MILESIAN GIRLS, ARTEMIS, AND ASPALIS
There were a number of other myths in which maidens were said to have been hanged, or to have hanged themselves, three of which we should at least note in passing.100
Plutarch briefly relates the story of a disaster that took place in Mile- tus.101 Once, he says, a strange and terrible form of suffering (pathos) seized all the local virgins, which caused them to conceive a sudden and urgent desire to hang themselves. Quite a few of them sneaked away and did so before their parents could stop them. The source of the evil, Plutarch says, was never securely identified, but in the opinion of some, it was supernatural (daimonion).
Plutarch tells us no more than this, unfortunately, but certain elements in the story suggest it began as a cult aition much like some that we have already discussed. The wholesale nature of the disaster-all the young women are affected-reminds us of the Athenian maidens driven crazy by Erigone and the Laconian maidens who hanged themselves on Carya's tree. It also, of course, points toward some real Milesian rite practiced by all or most representatives of an age group. The suddenness with which the malady took hold also finds echoes in Erigone's and Carya's tales. The "cure" as described by Plutarch is very interesting: a "man of sense" proposed that the corpses of all the dead maidens be carried through the town naked; this presented such a humiliating spectacle, he continues, that the girls who were still alive were shaken back into their senses, afraid that their bodies would be treated in the same way if they died. Was that really how the girls were cured? The explanation sounds impossibly rational; one cannot help but wonder whether Plutarch heard a distorted version of a myth that served as the aition for a ritual in which statues representing mythic maidens who had died were carried through the city, perhaps to the temple of a goddess who oversaw girls' transitions in Miletus. The element of nudity would be well at home in both myths and cults of transition in general, where young people sometimes exchange clothing for nakedness and then nakedness for clothing; nudity marks their marginality, whereas assumption of new clothing marks assumption of new status.102 Perhaps it would be particularly at home in Miletus, where there was a cult to Artemis Chitone (Artemis of the Tunic).103 We do not know what occurred in this cult or any of the others with which this epithet of the goddess is associated, but the emphasis on clothing implied by the epithet suggests a ritualized contrast between the states of being clothed and naked.
Most famous of all dead virgins, perhaps, is Artemis herself, who was worshipped as "She Who Hangs Herself" at Condylea in Arcadia, a town near Caphyae.104 The cult aition tells of how some children once playfully put a noose around the neck of the statue of Artemis there and said that she had hanged herself. Their elders, horrified by this apparent blasphemy, killed the children. Artemis, far from being pleased by the children's deaths, punished the elders by causing all their unborn children to die in their mothers' wombs. The Pythia decreed that this terrible punishment would stop only when an annual cult in honor of the murdered children had been established and Artemis had been given the name Apanchomene, "She Who Hangs Herself." The Pythia also recommended other cultic actions that Pausanias unfortunately does not trouble to describe, referring to them only collectively, as "the rest of the things," "ta alla."
I would suggest that this story began as two separate myths, which later became entangled with one another. One story attempted to explain why certain children were paid cult. The answer (which is used to explain other children's cults as well) 105 was that the local inhabitants had killed them and then had been told by an oracle to make amends by paying them cult. This explanation, however, raises the question of why the local inhabitants killed the children in the first place. At this point, the second story, which originally served to explain the origin of a cult to Artemis, was bent into service: the children died because, in the perception of the inhabitants, they had been blaspheming Artemis. That the children's behavior was, on the contrary, proper-that is, correct behavior within the local cult of Artemis-is indicated by the fact that the oracle not only told the inhabitants to make amends to the ghosts of the children but also told them to worship Artemis as Apanchomene. Such entangling of two cultic aitia is not unusual: a similar case arises in connection with the Corinthian cults of Hera Akraia and of Medea's children.106
The original form of the second story, I suggest, was like the others we have examined. I would hypothesize that it involved a girl whose tragic suicide, like those of Erigone and Aspalis, led to widespread disasters, and thereafter to the institution of a cult, in which she was worshipped as "She Who Hangs Herself." Her statue was erected in Artemis's temple under this name and something that substituted for a maiden (an animal? a figurine?) was hanged in its honor each year. By Pausanias's time, the statue of the heroine had come to be regarded as a statue of Artemis herself, and the title had been given over to the goddess. As in many other cases, the heroine and the goddess probably were very similar in function to begin with, anyway. 107
The form that the disaster took in this case-an epidemic of miscarriages rather than of suicides among local virgins-can be explained in either of two ways. If it was borrowed from the first myth and cult whose existence I have hypothesized, then it represents poetic justice: if children are murdered, then the murderers must lose their own children in turn. If this part of the story was attached to the cult of Artemis and the hanging maiden from the beginning, however, it probably reflects the fact that a girl's "transitional period" actually extends beyond marriage; a parthenos does not become a gyne until she has borne children for her husband.108 This is why we hear about some dead maidens, such as Gello, attacking children and pregnant women as well as girls of their own age, and why Aeschylus's Erinyes threaten both to make young people aoroi through early deaths and to smite women's fecundity after they are married. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot expect all myth and ritual complexes, even when very similar in function and mode of expression, to be identical. Local requirements and customs, as well as the ways in which one local cult interacted with others in its area, would dictate otherwise.
The final myth I shall discuss in this section, the story of Aspalis, is known only from Antoninus Liberalis, who follows Nicander. In the city of Meliteia in Phthia, the virgin Aspalis hanged herself to avoid being raped. Her body disappeared before it could be buried by the horrified citizens, and a statue of her simultaneously appeared in Artemis's local temple. Thereafter, she was paid cult under the name of Aspalis Ameilete Hecaerge. Every year a ritual was performed in which local virgins hanged a virgin goat from Aspalis's statue, "just as Aspalis, being a virgin, had hanged." 109
Many elements in Aspalis's story are familiar from other maidens' stories: her inappropriate introduction to sexuality, her suicide by hanging, and her transformation into a cult statue (although here, for the first time, we have a case in which the maiden both dies and is transformed). The mode of death and its symbolic reenactment bring us particularly close to the tales of Carya and Erigone as well as to the hypothetical myth and ritual I have just proposed for the cult of Artemis Apanchomene. As in the myth of Carya, the reenactment takes place upon what remains of the original victim (here, the statue), as if Aspalis were demanding the death of the "virgin" herself. As in the case of the Aiora, the reenactment is safely symbolic: a virginal goat dies instead of virginal girls. Using each of the myths to fill gaps in the others, we might guess that at the Caryatis festival, animals or something else that represented maidens similarly were hanged from a nut tree to propitiate Carya, and that at the Aiora specially selected girls (including, perhaps, the priestess of Artemis, an office once filled by Erigone herself?) swung from the tree believed to be that on which Erigone had hanged herself. But all of this must remain only conjecture.
What Antoninus tells us of Aspalis and her ritual aligns with the paradigm that we developed through our investigations of Erigone, Carya, and others and thus lays open the possibility that she, too, was viewed as a pro
stropaios, who would return to drive the Melitean virgins to maddened suicide if she did not receive her annual sacrifice. Support for this idea can be found in one of the names that she received after her death: Ameilete, which means "Pitiless," or "Cruel." 110 As discussed in chapter 5, transparently negative names typically belong to threatening spirits rather than to gods. Ameilete could quite properly describe a prostropaios.
IPHIGENIA AND HECATE
We are almost ready to return to Hecate and her connection to creatures such the vengeful ghosts we have been discussing, but we must do it through the back door, by focusing first on a figure with whom she was associated: Iphigenia.
Iphigenia's role as the dying maiden is well known to anyone who has ever taken a mythology course. Her virginity is emphasized in the bestknown version of the story, in which she is lured to the place of her slaughter by a promise of marriage to Achilles. Her father, the very man who should then facilitate her passage into the roles of wife and mother, becomes the one who deprives her of any chance to fulfill them. In another version of the myth, Artemis rescues Iphigenia at the last moment, replacing her on the altar with a deer and making the girl her priestess first at Tauris and then at Brauron.111
Iphigenia's connection with girls' transitional rites at Branton is also well known. As a virgin sacrificed to Artemis, she becomes a mythic prototype for girls who later "sacrifice" their maidenhood at Brauron, in preparation for marriage.112 Here I wish to focus on another aspect of Iphigenia's role at Brauron, however. At the end of Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, Athena announces to Iphigenia that after she has died in the goddess' service, she will receive as her agalmata "fine-textured weavings, which women who die in childbed have left behind in their homes." The temple inventories from Brauron itself have not yet been published, so we cannot look there for any dedications like this, but inscriptions from the Brauronion in Athens mention that some unfinished pieces of clothing were dedicated there. It is hard to see why anyone would dedicate unfinished clothing to a goddess; typically, in fact, favorite items of used clothing were dedicated to goddesses. Perhaps these strange dedications in the Brauronion represent projects left incomplete at the time their creators' deaths; if so they would fit Euripides' description of dedications to Iphigenia very nicely.113
Who performed these dedications, and why? It is hard to be sure, but similar dedications of clothing point toward a possible answer. In a later portion of the Hippocratic text discussed earlier, Concerning Unmarried Girls, the author goes on to say that if a girl survives her terrible period of suicidal urges and returns to her senses, diviners (manteis) order the gynaikes (probably the older women in the afflicted girl's family) to dedicate many splendid garments to Artemis in thanks, and in hopes that the problem will not return.'14
In the author's opinion, of course, this is a foolish superstition, but for our purposes, the recommendations of the manteis are a valuable parallel to the dedication of clothing to Iphigenia. In one case, the clothing is dedicated to the goddess in thanks for helping a girl survive a traumatic period in which she was nearly killed by threatening spirits, and in hopes that no further attacks will occur before the girl marries and becomes pregnant. The goddess is clearly believed responsible for the aversion of these spirits. Similarly, from the Greek Anthology, we learn that women frequently dedicated items of their clothing to Artemis or Eileithyia in thanks for safe delivery of children and in hopes of successful births in the future; in one instance, a woman's husband apparently joins her in making the dedication as well.115 Given what we learned of aorai in chapter 5, we must assume that in these instances, too, the goddesses are being credited with the aversion of dangerous forces, as well as with the active promotion of safe births.
In the other case, the clothing of a woman who has failed to make her transition to motherhood is dedicated to a heroine who was believed to have failed as well. In part, the latter offerings may have been attempts to make-up for what would have been assumed to have been inadequate offerings to Artemis before the birth. After all, if the woman had died, Artemis must not have been happy with her; more should have been dedicated in the first place. The question then becomes what these postmortem dedications were imagined to accomplish. Certainly, they were too late to save the woman who wove the clothing. They can have been offered only for the good of the rest of the family: the infant, if it had survived the birth, other children whom the dead woman left behind, or perhaps future children whom the husband expected to sire upon another wife, as well as that wife herself. That they were offered to Iphigenia reflects in part, probably, the fact that she had originally been a birth goddess herself, like Artemis,' 16 but that they were offered to her instead of Artemis in Artemis's own sanctuary surely also reflects the fact that, like the dead woman to whom the clothes belonged, Iphigenia was a victim of the goddess, whose career as a gyne had been cut short. As is so often the case, a divinity and the once-mortal heroine worshipped in her sanctuary mirror one another.
The dedications also indicate that Iphigenia had some control over the welfare of the individuals for whose benefit they were being made. Like Erigone, Carya, Aspalis, and all the others whom we have met in this chapter, Iphigenia had reason to be envious of the living and therefore to deprive them of success if she were not propitiated by the proper rituals. That she might give vent to her envy by attacking children or parturient women, rather than virgins, as Erigone and Carya did, for example, would make sense for two reasons that I already have mentioned. First, a girl's "transitional period" extended beyond marriage; a parthenos did not become a gyne until she had borne children for her husband. Thus, truncating the process at any point had the same effect: transition remained incomplete. Second, Iphigenia was a birth goddess; when she was subordinated by Artemis, she may have fallen into the same mythic paradigm that other former divinities had, becoming a virgin whose death Artemis caused or whom Artemis rescued as she was about to die, but in cult she could retain her original function of protecting childbirth and nurture. As an agent approached for help in these matters, she would also be viewed as an agent liable to thwart them. Perhaps it was believed, indeed, that she not only would cause problems for the chil dren who survived the dead woman and for any future children the widower sired, but also had been the cause of the original mother's death in childbed.
Some of the other texts we have examined invite us to push the idea a little further. Is it only her own anger that the dedications to Iphigenia are supposed to appease? As we learned in chapter 5 from the stories of Lamia and Mormo, an aore might begin her career by killing her own children; there are parallels for this from other cultures throughout the ancient Mediterranean and the modern world.117 Because any woman who had died in childbirth was liable to become such a demon, her survivors would do well to take whatever precautions they could to prevent her from doing the same, or from attacking other, reproductively viable women in the family who remained behind; dedicating clothing to Iphigenia might be imagined to help win her favor and support in this matter. This hypothesis aligns with the paradigm that I proposed for the Erinyes and the Pandareids, in which aorai are led and controlled by divinities who themselves share the traits of aorai.
Which brings us, finally, to our last piece of information about Iphigenia, and to the avenue by which we shall finally return to Hecate. In the earliest attested version of Iphigenia's myth, found in a fragment of Stesichorus, Artemis neither allowed the girl to die nor spirited her away to become a priestess. Rather, the goddess caused Iphigenia to "become Hecate." 118
There are several conclusions that one might reach after thinking about this rather remarkable story. Because Artemis and Hecate were identified from early times, it could be understood simply as an indirect way of affiliating Iphigenia and Artemis, a variation of the motif whereby the dying virgin is transformed by Artemis into her priestess, a cult statue within her temple, or into some other agalma such as the karuatree. Yet this will not really work. Hecate is a goddess in he
r own right, not Artemis's servant or ornament. Iphigenia's transformation, therefore, means something different from the others, or at least has addi tional significance. Certainly, it suggests that Iphigenia and Hecate were viewed as having common interests; most likely, this was their shared concern with birth and nurture. It also suggests that my hypothesis as to why dead women's clothes were dedicated to Iphigenia is correct. To "become Hecate," after all, is to become a goddess who, by the time this myth developed, was probably already the mistress of unhappy souls.119 In identifying Iphigenia with Hecate, then, the myth seems to be saying that this girl who had died before her proper time had become not just any vengeful ghost, like Erigone, but the vengeful ghost, the quintessential leader of other unhappy, prematurely dead souls.
It is even more important for us to look at this myth from the opposite side, however, and ask what it tells us about Hecate. If this story made sense as a tale of her origins, then we have to assume that it reflected whatever Hecate represented to the Greek imagination. And indeed, this presumption is verified by the fact that Hecate's origin is explained by a different and yet essentially identical story, which, Eustathius and Photius tell us, was in circulation at least as early as Callimachus's Hypomnemata. Artemis visited the home of Ephesus, an early king of the same-named city, but was thrown out by a rude woman. In anger, Artemis first changed the woman into a bitch, but then in pity changed her back into human form. Ashamed of her behavior, the woman hanged herself with her girdle. Artemis then took off her own clothing or jewelry (kosmos) and adorning the corpse, "named her Hecate" (Hekaten onomasai, Eustathius; Hekaten prosagoreusai, Photius).120
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