The Greek Myths

  5. Chrysaor was Demeter’s new-moon sign, the golden sickle, or falchion; her consorts carried it when they deputized for her. Athene, in this version, is Zeus’s collaborator, reborn from his head, and a traitress to the old religion (see 9. 1). The three Harpies, regarded by Homer as personifications of the storm winds (Odyssey xx. 66–78), were the earlier Athene, the Triple-goddess, in her capacity of sudden destroyer. So were the Graeae, the Three Grey Ones, as their names Enyo (‘warlike’), Pemphredo (‘wasp’), and Deino (‘terrible’) show; their single eye and tooth are misreadings of a sacred picture (see 73. 9), and the swan is a death-bird in European mythology (see 32. 2).

  6. Phorcys, a masculine form of Phorcis, the Goddess or Sow (see 74. 4 and 96. 2), who devours corpses, appears in Latin as Orcus, a title of Hades, and as porcus, hog. The Gorgons and Grey Ones were called Phorcides, because it was death to profane the Goddess’s Mysteries; but Phorcys’s prophetic wisdom must refer to a sow-oracle (see 24. 7).

  7. The names of the Hesperides, described as children either of Ceto and Phorcys, or of Night, or of Atlas the Titan who holds up the heavens in the Far West (see 39. 1 and 133. e), refer to the sunset. Then the sky is green, yellow, and red, as if it were an apple-tree in full bearing; and the Sun, cut by the horizon like a crimson half-apple, meets his death dramatically in the western waves. When the Sun has gone, Hesperus appears. This star was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphrodite, and the apple was the gift by which her priestess decoyed the king, the Sun’s representative, to his death with love-songs; if an apple is cut in two transversely, her five-pointed star appears in the centre of each half.

  34

  THE CHILDREN OF ECHIDNE

  ECHIDNE bore a dreadful brood to Typhon: namely, Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell; the Hydra, a many-headed water-serpent living at Lerna; the Chimaera, a fire-breathing goat with lion’s head and serpent’s body; and Orthrus, the two-headed hound of Geryon, who lay with his own mother and begot on her the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion.1

  1. Hesiod: Theogony 306 ff.

  1. Cerberus (see 31. a and 134. e), associated by the Dorians with the dog-headed Egyptian god Anubis who conducted souls to the Underworld, seems to have originally been the Death-goddess Hecate, or Hecabe (see 168.1); she was portrayed as a bitch because dogs eat corpse flesh and howl at the moon.

  2. The Chimaera was, apparently, a calendar-symbol of the tripartite year (see 75. 2), of which the seasonal emblems were lion, goat, and serpent.

  3. Orthrus (see 132. d), who fathered the Chimaera, the Sphinx (see 105. e), the Hydra (see 60. h and 124. c), and the Nemean Lion (see 123. b) on Echidne was Sirius, the Dog-star, which inaugurated the Athenian New Year. He had two heads, like Janus, because the reformed year at Athens had two seasons, not three; Orthrus’s son, the Lion, emblemizing the first half, and his daughter, the Serpent, emblemizing the second. When the Goat-emblem disappeared, the Chimaera gave place to the Sphinx, with her winged lion’s body and serpent’s tail. Since the reformed New Year began when the Sun was in Leo and the Dog Days had now begun, Orthrus looked in two directions – forward to the New Year, backward to the Old – like the Calendar-goddess Cardea, whom the Romans named Postvorta and Antevorta on that account. Orthrus was called ‘early’ presumably because he introduced the New Year.

  35

  THE GIANTS’ REVOLT

  ENRAGED because Zeus had confined their brothers, the Titans, in Tartarus, certain tall and terrible giants, with long locks and beards, and serpent-tails for feet, plotted an assault on Heaven. They had been born from Mother Earth at Thracian Phlegra, twenty-four in number.1

  b. Without warning, they seized rocks and fire-brands and hurled them upwards from their mountain tops, so that the Olympians were hard pressed. Hera prophesied gloomily that the giants could never be killed by any god, but only by a single, lion-skinned mortal; and that even he could do nothing unless the enemy were anticipated in their search for a certain herb of invulnerability, which grew in a secret place on earth. Zeus at once took counsel with Athene; sent her off to warn Heracles, the lion-skinned mortal to whom Hera was evidently referring, exactly how matters stood; and forbade Eros, Selene, and Helius to shine for a while. Under the feeble light of the stars, Zeus groped about on earth, in the region to which Athene directed him, found the herb, and brought it safely to Heaven.

  c. The Olympians could now join battle with the giants. Heracles let loose his first arrow against Alcyoneus, the enemy’s leader. He fell to the ground, but sprang up again revived, because this was his native soil of Phlegra. ‘Quick, noble Heracles!’ cried Athene. ‘Drag him away to another country!’ Heracles caught Alcyoneus up on his shoulders, and dragged him over the Thracian border, where he despatched him with a club.

  d. Then Porphyrion leaped into Heaven from the great pyramid of rocks which the giants had piled up, and none of the gods stood his ground. Only Athene adopted a posture of defence. Rushing by her, Porphyrion made for Hera, whom he tried to strangle; but, wounded in the liver by a timely arrow from Eros’s bow, he turned from anger to lust, and ripped off Hera’s glorious robe. Zeus, seeing that his wife was about to be outraged, ran forward in jealous wrath, and felled Porphyrion with a thunderbolt. Up he sprang again, but Heracles, returning to Phlegra in the nick of time, mortally wounded him with an arrow. Meanwhile, Ephialtes had engaged Ares and beaten him to his knees; however, Apollo shot the wretch in the left eye and called to Heracles, who at once planted another arrow in the right. Thus died Ephialtes.

  e. Now, wherever a god wounded a giant – as when Dionysus felled Eurytus with his thyrsus, or Hecate singed Clytius with her torches, or Hephaestus scalded Mimas with a ladle of red-hot metal, or Athene crushed the lustful Pallas with a stone, it was Heracles who had to deal the death blow. The peace-loving goddesses Hestia and Demeter took no part in the conflict, but stood dismayed, wringing their hands; the Fates, however, swung brazen pestles to good effect.2

  f. Discouraged, the remaining giants fled back to earth, pursued by the Olympians. Athene threw a vast missile at Enceladus, which crushed him flat and became the island of Sicily. And Poseidon broke off part of Cos with his trident and threw it at Polybutes; this became the nearby islet of Nisyros, beneath which he lies buried.3

  g. The remaining giants made a last stand at Bathos, near Arcadian Trapezus, where the ground still burns, and giants’ bones are sometimes turned up by ploughmen. Hermes, borrowing Hades’s helmet of invisibility, struck down Hippolytus, and Artemis pierced Gration with an arrow; while the Fates’ pestles broke the heads of Agrius and Thoas. Ares, with his spear, and Zeus, with his thunderbolt, now accounted for the rest, though Heracles was called upon to despatch each giant as he fell. But some say that the battle took place on the Phlegraean Plain, near Cumae in Italy.4

  h. Silenus the earth-born Satyr claims to have taken part in this battle at the side of his pupil Dionysus, killing Enceladus and spreading panic among the giants by the braying of his old pack-ass; but Silenus is usually drunken and cannot distinguish truth from falsehood.5

  1. Apollodorus: i. 6. 1; Hyginus: Fabulae, Proem.

  2. Apollodorus: i. 6. 2.

  3. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Strabo: x. 5. 16.

  4. Pausanias: viii. 29. 1–2; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 21.

  5. Euripides: Cyclops 5 ff.

  1. This is a post-Homeric story, preserved in a degenerate version: Eros and Dionysus, who take part in the fighting, are late-comers to Olympus (see 15. 1–2 and 27. 5), and Heracles is admitted there before his apotheosis on Mount Oeta (see 147. h). It purports to account for the finding of mammoth bones at Trapezus (where they are still shown in the local museum); and for the volcanic fires at Bathos near by – also at Arcadian, or Thracian, Pallene, at Cumae, and in the islands of Sicily and Nisyros, beneath which Athene and Poseidon are said to have buried two of the giants.

  2. The historical incident underlying the Giants’ Revolt – and also the Aloeids’ Revolt (see 37. b), of which
it is usually regarded as a doublet – seems to be a concerted attempt by non-Hellenic mountaineers to storm certain Hellenic fortresses, and their repulse by the Hellenes’ subjectallies. But the powerlessness and cowardice of the gods, contrasted with the invincibility of Heracles, and the farcical incidents of the battle, are more characteristic of popular fiction than of myth.

  3. There is, however, a hidden religious element in the story. These giants are not flesh and blood, but earth-born spirits, as their serpent-tails prove, and can be thwarted only by the possession of a magical herb. No mythographer mentions the name of the herb, but it was probably the ephialtion, a specific against the nightmare. Ephialtes, the name of the giants’ leader means literally ‘he who leaps upon’ (incubus in Latin); and the attempts of Porphyrion to strangle and rape Hera, and of Pallas to rape Athene, suggest that the story mainly concerns the wisdom of invoking Heracles the Saviour, when threatened by erotic nightmares at any hour of the twenty-four.

  4. Alcyoneus (‘mighty ass’) is probably the spirit of the sirocco, ‘the breath of the Wild Ass, or Typhon’ (see 36. 1), which brings bad dreams, and murderous inclinations, and rapes; and this makes Silenus’s claim to have routed the giants with the braying of his pack-ass still more ridiculous (see 20. b). Mimas (‘mimicry’) may refer to the delusive verisimilitude of dreams; and Hippolytus (‘stampede of horses’) recalls the ancient attribution of terror-dreams to the Mare-headed goddess. In the north, it was Odin whom sufferers from ‘the Nightmare and her ninefold’ invoked, until his place was taken by St Swithold.

  5. What use Heracles made of the herb can be deduced from the Babylonian myth of the cosmic fight between the new gods and the old. There Marduck, Heracles’s counterpart, holds a herb to his nostrils against the noxious smell of the goddess Tiamat; here Alcyoneus’s breath has to be counteracted.

  36

  TYPHON

  IN revenge for the destruction of the giants, Mother Earth lay with Tartarus, and presently in the Corycian Cave of Cilicia brought forth her youngest child, Typhon: the largest monster ever born.1 From the thighs downward he was nothing but coiled serpents, and his arms which, when he spread them out, reached a hundred leagues in either direction, had countless serpents’ heads instead of hands. His brutish ass-head touched the stars, his vast wings darkened the sun, fire flashed from his eyes, and flaming rocks hurtled from his mouth. When he came rushing towards Olympus, the gods fled in terror to Egypt, where they disguised themselves as animals: Zeus becoming a ram; Apollo, a crow; Dionysus, a goat; Hera, a white cow; Artemis, a cat; Aphrodite, a fish; Ares, a boar; Hermes, an ibis, and so on.

  b. Athene alone stood her ground, and taunted Zeus with cowardice until, resuming his true form, he let fly a thunderbolt at Typhon, and followed this up with a sweep of the same flint sickle that had served to castrate his grandfather Uranus. Wounded and shouting, Typhon fled to Mount Casius, which looms over Syria from the north, and there the two grappled. Typhon twined his myriad coils about Zeus, disarmed him of his sickle and, after severing the sinews of his hands and feet with it, dragged him into the Corycian Cave. Zeus is immortal, but now he could not move a finger, and Typhon had hidden the sinews in a bear-skin, over which Delphyne, a serpent-tailed sister-monster, stood guard.

  c. The news of Zeus’s defeat spread dismay among the gods, but Hermes and Pan went secretly to the cave, where Pan frightened Delphyne with a sudden horrible shout, while Hermes skilfully abstracted the sinews and replaced them on Zeus’s limbs.2

  d. But some say that it was Cadmus who wheedled the sinews from Delphyne, saying that he needed them for lyre-strings on which to play her delightful music; and Apollo who shot her dead.3

  e. Zeus returned to Olympus and, mounted upon a chariot drawn by winged horses, once more pursued Typhon with thunderbolts. Typhon had gone to Mount Nysa, where the Three Fates offered him ephemeral fruits, pretending that these would restore his vigour though, in reality, they doomed him to certain death. He reached Mount Haemus in Thrace and, picking up whole mountains, hurled them at Zeus, who interposed his thunderbolts, so that they rebounded on the monster, wounding him frightfully. The streams of Typhon’s blood gave Mount Haemus its name. He fled towards Sicily, where Zeus ended the running fight by hurling Mount Aetna upon him, and fire belches from its cone to this day.4

  1. Hesiod: Theogony 819 ff.; Pindar: Pythian Odes i. 15 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 152.

  2. Apollodorus: i. 6. 3.

  3. Nonnus: Dionysiaca i. 481 ff.; Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 706.

  4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pindar: loc. cit.

  1. ‘Corycian’, said to mean ‘of the leather sack’, may record the ancient custom of confining winds in bags, followed by Aeolus (see 170. g), and preserved by medieval witches. In the other Corycian Cave, at Delphi, Delphyne’s serpent-mate was called Python, not Typhon. Python (‘serpent’) personified the destructive North Wind – winds were habitually depicted with serpent tails – which whirls down on Syria from Mount Casius, and on Greece from Mount Haemus (see 21. 2). Typhon, on the other hand, means ‘stupefying smoke’, and his appearance describes a volcanic eruption; hence Zeus was said to have buried him at last under Mount Aetna. But the name Typhon also meant the burning Sirocco from the Southern Desert, a cause of havoc in Libya and Greece, which carries a volcanic smell and was pictured by the Egyptians as a desert ass (see 35. 4 and 83. 2). The god Set, whose breath Typhon was said to be, maimed Osiris in much the same way as Python maimed Zeus, but both were finally overcome; and the parallel has confused Python with Typhon.

  2. This divine flight into Egypt, as Lucian observes (On Sacrifices 14), was invented to account for the Egyptian worship of gods in animal form – Zeus-Ammon as ram (see 133. j), Hermes-Thoth as ibis or crane (see 52. 6), Hera-Isis as cow (see 56. 2), Artemis-Pasht as cat, and so on; but it may also refer historically to a frightened exodus of priests and priestesses from the Aegean Archipelago, when a volcanic eruption engulfed half of the large island of Thera, shortly before 2000 B.C. Cats were not domesticated in Classical Greece. A further source of this legend seems to be the Babylonian Creation Epic, the Enuma Elish, according to which, in Damascius’s earlier version, the goddess Tiamat, her consort Apsu, and their son Mummi (‘confusion’), let loose Kingu and a horde of other monsters against the newly-born trinity of gods: Ea, Anu, and Bel. A panic flight follows; but presently Bel rallies his brothers, takes command and defeats Tiamat’s forces, crushing her skull with a club and slicing her in two ‘like a flat-fish’.

  3. The myth of Zeus, Delphyne, and the bear-skin records Zeus’s humiliation at the hands of the Great Goddess, worshipped as a She-bear, whose chief oracle was at Delphi; the historical occasion is unknown, but the Cadmeians of Boeotia seem to have been concerned with preserving the Zeus cult. Typhon’s ‘ephemeral fruits’, given him by the Three Fates, appear to be the usual death-apples (see 18. 4; 32. 4; 33. 7, etc.). In a proto-Hittite version of the myth the serpent Illyunka overcomes the Storm-god and takes away his eyes and heart, which he recovers by a stratagem. The Divine Council then call on the goddess Inara to exact vengeance. Illyunka, invited by her to a feast, eats until gorged; whereupon she binds him with a cord and he is despatched by the Storm-god.

  4. Mount Casius (now Jebel-el-Akra) is the Mount Hazzi which figures in the Hittite story of Ullikummi the stone giant, who grew at an enormous rate, and was ordered by his father Kumarbi to destroy the seventy gods of Heaven. The Storm-god, the Sun-god, the Goddess of Beauty and all their fellow-deities failed to kill Ullikummi, until Ea the God of Wisdom, using the knife that originally severed Heaven from Earth, cut off the monster’s feet and sent it crashing into the sea. Elements of this story occur in the myth of Typhon, and also in that of the Aloeids, who grew at the same rate and used mountains as a ladder to Heaven (see 37. b). The Cadmeians are likely to have brought these legends into Greece from Asia Minor (see 6. 1).

  37

  THE ALOEIDS

  EPHIALTES and Otus were the bastard sons of Iphimede
ia, a daughter of Triops. She had fallen in love with Poseidon, and used to crouch on the seashore, scooping up the waves in her hands and pouring them into her lap; thus she got herself with child. Ephialtes and Otus were, however, called the Aloeids because Iphimedeia subsequently married Aloeus, who had been made king of Boeotian Asopia by his father, Helius. The Aloeids grew one cubit in breadth and one fathom in height every year and, when they were nine years old, being then nine cubits broad and nine fathoms high, declared war on Olympus. Ephialtes swore by the river Styx to outrage Hera, and Otus similarly swore to outrage Artemis.1

  b. Deciding that Ares the God of War must be their first capture, they went to Thrace, disarmed him, bound him, and confined him in a brazen vessel, which they hid in the house of their stepmother Eriboea, Iphimedeia being now dead. Then their siege of Olympus began: they made a mound for its assault by piling Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa, and further threatened to cast mountains into the sea until it became dry land, though the lowlands were swamped by the waves. Their confidence was unquenchable because it had been prophesied that no other men, nor any gods, could kill them.

  c. On Apollo’s advice, Artemis sent the Aloeids a message: if they raised their seige, she would meet them on the island of Naxos, and there submit to Otus’s embraces. Otus was overjoyed, but Ephialtes, not having received a similar message from Hera, grew jealous and angry. A cruel quarrel broke out on Naxos, where they went together: Ephialtes insisting that the terms should be rejected unless, as the elder of the two, he were the first to enjoy Artemis. The argument had reached its height, when Artemis herself appeared in the form of a white doe, and each Aloeid, seizing his javelin, made ready to prove himself the better marksman by flinging it at her. As she darted between them, swift as the wind, they let fly and each pierced the other through and through. Thus both perished, and the prophecy that they could not be killed by other men, or by gods, was justified. Their bodies were carried back for interment in Boeotian Anthedon; but the Naxians still pay them heroic honours. They are remembered also as the founders of Boeotian Ascra; and as the first mortals to worship the Muses of Helicon.2