i. Though Apollo refuses to bind himself in marriage, he has got many nymphs and mortal women with child; among them, Phthia, on whom he fathered Dorus and his brothers; and Thalia the Muse, on whom he fathered the Corybantes; and Coronis, on whom he fathered Asclepius; and Aria, on whom he fathered Miletus; and Cyrene, on whom he fathered Aristaeus.6
j. He also seduced the nymph Dryope, who was tending her father’s flocks on Mount Oeta in the company of her friends, the Hamadryads. Apollo disguised himself as a tortoise, with which they all played and, when Dryope put him into her bosom, he turned into a hissing serpent, scared away the Hamadryads, and enjoyed her. She bore him Amphissus, who founded the city of Oeta and built a temple to his father; there Dryope served as priestess until, one day, the Hamadryads stole her away, and left a poplar in her place.7
k. Apollo was not invariably successful in love. On one occasion he tried to steal Marpessa from Idas, but she remained true to her husband. On another, he pursued Daphne, the mountain nymph, a priestess of Mother Earth, daughter of the river Peneius in Thessaly; but when he overtook her, she cried out to Mother Earth who, in the nick of time, spirited her away to Crete, where she bcame known as Pasiphaë. Mother Earth left a laurel-tree in her place, and from its leaves Apollo made a wreath to console himself.8
l. His attempt on Daphne, it must be added, was no sudden impulse. He had long been in love with her, and had brought about the death of his rival, Leucippus, son of Oenomaus, who disguised himself as a girl and joined Daphne’s mountain revels. Apollo, knowing of this by divination, advised the mountain nymphs to bathe naked, and thus make sure that everyone in their company was a woman; Leucippus’s imposture was at once discovered, and the nymphs tore him to pieces.9
m. There was also the case of the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, a Spartan prince, with whom not only the poet Thamyris fell in love – the first man who ever wooed one of his own sex – but Apollo himself, the first god to do so. Apollo did not find Thamyris a serious rival; having overheard his boast that he could surpass the Muses in song, he maliciously reported it to them, and they at once robbed Thamyris of his sight, his voice, and his memory for harping. But the West Wind had also taken a fancy to Hyacinthus, and became insanely jealous of Apollo, who was one day teaching the boy how to hurl a discus, when the West Wind caught it in mid-air, dashed it against Hyacinthus’s skull, and killed him. From his blood sprang the hyacinth flower, on which his initial letters are still to be traced.10
n. Apollo earned Zeus’s anger only once after the famous conspiracy to dethrone him. This was when his son Asclepius, the physician, had the temerity to resurrect a dead man, and thus rob Hades of a subject; Hades naturally lodged a complaint on Olympus, Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and Apollo in revenge killed the Cyclopes. Zeus was enraged at the loss of his armourers, and would have banished Apollo to Tartarus for ever, had not Leto pleaded for his forgiveness and undertaken that he would mend his ways. The sentence was reduced to one year’s hard labour, which Apollo was to serve in the sheep-folds of King Admetus of Therae. Obeying Leto’s advice, Apollo not only carried out the sentence humbly, but conferred great benefits on Admetus.11
o. Having learned his lesson, he thereafter preached moderation in all things: the phrases ‘Know thyself!’ and ‘Nothing in excess!’ were always on his lips. He brought the Muses down from their home on Mount Helicon to Delphi, tamed their wild frenzy, and led them in formal and decorous dances.12
1. Hyginus: Fabula 140; Apollodorus: i. 4. 1; Homeric Hymn to Apollo 300–306; Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: ii. 706.
2. Aelian: Varia Historia iii. 1; Plutarch: Greek Questions 12; Why Oracles Are Silent 15; Pausanias: ii. 7. 7; x. 16. 3.
3. Apollodorus: i. 4.1; Pausanias: ii. 30.3 and x. 6. 5; Plutarch: Greek Questions 12; Hyginus: Fabula 55; Homer: Odyssey xi. 576 ff.; Pindar: Pythian Odes iv. 90 ff.
4. Diodorus Siculus: iii. 58–9; Hyginus: Fabula 165; Apollodorus: i. 4. 2; Second Vatican Mythographer: 115; Pliny: Natural History xvi. 89.
5. Hyginus: Fabula 191; Homer: Iliad i. 603.
6. Apollodorus: i. 7. 6; i. 3. 4; iii. 10. 3; iii. 1. 2; Pausanias: x. 17. 3.
7. Antoninus Liberalis: 32; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Dryope; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 325 ff.
8. Apollodorus: i. 7. 9; Plutarch: Agis 9.
9. Hyginus: Fabula 203; Pausanias: viii. 20. 2; x. 5. 3; Parthenius: Erotica 15; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 6.
10. Homer: Iliad ii. 595–600; Lucian: Dialogues of the Gods 14; Apollodorus: i. 3.3; Pausanias: iii. 1. 3.
11. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 4; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 71.
12. Homer: Iliad i. 603–4; Plutarch: On the Pythian Oracles 17.
1. Apollo’s history is a confusing one. The Greeks made him the son of Leto, a goddess known as Lat in Southern Palestine (see 14. 2), but he was also a god of the Hyperboreans (‘beyond-the-North-Wind-men’), whom Hecataeus (Diodorus Siculus: ii. 47) clearly identified with the British, though Pindar (Pythian Odes x. 50–55) regarded them as Libyans. Delos was the centre of this Hyperborean cult which, it seems, extended south-eastward to Nabataea and Palestine, north-westward to Britain, and included Athens. Visits were constantly exchanged between the states united in this cult (Diodorus Siculus: loc cit.).
2. Apollo, among the Hyperboreans, sacrificed hetacombs of asses (Pindar: loc. cit.), which identifies him with the ‘Child Horus’, whose defeat of his enemy Set the Egyptians annually celebrated by driving wild asses over a precipice (Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris 30). Horus was avenging Set’s murder of his father Osiris – the sacred king, beloved of the Triple Moon-goddess Isis, or Lat, whom his tanist sacrificed at midsummer and midwinter, and of whom Horus was himself the reincarnation. The myth of Leto’s pursuit by Python corresponds with the myth of Isis’s pursuit by Set (during the seventy-two hottest days of the year). Moreover, Python is identified with Typhon, the Greek Set (see 36. 1), in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and by the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius. The Hyperborean Apollo is, in fact, a Greek Horus.
3. But the myth has been given a political turn: Python is said to have been sent against Leto by Hera, who had borne him parthenogenetically to spite Zeus (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 305); and Apollo, after killing Python (and presumably also his mate Delphyne), seizes the oracular shrine of Mother Earth at Delphi – for Hera was Mother Earth, or Delphyne in her prophetic aspect. It seems that certain Northern Hellenes, allied with Thraco-Libyans, invaded Central Greece and the Peloponnese, where they were opposed by the pre-Hellenic worshippers of the Earth-goddess, but captured her chief oracular shrines. At Delphi, they destroyed the sacred oracular serpent – a similar serpent was kept in the Erechtheum at Athens (see 25. 2) – and took over the oracle in the name of their god Apollo Smintheus. Smintheus (‘mousy’), like Esmun the Canaanite god of healing, had a curative mouse for his emblem. The invaders agreed to identify him with Apollo, the Hyperborean Horus, worshipped by their allies. To placate local opinion at Delphi, regular funeral games were instituted in honour of the dead hero Python, and his priestess was retained in office.
4. The Moon-goddess Brizo (‘soother’) of Delos, indistinguishable from Leto, may be identified with the Hyperborean Triple-goddess Brigit, who became Christianized as St Brigit, or St Bride. Brigit was patroness of all the arts, and Apollo followed her example. The attempt on Leto by the giant Tityus suggests an abortive rising by the mountaineers of Phocis against the invaders.
5. Apollo’s victories over Marsyas and Pan commemorate the Hellenic conquests of Phrygia and Arcadia, and the consequent supersession in those regions of wind instruments by stringed ones, except among the peasantry. Masyas’s punishment may refer to the ritual flaying of a sacred king – as Athene stripped Pallas of his magical aegis (see 9. a) – or the removal of the entire bark from an alder-shoot, to make a shepherd’s pipe, the alder being personified as a god or demi-god (see 28. 1 and 57. 1). Apollo was claimed as an ancestor of the Dorian Greeks, and of the Milesians, who paid him especial honour
s. The Corybantes, dancers at the Winter Solstice festival, were called his children by Thalia the Muse, because he was god of Music.
6. His pursuit of Daphne the Mountain-nymph, daughter of the river Peneius, and priestess of Mother Earth, refers apparently to the Hellenic capture of Tempe, where the goddess Daphoene (‘bloody one’) was worshipped by a college of orgiastic laurel-chewing Maenads (see 46. 2 and 51. 2). After suppressing the college – Plutarch’s account suggests that the priestesses fled to Crete, where the Moon-goddess was called Pasiphaë (see 88. e) – Apollo took over the laurel which, afterwards, only the Pythoness might chew. Daphoene will have been mare-headed at Tempe, as at Phigalia (see 16. 5); Leucippus (‘white horse’) was the sacred king of the local horse cult, annually torn in pieces by the wild women, who bathed after his murder to purify themselves, not before (see 22. 1 and 150. 1).
7. Apollo’s seduction of Dryope on Oeta perhaps records the local supersession of an oak cult by a cult of Apollo, to whom the poplar was sacred (see 42. d); as does his seduction of Aria. His tortoise disguise is a reference to the lyre he had bought from Hermes (see 17. d). Phthia’s name suggests that she was an autumnal aspect of the goddess. The unsuccessful attempt on Marpessa (‘snatcher’), seems to record Apollo’s failure to seize a Messenian shrine : that of the Grain-goddess as Sow (see 74. 4). Apollo’s servitude to Admetus of Pherae may recall a historical event: the humiliation of the Apollonian priesthood in punishment for their massacre of a pre-Hellenic smith-guild which had enjoyed Zeus’s protection.
8. The myth of Hyacinthus, which seems at first sight no more than a sentimental fable told to explain the mark on the Greek hyacinth (see 165. j and 2) concerns the Cretan Flower-hero Hyacinthus (see 159. 4), also apparently called Narcissus (see 85. 2), whose worship was introduced into Mycenaean Greece, and who named the later summer month of Hyacinthius in Crete, Rhodes, Cos, Thera, and at Sparta. Dorian Apollo usurped Hyacinthus’s name at Tarentum, where he had a hero tomb (Polybius: viii. 30); and at Amyclae, a Mycenaean city, another ‘tomb of Hyacinthus’ became the foundation of Apollo’s throne. Apollo was an immortal by this time, Hyacinthus reigned only for a season: his death by a discus recalls that of his nephew Acrisius (see 73. 3).
9. Coronis (‘crow’), mother of Asclepius by Apollo, was probably a title of Athene’s (see 25. 5); but the Athenians always denied that she had children, and disguised the myth (see 50. b).
10. In Classical times, music, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science came under Apollo’s control. As the enemy of barbarism, he stood for moderation in all things, and the seven strings of his lute were connected with the seven vowels of the later Greek alphabet (see 52. 8), given mystical significance, and used for therapeutic music. Finally, because of his identification with the Child Horus, a solar concept, he was worshipped as the sun, whose Corinthian cult had been taken over by Solar Zeus; and his sister Artemis was, rightly, identified with the moon.
11. Cicero, in his essay On the Nature of the Gods (iii. 23), makes Apollo son of Leto only the fourth of an ancient series: he distinguishes Apollo son of Hephaestus, Apollo the father of the Cretan Corybantes, and the Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws.
12. Apollo’s killing of the Python is not, however, so simple a myth as at first appears, because the stone omphalos on which the Pythoness sat was traditionally the tomb of the hero incarnate in the serpent, whose oracles she delivered (Hesychius sub Archus’s Mound; Varro: On the Latin Languages vii. 17). The Hellenic priest of Apollo usurped the functions of the sacred king who, legitimately and ceremonially, had always killed his predecessor, the hero. This is proved by the Stepteria rite recorded in Plutarch’s Why Oracles Are Silent (15). Every ninth year a hut representing a king’s dwelling was built on the threshing floor at Delphi and a night attack suddenly made on it by… [here there is a gap in the account]… The table of first-fruits was overturned, the hut set on fire, and the torch-men fled from the sanctuary without looking behind them. Afterwards the youth who had taken part in the deed went to Tempe for purification, whence he returned in triumph, crowned and carrying a laurel branch.
13. The sudden concerted assault on the inmate of the hut recalls the mysterious murder of Romulus by his companions. It also recalls the yearly Buphonia sacrifice at Athens when the priests who had killed the Zeus-ox with a double-axe, fled without looking behind them; then ate the flesh at a communal feast (see 53. 7), staged a mimic resurrection of the ox, and brought up the axe for trial on a charge of sacrilege.
14. At Delphi, as at Cnossus, the sacred king must have reigned until the ninth year (see 88. 6). The boy went to Tempe doubtless because the Apollo cult had originated there.
22
ARTEMIS’S NATURE AND DEEDS
ARTEMIS, Apollo’s sister, goes armed with bow and arrows and, like him, has the power both to send plagues or sudden death among mortals, and to heal them. She is the protectress of little children, and of all sucking animals, but she also loves the chase, especially that of stags.
b. One day, while she was still a three-year-old child, her father Zeus, on whose knees she was sitting, asked her what presents she would like. Artemis answered at once: ‘Pray give me eternal virginity; as many names as my brother Apollo; a bow and arrows like his; the office of bringing light; a saffron hunting tunic with a red hem reaching to my knees; sixty young ocean nymphs, all of the same age, as my maids of honour; twenty river nymphs from Amnisus in Crete, to take care of my buskins and feed my hounds when I am not out shooting; all the mountains in the world; and, lastly, any city you care to choose for me, but one will be enough, because I intend to live on mountains most of the time. Unfortunately, women in labour will often be invoking me, since my mother Leto carried and bore me without pains, and the Fates have therefore made me patroness of childbirth.’1
c. She stretched up for Zeus’s beard, and he smiled proudly, saying: ‘With children like you, I need not fear Hera’s jealous anger! You shall have all this, and more besides: not one, but thirty cities, and a share in many others, both on the mainland and in the archipelago; and I appoint you guardian of their roads and harbours.’2
d. Artemis thanked him, sprang from his knee, and went first to Mount Leucus in Crete, and next to the Ocean stream, where she chose numerous nine-year-old nymphs for her attendants; their mothers were delighted to let them go.3 On Hephaestus’s invitation, she then visited the Cyclopes on the Island of Lipara, and found them hammering away at a horse-trough for Poseidon. Brontes, who had been instructed to make whatever she wanted, took her on his knee; but, disliking his endearments, she tore a handful of hair from his chest, where a bald patch remained to the day of his death; anyone might have supposed that he had the mange. The nymphs were terrified at the wild appearance of the Cyclopes, and at the din of their smithy – well they might be, for whenever a little girl is disobedient her mother threatens her with Brontes, Arges, or Steropes. But Artemis boldly told them to abandon Poseidon’s trough for a while, and make her a silver bow, with a quiverful of arrows, in return for which they should eat the first prey she brought down.4 With these weapons she went to Arcadia, where Pan was engaged in cutting up a lynx to feed his bitches and their whelps. He gave her three lop-eared hounds, two parti-coloured and one spotted, together capable of dragging live lions back to their kennels; and seven swift hounds from Sparta.5
e. Having captured alive two couple of horned hinds, she harnessed them to a golden chariot with golden bits, and drove north over Thracian Mount Haemus. She cut her first pine torch on Mysian Olympus, and lit it at the cinders of a lightning-struck tree. She tried her silver bow four times: her first two targets were trees; her third, a wild beast; her fourth, a city of unjust men.6
f. Then she returned to Greece, where the Amnisian nymphs unyoked her hinds, rubbed them down, fed them on the same quick-growing trefoil, from Hera’s pasture, which the steeds of Zeus eat, and watered them from golden troughs.7
g. Once the River-god Alpheius,
son of Thetis, dared fall in love with Artemis and pursue her across Greece; but she came to Letrini in Elis (or, some say, as far as the island of Ortygia near Syracuse), where she daubed her face, and those of all her nymphs, with white mud, so that she became indistinguishable from the rest of the company. Alpheius was forced to retire, pursued by mocking laughter.8
h. Artemis requires the same perfect chastity from her companions as she practises herself. When Zeus had seduced one of them, Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, Artemis noticed that she was with child. Changing her into a bear, she shouted to the pack, and Callisto would have been hunted to death had she not been caught up to Heaven by Zeus who, later, set her image among the stars. But some say that Zeus himself changed Callisto into a bear, and that jealous Hera arranged for Artemis to chase her in error. Callisto’s child, Arcas, was saved, and became the ancestor of the Arcadians.9
i. On another occasion, Actaeon, son of Aristaeus, stood leaning against a rock near Orchomenus when he happened to see Artemis bathing in a stream not far off, and stayed to watch. Lest he should afterwards dare boast to his companions that she had displayed herself naked in his presence, she changed him into a stag and, with his own pack of fifty hounds, tore him to pieces.10
1. Callimachus: Hymn to Artemis 1 ff.
2. Ibid.: 26 ff.
3. Ibid.: 40 ff.
4. Ibid.: 47 ff.
5. Ibid.: 69 ff.
6. Ibid.: 110 ff.
7. Ibid.: 162 ff.
8. Pausanias: vi. 22. 5; Scholiast on Pindar’s Pythian Odes ii. 12.
9. Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 1; Apollodorus: iii. 8. 2.
10. Hyginus: Fabula 181; Pausanias: ix. 2. 3.
1. The Maiden of the Silver Bow, whom the Greeks enrolled in the Olympian family, was the youngest member of the Artemis Triad, ‘Artemis’ being one more title of the Triple Moon-goddess; and had a right therefore to feed her hinds on trefoil, a symbol of trinity. Her silver bow stood for the new moon. Yet the Olympian Artemis was more than a Maiden. Elsewhere, at Ephesus, for instance, she was worshipped in her second person, as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort, and the date-palm (see 14. a), stag, and bee (see 18. 3) for her principal emblems. Her midwifery belongs, rather, to the Crone, as do her arrows of death; and the nine-year-old priestesses are a reminder that the moon’s death number is three times three. She recalls the Cretan ‘Lady of the Wild Things’, apparently the supreme Nymph-goddess of archaic totem societies; and the ritual bath in which Actaeon surprised her, like the horned hinds of her chariot (see 125. a) and the quails of Ortygia (see 14. 3), seems more appropriate to the Nymph than the Maiden. Actaeon was, it seems, a sacred king of the pre-Hellenic stag cult, torn to pieces at the end of his reign of fifty months, namely half a Great Year; his co-king, or tanist, reigning for the remainder. The Nymph properly took her bath after, not before, the murder. There are numerous parallels to this ritual custom in Irish and Welsh myth, and as late as the first century A.D. a man dressed in a stag’s skin was periodically chased and killed on the Arcadian Mount Lycaeum (Plutarch: Greek Questions 39). The hounds will have been white with red ears, like the ‘hounds of Hell’ in Celtic mythology. There was a fifth horned hind which escaped Artemis (see 125. a).
The Greek Myths Page 10