The Greek Myths, Page 27

  61

  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 nightmareish mask.

  b. Later, she joined the company of the Empusae, lying with young men and sucking their blood while they slept.1

  1. Diodorus Siculus: xx. 41; Suidas sub Lamia; Plutarch: On Curiosity 2; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Peace 757; Strabo: i. 11. 8; Eustathius on Homer p. 1714; Aristotle: Ethics vii. 5.

  1. Lamia was the Libyan Neith, the Love-and-Battle goddess, also named Anatha and Athene (see 8. 1 and 25. 2), whose worship the Achaeans suppressed; like Alphito of Arcadia, she ended as a nursery bogey (see 52. 7). 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 (see 33. 3), 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 (see 73. 8). The Empusae were incubae (see 55. 1).

  62

  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 came to Sparta, where Leda, wife of King Tyndareus, presently found a hyacinth-coloured egg lying in a marsh, which she brought home and hid in a chest: from it Helen of Troy was hatched.1 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 fishes and hatched by doves, broke open to reveal the Syrian Goddess of Love.2

  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.3

  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 Eurotas; that she laid an egg from which were hatched Helen, Castor, and Polydeuces; and that she was consequently deified as the goddess Nemesis.4 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;5 others again, that Castor and Clytaemnestra were children of Tyndareus, while Helen and Polydeuces were children of Zeus.6

  1. Athenaeus, quoting Homer’s Cypria p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 7; Sappho: Fragment 105; Pausanias: i. 33. 7; Eratosthenes: Catasterismoi 25.

  2. Athenaeus: 57 f.; Plutarch: Symposiacs ii. 3. 3; Hyginus: Fabula 197.

  3. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 8.

  4. Lactantius: i. 21; Hyginus: Fabula 77; First Vatican Mythographer: 78 and 204.

  5. Homer: Odyssey xi. 299; Iliad iii. 426; Euripides: Helena 254, 1497 and 1680.

  6. Pindar: Nemean Odes x. 80; Apollodorus: iii. 10. 6–7.

  1. Nemesis was the Moon-goddess as Nymph (see 32. 2) and, in the earliest form of the love-chase myth, she pursued the sacred king through his seasonal changes of hare, fish, bee, and mouse – or hare, fish, bird, and grain of wheat – and finally devoured him. With the victory of the patriarchal system, the chase was reversed: the goddess now fled from Zeus, as in the English ballad of the Coal-black Smith (see 89. 2). She had changed into an otter or beaver to pursue the fish, and Castor’s name (‘beaver’) is clearly a survival of this myth, whereas that of Polydeuces (‘much sweet wine’) records the character of the festivities during which the chase took place.

  2. Lada is said to be the Lycian (i.e. Cretan) word for ‘woman’, and Leda was the goddess Latona, or Leto, or Lat, who bore Apollo and Artemis at Delos (see 14. 2). 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 (see 43. 1; 70. 8; and 159. 1), 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 (see 1. a). Helen had two temples near Sparta: one at Therapnae, built on a Mycenaean site; another at Dendra, connected with a tree cult, as her Rhodian shrine also was (see 88.10). Pollux (x. 191) mentions a Spartan festival called the Helenephoria, closely resembling Athene’s Thesmophoria at Athens (see 48. b), during which certain unmentionable objects were carried in a special basket called a helene; such a basket Helen herself carries in reliefs showing her accompanied by the Dioscuri. The objects may have been phallic emblems; she was an orgiastic goddess.

  4. Zeus tricked Nemesis, the goddess of the Peloponnesian swan cult, by appealing to her pity, exactly as he had tricked Hera of the Cretan cuckoo cult (see 12. a). This myth refers, it seems, to the arrival at Cretan or Pelasgian cities of Hellenic warriors who, to begin with, paid homage to the Great Goddess and provided her priestesses with obedient consorts, but eventually wrested the supreme sovereignty from her.

  63

  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.1

  1. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 62; Hyginus: Fabulae 33 and 62; Pindar: Pythian Odes ii. 33–89, with scholiast; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 6; Scholiast on Euripides’s Phoenician Women 1185.

  1. Ixion’s name, formed from ischys (‘strength’) and io (‘moon’) (see 52. 2), also suggests ixias (‘mistletoe’). As an oak-king with mistletoe genitals (see 50. 2), 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 (see 116. 4), beheaded with an axe, emasculated, spread-eagled to a tree, and roas
ted; 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 Dodonan Oak-goddess (see 51. 1) and therefore of Zeus’s wife Hera. That old-fashioned kings called themselves Zeus (see 45. 2; 68. 1; and 156. 4) and married Dia of the Rain Clouds, naturally displeased the Olympian priests, who misinterpreted the ritual picture of the spread-eagled Lapith king as recording his punishment for impiety, and invented the anecdote of the cloud. On an Etruscan mirror, Ixion is shown spread-eagled to a fire-wheel, with mushroom tinder at his feet; elsewhere, he is bound in the same ‘fivefold bond’ with which the Irish hero Curoi tied Cuchulain – bent backwards into a hoop (Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vii. 12), with his ankles, wrists, and neck tied together, like Osiris in the Book of the Dead. This attitude recalls the burning wheels rolled downhill at European midsummer festivities, as a sign that the sun has reached its zenith and must now decline again until the winter solstice. Ixion’s pitfall is unmetaphorical: surrogate victims were needed for the sacred king, such as prisoners taken in battle or, failing these, travellers caught in traps. The myth seems to record a treaty made by Zeus’s Hellenes with the Lapiths, Phlegyans, and Centaurs, which was broken by the ritual murder of Hellenic travellers and the seizure of their womenfolk; the Hellenes demanded, and were given, an official apology.

  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 goats. Centaurus will have been an oracular hero with a serpent’s tail, and the story of Boreas’s mating with mares is therefore attached to him (see 48. e).

  64

  ENDYMION

  ENDYMION was the handsome son of Zeus and the Nymph Calyce, an Aeolian by race though Carian by origin, and ousted Clymenus from the kingdom of Elis. His wife, known by many different names, such as Iphianassa, Hyperippe, Chromia, and Neis, bore him four sons; he also fathered fifty daughters on Selene, who had fallen desperately in love with him.1

  b. Endymion was lying asleep in a cave on Carian Mount Latmus one still night when Selene first saw him, lay down by his side, and gently kissed his closed eyes. Afterwards, some say, he returned to the same cave and fell into a dreamless sleep. This sleep, from which he has never yet awakened, came upon him either at his own request, because he hated the approach of old age; or because Zeus suspected him of an intrigue with Hera; or because Selene found that she preferred gently kissing him to being the object of his too fertile passion. In any case, he has never grown a day older, and preserves the bloom of youth on his cheeks. But others say that he lies buried at Olympia, where his four sons ran a race for the vacant throne, which Epeius won.2

  c. One of his defeated sons, Aetolus, later competed in a chariot-race at the funeral games of Azan, son of Arcas, the first ever celebrated in Greece. Since the spectators were unaware that they should keep off the course, Aetolus’s chariot accidentally ran over Apis, son of Phoroneus, and fatally injured him. Salmoneus, who was present, banished Aetolus across the Gulf of Corinth, where he killed Dorus and his brothers and conquered the land now called Aetolia after him.3

  1. Apollodorus: i. 7. 5–6; Pausanias: v. 8. 1 and 1. 2.

  2. Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; Scholiast on Theocritus’s Idylls iii. 49; Cicero; Tuscan Debates i. 38; Pausanias: v. 1. 3.

  3. Pausanias: viii. 4. 2–3 and v. 1. 6; Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; Strabo: viii. 3.33.

  1. This myth records how an Aeolian chief invaded Elis, and accepted the consequences of marrying the Pelasgian Moon-goddess Hera’s representative – the names of Endymion’s wives are all moon-titles – head of a college of fifty water-priestesses (see 60. 3). When his reign ended he was duly sacrificed and awarded a hero shrine at Olympia. Pisa, the city to which Olympia belonged, is said to have meant in the Lydian (or Cretan) language ‘private resting-place’: namely, of the Moon (Servius on Virgil x. 179).

  2. The name Endymion, from enduein (Latin: inducere), refers to the Moon’s seduction of the king, as though she were one of the Empusae (see 55. a); 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 (see 69. 1); 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 (see 71. 1 and 109. 4). But the foot race won by Epeius (‘successor’) was the earlier event (see 53. 3). The existence of an Endymion sanctuary on Mount Latmus in Caria suggests that an Aeolian colony from Elis settled there. His ritual marriage with Hera, like Ixion’s, will have offended the priests of Zeus (see 63. 2).

  4. Apis is the noun formed from apios, a Homeric adjective usually meaning ‘far off’ but, when applied to the Peloponnese (Aeschylus: Suppliants 262), ‘of the pear-tree’ (see 74. 6).

  65

  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.1

  1. Apollodorus: iii. 14.3; Ovid: Metamorphoses x. 243 ff; Arnobius: Against the Nations vi. 22.

  1. Pygmalion, married to Aphrodite’s priestess at Paphos, seems to have kept the goddess’s white cult-image (cf. 1 Samuel xix. 13) 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 patrilinear system on the Cypriots. But it is more likely that, like his grandson Cinyras (see 18. 5), he refused to give up the goddess’s image at the end of his eight-year reign; and that he prolonged this by marriage with another of Aphrodite’s priestesses – technically his daughter, since she was heiress to the throne – who is called Metharme (‘change’), to mark the innovation.

  66

  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.1

  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.2

  c. Having thus disposed of Aegina’s father, Zeus conveyed her secretly to the island then called Oenone, or Oenopia, where he lay with her in the form of an eagle, or of a flame, and cupids hovered over their couch, administering the gifts of love.3 In course of time Hera discovered that Aegina had borne Zeus a son named Aeacus, and angrily resolved to destroy every inhabitant of Oenone, where he was now king. She introduced a ser
pent into one of its streams, which befouled the water and 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 no 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.4

  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 falling to the ground from the sacred oak, and springing 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 stream.

  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.5