The Greek Myths

by Robert Graves

  d. Midas, having thus entered Asia with his train of Brigians, was adopted by the childless Phrygian King Gordius. While only a poor peasant, Gordius had been surprised one day to see a royal eagle perch on the pole of his ox-cart. Since it seemed prepared to settle there all day, he drove the team towards Phrygian Telmissus, now a part of Galatia, where there was a reliable oracle; but at the gate of the city he met a young prophetess who, when she saw the eagle still perched on the pole, insisted on his offering immediate sacrifices to Zeus the King. ‘Let me come with you, peasant,’ she said, ‘to make sure that you choose the correct victims.’ ‘By all means,’ replied Gordius. ‘You appear to be a wise and considerate young woman. Are you prepared to marry me?’ ‘As soon as the sacrifices have been offered,’ she answered.

  e. Meanwhile, the King of Phrygia had died suddenly, without issue, and an oracle announced: ‘Phrygians, your new king is approaching with his bride, seated in an ox-cart!’

  When the ox-cart entered the market place of Telmissus, the eagle at once attracted popular attention, and Gordius was unanimously acclaimed king. In gratitude, he dedicated the cart to Zeus, together with its yoke, which he had knotted to the pole in a peculiar manner. An oracle then declared that whoever discovered how to untie the knot would become the lord of all Asia. Yoke and pole were consequently laid up in the Acropolis at Gordium, a city which Gordius had founded, where the priests of Zeus guarded them jealously for centuries – until Alexander the Macedonian petulantly cut the knot with his sword.5

  f. After Gordius’s death, Midas succeeded to the throne, promoted the worship of Dionysus, and founded the city of Ancyra. The Brigians who had come with him became known as Phrygians, and the kings of Phrygia are alternately named Midas and Gordius to this day; so that the first Midas is now mistakenly described as a son of Gordius.6

  g. Midas attended the famous musical contest between Apollo and Marsyas, umpired by the River-god Tmolus. Tmolus awarded the prize to Apollo who, when Midas dissented from the verdict, punished him with a pair of ass’s ears. For a long time, Midas managed to conceal these under a Phrygian cap; but his barber, made aware of the deformity, found it impossible to keep the shameful secret close, as Midas had enjoined him to do on pain of death. He therefore dug a hole in the river-bank and, first making sure that nobody was about, whispered into it: ‘King Midas has ass’s ears!’ Then he filled up the hole, and went away, at peace with himself until a reed sprouted from the bank and whispered the secret to all who passed. When Midas learned that his disgrace had become public knowledge, he condemned the barber to death, drank bull’s blood, and perished miserably.7

  1. Hyginus: Fabula 274; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana vi. 27; Herodotus: i. 14 and viii. 138.

  2. Cicero: On Divination i. 36; Valerius Maximus: i. 6. 3; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 92–3.

  3. Aelian: Varia Historia iii. 18.

  4. Plutarch: Minos 5; Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 90 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 191; Virgil; Eclogues vi. 13 ff.

  5. Arrian: Anabasis of Alexander ii. 3.

  6. Justin: xi. 7; Pausanias: i. 4. 5; Aelian: Varia Historia iv. 17.

  7. Ovid: Metamorphoses xi. 146 ff.; Persius: Satires i. 121; Strabo: i. 3. 21.

  1. Midas has been plausibly identified with Mita, King of the Moschians (‘calf-men’), or Mushki, a people of Pontic origin who, in the middle of the second millennium B.C., occupied the western part of Thrace, afterwards known as Macedonia; they crossed the Hellespont about the year 1200 B.C., broke the power of the Hittites in Asia Minor, and captured Pteria, their capital. ‘Moschians’ refers perhaps to a cult of the bull-calf as the spirit of the sacred year. Midas’s rose gardens and the account of his birth suggest an orgiastic cult of Aphrodite, to whom the rose was sacred. The story of the golden touch has been invented to account for the riches of the Mita dynasty, and for the presence of gold in the Pactolus river; and it is often said that the ass’s ears were suggested by Midas’s representation as a satyr, with hideously lengthened ears, in Athenian comic drama.

  2. But since asses were sacred to his benefactor Dionysus, who set a pair of them among the stars (Hyginus: Poetic Astronomy ii. 23), it is likely that the original Midas gloried in his ass disguise. A pair of ass’s ears at the tip of a reed sceptre was the token of royalty carried by all Egyptian dynastic gods, in memory of the time when ass-eared Set (see 35. 4) ruled their pantheon. Set had greatly declined in power until his temporary revival by the Hyksos kings of the early second millennium B.C.; but because the Hittites formed part of the great horde of northern conquerors led by the Hyksos, ass-eared Midas may well have claimed sovereignty over the Hittite Empire in Set’s name. In pre-dynastic times, Set had ruled the second half of the year, and annually murdered his brother Osiris, the spirit of the first half, whose emblem was a bull: they were, in fact, the familiar rival twins perpetually contending for the favours of their sister, the Moon-goddess Isis.

  3. It is likely that the icon from which the story of Midas’s barber derives showed the death of the ass-king. His sun-ray hair, the seat of royal power, is shorn off, like Samson’s (see 91. 1); his decapitated head is buried in a hole to guard the city of Ancyra from invasion. The reed is an ambivalent symbol: as the ‘tree’ of the twelfth month (see 52. 3), it gives him an oracular warning of imminent death; it also enroyals his successor. Because of the great magical potency of bull’s blood, only priestesses of the Earth-mother could drink it without harm (see 51. 4 and 155. a), and being the blood of Osiris, it would be peculiarly poisonous to an ass-king.

  4. The secret of the Gordian knot seems to have been a religious one, probably the ineffable name of Dionysus, a knot-cypher tied in the rawhide thong. Gordium was the key to Asia (Asia Minor) because its citadel commanded the only practicable trade route from Troy to Antioch; and the local priestess or priest will have communicated the secret to the King of Phrygia alone, as the High-priest alone was entrusted with the ineffable name of Jehovah at Jerusalem. Alexander’s brutal cutting of the knot, when he marshalled his army at Gordium for the invasion of Greater Asia, ended an ancient dispensation by placing the power of the sword above that of religious mystery. Gordius (from gruzein, ‘to grunt’ or ‘grumble’) was perhaps so named from the muttering at his oracular shrine.

  5. Why the story of the Atlantic Continent should have been attributed to the drunken Silenus may be divined from three incidents reported by Plutarch (Life of Solon 25–9). The first is that Solon travelled extensively in Asia Minor and Egypt; the second, that he believed the story of Atlantis (see 39. b) and turned it into an epic poem; the third, that he quarrelled with Thespis the dramatist who, in his plays about Dionysus, put ludicrous speeches, apparently full of topical allusions, into the mouths of satyrs. Solon asked: ‘Are you not alarmed, Thespis, to tell so many lies to so large an audience?’ When Thespis answered: ‘What does it matter when the whole play is a joke?’, Solon struck the ground violently with his staff: ‘Encourage such jokes in our theatre, and they will soon creep into our contracts and treaties!’ Aelian, who quotes Theopompus as his authority, seems to have had access at second or third hand to a comedy by Thespis, or his pupil Pratinas, ridiculing Solon for the Utopian lies told in the epic poem, and presenting him as Silenus, wandering footloose about Egypt and Asia Minor (see 27. b). Silenus and Solon are not dissimilar names and as Silenus was tutor to Dionysus, so Solon was tutor to Peisistratus who – perhaps on his advice – founded the Dionysian rites at Athens (see 27. 5).

  6. It is possible that Solon during his travels had picked up scraps of Atlantian lore which he incorporated in his epic, and which lent themselves to theatrical parody: such as the Gaelic legend of a Land of Youth beyond the Ocean – where Niamh of the Golden Hair took Oisin, and whence he returned centuries later on a visit to Ireland. Oisin, it will be recalled, was disgusted with the degeneracy of his own people compared with Niamh’s, and bitterly regretted having come back. The unnavigable whirlpool is the famous one, assumed by ancient physicists,
where the Ocean spills over the edge of the world into nothingness. Solon seems also to have heard geographers discussing the possible existence of an Atlantic Continent: Erathosthenes, Mela, Cicero, and Strabo speculated on it and Seneca foretold its discovery in the second act of his Medea – a passage which is said to have made a deep impression on the young Columbus.

  84

  CLEOBIS AND BITON

  CLEOBIS and Biton, two young Argives, were the sons of Hera’s priestess at Argos. When the time came for her to perform the rites of the goddess, and the white oxen which were to draw her sacred chariot had not yet arrived from the pasture, Cleobis and Biton, harnessing themselves to the chariot, dragged it to the temple, a distance of nearly five miles. Pleased with their filial devotion, the priestess prayed that the goddess would grant them the best gift she could bestow on mortals; and when she had performed her rites, they went to sleep in the temple, never to wake again.1

  b. A similar gift was granted to Agamedes and Trophonius, sons of Erginus. These twins had built a stone threshold upon foundations laid by Apollo himself for his temple at Delphi. His oracle told them: ‘Live merrily and indulge yourselves in every pleasure for six days; on the seventh, your heart’s desire shall be granted.’ On the seventh day both were found dead in their beds. Hence it is said: ‘Those whom the gods love die young.2

  c. Trophonius was later awarded an oracle of his own at Lebadeia in Boeotia.3

  1. Herodotus: i. 31; Pausanias: ii. 20. 2.

  2. Pindar, quoted by Plutarch: Consolation to Apollonius 14; Homeric Hymn to Apollo 294–99; Menander: Fragments of Greek Comedy iv. 105, ed. Meinecke.

  3. Herodotus: i. 46; Euripides: Ion 300.

  1. The myth of Cleobis and Biton apparently refers to the human sacrifices offered when a new temple was dedicated to the Moon-goddess: at Argos, twin brothers were chosen as surrogates for the co-kings, and harnessed to a moon-chariot in place of the white bulls, the usual sacrifice. They will have been buried under the temple threshold to keep away hostile influences (see 169. h); perhaps this was why the twins Castor and Polydeuces (see 62. c) were sometimes called Oebalides, which may mean ‘sons of the temple threshold’ rather than ‘of the speckled sheep-skin’. The priests of Apollo evidently adopted this practice at Delphi, although they denied the Moon-goddess, to whom the sacrifice should have been made, any foothold in the temple.

  2. The seventh day, which was sacred to the Titan Cronus (and to Cronian Jehovah at Jerusalem) had ‘repose’ as its planetary function; but ‘repose’ signified death in the goddess’s honour – hence the hero-oracle awarded to Trophonius (see 51. 1).

  85

  NARCISSUS

  NARCISSUS was a Thespian, the son of the blue Nymph Leiriope, whom the River-god Cephisus had once encircled with the windings of his streams, and ravished. The seer Teiresias told Leiriope, the first person ever to consult him: ‘Narcissus will live to a ripe old age, provided that he never knows himself.’ Anyone might excusably have fallen in love with Narcissus, even as a child, and when he reached the age of sixteen, his path was strewn with heartlessly rejected lovers of both sexes; for he had a stubborn pride in his own beauty.

  b. Among these lovers was the nymph Echo, who could no longer use her voice, except in foolish repetition of another’s shout: a punishment for having kept Hera entertained with long stories while Zeus’s concubines, the mountain nymphs, evaded her jealous eye and made good their escape. One day when Narcissus went out to net stags, Echo stealthily followed him through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but unable to speak first. At last Narcissus, finding that he had strayed from his companions, shouted: ‘Is anyone here?’

  ‘Here!’ Echo answered, which surprised Narcissus, since no one was in sight.

  ‘Come!’

  ‘Come!’

  ‘Why do you avoid me?’

  ‘Why do you avoid me?’

  ‘Let us come together here!’

  ‘Let us come together here!’ repeated Echo, and joyfully rushed from her hiding place to embrace Narcissus. Yet he shook her off roughly, and ran away. ‘I will die before you ever lie with me!’ he cried.

  ‘Lie with me!’ Echo pleaded.

  But Narcissus had gone, and she spent the rest of her life in lonely glens, pining away for love and mortification, until only her voice remained.1

  c. One day, Narcissus sent a sword to Ameinius, his most insistent suitor, after whom the river Ameinius is named; it is a tributary of the river Helisson, which flows into the Alpheius. Ameinius killed himself on Narcissus’s threshold, calling on the gods to avenge his death.

  d. Artemis heard the plea, and made Narcissus fall in love, though denying him love’s consummation. At Donacon in Thespia he came upon a spring, clear as silver, and never yet disturbed by cattle, birds, wild beasts, or even by branches dropping off the trees that shaded it; and as he cast himself down, exhausted, on the grassy verge to slake his thirst, he fell in love with his reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful boy who confronted him, but presently recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened.

  e. Echo, although she had not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in his breast, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!’ as he expired. His blood soaked the earth, and up sprang the white narcissus flower with its red corollary, from which an unguent balm is now distilled at Chaeronea. This is recommended for affections of the ears (though apt to give headaches), and as a vulnerary, and for the cure of frost-bite.2

  1. Ovid: Metamorphoses iii. 341–401.

  2. Pausanias: viii. 29.4 and ix. 31. 6; Ovid: Metamorphoses 402–510; Conon: Narrations 24; Pliny: Natural History xxi. 75.

  1. The ‘narcissus’ used in the ancient wreath of Demeter and Persephone (Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus 682–4), and also called leirion was the three-petalled blue fleur-de-lys or iris: sacred to the Triple-goddess, and worn as a chaplet when the Three Solemn Ones (see 115. c), or Erinnyes, were being placated. It flowers in late autumn, shortly before the ‘poet’s narcissus’, which is perhaps why Leiriope has been described as Narcissus’s mother. This fanciful moral tale – incidentally accounting for the medicinal properties of narcissus-oil, a well-known narcotic, as the first syllable of ‘Narcissus’ implies – may be deduced from an icon which showed the despairing Alcmaeon (see 107. e), or Orestes (see 114. a), lying crowned with lilies, beside a pool in which he has vainly tried to purify himself after murdering his mother; the Erinnyes having refused to be placated. Echo, in this icon, would represent the mocking ghost of his mother, and Ameinius his murdered father.

  2. But –issus, like –inthus, is a Cretan termination, and both Narcissus and Hyacinthus seem to have been names for the Cretan springflower-hero whose death the goddess bewails on the gold ring from the Mycenaean Acropolis; elsewhere he is called Antheus (see 159. 4), a surname of Dionysus. Moreover, the lily was the royal emblem of the Cnossian king. In a painted relief found among the Palace ruins, he walks, sceptre in hand, through a lily-meadow, wearing a crown and necklace of fleur-de-lys.

  86

  PHYLLIS AND CARYA

  PHYLLIS, a Thracian princess, was in love with Acamas a son of Theseus, who had gone to fight at Troy. When Troy fell, and the Athenian fleet returned, Phyllis paid frequent visits to the shore, hoping to sight his ship; but this had been delayed by a leak, and she died of grief after her ninth fruitless visit, at a place called Enneodos. She was metamorphosed by Athene into an almond-tree, and Acamas, arriving on the following day, embraced only her rough bark. In response to his caresses the branches burst into flower instead of leaf, which has been a peculiarity of almond-trees ever since. Every year, the Athenians dance in her honour, and in his.1

&n
bsp; b. And Carya, daughter of a Laconian king, was beloved of Dionysus, but died suddenly at Caryae, and was metamorphosed by him into a walnut-tree. Artemis brought the news to the Laconians, who thereupon built a temple to Artemis Caryatis, from which Caryatids – female statues used as columns – take their name. At Caryae too, the Laconian women dance annually in the goddess’s honour, having been instructed by the Dioscuri.2

  1. Lucian: On the Dance 40; Hyginus: Fabula 59; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues v. 10; First Vatican Mythographer 159.

  2. Pausanias: iii. 10. 8 and iv. 16. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues viii. 29.

  1. Both these myths are told to account for the festal use of almond or walnut, in honour of Car, or Carya (see 57. 2), otherwise known as Metis (see 1. d and 9. d), the Titaness of Wisdom; and are apparently deduced from an icon which showed a young poet worshipping a nut-tree in the goddess’s presence, while nine young women performed a round dance. Enneodos, which occurs also in the legend of the Thracian Phyllis who drove Demophon mad (see 169. i), means ‘nine journeys’, and the number nine was connected with nuts by the Irish bards, and nuts with poetic inspiration; and in their tree-alphabet (see 52. 3) the letter coll (‘C’), meaning ‘hazel’, also expressed the number nine. According to the Irish Dinnschenchas, the fountain of inspiration in the river Boyne was overhung by the nine hazels of poetic art, and inhabited by spotted fish which sang. Another Caryae (‘walnut-trees’) in Arcadia, stood close to a stream reported by Pausanias to contain the same peculiar kind of fish (Pausanias: vii. 14. 1–3 and 21. 1; Athenaeus: viii. p. 331).