5. Castor and Polydeuces’s visit to Phormio’s house is disingenuously described: the author is relating another trick played on the stupid Spartans by an impersonation of their national heroes. Cyrene, where the Dioscuri were worshipped, supplied herb-benjamin, a kind of asafoetida, the strong smell and taste of which made it valued as a condiment. The two Cyrenian merchants were obviously what they professed themselves to be, and when they went off with Phormio’s daughter, left their wares behind in payment: Phormio decided to call it a miracle.
6. Wild pear-trees were sacred to the Moon because of their white blossom, and the most ancient image of the Death-goddess Hera, in the Heraeum at Mycenae, was made of pear-wood. Plutarch (Greek Questions 51) and Aelian (Varia Historia iii. 39) mention the pear as a fruit peculiarly venerated at Argos and Tiryns; hence the Peloponnese was called Apia, ‘of the pear-tree’ (see 64. 4). Athene, also a Death-goddess, had the surname Oncë (‘pear-tree’) at her pear-sanctuary in Boeotia. The Dioscuri chose this tree for their perch in order to show that they were genuine heroes; moreover, the pear-tree forms fruit towards the end of May (see 72. 2), when the sun is in the house of the Twins; and when the sailing season begins in the Eastern Mediterranean. Sparrows that follow the Dioscuri, when they appear in answer to sailors’ prayers, belong to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; Xuthus (‘sparrow’), the father of Aeolus (see 43. 1), was an ancestor of the Dioscuri, who worshipped her.
7. In the Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri (7 ff.), it is not made clear whether Castor and Polydeuces are followed by sparrows or whether they come darting on ‘sparrowy wings’ through the upper air, to help distressed sailors; but on Etruscan mirrors they are sometimes pictured as winged. Their symbol at Sparta, the docana, represented the two supporting pillars of a shrine; another symbol consisted of two amphoras, each entwined by a serpent – the serpents being the incarnate Dioscuri who came to eat food placed in the amphoras.
8. Gorgophone defied the Indo-European convention of suttee by marrying again (see 69. 2; 74. a and 106. l).
75
BELLEROPHON
BELLEROPHON, son of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus, left Corinth under a cloud, having first killed one Bellerus – which earned him his nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon – and then his own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades.1 He fled as a suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but (so ill luck would have it) Anteia, Proetus’s wife whom some call Stheneboea, fell in love with him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he dared not risk the Furies’ vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia’s father Iobates, King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: ‘Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.’
b. Iobates, equally loth to ill-treat a royal guest, asked Bellerophon to do him the service of destroying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing she-monster with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail. ‘She is’, he explained, ‘a daughter of Echidne, whom my enemy, the King of Caria, has made a household pet.’ Before setting about this task, Bellerophon consulted the seer Polyeidus, and was advised to catch and tame the winged horse Pegasus, beloved by the Muses of Mount Helicon, for whom he had created the well Hippocrene by stamping his moon-shaped hoof.2
c. Pegasus was absent from Helicon, but Bellerophon found him drinking at Peirene, on the Acropolis of Corinth, another of his wells; and threw over his head a golden bridle, Athene’s timely present. But some say that Athene gave Pegasus already bridled to Bellerophon; and others, that Poseidon, who was really Bellerophon’s father, did so. Be that as it may, Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera by flying above her on Pegasus’s back, riddling her with arrows, and then thrusting between her jaws a lump of lead which he had fixed to the point of his spear. The Chimaera’s fiery breath melted the lead, which trickled down her throat, searing her vitals.3
d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once against the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bowshot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian Plain of Xanthus, he beat off a band of Carian pirates led by one Cheimarrhus, a fiery and boastful warrior, who sailed in a ship adorned with a lion figurehead and a serpent stern. When Iobates showed no gratitude even then but, on the contrary, sent the palace guards to ambush him on his return, Bellerophon dismounted and prayed that, while he advanced on foot, Poseidon would flood the Xanthian Plain behind him. Poseidon heard his prayer, and sent great waves rolling slowly forward as Bellerophon approached Iobates’s palace; and, because no man could persuade him to retire, the Xanthian women hoisted their skirts to the waist and came rushing towards him full butt, offering themselves to him one and all, if only he would relent. Bellerophon’s modesty was such that he turned tail and ran; and the waves retreated with him.
e. Convinced now that Proetus must have been mistaken about the attempt on Anteia’s virtue, Iobates produced the letter, and demanded an exact account of the affair. On learning the truth, he implored Bellerophon’s forgiveness, gave him his daughter Philonoë in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xanthian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, all Xanthians should reckon descent from the mother, not the father.
f. Bellerophon, at the height of his fortune, presumptuously undertook a flight to Olympus, as though he were an immortal; but Zeus sent a gadfly, which stung Pegasus under the tail, making him rear and fling Bellerophon ingloriously to earth. Pegasus completed the flight to Olympus, where Zeus now uses him as a pack-beast for thunderbolts; and Bellerophon, who had fallen into a thorn-bush, wandered about the earth, lame, blind, lonely and accursed, always avoiding the paths of men, until death overtook him.4
1. Apollodorus: i. 9. 3; Homer: Iliad vi. 155.
2. Homer: Iliad vi. 160; Eustathius on the same text; Apollodorus: ii. 3. 1; Antoninus Liberalis: 9; Homer: Iliad xvi. 328 ff.
3. Hesiod Theogony 319 ff.; Apollodorus: ii. 3. 2; Pindar: Olympian Odes xiii. 63 ff.; Pausanias: ii. 4.1; Hyginus: Fabula 157; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad vi. 155; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 17.
4. Pindar: Olympian Odes xiii. 87–90; Isthmian Odes vii. 44; Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Plutarch: On the Virtues of Women 9; Homer: Iliad vi. 155–203 and xvi. 328; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 646; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 838.
1. Anteia’s attempted seduction of Bellerophon has several Greek parallels (see 70. 2), besides a Palestinian parallel in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, and an Egyptian parallel in The Tale of the Two Brothers. The provenience of the myth is uncertain.
2. Echnide’s daughter, the Chimaera, who is depicted on a Hittite building at Carchemish, was a symbol of the Great Goddess’s tripartite Sacred Year – lion for spring, goat for summer, serpent for winter. A damaged glass plaque found at Dendra near Mycenae shows a hero tussling with a lion, from the back of which emerges what appears to be a goat’s head; the tail is long and serpentine. Since the plaque dates from a period when the goddess was still supreme, this icon – paralleled in an Etruscan fresco at Tarquinia, though the hero here is mounted, like Bellerophon – must be read as a king’s coronation combat against men in beast disguise (see 81. 2 and 123. 1) who represent the different seasons of the year. After the Achaean religious revolution which subordinated the goddess Hera to Zeus, the icon became ambivalent: it could also be read as recording the suppression by Hellenic invaders, of the ancient Carian calendar.
3. Bellerophon’s taming of Pegasus, the Moon-horse used in rain-making, with a bridle provided by Athene, suggests that the candidate for the sacred kingship was charged by the Triple Muse (‘mountain goddess’), or her representative, with the capture of a wild horse; thus Heracles later rode Arion (‘moon-creature on high’) when he took possession of Elis (see 138. g). To judge from primitive Danish and
Irish practice, the flesh of this horse was sacramentally eaten by the king after his symbolic rebirth from the Mare-headed Mountain-goddess. But this part of the myth is equally ambivalent: it can also be read as recording the seizure by Hellenic invaders of the Mountain-goddess’s shrines at Ascra on Mount Helicon, and Corinth. A similar event is recorded in Poseidon’s violation of the Mare-headed Arcadian Demeter (see 16. f), on whom he begot this same Moon-horse Arion; and of Medusa, on whom he begot Pegasus (see 73. h); which explains Poseidon’s intrusion into the story of Bellerophon. How Zeus humbled Bellerophon is a moral anecdote told to discourage revolt against the Olympian faith; Bellerophon, the dart-bearer, flying across the sky, is the same character as his grandfather Sisyphus, or Tesup (see 67. 1), a solar hero whose cult was replaced by that of solar Zeus; he is therefore given a similarly luckless end, which recalls that of Helius’s son Phaëthon (see 42. 2).
4. Bellerophon’s enemies, the Solymians, were Children of Salma. Since all cities and capes beginning with the syllable salm have an easterly situation, she was probably the Goddess of the Spring Equinox; but she soon became masculinized as the Sun-god Solyma, or Selin, Solomon, or Ab-Salom, who gave his name to Jerusalem. The Amazons were the Moon-goddess’s fighting priestesses (see 100. 1).
5. Bellerophon’s retreat from the Xanthian women may have been deduced from an icon which showed the Wild Women maddened with hippomanes – either a herb, or the slimy vaginal issue of a mare in heat, or the black membrane cut from the forehead of a new-born foal – closing in on the sacred king by the seashore at the end of his reign. Their skirts were hoisted, as in the erotic worship of Egyptian Apis (Diodorus Siculus: i. 85), so that when they dismembered him, his spurting blood would quicken their wombs. Since Xanthus (‘yellow’) is the name of one of Achilles’s horses, and of one belonging to Hector, and of one given to Peleus by Poseidon, these women perhaps wore ritual horse-masks with moon-yellow manes, like those of palominos; for wild mares had eaten Bellerophon’s father Glaucus by the seashore of Corinth (see 71. 1). Yet this reformed myth retains a primitive element: the approach of naked women from the chieftain’s own clan, with whom intercourse was forbidden, would force him to retreat and hide his face, and in Irish legend this same ruse was employed against Cuchulain, when his fury could not otherwise be checked. The account of the Xanthian matrilineal reckoning of descent has been turned inside out: it was the Hellenes who, on the contrary, managed to enforce patrilineal reckoning on all Carians, except the conservative Xanthians.
6. Cheimarrhus’s name is derived from chimaros, or chimaera (‘goat’); both his fiery nature and his ship with the lion figurehead and serpent stern have been introduced into Bellerophon’s story by some euhemerist to explain away the fire-breathing Chimaera. Mount Chimaera (‘goat-mountain’) was also the name of an active volcano near Phaselis in Lycia (Pliny: Natural History ii. 106 and v. 27), which accounts for the fiery breath.
76
ANTIOPE
SOME say that when Zeus seduced Antiope, daughter of Nycteus the Theban, she fled to the King of Sicyon, who agreed to marry her, and thus occasioned a war in which Nycteus was killed. Antiope’s uncle Lycus presently defeated the Sicyonians in a bloody battle and brought her back, a widow, to Thebes. After giving birth in a wayside thicket to the twins Amphion and Zethus, whom Lycus at once exposed on Mount Cithaeron, she was cruelly ill-treated for many years by her aunt Dirce. At last, she contrived to escape from the prison in which she was immured, and fled to the hut where Amphion and Zethus, whom a passing cattleman had rescued, were now living. But they mistook Antiope for a runaway slave, and refused to shelter her. Dirce then came rushing up in a Bacchic frenzy, seized hold of Antiope, and dragged her away.
‘My lads,’ cried the cattleman, ‘you had better beware of the Furies!’
‘Why the Furies?’ they asked.
‘Because you have refused to protect your mother, who is now being carried off for execution by that savage aunt of hers.’
The twins at once went in pursuit, rescued Antiope, and tied Dirce by the hair to the horns of a wild bull, which made short work of her.1
b. Others say that the river Asopus was Antiope’s father, and that one night the King of Sicyon impersonated Lycus, to whom she was married, and seduced her. Lycus divorced Antiope in consequence and married Dirce, thus leaving Zeus free to court the lonely Antiope, and get her with child. Dirce, suspecting that this was Lycus’s doing, confined Antiope in a dark dungeon; from which, however, she was freed by Zeus just in time to bring forth Amphion and Zethus on Mount Cithaeron. The twins grew up among the cattlemen with whom Antiope had taken refuge and, when they were old enough to understand how unkindly their mother had been treated, she persuaded them to avenge her. They met Dirce roaming the slopes of Mount Cithaeron in a Bacchic frenzy, tied her by the hair to the horns of a wild bull and, when she was dead, flung her body on the ground; where a spring welled up, afterwards called the Dircaean Stream. But Dionysus avenged this murder of his votary: he sent Antiope raging madly all over Greece until at last Phocus, a grandson of Sisyphus, cured and married her in Phocis.
c. Amphion and Zethus visited Thebes, where they expelled King Laius and built the lower city, Cadmus having already built the upper. Now Zethus had often taunted Amphion for his devotion to the lyre given him by Hermes. ‘It distracts you’, he would say, ‘from useful work.’ Yet when they became masons, Amphion’s stones moved to the sound of his lyre and gently slid into place, while Zethus was obliged to use main force, lagging far behind his brother. The twins ruled jointly in Thebes, where Zethus married Thebe, after whom the city – previously known as Cadmeia – is now named; and Amphion married Niobe. But all her children except two were shot dead by Apollo and Artemis, whose mother Leto she had insulted. Amphion was himself killed by Apollo for trying to take vengeance on the Delphic priests, and further punished in Tartarus.2 Amphion and Zethus are buried in one grave at Thebes, which is guarded carefully when the sun is in Taurus; for then the people of Phocian Tithorea try to steal earth from the mound and place it on the grave of Phocus and Antiope. An oracle once said that this act would increase the fertility of all Phocis at the expense of Thebes.3
1. Hyginus: Fabula 8; Apollodorus: iii. 5. 5; Pausanias: ii. 6. 2; Euripides: Antiope, Fragments; Apollonius Rhodius: iv. 1090, with scholiast.
2. Homer: Odyssey xi. 260; Hyginus: Fabula 7; Pausanias: vi. 20. 8; ix. 5. 3 and 17. 4; Horace: Epistles i. 18. 41; Apollonius Rhodius: i. 735–41.
3. Pausanias: ix. 17. 3.
1. These two versions of the Dirce myth show how free the mythographers felt to make their narrative fit the main elements of a literary tradition which, in this case, seems to have been deduced from a series of sacred icons. Antiope, emerging joyfully out of her dungeon and followed by the scowling Dirce, recalls Core’s annual reappearance in Hecate’s company (see 24. k). She is called Antiope (‘confronting’) in this context, because her face is upturned to the sky, not bent towards the Underworld, and ‘Daughter of Night’ – Nycteis, not Nycteus – because she emerges from the darkness. The ‘raging on the mountain’ by Dirce and Antiope has been misinterpreted as a Bacchic orgy; theirs was clearly an erotic gadfly dance, for which they behaved like Moon-heifers in heat (see 56.1). Dirce’s name (‘double’) stands for the horned moon, and the icon from which the myth is taken will have shown her not being tied to the bull in punishment, but ritually marrying the bull-king (see 88. 7). A secondary meaning may be concealed in dirce: namely ‘cleft’, that is, ‘in an erotic condition’. The Dircaean spring, like Hippocrene, will have been moon-shaped. Antiope’s sons are the familiar royal twins borne by the Moon-goddess: her sacred king and his tanist.
2. Amphion’s three-stringed lyre, with which he raised the walls of Lower Thebes – since Hermes was his employer, it can have had only three strings – was constructed to celebrate the Triple-goddess, who reigned in the air, on earth, and in the Underworld, and will have been played during the building to safeguar
d the city’s foundations, gates, and towers. The name ‘Amphion’ (‘native of two lands’) records his citizenship of Sicyon and Thebes.
77
NIOBE
NIOBE, sister of Pelops, had married Amphion King of Thebes and borne him seven sons and seven daughters, of whom she was so inordinately proud that, one day, she disparaged Leto herself for having only two children: Apollo and Artemis. Mante, the prophetic daughter of Teiresias, overhearing this rash remark, advised the Theban women to placate Leto and her children at once: burning frankincense and wreathing their hair with laurel branches. When the scent of incense was already floating in the air, Niobe appeared, followed by a throng of attendants and dressed in a splendid Phrygian robe, her long hair flowing loose. She interrupted the sacrifice and furiously asked why Leto, a woman of obscure parentage, with a mannish daughter and a womanish son, should be preferred to her, Niobe, grandchild of Zeus and Atlas, the dread of the Phrygians, and a queen of Cadmus’s royal house? Though fate or ill-luck might carry off two or three of her children, would she not still remain the richer?
The Greek Myths Page 33