The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  2. Hyginus: Fabulae 1, 3, 5 and 88; Fragments of Euripides’s Ino; Herodotus: vii. 197; Pausanias: ix. 34. 5.

  1. Athamas’s name is connected in the myth with Athamania, the city which he is said to have founded in the Thessalian wilderness; but seems formed, rather, from Ath (‘high’), and amaein (‘to reap’) – meaning ‘the king dedicated to the Reaper on High’, namely the Goddess of the Harvest Moon. The conflict between his rival wives Ino and Nephele was probably one between early Ionian settlers in Boeotia, who had adopted the worship of the Corn-goddess Ino, and the pastoral Aeolian invaders. An attempt to make over the agricultural rites of the Ionian goddess Ino to the Aeolian thunder-god and his wife Nephele, the rain-cloud, seems to have been foiled by the priestesses’ parching of the seed-corn.

  2. The myth of Athamas and Phrixus records the annual mountain sacrifice of the king, or of the king’s surrogate – first a boy dressed in a ram’s fleece, and later a ram – during the New Year rain-inducing festival which shepherds celebrated at the Spring Equinox. Zeus’s ram-sacrifice on the summit of Mount Pelion, not far from Laphystium, took place in April when, according to the Zodiac, the Ram was in the ascendant; the chief men of the district used to struggle up, wearing white sheep-skins (Dicearchus: ii. 8), and the rite still survives there today in the mock-sacrifice and resurrection of an old man who wears a black sheep’s mask (see 148. 10). The mourning garments, ordered for the children sentenced to death, suggest that a black fleece was worn by the victim, and white ones by the priest and the spectators. Biadice’s love for Phrixus recalls Potiphar’s wife’s love for Joseph, a companion myth from Canaan: much the same story is also told of Anteia and Bellerophon (see 75. a), Cretheis and Peleus (see 81. g), Phaedra and Hippolytus (see 101. a–g), Phylonome and Tenes (see 161. g).

  3. That Nephele (‘cloud’) was Hera’s gift to Athamas and created in her own image, suggests that in the original version Athamas the Aeolian king himself represented the thunder-god, like his predecessor Ixion (see 63. 1), and his brother Salmoneus (see 68. 1); and that, when he married Themisto (who, in Euripides’s version of the myth, is Ino’s rival), she took the part of the thunder-god’s wife.

  4. Ino was Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess’, and proved her identity with the Triple Muse by revelling on Mount Parnassus. Her name (‘she who makes sinewy’) suggests ithyphallic orgies, and the sturdy growth of corn; boys will have been bloodily sacrificed to her before every winter sowing. Zeus is himself credited with having defied Ino in gratitude for her kindness to Dionysus, and Athamas bears an agricultural name in her honour; in other words, the Ionian farmers settled their religious differences with the Aeolian shepherds to their own advantage.

  5. The myth, however, is a medley of early cult elements. The sacramental Zagreus cult, which became that of Dionysus the Kid (see 30. 3), is suggested when Athamas takes Ino for a she-goat; the sacramental Actaeon cult is suggested when he takes Learchus for a stag, shoots him, and tears him in pieces (see 22. 1). Ino’s younger son Melicertes is the Canaanite Heracles Melkarth (‘protector of the city’), alias Moloch who, as the new-born solar king, comes riding on dolphin-back towards the isthmus; and whose death, at the close of his four years’ reign, was celebrated at the Isthmian Funeral Games. Infants were sacrificed to Melicertes on the Island of Tenedos, and probably also at Corinth (see 156.2), as they were to Moloch at Jerusalem (Leviticus xviii. 21 and 1 Kings xi. 7).

  6. Only when Zeus became god of the clear sky and usurped the goddess’s solar attributes did the fleece become golden – thus the First Vatican Mythographer says that it was ‘the fleece in which Zeus ascended the sky’ – but while he was inducer of the thunderstorm it had been purple-black (Simonides: Fragment 21).

  7. In one version of the myth (Hippias: Fragment 12), Ino is called Gorgopis (‘grim-faced’), a title of Athene’s; and savage Sciron who hurled travellers over the cliff, took his name from the white parasol – more properly a paralune – carried in Athene’s processions. The Molurian Rock was evidently the cliff from which the sacred king, or his surrogates, were thrown into the sea in honour of the Moon-goddess Athene, or Ino, the parasol being apparently used to break the fall (see 89. 6; 92. 3; 96. 3 and 98. 7).

  8. Helle’s drowning parallels Ino’s. Both are Moon-goddesses, and the myth is ambivalent: it represents the nightly setting of the Moon and, at the same time, the abandonment of Helle’s lunar cult in favour of Zeus’s solar one. Both are equally Sea-goddesses: Helle gave her name to the junction of two seas, Ino-Leucothea appeared to Odysseus in the guise of a seamew and rescued him from drowning (see 170. y).

  9. Athamas’s tribe is more likely to have migrated from Boeotian Mount Laphystium and Athamania to Thessalian Mount Laphystius and Athamania, than contrariwise; he had a strong connexion with Corinth, the kingdom of his brother Sisyphus, and is said to have founded the city of Acraephia to the east of Lake Copais, where there was a ‘Field of Athamas’ (Stephanus of Byzantium sub Acraephia; Pausanias: ix. 24. 1). Several of his sons are also credited with the foundation of Boeotian cities. He is indeed plausibly described as a son of Minyas, and King of Orchomenus, which would have given him power over the Copaic Plain and Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 230; Hellanicus on Apollonius Rhodius: iii. 265) and allied him with Corinth against the intervening states of Athens and Thebes. The probable reason for the Athamanians’ northward wanderings into Thessaly was the disastrous war fought between Orchomenus and Thebes, recorded in the Heracles cycle (see 121. d). Nephele’s ragings on the mountain recall the daughters of Minyas who are said to have been overtaken by a Bacchic frenzy on Mount Laphystium (Scholiast on Lycophron’s Alexandra 1237): the alleged origin of the Agrionia festival at Orchomenus.

  71

  THE MARES OF GLAUCUS

  GLAUCUS, son of Sisyphus and Merope, and father of Bellerophon, lived at Potniae near Thebes where, scorning the power of Aphrodite, he refused to let his mares breed. He hoped by this means to make them more spirited than other contestants in the chariot races which were his chief interest. But Aphrodite was vexed; and complained to Zeus that he had gone so far as to feed the mares on human flesh. When Zeus permitted her to take what action she pleased against Glaucus, she led the mares out by night to drink from a well sacred to herself, and graze on a herb called hippomanes which grew at its lip. This she did just before Jason celebrated the funeral games of Pelias on the seashore at Iolcus; and no sooner had Glaucus yoked the mares to his chariot pole than they bolted, overthrew the chariot, dragged him along the ground entangled in the reins, for the whole length of the stadium, and then ate him alive.1 But some say that this took place at Potniae, not Iolcus; and others, that Glaucus leaped into the sea in grief for Melicertes son of Athamas; or that Glaucus was the name given to Melicertes after his death.2

  b. Glaucus’s ghost, called the Taraxippus, or Horse-scarer, still haunts the Isthmus of Corinth, where his father Sisyphus first taught him the charioteer’s art, and delights in scaring the horses at the Isthmian Games, thus causing many deaths. Another horse-scarer is the ghost of Myrtilus whom Pelops killed. He haunts the stadium at Olympia, where charioteers offer him sacrifices in the hope of avoiding destruction.3

  1. Homer: Iliad vi. 154; Apollodorus: ii. 3. 1; Pausanias: vi. 20. 9; Hyginus: Fabulae 250 and 273; Ovid: Ibis 557; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 318 and Phoenician Women 1131; Aelian: Nature of Animals xv. 25.

  2. Strabo: ix. 2. 24; Athenaeus: vii. pp. 296–7.

  3. Pausanias: vi. 20. 8.

  1. The myths of Lycurgus (see 27. e) and Diomedes (see 130. b) suggest that the pre-Hellenic sacred king was torn in pieces at the close of his reign by women disguised as mares. In Hellenic times, this ritual was altered to death by being dragged at the tail of a four-horse chariot, as in the myths of Hippolytus (see 101.g), Laius (see 105. d), Oenomaus (see 109. j), Abderus (see 130. 1), Hector (see 163. 4), and others. At the Babylonian New Year festivities, when the Sun-god Marduk, incarnate in the King, was bel
ieved to be in Hell fighting the sea-monster Tiamat (see 73. 7), a chariot drawn by four masterless horses was let loose in the streets, to symbolize the chaotic state of the world during the demise of the crown; presumably with a puppet charioteer entangled in the reins. If the Babylonian ritual was of common origin with the Greek, a boy interrex will have succeeded to the King’s throne and bed during his demise of a single day and, at dawn next morning, been dragged at the chariot’s tail – as in the myths of Phaëthon (see 42. 2) and Hippolytus (see 101. g). The King was then reinstalled on his throne.

  2. The myth of Glaucus is unusual: he is not only involved in a chariot-wreck, but eaten by the mares. That he despised Aphrodite and would not let his mares breed, suggests a patriarchal attempt to suppress Theban erotic festivities in honour of the Potniae, ‘powerful ones’, namely the Moon triad.

  3. The Taraxippus seems to have been an archaic royal statue, marking the first turn of the race-course; horses new to the stadium were distracted by it at the moment when their charioteer was trying to cut in and take the inner berth; but this was also the place where the chariot-crash was staged for the old king, or his interrex, by the removal of his linchpins (see 109.j).

  4. Glaucus (‘grey-green’) is likely to have been in one sense the Minoan representative who visited the Isthmus (see 90. 7) with the annual edicts; and in another Melicertes (Melkarth ‘guardian of the city’), a Phoenician title of the King of Corinth, who theoretically arrived every year, new-born, on dolphin-back (see 70. 5 and 87. 2), and was flung into the sea when his reign ended (see 96. 3).

  72

  MELAMPUS

  MELAMPUS the Minyan, Cretheus’s grandson, who lived at Pylus in Messene, was the first mortal to be granted prophetic powers, the first to practise as a physician, the first to build temples to Dionysus in Greece, and the first to temper wine with water.1

  b. His brother Bias, to whom he was deeply attached, fell in love with their cousin Pero; but so many suitors came for her hand that she was promised by her father Neleus to the man who could drive off King Phylacus’s cattle from Phylace. Phylacus prized these cattle above everything in the world, except his only son Iphiclus, and guarded them in person with the help of an unsleeping and unapproachable dog.

  c. Now, Melampus could understand the language of birds, his ears having been licked clean by a grateful brood of young serpents: he had rescued these from death at the hands of his attendants and piously buried their parents’ dead bodies. Moreover, Apollo, whom he met one day by the banks of the river Alpheius, had taught him to prophesy from the entrails of sacrificial victims.2 It thus came to his knowledge that whoever tried to steal the cattle would be made a present of them, though only after being imprisoned for exactly one year. Since Bias was in despair, Melampus decided to visit Phylacus’s byre by dead of night; but as soon as he laid his hand on a cow, the dog bit his leg, and Phylacus, springing up from the straw, led him away to prison. This was, of course, no more than Melampus expected.

  d. On the evening before his year of imprisonment ended Melampus heard two woodworms talking at the end of a beam which was socketed into the wall above his head. One asked with a sigh of fatigue: ‘How many days yet of gnawing, brother?’

  The other worm, his mouth full of wood-dust, replied: ‘We are making good progress. The beam will collapse tomorrow at dawn, if we waste no time in idle conversation.’

  Melampus at once shouted: ‘Phylacus, Phylacus, pray transfer me to another cell!’ Phylacus, though laughing at Melampus’s reasons for this request, did not deny him. When the beam duly collapsed and killed one of the women who was helping to carry out the bed, Phylacus was astounded at Melampus’s prescience. ‘I will grant you both your freedom and the cattle,’ he said, ‘if only you would cure my son Iphiclus of impotency.’

  e. Melampus agreed. He began the task by sacrificing two bulls to Apollo, and after he had burned the thigh-bones with the fat, left their carcasses lying by the altar. Presently two vultures flew down, and one remarked to the other: ‘It must be several years since we were last here – that time when Phylacus was gelding rams and we collected our perquisites.’

  ‘I well remember it,’ said the other vulture. ‘Iphiclus, who was then still a child, saw his father coming towards him with a blood-stained knife, and took fright. He apparently feared to be gelded himself, because he screamed at the top of his voice. Phylacus drove the knife into the sacred pear-tree over there, for safe-keeping, while he ran to comfort Iphiclus. That fright accounts for the impotency. Look, Phylacus forgot to recover the knife! There it still is, sticking in the tree, but bark has grown over its blade, and only the end of its handle shows.’

  ‘In that case,’ remarked the first vulture, ‘the remedy for Iphiclus’s impotency would be to draw out the knife, scrape off the rust left by the ram’s blood and administer it to him, mixed in water, every day for ten days.’

  ‘I concur,’ said the other vulture. ‘But who, less intelligent than ourselves, would have the sense to prescribe such a medicine?’

  f. Thus Melampus was able to cure Iphiclus, who soon begot a son named Podarces; and, having claimed first the cattle and then Pero, he presented her, still a virgin, to his grateful brother Bias.3

  g. Now, Proetus, son of Abas, joint-king of Argolis with Acrisius, had married Stheneboea, who bore him three daughters named Lysippe, Iphinoë, and Iphianassa – but some call the two younger ones Hipponoë and Cyrianassa. Whether it was because they had offended Dionysus, or because they had offended Hera by their overindulgence in love-affairs, or by stealing gold from her image at Tiryns, their father’s capital, all three were divinely afflicted by madness and went raging on the mountains, like cows stung by the gadfly, behaving in a most disorderly fashion and assaulting travellers.4

  h. Melampus, when he heard the news, came to Tiryns and offered to cure them, on condition that Proetus paid him with a third share of his kingdom.

  ‘The price is far too high,’ said Proetus brusquely; and Melampus retired.

  The madness then spread to the Argive women, a great many of whom killed their children, deserted their homes, and went raving off to join Proetus’s three daughters, so that no roads were safe, and sheep and cattle suffered heavy losses because the wild women tore them in pieces and devoured them raw. At this Proetus sent hastily for Melampus to say that he accepted his terms.

  ‘No, no.’ said Melampus, ‘as the disease has increased, so has my fee! Give me one third of your kingdom, and another third to my brother Bias, and I undertake to save you from this calamity. If you refuse, there will not be one Argive woman left in her home.’

  When Proetus agreed, Melampus advised him: ‘Vow twenty red oxen to Helius – I will tell you what to say – and all will be well.’

  i. Proetus accordingly vowed the oxen to Helius, on condition that his daughters and their followers were cured; and Helius, who sees everything, at once promised Artemis the names of certain kings who had omitted their sacrifices to her, on condition that she persuaded Hera to remove the curse from the Argive women. Now, Artemis had recently hunted the Nymph Callisto to death for Hera’s sake, so found no difficulty in carrying out her side of the bargain. This is the way that business is done in Heaven as on earth: hand washes hand.

  j. Then Melampus, helped by Bias and a chosen company of sturdy young men, drove the disorderly crowd of women down from the mountains to Sicyon, where their madness left them, and then purified them by immersion in a holy well. Not finding Proetus’s daughters among this rabble, Melampus and Bias went off again and chased all three of them to Lusi in Arcadia, where they rook refuge in a cave overlooking the river Styx. There Lysippe and Iphianassa regained their sanity and were purified; but Iphinoë had died on the way.

  k. Melampus then married Lysippe, Bias (whose wife Pero had recently died) married Iphianassa, and Proetus rewarded them both according to his promise. But some say that Proetus’s true name was Anaxagoras.5

  1. Apollodorus: ii. 2. 2; Athen
aeus: ii. p. 45.

  2. Apollodorus: i. 9. 11.

  3. Homer Odyssey xi. 281–97, with scholiasts; Apollodorus: i. 9. 12.

  4. Hesiod: Catalogue of Women; Apollodorus: ii. 4. 1; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues vi. 48.

  5. Apollodorus: ii. 2. 1–2; Bacchylides: Epinicia x. 40–112; Herodotus: ix. 34; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 68; Pausanias: ii. 18. 4; iv. 36. 3; v. 5. 5 and viii. 18. 3; Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes ix. 13.

  1. It was a common claim of wizards that their ears had been licked by serpents, which were held to be incarnate spirits of oracular heroes (‘The Language of Animals’ by J. R. Frazer, Archaeological Review i, 1888), and that they were thus enabled to understand the language of birds and insects (see 105. g and 158. p). Apollo’s priests appear to have been more than usually astute in claiming prophesy by this means.

  2. Iphiclus’s disability is factual rather than mythical: the rust of the gelding-knife would be an appropriate psychological cure for impotence caused by a sudden fright, and in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic. Apollodorus describes the tree into which the knife was thrust as an oak, but it is more likely to have been the wild pear-tree sacred to the White Goddess of the Peloponnese (see 74. 6), which fruits in May, the month of enforced chastity; Phylacus had insulted the goddess by wounding her tree. The wizard’s claim to have been told of the treatment by vultures – important birds in augury (see 119. i) – would strengthen the belief in its efficacy. Pero’s name has been interpreted as meaning ‘maimed or deficient’, a reference to Iphiclus’s disability, which is the main point of the story, rather than as meaning ‘leather bag’, a reference to her control of the winds (see 36. 1).

  3. It appears that ‘Melampus’, a leader of Aeolians from Pylus, seized part of Argolis from the Canaanite settlers who called themselves Sons of Abas (the Semitic word for ‘father’), namely the god Melkarth (see 70. 5), and instituted a double kingdom. His winning of the cattle from Phylacus (‘guardian’), who has an unsleeping dog, recalls Heracles’s Tenth Labour, and the myth is similarly based on the Hellenic custom of buying a bride with the proceeds of a cattle raid (see 132.1).