diaforos

vol i / myths 1 – 55

vol iii / myths 105 – 147

vol iv / myths 148 – 171

56 Io
57 Phoroneus
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 Salmoneus And Tyro
69 Alcestis
70 Athamas
71 The Mares Of Glaucus
72 Melampus
73 Perseus
74 The Rival Twins
75 Bellerophon
76 Antiope
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 Phyllis And Carya
87 Arion
88 Minos And His Brothers
89 The Loves Of Minos
90 The Children Of Pasiphae.
91 Scylla And Nisus
92 Daedalus And Talos
93 Catreus And Althaemenes
94 The Sons Of Pandion
95 The Birth Of Theseus
96 The Labours Of Theseus
97 Theseus And Medea
98 Theseus In Crete
99 The federalization Of Attica
100 Theseus And The Amazons
101 Phaedra And Hippolytus
102 Lapiths And Centaurs
103 Theseus in Tartarus
104 The Death Of Theseus

Ιώ – σελ 217
Φορωνεύς – σελ 221
Ευρώπη και Κάδμος – σελ 222
Κάδμος και Αρμονία – σελ 227
Βήλος και Δαναΐδες – σελ 229
Λάμια – σελ 236
Λήδα – σελ 237
Ιξίων – σελ 240
Ενδημίων – σελ 242
Πυγμαλίων και Γαλάτεια – σελ 244
Αιακός – σελ 245
Σίσυφος – σελ 250
Σαλμονεύς και Τυρώ – σελ 256
Άλκηστις – σελ 259
Αθάμας – σελ 262
Οι Φοράδες του Γλάυκου – σελ 269
Μελάμπους – σελ 272
Περσεύς – σελ 278
Οι Αντίζηλοι Δίδυμοι – σελ 289
Βελλερεφόντης – σελ 298
Αντιόπη – σελ 303
Νιόβη – σελ 306
Καινίς και Καινεύς – σελ 309
Ηριγόνη – σελ 311
Ο Καλυδώνιος Κάπρος – σελ 313
Τελαμών και Πηλεύς – σελ 320
Αρισταίος – σελ 330
Μίδας – 336
Κλέοβις και Βίτων – σελ 342
Νάρκισσος – σελ 344
Φυλλίς και Καρύα – σελ 347
Αρίων – σελ 348
Ο Μίνως και οι Αδελφοί του – σελ 351
Οι Έρωτες του Μίνωα – σελ 360
Τα Παιδιά της Πασιφάης – σελ 366
Σκύλλα και Νίσος – σελ 372
Ο Δαίδαλος και ο Τάλως – σελ 376
Κατρεύς και Αλθαιμένης – σελ 386
Οι Γιοί του Πανδίονα – σελ 388
Η Γέννηση του Θησέα – σελ 392
Οι Άθλοι του Θησέα – σελ 397
Θησεύς και Μήδεια – σελ 404
Ο Θησεύς στην Κρήτη – σελ 409
Ο Συνοικισμός της Αττικής – σελ 425
Θησεύς και Αμαζόνες – σελ 430
Φαίδρα και Ιππόλυτος – σελ 434
Λαπίθες και Κένταυροι – σελ 440
Ο Θησεύς στον Τάρταρο – σελ 443
Ο Θάνατος του Θησέα – σελ 447

p. 115
Io

IO, daughter of the River-god Inachus, was a priestess of Argive Hera. Zeus, over whom Iynx, daughter of Pan and Echo, had cast a spell, fell in love with Io, and when Hera charged him with infidelity and turned Iynx into a wryneck as a punishment, he lied: ‘I have never touched Io’. He then turned her into a white cow, which Hera claimed as hers and handed over for safe keeping to Argus Panoptes, ordering him: ‘Tether this beast secretly to an olive-tree at Nemea.’ But Zeus sent Hermes to fetch her back, and himself led the way to Nemea—or, some say, to Mycenae—dressed in woodpecker disguise. Hermes, though the cleverest of thieves, knew that he could not steal Io without being detected by one of Argus’s hundred eyes; he therefore charmed him asleep by playing the flute, crushed him with a boulder, cut off his head, and released Io. Hera, having placed Argus’s eyes in the tail of her peacock, as a constant reminder of his foul murder, set a gadfly to sting Io and chase her 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 to 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 languished 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 Telegonus, 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.

c. But some believe that Io bore Epaphus in an Euboean cave called Boösaule, 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.

d. Others have a quite different story to tell. They say that Inachus, a son of Iapetus, ruled over Argos, and founded the city of Iopolis—for Io 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 off Io, 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.




p. 117
Phoroneus

THE first man to found and people a city with 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.




















p. 118
Europe And Cadmus

AGENOR, Libya’s son by Poseidon and twin to Belus, left Egypt to settle in the Land of Canaan, where he married Telephassa, otherwise called Argiope, who bore him Cadmus, Phoenix, Cilix, Thasus and Phineus, and one daughter, Europe.

b. Zeus, falling in love with Europe, sent Hermes to drive Agenors cattle down to the seashore at Tyre, where she and her companions used to walk. He himself joined the herd, disguised as a snow-white bull with great dew-laps and small, gem-like horns, between which ran single black streak. Europe was struck by his beauty and, on finding him gentle as a lamb, mastered her fear and began to play with him putting flowers in his mouth and hanging garlands on his horns; in the end, she climbed upon his shoulders, and let him amble down with her to the edge of the sea. Suddenly he swam away, while she looked back in terror at the receding shore; one of her hands dung to his right horn, the other still held a flower-basket.

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 pine-tree. She bore him three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon.

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 Alphesiboea. Cilix went to the Land of the Hypachaeans, which took his name, Cilicia; 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.

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 Thera, 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 beast 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.

g. Cadmus, warning 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 that 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. No sooner had he offered Athene the sacrifice, than she appeared, praising him for what he had done, and ordering him to sow the serpent’s teeth in the soil. When he obeyed her, armed Sparti, or Sown Men, at once sprang up, clashing their weapons together. Cadmus tossed a stone among them and they began to brawl, each accusing the other of having thrown it, and fought so fiercely that, at last, only five survive Echion, Udaeus, Chthonius, Hyperenor, and Pelorus, who unanimously offered Cadmus their services. But Ares demanded vengeance for the death of the serpent, and Cadmus was sentenced by a divine court to become his bondman for a Great Year.




p. 120
Cadmus And Harmonia

WHEN Cadmus had served eight years in bondage to Ares, to expiate the murder of the Castallan serpent, Athene secured him the land of Boeotia. With the help of his Sown Men, he built the Theban polis, named ‘The Cadmea’ in his own honour and, after being initiated into the mysteries which Zeus had taught Iasion, married Harmonia, the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares; some say that Athene …brought… her to him when he visited Samothrace.

b. This was the first mortal wedding ever attended by the Olympians. Twelve golden thrones were set up for them in Cadmus’s palace, which stood on the site of the present Theban market place; and all brought gifts. Aphrodite presented Harmonia with the famous golden necklace made by Hephaestus—originally it had been Zeus’s love-gift to Cadmus’s sister Europe—which conferred irresistible beauty on its wearer. Athene gave her a golden robe, which conferred divine dignity on its wearer, also a set of flutes; and Hermes lyre. Cadmus’s own present to Harmonia was another rich robe. Electra, Iasion’s mother, taught her the rites of the Great Goddess, while Demeter assured her a prosperous barley harvest by lying with Iasion in a thrice-ploughed field during the celebrations. The Thebans still show the place where the Muses played the flute and sang on this occasion, and where Apollo performed on the lyre.

c. In his old age, to placate Ares, who had not yet wholly forgiven him for him for killing the serpent, Cadmus resigned the Theban throne in 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.

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 after her murder of Pentheus; but on hearing that her parents commanded the Enchelean forces, she murdered Lycotherses too, and gave the kingdom to Cadmus.

e. In their 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 of Buthoë. He was succeeded by Illyrius, the son of his old age.




p. 121
Belus And The Danaids

KING Belus, who ruled at Chemmis in the Egyptian Thebaid, was the son of Libya by Poseidon, and twin-brother of Agenor. His wife Anchinoë, daughter of Nilus, bore him the twins Aegyptus and Danaus, and a third son, Cepheus.

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 like. Danaus, sent to rule Libya, had fifty daughters, called the Danaids, also born of various mothers: 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 confirmed his fears that Aegyptus had it in his mind to kill all the Danaids, prepared to flee from Libya.

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 they 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; the cities of Lindus, Ialysus, and Cameirus are called after them.

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 doubtless have kept the throne, despite Danaus’s declaration 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 would take the throne by violence if he were opposed, and therefore persuaded Gelanor to resign it peacefully.

f. Danaus, convinced that the wolf had been Apollo in disguise, dedicated the famous shrine to Wolfish Apollo at Argos, and became so 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 invasion, the Thesmophoria are no longer performed in the Peloponnese, except by the Arcadians.

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 rivers 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 sleeping 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 father’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 of water jetted 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.

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.’

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 supplied the city with several of these, including four sacred ones, it was waterless at the time in question. Seeing that thirst would soon force him to capitulate, Danaus 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 couples—his choice being made in some cases because the bride and bridegroom had mothers of equal rank, or because their names were similar—thus Cleite, Sthenele, and Chrysippe married Cleitus, Sthenelus, and Chrysippus—but in most cases he drew lots from a helmet.

k. During the wedding-feast Danaus secretly doled out sharp pins which his daughters were to conceal in their hair; and at midnight each stabbed her husband through the heart. There was only one survivor—on Artemis’s advice, Hypermnestra saved the life of Lynceus, because he had spared her maidenhead; and helped him in his flight to the city 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 annual beacon-fires in commemoration of this pact. At dawn, Danaus learned of Hypermnestra’s disobedience, and she was tried for her life; but acquitted by the Argive judges. She therefore raised an image to Victorious Aphrodite in the shrine of Wolfish Apollo, and also dedicate a sanctuary to Persuasive Artemis.

l. The murdered men’s heads were buried at Lerna, and their bodies given full funeral honours below the walls of Argos; but, although Athene and Hermes purified the Danaids in the Lernaean Lake with Zeus’s permission, the Judges of the Dead have condemned them the endless task of carrying water in jars perforated like sieves.

m. Lynceus and Hypermnestra were reunited, and Danaus, deciding to marry off the other daughters as fast as he could before noon on the day of their purification, called for suitors. He proposed a marriage race starting from the street now called Apheta: the winner to have fast choice of a wife, and the others the next choices, in their order of finishing the race. Since he could not find enough men who would risk their lives by marrying murderesses, only a few ran; but when the wedding night passed without disaster to the new bridegrooms, more suitors appeared, and another race was run on the following day. A descendants of these marriages rank as Danaans; and the Argives still celebrate the race in their so-called Hymenaean Contest. Lynceus later killed Danaus, and reigned in his stead. He would willingly have killed his sisters-in-law at the same time, to avenge his murdered brothers, had the Argives permitted this.

n. Meanwhile, Aegyptus had come to Greece, but when he learned of his sons’ fate, fled to Aroe, where he died, and was buried at Patrae, in a sanctuary of Serapis.

o. 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 lighting false beacons.




p. 124
Lamia

BELUS had a beautiful daughter, Lamia, who ruled in Libya, and 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 nightmarish mask.

b. Later, she joined the company of the Empusae, lying with young men and sucking their blood while they slept.




p. 124
Leda

SOME say that when Zeus fell in love with Nemesis, she fled from him into the water and became a fish; he pursued her as a beaver, ploughing up the waves. She leaped ashore, and transformed herself into this wild beast or that, but could not shake Zeus off, because he borrowed the form of even fiercer and swifter beasts. At last she took to the air as a wild goose; he became a swan, and trod her triumphantly at Rhamnus in Attica. Nemesis shook her feathers resignedly, and carried to Sparta, where Leda, wife of King Tyndareus, presently found hyacinth-coloured egg lying in a marsh, which she brought home and hid in a chest: from it Helen of Troy was hatched. But some say that this egg dropped from the moon, like the egg that, in ancient times plunged into the river Euphrates and, being towed ashore by fish and hatched by doves, broke open to reveal the Syrian Goddess of Love.

b. Others say that Zeus, pretending to be a swan pursued by an eagle took refuge in Nemesis’s bosom, where he ravished her and that, in due process of time, she laid an egg, which Hermes threw between Leda’s thighs, as she sat on a stool with her legs apart. Thus Leda gave birth to Helen, and Zeus placed the images of Swan and Eagle in the Heavens to commemorate this ruse.

c. The most usual account, however, is that it was Leda herself with whom Zeus companied in the form of a swan beside the river Eurot: that she laid an egg from which were hatched Helen, Castor, and Polydeuces; and that she was consequently deified as the goddess Nemesis. Now, Leda’s husband Tyndareus 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 that Castor and Polydeuces were Tyndareus’s sons; some others again, that Castor and Clytaemnestra were children of Tyndareus, while Helen and Polydeuces were children of Zeus.











p. 125
Ixion

IXION, 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.
























p.
Endymion

missing part from original text






























p. 127
Pygmalion And Galatea

PYGMALION, 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. Paphus, Pygmalion’s successor, was the father of Cinyras, who founded the Cyprian city of Paphos and built a famous temple to Aphrodite there.






p. 127
Aeacus

THE River-god Asopus—whom some call the son of Oceanus and Tethys; some, of Poseidon and Pero; others, of Zeus and Eurynome—married Metope, daughter of the river Ladon, by whom he had two sons and either twelve or twenty daughters.

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, Asopus set out in search of her. At Corinth he learned that Zeus was once again the culprit, went vengefully in pursuit, and found him embracing Aegina in a wood. Zeus, who was unarmed, fled ignominiously through the thickets and, when out of sight, transformed himself into a rock until Asopus had gone by; whereupon he stole back to Olympus and from the safety of its ramparts pelted him with thunderbolts. Asopus still moves slowly from the wounds he then received, and lumps of burned coal are often fetched from his river bed.

c. Having thus disposed of Aegina’s father, Zeus conveyed secretly to the island then called Oenone, or Oenopia, where he laid with her in the form of an eagle, or of a flame, and cupids hovered over their couch, administering the gifts of love. In course of time Hera discovered that Aegina had borne Zeus a son named Aeacus, ant resolved to destroy every inhabitant of Oenone, where he was a king. She introduced a serpent into one of its streams, which hatched out thousands of eggs; so that swarms of serpents went wriggling over the fields into all the other streams and rivers. Thick darkness and a drowsy heat spread across the island, which Aeacus had renamed Aegina, and the pestilential South Wind blew for not 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. Appeals 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 alive.

e. One day, Aeacus’s prayers were answered with thunder and lightning. Encouraged 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 terrified, 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 ground from the sacred oak, and bringing up as men. When he awoke, he dismissed this as deceitful fantasy; 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 period.

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 display an ant-like thrift, patience, and tenacity. Later, these Myrmidons followed Peleus into exile from Aegina, and fought beside Achilles and Patroclus at Troy.

g. But some say that Achilles’s allies, the Myrmidons, were so named in honour of King Myrmidon, whose daughter Eurymedusa was seduced by Zeus in the form of an ant—which is why ants are sacred in Thessaly. And others tell of a nymph named Myrmex who, when her companion Athene invented the plough, boasted that she had made the discovery herself, and was turned into an ant as a punishment.

h. Aeacus, who married Endeis of Megara, was widely renowned for his piety, and held in such honour that men longed to feast their eyes upon him. All the noblest heroes of Sparta and Athens clamoured to fight under his command, though he had made Aegina the most difficult of the Aegean islands to approach, surrounding it with sunken rocks and dangerous reefs, as a protection against pirates. When al Greece was affected with a drought caused by Pelops’s murder of the Arcadian king Stymphalus or, some say, by the Athenians’ murder of Androgeus, the Delphic Oracle advised the Greeks: ‘Ask Aeacus to pray for your delivery!’ Thereupon every city sent a herald to Aeacus who ascended Mount Panhellenius, the highest peak in his island, robed as a priest of Zeus. There he sacrificed to the gods, and prayed for an end to the drought. His prayer was answered by a loud thunder clap, clouds obscured the sky, and furious showers of rain soaked the whole land of Greece. He then dedicated a sanctuary to Zeus on Panhellenius, and a cloud settling on the mountain summit has ever since been an unfailing portent of rain.

i. Apollo and Poseidon took Aeacus with them when they built the walls of Troy, knowing that unless a mortal joined in this work, the city would be impregnable and its inhabitants capable of defying the gods. Scarcely had they finished their task when three grey-eyed serpents tried to scale the walls. Two chose the part just completed by 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 Troy 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.

j. Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthys were the three of Zeus’s sons whom he would have most liked to spare the burden of old age. The Fates, however, would not permit this, and Zeus, by graciously accepting their ban, provided the other Olympians with a good example.

k. When Aeacus died, he became one of the three Judges in Tartarus, where he gives laws to the shades, and is even called upon to arbitrate quarrels that may arise between the gods. Some add that he keeps the keys of Tartarus, imposes a toll, and checks the ghosts brought down by Hermes against Atropos’s invoice.




p. 129
Sisyphus

SISYPHUS, son of Aeolus, married Atlas’s daughter Merope, the Pleiad, who bore him Glaucus, Ornytion, and Sinon, and owned a fine herd of cattle on the Isthmus of Corinth.

b. Near him lived Autolycus, son of Chione, whose twin-brother Philammon was begotten by Apollo, though Autolycus himself claimed Hermes as his father.

c. Now, Autolycus was a past master in theft, Hermes having given him the power of metamorphosing whatever beasts he stole, from horned to unhorned, or from black to white, and contrariwise. Thus although Sisyphus noticed that his own herds grew steadily smaller while those of Autolycus increased, he was unable at first to accuse him of theft; and therefore, one day, engraved the inside of all his cattle’s hooves with the monogram SS or, some say, with the words ‘Stolen by Autolycus’. That night Autolycus helped himself as usually and at dawn hoof-prints along the road provided Sisyphus with sufficient evidence to summon neighbours in witness of the theft. He visited Autolycus’s stable, recognized his stolen beasts by their marked hooves and, leaving his witnesses to remonstrate with the thief, hurried 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’.

d. Sisyphus founded 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 him as the worst knave on earth, granting only that he promoted Corinthian commerce and navigation.

e. When, on the death of Aeolus, Salmoneus usurped the Thessalian throne, Sisyphus, who was the rightful heir, consulted the Delphic Oracle and was told: ‘Sire children on your niece; they will 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 and produced the dead bodies, falsely accused Salmoneus of incest and murder; and had him expelled from Thessaly.

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 happened to Aegina but would not reveal anything unless Asopus 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 the Archer. Then Sisyphus told him all he knew.

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 Sisyphus 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 should have been left on the far side of the river Styx. ‘Let me return to the upper world,’ he pleaded, ‘arrange for my burial, and avenge neglect shown me. My presence here is most irregular. I will be back within three days.’ Persephone was deceived and granted his request, but as soon as Sisyphus found himself once again under the light of sun, he repudiated his promise to Persephone. Finally, Hermes called upon to fetch him back by force.

i. It may have been because he had injured Salmoneus, or because he had betrayed Zeus’s secret, or because he had always lived by robbery and often murdered unsuspecting travellers—some say that it Theseus who put an end to Sisyphus’s career, though this is not generally mentioned among Theseus’s Feats—at any rate, Sisyphus was given an exemplary punishment. The Judges of the Dead showed him a tall block of stone—identical in size with that into which Zeus had turned himself when fleeing from Asopus—and ordered him to roll it until brow of a hill and topple it down the farther slope. He has never succeeded in doing so. As soon as he has almost reached the summit, he is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounce the very bottom once more; where he wearily retrieves it and rolling begins all over again, though sweat bathes his limbs, and a cloud of rises above his head.

j. Merope, ashamed to find herself the only Pleiad with a husband in the Underworld—and a criminal too—deserted her six starry sisters from the night sky and has never been seen since. And as the whereabouts of Neleus’s tomb on the Corinthian Isthmus was a secret which Sisyphus refused to divulge even to Nestor, so the Corinthians are now equally reticent when asked for the whereabouts of Sisyphus’s own.




p. 132
Salmoneus And Tyro

SALMONEUS, 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. 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 unfortunate subjects, who were expected to mistake them for lightning. One fine day Zeus punished Salmoneus by hurling a real thunderbolt, which not only destroyed him, chariot and all, but burned down the entire city.

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 Alpheius; 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 told 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.

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 his brood-mare had kicked the elder in the face. The horse-herd’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 wooden 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.

e. Tyro later married her uncle Cretheus, founder of Iolcus, whom she bore Aeson, father of Jason the Argonaut; he also regarded Pelias and Neleus as his sons.

f. After Cretheus’s death, the twins came to blows: Pelias took the throne of Iolcus, exiled Neleus, and kept Aeson as a prisoner in his palace. Neleus led Cretheus’s grandsons Melampus and Bias with company of Achaeans, Phthiotians, and Aeolians to the land of Messene, where he drove the Lelegans out of Pylus, and raised to such a height of fame that he is now acclaimed as its founder. He married Chloris; but all their twelve children, except Nestor have been eventually killed by Heracles.




p. 133
Alcestis

ALCESTIS, 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, and asked: ‘Have I treated you with the respect due to your godhead? ‘You have indeed,’ Apollo assented, ‘and I have shown my gratitude by making all your ewes drop twins.’ ‘As a final favour, then,’ pleaded Admetus, ‘pray help me to win Alcestis, by enabling me to fulfill Pelias’s conditions.’ ‘I shall be pleased to do so,’ replied 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.

b. It is not known why Admetus omitted the customary sacrifice to Artemis before marrying Alcestis, but the goddess was quick enough to punish him. When, flushed with wine, anointed with essences, garlanded with flowers, he entered the bridal chamber that night, he recoiled in horror. No lovely naked bride awaited him on the marriage couch, but a tangled knot of hissing serpents. Admetus ran shouting for Apollo, who kindly intervened with Artemis on his behalf. The neglected sacrifice having been offered at once, all was well, Apollo even obtaining Artemis’s promise that, when the day of Admetus’ death came, he should be spared on condition that a member of his family died voluntarily for love of him.

c. This fatal day came sooner than Admetus expected. Hermes flied into the palace one morning and summoned him to Tartarus. General consternation prevailed; but Apollo gained a little time for Admetus by making the Three Fates drunk, and thus delayed the fatal scission of his life’s thread. Admetus ran in haste to his old parents, clasped their knees, and begged each of them in turn to surrender him the butt-end of existence. Both roundly refused, saying that they still derived much enjoyment from life, and that he should be content with his appointed lot, like everyone else.

d. Then, for love of Admetus, Alcestis took poison and her ghost descended to Tartarus; but Persephone considered it an evil thing that a wife should die instead of a husband. ‘Back with you to the upper air!’ she cried.

e. Some tell the tale differently. They say that Hades came in person to fetch Admetus and that, when he fled, Alcestis volunteered to take his place; but Heracles arrived unexpectedly with a new wild-oily, club, and rescued her.




p. 135
Athamas

ATHAMAS 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 turned in a fury to Olympus, complaining to Hera that she had been insulted. Hera took her part, and vowed: ‘My eternal vengeance shall fall upon Athamas and his House!’

c. Nephele thereupon went back to Mount 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 young 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 running up and wrested the sacrificial flint from his hand. ‘My father Zeus,’ Heracles exclaimed, ‘loathes human sacrifices!’ Nevertheless, Phrixus would have perished despite this 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. Over-awed 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 sacrificial 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, had not 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 deified 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 settle, 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, founded 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 Melicertes, 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, flayed 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 who 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.’

k. 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 twins 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, again, 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 topped 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 Helius’s son Aeëtes 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 Cytisorus, coming to Orchomenus from Colchis, rescued Athamas as he was being sacrificed for a sin-offering.




p. 138
The Mares Of Glaucus

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 drink 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 alive. But some say that this took place at Potniae, not Iolcus; and others, that Glaucus leaped into the sea in grief for Melicertes son of Athamas; or that Glaucus was the name given to Melicertes after his death.

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 sacrifices in the hope of avoiding destruction.












p. 139
Melampus

MELAMPUS 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.

c. 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 Alpheius, had taught him to prophesy from the entrails of sacrificial victims. It thus came to his knowledge that whoever tried to steal the cattle 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 sign 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 me to another cell!’ Phylacus, though laughing at Melampus’s reasons this request, did not deny him. When the beam duly collapsed and killed one of the women who was helping to carry out the bed, Phylacus was astounded at Melampus’s prescience. ‘I will grant you both your freedom and the cattle,’ he said, ‘if only you would cure my 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. Presently 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 our perquisites.’ ‘I well remember it,’ said the other vulture. ‘Iphiclus, who was then still a child, saw his father coming towards him with a blood-stain, knife, and took fright. He apparently feared to be gelded himself because he screamed at the top of his voice. Phylacus drove the knife into the sacred pear-tree over there, for safe-keeping, while he ran to 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 hand shows.” ‘In that case,’ remarked the first vulture, ‘the remedy for Iphiclus’s impotency would be to draw out the knife, scrape off the rust left the rams’ blood and administer it to him, mixed in water, everyday for ten days.’ ‘I concur,’ said the other vulture. ‘But who, less intelligent then ourselves, would have the sense to prescribe such a medicine?’

f. Thus Melampus was able to cure Iphiclus, who soon begot a son named Podarces; and, having claimed first the cattle and then Pero, presented her, still a virgin, to his grateful brother Bias.

g. Now, Proetus, son of Abas, joint-king of Argolis with Acrisius had married Stheneboea, who bore him three daughters named Lysippe, Iphinoë, and Iphianassa—but some call the two younger ones Hipponoë and Cyrianassa. Whether it was because they have offended Dionysus, or because they had offended Hera by their over-indulgence in love-affairs, or by stealing gold from her image at Tiryns, their father’s capital, all three were divinely afflicted by madness and went raging on the mountains, like cows stung by the gadfly, behaving in a most disorderly fashion and assaulting travellers.

h. Melampus, when he heard the news, came to Tiryns and offered to cure them, on condition that Proetus paid him with a third share 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 Melampus, 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 Proetus 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 sacrifices 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 purified; but Iphinoë had died on the way.

k. Melampus then married Lysippe, Bias (whose wife Pero had recently died) married Iphianassa, and Proetus rewarded them both according to his promise. But some say that Proetus’s true name was Anaxagoras.




p. 142
Perseus

ABAS, 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 Danaë, 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 of a Lycian army to support his claims to the succession. A bloody battle 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.

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 of them.

c. Acrisius, who was married to Aganippe, had no sons, but only this one daughter Danaë 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 Danaë in a dungeon with brazen doors, guarded by savage dogs; but, despite these precautions, Zeus came upon her in a shower of gold, and she bore him a son named Perseus. When Acrisius learned of Danaë’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 Danaë and Perseus still alive. He took them at once to his brother, King Polydectes, who reared Perseus in his own house.

d. Some years passed and Perseus, grown to manhood, defended Danaë against Polydectes who, with his subjects’ support, had tried to force marriage upon her. Polydectes then assembled his friends 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,’ replied Polydectes at once. Now, the Gorgon Medusa had serpents for hair, huge teeth, protruding tongue, and altogether so ugly a face that all who gazed at it were petrified with fright.

f. Athene 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 him 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 brightly-polished shield.

g. Hermes also helped Perseus, giving him an adamantine sickle with which to cut off Medusa’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.

h. Perseus then collected the sandals, wallet, and helmet from the nymphs, and flew westwards to the Land of the Hyperboreans, where he found the Gorgons asleep, among rain-worn shapes of men and wild beasts petrified by Medusa. He fixed his eyes on the reflection in the shield, Athene guided his hand, and he cut off Medusa’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.

i. At sunset, Perseus alighted near the palace of the Titan Atlas to whom, as a punishment for his inhospitality, he showed the Gorgon’s head and thus transformed him into a mountain; and on the following day turned eastward and flew across the Ulbyan desert, Hermes helping him to carry the weighty head. By the way he dropped the Graeae’s eye 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.

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. 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 Cassiopeia 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.

l. Cepheus and Cassiopeia grudgingly welcomed him as their son-in-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, was forced to snatch the Gorgon’s head from its bed of coral and turn the remaining two hundred of them to stone.

n. Poseidon set the images of Cepheus and Cassiopeia among the stars—the latter, as a punishment for her treachery, is tied in a market-basket 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 petrified bones were exhibited in the city itself until Marcus Aemilius Scaurus had them taken to Rome during his aedileship.

o. Perseus returned hurriedly to Seriphos, taking Andromeda with him, and found that Danaë 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, averting 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. 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 Teutamides was holding in honour of his dead father, and competed in the five-fold 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.

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 presently 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 [mycos] sprang up, and provided him with a stream of water. The Cyclopes built the walls of both cities.

s. Others give a very different account of the matter. They say that Polydectes succeeded in marrying Danaë, 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.

t. 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.




p. 146
The Rival Twins

WHEN the male line of Polycaon’s House had died out after five generations, the Messenians invited Perieres, the son of Aeolus, to be their king, and he married Perseus’s daughter Gorgophone. She survived him and was the first widow to remarry, her new husband being Oebalus the Spartan. 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 the coast of Troy; Marpessa; Cleopatra; and Evadne, daughter of Phylacus, who threw herself on the funeral pyre when her husband perished at Thebes.

b. Aphareus and Leucippus were Gorgophone’s sons by Perieres, whereas Tyndareus and Icarius were her sons by Oebalus. Tyndareus succeeded his father on the throne of Sparta, Icarius acting as his co-king; but Hippocoön and his twelve sons expelled both of them, though some, indeed, say that Icarius (later to become Odysseus’s father-in-law) took Hippocoön’s side. Taking refuge with king Thestus in Aetolia, Tyndareus married his daughter Leda, who bore him Castor and Clytaemnestra, at the same time bearing Helen and Polydeuces to Zeus. Later, having adopted Polydeuces, Tyndareus gained the Spartan throne, and was one of those whom Asclepius raised from the dead. His tomb is still shown at Sparta.

c. Meanwhile, his half-brother Aphareus had succeeded Perieres on the throne of Messene, where Leucippus—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. Now, Leucippus’s daughters, the Leucippides, namely Phoebe, a priestess of 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.

d. The Dioscuri, who were never separated from one another in an adventure, became the pride of Sparta. Castor was famous as a soldier and tamer of horses, Polydeuces as the best boxer of his day; both won prizes at the Olympic Games. Their cousins and rivals were not devoted to each other; Idas had greater strength than Lynceus, Lynceus such sharp eyes that he could see in the dark or divine the whereabouts of buried treasure.

e. Now, Evenus, a son of Ares, had married Alcippe, by whom he became the father of Marpessa. In an attempt to keep her a virgin, he 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 and Apollo, falling in love with Marpessa, expressed his disgust of so barbarous a custom; and said that he would soon end it by challenging Evenus to a race. But Idas had also set his heart on Marpessa, and begged a winged chariot from his father Poseidon. 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.

f. When Idas reached Messene, Apollo tried to take Marpessa from him. They fought a duel, but Zeus parted them, and ruled that Marpessa herself should decide whom she prefers. Knowing that 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.

g. Idas and Lynceus were among the Calydonian hunters, and sailed in the Argo to Colchis. One day, after the death of Aphareus, they and the Dioscuri patched up their quarrel sufficiently 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 eating; 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, sacrificing 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.

h. But the Messenians say that Castor killed Lynceus, 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.

i. Others say that it was Lynceus who mortally wounded Castor in a battle 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 Polyneices.

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 Twins.

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 son of Asclepius.

l. The Spartans still show the house where the Dioscuri lived. It was afterwards owned by one Phormio, whom they visited one night, pretending to be strangers from Cyrene. They asked him for lodging, and begged leave to sleep in their old room. Phormio replied that they were 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.

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 ship, they will come hastening through the sky,

n. The Dioscuri fought with the Spartan fleet at Aegospotamos, and the victors afterwards hung up two golden stars in their honour at Delphi; but these fell down and disappeared shortly before the fatal battle of Leuctra.

o. During the second Messenian War, a couple of Messenians aroused the Dioscuri’s anger by impersonalizing them. 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 sacrificed to them when Epaminondas founded the new city of Messene. p. They preside at the Spartan Games, and because they invented the war-dance and war-like mimic are the patrons of all bards who sing of ancient battles. 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. 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 have 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 Polydeuces’s Thessalian charger was a gift from Hermes.




p. 150
Bellerophon

BELLEROPHON, son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, left Corinth under a cloud, disgraced by having 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 dared 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 she-monster 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 Caria, has made a household pet.’ Before setting 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.

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.

d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once against the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bow-shot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian Plain of Xanthus, he beat off a 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 Philonoë in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xanthian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, all 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.









p. 152
Antiope

SOME say that when Zeus seduced Antiope, daughter of Nycteus the Theban, she fled to the King of Sicyon, who agreed to marry her, and thus occasioned a war in which Nycteus was killed. Antiope’s uncle Lycus presently defeated the Sicyonians in a bloody battle and brought her back, a widow, to Thebes. After giving birth in a wayside thick to the twins Amphion and Zethus, whom Lycus at once exposed at Mount Cithaeron, she was cruelly ill-treated for many years by her aunt, Dirce. At last, she contrived to escape from the prison in which she was immured, and fled to the hut where Amphion and Zethus, whom a passing cattle-man had rescued, were now living. But they mistook Antiope for a runway slave, and refused to shelter her. Dirce then came rushing up in a Bacchic frenzy, seized hold of Antiope, and dragged her away. ‘My lads,’ cried the cattle-man, ‘you had better beware of the Furies.’ ‘Why the Furies?’ they asked. ‘Because you have refused to protect your mother, who is now being carried off for execution by that savage aunt of hers.’ The twins at once went in pursuit, rescued Antiope, and tied Dirce by the hair to the horns of a wild bull, which made short work of her.

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 Antiope, and get her with child. Dirce, suspecting that this was Lycus’s doing, imprisoned 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 cattle-men with whom Antiope 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 married 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 work.’ 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 ruled jointly 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. Amphion was himself killed by Apollo for trying to take vengeance on the Delphic priests, and further punished in Tartarus. Amphion and Zethus are buried in one grave at Thebes, which is guarded carefully when the sun is in Taurus; for then the people of Phocian 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.




p. 154
Niobe

NIOBE, sister of Pelops, had married Amphion, King of Thebes an borne him seven sons and seven daughters, of whom she was so inordinately proud that, one day, she disparaged Leto herself for having only two children: Apollo and Artemis. Manto, the prophetic daughter of Teiresias, overhearing this rash remark, advised the Theban women to placate Leto and her children at once: burning frank-incense 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 sacrifice, the terrified 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 spinning in the palace and, with a quiverful of arrows, despatched all of them, except Meliboëa, who had followed Amyclas’s example. These two survivors hastened to build Leto a temple, though Meliboëa had turned so pale with fear that she was still nicknamed Chloris when she married Neleus 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 summer.

d. All men mourned for Amphion, deploring the extinction of his race, but none mourned for Niobe, except her equally proud brother Pelops.




p. 155
Caenis And Caeneus

POSEIDON once lay with the Nymph Caenis, daughter of Elatus the Magnesian or, some say, of Coronus the Lapith, and asked her to name 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 remaining 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.




p. 156
Erigone

ALTHOUGH Oeneus was the first mortal to be given a vine plant by Dionysus, Icarius anticipated him in the making of wine. He offered a sample from his trial jarful to a party of shepherds 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 under a pine-tree and, afterwards, 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 Bootes, and Erigone with the constellation of the Virgin.










p. 157
The Calydonian Boar

OENEUS, 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 cattle and labourers, and to ravage his crops; but Oeneus 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 Salamis; 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. Iasus had wished for a male heir and Atalanta’s birth disappointed him so cruelly that he exposed her on the Parthenian Hill near Calydon, where she was suckled by a bear which Artemis sent to her aid. Atalanta grew to womanhood among a clan of hunters who found and reared her, but remained a virgin, and always carried arms. On one occasion she came fainting from 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.

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 her’ 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-hunters, 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 overgrown 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 Amphiaraus 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 his 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 should have gone to the most honourable person present—namely himself, as Oeneus’s brother-in-law. Plexippus’s younger brother supported 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.

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 the 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 took place, but the Oracle’s warning was justified 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. 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; Atalanta’s husband was not Melanion but Hippomenes; and she was the daughter of Schoeneus, who ruled Boeotian Onchestus. It is added that she and he prophaned a sanctuary not of Zeus but of Cybele, who turned them into lions and yoked them to her chariot.




p. 159
Telamon And Peleus

THE mother of Aeacus’s two elder sons, namely Telamon and Peleus, was Endeis, 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.

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 Phocis, where 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 the state of Phocis to its present limits. One day Aeacus sent for Phocus, perhaps intending to bequeath him the island kingdom; but, encouraged by their mother, Telamon and Peleus plotted to kill him on his return. They challenged Phocus to a five-fold 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 Peleus were equally guilty of fratricide, and together hid the body in a wood, where Aeacus found it. Phocus lies buried close to the Aeaceum.

c. Telamon took refuge in the island of Salamis, where Cychreus was king, and sent back a messenger, denying any part in the murder. Aeacus, 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 mole, 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.

d. This Cychreus, a son of Poseidon and Salamis, daughter of the river 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 buried, 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.

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 equally well-known Teucer.

f. Peleus fled to the court of Actor, King of Phthia, by whose adopted son Eurytion he was purified. Actor then gave him his daughter 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 purified, this time by Acastus, son of Pelias.

g. Acastus’s wife, Cretheis, tried to seduce Peleus and, when he rebuffed her advances, lyingly told Polymela: ‘He intends to desert you and marry my daughter Sterope.’ Polymela believed Cretheis’s mischievous tale, and hanged herself. Not content with the harm she had done, Cretheis went weeping to Acastus, and accused Peleus of having attempted her virtue.

h. Loth to kill the man whom he had purified, Acastus challenged him to a hunting contest on Mount Pelion. Now, in reward for his chastity, the gods had given Peleus a magic sword, forged by Daedalus which had the property of making its owner victorious in battle and equally successful in the chase. Thus he soon piled up a great heap of 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 own mouths!’ cried Peleus, who had cut out their tongues, and now produced 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 trencher-man, Peleus fell fast asleep. Acastus then robbed him of his magic sword, hid it under a pile of cow-dung, and stole away with his followers. Peleus awoke to find himself deserted, disarmed, and surrounded by wild Centaurs, who were on the point of murdering him however, their king Cheiron not only intervened to save his life, but divined where the sword lay hidden and restored it to him.

j. Meanwhile, on the advice of Themis, Zeus chose Peleus to be the husband of the Nereid Thetis, whom he would have married himself had he not been discouraged by the Fates’ prophecy that any son born to Thetis would become far more powerful than his father. He was also vexed that Thetis had rejected his advances, for her foster-mother Hera’s sake, and therefore vowed that she should never marry an immortal. Hera, however, gratefully decided to match her with the noblest of mortals, and summoned all Olympians to the wedding when the moon should next be full, at the same time sending her messenger to King Cheiron’s cave with an order for Peleus to make ready.

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 of a 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; but Peleus had been warned what to expect, and clung to her resolutely, even when she became an enormous slippery cuttle-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. 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 of grass, brandishing darts of fir, and prophesying good fortune.

m. Cheiron gave Peleus 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 magnificent suit of golden armour, to which Poseidon added the two immortal horses Balius and Xanthus—by the West Wind out of the Harpy Podarge.

n. But the goddess Eris, who had not been invited, was determined to put the divine guests at logger-heads, 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 proto-catarctical cause of the Trojan War.

o. 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. p. Meanwhile Peleus, whose fortunes the kindly Cheiron had restored, and who now also acquired large herds of cattle as a dowry, sent some of these to Phthia as an indemnity for his accidental killing of Eurytion; but, when the payment was refused by the Phthians, let them to roam at will about the countryside. This proved to have been a fortunate decision, because a fierce wolf which Psamathe had sent after him, to avenge the death of her son Phocus, 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 between Locris and Phocis.

q. Later, Peleus returned to Iolcus, where Zeus supplied him with an army of ants transformed into warriors; and thus he became known as 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.

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 ankle-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 Peleus, and returned to her home in the sea, naming her son ‘Achilles’, because he had as yet placed no lips 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.

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.

t. 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 contriving to kill Acastus’s sons and seize the city. But Peleus, growing impatient, had chartered a vessel for a voyage to Molossia; rough weather drove her to the island of Kos, near Euboea, where he died and was buried, thus forfeiting the immortality which Thetis had promised him.




p. 164
Aristaeus

HYPSEUS, 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 Pelias’s funeral games.

b. Cheiron further 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 manhood, he would win the titles of ‘Immortal Zeus’, ‘Pure Apollo’, and ‘Guardian of the Flocks’.

c. Apollo duly took Cyrene 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.

d. The Myrtle-nymphs, nicknaming Aristaeus ‘Agreus’ and ‘Nomius’, taught him how to curdle milk for cheese, build bee-hives, and make the oleaster yield the cultivated olive. These useful arts he passed on to others, who gratefully paid him divine honours. From Ulbya 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 Autonoë, 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 Othrys, and in the valley of the river Apidanus. It was here that Aristaeus perfected the art of hunting, taught him by Cyrene.

f. One day he went to consult the Delphic Oracle, and was told to visit 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 gratified 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 showered Aristaeus with gratitude, but still continue to propitiate the Dog-star every year before its appearance.

g. He then visited Arcadia and, later, settled at Tempe. But there all 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 Naiad sisters. His aunt, Arethusa, heard an imploring voice through the water; put out her head, recognized Aristaeus, and invited him down to the wonderful palace of the Naiads. These washed him with water drawn from a perpetual spring and, after a sacrificial feast, he was advised by Cyrene: ‘Bind my cousin Proteus, and force him to explain why your bees sickened.’

h. Proteus was taking his midday rest in a cave on the island Pharos, sheltering from the heat of the Dog-star, and Aristaeus, having overcome him, despite his changes, learned that the bees’ sickness was 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 had fled from him and been bitten by a serpent.

i. Aristaeus now returned to the Naiads’ palace, where Cyrene instructed him to raise four altars in the woods to the Dryads, Eurydice’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 poppies of forgetfullness, a fatted calf, and a black ewe to propitiate the ghost of Orpheus, who had now joined Eurydice below. Aristaeus obeyed and, on the ninth morning, a swarm of bees rose from the rotting carcasses 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.

j. Later, distressed by the death of his son Actaeon, which arose in 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.

k. Aristaeus visited other distant islands, and spent some years in Sicily, where he received divine honours, especially from the olive-growers. 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.




p. 167
Midas

MIDAS, 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. 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.

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 Boeotia, 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 traveller 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 Dionysus’s headquarters.

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 was fast dying of hunger and thirst; whereupon Dionysus, highly entertained, 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 the river Pactolus are bright with gold to this day.

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 day, he drove the team towards Phrygian Telmissus, now a part of 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 discovered 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 Macedonian petulantly cut the knot with his sword.

f. After Gordius’s death, Midas succeeded to the throne, promoted the worship of Dionysus, and founded the city of Ancyra. The Brigians 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.

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 of ass’s ears. 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.




p. 169
Cleobis And Biton

CLEOBIS 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 five 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.

b. A similar gift was granted to Agamedes and Trophonius, sons of Erginus. These twins had built a stone threshold upon foundations laid by Apollo himself for his temple at Delphi. His oracle told them: ‘Live and indulge yourselves in every pleasure for six days; on the seventh your heart’s desire shall be granted.’ On the seventh day both were found dead, in their beds. Hence it is said: Those whom gods love die young.

c. Trophonius, after death, was awarded own oracular shrine in Boeotian Lebadea.




p. 170
Narcissus

NARCISSUS was a Thespian, the son of the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the wings of his streams, and ravished. The seer Teiresias told Leiriope, the first 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 of 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 punishment 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 unable to speak first. 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 ran 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, Narcissus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Helisson, 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 Thespiae he came upon 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; and as he cast himself 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 recognised 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 torments; 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 narcissus flower with its red corollary, from which an unguent balm is now distilled at Chaeronea. This is recommended for affections of the ear (though apt to give headaches), and as a vulnerary, and for the cure of frost-bite.




p. 171
Phyllis And Carya

PHYLLIS, 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.

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 Caryatids—female 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.








p. 172
Arion

ARION 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,’ Arion 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. The 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, lath 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, Periander 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.’ Periander 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.

c. Nor was Arion the first man to have been saved by a dolphin. A dolphin rescued Enables when he leaped overboard to join his sweetheart Phonies who, in accordance with an oracle, had been chosen by lot and thrown into the sea to appease Amphitricha—for this was the expedition which the sons of Penthouse were leading to Lesbos as the island’s first colonists—and the dolphin’s mate rescued Phonies. Another dolphin saved Helianthus from drowning in the Crustacean Sea on his way to Italy. Likewise Cadies, the Cretan brother of Yaps, 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.




p. 173
Minos And His Brothers

WHEN 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.

b. This marriage proving childless, Asterius adopted Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon, and made them his heirs. But when the brothers grew to manhood, they quarrelled for the love of a beautiful boy named Miletus, begotten by Apollo on the Nymph Areia, whom some call Deione, and others, Theia. Miletus having decided that he liked Sarpedon best, was driven from Crete by Minos, and sailed with a large fleet to Caria 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 refrained from doing more than warn Miletus, who fled to Caria of his own accord. Others say that the boy who occasioned the quarrel was not Miletus but one Atymnius, a son of Zeus and Cassiopeia, or of Phoenix.

c. 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 of living 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.

e. Meanwhile, Minos had married Pasiphaë, a daughter of Helius and the nymph Crete, otherwise known as Perseis. But Poseidon, to avenge the affront offered him by Minos, made Pasiphaë fall in love with the white bull which had been withheld from sacrifice. 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 Pasiphaë 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 Pasiphaë had all her desire, and later gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’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 sacrificed merely the next best; hence Poseidon’s wrath; others say that it was Zeus whom he offended; others again, that Pasiphaë had failed for several years to propitiate Aphrodite, who now punished 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.

g. Minos consulted an oracle to know how he might best avoid scandal and conceal Pasiphaë’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 Pasiphaë and the Minotaur.

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 judicial code. Every ninth year, he would visit Zeus’s cave and bring 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 bequeathed land in Crete to his son Gortys, after whom the Cretan city is named, although the Tegeans insist that Gortys was an Arcadian, the son of Tegeates. Rhadamanthys also bequeathed land in Asia 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 Staphylus; and Maroneia to Euanthes; and Paros to Alcaeus; and Delos to Anius; and Andros to Andrus.

i. Rhadamanthys eventually fled to Boeotia because he had killed kinsman, and lived there in exile at Ocaleae, where he married Alcmene, 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. 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.


























































p. 177
The Loves Of Minos

MINOS lay with the nymph Paria, whose sons colonized Paros anti were later killed by Heracles; also with Androgeneia, the mother of the senior Asterius, as well as many others; but especially he pursued Britomartis of Gortyna, a daughter of Leto. She invented hunting-nets and was a close companion to Artemis, whose hounds she kept on a leash.

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.

c. Minos’s many infidelities so enraged Pasiphaë 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 millipedes, which preyed on her vitals. 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 with Eos, of whom she was painfully jealous.

d. Eos bore Cephalus a son named Phaëthon; but Aphrodite stole him while still a child, to be the night-watchman of her most sacred shrines; and the Cretans call him Adymnus, by which they mean the morning and the evening star.

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 filling her with reptiles and insects. This draught had the desired effect, but Procris feared that Pasiphaë might bewitch her, and therefore returned hurriedly to Athens, disguised as a handsome boy, having first 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 dart so 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 wife. Thus they were reconciled at last, and Cephalus enjoyed great sport with the and the dart. But Artemis was vexed that her valuable gifts should be bandied from hand to hand by these mercenary adulterers, and plotted revenge. She put it into Procris’s head to suspect that Cephalus was still visiting Eos when he rose two hours after midnight and went off to hunt.

g. One night Procris, wearing a dark tunic, crept out after him in the half light. Presently he heard a rustle in a thicket behind him, Laelaps growled and stiffened, Cephalus let fly with the unerring dart and transfixed Procris. In due course the Areiopagus sentenced him to perpetual banishment for murder.

h. Cephalus retired to Thebes, where King Amphitryon, the supposed father of Heracles, borrowed Laelaps 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.

i. Cephalus next assisted Amphitryon in a successful war against Teleboans and Taphians. Before it began, Amphitryon made all his 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. The Teleboan king was Pterelaus, on whose head Poseidon, being his 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.

j. Cephalus’s share of the Teleboan dominions was the island of Cephallenia, 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 the 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 purified of his guilt, he was haunted by Procris’s ghost and, fearing to bring misfortune on his companions, went one day to Cape Leucas, where he had built a temple to Apollo of the White Rock, and plunged into the sea from 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.




p. 180
The Children Of Pasiphae.

AMONG Pasiphaë’s children by Minos were Acacallis, Ariadne, Androgeus, Catreus, Glaucus, and Phaedra. She also bore Cydon to Hermes, and Libyan Ammon to Zeus.

b. Ariadne, beloved first by Theseus, and then by Dionysus, bore many 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-affair 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.

c. Glaucus, while still a child, was playing ball one day in the palace at Cnossus or, perhaps, chasing a mouse, when he suddenly disappeared. Minos and Pasiphaë 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.

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 Curetes, 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. ‘Ah, 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.

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’.

h. Androgeus visited Athens, and won every contest in the All-Athenian 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 Oenoë on the way to Thebes, where he was about to compete in certain funeral games. Androgeus defended himself 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.

j. Glaucus son of Minos has sometimes been confused with Anthedonian 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 every 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.








p. 182
Scylla And Nisus

MINOS was the first king to control the Mediterranean Sea, which he cleared of pirates, and in Crete ruled over ninety cities. When the Athenians had murdered his son Androgeus, he decided to take vengeance on them, and sailed around the Aegean collecting ships and armed 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 things that glitter. He made an alliance with the people of Anaphe, but rebuffed by King Aeacus of Aegina and departed, swearing revenge. Aeacus then answered an appeal from Cephalus to join the Athenians against Minos.

b. Meanwhile, Minos was partying the Isthmus of Corinth. He laid siege to Nisa, ruled by Nisus the Egyptian, who had a daughter name Scylla. A tower stood in the city, built by Apollo [and 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 lyre there while he was working as a mason. Scylla used to spend much time at the top of the tower, playing tunes on the stone with a lapful pebbles; and here she climbed daily when the war began, to watch

c. The siege of Nisa was protracted, and Scylla soon came to know the name of every Cretan warrior. Struck by the beauty of Minos, and by his magnificent clothes and white charger, she fell perversely in love with him. Some say that Aphrodite willed it so; others blame Hera.

d. One night Scylla crept into her father’s chamber, and cut off the famous bright lock on which his life and throne depended; then, taking 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 clung 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 cirrus-bird, which is well known for its purple breast and red legs. But some say that Minos gave orders for Scylla to be drowned; and others that her soul became the fish cirrus, not the bird of that name.

e. Nisa was afterwards called Megara, in honour of Megareus, a son of Oenope by Hippomenes; he had been Nisus’s ally and married his daughter Iphinoë, and is said to have succeeded him on the throne.

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 Greece 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 Aeacus offer up prayers on their behalf. When this had been done, the earthquakes everywhere ceased, except in Attica.

g. The Athenians thereupon sought to redeem themselves from the curse by sacrificing to Persephone the daughters of Hyacinthus, namely Antheis, Aegleis, Lyctaea, and Orthaea, on the grave of the Cyclops Geraestus. 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 every nine years to Crete as a prey for the Minotaur.

h. Minos then returned to Cnossus, where he sacrificed a hecatomb of bulls in gratitude for his success; but his end came in the ninth year.





p. 184
Daedalus And Talos

a. The parentage of Daedalus is disputed. His mother is named Alcippe by some; by others, Merope; by still others, Iphinoë; and all give him a different father, though it is generally agreed that he belonged to the royal house of Athens, which claimed descent from Erechtheus. He was a wonderful smith, having been instructed in his art by Athene herself.

b. One of his apprentices, Talos the son of his sister Polycaste, or Perdix, had already surpassed him in craftsmanship while only twelve years old. Talos happened one day to pick up the jawbone of a serpent or, some say, of 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 claimed himself to have forged the first saw, soon grew unbearably jealous. 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 done 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 had piously taken up a dead serpent, as the law required – which was not altogether untrue, Talos being an Erechtheid – but there were bloodstains on the bag, and his crime did not escape detection, whereupon the Areiopagus banished him for murder. According to another account he fled before the trial could take place.

c. Now, the soul of Talos – whom some call Calus, Circinus, or Tantalus – flew off in the form of a partridge, but his body was buried where it had fallen. Polycaste hanged herself when she heard of his death, and the Athenians built a sanctuary in her honour beside the Acropolis.

d. Daedalus took refuge in one of the Attic demes, whose people are named Daedalids after him; and then in Cretan Cnossus, where King Minos delighted to welcome so skilled a craftsman. He lived there for some time, at peace and in high favour, until Minos, learning that he had helped Pasiphaë to couple with Poseidon’s white bull, locked him up for a while in the Labyrinth, together with his son Icarus, whose mother, Naucrate, was one of Minos’s slaves; but Pasiphaë freed them both.

e. It was not easy, however, to escape from Crete, since Minos kept all his ships under military guard, and now offered a large reward for his apprehension. But Daedalus made a pair of wings for himself, and another for Icarus, the quill feathers of which were threaded together, but the smaller ones held in place by wax. Having tied on Icarus’s pair 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 the feathers be wetted by the sea.’ Then he slipped his arms into his own pair of wings and they flew off. ‘Follow me closely,’ he cried, ‘do not set your own course!’

f. They had left Naxos, Delos, and Paros behind them on the left hand, and were leaving Lebynthos and Calymne behind on the right, when Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions and began soaring towards the sun, rejoiced by the lift of his great sweeping wings. Presently, when Daedalus looked over his shoulder, he could no longer see Icarus; 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 then 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, chattering for delight – the soul of his sister Polycaste, at last avenged. This island has now given its name to the surrounding sea.

g. But some, disbelieving the story, say that Daedalus fled from Crete in a boat provided by Pasiphaë; and that, on their way to Sicily, they were about to disembark at a small island, when Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. They add that it was Heracles who buried Icarus; in gratitude for which, Daedalus made so lifelike a statue of him at Pisa that Heracles mistook it for a rival and felled it with a stone. Others say that Daedalus invented sails, not wings, as a means of outstripping Minos’s galleys; and that Icarus, steering carelessly, was drowned when their boat capsized.

h. 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 hospitably received by King Cocalus, and lived among the Sicilians, enjoying great fame and erecting many fine buildings.

i. Meanwhile, Minos had raised a considerable fleet, and set out in search of Daedalus. He brought with him a Triton shell, and wherever he went promised to reward anyone who could pass a linen thread thorough it: a problem which, he knew, Daedalus alone would be able to solve. Arrived at Camicus, he offered the shell to Cocalus, who undertook to have it threaded; and, sure enough, Daedalus found out how to do this. Fastening a gossamer thread to an ant, he bored a hole at 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, assured that he had at last found Daedalus’s hiding—place, demanded his surrender. But Cocalus’s daughters were loth to lose Daedalus, who made them such beautiful toys, and with his help they concocted a plot. Daedalus led a pipe through the roof of the bathroom, down which they poured boiling water or, some say, pitch upon Minos, while he 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.

j. Minos’s followers buried him with great pomp, and Zeus made him a judge of the dead in Tartarus, with his brother Rhadamanthys and his enemy Aeacus as colleagues. Since Minos’s tomb occupied the centre of Aphrodite’s temple at Camicus, he was honoured there for many generations by great crowds of Sicilians who came to worship Aphrodite. In the end, his bones were returned to Crete by Theron, the tyrant of Acragas.

k. After Minos’s death the Cretans fell into complete disorder, because their main fleet was burned by the Sicilians. Of the crews who were forced to remain overseas, some built the city of Minoa, close to the beach where they had landed; others, the city of Hyria in Messapia; still others, marching into the centre of Sicily, fortified a hill which became the city of Enguos, so called from a spring which flows close by. There they built a temple of the Mothers, whom they continued to honour greatly, as in their native Crete.

l. But Daedalus left Sicily to join Iolaus, the nephew and charioteer of Tirynthian Heracles, who led a body of Athenians and Thespians to Sardinia. Many of his works survive to this day in Sardinia; they are called Daedaleia [or Daidala].

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; others, that he was forged by Hephaestus in Sardinia, and that he had only one vein, which ran from his neck down to his ankles, where it was stoppered by a bronze pin. It was his task to run thrice daily around the island of Crete and throw rocks at any foreign ship; and also to go thrice a year at a more leisurely pace, through the villages of Crete, announcing Minos’s laws inscribed on brazen tablets. When the Sardinians tried to invade the island, Talos made himself red-hot in a fire and destroyed them in his burning embrace, grinning fiercely; hence the expression ‘Sardonic grin’. In the end, Medea killed Talos by pulling out the vein and letting his life-blood escape; though some say that Poeas the transfixed him with a poisoned arrow.



















p. 189
Catreus And Althaemenes

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 Crethenia, 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.

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 Clymene married Nauplius, the 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 exile, he prayed to be swallowed up by the earth. A chasm opened accordingly and he disappeared, but is paid heroic honours to this day.




p. 190
The Sons Of Pandion

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.

b. Cecrops, whom Metion and Orneus threatened to kill, fled first to Megara 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. But he did not retain long his power, for though Metion died, his sons by Alcippe, or Iphinoë, 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 confusion.

c. When the sons of Metion expelled Pandion from Athens he fled to the court of Pylas, Pylos, or Pylon, a Lelegian king of Megara, whose daughter Pylia he married. Later, Pylas killed his uncle Bias and, leaving Pandion to rule Megara, took refuge in Messenia, where he founded the city of Pylus. Driven thence by Neleus and the Pelasgians of Iolcus, he entered Elis, and there founded a second Pylus. Pylia bore Pandion four sons at Megara: Aegeus, Pallas, Nisus, and Lycus, though Aegeus’s jealous brothers spread the rumour that he was the bastard son of Scyrius. Pandion never returned to Athens. He enjoys a hero-shrine in Megara, where his tomb is still shown on the Cliff of Athene the diver-bird, in proof that this territory once belonged to Athens; it was disguised as this bird that Athene hid his father Cecrops under her aegis, and carried him in safety to Megara.

d. After Pandion’s death his sons marched against Athens, drove out the sons of Metion, and divided Attica into four parts, as their father instructed them to do. Aegeus, being the eldest, was awarded the sovereignty of Athens, while his brothers drew lots for the remainder parts kingdom: Nisus won Megara and the surrounding country as far east as Corinth; Lycus won Euboea; and Pallas Southern Attica, where bred a rugged race of giants.

e. Pylas’s son Sciron, who married one of Pandion’s daughters, disbarred Nisus’s claim to Megara, and Aeacus, called in to judge the dispute, awarded the kingship to Nisus and his descendants, but the commandment of its armies to Sciron. In those days Megara was called Nisa, and Nisus also gave his name to the port of Nisaea, which he founded. When Minos killed Nisus he was buried in Athens, where his tomb is still shown behind the Lyceum. The Megarans, however, who do not admit that their city was ever captured by the Cretans, claim that Megareus married Nisus’s daughter Iphinoë and succeeded him.

f. Aegeus, like Cecrops and Pandion, found his life constantly threatened by the plots of his kinsmen, among them Lycus, whom is said to have exiled from Euboea. Lycus took refuge with Sarpedon, and gave his name to Lycia, after first visiting Aphareus at Arene, initiating the royal household into the Mysteries of the Great Goddess Demeter and Persephone, and also into those of Atthis, at the antique Messenian capital of Andania. This Atthis, who gave Attica its name was one of the three daughters of Cranaus, the autochthonous king of Athens reigning at the time of the Deucalonian Flood. The oak-cops at Andania, where Lycus purified the initiates, still bears his name. He had been granted the power of prophecy, and it was his oracle which later declared that if the Messenians kept a certain secret thing they would one day recover their patrimony, but if not, they would forfeit it for ever. Lycus was referring to an account of the Mysteries the Great Goddess engraved on a sheet of tin, which the Messenians thereupon buried in a brazen urn between a yew and a myrtle, on summit of Mount Ithone; Epaminondas the Theban eventually desinterred 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 received the surname ‘Lycaean’, and expelled wolves from Athens by the scent of his sacrifices.




p. 191
The Birth Of Theseus

AEGEUS’s first wife was Melite, daughter of Hoples; and his second, Chalcioppe, daughter of Rhexenor; but neither bore him any children. Ascribing this, and the misfortunes of his sisters Procne and Philomela, to Aphrodite’s anger, he introduced her worship into Athens, and then went to consult the Delphic Oracle. The Oracle warned him not to untie the mouth of his bulging wine-skin until he reached the highest point of Athens, lest he die one day of grief, a response which Aegeus could not interpret.

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 him a son by magic. Next, he visited Troezen, where his old comrades Pittheus and Troezen, sons of Pelops, had recently come from Pisa to share a kingdom with King Aetius. Aetius was the successor of his father Anthas, son of Poseidon and Alcyone who, having founded the cities Anthaea and Hyperea, had lately sailed off to found Halicarnass in Caria. But Aetius seems to have enjoyed little power, because Pittheus, after Troezen’s death, united Anthaea and Hyperea into a single city, which he dedicated jointly to Athene and Poseidon, calling Troezen.

c. Pittheus was the most learned man of his age, and one of his most known apothegms on friendship, is often quoted: ‘Blast not the hope the friendship hath conceived; but fill its measure high!’ He founded sanctuary of Oracular Apollo at Troezen, which is the oldest surviving shrine in Greece; and also dedicated an altar to the Triple-goddess Themis. Three white marble thrones, now placed above his tomb behind the temple of Artemis the Saviour, used to serve him and the others as judgement seats. He also taught the art of oratory in Muses’ sanctuary at Troezen—which was founded by Hephaestus’s son Ardalus, the reputed inventor of the flute—and a treatise on rhetoric by his hand is extant.

d. Now, while Pittheus was still living at Pisa, Bellerophon asked to marry his daughter Aethra, but had been sent away to Caria in disgrace before the marriage could be celebrated; though still attracted to Bellerophon, she had little hope of his return. Pittheus, therefore, grieving at her enforced virginity, and influenced by the spell which Medea was casting on all of them from afar, made Aegeus drunk and sent him to bed with Aethra. Later in the same night, Poseidon also enjoyed her. For, in obedience to a dream sent by Athene, she left the drunken Aegeus, and waded across to the island of Sphaeria, which lies close to the mainland of Troezen, carrying libations to pour at the tomb of Sphaerus, Pelops’s charioteer. There, with Athene’s guidance, Poseidon overpowered her, and Aethra subsequently changed the name of the island from Sphaeria to Hiera, and founded on temple of Apaturian Athene, establishing a rule that girls should henceforth dedicate her girdle to the goddess before marriage. Poseidon, however, generously conceded to Aegeus the parentage of any child born to Aethra in the due time.

e. Aegeus, when he awoke and found himself in Aethra’s bed, told her that if a son were born to them he must not be exposed or sent away, but secretly reared in Troezen. Then he sailed back celebrate the All-Athenian Festival, after hiding his sword and sandals under a hollow rock, known as Altar of Strong Zeus, that stood on the road from Troezen to Hermium. If, when the boy is born, he could move this rock and recover the tokens, he was to be sent with them to Athens. Meanwhile, Aethra must keep silence, lest Aegeus nephews, the fifty children of Pallas, plotted against her life. The sword was an heirloom from Cecrops.

f. At a place now called Genethlium, on the way from the city to harbour of Troezen, Aethra gave birth to a boy. Some say that she at once named him Theseus, because the tokens had been deposited for him, others that he afterwards won this name at Athens. He was up in Troezen, where his guardian Pittheus discreetly spread rumour that Poseidon had been his father; and one Connidas, to the Athenians still sacrifice a ram on the day before the Thesean Feasts, acted as his pedagogue. But some say that Theseus grew up at Marathon.

g. One day Heracles, dining at Troezen with Pittheus, removed his lion-skin and threw it over a stool. When the palace children came in, they screamed and fled, all except seven-year-old Theseus, who ran to take axe from the woodpile, and returned boldly, prepared to attack a real lion.

h. At the age of sixteen years he visited Delphi, and offered his first shaven hair-clippings to Apollo. He shaved, however, only the fore of his head, like the Arabians and Mysians, or like the war-like Euboeans, who thereby deny their enemies any advantage in combat. This kind of tonsure, and the precinct where he performed the ceremony, are both still called Thesean. He was now an intelligent and prudent youth; and Aethra, leading him to the rock 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, at Pittheus’s warnings and his mother’s entreaties, he would not visit Athens by the safe sea route, but insisted on travelling over by foot, impelled by a desire to emulate the feats of his cousin-german Heracles, whom he greatly admired.




p. 194
The Labours Of Theseus

THESEUS set out to free the bandit-ridden coast road which led from Troezen to Athens. He would pick no quarrels but take vengeance on all who dared to molest him, making the punishment fit the crime, as was Heracles’s way. At Epidaurus, Periphetes the cripple waylaid attacked him. Periphetes, whom some call Poseidon’s son, and others the son of Hephaestus 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.

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. He had been nicknamed Pityocamptes, or ‘pinebender’, because he was strong enough to bend down the tops of pine-trees 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.

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 if they 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, Melanippus. Afterwards he gave her in marriage to Deioneus 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.

d. Some, however, say that Theseus killed Sinis many years later, and rededicated the Isthmian Games to him, although they had been founded by Sisyphus in honour of Melicertes, the son of Ino.

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 who bred it, was said to be the child of Typhon and Echidne.

f. Following the coast road, Theseus came to the precipitous cliffs rushing 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. Sciron used to seat himself upon a rock and force passing travellers to wash his feet: when they stooped to the task he would kick them over the cliff into the sea, where a giant turtle swam about, waiting to devour them. (Turtles closely 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.

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 Theseus killed Sciron after the capture of Eleusis, many years later, and celebrated the Isthmian Games in his honour under the patronage of Poseidon.

h. The cliffs of Sciron rise close to the Molurian Rocks, and over them runs Sciron’s footpath, made by him when he commanded the armies of Megara. A violent north-western breeze which blows seaward across these heights is called Sciron by the Athenians.

i. Now, sciron means ‘parasol’; and the month of Scirophorionis so called because at the Women’s Festival of Demeter and Core, on the twelfth day of Scirophorionis, the priest of Erechtheus carries a white parasol, and a priestess of Athene Sciras carries another in solemn procession from the Acropolis—for on that occasion the goddess’s image is daubed with sciras, a sort of gypsum, to commemorate the white image which Theseus made of her after he had destroyed the Minotaur.

j. Continuing his journey to Athens, Theseus met Cercyon the Arcadian, whom some call the son of Branchus and the nymph Argiope; others, the son of Hephaestus, or Poseidon. 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 witnessed 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.

k. On reaching Attic Coridallus, 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 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.




p. 196
Theseus And Medea

HAVING arrived 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 Phytalids welcomed Theseus as their guest, which was the first true hospitality he had received since leaving 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 impertinently asked why he was allowed to wander about unescorted. Disdaining to reply, Theseus unyoked the oxen from the masons’ cart and tossed one of them into the air, high above the temple roof.

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 Theseus.

c. Medea, however, recognized Theseus as soon as he arrived in the city, and grew jealous on behalf of Medus, 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 peasants call it ‘aconite’.

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 garlanded oxen were sacrificed 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.

f. Theseus then went in vengeful pursuit of Medea, who eluded him by casting a magic cloud about herself; and presently left Athens with young Medus, and an escort which Aegeus generously provided. But some say that she fled with Polyxenus, her son by Jason.

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 throne of Athens, broke into open revolt when this footloose stranger threatened to baulk their hopes of ever ruling Athens. They divided their forces: Pallas with twenty-five of his sons and numerous retainers marched against the city from the direction of Sphettus, while the other twenty-five lay in ambush at Gargettus. But Theseus, informed of their plan by a herald named Leos, of the Agnian clan, sprang the ambush destroyed and the entire force. Pallas thereupon disbanded his corners and sued for peace. The Pallantids have never forgotten Leos’s treachery, and still will not intermarry with the Agnians nor allow any herald to begin a proclamation with the words ‘Akouete leoi!’ (‘Hearken people!’), because of the resemblance which leoi bean to the name of Leos.

h. This Leos must be distinguished from the other Leos, Orpheus’s son, and ancestor of the Athenian Leontids. Once, in a time of plague, Leos obeyed the Delphic Oracle by sacrificing his daughters Theope, Praxithea, and Eubule to save the city. The Athenians made up the Leocorium in their honour.







p. 199
Theseus In Crete

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 through the streets of Athens, and up the steep slope of the Acropolis, where he sacrificed it to Athene, or to Apollo.

b. As he approached Marathon, Theseus had been hospitably entertained by a needy old spinster named Hecale, or Hecalene, who vowed ram to Zeus if he came back safely. But she died before his return, instituted the Hecalesian Rites, to honour her and Zeus Hecalius, which are still performed today. Because Theseus was no more than a child at this time, Hecale had caressed him with childish endearment, and is therefore commonly known by the diminutive Hecalene, as much as Hecale.

c. In requital for the death of Androgeus, Minos gave orders that the should send seven youths and seven maidens every ninth year—at the close of every Great Year—to the Cretan Labyrinth, where the Minotaur waited to devour them. This Minotaur, whose name was Asterius, or Asterion, was the bull-headed monster Pasiphaë had borne to the white bull. Soon after Theseus’s Athens the tribute fell due for the third time, and he so deeply moved by the fathers whose children were indicated by lot, that offered himself as one of the victims, despite Aegeus’s earnest dissuasion. But some say that the lot had fallen on him. According to others, King Minos came in person with a large fleet to elect victims; his eye lighted on Theseus who, though a native to Troezen not Athens, volunteered to come on the condition that if he killed the Minotaur with his bare hands the tribute would be annulled.

d. On the two previous occasions, the ship which conveyed the victims had carried black sails, but Theseus was confident that the gods were on his side, and Aegeus therefore gave him a white sail as a signal of success—though some say that it was a red in juice of the kern-oak berry.

e. When the lots had been cast at the Law Courts, Theseus led his companions to the shrine of Apollo the Dolphin, and 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, replaced two of the maiden victims with a pair of effeminate youths, of unusual courage and presence of mind. These he ordered to take warm baths, avoid the rays of the sun, perfume their heads and bodies with unguent oils, and practise how to talk, gesture, and walk like women. He was thus able to deceive Minos by passing off as maidens.

f. Phaeax, the ancestor of Phaeacians, among whom he were called Odysseus, stood as pilot at the prow of the thirty-yard ship in which they sailed, because no Athenian as yet knew anything about navigation. Some say that the helmsman was Phereclus; but those who name Nausitheus are likely to be right, since Theseus on his return raised monuments to Nausitheus and Phaeax at Phalerum, the port of departure; and initiated the Festival of Navigators, which is still celebrated in their honour.

g. The Delphic Oracle had advised Theseus to take Aphrodite as his guide and companion on the voyage. He therefore sacrificed to her on the strand; and the victim, a she-goat, became a he-goat death-throes. This prodigy won Aphrodite her title of Epitragia.

h. Theseus sailed on the sixth day of Munychion [April]. Every year on this date the Athenians still send virgins to the Dolphin Temple, to propitiate Apollo, because Theseus omitted to do so before taking his leave. The god’s displeasure was shown in a storm, which forced him to take shelter at Delphi and there offer belated sacrifice

i. When the ship reached Crete some days afterwards, Minos came down to the harbour to count the victims. Falling in love with one the Athenian maidens-whether it was Periboea (who became mother of Ajax) or Eriboea, or Phereboea, is not agreed, for these three bore confusingly similar names—he would have ravished her then there, had Theseus not protested that it was his duty as Poseidon’s son to defend virgins against outrage by tyrants. Minos, laughing lewdly replied that Poseidon had never been known to show delicate respect for any virgins who took his fancy.

j. ‘Ha!’ he cried, ‘prove yourself a son of Poseidon, by retrieving bauble for me!’ So saying, he flung his golden signet ring into the sea. ‘First prove that you are a son of Zeus’ retorted Theseus. This Minos did. His prayer: ‘Father Zeus, hear me!’ was at once answered by lightning and a rap of thunder. Without more ado Theseus dived into the sea, where a large school of dolphins escorted him honourably down to the palace of the Nereids. Some say that Thetis the Nereid then gave him the jewelled crown, the wedding gift from Aphrodite, which afterwards Ariadne wore; others, that Amphitrite the Sea-goddess did so herself, and that she sent the Nereids swimming in every direction to find the golden ring. At all events, when Theseus emerged from the sea, he was carrying both the ring and the crown, as Micon has recorded in his painting on the third wall of Theseus’s temple.

k. Aphrodite had indeed accompanied Theseus: for not only did Periboea and Phereboea invite the chivalrous Theseus to their beds and were not spurned, but Minos’s own daughter Ariadne fell in love with him at first sight. ‘I will help you to kill my half-brother, the Minotaur,’ she secretly promised him, ‘if I may return to Athens with you as your wife.’ This offer Theseus gladly accepted, and married her. Now, before Daedalus left Crete, he had given her 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, diminishing as it went and making, with devious turns and twists, for the corners where the Minotaur was lodged. This ball Ariadne gave to Theseus and instructed him to follow it until he reached the sleeping monster, whom he must seize by the hair and sacrifice to Poseidon. He then can come back by rolling up the thread into a ball again.

l. 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 hands, or with his celebrated club, is much disputed. A sculptured at Amyclae shows the Minotaur bound and led in triumph by Theseus to Athens; but this is not the generally-accepted story.

m. When Theseus emerged from the Labyrinth, spotted with blood, Ariadne embraced him passionately, and guided the whole Athenian group to the harbour. For, in the meantime, the two effeminate-looking youths had killed the guards of the women’s quarters, and released the virgin victims. They all stole aboard their ship, where Nausitheus and Phaeax were expecting them, and rowed hastily away. But although Theseus broke in the hulls of several Cretan ships, to prevent the persecution, alarm sounded and he was forced to fight a sea-battle in the port before escaping, fortunately without loss, under cover of darkness.

n. Some days later, after disembarking on the island then named Dia, but now known as Naxos, Theseus left Ariadne asleep on the beach and sailed away. Why he did so must remain a mystery. Some say that he deserted her in favour of a new mistress, Aegle, daughter of Panopeus; others that, while wind-bound on Dia, he reflected on the scandal at Athens would cause. Others again say that Dionysus, appearing to Theseus in a dream, threateningly demanded Ariadne for himself, and that, when Theseus noticed Dionysus’s fleet bearing down on Dia, he weighed anchor in sudden terror; Dionysus having cast a spell which made him forget his promise to Ariadne and even her very existence.

o. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, Dionysus’s priests in Athens affirm that when Ariadne found herself alone on the deserted shore, she broke into bitter laments, remembering how she has trembled while Theseus set out to kill her monstrous half-brother, how she had offered silent vows for his success; and how, through her love of him, she had deserted her parents and motherland. She now invoked the whole universe for vengeance, and Father Zeus nodded in assent. Then, gently and sweetly, Dionysus with his merry train of satyrs and maenads came to Ariadne’s rescue. He married her without delay, setting Thetis’s crown upon her head, and she bore him many children. Of these only Thoas and Oenopion are sometimes called Theseus’s sons. The crown, which Dionysus later set among the stars as the Corona Borealis, was made by Hephaestus off fiery gold and Indian gems, set in the shape of roses.

p. The Cretans, however, refuse to admit that the Minotaur ever existed, or that Theseus won Ariadne by clandestine means. They describe the Labyrinth as merely a well-guarded prison, where Athenian youths and maidens were kept in readiness for Androgeus funeral games. Some were sacrificed at his tomb; others presented to the prizewinners as slaves. It happened that Minos’s cruel and arrogant general Taurus had carried all before him, year after year: winning every event in which he competed, much to the disgust of his rivals. He had also forfeited Minos’s confidence because he was rumoured to be carrying on an adulterous affair with Pasiphaë, connived at by Daedalus, and one of her twin sons bore a close resemblance to him. Minos therefore, gladly granted Theseus’s request for the privilege of fighting against Taurus. In ancient Crete, women as well as men attended the games, and Ariadne fell in love with Theseus when, three time succession, she saw him toss the former champion over his head, pinning his shoulders to the ground. The sight afforded Minos almost satisfaction: he awarded Theseus the prize, accepted him as his son law, and remitted the cruel tribute.

q. A traditional Boeotian song confirms this tradition that none of the victims were put to death. It records that the Cretans sent an offering of their first-born to Delphi, for the most part children of Crethanised Athenian slaves. The Delphians, however, could not support these from the resources of their small city, and therefore packed them off to found a colony at Iapygia in Italy. Later, they settled at Boeotia in Thrace, and the nostalgic cry raised by the Boeotian maidens: ‘Oh, let us return to Athens!’, gives a constant render of their origin.

r. An altogether different account is given by the Cypriots and others. They say that Minos and Theseus agreed on oath that no ship except the Argo, commanded by Jason, who had a commission to clear the 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.

s. After long feasting 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 Amathus. 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 Amathus treated Ariadne kindly, comforting her with letters which, they pretended, had just arrived from Theseus, who was repairing his ship on the shores of a neighbouring island; and when she died in childbed, gave her a lavish funeral. Ariadne’s tomb is 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 profaned his Naydan grotto, and complained to Artemis, who killed her in childbed with merciless shafts; but some say that she hanged herself for fear of Artemis.

t. 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 of crowning 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.

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 enclosing 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. 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, keep up much 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.

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, swooned, 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.

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 Aegeus, and honoured him with a hero-shrine. 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 filled 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.

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 trader took to supply the needful sacrifices; and Theseus awarded his priesthood to the Phytalids, 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 over, hauled and refuted that philosophers cite it as a stock instance, when discussing the problem of continuous identity.




p. 206
The federalization Of Attica

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 purified of their blood at Troezen, where his son Hippolytus now reigned as king, and spent a whole year there. On his return, 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 communities were to relinquish their independence, Theseus must approach each clan 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-chief and supreme judge. Those who remained unconvinced by the arguments he used respected his strength at least.

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 City 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 Springs. The Athenians still call the Acropolis ‘the City’.

d. He named the sixteenth day of Hecatomboeon [July] ‘Federation Day’, and made it a public festival in honour of Athene, when a bloodless sacrifice is also offered to Peace. By renaming the Athenian Games celebrated on this day to ‘All-Athenian’, he opened it to the whole Attica; and also introduced the worship of Federal Aphrodite and of Persuasion. Then, resigning the throne, as he had promised, he gained Attica its new constitution, and under the best of auspices: for Delphic Oracle prophesied that Athens would now ride the stormy 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, or ‘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. 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 continued to reign as before and that, after the death of King Menestheus, who led the Athenians against Troy, his dynasty persisted for three generations. 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 and summoned Peloponnesian delegates to the Isthmus, upon them to settle a long-standing frontier dispute with neighbouring Ionians. At a place agreed by both parties, he raised the famous column with inscription on its eastern side: ‘This is not the Peloponnese but Ionia!’, and on the western: ‘This is not Ionia, but the Peloponnese!’ 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 him.




p. 208
Theseus And The Amazons

SOME say that Theseus took part in Heracles’s successful expedition against the Amazons, and received as his share of the booty their queen Antiope, 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.

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 Antiope as his guest. They add that among his companions were three Athenian brothers, Euneus, Thoas, and Soloön, the last of whom fell in love with Antiope but, not daring to approach her directly, asked Euneus to plead his cause. Antiope rejected these advances, though continuing to treat Soloön no less civilly than before, 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 greatly afflicted in a strange country, he must found a city and leave behind some of his companions to govern it, he built Pythopolis, in honour of Pythian Apollo, and named the near-by river Soloön. 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.

c. Antiope’s sister Oreithyia, mistaken by some for Hippolyte, whose 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.

d. The Athenian forces were already marshalled, 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.

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 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, settled in Scythia.

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 battle were sent to Chalcis to be cured. Antiope and Molpadia 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 Cynoscephalae; a few more, near Chaeronaea by the river Haemon. In the Pyrrhichan region of Laconia, shrines mark the place where the Amazons halted their advance and dedicated two wooden images 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.

g. According to one account, the Amazons entered Thrace by way of Phrygia, not Scythia, and founded the sanctuary of Ephesian Artemis as they marched along the coast. According to another, they had taken refuge in this sanctuary on two earlier occasions: namely in their flight 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 Delphic Oracle had foretold, when he entered into an alliance with King Deucalion the Cretan, and married his sister Phaedra. The jealous Antiope, who was not his legal wife, interrupted the wedding festivities by bursting 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 Demophoön, and never lain with another man.




p. 210
Phaedra And Hippolytus

AFTER 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 Demophoön, Phaedra’s sons, to reign over Athens.

b. Hippolytus, who had inherited his 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.

c. 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 a jewelled 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.

d. 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 officiously implored her to send Hippolytus a letter. This 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: witness my grandmother Europe, my mother Pasiphaë, 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 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 hunting 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.’

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.

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!’

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 of 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 twinkling 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 certain, though, she commanded the Troezenians to pay Hippolytus divine honours, and all Troezenian brides henceforth to cut off a 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 offered him his annual sacrifice. Both Phaedra’s and Hippolytus tombs, the latter a mound of earth, are shown in the enclosure of the 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 gods set him among the stars as the Charioteer.

j. The Athenians raised a barrow in Hippolytus’s memory, close to the Temple of Themis, because his death had been brought about by bad curses. Some say that Theseus, accused of his murder, was found guilty, ostracized, and banished to Scyros, where he ended his life in shame and grief. But his downfall is more generally believed to have been cause by an attempted rape of Persephone.

k. Hippolytus’s ghost descended to Tartarus, and Artemis, in big indignation, begged Asclepius to revive his corpse. Asclepius opened the doors of his ivory medicine cabinet and took out the herb with which Cretan Glaucus had been revived. With it he thrice touched Hippolytus’s breast, repeating certain charms, and at the third touch the dead man raised his head from the ground. But Hades and the Three Fates, scandalized by this breach of privilege, persuaded Zeus kill Asclepius with a thunderbolt.

l. The Latins relate that Artemis then wrapped Hippolytus in a thick cloud, disguised him as an aged man, and changed his features. After hesitating between Crete and Delos as suitable places of concealment, she brought him to her sacred grove at Italian Aricia. There with her consent, he married the nymph Egeria, and he still lives beside the lake among dark oak-woods, surrounded by sheer precipices. As he should be reminded of his death, Artemis changed his name Virbius, which means vir bis, or ‘twice a man’; and no horses are allowed in the vicinity. The priesthood of Arician Artemis is only to runaway slaves. In her grove grows an ancient oak-tree, the branches of which may not be broken, but if a slave dares do so 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 remain with him at Athens, but he refused.

m. A tablet in Asclepius’s Epidaurian sanctuary records that Hippolytus dedicated twenty horses to him, in gratitude for having been revived.




p. 212
Lapiths And Centaurs

SOME say that Peirithous the Lapith was the son of Ixion and Dia, daughter of Dioneus; others, that he was the son of Zeus who, disguised as a stallion, coursed around Dia before seducing her.

b. Almost incredible reports of Theseus’s strength and valour had reached Peirithous, who ruled over the Magnetes, at the mound of 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 Marathon. 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 nobility of appearance that the cattle were forgotten, and they swore an oath of everlasting friendship.

c. Peirithous married Hippodameia, or Deidameia, daughter of Butes—or, some say, of Adrastus—and invited all the Olympians to his wedding, except Ares and Eris; he remembered the mischief which Eris had caused at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Since more guests 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, when they smelled its fragrance, pushed away the sour milk which was set before them, and ran to fill their silver horns from the wine-skins. In their ignorance they swilled the strong liquor unmixed with water, becoming so drunk that when the bride was escorted into the cavern to greet them, Eurytus, or Eurytion, leaped from his stool, overturned the table, and dragged her away by the hair. At once the other Centaurs followed his disgraceful example, lecherously straddling the nearest women and boys.

e. Peirithous and his paranymph Theseus sprang to Hippodameia’s rescue, cut off Eurytion’s ears and nose and, with the help of the Lapiths, threw him out of the cavern. The ensuring fight, in the course of which Caeneus the Lapith was killed, lasted until nightfall; and thus began the long feud between the Centaurs and their Lapith neighbours, engineered by Ares and Eris in revenge for the slight offered them.

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 kingdom with Peirithous, and who now, rallying their forces, invaded Lapith territory. They surprised and slaughtered the main Lapith army, and when the survivors fled to Pholoë in Elis, the vengeful Centaurs expulsed them and converted Pholoë into a bandit stronghold of their own. Finally the Lapiths settled in Malea.

g. It was during Theseus’s campaign against the Centaurs that he met Heracles again, for the first time since his childhood; and presently initiated him into the Mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis.




p. 213
Theseus in Tartarus

AFTER Hippodameia’s death Peirithous persuaded Theseus, whose wife Phaedra had recently hanged herself, to visit Sparta in Iris company and carry away Helen, a sister of Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, with whom they were both ambitious to be connected by marriage. Where the sanctuary of Serapis now stands at Athens, they swore to stand by each other in this perilous enterprise; to draw lots for Helen when they had won her; and then to carry off another of Zeus’s daughters for the loser, whatever the danger might be.

b. This decided, they led an army into Lacedaemon; then, riding 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 where, as had been agreed, lots were drawn for Helen; and Theseus proved the winner. 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 nubile—being 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 Idas and Lynceus who stole Helen, and then entrusted her to the protection of Theseus, in revenge for the Dioscuri’s abduction of the Leucippides. Others record that Helen’s father Tyndareus himself entrusted her to Theseus, on learning that his nephew Enarephorus, son of Hippocoön, was planning to abduct her.

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 response 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 Cerberus’s teeth, while Hades looked on, smiling grimly.

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 to release the evil-doers and take them back to the upper air, if he could. Heracles thereupon grasped Theseus by both hands and heaved with gigantic strength until, with a rending noise, he was torn 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.

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 Peirithous 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.




p. 215
The Death Of Theseus

DURING Theseus’s absence in Tartarus the Dioscuri assembled an army of Laconians and Arcadians, marched against Athens, and demanded the return of Helen. When the Athenians denied that they were sheltering her, or had the least notion where she might be, the Dioscuri proceeded to ravage Attica, until the inhabitants of Decelia, 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 entitled to seats of honour at Spartan festivals—their lands alone were spared in the Peloponnesian War, when the invading Spartans laid Attica waste.

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 philosophers meet and express their irreligious views on the nature of the gods.

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 his men. Some say that it was he, not Marathon the father of Sicyon and Corinthus, who gave his name to the city of Marathon.

d. Now, Peteos son of Orneus and grandson 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 Athens. This Menestheus 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 religion, and had become subject to an adventurer of obscure origin who, however, had now vacated the throne and was rumoured dead.

e. When Aphidnae fell, and Athens was in danger, Menestheus persuaded the people to welcome the Dioscuri into the city as their benefactors and deliverers. They did indeed behave most correctly, 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, Iphigeneia, and dedicated a sanctuary to Artemis in gratitude for her safe delivery.

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 tortures, and found Athens so sadly corrupted by faction and sedition that he was no longer able to maintain order. First smuggling his children out of the city to Euboea, where Elpenor son of Chalcodon sheltered them—but some say that they had fled there before his return—and then solemnly cursing the people of Athens from Mount Gargettus, he sailed for Crete, where Deucalion had promised to shelter him.

g. A storm blew his 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 fame and lineage. Theseus, who had inherited an estate on Scyros, asked permission to settle there. But Lycomedes had long regarded this estate as his own and, under the pretence of showing Theseus its boundaries, 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-prandial stroll.

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.

i. Theseus is said to have forcibly abducted Anaxo of Troezen; and to have lain with Iope, daughter of Tirynthian Iphicles. 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 continually 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 the 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 Gymnasium.

j. Theseus was a skilled lyre-player and has now become joint patron 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 Athenians was caused by his abduction of Helen, and the second by his refusal to surrender Heracles’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 cube of an even number, represents Poseidon’s unshakeable power.

p. 116

1. This myth consists of several strands. The Argives worshipped the moon as a cow, because the horned new moon was regarded as the source of all water, and therefore of cattle fodder. Her three colours: white for the new moon, red for the harvest moon, black for the moon when it waned, represented the three ages of the Moon-goddess—Maiden, Nymph, and Crone. Io changed her colour, as the moon changes, but for ‘red’ the mythographer substitutes ‘violet’ because ion is Greek for the violet flower. Woodpeckers were thought to be knocking for rain when they tapped on oak-trunks; and Io was the Moon as rain bringer. The herdsmen needed rain most pressingly in late summer when gadflies attacked their cattle and sent them frantic; in Africa cattle-owning Negro tribes still hurry from pasture to pasture when attacked by them. Io’s Argive priestesses seem to have performed annual heifer-dance in which they pretended to be driven mad by gadflies, while woodpecker-men, tapping on oak-doors and crying ‘Io! 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 cows. Argive colonies founded in Euboea, the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, Syria, and Egypt, took their rain-making dance with them. The wryneck, the Moon-goddess’s prime orgiastic bird, nests in willows and was therefore concerned with water-magic

2. The legend invented to account for the eastward spread of this ritual, as well as the similarity between the worship of Io in Greece, Isis in Egypt, Astarte in Syria, and Kali in India, has been grafted on the unrelated stories: that of the holy moon-cow wandering around the heavens, guarded by the stars—there is a cognate Irish legend of ‘Green Stripper’—and that of the Moon-priestesses whom the leaders of the invading Hellenes, each calling himself Zeus, violated to the dish of the local population. Hera, as Zeus’s wife, is then made to expand jealousy of Io, though Io was another name for ‘cow-eyed’ Hera. Demeter’s mourning for Persephone is recalled in the Argive festival of mourning for Io, since Io has been equated in the myth with Demeter. Moreover, every three years Demeter’s Mysteries were celebrated in 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 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). Faunus’s Cretan tomb bore the epitaph: ‘Here lies the woodpecker who was also Zeus’ (Suidas sub Picos). All three are rain-making shepherd-gods. Libya’s name denotes rain, and the winter rains came to Greece from the direction of Libya.

3. Zeus’s fathering 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 cattle-breeding 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.






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1. Phoroneus’s name, which the Greeks read as ‘bringer of a price’ in the sense that he invented markets, probably stands for Fearinus (‘of the dawn of the year’, i.e. the Spring); variants are Bran, Barn, Bergn, Vrot, Ephron, Gwern, Fearn, and Brennus. As the spirit of the alder-tree which presided over the fourth month in the sacred year, during which the Spring Fire Festival was celebrated, he was described as a son of Inachus, because alders grow by rivers. His mother is the ash-nymph Melia, because the ash, the preceding tree of the same series, is said to ‘court the flash’—lightning-struck trees were primitive man’s first source of fire. Being an oracular hero, he was also associated with the crow. Phoroneus’s discovery of the use of fire may be explained by the ancient smiths’ and potters’ preference for alder charcoal, which gives out more heat than any other. Cerdo (‘gain or ‘art’) is one of Demeter’s titles; it was applied to her as weasel, or vixen, for both are considered prophetic animals. ‘Phoroneus’ seems to have been title of Cronus, with whom the crow and the alder are also associated and therefore the Titan of the Seventh Day. The division of Phoroneus’s kingdom between his sons Pelasgus, Iasus, and Agenor recalls that of Cronus’s kingdom between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, 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 have derived his title from his Moon-mother Artemis Caria, or Caryatis.




p. 119
1. There are numerous confusing variations of the genealogy given above: for instance, Thasus is alternatively described as the son of Poseidon, Cilix (Apollodorus), or Tityus (Pindar: Pythian Odes). Agenor is the Phoenician hero Chnas, who appears in Genesis as ‘Canaan’; many Canaanite customs point to an East African provenience and the Canaanites may have originally come to Lower Egypt from Uganda. The dispersal of Agenor’s sons seems to record the westward flight of Canaanite tribes early in the second millennium BC, under pressure from Aryan and Semitic invaders.

2. The story of Inachus’s sons and their search for Io the moon-cow has influenced that of Agenor’s sons and their search of Europe. Phoenix is a masculine form of Phoenissa (‘the red, or bloody one’), a title given to the moon as goddess of Death-in-Life. Europe 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-ope 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, and is associated with witchcraft 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 triumphantly 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). Zeus’s seduction of Europe in eagle-disguise recalls his seduction of Hera in cuckoo-disguise; since (according to Hesychius) Hera bore the title ‘Europia’. Europe’s Cretan and Corinthian name was Hellotis, which suggests Helice (‘willow’); Helle, and Helen are the same divine character. Callimachus in his Epithalamion for Helen mentions that the plane-tree was also sacred to Helen. Its sanctity lay in its five-pointed leaves, representing the hand of the goddess, and its annual sloughing of bark; but Apollo borrowed it, as the God Esmun did Tanit’s (Neith’s) open-hand emblem.

4. It is possible that the story of Europe also commemorates a raid on Phoenicia by Hellenes from Crete. John Malalas will hardly have invented 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 captives, Europe among them; this event is still recalled in the annual “Evil Evening” observed at Tyre’ (Chronicles). Herodotus agrees with Malalas.

5. Tyrian Heracles, whom Theseus worshipped at Olympia, was the 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. 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. Jason’s crop of dragon’s teeth was probably sown at Iolcus or Corinth, not Colchis.

6. Troy and Antioch were also said to have been founded or selected by sacred cows. But it is less likely that this practice was literally carried out, than that the cow was turned loosely restricted part of a selected site and the temple of the Moon-goddess founded where she lay down. A cow’s strategic and commercial abilities are not highly developed.




p. 120
1. Cadmus’s marriage to Harmonia, in the presence of the Twelve Olympian deities, is paralleled by Peleus’s marriage to Thetis, and seems to record a general Hellenic recognition of the Cadmeian conquerors of Thebes, after they had been sponsored by the Athenians and decently initiated into the Samothracian Mysteries. His founding of Buthoë constitutes a claim by the Illyrians to be treated as Greeks, and therefore to take part in the Olympic Games. Cadmus will have had an oracle in Illyria, 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.












































p. 123
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 emigrants from Libya and Ethiopia, which seems probable. Belus is the Baal of the Old Testament, and the Bel of the Apocrypha; he had taken his 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 Moon-goddess Danaë. The names Linda, Cameira, and Ialysa seem to be worn-down forms of linodeousa (‘binder with linen thread’), catamerizousa (‘sharer out’), and ialemistria (‘wailing woman’); they are, in fact, the familiar Three Fates, or Moerae, otherwise known as Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, because they exercised very same functions. The Classical theory of the linen-thread was that the goddess tied the human being to the end of a carefully measured thread which she paid out yearly, until the time came for her to cut it and relinquish his soul to death. But originally she bound the wailing infant with a linen swaddling band on which his clan and family marks were embroidered and thus assigned him his destined place in society.

3. Danaë’s Sumerian name was Dam-kina. The Hebrews called her Dinah (Genesis), also masculinized as Dan. Fifty Moon-priestesses were the regular complement of a college, and their duty was to preserve the land watered by rain-making charms, irrigation, and well-digging; hence the Danaids’ name has been connected with the Greek word danos—‘parched’, and with danos—‘a gift’, the first of which is sometimes long and sometimes short. The twinship of Agenor and Belus, like that of Danaus and Aegyptus, points to a regal system at Argos, in which each co-king married a Chief-priestess and reigned for fifty lunar months, or Great Year. Chief-priestesses were chosen by a foot race (the origin of Olympic Games), run at the end of the fifty months, or of forty-nine in alternate years. And the New Year foot race at Olympia, Sparta, Jerusalem (Hooke: Origin of Early Semitic Rituals), and Babylon (Langdon: Epic of Creation) was run for the sacred kingship, as at Argos. A Sun-king must be quick.

4. The Hydra, destroyed by Heracles, seem to have personified this college of water-providing priestesses, and the myth of the Danaids apparently records two Hellenic attempts on their sanctuary, the first of which failed signally. After the second successful attempt, the Hellenic leader married the Chief-priestess and distributed the water-priestesses as wives among his chieftains. ‘The street called Apheta’ will have been the starting-point in the girls’ race for the office of Chief-priestess; but also used in the men’s foot race for the sacred kingship. Lynceus, a royal title in Messene too, means ‘of the lynx’—the caracal, a sort of lion, famous for its sharp sight..

5. ‘Aegyptus’ and ‘Danaus’ seem to have been early titles of Argive co—kings; and since it was a widespread custom to bury the sacred king’s head at the approaches of a city, and thus protect it against invasion, the supposed heads of Aegyptus’s sons buried at Lerna are 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 matricide. 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. 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) 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, 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.





























































p. 124
1. Lamia was the Libyan Neith, the Love-and-Battle goddess, also named Anatha and Athene, whose worship the Achaeans suppressed; like Alphito of Arcadia, she ended as a nurse bogey. Her name, Lamia, seems to be akin to lamyros (‘gluttonous’), from laimos (‘gullet’)—thus, of a woman: ‘lecherous’; and her ugly face is the prophylactic Gorgon mask worn by her priestesses during their Mysteries, of which infanticide was an integral part. Lamia’s removable eyes are perhaps deduced from a picture of the goddess about to bestow mystic sight on a hero by proffering him an eye. The Empusae were incubae.






p. 125
1. Nemesis was the Moon-goddess as Nymph 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. 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. 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 of the Moon-goddess, whose identity with Lucian’s Syrian goddess is emphasized by Hyginus. But Hyginus’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 dove. She herself rose from the Void. Helen had two temples near Sparta: one at Therapnae, built on a Mycenaean site; another at Dendra, connected with a tree cult, as her Rhodian shrine also was. Pollux mentions a Spartan festival called the Helenephoria, closely resembling Athene’s Thesmophoria at Athens, 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. 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.




p. 126
1. Ixion’s name, formed from ischys (‘strength’) and io (‘moon’), also suggests ixias (‘mistletoe’). As an oak-king with mistletoe genitals, representing the thunder-god, he ritually married the rain-making Moon-goddess; and was then scourged, so that his blood and sperm would fructify the earth, 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.

2. The Moon-goddess of the oak cult was known as Dia (‘of the sky’), a title of the Dodonian Oak-goddess, and therefore of Zeus’s wife Hera. That old-fashioned kings called themselves Zeus 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 fire-wheel, with mushroom tinder at his feet; elsewhere, he is bound in the same ‘five-fold bond’ with which the Irish hero Curoi tied Cuchulain—bent backwards into a hoop (Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana), 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.

3. Horses were sacred to the moon, and hobby-horse dances, designed to make rain fall, have apparently given rise to the legend that the Centaurs were half horse, half man. The earliest Greek representation of Centaurs—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 in Crete, the motif has evidently been imported from the mainland. In archaic art, the satyrs were also pictured as hobby-horse 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.




p. 126
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. 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).

2. The name Endymion, from endeuein (Latin: inducere), refers to the Moon’s seduction of the king, as though she were one of the Empusae; but the ancients explain it as referring to somnum ei inductum, ‘the sleep put upon him’.

3. Aetolus, like Pelops, will have driven his chariot around the Olympian stadium in impersonation of the sun; 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 king’s surrogate died. But the foot race won by Epeius (‘successor’) was the earlier event. 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.

4. Apis is the noun formed from apios, a Homeric adjective usually meaning ‘far off’ but, when applied to the Peloponnese (Aeschylus: Suppliants), ‘of the pear-tree’.




p. 127
1. Pygmalion, married to Aphrodite’s priestess at Paphos, seems to have kept the goddess’s white cult-image 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 patrilineal system on the Cypriots. But it is more likely that, like his grandson Cinyras, 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 of Aphrodite’s priestesses—technically his daughter, since she was heiress to the throne—who is called Metharme (‘change’), to mark the innovation.




p. 129
1. Asopus’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 of Phlius, a city at the head waters of the Asopus; and an unsuccessful appeal made by their neighbours for military aid from Corinth. Eurynome and Tethys, the names of Asopus’s mother, were ancient titles of the Moon-goddess, and ‘Pero’ points to pera, a leather bag, and thus to Athene’s goat-skin aegis—as ‘Aegina’ also does.

2. The Aeacus myth concerns the conquest of Aegina by Phthiotian 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 reasonable explanations of myths, but seldom looked far enough, the soil of Aegina was covered by a layer of stones, and the Aeginetans called themselves Myrmidons because, like ants, they had to excavate before they could fill their fields, and because they were troglodytes (Strabo). But the Thessalian legend of Myrmex is a simple myth of origin: the Phthiotian Myrmidons claimed 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.

3. The Phthiotian colonists of Aegina later merged their myths with those of Achaean invaders from Phlius on the fiver Asopus; and, since these Phthians had retained their allegiance to the oak-oracle of Dodona, the ants are described as filling from a tree, instead of emerging from the ground.

4. In the original myth, Aeacus will have induced the rain-storm not by an appeal to Zeus, but by some such magic as Salmoneus used. His law-giving 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 Aeginetan talent as the standard weight of precious metal. It was of Cretan origin and turned the scales at 100 lb.










































































p. 131
1. ‘Sisyphus’, though the Greeks understood it to mean ‘very wise’, is spelled 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, whose sacred animal was a bull. Bronze statuettes and reliefs of this bull, dating from the fourteenth century BC, 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, so also did Alcyoneus, and his contemporary, Heracles. But Autolycus’s use of magic in his theft from Sisyphus recalls the story of Jacob and Laban (Genesis). Jacob, like Autolycus, had the gift of turning cattle to whatever colour he wanted, and thus diminished Laban’s flocks. The cultural connection between Corinth and Canaan, which is shown in the myths of Nisus, Oedipus, Alcathous, and Melicertes, 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 familiar enough icon. The existence of a Corinthian Sun cult is well established: Helius and Aphrodite are said to have held the acropolis in succession, and shared a temple there (Pausanias). 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, and the Sun-god demanded human burnt sacrifices to inaugurate his year. Anticleia’s seduction has been deduced perhaps from a picture showing Helius’s marriage to Aphrodite; and the mythographer’s hostility towards Sisyphus voices Hellenic disgust at the strategic planting of non-Hellenic settlements on the narrow isthmus separating the Peloponnese from Attica. His outwitting of Hades probably refers to a sacred king’s refusal to abdicate at the end of his reign. 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, is the masculine form of Hypsipyle: a title, probably, of the Moon-goddess.

3. Sisyphus and Neleus were probably buried at strategic points on the Isthmus as a charm against invasion. A lacuna occurs in Hyginus’s account of Sisyphus’s revenge on Salmoneus; I hay supplied a passage which makes sense of the story.

4. Peirene, the spring on the citadel of Corinth where Bellerophon took Pegasus to drink, had no emanation and never failed. Peirene was also the name of a fountain outside the city gate, on the way from the market-place to Lechaeum, where Peirene (‘of the osiers’)—whom the mythographers describe as the daughter of Achelous, or of Oebalus; or of Asopus and Merope (Diodorus Siculus)—was said to have been turned into a spring when she wept for her son Cenchrias (‘spotted serpent’); whom Artemis had unwittingly killed. ‘Corinthian bronze’ took characteristic colour from being plunged red-hot into this spring.

5. One of the seven Pleiads disappeared in early Classical times, and her absence had to be explained.

6. A question remains: was the double-S really the monogram Sisyphus. The icon illustrating the myth probably showed him examining the tracks of the stolen sheep and cattle which, since they ‘parted hoof’, were formalized as C. This sign stood for SS in the earlier Greek script, and could also be read as the conjoined halves of the lunar month and all that these implied—waxing and waning, increase an decline, blessing and cursing. Beasts which ‘parted the hoof’ were self-dedicated to the Moon—they are the sacrifices ordained at the Moon Festivals in Leviticus—and the SS will therefore have referred to Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite, rather than to Sisyphus, who as sun-king merely held her sacred herd in trust. The figure CC representing the full moon (as distinguished from O, representing the simple sun-disk) was marked on each flank of the sacred cow which directed Cadmus to the site of Thebes.
































p. 133
1. Antigonus of Carystus (Account of Marvellous Things) recounts that a rain-bringing bronze wagon was kept at Crannon: whirl of drought the people drove over rough ground to shake it and give sound—and also (as Crannonian coins show) to splash about the water from the jars which it contained. Rain always came, according to Antigonus. Thus Salmoneus’s charm for inducing thunderstorms have been common religious practice: like rattling pebbles in a dry jar, 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 Achaean authority. To judge from the Danaids’ sieves and the Argive cow dance, rain-making was originally female prerogative—as it remains among certain primitive African tribes—the Hereros and the Damaras—but passed into the sacred king when the Queen permitted him to act as her deputy.

2. Tyro was the Goddess-mother of the Tyrians and Tyrrhenians, or Tyrsenians, and perhaps also of the Tirynthians; hers is probably a pre-Hellenic name, but supplied Greek with the word tyrsis (‘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; 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, 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; Antiope was also connected by marriage with Sisyphus.

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 the 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 forty-nine or fifty months in the same kingdom.

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. In Palestine horned altars, like that to which Joab clung (Kings.), survived the dethronement of the Moon-cow and her golden Calf.

















p. 134
1. The yoking of a lion and a wild boar to the same chariot is the theme of a Theban myth, 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 and Acrisius eventually did at Argos, rather than keep it entire, and rule alternately—as Polyneices and Eteocles did at Thebes. A fruit of the race-course in a chariot was a proof of royalty.

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 and Polyxena, grew from the Indo-European custom which forbade widows to remarry; once this ban was relaxed, suttee became less attractive.

3. 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. Wild-olive served in Greece to expel evil influences; as the birch did in Italy and northern Europe.


























p. 137
1. 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 Pelion, 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), and the rite still survives there today in the mock-sacrifice and resurrection of an old man who wears a black sheep’s mask. 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, Cretheis and Peleus, Phaedra and Hippolytus, Phylonome and Tenes.

3. That Nephele (‘cloud’) was Hera’s gift to Athamas and created in her own image, suggests that in the original version Athamas the Aeolian king himself represented the thunder-god, like his predecessor Ixion, and his brother Salmoneus; and that, when he married Themisto (who, in Euripides’s version of the myth, is Ino’s rival), she took the part of the thunder-god’s wife.

4. Ino was Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess ‘, and proved her identity with the Triple Muse by revelling on Mount Parnassus. Her name (‘she who makes sinewy’) suggests ithyphallic orgies, and the sturdy growl of corn; boys will have been bloodily sacrificed to her before eve of winter sowing. Zeus is himself credited with having defied Ino in gratitude for her kindness to Dionysus, and Athamas bears an agricultural name in her honour; in other words, the Ionian farmers settled the religious differences with the Aeolian shepherds to their own advantage.

5. The myth, however, is a medley of early cult elements. The sacramental Zagreus cult, which became that of Dionysus the Kid is suggested when Athamas takes Ino for a she-goat; the sacrament Actaeon cult is suggested when he takes Learchus for a stag, shoots and tears him in pieces. Ino’s younger son Melicertes is the Canaanite Heracles Melkarth (‘protector of the city’), alias Moloch as the new-born solar king, comes riding on dolphin-back towards the isthmus; and whose death, at the close of his four years’ reign, was celebrated at the Isthmian Funeral Games. Infants were sacrificed to Melicertes on the Island of Tenedos, and probably also at Corinth, as they were to Moloch at Jerusalem (Leviticus and Kings).

6. Only when Zeus became god of the clear sky and usurped the goddess’s solar attributes did the fleece become golden—thus the First Vatican Mythographer says that it was ‘the fleece in which Zeus ascended the sky’—but while he was inducer of the thunderstorm it had been purple-black (Simonides).

7. In one version of the myth (Hippias: Fragment, Ino is called Gorgopis (‘grim-faced’), a title of Athene’s; and savage Sciron who hurled travellers over the cliff, took his name from the white parasol, or more properly a paralune—carried in Athene’s processions. The Molurian Rock was evidently the cliff from which the sacred king, or his surrogates, were thrown into the sea in honour of the Moon-goddess Athene, or Ino, while parasol being apparently used to break the fall.

8. Helle’s drowning parallels Ino’s. Both are Moon-goddesses, and the 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 the junction of two seas, Ino-Leucothea appeared to Odysseus in the guise a seamew and rescued him from drowning.

9. Athamas’s tribe is more likely to have migrated from Boeotian Mount Laphystium and Athamania to Thessalian Mount Laphystius and Athamania, than contrariwise; he had a strong connection 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). 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 (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius) and allied him with Corinth against the intervening states of Athens and Thebes. The probable reason for the Athamanians’ northward wanderings into Thessaly was the disastrous war fought between Orchomenus and Thebes, recorded in the Heracles cycle. 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); the alleged origin of the Agrionia festival at Orchomenus.
















































p. 138
1. The myths of Lycurgus and Diomedes suggest that the pre-Hellenic sacred king was torn 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, Laius, Oenomaus, Abderus, Hector, 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, 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 chariot’s tail—as in the myths of Phaëthon and Hippolytus. The King was then reinstalled on his throne.

2. The myth of Glaucus is unusual: he is not only involved in a chariot-wreck, 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.

3. The Taraxippus seems to have been an archaic royal statue, marking the first turn of the race-course; horses new to the stadium were distracted 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.

4. Glaucus (‘grey-green’) is likely to have been in one sense the Minoan representative who visited the Isthmus with the annual edicts; and in another Melicertes (Melkarth, ‘guardian of the city’), a Phoenician title of the King of Corinth, who theoretically arrived every year, new-born, on dolphin-back, and was flung into the sea when his reign ended.




p. 141
1. It was a common claim of wizards that their ears had been licked by serpents, which were held to be incarnate spirits of oracular heroes (The Language of Animals by J. R. Frazer, Archaeological Review) and that they were thus enabled to understand the language of birds and insects. Apollo’s priests appear to have been more than usually astute in claiming to prophesy by this means.

2. Iphiclus’s disability is factual rather than mythical: the rust of the gelding-knife would be an appropriate psychological cure for impotency caused by a sudden fright, and in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic. Apollodorus describes the tree, into which the knife was thrust as an oak, but it is more likely to have been the wild pear-tree, sacred to the White Goddess of the Peloponnese, which fruit in May, the month of enforced chastity; Phylacus had insulted the goddess by wounding her tree. The wizard’s claim to have been told of the treatment by vultures—important birds in augury—would strengthen the belief in its efficacy. Pero’s name has been interpreted as meaning ‘maimed or deficient’, a reference to Iphiclus’s disability, which is the main point of the story, rather than as meaning ‘leather bag’, a reference to her control of the winds.

3. It appears that ‘Melampus’, a leader of Aeolians from Pylus, seized part of Argolis from the Canaanite settlers who called themselves Son of Abas (the Semitic word for ‘father’), namely the god Melkarth, and instituted a double kingdom. His winning of the cattle from Phylacus (‘guardian’), who has an unsleeping dog, recalls Heracles’ Tenth Labour, and the myth is similarly based on the Hellenic custom of buying a bride with the proceeds of a cattle raid.

4. ‘Proetus’ seems to be another name for Ophion, the Demiurg. The mother of his daughters was Stheneboea, the Moon-goddess as cow—namely Io, who was maddened in much the same way—and their names are titles of the same goddess in her destructive capacity as Lamia, and as Hippolyte, whose wild mares tore the sacred king to pieces at the end of his reign. But the orgy for which the Moon-priestesses dressed as mares, should be distinguished from the rain-making gadfly dance for which they dressed as heifers; 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. The Aeolians’ capture of the goddess’s shrine at Lusi, recorded here in mythic form, would have put an end to the wild-mare orgies; Demeter’s rape by Poseidon records the same event. Libations poured to the Serpent-goddess in an Arcadian shrine between Sicyon and Lusi may account for the story of Iphinoë’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 earlier, 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 Tridaria (‘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 from Troy (Pausanias).

6. Melamopodes (‘black feet’), is a common Classical name for the Egyptians; and these stories of how Melampus understood what birds or insects were saying are likely to be of African, not Aeolian, origin.






























































p. 145
1. 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 tanist for the rest of the year, each reigned in turn for forty-nine or fifty months—namely half a Great Year. This kingdom was later, it seems, divided in halves, with co-kings ruling 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; and Pharez and Zarah, both of whom quarrel for precedence in the womb, like Acrisius and Proetus. In the 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 Gasterocheires (‘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, 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 Danaë, Perseus, and the ark seems related to that of Isis, Osiris, Set, and the Child Horus. In the earliest version, Proetus is Perseus’s father, the Argive Osiris; Danaë 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, and in that of Rhoeo. But Danaë, imprisoned in the brazen dungeon, where she bears a child, is the subject of a familiar New Year icon; Zeus’s impregnation of Danaë with a shower of gold must refer to the ritual marriage of the Sun and the Moon, from which the New Year king was born. It can also be read as pastoral allegory: ‘water of gold’ for the Greek shepherd, and Zeus sends thunder-showers on the earth—Danaë. The name ‘Deicterion’ means that the Gorgon’s head was 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 of Bellerophon; when Cnossus fell about 1400 BC, 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; and the Gorgon-head is a prophylactic mask, worn by her priestesses to scare away the uninitiated, 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. 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 an 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; and according to Job, Rahab was the Sea. In the same icon, the jewelled, 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 Sea-goddess, 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. A Greek colony planted at Chemmis, apparently towards the end of the second millennium BC, identified Perseus with the god Chem, whose hieroglyph was a winged bird and a solar disk; and Herodotus emphasizes the connection between Danaë, 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 intoxicating mushroom of Dionysus, to whose worship he had been converted, read the Foreword to this revised edition.

9. The second, simpler version of 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, 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. 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, 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. 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’.








































































































p. 149
1. In order to allow the sacred king precedence over his tanist, he was usually described as the son of a god, by a mother on whom her husband subsequently tithered a mortal twin. Thus Heracles is Zeus’s son by Alcmene, but his twin Iphicles is the son of her husband Amphitryon, similar story is told both about the Dioscuri of Laconia, and about their rivals, Idas and Lynceus of Messenia. The perfect harmony existing between the twins themselves marks a new stage in the development of kingship, when the tanist acts as vizier and chief-of-staff, being nominally less powerful than the sacred king. Castor therefore, not Polydeuces, is the authority on war—he even instructs Heracles in militant arts, thus identifying himself with Iphicles—and Lynceus, not Idas, gifted with acute vision. But until the double-kingdom system had been evolved, the tanist was not regarded as immortal, nor granted the same posthumous status as his twin.

2. The Spartans were frequently at war with the Messenians and, in Classical times, had sufficient military power, and influence over the Delphic Oracle, to impose their twin heroes on the rest of Greece, as enjoying 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 Iphicles, or Idas and Lynceus, or Acrisius and Proetus—instead of merely Castor and Polydeuces, who were not even the only heroes privileged to ride 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 and Heracles; 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 moon-names, being, in fact, the Moon-goddess’s representatives; thus, in vase-paintings, 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 Moon-goddess 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 Mare-headed Mother was worshipped; thus establishing a claim to the surrounding region.

4. Similarly with Marpessa: apparently the Messenians made a raid on the Aetolians 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, worshippers 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 and the Heracles-Cyenus 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 after having offered seven annual surrogates to the goddess. His horses are sacrificed as a preliminary to the installation of the new king. The drowning of Evenus is probably misread: it shows Idas being purified before marriage and then riding off triumphantly in the Queen’s chariot. Yet these Pelasgian marriage rites have been combined in the story with the Hellenic custom of marriage by capture. The fatal cattle-raid may record a historical incident: a quarrel between the Messenians and Spartans about the sharing of spoil in a joint expedition against Arcadia.

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 of asafetida, the strong smell and taste of which made it valued as a condiment. The two Cyrenian merchants were obviously what they professed themselves 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 white blossom, and the most ancient image of the Death-goddess Hera, in the Heraeum at Mycenae, was made of pear-wood. Plutarch and Aelian mention the pear as a fruit peculiarly venerated at Argos and Tiryns; hence the Peloponnese was called Apia ‘of the pear-tree’. Athene, also a Death-goddess, had the name Oncë (‘pear-tree’) at her pear-sanctuary in Boeotia. The Dioscuri chose this tree for their perch in order to show that they were genuine heroes; moreover, the pear-tree forms fruit towards the end of May, when the sun is in the house of the Twins; and when the sailing season begins in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sparrows that follow the Dioscuri, when they appear in answer to sailors’ prayers, belong to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; Xuthus (‘sparrow’), the father of Aeolus, was an ancestor of the Dioscuri, who worshipped her.

7. In the Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri, it is not made clear whether Castor and Polydeuces are followed by sparrows or whether they come darting on ‘sparrowy wings’ through the upper air, to aid distressed sailors; but on Etruscan mirrors they are sometimes pictured as winged. Their symbol at Sparta, the docana, represented the two supporting pillars of a shrine; another symbol consisted of two amphora each entwined by a serpent—the serpents being the incarnate Dioscuri who came to eat food placed in the amphoras.

8. Gorgophone defied the Indo-European convention of suttee marrying again.




















































































p. 151
1. Anteia’s attempted seduction of Bellerophon has several Greek parallels, 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 Hittite building at Carchemish, was a symbol of the Great Goddess’s tripartite Sacred Year—lion for spring, goat for summer, serpent for winter. A damaged glass plaque found at Dendra near Mycenae shows her tussling with a lion, from the back of which emerges what appears to be a goat’s head; the tail is long and serpentine. Since the plaque dates from a period when the goddess was still supreme, this icon—paralleled in an 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 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 rain-making, 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. 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 Mountain-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, on whom he begot this same Moon-horse Arion; and of Medusa, on whom he begot Pegasus; which explains Poseidon’s intrusion into the story of Bellerophon. How Zeus humbled Bellerophon is a moral anecdote told to discourage revolt against the Olympian faith; Bellerophon, the dart-bearer, flying across the sky, is the same character as his grandfather Sisyphus, or Tesup, 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 Phaëthon.

4. Bellerophon’s enemies, the Solymians, were Children of Salma. Since all titles and capes beginning with the syllable salm 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.

5. Bellerophon’s retreat from the Xanthian women may have been deduced from an icon which showed the Wild Women maddened with hippomanes—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—closing in on the sacred king by the seashore at the end of his reign. Their skirts were hoisted, as in the erotic worship of Egyptian Apis (Diodorus Siculus), 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 of palominos; for wild mares had eaten Bellerophon’s father Glaucus by the seashore of Corinth. Yet this reformed myth retains a primitive element: the approach, naked women from the chieftain’s own clan, with whom intercourse was forbidden, would force him to retreat and hide his face, and in Irish legend this same ruse was employed against Cuchulain, when his fury could not otherwise be checked. The account of the Xanthian matrilineal reckoning of descent has been turned inside out: it was the Hellenes who, on the contrary, managed to enforce patrilineal reckoning on all Carians except the conservative Xanthians.

6. Cheimarrhus’s name is derived from chimaros, or chimaera (‘goat’); both his fiery nature and his ship with the lion figure-head and serpent stern have been introduced into Bellerophon’s story by some euhemerists to explain away the fire-breathing Chimaera. Mount Chimaera (‘goat mountain’) was also the name of an active volcano near Phaselis in Lycia (Pliny: Natural History), which accounts for the fierce breath.




p. 153
1. These two versions of the Dirce myth show how free the mythographers 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. Antiope, emerging joyfully out of her dungeon and followed by the scowling Dirce, recalls Core’s annual reappearance in Hecate’s company. She is called Antiope (‘confronting’) in this 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 mountain’ 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. 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 marrying the bull-king. 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 by the Moon-goddess: her sacred king and his tanist.

2. Amphion’s three-stringer lyre, with which he raised the walls of Lower Thebes—since Hermes was his employer, it can have had only three strings—was constructed to celebrate the Triple-goddess, who reigned in the air, on earth, and in the Underworld, and will have been 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.





































p. 154
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 Euripides and Apollodorus, which makes the best sense, is that she had seven and seven daughters. Since Niobe, in the Theban version of the myth was a grand-daughter of the Titan Atlas and, in the Argive version, daughter or mother of Phoroneus, also described as a Titan, and Pelasgus; and could claim to be the first mortal woman violated by Zeus, the myth may concern the defeat of the seven Titans and Titanesses by the Olympians. If so, it records the suppression of the calendar system prevailing in Pelasgian Greece, Palestine, Syria, and North-western Europe; which was based on a month divided into four weeks of seven days, each ruled by one of the seven planetary bodies. Amphion and his twelve children, in Homer’s version of the myth, perhaps stand for the thirteen months of this calendar. Mount Sipylus may have been the last home in Asia Minor of the Titan’s cult, as Thebes was in Greece. The statue of Niobe is a crag of roughly human shape, which seems to weep when the sun’s arrows strike its winter cap of snow, and the likeness is reinforced by a Hittite Goddess mother carved in rock on the same mountain and dating from perhaps the late fifteenth century BC. ‘Niobe’ probably means snowy—the b representing the v in the Latin nivis, or the ph in the Greek nipha. One of her daughters is called Chiade by Hyginus: a word which makes no sense in Greek, unless it be a worn-down form of chionos niphades, ‘snow-flakes’.

2. Parthenius (Love Stories) gives a different account of Niobe’s punishment: by Leto’s contrivance, Niobe’s father fell incestuously love with her and, when she repulsed him, burned her children to death; her husband was then mangled by a wild boar, and she threw herself from a rock. This story, confirmed by the scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women, is influenced by the myths of Cinyras, Smyrna and Adonis, and by the custom of burning children to the god Moloch.














p. 155
1. This myth has 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 may-pole 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 Aeolians 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-figured oil jar, 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; ‘Caenis” means ‘new’.

2. The variety of sandy-winged bird released from the effigy depends on the season at which the rite was performed. If spring, it may have been a cuckoo.




p. 156
1. Maera was the name given to Priam’s wife Hecabe, or Hecuba, after her transformation into a dog, and since Hecuba was really the three-headed Death-goddess Hecate, 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, 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 fertility goddess Ariadne or Helen were previously hung from fruit-trees. 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-circle 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 swinging 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.




p. 159
1. Greek physicians credited the marshmallow (althaia, from althainein, ‘to cure’) with healing virtue and, being the first spring flower from which bees suck honey, it had much the same mythic importance as ivy-blossom, the last. The Calydonian 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, 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, 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; it suggests the widespread custom of sacrificing a royal prince at the foundation of a city (I Kings). Meleager’s 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 meleagris, 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—which had a blue wattle, as opposed to the red-wattled 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 Lerians’ reputation for evil-living may have been due to their religious conservatism, like the Cretans’ reputation for lying.

4. She-bears were sacred to Artemis, and Atalanta’s race against Melanion is probably deduced from an icon which showed the doomed king, with the golden apples in his hand, 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.

5. 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)—is a problem of greater interest than Sir James 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.

6. Oeneus was not the only Hellenic king who withheld a sacrifice from Artemis. 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; and Oeneus may well have refused to be torn in pieces.
































































































p. 162
1. The myth of Aeacus, 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 full 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 of fifty seal-priestesses, dedicated to the Moon, which formed a proem to 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 Cape Sepias, a similar ritual was performed in Magnesia by a college of cuttle-fish priestesses—the cuttle-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. Peleus (‘muddy’) may have become the sacred king’s title after he had been anointed with sepia, since he is described as the son of Endeis, ‘the entangler’, a synonym for the cuttle-fish.

2. Acastus’s hunting party, the subsequent banquet, and the loss of 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 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. The myrtle behind which Peleus first met her, emblemized the last month of his predecessor’s reign; and therefore served as their rendezvous when his own reign ended. This myth seems to record a treaty-marriage, attended by representatives of twelve confederate tribes or clans, 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 Battayle 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-oak clan. Such an adoption will have implied a sacrificial horse-feast: which explains the wedding gift of Balius and Xanthus without a chariot for them to draw. The Centaurs of Magnesia and the Thessalians of Iolcus seem to have been bound by an exogamic alliance: 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. 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 of later mythographers. There is no reason to suppose that Peleus 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. Cychreus’s connection with the Eleusinian Mysteries and Telamon’s marriage to an Athenian princess became important when, in 620 BC, Athens and Megara disputed the possession of Salamis. The Spartans judged the case, and the Athenian ambassadors successfully based their claim on Telamon’s connection with Attica (Plutarch: Solon).

7. Phocus’s death by the discus, like that of Acrisius, seems to be a misinterpretation of an icon which showed the end of the seal-king’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.

8. The burning of Thetis’s sons was common practice: the yearly sacrifice of boy surrogates for the sacred king. At the close of the eighth year the king himself died. A parallel in the Indian Mahabharata is the drowning by the Ganges-goddess 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 of Proetus: the sacred king, instead of letting himself be sacrificed when his reign was due to end, retailed 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’). Antoninus Liberalis’s story of Thetis and the wolf seems to have been deduced from an icon which showed a priestess of Wolfish Aphrodite (Pausanias) wearing a Gorgon mask as she sacrifices cattle.






























































































p. 165
1. Aristaeus’s origins have been embroidered upon by Pindar, to flatter a descendant of Battus who, in 691 BC led a colony from Thera to Libya, where he founded Cyrene, and was the first king of a long dynasty. The Cyreneans claimed their ancestor Aristaeus—according to Justin, Battus (‘tongue-tied’) was only his nickname as the son of Apollo, 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 of a Magnesian horse cult imported to Thera; for Cheiron’s name also appears in early Theran rock inscriptions. The myth of Idmon’s birth from Cyrene and Ares refers to this earlier goddess.

2. Myrtle is originally a death-tree, and the Myrtle-nymphs were therefore prophetesses capable of instructing young Aristaeus; but it became symbolic of colonization, because emigrants took myrtle boughs with them to demonstrate that they had ended an epoch.

3. Aristaeus was a cult-title of Arcadian and Cean Zeus; and elsewhere of Apollo and Hermes. According to Servius Hesiod called Aristaeus ‘a pastoral Apollo’. At Tanagra in Boeotia (Pausanias) Hermes was known as ‘Ram-bearer’, and fish were sacred to him at Pharae in Achaea (Pausanias). Thus a tomb-painting at Cyrene shows ‘Aristaeus’ surrounded by sheep and fish and carrying a ram. His wanderings are offered in explanation of the cult—title Aristaeus, which occurs in Sicily, Sardinia, Ceos, Boeotia, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Arcadia. The Dog-star is the Egyptian god Thoth, identified 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 tussling amorously with a lion, while a bee hovers above the carcass of another lion. 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 predecessor, which appears as a bee. This is spring-time, when bees first swarm, but afterwards, as the Midsummer Bee-goddess, she will sting him to death, and emasculate him. The lion which the sacred king himself killed—as did both Heracles and his friend Phylius the Peloponnese; or Cyzicus on Mount Dindymum in the Sea of Marmara; or Samson in Philistia (Judges);or David at Bethlehem (Samuel)—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 the irresponsible use of myth: Proteus, who lived at Pharos in 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 consulted; 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 Cretans than that of olive-grafts; but once Hellenic colonies had been founded on the southern coast in late Mycenaean times, olive-culture was established there. The Aristaeus who visited Sicily may be identified with Zeus Morius, who was responsible for distributing grafts of the sacred olive-trees descended from the one planted by Athene on the Athenian Acropolis. 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—such as cerion, honey-comb, cerinos, waxen, and ceraphis, ‘bee-moth’—a kind of locust. Cer, in fact, whose name (also spelt Car or Q’re) came generally to mean ‘fate’, ‘doom’, or ‘destiny’ multiplied into ceres, ‘spites, plagues, or unseen illnesses’—must have been the Cretan Bee-goddess, a goddess of Death in Life. Thus the Sphinx-goddess of Thebes is called by Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes) ‘the man-snatching Cer’.










































p. 168
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 BC, occupied the western part of Thrace, afterwards known as Macedonia; they crossed the Hellespont about the year 1200 BC, 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 Athenian comic drama.

2. But since asses were sacred to his benefactor Dionysus, who set a pair of them among the stars (Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy), it is likely that the original Midas gloried in his ass disguise. A pair of ass’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 ruled their pantheon. Set had greatly declined in power until his temporary revival by the Hyksos kings of the early second millennium BC; but because the Hittites formed part of the great horde of northern conquerors led by the Hyksos, ass-eared Midas may well have claimed sovereignty over the Hittite Empire in Set’s name. In pre-dynastic times, Set has ruled the second half of the year, and annually murdered his brother Osiris, the spirit of the first half, whose emblem was a bull: they were, fact, the familiar rival twins perpetually contending for the favours their sister, the Moon-goddess Isis.

3. It is likely that the icon from which the story of Midas’s barber derives showed the death of the ass-king. His sun-ray hair, the seat royal power, is shorn off, like Samson’s; his decapitated body is buried in a hole to guard the city of Ancyra from invasion. The reed an ambivalent symbol: as the ‘tree’ of the twelfth month, gives him oracular warning of imminent death; it also enroyals his successor. Because of the great magical potency of bull’s blood, only priestesses of the Earth-mother could drink it without harm, and being the blood of Osiris, it would be peculiarly poisonous an ass-king.

4. The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious one, probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot—cypher tied in the hide thong. Gordium was the key to Asia (Asia Minor) because its citadel 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 ineffable name of Jehovah at Jerusalem. Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Greater Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mystery. Gordius (from gruzein, ‘to grunt’ or ‘grumble’) was perhaps so named from the muttering at his oracular shrine.

5. Why the story of the Atlantic Continent should have been attributed to the drunken Silenus may be divined from three incidents reported by Plutarch (Life of Solon). The first is that Solon travelled extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt; the second, that he believed the story of Atlantis and turned it into an epic poem; the third that he quarrelled with Thespis the dramatist who, in his plays about Dionysus, put ludicrous speeches, apparently full of topical allusion into the mouths of satyrs. Solon asked: ‘Are you not alarmed, Thespis, to tell so many lies to so large an audience?’ When Thespis answered ‘What does it matter when the whole play is a joke.’, Solon struck ground violently with his staff: ‘Encourage such jokes in our theatre, an they will soon creep into our contracts and treaties!’ Aelian, who quoted Theopompus as his authority, seems to have had access at second or third hand to a comedy by Thespis, or his pupil Pratinas, ridiculing Solon for utopian lies told in the epic poem, and presenting him as Silenus, footloose about Egypt and Asia Minor. Silenus and Solon are not dissimilar names and as Silenus was tutor to Dionysus, so was tutor to Peisistratus who—perhaps on his advice—founded rites at Athens

6. It is possible that Solon during his travels had picked up scraps of which he incorporated in his epic, and which lent them parody: 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 is said, was disgusted of his own people compared to Niamh’s, and bitterly regretted having come back. The unnavigable whirlpool is the famous one, assumed by ancient physicists, where the ocean returns and marks the end of the world into nothingness. Solon seems to have heard geographers discussing the possible existence of an Continent of Atlantis: 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 Solon.













p. 169
1. The myth of Cleobis and Biton apparently refers to the human sacrifices 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; perhaps this was why the twins Castor and Polydeuces 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 sacrifice should have been made, any foothold in the temple.

2. 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 hero-oracle awarded to Trophonius.









p. 171
1. The ‘narcissus’ used in the ancient wreath of Demeter and Persephone (Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus), and also called leirion was the three-petalled blue fleur-de-lys or iris: sacred to the Triple-goddess, and worn as a chaplet when the Three Solemn Ones, or Erinnyes, were being placated. It flowers in late autumn, shortly before the ‘poet’s narcissus’, which is perhaps why Leiriope has been described 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, or Orestes, lying crowned with lilies, beside a pool in which he has vainly tried to purify himself after murdering his mother; the Erinnyes having refused to be placated. Echo, in this icon, would represent the mocking ghost of his mother, and Ameinius his murdered father.

2. But—issus, like—inthus, is a Cretan termination, and both Narcissus and Hyacinthus seem to have been names for the Cretan springflower-hero whose death the goddess bewails on the gold ring from the Mycenaean Acropolis; elsewhere he is called Antheus a surname of Dionysus. Moreover, the lily was the royal emblem of the Cnossian king. In a painted relief found among the Palace ruins, he walks, sceptre in hand, through a lily-meadow, wearing a crown and necklace of fleur-de-lys.






































p. 171
1. Both these myths are told to account for the festal use of almond or walnut, in honour of Car, or Carya, otherwise known as Metis, 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, 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 the letter coll (‘c’), meaning ‘hazel’—also expressed the number nine. According to the Irish Dinnschenchas, the fountain of inspiration in the river Boy-ne was overhung by the nine hazels of poetic art, and inhabited by spotted fish which sang. Another Caryae (‘walnut-trees’) in Arcadia, stood close to a stream reported by Pausanias to contain the same peculiar kind of fish (Pausanias).

2. The goddess Car, who gave her name to Caria, became the Italian divinatory goddess Carmenta, ‘Car the Wise’, and the Caryatids are her nut-nymphs—as the Meliae are ashnymphs; the Mëliae, apple-nymphs; and the Dryads, oak-nymphs. Pliny has preserved the tradition that Car invented augury (Natural History). Phyllis (‘leafy’) may be a humble Greek version of the Palestinian and Mesopotarnian Great Goddess Belili; in the Demophon myth she is associated with Rhea.




p. 173
1. Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh, century BC, and a fragment of Arian’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arian’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 music—partly on a misinterpretation of a statue which showed the god Palimony, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back. Mythic color is lent to the story by making Arion a son of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse Arion, and by giving his name to the Lyre constellation. Pausanias, a level-headed and truthful writer, doubts Herodotus’s hearsay story about Arion; but reports that he has seen with his own eyes the dolphin at Proselyte, 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. 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 Enables and Phonies is probably deduced from an icon which showed Amphitricha and Triton riding on dolphins. Enables is also associated by Plutarch with an octopus cult, and his name recalls that of Oedipus, the Corinthian New Year Child, he will have been at Mytilene, as Helianthus was in Italy. Taras, a son of Poseidon by Minos’s daughter Satyraea (‘of the satyrs’), was the dolphin-riding New Year Child of Tarentum, which he is said to have founded, and where he had a hero shrine (Pausanias); Helianthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 BC, took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicilians whom he found there.

3. Icadius’s name, which means ‘twentieth’, is connected perhaps with the date of the month on which his advent was celebrated.


















p. 175
1. Sir Arthur Evans’s classification of successive periods of pre-Classical Cretan Culture as Minoan I, II, and III, suggests that the ruler of Crete was already called Minos in the early third millennium BC; but this is misleading. Minos seems to have been the royal title 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 of 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 in by Tectamus (‘craftsman’)—a name which identifies him with Daedalus, and with Hephaestus, Rhadamanthys’s alleged father—were Minos’s original companions; and that Asterius (‘starry’) is a masculinization of Asterië, the goddess as Queen of Heaven and creatrix of the planetary powers. Crete itself is a Greek word, a form of crateia, ‘strong, or ruling, 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 millennium 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 difficulty. (Whether inscriptions in Linear Script A are written in Greek or Cretan has not yet been established, great number of names from Greek mythology occur in both Cretan and mainland tablets, among them: Achilles, Idomeneus, Theseus, Cretheus, 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 favours 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 BC, 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 in Lycia, Herodotus records that the Lycians of his time still reckoned by matrilineal descent (Herodotus; Strabo), like the Carians. Miletos may be a native Cretan word, or a transliteration of milteios, ‘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 Hellenic ones, and the Lycians and Carians came of partly Cretan stock; as did the Puresati (Philistines), whose name also means ‘red men’.

3. The gigantic rulers of Anactoria recall the Anakim of Genesis, giants (Joshua) ousted by Caleb from the oracular shrine which had once belonged to Ephron the son of Heth (Tethys?). Ephron gave his name to Hebron (Genesis), 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 BC. Lade, the burial place of Anax’s son Asterius, was probably so called in honour of the goddess Lat, Leto, or Latona, and that this Asterius bears the same name as Minos’s father suggests that the Milesians brought it with them from the Cretan Miletus. 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 BC to Gaetulia in North Africa, and finally reached Ireland by way of Brigantium (Compostela, in North-western Spain).

4. Miletus’s claim to be Apollo’s son suggests that the Milesian kings were given solar attributes, like those of Corinth.

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 Minos sacrificed the bull, which again suggests that the earlier holders of the title ‘Minos’ were Aeolians. Crete had for centuries been a very rich country and, in the late eighth century BC, was shared between the Achaeans, Dorians, Pelasgians, Cydonians (Aeolians), and in the far west of the island, ‘true Cretans’ (Odyssey). Diodorus Siculus tried 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 the ritual of the Sun-hero who, at New Year, makes his annual reappearance as a child floating in an ark—like Moses, Perseus, Anius, and others. A Cretan connection with the Perseus myth is provided by Pasiphaë’s mother Perseis. Zeus’s concession to Sarpedon, that he should live for three generations, means perhaps that instead of the usual eight years—a Great Year-which was the length of Minos’s reign, he was allowed to keep his throne until the nineteenth year, when a closer synchronization of solar and lunar time occurred than at the end of eight; and thus broke into the third Great Year.

7. Since ‘Pasiphaë’, according to Pausanias, is a title of the Moon; and ‘Itone’, her other name, a title of Athene as rain-maker (Pausanias), the myth of Pasiphaë and the bull points to a ritual marriage under an oak between the Moon-priestess, wearing cow’s horns, and the Minos-king, wearing a bull’s mask. 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 (Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues). Daedalus’s discreet retirement from the meadow suggests that this was not consummated publicly in the Pictish or Moesynoechian style. Many later Greeks disliked the Pasiphaë myth, and preferred to believe that she had an affair not with a bull, but with a man called Taurus (Plutarch: Theseus; Palaephatus). White bulls, which were peculiarly sacred to the Moon, figured in the annual sacrifice on the Alban mount at Rome, in the cult of Thracian Dionysus, in the mistletoe-and-oak ritual of the Gallic Druids and, according to the Book of the Dun Cow, in the divinatory rites which preceded an ancient Irish coronation.

8. Minos’s palace at Cnossus was a complex of rooms, ante-rooms, halls, and corridors in which a country visitor might easily lose his way. Sir Arthur Evans suggests that this was the Labyrinth, so called from the labrys, or double-headed axe; a familiar emblem of Cretan sovereignty shaped like a waxing and a waning moon joined together back to back, and symbolizing the creative 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 Russia, for use in the Easter maze-dance. This dance was performed in Italy (Pliny: Natural History), and in Troy (Scholiast on Euripides’s Andromache), and seems to have been introduced into Britain, towards the end of the third millennium BC, by Neolithic immigrant from North Africa. Homer describes the Cnossus maze (Iliad): ‘Daedalus in Cnossus once contrived a dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne’; and Lucian refers to popular dances in Crete connected with Ariadne and the Labyrinth (On the Dance).

9. The cult of Rhadamanthys may have been brought from Boeotia to Crete, and not contrariwise. Haliartus, where he had a hero-shrine, was apparently sacred to the ‘White Goddess of Bread’, namely Demeter, for Halia, ‘of the sea’, was a title of the Moon as Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess’ (Diodorus Siculus), and artos means ‘bread’. Alcmene (‘strong in wrath’) is another Moon-title. Though said to be Cretan word, Rhadamanthys may stand for Rhabdomantis, ‘divining with wand’, a name taken from the reed-bed at Haliartus, where his spirits stirred the tops oracularly. If so, the tradition of his having legislated for all Crete and the islands of Asia Minor will mean that similar oracle in Crete was consulted at the beginning of each new reign, and that its pronouncements carried authority wherever Cretan weights, measures, and trading 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.

10. 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 Daedalus’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, as the Attic Erigone did. Artemis the Hanged One, who had a sanctuary at Condyleia in Arcadia (Pausanias), and Helen of the Trees, who had a sanctuary at Rhodes and is said to have been hanged by Polyxo (Pausanias), may be variants of the same goddess.




p. 178
1. 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.

2. The Moon-goddess was called Britomartis in Eastern Crete. Hence the Greeks identified her with Artemis (Diodorus Siculus; Euripides; Hesychius), and with Hecate (Euripides). In Western Crete she was Dictynna, as Virgil knew: ‘They called the Moon Dictynna after your name’. Dictynna is connected in the myth with dictyon, 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 king by the goddess armed with a net was converted into a love chase of the goddess by the sacred king. Both chases occur frequently in European folklore. 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.

3. To judge from the ritual of the Celtic North, where the goddess is called Goda (‘the Good’)—Neanthes translates the syllable brito as ‘good’ (Greek Historical Fragments)—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 connection 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 which she transforms 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 that Pasiphaë originally married a goat-king. Laphria (‘she who wins booty’), Dictynna’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 flayed and converted into her aegis). ‘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 taken 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 Athens, and the eventual downfall of Cnossus, it records perhaps the Cretan king’s demand for a ritual marriage with the High-priestess of Athens, 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, 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. Pasiphaë’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 white rock at Cape Leucas rightly reminds Strabo 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. Boats were waiting to pick him up if he survived, and convey him to some other island.

7. The myth of Comaetho and Pterelaus refers to the cutting of the solar king’s hair before his death; but the name Pterelaus suggests that the winged pharmacos flung to his death was originally the king. The syllable elaos, or elaios, stands for the wild olive which, like the birch in Italy and North-western Europe, was used for the expulsion of evil spirits; and in the Rhodian dialect elaios meant simply pharmacos. But the fates of Pterelaus and Cephalus are mythically linked by Procris’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); probably because the Aeolians worshipped the Moon-goddess as a vixen; and the myth of the Teumessian vixen may record Aeolian raids on Cadmeia in search of child sacrifices, to which the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans put an end.

9. Phaëthon and Adymnus (from a-dyomenos, ‘he who does not set’) are both allegorical names for the planet Venus. But Phaëthon, son of Eos and Cephalus, has been confused by Normus with Phaëthon, son of Helius, who drove the sun-chariot and was drowned; and with Atymnius (from atos and hymnos, ‘insatiate of heroic praise’), a sun-hero worshipped by the Milesians.

10. Epeius, who built the wooden horse, 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).








p. 181
1. Pasiphaë as the Moon has been credited with numerous sons: Cydon, the eponymous hero of Cydon near Tegea, and of the Cydonian colony in Crete; Glaucus, a Corinthian sea-hero; 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 rain-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 Pan.

2. The myth of Acacallis (‘unwalled’) apparently records the capture, by invading Hellenes from Aegialae, of the West Cretan city of Tarrha which, like other Cretan cities, was unwalled; 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 of Io the Moon-cow; those of Augeias’s sacred bulls; and on a Caeretan vase 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 unicorn, as a calendar symbol, represented the Moon-goddess’s dominion over the five seasons of the Osirian year, each of which contributed 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 of Apollo Smintheus (‘Mouse Apollo’); or the original story may have been that Minos gave him a mouse coated with honey to swallow—a desperate remedy prescribed for sick children in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His manner of death may also refer to the use of honey as an embalming fluid—many jar-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), which showed Hermes summoning the dead from burial jars, while their souls hovered above in the form of bees.

4. Polyeidus is both the shape-shifting Zagreus and the demi-god Asclepius, whose regenerative herb seems to have been mistletoe, or its Eastern-European counterpart, the loranthus. The Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh provides a parallel to the serpent’s revivification. 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.

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 Ancient Ones, 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, based, perhaps, on some irrelevant tradition of a murder done at Oenoë.

7. Anthedonian Glaucus’s oracular gifts, his name, and his love-affairs, one of which was with Scylla 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, had enjoyed Scylla; and Anthedon (‘rejoicing in flowers’) was apparently a title of the Cretan Spring-flower hero incarnate in every late Minoan king. The King of Cnossus seems to have been connected by sacred marriages with all member states of his confederacy; 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, 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, and Melicertes the sea-god of Corinth, identified with another Glaucus. Cronus’s grass of the Golden Age may have been the magical herbe d’or of the Druids.

8. A version of the Glaucus myth is quoted from the Lydian historian Xanthus by Pliny (Natural History) and Nonnus (Dionysiaea), and commemorated on a series of coins from Sardis. When the hero Tylon, or Tylus (‘knot’ or ‘phallus’), was fatally bitten in the heel by a poisonous serpent, his sister Moera (‘fate’) appealed to the giant Damasen (‘subduer’), who avenged him. Another serpent then fetched ‘the flower of Zeus’ from the woods, and laid it on the lips of its dead mate, which came to life again; Moera followed this example and similarly restored Tylus.




p. 183
1. 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 1400 BC. The myth itself, almost exactly repeated in the Taphian story of Pterelaus and Comaetho, recalls those of Samson and Delilah in Philistia; 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 favour of the Moon-goddess who, at midsummer, cuts off the king’s hair and betrays him. The king’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; Blathnat ties Curoi’s to a bed-post before summoning her lover Cuchulain to kill him; Blodeuwedd ties Llew Llaw’s to a tree before summoning her lover Gronw. Llew Llaw’s soul takes the form of an eagle, and Blodeuwedd (‘fair flower aspect’), a woman magically made of nine different flowers is metamorphosed into an owl—as Scylla perhaps also was in the original Greek legend. A collation of these five myths shows that Scylla-Comaetho-Blodeuwedd-Blathnat-Delilah is the Moon-goddess in her spring and summer aspect as Aphrodite Comaetho (‘bright-haired’); it the autumn she turns into an owl, or a cirrus, and becomes the Death goddess Athene—who had many bird-epiphanies, including the owl—or Hera, or Hecate. Her name Scylla indicates that the king was torn to pieces after his head had been shaven. As in the myth of Llew Llaw, the punishment subsequently inflicted on the traitress is a later moral addition.

2. Ovid (Art of Love) identifies this Scylla with a namesake whom Amphitrite turned into a dog-monster because Poseidon had seduced her, and says that she harboured wild dogs in her womb and loins as a punishment for cutting off Nisus’s lock. Ovid is rarely mistaken in his mythology, and he may here be recording a legend that Pasiphaë’s curse upon Minos made him fill Scylla’s womb with puppies, rather than with serpents, scorpions, and millipedes. Pasiphaë and Amphitrite are the same Moon-and-Sea-goddess, and Minos, as the ruler of the Mediterranean, became identified with Poseidon.

3. The sacrifice of the daughters of Hyacinthus on Geraestus’s tomb may refer to the ‘gardens of Adonis’ planted in honour of the doomed king—being cut flowers, they withered in a few hours. But Geraestus was one of pre-Achaean Cyclops, and according to the Etymologicum Magnum, his daughters nursed the infant Zeus at Gortys; moreover, 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 dying Cretan Zeus was indistinguishable from Hyacinthus. Perhaps, therefore, the myth concerns four dolls hung from a blossoming fruit-tree, to face the cardinal points of the compass; in a fructifying ceremony of the ‘Hanged Artemis’.

4. The seven Athenian youths dedicated to the Minotaur were probably surrogates sacrificed 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 Crucifixion 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. The seven Athenian maidens were not sacrificed; they became attendants on the Moon-priestess, and performed bull-fights, such as are shown in Cretan works of art: a dangerous but not necessarily fatal sport.

5. A set of musical stones may have existed at Megara on the model of a xylophone; it would not have been difficult to construct. But perhaps there is a recollection here of Memnon’s singing statue in Egypt: hollow, with an orifice at the back of the open mouth, through which the hot air was getting out at dawn when the sun warmed the stone.




p. 187
1. Hephaestus is sometimes described as Hera’s son by Talos, and Talos as Daedalus’s young nephew; but Daedalus was a junior member of House of Erechtheus, which was founded long after the birth of Hephaestus. Such chronological discrepancies are the rule in mythology. Daedalus {‘bright’ or ‘cunningly wrought’), Talos (‘sufferer’), and Hephaestus (‘he who shines by day’), are shown by the similarity of attributes to be merely different titles of the same mythical character. Icarus (from io-carios, ‘dedicated to the Moon-goddess Car’) may yet be another of his titles. For Hephaestus the smith-god married to Aphrodite, to whom the partridge was sacred; the sister of Daedalus the smith is called Perdix (‘partridge’); the soul of Talos the smith flies off as a partridge; a partridge appeared at the burial of Daedalus’s son Icarus. Besides, Hephaestus was flung from Olympus; Talos was flung from the Acropolis. Hephaestus hobbled when he walked: one of Talos’s names was Tantalus (‘hobbling, or lurching’); a cock-partridge hobbles in his love-dance, holding one heel ready to strike at rivals. Moreover, the Latin god Vulcan hobbled. His cult had been introduced from Crete, where he was called Velchanus and had a cock for his emblem, because the cock crows at dawn and was therefore appropriate to a Sun-hero. But the cock did not reach Crete until the sixth century BC and is likely to have displaced the partridge as Velchanus’s bird.

2. It seems that in the spring an erotic partridge dance was performed in honour of the Moon-goddess, and that the male dancers hobbled and wore wings. In Palestine this ceremony, called the Pesach (‘the hobbling’) was, according to Jerome, still performed at Beth-Hoglah (‘the Shrine the Hobbler’), where the devotees danced in a spiral. Beth-Hoglah is identified with ‘the threshing-floor of Atad’, on which mourning was made for the lame King Jacob, whose name may mean Jah Aceb (‘the heel-god’). Jeremiah warns the Jews not to take part in those orgiastic Canaanite rites, quoting: ‘The partridge gathereth young that she have not brought forth.’ Anaphe, an island situated to the north of Crete, with which Minos made a treaty, was famous in antiquity as a resting-place for migrant partridges.

3. The myth of Daedalus and Talos, like its variant, the myth Daedalus and Icarus, seems to combine the ritual of burning the solar king’s surrogate, who had put on eagle’s wings, in the spring bonfire—when the Palestinian New Year began—with the rituals flinging the partridge-winged pharmacos, a similar surrogate, over a rock into the sea, and of pricking the king in the heel with a poisoned arrow. But the fishermen’s and peasants’ admiration of flying Daedalus is probably borrowed from an icon of the winged Perseus or Marduk.

4. In one sense the labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus escaped was the mosaic floor with the maze pattern, which they had to follow in the ritual partridge dance; but Daedalus’s escape to Sicily, Cumae, and Sardinia refers perhaps to the flight of the native bronze workers from Crete as the result of successive Hellenic invasions. A ruse of the Triton shell, and Minos’s burial in a shrine of Aphrodite to whom this shell was sacred, suggest that Minos was also, in context, regarded as Hephaestus, the Sea-goddess’s lover. His death in bath is an incident that has apparently become detached from the myth of Nisus and Scylla; Nisus’s Celtic counterpart, Llew Llaw was killed in a bath by a trick; and so was another sacred King, Agamemnon of Mycenae.

5. The name Naucrate (‘sea-power’) records the historical consequences of Minos’s defeat in Sicily—the passing of sea-power from ruling Cretan into Greek bands. That she was one of Minos’s slaves suggests a palace revolution of Hellenic mercenaries at Cnossus.

6. If Polycaste, the other name of Talos’s mother Perdix, means polycassitere, ‘much tin’, it belongs to the myth of the bronze man, Talos’s namesake. Cretan supremacy depended largely on plentiful supplies of tin, to mix with Cyprian copper; according to Professor Christopher Hawkes, the nearest source was the island of Mallorca.

7. Talos is said by Hesychius to be a name for the Sun; originally, therefore, Talos will have coursed only once a day around Crete. Perhaps, however, the harbours of Crete were guarded against pirates by three corps of watches which sent out patrols. And since Talos the Sun was also called Taurus (‘the bull’), his thrice-yearly visit to the villages was probably a royal progress of the Sun-king, wearing his ritual bull-mask—the Cretan year being divided into three seasons. Talos’s red-hot embrace may record the human burnt sacrifices offered to Moloch, alias Melkarth, who was worshipped in Corinth as Melicertes, and probably also known in Crete. Since this Talos came from Sardinia, where Daedalus was said to have fled when pursued by Minos, and was at the same time Zeus’s gift to Minos, the mythographers have simplified the story by giving Hephaestus, rather than Daedalus, credit for its construction; Hephaestus and Daedalus being the same character. The sardonicus risus, or rictus, stiffening of the facial muscles, symptomatic of lock-jaw, was perhaps so called because the stag-man of early Sardinian bronzes wears the same gaping grin.

8. Talos’s single vein belongs to the mystery of early bronze casting by the cire-perdue method. First, the smith made a beeswax image which he covered with a layer of clay, and laid in an oven. As soon as the clay had been well baked he pierced the spot between heel and ankle, so that the wax ran out and deft a mould, into which molten bronze could be poured. When he had filled this, and the metal inside had cooled, he broke the clay, leaving a bronze image of the same shape as the original wax one. The Cretans brought the cire-perdue method to Sardinia, together with Daedalus cult. Since Daedalus learned his craft from Athene, who was known as Medea at Corinth, the story of Talos’s death may have been a misreading of an icon which showed Athene demonstrating the cire-perdue method. The tradition that melted wax caused Icarus’s death seems to be referring rather, to the myth of his cousin Talos; because Talos the bronze-man is closely connected with his namesake, the worker in ~bronze and the reputed inventor of compasses.

9. Compasses are part of the bronze-worker’s mystery, essential for accurate drawing of concentric circles when bowls, helmets, or masks have to be beaten out. Hence Talos was known as Circinus, ‘the circular’, a title which referred both to the course of the sun and to the use of compass. His invention of the saw has been rightly emphasized; the Cretans had used double-toothed turning-saws for free workers which they used with marvellous dexterity. Talos is the son of an ash nymph, because ash-charcoal yields a very high heat for smelting. This myth sheds light also on Prometheus’s creation of man from clay, in Hebrew legend Prometheus’s part was played by the Archangel Michael who worked under the eye of Jehovah.

10. Poeas’s shooting of Talos recalls Paris’s shooting of Achilles in the heel, and the deaths of the Centaurs Pholus and Cheiron. These myths are closely related. Pholus and Cheiron died from Heracles’s poisoned arrows. Poeas was the father of Philoctetes and, when Heracles had been poisoned by another Centaur, ordered him to kindle the pyre. As a result, Philoctetes obtained the same arrows, one of which poisoned him. Paris then borrowed Thessalian Apollo’s deadly arrows to kill Achilles, Cheiron’s foster-son. Finally, when Philoctetes avenged Achilles by shooting Paris, he used another from Heracles’s quiver. The Thessalian sacred king was, it seems, killed by an arrow smeared with viper venom, which tanist drove between his heel and ankle. In the Sanskrit Mahabharata, divine hero Krishna, whom Alexander’s Greeks identified with Heracles was shot in the heel and killed by the hunter Jara who, in some myths appears as his brother: i.e. tanist.

11. In Celtic myth the labyrinth came to mean the royal tomb (White Goddess); and that it also did so among the early Greeks is suggested by its definition in the Etymologicum Magnum as ‘a mountain cave’, and by Eustathius (On Homer’s Odyssey) as ‘a subterranean cave. Etruscan Lars Porsena made one for his tomb (Varro,), and there were labyrinths in the ‘Cyclop caves’, i.e. pre-Hellenic, caves near Nauplia (Strabo); on Samos (Pliny); and on Lemnos (Pliny). To escape from the labyrinth, therefore, is to be reincarnated.

12. Although Daedalus ranks as an Athenian, because of the deme named in his honour, the Daedalic crafts were introduced Attica from Crete, not contrariwise. The toys that he made for daughters of Cocalus are likely to have been dolls with movable limbs like those which pleased Pasiphaë and her daughter Ariadne, and which seem to have been used in the Attic tree cult of Erigone. At any rate, Polycaste, Daedalus’s sister, hanged herself, as did two Erigone and Ariadne herself.

13. The Messapians of Hyria, later Uria, now Oria, were known in Classical times for their Cretan customs—kiss-curl, flower-embroidered robes, double-axe, and so on; and pottery found there can be dated back from 1400 B.C., which bears out the story.




p. 189
1. This artificial myth, which records a Mycenaeo-Minoan occupation of Rhodes in the fifteenth century BC, 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 byrios, or buriash, occurs in the royal title of the Third Babylonian Dynasty, founded in 1750 BC; and deity of Atabyrius in Crete, like that of Atabyrium (Mount Tabor) in Palestine, famous for its golden calf worship, was the Hittite Tesup, cattle-owning Sun-god. Rhodes first belonged to the Sumerian Moon-goddess Dam-Kina, or Danaë, but passed into the possession of Tesup; and, on the breakdown of the Hittite Empire, was colonized by Greek-speaking Cretans who retained the cult, but made Atabyrius a son of Proetus (‘first man’) and Eurynome the Creatrix. In Dorian times Zeus Atabyrius usurped Tesup’s Rhodian cult. The roar of bulls will have been produced by the whirling of rhomboi, or bull-roarers, used to frighten away evil spirits.

2. Apemosyne’s death at Cameirus 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 Danaids, are the familiar Moon-triad: Apemosyne being the third person, Cameira’s counterpart. Catreus accidentally murdered by Althaeamenes, Laius accidentally murdered by his son Oedipus, and Odysseus by his son Telegonus, 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.

















p. 191
1. Mythical genealogies such as these were quoted whenever the sovereignty of states or hereditary privileges came into dispute. The division of Megara between the sacred king, who performed necessary sacrifices, and his tanist, who commanded the army, is paralleled at Sparta. Aegeus’s name records the goat cult in Athens, and name of Lycus the wolf cult; any Athenian who killed a wolf was obliged to mend it by public subscription (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius. The diver-bird was sacred to Athene as protectress of ships and, since the Cliff of Athene overhung the sea, this may have been another of the cliffs from which her priestess launched the feathered pharmacos. Atthis (actes thea, ‘goddess of the rugged coast’) seems to have been a title of the Attic Triple-goddess; her sisters were named Cranaë (‘stony’) and Cranaechme (‘rocky point); and, since Procne and Philomela, when turned into birds, were jointly called Atthis (Martial), she is likely to have been connected with the same cliff-top ritual. Atthis, as Athene, has several other bird epiphanies in Homer. The Mysteries of the Great Goddesses, which concerned resurrection, had been buried between yew and myrtle because these stood, respectively, for the last vowel and the last consonant of the tree alphabet, and were sacred to the Death-goddess.





























































p. 193
1. Pittheus is a masculine form of Pitthea. The names of the towns which he united to form Troezen suggests a matriarchal calendar-triad, consisting of Anthea (‘flowery’), the Goddess of Spring, Hyperea (‘being overhead’), the Goddess of Summer, when the sun is its zenith; and Pitthea (‘pine-goddess’), worshipped in autumn when Attis-Adonis was sacrificed on his pine. They may be identified with the Triple-goddess Themis, to whom Pittheus raised an altar, since the name Troezen is apparently a worn-down form of trion hezomenon— ‘[the city] of the three sitters’, which refers to the three white thrones which served ‘Pittheus and two others’ as seats of justice.

2. Theseus must originally have had a twin, since his mother lay with both a god and a mortal on the same night; the myths of Idas and Lynceus, Castor and Polydeuces, Heracles and Iphicles, make this certain. Moreover, he wore the lion-skin, like Heracles, and therefore have been the sacred king, not the tanist. But when, after the Persian Wars, Theseus became the chief national hero of Athens, paternity at least had to be Athenian, because his mother came from Troezen. The mythographers then decided to have it both ways: he was an Athenian, the son of Aegeus, a mortal; but whenever he needed to claim Poseidon as his father, he could do so. In either case, his mother remained a Troezenian; Athens had important interests there. He was also allowed an honorary twin, Peirithous who, being mortal, could not escape from Tartarus—as Heracles, Polydeuces, and Theseus himself did. No efforts were spared to connect Theseus with Heracles, but the Athenians never grew powerful enough to make him into an Olympian god.

3. There seem, however, to have been at least three mythological characters called Theseus: one from Troezen, one from Marathon in Attica, and the third from Lapith territory. These were not unified into a single character until the sixth century BC, when (as Professor George Thomson suggests) the Butads, a Lapith clan who had become leading aristocrats at Athens and even usurped the native Pelasgian priesthood of Erechtheus, put forward the Athenian Theseus as a rival to Dorian Heracles. Again, Pittheus was clearly both an Elean and Troezenian title—also borne by the eponymous hero of an Attic deme belonging to the Cecropian tribe.

4. Aethra’s visit to Sphaeria suggests that the ancient custom of sacral 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. Odin, Galahad, and Arthur were all in turn required to perform a similar feat; and an immense sword, lion-hilted and plunged into a rock, figures in the sacred marriage scene carved at Hattasus. Since Aegeus’s rock is called both the Altar of Strong Zeus and the Rock of Theseus, 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’), otherwise known as Car, or Q’re, or Carys, the solar king whose locks were annually shorn before his death, like those of Tyrian Samson and Megarean Nisus. At a feast called the Comyria (‘hair trimming’), young men sacrificed their forelocks in yearly mourning for him, and were afterwards known as Curetes. This custom, probably of Libyan origin (Herodotus), had spread to Asia Minor and Greece; an injunction against it occurs in Leviticus. But, by Plutarch’s time, Apollo was worshipped as the immortal Sun-god and, in proof of this, kept his own hair rigorously un-shorn.

6. Aetius’s division of Troezenia between Troezen, Pittheus, and himself, recalls the arrangement made by Proetus with Melampus and Bias. The Pittheus who taught rhetoric and whose treatise survived until Classical times must have been a late historical character.





























p. 195
1. The killing of Periphetes has been invented to account for Theseus’s brass-bound club, like the one carried by Heracles. Periphetes is described as a cripple because he was the son of Daedalus the smith, and smiths were often ritually lamed.

2. Since the North Wind, which bent the pines, was held to fertilize women, animals, and plants, ‘Pityocamptes’ is described as the father of Perigune, a cornfield-goddess. 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 Sow Demeter, whose cult was early suppressed in the Peloponnese. That Theseus went out of his way to kill a mere sow troubled the mythographers: Hyginus and Ovid, indeed, make her a boar, and Plutarch describes her as a woman bandit whose disgusting behaviour earned her the nickname of ‘sow’. But she appears in early Welsh myth as the Old White Sow, Hen Wen, tended by the swineherd magician Coll 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).

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 pharmacos from the White Rock. The first hero who had met his death here was Melicertes, 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 . This is to suggest that Sciron, shown making ready to kick a traveller into the sea, is the pharmacos 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 in the terracotta of the Royal Colonnade at Athens—Pausanias), 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, and with Eryx in Sicily; Odysseus with Philomeleides on Tenedos. A third scene, taken for Theseus’s revenge on Sciron, shows the pharmacos 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 makes Daedalus, not Theseus, kill Sciron, probably because of Daedalus’s mythic connection with the pharmacos ritual of the partridge king.

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 white pharmacos dolls, called ‘Argives’ (‘white men’), thrown into running water once a year at the May purification of temples; also the white cakes shaped like pigs, and made of flour mixed with gypsum (Pliny: Natural History), 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 Thesmophoria as in Theseus: namely ‘tokens deposited’—in the baskets woven of wild asparagus and rush which Perigune sanctified. They were phallic tokens, and the festival was an erotic one: this is justified by Theseus’s seduction of Perigune, and also by Hermes’s seduction of Herse. 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.

5. 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.

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. In that case, the Isthmian Games are analogous to the Pythian 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 Hippolytus, was only another nickname for Sinis—Pityocamptes; and Procrustes seems to be a fictional character, invented to account for a familiar icon: the hair of the old king—Samson, Pterelaus, Nisus, Curoi, Llew Llaw, or whatever he may have been called—is tied to the bedpost by his treacherous bride, while his rival, axe in hand, is preparing to destroy him. ‘Theseus’ and his Hellenes abolished the custom of throwing the old king over the Molurian Rock, and rededicated the Games to Poseidon at Ino’s expense, Ino being one of Athene’s earlier titles.
















p. 198
1. This artificial romance with its theatrical dénouement in the poisoning scene recalls that of Ion; and the incident of the ox thrown into the air seems merely a crude imitation of Heracles’s feats. The ‘masons’ question is anachronistic, because in the heroic age young woman 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. 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 Moon-goddess. 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, 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.

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. Theseus’s defeat of the Pallantids similarly refers to the suppression of the original Athene cult, 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); 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. 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 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. 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) and a swallow; in company with Apollo, as a vulture (Iliad); and in company with Hera, as a dove. On a small Athenian vase of 500 BC she is shown as a lark; and Athene the diver-bird, or gannet, had a shrine near Megara (Pausanias). 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; Pollux; Athenaeus).

5. Plutarch’s story of Akouete leoi is plausible enough: it often happened in the 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.




p. 203
1. Greece was Cretanised towards the close of the eighteenth century BC, 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, makes 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 flotilla; 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 BC, 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 makes peace with Minos himself.

2. 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 of a 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 with the Chief-priestess as Moon-cow. One element in the formation of the Labyrinth myth may have been that the palace at Cnossus—the house of the labrys, or double-axe—was a complex of rooms and corridors, and that the Athenian raiders had difficulty in finding and killing the king when they captured it. But this is not all. An open space in front of the palace was occupied by a dance floor with a maze pattern used to guide performers of an erotic spring dance. 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, whose fate was to be knocked on the head by the hunter (Ecclesiasticus).

3. An Etruscan wine-jar from Tragliatella, 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 harrowed 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 BC, since 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 Romans 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 of 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; 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 faultlessly; and this may have given rise to the story of the ball of twine (A. B. Cook: Journal of Hellenic Studies); at Athens, as on Mount Sipylus, the rope dance was called cordax (Aristophanes: Clouds). 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. This 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 fruit-laden boughs in Ariadne’s honour, and Dionysus’s, and her suicide by hanging, ‘because she feared Artemis’, suggest that Ariadne-dolls were attached to these boughs. 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 found 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. Matrilineal 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 rightful 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 explained 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, 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 fruit-laden 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 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 a pharmacos, from the White Rock into the sea . In the illustrative icon which the mythographer has evidently misread, Theseus’s black-sailed ship must have been a boat standing by to rescue the pharmacos; it has dark sails, because Mediterranean fishermen usually tan their nets and canvas to prevent the salt water from rotting them. The kern-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, if a 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 beans planting, was at first a mystery confined to women.

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, is 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 shows the goddess standing on an altar made entirely of bulls’ horns.

11. 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.

12. Oenopion and Thoas are sometimes called Theseus’s sons’ because these were the heroes of Chios and Lemnos, subject allies of the Athenians.

























































































































































p. 207
1. The mythical element of the Theseus story has here been submerged in what purports to be Athenian constitutional history; but the Federalization of Attica would have happened years too early; and Theseus’s propaganda of making democratical reforms was probably invented in the fifth century BC for Cleisthenes. Legal reforms made during the late Jewish monarchy were attributed to Moses by the editors of the Pentateuch.

2. Oxen provided the standard of value in ancient Greece, Italy, and Ireland, as they still do among backward pastoral tribes of East Africa, and the Athenians struck no coins until nearly five hundred years after the Trojan War. But it is true that Cretan copper ingots of a fixed weight were stamped with a bull’s head or a recumbent calf (Sir Arthur Evans: Minoan Weights and Mediums of Currency); and the Butadae who seem to have been largely responsible for the development of the myth of Theseus, have had this tradition in mind when they struck money stamped with the ox-head, their clan-device.

3. The division of Attica into twelve communities is paralleled by a similar happenings the Nile Delta and in Etruria, and by the distributing Canaanite territory among the twelve tribes of Israel; the number may in each case have been chosen to allow for a monthly procession of a monarch from tribe to tribe. Greeks of the heroic age did not distinguish between murder and manslaughter; in either case a blood price had to be paid to the victim’s clan, and the killer then changed his name and left the city for ever. Thus Telamon and Peleus continued to be highly regarded by the gods after their treacherous murder of Phocus; and Medea killed Apsyrtus without antagonizing her new Corinthian subjects. At Athens, however, in the Classical period, willful 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 BC; 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 sufficed to rid the city of the pollution caused by the murder.























































p. 209
1. ‘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 Armenian word, meaning “Moon women’. Since the priestesses of the Moon-goddess on the shores of the Black Sea bore arms, as they also did in the Gulf of Sirte, 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 fable of an Amazonian invasion from the river Thermodon. These which were extant in Classical times on the footstool of Zeus’s Olympia; at Athens on the central wall of Painted Colonnade (Pausanias), on Athene’s shield, in the temple of Theseus, and elsewhere (Pausanias), represented the fight between the pre-Hellenic priestesses of Athene for the Hellenic invasion of Attica and the resistance to them. There will also have been armed priestesses at Ephesus—Minoan colony, as the name of the founder Cresus (‘Cretan’) suggests— and in all cities where Amazons’ graves were shown. Oreithyia, or Hippolyte, is supposed to have gone several hundred miles out of her way through Scythia; probably because the Cimmerian Bosphorus—Crimea—was the seat of Artemis’s savage Taurian cult, where the priestesses dispatched male victims.

2. Antiope’s interruption of Phaedra’s wedding may have been deduced from an icon which showed the Hellenic conqueror about to violate the High-priestess, after he had killed her companions. Antiope was not Theseus’s legal wife, because she belonged to a society which resisted monogamy. The names Melanippe and Hippolytus associate the Amazons with the pre-Hellenic horse cult. The name of Soloön (‘egg-shaped weight’) may be derived from a weight-carrying event 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.







































































p. 211
1. The incident of Phaedra’s incestuous love for Hippolytus, like that of Potiphar’s wife and her adulterous love for Joseph, 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. 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 olive, later associated with the crash: the myrtle, in fact, which grew close to his hero shrine, and was famous for its perforated leaves. Myrtle symbolized the last month of the king’s reign; as appears in the story of Oenomaus’s chariot crash; 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, who has been confused with Glaucus son of Sisyphus, was revived by mistletoe. Though the pre-Hellenic mistletoe and oak cult had been suppressed in Greece, 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.

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, which suggests that he was buried at some strategic point of the Isthmus.











































































































p. 213
1. Both Lapiths and Centaurs claimed descent from Ixion, an oak-hero, and had a horse cult in common. They were primitive mountain tribes in Northern Greece, of whose ancient rivalry the Hellenes took advantage by allying themselves first with one, and then with the other. Centaur and Lapith may be italic words: centuria, ‘war-band of one hundred’ and lapicidae, ‘Psintchithpers’. (The usual Classical etymology is, respectively, from centtauroi, ‘those who spear bulls’, and lapizein, ‘to swagger’.) These mountaineers seem to have had erotic orgies, and thus won a reputation for promiscuity among the monogamous Hellenes; members of this Neolithic race survived in the Arcadian mountains, and on Mount Pindus, until Classical times, and vestiges of their pre-Hellenic language are to be found in modern Albania.

2. It is, however, unlikely that the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs —depicted on the gable of Zeus’s temple at Olympia (Pausanias); at Athens in the sanctuary of Theseus (Pausanias); and on Athene’s aegis (Pausanias)—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-skinned Heracles also fought the Centaurs on a similarly festive occasion. Homer calls them ‘shaggy wild beasts’, and since they are not differentiated from satyrs in early Greek vase-paintings, the icon probably shows a newly-installed king—it does not matter who—battling with dancers disguised 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.

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 of Dioneus, ‘the divine daughter of the seashore’—halter in hand, encouraging the candidate for kingship to master the wild horse. Hippodameia’s name (‘horse-tamer’) refers to the same icon. Zeus, disguised as stallion, ‘coursed around’ Dia, because that is the meaning of the name Peirithous; and Ixion, as the Sun-god, spread-eagled to his wheel, coursed around the heavens.






















p. 214
1. Leading heroes in several mythologies are said to have harrowed Hell: Theseus, Heracles, Dionysus, and Orpheus in Greece; Bel and Marduk in Babylonia; Aeneas in Italy; Cuchulain in Ireland; Arthur, Gwydion, and Amathaon in Britain; Ogier le Danois in Brittany. The origin of the myth seems to be a temporary 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 more then thirteen months of a solar year.

2. Bel, and his successor Marduk, spent their period of demise in battle with the marine monster Tiamat, an embodiment of the Sea-goddess who sent the Deluge; like ancient Irish kings, who are said to have gone out to do battle with the Atlantic breakers, they seem to have ceremonially drowned. An Etruscan vase shows the moribund king, whose name is given as Jason, in the jaws of a sea-monster—an icon from which the moral anecdote of Jonah and the whale have apparently been deduced, Jonah being Marduk.

3. Athenian mythographers have succeeded in disguising the bitter rivalry between Theseus and his acting-twin Peirithous for the favours of the Goddess of Death-in-Life—who appears in the myth as Helen and Persephone—by presenting them as a devoted friends like Castor and Polydeuces who made an amatory raid on a city, and one of whom was excused death claim thanks to alleged divine birth. Idas and Lynceus, a similar pair of twins, have been introduced into the story to emphasize this point. But name of Peirithous, ‘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 meets the Goddess of Justice, as though Theseus were merely tanist.

4. Helen’s abduction during a sacrifice recalls that of Oreithyia by Boreas, and may have been deduced from the same icon, which represents erotic orgies at the Athenian Thesmophoria. It is possible though, that a shrine of the Attic goddess Helen at Aphidnae contained an image or other cult object stolen by the Athenians from her Laconian equivalent—if the visit to Tartarus is a doublet of the story, they may made a sea-raid on Taenarus—and that this was subsequently retrieved 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, Theseus redivivus, would then be installed. An attempt was made by Athenians to elevate Theseus to the status of an Olympian god, by asserting that he had escaped from death, as Dionysus and Heracles, but their Peloponnesian enemies successfully opposed this claim. Some insist that he had never escaped, but was punished eternally for his insolence like Ixion and Sisyphus. Others rationalized the story by saying that he raided Cichyrus, not Tartarus; and took the trouble to explain that Peirithous had not been mauled by Cerberus, but by Molosthenian dog—largest and fiercest breed in Greece. The most generous concession made to Athenian myth was that Theseus, released after a humiliating session in the Chair of Forgetfulness, apologetically transferred most of his temples and sanctuaries to Heracles the Rescuer, whose Labours and sufferings he imitated.

6. Yet Theseus was a hero of some importance, and must be given the credit of having harrowed Hell, in the sense that he penetrated to the centre of the Cretan maze, where Death was waiting, and came safely 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 national demi-god. The central source of this hostility towards Theseus was probably Delphi, where Apollo’s Oracle was notoriously subservient to the Spartans in their struggle against Athens.













p. 217
1. Menestheus the Erechtheid, who is praised in Iliad 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 co-king, 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.

2. The theme of the feathered pharmacos reappears in the names of Menestheus’s father and grandfather, 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 scir (an abbreviated form of Scirophoria, explaining why the king is being 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 Athenian name. Originally, it seems, sacrifices were offered to the Moon-goddess on the eighth day of each lunation, 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 made of fennel stalks for carrying the new sacred fire from a central hearth to private ones, after their annual extinction.

4. Before closing the story of Theseus, let me here add a further note to the Tragliatella vase 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. The scene takes place on the day of the king’s ritual death, and the Moon-queen (Pasiphaë) has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm threateningly akimbo. With the 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 other—we may call her the princess Ariadne, who helped Theseus to 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 the Troy-town dances were performed in 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.