The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  g. But some say that Achilles’s allies, the Myrmidons, were so named in honour of King Myrmidon, whose daughter Eurymedusa was seduced by Zeus in the form of an ant – which is why ants are sacred in Thessaly. And others tell of a nymph named Myrmex who, when her companion Athene invented the plough, boasted that she had made the discovery herself, and was turned into an ant as a punishment.6

  h. Aeacus, who married Endeis of Megara, was widely renowned for his piety, and held in such honour that men longed to feast their eyes upon him. All the noblest heroes of Sparta and Athens clamoured to fight under his command, though he had made Aegina the most difficult of the Aegean islands to approach, surrounding it with sunken rocks and dangerous reefs, as a protection against pirates.7 When all Greece was afflicted with a drought caused by Pelops’s murder of the Arcadian king Stymphalus or, some say, by the Athenians’ murder of Androgeus, the Delphic Oracle advised the Greeks: ‘Ask Aeacus to pray for your delivery!’ Thereupon every city sent a herald to Aeacus, who ascended Mount Panhellenius, the highest peak in his island, robed as a priest of Zeus. There he sacrificed to the gods, and prayed for an end to the drought. His prayer was answered by a loud thunder clap, clouds obscured the sky, and furious showers of rain soaked the whole land of Greece. He then dedicated a sanctuary to Zeus on Panhellenius, and a cloud settling on the mountain summit has ever since been an unfailing portent of rain.8

  i. Apollo and Poseidon took Aeacus with them when they built the walls of Troy, knowing that unless a mortal joined in this work, the city would be impregnable and its inhabitants capable of defying the gods. Scarcely had they finished their task when three grey-eyed serpents tried to scale the walls. Two chose the part just completed by the gods, but tumbled down and died; the third, with a cry, rushed at Aeacus’s part and forced his way in. Apollo then prophesied that Troy would fall more than once, and that Aeacus’s sons would be among its captors, both in the first and fourth generations; as indeed came to pass in the persons of Telamon and Ajax.9

  j. Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthys were the three of Zeus’s sons whom he would have most liked to spare the burden of old age. The Fates, however, would not permit this, and Zeus, by graciously accepting their ban, provided the other Olympians with a good example.10

  k. When Aeacus died, he became one of the three Judges in Tartarus, where he gives laws to the shades, and is even called upon to arbitrate quarrels that may arise between the gods. Some add that he keeps the keys of Tartarus, imposes a toll and checks the ghosts brought down by Hermes against Atropos’s invoice.11

  1. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72.

  2. Diodorus Siculus: loc. cit.; Pindar: Isthmian Odes viii. 17 ff.; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 78; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Lactantius on Statius’s Thebaid vii. 215.

  3. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 7; Pindar: Nemean Odes viii. 6; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 113.

  4. Hyginus: Fabula 52; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 520 ff.

  5. Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 614 ff.; Hyginus: loc cit.; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Pausanias: ii. 29. 2; Strabo: viii. 6. 19 and ix. 5. 9.

  6. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 7 and iv. 402; Clement of Alexandria: Address to the Gentiles ii. 39. 6.

  7. Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Pindar: Nemean Odes viii. 8 ff; Pausanias: ii. 29. 5.

  8. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 61. 1; Clement of Alexandria: Stromateis vi. 3. 28; Pausanias: ii. 30. 4; Theophrastus: Weather Signs i. 24.

  9. Pindar: Olympian Odes viii. 30 ff., with scholiast.

  10. Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 426 ff.

  11. Ibid.: xiii. 25; Pindar: Isthmian Odes viii. 24; Apollodorus: iii. 12. 6; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead xx. 1; Charon 2; and Voyage Below iv.

  1. Asopus’s daughters ravished by Apollo and Poseidon will have been colleges of Moon-priestesses in the Asopus valley of the North-eastern Peloponnese, whose fertile lands were seized by the Aeolians. Aegina’s rape seems to record a subsequent Achaean conquest of Phlius, a city at the headwaters of the Asopus; and an unsuccessful appeal made by their neighbours for military aid from Corinth. Eurynome and Tethys (see 1. a and d), the names of Asopus’s mother, were ancient titles of the Moon-goddess, and ‘Pero’ points to pera, a leather bag (see 36. 1), and thus to Athene’s goat-skin aegis – as ‘Aegina’ also does.

  2. The Aeacus myth concerns the conquest of Aegina by Phthiotian Myrmidons, whose tribal emblem was an ant. Previously, the island was, it seems, held by goat-cult Pelasgians, and their hostility towards the invaders is recorded in Hera’s poisoning of the streams. According to Strabo, who always looked for reasonable explanations of myths, but seldom looked far enough, the soil of Aegina was covered by a layer of stones, and the Aeginetans called themselves Myrmidons because, like ants, they had to excavate before they could till their fields, and because they were troglodytes (Strabo: viii. 6. 16). But the Thessalian legend of Myrmex is a simple myth of origin: the Phthiotian Myrmidons claimed to be autochthonous, as ants are, and showed such loyalty to the laws of their priestess, the Queen Ant, that Zeus’s Hellenic representative who married her had to become an honorary ant himself. If Myrmex was, in fact, a title of the Mother-goddess of Northern Greece, she might well claim to have invented the plough, because agriculture had been established by immigrants from Asia Minor before the Hellenes reached Athens.

  3. The Phthiotian colonists of Aegina later merged their myths with those of Achaean invaders from Phlius on the river Asopus; and, since these Phlians had retained their allegiance to the oak-oracle of Dodona (see 51. a), the ants are described as falling from a tree, instead of emerging from the ground.

  4. In the original myth, Aeacus will have induced the rain-storm not by an appeal to Zeus, but by some such magic as Salmoneus used (see 68. 1). His law-giving in Tartarus, like that of Minos and Rhadamanthys, suggests that an Aeginetan legal code was adopted in other parts of Greece. It probably applied to commercial, rather than criminal law, judging from the general acceptance, in Classical times, of the Aeginetan talent as the standard weight of precious metal. It was of Cretan origin and turned the scales at 100 lb. avoirdupois.

  67

  SISYPHUS

  SISYPHUS, son of Aeolus, married Atlas’s daughter Merope, the Pleiad, who bore him Glaucus, Ornytion, and Sinon, and owned a fine herd of cattle on the Isthmus of Corinth.1

  b. Near him lived Autolycus, son of Chione, whose twin-brother Philammon was begotten by Apollo, though Autolycus himself claimed Hermes as his father.2

  c. Now, Autolycus was a past master in theft, Hermes having given him the power of metamorphosing whatever beasts he stole, from horned to unhorned, or from black to white, and contrariwise. Thus, although Sisyphus noticed that his own herds grew steadily smaller, while those of Autolycus increased, he was unable at first to convict him of theft; and therefore, one day, engraved the inside of all his cattle’s hooves with the monogram SS or, some say, with the words ‘Stolen by Autolycus’. That night Autolycus helped himself as usual, and at dawn hoof-prints along the road provided Sisyphus with sufficient evidence to summon neighbours in witness of the theft. He visited Autolycus’s stable, recognized his stolen beasts by their marked hooves and, leaving his witnesses to remonstrate with the thief, hurried around the house, entered by the portal, and while the argument was in progress outside seduced Autolycus’s daughter Anticleia, wife to Laertes the Argive. She bore him Odysseus, the manner of whose conception is enough to account for the cunning he habitually showed, and for his nickname ‘Hypsipylon’.3

  d. Sisyphus founded Ephyra, afterwards known as Corinth, and peopled it with men sprung from mushrooms, unless it be true that Medea gave him the kingdom as a present. His contemporaries knew him as the worst knave on earth, granting only that he promoted Corinthian commerce and navigation.4

  e. When, on the death of Aeolus, Salmoneus usurped the Thessalian throne, Sisyphus, who was the rightful heir, consulted the Delphic Oracle and was told: ‘Sire children on your niece; they will aven
ge you!’ He therefore seduced Tyro, Salmoneus’s daughter, who, happening to discover that his motive was not love for her, but hatred of her father, killed the two sons she had borne him. Sisyphus entered then the market place of Larissa [? produced the dead bodies, falsely accused Salmoneus of incest and murder] and had him expelled from Thessaly.5

  f. After Zeus’s abduction of Aegina, her father the River-god Asopus came to Corinth in search of her. Sisyphus knew well what had happened to Aegina but would not reveal anything unless Asopus undertook to supply the citadel of Corinth with a perennial spring. Asopus accordingly made the spring Peirene rise behind Aphrodite’s temple, where there are now images of the goddess, armed; of the Sun; and of Eros the Archer. Then Sisyphus told him all he knew.6

  g. Zeus, who had narrowly escaped Asopus’s vengeance, ordered his brother Hades to fetch Sisyphus down to Tartarus and punish him everlastingly for his betrayal of divine secrets. Yet Sisyphus would not be daunted: he cunningly put Hades himself in handcuffs by persuading him to demonstrate their use, and then quickly locking them. Thus Hades was kept a prisoner in Sisyphus’s house for some days – an impossible situation, because nobody could die, even men who had been beheaded or cut in pieces; until at last Ares, whose interests were threatened, came hurrying up, set him free, and delivered Sisyphus into his clutches.

  h. Sisyphus, however, kept another trick in reserve. Before descending to Tartarus, he instructed his wife Merope not to bury him; and, on reaching the Palace of Hades went straight to Persephone, and told her that, as an unburied person, he had no right to be there but should have been left on the far side of the river Styx. ‘Let me return to the upper world,’ he pleaded, ‘arrange for my burial, and avenge the neglect shown me. My presence here is most irregular. I will be back within three days.’ Persephone was deceived and granted his request; but as soon as Sisyphus found himself once again under the light of the sun, he repudiated his promise to Persephone. Finally, Hermes was called upon to hale him back by force.7

  i. It may have been because he had injured Salmoneus, or because he had betrayed Zeus’s secret, or because he had always lived by robbery and often murdered unsuspecting travellers – some say that it was Theseus who put an end to Sisyphus’s career, though this is not generally mentioned among Theseus’s feats – at any rate, Sisyphus was given an exemplary punishment.8 The Judges of the Dead showed him a huge block of stone – identical in size with that into which Zeus had turned himself when fleeing from Asopus – and ordered him to roll it up the brow of a hill and topple it down the farther slope. He has never yet succeeded in doing so. As soon as he has almost reached the summit, he is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounces to the very bottom once more; where he wearily retrieves it and must begin all over again, though sweat bathes his limbs, and a cloud of dust rises above his head.9

  j. Merope, ashamed to find herself the only Pleiad with a husband in the Underworld – and a criminal too – deserted her six starry sisters in the night sky and has never been seen since. And as the whereabouts of Neleus’s tomb on the Corinthian Isthmus was a secret which Sisyphus refused to divulge even to Nestor, so the Corinthians are now equally reticent when asked for the whereabouts of Sisyphus’s own burial place.10

  1. Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Pausanias: ii. 4. 3; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid ii. 79.

  2. Hyginus: Fabula 200.

  3. Polyaenus: vi. 52; Hyginus: Fabula 201; Suidas sub Sisyphus; Sophocles: Ajax 190; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Philoctetes 417.

  4. Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 393; Eumelus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 3. 8; Homer: Iliad vi. 153; Scholiast on Aristophanes’s Acarnanians 390; Scholiast on Sophocles’s Ajax 190; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 980; Ovid: Heroides xii. 203; Horace: Satires ii. 17. 12.

  5. Hyginus: Fabula 60.

  6. Pausanias: ii. 5.1.

  7. Theognis: 712 ff.; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad pp. 487, 631, and 1702.

  8. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 616; Scholiast on Statius’s Thebaid ii. 380; Hyginus: Fabula 38.

  9. Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad i. 180; Pausanias: x. 31. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 459; Homer: Odyssey xi. 593–600.

  10. Ovid: Fasti i. 175–6; Eumelus, quoted by Pausanias: ii. 2. 2.

  1. ‘Sisyphus’, though the Greeks understood it to mean ‘very wise’, is spelt Sesephus by Hesychius, and is thought to be a Greek variant of Tesup, the Hittite Sun-god, identical with Atabyrius the Sun-god of Rhodes (see 42. 4 and 93. 1), whose sacred animal was a bull. Bronze statuettes and reliefs of this bull, dating from the fourteenth century B.C., have been found, marked with a sceptre and two disks on the flank, and with a trefoil on the haunch. Raids on the Sun-god’s marked cattle are a commonplace in Greek myth: Odysseus’s companions made them (see 170. u), so also did Alcyoneus, and his contemporary, Heracles (see 132. d and w). But Autolycus’s use of magic in his theft from Sisyphus recalls the story of Jacob and Laban (Genesis xxix and xxx). Jacob, like Autolycus, had the gift of turning cattle to whatever colour he wanted, and thus diminished Laban’s flocks. The cultural connexion between Corinth and Canaan, which is shown in the myths of Nisus (see 91. 1), Oedipus (see 105. 1 and 7), Alcathous (see 110. 2), and Melicertes (see 70. 2), may be Hittite. Alcyoneus also came from Corinth.

  2. Sisyphus’s ‘shameless stone’ was originally a sun-disk, and the hill up which he rolled it is the vault of Heaven; this made a familiar enough icon. The existence of a Corinthian Sun cult is well established: Helius and Aphrodite are said to have held the acropolis in succession, and shared a temple there (Pausanias: ii. 4. 7). Moreover, Sisyphus is invariably placed next to Ixion in Tartarus, and Ixion’s fire-wheel is a symbol of the sun. This explains why the people of Ephyra sprang from mushrooms, mushrooms were the ritual tinder of Ixion’s fire-wheel (see 63. 2), and the Sun-god demanded human burnt sacrifices to inaugurate his year. Anticleia’s seduction has been deduced perhaps from a picture showing Helius’s marriage to Aphrodite; and the mythographer’s hostility towards Sisyphus voices Hellenic disgust at the strategic planting of non-Hellenic settlements on the narrow isthmus separating the Peloponnese from Attica. His outwitting of Hades probably refers to a sacred king’s refusal to abdicate at the end of his reign (see 170. 1). To judge from the sun-bull’s markings, he contrived to rule for two Great Years, represented by the sceptre and the sun-disks, and obtained the Triple-goddess’s assent, represented by the trefoil. Hypsipylon, Odysseus’s nickname, is the masculine form of Hypsipyle: a title, probably, of the Moon-goddess (see 106. 3).

  3. Sisyphus and Neleus were probably buried at strategic points on the Isthmus as a charm against invasion (see 101. 3 and 146. 2). A lacuna occurs in Hyginus’s account of Sisyphus’s revenge on Salmoneus; I have supplied a passage (para. e, above) which makes sense of the story.

  4. Peirene, the spring on the citadel of Corinth where Bellerophon took Pegasus to drink (see 75. c), had no efflux and never failed (Pausanias: ii. 5. 1; Strabo: vii. 6. 21). Peirene was also the name of a fountain outside the city gate, on the way from the market-place to Lechaeum, where Peirene (‘of the osiers’) – whom the mythographers describe as the daughter of Achelous, or of Oebalus (Pausanias: loc. cit.); or of Asopus and Metope (Diodorus Siculus: iv. 72) – was said to have been turned into a spring when she wept for her son Cenchrias (‘spotted serpent’), whom Artemis had unwittingly killed. ‘Corinthian bronze’ took its characteristic colour from being plunged red-hot into this spring (Pausanias: ii. 3. 3).

  5. One of the seven Pleiads disappeared in early Classical times, and her absence had to be explained (see 41. 6).

  6. A question remains: was the double-S really the monogram of Sisyphus? The icon illustrating the myth probably showed him examining the tracks of the stolen sheep and cattle which, since they ‘parted the hoof’, were formalized as CƆ. This sign stood for SS in the earliest Greek script, and could also be read as the conjoined halves of the lunar month and all that these implied – waxing and waning, increase and decline, bl
essing and cursing. Animals which ‘parted the hoof’ were self-dedicated to the Moon – they are the sacrifices ordained at the New Moon Festivals in Leviticus – and the SS will therefore have referred to Selene the Moon, alias Aphrodite, rather than to Sisyphus, who as Sun-king merely held her sacred herd in trust (see 42. 1). The figure CƆ, representing the full moon (as distinguished from O, representing the simple sun-disk) was marked on each flank of the sacred cow which directed Cadmus to the site of Thebes (see 58.f).

  68

  SALMONEUS AND TYRO

  SALMONEUS, a son, or grandson, of Aeolus and Enarete, reigned for a time in Thessaly before leading an Aeolian colony to the eastern confines of Elis, where he built the city of Salmonia near the source of the river Enipeus, a tributary of the Alpheius.1 Salmoneus was hated by his subjects, and went so far in his royal insolence as to transfer Zeus’s sacrifices to his own altars, and announce that he was Zeus. He even drove through the streets of Salmonia, dragging brazen cauldrons, bound with hide, behind his chariot to simulate Zeus’s thunder, and hurling oaken torches into the air; some of these, as they fell, scorched his unfortunate subjects, who were expected to mistake them for lightning. One fine day Zeus punished Salmoneus by hurling a real thunderbolt, which not only destroyed him, chariot and all, but burned down the entire city.2

  b. Alcidice, Salmoneus’s wife, had died many years before, in giving birth to a beautiful daughter named Tyro. Tyro was under the charge of her stepmother Sidero, and treated with great cruelty as the cause of the family’s expulsion from Thessaly; having killed the two sons she bore to her evil uncle Sisyphus. She now fell in love with the river Enipeus, and haunted its banks day after day, weeping for loneliness. But the River-god, although amused and even flattered by her passion, would not show her the least encouragement.