The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  g. All went well for some years, until Metapontus decided to discard Arne and marry again. Aeolus and Boeotus took their mother’s side in the ensuing wrangle, and killed Autolyte, the new queen, but were obliged to forfeit their inheritance and flee. Boeotus, with Arne, took refuge in the palace of his grandfather Aeolus, who bequeathed him the southern part of his kingdom, and renamed it Arne; the inhabitants are still called Boeotians. Two Thessalian cities, one of which later became Chaeronaea, also adopted Arne’s name.4

  h. Aeolus, meanwhile, had set sail with a number of friends and, steering west, took possession of the seven Aeolian Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, where he became famous as the confidant of the gods and guardian of the winds. His home was on Lipara, a floating island of sheer cliff, within which the winds were confined. He had six sons and six daughters by his wife Enarete, all of whom lived together, well content with one another’s company, in a palace surrounded by a brazen wall. It was a life of perpetual feasting, song, and merriment until, one day, Aeolus discovered that the youngest son, Macareus, had been sleeping with his sister Canache. In horror, he threw the fruit of their incestuous love to the dogs, and sent Canache a sword with which she dutifully killed herself. But he then learned that his other sons and daughters, having never been warned that incest among humans was displeasing to the gods, had also innocently paired off, and considered themselves as husbands and wives. Not wishing to offend Zeus, who regards incest as an Olympic prerogative, Aeolus broke up these unions, and ordered four of his remaining sons to emigrate. They visited Italy and Sicily, where each founded a famous kingdom, and rivalled his father in chastity and justice; only the fifth and eldest son stayed at home, as Aeolus’s successor to the throne of Lipara. But some say that Macareus and Canache had a daughter, Amphissa, later beloved by Apollo.5

  i. Zeus had confined the winds because he feared that, unless kept under control, they might one day sweep both earth and sea away into the air, and Aeolus took charge of them at Hera’s desire. His task was to let them out, one by one, at his own discretion, or at the considered request of some Olympian deity. If a storm were needed he would plunge his spear into the cliff-side and the winds would stream out of the hole it had made, until he stopped it again. Aeolus was so discreet and capable that, when his death hour approached, Zeus did not commit him to Tartarus, but seated him on a throne within the Cave of the Winds, where he is still to be found. Hera insists that Aeolus’s responsibilities entitle him to attend the feasts of the gods; but the other Olympians – especially Poseidon, who claims the sea, and the air above it, as his own property, and grudges anyone the right to raise storms-regard him as an interloper.6

  1. Apollodorus: i. 7. 3.

  2. Herodotus: i. 56; Pausanias: vii. I. 2.

  3. Hyginus: Fabula 186; Poetic Astronomy ii. 18.

  4. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 67. 6; Pausanias: ix. 40. 3.

  5. Ovid: Heroides xi; Homer: Odyssey x. 1 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 238; Plutarch: Parallel Stories 28; Diodorus Siculus: v. 8; Pausanias: x. 38. 2.

  6. Homer: Odyssey loc. cit.; Virgil: Aeneid i. 142–5.

  1. The Ionians and Aeolians, the first two waves of patriarchal Hellenes to invade Greece, were persuaded by the Hellads already there to worship the Triple-goddess and change their social customs accordingly, becoming Greeks (graikoi, ‘worshippers of the Grey Goddess, or Crone’). Later, the Achaeans and Dorians succeeded in establishing patriarchal rule and patrilinear inheritance, and therefore described Achaeus and Dorus as first-generation sons of a common ancestor, Hellen – a masculine form of the Moon-goddess Helle or Helen. The Parian Chronicle records that this change from Greeks to Hellenes took place in 1521 B.C., which seems a reasonable enough date. Aeolus and Ion were then relegated to the second generation, and called sons of the thievish Xuthus, this being a way of denouncing the Aeolian and Ionian devotion to the orgiastic Moon-goddess Aphrodite – whose sacred bird was the xuthos, or sparrow, and whose priestesses cared nothing for the patriarchal view that women were the property of their fathers and husbands. But Euripides, as a loyal Ionian of Athens, makes Ion elder brother to Dorus and Achaeus, and the son of Apollo as well (see 44. a).

  2. Poseidon’s seduction of Melanippe, his seduction of the Mare-headed Demeter (see 16. f), and Aeolus’s seduction of Euippe, all refer perhaps to the same event: the seizure of Aeolians of the pre-Hellenic horse-cult centres. The myth of Arne’s being blinded and imprisoned in a tomb, where she bore the twins Aeolus and Boeotus, and of their subsequent exposure on the mountain among wild beasts, is apparently deduced from the familiar icon that yielded the myths of Danaë (see 73. 4), Antiope (see 76. a), and the rest. A priestess of Mother Earth’s is shown crouched in a tholus tomb, presenting the New Year twins to the shepherds, for revelation at her Mysteries; tholus tombs have their entrances always facing east, as if in promise of rebirth. These shepherds are instructed to report that they found the infants abandoned on the mountainside, being suckled by some sacred animal – cow, sow, she-goat, bitch, or she-wolf. The wild beasts from whom the twins are supposed to have been saved represent the seasonal transformations of the newly-born sacred king (see 30. 1).

  3. Except for the matter of the imprisoned winds, and the family incest on Lipara, the remainder of the myth concerns tribal migrations. The mythographers are thoroughly confused between Aeolus the son of Hellen; another Aeolus who, in order to make the Aeolians into third-generation Greeks, is said to have been the son of Xuthus; and the third Aeolus, grandson of the first.

  4. Since the Homeric gods did not regard the incest of Aeolus’s sons and daughters as in the least reprehensible, it looks as if both he and Enarete were not mortals and thus bound by the priestly tables of kindred and affinity, but Titans; and that their sons and daughters were the remaining six couples, in charge of the seven celestial bodies and the seven days of the sacred week (see 1. d). This would explain their privileged and god-like existence, without problems of either food, drink, or clothing, in an impregnable palace built on a floating island – like Delos before the birth of Apollo (see 14. 3). ‘Macareus’ means ‘happy’, as only gods were happy. It was left for Latin mythographers to humanize Aeolus, and awaken him to a serious view of his family’s conduct; their amendment to the myth permitted them to account both for the foundation of Aeolian kingdoms in Italy and Sicily and – because ‘Canache’ means ‘barking’ and her child was thrown to the dogs – for the Italian custom of puppy sacrifice. Ovid apparently took this story from the second book of Sostratus’s Etruscan History (Plutarch: Parallel Stories 28).

  5. The winds were originally the property of Hera, and the male gods had no power over them; indeed, in Diodorus’s account, Aeolus merely teaches the islanders the use of sails in navigation and foretells, from signs in the fire, what winds will rise. Control of the winds, regarded as the spirits of the dead, is one of the privileges that the Death-goddess’s representatives have been most loth to surrender; witches in England, Scotland, and Brittany still claimed to control and sell winds to sailors as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the Dorians had been thorough: already by Homer’s time they had advanced Aeolus, the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolians, to the rank of godling, and given him charge of his fellow-winds at Hera’s expense – the Aeolian Islands, which bore his name, being situated in a region notorious for the violence and diversity of its winds (see 170. g). This compromise was apparently accepted with bad grace by the priests of Zeus and Poseidon, who opposed the creation of any new deities, and doubtless also by Hera’s conservative devotees, who regarded the winds as her inalienable property.

  44

  ION

  APOLLO lay secretly with Erechtheus’s daughter Creusa, wife to Xuthus, in a cave below the Athenian Propylaea. When her son was born Apollo spirited him away to Delphi, where he became a temple servant, and the priests named him Ion. Xuthus had no heir and, after many delays, went at last to ask the Delphic Oracle how he might procure one. To his surprise he was told that t
he first person to meet him as he left the sanctuary would be his son; this was Ion, and Xuthus concluded that he had begotten him on some Maenad in the promiscuous Dionysiac orgies at Delphi many years before. Ion could not contradict this, and acknowledged him as his father. But Creusa was vexed to find that Xuthus now had a son, while she had none, and tried to murder Ion by offering him a cup of poisoned wine. Ion, however, first poured a libation to the gods, and a dove flew down to taste the spilt wine. The dove died, and Creusa fled for sanctuary to Apollo’s altar. When the vengeful Ion tried to drag her away, the priestess intervened, explaining that he was Creusa’s son by Apollo, though Xuthus must not be undeceived in the belief that he had fathered him on a Maenad. Xuthus was then promised that he would beget Dorus and Achaeus on Creusa.

  b. Afterwards, Ion married Helice, daughter of Selinus, King of Aegialus, whom he succeeded on the throne; and, at the death of Erechtheus, he was chosen King of Athens. The four occupational classes of Athenians – farmers, craftsmen, priests, and soldiers – are named after the sons borne to him by Helice.1

  1. Pausanias: vii. 1. 2; Euripides: Ion; Strabo: viii. 7. 1; Conon: Narrations 27.

  1. This theatrical myth is told to substantiate the Ionians’ seniority over Dorians and Achaeans (see 43. 1), and also to award them divine descent from Apollo. But Creusa in the cave is perhaps the goddess, presenting the New Year infant, or infants (see 43. 2), to a shepherd – mistaken for Apollo in pastoral dress. Helice, the willow, was the tree of the fifth month, sacred to the Triple Muse, whose priestess used it in every kind of witchcraft and water-magic (see 28. 5); the Ionians seem to have subordinated themselves willingly to her.

  45

  ALCYONE AND CEYX

  ALCYONE was the daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds, and Aegiale. She married Ceyx of Trachis, son of the Morning-star, and they were so happy in each other’s company that she daringly called herself Hera, and him Zeus. This naturally vexed the Olympian Zeus and Hera, who let a thunderstorm break over the ship in which Ceyx was sailing to consult an oracle, and drowned him. His ghost appeared to Alcyone who, greatly against her will, had stayed behind in Trachis, whereupon distraught with grief, she leapt into the sea. Some pitying god transformed them both into kingfishers.

  b. Now, every winter, the hen-kingfisher carries her dead mate with great wailing to his burial and then, building a closely compacted nest from the thorns of the sea-needle, launches it on the sea, lays her eggs in it, and hatches out her chicks. She does all this in the Halcyon Days – the seven which precede the winter solstice, and the seven which succeed it – while Aeolus forbids his winds to sweep across the waters.

  c. But some say that Ceyx was turned into a seamew.1

  1. Apollodorus: 1. 7. 3; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Birds 250; Scholiast and Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad ix. 562; Pliny: Natural History x. 47; Hyginus: Fabula 65; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 410-748; Lucian: Halcyon i.; Plutarch: Which Animals Are the Craftier? 35.

  1. The legend of the halcyon’s, or kingfisher’s, nest (which has no foundation in natural history, since the halycon does not build any kind of nest, but lays eggs in holes by the waterside) can refer only to the birth of the new sacred king at the winter solstice – after the queen who represents his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. But because the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, ‘every year’ must be understood, as ‘every Great Year’, of one hundred lunations, in the last of which solar and lunar time were roughly synchronized, and the sacred king’s term ended.

  2. Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone (see 80. d), a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (Iliad ix. 562), and with a daughter of Aeolus, guardian of the winds (see 43. h). Halcyon cannot therefore mean hal-cyon, ‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for alcy-one, ‘the queen who wards off evil’. This derivation is confirmed by the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, and the manner of their punishment by Zeus and Hera. The seamew part of the legend need not be pressed, although this bird, which has a plaintive cry, was sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite, or Leucothea (see 170. y), like the halcyon of Cyprus (see 160. g). It seems that late in the second millennium B.C. the sea-faring Aeolians, who had agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Zeus-worshipping Achaeans, and were forced to accept the Olympian religion. ‘Zeus’, which according to Johannes Tzetzes (Antehomerica 102 ff. and Chiliades i. 474) had hitherto been a title borne by petty kings (see 68. 1), was henceforth reserved for the Father of Heaven alone. But in Crete, the ancient mystical tradition that Zeus was born and died annually lingered on into Christian times, and tombs of Zeus were shown at Cnossus, on Mount Ida, and on Mount Dicte, each a different cult-centre. Callimachus was scandalized, and in his Hymn to Zeus wrote: ‘The Cretans are always liars. They have even built thy tomb, O Lord! But thou art not dead, for thou livest for ever.’ This is quoted in Titus i. 12 (see 7. 6).

  3. Pliny, who describes the halcyon’s alleged nest in detail – apparently the zoöphyte called halcyoneum by Linnaeus – reports that the halcyon is rarely seen, and then only at the two solstices and at the setting of the Pleiades. This proves her to have originally been a manifestation of the Moon-goddess, who was alternately the Goddess of Life-in-Death at the winter solstice, and of Death-in-Life at the summer solstice; and who, every Great Year, early in November, when the Pleiades set, sent the sacred king his death summons.

  4. Still another Alcyone, daughter of Pleione (‘sailing queen’) by Atlas, was the leader of the seven Pleiades (see 39. d). The Pleiades’ heliacal rising in May began the navigational year; their setting marked its end, when (as Pliny notes in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold north wind blows. The circumstances of Ceyx’s death show that the Aeolians, who were famous sailors, worshipped the goddess as ‘Alcyone’ because she protected them from rocks and rough weather: Zeus wrecked Ceyx’s ship, in defiance of her powers, by hurling a thunderbolt at it. Yet the halcyon was still credited with the magical power of allaying storms; and its body, when dried, was used as a talisman against Zeus’s lightning – presumably on the ground that where once it strikes it will not strike again. The Mediterranean is inclined to be calm about the time of the winter solstice.

  46

  TEREUS

  TEREUS, a son of Ares, ruled over the Thracians then occupying Phocian Daulis – though some say that he was King of Pagae in Megaris1 – and, having acted as mediator in a boundary dispute for Pandion, King of Athens and father of the twins Butes and Erechtheus, married their sister Procne, who bore him a son, Itys.

  b. Unfortunately Tereus, enchanted by the voice of Procne’s younger sister Philomela, had fallen in love with her; and, a year later, concealing Procne in a rustic cabin near his palace at Daulis, he reported her death to Pandion. Pandion, condoling with Tereus, generously offered him Philomela in Procne’s place, and provided Athenian guards as her escort when she went to Daulis for the wedding. These guards Tereus murdered and, when Philomela reached the palace, he had already forced her to lie with him. Procne soon heard the news but, as a measure of precaution, Tereus cut out her tongue and confined her to the slaves’ quarters, where she could communicate with Philomela only be weaving a secret message into the pattern of a bridal robe intended for her. This ran simply: ‘Procne is among the slaves.’

  c. Meanwhile, an oracle had warned Tereus that Itys would die by the hand of a blood relative and, suspecting his brother Dryas of a murderous plot to seize the throne, struck him down unexpectedly with an axe. The same day, Philomela read the message woven into the robe. She hurried to the slaves’ quarters, found one of the rooms bolted, broke down the door, and released Procne, who was chattering unintelligibly and running around in circles.

  ‘Oh, to be revenged on Tereus, who pretended that you were dead, and seduced me!’ wailed Philomela, aghast.

  Procne, being tongueless, could no
t reply, but flew out and, seizing her son Itys, killed him, gutted him, and then boiled him in a copper cauldron for Tereus to eat on his return.

  d. When Tereus realized what flesh he had been tasting, he grasped the axe with which he had killed Dryas and pursued the sisters as they fled from the palace. He soon overtook them and was on the point of committing a double murder when the gods changed all three into birds; Procne became a swallow; Philomela, a nightingale; Tereus, a hoopoe. And the Phocians say that no swallow dares nest in Daulis or its environs, and no nightingale sings, for fear of Tereus. But the swallow, having no tongue, screams and flies around in circles; while the hoopoe flutters in pursuit of her, crying ‘Pou? Pou?’ (where? where?). Meanwhile, the nightingale retreats to Athens, where she mourns without cease for Itys, whose death she inadvertently caused, singing ‘Itu! Itu!’2

  e. But some say that Tereus was turned into a hawk.3

  1. Apollodorus: iii. 14. 8; Thucydides: ii. 29; Strabo: ix. 3. 13; Pausanias: i. 41. 8

  2. Apollodoruss: iii. 14. 8; Nonnus: Dionysiaca iv. 320; Pausanias: i. 5. 4; i. 41. 8 and x. 4. 6; Hyginus: Fabula 45; Fragments of Sophocles’s Tereus; Eustathius on Homer’s Odyssey xix. 418; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 426–674; First Vatican Mythographer: 217.

  3. Hyginus: Fabula 45.

  1. This extravagant romance seems to have been invented to account for a series of Thraco-Pelasgian wall-paintings, found by Phocian invaders in a temple at Daulis (‘shaggy’), which illustrated different methods of prophecy in local use.