a febrifuge, Heracles, who drove the fever-birds from Stymphalus, became credited with its discovery.
6. The sequence of Heracles’s feats varies considerably. Diodorus Siculus and Hyginus arrange the Twelve Labours in the same order as Apollodorus, except that they both place the Fourth before the Third, and the Sixth before the Fifth; and that Diodorus places the Twelfth before the Eleventh. Nearly all mythographers agree that the killing of the Nemean Lion was the First Labour, but in Hyginus’s sequence of ‘the Twelve Labours of Heracles set by Eurystheus’ (Fabula 30), it is preceded by the stranghng of the serpents. In one place, Diodorus Siculus associates the killing of Antaeus and Busiris with the Tenth Labour (iv. ]7-~8); in another, with the Eleventh (‘xv. 27). And while some writers make Heracles sail with the Argonauts in his youth (Silius Italicus: i. 5 12); others place this adventure after the Fourth Labour (Apollonius Rhodius: i. 122); and others after the Eighth (Diodorus Siculus: iv. xs). But some make him perform the Ninth (Valerius Flaccus: Argonautica v. 91) and Twelfth (ibicI.: ii. 382) Labours, and break the horns of’ both bulls’ (ibid.: i. 36) before he sailed with the Argonauts; and others deny that he sailed at all, on the ground that he was then serving as Queen Omphale’s slave (Hcrodotus, quoted by Apollodorus: i. 9. ~9).
7. According to Lťcophron x 328, Heracles was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries before setting out on the Ninth Labour; but Philochorus (quoted by Plutarch: Theseus 26) says that Theseus had him initiated in the course of its performance (ibid.: 30), and was rescued by him from Tartarus during the Twelfth Labour (Apollodorus: ii. 5—12). According to Pausanias (i. 27. 7), Theseus was only seven years old when Heracles came to Troezen, wearing the lion pelt; and cleared the Isthmus of malefactors on his way to Athens, at the time when Heracles was serving Omphale (Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3)—Euripides believed that Heracles had fought with Ares’s son Cycnus before setting out on the Eighth Labour (Alcestis 50I If.); Propertius (iv. 19. 41), that he had already visited Tartarus when he killed Cacus; and Ovid (Fasti v. 388), that Cheiron died accidentally when Heracles had almost completed his Labours, not during the Fourth.
8. Albricus (22) lists the following Twelve Labours in this order, with allegorical explanations: defeating the Centaurs at a wedding; killing the lion; rescuing Alcestis from Tartarus and chaining Cerberus; winning the apples of the Hesperides; destroying the Hydra; wrestling with Achelous; killing Cacus; winning the mares of Diomedes; defeating Antaeus; capturing the boar; lifting the cattle of Geryon; holding up the heavens. 9—Various Labours and bye-works of Heracles were represented on Apollo’s throne at Amyclae (Pausanias: iii. 18.7-9); and in the bronze shrine of Athene on the Spartan acropolis (Pausanias: iii. 17. 3). Praxiteles’s gable sculptures on the Theban shrine of Heracles showed most of the Twelve Labours, but the Stymphalian Birds were missing, and the wrestling match with Antaeus replaced the cleansing of Augeias’s stables. The evident desire of so many cities to be associated with Heracles’s Labours suggests that much the same ritual marriage-task drama, as a preliminary to coronation, was performed over a wide area.
W~~/Heracles returned to Thebes after his Labours, he gave Megara, his wife, now thirty-three years old, in marriage to his nephew and charioteer Iolaus, who was only sixteen, remarking that his own union with her had been inauspicious.x He then looked about for a younger and more fortunate wife; and, hearing that his friend Eurytus, a son of Melanius, King of Oechalia, had offered to marry his daughter Iole to any archer who could outshoot him and his four sons, took the road there.2 Eurytus had been given a fine bow and taught its use by Apollo himself, whom he now claimed to surpass in marksmanship, yet Heracles found no difficulty in winning the contest. The result displeased Eurytus excessively and, when he learned that Heracles had discarded Megara after murdering her children, he refused to give him Iole. Having drunk a great deal of wine to gain confidence, ‘You could never compare with me and my sons as an archer,’ he told Heracles, ‘were it not that you unfairly use magic arrows, which cannot miss their mark. This contest is void, and I would not, in any case, entrust my beloved daughter to such a ruff~an as yoursall! Moreover, you are Eurystheus’s slave and, like a slave, deserve only blows from a free man.’ So saying, he drove Heracles out of the Palace. Heracles did not retaliate at once, as he might well have done; but swore to take vengeance.$
b. Three of Eurytus’s sons, namdy Didaeon, Clytius, and Toxeus, ú had supported their father in his dishonest pretensions. The eldest, however, whose name was Iphitus, declared that Iole should in all fairness have been given to Heracles; and when, soon afterwards, twelve strong-hooved brood-mares and twelve sturdy mule-foals disappeared from Euboea, he refused to believe that Heracles was the thief. As a matter of fact, they had been stolen by the well-known thiefAutolycus, who magically changed their appearance and sold them to the unsus?ecting Heracles as if they were his own.4 Iphitus followed the tracks of the mares and foals and found that they led towards Tiryns, which made him suspect that Heracles was, after all, avenging the insult offered him by Eurytus. Coming suddenly face to face with Heracles, who had just returned from his rescue of Alcestis, he concealed his sus?icious and merely asked for advice in the matter. Heracles did not recognize the beasts from Iphitus’s description as those sold to him by Autolycus, and with his usual heartiness promised to search for them ifIphitus would consent to become his guest. Yet he now divined that he was suspected of theft, which galled his sensitive heart. After a grand banquet, he led Iphitus to the top of the highest tower in Tiryns. ‘ Look about you l’ he demanded,’and tell me whether your mares are grazing anywhere in sight.’ ‘I cannot see them,’ Iphitus admitted. ‘Then you have falsely accused me in your heart of being a thief! ‘ Heracles roared, distraught with anger, and hurled him to his death.s
1. Heracles presently went to Neleus, King of Pylus, and asked to be purified; but Neleus refused, because Eurytus was his ally. Nor would any of his sons, except the youngest, Nestor, consent to receive Heracles, who eventually persuaded Deiphobus, the son of Hippolytus, to purify him at Amyclae. However, he still suffered from evil dreams, and went to ask the Delphic Oracle how he might be rid of them.6 The Pythoness Xenoclea refused to answer this question. ‘You murdered your guest,’ she said. ‘I have no oracles for such as you!’ ‘Then I shall be obliged to institute an oracle of my own!’ cried Heracles. With that, he plundered the shrine of its votive offerings and even pulled away the tripod on which Xenoclea sat. ‘Heracles of Tiryns is a ve~ different man from his Canopic namesake,’ the Pythoness said severell as he carried the tripod from the shrine; she meant that the Egypti~ Heracles had once come to Delphi and behaved with courtesy reverence.7
d. Up rose the indignant Apollo, and śought Heracles until Zeu parted the combatants with a thunderbolt, making them clasp hands friendship. Heracles restored the sacred tripod, and together the’ founded the city of Gythiurn, where images of Apollo, Heracles, Dionysus now stand side by side in the market place. Xenoclea th~ gave Heracles the following oracle: ‘To be rid of your affliction yo~ must be sold into slavery for one whole year and the price you fet~ must be offered to Iphitus’s children.8 Zeus is enraged that you hay violated the laws of hospit. ality, whatever the provocation.’ ‘Whos slave am I to be?’ asked Heracles humbly. ‘Queen Omphale of Lydi will purchase you,’ Xenoclca replied. ‘I obey,’ said Heracles, ‘but on day I shall enslave the man who has brought this suffering upon me and all his family too!’ 9 Some, however, say that Heracles did no return the tripod and that, when one thousand years later, heard that it had been taken to the city of Pheneus, he punished th Pheneans by blocking the channel which Heracles had dug to carry the heavy rains, and flooded their city.10
e. Another wholly different account of these events is curren~
according to which Lycus the Euboean, son of Poseidon and Dirc~ attacked Thebes dur’mg a time of sedition, killed King Creon, an, usurped the throne. Believing Copreus’s report that Heracles had die~ Lycus tried to seduce Megara and, when she resisted him, would hay killed her and the children had Heracles not returned from Tartarusj~ in time to exact vengeance. Thereupon Hera, whose favourite Lyc~ was, drove Heracles mad: he killed Megara and his own sons, also mirfion, the Aetolian Stichius. ~ ~ The Thebans, who show the children~ tomb, say that Heracles would have killed his foster-father Amphi tryon as well, if Athene had not knocked him insensible with a hug stone; to which they point, saying: ‘We nick-name it “The Chaste her”.’ But Amphitryon ha.d, in fact, died long before, in the Orcho menan campaign. The Athenians claim that Theseus, grateful to Hera cles for his rescue from Tartarus, arrived at this juncture with Athenian army, to help Heracles against Lycus. He stood aghast at th murder, yet promised Heracles every honour for the rest of his life, and after his death as well, and brought him to Athens, where Medea cured his madness with medicines. Sicalus then purified him once more? x. Plutarch: On Love 9; Apollodorus: ii. 6. x; Pausanias: x. 29. 3~. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 31; Pausanias: iv. 33—5; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 260 if. 3. Hyginus: Fabula ~4; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 88-9; Homer: Odyssey/viii. 226-8; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Diodorus SiCulus: Ioc. tit.; Sophocles: foe. cit.
4. Hesiod, quoted by scholiast on Sophocles’s Trachinian Women
266; Homer: Odyssey xxi. ~5 if.; Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 6. 2; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xxi. 22.
5. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 271; Homer: Ioc. tit, with scholiast quoting Pherecydes; Diodorus Siculus:
loc. cit.
6. Apollodorus: loc. dr.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.
7. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: x. 13.4; Hyginus: Fabula 32. 8. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: loc. dr.; Pausanias: ii. 2t. 7; Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. tit.
9. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 248 fl. and 275 if-; Hyginus: Ioc. tit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300.
~o. Plutarch: On the Slowness of Divine Vengeance 12; Pausanias: viii. ~4. 3.
I ~. Hyginus: Fabula 32; Euripides: Heracles 26 if. and 553; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 300; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Trachinian Women 355; PtolemyHephaesfionos: vii, quoted byPhotius P.490.
12. Euripides: Heracles 26 if., 1263 if., and 1322; Pausanias: ix. XL 2; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55; Menocrates, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Isthmian Odes iv. 104 if.
* ~. In matrilineal society, divorce of a royal wife implies abandonment of the kingdom which has been her marriage portion; and it seems likely that, once the ancient conventions were relaxed in Greece, a sacred king could escape death at the end of his reign by abandoning his kingdom and marrying the heiress of another. tf this is so, Euryms’s objection to Heracles as a son-in4aw will not have been that he had killed his children —the annual victims sacrificed while he reigned at Thebes—but that he had evaded his royal duty of dying. The winning of a bride by a feat of archery was an Indo-European custom: in the Mahabharata, Arjuna wins Draupadi thus, and in the Ramayana, Rama bends Shiva’s powerful bow and wins Sita. Moreover, the shooting of one arrow towards each cardinal point of the compass, and one towards the zenith (see i26.2 and 132. 8), formed part of the royal marriage rites in India and Egypt. The mares a ~ surrogate flung from the Theban walls at the end of every year, or at any other time in placation of some angry deity (see I05.6; ~ 06.j; and ~ 2 ~.3). z.. Heracles’s seizure of the Delphic tripod apparently records a Dorian capture of the shrine; as the thunderbolt thrown between Apollo and Heracles records a decision that Apollo should be allowed to keep his Oracle, rather than yield it to Heracles—provided that he served the Dorian interests as patron of the Dymanes, a tribe belonging to the Doric League. It was notorious that the Spartans, who were Dorians, controlled the Delphic Oracle in Classical times. Euripides omits the tripod incident in his Heracles because, i~ 421 n.c., the Athenians had been worsted by the Treaty of Nicias in their attempt to maintain the Phocians’ soverefignty over Delphi; the Spartans insisted on making it a separate puppet state which they themselves controlled. In the middle of the fourth century, when the dispute broke out again, the Phocians seized Delphi and appropriated.some of its treasures to raise forces in their own defence; but were badly beaten, and all their cities destroyed.
3. The Pythoness’s reproach seems to mean that the Dorians, who had conquered the Peloponnese, called thcmselve~ ‘Sons of Heracles’, and did not show her the same respect as their Achaean, Aeolian, and Io~ian predecessors, whose religious ties were with the agricultural Libyans of the Egyptian Delta, rather than with the Hellenic cattle-kings; Xenoclea’s predecessor Herophile (‘dear to Hera’), had been Zeus’s daughter by Lamia and called ‘Sibyl’ by the Libyans over whom she ruled (Pausanias: x. ~2. 1; Euripides: Prologue to Lamia). Cicero confirms this view when he denies that Alcmene’s son (i.e. the pre-Dorian Heracles) was the one who fought Apollo for the tripod (On the Nature of the Gods iii). Attempts were later made, in the name of religious decency, to patch up the quarrel between Apollo the Phocian and Heracles the Dorian. Thus Plutarch, a Delphic priest, suggests (Dialogtte on the E at Delphi 6) that Heracles became a~ expert diviner and logician, and ‘seemed to have seized the tripod in friendly rivalry with Apollo.’ When describing Apollo’s vengeance on the people of Pheneus, he tactfully suppresses the fact that it was Heracles who had dug them the channd (see 138. d).
H~a,~cś~s was taken to Asia and offered for sale as a nameless slave by Hermes, patron of all important financial transactions, who afterwards handed the purchase money of three silver talents to Iphitus’s orphans. Nevertheless, Euryms stubbornly forbade his grandchildren to accept any monetary compensation, saying that only blood would pay for blood; and what happened to the silver, Hermes alone knows? As the Pythoness had foretold, Heracles was bought by Omphale, Queen of Lydia, a woman with a good eye for a bargain; and he served her faith~ fully either for one year, or for three, riddi~g Asia Minor of the bandits who infested it.2
b. This Omphale, a daughter of Jordanes and, according to some authorities, the mother of Tantalus, had been bequeathed the kingdom by her unfortunate husband Tmolus, son of Ares and Theogone.
While out hunting on Mount Carmanorium—so called in honour of Carmanor son of Dionysus and Alexirrho~, who was killed there by a wild boar—he fell in love with a huntress named Arrhippe, a chaste attendaut of Artemis. Arrhippe, deaf to Tmolus’s &teats and eritreaties, fled to her mistress’s temple where, disregarding its sanctity, he ravished her on the goddess’s own couch. She hanged herself from a beam, after invoking Artemis, who thereupon let loose a mad bull; Tmolus was tossed into the air, fell on pointed stakes and sharp stones and died in torment. Theoclymenus, his son by Omphale, buried him where he lay, renaming the mountain ‘Tmolus’; a city of the same name, built upon its slopes, was destroyed by a great earthquake in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.3
c. Among the many bye-works which Heracles performed during this servitude was his capture of the two Ephesian Cercopes, who had constantly robbed him of his sleep. They were twin brothers named tither Passalus and Acmon; or Olus and Eurybatus; or Sillus and Tfiballus—sons of Oceanus by Theia, and the most accomplished cheats and liars known to mankind, who roamed the world, continually practising new decepdom. Theia had warned them to keep clear of Heracles and her words ‘My little White-bottoms, you have yet to meet d~e great Black-bottom!’ becoming proverbial, ‘white-bottom’ now means ‘cowardly, ba~e, or lascivious’.4 They would buzz around Heracles’s bed in the guise of bluebottles, until one night he grabbed them, forced them to resume their proper ~hape, and bore them off, dangling head-downwards from a pole which he carried over his shoulder. Now, Heracles’s bottom,.which the lion’, pelt clid not cover, had been burned as black as an old leather ~txield by exposure to ghe sun, and by the fiery breaths of Cacu~ and of the Crexan ball; and the Cercopes burst into a fit of immoderate laughter to find themselves suspended upside-down, staring at it. Their merriment surprised Heracles, and when h~e learned its cause, he sat down upon a rock and laughed so heartily himself that they persuaded him to release them. But though we know of an Asian city named Cercopia, the haunts of the Cercopes and a rock called ‘Black Bottom’ are shown at Thermopylae; this incident therefore is likely to have taken place on another occasion. S
d. Some say that the Cercopes were eventually turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus; others, that he punished their fraudulence by changing them into apes with long yellow hair, and sending them to the Italian islands named Pithecusae.6
e. In a Lydian ravine lived one Syleus, who used to seize pass’rag strangers and force them to dig his vineyard; but Heracles tore up the vines by their roots. Again, when Lydians from Itone began plundering Omphale’s country, Heracles recovered the spoil and razed their city.7 And at Celaenae lived Lityerses the farmer, a bastard son of King Minos, who would offer hospitality to wayfarers but force them to compete with him in reaping h~s harvest. If their strength flagged, he would whip them and at evening, when he had won the contest, would behead them and conceal thdr bodies in sheaves, chanting lugubriously as he did so. Heracles visited Celaenae in order to rescue the shepherd Daphnis, a son of Hermes who, after searching throughout the world for his beloved Pimplea, carried off by pirates, had at last found her among the slave-girls ofLityerses. Daphnis was challenged to the reaping con- test, but Heracles taking his place out-reaped Lityerses, whom he decapitated with a sickle, throwing the trunk into the river Maeander. Not only did Daphnis win back his Pimplea, but Heracles gave her Lityerses’s palace as a dowry. In honour ofLityerses, Phrygian reapers still sing a harvest dirge closely resembling that raised in honour of Maneros, son of the first Egyptian king, who also died in the harvest field.8
f. Finally, beside the Lydian river Sagaris, Heracles shot dead a gigantic serpent which was destroying men and crops; and the grateful Omphale, having at last discovered his identity and parentage, released him and sent him back to Tiryns, laden with gifts; while Zeus contrived the constellation Ophiuchus to commemorate the victory. This river Sagaris, by the way, was named after a son of Myndon and Alexirrho~ who, driven mad by the Mother of the Gods for slighting her Mysteries and insulting her eunuch priests, drowned himself in its waters.9
g. Omphale had bought Heracles as a lover rather than a fighter. He lathered on her three sons, namely Lamus; Agelaus, ancestor of a famous King Croesus who tried to immolate himself on a pyre when the Persians captured Sardis; and Laomedon.10 Some add a fourth, Tyrrhenus, or Tyrsenus, who invented the trumpet and led Lydian emigrants to Etruria, where they took the nameTyrrhenians; but it is more probable that Tyrrhenus was the son of King Atys, and a remote descendant of Heracles and Omphale.TM By one of Omphale’s women, named Malis, Heracles was already the father of Cleodaeus, or Cleolaus; and of Alcaeus, founder of the Lydian dynasty which King Croesus ousted from the throne of Sardis?
h. Reports reached Greece that Heracles had discarded his lion pelt and his aspen wreath, and instead wore jewelled necklaces, golden bracelets, a woman’s turban, a purple shawl, and a Maeonian girdle. There he sat—the story went—surrounded by wanton Ion/an girls, teasing wool from the polished wool-basket, or spinning the thread; trembling, as he did so, when his mistress scolded him. She would strike him with her golden slipper if ever his clumsy fingers crushed the spindle, and make him recount his past achievements for her amusement; yet apparently he felt no shame. Hence painters show Heracles wearing a yellow petticoat, and letting himself be combed and manicured by Omphale’s maids, while she dresses up in his lion pelt, and wields his club and bow.1S
i. What, however, had happened was no more than this. One day, when Heracles and Omphale were visiting the vineyards of Tmolus, she in a purple, gold-embroidered gown, with perfumed locks, he gallantly holding a golden parasol over her head, Pan caught sight of them from a high hill. Falling in love with Omphale, he bade farewall to the mountain-goddesses, crying: ‘Henceforth she alone shall be my love!’ Omphale and Heracles reached their destination, a secluded grotto, where it amused them to exchange clothes. She dressed him in a net-work girdle, absurdly small for his waist, and her purple gown. Though she unlaced this to the fullest extent, he split the sleeves; and the ties of her sandals were far too short to meet across his instep.
j. After dinner, they went to sleep on separate couches, having vowed a dawn sacrif~ce to Dionysus, who requires marital purity from his devotees on such occasions. At midnight, Pan crept into the grotto and, fumbling about in the darkness, found what he thought was Omphale’s couch, because the sleeper was dad in silk. With trembling hands he untucked the bed-clothes from the bottom, and wormed his way in; but Heracles, waking and drawing up One foot, kicked him across the grotto. Hearing a loud crash and a howl, Omphale sprang up and called for lights, and when t~ese came she and Heracles laughed until they cried to see Pan sprawled in a comer, nursing his bruises. Since that day, Pan has abhorred clothes, and summons his officials naked to his rites; it was he who revenged himself on Heracles by spreading the rumour that his whimsical exchange of garments with Omphalc was habitual and perverse. ~4
1. Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 31; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey x~. 22.
2. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 253; Apollodorus: ii. 6.
dorus Siculus: 10c. tit.
3. Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3 ; Plutarch: On Rivers 7; Tacitus: Annals ii. 47. 4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Suidas sub Cercopes; Scholiast on Lucian’s Alexander 4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 9~.
5. W. H. Roscher: Lexikon der griechischen und rSmischen Mytologie ii. x ~66 if.; K. O. Milllet: Dorians i. 464; Ptolemy Claudius: v. 2; Herodotus: vii. 2t6.
6. Suidas sub Cercopes; Harpocration sub Cercopes, quoting Xenagoras; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xix. 247; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 88 if. 7. Tzetzes: Chiliades ii. 432 if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 3 I; Dionysius: Description of the Earth 465; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Itone. 8. Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls x. 4~; Athenaeus: x. 615 and xiv. 6~9; Eustathius on Homer x ~64; Hesychius, Photius, and Suida~
sub Lityerses; Pollux: iv. 54.
9. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. ~4; Plutarch: On Rivers 12.
~o. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 3~; Bacchylides: iii. 24-62; Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3; Palaephatus: 45~ ~. Pausanias: ii. 2t. 3; Herodotus: i. 94; Strabo: v. 2.2; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 28.
xz. Hellanicus: Fragment ~02, ed. Didot; Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Eusebius: Preparation for the Gospel ii. 35; Herodotus: i. 7~3. Ovid: Heroides ix. 54 fi~; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods ~3; Plutarch: On Whether an Aged Man Ought to Meddle in State Affairs 4. 14. Ovid: Fasti ii. 305.
1. Carmanor will have been a title of Adonis (see 18.7), also killed by a boar. Tmolus’s desecration of the temple of Artemis cannot be dated; neither can the order that Heracles should compensate Eurytus for his son’s murder. Both events, however, seem to be historical in origin. It is likely that Omphale stands for the Pythoness, guardian of the Delphic ornphalus, who awarded the compensation, making Heracles a templeslave until it should be paid, and that,’ Omphale’ being also the name of a Lydian queen, the scene of his servitude was changed by the mythographers, to suit another set of traditions. 2. The Cercopes, as their various pairs of names show, were ceres, or Spites, coming in the shape of delusive and mischievous dreams, and could be foiled by an appeal to Heracles who, alone, had power over the Nightmare (see 35.3-4). Though represented at first as simple ghosts, like Cecrops (whose name is another form of cercops), in later works of art they figure as cercopithecoi, ‘apes’, perhaps because of Heracles’s associatiou with Gibraltar, one of his Pillars, from which Carthaginian merchants brought them as pets for rich Greek and Roman ladies. No apes seem to have frequented Ischia and Procida, two islands to the north of the Bay of Naples, which the Greeks called Pithecusae; their name really refers to the pithoi, or jars, manufactured there (Pliny: Natural History iii. 6.
$. The vine-dressers’ custom of seizing and killing a stranger at the vintage season, in honour of the Vine-spirit, was widespread in Syria and Asia Minor; and a similar harvest sacrifice took place both there and in Europe. Sir James Frazer has discussed this subject exhaustively in his Golden Bough. Heracles is here credited with the abolition of human sacrifice: a social reform on which the Greeks prided themselves, even when their wars grew more and more aavage and destructive.
4. Classical writers made Heracles’s servitude to Omphale an allegory of how easily a strong man becomes enslaved by a lecherous and ambitious woman; and that they regarded the navel as the seat of female passion sufficiently explains Omphale’s name in this sense. But the fable refers, rather, to an early stage in the development of the sacred kingship from matriarchy to patriarchy, when the king, as the Queen’s consort, was privileged to deputize for her in ceremonies and sacrifices—but only if he wore her robes. Revelllout has shown that this was the system at Lagash in early Sumerian times, and in several Cretan works of art men are shown wearing female garments for sacrificial purposes—not only the spotted trouser-skirt, as on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, but even, as on a palace-fresco at Cnossus, the fiounced skirt. Heracles’s slavery is explai~ed by West African matriarchal native customs: in Loango, Daura, and the Abrons, as Briffault has pointed out, the king is of servile birth and without power; in Agonna, Latuka, Ubemba, and elsewhere, there is only a queen, who does not marry but takes servile lovers. Moreover, a sixnilar system survived until Classical times among the ancient Locrian nobility who had the privilege of sending priestesses to Trojan Athene (see x 5 8.8); they were forced to emigrate in 6 8 3 B.c. from Central Greece to Epizephyrian Locri, on the toe of Italy,’ because ośthe scandal caused by their noblewomen’s indiscriminate love affairs with slaves’ (see ~ 8.8). These Locrians, who were of non-Hellenic origin and made a virtue of preonuptial promiscuity in the Cretan, Carian, or Arnorite style (Clearchus: 6), insisted on strictly matrili~ear succession (Dionysius: Description of the Earth 365-7; Polybius: xii. 6b). The same customs must have been general in pre-Hellenic Greece and Italy, but it is only at Bagnara, near the ruins of Epizephyrian Locri, that the matriarchal tradition is recalled today. The Bagnarotte wear long, pleated skirts, and set off barefoot on their commercial rounds which last for several days, leaving the men to mind the chil&en; they can carry as much as two quintals on their heads. The men take holidays in the spring sworclfxsh season, when they show their skill with the harpoon; and in the summer, when they go to the hills and burn charcoal. Although the off~cial patron of Bagnera is St Nicholas, no Bagnarotte will acknowledge his existence; and their parish priest complains that they pay far more attention to the Virgin than even to the Son—the Virgin having succeeded Core, the Maid, for whose splendid temple Locri was famous m Classical times.
AFTER serving as a slave to Queen Omphale, Heracles returned to Tiryns, his sanity n9w fully restored, and at once planned an expedition against Troy.1 His reasons were as follows. He and Telamon, either on their way back from the country of the Amazons, or when they landed vqith the Argonauts at Sigeium, had been astonished to find Laomedon’s daughter Hesione, stark naked except for her jewels, chained to a rock on the Trojan shore.2 It appeared that Poseidon had sent a sea-monster to punish Laomedon for having failed to pay him and Apollo their stipulated fee when they built the city walls and tended his flocks. Some say that he should have sacrificed to them all the catfie born in his kingdom that year; others, that he had promised them only a low wage as day-labourers, but even so cheated them of more than thirty Trojan drachmae. In revenge, Apollo sent a plague, and Poseidon ordered this monster to prey on the plainsfolk and ruin their fields by spewing sea water over them. According to another account, Laomedon fulfilled h~s obligations to Apollo, but not to Poseidon, who therefore sent the plague as well as the monster.1
b. Laomedon visited the Oracle of Zeus Ammon, and was advised by him to expose Hesione on the seashore for the monster to devour. Yet he obstinately refused to do so unless the Trojan nobles would first let him sacrifice their own daughters. In despair, they consulted Apollo who, being no less angry than Poseidon, gave them little satisfaction. Most parents at once sent their children abroad for safety, but Lao~ncdon tried to force a certain Phoenodamas, who had kept his three daughters at home, to expose one of them; upon which Phoenodamas harangued the assembly, pleading that Laomedon was alone responsible śt~r their present distress, and should be made to suffer for it by sacrificing his daughter. In the end, it was decided to cast lots, and the lot fell upon Hesione, who was accordingly bound to the rock, where Heracles found her.4
1. Heracles now broke her bonds, went up to the city, and offered to destroy the monster in return for the two matchless, immortal, snowwhite horses, or mares, which could run over water and standing corn like the wind, and which Zeus had given Laomedon as compensation for the rape of Ganymedes. Laomedon readily agreed to the bargain.s
~L With Athene’s help, the Trojans then built Heracles a high wall w!fich served to protect him from the monster as it poked its head out of the sea and advanced across the plain. On reaching the wall, it o?ened its great jaws and Heracles leaped fully-armed down its throat. Iqc spent three days in the monster’s belly, and emerged victorious, although the struggle had cost him every hair on his head.6
e. What happened next is much disputed. Some say that Laomedon gave Hesione to Heracles as his bride—at the same time persuading him to leave her, and the mares, at Troy, while he went off with the Argonauts—but that, after the Fleece had been won, his cupidity got the better of him, and he refused to let Heracles have either Hesione or d~e mares. Others say that he had made this refusal a month or two previously, when Heracles came to Troy in search of HylasY
f. The most circumstantial version, however, is that Laomedon cheated Heracles by substituting mortal horses for the immortal ones; whereupon Heracles threatened to make war on Troy, and put to sea in a rage. First he visited the island of Paros, where he raised an altar to Zeus and~ Apollo; and then the Isthmus of Corinth, where he ~36. 4—~37. a , Central Greece to Epizephyrian Locri, on the toe of Italy, because of the ~ scandal caused by their noblewomen’s indiscriminate love affairs with ;~ slaves’ (see ~8.8). These Locfians, who were of non-Hellenic origin and made a virtue of pre-nuptial promiscuity in the Cretan, Carian, or Amorite style (Clearchus: 6), iusisted on strictly matrili~ear succession (Dionysius: Description of the Earth 365-7; Polybius: xii. 6b). The same customs must have been general in pre-Hellenic Greece and Italy, but it is only at Bagnara, near the ruins ofEpizephyrian Locri, that the matriarchal tradition is recalled today. The Bagnarotte wear long, pleated skirts, and set off barefoot on their conamercial rounds which last for several days, leaving the men to miud the children; they can carry as much as two quintals on their hcads. The men take holidays in the spring swordf~sh season, when they show their skill with the harpoon; and in the summer, when they go to the hills and burn charcoal. Although the official patron of Bagnera is St Nicholas, no Bagnarotte will acknowledge his existence; and their parish priest complains that they pay far more attention to the Virgin than even to the Son—the Virgin having succeeded Core, the Maid, for whose splendid temple Locri was famous in Classical times.
Arr~a serving as a slave to Queen Omphale, Heracles returned to Tiryns, his sanity n9w fully restored, and at once planned an expedition against Troy.1 His reasons were as follows. He and Telamon, either on their way back from the cottatry of the Amazons, or when they landed with the Argonauts at Sigeium, had been astonished to find Laomedon’s daughter Hesione, stark naked except for her jewels, chained to a rock on the Trojan shore.2 It appeared that Poseidon had sent a sea-monster to punish Laomedon for having failed to pay him and Apollo their stipulated fee when they built the city walls and tended his flocks. Some say that he should have sacrificed to them all the cattle born in his kingdom that year; others, that he had promised them only a low wage as day-labourers, but even so cheated them of more than thirty Trojan drachmae. In revenge, Apollo sent a plague, and Poseidon ordered this monster to prey on the plainsfolk and ruin their f~elds by spewing sea water over them. According to another account, Laomedon fulfilled h~s obligations to Apollo, but not to Poseidon, who therefore sent the plague as well as the monster.1
b. Laomedon visited the Oracle ośZeus Ammon, and was advised by/tim to expose Hesione on the seashore for the monster to devour. Yet he obstinately reśused to do so unless the Trojan nobles would first let ~fim sacr~ce their own daughters. In despair, they consulted ApoLlo who, being no less angry than Poseidon, gave them little satisfaction. Most parents at once sent their children abroad for safety, but Laomedon tried to force a certain Phoenodamas, who had kept his three daughters at home, to expose one of them; upon which Phoenodamas harangued the assembly, pleading that Laomedon was alone responsible for their present distress, and should be made to suffer for it by sacriricing his daughter. In the end, it was decided to cast lots, and the lot fell upon Hcsione, who was accordingly bound to the rock, where Heracles found her.4
c. Hcrades now broke her bonds, went up to the city, and offered to destroy the monster in return for the two matchless, immortal, snowwhite horses, or mares, which could run over water and standing ‘corn like the wind, and which Zeus had given Laomedon as compen;ation for the rape of Ganymedes. Laomedon readily agreed to the bargain.s
d. With Athene’s help, the Trojans then built Heracles a high wall which served to protect him from the monster as it poked its head out of the sea and advanced across the plain. On reaching the wall, it opened its great jaws and Heracles leaped fully-armed down its throat. He spent three days in the monster’s belly, and emerged victorious, although the struggle had cost him every hair on his head.6
e. What happened next is much disputed. Some say that Laomedon gave Hesione to Heracles as his bride—at the same time persuading !.1 him to leave her, and the mares, at Troy, while he went off with the Argonauts—but that, after the Fleece had been won, his cupidity got the better of him, and he refused to let Heracles have either Hesione or the mares. Others say that he had made this refusal a month or two when Heracles came to Troy in search of Hylas.7
f. The most circumstantial version, however, is that Laomedon Heracles by subsfitufmg mortal horses for the immortal ones; vhereupon Heracles threatened to make war on Troy, and put to sea in a rage. First he visited the island of Paros, where he raised an to Zeus and ApoLlo; and then the Isthmus of Corinth, where he prophesied Laomedon’s doom; finally he recruited soldiers in his ow~ city of Tiryns.8
.4. Laomedon, in the meantime, had killed Phoenodarnas and sol~ his three daughters to Sicilian merchants come to buy victims for tlic wild-beast shows; but in Sicily they were rescued by Aphrodite, anc the eldest, Aegesta, lay with the river Crimissus, who took the form o~ a dog—and bore him a son, Aegestes, called Acestes by the Latins.1 This Aegestes, aided by Anchises’s bastard son Elymus, whom h~
brought from Troy, founded the cities of Aegesta, later called Scgcsta: Entella, which he named after his wife; Eryx; and Asea. Aegesta is sai~ to have eventually returned to Troy and there married one Capys, b) whom she became the mother of Anchises.10
h. It is disputed whether Heracles embarked for Troy with eighteet long ships of fifty oars each; or with only six small craft and scant~ forces.x~ But among his allies were Iolaus; Telamon son of Aeacus Peleus; the Argive Oicles; and the Boeotian Deimachus.xz
i. Heracles had found Telamon at Salamis feasting with his friends He was at once offered the golden wine-bowl and invited to pour th~ first libation to Zeus; having done so, he stretched out his hands t~ heaven and prayed:’ O Father, send Tclamon a fine son, with a ski~ a: tough as this lion pelt, and courage to match !’ For he saw that Periboea Telamon’s wife, was on the point of giving birth. Zeus sent down hi: eagle in answer, and Heracles assured Telamon that the prayer wouk bc granted; and, indeed, as soon as the feast was over, Periboea gav~ birth to Great Ajax, around whom Heracles threw the lion pelt, thu m~.king him invulnerable, except in his neck and arm-pit, where th~ quiver had interposed.13
j. On disembarking near Troy, Heracles left Oides to guard th~
ships, while he himself led the other champions in an assault on the city Laomedon, taken by surprise, had no time to marshal his army, bu supplied the common folk with swords and torches and hurried then down to buna the fleet. Oides resisted him to the death, fighting a nobl~ rear-guard action, while his comrades launched the ships and escaped Laomedon then hurried back to the city and, after a skirmish wid Heracles’s straggling forces, managed to re-enter and bar the gate behind him.
k. Having no patience for a long siege, Heracles ordered an imme diate assault. The first to breach the wall and enter was Telamon, wh~ chose the western curtain built by his father Aeacus as the weakest spot 237./e—137. o 272 but Heracles came hard at his heels, mad with jealousy. Tehmon, suddenly aware that Heracles’s drawn sword was intended for his own vitals, had the presence of mind to stoop and collect some large stones dislodged from the wall.’ What are you at?’ roared Heracles.’ Building an altar to Heracles the Victor, Heracles the Averter of Ills !’ answered the resourceful Telamon. ‘I leave the sack of Troy to you.’~4 Heracles thanked him briefly, and raced on. He then shot down Laomedon and all his sons, except Podarces, who alone had maintained that Heracles should be given the immortal mares; and sacked the city. After glutting his vengeance, he rewarded Telamon with the hand of Hesione, whom he gave permission to ransom any one of her fellow capf~ves. She chose Podarces. ‘Very well,’ said Heracles. ‘But first he must be sold as a slave.’ So Podarces was put up for sale, and Hesione redeemed him with the golden veil which bound her head: hence Podarces won the name 0fPriam, which means ‘redeemed’. But some say that he was a mere infant at the time.15
1. Having burned Troy and left its highways desolate, Heracles set Priam on the throne, and put to sea. Hesione accompanied Telamon to Salamis, where she bore him Teucer; whether in wedlock or in bastardy is not agreed.16 Later she deserted Telamon, escaped to Asia Minor, and swam across to Miletus, where King Arion found her
t~idden in a wood. There she bore Telamon a second son, Trambelus, whom Arion reared as his own, and appointed king of Telamon’s
,~.siatic kinsmen the Lelegians or, some say, of the Lesbians. When, in the course of the Trojan War, Achilles raided Miletus, he killed Tram~ belus, learning too late that he was Telamon’s son, which caused him great gricf.1?
1. Some say that Oicles did not fall at Troy, but was still alive when fi~e śrin~yes drove his grandson Alcmaeon mad. His tomb is shown in Arcadia, near the Megalopolitan precinct of Boreas.1*
n. Heracles now sailed from the Troad, taking with him Glaucia, a daughter of the river Scamander. During the siege, she had been Deirnachus’s mistress, and when he fell in battle, had applied to Heracles f,~r protection. Heracles led her aboard his ship, overjoyed that the stock of so gallant a friend should survive: for Glaucia was pregnant, and later gave birth to a son named Scamander.1
0. Now, while Sleep lulled Zeus into drowsiness, Hera summoned Boreas to raise a storm, which drove Heracles far off his course to the island of Cos. Zeus awoke in a rage and threatened to cast Sleep down from the upper air into the gulfofErebus; but she fled as a suppliant to Night, whom even Zeus dared not displease. In his frustration he began tossing the gods about Olympus. Some say that it was on this occasion that he chained Hera by her wrists to the rafters, tying anvils to her ankles; and hurled Hephaestus down to earth. Having thus vented his ill-temper to the full, he rescued Heracles from Cos and led him back to Argos, where his adventures are variously described.20
p. Some say that the Coans mistook him for a pirate and tried to prevent his approach by pelting his ship with stones. But he forced a landing, took the city of Astypalaea in a night assault, and killed the king, Eurypylus, a son of Poseidon and Astypalaea. He was himself wounded by Chalcodon, but rescued by Zeus when on the point of being despatched.2x Others say that he attacked Cos because he had fallen in love with Chalciope, Eurypylus’s daughter.22
q. According to still another account, five of Herades’s six ships foundered in the storm. The surviving one ran aground at Laceta on the island of Cos, he and his shipmates saving only their weapons from the wreck. As they stood wringing the sea water out of their clothes, a flock of sheep passed by, and Heracles asked the Meropian shepherd, one Antagoras, for the gift of a ram; whereupon Antagoras, who was of powerful build, challenged Heracles to wresde with him, offering the ram as a prize. Heracles accepted the challenge but, when the two champions came to grips, Antagoras’s Meropian friends ran to his assistance, and the Greeks did the same for Heracles, so that a general roughwand-tumble ensued. Exhausted by the storm and by the number of his enemies, Heracles broke off the fight and fled to the house of a stout Thracian matron, in whose clothes he disguised himself, thus contriving to escape.
r. Later in the day, refreshed by food and sleep, he fought the Meropians aga’m and worsted them; after which he was purified of their blood and, still dressed in women’s clothes, married Chaldope, by whom he became the father of Thessalus.23Atmual sacrifices are now offered to Heracles on the field where this battle was fought; and Coan bridegrooms wear women’s clothes when they welcome their brides home—as the priest of Heracles at Antimacheia also does before he begins a sacrifice.Z4
s. The women of Astypalaea were offended at Heracles, and abused him, whereupon Hera honoured them with horns like cows; but some say that this was a punishment inflicted on them by Aphrodite for daring to extol their beauty above hers.2S
1. Having laid waste Cos, and all but a~ihilated the Meropians, Heracles was guided by Athene to Phlegra, where he helped the gods to win their battle against the giants.Z6 Thence he came to Boeofa where, at his insistence, Scamander was elected king. Seamander renamed the river tnachus after himself, and a near-by stream after his mother Glaucia; he also named the spring Addusa after his wife, by whom he had three daughters, sffll honoured locally under the name of’ Maidens’.27
x. Apollodorus: fl. 4. 6.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 5—9; Hyginus: Fabula 89; Diodorm Siculus: iv. 42; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 34.
3. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Lucian: On Sacrifices 4; Tzctzes: loc. tit.; Diodorus Sieulus: loc. tit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 3.
4. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 30 andi. 554; Tzetzes: OnLFophron 472; Hyginus: Fabula 89.
5. Diodorus Saculus: iv. 42; Tzetzes: On Lycolahron 34; Valeflus Flaccus: ii. 487; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: ii. 5—9; Hcllanicus, quoted by schohast on Homer’s Iliad xx. 146.
6. Homer: Iliad xx. ~45-8; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Hellanicus: foe. tit. 7. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 42 and 49; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 623. 8. Apollodorus: ii. 5.9; Hellanicus: 10c. tit.; Pindar: Fragment ~40a, ed. Schroeder, and Isthmian Odes vi. 26 if.
9. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 472 and 953; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 554 and v. 30.
Io. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 472, 953, and 965; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 554; v. 30 and 73.
~I. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32; Apollodorus: ii. 6, 4; Homer: Iliad v. 638 if.
12. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iii. 61 and Isthmian Odes i. z~-3; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit. and i. 8. 2; Homer: Odyssey xv. 243; Plutarch: Greek Questions 41.
13. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 7; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vi. 35 if.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 455; Scholiast on Sophodes’s Ajax 833; SchoLiast on Homer’s//iad xxiii. 82L ~4. Apollodorus: il. 6. 4; Hellanicus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 469~5. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32; Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 337; Apollodorus: loc. dr.; Hyginus: Fabula 89; Homer: Iliad v. 638 if.. 16. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 7; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 3; Homer: Iliad viii. 283 if.., and scholiast on 284.
17. Tzetzes: On Lyeo!ahron 467; Athenaeus: ii. 4~ Parthenius: Love Stories
18. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 5; Pausanias: viii. 36. 419. Plutarch: Greek Questions 4~. 20. Homer: Iliadxiv. 250 if. and xv. 18 if.; ApollodQrus: i. 3—5 and il. 7.1.
~x. Apollodorus: ~ii. 7—x.
22. Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes iv. 40.
23. Apollodorus: ii. 7-8; Homer: Iliaalii. 6784).
24. Plutarch: Greek Questions 58.
25. Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 363-4; Lactantius: Stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses vii. xo.
26. Apollodorus: ii. ~/. x; Pindar: Isthmian Odes vi. 31 if. 27. Plutarch: Greek Questions 41.
* 1. This legend concerns the sack of the fifth, or pre-Homeric, city of Troy: probably by Minyans, that is to say Aeolian Greeks, supported by Lelegians, when a timely earthquake overthrew i~ massive walls (see x 58.8). From the legend of the GoldenFleece we gather that Laomedon had opposed Lelegian as well as Minyan mercantile ventures Sea (see ~48. ~0), and that the only way to bring ham to reason was to destroy his city, which commanded the Hellespont and the Scamander plain where the East-West fair was annually held. The Ninth Labour refers to Black Sea enterprises of the same sort (see 131. 11). Herades’s task was assisted by an earthquake, dated about 1260
2. Heracles?s :rescue .of Hesione, paralleled by Perseus’s rescue of Andromeda (see 73.7), is clearly derived from an icon common in Syria and A~sia Minor: Marduk’s ~conquest-of the Sea-monster Tiamat, an emanation of the goddess Ishtar, whose power he annulled by chaining her to a rock. Heraclesds swallowed by Tiamat, and disappears for three days before fighting his way out. So also, according to a He.brew moral tale apparently based,on ~the same icon, Jonah spent three days in the Whale’s belly; and so Ma~duk?s representative, the King of Babylon, spent a period in demise every year, during whach he was supposedly fighting Tiamat; (see 71.1;’73.7 and 103.1 ). Marduk’s or.t?erseus’s white solar horse here becomes the reward. for I-Iesione’s rescue. Heracles’s loss of hair emphasizes his solar character: :t shearin~ of [he sacred king’s locks when the year came to an .end, ~ypified ~the ‘reduetmn of his magical strength, as in the story of Samson (see 9~. 1). When he reappeared, he lxac~ no move hair than an infant.Hesione’s ransofa of Podarces may represent the Queen-mother~ of Seh~’s (Seamander?) intervention with the Hittite KingMu~silis on behalf of her scapegrace;son Ma~uapadattas..3. Phoenodamas’s three .daughters .-repro~ea~t .the Moon-goddess in ri~d, ruhng the three—cornered island of Sicily. The dog was sacred to her as Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hecate. Greek-speaking Sicilians were ad~ dieted to the Homeric epics, like the Romans, and equally anxious to claim Trojan ancestry on however insecure grounds. Scamander’s three daughters represent the same goddess in Boeotia. Glaucia’s bearing oś a child to Seamander was not unusual. According to the pseudo-Aeschines (Dialogues Io. 3), Trojan brides used to bathe in the river, and cry: ‘Seamander, take my virginity ! ‘; which points to an archaic period when it was thought that river water would quicken their wombs (see 68. z). 4. To what Hellenic conquest of the Helladic island of Cos Heracles’s visit refers is uncertain, but the subsequent wearing of women’s dress by the bridegroom, when he welcomed his bride home, seems to be a concession to the former matrilocal custom by which she welcomed him to her house, not contrariwise (see 160.3). A cow-dance will have been performed on Cos, similar to the Argive rite honouring the Moon-goddess [o (see 56. ~). At Antimacheia, the sacred king was still at the primitive stage of being the Queen’s deputy, and obliged therefore to wear female dress (scc ~8.8 and ~36.4)5—haomedon’s mares were of the same breed as those sired at Troy by Boreas (see 29. e).
1. The Inachus was an Argive river; Plutarch seems to be the sole authority for a Iioeotian Inachus, or Scamander.
No x long after his return, Heracles collected a force of Tirynthians and Arcadians and, joined by volunteers from the noblest Greek families, marched against Augeias, King of Elis, whom he owed a grudge on account of the Fifth Labour. x Augeias, however, foresee’rag this attack, had prepared to resist it by appointing a~ his generals Eurytus and Cteatus, the sons of his brother Actor and Molione, or Moline, a daughter of Molus; and by giving a share in the Elean government to the valiant Amarynceus, who is usually described aa a son of the Thessalian immigrant Pyttius. Z
b. The sons of Actor are called Mollones, or Molionides, after their mother, to distinguish them from those of the other Actor, who marfled Aegina. They were twins, born from a silver egg, and surpassed all their contemporaries in strength; but, unlike the Dioscuri, had been joined together at the waist from birth.3 The Moliones married the twin daughters of Dexamenus the Centaur and, one generation later, their sons reigned in Elis jointly with Augeias’s grandson and Amarynceus’s son. Each of these four commanded ten ships in the expedition to Troy. Actor already possessed a share of the kingdom through his mother Hyrmine, a daughter of Neleus, whose name he gave to the now vanished city of Hyrmine.4
c. Heracles did not cover himself with glory in this Elean War. Hc fell sick, and when the Moliones routed his army, which was encamped In the heart of Elis, the Corinthians intervened by proclaiming the isthmian Truce. Among those wounded by the Moliones was Herades’s twin brother Iphicles; his friends carried him fainting to Phencus in Arcadia, where he eventually died and became a hero. Three hundred and sixty Cleonensians also died bravely, fighting at Heraclcs’s side; to them he ceded the honours awarded him by the Nemeans after he had killed the lion. S He now retired to Olenus, the home of his friend Dexamenus, father-in-law of the Moliones, whose youngest daughter Deianeira he deflowered, after promising to marry her. When Heracles had passed on, the Centaur Eurytion asked for her hand, which Dexamenus feared to refuse him; but on the wedding day Heracles reappeared without warning, shot down Euryuon and his brothers, and took Deianeira away with him. Some say, however, that Heracles’s bride was named Mnesimache, or Hippolyte; on the ground that Deianeira is more usually described as the daughter ofOeneus. Dexamenus had been born at Bura, famous for its dice-oracle of Heracles.6
d. When Heracles returned to Tiryns, Eurystheus accused him of designs on the high kingship in which he had himself been confirmed by Zeus, and banished him from Argolis. With his mother Alcmene, and his nephew Iolaus, Heracles then rejoined Iphicles at Pheneus, whcre he took Laonome, daughter of Guneus, as his mistress. Through the middle of the Pheneatian Plain, he dug a channel for the river Aroanius, some fifty furlongs long and as much as thirty feet deep; but the river soon deserted this channel, which has caved in here and there, and returned to its former course. He also dug deep chasms at the foot of the Phenean Mountains to carry off flood water; these have served their purpose well, except that on one occasion, after a cloud-burst, the Aroanius rose and inundated the ancient city of Pheneus—the highwater marks of this flood are still shown on the mountainside.?
e. Afterwards, hearing that the Eleans were sending a procession to honour Poseidon at the Third Isthmian Festival, and that the Moliones would wireess the games and take part in the sacrifices, Heracles ambushed them from a roadside thicket below Cleonae, and shot both dead; and killed their cousin, the other Eurytus, as well, a son of King Augeias. S
fi. Molione soon learned who had murdered her sons, and made the Eleans demand satisfaction from Eurystheus, on t~e ground that Heracles was a native of Tiryns. When Eurystheus disclaimed responsibility for the misdeeds of Heracles, whom he had banished, Mollone asked the Corinthians to exclude all Argives from the Isthmian Games until satisfaction had been given for the murder. This they declined to do, whereupon Molione laid a curse on every Elean who might take part in the festival. Her curse is still respected: no Elean athlete will ever enter for the Isthmian Games.9
g. Heracles now borrowed the black-maned horse Arion from Oncus, mastered him, raised a new army in Argos, Thebes, and Arcadia, and sacked the city of Elis. Some say that he killed Augeias and his sons, restored Phyleus, the rightful king, and set him on the Elean throne; others, that he spared Augeias’s life at least. When Heracles decided to repeople Elis by ordering the widows of the dead Eleans to lie with his soldiers, the widows offered a common prayer to Athene that they might conceive at the first embrace. This prayer was heard and, in gratitude, they founded a sanctuary of Athene the Mother. So widespread was the joy at this fortunate event that the place where they had met their new husbands, and the stream flowing by it, was called Bad)/, which is the Elean word for ‘sweet’. Heracles then gave the horse Arion to Adrastus, saying that, after all, he preferred to fight on foot?
h. About this time, Heracles won his title of Buphagus, or ‘Oxeater’. It happened as follows. Lepreus, the son of Caucon and Astydameia, who founded the city of Lepreus in Arcadia (the district derived its name from the leprosy which had attacked the earliest settlers), had foolishly advised King Augeias to fetter Heracles when he asked to be paid for having cleansed the cattle-yards. Hearing that Heracles was on his way to the city, Astydameia persuaded Lepreus to receive him courteously and plead for forgiveness. This Heracles granted, but challenged Lcpreus to a triple contest: of throwing the discus, drinking bucket after bucket of water, and eating an ox. Then, though Heracles won the discus-throw and the drinking-match, Lepreus ate the ox in
less time than he. Flushed with success, he challenged Heracles to a duel, and was at once clubbed to death; his tomb is shown at Phigalia. The Lepreans, who worship Demeter and Zeus of the White Poplar, have always been subjects of Elis; and if one of them ever wins a prize at Olympia, the herald procla/ms him an Elean from Lepreus. King Augeias is still honoured as a hero by the Eleans, and it was only during the reign of Lycurgus the Spartan that they were persuaded to forget their enmity of Heracles and sacrifice to him also; by which means they averted a pestilence. ~ ~
i. After the conquest of Elis, Heracles assembled his army at Pisa, and used the spoil to establish the famous four-yearly Olympic Festival and Games in honour of his father Zeus, which some claim was only the eighth athletic contest ever held.12 Having measured a precinct for Zeus, and fenced off the Sacred Grove, he stepped out the stadium, named a neighbouring hillock ‘The Hill of Cronus’, and raised six altars to the Olympian gods: one for every pair of them. In sacrificing to Zeus, he burnt the victims’ thighs upon a fire of white poplar wood cut from trees growing by the Thesprotian river Acheron; he also forreded a sacrificial hearth in honour of his great-grandfather Pelops, and assigned him a shrine. Being much plagued by flies on this occasion, he offered a second sacrifice to Zeus the Averter ofl~lies: who sent them buzzing across the river A1pheius. The Eleans still sacrif~ce to this Zeus, when they expel the flies from Olympia.1
j. Now, at the first full moon after the summer solstice all was ready for the Festival, except that the valley lacked trees to shade it from the sun. Heracles therefore returned to the Land of the Hyperboreans, where he had admired the wild olives growing at the source of the Danube, and persuaded Apollo’s priests to give him one for planting in Zeus’s precinct. Returning to Olympia, he ordained that the Aetolian umpire should crown the victors with its leaves: which were to be their only reward, because he himself had performed his Labours without payment from Eurystheus. This tree, called ‘The Olive of the Fair Crown’, still grows in the Sacred Grove behind Zeus’s temple. The branches for the wreaths are lopped with a golden sickle by a noblyborn boy, both of whose parents must be alive. Z4
k. Some say that Heracles won all the events by default, because none dared compete against him; but the truth is that every one was body disputed. No other entrants could, however, be found for the wrestling match, until Zeus, in disguise, condescended to enter the ring. The match was drawn, Zeus revealed himself to his son Heracles, all the spectators cheered, and the full moon shone as bright as day. ES I. But the more ancient legend is that the Olympic Games were founded by Heracles the Dactyl, and that it was he who brought the wild olive from the land of the Hyperboreans. Charms and amulets in honour of Heracles the Dactyl are much used by sorceresses, who have little regard for Heracles son of Alcmene. Zeus’s altar, which stands at an equal distance between the shrine of Pelops and the sanctuary of Hera, but in front of both, is said to have been built by this earlier Heracles, like the altar at Pergamus, from the ashes of the thigh-bones he sacrif~ced to Zeus. Once a year, on the nineteenth day of the Elean month Elaphius, soothsayers fetch the ashes from the Council Hall, and after moistening them with water from the river Alpheius—no other will serve—apply a fresh coat of this plaster to the altar.16
m. This is not, however, to deny that Heracles the son of Alcmene refounded the Games: for an ancient walled gymnasium is shown at Elis, where atl~letes train. Tall plane-trees grow between the runningtracks, and the enclosure is called Xystus because Heracles exercised himself there by scraśing up thistles. But Clymenus the Cretan, son of Cardis a descendant of the Dactyl, had celebrated the Festival, only fifty years after the DeucalionJan Flood; and subsequently End}maion had done the same, and Pelops, and Amythaon son of Cretheus, also Pelias and Neleus, and some say Augeias.17
n. The Olympic Festival is held at an interval alternately of fortynine and fifty months, according to the calendar, and now lasts for five days: from the eleventh to the fifteenth of the month in which it happens to fall. Heralds proclaim an absolute armistice throughout Greece for the whole of this month, and no athlete is permitted to attend who has been guilty of any felony or offence against the gods. Originally, the Festival was managed by the Pisans; but, after the final return of the Heraclids, their Aetolian allies settled in Elis and were charged with the task.18
0. On the northern side of the Hill of Cronus, a serpent called Sosipolls is housed in Eileithyia’s shrine; a white-veiled virgin-priestess feeds it with honey-cakes and water. This custom commemorates a miracle which drove away the Arcadians when they fought against the holy land of Elis: an unknown woman came to the Elean generals with a suckling child and gave it to them as their champion. They believed her, and when she sat d~e child down between the two armies, it changed into a serpent; the Arcadians fled, pursued by the Eleans, and suffered fearful losses. Eileithyia’s shrine marks the place where the serpent disappeared into the Hill of Cronus. On the summit, sacrif~ces are offered to Cronus at the spr’mg equinox in the month of Elaphius, By priestesses known as ‘Queens’.19
I./lpollodorus: ii. 7. 2; Pindar: clympian Odes x. 3 ~-3. ~. Pausanias: v. x. 8 and v. a. 2; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ix. 834 and xxiii. 1442.
3. Homer: Iliad xi. 709; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Ibycus, quoted by Athenaeus: ii. 50; Porphyry: Questions Relevant to Homer’s Iliad 265; Plutarch: On Brotherly Love i.
4. Pausanias: v. ~. 8 andv. 3.4; Homer: Iliaalii. 615-24; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 172.
5. Apollodorus: loc. ›it.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 31-3; Pausanias: v. 2. x and viii. 14. 6; Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 5.
6. Hyginus: Fabula 33; Apollodorus: ii. 5. 5 and 7. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 33; ?ausanias: vii. 25.5-6.
7. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. 14.
8. Apollodorus: ii. 7. :z; Diodoms Siculus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: ii. 1; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 26 if.
9. Pausanias: v. 2. 2-3.
~o. Pausanias: viii. ~5—5 and v. 3. x; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 2; Homeric scholiast, quoted by Meursius: On Lycophron 40; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v’fi. 666.
x~. Athenaeus: x. 4~2; Pausanias: v. 4—~; 4. 4 and 5. 3-4~2. Pindar: Ol},mpian Odes x. 43 if..; Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 41; Hyginus: Fabula 273.
13. Pindar: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: v. 13. x and 14. ~-~.
14. Pindar: Olympian Odes iii. xx if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 14; Pausanias: v. 15.3. ~ 5. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 60 if..; Pausanias: v. 8. x; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 41. ~6. Pausanias: v. 7—4 mad 13.5; Diodorus Siculus: v. 64.
t7. Pausanias: vi. 23. x and v. 8. x.
18. Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odesiii. 3 5 and v. 6; Demosthenes: Against Aristocrates pp. 631-2; Strabo: viii. 3.33.
19. Pausanias: vi. 20. x-3.
1. This myth apparently records an unsuccessful Achaean invasion of the Western Pelopormese followed, at the close of the thirteenth century B.c., by a second, successful, invasion which has, however, been confused W’lth the Dorian invasion of the eleventh century/B.C.—Heracles having also been a Dorian hero. The murder of Eurytion may be deduced from the same wedding-icon that showed the killing of Pholus. Herades’s digging of the Aroardan channel is paralleled by similar feats in Elis (see ~2~. d), Boeotia (see 142. $), and Thrace (see 130. b); and the honours paid to the tl~ee hundred and sixty Cleonensians probably refer to a calendar mystery, since three hundred and sixty are the number of days in the Egyptian year, exclusive of the five sacred to Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.
2. The leprosy associated with Lepreus was vitiligo, a skin disease caused by foul food, which the Moon-goddess of the white poplar could cure (White Goddess, p. 432); true leprosy did not reach Europe until the first century B.C.
.3, Heracles’s title of Buphagus originally referred to the eating of an ox by his worshippers.
4. Sosopolis must have been the ghost of Cronus after whom the hillock was called, and whose head was buried on its northern slopes, to protect the stadium which lay behind it, near the junction of the Cladeus and Alpheius. His British counterpart Bran similarly guarded Tower Hill, commanding London (see t46.2). The spring equinox, when fawns are dropped, occurs during the alder-month of the tree-calendar, also called Elaphius (‘of the fawn’), and peculiarly sacred to Cronus-Bran (White Goddess, pp. 168-72 and 206-7). This suggests that, originally, the Elean New Year began at the spring solstice, as in parts of Italy, when the King of the old year, wearing horns like Actaeon (see 22. 1), was pu.t to death by the wild women, or ‘Queens’; Heracles the Dactyl belongs to this cult (see 53, b). The Pelopians seem to have changed the calendar when they arrived with their solar chariot and porpoise, making the funeral games celebrate the midsummer murder and supersession of Zeus, the sacred king, by his tanist—as the king revenged himself on the tanist at midwinter. In Classical times, therefore, the Elean New Year was celebrated in the summer. The mention of Pelops suggests th~ the king was sacrificially eaten and the ashes of his bones mixed with water to plaster the Goddess’s altar. He was called the Green Zeus, or Achilles (see 164..1), as well as Heracles.
5. Wild olive, used in Greece to expel old-year demons and spites, who took the form of flies, was introduced from Libya, where the cult of the North Wind originated (see 48. i and 133.5), rather than the North. At Olympia, it will have been misfietoe (or loranthus), not wild-olive, which the boy lopped with a golden sickle (see 7—I and 50. 2); wild-olive figured in the Hyperborean tree-calendar (see 119. 3)—The g’~rlz’ footrace for the position of priestess to Hera was the earliest event; but when the single year of the king’s reign was prolonged to a Great Year of nominally a hundred months—to permit a more exact synchronization of solar and lunar time—the king reigned for one half of this period, h tanist for the other. Later, both ruled concurrently under the title Moliones, and were no less closely united than the kings of Sparta (s~ 74—~). It may be that a case of Siamese twins had occurred in Greece reinforce the metaphor. But Augeias’s division of Elis, reported ~c Homer, shows that at a still later stage, the sacred king retained a thi~ part of his kingdom when he was due to retire; as Proetus did at Arg~ Amarynceus’s share was evidently gained by conquest.
6. Molione is perhaps a title of the Elean Moon-goddess, the patrone of the Games, meaning’ Queen of the Moly’; the m01ť being a herb whic elsewhere defied moon-magic (see ~70. 5). She was also known as Ag; mede (‘very cunning’); and this is the name of Augeias’s sorcere daughter, who ‘ ka~ew all the drugs that grow on earth’ (Homer: Iliad~ 739—41). In Classical Greece, ‘Athene the Mother’ was a strange a~: indecent concept and had to be explained away (see 25. g and ~4~—~), b~ the Elean tradition suggests that erotic orgies had been celebrated in h, honour beside the river Bady.
7. The mastery of Arion, it seems, formecl part of the coronation rite Arcadian Oncu~ (see 130. ~).
HERACLES next sacked and burned the city of Pylus, because d pylians had gone to the aid of Elis. He killed all Neleus’s sons, except d youngest, Nestor, who was away at Gerania, but Neleus Idmself escape wit~ his ]ife.1
b. Athene, champion of justice, fought for Heracles; and Pylus w: defended by Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and Ares. While Athene engage Ares, Heracles made for Poseidon, club against trident, and forced hi] to give way. Next, he ran to assist Athene, spear in hand, and his thi~ lunge pierced Ares’s sh~eld, dashing him headlong to the ground; thel with a powerful thrust at Ares’s thigh, he drove deep into the divh flesh. Ares fled in anguish to Olympus, where Apollo spread sootbin u~guents on the wound and healed it within the hour; so he tenewe the fight, until one of Heracles’s arrows pierced his shotrider, and force lfim off the field for good. Meanwhile, Heracles had also wounde Hera in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow. Z
e. Neleus’s eldest son, Periclymenus the Argonaut, was gifted b Poseidon with boundless strength and the power of assuming whatever shape he pleased, whether ‘of bird, beast, or tree. On this occasion he turned himself first into a lion, then into a serpent and after a while, to escape scrutiny, perched on the yoke-boss of Heracles’s horses in the form of an ant, or fly, or bee.3 Heracles, nudged by Athene, recognized Periclymenus and reached for his club, whereupon Periclymenus became an eagle, and tried to peck out his eyes, but a sudden arrow from Heracles’s bow pierced him underneath his wing. He tumbled to earth, and the arrow was drivea through his neck by the fall, killing him. Some say, however, that he flew away in safety; and that Heracles had attacked Poseidon on an earlier occasion, after the murder of Iphitus, when Neleus refused to purify him; and that the fight with Hades took place at the other Pylus, in Elis, when Heracles was challenged for carrying off Cerberus without permission.4
d. Heracles gave the city of Messene to Nestor, in trust for his own descendants, remembering that Nestor had taken no part in robbing him of Geryon’s cattle; and soon came to love him more even than Hylas and Iolaus. It was Nestor who first swore an oath by Heracles.5
e. The Eleans, though they themselves rebuilt Pylus, took advantage of the Pylians’ weakness to oppress them in petty ways. Neleus kept his patience until one day, having sent a chariot and a prize-winning team of four horses to contest for a tripod in the Olympic Games, he learned that Augeias had appropriated them and sent the charioteer home on foot. At this, he ordered Nestor to make a retaliatory raid on t~e Elean Plain; and Nestor managed to drive away fifty herds of catfie, fifty flocks of sheep, fifty droves of swine, fifty flocks of goats, and one hundred and fifty chesmut mares, many with foal, beating off the Eleans who opposed him and blooding his spear in this, his first fight. Neleus’s heralds then convoked all in Pylus who were owed a debt by the Eleans, and when he had divided the booty among the claimants, keeping back the lion’s share for Nestor, sacrificed la.vishly to the gods. Three days later, the Eleans advanced on Pylus in full array—among them the two orphaned sons of the Moliones, who had inherited their tide-and crossed t~e Plain from Thryoessa. But Athene came by rfight to warn and marshal the Pylians; and when battle had been joined, Nestor, who was on foot, struck down Amarynceus, the Elean conmaander and, seizing his chariot, rushed like a black tempest through the Elean ranks, capturing fifty other chariots and killing a hundred men. The Moliones would also have fallen to his busy spear, had not Poseidon wrapped them in an impenetrable mist and spiriteel them away. The Eleans, hotly pursued by Nestor’s army, fled as far as the Olenian Rock, where Athene called a halt.6
f. A truce being then agreed upon, Amarynceus was buried at Buprasium, and awarded funeral games, in which numerous Pylians took part. The Moliones won the chariot race by crowding Nestor at the turn, but he is said to have won al! the other events: the boxing and the wresding match, the foot-race and thejavelin-throw. Of these feats, it is only fight to add, Nestor himself, in garrulous old age, was the principal witness; since by the grace of Apollo, who granted him the years of which his maternal uncles had been deprived, he lived for three centuries, and no contemporary survived to gainsay him.?
x. Pausanias: ii. 2. 2; iii. 26. 6 and v. 3. x; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 3, Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68.
2. Pausanias: vi. 25.3; Schohast on Homer’s Iliad xi. 689; Hesiod: Shield of Heracles 359 if.; Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 30-x; Homer: Iliad v. 392 iT.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 393. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 156-60; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 285; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad ii. 336 and xi. 286.
4. Apollodorus: i. 9—9; Hesiod, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius i. 156; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 548 if.; Hyginus: Fabula ~o; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes ix. 30 if.
5. Pausanias: ii. ~8. 6; Philostratus: Herolea
6. Pausanias: vi. 22. 3; Homer: Iliadxi. 671 and 761.
7. Homer: Iliad xxiii. 630-42; Hyginus: Fabula
‘h
1. The capture of Pylus seems to be another incident in the thirteenthcentury Achaean invasion of the Peloponnese. Hera, Poseidon, Hades, and Ares, the elder deities, are aiding El~s; the younger ones, Athene reborn from Zeus’s head, and Heracles as Zeus’s son, oppose them. Heracles’s defeat of Periclymenus, the shape-shifter, may mark the suppression of a New Year child-sacrifice; and Periclymenus’s power to take the shape of any tree refers, apparently, to the succession of thirteen months through which the interrex passed in his ritual ballet, each month having an emblematic tree, from wild-olive to myrtle (see 52. $ and 169. 6). The wounding of Hades presents Heracles as the champion destined to cheat the grave and become immortal (see 145. h); moreover, according to Homer (Iliad v. 3 19 if.), he wounded Hades’ at Pylus, among ú the corpses’—which could equally mean: ‘at the gate, among the dead’; the gate being that of the Underworld, perhaps in the Far North (see 170. 4). If so, Hades is a substitute for Cronus, whom Heracles defeated in tl~e sepulchral island of Erytheia (see 132. d), and the encounter is a doublet of the Twelfth Labour, when he barrowed Hell. Heracles’s Pyhan allies, significantly aided by Athene, are described by Homer (Iliad xi. 6~7 and 761) a~ Achaeans, though Neleus’~ dynasty was, in fact, Aeolian.
2. Heracles’$ wounding of Hera in the right breast with a three-barbed arrow seems to allegorize the Dorian invasion of the Western ?eloponnese when the three tribes, who called themselves Sons of Heracles, humbled the power of the Elean Goddess (see 146. ~).
HEa~›L~S decided to attack Sparta and punish the sons of Hippocoi3n. They had not only refused to purify him after the death oflphitus, and fought against him under Neleus’s command, but also murdered his friend, Oeonus. It happened that Oeonus son of Licymnius, who had accompanied Heracles to Sparta, was strolling about the city when, just outside HippocoiSn’s palace, a huge Molossian hound ran at him; in self-defence, he threw a stone which struck it on the muzzle. Out darted the sons of Hippoco;Sn and beat him with cudgels. Heracles ran to Oeonus’s rescue from the other end of the street, but arrived too late. Oeonus was cudgelled to death, and Heracles, wounded in the hollow of his hand and in the thigh, fled to the shrine of Eleusinian Demeter, near Mount Taygetus; where Asclepins hid him and healed his wounds.
b. Having mustered a small army, Heracles now marched to Tegea in Arcadia and there begged Cepheus the son of Aleus toj oin him with his twenty sons. At first, Cepheus refused, fearing for the safety of Tegea if he left home. But Heracles, whom Athene had given a lock of the Gorgon’s hair in a brazen jar, presented it to Cepheus’s daughter Aerope: shotfid the city be attacked, he said, she was to display the lock thrice from its walls, turning her back to the enemy, who would immediately flee. As events proved, however, Aerope had no need of charm.2
c. Thus Cepheusjoined the expedition against Sparta, in which, by ill forttree, he and seventeen of his sons fell. Some say that Iphicles was also killed, but this is likely to have been the Aetolian Argonaut of that name, not Amphitryon’s son. Herades’s army suffered few other casualties, whereas the Spartans lost Hippoco~Sn and all his twelve sons, with numerous other men ośhigh rank; and their c/~ was taken by storm. Heracles then restored Tyndareus, leaving him the kingdom in trust for his own descendants.3
d. Since Hera, inexplicably, had not thwarted him in this campaign, Heracles built her a shrine at Sparta, and sacrificed goats, having no other victims at his disposal. The Spartans are thus the only Greeks who surname Hera ‘Goat-eating’, and offer goats to her. Heracles also raised a temple to Athene of the Just Deserts; and, on the road to Therapne, a shrine to Cotylaean Asclepius which commemorates the wound in the hollow of his hand. A shrine at Tegea, called ‘The Common Hearth of the Arcadians’, is remarkable for it* statue ośHeracles with the wound in his thigh.4
r. Apollodorus: ii..7. 3; Pausanias: iii. 15.3; iii. 19. 7; iii. 20. 5 and viii. 53.3.
2. Apollodorns: loc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. 47. 4.
3. Apollodorus: loc. tit. and iii. xo. 5; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 334. Pausanias: iii. xS. 7; iii. 19. 7 and viii. 53.3— . 1. Here the Heracles myth is lost in saga; and pseudo-myth is introduced to explain such anomalies as Goat-eating Hera, Hollow-of-theHand Asclepius, Heracles of the Wounded Thigh, and Tegea’s long immunity from capture. But Hera’s wild women had once eaten Zagreus, Zeus, and Dionysus in wild-goat form; Asclepius’s statue probably held medicines in the hollow of the hand; the wound in Heracles’s thigh will have been made by a boar (see 157. e); and the Tegeans may have displayed a Gorgon’s head on their gates as a prophylactic charm. To assault a city thus protecred was, as it were, to violate the maiden-goddess Athene: a superstition also fostered by the Athenians.
2. Whenever Heracles leaves an Achaean, Aerolian, Sicilian, or Pclasgian city in trust for Iris descendants, this is an attempted justification of ks later seizure by the Dorians (see 132. q and 6; ~43. d; and 146. e). AUGE
A~Js, king of Tegea, the son of Apheidas, married Neaera, a danghter of Pereus, who bore him Auge, Cepheus, Lycurgus, and Aphidamas. An ancient shrine of Athene Alta, founded at Tegea by Aleus, still contains a sacred couch of the goddess.1
b. When, on a visit to Delphi, Aleus was warned by the Oracle that Neaera’s two brothers would die by the hand of her daughter’s son, he hurried home and appointed Auge a priestess of Athene, threatening to kill her if she were unchaste. Whether Heracles came to Tegea on his way to fight King Augcias, or on his return from Sparta, is disputed; at all events, Aletn entertained him hospitably in Athene’s temple. There, flushed with wine, Heracles violated the virgin-priestess beside a fountain which is still shown to the north of the shrine; since, however, Auge made no outcry, it is often suggested that she came there by assignation.2
c. Heracles continued on his way, and at Stymphalus begot Eures on Parthenope, the daughter of Stymphalus; But meanwhile pestilence and famine came upon Tcgea, and Aleus, informed by the Pythoness that a crime had been committed in Athene’s sacred precinct, visited it and found Auge far gone with cl~ild. Though she wept and declared that Heracles had violated her in a fit of drunkenness, Aleus would not believe this, He dragged her to the Tegean market place, where she fell upon her knees at the site of the present temple of Eileithyia, famed for its image of ‘Auge on her Knees’.1 Ashamed to kill his daughter in pubhc, Aleus engaged King Nauphus to drown her. Nauplius accordingly set out with Auge for Nauplia; But on Mount Parthenius she was overtaken by labour-pangs, and made some excuse to turn aside into a wood. There she gave birth to a son and, hiding him in a thicket, returned to where Nauplius was patiently waiting for her by the roadside. However, having no inten60n of drowning a princess when he could dispose of her at a high price in the slave-market, he sold Auge to some Carian merchants who had just arrived at Nauplia and who, in turn, sold her [o Teuthras, king ofMysian Teuthrania.4
d. Augo’s son was suckled by a doe on Mount Parthenius (where he now has a sacred predmct ) and some cattle-men found him, named him Telephus, and took him to their master, King Corythus. At the same timc, by a coincidence, Corythus’s shepherds discovered Atalanta’s intent son, whom she had borne to Meleager, exposed on the same hillside: they named him Parthenopaeus, which is ‘son of a pierced maidenhead’, because Atalanta was pretending to be still a virgin.5
e. When Telephus grew to manhood, he approached the Delphic Oracle for news of his parents. He was told: ‘Sail and seek King Teuthras the Mysian.’ In Mysia he found Auge, now married to Teuthras, from whom he learned that she was his mother and Heracles his father; and this he could well believe, for no woman had ever borne Heracles a son so like himself. Teuthras thereupon gave Tclephus daughter Argiope in marriage, and appointed him heir to the kingdona.6 f.. Others say that Telephus, after having killed Hippothous and Nereus, his maternal uncles, went silent and speechless to Mysia in search of his mother. ‘The silence ofTelephus’ became proverbial; but Parthenopaeus came with him as spokesman.? It happened that the renowned Argonaut Idas, son of Aphareus, was about to seize the Mysian thrc~ne, and Teuthras in desperation promised to resign it to Telephus and give him his adopted daughter in marriage, if only Idas were driven away. Thereupon Telephus, with Parthenopaeus’s help, routed Idas in a single batde. Now, Teuthras’s adopted daughter happened to be Auge, who did not recognize Telephus, nor did he know that she was his mother. Faithful to Heracles’s memory, she took a sword into her bedroom on the wedding night, and would have killed Telephus when he entered, had not the gods sent a large serpent between them. Auge threw down the sword in alarm and confessed her murderous intentions. She then apostrophized Heracles; and Telephus, who had been on t~e point of matricide, was inspired to cry out:’O mother, mother!’ They fell weeping into each other’s arms and, the next day, returned with Teuthras’s blessing to their native land. Auge’s tomb is shown at Pergamus beside the river Caicus. The Pergamenians daim to be Arcadian emigrants who crossed to Asia with Telcphus, and offer him heroic sacrifices.8
g. Others say that Telephus married Astyoche, or Laodice, a daughter of Trojan Priam. Others, again, that Heracles had lain with Auge at Troy when he went there to fetch Laomedon’s immortal horses. Still others, that Aleus locked Auge and her infant in an ark, which he corn~ mitred to the waves; and that, under Athene’s watchful care, the chest drifted towards Asia Minor and was cast ashore at the mouth of the river Caicus, where King Teuthras married Auge and adopted Telephus. O
h. This Teuthras, hunting on Mount Teuthras, once pursued a monstrous boar, which fled to the temple of Orthosian Artemis. He was about to force his way in, when the boar cried out: ‘Spare me, my lord! I am the Goddess’s nursling!’ Teuthras paid no attention, and killed it, thereby offending Artemis so deeply that she restored the boar a sacred king to ensure good crops. Relics of this custom were found k Heracles’s temple at Rome, where his bride was called Acca—counterpart of the Peloponnesian White Goddess Acco—and at Jerusalem where before the religious reforms of the Exile, a sacred marriage seems to hav~ been celebrated every September between the High-priest, a representa. tire of Jehovah, and the goddess Anatha. Professor Raphael Patai summarizes the evidence for the Jerusalem marriage in his Man and Templt (pp: 88-94, London, 1947). The divine children supposedly born ofsuc~ unions became the Corn-spirits of the coming year; thus Athene flit= was a corn-goddess, patroness of corn-mills. The numerous sons whom Heracles lathered on nymphs witness to the prevalence of this religion., theory. He is credited with only one anomalous daughter, Macar’n (‘blessed”).’
The Auge myth has been told to account for au Arcadian emigratio~ to Mysia, probably m~der pressure from the Achaeans; also for Tegean festivities in honour of the New Year god as fawn which, to judge from the Hesiod fragment, had their counterpart in the Troad.
2. That Auge and her child dri~~ed in an ark to the river Caicus—~ scene illustrated on the altar of Pergamus, and on Pergamene coinsmeans merely that the cult orange and Telephus had been iinported into Mysia by Tegean colonists, and that Auge, as the Moon-goddess, wa~ supposed to ride in her crescent boat to the New Year celebrations. Athene’s subsequent change from orgiastic bride to chaste warriormaiden has confused the story: in some versions Teuthras becomes Auge’s bridegroom, but in others he piously adopts her. Hyginus’s version is based on some late and artificial drama.
3. The myth of the golden boar refers partly to the curative properties of the antipathes stone on Mount Teuthras; partly, perhaps, to a Mysian custom of avenging the death of Adonis, who had been killed by Apollo in the form of a boar. [t looks as ifAdonis’s representative, a man wearing a boar’s hide with golden tusks, was now spared if he could take refuge from his pursuers in the sanctuary of Apollo’s sister Artemis. The kings of Tegea, Auge’s birthplace, were, it seems, habitually killed by boars (see ~40. ~ and ~57—e).
4. Phialo’s adventnre with the jay is an anecdotal fancy, supposed to account for the name of the spring, which may originally have been sacred to a jay totem-clan.
spending four years in Pheneus, Heracles decided to leave the Peloponnese. At the head of a large Arcad/an force, he sailed across to Calydon in Aetolia, where he took up his residence. Having now no legitimate sons, and no wife, he courted Deiandra, the supposed daughter of Oeneus, thus keeping his promise to the ghost of her brother Meleager. But Deianeira was really the daughter of the god 13ionysus, by Oeneus’s wife Althaea, as had become apparent when , Meleager died and Artemis turned his lamenting sisters into guineafowl; for Dionysus then persuaded Artemis to let Deianeira and her sister Gorge retain their human shapes.1
6. Many suitors came to Oeneus’s palace in Pleuron, demanding the hand of lovely Deianeira, who drove a chariot and practised the art of war; but all abandoned their claims when they found themselves in rivalry with Heracles and the River-god Achelous. It is common knowledge that immortal Achelous appears in three forms: as a bull, as a speckled serpent, and as a bull-headed man. Streams of water flow continually from his shaggy beard, and Deianeira would rather have died than marry him. Z
r. Heracles, when summoned by Oeneus to plead his suit, boasted that if he married Deianeira, she would not only have Zeus for a father-in-law, but enjoy the reflected glory of his own Twelve Labours. Achelous (now in bulbheaded form) scoffed at this, remarking that he was a well-known personage, the father of all Greek waters, not a footloose stranger like Heracles, and that the Oracle of Dodona had instructed all visitants to offer him sacrifices. Then he taunted Herades: ‘Either you are not Zeus’s son, or your mother is an adulteress!’ Heracles scowled. ‘I am better at fighting than debating,’ he said, ‘and I will not hear my mother insulted!’
d. Achelous cast aside his green garment, and wrestled with Heracles until he was thrown on his back, whereupon he defdy turned into a speckled serpent and wriggled away.
‘I strangled serpents in my cradle!’ laughed Heracles, stooping to grip his throat. Next, Achelous became a bull and charged; Heracles nimbly stepped aside and, catching hold of both his horns, hurled him to the ground with such force that the right horn snapped clean off. Achelous retired, miserably ashamed, and hid his injury under a chaplet of willow-branches.3 Some say that Heracles returned the broken horn to ^chelous in exchange for the horn of Goat Amaltheia; and some, that it was changed into Amalthe’~a’s by the Naiads, and that Heracles presented it to Oeneus as a bridal gift.* Others say that in the course of his Twelfth Labour, he took the horn down to Tartarus, filled by the Hesperides with golden fruit and now called the Cornuc01
for Plutus, Tyche’s assistant. S
e. After marrying Dcianeira, Heracles marched with th ians against the Thesprotian city of Ephyra—later Cichy~
he overcame and killed King Phyleus. Among the captive leus’s daughter Astyoche, by whom Heracles became th Tlepolemus; though some say that Tlepolemus’s mother dameia, daughter of Amyntor, whom Heracles abducted Ephyra, a city famous for its poisons.6
f. On the advice of an Oracle, Heracles now sent word t Thespius: ‘Keep seven of your sons in Thespiae, send three and order the remaining forty to colonize the island of Thespius obeyed. Descendants of those who went to The honoured there; and descendants of those who stayed behi]
piae, the so-called Demuchi, governed the city unt’d recent forces led to Sardinia by Iolaus included Thespian and At}
tingents, this being the first Greek colonial expedition in kings came of different stock from the common people. l feared the Sardinians in batde, Iolaus divided the island into planted olive-trees, and made it so fertile that the Carthag since been prepared to undergo immense troubles and da~
possession. He founded the city of Olbia, and encouraged ians to found that of Ogryle. With the consent of the sons o who regarded Iolaus as their second fatl~ef, he called the col himself, Iolarians; and they still sacrifice to Father Iolaus, Persians do to Father Cyrus. It has been said that Iolaus returned to Greece, by way of Sicily, where some of hi~
settled and awarded him hero rites; but according to the Th, should h~ow, none of the colonists ever came back.7
g. At a feast three years later, Heracles grew enraged wi kinsman of Oeneus, variously named Eunomm, Eurynon mus, Arch/as, or Chaerias, the son of Architeles, who was t~ water on Heracles’s hands, and clumsily splashed his leg~
boxed the boy’s ears harder than he intended, and killed hit forgiven by Architeles for this accident, Heracles decided due penalty of exile, and went away with Deianeira, ant Hyllus, to Trachis, the home of Amphitryon’s nephew Ce3
h. A similar accident had occurred at Phlius, a city whicl:
east of Arcadia, when Heracles returned from the Garden of xxx. Disliking the drink set before him, he struck Cyathus, the cupbearer, with one finger only, but killed him none the less. A chapel to Cyathus’s memory has been built against Apollo’s Phlian tempte.9 i. Some say that Herades wrestled against Achelous before the murder of Iphitus, which was the cause of his removal to Trachis; others, that he went there when first exiled from Tiryns. IO At all events, he came with Deianeira to the river Evenus, then in full flood, where the Centaur Nessus, claiming that he was the gods’ authorized ferryman and chosen because of his righteousness, offered, for a small fee, to carry Deianeira dry-shod across the water while Heracles swam. He agreed, paid Nessus the fare, threw his club and bow over the river, and plunged in. Nessus, however, instead of keeping to his bargain, galloped off in the opposite direction with Deianeira in his arms; then threw her to the ground and tried to violate her. She screamed for help, and Heracles, quickly recover’rag his bow, took careful aim and pierced Nessus through the breast from half a mile away.
j. Wrenching out the arrow, Nessus told Deianeira: ‘If you mix the seed which I have spilt on the ground with blood from my wound, add olive oil, and secretly anoint Heracles’s shirt with the mixture, you will never again have cause to complain of his unfaithfulness.’ Deianeira hurriedly collected the ingredients in a jar, which she sealed and kept by her without saying a word to Heracles on the subject.Ix
k. Another version of the story is that Nessus offered Deianeira wool soaked in his own blood, and told her to weave it into a shirt for Heracles. A third version is that he gave her his own blood-stained shirt as a love-charm, and then fled to a neighbouring tribe of Locrians, where he died of the wound; but his body rotted unburied, at the foot of Mount Taphiassus, tainting the country with its noisome smellhence these Locrians are called Ozotian. The spring beside which he died still smells foerid and contains dots of blood.Iz
/. By Deianeira, Heracles had already become the father of Hyllus, Ctesippus, Glenus, and Hodites; also of Macaria, his only daughter. IS x. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 34; Apollodorus: i. 8. x and ii. 7. 5; Bacchylides: Epinicia v. 165 if.; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 2. 2. Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. x-xoo; Apollodorus: i. 8. x; Sophocles: Trachinian Women ~ if.
3. Ovid: Ioc. cit.; Ephorus, quoted by Macrobius: v. xS; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 50.194 “~42. I—142.3 ~~ 4. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit. and ii. 7. $; Ovid: Ioc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 35; Strabo: x. 2. ~9.
5. Hyginus: Fabula 3 ~; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebald iv. ~06. 6. Strabo: vii. 7—$ and ~I; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 36; Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 23 IT., with schohast; Homer: Iliad ii. 658-60 and Odyssey i. 259-6~.
7. ~pollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 29-30; Pausanias: v’fi. 2. 2; x. ~7. 4 and ix. 23. x.
8. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 36; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Tzetzes: On Ly›ophron 50; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 1900; Scholiast on Sophodes’s Trachinian Women 39.
9. Pausanias: ii. ~3—8.
~o. Sophocles: Trachinian Women ~-40; Pausanias: i. 32. 5.
x~. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 6; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 555-6~; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. xox if.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 46.
x~. Scholiast on Horace’s Epodes iii; Ovid: loc. tit.; Pausanias: x. 38. ~; Strabo: ix. 4. 8.
13. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 8; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 37; Pausanias: i. 32. 5 ~. The story of Meleager’s sisters is told to account for a guinea-fowl cult of Artemis on Leros (see 80. 3).
2. Deianeira’s love of war reveals her as a representative of the pre~ Olympian Battle-goddess Athene, with whose sacred marriagcs i~ different localities this part of the Heracles legend is chiefly concerned (scc ~4~. ~).
3. Heracles’s contest with Achelous, like that of Theseus with the Minotaur, should be read as part of the royal marriage ritual. Bull and Serpent stood for the waxing and the waning year—’ the bull who is the serpent’s father, and the serpent whose son is the bull’—over both of which the sacred king won domination. A bull’s horn, regarded from earliest times as the seat of fertility, enroyalled the candidate for kingship who laid hold of it when he wrestled either with an actual bull, or with a bull-masked opponent. The Babylonian hero Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s mot~ tal twin, and devotee of the Queen of Heaven, seized the Bull of Heaven by the horns and killed it with his sword; and the winning of a cornucopia was a marriage-task imposed on the Welsh hero Peredur in the Mabinogion (see ~48.5). In Crete, the bull cult had succeeded that of the wild-goat, whose horn was equally potent. But it seems that the icon which showed this ritual contest was interpreted by the Greeks as illustrating Heracles’s struggle with the River Achelous: namely the dyking and draining of the Paracheloitis, a tract of land, formed of the silt brought down by the Achelous, which had slowly been joining the Echinachan Isles to the mainland; and the consequent recovery of a large area of farmland. Heracles was often credited with engineering feats such as these (Strabo: x. 2. 19; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 35). The sacrifice ordered by the Dodonian Oracle will hardly have been to the river Achelous; more likely it was prescribed for Achelois, the Moon-goddess’ who drives away pain’.
4. Etmomus and Cyathus will have been boy-victims: surrogates for the sacred king at the dose of his reign.
5. Nessus’s attempted rape of Deianeira recalls the disorderly scenes at the wedding of Peirithous, when Theseus (the Athenian Heracles) intervened to save Hippodameia from assault by the Centaur Eurytion (see ~02. d). Since the Centaurs were originally depicted as goat-men, the icon on which the incident is based probably showed the Queen riding on the goat-king’s back, as she did at the May Eve celebrations of Northern Europe, before her sacred marriage; Eurytion is the ‘interloper’, a stock-character made familiar by the comedies of Aristophanes, who still appears at Northern Greek marriage festivities. The earliest mythical example of the. interloper is the same Enkidu: he interrupted Gilgamesh’s sacred marriage with the Goddess of Erech, and challenged him to battle. Another interloper is Agenor, who tried to take Andromeda from Perseus at his wedd’mg feast (see 73—l).
6. The first settlers in Sardinia, neolithic Libyans, managed to survive in the mountainous parts; subsequent immigrants—’Cretans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Jews—attempted to hold the coastal districts, but malaria always defeated them. Only during the last few years has the mortality been checked by spraying the pools where the malarial mosquito breeds.
7. ‘Ozolian’ (‘smelly’), a nickname given to the Locrians settled near Phocis, to distinguish them from their Opuntian and Epizephyrian k’msfolk, probably referred to their habit of wearing undressed goat-skins which had a foetid smell in damp weather. The Locrians themselves preferred to derive it from ozoi, ‘vine shoots’ (Pausanias: x. 38. ~), because of the first vinestock planted in their country (see 38.7)—
ST~r~ accompanied by his Arcadian allies, Heracles came to Trachis where he settled down for awhile, under the protection of Ceyx. On his way, he had passed through the country of the Dryopians, which is overshadowed by Mount Parnassus, and found their king Theiodamas,~ the son of Dryops, ploughing with a yoke of oxen.1 Being hungry and also eager for a pretext to make war on the Dryopians—who, as everyone knew, had no right to the country—Heracles demanded one of the oxen; and, when Theiodamas refused, killed him. After slaughtering the ox, and feasting on its flesh, he bore off Theiodamas’s infant son Hylas, whose mother was the nymph Menodice, Orion’s daughter.2
But some call Hylas’s father Ceyx, or Euphemus, or Theiomenes; and insist that Theiodamas was the Rhodian ploughman who cursed from afar while Heracles sacrif~ced one of his oxen.3
b. It seems that Phylas, Theiodamas’s successor, violated Apollo’s temple at Delphi. Outraged on Apollo’s behalf, Heracles killed Phylas and carried off his daughter Meda; she bore him Antiochus, founder of the Athenian deme which bears his name.4 He then expelled the Dryopians from their city on Mount Parnassus, and gave it to the Malians who had helped in its conquest. The leading Dryopians he took to Delphi and dedicated them at the shrine as slaves; but, Apollo having no use for them, they were sent away to the Peloponnese, where they sought the favour of Eurystheus the High King. Under his orders, and with the assistance of other fugitive compatriots, they built three cities, Asine, Hermione, and Eion. Of the remaining Dryopians, some fled to Euboea, others to Cyprus and to the island of Cynthos. But only the men of Asine still pride themselves on being Dryopians; they have built a shrine to their ancestor Dryops, with an ancient image, and celebrate mysteries in his honour every second year. S
c. Dryops was Apollo’s son by Dia, a daughter of King Lycaon, for fear of whom she hid the infant in a hollow oak; hence his name. Some say that Dryops himself brought his people from the Thessalian river Spercheius to Asine, and that he was a son of Spercheius by the nymph Polydora.6
d. A boundary dispute had arisen between the Dorians of Hestiaeotis, ruled by King Aegimius, and the Lapiths of Mount Olympus, former allies of the Dryopians, whose king was Coronus, a son of Caefieus. The Dorians, greatly oumumbered by the Lapiths, fled to Heracles and appealed for help, offering him in return a third share of their kingdom; whereupon Heracles and his Arcadian allies defeated the Lapiths, slew Coronus and most of his subjects, and forced them to quit the disputed land. Some of them settled at Corinth. Aegimius then held Herades’s third share in trust for his descendants.7
e. Heracles now came to Itonus, a city of Phthiotis, where the ancient temple of Athene stands. Here he met Cycnus, a son of Ares and Pelopia, who was constantly offering valuable prizes to guests who dared fight a chariot duel with him. The ever-victorious Cycnus would cut off their heads and use the skulls to decorate the temple of his father Ares. This, by the way, was not the Cycnus whom Ares had begotten on Pyrene and transformed into a swan when he died?
f Apollo, growing vexed with Cycnus, because he waylaid and carried off herds of cattle which were being sent for sacrif~ce to Delphi, incited Heracles to accept Cycnus’s challenge. It was agreed that Heracles should be supported by his charioteer Iolaus, and Cycnus by his father Ares. Heracles, though this was not his usual style offighting, put on the polished bronze greaves which Hephaestus had made for him, the curiously wrought golden breast-plate given him by Athene, and a pair of iron shoulder-guards. Armed with bow and arrows, spear, helmet, and a stout shield which Zeus had ordered Hephaestus to supply, he lightly mounted his chariot.
g. Athene, descending from Olympus, now warned Heracles that, although empowered by Zeus to kill and despoil Cycnus, he must do no more than defend himself against Ares and, even if victorious, not deprive him of either his horses or his splendid armour. She then mounted beside Heracles and Iolaus, shaking her aegis, and Mother Earth groaned as the chariot whirled forward. Cycnus drove to meet them at full speed, and both he and Heracles were thrown to the ground by the shock of their encounter, spear against shield. Yet they sprang to their feet and, after a short combat, Heracles thrust Cycnus through the neck. He then boldly faced Ares, who hurled a spear at him; and Athene, with an angry frown, turned it aside. Ares ran at Heracles sword in hand, only to be wounded in the thigh for his pains, and Heracles would have dealt him a further blow as he lay on the ground, had not Zeus parted the combatants with a thunderbolt. Heracles and Iolaus then despoiled Cycnus’s corpse and resumed their interrupted journey; while Athene led the fainting Ares back to Olympus. Cycnus was buried by’ Ceyx in the valley of the Anaurus but, at Apollo’s command, the swollen river washed away his headstone.9
h. Some, however, say that Cycnus lived at Amphanae, and that Heracles transfixed him with an arrow beside the river Peneius, or at Pegasae.TM
i. Passing through Pelasgiotis, Heracles now came to Ormenium, a small city at the foot of Mount Pelion, where King Amyntor refused to give him his daughter Astydameia. ‘You are marr:~ed already,’ he said, ‘and have betrayed far too many princesses for me to trust you with another.’ Heracles attacked the city and, after killing Amyntor, carried off Astydameia, who bore him Ctesippus or, some say, Tlepolemus.TM
x. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 36; Probus, on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 6; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 13 x.
2. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 7; Apollonius Rhodius: i. xz~z if.; Hyg/nus: Fabula ~4.
3. Nicander, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis: 26; Hellanicus, quoted by schohast on Apollonius Rhodius i. ~3 x and 1207; Philostratus: Imagines ii. 24.
4. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 37; Pausanias: i. 5. z.
5. Diodorus Siculus: loc. tit.; Herodotus: viii. 46; Pausanias: iv. 6 and viii. 34. 6.
6. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 480; Aristotle, quoted by Strabo: viii. 6. 13; Antoninus Liberalis: Trans~rmations 32.
7. Apollodorus: ii. 7. 7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 378. Euripides: Heracles 389-93; Pausanias: i. 9.7. 7; Scholiast on Pindar’s Ol)~mpian Odes ii. 82 and x. xS; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. 254.
9. Hesiod: Shield of Heracles 57-~38 and 3~8-480; Hyginus: Fabula 31; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 7; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 37; Euripides: loc. tit.
xo. Pausanias: i. 27. 7; Hesiod: Shield of Heracles 318-480.
II. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 37; Strabo: ix. 5—xS; Apollodorus: iii. 13. 8 and ii. 7. 7-8; Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 23 if., with schohast. 1. Heracles’s sacrifice of a plough ox, Theiodamas’s cursing, and the appearance of the infant Hylas from a fnrrow, are all parts of the preHellenic sowing ritual. Ox blood propitiates the Earth-goddess, curses avert divine anger from the sprouting seeds, the child represents the coming crop—namely Plutus, whom Demeter bore to Iasius after they had embraced in the thrice-ploughed field (see 24. a). Theiodamas is the spirit of the old year, now destroyed. The annual mourning for the doomed tree-spirit Hylas (see 150. d-e) has here been confused with mourning for the doomed corn-spirit.
2. Heracles’s expulsion of the Dryopians from Parnassus with Dorian assistance, and the Dryopian emigration to Southeru Greece, are likely to have taken place in the twelfth century ~3.c., before the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese (see 146. ~). His combat with Cycnus recalls Pelops’s race with Oenomaus (see 109. d-j), another son of Ares, and equally notorious as a head-hunter. In both cases one of the chariots contained a woman: namely Oenomaus’s daughter Hippodameia (the subject of his contention with Pelops) and Athene, who is apparently, the same character—namely the new king’s destined bride. Cycnm, like Spartan Polydeuces, is a king of the swan cult whose soul flies off to the far northern otherworld (see ~6~. 4).
3. Aegimius’s name—if it means ‘acting the part of a goat’—suggests that he performed a May Eve goat-marriage with the tribal queen, and that in his war against the Lapiths of Northern Th~ssaly his Dorians fought beside the Centaurs, the Lapiths’ hereditary enemies who, like the Satyrs, are depicted in early works of art as goat-men (see 1142..5). 4. Cypselus the tyrant of Corinth, famous for his carved chest, claimed descent from the Lapith royal house of Caeneus (see 78.
AT Trachis Heracles mustered an army of Arcadians, Melians, and Epicnemidian Locrians, and marched against Oechalia to revenge hin1[s~lśon King Eurytus, who refused to surrender the princess Iole, fairly won in an archery contest; but he told his allies no more than that E~~r~tus had been unjustly exacting tribute from the Euboeans. He stormed the city, fiddled Eurytus and his son with arrows and, after burying certain of his comrades who had fallen in the batfie, namely Ceyx’s son Hippasus, and Argeius and Melas, sons of Licymnius, pillaged Occhalia and took Iole captive.1 Rather than yield to Heracles, lole had allowed him to murder her entire family before her very eyes, and t~en leaped from the city wall; yet she survived, because her skirts were billowed out by the wind and broke the fall. Now Heracles sent her, with other Oechalian women, to Deianeira at Trachis, while he visited the Euboean headland of Cenaeum.1 It should be noted here that when taking leave of Deianeira, Heracles had divulged a prophecy: at the end of fifteen months, he was fated either to die, or to spend the remainder of his life in perfect tranquility. The news had been conveycd to him by the twin doves of the ancient oak oracle at Dodona.3 on tins occasion: wnemer tne ~v~esseman; tne ~nessanan; me a the Trachinian; or the Aetolian.1 Messenian Oechalia is the m~
of these, since Eurytus’s father Melaneus, King of the Dryo skilled archer, and hence called a son of Apollo—came to Me the reign of Perieres, son of Aeolus, who gave him Oechalia as 1~ Oechalia was called after Melaneus’s wife. Here, in a sacred grove, heroic sacrifices to Eurytus, whose bones are preset brazen urn, initiate the Great Goddess’s Mysteries, Others Oechalia with Anclania, a mile from the cypress-grove, wh~
Mysteries were formerly held. Eurytus was one of the heroe the Messenians invited to dwell among them when Epan restored their Peloponnesian.patrimony. S
x. Athenaeus: xi. 461; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 72, Nicias ofMallus, quoted by Plutarch: ParalleI Stories ~ 3; t Fabula 353 Sophocles: Trachinian Women 283 if.; Apo]
loc. tit.
3. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 44-5.
4. Homer: Iliad ii. 596 and 730; Odyssey xxi. 13-~4; Se Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 291; Strabo: ix. 5. ~7 and x. I. Io.
2. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 4; Pausanias: iv. z
33.5—6 and 27. 4; Strabo: x. L ;8.
* ~. Eurytus had refused to yield Iole on the ground that Herac slave (see 135—a). Though Iole’s suicidal leap makes a plausibl~ Mycenaean skirts were bell-shaped, and my father once sa Victorian suicide saved by her vast crinoline—it has most ILk deduced from a Mycenaean picture of the goddess hovering ~
army as it assaulted her city. The name Oechalla, ‘house of flour that the goddess in whose honour the mysteries were Derfort Demeter.
Hav~No consecrated marble altars and a sacred grove to 1~
Zeus on the Cenaean headland, Heracles prepared a thanksgivi~ rice for the capture of Oechalia. He had already sent Lichas back: to ask Deianeira for a fine shirt and a cloak of the sort which he regularly wore on such occasions.x
b. Deianeira, comfortably installed at Trachis, was by now resigned to Heracles’s habit of taking mistresses; and, when she recognized Iole as the latest of these, felt pity rather than resentment for the fatal beauty which had been Oechalia’s ruin. Yet was it not intolerable that Heracles expected Iole and herself to live together under t~e same roof? Since she was no longer young, Deianeira decided to use Nessus’s supposed love-charm as a means of holding her husband’s affection. Having woven him a new sacrif~cial shirt against his safe return, she covertly unsealed the jar, soaked a piece of wool in the mixture, and rubbed the shirt with it. When Lichas arrived she locked the shirt in a chest which she gave to him, say’rag: ‘ On no account expose the shirt to light or heat until Heracles is about to wear it at the sacrifice.’ Lichas had already driven off at full speed in his chariot when Deianeira, glancing at the piece of wool which she had thrown down into the sunlit courtyard, was horrified to see it burning away like saw-dust, while red foam bubbled up from the flag-stones. Realizing that Nessus had deceived her, she sent a courier post-haste to recall Lichas and, cursing her folly, swore that if Heracles died she would not survive him.2
c. The courier arrived too late at the Cenaean headland. Heracles had by now put on the shirt and sacrificed twelve immaculate bulls as the first-fruits of his spoils: in all, he had brought to the altar a mixed herd of one hundred cattle. He was pouring wine from a bowl on the altars and throwing frankincense on the flames when he let out a sudden yell as if he had been bitten by a serpent. The heat had melted the Hydra’s poison in Nessus’s blood, which coursed all over Heracles’s limbs, corroding his flesh. Soon the pain was beyond endurance and, bellowing in anguish, he overturned the altars. He tried to rip off the shirt, but it clung to him so fast that his flesh came away with it, laying bare the bones. His blood hissed and bubbled like spring water when red-hot metal is being tempered. He plunged headlong into the nearest stream, but the poison burned only the fiercer; these waters have been scalding hot ever since and are called Thermopylae, or ‘hot passage’.3
d. Ranging over the mountain, tearing up trees as he went, Heracles came upon the terrif~ed Lichas crouched in the hollow of a rock, his knees clasped with his hands. In vain did Lichas try to exculpate himself: Heracles seized him, whirled him thrice about his head and flung him into the Euboean Sea. There he was transformed: he became a rock o~ human appearance, projecting a short distance above the waves, whic~ sailors still call Lichas and on wt,~ich they are afraid to tread, believin~ it to be sentient. The army, watching from afar, raised a great shout ot lamentation, but none dared approach until, writhing in agony, Heracles summoned Hyllus, and asked to be carried away to die in solitude. Hyllus conveyed him to the foot of Mount Oeta in Trachis (a region famous for its white hellebore), the Delphic Orate having alread) pointed this out to Licymnius and Iolaus as the destined scene of theix friend’s death.4
e. Aghast at the news, Deianeira hanged herselfor, some say, stabbed herself with a sword in their marriage bed. Herades’s one thought had been to punish her before he died, but when Hyllus assured him tha~ she was innocent, as her suicide proved, he sighed forgivingly and expressed a wish that Alcmene and all his sons should assemble to heas his last words. Alcmene, however, was at Tiryns with some of hi., children, and most of the others had settled at Thebes. Thus he could reveal Zeus’s prophecy, now fulfilled, only to Hyllus: ‘No man alive may ever kill Heracles; a dead enemy shall be his downfall.’ Hyllus then asked for instructions, and was told: ‘Swear by the head of Zeus that you will convey me to the highest peak of this mountain, and there burn me, without lamentation, on a pyre of oak-branches and trunks of the male wild-olive. Likewise swear to marry Iole as soon as you come of age.’ Though scandalized by these requests, Hyllus promised to observe them. S
f When all had been prepared, Iolaus and his companions retired a short distance, while Heracles mounted the pyre and gave orders lot its kindling. But none dared obey, until a passing Aeolian shepherd named Poeas ordered Philo~tetes, his son by Demonassa, to do as Heracles asked. In gratitude, Heracles bequeathed his quiver, bow, and arrows to Philoctetes and, when the flames began to lick at the pyre, spread his lion-pelt over the platform at the summit and lay down, with his club for pillow, looking as blissful as a garlanded guest surrounded by wine-cups. Thunderbolts then fell from the sky and at once reduced the pyre to ashes.6
g. In Olympus, Zeus congratulated himself that his favourite son had behaved so nobly. ‘Heracles’s immortal part’, he announced, ‘is safe from death, and I shall soon welcome hixn to this blessed region. But if anyone here grieves at his deification, so richly meritrid, that god or g?.ddess must nevertheless approve it willy-nilly !’
~11 the Olympians assented, and Hera decided to swallow the insult, wNch was clearly aimed at her, because she had already arranged to. punish Philoctetes, for his kindly act, by the bite of a Lemnian viper.
t~. The thunderbolts had consumed Heracles’s mortal part. He no 10nger~bore any resemblance to Alcmene but, like a snake that has cast its ~10ugh, appeared in all the maje, sty of his divine father. A cloud receiv. ed him from his companions sight as, amid peals of thtmder, Zeus bore him up to heaven in his four-horse chariot; where Athene took him by the hand and solemnly introduced him to her fello deities.7
i. Now, Zeus had destined Heracles as one of the Twelve Olympians, yet was loth to expel any of the existing company of gods in order to make room for him. He therefore persuaded Hera to adopt Heracles by a ceremony of rebirth: namely, going to bed, pretending to be in labour, and then producing him from beneath her skim—which is the adoption ritual still in use among many barbarian tribes. Henceforth, Hera regarded Heracles as her son and loved him next only to Zeus. All the immortals welcomed his arrival; and Hera married him to her pretty daughter Hebe, who bore him Alexiares and Anicetus. And, indeed, Heracles had earned Hera’s true gratitude in the revolt of the Giants by killing Pronomus, when he tried to violate her.8
j. Heracles became the porter of heaven, and never tires of standing at the Olympian gates, towards nightfall, waiting for Artemis’s return from the chase. He greets her merrily, and hauls the heaps of prey out of her chariot, frowning and wagging a finger in disapproval if he finds only harmless goats and hares. ‘Shoot wild boars,’ he says, ‘that trample down crops and gash orchard-trees; shoot man-killing bulls, and lions, and wolves ! But what harm have goats and hares done us?’ Then he flays the carcasses, and voraciously eats any titbits that take his fancy.9 Yet while the immortal Heracles banquets at the divine table, his mortal phantom stalks about Tartarus, among the twittering dead; bow drawn, arrow fitted to the string. Across his shoulder is slung a golden baldric, terrifyingly wrought with lions, bears, wild boars, and scenes of battle and slaughter. Iř
k. When Iolaus and his companions returned to Trachis, Menoetius, the son of Actor, sacrificed a ram, a bull, and a boar to Heracles, and instituted his hero-worship at Locrian Opus; the Thebans soon followed suit; but the Athenians, led by the people of Marathon, w~ the first to worship him as a god, and all mankind now follows th, glorious example.1 Heracles’s son Phaestus forrod that the Sicyonia were offering his father hero-rites, but himself insisted on sacrif~cing him as a god. To this day, therefore, the people of Sicyon, aftcr k,~11i: a lamb and burning its thighs on the altar to Heracles the god, dcv~ part of its flesh to Heracles the hero. At Oeta, he is worshipped unc ate-~r~am.1qc.10. nrr~¬t~Jaecause he scared aw~y the locusts which w~ about to setde on the city; but the Ionians of Erythrae worship him Heracles Ipoctonus, because he destroyed the ipes, which are wor~ that attack vines in almost every other region.
1. A Tyrian image of Heracles, now in his shrine at Erythrae, is sa to represent Heracles the Dactyl. It was found floating on a raft in ś Ionian Sea off Cape Mesate, exactly halfway between the harbour Erythrae and the island of Chios. The Erythraeans on one side and ś Chians on the other, strained every nerve to tow the raft to their ov shore—but without success. At last an Erythraean fisherman ham, Phormio, who had lost his sight, dreamed that the women of Erythr must plait a rope from their shorn tresses; with this, the men would i able to tow the raft home. The women of a Thracian clan that h~ settled in Erythrae complied, and the raft was towed ashore; a~ only their descendants are now permitted to enter the shrine whe the rope is laid up. Phormio recovered his sight, and kept it until ] died.12
L Sophocles: Trachinian Women 298 and 752-4; Apollodorus: ii.
7; Diodorus Sictrim: iv. 38.
2. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 460-751; Hyginus: Fabula 36.
3. Sophocles: Trachinian Women 756 if.; Nonnus—Westermam Mythographi Graeci: Appendix Narrationurn xxviii. 8; Tzetzes: ( Lycophron 50-~.
4. Ovid: Metarnorphoserix. 155 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 36; Sophod~ Trachinian Women 783 if.; Apollodorus: ii. 7. 7; Pliny: Natu~
History xxv. 2~; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 38.
5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Sophocles: Trachinian Women 912 to en 6. Diodorus Sictrim: loc. cit.; Hyg’mus: Fabula xoz; Ovid: Metam~ phoses ix. 299 if..
7. Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 24~-73; Apollodorus: Ioc. ›it.; Hygint loc. cit.; Pausanias: i’ti. xS. 7.
8. Diodorus Sictrim: iv. 39; Hesiod on Onomacritus: Fragment, e Evelyn-White pp. 6~ 5-~6, Loeb; Pindar: Isthmian Odesiv. 59 ai Nemean Odes x. 18; Apollodorus: toc. tit.; Sotas of Byzantium, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1349-50.
9. Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis ~45 ff~o. Homer: Odyssey xi. 60~ if. ~. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 39; Pausanias: i. 15.41z. Pausanias: ii. Io. x; ix. 27. 5 and vii. 5.3; Strabo: xiii. ~. 64 . I. Before sacrificing and thus immortalizing the sacred king—as Calypso promised to immortalize Odysseus (see ~70. w)—the Queen will have stripped him of his clothes and regalia. What floggings and mutilations he suffered until he was laid on the pyre for immortahzation, is not suggested here, but the icons from which the account seems to be deduced probably showed him bleeding and in agony, as he struggled into the white linen shirt which consecrated him to the Death-goddess. 2. A tradition that Heracles died on the Cenaean headland has been reconciled with another that had him die on Mount Oeta, where early inscriptions and statuettes show that the sacred king continued to be burned in effigy for centuries after he ceased to be burned in the flesh. Oak is the correct wood for the midsummer bonfire; wild—olive is the wood of the New Year, when the king began his reign by expelling the spirits of the old year. Poeas, or Philoctetes, who lighted the pyre, is the king’s tanist and successor; he inherits his arms and bed—Iole’s marriage to Hyllus must be read in this hght—and dies by snake-bite at the end of the year.
$. Formerly, Heracles’s soul had gone to the Western Paradise of the Hesperides; or to the silver castle, the Corona Borealis, at the back of the North Wind—a legend which Pindar has uncomprehendingly included in a brief account of the Third Labour (see I~5. k). His admission to the Olympian Heaven—where, however, he never secured a seat among the twelve, as Dionysus did (see 27.5)—is a late conception. It may be based on the misreading of the same sacred icon which accounts for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (see 82. 1-5), for the so-called rape of Ganymedes (see 29. ~), and for the arming of Heracles (see 123.2). This icon will have shown Athene, or Hebe, the youthful queen and bride, introducing the king to twelve witnesses of the sacred marriage, each representing a clan ofa rehgious confederacy or a month of the sacred year; he has been ritually reborn either from a mare, or (as here) from a woman. Heracles figures as a heavenly porter because he died at midsummerthe year being likened to an oaken door which turned on a hinge, opened to its widest extent at the midsummer sols.tice, then gradually closed, as the days began to shorten (White Goddess pp. 175-7). What kept him from becoming a full Olympian seems to have been the authority of Homer: the Odyssey had recorded the presence of his shade in Tartarus.
4. If the Erythraean statue of Heracles was of Tyrian provenience, the rope in the temple will have been woven not of women’s hair but of hair shorn from the sacred king before his death at the winter solstice—as Delilah shore that of Samson, a Tyrian sun-hero. A similar sun-hero had been sacrificed by the Thracian women who adopted his cult (see 28.2). The statue was probably towed on a raft to avoid the haHowing of a merchant vessel and its consequent withdrawal from trade. ‘ Ipoctonus’ may have been a local variant of Heracles’s more usual title Ophioctonus, ‘serpent-killing’. His renovation by death ‘like a snake that casts its slough,’ was a figure borrowed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead; snakes were held to put off old age by casting their slough, ‘slough’ and ‘ old age’ both being geros in Greek (see ~ 60. 11 ). He rides to Heaven in a four-horse chariot as a solar hero and patron of the Olympic Games; each horse representing one of the four years between the Games, or one season of a year divided by equinoxes and solstices. A square image of the sun, worshipped as Heracles the Saviour, stood in the Great Goddess’s precinct at Megalopohs (Pausanias: viii. 3~. 4); it was probably an ancient altar, like several square blocks found in the palace at Cnossus, and another found in the West Court of the palace at Phaestus.
5. Hebe, Heracles’s bride, may not, perhaps, be the goddess as Youth, but a deity mentioned in the 48th and 49th Orphic Hymns as Hipta the Earth-mother, to whom Dionysus was delivered for safe-keeping. Proclus says (Against Timaeus ii. 124c) that she carried him on her head in a winnowing basket. Hipta is associated with Zeus Sabazius (see 27.3) in two early inscriptions from Maeonia, then inhabited by a Lydo-Phrygian tribe; and Professor Kretschmer has identified her with the M/tannian goddess Hepa, Hepit, or Hebe, mentioned in the texts from Boghaz-Keui and apparently brought to Maeonia from Thrace. If Heracles married this Hebe, the myth concerns the Heracles who did great deeds in Phrygia (see ~ 3 x. h), Mysia (see ~ 3 t. e), and Lydia (see x 36. a-f); he can be identified with Zeus Sabazius. Hipta was well known throughout the M/ddle East. A rock-carving at Hattusas in Lycaonia (see ~3—2) shows her mounted on a lion, about to celebrate a sacred marriage with the H/ttite Storm-god. She is there called Hepatu, said to be a Hurrian word, and Professor B. Hrozn~r (Civilization of the Hittites and Subareans, ch. xv) equates her with Hawwa, ‘the Mother of All Living’, who appears in Genesis ii as Eve. HroznS’ mentions the Canaanite prince of Jerusalem Abctihepa; and Adam, who married Eve, was a tutelary hero of Jerusalem (Jerome: Commentary on Ephesians v
ALCMENE, the mother of Heracles, had gone to Tiryns, taking some of his sons with her; others were still at Thebes and Trachis. Eurystheus now derided to expel them all from Greece, before they could reach manhood and depose him. He therefore sent a message to Ceyx, demadhag the extradition not only of the Heraclids, but also of Iolaus, the whole house of Licymnius, and Heracles’s Arcadian allies. Too weak to oppose Eurystheus, they left Trachis in a body—Ceyx pleading that he was powerless to help them—and visited most of the great Greek dries as suppliants, begging for hospitality. The Athenians under Theseus alone dared defy Eurystheus: their innate sense of justice prevailed when they saw the Heraclids seated at the Altar of Mercy.1
b. Theseus settled the Heraclids and their companions at Tricorythus —a city of the Attic tetrapolls—and would not surrender them to Eurystheus, which was the cause of the first war between Athens and d~e Peloponnese~ For, when all the Heraclids had grown to manhood, Eurystheus assembled an army and marched against Athens; Iolaus, Theseus, and Hyllus being appointed to command the combined Ad~en~ans and Heraclids. But some say that Theseus had now been succeeded by his son Demophon. Since an oracle announced that the Athenians must be defeated unless one of Heracles’s children would die for the common good, Macaria, Heracles’s only daughter, killed herself at Marathon, and thus gave her name to the Macarian spr’mg.2
c. The Athenians, whose protection of the Heraclids is even today a source of civic pride, then defeated Eurystheus in a pitched battle and killed his sons Alexander, Iphimedon, Eurybius, Mentor, and Perimedes, besides many of his allies. Eurysthens fled in his chariot, pursued by Hyllus, who overtook him at the Scironian Rocks and there cut off hi~ head, from which Alcmene gouged the eyes with weaving-pins; his tomb is shown near by.1 But some say that he was captured by Iolaus at the Scironian Rocks, and taken to Alcmene, who ordered his execution. The Athenians interceded for him, though in vain, and before the sentence was carried out, Eurystheus shed tears of gratitude and declared that he would reveal himself, even in death, as their firm friend, and a sworn enemy to the Herachds. ‘Theseus;’ he cried. ‘You need not pour libations or blood on my tomb: even without such offerings I undertake to drive all enemies from the land of Attica!’ Then he was executed and buried in front of Athene’s sanctuary at Pellene, midway between Athens and Marathon. A very different account is that the Athenians assisted Eurystheus in a battle which he fought against the Heraclids at Marathon; and that Iolaus, having cut off his head beside the Macarian spring, close to the chariot road, buried it at Tricorythus, and sent the trunk to Gargettus for burial.4
d. Meanwhile, Hyllus and the Heraclids who had settled by the Electrian Gate at Thebes invaded the Peloponnese, capturing all its cities in a sudden onset; but when, next year, a plague broke out and an oracle announced: ‘The Heraclids have returned before the due time!’ Hyllus withdrew to Marathon. Obeying his father’s last wish, he had married Iole and been adopted by Aegimius the Dorian; he now went to ask the Delphic Oracle when ‘the due time’ would come, and was warned to ‘wait for the third crop’. Taking this to mean three years, he rested until these had passed and then marched again. On the Isthmus he was met by Atrens, who had meanwhile succeeded to the Mycenaean throne and rode at the head of an Achaean army. S
e. To avoid needless slaughter Hyllus challenged any opponent of rank to single combat.’ IfI win,’ he said, ‘let the throne and kingdom be mine. IfI lose, we sons of Heracles will not return along this road for another fifty years.’ Echemus, King of Tegea, accepted the challenge, and the duel took place on the Corintho-Megarid frontier. Hyllus fell, and was buried in the city of Megara; whereupon the Heraclids honoured his undertaking and once more retired to Tricorythus, and thence to Doris, where they claimed from Aegimius that share of the kingdom which their father had entrusted to him. Only Licymnius and his sons, and Heracles’s son Tlepolemus, who was invited to setde at Argos, remained in the Peloponnese. Delphic Apollo, whose seemingly unsound advice had earned him many reproaches, explained that by the ‘third crop’ he meant the third generation.1
f Alcmene went back to Thebes and, when she died there at a great age, Zeus ordered Hermes to plunder the coffin which the Heraclids were carrying to the grave; and this he did, adroidy substituting a stone for the body, which he carried off to the Islands of the Blessed. There, revived and rejuvenated, Alcmene became the wife of Rhadamanthys. Meanwhile, finding the coffin too heavy for their shoulders, the Heraclids opened it, and discovered the fraud. They set up the stone in a sacred grove at Thebes, where Alcmene is now worshipped as a god~ dess. But some say that she married Rhadamanthys at Ocaleae, before 1.1cr death; and others, that she died in Megara, where her tomb is still shown, on a journey from Argos to Thebes—they add, that when a dispute arose among the Heraclids, some wishing to convey her corpse back to Argos, others to continue the journey, the Delphic Oracle advised them to bury her in Megara. Another so-called tomb of Alcmene is shown at Haliartus.7
g. The Thebans awarded Iolaus a hero-shrine, close to Amphitryon’s, where lovers plight their troths for Herades’s sake; although it is generally admitted that Iolaus died in Sardinia?
h. At Argos, Tlepolemus accidentally killed his beloved grand-uncle Licymnius. He was chastising a servant with an olive-wood club when Licymnius, now old and blind, stumbled between them and caught a blow on his skull. Threatened with death by the other Heraclids, Tlepolemus built a fleet, gathered a large number of companions and, on Apollo’s advice, fled to Rhodes, where he settled after long wandering and many hardships.9 In those days Rhodes was inhabited by Greek settlers under Triops, a son of Phorbas, with whose consent Tlepolemus divided the island into three parts and is said to have founded the cities ofLindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus. His people were favoured and enriched by Zeus. Later, Tlepolemus sailed to Troy with a fleet of nine Rhodian ships.10
i. Heracles begot another Hyllus on the water-nymph Melite, daughter of the River-god Aegaeus, in the land of the Phaeacians. He had gone there after the murder of his children, in the hope of being purified by King Nausithous and by Macris, the nurse of Dionysus. This was the Hyllus who emigrated to the Cronian Sea with a number of Phaeacian settiers, and gave his name to the Hyllaeans.n
j. The latest-born of all the Herachds is said to have been the Thasian athlete Theagenes, whose mother was visited one night in the temple of Heracles by someone whom she took for his priest, her husband Timosthenes, but who proved to be the god himself.12
k. The Herachds eventually reconquered the Peloponnese in the
~burth generation under Temenus, Cresphontes, and the twins Prodes and Eurysthenes, after killing the High King Tisamenes of Mycenae, a son of Orestes. They would have succeeded earlier, had not one of their princes murdered Camus, an Acarnanian poet, as he came towards them chanting prophetic verses; mistaking him for a magician sent against them by Tisamenes. In ?nnishment of this sacrilege the Heradid fleet was sunk and famine caused their army to disband. The Delphic Oracle now advised thorn ‘to banish the slayer for ten years and take Triops as a guide in l~ place.’ They were about to fetch Triops son of Phorbas from Rhodes, when Temenus noticed an Aetolian chieftain named Oxylus, who had just expiated some murder or other with a year’s exile in Elis, riding by on a one-eyed horse. Now, Triops means ‘three-eyed’, and Temenus therefore engaged him as guide and, landing on the coast of Elis with his Heraclid kinsmen, soon conquered the whole Peloponnese, and divided it by lot. The lot marked with a toad meant Argos and went to Temenus; that marked with a serpent meant Sparta and went to the twins Procles and Eurysthenes; that marked with a fox meant Messene and went to Cresphontes. Xa
x. Sophocles: Trachinian Women x~51-5; Hecataeus, quoted by Longinus: De Sublimitate 27; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 57; Apollodorus: ii. 8. x and hi. 7. x; Pausanias: i. 32.52. Diodorus Sictrim: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 8. x; Pausanias: loc. cit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Antoninus Liberahs: Transformations 33; Zenobius: Proverbs ii. 6~.
3. Lysias: ii. ~-~6; Isocrates: Panegyric ~5-~6; Apollodorus: ii. 8. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: i. 444—Euripides: Children of Heracles 843 if.; 928 if. and i026 if.; Strabo: viii. 6. ~9.
5. Pherecydes, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 33; Strabo: ix. 40. IO.
6. Pausanias: i. 44. 14 and 41. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 58; Apollodorus: ii. 8~. 2. 7. Diodorus Siculus: Ioc. cit.; Apollodorus: ii. 4. xx and hi. x. 2; Pausanias: i. 4~. x; Plutarch: Lysander 28.
8. Pindar: Pythian Odes ix. 79 If.; Plutarch: On Love ~7; Pausanias: ix. 23. ~.
9. Homer: Iliad ii. 653-70; Apollodorus: ii. 8.2; Pindar: Olympian Odes vii. 27 ffxo. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 58; Homer: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 23.
1. Apollonius Rhoclius: iv. 538 rE.
12. Pausanias: vi. II. 12.
~3. Apollodorus: ii. 8.2-5; Pausanias: ii. ~8.7; iii. ~3.4; v. 3.5-7 and viii. 5.6; Strabo: viii. 3—33; Herodotus: vi. 52.
* ~. The disastrous invasion of the Mycenaean Pelopormese by uncultured patriarchal mountaineers from Central Greece which, according to Pausanias (iv. 3.3) and Thucydides (i. ~2. 3), took place about xxoo B.c., was called the Dorian because its leaders came from the small state of Doris. Three tribes composed this Dorian League: the Hylleids, who worshipped Heracles; the Dymanes (‘enterers’), who worshipped Apollo; and the Pamphylloi (‘ men from every tribe’), who worshipped Demeter. After overrunning Southern Thessaly, the Dorians seem to have allied themselves with the Athenians before they ventured to attack the Peloponnese. The first attempt failed, though Mycenae was burned about ~xoo ~3.c., but a century later they conquered the eastern and southern regions, having by now destroyed the entire ancient culture of Argolis. This invasion, which caused emigrations from Argolis to Rhodes, from Attica to the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and apparently also from Thebes to Sardinia, brought the Dark Ages into Greece. z. Strategic burial of a hero’s head is commonplace in myth: thus, according to the Mabinogion, Bran’s head was buried on Tower Hill to guard London from invasion by way of the Thames: and according to Ambrose (Epistle vii. 2), Adam’s head was buried at Golgotha, to protect Jerusalem from the north. Moreover, Euripides (Rhesus 413-15) makes Hector declare that the ghosts even of strangers could serve as Troy’s guard/an spirits (see 28.6). Both Tricorythus and Gargettus lie at narrow clefRes commanding the approaches to Attica. Iolaus’s pursuit of Eurystheus past the Scironian Rocks seems to have been borrowed from the same icon that suggested the myth of Hippolytus (see ion. g).
3. The land of the Phaeacians (see 170. y) was Corcyra, or Drepane, now Corfu, off which lay the sacred islet of Macris (see 154. a); the CronJan Sea was the Gulf Of Finland, whence amber seems to have been fetched by Corcyriin enterprise—Corcyra is associated with the Argonaut amber-expedition to the head of the Adriatic (see 148.9)4—Triops, the Greek colonist of Rhodes, is a masculinization of the ancient Triple-goddess Dana8, or Damkina, after whose three persons Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus were named. According to other accounts, these cities were founded by the Telchines (see 54—a), or by Danaus (see 60. d).
5. Alcmene be’rag merely a rifle of Hera’s, there was nothing remarkable in the dedication of a temple to her. 6. Polygnotus, in his famous painting at Delphi, showed Menelaus with a serpent badge on his shield (Pausanias: x. 26. 3)—presumably the water-serpent of Sparta (see 125.3). A fox helped the Messenian hero Aristomenes to escape from a pit into which the Spartans had thrown him (Pausanias: iv. xS. 6); and the goddess as vixen was well known in Greece (see 49. 2 and 89.8). The toad seems to have become the Argive emblem, not only because it had a reputation of being dangerous to handle, and of causing a hush of awe among all who saw it (Pliny: Natural Histor]/xxxii. xs), but because Argos was first called Phoronicum (see 57—a); in the syllabary which preceded the alphabet at Argos, the radicals PHRN could be expressed by a toad, phryne.
Tug child Umus of Argos must be distinguished from Linus, the son of Ismenius, whom Heracles killed with a lyre. According to the Argives, Psamathe, the daughter of Crotopus, bore the child Linus to Apollo and, fearing her father’s wrath, exposed him on a mountain. He was found and reared by shepherds, but afterwards torn in pieces by Crotopus’s mastiffs. Since Psamathe could not disguise her grief, Crotopus soon guessed that she was Linus’s mother, and condemned her to death. Apollo punished the city of Argos for this double crime by sending a sort of Harpy named Poene, who snatched young children from their parents until one Coroebus took it upon himself to destroy her. A plague then descended on the city and, when it showed no sign of abating, the Argives consulted the Delphic Oracle, which advised them to propitiate Psamathe and Linus. Accordingly they offered sacrifices to their ghosts, the women and maidens chanting dirges, still called linoi; and since Linus had been reared among lambs, named the festival arnis, and the month in which it was held arneios. The plague still raging, at last Coroebus went to Delphi and confessed to Poene’s murder. The Pythoness would not let him return to Argos, but said: ‘Carry my tripod hence, and build a temple to Apollo wherever it falls from your hands!’ This happened to him on Mount Geraneia, where he founded first the temple and then the city of Tripodisci, and took up residence there. His tomb is shown in the market place at Megara; surmounted by a group of statuary, which depicts Poene’s murder—the most ancient sculptures of that kind still surviving in Greece. ~ This second Linus is sometimes called Oetolinus, and harpists mourn him at banquets. Z
b. A third Linus likewise lies buried at Argos: he was the poet whom some describe as a son of Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope—thus making him Orpheus’s brother. Others call him the son of Apollo and the Muse Urania, or Arethusa, a daughter of Poseid, on; or of Hermes and Urania; others, again, of Amphimarus, Poseidon s son, and Urania; still others, of Magnes and ~he Muse Clio.3 Linus was the greatest musician who ever appeared among mankind, and jealous Apollo killed him. He had composed ballads in honour of Dionysus and other ancient heroes, afterwards recording them in Pelasgian letters; also an epic of the Creation. Linus, in fact, invented rhythm and melody, was universally wise, and taught both Thamyris and Orpheus.4
c. The lament for Linus spread all over the world and is the theme, for instance, of the Egyptian Song of Maneros. On Mount Helicon, as one approached the Muses grove, Linus s portrait is carved in the w~11 of a small grotto, where annual sacrifices to him precede those offered to the Muses. It is claimed that he lies buffed at Thebes, and that Phihp, father of Alexander the Great, after defeating the Greeks at Chaeronea, removed his bones to Macedonia, in accordance with a dream; but afterwards dreamed agai~, and sent them back.s
1. Pausanias: i. 43.7 and ii. ~9. 7; Conon: Narrations 19; Athenaeus: iii. 99.
2. Sappho, quoted by .Pausanias: ix. 29. 3; Homer: Iliad xvfii. 569-70; Hesiod, quoted by Diogenes Laertius: viii. ~. 25.
3. Apollodorus: i. 3—2; Hyginus: Fabula 161; Contest of Homer and Hesiod 3 14; Diogenes Laertius: Prooernium 3; Pausanias: ix. 29. 3; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 83 x.
4. Dio~lorus Siculus: ifi. 67; Diogenes Laertius: Ioc. cit.; Hesiod, quoted by Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis i.p. ~2~.
5. Pausanias: loc. tit.
* I. Pausanias connects the myth of the Child Linus with that of Maneros, the Egyptian Corn-spirit, for whom dirges were chanted at harvest time; but Linus seems to have been the spirit of the flax-plant (linos), sown in spring and harvested in summer. He had Psamathe for mother because, according to Pliny (Natural History xix. 2), ‘they sowed flax in sandy soil.’ His grandfather, and murderer, was Crotopus because —again according to Phny—the yellowing flax-stalks, after having been plucked out by the roots, and hung up in the open air, were bruised with the ‘pounding feet’ of tow-mallets. And Apollo, whose priests wore l’men, and who was patron of all Greek music, fathered him. Linus’s destruction by dogs evidently refers to the maceration of the flax-stems with iron hatchets, a process which Pliny describes in the same passage. Frazer suggests, although without supporting evidence, that Linus is a Greek mishearhag of the Phoenician ai lanu, ‘woe upon us’. Oetolinus means ‘ doomed Linus ‘.
1. The myth has, however, been reduced to the familiar pattent of the child exposed for fear of a jealous grandfather and reared by shepherds; wkich suggests that the linen industry ha Argolis died out, owi~g to the Dorian invasion or Egyptian underselling, or both, and was replaced by a woolien i~dustry; yet the annual dirges for the child Linus confmued to be chanted. The flax industry is likely to have been established by the Cretans who civilized Argohs; the Greek word for flax-rope is rneri~tttos, and all—inthos words are of Cretan origha.
$. Coroebus, when he killed Poene (‘ punishment’), probably forbade child sacrifices at the Linus festival, and substituted lambs, renaming thc month ‘Lamb Month’; he has been identified with an Elean of the same name who won the foot-race at the First Olympiad (776 n.c.). Tripodiscus seems to have no connexion with tripods, but to be derived from tripodizein, ‘ to fetter thrice’. 4. Since the flax-harvest was the occasion of plaintive dirges and rh thmic pounding, and since at midsummer—to judge f~om the Swiss and Suabian examples quoted ha Frazer’s Golden Bough—yotmg people leaped around a bonfzre to make the flax grow high, another mystical Linus was presumed: one who attained manhood and became a famous musician, the inventor of rhythm and melody. This Linus had a Muse mother, and for his father, Arcadian Hermes, or Thracian Oeagrius, or Magnes, the eponymous ancestor of the Magnesians; he was, in fact, not a Hellene, but guardian of the pre-Hellenic Pelasgian culture, which included the tree-calendar and Creation lore. Apollo, who tolerated no rivals in music—as he had shown in the case of Marsyas (see zx.f)—is said to have killed him off-hand; but this was an incorrect account, since Apollo adopted, rather than murdered, Linus. Later, his death was more appropriately laid at the door of Heracles, patron of the uncivilized Dorian invaders (see ~46. ~).
.5. Linus is called Orpheus’s brother because of a similarity in their fate (see 28. ~). In the Austrian Alps (! am informed by Margarita SchbnWels) men are not admitted to the flax-harvest, or to the process o~~ drying, beating, and macerating, or to the spinning-rooms. The ruling spirit is the Harpatsch: a terrifying hag, whose hands and face are rubbed with soot. Any man who meets her accidentally, is embraced, forced to dance, sexually assaulted, and smeared with soot. Moreover, the women who beat the flax, called Bechlerinnen, chase and surround any stranger who blunders h~to their midst. They make him lie down, step over him, tie his hands and feet, wrap him in tow, scour his face and hands with prickly flax-waste, rub him against the rough bark of a felled tree, and flually roll him downhill. Near Feldkirch, they only make the trespasser lie down and step over him; but elsewhere they open his trouser-flies and stuff them with flax-waste, which is so pai~ful that he has to escape barelegged. Near Salzburg, the Bechleri~nen untrouser the trespasser themselves, and threaten to castrate him; after his flight, they purify the place by burning twigs and clashing sickles together.
6. Little is known of what goes on in the spinning-rooms, the women being so secretive; except that they chant a dirge called the Flachses Qual (‘Flax’s Torment’), or Leinen Klage (‘Linen Lament’). It seems likely, then, that at the flax-harvest women used to catch, sexually assault, and dismember a man who represented the flax-spirit; but since this was also the fhte of Orpheus, who protested against human sacrif~ce and sexual orgies (see 28. d), Li~m has been described as his brother. The Harpatsch is familiar: she is the carline-wife of the corn harvest, representative of the Earth-goddess. Sickles are clashed solely in honour of the moon; they are not used in the flax harvest. Linus is credited with the invention of music because these dirges are put into the mouth of the Flax-spirit himself, and because some lyre-strings were made from flaxen thread.
AFr~a the death of King Cretheus the Aeolian, Pelias, son of Poseidon, already an old man, seized the Iolcan throne from his half-brother Aeson, the rightful heir. An oracle presently warning him that he would be killed by a descendant of Aeolus, Pelias put to death every prominent Aeolian he dared lay hands upon, except Aeson, whom he spared for his mother Tyro’s sake, but kept a prisoner in the palace; forcing him to renounce his inheritar. ce.
b. Now, Aeson had married Polymele, aIso known as Amphinome, Perimede, Alcimede, Polymede, Polypberne, Scarphe, or Arne, who bore him one son, by name Diomedes. X Pelias would have destroyed the child without mercy, had not Polymele summoned her kinswomen to weep over him, as though he were still-born, and then smuggled him out of the city to Mount Pelion; where Cheiron the Centaur reared him, as he did before, or afterwards, with Asclepius, Achilles, Aeneas, and other famous heroes. Z
c. A second oracle warned Pelias to beware a one-sandalled man and when, one day on the seashore, a group of his princely allies joined him in a solemn sacrifice to Poseidon, his eye fell upon a tall, long-haired Magnesian youth, dressed in a close-fitting leather tunic and a leopardskin. He was armed with two broad-bladed spears, and wore only one sandal.3
d. The other sandal he had lost in the muddy river Anauruswhich some miscall the Evenus, or Enipeus—by the contrivance of a crone who, standing on the farther bank, begged passers-by to carry her across. None took pity on her, until this young stranger courteously offered her his broad back; but he found himself staggering under the weight, since she was none other than the goddess Hera in disguise. l:or Pelias had vexed Hera by withholding her customary sacrificcs, and she was determined to punish him for this neglect.4
e. When, therefore, Pelias asked the stranger roughly: ‘Who are you, and what is your father’s name?’, he replied that Cheiron, his foster-father, called him Jason, though he had formerly been known as Diomedes, son of Aeson.
Pelias glared at him balefully.’What would you do,’ he enquired suddenly, ‘if an oracle announced that one of your fellow-citizens were destined to kill you?’
‘I should send him to fetch the golden ram’s fleece’from Colchis,’ Jason replied, not knowing that Hera had placed those words in his mouth. ‘And, pray, whom have I the honour of addressing?’
f. When Pelias revealed his identity, Jason was unabashed. He boldly claimed the throne usurped by Pelias, though not the flocks and herds which had gone with it; and since he was strongly supported by his uncle Pheres, king of Pherae, and Amathaon, king of Pylus, who had come to take part in the sacrifice, Pelias feared to deny him his birthright.’ But tint,’ he insisted,’ I reqff~re you to free our beloved country from a curse!’
g. Jason then learned that Pelias was being haunted by the ghost of Phrixus, who had fled from Orchomenus a generation before, riding on the back of a divine ram, to avoid being sacrificed. He took refuge in Colchis where, on his death, he was denied proper burial; and, according to the Delphic Oracle, the land of Iolcus, where many of Jason’s Minyan relatives were settled, would never prosper unless his ghost were brought home in a ship, together with the golden ram’s fleece. The fleece now hung from a tree in the grove of Colchian Ares, guarded night and day by an unsleeping dragon. Once this pious feat had been accomplished, Pelias declared, he would gladly resign the kingship, which was becoming burdensome for a man of his advanced years.s
h. Jason could not deny Pelias this service, and therefore sent heralds to every court of Greece, calling for volunteers who would sail with him. He also prevailed upon Argus the Thespian to build him a fiftyoared ship; and this was done at Pagasae, with seasoned timber from Mount Pelion; after which Athene herself fitted an oracular beam into the Argo’s prow, cut from her father Zeus’s oak at Dodona.6
i. Many different muster-rolls of the Argonauts—as Jason’s companions are called—have been compiled at various times; but the following names are those given by the most trustworthy authorities:
Acastus, son of King Pelias
Actor, son of Deion the Phocian
Admetus, prince of Pherae
Amphiaraus, the Argive seer
Great Ancaeus of Tegea, son of Poseidon
Little Ancaeus, the Lelegian of Samos
Argus the Thespian, builder of the Argo
Ascalaphus the Orchomenan, son of Ares
Asterius, son of Cometes, a Pelopian
Atalanta of Calydon, the virgin huntress
Augeia s, son of King Phorbas of Elis
Butes of Athens, the bee-master
Caeneus the Lapith, who had once been a woman
Calais, the winged son of Boreas
Canthus the Euboean
Castor, the Spartan wrestler, one of the Dioscuri
Cepheus, son of Aleus the Arcadian
Cotonus the Lapith, of Gyrton in Thessaly
Echion, son of Hermes, the herald
Erginus of Miletus
Euphemus of Taenarum, the swimmer
Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, one of the Epigoni
Eurydamas the Dolopian, from Lake Xynias
Heracles of Tiryns, the strongest man who ever lived, now a god
Iylas the Dryopian, squire to Heracles
Idas, son of Aphareus of Messene
ISmon the Argive, Apollo’s son
Iphicles, son of Thesfius the Aetolian
Iphitus, brother of King Eurystheus of Mycenae
Jason, the captain of t~e expedition
Laertes, son of Acrisius the Argive
Lynceus, the look-out man, brother to Idas
Melampus of Pylus, son of Poseidon
Meleager of Calydon
Mopsus the Lapith
Nauplius the Argive, son of Poseidon, a noted navigaeor
Oileus the Locrian, father of Ajax
Orpheus, the Thracian poet
Palaemon, son of Hephaestus, an Aetolian
Peleus the Myrmidon
Peneleos, son of Hippalcimus, the Bocotian
Peridymenus of Pylus, the shape-shifting son of Poseidon
Phalerus, the Athenian archer
Phanus, the Cretan son of Dionysus
Poeas, son of Thaumacus the Magnesian
Polydeuces, the Spartan boxer, one of the Dioscuri
Polyphemus, son of Elatus, the Arcadian
Staphylus, brother of Phanus
Tiphys, the helmsman, of Boeotian Siphae
Zetes, brother of Calais
—and never before or since was so gallant a ship’s company gathered together.7
j. The Argonauts are often known as Minyans, because they brought back the ghost of Phrixus, grandson of Minyas, and the fleece oś~s ram; and because many of them, including Jason himself, sprang from the blood of Minyas’s daughters. This Minyas, a son of Chryses, had migrated from Thessaly to Orchomenus in Boeotia, where he founded a kingdom, and was the first king ever to build a treasury.8
1. Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xii. 70; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 50. x; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 232; Apollodorus: i. 9. 16; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 45; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 872.
2. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. ~98 ~ and Nemean Odes iii. 94 ~; Homer: Iliad xvi. ~433. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 7; Apoi!odorus: loc. tit.; Pindar: P),thian Odes iv. ~28 iT.
4. Apoltonius Rhodius: i. 8-17; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Ioc. cit.; Hyginus: Fabula 13; Valerius Flaccus: i. 84.
5. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: 10c. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 40; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xii. 70; Hesiod: Theogony 992 if.
6. Pindar: loc. cit.; Valeflus Flaccus: i. 39; Apollodorus: loc. cit. 7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabulae 12 and 14-23; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 20; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 40-9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 175; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. x if.; Valerius Haccus: Argonautica i. passim.
8. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 229; Pausanias: ix. 36. 3.
, ~. In Homer’s day, a ballad cycle about the Argo’s voyage to the land of Ae~tes (‘mighty’) was ‘on everyone’s lips’ (Odyssey xii. 40), and he places the Planctae—through which she had passed even before Odysseus did—near the Islands of the Sirens, and not far from Scylla and Charybdis. All these perils occur in the fuller accounts of the Argo’s return from Colchis.
2. According to Hesiod, Jason, son of Aeson, after accomplishing many grievous tasks imposed by Pelias, married Ae~tes’s daughter who came with him to Iolcus, where’ she was subject to him’ and bore his son Medeius, whom Cheiron educated. But Hesiod seems to have been misinformed: in heroic times no princess was brought to her husband’s home—he came to hers (see 137. 4 and 160. $). Thus Jason either married Ae~tes’s daughter and settled at his court, or else he married Pelias’s daughter and settled at Iolcus. Eumelus (eighth century) reports that when Corinthus died without issue, Medea successfully claimed the vacant throne of Corinth, being a daughter of Ae~tes who, not content with his heritage, had emigrated thence to Colchis; and that Jason, her husband, thereupon became king.
3. Neither Colchis, nor its capital of Aea, are mentioned in these early accounts, which describe Ae&es as the son of Helius, and the brother of Aeaean Circe. Nor must it be supposed that the story known to Homer had much in common with the one told by Apollodorus and Apollonius Rhodius; the course, even, of the Argo’s outward voyage, let alone her homeward one, was not yet fixed by Herodotus’s time—for Pindar, in his Fourth Pythian Ode (462 B.c.), had presented a version very different from his.
4. The myth of Pelias and Diomedes—Jason’s original name—seems to have been about a prince exposed on a mountain, reared by horseherds, and set seemingly impossible tasks by the king of a neighbouring city, not necessarily a usurper: such as the yoking of fire-breathing bulls, and the winning of a treasure guarded by a sea-monster-Jason, half-dead iu thc sea-monster’s maw, is the subject of Etruscan works of art. His reward will have been to marry the royal heiress. Similar myths are common in Celtic mythology—witness the labours imposed upon Kilhwych, the Mabinogion hero, when he wished to marry the sorceress Olwen—and’apparently refer to ritual tests of a king’s courage before his coronation.
5. It is indeed from the Tale of Kilhwych and Olwen, and from the similar Tale of Peredur Son of Evrawc, also in the Mabinogion, that the most plausible guesses can be made at the nature of Diomedes’s tasks. Kilhwych, falling in love with Olwen, was ordered by her father to yoke a yellow and a brindled bull, to clear a hill of thorns and scrub, sow this with corn, and then harvest the grain in a single day (see 127. ~ and ~ 52.3); also to win a horn ofp!enty, and a magic Irish cauldron. Peredur, falling in love with an unknown maiden, had to kill a water-monster, called the Avanc, in a lake near the Mound of Mourning—Aeaea means ‘mournhag’. On condition that he swore faith with her, she gave him a magic stone, which enabled him to defeat the Avanc, and win ‘all the gold a man might desire.’ The malden proved to be the Empress of Cristinobx. q, a sorceress, who lived in great style ‘towards India’; and Peredur remained her lover for fourteen years. Since the only other Welsh hero to defeat an Avanc was Hu Gadarn the Mighty, ancestor of the Cymry, who by yoking two bulls to the monster, dragged it out of the Conwy River (Welsh Triads iii. 97), it seems likely that Jason also hauled his monster from the water, ~ ~th the help of his fire-breathing team.
6. The Irish cauldron fetched by Kilhwych was apparently the one mentioned in the Tale ofPeredur: a cauldron of regeneration, like that subsequently used by Medea—a giant had fouaad it at the bottom of an Irish lake. Diomedes may have been required to fetch a similar one for Pehas. The scene of his labours will have been some ungeographical country ‘towards the rising sun’. No cornucopia is mentioned in the Argonaut legend, but Medea, for no clear reason, rejuvenates the nymph Macris and her sisters, formerly the nurses of Dionysus, when she meets them on Drepane, or Corcyra. Since Dionysus had much in common with the infant Zeus, whose nurse, the goat Amaltheia, provided the original cornucopia (see 7. b), Medea may have helped Diomedes to win another cornucopia from the nymphs by lending them her services. Heracles’s Labours (like those of Theseus and Orion) are best understood as marriage tasks and included ‘the breaking of the horns of both bulls’ (the Cretan and the Acheloan—see ~34. 6).
7. This marriage-task myth, one version of which seems to have been current at Iolcus, with Pelias as villain, and another at Corinth, with Corinthus as villain, evidently became linked to the semi-historical legend ofa Mhayan sea expedition sent out from Iolcus by the Orchomenans. Orchomenus belonged to the ancient amphictyony, or league, of Calaureia (Strabo: viii. 6. ~4), presided over by the Aeolian god Poseidon, which included six seaside states of Argos and Attica; it was the only inland city of the seven and strategically placed between the Gulf of Corinth and the Thessalian Gulf. its people, li~e Hesiod’s Boeotians, may have been farmers in the winter and sailors in the summer.
8. The supposed object of the expedition was to recover a sacred fleece, which had been carried away ‘to the land of Ae~tes’ by King Phrixm, a grandson of Minyas, when about to be sacrificed on Mount Laphystium (~ee 70. d), and to escort Phrixus’s ghost home to Orchomenus. Its leader will have been a Minyan—which Diomedes son of Aeson was not—perhaps Cytisorus (Herodotus: vii. 197), son of Phrixus, whom Apollonius Rhodius bri~gs prominently into the story (see ~sx.f and x$2. b), and who won the surname Jason (‘healer’) at Orchomenus when he checked the drought and plague caused by Phrixus’s escape. Nevertheless, Diomedes was a Minyan on his mother’s side; and descent is likely to have been matrilinear both at Orchomenus and Pelasgian Iolcus.
9. In this Nlinyan legend, the land of Ae~tes cannot have lain at the other end of the Black Sea; all the early evidence points to the hgad of the Adriatic. The Argonauts are believed to have navigated the river Po, near the mouth of which, across the Gulf, lay Circe’s Island of Aeaea, now called Lussin; and to have been trapped by Ae~tes’s Colchians at the mouth of the Ister—not the Danube but, as Diodorus Siculus suggests, the small river Istrus, which gives Istria its name. Medea then killed her brother Apsyrtus, who was buried in the neighbouring Apsyrtides; and when she and Jason took refuge with Alcinous, King ofDrepane (Corcyra), a few days’ sail to the southward, the Colchians, cheated of their vengeance, feared to incur Ae~tes’s anger by returning empty-handed and therefore built the city of Pola on the Istrian mainland. Moreover, Siren4and, the Clashing Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, all lie close to Sicily, past which the Argo was then blown by the violent north-easter. ‘ Colchis’ may, in fact, be an error for’ Colicaria’ on the Lower Po, not far from Mantua, apparently a station on the Amber Route; since Helius’s daughters, who wept amber tears, are brought into the story as soon as the Argo enters the Po (see 42. d). Amber was sacred to the Sun, and Electra (‘ amber’), the island at which the Argo is said to have touched, will hardly have been Samothrace, as the scholiasts believe; but ‘the land of Ae~tes’, a trading post at the terminus of the Amber Route—perhaps Corinthian, because Ae~tes had brought his Sun cult from Corinth, but perhaps Pelasgian, because according to Dionysius’s Description of the Earth (i. 18) a Pelasgian colony, originating from Dodona, once maintained a powerful fleet at one of the mouths of the Po. ~0. To the ungeographical myth of Diomedes, now combined with the legend ofa Minyan voyage to the land ofAe~tes, a third element was added: the tradition of an early piratical raid along the southern coast of the Black Sea, made at the orders of another Minyan king. The sixth city of Troy, by its command of the Hellespont, enjoyed a monopoly of the Black Sea trade, which this raid will have been planned to challenge (see 137. ~). Now, the Minyans’ supposed objective on their Adriatic voyage was not a golden, but, according to Simonides (quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 77) a purple, fleece which the First Vatican Mythographer describes as that’in which Zeus used to ascend to Heaven.’ In other words, it was a black fleece worn in a royal rain-making rite, like the one still performed every May Day on the summit of Mount Pelion: where an old man in a black sheepskin mask is killed and brought to life again by his companions, who are dressed in white fleeces (Annals of the British School at Athens xvi. 244-9, ~909-~6). According to Dicearchus (ii. 8), this rite was performed in Classical times under the auspices of Zeus Actaeus, or Acraeus (‘ of the summit ‘). Originally the man in the black sheepskin mask will have been the king, Zeus’s representative, who was sacrificed at the close of his reign. The use of the same ceremony on Mount Pelion as on Mount Laphystium will account for the combiniug of the two Iolcan traditions, namely the myth of Diomedes and the legend of the Black Sea raid, with the tradition of a Minyan voyage to undo the ntischief caused by Phrixus.
1. Yet the Minyans’ commission will hardly have been to bring back the los~ Laphystian fleece, which was easily replaced: they are far more likely to have gone in search of amber, with which to propitiate the injured deity, the Mountain-goddess. It should be ~enaembered that the Minyans held ‘Sandy Pylus’ on the western coast of the Peloponnesccaptured from the Lelegians by Neleus with the help oflolcan Pelasgi:~ns (see 94. c)—and that, according to Aristotle (Mirabilia 82), the Pylians brought amber from the mouth of the Po. On the site of this Pylus (now the village of Kakovatos) huge quantities of amber have recently been unearthed.
~z. On the easterly voyage this fleece became ‘golden’, because Diomedes’s feat o.fwinning the sea-monster treasure had to be included; a~ad because, as Strabo points out, the Argonauts who broke into tbe Black Sea went in search of alluvial gold from the Colchian Phasis (now the Rion), collected by the natives in fleeces laid on the river bed. Nor was it only’the confusion of Colchis with Colicaria, of Aea (‘earth’) with Aeaea (‘ wailing ‘), and of the Pelionian black fleece with the Laphystian, that made these different traditions coalesce. The daw~a palace of Ae~tes’s father Helius lay in Colchis (see 42. a), the most easterly country know~ to Homer; andJasonica, shrines of Heracles the Healer, were reported from the Eastern Gulf of the Black Sea, where the Aeolians had established trading posts. According to some authorities, Heracles led the Black Sea expedition. Moreover, since Homer had mentioned Jason o~fiy as the father of Euneus, who provided the Greeks with wine during the siege of Troy (see ~62. i), and since Lemnos lay east of Thessaly, the Argo was also thought to have headed east. The Wandering, or Clashing, Rocks, which Homer placed in Sicilian waters, have thus been transferred to the Bosphorus.
13. Every city needed a representative Argonaut to justify its trading rights in the Black Sea, and travelling minstrels were willing enough to introduce another name or two into this composite ballad cycle. Several nominal rolls of Argonauts therefore survive, all irreconcilable, but for the most part based on the theory that they used a fifty~oared vessel—not, indeed, an impossibil/ty in Mycenaean times; Tzetzes alone gives a hundred names. Yet not even the most hardened sceptic seems to have doubted that the legend was in the main historical, or that the voyage took place before the Trojan War, sometime in the thirteenth century ~4. Jason’s single sandal proved him to be a fighting man. Aetolian warriors were famous for their habit of campaigning with only the left foot shod (Macrobius: v. 28-2~; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes iv. 233), a device also adopted during the Peloponnesian War by the Plataeans, to gain better purchase in the mud (Thucydides: iii. 22). Why the foot on the shield side, rather than the weapon side, remained shod, may have been because it was advanced in a hand-to-hand struggle, and could be used for kicking an opponent in the groin. Thus the left was the hostile foot, and never set on the threshold of a friend’s house; the tradition survives i~ modern Europe, where soldiers invariably march off to war with their left foot foremost.
15. Hera’s quarrel siege of Troy (see t62. i), and since Lemnos hy east of Thessaly, the Argo was also thought to have headed east. The Wandering, or Clashing, Rocks, which Homer placed in Sicilian waters, have thus been transferred to the Bosphorus.
~3. Every city needed a representative Argonaut to justify its trading rights in the Black Sea, and travelling minstrels were willing enough to introduce another name or two into this composite ballad cycle. Several nominal rolls of Argonauts therefore survive, all irreconcilable, but for the most part based on the theory that they used a fifty-oared vessel—not, indeed, an impossibility in Mycenaean times; Tzetzes alone gives a hundred names. Yet not even the most hardened sceptic seems to have doubted that the legend was in the main historical, or that the voyage took place before the Trojan War, sometime in the thirteenth century B.C. ~4. Jason’s single sandal proved him to be a fighting man. Aetolian warriors were famous for their habit of campaigning with only the left foot shod (Macrob/us: v. ~8-2t; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes iv. ~33), a device also adopted during the Peloponnesian War by the Plataeans, to gain better purchase in the mud (Thucydides: iii. zz). Why the foot on the shield side, rather than the weapon side, remained shod, may have been because it was advanced in a hand-to-hand struggle, and could be used for kicking an opponent in the groin. Thus the left was the hostile foot, and never set on the threshold of a friend’s house; the tradition survives in modern Europe, where soldiers invariably march off to war with their left foot foremost.
~5. Hera’s quarrel with Pelias, over the withholding of her sacrifice, suggests tension between a Poseidon-worshipping Achaean dynasty at Iolcus and the goddess-worshipping Aeolo-Magnesians, theh’ subjects.
H~,~ cr~ s, after capturing the Erymanthian Boar, appeared suddenly at P~gasae, and was invited by a unanimous vote to captain the Argo; but generously agreed to serve under Jason who, though a novice, had planned and proclaimed the expedition. Accordingly, when the ship had been launched, and lots drawn for the henclaes, two oarsmen to each bench, it was Jason who sacrificed a yoke of oxen to Apollo of Embarkations. As the smoke of his sacr’ff~ce rose propitiously to heaven in dark, swirling columns, the Argonauts sat down to their fare~ banquet, at which Orpheus with his lyre appeased certain drun’. brawls. Sailing thence by the first light of dawn, they shaped a co~ for Lemnos.1
b. About a year before this, the Lemnian men had quarrdled v their wives, complaining that they stank, and made concubine~
Thracian girls captured on raids. In revenge, the Lemnian wor murdered them all without pity, old and young alike, except Thoas, whose life his daughter Hypsipyle secretly~ spared, ~ett~n~ adrift in an oarless boat. Now, when the Argo hove in sight and d Lemnian women mistook her for an enemy ship from Thrace, the donned their dead husbands’ armour and ran boldly shoreward, to rep the threatened attack. The eloquent Echion, however, landing staff hand as Jason’s herald, soon set their minds at rest; and Hypsipy called a council at which she proposed to send a gift of food and wi~ to the Argonauts, but not to admit them into her city of Myrine, f fear of bei~g charged with the massacre. Polyxo, Hypsipyle’s ag~ nurse, then rose to plead that, without men, the Lemnian race mt presendy become extinct. ‘The wisest course’, she said, :would be offer yourselves in love to those well-born adventurers, and thus n only place our island under strong protection, but breed a ne stalwart stock.’
c. This disinterested advice was loudly acclaimed, and the Argonat were welcomed to Myrine. Hypsipyle did not, of course, tell Jason t] whole truth but, stammering and blushing, explained that after ill-treatment at the hands of their husbands, her companions had ris~ in arms and forced them to emigrate. The vacant throne ofLerrmos, s] said, was now his for the asking. Jason, although gratefully accepti~ her offer, declared that before settling in fertile Lemnos he must cor plete his quest of the Golden Fleece. Nevertheless, Hypsipyle soon pe suaded the Argonauts to postpone their departure; for each adventur was surrounded by numerous young women, all itching to bed wi him.2 Hypsipyle claimed Jason for herself, and royally she entertain, him; it was then that he begot Euneus, and his twin Nebrophqnt whom some call Deiphilus, or Thoas the Younger. Euneus eventual became king of Lemnos and supplied the Greeks with wine during t] Trojan War.
d. Many children were begotten on this occasion by the other Arg, nauts too and, had it not been for Heracles, who was guarding the At, and at last strode angrily into Myrine, beating upon the house doors with his club and summoning his comrades back to duty, it is unlikely that the golden fleece would ever have left Colchis. He soon forced them down to the shore; and that same night they sailed for Samothrace, where they were duly initiated into the mysteries of Persephone and her servants, the Cabeiri, who save sailors from shipwreck.3
e. Afterwards, when the Lemnian women discovered that Hypsipyle, in breach of her oath, had spared Thoas—he was cast ashore on the island of Sicinos, and later reigned over the Taurians—they sold her into slavery to King Lycurgus of Nemea. But some say that Thracian pirates raided Myrine and captured her. On attaining manhood, Euneus purified the island of blood guilt, and the rites he used are still repeated at the annual festival of the Cabeiri: for the space of nine days, all Lemnian hearth-fires are exfnguished, and offerings made to the dead, after which new fire is brought by ship from Apollo’s altar at Delos.4 fi The Argonauts sailed on, leaving Imbros to starboard and, since it was well known that King Laomedon of Troy guarded the entrance to the Hellespont and let no Greek ship enter, they slipped through the Straits by night, hugging the Thracian coast, and reached the Sea of Marmara in safety. Approaching Dolionian territory, they landed at the neck of a rugged peninsula, named Arcton, which is crowned by Mount Dindymum. Here they were welcomed by King Cyzicus, the son ofAeneus, Heracles’s former ally, who had just married Cleite of Phrygian Percote and warmly invited them to share his wedding banquet. While the revelry was still in progress, the Argo’s guards were attacked with rocks and clubs by certain six-handed Earth-born giants from the interior of the peninsula, but beat them off..
g. Afterwards, the Argonauts dedicated their anchor-stone to Athene, in whose temple it is shown to this day, and, taking aboard a heavier one, rowed away with cordial farewells, shaping a course for the Bosphorus. But a north-easterly wind suddenly whirled down upon them, and soon they were making so little way that Tiphys decided to about ship, and ran back to the lee of the peninsula. He was driven off his course; and the Argonauts, beaching their skip at random in the pitch-dark, were at once assailed by well-armed warriors. Only when they had overcome these in a fierce battle, killing some and putting the remainder to flight, did Jason discover that he had made the eastern shore of Arcton, and that noble King Cyzicus, who had mistaken the Argonauts for pirates, lay dead at his feet. Cleite, driven mad by the news, hanged herself; and the nymphs of the grove wept so piteously that their tears formed the fountain which now bears her name.
h. The Argonauts held funeral games in Cyzicus’s honour, but remained weather-bound for many days more, At last a halcyon tered above Jason’s head, and perched twitter’rag on the prow of the A~;~o; whereupon Mopsus, who understood the language of birds, explakLed that all would be well if they placated the goddess Rhea. She had exacted Cyzicus’s death in requital for that of her sacred lion’s, killed by him on Mount Dindymum, and was now vexed with the Argonauts for having caused such carnage among her six-armed Earthborn brothers. They therefore raised an image to the goddess, carved by Argus from an ancient vine-stock, and danced in full armour on the mountain top. Rhea acknowledged their devotion: she made a springnow called the Spring of Jason—gush from the neighbouring rocks. fair breeze then arose, and they continued the voyage. The Dolionians, however, prolonged their mourni~g to a full month, light’rag no fires, and subsisting on uncooked foods, a custom whicll is still observed ~[uring the annual Cyzican Games. S
1. Apollonius Rhodius: i. 3~7 if2. Apollonius Rhodius: i. I-607; Herodotus: vi. 138; Apollodorus: i. 9—~7; Argot~antica Orphica 473 IT..; Valerius Flaccus: Argonatttica ii. 77; Hyginus: Fabula
3. Homer: Iliad vii. 468, with scholiast; Statius: Thebaid vi. 34; Apollouius Rhodius: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Valerius Flaccus: loc. tit.; Hygiuus: toc. tit.; Fragments of Sophocles ii. 51 if.., ed. Pearson.
4. Apollodorus: iii. 6. 4; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Philostratus: Heroica xx. 24.
5. First Vatican Mythographer: 49; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 922 if. and 935-1077; Argonautlea Orphka 486 if.; Valerius Flaccus:
Argonautica ii. 634; Hyginus: Fabula ~6
, ~. Jason is made to call at Lemnos because, accordhag to Homer, Euneus, who reigned there during the Trojan War, was his son; and because Euphemus, another Argonaut, begot Leucophanes (‘ white appearance’) on a Lcmnian woman (Tzetzcs: On Lycophron 886; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes iv. 455), thus becoming the ancestor of a longlived Cyrenean dynasty. The Lemnian massacre suggests that the islanders retained the gynocratic form of society, supported by armed priestesses, which was noted among certain Libyan tribes in Herodotus’s time (see ), and that visiting Hellenes could understand this anomaly only in ~s o~’a female revolution. Myrine was the name of their goddess (see 3). Perhaps the Lemnian women wcre said to have stunk because
‘ ~~ orked in woad—used by their Thracian neighbours for tatcooing :M~ has so nauseous and lingering a smell that Norfolk woad-making ilics have always been obliged to intermarry.
$amothrace was a centre of the Helladic religion, and initiates into ~oon-goddess Mysteries—the secret of which has been well kept~cre entitled to wear a purple amulet (Apollonius Rhodius: i. ~97; ~)i~,dort~s Siculus: v. 49), valued as a protection against dangers of all kh~ds, but especially shipwreck. Philip of Macedon and his wife Olympias b›can~c initiates (Aristophanes: Peace ~-77, with scholiast); Germanicus Cacsa~ was prevented from taking part in the Mysteries only by an omen and died soon after (Tacitus: Annals ii. 54). Certain ancient bronze vcssd~ laid up in Samothrace were said to have been dedicated by the Argonauts.
3. Rhea’s brothers, the six-armed Earth-born of Bear Island, are perl~a?s deduced from pictures of shaggy men, wearing bear-skins with the paws extended. The account of Cyzicus’s death is circumstantial enough to suggest a genuine tradition of the Black Sea raid, though one as little con~ccted with the annual extinction of fires at Cyzicus, as was the supposed Lemnian massacre with a similar ceremony at Myrine, during the nine-day festival of the Cabeiri. At the close of the year, when the sacred king was sacrificed, fires were habitually extinguished in many kingdoms, to be renewed afterwards as one of the rites in the new king’s installation.
4. ~! he killing of Rhea’s lion probably refers to the suppression of her wors!~ip at Cyzicus in favour of Olympianism.
5. Halcyons were messengers of the Sea-goddess Atcyone (‘the queen ,,vho wards off[storms]’—see 45. ~-z).
A ~ Heradcs’s challenge the Argonauts now engaged in a contest to see who could row the longest. After many laborious hours, relieved only by Orpheus’s lyre, Jason, dse Dioscuri, and Heracles alone held out; fi~dr comrades having each in turn confessed themselves beaten. Cast0r’s strength began to ebb, and Polydcuces, who could not otherwise induce him to desist, shipped his own oar. Jason and Heracles, however, continued to urge the Argo forward, seated on opposite sides of the ship, until presendy, as they reached the mouth of the fiver Chius in Mysia, Jason fainted. Almost at once Herades’s oar snapped. He glared about him, in anger and disgust; and his weary companions, thrusting their oars through the oar-holes again, beached the Argo by the fiverside.
b. While they prepared the evening meal, Heracles went in search of a tree which would serve to make him a new oar. He uprooted an enor. mous fir, but when he dragged it back for trimming beside the canal fire, found that his squire Hylas had set out, an hour or two previousl~ to fetch water from the near-by pool of Pegae, and not yet returned Polyphemus was away, searching for him. Hylas had been Heracles’ minion and darling ever since the death of his father, Theiodan~ king of the Dryopians, whom Heracles had killed when refused th gift of a plough-ox.
Crying’ Hylas ! Hylas ! ‘, Heracles plunged frantically into the woods,! and soon met Polyphemus, who reported: ‘Alas, I heard Hylas shouth~g~ for help; and ran towards his voice. But when I reached Pegae I found no signs of a struggle either with wild beasts or with other enemies. There was only his water-pitcher lying abandoned by the pool side.’ Heracles and Polyphemus continued their search all night, and forced every Mysian whom they met to join in it, but to no avail; the fact being that Dryope and her sister-nymphs of Pegae had fallen in love with Hylas, and enticed him to come and live with them in an underwater grotto.
c. At dawn, a favourable breeze sprang up and, since neither Herades nor Polyphemus appeared, though everyone shouted their names until the hillsides echoed, Jason gave orders for the voyage to be resumed. This decision was loudly contested and, as the Argo drew farther away from the shore, several of the Argonauts accused him of having marooned Heracles to avenge his defeat at rowing. They even tried to make Tiphys turn the ship about; but Calais and Zetes interposed, which is why Heracles later killed them in the island of Tenos, where he set a tottering logan-stone upon their tomb.
d. After threatening to lay Mysia waste unless the inhabitants continued their search for Hylas, dead or alive, and then leading a successful raid on Troy, Heracles resumed his Labours; but Polyphemus settled near Pegae and. built the city of Crius, where he reigned ,until the Chalybians killed him in battle.x For Hcracles’s sake, the Mysians still sacrifice once a year to Hylas at Prusa, near Pegae; their priest t~rice calls his name aloud, and the devotees pretend to search for him in the woods.1
e. Hylas, indeed, suffered the same fate as Bormus, or ]30rimus, son of Upius, a Mariandynian youth of extraordinary beauty who once, at harvest time, went to a well to fetch water for the reapers. He too was drawn into the well by the nymphs and never seen again. The country people of Bithynia celebrate his memory every year at harvest time with plaintive songs to the accompaniment of flutes.3
f Some therefore deride the story of Hylas, saying that he was really 130rmus, and that Heracles had been abandoned at Magnesian Aphetae, dose to Pagasae, when he went ashore to draw water, soon after the voyage began; the oracular beam of the Argo having announced that he would be too heavy for her to carry. Others, on the contrary, say that he not only reached Colchis, but commanded the expedition throughout.4
g. Next, the Argo touched at the island of Bebrycos, also in the Sea of Marmara, ruled by the arrogant King Amycus, a son of Poseidon. This Amycus fancied himself as a boxer, and used to challenge strangers to a match, which invariably proved their undoing; but if they declined, he flung them without ceremony over a chff into the sea. He now approached the Argonauts, and refused them food or water unless one of their champiota would meet him in the ring. Polydeuces, who had won the boxing contest at the Olympic Games, stepped forward willingly, and drew on the raw-hide gloves which Amycus offered him.
h. Amycus and Polydeuces went at it, hammer and tongs, in a flowery dell, not far from the beach. Amycus’s gloves were studded with brazen spikes, and the muscles on his shaggy arms stood out like boulders covered with seaweed. He was by far the heavier man, and the younger by several years; but Polydeuces, fighting cautiously at first, and avoiding his bull-like rushes, soon discovered the weak points in his defence and, before long, had him spitting blood from a swollen mouth. After a prolonged bout, in which neither showed the least sign of flagging, Polydeuces broke through Amycus’s guard, flattened his nose with a straight left-handed punch, and dealt further merciless punishment on either side of it, using hooks and jolts. In pain and desperation, Amycus grasped Polydeuces’s left fist and tugged at it with his left hand, while he brought up a powerful right swing; but Polydeuces threw himself in the direction of the tug. The swing wear wide, and he countered with a stunning right-handed hook to the ear, followed by so irresistible an upper cut that it broke the bones of Amycus’s temple and killed him instantly. i. When they saw their king lying dead, the Bebrycans sprang to arms, but Polydeuces’s cheering companions routed them easily a~d sacked the royal palace. To placate Poseidon, Amycus’s father, Jason then offered a holocaust of twenty red bulls, which were found among the spoils.s
j. The Argonauts put to sea again on the next day, and came to Salmydessus in Eastern Thrace, where Phineus, the son of Agenor,! reigned. He had been blinded by the gods for prophesying the future l too accurately, and was also plagued by a pair of Harpies: loathsome, winged, female creatures who, at every meal, flew into the palace and snatched victuals from his table, befouling the rest, so that it stank and was inedible. One Harpy was called Aellopus, and the other Ocypete.1 When Jason asked Phineus for advice on how to win the golden fleece, he was told: ‘First rid me of the Harpies!’ Phineus’s servants spread the Argonauts a banquet, upon which the Harpies immediately descended, playing their usual tricks. Calais and Zetes, however, the winged sons of Boreas, arose sword in hand, and chased them into the air and far across the sea. Some say that they caught up with the Hatpies at the Strophades islands, but spared their lives when they turned back and implored mercy; for Iris, Hera’s messenger, intervened, promising that they would return to their cave in Cretan Dicte and never again molest Phineus. Others say that Ocypete made terms at these islands, but that Aellopus flew on, only to be drowned in the Peloponnesian river Tigris, now called Harpys after her.
k. Phineus instructed Jason how to navigate the Bosphorus, and gave him a detailed account of what weather, hospitality, and fortune to expect on his way to Colchis, a country first colonized by the Egyptians, which lies at the easternmost end of the Black Sea, under the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains. He added: ‘And once you have reached Colchis, trust in Aphrodite!’ 7
1. Now, Phineus had married first Cleopatra, shter to Calais and Zetes and then, on her death, Idaea, a Scytltian princess. Idaea was jealous of Cleopatra’s two sons, and suborned false wimesses to accuse them of all manner of wickedness. calais and Zetes, however, detecting the conspiracy, freed their nephews from prison, where they were being daily flogged by Scythian guards, and Phineus not only restored them to fayour, but sent Idaea back to her father?
m. And some say that Phineus was blinded by the gods after the Argonauts’ visit, because he had given them prophetic advice.9
1. Apollouius Rhodius: i. 1207 if.; Theocritus: Idylls xiii; Arg011autica Orphica 646 IT.; Valeflus Flaccus: Argonautica iii. 521 if.; Hyginus: Fabula ~4; Apollodorus: i. 9. 19.. 2. Theocritus: Idylls xiii. 73 IT.; Strabo: xii. 4—3; Antoninus Liberalis: Transforlnations 26.
3. Athenaeus: xiv. 620; Aeschylus: Persian Women 94~; Scholiast on Dionysius’s Description of the Earth 791; Pollux: iv. 54.
4. Herodotus: i. 193; Apollodorus: i. 9. 19; Theocritus: Idylls xiii. 73 if.
5. Apollodorus: i. 9. 20; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. i if..; Theocritus: Idylls xxii. 27 if.; Argonautica Orphica 661 If.; Valerius Flaccus: Argonautlea iv. 99 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 17; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebald iii. 353.
6. Apollodorus: i. 9.2~; Hesiod: Theogony 265—9.
7. Herodotus: ii. 147; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 176 lcf.; Valerius Placcus: Argonautlea iv. 22 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 19; First Vatican Mythographer: 27; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 209.
8. Diodorus Siculus: iv.
9. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.
1. In the legend of the Iolcans’ easterly voyage to the Black Seathough not in that of the Minyans’ westerly voyage to Istria—Heracles may have led the expedition. The story of Hylas’s disappearance was inven ted to explain the Mysian rites, still practised at Prusa, near Pegae, in Roman times, of mourning for Adonis of the Woods. Hylas’s fate at the hands of Dryope and her nymphs will have been that of Leucippus (see 2t. 6), Actaeon (see 22. i), Orpheus (see 28. d), or any other sacred kings of the oak cult: namely, to be dismembered and eaten by wild women, who then purified themselves in a spring and announced that hc had unaccountably vanished. ‘Dryope’ means ‘woodpecker’ (literally: ‘oakface’), a bird whose tapping on the oak-trunk suggested the search for Hylas, a Dryopian by birth, and was held to portend wet weather (see 56. ~); the main object of this sacrifice being to bring on the autumn rains. Heracles, as the new king, will have pretended to join in the search for his predecessor. Bormus, or Borimus, is possibly a variant of Brimos’s son Brimus (see 24. 6).
2. The story of Amycus may be derived from an icon which showed the funeral games celebrated after the old ki~g had been flung over a cliff (see 96.3 and 6). Boxing, a Cretan sport, mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, seems to have been clean enough until the civic rivalry of the Olympic Games introduced professionalism. Roman amphitheatre pugilists used spiked gloves and knuckledusters, not the’traditional rawhide thongs; Theocritus, in his expert account of the Polydeuces-Amycus fight, is lamenting the lost glories of the ring.
Harpies were originally personifications of the Cretan Death-goddess as a whirlwind (Homer: Odyssey i. 241 and xx. 66 and 77) but, in this context, appear to have been sacred birds, kites or sea-eagles, for which the Thracians regularly set out food. Diodorus Siculus, when describh~g the Argonauts’ visit to Phineus’s court, studiously avoids any mention of the Harpies—for fear perhaps of incurring their wrath—yet contrives to hint that blind Phineus’s second wife, a Scythian, tricked him by pretending that Harpies were snatching away his food, and befouling what they left, whereas his own servants were doing this at her orders. Phineus was slowly starving to death when Calais and Zetes—the brothers of his first wife—detected her guilt and released their nephews from the prison into which she had persuaded Phineus to cast them.
3. The Strophades (‘turning’) islands were so called because ships could expect the wind to turn as they approached.
4. Logan-stones, enormous boulders so carefully balanced that they will rock from side to side at the least impulse, are funerary monuments, apparently set up by avenue-building emigrants from Libya, towards the end of the third millennium. A few are still working in Cornwall and Devon, others have been displaced by the concerted efforts of idle soldiers or tourists. The dedication of a TenJan logan-stone to Calais and Zetes, the winged sons of Boreas, suggests that spirits of heroes were invoked to rock the boulder in the form of winds, and thus crush a live victim laid underneath.
P~~/~us had warned the Argonauts of the terrifying rocks, called Symplegades, or Planctae, or Cyaneae which, perpetually shrouded in sea mist, guarded the entrance to the Bosphorus. When a ship attempted to pass between them, they drove together and crushed her; but, at Phineus’s advice, Euphemus let loose a dove or, some say, a heron, to fly ahead of the Argo. As soon as the rocks had nipped off her tail feathers, and recoiled again, the Argonauts rowed through with all speed, aided by Athene and by Orpheus’s lyre, and lost only their stern ornament. Thereafter, in accordance with a prophecy, the rocks remained rooted, one on either side of the straits, and though the force of the cttrrent made the shit2 all but ~e~h[e, ~› Krg(~tt~uts pulled at their oars until they bent like bows, and gained the Black Sea without disaster.1
b. Coasting along the southern shore, they presendy touched at the islet of Thynias, where Apollo deigned to appear before them in a blaze of divine glory. Orpheus at once raised an altar and sacr’tficed a wild goat to him as Apollo of the Dawn. At his instance, the Argonauts now swore never to desert one another in time of danger, an oath commemorated in the Temple of Harmonia since built on this island.
c. Thence they sailed to the city of Mariandyne—famous for the near-by chasm up which Heracles dragged the dog Cerberus from the Underworld—and were warmly welcomed by King Lycus. News that his enemy, King Amycus, was dead had already reached Lycus by runner, and he gratefully offered the Argonauts his son Dascylus to guide them on their journey along the coast. The following day, as they wcrc about to embark, Idmon the seer was attacked by a ferocious boar lurking in the reed-beds of the river Lycus, which gashed his thigh deeply with its great tusks. Idas sprang to Idmon’s assistance and, when the boar charged again, impaled it on his spear; however, Idmon bled to death despite their care, and the Argonauts mourned him for three days. Then Tiphys sickened and died, and his comrades were plunged in grief as they raised a barrow over his ashes, beside the one that they had raised for Idmon. Great Ancaeus first, and after him Erginus, Nauplius and Euphemus, all offered to take Tiphys’s place as navigator; bt~t Ancaeus was chosen, and served them well.2
d. From Mariandyne they continued eastward trader sail for many daS’s, until they reached Sinope in Paphlagonia, a city named after the river Asopus’s daughter, to whom Zeus, falling in love with her, had ?romised whatever gift she wished. Sinope craftily chose virginity, ~nadc her home here, and spent the remainder of her life in happy solitt~c!e. At Sinope, Jason found recruits to f~ll three of the vacant seats on l~is benches: namely the brothers Deileon, Autolycus, and Phlogius, of Tricca, who had accompanied Heracles on his expedition to the Amazons but, being parted from him by accident, were now strand in this oudandish region.
e. The Argo then sailed past the country of the Amazons; and that the iron-working Chalybians, who neither till the soil, nor tend flocl but live wholly on the gains of their forges; and the country of t Tibarenians, where it is the custom for husbands to groan, as if in chil bed, while their wives are in labour; and the country of the Moes nocchians, who live in wooden casdes, couple promiscuously, a~
carry immensely long spears and white shields in the shape of iv leaves.a
f. Near the islet of Ares, great flocks of birds flew over the Ar~ dropping brazen plumes, one of which wounded O~~eus in the shot der. At this, the Argonauts, recalling Phineus’$ injunctions, donn, their helmets and shouted at the top of t~eir voices; half of them ro~ ing, while the remainder protected them with shields, against whi they clashed their swords. Phineus had also counselled them to land ~ the islet, and this they now did, driving away myriads of birds, until n one was left. That night they praised his wisdom, when a huge stor arose and four Aeolians clinging to a baulk of timber were cast asho~ dose to their camp; these castaways proved to be Cyfisorus, Arget Phrontis, and Melanion, sore of Phrixus by Chalciope, daughter King Ae~tes of Colchis, and tlms closely related to many of th0 present. They had been shipwrecked on a journey to Greece, whe they were intending to claim the Orchomenan kingdom of their gran, father Athamas. Jason greeted them warmly, and all together offer~ sober sacrif~ces on a black stone in the temple of Ares, where its fou! dress, the Amazon Antiope, had once sacrificed horses. When Jasc explained that his mission was to bring back the soul of Phrixus Greece, and also recover the fleece of the golden ram on which he hl ridden, Cytisorus and his brotlaers found themselves in a quandar though owing devotion to their father’s memory, they feared to offer their grandfather by demanding the fleece. However, what choice hl they but to make common cause with these cousins who had sav~
their lives? ~
g. The Argo then coasted past the island of Philyra, where Crow once lay with Philyra, daughter of Oceanus, and was surprised by Rh~ in the act; whereupon he had turned himself into a stallion, and gallop~ off, leaving Philyra to bear her child, half man, half horse—whic proved to be Cheiron the~learned Centaur. Loathing the monster st now had to suckle, Philyra prayed to become other t~an she was; and was metamorphosed into a linden-tree. But some say that tkis took place in Thessaly, or Thrace; not on the island of philyra.s
h. Soon the Caucasus Range towered above the Argonauts, and they entered the mouth of the broad Phasis river, which waters Colchis. First pouring a libation of wine mixed with honey to the gods of the land,Jason concealed the Argo in a sheltered backwater, where he called a cotn~cil of war. 6
x. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 329; Argonautlea Orphica 688; Homer: Odyssey xii. 6~; Herodotus: iv. 85; Pliny: NaturaI Histor?, vi. 52; Valerius Flaccus: iv. 56~ if.; Apollodorus: i. 9. 22.
2. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 85~-98; Argonautka Orphica 729 if..; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 890; Valerim Flaccus: v. 13 if.; Hyginus: Fabulae ~4 and 18; Apollodorus: i. 9—23.
3. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 946-I028; Valet/us Flaccus: v. xoS; Argonautica Orphica 738-46; Xenophon: Anabasis v. 4. x-32 and 5. 4. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. I030-1230.
5. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 123~-41; Hyginus: Fabula 138; Philargurius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 93; Valerim Flaccus: v. 153; Argonautiea Orphiea 747.
6. Apollonius Rhodius: ii. I030-1285; Argonautlea Orphica 747-$5; Valerim Flaccus: v. 153-83.
1. The Clashing, Wandering, or Blue Rocks, shrouded in sea mist, seem to have been ice-floes from the Russian rivers adrift in the Black Sea; reports of these were combined with discouraging accounts of the Bosphorus, down which the current, swollen by the thawing of the great Russian rivers, often runs at five knots. Other Wandering Islands in the Baltic Sea seem to have been known to the amber-merchants (see ~70. 4). 2. Cenotaphs later raised by Greek colonists to honour the heroes Idmon and Tiphys may account for the story of their deaths during file voyage. Idmon is said to have been killed by a boar, like Cretan Zeus, Ancaeus, and Adonis—all early sacred kings (see 18.7). The name Idmon (‘ knowing’) suggests that his was an oracular shrine and, indeed, Apollonius Rhodius describes him as a seer. 3. Mariandyne is named after Ma-ri-enna (Sumerian for ‘high fruitful mother of heaven ‘), alias Myrine, Ay-mari, or Mariamne, a well-known goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean. Chalybs was the Greek for ‘iron’, and’ Chalybians’ seems to have been another name for the Tibarenians, the first iron workers of antiquity. In Genesis x. 2, their land is called Tubal (Tubal——Tibar), and Tubal Cain stands for the Tibarenians who had come down from Armenia into Canaan with the Hyksos hordes.
Modified forms of the couvade practised by the Tibarenians survive in many parts .fEurope. The customs of the Moesynoechians, described by Xenophon—whose Anabasis Apollonius Rhodius had studied—are remarkably similar to those of the Scottish Picts and the Irish Sidhe, tribes which came to Britain in the early Bronze Age from the Black Sea region. 4—Jason’s encounter with the birds on the islet of Ares, now Puga Islet, near the Kessab river, suggests that the Argo arrived there at the beginning of May; she will have navigated the Bosphorus before the current grew too powerful to stem, and reached Puga at the time of the great spring migration of birds from the Sinai peninsula. It appears that a number of exhausted birds, having flown across the mountains of Asia Minor, on their way to the Volga, found their usual sanctuary of Puga islet overcrowded and alighted on the Argo, frightening the superstitious crew nearly out of their wits. According to Nicoll’s Birds of Egypt, these migrants include ‘kestrels, larks, harriers, ducks and waders,’ but since the islet was dedicated to Ares, they are credited by the mythographers with brazen feathers and hostile intentions. Heracles’s expulsion of the Stymphalian birds to an island in the Eastern Black Sea is likely to have been deduced from the Argonauts’ adventure, r~ther than contrariwise as is usually supposed.
5. Cheiron’s fame as a doctor, scholar, and prophet won him the title Son of Philyra (‘linden’); he is also called a descendant of Ixion (see 63. d). Linden flowers were much used in Classical times as a restorative, and still are; moreover, the bast, or inner bark, of the linden provided handy writing tablets, and when torn into strips was used in divi~ation (Herodotus: iv. 67; Aelian: Varia Historia xiv. 12). But Philyra island will have derived its name from a clump of linden-trees which grew there, rather than from any historical ties with Thessaly or Thrace. None of these coastal islands is more than a hundred yards long.
6. Colchis is now known as Georgia, and the Phasis river as the Rion.
IN Olympus, Hera.and Athene were anxiously debating how their favourite, Jason, might win the golden fleece. At last they decided to approach Aphrodite, who undertook that her naughty litde son Eros would make Medea, King Ae&es’s daughter, conceive a sudden passion for him. Aphrodite found Eros rolling dice with Ganymedes, but cheating at every throw, and begged him to let fly one of his arrows at Medea’s heart. The payment she offered was a golden ball enamelled with blue rings, formerly the infant Zeus’s plaything; when tossed into the air, it left a track like a falling star. Eros eagerly accepted this bribe, and Aphrodite promised her fellow-goddesses to keep Medea’s passion glowing by means of a novel charm: a live wryneck, spread-eagled to a firewheel.
b. Meanwhile, at the council of war held in the backwater, Jason proposed going with Phrixus’s sons to the near-by city of Colchian Aea, where Ae~tes ruled, and demanding the fleece as a favour; only if this were denied would they resort to guile or force. All welcomed his suggestion, and Augeias, Ae~tes’s half-brother, joined the party. They approached Aea by way of Circe’s riverside cemetery, where male corpses wrapped in untanned ox~hides were exposed on the tops of willow-trees for birds to eat—the Colchians bury only female corpses. Aea shone splendidly down on them from a hill, sacred to Helius, Ae~tes’s father, who stabled his white horses there. Hephaestus had built the royal palace in gratitude for iHelius’s rescue of him when overwhelmed by the Giants during their assault on Olympus.
c. King Ae~tes’s first wife, the Caucasian nymph Asterodeia, mother ofChalciope, Phrixus’s widow, and of Medea, iHecate’s witch-priestess, was dead some years before this; and his second wife, Eidyia, had now borne him a son, Apsyrtus.
d. As Jason and his companions approached the palace, they werc met first by Chalciope, who was surprised to see Cytisorus and her other three sons returning so soon and, when she heard their story, showered thanks on Jason for his rescue of them. Next came Ae~tes, accompanied by Eidyia and showing great displeasure—for Laomedon had undertaken to prevent all Greeks from entering the Black Sea—and asked Aegeus, his favourite grandson, to explain the intrusion. Aegeus replied that Jason, to whom he and his brothers owed their lives, had come to fetch away the golden fleece in accordance with an oracle. Seeing that Ae~tes’s face wore a look of fury, he added at once: ‘In return for which favour, these noble Greeks will gladly subject the Sauromatians to your Majesty’s rule.’ Ae~tes gave a contemptuous laugh, then ordered Jason—and Augeias, whom he would not deign to acknowledge as his brother—to return whence they came, before he had their tongues cut out and their hands lopped off.
e. At this point, the princess Medea emerged from the pahcc.
when Jason answered gently and courteously, Ae~tes, ashamed of himself, undertook to yield the fleece, though on ~
seemed imp~ssibte terms. Jason must yoke two fire-breathing br: śooted bulls, creations of Hephaestus; plough the Field of Ares t~ extent of f~ur ploughgates; and then sow it with the serpcnt’s given him by Athene, a Few left over from Cadmus’s sowing at The’ Jason stood stupefied, wondering how to perform these unhcar~l-~i feats, but Eros aimed one of his arrows at Medea, and drove it int~ heart, up to the śeathers.
f. Chalciope, visiting Medea’s bedroom that evening, to erdis:
help on behalf of Cytisorus and his brothers, found that she had i ~~ head over heels in love with Jason. When Chalciope offered hers›l~ ;~ go-between, Medea eagerly undertook to help him yoke the breathing bulls and win the fleece; making it her sole condition th~ should sail back in the Argo as his wife.
g. Jason was summoned, and swore by all the gods of Oly~up~:~
keep faith with Medea for ever. She offered him a flask of lotion, bl, ~ ~red juice of the two-sulked, saffron-coloured Caucasian crocus, ~ i~, would protect him against the bulls’ fiery breath; this potent first sprang from the blood of the tortured Prometheus. Jason grate~.i~ accepted the flask and, after a libation of honey, unstoppered it bathed his body, spear and shie/d in the contents. He was thus a~!~’ subdue the bulls and harness them to a plough with an yoke. All day he ploughed, and at nightfall sowed the teeth, which armed men immecLiately sprouted. He provoked these to :~. one against another, as Cadmus had done on a similar occasion , throwing a stone quoit into their midst; then despatched the wottt,, survivors.
h. King AeEtes, however, had no intention of parting with ~i~
fleece, and shamelessly repudiated his bargain. He threatened to I~ the Argo, which was now moored offAea, and massacre her crew; Medea, in whom he had unwisely confided, led Jason and a part’
Argonauts to the precinct of Ares, some six miles away. There fleece hung, guarded by a loathsome and immortal dragon ofa th ‘ and coils, larger than the Argo herself, and born from the blood o: monster Typhon, destroyed by Zeus. She soothed the hissing dragon withincantations and then, using freshly-cut sprigs of juniper, sprinkled soporific drops on his eyelids. Jason stealthily unfastened the from the oak-tree, and together they hurried down to the beach where the Argo lay.
i. An alarm had already been raised by the priests of Ares and, in a running fight, the Cotchians wounded Iphitus, Meleager, Argus, Atalanta, and Jason. Yet all of them contrived to scramble aboard the waiting Argo, which was rowed off in great haste, pursued by Ae~tes’s galleys. Iphitus alone succumbed to his wounds; Medea soon healed the others with ruineraries of her own invention.1
j. Now, the Sau. romatians whom Jason had undertaken to conquer were descendants of three shiploads of Amazons captured by Heracles during his Ninth Labour; they broke their fetters and killed the sailors set as guards over them, but knowing nothing of seamanship, drifted across to the Cimmerian Bosphorus, where they landed at Crenmi in the country of the free Scythiare. There they captured a herd of wild horses, mounted them and began to ravage the land. Presently the Scythians, discovering from some corpses which fell into their hands that the invaders were women, sent out a band of young men to offer the Amazons love rather than battle. This did not prove difficult, but the Amazons consented to marry them only if they would move to the eastern bank of the river Tanais; where their descendants, the Sauromatians, still live and preserve certain Amazon cttstoms, such as that every girl must have killed a man in battle before she can find a husband) ~. Apollodorus: i. 9. 23; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. ~260—iv. 246; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 48. I-5; Valerius Flaccus: v. 177—viii. ~39; Hyginu~: Fabula 22; Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 221 if.; Ovid:
Metamorśhoses vii. I. 138-9; Plutarch: On Rirers v. 4; Arśonautica Orphica 755-~o~2.
2, Herodotus: iv. I~o-17.
1. This part of the legend embodies the primitive myth of the tasks imposed on Diomedes by the king whose daughter he wished to marry. z. Aphrodite’s love charm, carefully described by Theocritus (l’d2/11s ii. ~7), was used throughout Greece, including Socrates’s circle (Xenophou: Memorabilia iii. ~~. ~7)—Because the wryneck builds in willows, hisses like a snake and lays white eggs, it has always been sacred to the moon; Io (‘ moon’) sent it as her messenger to amorous Zeus (see 56. a). One of its popular names in Europe is ‘cuckoo’s mate’, and the cuckoo appears in the story of how Zeus courted the Moon-goddess Hera (see ú ~2. a). Fire-kindling by friction was sympathetic magic to cause love as the English word punk means both tinder and a harlot. Eros wi~ torch and arrows is post-Homeric but, by the time of Apol10ni~
Rhodius, his naughty behaviour and Aphrodite’s despair had become llteraryjoke (see ~ 8. a) which Apuleius took one stage further in Cuph/~ Psyche.
$. The Colchian custom of wrapping corpses in hides and expos’n~ them on the tops of willow-trees recalls the Parsee custom of leaving the~ on platforms for the vultures to eat, in order not to defde the sacred prin ciple of fire, the Sun’s holy gift, by the act of cremation. Apolloni~ Rhodius mentions it, apparently to emphasize Pelias’s concern f~ Phrixus’s ghost: being a Greek, he could not consider it an adequat funeral rite. ?se~tes’s fire-breath~ng bulls, again, recall, those brazen one in which prisoners were roasted alive by Phalaris of AgrigentumRhodian colony—presumably in honour of their god Helius, wh0s symbol was a brazen bull (Pindar: Pythian Odes i. 185, with scholiast~, but the sown men with whom Jason contended are inappropriate to th story. Though it was reasonable for Cadmus, a Canaanite stranger, t fight the Pelasgian autochthons when he invaded Boeotia (see 58. Jason as a native-born candidate for the kingship will rather have been sc Kilhwych’s task of ploughing, sowing, and reaping a harvest in one da (see 148. 5)—a ritual act easily mimed at midsummer—then wrestle with a bull and fought the customary mock battle against men in beasl disguise. His winning of the golden fleece is paralleled by Heracles winning of the golden apples, which another unsleeping dragon guarde (see 133. a). At least four of Heracles’s Labours seem to have been in~ posed on him as a candidate for the kingship (see ~23. ~; ~24. z; ~27. ~ an ~29. ~).
4. Jason and Heracles are, in fact, the same character so far as the ma~ riage-task myth is concerned; and the First and Seventh Labours surviv vestigially here in the killing of the Mariandy~~an Boar and the Cyzica Lion, with both of which Jason should have been credited. ‘Jason’ w~’ of course, a title of Heracles.
5. Medea’s Colchian crocus is the poisonous colchicurn, or meado~ saffron, used by the ancients as the most reliable specific against gout, still remains. Its dangerous reputation contributed to Medea’s. 6. The Sauromatians were the mounted Scythian bowmen of th steppe.s (see 132. 6); no wonder Ae~tes laughed at the notion thatJas01 and his heavily armed infantry could subdue them,
MANY different accounts survive of the Argo’s return to Thessaly, thoughit is gencrally agreed that, following Phineus’s advice, the Argonauts sailed counter sunwise around the Black Sea. Some say that when Ae~tes overtook them, near tl~e mouth of the Danube, Medea killed her young half-brother Apsyrtus, whom she had brought aboard, and cut him into pieces, which she consigned one by one to the swift current. This cruel stratagem delayed the pursuit, because obliging Ae~tes to retrieve each piece in turn for subsequent burial at Tomi.x The true name of Medea’s half-brother is said to have been Aegialeus; for’ Apsyrtus’, meaning’ swept down’, merely records what happened to his mangled limbs after he had died.1 Others place the crime at Aea itself, and say that Jason also killed Ae~tes.3
b. The most circumstantial and coherent account, however, is that Apsyrtus, sent by AeEtes in pursuit of Jason, trapped the Argo at the mouth of the Danube, where the Argonauts agreed to set Medea ashore on a near-byisland sacred to Artemis, leaving her in charge of a priestess for a few days; meanwhile a king of the Brygians would judge the case and decide whether she was to return home or follow Jason to Greece, and in whose possession the fleece should remain. But Medea sent a private message to Apsyrtus, pretending that she had been forcibly abducted, and begging him to rescue her. That night, when he visited tl~e island and thereby broke the truce, Jason followed, lay in wait and struck him down from behind. He then cut offApsyrtus’s extremities, and thrice licked up some of the fallen blood, which he spat out again each time, to prevent the ghost from pursuing him. As soon as Medea was once more aboard the Argo, the Argonauts attacked the leaderless C01chians, scattered their flotilla, and escaped.4
c. Some would have it that, after Apsyrtus’s murder, the Argo turned back and sailed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea, and thence into the Indian Ocean, regaining the Mediterranean by way of Lake Tritonis.s Others, that she sailed up the Danube and Save, and then down the Po, which joins the Save, into the Adriatic Sea;6 but was pursued by storms and driven around the whole coast of Italy, until she reached Circe’s island of Aeaea. Others again, that she sailed up the Danube, and then reached Circe’s island by way of the 70 and the eddying pools where is joined by the mighty Rh6ne.?
d. Still others hold that the Argonauts rowed reached its source; then dragged the Argo to the headwaters river which runs north into the Gulf of Finland. Or that from the Danube they dragged her to the source of the river Elbe and, borne on its waters, reached Jutland. And that they then shaped a westerly course towards the Ocean,~passin~ b.ť Britain and Ireland, and reached Circe’s island after sailing between the Pillars of Heracles and along the coasts of Spain and Gaul.8
e. These are not, however, feasible routes. The truth is that the Argo returned by the Bosphorus, the way she had come, and passed through the Hellespont ia safety, because the Trojans could no longc~ oppose her passage. For Heracles, on his return from Mysia, had collected a fleet of six ships [supplied by the Dolionians and their Percotean allies] and, sailing up the river Seamander under cover of darkness, surprised and destroyed the Trodjan fleet. He then battered his way into Troy with his dub, and demanded from King Laomedon the maneating mares of King Diomedes, which he had left in his charge some years previously. When Laomedon denied any knowledge of these, Heracles killed him and all his sons, except the infant Podarces, or Priam, whom he appointed kiug in his stead.9
f. Jason and Medea were no longer aboard the ~trgo. Her oracular beam had spoken once more, reśusiug to carry either of them ~mtil they had been purified of murder, and from the mouth of the Danube they had set out overland for Aeaea, the island home of Medea’s aunt: Circe. This was not the Campanian Acaca where Circe later went to live, but her former Istrian seat; and Medea led Jason there by the route down which the straw-wrapped gifts of the Hyperboreans are yearly brought to Delos. Circe, to whom they came as sup?liants, grudgingly purified them with the blood of a young sow.TM
g. Now, their Colchian pursuers had been warned not to come back without Medea and the fleece and, guessing that she had gone to Circe for purification, followed the Argo across the Aegea~ Sea, around the Peloponnese, and up the Illyrian coast, rightly concluding tliat Medea and Jason had arranged to be fetched from Aeaea.
h. Some, however, say that A?syrtus was still commancling the Colchian flotilla at this time, and that Medea trapped and murdered him in one of the Illyrian islands now called the Apsyrtidcs.
153. ~—153. e 243 i. Apollodorus: i. 9. e4; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on nius Rhodius: iv. 223 and 228; Ovid: Tristia iii, 9; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Tomeus.
1. Cicero: On the Nature of the Godsi’fi. 19; Justin: xhi. 3; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 45.
3. Sophocles, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius iv. 228; Euripides: Medea 1334; Diodorm Siculus: iv. 48.
4. Apol/onius Rhodius: iv. 5. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 250 if..; Mirnnermus, quoted by Strabo: i. z. 40.
6. Apollodorus: i. 9. 24; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 7-8.
7. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 508-660.
8. Timaeus, quoted by Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 3; Argonautlea Orphica I030-x~049. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 48; Homer: Odyssey xii. 69 if. and Iliad v. 638 if.
~o. ^pollodorus: lac. cit.; Herodotus: iv. 33; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 659-7~7.
IL Hyginus: Fabula 23; Apollodorus: 10c. cit.
~z. Strabo: vii. 5.5.
1. The combination of the westerly with the easterly voyage passed a~uster until Greek geographical knowledge increased and it became the principal elements in the story: namely, the winning of the fleece from the Phasis, and the purification of Medea and Jaso~ by Circe, who lived either in Istria or off the western coast of Italy. Yet, since no historian could afford to offend his public by rejecting the voyage as fabulous, the Argonauts were supposed, at first, to have returned from the Black Sea by way of the Danube, the Save, and the Adriatic; then, when explorers found that the Save does not enter the Adriat’~c, a junction was presumed between the Danube and the Po, down which the Argo could have sailed; and when, later, the Danube proved t~ be ~a~4gable only up to the Iron Gates, aud not to joiu the Po, she was ~,cld to have passed up the Phasis into the Caspian Sea, and thus into the /~dian Ocean (where another Colchis stretched along the Malabar coast —~colc~uy Hephaestionos: viii. x. xo), and back by way of the ‘Ocean Stream’ and Lake Tritonis.
1. The feasibility of this third route, too, being presently denied, ~ťthographers suggested that the Argo had sailed up the Don, presumed to ixav› its source in the Gulf of Finland, from which she could circum~avigatc Europe, and return to Greece through the Straits of Gibraltar. t)r so~nehow to have reached the Elbe by way of the Danube and a long portage, then sailed down to its mouth and so home, coasting past Ireland and Spain. Diodorus Siculus, who had the sense to see that the Argo co~I have returned only through the Bosphorus, as she came, discussed t~ problem most realistically, and made the illuminating point that the Ister ~ (now the Danube) was often confused with the Istrus, a trifling stream~ which entered the Adriatic near Trieste. Indeed, even in the time of Augustus, the geographer P0mponius Mela could report (ii. 3,
4. 4) that the western branch of the Danube ‘flows into the
a turbulence and violence equal to that of the Po.’ The seizure of fleece, the Colchians’ pursuit, and the death of Apsyrtus, will originally taken place in the northern Adriatic. Ovid that Apsyrtus had been murdered at the mouth of the Danube and’ at Total: because that was his own destined death-place.
$. Aeaea (see ~70. i-l and 5) is said to have belonged to father of Minyas, and great-grandfather of Phrixus; and Chryses ‘golden’. It may well have been his spirit, rather than that which the Minyans were ordered to appease when they fleece. According to Strabo, Phrixus enjoyed the Black Sea, ‘where a ram is never sacrificed’; this been a late foundation, prompted by the fame of the Argo’s voyage thus the Romans also built tcmples to Grcek heroes and heroines tiously introduced into their national history.
4. The name ‘Apsyrtus’, which commemorates the remains downstream, was perhaps a local title of Orpheus after memberment by the Maenads (see 28. d).
5. Valerius Flaccus and Diodorus Sicutus both record that sacked Troy on the outward, not the homeward, voyage; to be a mistake.
AaR~v~n at Corcyra, which was then named Drepane, found the Argo beached opposite the islet of Macris; joyfully celebrating the successful outcome of their Colchian leader now visited King Alcinous and (
ing on Ae~tes’s behalf the surrender of Medea and the fleece. Arete, whom Medea had appealed for protection, kept Alcinous awake night by complaining of the ill-treatment to which fathers too subject their errant daughters: for instance, of Nycteus’s cruelty Antiope, and of Acrisius’s to Dana~. ‘Even now,’ she said, ‘that poor princess Metope languishes in an Epeirot dungeon, at the orders of her ogreish father, King Echetus! She has been blinded with brazen spikes, and set to grind iron barley-corns in a heavy quem: “When they are flour, I will restore y~ur sight,” he taunts the poor girl. AeEtes is capable of treating this charming Medea with equal barbarity, if you give him the chance.’ ~
b. Arete finally prevailed upon Alcinous to tell her what judgement he would deliver next morning, namely:’ If Medea is still a virgin, she shall return to Colchis; if not, she is at liberty to stay with Jason.’ Leaving him sound asleep, Arete sent her herald to warn Jason what he must expect; and he married Medea without delay in the Cave of Macris, the daughter of Ar’~staeus and sometime Dionysus’s nurse. The Argonauts celebrated the wedding with a sumptuous banquet and spread the golden fleece over the bridal couch. Judgement was duly delivered in the morning, Jason claimed Medea as his wife, and the Co]cl~ians could neither implement Ae&es’s orders nor, for fear of his wrath, return home. Some therefore settled in Corcyra, and others occupied those Iltyrian islands, not far from Circe’s Aeaea, which are now called the Apsyrtides; and afterwards built the city 6fPola on the Istrian mainland.2
c. When, a year or two later, AeEtes heard of these happenings, he nearly died of rage and sent a herald to Greece demanding the person of Medea and requital for the injuries done him; but was informed that no requital had yet been made for Io’s abduction by men of Ae&es’s race (though the truth was that she fled because a gadfly pursued her) and none should therefore be given for the voluntary departure of Medea.3
d. Jason now needed only to double Cape Malea, and return with the i]eecc to Iolcus. He cruised in safety past the Islands of the Sirens, where the ravishing strains of these bird-women were countered by the even lovelier strains of Orpheus’s lyre. Butes alone sprang overboard in an attempt to swim ashore, but Aphrodite rescued him; she took him to Mount Eryx by way of Lilyb~eum, and there made him her lover.
Some say that the Sirens, who had already lost their wings as a result of an unsuccessful singing contest with the Muses, sponsored by Hera, committed suicide because of their failure to outcharm Orpheus; yet they were still on their island when Odysseus came by a generation later.4
e. The Argonauts then sailed in fine weather along the coast of Eastern Sicily, where they watched the matchless white herds of Helius grazing on the shore, but refrained from stealing any of them. S Suddenly they were struck by a frightful North Wind which, in nine days’ time, drove them to the uttermost parts of Libya; there, an enormous wave swept the Argo over the perilous rocks which line the coast and retreated, leaving her high and dry a mile or more inland. A lifeless desert stretched as far as the eye could see, and the Argonauts hacl already prepared themselves for death, when the Triple-goddess Libya, clad in goat skins, appeared to Jason in a dream and gave him reassurance. At this, they took heart, and [setting the Argo on rollers] movecl~ her by the force of their shoulders to the salt Lake Tritonis, which several miles off, a task that occupied twelve days. All would have di~ ofd~irst, but for a spring which Heracles, on his way to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, had recently caused to gush from the ground.6 f Canthus was now killed by Caphaurus, a Garamanfan shepherd whose flocks he was driving off, but his comrades avenged him.7 A~ hardly had the two corpses been buried than Mopsus trod upon Libyan serpent which bit him in the heel; a thick mist spread over h~ eyes, his hair fell out, and he died in agony. The Argonauts, after givin him a hero’s burial, once more began to despair, being unable to tim any outlet to the Lake.a
g. Jason, however, before he embarked on this voyage, had consulted the Pythoness at Delphi who gave him two massive brazen tripods, with one of which Orpheus now advised him to propitiate the deities of the land. When he did so, the god Triton appeared and took up the tripod without so much as a word of thanks, but Euphemus barred his way and asked him politely:’ Pray, my lord, will you kindly direct us to the Mediterranean Sea?’ For answer, Triton merely pointed towards the Tacapae river but, as an afterthought, handed him a clod of earth, which gave his descendants sovereignty over Libya to this day. Euphemus acknowledged the gift with the sacrifice of a sheep, and Triton consented to draw the Argo along by her keel, until once more she entered the Mediterranean Sea, predicting, as he went, that when the descendant of a certain Argonaut should seize and carry off the brazen tripod from his temple, a hundred Greek cities would rise around Lake Tritonis. The Libyan troglodytes, overhearing these words, at once hid the tripod in t~e sand; and the prophecy has not yet been fulfilled.0
h. Heading northward, the Argonauts reached Crete, where they were prevented from landing by Talos the bronze sentinel, a creation of Hephaestus, who pelted the Argo with rocks, as was his custom. Medea called sweetly to tiffs monster, promising to make h~m immortal if he drank a certain magic potion; but it was a sleeping draught and, while he slept, she removed the bronze nail which stoppored the single vein running from his neck to lxis ankles. Out rushed the divine ichor, a colourless liquid serving him for blood, and he died. Some, however, say that, bewitched by Medea’s eyes, Talos staggered about, grazed his heel against a rock, and bled to death. Others, that Poeas shot him in the lieel with an arrow.1O
i. On the following night, the Argo was caught in a storm from the south, but Jason invoked Apollo, who sent a flash of light, revealing to starboard the island of Anaphe, one of the Sporades, where Ancaeus managed to beach the ship. In gratitude,Jason raised an altar to Apollo; and Medea’s twelve Phaeacian bond-maidens, given her by Queen Arete, laughed merrily when, for lack of a victim, he and his comrades poured water hbafions upon the burning brands of the sacrifice. The Argonauts taunted them in reply, and tussled amorously with thema custom which survives to this day at the Autunm Festival of Anaphe. ‘.j. Sailing to Aegina, they held a contest: as to who could first draw a pitcher of water and carry it back to the ship; a race still run by the Aeginctans. From Aegina it was a simple voyage to Iolcus, such as scores ofsiffps make every year, and they made it in fair weather without danger?
k. Some minstrels arrange these events in a different order: they say that the Argonauts repopulated Lemnos on the homeward journey, not as they were sailing for Colciffs;~z others, that their visit to Libya took place before the voyage to Aea began, when Jason went in the Argo to consult t~e Delpl~ic Oracle and was driven off his course by a sudden storm. ~a Others again hold that they cruised down the western coast of Italy and named a harbour in the island of Elba, where they landed, ‘Argous’ after the Argo, and that when they scraped off their sweat on the beach, it turned into pebbles ofvar’legated forms. Further, that they founded the temple of Argive Hera at Leucania; that, like Odysseus, they sailed between Scylla and Charybdis; and that Thetis with her Nereids guided them pus? the flame-spouting Planerue, or Wandering Rocks, which are now firmly anchored to the sea-bed. x~ I. Still others maintain that Jason and his companions explored the country about Colchian Aea, advancing as far as Media; that one of them, Armenus, a Thessalian from Lake Boebe, setfled in Armenia, and gave his name to the entire country. This view they justif). by pointing out that the heroic monuments in honour of Jason, which Armenus erected at the Caspian Gates, are much revered by the barbarians; and that the Armenians still wear the ancient Thessalias~ dress.lS I. ApoLlonius Rhodius: iv. I090-95; Homer: Odyssey xviii. 83 and xxi. 307, with scholiast.
2. Strabo: i. 2. 39 and vii. 5. 5; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 5t~-z~; Hyginus: Fabula 23; Apollodorus: i. 9. z$; Callimachus, quoted by Strabo: i. 2.39.
3. Herodotus: i. x.
4. Pausanias: ix. 34—2; Strabo: vi. x. i; Argonautica Orphica 1254; Homer: Odyssey xii. I-ZOo.
5. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 922-79; Argonautica Orphica 1270-97; Hyginus: Fabula 14.
6. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1228-1460.
7. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~46~-95; Valerim Flaccus: vi. 317 and vii. 422.
8. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 881; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1518-36.
9. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 17-39 and 255-61; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~537-1628; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 6; Argonautica Ori~hica 1335-6; Herodotus: iv. 179.
xo. Apollodorus: i. 9. 26; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. t639-93; Argo. hautlea Orphica 1337-40; Lucian: On the Dance 49; Sophocles, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. t638.
II. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1765-72; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Argo. nautica Orphica 1344-8.
12. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 252.
13. Herodotus: iii. 127.
14. Strabo: v. 2. 6 and vi. I. I; Apollodorus: i. 9. 24; Apollonius 17clioaldus: iv. 922 ~
I$. Strabo: xi. 14. ~2 and ~3. to.
~r
1. The myth of Metope, given in full neither by Homer nor by Apollonius Rhodius, recalls those of Ame (see 43—z) and Antlope (see 76. b). She has, it seems, been deduced from an icon showing the Fategvddess seated in a tomb; her quern being the world-mill around which, ‘ according to Varro’s Treatise on Rustic Affairs, the celestial system turns, and which appears both in the Nprse Edda, worked by the giantesses Fenja and Menja, and in Judges, worked by the blinded Tyrian Suu-her0 Samson. Demeter, goddess of corn-mills, was an underground deity.
g. Herodotus’s account of AeEtes’s embassy to Greece makes little 248 154. l—154. 2
them, Armenus, a Thessalian from Lake Boebe, settled in Armenia and gave his name to the entire country. This view they justify by pointing out that the heroic monun~ents in honour of Jason, which Armenus erected at the Caspian Gates, are much revered by the barbarians; and that the Armenians still wear the ancient Thessalhn dress.15 x. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. l090-95; Homer: Odyssey xviii. 83 and xxi. 307, with scholiast.
2. Strabo: i. 2. 39 and vii. 5. 5; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 5~1-2~; Hyginus: Fabula 23; Apollodorus: i. 9. 25; Callimachus, quoted by Strabo: i. 2. 39.
3. Herodotus: i. x.
4. Pausanias: ix. 34. 2; Strabo: vi. L ~; Argonautica crphic,~ ~284; Homer: Odyssey xii. x-200.
5. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 922-79; Argonautica Orphica 1270-97; Hyginus: Fabula 14.
6. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1228-1460.
7. Hyginu~: loc. tit.; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 146~-95; Valcrius Flaccus: vi. 317 and vii. 422.
8. Tzetzes: On L7cophron 881; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 15~s-36.
9. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 17-39 and 255-6~; Apollonius iv. 1537-1628; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 56. 6; Argonautica
1335-6; Herodotus: iv. 179.
lO. Apollodorus: i. 9. 26; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. ~639-93; nautica Orphica ~337-40; Lucian: On the Dance 49; quoted by schohast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1638.
1. Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1765-72; Apollodorus: loc. ci.1.; hautlea Orphica 1344-8.
12. Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 252.
~3—Herodotus: iii. 127.
~4. Strabo: v. 2. 6 and vi. x. ~; Apollodorus: i. 9. 24; Apollo~ius Rhodius: iv. 922 fl.
15—Strabo: xL 14. 12 and 13. xo.
* 1. The myth of Metope, given in full neither by Homer nor by Apollonius Rhodius, recalls those of Ame (see 43.2) and Antk)pc 76. b). She has, it seems, been deduced from an icon showing the goddess seated in a tomb; her quern being the world-mill around according to Varro’s Treatise on Rustic Affairs, the celestial system turbos, and wh/ch appears both in the Nl>rse Edda, worked by the giantc>~cs Fcnja and Menja, and in Judges, worked by the bhnded Tyrian Sun-h~r0 Samson. Demeter, goddess of corn-mills, was an tu~derground deity.
g. Herodotus’s account of Ae~tes’s embassy to Greece makes little sense, unless he held that the Argive princess Io did not flee to Colchis in a fit of madness, disguised as a heifer, and eventually become deified by the Egyptians as Isis (see 56. b), but was taken in a raid by the Colchians (whom he describes as relics of Pharaoh Sesostris’s army that invaded Asia) and sold into Egypt.
3. The three Sirens—Homer makes them only two—were singing daughters of Earth, who beguiled sailors to the meadows of their island, where the bones of former victims lay mouldering in heaps (Odyssey xii. 39 IT. and x 84 IT.). They were pictured as bird-women, and have much in common with the Birds of Rhiannon in Welsh myth, who mourned for Bran and other heroes; Rhiannon was a mare-headed Demeter. Sirenland is best understood as the sepulchral island which receives the dead king’s ghost, like Arthur’s Avalon (see 3~. 2); the Sirens were both the priestesses who mourned for him, and the birds that haunted the islandservants of the Death-goddess. As such, they belonged to a pre-Olympian cult—which is why they are said to have been worsted in a contest with Zeus’s daughters, the Muses. Their home is variously given as the Sirenusian Islands off Paestum; Capri; and ‘dose to Sicilian Cape Pelorus’ (Strabo: i. 2. 12). Pairs of Sirens were still carved on tombs in the time of Euripides (Helen 167), and their name is usually derived from seirazein, ‘to bind with a cord’; but if, as is more likely, it comes from the other seirazein which means ‘ to dry up ‘, the two Sirens will have represented tw’m aspects of the goddess at midsummer when the Greek pastures dry up: Ante-vorta and Post-vorta—she who looks prophetically forward to the new king’s reign and she who mourns the old (see x 70. 7)—The mermaid type of Siren is post-Classical. 4. Helius’s herd consisted of three hundred and fifty head, the gift of his mother, the Moon-goddess (see 42. ~ and 170. ~0). Several colonies from Corinth and Rhodes, where his sky-bull was worshipped, had been planted in Sicily. Odysseus knew Helius as ‘Hyperion’ (see 170. u). 5. Lake Tritonis, once an enormous inland sea that had overwhelmed the lands of the neolithic Atlantians, has been slowly shrinking ever since, and though still of respectable size in Classical times—the geographer Stylax reckoned it at some nine hundred square miles—is now reduced to a line ofsak marshes (see 39. 6). Neith, the skin-clad Triple-goddess of Libya, anticipated Athene with her aegis (see 8. ~ ).
6. Mopsus, whose death by snake-bite in the heel was a common one (see 106. g; 117—c and ~68. e) appears also in the myth of Derceto (see ~89. 2), the Philistine Dictynna. Another Mopsus, Teiresias’s grandson, survived the Trojan War (see 169. c).
7. Caphaurus is an odd name for a Libyan—caphaura being the Arabic for’ camphor ‘, which does not grow in Libya—but the mythographers had a poor sense of geography.
8. Talos the bronze man is a composite character: partly sky-bull, partly sacred king with a vulnerable heel, partly a demonstration of t cite-perdue method of bronze casting (see 92. 8).
9. The water-sacrifice at Anaphc recalls that offered by the Jews on the Day of Willows, the clitnax of their festival of Tabernacles, when water was brought up in solemn procession from the Pool of Siloam; the Aeginetan water-race will have been part of a similar ceremony. Tabernacles began as an autumn fertility feast and, according to the Talmud, the Pharisees found it difficult to curb the traditional ‘lightheadedness’ of the women.
10. ‘Pebbles of variegated form’, iron crystals, are still fouud on the shores of Elba.
11. Thetis guided the Argo through the Planctae at the entrance to the Straits of Messina, as Athene guided her through the Planctae at the entrance to the Bosphorus. Odysseus avoided them by choosing the passage between Scylla and Charybdis (see 170. t). The western Planctae are the volcanic Lipari Islands.
12. Arme~ia, meaning Ar-Minni, ‘ the high land ofMi~ni’—Mhmi is summoned by Jeremiah (ti. 27) to war against Babylon—has no historical connexion with Armenm of Lake Boebe. But Minni is apparently the Minyas whom Josephus mentions (Antiquities i. ~. 6) when describing Noah’s Flood: and the name of the Thessalian Minyas, ancestor of the Minyans, offered a plausible link between Armenia and Thessaly.
O/aE autumn evening, the Argonauts regained the well-remembered beach of Pagasae, but found no one there to greet them. Indced, it was rumoured in Thessaly that all were dead; Pelias had therefore been emboldened to kill Jason’s parents, Aeson and Polymele, and an infant son, Promachus, born to them since the departure of the Argo. Aeson, however, asked permission to take his own life and, his plea being granted, dra~ bull’s blood and thus expired; whereupon Polymele killed herself with a dagger or, some say, a rope, after cursing Pelias, who mercilessly dashed out Promachus’s brains on the palace floor.I
b. Jason, hearing this doleful story from a solitary boatman, forbade him to spread the news of the Argo’s homecoming, and summoned a council of war. All his comrades were of the opi~fion that Pelias served death, but when Jason demanded an immediate assault on Iolcus, Acastus remarked that he could hardly be expected to oppose his father; and the others thought it wiser to disperse, each to his own home and there, if necessary, raise contingents for a war on Jason’s behalf. Iolcus, indeed, seemed too strongly garrisoned to be stormed by a company so small as theirs.
c. Medea, however, spoke up and undertook to reduce the cit~
singlehanded. She instructed the Argonauts to conceal their ship, and .......... a~ ~A ,o~h~Aed beach within sight of
/hemsdives, on some wooded and secluded oeacn w~tnln s~gnt ot 101cus. When they saw a torch waved from t~e palace roof, this would mean that Pelias was dead, the gates open, and the city theirs for the taking.
d. During her visit to Anaphe, Medea had found a hollow image of /~rtemis and brought it aboard the Argo. She now dressed her twelve Phaeacian bond-maidens in strange disguises and led them, each in turn carrying the image, towards Iolcus. On reaching the city gates Medea, who had given herself the appearance of a wrinkled crone, ordered the sentinels to let her pass. She cried in a shrill voice that the goddess Artemis had come from the foggy land of the Hyperboreans, in a chariot drawn by flying serpents, to bring good fortune to Iolcus. The startled sentinels dared not disobey, and Medea with her bond-maidens, raging through the streets like maenads, roused the inhabitants to religious frenzy.
e. Awakened from sleep, Pelias enquired in terror what the goddess required of him. Medea answered that Artemis was about to acknowledge his piety by rejuvenating him, and thus allowing him to beget heirs in place of tile tanfilial Acastus, who had lately died in a shipwreck off the Libvan coast. Pelias doubted this promise, until Medea, hv removing t~e illusion of old age that she had cast about herself, turned young again before his very eyes. ‘Such is the power of Artemis!’ she cried. He then watched while she cut a bleary-eyed old ram into thirteen pieces and boiled them in a cauldron. Using Colchian spells,which he mistook for Hyperborean ones, and solemnly conjuring Artemis to assist her, Medea then pretended to rejuvenate the dead ram—for a frisky lamb was hidden, with other magical gear, inside the goddess’s hollow image. Pelias, now wholly deceived, consented to lie on a couch, where Medea soon charmed him to sleep. She then commanded his daughters, Alcestis, Evadne, and Amphinome, to cut him up, just as they had seen her do with the ram, and boil the pieces in the same cauldron.
f. Alcestis piously refused to shed her father’s blood in however good a cause; but Medea, by giving further proof of her magic powers, persuaded Evadne and Amphinome to wield their knives with resolution. When the deed was done, she led them up to the roof, each carrying a torch, and explained that they must invoke the Moon while the caul~ dron was coming to a boil. From their ambush, the Argonauts saw the distant gleam of torches and, welcoming the signal, rushed into Iolcus, where they met with no opposition.
g. Jason, however, fearing Acastus’s vengeance, resigned the king~ dom to him, neither did he dispute the sentence of banishment passed on him by the Iolcan Coun.cil: for he hoped to sit upon a richer throne elsewhere. Z
h. Some deny that Aeson was forced to take his own hfe, and declare that, on the contrary, Medea, after first draining the effete blood from his body, restoreel his youth by a magic elixir, as she had also restored Macris and her sister-nymphs on Corcyra; and presented him, stalwart and vigorous, to Pelias at the palace gates. Having thus persuaded Pelias to undergo the same treatment, she deceived him by omitting the appropriate spells, so that he died miserably. 3
i. At Pehas’s funeral games, celebrated the following day, Euphemus won the two-horse chariot race; Polydcuces, the boxing contest; Mdeager, the javelin throw; Peleus, the wrestling match; Zetes, the shorter foot race, and his brother Calais (or, some say, Iphiclus) the longer one; and Heracles, now returned from his visit to the Hesperides, the all-in fighting. But during the four-horse chariot race, which Heracles’s charioteer Iolaus won, Glaucus, son of Sisyphus, was devoured by his horses which the goddess Aphrodite had maddened with hippomanes.4
j. As for Pelias’s daughters: Alcesf~s married Admetus of Pherae, to whom she had long been afftanced; Evadne and Amphinome were banished by Acastus to Mantinea in Arcadia where, after purification, they succeeded in making honourable marriages. S
Diodorus Siculus: iv. 50. x; Apollodorus: i. 9—~6 and 27; Valerius Flaccus: i. 777 if.
Apollodorus: i.9. 27; Diodorus Siculus’ iv. 51. x-53. x;Pausanias: viii. x x. 2; Plautus: Pseudolus iii. 868 if.; Cicero: On Old Age xxiii. 83; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 297-349; Hyginus: Fabula 24. 255. ~—156. a 253 3. Hypothesis to Euripides’s Medea; Scholiast on Euripides’s Knights 1321; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 251-94-.
4. Pausanias: v. 27. 9; Hyginus: Fabula 278.
5. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 53.2; Hyginus: Fabula 24; Pausanias: viii. 11.2.
1. The Cretans and Mycenaeans used bull’s blood, plentifully diluted with water, as a magic to fertilize crops and trees; only the priestess of Mother Earth could drink it pure without being poisoned (see 5 z—4). 2. Classical mythographers find it hard to decide how far Medea was an illusionist or cheat, and how far her magic was genuine. Cauldrons of regeneration are common,in Celtic myth (see ~48.5-6); hence Medea pretends to be a Hyperborean, that may mean a British, goddess. The underlying religious theory seems to have been that at midsummer the sacred king, wearing a black ram’s mask, was slaughtered on a mountain top and his pieces stewed into a soup, .for the priestesses to eat; his spirit would then pass into one of them, to be born again as a child in the next lambing season. Phrixus’s avoidance of this fate had been the original cause of the Argonauts’ expedition (see 70. 2 and 248. g).
3. Medea’s serpent-drawn chariot—serpents are underworld creatures —had wings because she was both earth-goddess and moon-goddess. She appears in triad here as Persephone-Demeter-Hecate: the three daughters of Pelias dismembering their father. The theory that the Sun-king marries the Moon-queen, who then graciously invites him to mount her chariot (see 24. m), changed as the patriarchal system hardened: by Classical times, the serpent-chariot was Helius’s undisputed property, and in the later myth of Medea and Thescus (see 154. d) he lent it to his granddaughter Medea only because she stood in peril of death (see 156. d). The Indian Earth-goddess of the Ramayana also rides in a serpent-chariot. 4. Callimachus seems to credit the huntress Cyrene with winning the foot race at Pelias’s funeral games (see 82. a).
/k J~so/a first visited Boeofian Orchomenus, where he hung up the golden fleece in the temple of Laphysdan Zeus; next, he beached the Ar,,oo on the Isthmus of Corinth, and there dedicated her to Poseidon.
b. Now, Medea was the only surviving child ofAe~tes, d king of Corinth, who when he emigrated to Colchis had his regent a certain Bunus. The throne having fallen vacant, without issue of the usurper Corinthus, son of Marathon (,~
himself’ Son of Zeus’), Medea claimed it, and the Corinthian Jason as their king. But, after reigning for ten prosperous years, he came to suspect that Medea had secured his sucr poisoning Corinthus; and proposed to divorce her in fayour the Theban, daughter of King Creon.
e. Medea, while not denying her crime, held Jason to the o he had sworn at Aea in the name of all the gods, and when he that a forced oath was invalid, pointed out that he also owed of Cori~th to her. He answered: ‘True, but the Corinth learned to have more respect for me than for you.’ Since he, obdurate Medea, feigning submission, sent Glauce a weddh the hands of the royal princes—for she had borne Jason seven daughters—namely, a golden crown and a long white sooner had Glauce put them on, than unquenchable flame and consumed not only her—although she plunged headlon palace fountain—but King Creon, a crowd of other disl Theban guests, and everyone else assembled in the pala~
Jason; who escaped by leaping from an upper window.
d. At this point Zeus, gready admiring Medea’s spirit, f with her, but she repulsed all his advances. Hera was grate~
make your children immortal,’ said she, ‘if you lay them o~
ficial altar in my temple.’ Medea did so; and then fled in drawn by winged serpents, a loan from her grandfather Hi bequeathlug the kingdom to Sisyphus.1
e. The name of only one of Medea’s daughters by Jason ~
bered: Eriopis. Her eldest son, Medeius, or Polyxenus, who educated by Cheiron on Mount Pelion, afterwards ruled the Media; but Medeius’s father is sometimes called Aegeus.2
sons were Mermerus, Pheres, or Thess~lus, Alcimedcs, Tis~
Argus; all of whom the Corinthians, enraged by the murder and Creon, seized and stoned to death. For this crime they since made expiatiou: seven girls and seven boys, wearing ments and with their heads shaven, spend a whole year in the Hera on the Heights, where the murder was committed.3 B
the Delphic Oracle, the dead children’s corpses were buried; their souls, however, became immortal, as Hera had promised. There are those who charge Jason with condoning this murder, but explain that he was vexed beyond endurance by Medea’s ambition on b&alf of his ch/ldrcn.4
f. Others again, misled by the dramat/st Euripides, whom the Corinthians bribed with fiśteen talents of silver to absolve them of guilt, pretend that Medea killed two of her own children;S and that the remainder perished in the palace which she had set on fire—except Thessalus, who escaped and later reigned over Iolcus, giving his name to all Thessaly; and Pheres, whose son Mermerus inherited Medea’s skill as a poisoner.6
1. Emnelus: Fragments 2-4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Apollodorus: i. 9. ~6; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 391-40~; Ptolemy Hephaest/onos ii.; Apuleius: Golden Ass i. Io; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~75; Euripides: Medea.
2. Hesiod: Theogony 98~ ft’.; Pausanias: ii. 3.7 and iii. 3.7; Hyginus: Fabulae 24 and 27.
3. Apollodoru~: i. 9. 28; Pausanias: ii. 3.6; Aelian: Varia Historia v. 2~; Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 9 and 264; Philostratus:
Heroica xx. 24.
4. Diodorus Siculus: v. 55; Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea 1387. 5. Scholiast on Euripides: Ioe. eit.; Hyginus: FabuIa 25; Euripides: Medea ~27~; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogue viii. 476. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Homer: Odyssey i. 260, with scholiast. ~. The number of Medea’s children recalls that of the Titans and Titanesses (see ~. $ and 43.4), but the fourteen boys and girls who were annually confined in Hera’s Temple may have stood for the odd and even days of the first half of the sacred month.
1. Glauce’s death was perhaps deduced from an icon showing the
~nnual holocaust in the Telnple of Hera, like that described by Lucian at Hierapolis (On the Syrian Goddess 49)—But Glauce will have been the d/ademed priestess who directed the conflagration, not its victim; and the well, her ritual bath. Lucian explains that the Syrian goddess was, on the whole, Hera; though she also had some attributes of Athene and the other goddesses (ibid. 32). Here Eriopis (‘large-eyed ‘) points to coweyed Hera, and Glauce (‘ owl’) to owl-eyed Athene. In Lucian’s time, domestic animals were hung from the branches of trees piled in the temple court of Hierapolis, and burned alive; but the death ~ofMedea’s fourteen children, and the expiation made for them, suggest that human victims were originally offered. Melicertes, the Cretan god who presided over the Isthmian Games at Corinth (see 70. h and 96. 6), was Melkar~t~,: ‘protector of the city’, the Phoenician Heracles, in whose name chi]drc:: were certaiauly burned alive at Jerusalem (Leviticus xviii. 21 and xx. :: x Kings xi. 7; z Kings xxiii. Io;Jeremiah xxxii. 35). Fire, being a sac~ element, immortalized the victims, as it did Heracles himself when l~c ascended his pyre on Mount Oeta, lay down and was consumed (~cc ~45.f).
3. Whether Medea, Jason, or the Corinthians sacrificed the chil&~.: became an important question only later, when Medea had ceased te ~-: identified with lno, Mehcertes’s mother, and human sacrifice dcno~c ! barbarism. Since any drama wh/ch won a prize at the Athenian ścst~,’~; in honour of Dionysus at once acquired religious au~hority, it is v~r, probable that the Corinthians recompensed Euripides well for his ge~’rous marfipulation of the now discreditable myth. 4—Zeus’s love for Medea, like Hera’s for Jason (Homer: Odysse), xii. 72; Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 66), suggests that ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ were titles of the Corinthian king and queen (see 43. e and 68. ~). Corinthus, though the son of Marathon, was also styled ‘ son of Zeus’, and Marathon’s father Epopeus (‘he who sees all’) had the same wife as Zeus (Pausanias: ii. L X; Asius: Fragment ~).
M~x~ ~ fled first to Heracles at Thebes, where he had promised to shelter her should Jason ever prove unfaithful, and cured him of the madness that had made him kill his children; nevertheless, the Thebans would not permit her to take up residence among them because Creon, whom she had murdered, was their King. So she went to Athens, and King Aegeus was glad to marry her. Next, ban/shed from Athens for her attempted poisoning of Theseus, she sailed to Italy and taught the Marrubians the art of snake-charming; they still worship her as the goddess Angitia.1 After a brief visit to Thessaly, where she unsuccessfully competed with Thetis in a beauty contest judged by Idomeneus the Cretan, she married an Asian king whose name has not survived but who is said to have been Medeius’s true father.
/~. Hearing, finally, that Ae&es’s Colchian throne had been usurped by her uncle Perses, Medea went to Colchis with Medeius, who killed Perses, set Ae&es on his throne again, and enlarged the kingdom of Colchis to include Media. Some pretend that she was by that time reconciled to Jason, and took him with her to Colchis; but the history of Medea has, of course, been embellished and distorted by the extravagant fancies of many tragic dramatists.Z The truth is that Jason, having śor~eited the śavour of the gods, whose names he had taken in vain when he broke faith with Medea, wandcreed homeless from city to city, hated of men. In old age he came once more to Corinth, and sat down in the shadow of the Argo, remembering his past glories, and grieving for the disasters that had overwhelmed him. He was about to hang himself from the prow, when it suddenly toppled forward and killed him. Poseidon then placed the image of the Argo’s stem, which was innocent of homicide, among the stars.3
c. Medea never died, but became an immortal and reigned in the Elysian Fields where some say that she, rather than Helen, married Achilles.4
d. As for Athamas, whose failure to sacrifice Phrixus had been the cause of the Argonauts’ expedition, he was on the point of being himself sacrificed at Orchomenus, as the sin-offering demanded by the Oracle of Laphystian Zeus, when his grandson Cytisorus returned from Aeaca and rescued him. This vexed Zeus, who decreed that, henceforth, the eldest son of the Athamantids must avoid the Council Hall in perpetuity, on pain of death; a decree which has been observed ever since.5
e. The homecomings of the Argonauts yield many tales; but that of Great Ancaeus, the helmsman, is the most instructive. Having survived so many hardslfips and perils, he returned to his palace at Tegea, where a seer had once warned him that he would never taste the wine of a vineyard which he had planted some years previously. On the day of his arrival, Ancaeus was informed that his steward had harvested the first grapes, and that the wine awaited him. He therefore fdled a winecup, set it to his lips and, calling the seer, reproached him for prophesying falsely. The seer answered:’ Sire, there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip!’, and at that instant Ancaeus’s servants ran up, shouting: ‘My lord, a wild boar ! It is ravaging your vineyard !’ He set down the untasted cup, grasped his boar-spear, and hurried out; but the boar lay concealed behind a bush and, charging, killed him.6
x. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 54; Apollodorus: i. 9—28; Plutarch: Theseus 12; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 750.
2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: v.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55-66.2; Hy ginus: Fabula 26; Justin: xlii. 2; Tacitus: Annals vi. 343—Diodorus Siculus: iv. 55; Scholiast on the Hypothesis of Eurip ides’s Medea; Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy xxxvi.
4. Scholiast on Euripides’s Medea ~o; and on Apollonius Rhodiu~ iv. 8~4.
5. Herodotus: vii. 2976. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. ~85. 1. An Attic cult of Demeter as Earth-goddess has given rise to t~ story of Medea’s stay at Athens (see 97. b). Similar cults account for h~ visits to Thebes, Thessaly, and Asia Minor; but the Marrubians may emigrated to Italy from Libya, where the Psyllians were adept in the a: of snake-charming (Pliny: Natural History vii. 2). Medea’s reign in t} Elysian fields is understandable: as the goddess who presided over cauldron of regeneration, she could offer heroes the chance of anoth~ life on earth (see 31. c). Helen (‘moon’) will have been one of her rid, (see 159.
2. In the heroic age, it seems, the king of Orchomenus, when his rei~ ended, was led for sacrifice to the top of Mount Laphystium. This k/~ was also a priest of Laphystian Zeus, an office hereditary in the matriline: Minyan clan; and at the time of the Persian Wars, according to Hcr~ dotus, the clan chief was still expected to attend the Cquncil Hall wh› summoned for sacrifice. No one, however, forced him to obey th summons, and he seems from Herodotus’s account to have been repr~ sented by a surrogate except on occasions of national disaster, such as plague or drought, when he would feel obliged to attend in person. The deaths of Jason and Ancaeus are moral talcs, emphasizing dangers of excessive fame, prosperity, or pride. But Ancaeus dies royal/ in his own city, from the gash ofa boar’s tusk (see 18.7); whereasJaso~ like Bellerophon (see 75-f) and Oedipus (see ~05. k), wanders from cil to caW, hated of men, and is eventually killed by accident. In the Isthm~ where Jason had reigned, the custom was for the royal pharmacos to t thrown over the cliff, but rescued from the sea by a waiting boat a~ banished to the life of an anonymous beggar, taking his ill-luck wi~ him (see 89.6 and 98.7)3. Sir Isaac Newton was the first, so far as I know, to point out tt connexion between the Zodiac and the Argo’s voyage; and the leger may well have been influenced at Alexandria by the Zodiacal Signs: tt Ram of Phrixus, the Bulls of AcEres, the Dioscuri as the Heavenly Twi~ Rhea’s Lion, the Scales of Alcinous, the Water-carriers of Aegin Heracles as Bowman, Medea as Virgin, and the Goat, symbol oflecher to record the love-making on Lemnos. When the Egyptian Zodiacal Signs are used, the missing elements appear: Serpent for Scorpion; and Scarab, symbol of regeneration, for Crab.
0N~st0ry told about the foundation of Troy is that, in time of famine, a third of the Cretan people, commanded by Prince Scamander, set out to found a colony. On reaching Phrygia, they pitched their camp beside the sea, not far from the city of Hamaxitus, ~ below a high mountain which they named Ida in honour of Zeus’s Cretan home. Now, Apollo had advised them to settle wherever they shotfid be attacked by earthborn enemies under cover of darkness; and that same night a horde of famished field mice invaded the tents and nibbled at bow-strings, leather shield-straps, and all other edible parts of the Cretans’ war-gear. Seamander accordingly called a halt, dedicated a temple to Sminthian Apollo (around which the city of Sminthium soon grew) and married the nymph Idaea, who bore him a son, Teucer. With Apollo’s help, the Cretans defeated their new neighbouts, the Bebrycians, but in the course of the fighting Seamander had leaped into the river Xanthus, which thereupon took his name. Teucer, after whom the settlers were called Teucrians, succeeded him. Yet some say that Teucer himself led the Cretan immigrants, and was welcomed to Phrygia by Dardanus, who gave him his daughter in marriage and called his own subjects Teucrians.Z
b. The Athenians tell a wholly different story. They deny that the Teucrians came from Crete, and record that a certain Teucer, belonging to the deme of Troes, emigrated from Athens to Phrygia; and that Dardanus, Zeus’s son by the Pleiad Electra, and a native of Arcadian Pheneus, was welcomed to Phrygia by this Teucer, not contrariwise. In support of this tradition it is urged that Erichthonius appears in the genealogy both of the Athenian and the Teucrian royal houses.3 Dardanus, the Athenians go on to say, married Chryse, the daughter of Pallas, who bore him two sons, Idaeus and Deimas. These reigned for a while over the Arcadian kingdom founded by Atlas, but were parted by the calamities of the Deucalionian Flood. Deimas remained in Arcadia, but Idaeus went with his father Dardanus to Samothrace, which they colonized together, the island being thereafter called Dardania. Chryse had brought Dardanus as her dowry the sacred irnagcs of the Great Deities whose priestess she was, and he now introduced tl~cir cult into Samothrace, though keeping their true names a secrct. danus also founded a college of Salian priests to perform the ncccs~:~r~’ rites; which were the same as those performed by the Cretan Ct~rctc. s.4
c. Grief at the death of his brother Iasion drove Dardanus across sea to the Troad. He arrived alone, paddling a raft made of an inflated skin which he had ballasted with four stones. Teucer received him hospitably and, on condition that he helped to subdue certain neighbouring tribes, gave him a share of the kingdom and married him to the princess Bateia. Some say that this Bateia was Teucer’s aunt; others, that she was his daughter. S
d. Dardanus proposed to found a city on the smalJ hill of Ate, which rises from the plain where Troy, or Ilium, now stands; but when an oracle of Phrygian Apollo warned him that misfortune would always attend its inhabitants, he chose a site on the lower slopes of Mount Ida, and named his city Dardania.6 After Teucer’s death, Dardanus succeeded to the remainder of the kingdom, giv’mg it his own name, and e~tended his rule over many Asiatic nations; he also sent out colordes to Thrace and bey0nd.?
e. Meanwhile, Dardanus’s youngest son Idaeus had followed him the Troad, bringing the sacred images; which enabled Darclanus teach his people the Samothracian Mysteries. An oracle then assureel him that the city which he was about to found would rem, ain invincible only so long as his wife’s dowry continued under Athene s protection.S His tomb is still shown in that part of Troy which was called 1 before it merged with the villages of Ilium and Tros into a single Idaeus settled on the Idaean Mountains which, some say, are called after him; and there instituted the worship and Mysteries of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods.9
fi According to the Latin tradition, Iasion’s father was the Tyrrhenian prince Corythus; and his twin, Dardanus, the son of Zeus by Corythus’s wife Electra. Both emigrated from Etruria, after dividing these sacred images between them: lasion went to Samothrace, and Dardanta to the Troad. While battling with the Bebrycians, who tried to throw the Tyrrhenians back into the sea, Dardanus lost his helmet and, although his troops werein retreat, led them back to recover it. This time he’ w,~, victorious, and founded a city named Corythus on the battle~cl,!~ .1s mucl~ in memory of his helmet (corys), as of his father. Xo ,. Idaeus had two elder brothers, Erichthonius and Ilus, or Zacynti~5~ ~nd a daughter, Idaea, who became Phineus’s second wife. When ~ric[~t honius succeeded to the kingdom of Dardanus, he married Asty~che. the daughter of Simoeis, who bore him Tros.I~ Erichthonius, dc~ed also as a king of Crete, was the most prosperous of men,
~r of the three thousand mares with which Boreas fellin love. Tros ~c-~ ~ded his father Erichthonius, and not only Troy but the whole ~r,,~c[ took his name. By his wife CallirrhoE, a daughter of Scamander, h~ i-c. carne the father of Cleopatra the Younger, Ilus the Younger, ,~,~,-~cus, and Ganymedes.1Z
i~ Meanwhile, Ilus the brother of Erichthonius had gone to Phrygia ~-!~ ~ :, entering for the games which he found in progress, he was victc,~-i .as in the wrestling match and won fifty youths and fifty maidens a~ i~ prize. The Phrygian king (whose name is now forgotten) also ~”, ~ him a dappled cow, and advised him to found a city wherever she ~’~.1:~.1d first lie down. flus followed her; she lay down on reaching the i~~, ~fAte; and there he built the city of Ilium though, because of the warbling oracle delivered to his father Dardanus,’he raised no fortificati~. Some, however, say that it was one of Ilus’s own Mysian co(rs ,~,. ],;h he followed, and that his instructions came from Apollo. But others hold that Ilium was founded by Locrian immigrants, and that they gave the name of their mountain Phriconis to the Trojan mountain ofCyme. Xa
i. When the circuit of the city boundaries bad been marked out, Ilus prayed to Almighty Zeus for a sign, and next morning noticed a wooden object lying in front of his tent, half buried in the earth, and overgrown with weeds. This was the Palladium, a legless image three cubits high, made by Athene in memory of her dead Libyan playmate Pallas. Fallas, whose name Athene added to her own, held a spear aloft in the right hand, and a distaff and spindle in the left; aroufid her breast was wrapped the aegis. Athene had first set up the image on Olympus, beside Zeus’s throne, where it received great honour; but, when Ilus’s great-grandmother, the Pleiad Electra, was violated by Zeus and defiled it with her touch, Athene angrily cast her, with the image, down to earttl.14
/. Apollo Smintheus now advised Ilus: ‘Preserve the Goddess who fell from the skies, and you will preserve your city: for wherever she goes, she carries empire !’ Accordingly he raised a temple on the citadel to house the image?
k. Some say that the temple was already rising when the image descended from heaven as the goddess’s gift. It dropped through a ?art of the roof which had not yet been completed, and was found standing exacdy in its proper place. 16 Others say that Electra gave the Palladium to Dardanus, her son by Zeus, and that it was carded from Dardania to Ilium after his death. I? Others, again, say that it fell from heaven at Athens, and t~at the Athenian Teucer brought it to the Troad. Still others believe that there were two Palladia, an Athenian and a Trojan, the latter carved from the bones of Pelops, just as the image of Zeus at Olympia was carved from Indian ivory; or, that there were n~:’~~ú Palladia, all similarly cast from heaven, including the Samo~hr;~( images brought to the Troad by Idaeus? The College of Vcstal~ at Rome now guard what is reputed to be the genuine Palladium. No man may look at it with impunity. Once, while it was still in Trc.i ~n hands, Ilus rushed to its rescue at an alarm of fire, and was blinded his pains; later, however, he contrived to placate Athene and rcgai~cd his sight. 19
1. Eurydice, daughter of Adrastus, bore to Ilus Laomedon, Themiste who married the Phrygian Capys and, some say, the mother of Anchises.2ř By Strymo, a daughter of Seamander a~ Leucippe, or Zeuxippe, or Tho~3sa, Laomedon had five sons:
Tithonus, Lampus, Clyfius, Hicetaon, and Podarces; as well as tl~r~’e daughters: Hesione, Cilla, and Astyoche. He also begot bastard tx~, on the nymph-shepherdess Calybe. It was he who decided to build famous walls of Troy and was lucky enough to secure the services gods Apollo and Poseidon, then under Zeus’s displeasure for a rc~ they made against him and forced to serve as day-labourers. Posci~i, did the building, while Apollo played the lyre and fed Lao~ncd(~’s flocks; and Aeacus the Lelegian lent Poseidon a hand. But Laomc~i n cheated the gods of their pay and earned their bitter resentment. ~ was the reason why he and all his sons—except Podarces, now rcnan~cd Priam—perished in Heracles’s sack of Troy.21
m. priam, to whom Heracles generously awarded the Trojan throne, surmised that the calamity which had befallen Troy was due to its lucl~less site, rather than to the anger of the gods. He therefore sent onc. his nephews to ask the Pythoness at Delphi whether a curse still lay on the hill of Ate. But the priest of Apollo, Panthous the son of Othrias, was so beautiful that Priam’s nephew, forgetting his commission, fell in love with him and carried him back to Troy. Though vexed, Priam had not the heart to punish his nephew. In compensation for the injury done he appointed Panthous priest of Apollo and, ashamed to consult the Pythoness again, rebuilt Troy on the same foundations. Priam’s first wife was Arisbe, a daughter of Merops, the seer. When she had borne him Aesacus, he married her to Hyrtacus, by whom she became the mother of the Hyrtacides: Asius and Nisus?
n. This Acsacus, who learned the art of interpreting d~earn~ from big grandfather Merops, is famous for the great love he showed Asterope, a daughter of the river Cebren: when she died, he tried repeatedly to kill himself by leaping from a sea-cliffunfil, at last, the gods took pit) on his plight. They turned Aesacus into a diving bird, thus allowing him to indulge his obsession with greater decency.2s
o. Hecabe, Priam’s second wife—whom the Latins call Hecubawas a daughter of Dymas and the nymph Euno~; or, some say, of Cisseus and Telecleia; or of the river Sangarius and Metope; or of Glaucippe, the daughter of Xanthus.24 She bore Priam nineteen of his fifty sons, the remainder being the children of concubines; all fifty occupied adjacent bed-chambers of polished stone. Priam’s twelve daughters slept with their husbands on the farther side of the samc courtyard.2s Hecabe’s eldest son was Hector, whom some call the son of Apollo; next, she bore Paris; then Creusa, Laodice, and Polyxena; then Deiphobus, Helenus, Cassandra, Pammon, Polites, Antiphus, Hipponous, and Polydorus. But Troilus was certainly begotten on her by Apollo.26
p. Among Hecabe’s younger children were the twins Cassandra and Hclenus. At their birthday feast, celebrated in the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo, they grew tired of play and fell asleep in a corner, while their forgetrial parents, who had drunk too much wine, staggered home without them. When Hecabe returned to the temple, she found the sacred serpents licking the children’s ears, and screamed for terror. The serpents at once disappeared into a pile of laurel boughs, but from that hour both Cassandra and Helenus possessed the gift of prophecy. Z? q. Another account of the matter is that one day Cassandra fell asleep in the temple, Apollo appeared and promised to teach her the art of prophecy if she would lie with him. Cassandra, after accepting his gift, went back on the bargain; but Apollo begged her to give him one kiss and, as she did so, spat into her mouth, thus ensuring that none would ever beheve what she prophesied.28
r. When, after several years of prudent government, Priam had restored Troy to its former wealth and power, he summoned a Council to discuss the case of his sister Hesione, whom Telamon the Acacid had taken away to Greece. Though he himself was in fayour of force, the Council recommended that persuasion should first be tried. His brother-in-law Anterior and his cousin Anchises therefore went to Greece and dehvered the Trojan demands to the assembled Greeks at Telamon’s court; but were scornfully sent about their business. Y!~i~ incident was a main cause of the Trojan War,29 the gloomy end ;,i’ which Cassandra was now already predicting. To avoid scandal, Pri:~ locked her up in a pyramidal building on the citadel; the wardre,;s wi~ cared for her had orders to keep him informed of all her prophesse utterances.30
1. Strabo: xiii. L 48.
2. Servius on, Virgil’s Aeneid iii. l08; Strabo: toc. tit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1302.
3. Apollodorus: iii. 12. I; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Strabo: loc. tit.
4. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Roman Antiquities i. 61 and ii. 70-~; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. ~204; Conon: Narrations Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 285.
5. Apollodorus: iii. 12. x; Lycophron: 72 if ... with Tzetzcs’s con~mcnts; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xx. z~5; Scrvius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 167; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 29.
6. Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: v. 48; Strabo: Fragment 50; Homer: Iliad xx. 2t5 iT.
7. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Servius: loc. tit.; Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit. 8. Strabo: loc. ›it.; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 6i; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad p. ~204; Conon: Narrations 2t; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. ~66.
9. Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 7~; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: loc. tit. ~o. Servius: loc. tit.; vii, 207 and iii. tS~ ~. Apollodorus: iii. 12.2 and iii. ~5.3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 50. 3.
~2. Homer: Iliad xx. 220 if..; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 62; Apollodorus: iii. 12. ~.
~3. Apollodorus: iii. lZ. 3; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~9; Lcsses of Lampsacus, quoted by Tzetzes: loc. tit.; Pindar: Olympian Odes viii. 30 if.., with scholiast; Strabo: xiii. x. 3 and 3.3.
14. Ovid: Fasti vi. 420 iT.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
15. Ovid: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
16. Dictys Cretensis: v. 5~7. Scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women ~~36; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 6~; $ervius on Virgil’s Aetteid fl. ~66.
18. Clement of Alexandria: Protrepticon iv. 47; Servius: loc. tit.; ?herecydes, quoted by Tzetzes: On L ycophron 355; l~tymologicum Magnum: sub Palladium pp. 649-50.
~9. Dercyllus: Foundations of Cities i, quoted by Plutarch: Parallel Stories ~7.
20. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 2 and 3.
21. Apolloclorus: ii. 59; ii. 6. 4 and iii. 12. 3; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliadill. 250; Homer: Iliadvi. 23-6; xxi. 446 and vii. 452; Horace: Odes iii. 3. 21; Pindar: Olympic Odes viii. 42, with scholiast; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 32.
22. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidii. 319; Apollodorus: iii. 22. 5; Homer: Iliaalii. 831 and 837; Virgil: Aeneid ix. 276-7.
23. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 128; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 755-95.
24. Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliadxvi. 718; and on Euripides’s Hecabe 32; Athenion, quoted by scholiast on Homer: loc, cit.; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
25. Homer: Iliad xxiv. 495-7 and vi. 242-50.
26. Stesichorus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 266; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
27. Anfclides, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad vii. 44.
28. Hyginus: Fabula 93; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 5; Servins on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 247.
29. Benoit: Roman de Troie 385 and 3187 if.; The Seege or BatayIe of Troye 349 if. and 385; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 340; Dares: 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 80.
30. Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1220; Tzetzes: Hypothesis of LFophron’s Alexandra; On Lycophron 29 and 350.
* I. The situation of Troy on a well-watered plain at the entrance to the Hellespont, though establishing it as the main centre of Bronze Age trade between East and West, provoked frequent attacks from all quarters. Greek, Cretan, and Phrygian claims to have founded the city were not irreconcilable, since by Classical times it had been destroyed and rebuilt often enough: there were ten Troys in all, the seventh being the Homeric city. The Troy with which Homer is concerned seems to have been peopled by a federation of three tribes—Trojans, Ilians, and Dardaniansa usual arrangement in the Bronze Age.
2. ‘ Sminthian Apollo’ points to Crete, Stninthos being the Cretan word for ‘mouse’, a sacred animal not only at Cnossus (see 90. 3), but in Philistia (~ Samuel vi. 4) and Phocis (Pausanias: x. ~z. 5); and Erichthonins, the fertilizing North Wind, was worshipped alike by the Pelasgians of Athens and the Thracians (see 48. $). But the Athenian claim to have founded Troy may be dismissed as political propaganda. The white mice kept in Apollo’s temples were prophylactic both against plague and against sudden invasions of mice such as Aelian (History o/Animals xii.. and 41) and Aristotle (History/of Animals vi. 370) mention. Dardanu may have been a Tyrrhenian from Lydia (see ~36. ~) or Samothrace; but Servius errs in recordin~ that he came from Etruria, where the Tyrrhenians settled long after the Trojan War. ‘Zacinthus ‘, a Cretan word, figuring in the Trojan royal pedigree, was the name of an island belonging to Odysseus’s kingdom; and this suggests that he claimed hereditary rights at Troy.
3. The Palladium, which the Vestal Virgins guarded at Rome, as the luck of the city, held immense importance for Italian mythographers; they claimed that it had been rescued from Troy by Aeneas (Pausanias: ii. 23. 5) and brought to Italy. It was perhaps made of porpoise-ivory (see x 08.5)—’Palladium’ means a stone or other cult-object around which the girls of a particular clan danced, as at Thespiae (see 120. a), or young men leaped, pallas being used indiscriminately for both sexes. The Roman College of Salii was a society of leaping priests. When such cult-objects became identified with tribal prosperity and were carefully guarded against theft or mutilation, palladio was read as meaning palta, ‘ or things hurled from heaven’. Palta might not be hidden from the sky; thus the sacred thunder-stone of Terminus at Rome stood under a hole in the roof of Juppiter’s temple—which accounts for the similar opening at Troy. 4. Worship of meteorites was easily extended to ancient monoliths, the funerary origin of which had been forgotten; then from monolith to stone image, and from stone image to wooden or ivory image is a short step. But the falling of a shield from heaven—Mars’s ancile (Ovid: Fasti iii. 259-73) is the best-known instance—needs more explanation. At first, meteorites, as the only genuinepalta, were taken to be the origin of lightning, which splits forest trees. Next, neolithic stone axes, such as the one recently found in the Mycenaean sanctuary of Asine, and early Bronze Age celts or pestles, such as Cybele’s pestle at Ephesus (Acts xix. 35), were mistaken for thunderbolts. But the shield was also a thunder instrument. Pre-Hellenic rain-makers summoned storms by whirling bull-roarers to imitate the sound of rising wind and, for thunder, beat on huge, tightly-stretched ox-hide shields, with double-headed drum-sticks like those carried by the Solion priests in the Anagni relief. The only way to keep a bull-roarer sounding continuously is to whirl it in a figure-ofeight, as boys do with toy windmills, and since torches, used to imitate lightning, were, it seems, whirled in the same pattern, the rain-making dfield was cut to form a figure-of-eight, and the double drum-stick beat continuously on both sides. This is why surviving Cretan icons show the Thunder-spirit descending as a figure-of-eight shield; and why therefore ancient shields were eventually worshipped as paIta. A painted limestone tablet from the Acropolis at Mycenae proves, by the colour of the flesh, that the Thunder-spirit was a goddess, rather than a god; on a gold ring found near by, the sex of the descending shield is not indicated. 5. Cassandra and the serpents recall the myth of Melampus (see ~22. c), and Apollo’s spitting into her mouth that of Glaucus (see 90. f). Her i~risc>n was probably a bee-hive tomb from which she uttered prophecies i~ the name of the hero who lay buried there (see 43.2 and ~54. ~). 6. Aesacus, the name of Priam’s prophetic son, meant the myrtlebr,~ilch which was passed around at Greek banquets as a challenge to sing or coinpose. Myrtle being a death-tree (see ~o~. ~ and ~09.4), such poems may originally have been prophecies made at a hero-feast. The diving bird was sacred to Atheuc in Attica and associated with the drowning of the royalpharmacos (see 94.1). Scamander’s leaping into the river Xanthus must refer to a similar Trojan custom of drowning the old king (see ~08.3); his ghost supposedly impregnated girls when they came there to bathe (see ~37.3). Tantalus, who appears to have suffered the same fate, rnnrried Xanthus’s daughter (see ~08. b).
7. Priam had fifty sons, nineteen of whom were legitimate; this suggests that at Troy the length of the king’s reign was governed by the nineteen-year metonic cycle, not the cycle of one hundred lunations shared between king and tanist, as in Crete (see ~38.5) and Arcadia (see 38.2). His twelve daughters were perhaps guardians of the months. 8. The importance of Aeacus’s share in building the walls of Troy should not be overlooked: Apollo had prophesied that his descendants should be present at its capture both in the first and the fourth generation (scc 66. i), and only the part built by Aeacus cotfid be breached (Pindar: Pythian Odes viii. 3 ~-46). Andromache reminded Hector that this part was the curtain on the west side of the wall ‘near the fig tree,’ where the city might be most easily assailed (Homer: Iliad vi. 43~-9), and ‘where the most valiant men who follow the two Ajax’s have thrice attempted to force an entry—whether some soothsayer has revealed the secret to thcm, or whether their own spirit urges them on.’ DiSrpfeld’s excavations of Troy proved that the wall was, tinaccountably, weakest at this point; but the Ajax’s or ‘Aeacans’ needed no soothsayer to inform them oi’ tbis if, as Polybius suggests, ‘Aeacus’ came from Little Ajax’s city of Opuntian Locris. Locris, which seems to have provided the Ilian element in Homeric Troy, and enjoyed the privilege of nominating Trojan priestesses (see ~68. z), was a pre-Hellenic Lelegian district with matrilinear and even matriarchal institutions (see 136. 4); another tribe ol Lelegians, perhaps of Locrian descent, lived at Pedasus in the Troad. One of their princesses, Laotho~, came to Troy and had a child by Priam (Homer: Iliad xxi. 86). It seems to have been the Locrian priestesses’ readiness to smuggle away the Palladium to safety in Lochs that facilitated the Greeks’ capture of the city (see 168.4). 9—Since one Teucer was Scamander’s son, and another was Aeacus’s grandson and son of Priam’s sister Hesione (see 137. e), the Teucrian element at Troy may be identified with the Lelegian, or Aeacan, or Ilian; the other two elements being the Lydian, or Dardauian, or Tyrrhenian; and the Trojan, or Phrygian.
WHu~/Helen, Leda’s beautiful daughter, grew to womanhood at Sparta in the palace of her foster-father Tyndareus, all the princes of Greece came with rich gifts as her suitors, or sent their kinsmen to represent them. Diomedes, fresh from his victory at Thebes, was there with Ajax, Teucer, Philoctetes, Idomeneus, Patroclus, Menestheus, and many others. Odysseus came too, but empty-handed, because he had not the least chance of success—for, even though the Dioscuri, Helen’s brothers, wanted her to marry Menestheus of Athens, she would, Odysseus knew, be given to Prince Menelaus, the richest of the Achaeans, represented by Tyndareus’s powerful son-in-la Agamemnon.x
b. Tyndareus sent no suitor away, but would, on the other hand, accept none of the proffered gifts; fearing that his partiality for any one pt’race might set the others quarrelling. Odysseus asked him one day: ‘IfI tell you how to avoid a quarrel will you, in return, help me to marry Icarius’s daughter Penelope?’ ‘It is a bargain,’ cried Tyndareus. ‘ Then,’ continued Odysseus,’ my advice to you is: insist that all Helen’s suitors swear to defend her chosen husband against whoever resents his good fortune.’ Tyndareus agreed that this was a prudent course. After sacrificing a horse, and jointing it, he made the suitors stand on its bloody pieces, and repeat the oath which Odysseus had formulated; the joints were then buried at a place still called ‘The Horse’s Tomb’. ›. It is not known whether Tyndareus himself chose Helen’s husband, or whether she declared her own preference by crowning him with a wreath.2 At all events, she married Menelaus, who became King of Sparta after the death of Tyndareus and the deification of the Dioscuri. Yet their marriage was doomed to failure: years before, while sacrificing to the gods, Tyndareus had stupidly overlooked Aphrodite, who took her revenge by swearing to make all three of his daughters-Clytaemnestra, Timandra, and Helen-notorious for their adulteries. S
d. Menelaus had one daughter by Helen, whom she named Hermione; their sons were Aethiolas, Maraphius—from whom the Persian family of the Maraphions claim descent—and Pleisthenes. An Aetolian slave-girl named Pieris later bore Menelaus twin bastards: Nicostratus and Megapenthes.4
e. Why, it is asked, had Zeus and Themis planned the Trojan War? Was it to make Helen famous for having embroiled Europe and Asia? Or to exalt the race of the demi-gods, and at the same time to thin out the populous tribes that were oppressing the surface of Mother Earth? ]~heir reason must remain obscure, but the decision had already been taken when Eris threw down a golden apple inscribed ‘For the Fairest’ at tt~c wedding of Pel~us and Thetis. Almighty Zeus refused to decide the ensuing dispute between Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, and let Hermes lead the goddesses to Mount Ida, where Priam’s lost son Paris would act as arbiter. S
f Now, just before the birth of Paris, Hecabe had dreamed that she brot~ght forth a faggot from which wriggled countless fiery serpents. She awoke screaming that the city of Troy and the forests of Mount Ida were ablaze. Priam at once consulted his son Aesacus, the seer, who announced:’ The child about to be born will be the ruin of our country! I beg you to do away with him.’6
,~. A few days later, Aesacus made a further announcement: ‘The royal Trojan who brings forth a child today must be destroyed, and so must her offspring!’ Priam thereupon killed his sister Cilla, and her infant son Munippus, born that morning from a secret union with Thyrnoetes, and buried them in the sacred prednct of Tros. But Hecabe was delivered of a son before nightfall, and Priam spared both their lives, although Herophile, priestess of Apollo, and other seers, urged Hecabe at least to kill the child. She could not bring herself to do so; and in the end Priam was prevailed upon to send for his chief herdsman, one Agelaus, and entrust him with the task. Agelaus, being too soft-hearted to use a rope or a sword, exposed the infant on Mount Ida, where he was suckled by a she-bear. Returning after five days, Agelaus was amazed at the portent, and brought the waif home in a wallct hence the name ‘Paris’—to rear with his own new-born son;7 and t~k a dog’s tongue to Priam as evidence that his command had been obc~, c~!. But some say that Hecabe bribed Agelaus to spare Paris and keep t!~c secret from Priam?
h. Paris’s noble birth was soon disclosed by his outstanding bea~er,. intelligence, and strength: when little more than a child, lie route:!, band of cattle-thieves and recovered the cows they had stolen, t~~; winning the surname Alexander.1 Though ranking no higher th~ ~
slave at this time, Paris became the chosen lover of Oenone, dau g]:tcr ,~ f the river Oeneus, a fountain-nymph. She had been taught th,: arc ~ť prophecy by Rhea, and that of medicine by Apollo while he wa~ ~ct::’.c as Laomedon’s herdsman. Paris and Oenone used to herd their ~k,~ k, and hunt together; he carved her name in the bark of beech-trees ~,~.! poplars.10 His chief amusement was setting Agelaus’s bulls to f~gl~t ~,~c another; he would crown the victor with flowers, and the loser with straw. When one bull began to win consistently, Paris pitted it against the champions of h~s neighbours’ herds, all of which were defeated. At last he offered to set a golden crown upon the horns of any bull that could overcome his own; so, for a jest, Ares turned himself into a bull, and won the prize. Paris’s unhesitating award of this crown to Ares surprised and pleased the gods as they watched from Olympus; which is why Zeus chose him to arbitrate between the three goddesses? i. He was herding his cattle on Mount Gargarus, the highest peak of Ida, when Hermes, accompanied by Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite, delivered the golden apple and Zeus’s message: ‘Paris, since you are as handsome as you are wise in affairs of the heart, Zeus commands you to judge which of these goddesses is the fairest.’
Paris accepted the apple doubtfully. ‘How can a simple’ cattle-man like myself become an arbiter of divine beauty?’ he cried.’ I shall divide this apple between all three.’
‘No, no, you cannot disobey Almighty Zeus!’ Hermes replied hurriedly. ‘Nor am I authorized to give you advice. Use your native intelligence!’
‘ So be it,’ sighed Paris. ‘But first I beg the losers not to be vexed with me. I am only a human being, liable to make the stupidest mistakes.’ The goddesses all agreed to abide by his decision.
‘Will it be enough to judge them as they are?’ Paris asked Hermes, ‘or should they be naked?’
‘The rules of the contest are śor you to decide,’ Hermes answered with a discreet smile.
‘In that case, will they k~ndly disrobe?’
Hermes told the goddesses to do so, and pohtely turned his back.
j. Aphro~te was soon ready, but Athene insisted that she should remove the śamous magic girdle, which gave her an unfair advantage by making everyone Fall in love with the wearer. ‘Very well,’ said Aphrodite spiteśully. ‘ I will, on condition that you remove your helmet —you look hideous without it.’
‘Now, if you please, I must judge you one at a time,’ announced Paris, ‘to avoid distractive arguments. Come here, Divine Hera! Will you other two goddesses be good enough to leave us śor awhile?’ ‘Examine me conscientiously,’ said Hera, turning slowly around, and displaying her magnificent figure,’ and remember that if you judge me the fairest, I will make you lord oś all Asia, and the richest man a]ive.’lz
‘I am not to be bribed, my Lady ... Very well, thank you. Now I
have seen all that I need to see. Come, Divine Athene!’
k. ‘Here I am,’ said Athene, striding purposefully forward. ‘Listen, Paris, if you have enough common sense to award me the prize, I will make you victorious in all your battles, as well as the handsomest and wisest man in the world.’
‘I am a humble herdsman, not a soldier,’ said Paris. ‘You can see for yourself that peace reigns throughout Lydia and Phrygia, and that King Priam’s sovereignty is uncontested. But I promise to consider fairly your claim to the apple. Now you are at liberty to put on your clothes and helmet aga’m. Is Aphrodite ready?’
1. Aphrodite sidled up to him, and Paris blushed because she came so close that they were almost touching.
‘Look carefully, please, pass nothing over .... By the way, as soon as I saw you, I said to myself:” Upon my word, there goes the handsomest young man in Phrygia! Why does he waste himself here in the wilderness herding stupid catde?” Well, why do you, Paris? Why not move into a city and lead a ~ivilized life? What have you to lose by marrying someone like Helen of Sparta, who is as beautiful as I am, and no less passionate? I am convinced that, once you two have met, she w’dl abandon her home, her family, everything, to become your mistress. Surely you have heard of Helen?’
‘Never until now, my Lady. I should be most describe her.’
m. ‘Helen is of fair and dclicate complexion, having been from a swan’s egg. She can claim Zeus for a father,.loves hunting and wresding, caused one war while she was still a child—and, when she came of age, all the princes of Greece were her suitors. At present sheis married to Menelaus, brother of the High King Agamemnon; but that makes no odds—you can have her if you like.’
flow ~s t’fiat possible, i’(sl~e is already marribdS~‘Heavens! How innocent you are! Have you/never heard that it is my divine duty to arrange affairs of this sort? I suggest now that you tour Greece with my son Eros as your guide. Once you reach Sparta, he and I will see that Helen falls head over heels in love with you.’ ‘Would you swear to that?’ Paris asked excitedly.
Aphrodite uttered a solemn oath, and Paris, without a second thought, awarded her the golden apple.
By this judgement he incurred the smothered hatred of both Hera and Athene, who went offarm4n-arm to plot the destruction of Troy; while Aphrodite, with a naughty smile, stood wondering how best to keep her promise.1
n. Soon afterwards, Priam sent his servants to fetch a bull from Agelaus’s herd. It was to be a prize at the funeral games now annually celebrated in honour of his dead son. When the servants chose the champion bull, Paris was seized by a sudden desire to attend the games, and ran after them. Agelaus tried to restrain him: ‘You have your own private bull fights, what more do you want?’ But Paris persisted and, in the end, Agelaus accompanied him to Troy.
0. It was a Trojan custom that, at the close of the sixth lap of the chariot race, tho~e who had entered for the boxing match should begin fighting in front of the throne. Paris decided to compete and, despite Agelaus’s eritreaties, sprang into the arena and won the crown, by sheer courage rather than by skill. He also came home first in the footrace, which so exasperated Priam’s sons that they challenged him to another; thus he won his third crown. Ashamed at this public defeat, they decided to kill him and set an armed guard at every exit of the stadium, while Hector and Ddphobus attacked him with their swords. Paris leaped for the protection of Zeus’s altar, and Agelaus ran towards Priam, crying:’ Your Majesty, this youth is your long-lost son!’ Priam at once summoned Hecabe who, when Agelaus displayed a rattle which had been found in Paris’s hands, conf~rmed his identity. He was taken triumphantly to the palace, where Priam celebrated his return with a huge banquet and sacrifices to the gods. Yet, as soon as the priests of Apollo heard the news, they annotmced that Paris must be putto death immediately, else Troy would perish. This was reported to Priam, who answered: ‘Better that Troy should fall, than that my wonderful son should die!’X4
p. Paris’s married brothers presently urged him to take a wife; but he told them that he trusted Aphrodite to choose one for him, and used to offer her prayers every day. When another Council was called to discuss the rescue of Hesione, peaceful overtures having failed, Paris volunteered to lead the expedition, if Priam would provide him with a large, well-manned fleet. He cunningly added that, should he fail to bring Hesione back, he might perhaps carry off a Greek princess of equal rank to hold in ransom for her. His heart was, of course, secredy set on going to Sparta to fetch back Helen.1S
q. That very day, Menelaus arrived unexpectedly at Troy and enquired for the tombs of Lycus and Chimaerus, Prometheus’s sons by Celaeno the Atlantid: he expla’med that the remedy which the Delphic Oracle had prescribed him for a plague now ravaging Sparta was to offer them heroic sacrifices. Paris entertained Menelaus and begged, as a favour, to be purified by him at Sparta, since he had accidentally killed Antenor’s young son Antheus with a toy sword. When Menelaus agreed, Paris, on Aphrodite’s advice, commissioned Phereclus, the son of Tecton, to build the fleet which Priam had promised him; the figurehead of his flag-ship was to be an Aphrodite holding a miniature Eros. Paris’s cousin Aeneas, Anchises’s son, agreed to accompany him.16 Cassandra, her hair streaming loose, foretold the conflagration that the voyage would cause, and Helenus concurred; but Priam took no notice of either of his prophetic children. Even Oenone failed to dissuade Paris from the fatal journey, although he wept when kissing her good-bye. ‘ Come back to me if ever you are wounded,’ she said, ‘ because I alone can heal you.TM
r. The fleet put out to sea, Aphrodite sent a fayouting breeze, and Paris soon reached Sparta, where Menelaus feasted him for nine days. At the banquet, Paris presented Helen with the gifts that he had brought from Troy; and his shameless glances, loud sighs and bold signals caused her considerable embarrassment. Picking up her goblet he would set his lips to that part of the rim from which she had drunk; and once she found the words ‘ I love you, Helen !’ traced in wine on the table top. She grew terrified that Menelaus might suspect her of encouraging Paris’s passion; but, being an unobservant man, he cheerfully sailed off to Crete, where he had to attend the obsequies of his grandfather Catreus, leaving her to entertain the guests and rule the kingdom during his absence?
s. Helen eloped with Paris that very night, and gave herself to him in love at the first port of call, which was the island of Crana~. On the mainland, opposite Crana~, stands a shrine of Aphrodite the Uniter, founded by Paris to celebrate this occasion.19 Some record untruthfully that Helen rejected his advances, and that he carried her off by force while she was out hunting; or by a sudden raid on the city of Sparta; or by disguising himself, with Aphrodite’s aid, as Menelaus. She abandoned her daughter Hermione, then nine years of age, but took away her son Pleisthenes, the greater part of the palace treasures, and gold to the value of three talents stolen from Apollo’s temple; as well as five serv’mg women, among whom were the two former queens, Aethra the mother of Theseus, and Theisadi~, Peirithotis’s sister. zo
1. As they steered towards Troy, a great storm sent by Hera forced Paris to touch at Cyprus. Thence he sailed to Sidon, and was entertainec~ by the king whom, being now instructed in the ways of the Greek world, he,treacherously murdered and robbed in his own banquoting hall. While the rich booty was being embarked, a company of Sidonians attacked him; these he beat off, after a bloody fight and the loss of two ships, and came safely away. Fearing pursuit by Menelaus, Paris delayed for several months in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Egypt; but, reaching Troy at last, he celebrated his wedding with Helen. Zx The Trojans welcomed her, entranced by such divine beauty; and one day, finding a stone on the Trojan citadel, which dripped blood when rubbed against another, she recognized this as a powerful aphrodisiac and used it to keep Paris’s passion ablaze. What was more, all Troy, not Paris only, fell in love with her; and Priam took an oath never to let her go.2z
u. An altogether different account of the matter is that Hermes stole Helen at Zeus’s command, and entrusted her to King Proteus of Egypt; meanwhile, a phantom Helen, fashioned from clouds by Hera (or, some say, by Proteus) was sent to Troy at Paris’s side: with the sole purpose of provoking strife.23 Egyptian priests record, no less improbably, that the Trojan fleet blown o~its course, and mat Paris landed at, me Pans in the Canopic mouth of the Nile. There stands Heracles s temple, a sanctuary for runaway slaves who, on arrival, dedicate themselves to the god and receive certain sacred marks on their bodies. Paris’s servants fled here and, after securing the priests’ protection, accused him of having al>ducted Helen. The Canopic warden took cognizance of the matter and reported it to King Proteus at Memphis, who had Paris arrested and brought before him, together with Helen and the stolen treasure. After a close interrogation, Proteus banished Paris but detained Helen and the treasure in Egypt, until Menelaus should come to recover them. In Memphis stands a temple of Aphrodite the Stranger, said to have been dedicated by Helen herself.
Helen bore Paris three sons, Bunomus, Aganus, and Idaeus, all of them killed at Troy while still infants by the collapse of a roof; and one daughter, also called Helen.24 Paris had an elder son by Oenone, named Corythus, whom, in jealousy of Helen, she sent to guide the avenging Greeks to Troy.25
1. Apollodorus: iii. ~o. 8; Hyginus: FabuIa 81; Ovid: Heroidesxvii. ~04; Hesiod: The Catalogues of Women, Fragment 68, pp. 192 iT., ed. Evelyn-White.
2. Hesiod: loc. tit.; Apollodoms: iii. ~o. 9; Pausanias: iii. 20. 9; Hyginus: Fabula 78. ,
3. Stesichorus, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 249; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: ifi. xx. 2.
4. Homer: Odyssey iv. 12-14; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad iii. 175; Cypria, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache 898; Pausanias: ii. 18.55. Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy x; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. x-2; Cypria, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 5.
6. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 5; Hyginus: Fabula 9~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 86; Pindar: Fragment of Paean 8, pp. 544-6, ed. Sandys. 7. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 224 and 314; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidii. 32; Pausanias: x. 12. 3; Scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache 294; and on Iphigeneia in Aulis 1285; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 91; Konrad yon Wfirzburg: Der trojanische Krieg 442 if.
and 546 if.
8. Dictys Cretensis: iii; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae.
9. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Ovid: Heroides xvi. 51-2 and 359-60. xo. Ovid: Heroides v. ~2-30 and 139; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 57; Apollodorus: iii. 12.6.
ii.
I;g.
13.
14.
15,
16. Trojanska Pr/~a p. ~59; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae. Ovid: Heroides xvi. 71-3 and v. 35-6; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 20; Hyginus: Fabula 92.
Hyginus: loc. tit.; Ovid: Heroides xvi. ~49-52; Lucian: loc. tit. Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae; Hyginus: Fabula 91; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid v. 370; Ovid: Heroides xvi. 92 and 361-2.
Dares: 4-8; Rawlinson: Ioc. cit.
Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~32; Cypria, quoted bY Proclus: Chrestomathy i; Homer: lliadv. 59 if..; Apollodorm: Epitome iii. 2; Ovid: Heroides xvi. 115-16.
~ 7. Cypria, quoted by Produs: loc. tit.; Ovid: Hero ides xvi. ~ ~9 if. and~ 45 if-; Apollodorus: iii. ~2. 6.
~8. Ovid: Heroides xvi. 21-3; xv’fi. 74 IT.; 83 and ~55 IT.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 3; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: loc. tit. ~9. Ovid: Heroides xvi. 259-62; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: iii. 22. 2; ApoLlodorus: loc. tit.; Homer: Iliad iii. 445. 20. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 655; Eustathius on Homer, p. 1946; Apollodorus: loc. ›it.; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: loc. tit.; Dares: ~o; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~32 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 92.
21. Homer: Odyssey iv. 227-30; Proclus: Chrestomathy ~; Dictys Cretensis: i. 5; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~32ff.
22. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 33.
23. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 5; Euripides: Etectra ~28 and Helen 3~ if.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 655 and ii. 595; Stesichorus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~3.
24. Herodotus: ii. ~~2-~5; Dictys Cretensis: v, 5; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 85~; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: iv. 25. Conon: Narrations 22; Tzetzes: On Ly›ophron 57 if.
1. Stesichorus, the sixth-century ‘Sicilian poet, is credited with the story that Helen never went to Troy and that the war was fought for ‘ only a phantom ‘. After writing a poem which presented her in a most unfavourable light, he went blind, and afterwards learned that he lay under her posthumous displeasure (see ~64. m). Hence his palinode beginning:’ This tale is true, thou didst not go aboard The well-benched ships, nor reach the towers of Troy,’ a public declamation of which restored his sight (Plato: Phaedrus 44; Pausanias: iii. 19. ~). And, indeed, it is not clear in what sense Paris, or Theseus before him, had abducted Helen. ‘Helen’ was the name oft he Spartan Moon-goddess, marriage to whom, after a horse-sacrif~ce (see 81. 4), made Menelaus king; yet Paris did not usurp the throne. It is of course possible that the Trojans raided Sparta, carrying off the he’lress and the palace treasures in retaliation for a Greek sack of Troy, which Hesione’s story implies. Yet though Theseus’s Helen was, perhaps, flesh and blood (see 103.4), the Trojan Helen is far more likely to have been’ only a phantom’, as Stesichorus claimed.
2. This is to suggest that the mn~stgres tgs Helen,s, ‘suitors of Helen’, were really mn~st~res tou hetl~spontou, ‘those who were mindful of the Hellespont’, and that the solemn oath which these kings took on the bloody joints of the horse sacred to Poseidon, the chief patron of the expedition, was to support the rights of any member of the confederacy to navigate the Hellespont, despite the Trojans and their Asiatic allies (see ~48.10; 160. 1 and 162.3)—After all, the .Hellespont bore the name of ~eir 0wn goddess Helle. The Helen story comes, in fact, from the Ugarit epic Keret, in which Keret’s lawful wife Huray is abducted to Udm. 3. Paris’s birth follows the mythical pattern of Aeolm (see 43. c), Pelias (see 68. d), Oedipus (see ~05. a), Jason (see 148. b), and the rest; he is the familiar New Year child, with Agelaus’s son for twin. His defeat of the fifty sons of Priam in a foot-race is no less familiar (see 53.3 and 60. ‘Oenone’ seems to have been a title of the pt’recess whom he won on this occasion (see 53—3; 60. 4; 98. 7 and 160. d).
He did not, in fact, award the apple to the fairest of the three goddesses. Tiffs tale is mistakenly deduced from the icon which showed Heracles being given an apple-bough by the Hesperides (see 133.4)—the naked Nymph-goddess in triad—Adanus of Hebron being immortalized by the Canaanite Mother of All Living, or the victor of the foot-race at Olympia receiving his prize (see 53.7); as is proved by the presence of Hermes, Conductor of Souls, his guide to the Elysian Fields.
4. During the fourteenth century B.C., Egypt and Phoenicia suffered from frequent raids by the Keftiu, or ‘peoples of the sea’, in which the Trojans seem to have taken a leading part. Among the tribes that gained a foothold in Palestine were the Girgashites (Genesis x. ~6), namely Teucrians from Gergis, or Gergithium, in the Troad (Homer: Iliad viii. 304; Herodotus: v. ~22 and viL 43; Livy: xxxviii. 39). Priam and Anchise; figure in the Old Testament as Piram and Achish (Joshua x. 3 and Samuel xxvii. 2); and Pharez, an ancestor of the racially mixed tribe of Judah, who fought with his twin inside their mother’s womb (Genesis xxxvifi. 29), seems to be Pads. Helen’s ‘bleeding stone’, found on the Trojan citadel, is explained by the execution there of Priam’s nephew Munippus: Paris remained the queen’s consort at the price of annual child sacrifice. Antheus (‘ flowery’), is a similar victim: his name, a title of the Spfi~g Dionysus (see 85.2), was given to other unfortunate pr’mces, cut down in the flower of their lives; among them the son of Poseidon, killed and rayed by Cleomenes (Philostephanus: Fragment 8); and Anthem of Hal/camassus, drowned in a well by Cleohis (Parthenius: Narrations 14). 5. Cilla, whose name means ‘the divinatory dice made from ass’s bone’ (Hesychius sub Cillae) must be Athene, the goddess of the Trojan citadel, who invented this art of prognostication (see ~7. 3) and presided over the death of Munippus.
W,v.1/Paris derided to make Helen his wife, he did not expect to pay for his outrage of Menelaus’s hospitality. Had the Cretans been called to account when, in the name of Zeus, they stole Europe from the Phoenicians? Had the Argonauts been asked to pay for their abduction of Medea from Colchis? Or the Athenians for their abduction of Cretan Ariadne? Or the Thracians for that of Athenian Oreithyia?I This case, however, proved to be different. Hera sent Iris flying to Crete with news of the elopement; and Menelaus hurried to Mycenae, where he begged his brother Agamemnon to raise levies at once and lead an army against Troy.
b. Agamemnon consented to take this course only if the envoys whom he now sent to Troy, demanding Helen’s return and compensation for the injury done to Menelaus, came back empty-handed. When Priam denied all knowledge of the matter—Paris being still in Southern waters—and asked what satisfaction his own envoys had been offered for the rape of Hesione, heralds were sent by Menelaus to every prince who had taken his oath on the bloodyj oints of the horse, reminding him that Paris’s act was an affront to the whole of Greece. Unless the crime were punished in an exemplary fashion, nobody could henceforth be sure of his wife’s safety. Menelaus now fetched old Nestor from Pylus, and together they travelled over the Greek mainland, summoning the leaders of the expedition.2
c. Next, accompanied by Menelaus and Palamedes, the son of Nauplius, Agamemnon visited Ithaca, where he had the greatest difficulty in persuading Odysseus to join the expedition. This Odysseus, though he passed as the son of Laertes, had been secretly begotten by Sisyphus on Anticleia, daughter of the famous thief Autolycus. Just after the birth, Autolycus came to Ithaca and on the first night of his stay, when supper ended, took the infant on his knee. ‘Name him, father,’ said Anticleia. Autolycus answered: ‘In the course of my life I have antagonized many princes, and I shall therefore name this grandson Odysseus, meaning The Angry One, because he will be the victim of my enmities. Yet if he ever comes to Mount Parnassus to reproach me, I shall give him a share of my possessions, and assuage his anger.’ As soon as Odysseus came of age, he duly visited Autolycus but, while out hunting with his uncles, was gashed in the thigh by a boar, and carried the scar to his grave. However, Autolycus looked after him well enough, and he returned to Ithaca laden with the promised gifts. S
d. Odysseus married Penelope, daughter of Icarius and the Naiad Periboea; some say, at the request of Icarius’s brother Tyndareus, who arranged for him to win a suitors’ race down the Spartan street called ‘Apheta’. Penelope, formerly named Arnaea, or Arnacia, had been flung into the sea by Nauplius at her father’s order; but a flock of purplestriped ducks buoyed her up, fed her, and towed her ashore. Impressed by this prodigy, Icarius and Periboea relented, and Arnaea won the new name of Penelope, which means ‘duck’.4
e. After marrying Penelope to Odysseus, Icarius begged him to remain at Sparta and, when he refused, followed the chariot in which the bridal pair were driving away, entreating her to stay behind. Odysseus, who had hitherto kept his patience, turned and told Penelope: ‘Either come to Ithaca of your own free will; or, if you prefer your father, stay here without me ? Penelope’s only reply was to draw down her veil. Icarius, realizing that Odysseus was within his rights, let her go, and raised an image to Modesty, which is still shown some four miles from the city of Sparta, at the place where this incident happened.s fi Now, Odysseus had been warned by an oracle: ‘If you go to Troy, you will not return until the twentieth year, and then alone and destitute.’ He therefore feigned madness, and Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Palamedes found him wearing a peasant’s felt cap shaped like a half-egg, ploughing with an ass and an ox yoked together, and flinging salt over his shoulder as he went. When he pretended not to recognize his distinguished guests, Palamedes snatched the infant Telemacbus from Penelope’s arms and set him on the ground before the advancing team. Odysseus hastily reined them in to avoid killing his only son and, his sanity having thus been established, was obliged to join the expedition.6
g. Menelaus and Odysseus then travelled with Agamemnon’s herald Talthybius to Cyprus, where King Cinyras, another of Helen’s former suitors, handed them a breastplate as a gift for Agamemnon, and swore to contribute fifty ships. He kept his promise, but sent only one real ship and forty-me small earthenware ones, with dolls for crews, which the captain launched as he approached the coast of Greece. Invoked by Agamemnon to avenge this fraud, Apollo is said to have killed Cinyras, whereupon his fifty daughters leapt into the sea and became halcyons; the truth is, however, that Cinyras killed himself when he discovered that he had committed incest with his daughter Smyrne.?
h. Calchas the priest of Apollo, a Trojan renegade, had foretold that Troy could not be taken without the aid ofyotmg Achilles, the seventh son of Peleus. Achilles’s mother Thetis had destroyed his other brothers by burning away their mortal parts, and he would have perished in the same way, had not Peleus snatched him from the fire, replacing his charred ankle-bone with one borrowed from the disinterred skeleton of the giant Damysus. But some say that Thetis dipped him in the river Styx, so that only the heel by which she held him was not immortalized?
i. When Thetis deserted Peleus, he took the child to Cheiron the Centaur, who reared him on Mount Pelion, feeding him on the umbles of lions and wild boars, and the marrow of bears, to give him courage; or, according to another account, on honey-comb, and fawns’ marrou/ to make him run swiftly. Cheiron instructed him in the arts of riding, hunting, pipe-playing, and healing; the Muse Calliope, also, taught him how to sing at banquets. When only six years of age he killed his first boar, and thenceforth was constantly dragging the panting bodies of boars and lions back to Cheiron’s cave. Athene and Artemis gazed in wonder at this golden-haired child, who was so swift of foot that he could overtake and kill stags without the help of hounds.9
j. Now, Thetis knew that her son would never return from Troy if he joined the expedition, since he was fated either to gain glory there and die early, or to live a long but inglorious life at home. She disguised him as a girl, and entrusted him to Lycomedes, king of Scyros, in whose palace he lived under the name of Cercysera, Aissa, or Pyrrha; and had an intrigue with Lycomedes’s daughter Deidameia, by whom he became the father of Pyrrlms, later called Neoptolemus. But some say that Neoptolemus was the son of Achilles and Iphigeneia. 10
k. Odysseus, Nestor, and Ajax were sent to fetch Achilles from Scyros, where he was rumoured to be hidden. Lycomedes let them
‘~60. k—~60. n 28~
search the palace, and they might never have detected Achilles, had not Odysseus laid a pile of gifts—for the most part jewels, girdles, embroidered dresses and such—in the hall, and asked the court4adies to take their choice. Then Odysseus ordered a sudden trumpet-blast and clash of arms to sound outside the palace and, sure enough, one of the girls stripped herself to the waist and seized the shield and spear which he had included among the gifts. It was Achilles, who now promised to lead his Myrmidons to Troy.x~
1. Some authorities disdain this as a fanciful tale and say that Nestor and Odysseus came on a recruiting tour to Phthia, where they were entertained by Peleus, who readily allowed Achilles, now fifteen years of age, to go off under the tutorship of Phoenix, the son of Amyntor and Cleobule; and that Thetis gave him a beautiful inlaid chest, packed with tunics, wind-proof cloaks, and thick rugs for the journey? This Phoenix had been accused by Phthia, his father’s concubine, of having violated her. Amyntor blinded Phoenix, at the same time setting a curse of childlessness on him; and whether the accusation was true or false, childless he remained. However, he fled to Phthia, where Peleus not 0nly persuaded Cheiron to restore his sight, but appointed him king of the neighbouring Dolopians. Phoenix then volunteered to become the guardian of Achilles who, in return, became deeply attached to him. Some, therefore, hold that Phoenix’s blindness was not true loss of sight, but metaphorical of impotence—a curse which ?eleus lifted by making him a second father to Achilles.13
ns. Achilles had an inseparable companion: his cousin Patroclus, who was older than he, though neither so strong, nor so swift, nor so welt-born. The name of Patrodus’s father is sometimes given as Menoetius of Opus, and sometimes as Aeacus; and his mother is variously called Sthenele, daughter of Acastus; Periopis, daughter of Pheres; Polymele, daughter of Peleus; or Philomele, daughter of Actor.14 He had fled to Pelcus’s court after killing Amphidamas’s son Cleitonymus, or Aeanes, in a quarrel over a game of dice.1S
n. When the Greek fleet was already drawn up at Aulis, a protected beach in the Euboean straits, Cretan envoys came to announce that their King Idomeneus, son of Deucalio.n, would bring a hundred ships to Troy, if Agamemnon agreed to share the supreme command with him; and this condition was accepted. Idomeneus, a former suitor of Helen’s, and famous for his good looks, brought as his lieutenant Meriones, son of Molus, reputedly one of Minos’s bastards. He bore the figure of a cock on his shield, because he was descended from Helius, and wore a helmet garnished with boar’s tusks? Thus the~. expedition became a Creto-Hellene enterprise. The Hellenic land forces were commanded by Agamemnon, with Odysseus, Palame&s and Diomedes as his lieutenants; and the Hellenic fleet by Achilles, with the support of Great Ajax and Phoenix.
0. Of all his counsellors, Agamemnon set most store by Nestor King of Pylus, whose wisdom was unrivalled, and whose eloquence sweeter than honey. He ruled over three generations of men, but remained, despite his great age, a bold fighter, and the one commander who surpassed the Athenian king Menestheus in cavalry and infantry tactics. ~ His sound judgement was shared by Odysseus, and these two always:. advised the same course for the successful conduct of the war.18 p. Great Ajax, son of Telamon and Periboea, came from Salamis.
He was second only to Achilles in courage, strength, and beauty, ancl stood head and shoulders taller than his nearest rival, carrying a shield of proof made from seven bulls’ hides. His body was invulnerabl, except in the armpit, and some say, at the neck, because ofdae charm Heracles had laid upon him.19 As he went aboard his vessel, Telamon gave him this parting advice: ‘ Set your mind on conquest, but always with the help of the gods.’ Ajax boasted: ‘With the help of the gods, any coward or fool can win glory; I trust to do so even without them!’ By this boast, and others like it, he incurred divine anger. On one occasion, when Athene came to urge him on in battle, he shouted back: ‘Be off, Goddess, and encourage my fellow-Greeks: for, where I am, no enemy will ever break through!’20 Ajax’s half-brother Teucer, a bastard son of Telamon and Hesione, and the best archer in Greece, used to fight from behind Ajax’s shield, returning to its shelter as a child runs to his mother.2~
q. Little Ajax the Locrian, son of Oileus and Eriopis, though small, outdid all the Greeks in spear-throwing and, next to Achilles, ran the swiftest. He was the third member of Great Ajax’s team of fighters, and could easily be recognized by his linen corslet and the tame serpent, longer than a man, which followed him everywhere like a dog.22 His half-brother Medon, a bastard son of O~leus and the nymph Rhene, came from Phytace, where he had been banished for having slain Eriopis’s brother.23
r. Diomedes, the son of Tydeus and Deipyle, came from Argos, accompanied by two fellow-Epigoni, namely Sthenelus, son of Capaneus, and Euryalus the Argonaut, son of Mecisteus. He had been deeply in love with Helen, and took her abduction by Paris as a personal affront.24
s. Tlepolemus the Argive, a son of Heracles, brought nine ships from Rhodes.2S
1. Before leaving Aulis, the Greek fleet received supplies of corn, wine, and other provisions from ANus, king of Delos, whom Apollo had secredy begotten on Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus and Chrysothemis. Rhoeo was locked in a chest and set adrift by her father when he found her with child; but, being washed ashore on the coast of’ Euboea, gave birth to a boy whom she named Anius, because of the trouble she had suffered on his account; and Apollo made him his own prophetic priest-king at Delos. Some say, however, that Rhoeo’s chest drifted direcdy to Delos. Z6
u. By his wife Dorippe, Anius was the father of three daughters: Elais, Spermo, and Oeno, who are called the Winegrowers; and of a son, Andron, king of Andros, to whom Apollo taught the art of augury. Being himself a priest of Apollo, Anius dedicated the Winegrowers to Dionysus, wishing his family to be urider the protection of more than one god. In return, Dionysus granted that whatever Elais touched, after invoking his help, should be turned into oil; whatever Spermo touched, into corn; and whatever Oeno touched, into wine.27 Thus Anius found it easy enough to provision the Greek fleet. Yet Agamemnon was not satisfied: he sent Menelaus and Odysseus to Delos, where they asked Anius whether they might take the Winegrowers on the expedition. Anius refused this request, telling Menelaus that it was the will of the gods that Troy should be taken only in the tenth year. ‘Why not all remain here on Delos for the intervening period?’ he suggested hospitably. ‘My daughters will keep you supplied with food and drink until the tenth year, and they shall then accompany you to Troy, if necessary.’ But, because Agamemnon had strictly ordered: ‘ Bring them to me, whether Anius consents or not !’, Odysseus bound the Winegrowers, and forced them to embark in his vessel? When they escaped, two of them fleeing to Euboea and the other to Andros, Agamemnon sent ships in pursuit, and threatened war if they were not given up. All three surrendered, but called upon Dionysus, who turned tl~cm into doves; and to this day doves are doselF protected on Delos. Z0
v. At Aulis, while Agamemnon was sacrificing to Zeus and Apollo, a blue serpent with blood-red markings on its back darted from beneath the altar, and made straight for a free plane-tree which grew near by. On the highest branch lay a sparrow’s nest, containing eight young birds and their mother: the serpent devoured them all and then, still coiled around the branch, was turned to stone by Zeus. Calchas explained this portent as strengthening Anius’s prophecy: nine years must pass before Troy could be taken, but taken it would be. Zeus further heartened them all with a flash of lightning on their right, as the fleet set sail.30
w. Some say that the Greeks left Aulis a month after Agamemnon had persuaded Odysseus to join them, and Calchas piloted them to Troy by his second-sight. Others, that Oenone sent her son Corythus to guide them. 3~ But, according to a third, more generally accepted account, they had no pilot, and sailed in error to Mysia, where they disembarked and began to ravage the country, mistaking it for the Troad. King Telephus drove them back to their ships and killed the brave Thersander, son of Theban Polyneices, who alone had stood his ground. Then up ran Achilles and Patrodus, at sight of whom Telephus turned and fled along the banks of the river Caicus. Now, the Grceks had sacrif~ced to Dionysus at Aulis, whereas the Mysians had neglected him; as a punishment, therefore, Telephus was tripped up by a vine that sprang unexpectedly from the soil, and Achilles wounded him in the thigh with the famous spear which only he could wield, Cheiron’s gift to his father Peleus.32
x. Thersander was buried at Mysian Elaea, where he now has a heroshrine; the command of his Boeotians passed first to Peneleos and next, when he was killed by Telephus’s son Eurypylus, to Thersander’s son Tisamenus, who had not been of age at the time of his father’s de;xth. But some pretend that Thersander survived, and was one of those who hid in the Wooden Horse.33
y. Having bathed their wounded in the hot Ionian springs near Smyrna, called ‘The Baths ofAgamenmon’, the Greeks put to sea once more but, their ships being scattered by a violent storm which Hera had raised, each captain steered for his own country. It was on this occasion that Achilles landed at Scyros, and formally married Deidameia.34 Some believe that Troy fell twenty years after the abduction of Helen: that the Greeks made this false start in the second year; and that eight years elapsed before they embarked again. But it is far more probable that their council of war at Spartan Hellenium was held in the same year as their rerrement from Mysia; they were still, it is said, in great perplexity because they had no competent pilot to steer them to Troy.3S
2. Meanwhile,Telephus’s wound still festered, and Apollo armounced that it could be healed only by its cause. So he visited Agamemnon at Mycenae, clad in rags like a suppliant, and on Clytaemnestra’s advice snatched the infant Oresres from his cradle. ‘I will kill your son,’ he cried,’ unless you cure me !’ But/~gamemnon, having been warned by an oracle that the Greeks could not take Troy without Telephus’s advice, gladly undertook to aid him, if he would guide the fleet to Troy. When Telephus agreed, Achilles, at Agamemnon’s request, scraped some rust off his spear into the wound and thus healed it; with the śurther help of the herb achilleos, a vulnerary which he had himself discovered? Telcphus later refused to join the expedition, on the ground that his wife, Laodice, also called I-Iiera, or Asryoche, was Priam’s daughter; but he showed the Greeks what course to shape, and Calchas confirmed the accuracy of his advice by divination.3?
1. Herodotus: i. I-4; Ovid: Heroides xvi. 341-50.
2. Herodotus: i. 3; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy x; Apollodorus: Epitolne iii. 6.
3. Hyginus: Fabula 95; Homer: Odyssey xxiv. 115-~9 and xix.
399-466; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. ~2; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 529.
4. Apollodorus: iii. ~o. 6 and 9; Pausanias: iii. ~2. 2; Tzctzes: On Lycophron 792; Didymus, quoted by Eustathius on Homer,
p. ~422.
5. Pausanias: iii. 20. 2.
6. Hyginus: loc. tit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. $~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 8~8; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 7.
7. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 9; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad xi. 20; Nonnus: Dionysiaca xiii. 45~; Hyginus: Fabula 242.
8. Apollodorus: iii. ~3.8; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi.; Lycophron: Alexandra ~78 if., with scholiast; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xvi. 37; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Clouds ~068; Scholiast on Apollo~ nius Rhodius: iv. 8~6.
9. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 57; Fulgentius: Mythologicon iii. 7; Apollodorus: iii. ~3—6; Philostratus: Heroica xx. 2 and xix. 2; Argonautica Orphica 392 iT.; Statius: Achilleid i. 269 if.; Homer: Iliad xi. 83~-2; Pindar: Nemean Odes iii. 43 IT.
~o. Apollodorus: iii. ~3.8; Homer: Iliadix. 4~o if.; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: i; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~83.
II.
12.
13—
14.
160
Apollodorus: 10c. eit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 3 3 2; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. ~62 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 96.
Homer: Iliadix. 769 if.; 438 if. and xvi. 298.
Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 421; Homer: Iliad ix. 447 if. and 485.
Homer: Iliad xi. 786-7; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 69-70; Hesiod, quoted by Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad i. 337; Apollodorus: lot. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula 97; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 8 16. I$. Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Strabo: ix. 4. 2.
~6. Apollodorus: iii. 3. I; Philostratus: Heroica 7; Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Hyginus: Fabula 81; Pausanias: v. 23. 5; Homer: Iliad x. 61 iT.
17. Dictys Cretensis: i. 16; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 6.
18. Homer: Illadii. 21 and i. 247-52; iv. 310 if.; ii. 553-5; Odyssey iii. 244 and ~26-9.
19. Homer: Iliad xvii. 279-80 and iii. 226-7; Sophocles: Ajax 576 and 833, with scholiast; Scholiast on Homer’s 11iad xxiii. 821; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 455 ft.
20. Sophocles: Ajax 762-77.
21. Homer: Iliad viii. 266-72.
22. Homer: Iliad xiii. 697; ii. $27-30; xiv. 520 and xiii. 70i ft..; Hyginus: Fabula 97; Philostratus: Heroica viii. I.
23. Homer: Iliad ii. 728 and xiii. 694-7.
24. Apollodorus: i. 8.5; Hyginus: Ioc. tit.; Homer: Iliad ii. 564-6. 25. Homer: Iliad ii. 653-4; Hyginus: lo›. tit.
26. Dictys Cretensis : i. 2 3 ; Servius on Virgil’ s Aeneid iii. 80 ; Diodorus Siculus: v. 62; Tzetzes: On Lycophron $70.
27. Tzetzes: Ioc. eit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. xo; Ovid: Metamor~ phoses xiii. 650 ft.; Servius: Ioc. tit.
28. Stesichorus, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey vi. ~64; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 583; Servius: Ioc. cit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron $70.
29. Ovid: Metamorphoses 643-74; Servius: loc. tit.
30. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. I$; Homer: Iliad ii. 303-53; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 13-23.
31. Homer: Odyssey xxiv. ~~8-19 and Iliad i. 71; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 57 ft. 32. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. ~7; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 70 if.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 206 and 209; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad
i. 59; Homer: Iliad xvi. 140-4.
33—Pausanias: ix. 5.7-8; Virgil: Aeneid ii. 26~.
34. Philostratus: Heroica iii. 35; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 18; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy ~.
35. Homer: Iliadxxiv. 765; Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Pausanias: iii. ~2.5.
II.
12.
X3.
14. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 332; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. ~62 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 96.
Homer: Iliadix. 769 if.; 438 if—and xvi. 298.
Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 42!; Homer: Iliad ix. 447 if. and 485.
Homer: Iliad xi. 786-7; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 69-70; Hesiod, quoted by Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad i. 337; Apollodorus: loc. eit.; Hyginus: Fabula 97; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 8~6. I$. Apollodorus: loc. tit.; Strabo: ix. 4. 2.
~6. Apollodorus: iii. 3—~; Philostratus: Heroica 7; Diodorus Siculus: v. 79; Hyginus: Fabula 81; Pausanias: v. 23.5; Homer: Iliad x.
6~ff.
~7. Dictys Cretensis: i. ~6; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 6.
~8. Homer: IIiadii. 2~ and i. 247-52; iv. 3~o if.; ii. 553-5; Odyssey iii. 244 and ~26-9.
~9. Homer: Iliad xvii. 279-80 and iii. :226-7; Sophocles: Ajax 576 and 833, with scholiast; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xxiii. 82~; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 455 ff20. Sophocles: Ajax 762-77.
2L Homer: Iliad viii. 266-72.
22. Homer: Iliad xiii. 697; ii. $27-30; xiv. 520 and xiii. 70~ fir.; Hyginus: FabuIa 97; Philostratus: Heroica v)fii. ~.
23. Homer: Iliad ii. 728 and xiii. 694-7.
24. Apollodorus: i. 8. 5; Hyginus: Ioc. ›it.; Homer: Iliad ii. 564-6. 25. Homer: Iliad ii. 653-4; Hyginus: loc. tit.
26. Dictys Cretensis: i. 23; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidiii. 80; Diodorus Siculus: v. 62; Tzetzes: On Lycophron $70.
27. Tzetzes: Io›. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. ~o; Ovid: Metamor, phoses xiii. 650 if.; Servius: Ioc. tit.
28. Stesichorus, quoted by scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey vi. 164; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 583; Servius: loc. tit.; Pherecydes, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 570.
29. Ovid: Metamorphoses 643-74; Servius: 10c. cit.
30. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 15; Homer: Iliad ii. 303-53; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. ~ 3-233~. Homer: Odyssey xxiv. ~xS-~9 and Iliad i. 71; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 57 if. 32. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. ~7; Pindar: Olympian Odes ix. 70 if.; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 206 and 209; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad
i. 59; Homer: Iliad xvi. ~40-4.
33. Pausanias: ix. 5—7-8; Virgil: Aeneid ii. 261.
34—Philostratus: Heroica iii. 35; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 18; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy ~.
35. Homer: IIiadxxiv. 765; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: iii. ~2.5. 160. I—~60. 4 287 36. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. i9-20; Hyginus: Fabula Iox; Pliny: Natural History xxv. ~9.
37. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Philostratus: Heroicall. 18; Scholiast onHomer’s Odyssey i. 520; Apollodorm: Epitome iii. 20.
, After the fall of Cnossus, about the year 1400 B.c., a contest for sea,wet arose between the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. This is dected in Herodotus’s account, which John Malalas supports (see 58.4), ;the raids preceding Helen’s abduction, and in Apollodorus’s record of 0w Paris raided Sidon (see 159. t), and Agamemnon’s people, Mysia. A ‘rojan confederacy offered the chief obstacle to Greek mercantile ambi10ns, until the High King of Mycenae gathered his allies, including the ~reek overlords of Crete, for a concerted attack on Troy. The naval war, m0pposed to the siege of Troy, may well have lasted for nine or ten years. ~. Among Agamemnon’s independent allies were the islanders of Same, Dulichium, and Zacynthus led by Odysseus; the Southern led by Achilles; and their Aeacan cousins from Locris and led by the two Ajaxes. These chieftains proved an awkward
, handle and Agamenmon could keep them from each other’s only by intrigue, with the loyal support of his Peloponnesian henchmen Menelaus of Sparta, Diomedes of Argos, and Nestor of Pylus. Ajax’s rejection of the Olympian gods and his affront to the Zeus-born Athene have been misrepresented as evidence of atheism; they record, :rather, his religious conservatism. The Aeacids were of Lelegian stock and worshipped the pre-Hellenic goddess (see 158. 8 and ~68.2). 5. The Thebans and Athenians seem to have kept out of the war; though Athenian forces are mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships, they play no memorable part before Troy. But the presence of King Menestheus has been emphasized to justify later Athenian expansion along the Black Sea coast (see 162. 3)—Odysseus is a key-figure in Greek mythology. Despite his birth from a daughter of the Corinthian Sun-god and his oldfashioned foot-race winning of Penelope, he breaks the ancient matrilocal rule by insisting that Penelope shall come to his kingdom, rather than he to hers (see 137. 4). Also, like his father Sisyphus (see 67. 2), and Cretan Cinyras (see 18.5), he refuses to die at the end of his proper term—which is the central allegory of the Odyssey (see 170. I and 17~. 3). Odysseus, moreover, is the first mythical character credited with an irrelevant physical peculiarity: legs short in proportion to his body, so that he’ looks nobler sitting than standing.’ The scarred thigh, however, should be read as a sign that he escaped the death incumbent on boar-cult kings (see ~8.3 and 151. 2).
4. Odysseus’s pretended madness, though consistent with his novel reluctance to act as behoved a king, seems to be misreported. What he did was to demonstrate prophetically the uselessness of the war to which he had been summoned. Wearing a conical hat which marked the mystagogue or seer, he ploughed a field up and down. Ox and ass stood for Zeus and Cronus, or summer and winter; and each furrow, so,a,n with salt, for a wasted year. Palamedes, who also had prophetic powers (see 52. 6), then seized Telemachus and halted the plough, doubtless at the tenth furrow, by setting him in front of the team: he thereby showed that the decisive battle, which is the meaning of’ Telemachus ‘, would take place then. 5—Achilles, a more conservative character, hides among women, as befits a solar hero (White Goddess p. 212), and takes arms in the fourth month, when the Sun has passed the equinox and so from the tutelage of his mother, Night. Cretan boys were called scotioi, ‘ children of darkness’ (see 27. 2), while confined to the women’s quarters, not having yet been given arms and liberty by the priestess-mother (see 12~. 5). In the Mabinogion, Odysseus’s ruse for arming Achilles is used by Gwydion (the god Odin, or Woden) on a similar occasion: wishing to release Llew Llaw Gyffes, another solar hero, from the power of his mother Arianrhod, he creates a noise of battle outside the castle and frightens her into giv’mg Llew Llaw sword and shield. The Welsh is probably the elder version of the myth, which the Argives dramatized on the first day of the fourth month by a fight between boys dressed in girls’ clothes and women dressed in men’s—the festival being called the Hybristica (‘shameful behaviour’). Its historical excuse was that, early in the fifth century, the poetess Telesilla, with a company of women, had contrived to hold Argos against King Cleomenes of Sparta, after the total defeat of the Argive army (Plutarch: On the Virtues of Women 4). Since Patroclus bears an inappropriately patriarchal name (‘ glory of the father’), he may have once been Phoenix (‘blood red’), Achilles’s twin and tanist undcr the matrilinear system.
6. All the Greek leaders before Troy are sacred kings. Little Ajax’s tame serpent cannot have accompanied him into battle: he did not have one m~til he became an oracular hero. Idomeneus’s boar’s tusk helmet, attested by finds in Crete and Mycenaean Greece, was originally perhaps worn by the tanist (see ~ 8.7); his cock, sacred to the sun, and representh~g Zeus Velchanos, must be a late addition to Homer because the domestic hen did not reach Greece until the sixth century ~3.c. The original device is likely to have been a cock partridge (see 92. ~ ). These cumbrous shields consisted ofbull’s hides sewn together, the extremities being rounded off, and the waist nipped, in figure-of—eight shape, for ritual use. They covered the entire body from chin to ankle. Achilles (‘lipless’) seems to have been a commou title of oracular heroes, since there were Achilles cults at Scyros, Phthia, and Elis (Pausanias: vi. 23. 3).
7. Rhoeo, daughter of Staphylus and Chrysothemis (‘Pomegranate, daughter of Bunch of Grapes and Golden Order’) came to Delos in a thest and is the familiar fertility-goddess with her new-moon boat. She also ai>pears in triad as her grand-daughters the Winegrowers, whose names mean’ olive oil’, ‘ grain’ and’ wine’. Their mother is Dorippe, or ‘gift mare’, which suggests that Rhoeo was the mare-headed Demeter (see ~6.5)—Her cult survives vestigially today in the three-cupped kernos, a vessel used by Greek Orthodox priests to hold the gifts of oil, grain, and wine brought to church for s~Inctification. A kernos of the same type has bcc~ f~)und in an early Minoan tomb at Koumasa; and the Winegrowers, bci~g great-grandchildren of Ariadne, must have come to Delos from Crete (see 27. 8).
,~. The Greeks’ difficulty in finding their way to Troy is contradicted by tile ease with which Menelaus had sailed there; perhaps in the original lcgc~d Trojan Aphrodite cast a spell which fogged their memory, as she a~~crwards dispersed the fleets on the return voyage (see ~69. 2). 9. Achilles’s treatment of the spear wound, based on the ancient h01~(~copathic principle that ‘like cures like’, recalls Melampus’s use of rust frt~m a gelding-knife to restore Iphiclus (see 72. e).
~,~. Maenads, in vase-paintings, sometimes have their limbs tattooed with a woof-and-warp pattern formalized as a ladder. If their faces were once similarly tattooed as a camouflage for woodland revelling, this ~zight explain the name Penelope (‘ with a web over her face’), as a title 0ś the orgiastic mountain-goddess; alternatively, she may have worn a net in her orgies, like Dictynna and the British goddess Goda (see 89. z and 3)—Pan’s alleged birth from Penelope, after she had slept promiscuously with all her suitors in Odysseus’s absence (see ~6~. I), records a tradition ofpre-Hellenic sexual orgies; the penelope duck, like the swan, was probably a totem-bird of Sparta (see 62.3-4).
1. No commentator has hitherto troubled to explain precisely why Calchas’s nest of birds should have been set on a plane-tree and devoured by a serpent; but the fact is that serpents cast their slough each year and renew themselves, and so do plane-trees—whicfi makes them both
s3,nabols of regeneration. Calchas therefore knew that the birds which were devoured stood for years, not months. Though later appropriated by Apollo, the plane was the Goddess’s sacred tree in Crete and Sparta (see 58.3), because its leaf resembled a green hand with the fingers stretched out to bless—a gesture frequently found in her archaic statuettes. The blue spots on the serpent showed that it was sent by Zeus, who x~’~)re a blue nimbus as god of the sky. Cinyras’s toy ships perhaps reflect a Cyprian custom borrowed from Egypt, of burying terracotta ships beside dead princes for their voyage to the Otherworld.
~2. The fifty daughters of Cinyras’s who turned into halcyons will have been a college of Aphrodite’s priestesses. One of her rifles was ‘Alcyone’, ‘the queen who wards off [storms]’, and the halcyons, or kingfishers, which were sacred to her, portended calms (see 45—z).
Ca L c H a s, the brother of Leucippe and,Theono~, had learned the ‘. of prophecy from his father Thestor. One day, Theono~ was walldr on the seashore near Troy, when Carian pirates bore her off, and she became mistress to King Icarus. Thestor at once set out in pursuit, but was shipwrecked on the Carian coast and imprisoned by Icarus. Sever years later, Leucippe, who had been a mere child when these sad eve~ took place, went to Delphi for news of her father and sister. Advisedl the Pythoness to disguise herself as a priest of Apollo and go to Caria~ search of them, Leucippe obediently shaved her head and visited th court of King Icarus; but Theono~, not seeing through the disguise, fe in love with her, and told one of the guards:’ Bring that young priest t my bedroom!’ Leucippe, failing to recognize Theono~, and fearing t be put to death as an impostor, rebuffed her; whereupon Theon0{ since she could not ask the palace servants to commit sacrilege by killin a priest, gave orders that one of the foreign prisoners must do so, an sent a sword for his use.
b. Now, the prisoner chosen was Thestor, who went to the bedr00~ in which Leucippe had been locked, displayed his sword, and despai~ ingly told her his story. ‘I will not kill you, sir,’ he said, ‘because I too worship Apollo, and prefer to kill myself! But let me first reveal my name: I am Thestor, son of Idmon the Argonaut, a Trojan priest.’ He was about to plunge the sword into his own breast, when Leucip?e snatched it away.’ Father, father !’ she exclaimed,’ I am Leucippe, your daughter! Do not turn this weapon against yourself; use it to kill King Icarus’s abominable concubine. Come, follow me!’ They hurried to Theonoi’s embroidery-chamber. ‘Ah, lustful one,’ cried Leucippe, bursting in and dragging Thestor after her.’ Prepare to die by the hand of my father, Thestor son ofIdmon!’ Then it was Theono~’s turn to exclaim: ‘Father, father!’; and when the three had wept tears o fj0y, and given thanks to Apollo, King Icarus generously sent them all home, laden with gifts.1
c. Now Priam, after rejecting Agamemnon’s demand for the return of Helen, sent Thestor’s son Calchas, a priest of Apollo, to consult the Delphic Pythoness. Having foretold the fall of Troy and the total ruin of Priam’s house, she ordered Calchas to join the Greeks and prevent them from raising the siege until they were victorious. Cakhas then swore an oath of friendship with Achilles, who lodged him in his own house, and presendy brought him to Agamernnon.2
d. When the Greek fleet assembled for the second time at Aulis, but was windbound there for many days, Calchas prophesied that they would be unable to sail unless Agamemnon sacrificed the most beautiful ośhis daughters to Artemis. Why Artemis should have been vexed is disputed. Some say that, on shooting a stag at long range, Agamemnon had boasted: ‘Artemis herself could not have done better!’; or had killed her sacred goat; or had vowed to offer herthe most beautiful creature born that year in his kingdom, which happened to be Iphigeneia; 0t that his father Atrens had withheld a goldenlamb which was her due.1 At any rate, Agamemnon refused to do as he was expected, saying that Clytaemnestra would never let Iphigeneia go. But when the G~eeks swore: ‘We shall transfer our allegiance to ?alamedes if he continues obdurate,’ and when Odysseus, feigning anger, prepared to sail home, Menelaus came forward as peace-maker. He suggested that Odysseus and ‘l’althybius should fetch Iphigeneia to Aulis, on the pretext of marrying her to Achilles as a reward for his dating feats in Mysia. To this ruse Agamemnon agreed, and ~though he at once sent a secret message, warning Clytaemnestra not to believe Odysseus, Menelaus intercepted this, and she was tricked into bśmging Iphigeneia to Auli~.1
c. When Achilles found that his name had been misused, he undertook to protect Iphigeneia from injury; but she nobly consented to die for the glory of Greece, and offered her neck to the sacrificial axe witht~ut a word of complai~t. Some say that, in the nick of fxme, Artemis carried her off to the land of the Taurians, subst~tuting a hind at the altar; or a she-bear; or an old woman. Others, that a peal of thunder was heard and that, at Artemis’s order and Clytaemnestra’s plea, A.chilles intervened, saved Iphigeneia, and sent her to Scythia; or that l:e n~:~rried her, and that she, not Deidameia, bore him Neoptolemus.S f But whether Iphigeneia died or was spared, the north-easterly gale dropped, and the fleet set sail at last. They first touched at Lesbos, v, herc Odysseus entered the ring against King Philomeleides, who always compelled his guests to wrestle with him; and, amid the loud d~eers of every Greek present, threw him ignominiously. Next, they l~ndcd on Tenedos, which is visible from Troy, and was then ruled by Tenes who, though reputedly the son of Cycnus and Procleia of Laomedon, could call Apollo his father.
,›. This Cycnus, a son of Poseidon and Calyce, or Harpale, Colonae. He had been born in secret, and exposed on the seashore was found by some fishermen who saw a swan flying him.6 After the death of Procleia, Tragasus; she fell in love with her step-son Tenes, failed to seduc, and vengefully accused him of having tried to violate her.
the flautist Molpus as a witness; and Cycnus, believing them, Tenes and his sister Hemithea in a chest and set them adrift on the s They were washed ashore on the island of Tenedos, hitherto Leucophrys, which means’ white brow’.7 Later the truth, he had Molpus stoned to death.
hearing that Tenes survived and was living on Tenedos, hastened ther to admit his error. But Tenes, in an unforgiving mood, cut the cabk of Cycnus’s ship with an axe: hence the proverbial expression fbr an angry refusal—’He cut him with an axe from Tenedos.’ Finall)’, however, Tenes softened, and Cycnus settled near him on Tenedos.S
h. Now, Thetis had warned Achilles that if ever he killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by Apollo’s hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the sol~ purpose of reminding him of this. But Achilles, when he saw Tenes hurhng a huge rock from a at the Greek ships, swam ashore, and thoughtlessly thrust him through the heart. The Greeks then landed and ravaged Tenedos; and realizing too late what he had done, Achilles put Mnemon to death because he had failed to remind him of Thetis’s words. He buried Tenes where his shrine now stands: no flautist may enter there, nor may Achill›s’s name be mentioned.9 Achilles also killed Cycnus with a blow on the head, only vulnerable part; and pursued Hemithea, who fled from him like a hind, but would have been overtaken and violated, had not the earth swallowed her up. It was in Tenedos, too, that Achilles first quarrelled with Agamenmon, whom he accused of having invited him tojoin the expedition only as an afterthought.10
i. Palamedes offered a hecatomb to Apollo Smintheus in gratitude for the Tenedan victory but, as he did so, a water-snake approached the altar and bit Philoctetes, the famous archer, in the foot; Neither unguents nor fomentations availed, and the wound grew so noisome, and Philoctetes’s groans so loud, that the army could no longer t~Icrate his company. Agamemnon therefore ordered Odysseus to put him ashore in a deserted district of Lemnos, where he sustained life for several years by shooting birds; and Medon assumed the command of his troops.1~
j. According to another account, the accident happened on Chrysc, an islet off Lemnos, which has since vanished beneath the sea. There either the nymph Chryse fell in love with Philoctetes and, when he rejected her advances, provoked a viper to bite him while he was clearing away the earth from a buried altar of Athene Chryse; or else a serpent that guarded Athene’s temple bit him when he came too close.1z
k. According to a third account, Philoctetes was bitten in Lemnos itself by a serpent which Hera sent as a punishment for his having dared to kindle Heracles’s funeral pyre. He was, at the time, rapfly gazing at the altar raised to Athene by Jason, and planning to raise another t.1 Herades. ~3
1. A fourth account is that Philoctetes was bitten while admiring Troilus’s tomb in the temple ofThymbraean Apollo.14 A fifth, that he ú was wounded by one ofHeracles’s envenomed arrows. Heracles, it is said, had made him swear never to divulge the whereabouts of his buried ashes; but when the Greeks learned that Troy could not be sacked without the use of Heracles’s arrows, they went in search of Philoctetes. Though at first denying all knowledge of Heracles, he ended by telling them exactly what had’happened on Mount Oeta; so . they eagerly asked him where they might find the grave. This question he refused to answer, but they became so insistent that he went to the place, and there wordlessly stamped on the ground. Later, as he passed the grave on his way to the Trojan War, one of Heracles’s arrows leaped from the quiver and pierced his foot: a warning that one must not reveal divine secrets even by a sign or hint.x$
1. Hyginus: Fabula 190.
2. Benoit: Le Roman de Troie.
3. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: v., quoted by Photius p. 483; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 2~.
4. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: foe. cit.; Euripides: loc. cit.; Apollodorus: Epitome hi. 22; Dictys Cretensis: i. 20.
5. Euripides: Iphigeneia in AuIis; Sophocles: Electra 574; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Dictys Cretensis: i. 19; Tzetzes: On Lycophron x 83. 6. Homer: Odyssey iv. 342-4; Apollodorus: Epitome hi. 23-4; Pausanias: x. 14—2; Hyginus: Fabula ~57; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes ii. 147; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 232-3. 7. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 24; Pausanias: loc. tit.; Tzetzes: loc. tit. 8. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 25; Pausanias: x. 14. 2; Tzetzes: loc. ›it.
9. Tzetzes: Ioc. cit.; Plutarch: Greek Questions28.
~o. Tzetzes: Ioc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 31; Cyprla, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy L
xx. Dictys Cretensis: ii. ~4; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 27; Homer: Itiad ii. 727.
12. Pausanias: viii. 33. 2; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 91~; Sophocles: Phitoctetes 1327; Philostratus: Imagines 17; Eustathius on Homer p. 330.
13. Hyginus: Fabula ~02; Scholiast on Sophodes’s Philoctetes, verses 2, 193 and 266.
~$. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 402.
~t
1. The lost play from which Hygi~us has taken the story of Thestor and his daughters shows the Greek dramatists at their most theatrical; it has no mythological value.
1. A version of the ‘Jephthah’s daughter’ myth (see ~ 69..5 ) seems to have been confused with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of a priestess at Aulis, on a charge of raising contrary winds by witchcraft; Six Francis Drake once hanged one of his sailors, a spy in Cecil’s pay, on the same charge. Agamemnon’s high-handed action, it seems, offended conservative opinion at home, women being traditionally exempt from sacrifice. The Taurians, to whom Iphigeneia was said to have been sent by Artemis, lived in the Crimea and worshipped Artemis as a man-slayer; Agamemnon’s son Orestes fell into their clutches (see I t6. e), 3. Odysseus’s wrestlfiag match with King Philomeleides, whose name means’ dear to the apple-nymphs ‘, is probably taken from a familiar icon, showing the ritual contest in which the old king is defeated by the new and given an apple-bough (see 53—b).
4. Achilles killed a second Cycnus (see 162.f); Heracles killed a third (see ~43. g), and was prevented by Zeus from killing a fourth (see x 33—d). The name imphed that swans conveyed these royal souls to the Northern Paradise. When Apollo appears in ancient works of art riding on swanback, or in a chariot drawn by swans (Overbeck: Griechische Kunstmythologie) on a visit to the Hyperboreans, this is a polite way of depicting his representative’s annual death at midsummer. Singing swans then fly north to their breeding grounds in the Arctic circle, and utter two trumpet4ike notes as they go; which is why Pausanias (i. 30. 3) says that swans are versed in the Muses’ craft. ‘ Swans sing before they die’: the sacred king’s soul departs to the sound of music.
5. Philoctetes’s wound has been associated with many different localities because the icon from which his story derives was widely current. He is the sacred king ofTeneros, Lemnos, Euboea, or any other Helladic state, receiving the prick of an envenomed arrow in his foot (see ~26.3; 154. h; 164. j and ~66. e) beside the goddess’s altar. 6. Heracles was not the only sacred king whose grave remained a secret; this seems to have been common practice on the Isthmus of Corinth (see 67. j), and among the primitive Hebrews (Deuteronomy xxxiv. 6).
7, Tenes hurling rocks may be a misinterpretation of the familiar icon which shows a sun-hero pushing the sun-boulder up to the zenith (see 67. ~), since Talos, a Cretan sun-hero, also hurled rocks at approaching ships (see ~$4. h). The ships in this icon would merely indicate that Crete, or Tenedos, was a naval power.
AT what point the Greeks sent Priam envoys to demand the return of Helen and ofMenelaus’s pioperty, is disputed. Some say, soon after the expedition had landed in the Troad; others, before the ships assembled at Auhs; but it is commonly held that the embassy, consisting of Menebus, Odysseus, and Palamedes, went ahead from Tenedos.1 The Trojans, however, being determined to keep Helen, would have murdered them all had not Antenor, in whose house they were lodging, forbidden the shameful deed. z
b. Vexed by this obduracy, the Greeks sailed from Tenedos and beached their ships within sight of Troy. The Trojans at once flocked down to the sea and tried to repel the invaders with showers of stones. Then, while all the others hesitated—even Achilles, whom Thetis had warned that the first to land would be the first to die—Protesilaus leaped ashore, killed a number of Trojans, and was struck dead by Hector; or it may have been Euphorbus; or Aeneas’s friend Achates.3
c. This Protesilaus, an uncle of Philoctetes, and son of that Iphiclus whom Melampus cured of impotence, had been called Iolaus, but was renamed from the circumstance of his death.4 He lies buried in the Thracian Chersonese, near the dty of Elaeus, where he is now given divine honours. Tall elm-trees, planted by nymphs, stand within. his precinct and overshadow the tomb. The boughs which face Troy across the sea burst early into leaf, but presendy go bare; while those on the other side are still green in winter-time. When the elms grow so high that the walls of Troy can be clearly discerned by a man posted in~ their upper branches, they wither; saplings, however, spring again from the roots. S
d. Protesilaus’s wife Laodameia, daughter of Acastus (whom some call Polydora daughter of Mcleager) missed him so sadly that as soon as he sailed for Troy she made a brazen, or wax, statue of him and laid it in her bed. But this was poor comfort, and when news came of his death. she begged the gods to take pity and let him revisit her, if only fi~r three hours. Almighty Zeus granted Laodameia’s request, and Hcrrncs brought up Protesilaus’s ghost from Tartarus to animate the statue. Speaking with its mouth, Protesilaus then adjured her not to delay in following him, and the three hours had no sooner ended than she stabbed herself to death in his embrace.0 Others say that Laodamcia’s father Acastus forced her to remarry, but that she spent her nights with Protesilaus’s statue until one day a servant, bringing apples for a d:~~ sacrif~ce, looked through a crack in the bedroom-door and sa embracing what he took to be a lover. He ran and told Acastus wt~ bursting into the room, discovered the truth. Rather than tl~at should torture herself by fruitless longing, Acastus ordered the to be burned; but Laodameia threw herself into the flames and perished with it.7
e. According to another tradition, Protesilaus survived the Trojan War and set sail for home. He took back, as his r’ ‘ ‘ p ~soner, Priam s sister Aethylla. On the way he landed at the Macedonian peninsula of Pellen› but, while he went ashore in search of water, Aethylla persuaded the other captive women’ to burn the ships; and Protesilaus, thus obliged to remain on Pellene, founded the city of Scione. This, however, is an error: Aethylla, with Astyoche and her fellow-captives, s,et fire to the vessels beside the Italian river Navaethus, which means burning of ships’; and Protesilaus did not figure among their captors?
f Achilles was the second Greek to land on the Trojan shore, closely followed by his Myrmidons, and killed Cycnus son of Poseidon with a well-flung stone. Thereupon the Trojans broke and fled back to their city, while the remainder of the Greeks disembarked and pressed murderously on the rout. According to another account, Achilles, mindful of Brotesilaus’s rite, was the very last to land, and then took such a prodigious leap from his ship that a spring gushed out where his feet struck the shore. In the ensuing battle, it is said, Cycnus, who was invulnerable, killed Greeks by the hundred; but Achilles, after trying sword and spear against him in vain, battered furiously at his face with the hilt of his sword, forced him backwards until he tripped over a stone, then knelt on his breast and strangled him with the straps of his helmet; however, Poseidon turned his spirit into a swan, which flew away. The Greeks then laid siege to Troy and drew up their strips behind a stockade.9
g. Now, the city was fated not to fall if Troilus could attain the ag~ of twenty. Some say that Achilles fell in love with him as they fought together, and ‘I will kill you,’ he said, ‘unless you yicld to my caresses!’ Troilus fled and took sanctuary in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo; but Achill.es cared nothing for the god’s wrath and since Troilus remained coy, beheaded him at the altar, the very place where he himself later perished.10 Others say that Achilles speared Troilus while h~ was exercising his horses in the temple precinct; or that he lured hir~ out by offering a gift of doves, and that Troilus died with crushed ribs and livid face, in such bear-like fashion did Achilles make love. Others, again, say that Troilus sallied vengefully from Troy after the death of Memnon and encountered Achilles, who killed him—or else he was taken prisoner and then publicly slaughtered in cold blood at Achilles’s orders—and that, being then middle-aged, with a swarthy complexion and a flowing beard, he can hardiy have excited Achilles’s passion. But whatever the manner of his death, Achilles caused it, and the Trojans mourned for him as grievously as for Hector.1
h. Troilus is said to have loved Briseis, Calchas’s beautiful daughter, who had been left behind in Troy by her father and, since she had phyed no part in his defection, continued to be treated there with courtesy. Calchas, knowing that Troy must fall, persuaded Agamemnon to ask Priam for her on his behalf, lest she shotfid be made a prisoner of war. Priam generously gave his assent and several of his sons escorted Briseis to the Greek camp. Although she had sworn undying fidelity to Troilus, Briseis soon transferred her affections t:) Diomedes the Argive, who fell passionately in love with her and did his best to kill Troilus whenever he appeared on the battlefield.12 i. On a night expedition, Achilles captured Lycaon, surprising him in his father Priam’s orchard, where he was cutting fig-tree shoots for use as chariot-rails. Patroclus took Lycaon to Lemnos, and sold him to Jason’s son, King Euneus, who supphed the Greek forces with wine; the price being a silver Phoenidan mixing-bowl. But E~tion oflmbros ransomed him, and he returned to Troy, only to perish at the hand 0 Achilles twelve days later.13
j. AchLlles now set out with a band of volunteers to ravage the Trojan countryside. On Mount Ida he cut off Aeneas the Dardanian from his cattle, chased him down the wooded slopes and, after killing the cattlemen and Priam’s son Mestor, captured the herd and sacked the city of Lyrnessus, where Aeneas had taken refuge. Mynes and Epistrophus, sons of King Evenus, died in the fighting; but Zeus helped Aeneas to escape. Mynes’s wife, another Briseis, daughter ofl3riseus, was made captive, and her father hanged himself.14
k. Though Aeneas had connived at Paris’s abduction of Helen, he remained neutral for the first few years of the war; being born of the goddess Aphrodite by Anchises, the grandson of Tros, he resented tile disdain shown him by his cousin Priam.1S Yet Achilles’s provocativ~ raid obliged the Dardanians to join forces with the Trojans at Aeneas proved a skilled fighter and even Achilles did not dispar:~, him: for if Hector was the hand of the Trojans, Aeneas was their soul. His divine mother frequendy helped him in batfie; and once, when Diomedes had broken his hip with the cast of a stone, rescued him from death; and when Diomedes had wonnded her too, with a spear-thiust in the wrist, Apollo carried Aeneas off the field for Leto and Artemis to cure. On another occasion his life was saved by Poseidon who, though hostile to the Trojans, respected the decrees of fate and knew that the royal line of Aeneas must eventually rule Troy?
1. Many cities allied to Troy were now taken by Achilles: Lesbos, Phocaea, Colophon, Smyrna, Clazomenae, Cyme, Aegialus, Tenos, Adramyttium, Dide, Endium, Linnaeum, Colone, Lyrnessus, Antandrus, and several others, including Hypoplacian Thebes, where another E~tion, father of Hector’s wife Andromache, and his comrade Podes, ruled over the Cilicians. Achilles killed E~tion, and seven of his sons besides, but did not despoil his corpse: he burned it fully armoured and around the barrow which he heaped, mountain-nymphs planted a grove of elm-trees.17 The captives included Astynome, or Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo in the island of Sminthos. Some call Astynome E~tion’s wife; others say that Chryses had sent her to Lyrnessus for protection, or to attend a festival of Artemis. When the spoils were distributed, she fell to Agamenmon, as did Briseis to Achilles. From Hypoplacian Thebes, Achilles also brought away the swift horse Pcdasus, whom he yoked to his immortal team.18
m. Great Ajax sailed to the Thracian Chersonese, where he captured Lycaon’s blood-brother Polydorus—their mother was Laotho~—and in TeuthratLia killed King Teuthras, and carried off great spoils, among them the princess Tecmessa, whom he made his concubine.19
n. As the tenth year of the war approached, the Greeks refrained from raiding the coast of Asia Minor, and concentrated their forces before Troy. The Trojans marshalled their allies against them—Dardanians, led by Aeneas and the two sons orAntenor; Thracian Ciconians; Paeonians; Paphlagonians; Mysians; Phrygians; Maeonians; Carians; Lycians; and so forth. Sarpedon, whom Bellerophon’s daughter Laodameia had borne to Zeus, led the Lycians. This is his story. When Laodameia’s brother Isander and Hippolochus were contending for the kingdom, it was proposed that whichever of them might shoot an arrow through a gold ring hung upon a child’s breast should be king. Each hotly demanded the other’s child as the victim, but Laodameia prevented them from murdering each other by offering to tie the ring ú around the neck of her own son, Sarpedon. Astounded at such noble unselfishness, they both agreed to resign their claims to the kingdom in fayour of Sarpedon; with whom Glaucus, the son of Hippolochus, was now reigrfing as co-king.20
0. Agamemnon had sent Odysseus on a foraging expedition to Thrace, and when he came back empty-handed, Palamedes son of Nauplius upbraided him for his sloth and cowardice. ‘It was not my fault,’ cried Odysseus, ‘that no corn could be found. If Agamemnon had sent you in my stead, you would have had no greater success.’ Thus challenged, Palamedes set sail at once and presently reappeared with a ship-load ofgrain. Z~
ś. After days of tortuous thought, Odysseus at last hit upon a plan by which he might be revenged on Palamedes; for his honour was wounded. He sent word to Agamemnon:’ The gods have wanted me in a dream that treachery is afoot: the camp must be moved for a day and anight.’ When Agamemnon gave immediate orders to have this done, Odysseus secretly buried a sackful of gold at the place where Palamedes’s tent had been pitched. He then forced a Phrygian’prisoner to write a letter, as if from Priam to Palamedes, which read: ‘The gold that I’ have sent is the price you asked for betraying the Greek camp.’ Having then ordered the prisoner to l~and Palamedes this letter, Odysseus had him killed just outside the camp, before he could deliver it. Next day, when the army returned to the old site, someone found the prisoner’s corpse and took the letter to Againchinon. Palamcdcs v court-martialled and, when he body denied having Priam or anyone else, Odysseus suggested that his tent should searched. The gold was discovered, and the whole arm)
medes to death as a traitor?
q. Some say that Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes were all plicated in this plot, and that they jointly dictated the false letter to the Phrygian and afterwards bribed a servant to hide it with the gold under Palamedes’s bed. When Palamcdes was led off’ to the place ośstoning he cried aloud: ‘Truth, I mourn for you, who have predcceased mc{‘Z3 r. Others, again, say that Odysseus and Diomedes, pretending to have discovered a treasure in a deep well, let Palamedes down into it by a rope, and then tumbled large stones on his head; or that they drowned him on a fishing excursion. still others say that Paris killed him with an arrow. It is not even agreed whether his death took place at Trojan Colonae, at Geraestus, or on Tenedos; but he has a hero. shrine near Lesbian Methymna. Z4
s. Palamedes had deserved the gratitude of his comrades by tl~e invention of dice, with which they whiled away their time before Troy; and the first set of which he dedicated in the temple of Tychc at Argos. But all envied him his superior wisdom, because he had als0 invented hghthouses, scales, measures, the discus, the alphabet, anti tile art of posting sentinels.2s
1. When Nauplius heard of the murder, he sailed to Troy and claimed satisfaction; yet this was denied him by Agamemnon, had been Odysseus’s accomplice and enjoyed the confidence off all t}~e Greek leaders. So Nauplius returned to Greece with his surviving Oeax, and brought false news to the wives of Palamedes’s murderers, saying to each: ‘Your husband is bringing back a Trojan concubicle as his new queen.’ Some of these unhappy wives thereupon killed selves. Others committed adultery: as did Agamemnon’s wife taerrmestra, with Aegisthus; Diomedes’s wife Aegialeia, with Con~ctes son of Sthenelus; and Idomeneus’s wife Meda, with one Leucus. Z~ x. Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy i; Tzetzes: Ant~’hom~’rica ~ 54 if.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad iii. 206.
1. Dictys Cretensis: i. 4; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 28-9; Honker: Iliad iii. 207.
3. Apollodorus: Epitomeiii. 29-30; Hyginus: Fabula 103; Eustathi’as on Homer pp. 325 and 326, 162. i 30~
4. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Eustathius on Homer p. ~45.
5. Pausanias: i. 34. 2; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 532-3; Philostratus: Heroica iii. I; Quintus Smymaeus: Posthomerica vii. 408 fir.; Pliny: Natural History xvi. 88.
6. Hyginus: Fabulae ~03 and ~04; Cypria, quoted by Pausanias: iv. 2. 5; Ovid: Heroides xiii. 152; Eustathius on Homer p. 325; Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 30; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 447. 7. Eustathius on Homer, loc. tit.; Hyginus: Fabula I04.
8. Conon: Narrations 13; Apoilodorus: Epitome, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 941; Strabo: vi. I. 12.
9. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 31; Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~45; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 70-145.
10. First Vatican Mythographer: 210; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 307. I~. EustathiusonHomer’slliadxxiv. 251,p. 1348; Servius onVirgil’s Aeneid i. 478; Dictys Cretensis: iv. 9; Tzetzes: loc. cit.
~z. Benoit: Le Roman de Troie.
13. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 32; Homer: Iliad xxi. 34 if. and 85-6; ~:xiii. 740-7 and vii. 467-8.
14. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 32; Homer: Iliad ii. 690-3; xx. 89 fl. and 188 if.; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad iii. 58; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 184; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy i; Dictys Cretensis: ii. ~7.
15. Hyginus: Fabula 115; Homer: IIfad xiii. 460 fir. and xx. 181 if..; Hesiod: Theogony I007.
16. Homer: Iliad v. 305 if.; xx. 178 if. and 585 if.; Philostratus: Heroica 13.
17. Homer: Iliad ix. 328-9; vi. 395-7; xvii. 575-7 and vi. 413-28; Apollodoru~: Epitome iii. 33.
18. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 17; Homer: Iliad i. 366 fir. and xvi. 149-54; Eustathius on Homer pp. 77, 118 and ~~9.
19. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 18; Sophocles: Ajax 210; Horace: Odes ii. ~.1.
zo. Heracleides Ponticus: Homeric Allegories pp. 424-$; Homer: Iliad vi. 196 if.; ApoLlodorus: Epitome iii. 34-5; Eustathius on Homer p. 894.
1. Cypria, quoted by Proclus: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 8~.
22. Apollodorus: Epitome iii. 8; Hyginus: Fabula I05.
23. Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 432; Philostratus: 17~?roica Io. 24. Dictys Cretensis: ii. xS; Cypria, quoted by Pausanias: x. 31. I; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 384 fl. and I097; Dares: 28.
25. Pausanias: x. 3 I. I and ii. 20. 3; Philostratus: loc. tit.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Oresres 432; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 8 I; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 384. 26. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 8-9; Tzetzes: On LFophron Eustathius on Homer p. 24; Dictys Cretensis: vi. 2.
1. The Iliad deals in sequence only with the tenth year of the sie~ each mythographer has arranged the events of the preceding different order. According to Apollodorus (Epitome iii. 32-3), kills Troilus; captures Lycaon; raids Aeneas’s cattle; and takes cities. According to the C)~pria (quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy Greeks, failing to take Troy by assault, lay waste the country an round about; Aphrodite and Thetis contrive a meeting between and Helen; the Greeks decide to go home but are restrained by who then drives offAeneas’s cattle, sacks many cities, and kills Patroclus sells Lycaon on Lemnos; the spoils are divided; Palart stoned to death.
2. AccordingtoTzetzes (OnLycophron 307),TroilusoutlivesM
and Hector. Similarly, according to Dares the Phrygian, Troilus st Hector as commander of the Trojan forces (Dares: 30), until on~ chariot horses is wounded and Achilles, driving up, runs him th Achilles tries to drag away the body, but is wounded by Memnon, he kills; the Trojans take refuge within the city and Priam giv~ Troilus and Memnon a magnificent funeral (Dares: 33).
3. The Trojan War is historical, and whatever the immediat, may have been, it was a trade war. Troy controlled the valuable Sea trade in gold, silver, iron, cinnabar, ship’s timber, hnen, hem[ fish, oil, and Chinese jade. When once Troy had fallen, the Gree~ able to plant colonic~ all along the eastern trade route, which grew as those of Asia Minor and Sicily. In the end, Athens, as the 1 maritime power, profired most from the Black Sea trade, especiall its cheap grain; and it was the loss of a fleet guarding the entrance Hellespont that ruined her at Aegospotamiin 405 B.c., and ended tt Peloponnesian Wars. Perhaps, therefore, the constant negotiatic tween Agamemnon and Priam did not concern the return of H
much as the restoration of the Greek rights to enter the Hellespo: 4—It is probable that the Greeks prepared for their final assau series of raids on the coasts of Thrace and Asia Minor, to cripple th power of the Trojan alliance; and that they maintained a camp mouth of the Scamander to prevent Mediterranean trade from re Troy, or the annual East-West Fair from being celebrated on the But the Iliad makes it clear that Troy was not besieged in the sen her lines of communication with the interior were cut, and while Achilles was about, the Trojans did not venture by day~t~ the Dardanian Gate, the one which led inland (Iliad v. 789); a: Greek laundresses feared to wash their clothes at the spr’mg a bow i62. 4-162. 7 303 from the walls (Iliad xxii. 256); yet supplies and reinforcements entered freely, and the Trojans held Sestos and Abydos, which kept them in dose touch with Thrace. That the Greeks boasted so loudly of a raid on the catde of Mount Ida, and another on Priam’s fig-orchard, suggests that they seldom went far inland. The fig-shoots used for the rail of Lycaon’s chariot were apparently designed to place it under the protection of Aphrodite. In the pre-Trojan-War tablets found at Cnossus, a number of ‘red-painted Cydonian chariots’ are mentioned,’ with joiner,/work complete’, but only the wood of the rails is specified: it is always fig. Yet fig was not nearly so suitable a wood for the purpose as many others available to the Cretans and Trojans.
5. Agamemnon had engaged in a war of attrition, the success of which Hector confesses (Iliadxvii. 225 and x-viii. 287—92) when he speaks of the drain on Trojan resources caused by the drying up of trade, and the need to subsidize allies. The Paphlagonians, Thracians, and Mysians were producers, not merchants, and ready to have direct dealings with the Greeks. Only the mercantile Lycians, who imported goods from the South-east, seem to have been much concerned about the fate of Troy, which secured their northern trade routes; indeed, when Troy fell, the trade of Asia Minor was monopolized by Agamemnon’s allies the Rhodians, and the Lycians were m/ned. 6. The coldblooded treatment of women, suppliants, and allies serves as a reminder that the Iliad is not Bronze Age myth. With the fall of Cnossus (see 39. 7 and 89. l) and the consequent disappearance ofthepax Cretensis, imposed by the Cretan Sea-goddess upon all countries within her sphere of influence, a new Iron Age morality emerges: that of the conquering tyrant, a petty Zeus, who acknowledges no divine restraint. Iphigeneia’s sacrifice, Odysseus’s hateful revenge on Palamedes, the selling of Lycaon for a silver cup, Achilles’s shameless pursuit of Troilus and the forced concubinage of Briseis and Chryseis are typical of barbarous saga. It is proper that Palamedes should have been the innocent victim of an unholy alliance between Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, since he represents the Cretan culture planted in Argolis—the inventions with which he is credited being all of Cretan origin. His murder in a well may have been suggested by ‘Truth, I mourn you, who have predeceased me l’ and by the familiar connexion of truth with wells. Palamedes means ‘andent wisdom’ and, like Hephaestus, his Lemnian counterpart, he was an oracular hero. His inventions reveal him as Thoth or Hermes (see 17. g). Dice have the same history as cards: they were oracuhr instruments before being used for games of chance (see 17.3). 7. The elm-tree, which does not form part of the tree—calendar (see 53.3), is mainly associated with the Dionysus cult, since. the Greeks trained vines on elm-saplings; but elms were planted by nymphs around the tombs of Protesilaus and E~tion, presumably because the leaves and 304 i62. 7—i62. lo bark served as ruineraries (Pliny: Natural History xxiv. 33), and promised to be even more efficacious if taken from the graves of princes who had succumbed to many wounds.
8. Laodameia’s perverse attachfiaent to Protesilaus’s statue may have been deduced from a sacred-wedding icon: in some Hittite marriageseals, the procumbent king is carved so stiffly that he looks like a statue. The apples brought by a servant, and Acastus’s sudden entry, suggest that the scene represented a queen’s betrayal of a king to her lover the tadst, who cuts the fatal apple containing his soul—as in the Irish legend of Cuchulain, Dechtire, and Curoi.
Briseis (accusative case: Briseida) became confused with Chryses, or Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, who had borne a bastard to Agamemnon (see I ~6. h); and the mediaeval Latin legend of Criseis (accusative case: Criseida) developed vigorously until Henrysoun’s Testament of Cresseic and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
9. Teuthraula may have been so called after the teuthis, or octopus, sacred to the Cretan Goddess (see 8~. l), whose chief priestess was Tecmessa (‘ she who ordains ‘). Though the Sarpedon myth is confused, its elements are all familiar Apparently the kingdom of Lycia, founded by another Sarpedon, uncl, of another Glaucus—Greek-speaking Cretans of Aeolian or Pelasgia~ stock, who were driven overseas by the Achaeans—was a double one with matrilinear succession, the title of the Moon-priestess being Lao. dameia (‘ tamer of the people’). Its sacred king seems to have been rituall,. ‘ born from a marc’ (see 8 x. 4 and 167. 2)—hence his name, Hippolochus ú and Isander (‘impartial man’) acted as his tanist. Sarpedon’s’name {‘re .joicing in a wooden ark’) refers apparently to the annual arrival ofth New Year Child in a boat. Here the Childis the interrex, to whom Hippo ~ochus resigns his kingship for a single day; he must then be suffocated i] honey, hke Cretan Glaucus (see 7~—d), or killed in a chariot crash, Eke th Isthmian Glaucus (see 90. ~), or transfixed with an arrow by the revive. Hippolochus, like Learchus son of Athamas (see 70. 5)io. To shoot an apple poised upon the head, or at a penny set in the ca[ of one’s own son was a test of marksmanship prescribed to mediaev: archers, whose guild (as appears in the Malleus Maleficarum and in th Little Geste of Robin Hood) belonged to the pagan witch cult both i śngland and Celtic Germany. In England this test was, it seems, designe to choose a ‘gudeman’ for Maid Marian, by marriage to whom h became Robin Hood, Lord of the Greenwood. Since the northern witc cult had much in common with neolithic religion of the Aegean, it ma be that the Lycians did not place the ring on a boy’s breast, but on h head, and that it represented a golden serpent (see ~19. 4); or that it w; the ring of an axe which he held in his hand, like those through whic Odysseus shot when he recovered Penelope from the suitors (see ~7 ised had
~6~. ~0—163. b 305 h). The mythographer has perhaps confused the shooting test demanded era new candidate for the kingship with the sacrifice of an interrex. ~. Aethylla means ‘kindling timber’, and the annual burning of a boat may have originated the Scione legend.
Protes’xlaus (‘first of the people’) must have been so common a royal title that several cities claimed his tomb.
W~N~r~a now drew on, and since this has never been a batde season among civilized nations, the Greeks spent it enlarging their camp arid practising archery. Sometimes they came across Trojan notables in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo, which was neutral territory; and once, wl~de Hecabe happened to be sacrificing there, Achilles arrived on the same errand and fell desperately in love with her daughter Polyxena. He made no declaration at the time but, returning to his hut in torment, sent the kindly Automedon to ask Hector on what terms he might marry Polyxena. Hector replied: ‘ She shall be his on the day that he betrays the Greek camp to my father Priam.’ Achilles seemed willing enough to accept Hector’s conditions, but drew back sullenly when informed that if he failed to betray the camp, he must swear instead to murder his cousin Great Ajax and the sons ofAtherfian Pleisthenes.1
b. Spring came and fighting was resumed. In the first engagement of the season Achilles sought out Hector, but the watchful Helenus pierced his hand with an arrow shot from an ivory bow, Apollo’s love gift, and forced him to give ground. Zeus himself guided the arrowhead; and as he did so decided to relieve the Trojans, whom the raids and the consequent desertion of certain Asiatic allies had greatly discouraged, by plaguing the Greeks and detaching Achilles from his fellow-chieftains.1 When, therefore, Chryses came to ransom Chryseis, Zeus persuaded Agamemnon to drive him away with opprobrious words; and Apollo, invoked by Chryses, posted himself vengefully near the ships, shoot’nag deadly arrows among the Greeks day after day. Hundreds perished, though (as it happened) no kings or princes suffered, and on the tenth day Calchas made known the presence of 306 ‘ ~63. b—~63.f !;~i!
the god. At his instance, Agamemnon grudgingly sent Chryseis bac~ to her father, with propitiatory gifts, but recouped his loss by se~ ]3riseis from Achilles, to whom she had been allotted; whereupon Achilles, in a rage, announced that he would take no further part in the War; and his mother Thetis indignantly approached Zeus, who mised her satisfaction on his behalf. t3ut some say that Achilles kept out of the fighting in order to show his goodwill towards Priam as Polp xena’s father.3
c. When the Trojans became aware that Achilles and his Myrmidons had withdrawn from the field, they took heart and made a vigorous sortie. Agamemnon, in alarm, granted them a truce, during which Paris and Menelaus were to fight a duel for the possession of Helen and the stolen treasure. The duel, however, proved indecisive, because when Aphrodite saw that Paris was getting the worst of it, she wrapped him in a magic mist and carried him back to Troy. Hera then sent Athene down to break the truce by making Pandarus son of Lyc~0~ shoot an arrow at Menelaus, which she did; at the same time inspired Diomedes to kill Pandarus and wound Aeneas and his Aphrodite. Glaucus son of Hippolochtts now opposed Diomedes, both recalled the close friendship that had bound their fathers, courteously exchanged arms.4
d. Hector challenged Achilles to single combat; and when Ad~illes sent back word that he had retired from the war, the Greeks Great Ajax as his substitute. These two champions fought pause until nightfall, when heralds parted them and each praised the other’s skill and courage. Ajax gave Hector the brilli.u~t purple baldric by which he was later dragged to his death; and Hcccc, r gave Ajax the silver-studded sword with which he was later to con~i~ suicide.s
e. An armistice being agreed upon, the Greeks raised a long barrow over their dead, and crowned it with a wall beyond which they d~g a deep, palisaded trench. But they had omitted to appease the deities supported the Trojans and, when fighting was resumed, were dri’~’cn across the trench and behind the wall. That night the Trojans encam dose to the Greek ships.6
f In despair, Agamemnon sent Phoenix, Ajax, Odysseus aI~d two heralds to placate Achilles, offering him countless gifts and d~e of Briseis (they were to swear that she was still a virgin) if onl’. would fight again. It should be explained that Chryses had mcan~i~i]c 163. f—~63. i 307 brought back his daughter, who protested that she had been very well treated by Agamemnon and wished to remain with him; she was pregnant at the time and later gave birth to Chryses the Second, a child of doubtful paternity. Achilles greeted the deputation with a pleasant smile, but refused their offers, and announced that he must sail home next morning.7
g. That same night about the third watch when the moon was high, Odysseus and Diomedes, encouraged by a lucky auspice from Athene —a heron on their right hand—decided to raid the Trojan lines. They happened to stumble over Dolon, son of Eumelus, who had been sent out on patrol by the enemy and, after forcibly extracting information from him, cut his throat. Odysseus then hid Dolon’s ferret-skin cap, wolf-skin cloak, bow and spear in a tamarisk bush and hurried with Diomedes to the right flank of the Trojan line where, they now knew, Rhesus the Thracian was encamped. He is variously described as the son oftbeMuse Euterpe, or Calliope, byEioneus, or Ares, or Strymon. Having stealthily assassinated Rhesus and twelve of his companions in their sleep, they drove off his magnificent horses, white as snow and swifter than the wind, and recovered the spoils from the tamarisk bush on their way back.1 The capture of Rhesus’s horses was of the highest importance, since an oracle had foretold that Troy would become impregnable once they had eaten Trojan fodder and drunken from the river Seamander, and this they had not yet done. When the surviving Thracians awoke, to find King Rhesus dead and his horses gone, they fled in despair; the Greeks killed nearly every one of them.9
h. On the following day, however, after a fierce struggle, in which Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Eurypylus, and Machaon the surgeon were all wounded, the Greeks took to flight and Hector breached their wall. ~o Encouraged by Apollo, he pushed on towards the ships and, despite assistance lent by Poseidon to the two Ajaxes and Idomeneus, broke through the Greek line. At this point Hera, who hated the Trojans, borrowed Aphrodite’s girdle and persuaded Zeus to come and sleep with her; a ruse which allowed Poseidon to turn the battle in the Greeks’ fayour. But Zeus, soon discovering that he had been duped, revived Hector (nearly killed by Ajax with a huge stone), ordered Poseidon off the field, and restored the Trojans’ courage. Forward they went again: Medon killing Periphetes son of Copreus, and many other champions. X ~
i. Even Great Ajax was forced to yield ground; and Achilles, when 308 163. i—163. l he saw flames swirling from the stern of Protesilaus’s ship, set on the Trojans, so far forgot his grudge as to marshal the Myrmidons an hurry them to Patroclus’s assistance. Patrodus had flung a spear into th mass of Trojans gathered around Protesilaus’s ship and transfixc Pyraechmes, king of the Paeonians, At this the Trojans, mistaki~~g for Achilles, fled; and Patroclus extinguished the fire, saving the of the ship at least, and cut down Sarpedon. Though Glaucus tried t rally his Lycians and so protect Sarpedon’s body from despoiln~c~ Zeus let Patroclus chase the whole Trojan army towards the ti~
Hector being the first to retire, wounded severely by Ajax.
j. The Greeks stripped Sarpedon of his armour, but at Zeus’s orde Apollo rescued the body, which he prepared for burial, whereupc Sleep and Death bore it away to Lycia. Patrodus meanwhile pressed the rout, and would have taken Troy single-handed, had not Apo[ hastily mounted the wall, and thrice thrust him back with a shield as I attempted to scale it. Fighting continued until nightfall, when Apoll wrapped in a thick mist, came up behind Patroclus and buffeted hi~ smartly between t~e shoulderblades. Patroclus’s eyes started from head; his helmet flew off; his spear was shattered into splinters; shield fell to the ground; and Apollo grimly unlaced his corslc Euphorbus son of Panthous, observing Patroclus’s plight, wound~ him without fear of retaliation, and as he staggered away, Hector, wt had returned to the batde, despatched him with a single blow?
k. Up ran Menelaus and killed Euphorbus—who is said, by the wa to have been reincarnate centuries later in the philosopher Pythagoras and strutted off to his hut with the spoils; leaving Hector to str Patroclus of his borrowed armour. Menelaus and Great Ajax th~
reappeared and together defended Patroclus’s body tmtil dusk, wh~ they contrived to carry it back to the ships. But Achilles, on hearing news, rolled in the dust, and yielded to an ecstasy of grief. 13 I. Thetis entered her son’s hut carrying a new suit of armour, whi~ included a pair of valuable tin greaves, hurrieclly forged by Hephaestt Achilles put the suit on, made peace with Agamemnon (who delivcr~ Briseis to him inviolate, swearing that he had taken her in anger, n lust) and set out to avenge Patroclus. X4 None could stand against wrath. The Trojans broke and fled to the Seamander, where he them into two bodies, driving one across the plain towards the cit and penning the other in a bend of the river. Furiously, the River-gt rushed at him, but Hephaestus took Achilles’s part and dried up t] ~63. l—163. o 309
waters with a scorching flame. The Trojan survivors regained the city, like a herd of frightened deer.1S
rn. When Achilles at last met Hector and engaged him in.single combat, both sides drew back and stood watching amazed. Hector turned and began to run around the city walls. He hoped by this manoeuvre to weary Achilles, who had long been inactive and should therefore have been short of breath. But he was mistaken. Achilles chased him thrice around the walls, and whenever he made for the shelter of a gate, counting on the help of his brothers, always headed him off. Finally Hector halted and stood his ground, but Achilles ran him through the breast, and refused his dying plea that his body might be ransomed for burial. After possessing himself of the armour, Achilles slit the flesh behind the tendons of Hector’s heels. He then passed leather thongs through the slits, secured them to his chariot and, whipping up Balius, Xanthus, and Pedasus, dragged the body towards the ships at an easy canter. Hector’s head, its black locks streaming on either side, churned up a cloud of dust behind him. But some say that Achilles dragged the corpse three times around the city walls, by the baldric which Ajax had given him.16
n. Achilles now buried Patrodus. Five Greek princes were sent to Mount Ida in search of timber for the funeral pyre, upon which Achilles sacrificed not only horses, and two of Patroclus’s own pack of nine hounds, but twelve noble Trojan captives, several sons of Priam among them, by cutting their throats. He even threatened to throw Hector’s corpse to the remaining hounds; Aphrodite, however, restrained him. At Patroclus’s funeral games Diomedes won the chariot race, and Epeius, despite his cowardice, the boxing-match; Ajax and Odysseus tied in the wrestling match. 17
o. Still consumed by grief, Achilles rose every day at dawn to drag Hector’s body three times around Patroclus’s tomb. Yet Apollo protected it from corruption and laceration and, eventually, at the command of Zeus, Hermes led Priam to the Greek camp under cover of night, and persuaded Achilles to accept a ransom.18 On this occasion Priam showed great magnanimity towards Achilles whom he had found asleep in his hut and might easily have murdered. The ransom agreed upon was Hector’s weight in gold. Accordingly, the Greeks set up a pair of scales outside the city walls, laid the corpse on one pan, and invited the Trojans to heap gold in the other. When Priam’s treasury had been ransacked of ingots and jewels, and Hector’s huge bulk still 310 163.0—163. q depressed the pan, Polyxena, watching from the wall, threw down her bracelets to supply the missing weight. Overcome by admiration, Achilles told Priam: ‘I will cheerfully barter Hector against Polyxena. Keep your gold; marry her to me; and if you then restore ‘Helen to Menelaus, I undertake to make peace between your people and ours.’ Priam, for the moment, was content to ransom Hector at the agreed price in gold; but promised to give Polyxena to Achilles freely if he persuaded the Greeks to depart without Helen. Achilles replied that hc would do what he could, and Priam then took away the corpse for burial. So great an uproar arose at Hector’s funeral—the Trojans lamenting, the Greeks trying to drown their dirges with boos and cat-calls—that birds flying overhead fell down stunned by the noise.1 iv. At the command of an oracle, Hector’s bones were eventuaJJv taken to Boeotian Thebes, where his grave is still shown beside tb~c lotretain of Oedipus. Some quote the Oracle as follows:
‘Hearken, ye men of Thebes, who dwell in the city of Cadmus, Should you desire your land to be prosperous, wealthy and blameless, Carry the bones of Hector, Priam’s son, to your city.
Asia holds them now; there Zeus will attend to his worship.’
Others say that when a plague ravaged Greece, Apollo ordered the reburial of Hector’s bones in a famous Greek city which had taken n~ part in the Trojan War.20
q. A wholly different tradition makes Hector a son of Apollo, ~vho~n Penthesileia the Amazon killed.2~
1. Dictys Cretensis: iii.
2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi.; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 6; C),pri,~, quoted by Proclus: Chrestornathy L
3. Homer: Iliad i; Dictys Cretensis: ii. 30; First Vatican grapher: 2~~.
4. Homer: Itiadiii.; iv. ~-~29; v. ~-4~7 and vi. I~9-236.
5. Athenaeus: i. 8; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae; Homer: Iliad vii. 66-~32; Hyginus: Fabula
6. Homer: Iliad vii. 436-50 and viii.
7. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 47; Hyginus: Fabula ~2~; Homer: Iliad ix. 8. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 473; Apollodorus: i. 3—4; Homcr: Iliad x.
9. Servius: for. tit.; Dictys Cretensis: ii. 45—6.
~o. Homer: Iliad xi and xii. fl. Homer: Iliad xii-xiv.
~2. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 43; Homer: Iliad xvi.
~3. Hyginus: Fabula x 12; Philostratm: Life of Aśollonius of Tyana i. x and Heroica ~9—4; Pausanias: ii. ~7. 3; Homer: Iliad xvii.
14. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 48-52; Homer: Iliad xviii-xix.
~5. Homer: Iliad xxi.
16. Homer: Iliad xxii.
~7. Hyginus: loc. tit.; Virgil: Aeneid i. 487; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 12-~4; Homer: Iliad xxiii.
~8. Homer: Iliad xxiv.
19. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 491; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae; Dares: 27; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 16 and 9.7.
zo. Pausanias: ix. 18.4; Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 1194.
2~. Stesichorus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 266; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi., quoted by Photius p. 487.
* ~. According to Proclus (Chrestomathy xcix. ~9-20), Homerus means ‘blind’ rather than ‘hostage’, which is the usual translation; minstrelsy was a natural vocation for the blind, since blindness and inspiration often went together (see xoS. h). The identity of the original Homer has been debated for some two thousand five hundred years. In the earliest tradition he is plausibly called an Ionian from Chios. A clan of Homeridae, or ú ‘Sons of the Blind Man’, who recited the traditional Homeric poems and eventually became a guild (Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes ii. ~), had their headquarters at Delos, the centre of the Ionian world, where Homer himself was said to have recited (Homeric H~/mn iii. ~65-73). Parts of the IiiM date from the tenth century B.C.; the subject matter is three centuries older. By the sixth century unauthorized recitals of the Iliad were slowly corrupthag the text; Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, therefore ordered an off~cial recension, which he entrusted to four leading scholars. They seem to have done the task well but, since Homer had come to be regarded as a prime authority in disputes between cities, Peisistratus’s enemies accused him of interpolating verses for political ends (Strabo: ix. ~. ~o). z. The twenty-four books of the lliadhave grown out of a poem called ‘TheWrath of Achilles’—which could perhaps have been recited in a single night, and which dealt with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the possession of a captured princess. It is unlikely that the text of the central events has been radically edited since the first Iliadof about 750 B.c. Yet the quarrels are so unedifying, and all the Greek leaders behave so murderously, deceitfully, and shamelessly, while the Trojans by contrast behave so well, that it is obvious on whose side the author’s sympathy lay. As a legatee of the Minoan court bards he found his spiritual home among the departed glories of Cnossus and Mycenae, not 136. 2-164. c beside the camp fires of the barbarous invaders from the North Homer faithfully describes the lives of his new overlords, who have usurped ancient religious titles by marrying tribal heiresses and, though calling them godlike, wise, and noble, holds them in deep disgust. They live by the sword and perish by the sword, disdaining love, friendship, faith, or the arts of peace. They care so little for the divine names by which they swear that he dares jest in their presence about the greedy, sly, quarrelsome, lecherous, cowardly Olympians who have turned the world upside down. One would dismiss him as an irreligious wretch, were he not clearly a secret worshipper of the Great G9ddess of Asia (whom the Greeks had humiliated in this war); and did not glints of his warm and honourable nature appear whenever he is describing family life in Priam’s palace. Homer has drawn on the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic for the Achilles story; with Achilles as Gilgamesh, Thetis as Ninsun, Patroclus as Enkidu. $. Achilles’s hysterical behaviour when he heard that Patroclus was dead must have shocked Homer, but he has clothed the barbarities of the: funeral in mock-heroic language, confident that his overlords will not recognize the sharpness of the satire—Homer may be said, in a sense, to have anticipated Goya, whose caricature-portraits of the Spa~ish royal family were so splendidly painted that they could be accepted by the victims as honest likenesses. But the point of the Iliad as satire has been somewhat blunted by the Homeridae’s need to placate their divine hosts at Delos; Apollo and Artemis must support the Trojans and display dignity and discretion, in contrast at least with the vicious deities of the Hellenic camp. One result of the Iliad’s acceptance by Greek city authorities as a national epic was that no one ever again took the Olympian religion seriously, and Greek morals always remained barbarous—except in places where Cretan mystery cults survived and the mystagogues required a good-conduct certificate from their initiates. The Great Goddess, though now of~icially subordinate to Zeus, continued to exert a strong spiritual influence at Eleusis, Corinth and Samothrace, until the suppression of her mysteries by early Byzantine emperors. Lucian, who loved his Homer and succeeded him as the prime satirist of the Olympians, also worshipped the Goddess, to whom he had sacrificed his first hair-clippings at Hierapolis.
4. Hector’s bones were said to have been brought to Thebes from Troy, yet ‘Hector’ was a title of the Theban sacred king before the Trojan War took place; and he suffered the same fate when his reign ended—which was to be dragged in the ‘wreck of a circling chariot, like Glaucus (see 7~. a), Hippolytus (see ~oI. g), Oenomaus (see ~09. g), and Abderus (see 130. b). Since ‘Achilles’ was also a title rather than a name, the combat may have been borrowed from the lost Theban saga of
‘ Oedlpus’s Sheep ‘, in which co-kings fought for the throne (see ~06.2).
T~t~ Amazon Queen Penthesileia, daughter of Otrere and Ares, had sought refuge in Troy from the Erinnyes of her sister Hippolyte (also called Glauce, or Melanippe), whom she had accidentally shot, either while out hunting or, according to the Athenians, in the fight which followed Theseus’s wedding with Phaedra. Purified by Priam, she greatly distinguished herself in battle, accounting for many Greeks, among them (it is said) Machaon, though the commoner account makes him fall by the hand of Eurypylus, son ofTelephus.x She drove Achilles from the field on several occasions—some even claim that she killed him and that Zeus,. at the plea of Thefts, restored him to life but at last he ran her through, fell in love with her dead body, and committed necro?hily upon it there and then.2 When he later called for volunteers to bury Penthesileia, Thersites, a son of Aetolian Agfius, and the ugliest Greek at Troy, who had gouged out her eyes with his spear as she lay dying,jeeringly accused Achilles of filthy and unnatural lust. Achilles turned and struck Thersites so hard that he broke every tooth in his head and sent his ghost scurrying down to Tartarus.3
b. This caused high indignation among the Greeks, and Diomedes, who was a cousin of Thersites and wished to show his disdain for Achilles, dragged Penthesileia’s body along by the foot and threw it into the Scamander; whence, however, it was rescued and buried on the bank with great honour—some say by Achilles; others, by the Trojans. Achilles then set sail for Lesbos, where he sacrificed to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto; and Odysseus, a sworn enemy to Thersites, purrfled him of the murder. The dying Penthesileia, supported by Achilles, is carved on the throne of Zeus at Olympia.4 Her nurse, the Amazon Clete, hearing that she had fled to Troy after the death of Hippolyte, set out to search for her, but was driven by contrary winds to Italy, where she settled and founded the city ofClete. S
c. Priam had by now persuaded his half-brother, Tithonus of Assyria, to send his son Memnon the Ethiopian to Troy; the bribe he ‘offered was a golden vine.6 A so-called palace of Memnon is shown in Ethiopia, although when Tithonus emigrated to Assyria and founded Susa, Memnon, then only a child, had gone with him. Susa is now 3~4 ~64. c—~64../ commonly known as the City. of Memnon; and its inhabitants as Cissians, after Memnon’s mother Cissia. His palace on the Acropolis was standing until the time of the Persians.7
d. Tithonus governed the province of Persia for the Assyrian king Teutamus, Priam’s overlord, who put Menmon in command of a thousand Ethiopians, a thousand Susians, and two hundred chariots. The Phrygians still show the rough, straight road, with camp-sites every fifteen miles or so, by which Memnon, after he had subjugated all the intervening nations, marched to Troy. He was black as ebony, but the handsomest man alive, and like Achilles wore armour forged by Hephaestus. S Some say that he led a large army of Ethiopians and Indians to Troy by way of Armenia, and that another expedition sailed from Phoenicia at his orders under a Sidonian named Phalas. Landing on Rhodes, the inhabitants of which favoured the Greek cause, Phalas was asked in public: ‘Are you not ashamed, sir, to assist Paris the Trojan and other declared enemies of your native city?’ The Phoeniciaa sailors, who now heard for the first time where they were bound, stoned Phalas to death as a traitor and settled in Ialysus and Cameirus, after dividing among themselves the treasure and munitions of war which Phalas had brought with him.9
e. Meanwhile, at Troy, Memnon killed several leading Greeks, including Antilochus, son of Nestor, when he came to his father’s rescue: for Paris had shot one of Nestor’s chariot horses and terror made ~ its team-mate unmanageable? This Antilochus had been exposed as a child on Mount Ida by his mother Anaxibia, or Eurydice, and there suckled by a bitch. Though too young to sail from Aulis at the beginning of the war, he followed some years later and begged Achilles to soothe Nestor’s anger at his unexpected arrival. Achilles, delighted with Antilochus’s warlike spirit, undertook to mediate between them and, at his desire, Nestor introduced him to Agamemnon.1~ Antilochus was one of the youngest, handsomest, swiftest and most courageous Greeks who fought at Troy and Nestor, having been warned by an oracle to protect him against an Ethiopian, appointed Chahon as his guardian; but in vain.1z The bones of Antitochus were laid beside those of his friends, Achilles and Patroclus, whose ghosts he accompanied to the Asphodel Fields.13
f. That day, with the help of Memnon’s Ethiopians, the Trojans nearly succeeded in burning the Greek ships, but darkness fell and they retired. After burying their dead, the Greeks chose Great Ajax to 164. f—164. i 31$
Memnon; and next morning the single combat had already begun, when Thetis sought out Achilles, who was absent from the camp, and broke the news of Anfilochus’s death. Achilles hastened back to take vengeance, and while Zeus, calling for a pair of scales, weighed .his fate against that of Memnon, 14 he brushed Ajax aside and made the combat his own. The pan containing Memnon’s fate sank in Jove’s hand, Achilles dealt the death-blow, and presently black head and bright armour crowned the flaming pyre ofAntilochus. XS
g. Some, however, report that Memnon was ambushed by Thessalians; and that his Ethiopians, having burned his body, carried the ashes to Tithonus; and that they now lie buried on a hill overlooking the mouth of the river Aesepus, where a village bears his name.16 Eos, who is described as Memnon’s mother, implored Zeus to confer immortality upon him and some further honour as well. A number of phantom hen-birds, called Memnonides, were consequently formed from the embers and smoke of his pyre, and rising into the air, flew ‘three times around it. At the fourth circuit they divided into two flocks, fought with claws and beaks, and fell down upon his ashes as a funeral sacrifice. Memnonides still fight and fall at his tomb when the Sun has all the signs of the Zodiac.17
h. According to another tradition, these birds are Memnon’s girl companions, who lamented for him so excessively that the gods, in pity, metamorphosed them into birds. They make an annual visit to his tomb, where they weep and lacerate themselves until some of them fall dead. The Hellespontines say that when the Memnonides visit Memnon’s grave beside the Hellespont, they use their wings to sprinkle it with water from the river Aesepus; and that Eos st’ill weeps tears of dew for him every morning. Polygnotus has pictured Memnon fac’mg his rival Sarpedon and dressed in a cloak embroidered with these birds. The gods are said to observe the anniversaries of both their deaths as days of mourning. ~s
i. Others believe that Memnon’s bones were taken to Cyprian Papbus, and thence to Rhodes, where his sister Himera, or Hemera, came to fetch them away. The Phoenicians who had rebelled against ?halas allowed her to do so on condition that she did not press for the return of their stolen treasure. To this she agreed, and brought the urn t(~ Phoenicia; she buried it there at Palliochis and then disappeared.19 Others, again, say that Memnon’s tomb is to be seen near Palton in Syria, beside the river Badas. His bronze sword hangs on the wall of 164. i—164. k Asclepius’s temple at Nicomedeia; and Egyptian Thebes is famous a colossal black statue—a seated stone f~gure—which utters a sound the breaking of a lyre~string every day at sunrise. All Greek-spea~ people call it Memnon; not so the Egyptians.20
j.’ Achilles now routed the Trojans and pursued them towards city, but his course, too, was run. Poseidon and Apollo, pledge( avenge the deaths of Cycnus and Troilus, and to punish certain inso boasts that Achilles had uttered over Hector’s corpse, took cou together. Veiled with cloud and standing by the Scaean Gate, Ap sought out Paris in the thick of battle, turned his bow and guided fatal shaft. It struck the one vulnerable part of Achilles’s body, the r heel, and he died in agony.2~ But some say that Apollo, assuming likeness of Paris, himself shot Achilles; and that this was the acer which Neoptolemus, Achilles’s son, accepted. A fierce batde rage, day over the corpse. Great Ajax struck down Glaucus, despoiled of his armour, sent it back to the camp and, despite a shower old carried dead Achilles through the midst of the enemy, Odysseus br ing up the rear. A tempest sent by Zeus then put an end to the strugg
k. According to another tradition, Achilles was the victim ofa ! Priam had offered him Polyxena in marriage on condition that siege of Troy was raised. But Polyxena, who could not śor2
Achilles for murdering her brother Troilus, made him disclose vulnerability of his heel, since there is no secret that women ca~ extract from men in proof of love. At her request he came, bare and unarmed, to ratify the agreement by sacrificing to Tryruhr: Apollo; then, while Deiphobus clasped him to his breast in prete~ friendship, Paris, hiding behind the god’s image, pierced his heel, a poisoned arrow or, some say, a sword. Before dy’mg, howe Achilles seized firebrands from the altar and laid about him vigoro~ felling many Trojans and temple servants.23 Meanwhile, Odys:
Ajax, and Diomedes, suspecting Achilles of treachery, had follo him to the temple. Paris and Deiphobus rushed past them throug} doorway, they entered, and Achilles, expiring in their arms, be~ them, after Troy fell, to sacrifice Polyxena at his tomb. Ajax cartie~ body out of the shrine on his shoulders; the Trojans tried to captu] but the Greeks drove them off and conveyed it to the ships. Some on the other hand, that the Trojans won the tussle and did not surre~ Achilles’s body until the ransom which Priam paid for Hector been returned.v*
164. l—164. n 317 1. The Greeks were dismayed by their loss. Poseidon, however, promised Thetis to bestow on Achilles an island in the Black Sea, where the coastal tribes would offer him divine sacrifices for all eternity. A company of Nereids came to Troy to mourn with her and stood desolately around his corpse, while the nine Muses chanted the dirge. Their mourning lasted seventeen days and nights, but though Agamemnon and his fellow-leaders shed many tears, none of the common soldiers greatly regretted the death of so notorious a traitor. On the eighteenth day, Achilles’s body was burned upon a pyre and his ashes, mixed with those of Patroclus, were laid in a golden urn made by He?haestus, Thetis’s wedding gift from Dionysus; this was buried on the headland of Sigaeum, which dominates the Hellespont, and over it the Greeks raised a lofty cairn as a landmark.as In a neighbouring village called Achilleum stands a temple sacred to Achilles, and his statue wearing a woman’s ear-ring?
~n. While the Achaeans were holding funeral games in his honourEumelus winning the chariot race, Diomedes the foot-race, Ajax the discus-throw, and Teucer the archery contest—Thetis snatched Achilles’s soul from the pyre and conveyed it to Leuce, an island about twenty furlongs in circumference, wooded and full of beasts, both wild and tame, which lies opposite the mouths of the Danube, and is now sacred to him. Once, when a certain Crotonian named Leonymus, who had been severely wounded in the breast while fighting his neighhours, the Epizephyrian Locrians, visited Delphi to enquire how he might be cured, the Pythoness told him: ‘Sail to Leuce. There Little Ajax, whose ghost your enemies invoked to fight for them, will appear and heal your wound.’ He returned some months later, safe and well, reporting that he had seen Achilles, Patroclus, Antilochus, Great Ajax, and finally Little Ajax, who had healed him. Helen, now married to Achilles, had said: ‘Pray, Leonymus, sail to Himera, and tell the libeller of Helen that the loss of his sight is due to her displeasure.’ Sailors on the northward run from the Bosphorus to Olbia frequently hear Achilles chanting Homer’s verses across the water, the sound being accompanied by the clatter of horses’ hooves, shouts of warriors, and clash of’ arms. Z7
1. Achilles first lay with Helen, not long before his death, in a dream arranged by his mother Thetis. This experience afforded him such pleasure that he asked Helen to display herself to him in waking life on the wall of Troy. She did so, and he fell desperately in love. Since he 318 164. n—164. p was her fifth husband, they call him Pemptus, meaning ‘fifth’, Crete; Theseus, Menelaus, Paris, and finally Deiphobus, having be. his predecessors. Z8
0. But others hold that Achilles remains under the power of Had, and complains bitterly of his lot as he strides about the Asph0t Meadows; others, again, that he married Medea and lives royally in t Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed.29
p. By order of an oracle, a cenotaph was set up for Achilles in t ancient gymnasium at Olympia; there, at the opening of the festival, the sun is sinking, the Elean women honour him with funeral fi~ The Thessalians, at the command of the Dodonian Oracle, also sacri~ annually to Achilles; and on the road which leads northward frc Sparta stands a sanctuary built for him by Prax, his great-grandsc which is closed to the general public; but the boys who are required fight in a near-by plane-tree grove enter and sacrifice to him befo~ h~d.10
x. Quintus Smyrnaeus: Posthomerica i. 18 if.; Apollodorus: Epito v. ~-2; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Pausanias: Jii. 26. 7~. Eustathius on Homer p. 1696; Apollodorus: toc. cit.; Rawlins( Excidium Troiae.
3. Apollodorus: i. 8.6; Homer: Iliaalii. 212 if., with scholiast on 21 Tzetzes: On Lycophron 9994. Tzetzes: Ioc. cit.; Servius on VirgiI’s Aeneidi. 495; Tryphiodor 37; Arctinus of Miletus: Aethiopis, quoted by Proclus: Chre~
mathy z; Pausanias: x. 3~—x and v. Ix. z.
5. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 995.
6. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 493; Apollodorus: iii. xz. 4 a Epitome v. 3.
7. Diodorus Siculus: ii. 22; Pausanias: i. 42. 2; Herodotus: v. Strabo: xv. 3—2; Aeschylus, quoted by Strabo: loc. tit.
8. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: x. 31. 2; Ovid: Arnores i. 3-4; Homer: Odyssey xi. 522; Arctinus, quoted by Prod Chrestomathy 2.
9. Dictys Cretensis: iv. 4~o. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 3; Pindar: Pythian Odes vi. 28 if. ix. Apollodorus: i. 9—9. and iii. Io. 8; Homer: Odyssey iii.
Hyginus: Fabula 252; Philostratus: Heroica iii.
~2. Homer: Odyssey iii. x ~2; xxiv. ~ 7 and Iliad xxxiii. 556; Eustath on Homer p. ~697.
13. Homer: Odyssey xxiv. 16 and 78; Pausanias: iii.
14. Dictys Cretensis: iv. 5; Quintus Smymaeus: Posthomerica 224 if.; Philostratus: Imagines ii. 7; Aeschylus: Psychostasia, quoted by Plutarch: How a Young Man Should Listen to Poetry 2.
15. Dictys Cretens’zs: iv. 6; Philostratus: Heroica iii. 4.
16. Diodorus Siculus: ii. 22; Strabo: xiii. I.
17. Apoilodorus: ill 12.4; Arctinus of Miletus: Aethiopis, quoted by Produs: Chrestomathy 2; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 578 if.
18. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 755 and 493; Pausanias: x. 31. SchoLiast on Aristophanes’s Clouds 622.
~9. Dictys Cretensis: vi. Io.
go. Simonides, quoted by Strabo: xv. 3—z; Pausanias: iii. 3.6 and i. 42. 2.
zI. Arctinus of Miletus: Aethlopis, quoted by Produs: Chrestomathy 2; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 580 if.; Hyginus: Fabula 107; Apollc~ dorus: Epitome v. 3.
22. Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 4; Homer: Odyssey xxiv. 42.
23. Rawlinson: Excidiurn Troiae; Dares: 34; Dictys Cretensis: iv. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 57; Second Vatican Mythographer: 205.
24. Dictys Cretensis: iv. ~o-~3; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 322; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 269.
25. Quintus Smyrnaeus: iii. 766-80; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 5; Dictys Cretensis: iv. 13-14; Tzetzes: Posthomerica43 x-67; Homer: Odyssey xxiv. 43-84.
‘ 26. Strabo: xi. 2.6; Arctinus of Miletus: Aethiop& quoted byProclus: Chrestontathy 2; Apollodorus: loc. tit.
27. Pausanias: iii. 19. xx; Philostratus: Heroica xx. 32-40.
28. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 145 and 174; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 3429. Homer: Odyssey xi. 471-540; Ibycus, quoted by scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 815; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.
30, Philostratus: Herolca xix. 14; Pausanias: vi. 23.2 and iii. 20. 8. * 1. Penthesileia was one of the Amazons defeated by Theseus and Heracles: that is to say, one of Athene’s fighting priestesses, defeated by the Aeolian invaders of Greece (see xoo. 1 and 13~. 2). The incident has been staged at Troy because Priam’s confederacy is said to have comprised all the tribes of Asia Minor. Penthesileia does not appear in the Iliad, but Achilles’s outrage of her corpse is characteristically Homeric, and since sheis mentionedin so many other Classical texts, a passage about her may well have been suppressed by Peisistratus’s editors. Dictys Cretensis (iv. 2-3) modernizes the story: he says that she rode up at the head 0śa large army and, finding Hector dead, would have gone away again, 320’ 164. ~—~64. $
had not Paris bribed her to stay with gold and silver. Achilles s Penthesileia in their first encounter, and dragged her from the saddlel the hair. As she lay dying on the ground, the this virago to the dogs as a punishment for exceeding the nature womankind!’ Though Achilles demanded an honourable funeral medes took the corpse by its feet and dragged it into the Scamandet. Old Nurses in Greek legend usually stand for the Goddess
(see 24. 9); and Penthesileia’s nurse Clete (‘invoked’) is no exception. z. Cissia (‘ivy’) seems to be an early title of the variously dess who presided over the ivy and vine revels in Greece, Thrace, Minor, and Syria (see ~68. 3); Memnon’s ‘Cissians’, however, are variant of’ Susians’ (‘lily-men’), so called in honour of the Susanhah, or Astarte. Priam probably applied for help ians but to the Hittites, who may well have ~ent reinforcements and also by sea, from Syria. ‘Memnon’ (‘resolute’), a common tidec Greek kings—intensified in ‘Agamemnon’ (‘ very resolute’)—has been confused with Mnemon, a title of Artaxerxes the Assyrian, Amenophis, the name of the ~’haraoh in whose honour singing statue was constructed at Thebes. The first rays oft the hollow stone, making the air inside expand and rush through narrow throat.
3. Achilles in his birth, youth, and death is as the ancient Pelasgian sacred king, destined to become the ‘li oracular hero. His mythic opponent bore various names and’ Paris’ and’ Apollo ‘. Here it is Memnon son of Cissia.
with Memnon, each supported by his mother, was carved on the Chest ~ Cypselus (Pausanias: v. 19. x), and on the throne olAF
(Pausanias: iii. 18. 7); besides figuring in a large group by the Lycius, which the inhabitants ofApollonia ded anias: v. 22.2). These two represent sacred king and tanist—Achilles of the Sea-goddess, bright Spirit of the Waxing Year: Memnon, son 0 the Ivy-goddess, dark Spirit of the Waning Year, to whom the vine is sacred. They kill each other altensately, at the solstices; the king always succumbs to a heel-wound, his with a sword. Achilles, in this ancient sense, untainted by behaviour of the Achaean and Dorian chieftains who usurped the name, was widely worshipped as a hero; and the non-Homeric story ofkis betrayal by Polyxena, who wormed from him the secret of his vulnerable heel, places him beside Llew Llaw, Cuchulain, Samson, Age heroes of honest repute. His struggle with Penthesileia likely to have been of the same sort as his father Peleus’s Thetis (see 8 x. k). The recipient of Helen’s messag~
is now a treeless Rumanian prison island—was the poet Stesichorus 31. 9 and 159. I).
?~ 164. 4—165. a 32t 4. Because Memnon came from the East to help Priam, he was styled ‘the son oleos’ (‘dawn’); and because he needed a father, Eos’s lover Tithonus seemed the natural choice (see 40. c). A fight at the winter solstice between girls in bird-disguise, which Ovid records, is a more likely explanation of the Memnonides than that they are fanciful embodiments of sparks flying up from a corpse on the pyre; the fight will originally have been for the high-priestess-ship, in Libyan style (see 8. ~)..1. Achilles as the sacred king of Olympia was mourned after the sum-’ mer solstice, when the Olympic funeral games Were held in his honour; his tanist, locally called ‘Cronus’, was mourned after the winter solstice (see t 38.4). In the British Isles these feasts fell on Lammas and St Stephen’s Day respectively; but though the corpse of the golden-crested wren, the bird of Cronus, is still carried in procession through country districts on St Stephen’s Day, the British Memnonides ‘ fell a-sighing and a-sobbing’ only for the robin, not for his victim, the wren: the tanist, not the sacred king.
6. Achilles’s hero-shrine in Crete must have been built by Pelasgian immigrants; but the plane is a Cretan tree. Since the plane-leaf represented Rhea’s green hand, Achilles may have been called Pemptus (‘ fifth ‘) to identify him with Acesidas, the fifth of her Dactyls, namely the oracular lit fie finger, as Heracles was identified with the first, the virile thumb (see 53—~).
7. Ptiam’s golden vine, his bribe to Tithonus for sending Memnon, seems to have been the one given Tros by Zeus in compensation for the rape of Ganymedes (see 29. b).
Wn~/~ Thetis decided to award the arms of Achilles to the most courageous Greek left alive before Troy, only Ajax and Odysseus, who had boldly defended the corpse together,~ dared come forward to claim ú them. Some say that Agamemnon, from a dislike of the whole House of Aeacus, rejected Ajax’s pretensions and divided the arms between Menelaus and Odysseus, whose goodwill he valued far more highly;2 others, that he avoided the odium of a decision by referring the case to the assembled Greek lea&rs, who settled it by a secret ballot; or that he referred it to the Cretans and other allies; or that he forced his Trojan prisoners to declare which of the two claimants had done them most harm.3 But the truth is that, while Ajax and Odysseus were still cort petitively boasting of their achievements, Nestor advised Agamemnon to send spies by night to ~isten under the Trojan walls for the enemy’s unbiased opinion on the matter. The spies overheard a party of young girls chattering together; and when one praised Ajax for bearing dead Achilles from the battlefield through a storm of missiles, another, at Athene’s instigation, replied: ‘Nonsense! Even a slave-woman will do as much, once someone has set a corpse on her shoulders; But thrust weapons into her hand, and she will be too frightened to use them. Odysseus, not Ajax, bore the brunt of our attack.’4
b. Agamemnon therefore awarded the arms to Odysseus. He and Menelaus would never, of course, have dared to insult Ajax in this manner had Achilles still been alive: for Achilles thought the world of his gallant cousin. It was Zeus himself who provoked the quarrel.s
c. In a dumb rage, Ajax planned to revenge himself on his fellowGreeks that very night; Athene, however, struck him with madness and turned him loose, sword in hand, among the cattle and sheep which had been lifted from Trojan farms to form part of the common spoil. After immense slaughter, he chained the surviving beasts togctI~cr, hauled them back to the camp, and there continued his butchcr’s worth. Choosing two white-looted rams, he lopped off the head and tongt~e of one, which he mistook for Agamemnon, or Menelaus; and tied the other upright to a pillar, where he flogged it with a horse’s halter, screaming abuse and calling it perfidious Odysseus.6
d. At last coming to his senses in utter despair, he summoned Eurysaces, his son by Tecmessa, and gave him the huge, sevenfold shield after Which he had been named. ‘The rest of my arms will be buried with me when I die,’ he said. Ajax’s half-brother Teucer, son of Priam’s captive sister Hesione, happened to be away in Mysia, but Ajax left a message appointing him guardian of Eurysaces, who was to be taken home to his grandparents Telamon and Eriboea of Salamis. Then, with a word to Tecmessa that he would escape Athene’s anger by bathing in a sea pool and finding some untrodden patch of ground where the sword might be securely buried, he set out, determined on death.
e. He fixed the sword—the very one which Hector had exchanged for the purple baldric—upright in the earth, and after calling on Zeus to tell Teucer where his corpse might be found; on Hermes, to conduct his soul to the Asphodel Fields; and on the Erinnyes, for vengeance, threw himself upon it. The sword, loathing its task, doubled back in ~65. e—165. i 323 the shape of a bow, and dawn had broken before he contrived to comanit suicide by driving the point underneath his vulnerable arm-pit.7 .f~ Meanwhile Teucer, returning from Mysia, narrowly escaped murder by the Greeks, who were indignant at the slaughter of their livestock. Calchas, having been granted no prophetic warning of the suicide, took Teucer aside and advised him to confine Ajax to his hut, as one maddened by the wrath of Athene. Podaleirius son of Asclepius agre~’d; he was as expert a physician as his brother Machaon was a surge’on, and had been the first to diagnose Ajax’s madness from his fl~tshing eyes? But Teucer merely shook his head, having already been h~f~rmed by Zeus of his brother’s death, and went sadly out with ‘lcc~nessa to find the corpse.
~~. There Ajax lay in a pool of blood, and dismay overcame Teucer. }ft)w could he return to Salamis, and face his father Telamon? As he srt)(>~t, tearing his hair, Menelaus strode up and forbade him to bury ^~:~x, who must be left for the greedy kites and pious vultures. Teucer sent him about his business, and leaving Eurysaces in suppliant’s dress t~ display locks of his own, Teucer’s, and Tecmessa’s hair, and so guard Aj,~r’s corpse—over which Tecmessa had spread her robe—he came
r,t7ing before Agamemnon. Odysseus intervened in the ensuing dis}:[:r~’, and not only urged Agamemnon to permit t~e funeral rites, but t~i!;.’red to help Teucer carry them out. This service Teucer declined, wl~ilc acknowledging Odysseus’s courtesy. Finally Agamemnon, on C~!~:has’s advice, allowed Ajax to be buried in a suicide’s coffin at Cape i~I~,ctcum, rather than burned on a pyre as if he had fallen honourably i~: i:attlc.9
/~. Some hold that the cause of the quarrel between Ajax and Odys~c::s was the possession of the Palladium, and that it took place after ‘I-r:’y had fallen.1O Others deny that Ajax committed suicide, and say tl~:r since he was proof against steel, the Trojans killed him with lumps oi-,,’lay, having been advised to do so by an oracle. But this may have b~’~’n another Ajax’ L
i. Afterwards, when Odysseus visited the Asphodel Fields, Ajax was tl~c only ghost who stood aloof from him, rejecting his excuses that Zeus had been responsible for this unfortunate affair. Odysseus had by tl~,~t time wisely presented the arms to Achillcs’s son Neoptolemus; rl~t~g], the Acolians who later settied at Troy say that he lost them in a ~l~ipwreck as he sailed home, whereupon by Thefis’s contrivance the waves deposited them beside Ajax’s tomb at Rhoeteum. Dur’mg the 165. i—165. I ‘
reign of the Emperor Hadrian, high seas washed open the tomb and Bones were seen to be of gigantic size, the knee-caps alone Being as as a discus used by boys practising for the pentathlon; at the Eraper orders, they were at once reinterred. ~2
j. The Salaminians report that a new flower appeared in their island when Ajax died: white, tinged with red, smaller than a lily and, like the hyacinth, bearing letters which spell Ai! Ai! (‘woe, woe!’). But it is generally believed that the new flower sprang from Ajax’s blood where he fell, since the letters also stand for Aias Aiaddes ,’ Ajax the Aeacid’. In the Salaminian mark4t place stands a temple of Ajax, with an cbony image; and not far from the harbour a boulder is shown on which Telamon sat gazing at the ship which bore his sons away to Aulis.13
b. Teucer eventually returned to Salamis, but Telamon accused him offratricide in the second degree, since he had not pressedAjax’s claim to the disputed arms. Forbidddn to land, he pleaded his case from the sea while the judges listened on the shore; Telamon himself had been forced to do the same by his own father Aeacus, when accused of murdering his brother Phocus. But as Telamon had been found guilty and banished, so also was Teucer, on the ground that he had brought back ndther Ajax’s bones, nor Tecmessa, nor Eurysaces; which proved neglect. He set sail for Cyprus, where with Apollo’s favour and the permission of King Belus the SidonJan he founded the other Salamis.14 !. The Athenians honour Ajax as one of their eponymous heroes, and insist that Philaeus, the son of Eurysaces, became an Athenian citizen and surrendered the sovereignty of Salamis to them.1s
1. Homer: Odyssey xi. 543 if.; Argument of Sophodes’s Ajax.
2. Hyginus: Fabula I07.
3. Pindar: Nemean Odes viii. 26 if..; Ovid: Metamorphoses xii. 620 if.; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 6; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 547. 4. Lesches: Little lliad, quoted by scholiast on Aristophanes’ s Knights ~056.
5. Homer: Odyssey xi. 559-60.
6. Sophocles: Ajax, with Argument; Zenobius: Prouerbs i. 43.
7. Sophocles: Ajax; Aeschylus, quoted by scholiast on Ajax 833 and on Iliad xxiii. 82~; Arctinus of Miletus: Aethiośis, quoted by scholiast on Pindar’s Isthmian Odes iii. 53.
8. Arctinus: Sack of Ilium, quoted by Eustathius on Homer’s IliM xiii. 5~5.
9. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 7; Philostratus: Heroica xiii. 7.
Io. Dictys Cretensis: v. ~4-15.
165. ~—166. a 325 ix. Argument of Sophocles’s Ajax.
12. Homer: Od},ssey xi. 543 if.; Pausanias: i. 35—3; Philostratus: Herolea i. 2.
~ 3. Pausanias: i. 35—2-3; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 382 if. ~4. Pausanias: i. 28. ~2 and viii. ~ 5.3; Servius qn Virgil’s Aeneidi. 6~9; Pindar: Nemean Odes iv. 60; Aeschylus: Persians i. 35—2 and 5—2. ~5—Herodotus: vi. 35; Pausanias: i. 35.2; Plutarch: Solon xi. ~. Here the mythologicalelement is small. Ajax was perhaps shown on some Cyprian icon tying the ram to a pillar; not because he had gone mad, but because this was a form of sacrifice introduced into Cyprus from Crete (see 39.2).
2. Homer’s hyacinth is the blue larkspur—hyacinthos grapta—which has markings on thc base of its petals resembling the early Greek letters AI; it had also been sacred to Cretan Hyacinthus (see 21. 8).
3. The bones of Ajax reinterred by Hadrian, like those of Theseus (see 104. i), probably belonged to some far more ancient hero. Peisistratus ú made use of Ajax’s alleged connexion with Attica to claim sovereignty over the island of Salamis, previously held by Megara, and is said to have supported his claim by the insertion of forged verses (see 163. I) into the Homeric canon (Iliad ii. 458-559; Aristotle: Rhetoric i. xS; Plutarch: Solon ~o). Aia is an old form of gala (‘earth’), and alas (‘Ajax’) will have .meant ‘ countryman’.
4. To kill a man with lumps of clay, rather than swords, was a primitive means of avoiding blood guilt; and this other Ajax’s murder must therefore have been the work of his kinsmen, not the Trojan enemy. 5. That Odysseus and Ajax quarrelled for the possession of the Palladium is historically important; but Sophocles has carelessly confused Great Ajax with Little Ajax (scc 166.2).
ACH~LZES was dead, and the Greeks had begun to despair. Calchas now prophesied that Troy could not be taken except with the help of Heracles’s bow and arrows. Odysseus and Diomedes were therefore deputed to sail for Lemnos and fetch them from Philoctetes, their present owner.1
~65. i—~66. a 325 xx. Argument of Sophocles’s Ajax.
~2. Homer: Odyssey xi. 543 if.; Pausanias: i. 35—3; Philostratus: Herolea i. 2.
13. Pausanias: i. 35—2-3; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 382 if. ~4. Pausanias: i. 28. ~2 and viii. ~ 5.3; Servius qn Virgil’s Aeneidi. 6~9; Pindar: Nemean Odes iv. 60; Aeschylus: Persians i. 35.2 and 5.2. ~5. Herodotus: vi. 35; Pausanias: i. 35—2; Plutarch: Solon xi. ,
1. Here the mythological element is small. Ajax was perhaps shown on some Cyprian icon tying the ram to a pillar; not because he had gone mad, but because this was a form of sacrifice introduced into Cyprus from Crete (see 39.2).
2. Homer’s hyacinth is the blue larkspur—hyacinthos grapta—which has markings on the base of its petals resembling the early Greek letters AI; it had also been sacred to Cretan Hyacinthus (see 2~. 8).
3. The bones of Ajax feinterred by Hadrian, like those of Theseus (see ~04. i), probably belonged to some far more ancient hero. Peisistratus made use of Ajax’s alleged connexion with Attica to claim sovereignty over the island of Salamis, previously held by Megara, and is said to have supported his claim by the insertion of forged verses (see ~63.1) into the Homeric canon (Iliad ii. 458-559; Aristotle: Rhetoric i. ~$; Plutarch: Solon ~ o). Aia is an old form of gala (‘ earth’), and alas (‘ Ajax’) will have .meant ~ comltryman ‘.
4. To kill a man with lumps of clay, rather than swords, was a primitive means of avoiding blood guilt; and this other Ajax’s murder must therefore have been the work of his kinsmen, not the Trojan enemy. 5. That Odysseus and Ajax quarrelled for the possession of the Palhdium is historically important; but Sophocles has carelessly confused Great Ajax with Little Ajax (see ~66. z).
ACU~LZES was dead, and the Greeks had begun to despair. Calchas now prophesied that Troy could not be taken except with the help of Heracles’s bow and arrows. Odysseus and Diomedes were therefore deputed to sail for Lemnos and fetch them from Philoctetes, their present owner.1
326 166. b—~66. e
b. Some say that King Actor’s shepherd Phimachus, son phion, had sheltered Philoctetes and dressed his noisome wound for~ past ten years. Others record that some of Philoctetes’s troops settled beside him in Lemnos, and that the Ascle cured him, with Lemnian earth, before the deputation arrived; or ~ Pylius, or Pelius, a son of Hephaestus, did so. Philoctetes is said then conquered certain small islands off the Trojan coast for Euneus, dispossessing the Carian population-a kindness Euneus acknowledged by giving him the Lemnian district Thus, it is explained, Odysseus and Diomedes had no need to Philoctctes with offers of medical treatment; he came willin carrying his bow and arrows, to win the war for them and glory himself. According to still another account, the deputation foun~ long dead of the wound and persuaded his heirs to let them borrow bow.3
c. The truth is, however, that Philoctetes stayed in Lemnos painfully, until Odysseus tricked him into handing over the bow arrows; but Diomedes (not, as some mistakerdy say, declined to be implicated in the theft and advised Philoctetes to dern~nd the return of his property. At this, the god Heracles intervened. ‘(;~ with them to Troy, Philoctetes,’ he said, ‘and I will send an Asclo~ i d there to cure you; for Troy must fall a second time to my arrows. ~ ~ shall be chosen from among the Greeks as the boldest fighter of ,~!1. You shall kill Paris, take part in the sack of Troy, and send home ri~c spoils, reserving the noblest prize for your father Poeas. But ren~cml~r: you cannot take Troy without Neoptolemus son of Achilles, nor ~’.n he do so without you!’~
d. Philoctetes obeyed, and on his arrival at the Greek can~p ~’,,~ bathed with fresh water and put to sleep in Apollo’s temple; as i~› ~l~ ~, Machaon the surgeon cut away the decaying flesh from the x~t~d, poured in wine, and applied healing herbs and the serpentine ~t~,~. But some say that Machaon’s brother Podaleirius, the physici:~n, t,,,,k charge of the case. S
e. No sooner was Phi~octetes about again, than he challenged Ptri, to a combat in archery. The first arrow he shot went wide, the scc{,~ pierced Paris’s bow-hand, the third blinded his right eye, and ti~c fourth struck his ankle, wounding him mortally. Despite Mencla[~,~ attempt to despatch Paris, he contrived to hobble from the f~cld :’.1,i take refuge in Troy. That night the Trojans carried him to Mount ld,~, ~66. e—166. h 32?
where he begged his former mistress, the nymph Oenone, to heal him; from an inveterate hatred of Helen, however, she cruelly shook her head and he was brought back to die. Presently Oenone relented, and ran to Troy with a basketful of healing drugs, but found him already dead. In a frenzy of grief she leaped from the walls, or hanged herself, or burned herself to death on his pyre—no one remembers which.
Some excuse Oenone by saying that she would have healed Paris at once, had not her father prevented her; she was obliged to wait until he had left the house before bringing the simples, and then it proved too late.6
f. Helenus and Deiphobus now quarrelled for Helen’s hand, and Priam supported Deiphobus’s claim on the ground that he had shown the greater valour; but, though her marriage to Paris had been divinely arranged, Helen could not forget that she was still Queen of Sparta and wife to Menelaus. One night, a sentry caught her tying a rope to the battlements in an attempt to escape. She was led before Deiphobus, who inarried her by force—much to the disgust of the other Trojans. Hclenus immediately left the city and went to live .with Arisbe on the slopes of Mount Ida.?
o Upon hearing from Calchas that Helenus alone knew the secret
.1.
oracles which protected Troy, Agamemnon sent Odysseus to waylay ~:d drag him to the Greek camp. Helenus happened to be staying as Chryses’s guest in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo, when Odysseus came in search of him, and proved ready enough to disclose the oracles, on condition that he would be given a secure home in some distant landú He had deserted Troy, he explained, not because he feared death, but becatlse neither he nor Aeneas could overlook Paris’s sacrilegious murder of Achilles in this very temple, for which no amends had yet been made to Apollo?
h. ‘ So be it. Hold nothing back, and I will guarantee your hfe and safety,’ said Odysseus.
‘The oracles are brief and clear,’ Helenus answered. ‘Troy falls this summer, ira certain bone of Pelops is brought to your camp; ifNeoptolcmus takes the field; and if Athene’s Palladium is stolen from the ú .. 7~ citadel—because the walls cannot be breached while it remains there. Agamemnon at once sent to Pisa for Pelops’s shoulder-blade. Meanwhile, Odysseus, Phoenix, and Diomedes sailed to Scyros, where they persuaded Lycomedes to let Neoptolemus come to Troy—some say that he was then only twelve years old. The ghost of Achilles appeared 328 ~66. h—~66. l before him on his arrival, and he forthwith disfinguished himself both in council and inwar, Odysseus gladly resigning Achilles’s arms to him? i. Eurypylus son of Telephus now reinforced the Trojans with an army of Mysians, and Priam, who had offered his mother Astyoche a golden vine if he came, betrothed him to Cassandra. Eurypylus proved a resolute fighter, and killed Machaon the surgeon; which is why, m Asdepius’s sanctuary at Pergamus, whe~e every service begins with a hymn celebrating Telephus, the name of his son Eurypylus may not be spoken on any occasion. Machaon’s bones were taken back to Pylus by Nestor, and sick people are healed in the sanctuary at Geraneia; his garlanded bronze statue dominates the sacred place called ‘The Rose’. Eurypylus himself was killed by Neoptolemus.1’
fi Shordy before the fall of Troy, the dissensions~between Priam’s sons grew so fierce that he authorized Antenor to negotiate peace with Agamemnon. On his arrival at the Greek camp Antenor, out of hatred for Deiphobus, agreed to betray the Palladium and the city into Odysseus’s hands; his price was the kingship and half of Priam’s treasure. Aeneas, he told A~amemnon, could also be counted upon to help.12
k. Together they concocted a plan, in pursuance of which Odysseus asked Diomedes to flog him mercilessly; then, bloodstained, filthy, and dressed in rags, he gained admittance into Troy as a runaway slave. Helen alone saw through his disguise, but when she privately questioned him, was fobbed off with evasive answers. Nevertheless, he could not decline an invitation to her house, where she bathed, anointed and clothed him in free robes; and his identity be’rag thus estabhshed beyond question, swore a solemn oath that she would not betray him to the Trojans—so far she had confided only in Hecabe—if he revealed all the details of his plan to her. Helen explained that she was now kept a prisoner in Troy, and longed to go home. At this juncture, Hecabe entered. Odysseus at once threw himself at her feet, weeping for terror, and implored her not to denounce him. Surprisingly enough, she agreed. He then hurried back, guided by Hecabe, and reached iris friends in safety with a harvest of information; claiming to have killed a number of Trojans who would not open the gates for him. 13
1. Some say that Odysseus stole the Palladium on this occasion, single-handed. Others say that he and Diomedes, as favourites of Athene, were chosen to do so, and that they climbed up to the citadel by way of a narrow and muddy conduit, killed the sleeping guards, and together took possession of the image, which the priestess Theano, Antenor’s 166. l—166. m 329
wife, willingly surrender’ed.14 The common account, however, is that Diomedes scaled the wall by climbing upon Odysseus’s shoulders, because the ladder was short, and entered Troy alone. When he reappeared, carrying the Palladium in his arms, the two of them set out for the camp, side by side, under a full moon; but Odysseus wanted all the glory. He dropped behind Diomedes, to whose shoulders the image was now strapped, and would have murdered him, had not the shadow of his sword caught Diomedes’s eye, the moon being still low in tl~,e hcavens. He spun about, drew his own sword and, disarming Odysseus, ?inioncd his hands and drove him back to the ships with repeated kicks and blows. Hence the phrase ‘Diomedes’s compulsion’, often applied to those whose actions are coerced.1s tn. The Romans pretend that Odysseus and Diomedes carried offa xncre replica of the Palladium which was on public display, and that Aeneas, at the fall of Troy, rescued the authentic image, smuggled it out with the remainder of his sacred luggage, and brought it safe to Italy.16
1. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 8; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 91 x; Sophocles: Philoctetes i. if.
1. Hyginus: Fabula I02; Eustathius on Homer p. 330; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi., quoted by Photius p. 490; Philostratus: Heroica 53. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: v., quoted by Photius p.486; Pamanias: i. 22. 6.
4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Philostratus: loc. tit. and Philoaetes 915 fi~ and ~409 if.
5. Orpheus and Dionysius, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 91~; Apollodorus: loc. cit.
6. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 61-2; 64 and 91~; Lesches: Little Iliad; Apollodorus: iii. ~2.6.
7. Apoliodorus: Epitome v. 9; Tzetzes: OnLycophron ~43 and ~68; Euripides: Trojan Women 955-60; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 166. 8. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 9-~o; Sophocles: Philoctetes 606; Orpheus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 91~; Dictys Cretensis: iv. 18.
9. Sophocles: Philoaetes ~337-42; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Tzetzes: loc. tit.
io. Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~; Pausanias: v. 13.3; Homer: Odyssey xi. 506 if.; Philostratus: Imagines 2; Quintus Smyrn.aeus: Posthomefica vi. 57-x 13 and vii. 169-43 o; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae; Lesches: 10c. tit.
33ř 266. ~—167. a
~1. Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xi. 520; Dictys Cretensis: iv. ~4; Little Iliad, quoted by Pausanias: in. 26. 7; Apollodorus: Epitome V. 12.
~2. Dictys Cretensis: iv. 22 and v. 8.
13. Euripides: Hccabe 239-50; Homer: Odyssey iv. 242 t~.; Lesches: loc. tit.
~4. Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~3; Sophocles: Fragment 367; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. ~66; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad vi. 31~; Stfidas sub Palladium; Johannes Malalas: Chronographica v. p. ~09, ed.
Dindorf; Dictys Cretensis: v. 5 and 8.
~5. Conon: Narrations 34; Servius: loc. tit.
16. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 68 if.; Ovid: Fasti vi. 434. I. All this is idle romance, or drama, except for the stealing of the Palladium, Hecabe’s mysterious refusal to betray Odysseus (see ~68.5), and the death of Paris from a wound in his ankle (see 92. 10; 126.3 and 164. j). Pelops’s shoulder-blade was probably of porpoise-ivory (see l09. 5). The account which makes Philoctetes succumb to poison—of Heracles’s arrows dipped in the Hydra’s blood—sedms to be the earliest one (see ~62. l).
2. Pausanias reports (v. 13.3): ‘When the Greeks returned from Troy, the ship that carried the shoulder-blade of Pelops was sunk off Euboea in a storm. Many years later an Eretrian fisherman named Damarmenus
(“subduer of sails”) drew up a bone in his net, which was of such astonishing size that he hid it in the sand while he went to ask the Delphic Oracle whose bone it was, and what ought to be done with it. Apollo had arranged that an Elean embassy should arrive that same day requiring a remedy for a plague. The Pythoness answered the Eleans: “Recover the shoulder-blade of Pelops.” To Damarmenus she said: “Give your bone to those ambassadors.” The Eleans rewarded him well, making the custodianship of the bone hereditary in his house. It was no longer to be seeu when I visited Elis: doubtless age and the action of the sea-water in which it had lain so long had mouldered it away.’
ATHENE now inspired Prylis, son of Hermes, to suggest that entry should be ga/ned into Troy by means of a wooden horse; and Epeius, ~67. a—~67. e 33~
son of Panopeus, a Phocian from Parnassus, volunteered to build one under Athene’s supervision. Afterwards, of course, Odysseus claimed all the credit for this stratagem?
b. Epeius had brought thirty ships from the Cyclades to Troy. He held the office of water-bearer to the House of Atreus; as appears in the frieze of Apollo’s temple at Carthen, and though a skilled boxer and a consummate craftsman, was born a coward, in divine punishment for his father’s breach of faith—Panopeus had falsely sworn in Athene’s name not to embezzle any part of the Taphian booty won by Amphitryon. Epcius’s cowardice has since become proverbial.2
c. He built an enormous hollow horse of fir planks, with a trap-door fitted into one flank, and large letters cut on the other which consecrated it to Athene: ‘In thankful anticipation of a safe return to their homes, the Greeks dedicate this o~bring to the Goddess.’~ Odysseus persuaded the bravest of the Greeks to climb fully armed up a ropeladder and through the trap*door into the belly of the horse. Their : number is variously given as twenty-three, thirty or more, fifty, and, absurdly enough, three thousand. Among them were Menelaus, Odysseus, Diomedes, Sthenclus, Acamas, Thoas, and Neoptolemus. Coaxed, threatened, and bribed, Epeius himselfjoined the party. He cIimbed up l~st, drew the ladder in after him and, since he alone knew how to work the trap-door, took his seat beside the Iock.4
d. At nightfall, the remaining Greeks under Agamemnon followed Odysseus’s instructions, which were to burn their camp, put out to sea, and wait off Tenedos and the Calydnian Islands until the following evening. Only Odysseus’s first cousin Sinon, a grandson of Autolycus, stayed behind to light a signal beacon for their return.s
e. At break of day, Trojan scouts reported that the camp lay in ashes and that the Greeks had departed, leaving a hue horse on the seashore. Priam and several of his sons went out to view it and, as they stood staring in wonder, Thymoetes was the first to break the silence. ‘ Since this is a gift to Athene,’ he said,’ I propose that we take it into Troy and haul it up to her citadel.’ ‘No, no!’ cried Capys. ‘Athene favoured the Creeks too long; we must either burn it at once or break it open to see what the belly contains.’ But Priam declared: ‘Thymoetes is right. We will fetch it in on rollers. Let nobody desecrate Athene’s property.’ The horse proved too broad to be squeezed through the gates. Even when the wall had been breached, it stuck four times. With enormous efforts the Trojans then hauled it up to the citadel; but at least took the 332 167. e—~67. h precaution of repairing the breach behind them. Another heated argument followed when Cassandra announced that the horse contained armed men, and was supported in her view by the seer Laoco/Sn, son of Antenor, whom some mistakenly call the brother of Anchises. Crying: ‘You fools, never trust a Greek even if he brings you gifts!’, he hurled his spear, which stuck quivering in the horse’s flank and caused the weapons inside to clash together. Cheers and shouts arose: ‘Burn it!’ ‘Hurl it over the walls !’ But,’ Let it stay,’ pleaded Priam’s supporters.6 f This argument was interrupted by the arrival of Sinon, whom a couple of Trojan soldiers were marching up in chains. Under interrogation, he said that Odysseus had long been trying to destroy him because he knew the secret of Palamedes’s murder. The Greeks, he went on, were heartily sick of the war, and would have sailed home months before this, but that the uninterrupted bad weather prevented them. Apollo had advised them to placate the Winds with blood, as when they were delayed at Aulis. ‘Whereupon,’ Sinon continued,
‘ Odysseus dragged Calchas forward, and asked him to name the victim. Calchas would not give an immediate answer and went into retirement for ten days, at the end of which time, doubtless bribed by Odysseus, he entered the Council hut and pointed at me. All present welcomed this verdict, every man relieved at not being chosen as the scapegoat, and I was put in fetters; but a favourable wind sprang up, my companions hurriedly launched their vessels, and in the confusion I made my escape.’
g. Thus Priam was tricked into accepting Sinon as a suppliant, and had his fetters broken. ‘Now tell us about this hone,’ he said kindly. Sinon explained that the Greeks had forfeited Athene’s support, on which they depended, when Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium from her temple. No sooner had they brought it to their camp than the image was three times enveloped by flames, and its limbs sweated in proof of the goddess’s wrath. Calchas thereupon advised Agamemnon to sail for home and assemble a fresh expedition in Greece, under better auspices, leaving the horse as a placatory gift to’ Athene. ‘ Why was it built so big?’ asked Priam. Sinon, well coached by Odysseus, replied: ‘To prevent you from bringing it into the city. Calchas foretells that if you despise this sacred image, Athene will ruin you; but once it enters Troy, you shall be empowered to marshal all the forces of Asia, invade Greece, and conquer Mycenae.’?
h. ‘ These are lies,’ cried Laoco/3n, ‘ and sound as if they were invented 167. h—i67. k 333 by Odysseus. Do not believe him, Priam!’ He added: ‘Pray, my lord, give me leave to sacrif~ce a bull to Poseidon. When I come back I hope to see this wooden horse reduced to ashe~.’ It should be explained that the Trojans, having stoned their priest of Poseidon to death nine years before, had decided not to replace him until the war seemed to have ended. Now they chose Laoco/Sn by lot to.propitiate Poseidon. He was already the priest of Thymbraean ApoLlo, whom he had angered by marrying and begetting children, despite a vow of celibacy and, worse, by lying with his wife Antlope in sight of the god’s image?
i. Laoco/3n retired to select a victim and prepare the altar but, in warning of Troy’s approaching doom, Apollo sent two great seaserpents, named Porces and Chariboea, or Curissia, or Periboea, rushing towards Troy from Tenedos and the Calydnian Islands.9 They darted ashore and, coiling around the hmbs of Laoco~3n’s twin sons Antiphas and Thymbraeus, whom some call Melanthus, crushed them to death. Laocoi3n ran to their rescue, but he too died miserably. The serpents then ghded up to the citadel and while one wound about Athene’s feet, the other took refuge behind her aegis. Some, however, say that only one of Laocoi3n’s sons was killed and that he died in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo, not beside Poseidon’s altar; and others ú that Laoc06n himself escaped death. to
j. This terrible portent served to convince the Trojans that Sinon had spoken the truth. Priam mistakenly assumed that Laoco~3n was being punished for hurling his spear at the hone, rather than for having insulted ApoLlo. He at once dedicated the horse to Athene and although ^eneas’s followers retired in alarm to their huts on Mount Ida, nearly all Priam’s Trojans began to celebrate the victory with banquets and merrymaking. The women gathered flowers from the river banks, gatlanded the horse’s mane, and spread a carpet of roses around its hooves.It
k. Meanwhile, inside the horse’s belly, the Greeks had been trembling for terror, and Epeius wept silendy, in an ecstasy of fear. Only Neo?tolemus showed no emotion, even when the point of Laoc06n’s spear broke through the timben close to his head. Time after time he nudged Odysseus to order the assault—for Odysseus was in command—and dutched his lance and sword-hilt menacingly. But Odysseus would not consent. In the evening Helen strolled from the palace and went around the horse three times, patting its flanks and, as if to amuse Deiphobus who was with her, teased the hidden Greeks by imitating 334 167. k—~67. m the voice of each of their wives in turn. Menelaus and Diomede squatting in the middle of the horse next to Odysseus, were tempted t leap out when they heard themselves called by name; but he restraine them and, seeing that Antielus was on the point of answering, clapped hand over his mouth and, some say, strangled him.12
L That night, exhausted with feasting and revelry, the Trojans sle1 soundly, and not even the bark of a dog broke the stillness. But Hele lay awake, and a bright round light blazed above her chamber as signal to the Greeks. At midnight, just before the full moon rose—d seventh of the year—Sinon crept from the city to kindle a beacon c Achilles’s tomb, and Anterior waved a torch.13
Agamemnon answered these signals by lighting pine-wood chi1
in a cresset on the deck of his ship, which was now heaved-to a fe’ bow-shots from the coast; and the whole fleet drove shorewar~
Antenor, cautiously approaching the horse, reported in a low voit that all was well, and Odysseus ordered Epeius to unlock the trat door. 14
m. Echion, son of Portheus, leaping out first, fell and broke his ned the rest descended by Epeius’s rope-ladder. Some ran to open the gat~ for the landing party, others cut down drowsy sentries guarding t~ citadel and palace; but Menelaus could think only of Helen, and r~ straight towards her house. IS
1. Hygiuus: Fabula l08; Tze~zes: OnLycophron219ff..; Apollodoru Epitome v. ~4.
2. Euripides: Trojan Women ~o; Dictys Cretensis: i. ~7; Stesichoru quoted by Eustathius on Homer p. 1323; Athenaeus: x. p. 45’
Homer: Iliad xxiii. 665; Tzetzcs: On Lycophron 930; Hesychi~
sub Epeius.
3. Homer: Odyssey viii. 493; Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~4-~54. Tzetzes: 10c. tit. and Posthomerica 641-50; Quintus Smyrnaeu Posthomerica xii. 314-35; Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~4; Little Ilia quoted by Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.; Hyginus: Ioc. tit.
5. Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~4-~5; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 344.
6. Virgil: Aeneid ii. 13-249; Lesches: Little Iliad; Tzetzes: On Lyc~ phron 347; Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~6-17; Hyginus: Fabula ~3
7. Virgil: 10c. cit.
8. Euphorion, quoted by Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidii. 20~ ; Hyginu loc. cit.; Virgil: loc. cit.
9. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 18; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Tzetzes: loc. cil Lysimachus, quoted by Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 2~ ~. 10. Thessandrus, quoted by Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid: loc. tit.; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Quintus Smyrnaeus: Posthomerica xii. 444-97; Arctinus of Miletus: Sack of Ilium; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Virgil: loc. tit. I~. Homer: Odyssey viii. 504 if.; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 16-17; Arctinus of Miletus: ibid.; Lesches: loc. tit.; Tryphiodorus: Sack qf Troy 3 16 if. and 340-4.
~2. Homer: Odyssey xi. 523-32 and iv. 271-89; Tryphiodorus: Sack of Troy 463-9ř.
13. Tryphiodorus: Sack of Troy 487-521; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 255; Lesches: loc. cit., quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 344; Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~9.
14. Virgil: Aeneid ii. 256 if.; Hyginus: Fabula I08; Apollodorus.: Epitome v. 20; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 340.
~5. Apollodorus: loc. tit.
~r
1. Classical commentators on Homer were dissatisfied with the story of the wooden horse. They suggested, variously, that the Greeks used a llorse-likc engine for breaking down the wag, (Pausanias: i. 23. Io); that Antenor admitted the Greeks into Troy by a postern which had a horse p,~intcd on it; or that the sign of a horse was used to distinguish the Greeks frr~n their enemies in the darkness and confusion; or that when Troy had bec:i i)ctrayed, the oracles forbade the plundering of any house marked with. the sign of a horse—hence those orAntenor and others were spared; ~r th:~t Troy fell as the result of a cavalry action; or that the Greeks, after [,ur~fing their camp, concealed themselves behind Mount Hippius (‘of the horse’).
2. Troy is quite likely to have been stormed by means of a wheeled ~t)()den tower, faced with wet horse hides as a protection against incendi~ry darts, and pushed towards the notoriously weak part of the defences —tlac westcrn curtain which Aeacus had built (see 158.8). But this would ilardly account for the legend that the Trojan leaders were concealed in tile hors›’s ‘belly’. Perhaps the Homeridae invented this to explain a no i~gcr intelligible icon showing a walled city, a queen, a solemn assembly, ~tnd tile sacred king in the act of rebirth, head first, from a mare, which was the sacred animal both of the Trojans (see 48.3) and of the Aeacids (see st. 4). A wooden mare built of fir, the birth-tree (see 5 I. 5), may have been used in this ceremony, as a wooden cow facilitated the sacred marriage of Minos and Pasipha~ (see 88. e). Was the struggle between Odysseus and Antielus deduced perhaps from an icon that showed twins quarrelling in the womb (see 73—2)?
.3. The story of LaocoiSn’s son, or sons, recalls that of the two serpents strangled by Heracles (see ~19. 2). According to some versions, their death occurred in Apollo’s shrine, and Laocoi3n himself, like Amphi— 336 167. 3—168. b tryon, escaped unharmed. The serpents will, in fact, have merely bee~ cleansing the boys’ ears to give them prophetic powers.’ Antiphas’ apparently means ‘prophet’—’one who speaks instead of’ the god. 4—On the divine level this war was fought between Aphrodite, the Trojan Sea-goddess, and the Greek Sea-god Poseidon (see 169. ~)—hence Priam’s suppression of Poseidon’s priesthood.
5. Sweating images have been a recurrent phenomenon ever since the Fall of Troy; Roman gods later adopted this warning signal, and so did the Catholic saints who took their places.
6. In early saga Epeius’s reputation for courage was such that l-ils name became ironically applied to a braggart; and from braggart to coward is only a short step (see 88. ~0).
O D ~e s s ~ u s, it seems, had promised Hecabe and Helen that all who offered no resistance shotfid be spared. Yet now the Greeks poured silenfiy through the moonlit streets, broke into the unguarded houses, and cut the throats of the Trojans as they slept. Hecabe took refuge with her daughters beneath an ancient laurel-tree at the altar raised to Zeus of the Courtyard, where she restrained Priam from rushing into the thick of the fight. ‘Remain among us, my lord,’ she pleaded, ‘in this safe place. You are too old and feeble for battle.’ Priam, grumbling, did as she asked until their son Polites ran by, closely pursued by the Greeks, and fell transfixed before their eyes.1 Cursing Neoptolemus, who had delivered the death blow, Priam hurled an ineffectual spear at him; whereupon he was hustled away from the altar steps, now red with Polites’s blood, and butchered at the threshold of his own palace. But Neoptolemns, remembering his filial duty, dragged the body to Achilles’s tomb on the Sigaean promontory, where he left it to rot, headless and tinburied.2
b. Meanwhile Odysseus and Menelaus had made for Deiphobus’s house, and there engaged in the bloodiest of all their combats, emerg’mg victorious only with Athene’s aid. Which of the two killed Deiphobus is disputed. Some even say that Helen herself plunged a dagger into his back; and that this action, and the sight of her naked breasts, so weak— ~68. b—~68. d 337 ened the resolution of Menelaus, who had sworn ‘She must die!’, that he threw away his sword and led her in safety to the ships. Deiphobus’s corpse was atrociously mangled, but Aeneas later raised a monument to him on Cape Rhoeteum.3
Odysseus saw Glaucus, one of Antenor’s sons, flee’rag down a street with a company of Greeks in hot pursuit. He intervened, and at the same time rescued Glaucus’s brother Helicaon, who had been seriously wounded. Menelaus then hung a leopard’s skin over the door of Antenor’s house, as a sign that it should be spared.4 Anterior, his wife Theano, and his four sons, were allowed to go free, taking all their goods with them; some days later they sailed away in Menelaus’s ship, and setfled first at Cyrene, next in Thrace, and finally at Henetica on the Adriatic. S Henetica was so called because Antenor took command of certain refugees from Paphlagonian Enete, whose King Pylaemenes had fallen at Troy, and led them in a successful war against the Euganei of the Northern Italian plain. The port and district where they disembarked was renamed ‘New Troy’, and they themselves are now known as Venetians. Antenor is also said to have founded the city of ?adua.6
e. According to the Romans, the only other Trojan family spared by the Greeks was that of Aeneas who, like Anterior, had lately urged the surrender of Helen and the conclusion of a just peace; Agamemnon, seeing him lift the venerable Anchises upon his shoulders and carry him towards the Dardanian Gate without a sideways glance, gave orders that so pious a son should not be molested. Some, however, say that Aeneas was absent in Phrygia when the city fell.7 Others, that he defended Troy to the last, then retired to the citadel of Pergamus and, after a second bold stand, sent his people forward under cover ofdarkne~s to Mount Ida, where he followed them as soon as he might with his family, his treasure, and the sacred images; and that, being offered honourable terms by the Greeks, he passed over into Thracian Pellene, and died either there or at Arcadian Orchomenus. But the Romans say that he wandered at last to Latium, founded the city of Lavinium and, falling in battle, was carried up to Heaven. All these are fables: the truth is that Neoptolemus led him away captive on board his ship, the most honourable prize won by any of the Greeks, and held him for ransom, which in due course the Dardanians paid?
d. Helicaon’s wife Laodice (whom some call the wife of Telephus) had lain with Acamas the Athenian, when he came to Troy in Dio— 338 168. d—168.f named’! medes’s embassy ten years before, and secretly borne him a son Munitus, whom Helen’s slave-woman Aethra—mother to Theseus, and thus the infant’s great-grandmother—had reared for her. At the fall of Troy, as Laodice stood in the sanctuary of Tros, beside the tombs of Cilla and Munippus, the earth gaped and swallowed her before the eyes of all.9
e. In the confusion, Aethra fled with Munitus to the Greek camp, where Acamas and Demophon recognizedher as their long-lost grandmother, whom they had sworn either to rescue or to ransom. Demophon at once approached Agamemnon and demanded her repatriation, with that of her fellow-captive, the sister ofPeirithous. Menestheus of Athens supported their plea, and since Helen had often shown her dislike of Aethra by setting a foot on her head and tugging at her hair, Agamemnon gave his assent; but obliged Demophon and Acamas to waive their claims to any other Trojan spoil. Unfortunately, when Acamas landed in Thrace on his homeward voyage, Munitus, who was accompanying him, died ofa serpent’s bite.TM
fi No sooner had the massacre begun in T~oy than Cassandra fled to the temple of Athene and clutched the wooden image which had replaced the stolen Palladium. There Little Ajax found her and tried to drag her away, but she embraced the image so tightly that he had to take it with him when he carried her off into concubinage; which was the common fate of all Trojan women. Agamemnon, however, claimed Cassandra as the particular award of his own valour, and Odysseus obligingly put it about that Ajax had violated Cassandra in the shrine; which was why the image kept its eyes upturned to Heaven, as if horror-stricken.1I Thus Cassandra became Agamemnon’s prize, while Ajax earned the hatred of the whole army; and, when the Greeks were about to sail, Calchas war~ed the Council that Athene must be placated for the insult offered to her priestess. To gratify Agamemnon, Odysseus then proposed the stoning of Ajax; but he escaped by taking sanctuary at Athene’s altar, where he swore a solemn oath that Odysseus was lying as usual; nor did Cassandra herself support the charge of rape. Nevertheless, Calchas’s prophecy could hardly be disregarded; Ajax therefore expressed sorrow for having forcibly removed the image, and offered to expiate his crime. This he was prevented from doing by death: the ship in which he sailed home to Greece being wrecked on the Gyraean Rocks. When he scrambled ashore, Poseidon split the rocks with his trident and drowned him; or, some say, Athene , i68. f—~68. h 339 black for a whole year, and now annually launch a black-sailed ship, heapcd with gifts, and burn it in his honour.1z
g. Athene’s wrath then fell on the land of Optmtian Locris, and the Delphic Oracle warned Ajax’s former subjects that they would have no relief from famine and pestilence unless they sent two gifts to Troy every year for a thousand years. Accordingly, the Hundred Houses of śocris have ever since shouldered this burden in proof of their nobility, They choose the gifts by lot, and land them at dead of night on the Rhoetean headland, each time varying the season; with them go kinsmen who know the country and can smuggle them into the sanctuary of Athene. If the Trojans catch these girls, they are stoned to death, burned as a defilement to the land, and their ashes scattered on the sea; but once inside the shrine, they are safe. Their hair is then shorn, they are given the single garment of a slave, and spend their days in menial temple duties until relieved by another pair. It happened many years ago that when the Trarians captured Troy and killed a Locrian priestess in the temple itself, the Locrians decided that their long penance must be over and therefore sent no more gifts; but, famine and pestilence supervening, they hastened to resume their ancient custom, t~e term of which is only now drawing to an end. These girls gain Athene’s sanctuary by way of an underground passage, the secret entrance to which is at some distance from the walls, and which leads to the muddy culvert used by Odysseus and Diomedes when they stole the Palladium. The Trojans have no notion how the girls contrive to enter, and never know on what night the relief is due to arrive, so that they seldom catch them, and then only by accident.1~
h. After the massacre, Agamemnon’s people plundered and burned Troy, divided the spoils, razed the walls, and sacrificed holocausts to their gods. The Council had debated for awhile what should be done with Hector’s infant son Astyanax, otherwise called Scamandrius; and when Odysseus recommended the systematic extirpation of Priam’s descendants, Calchas settled the boy’s fate by prophesying that, if allowed to survive, he would avenge Iris parents and his city. Though all other princes shrank from infanfcide, Odysseus willingly hurled Astyanax from the battlements. 14 But some say that Neoptolemus, to whom Hector’s widow Andromache had fallen as a prize in the division of spoil, snatched Astyanax from her, in anticipation of the Coun(fi’s 340 ~68. h—168. l decree, whirled him around his head by one foot and flung him upon~ the rocks far below. XS And others say that Astyanax leaped to his death from the wall, while Odysseus was reciting Calchas’s prophecy and invoking the gods to approve the cruel rite?
i. The Council also debated Polyxena’s fate. As he lay dying, Achilles had begged that she should be sacrificed upon his tomb, and more recently had appeared in dreams to Neoptolemus and other chieftains, threatening to keep the fleet windbound at Troy until they fulldied his demand. A voice was also heard complaining from the tomb: ‘It is unjust that none of the spoil has been awarded to me!’ And a ghost appeared on the Rhoetean headland, clad in golden armour, crying: ‘Whither away, Greeks? Would you leave my tomb unhonoured?’ ~7
j. Calchas now declared that Polyxena must not be denied to Achilles, who loved her. Agamemnon dissented, arguing that enough blood was already shed, of old men and infants as well as of warriors, to glut Achilles’s vengeance, and that dead men, however famous, enjoyed no rights over live women. But Demophon and Acamas, who had been defrauded of their fair share in the spoils, clamoured that Agamemnon was expressing this view only to please Polyxena’s sister Cassandra and make her submit more readily to his embraces. They asked: ‘Which deserves the greater respect, Achilles’s sword or Cassandra’s bed?’ Feeling ran high and Odysseus, intervening, persuaded Agamemnon to give way?
k. The Council then instructed Odysseus to fetch Polyxena, and invited Neoptolemus to officiate as priest. She was sacrificed on Achilles’s tomb, in the sight of the whole army, who hastened to give her honourable burial; whereupon fayouting winds sprang up at once. ~9 But some say that the Greek fleet had already reached Thrace when the ghost of Achilles appeared, threatening them with contrary w’mds, and that Polyxena was sacr’Lflced there? Others record that she went of her own free~vill to Achilles’s tomb, before Troy fell, and threw herself on the point of a sword, thus expiating the wrong she had done him? I. Though Achilles had killed Polydorus, Priam’s son by Laotho~, the youngest and best-loved of his children, yet another prince of the same name survived. He was Priam’s son by Hecabe and had been sent for safety to the Thracian Chersonese, where his aunt Iliona, wife of King Polymnestor, reared him. Iliona treated Polydorus as though he were a true brother to Deiphilus, whom she had borne to Polymnestor. ~68. l—168. n 34~
Agamemnon, pursuing Odysseus’s policy of extirpation, now sent messengers to Polymnestor promising him Electra for a wife and a dowry of gold if he would do away with Polydorus. Polymnestor accepted the bribe, yet could not bring himself to harm a child whom he had sworn to protect, and instead killed his own son Deiphilus in the presence of the messengers, who went back deceived. Polydorus, not knowing the secret of his birth, but realizing that he was the cause of Iliona’s estrangement from Polymnestor, went to Delphi and asked the Pythoness: ‘What ails my parents?’ She answered: ‘Is it a small thing that your city is reduced to ashes, your father butchered and your mother enslaved, that you should come to me with such a question?’ He returned to Thrace in great anxiety, but found nothing changed since his departure. ‘Can Apollo have been mistaken?’ he wondered. Iliona told him the truth and, indignant that Polymnestor should have murdered his only child for gold and the promise of another queen, he first blinded and then stabbed him?
m. Od~ers say that Polymnestor was threatened by the Greeks with relentless war unless he would give up Polydorus and that, when he ~~elded, they brought the boX to their camp and offered to exchange him for Helen. Since Priam declined to discuss the proposal, Agamemnon had Polydorus stoned to death beneath the walls of Troy, afterwards sending his body to Helen with the message: ‘Show Priam this, and ask him whether he regrets his decision.’ It was an act of wanton spite, because Priam had pledged his word never to surrender Helen while she remained under Aphrodite’s protection, and was ready to ransom Polydorus with the rich city ofAntandrus. Z3
n. Odysseus won Hecabe as his prize, and took her to the Thracian Chersonese, where she uttered such hideous invectives against him and the other Greeks, for their barbarity and breaches of faith, that they found no alternative but to put her to death. Her spirit took the shape of one of those fearful black bitches that follow Hecate, leaped into the sea and swam away towards the Hellespont; they called the place of her burial’ The Bitch’s Tomb’.24 Another version of the story is that after the sacrifice of Polyxena, Hecabe found the dead body of Polydorus washed up on the shore, her son-in-law Polyrnnestor having murdered him for the gold with which Priam was clefraying the expenses of his education. She summoned Polymnestor, promising to let him into the secret of a treasure concealed among the rums of Troy, and when he approached with his two sons, drew a dagger from her 342 168. n—168. o bosom, stabbed the boys to death and tore out Polymnestor’s eyes; a display of ill-temper which Agamemnon pardoned because of her age and misfortunes. The Thracian nobles would have taken vengeance on Hecabe with darts and stones, but she transformed herself into a bitch named Maera, and ran around howling dismally, so that they retired in confusion.rS
o. Some say that Antenor founded a new Trojan kingdom upon the ruins of the old one. Others, that Astyanax survived and became King of Troy after the departure of the Greeks; and that, when he was expelled by Antenor and his allies, Aeneas put him back on the throneto which, however, Aeneas’s son Ascanius eventually succeeded, as had been prophesied. Be that as it may, Troy has never since been more than a shadow of its former self. 26
1. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 21; Euripides: Hecabe 23; Virgil: Aeneid it. 506-57.
2. Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Pausanias: x. 27. x; Virgil: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: loc. sit.; Euripides: Trojan Women ~6-17.
3. Homer: Odyssey viii. 5~7-20; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 22; Hyginus: Fabula 240; Pausanias: v. 18. ~; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by scholiast on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata 155; Virgil:
Aeneid vi. 494 if.; Dictys ~Zretensis: v. ~2.
4. Apollodorus: Epitome v. 2~; Homer: Iliad iii. 123; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Pausanias: x. 26. 3; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidi. 246; Sophocles: Capture of Troy, quoted by Strabo: xiii. ~. 53. $. Pausanias: x. 27. ~; Pindar: Pythian Odes v. 82 fl.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 246; Strabo: xiii. ~. 53.
6. Livy: i. ~; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneidi. 246.
7. Livy: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 2~; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 48. 8. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 48, 49, and 64; Aelian: Varia Historia iii. 22; Hyginus: Fabula 254; Strabo: xiii. 608; Pausanias: viii. 12. 5; Virgil: Aeneid, passim; Plutarch: Romulus 3; Livy: i. 2; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1268.
9. Hyginus: Fabula xox; Homer: Iliad iii. 123-4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 495 if. and 3r4; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 23. io. Scholiast on Euripides’s Trojan Women32;Apollodorus:Epitome v. 22; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Pausanias: x. 25.3; Hyginus: Fabula 243; Pausanias: v. ~9. z; Dio Chrysostom: Orations xi. i. p. 179, ed. Dindorff; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 495; Parthenius:
Love Stories 16.
I~. Arctinus of Miletus: Sack of Ilium; Virgil: Aeneid ii. 406; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xiii. 66. ~68. ~ ú 343 iz. Tzetzes: On Lycośhron 365; Apollodorus: Epitome v. 23; Pausanias: x. 3]—~; i. ]$. 3 and x. 26. I; Homer: Odyssey iv. 99. ]3. Hyginus: Fabula ]]6; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xiii. 66; Lycophron: ] ] 4 ]-73, with Tzetzes’s scholia; Polybius: xii. On the Slowness of Divine Justice xii; Strabo: xiii. ~. 40; Aehan: Varia Historia, Fragment 47; Aeneas Tacticus: xxxi. 24.
~4. Homer: Iliad vi. 402; Apollodorus: Ioc. tit.; Euripides: Trojan Women 7~9 if-; Hyginus: FabuIa ]09; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 457; Tryphiodorus: Sack of Troy 644-6.
~$. Apollodorus: loc. cito; Lesches: Little Iliad, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron ~268; Pausanias: x. 25.4.
16. Seneca: Troades $24 if. and ]063 if.
~7. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 322; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 323; Quintus Smyrnaeus: Posthomerica xiv. 2 ]o-328; Euripides: Hecabe ]07 if.
. 18. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid: loc. cit.; Euripides: Ioc.
19. Euripides: He~abe 218 tic. and $z~-82.
20. Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 439 ff-; Pausanias: x. z$. 4.
21. Philostratus: Herolea xix. II.
22. Homer: Ili~dxxii. 48 and xx. 407 ff.; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.’and 240. 23. Dictys Cretensis: ii. ~8, 22, and 27; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 6.
~4. Apollodorus: Ioc. ~it.; Hyginus: Fabula I~I; Dictys Cretensis: v. ]6; Tzctzes: On Lycophron ]]76.
25. Euripides: Hecabe; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 536 if..
26. Dictys Cretensis: v. 17; Abas, quoted by Servius on Virg/fi’s Aeneid ix. ~64; Livy: i. ~.
. i. Odysscus’s considerate treatment of such renegades as Antenor and Calchas is contrasted here with the treachery he showed to his honest comrades Palamedes, Great Ajax, Little Ajax, and Diomedes, and with his savage handling of Astyanax, Polydorus, and Polyxena; but because Julius Caesar and Augustus claimed descent from-Aeneas—another traitor spared by Odysseus, and regarded at Rome as a model of pietythe satiric implications are lost on modern readers. It is a pity that the exact terms of Hecabe’s invectives against Odysseus and his comrades in dishonour, which must have expressed Homer’s true feelings, have no~ survived; but her conversion into the Cretan Hecate, Maera, or Scylla the sea-bitch (see ]6.2; 91. 2; and 170. t), suggests that he regarded the curses as valid—kingdoms founded on barbarity and ill-faith could never prosper. Maera was Scylla’s emblem in heaven, the Lesser Dog-star, and when it rose, human sacrifices were offered at Marathon in Attica: the most famous victim being King Icarius (see 79—i), whose daughter 344 168. ~—168.4
Odysseus had married and whose fate he will therefore have the original myth (see 159. b).
2. The well-authenticated case ofthe Locrian in Greek history, since Little Ajax’s alleged violation dismissed by reputable mythographers as an Odyssean lie, and it is that the Locrian girls gained entry into Troy as a matter of civ/c pri&, not of penance. A genuine attempt was made by the Trojans to keep them out, if we can trust Aeneas Tacticus’s account—he is discussing the danger of building cities with secret entrances—and that they defilement of the land’ if caught, and as slaves if they managed to gain entry, is consistent with this view. Little Ajax was the son of Locrian~ Oileus; whose name, also borne by a Trojan warrior whom Agamenmoni killed (Ili~d xi. 9. 3), is an early form of’Ilus’; and Priam’s Ilium had seems, been partly colonized by Locrians, a pre-Hellenic tribe of Lelege~ (Aristotle: Fragment 560; Dionysius of Halicarnassus: i. 17; Strabo: xiii. x. 3 and 3.3). They gave the name of the Locrian mountain Phricones to what was hitherto called Cyme; and eujoyed a hereditary right to supply Athene with a quota of priestesses (see ~ 58.8). This right they contint~ed to exercise long after the Trojan War—when the city had lost its political power and became merely a place of sentimental pilgrimage—much to the disgust of the Trojans, who regarded the girls as their natural enemies, 3—The curse, effective for a thousand years, ended about 264 B.C.—! which would correspond with the Delian (and thus the Homeric) dating of the Trojan War, though Eratosthenes reckoned it a hundred years later. Odysseus’s secret conduit has been discovered in the ruins of Troy and is described by Walter Leaf in his Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography, (London, 19~2, pp. x~6-44). But why did Theano turn traitress and surrender the Palladium? Probably because being a Locrian—Theano was also the name of the famous poetess of Epizephyrian Locri—she either disagreed with Priam’s anti-Locrian trade policy, or knew that Troy must fall and wanted the image removed to safety, rather than captured by Agamemnon. Homer makes her a daughter of Thracian Cisseus, and there was at least one Locrian colony in Thrace, namely Abdera (see 130. c). As a Locrian, however, Theano will have reckoned descent matrilineally (Polybius: xii. 5.6); and was probably surnamed Cisseis, ‘ivy-woman’, in honour of Athene whose chief festival fell during the ivy-month (see 5g. $).
4. Sophocles, in the Argument to his Ajax, mentions a quarrel between Odysseus and Ajax over the Palladium after the fall of Troy; but this must have been Little Ajax, since Great Ajax had already killed himself. We may therefore suppose that Little Ajax, rather than Diomedes, led Odysseus up the conduit to fetch away the Palladium with the connivance of his compatriot Theano; that Odysseus accused Little Ajax of laying violent hands on a non-Locrian priestess who clung to the image ~68.4—~68.8 345 which Theano was helping him to remove; and that afterwards Ajax, ! while admitting his error, explained that he had been as gentle as possible in the circumstances. Such an event would have justified the Trojans of later centuries in trying to restrain the Locrian girls from exercising their rights as Trojan priestesses; in representing their continued arrival as a penance due for Ajax’s crime, even though Athene had summarily pun/shed him with a thunderbolt; and in treating them as menials. Ody~,.eus may have insisted upon accompanying Little Ajax into the ci~.adcI, on the ground that Zacynthus, eponymous ancestor of his subjects ti~e Zacynthians, figured in a list of early Trojan kings. 5. ‘l’his, again, would explain Hecabe’s failure to denounce Odysseus to the Trojans when he entered the city as a spy. She too is described as a ‘daughter of Cisseus’; was she another Locrian from Thrace who connived at Ajax’s removal of the Palladium? Hecabe had no cause to love Odyss~.tus, and her reason for facilitating his escape can only have been to prevc~,.t him from denouncing her to the Trojans. Odysseus doubtless slipped out quietly by the culvert and not, as he boasted, by the gate ‘after ‘killing many Trojans’. Presumably he demanded old Hecabe as his share of the spoil because she had been a material witness of the Palladium incident and he wanted to stop her mouth. She seems, however, t<~ have revealed everything before she died. 6. ›)ne of the principal causes of the Trojan War (see x$8. r and ~60. b) was Tdamon’s abduction of Priam’s sister Hesione, the mother of Great Aiax and thus a kinswoman of Little Ajax; this points to long-standing frictio:~ between Priam and the Locrians of Greece. Patroclus, who caused the Trojans such heavy losses, was yet another Locrian, described as Abderus’s brother.
The name Astyanax (‘king of the city’), and the solemnity of the debate about his death, suggests that the icon on which the story is based represented the ritual sacrifice of a child at the dedication of a new cityan ancient custom ‘in the Eastern Mediterranean (~ Kings xvi. 34). 7. Agamemnon’s allies did not long enjoy the fruits of their triumph over Troy. Between x~oo and ~050 n.c., the Dorian invasion overwheha~ed Mycenaean culture in the Peloponnese and the Dark Ages supervened; it was a century or two before the Ionians, forced by the Dorians to emigrate to Asia Minor, began their cultural renascence; wlfich was based solidly on Homer.
8. Aeneas’s wander’mgs belong to Roman, not Greek, mythology; and have therefore been omitted here.
‘L~T us sail at once,’ said Menelaus, ‘while the breeze holds.’ ‘No, n0’~ replied Agamemnon,’ let us first sacrifice to Athene.” We Greeks owe Athene nothing!’ Menelaus told him. ‘She defended the Trojan cita-~ del too long.’ The brothers parted on ill terms and never saw each other again, for whereas Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Nestor enjoye~ a prosperous homeward voyage, Menelaus was caught in a storm se~ by Athene; and lost all but five vessels. These were blown to Cret~ whence he crossed the sea to Egypt, and spent eight years in souther waters, unable to return. He visited Cyprus, Phoenicia, Ethiopia, an Libya, the princes of which received him hospitably and gave him; many rich gifts. At last he came to Pharos, where the nymph Eidothea advised him to capture her prophetic father, Proteus the sea-god, who alone could tell him how to break the adverse spell and secure southerly breeze.
Menelaus and three companions accordingly disguised themselves i stinking seal-skins and lay waiting on the shore, until they werejoine~ at midday by hundreds of seals, Proteus’s flock. Proteus himself then appeared and went to sleep among the seals: whereupon Menelaus and his party seized him, and though he turned successively into lion, serpent, panther, boar, running water, and leafy tree, held him fast and forced him to prophesy. He announced that Agamemnon had been murdered, and that Menelaus must visit Egypt once more and pro-i pitiate the gods w~th hecatombs. This he duly did, and no sooner hadhe i raised a cenotaph to Agamemnon, beside the River of Egypt, than the winds blew fair at last. He arrived at Sparta, accompanied by Helen, on the very day that Oresres avenged Agamemnon’s murder.x
b. A great many ships, though containing no leaders of note, were wrecked on the Euboean coast, because Nauplius had kindled a beacon on Mount Caphareus to lure his enemies to their death, as if guiding them into the shelter of the Pagasaean Gulf; but this crime became known to Zeus, and it was by a false beacon that Nauplius himself met l~s end many years later.2
c. Amphilochus, Calchas, Podaleirius and a few others travelled by land to Colophon, where Calchas died, as had been prophesied, on ~69. a—~69. e 347 meeting a wiser seer than himself—none other than Mopsus, the son of Apollo and Teiresias’s daughter Manto. A wild fig-tree covered with fruit grew at Colophon, and Calchas, wishing to abash Mopsus, challenged him as follows: ‘Can you perhaps tell me, dear colleague, exactly how many figs will be harvested from that tree?’ Mopsus, dosing his eyes, as one who trusts to inner sight rather than vulgar computation, answered: ‘Certainly: first ten thousand figs, then an ^eginetan bushel of figs, carefully weighed—yes, and a single fig left over.’ Calchas laughed scornfully at the single fig, but when the tree had bccn stripped, Mopsus’s intuition proved unerring. ‘To descend fr~m thousands to lesser quantities, deer colleague,’ Mopsus now said, wifll an unpleasant smile, ‘how many piglings, would you say, repose in fl~e paunch of that pregnant sow; and how many of each sex will she śarrow; and when?’
‘Eight piglings, all male, and she will farrow them within nine days,’ Calchas answered at random, hoping to be gone before his guess could be disproved. ‘I am of a different opinion,’ said Mopsus, again closing his eyes. ‘My estimate is three piglings, only one of them a boar; and the time of their birth will be midday tomorrow, not a minute earher or later.’ Mopsus was right once more, and Calchas died of a broken heart. His comrades buried him at Nothium.3
d. The timorous Podaleirius, instead of asking his prophetic friends where he should setfie, preferred to consult the Delphic Pythoness, who advised him irritably to go wherever he would suffer no harm, even if the skies were to fall. After much thought, he chose a place in Carla called Syrnos, ringed around with mountains; their summits would, he hoped, catch and support the blue firmament should Arias ever let it slip from his shoulders. The Italians built Podaleirius a heroshri~e on Mount Drium in Daunia, at the summit of which the ghost of Calchas now maintains a dream oracle.4
~’. A dispute arose between Mopsus and Amphilochus. They had
i~,ii~:ly founded the city of Mallus in Cilicia, and when Amphilochus r~’tired to his own city of Amphilochian Argos, Mopsus became sole ~,~,c’reign. Amphilochus, dissatisfied with affairs at Argos, came back after twclve months to Mallus, expecting to resume his former powers, b~t Mopsus gruffly told him to begone. When the embarrassed Malli~ suggested that this dispute should be decided by single combat, tlac rivals fought and each killed the other. The funeral pyres’were so ?l;~ccd that Mopsus and Amphilochus could not exchange unseemly 348 ~69. e ~ ~69. h scowls during their cremation, yet the ghosts somehow became so tenderly linked in friendship that they set up a common oracle; which has now earned a higher reputation for truth even than Delptlic Apollo’s. All questions are written on wax tablets, and the response~ given in dreams, at the remarkably low price of two coppers apiece. S
f. Neoptolemus sailed homeward as soon as he had offered sacrifices: to the gods and to his father’s ghost; and escaped the great tempest which caught Menelaus and Idomeneus, by taking the prophetic advice of his friend Helenus and running for Molossia. After killing King Phoenix and marrying his own mother to Helenus, who became king ‘of the Molossians and founded a new capital city, Neoptolemu~
regained Iolcus at last.6 There he succeeded to the kingdom of his grandfather Peleus, whom the sons of Acastus had expelled; 7 but on Helenus’s advice did not stay to enjoy it. He burned his ships andt marched inland to Lake Pambrotis in Epirus, near the Oracle 0fi Dodona where he was welcomed by a com~an~, of his distant kins-:~ men. They were bivouacking under blankets supported by spear-butx ~, stuck into the ground. Neoptolemus remembered the kvords oi~
Helenus: ‘When you find a house with foundations of iron, wooden walls, and a woollen roof, halt, sacrifice to’the gods, build a city!’ Here he begot two more sons on Andromache, namely Pielus and Pergamus.
g. His end was inglorious. Going to Delphi, he demanded satisfaction for the death of his father Achilles whom Apollo, disguised as Paris, was said to have shot in his temple at Troy. When the Pythoness coldly denied him this, he plundered and burned the shrine. Next he. went to Sparta, and claimed that Menelaus had betrothed Hermione to him before Troy; but that her grandfather Tyndareus had instead given her to Agamemnon’s son Orestes. Oresres now being pursued by the Erinnyes, and under a divine curse, it was only just, he argued, that Hermione should become his wife. Despite Orestes’s protests, the Spartans granted his plea, and the marriage took place at Sparta. Hermione, however, proving barren, Neoptolemus returned to Delphi and, entering the smoke-blackened sanctuary, which Apollo had decided to rebuild, asked why this should be.
h. He was ordered to offer placatory sacrifices to the god and, while doing so, met Orestes at the altar. Oresres would have killed him then and there, had not Apollo, foreseeing that Neoptolemus must die by another hand that very day, prevented it. Now, the flesh of the sacrifices 169. h—~69. k 349 offered to the god at Delphi has always been a perquisite of the temple servants; but Neoptolemus, in his ignorance, could not bear to see the fat carcasses of the oxen which he had slaughtered being hauled away before his eyes, and tried to prevent it by force. ‘Let us be rid of this troublesome son of Achilles!’ said the Pythoness shortly; whereupon oneMachaereus, a Phocian, cut down Neoptolemus with his sacrificial knife.
‘Bury him beneath the threshold of our new sanctuary,’ she commanded. ‘ He was a famous warrior, and his g]xost will guard it against all attacks. And if he has truly repented of his insult to Apollo, let him preside over processions and sacrif~ces in honour of heroes hke himself. But some say that Oresres instigated the murder.8
i. Demophon the Athenian touched at Thrace on his return to Athens, and there Phyllis, a 13isaltian princess, fell in love with him. He married her and became king. When he tired of Thrace, and decided to resume his travels, Phyllis could do nothing to hold him. ‘! must visit Athens and greet my mother, whom I last saw eleven years ago,’ said Demophon. ‘You should have thought of that before you accepted the throne,’ Phyllis answered, in tears.’ It is not lawful to absent yourself for more than a few months at most.’ Demophon swore by every god in Olympus that he would be back within the year; but ?hvllis knew that he was lying. She accompanied him as far as the port called Enneodos, and there gave him a casket. ‘This contains a charm,’ ?hylhs said. ‘Open it only when you have abandoned all hope of retuming to me.’
j. Demophon had no intention of going to Athens. He steered a south-easterly course for Cyprus, where he setfled; and when the year was done, Phyllis cursed him in Mother Rhea’s name, took poison, and died. At that very hour, curiosity prompted Demophon to open the casket, and the sight of its contents—who knows what they were?made a lunatic of him. He leaped on his horse and galloped off in panic, bclabouring its head with the flat of his sword until it stumbled and fell. ]~t~e sword flew from his hand, stuck point upwards in the ground, and transfixed him as he was flung over the horse’s head.
A story is told of another Thracian princess named Phyllis, who had fallen in love with Demophon’s brother Acamas and, when storms, delayed his return from Troy, died of sorrow and was metamorphosed into an almond-tree. These two princesses have often been confused.9
k. Diomedes, Like Agamemnon and others, experienced Aphrod’tte’s 350 169. k—169. tn bitter enmity. He was first wrecked on the Lycian coast, where Kingi Lycus would have sacrificed him to Ares, had not the princess Callirrho~ helped him to escape; and, on reaching Argos, found that his w’śe Aegialeia had been persuaded by Nauplius to live in adultery with Cometes or, some say, with Hippolytus. Retiring to Corinth, he learned there that his grandfather Oeneus needed assistance against certain rebels; so he sailed for Aetolia and set him firmly on his throne again. But some say that Diomedes had been forced to leave Argos long before the Trojan War, on his return from the Epigoni’s successful Theban campaign; and that Agamemnon had since assisted him to win back his kingdom? He spent the remainder of his life in Italian Daunia, where” he married Euippe, daughter of King Daunus; and built many famous cities, including Brundisium, which may have been why Daunus jealously murdered him when he was an old man, and buried him in one of the islands now called the Diomedans. According to another account, however, he suddenly disappeared by an act of divine magic, and his comrades turned into gentle and virtuous birds, which still nest on those islands. Diomedes’s golden armour has been preserved by the priests of Athene at Apulian L~ceria, and he is worshipped as a god in Venetia, and throughout Southern Italy. X~
1. Nauplius had also persuaded Idomeneus’s wife Meda to be faithless. She took one Lcucus for her lover, but he soon drove her and Idomeneus’s daughter Cleisithyra from the palace and murdered them both in the temple where they had taken sanctuary. Leucus then seduced ten cities from allegiance to their rightful king, and ust~rped the throne. Caught in a storm as he sailed for Crete, Idomeneus vowed to dedicate to Poseidon the first person whom he met; and this happened to be his own son or, some say, another of his daughters. He was on the point of fulfilling his vow when a pestilence visited the country and interrupted the sacrifice. Leucus now had a good excuse for banishing Idomeneus, who emigrated to the Sallentine region of Calabria, and lived there until his death.
in. Few of the other Greeks reached home again, and those who did found only trouble awaiting them. Philoctetes was expelled by rebels from his city of Meliboea in Thessaly, and fled to Southern Italy, where he founded Petelia, and Crimissa near Croton, and sent some of his followers to help Aegestes fortify Sicilian Aegesta. He dedicatccl his famous bow at Crimissa, in the sanctuary of Distraught Apollo, and when he died was buried beside the river Sybaris.13
‘7~? 169. n—169. o 351 1n. Contrary winds forced Guneus to the Cynips river in Libya, and ~ made his home there. Pheidippus with his Coans went first to Andros ~Band thence to Cyprus, where Agapenor had also settled. Menestheus ,clip.not resume his reign at Athel~s, but accepted the vacant,kingship of Melos; some say, however, that he died at Troy. E1penor s followers were wrecked on the shores of Epirus, and occupied Apollonia; those of Protesihus, near Pellene in the Thracian Chersonese; and Tlepo lemus’s Rhodians, on one ofthe Iberian islands, whence a partyofthem sailed westward again to Italy and were helped by Philoctet, es in their war against the barbarous Lucanians.1’t The tale ofOdysseus s wander ings is now Homeric entertainment for twenty-four nights. 0. Only Nestor, who had always shown himself just, prudent, generous, courteous, and respectful to the gods, returned safe and sound to Pylus, where he enjoyed a happy old age, untroubled by wars, and surrounded by bold, intelligent sons. For so Almighty Zeus decreed. t s
1. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. I; Homer: Odyssey iii. 130 if.. and iv 77-592; Hagias, quoted by Proclus (Greek Epic Fragments p. 53, ed. Kinkel).
2. Apollodorus: ii. I. 5 and Epitome vi. xx; Euripides: Helen 766 if. and x ~ 26 iT.; Hyginus: Fabula x x 6; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 260.
3. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 2-4; Strabo: xiv. ~. 27, quoting Hesiod, Sophocles, and Pherecydes; Tzetzes: On LFophron 427 and 980.
4. Apollodorus: Eśitome vi. ~8; Pausanias: iii. 26.7; Stephanus of’ Byzantium sub Syrna; Strabo: vi. 3. 9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron
~047.
5. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 7 and Epitome vi. ~9; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 440-42; Strabo: xiv. 5. ~6; Pausanias: i. 34. 3; Lucian: Alexander ~ 9; Plutarch: l/Vh y thc Oracles Are Silent 45; Cicero: On Divination i. 40. 88; Dio Cassius: lxxii. 76. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. ~2 and ~3; Hagias: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. ~66; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey iii. ~88. 7. Dictys Cretensis: vi. 7-9.
s. Homer: Odyssey iv. ~-9; Apollodorus: Epitome vi. ~3-14; Euripides: Andromache 89~-~085 and Oresres ~649, with scholiast; Hyginus: Fabula 123; Eustathius on Homer’s Odysseyiv. 3; Scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache 32 and 5 ~; Ovid: Heroides viii. 3 ~ if..; Fragments of Sophocles ii. 44~ ft’., ed. Pearson; Pausanias: x. 7—~ and x. 24. 4-5; Pindar: Nemean Odes vii. 50-70, with scholiast; Virgil: Aeneidiii. 330; Strabo: ix. 3.9.
9. Apollodorus: Epitome v. ~6; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 495; Lucian:’ On the Dance 40; Hyginus: Fabula 59; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues V. IO.
xo. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 23; Dictys Cretensis: vi. 2; Tzetzcs: On Lycophron 609; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 9; Hyginus: Fabula 175; Apollodorus: i. 8.6; Pausanias: ii. 25.
I~. Pausanias: i. rx; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 9 and xi. :46; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 60z and 618; Strabo: vi. 3.8-9; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes x. 12; Scylax: p. 6.
xz. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. xo; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 384-6; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 12~ a~,d xi. 264; First Vatican Mythographer: 195; Second Vatican Mythographer: 2 xo; Virgil: Aeneid ~21 if. and 400 if.
13. Tzetzes: On Lycophron 911, quoting Apollodorus’s Epitotnc; Homer: Iliad ii. 7~7 if.; Strabo: vi. x. 3; Aristotle: Mirabilia 107. 14. Tzetzes: On L~cophron 911; Pausanias: i. 17. 6.
~5—Homer: Odysse~ iv. ~-09; Pausanias: iv. 3.4; Hyginus: Fabula ~. The mythographers make Aphrodite fight against the Greeks because, as Love-goddess, she had backed Paris’s abduction of Helen. But she was also the Sea-goddess whom the Trojans invoked to destroy the commercial confederacy patronized by Poseidon—and the storms allegedly raised by Athene or Poseidon to deny the victors a safe return must first have been ascribed to her. This principle of vengeance enabled a great many cities in Italy, Libya, Cyprus, and elsewhere to claim śoundation by heroes shipwrecked on their way back from Troy; rather than by refugees from the Dorian invasion of Greece.
2. To bury a young warrior under a temple threshold was common practice, and since Neoptolemus had burned the old shrine at Delphi, the Pythoness naturally chose him as her victim when a new building was planted on its ruins. The previous guardians of the threshold had been Agamedes and Trophonius (see 84. b).
3. Rhea, who sanctified the mysterious object in Demophon’s casket, was also called Pandora, and this myth may therefore be an earlier version of how Epimetheus’s wife Pandora opened the box of spites (see 39. j): a warning to men who pry into women’s mysteries, rather than contrariwise. ‘Mopsus’ was an eighth century B.C. royal title in Cilicia. 4. The birds into which Diomedes’s followers were transformed are described as ‘virtuous’ evidently to distinguish them from their cruel bi~d-neighbours, the Sirens (see 154—d and 3; 170. 7).
5. A vow like Idomeneus’s was made by Maeander (‘searching for a man’), when he vowed to the Queen of Heaven the first person who should congratulate him on his storm of Pessinus; and this proved to be 169. 5—~,6,9. 7 353
his son Archelaus (‘ ruler of the people ). Maeander killed him and then es remorsefully leaped into the river (Plutarch: On Rivers ix. 1). A more familiar version of the same myth is found in Judges xi. 30 if., where Jephthah vows his daughter as a burnt offering to Jehovah if he is la successful in war. These variants suggest that Idomeneus vowed a male sacrifice to Aphrodite, rather than to Poseidon; as Maeander did to the 5; Queen of Heaven, and as Jephthah doubtless did to Anatha, who required st such burnt offerings on her holy Judaean mountains. It looks, indeed, as if sacrifice of a royal prince in gratitude for a successful campaign was r— once common practice—Jonathan would have been slaughtered by his fither, King Saul, after the victory near Michmash, had not the people id protested—and that the interruption of Idomeneus’s sacrifice, like Abraham’s on Mount Moriah, or Athamas’s on Mount Laphystium
c; (see 70. d) was a warning that this custom no longer pleased Heaven. The 7— substitution of a princess for a prince, as in the story of Jephthah, or in the First Vatican Mythographer’s account of Idomeneus’s vow, marks the anti-matriarchal reaction characteristic of heroic saga.
6. Menelaus’s wanderings in the Southern Mediterranean refer to Achaean piracies and attempts at colonization. According to Xanthus, an early Lydian historian, the Phoenician city of Ascalon was founded by Ascalus (‘ untilled ‘), brother of Pelops, and therefore a collateral ancestor of Menelaus. Again, when Joshua conquered Canaan in the thirteenth century n.c., the men ofGibeon (Agabon in one Septuagint text, meaning Astu Achaivon, ‘the city of the Achaeans ‘) came as suppliants to Joshua d Greek fashion, pleading that they were not native Canaanites, but Hivires, i.e. Achaeans, from overseas. Joshua recognized their rights as n foresters of the sacred groves and drawers of sacred water (Joshua ix). It seems from verse 9 that they reminded Joshua of the ancient maritime n league of Keftiu presided over by Minos of Cnossus, to which the Achaeans and Abraham’s people both once belonged. Abraham, who CalUe into the Delta with the Hyksos kings, had married his sister Sarah n to ‘Pharaoh’, meaning the Cnossian ruler of Pharos—then the chief trading dep6t of the confederacy. But by the time of Menelaus, Cnossus :, lay in ruins, the confederates had turned pirates and been defeated by the Egyptians at the Battle of Piari (1229 B.C.)—’I trapped them like wildfowl, they were dragged, hemmed in, laid low on the beach, their ships and goods were fallen into the sea’—and Pharos, no longer the largest port in the ancient world, became a mere breeding place for seals. A submarine disaster had overwhelmed its harbour works (see 39. 2), and h~ carly Classical times foreign trade passed through Naucratis, the Milesian entrep~t (see 25.6).
a 7. Menelaus’s struggle with Proteus is a degenerate version of a familiar myth: the Seal-goddess Thetis has been masculinized into Proteus, and Menelaus, instead of waiting for the seal-skin to be discarded, and then VOL. II—M
354 169. 7—170. a amorously grappling with the deity, as Peleus did (see 81. 1-3), uses a seal-skin as a disguise, calls upon three men to help him, and requires no more from his captive than an oracular answer. Proteus rapidly transforms himself, as Thetis did with Peleus, or as Dionysus-Zagreus, who is associated with Pharos (see 27. 7), did when threatened by the Titans. The Homeric list of his transformations is a muddied one: two or three seasonal sequences have been telescoped. Lion and boar are intelligible emblems of a two-season year (see 69. l); so are bull, lion, and waterserpent, of a three-season year (see 27.4 and ~23. ~); the panther is sacred to Dionysus (see 27. 4); and the ‘leafy tree’, paralleled in the story of Periclymenus, refers perhaps to the sacred trees of the months (see 53.3 and ~39. ~)—Proteus’s changes make amusing fiction, but are wholly inappropriate to the oracular context, unless the real story is that after a reign of eight years, and the annual killing of an interrex in Cretan style, Menelaus became the oracular hero of a settlement founded beside the River of Egypt (see I~2. $).
O D ť s s E u s, setting sail from Troy in the sure knowledge that he must wander for another ten years before he could hope to regain Ithaca, touched first at Ciconian Ismarus and took it by storm. In the pillage he spared only Maro, Apollo’s priest, who gratefully presented him with several jars of sweet wine; but the Ciconians of the interior saw the pall of smoke spread high above the burned city, and charging down on the Greeks as they drank by the seashore, scattered them in all directions. When Odysseus had rallied and re-embarked his men with heavy losses, a fierce north-easterly gale drove him across the Aegean Sea towards Cythera.1 On the fourth day, during a tempting lull, he tried to double Cape Malea and work up northward to Ithaca, but the wind rose again more violently than before. After nine days of danger and misery, the Libyan promontory where the Lotus-eaters live hove in sight. Now, the lotus is a stoneless, saffron-coloured fruit about the size of a bean, growing in sweet and wholesome clusters, though with tl~e property of making those who have tasted it lose all memory of their own land; some travellers, however, describe it as a kind of apple from which a heavy cider is brewedú Odysseus landed to draw water, and sent out a patrol of three men, who ate the lotus offered them by the natives and so forgot their mission. After a while he went in search of them at the head of a rescue party, and though himself tempted to taste the lotus, refrained. He brought the deserters back by force, clapped them in irons, and sailed away without more ado.2
b. Next he came to a fertile, well-wooded islgnd, inhabited only by cottadoss wild goats, and shot some of these for food. There he beached the whole fleet, except a single ship in which he set out to explore the opposite coast. It proved to be the land of the fiercc and barbarous Cyclopes, so called because of the large, round eye that glared from the centre of each forehead. They have lost the art ofsmithcraft known to their ancestors who worked for Zeus, and are now shepherds without laws, assemblies, ships, markets, or knowledge of agriculture; living sullenly apart from one another, in caverns hollowed from the rocky lfills. Seeing the high, laurel-hung entrance of such a cavern, beyond a stock-yard walled with huge stones, Odysseus and his companions entered, unaware that the property belonged to a Cyclops named Polyphemus, a gigantic son of Poseidon and the nymph Tho;Ssa, who loved to dine off human flesh. The Greeks made themselves at home by lighting a large fire; then slaughtered and roasted some kids that they found penned at the back of the cavern, helped themselves to cheese from baskets hung on the walls, and feasted cheerfully. Towards evening Polyphemus appeared. He drove his flock into the cavern and closed the entrance behind him with a slab of stone so huge that twenty teams of oxen could scarcely have stirred it; then, not observing that he had guests, sat down to milk his ewes and goats. Finally he glanced up from the pail and saw Odysseus and his comrades rechned around the hearth. He asked gruffly what business they had in his cavern. Odysseus rephed: ‘Gentle monster, we are Greeks on our way home after the sack of Troy; pray remember your duty to the gods and entertain us hospitably.’ For answer Polyphemus snorted, seized two sailors by the feet, dashed out their brains on the floor, and devoured the carcasses raw, growling over the bones like any mountah~ lion.
c. Odysseus would have taken bloody vengeance before dawn, but dared not, because Polyphemus alone was strong enough to shift the stone from the entrance. He passed the night, head clasped between hands, elaborating a plan of escape, while Polyphemus snored dreadfully. For breakfast, the monster brained and killed another two sailors. 356 ~70. c—~70.f ~!l after which he silently drove out his flock before him and closed cavern with the same slab of stone; but Odysseus took a stake ofgre~ [ olive-wood, sharpened and hardened one end in the fire, then c~0~I cealed it under a heap of dung. That evening the Cyclops returned and ate two more of the twelve sailors, whereupon Odysseus politely offered him an ivy-wood bowl of the heady wine given him by Mar0 in Ciconian Ismarus; fortunately, he had brought a full wine-skin ashore. Polyphemus drank greedily, called for a second bowlful, never in his life having tasted any drink stronger than buttermilk, and condescended to ask Odysseus his name. ‘My name is Oudeis,’ Odysseus~ rephed, or that ~s what everyone calls me, for short. Now, Oudet~[ means ‘Nobody’. ‘I will eat you last, friend Oudeis,’ Polyphernusw promised.
d. As soon as the Cyclops had fallen into a drunken sleep, the wine having been untempered with water, Odysseus and his remaining companions heated the stake in the embers of the fire, then drove it into the single eye and twisted it about, Odysseus bearing down heavfly~ from above, as one drills a bolt hole in ship’s timber. The eye hissed, Polypremus raised a horrible yell, which set all his neighbours hurrying~ from near and far to learn what was amiss.
‘I am blinded and in frightful agony! It is the fault of Oudeis,’ he bellowed. you’! ‘Poor wretch ? they replied.’ If, as you say, nobody is to blame, must be in a delirious fever. Pray to our Father Poseidon for recovery, and stop making so much noise!’
They went off grumbling, and Polyphemus felt his way to the cavern mouth, removed the slab of stone and, groping expectantly with his hands, waited to catch the surviving Greeks as they tried to escape. But Odysseus took withies and tied each of his comrades in turn under the belly of a ram, the middle one of three, distributing the weight evenly. He himself chose an enormous tup, the leader of the flock, and prepared to curl up underneath it, gripping the fleece with his fingers and toes.
e. At dawn, Polyphemus let his flock out to pasture, gently stroking their backs to make sure that no one was astride of them. He lingered awhile talking sorrowfully to the beast under which Odysseus lay concealed, asking it:’ Why, dear ram, are you not to the fore, as usual? Do you pity me in my misfortune?’ But at last he allowed it to pass. fi Thus Odysseus contrived both to free his companions and to
~70. f—~70. h 357 drive a flock of fat rams down to the ship. Quickly she was launched, and as the men seized their oars and began to row off, Odysseus could not refrain from shouting an ironical goodbye. For answer, Polyphemus hurled a large rock, which fell halfa length ahead of the ship; its backwash nearly fetched her ashore again. Odysseus laughed, and cried: ‘Should anyone ask who blinded you, answer that it was not Oudeis, but Odysseus of Ithaca!’ The enraged Cyclops prayed aloud to Poseidon: ‘Grant, father, that if my enemy Odysseus ever returns l~on~e, he may arrive late, in evil plight, from a foreign ship, having lost all his comrades; may he also fmd a heap of troubles massed on the t~rcshold!’ He hurled another, even larger, rock and this time it fell halśa length astern of the ship; so that the wave which it raised carried her swiftly to the island where Odysseus’s other followers were anxiously awaiting him. But Poseidon listened to Polyphemus, and promised the required vengeance.3
~~. Odysseus now steered to the north, and presently reached the Isle of Aeolus, Warden of the Winds, who entertained him nobly for an entire month and, on the last day, handed him a bag 6fwinds, explaining that while its neck was secured with silver wire, all would be well. He had not, he said, imprisoned the gentle West Wind, which would waft the fleet steadily over the Ionian Sea towards Ithaca, but Odysseus might release the others one by one, if for any reason he needed to alter his course. Smoke could already be descried rising from the chimneys of Odysseus’s palace, when he fell asleep, overcome by exhaustion. His men, who had been watching for this moment, untied the bag, which promised to contain wine. At once the Winds roared homeward i:~ a body, driving the slfip before them; and Odysseus soon found l~.i~nself on Aeolus’s island again. With profuse apologies he asked for further help, but was told to begone and use oars this time; not a breath of West Wind should he be given. ‘I cannot assist a man whom the gods oppose,’ cried Aeolus, slamming the door in his face.4
h. After a seven days’ voyage, Odysseus came to the land of the Laestrygones, ruled over by King Lamus, which is said by some to have lain in the north-western part of Sicily. Others place it near Formiae in Italy, where the noble House of Lamia claims descent from King Lamus; and this seems credible, because who would admit descent from cannibals, unless it were a matter of common tradition?S In the land of the Laestrygones, night and morning come so dose together that shepherds leading home their flocks at sunset hail those who drive ~70. h—~70. k theirs out at dawn. Odysseus’s captains boldly entered the harbour of Telepylus which, except for a narrow entrance, is ringed by abrupt cliffs, and beached their ships near a cart track that wound up a valley, Odysseus himself, being more cautious, made his ship fast to a rock outside the harbour, after sending three scouts inland to reconnoitre. They followed the track until they found a girl drawing water from a spring. She proved to be a daughter of Antiphates, a Laestrygonian chieftain, to whose house she led them. There, however, they were mercilessly set upon by a horde of savages who seized one of them and killed him for the pot; the other two ran off at full speed, but the savages, instead of pursuing them, made for the chfftops and stove in the ships with a cascade of boulders before they could be launched. Then, descending to the beach, they massacred and devoured the crevn at their leisure. Odysseus escaped by cutting the hawser of his ship a sword, and calling on his comrades to row for dear life.6
i. He steered his sole remaining vessel due east and, after a longi voyage, reached Acaea, the Island of Dawn, ruled over by the goddeua Circe, daughter of Helius and Perse, and thus sister to Ae&es, the balefull king of Colchis. Circe was skilled in all enchantments, but had little] love for human-kind. When lots were cast to decide who should stay! to guard the ship and who should reconnoitre the island, Odysseus’s/ mate Eurylochus was chosen to go ashore with twenty-two others. He found Aeaea rich in oaks and other forest trees, and at last came upon Circe’s palace, built in a wide clearing towards the centre of the island. Wolves and lions prowled around but, instead of attacking Eurylochus j and his party, stood upright on their hind legs and caressed them. One might have taken these beasts for human beings, and so indeed theyi were, though thus transformed by Circe’s spells. ‘!
j. Circe sat in her hall, singing to her loom and, when Eurylochus’s[ party raised a halloo, stepped out with a smile and invited them to dine[ at her table. All entered gladly, except Eurylochus himself who, sus-! pecting a trap, stayed behind and peered anxiously in at the windows.:! The goddess set a mess of cheese, barley, honey, and wine before thel hungry sailors; but it was drugged, and no sooner had they begun to eat than she struck their shoulders with her wand and transformed them into hogs. Grimly then she opened the wicket of a sty, scattered a few handfuls of acorns and cornel-cherries on the miry floor, and left them there to wallow.
le. Eurylochm came back, weeping, and reported this misfortune to ~70. k—~70. rn 359
Odysseus, who seized his sword and went off, bent on rescue, though without any setded plan in his head. To his surprise he encountered the god Hermes, who greeted him politely and offered him a charm against Circe’s magic: a scented white flower with a black root, called moly, which only tlie gods can recognize and cull. Odysseus accepted the gift gratefully and, continuing on his way, was in due course entertained by Circe. When he had eaten his drugged meal, she raised her wand and struck him on the shoulder. ‘Go join your comrades in the sty,’ she commanded. But having surreptitiously smelt the moly flower, ‘ he remained unenchanted, and leaped up, sword in hand. Circe fell weeping at his feet.’ Spare me,’ she cried,’ and you shall share my couch and reign in Aeaea with me!’ Well aware that witches have power to enervate and destroy their lovers, by secretly drawing off their blood in little bladders, Odysseus exacted a solemn oath from Circe not to plot any further mischief against him. This oath she swore by the blessed gods and, after giv’mg him a deliciously warm bath, wine in golden ú cups, and a tasty supper served by a staid housekeeper, prepared to pass the night with him in a purple-covedeted bed. Yet Odysseus would not respond to her amorous advances until she consented to free not only his comrades but all the ot~er sailors enchanted by her. Once this was done, he gladly stayed in Aeaea until she had borne him three sons, Agrius, Latinus, and Telegonus.7
1. Odysseus longed to be on his way aga’m, and Circe consented to let him go. But he must first visit Tartarus, and there seek out Teiresias the seer, who would prophesy the fate prepared for him in Ithaca, should he ever reach it, and afterwards.’ Run before the North Wind,’ Circe said, ‘until you come to the Ocean Stream and the Grove of Persephone, remarkable for its black poplars and aged willows. At the point where the rivers Phlegethon and Cocytus flow into the Acheron, dig a trench, and sacrifice a young ram and a black ewe—which I myself x~,ill provide—to Hades and Persephone. Let the blood enter the trench, and as you wait for Teiresias to arrive drive off all other ghosts with your sword. Allow him to drink as much as he pleases and then listen carefully to his advice.’
rn. Odysseus forced his men aboard, unwilling though they were to sail from pleasant Aeaea to the land of Hades. Circe supplied a favourable breeze, which wafted them swiftly to the Ocean Stream and those lost frontiers of the world where the fog-bound Cimmerians, citizens of Perpetual Dusk, are denied all view of the Sun. When they sighted 360 170. rn—~70. p Persephone’s Grove, Odysseus landed, and did exactly as Circe advised him. The first ghost to appear at the trench was that of Elpenor, one of his own crew who, only a few days previously, had dru~ken himself to sleep on the roofofCirce’s palace, awoken in a daze, toppled over the edge, and killed himself. Odysseus, having left Aeaea so hurriedly that E1penor’s absence had escaped his notice until too !ate, now promised him decent burial.’ To think that you came here on foot quicker than I have come by ship!’ he exclaimed. But he denied
E1penor the least sip of the blood, however piteously he might ?Icad.
n. A mixed crowd of ghosts swarmed about the trench, men a~~d women of all dates and every age, including Odysseus’s mother Antideia; but he would not let even her drink before Teiresias had done so. At last Teiresias appeared, lapped the blood gratefully, and wanted Odysseus to keep his men under strict control once they had sighted Sicily, their next landfall, lest they be tempted to steal the cattle of the Sun,Titan Hyperion. He must expect great trouble in Ithaca, and though he could hope to avenge himself on the scoundrels who were devouring his substance there, his travels would not yet have finished. He must take an oar and carry it on his shoulder until he came to an inland region where no man salted his meat, and where the oar would be mistaken for a winnowing-bat. If he then sacrificed to Poseidon, he might regain Ithaca and enjoy a prosperous old age; but in the end death would come to him from the sea.
o. Having thanked Teiresias and promised him the blood of another black ewe on his return to Ithaca, Odysseus at last permitted his mother to quench her thirst. She gave him further news from home, but kept a discreet silence about her daughter-’m4aw’s suitors. When she had said goodbye, the ghosts of numerous queens and princesses trooped up to lap the blood. Odysseus was delighted to meet such well-known personages as Antiope, Iocaste, Chloris, Pero, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, and Eriphyle.
p. He next entertained a troop of former comrades: Agamemnon, who advised him to land on Ithaca in secret; Achilles, whom he cheered by reporting Neoptolemus’s mighty feats; and Great Ajax, who had by no means yet forgiven him and strode sulkily away. Odysseus also saw Minos judging, Orion hunting, Tantalus and Sisyphus suffering, and Heracles—or rather his wraith, for Heracles himself banquets at ease among the immortal gods—who commiserated with him on his long hbours. S
170. q—170. t 361
q. Odysseus sailed back safely to Aeaea, where he buried the body of ś1penor and planted his oar on the barrow as a memorial. Circe greeted him merrily. ‘What hardihood to have visited the land of Hades!’ she cried. ‘One death is enough for most men; but now you will have had two !’ She warned him that he must next pass the Island of the Sirens, whose beautiful voices enchanted all who sailed near. These children of Achelous or, some say, Phorcys, by either the Muse Terpsichore, or by Sterope, Portha~Tn’s daughter, had girls’ faces but birds’ feet and feathers, and many different stories are told to account for this pecuharity: such as that they had been playing with Core when Hades abducted her, and that Demeter, vexed because they had not come to her aid, gave them wings, saying: ‘Begone, and search for my daughter all over the world!’ Or that Aphrodite turned them into birds because, for pride, they would not yield their maidenheads either ‘ to gods or men. They no longer had the power of flight, however, since the Muses had defeated them in a musical contest and pulled out their wing feathers to make themselves crowns. Now they sat and sang in a meadow among the heaped bones of sailors whom they had drawn to their death. ‘Plug your men’s ears with bees-wax,’ advised Circe, ‘and if you are eager to hear their music, have your crew bind you hand and foot to the mast, and make them swear not to let you escape, however harshly you may threaten them.’ Circe warned Odysseus of other perils in store for him, when he came to say goodbye; and he sailed off, once more conveyed by a fair breeze.
r. ^st~e ship approached Siren Land, Odysseus took Circe’s advice, and the Sirens sang so sweefiy, promising him foreknowledge of all future happenings on earth, that he shouted to his comparfions, threaterring them with death if they would not release him; but, obeying his earlier orders, they only lashed him tighter to the mast. Thus the ship sailed by in safety, and the Sirens committed suicide for vexation.9 s. Some believe that there were only two Sirens; others, that there were three, namely Parthenope, Leucosia, and Ligeia; or Peisino~, Aghope, and Thelxepeia; or Aglaophonos, Thelxiope, and Molpe.
Still others name four: Teles, Raiclne, Thelxiope, and Molpe.1O t. Odysseus’s next danger lay in passing between two cliffs, one of which harboured Scylla, and the other Charybdis, her fellow-monster. Charybdis, daughter of Mother Earth and Poseidon, was a voracious woman, who had been hurled by Zeus’s thunderbolt into the sea and now, thrice daily, sucked in a huge volume of water and presenfiy 170. t—170. v spewed it out again. Scylla, the once beautiful daughter of Hecate Crataeis by Phorcys, or Phorbas—or of Echidne by Typhon, Triton, or Tyrrhenius—had been changed into a dog-like monster with six fearful heads and twelve feet. This was done either by Circe when jealous of the sea-god Glaucus’s love for her, or by Amphitrite, similarly jealous of Poseidon’s love. She would seize sailors, crack their bones, and slowly swallow them. Almost the strangest thing about Scylla was her yelp: no louder than the whimper of a newly-born puppy. Trying to escape from Charybdis, Odysseus steered a trifle too near Scylla who, leaning over the gunwales, snatched six of his ablest sailors off the deck, one in each mouth, and whisked them away to the rocks, where she devoured them at leisure. They screamed and stretched out their hands to Odysseus, but he dared not attempt a rescue, and sailed on.1 u. Odysseus took this course in order to avoid the Wandering, or Clashing, Rocks, between which only the Argo had ever succeeded in passing; he was unaware that they were now rooted to the sea-bed. Soon he sighted Sicily, where Hyperion the Sun-Titan, whom some call Helius, had seven herds of splendid cattle at pasture, fifty to a herd, and large flocks of sturdy sheep as well. Odysseus made his men swear a solemn oath to be content with the provisions which Circe had supplied, and not steal a single cow. They then landed and beached the ship, but the South Wind blew for thirty days, food grew scarce, and though the sailors hunted or fished every day, they had little success. At last Eurylochus, desperate with hunger, drew his comrades aside and persuaded them to slaughter some of the cattle—in compensation for which, he hastened to add, they would build Hyperion a splendid temple on their return to Ithaca. They waited until Odysseus had fallen asleep, caught several cows, slaughtered them, sacrificed the thighbones and fat to the gods, and roasted enough good beef for a six days’ feast.
v. Odysseus was horrified when he awoke to find what had happened; and so was Hyperion on hearing the story from Lampetia, his daughter and chief herdswoman. Hyperion complained to Zeus who, seehag that Odysseus’s ship had been launched again, sent a sudden westerly storm to bring the mast crashing down on the helmsman’s skull; and then flung a thunderbolt on deck. The ship foundered, and all aboard were drowned, except Odysseus. He contrived to lash the floating mast and keel together with the raw-hide back-stay, and damher astride this makeshift vessel. But a southerly gale sprang up, 170. v—170. y 363
and he found himself sucked towards Charybdis’s whirlpool. Clutching at the bole of a wild fig-tree which grew from the cliff above, he hung on grimly until the mast and keel had been swallowed and regurgitated; then mounted them once more and paddled away with his hands. After nine days he drifted ashore on the island of Ogygia, where lived Calypso, the daughter of Thetis by Oceanus, or it may have been Ncreus, or Atlas.1z
i~,. Thickets of alder, black poplar, and cypress, with horned owls, falcons, and garrulous sea-crows roosting in their branches, sheltered Catypso’s great cavern. A grape-vine twisted across the entrance. Parsley and irises grew thick in an adjoining meadow, which was fedby four clear streams. Here lovely Calypso welcomed Odysseus as he stumbled ashore, and offered him plentiful food, heady drink, and a share of her soft bed. ‘If you stay w/th me,’ she pleaded, ‘you shall enjoy immortality and ageless youth.’ Some say that it was Calypso, not Circe, who bore him Latinus, besides the twins Nausithous and Nausinous.
x. Calypso detained Odysseus on Ogygia for seven years—or perhaps only for five—and tried to make him forget Ithaca; but he had soon tired of her embraces, and used to sit despondenfiy on the shore, staring out to sea. At last, taking advantage of Poseidon’s absence, Zeus sent Hermes to Calypso with an order for Odysseus’s release. She had no option but to obey, and therefore told him to build a raft, which she would victual sufficienfiy: providing a sack of corn, skins of wine and water, and dried meat. Though Odysseus suspected a trap, Calypso swore by the Styx that she would not deceive him, and lent him axe, adze, augers, and all other necessary gear. He needed no urging, but improxC~sed a raft from a score of tree-trunks lashed together; launched it on rollers; kissed Calypso goodbye, and set sail with a gentle breeze. y. Poseidon had been visiting his blameless friends the Ethiopiar~., and as he drove home across the sea in his winged chariot, suddenly saw tbc raft. At once Odysseus was swept overboard by a huge wave, and the rich robes which he wore dragged him down to the sea-depths until his lungs seemed about to burst. Yet being a powerful swimmer, hc managed to divest himself of the robes, regain the surface, and scralnble back on the raft. The pitiful goddess Leucothea, formerly I~o, wife of Athamas, alighted beside him there, disguised as a seamew. In her beak she carried a ve’ll, which she told Odysseus to wind around his middle before plunging into the sea again. This veil would save him, ]70. y—170. z she promised. He hesitated to obey but, when another wave shattered the raft, wound the veil around him and swam off. Since Poseidon had now returned to his underwater palace near Euboea, Athene dared send a wind to flatten the waves in Odysseus’s path, and two days later he was cast ashore, utterly exhausted, on the island of Drepane then occupied by the Phaeacians. He lay down in the shelter of a copse beside a stream, heaped dry leaves over himself, and fell fast asleep.13 z. Next morning the lovely Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, the royal pair who had once shown such kindness to Jason and Medea, came to wash her linen in the stream. When the work was done she played at ball with her women. Their ball happened to bounce into the water, a shout of dismay rang out, and Odysseus awoke in alarm. He had no clothes, but used a leafy olive-branch to conceal his nakedness and, creeping forward, addressed such honeyed words to Nausicaa that she discreetly took him under her protection and had him brought to the palace. There Alcinous heaped gifts on Odysseus and, after listening to his adventures, sent him off to Ithaca in a free ship. His escort knew the island well. They cast anchor in the haven of Phorcys, but decided not to disturb his sound sleep, carried him ashore and laid him gendy on the sand, stacking Alcinous’s gifts beneath a tree not far off. Poseidon, however, was so vexed by the Phaeacians’ kindness to Odysseus that he struck the ship with the fiat of his hand as she sailed home, and turned her into stone, crew and all. Alcinous at once sacrificed twelve choice bulls to Poseidon, who was now threatening to deprive the city of its two hathours by dropping a great mountain between; and some say that he was as good as his word. ‘This will teach us not to be hospitable in future!’ Alcinous told Arete in bitter tones. 14
x. Homer: Odyssey ix. 39—66.
2. Apollodorus: Epitome vii. 2-3; Homer: Odyssey ix. 82-I04; Herodotus: iv. 177; Pliny: Natural History xiii. 32; Hyginus:
Fabula 125.
3. Homer: Odyssey ix. I05-542; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Euripides:
Cyclops; Apollodorus: Epitome vii. 4-9.
4. Homer: Odyssey x. x-76; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 223-32.
5. Thucydides: i. 2; Pliny: Natural History iii. 5.9 and 8. ~4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 662 and 956; Silius Italicus: vii. 410 and xiv. ~26; Cicero: Against Atticus ii. 13; Horace: Odes iii. ~7.
6. Homer: Odyssey x. 30-~32; Hyginus: Io›. ›it.; Apollodorus:
Epitome vii. 12; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 233-44.
ú 7. Homer: Odyssey x. ~33-574 and xii. ~-~; Hyginus: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 246-440; Hesiod: Theogony ~o~-~4; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xvi. ~8. 8. Homer: Odyssey xi; Hyginus: loc. tit.; Apollodorus: Epitome vii. 17.
9. Homer: Odyssey xii; Apollodorus: Epitome vii. ~9; Apolionius Rhodius: iv. 898; Aelian: On the Nature of Animals xvii. 23; Ovid: Metamorphoses v. 552-62; Pausanias: ix. 34. 3; Hyginus: Fabulae 125 and ~4~; Sophocles: Odysseus, Fragment 86~, ed. Pearson.
~o. Plutarch: Convivial Questions ix. ~4. 6; Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xii. 39; Hyginus: Fabulae loc. cit. and Preface; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 7~2; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xii. ~67.
1. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 420; Apol10dorus: Epitome v’fi. Homer: Odyssey xii. 73-~26 and 222-59; Hyginus: Fabulae
~99 and Preface; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 828, with scholiast; Eustathius on Homer p. ~7~4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 45 and 650; Ovid: Metamorphoses xiii. 732 if. and 906 IT.
~2. Homer: Odyssey xii. ~27-453; Apollodorus: i. 2. 7 and Epitome vii. 22-3; Hesiod: Theogony 359~3. Homer: Odyssey ť. ~3-493 and vii. 243-66; Hyginus: Fabula Hesiod: Theogony ~~ if.; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii.
~oo; Eustathius on Homer:s Odyssey xvi. ~8; Apollodorus:
Epitome vii. 24.
~4. Homer: Odyssey xiii. ~-~87; Apollodorus: Epitome vii. 25; Hyginus: toc. cit.
1. Apollodorus records (Epitome vii. 29) that ‘some have taken the Odyssey to be an account of a voyage around Sicily.’ Samuel Butler came independently to the same view and read Nausicaa as a self-portrait of the authoress—a young and talented Sicilian noblewoman of the Eryx district. In his Authoress of the Odyssey, he adduces the intimate knowledge here shown of domestic life at court, contrasted with the sketchy knowledge of seafaring or pastoral economy, and emphasizes the ‘preponderance of female interest’. He points out that only a woman could have made Odysseus interview the famous women of the past before the famous men and, in his farewell speech to the Phaeacians, hope that ‘they will continue to please their wives and children,’ rather than the other way about (Odyssey xiii. 44-5); or made Helen pat the Wooden Horse and tease the men inside (see ~67. k). It is difficult to disagree with Butler. The light, humorous, naive, spirited touch of the Odyssey is almost certainly a woman’s. But Nausicaa has combined, and localized in her native 366 ]70. ~—170. $
Sicily, two different legends, neither of them invented by seus’s semi-historical return from Troy, and the allegorical adventures another hero—let us call him Ulysses—who, like Odysseus’s grandfather Sisyphus (see 67.2), would not die when his term of sovereignty ended. The Odysseus legend will have included the raid on Ismarus; the tempest which drove him far to the south-west; the return by way of Sicily and Italy; the shipwreck on Drepane (Corfu); and his eventual vengeance on the suitors. All, or nearly all, the other incidents belong to the Ulysses story. Lotus4and, the cavern of the Cyclops, the harbour of Telcpylus, Aeaea, Persephone’s Grove, Siren Land, Ogygia, Scylla and Charybdis, the Depths of the Sea, even the Bay of Phorcys—all are different metaphors for the death which he evaded. To these evasions may be added his execution of old Hecabe, ot~erwise known as Maera the Lesser Dog Star, to whom Icarius’s successor should have been sacrificed (see ~ 68. ~). z. Both Scylax (Periplus xo) and Herodotus (iv. 77) knew tl~c Lotuseaters as a nation living in Western Libya near the matriarchal Gi~&~cs. Their staple was the palatable and nourishing cordia myxa, a sweet, sticky fruit growing in grape4ike clusters which, pressed and mixed with grain (Pliny: Natural History xiii. 32; Theophrastus: History of Plants iv. 3. ~), once fed an army marching against Carthage. Cordia myxa has~becn confused with rharnnus zizyphus, a sort of crab-apple which yields a r~)ugh cider and has a stone instead of pips. The forgetfulness induced by lotuseating is sometimes explained as due to the potency of this dri~k: but lotus-eating is not the same as lotus-drinking. Since, therefore, the s.1crcd king’s tasting of an apple given him by the Belle Dame Saus Merci was tantamount to accepting death at her hands (see 33.7 and 133.4), the cautious Ulysses, well aware that pale kings and warriors languished in the Underworld because of an apple, will have refused to taste the rl~amnus. In a Scottish witch-cult ballad, Thomas the Rhymer is wanted ~,~t to touch the apples of Paradise shown him by the Queen of Elpha:nc. 3—The cavern of the Cyclops is plainly a place of death, and cdysseus’s party consisted of thirteen men: the hunther of months for which the primitive king reigned. One-eyed Polyphemus, who sotneti~cs has a witch-mother, occurs in folk-tale throughout Europe, and can be traced back to the Caucasus; but the twelve companions figure only in the (~)d),ssey. Whatever the meaning of the Caucasian tale may have been, A. B. Cook in his Zeus (pp. 302-23) shows that the Cyclops’s eye was a (;reck solar emblem. Yet when Odysseus blinded Polyphemus, to avoid bci~g devoured like his companions, the Sun itself continued to shine. cnly the eye of the god Baal, or Moloch, or Tesup, or Polyphemus (‘fam(~us’), who demanded human sacrifice, had been put out, and the king triu~nphantly drove off his stolen rams. Since the pastoral setting of the Caucasian tale was retained in the Odyssey, and its ogre had a single eye, he could be mistaken for one of the pre-Hellenic Cyclopes, famous metal-workers, ;70. 3—;~o. 6 367
;~.l~s› c~lture had spread to Sicily, and who perhaps had an eye tattooed ~;~ t!c c~_’ntre of their foreheads as a clan mark (see 3.2).
4. Telepylus, which means ‘the far-offgate [of Hell] ‘, lies in the ex~rc~e north of Europe, the Land of the Midnight Sun, where the incomi~ ~l~epherd hails the outgoing shepherd. To this cold region,’ at the back oft!~e North Wind’, belong the Wandering, or Clashing, Rocks, namely ice-floes (see ~$~. ~), and also the Cimmerians, whose darkness at noon co~plemented their midnight sun in June. It was perhaps at Telepylus that Heracles fought Hades (see ~39—~); if so, the battle will have taken plato during his visit to the Hyperboreans (see ;~$. ~). The Laestryg~ians (‘ of a very harsh race ‘) were perhaps Norwegian fiord-dwellers ~:’ whose barbarous behaviour the amber merchants were warned on their visits to Bornholm and the Southern Baltic coast.
.1. Aeaea (‘wailing’)isatypicaldeathislandwherethefamiliarDeath~c~ddcss sings as she spins. The Argonautic legend places it at the head of th~~ Adriatic Gulf; it may well be Lussin near Pola (see ;48. 9). Circe ~c~s ‘ falcon’, and she had a cemetery in Colchis, planted with willows, ~;.1:r~,d to Hecate. The men transformed into beasts suggest the doctrine ~ ~,~etempsychosis, but the pig is particularly sacred to the Death-goddc;~, and she feeds them on Cronus’s cornel-cherries, the red food of the Jc~d, so they are perhaps simply ghosts (see 24. ~ and 33. 7). What Hermes’s moly was, the grammarians could not decide. Tzetzes (On L)~c~phron 679) says that the druggists call it’ wild rue’; but the descripti~ ~u the Odyssey suggests the wild cyclamen, which is difficult to find, ~~c~i~t›s being white-petalled, dark-bulbed and very sweet-scented. Late ś~l;~s~ical writers attached the name ‘moly’ to a sort of garlic with a ~-cllc~w flower which was believed to grow (as the onion, squill, and true ,~;~rlic did) when the moon waned, rather than when it waxed, and hence cc~ ~crve as a counter-charm against Hecate’s moon magic. Marduk, the }~:~I~,’10nian hero, sniffed at a divine herb as an antidote to the noxious ~:i! of the Sea-goddess Tiamat, but its species is not particularized in the :?ic (see 35—5).
6. Persephone’s black-poplar grove lay in the far-western Tartarus, ~! ‘Odysseus did not’ descend’ into it—like Heracles (see ~34. c), Aeneas, ,~ci Dante-though Circe assumed that he had done so (see 31. a). [‘I~lc~,~cthon, Cocytus, and Acheron belong properly to the Underground Hc!l. However, the authoress of the Odyssey had little geographical ~vledge, and called upon West, South or North winds at random.
‘~!~ ;seus should have been taken by east winds to Ogygia and Per~ci~l~ne’s Grove, and by south winds to Telepylus and Aeaea: yet she ~;~c[ ~ome justification for making Odysseus steer due East to Aeaea, as :[~c l~and of Dawn, where the heroes Orion and Tithonus had met their ~caths. The entrances of Mycenaean bee-hive tombs face east; and Circe, ~ci~g Helius’s daughter, had Eos (‘ dawn ‘) for an aunt.
7. Sirens (see 154. 3) were carved on funeral monuments as d.eathf~ angels chanting dirges to lyre music, but also credited with erotic designs on the heroes whom they mourned; and, since the soul was believed to fly off in the form of a bird, were pictured, like the Harpies, as birds of prey waiting to catch and secure it. Though daughters of Phorcys, or Hell, and therefore first cousins of the Hatpies, they did not live underground, or in caverns, but on a green sepulchral island resembling Aeaea Ogygia; and proved particularly dangerous in windless weather at midday, the time of sunstroke and siesta-nightmares. Since they are als0: called daughters of Achelous, their island may originally of the Echinades, at the mouth of the river Achelous (see 142. 3). Sicilians placed them near Cape Pelorus (now Faro) in Sicily; on the Sirenusian Islands near Naples, or on Capri (Strabo: i.
x 54. d and 3)8.’ Ogygia’, the name of yet another sepulchral island. same word as’ Oceanus’, Ogen being an intermediate form
(‘hidden’ or ‘hider’) is one more Death-goddess, as is shown cavern surrounded with alders—sacred to the Death-god Cronus, Bran—in the branches of which perch his sea-crows, or choughs
98.3), and her own horned owls and falcons. Parsley was an emblen mourning (see 106.3), and the iris a death flower (see 85. ~). She raised Odysseus ageless youth, but he wanted life, not heroic imm 9—Scylla (‘she who rends’), daughter of Phorcys, or Hecate, Charybdis (‘ the sucker-down ‘), are titles ofth~
These names became attached to rocks and currents on either side of Straits of Messi~a, but must be understood i~ a larger sense
9~. 2). Leucothea (see 70.4) as a seamew was the Sea-goddess over a shipwreck (see45.2). Since the Cretan Sea-goddess sented as an octopus (see 81. ~), and Scylla dragged the sailors Odysseus’s ship, it may be that Cretans who traded with India knew~ large tropical varieties, unknown in the Mediterranean with this dangerous habit. The description of Scylla’s yelp is mythological importance than first appears: it identifies her with white, red-eared death-hounds, the Spectral Pack or 1
British legend, which pursue the souls of the damned. They were ancient Egyptian hunting dogs, sacred to Anubis and still brcd i~ th of Iviza, which when in pursuit of their quarry make a ‘questin like the whimper of puppies or the music of the migrating barnaclegoose (see White Goddess p. 41~). lo. Only two incidents falling between Odysseus’s skirmish with the Ciconians and his arrival at Phaeacia seem not to concern the ninef01d rejection of death: namely his visit to the Island of Aeolus, and the the~ of Hyperion’s cattle. But the winds under Aeolus’s charge were spirits of the dead (see 43.5); and Hyperion’s cattle are the herd stolen by Heracles 170. ~0—171. a 369 on his Tenth La~our—essentially a harrowing of Hell (see ~32. ~). That Odysseus claimed to have taken no part in the raid means little; neither did his maternal grandfather Autolycus (see ~60. c) own up to his lifting ofsun-catde (see 67. ›).
1. Odysseus, whose name, meaning ‘angry’, stands for the red-faced sacred king (see 27. ~2), is called ‘Ulysses’ or ‘ Ulixes’ in Latin—a word probably formed from oulos,’ wound’ and ischea,’ thigh’—in reference to the boar’s-tusk wound which his old nurse recognized when he came back to Ithaca (see 160. c and ~7!. g). It was a common form of royal death to have one’s thigh gored by a boar, yet Odysseus had somehow survived the wound (see ~8. 7 and ~Sz.
Wx~~~ Odysseus awoke he did not at first recognize his native island, over which Athene had cast a distortire glamour. Presently she came by, disguised as a shepherd boy, and listened to his long, lying tale of how he was a Cretan who, after killing Idomeneus’s son, had fled northward in a SidonJan ship, and been put ashore here against his will. ‘ What island is this?’ he asked. Athene laughed and caressed Odysseus’s cheek: ‘A wonderful liar you are, indeed!’ she said. ‘But for knowing the truth I might eas’tly have been deceived. What surprises me, though, is that you did not penetrate my disguise. I am Athene; the Phaeacians landed you here at my instructiota. I regret having taken so many )~ears to fetch you home; but I did not dare offend my uncle Poseidon by supporting you too openly.’ She helped him to stow away his Phaeacian cauldrons, tripods, purple doaks and golden cups in the shelter of a cave, and then transformed him beyond recognition—withered his skin, thinned and whitened his red locks, clothed him in filthy rags, and directed him to the hut of Eumaeus, the fait~ful old palace-swineherd. Athene was just back from Sparta, where Telemachns had gone to ask Menelaus, recently returned from Egypt, whether he could supply any news of Odyssens.
Now, it should be explained that, presuming Odysseus’s death, no less than one hundred and twelve insolent young princes of the islands which formed the kingdom—Dulichium, Same, Zacynthns, and Ithaca itself—were courting his wife Penelope, each hoping to marry her: take the throne; and had agreed among themselves to kill Telemachus on his return from Sparta.
b. When they first asked Penelope to decide between them, she declared that Odysseus must certainly still be alive, since his home-coming had been foretold by a reliable oracle; and later, hard-pressed, promised a decision as which she must weave against the death of old Laertes, law. But she took three years over the task, weaving it by day and unravelling it by night, until at last the suitors detected the ruse. All the time they were disporting themselves in Odysseus’s palace, drinking his wine, slaughtering his pigs, sheep, and catde, and seducing maid-servants.2
c. To Eumaeus, who received Odysseus kindly, he gave another false account of himself, though declaring on oath that Odysseus was alive and on the way home. Telemachus now landed unexpectedly, evading the suitors’ plots to murder him, and came straight to Eumaeus’s hut; Athene had sent him back in haste from Sparta.
however, did not disclose his identity until Athene gave the word magically restored him to his true appearance. A touching scene of recognition between father and son followed. But Eumaeus had not yet been taken into the secret, nor was Telemachus allowed to enlSgh Penelope.
d. Once more disguised as a beggar, Odysseus went to spy upon the suitors. On the way he encountered his goat-herd Melantheus, who railed indecently at him and kicked him on the hip; yet Od~?sscus refrained from immediate vengeance. When he reached the ?alsace court, he found old Argus, once a famous hunting hound, stretched a dunghill, mangy, decrepit, and tormented by fleas. Argus his raw stump of a tail and drooped his tattered ears in recog~itio~ of Odysseus, who covertly brushed away a tear as Argus expired.3
e. Eumaeus led Odysseus into the banquefing hall, where Tclemachus, pretending not to know who he was, offered him hospital:.1?.. Athene then appeared, though inaudible and invisible to all but O~,’~seus, and suggested that he should make a round of the hall scraps from the suitors, and thus learn what sort of men the;.’ were. This he did, and found them no less niggardly than rapacious. Tl~e most shameless of the entire company, Antinous of Ithaca (to whom he t01d a wholly different tale of his adventures) angrily threw a footstool ~~/ ~71. e—~7~. h 371 at him. Odysseus, nursing a bruised shoulder, appealed to the other suitor:s, who agreed that Antinous should have shown more courtesy; and Penelope, when her maids reported the incident, was scandalized. She sent for the supposed beggar, hoping to have news from him of her 10st husband. Odysseus promised to visit the royal padour that evening, and tell her whatever she wished to know.4
fi Meanwhile, a sturdy Ithacan beggar, nicknamed ‘Irus’ because, like the goddess Iris, he was at everyone’s beck and call, tried to chase Odysseus from the porch. When he would not stir, Irus challenged him to a boxing match, and Antinous, laughing heartily, offered the winner a goat’s haggis and a seat at the suitors’ mess. Odysseus hoisted his rags, tucked them under the frayed belt which he was wearing, and sqt~arcd up to Irus. The ruffian shrank away at sight of his bulging muscles, but was kept from precipitate flight by the taunts of the suitors; then Odysseus felled him with a single blow, taking care not to attract too much notice by making it a mortal one. The suitors applauded, sneered, quarrelled, setfled to their afternoon’s feasting, toasted Penelope, who now came to extract bridal gifts from them all (though with no intention of making a def~nite choice), and at nightfall dispersed to their various lodgings. S
g. Odysseus instructed Telemacbus to take down the spears which hung on the walls of the banqueting hall and store them in the armoury, while he went to visit Penelope.
She did not know him, and he spun her a long, circumstantial yarn, describing a recent encounter with Odysseus; who had, he said, gone to constdt Zeus’s Oracle at Dodona, but should soon be back in Ithaca. Penelope listened attentively, and ordered Eurycleia, Odysseus’s aged nurse, to give him a foot-bath. Eurycleia presently recognized the scar on Ms thigh, and cried out in joy and surprise; so he gripped her withered throat and hissed for silence. Penelope missed the incident; Addcue had distracted her attention.6
t~. O~ the following day, at another banquet; Agelaus of Same, one of the suitors, asked Telemachus whether he could not persuade his motF. cr to make up her mind. Penelope thereupon announced that she ~as ready to accept any suitor who would emulate Odysseus’s feat of shooting an arrow through twelve axe-rings; the axes to be set in a straight row with their butt~ planted in a trench. She showed them the bow which they must use: one given to Odysseus by Iphitus,
t~,enty-five years ago, when he went to protest at Messene against the 372 171. h—171. i theft from Ithaca of three hundred sheep and their shepherds. It once belonged to Eurytus, the father of Iphitus, whom Apollo himself had instructed in archery, but whom Heracles outshot and hi/ed. Some of the suitors now tried to string the powerful weapon, and were unable to bend it, even after softening the wood with tallow; it was therefore decided to postpone the trial until the next day. Telemacbus, who came nearest to accomplishing the feat, laid down the bow again at a warning sign from Odysseus. Then Odysseus, despite protests and vulgar insults —in the course of which Telemachus was forced to order Penelope back to her room—seized the bow, strung it easily, and twanged the strung melodiously for all to hear. Taking careful aim he shot an arrow through every one of the twelve axe-rungs. Meanwhile Telemacbus, who had hurriedly slipped out, re-entered with sword and spear, and Odysseus declared himself at last by shooting Antinons in the throat. i. The suitors sprang up and rushed to the walls, only to find that the spears were no longer in their usual places. Eurymachus begged for mercy, and when Odysseus refused it, drew sword and lunged at him, whereupon an arrow transfixed his liver and he fell dying. A fierce fight ensued between the desperate suitors armed with swords, and Odysseus, unarmed except for t~e bow but posted before the main entrance to the hall. Telemachus ran back to the armoury, and brought shields, spears and helmets to arm his father and Eumaeus and Philoetius, the two faithful servants who were standing by him; for though Odysseus had shot down the suitors in heaps, his stock of arrows was nearly expended. Melantheus, stealing off by a side door to fetch weapons for the suitors, was caught and trussed up on his second visit to the armour,/, before he had succeeded in arming more than a few of them. The slaughter then continued, and Athene in the guise of a swallow flew twittering around the hall until every one of the suitors and their supporters lay dead, except only Medon the herald, and Phemius the bard; these Odysseus spared, because they had not actively wronged hin~, and because their persons were sacrosanct. He now paused to ask Eurycleia, who had locked the palace women in their quarters, how many of these had remained true to his cause. She answered: ‘Only twelve have disgraced themselves, my lord.’ The guilty maid-servants were summoned and set to cleanse the hall of blood with sponges and water; when they had done, Odysseus hanged them in a row. They kicked a little, but soon all was over. Afterwards, Eumaeus and Philoetius docked Melantheus of his extremities—nose, ears, hands, and genitals, which were cast to the dogs.7
j. Odysseus, at last reunited with Penelope, and with his father Laertes, told them his various adventures, this time keeping to the truth. A force of Ithacan rebels approached, the kinsmen of Antinous and other dead suitors, and seeing that Odysseus was outnumbered, the aged Laertes joined vigorously in the f~ght, which was going well enough for them until Athene intervened and imposed a truce.8 The rebels then brought a combined legal action against Odysseus, appointing as their judge Neoptolemus, King of the Epirot Islands. Odysseus agreed to accept his verdict, and Neoptolemus ruled that he should leave his kingdom and not return until ten years had passed, during which time the heirs of the suitors were ordered to compensate him for their depredations, with payments made to Telemachus, now king.9
k. Poseidon, however, still remained to be placated; and Odysseus set out on foot, as Teiresias had instru. cted, across the niountains of Epirus, carrying an oar over his shoulder. When he reached Thesprotis, the countryfolk cried: ‘Stranger, why a witmowing-bat in Springtime?’ He accordingly sacrif~ced a ram, bull, and boar to Poseidon, and was forgiven.1O Since he could not return to Ithaca even yet, he married Callidice, Queen of the Thesprotians, and commanded her army in a war against the Brygians, under the leadership of Ares; but Apollo called for a truce. Nine years later, Polypoetes, Odysseus’s son by Callidice, succeeded to the Thesprotian kingdom, and Odysseus went home to Ithaca, which Penelope was now ruling in the name of their young son Poliporthis; Telemachus had been banished to Cephallenia, because an oracle announced: ‘Odysseus, your own son shall kill you!’ At Ithaca, death came to Odysseus from the sea, as Teiresias had foretold. His son by Circe, Telegonus, sailing in search of him, raided Ithaca (which he mistook for Corcyra) and Odysseus sallied out to repel the attack. Telegonus killed him on the seashore, and the fatal weapon was a spear armed with the spine of a sting-ray. Having spent the required year in exile, Telegonus married Penelope. Telemachus then married Circe; thus both branches of the family became dosely united. ~ ~
1. Some deny that Penelope remained faithful to Odysseus. They accuse her of companying with Amphinomus of Dulichium, or with all the suitors in turn, and say that the fruit of this union was the monstrous god Pan—at sight of whom Odysseus fled for shame to Aetolia, after sending Penelope away in disgrace to her father Icadus at Man— 374 ~71. I-~7~. 2
tinea, where her tomb is still shown, Others record that she bore to Hermes, and that Odysseus married an Aetolian princess, the daugt ter of King Thoas, begot on her his youngest son Leontophonus, an died in prosperous old age.TM
1. Homer: Odyssey xiii. 187 if. and xvi. 245-53; Ap,41~~.1r~
Epitome vii. 26-30.
2. Homer: Odyssey xix. 136-58 and xiv. 80-I09; Hygi~’~s:
126; Apollodorus: Epitome vii.
3. Homer: Odyssey xSv-xvi; ApoIlodorus: Epitome vii. 32.
4. Homer: Odyssey xvii; Apollodorus: Ioc. cit.
5. Homer: Odyssey xviii.
6. Homer: Odyssey xix.
7. Homer: Odyssey xx-xxii; Hyginus: Ioc. cit.; Apollod~2ru~:
tome v~i. 33.
8. Homer: Odyssey xxii-xxiv.
9. Plutarch: Greek Questions Io. Homer: Odyssey xi. 119—31; Apollodorus: Epitome vii. 34
II. Apollodorus: 10c. cit.; Eugammon of Cyrene, quoted by l~rocl~ Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta 57 if-, ed. Kinkel; Hyginus: Fab~
127; Pausanias: viii. 12.6; Scholiast on Odyssey xi. ~34; thius on Odyssey xi. 133; Parthe~ius: Love Stories 3; Tzetzcs: ( Lycophron 794; Dictys Cretensis: vi. 4 if.; Servius on Virgi Aeneid ii. 44; Fragn~ents of Sophocles ii. los if., ed. Pearson. zz. Servius: Ioc. tit.; Pausanias: viii. 12.5 if.; Cicero: On the the Gods iii. 22. 56; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 772, quoting Dt~ris t SamJan.
1. Odysseus’s assassination of the suitors belongs to the Ulysses al gory: one more instance of the sacred king’s refusal to die at the close his reign. He intervenes, that is to say, in the archery contest held decide his successor (see 135. ~), and destroys all the candidates. 0 primitive archery test of the candidate for kingship seems to have ce sisted in shooting through a ring placed ou a boy’s head (see ~62. ~. z. The Odyssey nowhere directly suggests that Penelope has be unfaithful to her husband during his long absence, though in Book x~ 281-3 she bewitches the suitors by her coquetry, extorts tribute fro them, and shows a decided preference for Amphhaomus of Dulichi~ (Odyssey xvi. 394-8). But Odysseus does not trust her well enough reveal himself until he has killed his rivals; and his mother Anticl~ shows that there is something to conceal when she says not one word him about the suitors (Odyssey xi. 180 if.). The archaic account that rna[ Penelope the mother of Pan by Hermes, or alternatively by all the suito ~7L 2—~7X. 4 375
refers, it seems, to the Goddess Penelope and her primitive spring orgies (see 26.2). Her cuckolding of Odysseus and eventual return to Man~aea, another archaic story, are a reminder of his insolence in forcing her to co~› with him to Ithaca, against ancient matrilocal custom (see 160. e). But Nausicaa, the authoress, tells the story in her own way, white-washi~g Penelope. She accepts the patriarchal system into which she has been born, and prefers gentle irony to the bitter satire found in the Iliad. The g0ddcss is now displaced by Almighty Zeus, kings are no longer sacrificed iu her honour, and the agc of myth has ended—very well ! That need ~:ot greatly disturb Nausicaa, while she can still joke and play ball with ltcr gc~od-natured servant girls, pull the hair of those who displease her, listc~ to old Eurycleia’s tales, and twist Father Alcinous around one (~nger.
3. So the Odyssey breaks ofFwith Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus, ;. patriarchal male triad of heroes, supported by Zeus-born Athene and triumphing over their foes; while the serving wenches hang in a row for their lack of discretion, to show that Nausicaa disapproves of pre-marital promiscttity as cheapening the marriage-market.
The end has been preserved by other mythographers. Odysseus is banished to Thesprotia, and Telemachus to Cephallenia, whereas Penelope stays contentedly at the palace, ruling in the name of her son Poliporthis. Teiresias’s prophecy remains, of course, to be fulfilled: Odysseus will not die comfortably of old age, like the respected and garrulous Nestor. Death must strike him down in the traditional style which. he thought to abolish: the New Year Child riding on dolphin-back will run him through with a sting-ray spear. Much the same fate overtook Catreus of Rhodes: his son Althacmenes accidentally speared him on the beach (see 93.2). Sting-ray spears, also used by the Polynesians, cause inflamed wounds, wlzich the Greeks and Latins held to be incurable (Aelian: Nat~trc of Animals i. 56); the sting-ray (trygon pastinaca) is common in the Mediterranean. Heracles is said to have been wounded by one (see xe3. z). 4. Telemachus’s marriage to Circe, and Telegonus’s to Penelope, are surprising at first sight. Sir James Frazer (Apollodorus ii. p. 303, Loeb) co~ccts these apparently incestuous unions with the rule by which, in ?013~gamous societies, a king inherited all his father’s concubines, except I~is own mother (z Samuel xvi. ~x f[~). But polygamy never became a ~reek institution, and neither Telemachus, nor Telegonus, nor Oedipus, a New Year Child,’ born of the swelling wave ‘, who killed his father and ~arr:~ed the widowed Iocaste (see xos. e), nor Heracles’s son Hyllus, who ~arried his step-mother Iole (see 145. e), was polygamous. Each merely killed and succeeded the King of the Old Year in the ancient mythic style, and was thereafter called his son. This explains why Telemachus prepares to string the bow—which would have given him Penelope as his wife—but Odysseus frowns at him, and he desists; it is a detail suturing from the Ulysses story, uncritica~y fetalned in the Odz›~. 5—Who knows whether Odysseus’s red hair has any mythic significance (see 133.8), or whether it is an irrelevant personal peculiarity, like his short legs, belonging to some adventurer in Sicily whom Nausicaa has portrayed as Odysseus? Autolycus, of course, named him ‘the angry one’ at birth (see 160. c), and red hair is traditionally associated with ill temper. But though masquerading as an epic, the Odyssey is the first Greek novel; and therefore wholly irresponsible where myths are cono cerned. I have suggested the possible circumstances of its composition in another novel: Homer’s Daughter.*
* London and New_York,
Many of the meanings are doubtful. Names in italics refer to characters in non-Hellenic mythology. References are to paragraśh numbers, not page nutnbers.
]lbas—lizard, 24.e,9; 72.3; 73.a
Abclerus—? son of battle, 71.t; Abraham, 169.5,6
AcacalIis—without walls, 90.a,b,g
Academus—of a silent district, I04.b
Acamas—unwearying, 86.a; IoI.a;
131.11; 167.c; i68.d,e,j; 169.j
Acarnan—thistle, I07.g
Acastus—? acatastatos, unstable, 80.b;
81 passim; 148.i; 155 passim;
162.d, 8; ~69.f
.Area—she who fashions,
Acco—she who fashions, 141.1
gcesidas—averter from Mt Ida, Achaeus—griever, 43.b,I; 44.a
Achates—agate, 162.b
Achelois—she who drives away grief, Achelous, R.—? he who drives away grief, 7.4; 67.4; I07.e; 127.2 ;134.8;
142 passim; 170.q,7
Achilles—lipless, 3 I.c; 81 .r,s, 1; 126.g, 2;
138.4; i57.c; 160 passim; passim; 163 passim; 164 passim;
165.a,b; i66.a,g; 168.j,k,l; 169.g;
170.p
Achish, 159.4
Acidusa—barbed being, 137.t
Acmon—anvil, or pestle, 53.c; 136.c
Acfisius—ill-judgement, 21.8; 38.8;
69.1; 72.g; 73 passim; 81.7; I09.c;
148.i
Actaeon—shore dweller, 22.i,1; 28.2;
31.3; 32.1; 54.b; 82.e,j; 138.4
Actaeus—of the coast, 25d
Actis—beam of light, 42.c, 4
Actor—leader, 81.f, 8; 138.a,b;
i66.b
Adam, 4.3; 28.6; 5~.2; 145-5; 146.2
Adanus—he of the acorns, i.d; 159.$
Admete—untamed, 13 x.a,j,l,$
Admetus-untamed, to.b; 2i.n,7; 69
passim; 80.c; ~30.b; 148.i; 155.j
Adonis—lord, 18.h,i,j,2,6,7; 25.5,11;
27.10; 58.d; 77.2; IoI.g; 126.1; Adrasteia—inescapable, 7.b,$; 32.3
Adrastus—he who stands his ground,
I02.C; l06 passim; I07.b,c; 138.g; Adynmus—unsetting, 89.d,9
Aeacus—bewailing, or earth-born,
31.b; 66 passim; 81 passim; 88.i;
91.a,f; 9~.j; 94.e; 96.g;
158.1,8,9; 165.a,k; 167.1
Aeanes—wearisome, 160.m
Aechmagoras—warlike spirit of the market-place,
A~don—nightingale, ~oS.g
Aedos—shame,
Ae~tes—mighty, or eagle, 70.1; 129.1;
148 passim; ! 52 passim; 153 passim;
154 passim; 157.b; 170.i
Aegaeon—goatish, 3.1; 13a.h
Aegaeus, R.—goatish, 146.i
Aegeia—bright, i06.a,c
Aegesta—pleasing goat, ~37.g
Aegestes, or Acesres—pleasing hogoat, ~37.g; ~69.m
Aegeus—goatish, 88.d; 90.h; 94passim;
95 passim; 97 passim; 98.a,d,v, 7;
99.a; ~52.d; 156.e; ~ 57.a
Aegialeia—of the seashore, 162.t; 169. k
Aegialeius—of the seashore, ~07.b,c
Aegimius—? aigimimos, acting the part of a he-goat, 78.a; 143.d,$; 146.d,e
Aegina—goat strength, 66.b,1; 67.f;
138.b
Aegisthus—goat strength, ! x I passim;
113 passim; 114 passim; 116.1;
i 17.a; 162.t
Aegle—dazzling light, 33.d; 98.n Aegleis—bright, 91.,g.
Aegyptus—.> supine he-goat, 56.3; 60
passim
Aelinus—dLge, ZlO.C
A~llopus—storm foot, ~ 50.j
Aeneas, 6r Aeneus—praiseworthy,
18.g.$; SO.g; 51.6; 98.3; I03.1;
158.3; 159.q; 162 passim; 163.c;
166.j,m; 167.j; 168 passim
Aeolus—? earth destroyer, x.3; 36.1;
43 passim; 45.a,b,2; 67.e; 68.a;
148.a; 170.g,lo
Aerope—sky face, 93.a,c; 111.c,e,f,
5,,4; 140.b
Aesacus—myrtle branch, ~58.m,n,6;
159 passim
Aesculapius—? ex aesculeo apiens, hanging from an esculent oak, Aeson—? aesyrnnaon, ruler, 68.e,f;
148.a,b,e; I 5 5.a,h
Aethiolas—? destroyed by fire, 159.d
Aethra—bright sky, 95 passim; 97.b; l04.e; 159.s; 168.d.e
Aethylla—kindling timber, i62.e,I lAetius—originator, 95-b, 6
Aetolus—? cause of destruction, 64.c,$
Agamede—very cunding, x 38.6
Agamedes—very cunning, $i.i; 84
passim; ia~f; 169.1
Agamemnon—very resolute, 91.4;
93.c; III.f,j,n; i12 passim; 113 passim; 116.i,~,2; ~3t.ll; 159 passim; i60 passim; 16~ passim; 162 passim;
163 passim; 164.e; 165 passim; 166
passim; 167 passim; ~68 passim; 169
passim; 170.p
Aganippe-mare who kills mercifully,
73-c
Aganus—gentle, I$9.v
Agapenor—much distress, 169.n
Agathyrsus—much r aging, 132.v
Agave—high-born, 27.f,9; 59.d
Agelaus—herdsman, 136.g; 159passim;
17~.h
Agenor—ve~:y manly, 56.b,3; 57.a,~ ; 58
passim; 60.$; 73.1; 142.5; 150.j
INDEX
Aglaia—bright, 73.a; ~05.5
Aglauros—dewfall, 25 passim
Aglaus—splendid, x x I.g
Agraulos—rustic one, 25 passim
Agreus—wild, 82.d
Agriope—savage face, 28.b,4
Agrius—wild (the Centaur), 35.g;
126.b; ~64.a; 170.k
Agyieus—he of the street, $~.b
Aidoneus—Hades, I03.e
Aissa—swift, 160.j
Ajax, Great—of the earth, 66.i; 81.e;
IIo.e; ~37.i; 159.a; i60.k,n,p,2;
162.m; 163 passim; 164 passim; 165
passim; 168passim; 170.p
Ajax, Little, i60.p,2,6; 163.h; 164.m;
165.5; i68 passim
Ajuna, 135.1
Alalcomeneus—guardian, 5.a,1
Alastot—avenger, xxx.p,5
Alcaeus—mighty one, 88.h; 118.d,$;
119.b; 131.e; ~36.g
Alcaids—sons of the mighty one,
i22.a,2
Alcathous—impetuous might, 67.1;
I09.e,o; IlO.t,d,e, 2; i20.ś
Alcestis—might of the home, 69 passim; I06.6; 134.4,8; 155 passim Alcidice—mighty justice, 68.b
Alcimede—mighty cunning, 148.b
Alcimedes—mighty cunning, or nfighty genitals, 156.e
Alcimcdon—nlighty ruler, 141.h
Alcinous—mighty mind, 148.9; 154
passim; 170.2; 171.2
Alcippe—mighty mare, 19.b,a; 25.J;
74.e; 92.a; 94.b
Alcis—miglit, 121.C,$
Alcltho~—impetuous might, 27.g
Alcmaeon—mighty endearour, 85.1; 107passim; 113.6; 115.4; 137.m
Alcmena or Alcmene—might of the moon, or mighty in wrath, 74.
~; 88.i,9; 1io.c; 118 passim; 119
passim; 138.d; 145.e,h; 146 passim
Alcon—mighty, 119.f, 4
INDI]X
Alcyonc—queen who wards off
[storms], 45 passim; 95.b; 110.C;
125.c; 126.d; 149.5; 160.12
Alcyoneus—alceoneus, mighty ass,
35.c,4,5; 67.1; 132.u2
?decto—unnameable, 6.a; 3 I.g; 115.2
filetes—wanderer, 113.e; 117.a
Aleus—grinder, 140.b; 141 passim
Alexander—he who wards off men,
146.c
?dexirrho~—averting the flow,
136.b,f
Alexiares—warding off war, 145.1
Aleyn, ?3.2
Aloeides—children of the threshing floor, 35.2; 36.4; 37passim
Aloeus—of the threshing floor, 19.b;
37.a,I
ú Alope—alopecodis, sly as a vixen, 49
passim, 96.j,5
Alopecus—fox, 116.1,4
Alpheius, R.—whiteish, 22.g, 2
Alphesiboea—bringing many oxen,
58.d, 2
Alphito—white goddess, 22.2; 52.7;
61.1; 113.7
Althaea—marshmallow, 80.a,l; 142.a
?dthaemenes—strength 6fgrowth, 93
passim; 171.3
Alxion—war-like native, I09.b
Amaltheia—tender, 7.b,$,4; 26.b;
30.3; l08.e; 142.d
Amarynccus—swift darting, 138.a,b,
5; 139.e,f
Ama~haon, l03./; l08.8; 148.f Amazons—moon-women, 27.d; 39.
5,6; 75.d; Ioo passim; 131 passim;
132.f; 134.2; Isx.d,e; 152.j; 164
passim
Ameinius—unpausing, 85.b,I
Ammon—sandy, 27.b; 51.1; 90.a,1
Amnisian Nymphs—of the she-lambs,
22.f hmphiaraus—doubly cursed, 51.g;
80.c,e,g; l06 passim; l07.a; 148.i
Amphictyon—fastener together, 24.5;
38.h.8
379
Amphictyonis—fastener together;
38.8
Amphidamas—taming all about him,
I08.b; 127.a; 133.k; 160.m
Amphilochus—double ambush, 51.g,
8; l07.d,i; 169.c,e ,
Amphimarus—? ambidextrous, 147.b
Amphinome—grazing all about,
148.b; 155 passim
Amphinomus—grazing all about,
17~.1,2
Amphion—native of two lands, 76.a,b,
c,2; 77passim; I09./,6 Amphissa—double strength, 43-h
Amphissus—double strength, 21.j
Amphitrite—the third one who encircles, i.e. the sea, 16.b,1,2; 47.c; 87.c; 91.2; 98.j
Amphitryon—harassing on either side,
74.1; 89.h,i; 111.b; 118passim; 119
passim; 120.a; 121.d; 122.e; 135.e;
146.g; 167.b
Amyclas—very lustful, 77.b; 125.c
Amycus—loudly bellowing, 131.e,h;
150 passim; 151.c
Amymone—blameless, 16.e,5; 60.
g,o
Amyntor—defender, 142.e; 143.i;
160./ Amythaon—unspeakably great, 112.b,
138.m
Anakim, 88.3; 117.$
Anatha, 9.4; 4~.4; 61.1; 82.4; 98.7;
114.4; 133.10; 141.1; 169.5
Anax—king, 88.b,$
Anaxagoras—king of the marketplace, 72.k
Anaxandddes—son of the kingly man, 117.d, 7
Anaxibia—queenly strength, x I x.f or Eurydice, 164.e
Anaxo—queen, 104.i; 118.a
Ancaeus—of the glen, 18.7; 80.c,d,g;
148.i; 151.c; r54.i; 157.e.2
Anchiale—close to the sea, or sea-girt,
53.a
Anchino~—quick wit, 60.a
380
Anchises—living with Isis, xg.f,g,3;
137.g; 158.1,r; ]59.4; i62.1; 168
passim
Ancius—of the dell, 126.b
Andxoclea—glory of men, 121.c,3
Androgeneia—mother of men, 89.a
Androgeus—man of the earth, 66.h;
90 śassim; 91.a,f; 98.a,c.p; 131.i,6
Androgyne—man-woman, i8.8
Andromache—battle of men, 158.8;
168.h
Andromeda—ruler of men, 73 passim;
]37.2
Andton—man’s apartment, i60.u
Androphonos—man-slayer, 18.4
Andrus—manly, 88.h
Angitia—snake-goddess, 157.a
Anicetus—unconquerable, 145.i
Anippe—queenly mare, 133.k
Anius—troublous, 88.h; 160.t,u,v
Annwin, 3 ].3
Antaeus—besought with prayers, 53.$;
I09.1, 13:~-f; 133 passim; 134.6,8,9
Antagoras—facing the market-place,
137.q
Anteia—precedence, 70.2; 73.a; 75.
~,e~1
Antenor—instcad of a man, 158.r;
1594; 162.n; 166.j,l; 267.e,/,x; 168 pa~sim
Ante-vorta, 154.3
Anthas—flowery, 95.b
Anthea—flowery, 95.1
Anthedon—rejoicing in flowers,
90d, 7
Antheis—flowery, 9].g
Antheus—85.2; 159.q, 4
Antibia—confronting strength, ] Io.c
Anticleia—false key, or in place of the famous one, 67.c; 96.a; ]60.›;
170.Y~,O; 171.2
Antielus—near the marshland, r 67.Ie,2
Antigone, in place of a mother, I05.k; i06.m
Antileon—bold as a lion, 120.b
Antilochus—lying in ambush against,
164.e,f,m
INDEX 1
Antinous—hostile mind, 171 pa~/ra Antiochus—driver against, 143.b
Antiope—with face confronting, 43.a;
68.2; 76 passim zoo passim; 10I.b;
I06.7; ]31.e,g; 151.f; 154.a; 167.J;I
170,o
Antiphas—speaking in the name d
167.i,$
Antiphates—spokesman, 170.h
Antiphus—contrary, 158.o ~
Antipoenus—vicarious penalty, I;~I.›~
Anu, 6.6 1
Anubis, 17.a; 31.3; 34.1; ]70.9
Apemosyne—unknowinghess, 93
passim
Apesantus—? he who lets loose against,
123.e,5
Aphaea—not dark, or vanisher, 89.b,4
Aphareus—unclothed, 74.b,e,g,k; 94.f;
14].f
Apheidas—lavish, ]41.a
Aphidamas—? amphidamas, taming all about him, 141.a
Aphldnus—shrinking away until he bends backwards, I03.b; I04.e
Aphrodite—foam-born, 6,6; x] passim; 13.6; i$.b,1; 18 śassim; 19.a; 23.1; 28.f; 32.4; 33-7; 65-a,I; 67.2;
71.a; 80.1; 83.1; 91.2; 92.j; 98.g,k;
I01.b,5; I08.1, ]26.1; 137.s; 152.
a.2; ]54.d; ]59passim; 162.4; 163.
c,n; 167.4; 169.1; 170.q
Comaetho—bright-haired, 91.1
Cyprian, 18.8
Eldest of the Fates, Io.$; 18.4
Epitragia—turned into a he-goat,
98.g
Epitymbria—of the tombs, 18.4
Erycina—of the heather, 18.3; 132a
Federal, 99.d the Fish, 36.a
Melaenis—black, 18.4
Peeping, io].c
Schoenis—of the rush-basket, 80.4
Scotia—of darkness, 18.4
Stranger, 159.v
Tenmian, 109.g
INDEX
Aphrodite—continued
Trojan, ~60.8
Unicef, 159.s
Urania—queen of the mountains, xo.c,$
Victorious, 60.k
Wolfish, 81.9
Apis—long ago, 56.b; 64.c,3,~l; 75.5
Apollo—destroyer, or apple-man,
13.c; ~4 passim; 17 passim; 18.j; 21
passim; 22.b; 28.f,3; 40.3; 42.I;
43.h; 44.a; 50.c,d,e,4; 51.cI, 4; 52.8;
66.1; 69.a,c; 74.e,f; 76.c; 77.a,b;
82.a,b,c,l; 83.g; 84.b; 91.b; 95.h,5;
97.1; 98.t,u,10; I07.f; 113.f; 114.
fn; 115.4; 116.a; 135.d, 2,3; 137. a;
139.f; 143.f; 154.i; 158passim; 16i passim; 163.j,p,$; 164.j; 167.j; 169
passim
Cillaean, l09.g, 2
of the Dawn, ~51.b
Distraught, 169.m the Dolphin, 97.a; 99.2
of the Embarcations, 149.a the Hunter, I~o.d; 133./ Hyperborean, 21.3; 113.7
Lycian, 60,8
Phrygian, 158.d
Pure, 82.b
Pythian, 28.3; 99.c; 100.b
Smintheus—mousy, 14.2; ~x.3;
90.3; 158.a,j, 2; 161.i
Solar, l09.2
Thymbraean, 158.p; 161.1; 163.a;
164,k; 166.g; 167.h,i of the White Rock, 89.j
Apsu, 36.2
Apsyrtus, or Aegialeus—swept downstream, 148.9; 152,c; 153 passim Aqhat, 41.4
Arachne—spider, 25.h,6
Arawn, l08.8
Areas—bear, 64.c; 132.r
Archelaus—ruler of the people, 1 17.g;
~69.5
Archemorus—beginner of doom, or original olive-stock, I06.h,$
381
Archias—eminent, 142.g
Archippe—dominant mare, x ~o.›
Architeles—plenipotentiary, 142.ś
Ardalus—dirty, 951
Areia—warlike, 88.b
Arene—man-like, 74.e
Ares—male warrior, x.$; 12.c,2;
15.b; 18.b,c,d,j; ~9 passim; 35.d;
37.b,d,$; 40.b; 46.a; 48.d; 58.g;
59.a,e; 67.g; 70.m; 80./,~; 102.e; 106.j,~; 109.b,d; 130.a; 133.d; 139.
b,~; 143.g; ~51.f,4; Is2.h,i; 159.h;
~64.a
Colchian, 148.g
Aresthanas—strength of prayer,
50.d
Arete—unspeakable, x 54 passim, ~ 70.2
Arethusa—ardusa, the waterer, 22.a;
82,g
Argeius—whited, 110. c; ~44.a
Arges—brightness, 5.b,2; 22.d
Argeus—bright, 151:f
Argiope—bright face, 58.a,2; 96.j, 5;
~4~.e
Argonauts, 28.b; 70.e; i:26.f; 128.b;
~33-f; ~34.6; ~37.e; 148passim; ~49
passim; x 50 śassim; I Sm passim; ~52
passim; 153 passim; z 54 passim; ~ 5 5
passim; 156 passim
Argus—bright hound, 171.d son of Medea, 156.e
Panoptes—the bright one, all eyes,
33.e; 56.a the Thespian, 148.h,i; 152.i
Arii—oak-tree, 21.i,7
Ariadne—ariaśne, most pure; or high fruitful mother of the barley,
27.i,8; 38.h,3; 79.2; 88.h,~0;
90.a,b,~; 92.12; 98 paXsire; ~oz.d;
104.4; 114.6; 160.a; 170.o
Aridela—the very manifest one,
98.s,5
Arion—lofty native, 16.f,5; 33.4;
75.3; I06./; 138.g,7 King of Miletus, I}7,1
the Musician, 87passim
38:~
Arisbe—? from arlsto and baino, she who travels best, z$8.rn; ~66.f
Aristaeus—the best, z;.i; 28.c; 8~
passim; 154.b
Aristeus—see Aristaeus
Aristippe—best of mares, 27.g
Aristo—good, ~17.d, 7
Aristomenes—best strength, 74.o;
146.6
Armenus—union, 154.1
Arnacia—sheepskin, 160.d
Arnaea—ewe, ~60.d
Arne—ewe-lamb, 43 passim; 91.a;
148.b
Arrhippe—best of mares, x 36.b
Arsino~—male-minded daughter of Minyas, 27.g daughter ofPhegeus, 107.f,g nurse of Orestes, ~ x 3.a
Arsippe—? arsipous, she who raises the foot, 27.g
Artemis—? high source of water, 14
passim; 21.b,d; 2:z passim; 37.c;
41.d,e,4; 43.c; 50.4; 69.2; 72.i;
77.a,b; 80 passim; 81.9; 89.a,z;
98.s,u, 7; xoo.2; ~oi.b,k,l; 108.k;
~~z.c; 116 passim; 117.g; ~25 passim; 126.1; ~42.a,/; ~45.j; ~61.d Alpheia—whiteish, zz.2
An~eitis—of the planet Venus, I 16.j
Aphaea—not dark, 89.4
Arician, ~o~.l
Brauronian, z~6.5
Carian, 57.2
Caryatis—of the walnut, 86.b
Cat, 36.a
Cordax—of the rope dance, i09.p
Cydonian, 109.i
Dictynna—of the net, t ~6.c
Eileithyia—she who comes to the aid of women in childbed, ~5.a,~
Elaphios—hindlike, t25.1
Ephesian, 22.1; ioo.f; ii6.5; i31.
d,3,5
Famous, 12!.c,e the Hanged One, 88.10; 91.3; 98..5
the Hind, ~z$.1,3
INDEX
the Huntress, I xo.d
Hyacinthropos—nurse of Hyadn—’
thus, 92.3
Hyperborean, 155.d,e
Lady of the Lake, 89.b
Lady of the Wild Things, 22.1,6
Laphria—despoiling, 22.6; 89.b,4
Lygodesma—bound with willows, 126.l
Metapontinan, 43.e
Olympian, 22.1
Orthia—upright, z03.b; x~6.c,k,l,4
Orthosian, 14~.h
Persuasive, 60.k
Saronian, xo~.g
Saviour, 98.x; 134.g
Stymphalian, 128.d
Taurian, z~.i; l16.b,c,j; 117.a
Tauropole—bulI-killer, i~6.c.i.j;
~3~.c
Thoantea—of Thoas, ~ 16.c
Tfidaria—threefold assigner of lots,
72.5
Trina—of the three ways, x 16.c
Wolfish, 114.h
Arthur, K~g, 3~.3; 82.2; 95.1; 98.3; 103.1; ~54-3
Aruru, 4.1,5; 39.8
Ascalaphus—short-eared owl, =4.j.I.
~2; ~34.d the Orchomenan, ~48.1
Ascalus, untilled, ~69.6
AscaNus—tentless, ~68.o
Asclepius—unceasingly gentle, 3.b;
zI.i,n,9; 4~.d,3; 50 passim; 51.g;
74.b,k; 90.4; xo~.k,m; 133.11;
140.a; ~66.i
AgNtas—purifier, 50.h
Cotylaean—hollow-of-the-hand,
140.d,~
Ash-nymphs—see Me~ae
Ashtar, 30.4
Ashtaroth, ~x.1
Asius—merry, i58.m
Asopus, R.—? asiepqos, never silent, 66
passim; 67~i.4; 76.b; 81.d; ~09.b;
151.d hssaracus—? assaros, disdainful, 158.g
Astarte, 56.2; 58.2; 68.4; 73.7; 164.g
Asteri~—of the starry sky, or of the sun, 88.1; I09.b,3; 130.a
Asterion, R.—of the sun, 16.e
Asterius, on—of the starry sky, or of the sun giant, 88 passim; 98.c,g son of Cometes, 148.i the Lesser, 89.a
Astcrodeia—goddess of the sun, xS:z.c
Asterope—sun-face, 109.b; 158.n
Astrabacus—sure-sighted remedy,
i~6.1
Astraeus—starry, 40.b,g
Astyanax, or Scamandrius—king of the city, 168 passim
Astvdameia—tamer of cities, IIO.C;
138.h; 142.e; 143.i
Astyuome—lawgiver of the city, 162.1
Astyocha, Astyoche—possessor of the city, IIo.g; 141.g; 142.e; 158.g,I;
160.2; 162.e; 166.i
Astypalaea—ancient city, 137.p
Asvfits, 16.6
Atabyrius—(non-Greek word), 67.1;
93.1
Atalauta—unswaying, 80 passim;
~4~.d; 148.i; 152.i
Athamas—reaper on high, 24.3; 27.a;
70 passim; 151.f; 157.d; 169.5
Athene—? inversion of Anatha,
&t~nerian—Queen of Heaven, 4.b;
5.a; 8 passim; 9.d,l,g,4,5,6; 16.
c,d,e,3,4; 17.3; 18.1; 19.b; 21.e,9;
22.7; 23.1; 25 passim; 30.b; 33.b,5;
35.b; 39.g,I,lO; 50.e,g,3,6,7; 58.g;
66.1,,; 70.7; 73.f,h; 75.c,3; 89.4;
97.4; l05.g; I06.j; 114.b,m,n,g,4;
115 passim; 116.h,i,1; ii9.a; i24.d;
~2$.1; 134.c,g; 139. b,e,1; 14~.b,c,1;
142.l; 143.g; 145.h; 148./~; 158. e,i,k; ~ 59 passim; 160.p; 165.c; 167
?as>tm; 168.fg,~; 170 passitn; 171
passim
Alalcomeueis—guardian, 5.1
Alea—she who grinds, 14~.a,I
INDEX ~8~
Apaturia—guardian of deceits, ~.d
Chryse—golden, 161..1
Colocasi~—of the red watcr-lily~
~II.h
Coronis—of the raven, or crow, 25.5
Girder-on-of-Arms, 12~.e,5
Goatish, 50.6
Itone—of the willow, 88.7
of the Just Deserts, 140.d
Laphria—despoiler, 9.1
Mother, 138.g, 6
Narcaea—benumbing, x xo.b,l
Onga—(Phoenician word), 58.f
Polias—of the city, 47.4; 48.b,1
Sciras—of the parasol, 96.i
Warlike, I~5.a
Atlas—he who dares, or suffers, I.d;
7.d,e; 33.d, 7; 39 passim; 41.e; 73.i;
77.1; I08.b,4; 125.1; 130.a; 133
passim
Atreus—fearless, I06.Z; I09.e/; IiO. c,g,h; III passim; 112.a,b,e,g; 117.
a.2; 118.a; 146.d; 161.d
Atropos—she who cannot be turned,
~o passim; 60.2; 66.k
Atthis—.1 actes rhea, goddess of the rugged coast, 94:f, 1
Attis—(non-Greek word), 79.1; I05.6
Atymnius—insatiate of heroic praise,
88.b; 89.9
Atys—.1 short for atFhes, luckless,
136.g
Auge—radiance, 141 passim
Augeias—bright ray, 90.3; 122.c; 127
passim; ~34.9; 138 passim; 139.e;
141.b; i~.8.i; 152.b,d
Autolycus—very wolf, 17.j; 67.b,c,1;
119.f; 135.b; 151.d; 160.c; 167.d;
170.lO; 171.5
Autolyte—stampede, 43.g
Automedon—independent ruler, 16a.
Automedusa—cunning itsall, xxo.e
Autono~—with a mind of her own,
82.e
Auxo—increase, x 3-$
Avanc, 148.5
Al/-Mari, 131.3; 151.3 aaal, 30.4; 60,1; 170.$
Bacche—raging, 27.b
BaLius—piebald, 8’t.m,4; 163.m
Banbha,
Bateia—of the bramble,
Baton—blackberry, i06.k,$
Battus—tongue-tied, 82.1
Baubo—soother, 24.d,g
Bauds—over-modest, 41
Bel, L$; 4.5; 60.1; 73.7; I03.l,a
Belili, 4.3; 60.1; 86.2
Bellerophon—.1 bele?~horon, bearing darts, 67.4; 70.2; 73.$; 75 passim;
95.d
Beltis, 1.3
Belus—baal, lord, 56.b,$; 58.a; 60 pas-sim; 61.a; 65.a; 165.k
Benthesicyme—wave of the deep,
16.b,l; 47.c
Beroe—?phero~, she who brings eggs,
18.k
Bia—force, 8.3
Biadice—justice by force, 70.d,f, 2
Bias—force, 68:~ 72 passim; 94.c
Biton—bison, wild ox, 84 passim
Blathnat,
Blodeuwedd, 9t.1; ri2,1
Boeotus—herdsman, 43 passim
Boreas—North Wind, or devouring,
x.a,z; 12.5; 25.5; 47.c, 4; 48passim;
63.$; 96.6; 109.d; 137.m,o,.1; 138.5;
150.j, 4;
Borim#s, 150,e,l
Bormus—plaintive, 150.e,f,l
Bran, 6.2;
134.1; 138.4; 146.2; 170.8
Branchus—hoarse, 96.j,.1
Branwen, 25.5
Breseus—he who prevails, 162.j
Brian, 14.$;
Briareus—strong, 3.b,I; 13.c,~; 131.
g,2; 132.h
Brigit, 21.4; 23.s
Britom~rtis—good maiden, 89.a,b,~
Brizo—charmer, or soother, 21.4
Bromie—roaring, 27.b
Brontes—thunder, 3.b,e;
Broteas—gory, I08 passim
Budeia—goddess of oxen, 121.a
Bunomus—oxograzing, 159.v
Bunus—hill, 156.b
Busiris—grave of Osiris, x 32.f; 13~.
134.6
Butes—heMsman, 18.k; 46.a,3;
a,b,l,4; 50.5; 10/.c; 132.q; 154.d
Buzyge—ox yoker, xzx.a
Cabeiri—(non-Greek word),
Cacus—bad, 131./,m,6; 134.7,8 Cadmus—from the east, ~4.c,5;
~7.6; 36.d; 52.a,c; 58passim; 59
sire; 67.6; 76.c; 105.i;
152.e,g
Caeneus—new, 78 passim; 80.›;
›.e; 143.d,4; 148.i
Caenis—new, 78 passim
Calais—of changeful hue, 48.c; I
r 50 passim; 155.i
Calchas—brazen, 160 passim; ~6~ ś~gat sire; 162.h; 163.b; 165 passim;
a,g; 167 passim; 168 passim; ~o..
passim ~67
Cale—fair, 13.$; 105.h ji01
Caleb, 88.3 gS.l
Callidice—fair justice, ~71.1
Callileon—handsome lion, I ~ ~.g [o.1
Calliope—fair face, 18.i,7; 28.a; ~
160.i; 163.g ~eu:
Callipolis—fair city, IIo~e,z io.1
Callirrho~—fair flowing, t07 śa
132.a; 158-g; 169.k ~or
Callisto—fairest, 22.h,4; 72.i iop
Caius—fair, 92.c
Calybe—cabin, 158.1 iass~
gO
INDEX
—rosebud, 0r ear-ting, 64.a;
I.g
~—hidden, or hider, 170 pas—
ta—sharer out, 42.4; 54.1; 60.2;
,g iro—sharer-out, 108.f,9
e—crooked, 7.e he—barking, 43.h,4
ton—.1 shining, 4~.d hus—[dedicated to] the Basketddess, 96.f us—pack ass, 148.i; 154.f leus—charioteer, 50.1, 106 pas~; 160.r
~urus—camphor, 154.f, 7
—gulper, or snatcher, 137.g;
LI; 167.e
(non-Greek word), 1,5; 7.4; 57.
.; 82.6; 86.1,a; 95.5
~, 34.$
;—? Car(an Zeus, 138.m
,57.2
~nor—servant of the Moonddess Car, 18.7; 21.b; 90.b;
5.b,1
enta—Car the wise, 52.a,5; 86.2;
2.o,6
s—trumpet, 146./e ,—withering, 13.2
—nut-tree, 86 passim fis—of the nut-tree, 57.2
~dra—she who entangles men,
.5; ix:~ passim; x 58 passim; 166.i;
7 pasdm; 168 passim
~eia—cassia-juice, 73 passim;
.b
:—beaver, 62.c,~; 74 passim;
.c; 84.1; I03.a,$; x/3.d; 119:f; Li zs—catarrho~s, down-flowing,
a,b,i; 93 passim; ixt.1, 159-r;
r.3
.n—? croaker, 138.h ps—cercops, face with a tail, ~&c;
4; 25.c,d,5; 38.1; 43.b; 47.b; 94
‘sam
385
Cedalion—he who takes charge of sailors, 41.b
Celaeno—swarthy, 159.q
Celeus—caller; hence: sorcerer, or woodpecker, 24.e,1,5,~o; 47.c; 56.2
Celmis—smelting, 53.c,2
Cenchrias—spotted serpent, 67.4
Centaurs—(see Centaurus), 7.7; 50.$;
63.3; 81.h,1,4; 92.lo; I02 passim; la6passim; 134.a,8; 143.$
Centaurus—? one hundred strong,
63 .d,3
Cephalus—head, 23.1; 25.d; 40.b, 2;
47.b; 89 passim; 118.b
Cepheus—cepeus, gardener, 60.a; 73
passim; 80.c,d; 140.b,c; ~41.a; ~48.i
Cephissus, R.—river of gardens, 16.e;
24.1; 85.a
Cer—fate, or doom, 82.6
Cerambus—horned beetle, 38.e.11
Cerberus—.1 ker berethrou, demon of the pit, ~28.c; 31.a,$,7; 34 passim;
97.c; ~03.c; i08.?; 132.4; ~34/~assire; ~39.c; ~5~.c Cercopes—faces with tails, 136passim
Cercyon—boar’s tail, 49.a,b; 96.j,3,~
Cercysera—distaff wielder, 160.j
Cerdo—gain, or weasel, or vixen, g4—7;
57.a,~; 118..$
Ceryx—herald, :~5.d; 47.f
Ceto—sea monster, 33.b,g, 2,7; 135.b
Ceuthonymus—hidden name, z 34.d
Ceyx—sea-mew, 45 passim; 14g.g; 143
passim, 144.a; 146.a
Chaerias—welcomer, 14~-.g
Chalciope—brazen face, 95-a; x 37.1,r;
i51.fi 152.c,d,f
Chalcodon-brazen path, xoo.d; 104.f;
137.p
Chalion—? chaliphron, thoughtless,
164.e
Chaos—yawning, l.a; 3.a; 4.a,c; IL~
Chariboea—grace of cattle, 167.1
Charis—grace, 13.3
Charires—graces, 13.a,$; Ios.h,$
Charon—fierce brightness, 28.1; 3 ~.a;
134.c
DL. II—N
386
Charybdis—sucker down, 148.1,9;
154.11; 170.t,v,~,9
Cheimarrhus—torrent, 75.d, 6
Cheiron—hand, 43.c; 50.c,e,g,$; 63.d;
81 passim; 82 passim; 126 passim;
133.l; 148.b,e,g; 151.g,5; 156.e;
160.i,l
Chem, 73.8
Chiade—snowflakes, 77.1
Chimaera—she-goat, 17.j; 34 Passim; 73.5; 75 passim; l05.e; 123. b,~
Chimaerus—he-goat, 159.q
Chione—snowqueen, 47.c; 48.c; 67.b
Chlidanope—delicate face, 82.a
Chloris—greenish, 68.f; 77.b; lxo.a;
170.0
Chnas, 55.1
Choere—sow, 24.7
Chon, 118.2
Chromia—embellisher, 64.a
Chrysaor—golden falchion, 33.b,5;
73.h; 132.a,f, 4
Chryse—golden, I $8.b; 161.j
Chryseis—golden, 116.h; 162.I, 6,$;
~63.b
Chryses—golden, 1~6.h; 131.e; 148.j;
153.3; i62.1,8; 163.b,f; i66.g
Chtysippus—golden horse, 29.t; 105.
e,g; ilo passim; 1ii.tl
Chrysothemis—golden order, ! Ia.d,l; ii3.e,n,$,7; 160 t.7
Chthonia—of the soft, 47.b
Chthonius—of the soil, 55.g,~
Chylm—juice of a plant, or berry,
50.c,~
Cilix—.1 cillix, an ox with cxooked horns, 58.a,d,~; 88.d
Cilla—she-ass, or dice made from ass’s bone, 158.1; 159-g,5; 168.d
Cillus, Cillas, Cellas—ass, I09.g,i, 7
Cinyras—plaintive cry, 18.h,5,7; 65.a,
1; 77.2; 160.g,11,12
Circe-falcon, 28.5; 42.$; 56.2; 89.e,$;
:t32.p; 148.3,9; 152.b; 153 passim;
154.b; 170passitn; 171.k,4
Circinus—the circular, 92.c,9
INDBX
Cisseis—ivy woman, 168.3
Cisseus—of the ivy, 158.0; 168.$
Cissia—ivy, 164.c, 2,3
Cleia—famous, 27.2
Cleisithyra—locker of the door
Cleite—renowned, 149.f,g
Cleitonymus—famous name, I
Cleitus—renowned, 40.b
Cleobis—cleo-bios, famous life, g sire, 159.4
Cleobule—famous counsel,
160./ Cleodaeus—famous warrior, 13
Cleodice—famous justice, ~zS.c ~i
Cleola—wholly famous, Xl~.f i
Cleolaus—famous people, 136.g~.
Cleomenes—famous strength, 11
Cleon—famous, Iio.c
Cleopatra—glory of her father
48.c; 74.a; 80.d,i; 150.1; 158.
Cleotheta—noble beauty, I08.1
Clete—chosen, or invoked, 164.1
Clio—proclaimer, 147.b
Clotho-spinner, xopassim, 60.1;:
Clymene—famous might, 39.a;
80.c; 93.a,c; 109.f; 1~:.1
170.o
Clymeneus, or Clymenusmight, 64.a; IzI.p,5; 121.a; I’.
Clytaernnestra—.1 praiseworthy ~
ing, 62.c; 74.b; 112 passim; passim; 114 passim; 117.5; I
160.2; 161 passim; 162.1
Clytia—famous, loS.b
Clyti~—famous, xoS.f
Clytius—famous, 35.e; 135.b; 15l
Cocalus o spiral shell, 92.h,Ia
Coeus—intelligent, ~.d; 14.a, 2; ~
Comaetho—bright hair, 72.5; 89.
91.1
Cometes—long-haired, 117.h; I,
162.t; ~69.k
Connidas—knowing man from
Ida, 95.f
Coptens—dung man, txo.c; I:
Ia7.d,~; 135.e; 163.h
Cordelia, 73.2
24passim; 27.tl; 76.1
78.1; 96. i; 132.s; 134.b; 136.4;
~70.q
C0rinthius—club man, 1 lO.C
Corintbus—club man, 96.b; 148.6;
156.b,4
Corocbus—? feaster on ox chine,
~47.a,3
Coronea—of the crows, 70.i
Coronis—crow, or raven mother of Asclepius, 21.i,9; 47.4;
50.p,m the Hyad, 27.2
Coronus—crow, or raven, 50~1; 78.a;
~43.d; 148.i
Corunctes—cudgel man, 96.a
Corybantes—crested dancers, 21.i,5;
30.a,l
Corythus—helmeted, 141.d; 158.f;
~ 59.v; ~60.
Cottus—son of Cotytto, 3.b,1
Cotytto—(non-Greek word), 3.I; 27.1,$
Crana~—rocky, 94-1
Cranaechme—rocky point, 94.1
Cranaus—rocky, 94.f
Cratus—strength, 8.3
Creiddylad, 73.2
Crcon—ruler, l05.k; I06.k,l,m,7;
107.i; 118.b,$; 121.c; ~22.a; 135.e;
~ 56 passim
Cr›sphontes—stronger slayer, 146.k
Cressida—chryseis, golden, 162.8
Erems—Cretan, IOO.g,!
Crete—crateia, strong, or ruling, goddess, 88.e,1
Creteus—ruler, 88.1
Crethcis—ruler, 70.2; 81.g,q,5
Crctheus—ruler, 68.e,f; 70.d; 88.a,1;
~48.a
Crcusa—sovereign being mother of Ion, 43.b; 44.a,~; 47.&
Naiad, 82.a daughter of Priam, 158.o
Crimissus, R.—.1 (Cretan word), 137.g
Cristinobld, Empress of 148.5
Cronus-crow, x.d; 6passim; 7passim;
~x.b; 12.a; 16.a,f; 25.4; 28.1;
t~qDZX 387
30.a,3; 31.c,~,6; 39.e; 51.k,6; 53.
5,6; 54.a; 57.1; 84.2; l05.5; IOS.a;
109.1; Ili.4; ii8.c; 129.2; 132.e, 4,
5,{5; 134.1; 138.i,o,4; 139.1; I$I.g;
164..5; 170.5,8
Croton—dog tick, 132.t
Crotopus—thumping foot, 147.a,1
Crotus—rhythmic beat, 26.d; 126.g
Cteatus—he who gains possession,
138.a
Ctesippus—possessor of horses, 142./; 143.i
Cuchulain, 63.$; 75.5; 91.1; I03.1;
132.1; 162.8; 164.3
Cureres—young men who have shaved their hair, 7.c, 1,4; 22.6;
30.a,I,$; 53.b; 90.d; 95-5; 97.1;
158.b
Curissia—dirge, 167.i
Curoi, 63.g; 91.1; 162~8
Cyamites—son of a bean, 24./ Cyathus—wine-cup, 142.h,4
Cybele, she of the hair, or she with the axe, 18.3; 21.e,f; 29.3; 80.1; 158.4
Cybosurus—square bucket, 110.c
Cychreus—? cichoreus, of the endive,
81.c,d, 6
Cyclopes—ring-eyed, 3.b,2; 6.a,b;
7.e; 21.n; 22.d; 31.e; 41.2; 73,b,p,r;
~70 passim
Cycnus—swan son of Apollo, 123.i,t son of Ares, 133.d; 134.7; 143 passim; 161.4
son of Poseidon, 161 passim; 162._/; 164.j
Cydon—glory, 90.a
Cylarabes—? qclarabes, with rattling chariot wheels, 112.a; 117.C
Cyllene—crooked queen, 17.a,$
Cyllenius—devoted to the crooked queen, 131.9
Cyrene—sovereign queen, or mistress of the briclle, 21.i; 82passim; 130.a;
155.4
Cyrianassa—queen of the chieftains,
72.g
388
Cytisorus—clover season, 70.m; x 48.8;
xS~.f; xse.d,f; 157.d
Cyzicus—exalted, 82.4; 149passim
Dactyls—fingers, 53 passim; 131.9;
132.4; 164.6
Daedalus—bright, or cunningly wrought, 18.3; 81.h; 82.j; 88.
e,f,~,7; 9:z passim; 94.b; 96.1,$;
98.k,r,u,$,5; 122.c
1~ .......... 1 ú t-—1 _~
INDEX
Deinus—terrible, ~30.a
Deion—despoiler, ~48.i
Deione—queen of spoil, 88.b
Deioneus—son of the queen ofs~
63.2; 96.›
Deiphilus—lover of spoil, 149.c; I~
Deiphobus—scaring the spoiler, 13~
158.o; 259.o; 164.k; 166.f; I~
168.b
Deipyla, or Deipyle—hostile
106.a,c; 160.r
~ ~. ú ~ .....
388
Cytisorus—dover season, 70.tn; x 48.8; xsxf; 152.d,f; 157.d
Cyzicus—exalted, 82.4; 149śassirn
Dactyls—fingers, 53 passim; 131.9;
132.4; 164.6
Daedalus—bright, or cunningly wrought, 18.$; 81.h; 82.j; 88.
e,f,l~7; 92 passim; 94.b; 96.1,$;
98.1e,r,u,$,5; i22.c
Damarmenus—subduer of sails, 166.2
Damasen—subduer, 90.8
Dam-kina, 60.3; 93.1; 146.,/ Damnameneus—compeller, i.e. hammer, 53.c, 2
Damysus—conqueror, 81.r; 160.h
Dan, 60.3
Dana~—she who judges, or parched,
42.4; 43.1; 60.$; 73 passim; 93.I;
146.4
Danaids, 16.e; 54.1; 60 passim, 68.1;
124.b,$
‘ Danaus—Dan,judge, or son of Dana,,
x.x; 53.3; 56.7; 60 passim; 73-a; 109,b; 124.b; 146.4
Daphne—laurel, 21.k,l,b; ~07.c,1
Daphnis—laurel, 17.j,$; 51.b,2; I 36.e
Daphoene—bloody one, 21.6
Daphoenissa—bloody one, $I.2
Dardanus—? from dar-daio, burnerup, 24.a; 48.e; 158 passim
Dascylus—litde pointer, ~31.e,h,9;
15~.c
Daunus—sleeper, 169.k
David, 82.4; IIo.*
Dechtire, 162.8
Deianeira—stringer-together of spoil,
118.2; 134.c; 138.›; ~42 passim;
144.a; ~45 passim
Deidameia—taker of spoil, 53.7; I 02.c;
160.j,y
Deileon—spoil-taking lion, 151.d
Deimachus—battle spoil, 137.h,n
Deimas—fearful, x$8.b
Deimus—fearful, 18.a
Deino—terrible, 33.c.3
INDEX
Deinus—terrible, t~o.a
Deion—despoiler, ~48.i
Deione—queen of spoil, 88.b
Deioneus—son of the queen of~I
63.I; 96.c
Deiphilus—lover of spoil, 149.c; I~
Deiphobus—scaring the spoiler, 1~~
158.o; 159.o; 164.k; 166f; I~
i68.b
Deipyla, or Deipyle—hostile
I06.a,c; 160.r
Deliades—son of Delian Apollo, ,~
Delilah, 91.1; ~45.4
Delphinus—dolphin, ~6.b,~
Delphyne—womb, 2~.a,$; 36 ~
Demeter—barley-mother, 7.1
~4.b,4; 16.f,.5,6; 24 passim; 51
33.4; 51.e; 60.f; 72.4; 8i.d; 85
88.9; 94-f; 96.i; 97.1; I02.f; I
c,h,6; 121.3; 134 passim; 14~
15›.I; 157.1; 170.q
Eleusinian, 140.a
Erinnys—the fury, 16.6
Europe—broadfaced, 5 I.i
Lernaean, 12›.b
Mare-headed, 16.5; 19.Z; 46.$; 41
75.3; 108-5
Subterrene, 28.h
Demonassa—queen of the peo[~
145.f
Demophon-voice of the people, 86.
131.11; 146.b; 168.e,j; 169 passi~
Demophoi3n—light of the peop$
~4.d,e,~o; Ioo.h; IoI.a; 114.!
Dendrites—tree youth, 27.2
Derceto—(non-Greek word), 89.2; ~54a
Dcrcynus—derceynus, sleeping wit open eyes, 132./~ ‘, Desmontes—desmentes, gaoler, 43.1,!
Despoena—mistress, 16.f,5
Deucalion—new-wine sailor father of Idomeneus, 160.n son of Minos, 98.1; xoo.h; I04f husband of Pyrrha, 27.6; 38 passin
39.2
Dexamenus, entertainer, 127:/; 138./~ Dia-ofthesky, 63.a,l,2; I02.a,~; 141
I Diarmuid, 18.7
~I[; Dias—bright, rIo.›
I Dice—natural law, or justice, 32.1
~ Dictynna—she of the fishing-nets,
] 89.b,2,4; 154.6; 160.lo
] Dictys—ne~, 73.c,o,p
~ Didaeon-. experienced, r35.b
Dinah, 60.3
Diocles—glory of Zeus, 24.1,$
Diodorus—gift of Zeus, 133.i
Diomedes—god-like cunning of Argos, 71.1; I09.f; 159.a; 160.
n,r, 2; 162 passim; r63 passim; 164
passim; 166 passim; 167 passim; 168
passim; 169 passim
(Jason), 148 passim; 152.1
King of Thrace, 82.c; 121.4; 130 passim; 134.8; 153.e
Dione—divine queen, I.d; 7.1; ix.b,2;
~4.b,4; ~oS.b
Dionysus—lame god, 14 passim;
~8.e,8; 27 passim; 28.d, 2,3; 30.3;
35.e,h,1; 38.h,3; 70.g,h,4; 72.g,5;
76.b; 79.a,2; 82.k; 83 passim; 86.b;
87.a; 88.7; 90.b; 98.n,o,s,w,6,9;
IIo.b; 123.1; 126.b; 134.b,e,4;
136.j; 14~.a; 148.6; 160.u
Bromius—raging, 17.7,9
Cretan, 98.6
of the Marshes, 99.c
Plutodotes—giver of wealth, ~29.
1,2
Sabazius—breaker in pieces, ~7.7,9
Saviour, 124.b
Dioscuri—sons of Zeus, 74 passim; i03,a,b; 112.C; 113.7; 114.4; 116.e;
~50.a; 159 passim
Dirce—dicre, cleft, or double, 68.2; 76
passim; 135.e
Dog-star—see Orthrus, Sirius
Dolon—ensnarer, 163.,~
Dolophion—curtrang native snake,
i66.b
Dorippe—gift mare, 160.u,7
Doris—bountiful, 33.a,2
Dorus—gift, aLi; 43.b,1; 64.c; 88.a,1
389
Drapaudi, 135.1
Dryads—oak-nymphs, 82.i; 86.2
Dryas—oak, 27.e,$, 46.c,d, 2
Dryope—woodpecker, 21,j; 26.5;
56.2; 150.b,~
Dryops—oak face, 21.7; 143 passim
Dylan, l05.1
Dymas—? dynamis, powerful, 158.o
Dysaules—of the unlucky house, 24.e
Dysponteus—rough sea, 109.c
Es, 6.6; 39.8
Eabani, 4.2
Earth, Mother, 3.a,1; 4.a; 6.a; 7.a,e;
13.4; 15.a; 20.2; 21 passim; 25,b,d;
33.d,g; 36.a; 41.d,f; 43.2; 51.
b,f, 2,4; 78.1; 83.3; 88.b; 99.c; loo:f; 113.g; 115.d; 133.a,b,g,h;
143.g; 154.3; 170.t
Echedemus—he who holds the people, 104.b
Echemus—.1 echemythos, taciturn,
~46.e
Echenus—rein holder, 132.o
Echephron—possessed of intelligence,
132.r
Echetus—man of substance, 154.a
Echidne—she-viper, 33.b,e,~; 34 passim; 60.h; 75.b; 96.e; Ios.e; 124.a; 132.a; 133.b,I; 170.t
Echion—viper, 17.j,3; 58.g,5; 148.i;
149.b; 167.rn
Echo—echo, 26.d; 56.a; 85 passim
E~tion—terrible native, 162.1,;,7
Egeria—aegeiria, of the black poplar,
IOI.l,l
Eidothea—divine shape, 169.a
Eidyia—knowledgeable, 152.c,d
Eileithyia—she who comes to aid women in childbed, IS.a; IiS.e,g;
138.o; 141.›
Eioneus—with high banks, 63.a,~;
l02.a,3; 163.g
Eire, 24.$
El, 27.12
Elais—of the olive, i60.1s
390
Elaphios—hindllke, 125.!
Elate—fir-tree, 26.2; 78.1
Elatus—of the ftr, or lofty, So.b,.1;
75.a,i; 126.c; x›8./ Electra—amber daughter of Agamemnon, IIz.d,l;
113 passim; 114 passim; xi6.i,l; 117.a,b,5; 168.1
wife of Corythus, 158.f
Ocean-nymph, 33.g,z daughter of Oedipus, 59.k
Pleiad, 41.6; i58.b,i,k
Electryo—beaming, 42.c, 4
Electryon—beaming, i18.a,b
Eleius—the Elean, 127.a,1
Elpenor—man’s hope son of Chalcodon, I04.f comrade of Odysseus, 170 passim
Elphame, Queen of, 170.2
E1phenor—man’s deceit, 169.n
Elymus—quiver, 137.g
Empusae—forcers-in, 55 passim;
6La,1; 64.Z
Enalus—child of the sea, 87.c,z
Enarephorus—spoil winner, r03.b
Enarete—virtuous, 43.h,4; 68.a
Enceladus—buzzing, 3$.f,h
Endels—entangler, 66.h; 8r.a,1; 96.,{
Endor, Witch of, 51.2
Endymion—seduced native, 40.c;
64passim, 138.m
Enkidu, IxS,z; 132.1; 142-$
Ennomus—lawful, r42.ś
Entella—commanding, 137.g
Enyo—war-Like, 33.c,$
Enyues—war-like, 88.h
Eos-dawn, 29.c,;; 35.b; 40 passim;
41.b,c,d; 42.a; 89.c,d,f,j; 164.g,h, 4;
170.6
Epaphus—a touching, 56.b,c,3; 133.k
Epeius—successor, or assaulter, 64.b,3;
89.10; I09.n; 263.n; 167 pas$im
Ephesus—appetite, ioo.g
Ephialtes—he who leaps upon, i.e.
nightmare, 35.d,$; 37 passim
Ephron, 88.$
Epicustc—? worn-down form ofepi—
INDEX
catastreśhomene, upsetting 0~
III.p
Epidaurus—? epidaulos, shaggy, ~I~
Epigoni—those born afterwards, I{
passim; 169.k
Epimedes—he who thinks too 1~
53.b,1
Epimetheus—afterthought, 38.c, passim; 169.3
Epistrophus—tacldng, i62.j
Epopeus—he who sees all, 156.4
Erato—passionate, 27.b
Ercwlf, 132.3
Erebus—the covered [pit], 4.a; ~c
Erechtheus—? he who hastens over t heather, or shatterer, 25.2, 7; 43
44.b; 46.a,$; 47 passim; 48.a,I
92.a,~; 94.a; 95.3; 96.i,4; 99.b
Erginus—confiner, 84.b; ~22 pass/~ 148.i
Eriboea—rich in cattle, 37.b,d; 98.{ !
Ericepaius—feeder upon heather, z.1,i
Erichthonius—wool on the earth, ~
much earth, or from the land ośth heather, 25.c,d,e,l,~; 48.e,3; Jc
e,l,6; IoS.g; lS8.g,h,z
Erigone—child of strife, or plenti~
offspring, 79 passim; 88.10; 92.1l
98.5; i06.2; 114.m,n, 6; ~17.a,b,;
Erinnyes—angry ones, 4.a; 6.a,3; 18.1
31.g; 32.3,4; 33.g; 80.i; 85.1; ~03.1
I05.k, 6; 107.d,f; xoS.f; 113.f,~,;
114 passim; 115 passim; r16.a,e,:
117.1; 137.m; 164.a; ~65.e; 169.1
Eriopis—large-eyed, or very rid
z 56.e,z; 160.q
Eripha—kid, I09.e
Eriphus—kid, 27.2
Eriphyle—tribal strife, 106.e; I07/~ slm; 113.6; ~15.4; 170.o
Eris—strife, I~.c,z; 19.a; 81.n,d; I,
c,e; III.e,Z; 159.e
Eros—erotic love, 2.b; x$ passi;
35.d,1; 152.a,e,2; I 59.m,q
Erymanthus—divining by lots, z;
a~1
Erysichthon—earth-fearer, 24.b,4
—red land, ~32.$
33.d
88.h,~
; 132.q,6
‘~.1
word), he whom we evoke, 21.$; 133.1~
29.2
glory, 69.1; xos.k; 106
passim glory, 106.f
IIO.d
~?.i,~; 88.1
e—mo~ ~uous, IOp.1
9~.A.2
—good counsel ~4-~; g&
ú ,{; p?.1
27.2
—? wc~-fitted, 14t.t
~ppe—goodly m~e, 43.c,~; So.g;
169.k
E~ppus—goo~y sta~on, lio.d~
Et~macus—of good endearour, 24.7;
171 passim
! ~mclus—sweet mdody, 16~.g; 164.
~,~tmenides—~n~y ones, 3t.g
~umolpus—good melody, ~4.fil, 5,~;
47p~sim; 48.c; 100.d; 119.g; 134.n
E~ncus—of the couch, I~.b; t48.12;
~49.c,e,~; t62.i; ~66.b
E~no~—good inte~gence, 158.1
~IlOI~itl$—orderly, 142.g, 4
E~pal~txxus—inventor, 94.1
~phc~ne—re~gious silence, 26.d
~phcn~us—religious silence, ~43,a;
~4~.i; ~49.1; ~.a; 154.g; 155.i
~t~ph~rbus—good pasture, t62,b;
~63.j,k
~phrosyne—good cheer, 105.h,5
Europe—broad rice, or we~ watered
Acrope), t11.f
~tcr of Cadmus, 58 passim; 88,n;
89. z; 90.3; ~ox.d; 160.a
E~trotas—fair flowing, ~25.c,3
L~ryalc—wide wandering, or of the broad t~es~ng floor, 33.b,3;
73-~h
INDEX 391
Euryalus—wide wanderer, 148.i;
x 60.r
Euryanassa—wide-ruling queen, I080
b,j
Eurybatus—wide walker, 136.c
Eurybia—wid.e strength, 33.ś,~,2
Eurybius—long life, 134.i; I›6.c
Eurycleia—broad fame, 171 passim
Eurydamas—wide taming, r48.i
Eurydice—wide justice daughter ofAdrastus, 158.1
sister of Hyacinthus. I z 5.c wife of Orpheus, 28 passim; 33.1;
82.h,i daughter of Pelops, 1 io.c
Eurygyes—wide-circling, 90.I
Eurylochus—extensive ambush, 81.d comrade of Odysseus, 170 passim
Eurymachus—wide battler, 171 passim
Eurymedon—wide rule, I.d; 39.a;
~31.e
Eurymedusa—the being of wide cuno ning, 66.g
Eurynome—wide wandering, or wide rule, x.a,t; 2.1; 13.a,$; 23.a,I; 33.1;
40.2; 47.2; 48.1; 66.a,i; 93.1
Eurynomus—wide wandering, or wide rule, 142.g
Euryphaessa—wide shining, 42.a,1
Eurypylus—broad cuirass, or wide gate, 72.5; 134.i; 137.p son of Telephus, 160.x; 163.h; 164.a;
i66.i
Eurysaces—broad shield, 165 passim
Eurysthenes—wide strength, 146.k
Eurystheus—forcing strongly back far and wide, 28.6; I04.j; Iio.c; xxS.
e,$; 122.e; 123f, g; ~24.a,g; 125.b;
126.d,~ś; x,~7.a,d,e; 129 passim; 130.
a,c; 131.a,j; 133.f; 134.i; ~’5.a;
138.d,f,j; 143.b; 146passlm
Eurythemista—wide ordering, I08.b
Eurytho~—of wide activity, 109.b
Eurytion—widely honoured, 80.c,g;
81.f,p; I02.d,e,z; ~26.d; 127..f; 132
a,d; ~42.5
Centaur, 138.c,s
392
Eurytus—full-flowing, 35.e; xo:z.d;
119../; 135 passim; 136.a,1; 138.a; 144 passim; 171.h son of Attgeias, 138.e
Euterpe—rejoicing well, 163.g
Evadne—? euanthe, blooming, 69. e;
74.a; i06.1,6; 155 passim
Evander—good for men, 52.a; 132
passim
Eve, 4.a,3; 145.5
Evenus—controlling the reins, 74.e,3;
109.f; 162.j
Fates, Three, 4.a,I; xo passim; 13.a,3;
17.h; 18.1; 35.e,g; 36.e,3; 52,a,~;
60.2; 69.c; 73.9; go.a; 81./; 90.6; xoI.k; xos.b; ~xs.f
Faunus—? favonius, he who layouts,
56.g; 132.p
Fearinns—of the dawn, 57.1
INDEX
Gelanor—laughter, 60.e
Gelonus—laughing, ~32.t,
Geraestus—venerable, 91.g,3
Getyon—?geranon, crane, 31.6; 5~
127. g; ~32 passing ~34.8; 139.d
Giants—4.a; 35 passins; 36.a; 57
ú 145.i; x 52.b
Gilgamesh, 4.2; 41.3; 90.4; HSa
~22.3; ~24.2; 132.1; 142.3
Glauce—owl, gI.c,e; 156 passim; 164
Glaucia—grey-green, 137.,,t,$
Glaucippe—grey mare, ~58.o
Glaucus—grey-green son of Anthedon, 90.j, 7
son of Hippolochus, 162.n; 16
~64.j; 168.b son of Minos, so.f,/; 90 passi~ ;oI.k,t; 162.q nephew of Sarpedon, ~62.9
sea-god, 170.t son of Sisyphus, 42.g; 67.a; 7~ P~
Fenja, 154.1
Finn mac Cool, 18.7
Fionn, 73.9
Flora,
Fodhla, 24.3
Fortune, 32.1
Furies—see Erinnye~
Gabriel, 31.3
Galahad, 95.5
sire; 75.a,5; 90.7; lOI.1; 155.i
162.9
Glenus—wonder, 142./ Goat-Pan—see Pan
Gode, Goda, ~8.1; 89.3; 160. lo
Godiva, Lady, 89.$
Gog, 131.7
Golgos—?gorgos, grim, 18.k
Gordius—? grudios, muttering, grunting, 83 passim
Gorge—grim, 142.a
Galanthis, Galanthias, Galen—weasel,
x ~ 8.g,h,5
Galata—Gaul, or Galatian, 132.j
Galatea—milk white, 65 passim
Ganymedes—from ganuesthal and medea, rejoicing in virility, 29 passim; 40.c; 81./; 137.c; 152.a; 164.7 son of Tros, 158.g
Gara, 1.5
Garamas—people of the Goddess Car,
3.c,3; 90.b
Garanus—crane, 132.n.1
Gasterocheires—bellies with hands,
23.1; 73-b.3
Geilissa—smiler, I x 3.a,J,4
Gorgons—grim ones, 9.b,5; 33 pas$ia
59.d; 50.3; 73-f,h,5,9; 81.9;
132.f, 3; ~40.b,~
Gorgophone—Gorgon-death, 73.
7~ passim
Gorgopis—grim-faced, 70.7
Gortys—?grotys, of the cavern, orfro~
Carten, Cretan word for ‘co
88,h.7
Graces, 90.i, 6; 114.j
Graeae—grey ones, 33 passim;
73.g,i,9
Gras—.1 grasos, smelling like a goa
~17.g
Gration—scratcher, 33.g
‘iNDlaX
Great Goddess, 20.2; 23.2; 2-9.$; 75.2;
145.4
Green Stripper, 56.2
Gronw, 91.1; II:~.!
Guneus—fertile land, 138.d; 169.n
Gwydion, l03.1; 160.5
Gwyn, 73.2
Cwythur, 73.2
G~gcs—gegenes, earth-born, 3.b,l
[4~dcs—sightless, 7.a,e,5; 13.a; 16.a;
17.3; 2-1.n; 24.c,i,j,k,3; 28.c; 30.a;
31 passim; 50f; 67.,g,2; 69.e; 73.g;
IoI.k; I03.c; 12-4.b; 134.d,e; 139.
b,c,l; 164.o; 170 passim
Haemon—skilful, or making bloody, l05.e; 106.m,7
Halesus—wanderer, x I ~.I
Halia—of the sea, 42.c,4
Haliartus—bread of the ~ea, 70./ thlirrhothius—roaring sea, 19.b,~;
25.4
~ t~Ii%cus—arrested,
i,~l>,.1—(non-Greek word now), 28.1
Han~aclryads—oak-nymphs, 2-I.j; 60.b
Harxn~nia—concord, 18.a,9; 2-4.a; 59
passim; 106.e; 107.a; 131.b
Harmotho~—sharp nail, ltog.e
Harpale—grasping, 161.,~
Harpalyce—ravening she-wolf, IIx.
?.5
Harpalycus—ravening wolf, 1!9.f
Harpits—snatchers, 33.g,5; l08f; 150.
./,2; ~70.7 }Iarpma—? falcon, I09.b
11athor, 68.4
Hawwa, ~45.5
Hebe—youth, or she who removes from sight, or Hittite: Hepa, earthmother, xg.2; 2-9.c; 12-3.2; 145.i,$,5 H›cabe—moving far off, 34.1; 50.6;
79-~; 158 passim; 159passim; 163.a;
164.k,~; 167 passim; i68 t’assbn;
~70.I
Hecaerge—working from afar, 110.e
Hecale, Hecalene—worn-down form
393
of Hecate Selene, the fir-shooting moon, i.e. Artemis, 98.b, 7
Hecate—one hundred, 16.a; 24.g,k,12;
28.h,4; 31 passim; 34.1; 35.e; 37.1;
38.7; 42.3; 50.6; 55.a,1; 76.1; 79.1;
89.2; ii6.c; 117.1; 118.h,3; 12,3.1;
124.4; 134.1; 152.c; i68.1; 170. t the Younger, 117.b
Hector—prop, or stay, 158.o, 8; 159.o;
162 passim; 163 passim; 164 passim
Hecuba—see Hecabe
Hegemone—mastery, 13.3
Heleius—warty, xxS.b
Helen—moon, or basket used for offerings to the Moon-goddess
Helen Dendritis—Helen of the trees, 88.10; ~05.4; 114.6
daughter of Leda, 31.c, 2; 32.b; 58.3;
62.a,b,c,3; 74.b,o; 79.2; l03 passim;
l04 passim; 112.›,e; 114 passim; 116.n; 159 passim; 160passim; 162
passim; 163.c,o; 164 passim; 166
passim; 167 passim; ~68 passim; 169
passim; 170. I
daughter of Paris, l13.e,k; 159.v
Helenus—of the moon, 158.o,p;
159.p; 162.b; 166 passim; 169.f
Helicaon—burning sun, 168.b,d
Helice—willow, 28..5; 44.b,1; 58,3
Helius—the Sun, 1.3; 16.e; 18.a; 24.g;
28.d; 35.b; 37.a; 40.a; 42 passim;
67.a; 70.e,l; 72.i; So.b; 88.e; 109.g;
111.e; 118.c; 127.a,I; 132.c,w; 148.
$,9,1~; 152.b,3; 154.e,4; 155.3;
160.n; 170.i,u,6
Hello—bright, 38.9,10; 43-~; 58.3;
62.3; 70 passim; 159.1
Hellcn—bright, 38.h,9; 43 passim
Hemera—day, 40.a,3; 164.i
Hemithea—half divine, 161.g,h
Henioche—she who holds the reins,
96.f
Hen Wen, 96.2
Hepa, 145.5
Hepatu, 82.4; ~45-$
Hephaestus—? hemeraphaestos, he who shines by day, 9.d; 12.c,2,$; 1Spas—
108.c; 109.m,q; 128.b; 132.1; 137.0;
143.f; 163./; 164.1 Hepit, 145.5
Hepta, 13.4
Hera—protectress, 7.a; 12 and 13
_pasdm; 14.›; 21.3; 23.a,b; 24.11; 27.
a,b,2,.s,lo; 35.b,d,e; 43./,4; 45.a; 51.f, 53-$; 58.3; 61.a; 64.2; 68.d,4;
70.b,d,g; 72.g; 74.6; 84.a; 85.b; 97.4;
I05.h,8; xIo.a,1; 113.4; 11S passire;
~19 passim; 122.b,e; 123.d; 124.a,g;
128.d; 129.b; 132.d,u; 133.a,c,f,4;
135.e; 137.0; 139.b,1,~; 140.d; 145.
g,i; 148.d,e,15; I 56.d,~,4; 159 passim; 161.k; 163.h
Argive, I 54.k
Eriboea, 37.3
Goat-eating, 140.d, 1
Hellotis, 58.3
Heracles—glory of Hera son of Alcmene, 24./; 3/.5; 35 passim; 39.d,I; 51.g; 53.6; 58.d; 60.4; 68.f; 69.c,$; 70.d; 7~.I; 75.3; 93.g;
95.g,h,2; xoo.a; I02.g,e; r03.d,e;
I04.j; I09.q; 11S passire; 119passim;
I 20 passim; 121 passim; 122 passim;
123 passim; 124passim; 125passim;
126 passim; 127 passim; 128 passim;
129 passim; I 30 pasism; 131 passim;
132passim; 133 passim; 134passim;
135 passim; 136 passim; 137 passim;
138passim; 139passim; leo passim;
141 passim; 142 passim; 143 passim;
144 passim; 145 passim; 146 passim;
148.i; r49.a,d; 151.4; 15~.j,3,4;
153.e; 154.e; 157.a; 161.k,1,6; 166.
c,I; 170.p,4,10
Avefret of Rls, 137.k
Bright-eyed, 134.h
Buphagus—ox-eater, x$
Celestial, 132.3
Cornopion—locust scarer, 14$.k the Dactyl, 53.b,1,4; 118.2; 119.3;
125.1; 131.9; 138./,4; 145.1 Horsebinder, 12i.
lpoctonus—grub-~
Melkarth—prote~
70.5; 96.$,6; 133.
Melon—of apples,
Nose-docker, 121.
Ogmius—of the
119.3; 125.1; 132.
Ophioctonus145.4
Saviour, 35.3; ~03.
Scythian, 132.6
Tyrian, or Phoenic
4; 133.11;
Victor, 137.k of the Wounded
Heraclids—sons of
135.3; 138.n; 146
Hercele,
Hermaphroditus, her
Hermes—cairn, or pi sire; 15.b,1;
25.d, 4; 26.b, 2; 31
62.b; 67.h; 73.9; 7
170.k
Egyptian (son of Z
Infernal,
Ram-bearer,
Hermione—pillar-qu
117.b,2; 159.d,s;
Herne, 3
Herophile—dear to H
Herophilus—dear to
Herse ~ sprinkled wi
‘48.1
Hesione—queen of
131.i; 137 passim;
~60, b,p; 165.d;
Hespera—evening,
Hespere—evening, 33
Hesperides—nymph
4.a,~; iz.b; 33 pa
~ l~assim; 142.d,h; 154.e; 159.$
evening, 33.d
—evening star, 33.d, 7; 133.2
7.a,8; 13.c; 20 passirn;
~7.k,5; 31.8
115.e
121.3
—suppliant, 158.1
~ 60.2
Hilaeira—shining, 74.c,is
Hiicus—see Oileus
Himera—longing, 164.i
Hi~nerus—longing, 125.c,$
Hi?palcimus, Hippalcmus, Hippalcus
—horse strength, 110.c; 148.i
Hippasus—horseman, 27.g,9; 110.c;
~44.a
Hippeus—horse-like, i20.b
Hippo—mare, 13 I.c, d
HippocoOn-horse stable, 74.b; l03.b;
~40 passim
~li?~~odameia—horse tamer, 73.d,o; i02.c,e,$; I03.a; l09 passim; 110
passim; 143.;~
l-fippodamus—horse tamer, I09.C
Hippolochus—born from a mare,
162.n,9; 163.c
Hippolyte—of the stampeding horses,
72.4; Ioo.c,ś; 131 passim; 138.c;
;64.a,b
Hippolytus—of the stampeding horses son of Theseus, 42.2; $o.1, 70.2; 71.1
90.b; 99.a; 100.h,~; lol passim;
[35.c; 169.k giant, 35.g-,/ }tippomcdon—lord of horses, l06.d
}tippomenes—horse might, 80./; 91.e
Hippono;3—horse wisdom, 72.ś
l-lipponous—horse wisdom, 158.o tti? potho~—impetuous mare, 110.c
~hppothous—impetuous stallion,
49.a,b,1,2; 141.f
Hipta, 145.$
Histotis—well-informed, 118.g.
Hodires—wayfarer, 142./ Holle, Frau, 18.1
Homadus—hubbub, 126.d
Hoples—weapon man, 95.a
Horus, 21.2,3,10; 41.3,4; 42.1; 73.4;
89.1; 118.6; 123.3; 126.1; 138.1
Hours, IIH.c
H’u Gadarn, 148.3
Hundred-handed Ones, 3.c; 6.b; 7.e,
5,7; 131.2
Hyacinthides—daughters of Hyacinthus, 91.$
Hyacinthus—hyacinth, 21.m,8; 85.a;
91.g,$; 125.c; 165.2
Hyades—rain-makers, or piglets, 27.2;
39.d,1; 41.6
Hybris—shamelessness, 26.b
Hydra—water creature, 34 passim;
60.h,4; 124 passim; 131.1; 133.4;
134.8; r45.c; 166.1
Hygieia—health, 50.i,2
Hylaeus—of the woods, So.f; 126.b
Hylas—of the woods, 14-5; 126.f;
137.e; 139.d; 143.a,~; 148.i; 150 passim
Hyllus, or Hylleios—? woodsman,
142./; 145 passim; 146 passim; 171.4
Hyperboreans—beyond-the-North,
Wind-men, 21.1z; 83.b
Hyperea—being overhead, 95-~
Hyperenor—overbearing, 58.g,.S
Hyperion—dweller on high, ~.d;
40.a; 41.2; 42.a,I; 154.4; 170 passim
Hyperippe—heavenly mare, 64.a
Hypermnestra—excessive wooing,
60.k,m,7
Hyperochus—excelling, l09.b
Hypseus—high one, 82.a
Hypsipyle—of the high gate, 67.1;
~06.g,3; 116.b; 149passim
Hypsipylon—of the high gate, 67.c, 2
Hyria—beehive, 123.i
Hyrieus—of the beekives, 41.f
Hyrmine—? murmur of the beehives,
138.b
Hyrtacus—(non-Greek word), 158.m
~ passim; 142.d,h; 154.e; r59.$
g, 33.d star, 33.d, 7; 133.2
,.a,8; 13.c; 20 passim;
: 27.k,5; 3 x. 8
—silent, 115.›
J r58.!
priestess, 160.2
Hilaeira—shining, 74.r,/~ ›li[cus—see Oileus
~li~ncra—longing, 164.1
/qi~:~›rus—longing, ~25.c,$ ~li?palcimus, Hippalcmus, Flippalcus
—horse strength, r ~o.c; r48.i kli?pasus—horseman, 27.ś,9; IIo.c;
144.a
Hi?peus—horse-like, 120.b
}1i;~po—mare, 13~.c,d
Hi[~poc06n—horse stable, 74.b; l03.b;
t40 passim
Hi?p~dameia—horse tamer, 73.d,o;
l02.c,e,3; l03.a; I09 passim; Iro passim; 143.2
Hipp(>damus—horse tamer, r09.c
Hippolochus—born from a mare,
t62.n,9; 16j.c
Hippolyte—of the stampeding horses,
72.4; ioo.c,g; 131 passim; 138.c;
~64.a,b
Hippolytus—of the stampeding horses son of Theseus, 42.2; so.f; 70.2; 71.1
90.b; 99.a; loo.h,~; IOI passim; ijS.c; 169.k giant, 35.g.4
Hippomedon—lord of horses, r06.d
Hippomenes—horse might, 80./; 9t.e
Hippono~—horse wisdom, 72.g
Hipponous—horse wisdom, r58.o
Hippoth oE—impetuous mare, 1 IO.C
Hippothous—impetuou~ stallion,
49.a,b,l,2; 141.f
Hipta, 145.5
Historls—well-informed, 118.,›
Hodires—wayfarer, 142./ Holle, Frau, r8.1
Homadus—hubbub, 126.d
Hoples—weapon man, 95.a
Horus, 21.2,3,10; 41.3,4; 42.1; 73-4;
89.2; lr8.6; r23.$; 126.1; 1.t8.1
Hours, ii8.c
Iaru Gadarn, 148.5
Hundred-handed Ones, 3.c; 6.b; 7.e,
5,7; 131.1
Hyacinthides—daughters of Hyacinthus, 91.3
Hyacinthus—hyacinth, ~I.m,8; 85.1;
91.,~,$; 125.c; 165.1
Hyades—rain-makers, or piglets, ~-7.2;
39.d,I; 41.6
Hybris—shamelessness, 26.b
Hydra—water creature, 34 passim;
60.h,4; 124 passim; 131.1; 133.4;
134.8; r45.c; 166.1
Hygieia—health, 50.i,e
Hylaeus—of the woods, 80.f; l26.b
Hylas—of the woods, 24.5; 126.f;
~37.e; 139.d; 143.a,1; 148.i; 150 passim
Hyllus, or Hylleios—? woodsman,
142.l; 145 passim; 146 passim;
17r.4
Hyperboreans—beyond-the-North,
Wind-men, 21.1~; 83.b
Hyperea—being overhead, 95.1
Hyperenor—overbearing, 58.ś,5
Hyperion—dweller on high,
40.a; 4L2; 42.a,I; 154.4; 170 passim
Hyperippe—heavenly mare, 64.a
Hypermnestra—excessive wooing,
60.k,m, 7
Hyperochus—excelling, I09.b
Hypseus—high one, 82.a
Hypsipyle—of the high gate, 67.1; i06.g,$; 116.b; 149passim
Hypsipylon—of the high gate, 67.c,~
Hyria—beehive, 123.i
Hyrieus—of the beehives, 4r.f
Hyrmine—? tourram of the beehives,
138.b
Hyrtacus—(non-Greek word), I$8.tn
Iahu—exalted dove ~.1
Ialebion—? ialemobion, hapless life,
~alysa—wailing woman, 42.4; 54.1;
60.2
Iambe—limping,
Iao, 2.2
Iapetus—hurrier, 4.b,~; 39.a,2; ~.1;
87.c
Iapys—see Iapetus
Iasion—healing native, a4,a; passim
~asius—healer, 24.a, 6; $3.b,l;
Iasus—healer, $7.a,1; 80.c,j
Icadius—eicadios, twentieth, 87.c,$
Iearius—iotarios, dedicated to the
Moon-goddess Car, or of the
Icarian Sea the Athenian, 79 passim; 82.f
King of Caria, father of Penelope, 74.b; ~59.b;
160.d; 170.1; 171.1
Icarus—(same meaning as Icarius), 29.2;
92 passim; ~09.4; 161.a,b
Idaea—of Mt Ida, or of a wooded mountain, ~$o./; x$8.a,g Idaeus—of Mt Ida, or of a wooded mountain, 158 passim; ~$9.v
Idas—of Mt Ida, 2~.k; 74 passim;
80.c,d,l; z03.b,$; 14~.f; 148.i; ~SLC
Idmon—knowing, 82.c, 1; 148.i;
c,2; 161.b ldomeneus—? idmoneus, knowing one,
~$7.a; ~59.a; ~60.n,6; 162.t; ~63.h;
169.f,/,$; ~7~.a Riona—queen of Ilium, ~88.1
111yrius—.1 ill-ouros, squinting wild bull, 59.e lll~unka, 36.$
flus—troop, or he who forces back
(Oileus), ~$.f; xoS.a; ~09.a; 168.2
brother of Erichthonius, 158 passim the Younger, x$8.1
Inachus—.1 making strong and sinewy,
~6.›; 56.a,d; $7.a,~; 58.a; 60.g
Indra, 7.6; 132.5
27.6; 51..S; 70 passim; 96.
]70.y
Io—moon, 7.b,3; 14.b, 4; 52.a, slm; 57.a; 68.4; 72.4; 90.3
Iobates—he who goes with t}
73.a; 75 passim
Iocaste—? io-cassitere, shinin 105 passim, ~70.o
Iodama—.1 iodamalis, heifer c
9.b,6
Iolaus—the people of the land-boulder, 9a./; c,g; ~24 passim; ~27.d;
~33.1t; 135.a; ~37.h; ~38.
~4a.f; ~43.g; 145.d,k; ~41
~55-i
(Protesilaus), ~62.c
Iole—? iolets land-flock,
~45.a,e,2; 146.d; 171.4
Ion—land-man, or native, 4
passim; 47.g
Ioxus—.1 ioxus, of battle din,
Iphianassa—mighty queen,
g,j,k;
Iphibo~—strength of oxen,:
Iphicles—famous might son of Amphitryon, 74.1; 104.1; ~zS passim; ~9 Pas
a; ~38.c,d
Argonaut, ~40.c; ~48-i
Iphiclus—famous might,
~62.c
Iphigeneia—mo~hering a strr
I04.e; 112.d,h,~; 113.a; I:
passim; ~7 passim; ~60.j; sire; 162.6
Iphimedeia—she who streng~
genitals, 37.a,~; ~70.o
Iphimedon—mighty ruler,
Iphinog—mighty iutellige
g,j, 4; 91.e; 92.a; 94.b; ~Io lphitus—shield strength,
~36.a; ~40.a; ~52.i; ~7~.h brother of Eurystheus,
Iris—rainbow, ~5.b; 24.g; 8~
i50.j; i60.a; 171.f
INDEX
Ires—rnasc, line form oflris, 171.f
Isander—impartial, 162.n,9
Ischepolis—strong city, ~ Io.e,f
Ischys—strength, 50 passim
Ishtar, I~.1; 24.11; 29.2; 51.1; 73.7;
~03.a; x~8.2
Isis-she who weeps, ~8.$; a~.2; 22.7;
4L$; 42.1; 56.b; 68.4; 73.4; 83.2;
89.2; 123.$; 134.4; ~38.1
Innerflus, R.—knowledgeable, ! 19.g;
147.a
Itonus—willow-man, 9.b,~/ Itylus—httle Itys, ioS.g ftys—willow, 46.a,c,d; 47.a luchar, 24.3; 132.5
Iucharba, 24.3; 132.5
Ixion—strong native, 50.2; 63
passim; 67.2; 70.a,I; I02.a,f,t,3;
I03-e
Iynx—wryneck, 56.a
Jacob, 39.8; 67.1; 73.2; 92.2
Janus, 34.3; 37.2
Japher, 39.2
Jason—healer, 58.5; 68.e; 80.c,g; 98.r;
~03.2; 129.1; 148 passim; 149passire; x 50 passim; 15 ~passim; x 52 passim; ~ 53passim; x 54 passim; x 5 5 passirn; I 56 passirn; I 57 passirn; i61.k fihovah, ~.s; 4.3; 9.4; 51.I; 73.7; 83.4;
84.2; 92.9; 14~.1
Jephtha, 161.2; 169.5
Jonah, I03.2; 137.2
169.5
!Jordanes—(Semitic word), river of ement, 136.a
133,i; 169.6
118.2
~iter, x.4; 158.$
Kali, 56.2
Karn-son of Car, 95.$
Ker, 1.5; 57.2
Keret, 159,2
397
Kilhwych, 148.4,5,6; ~52.$
Kingu, 46.2; 39.8
Krishna, 92.10
Kurnarbi, 6,6; 27.$
Laban, 67.l
Labdacus—? lampadon aces, help of torches, 105.a,1
Labicus—girdled, 90.g
Labryadae—men of the axe, 51.2
Lacedaemon—lake demon, 125.c,3
Lachesis—measurer, ~o passim; 42.c;
60.2
Lacinius-jagged, 132.t
Lacone—lady of the lake, ~25.$
Ladon—he who embraces, 33.b,f,~;
66.a; ~33 passim
Laelaps—hurricane, 89.f,g,h; ~8.b
Laertes—ant, 67.c; 148.i; ~60 l~assim;
~71 passirn
Lahamu, 7.$
Lahmu, 7.5
Laidley Worm, ~32.6
Laius—? I~ios, having cattle, 76.c; ~05
passim; iio.g,h
Lamia—gluttonous, or lecherous, 61
passim; 72.4; ~35.$
Lampado—torch, 132.c
Lampetia—brightness of the year, 42.b;
170.v
Lampon—beaming, 130.a
Lampus—torch, 130. I; 15g.!
Lamus—gulper, or glutton, 136.g;
170.h
Laoc06n—very perceptive, ~?~ssirn
Laodameia—tamer of people nurse of Oresres, 113.a wife of Protesilaus, 162.d,n,t,9
Laodice—justice of the people, 112.d;
~41.g; 158.o; i60.2; 168.d
Laomedon—ruler of the people, ~3.c;
29.1; 81.e; 131.11; 136.g; 137passirn; 14~-g; 149.f; ~52.d; 153.e; 158./ Laonome—law of the people, 138.d
Laotho~-rushing stone, ~58.8; ~62.rn;
168.1
398 INDEX
Lapiths—.1 lapicidae, flint chippers, ~02 Linda—binder with linen thread, 4 passim 54.1; 60.2 Lat, 14.a; 2~.12; 22.7; 62.2; 88.3 Linos—linen thread, 108.b Latinus—Latin, 132.p; ~70.k,w Linus—flax, or flaxen lyre-string Latona—queen Lat, ~4.2; 62.2; of Argos, ~47passim 88.3 son oflsmenius, 24.5; 119.g,3; 147.a Latromis—wanton, 27.i,8 son of Oeagrus, 147.b,4 Ixar, 73.2 Lityerses—(non-Greek word), 7.1; 24.5; Learchus—ruler of the people, 27.a,2; 136.e
70 passim; 162.9 Llew Llaw, 29.2; 91.1,4; ~12.l; i32.5; Leda—lady, 32.2; 62 passim; 74.b,j; 160.5; 164.3
~t3.a; 159.a; ~-70.a U?r,
Leiriope—lily face, 85.a,~ Lud, 73.6
Leontophonus—lion killer, 17L/ Lugh, 132.$ Leonymus—lion name, 164.m Lugos, i32.5 Leos—lion Lycaon—deluding wolf an Athenian, 97.g,h son of Pelasgus, 38 passim; son of Orpheus, 97.2 162.1,4; ~63.c Leprea—scabby, t13.7 brother ofPolydorus, 162.m,t Lepreus—scabby, 74.2; x 38.h,2 Lycastus—fellow citizen. of the wolves, Lethe, R.—forgetfulness, 14.b,4 88.h,5
Leto—~ stone, or lady, 14.a,2; 21 pas— Lychnus—lamp, 25.1 sire; 22.b; 32.2; 62.2; 77 passim; Lycomedes—wolf-cunning, 104.g; 88..3; 89.a 160.j,k; 166.h Leuce-white, or white poplar, 3 x.d,5; Lycotherses—summer wolf, 59.d 134.f Lyctaea—~ lycotheia, divine she-wol~ Leucippe—white mare, 27.g; 14~.h; 91.g
158./; 16~ passim Lycurgus—wolf work, 27.e.$; 50.f, Leucippides—white illlies, 74.c,p,3; 7L1; ~06.g; 141.a 103.b of Nemea, 149.e Leucippus—white stallion, 2LI, 6; Lycus—wolf, 76.a; 88.d; 94 passim; 74.b,c; 109.c 12~-.c; 131.e,h; ~35.e; ~5/.c; 159.q; Leucon—white, 70.a,i 169.k
Leucophanes—white appearance, Lynceus—sharp-eyed as a lynx, 60. 149.1 k,m,4,7; 74 passim; 80.c; to Leucothea—white goddess, 4:~.c, 4; 148.i
45.2; 70.h, 4,8; 88.9; 170.y,9 Lysianassa—queen who Leucus—white, i62.t; 169./ 133.k Libya—dripping rain, 56.d,z,$; 58.a,2; Lysidice—dispensing with 82.b,c; 154.e IIO.C
Lichas—sheer cliff, x x 7.d; 14$.b,d Lysippe—she who lets loose the horse~ Licynmius—.1 lichymnios, hymn at win— 72.g,j,k; I 3 I passim nowhag time, ~8.b; 140.a; ~44.a;
145.d; 146 passim
Ligys—shrill, ~32.k Macareus—happy, 43.h, 4 Lilim—children of Lilith, 55.1 Macaria—blessed, 120.3; 141.1; 142.1; Lilith—scritch—owl, 55.1 ~46.b
INDI~X
169.h
$o.i; ~63./~; 164.a; 165.f; i66.d,i
—tall, or far off’, 27.b,~;
~2.e; ~46.i; ~48.6; x$4 passim;
155.h
—searching for/a man, i69.3
., 2~.6; 26.1,2;
a7 passim; 28.d,e,f,z; 4~.1; 44.a;
153.4; 160.lO
—ghstening, 77 passim; ~68.
1.I; 170.O.1
III.l
147.b,4
17.et, c
~, 136.g
1.1; 136.e; ~47.1
~rophctcss, 77.a
~hetess, XOT.›,L 169.c
.s—? marathrius, of the fennel,
159.d
.1 tnarathton, fennel, 94.b;
I04.c; 156.b,4
1.1; 4.5; 7.5; 35-5; 71.1; 73.7;
92.3; I03.1,2; 237.1; 170.5
131.3; 151.3
~3~.$; ~62.10 high fruitfid mother of heaven, ~31.3; 151.5
—marble king, 109.4
marmaranex, marble king,
109.e,8
.1 maris, a liquid measure of three pints, 170 passim
131.c,d
21./e, 7; 74.a,e,$ 27.12; ~58.4
? from marnamal, bartlet,
aLe,f, 5; 83.g
148.i; 160.r
, 143.b; 162.t; 169.1
—cunning, 67.d; 92.m,8; 95
l~a$s/m; 97 passim; 98.a; 135.e; 148.6; ISapassitn; 153 laassim; 154
399
passim; 155 passim; 156 passlm; 157
passim; 160.a; i64.o
Medeius—cunning, ~48.1
alias Polyxemus, 156.e; x 57.a,b
Medon—ruler, l17.b; 160.q; 161.i;
163.h; 17Li
Medus—cunning, 97.c
Medusa—cunning, 9.a; 33.b,$,4; so.e;
73 passim; 75.3; 132.1,4; 134.c
Megaera—grudge, 6.a; 31.g; 115.2
Megamede—great cunning, 120.b
Megapenthes—great grief, 73.1/,s; 117.c; 159.d
Megara—oracular cave, 122 śassim;
I 3 5.a,e
Megareus—of the oracular cave, 91.e;
94.e; I IO,d,/ Megaras—cave, or cleft of rock,
38.e
Megera—passing lovdy, 122.a
Melaenis—black one, 18.4
Melampus—black foot, 40.b; 68f; 72
passim; 126.e; 248.i
Melaneus—black one, 14.a,1; 144.b
Melanion—black native
Atalanta’s husband, 80.k,l,~
son ofPhrixus, xsz.f
Melauippe—black mare, 43.c,~; xoo.1;
13 x.e,g; 164.a
M~lanippus—black stallion, 72.5;
96.c; 106.b,j, 4
Melauius—black, 135.a
Melantheus, or Melanthus, with black blossoms, or swarthy, 171.d,i
Melas—black, 144.a
Meleager—guinea fowl, 45.a; 74.a,i;
80 passim; 134.c; 141.d; ~42.a,1;
148.i; 152.i; 155.i; 16a.d
Melia—ash-tree, 57.a,I
Meliae—ash-nymphs, 6.4; 32.$; 86.2
Melibo~a—sweet cry, 77.b
Melicertes—melicretes, sweet power,
42.›; 67.1; 70passin~; 71.a,4; 90.7;
92.7; 96.d,3; l09.5; xxo.2; 122.2;
156.1,$
Melisseus—honey-man, 7-~
Melite—attention, 95.a; 146.1
400
Melkarth, 72.3; 92,7; 122.2; 156.2
Memnon—resolute, 9~.5; ~62.g, 2; 164
passim
Menedemus—withstanding the people, 127.d
Menelaus—might of the people, 3 x.a;
74.k; 93.c; x~i.f,j; x~zpassim; ~4
passim; 116.n,2; ~7.c,5; 146.6; ~$9
pa~sim; 160 passim; 161.d; ~62 passim; 163 passim; 165 passim; ~66 passim; ~ 67 passim; 168 passim; ~69
passim; ~71.a
Menestheus—divine strength, 99.e;
~04 passim; 131,11; ~59.a; ~60.o,3;
168.e; ~69.n
Menja, ~54.1
Menodice—right of might, 143.a
Menoeceus—strength of the house,
I05.i, 4; ~06.j; 121.a
Menoetes—defying fate, 132.d, 4;
134.d,~
Menoetius—defying fate, or ruined strength, 39.a,c,~l; 130.c; 134.d;
145,k; 160.m
Menos—moon, 52.1
Mentor—? menetos, patient, 146.c
MetJones—share of payment, ~60.n
Mermerus—care4aden, x 56.e,f
Merope—eloquent, or bee-eater,
4~.a,b; 67.a,h,j, 4; 92.a; ~oS.f
Merops—eloquent, or bee-eater, x oS.c;
x 58.m,n
Mestor—counsellor, 162.j
Metaneira—she who lives among maidens, 24.d,e,5
Metepontus—oversea, 43.e,g
Metharme—change, 65.a,1
Metiadusa—distressingly full of counsel, 94.b
Metion—deliberator, 94 passim
Metis—counsel, x.d; 4.a; 7.d; 9passim;
86.1
Metope—metopedon, headlong, or metopon, forefront, 66.a; ~54.a,t;
158.o
Mettus Curtius, 105.4
Michael, 4.3; 92.9
INDEX
Midas—mite, seed, z~.h; 83 passim
Midea—medeia, cunning, ~ ~ 8.b
Miletus—? milteias, painted with red ochre, 2~.i; 88.b,z,4
Mimes—mimicry, 35.e, 4
Minos—? meinos osia, the toOOh’S
creature son of Lycastus, 88.3
son of Zeus, 29.3; 30.1; 31.b; 58.c;
66.i, 4; 87.2; 88 passim; 89 śasiira;
90 passim; 9~ passim; 92 passim; 98
passim; ixo.d,h; 129.a; 136.e; 160.
n; 167.2; 169.6; 270.p
Minotaur—Minos bull, 88.e:f; 91.4;
98 passim; ~29.a
Minthe—mint, 3 x.d, 6
Minyas—moon-man, 27.g; 70.9; 148.
j, 8; x$4.t2
Mitre, 7.6; ~32.5
Mnemon—mindful, ~6~.h
Mnemosyne—memory, ~3.a
Mnesimache—mindful of battle,
x 27.f; 138.c
Moera—share, or fate, 98.8
moerae—see Fates
Molione—queen of the moly, or wardor, ~38.a,f, 6
Moliones—warriors, ~38 passim,
139.e,f
Molionides—sons of the warrior queen, 138.b
Moloch, 70.5; 77.1; 92.7; IIO.1;
170.3
Molorchus—tree-planter, 123.d,f,h
Molpadia—death song, xoo.e,f
Molpus—melody, 262.g
Molus—toil of war, 238.a; 160.n
Mopsus—.1 moschos, calf the Lapida, 5Lś,8; 73-i; 78.S; 89.a;
X07.i; ~3~.o,5; ~48.i; 249.h; 154.f,~
grandson of Teiresias, 254.6; 269
passim
Morning Star—see Phosphorus
Moses, 88.6; 99.1; l05.1
Mot, 73.2
Mother of the Gods~ ~3~.n,4;
158.e
M›xu$, g9, 2
Mummi, 36.1
Munippus—solitary stallion, 159.
‘g,4,5; ~68.d
Murdtus—single shield, 168.e
Musaeus—of the Muses, 134.a
Muses—mountam-goddesses, 13.a,4;
17.3; 21.f,o; 28.e,f; 37.c,1; 59.b;
75.b; 81.1; 82,t; 95.c; 105.e,z;
126.g; 132.0; 147.c; 154.d,$; 161.4;
164.1; 170.q
Mygdon—? amygdalon, almond, 131.e
Myles—mill, i25.c
Myndon—dumb, 136.f
Mynes—excuse, 162.j
Myrine—sea-goddess, 131 passim;
149.1; 151.3
Myrmex—ant, 66.g, ~; 81.9
Myrmidon—ant, 66.g
Myrtilus—myrtle, 71.b; l09 passim; iii.ś
Myrtle-nymphs, 82.c,d, 2
.Myrto, Myrtea, Myrtoessa—seagoddess, l09.1,6
Myscelus—? little mouse, 13a.t
Naiads—water-nymphs, 60.b; 82 passim; Ill,g
Narcaeus—benumbing, 110.b,I
Narcissus—benumbing, or narcotic,
21.8; 26.d; 85 passim
Naucrate—ship mistress, 92.d,$
Naupiadame—pursuer of ships, 127.a
Nauplius—navigator, 60.o; 93.c; 111:/; ii2.f.h; 141.c~ 148.i; 160.c.d; 162.t;
169 passim
Nausicaa—burner of ships, 170.2,1;
171.2,3,5
Nausinous—cunning sailor, 170.
Nausithcus—in the service of the seagoddess, 98.f,m
Nausithous—impetuous sailor son of Odysseus, 170.
King of Phaeacians, 146.i
Neaera—the younger, 141.a,b
Nebrophonus—death of a kid, 149.c
INDI~X 40l
Necessity, lO.C
Neis—water-nymph, 64.a ú
Neith, 8.1; 39.2; 61.1; 73.6; 114.4;
131.3; 133.10; 14.1.1; 154.5
Neleus—ruthless, 7.3; 67.j,$; 68.
d,e,f,$; 72.b; 77.b; 94.r; ~35.›; 138.
b,m; 139passim; 140.a; 148.11
Nemea, of the glade, 123.c
Nemesis—due enactment, or divine vengeance, 4.a; 7.3; 16.6; 32 passim; 62 passim
Neoptolemus—new war, 81.s,t; 117.b;
161.e; 164.j; 165.i; 166passim; 167
passim; 168 passim; 169 passim;
170.p; 171.j
Nephahon—sober, 131.e
Nephele-cloud, 63.d; 70passim; 126.b
Nephthys, 31.3; 42.1; 123.3; 138.1
Nereids—the wet ones, 4. b; 33 passim;
73.j; 81./,i; 98.j; 154.k; 164./ Nereis—wet one, 16.1; 33.2
Nereus—wet one, 33.a,g,~; 133.d,e,5;
141.f
Nergal, I.$
Nessus—.1 neossus, young bird or aaimal, 126.d; 142passim; 145 passim
Nestor—? neostoreus, newly speaking,
27.5; 67.j; 68f; 74.k; 80.c,g; 102.c;
135.c; 139 passim; 160 passim; 164.
e; 165.a; 166.i; 169passim
Ngame, 39.11
Niamh of the Golden Hair, 83.6
Nicippe—conquering mare, 24.b; 11.
o,c; 118.d
Nicostrate—victorious army, 131.o
Nicostratus—victorious army, 117.c;
159.d
Night, z.b,e; 4.a; lo.a; 33.7; 137.o
Nile, R.—133./* Ninib, 2.$
Niobe—snowy, 1.3; 76.c; 77 passim; l08.b,~,i,1,9; lZS.f
Nisus—brightness, or emigrant, 67.1;
91 passim; 91.1; 94.c,d,e; 95..5;
110.d son of Hyrtacus, 158.ra
40~,
Noah, 27.5; 38.3; 39.2; 123.1; 154.12
Nomia—grazer, 17.j
Nomius—guardian of the flocks, 82.d
Norax—? norops, with face too bright to look at, 132.d,$
Norns, Three, 6.4
North Wind—see Boreas
Nycteus—of the night, 76.a; x$4.a
Nyctimus—of the night, 38.b; ~oS.c
Nysa—lame, 27.b
Oceanus—of the swift queen, Ld;
2.a,1; 4.a; iI.b; 32.4; 132.a,c; 136.c;
170.8
Ocypete—swift wing, I$o.j
Odin, 6.4; 35-4; 150.j
Odysseus-angry, 67.c,z; 123.2; 132.p;
154.d, 11; 159 passim; 160 passim;
161 passim; 162passim; 163 passim;
164 passim; 165 passim; 166 passim;
167 passim; 168 passim; 169passim;
i70 passim; 171 passim
Oeagrus—oea-agrios, of the wild sorbapple, 28.a,1; ~47.b,4
Oeax—ship’s helm, I ~ I.f; z 12.h; ~ ~4.b;
Ii6.1; 117.a; ~62.t
Oebalides—.1 sons of the threshold,
84.1
Oebalus—? from oebalia, speckled sheepskin, or from oecobatos, threshold of the house, 67.4; 74.a,b
Oedipus—swell-foot, or perhaps child of the swelling wave, 67.1; ~o$
passim; i06.b,2; 114.1; ~63.p
Oeneis—vinous, 26.b,2
Oeneus—vinous, 79.a; 80 passim; i06.b; ii2.a; 138.c; 142 passim;
159.h; 169.k
Oeno—of wine, 160.u
Oenomaus—impetuous with wine,
53.7; 71.1; 109passim; ~7.5; ~43.2
Oenone—queen of wine, x 59 passim;
i60.w; 166.e
Oenope—wine face, 91.e
Oenopion—wine in plenty, 27.i, 8; 41
passim; 79.a; 88.h; 98.0,12; ~23.4
INDEX
Oeonus—sol{tary b{rd of omen, 140.a
Oetol{nus—doomed Linus, 147.a,1
Ogier le Danois, 103.1
Ogma Sun[ace, $2.4; 132.$,6
Oicles—noble bird, 137.h,j,m
Oileus, or Hileus—gracious (earlyforra of Ilus), 148.i; ~sx.f; 160.q
Oisin, 83.6
Olus—? olesypnos, destroyer of sleep,
136.c
OIwen, 148.4,$
Omphale—navel, ~08.a,9; 13~-j; 134.
6; ~35.d; 136passim; 137.a
Once—pear-tree, 74-6
Oncus—hook, ~6.f; 24.d; 138.g
Oneaea—serviceable, 87.a
Onn, 42.4
Opheltes—benefactor, or wound round by a serpent, I06.g,h,$; ~23.
f..5
Ophion—native snake, x.a,b,c,2; 2.1;
25..5; 48.1; 62.$
Opis—awe, 4~.d, 4; x~o.e
Orchomenus—strength of the battle rank, I x I.g
Orcus—boar, 123.2
Oreithyia—she who rages on the mountains, 25.2; 47.b,c; 48.a,b,l,$,
4; zoo passim; I03.4; 160.a
Oresres—mountaineer, 85.1; 112.
d,g,~; 113 passim; I~4 passim; I~$
passim; ~6 passim; 1~7 passim;
160.2; ~69 passim
Orestheus—dedicated to the Mountain-goddess, 38.h,7; ~14.k
Oreus—of the mountain, ~26.b
Orion—dweller on the mountain,
40.b; 4lpass~m; $o:/; 123.1,4; i32.1; ~43.a; ~70.p
Orneus—orneon, bird. 94 passim
Orms—bird, 128.d
Ornytion—bird-man, 46..5; 67.a;
8~.b
Orpheus—? ophruoeis, of the fiver bank, 26.2; 28 passim; 53.a; 82.i;
83.a; 97.h; ~03.1; 147.b,5,6; 148.i;
149.a; 150.a; 151.a; 153.4; 154.d,g
INDEX
Orsels—she who stirs up, 4.;.a
Orsiloche—inducing childbirth, x 16.d
Orthaea—upright, 92.g
Orthrus—early, 34passim; zos.e; 223.
b,i; 132.a,d,3,4
Osiris, 7.1; 28.3,7; 36.2; 38.2l; 42.3;
ú 42.i; 73.,/; 83.2,3; 116.b,6; lZ3.3; 226.1; 133.$; 234.2,4; 238.1
Othrias—? impulsive, z 58.m
Otionia—with the ear-flaps, 47.b,d, 2
Otrere-nimble, 232.b; 264.a
Otus—he who pushes back, 37passim
Oxylus—? oxylalus, quick to seize,
146.k
Pactolus, R.—? assuring destruction, i08.b
Paeonius—deliverer from evil, 53.b
Pagasus—he who holds fast, 52.b
Palaemon—wrestler, 70.h; 87.1; 122
passim; 148.i
Palamedes—ancient wisdom, 9.5;h; 39.8; 52.a,6; IzLf; zi2.f;
160 passim; 16~ passim; 162 passim;
167.f; 268.1
Pallantids—sons of Pallas, 99.3; I05.7
Pallas—maiden, or youth
Giant, 9passim, 35.e,3; 89.c, 4
son of Lycaon 99.a son of Pandion, 94.c,d; 95.e; 97.g;
99.a; 158.b half-brother of Theseus, 99.a
Titan, 8.$
daughter of Triton, 8 passim; 21.$;
158.i
Pammon-pammaen, full moon, x 58.o
Pan—pasture, 76.e,lo; 27.j, 4; 21.c,h,5;
22.d; 26 passim; 36.c; 56.a, 2; i08.h; zzI.C; 136.i,j; 160.10;
Pancratis—all strength, 37.2
Pandareus—he who flays all, z08 passim
Pandarus—he who flays all, 163.1
Pandion—[priest of the] All-Zeus festival, 46.a,b; 47,a; 94 passim;
403
Pandora—all-giving wife of Epimetheus, 4.3; 39.h,j, 8;
169.3
daughter of Erechtheus, 47.b,d,2
Pandorus—all-giving, 94 passim
Pandrosos—all-dewy, 25.d
Paaopeus—all-viewing, or full moon,
89.i; 98.n; 167.b
Panthous—all-impetuous, 258.m;
263.j
Papbus—foam, 65.a
Paria—ancient one, 89.a
Pariae—ancient ones, 90úg
Paris (or Alexander)—wallet, 105.$;
122.e; 132.1z; 158.o; 259 passim;
160 passim; 162 passim; 163 passim;
164 passim; 166 passim; 269.t
Parnasus—? frompal, no, scatterer, 38.f
Parthenia—maiden, z09.e
Parthenopaeus—son of a pierced maidenhead, 80./; z06.d; 142.d,f Parthenope—maiden face, 241.c
Pasht, 36.2
Pasipha~—she who shines for all, 26.2; zz.k; 51.h,$; 88 passim; 89.c,e, 4,5;
90 passim; 92.2; 92.d,g, t2; 98.c,p;
10Ld; 229.a; 267.1
Pasithea Cale—goddess beautiful to
~11, 13.3; xos.h
Passalus—gay, 136.c
Patroclus—glory of the father, z 59.a;
160 passim; 163 passim; 164 passim;
268.1
Pedasus—bounder, 262.l; 263.m
Pegasus—of the wells, 33.b,4; 67.4;
73.h; 75 passim
Pe’trithous—he who turns around,
78.b; 80.c; 95.1; zoo.b; ioz.c; z02
passim; I03 passim; I04.e,~; 223.3;
126.1; 132.1; 234.d; 259.s; 268.e
Pelagon—of the sea, 58f
Pelasgus—ancient, or seafarer, I.d,$;
38.a; 57.a,~; 77-t
Peleus—muddy, 26.b,1; 29.1; 66:f;
70.2; 80.c,g; 81 passim; 132.a;
237.h; 248.i; ~55.i; 159.e; 160passim; 169.f
404
Pelias—black and blue, 47.c; 68 passim;
69.a; 71.a; 82.a; ~38.m; 148passim;
~ 52.3; 155 passim
Pelopia, eia—muddy face, ~II passim
Pelops—muddy face, 42.2; 53-7; 71.b;
77.a,d; 95.b; ~ 08 passim; I 09 passim; iio passim; XlI.a; ~3.n; 1~7.f, 5;
x~8.a; ~31.h; 138.i,l,m,4; 143.2;
158.k; 166.h,~,2; 169.6
son of Agamemnon, I~2.h
Pelorus—monstrous serpent, 58.g,5
Pemon—misery, 96.b
Pemphredo—wasp, 33.c,5
Pemptus ~ fifth, t64.n,6
Peneius, R.—ofthethread, 21.k, 6; $2.a
Peneleos—baneful lion, 148.i; 160.x
Penelope—with a web over her face, or striped duck, 26.b,z; 159.b; 160 passim; 162.10; 17~ passim
Penthesileia—forcing men to mourn,
163.q; 164 passim
Pentheus—grief, ~7.f, 5,9; 59.c,d
Penthilus—assuager of grief, 8%›;
I~7.b,g
Perdix—partridge, 92.b,~,6
Peredur, ~42.$; ~48.5
Pereus—slave dealer, 141,a
Pergamus—citadel, 169.f
Periboea—surrounded by cattle, 8 ~.e;
98.i,k; 10s.c,d,j; i~o.e; 137.i; 160.p
(Curisf~a), 167.1
Periclymenus—very famous, 139.c,I;
148.i
Perieres—? surrounded by entrenchments, 47 passim, 144.b
Perigune—much cornland, 96.c, 2,4
Perilaus—surrounded by his people,
114.m
Perimede-very curming, I~$.b; 148.b
Perimedes—very cunning, 134.i; x 46.c
Periopis—with much wealth, 160.m
Periphetes—notorious, 96.a,~; 163.h
Pero—leather bag, 66.a,1; ?z Ioassim;
170.o
Perse—destruction, 170.i
Petsels—destroyer, 88.e, 6
Persephatta—she who tells ofdestruc—
INDBX
tion, or destructive dove, 14.2
Persephone—bringer of destruction,
13.a; 14.5,4; i6.f ;IS.h,i,j; 24.c,k,l,
2; 27.a,k,~o,~; 30.a; 31 passim; 5~.
7; 67.h; 69.d,3; 85.1; 94-f; xoI.j;
l03.C,d,$; xoS.c; 12~.3; 124.b,4;
134.d; 149.d; ~70.I,6
Perses—destroyer, x 57.b
Perseus—destroyer, 9.a; 27.j, 5; 33.b;
39.d; 73 passim; ~II.a; ~8.a,d,e,~,
5; 137.g
Peteos—? peteenos, leathered, ~04.d
Phaea—shining one, 96.2,5
Phaeax—bright arrival, 98:f,m
Phaedra—bright one, 70.2; 90.a,b,t; xoo.h,z; Ioi passim; I03.a; 164.a;
170.o
Phaeo—chin, 27.2
Phaestus—made to shine, ~45.k
Phaesyle—? filtered light, 27.1
Pha~thon—shining son of Eos, 89.d,9
son of HeHus, z.b; ~8.5; 29.1; 4~.
d, 2,$; 71.1; 75-3; 89.9
Phaethon (bull)—shining, ~7.c
Phaethusa—bright being, ~09.f
Phaetusa—bright being, 42.b
Phalanthus—bald, 87.c, 2
Phalas—shining helmet-ridge, t64
passim
Phalerus—patched, or streaked with white, ~9.f; 131.1~; 148.i
Phanes—revealer, z.b,2; 123.t
Phanus—torch, 148.i
Pharez, 73-2; 159.4
Phegeus—esculent oak, 107.e,f,g
Pheidippus—sparing his horses, 169.n
Phemius—famous, 171.i
Phereboea—she who brings catfie,
98.i,k
Phereclus-bringing glory, 98.f; ~ 59.q
Pheres—bearer, 148.fi, 156.e,f
Phialo—bow1, 14~.h,4
Plfilaeus—? philaemos, bloo&hirsty,
165.1
Ph’fiammon—lover of the racecourse,
67.b
INDEX
Philemon—friendly slinger, 41.5
Philoctetes—love of possessions, 92.1 o;
~45 passim; 159.a; 166 passim;
169,m,n
Philoetius—happy doom, 171.i
Philolaus—beloved of the people,
131.e
Philomela—sweet melody, 46 passim;
47.a; 94.1; 95.a
Philoxnele—sweet melody, 160.m
Philomeleides—dear to the applenymphs, 161.f,,$
Philono~—kindly mind, 75.e
Philyra—lime-tree, 151.g,5
Phimachus—muzzler of pain, ~66.b phineis—sea-eagle, 87.c,z
Phineus—.1 phmeus, sea-eagle, 48.c;
58.a,d; 150 passim; I 51.a,f; I 53.a;
158.g
Phlegyas—fiery, 50.a,d; 63.a
Phiogius—fiery, Isx.d
Phobus—fear, 18.a; xoo.d
Phocus—seal, 46.5; 76.b,c; 81 passim;
165,k
Phoebe—bright moon, 1.d; 14.a,z;
51.b; 74.c,p
Phoenissa—bloody one, 58.2
Phoenix—palm-tree, or blood-red,
xS.h; 58.a,d, 2; 88.b,z; 105.6
son of Amyntor, 160,/,n,5; 163.f; 166.h; 169.f
Phoenodamas—restrainer of slaughter,
~ 37.b,g,$
Pholus-read, ig6passim; 138.1
Phorbas—fearful, 146.h; 148.i; 170.t
Phorcids—sow’s children, 33 passim
Phorcis—sow, 24.7; 33.5
Phorcys—boar, 16.b: 33 passim; 73.t;
123.2; 133.b; 170.q,t,z,~,7,9
Phormio—seaman’s plaited cloak,
74.m
Phoroneus—bringer of a price, or fearinus, of the Spring, 27.12; 28.1;
42.3; 50.1; 52.a,1,4; 57passim; 64.c;
77.1; 118.5; 134.1
Phosphorus—Morning Star, 40.b,a;
45.a
405
Phrasius—speaker, 133./e Phrixus—bristling, or stiff with horror,
70 passim; 148 passim; 151.f; Isa.b,
3; 153.3; 155.2; 157.d
Phrontis—care, x 51.f
Phthia—waning, el.i; 160.!
Phylacus—guardian, 72 passim
Phylas—guard, 143.b
Phyleus—tribal chief, 127 passim;
138.g; 142.e
Phylius—leafy, 82.4; 123.1,1
Phyllis—leafy the Bisaltian, 169 passim the Thracian, 86 śassim; 169.j
Phylonome—tribal pasture, 70. 2;
161.g
Physcoa—fat paunch, xio.b
Phytalids—the growers, 98.x.8
Phytalus—orchard-keeper, 24.m,13;
97.a
Picus—woodpecker, 56.2
Pielus—plump, 169.f
Pieris-juicy, 159.d
Pimplea—she who fills, 136.e
Priam, I 59.4
Pitrhea—pine-goddess, 95.1
Pitthem—pine-god, 95 passint, I01.a;
IIO.C
Pityocamptes—pine-bender, 96.b,2,6
Pitys—f~r, 26.e,z
Pleiades—sailLug ones, or flock of doves, 39.d; 41.e, 6; 45.3,4; 67.j,5;
III.1
Pleione—sailing queen, 41.e; 45.4
Pleisthenes—strength in sailing, or greatest strergth, 93.c; IIO.C; III.
fg; 159.d,s; 163,a
Plexippus—braided horse-hair, 80.h
Pluto—wealth alias Hades, 24.5; 3~.g mother of Tantalus, IoS.a
Plutus—wealth, 24.a,5,6; 142.d; 143.1
Podaleirius—without lilies where he treads, i.e. discouraging death,
50.i; 165..f, 166.d; 169.c,d
Podarces—bear-foot, 137.k; 153.e;
~58.1
406
Podarge—bright foot, 81.rn
Podargus—bright foot, 130.a,~
Podes—? podiaios, only a foot high,
i62.1
Poeas—grazier, 92.10; 145.f, 2; 148.i;
154.h; 166.c
Poene—punishment, 147.a,$
Polites—citizen, ~58.o; 168.a
Poltys—porridge, 131.i
Polybus—many oxen, xos.b,c,d,j
Polybutes—rich in oxen, 35.f
Polycaon—much burning, 74.a
Polycaste—.1poIycassiter~, much tin, 92 passirn
Polydectes—much welcoming, 73.
c,d,e,o,$
Polydeuces—much sweet wh~e, 62.
c,~; 74 passirn; 80.c; 84.1; 103.a,$;
148.i; 150 passirn; 155.i
Polydora—many gifts, 74.a; 162.d
Polydorus—many gifts son of Hecabe, 158.0; 168.1
son ofLaothoE, 162.rn; 168 passim
Polyeidus—shape-shifter, 75.b; 90passirn; 141.h
Polygonus—with many children, x 3 x.i
Polymede—many-wiled, 148.b
Polymela—many songs, 81.f.g
Polymele—many songs,/48.b; ~55.a; ~60.rn
Polymnestor—mindful of many things, ~68.l, rn,n
Polyneices—much strife, 69.1; 74.i;
IoS.k; 106 passirn; 107.d; 160.
Polypemon—much misery, 96.b,k
Polypheides—exceedingly thrifty,
112.a
Polypheme—famous, 148.b
PolyFhemus—famous
Argonaut, 148.i; 150passim
Cyclops, 170 passim
Polyphontes—murderer of many,
~os.d
Polypoetes—maker of many things,
17Lk
Polyporthis—sacker of many cities,
171.k,~
INDEX
Polyxena—many guests, 69.2; ~$8.o;—~
Id3.a,o; 164.k,$; i68pas$irn
Polyxenus—many guests, 97.f
Polyxo—much itching, 88.10; 114.0;
149.b
Porces—? phorces, fate, 167.i
Porphyrion—dark-blue moon-man,
35.a,3
Porthaon—plunderer, 170.q
Portheus—sacker, 167.rn
Poseidon—potidan, he who gives to drink from the wooded mountain,
7passlrn; 9.c; 13.c; 16passirn; xS.d;
19.2; 25.b,l; 27.9; 33.b,4; 39.b,7;
43-i; 47.d,e,$; 49.a,b; 54.a; 56.b;
60.g; 66.i; 68.c,~; 70./; 73.h,j; 75.d; 78.a; 88.b,e,f; 90.7; 95.b,d,f; 97.1;
98.i; 99.f; Iox.J’; 104.k,2; 108.i;
1g7.2; 133.g; 137.a; 139.b,e,~; 150.
i; 158.1; 162.f; 163.h; 164./; 167. h,i,4; 168.f; ~69.1,~; 170 passim;
171.k
Erechtheus, 474
Post-vorta, 154.$
Potidan, 127.1
Potniae—powerful ones, 7L~
Prarnanthu, 39.8
Prax—doer, 164.p
Praxithea—active goddess, 47.b; 97.h,~
Presbon—right of inheritance, 70.rn
Priam—redeemed, 112.e; 131.d,~s;
137.k,I; 141.g; 153.e; 158 passim;
x 59 passirn; 160 passirn; 161 passim;
162 passirn; 163 passirn; ~64 passim;
166 passim; 167 passim; 168 passim
Priapus—pruner of the pear-tree, x 5 J;
i8.e,k,~; zo.b,~
Priolas—.1 from priein, to grate out, and olola, I am ruined, 13Lh
Procleia—challenger, x 6~.f,g
Procles—challenger, ~46.k
Procne—progonE, the elder, 46passim,
47.a; 94.1; 95.a
Procnis—progonE, the elder, 47.b
Procris—preference wife of Cephalus, 89passim; 170.o
Thespiad, xzo.b
Procrustes—stretcher-out, 96.k, 6
Proetus—first man, 69.I; 72 passim; 73
passim; 75.a,e; 81.8; 93.1; xIS.g;
126.e; 138.6
Promachus—champion, 132.r; I$5.a
Prometheus-forethought, or swastika,
4.b,c,3; 83.c; 39 passim; 57.a; 92.9;
126.c; 133 passim; I 5v..g
Pronomus—forager, 145.i
Proserpina—fearful one, 24.2
Prosymne—addressed with hymns,
124.b,4
Prote—first, 42.d
Protefilaus—first to rush into battle,
74.a; i62 passim; 163.i; 169.n
Proteus—first man, 27.b,7; 33.2; 82
passim; 90.7; I~2.o; 131.i, 6; 133.1;
159.u,v; 169.a,?
Protogenus Pha~thon—first-born sh’mer, 2.b,2
Protogonia—first-born, 47.b,d, 2
Pryderi, 27.9
Prylis—dance in armour, 167.a
Psamathe—sandy shore, 81.a,p,1;
~47.a,1
Psophis—uproar, ~3.2r
Psylla—flea, 109.d
Pteleon—elm grove, or boar-like,
89.c,e,j,.s
Pterelas—launcher of feathers, 89
passim
Pterelaus—feathered riddance, 89.i, 7;
91.1; 118.a,›; 119.C
Pwyll, 27.9
Pygmalion—shaggy fist, 65 passim
Pylades—? pylades, gate of Hades, I ~ 3
passim; x I 4 passim; 116 passim ; 117
passim
Pylaemenes—strength of the pass,
i68.b
Pylas—gate, 94.c
Pylenor—on the threshold of manhood, i26.e
Pylia—of the gate, 94.c
Pylius, or Pelius-of the gate, 104.e;
134.a; 166.b
Pylon—gate, 94.c
407
Pyraechmus—point of flame, ~22.b,2;
163.i
Pyrene—fiery reins, 132.j; 133.d
Pyrrha—fiery red, 38 passim; (see also
Cercysera)
Pyrrhus (later Neoptolemus)—fiery red, 160.j
Python—serpent, 14.a, 2; 21.a,b,z,$,12;
32.a; 36.1; 51.b; 58.5; 96.6
Pyttius—? inquirer, 138.a
Queen of the May, 26.4
Queens, i38.o,4
Q’re, x.5; 57.2; 82.6; 95-$
Ra, 41..5; 42.4; xi7.1
Rahab, 33.2
Rama, 135.1
Rarus—abortive child, or womb, 24.
m,8
Recaranus—see Trigaranus, i32.n
Remus, 68.$; 80.2
Rhacius—ragged, 107.i
Rhadamanthys—? rhabdomantis, he who div’mes with a wand, 31.6;
58.c; 66.i,4; 88 śassim; 119.g;
146.f
Rhaecus—breaker, 80.f
Rhea—earth, x.d; 2.b,2; 7passim; 12.a; ú
13.a,z; 16.f; 24.k; 27.a,e, 7,12; 30.
a.$; 39.8; 47.2; 53.a,c,g; 54.a; 86.2;
91.3; I08.a,h,7; 149.h,3,4; ~51.g;
164.6; ~69.j,3
Rhea Silvia, 68.3
Rhene—ewe, 160.q
Rhesus—breaker, 163.g
Rhexenor—manly deeds, 95.a
Rhiannon, 27.9; 154.3
Rhode—rhodea, rosy, 16.b,~; 42.c,d
Rhodus—rose, xS.d
Rhoeo—pomegranate, 160.t,7
Rigantona—great queen, 27.9
Rimmon, 27.10
Robin Hood, 119.4; 169..10
Romulus, 21.15; 68.3; So.a; 105.1,5
408
Sabazius—breaker in pieces, 7-~;
27.3, 7,9
Sagaris, R.—single-edged sword, ! 36-f
Salamis—~ eastern, 81.d
Salmoneus—beloved of the Goddess
Salma, 64.c; 67.e,i,$; 68 passim
Samas—z.3
Samson, 82.4; 83.3; 91.Lg XXO.2; ~45.
4; ~54.i; 164.$
Sangarius, R.—fit for canoes, 158.o
Sarah, 169.6
Saranyu, 16.6
Sarpedon—rejoicing in a wooden ark uncle of Glaucus, 162.9
brother of Minos, 58.c; 88 passim;
~ 94.f, 131.I
son of Zeus, ~62.n,9; 163.1,j; 164.h
Saturn, 7.1
Satyraea—of the satyrs, 87.g
Saul, 169.5
Saurus—lizard, 125.b
Scamander, R.—crooked man, 68.e;
137.n,3; 163./ son of Deimachus, 137.n,t; 158.
a,g,l,6,9
Scarphe—black hellebore, 148.b
Schoeneus—of the rush basket, 80./,4 Schoenus—of the rush basket, zzi.p
Sciron—of the parasol, 23.1; 70.h,7;
81.a; 94.e; 96 passirn; xxo.c
Scorpion-men, 41.3
Scotia—dark one, 28.4
Scylla—she who rends daughter of Nisus, 91 passim; 92.4;
168.1
daughter of Phorcys, 16.b, 2; 61.a;
90.7; 148.1,9; 154.11; 170.t,1,9
Scyrius—stony, 94.c
Scythes—Aeolic for scyphes, goblet,
119.$; I$2.v
Seasons, Ix.a; I~.a, 4; 13.a,e
Selene-moon, ~.$; 14.5; 26.e,4; 35.b;
42.a; 62.3; 64.a,b; 67.6; 74.3; 123
passim
Semele—moon, 14.c,5; ~7.k, 2,6,11;
28.4; x:24.b,4; 134.g, 4
Set, 18.3; 2i.1; 36.1; 41.1/; 42.1; 73.4; INDEX
83.1; 89.2; ~23.$; 133.8; 138.1
Sheol, 24.11
Shiva, 135.1
S/caius—silent, 135.e Sicyon—cucumber, 94.b
Sidero—starry, 68.b,d, 2,4
Silenus—moon-man, 17.1,4; 27.1
35.h; 83 passim; 126.b,$
Si]lus-jeerer, 136.1
Simoeis—snubnosed, 158.g
Sin, 1.3
Si~s—robber, 96 passim; 97.a
~mon—plunderer the Greek spy, 167 passim son of Sisyphm, 67.a
Sinope—moon-face, 151.d
Sipyl~, ~oS.g; 131.o
Sirens—those who bind with a cord,, those who wither, 126.d,3; t2a.
148.1,9; 154.d,3; 169.4; 170 l~,~ysi
~~~~
Aglaope—beautiful rice
Aglaophonos—beautiful voice
~ucosia—w~te being
Ligeia—shri~
Molpe—mu(le
Parthenope—maiden rice
Peisin08—persuading the mind
RZadne—improvemen~
Teles—peffe~
TheNepeia—sootNng words
The~iope—persuasive face
Sirius—Dog-star (see Orthrus), 3 ~.
34.3; 3%~; 82:~3; ~32.3
Sisyphus—? se-sophos, very wise, 4L
67 p~sim; 68.b,g; 70.h,9; 7r.b; 7
a,3; 96.d; 105.7; roB.a; ~55.i; 15
d; ~60.c; 170.p
Sita, ~35.1
Sleep, 4.a; lr8.c; ~37.0; t63.j
Smyrna—myrrh, 18.h,3, 6; 77. ~; 131..
160.g
Solemn Ones—(see Efnnyes), l05.i lr5p~sim; ~7.i
SoloSn—egg-shaped weight, ~oo.b,
Solyma, 75.4
Som, 118.1
INDRX
$ophax—? sophanax, wise king, 133.i
Sosipolis—saylout of the state, t 38.o,4
Spermo—of the seed, 160.u
Sphaerus—boxer, or ball, 95.d; t09.i
Sphinx—throttler, 34.a,3; 82.6; I05
passim; l06.1; 119.e; Izt.3; 123.t
Spites, 15.1; 39.j
Staphylus—bunch of grapes, a7.i, 8;
88.h; 148.i; ~60.t, 7
Sterope—stubborn face, or lightning.
t09.c; 170.q
Steropes—lightning, 3.b, 2; 22.d
Stheino—strong, 33.b,$
Stheneboea—strength of cattle, 7a,
g, 4; 73.a; 75.a
Sthenele—strong light, t60.nt
Sthenelus—strong forcer back son ofCapaneus, t60.r; t62.t; 167.t father of Eurystheus, six.b; Ira.a;
t~8.a,d of Paros, 131.e
Stheno—strong, 73.f.h
Stichius—naarshal, 235.e
Strophius—twisted head-band, ~13.
b,i,j; tt4.e the Second, lt7.b
Strymo—harsh, 158./ Strymon—harsh, 163.g
Stygian Nymphs, 73.g,9
Stymphalus—? priapic member, 66.h;
109.n,7; t28.d; t4~.c
Styx—hated, t3.a; 3~.4; 37.d
Susannab, 164.2
Sylea—plunderer, 96.b
Syleus—pkmderer, 136.e
Syrian Goddess, 62.a,$; 98.1
Syśmx—reed, 26.e
Talos—.1 sufferer bronze man, 23.1; 90.7
pupil of Daedalus, I a.c,3; 92 passim;
154passim; 161.7
Talthybius—tzalthybius, stormy life,
16~.d
Tammuz, or Thamus, t$.6,7;
26.5; 27.10; 91.4
409
Tanais, R.—long, 131.b
Tantalus—lurching, or most wretched,
77.c; l05.7; i08 passim; l09.a,1,7;
Ili.4; 125.3; 136.b; 158.6; 170.p son ofBroteas, 108./~ the Second, ling; l~2.c,h
(see Talos), 92.c,I
Taphius—of the tomb, lXO.C
Taras—troubler, 87.2
Taraxippus—horse-scarer, 71.b,3
Tartarus—(Cretan word) ? far west, 4.a;
15.a; 36.a; I03 passim; ~34 passim
Tauropolus—bull slayer, 27.i,8
Taurus-bull, 58.4; 88.7; 9~.7; 98.p,2;
99.f
Taygete ú—? tanygennetos, longchecked, 125.c,~,3
Tecmessa—? from tecmairesthai, she who ordains, or judges, 162.m,9;
165 passim
Tectamus—craftsman, 88.a,t
Tecton—carpenter, ! 59.q
Tegeates—roof-man, 88.h
Tegyrius—beehive coveter, 47.c,1
Teiresias—he who delights in signs,
25.g; 77.a; 85.a; 10s.h,i,j,5,8; 106.j;
I07.b,i; 119.e,2; 154.6; 170 passim;
171.3
Telamon—he who suffers, supports, or dares; also baldric, i.e. supporting strap, 66.e,i; 80.c,g; 81 passim;
108.4; 13t.a; 137 passim; ~58.r;
160.p; 165 passim; 168.6
Telchines—enchanted, or Tyrrhenians,
42.c; 54 passim; 60.2; t46.4
Telebus—from telboreal, ill-treater,
x~8.f
Telecleia—distant fame, ~ 58.o
Teledamus—far-tamer, tt2.h
Telegonus—last-born son of Odysseus, 170.k; 171 passim son of Proteus, $6.b; t31.i
Telemacbus—decisive battle, 160.f, 4;
t7t passim
Telephassa—far shiner, 58.a,e,a
Telephus—suckled by a doe, 141
passim; 160. w,z; 166.i; 168.d
410
Temenus-precinct, 12.a; 128.a111146.k
Tenes—strip, or tendon, 70.2; 161
passim
Terambus, 38.11
Tereus—watcher, 46 passim
Termerus—? termlos, destined end,
119-j
Terminus, 158.3
Terpsichore—rejoicing in the dance,
~70.q
Tesup, 42.I,4167.51 75.3; 93.11 170.3
Tethys—disposer, x,d; 2.a,I; I~.b,21
33.1; ~ 66.1
Teucer—teucter, artisan, 81.e; 137.11
158.91 159.a; 160./~; 164.m; 165 passim
Teumessian Vixen, 89.h,81 116.41
118.5
Teutamides—son ofhlm who repeats himself, 73.p
Teutamus—repeating himself, 164.d
Teutarus—continual practice, x 19.f,5
Teuthras—? of the cuttlefish, 141
passim
ThaLia—festive, 21.1,51 I05.5
Thallo—sprout’rag, 13-~
Thamyrls—thick-set, 21.m; 29.5; 1 Io.
h; 147.b
Thasius—the Thasian, 133.k
Thasus—? from thasso, idler, 58.a,d, 1
Thaumacus—wonder worker, 148.i
Thaumas—wonderful, 33.g,*
Thea—divine, 43.c
Theagenes—religiously born, 146.j
Theano—goddess, 43.e,f; 164./; 168 passim
Thebe—admirable, 66.b; 76.c
Theia—divine, I.d; 40.a; 4a.a; 88.b;
136.c
Theins—diviner, 18.h
Theiodamas—divine tamer, 143.a,b,~;
150.b
Theiomenes—divine strength, 143.a
Theisadie—? from theiazomenai, oracularly inspired, 159.s
Themis—order
Nymph, 132.0
INDEX
Titaness, I.d; iI.a; 13.a,21 16.b
38.d; 51.b; 8i.j; 95.c,l; roi.j; ~59.,
Themiste, oracular, 158.l
Themisto—oracular, 70, i,j,k,3
Theobule—divine counsel, ~09.1ś
Theoclymenus—famous as a god
136.b
Theogone—child of the gods, ~36.b
Theonog—divine intelligence, 16
passim
Theope—divine face, 97.h,~
Theophane—appearance of the god dess, 70.1
Thersander—encourager of men, Io~
a,d; i60.w,x
Thersites—son of courage, 16
passim
Theseus—he who lays down, ~
deposits, 49.b; 80.c,g; 88.fi, 90.b; 9
passim; 96passim; 97passim; 98 pa~
sire; 99 passim; ~oo passim; io passim; 10z passim; 103 passim; ~o passim; I05.71 I06.1,m; 113.31 ~I~
$; 129.b; 131.a,g, 4,~l; ~32.11 13,
a,d,2,7; 135.e; 146 passim
Thespius, divinely-sounding, i20pa:
sire; ~22.d; 14~.f
Thesprotus—first ordalner, 11 I.h,i
Thessalus—? dark prayer, 137.r son of Medea, I 56.e,f
Thestius—devotee of the Godde
Hestia, 74.b; 120.a,1; 14.8.i
Thestor—? from theiazein, inspire
161 passim
Thetis—disposer, Ix.1; 13.c,11 16.b,
a3.a,~; e7.e; ~9.11 33.a,e; 43.c; ~
passim; 98.j,11; I08.51 124.3,4; 15.
k,l~; x$7.a; 159.e; 160passim; ~6
h; 162.b; 163.b,1; 164passim; 165..
168.f; 169.7; 170.v
Thoas—impetuous, or nimble
King of Calydon, 167.c; 171.1
Giant, 35-g the Lemnian, ~7.i, 6; 88.h; 98.0,~
116 passim; 149.b companion of Theseus, ~oo.b; t06
the Younger, 149.c
INDEX
~homas the Rhymer, 170.2
Tho/3sa—impetuous bei~g, 158.1; 170.b
Thoth, 17.2; 36.2; 52.tS; 82.3; 128.4;
~33-3; 162.6
133.k
i, 17.g,$
—pestle, 93.c; I06.2; 110.
c,g,h; III passim; i~2.a,k; r17.a, 2;
118.a or Melanthus—of the bitter herb, 167.i
159.g; ~67.e
—raging queen, 27.k,2,11
Tiamat, 4.5; 7.5; 33.2; 35.5; 36.2; 73.7;
I03.2; 137.1; 170.5
24.1
honoured strength, IIo.
d,f
, man, 159.c
—strength of dignity,
146.j
a—? (non-Greek word), 133.i
—from the pool, 148.i; 149.g;
150.c; 15 I.c,2
146.k
—vengeful son of Oresres, 117.h,2
son of Thersander, 160.x avenger of men, 156.e
6.a;
3t.g; I07.i; 115.2
Titanesses—lords, 1.3,4; 4.a;
6.a; 7.d,e; 27.a,4; 30.a,b,l,3; 35.a;
39.a; 77.1; 98.4; 156.1
—partner of the queen of
1.l; 40.c,$; 158.1; 164passim
13 I.h,9
‘, 40-3
—.1 from tituscomai, attempter,
21.d,4; 58.1; 131.lo
—battle-enduring, x 14.o;
142.e; 143.i; 146.e,h; 160.s; ~69.n
—(non-Greek word), 83.g; i08.a,$,10; 136.b,I
queen, ~3L6
411
Toxeus—archer, 80.a,g; 135.b
Tragasus—lustful as a goat, 161.g
Trambelus—? lord of ships, 137./ Triballus—lounger, 136.c
Tricarenon—triple crane, ~ 32.4
Trigaranus—triple crane, 132.4
Triops—three-faced, 146.h,4
Triptolemus—thrice daring, 24passim;
56.d; ii6.6
Triton—tritaon, being in her third day,
8.1; 16.b,l; 154.g; 170.t
Tritone—third queen, 8.1
Troezen—worn-down form of trion hezomenon, [the city] of the three sitters, 95.b,6
Troilus—Trojan from Ilium, 158.0;
i61.1; 162 passim; 164 passim
Trophonius—increaser of sales, 51.
i,k,6; 84passim; 12i.f, 169.1
Tros—Trojan, 29.a,b,1; xS~.g; 164.7;
i68.d
Tubal Cain, xSX.$
Tyche—fortune, 3~ passim; 14a.d;
162.s
Tydeus—.1 thumper, I06passim; 160.r
Tylon, or Tylus—knot, or pha~us,
90.8
Tyndareus—pounder, so.f; 62.a,c; 74
passim; I03.b; 112.a,c,2; ~13.a,$; i14passim; 117.c; 140.c; 159passim;
i60. d; 169.g
Typhon—stupefying smoke,hot wind, or hurricane, 21.a; 33-e; 34 passim;
35.4; 36 passim; 48.3; 96.e; I05.e;
123.b; 124.a; 132.a; 133.b,1,11;
152.h; 170.t
Tyro—the Tyrian, 67.e; 68 passim;
148.a
Tyrrhenus—of the walled city, ~36.ś
Tyrsenus—of the walled city, x 36.g
Udaeus—of the earth, 58.g,$
Ullikummi, 6.6; 36.4
Ulysses, or Ulyxes—wounded in the thigh, 170 passim; 17~ passim
Ltnial, l~8.2
INDI~X
lJrana—queen of the mountains, of the winds, of summer, or of wild oxen, 3.1
Urania—heavenly, 147.b
Uranus—king of the mountains, 2.b,2;
3.a,I; 6.a, 1,6; 7.a; lr.b; 36.b; $4.a;
88.b
Urion—native who makes water, or native of the mountains,
41./,5 Varuna, 3.1; 7.6; r32.5
Velchanus—.1 from helcein, the king who drags [his foot], 92.1
Virbius—hierobios, holy life, ~01.1,1
Vivaswat, 16.6
Vixen-goddess, x ~ 6.4
Vulcan, 32.2; 92.1
West Wind, ~$.b; 21.m; 48.a; 8~.m
Wild Women, 14.5; 27.11
Winegrowers, 160.u,7
Xanthus—yellow, 75.5; 8~.m,4; 130.
a; ~32.r; 158.o,6
horse, 163.m
River, ~oS.b
Xenoclea—famous guest, ~35.c,d,$
Xisuthros, 38.4
Xuthus—sparrow, 43 passim; 44.a;
46.5; 74.6; loo.d
Yatpan, 41.4
Zacynthus—? (Cretan word), ~ $$.g,2;
~68.4
Zagreus—restored to life, 27.8; 28.1;
30 passim; 70.5; 90.4; 129.2; 140.1
Zarah, 73.2
Zelus—zeal, 8.3
Zetes—searcher, 48.c; ~48.1; 150passire; ~ 5 5.i
Zethus—seeker, 76.a,b,c; xoS.g
Zeus—bright sky, L3; 7passim; 9pas-sim; x~.a; 12 passim; i3 passim; ~4. a,c, 1,5; 16.a; 17.c,f; 20.a; 23.b;
24.c,g; 28.h; 29 passim; 30.a,b,3;
32.b,2; 36.b,e; 38.b,c, 1; 39.e,f,h,i;
41.f; 43-i; 45.a,2; 47.3; SO.g; 51.a,l;
53.a,5; 56.a; 58.b,c; 62.a; 63.c,2; 66
passim; 68.a,1; 70.2,6; 73.c; 77.c;
8~.j; 88.9; 89.h; 98.j; I02.a,3; 105.
h; xoS.c,e; 117.2; 118 passim; 1~9
passim; 125.c; 137.o; ~38.k; 145.
g,h,i; 148.10; 156.d, 4; 160.11; 163.
h; 170. x
Acraeus—of the summit, ~48.10
Actaeus—of the summit, 148.10
Agamemnon—very resolute, I~Z.
0..3
Ammon, 36.2; 73.j; 133.j; 137.b
Arcadian, 82.$
Atabyrius, 93.1
Avefret of Flies, ~38.i
Cean, 82.3
of the Courtyard, ~68.a
Cretan, 91.3; 108.7; ~51.2
Deliverer, 70.e
Dodonan, SEa
Gracious, 97.a
Green, 138.4
Hecaleius—95.b
Heliopolitan, r.4; 42.4
Immortal, 82.b
Labradian—of the axe, ~31.j, 6
Laphystian, 234.h; ~56.a; 157.d, 2
Leader of the Fates, lO.3
Lycaeus—wolfish, 38.a,g; 108.5;
128.3
Morius—distributor, 82.6
Picus—woodpecker, 56.d, 2
Preserver, 121.O
Reliever, 114.i
Sabazius—breaker in pieces, ~45.5
Saylout, 123.d,f
Solar, 2LIO; ~09.2
Strong, 95.e,5
Warlike, I09.d of the White Poplar, 138.h
Velchanos—i60.6
Zeuxippe—she who yokes horses,
46.3; 158.1